Unravelling Oliver Read Online Free PDF Page A

toughened up, and in fact by the end of June there was little to be done on the vines and we moved to the orchard and olive grove, where the work was considerably less taxing. I spent the first month hoeing beneath each vine, scraping out each weed from the clover, grass and wild oats that covered the rows between vines. It was remarkable how fast they grew in early June, an inch or two a day sometimes, though Madame told us that the growth spurts were even faster in the early spring. Oliver and Laura were put with a different team on the vital task of
épamprage
, removing the unwanted sucker shoots from the vine trunk and selectively removing shoots from the head. The vines were cared for like ailing children, monitored, encouraged, soothed and coaxed into grapefulness.
    I must admit that we took full advantage of the free wine after work and would often crawl into bed in the smallest hours of the morning, blind drunk. In fact, some people didn’t make it as far as their own bed. Sometimes they only made it as far as other people’s beds. Such a heady time.
    And yet, I knew I had to try to fix the thing that was wrong with me. I was on a mission to rid myself of the albatross that was my virginity. I thought that it might cure me. Sharing a bunk-house with those immodest men was quite a strain.
    Oliver’s spoken French was far better than Laura’s or
mine, and he often negotiated between Madame and ‘les Paddies’, as we became known. It was because of this that old Monsieur d’Aigse began to take an interest in Oliver. He asked Oliver the English names for certain plants and flowers, and Oliver would obligingly translate. Before long, Oliver was promoted. He spent more and more time in the chateau in Monsieur’s study. Officially, Monsieur took him on as a translator, working on some old maps or some such that Monsieur had compiled for his private collection. Lucky bastard. The vineyard work was tough. Oliver didn’t move out of the dorm, but he no longer had to work in the field. Laura was a little disgruntled about it, I remember. Occasionally, I spied him from the field beside the lower lake, sitting outside on the terrace with Monsieur, a jug of wine by his side, or playing some high-jinks game with the highly mischievous Jean-Luc. Their shouts and laughter ricocheted off the walls of the house and echoed through the valley. Oliver looked like the missing link between the old man and the boy. We noted how well Oliver seemed to fit in with them. When he came back to us in the evenings, he was like a different man. More content, perhaps; happier, anyway. Laura wasn’t the only one who was jealous of the time that Oliver spent with the family. I, too, didn’t like the way he became more like one of them than us. Instinctively, I knew that Oliver could never love me, but at least while he was dating Laura, I could be around him, in his circle of friends. Now, he was becoming removed from us. He would return full of stories about the funny things that Jean-Luc said, the new game they had played together. Oliver told us at one stage
that if he ever had a son, he wanted him to be just like Jean-Luc. I lightly commented that Monsieur d’Aigse would be a good father figure too, but Oliver just glared at me for a second before walking off. Whatever the story was with Oliver’s parentage, it was clearly a sore point. I didn’t know then that he was violent, but he certainly looked like he wanted to hit me.

4. Oliver
    When I left school, women were a complete mystery to me – at least until I met Laura Condell. I had been in the sole company of priests and boys as a boarder in St Finian’s since I was six years old, and apart from one summer on Stanley Connolly’s farm, where, quite frankly, his three feline sisters terrified me, I had no experience of women. Apparently, you are supposed to learn the facts of life and the etiquette of how to treat women from your mother, or, failing that, your father. I learned