They had been going to the Locarno every Friday and Saturday for more than a year when Mercedes was asked to dance by a young Englishman she had not noticed before.
‘May I?’ he asked simply, holding out his hand.
It was a tango. She must have danced with a hundred men before, but he was a cut above the rest. Later that night, she went over the dance again in her mind and every note of the music came back to her.
For this young man the experience of dancing with Mercedes had held its magic too. The feeling of her light, slight body responding to the merest touch of his palm was very different to the measured clumsiness of most English girls. At the end of the dance, when he was once more sipping a pint with his friends and she was back with her friend, he was not sure that he had really danced with her at all. It was just a memory, something insubstantial.
The following week, Mercedes hoped that the slim, fair Englishman would ask her to dance again. She was not disappointed and smiled her acceptance when he approached. This time it was a quickstep.
He had felt something keen and urgent in the way she danced. Without comparison, she was better than anyone he had ever danced with before, and he realised that her movements were not just a sequence of responses to him. Occasionally he felt her giving him direction. This dark Spanish girl was much more powerful than she looked.
‘I’ve met someone who is a wonderful dancer,’ Mercedes wrote to her mother. ‘Even when they are trying their best, most of them are so clumsy.’
Mercedes’ letters to her mother always talked about dancing. It was a cheerful subject unlike any other, and Concha was delighted when Mercedes wrote one day to say that she had won a competition.
‘I’m partnering that very good dancer I told you about. And we have done really well. We have the County finals next weekend, and if we get through we’ll be in the Regionals,’ she wrote excitedly.
For several years this partnership continued and they never met anywhere but on the dance floor, and occasionally for a cup of tea beforehand. They won every competition they entered and their style and grace as a partnership dazzled everyone. No other dancers had a chance against them. Watching them was sheer exhilaration and the judges always spotted the joy on Mercedes’ face as she whirled past them.
It was not until 1955 that he proposed, nearly a decade after their first dance. Mercedes was taken aback. In all that time it had not occurred to her that her partner was in love with her. She was completely devastated by the proposal. As far as she could see it had come out of the blue. She loved Javier and only him, and was full of irrational guilt.
Carmen was tough with her. She had found a husband for herself three years earlier and already had her second child on the way.
‘You need to face something, Mercedes,’ she said. ‘Are you ever going to see Javier again?’
It was a question Mercedes had not dared to ask herself for more than five years now.
‘Don’t you think that if he was still alive you would have heard from him?’
She knew Carmen was probably right. Javier knew her mother’s address, and if he was alive he would have written and Concha would have forwarded the correspondence. All the time, though, there was the nagging doubt that letters could go astray and that somewhere, somehow the man she loved so much was still alive.
‘I don’t know. But I can’t give up on him.’
‘Well, you mustn’t give up on this one either. He is here
now
, Mercedes.You would be mad to let him go.’
The next time they danced, Mercedes tried to see her partner in a different light. She had always regarded him more like a brother than a lover. Could that ever change?
After the session, they had a cup of tea. Mercedes felt it was appropriate. They needed to talk.
‘All I wanted to say was that you can take as long as you like to think about it. I shall wait. Twenty-five years, if necessary,’ said her dance partner.
Mercedes studied his face as he spoke. She saw such warmth and kindness that she wondered if she might melt. The pale blue eyes looked into hers and she could see that his words were completely sincere. There was no mistaking his love.
It took her much less than twenty-five years to make her decision. Within a few months she realised that she would be a fool to let this sweet man go.
‘You can’t be doing the wrong thing by marrying him,’ teased Carmen. ‘If you’re as compatible as that on the dance floor, imagine . . .’
‘Carmen!’ exclaimed Mercedes, blushing. ‘What a thing to say!’
She wrote to her mother to tell her of her engagement. Mercedes was keen for Concha to travel to the wedding but she was an old lady now and had too many anxieties about the journey, not least whether she would be allowed back into Spain afterwards. Mercedes understood completely. A month before the wedding, a package came from Granada. Mercedes was intrigued when she recognised her mother’s shaky handwriting on the brown paper, and saw the rows of stamps with Franco’s head blackened by the franking machine. Her hands trembled as she struggled to cut through the string with a pair of blunt kitchen scissors.
It was the white lace mantilla that Concha had worn for her own wedding. For forty-five years it had been kept in waxed tissue paper and had survived when so much else had been lost. It was intact, if a shade darker perhaps, and unmarked. Its safe arrival seemed little short of a miracle. Beneath the layers of brown paper, her mother had padded the package out with a copy of the Granada newspaper,
El Ideal
. Mercedes put it to one side to cushion the contents. It was a month or two out of date now but she would look through it later. Even the sight of the mast-head made her stomach somersault.
Inside was also a letter from her mother and, in the envelope, a simple, unadorned gold chain.
‘I wore this on my wedding day too,’ she wrote. ‘My mother gave it to me and now I am giving it to you. It had a crucifix once but I took that off some time ago and now I seem to have lost it. I think you know about my feelings for the Church.’
For Mercedes, the only slightly sour note aside from the fact that Concha would not be there on her wedding day, was the disapproval of her fiancé’s parents. Mercedes was foreign and some people were afraid of foreigners in those days. As far as they were concerned she had come from another planet.They were not that happy either that she was a few years older than their son, but by the time they walked down the aisle together as man and wife, they had come round a little.
The marriage took place in the registry office in Beckenham. The bride wore a simple knee-length, fitted cotton gown with three-quarter-length sleeves, which she had made herself and her hair was ‘up’ in the Spanish style, with the extravagant lace mantilla cascading over her shoulders. Carmen was a witness and the guests were mostly Spanish exiles who, like her, had remained in the United Kingdom.
Victor Silvester, the great band leader who had seen them dance many times, sent them a telegram that was read out at their small reception in a local hotel:‘To the happy couple. May your marriage be as perfect as your dancing.’
Chapter Thirty-eight
MIGUEL HAD ALMOST got to the end of the pile of letters. Sonia could see that only one sheet remained in his hand. It was past midnight now and Sonia was worried that he might be getting too tired to go on. Mercedes’ story, if it ended here, had a happy ending and perhaps she should be content with that.
‘Are you sure you aren’t too tired to keep going?’ she asked with concern.
‘No, no,’ he replied. ‘I must read you this one. It’s the last she wrote, not long after her wedding.’
England has provided the safe haven I longed for. I still feel an alien in some ways, but there are plenty of kind people here.
Of course, what has kept my spirit alive, and has done ever since I got here, is dancing. It is the one thing that English people seemed to know about Spain: that there are people who dance in big flounced dresses and clack on castanets. Performing reminds me of who I am and yet sometimes it’s better not to dwell too much on that.
And, of course, what has made me happiest of all is the wonderful man I have just married. I could tell straight away when we met that he was younger than me, but he has a kind face and he can dance, as the English always say, ‘like Fred Astaire’. Even though he is fair-haired and pale-skinned and not at all like a Granadino I am sure you would love . . .
Sonia held her breath. She hardly dared hear the name.
. . . Jack.
Sonia had bitten her lip so hard that it bled. Her neck and chest throbbed with the pain of unshed tears. She was determined not to let Miguel see what impact the letter was having on her. She was not sure it was the right time to explain. He still had a little more to read:
No one here really knows anything about Spain and I have told my new husband very little about Granada, and certainly nothing of the horrors of our war.
I still wonder what became of Javier, and think of him often.
I know you understand why I haven’t returned, given all that’s happened to our family and probably the man I loved too.
Mercedes
For the first time, Sonia noticed that she was not alone in fighting back the tears. Miguel’s cheeks were damp with them. She was puzzled that he should be so upset when the story was not new to him, and she put her arm around him, handing him one of his own paper serviettes to mop his face.
‘I can see you were fond of them, the Ramírez family,’ she said gently.
They sat for a few minutes in silence. Sonia needed some time to reflect. There was no doubt now. This was her mother’s story and until today she had never known a word of it. She was shaken to the core of her being, and clearly her father would be too if he learned the details of his wife’s history. She would have to consider carefully whether such knowledge was really of use to someone in the last years of his life.
Mercedes’ tale lay on the table in front of them and Miguel’s misshapen old fingers picked up the pages, carefully folded them along their usual creases and returned them to the envelope. Sonia registered that these letters had been read and reread many times. It was strange. Why should these letters from her mother to her grandmother mean so much to Miguel? Her heart quickened and she could not quite tell why. Nor could she bring herself to ask this question.
Miguel was looking at Sonia now. She could see that he wanted to say something.
‘Thank you for listening to all of that,’ he said.
‘You mustn’t thank me!’ replied Sonia, trying to contain her emotion. ‘It’s me who should be thanking you. I did ask you to tell me.’
‘Yes, but you have been such a good listener.’
Now was her moment. She yearned to show Miguel the photographs she carried with her and now that she knew for certain that Mercedes Ramírez and her mother were one and the same, it did not seem ridiculous any more.
‘There is a reason for that, you know,’ she said digging into her handbag for her wallet.
She found two photographs, one of her mother as a teenage girl in flamenco costume and the other of the group of children sitting on the barrel.
Miguel had picked up the former.
‘That’s Mercedes!’ he said excitedly. ‘Where on earth did you get that?’
She paused. ‘From my father,’ she answered.
‘Your father?’ exclaimed Miguel incredulously. ‘I don’t think I understand . . .’
A moment or two passed before she could actually make herself say the words.
‘Mercedes was my mother.’
The old man could not speak. Sonia was worried, but within moments he had recovered. He was shaking his head from side to side in pure disbelief.
‘Mercedes was your mother . . .’
He was silent for a moment, and Sonia was almost unnerved by the intensity of his gaze.