Unravelling Oliver (19 page)

As soon as everyone was asleep, I made my way silently up to the back door beside the lean-to building and into the library. The leather-bound books and handwritten papers that I had been working on were kept on a shelf in a corner of the room by the door. It struck me that these must be saved from the fire. How grateful might they be to discover that the summer’s work had been rescued and that Jean-Luc’s most personal inheritance was intact?

I put them to one side while I amassed a bundle of loose typing paper all around the bookcase and doused it with lighter fuel. I planned to be the one to discover the fire in about twenty minutes so that I could be the hero
who stopped the fire going out of control. I lit the touch-paper and watched for a moment. I hoped the fire would catch in time. Hiding the leather-bound books near the bunk-house, I crept back to wait for the appropriate moment to sound the alarm.

I checked my watch about every six seconds, but time seemed to relax its grip and the minute hand of my watch appeared to freeze. I held it to my ear, and
tick, tick, tick
, yes, it was working as it should. Minutes before my planned alarm-raising, I heard my name being called softly from the door of the bunk-house. Damn, Laura. I got up and went to her and we had the same argument again that we had had earlier in the evening, but this time she began to fight back.

‘You can’t just dump me with no explanation! You can’t just leave me! We love each other!’

She was raising her voice, growing hysterical, and I knew I must get away from her, go up to the house and put out the fire. Others had emerged to see what the fuss was about, and Laura was by now grabbing at my shoulders, wailing at me, ‘Why? Why? What have I done?’

I tried to get her to shut up. ‘Nothing, you’ve done nothing, I just can’t … I don’t …’

I was aware of shadows moving around us. We had woken everyone. Michael emerged out of the gloom. He was clearly annoyed and I think embarrassed that Laura was making such a spectacle of us. He took control and ordered us both sternly to go back to bed. What was I to do? Maybe thirty minutes had now passed, but no sign or smell of smoke or fire had yet reached our quarters, and I thought perhaps it might have gone out. I reluctantly followed
him back to the bunk-house as Laura was led away weeping by one of the girls. I lay down, furious, as Michael began to give me a whispered lecture about Laura’s delicate ‘feelings’. Should I just feign storming off in a temper, so that I could go and check on the fire? How much longer could I wait? Could the fire have blown itself out? Michael was still going on and on, but suddenly he stopped. ‘What’s that smell?’ he said, and he leapt out of bed and ran to the door.

Michael was the one to raise the alarm. He could have been the hero, not me. But we were both too late to save lives.

I did not know about the paraffin cans in the lean-to shed, behind the door. I had never been upstairs in the house, and somehow I got the impression that there were no bedrooms in the east wing. I never meant harm to the boy or his papi, but I am solely responsible for their deaths. I will never forget the sound of Madame Véronique’s screams. It has haunted me for nearly forty years.

I was just about putting one foot in front of the other in the days that followed, going through the motions of empathy and sympathy, but I felt nothing at all, just a needle-sharp aching wound in the core of my soul. I tried not to sleep, because waking to the horror of the truth every day was unbearable.

Sweet Laura tried to comfort me. It was known that I had grown close to the dead, but I could not take her platitudes and rejected her all over again. I worked with everybody else, trying to clear the mess and the destruction and trying to avoid contact with Madame Véronique, whose family I had murdered.

I cleared out the library, but there was nothing left of it except some maps and an ivory paperweight that were kept in a metal box. Madame came to me and specifically asked about the leather-bound books, among other things. Monsieur must have told her about our project. I told her they too had been destroyed. Then I broke down and wept, and she held me in her bandaged arms and I felt worse. The fire service concluded that a stray ember from Monsieur’s pipe, which somehow ignited the paraffin in the lean-to, must have sparked the fire.

Four days before we were to leave, Laura told me she was pregnant with my baby. I could hardly ingest the information and ignored it and her, but she was everywhere I turned over the following days. In my grief I snapped at her finally, insisting there was no way I could have a family. My child had just been buried. She stared at me, and I realized what I’d said and realized I’d meant it. She cried and pleaded, but I was not going to concede any more emotion. I was already spent. I told her to get herself fixed up and to send me the bill. Somehow, I would scrape the money together to pay for it. She cried more.

Laura wisely decided not to come home with us. I assumed she’d find a little doctor somewhere who could sort her out. Michael was baffled by his sister’s insistence on staying on at Chateau d’Aigse, and negotiated between Laura and her parents in expensive phone calls that went on for two days. I presented it to him as philanthropy on Laura’s part. She simply wanted to stay and help Madame Véronique, and sure, what harm could it do. He knew by then that we had split up, but clearly she had not confided any of the details in him. I could not look at her or Madame
Véronique on our day of departure. My shame would have been too obvious.

My shame was not so great, however, that I did not have the leather-bound books containing every story ever written by Vincent d’Aigse wrapped in a towel at the bottom of my suitcase. I’m not sure why I took them. Maybe I wanted some part of my two friends to take with me. Their innocence and their purity. Maybe I needed a reminder of my guilt. I had deliberately lied to Madame Véronique, but these stories were all I had left of those two precious souls and I could not relinquish them.

Back in Dublin, in my sunless bedsit, I spent a week in bed, not leaving the house or speaking to anybody. How could I even begin to explain that I only meant to be a hero, and not a murderer?

The books were on the dresser accusing me, and yet I could not bring myself to dispose of them. I did not look at them or open them. Finally, I dragged myself out of my decline. I left the house and went to a second-hand furniture shop where I bought an old wooden box with a sturdy lock. I came home and locked the books into the box and hoped that I would forget where I had hidden the key.

Laura was not so easy to forget about. She wrote several letters, trying to convince me that ‘we’ could keep the baby, that her parents would stand by us eventually. For a while, I considered it, but ultimately dismissed the notion. Marrying into a wealthy family was not a bad option, but raising a child? When I had just killed one? I do, after all, have a sense of morality. Then she wrote to say that she was going to have the baby in France and that I must go and
join her there to raise our child. Another two months went by, and she wrote that she had changed her mind and was going to keep the baby anyway and bring it home, regardless of my involvement, sending me into paroxysms of panic. I never replied to any of the letters, but waited with increasing anxiety for news of the baby’s birth.

The due date came and went and I heard nothing. But three months later, I assume in a last-ditch attempt to make me change my mind, she sent me a pink plastic hospital bracelet with ‘Bébé Condell’ written on it. There was no letter attached, and I was relieved that my name had not been used. Apparently, I had a child, a baby girl.

An unwanted child had an unwanted child. Perhaps the apple did not fall far from the tree after all. There are several clichés I could use to illustrate the fact that I am undoubtedly my father’s son. Like him, I did not want a baby. Maybe what I did was worse, by not acknowledging the child at all, but Laura was a sensible person and I knew that if Michael wasn’t allowed out of the closet, then Laura knew how difficult it would be to bring home what was then termed a ‘bastard’ child.

In August 1974, I heard that Laura was coming home. Nobody mentioned a baby. I assumed she had placed it for adoption. I hoped the baby would have a family that loved her. But at the back of my mind, I had a doubt that there had ever been a baby. I wondered about the possibility that Laura was never pregnant in the first place. I thought she may even have had an abortion or may have miscarried it. Why did she send me the bracelet, and not a photograph? If she was really trying to convince me to keep it, wouldn’t she have sent me a photograph? Also, my instincts told me
that Laura simply would not have given up her baby. She was braver than me.

I saw Laura in college the following October and avoided contact. She was thin and sickly-looking and appeared not to socialize. It was rumoured that she was suffering from depression. Michael came to me and asked if I would talk to her. I could not refuse. I approached her one day in the library. She was standing in front of a bookshelf in the anthropology section. I greeted her and asked if she would like to come and have a coffee with me. She did not speak, but took my hand and placed it on her almost concave belly, just for a moment, and then she walked away. It was the same gesture she had made when I left her in France.

I was angry with her and wrote her a coded letter then, reassuring her that she had done the right thing but insisting she should just get over the past and get on with her life. She did not reply to my letter, but returned it. I found it in shreds, posted through the slats of my locker.

The girl was clearly unstable. Within a month or two, I heard that she dropped out of college, and then Michael rang me to say that she was dead.

I tried to have a reaction to this. I tried to cry. I expected guilt or anger but instead there was a strange emptiness, another void to add to the one already at the core of my soul, if such a thing exists. I had rejected her and hurt her, but I felt nothing, except that she was one less reminder of that summer. I am sorry that she did not think life was worth living. Another man could have loved her the way she needed. She was very beautiful, after all, and adorable, pleasant, easy company most of the time, before France.
Several men I knew would have wanted nothing more than a date with the alluring and elusive Laura Condell. I regretted that she died but it was not my fault. None of this was my fault. I was supposed to be wailing and gnashing my teeth apparently, but I had really
done
guilt by then, and it was of no benefit whatsoever.

I left college the following year with a 2:2, a good enough degree. I would have liked to start my own business importing wine or something like that, but with no capital and no collateral, it was out of the question.

Out of financial desperation and seeking guidance, I even went to my father’s house one evening and rang the doorbell. I stepped back and waited, saw the curtain twitch, saw him seeing me, and then the curtains were drawn by an unseen hand and the door remained shut.

Eventually I got a dull job working alongside unambitious people in the offices of the Inland Revenue as a clerical assistant, the lowest form of life, but it allowed me to rent a flat on Raglan Road, a better part of Dublin. It didn’t take too long to move house. One battered suitcase and a refuse sack containing my mugs, pots, kettle and radio. And the locked wooden box, its key in my pocket.

My new home was even smaller than the one I had before, but location, location, location. I lived on beans and eggs and tea, and met up with some of the old crowd every summer to go travelling, having scrimped since the previous year. I lied about what I was doing, pretended to be rising through the ranks of the diplomatic corps. My sense of envy festered.

By early 1982, I was getting rather depressed. It had
taken me seven years to move up one grade from clerical assistant to clerical officer, and that was only because someone died. I was sick of the penury, sick of the pretence and sick of myself. It seemed that I was doomed to this misery for the foreseeable future. There was no one to rescue me. Unable to control my thoughts, I recalled the hero who could have rescued me, if I hadn’t killed him. I remembered that kind old man, the boy, and a time when there were possibilities, when I was surrounded by decency. The box on top of the wardrobe in my room underneath its layer of dust called to me.

Several times in the intervening years, I had been on the point of throwing out the leather-bound books, thinking that doing so would ease my guilt. But I never did. It would have been sacrilegious. They represented something beautiful, something that I had destroyed, but which nevertheless I needed. I could not explain the need, not then. On that night, in that moment of torment, I only wanted to remember.

With shaking hands, I unlocked the box. I read the stories again. There were twenty-two of them in total, some already neatly typed up by me in the pages of the leather-bound books, some written in blotted ink by a shaky hand on loose sheets that I’d carefully placed between the pages. I did not sleep for a week thereafter, but then a few bottles of cheap wine helped me to forget the child for whom they were written and the hand that wrote the original drafts. Remembering had been a mistake. Or so I thought.

Gradually, it dawned on me that these stories could be my escape route. If they had not died, if I had become
somehow part of their family, would these stories not also have become mine? I was the only one that the old man had trusted to transcribe them. Why? Why a strange Irish boy he did not know? Why not a local scholar? Why did he choose me? If Jean-Luc was no longer around to benefit from these stories, well then, why not me? The fire was just the result of a minor deception that went awry, I told myself, desperate to justify my plagiarism, and once I had made the decision, it was easy. I only needed to rewrite them in English, change any identifiable details and publish them under a pseudonym, just to be sure. If I were to publish a couple of thousand copies in an Irish print run, I might be able to secure a future for myself.