The Olive Tree (53 page)

‘What is it?’

‘Sorry . . . I mean, I forgot for a bit, and that was lovely. But Daddy died this morning, didn’t he? Oh dear, oh dear . . .’ Then she burrowed her face back into
my armpit, onto which I hoped I’d sprayed enough deodorant to overcome the rank smell engendered by Final Exam, plus Her, plus Genetic Dad dying today.

‘Can I get you something to eat?’ I asked, trying to say something practical, like Real Dad would do.

‘No, thank you,’ came the whisper from my armpit.

‘Viola,’ I continued in the same ‘Dad’ vein. ‘I really think you should get some sleep. You must be exhausted.’

At this, she emerged from my armpit and looked at me, and I watched her try to gather herself together. ‘Yes, I should,’ she replied staunchly. ‘And you must be
getting back to Oxford.’

‘I don’t have to go back to Oxford, it’s all over there now until September. I’m going to stay at Mum and Dad’s apartment tonight. I called them on the
train to ask if I could.’ I looked down to check my watch. ‘I should make a move, actually, as the crazy old woman who holds the keys and lives in the basement goes to sleep at ten
o’clock and I won’t be able to get in.’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘We’d better go.’

I watched her drain her wine, her cheeks losing the blush of alcohol as she stood up, and the frown creases on her forehead reappearing. We walked out of the pub in silence.

‘Well then, thanks again, Alex. You’ve just been amazing.’ She pecked me on the cheek. ‘Good night.’

‘Viola!’ I said as she pulled away from me. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Home,’ she said forlornly.

‘Who’s there for you?’

This time she shrugged without words.

‘Look, do you want to come home with me . . . I mean, surely you need some company tonight?’

‘It’s so sweet of you, Alex, but really, I think you’ve done enough.’

Viola, I will never, ever have done enough for you. In fact, I haven’t even begun ‘doing’ yet . . .

I held out my hand then, and grabbed her and pulled her back. ‘Don’t be silly. There is no way on earth I’m leaving you alone tonight.’

And then it was me who took her into my arms, and as her lips puckered up towards my face, it was also me who pretended not to notice. And me who clumsily put my own mouth to her
delicate little ear as I hugged her.

When we arrived at the apartment in Bloomsbury, which, as it happened, was only a few streets along from Viola’s halls of residence, I managed to gain access by enticing the
little old lady to come to the door of her basement flat. She handed me the key through the narrow opening that the series of chains on the inside of her door provided; her bony arm reminded me of
the twig Hansel stuck out to fool the witch, in the fairy tale.

I showed Viola the bathroom, which she said she needed. I was in the bedroom taking a jumper out of my holdall – the apartment was chilly – when Viola walked in behind
me and fell onto the bed.

‘Sorry, Alex, but oh my God . . . I am soooo tired.’

‘I know.’ I watched her as she closed her eyes. ‘Are you sure you shouldn’t have something to eat?’ I asked her as I looked at her fabulous self, lying
there like a nymph on the bed – hair splayed across the pillow, long legs elegantly and photogenically placed, even though she’d literally thrown herself onto it.

There was no reply. She’d gone to sleep.

So I went and made myself a strange supper of baked beans and a can of tuna I’d found in the cupboard, and ate it in the sitting room, watching the BBC news (
why?
). As
I ate I tried to put my brain into rational order and plunder my own psyche for a reaction to Sacha dying. But Viola had scrambled my rationale, and every time I thought about Genetic Dad lying in
a freezer drawer in a morgue, and how I felt about it, instead I saw her, and my mind went off at another tangent altogether.

Besides, beyond the fact that I felt sadness for a life brought to an end far too soon, the terrible truth was, using Sondheim’s famous lyric . . . that I felt nothing.

Then I heard Viola whimpering through the thin stud wall, and went to her.

‘What is it?’ I asked, immediately chiding myself for the ridiculousness of the question.

She didn’t answer. I groped in the dark for a square of free mattress on the edge of the bed so I didn’t sit on bits of her.

‘I had a dream . . . that he was alive . . .’

‘Oh Viola.’

‘I know he isn’t.’ I felt her arm swipe across her eyes and cheeks, wiping away the tears, and wished then that I could feel the same pain for our father as she
did, but I couldn’t. And that made me feel even worse.

‘I’m so sorry, sweetheart,’ I said softly, ‘but he isn’t.’ And at that moment I cursed Jules and Rupes. No matter what Our Father Who Art in
Heaven had done or not done, he was hardly Saddam or Stalin or Mao. Or even a seriously bad human being. He was just flawed and selfish and weak, and rather pathetic. And surely a mother and a
brother – adoptive or not – should be here to support the one family member who had loved Sacha enough to be devastated by his departure? ‘It’s only me, I’m
afraid.’

‘Oh Alex, don’t say that.’ The hand that had been wiping away her tears reached for mine, and I extended it into the near-darkness. It was taken, and squeezed.
Very, very tightly. ‘I didn’t mean it like that. I know Daddy’s dead. I meant that you don’t need to be sorry that it’s only you. Of all the people on Earth, I
can’t think of anyone I’d like more to be here with me now. It’s like some kind of surreal dream. Really.’

She squeezed my hand even tighter as a sort of extra emphasis on the last word.

‘Alex?’

‘Yes, Viola?’

‘Would you . . . Would you come and give me a hug?’

Christ!

‘’Course I would.’ So I stood up and made my way round to the other side of the bed, groped again for a spare bit of mattress, then lay down next to her. She
snuggled into me as if we were two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, separated for years in different boxes, then finally put together. My arm moved to her tiny waist and my knees did a bendy thing and
fitted in perfectly behind hers.

‘Thank you,’ she said eventually, just as I was thinking she’d probably gone to sleep.

‘For what?’

‘For being here. For being you.’

‘That’s okay.’ Then I
really
thought she’d gone to sleep, as there was silence for an awfully long time. And believe me, I was counting the
seconds.

‘Alex?’ she murmured drowsily.

‘Yes?’

‘I love you. It sounds corny, but I always have. And I think I always will.’

The worst thing was, even though every brain cell and sinew in me was desperate to reciprocate the words, I felt I couldn’t. Because I was again thinking about how she might
feel when she found out the truth.

That night was one of the most torturous of my life. And it wasn’t because I had just lost my father – rather that I had just found my future. All night I lay there,
wide awake, as Viola slept fitfully in my arms. Every time she stirred, I’d raise the hand that was around her waist to her silken hair. And as she whimpered, I’d stroke it and
she’d go back to sleep.

‘I love you,’ I mouthed into her ear. ‘I love you.’

To be fair, I defy any man to lie for an entire six hours with one of the most gorgeous females on the planet in their arms without feeling illicit carnal desire – even
leaving aside the complexity of the ‘illicitness’ of my relationship with Viola.

Viola
. . . I must have been hallucinating at some point, as I suddenly saw an instrument floating across my vision, made of shiny, nut-brown wood and complete with
strings.

Violin, cello . . . trumpet!
Perhaps I did doze on and off that night, but it wasn’t very deeply, as I remember thinking at one point that maybe we could call our
first-born ‘Harp’. But then I remembered that we’d only have to add an ‘er’ to end up with the same name as a child spawned by a famous footballer and his equally
famous wife.

Drum? Or how about Bassoon?

At some point, I must have really fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, there was a strong smell of coffee being floated under my nose.

‘Alex?’ My Titian muse was upright above me, her hair wet from the shower. She proffered a mug. ‘Wake up.’

‘I am! I mean, I will.’

‘Here, I made you some coffee.’ She put it down on the table beside me, then walked to the other side of the bed and sat on it cross-legged, a pad and pen in her lap.
‘Okay: so what was it you said we had to do today?’

Sacha’s funeral was held in the chapel of Magdalen, his and Dad’s old college. And now, of course, mine. I admit to having pulled a few strings when Viola
mentioned how lovely it would be to hold it there. Given that Sacha’s life was hardly going to stand out against the achievements of his fellow alumni, I had a word. (There had to be some
advantages to doing philosophy for the past three years; it had included a heap of incredibly dull theology lectures given by the college chaplain.)

Between us we managed to get at least thirty people to attend – the Pandora posse, plus a number of oldies that Dad had managed to convince to come and swell the numbers,
promising (I’m sure) a serious piss-up in the college bar afterwards. Whoever and however, they duly arrived.

Just as I was walking towards my parents, Viola took my hand and insisted that I come and sit in the front pew with her. Rupes sat on my other side, and Jules on Viola’s.

‘Alex has been wonderful,’ she told them both.

So in the end, there I was on the front pew, mourning my father next to my half-brother – who wept like a bloody baby – and Viola, my, er . . . well, what the hell
was
she to me?

I spent most of the service pondering this conundrum. And in the end – though I decided I should double-check on the internet to confirm it – I deduced that she was
actually nothing at all. Which meant, I thought in relief, that it was possible for her to be
everything
to me in the future. And that made me feel much better.

Whatever Mum felt about me being plonked in the centre of a Chandler sandwich at Sacha/Alexander’s funeral like the proverbial cuckoo in the nest, she didn’t say. She
sat with William, Chloë, Immy and Fred just behind us.

I kept in the background at the wake, feeling Jules’ eyes upon me, whether real or imagined. Although at one point she did thank me for being so kind to Viola.

Having recovered from his tears, all Rupes could ask me was whether I thought there’d be a will. I assured him that there wasn’t. Viola and I had already checked that
out, and Sacha hadn’t even made one (thank God).

Our father had nothing left to leave anyone.

My mother came up to me just before they left. ‘Viola says you’ve been wonderful.’

‘Not really, Mum.’

‘You haven’t told her yet, have you?’

I shook my head.

‘Alex.’ She took my hands in her desperately bony ones, and I thought how fragile she looked. ‘Please, learn from my mistakes. As soon as you can is best . .
.’

Then she kissed and hugged me with all the strength she possessed, which at the time wasn’t very much, and said goodbye.

That night, I’d managed to secure two rooms in college – one for me and one for Viola. It was obvious she’d drunk far too much, and alcohol and emotion had mixed
together to form a lethal combination of false euphoria and despair.

She babbled on about how she hated – yes,
hated
– her mum. Apparently, Jules had once had too much to drink, and said it was Sacha who’d wanted to adopt
her.

‘From now on, she can go fuck herself,’ Viola announced. ‘I never want to see her, or that idiot of a brother, ever again!’

I knew she didn’t really mean it – she was just distraught and exhausted – but I understood her sentiment. And then she fell onto the bed in
my
room, not
hers. And again, sobbed pitifully and asked me to hold her.

And my resolve to tell her the truth disappeared.

Not tonight
, I thought,
tomorrow
. . .

And the truth was, tomorrow never came. It. Just. Didn’t. And then there was a night a couple of weeks later, when I’d suggested to her that it might do her good
to get away, and why didn’t she come with me to a rather grand house party I’d been invited to in Italy by a friend of mine from Oxford. There, truth be told, my resolve left me
completely. The host simply assumed that we were a couple. And there, in our beautiful Florentine bedroom, we made love for the first time.

After that everything was so incredibly perfect that I just couldn’t bear – like my mother before me – to impart the terrible news. And so it went on, and on . . .
and with it going on, my guilt built up until I became someone who looked like Alex from the outside, but in fact personified a small, ugly lying troll of deceit.

Those few months – ostensibly – were the best of my life. I was working in London for the summer, having secured myself an internship at the British Library in
King’s Cross, documenting and filing the hard copies and digital details of philosophical works. Mum and Dad had lent me their little apartment in Bloomsbury for the duration.

During the day I handled works of literary art and by night, Viola, who was the most perfect physical work of art I could ever imagine.

Having refused to go home to her mother’s cottage for the summer, as she wasn’t speaking to either Jules or Rupes, Viola found herself a job at a supermarket round the
corner. Then she asked tentatively if she could move in with me, as she had nowhere to live. And I readily agreed.

Some mornings, as I cycled – yes, cycled – off down the Euston Road to work, I felt like something out of a novel. My world was perfect.

Except for the fact I was living a lie.

Every day I sat in a basement surrounded by books full of wise words, knowing that every last one of them, from Sophocles to the modern self-help versions, would tell me I must
’fess up. And every evening, I’d prepare myself on the wacky race back home to her, swearing to myself that tonight would be the night.