The Olive Harvest (The Olive Series Book 3) Page 16

  ‘Don’t be jealous, Bassie,’ I call after him. To no avail.

  Like the Old Woman who lived in a Shoe, I have a house bursting at the seams. My Irish cousin, Noel, with his family and Michel’s German nephew, Hajo, who celebrated his fourteenth birthday with us here on the farm soon after we bought the place and who has come to visit this year with his mother, his adolescent sister and his strikingly good-looking young girlfriend are followed by Michel’s sister, Angélique, husband Ralf and three sons. The men are calling for me to take heed of Quashia’s words. They have made a tour of the grounds and return to report the extent of the boar damage. Noel warns that the wild pigs have begun to steal the apples and in reaching for them have stripped off leaves and branches, leaving them broken like fallen wings or withering on the ground. Further aloft, towards the hill’s crown, the beasts are grubbing around the feet of the sapling oliviers, turning over the earth. Many of the small trees have been knocked sidewise, notes Ralf. Not yet uprooted but worryingly slanted. ‘They will eventually die in this heat if their roots have been dislodged and they cannot reach subsoil water sources,’ cautions Noel. I am glad that Quashia has gone off to his cottage and is not around to hear these warnings.

  ‘Do you think I am being stubborn?’ I direct my question to Noel, who is the closest I have to a brother, believing that he will guide me honestly.

  ‘It’s foolish, Carol, and short-sighted. Something has to be done.’

  ‘You can’t expect Quashia to work the way he does only to find that each morning the refurbishments he has already completed need to be repaired. Consider him, Carol, not the wild pigs,’ chips in Hajo.

  This evening we dine late and though it is after ten, the children eat with us. It is too hot to sleep. Noel, Hajo and Ralf have prepared a steaming barbecue. Our home-grown garlic is a huge success. The cloves take longer to peel – being small they are fiddly – but they are an extremely flavoursome bonus to our dishes. Unusually, the dogs grow restless as we squash together around the groaning table. They are pacing the terraces, barking and growling up into the darkness towards the stands of pines silhouetted on the hillside. Something is up there, spooking them. We hush our chatter to listen and a bloodcurdling high-pitched screech tears into the sultry, unstirring night.

  ‘Jeez, what was what?’

  I shake my head. I have never heard such a cry here before. Disturbed, everyone rises from the table. The children are terrified and cling fast to their mothers’ hips. The screech rips forth again. Could it be a hooting eagle owl? A tree shrew? Or my honey buzzards? The hill returns to silence while we, shaken, return to the serving of supper, our conversation muted.

  Suddenly Bassett bolts. Up and down the terrace, to and fro, back and forth, like a freaked horse. I call to him to be calm but due to my dedication to the hares and Intruder, I am not his best friend these days. He throws a backwards glance towards me and then sets off into the night, cantering and baying mournfully. On he goes, yowling and pacing, until he reaches the level below our little apple orchard where he pauses, eyeballing the upper reaches of the hill. I hurry from the table to bring him back but as I pass the bank of cedars, I am stopped in my tracks. There, gazing menacingly down upon our bristling little dog, looming in the exaggerated shadowed light as broad as a bison, is a wild sow. The beast holds its ground at the edge of the stone wall, glaring malevolently upon our hunting hound who, in return, is baring his teeth.

  ‘Viens ici, Bassett,’ I encourage breathlessly. But without heed or warning the dog sprints forward, hurry-scurrying towards the wild pig.

  ‘No!’ I cry, rather too loudly, as the boar vaults through the air. For such a mammoth beast, she seems astoundingly agile. She lands with a reverberating thud directly in line with the dog and begins to charge, fit to kill.

  ‘Bass!’ I shriek. Everyone springs to their feet again. The children are wailing. Mothers are attempting to usher their young into the house while Bassett turns on his heels and flees, flashing out of the path of the fulminating mammal. He streaks past me as Hajo, who has had the foresight to run and fetch a torch from his car, arrives and levels the beam full on to the boar, who turns tail, retreating hastily to take refuge in the shadows between the stone ruin, the pines and the monumental Judas tree. Hajo steers the shaft of light upon the boar’s pointed, tuskless face, locating its wild, angry eyes now fearful and uncertain, while Bass, safely ensconced between his two pals beneath the dining table, is shivering and traumatised.

  I toss sleeplessly most of the night knowing that it is time to make choices.

  The following morning, early, Angélique finds me bleary-eyed in the kitchen preparing coffee.

  ‘Excuse for my English,’ she says, ‘and for my words, but I think you are not very fine in these days.’ Angélique is a madonna of a woman, yielding yet powerful. We became close during the last days of her father, Robert’s, life when we spent hours alone together at his hospital bedside. Although she is almost a decade younger than I am, I look up to her, admire and respect her. Falteringly, I broach my concerns about Michel, attempting to open up to her. ‘I don’t recognise him. I fear for his health, for our marriage.’

  ‘You must go to him,’ she counsels.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘No,’ she smiles, wrapping her arm around my shoulder. ‘But once, when we were children, Papa was going through difficult days, it was Michel who lent the greatest shoulder. He spent hours with Robert, not talking much, creating small projects to give him back his confidence. It sounds to me as though Michel needs such support now.’

  ‘He doesn’t seem to want it from me.’

  ‘Try.’

  Before leaving for Paris, I telephone the refuge centre for lost dogs. Having explained my dilemma with Intruder, I am advised by the desk clerk that his breed of sheepdog can rarely cohabit. He is a loyal and faithful animal but an aggressive fighter if his top-dog position is threatened. ‘Bring him here,’ she advises. ‘We will find him a good home with a master who has no others.’

  Intruder must go.

  I release him from the lead he has been attached to for the best part of the last three days, whistle him to the car and he pounces in buoyantly. He sits beside me on the passenger seat, mascot stance, tongue hanging loose, panting and dribbling, pleased as Punch with his jumped-up station. His eyes glitter like tinfoil because he thinks he has won my undivided attention; that he is selected and apart from the others who gaze up at the vehicle in forlorn bewilderment.

  ‘I hate to do this, pal,’ I tell him during the short journey.

  When we arrive at the refuge and I read the accusation and desperate final plea in his expression it almost breaks my heart, but what choice do I have? I stand firm, kissing him on his wiry forelock and jumping away smartly as he takes a sharp-toothed swipe at my cheek.

  From the refuge I turn inland, seeking out Alexandre who, I learn, is away for a week in the mountains with his family. I leave no message. When I arrive back at the farm without Intruder there is much canine jumping for joy and licking of my legs.

  Two days later, I say au revoir to my house guests, leaving them to enjoy the farm while I absent myself to fly up to Michel, taking with me the dried and gathered flowers, bags of our garden herbs, figs, garlic and early-season grapes. I find him living a solitary and frugal existence. He has lost weight, but not shockingly so. What stuns me, though, is that he has painted all the woodwork in the studio where he lives and works the Matisse blue of Appassionata’s shutters. A curving staircase which leads to the mezzanine where he sleeps is a rich azure; doors and window frames have received the same treatment, blue or turquoise. The two windowsills in the kitchen are ablaze with fire-red geraniums, placed in southern-baked terracotta pots. The stairs from street-level to atelier have been daubed a deep, brick red. No surface remains uncoated. It is a cave of intense colours.

  Glass jars that once contained yoghurt, washed of all food traces, are filled with dark brown earth and seedlings or
brightly coloured powders: yellows, purples, emerald green, white. Dozens of them, like a row of sentries, are marshalled against the walls. Since we first met, Michel has always expressed a deep appreciation of colour, of spectrums of light, of tone, palettes, shapes and forms. I have frequently thought that, aside from the love itself, it is one of the greatest gifts our relationship has offered me: the world unveiled and received through tinctures and textures of light. I had felt hopeful earlier in the summer that this was his pathway back to health, but now I am at a loss. My response to this space is that it is extreme, enveloping, suffocating. I suspect that I am in the company of a man who is in difficulty. Is this an identity crisis, an experimentation? A desperate bid for colour beyond a black depression triggered by shock?

  Angélique’s words were clear and simple but faced with the reality, I don’t know how best to support him. I enquire after his health, his professional world, what films he might be preparing. He tells me that his affairs have suffered from his extended absence; contracts are slow; he has decided to bias his company exclusively towards the making of documentary films. Eventually, though, he wants to step back from business. He intends to travel less.

  ‘What would you prefer to do instead?’ Hoping that he might want to spend more time at the farm, I suggest that we reconstruct the ruin, build him a studio. He shakes his head. ‘Thank you, but no. I cannot see yet what this new phase of life, the future, will bring but I need to face the present alone,’ is his response.

  ‘I hope it will include us,’ I admit softly.

  One Shot More or Less

  The evening before we are due to set off on our hunting trip, Alexandre telephones to confirm with me what I will require: an extra T-shirt and a spare pair of natural-fibre socks and no perfume, he reiterates. ‘You can wash, of course, but with unperfumed soap.’ Hiking boots are indispensable. A heavy sweater is vital as is a mountain jacket – if I don’t own one, he can supply this. ‘Bring whatever food you fancy, not forgetting mineral water.’ All to be transported in a rucksack, nothing carried by hand and I am not to wear white, anything bright or eye-catching. It will alert the gibier, the game.

  ‘If you have khaki clothes, or a combat outfit all the better.’

  ‘Combat? Me? I’m sorry, I haven’t.’

  He then informs me that we need to set off from his mother’s house, a short drive from the foot of the mountain, by half-past four in the morning. ‘Jacques will collect you. Arrange it with him. See you tomorrow.’

  When I speak to Jacques we agree that pick-up will be at quarter-past two. It is now 9 pm. I only arrived back at the farm two hours ago. I stayed on in Paris for a few days to support Michel in whatever way I could, but he remained desirous of his space, and then I received a call summoning me to London. I have returned to an empty house, all guests gone and the cupboards bare. I have no bread and the boulangerie is now closed. Quashia, whose working day is back to its regular schedule now that the crushing heat has abated, offers to scoot to his local twenty-four-hour Arab épicerie and buy me a loaf. I gladly accept his kind offer and set about rummaging through the wardrobe and various drawers in search of sweaters, a rucksack and my hiking boots, which I have not worn for more than six months. I should have prepared for this, got used to them again.

  At half-past one, after two and a half hours’ sleep, I am out of bed again, running a bath, making sandwiches, feeling shivery from exhaustion. Outside it is the dead of night and Lucky stares at me with incomprehension.

  Jacques arrives late, mumbling apologies. He managed only one hour’s sleep, having spent the evening with his five-year-old daughter at the circus. ‘The tigers were fantastic, he mutters as we set off inland. Our journey is expected to take close to two hours. Aside from weekly conversations about swimming pool, fire or boar matters, Jacques and I barely know one another and, as this does not feel like the appropriate moment to get acquainted, I doze or stare out of the window. I can make out very little of the passing landscape because it is still pitch black. The alpine trees and mountain villages are little more than cut-out shadows but beyond, as we negotiate the hairpin bends, spiralling upwards in his Renault 4, the sky is navy clear with a corn-yellow half-moon and galaxies of stars to irradiate our route. At one point, I catch sight of a constellation that resembles the outline of a tree and because it is unknown to me I point it out to my new companion but, too tired to express interest, he merely grunts.

  In the village of Belvédère, at an altitude of over 500 metres, within the chalet home of Simone, Alexandre’s mother, who is upstairs sleeping, our arrival is greeted by a trio of men and Beethoven, a floppy black dog the size of a donkey. The television is on in the kitchen where the men are staring at a film about fishing as they drink coffee and kit themselves up in their hunting gear. The topic of conversation is fish. Aside from a nodded greeting, I am ignored. No one expresses surprise or disapproval that I, a woman, am to accompany them. I say nothing apart from a shy bonjour and then merci in response to an offer of coffee. They talk amongst themselves and I study the room. The kitchen shelves and cupboard tops are cluttered with a collection of ornate, brightly enamelled jugs. Everywhere is neat and frilly or wooden and pristine. Jacques, the fisherman, participates in the conversation principally to confirm the varieties of catch displayed on the screen. As well as Alexandre, who is dressed impressively in fitted khaki slacks with several large pockets and matching T-shirt, and looks from head to toe as handsome as a Greek god, there are two others. Jacky, an older man with a large strip of Elastoplast on his forehead, who is introduced as Alexandre’s father but, I learn later, is actually his stepfather, and Didier, their lithe young companion and regular member of their hunt team, also dressed from head to foot in sharply pressed khaki.

  Four yellow plastic bands, rather like hospital identity bracelets, are laid carefully on the table. They have lettering and numbers printed on them. The men discuss them – I cannot follow what they are saying – and then Alexandre packs them in his satchel.

  ‘What are they?’ I ask anyone who might be listening.

  ‘Les bracelets.’ Which leaves me none the wiser. My erroneous guess is that they are name tags, one for each man, required in case someone should be involved in an accident on the mountain or has to be left behind. A green quilted hunting gilet is tossed my way and we are given the signal to move. It is twenty to five. Outside in the yard, the men clamber into the rear of a white Transit van. I am about to follow but am redirected to the front cabin, to the central seat between Alexandre, who will be driving, and his father, who insists on referring to me as Madam and speaking about me as though I am invisible.

  ‘Madam should be next to you.’

  ‘Please call me Carol,’ I ask of Jacky once the excessively playful Beethoven has been ushered back into the house, we are all in our places and the van is being reversed at breakneck speed down the steep driveway of Alexandre’s childhood home. Jacky pays my request no attention. I doubt that he has heard me, chattering as he does incessantly and loudly. In spite of the hour the talk is ebullient and charged with expectation. A hunting trip is afoot, only the second of this season, and I am patently aware of myself both as female and as someone who has not comprehended the pleasure this sport affords them. As we drive along the high roads and narrow passes of the mountain village, Alexandre slows the vehicle to allow himself and his father, who leans right across me when looking to the left, the opportunity to peer up the serpentine entrances into others’ homes.

  ‘Ah, Louis has left then. He’ll be at his post,’ one remarks to the other, or ‘Henri’s car is there. He must have returned from his trip.’

  ‘Your aunt’s lights are on.’

  ‘Impossible! She went to Nice.’

  They seem to be acquainted with every single inhabitant and to know by heart the personal itineraries of the denizens of each and every dwelling, and they talk of the nearby coastal towns as though they were foreign domains a million miles from their pictu
resque alpine enclave.

  Within no time we are parked on a stony slope at what appears to be the mouth of a mountain defile, and out we all tumble. It is ten to five, still night and, due to the altitude, exceedingly chilly. I hear a stream coursing from somewhere on high. It must be feeding the rather dramatic waterfall, Cascade du Ray, we passed a few minutes back. While the bags and rifles are unloaded I contemplate the magnificently clear, starlit sky and the dark silhouettes of eminent peaks encircling us. Four rifles are slung over four shoulders – their lethality disturbs me as the moon glints against the metal and creates a ghostly, coppery effect – my rucksack is tossed my way and I drag it on to my back. It is heavier than I had anticipated. I am handed a baton, a walking stick, by Jacky with the words, ‘Madam might need this.’ Alexandre takes the lead and we begin the ascent. The men set off at a lick and soon settle into a marching rhythm which is steady but rather too brisk for me. I am third in line as we snake our way in single file up a shingled, dusty and rock-strewn path. Behind me is Didier, the silent member of the quartet, and bringing up the rear, old Jacky.

  Within minutes I am breathless and battling against the necessity to huff and puff. I am trying to avoid raspy inhalations which might draw the men’s attention. I have slept for little more than two hours, I am out of condition, my backpack is already cutting into my shoulders and my boots feel like lead weights as I lift and tread. I am also hiking at a higher altitude than I am used to. Our farm sits at somewhere around 100 metres above sea-level. We are now close to 600, heading for a plateau, Cime Valette, which rises out of the clouds at 2,200 metres and has been described to me as a two-hour climb. I glance upwards trying to gauge the distance to our destination. However, in the blackness, beyond the stands of fir trees I cannot decipher anything. The sharp tilting of my head causes it to spin and I feel as though I might vomit. My breathing is growing constricted. I am gasping for air and, as I suck in, I hear a wheezing in my chest. This is soon followed by a shooting pain in my left arm while another attacks a nerve trapped in my neck and travels upwards into the left side of my head. I fear that I am on the verge of a heart attack. In fact, I am sure of it. I am suffering all the warning signs. We march on, scaling and talking. Or rather, the men, so fleet of foot, are joking and bantering, flicking their pencil-thin torches on and off as they, we, negotiate awkward roots or jagged rocks jutting dangerously out of the sharp bends. I remain silent. I am incapable of speech, concentrating as I am on my heavily plodding feet as well as my unwieldy, misfiring system. I am perspiring. Beneath many layers of clothing, my back is cold and damp yet I am hot and sticky. I am very aware that two men are directly behind me and that I am hindering their acceleration. Time is of the essence during these hunts and one of the fundamental rules is that the men must reach the summit and be stationed at their posts before daybreak. I am terrified that someone will notice my deteriorating condition. For their sakes, I cannot dawdle. I make a supreme effort and put on a spurt. On the other hand, if I keep going at this velocity, I might explode. My heart is hammering against my breastbone and my breathing is now so loud someone must have noticed. I stumble into what seems to be a small cairn at the pathside. It is dislodged by my clumsy footing and sends several rocks and stones rolling thunderously down the silent hillside. Suddenly Alexandre stops. He turns back and hands me his torch. ‘Here, use this. How are you getting on?’ he quizzes.