The Olive Harvest (The Olive Series Book 3) Page 21

  ‘It was a good idea, this day out,’ smiles Michel. ‘Fresh air frees the mind.’

  I take this opportunity to suggest that I accompany him when he returns to Paris. He goes silent, sips his wine, shakes his head. ‘Your visit was nice but I must be alone.’

  I bite back my disappointment. ‘How can I support you, then?’

  ‘By what you’re doing.’ And he leaves it at that.

  Afterwards we stroll the main street where stalls are lining the roadsides and the shallows of the grassy slopes. All are selling locally produced goodies. There are nobbly walking sticks carved from cherry wood and holm-oak, intricately patterned socks spun from sheep’s wool, deliciously tempting goat’s cheeses from a female farmer in Clans. We pause and buy several, more than we can reasonably consume. ‘You can take some to Paris,’ I murmur as I stuff them into my bag, fighting not to give way to the turbulence that is building in the wake of Michel’s imminent departure. ‘And Quashia might like one.’

  We pause at a stall selling dark and golden pots of honey and, lo and behold, there on display are large jars of rhododendron honey and the apiculteur’s label is our very own M. Huilier’s.

  ‘Are they here?’ I ask excitedly.

  ‘No,’ replies the young stallholder who, with his dark, curling locks and soft pale voice, reminds me of a country hippy, a survivor from Woodstock, or a knight from bygone days.

  ‘Send our good wishes,’ we cry. ‘They are bringing their bees to us.’

  Yes, the next transhumance we will participate in will end directly at our door.

  The following morning, I pack up Jacky’s donated leg of venison and most of the purchases from Roubion’s market stalls and Michel flies off laden with them to Paris. A lull, a breath of calm, after the to-ings and fro-ings of the Mipcom television market returns to the coast and in another, far less pleasing sense, to the farm and my daily life.

  As we kiss goodbye I see in his eyes that he has already left. I miss him from the instant he disappears through the Departures gate, more so because we have made no plans for our next meeting and nothing has been resolved.

  ‘Why don’t I come and visit you soon?’ I offer again.

  ‘We’ll see,’ is his minimal response.

  Checking my watch on the drive home, I am thinking, ‘Take-off time.’ ‘Now he is in the skies.’ Doubts haunt me. Will we find a way to rescue our marriage, to realign our common life, which seems to have taken a turn as oblique and as incomprehensible to me as the wall of Quashia’s shed?

  Since Michel’s arrival and departure, there has been a flurry of dismantling and reconstruction of ‘the hangar’, which is what both men have now decided Quashia is creating. Everywhere are pegs and string, a cat’s cradle of intricate skeins to assist him to make level the tilts and bevels Michel has corrected, and the responsibility rests once again with me. I traipse the hill from time to time to encourage, to keep an eye and follow as closely as I am able the instructions Michel has left with me, but I am ignorant of all building skills and feel helpless in the face of the exercise. The lower structure is in place, after a fashion, and Quashia is now occupied with the installation of the timbers that will support the corrugated base of the tiled roof, but they look worryingly insecure to me.

  ‘Carol, can you pop to the builders’ merchants and pick up some glue? It’s for these roof tiles. You know the one?’

  I nod. ‘How many tubes do you want?’

  ‘Twenty,’ he calls after me.

  Twenty! ‘Monsieur Q., you cannot possibly need so many.’

  ‘Twenty,’ he insists, and off I go, as obedient as the mason’s votary.

  ‘I’ve left you a cheese in the garage, Monsieur Quashia.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he calls between bouts of hammering.

  And so our life continues, returning to the struggle of keeping everything afloat: Appassionata Without Michel. Once again he has retreated into his tunnel of silence. It is as though he has walked out of my life.

  The Fortunes of Saints

  The first draft of the script I was contracted to write is winging its way to Los Angeles by Chronopost, leaving me at a loose end. There is barely an olive harvest to give my attention to; there has been no feedback for months from the various oil bodies regarding our AOC, not since the letter I ignored; the wild boars have, mercifully, taken to driving others to distraction; Quashia hammers constantly at his shed, laying tiles now, and there is little input I can make to improve the situation so, turning my attention to my rather moribund life as an actress, I call my theatrical agent in London. ‘Is there any work?’ I ask him.

  ‘Darling, it’s difficult all round but you have been away so long. I could probably find you a theatre tour. I had a conversation with one of the managements this morning. They’re casting for a thriller. It’s a bit of a pot-boiler. It won’t be coming to town, of course, and you’d need to sign for six months …’

  ‘Six months! I couldn’t. I have responsibilities here.’

  ‘Well, there’s nothing else right now.’

  ‘No television?’

  ‘Soaps, police series and game shows, darling. That’s what British television has been reduced to, I’m sorry to say. I’ll try to find you something, though, a nice little cash cow is what you need. Still, if I were you I’d stay where you are, laze by the pool and drink champagne.’

  So here I am casting about for opportunities, ways to stay focused, to reassure myself that battling on with the farm is my best option. My husband is adamant that he needs time alone and the truth is I am floundering. My life feels rather as though the roof has blown off it.

  At the beginning of our summer, in those few days before our accident, when I had pressed Michel for our outing to the Camargue, I found no festivals for us to participate in. Now approaches a renowned autumn weekend, a religious celebration and a gypsy pilgrimage held at the twelfth-century church in the Camarguais fishing port of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. On the Friday morning I decide on a whim to attend it alone, to trace the journey we had intended to make. One call secures me a cheap hotel. I throw a few ill-assorted clothes into a travel bag and take off, leaving behind me our land of sloping hills and villages perched in mid-air where patriarchs in berets pass their après-midis playing pétanque in the squares, passing through conifer forests in the Var blackened by the summer’s atrocities, red-earthed vineyards and plains of silvery olive trees. Grove after grove of silvery olive trees. Simply driving alongside them lifts my spirits.

  Van Gogh, who spent miserable days of sadness and sickness in Arles, the capital of the Camargue, discovered that the olive tree was a source of wellbeing and an inspiration to him. He wrote to his brother: ‘Ah, my dear Theo, if you could see the olives at this moment. The old silver foliage and the silver-green against the blue … The murmur of an olive grove has something very intimate, immensely old. It is too beautiful for me to try to conceive of it or dare to paint it.’ Eventually he dared: Van Gogh managed eighteen canvasses of olive trees.

  I flash by the distant Alpilles range, north-east of Arles, where Frédéric Mistral was born, lived and wrote his poetry, swing left off Autoroute 7, with its convoys of articulated lorries hurtling to and from Barcelona, and whisper a brief au revoir to all those ancient murmuring trees, to the clefts and gullies, the escarpments and precipices. I am now bent on a meridional line. South, seawards from Arles with its magnificent classical and mediaeval structures, into a delta where the Romans and Greeks have not left their imprints, to a territory where the influences arise from other, I suspect, more pagan sources.

  On my approach to the coastal town of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer I pass through windswept, alluvial marshlands. Gone is all greenery. Winding through terrain flat as a pancake I find myself in a reedy wetland where little grows besides rice and a vine cultivated in sand. Birds overhead wheel and whistle. The landscape and vegetation are so different here that it is hard to believe I am a mere two hours from our stone-terraced olive farm.
There is not a knoll, hillock, cairn or midden to break the horizon in any direction, not unless I turn my head back, northwards. The physical features of this Provence are quite new to me. Marshland, grassland, swamps. Golden-hued; wet, caney and reflective. A primitive topography enclosed by two estuaries reaching to the sea like yearning arms, flowing and forked from their mother source, the Rhône. These lesser waters are known as Grand Rhône and Petit Rhône. In between them lies this mysterious, croissant-shaped, alluvial delta: the Camargue, where native white horses and solid black bulls roam freely as they have done since prehistoric times. I soon begin to sight them, grazing on marram grass at the borders of the swamps. Herds of them. White horses, black cattle. Manado is Provençal for herd. The finest of these wild white horses were selected from the Camarguais herds, the manades, for games involving the bulls. Animals are never killed in a course Camarguaise. In that sense it is dissimilar to Spanish bullfighting, the corrida. I appreciate that. I stop the car to observe them. The bulls return my interest. They raise their bovine heads, Houri-eyed, with stupendous lyre-shaped horns, and outstare me. Unlike the horses who feed on, oblivious. White herons, known as cattle egrets, perch on the bulls’ thick-set necks and on the haunches of the stallions.

  Not only are there no olives here, there are precious few shrubs or trees of any description in these sodden plains. It is due to the excessively saline atmosphere. I notice a few random figs, gnarled, knock-kneed and mottled by the winds, but there is little else in the way of arboreal cover. I drive by a pine. Its towering height in this lowland is a luscious originality, almost an affront. Its brilliant greenness brushing the deep blue sky bowls me over. A bold placement and unexpected.

  Everywhere I turn my head there are birds: harriers overhead, songbirds, wading birds plodding about, their beaks dipping in and out of the mud like shoppers rummaging through stalls at a market. I slow the car so that I can better observe them. The songbirds are the most numerous of all. On a telephone line, within minutes of one another, I spot two raptors, still as stuffed toys, but I am not able to identify them. The afternoon is warm, not clammy as I had expected, but clear and sunny, though the air is brackish. On I motor, chasing the setting sun, not disappointed by my stolen day, cruising through the vast plains, deserted save for the abundant wildlife, on my solitary journey to the sea.

  Several images, one directly after another, make me whoop with delight. They begin with my first-ever sighting of a huge flock of the region’s renowned rose flamingos wading and strutting in the shallow water. And a party take flight! What a spectacle! White and lipstick pink with black underwings. The wings beat silently over an orange-pink sun reflected in the flat wetland water. I sit gazing by the roadside, losing all sense of time, wishing Michel were with me, wondering how this year might have turned out if we had left for this trip when we had planned to.

  On the move again, I begin to notice examples of the traditional mas, the farmhouses; each one is pure white. They date back to days long ago when the region’s mounted herdsmen, who tended the bull stock, lived in cabanes de gardians, whitewashed cottages with thatched roofs. Set back from the roads beyond corrals of white horses, they are very lovely.

  Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer was the first place in Provence to adopt the Christian faith. Once a thriving fishing port, now a tourist hangout, it received its name in the nineteenth century. In earlier days, I don’t know how far back, it had been called Ra after the Egyptian sun god. Its present appellation honours two saints: Mary Salome, mother of the apostles James and John, and Mary Jacob, the sister of the Virgin Mother of Christ. Legend has it that this pair of Marys, in the company of Mary Magdalene, Lazarus, his sister Martha, along with their dark-skinned Ethiopian servant, Sarah, fled Palestine and beached up on this littoral, having beaten their way across the Mediterranean sea from its distant eastern shores. This boatload of washed-up saints, servants and Christian evangelists was on the run from persecution by the Middle Eastern Jews and Romans who feared the recently baptised, apostolising Christians. In those days, of course, this village was nothing but a windy wasteland of sand dunes and salt marshes. The story goes that all the disciples aboard the boat continued on by foot, venturing deeper into the heart of Provence, to preach their gospels and bring faith to the Gauls, save for the two, more elderly Marys, Salome and Jacob, who, judging their travelling days at an end, remained behind and built an altar in Saintes-de-la-Mer on the spot where the present-day church stands. (I love the idea of the ‘elderly women’ staying put – they were probably somewhere in their mid- to late thirties, poor devils!)

  What happened to their Ethiopian servant is not clear. There is even a question as to whether this Sarah figure really did accompany the refugees on their seafaring odyssey or whether she simply happened to be on the beach and gave them safe harbour in this remote and primitive place after what must have been a traumatic voyage. Imagine their condition when they docked. They had fled Palestine in terror of their lives, had been at sea for weeks, months? Surely this shipload of faithfuls, predominantly women, must count as some of the earliest boat people or asylum-seekers?

  I find it a fascinating tale, particularly the inclusion of Sarah. There is no documented information about how or why the black-skinned woman, who has not been canonised by the Catholic Church, should have been promoted to the role she holds today. Nevertheless, she is venerated by gypsies worldwide and christened by them Saint Sarah, patron saint of gypsies and travellers.

  It is close to midnight when I reach the seafront and, in spite of the well-advertised pèlerinage, pilgrimage, which is due to commence the following afternoon, the place is as deserted as any out-of-season resort. I park my car on the front and walk in the direction of the water to stretch my limbs and inhale the saline air. My hair whips against my face. Beyond a low stone wall, the waves are rolling against the breakstones, hard and battle-grey. The sky is covered with louring clouds and streaky patches of silver light where the moon is trying to break through. It threatens bad weather.

  Standing by myself, no one at my side, a mere speck in the middle of the night, looking out across the moving sheet of metal that is the Mediterranean towards its eastern shores, its north African coastline, too distant to see and only imaginable, I ask myself what has impelled me to make this solitary journey from one side of the Provence coast to the other. I cannot fully formulate an answer but healing is certainly one of the words that springs to mind. I am alone, uncertain about how best to move forward or what to hang on to and I fear the disintegration of my marriage.

  I return to the car, pull out my bag, cross the street to my two-star hotel and bang hard on the door. Without greeting, a po-faced woman leads me up one flight of stairs to a bleak, sea-facing room where I fall into bed exhausted and sink into a deep but dream-infested sleep.

  Yesterday I left our south-eastern corner of Provence, where the equinox days were golden and delicious, and I awake this Saturday morning to brooding, stormy weather. Sombre and impenetrable is the horizon. A windswept hike along the beach beneath a troubled, pewter sky finds me in conversation with a stick-insect of a woman dressed entirely in white out walking a brown and white shaggy dog. Like a wraith she appears from nowhere, staggering over dunes wreathed in misty sea air with her panting, inquisitive companion at her side.

  I mention the pilgrimage. Her wrinkled eyes are weepy from the wind and whorling sands and as pale green as celery. ‘Is it this weekend?’ she asks sniffing, staring inland towards dead-level, boggy infinity.

  I find her question strange. How can someone live in this secluded billet and not be aware of the event?

  ‘I’ve never been. Some say it’s worth seeing, but watch your bag and jewellery because the pilgrims are gypsies and even gypsies at worship won’t pass up an opportunity to rob you.’

  I wish her good day and wend my way back towards the town.

  En route I run across half a dozen caravans parked at the shoreline by men on fold-up stools, sipping hot
drinks and fishing in the rough waves, and then, further along, dark-skinned families lolling about on the rocks, wrapped up warm, doing nothing by the choppy sea. I head for the church, popping into the tourist office along the way, keen to confirm the weekend’s sequence of events. It is lunchtime. Still, they are open and an obliging young man hands me the programme, affirming the procession, but it is tomorrow, not today, and no gypsies will be in attendance. ‘They only grace the May festival when the relics of their Saint Sarah are brought out. For that occasion gypsies make the pilgrimage from the four corners of the world. During ten days in late May our fishing port is journey’s end for them and a colourful gypsy party it is, too; an opportunity to baptise their children in a holy place and to perform certain secret rites which are associated with giving their daughters’ hands in marriage. But this October weekend, the celebration is in honour of the Marys and is strictly a local observance. You won’t see any gypsies – boumians is our Provençal word for them – today.’