Bay of Secrets (11 page)

And Papa returned home in a terrible temper.

‘Tomás? What is wrong?’ Julia’s mother asked.

He looked around him, twisting his head from side to side. Once again his dark eyes had a look, almost of madness, that made Julia shiver. ‘Almost half the tram workers have lost their jobs.’ He clicked his fingers. ‘Just like that.’

Julia’s mother laid a restraining hand on his arm.

Instantly he quietened, staring morosely into the distance as if he was trying to make sense of it all.

‘I can scarcely believe it,’ Julia’s mother said. But she too had lost her job some time before. She had no choice. Like all women, she must now stay home, must obey her husband in all things because his word was law. And if he was afraid – or turned half mad from what was happening? If he could not get work and they had no money? What then?

‘But who will teach the children?’ Julia had asked. She had been hoping – once, in a different lifetime – to be a teacher herself. Clearly that would never happen now.

‘Someone who holds the correct beliefs and has the accepted record of behaviour,’ Mama had said without a hint of irony in her voice.

‘The church is now the power behind education,’ Papa muttered. ‘But at what price?’

Julia still fought to understand. She knew that churches had been closed down – even gutted – during the Civil War. And she knew that many people had not wanted this to be.
But what people thought now … Who could tell? People – truly – were not allowed to think. Their thoughts were dictated to them, it seemed.

‘Almost half the workers!’ Now Papa was shouting once more. ‘It is madness!’

‘Hush, Tomás.’ Again, she calmed him. Julia’s mother could always calm him.

But Julia knew that both her parents were afraid. She was afraid too. Everyone was.

‘We cannot go on like this.’ He looked at their mother, hard, until she looked away. And then he peered out into the hazy glow of the streetlights glistening on the cobbles of Puerta del Angel. His anger, the wildness in his eyes had dissipated now. But what Julia saw there seemed worse.

‘I tell you,’ he said. ‘Something must change.’

What could change? Julia shivered with a sense of foreboding as she lay in her bed and listened to their voices as they talked that night. They were arguing about something – but what? She did not get up to listen. She wanted to know, but she could not bear to know. It sounded bad. But could things get any worse?

The following evening, her parents took her to one side.

‘Julia,’ said her father. ‘You understand how things are with us?’

‘Yes, Papa.’

But Julia wanted to slink away and never be seen again. She wanted to disappear in a puff of smoke, or fly out of the window to somewhere safe and calm, where everyone was
allowed to be who they wanted to be. She did not want to hear this.

‘We have to think of your welfare,’ he said.

Julia blinked up at him. What about the welfare of the rest of the family? She might not be her father’s favourite – Paloma was the one who took his arm and made him smile – but she had always known she was loved.

‘And so we have been talking – your mother and I.’

Julia looked at her mother. Her eyes were red. She guessed that this – whatever it was – was what they had been arguing about at the dead of night. Perhaps she should have listened at the top of the stairs. Perhaps she could have changed their minds.

‘And I have been making enquiries.’ He cleared his throat.

‘About what, Papa?’ Julia dared to ask.

‘About your futures,’ he said.

It was, then, as Julia had feared. ‘Mama?’ She reached for her mother’s hand.

‘Hush,’ she said. But Julia knew her heart was not in it. She was beaten, defeated by her own life and what it had become.

‘You will enter the sisterhood,’ her father said.

The sisterhood? She was to become a nun? Julia looked wildly from one to the other of them. ‘The sisterhood?’ she echoed.

Her mother squeezed her hand. ‘You will be safe there, Julia,’ she said. ‘You will not want for food—’

‘But … ’ Whatever she had been expecting, it was not
this. Their family was not remotely religious in their beliefs. The sisterhood? It had never even been mentioned as a possibility.

‘It has been decided,’ her father said. ‘The Church will provide. It will have to.’

‘Papa?’ Julia searched for compassion in his eyes. But she saw only despair. She had always tried to understand him, she had always respected and obeyed him. But this … ?

‘It is the right place for you.’

‘And Matilde?’ Julia was angry now. She felt it rising up inside her like fire. ‘And Paloma?’

Her mother put her arms around her. ‘They must make sacrifices too,’ she whispered. ‘We have done our best, my daughter. We can do no more.’

Sacrifices? Julia broke away from her embrace and ran. She ran out into the street blindly, not knowing where she was going, just needing to get away, to escape. Tears streamed down her face, her hair was in disarray – blowing madly like the leaves in the autumn wind. What sacrifices would her sisters have to make? They were pretty girls. How hard would it be to marry off a pretty girl in the aftermath of the Civil War if you didn’t much care who you married her off to? Not so Julia. She was the plain one, the quiet one, the passive one who could always be told what to do, where to go.

She thought for one fleeting moment of Mario Vamos, of the look in his black eyes. She had made it easy for her parents to decide. They had all received a good education but Julia had studied the hardest. Her English language was of a
high standard; her main interest was history. Her sisters would be married off – she knew it. Would that be better or worse than being married off to God?

At last Julia found herself outside the Ateneo Library. She didn’t feel calm or passive any longer. She felt desperate, wind-blown, hardly able to breathe. She steadied herself and looked up at the grand building. Inside was a web of passage-ways and reading rooms which had somehow survived the Civil War bombings and where Julia still loved to wander and read. Now, she would no longer be able to do such things. She would be a prisoner. She would be estranged from the family she loved. From the world.

Julia wandered the streets for an hour before she returned home. She walked past the beggars and the tramps and she wept for what had been taken away from them all. It was their individual liberty – but it was their identity too. Their heritage – which was part of their very soul. Even in the Ateneo forbidden works in Catalan had been destroyed. Their press had been banned, and other newspapers were no doubt censored and controlled. To all intents and purposes there was no Catalan. There was no rousing music now being played along the Ramblas. Instead, posters proclaimed, ‘Speak the Language of the Empire’. Now they were Spanish and Spanish alone. He had taken away even their voice.

Was the convent in Barcelona the right place for Julia? She bowed her head and felt a final solitary tear weave down her face. Her father had said that the Church would provide.
And what choice did she have? Their family had no money. Otherwise they would starve.

She walked back into their house with her head held high. She would be strong. She would not let them see what this had done to her. She would accept her parents’ decision. She was an obedient daughter and she would obey.

On Friday night Andrés made his way to the Jazz Café. Gone were the days of people sitting at the bar with a beer and a cigarette and yet somehow the place retained its smoky atmosphere. Low lighting. A guy on the piano. Wooden tables scattered cabaret-style with red cloths and tea-lights in stained glass holders. The walls – like the music – were deep blue.

The Jazz Café was part of Pridehaven Arts Centre – an art deco building that housed exhibitions and had a small theatre; the café at the back echoed the centre’s sinuous curves – the room was oval and the mahogany bar followed the line of the top wall’s curve like a comforting arm around a shoulder.

‘Andrés.’ Tina was behind the bar. She looked pleased to see him. She leant forward to kiss him on the cheek, once, twice. He tried to inhale her perfume but he was too slow. ‘Beer?’

‘Please.’

Tina was a brunette with generous curves and a shapely head which Andrés had drawn on several occasions. In fact he’d done a painting of her behind the bar, hand on the beer pump, showing the reflection of her back in the mirror
behind, which he liked to think was reminiscent of the café images favoured by Manet – an impressionist painter he admired. Not that he aspired to those dizzy heights. But he rather liked the idea of painter as
flaneur
 – strolling and observing life rather than loitering, of course. He’d definitely put that one in the exhibition. He enjoyed the sweep of Tina’s eyelashes as she surveyed her clientele, the angle of her cheekbones, the faintest aura of superiority she assumed. Tina had worked here for a long time – she was most definitely in charge of the Friday night Jazz Café.

A well-cut bob swung back and forth as she walked, as she bent to fetch a San Miguel from the fridge behind her. Nice.

‘You OK?’ She flipped off the bottle top. Tina always asked him if he was OK. He knew she worried.

‘Fine, thank you.’ He was looking forward to the auction next week. He needed something more in his life – wasn’t Tina always telling him he needed something more in his life? – and he hoped the project of doing up Coastguard’s Cottage would be that something.

‘Yeah. Right.’ Tina raised an eyebrow. She was wearing a close-fitting black T-shirt and jeans that were surely too tight to be comfortable. It had to be said though, she looked good.

It was a spider’s web, thought Andrés. Which was beautiful. Which could be supportive – and flexible too. It could catch you in its sticky threads, stop you from falling. On the other hand – it could trap you, and eat you right up. Once you were in, you were in. There was no moving on. There was no escape.

‘You are busy tonight.’ Andrés nodded towards the rest of the room. The place was maybe half full, which was healthy for just after eight p.m. By nine it would be buzzing. And it was good sometimes to be in a place which was buzzing. It stopped you from brooding. Though Andrés had got used to his own company, his own self ticking away the evening like a railway station clock waiting for the next train. But other nights his head was screaming with images of the island, of his father, of his mother and his sister, and he needed something to drown it out. When a place was buzzing, you could let it slip over you, you could melt into it, even feel you were part of it for a while.

‘There’s a band in. Last minute, but we put up a poster.’ Tina shrugged. ‘People get to hear.’ She took his money and turned towards the till.

This time he caught the faint waft of her perfume. Geraniums. In Ricoroque they always grew geraniums in the tubs outside the front door. Geraniums grew well in
picon
, the dew-collecting gravel of the Canaries, and they didn’t mind being thirsty. ‘Any good?’ he enquired.

‘Yeah. They’re good.’ She gave him his change. ‘They used to play here every week. Then they broke up. Because—’

But Andrés didn’t get to hear why they broke up because another customer wanted a drink and Tina was already sashaying to the other end of the bar to serve him.

So he waved a hand to her and grabbed a stool.

He liked to sit here at the end of the bar. He could have his back to the wall – so there’d be no surprises – he could
talk to Tina when she was free, and he had a decent view of the stage and the rest of the room. Sometimes the music absorbed him, sometimes he liked to people-watch, sometimes he forgot where he was and it was a shock when it came to closing time and he realised he’d spent the entire evening in Ricoroque.

I’m a voyeur
, he thought, as he settled himself more comfortably on the bar stool and took a pull of his beer. A
flaneur
. For ever on the sidelines of life. Watching everyone else have a good time.

Andrés had first met Tina several years ago. She and Gez were his first friends in West Dorset; real friends, that was, as in people who cared. He’d wandered into the Jazz Café one night when it was quiet, and got talking to Tina. She was easy – light to talk to, quick to smile, direct; no games. He liked that. He even toyed with the idea of asking her out for a drink. She wasn’t really his type. But then again, what was his type? He wasn’t sure that he knew.

But Tina had made it clear early on that she wasn’t available. ‘You’ll have to come in another night and meet Gez,’ she said. ‘You’ll get on. I can tell.’

‘Your husband?’ Andrés asked, though he hadn’t seen a ring.

‘Boyfriend,’ she said. ‘Lover.’ And she fixed him with her direct gaze. Hazel eyes, he guessed, though in the dim light of the café it was hard to tell. ‘You?’

‘Me?’ For an awful moment, Andrés had thought she was proposing a threesome.

‘Do you have someone? A girlfriend? A lover? A wife?’ She laughed. Even then she could read him like a book.

He laughed back – pure relief. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No one.’ Idiot. There had been women – of course. He wasn’t a monk, for God’s sake. But as soon as things began to get serious, as soon as they tried to get too involved in his life or wanted to move in with him, he cut himself free. Maybe he wasn’t meant to have a woman in his life. Maybe what he’d seen of his own parents’ marriage had put him off. Maybe he wasn’t the type to make a commitment. Tina had her theories – well, she would, she was a woman, wasn’t she? Her theory was that he hadn’t yet met the Right One.

At the time, she’d just shrugged and said, ‘Come in on Sunday. Meet Gez.’

But she’d been trying to fix him up ever since.

As Tina had predicted, Andrés and Gez did get on well and suddenly Andrés realised he had acquired a social life. Easy, really, like finding a key. He could wander into the Jazz Café and talk to Tina whenever he chose, he was invited for supper at Tina and Gez’s at least once a fortnight and he played tennis with Gez most Sunday mornings – followed by a pint at the Black Lamb near the tennis courts. And – thanks to Tina – he had a succession of blind dates.