Bay of Secrets (12 page)

These were not so easy.

Andrés put the bottle of beer to his lips. Not that he blamed Tina for trying. She thought it would make him happy because Gez made her happy. Man needed woman; woman needed man. We were never meant to live alone. But
Andrés knew his life wasn’t quite so simple. He suspected it wasn’t just a case of him not having met the right girl.

The first date was shy and self-conscious and made Andrés feel so nervous that he knocked over his glass and spilt beer all over her dress; the second date spent most of the evening surreptitiously texting her ex; the third tried to get him into bed after two gin and tonics and scared him half to death.

‘What’s wrong with all my friends?’ Tina complained one evening at supper. She counted them off on the fingers of one hand. ‘You are so damned fussy, Andrés.’

‘Nothing,’ said Andrés. ‘They’re all really nice ladies.’ For someone else, just not for him.

‘Women,’ corrected Tina, spooning out generous portions of lasagne.

Andrés exchanged a conspiratorial glance with Gez, but Tina being Tina neatly intercepted it. ‘Fuck you,’ she said genially.

‘OK.’ Every time Andrés considered himself fluent, some cultural nuance of the English language raised its confusing head. ‘Women.’

‘Which one did you fancy the most?’ Tina was in analytical mode. She threw some salad into a glass bowl in the centre of the table and passed around kitchen towel for napkins. ‘To help me for next time.’ Her suppers were always simple and always delicious. Tina had a warmth, a way about her that made Andrés feel comfortable and welcomed.

He frowned. But what was the correct answer? He glanced
again at Gez, but Gez was looking innocent in a kind of
You’re on your own this time
sort of a way. ‘Er, number three?’

‘You mean Jane,’ snapped Tina. She tossed balsamic vinegar on to the salad leaves and added a deft swirl of olive oil.

‘Yes, Jane.’

‘You like women to be small and slim then. And blonde.’ Tina narrowed her eyes. ‘Do you have protective issues, Andrés?’

‘Protective issues?’ He blinked at her. ‘Not that I’m aware of.’

Gez helped himself to a heap of salad. Andrés followed suit.

‘Small, blonde, fluffy, needs looking after,’ Tina pressed.

‘I never said anything about fluffy.’ And she was quite wrong. He liked independent women, those who had opinions and something to say for themselves. He wasn’t interested in a doormat he could walk all over – you could get those from the Pound Store in town.

Tina frowned. ‘You need to loosen up a bit,’ she said. ‘You’re a bit stiff, a bit too formal.’

Andrés shrugged. He was what he was. It was how he had been brought up.

Tina put a hand on his arm. ‘And you would tell me, wouldn’t you, Andrés?’

‘What?’

‘If you were gay?’

He laughed. Though it would be easier, perhaps, if he were. Knowing that the next weekend some vaguely Jane
lookalike would no doubt be dangled before him like a bone in front of a dog.

*

From the other end of the bar, Tina gestured to him.
Another?
He nodded, realising he’d drunk the first already. He was thirsty, but now he’d slow down.

After a few months of non-starters in the blind-dating department, most women would have given up. Not Tina. Even now, she still made regular offerings and Andrés had to admit he’d met a lot of interesting people, been on quite a few dates and made several more friends. Where did she get them all from? Had she advertised? He didn’t have a girlfriend, but he had a social life. It had wrapped itself around him with strong, silken strands.

Tina brought over another beer. ‘What’s up?’

‘Nothing.’ He dipped into his pocket for change. Though lately he’d been thinking about them more and more often. His family. The island. Part of him ached to go back there. But how could he go back where he wasn’t wanted?
Nothing has changed
, his mother had said. And she was right.

The music changed now, though. The pianist shifted rhythm and the notes seemed to vibrate through Andrés’s body. He closed his eyes. If he were deaf, he thought, he would still hear this music. He would feel it in every fibre of his being. He knew it.

The vibrations took him back to the drumming in his old island home. The villagers were always practising the
drumming for
festa
time. They would gather after dark in the square outside the cultural centre for singing, drumming and dancing. The islanders had their own traditions; the
Malagueña
, the
folias
and
seguidillas
; their own folk dancing in national costume for
festa
. And on holidays – Sundays and
festa
days – there would be a barbecue down in the village square; pungent fragrances and smoke billowing from huge baths on wheels filled with charcoal with meshing over them, roasting sausages, ribs of pork and slabs of goat meat; boiling vats of small wrinkled Canarian potatoes. Dozens of trestle tables set up in the square, the local wine flowing, the drums pounding, their heavy vibrations spinning through the night air.

Later, their family would sit in the
casa
, their mother working at her embroidery or making a dress for Izabella from a piece of bright scarlet cloth, perhaps. Ricoroque had once been a port for cochineal – the red dye from the beetle had made the village prosper; a stone jetty had even been built down in the bay. Cochineal had coloured the Spanish conquistadors’
bayetas
and the Navajo women used to unpick these vibrant blankets and reweave the threads to create their own colourful garments.

Andrés vividly recalled one time when he was still a boy. Mama had pinned the cloth around Izabella, fastened a red flower in her dark hair and as they opened the windows and the doors to the thudding rhythms of the primeval drumming, so Izabella had begun to dance. His quiet and shy sister seemed to be under a spell that night. She swayed and
swirled, arched and twisted, her raven hair opening behind her like a fan. On and on drove the drums into the night. Faster and faster Izabella danced. Until Andrés joined in too, his limbs responding instinctively to a rhythm he didn’t even understand. Laughing, he had pulled his mother up to join them.

Enrique Marin though, would never dance. He watched his family and his eyes were as black and unreadable as the volcanic rock of their island.

*

Andrés wiped a tear from his cheek. He didn’t look at Tina just in case she was watching him.
A spider’s web
 …

The music stopped and some different people emerged on to the stage of the Jazz Café. Some of the audience clapped and someone cheered. This must be the band Tina had mentioned, Andrés thought.

There was a drummer, a keyboards man, someone on double bass and … A girl came on to the stage. No, a woman. Andrés blinked. She was wearing a red dress and, rather spookily, she too had a red flower pinned in her spiky blond hair. He knew who this was. The woman from the cliff top, the woman who he had thought he might have seen before. And he had. It was coming back to him now. This was where he had seen her. Years earlier – back in the days when he had first come here to the Jazz Café. He had seen her before onstage with this band. And then she had disappeared.

They did a bit of a warm-up. The keyboards guy said
something into the mic and then the woman in red picked up an instrument from its case, a gleaming saxophone. She held it lovingly, almost caressing it with her fingers.

And the band began to play. ‘Summertime’. Unbearably slow, achingly sad.

*

When they’d finished their set, people began to drift away and Tina slowed down. She was collecting glasses from tables, stacking them on to the bar.

‘Who is she?’ She had played with such melancholy and Andrés wondered how anybody could be so sad. He was mesmerised. Her sadness had wrapped itself around him. He wasn’t sure whether it was her playing or his own state of mind. Maybe both.

‘She … ?’ Tina stood next to him hands on hips. ‘You mean Ruby?’

‘Ruby.’ The name was perfect.

‘Well, don’t get your hopes up.’ Tina went back behind the bar. ‘Tonight’s a one-off. Ruby doesn’t live here any more. She’s been based in London for a while.’

London. Was he interested? Andrés slid off his stool. He wasn’t interested in long-distance relationships, that was for sure. Not even in relationships. Still … ‘I just liked her playing,’ he told Tina, ignoring her smirk. ‘I’ve seen her around lately. I just happened to notice—’

‘About time,’ she muttered.

He ignored this too.

But maybe Tina was right about what was missing from
his life. Maybe the cottage would not be enough. Maybe he should try harder. And on the way back to his place, Andrés actually found himself whistling.

Ruby headed for the auction on her new bike. She’d bought it from the Dutch bike shop in town when she was walking back from lunch with Mel yesterday. Couldn’t resist really. It was shiny black, had a basket in front and made her feel windborne, almost carefree. She wouldn’t allow herself to be beaten down by circumstances, loss and discovery, she decided. And today she had every intention of buying herself a cottage.

Even Mel had been forced to admit that the words ‘delayed registration’ on her birth certificate suggested that all was not quite as it seemed. ‘Stop protecting me,’ Ruby had told her in the end as they left the café. ‘Say what you really think.’ And so Mel had. ‘I think you should talk to someone who was around at the time you were born,’ she said. ‘What about your grandparents?’

Her grandparents … The memory slammed into her.

Bolt from the blue
, her grandmother had said at the funeral. Ruby had assumed she’d been referring to the accident, the motorbike crash which had killed her daughter – certainly a bolt from the blue, a terrible shock, a tragedy. But her grandmother had been looking straight at Ruby when she said it. And she’d been so confused.

Ruby stared at Mel in horror.

‘What?’

She shook her head. ‘Nothing.’ But supposing Ruby’s birth had been the bolt from the blue? Combined with the shoebox, the letter and the lack of early photographs … It all made a horrible kind of sense.

‘Or one of your mother’s friends?’ Mel said gently when they got to the hat shop.

They kissed goodbye. Yeah, thought Ruby. Like Frances.

*

The bike was faster than she’d expected and Ruby loved the feeling of the wind in her hair as she gathered speed. Had her mother – Vivien – felt this way just before the accident, she wondered? Had she closed her eyes just for a second, before …
There’s always a blind spot.
Ruby pushed the thought away.

She remembered how supportive Frances had been at the funeral. She was upset herself – Vivien was her closest friend, although they hadn’t seen quite so much of each other since Frances had moved to North Cornwall to be nearer her daughter and grandchildren. ‘If there’s anything I can do, my dear,’ she had said as she scribbled her contact details on to a scrap of paper which she pressed into Ruby’s hand, ‘just ask.’

And Ruby was going to do just that. Thank goodness she hadn’t thrown it away. The scrap of paper was still tucked inside the zip pocket of her handbag. She was just plucking up some courage and waiting for the right time. Was she Vivien and Tom’s daughter? Was she Ruby Rae? She
desperately needed to know. But afterwards – there would be no going back.

She freewheeled down the hill past the museum and the library where the Wednesday market was in full swing. The auction was being held in a town hall four miles away. She had enough time – hopefully, although the bike was taking a bit of getting used to; the back brake was operated by back-pedalling and the saddle was almost too high for her to put her foot down. But she loved it anyway. It was fabulous to sit upright and survey the cropped fields and green Dorset hills. It was like going back in time; back to that childhood she dreaded was about to be snatched away from her.

Saturday night’s gig at the Jazz Café had been dedicated to her parents and it had felt like a much more potent and personal goodbye. And although the sadness had almost overwhelmed her … It had been good for her. And it had gone well. When she saw the audience out there, when she heard the applause, when she felt that pure rush of adrenalin at performing and playing … She had been on such a high. She’d almost forgotten about shoeboxes, photographs and birth certificates.

And if they weren’t her parents? She couldn’t stop the thought edging once more into her mind. She had lost them both and now she was in danger of discovering that they might not have been hers to lose in the first place.

She pushed down on the pedals, drove the bike faster. But they were still her parents in the real sense of the word. They had cared for her. They had loved her. No one could take that
away.
Even if
 … This thought seemed to float in the air and stream away, like gulls’ wings in a thermal.

*

Auctions were weird. The auctioneer weaved his way through the proceedings, arms raised, eyes in the back of his head and his ears, pushing the price up every time it seemed to be stagnating, firing out the standard phrases: ‘It’s with you’; ‘It’s against you’; ‘Who’ll give me … ?’; ‘Now two’; ‘Am I seeing three?’ It was like a chant, a poem; it was almost hypnotic. Ruby was a bit nervous – she’d never been to an auction before and this was a huge purchase. She knew her budget though. She could only go up to £200,000. That was her absolute limit. She wasn’t allowed to go a whisker more, no matter how tempted she might be.

There was a picture of Coastguard’s Cottage in the auction brochure, looking suitably desolate and in need of adoption, and she allowed herself a brief daydream. In the fantasy, she was up a ladder wearing paint-stained overalls, daubing the sitting room white. White walls, wooden beams, polished floorboards, good antique furniture. A leather sofa? A chaise longue?

She recalled the view of Chesil Beach – the rolling tide, the cresting waves, the sea that stretched into infinity. The promise of a twisting pathway up the green and golden cliff. The fairy tale. Yes, but could it really exist for her again?