Unravelling Oliver(7)

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.