Unravelling Oliver (15 page)

I did not know it then, but I later came to understand that Jean-Luc and his papi died of smoke inhalation, probably in their sleep. It is something of a comfort to me, as I spent months afterwards in the nightmare of imagination
wondering if they had to watch each other burn to death, screaming for my help, after desperately trying to save each other.

The chaos of the night comes back to me in small pieces: the surprising sound of my own screams; the grasping arms of Michael and Constantine, who held me back from the flames; the smell of the fire and my own sweat; the women from the dorm crying; the men taking control and becoming important, busy men of action. Quite separately, I remember secretly pregnant Laura hysterical and clinging to Oliver, who seemed not to know she was there.

I was heavily sedated in the days that followed. I have no memory of the funerals, but they tell me I was there. I stayed in the house. The western side was structurally unaffected; there was some smoke damage, but it was minimal. The thick stone walls between the east wing and the hallway stopped the fire from reaching my side of the house. The kitchen, salon and my bedroom, among others, were intact. Hundreds of people came and went, bringing food, prayers, reassurances, blessings, and shared experiences of loss, but it was weeks before I began to see that my future was exactly what Papa had always feared for me.

Some of the labourers left shortly after the fire, apologetically bidding farewell: it was obvious that we could not pay them. The vineyard was abandoned, but the Irish students stayed for another month. Most of them had come to France for the experience rather than out of financial necessity. Michael was wonderful and readily took control of the kitchen. I had no interest in anything, and my hands would take time to heal. The others did their best to clear
the wreckage of the east wing. They had to return to college then, as they had already missed the first weeks. Oliver was in shock and barely spoke to anyone. I admit that I resented his grief because I felt he had no right to it. He had known them for a matter of months, but they were my life, and I felt bitter anger every time I saw him sitting absently on the terrace steps with his head in his hands, as Laura tried to cajole him back to life like one of our vines.

When it came to their leaving, Laura asked me if she could stay. She confided that she had told Oliver about the pregnancy in a moment of desperation, hoping that it would shock him into some reaction, but that Oliver did not want to know and insisted that he would never be a father again. Again? What did he mean, ‘again’? Laura explained that Oliver had a game with Jean-Luc where he and Jean-Luc pretended to be father and son, and that my father had taken part. I do not know if this was true, but maybe Oliver really felt that he had become Jean-Luc’s father in a way, and Papa’s son too. It was a foolish game, but finally I understood his pain and grief, and without ever speaking of it, I forgave Oliver.

I told Laura she could stay. I did not think that she would be with me for a whole year, or that she too would die soon afterwards. So much death.

Laura’s moods were erratic in the months following her return from France. My parents were concerned. She returned to college that October of 1974, but dropped out again in November. And then, in the first week in December, she went missing.

I got a phone call in the restaurant on a Thursday morning from Mum to ask if I knew where she was. She’d gone to bed the previous night at about ten o’clock, but when Mum called her that morning, there was no answer. Her bed had not been slept in and nobody had heard her leave the house. We rang around friends and neighbours, but nobody had seen or heard from her. When she still hadn’t returned on Friday morning, my mother was out of her mind with worry. Laura had been very calm when my mother last spoke to her on Wednesday morning, to the extent that Mum thought Laura had turned a corner. They’d talked about going shopping for a new pair of boots at the weekend. Mum had seen a pair that she liked, and thought they would suit Laura. Mum said they’d go into town together to a particular shop on Saturday. Laura said she was looking forward to going back to college and getting back to normal, admitted that the year in France had been a bit of an ordeal, and said that she should have come home with me. Mum reassured her that everyone understood, that once she got back into a routine, things
would fall into place. We made Mum go over that conversation again and again, every mundane detail, but could find nothing sinister or disturbing about it. Except that the brand-new boots that Mum had admired were later found in a box in Laura’s wardrobe, but not in Laura’s size. In Mum’s size, bought and paid for on Wednesday afternoon.

We started ringing round hospitals on Friday morning. How often does it happen, I wonder, that a person turns up in hospital amnesiac and unidentified? Not often enough, I imagine, for those of us looking for them. On Friday afternoon, the guards came to take statements. They wanted to put her photograph in the newspapers. The most beautiful photo I had was one I’d taken in France with my Agfa Instamatic. We had all been drunk. Laura was leaning her head on Oliver’s shoulder. He was naked from the waist up. Her eyes were closed, and about one quarter of her face was hidden behind several wine glasses in the foreground. But she was smiling in the photo, as if she knew a secret that nobody else did. We agreed it was not suitable for publication, and Dad found a photo from Christmas the previous year, where she looked happy but serious. My parents were terrified of the glare of publicity that was about to descend. We are private people and to them, my sister’s breakdown was dirty laundry.

The sun continued to rise and set, the grandfather clock ticked its metronome of misery in the hallway, cars drove past, and children could be heard laughing as they passed our gates, but there was a gaping hole in the centre of our lives, a huge question mark without an answer. The photo was due to be published in the newspapers and broadcast
on TV on Monday, but on Sunday afternoon the guards called and asked Dad to come down to the station. We knew there had been a development, but Dad refused to let Mum accompany him. I waited with Mum while he was gone, and we speculated on what the breakthrough might be, both of us terrified of uttering what we already knew, as if by saying it, it made it real.

Dad returned a relatively short time later with Mum’s brother, my Uncle Dan, and a young garda. I don’t know why the garda came with him. Maybe it was policy. Maybe it was courtesy, to make sure Dad got home all right.

Laura’s body had washed up on the Tragumna beach that morning in West Cork. A dog walker (why is it always a dog walker?) had seen someone the previous night from the cliff-side and had alerted the guards. Apparently she had walked into the sea fully clothed. We protested that it couldn’t be her. Why would she go there? But really we knew that was exactly where she’d go. It was the beach we had played on as children when we visited my maternal grandmother in Skibbereen. The guards had found her handbag nearby. There was no note, but enough in her bag to indicate her identity. We all travelled together to Cork that night to make the formal identification. Dad and Uncle Dan tried to persuade Mum and me that we didn’t need to see her. I agreed, God forgive me, but Mum insisted, so Mum and Dad went in together through the swing doors and I was left outside with Uncle Dan to wait. I could hear their footsteps echoing over the tiled floor, and then there was no other sound but that of the hum of industrial refrigeration and my breath and Uncle Dan’s breath. Once again, time proved useless in the face of
tragedy as we waited, maybe minutes, maybe hours, for the news that was not new at all. At one stage Uncle Dan suggested that we say a Hail Mary. I did not understand what possible difference it could make to the outcome.

I think my parents died of grief eventually, although it took a few years. Madame Véronique could shed no light on why Laura had killed herself when we contacted her. She maintained that Laura had been an excellent worker and had noticed nothing strange about her. She said we should be proud of such an intelligent and capable young lady. We took solace from that.

I go over and over what I knew of Laura in the final years of her life. Before we went to France, Laura was a brilliant, flighty, flirty girl with a bright future. During that summer of 1973 she began to show signs of change. I was surprised by Madame’s commendation of her. Surprised, but somewhat comforted.

The funeral was devastating. Oliver sent us his regrets in a beautifully written card but could not attend. I was mildly angry about that, amid all the other anger and sorrow I felt. I thought it was discourteous to my parents and me, and to Laura’s memory. What could be so important that he would stay away?

With the help of the guards, we had managed to stop the broadcast of the photograph, and kept it out of all but one of the newspapers. The funeral was private, and afterwards condolence cards started to arrive slowly, over many months. Suicide was not discussed then, and people didn’t know exactly how to sympathize with our loss, so we dealt with it on our own mostly so as not to embarrass our
friends. I don’t think attitudes to suicide have changed since then. When somebody dies of cancer, the course of the illness is openly charted and the stages of deterioration catalogued afterwards, but with suicide there is no public discussion and nowhere to bring your grief. It is just the dirty little secret of the bereaved family.

I knew that Laura’s decline had started before we left France, and I wondered if Oliver held the key to the mystery of Laura’s depression. After all, he was the person who knew her most intimately. I even considered that she might have been pregnant when we left her there, but I know Laura and I can’t imagine she would have had an abortion, or given up a baby, regardless of the disgrace it might have brought in those times. The only other theory was that she might have been pregnant and miscarried. I floated the notion to Oliver, but he was stricken by the suggestion. It had not occurred to him. I was sorry I suggested it then, because it must have seemed like I was trying to blame him.

Years later, Oliver named a particularly heroic character in one of his story books after Laura. I appreciated that. He only got in touch again sometime in the early eighties to ask delicately if we could host his wedding reception in L’Étoile.

By that time, Dermot had joined me as maître d’ while I cheffed. Despite the awkwardness of our first meeting, it turned out that in fact Dermot was very good with people, remembering their names, their birthdays and their favourite tipples. He was also a super organizer and managed to poach the best waiters from all over town. People returned to the restaurant as much for the superb service and
attention to detail they received from Dermot and his team as for the food.

The restaurant was housed in a mews building, and I lived comfortably in the flat on the floor above the dining area. I specialized –
naturellement
– in rustic French cuisine, referred to pejoratively as ‘peasant food’ by one particularly nasty critic, but quite sophisticated for Dublin at the time, and because we had a liquor licence and took late bookings we quickly became popular with the theatrical crowd; a mixed blessing really – they drank like fish and added some glamour to the place, but often couldn’t pay the bill or had to be put to bed in the lounge area at closing time. The stories I could tell of backstage antics in Dublin would put gossip columnists out of business, but we pride ourselves on discretion and Dermot drives me mad sometimes because he won’t even tell
me
who’s sleeping with whom.

I was happy to hear from Oliver after so long and glad to organize his wedding reception. Also, I wanted to show him that I, too, was successful and in a committed relationship, and that I wasn’t a freak.

I was surprised by his choice of bride. Alice. She was pretty, I suppose, but Oliver was known for the beauties he dated and Alice just did not measure up to the usual criteria. She was no Laura. Poor Alice. Whatever happened later on, she was very happy that day. Oliver had no family at his wedding reception. I had long suspected that the hints he dropped about his wealthy parents were a cover. I thought he was probably an orphan, and the lack of family at his wedding confirmed it for me.

I haven’t seen Oliver for years now, apart from his occasional
TV appearances. I don’t think he’s been in the restaurant for a long time. When he became a successful writer, I was very pleased for him. Not having children of my own, I read only one or two of the books, and I’m aware that I’m not the target market for them, but I could see how special they are. There have been film adaptations with big-name Hollywood stars, so I’ve seen more than I have read. His name cropped up regularly in the media, and I could never think of him without thinking firstly, with acute embarrassment, of my self-ejection from the closet, and secondly, with acute sorrow, of my beautiful sister Laura.

Now that the truth about Oliver’s character has been revealed, I have been forced to consider if somehow Oliver caused Laura’s breakdown. It was over a year after our visit to France when she died, but I can’t help feeling more certain than ever that something awful happened between Laura and Oliver that summer, something so terrible that she walked into the sea with rocks in her pockets.