I had no idea what I was going to do with my life, but Father Daniel took me aside and counselled that my grades were good enough for university and that I could always come back to the school to teach when I had my degree. He came to my rescue once more and offered to pay my college fees and found me a bedsit in Rathmines.
It took quite a while to get used to living alone and preparing food for myself. Up till then, my life had been organized with military precision. I had become institutionalized in my years at boarding school. I was not used to being alone. I wrote to my father telling him of my new address, but received no reply. I worked in a fruit market early mornings and weekends to support myself and to keep myself occupied, but college life was enjoyable nonetheless. A lot of students were living away from home and I could pretend to be like everybody else. I was not an outstanding student by any means, although I was top of the class in French. Trying to work and socialize on my meagre earnings meant that study was sometimes neglected, but I managed to earn respectable grades despite that.
Having had a taste of freedom, I knew for sure that I could not go back to the school, nor had I the temperament for teaching.
By early 1973, I was dating Laura. Wild and beautiful Laura. So different from the other girls. I loved her, I thought. Maybe if we had stayed in Dublin that summer, everything would have turned out differently; maybe we would be married, happily ever after married.
As my second-year exams approached, Laura hatched a plan for us to spend a summer abroad on a working holiday. I thought it was a pipe dream, but Laura wrote to farms and vineyards and canning factories all over Europe looking for jobs and eventually got a response from a farm in Aquitaine. We were invited to an estate in a tiny town called Clochamps. There was a chateau and a vineyard, an olive grove and an orchard. It sounded ideal. Mindful of my previous summers in captivity, I was eager to travel, expand my horizons and see what the world had to offer, and also to spend time with Laura. The plan, of course, was somewhat derailed by Laura’s parents, who, although fond of me, did not approve of the two of us going off together by ourselves. However, there was nobody more determined than Laura, who persuaded her brother Michael and five others to join us. Chaperones, in the eyes of her parents. It was to be paid work with accommodation included, and thankfully, Father Daniel agreed to lend me the fare to get there.
I loved it from the moment I arrived. I was used to manual labour from my extracurricular job in the market, and while the others took a little while to adjust, I found it relatively easy. Irish summers could be grey, damp and miserable, but here the sun shone every day and although we could see marvellous lightning storms at night at the other end of our valley, the rain did not fall in Clochamps. My college mates complained of heat and sunburn, but I easily acclimatized. The meals provided gratis were simple but excellent, wine was free too, and Laura and I easily found time and space to be intimate away from her brother and the others.
The elderly owner of Chateau d’Aigse befriended me early on. I translated for the others. My spoken and written French were good, and he was genuinely interested in me and wanted to know what I was studying, how I intended to use my degree, my plans for the future. After two weeks, Monsieur asked if I would be interested in doing some transcribing work for him. I readily agreed, thinking that the office work would involve typing invoices or some kind of record keeping. That is what he led his daughter to believe. He asked for my discretion and overpaid me. He introduced me to his grandson, Jean-Luc, the most beautiful and charming child I will ever know.
On the first day I reported for duty in the library, Jean-Luc was there also and Monsieur asked me to take a seat while he read his grandson a story. I was intrigued. Jean-Luc formally stepped forward and shook my hand. I knelt down to his eye level and returned his greeting with a little bow. He laughed and looked up at his grandfather and, pointing at me, he called me ‘Frown’.
As Monsieur began to tell the story, I watched the boy’s face as he perched on his papi’s knee. He was transfixed by the tale of a happy young prince of a fantastical land and would exclaim in the middle of the telling, would hide his eyes at the arrival of the bad witch, and clap his hands in excitement at our hero’s escape in the end. I realized that Frown was a character who protected the Prince, and that the Prince was clearly modelled on Jean-Luc. I, too, thought the story was wonderful and said so to Monsieur d’Aigse. He was very happy to be complimented and explained that he had written a series of these stories on and off over the last decades, but that they consisted of handwritten notes. He wasn’t even sure how many stories there were. He had developed a palsy in his right hand and could no longer trust his own penmanship. My task, he said, was to type up all these stories to be pasted into some expensive leather-bound books he had bought for the purpose. It was to be our secret. He thought his daughter would disapprove that I was not being used for estate work, but I think she very quickly guessed what I had been employed to do. She did not interfere, however.
As I heard his stories, I thought they were good enough to send to a publisher, but Monsieur insisted that they were written solely for his family and that when Jean-Luc was older, he could decide what to do with them.
Laura began to complain bitterly that I was not spending enough time with her. She was right. I was enjoying myself with my two companions, and on several occasions I was invited to dine with the family. Madame Véronique was a little more distant than her father and son, but I loved being there with them and was reluctant to leave when the working day was done.
I tried to humour Laura, promising that I would devote the next night to her, but I rarely kept those promises. The old man treated me like a son. He thought I was a good man. A family was more seductive than anything she could offer me, although I continued to sleep with her because, after all, a man has needs.
As I set about typing these stories and then laboriously pasting them into the leather-bound books, I found myself growing closer to the old man and the little boy. I was included in their secret world, and they accepted me without question. I could not get enough of their company, and it suddenly seemed to me as if I had somehow been wasting my time with Laura, as if no mere romantic relationship could be worth more than this platonic one between three menfolk who might, in some realm of possibility, have been three generations of the same family. I lost almost total interest in her affection and her vibrancy, and by now used her only for sex. All of the things in which I had previously delighted were now meaningless, as if the spell of the enchantress were broken. This new connection felt somehow purer.
For the first time in my life, I felt able to confide my private thoughts. I told Monsieur of my father’s lack of interest in me. He was clearly appalled and he shook his head in wonder, as if to say, ‘How could a man not be proud of this boy?’ and I loved him for it. He suggested that there was enough transcribing work to keep me busy for more than one summer, and I agreed enthusiastically to return the following year.