The Return (16 page)

Read The Return Online

Authors: Victoria Hislop

Tags: #British - Spain, #Psychological Fiction, #Family, #British, #Spain - History - Civil War; 1936-1939 - Social Aspects, #General, #Granada (Spain), #Historical, #War & Military, #Families, #Fiction, #Spain

BOOK: The Return
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That evening, Sonia met him in the hallway. She said nothing about his absence the previous night.
 
‘I think we should eat together tonight,’ she said.
 
‘OK. If you want.’
 
‘I’ll do some pasta,’ she offered as James brushed past her into the bathroom.
 
They never got as far as eating the
tagliatelli putanesca
. Before Sonia had even finished preparing the sauce, James was draining the first bottle of wine.The touchpaper had already been ignited.
 
As she poured herself a glass from a second bottle, which was already uncorked and standing on the table, she could sense James’s aggression.
 
‘So, been dancing lately?’ he slurred.
 
‘Yes,’ Sonia replied, trying to keep herself calm, neutral.
 
‘You must be a bloody professional by now.’
 
She sat down, playing with the stem of her glass and took a deep breath. A glass of wine had emboldened her too.
 
‘I’m starting lessons on Fridays now,’ she said.
 
‘Fridays . . . That’s kind of the weekend, isn’t it?’
 
In spite of herself, she began to trickle oil onto the flames. ‘It’s the day that they hold intermediate lessons. I’m not really a beginner now,’ she continued.
 
‘Yeah, but Fridays will be a pain in the arse. It’ll bugger up Friday nights, Sonia.’
 
James’s tone to her now was friendly but slightly mocking, and she found this strange mix mildly threatening.
 
James poured himself another glass and slammed the bottle down on the table.
 
‘It’s a fucking
nuisance
, Sonia!’
 
‘You don’t need to put it like that, James.’
 
‘Well, tough! That’s the way I see it,’ he slurred. ‘This dancing thing just doesn’t fucking well fit with our life, Sonia.’
 
Our life, thought Sonia, turning this pair of words over in her head.
Our
life?
 
The words sounded alien to her. She couldn’t identify with them any more than she could picture an existence without dance. There was a degree of menace in a six-foot drunk, even sitting at his own kitchen table in a pinstripe suit. He rocked back on his chair and glared at Sonia. Wine splashed onto his yellow silk tie and she watched the spreading stain. At all costs she wanted to avoid confrontation.
 
The pasta was cooked. Sonia switched off the gas and just as she lifted the pan she heard James roar, ‘
WELL?
Are you going to give it up or not?’
 
The volume of his voice almost made her drop the pan. Scalding water splashed across the floor and, realising that her hands were shaking violently, she put the pan down on the draining board.
 
‘Look, I don’t really feel like eating at the moment,’ she said. ‘I’m going to have an early night.’
 
She had genuinely lost her appetite and left the room, nauseous with fear and shocked by the realisation that she was married to someone who now instilled such terror in her.
 
It looked as if the new ‘normality’ of sleeping in separate rooms would continue. A knot tightened in her stomach. She had never imagined it would get to this.
 
The next afternoon an envelope icon appeared on her mobile phone. It was a text from Maggie asking her to come out to Spain for a few days. It took Sonia less than a second to write her three letter answer. There was nothing pressing in her diary and another trip to Granada would be a welcome escape. She could do with a few days to mull things over, and she would visit the old man at the bar. It was just the opportunity she had wanted.
 
Chapter Eleven
 
NEAT ROWS OF olive trees, strong vines and ripening vegetables chequer-boarded the fields. High in the mountains, snows had gently melted through the last few weeks of March and into April, supplying steady streams of moisture for germination, and now the rich soils were dense with crops. Sunshine, growing in intensity almost by the day, began to ripen strawberries and tomatoes from green to scarlet. Craggy mountains, rolling hills, smudges of white-washed pueblos dotted amongst them and great spreads of cultivation - through the murky aeroplane window, Sonia peered at this landscape, transformed since she last saw it by the early summer warmth.
 
The air-conditioned aircraft left her unprepared for the blast of heat that greeted her as its doors were opened. She blinked as she emerged into the late afternoon sunshine, gusts of warm air circling round her on the tarmac as though a giant hair dryer was targeting her with its hot blast. In that moment, she felt herself begin to thaw. The icy English weather of the past few months had chilled her to the core.
 
A taxi whisked Sonia into Granada’s city centre, giving her a glimpse of the Alhambra as she passed. The driver was in a hurry, swerving between other cars in the rush-hour traffic, impatient to return to the airport for another flat-fare passenger.
 
‘I can’t take you there,’ he had told her grumpily when she showed him the address. He had the manner of someone who thrived on the pleasure of being unhelpful. ‘It’s not possible.’
 
Maggie was living in the Albaicín, the old Arab quarter where the winding cobbled streets were barely wide enough for pedestrians, let alone cars, and the taxi driver peremptorily dropped Sonia off in the Plaza Nueva.
 
She stood in the square and looked about her. One side was lined with cafés, all of them now crowded with people, mostly tourists refreshing themselves with soft drinks and ice creams in a forest of colourful umbrellas advertising beer or Coke. Following Maggie’s directions, she walked up to the church at the far end and climbed some broad stone steps to the side of it.
 
A group of dreadlocked travellers lay across her path, one strumming a guitar, another playing a flute, while a third tossed a ball for his mangy dog. Struggling with her heavy bag, Sonia knocked over one of their cans of beer, spilling its contents down the steps. The guitarist leaped up.
 
Before she had time to react, he wrested the bag from her hands and began to run. Her stomach somersaulted with panic. She started after him, only to find that, at the top of the steps, he stopped dead.
 
‘Please . . .’ he said, with a heavy accent. To her relief and surprise, he carefully set the bag down on the smooth stones.
 
‘
Gracias
,’ she said, covered with confusion, realising now that his intentions were entirely noble.
 
‘
De nada
,’ he said, his handsome, bearded face suffused with a smile.
 
Sonia noted that he could have been little more than eighteen. The bristles hid angelic, almost childlike features.
 
It was only another twenty metres to her destination and the wheels of her bag rattled noisily on the cobbles as she made her way along the Calle Santa Ana, hugging a slim strip of shade. She rang the doorbell to flat 8, at number 32. Beyond the ornate iron-work and the glass of the outer door she could see a hallway tiled from floor to ceiling with bright blue and white tiles. High above her she heard her name. She stepped away from the doorway and looked up.
 
Almost dazzled by the brightness of an azure sky, she saw a silhouette. It was Maggie, leaning precariously over a balcony.
 
‘Sonia!’ she called. ‘Here! Catch!’
 
A bunch of keys landed noisily on the stones.
 
‘It’s the silver one! I’m on the fifth floor!’
 
Sonia let herself in and began to climb the stairs. There was no cherubic boy here.
 
By the time she reached the right floor, she was panting. Maggie stood in the doorway, smiling, exotic in a bright printed kaftan, eyes luminous in her tanned face.
 
‘Sonia! It’s lovely to see you,’ she cried, taking her friend’s suitcase. ‘Come in.’
 
After the brightness of the tiled stairwell, the flat seemed dark. A low-voltage light bulb in the hallway gave out a dim glow and Sonia’s eyes struggled to adjust to the gloom.
 
Maggie’s sitting room was kitted out in Moorish style, with rugs and throws, Arabic lanterns and mobiles of coloured glass that jangled in a breeze that blew lightly through the apartment. Sonia was as charmed by it as by the view out of the huge floor-to-ceiling windows of the River Darro, which ran just below the building, carving a divide between the clustered buildings of Granada’s oldest
barrio
.
 
‘It’s heavenly,’ said Sonia. ‘How on earth did you find a place like this?’
 
‘Through a friend of a friend of this gorgeous man I met when I went into the estate agency to find somewhere to rent.’
 
‘Gorgeous man?’ enquired Sonia, immediately picking up on something in Maggie’s tone of voice.
 
‘Oh, yes, Carlos,’ she replied, not quite blushing. ‘He owns the estate agency.’
 
‘But what about Paco?’
 
‘I’m sure you can guess. He came to meet me at the airport when I arrived and we spent a couple of nights together. And then after that it was excuses, excuses, excuses. But really, in the end I didn’t mind,’ she said philosophically. ‘I sort of owe it to him for making me come out here.’
 
‘So it’s OK, is it?’ Sonia said cautiously.
 
‘OK?’ exclaimed Maggie breathlessly. ‘It’s so much more than OK.They really know how to live life here. It’s quite exhausting, though, going to bed at three every night when you have to get up to work. But I love it. I absolutely love everything about it.’
 
‘And what about this Carlos?’ asked Sonia teasingly.
 
‘Well, he seems quite keen.We’ve seen quite a lot of each other. And he likes dancing . . .’ Maggie mentioned the latter as though it was the most important of all.
 
For several hours they lounged on low, bright cushions and drank mint tea. They had so much to tell each other, having spoken only once on the telephone since Maggie had moved to Granada. Sonia mentioned James’s worsening drink habit and his resentment of her dancing, but she did not reveal how fragile things had become.
 
The sun had gone down by the time they went off into the city in search of tapas.
 
Later that evening, leaving Maggie to meet her new boyfriend, Sonia went to El Barril. She hoped to catch Miguel before he closed for the night. She smiled to herself as she thought of the conclusion James had jumped to when she had received that postcard all those weeks ago.
 
It was almost eleven thirty when Sonia turned up there, and she decided to go inside to find him. She could see on his face an immediate flash of recognition.
 
‘Yes, yes!’ he exclaimed. ‘You are the beautiful English lady.You have come back!’
 
‘Of course. And thank you for the postcard.’
 
‘It reached you!’
 
‘How did you know my name?’ she said, holding out her hand for him to shake, which he did with great enthusiasm.
 
‘I caught a glimpse of your signature when you were writing a postcard,’ he admitted guiltily. ‘It stuck in my mind.’
 
‘Oh!’ she said, rather surprised.
 
He seemed to have slowed down a little in the weeks since she had been there. She was warmed by his welcome and settled herself on to a stool at the bar. All the other customers had gone.
 
‘Are you here to do more dancing?’ he asked. ‘You must want coffee - and a brandy?’ Before Sonia had replied to either question, steam was gurgling noisily through a jug of milk and conversation was temporarily precluded.
 
While Miguel was busy, she got up and strolled as nonchalantly as she could towards the display of pictures on the wall. There they were, just as before, the proud bullfighter and, next to him, the dancer. Sonia went up close and stared into the girl’s eyes. No, she could not be absolutely certain. The features were similar to those of the woman in the photo she had squirrelled away in her wallet but they did not appear identical.The dress in her own photo was reminiscent of those in the framed pictures, and yet not exactly the same.
 
Miguel came up behind her with her coffee and handed it to her.
 
‘You like these pictures, don’t you?’ he said.
 
Sonia hesitated. ‘Like’ wasn’t really adequate to describe the effect they had on her, but she couldn’t tell Miguel the truth. It would sound so far-fetched.

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