Daughter of Catalonia (2 page)

The upper floor of the house was hushed with the expectancy of death. Downstairs, in the drawing room, the hall, the dining room, daily routines seemed to continue as normal. The usual predictable menus at breakfast, lunch and dinner were served at the same set times as ever. Grandfather spent his days as always in his study muttering over the daily news, or in the garden, harrying the jobbing gardener. Grandmama moved within her small kingdom with her usual gentle grace, drank tea in her little sitting room reading the same society journals, and occasionally received well-wishers bringing flowers and small tokens for Elise. In the room above, Elise lay unheeding in her heavy mahogany bed, while nameless nurses came and went quietly on their shifts, so as not to disturb anyone on the floor below with the reminder of death.

Madeleine sat hourly by her mother’s side, watching her, counting her laboured breaths, doing nothing because there was nothing to be done, nothing that was not better done by the nurses, brisk and forbidding in their starched collars. Once a day Grandmama would visit her daughter, wreathed in perfume, stroking Elise’s hand with butterfly strokes as she made kind enquiries of the nurse. Grandfather never came.

Occasionally Grandmama would try to persuade Madeleine to leave her mother’s bedside for a while, suggesting that she needed some fresh air and some company. Should she maybe not take a walk, or come downstairs next time there were visitors? This self-imposed vigil was surely unhealthy and unnecessary. But Madeleine conceded only a physical presence at mealtimes, eating without tasting, and answering questions posed by form with the standard answers they deserved. And after each meal she returned upstairs to her mother.

Elise spent less and less time awake now. When she woke, she would occasionally be fully conscious and vitally aware of her daughter’s presence, and it was these rare moments which Madeleine lived for. At other times she would lie semi-comatose, her eyes unfocused, in a world between sleep and life, occasionally at peace, to Madeleine’s eyes, but more frequently twitching involuntarily in a silent underworld of pain. As increasing pain drew her out of sleep, her face would constrict sharply, and she would come fully awake, her hands gripping Madeleine with an intensity which left small blue bruises on Madeleine’s wrists. The nurse would then
emerge from behind her desk, moving Madeleine gently aside, a syringe in her hand with some dose to help Elise back into the sleep of the near dead, to begin the cycle again. Did she dream, Madeleine wondered? Did her dreams take her back to younger days of sunshine and passion? Did that time still exist for her?

Today Dr Jenkins, musty as ever in his pre-war jacket with its newly sewn elbows, had made what might be his last visit to Elise’s bedside. He had listened to her breathing, checked her pulse, and conferred in a hushed voice with the nurse, then had gone to break the news to Grandfather that his daughter would probably not live through the night. Robert had been sent for and was due today. At some point, Madeleine presumed, they would all come up to stand over the impending corpse. But for now she had
Maman
to herself. Even the brisk day nurse had gone downstairs to eat, and Madeleine sat alone in fragile stillness listening to her mother’s shallow breathing, stroking the crumpled skin on her thin, tired hands.

The covers on Elise’s bed were stretched so tight they appeared to constrict her uneven breathing even further. Leaning over the high bed, Madeleine loosened them, disturbing the marble finish of the sheets and wondering what reaction she might get from nurse.
Maman
lay quiet on the heavy pillows, her still beautiful golden hair framing ashen, sunken cheeks.

Only forty-two years old, and until last year the most beautiful English rose, in spite of her faded clothes and worn expression. She had been a broken rose for many
years, Madeleine thought as she watched her, and now no petals remained. She had done nothing to fight her illness, although it was hard to believe anything could have been done for her. Cancer was a word of dread and foreboding, and Elise had relieved the family of many months of fear by hiding the illness and her weight loss, appearing merely to be losing her youth as she had long since lost her hope.

The nurse came quietly into the room, checked swiftly on Elise, and nodded at her sleeping form. She turned to Madeleine. ‘I’ve had my lunch, Miss Madeleine, and now I’ll sit with your mother. You go down to lunch now. Mrs Hopkins tells me your grandparents are already in the dining room. Go down now, and then maybe your mother will wake when you return.’

‘No, no thank you, I’m not hungry,’ Madeleine said, with a quick shake of her head. ‘She may wake any moment and I want to be here.’ It may be the last time, she wanted to say.

The nurse pursed her lips. ‘As you say, Miss.’

She moved over to the window table which now served as a desk and dispensary, and placed a new vial next to the syringe. The low-lying spring sun shone in watery shafts through the new leaves on the trees outside, and picked out the metal dish which held the syringe, and the plain glass jug of water on the table. Not a mote of dust floated in the sunlight.

‘They’ve sent for your brother to come home from Oxford,’ offered the nurse. ‘I think the driver went for him, so he should be here quite soon.’

Madeleine acknowledged with a brief smile, but her throat constricted at the thought of Robert seeing their mother at the end. He was a surprisingly fragile creature, despite his youthful muscle and careful poise. He was at once commanding and childlike, and his last visit home had tested his hard-imposed self-control, flaying open old wounds which he had long ago sealed over with a studied British reserve. Madeleine had seen in his eyes the beginnings of fear, and the hands which held his mother’s had trembled.
Maman
had come unusually awake for Robert, reaching out to touch him, each movement of her eyes a caress. Robert, who was the copy of his father, the closest living image of the dark, broad, handsome Spaniard who had defined Elise’s existence. Only Robert’s skin was fairer, and his hair a rich brown in place of his father’s black mane, but still his colouring was not fully British and irked their grandfather. Madeleine shared this smooth Mediterranean skin which would not freckle and turned olive in the sun, with the same almond eyes, full lips and mass of dark hair, but her face was longer, slimmer, more like her mother’s. It was Robert, with his broad, planed cheeks and electric smile, who personified Luis, their photos sitting side by side on
Maman
’s dressing table.

At Madeleine’s side came a tiny flutter of movement, and Elise opened her eyes, gazing straight ahead, in the position where her sheets held her imprisoned. Madeleine leant forward so that her head was above her mother’s.

‘
Maman
?’

‘
Petite
!’ Her mother smiled, a half smile with the
merest shadow of the old magic. Madeleine reached for her hand.

‘Robert is coming. You’ll see him this afternoon.’

Another smile, then a sharp grimace of pain, and two words, ‘Ah, Robert.’

‘He’ll be here. He’s on his way.’ And God willing you will be awake to see him. Let this not be the last awakening, thought Madeleine.

The grimace of pain had been enough to make the nurse act quickly. She approached the bed, a full syringe in her hand.

‘Not yet!’ Madeleine protested, then leant again towards her mother. She squeezed the shrivelled hand gently, and smoothed a stray lock of hair from her forehead.

‘Would you like to drink something,
Maman
?’ She offered a glass of water.

Again a precious half smile. ‘Thank you.’

Madeleine put her arm around Elise’s shoulders and raised her feather-light body a little. As she drank, a tiny, painful sip, Madeleine held her close. There was nothing she needed to say to
Maman
now. To have her awake was enough.

Elise leant back against her, and another spasm of pain twisted her face. This time the nurse stepped forward with iron determination, and Madeleine eased her mother back onto the pillows, and then watched helplessly as the syringe entered her arm and she sank again into oblivion.

‘You might as well go and eat now,’ the nurse repeated.

Madeleine sat for a further minute, then nodded
dumbly. There was no point in staying now. She picked up her cardigan and went downstairs.

In the gloomy green dining room, her grandparents were already seated at table. Thankfully this was Sunday, cook’s day off, and a simple cold buffet had been laid out on the sideboard. Self-service lunch, and she could arrive late without a scold. Grandfather was dressed for church. A tall, bent figure, with skin as dry as paper and joints stiff and sore, he sat awkwardly at the head of the table, and glowered at the array of pills set out before him in a regimented line.

In the drawing room there was a photograph of her grandfather on the day of his graduation from King’s College in Oxford, tall, lean and very serious in his robes, and next to it another silver-framed photograph of him some years later with Grandmama, during their courting days in London, Grandfather in a morning suit, looking very dashing next to the dainty,
high-born
Parisian
demoiselle
who had secured his future as a society lawyer. The grave young man in the first photograph showed hints of the determination which had allowed Paul Gresham to climb so fast, but no hint yet of the careful charm which won him his wealthy clients, and the grace and diplomacy he used to rescue them from their indiscretions. Grandmama opened the doors for him, and he treasured his elegant French bride and her connections like a fragile piece of antique lace, working endlessly to give her the social life she took for granted. As a child Madeleine had always been drawn to the silver-framed couple in that photograph in the
drawing room: they were almost deliciously elegant but curiously superficial.

There were no photographs of the grimmer years of the Great War, but in the 1920s there were more pictures of them dancing and parading in Gay Paris. Where were their children, Madeleine wondered, during these visits to Paris? John and Michael, and little Elise, of whom a group photo sat on a different table, the boys in starched collars, Elise in little girl’s ribbons, gravely posing together for a studio camera. There were no more photos of disgraced Elise, but there was one of John and Michael again, as young men, dangling an enormous fish proudly from a hook. Michael must have died soon after, thought Madeleine, in that road accident no one was allowed to mention. And then John: there was a final picture of John, in his uniform, handsome and serious, placed next to the DSO that had been awarded to him posthumously – just one more war hero who had never returned.

Had it been this final grief which drove Grandfather to isolate himself in the country, and turned him into the hardened fossil who crabbed at life, consumed by the iniquities of tied tenants and the outrages of socialism? Madeleine had known no other side of him. From the moment of her arrival in England with her mother and brother, three windblown, miserable refugees from occupied France, she had lived with her grandparents in this house, and Grandfather had required silence, conformity and above all ‘Englishness’ from these barbarian grandchildren previously raised in what he deemed a bohemian, Communist conspiracy. That
past was dead, and their lives were henceforth his to command.

Grandmama was different. She paid little attention to Grandfather’s outbursts and simply arranged his small comforts, and at sixty-eight still radiated elegance. Amid her velvets and silks, soft leather gloves and laced corselettes, she stood out among her Berkshire neighbours in their tweeds and riding suits, but managed to be accepted, and even played a part in parish activities, provided nothing was too strenuous or demanding. She fluttered and murmured in French, and unlike him was happy to hear her grandchildren speaking French with their mother. But like Grandfather, she could never forgive her daughter for the crime of marrying Luis Garriga during a supposedly well-controlled visit to her aunt’s family in Paris. Nor could she forgive her for being alive when her two beloved sons were dead.

And as for Luis Garriga’s Mediterranean children, they had to work their way into a place in this family. Robert had achieved approval when he was picked for the rugby team at Winchester, and became his grandfather’s pet when he later chose to study law at Oxford, following in Paul Gresham’s footsteps. He rode well, talked fishing to Grandfather, and was popular among all their social group. Madeleine knew how hard he had worked at this character. Outgoing by nature, yearning for acceptance, and struggling with the elusive legacy and identity of a father he couldn’t remember, Robert had found safety and refuge finally under his grandfather’s gradually unfolding wing. Paul Gresham
needed a new son, and Robert had won his wings as the family’s future.

Madeleine had always been of far less interest. The family may have needed the little boy who came to them so young and unformed from France, but his brown, passionate sister was older, and spiky and unbending. Six years old, speaking Catalan and French in preference to English, her memories of ‘home’ were strong, and she spent her days with her mother, prattling endlessly about Vermeilla, and Papa, and Uncle Philippe, hiding from her grandparents.

When the news came of Papa’s death in 1944, and
Maman
became so terribly withdrawn, it was decided it would be better if Madeleine was sent to school. The experience certainly cured her of her childish prattle and exuberance. School life surrounded by girls called Margaret and Audrey, Elizabeth and Susan, all with identical, insular backgrounds, was worse than living with Grandfather. None of the girls, in these post-war years, had ever left English shores. None had names like Madeleine, and they pronounced the name with exaggerated care, as something exotic and potentially suspect.

Madeleine reacted like a porcupine, curling her soul into a tight ball, with nothing but sharp quills directed at all around her. The girls learnt to keep their distance, and Madeleine learnt to keep hers. She wanted to shout at them. ‘Madalena! My real name is actually Madalena!’ She could imagine them murdering the name in their upper-class accents, and called up memories of her father’s deep voice, his laughing face inches from her own
as he swung her in his arms. ‘Madalena,’ he would say, ‘Madalena
bella
. Your beautiful eyes will win all hearts.’ But now Madeleine learnt to stay in the background, and nursed her memories in private. At weekends she was allowed home, and would cling to her silent mother, willing her to get better.