The Olive Harvest (The Olive Series Book 3) Page 24

  When I arrive back at the ranch, exhausted, Annette is nowhere to be found. She has gone riding. The place is deserted; all the other guests have departed. Young waiters flit to and fro, tidying up. I pack up my bag in my room and then settle with a book in the salon, by the fire, waiting to say au revoir to my hostess. The pretty waitress who extinguished last night’s fire comes to enquire what I would like for dinner. Annette has left instructions for the chef to prepare my preferred choice.

  ‘You will eat together,’ she announces.

  ‘I had been intending to leave,’ I protest genially.

  Beyond the picture window the day is falling fast and the light is fading to luminous grey. It has that special quality that flat land gives off: nothing lies beyond the darkness except misty impenetrable infinity. It has begun to rain again. I hear the drops drumming against the leaves in the garden. A heavy percussion. Autumn leaves swirl and bunch and get trapped in corners of the yard and around the legs of garden furniture. The hulking Labrador, Ghost, comes lumbering in through the door, rambling to and fro as though lost, and then drops like a brick by the heat of the fire. I hear Annette’s excited voice from somewhere out in the hall. When she enters, dressed from head to foot in brown riding leather, she is flushed and exhilarated, full of the charge of the ride. ‘Ah, bonjour, Carol.’ She throws off her jacket and falls back into one of the chesterfields. Ghost struggles to his feet and draws close to her, to us. I notice then for the first time his quartz-white eyes.

  ‘He’s blind?’

  ‘Yes, one hundred per cent blind, and it is inoperable. I have tried everything, spent thousands but there is nothing to be done. Poor Ghost will never see again.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Annette confides that her neighbour was responsible.

  I am horrified.

  ‘Ghost was trespassing. He got into the habit of scooting over on to the man’s land and chasing his geese. The fellow warned me and I tried to keep the dog away but he was frisky, full-blooded and disobedient. One afternoon when I was occupied with business here, Ghost slipped his lead and shot off. I found him later in the evening, wandering aimlessly down in the lane in the dark, eyes gouged. The farmer had pierced the dog’s eyes with a horseman’s trident.’

  While Annette goes off to shower, I ponder the barbarism of such an act.

  My hostess and I meet again at seven for drinks and to dine together. Aside from the staff, we are quite alone. I learn that her husband lives and works in Paris. There are complications: a former wife, a child from that first marriage. ‘We came down here to begin again but he has been drawn back.’

  ‘And you run this place alone?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘I admire you. I find Provence a very male land, earthy and virile, but also an enigma; romantic, poetic at heart but racist and brutal too. Are you afraid?’

  ‘I keep a gun beneath my bed. And I have Ghost.’ Annette catches my look. ‘He can still hear and he can bark. Only the immediate neighbours know of his affliction. And you?’

  ‘I have three dogs, no gun.’ I admit that I too am struggling with an isolated farm and a long-distance husband, but I disclose nothing of our accident and Michel’s estrangement. I am not ready to own up to it, or to face the dawning reality that Michel has gone.

  We smile. Two women washed up from other shores, other lives, now woven into the fabric of Provence. For better or worse.

  280,000 Bees for Breakfast

  With renewed resolve I return to the farm. All the same, our dearth of crop refuels my heightening sense of displacement, of purposelessness. In silvery olive groves all along the Nice uplands, the time of reaping approaches. My little agricultural magazine is predicting vintage harvests in superabundance for oléiculteurs growing the cailletier variety. Alas, not at Appassionata. The work involved in the gathering of olives, delivering the mounds to the mill and reuniting with those weathered farmers fussing over the quality of freshly pressed oil; all of these have been braided into the tempo of my seasons. This year, more than ever, I yearn for this raison d’être and for the fatiguing physical demands of bringing in a crop.

  Due to the summer’s phenomenal heat, the smattering of olives we have produced are ripening early. Hearteningly, many of those fat, dark oleiferous drupes are springing forth on the saplings. If this is a teaser of yields to come we can look forward to oodles of oil in our dotage. This autumn, however, the sad reality is that the slender output will not meet the mill’s requirement of 100 kilos of fruit that entitle Appassionata to a single-estate pressing. I prefer not to throw in our lot with others because the quality cannot be guaranteed and many will have been treated with pesticides. Yet I would hate to see the few kilos we do have shrivel and rot on the ground. So I telephone the mill for advice.

  ‘Bottle them for table olives,’ suggests the miller’s wife.

  Michel talked of us experimenting with table olives and René has promoted the idea on several occasions. He swears it is more lucrative than flogging oil. Even so, because I relish the oil-pressing process, I have never really been attracted to marinating the fruit. Still, circumstances suggest that this is the year to try. The miller’s wife instructs me over the telephone. ‘For every kilo of drupes – and remember, they do need to be of the finest quality – you use ninety grammes of sea salt. Place the olives in a glass jar, cover them with water, add a few twigs of thyme, home-grown is preferable, and leave them tightly sealed for several months.’

  It sounds simple enough, I decide to give it a go. I will harvest alone. I won’t net the trees; the fruit is too scarce to bother. I have no need of ladders; the junior trees are barely my height. This frees Quashia to crack on with the ‘hangar’ and complete the wretched thing before winter sets in. I work in my den until the afternoons and then I pick a few olives until sunset, storing them in a crate in the summer kitchen ready for bottling.

  Mid-October brings with it a fleeting snap of cool weather which presages the first signs of deep autumn and we are grateful for it. The monstrous heat has left us. The skies are quiet. All tourists have departed. In the Var, the clearance of thousands of tons of charcoaled debris before the spring reafforestation is underway. Quashia shifts to his winter schedule. He begins at eight, breaks for lunch, then labours till six. Soon, when Ramadan comes round, he will slog through without a meal. I no longer walk out of the house every morning to a blanket of blinding heat. We are more energetic. Today, we have released our fostered hares. Quashia carried them, kicking and boxing, down to the stream in the valley beyond our property, when he set off for his lunch. He has returned with all but a tear in his eye. He swears the little fellows turned back to thank him before hopping off. ‘I’d grown fond of them,’ he moans.

  ‘But they had to go. They are ferals, not pets.’ Gérard, our vet, who came to inspect them to reassure me that they were not infected with myxomatosis, warned that they could never be tamed. ‘Soon, Monsieur Q., there will be bees to look forward to,’ I console. I e-mail our apiarists to reaffirm how much we are looking forward to the arrival of the hives. I receive a response which perturbs me.

  ‘We have been hearing on the radio about the exodus of sangliers from the burned-out forests. Troupes of them are hunting down your way, we understand. As a rule, the only beast that will approach or disturb a beehive is a cow but, no doubt, you know that autumn is the boars’ mating season and a pregnant sow can be extremely aggressive. Imagine if a hive were knocked over, or damaged. Please confirm by return that our little girls will not be in danger. Otherwise, we must find ourselves an alternative placement as soon as possible.’

  I reply assuring M. Huilier that their girls will be untroubled by sangliers. There have been no sightings of wild boar on our land for almost two months. Quashia is convinced that they have found new grazing lands. Alexandre warns me they will be back. If they do return, I tell him, I will call him in. I am praying it will not come to that.

  While I am completing my
cueillette, the gathering of my few ripened drupes, I telephone René – I miss him and his anecdotes – to confirm the advice I have been given on the preparation of table olives as well as to learn what news there is of Claude, the water-diviner.

  ‘How much thyme should I add to each litre jar?’

  ‘None,’ is his response.

  ‘None? But I rang the mill and was told to soak a few sprigs in the infusion.’

  ‘Once the olives are ready to eat you can spice them with whatever you fancy but it is best at this stage to prepare them au naturel. Leave your options open as far as flavour goes.’ Claude is working again, René says, and determined to keep occupied. ‘I have been at his place almost every day. He’s extending his groves; we’re planting another hundred and thirty trees. Ten-year-olds, bigger than yours. Back-breaking. Fortunately, he has all the necessary machinery and the land is flattish, unlike the grind at your place.’

  ‘Do you think he’s too busy to see me?’

  ‘Not at all – he’s been asking after you. He said he was pleased to hear from you when his wife died. I’ll talk to him in the morning and call you back.’

  Our olive guru so rarely makes contact when he promises that I am quite taken aback to hear from him the following morning. ‘What are you doing later? Claude is inviting you up here to visit his groves and stay for an apéro.’

  Before I am given the opportunity to react Claude is on the phone, his manner as gracious as ever. And so it is agreed that René will collect and deliver me to this multimillionaire’s estate at the close of their working day. I am delighted. We haven’t seen one another in a long while.

  ‘I won’t bring you tomatoes because I know how loaded you are.’ René is back on the line.

  ‘Actually, René, if you have some to spare …’

  ‘I thought you were laden. Let me guess, they’re all blighted. You didn’t treat them.’

  ‘You are right, we didn’t treat them, but they were not blighted. Wild boars … I’ll tell you when I see you.’

  Claude’s olive farm lies about a hundred metres higher inland than ours. I am not quite sure what to expect. René has eulogised the plantation so often, and never loses an opportunity to remind me that the small boy who sat beside him in class at the local village school is today one of the most successful business merchants in the south of France. My one and only encounter with Monsieur, the water-diviner, impressed me greatly. I had been expecting a charlatan, a sharp-talking Provençal trickster, but my fears could not have been more unfounded.

  We arrive at his gates, which open with a key card, unlike ours, which bear an old-fashioned padlock. The immersion into his plateau valley property is gentle and meandering. Everywhere there are white wooden picket fences, which I have never come across in this part of the world before. It feels like a ranch in the United States. ‘These were originally the horse paddocks.’ René is pointing out generous flats of land which flank our approach. He pulls up behind Claude’s navy blue four-wheel-drive. I recognise it from the visit he and his late wife made to our home. Three more cars are stationed in front of a tractor, a plough and several other pieces of rather impressive farming machinery. Two black guard dogs come bounding and barking towards us, followed by a white husky.

  ‘These were the stables,’ said René, ignoring the animals, who are jumping up on me, knocking me backwards and scrapping amongst themselves. I leave them to their high jinks. Aside from the elegant building René has described as the stables, there are two impressive Provençal-styled bungalows, at some distance from one another, but no sign of human activity.

  Our olive guru escorts me to the upper paddocks where row upon row of olive saplings have been recently planted. All are visibly irregular; they remind me of Quashia’s wonky shed. Loamy earth, freshly turned, lies higgledy-piggledy in miniature hillocks, as though a mole has gone mad. To the left and right, on the incline above us and beyond the main house, there are statuesque oliviers, all with forked or three-pronged trunks. Unlike these specimens, ours are almost entirely solid, circular, single-trunked, thicker than cartwheels. Here, at this marginally higher altitude, farms sport the scars of centuries of cooler climes, decades before the frost of 1956, and it is easy to see how the trees have fought back, grown anew, multiple-limbed. Claude’s holding is a celebration of olive trees. There is no other vegetation here. The odd Barbary fig cactus scattered about but otherwise, nothing: after our long hot summer, even the ground scrub has withered. To irrigate his trees Claude has installed a complex watering system which snakes its way through the magisterial groves.

  A cry from somewhere above hails the arrival of the man himself. Stepping across the fields, waving, is a figure I would have barely recognised. Stooped now, with grief etched on his face, he does not immediately meet my gaze. Still, he shakes my hand, assures me of a warm welcome and signals our path. ‘Shall we begin?’

  Off we go, inspecting every tree, admiring their handsome offerings. It cannot be denied that Claude is in for a bumper crop. Scads of fruit. Interestingly, the difference in altitude means that his fruits are a month less ripe than those on our smallholding. As a rule, we would gather mid- to late November. This is sooner than some farmers, but we prefer our fruits to be pressed before they are too ripe because we are partial to that tangy, peppery flavour an early récolte delivers. This year, due to the heatwave and scarcity, I will be done by the beginning of the month. Claude will commence picking in three weeks, the time we would normally be harvesting.

  All his trees except four, bunched together in a remote corner, are cailletiers. He does not know the variety of this quartet. Their fruits are considerably smaller.

  ‘I wonder why they are here?’ I muse.

  ‘Why to pollinate the others, of course!’

  This explanation surprises me. I have never heard it before and it reminds me yet again that there are myriad myths about the olive tree and at least a dozen different systems of farming.

  ‘Ours are all cailletier except six smaller trees I planted by mistake soon after we arrived here. They are tanche olives but, if we are to gain an AOC ticket, they cannot be pressed with the rest of the crop.’

  ‘Perhaps not, but they are useful for pollination,’ rejoins Claude.

  I do not argue with him. Our hill has produced olive trees for somewhere in the region of four hundred years, well before the French Revolution. As far as I am aware, mixing varieties to pollinate has never been essential. I suspect Claude is operating a method of olive farming that I have not come across. René says nothing to correct either of us, so I drop the subject and we drift on to inspect his two forages, drilled wells. He indicates at what junctures on his hand he ‘felt’ water, where the underground rivers converge, what the drilling processes involved and how the water is discharged. Of course, as this man is a diviner, water and the sleuthing of it is a passion of his. His equipment strikes me as complicated and extremely expensive, but, due to the prohibitive cost, we have failed to drill to any source at all, so who am I to comment? Claude inventories, in minute detail, the function of every machine and then the system by which water arrives here from the mountains. All water used externally on the estate is from clear alpine streams. My technical and engineering skills are non-existent and he soon loses me. I apologise. He shrugs. We hike up to his pump house. It has been constructed with eight valves. These enable him to irrigate selected areas of the grounds or to boost the pool level without wasting the precious fluid willy-nilly, all at once.

  ‘I need to repair this step and paint that door again. See how it’s flaking. And I must refill this cracked cement patch here. As you see, there is a great deal of work to do. Let’s tour the rest of the grounds, shall we, and then we’ll have a glass of champagne. You drink champagne?’

  I nod, asking myself why at seventy-nine he is creating such a workload for himself and the answer is clear to me. He is mapping an inheritance for his offspring, protecting this fecund valley that has been his life
and, perhaps most important of all, giving himself reasons to look to that future, albeit without his mate. During the remainder of our tour he recalls how he constructed the main house from recovered stones which had originally belonged to the drystone walls enclosing the land.

  ‘It was in poor condition. Sections had subsided and the expense of re-erecting it would have been astronomical. Mon épouse suggested we gathered the stones together to see what we had.’ He frequently makes reference to ‘mon épouse,’ my spouse, when pointing out a structural addition or a stone configuration designed by her, and I sense how present she remains in his daily life.

  Olive farming offers this man meaning and purpose, as it does me. Claude’s crop will be a windfall this season; he has only René to assist him. Two near-octogenarians. I could offer my additional pair of hands. If they accept, it will allow me to participate in the cycle of harvesting and pressing, a process that I have come to count on, to look forward to. And, without saying a word to either man, perhaps keeping company with another who is pining for his partner will help me through my solitary and uncertain days. Even if it doesn’t, the olive gathering and oil-pressing certainly will.

  Once we are settled at the table on his terrace, looking towards his trees and a church tower on a faraway hill, full champagne flutes before us, Claude recalls the Liberation. He, like René, takes delight in recounting his war stories. Neither knew the Great War but both their fathers did and these two were strapping young men during the Second World War.

  ‘On 24 August 1944, four hundred US Dakota planes flying in from Corsica zoomed across this valley. From this very spot my father and I watched their arrival. I was a naïve fellow but keen as mustard. It was a thrilling moment. We were liberated the same day as Paris. Interpreters were needed for all the American soldiers arriving in those planes. I had been learning English, studying religiously, craving the day when the Allies would land. During the ten days they were based here before they moved on to Italy I served as interpreter, and a very proud one. I love Americans.’ The sorrow I read in Claude’s face when we arrived has softened. ‘We had such fun. Many of the Yankee soldiers were my age. We taught one another street talk that made us laugh.’