Unravelling Oliver (7 page)

‘Laura!’ I called out to her sharply. She let him go then and turned to glare at me.

‘Go to bed, Laura,’ I whispered fiercely, ‘you’re making a show of yourself.’

Oliver turned, as if to walk away from me, but I stopped him. ‘Oliver, we need to have a conversation.’ He looked uncertain but followed me back into the bunk-house, and gradually everybody settled down again. In whispers, I began to apologize for Laura’s behaviour.

‘She’s not normally like this, I don’t really know what’s got into her … maybe it’s the new environment, maybe the work is just too hard for her.’ I asked him to try to be a bit more patient with her. I understood he no longer wanted a relationship with her, but asked him just to pay her a bit of attention so that she wouldn’t feel ignored. He refused to meet my eyes and kept fiddling with his watch strap. I was mortified at finding myself in this position, so soon after declaring my own feelings for him.

It was a few moments before I noticed a strange something in the air. I couldn’t place it, but instinct pushed me out of bed again and I rose carefully, unwilling to disturb the others. Oliver followed. We went out into the open air. The night was warm, but there was a distinct smell out here, and in my confusion I thought at first that someone must still be up smoking the herbal stuff. Oliver pointed towards the house. Unusually, there was little moonlight, so it was only possible to make out the bare outline of the chateau against the night sky, and then I heard a kind of crackling sound and suddenly I was running up the steps and I knew the smell was fire and the air was thick with it, and when I neared the top of the steps I could feel the scorching heat on my face and see that the ground floor of one wing was engulfed in flames. Oliver went to wake everyone.

If I had been more alert, if I had moved faster, if I hadn’t been so tired that day, if I had known, if I had thought about it, if I had … Jesus, I could fill the void with ifs. I started to shout, but my voice drifted meekly into the night and I remembered that the acoustics of the place were such that I had to be actually on the terrace in front of the building to be heard.

One of my duties had been to summon the workers to lunch by ringing the bell in the tower of the disused chapel in one corner of the courtyard, and through the smoke I could see that side was unaffected by flames, so, roaring for help, I shouldered my way through the heavy wooden door and began heaving on the ancient rope until the bell was clanging frantically without rhythm in the chapel tower. The noise of the fire was loud now, cracking, spitting, groaning. I worried that there might be bedrooms directly above the library, which was by now being consumed by a fierce and angry blaze. People began to appear out of the smoke, and all I could glimpse was a scene of chaos, confusion and horror. I found Laura quickly, crying and clinging to an ashen-faced Oliver. I got a few of the lads to drag up the irrigation hoses from the field, but it took ages and when they had unfurled them it became clear they were fixed in position and didn’t stretch within ten yards of the fire. Several of the workers to my left were shouting and gesturing, trying to prise open the ancient stone lid of the disused well at the bottom of the terrace steps. Others were dragging a long-abandoned garden hose from the cave-like cellars underneath. Still others stood around staring in shock. Then a creature appeared out of the flames, almost unrecognizable as human, but above the noise of the fire and the roars of instructions, I could hear a high-pitched woman’s voice screaming, not in the cut-glass, clean sound one hears from the archetypal heroine on TV, but an ugly, ugly shriek of yearning. I had never heard a sound like that before, and the thought of ever hearing it again fills me with dread. It was the sound of Madame’s loss, grief and despair. Her entire body and
whatever slight garment she was wearing were blackened, most of her long hair had burned away, and her head was smouldering. I grabbed her and held on tight as she tried to escape me and run into the gaping maw of the inferno, hoarsely screaming all the time ‘Papa! Jean-Luc!’ until she could scream no longer.

The entire east wing of the house was engulfed in flames which licked and grabbed at falling timbers, tiles and masonry. Later I was to find out that the boy Jean-Luc often used to sleep in a cot bed in his grandad’s room on the first floor of that wing. I imagine it was an hour before the fire tenders came from the town, but time means little in the face of the elements; it’s an artificial construct that means nothing to the four winds. They pay no heed to ticking clocks. The firemen forced us back and finally took control. They were organized, and I admit that my reaction to their arrival was one of relief, although hope had been long vanquished by the flames.

There was nothing left of the east wing at the end of that night, bar the exterior walls. Through the flame-filled windows, I could only see the night sky and some collapsed roof beams. There was no hope for either of them. Poor Madame – her past and her future utterly wiped out in the unkindest way possible.

It was only after I had deposited Madame into the ambulance, completely broken and still convulsed by silent sobs, that I noticed Oliver was standing behind me, still, silent, his face a mask, his hands shaking as if independent of his wrists. He was in a state of shock.

Oliver Ryan’s name has been in the headlines in the papers here over the last month or two. I have refused to take part in any more media interviews. I cannot help but feel responsible for his attack on his wife. It is tragic, but every time his name is spoken, I automatically think first of the harvest of 1973, and I feel the pain as sharply as I felt it almost forty years ago.

One does not forget the worst time of one’s life, no matter how hard one tries. I have spent so many years wishing to change things. What if one had done this, what if one had done that … But the ache is still there. Time does not heal. It is a lie. One just gets used to the wound. There is nothing more.

But I must make sense of all this, before it slips through my fingers. One must go back to my father’s time to explain everything. One would want everything to be clear.

Papa was made old by
la guerre
, much older than his years. I was a small child at the time of the war, and did not understand anything except that there was a constant stream of visitors to our estate for a certain period. I know now that they were Jewish families protected by my father from the Préfet of Bordeaux in the Vichy regime. It has since been revealed that this civil servant ordered the deportation of 1,690 Jews, including 223 children, from
the Bordeaux region to the transit camp at Drancy, near Paris, and then on to death camps in the east.

It is impossible to believe that so many of my compatriots did nothing, but I think genocide happens every day in some part of the world and it is easier for us to pretend that it is not happening, easier to turn off the TV or skip that column in the newspaper.

My father was a hero, an intellectual and a noble man. My mother’s death occurred shortly after the occupation, and he was heartbroken, but she had foreseen some of the horror that was to follow and she extracted a promise from my father that he would do everything in his power to protect our friends, no matter what their faith. We lived in very comfortable circumstances in a chateau handed down through seven generations of my father’s family. We produced good wines that were sold all over Europe and gave employment throughout the region. My father was less business-orientated than my mother and struggled to keep a rein on things in her absence. He was too distracted and scandalized that the Vichy government could preside over such evil.

He invited several Jewish families to make their homes in the wine cellars underneath the terraced steps, particularly between 1942 and 1944, as the round-ups intensified with the full participation of our own French authorities. Papa refused to stay quiet and made several representations to the secretary general to the Préfecture to no avail. So he took the law into his own hands and, using local informants, was able to pre-empt the official round-ups with round-ups of his own. My Tante Cécile was active in the Resistance movement in the city and, through a
network of friends, managed to coordinate the rescue of many families targeted by the Gestapo. The families had to be kept out of sight, and even though we probably had the space for them in the chateau, Papa felt it was too risky. Our chateau was in a valley overlooked on two sides, so it was not possible for any of them to be outside during the daytime. If there was to be a sudden inspection, there must be no trace of them. So Papa set about turning the cellars into a more comfortable home. He knew he risked the business by doing this as wine production would have to cease for the duration. He ordered oil lamps, blankets, books and clothing through some friends in Valence so as not to arouse suspicion in the local village of Clochamps. He took delivery at night and, with trusted friends, created a temporary sanctuary for these families who had nowhere else to run, until a contact could be made to get them north, out of the country and across the border to Switzerland where they were guaranteed to be free of persecution. As a child, it was tremendously exciting for me. A constant stream of new people coming and going. I was too young to notice their sorrow and desperation. Until then, I had been home-schooled, an only child, but Papa made sure that I knew the importance of keeping secrets when it was crucial to do so.

Despite all this activity, my father continued to make time for me, ensuring that I understood the world in a moral sense and that I knew that I would always come first in his life.

In May 1944, just a few months before the Liberation, a midnight raid by the Gestapo found fourteen Jewish families in our cellars, including my best friends Sara and
Marianne. I never saw them again, but was later to discover that they and all their families were dead, some shot while trying to escape the camp at Drancy, others gassed in Auschwitz.

The Gestapo seized our home, had my father arrested by the local police, and I was sent to Tante Cécile in the city. I did not see my father again for six months, but prayed every night for his safe return. I do not remember most of these events and it shames me a little that I do not, but I can visualize the story as it was retold to me by those who were old enough to understand what was happening.

We were reunited for Christmas after the Liberation back at Chateau d’Aigse, but it was barely recognizable as the grand home it had once been. The house had been stripped to its bones; no rugs, paintings, furniture or bedding. Floorboards had been used as firewood. It was the first time I saw my father cry. Whatever they had done to him in prison had broken him. He was just forty-eight years old.

Many years later, I wanted him to get a typewriter and modernize our archaic filing system as it would be easier than filling out the old ledgers we used for the administration of the farm. Papa’s refusal was instant and ferocious, and it was only then he told me that while in prison he had been forced to type up deportation orders. He had told nobody and, despite his heroics, he felt nothing but shame. I think it an honourable thing not to visit your horror upon those that you love, but I suspect that the pain of keeping it inside must also cause a lesion to the soul. It was known that when the Gestapo realized they were on the verge of defeat, they became particularly vicious.

I recall the particular warmth of my father holding me tightly in the skeleton of our library, picking over the remnants of our raped bookshelves where he had kept many precious volumes. Papa was a book collector, and I remember that he swore to restore this room first.

Because our winery had ceased production when we were hiding the families (there was no way of operating without the use of the cellars), and my father’s nerves were too shattered to return to the business of wine, we had no income apart from what was left of his inheritance. We closed off one wing of the house and confined ourselves to just a few rooms. My privileged childhood was over, but I had no concept of it and so I did not miss it. I was too young to be aware of wealth or the lack of it. I was delighted to attend the local
lycée
as my father tried desperately to nurse his neglected vines back to life. My father begged Tante Cécile to move in with us. He was determined that I should have a mother figure. Tante Cécile was my mother’s older spinster sister. The few photographs that remain of my mother show some resemblance, though my mother was beautiful and Cécile was not. She did not know what to do with a child, and we had many battles of will over the most ridiculous things. My father grew weary of being the referee between us, and it took me some time to realize that if Papa trusted her, then I should also trust her. It occurs to me now that they may have been lovers. I have snapshots of catching them awkwardly together in my mind, but no matter. She was a good woman in a difficult situation, and I should have been more aware of the sacrifice she had made to become my guardian.

It was Tante Cécile who spoke to me about how to be a woman and who gave me napkins when menstrual blood first appeared. I thank God for that, because my father was old-fashioned in a lot of ways and could not have countenanced such a conversation, although he proved to be quite the feminist in other ways later on.

I was decidedly average at school but got respectable grades upon graduation. Papa thought it was time for me to go to university in Bordeaux or Paris, but I was not a city girl and could not imagine myself adjusting to life beyond my friends, my father and Cécile. The village girls were not going to university and I thought of myself as one of them. They would mostly end up working on our land in some capacity, so I did not want to mark myself out as different from them. They were good, honest people. Besides, we could not afford three years in the Sorbonne, and I thought that anything I needed to learn, I could learn in Clochamps. I had no ambition to be a doctor or a lawyer, as my father had suggested, and I dreaded telling him this. When I eventually did, his relief was palpable. My father and I had become very close, and he depended upon me more as he aged and his health gradually began to fail.

It was arranged that I would work as secretary to the
maire
, a token job really that took up five half-days a week, although it was rather more demanding to dodge his roaming hands successfully for the ten years I worked there, usually by reminding him loudly of his obligations to his wife and children and by pointing out how very old he was.

I never breathed a word of this to my father. He would
have been horrified, and I was strong enough and confident enough to deal with the old buffoon.

In the afternoons, I returned to my father and Cécile, and helped with the work of maintaining the land and the house as we began a painstaking restoration project.

I had a social life with the other young people in the village, and I attended all the local carnivals and dances, but I did not want a boyfriend. I was sought after by the local boys, and I certainly flirted and exchanged kisses and probably was quite a tease, but I did not fall in love. I cannot understand why, as most of my friends fell in love many times before they married and several times afterwards, but at the back of my mind, I always wondered,
Would Papa like this boy in his house? Would Papa like to see me marry this boy? Could Papa live with this boy?
The answer in my head was always negative. My female friends pitied me, I think, as I attended one wedding after another, assuring me that I would be next, suggesting their cousins and friends as potential partners, but I was happy alone.

The next decade saw the recovery of the vineyard. My father was something of a legendary figure in the entire region. Mostly the villagers felt tremendous guilt that they had done nothing during those terrible years, although we understood their fear. Even known collaborators bent over backwards to help us, and Papa accepted their help graciously, knowing that he was doing them the favour. We drew up plans to restore the house to its former glory, although it was a tediously slow process and, as it later turned out, a futile one.

By the time I was thirty-two, my beloved Tante Cécile had died peacefully in her sleep and my father was bereft again. I, too, felt grief, but whether my father and Cécile were lovers or not, they were certainly confidants and, I suspect, I was often the sole topic of conversation. Cécile thought my father was wrong not to insist that I go to university. She thought I would never meet a suitable husband in our provincial little corner. After she died, Papa began to worry that she was right. It worried him enormously that I was childless. By then, I had had a healthy number of assignations, and had long since lost my virginity to our butcher’s nephew Pierre, who came to spend a winter in Clochamps and begged me to marry him at the end of it. It was an intense affair but I saw no future in it, and poor Pierre left the village with a broken heart. Papa had begged me to marry him, or indeed anyone, but I resisted, insisting that I did not want a husband and would never marry. Papa surprised me then by lowering his expectations, suggesting that I take a lover instead. I was shocked, not by the idea of having a lover, which was an entirely acceptable concept, but that my father had suggested it.

‘But you need a child!’ he pleaded. ‘When I am gone, there will be nobody! I am getting old and tired and you are here to care for me, but who will take care of you when you are old? Nobody! Who will take care of this estate?’

I had to concede his point. But looking at the potential gene pool in the village, I could not think of anybody who I would want as a father to my child, except Pierre and he had married and moved north to Limoges.

It had now been six years since my liaison with Pierre. He was strong and handsome and was interested in old
maps and books. I began to regret not accepting his proposal, which I think had been sincere. He had not ever met Papa, but they had shared interests, for example books and me, so they might have been friends.

Pierre visited his uncle once a year, and there was the small matter of timing within my cycle to be considered. I know it was deceitful of me, because perhaps I could have told him the truth and got the same result, but I was afraid that Pierre’s inherent decency would preclude him from cheating on his wife if I had baldly made my request. All Pierre’s qualities were of the kind one would want for one’s child, is that not so?