Unravelling Oliver (18 page)

Towards the end of October last year, two ladies from Ireland arrived at Cuisine de Campagne, both in their late fifties. I noticed them immediately because they seemed such unlikely friends. One of them was loud, wore too much make-up and blatantly set out on a mission to seduce the only available single man in the group. The other was quiet, bookish and less inclined to socialize. I felt sorry for her as it soon became obvious that her friend had decided to abandon her for the duration of the holiday. I introduced myself to Alice and invited her to join us on several evenings, and together with Pierre, we ended up discussing all the things one is not supposed to: politics, religion, race, and so on. Her friend Moya had made the booking online, so it was only on the last night that I noticed Alice’s surname as she signed the guestbook.

‘Ryan?’ I said. ‘The first Ryan I ever met was an Irish boy working here the summer of 1973. His name was also Ryan, Oliver Ryan.’

‘But that’s my husband’s name!’

We laughed at the coincidence. She was astonished, and we quickly made the connection that she was the same Oliver’s wife when she showed me some photos. He was older but still handsome, and there was no mistaking him. We spoke for most of the night. I was happy to hear that he was a successful writer. I recalled that Michael may have mentioned
that in correspondence. Alice was shocked when I recounted the pivotal events of that season, of the fire and the death of my son and my father. She knew that Oliver had spent summers abroad – she actually fell in love with him on a foreign trip to the Greek islands – but it seemed that he had never told her much about the summer of 1973 except that he worked on a vineyard. I thought this odd because, whatever his trauma at the time, it was bizarre to me that all these years later he had never mentioned the fire or the deaths. The story of that summer is something one could not easily forget, particularly Oliver. With regard for his privacy, I did not tell Alice of the bond Oliver had with Papa and Jean-Luc, realizing that if Oliver had not talked about it in nearly forty years, he had buried it for a reason. I was discreet as ever, and did not mention Laura except as one of the gang, although it seemed that Alice had heard of her. Alice and Oliver had had their wedding reception in Michael’s restaurant, although apparently Michael and Oliver were no longer friends, and she mentioned that Michael’s sister had died tragically young. Poor Laura.

‘Oliver was an enormous help to me after the fire. He was very upset.’

‘Oh, that’s lovely to hear – I mean, that he was helpful,’ Alice said, proudly.

‘Yes, of course he was sad about Papa and Jean-Luc, but he insisted on clearing out the library where he and Papa had worked together. They tell me he did the work of ten men in the week after the fire. He must also have been devastated because all of the work he had done with Papa’s stories went up in smoke. He worked so hard transcribing them for my father.’

‘Your father wrote stories?’ Alice said.

‘Yes, I am a little surprised that he never told you any of this. My father secretly engaged Oliver to transcribe all the stories he had written for Jean-Luc.’

‘Children’s stories? Well, perhaps that’s where he got his inspiration. Oliver writes books for children too. How lovely that it was your father who must have given him the idea. What were your father’s stories about?’ she asked.

‘I can scarcely remember, it was so long ago, but the central character was Prince Felix, and there was a trusted servant called Frown, an evil witch and a flying chair.’

Alice narrowed her eyes and clutched her hand to her breast.

‘Prince
Sparkle
,’ she said, ‘and
Grimace
.’

I didn’t understand. ‘Are you feeling all right?’ I asked.

‘Tell me more about the stories,’ she said, and her voice had grown thin and shrill. I did not know in what way I could have offended her.

When I could not recall the details specifically, Alice became agitated.

‘Are you sure your father wrote the stories, that it was not Oliver?’

It was my turn to be offended by her insistence.

‘But what a preposterous question! My father began to write these stories when he was released from prison after the Liberation, long before we met Oliver!’

Alice sprang up from her chair and started pacing. To my astonishment, she began to describe the stories I had not heard in many decades.

‘There is a young prince who lives in a land of sunlight and joy. An evil queen and her army come from the gloom
to invade and occupy their land. She banishes the sun and orders them to live in the darkness, or to die. The Prince’s servant invents a magic chair that flies beyond the stars, and every morning Prince Sparkle and his servant Grimace would fly far behind the moon until they found the sunlight. They would capture the sunlight in their cloaks and smuggle it back to their kingdom and share it with their people.’

It was my turn to be shocked.

‘How … how could you
know
?’ I asked.

‘Oliver wrote it. I illustrated it!’ she said. ‘I have illustrated all the stories!’ and she broke into sobs.

My shock turned to anger, and I suddenly felt the need to defend my long-dead father from her insinuation. ‘Papa enjoyed writing them,’ I insisted on explaining. ‘He read them to me as a child. It was part of our bedtime ritual, though he wrote less when I grew older. But as soon as I became pregnant with Jean-Luc, he began writing them again with renewed vigour and he continued writing these stories until his death, despite the physical discomfort it caused him.’

‘How did he write them? Have you no copies?’ Alice demanded to know.

‘They were written on loose sheets of paper all over the house. Papa had primarily employed Oliver to transcribe them into leather-bound books so that they could be compiled in just a few volumes.’

‘Why did he ask Oliver? Why Oliver?’

‘I don’t know. He liked him. Papa treated Oliver like a son. My father did not like to type anything himself. But he insisted that the stories should be made of ink.’

To my horror, Alice began to relate more of Papa’s stories to me. The names of the characters and the places were different – Papa’s witch was now an evil queen – but the stories were undeniably the same.

Truth can cause more pain than lies, I think. Some secrets are best left as secrets. The facts are simple. Oliver stole Papa’s stories. I had no way of proving it. The stories existed solely in Oliver’s typed notes. The only people who remembered their original versions were long dead.

Oliver used a pseudonym to write these books: Vincent Dax. How clever and sinister. Having no children, I never bought one of his books. Pierre’s girls were not readers. When I looked him up on the Internet, I realized what an industry had been built around Prince Felix, or Prince Sparkle as he was in Oliver’s version. Films, stage musicals, merchandise. Oliver has made millions from my dead father and betrayed his honour.

The revelations certainly upset his wife. We talked through the night until almost dawn. It seems that Papa’s stories were what attracted her to Oliver in the first place. He was shrewd with the stories, releasing just one every year or two, and has made them last for all this time, although it seems now that he has run out, as he has published nothing for five years. We worked out that he had spent almost twenty-five years carefully translating and plagiarizing my father’s work. Alice insisted that he was currently working on a book but that he was finding this one particularly difficult. It was to be his first adult novel, but he claimed to be suffering from writer’s block.

It seemed that Oliver was not even a good husband to Alice. She was aware that he had been unfaithful. Possibly
even with her travelling companion, Moya. He was dismissive of her work and of her opinions. He was intolerant of her friends. He could not get on with her mentally challenged brother, and upset him to the point where the unfortunate man became aggressive and had to be put into a residential care home.

‘Why do you stay? Why do you not leave him?’

‘He needs me … needed me.’ She corrected herself. ‘He told me that he could not write the stories without me.’

‘What about love?’

‘I thought that
was
love.’

The next day, Alice and Moya left together. Moya returned alone some hours later. The ridiculous woman was leaving her husband – for our solitary single man, it seemed. Always with the Irish, there is the drama!

Alice emailed me to tell me that she had found the leather-bound books and was going to confront him, but asked for my patience. I never dreamed that he would attack her, but I was keeping abreast of all news of him and when I read later that he had been arrested for her assault, I realized that I must somehow be involved, that the books were the source of the trouble. I contacted the Irish authorities. I supplied the motive for the attack. I am finally going to Ireland, to give evidence at the trial. The lawyers tell me that he will admit to the plagiarism. I am horrified by what he did to Alice, and a part of me wishes I had never met her and that we had never discovered the truth.

The truth remains. Oliver has betrayed us all.

Papa did not write those stories for publication. He
wrote them for me and for my precious little boy. I know it should not matter to me that Oliver made money from them. If I had found the books, I do not think it would have occurred to me to publish them, but they were mine.

What kind of a man is Oliver to have done such a thing? I wonder if he really loved my father at all, if he even cared about my son. Was it an opportunistic moment, when he found the books intact amid the debris and thought he could just take them? Or had he been making secret copies all along, knowing that we would never publish them ourselves? Alice told me that Oliver had no mother to speak of and that he and his father had been long estranged, that in fact she never even met Oliver’s father. So could it be that after my father’s death, he found the books and thought of them as his inheritance?

I recalled what Oliver said to Laura about her pregnancy, about not wanting
another
child. But then I think of Laura’s infidelity and it stops making sense. Perhaps Oliver was trying to make a family out of mine. Who knows? He is just a thief.

Of course, I went into the town the day after Alice left and bought all of the books. The stories are as I remember them, but astonishingly, Alice’s illustration of the central character, Prince Sparkle, is uncannily the image of my boy, Jean-Luc.

The month before I left school, my father sent a cheque for fifty pounds in the post and a curt note suggesting that I find myself a flat and a job as I was soon to be eighteen and could not expect to be supported any further.

I had no idea what I was going to do with my life, but Father Daniel took me aside and counselled that my grades were good enough for university and that I could always come back to the school to teach when I had my degree. He came to my rescue once more and offered to pay my college fees and found me a bedsit in Rathmines.

It took quite a while to get used to living alone and preparing food for myself. Up till then, my life had been organized with military precision. I had become institutionalized in my years at boarding school. I was not used to being alone. I wrote to my father telling him of my new address, but received no reply. I worked in a fruit market early mornings and weekends to support myself and to keep myself occupied, but college life was enjoyable nonetheless. A lot of students were living away from home and I could pretend to be like everybody else. I was not an outstanding student by any means, although I was top of the class in French. Trying to work and socialize on my meagre earnings meant that study was sometimes neglected, but I managed to earn respectable grades despite that.

Having had a taste of freedom, I knew for sure that
I could not go back to the school, nor had I the temperament for teaching.

By early 1973, I was dating Laura. Wild and beautiful Laura. So different from the other girls. I loved her, I thought. Maybe if we had stayed in Dublin that summer, everything would have turned out differently; maybe we would be married, happily ever after married.

As my second-year exams approached, Laura hatched a plan for us to spend a summer abroad on a working holiday. I thought it was a pipe dream, but Laura wrote to farms and vineyards and canning factories all over Europe looking for jobs and eventually got a response from a farm in Aquitaine. We were invited to an estate in a tiny town called Clochamps. There was a chateau and a vineyard, an olive grove and an orchard. It sounded ideal. Mindful of my previous summers in captivity, I was eager to travel, expand my horizons and see what the world had to offer, and also to spend time with Laura. The plan, of course, was somewhat derailed by Laura’s parents, who, although fond of me, did not approve of the two of us going off together by ourselves. However, there was nobody more determined than Laura, who persuaded her brother Michael and five others to join us. Chaperones, in the eyes of her parents. It was to be paid work with accommodation included, and thankfully, Father Daniel agreed to lend me the fare to get there.

I loved it from the moment I arrived. I was used to manual labour from my extracurricular job in the market, and while the others took a little while to adjust, I found it relatively easy. Irish summers could be grey, damp and miserable, but here the sun shone every day and although
we could see marvellous lightning storms at night at the other end of our valley, the rain did not fall in Clochamps. My college mates complained of heat and sunburn, but I easily acclimatized. The meals provided gratis were simple but excellent, wine was free too, and Laura and I easily found time and space to be intimate away from her brother and the others.

The elderly owner of Chateau d’Aigse befriended me early on. I translated for the others. My spoken and written French were good, and he was genuinely interested in me and wanted to know what I was studying, how I intended to use my degree, my plans for the future. After two weeks, Monsieur asked if I would be interested in doing some transcribing work for him. I readily agreed, thinking that the office work would involve typing invoices or some kind of record keeping. That is what he led his daughter to believe. He asked for my discretion and overpaid me. He introduced me to his grandson, Jean-Luc, the most beautiful and charming child I will ever know.

On the first day I reported for duty in the library, Jean-Luc was there also and Monsieur asked me to take a seat while he read his grandson a story. I was intrigued. Jean-Luc formally stepped forward and shook my hand. I knelt down to his eye level and returned his greeting with a little bow. He laughed and looked up at his grandfather and, pointing at me, he called me ‘Frown’.

As Monsieur began to tell the story, I watched the boy’s face as he perched on his papi’s knee. He was transfixed by the tale of a happy young prince of a fantastical land and would exclaim in the middle of the telling, would hide his eyes at the arrival of the bad witch, and clap his hands in
excitement at our hero’s escape in the end. I realized that Frown was a character who protected the Prince, and that the Prince was clearly modelled on Jean-Luc. I, too, thought the story was wonderful and said so to Monsieur d’Aigse. He was very happy to be complimented and explained that he had written a series of these stories on and off over the last decades, but that they consisted of handwritten notes. He wasn’t even sure how many stories there were. He had developed a palsy in his right hand and could no longer trust his own penmanship. My task, he said, was to type up all these stories to be pasted into some expensive leather-bound books he had bought for the purpose. It was to be our secret. He thought his daughter would disapprove that I was not being used for estate work, but I think she very quickly guessed what I had been employed to do. She did not interfere, however.

As I heard his stories, I thought they were good enough to send to a publisher, but Monsieur insisted that they were written solely for his family and that when Jean-Luc was older, he could decide what to do with them.

Laura began to complain bitterly that I was not spending enough time with her. She was right. I was enjoying myself with my two companions, and on several occasions I was invited to dine with the family. Madame Véronique was a little more distant than her father and son, but I loved being there with them and was reluctant to leave when the working day was done.

I tried to humour Laura, promising that I would devote the next night to her, but I rarely kept those promises. The old man treated me like a son. He thought I was a good man. A family was more seductive than anything she could
offer me, although I continued to sleep with her because, after all, a man has needs.

As I set about typing these stories and then laboriously pasting them into the leather-bound books, I found myself growing closer to the old man and the little boy. I was included in their secret world, and they accepted me without question. I could not get enough of their company, and it suddenly seemed to me as if I had somehow been wasting my time with Laura, as if no mere romantic relationship could be worth more than this platonic one between three menfolk who might, in some realm of possibility, have been three generations of the same family. I lost almost total interest in her affection and her vibrancy, and by now used her only for sex. All of the things in which I had previously delighted were now meaningless, as if the spell of the enchantress were broken. This new connection felt somehow purer.

For the first time in my life, I felt able to confide my private thoughts. I told Monsieur of my father’s lack of interest in me. He was clearly appalled and he shook his head in wonder, as if to say, ‘How could a man not be proud of this boy?’ and I loved him for it. He suggested that there was enough transcribing work to keep me busy for more than one summer, and I agreed enthusiastically to return the following year.

The truth is that I did not want to leave. There wasn’t that much time left. The idea of returning to my drab and lonely bedsit filled me with revulsion, and even thoughts of Laura’s affection failed to quell my growing anxiety about the future.

At this time, I was worried about my prospects. I did not have the family support that most of my fellow students had, and my existence in Dublin was hand to mouth. I hid it well, bought good second-hand clothing, borrowed books, stole stationery, and when in private survived on tea, bread and whatever fruit I could scrounge from the market. I let my friends think my parents lived in the countryside somewhere, and never allowed any visitors to my bedsit. I stayed in their homes and met their families and got more insight into how the other half lived. I desperately wanted what they had, but there seemed to be no way for me to achieve it. I was jealous of their lifestyle and their lack of anxiety about what lay ahead. I was headed for the lowest rung of the civil service, without the all-important contacts that everybody else seemed to have, or the financial backing to set them up in business. When I borrowed the fare to France, Father Daniel very gently informed me that he could not continue to fund my life beyond college. We were both mortified. I was grateful for everything he had done for me. He again suggested that I could come back to the school and teach, but that was now out of the question. I had finally escaped boarding school and there was no way I was going back. I was getting plenty of female attention, but I foresaw that when it came to marrying time, no family of good standing would allow their daughter to hitch herself to a penniless nobody. I needed a plan.

What could I do to force the d’Aigses to invite me to stay here with them? How could I endear myself to Monsieur d’Aigse to the extent that he would ‘adopt’ me? I probably could have seduced Madame Véronique if I’d
put my mind to it, but I was not attracted to her, and regardless, my dream future entailed my being accepted as me, without pretence. I did not want to live a lie. Not then.

My French was good enough to be able to converse with the locals. I knew of Monsieur’s several acts of bravery during the war. He was a hero in the commune. Could I be a hero too? What if I were to save a life? I began to fantasize about how I could achieve Monsieur’s iconic status. It amused me in my idle hours to imagine being embraced as one of their own. What if I could save Jean-Luc’s life? Wouldn’t that earn their loyalty and gratitude? Wouldn’t they beg me to stay and live with them for ever, as part of the family, their protector? But I reasoned I could never save Jean-Luc’s life without jeopardizing it, and that, obviously, was out of the question. Still, I could not shake off my romanticized dreams of the future. It became as real to me as if it had already happened, and I regarded the old man and his grandson with ever growing affection.

Then, I thought, what if I were to save the chateau? Surely that would be on a par with saving a life. And maybe it was something I could engineer if I put my mind to it. The idea came together slowly over several weeks – though in the beginning I believe I thought of it as comforting fantasy rather than a plan; something to puzzle over, as if teasing out a mathematical equation. But gradually I began to look around with a sense of purpose. I scrutinized the chateau in a new way.

It struck me that fire was something I understood. Any boy who spent time in a boarding school was well versed in the art of pyrotechnics. It is said that necessity is the
mother of invention, but often it is in fact boredom. We knew what burned fastest, loudest and most colourfully. We knew what caused explosions, what made a damp squib, how to cover up the smell of sulphur. I knew how to start a fire, and I also knew how to contain it.

The harvest started in early September so all hands were required in the vineyard, but by then I knew my way around the ground floor of the house and I knew that the most flammable part of it must be Monsieur’s library, with its dusty collection of books, maps and ancient ledgers detailing the commerce of the house over centuries. If I could be the first on the scene, if I could save the house, then I would be the hero. I could be employed to restore the library to its former glory. I was the only person who knew where everything in it was kept. Surely, Monsieur would see the wisdom of keeping me on? He would blame himself: a spark from his pipe must have escaped unnoticed, he would think, and smouldered slowly until it caught fire.

Shaking Laura off that night was the difficult part. She had something to tell me, she said; she needed time alone with me. I assumed she was going to tell me that her brother was a queer, but everyone knew that already. I put her off, saying that I was exhausted and needed to sleep. She insisted it was urgent; she had to tell me something important. I lost my temper with her then, told her I’d had enough of her clinginess, her jealousy of my work in the house, her demanding my attention constantly. I told her our relationship was over and that she should find somebody else to follow like a dog. I was unnecessarily cruel. I regret it. I was too absorbed by my own skulduggery to give much thought to her feelings.

Monsieur and Jean-Luc came down to the vineyard to say goodnight to me that night. We were working till dusk, and I had not been inside the chateau for a week.

‘Goodnight, Frown!’ said the little boy, and laughed, delighted with himself.

‘Good night, Prince Felix!’ I responded.

I must have drunk six cups of coffee that night to keep myself awake. I was exhausted, naturally, but exhilarated by the task I had determined to undertake. Nobody stayed up too late, aware of another arduous day ahead. I lay in my bunk, listening to their breathing, waiting for each room-mate to succumb to hard-earned slumber. Michael tried to engage me in whispered conversation about Laura. He had noticed she had seemed upset earlier in the evening. I admitted we had had a row, but avoided the details of my vindictiveness. I assured him that I would talk to her in the morning and that we would patch things up. He was content with this, and soon he was breathing evenly.