The Olive Harvest (The Olive Series Book 3) Read online

  ‘Where have you been?’ cries the mill-owner, Christophe, when we walk through the door. ‘I thought you’d abandoned us, chosen another establishment. It is happening more and more.’

  Evidently his daughter-in-law hasn’t mentioned my call bemoaning our dearth of olives.

  ‘We have no fruit this year,’ I explain.

  ‘No olives? Have mercy! What about your AOC?’

  ‘Still no news.’

  He huffs and smacks his head dramatically with the palm of his hand. ‘It’ll all come good,’ he assures me with uncharacteristic optimism. ‘But no olives, mon Dieu!’

  While René oversees Claude’s pressing, I zip upstairs to the shop to buy soaps and pots of green and black tapénade home-made by the miller’s wife. Inside the door a display of santons greets me. These are the small Provençal figurines made out of clay or wood that people Nativity cribs. Christmas is round the corner! Here, in the south, every home displays its own crib and most families include a selection of santons from the numerous local characters on offer: the miller with his donkey, the fisherman, knife-grinder, tambour player and many others. The figures stand outside the stable, waiting to pay homage to the infant Jesus. Within, of course, are the shepherds, the Three Kings – the usual cast of players.

  ‘Want to buy a set?’ asks the miller’s wife. I shake my head. I can hardly bear to contemplate Christmas. But I am fascinated to know where the tradition sprang from. She happily explains. The idea was conceived in 1789, during the Revolution, when the churches were closed and there was nowhere for Catholics to honour and celebrate the Nativity. It was a church statue-maker from Marseille, Jean-Louis Lagnel, who came up with the idea of making figurines that ordinary families could buy inexpensively and keep tucked away in their homes. They proved an enormous success. Santon in French, or santoun in Provençal, means little saint. To this day there is a santons fair in Marseille.

  When René has completed Claude’s pressing – a shocking result, he whispers, shaking his luxurious grey head, more than 7 kilos for a litre – he coughs up for the mill charges, we offer our good wishes and everyone embraces, crying, ‘Merry Christmas!’ Back at Claude’s farm, the mood is less jolly. The oil is not exceptional and his health is deteriorating so the men decide to postpone the remainder of the récolte until after the New Year. Claude wishes me the best for the coming season and presents me with a magnum of champagne, a petit acknowledgement of my contribution.

  At Appassionata’s altitude, along the verdurous lowlands, the harvests have been gathered, the copper-red earth is at rest and I, like the majority in the occidental world, turn my thoughts to Yuletide. Michel remains noncommittal about the holidays. His reasoning is that he must rebuild, must use the quiet period to catch up on so much lost time. Otherwise he doubts he will ever ride the wave.

  ‘Why not bring the work with you, I’ll leave you in peace,’ I promise. And so, thankfully, a few days before the event, I extract a positive response from him.

  Delighted, I gallop round the shops, stocking up the trolley, spending way more than I can afford, gathering up yards and yards of flashing lights at giveaway prices from a shop announcing imminent liquidation, determined that the farm will flag a bright and celebratory air and not smack of the turmoil I have been living through. I have few do-it-yourself skills but I set about garlanding the salon with my recently purchased illuminations. Nails go everywhere except in the walls and I hammer fingers when the fiddly things shoot from my grasp. I stand back to admire the final effect. It looks like nothing more than a sparkly, shapelessly knitted cardigan sleeve. Oh well, it’s the best I can achieve. Outside I sling a necklace of coloured lights above the stables and am rather chuffed with the result until I close the upper doors and crush three bulbs in the attempt; my decorations have been hung too low. Next stop Cannes, the old port, where we have always bought our blue pine Christmas tree. Because the season is upon us and business is slowing, I find a towering bushy example and barter ruthlessly for it until eventually our regular vendor, who is an antique-dealer by trade and does not remember me from Eve, nods his head wearily and hands it over for a third of its astronomical asking price. He binds the tree tightly with string, pinioning its spreading boughs, and straps it to the roof of my car. Even so, its angel tip juts forward and shadows my vision like a stormy sky. I scale the hills gingerly, arrive home safely and cut the tree loose. An error. Its fronds spring forth like a dancer in flight, which creates difficulty in unloading it. I shove and push and heave. Flushed and pricked by its needles, I finally manage to roll it to the roof’s edge and it spins to the ground, thudding on the tarmac, snapping several of its stems in the process and sending the dogs scurrying away. I am whacked. And how will I ever get it up the stairs and into the house, let alone dress it and have it in place before Michel’s arrival? Somehow I manage.

  In amongst the hustle and bustle of fur-clad Parisian trippers laden with elegantly parcelled gifts, I find my husband at the baggage carousel. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ I pant. He looks misplaced within this arriving world of voluble Christmas spirit, and his vulnerability breaks my heart. People all about us hug and clasp and screech with holiday cheer. He greets me with a brief kiss and a tender brush of my cheek but I can already tell that he is frozen still. His gaze is fixed in a caught-off-guard expression and reminds me of a teddy bear’s button-eyes sewn on too tightly. The wound on his forehead is slowly healing, but what inner scars remain, what internal derangement might the accident, so swiftly followed by the closure of his company, have precipitated? Michel has always been such an elegant man. The way he moves, lays a table, his sense of arrangement and colour, his manners and social graces, and although all those qualities remain, I cannot help feeling that I am in the company of someone who does not fit himself – who is not, as the French say, bien dans sa peau, good in his skin – someone who cannot find a way through the channels of his body, as though the signals from his brain have been stunned. His hands dangle loosely, operating like empty gloves. He is not clumsy, far from it, but he appears to flounder in the face of things. Lost.

  Come. Come home. I take him by the hand and lead him to the car.

  Back at the house we go scouting in the garden for a yule log: it’s my excuse for us to tramp about the shabby acres together in our wellies in the crisp, falling light. Rooting and exploring, we are re-encountering the surfaces in one another’s company. Robins abound. Berries, too, the colours of the robins’ breasts, and narcissi pushing up through the apertures in the stone walls. Hands on grainy bark, we stand before sky-scraping pines in indecision. Which to choose? ‘According to Provençal lore it needs to be cut from a fruit tree,’ I say, but in that case our choice is limited. Most of the fruit trees are way too young to start having bits lopped off them. Eventually we settle on a smooth, otter-grey, S-bend from our elephantine fig alongside the pool. He won’t miss it, will he? And we stagger with it up the rock-hard slopes, sliding over mulchy fallen leaves into the house to throw it on the open fire to join other red-hot logs of pine and oak. Afterwards, crouched on cushions on the worn rug by the flames, I slip on a Helen Merrill CD and serve us a welcome home glass of Claude’s champagne. It’s an upbeat beginning.

  ‘Remember when we slept on that horrid lumpy old mattress in here?’ I say. ‘There were five geckos on the chimney breast. “They are the guardians of the house,” you said. “They are watching over us.” ’ I glance about the sitting room. It is less shabby these days, pristine white, and the geckos rarely enter any more. They hide away behind the blue shutters hooked back against the exterior façade, keeping their distance. Only when they are disturbed and scurry every which way at once do we see them indoors.

  ‘We’ll have to find ourselves other guardians. Any suggestions?’

  Michel shakes his head.

  The following day is tranquil and sunny and we are easy in one another’s company if not noticeably chatty or intimate. We lunch outside together on the terrace, but when the
sun begins its descent behind the hills and the afternoon grows chilly we return into the house to curl up by the log fire, to work, read or watch films. I potter a bit in my den and suggest driving to the market to buy oysters, which are traditional here at Christmas and oh so cheap, but Michel shakes his head saying he doesn’t fancy them. ‘Well, we have turkey. What else might you like?’

  Nothing special, he tells me. He takes handfuls of cash and off he goes to the hardware supermarket, returning with rainbows of paint and a job lot of brushes of all sizes. He seems delighted by his purchases and I am, too, for him, and enquire, encouragingly, I pray, what he intends to do with them.

  ‘Paint,’ he replies absentmindedly.

  He sets himself up an outdoor atelier beneath the magnolia tree where in the summer we are tucked up in the shade. He lays out a transparent plastic ground-sheet, places his paints and white spirits, his tools, in orderly rows and disappears in search of something else.

  I go inside to throw another log on to the fire blazing away in the hearth, wanting to leave him free so that he does not feel watched over. Standing in the kitchen, by the sink, staring out of the back window up the hill towards the pine forest, I catch sight of a rabbit poised on hind legs beneath one of the palm trees. There is very little food about at this time of year and we have wire-netted almost every plant on the estate to keep these and other scavengers at bay, but we forgot Michel’s flourishing palm grove. The creature drops down on all fours and draws close to a serrated trunk; back up on its hind legs, head lifted, it begins to nibble hungrily at one of the lower fronds and I marvel at how, when the tips of the leaves are as sharp as needles, it doesn’t cut its mouth. It feeds on regardless. Well, I’ll leave it be. It’s Christmas, after all, and the rabbits are less harmful than the boars.

  I think of Michel occupied elsewhere on the land and resist the temptation to cry. At least we are both still here, I tell myself. We can rebuild.

  I will not give up.

  When Michel returns from a tour of the grounds he tells me that there are wild boar tracks all over the summit of the hill.

  It is Christmas Eve. Jacques is coming to clean the pool later and I want to leave a gift of champagne for him but the pool-house doors are jammed shut. They are made of iron and I haven’t the strength to lever them open unaided. Quashia tells me that he will handle it. When I am next in the garden, I find him and Michel together. Quashia is laughing, happy to have his friend and patron home. They have oiled the lock, to no avail. Michel is now bent to it with his ear pressed against the door. He reminds me of a safe-breaker as he listens for the clicks that might release the mechanism. He rises and shakes his head. Quashia asks to have a go and before anyone can stop him he steps forward and smashes a long crowbar against the lock. Now it is well and truly jammed.

  I am gobsmacked. ‘What did you do that for?’

  ‘Sometimes the shock releases the problem.’

  I continue on my way to gather herbs for the turkey I have stuffed for this evening’s meal, our Christmas dinner.

  The next thing I hear is the whirring of the drill. I decide it is better not to know what the pair of them are up to. They are worse than Laurel and Hardy. I am now engaged in the grimy business of emptying out last night’s ashes from the grate. Opening the front door, I am assailed by the thundering ring of a mallet hitting metal. I sigh. Glancing back into the sitting room, I see a trail of cinders marking my route. My pail, I now notice, has holes in the bottom. Michel joins me outside on the upper terrace. He looks shiny from exertion and downcast.

  ‘How did it go?’

  He shakes his head. ‘We did our best but we couldn’t save it. We had to remove the lock.’

  ‘It’s no big deal. Knowing Quashia, there’s probably another one in the garage.’

  ‘Unfortunately, the drilling buckled the door and, while we were removing that, the concrete frame which held the double doors in place cracked apart.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It was very old.’

  When I pass the pool house on my way to swim I find one lone blue door hanging by a prayer and a stray upper bolt. It is all that remains of the pool house frontage. This is so unlike Michel.

  Jacques arrives, bearing a gift-wrapped poinsettia for us and we give him the champagne. He joins us for an apéritif and we sit looking out over the sea. ‘Alexandre says there have been reports near the lake park of wild-boar damage. It seems they are back and wreaking serious damage hereabouts,’ he warns.

  ‘They’ve been here, too,’ I admit.

  We talk until the sun goes down about the old vineyard, his passion for fishing and our hunting trip and then his wife calls wanting to know why he’s still working.

  ‘I’d better be off.’ He kisses us both and wishes us happy holidays. ‘Did the boars break the pool door?’

  I shake my head.

  He looks puzzled. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Best not to ask. Have a splendid Christmas.’

  *

  The weather is glorious, a true Côte d’Azur Christmas Day.

  I catch sight of Michel climbing the hill, carting a plastic bucket containing some of Quashia’s bits and pieces and the larger of the two chainsaws. I deduce that he is going to embark on a spot of much-needed pruning. It’s a touch early in the season, perhaps, but that’s fine. When I take coffee to him later I find him cutting back the branches of a tree that has been dead for some time. I am baffled. He must mistakenly believe the deciduous oak is in hibernation.

  ‘How’s it going?’ I lay the tray on the ground. Michel switches off the chainsaw and deposits it by the sawn logs. He is sticky with perspiration and sawdust.

  He looks admiringly upon his work. ‘Fine. Nearly finished.’

  I am anxious not to negate his efforts. ‘It could be dead, that one. Difficult to say.’

  Michel turns with an expression of surprise. ‘Of course it’s dead. It has been since the spring.’

  ‘So you’re chopping it down?’

  ‘No, I am going to paint it blue. First, I am structuring it, then I will buff it and, before I leave, I will paint it blue.’ He bends to retrieve his coffee. ‘Imagine. You will stand on the terraces and look up at the young olive groves, every day growing taller and stronger, and in the midst of them will be a beautifully sculpted blue tree and, as a backdrop, the equally cobalt sky.’ He falls silent.

  ‘We’ll paint the shutters the colours of Matisse’s chapel.’

  He peers at me quizzically as though trying to recall.

  ‘Remember? Azure blue. Côte d’Azur. The blue coast. It is what you said to me the second time we came to visit Appassionata, after an outing to Matisse’s chapel in Vence.’

  He drops his gaze and shuffles his boot against the stony earth. ‘Did I?’

  ‘You don’t remember?’

  Gaze remaining earthwards, he nods. ‘So I did. A long time ago now. I’m sorry.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For the way it worked out.’

  For the way it worked out.

  I lean in, kiss him on the cheek. ‘It was an excellent choice, and so is your blue tree.’

  I descend the hill to the flowerbeds where I rummage about the borders until I unearth the Fijian shells and for the second time this year they are laid out along the wall. I recall what Angélique said to me about how Michel created achievable projects for his father. Christmas birds are chirruping in the winter sun and my spirits are lifted. I like the idea of a blue tree and perhaps, after the tree, I will suggest the restoration of the ruin. I’ll find a way to finance it. For the way it worked out. Michel could begin again here, start a new company from home, cut down the expenses. It will work out. Yes, my spirits are lifted. His wellbeing will be the finest of Christmas gifts.

  Later, as we are sitting together by the fire, I cite Picasso. When the artist lived in Mougins there was an electricity pylon that had been erected within sight of his villa. Picasso fought to have it removed but, gett
ing no joy from the blank wall of officialdom that reigns in these parts, he set about painting it and transformed it into an object of delight. We have one of those ugly poles. It rises up out of the lower garden, smack bang alongside our pool and fig tree and divides our view of the sea in half. Ours remains not because we tolerate its unsightliness but because we have not had the spare cash to pay for its removal. To take it away and feed the electricity underground from lane to farmhouse would cost us, according to an out-of-date quote from the EDF, France’s electricity board, somewhere in the region of 50,000 francs or £5,000. At that price we decided a while back to live with it until there is little else to spend our hard-earned dosh on.

  ‘When you’ve finished your tree, wouldn’t it be terrific if you painted our concrete monstrosity?’

  Michel does not answer. He stares into the crackling flames, deep in thought.

  I persist. ‘Tree blue, perhaps? A marriage of wood and concrete, how about that? Or, what else, fig-leaf green?’ Still he makes no response. ‘You’re very silent. What are you thinking about?’

  ‘The roof.’

  ‘Why, is there a problem with it?’

  ‘No, not this roof. The idea of roof, the concept of it. I think we should get divorced.’

  I close my eyes, aware of my quickening heartbeat, of the flutter of panic and the icy fear within me. I want not to have heard him, to be mistaken.

  ‘Please don’t say that, Michel. We can get through this, I know we can. We’ll rally, whatever the problems are. But, please, don’t let’s talk of divorce. Not yet. I am here for you. I’ll be a bridge, or if you need more time alone then we can refigure our marriage. However you want it to be.’