Unravelling Oliver (9 page)

My restaurant, L’Étoile Bleue, opened at the end of March 1974 in a laneway off a Georgian square in the city centre. In the space of a year, my life had turned upside down in spectacular style. The restaurant did good business from the start, and within a few months I could see that if trade continued at the current rate, I would be able to repay my father’s investment within maybe five or six years, so all was fabulous. Then, in August, Laura came home.

My parents were, of course, relieved and I wanted to hear all about what was happening in Clochamps, how the building project was going in Chateau d’Aigse, how Madame Véronique was, whether she had seen Thierry, and so on. Laura answered my questions but seemed distant and uninterested. She looked pretty dreadful too: she had
dark circles under her eyes and she was very thin. She just picked at her food at mealtimes. We didn’t recognize her odd behaviour for the nervous breakdown she was having. My mother brought her to a doctor who recommended a foul-smelling tonic that had no effect whatsoever. When I suggested getting in touch with Oliver, she barely reacted at all. I didn’t understand what was going on with Laura, but I was worried. I offered her a few weeks’ work in the restaurant. She had deferred college for a year and still had more than a month before she started again. She would be OK for a few days and then she wouldn’t show up at all, leaving us frustrated and short-staffed. She said she was tired. ‘Of what?’ I said. ‘You don’t bloody do anything!’

Reluctantly I approached Oliver to ask if he would call to the house to see her. He obliged by offering to take her out for a meal in my restaurant or anywhere she wanted, but Laura refused to go. Oliver even wrote her a letter, but Laura didn’t want to see him. I wondered if perhaps there was more to Oliver and Laura’s break-up than I knew. To all outward appearances, he had been a gentleman throughout their entire relationship – there was no question that he had cheated on her or anything like that – but it was clear that Laura wasn’t going to forgive him for rejecting her. Usually it was Laura who did the rejecting. She clearly couldn’t handle being on the receiving end. I didn’t think that Oliver could be held responsible for her depression. Not then.

I find it difficult to believe what is being said and written about Oliver. It is true that I haven’t seen him in decades, but the person they are describing in the headlines is not the boy I knew.

When Oliver became so hugely successful as Vincent Dax, I was really glad that his life had worked out so well, because as far as I remember he had a fairly miserable childhood, even by Irish standards. I know because I was there for part of it. They say that children always accept their own reality as normality, so I suspect that Oliver wasn’t that aware of how neglected he was, but it was certainly whispered about at the time.

My father had died the year before I arrived in St Finian’s in south Dublin. I was fourteen and had three sisters. I think Mammy just wanted me to have a more stable education and to have some masculine influences on my life. We lived in rural south Kilkenny and I ended up working the farm quite a bit, but Mammy was determined that I wouldn’t follow my father into an early grave, which, she insisted, was a result of working his fingers to the bone from dawn till dusk. The other more pressing reason, though I didn’t appreciate it at the time, was my chronic shyness. I have a disfiguring port wine stain across my left eye and for most of my life have been self-conscious about it. My mother felt that if she didn’t find a way to get me off
the farm at a young age, I would probably never leave home. She was right.

St Finian’s wasn’t a bad school by the standards of the day. I don’t ever remember there being reports of sexual abuse or anything like that. The priests were, by and large, quite kind. There was the token sadist, naturally enough, but I reckon having only one on staff in an entire school in the 1960s was a pretty good ratio.

When I arrived in Oliver’s class, he had already been in St Finian’s for eight years. It seems really shocking now; the thought of sending my own little fella away when he was only six sends shivers down my spine, but it really wasn’t that unusual at the time. Oliver was pretty quiet, most notable for the fact that his clothes were almost threadbare. Because of this and because of his dark complexion, he was an obvious target for general slagging. Academically, he was pretty average, better at French than anything else though still not outstanding. For the first year, before I really got to know him, I assumed he was a scholarship child because he seemed so, well … poor. We knew he had no mother and assumed that she was dead. It was rumoured that Oliver’s dad hadn’t been married to Oliver’s mother or that she might have died in childbirth. He never spoke of her and it was just one of those things that was understood; it would be inappropriate to ask, like the fact that we all knew Simon Wallace was adopted but no one ever mentioned it.

Oliver spoke of his father though, often, and with reverence and pride. I can’t remember exactly what it was he did, something to do with the church, senior adviser to the Archbishop of Dublin, something like that. It was surprising
to me that Oliver’s dad would be someone of importance because his general neglect of, and lack of interest in, his own son was staggering. What shocked me even more was the fact that Oliver had a sibling, a pale-eyed blond-haired half-brother, Philip, about seven years younger than him, who lived at home and went to the primary school attached to our school. I never saw them speak to each other in intimate terms. It was as if they were completely unrelated. But the most awful thing was that Oliver’s home was less than a mile from the school and he seemed to be forbidden from entering it. At Christmas time and during school holidays, Oliver stayed with the priests. From the window of the corridor beside the science laboratory on the top floor of the school, you could see Oliver’s house. Many, many times, I found him perched on the windowsill, often with my pair of binoculars, watching his family come and go. Somehow, it seems much more tragic now. In the macho world of an all-boys’ boarding school, there was no room for sentimentality or sympathy. If we were wounded, we learned to hide it well.

Oliver and I became friends in my second year at the school in a passive kind of way. We didn’t exactly choose each other. It was just because everyone else had friends and we were the two oddities with whom no one else wanted to hang out. My disfigurement and Oliver’s manifest neglect marked us as outsiders. He named us ‘The Weirdos’. We didn’t belong in the hip crowd and we didn’t belong in what we called the ‘mumsy’ crowd, and as we weren’t part of any particular gang, we buffeted along between all the various groups, falling out of favour with one and moving on to the next. I believe we trusted each
other. Oliver dominated the friendship, which really suited me fine. I pretty much went along with anything he said, but he wasn’t much of a rule-breaker or risk-taker so I was never led into jeopardy. He never mentioned my eye and I never mentioned his mother. That was the basis of a firm friendship in those days.

He was curious about my family, constantly asking me to retell stories and anecdotes from my holidays at home. Not having a mother, he wanted to know about mine.

Oliver’s father visited maybe once every year or eighteen months. Oliver would be in a knot of anxiety for weeks leading up to a visit, trying his best to raise his grades and keep out of any hint of trouble. He looked forward to it and dreaded it in equal measure, I think. When my mother or other parents visited, they always brought gifts for their children, usually a tuck box of some description or, if you had particularly cool parents, a set of darts, water pistols or other weapons of minor destruction.

A boy would always be very popular in the wake of a parental visit as he would be expected to share the swag. Some suggested that Oliver was keeping it for himself and simply refused to share, but I know that wasn’t the case. His father never brought him anything, except a book of psalms once.

Approaching summer holidays towards the end of my second year there, my mother suggested that I invite Oliver to join us on the farm for a few weeks. I wasn’t sure about this plan, if I’m honest. It was one thing to be hanging out in school, whittling catapults out of branches and spying on the school nurse and her boyfriend, Father James, but school and home were very different environments. My
home was a particularly feminine one, with a widowed mother and three girls, while Oliver was growing up in a school surrounded almost exclusively by men, except for the aforementioned nurse and a few of the jolly cleaners. I remember being worried by his reaction to my family and vice versa, but I needn’t have. All the women in my family fell in love with him. My mother would have adopted him if she could, and it was the most painful embarrassment to watch all my sisters going through the various stages of romantic attraction to him. Una, the youngest, was nine and spent as much time as possible climbing on to him for piggybacks or asking him to read to her. Michelle, thirteen, feigned a sudden curiosity in anything that Oliver had an interest in and spent her time baking new delicacies with which to charm him. Aoife, at sixteen, one year older than us, tried a different tack, pretending that she didn’t notice him, but always seemed to be in some state of undress when we walked in from the barn and developed a way of draping herself over our furniture that could only be described as louche.

Oliver took it in his stride. I’m sure he was somewhat discomfited, but he must have been flattered all the same. That was probably the first time he’d been around women of his own age. At first he was shy and overly polite, but he gradually relaxed until he almost became accepted as one of the clan. The plan was that he would stay three weeks. His father had apparently stipulated that Oliver must earn his keep and be put to work on the farm, but we were all used to working our summers on the farm anyway, so Oliver blended in quite well. Oliver proudly sent his first postcard to his father, telling him how much he was enjoying
his time and assuring him that he was working hard nonetheless. Two days later, my mother received a phone call from Mr Ryan instructing her to return Oliver to the school immediately. He should have had another eight days with us, but Oliver’s father would brook no argument and offered no reason for the change of plan. My mother was very upset, I recall, and bought Oliver a whole new set of clothing before we put him on the train back to Dublin. Oliver bade us farewell stoically. He didn’t question his father’s decision or express resentment. He didn’t seem angry about it, but I clearly remember the shine of tears in his eyes as we waved him goodbye from the station platform, my three sisters blowing him kisses, my mother as heartbroken as they were.

We never got a valid reason for Oliver’s sudden departure. As far as I know, he just went back to the school and spent the rest of the summer with the priests. My mother always maintained that his father acted out of spite, that the postcard alerted him to the fact that Oliver might actually be enjoying himself and so he felt compelled to put a stop to it. There wasn’t really any other explanation, I’m afraid. It is hard to credit that anyone could be so cruel to their own flesh and blood. I guess we will never know the reasons why, unless Oliver writes his autobiography. But I’m not sure if he would be allowed to do that now.

When we left school, Oliver went to college and I returned to the farm. We would meet up occasionally in Dublin for a few drinks. I knew from rumours that he had a small flat in Rathmines and worked mornings and weekends in a fruit and vegetable market to pay his rent. I guess once he
was educated, his father washed his hands of him, his duty done. Oliver spent summers working abroad to pay his college tuition, and I think he must have flourished and gained confidence during that time. One summer he went with a gang from college to work on a vineyard. Apparently there was some tragedy connected with a fire, but I never heard the full story as we lost contact around that time.

In December 1982, I was pleased to receive an invitation to Oliver’s wedding to a girl called Alice who was illustrating a book he had written. I was happy that he had found both love and a publisher. My mother was ill in hospital at the time, and I couldn’t make it to the wedding. It was a shame. I would have liked to have celebrated his happy day with him.

Just a few months later, I got an invite to the launch of Oliver’s first book. I was confused at first as the author’s name on the invite was Vincent Dax, but when I rang to query it, the publisher let me know that it was Oliver.

There were only ten or twelve people there; one was Father Daniel from the school, two or three were his friends from college who I had come across once or twice, and of course his agent, publishing folk, and his new bride, Alice. She was lovely, very warm and gracious. I recall that even though she had illustrated the book, she insisted that it was Oliver’s night and Oliver’s success.

Oliver was a nervous wreck and immediately I recognized why. He was waiting for his father. The fearful boy so desperate to impress that I recalled from schooldays hadn’t completely disappeared yet. All evening, as people congratulated him and he read passages from the book,
Oliver’s eyes swivelled backwards and forwards to the door. I asked him eventually if his father was expected. He gave me a look that said it was none of my business and not up for discussion. Later we had a few drinks in Neary’s and he relaxed a bit. I asked him why he had used a pseudonym. He grew embarrassed, and I guessed that perhaps his father had insisted upon it.

Since then, I have only seen Oliver a handful of times, but I noticed that when I met him, he seemed increasingly casual and breezy in conversation and almost dismissive of our shared childhood. Finally, he stopped returning my calls and didn’t respond to invitations.

He popped up on TV sometimes on the review programme or as a pundit on the radio, but it is years since we really knew each other socially.

When I grew up and met Sheila and we had our little boy Charlie, I often thought about what fatherhood should be. My own father had killed himself with work and was barely a presence in our lives; Sheila’s father was the local GP in Inistioge and by all accounts cared more for his community than his family. Other fathers may be violent alcoholics or too idle to provide for their own. None of us are perfect. I did my best with Charlie, and he is now a fine young man who makes me proud every day. Some men, though, they shouldn’t be fathers; they are not cut out for it.