Unravelling Oliver(53)

‘You can’t just dump me with no explanation! You can’t just leave me! We love each other!’

She was raising her voice, growing hysterical, and I knew I must get away from her, go up to the house and put out the fire. Others had emerged to see what the fuss was about, and Laura was by now grabbing at my shoulders, wailing at me, ‘Why? Why? What have I done?’

I tried to get her to shut up. ‘Nothing, you’ve done nothing, I just can’t … I don’t …’

I was aware of shadows moving around us. We had woken everyone. Michael emerged out of the gloom. He was clearly annoyed and I think embarrassed that Laura was making such a spectacle of us. He took control and ordered us both sternly to go back to bed. What was I to do? Maybe thirty minutes had now passed, but no sign or smell of smoke or fire had yet reached our quarters, and I thought perhaps it might have gone out. I reluctantly followed him back to the bunk-house as Laura was led away weeping by one of the girls. I lay down, furious, as Michael began to give me a whispered lecture about Laura’s delicate ‘feelings’. Should I just feign storming off in a temper, so that I could go and check on the fire? How much longer could I wait? Could the fire have blown itself out? Michael was still going on and on, but suddenly he stopped. ‘What’s that smell?’ he said, and he leapt out of bed and ran to the door.

Michael was the one to raise the alarm. He could have been the hero, not me. But we were both too late to save lives.

I did not know about the paraffin cans in the lean-to shed, behind the door. I had never been upstairs in the house, and somehow I got the impression that there were no bedrooms in the east wing. I never meant harm to the boy or his papi, but I am solely responsible for their deaths. I will never forget the sound of Madame Véronique’s screams. It has haunted me for nearly forty years.

I was just about putting one foot in front of the other in the days that followed, going through the motions of empathy and sympathy, but I felt nothing at all, just a needle-sharp aching wound in the core of my soul. I tried not to sleep, because waking to the horror of the truth every day was unbearable.

Sweet Laura tried to comfort me. It was known that I had grown close to the dead, but I could not take her platitudes and rejected her all over again. I worked with everybody else, trying to clear the mess and the destruction and trying to avoid contact with Madame Véronique, whose family I had murdered.

I cleared out the library, but there was nothing left of it except some maps and an ivory paperweight that were kept in a metal box. Madame came to me and specifically asked about the leather-bound books, among other things. Monsieur must have told her about our project. I told her they too had been destroyed. Then I broke down and wept, and she held me in her bandaged arms and I felt worse. The fire service concluded that a stray ember from Monsieur’s pipe, which somehow ignited the paraffin in the lean-to, must have sparked the fire.

Four days before we were to leave, Laura told me she was pregnant with my baby. I could hardly ingest the information and ignored it and her, but she was everywhere I turned over the following days. In my grief I snapped at her finally, insisting there was no way I could have a family. My child had just been buried. She stared at me, and I realized what I’d said and realized I’d meant it. She cried and pleaded, but I was not going to concede any more emotion. I was already spent. I told her to get herself fixed up and to send me the bill. Somehow, I would scrape the money together to pay for it. She cried more.

Laura wisely decided not to come home with us. I assumed she’d find a little doctor somewhere who could sort her out. Michael was baffled by his sister’s insistence on staying on at Chateau d’Aigse, and negotiated between Laura and her parents in expensive phone calls that went on for two days. I presented it to him as philanthropy on Laura’s part. She simply wanted to stay and help Madame Véronique, and sure, what harm could it do. He knew by then that we had split up, but clearly she had not confided any of the details in him. I could not look at her or Madame Véronique on our day of departure. My shame would have been too obvious.

My shame was not so great, however, that I did not have the leather-bound books containing every story ever written by Vincent d’Aigse wrapped in a towel at the bottom of my suitcase. I’m not sure why I took them. Maybe I wanted some part of my two friends to take with me. Their innocence and their purity. Maybe I needed a reminder of my guilt. I had deliberately lied to Madame Véronique, but these stories were all I had left of those two precious souls and I could not relinquish them.

Back in Dublin, in my sunless bedsit, I spent a week in bed, not leaving the house or speaking to anybody. How could I even begin to explain that I only meant to be a hero, and not a murderer?

The books were on the dresser accusing me, and yet I could not bring myself to dispose of them. I did not look at them or open them. Finally, I dragged myself out of my decline. I left the house and went to a second-hand furniture shop where I bought an old wooden box with a sturdy lock. I came home and locked the books into the box and hoped that I would forget where I had hidden the key.

Laura was not so easy to forget about. She wrote several letters, trying to convince me that ‘we’ could keep the baby, that her parents would stand by us eventually. For a while, I considered it, but ultimately dismissed the notion. Marrying into a wealthy family was not a bad option, but raising a child? When I had just killed one? I do, after all, have a sense of morality. Then she wrote to say that she was going to have the baby in France and that I must go and join her there to raise our child. Another two months went by, and she wrote that she had changed her mind and was going to keep the baby anyway and bring it home, regardless of my involvement, sending me into paroxysms of panic. I never replied to any of the letters, but waited with increasing anxiety for news of the baby’s birth.