Unraveling Oliver

¹⁹ VÉRONIQUE

Michael did his best to persuade Laura to leave Château d’Aigse with him, but she refused. She was determined to stay in Clochamps to have her secret baby. She used my tragic situation, claiming that she could take a year out to help me and that she could not simply abandon me, the grief-stricken, childless orphan. Her brother was surprised by her sudden devotion to me. He came to ask me if I was sure that Laura could be of assistance.

I did not tell him the truth of Laura’s predicament. I needed help though. My hands were still bandaged, and while my neighbors were generous and kind, I was on my own. Michael insisted that he and his friends would take no payment for their work. It was gracious of him. They were truly sympathique. He and Laura were good, good people.

I witnessed Oliver’s leave-taking of Laura from my bedroom window. I was afraid that she would make herself pathetic, but she took his hand and whispered earnestly into his ear. She surreptitiously pressed his hand to her belly, but he snatched it away, and never once during this encounter did he meet her eyes. He stood at a distance, fidgeting with his wrists. I thought then how cold he was, how insensitive and uncaring, and I wondered how my father and my son could have loved him. As he followed the others into the truck that was to take him to the city, Laura began to weep, and Michael, knowing nothing of the baby, must have thought her tears were marking the end of her affair with Oliver. He hugged her quickly and gave her his handkerchief. I could see he was trying to persuade her to change her mind about staying, but she was shaking her head. They hugged again, and he got on the truck, and it drove away. She waved as it motored up to the gates, and when it was out of sight she looked toward the spot on the horizon where it had been, and then she looked down and said some silent words to her belly. Even within my grief, I felt sympathy for the girl.

I got to know Laura then. Without the other English speakers around, her French improved rapidly. She was a brave and determined young lady. By the time the others left, she was in her third month of pregnancy, barely showing, but she was more settled now that she had made a plan. When the baby was born the following March, she would give it up for adoption at the Sacred Heart convent in Bordeaux and then return home and go back to her normal life. She had been educated by Sacred Heart nuns in Ireland and trusted they would be kind. I very much doubted that she had any idea what a mother might feel for her newborn baby, but, like I say, I was too preoccupied with trying to inhale and exhale to put much thought into it.

Laura was enormously helpful to me, although it took me time to realize it. At first, it irked me that she would insist on saying prayers for me and with me, lighting candles and blessing herself as she passed the ruin of the east wing. As if any God would allow a child and a war hero to burn to death, but gradually I began to see that there was some comfort in the ritual and that it kept the darkness at bay. Laura’s faith assured her that there was a purpose, a reason, and that, while it may never be revealed to us, it was for the ultimate good of mankind. To this day, I cannot say that I subscribe to such a theory.

Laura asked permission to move into the house, as the residential workers were mostly gone by November and the bunkhouses were not suitable for the winter. My rule about the house being only for family made no sense now that there was no family. Over the winter months we slowly became friends and confidants, Laura and I, as she nursed me, fed me, cared for me. How shocked she was when I told her about Jean-Luc’s paternity, and utterly aghast that my father had encouraged it. She had assumed I was a widow and insisted that being a single mother would never be acceptable in Ireland, that in her country, it was a shameful thing. It was the same in France, I told her, only I had an exceptional father. She insisted that it was not too late for me to fall in love, to marry, to have other children. I was just thirty-nine then, twice her age, but I was sure that I did not want love. It was not worth the risk of losing it. She nodded sagely but did not dare to compare her loss of Oliver to my loss, although I knew that was what she was thinking. After just a month, she no longer spoke of Oliver. He did not reply to her letters or take her phone calls. She accepted that it was not possible to make somebody love you, and knowing that, she just got on with her life and with nurturing the one inside her.

I think that toward the end of the pregnancy, Laura was beginning to think of taking the baby home and risking the opprobrium of her family. She used me as an example of how one could lead a perfectly normal life. She was sure that her parents would be horrified at first but that they would not ultimately turn her away. Her family were wealthy enough to support her, and even if they would not support her, there was an aunt who lived in a remote part of the country, where she might live as a “widow.” I encouraged this, believing that in most circumstances a mother and child ought never to be separated, and encouraged her to write to her family to tell them the truth. She insisted she would wait until the baby was born before making her final decision to bring her child home.

I was very disappointed when I realized that Laura had lied to me and to Oliver. I can understand why she lied to Oliver, of course I can, but there was no reason not to tell me the truth. Even after the evidence was staring us in the face, she persisted with the lie, and I think living that lie ultimately unhinged her mind. Oliver’s refusal to meet her eye when he left, and indeed his distancing himself from her, began to make sense when the truth of the baby’s conception became clear.

Laura went into labor in the second week of March, a little early, but safely so. Ann Marie was back by then. We did not call for the doctor. There was no need. Ann Marie, as well as being our family’s retainer, was an excellent midwife. She had no qualifications as such, but she had delivered me, Jean-Luc, and half the village. She was always the first person called when waters broke. A quick examination in her bedroom, and Ann Marie correctly predicted that the labor would be no more than four hours and that, given Laura’s health and age, it would not be difficult. I paced outside as Ann Marie and Laura labored together, and then I heard a cry, first Ann Marie’s cry of shock and then, within a moment, the baby’s cry. I entered the room as Ann Marie handed the bundle to a red-faced Laura, but smothered my own cry of surprise when I saw the baby. Ann Marie left the room with her hands in the air and a shrug. The baby was unambiguously métisse, mixed race. She was a beautiful child, with Laura’s clear blue eyes but the undeniably dark curls and facial features of an ethnic African infant. Laura had obviously been unfaithful to Oliver with one of the South African boys. I was shocked. This child was an enormous surprise.

Laura’s reaction to the birth was extraordinary. She did not appear to notice at first the baby’s coloring, just clasped the child to her, holding on, as if to life.

Once again, I did not know what to say to her. She is black, I said finally, and at first she did not realize what I was saying. Then she looked into the baby’s face and suddenly sat up, held the child out from her and stared. She said I was wrong. I told her she must have known this was possible. I gently asked her who the father was. “Oliver,” she insisted over and over again, until I realized that she must have convinced herself that it was true.

My relationship with Laura changed then. I admit that I tried to keep my distance from the child. I was still raw from losing my own child and was afraid to get close. Laura must have known I did not believe her, and while I did not care if she slept with a black man or a green one, it annoyed me that she continued to pretend. She suggested that the baby’s color might fade after a few days… a week… two weeks… and that her true Caucasian nature would appear soon. Did she really think I could be fooled? That the baby’s facial features could change? As I suspected, she bonded with the baby, who she named Nora after her mother, but every day she played the charade of waiting for the dark skin to fade, directing earnest prayers to the Lord Almighty to speed the process. I decided to ignore the race issue but wondered if Laura might be losing her mind. I was concerned about her.

After some months, I gently suggested that it might be time for her to make contact with her family and go home. Laura was extremely anxious now, more than before; bringing a child home to Ireland as an unmarried mother may have been brave, but bringing a black child home would cause a major scandal. France was fairly multicultural even back in 1974 because of the colonies, although more so in the bigger cities, but from what I could gather there was virtually no ethnic immigration into Ireland in those days. I suggested that a mixed-race child might be isolated growing up in Ireland. Again, she insisted that Nora was not mixed race and, exasperated, I let it go.

Another two months passed, and Laura had made no decision; it seemed as if she was actually waiting for the baby to turn white. Eventually I had to ask her to leave. It may seem cold of me, but I had my own issues of grief to deal with, and, to be honest, having a beautiful child in the house again unnerved me. I was jealous and bitter. I gave her the address of the Sacred Heart convent in Bordeaux and found a social worker who might deal with her case. Laura became more desperate and even suggested that I could adopt her baby and that she could come back every summer to visit. I was adamant that this was out of the question and angry with her for being so insensitive, and our friendship cooled significantly.

Nevertheless, I was sad to see her go in the end and she wept a little as I drove us to the station with little Nora in her arms. At the station I kissed them both and wished her well, but even then I was not certain what she would do. I asked her to keep in touch and let me know where she was and promised that I would never reveal her circumstances to anybody. That was the last I heard of her until I received the devastating letter from her brother Michael before Christmas that same year.

Laura was dead, and clearly it was a suicide. It was obvious from the letter that the family knew nothing of the baby. Michael wrote to me looking for answers, wondering if Laura had been acting strangely, if I knew of any particular trauma that might have happened to her, whether I knew of any reason why she might have wanted to take her life. Among his many tortured theories, he speculated whether Laura could have been pregnant and miscarried.

I gave my reply much consideration and thought that maybe the family had a right to the truth, but what good would it have done them? I knew from my friend in Bordeaux that the baby had been handed over for adoption, but Laura had not kept in touch in the intervening months. Even if Laura’s family knew, even if they wanted the child, it would have been too late. I wrote a letter telling some truth but withholding the bigger truth: I was shocked to hear the news; I knew nothing of a miscarriage; Laura was a wonderful person who was deeply missed by all at Château d’Aigse; she was a fantastic help to me personally in getting over my own loss. I told them to be proud of such a brave and beautiful girl. I sent my condolences to the family and passed on my best wishes to Oliver too.

My father visited me in a dream the night I mailed the letter. In the dream, we both knew he was dead and yet it was peaceful and natural for us to be chatting as we used to. He told me to start again and not to allow the past to destroy my future. I must begin to live once more and not permit the tragedies of the previous eighteen months to blight my chance of happiness. He touched my cheek the way he did when I was a child and kissed the top of my head twice, one kiss from him and one from Jean-Luc.

To try to rebuild Château d’Aigse or to sell up and move away? There seemed no way for me to start again on my own. The vineyard, the orchard, the olive grove had not been tended since the fire, but I had neither the inclination nor the energy. The money and the kindness of our neighbors could not be relied on indefinitely either. They felt they owed a debt to my father, but that generation was aging now and the younger ones owed us nothing, although I knew I would not be refused help if I asked for it.

I eventually decided to sell up and planned to move to a town my cousin lived in, perhaps twenty-five miles from Clochamps, but the day after the estate agent posted the notice in the paper, I had a visitor.

I had not seen Pierre since the week that Jean-Luc was conceived. I had made myself forget about him as best I could. Up until now, he had kept his word and stayed away, but news had filtered through to him in Limoges from his uncle that a minor scandal had followed roughly nine months after Pierre’s visit. His uncle had warned him to stay away and not to get involved for fear of disgracing his own family. They knew that I had raised this child with my father until the fire killed Papa and my boy, and that now I was on my own. Pierre and his uncle guessed he must be Jean-Luc’s father, and Pierre very much regretted that he’d had no part in his life. He had sought a divorce from his wife, who, he was sure, was having an affair with a local magistrate and had left him, taking their twin girls with her. He had never stopped thinking of me, had written several times over the years and then torn up the letters, still loved me with all his heart, he said, and that I was his first love.

I was astonished that a long-held fantasy could come true, and when this sweet and gentle perfect man offered to care for me, and adore me, I could not resist because love and care were the things I now craved, and to get them from the man who I had not dared to think about for seven years was the answer to a dream. He was shocked and disturbed when I admitted I had chosen him as a father, and wept bitter tears that he never got to meet his son, and what could I do but apologize for my deceit. Gradually, as I related the stories and anecdotes from the brief life of our son, I began to heal and Pierre got a sense of who his boy had been. I assured Pierre that Jean-Luc was as beautiful as his daddy.

This time, with nothing to prove and nothing to lose, I allowed Pierre into my life as I could share my grief and return his love, and we have grown older and closer to the point that he is now my life. We were not blessed with another child of our own—it was too late for me—but I have a wonderful relationship with Pierre’s two girls, who come every summer now and bring their own children and help with the culinary school.

Pierre and I married quickly. We reasoned we had spent enough time apart. We decided to take the château off the market. Pierre had learned well from his butcher uncle in those early years, and now owned a thriving meat-processing plant in Limoges, which he was able to relocate to our little village, bringing the life and employment to our region that Château d’Aigse could no longer provide. We sold the vineyard, the orchard, and the olive grove, keeping ten acres of our own, with the proviso that it would remain zoned as agricultural and would not be developed.

We had begun the restoration of the east wing, but my heart was not in it. For me, it was filled with ghosts and unhappy memories. I wondered if there was wisdom in rebuilding this part of the château. Who would live in the bedrooms, and who was there to read in the library? It had been destroyed once by Nazis and again by fire, and I could not be enthusiastic about this project. Once the debris had been cleared and the main staircase rebuilt, I decided to shut off the eastern wing indefinitely. It was not a question of money, though we certainly could not be extravagant, but Pierre convinced me that we were a team and that when the time was right, we would know what to do.

The Irish boy Michael and I kept up a sporadic correspondence after my initial response to the news of Laura’s death. He told me he had opened a restaurant, which surprised me—not that he wasn’t instinctively good at cooking, but I thought that he’d been interested in hairdressing. He credited me for introducing him to new tastes and culinary experiences and insisted that he would never have taken such an interest in food were it not for having such an excellent teacher. He would write sometimes from exotic locations, describing the new recipes or ingredients he had discovered, and I would suggest ways to alter or improve upon them. He invited me and my new husband several times to come and stay in Dublin and visit his restaurant, but I never did. The truth is that we would inevitably talk about Laura, and I was afraid that I would not be able to keep up the pretense that she had left Château d’Aigse in a happy and healthy state of mind. I allowed the correspondence to lapse eventually. It seemed there was little point in maintaining it.

Michael inspired my project, however. I knew about food, the sourcing, preparation, cooking, and presenting of it, and I knew I had taught him well. I began to form a plan, and when I asked Pierre’s advice, he caught my excitement and together we consulted architects and drew up a business plan.

Instead of restoring the east wing, we would create a purpose-built residential culinary school with lodgings above. We were insistent that the new building would be architecturally sympathetic to the original house and that it could be built within the existing walls so as not to destroy the aesthetic. It made complete sense. With a little help, I was already entirely capable of feeding groups of thirty twice a day on a daily basis. How much easier would it be if the thirty were to do the cooking themselves? Actually, we soon realized that we could take groups of no more than fifteen at a time, as it was not possible to house and instruct any more than this. Structurally, the interior would be very different from the original building and naturally fireproofed from top to bottom.

We have built the business since we opened our doors in 1978, and though I still supervise every aspect, we employ a full-time staff of at least seven, depending on the demand, and I can take a backseat when I want to. We now have an international reputation for excellence, several awards, and visitors from all over the world. I even reestablished contact with Michael to spread the word of our venture to Ireland, and he has sent us many new students. Pierre and I have traveled and studied several languages. Fifteen years ago, Pierre sold the meat plant and joined me in Cuisine de Campagne. We use our ten acres to grow fruit, herbs, and vegetables and source our meat and cheeses locally. We have good years and bad years, but there is usually a waiting list for the school. It is only because we opened it that we have finally discovered something else that happened in the summer of 1973, a long-kept secret of theft, deceit, and cruel betrayal. Oliver Ryan is a monster.