Liz Nugent - Unraveling Oliver

The accommodation was quite basic: a dorm for men and one for women, each with a water pump and hole-in-the-ground toilet at the end. Not the sort of thing we would put up with now, indeed, but our standards were a little bit lower when we were young. We thought it was all amusingly exotic.

The work, however, was grueling to begin with, before we all toughened up, and in fact by the end of June there was little to be done on the vines, and we moved to the orchard and olive grove, where the work was considerably less taxing. I spent the first month hoeing beneath each vine, scraping out each weed from the clover, grass, and wild oats that covered the rows between vines. It was remarkable how fast they grew in early June, an inch or two a day sometimes, though Madame told us that the growth spurts were even faster in the early spring. Oliver and Laura were put with a different team on the vital task of removing the unwanted sucker shoots from the vine trunk and selectively removing shoots from the head. The vines were cared for like ailing children, monitored, encouraged, soothed, and coaxed into grapefulness.

I must admit that we took full advantage of the free wine after work and would often crawl into bed in the smallest hours of the morning, blind drunk. In fact, some people didn’t make it as far as their own bed. Sometimes they only made it as far as other people’s beds. Such a heady time.

And yet, I knew I had to try to fix the thing that was wrong with me. I was on a mission to rid myself of the albatross that was my virginity. I thought that it might cure me. Sharing a bunkhouse with those immodest men was quite a strain.

Oliver’s spoken French was far better than Laura’s or mine, and he often negotiated between Madame and “les Paddies,” as we became known. It was because of this that old Monsieur d’Aigse began to take an interest in Oliver. He asked Oliver the English names for certain plants and flowers, and Oliver would obligingly translate. Before long, Oliver was promoted. He spent more and more time in the château in Monsieur’s study. Officially, Monsieur took him on as a translator, working on some old maps or some such that Monsieur had compiled for his private collection. Lucky bastard. The vineyard work was tough. Oliver didn’t move out of the dorm, but he no longer had to work in the field. Laura was a little disgruntled about it, I remember. Occasionally, I spied him from the field beside the lower lake, sitting outside on the terrace with Monsieur, a jug of wine by his side or playing some high-jinks game with the highly mischievous Jean-Luc. Their shouts and laughter ricocheted off the walls of the house and echoed through the valley. Oliver looked like the missing link between the old man and the boy. We noted how well Oliver seemed to fit in with them. When he came back to us in the evenings, he was like a different man. More content, perhaps; happier, anyway. Laura wasn’t the only one who was jealous of the time that Oliver spent with the family. I, too, didn’t like the way he became more like one of them than us. Inherently, I knew that Oliver could never love me, but at least while he was dating Laura, I could be around him, in his circle of friends. Now he was becoming removed from us. He would return full of stories about the funny things that Jean-Luc said, the new game they had played together. Oliver told us at one stage that if he ever had a son, he wanted him to be just like Jean-Luc. I lightly commented that Monsieur d’Aigse would be a good father figure too, but Oliver just glared at me for a second before walking off. Whatever the story was with Oliver’s parentage, it was clearly a sore point. I didn’t know then that he was violent, but he certainly looked like he wanted to hit me.

When I left school, women were a complete mystery to me—at least until I met Laura Condell. I had been in the sole company of priests and boys as a boarder in St. Finian’s since I was six years old, and apart from one summer on Stanley Connolly’s farm, where, quite frankly, his three feline sisters terrified me, I had no experience of women. Apparently, you are supposed to learn the facts of life and the etiquette of how to treat women from your mother, or, failing that, your father. I learned instead by osmosis.

Particular magazines, carefully camouflaged in packages containing cookie tins or wool sweaters, were passed among the boys of St. Finian’s and treated as hard currency. The source was usually a boy’s English cousin or foreign friend. My time with the magazines was severely limited due to my financially straitened circumstances. Not having much bargaining power, I didn’t get many chances to assess their content. I was naturally aroused and very curious about these images, the slender legs, the soft look of their breasts, and the beautiful curve of the hip from buttocks to waist.

When I eventually got to see the real thing, I was not too disappointed. The women in the magazines in those days were not very unlike their actual counterparts. I think modern pornography is probably the single biggest cause of erectile dysfunction. How else is a poor teenager to react when he finally gets to grips with an undepilated female body that is unlikely to have globe-shaped breasts standing to attention, a tiny waist and a bronzed oily sheen that he might think would help to slide himself inside her? The disillusionment with the reality must have a physical effect. Of course, now they can take a pill for that. I never needed such assistance.

I was, naturally, interested in sex, but I regarded boys with girlfriends as rather suspicious. Apart from sex, what would one want with a girl?

I knew, partly from a purple-faced biology teacher and partly from filthy innuendo disseminated by the other boys, that women bled regularly, and it seemed disgusting to me. Alien. I made it clear to Alice throughout our marriage that I didn’t want to know of cycles or bleeding or cysts or discharges or any of the other revolting paraphernalia that seems to come with the gender, and to be fair to her, she has left me untroubled by it all. A monthly “headache” is tolerable to me, and if she had to go to the hospital for a little “procedure” now and then, what of it? Dear Alice.

At a school dance in the autumn of my last year of school, I managed to shove my tongue into a girl’s mouth. Word had it that she’d let you ride her if you bought her a lemonade. Two boys had claimed success by this method. Later, outside leaning against Purple Face’s car, while couples danced inside to Dana’s “All Kinds of Everything,” my hands first encountered female breasts, “boozums” as they were known in the school patois. She made it difficult for me. I was forced to beg. How curiously yielding they were, falling around my desperate fingers, without their upholstery, pendulous and weighty. She allowed me to kiss them, and suddenly it all became deadly serious, and I tried to concentrate on my breathing to prevent the impending climax in my unfashionable trousers, but as my hands began to wander southward, she prissily slapped me away with the, I suspect, well-rehearsed line: “A girl has to draw the line somewhere, and my line is drawn around my waist.”

She pushed me away from her and reorganized her bra and vest and shirt and sweater and coat (it was winter), and I felt upset and confused and tried to kiss her again and get her to reconsider, but she complained it was cold and walked back into the hormone-drenched hall. I wanted to follow her and to apologize, but I wasn’t sure what I had done wrong, just that she had made me feel wrong, and bad. Not knowing what else to do, I burst into tears and masturbated and cursed the little cow, and felt better. My first pre-sexual sexual encounter. I should have reckoned with the braggadocio of the schoolboy. It was clear to me that nobody had ever broached her second line of defense.