Bay of Secrets (36 page)

Sister Julia’s heart went out to him. He was a man at the end of his tether. There was nowhere else for him to go. He was as much in need as any person to whom she had ever given spiritual guidance. ‘Be still, my son.’ She reached out and placed her palm on the top of his head.

For a moment, he closed his eyes.

When he opened them again he seemed calmer. ‘Come with me, Sister.’

And Sister Julia felt compelled to follow him to an overhanging rock where they sat side by side, but not touching, on a ledge that was sheltered from the wind.

Sister Julia bowed her head and she listened.

*

When he had finished speaking, she was quiet for a moment. She knew now who the man was. What he was and indeed what he had done. ‘Is there more, my son?’ she said, for now she could indeed see into his heart. She thought of the woman from the village who had come to see her that day, who had given her the delicate tablecloth
made of lace. And of the sadness in her dark eyes. Of what remained unsaid. ‘Is there more that you wish to tell me?’ she asked.

Ruby couldn’t wait to tell Andrés. She wouldn’t call him though; this was something she wanted to do face to face. Was it such a coincidence – her birth mother sitting for his father, the artist, Enrique Marin? Not really. Because it all made sense. Why Laura had gone to a place like Fuerteventura, the sort of life she would have been leading … Ruby could almost feel the pieces of the past slotting together. Her past. And the fact that it was somehow connected with Andrés’s past just made her spine tingle.

When she knew he would have finished work and that he’d be down at his studio – time was running out as far as the summer exhibition was concerned and he was there practically every spare hour he had these days – Ruby went down to see him, her laptop in its case slung over one shoulder.

It was a lovely summer’s evening and the late sun was glinting on the gently rocking water in the harbour and making the golden cliffs glow. But Ruby didn’t linger. She hurried through the back streets to the studios where, sure enough, Andrés was sorting out some framing for one of his pictures. Fortunately no one else was around.

‘Hi, Ruby.’ She saw him look up as she approached. Good.
She’d been a bit worried about disturbing him but he seemed pleased to see her.

Ruby lifted her face for his kiss; warm and tender. Felt herself folded against his chest. She loved that. Maybe it wasn’t too soon for them to think about the future. Why shouldn’t they? When something was right, it was right.

‘What brings you down here so early?’ He released her and turned back to his framing.

‘You’ll never guess.’ Ruby couldn’t keep the excitement out of her voice. Ever since she’d seen her image on the screen … Well, it was a lead, wasn’t it? Almost her first. And the journalist in Ruby couldn’t wait to follow it up. Neither could the daughter.

‘What?’ He laughed. ‘You look like you’ve found your fortune.’

‘No.’ She grinned back at him. ‘But I may have found my birth mother.’ She should probably resent Laura for what she’d done – just abandoning her to someone else’s care. And yet Ruby couldn’t bring herself to. All she could feel for Laura was compassion. Laura had been a young mother. She had given birth to Ruby with no father or family around to help her and then she had lost her own mother just afterwards. How must she have felt? How difficult must it have been? No, she couldn’t resent Laura and she couldn’t blame her either.

‘Really?’ He pulled her close again and held the back of her head scooped in his palm, in that way he had. ‘Where?’

‘I went on to your father’s website. And you won’t believe
what I found. Look.’ She pulled away and opened her laptop, putting it on the trestle table where Andrés was working.

Then she realised that Andrés hadn’t responded. ‘Andrés?’

His face was dark with anger. Oh, dear. In the excitement of finding the picture of Laura, she’d forgotten how
persona non grata
Enrique Marin was as far as his son was concerned.

‘You went on to my father’s website?’ He stared at her, his green eyes suddenly cold. ‘Why would you do that?’

‘I wanted to find out more about him, of course.’ She should have anticipated this. It was only a website, but she recalled that moment of foreboding she’d had before she’d clicked on it. She’d known he wouldn’t like it.

‘Why would you want to find out more about him?’ He’d stopped working and was still just staring at her, confusion mixing with the anger on his face. ‘Why would you be interested?’

‘Because he’s your father.’ For Ruby it was simple. Enrique Marin and his wife had created Andrés. They were his parents, his roots. For God’s sake. She had no family to introduce Andrés too. No one. How did he imagine that felt? Didn’t he realise how important your family were?

Andrés brought a fist down hard on the trestle table. It shuddered. Automatically, Ruby put a hand out to her laptop. What was the matter with him?

‘He is nothing to me,’ he said. ‘Nothing. Why can’t you understand?’

‘But—’

‘And why should he mean anything to you, Ruby? Why do you care?’

Ruby couldn’t answer that. How could she tell him she’d just been curious – when it obviously mattered so much? Andrés hated him. He really hated him and she had hugely underestimated the force of that hatred. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t care about him – of course I don’t. I don’t even know him. But he’s your father and I was just—’

‘Poking around in my affairs.’ He finished for her. ‘That was what you were doing, yes?’

Ruby was stung. She’d said she was sorry … And he was completely missing the point. ‘Don’t you even want to know what I found on his website?’ she asked him in a quiet voice. She really didn’t understand what she had done that was so terrible.

‘What?’ he muttered. ‘What did you find?’ But he wasn’t even looking at her now. He was looking beyond her, out of the open door into the summer evening outside. What was he thinking? She didn’t have a clue. She realised with a start how little she really knew about him.

‘I found my mother, Andrés,’ she whispered. ‘Your father painted a portrait of my birth mother.’

‘What?’ An expression of horror appeared on his face. ‘What did you say?’

‘Laura must have sat for him,’ she said. ‘He painted her.’

He stared at her. There was an awful pause which Ruby really didn’t understand. Then: ‘Show me,’ he said.

Hands shaking, she switched on her laptop, found the
folder where she’d copied the image. Double-clicked.

Once again, Laura’s image filled the screen. The girl with the long blonde hair and the sad, sad eyes. Laura …

Andrés was gazing at the image as if hypnotised. ‘This is his work?’ he asked. ‘He painted this?’

‘Yes.’

‘I do not believe it,’ he muttered. His fists were clenched. He swore softly in his native tongue. ‘I cannot believe it.’

‘But why not?’

‘Because … Because … ’ He turned to Ruby with an air of desperation. ‘What makes you so sure it is her?’

Ruby pulled the sketch he’d done of her at Golden Cap out of her bag. ‘Can’t you see the resemblance?’

‘No.’ He almost shouted. ‘No, I cannot.’ He seemed to tear his gaze away from the screen. He paced over to the other side of the unit, to the window that looked out on to the yard. Suddenly he looked like a defeated man and Ruby couldn’t bear that.

She followed him and reached out. Put her hand gently on his arm. ‘Why does it matter so much, Andrés?’ she murmured.

He shrugged off her hand, almost pushed her away. ‘It is ridiculous,’ he said. ‘You’re both blonde and blue-eyed. But so are a lot of other people.’

Why was he so cross? Ruby rummaged in her bag once again and pulled out the photo of Laura holding her as a baby. ‘Look again.’ She pushed it in front of him. She was beginning to get annoyed herself.

He took it, frowned once more. ‘It’s too blurred.’

‘But, Andrés’ – she pointed to the background – ‘the first time you saw that photo you said you recognised the landscape.’

‘Did I?’ He blinked.

‘Yes, you did. You said it reminded you of Fuerteventura.’ In fact, hadn’t he said that he thought it
was
Fuerteventura? ‘You said it was the sort of place someone like Laura would have gone to,’ she reminded him. ‘Hippies and travellers. People who drive VW camper vans. Remember?’

He took a step away from her. And he was avoiding her eyes. In fact his eyes were kind of glazed as if he didn’t want to hear any more; as if he didn’t want any of this to be true.

But why? Ruby had been so excited and he had just got out a pin and pricked the bubble. ‘Don’t you think it’s possible, Andrés,’ she said, trying to sound calm and reasonable, ‘that Laura was living there, that she needed money, that she went to sit for your father? She was beautiful, wasn’t she? Wouldn’t he have wanted to paint her?’

‘Yes.’ Andrés’s voice was bleak. ‘Yes, he would have wanted to paint her. But he didn’t. He couldn’t. This isn’t her, Ruby. You want it to be, but it’s not. Can’t you see what this means … ?’ He strode over to the door, flung it open and stomped outside.

Ruby couldn’t believe it. And no, she couldn’t see what it meant – apart from the fact that she had a lead to Laura’s whereabouts at last. She closed down the document and shut the laptop. Slung it back over her shoulder and followed him
outside. He was standing in the yard, just staring into the distance. ‘So you don’t think it’s worth following up?’ she asked.

He wouldn’t even look at her.

She tried again. ‘I want to go there, Andrés.’

‘To the island.’ It wasn’t a question. He still wasn’t looking at her and she’d swear he was almost crying.

‘Yes, to the island.’ For some reason, he didn’t want her to acknowledge what was happening here; what she’d found. But it was her history, her truth that she was investigating. So she had to be strong. ‘Would you come with me?’

Andrés swore softly. But it wasn’t a no, Ruby thought.

‘Would you introduce me to your father?’ she asked.

This time he shook his head. ‘Never,’ he said.

‘I can’t speak a word of Spanish,’ Ruby said. ‘You know I can’t. It would be so much harder to do this on my own. And it’s so important to me, Andrés.’ How could she explain about the feeling she’d had when she’d discovered she wasn’t really Vivien and Tom’s daughter? It was a sense of not existing, at least not in the way she always had before. A sense of being lost. Of being insubstantial, not really rooted. Whatever she could find out about Laura would help her deal with those feelings and allow her to move on. She might not actually find her – maybe she didn’t want to be found. But if there was a chance … She had to at least look into it.

‘But you will go on your own if you have to.’ At last he met her gaze.

She nodded. ‘Yes, I will.’

He sighed, a long sigh. ‘I cannot go back there, Ruby,’ he said. ‘I do not want to go back there. And now … ’

What did he mean – ‘and now’? ‘What happened?’ She braced herself.

‘It does not matter what happened,’ he said. ‘Especially not now.’

She reached out a hand, almost touching him, but not quite. ‘If you cared for me … ’ She started to say it. If he loved her, he would tell her.
If he loved her.
But she couldn’t quite find the words.

‘I care for you.’ He took her hand and raised it to his lips. ‘But you are asking me an impossible thing.’

‘Nothing’s impossible.’ How could she get through to him?

He shook his head. ‘You cannot possibly understand.’

The kiss on her hand – when it came – seemed so final. It felt like goodbye.

What could she do to make him change his mind? She searched his face. Nothing, it seemed. But if he didn’t trust her enough to tell her … ‘I can’t let it go, Andrés,’ she said.

‘No. I understand how it is, Ruby. You just cannot let it go.’ He disengaged her hand and she felt that he had disengaged so much more than that. ‘But you see – even that hardly matters now.’

How had everything gone so wrong?

Andrés watched Ruby’s proud retreating back until she was out of sight. He couldn’t believe it. It was too horrible to contemplate. The possibility … He swore softly to himself. Everything that could have gone wrong, had gone wrong. Was it possible? Andrés didn’t want to believe it, but yes, it was certainly possible. He thought of what Ruby had told him about Laura and how she had left her with Vivien when she was a baby. And that picture she’d shown him. It was more than possible – it seemed overwhelmingly likely.

That old bastard. Would he haunt Andrés’s life for ever? Would he fuck it up for ever?

And now he was ill. Was Andrés supposed to be sorry?

A few days ago, he had phoned his mother again as promised.

‘How is he?’ he’d asked her. ‘Has he seen the doctor yet?’

‘Yes, he has,’ she said.

‘How did you persuade him?’

‘It was not me,’ his mother said. ‘It was someone he spoke to on the cliffs beyond Playa del Castillo.’

‘Jesus … ’ It was so typical of the man that he would take
notice of some random person he’d met on the cliffs, rather than the wife who had stood by him through all his tempers and tantrums and God knew what else.

‘It was a nun,’ his mother said.

A nun? Andrés had shaken his head in despair. He knew his father too well to assume he’d had some sort of religious conversion. Never, in a million years. ‘What tests did they do?’ Andrés asked. For after all, it did not matter who his father had listened to. At least the stubborn old bugger had gone to the doctor at last. And he was glad – for his mother’s sake if nothing else.

‘What is it called?’ She spoke slowly. ‘A CT scan? A biopsy?’

‘And what was the result?’ He found he was holding his breath.

‘They do not know yet, Andrés. It will be another day or so, we think.’

‘Then I will phone you again in a few days,’ he’d told her. Andrés had a right to phone. A right to know. ‘Stay strong, Mama.’

But Andrés hadn’t phoned – not yet. And now he couldn’t bring himself to. But he could not settle to his work either. He had not told Ruby his father was not well. He had resisted. He didn’t even want to taint their relationship with a mention of the man. But now … Ruby would go there – back to the island – he knew she would. She was almost as stubborn as his father, God damn him. She would go to his parents’ house. Andrés realised he was shaking. What would
happen when she went to his parents’ house? What would she find out when she went there?