Return to the Olive Farm (The Olive Series Book 4)

by Carol Drinkwater

  Their twins, a boy and a girl, had recently turned two. Marley, as was his habit, was leaping about the place, calling, whirligigging, entertaining, wearing a selection of hats, wielding a flashing sword, brandishing a spaceship that was emitting an invasive low-frequency sound. The centre of attention though, whether Marley cared for it or not, was Chiara, who slept serenely, burping and gurgling her way through the festivities. For a child that had weighed in so solidly at birth both Michel and I had been surprised to be introduced to such a delicate creature, but, boy, was she gorgeous. A veritable Sleeping Beauty. Clarisse’s eldest daughter, Anna, was absent from these celebrations. She had opted for spending a week with her father, Clarisse’s ex-husband and a long-standing work colleague of Michel’s. Among this intimate gathering was one other grandparent, the children’s blood grandmother, Michel’s first wife. Some might consider such a set-up a little unusual, but this was France. Sylvie and I were friends. I admired her and enjoyed her wit and humour. She was pretty and she was a caring and attentive mother and grandmother. And we were not in competition. She had her own life, another relationship, lived for her offspring, was neither career-obsessed like me nor always on the move. When we arrived she was sitting in a corner of the living room playing with the twins while Marley twirled like a top and played the fool, no one throwing him more than the occasional glance.

  As a family, we sat drinking tea and later champagne, talking of those inconsequentials that fill out such occasions, that crochet together the stretch of time since we had all last assembled like this. Marley was designated the task of passing round the nibblies, which he did relentlessly and seemed aggrieved, disappointed, if we did not accept yet three more cheese-flavoured biscuits or another supermarket olive. A general and genuine interest in my travels provoked questions. I recounted anecdotes and spoke of future plans for my Olive Heritage Trail, my contacts with UNESCO who were keen to work with me on the project, and then the conversation returned to subjects of daily life while Cole and I talked theatre in a corner. Since moving to Paris, he had begun to direct stage productions though it was not easy for him to find employment, he confided. In these matters, within the family circle, I was his obvious point of contact. In fact, we had worked together recording the English narration for one or two documentary films produced by Michel so we shared professional bonds.

  When the general conversation turned to the hurdles of schooling, education and finding a decent crèche, I was always glad to share Cole’s company. These were debates where I held no opinions, had no experience and I never involved myself in them. This was a delicate issue for me. Occasionally during such moments I suffered a minor sense of exclusion, but reason prevailed. Why would anyone discuss such affairs with me? These were not my subjects. I was childless.

  Marley was tugging at my cardigan, determined to draw my attention away from his father. Cole and I were conversing in English so he, a bilingual boy, followed suit. He was trying to coax me to follow him into his bedroom. He wanted to show me ‘a secret’. I laughed, winked at Cole, excused myself and tramped along the freshly painted corridor behind the marching blond-haired child, madly waving his upper torso about as though he were a tree caught in a tempest. He closed the door after us and set to flicking on lights and beepers and then began yelling. He dragged from beneath his bunk bed a small trunk, flew it open and disgorged on to the ground an assortment of toys, books and plastic warfare components. He had switched to French now and was bidding me look at this and that. I felt uncomfortable, uncertain what to do.

  ‘Is this your secret trunk, Marley?’ I was reminding him of why he had beckoned me here, for he had possibly forgotten the pretext already.

  ‘A secret, your secret?’

  He paused for a moment, a much needed bridge of stillness, and then he sat back on himself on the floor and stared at me as though he had never set eyes on me before. Immediately, he leapt to his feet, flung the door open and screamed for ‘Pappy-Michel’ and ‘Maman’. I feared I had upset him, or had broken the spell in some way by asking a question that was too mundane or logical. Vanessa came hurrying along the corridor and grinned at the mess he had created. Slowly, quietly, she began to switch off the flashing, bleeping hardware and restored the room to a semblance of quietude. And then she smiled that electric smile of hers that could emblazon a coalmine.

  ‘Great flat,’ I said. Marley was now hugging my legs. ‘I love the colours, the soft olive green and cream of the woodwork.’

  ‘And I painted the entire place myself,’ she laughed. It was an open laugh, a sound that tossed her head back almost recklessly, swung her shoulder-length dark hair from side to side and left her milky neck open and vulnerable. Her beauty was breathtaking. She was such a sensuous woman that I sometimes silently bemoaned the fact that she had gone for motherhood and marriage so readily, at such an early age. I had always pictured her in some international arena, but such a thought voiced would have simply amused her, caused her to laugh more loudly still.

  ‘Your vision of the world is not mine, Carol,’ she would have said.

  And yet.

  ‘Well, it’s thanks to this little lad here that we have such a great place,’ she said, ruffling his hair, which seemed to subdue and calm him now.

  ‘Really, why?’

  ‘He’s a special needs child. It gave us preferential treatment on the waiting list for a bigger apartment.’ Vanessa spoke English with a broad American accent.

  ‘Special needs?’ I repeated, completely taken aback.

  ‘Yes, Marley’s hyperactive personality disorder, ADHD, plus the fact that I gave birth to twins gave us an opportunity. I could not have stood traipsing up and down the stairs of that Paris apartment any longer. I was studying for my teacher’s exams – phew, it was getting tough with two small ones and this one bustling about the place as though he were about to explode. Cole, when he is rehearsing, is working every hour under the sun. Well, you know how it is. I was going insane.’

  I looked at her hard. Her beauty was paler and she was strained, lined, but less so perhaps than the last time I had seen her.

  She and I had been close at one time. I adored her and after she had moved to the States, before she had met Cole, she had written me a wonderful letter that I had kept, treasured. She had told me that I had been ‘a role model’ for her. I was living a woman’s life, her prose had informed me. Spending time with me during her formative teenage years had allowed her to see that there were possibilities out there and it had encouraged her to be brave and set off alone for New York, to complete her master’s there. There, where she had met Cole. I had read the words, the sentiments of that letter, over and over to myself on many occasions, particularly during the period of marital separation. It came flooding back to me now.

  I had seen so little of her. For a number of years. We had drifted apart and yet whenever we were together I felt a great rush of love, of admiration, a childish desire to claim her as mine, my flesh. My daughter.

  And all this while she had been struggling.

  ‘You must come and stay with us,’ I whispered. ‘Bring the children and have a break.’

  ‘Heaven knows when,’ she grinned, ‘and where would we put the babies and this crazy little fella?’ but she leaned in to me and wrapped her arms about me. I could have cried.

  Fortunately, at that moment Pappy-Michel arrived and Marley was up and running, keen to display the gadgets again. Vanessa left us with him and returned to the main room, to her mother and the rest of her dearest kin.

  ‘I had no idea,’ I whispered to Michel in English.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Marley and his special needs.’

  Marley glanced my way, eyes narrowed. He must have understood.

  ‘It’s really very minor. He has no physical handicap nor any mental disability. It seems to be psychological, poor attention span, I think, but it has given them certain privileges which they were very grateful for. They struggle to make ends m
eet and they could not afford anything larger in Paris. This is ideal for them.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me all this?’

  Michel was crouched on his haunches, constructing some sort of magic castle with a dragon hovering at its moat. Boy and man were on the ground pulling bricks and plastic sticks of furniture from out of the trunk. Marley watched his Pappy silently, entranced, following his lead. ‘I honestly didn’t think about it, chérie,’ my husband said to me. ‘I assumed that you and Vanessa would have discussed such matters between you. I know how close you are.’

  ‘No,’ I replied absent-mindedly. I was fascinated to note how calm Marley had become, how absorbed he was in the world his grandfather was creating.

  ‘Is he a dragon, Pappy, or a snake with wings?’

  Michel is quite wonderful with small children. He draws them into extraordinary imaginative universes, but what was fascinating me was how readily Marley had responded.

  In the world of theatre I have known many actors, musicians, dancers and artists who were cast aside at school because they were judged to be incapable of concentration, difficult to teach, unmanageable, when, in fact, it transpired later that their talents lay in other directions. They were artists. I confess to being a little wary of such diagnoses as ADHD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. I myself as a child growing up in a home where there had been deep-scarring traumas had been frequently chastised because I was ‘incapable of sitting still’. I was not incapable at all. I was anxious to absent myself, to transport myself into the lands of make-believe where I felt safe and out of danger, where my eyes could look upon other, less distraught relationships, and I was at my most contented and peaceful when I was alone with the fantasy tools of creativity. Looking at Marley now with his large, round eyes locked upon the busy hands of his grandfather building a tower, I wondered.

  4

  Luke returned to visit us early in the New Year, with an exercise book scored with figures, estimations, flight path capabilities for the fly, timetables of cargo boats from Africa. It was impressive, well studied. Luke’s complex calculations suggested that we would require, exclusively for the lower groves where the old, gibbous fellows resided and our main fruit production took place, one thousand flies. He was offering to sell us five paniers, baskets, each containing two hundred of these exotics. Each batch equally divided, he said, between one hundred males and one hundred females.

  ‘And this will cost?’

  His response to Michel did not sound exorbitant. ‘I can ship them, get them through customs and quarantine and I’ll include delivery of them to your farm and even assist with the releasing of them in May; no, on second thoughts, perhaps we’ll do it much earlier. Yes, earlier. Depends when I can land them here. So for the entire service, I’ll charge you four hundred euros a container. In other words, two grand all told.’

  Obviously, we did not write him a cheque there and then. In fact, from the beginning, Luke made it perfectly clear that he would be requiring the money in cash because his ‘contacts in Africa insisted upon it’.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘It’s delicate,’ he said.

  We should have heard the warning bells, foreseen what lay ahead right then. My only excuse was that I was rather too eager to make this work. And I had done a fair amount of homework, researching Psyttalia. Psyttalia lounsburyi, as well as similar parasitoid relatives of his, were being reared and studied under quarantine in research laboratories in Sophia Antipolis, not fifteen kilometres from our farm. Infested olives had been gathered and taken to the laboratories for use in their experiments. The fly was also in residence at other research centres in California, Hawaii and southern Italy. Judging by a photograph I found of him, he was a rather attractive predator, minuscule, with a pair of outstanding, disproportionately long antennae. I surfed the internet day and night, but most of the information was hard to access and appeared to be under wraps. Still, the more I learned, the more excited I became because – and this was the hook – Psyttalia lounsburyi promised to be a serious – and organic – contender for the role of Olive Fly Exterminator.

  Michel, on the other hand, was growing concerned. He, who had initially been enthusiastic and supportive of our move away from insecticides, felt that we were jumping the gun. It was not that he suspected Luke, any more than I did. It was that Michel doubted the wisdom of setting loose an alien, a creature untried and untested on our land.

  ‘This could be irresponsible,’ he confided one evening in mid-January.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘If the laboratories are not releasing the insect, it is because they are not yet convinced that it is safe for the environment.’

  By the time the first month of the year was closing down, the weather had turned incessantly wet. Rain greeted every dark morning as I rose early. Michel had flown to China on a business trip. I was alone at the farm with Quashia. Together, we stared into the space that had once been the garage and was now a lake of detritus.

  ‘I warned you and I’m glad I listened to me and not you and moved all the essentials up into the hangar. If you don’t repair this roof, the west wall of the house will crumble beneath it. It’s too wet to prune or to reconstruct the drystoners. If you want me, I’ll be in the greenhouse.’ And with that he was gone, my loyal follower.

  The fact of the matter was that we could not afford the repairs on the roof. The quotations had put paid to all our plans at this stage.

  Luke dropped by. ‘Listen, I’ve got a flight booked to Nairobi on Friday. A rather substantial order to fulfil. Are you in or not?’ He was advising a swift decision. He felt that the flies would do better to sojourn the latter part of winter, early spring, on our land to acclimatise themselves to our situation and the environment.

  ‘Is that what your other clients have decided? I’d love to be in contact with them. Always heartening to meet others who are fighting for the organic route.’

  ‘They’re in Italy. Rather private people. It’s not my place to give out their details.’

  ‘No, of course not. Look, I’d prefer to wait until Michel returns …’

  ‘I think it’s urgent that you make the choice, Carol, so that I can get this order in, get the little sweethearts on the boat and on their way here. There are limited numbers of these darlings for sale. I don’t want to lose this shipment.’

  ‘Of course, I understand. Can I let you know definitely one way or another tomorrow?’

  I could not reach Michel. We were operating on a six-hour time difference. Whenever I telephoned his hotel room, he was not there or sleeping.

  Vanessa called. She was trying to reach ‘Papa’, wanting to let him know what a pleasure it had been to spend time with him at Christmas.

  ‘Why don’t you come down for a weekend, bring Marley?’ I offered. ‘I’ll get the plane tickets.’

  ‘Hey, we’d love to but there’s just so much on. Tell Papa, hi from me.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  That night alone in the house, music playing softly, working into the small hours at my computer, I came across a series of documents that led me to independent scientific research findings drawn up by Greenpeace. The results comprised a blacklist of agrochemical products hazardous for human health. Dimethoate, our olive spray, was on the list.

  *

  The rain had stopped and Quashia was itching to commence the pruning. The small trees had never been cut back and they had grown tall. They were lofty but without sufficient width on their lower trunks to secure them. He warned that a tempest could bring them down. His agitation heightened my dilemma, but I cannot lay the blame at his door, not at all.

  On the Thursday morning, after another call from Luke who warned that if we said no now, it could well mean a year’s delay to our plans, I took it upon myself to make the decision. I accepted Luke’s proposal, drove down to the bank and handed over two thousand euros to him in cash, but I was careful to take it from my own pool of funds rather than the farm’s. Two eur
os a fly. Was that an extortionate price to pay for what I hoped was a clean future? I had no idea, no notion of how to appraise such a costing. These little beings were arriving from Africa, after all. And if Michel was not in accord with my decision, I would argue (rather feebly) that it was my money I had lost. Still, I handed it over with a degree of incertitude. These two thousand euros, I said to myself, might be used towards restoring the garage or alleviating a little of Vanessa’s constraints.

  ‘Madame?’ The voice at the other end of the line reminded me of Marlene Dietrich.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s José. I have found someone who can handle your asbestos roof.’

  ‘Big José?’ I cried with delight. ‘Good to hear from you.’

  There was a silence. ‘No, Madame, I am rather small. Are you still looking?’

  ‘Yes, we are!’

  ‘I will bring him to take a look.’

  ‘And you recommend him?’

  ‘He’ll get that asbestos shifted for you at no vast cost and little hassle.’

  ‘Excellent.’ I did not admit it but we had been almost desperate enough to shell out the seven thousand euros we had been quoted at the outset.

  The following day, José, the shorter, wirier of the quartet, arrived in his van followed by a gentleman on a motorbike with a clipboard. I thought at first that his colleague, excessively tall, built awkwardly, like a misshapen barrel on sticks, was German. The man was introduced to me as the asbestos expert. He was employed by one of the companies who had refused me, but who were willing to do the business if I went through José’s masonry firm.

  ‘Before you begin to dismantle anything here, you will need a certificate,’ he informed me, looking at the few sheets of roofing and shaking his head despairingly.

  ‘I thought the certificate came last,’ I argued. My instinct was against this fellow from the outset. ‘I understood we received that when the material had been treated and disposed of.’