Autumn in Catalonia (12 page)

Joana looked at her, and in the gloom of the landing her eyes were unreadable.

‘Do you think I don’t know?’ she said.

When they came down to breakfast the following morning, it was to be told that Joana had left soon after dawn with Toni in the car.

‘Up to something, that’s what she was,’ Paula grumbled, as she plonked food grumpily on the table. Paula didn’t like upheaval, and what with unexplained guests arriving by night, and then her mistress getting up at a time she’d never seen, and calling for Toni, poor Paula was at sixes and sevens.

‘She said to tell you she wouldn’t be back today, and not to fret, and I’m to serve you the lamb for lunch.’ And with that Paula lumbered off, oblivious to the amazed trio she left behind her.

Carla, Martin and Maria were left to gape at each other over hot rolls and home-made jam. Carla couldn’t help looking speculatively at Martin.

‘Did Mama say anything to you? Do you know where she’s gone?’

But he shook his head, and was clearly as bemused as she was. ‘I can only guess she’s gone down to Girona,’ he said. ‘After all, where else would she have gone?’

Carla nodded. ‘Yesterday she said she had some thinking to do. She had some information she could use against my father, but wasn’t sure how best to do so. Well I guess the night brought her some counsel. I just hope she hasn’t put herself in danger in any way. My God, that woman can be frustrating! Why can’t she share anything with us?’

It was Maria who responded, putting her coffee cup down placidly before wiping the corner of her mouth with her napkin. ‘My goodness, but that’s good coffee! Your mother’s a strong-minded woman, Carla – some might even say pig-headed. Her daughter reminds me of her! But she has thought about whatever she’s doing, I’m sure. We can only be patient, and enjoy this coffee, and this view, and wait for whatever she has to tell us.’

The wait should have been stressful, but in the end the day was oddly soothing. They were just a few kilometres from Sant Galdric, and Carla caught her grandmother looking frequently down the valley towards where the village stood hidden from them by the trees and the turn of the hills. Without a car the village might as well be a hundred times more distant. Maria was too old to want to make the journey on foot, and for Carla it was out of the question, even if they weren’t supposed to be in hiding.

But the closeness of the village was in the air, and they talked about it, or Grandma did, and Carla and Martin
listened. They learnt about their common grandparents, about the girl who’d seemed to have a fancy for Victor, but who had her head turned by the doctor’s son from the next village, about the inspirational young teacher who’d come to the village out of the blue, and stayed for three years, long enough to set up a bond with Luis so strong that when he left he took Luis with him, to college in Barcelona.

‘Our father hoped that Luis would come back and take over the village school himself,’ Maria explained to them. ‘But Luis had other, bigger ideas. He couldn’t have been happy in Sant Galdric, not forever, but he was good to us all, and visited my mother often enough to stay her favourite!’

And did Victor never find another girl, Carla wanted to know? Not unless you counted a long-standing admiration for that same woman shopkeeper who’d helped Martin find a lift to the hill house the other day.

‘But she’s a fine-looking woman!’ Martin exclaimed. ‘What stopped Victor from pursuing that interest?’

‘Her husband!’ Maria chuckled. ‘No, Victor was better single, I think, and adoring the ladies from afar! He’s got some set old ways, has Victor, and likes his life just so.’

Carla and Martin walked after lunch along the forest tracks, and above them to a sunny crest where the view fell away before them in endless shades of green. Here Carla didn’t walk the way she walked in Girona, urgently, restlessly, driving herself to forget. Here she walked slowly, stopping to examine the late flowers below the cork trees, and following the crickets that jumped across her path. The last time she had walked in the hills was last winter
with Luc and his mother and brother. That had been a boisterous tramp over rough ground and through streams, full of action, full of talk. Here she simply meandered, with Martin by her side as though he had always been there, and with Luc, who seemed to walk with them. She even felt the touch of him by her side, and he was beside her all evening.

It was maybe because he seemed so close that she didn’t get that awful feeling of losing him as she came out of sleep in the morning. Friday dawned serene and glorious over the hill house. Carla’s window framed the sweep of the valley below, and the far summits, hazed peaks of indigo, which the dawn light gradually lit with flame to distinguish them from the sky. She’d slept with her curtains open, so that the dawn woke her slowly, and she lay in a peaceful limbo, watching the advancing light from her bed.

For the first time in months her dreams of Luc receded without leaving her in gut-wrenching dismay. A morning as magnificent as this had to bring something positive, and surely Mama was going to come up with something today.

All morning she and Martin were on the fidget, and by the afternoon Martin was driven to help Grandma roll some wool for knitting, because he was simply unable to sit still. When they heard the car at last, Martin leapt up and shot through the house, leaving the wool lying half ravelled. Carla was about to follow him when Grandma stopped her.

‘Sit still,
carinyo
,’ she urged her, with some humour. ‘We all need to hear what Joana is going to say, and there is no way I’m going to go running anywhere! Or if you must move, just go and ask Paula to bring us some coffee.’

So Carla contained herself, and waited with Grandma
on the veranda. She was pleased that Grandma had worn a flowered scarf today – it would hopefully please Mama. We need Mama on our side!

But there was no sign that Joana even noticed as she whisked out with Martin a couple of minutes later, and threw herself into a rattan chair.

‘Phew!’ she expelled, as she threw an envelope onto the table in front of her, knocking a ball of wool to the floor. ‘Well, Carla, there’s your evidence!’

She had tense little lines round her eyes, and her hands twitched restlessly, fluttering the air, and creating little corresponding currents of tension in Carla.

Carla reached across the table to look more closely at the envelope, but didn’t dare touch it. Joana looked up at her.

‘You look a great deal better, my love,’ she said.

‘I’ve been catching up on sleep,’ Carla acknowledged, and then, after a nervous pause, ‘So how was Girona? You saw my father?’

Joana nodded. ‘Yes, and what I had seen in his safe was still there, thank God. You see, it came to me the other night, while I was trying to think what to do, that the evidence I had wasn’t quite what we needed. I needed more and I had to go to Girona to get it.’

She broke off as Paula brought the coffee, and drank her first cup straight back, proffering it to Paula to be refilled. She took a biscuit too, and ate it hungrily. Carla didn’t remember ever seeing her mother so on edge.

‘Bring me some champagne, Paula,’ she ordered, peremptorily, and Paula grunted and went inside.

‘Sergi is being blackmailed,’ she continued, after Paula had left. ‘You see, I was aware that a man has been coming to see Sergi from time to time that he didn’t want me to meet. I saw the man when he came the first time, and I couldn’t help being suspicious of his visits. Thankfully Sergi has no idea how aware of his life I am! And he doesn’t know I have the combination to his safe either! Well, there was a letter in the safe – the letter the man wrote to ask for his first appointment.’

She looked around at her audience. She certainly had their full attention. ‘I’m not saying this is true, but it is alleged that Sergi arranged for one of his political rivals to have a car accident, a hit-and-run affair.’ She hesitated, but then continued, ‘It was simply accepted as an accident at the time, at least officially. But then …’ Joana paused again, and when she continued she spoke with some difficulty. ‘But then it seems that Sergi had the man he’d employed to do the hit-and-run disposed of to kill off the evidence. That’s what the blackmailer says, anyway. The hit-and-run driver had misgivings about Sergi after he’d done his job. Sergi must have frightened him, or somehow given some sign of what he was planning, so the driver left a letter with a friend, with all the details, to be used against Sergi if anything should happen to him.’

‘And when the driver was killed, the friend decided to use the letter to blackmail Sergi, rather than give it to the police?’ Martin asked.

‘Exactly!’

Martin shivered. ‘Dangerous, surely, if you knew what Sergi had already been capable of?’

‘Not so far, it seems,’ Joana answered. ‘Sergi was still paying before the summer, and all the evidence of the blackmail is still there.’

‘So what’s in that envelope is …’

‘Copies of everything the blackmailer sent to Sergi – his own letter asking for the meeting, and the photostat he made of the driver’s evidence against Sergi. I had to go back, you see! I’d written down names and stuff from the letters, thinking that one day this information could be useful, if things kept getting worse with Sergi, but I never really thought of how. And I didn’t actually have photostats.’

Carla bit her lip, and held out a hand tentatively towards the envelope. ‘Can I see?’ she asked, and found that her voice stuck a little.

Joana nodded. Carla waited while Paula shuffled back out with a tray of glasses and the inevitable champagne bottle, and then she reached forward and took the envelope onto her lap. She drew out a number of sheets of thin copy paper, which shook flimsily in the breeze – or was it that her hand shook? I don’t want to read this, she thought, but then pulled herself together. Being careful not to let the sheets slip, she flicked through and saw that some were duplicates. Mama had thought to make several copies. There were actually only three pages she needed to read. One was the typed letter from the blackmailer requesting an interview ‘regarding the letter enclosed’. He had a pseudonym, and a
poste restante
mailing address, but surely Sergi would have found out quite soon who his blackmailer was? She moved on to the dead driver’s letter.

This was handwritten in poor, uneducated script, and
took some deciphering, but its content was detailed and just as chilling as Carla had feared. Was it conclusive enough, though? It was only one man’s word, and that man was dead, but there were some facts that could be corroborated, surely? She studied it intently, frowning at the words in an attempt to make them speak to her. Then she shook her head to clear it, and passed the letters to Martin.

‘See what you make of those,’ she said to him, then turned to Joana. ‘There’s a lot of accusation in there, but is there really enough factual evidence to pin the hit-and-run on my father?’

Her voice came out tense but muted, and Joana responded in the same tone. ‘No, probably not, but there’s enough to cause him huge political damage, otherwise he wouldn’t have paid up.’

‘Why doesn’t he just bump off the blackmailer?’ Carla asked, and then wondered, appalled, at how easily the thought came to her, and how normal it seemed to imagine her father doing so.

‘I don’t know. If the guy has any sense he’ll have the original letter well hidden, and will hold out the threat that if anything happens to him another party will release the originals to the authorities.’

A sudden wave of revulsion came over Carla, so strong that she felt sick. ‘Mama, do you realise that this is my father we’re talking about here? He’s a cold-blooded murderer, for heaven’s sake! He probably killed the driver himself, because if he’d hired someone he would just have set up another potential blackmailer. Did he use a gun do you think, or a knife? Whatever it was it was in complete cold
blood. God help me, Mama,’ she finished on a horrified whisper. ‘You’re just his wife, but me, I carry his genes. He’s gone from being a power-hungry bully to a calculating killer. And this is my father!’

Martin looked up from his reading of the documents.

‘Joana!’ he said, urgently.

Joana frowned him down, but he persisted. ‘You must tell her now! You can’t leave things like this! Surely this is when you have to tell her?’

What did he mean? Carla looked a query at her mother. ‘Tell me what, Mama?’

Joana’s face was bleached of colour, and suddenly she looked ten years older. She took a quick gulp from her glass, choking a little on the bubbles. Carla looked for help to Grandma. Maria looked just as bemused as she was, but she spoke up for them both, as gently as ever.

‘What is it, Joana?’ Maria asked.

Joana shook her head violently. ‘No, no, I can’t!’ she cried.

Maria repeated the same words, ‘What is it, Joana?’ and as she spoke, Joana’s face crumpled, and she began to weep.

‘Oh God, how to tell you now, after all these years? Do you remember, Mama, way back before I married Sergi, when I was friendly with Alex, Enric the baker’s son? He wanted to marry me, but he couldn’t tell his family yet, because he was still training. And then when the Civil War ended he disappeared. We never knew why, but we knew he died – his father found that out. And I found out that I was pregnant – with Carla. So when Sergi wanted to marry me I had no choice. I was just relieved.’

Carla took hold of Grandma’s hand. Neither of them moved. Grandma’s hand didn’t even twitch. The afternoon was chilling into evening, and Joana shivered, and drew a hand to wipe her bleached white cheek. Carla watched through a haze as Martin felt for her mother’s other hand. Soon we’ll all join hands and make a circle, she thought, and suddenly wanted to laugh. The baby moved inside her, pushing against her stomach wall, and she could almost hear it gurgle. Sergi was not her father. He was not her father. Her father was not her father. Could this be true?

‘Then he’s not …’ She couldn’t finish the sentence.

Joana shook her head and took another gulp of champagne. ‘Sergi isn’t your father, Carla.’

It was all she said, but it was enough. It made it real. And it explained so much – why he had always been so cold, why he resented her so much. She’d always known he wanted a son, but even worse, the daughter he was lumbered with wasn’t even of his own blood. His last words to her came back to her, that day when he’d thrown her out of the Girona house.