Unraveling Oliver

by Liz Nugent

  There were few servants as such, but there were several laborers living on the estate who seemed more than willing to help out with any job at hand. I got the impression that all the neighbors had good reason to be grateful to this noble family. This was a house of faded gentry, something we were well used to in Ireland at the time.

  We lived in dormitory-style living quarters, tentlike structures erected for the season in a field below the terrace, overlooked by the grand Château d’Aigse. We would eat with the rest of the estate workers at the communal outdoor table. The local fieldhands were a lively bunch from the nearby village of Clochamps and surrounding areas.

  There were also some South African workers there that summer. I had never talked to black people before, had hardly seen one in Ireland, but these boys didn’t engage with us at all and kept themselves to themselves. I tried talking to them in gestures of friendship, but they kept their eyes to the ground, as if afraid. I was fascinated, I must admit. We wondered why the black guys didn’t stay on the estate like the rest of us, like their white manager. I’m not sure, but I imagine they were even younger than us. Although I had attended a student rally for the Irish Antiapartheid Movement, I had never before encountered apartheid’s ugliness. I heard that they had been sent over to learn how to plant a vineyard and take back some plants; the climate in the Western Cape was similar, apparently. I’d love to have known more about them and their circumstances, but they had very little French and virtually no English, and like everything else in those days, it was rude to ask. Their white “manager” was an absolute prick called Joost. He had brought them to France to learn what he was too stupid and lazy to learn himself. He did no work and instead spent his day drinking and shouting instructions at them, physically beating them if they made a mistake. He tried to ingratiate himself with the rest of us by making crude jokes about his countrymen’s color and stupidity. France was a country still recovering from its own shame about sitting back and allowing the segregation and persecution of the Jews, and the locals were not going to let that happen again. We all protested to Madame, who eventually was forced to eject them from the estate.

  The accommodation was quite basic: a dorm for men and one for women, each with a water pump and hole-in-the-ground toilet at the end. Not the sort of thing we would put up with now, indeed, but our standards were a little bit lower when we were young. We thought it was all amusingly exotic.

  The work, however, was grueling to begin with, before we all toughened up, and in fact by the end of June there was little to be done on the vines, and we moved to the orchard and olive grove, where the work was considerably less taxing. I spent the first month hoeing beneath each vine, scraping out each weed from the clover, grass, and wild oats that covered the rows between vines. It was remarkable how fast they grew in early June, an inch or two a day sometimes, though Madame told us that the growth spurts were even faster in the early spring. Oliver and Laura were put with a different team on the vital task of removing the unwanted sucker shoots from the vine trunk and selectively removing shoots from the head. The vines were cared for like ailing children, monitored, encouraged, soothed, and coaxed into grapefulness.

  I must admit that we took full advantage of the free wine after work and would often crawl into bed in the smallest hours of the morning, blind drunk. In fact, some people didn’t make it as far as their own bed. Sometimes they only made it as far as other people’s beds. Such a heady time.

  And yet, I knew I had to try to fix the thing that was wrong with me. I was on a mission to rid myself of the albatross that was my virginity. I thought that it might cure me. Sharing a bunkhouse with those immodest men was quite a strain.

  Oliver’s spoken French was far better than Laura’s or mine, and he often negotiated between Madame and “les Paddies,” as we became known. It was because of this that old Monsieur d’Aigse began to take an interest in Oliver. He asked Oliver the English names for certain plants and flowers, and Oliver would obligingly translate. Before long, Oliver was promoted. He spent more and more time in the château in Monsieur’s study. Officially, Monsieur took him on as a translator, working on some old maps or some such that Monsieur had compiled for his private collection. Lucky bastard. The vineyard work was tough. Oliver didn’t move out of the dorm, but he no longer had to work in the field. Laura was a little disgruntled about it, I remember. Occasionally, I spied him from the field beside the lower lake, sitting outside on the terrace with Monsieur, a jug of wine by his side or playing some high-jinks game with the highly mischievous Jean-Luc. Their shouts and laughter ricocheted off the walls of the house and echoed through the valley. Oliver looked like the missing link between the old man and the boy. We noted how well Oliver seemed to fit in with them. When he came back to us in the evenings, he was like a different man. More content, perhaps; happier, anyway. Laura wasn’t the only one who was jealous of the time that Oliver spent with the family. I, too, didn’t like the way he became more like one of them than us. Inherently, I knew that Oliver could never love me, but at least while he was dating Laura, I could be around him, in his circle of friends. Now he was becoming removed from us. He would return full of stories about the funny things that Jean-Luc said, the new game they had played together. Oliver told us at one stage that if he ever had a son, he wanted him to be just like Jean-Luc. I lightly commented that Monsieur d’Aigse would be a good father figure too, but Oliver just glared at me for a second before walking off. Whatever the story was with Oliver’s parentage, it was clearly a sore point. I didn’t know then that he was violent, but he certainly looked like he wanted to hit me.

  4

  * * *

  OLIVER

  When I left school, women were a complete mystery to me—at least until I met Laura Condell. I had been in the sole company of priests and boys as a boarder in St. Finian’s since I was six years old, and apart from one summer on Stanley Connolly’s farm, where, quite frankly, his three feline sisters terrified me, I had no experience of women. Apparently, you are supposed to learn the facts of life and the etiquette of how to treat women from your mother, or, failing that, your father. I learned instead by osmosis.

  Particular magazines, carefully camouflaged in packages containing cookie tins or wool sweaters, were passed among the boys of St. Finian’s and treated as hard currency. The source was usually a boy’s English cousin or foreign friend. My time with the magazines was severely limited due to my financially straitened circumstances. Not having much bargaining power, I didn’t get many chances to assess their content. I was naturally aroused and very curious about these images, the slender legs, the soft look of their breasts, and the beautiful curve of the hip from buttocks to waist.

  When I eventually got to see the real thing, I was not too disappointed. The women in the magazines in those days were not very unlike their actual counterparts. I think modern pornography is probably the single biggest cause of erectile dysfunction. How else is a poor teenager to react when he finally gets to grips with an undepilated female body that is unlikely to have globe-shaped breasts standing to attention, a tiny waist and a bronzed oily sheen that he might think would help to slide himself inside her? The disillusionment with the reality must have a physical effect. Of course, now they can take a pill for that. I never needed such assistance.

  I was, naturally, interested in sex, but I regarded boys with girlfriends as rather suspicious. Apart from sex, what would one want with a girl?

  I knew, partly from a purple-faced biology teacher and partly from filthy innuendo disseminated by the other boys, that women bled regularly, and it seemed disgusting to me. Alien. I made it clear to Alice throughout our marriage that I didn’t want to know of cycles or bleeding or cysts or discharges or any of the other revolting paraphernalia that seems to come with the gender, and to be fair to her, she has left me untroubled by it all. A monthly “headache” is tolerable to me, and if she had to go to the hospital for a little “procedure” now and then, what of it? Dear Alice
.

  At a school dance in the autumn of my last year of school, I managed to shove my tongue into a girl’s mouth. Word had it that she’d let you ride her if you bought her a lemonade. Two boys had claimed success by this method. Later, outside leaning against Purple Face’s car, while couples danced inside to Dana’s “All Kinds of Everything,” my hands first encountered female breasts, “boozums” as they were known in the school patois. She made it difficult for me. I was forced to beg. How curiously yielding they were, falling around my desperate fingers, without their upholstery, pendulous and weighty. She allowed me to kiss them, and suddenly it all became deadly serious, and I tried to concentrate on my breathing to prevent the impending climax in my unfashionable trousers, but as my hands began to wander southward, she prissily slapped me away with the, I suspect, well-rehearsed line: “A girl has to draw the line somewhere, and my line is drawn around my waist.”

  She pushed me away from her and reorganized her bra and vest and shirt and sweater and coat (it was winter), and I felt upset and confused and tried to kiss her again and get her to reconsider, but she complained it was cold and walked back into the hormone-drenched hall. I wanted to follow her and to apologize, but I wasn’t sure what I had done wrong, just that she had made me feel wrong, and bad. Not knowing what else to do, I burst into tears and masturbated and cursed the little cow, and felt better. My first pre-sexual sexual encounter. I should have reckoned with the braggadocio of the schoolboy. It was clear to me that nobody had ever broached her second line of defense.

  A year later, when I first started having sexual relationships with the girls in college, I was far more successful. While the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s had somehow just bypassed Ireland, in 1971 there were enough girls around campus with the curiosity and education to know that they also were entitled to orgasm. They were ready to do the things they’d read about. I followed the American tradition of hitting the four bases in order. I think I was unusual in that I almost always got to fourth base, and this certainly quickly boosted my confidence. Some of the other fellows subtly asked for advice, cloaking the request in jokey banter, but there was no secret.

  I have learned over the years how to charm them. It’s not too hard if you are handsome and can appear to be clever with a dry wit. Act as if you haven’t noticed them. Then, gradually, begin to take an interest, as if she is a specimen in a laboratory. Poke her a bit with a long stick while keeping your distance. Ignore her for long periods to see how she reacts, and then give her a good shake. It almost always works.

  In college, I dated girls until they yielded but usually dropped them when they began to ask questions about my background or my family. My reputation was one of a mysterious loner, and women, being naturally nosy, all thought they could get to the bottom of it. Perhaps they all thought they could mother me? As I didn’t have a mother, it was all meaningless to me. I fell into a pattern: pursue, claim, conquer, move on. It amazed me how women would try to possess me as soon as we’d slept together, as if I owed them a part of me. I had never had women in my life, and I simply didn’t know what to do with them. One girl, who I left sniveling in her predawn bed, threw a mug at my head and called me a “bastard.” I took my revenge by sleeping with her twin sister the following night.

  Some of the girls I liked more than others. I certainly didn’t hate women, but I can’t say that I felt an emotional connection to any of them. Except for Laura.

  • • •

  Laura was a challenge from day one. The first time I saw her, she was crossing the campus with two other girls. It was a cold day, and I noted their breath wisping into the air as they laughed and chatted. She was wearing a homemade red wool scarf around her neck and a long trench coat. She waved at me and smiled, and I was caught for a moment, captured by her vivacity and unsure of how to respond, and then Michael, with whom I was walking, called out to her and I realized that she was waving at him, and I felt foolish.

  Michael Condell introduced Laura as his sister, and I admit to being taken aback that siblings could look so different.

  Ironic, when you think about it.

  After that, I made a point of seeking her out, but unlike the other girls, she took no particular interest in me. Laura was darkly beautiful, willful and spirited, impulsive and brave. She was a year behind me, reading French, philosophy, and politics. She dated the rugby boys, the rich boys who had their own cars. It was going to be hard for me to compete, but, as I made an effort to get to know her, at least on the periphery, I realized that I didn’t just want to sleep with her. I wanted her in my life. I hoped that the golden aura that surrounded her might somehow encompass me and lift me to her pedestal. I can’t even now put my finger on what it was that was different about Laura. I had been out with beautiful girls before who all failed to tug at my alleged heartstrings. It may have been the way her blue eyes sparkled when she laughed, or the way she walked with purpose. It could have been her confidence, the fact that she seemed so sure of her place in the world when the rest of us were just pretending.

  My usual tactics didn’t work with Laura. She appeared not to notice me at all. I was conscious of my secondhand clothes and my squalid bedsit, and knew I would have to reinvent my story if I was to stand a chance, so I befriended Michael and began to curry favor that way. I was invited to their home for dinners and sat across the table from Laura, ignoring her and pretending to be riveted by her mother’s conversation, feigning fascination in her father’s rhododendrons. When oblique questions were asked about my parentage, I deflected them, hinting at a father who was always traveling abroad on important but unspecified business. I hinted at a country house that I might one day inherit and was vague and enigmatic enough to discourage further questioning. Still, Laura paid me no heed.

  I changed my game, and instead began to pay her some attention, included her in our plans, took an interest in her course work, offered help with essays, and invited her for drinks with us. Sometimes I would try subtly to ask Michael about her, but he would react huffily. Jealous of my interest in her, I assume. Michael was as gay as Christmas. It was never mentioned or acknowledged. Later, in France, I tried to help him be straight. Back in the day, we genuinely thought it might be possible. Perhaps we knew it wasn’t, but we were not willing to accept it. He liked me. I didn’t mind. He was useful. I liked him too, but not in the way that I know he wanted. However, his fraternal connection to Laura allowed me to get closer to her, although she was still proving immune to every seduction ploy I knew.

  Eventually, inspired by Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, which we were studying at the time, I decided to send her a love letter. I wrote more drafts of this letter than I have of any of my books. There were flowery versions, there was a terrible one in my own rhyming verse entirely ripped off from Keats, there was a version that included a Shakespearean sonnet, but in the end I simply told her how I felt about her, how beautiful I thought her, how she made me smile, and that I hoped she might one day let me take her to dinner. Above everything I have ever written, that letter is the text of which I am most proud. It was honest.

  Two days after I mailed the letter, I exited the lecture hall to find that Laura was waiting for me. She hooked her arm into mine, wrapped her red scarf around both of our necks, and gave me a chaste kiss on the cheek. I loved her then, I think, if that warm and giddy feeling is love.

  Our courtship was slow and sweet and delicate. I let Laura dictate the pace of our relationship. On a practical level, I had to deflect her curiosity about my background and lied that I lived with a strict aunt, which negated the possibility of her visiting my home, but Laura was not interested in my home, my past, my parents. Now that Laura had decided that we were a pair, she was interested in me. Me. We became quite the golden couple in a few short months, and I basked in the sunlight she reflected upon me. I was no longer the grubby boy in the secondhand coat trying to get his leg over.

  When we did eventually make love, it was entirely different from
anything I had experienced before. It was an early March afternoon in her parents’ house, and a wintry sun cast shadows across the tiled kitchen floor as we drank tea from china cups, leaning back, side by side, against the AGA oven. We were talking about our plans for the summer, and Laura suggested that we needed to get out of Dublin, “to get some privacy,” she said, and looked quickly at me, fiercely, and then looked away again. I knew what she meant, but I teased her—“Privacy? For what?”—and I brushed a strand of her dark hair out of her eyes and kissed her mouth gently. She responded softly at first and then twirled and stood in front of me so that we were nose to nose. “They won’t be back until after four,” she said, and led me by the hand up the back stairs to her bedroom. Once there, we quickly stripped and dived under the covers, both of us shy and tentative, and there we stayed for the next two hours, tenderly touching and tasting, and as I moved inside her I thought, idiotically, that life was good and that all would be well.

  Maybe I fooled myself. I thought I loved her and was loved by her and we were real, proper, grown-up people with genuine emotions and feelings for each other, and while in the past it may have given me satisfaction that others were jealous of us, now I simply wished that everyone could have what we had. Laura made me good, and I could never imagine a time when my love for her could be displaced by anybody. I was terribly immature.

  If only we hadn’t gone to France that summer of 1973.

  • • •

  Nine years later, I met Alice. She was no Laura, but by then I knew that I never deserved a girl like Laura. Alice was simple, loyal, discreet, and kind. Alice was a haven from my nightmares. I have never felt the same passion for Alice that I had for Laura, but until three months ago we made a very good life together. Alice and I complemented each other.