The Olive Harvest (The Olive Series Book 3)

by Carol Drinkwater

  After my swim and several gulps of coffee, I amble about the grounds for a while with Vanessa’s eight-month-old son in my arms, to give her a break and to be alone with the baby. How he gurgles and dribbles. I look back across the land to the table where Michel is seated with the girls either side of him. These lovely daughters of his who were jealous and uncertain of me in the early days are young women and mothers now, handling the responsibilities in their different ways.

  And I used to wonder how it would all turn out.

  While I am on my lap of the garden, our wine-variety expert, M. Laplaige, zooms up in a pure white Citroën, another of his classic cars. Accompanying him is Pascal Poire, Mr Pear, the blacksmith, who I have warned Alexandre is also a garde de chasse, a hunting warden. Although it is only ten in the morning the men request glasses of port or, if we have none, tequila. Laplaige comes bearing many kilos of lusciously red strawberries from his greenhouse. Strawberries, what a treat, and we will have them too when our own greenhouse alongside Quashia’s hangar has finally been constructed. The babe still in my arms, I thank him and run to the summer kitchen for dishes for the red fruits, which I place on the groaning breakfast table where our guests and families are feasting, conversing in three languages at once, smoking cigarettes, opening bottles of wine and discussing what will be served for lunch.

  A country weekend in high summer in France.

  A time to be idle, to linger in the company of friends and loved ones, to drink in the luxury of this hard-won moment, this precious day. I close my eyes in appreciation. A row of turtle doves on the electricity line coo in deep-throated resonance. They are becoming almost more common here than the myriad songbirds who chatter and flit from tree to tree, I remark to anyone who might be listening. Laplaige explains that there are so many areas in France where they are hunted now that they are emigrating ever southwards.

  A debate has broken out. Voices are raised in amicable argument. I lean along the table to find out what the trigger for so much passion on a Sunday late morning, almost lunchtime, could be. Cheese, I am told. Three young friends of Michel and Clarisse from Paris are offering opinions about cheese. A most serious matter, until the exchange breaks down. Now there are peals of laughter and lolling of arms across the tables. Couples are kissing, more cigarettes are lit up, yet more bottles are uncorked. Who cares what time of day it is?

  Clarisse regards her light-haired daughter, Celine, skipping with Titus, their dog, a mammoth beast but gentle and playful with the children. I watch the little girl too. Amber-skinned with hazel hair, dressed in a white T-shirt and black-striped shorts. She is attempting to throw the dog a ball but the huge black hound bounds towards her and seizes it from between her fingers. She shouts his name but he pays her no attention and then, when he is tired of his private game, he returns and lays it at her feet. Celine, who resembles both Michel and Serge, her father, shrieks with glee. Clarisse comments on the miracle of motherhood. I smile, saying nothing.

  Sometimes, even now, after everything, I feel as though I am the outsider, as though I belong with and to no one, as though an act in the story was cut or pages were lost before I was given the opportunity to play them out. As though my role in all of this is to observe. But when I sink into such thoughts, there is Michel, who holds out a hand and smiles with eyes that beckon me close, ‘Come, chérie, don’t sit alone. Be with us.’

  Michel with his smile that lights up the world, Michel who draws people from the four corners, who builds castles at dinner tables and dismantles them with equal facility. Michel who left but has returned.

  I watch Clarisse calling dogs and children to order. How she resembles her father: introspective, sensitive, creative and, above all, charming. How unlike Vanessa she is, who is more Latin, open and maternal, always laughing, passionate and pragmatic. I love to see them together, these girls who link arms and chatter like monkeys; twins but so dissimilar. Twins with individual souls. I am reminded of their adolescence and our early days here. I remain their stepmother but we have grown to be friends. And I am a grandmother, I suppose, of sorts. La belle-grandmère to the children. Titus comes loping across the terrace, intent on theft, and grabs a badminton racquet lying forgotten in the grass. Off he goes with it in his mouth, leaping terraces triumphantly. He could be an incarnation of Henri, the very first dog we ever welcomed to this property but had to return to the refuge because he was such a hooligan. Alas, cher Henri must have perished long since, unless he has made it to seventeen. Our own two hounds give chase, yapping and dribbling contentedly. Ella stays in her stable or sits outside in the shade. She is far too old to participate in such antics.

  Michel’s sister, Angélique, with her three strapping boys and husband at her side, joins us at the table and pours coffee from a flask. She gives me a wink, a private moment shared between us. She has been dismantling tents and storing them in a corner of the summer kitchen until tonight when, after more festivities, she will re-erect them. From the house I hear music. Someone has decided to silence Kiri Te Kanawa at her Songs of the Auvergne and switch to one of the Buddha Bar compilations. Our dogs are sniffing about in the summer-dried grass in the hope of les bonnes surprises. The children are building universes of their own in various corners of the garden. The bees are hovering and circling about the innumerable blossoms, bent upon their tasks of gathering nectar, spreading pollen. Our beekeepers will call in later to join us for an early-evening verre.

  I hear cries from across the grass, beyond the Florentine cypresses where we have sited our badminton court. I lean to look. Michel and the girls are at play in the hot afternoon sun, shaded by a line of wild oaks growing on the terrace below. He is in competition with the pair of them. I hear female cries: ‘Bien joué, Papa!’ He is an excellent player. I am surprised. I hadn’t known it. A documentary film-maker friend from Austria with his French wife, an underwater photographer, join the team and play resumes. I love that thwack of racquets. Out of nothing Michel creates play and adventure. He requires little money. His charm draws people to him.

  Many coloured roses are blossoming again in this season of efflorescence. Valerians are shooting up out of the walls, red and pink flowers everywhere. Yellow and white marguerite daisies crowd the flowerbeds. Pots of lipstick-red amaryllis are in full bloom. Our grapes are ripening fast in this exceptional heat. The blacksmith, a cool glass of beer at his side, is measuring the stone staircase with a view to installing the sweeping pergola Laplaige suggested on his first visit here, two summers ago. Quashia is nattering to René, frailer than ever before but still at work. His eyesight is not what it was and that, he claims, was the cause of the near-disastrous spraying incident. They are in debate about methods of pruning and harvesting. The trees are bending beneath the weight of the drupes. They are looking forward to our next harvest, and a bumper season it promises to be again.

  Olives again. Yes, here on this fabulous hillside, this sea-fronting escarpment, there will always be olives, always be harvests, whether the farm is paid for or not, whether families unite or lovers, partners drift apart.

  Without this olive farm might Michel and I have drifted apart? Certainly, it has bonded our story.

  Our love has changed: it has grown sturdier; there is a broader understanding of one another. The mosaics of Michel’s mind are a little clearer to me now. Sometimes, when we are alone or lying close within the safety of our private universe, he touches upon the ‘recent dark days’, when he ‘nearly let me go’. Days, he says, when he was in an extreme place, ‘where no one was’. But those days have passed now and he has learned to live again, to allocate his career its rightful place and not make it the whole of his life, to wake each morning to life, to a world where colours reign and there are many reasons to be joyful. He remembers everything, he says, but he prefers not to talk about it. ‘I, we, are fine again now. That’s what counts.’

  I close my eyes and wonder if he understands that it is the same for me. I also remember everything. How could I f
orget the abandonment, those lonely, lonely seasons? The world can be a brutal place, often extreme and random in its cruelty, but there is beauty too, generosity, romance, laughter and, at its core, there is boundless love and the ability to be reborn. Our ability to keep our hearts open to it is what counts, what keeps us liberated and alive.

  Many years ago, long before I cared a sou for an olive tree, long before I was able to describe its form, I heard a tale. Why are olive trees made up of two forked trunks growing from one single base? The tale’s answer, as far as I remember, is that two mythological lovers became separated, were driven apart, but no matter where their journeys tossed them, their souls returned to the olive tree in their search for one another’s embrace, and so they were reunited, joined together for eternity by the solidity of one root, one love; they were two halves of the same soul. The olive tree, its silhouette, is the physical representation of their love.

  While, all about me, friends and family enjoy this lusciously warm summer weekend along our cobalt-blue coastline, I turn my head and gaze up the hillside at our young saplings shooting skywards like silvery rockets. To the Provençal way of thinking a hundred-year-old olive tree is still a baby. It will give of its best harvests in the centuries to come. Of course, Michel and I won’t be around to gather these mature gifts. We will have passed on to other incarnations of ourselves, but we will have left a part of ourselves on this hillside.

  When we first discovered this Mediterranean paradise, sixty-four abandoned, 400-year-old olive trees stood here. Over time we have extended the groves, planting many juniors. In three centuries from now, when our young fellows are grown up and bountiful and we are long dead and forgotten, what will remain?

  I like to fancy that the part of Michel and I which is our joint soul will continue to inhabit this farm. I also like to fancy that one of the gnarled old trees, its branches fecund with fruit, its twin trunks forked and twisted, long since transformed from the silvery-green sapling growing promisingly on our property now, will be our harbour. Within that twin-trunked olivier, two limbs growing jointly from the one root base, will reside the âme sœurs, the twin souls, for ever locked in embrace, of Carol and Michel. And who knows whether, in one of those centuries to come, another thirty-something couple might chance upon this hillside, left to its own devices once more, and decide to sing it back into existence. Might they, on a hot summer’s afternoon like this one, gaze upon the gnarled and twisted branches of the two-forked tree and speculate upon what stories that ancient could tell them?

  And when the breeze stirs our olive’s boughs and its pearly-green foliage murmurs in the whispering groves, might the young strangers just catch on the wind the drift of exhaled words: Je vais t’aimer toujours. I will always love you.

  But, oh, how we might so easily have lost one another at the criss-crossing of paths.