The Devil's Music (40 page)

    There’s a suck of air as the connecting doors swish open. The trolley rattles and chinks towards us. She twists round to face me.

    ‘What will you do?’

    I stare at the trolley rattling and rolling down the narrow aisle.

    ‘Andrew?’

    ‘I don’t think I’ll stay.’

    I take her hand. Her wrists are narrow and bony and she’s wearing the bracelet I made for her after our first tango session on the beach, brown string threaded through a flat grey pebble.

    ‘Undo your hair for me.’

    She sits up. ‘What, now?’

    ‘Yes.’

    ‘You do it.’

    She lifts my hand from the table, turning it gently in both of hers. Then she rests the tip of her plait in my open palm and slips sideways in the seat so her back is towards me. Her plait is tight and glossy but, as soon as I begin to unwind the elastic band, the kinked strands spring apart and trickle over my fingers.

    I see Susie on the veranda at The Siding, hunched against the wind, wincing and covering her ears. The boys, naked, their buckets filled with pebbles. And my mother in a headscarf, sitting on the pebbles beside a breakwater, smiling, wrists resting loosely on bent knees, a cigarette between her fingers. It will be the right place for them all.

    And a lover? My mother’s lover?

    I cup my hands and Sarah’s hair tumbles over my palms and wrists, cool and light; tickling. My limbs are weak, as if I have lain ill for a long time and need sun to warm me; blue skies. I bury my face in the spirals and curls of Sarah’s hair and breathe its perfume. She’s humming some tango tune we danced to, some guy singing English with a heavy accent.
It’s wonderful, It’s wonderful
, are the only words I can remember.

    After a while, I gather the wild mass of her hair in both of my hands. ‘No, I don’t think I’ll stay at The Siding.’ I kiss the nape of her neck. ‘I’ll see Susie, then head back to Crete in time for Easter. They’re big on Easter over there. Want to come?’

    She’s very still.

    I begin to stroke her hair, gathering and smoothing the wiry mass of it into skeins, persuading them into three sections, preparing to weave the long plait back into existence.

    ‘I could think about it,’ she says, her eyes closed.

Helen wakes in the half light. Curled on one side, cheek on Ian’s pillow, she listens to the familiar sounds of him moving about downstairs. He must be whisking sugared milk and eggs in a bowl, she decides, making
torrijas
for breakfast: her favourite. Without opening her eyes she can see him in their tiny kitchen, bear-like and naked apart from a towel slung low around his hips, concentrating on the task. As soon as she thinks this, picturing his shoulders slightly stooped over the too-low worktop, the greying fur on his chest, she wants him. She buries her nose in his pillow.

    Helen likes to surface slowly into a day’s beginning. Usually, Ian will have been up for half an hour or more and she’ll lie, adrift, until the dip of the bed drags her half dredged from sleep as he returns with her
cafe con leche
. If he leaves the house early, without waking her, to go walking or to begin painting before heat seals the afternoon into stupor, she’ll feel wrong-footed all day; lacking in substance.

    Today there is no time. Her suitcase waits by the street door. Dowsed in longing, she slips from the covers and treads, bare feet on cool tiles, through the shadowy rooms. The kitchen is warm and light, the radio murmuring. Ian is dipping hunks of yesterday’s bread in a bowl of the milk and egg mixture, a threadbare hand towel draped across the swell of his buttocks. Helen has always liked that he is not slim-hipped, like a boy. She loves the anchoring weight of him. The dipped pieces of bread sizzle as he lays them, one by one, in the frying pan.

    He turns; smiles. And Helen wishes not to have seen it, shadowy-blue at the throb of his throat: the deep dent of his tracheotomy scar. He must have had the beard-trimmer out already this morning – his hair, too, is newly close-cropped, the snickets and gouges where it does not grow a reminder of his fragility. She’s never told him, but she prefers his hair longer, the scars hidden. So, as she rests her cheek on his grizzled chest, she closes her eyes.

Too soon, she’s easing the wheels of her new suitcase down the step and, calves braced for the slope of the cobblestones, she walks down towards the plaza just as the cockerels start up, triumphant and bossy. It will not, as she feared, be the rumbling of her suitcase wheels that wakens the slumbering village. The road is narrow as well as steep, built for feet and donkeys, not cars – a challenge when they first moved here, until Ian’s muscles grew stronger. Recently, he has yielded to the need for a stick once more, for long distances. Slashed down the thigh’s outer length by a molten rip of scar tissue, his left leg is fragmented bone held together with metal bolts. The muscle and ligaments have never regained their full strength; compared to his right leg, the left is slender. Down one side, the skin, melted and solidified, is almost hairless. She’s glad that, moments before she left the house, he returned for his stick before heading on up the mountain for his morning’s sketching and photography.

    To keep from thinking too much, Helen makes herself notice the blue-painted wooden chair with a rush seat in the courtyard under Modesta’s grapevine, Pablo’s work boots side by side near his low door, Alba’s blue plumbago stretching out under the archway. As she emerges from the jumble of walls and roofs and doorways, the view opens before her. Almond trees on the terraces are in blossom, the rosy-hearted white flowers fragile as confetti against the twisted, dark branches. Although the sun is early-morning low and invisible, the whitewashed walls of the
cortijo
s dotted along the winding track in the valley below are softened in its light. Alejo is baking bread already, the warm aroma wafting. She feels the scratch of the hemp bracelet on her wrist and stops to move her bag to the other shoulder. The knot inside her loosens a little.

    Safely tucked into the shoulder bag is a photograph of Elaine. The one Ian took, only days before she died. He usually keeps it in an olive-wood frame, high on a shelf in his studio. Last night, over a couple of glasses of red wine, they sifted through the Amandelle tin of old photographs, choosing which pictures of her life here Helen should take to England. She thought he’d gone to fetch another bottle from the storage room tucked away in the rocks, but he came back with the dusty frame from his studio. He fiddled, bending back the pins one by one to remove the glass, and then held the photograph in his large-knuckled hands. Elaine had been their only child, the child he hadn’t been able to father. He’d taken photographs of the milestones of her childhood, as any father might. As Elaine grew into womanhood the sculpted bone structure of her face emerged. Her hair, a sun-bleached blonde, grew long enough to pin up from her face. Ian said she had a perfectly balanced profile. His photographs, like this one, became more professional portrait shots.

    In the village plaza, the blind is still down over the entrance to Lucia’s store. Helen tries not to mind, waiting for the taxi, looking at her shoes, flat and comfortable for travelling and a little dusty already, and thinks instead about Lucia’s black curls, lost within two weeks of the chemotherapy that has her retching into the toilet at the back of the shop. Tears threaten.

    Then a toot as the taxi swings around the bend and the driver is portly, only middle-aged but probably less fit than Helen herself, grunting as he lifts her suitcase into the boot, the engine still running, pumping exhaust into the clear mountain air. She’s ducking her head to climb into the passenger seat when there’s a call, ‘
Hola!
’, and Lucia hurries across the plaza, fastening her headscarf. The two women hug, rocking. Lucia clucks something about ‘
sus niños
’ in Helen’s ear and adds, with a kiss, ‘
Hasta luego
.’

    ‘
Adiós
,’ Helen whispers into the headscarf that smells of soap powder.

    They wipe each other’s eyes.

She’s relieved that the driver is not communicative. He draws morosely on his cigarette and switches from one radio to another, hisses and crackles coming and going as the taxi winds down the mountains towards Almeria airport. She’s free to stare through the smeary glass, to notice early-morning light raking the almond and olive groves, to stare down into dark gorges. Snow glistens on distant peaks. Gazing at the mountains, Helen glimpses the soaring, fingertipped wings of a golden eagle spread against the blue. She imagines Ian trudging up the track, the crunch of his boots on rocky ground. With his latest work he has been exploring ways to portray the texture of shadow and sunlight on rock and soil. He adds tiny, precise detail of cork oak leaves, pinsapo needles and cones. When she saw the first of these pictures, she could actually smell pine resin as she stretched out her fingertips to touch the vivid paint.

In the departure lounge, she moves through the crowds. As always, the air-conditioning chill is unpleasant and she pauses to pull on her cardigan. In the Ladies she looks at herself critically in the mirror. A tall woman in her sixties: dark eyes; skin lined through years of aridity. And the smoking, although she’d given that up after Elaine’s sudden death, looking for causes and reasons for what, at the time, had seemed unreasonable. They’d treasured her so carefully. The doctors told them a cerebral aneurysm is more often than not congenital, but Helen had wanted something to blame.

    She runs a comb through her shoulder-length hair, now threaded with white. Perhaps she should have had it cut. She hadn’t known what to wear, had felt her choice of clothing might help her in a way to hold on to a sense of who she is. Eventually she’d settled on nothing special, a plain white shirt, the kind of over-sized, loose-fitting shirt she wears every day, untucked, over jeans: something she stands some hope of feeling relaxed in. No jewellery apart from the bracelet; Helen rarely dresses up. Perhaps she should have done, today.

    ‘
Perdone!
’ she apologises as she turns from the mirror and bumps into a little girl. The child looks up at her, thumb in mouth, bewildered, and it crosses Helen’s mind that she probably now looks Spanish rather than English. And she wonders, after almost half her life lived in Spain, how much of herself really is English any more.

    The escalator takes her up to the sandwich bars but, after her rich breakfast, Helen does not want food. She buys a coffee and sits at a table strewn with half-empty polystyrene cups and soiled paper napkins: the debris of strangers.

    This morning, before she got downstairs, Ian had cleared away last night’s empty bottle and wine glasses. He’d set their breakfast table with the colourful hand-painted crockery they chose together, years ago, from the local pottery. He put out the jars of cinnamon and honey, ready to spread over the cooked
tortijas
. The picture frame lay on the counter, now holding a photo of Helen taken on her last birthday.

    This airport is like any other, a place in-between, a grey-and-white public space. The lack of colour reminds her of England, of grey sky and grey sea on days when the horizon disappears altogether. On those days at The Siding, before Susie and Elaine were born, she and Andy would lick their fingers to decide where the wind was coming from and choose which side of the breakwater to spread her old hospital blanket. If it was cold they’d be bulky in jumpers and anoraks, another blanket tented over their heads for extra warmth. They’d tell each other stories. His were often about Houdini the Handcuff King who could bend over backwards and pick up pins with his eyelashes. One time, he told her a pirate story, filled with waves and wind and stormy weather. When they got home, the front door slammed as she carried bags and suitcases upstairs and the painting on the half landing rocked on its wire. The painting was the source of Andy’s pirate story, the storm and the tall square-rigged ships, she realised. Later that day she’d shown him how to make a Turk’s Head bracelet, the sailor’s rope bracelet said to have been worn as a talisman by the men whose job it was to climb to the very top of the rigging. After that, he always wore a sailor’s bracelet, though he learned to work more complicated variations.