Unravelling Oliver Read Online Free Page B

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 had been destroyed. The chateau had been stripped of its valuables, but not its majesty. The rumour 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 jack-booted 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.
    There were few servants as such, but there were several labourers living on the estate who seemed more than willing to help out with any job at hand. I got the impression that all the neighbours had good reason to be grateful to this noble family. This was a house of faded gentry, something we were well used to in Ireland at the time.
    We lived in dormitory-style quarters, tent-like structures erected for the season in a field below the terrace, overlooked by the grand Chateau d’Aigse. We would eat with the rest of the estate workers at the communal outdoor table. The local field hands were a lively bunch from the nearby village of Clochamps and surrounding areas. They were a good-humoured bunch.
    There were also some South African workers there that
summer. I had never talked to black people before, had hardly seen one in Ireland, but these boys didn’t engage with us at all and kept themselves to themselves. I tried talking to them in gestures of friendship, but they kept their eyes to the ground, as if afraid. I was fascinated, I must admit. We wondered why the black guys didn’t stay on the estate like the rest of us, like their white manager. I’m not sure, but I imagine they were even younger than us. Although I had attended a student rally for the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement, I had never before encountered apartheid’s ugliness. I heard that they had been sent over to learn how to plant a vineyard and take back some plants; the climate in the Western Cape was similar, apparently. I’d love to have known more about them and their circumstances, but they had very little French and virtually no English, and like everything else in those days, it was rude to ask. Their white ‘manager’ was an absolute prick called Joost. He had brought them to France to learn what he was too stupid and lazy to learn himself. He did no work and instead spent his day drinking and shouting instructions at them, physically beating them if they made a mistake. He tried to ingratiate himself with the rest of us by making crude jokes about his countrymen’s colour and stupidity. France was a country still recovering from its own shame about sitting back and allowing the segregation and persecution of the Jews, and the locals were not going to let that happen again. We all protested to Madame, who eventually was forced to eject them from the estate.
    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 that bit lower when we were young. We thought it was all amusingly exotic.
    The work, however, was gruelling to begin with, before we all