Liz Nugent - Unraveling Oliver

The first publisher I approached expressed interest, and that expression of interest allowed me to engage an agent who quickly negotiated a rather quick and unprecedentedly lucrative deal on the strength of the fact that I could pitch at least ten sequels on the spot. I immediately bought a good linen suit and rented a sports car from the proceeds of the advance.

A month later, I met Alice, who was to be my illustrator, at the launch of another book whose author my agent also represented. I could not believe my eyes when I saw her first drawings of Prince Felix. Without any guidance, she had captured the essence of a small French boy, nine years dead.

I invited Alice to come away with a small group of us to Paros on holidays. I planned my seduction terribly well and it was surprisingly easy, made easier by the clown that was Barney, who not only permitted his girlfriend to come traveling with me but also arranged with her mother to look after Eugene in Alice’s absence. It wouldn’t have made a difference in the end. She was predisposed to love me because, as she later confessed, she was in awe of my stories.

By the time the first one was published, I already believed that I’d written it. The advance blurb was so positive that I immediately thought my father might change his attitude toward me if I was successful, if he had something to be proud of, so I invited him to the launch. He did not come. I made no further attempt to contact him after that.

Alice and I got married and I lived happyishly ever after. Well, as happy as one can be in my circumstances. Alice was happy enough too, I suppose, once she’d resigned herself to being childless and got used to the idea of the imbecile being in a home, although my liaisons upset her from time to time, when I was careless enough to be caught, usually when Alice had done something to irritate me. But I was never careless with my darkest secret and kept it locked away in its wooden box.

It turned out that my meek and mild-mannered wife was more sly and devious than I could have imagined. Three months ago, she returned from her little culinary trip without Moya. Moya had finally got the courage to leave her husband for a Frenchman she’d met at the school. I had long ago come to the conclusion that Moya was a pain in the ass and had been in the process of dropping her, though God knows she didn’t take the hint easily. Now that Moya had left Con for another man that wasn’t me, I felt nothing but relief, though admittedly my pride was a little wounded.

I noticed that Alice was particularly quiet, and Moya’s early-morning phone call from France a few days prior had put me on edge. With nothing to lose, had Moya spitefully told Alice of our affair? When Alice had caught me out before, it usually led to weeping and stony silences for days and recriminations and stomping off to the spare room for a month until I promised to give up the floozy and never do it again. But I knew that this one would hurt more deeply. Alice had always thought of Moya as a friend, and it had been going on for years, not just one of my ten-weekers. When I broached the subject of Moya with her, she only said how devastated Con must be and that she hoped Moya would find happiness, but Alice’s mood was odd. She had a sudden confidence that I didn’t quite trust. I thought maybe she knew about my affair with Moya but was relieved that Moya was now out of the picture. I rationalized that either Moya’s absence made her more secure or she felt finally superior to Moya. I was quite wrong.

Four days after her return, on that chilly November evening, Alice prepared this terrific meal and said nothing at all until the raspberry roulade.

“Did you get the recipe for this on the cooking trip?” I said, trying to be breezy.

“It’s funny that you should mention that. I had a very interesting time. You never asked exactly where we went. Let me show you the brochure.”

I saw the word “Clochamps” before I saw the picture of the château and was instantly shocked into speechlessness.

“Madame Véronique remembers you very well.”

I still couldn’t say anything. She stood up, took the fork out of my hand and lowered her face to mine.

“You are a fraud, a liar, and a thief!”

So I punched her. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

The really ironic thing is that by the time Alice discovered my true deceit, I was actually working on my own book. The first truly authored by me. It wasn’t a children’s book at all. It was a very dark tale about neglect, abandonment, grief, and lost children. It was loosely based on the story of Cain and Abel. I wonder where I got the idea.

My God, writing is boring. Starting was the worst part, and it has taken me almost five years to write sixty pages. All I had been doing for the previous twenty-four years was reading, parsing, translating, and then using my trusty thesaurus to change the words around to take the Frenchness out of them. That was hard work too and took a great deal of skill. Though, as it turns out, writing does not come naturally to me. Under the guise of Vincent Dax, I regularly gave interviews to the media, exclaiming that the Prince of Solarand books pretty much wrote themselves. It was my little inside joke. Now that I have attempted to write, I can understand why other authors were so infuriated by my statement. Well, I continue to be baffled by theirs.

“I was born to write!” they might say, or “I couldn’t do anything else!” Pathetic.

If anybody had bothered to work it out, I did credit the old man with writing the books in the form of my pen name.

My wife, I had always thought, was a mouse, but now she had sharpened claws and revealed a feline arrogance I had never seen before. When I returned after my quick diversion to Nash’s, I found she had broken the lock on the wooden box, and the leather-bound books were on the kitchen table beside her. Her suitcase, only recently unpacked from her trip to the French culinary school, stood beside her. So she was leaving me. Fine. No problem. Off you go.

Only then, she calmly told me that the suitcase was packed for me, that she was returning the books to Madame Véronique, that I must leave her house. I told her she was being ridiculous. It didn’t have to be this way. I started to explain myself. Where was the harm in publishing what would probably have been discarded anyway?

Alice didn’t want to listen. My whole life was a lie, she said, reminding me that it was the books that had made her fall for me in the first place, reminding me of some of the more cringe-worthy things I may have said to her at one time or other—“I couldn’t write these without you,” “You’re my inspiration”—and of the many dedications to her on the acknowledgment pages: “… and finally my best to Alice, without whom none of this would be possible.”

I realized something I had failed to notice for the last thirty years. You don’t have to love a person. You can love the idea of a person. You can idealize them and turn them into the person you need. Alice loved the person that she thought I was. One way or another, I have managed to kill all the people who have loved me so far.

Where is my mother? Where is she? Couldn’t she have loved me? I may have killed her too. The whore.

Jean-Luc, my little friend, I remember the small arc of your arms around my shoulders and the heft of you as I piggybacked you around the terrace.

Monsieur d’Aigse, who showed me nothing but generosity and kindness, you opened your heart and your home to me and made me welcome when I offered you nothing in return but death, and then later, theft.

Laura, you were a normal happy girl until I chased you and somehow poisoned you to the point when death was your only option.