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

‘The police told us your husband could have died,’ she sobs. ‘My son has no father,’ she offers as a form of explanation. ‘Will you be pressing charges?’

  The question catches me off-guard. It had not occurred to either of us to do so. Our thoughts have not travelled such a distance into the future. We are still wrestling with the recent past.

  I tell her that I have no answer to give her, that we are recuperating and that my husband will heal. ‘He isn’t going to die,’ I say gratefully.

  ‘May I call again?’ She is weeping uncontrollably. ‘My son will be six months in hospital. My only boy.’

  I tell her that I am sorry for her son but I judge it unwise for us to maintain contact. Bob, from Monte Carlo, rings, wanting to know whether I telephoned him in the wee small hours or was it a dream he’d had? ‘After Michel and the other guys left my pad I sat up late watching movies. It’d been a disappointing evening and I had a few,’ he confesses rather sheepishly.

  I confirm that I did call and I apologise for my gibberish dawn intrusion.

  ‘It’s a fucking shame the budget for the project fell apart. We all tried our damnedest to get the bloody thing up and running and I know better than most how desperately Michel needed it to save his company from closure, but sometimes the pieces just don’t come together. How is he, by the way?’

  It takes me a moment to reply. ‘Sleeping.’ And that is a fact. Michel spends hour upon hour sound asleep in our room, shaded by the slatted shutters. In a no-time world of pillows and penumbra and plays of light. Dusk aeonian; infinitum. I pass by regularly and find him curled up beneath the duvet, breathing heavily; a creature speared; a hibernator hunkered down beneath a substantial bed of leaves in darkest winter. I sit beside him, careful not to disturb, and gently stroke the crown of his head; his soft curly hair still matted with blood. How long has he been struggling with such financial difficulties, and why hasn’t he shared them with me? He mustn’t worry. The contract I have recently completed will provide us with sufficient to run our lives for several months to come, as long as I don’t go investing in vineyards, that is.

  When he wakes and eventually rises up out of our room he settles on to one or other of the terraces drinking tea and gallons of water. Michel is not a man who enjoys tea but he finds it comforting now, he says. I boil more water and keep quiet about what I have learned. He sits beneath a parasol, out of the sun, to safeguard his wound, staring seawards. He seems distracted, only vaguely aware of our exchanges, and he stares into me with a quizzical expression that worries me, as though he is not entirely sure of my identity.

  His stare is unnerving.

  ‘Michel?’

  He knows my name and the daily details of our life together. I think so. I pay close attention to the minutiae in an attempt to confirm it. Quashia comes looking for him, needing advice about some aspect of the shed and Michel deals with it without a hitch. He remembers that we are building a shed. He has not forgotten his construction skills. There are no missing elements as far as I can tell, no memory loss, but he is unresponsive. Sentences do not seem to penetrate. It is as though he is concentrating on another dimension of sound. Somewhere else, deep in thought. A confused ruminant, striving to figure out a puzzle. Is he listening to an inner voice? Is he grappling with images of the accident? Is he worrying about his workload? He does not bear a troubled face. He is simply not present, and does not engage in conversation. And when the phone rings, for now the word is out that he has been injured, he waves the callers away. He wants to speak to no one. I shield him from the world. And I shield him from what I know.

  As for my own wounds, I am more or less intact. My face is a mesh of scratches and bruises and bumps; my left eye has puffed up like a rhizome and I have the irritating sensation that there is a mountain directly in my field of vision that won’t scratch away – it is the lesion above the cheekbone swelling up – and I am plagued by a nagging headache, but otherwise I am in workaday shape.

  Perfunctory matters are beginning to call on our attention and it is clear that I must take the reins. Two cars in Monte Carlo. None here, and we are several kilometres from the nearest bus stop; there is no other form of public transport in the vicinity. A letter from the olive organisation in Marseille which oversees tree plantation and olive produce has arrived. They are requesting an appointment for Monday of next week here at the farm; they wish to send a financial controller to visit us, to clarify a few outstanding queries. A form Michel has furnished appears to be incomplete, unsatisfactory. As far as I know we have never submitted any accounts to these people, though we are registered with them, so I cannot get to grips with what the letter is about. I put it aside; I’ll show it to Michel later and if he is not sufficiently recovered to handle the meeting, I will postpone it. Due to the augmenting heat, the swimming pool needs cleaning again. The firm contracted to carry out the work on a weekly basis is still not answering its phone. I am wondering if Michel has clocked the developing algae. He hasn’t stepped into the pool since we returned. He is constantly cold and is suffering from bouts of violent shivering. Shock, I assume. We both have pending appointments at the Princess Grace Hospital and no means of getting to the principality. We will need to hire a car, for we must attend. It is a fact that I shall have to undergo the scan I so cussedly resisted.

  Three days after the accident, I rise early, swim in the slippery green water and, armed with straw hat, walk to the nearest village before the sun has rounded the mountains, to take the bus to Cannes, where I rent us a replacement vehicle. From there I drive directly to the agricultural co-operative of which we are habitués and ask for Laurent, the young assistant who usually helps me unravel our farming dilemmas. Laurent is off sick, I am informed by the doleful biddy who keeps the till and rarely gives us the discounts we, as regular clients, are entitled to. It is unlikely that he will be back this year, she announces, while pressing her glasses up the bridge of her nose.

  ‘This year? But it is only June!’

  The cashier’s hangdog countenance, a harbinger of life’s bad blows, is interrupted by a lanky, peaty type with hands of horn who leans in from behind me, asking, ‘Lend me your Bible, will you, love, for five minutes?’

  She swivels on her chair, picks up a weighty paperback, delivers it to the client, muttering, ‘Bring it back,’ and then informs me that Laurent fell out of a tree, fractured his collarbone in several places and damaged a group of ligaments in his shoulder which have rendered him unemployable for the foreseeable future. I offer words of condolence to be transmitted to him, which the woman promises to deliver personally when she visits him at the hospital the following afternoon.

  ‘And what about you, madame? You look a right old sight yourself.’

  I shrug off discussion of our recent events, mighty grateful that our injuries will not continue on into another year, and am directed to the replacement employee, Alexandre. ‘You’ll find him in the hangar with the bird seed and dog food at the bottom of the yard.’

  I thank the teller and weave my way through the string of trucks and farmers at work charging or unloading produce in search of Alexandre. From the dark caverns of the warehouse strides a lean, athletic man in T-shirt, shorts and solid boots, in his late thirties, disarmingly good-looking with a beard that under different circumstances might be described as ‘designer’. He is smiling broadly and shakes my hand with the force of a labourer.

  ‘How can I help you?’ he grins.

  ‘Four dozen tins of dog meat, please, and fifty kilos of mixed biscuits.’

  While he freights these to the boot of the sprucely cleaned hire car, I explain my pool dilemma. Alexandre listens politely, all the while studying my face, which makes me self-conscious.

  ‘What is the name of the firm?’ he asks.

  I furnish him with this detail and he laughs loudly. ‘Sorry, but they went out of business a couple of months ago. You’ll need to find someone else.’

  ‘Yes, but where? It’s almost high season.
It promises to be a long hot summer … every other société will be fully booked.’ What I refrain from mentioning is that I have paid our contracted company six months in advance; a loss of approximately £1,000.

  ‘Jacques!’ yells Alexandre towards the yard, and a tall burly fellow in his early forties, equally fit and in his prime, stacking sacks of dark earth on to a battered truck, waves and continues with his task. ‘He’ll clean your pool. No need to look further.’

  When my shopping has been packed, I cross over to the man called Jacques and introduce myself. He, too, is robustly handsome and as tanned as a gypsy. He quotes me a price which is out of the question and then smiles, promising to drop by the farm later to check out what the job involves.

  ‘Well, come after five, please. We have an appointment earlier.’

  ‘He’ll sort you out,’ winks Alexandre, who has rested an arm on the cusp of my back.

  I have the feeling I am about to be stitched up. The two men grin at one another, secure on their turf; overt male bonding in the company of a woman, and a foreign woman to boot. I thank Alexandre a touch archly and silently resolve to give Jacques the brush-off when he drops by later.

  Alexandre leans in through the open car window. ‘You’re very pretty. What happened to your face? You certainly got walloped.’ I grunt and reverse the hired vehicle at a lick, causing him to jump swiftly out of the way. He watches my departure with amusement.

  I return home by the open parkland, which remains cordoned off and sadly lacking in dogs, children or games-players. I zoom up the drive to collect Michel. He is scribbling notes in the shade beneath one of the banks of cypress trees. We set off for Monte Carlo, the land of skyscrapers on the strand. Once there, passing at a distance Monaco Ville, the exalted rock upon which the Grimaldi family’s palace is sited, we go in search of Michel’s abandoned powder-blue Mercedes, which he claims to have parked in a tunnel beneath a flyover, close to a flight of steps. But when we arrive it is nowhere to be found. ‘Are you sure that’s where you left it?’ I ask him. He is quietly adamant.

  Either it has been stolen – highly unlikely under the scrupulous gaze of the Monégasque police force – or impounded for illegal parking. With the aid of a member of the aforementioned super-efficient law-enforcement team, we track the car down in no time. It has been impounded. A local rescue service installs a new battery. We cough up for that, and the astronomical sum requested for reclamation of the vehicle, and organise garage space at one of the hotels until I can return for it by train later in the week. Michel is still not able to drive; his vision is mildly fuzzy.

  Our visit to the Princess Grace Hospital delivers us both with heartening news. Our check-ups confirm that neither of us has suffered any permanent or long-term damage. My scan, mercifully, is clear. No stitches are to be administered to my face. ‘The cut is closing up nicely by itself, we’ll leave it be.’

  Michel’s wound is redressed – the stitches will evaporate within a few days. The injury will heal, though the doctor warns him that he will be scarred, that he is still suffering severe shock and that at all costs he must rest. ‘The shock will take a while to settle. Try not to travel and avoid all stress.’

  Both are tall orders for the silent, sleeping passenger at my side.

  We have cleared the toll booth west of Nice and I have chosen a tranquil, scenic route through the countryside to the farm. I don’t own up to it but the journey on the autoroute was nerve-racking. Every thundersome lorry or fast-moving saloon left me trembling, with the crash replaying in my psyche. Charles Aznavour is singing sotto voce on the radio. My thoughts are drifting from one place to the next, from the music to my work, which I haven’t touched in days, on to the financial trouble Michel is in and how deep his shock might be – I was given no opportunity to speak privately with the doctor – when a lurking damson cloud directly in front of us, some miles distant, draws me into the present. It is a wall of smoke.

  ‘Is that a fire up ahead?’

  Michel opens his eyes.

  ‘Any idea where it is?’ I ask, selfishly concerned for our own realty.

  Michel does not reply immediately and I throw a swift glance in his direction to confirm that he has heard, that my question has sunk in.

  ‘Difficult to say,’ is his eventual response.

  When we arrive at the dip in our high lane, where the road curves, we come upon Jacques waiting outside the locked gates. Beyond, the dogs are jumping and barking insanely. Lucky is hurling herself at the metal like the Hound of the Baskervilles while Jacques is sanguinely studying the sky and seabirds wheel fast overhead.

  I throw open the car door, hurry to unlock the gate and attach Lucky to the chain we have hitched to the trunk of one of the lower cypresses to confine her within the boundaries of our property.

  ‘Sorry if we’ve kept you waiting. Keep still, Lucky!’ I am wrangling with the Alsatian, who is practically rabid to get loose. Michel, I notice, has not stirred. He remains staring impassively ahead from his passenger seat.

  ‘Let me,’ offers Jacques.

  ‘No, she’s ferocious until she knows you. Watch out, she’ll bite! But don’t worry, when she makes friends she’s as soppy as a puppy.’

  This able-bodied gardener pays me no heed. He slips his fingers through the dog’s collar and she sinks submissively at his feet. Jacques bends to caress her. She is putty in his hands, thumping her tail, legs apart, open-bellied with animal happiness. I am astounded and pause to take in the scene.

  ‘She’ll be fine.’ He pulls on the cab door of his truck and the dog leaps in after him. They ascend the drive as a trusted twosome. I follow, drawing the gate to once the hire car is in.

  ‘Did you see that?’ I ask Michel.

  ‘What?’ he replies.

  ‘Are you in pain?’

  ‘I need to lie down for a bit.’

  By the pool, the three dogs are playing rough and tumble with Jacques’ sneakers and tugging at his jeans. He strokes them with absentminded affection, staring beyond the valley into the middle distance. ‘You seen the fire?’ he calls to me as I pass, running to unlock the house and escort Michel inside.

  ‘Saw it from the road. Any idea where it is?’

  ‘The very limit of the Var. Fifteen minutes from here. I think they caught it, but look.’ He raises his arm. ‘There’s another started up right behind it. We’ve got friends who live there.’

  ‘I’ll be right back.’ I am anxious to tend to Michel, who looks exceedingly pale but assures me that he is fine, waves me away and shuffles through to the bedroom.

  Returning downstairs, I turn my attention to the business of the pool.

  ‘It needs a good clean. Want me to get stuck into it right away?’

  I hesitate. ‘It depends on the price, Jacques. We can’t pay …’

  He revises this morning’s request to a sum almost 50 per cent less if we settle in cash. I have grown so accustomed to the local black market that I rarely argue against it these days – if I did we would never achieve anything. We shake hands on the deal, settle on ‘once a week’ and he strolls casually over to his truck to unload pool brushes, nets and metres of blue squidgy piping.

  ‘Do you want a beer?’ I yell, as I move off towards the summer kitchen.

  ‘No alcohol, thanks, it’s too darned hot. Some water would be terrific’ He pulls off his T-shirt, revealing a taut, sinewy torso in a singlet, tugs a cap from out of the back pocket of his jeans, shoves it down over his reddening face and rubs the sweat from his forehead with the pulse of his wrist. ‘Fires at this time of year! It doesn’t bode well. This’ll be just the beginning. We’re in for a long dry spell, I’d say.’

  I am sitting alone on the upper terrace, a glass of white wine growing warmish at my side, watching a crimson red sky darken to ash grey as the sun sets. Helicopters and Canadair planes have been buzzing back and forth for the last two hours. Now they have disappeared and the bats are swooping low, zipping and cornering like military jets
through the embers of daylight. Dusk is everywhere; in the corners of things; in the nocturnal penumbrae that are emerging; in the silhouettes; in the eclipsing light round the pruned heads of the orange trees.

  Michel is still sleeping, which is why I am upstairs and not laying the table down by the barbecue and the pool. I have thrown a couple of plates, pieces of cutlery, basic stuff, on to the small teak table up here, for when he awakes.

  I cannot deny that I am worried.

  His arrival is so silent, so disembodied, treading delicate bare feet on the tiles, his arms slipping like vapour round my shoulders, that I am hardly aware of his presence. I smile warmly, a little desperately, I fear. ‘Hungry?’

  I knock together pasta and salad and we eat our meal facing out towards the bay. From behind the shoulder of pine trees on the curved evergreen hill in front and to the right of our property, a dandelion-head of cloud begins to unfurl, pinking, bleeding into an eerie, unnatural sky.

  ‘Is that another fire somewhere?’ I whisper.

  We peer out along the horizon towards the Var. The cloud, rose-toned now, is tinged from beneath by flames. Flames that are travelling the coastline towards the west, towards Fréjus, reluming sections of the sky as they gain ground, billowing like a miniature atomic fallout.

  Michel estimates that the breadth of this ferocious conflagration is somewhere between ten and twenty hectares. A wall of destruction burning westwards. We watch on, passive spectators. It is curious how when our own investment is not threatened we feel distanced, dislocated from the event, though we have known the horror of fire bearing down on us here; a roaring, ravaging brute force. The planes, the ’copters cannot fly after sundown. Only foot-soldiers are at work, the ground-force fire brigade. In the fray, barely twenty miles from our dwelling.

  It is Friday, not that it really makes any difference. We have woken to a sky that is wreathed in fire clouds, sombre and ominous, hanging there as though shipwrecked. I sniff the distant land burning; charred whiffs on the wind. There is a vibe in the air, a mood along the littoral, of mourning. I am intending to return to Monte Carlo before lunch to collect the blue Mercedes and sign the necessary papers for the wreckage that was my own means of transport. I’ll drive the hire car to Cannes, return it and from there take the coast train bound for Italy. Michel has expressed no interest in accompanying me.