Autumn in Catalonia Page 9

  Her curiosity piqued, Joana rose from the sofa and crossed to the wall. Sure enough, about a kilometre down the track a young man was walking towards them, slowly making his way up to the hill house, and it did indeed look like her new cousin Martin.

  He’d appeared out of the blue three days ago, wafting with him currents of air from another world, from France, where her Uncle Luis had made a life, and a family, far from the harsh realities of the Spain he’d abandoned. For a long time as a teenager she had hated Luis for his broken promises. It had taken her own abrupt and frightening emergence into adulthood to make her understand how war could rupture relationships.

  And Martin had brought Uncle Luis back to her. The lights in his eyes, and his energy, and his intuitive intelligence were Luis. The reticence in him was not. The boldness of the journey he was making had perhaps made him sober, and the space between their lives was one which you had to explore very lightly, to find the links behind. So they’d reached out very tentative hands towards each other, and found they touched a chord.

  Most things she didn’t ask – what had driven him to come looking for his roots, what had happened to his mother, whether he had brothers or sisters? She didn’t want to know. A shade of Luis had appeared, the connection was made, and the rest was irrelevant. They toasted cousinhood in champagne in a simple acceptance, which was no less eloquent for what went unsaid.

  They’d been companions for a few hours, and then the following morning she’d sent him down to her mother and Victor. Very reluctantly she’d let him go. He felt like her friend, her discovery, and she’d watched the car drive away with a sense of mourning, because from now onwards his view of her would be tainted. That moment when all judgement was suspended, and all difficult questions were in abeyance, was over. She had been a mere stopping point on a longer journey, and she never expected to see him again.

  And now, just two days later he was back. What could be bringing him back again so soon? Joana felt a frisson of excitement coupled with anxiety. Whatever it was, it was something very practical this time, some serious trouble. For the second time he had made the cruel six-kilometre hike uphill from Sant Galdric. He hadn’t come for nothing.

  ‘Toni,’ she shouted, and a voice answered her from behind the house. ‘Toni, take the car down the track and meet my cousin Martin – he’s on his way up here to see us.’

  ‘Yes, Senyora,’ came the completely incurious reply, and within a few minutes Joana heard the sound of the car engine gunning. She watched as the car came round the corner of the house and headed at a slow pace down the track. She leant over and saw that Martin had stopped, and was waiting for the car to arrive.

  ‘Paula, bring another coffee cup,’ she called, and took her seat again on the cane sofa to wait. ‘And bring more champagne, and a tray of food for my cousin. He’ll have missed lunch.’

  Her mind shifted over all the reasons that might have sent Martin back up here again. When Paula showed the young visitor wordlessly back onto the veranda, she rose with unusual haste to greet him.

  There was something different about Martin since he’d left two days ago. His eyes were strained, and something about the set of his broad shoulders seemed too rigid. Was such tension because of her? What terrible things had they been telling him?

  ‘Martin? What is the matter, el meu cosí?’ She held out her hands, and he put his own into them involuntarily. He didn’t answer, and seemed to be searching for some words to say. She reached up and kissed him on both cheeks, and he softened and half smiled.

  ‘That’s better,’ she said, and closing her right hand more tightly over his she drew him forward to the couch, and coaxed him to sit down. ‘Something has happened, and you have come to ask for my help. But first you must have some coffee. You have walked all the way from the village?’

  ‘No, not all the way. The shopkeeper in the village found me a lift up to the gate to your land.’ His voice was tight, so much tighter than two days ago. Joana smiled her understanding, willing him to smile back. He seemed older all of a sudden, but his hand was strong and smooth in hers, the hand of a doctor, she reminded herself. She freed her hand to serve his coffee. As she handed it to him she caught his gaze on her, and his expression was inscrutable.

  ‘I’m glad to see you again, Martin,’ she said simply. ‘Tell me why you are here. You found my mother well?’

  He nodded. ‘Your mother and your uncle are both well.’ He paused, and looked away into the shadows as he asked, ‘Did you know your daughter is also with them?’

  ‘Carla?’ The word was expelled from her throat as she looked at him in amazement. His head turned and relief lit up his eyes and brought colour to his cheeks.

  ‘You didn’t know where she was!’

  ‘Why no!’ Her daughter’s dark, slender form swam into her mind, marching, as she always imagined her, in a group of students holding banners demanding student rights. Middle-class intellectuals, all of them, with too much money and not enough to do. All it did was to put Sergi’s political life in jeopardy. The thought hardened her, and she looked a challenge at Martin.

  ‘Has she got herself into trouble, then, with those friends of hers?’

  ‘In a way, I suppose – she is certainly in trouble. Listen, Joana, have you heard of a young man called Luc Serra?’

  She shook her head. ‘Is he one of her political friends?’

  ‘No, he’s her fiancé. They were going to be married in the summer, but he was arrested just before their wedding.’

  ‘Then he doesn’t sound like an ideal fiancé – indeed it sounds as though he was definitely one of her unsavoury political friends. If he has been arrested, then he must have been up to no good!’

  ‘No, Joana, there have been no protests for some months now, no arrests this last while among the students. Luc was lifted from his apartment for no reason in the middle of the night, and just taken away the day before they were due to leave Barcelona together.’ He watched her with anxious eyes, and continued. ‘Carla says her father, your husband Sergi, was watching them and had Luc arrested to prevent them getting married.’

  That could be true! Joana thought back to the summer months, to August, when Sergi had brought some foreign industrialists up to the hill house to shoot wild boar. She’d asked him if he had any news of Carla. Surely she should have graduated by now? Would she see sense and come home? Would he allow her to? And Sergi had laughed and said yes, Carla’s studies were indeed over, and as for those friends of hers, she wasn’t with them anymore. He seemed genuinely amused, and when she asked him where Carla was now, he told her not to worry her head about the girl – he’d make sure she was in good hands, and put a stop to all that political nonsense. He brushed aside all further questions, and left the hill house the next day, promising his guests some even better entertainment in the brothels of Girona. Joana had been uneasy, but powerless in the face of Sergi’s dismissal.

  She looked across at Martin, still studying her with those anxious lines around his eyes. ‘So my daughter has lost a boyfriend,’ she said, keeping her voice carefully neutral. ‘It sounds as though he was no bad loss.’

  ‘But it’s not like that, Joana, they were a serious couple, getting married, planning a future together. And that’s not all. You see, Carla is pregnant. And with no marriage certificate they’ll take the baby away from her. In fact, Sergi is plotting it. I saw him myself in Girona.’

  She turned aghast eyes on him, and felt the colour draining from her cheeks. She reached out blindly, and he took her hand in his as he continued talking, telling her how Sergi’s henchmen had been keeping watch on Carla, how Carla and her grandmother had hoped to bring the baby into the world hidden in their apartment, how thin Carla was, how desperate, with no news of Luc, and how, yesterday, they had seen Sergi, grim and disdainful, cruising by in his Mercedes with that calculating look in his eye. Gradually it seemed to dawn on him that Joana wasn’t responding – hadn’t said a word. She looked at him in stricken s
ilence, frozen into physical immobility as her mind reeled. Head and hands were chilled and she thought she might faint.

  ‘Are you all right?’ She heard his voice coming from somewhere far away, and as her eyes began to black over she felt two hands come round her shoulders, pushing her head down until she lay across Martin’s lap.

  ‘Stay there a moment,’ he said, and as he held her in place his hands massaged her shoulders, pinning her against the warmth of his body until the blood came back to her face, and she could sit up again without fainting, though waves of nausea still engulfed her, and the floor seemed to move before her eyes. Martin let her go, and she laid her head back against the sofa, allowing the reeling world to come slowly to rights.

  ‘I gave you a shock, I’m sorry.’ Martin’s voice was full of contrition, and she shook her head, and made herself look at him. As she met his troubled eyes she felt her own prick with tears, and words came tumbling out that had lain atrophied for twenty-four years.

  ‘Poor Carla,’ she started, and as she thought of her daughter the tears spilt down her cheeks. ‘My poor Carla. It’s such a dreadful thing, that fear, the blind panic that you feel, when no one can help you, and the baby just keeps growing, and you’re all alone …’

  Martin’s voice came slowly. ‘It happened to you?’

  ‘In 1939, yes. When the civil war was lost. It was a boy from Sant Galdric, Alex, my darling Alex. I was only seventeen, just a girl, and he was my knight in shining armour, but somehow he came under suspicion by the new regime. We never really understood why, because he had never been involved in the war, but you know, people were disappearing all the time back then, just disappearing and you never heard of them again. Or their bodies would turn up weeks later, completely randomly. And Alex …’ Her voice broke.

  ‘He disappeared too.’ The voice was gentle. She nodded, unable to speak.

  ‘And you were pregnant.’ He was so matter of fact, so soft-spoken. She nodded again, and as she looked up at his face a sob shook her and the tears took over. He drew her against him, and spoke above her head.

  ‘So Carla?’

  ‘Carla is Alex’s daughter. I knew, soon after Alex disappeared, that I was pregnant. I was so scared. And Sergi … Sergi had always wanted me, and we made a bargain. He took me and married me, and everyone assumed the baby was his, and I was saved. But then I had to live his life, make my life with him, on his terms.’

  She lifted her head and looked at Martin through the haze of tears, willing him to understand, aghast at her own words, her abandonment of reserve. Never had she spoken to anyone like this. Her hand went out to him in supplication, and he caught it and held it, and she saw that he too was crying, why she didn’t know, but his cheeks were wet with tears. He looked more appalled even than she felt, and long minutes passed during which neither of them could speak. It seemed to Joana that there was nothing more to say. She’d opened up the door to grief, and now she just gazed blankly on the bleakness she’d exposed.

  It was Martin who finally resumed their conversation. ‘Carla told me her father hit her,’ he said at last, keeping his voice level. ‘Did he resent her?’

  Joana sighed. ‘Things were never easy. But at first he was all right with her. She never looked like him, or even like me, to be honest. She was all Alex, especially as she got older, tall and dark, with a face all angles and expressions. But she loved Sergi when she was tiny, and always tried to please him. He didn’t like her back, though, and it showed, and she gradually withdrew from him. That was all right, though – I could paper over the cracks.

  ‘The real difficulty came later. You see, the bargain for Sergi was that he got a wife who could adorn his career, and give him sons to secure his line and cement his future, but the sons never came. He blamed me, of course, and as he always had an aggressive streak we both suffered, Carla and me, whenever he was angry or wanted someone to bully.’

  She ran one hand down her arm, as if to feel the bruises. ‘Sergi could never in a million years have accepted that he was incapable of bearing children, and yet the evidence was there that it was not me who was infertile. Carla was the proof of that, and he knew it underneath, and it just made him angrier. He got his own back by running me down, bending me more and more to his will. But he still required me to play the role of devoted wife, to smile for his friends and host his parties. In the eyes of the world we were a great couple, successful, fashionable, solidly loyal to the regime.’

  She was amazed at how good it felt to let down her guard. She’d never told this story to anyone, and had grown used to her private armour, leaning on it as a prop. This ‘cousin’ had pierced right through it, though, with his bolt of lightning out of the blue, and now it seemed she couldn’t pull the shell back round her.

  ‘You didn’t ever feel you could tell your mother?’

  ‘No!’ The word spat out from her throat, angrier than she had intended. ‘My mother believed like everyone that Carla was Sergi’s baby. They all thought I’d sold out when I married Sergi! Well, let them think so! I had to make a new life, and that was that. Later, when it got difficult, well, she was so far away, stuck in that village, praying for me at Mass, no doubt. It was like another world. She could never have understood our lives in Girona, and I wouldn’t have swapped all of Sergi’s nastiness to go back into that village by then!’

  ‘And Carla?’

  ‘What about Carla?’

  ‘Could you have shared with her? You were both suffering, after all.’

  She looked at him with renewed hostility. ‘You don’t understand! For most of her childhood Carla barely suffered at all from him. He would sometimes strike her, but all fathers would hit their children occasionally. He was hardly around when she was a girl – mostly her early life was just school, girls’ parties, music lessons, all that kind of thing. When most of Spain was starving, struggling to find food, she had more than most other girls could hope for, and all I wanted was to keep it that way, keep her innocent and out of it all, and make sure she had a future. But she got prickly as she got older, just at the same time as he was turning against us. She was too intelligent, too direct, too much like her real father, and the two of them began to hate each other. I was stuck in the middle, but she hated me too by then, and wasn’t much interested in my opinions. I don’t think she needed me to fight her battles for her! She was twice as strong as I’ll ever be, and desperate for confrontation.’

  She looked out over the veranda towards the hills. ‘She was lucky. She could get away and make her own life. I was in a contract, and had to obey.’

  ‘But she never really got away, did she? Carla has never really been free. Her father had her watched, stopped her marrying, gaoled her fiancé, and now that she’s completely vulnerable he’s got her trapped!’

  Joana winced at the challenge in his voice, and was relieved to see Paula shuffling out with the tray of food and the champagne. She put salad, and rice and chicken in front of Martin, and plonked the bottle on the low table between them, scattering some of the heavy charge in the air. As she headed indoors, Joana grinned at her departing back.

  ‘You’d better get on and eat that,’ she told Martin. ‘She’ll be desperate for her siesta, and wanting to clear the plates quickly! And while you eat you can tell me about Carla. You left her at my mother’s place?’

  ‘Yes,’ he answered, and told her the story between mouthfuls. ‘She’s staying indoors, hoping to keep out of your husband’s way. We believe that Sergi will try to abduct her – his henchmen saw me with her and then he came by himself to check me out when we were walking together in the street. He has never done that before, Carla says. She hasn’t seen him in person since she last visited him and you together. He must wonder if Carla has found herself a new man, and Carla is sure he’ll want to remove her from any new friendship which might jeopardise his plans and his control of her. Your mother is sure of it too. The easiest way for him to be sure of removing her illegitimate child is for him to lock
her away somewhere.’

  He paused to look at Joana, and she bit her lip and nodded. He continued. ‘She’s frightened of what might happen at night-time, but we thought that she would be safe by day today if she stayed inside, long enough anyway for me to come here.’

  ‘And she trusted that I would help her?’

  Joana couldn’t help the little note of appeal that came into her voice. Martin hesitated, and as she watched his face her own hardened in response, and she held up a hand.

  ‘There’s no need to answer that. She has no reason to believe in me. Let’s just talk practicalities instead. Carla needs to get away immediately from Girona, to somewhere Sergi won’t look for her. Well, she can come here. She won’t love it – she won’t want to be with me, and she has always hated this place, but she’ll be safe here. It’s the last place Sergi would think of looking for her.’

  ‘Does your husband not come here at all, then?’

  Joana laughed a little bitterly. ‘As I told you, he came here in August, with some business visitors. Otherwise no. Sergi has discovered far more fascinating company than me now – he had a very cool young woman as his mistress the last time I was in Girona.’

  ‘And are you kind of banished here?’

  ‘In a way,’ she answered, after a moment. She almost laughed at herself. Was she going to tell this young man everything about her life? But he made it very easy to talk, somehow.

  After a moment she continued. ‘Sergi tells the world I have a problem. With this.’ She gestured at her glass, and the open bottle of champagne waiting by her elbow. ‘He may well be right. But one way or another he has made it difficult for me to be among our old social group. He’s done it very cleverly, and everyone believes that I’m here for my health, that he has nothing but concern for me.’

  She watched Martin’s face for any reaction. It was Uncle Luis who looked back at her, not judging, but just waiting. She felt a little surge of defiance run through her as she drank again from her glass. She’d broken open her cage a little that afternoon, and it felt as though Uncle Luis was applauding her.