‘We have no choice.’
The wall was in collapse. Several of the big old stones had tumbled into the lavender bed. We were fortunate that the plants had not been flattened either by the heavy footfall of the blasted swine or the rocks themselves.
‘It requires immediate attention’ was Quashia’s diagnosis.
The wall was one of the longest on the land. Thirty-one metres, measuring it by his great strides; thirty-eight by mine. It was not possible to repair selected sections because it was drystone and might disintegrate if taken apart. There was no knowing what amount of invisible subsidence had been caused by hefty hogs.
‘There’s a month’s work right here. I’ll need three tons of grey washed sand delivered this afternoon and, for starters, get me sixteen sacks of cement.’ His curt demand. ‘When are you going to get this estate electrified?’
I did not argue. If the wall was not attended to directly, the collapse would destroy the entire lavender bed next time.
I glanced at Michel who was helping Quashia heave fallen stones away from the plants. I knew he would not disclose our news now.
‘I’ll call Mark,’ I said to the men.
‘Yes, lock the boars out and keep the dogs in. No more worries that Homer will go seeking retribution against the Rottweiler and those wretched pigs, bane of our lives, will be barred.’
Mark had been working with us for a number of years. He was easygoing and honest and usually dropped by within a couple of hours of being telephoned, unusual down here. While the men cleared up, he walked the land with me, measured the fencing required and told me there and then that we were looking at a minimum of thirty thousand euros. Given the garage investment, the price was completely out of the question. I admitted as much to him over a cup of coffee and he advised against the expenditure. ‘It does not always do the trick anyway. The beasts frequently penetrate whether the fences are electrified or not. I am receiving complaints all the time from foreigners who have bought expensive villas, contracted me to electrify the grounds, gone off after the summer and returned to find all the lawns churned up. Get yourself a gun.’ His parting words. I was glad Quashia, who was always itching for me to supply him with arms, was not within earshot.
The next debate was where to replant the lavenders. They could not wait. The shift would need to happen promptly, which meant preparing the ground somewhere else without delay.
‘I’ll do that,’ I offered, ‘when we’ve agreed upon a suitable spot.’
In all, there were forty-seven bushes to transplant, all of which must have been close to a decade old, plus the new ones I’d planted the days before and those still in their garden-centre pots.
‘I think you should just burn the old fellas’ was Quashia’s thought. ‘Their stems are long and woody. What good are they?’
I was determined to save them if I could. ‘Lavenders are excellent fodder for bees.’
‘But we don’t have bees. You never did anything about getting us hives.’
I ignored this and suggested that, before Quashia began on the wall, we determine the new site. There was not a great deal of choice. These Lavandula needed a sunny spot, not too shaded within the groves.
The year before, with much of the work being achieved during my absence, Quashia had reconstructed yet another of the damaged stone walls over on the Second Plot. This one was possibly the longest we possessed and it had taken him, along with weekend labouring assistance from Michel, almost four months to complete.
All these old drystoners were repaired with concrete, which I was rather unhappy about, but the fact was that they were otherwise dislodged again and again by the invading hogs. Our farm must have been an ancient pathway or draille – drahle in its original Occitan spelling – of theirs. The truth of the matter was the boars had foraged these hillsides long before we had arrived on the scene.
We had designated this massively extended wall, and the stoned garden that ran the length of it, for Michel’s eternally talked of vines. It sat at the lower extreme of what had once been the estate’s vineyard. The question was should we now use it for the homeless lavender? This was what – a hastily made decision – we settled upon. However, because it was a longer garden than the one that had been damaged by the boars, once I had replanted all the lavenders and installed the sixty smaller bushes, it looked half empty.
I set off for the nursery, for extra lavenders and culinary herbs to fill the gaps. Then, a most unexpected encounter on my way. Tidying up the lanes behind our hill, I spotted Jacques, our gone-underground swimming-pool man. I pulled over and called his name, fairly certain that he had spotted my car but was refusing to acknowledge me. I sat it out and eventually he laid down his rake and plodded over.
I could hear frogs in the nearby lake. Bumblebees, several kinds, were at work in the hedgerows.
‘We’ve missed you,’ I called as he approached cautiously. ‘How have you been, how’s your family?’
I was shocked as he drew near, when I saw his face, always so handsome. He looked grey, emaciated. My guess was that he, his wife or daughter had been struck by illness, but I was quite off the mark. Jacques had been subject to ‘an investigation’. He would not clarify. His company was ‘in deep trouble’. I assumed that this work, cleaning the streets, was a compulsory community service he was undertaking.
‘Come and see us. Will you work for us again?’
He shook his head. Those remarkable eyes looked hunted. ‘I wouldn’t dare,’ he muttered.
On sale at the garden centre were gorgeous examples of a French lavender, Lavandula heterophylla, or sweet lavender, a very robust plant. Another Frenchie, Lavandula dentate, ‘Candicans’, I chose for its almost silvery, creamy, light green foliage. Its blossoms were softly tinted, a washed-out blue. It had a slightly ghostly quality about it (like Jacques), and would complement the louder purples. I was quite astounded to discover the range of varieties. As with the bees – the honey and bumble were but two – I was equally ignorant of the Lavandulas. French or English had been the extent of my expertise and now I was stumbling upon choices from a list of more than two hundred varieties. The Lavender Route. It was as thrilling as learning a new language. But how shocked I had been by Jacques. In the days when he attended to our pool, he had become employed by a wealthy Englishman. On the black, of course. The Brit was retired from the secret service, according to Jacques, and was very liberal with funds. On the strength of this generosity, Jacques had started to learn English and was building himself a house in the hills near Gérard’s mill. I wondered whether this had been the undoing of our lost friend.
And what of Luke? Might I one day bump into him and uncover a similar moral tale? Might he be in some rank African prison charged with smuggling, or had he been pulled over, ‘nabbed’, for driving a vehicle fuelled by vegetable oil while on a public thoroughfare and then found to be transporting several thousand illegal exotics?
The underbelly of the Côte d’Azur!
For the past few days, Francisco had been working our site alone. At first, his companions had roared up the hill around eleven, unpacked lunch, set the fire going and prepared the barbecue. The foursome – their Arab assistants were no longer employed here – ate together, comme d’habitude, in the shade, drinking copiously, of course, then siesta’d beneath the hanging boughs of one or other of the great olives. Four of them, heads resting against a monumental trunk, stretched out on the grass, snoring. Quite a sight. Once awake, a swift coffee downed, the three Josés departed, hell-bent on another job, leaving Francisco alone while the clouds of smoke rose out of the dying embers and blackened an ever-increasing circle of grass.
But, of late, Francisco had become a solitary diner.
‘My companions are on another contract,’ he told Quashia.
A state of peace had been established between these two old-timers (temporary, it proved to be), which was heartening to observe. Each morning when Francisco stepped out of his white van, he and Q would ha
il one another with hearty greetings before embracing in tight bear hugs. Together, they strolled about the site, arm in arm. Francisco with operatic gestures explained to his Algerian comrade his plans for the finer details, the finishing touches of the work and Quashia would nod his assent, smiling, laughing.
So you approve of what he’s doing? I asked of Q, with a teasing wink.
‘He’s not like his companions,’ our man said. ‘He has a finer perception of the world.’
Francisco undoubtedly fancied himself as the artist of the team. He wore his hair long, smoked endless cheroots, complained about his mistresses and ex-wives whereas his pals were down-to-earth family men, earning a living, bringing up children.
Now that the gros œuvre, major works, had, according to the men, been more or less completed (which they had not), Francisco was engaged in the plastering work, the definition of corners, of pillars, wooden beams. He worked diligently, but we were now close to the end of our second month and the damp course had yet to be laid. There remained several important steps to be accomplished and I was puzzled as to why the men were not proceeding with them. Once or twice I offered Francisco a coffee, which he always refused, and enquired after the construction’s completion. ‘When will the others be back? The builders’ yard is nagging me about the delivery of the terracotta tiles.’
‘Bientôt, Madame, bientôt.’ Soon. He was guarded, never more specific.
It was early afternoon. I had been working inside, out of the early June heat, and had gone out to check on the dogs. Quashia was complaining that the longer grasses had encouraged ticks. Every year until this one, at the outset of summer, I had bought collars for the animals – never sprays – but since my meeting with the agrochemical experts I had avoided this. Even though I had eventually explained my reasons to Quashia, he judged me cruel.
‘We will have to be vigilant and check them every morning and evening,’ I insisted, which was what we were doing.
‘You think of the damn grass before your own beasts,’ he had huffed at me.
Where Quashia was now, I had no idea. Perhaps resting after his lunch, unwilling to continue the wall demolition until later, when the heat had eased. Suddenly, I noticed water everywhere, running in streams down the drive. I spotted Quashia, hat in his hand, scratching his head.
‘Has a pipe burst?’
‘It must be him, drinking two bottles of wine at lunchtime. He cannot work, he’s not capable.’
I was rather surprised by this, given their newly bonded friendship. ‘Where is he?’
Francisco’s van was visible but there was no sight of him.
‘Drunk, sleeping it off somewhere,’ growled Quashia. ‘They’ve been here for months. We need that garage finished. I have to get on with preparations for the olive spraying. They’re holding me up.’
My heart went cold at these words. We had still not come clean.
‘Let’s get this water turned off.’
We traced the leak to a small tap up beyond the works where a hosepipe was being used to soak the cement mix. It had been left open. We called for Francisco, but he was nowhere to be found.
‘He ate alone and drank the wine that had been put aside by his comrades. A full bottle and the remains of their quota, too.’
‘Nonsense, Mr Q. A glass with lunch does not mean he’s drunk.’
We found Francisco sleeping in the back of his van, doors wide open, conked out. Strong coffee was required. I hurried to the kitchen to get it underway, but the taps coughed empty. Our basin – its maximum capacity was one thousand litres – had trickled its remaining contents down the drive. Quashia strode into the valley to switch on the waterhouse pump. I could not bear to contemplate the cost of such waste. When I finally delivered black coffee to Francisco, I asked him when the men would be returning to finish off the roof. His reply was: ‘What do I know? I quit the company. This is my last assignment.’
I begged Michel to contact the Josés and find out what was going on, when the works would be terminated. ‘And it is time to talk to Quashia.’
Michel nodded. ‘Yes, he’s entitled to know.’
Early the following morning, I carried out a cup of freshly brewed coffee to our man. Two magpies were screeching, squabbling over unripened fruit in the fig tree. He was down in the old groves, demolishing the remaining quarter of wall, preparing the whole site for reconstruction. It was time. I intended to explain clearly why we had made our decision. I wanted him, perhaps more than anyone else, to be with us on this. We needed his support.
He took the coffee with a wide-open grin.
‘Excusez-moi,’ he said as he always did when I brought something for him, as though ‘forgive me, for the trouble this has caused you’. A gentle consideration on his part, but all such empathy disappeared instantly from his features as I began to detail what this transition involved and why we were making it.
‘But what about the summer spraying against the flies?’ he demanded.
‘No,’ I replied softly. ‘We will not be doing that any more.’
‘But what about the spraying machine you bought me? What’s to happen to that? And I thought I was to be laying paths up the hillside with Michel so that we can access the young groves at the summit … To prune and spray, and harvest more easily. We’ve been planning it for more than four years.’
‘Well, the trees will still need to be accessed. We will still be pruning and caring for them. In fact, now more than ever, Mr Quashia. The health of the trees will be paramount. The healthier they are, like any one of us, the greater resources they have to withstand illness, fungus attacks.’
‘But not the olive fly! You know as well as I do that no amount of trimming or pruning is going to rid them of that little blighter. And if you think it will, you are being ridiculous.’
‘Please, Mr Quashia, please don’t get upset. There are new methods being developed, even as we speak, to combat Dacus.’
‘Dacus?’
‘Sorry, the mouche d’olive.’
‘You mean like that fellow you brought here who promised to inundate the place with African flies? Carol, I have been farming since before you were born. Algeria is one the most ancient olive producers in the Mediterranean. I know what I am talking about. You need to kill off these insects with poison, and that’s that.’ He downed his coffee in one shot, handed me the cup and returned to his digging. He was not to be converted. Certainly not by me. My convictions meant nothing to him. Worse, he judged me a dilettante, as René had done.
I suggested to Michel that he go to him. ‘A man-to-man conversation about the challenges on the land. Please try to persuade him to work with us on this new programme even if as yet he does not agree with us.’
Michel walked down to his cottage later in the afternoon. His television blaring out in Arabic, a lamb stew boiling on the stove, they sat together and drank a glass of lemonade and Michel tried again.
‘Ideas, just ideas. The farm demands action,’ he mumbled.
Michel patiently explained why we needed to change our methods. ‘Carol is concerned for you, too, Quashia. Your health. It is one of the reasons she is so dead set against spraying. These products are dangerous for everybody’s health.’
But Quashia was not convinced. ‘I am not a young man,’ he confided to his employer and friend. Michel was a man Quashia valued as his brother, better educated, more able to work the French system which favoured Europeans, not the immigrants, the Maghrebians in particular, and he had been deeply grateful on several occasions over the years when either Michel or I had been at his side to defend his dignity against the officialdom that can be so dismissive of its foreign workforce. This, too, had bonded us. We were not divided by class or colour. We were, all of us, committed to Appassionata, its beauty, produce, and we all in our very different fashions loved the Mediterranean and its ways of life. But it appeared that we had reached an impasse.
‘I have seen fads come and go and that is all this is. I do not want to
waste my time pruning trees, repairing walls, whatever it might be, just to see them destroyed by boars or olive fly. I love olive trees. I gain great pleasure out of standing in the sun watching the branches swing. Well, we all do, I know that, but I grew up in a land with olive trees, an olive culture. Neither of you two did. I was weaned on olive oil!’
‘We don’t doubt that, Larbi.’ Michel frequently addressed him by his given name.
‘I know what I am talking about, Michel, and yet Carol will listen to the advice of any passer-by, but she will not listen to me. Hear me, please, you are an educated, intelligent man, you will understand what I am saying. We need to spray those trees or we will have no crops and, if we have no crops, you don’t need me. I am better off spending these last years of my life in Algeria, at home with my family. There is nothing for me here. I am a simple man, too old to change, too old for this nonsense. I love Carol as though she were my own, you both know that, but, excuse me, Michel, I fear she has lost her way, her ability to make productive decisions. She disappears for months on end, lives in the clouds believing in utopias that don’t exist and never will. If you want to allow this, then that is your choice, mon chef, and I must respect that, but you are the head of the household. Take charge, tell her firmly, “No, Carol, I am the man. I know best”, and let us get on with the business of farming olives. Otherwise I might as well pack up and go back to my son’s shop and end my years peacefully. There is nothing left for me here.’
It was probably the longest speech Quashia had ever made, certainly to either one of us. When Michel recounted it later, he said that our loyal assistant had spoken without anger but with certainty.
‘We are losing him’ was the summary of the hour in the cottage. ‘He is resolved. It will be difficult for us all.’
Return to the Olive Farm (The Olive Series Book 4) Page 29
