The Olive Branch

by Jo Thomas

  ‘Oh wow! This is fabu— What is that noise?’ she says as a whining and drilling shatters the peace again.

  I point in next door’s direction as I put the cheese on the tray and follow Lou outside.

  ‘I’m not sure what’s going on. He’s doing something to the old trullo in the olive grove over there.’ I nod in the direction of our adjoining wall.

  ‘What? The Bellanuovos?’

  I nod, putting down the tray and nipping back in for a bottle of water.

  ‘I didn’t think any of them were interested in doing anything on the land. They were all too busy waiting for the old man to die so they could take their inheritance and leave, like the other side of the family have done.’ She sits down on the crate where Marco was earlier and I sit opposite, laying out cheese, glasses, plates and a sharp knife. The sun is hotter now, but underneath the bamboo covering it’s lovely and shaded.

  ‘It’s Marco. I’m not sure what he’s doing over there.’

  ‘Hmm,’ says Lou, opening the wine and pouring while I cut the bread. The smell rises up and somehow makes the stresses of the day just a little bit easier. I breathe in the warm, comforting aroma.

  ‘Oh wow! Sophia’s?’ I ask as I open my eyes.

  ‘Of course.’ Lou smiles and helps herself to a hunk of cheese.

  ‘I don’t think Sophia approves of me being here. I think it’s the only thing she and Anna-Maria have in common.’ We both laugh. ‘But Sophia’s bread is the best around.’ I sniff the rosemary and black olive focaccia again and my mouth waters.

  ‘Ah, so you’ve worked out that Sophia is Anna-Maria’s sister-in-law. They don’t speak. The families haven’t spoken since I moved here.’ Lou fills me in matter-of-factly.

  ‘That’s why they had two wakes on the day of the funeral?’ I’m loading my plate with cheese and tomatoes.

  Lou nods and drizzles the olive oil she brought over her tomatoes.

  ‘So what caused that?’ I ask. ‘Must have been something pretty big.’

  ‘No idea.’ Lou shakes her head. ‘No one talks about it, not to me anyway. Some family fall-out. All I know is that there were two brothers: Marco’s father and his brother. They’ve both died now, but whatever the argument was about, it’s been going on for years.’ She takes a big bite of bread. ‘But Sophia’s focaccia is the best.’

  I tear off a corner of the bread. ‘Oh yes,’ I agree and sink my teeth through the salty crust. Then I try the spicy cheese, which makes my gums tingle. I take a slug of wine.

  ‘So, what’s been happening with you and the Bellanuovos?’ Lou asks, topping up my wine.

  I let out a long sigh. ‘Marco came round to offer to buy the place from me this morning,’ I say, suddenly feeling so much better for just sharing with someone.

  Lou shrugs in an Italian way.

  ‘And do you want to sell?’

  I falter and put my bread down on my plate.

  ‘Well, not to him . . . I mean, not for what he offered anyway,’ I gabble. She says nothing. ‘He offered me half what I paid for it.’

  ‘Would you have taken it if he’d offered you a good price?’

  ‘I . . . I . . .’ I know that if I let out anything of what’s going on in my head right now, it could all come tumbling out.

  ‘Oh, wait.’ I run into the house and come back out with a jar of my piccalilli.

  ‘Piccalilli!’ Lou squeals. ‘I haven’t had that in ages!’

  ‘Here, there’s a jar to take home too,’ I say, putting the piccalilli in front of her and then settling back ready to tell her my thoughts. ‘I got offered a job, a good one. I love this place,’ I hold a hand out to the house, ‘but, well, it’s a good job. It would’ve suited me. Put it like this, I think I may have rushed at this. And frankly, I want to go home.’

  ‘But it’s beautiful, there’s so much you could do here.’ Lou looks around, her passion rising, and I’m delighted she gets it and can see why I came. ‘I mean, out here is gorgeous, but the house itself is to die for, and then you’ve got the trullo and the olives . . .’

  ‘Ah, the trullo. Well that’s what I was depending on,’ I shuffle on my crate, ‘but the roof collapsed this morning.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says, and pours more wine. ‘We have a trullo, six cones, up the lane here, next to Luigi’s place.’

  ‘Who’s Luigi?’

  ‘He has the trullo next to us but lives in town. He’s the local goat man. Him and his son, Young Luigi. They look after the sheep and goats out this way and some of the land for people too.’

  ‘Yours is the one for sale?’ I realise, and Lou nods.

  ‘I’d love to do what you’re doing, but we just don’t have the money or the time to renovate it at the moment. Trullo roofs are a skilled job.’ She sips her wine thoughtfully.

  ‘So how do you find it being here? Would you ever go home?’ I ask, wanting to put off thinking about the trullo roof.

  ‘No.’ She shakes her head. ‘My boy’s Italian now. I won’t go back to the UK. Not unless we have to. Everything changes. Nothing’s how it used to be when you left it. Of course his mother’s a nightmare, even checks to see if I’ve ironed his underpants, but at least they’re great with our son and I can work. Like I say, I won’t go back unless . . .’ she takes a breath and a sip of wine, ‘unless we have to.’

  ‘That’s great that you teach in the school. So brave.’

  ‘I don’t know about brave,’ she laughs, ‘but it fits in well with family life, and I love working with the kids. But what about you? How did you end up here? You never said,’ she says, stabbing her fork into the piccalilli. ‘Do you have friends or family here?’

  I dip my bread into the glistening green pool of olive oil around the tomatoes.

  ‘No, no one,’ I say, and suddenly it feels very real and really quite lonely.

  ‘So how did you end up buying the Bellanuovos’ masseria? I didn’t think they’d ever sell it. Oh,’ she holds up her hands, ‘tell me to shut up, I’m too nosy for my own good. Really, don’t let me come round here asking questions. It’s none of my business.’

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ I say, pouring more wine. ‘The thing is, well, Ed and I, my partner, we split up. After his pug died, we realised we didn’t have much in common really. We never did, I don’t think.’

  ‘His pug?’ Lou looks incredulous. I realise now that it does sound bizzare.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I nod. ‘Dudley.’

  ‘Dudley the pug?’ Lou asks.

  I nod again. ‘We’d both known it for a long time before that. But somehow we just sort of limped on. Taking the dog out together was part of our daily routine. Like everything else we did together. Which side of the bed we slept on, which cereal bowl he ate out of, what we bought in the supermarket and how we divided the bills.’

  Lou sits back in her chair and listens.

  ‘Once Dudley was gone, everything else seemed to collapse with it. Suddenly I couldn’t stand the way he always ate his cereal from the same bowl. I didn’t want to sleep on the left of the bed and I was fed up with the same shopping and the same bills. It was all pointless. When he talked about getting another dog, I knew I had to leave before we started the cycle all over again.’

  ‘That was brave,’ she bats back at me. ‘I mean, it’s easier to take risks when you have nothing to lose.’

  ‘No, I’d been a coward for too long. I should have ended it sooner.’

  ‘How did Ed take it?’ Lou picks up her glass and leans back again.

  ‘It took him a while to accept it. He went very silent for a couple of weeks, but really he knew it was over too. Once we agreed that things weren’t working any more, he packed a bag and moved in with his work colleague Annabel, at first just as a lodger. But it wasn’t long before I realised they were starting to be
come more of an item. That hurt. The fact that he could move on so quickly. Soon after that, he put the flat on the market.’

  ‘Blimey, it does seem a bit quick.’

  ‘Well, Ed likes things straightforward and filed in their place.’

  ‘So, you had to move out?’

  ‘Yes, pack up, sell up and move out. Ed didn’t want anything from the flat. Annabel’s place is in Canary Wharf. Doubt they have room for a full-size fridge there, let alone all the furniture we’d bought for the Tooting place.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have kept it and moved into another flat?’

  I shake my head, brushing crumbs from my lap. I catch a glimpse of the small grey cat tiptoeing through the grass. The sun is hot and high now, and the building noise from next door has stopped.

  ‘Prices in London are just so high. There was no way I’d’ve been able to buy another place. And frankly, the thought of going back to renting a room in a flatshare just left me cold.’

  ‘So . . .’ Lou’s still trying to put the story together.

  ‘So once the flat was sold, not only was I single, but I was, well . . . homeless. And I didn’t have the sort of job where I needed to go to the office every day. I didn’t have any roots. My best friend lives miles away, and my other friends are great but they’ve got jobs of their own, and families. I just didn’t feel I belonged anywhere, even though I’ve lived in south London all my life. I felt as if I’d been cut adrift.’

  I sigh and cup my hands around my glass.

  ‘On my last night in the flat, my friend Morag was staying with me. That’s when I decided to do it, to buy this place. The next day, I moved into my mum’s. That’s why I needed the sale to happen quickly, and so did the seller.’

  ‘But it was never on the market. We’d’ve all known . . .’ Lou is becoming more and more intrigued. I might as well tell her, I think, because it’s not like I’m going to be staying. I’ve decided. As lovely as this lunch is, I certainly don’t feel I belong here, and I’m never going to fit in. I know what I’m going to do now.

  ‘I bought it on eBay,’ I say, and sit back and watch Lou’s jaw drop.

  Finally she says, ‘On eBay!’

  ‘Yup,’ I say, and smile, holding my glass to my lips. ‘I bought it on eBay,’ and my smile turns to a laugh.

  ‘That’s bonkers!’ Lou shrieks hysterically, not looking at all Italian now, but like a girl from Cardiff when Wales have scored the winning try. Her accent has got stronger and stronger with each sip that’s slipped down.

  Now it’s my turn to shrug. It didn’t seem that mad at the time.

  ‘I couldn’t afford a place to live in London, but I could afford one here. I’d been selling our furniture on eBay, the three-piece suite, the fridge freezer, even the bed. And then I saw it . . . It came up as an advert and I just clicked on it.’

  ‘What? And you just thought “I’ll buy that”?’

  ‘No.’ I shake my head, feeling a wonderful sense of release. ‘It reminded me of when I came out here as a student. I was happy then. I thought anything was possible. I thought I’d feel the same if I came back. So I just thought I’d put in a bid, see what happened . . .’ I trail off.

  Lou looks at me and narrows her eyes.

  ‘Had you been drinking?’

  Not for the first time today I nearly choke on my drink, but this time it’s with a full-blown laugh.

  ‘You had, hadn’t you?’

  ‘Okay, okay.’ I put up my hand. ‘I’d been out with Morag and our friend Elinor. It was Morag’s birthday. When we got in, I was checking my eBay account to see who’d won the wide-screen TV and the tropical fish tank, because I’d have to arrange the delivery.’

  ‘Tropical fish tank?’ She screws up her nose.

  ‘It was Ed’s. I bought it for him when Dudley died.’

  At that moment Daphne strolls round and lies down on the terrace beside us as if it’s the most natural thing in the world to have a pet goat at your feet. Suddenly a fish tank doesn’t seem so strange.

  ‘We’d had a meal at the local Italian. Morag came back with me and stayed over instead of catching the night bus home. We were finishing up the peach brandy, and there it was.’

  Lou has her hand over her mouth, like she’s never heard anything so mad or impetuous.

  ‘It was either that or a long stretch on my mum’s couch. At the time it seemed like a good idea.’

  ‘So you just bid on it?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ I nod, picking at the crumbs around the cheese.

  Lou suddenly stands up and goes across to a vine growing over a tumbledown pergola. She picks a bunch of grapes, pours some water over them and puts them by the cheese.

  ‘It was a bit of fun really. We were just wondering if it would be possible to change your life with a click of the button.’

  ‘And you did, oh my God!’

  ‘We went to bed. I forgot about it. Then the next morning I went to check the computer and there it was: “Congratulations! You were the successful bidder!”’

  ‘You didn’t think about trying to get out of it?’

  ‘I did. But I wanted to show Ed, and my mum, that I could do something on my own.’

  For a moment Lou is speechless, then she says, ‘And what are you going to do now?’

  ‘I’m going to sell it, just not to Marco Bellanuovo. But he did give me the idea. If I saw it and bought it, there must be plenty more people out there who are looking for a property like this. Who knows, I might even make a profit.’ I smile. ‘I’m going to put it back on the market, on eBay even.’

  Lou’s face drops.

  ‘But what about the trullo roof? That could put a dampener on the sale. People might want to rent it out, like you did.’

  She’s right. ‘I’ll have to see about getting it repaired.’ It’ll mean all of my savings, every bit of money from the sale of the furniture from the flat. But if it gets me to back to the UK . . . so be it.

  To my surprise, just as we’re finishing lunch, an electrician turns up. Marco rang him and instructed him to check all the electrics in the house. He works in the ironmonger’s and does odd jobs in his spare time. He inspects the wiring, sucks air through his teeth, apparently a universal language, and starts work. There’s no way I can sell this house knowing the electrics are faulty. When he leaves, he tells me he’ll be back, and I thank him and hand him some piccalilli, much to his consternation. I have to get rid of it all before I go. Because I’m selling up and moving on, and Marco Bellanuovo and his family will be someone else’s problem.

  Fuelled by friendship, laughter and rosé wine, and by being able to make a coffee without electrocuting myself, I march down the drive towards the Bellanuovos’ with Marco’s cheque in my hand. I also need to find out how much I owe the electrician. It’s my house, my problem.

  It’s cooler now. Lou has gone, and I feel a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders and gone with her.

  I lift and pull back the heavy iron gates, still listing on their hinges, and make a mental note to put them on my list of things to repair. Then I take a deep breath and set off down Anna-Maria’s drive, along the side of the house and towards the olive grove at the back. Daphne is trotting up and down on the other side of the wall, looking indignant that she’s not privy to what’s going on. A small cream and white dog comes hurtling round the corner, followed by her crew. Big, small, really small. They all stand and bark at me, and I freeze. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Daphne seems intent on getting in on the act and is pawing at the wall. I take a couple of steps back – yes, one step forward and two back; the irony of it isn’t lost on me. It’s a bit like my life right now. The only way out seems to be to sidestep the dogs and jump over the wall. There’s a bit of a drop the other side, but I think it may be my only option.

 
I shuffle sideways, the dogs still barking. As I stretch out my hand, I can feel Daphne’s nose snuffling in my palm. I put a foot up on the wall, and stones tumble and fall. I don’t want to take my eyes off the pack getting closer and closer to me.

  Suddenly there’s a whistle and a shout. The dogs stop barking just like that and turn and run back from where they came. My heart’s racing even though they’ve gone. Maybe I should just leave anyway. I put the cheque in my pocket, but then look back at the trullo where the noise has been coming from all day. Anna-Maria is standing looking out of the window of the house, beneath the red and white awning. Daphne bleats. I look back at Anna-Maria, who turns away, and I swear there’s a tiny smile in the corner of her mouth. That’s it. I decide I won’t be scared off by a gang threatening a sharp bite. Not the dogs, not the Bellanuovos.

  I straighten up and march towards the trullo, but when I reach the end of the drive, there’s no path, just earth. Looks like my cream deck shoes aren’t going to last long. But this is no time to be faint-hearted. I take a first bold step, and my foot sinks into the damp, thick, heavy reddish-brown earth, the colour of dark terracotta. It smells, but not in a bad way: earthy, rich and full of minerals. The sort of thing I could see Beth getting all animated over and wanting to run her hands through and inhale.

  After the first step, there’s only one way to do this. I stomp across the earth, clumps gathering round my feet, which are getting heavier and heavier. By the time I reach the low doorway of the trullo, I feel like Bigfoot, the yeti. I hold on to the crumbling door frame and bang my heels, and tiny bits of stone fall away from the wall. I immediately let go of the frame and try and scrape the mud away instead. Given my current record for property falling down when I touch it, I don’t want anything else to collapse around me.

  ‘Ciao!’ I call into the dark room. Then I try ‘Hello!’ because it just seems a more natural thing to go hand in hand with walking into someone’s home unannounced.