The Olive Harvest (The Olive Series Book 3)

by Carol Drinkwater

  Every day it grows hotter. And hotter. And there are increasing incidents of fire. The wind is turning in this direction. I see it on the sea, white horses scuffing the waves, frissons in the upper reaches of the trees. Fanned by the mistral whistling down the Rhône valley, the fires rage and spread. But miraculously they are still keeping their distance. Choppers beat through the heat. The sky is a traffic jam of activity. Clouds like silent peach-toned explosions curtain the horizon. In spite of their opaque menace, in a detached way I find them lovely; a ballet-without-music, a caravan in passage across the heavens; graceful, soundless and ominous.

  Jacques, thick-bodied, muscular, taciturn, cleans the pool in his leisurely manner and watches the sky. He reminds me of a shipwrecked mariner waiting for rescue. He can pinpoint exactly where the conflagration is centred. He tells us they all start with arson. Every year, without exception, in the dry summer months, tiny bands of pyromaniacs descend upon the coast with the express purpose of setting light to the vegetation. They wait for the winds, ignite a match and watch the forests combust, seeking a thrill beyond our comprehension. ‘Less than two per cent of the eruptions here are accidents or caused by negligence,’ he says. Last week, 30,000 hectares of coastal forest and heathland were burned to ashes. Homes are being evacuated.

  The hawking roar, the guttural bray of rushing fire engines and the persistent refrain of the Canadair planes are beginning to blur into an unbroken, unbearable Muzak while inquietude and rising-decibel panic are fast becoming the most-played phrases of summer. The air gives off an aroma which is repugnant. Cinders fall from the metallic sky like autumn leaves. They lace the pool’s surface and catch in the corners of the balustraded terraces. Cinders of what? Carbonised life and nature.

  It is four months since it has rained, and almost as many days since Michel has uttered more than a sentence. A ghost of his former self, he behaves as though stunned, perplexed, puzzled, as though he quite literally does not know what has hit him. The growing collection of objects he was squirreling together – our butterfly wing, various curiously shaped cuts of wood, a rusted lock he found when I took him up to talk about the reconstruction of the ruin, shards of painted terracotta tiles, broken casseroles – has been cast aside. Lacklustre odds and sods they have become, discarded in the bone-dry grass, offering no further inspiration. I find the shells back amongst the flowers. I am dismayed; I had begun to believe, to hope that here lay a path forward for him, an ingress back to his creative self.

  Now he has retreated into figures, scribbling long sums in teeny notepads, and he wears a worried expression. I make a discreet call to the specialist at the Princess Grace Hospital. I trot out my concerns and he listens patiently. ‘Should I bring him to you?’ I beg.

  The doctor assures me that Michel’s condition is quite in order given the force of the impact.

  ‘Do you think a project might assist him? I was thinking of rebuilding—’

  ‘He needs rest and your patient support.’

  ‘Professionally, he’s under financial stress but he’s not talking about it.’

  ‘Give him time and all will be well again. He will be back to his old self.’

  Can we return to our former selves, I wonder, replacing the receiver, after crisis or trauma? I am not sure.

  We wake to air suffused with the smell of charred land. But now the sky is silent. Too silent. Eerily so. I am going to Nice, to an art shop in one of the narrow back streets of the old town. On my way out of the door, Michel halts me. ‘I shall be leaving after the weekend,’ he announces calmly.

  I wait.

  ‘I must get back to Paris.’

  ‘But it’ll soon be August,’ I counter. ‘The capital will be empty. You might as well stay for the holiday season and return in September when France goes back to work.’

  ‘I shall spend August in Paris. I have contracts to catch up on.’

  ‘Why not fly up, collect the files you need and bring them back? Or I could go for you. Run your business from here. I won’t disturb you.’

  ‘I shan’t be coming back, Carol.’

  I stand by the half-open door, one foot on the mat, speechless, barely grasping what I am hearing. I move to close the door, to re-enter the hall, to discuss this. My heart is pounding.

  ‘I’m going for a walk. I’ll see you later.’ He turns and disappears through the French windows on to the patio beyond our bedroom, beyond our breakfast corner and out of sight. The sentence ‘I shan’t be coming back’ beats into my brain.

  *

  Down at the coast I call in on a friend who lives in an apartment by the waterfront, above the harbour where the ferries depart for Corsica. We sit on her vine-shaded terrace in dappled light, not conversing much – it’s too hot – idly gazing out over the port, drinking iced tea, watching the comings and goings. I long to unburden myself, to share my sorrow and fears, but a desire to protect Michel stays my words. Discussing his state of mind, his professional insecurities, feels like betrayal. This woman works in television, too, and so I resist my longing to open up. Suddenly two Canadairs appear from out of the sea just beyond the yachts, roaring up from nowhere like monstrous reptiles in a horror film. A thundersome clatter they create right overhead as they zoom inland. Without even so much as a glance upwards, my friend remarks, ‘More calamities, I suppose. Do you want another glass of tea?’

  I am shaken by her casual comment and ask myself if this constant state of alert is not desensitising us. If we live side by side with danger for long enough, albeit screened from it save for a smoke-louring sky, will it become our norm?

  My heart is settling into an unquiet state of alert.

  When I return home Michel is nowhere about. I leave the sketch pad and crayons I have bought for him, as well as several rolls of film for his camera, on the table in the summer kitchen out of the late-afternoon sun. I phone our new acquaintance, the apiarist, to confirm his impending visit for the Sunday after next. I am half-expecting the number to be erroneous, to return me an out-of-order signal, but I am desperate to find any evolution in our daily life that might ignite my husband’s attention and anchor him at base. I fall upon Mrs Beekeeper, or more precisely, Mme Huilier. She answers the phone with a chirpy ‘Allô’. I give my name and she sounds genuinely delighted to hear from me.

  ‘I would like to confirm our rendezvous for Sunday week.’

  ‘Ooh, yes, ten o’clock. We are so looking forward to it.’

  I am warmed by her enthusiasm. The meeting had been arranged for eleven, but no matter, I reconfirm it for ten and reiterate that they should check in with us and we will direct them to the gate. ‘There will be cold drinks awaiting you after your long drive,’ I assure her.

  ‘A bientôt, madame,’ she trills.

  I dig out my aged bee tome and start boning up on the subject of apiary once more. I pay heed to the bees working our land; alighting on flowers, gathering nectar, pollinating; pointing them out to Michel, sharing what I am learning, hoping to engage him too. He has expressed some interest in the beekeepers’ impending visit and I attempt to build on that.

  ‘Bees do not pay calls everywhere. The white-forked blossoms in our olive groves, for example, are never visited or fertilised by bees. And what of the fig tree? It has no blossoms, or so I had mistakenly concluded. I have frequently asked myself how a fig is pollinated and I have discovered this most extraordinary phenomenon. Figs do have flowers; they lie buried within the early fruit. But it is only the fruits with female flowers that mature into edible figs. So how do the bees access the flowers?’

  Michel ponders my question, but he cannot provide an answer.

  ‘They don’t!’ I cry. ‘Bees have no business with the fig tree. There is a special wasp, a fig wasp, that fertilises fig fruits. These wasps have evolved a symbiotic relationship with fig trees. The female wasps, who are tiny, about three millimetres in length, crawl inside the growing figs to visit the flowers which line the interior of the fruit. Some flowers are po
llinated, others receive eggs. Once the eggs have hatched, the male wasps, who are wingless, fertilise their new-born sisters and then the girls fly off to find other trees, where they begin the process all over again. Twenty times as many females as males are born. I guess their workload is greater.’ I laugh. He smiles, and I am encouraged to add, ‘Why not shoot a documentary about the myriad forms of propagation right here in the garden? You’d be working from home … I could write the text.’

  But Michel does not bite, does not pick up on the suggestion. So I don’t bother to mention that the fig wasp exists in Asia, southern Europe, Australia and California and pollinates Ficus carica, the common fig trees growing everywhere here. Nor that it is thanks to the Phoenicians that fig trees grow so prolifically in the occidental world, which could also be claimed of the olive tree. Although Michel has not jumped at the idea of making a film together, I steal this companionable moment to ask, ‘Won’t you stay here one more week to meet the beekeepers?’

  Suddenly I see the clouds darken his thoughts again. It turns out that he thought the apiarists’ visit was this coming Sunday. Is his grasp of time slipping away from him, or is it a simple error?

  ‘Why don’t you stay on till the end of the month then and meet them?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Later, when we begin to prepare our supper, I find the sketchbook and crayons and rolls of film lying on the floor under a chair by the wastepaper basket in his office. I shove aside my dejection, determined not to be defeated.

  Michel stays on.

  And for many of those days during the latter part of July, he appears fitter, more accessible, less lost within himself. We grow closer. But what I have yet to learn is that there are good days and regressive ones. His progress is not linear, not uninterrupted or consistent. I remain constantly on the look-out for subjects that might enthral him, might link him with the here and now.

  Towards the end of the third week of July, I read in one of the French newspapers that we, in the southeast of France, are facing a ‘stress hydrique’. The hygrométrie for our region is at 16 per cent. I show Michel the article. What does it mean? He does not know. I suggest we investigate.

  A hygroscope, or hydroscope, is an instrument used for the detection of humidity in the air. Sixteen per cent, its current reading, is the equivalent of, say, an area as hot and dry as Marrakesh at the end of August. Just for fun, we look the word up in my English dictionary and also discover ‘hydroscopist’: a water-diviner, a dowser. This spurs me to telephone our own water-diviner, Claude, with whom I have not spoken in a long, long while. My timing is not good. His wife had a stroke and died in her sleep a matter of days ago. I offer my sympathies and he promises to be back in touch when life is more upbeat.

  Then I call René, who is delighted to hear from me and talks as though I had scratched him from my address book. I refrain from pointing out that he has stood me up twice in our recent history.

  ‘It’s too hot to go out fishing with my boat so I’ve been driving inland, avoiding the coast. It’s the season of red fruits,’ he croons. ‘I’ve been walking in the mountains, most invigorating, collecting wild strawberries and myrtilles, bilberries, to make jam. I’ll bring you a couple of jars; you’ll never taste better. When can I drop by?’

  I marvel at the energy of this man.

  ‘How are your olive trees? I bet you regret the fact you haven’t treated them.’

  ‘They are fine,’ I retaliate. ‘We have our work cut out keeping the little ones irrigated, but otherwise …’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t overdo it! Even in the inferno of our summer they don’t want to be watered more than once every three weeks or the young roots won’t be encouraged to drive deeper and fend for themselves. I’d better pop by and see how you are coping.’

  I smile. We settle on a time and date two days hence but, not unusually, René doesn’t show up.

  On the third Sunday in July, M. and Mme Huilier chug up our hillside in their four-wheel-drive on the heels of Michel, who went in search of them when they telephoned to say that they had lost their way almost an hour ago. This is the first time he has been at the wheel since the accident but he was keen to go and I was glad of his interest. The retired couple arrive bearing a jar of golden rhododendron honey from their miellerie. Michel escorts them to the bougainvillaea terrace while I zip inside to prepare coffee because they have refused the cold drinks I’d prepared.

  ‘The rhododendrons are a wilder, more stunted variety of the fabulously bushy parkland plant known to the English by the same name. Here, they are a ground-growing shrub rather like a small azalea,’ Madame is explaining when I return with the tray of café. The bees collect from the rhododendrons in the Parc de la Mercantour at an altitude of 2,000 metres. Mercantour is a magnificent national park an hour and a half inland and to the east of our farm. The Huiliers’ hives also produce honey collected from lavender, pine and white heather but their pièce de resistance is miel de pissenlit, dandelion honey, which I confess to never having come across before.

  ‘Oh, you should have seen the dollar signs in our eyes when we discovered we could produce such an ambrosial delicacy, but, alas, the climate being what it was last year, our plans were ruined.’

  I am puzzled. The previous summer was extremely hot so I beg an explanation.

  ‘In the mountainous region where we are living we had a dreary summer. So wet and, as you probably know, bees will not be parted from their hives when it rains.’ This is Monsieur.

  I had not known this.

  ‘The weight of the falling water makes it impossible for them to fly and it can damage their wings. Last year was quite the reverse of this year’s atrocious heat. For two weeks during the dandelion-flowering season, it just chucked it down, never let up. Finally, when the sky cleared and the bees ventured forth from the hives, the dandelion flowers were finished.’

  ‘And so were all our get-rich-quick schemes,’ chortles Madame, as though it couldn’t have mattered less. ‘We like to earn a living, of course, who doesn’t? But we do this work because we love bees. Oh look, dearest.’ Madame has risen. Monsieur follows, and stares deep into the heart of a bougainvillaea bush in full flower. The pair shuffle along the terrace, heads buried in the foliage, entranced by every insect on the flowers.

  ‘See that bee working away there?’ Monsieur calls to us. I rise, take Michel’s hand and we follow. ‘She is une solitaire. A loner.’

  ‘A solitary bee. How can you know?’

  ‘Look at the size of her. She is smaller. The solitaires, as their name suggests, are outsiders, solitary insects; they hunt alone. They have no hive or social system to protect them.’

  ‘So how do they manage alone?’ I want to know.

  Monsieur shrugs. ‘If forced, most creatures find a way to survive alone.’

  Monsieur, who is seventy, was a professional gardener working for a local council. His hobby was beekeeping. When he retired he and his wife decided to take up apiculture as a full-time occupation. Their enthusiasm for their métier is heart-warming and contagious. Glancing at Michel I see that he too appears fascinated, engaged.

  ‘We are looking for a coastal spot, where the weather is mild in winter, to place fifty hives. The bees need to maintain a temperature within the hive of between twenty-five and thirty degrees to survive. If the outside temperature is cold and inside the hive it is, let us say, a mere fifteen degrees, they will need to consume their honey reserves to create sufficient calories to keep warm and maintain the health of their queen. The health of the queen is paramount. They wrap themselves in a ball around her and flap their wings constantly like millions of little fans, but it is to create heat, not ventilation. Of course, this is very hard work. It requires fit bees. Their strength is essential to achieve the perfect environment for the queen, who is laying up to a thousand eggs a day. One hive can consume as much as seventy grammes of honey a day.

  ‘Seventy grammes,’ I repeat, taking in the inf
ormation.

  ‘It may not sound like a great deal to you, madame, but it adds up to almost three kilos of honey per hive, each month!’ This is Monsieur again. I am a little taken aback by his tone. Madame counters with a discreet brush of his hand.

  ‘We have two hundred hives,’ she explains with a broad smile. ‘The figures speak for themselves. If the bees consume all the honey reserves throughout the winter we have nothing left to extract and sell. If we can camp them in a warmer climate between October and March they will require less food to protect their queen, to keep her warm; she will be healthier and she will spawn and incubate many more eggs. The position of your farm is ideal.’

  ‘There is one petit souci,’ returns her husband. ‘Where could we station our truck and trailer?’

  I am confused by what he has described as his ‘little worry’. Our parking area is generous by any standard even while it remains cluttered with Quashia’s building materials. I hastily apologise for the mess and assure him that it will have been cleaned up by October.

  ‘No, madame, you haven’t understood.’

  Oh, dear, I have heard that criticism before!

  ‘The trailer – la remorque – in which we transport our hives has been fitted with a costly piece of equipment that resembles a miniature crane. This lifts the hives and sets them down at their winter’s resting ground. It delivers the bees to the precise location, you understand?’