Unravelling Oliver (14 page)

The day after my father’s funeral, my mother told me that Oliver Ryan was my half-brother. She had desperately wanted my father to be the one to tell me, but right to the end he was deeply ashamed. Mum said he had got a woman pregnant while a priest back in the 1950s. She may have been a nurse, or even a nun. My mother doesn’t think she was a prostitute like my father told me, back when he was maintaining that Oliver was a cousin. My father never revealed the mother’s name. Mum says the woman abandoned her baby and disappeared, never to be seen again.
My father told my mother about it in the early days of their relationship. He insisted on starting their marriage with a clean slate and had Oliver shipped off to St Finian’s to be raised by the priests. Mum thought Dad was wrong to do that.

My mother was not the reason why Dad left the priesthood. They met some years later. She says that he was resistant to their relationship in the beginning; she thinks that they eventually bonded over their shared faith and that it was only when her uncle, Dad’s former bishop, gave his approval that Dad allowed himself to actually fall for her. He still kept extremely close links to the church and ultimately worked for them.

My mother insists she would have raised Oliver as her own son, if Dad had let her. Mum says that it was the only thing that caused heartache in their marriage. It was simply a part of my father’s life that he refused to acknowledge or discuss. She says he passionately and irrationally hated the boy, and she never knew why.

I was stunned to hear this, of course. How could the father I knew have abandoned a child so cruelly when he had always treated me with such warmth and affection? How could he have denied me a brother? Regardless of what Oliver’s mother was like, how could he have hated an innocent child? My mother couldn’t give me answers and nor could the priests of my father’s acquaintance who might have been contemporaries. They either had no knowledge of the tale or had heard something of the story back in the day, but none could add further information. Shockingly, Oliver knew that we shared a father. How jealous must he have been of me? The staring and the spying
in my schooldays finally made sense. Oliver Ryan was only watching his family. If the betrayal I now felt was so great, how must Oliver have felt his entire life? Earlier the previous day, I had accepted condolences from my brother on our father’s death. I knew that at some stage in the not too distant future, I would need to seek out this stranger. Perhaps it was not too late to welcome him to the family.

When I did seek him out some months later, our meeting did not go well.

I was intrigued by Father Daniel’s cryptic words at my father’s funeral. I wondered if my father had left me a bequest or a message of some kind, and I was conflicted about whether I wanted to receive it. But Father Daniel had always been good to me and I wanted to see him.

Father Daniel was a great age at this point, but his mind was still sharp and the years had not dulled his compassion. I know my current circumstances would be a great disappointment to him if he were still alive, but perhaps, of all people, he might have understood my desperation.

I was led into the priest’s parlour, familiar from the few occasions of my father’s visits in school days. It had not changed at all. I could see at once that Father Daniel was agitated, and he began by telling me that he was not sure if he was doing the right thing.

‘Your father was a … strange man,’ he stated, and got no argument from me. ‘I wanted to … I’m not sure if …’ There was his hesitancy and uncertainty again.

It seemed there was no bequest. I was not upset about that. It was not as if I needed money at that stage. Father Daniel explained that my father’s estate had been left entirely to Judith and Philip. I was not mentioned in the will. Judith had subsequently given Father Daniel a box containing some gold holy medals that she asked him to
pass on to me. I examined them in their box. They were engraved with crucifixes.

Father Daniel tried to apologize on my father’s behalf. I brushed off the apology and accepted a small glass of Jameson to lessen the priest’s embarrassment.

‘Did he ever mention to you …? About your mother?’ He looked nervous as he said it.

I sat up straight. ‘My … mother?’ Even the words felt alien on my lips.

He shifted position in his chair. ‘I see, I thought not. It’s not easy …’ he began, ‘we don’t have to … if you don’t want to.’

I asked for a minute and left the room, and had the strongest urge to smoke as my hands began independently to reach for my cuff buttons. I paced the corridor outside and was tempted just to walk away. Did I need this, did I really need to know? Of course I did. Every boy, regardless of age, needs a mother. If he can’t have her, he must at least know something about her. It is the natural order of things. Whether I needed to know was not the issue. I wanted to know. I paused before I re-entered Father Daniel’s room, wondering if I would be a different man when I emerged. I asked Father Daniel to tell me everything.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but I can only tell you what was said at the time. I have no proof of any of it, but I had friends out there at the time and they told me.’

‘Out there?’ I didn’t know what he meant.

‘Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia,’ he said. ‘There was an official report, but it was all hushed up. I tried to find it over the last month so that I would have something to give you, but it has disappeared. There are no records.’

These are the ‘facts’, as they were told to me:

My father was a young missionary priest who was sent out with three others to establish Catholic schools in rural villages along the Zambezi River in the early 1950s. In a particularly deprived and destitute village called Lakumu, where he was stationed for a year, he formed a friendship with a local native girl called Amadika.

Oh, no. My father was a paedophile priest? Oh, no. What has this to do with me?

Father Daniel was at pains to insist that Amadika was
not
a child. She was perhaps in her late teens or early twenties. They had a platonic relationship. She was apparently a very smart and diligent student, and it was known that my father favoured her with school prizes and allowed her to cook and clean for him.

He used her as his slave? Is that it? What has this to do with me?

The school was heavily oversubscribed, and a rule was introduced that only the younger children could attend. Amadika’s mother begged my father to allow her to continue her studies, but my father refused. He could not break the rules for anybody.

Apparently, Amadika was sent by her mother to sexually seduce my father in order to bargain for her right to stay in school. Father Daniel says that the natives had nothing else with which to bribe their educators, and the girl’s mother hoped that a good education might secure her future. It seems that my father was a particularly devout priest with ambitions, but that on this one occasion he yielded to natural urges and slept with the girl. He rejected her immediately afterwards, banned her from the school and ended their association.

Of course he slept with her. She offered herself. And then he was ashamed. What does this have to do with me?

Amadika’s pregnancy caused a scandal when she claimed that Father Francis Ryan was the child’s father. He strenuously denied it until the girl gave birth to a purely white baby – me.

No
.

Impossible. No
.

At this point in Father Daniel’s narrative, I reeled first with disbelief, and later, shock. I had always assumed, because of what my father had said, that I was the result of an affair with a prostitute, and so had never wanted to explore the issue too deeply, especially after my birth certificate seemed to be a work of fiction, but this was just too fantastical to be credible, I thought. I was white. Father Daniel admitted that he too had found it difficult to come to terms with, but swore this was the story he was told by the other priests. He insisted that Amadika was not a prostitute but rather a person forced by poverty, desperation and circumstance to use the only thing she had at her disposal to make a better life for herself. Somehow, that rang a bell with me, but I simply could not accept it.

‘You have no proof!’ I whispered. ‘You said there are no records!’

‘There are none,’ he admitted, ‘but I really can’t imagine why those who told me would lie about such a thing. I am the only person left alive who can tell you.’

I paced the room, processing what I had just been told, but it made no sense.

‘Maybe I was wrong to tell you, but I thought you should know what was said. It was kept very quiet.’

I did not believe it, and told him so in no uncertain terms. He apologized for causing any distress, and I could see that he was in anguish about having told me such a tale.

‘You can just carry on as normal. It is only we who know.’

‘What happened? To her?’

I tried to make sense of a tale that made no sense as Father Daniel continued his story. My story?

Amadika rejected her baby straight away. Nobody in the village had ever seen a white baby before. She was terrified of it and shunned by her friends and her neighbours in the village, who thought that the baby’s pale sickliness had brought a curse upon the tribe. Apparently, she left the child at the door of my father’s hut and left the village with her mother. Nobody knows where she went. Nobody knew her last name.

My father had a mental breakdown. According to the other priests, he had been particularly devout. Father Daniel suggested that my father must have found it exceptionally difficult to have broken his vows. He was insistent that he had never initiated sexual contact. His lofty ecclesiastical ambitions were ruined. He was forced out of the priesthood and returned to Ireland with his unwanted son. However, because of strong connections to the Archbishop’s Palace, my father was hired as a financial adviser and was warned to keep me as removed from him as possible, so as not to raise questions or provoke a scandal. They assumed, as the baby grew, as
I
grew, that I would develop physical signs of my black roots, that my hair might curl or my nose might flare, but I confounded their expectations by maintaining my Caucasian appearance.
Most of those who knew of my existence were told I was an orphaned nephew, but my father subsequently met and married Judith within a few years and abandoned me to St Finian’s.

If Father Daniel was right, if it was all true, I am a freak of nature. My eyes are dark brown and my pigmentation is a little more sallow than the average Irishman, but in every respect I am a white European. I chose not to believe it.

I told nobody, and when Father Daniel died a year later, I let the ridiculous story die with him. It made no difference to me now, and there was nothing I could do about the past. Who knows what went on in Africa? A little bit of private research revealed that my father had been in Northern Rhodesia at the time, and there was a village called Lakumu, but that was as far as I was prepared to go. It didn’t matter.

The truth is that I deserved a better father. I found one in France, but, alas, he was not mine.

I cannot remember how it was that we ended up taking Irish students that year. I knew little of Ireland, apart from their whiskey and some of their music. A cousin of a friend organized it, I think. I recall being sceptical as to how college-educated people could adapt to heavy manual labour, but they tried their best, I will say that for them, with varying degrees of success. We also agreed at that time to take on some South Africans who were keen to learn about the Bordeaux wines of our region, and we were to train them in viticulture and pay a small fee in exchange for their labour. Naturally, not all of my white workers were happy about working alongside the black boys, but my father, who was still a hero to our community, led by example. Without having to say anything, we were subtly reminded by him of the dire consequences of racial intolerance.

I was later ashamed that I did not make more enquiries into exactly who was going to come and how they would work. I had received a letter from a man in Stellenbosch who asked if he could send his son along with seven other labourers to learn about our grapes, so I was prepared for eight men to stay for two months. But then we got seven black boys, some very young, and one Afrikaner man named Joost, who was the only one who spoke French. It turned out that Joost was to inherit some land in the Western Cape and his father had decreed that he must plant it as
a vineyard, but Joost did not want to do any actual work so he brought these seven poor men to France to learn how to do the work for him. He refused to let them stay in the lodgings arranged for everybody else and had them billeted in a barn in the village. He also did not pay them the fee they had earned and instead paid them with wine that we dispensed freely. I did not work this out right away. It was the other labourers who told me what was going on. They were uncomfortable with it, and when I saw for myself the cuts and bruises on some of the men, I was finally convinced that the stories of Joost’s brutality were true and ordered him to leave. There was nothing I could do for those boys, who were little more than slaves. They had no education and no French, and we would not have work enough to keep them on beyond that summer. Papa and I sought them out the night before they left while Joost got drunk in the village. We gave them some money and food, and although they seemed terrified, one boy stepped forward to shake my hand and thank us. The other boys seemed stunned at his audacity.

By then, technically speaking, I oversaw everything to do with the estate, the chateau, the orchard, the olive grove and the winery, with terrific support from our friends and neighbours, but on a practical level I had appointed local managers Max and Constantine to run each division, friends and neighbours that we trusted. It amuses me now when I think about it, to realize that we were operating not unlike a kibbutz, or a commune in the English sense of the word, although I insisted that the family eat separately in the house each evening while the workers ate outdoors. I was adamant that the workers would not stay in the house
overnight. Everything else was shared. I actively encouraged Papa to let me take control, and I think he passed over the reins with relief and slipped into a graceful retirement. He did, however, insist on taking Jean-Luc’s education in hand. Jean-Luc was to start school in the autumn and his papi was determined that Jean-Luc would have a head start.

The role that I relished more than any was feeding the workers and I appointed myself as head of the kitchens, a task probably more menial than Papa would have liked for me, but it was the job that I wanted and the one in which I excelled. After the war, when we were left without servants, Tante Cécile had rolled up her sleeves and learned how to feed us good and nutritious food, and I learned my craft from her. She taught me all the basics of good rustic cuisine, and I prepared simple and wholesome meals for all our workers, relying as I did on my neighbours Max and Constantine to keep order in the fields and orchards.

Oliver and Laura were the first of the Irish workers who came to my attention. They were a very beautiful couple. Somebody ought to have painted them. He was astonishingly good-looking for an Irishman. Instead of the pale blotchy complexion of the others, his skin was smooth and his eyes full-lashed and shining. His girlfriend, Laura, was also dark-haired and clear-skinned, and very petite. I had many of the local girls working in the fields, but I wondered if this girl might be too delicate for such work.

Oliver spoke French well and translated for the others, and Papa quickly began to rely on him as the spokesperson for the group. Since the time of his incarceration, Papa
had developed a tremor in his right hand and his handwriting had suffered. He asked Oliver for help with some paperwork. Oliver took an interest in Jean-Luc too, and before long the three boys had bonded completely, regardless of the barriers of age, language and experience. Papa requested that Oliver be assigned as his assistant, and I, never having refused Papa anything before, conceded as usual. The relationship between them was extremely close, extraordinarily quickly. It was as if Papa and Jean-Luc had found the one they had long been searching for. I thought then that I had been wrong to deny my son a father, that Papa would have enjoyed having a man around the house, so while I was not altogether happy about this sudden friendship, I tolerated it for Papa’s sake. I did not know why Oliver had formed such a close bond with them. Presumably, he had a father of his own, but I admit to a little jealousy at having to share mine.

I was not the only person feeling jealous of this new bond. Oliver’s girlfriend was furious about Oliver’s promotion. He began to take his meals with the family in the house, at Papa’s insistence and against my wishes, and Laura seemed particularly jealous of the fact that Oliver obviously preferred the company of an old man and a boy to hers. Jean-Luc adored him. Oliver played the rough-and-tumble games with him for which Papa had grown too old. When I eventually persuaded Jean-Luc to go to bed, Oliver was always included in his chatter of the day. I thought of Pierre and what a wonderful father he could have been, had he known of his son.

Laura had a brother called Michael, who turned up one morning out of the blue at the kitchen door to offer
assistance with bread making. It was a serendipitous moment for all concerned, except for Anne-Marie, who was startled to see a big, pasty-faced Irishman in the kitchen, and got such a fright that she fell over and broke her arm. Anne-Marie was my Girl Friday in the kitchen, if one can justifiably describe a 77-year-old as a girl. She had been employed by the family since the first war, and I had asked for her help in the kitchens the previous summer, and we worked well together. She related to me the stories of my mother’s legendary beauty and her generosity. I am constantly aware of how much I have to live up to with the legacy of my parents’ goodness. On that day in 1973, Anne-Marie was finally persuaded for the first time to take a leave of absence while her arm healed. A 77-year-old bone, however, does not heal easily and I knew I must do without her for some months.

Michael, oblivious to the fact that he was the cause of the accident, was quickly enlisted, as lunch was to be served for thirty people at twelve o’clock, while poor Anne-Marie was taken off to the hospital. Luckily, Michael was clever, and as cookery is about demonstration and repetition, the language problem did not become an issue. However, I was astounded by how little he knew about food, how few ingredients he even recognized. Maybe it was true what they said about the Irish, that they ate only potatoes. Michael learned quickly and, what is more, he enjoyed it and was flamboyantly enthusiastic about every aspect of the process. I could not be certain that there was not some other agenda though, and one or two times I caught him looking at me as if I were a kind of unknown ingredient that he was not sure whether to peel, boil or plant.

One day, he flicked my hair out of my eyes rather clumsily, and it came to me suddenly that perhaps he had some kind of inclination to be a hairdresser, so I allowed him to play with my hair for a while. How stereotypical, I thought, a gay hairdresser. He was, quite obviously, gay.

His French was still quite halting, but when I precociously asked him about his sexuality, he had no problem understanding and crumbled instantly, weeping copiously. I realize now that this was his ‘coming out’ and that my words opened a floodgate of guilt, repression and confused identity. I ascertained that he was in lust with his friend Oliver, who was dating his sister Laura.
Catastrophe
. I assured him that I would tell nobody, and arranged for him to meet with Maurice, our neighbour, who was openly gay and spoke some English. I hoped that Maurice would be able to counsel Michael, so I was quite cross with him when it soon became apparent that he had taken Michael to a gay nightclub. I thought that might be rushing things, but what business was it of mine? They were adults, after all.

So now I knew Oliver and Michael well enough. Laura was the person who connected them, and soon she made her presence felt in my life too. She was a lovely girl, perhaps a little spoiled, but she hated the fact that Oliver and Michael were in the house and that she only saw them in the evenings, while all day long she was left with the others in the orchards, so when she collapsed one day and was stretchered up to the house, I was suspicious to put it mildly, thinking that this was a ploy to get into the house and attract some attention. But she was pale and sick. I was right to be suspicious, but not in the way that I thought.
I took her to the doctor in the village, and with her consent he told me that Laura was pregnant. I was initially annoyed. This was my first year taking migrant workers, and first there was the trouble with the Africans and now this. These employees were my responsibility, and clearly her thoughtless behaviour meant there had already been trouble. There have always been ways to avoid pregnancy, and I am not talking about abstention. I tried to be calm when I spoke to her. She was very tearful and afraid that I would ask her to leave the estate. I was not sure what to do. She begged me not to tell Oliver, fearful that this would spell the end of their relationship, although it was apparent to me that the relationship was practically over anyway. He had fallen in love with my family instead. I did not know what advice to offer Laura, so I offered none. She was from a strict Irish Catholic family. Despite the family chapel on our estate, Papa had raised me without a faith and without a need for the guilt in which other Catholics seemed to like to indulge. The options that might have been open to a faithless Frenchwoman would have been unthinkable to an Irish teenager. Laura was only nineteen years old, but she had to make her own decisions. Her brother Michael was concerned. She lied to him, telling him that she had some gastric flu. I allowed her to stay in the chateau for a few days, but then sent her back to the fields. I left it to her to make her choices. Just a few weeks later, I no longer cared. Not just about Laura, but about anything.

During the war, Papa ordered 100 gallons of paraffin for the lamps in the wine cellar so that the Jewish families who stayed there would not have to spend their waking hours
in complete darkness. It was delivered at night by a friend in the Resistance who had good contacts in Paris. I know my father sold my mother’s jewellery to pay for it, as gold was the only reliable currency at the time. When the house was raided in 1944, the Germans at first thought it was petrol and tried to fuel their trucks with it, but of all that they had destroyed in the house, the only things they left behind were the cans of paraffin, discarded in a lean-to shed adjacent to the library in the east wing of the chateau. Papa’s bedroom was directly above the library. By 1973, the entire building had long since been wired for electricity. It had crossed my mind at some time to dispose of the oil, but my father, who had lived through two wars and was more conscious of rationing than me, insisted that we hang on to the oil, in case of another war or a simple breakdown of electricity, which he still did not entirely trust. It was a particularly dry and dusty summer. On the 9th of September 1973, it had not rained for eighty-four days, and temperatures were well above average for the time of year.

Jean-Luc alternated between sleeping in my room or his papi’s. His own bedroom was rarely used. Both Papa and I had a small cot bed perpendicular to our own at the foot of our beds. It was very common at the time in French homes. If Papa was telling Jean-Luc a particularly good bedtime story, Jean-Luc could not be persuaded to return to my room. Sometimes the stories were a little bit scary and the walk from Papa’s room in the eastern side of the house to mine in the west wing was too much of a challenge for him. Papa would stay until Jean-Luc nodded off, and then, as it seemed a little cruel to move him as he slept, we would let him spend the night there.

I do not know what started the fire. My father’s pipe, a cigarette, a stray ember from the charcoal oven, we will never know. My memory of the night is quite unclear; I was woken by a noise like a strong wind rushing through the corridors, and then the sound of shouting. I thought I must be dreaming. Even when I got out of bed and looked out the window and saw the east wing in flames, it was so unreal and absolutely unexpected that I still did not comprehend how much of an emergency it was. I wandered through the smoke-filled hall in my nightdress before I fully understood the horror before me. When I was shocked out of sleep, I was disorientated and lost my sense of direction, but as I ran along the gallery towards what I thought was the east wing, the searing heat and smoke drove me back. I began to shout for my beloved father and son, but the only response I heard was a hiss and a crackle and the splintering and spitting of wood. I became hysterical and batted my way into the flames to get across the gallery to the eastern side of the house, but the floor beneath me was smouldering and I could smell my singed hair. When I realized I was at the top of the burning staircase, I knew I could go no further. I do not know how I burned my hands so badly. At the time, I did not even feel the pain. I do not recall how I got from the upper gallery to the courtyard, but I remember being restrained there by Michael as I kicked and bit him, trying to get away from him to rescue the only people in the world that I loved.