Unraveling Oliver Read online

  I said she wouldn’t last a week, but I guess she must have done all right, because she was there three or four years. I was wrong about her disappearing too. She still lived at home because of Eugene, and it was Susan who pulled away from the friendship more than Alice, because Susan started going out with Dave.

  Alice was certainly good with her hands. I remember a sculpture thing that she made for Susan’s birthday: some kind of ceramic swan-shaped yoke. I told her there and then that it was so good, she could sell it. She smiled at me.

  That was the first time I realized that she wouldn’t be going near any convent. The smile was a bit cheeky. The years in the art college must have shaken the nun out of her. Though she still dressed very modestly, I’m not sure that she had many boyfriends, or indeed any, during her college years. Maybe those fellas scared her with their drugs and loud music.

  Susan ran off to London after Dave within a few years and got a job as a hospital cook; married there, eventually. She never came back here to live after that. Still there now, married to DIY Dave, with four grown-up children. Chiswick. The “w” is silent.

  I had finished my apprenticeship as a mechanic and was working in my uncle Harry’s garage at that stage. I had a few bob in my pocket. I had moved into a flat in town. Had my own car. Lovely it was. A Ford Granada. It was enough to impress plenty of girls. I didn’t see as much of Alice anymore with Susan gone and me living in town. The odd time when I called to see Mam, I would see Alice leading Eugene by the hand to the local shop. If you ask me, I’d say they did too much for him. He might have learned to fend for himself a bit more had he been allowed.

  Mam said that Alice had some sort of job designing pictures for calendars or something like that. She said that one of the rooms in the house had been turned into a “studio.” There were rooms in that house that hadn’t been used in years, so it made sense.

  Then Mam said I should ask her out. That was a bit of a shocker. She was Avenue. I was Villas. Mam said it didn’t look like anyone else was ever going to ask her out, so I might as well. I don’t think Mam thought we’d have any big love affair or anything, just that Alice might like the company, and it would be polite. I wasn’t sure myself. I was twenty-eight by then, and she wasn’t far behind me. She was such a quiet one, I wouldn’t know what to be saying to her, and besides, I wasn’t sure that we’d be able to go anywhere without Eugene, but Mam insisted, as if it would be an act of charity. But it wasn’t an act of charity. Not to me. I always liked her.

  When I knocked on the door to ask, I realized that I was nervous. That was a bit unusual for me. I can handle myself in all sorts of situations. It’s just that she was a stranger to me, really, though I’d known her all my life. She wasn’t like the other girls I’d had a fumble with in the back of the Granada.

  She answered the door herself, Eugene standing behind her in the hallway. I didn’t know what words to use. I was embarrassed, like. But she smiled that smile again. Jesus, it was a lovely smile. I asked her if she’d like to come for a drive with me on Sunday, out to Killiney for a walk on the beach and then for a cup of tea in the hotel. She asked if I meant her and Eugene or just her. I said just her. She grinned then and said that would be grand, and I agreed to collect her at three on Sunday.

  I washed the car and had my hair cut on the Saturday. I remember because the barber nipped my left ear. Never gone back to him since. Felt like an eejit sitting in the car with Alice, making conversation, and me with a bandage on my ear. She was wearing lipstick and a brown dress with flowers on it. Very nice. Talking to her was easier than I thought it would be, though I can’t remember what we talked about. Actually, I’d say she talked more than me. I got a proper look at her when we were having our tea in the hotel. Quite good-looking, but not in a film-star way. She never went blond like the rest of them. They nearly all go blond in the end. From being a real skinny young one, she had filled out in all the right areas, with a kind of a rounded edge to her. Not fat, mind you. Shapely, like. Her face sort of glowed whenever she smiled, and then when she’d catch me looking at her, she’d blush and twist her fingers around one another. I realized that I really did fancy her then.

  She asked if I’d teach her to drive. By God, I would.

  That’s how it began.

  The lessons were bloody terrifying. She was an atrociously bad driver. After the first lesson, I had to remove a hedge from the front grille of my car, my pride and joy. I was even more afraid for myself than I was for the car, but somehow it was worth it. She had become more relaxed with me, a bit chatty even. Still shy and all and not exactly flirty or anything like that, but good fun all the same, and afterward we would often have a coffee and some cake in a café. Susan wasn’t wrong about her appetite.

  I was sort of worried that the mother wouldn’t approve of me because, you know, Villas and Avenue and all that, but in fairness to her, she was very nice to me and Eugene was always wanting to arm-wrestle me. I grew fond of him as well. It wasn’t his fault that he was peculiar, but he had a way of laughing like a donkey that was hilarious, even though I didn’t know what he was laughing about. Neither did he, I’m sure.

  At the end of her third lesson, I kissed her and asked her to marry me. She laughed, but she kissed me back, so that wasn’t too bad. We started having proper dates then, but she never talked about the proposal again. I think she thought I was joking, but I wasn’t. I didn’t have the nerve to ask her again, not for a while. I got to know her inasmuch as anyone could back then.

  I think I was good for Alice, when everyone else probably thought it was the other way around. We would go to local discos and dance halls. She made herself a dress of pink silk. She said it was “ashes of roses,” but if you ask me, it was pink. We began to have a bit of fumbling, if you know what I mean, nothing too heavy. I was afraid of pushing it too much with her in case I scared her off, and I reckoned she was pretty religious like her ma. We were all a bit religious in them days, I suppose. Not like now.

  We could have gone all the way once when we went to the races in Galway. We drove down in the Granada. I booked us into a small hotel for the night, in separate rooms, obviously. Alice must have been a charm because I won big on three races. I’d never had a day’s luck before that. After our day out, I ordered a bottle of wine with our meal (she had seconds of everything). I wasn’t used to wine then, only knew that there was red or white and that red seemed more sophisticated, so I pointed to the most expensive bottle of that on the menu (I’d had a few pints of plain already and was feeling generous). The uppity waiter asked if I was sure. I was, I said. Alice wasn’t used to wine either. Within half an hour, she was talking nonsense about wanting to live in a house made of books or some such. Unusually for Alice, she began to get a bit sexy with me, a bit loose limbed. I hardly knew what to do, but then she leaned across the table in a kind of wanton way and kissed me loudly on the lips. I was in heaven, but the waiter came over and killed the moment by telling us that we were disturbing the other diners. The other diners consisted of a middle-aged couple and two old ladies. I think they were disturbed all right, but I didn’t care.

  We floated up the stairs arm in arm. I deposited her at the door of her room where we kissed passionately for a few moments. She asked if I wanted to spend the night in her room. Well, I was hardly likely to argue, was I? She flopped herself down on the bed and catapulted her shoes one after another with a steady aim toward the waste bin, missing both times by miles. My God, she was fabulous. I excused myself and ran to the bathroom at the end of the hall (well, let’s just say it wasn’t the Four Seasons). I stood in a plastic shower stall, soaping myself in a frenzy of preparation. I rinsed myself repeatedly under the trickle of lukewarm water dribbling out of the rusted showerhead and dried myself off in a fierce hurry using a towel so stiff and thin that I practically sanded myself. I threw my dressing gown around me and headed back toward the room. I caught myself in the mirror halfway down the landing. My teeth and lips were coated in redd
ish-gray scum from the wine. I thought that Dracula might make a better impression than me. Thundering back into the bathroom in search of my toothbrush, I skidded cartoon-style in the puddle I had left behind me and, grabbing the sink on the way down, landed on my right elbow with water gushing over me from the detached pipe that had come away from the wall. Jesus, the pain. And the humiliation—when I looked up to see the manager and the elderly ladies and realized that my robe had flapped open, thereby exposing me to the four winds.

  To make things worse, every penny I’d won had to be paid over to the hotel and the local doctor. When I eventually got back to Alice’s room at three thirty in the morning, she was in exactly the same place as I’d left her, fully clothed but snoring lightly. I was too tired and hungover, not to mention suffering from the pain of my newly relocated elbow, to feel anything else. I went back to my own room and had an uncomfortable night’s sleep.

  The journey home was horrendous. Alice was purple with embarrassment at what she saw as her disgraceful behavior, and I couldn’t drive because of my arm, which meant that she had to take the wheel. I nearly fell out of love with her on the way home. We had five near-death experiences. I thought my shoulders would be permanently lodged in my ears, and to this day I get flashbacks to that corner in Kinnegad. There was a distinct cooling of our relationship after that.

  A week later, I was giving my friend Gerry the highlights of what had happened in the hotel, showing him the hotel bill so that he could see how much the night had cost me. He took the almighty piss out of me for ordering a whole bottle of port.

  • • •

  Gradually, Alice and I got back to normal, though the question of spending a night together out of town was never raised again. When I eventually admitted to her that I had mistakenly ordered port instead of wine, it broke the ice and allowed us to blame the drink for the events of that night.

  My mam was delighted that the two of us were going out. She often invited Alice for tea. Occasionally Alice would bring Eugene with her and then Mam would make too big a fuss, making it awkward for me and roaring at Eugene as if he was deaf. Eugene would laugh at her. He never minded what anyone said to him.

  I got on like a house on fire with Eugene. If you ask me, he was a great fella altogether really. He was a funny, happy child in a grown-up body. Always smiling. Now, I’m not saying he couldn’t be difficult sometimes. For instance, he liked to dance. In public, at mass or in the Quinnsworth usually, in front of everyone. But people understood that he was only a harmless eejit, God help him. We got into this game, him and me, where he’d be in his favorite chair, and I’d come up behind him and lift up his arms, and we’d pretend to be flying around the sitting room. He loved that game, so he did, and never got tired of it, and do you know what, it was a joy to be playing and to hear the laugh out of him like that. There’s not many that could lift Eugene, I can tell you. I’m as strong as an ox, and he’s no lightweight.

  Eugene’s bedtime was a lovely routine at the O’Reillys’. There’d be a pot of tea for us and a glass of milk for Eugene, and a plate of buttered bread would go around. And then when the dishes were done and the table scrubbed, there were prayers, everyone on their knees at the kitchen table saying the rosary, and after that Alice would read a story to Eugene, usually a fairy tale or maybe a nursery rhyme of some kind. She had a brilliant way of reading. She made all the people in the stories come alive with different voices and accents and all. I loved to listen to her almost as much as Eugene did.

  After a while, Mam started quizzing me. Was I serious about Alice? Did I know what I’d be taking on? I think Mam meant well, but we had a few rows about it. It wasn’t her business, after all. Mam thought it was great when I took Alice out the odd time and bought her cake, but she wanted to remind me that Alice would be responsible for Eugene when the mother died. If I married her, I’d be taking on the two of them. I made up my mind that that was fine with me. I really loved Alice by now, and if anything, Eugene would be a bonus.

  Although nothing was ever said, I believed we had an understanding. We had been together for more than a year. I hadn’t reckoned with Oliver. Alice could be walking around now, hale and hearty, if I had reckoned with Oliver.

  3

  * * *

  MICHAEL

  It’s probably five years since I’ve laid eyes on Oliver Ryan, or Vincent Dax, as he is better known. I have kept an eye on his successes through the media, but the news about his savage behavior last November is a total surprise. They say that Alice might never recover.

  I first met him when we were students in University College Dublin in 1971. We were both doing an arts degree and were in French and English together. Oliver was the type of boy that I liked to study: beautiful, in a poetic way. Obviously I was supposed to be sizing up the girls in my class, but there was something different about me.

  Oliver mostly kept himself to himself, but he used to sit behind me in French lectures, and we would occasionally share notes. It was only at the end of our second year that I got to know him socially. With Oliver, you only got to scratch the surface. I don’t remember him ever talking about his family, for example. To this day, I don’t know whether he has brothers or sisters. With all the stuff about him in the news, it’s odd that even now so little has come out about his background. None of us were ever invited to his home, and he exuded a certain air that precluded questions about his private life. Oliver was a bit of a mystery, really—obviously an attractive quality, which, along with his striking looks and impeccable manners, gained him a lot of attention from quite a few young ladies, not least my little sister Laura.

  Laura was the star of her year, academically gifted and stunningly beautiful in that wild West of Ireland way. I lurked in her shadow. Laura inherited our mother’s good looks, and Mum came from a long line of raven-haired beauties from West Cork, where once Spanish blood must have darkened the gene pool. I got my father’s County Laois looks. His family had been farmers for generations. Potato farmers, and if they say you are what you eat, then the male side of our family resembled nothing if not potatoes: pale with pockmarked skin and irregular features. Everyone loved Laura.

  Oliver came home with Laura to my parents’ house for dinner a few times. My mother adored him to the extent that it might have put Laura off, but Laura was love struck, although she did a terrific job of hiding it for an incredibly long time before finally yielding to Oliver’s charms. Oliver and Laura were part of a gang that enjoyed trips to the pub or weekends away in our holiday home in Wicklow. She was really happy with him. I was jealous.

  I have never understood what happened with Laura. Of course, she is no longer here to ask. Oliver was apparently as shocked as we were. We never got to the bottom of it. I often think about her now and what might have been. She and Oliver dated for only about five months, ending that awful summer we spent working the land in Bordeaux.

  I can’t remember who came up with the idea first. It might have been Laura, actually. She knew someone who knew someone, and after the rigors of a year of study and exams, we were all looking for a chance to get out of Dublin and away from parental control. We were to plant a vineyard in France. Others would go off to canning factories in Germany, and a few went to building sites in London, but the notion of a vineyard struck our ears in a singular fashion. It would surely mean access to cheap alcohol. We didn’t really consider the work part of the deal until we got there. Oliver signed up immediately, much to Laura’s delight. The agreement was room and board and a fairly meager wage in exchange for our labor. It sounded easy, and we were able to convince our parents that the opportunity to study the French language and culture should be encouraged rather than dismissed.

  We arrived in the last week of May. The initial couple of weeks were exhilarating. There were acres of land we were to prepare for planting, surrounded by a large peach orchard on one side and an olive grove on the other, set on a walled estate complete with château in a beautifully located valley, an
hour’s drive from the city of Bordeaux.

  Madame Véronique, a widow in her late thirties, ran the house and the estate. The only other members of the family were her six-year-old, a delightful little boy called Jean-Luc, and her elderly father, Monsieur d’Aigse. Monsieur d’Aigse and Jean-Luc were inseparable. They wandered around hand in hand, stooping to admire flowers or trees, the old man leaning down toward the boy, the little hand enclosed in his gnarled paw, which sometimes shook uncontrollably otherwise, whispering furtively and then exploding with laughter. It was never clear who was leading whom.

  The d’Aigse family had owned the estate for several generations, but during the war it had been taken over by the Nazis, and the family had been ejected from the premises. The vineyard that had been there previously had fallen into ruin and the livelihood of the village destroyed. The château had been stripped of its valuables, but not its majesty. The rumor was that Monsieur d’Aigse had fought in the Resistance and had directed several missions of sabotage from the vast cellars underneath the terrace steps. I don’t know if that was true, but it was great to think that such exploits were being planned several floors below, while the jackbooted Nazis goose-stepped their way around the house above. There were other versions of the tale: apparently Monsieur had been horribly tortured at one stage when he had been caught smuggling a Jewish family out of the village, but it felt insensitive or inappropriate to ask about it. The war was still a living memory at that time, one that most would rather forget in that part of the world.