The Muse (28 page)

 

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

21

O
live bathed Teresa and burned the filthy smock. She dressed her in her own Aran jumper and a pair of blue silk trousers that Sarah donated. Perhaps the beauty of the blue silk was to distract Teresa, but all it did was make her look incongruous; the luxury compared to the woollen jumper and her bald head. By the time Harold came back late from Malaga, Teresa had been administered two of Sarah's sleeping pills, and she was upstairs in one of the first-­floor bedrooms, fast asleep.

Before she could even tell him what had happened in the town square, Harold unburdened what he'd seen in the city. He was very shaken. The roads were in a terrible state, he said – since the two main bridges had been destroyed, isolating the centre, no one had done anything to fix them. He called it the perverse Buddhism of the Spaniards. Letting fate flow was all very well – but not at the expense of life. For how else could one explain not mending a bridge that might help feed citizens, waiting in the city, let alone the troops?

He'd parked outside and walked in on foot, and when he'd finally made it to the centre, there wasn't much food to be had. No tins at all, no cheese – no cheese! – no cake. He'd managed to find a kilo of sugar and one of weak acorn coffee, a rationed amount of salted cod, some fresh sardines, a box of cigarettes and a rachitic chorizo. He said the place was becoming unrecognizable – where once there were hanging baskets were now bombed buildings, the staring faces of the recent homeless, with nowhere to live and little to eat. Although the hotels were still standing – safe enough, for they were locked at night against marauding gangs – certain parts of the city were now nothing more than a smoking shell.

‘The organization's hopeless,' he said. ‘It's a fucking disaster,' he spat, and his wife and daughter flinched. What was bothering Harold so much – he, who was not from this place, who could leave any moment he wanted?

He told them that the ex-­pats who were staying in the city were holed up in the Regina Hotel, but the vast majority of foreigners were leaving on the second wave of destroyers the British Consulate had sent news of. He saw them down at the dock, their passports in hand, travelling trunks scattered around like a game of dominoes. English, Americans, Argentines, Germans and Chileans, some wealthy-­looking Spaniards. ‘They're saying the red wave will strike them, but it's Mussolini's bombers overhead,' he said. ‘The sea might be the only reliable way of sourcing food from now on. I don't see, with those bridges down, how it's all going to get in.'

‘We're too far from the sea here for that to be of any comfort,' Sarah snapped, picking up the sardines and chorizo and disappearing with them into the pantry. ‘Did you find the flag to purchase, like I asked?' she called.

‘Don't you have a clue?' he shouted back. ‘The air raids, the Italian warships bombing the port? You think I'll find a Union Jack in the middle of that?'

BUT DESPITE MALAGA'S TERRORS, OLIVE
believed it was Teresa who really started to unnerve her parents. Her presence was like a dark mass up in the first-­floor bedroom, and an atmosphere of guilt pervaded the house. Sarah did not know what to do with her, puffing perfume around the girl, bringing all the
Vogue
s and
Harpers
Teresa might desire. On seeing these offerings, Teresa said nothing, fixing Sarah with a surly look. Sarah kept away after that, unwilling to be near such volatility. Harold lugged the gramophone player up the stairs, but she played not one of his crackling jazz records.

By the third day in the finca, Teresa had contracted a fever. She lay in bed, muttering,
Bist du es? Bist du es?
over and over, as Olive dabbed her forehead and prayed a doctor might dare to come. Olive called for Sarah to come and help, but Sarah did not answer. Teresa's expression was fixed, her eyes clamped shut, face swollen with fatigue, her skin pale and clammy like a peeled egg.

There was no news of Isaac. Every night in the village, one of the bar owners would turn his wireless towards the hills, so that all those who might be hiding out there in the woods could keep up with the news. General Queipo de Llano, still broadcasting from Seville, told his listeners that he had fifty thousand Italian troops, three
banderas
of the Foreign Legion, and fifteen thousand North African tribesmen known as the Army of Africa, waiting to come in to Malaga. The report made Olive shiver, but she comforted herself with the idea that Isaac was somewhere near, listening too. She didn't want him to be in the north, she wanted him here.

Teresa's fever broke, and she lay on her back in silence for several more days. At night, listening to the whine of the distant bombers, Olive could hear Teresa moving up and down the corridors, bare-­footed catharsis of pacing – but what did she need, or want? Was this a night-­time vigil to call back her brother? But why, when he was the reason for her humiliation? Olive remembered Teresa's scream of rage in the town square, her look of impotence, her terror as Gregorio clutched her. She wondered if, after all this, Teresa really knew where Isaac was.

But Teresa was buried beneath the memory, mute, curled up on the bed like a foetus, her face towards the wall. She called for no one. It was a trauma none of them knew what to do with. Olive would wake at dawn and stand in front of a blank canvas, unable to lift the brush. She could not escape the image of the chair in the village square, the smock stained with faeces, Teresa's head a dull white glow, as her feet weaved over the finca hallway
,
and her hand gripped Olive's wrist. Fearing she might never paint a picture, nor see Isaac again, Olive was ashamed to realize that she couldn't tell which deprivation struck her deeper.
I have been useful to you
; Isaac's words resounded in her head and she pushed them away.

As the days progressed, Olive waited for the crust of Teresa's silence to crack open. Silence like this was Harold's worst nightmare. He thought ­people should speak, should voice their pain. He became all bluster, trying to force the issue of the prone girl lying up in one of his rooms. But Olive was sure it was coming; she could almost taste the power of Teresa's humiliation in the air, damming up the door of the spare bedroom, soon to break.

Harold said that as soon as Teresa was better and set up back in her cottage, they were going over the border into Gibraltar. As for Isaac, he had made his bed and was going to have to lie in it. Trying to sleep in her own bed in the attic, Olive could barely picture a proper pavement, a cultivated park, the slate roofs of Curzon Street and Berkeley Square wet with rain. To get to London meant to leaping a metaphysical boundary as much as a country's border, and she didn't know if she could, if she even wanted to at all. London might be a different sort of suffocation. If she was truly honest with herself, Olive could admit that there was something life-­affirming about living here, so close to the possibility of real death.

She began to feel responsible for Isaac's disappearance. He had been so angry, when he departed through the orchard that night on the veranda, calling
good luck
before he left. How long ago it seemed now, arriving here under the thin January sun, Isaac laying his hands on that chicken. Olive remembered the provocation she felt in her own body as he broke its neck. He'd given her so much. Had she satisfied him in return? No, she did not think so. When she tried to summon the memory of his hands on her, she found that she could not.

‘Do you think Isaac got away?' Sarah asked her one evening, when it was just her and Olive sitting in the front east room. Harold was in his study, Teresa still upstairs.

Olive rubbed her arms. The firewood was dwindling and they were rationing supplies. ‘I don't know.'

‘I'm sure he did,' Sarah said. ‘I'm sure he caught a train.' Olive noted how well her mother looked, despite the meagre rations, and Teresa's trauma that was threatening to engulf them. It was as if the stressed situation had finally given Sarah a sense of purpose.

‘Do you want to leave, Liv?' Sarah asked.

Olive pulled at a thread on the tatty sofa. Isaac had been right after all. They had come here and they would go again. ‘No,' she said. ‘This is home.'

•

Later that night, Olive heard a knock on her door. ‘Who is it?'

Teresa shuffled forward, hovering on the threshold. She was thinner than ever, and her hair had grown a little bit, but mostly Olive was relieved to see the determined look in Teresa's eyes.

‘Do you know what your father is saying?' Teresa asked.

Olive lay back on the bed. ‘He says many things.'

‘He talks about the fatalism of the Spaniards.'

‘Ignore him.'

‘What he says is not fair.'

‘I know it isn't.'

‘Does he think we are not trying to fight?'

‘He doesn't think that. It's easy when you're an outsider to say these things.'

‘It is not safe.'

‘I know, Tere.'

‘You should go.'

‘I'm not leaving you.'

‘You are not staying for me, señorita. I know why you are still here.' The girls looked at each other. ‘He isn't coming back,' Teresa said.

Olive sat up in the bed. ‘He might.'

Teresa laughed. It was a cracked, bitter sound. ‘You of all ­people should open your eyes.'

‘I should say they're pretty bloody open, thank you very much. More than most of the English back home.'

Teresa walked slowly into the room, running her hand over the top of
Rufina and the Lion.
‘My brother has done damage,' she said.

‘To the village?'

‘To this house.'

‘What do you mean? I'm the one who's responsible.'

‘I would like to thank you,' Teresa said. ‘For taking me away from Jorge and Gregorio.'

‘I wouldn't have done anything else.'

‘I have tried to fight.'

‘I know you have.'

‘But it is hard. It is like fighting yourself. And there are times I don't see why we should have to. Why should we have to fight?'

‘I don't know the answer to that, Tere.'

‘If you go, Olive – could I go too?'

Olive hesitated. Her father had no plans to take Teresa with them. ‘Do you have papers?'

Teresa made an unconscious gesture with her hand, patting her head where the scabs were beginning to heal. ‘No.'

There was a silence. ‘Let me neaten that situation,' said Olive.

‘What does it mean – “
neaten
”?'

Olive got off the bed and came towards her, putting her hands on the other girl's arms. ‘You need a new notebook of words. Here, I won't hurt you. I'll be gentle.'

Placing Teresa on the edge of the bed, she used a razor taken from her father's dressing table, and slowly shaved away the remaining patches of hair on Teresa's head. She rubbed calamine over the cuts as Teresa sat motionless, looking out towards the window, listening to the far-­off crumps of the guns in Malaga.

‘This is my brother's fault,' Teresa said dully.

Olive held the razor above Teresa's head. ‘Well, we've all been a bit foolish, haven't we? And you could blame it on your father. And he'd blame it on the government. And they'd blame it on the last government. I don't think Isaac meant for this to happen to you.'

‘Isaac thinks about the land, but forgets his doorstep,' Teresa said.

‘Isaac is a good man, Tere.'

‘You think so?'

‘He has a conscience.'

Teresa laughed. ‘Does he?'

‘You know where your brother is, don't you? I promise won't tell anyone. I just need to know.'

Teresa turned again to the window, her shoulders sagging. ‘I cannot tell you. It is better that you do not know.'

She heard a
snip.
Horrified, she turned to Olive and saw that the other girl had removed an enormous chunk of her own hair. ‘What are you doing?' Teresa said, as Olive cut away another handful.

‘You think I've just been playing a game down here, don't you?' Olive said.

‘Stop with your hair. Stop it.'

Teresa went to grab for the razor, but Olive pointed it in her direction, as warning to keep back. She began to hack and hack at herself, tufts of her thick hazel-­coloured hair floating to the floor. Teresa watched her, mesmerised. ‘Now you shave my head,' Olive said.

‘You are crazy.'

‘No, I'm not. What do I have to do to make ­people take me seriously?'

‘Having the same hair as me does not give you the same grief as me.'

‘Teresa, just do it.'

As she delicately scraped away every last hair on Olive's head, Teresa tried to hide her tears. She could not remember the last time she had cried in front of someone. She thought about that first painting of Olive's she had swapped onto the easel, Saint Justa becoming a woman in a wheatfield. Isaac had been convinced she'd done it because of the kiss she'd witnessed against the rusty gate, that Teresa was punishing him out of jealousy, taking away his opportunity to shine. Teresa had to admit, seeing what happened between them had hurt her at the time, making her feel left out and ignored, although she couldn't exactly articulate why. But she also knew her impulse had always been something more deep-­rooted, not really connected to Isaac, something else Teresa couldn't quite understand herself. The nearest way to describe it was as a bond she had made for herself, and about Olive being rightfully rewarded.

‘Tere, I'm going to ask you again. Do you know where he is?' Olive said.