‘I’ll dig the grave,’ was his bald response. He had no need to ask me where.
The lower of our two cherry trees, situated in one of the farm’s ancient olive groves, had died and been chopped down the year before. We had planted a replacement close by the original’s severed trunk.
Traditionally, it had been beneath that old fruit tree that all the farm dogs from our two decades of residence here had been laid to rest. The roll call had been standing at four: Sammy, Ella, Bassett and Lucky, who had been the most recent to be taken away at a venerable age. Cleo, way before her time, was to be number five.
Quashia bid me fetch his green jacket hanging up in the garage and then told me to get lost. He was intending to wrap the dog in the weather-beaten coat and bury her in it. I did as instructed and returned inside. Beyond the hiss of rain and the gurgles from the drains, I could hear the slap of the shovel against damp earth. I looked out of the window from my den and saw our man, standing in a muddied hole, pickaxing and digging. I poured him a cup of steaming hot coffee and returned outside.
‘I want to do this alone,’ he barked. ‘I reared her. I’ll see her into her resting place. Leave me be.’
His words were not entirely accurate – we had reared her, too – but I knew it was his method of dealing with his grief so I turned on my heel and left him to it. Swinging back, I called, ‘Shout to me when you need help to carry her from the car. She’s rather heavy.’
‘How long have I run this place? And you think I haven’t the strength to manage a dead beast?’ He waved me impatiently away, determinedly concentrating on the earth.
Alongside the car, sitting alert, were Homer, Cleo’s brother, and Lola, the running-to-fat, loyal mother; a cortège at the ready. Let no one claim that animals have no feelings. The expressions on their pointed faces left nothing unspoken.
An hour later, a knock on the door brought Quashia to me. His rheumy eyes looking directly at me.
‘It’s done?’
‘It’s done, and I’ll be leaving shortly.’
‘Yes, go back to the cottage and get dry. Have a hot shower. Thank you for what you have done for Cleo.’ I was slipping my feet into wellingtons, intending to lay a flower on the freshly dug mound.
‘We have no luck on this farm.’ Quashia was now trailing me. ‘This place carries bad luck with it.’
I rounded on him. ‘That’s not true and please don’t say such a thing!’
‘Yes, it is! She was barely more than a puppy. Last year at almost the same time Lucky died.’
‘But Lucky was more than sixteen, Mr Quashia!’
‘Bassett was poisoned while you were off doing whatever you were doing, away from here for months at a time, and we will have no olive crop next year, if your plans with that bloke go awry as I’m sure they will. As I said, no luck!’
We were back to the failed crops of former years. I sighed. Runnels of rain were dripping from my soaked hair, down my face and I knew that my instincts had been sound when I had suggested to Michel that we wait and not disclose to Quashia as yet our plans to finish with the insecticide sprays. It hadn’t been necessary to say anything, but Quashia had been keen, nosing like a dog after truffles, to learn the identity of the visitor inspecting the olive trees alongside Michel.
‘Mr Quashia, you have helped us bring in a select, hand-picked harvest of oil this year. Four pressings, all of which are top quality. There must be close to four hundred litres in the summer kitchen waiting to be decanted. I haven’t even totalled it all up yet, but there is surely sufficient to keep us going for two years.’
‘But we don’t need to keep going for two years, Carol. Sell the oil, make some money. I know how hard it is to make ends meet here, so let’s concentrate on upping our production level. I bumped into René at the food market a couple of days ago. He’s got the right idea.’
‘Michel and I both want to have another attempt next year at farming without chemicals, but, please, don’t let us debate this again now. Not now, of all times.’
‘You have tried those experiments before and we always lose the lot. We could have saved all those lost olives.’
‘Mr Quashia, you are going back over history. As I have said, we have four hundred litres of oil down in—’
‘Because we sprayed.’
‘Please understand that we want to try and run this farm in a way that does not—’ I sighed, exhausted. ‘Can we discuss this another time, please?’
‘But without the olives there is no farm, why can’t you see that? I have decided to leave, Carol.’
‘Leave, what do you mean?’
We were getting soaked and going round in circles.
‘I’m going back to my wife and children in Algeria.’
‘For Christmas? Yes, of course.’ I knew that as a Muslim this was not his holiday period, but he had lived in France for so many years that he skipped between all festivals, using whichever best suited him for his and his family’s agenda. ‘That’s fine, Mr Quashia, take a break. Michel and I will both be here from Boxing Day onwards and we can hold the fort. How long will you be away?’
He shook his head and stared at his feet.
‘It’s my teeth. They have to come out. The dentist said it could take months and months.’
‘But you only have one tooth!’ Actually, I bit my lip and just about refrained from remarking this fact.
‘How long will it take to remove one tooth? Can’t you see someone here? I can recommend a fellow down in Cannes. As a matter of fact, he’s originally from North Africa and his mother tongue is Arabic.’
‘There are two at the back of my mouth …’ Quashia opened wide, like a hippopotamus yawning, pink gums on display, and pointed to a pair of worn-down stubs, halfway down his throat, the colour of nicotine. ‘They are giving me gip and they’ll be as stubborn as hell to lift. I’ve had them all my life.’
‘Must you go to Algeria? It seems a little far for one extraction.’
‘Three. There are three to come out.’
‘Yes, three. Excuse me.’
We were not getting any drier and, given his mood, his pain over our lost companion, I saw little chance of resolving the discussions there and then. I slipped my arm through the sodden crook of his and we set off slowly in the direction of Cleo’s resting place. I was clutching the speckled white orchid I had clipped from one of the indoor plants. It now resembled a pad of soggy cotton wool.
‘I expect to be gone six months. I’ll leave early next year and I’ll be back for the harvest, if there is one. You can telephone me at my son’s épicerie when the fruits need picking. And if there’s no harvest, fruits all rotten due to your new way of wanting to do things … well, there’ll be little point in my returning.’
I took a deep breath and ignored this last threat. ‘Six months, Mr Q?’
‘And beside the urgent work needed on the roof in the garage, which by the way will bring the west side of the house down when it caves in, there’s a leak sprung in the cottage.’
‘Oh, Lord, I’m so sorry. Where is it?’
He did not reply. Wrapped within his silence my loyal steward plodded off, worn muddied boots squelching in the grey morning, heading down the drive to his cottage home without a glance back. ‘This whole farm needs a firm hand,’ I heard him mumble as he descended the winding path, disappearing from sight.
Six months! I hoped he was not serious. And this was the first mention of water infiltration down in the cottage. The whole place had been redecorated, its broken roof tiles replaced with new, only three years earlier. I gazed after him, not really focusing or even looking at the present, before stepping across the parking area, between the towering cypress trees to the lower of the cherries.
I was gambling that the loss of Cleo was the reason for Quashia’s apparent despair and that we could help him sort out his three teeth before or after a well-earned break back in North Africa with his family. But I wasn’t entirely convinced. I had noticed, slowly ov
er the previous six months, since my return, an erosion, a gentle but decisive slipping away. Quashia had begun to withdraw. He spent less extra-curricular time with us. He rarely strolled up for a cup of tea on a Sunday afternoon, to talk through future projects, to chew the cud with his ‘pal’ Michel. Perhaps, instead, he spent his weekends sleeping, resting, watching Arabic television. He was getting older and was showing signs of slowing down, but who wasn’t? I felt, though, that there was something else, as if a certain disapprobation towards us had crept in and was creating distance between us. Might it be connected to the extending arm of Islamic extremism in his country?
I wondered what, if any, inner turmoils were caused to those Algerians, village Berbers in Quashia’s case and that of his pals, by the country’s political and religious wranglings. This Berber man, originally a goatherd from the portals of the mountainous desert south of Constantine, whose father had been killed by the French during or before the Algerian War of Independence, had many split loyalties. We, our farm, were just part of the complex equation.
Quashia’s wife, in a wheelchair pushed by our gardener’s youngest son, her stepson, had made the Hajj a couple of years back. Our man himself had spoken of his desire to do the same this coming summer. Hajj. To pay his tribute, to undertake the requisite once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca demanded of all Muslims with sufficient funds to undertake the journey there and back. I wondered about the teeth. Six months? Perhaps it was his intention to fulfil his commitment to Mecca, to Allah, before it was too late for him, while he was still able-bodied and employed and had the financial wherewithal to pay for it. Possibly he preferred not to tell us about this. The teeth might well be his excuse.
I laid the soggy shreds of the orchid heads on Cleo’s grave and stood for a while gazing at the sodden earth. Her mother and brother, who had been padding about behind me, came to settle at my side. The rain had eased and was falling softly now, tiptoeing, delicately dancing off the sods of turned earth as though marking respect.
Gravesides. Burials in the rain, they emit such a mood of gloom, don’t they? Despondency. I turned and trudged back to the house. On my way, I stopped by the garage. In his hasty retreat Quashia had forgotten to lock the door. As I pulled it to, I noticed that the floor of the interior was a shallow lake of water and yet more tiles had fallen from the ceiling and lay broken within it. Raindrops were dripping fast on to our collection of tools and machinery, sliding down their plastic coverings. My management efforts had been in vain.
It was almost Christmas.
In a few days, I would be leaving for Paris. Michel had organised for us to spend a little of the early festive season up north with his twin daughters and their burgeoning families; travelling was easier, less complicated and costly for us than for all of them. I was pleased about this. I loved the young life around us, the gaiety and energy and the pleasure it gave my husband. Clarisse had moved far from us into the higher Alps, to a remote skiing village that was not the easiest to access. Michel had been trying to contact her, without luck, and we had not heard a word in more than two weeks. Her baby had been due the first week of December. It was looking unlikely that she would be meeting us in Paris.
Standing in the rain now, tugging my feet with difficulty out of my green wellingtons, I felt a ghastly sense of gloom, a prescience that was nagging at me. Were there further losses to come? Would Quashia genuinely consider leaving us?
Returning? What does that mean, to return? How do you return? Can you retrace your steps, wander blithely up past the gate lodge, stroke the dogs, take a tour of the groves and settle yourself back into your habitual chair? One of the certainties about travelling and then returning is that while you have been absent, engaging yourself in a million new experiences, the life you left behind you has also moved on. Everything evolves, changes, grows or diminishes. My life and that of the tribe surrounding me was no exception.
I was chucking woolly clothes, long socks, boots into a suitcase, collecting fresh herbs from the garden for the seasoning of the Christmas Eve turkey. Layering lemons and bitter oranges direct from the trees into shopping bags. These citrus globes served several purposes, culinary, comestible and aromatic; quartered and stuffed into fowl or served as dressing with fish, sliced into fizzy water or gin drinks, or peeled skins placed on burning logs in the fireplace to scent the rooms. Musky Arabia. I needed reading material to laze by those fires; books, writing pads. All was in anticipation of my departure to Paris. At the same time, I was also preparing for our return. This entailed shopping, stocking the cupboards and fridges with extra wine and non-perishables, and generally organising the rooms so that we would land back at home to a warm house and convivial atmosphere in readiness for guests arriving for the end-of-year celebrations.
Quashia’s mood had improved just a little and so had mine, much supported by a reappearance of winter sunshine, and, most importantly, the joyful tidings that Clarisse had given birth to a girl. Hitting the scales at five kilos, this little bundle was to be christened Chiara, which, of course, translated as ‘light’. Perfect for the season and to illuminate and elevate the mood I had been in danger of sinking into. Delightfully, for Michel, who had not seen his girls or their offspring for several months, it was agreed that everyone would convene at Vanessa’s in Paris, including Clarisse accompanied by her brand new infant, but not, alas, Chiara’s father, Philippe. He ran a skiing resort and this was his high season. She was to stay with us for a couple of days in the creaky old house Michel had moved into during our time of separation a while back now. This property outside Paris had since become the closest we had to a base in the north, essential for his work, which was predominantly centred in the capital.
Vanessa, the second of Michel’s twin girls along with her husband, Cole, had recently relocated to the outskirts of Paris into a more spacious first-floor flat. They had moved to this new address a few months earlier and neither Michel nor I had so far found an opportunity to visit. Previously, the couple had been existing in a one-bedroom, top-floor walk-up in a lovely part of the heart of the city, but the place with its ancient facilities had offered no lift and Vanessa, who had recently and most unexpectedly found herself the mother to three, had been obliged to drag prams, shopping baskets as well as all the rest of the child-rearing gallimaufry, up six flights of winding and narrow eighteenth-century stairs. It is rare, I understand, for the twin gene to be directly passed on and appear in the succeeding generation, but that was what had happened in this instance. Vanessa, a twin herself, had given birth to twins. She and Cole, who were not in a financial situation to extend their family by another two, had accepted their lot with good grace – they both adored their babies, of course – but I had been aware of the strain on Vanessa. She had relinquished her job as a photographer, a profession she had loved and had been extremely gifted at, and had decided to return to university to qualify as a teacher. She was starting again from scratch but she was tenacious and dedicated. Her new role would entitle her to a secure salary and longer, paid holidays. Time that could be designated to the raising of her children.
During the period Michel and I had been separated, a lonely, isolated time for me, I had seen less of his daughters. Understandably, their devotions had been torn or, rather, not torn at all: their loyalties had sat firmly in their father’s camp. Once or twice, at larger clan gatherings – funerals, birthday parties – it had grown awkward and I had stepped back. I had sadly felt obliged to let them, as well as their father, go. Fortunately, that was all a long time ago now and the restitching of relationships had been successfully achieved. Still, I was aware that there were gaps. I had missed out on certain developments within the family, the children growing up, and, because everyone was constantly occupied – all running about doing their best to make life happen, to earn a living – some of those gaps had never been closed.
Marley, Vanessa’s oldest boy, was a point in question. Marley, who charged to and fro like a fireman on a hazardous missi
on, was approaching eight and was six years older than his sibling twins. Vanessa had been pregnant with him when she had stood at the floor-to-ceiling window in her office in Manhattan and had watched the destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001, had witnessed the jumping of victims from windows to certain death. Had anything of the complex emotions of that horrific day and its aftermath been transmitted to that unborn child forming in her womb?
Michel and I, though our relationship had been strained at that stage, were there together at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport a year or so after 9/11 waiting to meet and greet Marley upon his first arrival into France, a sleeping baby who had crossed the Atlantic to begin his new life and had known not a thing about the devastation of the world at large, the shock ripples that were still permeating. Vanessa, with her American husband, Cole, armed with their small child, were choosing to build their future life in Paris. New York, they had decided, was, at that stage, no place to raise a family.
They had been laden with luggage and I had been handed Marley, a fair-haired, chubby cherub heavier than half a crate of olives. Looking back now, I think it was not an accident that Vanessa had passed her son over to me. She had always been sensitive to my situation. I stared hard at the boy, his eyes closed, long blond lashes, as though attempting to divine him, to know the secrets of his future and his sleeping heart. Impossible, of course. But I did mutter to Michel later when the parents were elsewhere that I wondered whether the boy might be carrying any traces of the memory of America’s recent traumas in his psyche.
It was Christmas Day, mid-afternoon. Along with Clarisse and Chiara who were staying with us, we were congregating at Vanessa and Cole’s for champagne en famille.
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