Unravelling Oliver (3 page)

To make things worse, every penny I’d won had to be paid over to the hotel and the local doctor. When I eventually got back to Alice’s room at 3.30 in the morning, she was in exactly the same place as I’d left her, fully clothed but snoring lightly. I was too tired and hung-over, not to mention suffering from the pain of my newly relocated elbow, to feel anything else. I went back to my own room and had an uncomfortable night’s sleep.

The journey home was horrendous. Alice was purple with embarrassment at what she saw as her disgraceful behaviour, and I couldn’t drive because of my arm, which meant that she had to take the wheel. I nearly fell out of love with her on the way home. We had five near-death experiences. I thought my shoulders would be permanently lodged in my ears, and to this day I get flashbacks to that corner in Kinnegad. There was a distinct cooling of our relationship after that.

A week later, I was giving my friend Gerry the highlights of what had happened in the hotel, showing him the hotel bill so that he could see how much the night had cost me. He took the almighty piss out of me for ordering a whole bottle of port.

Gradually, Alice and I got back to normal, though the question of spending a night together out of town was never raised again. When I eventually admitted to her that I had mistakenly ordered port instead of wine, it broke the ice and allowed us to blame the drink for the events of that night.

My mam was delighted that the two of us were going out. She often invited Alice for tea. Occasionally, Alice would bring Eugene with her and then Mam would make too big a fuss, making it awkward for me and roaring at Eugene as if he was deaf. Eugene would laugh at her. He never minded what anyone said to him.

I got on like a house on fire with Eugene. If you ask me, he was a great fella altogether really. He was a funny, happy child in a grown-up body. Always smiling. Now, I’m not saying he couldn’t be difficult sometimes. For instance, he liked to dance. In public, at Mass or in the Quinnsworth usually, in front of everyone. But people understood that he was only a harmless eejit, God help him. We got into this game, him and me, where he’d be in his favourite chair and I’d come up behind him and lift up his arms and we’d pretend to be flying around the sitting room. He loved that game, so he did, and never got tired of it, and do you know what, it was a joy to be playing and to hear the laugh out of him like that. There’s not many that could lift Eugene,
I can tell you. I’m as strong as an ox and he’s no lightweight.

Eugene’s bedtime was a lovely routine at the O’Reillys’. There’d be a pot of tea for us and a glass of milk for Eugene and a plate of buttered bread would go round. And then when it was washed up and the table scrubbed, there were prayers, everyone on their knees at the kitchen table saying the rosary, and after that Alice would read a story to Eugene, usually a fairy tale or maybe a nursery rhyme of some kind. She had a brilliant way of reading. She made all the people in the stories come alive with different voices and accents and all. I loved to listen to her almost as much as Eugene did.

After a while, Mam started quizzing me. Was I serious about Alice? Did I know what I’d be taking on? I think Mam meant well, but we had a few rows about it. It wasn’t her business, after all. Mam thought it was great when I took Alice out the odd time and bought her cake, but she wanted to remind me that Alice would be responsible for Eugene when the mother died. If I married her, I’d be taking on the two of them. I made up my mind that that was fine with me. I really loved Alice by now, and if anything, Eugene would be a bonus.

Although nothing was ever said, I believed we had an understanding. We had been together for over a year. I hadn’t reckoned with Oliver. Alice could be walking around now, hale and hearty, if I had reckoned with Oliver.

It’s probably five years since I’ve laid eyes on Oliver Ryan, or Vincent Dax, as he is better known. I have kept an eye on his successes through the media, but the news about his savage behaviour last November is a total surprise. They say that Alice might never recover.

I first met him when we were students in University College Dublin in 1971. We were both doing an Arts degree and were in French and English together. Oliver was the type of boy that I liked to study: beautiful, in a poetic way. Obviously I was supposed to be sizing up the girls in my class, but there was something different about me.

Oliver mostly kept himself to himself, but he used to sit behind me in French lectures and we would occasionally share notes. It was only at the end of our second year that I got to know him socially. With Oliver, you only got to scratch the surface. I don’t remember him ever talking about his family, for example. To this day, I don’t know whether he has brothers or sisters. With all the stuff about him in the news, it’s odd that even now so little has come out about his background. None of us were ever invited to his home, and he exuded a certain air that precluded questions about his private life. Oliver was a bit of a mystery really – obviously an attractive quality, which, along with his striking looks and impeccable manners, gained him
a lot of attention from quite a few young ladies, not least my little sister Laura.

Laura was the star of her year. Academically gifted and stunningly beautiful in that wild West of Ireland way, I lurked in her shadow. Laura inherited our mother’s good looks and Mum came from a long line of raven-haired beauties from West Cork, where once Spanish blood must have darkened the gene pool. I got my father’s County Laois looks. His family had been farmers for generations. Potato farmers, and if they say you are what you eat, then the male side of our family resembled nothing if not potatoes: pale with pockmarked skin and irregular features. Everyone loved Laura.

Oliver came home with Laura to my parents’ house for dinner a few times. My mother adored him to the extent that it might have put Laura off, but Laura was love-struck, although she did a terrific job of hiding it for an incredibly long time before finally yielding to Oliver’s charms. Oliver and Laura were part of a gang that enjoyed trips to the pub or weekends away in our holiday home in Wicklow. She was really happy with him. I was jealous.

I have never understood what happened with Laura. Of course, she is no longer here to ask. Oliver was apparently as shocked as we were. We never got to the bottom of it. I often think about her now and what might have been. She and Oliver dated for only about five months, ending that awful summer we spent working the land in Bordeaux.

I can’t remember who came up with the idea first. It might have been Laura, actually. She knew someone who knew someone, and after the rigours of a year of study and exams, we were all looking for a chance to get out of
Dublin and away from parental control. We were to plant a vineyard in France. Others would go off to canning factories in Germany and a few went to building sites in London, but the notion of a vineyard struck our ears in a singular fashion. It would surely mean access to cheap alcohol. We didn’t really consider the graft part of the deal until we got there. Oliver signed up immediately, much to Laura’s delight. The agreement was bed and board and a fairly meagre wage in exchange for our labour. It sounded easy and we were able to convince our parents that the opportunity to study the French language and culture should be encouraged rather than dismissed.

We arrived in the last week of May. The initial couple of weeks were exhilarating. There were acres of land we were to prepare for planting, surrounded by a large peach orchard on one side and an olive grove on the other, set on a walled estate complete with chateau in a beautifully located valley, an hour’s drive from the city of Bordeaux.

Madame Véronique, a widow in her late thirties, ran the house and the estate. The only other members of the family were her six-year-old, a delightful little boy called Jean-Luc, and her elderly father, Monsieur d’Aigse. Monsieur d’Aigse and Jean-Luc were inseparable. They wandered around hand in hand, stooping to admire flowers or trees, the old man leaning down towards the boy, the little hand enclosed in his gnarled paw, which sometimes shook uncontrollably otherwise, whispering furtively and then exploding with laughter. It was never clear who was leading whom.

The d’Aigse family had owned the estate for several generations, but during the war it had been taken over by
the Nazis and the family had been ejected from the premises. The vineyard that had been there previously had fallen into ruin and the livelihood of the village had been destroyed. The chateau had been stripped of its valuables, but not its majesty. The rumour was that Monsieur d’Aigse had fought in the Resistance and had directed several missions of sabotage from the vast cellars underneath the terrace steps. I don’t know if that was true, but it was great to think that such exploits were being planned several floors below, while the jack-booted Nazis goose-stepped their way around the house above. There were other versions of the tale: apparently Monsieur had been horribly tortured at one stage when he had been caught smuggling a Jewish family out of the village, but it felt insensitive or inappropriate to ask about it. The war was still a living memory at that time, one that most would rather forget in that part of the world.

There were few servants as such, but there were several labourers living on the estate who seemed more than willing to help out with any job at hand. I got the impression that all the neighbours had good reason to be grateful to this noble family. This was a house of faded gentry, something we were well used to in Ireland at the time.

We lived in dormitory-style quarters, tent-like structures erected for the season in a field below the terrace, overlooked by the grand Chateau d’Aigse. We would eat with the rest of the estate workers at the communal outdoor table. The local field hands were a lively bunch from the nearby village of Clochamps and surrounding areas. They were a good-humoured bunch.

There were also some South African workers there that
summer. I had never talked to black people before, had hardly seen one in Ireland, but these boys didn’t engage with us at all and kept themselves to themselves. I tried talking to them in gestures of friendship, but they kept their eyes to the ground, as if afraid. I was fascinated, I must admit. We wondered why the black guys didn’t stay on the estate like the rest of us, like their white manager. I’m not sure, but I imagine they were even younger than us. Although I had attended a student rally for the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement, I had never before encountered apartheid’s ugliness. I heard that they had been sent over to learn how to plant a vineyard and take back some plants; the climate in the Western Cape was similar, apparently. I’d love to have known more about them and their circumstances, but they had very little French and virtually no English, and like everything else in those days, it was rude to ask. Their white ‘manager’ was an absolute prick called Joost. He had brought them to France to learn what he was too stupid and lazy to learn himself. He did no work and instead spent his day drinking and shouting instructions at them, physically beating them if they made a mistake. He tried to ingratiate himself with the rest of us by making crude jokes about his countrymen’s colour and stupidity. France was a country still recovering from its own shame about sitting back and allowing the segregation and persecution of the Jews, and the locals were not going to let that happen again. We all protested to Madame, who eventually was forced to eject them from the estate.

The accommodation was quite basic: a dorm for men and one for women, each with a water pump and hole-in-the-ground toilet at the end. Not the sort of thing we
would put up with now, indeed, but our standards were that bit lower when we were young. We thought it was all amusingly exotic.

The work, however, was gruelling to begin with, before we all toughened up, and in fact by the end of June there was little to be done on the vines and we moved to the orchard and olive grove, where the work was considerably less taxing. I spent the first month hoeing beneath each vine, scraping out each weed from the clover, grass and wild oats that covered the rows between vines. It was remarkable how fast they grew in early June, an inch or two a day sometimes, though Madame told us that the growth spurts were even faster in the early spring. Oliver and Laura were put with a different team on the vital task of
épamprage
, removing the unwanted sucker shoots from the vine trunk and selectively removing shoots from the head. The vines were cared for like ailing children, monitored, encouraged, soothed and coaxed into grapefulness.

I must admit that we took full advantage of the free wine after work and would often crawl into bed in the smallest hours of the morning, blind drunk. In fact, some people didn’t make it as far as their own bed. Sometimes they only made it as far as other people’s beds. Such a heady time.

And yet, I knew I had to try to fix the thing that was wrong with me. I was on a mission to rid myself of the albatross that was my virginity. I thought that it might cure me. Sharing a bunk-house with those immodest men was quite a strain.

Oliver’s spoken French was far better than Laura’s or
mine, and he often negotiated between Madame and ‘les Paddies’, as we became known. It was because of this that old Monsieur d’Aigse began to take an interest in Oliver. He asked Oliver the English names for certain plants and flowers, and Oliver would obligingly translate. Before long, Oliver was promoted. He spent more and more time in the chateau in Monsieur’s study. Officially, Monsieur took him on as a translator, working on some old maps or some such that Monsieur had compiled for his private collection. Lucky bastard. The vineyard work was tough. Oliver didn’t move out of the dorm, but he no longer had to work in the field. Laura was a little disgruntled about it, I remember. Occasionally, I spied him from the field beside the lower lake, sitting outside on the terrace with Monsieur, a jug of wine by his side, or playing some high-jinks game with the highly mischievous Jean-Luc. Their shouts and laughter ricocheted off the walls of the house and echoed through the valley. Oliver looked like the missing link between the old man and the boy. We noted how well Oliver seemed to fit in with them. When he came back to us in the evenings, he was like a different man. More content, perhaps; happier, anyway. Laura wasn’t the only one who was jealous of the time that Oliver spent with the family. I, too, didn’t like the way he became more like one of them than us. Instinctively, I knew that Oliver could never love me, but at least while he was dating Laura, I could be around him, in his circle of friends. Now, he was becoming removed from us. He would return full of stories about the funny things that Jean-Luc said, the new game they had played together. Oliver told us at one stage
that if he ever had a son, he wanted him to be just like Jean-Luc. I lightly commented that Monsieur d’Aigse would be a good father figure too, but Oliver just glared at me for a second before walking off. Whatever the story was with Oliver’s parentage, it was clearly a sore point. I didn’t know then that he was violent, but he certainly looked like he wanted to hit me.