The Muse

1

Not all of us receive the ends that we deserve. Many moments that change a life’s course — a conversation with a stranger on a ship, for example — are pure luck. And yet no one writes you a letter, or chooses you as their confessor, without good reason. This is what she taught me: you have to be ready in order to be lucky. You have to put your pieces into play.

When my day came, it was so hot that my armpits had made moons on the blouse the shoe shop supplied to every employee. ‘It don’t matter what size,’ the woman said, dabbing herself with a handkerchief. My shoulders were aching, my fingertips chafing. I stared; sweat had turned the pale hair at her brow the colour of a wet mouse. London heat; it never has anywhere to go. I didn’t know it, but this woman was the last customer I would ever have to serve.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Just said,’ the woman sighed. ‘Any size’ll do.’

It was nearing closing time, which meant all the crumbs of dry skin — toe jam, as we called it — would have to be hoovered out of the carpet. Cynth always said we could have moulded a whole foot out of those scrapings, a monster to dance a jig of its own. She liked her job at Dolcis Shoes, and she’d got me mine — but within an hour of our shift, I craved the cool of my room, my cheap notebooks, my pencil waiting by the narrow bed. ‘Girl, you got to pick your face up,’ Cynth would whisper. ‘Or you working in the funeral parlour next door?’

I backed away to the stock cupboard, a place where I would often escape, immune as I was by now to its noxious smell of rubbered soles. I thought I might go in and scream silently at the wall of boxes.

‘Wait! Oi, wait,’ the woman called after me. When she was sure she had my attention, she bent low and slipped off her scuffed pump, revealing a foot that had no toes. Not one. A smooth stump, a block of flesh resting innocently on the faded carpet.

‘See,’ she said, her voice defeated as she kicked off the second shoe to reveal an identical state of affairs. ‘I just. . stuff the ends with paper, so it don’t matter what size you bring.’

It was a sight, and I have not forgotten it; the Englishwoman who showed me her toeless feet. At the time, perhaps I was repulsed. We always say the young have little truck with ugliness, have not learned to mask shock. I wasn’t that young, really; twenty-six. I don’t know what I did in the moment, but I do recall telling Cynth, on the way home to the flat we shared off Clapham Common, and her whooping with delighted horror at the thought of those toeless feet. ‘Stumpy McGee!’ she shouted. ‘She comin’ to get yuh, Delly!’ And then, with an optimistic pragmatism; ‘At least she wear any shoe she want.’

Perhaps that woman was a witch coming to herald the change in my path. I don’t believe so; a different woman did that. But her presence does seem a macabre end to that chapter of my life. Did she see in me a kindred vulnerability? Did she and I occupy a space where our only option was to fill the gap with paper? I don’t know. There does remain the very slim possibility that all she wanted was a new pair of shoes. And yet I always think of her as something from a fairy tale, because that was the day that everything changed.

Over the last five years since sailing to England from Port of Spain, I’d applied for many other jobs, and heard nothing. As the train from Southampton chugged into Waterloo, Cynth had mistaken house chimneys for factories, the promise of plenty of work. It was a promise that turned out to be harder to fulfil. I often fantasized about leaving Dolcis, once applying to a national newspaper to work as a tea-girl. Back home, with my degree and self-regard, I would never have dreamed of serving any soul tea, but Cynth had said, ‘A one-eye stone-deaf limping frog could do that job, and they still won’t give it to you, Odelle.’

Cynth, with whom I had gone to school, and with whom I had travelled to England, had become besotted with two things: shoes, and her fiancé, Samuel, whom she had met at our local church off Clapham High Street. (Sam turned out to be a great bonus, given the place was normally full of old tanties telling us about the good old days.) Because of finding him, Cynth did not strain at the bit as I did, and it could be a source of tension between us. I would often declare that I couldn’t take it any more, that I wasn’t like her, and Cynth would say, ‘Oh, because I some sheep and you so clever?’

I had telephoned so many advertisements which stated experience was not essential, and people sounded so nice — and then I’d turn up and miracle, miracle! every single job had been taken. And yet, call it folly, call it my pursuit of a just inheritance, but I kept on applying. The latest — and the best I’d ever seen — was a typist post at the Skelton Institute of Art, a place of pillars and porticoes. I’d even visited it once, on my monthly Saturday off. I’d spent the day wandering the rooms, moving from Gainsborough to Chagall, via aquatints by William Blake. On the train home to Clapham, a little girl gazed at me as if I was a painting. Her small fingers reached out and rubbed my earlobe, and she asked her mother, ‘Does it come off?’ Her mother didn’t chide: she looked like she damn well wanted the earlobe to give its answer.

I hadn’t scrapped with the boys to gain a first-class English Literature degree from the University of the West Indies for nothing. I hadn’t endured a child’s pinch in a train carriage, for nothing. Back home, the British Consulate itself had awarded me the Commonwealth Students’ first prize for my poem, ‘Caribbean Spider-Lily’. I’m sorry, Cynth, but I was not going to put shoes on sweaty Cinderellas for the rest of my life. There were tears, of course, mainly sobbed into my sagging pillow. The pressure of desire curdled inside me. I was ashamed of it, and yet it defined me. I had bigger things I wanted to do, and I’d done five years of waiting. In the meantime, I wrote revenge poems about the English weather, and lied to my mother that London was heaven.

The letter was on the mat when Cynth and I got home. I kicked off my shoes and stood stock-still in the hallway. The postmark was London W.1, the centre of the world. The Victorian tiles under my bare feet were cold; my toes flexed upon the brown and blue. I slid one finger under the flap of the envelope, lifting it like a broken leaf. It was the Skelton Institute letterhead.

‘Well?’ Cynth said.

I didn’t reply, one fingernail pressed into the floral Braille of our landlord’s Anaglypta wallpaper, as I read to the end in shock.

The Skelton Institute

Skelton Square

London, W.1

16th June, 1967

Dear Miss Bastien,

Thank you for sending your application letter and curriculum vitae.

To thrive, under whatever circumstances life presents us, is all anyone can hope for. You are clearly a young woman of great ability, amply armoured. To that degree, I am delighted to invite you to a week’s trial role in the typist position.

There is much to learn, and most of it must be learned alone. If this arrangement suits you, please advise me by return of post whether the offer is to be accepted, and we will proceed from there. The starting salary is £10 p/w.

With warm wishes,

Marjorie Quick

£10 a week. At Dolcis, I only got six. Four pounds would make the difference of a world, but it wasn’t even the money. It was that I was a step closer to what I’d been taught were Important Things — culture, history, art. The signature was in thick black ink, the ‘M’ and ‘Q’ extravagant, almost Italianate in grandeur. The letter smelled faintly of a peculiar perfume. It was a bit dog-eared, as if this Marjorie Quick had left it in her handbag for some days before finally deciding to take it to the post.

Goodbye shoe shop, goodbye drudgery. ‘I got it,’ I whispered to my friend. ‘They want me. I blimmin’ got it.’

Cynth screamed and took me in her arms. ‘Yes!’

I let out a sob. ‘You did it. You did it,’ she went on, and I breathed her neck, like air after thunder in Port of Spain. She took the letter and said, ‘What kind of a name is Marjorie Quick?’

I was too happy to answer. Dig your nail in that wall, Odelle Bastien; break apart that paper flower. But I wonder, given what happened, the trouble it led you to, would you do it again? Would you turn up at eight twenty-five on the morning of Monday 3 July 1967, adjusting that new hat of yours, feet wiggling in your Dolcis shoes, to work in the Skelton for £10 a week and a woman called Marjorie Quick?

Yes, I would. Because I was Odelle and Quick was Quick. And to think you have a second path is to be a fool.

2

I envisaged I would be working in a whole atrium of clattering typists, but I was alone. Many of the staff were away, I supposed, taking annual holidays in exotic places like France. Every day, I would walk up the stone steps towards the Skelton’s large doors, upon whose panes was blazoned in gold lettering ARS VINCIT OMNIA. Hands on the vincit and the omnia, I pushed inside to a place that smelled of old leather and polished wood, where to my immediate right was a long reception desk and a wall of pigeonholes looming behind it, already filled with the morning’s post.

The view in the room I’d been assigned was terrible — a brick wall smeared black with soot, and a long drop when you looked down. I could see an alleyway, where porters and secretaries from the neighbouring building would line up and smoke. I could never hear their conversations, only watch their body language, the ritual of a patted pocket, heads together like a kiss as the cigarette was flourished and the lighter caught, a leg bent coquettishly backwards against a wall. It was such a hidden place.

Skelton Square was tucked behind Piccadilly, on the river side. Standing there since George III was king, it had been lucky in the Blitz. Beyond the rooftops the sounds of the Circus could be heard; bus engines and honking motor cars, the keening calls of milk boys. There was a false sense of security in a place like this, in the heart of London’s West End.

For nearly the whole of the first week the only person I spoke to was a girl called Pamela Rudge. Pamela was the receptionist, and she would always be there, reading the Express at her counter, elbows on the wood, gum popping in her mouth before the big fellers showed and she threw it in the bin. With a hint of suffering, as if she’d been interrupted in a difficult activity, she would fold the newspaper like a piece of delicate lace and look up at me. ‘Good morning, Adele,’ she’d say. Twenty-one years old, Pam Rudge was the latest in a long line of East Enders, an immobile beehive lacquered to her head and enough black eyeliner to feed five pharaohs.

Rudge was fashionable, overtly sexual. I wanted her mint-green minidress, her pussy-bow blouses in shades of burnt orange, but I didn’t have the confidence to show my body like that. All my flair was locked inside my head. I wanted her lipstick shades, her blusher, but English powders transported me into strange, grey zones where I looked like a ghost. In the make-up department in Arding & Hobbs at the Junction, I’d only find things called ‘Buttermilk Nude’, ‘Blonde Corn’, ‘Apricot Bloom’, ‘Willow Lily’ and other such bad face poetry.

I decided that Pamela was the kind of person whose idea of a good night out was to gorge her face on a saveloy in Leicester Square. She probably spent her salary on hair spray and bad novels, but was too stupid to even read them. Perhaps I communicated some of these thoughts — because Pamela, in turn, would either maintain wide-eyed surprise at seeing me every day, as if astonished by my audacity to keep coming back, or express comatose boredom at the appearance of my face. Sometimes she would not even look up as I lifted the flap of the reception desk and let it drop with the lightest bang just at the level of her right ear.

Cynth once told me that I looked better in profile, and I said that made me sound like I was a coin. But now it makes me wonder about my two sides, the arch impression I probably gave Pamela, the spare change of myself that no one yet had pocketed. The truth was, I felt so prim before a girl like Rudge.

She knew no other blacks, she told me on the Thursday of that first week. When I replied that I hadn’t known any either by that name till I came here, she looked completely blank.

But despite the clunky dance with Pamela, I was ecstatic to be there. The Skelton was Eden, it was Mecca and Pemberley; the best of my dreams come to life. A room, a desk, a typewriter, Pall Mall in the morning as I walked from Charing Cross, a boulevard of golden light.

One of my jobs was to transcribe research notes for academic men I never saw, except for their nearly indecipherable handwriting, scribbling about bronze sculptures or sets of linocuts. I enjoyed this, but my principal duty revolved around a tray on my desk that would be filled with letters I was to type up and leave with Pamela downstairs. Most of the time they were fairly mundane, but every now and then I’d pick up a gem, a begging letter to some old millionaire or decrepit Lady Whatnot on their last legs. ‘My dear Sir Peter, it was such a pleasure to identify the Rembrandt you had in your attic back in ’57. Would you consider using the Skelton to help catalogue the rest of your wonderful collection?’ and so on. Letters to financiers and film moguls, informing them that a Matisse was floating around, or would they fancy a new room of the Skelton being named after them, as long as we could fill it with their artworks?

They were mainly written by the director of the Skelton, a man called Edmund Reede. Pamela told me Reede was in his sixties and had a short fuse. In the war, he had something to do with recovering art confiscated by the Nazis, but she didn’t know any more. The name ‘Edmund Reede’ for me conjured up a quintessential, intimidating Englishness, Savile Rowers in Whitehall clubs; eat the steak, hunt the fox. Three-piece suit, pomaded hair, great-uncle Henry’s golden watch. I would see him round the corridors, and he would look surprised every time. It was as if I had walked in naked off the street. We studied men like him at school — protected gentlemen, rich gentlemen, white gentlemen, who picked up pens and wrote the world for the rest of us to read.

The Skelton was a bit like that world, the world I’d been taught that I wanted to be in — and just by typing the letters, I felt closer to it all, as if my help in the matter was invaluable, as if I’d been picked for a reason. And the best thing was; I was fast. So once I had finished their letters, I used a spare hour here or there to type my own work — starting over and over again, scrunching up pieces of paper and making sure to put them in my handbag rather than leaving them like evidence in the waste-paper bin. Sometimes, I’d go home with my handbag brimming with balls of paper.

I told Cynth how I’d forgotten the smell of the Dolcis stock cupboard. ‘It’s as if one week can kill five years,’ I said, determined and rhapsodic about my transformation. I told her about Pamela, and joked about the rigidity of her beehive. Cynth paused, frowning, for she was frying me an egg in our tiny flat, and the hob was unreliable. ‘I pleased for yuh, Delly,’ she said. ‘I pleased it going so well.’

On the Friday of the first week, Reede’s letters completed, I was struggling with a poem in a quiet half-hour. Cynth had told me that the only thing she wanted as a wedding gift was ‘something written — seeing as you’re the only one who ever could.’ Touched but agonized, I stared at the Skelton’s typewriter, thinking how happy Sam and Cynth clearly made each other. It made me think about my own lack; the foot, but no glass slipper. It also made me realize how I had been struggling with my writing for months. I hated every word that came from me, couldn’t let any of it breathe.

A woman walked in just as I lit upon a possible phrase. ‘Hallo, Miss Bastien,’ she said, and the idea melted away. ‘Getting on? Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Marjorie Quick.’

I stood, knocking the typewriter in my haste, and she laughed. ‘This isn’t the army, you know. Take a seat.’ My eye darted to the poem on the reel, and I felt sick to my stomach that she might walk round and see it.

Marjorie Quick came towards me, hand outstretched, her gaze flicking to the typewriter. I took her hand, willing her to stay on the other side of the desk. She did, and I noticed the cigarette scent that clung to her, mingled with a musky, masculine perfume that I recognized from the letter she’d posted, and I would later learn was called Eau Sauvage.

Marjorie Quick was petite, upright, dressed in a way that eclipsed Pamela’s efforts. Wide black slacks that billowed like a sailor’s as she walked. A pale-pink silk blouse with a grey satin necktie loosely slung inside it. She looked like something out of Hollywood, with her short, silvering curls, her cheeks seeming carved from a fine honeyed wood. She could have been in her early fifties, I supposed, but looked unlike any fifty-year-old I’d ever met. Her jawline was sharp and her glamour hovered.

‘Hello,’ I said. I couldn’t stop staring at her.

‘Any bother?’ Quick seemed to feel the same, fixing her dark liquid irises on me, waiting for my answer. I noticed she looked rather flushed, a bead of perspiration on her forehead.

‘Bother?’ I repeated.

‘Good. What time is it?’ The clock was behind her, but she didn’t turn.

‘Nearly twelve-thirty.’

‘So let us lunch.’

3

She had her name engraved on a brass plate upon her door. I wondered how many women in London, in this year of our Lord 1967, had their own office. Working-class women had menial jobs, or nursed in the NHS, or were factory or shop girls or typists like me, and it had been like that for decades. But there was a world of difference, an almost unnavigable journey, between that and having your name engraved on the door. Perhaps Marjorie Quick was a scion of the Skelton family, here in some honorary position.

She opened the door, the nameplate glinting in the rays of sun through the window beyond, and ushered me inside. Her room was white and airy, with huge windows looking onto the square. The walls were bare of paintings, which I thought odd, being where we were. Three were covered in bookshelves and I spied mainly nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century novels, the surprise combination of Hopkins perching next to Pound, and a smattering of Roman history. They were all hardbacks, so I couldn’t see if the spines were bent.

From her large desk, Quick grabbed a packet of cigarettes. I watched as she extracted one, hesitated, and then placed it delicately on her lips. I would become accustomed to her habit of speeding up her actions, only to slow them again, as if checking herself. Her name lived up to her, but whether it was her languorous or hasty side that was more natural was always hard to tell.

‘Would you like one?’ she asked.

‘No, thank you.’

‘Then I’ll go on alone.’

Her lighter was one of those heavy, refillable silver varieties, to be left on a table rather than slipped in a pocket. It was the kind of thing you might see in a country house, a cross between a hand grenade and something up for auction at Christie’s. The Skelton had a lot of money, I reckoned, and Quick reflected it. Unspoken, but present, it was in the cut of her pink silk blouse, her brave trousers, her smoking paraphernalia. In her. I wondered again what exactly her role here was.

‘Gin?’ she said.

I hesitated. I never drank much, and I certainly did not like the taste of spirits. The smell reminded me too much of the men in the Port of Spain clubhouses — the bubble of rum through the blood, working to a roar of squalid pain or euphoria heard upon the dust roads into town. But Quick unscrewed the cap of the gin from a table in the corner and poured some into two tumblers. She delved in an icebox with a pair of tongs and dropped two cubes in my glass, splashed it with tonic to the top, added a slice of lemon, and handed it to me.

Sinking down into her chair as if she’d been standing for twenty days, Quick slugged back her own gin, picked up the telephone receiver and dialled a number. She sparked the lighter and a fat orange flame appeared. The end of her cigarette sizzled, tobacco leaf crisping into tendrils of blue smoke.

‘Hello, Harris? Yes, whatever it is today. But twice over. And a bottle of the Sancerre. Two glasses. How long? Fine.’ I listened to the cadences of her voice; clipped and husky, it didn’t sound entirely English, even though it had hints enough inside it of a draughty boarding school.

She placed the receiver back down, and flicked her cigarette into a giant marble ashtray. ‘The restaurant next door,’ she said. ‘I find it impossible to sit inside it.’

I sat down opposite her, cradling my glass, thinking of the sandwich Cynth had made for me, its edges curling in the heat of my desk drawer.

‘So,’ she said. ‘A new job.’

‘Yes, madam.’

Quick placed her glass on the desk. ‘First things, Miss Bastien. Never call me “madam”. Nor am I “miss”. I like to be known as Quick.’ She smiled, looking rueful. ‘Your name is French?’

‘Yes, I believe so.’

‘You speak French?’

‘No.’

‘To have and to be confuse me greatly. I thought people spoke French in Trinidad?’

I hesitated. ‘Only a few of our forebears were indoors, speaking with the French,’ I said.

Her eyes widened — with amusement, offence? It was impossible to tell. I dreaded that my history lesson was too much, too arch, and I was going to fail my trial period. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘How interesting.’ She took another slug of gin. ‘There’s not much to do here at the moment,’ she went on, ‘but I expect Mr Reede is keeping you busy with his endless flow of correspondence. I’m worried you’ll be bored.’

‘Oh, I’m sure I won’t be.’ I thought of Dolcis, of how they overworked Cynth and me; the way the husbands watched our buttocks whilst their wives slipped on their heels. ‘I’m just so pleased to be here.’

‘There’s probably more life to be seen in one day at Dolcis Shoes than a week at the Skelton. Did you enjoy it?’ she asked. ‘Touching all those women’s feet?’

The question was vaguely shocking, rimed with a sexual sharpness that stung me, virginal as I was. But I would not be cowed. ‘In all honesty,’ I replied, ‘with thirty pairs a day, it was appalling.’

She threw back her head and laughed. ‘All the cheeses of France!’

Her laughter was infectious and I giggled too. It was a ludicrous thing to say, but it melted the tension inside me. ‘Some people don’t mind it,’ I said, thinking of Cynth, how I was abasing her for this exchange, this strange game whose rules I didn’t know. ‘It takes a skill.’

‘I dare say. But so many anonymous toes.’ She shuddered. ‘We have all these beautiful portraits at the Skelton, but we’re really just gangling arms, gurgling intestines. The heat inside the liver.’ She looked at me hard, and took another drag. ‘I’ve had a lot longer than you to come to that conclusion, Miss Bastien. Toes, the crooks of elbows. Enjoy dignity in them while you can.’

‘I’ll try,’ I said, unsettled once again. There was a restlessness to her; it felt as if she was putting on a performance for me, and I didn’t know why.

There was a knock on the door. Quick told them to enter and our lunch arrived on a trolley, pushed by a very small, elderly porter who only had one arm. A basket of rolls, two flat fishes, a buoyant-looking salad, a bottle of wine in a cooler, and something else hidden under a steel dome. The porter glanced at me, startled like a rabbit. His rheumy eyes slid back to Quick.

‘That’ll be all, Harris. Thank you,’ Quick said.

‘We haven’t seen you all week, miss,’ he replied.

‘Ah — annual leave.’

‘Somewhere nice?’

‘No.’ Quick looked momentarily disconcerted. ‘Just a home stay.’

The porter changed his attention to me. ‘Bit different to the last one,’ he said, cocking his head. ‘Does Mr Reede know you’ve got a wog in?’

‘That will be everything, Harris,’ said Quick, in a tight voice. He cast her a disgruntled look and left the trolley, staring at me as he backed out of the door.

‘Harris,’ Quick said when he’d gone, as if to say his name was explanation enough. ‘The arm got lost in Passchendaele. He refuses to retire and no one has the heart to do it.’ The porter’s word clung to the air. Quick stood up and handed me a plate off the trolley.

‘Just use the desk to rest it, if you don’t mind.’ She carried her own plate round to her side of the desk. She had a slim little back, her shoulder blades slightly poking through the blouse like a pair of fins. The wine had been uncorked and she poured us both a glass.

‘It’s very good. Not like the stuff we use for the public.’ The glug of it was loud and lush and transgressive, like she was pouring me elixir in full daylight. ‘Cheers,’ Quick said briskly, raising her glass. ‘I hope you like lemon sole.’

‘Yes,’ I replied. I’d never eaten it before.

‘So. What did your parents say when you told them you were working here?’

‘My parents?’

‘Were they proud?’

I wiggled my toes in the confines of their shoes. ‘My father’s dead.’

‘Oh.’

‘My mother is still in Port of Spain. I’m an only child. She might not even have got my letter yet.’

‘Ah. That must be hard for you both.’

I thought of my mother — her belief in England, a place she would never see; and I thought of my father, recruited into the RAF, gone down over Germany in a ball of flame. When I was fifteen, the Prime Minister of Tobago had declared that the future of the islands’ children lay in their schoolbags. My mother, desperate for me not to live a life like hers and Dad’s, pushed me to better myself — but for what, when all the land post-independence was being sold to foreign companies who invested the profits back into their own countries? What were we youngsters supposed to do, when we reached the bottom of those schoolbags and found nothing there — just a seam, split from the weight of our books? We had to leave.

‘Are you all right, Miss Bastien?’ said Quick.

‘I came here with my friend, Cynth,’ I said, not wishing to dwell on Port of Spain, the death board with Dad’s name on it, his empty plot in Lapeyrouse Cemetery that Mama still kept vacant, the Catholic nuns who’d taught me as I grew up in my grief. ‘Cynthia’s engaged,’ I said. ‘She’s getting married.’

‘Ah.’ Quick picked up her knife and began to lift a small segment of the sole, and I had the strange feeling of saying too much without having said anything at all. ‘When?’

‘In two weeks. I’m maid of honour.’

‘And then what?’

‘Then what?’

‘Well, you’ll be alone, won’t you? She’ll be living with her husband.’

Quick always insisted on skirting her own truths whilst getting to the core of yours. She told me nothing about the Skelton, focusing only on finding out about me, and had soon skewered my darkest fear. The fact was, Cynth’s imminent departure from our little flat had hung between me and my oldest friend like a silent question, heavy with foreboding. We both knew she would leave to live with Samuel, but I couldn’t imagine rooming with anybody else, so I didn’t talk about it, and neither did she. I boasted about my new job and she fretted over wedding invitations and made me sandwiches I overlooked. The salary from the Skelton would cover the second room she was going to vacate, and this was my only comfort.

‘I enjoy my own company,’ I said, swallowing hard. ‘It’ll be nice to have some space.’

Quick reached for another cigarette, but then seemed to change her mind. If you were alone, I thought, you’d have already smoked three more. Her eyes rested briefly on my face as she lifted the steel dome to reveal a lemon meringue. ‘Do eat something, Miss Bastien,’ she said. ‘All this food.’

Whilst I ate my slice of meringue, Quick didn’t touch a crumb. She seemed born to all this, to the smoking and the telephone orders, the tangential observations. I imagined her in her twenties, raffing round London with a glamorous set, a cat amongst the Blitz. I was piecing her together from Mitford and Waugh, dousing her with a coat of my newly discovered Muriel Spark. It was perhaps a vanity, instilled in me from the education I’d received, which was little different from the model used in English public schools, with its Latin and Greek and boys playing cricket — but I had yearned for eccentric, confident people to enhance my life; I thought I deserved them, the sort of people you found only in novels. Quick hardly had to do anything, I was so sprung for it, so willing. Starved of my past life, I began to concoct a present fantasy.

‘Your application interested me greatly,’ she said. ‘You write very well. Very well. At your university, you seem to have been one of the brightest students. I take it you think you’re too good to be a secretary.’

Fear ran through me. Did this mean she was letting me go, that I hadn’t passed the trial? ‘I’m very grateful to be here,’ I said. ‘It’s a wonderful place to work.’

She made a face at these blandishments and I wondered what it was she wanted. I reached for a bread roll and rested it in my palm. It was the weight and size of a small marsupial and I had an instinct to stroke it. Feeling her eyes upon me, I plunged my thumb into the crust instead.

‘And what sort of things do you like to write?’

I thought of the piece of paper on the typewriter in the other room. ‘Poems, mainly. I’d like to write a novel one day. I’m still waiting for a good story.’

She smiled. ‘Don’t wait too long.’ I was quite relieved she gave me this instruction, because usually whenever I told people I wanted to write, they would tell me how their own lives would make the perfect subject. ‘I mean it,’ said Quick. ‘You mustn’t hang around. You never know what’s going to pounce on you.’

‘I won’t,’ I said, gratified by her insistence.

She sat back in her chair. ‘You do remind me of someone I used to know.’

‘I do?’ I found this immensely flattering and waited for Quick to go on, but her face clouded, and she broke the spine of the cigarette she’d left on the side of the ashtray.

‘What do you make of London?’ she asked. ‘You came in ’62. Do you like living here?’

I felt paralysed. She leaned forward. ‘Miss Bastien. This isn’t a test. I’m genuinely interested. Whatever you say, I won’t tell a soul. Cross my heart, I promise.’

I’d never told anybody this out loud. It may have been the gin, it may have been her open face, and the fact she didn’t laugh at my dream of writing. It may have been the confidence of youth, or that porter Harris, but it all came tumbling out. ‘I’ve never seen so much soot,’ I said.

She laughed. ‘The place is filthy.’

‘In Trinidad, we were brought up being told that London was a magic land.’

‘So was I.’

‘You’re not from here?’

She shrugged. ‘I’ve been here so long I can hardly remember anything else.’

‘They make you think London is full of order, and plenty, and honesty and green fields. The distance shrinks.’

‘What distance do you mean, Miss Bastien?’

‘Well, the Queen rules London and she rules your island, so London is part of you.’

‘I see.’

I didn’t think Quick did see, really, so I carried on. ‘You think they’ll know you here, because they also read Dickens and Brontë and Shakespeare. But I haven’t met anyone who can name three of his plays. At school, they showed us films of English life — bowler hats and buses flickering on the whitewash — while outside all we could hear were tree frogs. Why did anyone show us such things?’ My voice was rising. ‘I thought everyone was an Honourable—’ I stopped, fearing I’d said too much.

‘Go on,’ she said.

‘I thought London would mean prosperity and welcome. A Renaissance place. Glory and success. I thought leaving for England was the same as stepping out of my house and onto the street, just a slightly colder street where a beti with a brain could live next door to Elizabeth the Queen.’

Quick smiled. ‘You’ve been thinking about this.’

‘Sometimes you can’t think about anything else. There’s the cold, the wet, the rent, the lack. But — I do try to live.’

I felt I shouldn’t say any more; I couldn’t believe I’d said so much. The bread roll was in shreds upon my lap. Quick, in contrast, appeared totally relaxed. She sat back in her chair, her eyes alight. ‘Odelle,’ she said. ‘Don’t panic. It’s likely you’ll be fine.’

4

Cynthia married Samuel at Wandsworth Register Office, in a small room that smelled of bureaucracy and cheap perfume, with dark-green walls and steel chairs. Shirley and Helen, two girls from the shoe shop, came along in their finery. Sam’s friend from the buses, Patrick Minamore, was best man, and he brought with him his girlfriend Barbara, a fledgling actress and a talkative presence.

The registrar eyed us. The men were in suits, Patrick’s tie particularly loud — and everyone looked smart compared to the drab surround. Cynth was beautiful — I mean, she was beautiful anyway, even without love beaming through every inch of her, but in her white minidress, a simple white pill-box hat, and a pair of white shoes, given her by the manager, Connie, as a wedding present, she was radiant. She had a necklace of blue flowers made from ceramic, and two small pearls in her ears, so perfect and round, as if the oysters had made them especially for her.

Patrick, an aspiring photographer, was in charge of capturing us all. I still have some of those snaps. A fountain of rice caught mid-air, white rain upon Sam and Cynth’s laughing faces as they stand on the registry steps, their two hands lifted together as the grains cascade.

In marriage, at least, Cynth had triumphed. It was never going to be simple for us to find our way, and Cynth should have had a shoe empire by then, she was that good. It was not easy to sell shoes in Clapham High Street in 1967 as a Trinidadian girl. It was probably easier to write a poem about Trinidad’s flowers, send it to the British Consul and be rewarded with a prize. But at least she had Sam, and they had rubbed off well on each other — he serious and shy, she resourceful and determined — how her presence illuminated him as he signed his name in the register!

We went back to Sam and Patrick’s flat in black cabs, and told the taxi men that our friends had just got married. The drivers rolled down their windows and played the blues on the same radio station in concert, so loud we were terrified we’d get arrested for breaking the peace. Back in the flat, we lifted tea towels euphorically from sandwiches, found bottle openers, corkscrews, put a record on, and watched as they cut the white domed cake that Cynth had laced with rum.

After a couple of hours, other people turned up — friends of friends. Barbara had summoned up a gaggle of hip-looking folk, girls with long hair and short dresses, fellers in open-necked shirts, who looked like they needed a shave. I only glanced at them; I had long told myself those people were not for me and neither me for them. My back was damp with sweat and the ceiling seemed lower than it had been an hour ago. A couple of Barbara’s gang fell into a table, and a little red lamp with tassels tumbled to the floor. Though I’d never smoked it myself, I could smell the marijuana.

When the room was full, the mood was high and Cynth had drunk three Dubonnets and lemonade too many, she lifted the needle off the record player and announced, ‘My friend Delly is a poet and she wrote a poem about love.’ There was a cheer. ‘And she goin’ to read it now.’

‘Cynthia Morley, no,’ I hissed. ‘Just ’cos you now a married woman, you can’t boss me around.’

‘Wha’ happen now, Delly?’ called Sam. ‘Why yuh keeping yuhself so secret?’

‘Come on, Delly. For me,’ said Cynth, to my horror drawing out the poem from her handbag as another, yet more unstable cheer rippled around the fuggy room. When I had finally showed it to her a week ago, like a schoolgirl walking the long route to the teacher’s desk, she had read it in silence and then put her arms around me tight, whispering, Good Lord, Delly, you truly blessed.

‘Is a very good poem, Delly,’ she said now, as she thrust it in my hands. ‘Come on, show these people what you have.’

So I did it. A little wobbly from my own Dubonnet, I glanced up only once at all the faces, small moons stopped for nothing else but me. I read my poem about love from the paper, although I knew it off by heart. My words made the room fall silent. And when I finished, there was more silence, and I waited for Cynth, but even she didn’t seem able to speak.

I did not see his face in the crowd when I read that poem. I did not feel his eyes on me, although he told me later he couldn’t drag them off mine. I felt nothing change in the room, except the shock of my voice alone and the peculiar euphoria one feels in the wake of applause, feeling at once cheapened and triumphant.

He came up to me about half an hour later, where I was in the minuscule and cluttered kitchen, stacking the empty foil plates in neat towers, trying to make some order out of Sam and Patrick’s bachelor chaos. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘So you’re the poet. I’m Lawrie Scott.’

My first thought was to check whether there were bits of egg sandwich on my fingers. ‘I’m not a poet, I just write poems,’ I said, looking at my hands.

‘There’s a difference?’

‘I think there is.’

He leant against the counter, his long legs straight, crossing his arms like a detective. ‘Is your real name Delly, then?’ he said.

‘It’s Odelle.’ I was grateful for the bottle of Fairy Liquid and the scrubbing pad I began to put to good use.

‘Odelle.’ He stared back through the doorless arch to where the party had turned without a rudder, sinking into a sea of cigarette butts and shrieks, ring-pulls, discarded hair accessories, and someone’s suit jacket crumpled on the floor. Sam and Cynth would be leaving soon — for nowhere but our flat, which I’d promised to vacate for the evening. Tonight, I was to be staying in this pit. This Lawrie seemed lost in thought, perhaps a little stoned, and I noticed small purple smudges of tiredness under his eyes.

‘How do you know the happy couple?’ I asked.

‘I don’t. I’m friends with Barbara and she said there was a party. I didn’t know it was a wedding. I feel rather rude, but you know how it goes.’ I didn’t, so I said nothing. ‘You?’ he persisted.

‘I went to school with Cynthia. She is — was — my flatmate.’

‘Long time, then?’

‘Long time.’

‘Your poem was really good,’ he said.

‘Thank you.’

‘I can’t imagine what it’d be like to be married.’

‘I don’t suppose it’s much different,’ I replied, putting on a pair of yellow rubber gloves.

He turned to me. ‘Do you really think that? Is that why the poem was about love, not marriage?’

The mound of bubbles was rising in the sink because I hadn’t turned off the tap. He seemed genuinely interested, and this pleased me. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But don’t tell Cynth.’

He laughed, and I liked the sound. ‘My mother used to say that marriage got better with practice,’ he said. ‘But she was already on her second try.’

‘Goodness me,’ I said, laughing. I probably sounded so disapproving. Divorce, in those days, still contained the suggestion of debauch.

‘She died two weeks ago,’ he said.

I paused, scrubbing pad hovering over the sink, and looked at him to check I’d heard him right. ‘My stepfather told me I should come out,’ Lawrie went on, staring at the floor. ‘That I was getting under his feet. And of all places I end up at a wedding.’

He laughed again, but then was quiet, hugging himself in his fashionable leather jacket. I had not had such a personal conversation with a stranger before in England. I could not counsel him, and he did not seem to wish for it. He didn’t look like he was going to cry. I thought he might be hot in that coat, but he didn’t seem disposed to take it off. Perhaps he wasn’t planning to hang around. I registered my regret that this might be the case.

‘I haven’t seen my mother for five years,’ I said, plunging a tray sticky with cake smears into the hot water.

‘But she’s not dead, though.’

‘No. No, she’s not dead.’

‘I keep thinking I’m going to see her again. That she’ll be there when I go home. But the only person there is bloody Gerry.’

‘Gerry being your stepfather?’

His face darkened. ‘Yes, sorry. And my mother left everything to him.’

I tried to gauge Lawrie’s age. He could be thirty, I supposed, but the rapidity with which he was spilling himself open suggested someone younger. ‘That’s hard,’ I said. ‘Why would she do that?’

‘Long story. She did leave me one thing, actually. Gerry always hated it, which goes to show what a moron he is.’

‘That’s good you got something. What is it?’

Lawrie sighed again and uncrossed his arms, letting them hang by his side. ‘A painting. All it does is remind me of her.’ He gave me a rueful smile; his mouth crooked up one cheek. ‘Love is blind, love’s a bind. I could be a poet too.’ He cocked his head at the refrigerator. ‘Any milk?’

‘There should be. You know, I think it’s best you remember your mother rather than try and forget. My father died. And I don’t have anything of his at all. Just my name.’

Lawrie stopped, his hand on the refrigerator door. ‘Whoa. I’m sorry. Here am I, going on—’

‘It’s all right. No, really.’ I felt self-conscious now, and wished he’d just get the milk out and busy himself. I never usually talked about my parents, and yet I felt compelled to carry on. ‘He died in the war. He got shot down.’

Lawrie looked agog. ‘Mine died in the war too. But not in a plane.’ He paused and I got the sense he was going to say something, then thought better of it. ‘I never knew him,’ he added.

I felt awkward with this synchronicity of our circumstances, as if I’d deliberately sought it out. ‘I was two,’ I hurried on. ‘I don’t really remember him. He was called Odell, but without the “e”. When he died, my mother changed my name.’

‘She what? What were you known as before that?’

‘I don’t even know.’

This fact about myself sounded absurd and funny — at least, in that moment it did — maybe it was the clouds of pot billowing around — and we both started laughing. In fact, we laughed straight for about a minute, that pain in your stomach when you laugh and laugh — how one mother can rename you, how mad it is another’s suddenly dead, and you in a kitchen round the corner from the British Museum wearing yellow rubber gloves.

Lawrie turned fully towards me, the milk bottle lolling in his hand. Sobering up, I eyed it, worried that the liquid would start dripping through the lid at such a terrible angle.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘Delly.’

‘Odelle.’

‘Do you want to get out?’

‘From where?’

‘From here, you crazy girl.’

‘Who’s crazy?’

‘We could go to Soho. I’ve got a friend who can get us in to the Flamingo. But you’ll have to take off those rubber gloves. It’s not that sort of club.’

I didn’t know what to make of Lawrie at this point. I could describe him as grief-stricken, but arguably the grief hadn’t truly set in. Perhaps he was in shock — it had only been a fortnight. That he was angry with someone, and a bit lost, both certain of himself and yet avoiding himself — these things could be said about Lawrie. He spoke well, and he talked of Gerry and the house and his divorced, dead mother with a practised world-weariness that I wasn’t sure he was trying to escape or keep alive.

‘I–I’m tired,’ I said. ‘I can’t leave the party.’ I pulled the plug from the sink. As the water drained noisily, I wondered how his mother had died.

‘The Flamingo, Odelle.’

I’d never heard of it, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. ‘I can’t leave Cynth.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘I don’t think she needs you tonight.’ I blushed, looking into the disappearing bubbles. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘my car’s outside. How about we drop the painting off at my friend’s flat and then let’s go dancing. It doesn’t have to be the Flamingo. Do you like to dance?’

‘You have the painting with you?’ I said.

‘I see.’ He ran a hand through his hair. ‘More of an art girl than a nightclub girl?’

‘I don’t think I’m either of those girls. But I do work at an art gallery,’ I added. I wanted him to be impressed, to show him I wasn’t just some innocent prig who chose to wash up crockery rather than fall around on the carpet.

A light came into Lawrie’s eyes. ‘Do you want to see it?’ he said. ‘It’s in the boot of my car.’

Lawrie didn’t try and touch me in that kitchen. He didn’t let his hand drift anywhere near. The relief that he didn’t, and the desire that he might — I think they are the reasons I agreed to see his painting. I followed him, leaving the dishes stranded in the sink.

*

I think he wanted me to be impressed by the fact he was driving an MG, but that meant nothing to me, once I’d laid eyes on the painting in the boot. It was not large, and it had no frame. As an image, it was simple and at the same time not easily decipherable — a girl, holding another girl’s severed head in her hands on one side of the painting, and on the other, a lion, sitting on his haunches, not yet springing for the kill. It had the air of a fable.

Despite the slight distortion from the orange street lamp above us, the colours of the lower background reminded me of a Renaissance court portrait — that piled-up patchwork of fields all kinds of yellow and green, and what looked like a small white castle. The sky above was darker and less decorous; there was something nightmarish about its bruised indigoes. The painting gave me an immediate feeling of opposites — the girls against the lion, together in the face of its adversity. But there was a rewarding delicacy beyond its beautiful palette of colours — an elusive element that made it so alluring.

‘What do you think?’ asked Lawrie. His face seemed softer out of the glare of the kitchen light.

‘Me? I’m just the typist,’ I said.

‘Oh, come on. I heard that poem. Make a poem of this.’

‘It doesn’t work like that—’ I began, before I realized he was teasing me. I felt embarrassed, so I turned back to the painting. ‘It’s very unusual, I suppose. The colours, the subject matter. I wonder when it was painted? Could be last week, or last century.’

‘Or even earlier,’ he said eagerly.

I looked again at the old-fashioned fields in the background and then at the figures. ‘I don’t think so. The girl’s dress and cardigan — it’s more recent.’

‘Do you think that’s gold leaf?’ Lawrie bent down and pointed to the lion’s mane, the flowing strands which seemed to glint. His head was very close to mine and I could smell his skin, a trace of aftershave that gave me goosebumps.

‘Odelle?’ he said.

‘It’s not your usual painting,’ I replied hastily, as if I knew what a usual painting was. I straightened up. ‘Mr Scott, what are you going to do with it?’

He turned to me and smiled. The orange light caught the planes of his face and covered him in ghoulish shadow. ‘I like it when you call me Mr Scott.’

‘In that case, I’m going to call you Lawrie.’

He laughed, and my jaw tingled, threatening a smile. ‘I don’t think this was done by an amateur,’ I said. ‘What did your mother know about it?’

‘No idea. And all I know is, she took it with her wherever she went. At home, it was always in her bedroom. She didn’t like it in the public rooms.’

I pointed to the initials on the bottom right of the painting. ‘Who’s I.R.?’

Lawrie shrugged. ‘Not my forte.’

I wondered what Lawrie’s forte was, and whether I would ever find out, and why did I want to — and was that the reason I was feeling so odd?

In case he could read my thoughts, I bent my head down again towards the girl in the painting. She was wearing a light-blue dress with a dark woollen cardigan — you could even see the cable knit. The head she was carrying had a long dark plait, which snaked unsettlingly out of her cradled arms, towards the red earth floor. The strange thing was, even though she had no body, the floating girl didn’t seem dead at all. She was inviting me in, but there was a note of caution in her eyes. Neither figure was exactly beaming in welcome. They both seemed oblivious to the lion, which may or may not have been waiting for the kill.

‘I have to go,’ I said, pushing the painting away into his surprised hands. Lawrie, the party, the poem, the Dubonnet, Cynth’s marriage, the painting; suddenly I wanted to be alone.

Lawrie took the painting from me and closed the boot. He looked down at me, his head cocked to one side again. ‘Are you all right? Do you want me to walk you back in?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I mean, no. I’m fine. Thank you. Sorry. It was a pleasure to meet you. Good luck.’ I turned away and made it to the entrance of the block of flats, before he called out to me.

‘Hey, Odelle.’ I looked back to see him jam his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket, hunching his shoulders again. ‘I — you know — that really was a good poem.’

‘It always takes longer than you think, Mr Scott,’ I said. He laughed, and I smiled properly then, nevertheless relieved to be out of the street lamp’s glow.

5

When I was growing up, my mother and I would always eat lunch with Cynth’s family on Sundays. Four in the afternoon, a big pot on the hob, everyone coming in and out and dipping for themselves — and once the meal was done, we’d draw our chairs up to the radio at seven thirty and listen to the BBC’s Caribbean Voices, the only broadcast that mattered if you dreamed of being a writer.

Here’s the mad thing: poets from Barbados, Trini, Jamaica, Grenada, Antigua — any part of the British Caribbean — would send their stories all the way to Bush House on London’s Aldwych, in order to hear them read back again in their homes, thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean. There seemed no local facility to enable these stories to be processed, a fact which impressed upon me at a very young age that in order to be a writer, I would require the motherland’s seal of approval, the imperial sanction that my words were broadcastable.

The majority of the work was by men, but I would listen enraptured by the words and voices of Una Marson, Gladys Lindo, Constance Hollar — and Cynth would pipe up, ‘One day you be read out, Delly’ — and her little shining face, her bunches, she always made me feel like it was true. Seven years old, and she was the only one who ever told me to keep going. By 1960 that programme had stopped, and I came to England two years later with no idea what to do with my stories. Life at the shoe shop took over, so I only wrote in private, and Cynth, who must have seen the piles of notebooks which never left my bedroom, simply stopped her pestering.

She and Sam had found a flat to rent in Queen’s Park, and she’d transferred to a north London branch of Dolcis. Up to that point, I’d never really known loneliness. I’d always had my books, and Cynth had always been there. Suddenly, my thoughts were enormous in that tiny flat, because there was nobody to hear them and make them manageable, nobody cajoling or supporting me, or holding out their arms for a hug. Cynth’s absence became physical to me. Do you have a body if no one is there to touch it? I suppose you do, but sometimes it felt like I didn’t. I was just a mind, floating around the rooms. How badly prepared I’d been for the echo and clunk of my key in the lock, the lack of her sizzling frying pan, my solitary toothbrush, the silence where once she hummed her favourite songs.

When you saw a person every day — a person you liked, a person who lifted you up — you thought you were your best self, without trying very hard. Now, I saw myself as barely interesting, not so clever. No one wanted to hear my poems except Cynth, no one cared or understood where I was from like she did. I didn’t know how to be Odelle without Cynth to make me so. Cynth had done so much for me, but because she was gone, I still managed to resent her.

Her work commitments and mine meant we were only meeting once a fortnight, in the Lyon’s on Craven Street round the corner from the Skelton. I barely credited Cynth for the fact it was she who always arranged it.

At the counter, the waitress had slopped our cups so the liquid had spilled onto the saucer, and the bun I’d asked for was the most squashed. When I asked for a replacement saucer, the waitress ignored me, and when I paid for it, she wouldn’t put the change in my hand. She placed the money on the counter and pushed it over, not looking at my face. I turned to Cynth, and saw a familiar expression. We walked to find a spare table, as far away from the counter as we could.

‘How is it at the work?’ she asked. ‘You still trailin’ after that Marjorie Quick?

‘She meh boss, Cynthia.’

‘So you say.’

I hadn’t realized how obvious it was, the impression that Quick had made on me over the recent weeks. I had tried to find out more about Quick from Pamela, who could only tell me that Quick had once mentioned the county of Kent as her childhood home. What she did between being a girl and a woman in her fifties was a grey sketch. Perhaps she had been destined for a genteel, Kentish life, a magistrate’s wife or some such, but she chose instead to find a different kind of fortune in the rubble of post-war London. Her name was not in Debrett’s: she was not a Skelton descendant, one of my initial lines of thought. Her impeccable sartorial choices exuded power, a care of herself that was for nobody’s benefit but her own. Each perfect blouse, each pristine pair of trousers, was a pre-emptive self-narration. Quick’s clothes were an armour made of silk.

I knew she was unmarried and lived in Wimbledon, just off the common. She smoked constantly, and appeared close to Reede in the sort of way that water is close to a stone that it has worn down over decades. Pamela said that Quick had been here as long as Reede had, when he’d taken the directorship of the Skelton in 1947, twenty years ago. How she had come to meet Reede, or why she decided to take employment, remained a mystery. I wondered what sort of battle it had been to get to where she was now, and whether she’d read those Roman histories to give her some lessons in war.

‘She not like anyone I ever meet,’ I said to Cynth. ‘Friendly one minute, a sunlight beam. Then she like a hog-brush woman — she bristle so, it pain yuh to be near.’

Cynth sighed. ‘We bought G Plan for the flat.’

‘G-what?’

‘Oh, Delly. Sam work hard hard, so Ah say, leh we buy we a nice G Plan sofa so he can put up he foot at the end of the day.’

‘Hmm. And how your feet doin’?’

She sighed, stirring her lukewarm tea with a spoon. ‘Oh, let me tell you a thing. So our new postman get the letters mix up, and our neighbour knock with them.’ Cynth cleared her throat and put on a posh English voice. ‘“Oh, hell-air. Yes, this must be yours. We saw it had a black stamp.” Is a letter from Lagos, Delly. Meh name not on it, and Eh know nobody from Nigeria. “Black stamp”, I ask yuh.’

Her laugh died. Normally we would have discussed something like this in order to remove its barb, but after the waitress neither of us had the energy.

‘Tell me about the feller you was talking to at the wedding,’ she said, looking sly.

‘What feller?’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Lawrie Scott. The white one; handsome, skinny. He friend to Patrick’s Barbara. Ah didn’t drink that many Dubonnets — I saw you in the kitchen.’

‘Oh him. He real dotish.’

‘Hmm,’ she said, her eyes taking on a secret glow, and I knew I’d given myself away. ‘That strange.’

‘Why?’

‘Patrick told Sam he been asking about you.’ I shut my mouth tighter than a clam and Cynth grinned. ‘You writin’?’ she asked.

‘You only start asking me that, now you leave.’

‘I not gone. I on the other end of the Tube map, that is all.’

‘Like you worried I got nothing to do these days. Don’t worry, I writin’,’ I said, but this was a lie. I had stopped entirely at this point, believing that the idea of myself as a good writer was laughable.

‘Good. I glad you writin’,’ said Cynth firmly. ‘You know, there a poetry night going at the ICA,’ she went on. ‘Sam’s friend readin’, and he’s a real dotish boy compared to you. His poem does send me to sleep—’

‘Ah not readin’ at some meet-up, Cynthia,’ I said, wrinkling my nose. ‘Make no mistake.’

She sighed. ‘I not. Is just that you better, Odelle. You better and you know it, and you doing nothin’.’

‘Eh heh,’ I said. ‘I busy. I work. You go with your G Plan and stop all this foolishness. What, because I got no husban’ foot to worry me, I better go speakin’ my poetry an’ ting?’

Cynthia looked distraught. ‘Delly! Why you so vex? I only trying to help.’

‘Ah not vex.’ I drained my cup of tea. ‘Is all right for you,’ I said. ‘Don’t tell me how to live.’

Cynth was quiet after that. I should have said sorry then and there, but I didn’t. She left soon after, pinch-faced with tears, and I felt like a monster come out of the sea to grab her legs.

We didn’t meet up the next week, or the one after that, and she didn’t ring. Neither did I, and I felt so embarrassed, such a fool — a real dotish gyal, as Cynth no doubt described me that night to Sam. The longer she was silent, the more impossible it seemed to pick up the telephone.

All I really wanted to say was that I missed us living together. And I was someone who was supposed to be good with words.

6

Lawrie found me on the fifteenth of August. It was seven o’clock in the morning, and I was doing the early reception shift. Shops were still shut, the buses that moved along Charing Cross Road less frequent. I walked on to the Mall, and the long thoroughfare, usually busy, was an empty road of greenish light. It had been raining for a week, and the paving stones were wet from a dawn downpour, trees springing in the breeze like fronds beneath the sea.

I’d seen much worse rain than this, so I wasn’t too bothered, tucking the copy of the Express I’d bought for Pamela into my handbag to protect it from spatters, crossing up Carlton Gardens and over the circular centre of Skelton Square. I passed the plinth of the long-dead statesman adorning the middle point, a blank-eyed fellow whose frock coat was messed by pigeons. In the past, I would have found out who he was — but five years in London had purged my interest in old Victorian men. The statue’s infinite gaze made me feel even more exhausted.

I glanced up towards the Skelton. A young man was standing by the doors, tall and slim, wearing a slightly battered leather jacket. He had a narrow face and very dark brown hair. As I approached, I knew that it was him. I could feel my throat tighten, a little hop in the gut, a thudding swipe to the breast. I approached the steps, fetching the Skelton door key out of my handbag. Lawrie was wearing glasses this time, and their lenses glinted in the subterranean light. He was carrying a parcel under his arm, wrapped in that brown paper butchers used to wrap their slabs of meat.

He grinned at me. ‘Hello,’ he said.

What was it like to see Lawrie smile? I can try: it was as if a healer had placed their hands upon my chest. My kneecaps porridge, jaw tingling, no hope to swallow. I wanted to throw my arms around him and say, ‘It’s you, you came.’

‘Hello,’ I said instead. ‘Can I help?’

His smile faltered. ‘You don’t remember? We met, at the wedding. I came along with Barbara’s gang. You read a poem, and you wouldn’t go dancing with me.’

I frowned. ‘Oh, yes. How do you do?’

‘How do I do? Aren’t you going to ask me why I’m here?’

‘It’s seven o’clock in the morning, Mr. .?’

‘Scott,’ he said, the joy draining from his face. ‘Lawrie Scott.’

I walked past him and put the key in the lock, fumbling as I did so. What was wrong with me? Despite all my fantasies about how this was going to play out, faced with the reality, I was being just as obstructive as I had been before. I pushed inside and he followed me. ‘Are you here to see somebody?’ I said.

He gave me a hard look. ‘Odelle. I have visited every art gallery, every museum in this bloody city, trying to find you.’

‘To find me?’

‘Yes.’

‘You couldn’t find me in five weeks? You could have just asked Patrick Minamore.’

He laughed. ‘So you were counting.’ I blushed and looked away, busying myself with the post. He held up the brown-paper package, and said, ‘I’ve brought the lion girls.’

I couldn’t conceal the suspicion in my voice. ‘Who are they?’

He grinned. ‘My mother’s painting. I’ve taken your advice. Do you think someone will have a look at them for me?’

‘I’m sure they will.’

‘I looked up those initials you pointed out, I.R. Didn’t find a single name. So it’s probably not worth anything.’

‘Are you planning on selling it?’ I asked, head still fizzing, heart thumping uncomfortably as I moved around the other side of the wooden counter. I’d never been so direct with a boy before in my life.

‘Maybe. See what happens.’

‘But I thought it was your mother’s favourite?’

‘I was my mother’s favourite,’ he said, laying the parcel on the counter with a grim smile. ‘Only joking. I don’t want to sell it, but if it’s worth something, it will get me started, you see. Any minute, Gerry the Bastard — excuse my French — could kick me out.’

‘Don’t you work?’

‘Work?’

‘Don’t you have a job?’

‘I’ve had jobs in the past.’

‘The dim and distant?’

He pulled a face. ‘You don’t approve.’

The truth was, I didn’t approve of people who did no work. Everyone I knew since coming to London — Cynth, the girls in the shoe shop, Sam, Patrick, Pamela — we all had jobs. The point of being here was to have a job. Where I was from, doing your own work was the only wake-up from the long sleep which followed the generations in the fields. It was your way out. It’s hard to change the messages that circulate all your life, especially when they’ve been there since before your life was started.

Lawrie stared into the brown wrapping paper. ‘It’s a long story,’ he said, sensing my disapproval. ‘I dropped out of university. That was a few years ago. My mother wasn’t — oh, never mind. But I’d like to start something new.’

‘I see.’

He looked embarrassed, jamming his hands into his jacket pockets. ‘Look, Odelle. I’m not. . a layabout. I do want to do things. I want you to know that. I—’

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ I asked.

He stopped, mid-breath. ‘Tea. Yes. God, it’s early, isn’t it,’ he laughed.

‘Were you going to just stand out there until I turned up?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘You’re a mad boy.’

‘Who’s mad?’ he said, and we grinned at each other. I looked at his pale face. ‘Even without a job, my mother would still think you’re perfect.’

‘Why would she think that?’ he asked.

I sighed. It was too early in the morning to explain.

We had an hour together, sitting in the reception hall, the front door locked as I sorted the post and brewed the tea and coffee that Pamela and I had to keep renewing throughout the day. Lawrie seemed genuinely delighted by his cup of tea. It was as if he had never seen a hot beverage before.

He told me about his mother’s funeral. ‘It was awful. Gerry read a poem about a dying rose.’ I put my hand over my mouth to hide my smile. ‘No, you should laugh,’ he said. ‘My mother would have laughed. She would have hated it. She didn’t even like roses. And Gerry has a terrible poetry voice. The worst voice I’ve ever heard. Like he’s got a plunger up his bum. And the priest was senile. And there were no more than five of us there. It was bloody awful and I hated that she had to go through it.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

He sighed, stretching his legs out. ‘Not your fault, Odelle. Anyway. It’s done. RIP, all that.’ He rubbed his face as if erasing a memory. ‘And you? How’s life without your flatmate?’

I was touched he remembered. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Bit quiet.’

‘I thought you liked quiet.’

‘How would you know?’

‘You didn’t want to go to the Flamingo.’

‘Different sort of quiet,’ I said.

We were quiet ourselves then, me sitting behind the counter, and him on the other side, the brown-paper package between us, waiting on the wood. It was a nice silence, warm and full, and I liked him sitting there unobtrusive — yet, to my eyes, fizzing with the light I had sensed when we first met.

He was beautiful to me, and as I laid out the Express for Pamela, and did a spurious sorting of the desk, I hoped that she would be delayed somehow. Back home, I’d had one or two of what my mother would have called ‘dalliances’; holding hands in the dark at the Roxy, hot dogs after lectures, awkward kisses at a Princes Building concert, a late-night picnic on the Pitch Walk, watching the bluish light of the candle-flies. But I’d never done. . the whole thing.

I generally avoided male attention, finding the courting business excruciating. ‘Free love’ had passed us schoolgirls by in Port of Spain. Our Catholic education was a Victorian relic, redolent with overtones of fallen women, irretrievable girls mired in pools of their own foolishness. We had been instructed that we were too superior for that exchange of flesh.

My attitude to sex was one of haughty fear, confused by the fact that there were girls who did it, girls like Lystra Wilson or Dominique Mendes, with boyfriends older than themselves and secrets in their eyes, who seemed to be having a very good time indeed. How they procured these boyfriends was always a mystery to me — but it no doubt involved disobedience, climbing out of bedroom windows and into the nightclubs off Frederick Street and Marine Square. In my memory, Lystra and Dominique, those daring ones, seemed like women from the moment they were born, mermaids come ashore to live among us, feminine and powerful. No wonder we scaredy-cats retreated into books. Sex was beneath us, because it was beyond us.

The Skelton front door was still locked. I didn’t want it to end — the kettle whistling for more tea in the back room, him stretching and folding his legs, asking me what films I’d seen and how could I have not seen that and did I like blues or was I into folk and how many months had I worked here, and did I like being in Clapham. Lawrie was always very good at making you feel like you were important.

‘Would you like to go to the cinema?’ he said. ‘We could see You Only Live Twice, or The Jokers.’

‘The Jokers? Sounds about right for you.’

‘Oliver Reed’s in it — he’s excellent,’ said Lawrie, ‘but isn’t a crime caper too flip for you?’

‘Flip? Why?’

‘Because you’re clever. You’d take it as an insult if I took you to watch stupid blokes scampering around for the Crown Jewels.’

I laughed, happy to discover that Lawrie also had a strain of nervousness about all this, and touched that he wasn’t afraid to tell me about it. ‘Or do you want to see one of those French films,’ he said, ‘where people just walk in and out of rooms, looking at each other?’

‘Let’s go and see the Bond.’

‘All right. Excellent. Excellent! I loved Goldfinger — that bowler hat!’ I laughed again and he came up to the counter, leaning over to take my hand. I froze, looking at it. ‘Odelle,’ he said. ‘I think — I mean, you are—’

‘What?’

‘You’re just. .’ He was still holding on to my hand. For the first time in my life, I didn’t want a man to let go.

Outside, it began to rain. I turned my head, distracted by the rush of water beyond the door, cascading down onto the grey pavement. Lawrie leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. I turned back and he kissed me again, and it felt good, so we stood for some minutes, kissing in the reception of the Skelton.

I broke away. ‘You’ll get me sacked.’

‘All right. Can’t have that.’

He moved back to his chair, grinning like an idiot. The rain was thrumming heavily now, but this was English rain, not Trini rain. Back home, aerial waterfalls fell from the breaking sky, week on week of tropical downpour, forests doused so green they were almost black, the neon signs out, escarpments churned to mud, torch ginger flowers so red, like a man’s blood had coloured the petals — and all of us, standing under awnings or hiding in houses till it was safe once more to walk the shining asphalt road. We used to say ‘it rainin’’ as an excuse for being late, and everyone would always understand.

‘What?’ Lawrie said. ‘Why are you smiling?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing.’

There was a rapping on the door. Quick was peering through the glass, under the brim of a wide black umbrella. ‘Oh!’ I cried. ‘She early.’

I ran to the door and unlocked it, thanking God she hadn’t seen us kissing. Quick stepped inside, and I thought her face looked thinner. She removed her coat and brushed off her umbrella. ‘August,’ she muttered.

She looked up and saw Lawrie. ‘Who are you?’ she said, wary as a cat.

‘This is — Mr Scott,’ I said, surprised at her bluntness. ‘He’d like to speak to someone about his painting. Mr Scott, this is Miss Quick.’

‘Mr Scott?’ she repeated. She couldn’t take her eyes off him.

‘Hullo,’ Lawrie said, jumping to his feet. ‘Wondered if I’ve got an heirloom or a piece of junk.’ He put out his hand and Quick, as if resisting a great magnet, lifted her own to meet it. I saw her flinch, though Lawrie noticed nothing.

She smiled faintly. ‘I hope, for your sake, Mr Scott, it’s the former.’

‘Me too.’

‘May I see it?’

Lawrie went to the counter and began unwrapping the paper. Quick stayed where she was by the door, fingers gripping the top of her umbrella. She kept staring at him. Rain had soaked her coat but she didn’t take it off. Lawrie swung the painting up, holding it against his body for me and Quick to see. ‘Here it is,’ he said.

Quick stood for four or five seconds, eyes transfixed on the golden lion, the girls, the landscape spiralling out behind them. The umbrella slid out of her grasp and bumped to the floor. ‘Quick?’ I said. ‘Are you all right?’

She looked at me, abruptly turned on her heel and walked out of the front door. ‘It’s not that bad,’ said Lawrie, peering over the top of the painting.

Quick was hurrying away along the square, her head bowed, oblivious to the rain soaking her. As I reached for my own coat, Edmund Reede appeared and removed his dripping trilby.

He looked down at me. ‘Miss — Baston, is it?’

‘Bastien.’

‘Where are you running off to?’

‘To see Miss Quick. She’s — forgotten her umbrella.’

‘We were supposed to be having a meeting.’ He turned to where Lawrie was now sitting again, the painting on his knees, hastily covered in the brown paper. ‘And who’s this?’

‘Mr Scott has a painting,’ I said.

‘I can see that. Isn’t this all rather a flurry for eight fifteen in the morning? Where’s Miss Rudge?’

‘I’m on the early shift, Mr Reede. Mr Scott came today because he was hoping someone would take a look at his painting. It was his mother’s — her favourite. .’ I trailed off, desperate to follow Quick and see if she was all right.

Reede removed his wet overcoat with slow deliberation, as if I had placed the burden of the world on his shoulders. He was a tall, broad man and he filled the space with his fine tailoring and thatch of white hair, his woody aftershave. ‘Have you made an appointment?’ he asked Lawrie, his small blue eyes glinting with impatience.

‘No, sir.’

‘We’re not a drop-in centre, you know. This isn’t really how it’s done.’

Lawrie stiffened, the brown paper rustling over his painting. ‘I know that.’

‘Well, perhaps you don’t. Have Miss Bastien make an appointment for you some time next week. I have no time today.’ He turned to look back through the door where Quick had fled. ‘Why the hell did Marjorie just run off like that?’ he said. I’d never seen Reede look worried before. As he turned back, Lawrie stood up, half the brown paper falling to the floor. Reede stopped in his tracks, his gaze on the revealed half of the painting, the golden lion.

‘Is that yours?’ he asked Lawrie.

Lawrie lowered his eyes and gathered up the paper. ‘Yes,’ he said defensively. ‘Well — my mother’s. Now it’s mine.’ Reede stepped towards it, but Lawrie moved away, putting his hand out. ‘Hold on. You said you didn’t have time. You said next week. Although by then,’ he added, ‘I may have taken it elsewhere.’

‘Ah,’ said Reede. He put his hands up. ‘I just want to take a closer look. Please,’ he added, which seemed to cost him a great effort.

‘Why? A minute ago you couldn’t give a damn.’

Reede laughed; a twitchy joviality. ‘Look, old chap, I’m sorry if I was blunt. We get a damned lot of people coming in here with Auntie Edna’s heirlooms or something they bought for three bob off a bloke in Brick Lane, and you get a bit sick of it. But what you’ve got there looks interesting. If you let me take a look, I might be able to tell you why.’

Lawrie hesitated, before placing the painting back on the counter. He unwrapped the rest of the paper. Reede stepped towards it, drinking in the image, his fingers hovering over the paint, the second girl’s floating head, her snaking plait, the lion’s passive stare. ‘My goodness,’ he breathed. ‘Where did your mother get this?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Can you ask her?’

Lawrie glanced at me. ‘She’s dead.’

‘Ah.’ Reede hesitated. ‘So — have you any idea where she might have got it from?’

‘She bought most of her things from junk shops or flea markets, sometimes at auctions, but this one has been around since I was a little boy. It was always hanging on her wall, whatever house we moved to.’

‘Where was it hanging last?’

‘Her house in Surrey.’

‘Did she ever talk about it to you?’

‘Why would she do that?’

Reede gently picked up the painting and looked on the back. ‘No frame, just a hook,’ he murmured. ‘Well,’ he said, addressing Lawrie. ‘If she always had it hanging up, it might have had particular meaning to her.’

‘I think she just thought it was pretty,’ Lawrie said.

‘Pretty is not the word I would use.’

‘What word would you use, sir?’

Reede blinked away Lawrie’s tone. ‘On first impressions, “brave”. And provenance matters, Mr Scott, if you choose to exhibit things, or put things on the market. I assume that’s why you brought it to us.’

‘So it’s worth something?’

There was a pause. Reede breathed deeply, his eyes pinned to the picture. ‘Mr Scott, may I take you to my office so I can have a closer look at this?’

‘All right.’

‘Miss Bastien, bring coffee.’

Reede picked up the painting and gestured for Lawrie to follow him. I watched them walk up the spiral staircase, Lawrie looking back over his shoulder, his eyes wide with excitement, giving me a thumbs up.

Outside, the rain was becoming a torrent. I scoured the square for Quick, but of course, by now, she had gone. With her rolled-up umbrella in my hand like a lance, I ran along the left side of the square and turned up towards Piccadilly, blindly hoping I would see her. I took another right, unconsciously heading towards the Tube station, and then I saw her, a block ahead. The traffic honked and screeched, and the statue of Eros loomed.

‘Quick!’ I yelled. ‘Your umbrella!’ Heads turned to look, but I didn’t care. Quick hurried on, so I ran faster, reaching out to touch her arm. With lightning speed she pulled away from me and whirled round. Her expression was fixed on some distant point well beyond the bustling road, the tall and soot-encrusted buildings, the colourful billboards, the pedestrians hopping desperately around the puddles. Then she focused on me, almost with relief. She was drenched, and though her face was sopping wet, I couldn’t tell if it was rain or tears.

‘I forgot something,’ she said. ‘At home — I’ve forgotten — I need to go back and get it.’

‘Here,’ I said, ‘your umbrella. Let me call you a cab.’

She looked down at her umbrella, then up at me. ‘You’re soaking, Odelle. Why on earth did you run out?’

‘Because — well, because you did. And look at you.’ I put my hand on her wet sleeve and she stared at it momentarily. I was surprised by how thin her arm felt to touch.

‘Here.’ She pulled the umbrella out of my hands and opened it above our heads. We stared at each other under the black canopy, the roar of rain bashing down upon its flimsy structure, people brushing us as they ran to and fro for cover. Her curls were matted to her head; her powder had washed off her face, I could see the true flesh of her skin — and strangely, without the make-up, it looked more like a mask. She went as if to say something, but seemed to stop herself. ‘Jesus Christ,’ she murmured, briefly closing her eyes. ‘It’s a bloody monsoon.’

‘Shall I call you a cab?’

‘I’ll get the Tube. You don’t have a cigarette, do you?’

‘No,’ I said, disconcerted, for surely she knew by now I didn’t smoke.

‘That man — how did he come to the Skelton?’ she asked. ‘Do you know him? You seemed to know him.’

I looked down. Huge puddles were forming around our shoes. I thought of the coffee I was supposed to be making, how long I could be out here before I lost my job. ‘I only met him once before — at Cynth’s wedding. He found me again today.’

‘Found you? That’s fairly persistent behaviour. He’s not — bothering you, is he?’

‘Not at all. He’s fine,’ I said, a touch defensive. Why was Quick talking about Lawrie, when she was the one acting strange?

‘All right.’ She seemed to calm a bit. ‘Look, Odelle — I have to go. Tell him not to bother you with that painting.’

‘Mr Reede has already seen it.’

‘What?’

‘He came in shortly after you. Said that you and he had an early meeting. He had one look at it and took it to his office.’

She looked over my shoulder, in the direction of the Skelton. ‘What did Mr Reede say, when he saw it?’

‘He seemed. . excited.’

Quick lowered her eyes, her expression closed. In that moment, she looked very old. She gripped my hand and squeezed it. ‘Thank you, Odelle — for my umbrella. You’re a tribune, you really are. But take it, I’m going underground. Go back to the office.’

‘Quick, wait—’

She thrust the umbrella into my hand, and turned down the steps of the station. Before I could even call again to her, Quick had disappeared.

I

Sarah was unconscious, her face turned sideways, her artificial curls crushed on the pillow, the cuts on her bare legs covered in calamine smears. A soured scent of the night’s last glass rose from her mouth. On the bedside table was an overfilled ashtray, a pile of detective novels, and her Vogue magazines, their corners curled. Her clothes were everywhere on the dusty floorboards, here, stockings like sloughed snakes, there, a blouse, flattened in the effort of escape. Her rouge had melted in its pot. In the corner of the room, a lizard flicked across the tiles like a mote upon the eye.

Olive stood at the door, the letter from the Slade School of Fine Art gripped in her hand. The letter was only two weeks old, but it had a handkerchief’s flutter, the creases almost oiled from so much refolding. She walked over to her mother’s bed and perched on the end to read it again, although she knew it off by heart. It is our pleasure to invite you to undertake the Fine Art degree course. . The tutors were highly impressed. . rich imagination and novelty. . continuing the rigorous yet progressive tradition of the school. . we look forward to hearing from you within the next fortnight. Should your circumstances change, please inform us.

If she read it aloud, maybe Sarah would hear her through the fug, and that would be that; Olive would have to stick to her word, and go. Maybe a shock like this was best administered under the residual effects of a sleeping pill? When Olive had received the letter, back in London, she wanted to shout from the skyline what she’d gone and done. Her parents had had no idea — they didn’t even know their daughter still painted, let alone that she’d applied to art school. But part of Olive’s problem was that she had always been used to secrecy; it was where she was comfortable, the point from which she began to create. It was a pattern she was superstitious to break, and so here she was, in this village in the south of Spain.

As she gazed at her mother’s sleeping form, she remembered showing her father a portrait she’d made of Sarah from art class at school. ‘Oh, Liv,’ he’d said as her heart hammered, the expectation inching up her spine. ‘Give it as a present for your mother.’

That was all he’d said on the matter. A present for your mother.

Her father always said that of course women could pick up a paintbrush and paint, but the fact was, they didn’t make good artists. Olive had never quite worked out what the difference was. Since she was a little girl, playing in the corners of his gallery, she would overhear Harold discussing the issue with his clients, both men and women — and often the women would agree with him, preferring to put their money behind young men rather than anyone of their own sex. The artist as naturally male was such a widely held presupposition that Olive had come at times to believe in it herself. As a nineteen-year-old girl, she was on the underside; the dogged, plucky mascot of amateurship. But right now in Paris, Amrita Sher-Gil, Méret Oppenheim and Gabriele Münter were all working — Olive had even seen their pieces with her own eyes. Were they not artists? Was the difference between being a workaday painter and being an artist simply other people believing in you, or spending twice as much money on your work?

She found it impossible to express to her parents why she’d applied, the portfolio she’d collated, the essay she’d written on background figures in Bellini. Despite all she’d absorbed about women’s shortcomings in art, she’d gone and done it anyway. This was what she couldn’t understand; where the urge had come from. And yet, even though an independent life was just within her reach, still she was sitting at the foot of her mother’s bed.

Turning again to Sarah, she considered fetching her pastels. Once upon a time, her mother would let Olive parade in her furs, or her strings of pearls, or take her for eclairs at the Connaught, or to hear this violinist or that clever poet perform his work at the Musikverein — always friends of Sarah, and always, Olive had gradually realized as she grew up, in love with her. These days, no one knew what Sarah Schloss might say, or do. She resisted the doctors, and often the pills seemed pointless. Olive felt like she was nothing but a dreg, jetsam in her mother’s wake. So she drew her, in secret, in ways that Sarah would probably never forgive.

The long windows were ajar, and a breeze made the curtains dance. The dawn wind had lifted an impressive cloudscape from the mountains beyond Arazuelo, a duck-egg sky striated gold and pink. The letter still in her hand, Olive tiptoed towards the balcony and saw blank fields spanning towards rugged foothills in the distance, patched with scrub and wild daisies, where kites circled and grasshoppers sawed in the empty melon fields, oxen dragging ploughs across the earth in preparation for later seeding.

Oblivious rabbits hopped across the orchard and far off in the hills goats were being herded, the bells on their necks clanking atonally and out of rhythm, a calming sound because it lacked any conscious performance. A hunter’s gun rang out, and birds rose in chaos against the baroque Andalusian morning. Sarah did not stir, but the rabbits scattered, expert hiders, deserting the surface of the waiting earth. Olive closed the windows and the curtains dropped. Her mother probably hoped her long-sought tranquillity was to be found here — but there was a wildness under the tolling convent bell, the chance of wolves in the mountains. The futile yaps of a dog in a barn would puncture every silence. And yet, since their arrival, Olive personally found the landscape and the house itself energizing, in a way that was unfamiliar and wholly unexpected. She had taken an old wood panel that she’d found in the outhouse at the end of the orchard, carrying it up to the attic as if it was contraband. She had treated it in readiness for paint; but it remained blank.

Her father strode into the room, his large foot skidding a Vogue under the bed. Olive jammed the letter in her pyjama pocket and spun round to face him. ‘How many?’ he asked, pointing at the sleeping figure of his wife.

‘Don’t know,’ said Olive. ‘But more than normal, I think.’

‘Sheiße.’ Harold only swore in German in moments of great stress or great freedom. He loomed over Sarah and lifted a stray strand of hair delicately off her face. It was a gesture from another time, and it made Olive squeamish.

‘Did you get your cigarettes?’ she asked him.

‘Eh?’

‘Your cigarettes.’ Last night, he’d mentioned needing to get cigarettes from Malaga and visiting an artist’s studio — hoping to sniff out another Picasso, he’d said, laughing, as if lightning really did strike in the same place twice. Her father always seemed to slip out of the days like this — bored quickly, yet demanding an audience whenever he turned up again. They’d barely been here two days, and already he was off.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Yes. They’re in the car.’

Before he left his wife’s room, Harold poured his beloved a glass of water and left it by her bedside, just beyond the orbit of her reach.

*

Downstairs, the shutters were still half-closed and the minimal furniture was in shadow. The air had a tinge of camphor laced with old cigar smoke. The finca could not have been lived in for several years, Olive supposed. A large catacomb above the ground, each of its rooms reticent at her presence, long corridors furnished in colonial habits, dark hardwood cabinets empty of homely objects. It felt like everything was as it had been in the 1890s, and they were characters out of time, surrounded by the discarded props of a drawing-room play.

The vague moisture in the air was already evaporating. Olive threw open the shutters and sunlight bleached the room, a day of exposure but no warmth. The view was an uncultivated slope, which led down to the high wrought-iron fence and onwards, to the beginnings of the village road. She looked out; scraggy bushes and empty flower borders, three fruitless orange trees. Her father had said these mansions were always built outside the villages, near to well-irrigated and lush earth, where in summer, he declared, they would enjoy olive groves and cherry blossom, flower gardens of dama-de-noche and jacaranda, fountains and leisure and happiness, happiness.

Olive still had on her winter pyjamas and stockings, and an Aran jumper. The flagstones were so cool, it felt as if rain had just fallen on their large smooth squares. Just do it, she thought. Tell him you’ve got a place, and go. If only it was easy to act on thoughts. If only it was easier to know what was the best thing to do.

In the pantry, she discovered a tin of coffee beans and an old but functioning grinder. It was all there was for breakfast, and she and her father decided to drink it on the veranda at the back of the house. Harold went to the room where the telephone was. He had chosen this finca as it was the only one hooked up to a generator, but it was a surprise they had a telephone, and Harold was very pleased.

He was murmuring in German, probably to one of his friends in Vienna. He sounded insistent, but he was too quiet for her to make out the words. When they’d been in London, and he’d had news of what was happening in his home city — the street fights, the hijacked prayer meetings — he would plunge into dark silences. As she ground the beans, Olive thought of her childhood Vienna, the old and the new, the Jewish and the Christian, the educated and the curious, the psyche and the heart. When Harold said it was not safe for them to return, Olive could not quite take this in. In the circles they moved, the violence seemed so distant.

He’d finished his conversation and was sat on the veranda waiting for her, on a tatty green sofa someone had left out in the open air. Over his coat, he was wearing a long spindly scarf that Sarah had knitted, and he was frowning over his correspondence. He always had a knack of making sure that his post would be waiting for him, wherever they landed.

Olive lowered herself into a discarded rocking chair, hesitating for fear damp had weakened the glue, woodworm seeing to the joints. Her father lit a cigarette and placed his silver box on the flaking veranda floor. He sucked on the tobacco leaf, and Olive heard the satisfying crackle as his breath intensified the heat.

‘How long do you think we’ll be here?’ she asked, trying to sound casual.

He looked up from his letters. A thin line of smoke rose straight from the cigarette tip, no breeze up here to shift its journey. The column of ash accumulated, curving downwards and scattering onto the peeling boards. ‘Don’t tell me you already want to leave.’ He raised his dark brows. ‘Are you — ’ here, he sought the particularly English word — ‘pining? Is there someone we left behind in London?’

Olive stared listlessly at the January-thin orchard, briefly wishing that there was some chinless Geoffrey, with a white stucco house in South Kensington and a job at the Foreign Office as an under-secretary. But there was no one, and there never had been. She closed her eyes and could almost see the dull metal wink of imaginary cufflinks. ‘No. It’s just — we’re in the middle of nowhere.’

He laid the letter down and regarded her. ‘Livvi, what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t leave you on your own. Your mother—’

‘I could have been left on my own. Or with a friend.’

‘You always tell me you don’t have any friends.’

‘There’s — things I want to do.’

‘Like what?’

She touched her pyjama pocket. ‘Nothing. Nothing important.’

‘You never made much of London anyway.’

Olive did not reply, for her eye had been caught by two people standing in the orchard, waiting at the fountain that lay beyond the immediate ribbon of grass that surrounded the house. It was a man and a woman, and they made no effort to hide themselves. The woman was wearing a satchel against her body, and she seemed at one in this garden, the canes in the parched earth the only remnant of the tomatoes, aubergines and lettuces that must have thrived here once, when someone cared.

The man had both his hands stuffed in his pockets, his shoulders hunched, chin down, but the woman stared up at the muscular satyr in the fountain, poised with his empty canton. She closed her eyes, breathing in the air. Olive breathed too, the faint wafts of charcoal fire and fields of sage, the emptiness of this place, its sense of desolation. She wondered if there was a means to get that water flowing.

The couple began to approach the house, both of them with a pace as sure as the mountain goats, avoiding rabbit holes and minor rocks in their seemingly inexorable desire to approach. It jolted Olive, this confidence. She and her father watched them come near, their progress punctuated by the light snap of bracken beneath their feet.

The woman was younger than Olive had thought. Her eyes were dark, her satchel bulky and intriguing. She had a small nose and a little mouth and her skin was burnished like a nut. Her dress was plain black, with long sleeves that buttoned at the wrist. Her hair was also dark, thick and braided into a long plait, but as she turned to look at Harold, strands within it glinted redly in the morning sun.

The man had almost black hair, and was older, probably in his mid-twenties. Olive wondered if they were married. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. His face was that of a Tuscan noble, his body a sinewy featherweight boxer’s. He was dressed in pressed blue trousers, and an open-necked shirt like those Olive had seen on the men in the fields, although his was pristine and theirs were threadbare. His face was fine-boned, his mouth had an agile facility. His eyes were dark brown, and they grazed Olive’s body like a small electrical current. Were these two together? Olive was probably gawping, but she could not look away.

‘We bring bread,’ the man said in accented English, as his companion fumbled in her satchel and raised a loaf aloft.

Harold clapped his hands with delight. ‘Thank God!’ he said. ‘I’m starving. Hand it over here.’

The pair moved towards the veranda. Although she was about the same height as the girl, Olive felt much bigger than both of them, and uneasy for it — her arms too long and her head too large, her limbs out of control, giving her away. Why the hell was she still in her pyjamas like a schoolkid?

The girl placed a hand on her own chest. ‘Me llamo Teresa Robles,’ she said, pronouncing it the Spanish way, Row-blez.

‘Me llamo Isaac Robles,’ the man said.

‘Me llamo Olive Schloss.’

She must be his wife, Olive thought, for why else would he be with her at this time of the morning? The couple laughed, and she felt a flare of rage. Being called ‘Olive’ in Spain might be funny, but it was hardly the same as being called ‘Anchovy’, or ‘Apricot’. Olive had always been teased for her name: first, as Popeye’s woman; then as an adolescent, a cocktail nibble. Now, on the cusp of freedom, she was being laughed at for being the fruit upon the Spanish tree.

‘Harold Schloss.’ Her father shook hands with both of them, and Teresa handed him the bread. He beamed at it, as if it was a bar of gold and Teresa one of the Magi. ‘I’m her father,’ he added, which Olive felt unnecessary. Teresa knelt down, and with the careless precision of a magician, she produced from her satchel a strong-smelling hard sheep’s cheese laced with sprigs of rosemary, a cured sausage, three small quinces and several enormous lemons. She placed each fruit with a flourish on the scarred wood, where they glowed like planets, a solar system in which she momentarily became the sun.

‘Having a picnic without me?’

Sarah had appeared at the kitchen door, shivering in her silk pyjamas, wearing one of Harold’s flying jackets and a pair of his thickest hunting socks. Even haggard from a bad night’s sleep and the champagne they’d picked up in Paris, she looked like an off-duty movie star.

Olive saw the familiar reaction; Teresa blinked, dazzled by the bright blonde hair, the air of glamour that clung to Sarah wherever she went. Isaac knelt and plunged his fingers into the satchel. Something living appeared to be at the bottom, and it stirred, and the satchel began to move of its own accord.

‘Jesus!’ Olive cried.

‘Don’t be a coward,’ said Sarah.

Teresa caught Olive’s eye, and smiled, and Olive felt furious to be so publicly humiliated. Isaac pulled out a live chicken, its loose feathers floating to the floor, scaly feet dangling comically in his grip. The bird’s reptilian eye swivelled; fear twitched in its toes, tensing into claws. With his left hand, Isaac kept it still on the floorboards. It was making a muffled cluck, straining for the cool of its mistress’s bag. Slowly, Isaac placed his right hand on the back of the bird’s head, and cooing quietly, he tightened his grip. With a determined twist, he broke the chicken’s neck.

The bird slumped onto Isaac’s palm like a stuffed sock, and as he took his hand away and rested the creature on the veranda, Olive made sure he saw her look down at the drying bead of its eye.

‘You will eat today,’ Teresa said, directly to Olive. Olive couldn’t tell if this was an offering or an order.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it so up close,’ said Sarah. She gave the newcomers a radiant smile. ‘I’m Sarah Schloss. So who are you two, then?’

‘It’s just a bloody chicken,’ Olive snapped, her heart contracting as Isaac Robles laughed again.

II

Teresa watched the group move indoors as she collected her offerings from the veranda. She hadn’t wanted to come; it looked so obvious to her, so needy. There’s another rich guiri turned up with his wife and daughter, Isaac had said. You should see the car, the travelling trunks. There’s a gramophone roped to the roof. ‘Who is he?’ she’d asked her brother, but neither he nor anyone in the village knew. All that was clear was that a week ago, the duchess’s old finca had finally got some new inhabitants.

It was not that unusual for wealthy foreigners to come to this corner of southern Spain, bringing their industrial inheritances and discontentments with city life. Indeed, Teresa had worked for two sets of them before. They came down via Paris or Toulouse, Madrid or Barcelona, laden with boxes of paints and novels — and typewriters to write their own novels — and initialled trunks, which sometimes fell onto the road because of their clumsiness with the local mules. They were bohemian millionaires, or, more commonly, the bohemian children of millionaires, from Texas, Berlin, or London, wanting to dip their brush and dissolve in the sierra like one of their barely used watercolour squares. They arrived, they lived for a bit, and most of them departed.

Teresa could see out of the corner of her eye that Olive had not gone inside. The toes of her woollen socks had been inexpertly darned, which Teresa thought was a shame. People like this should dress better. Olive came towards her and knelt down. ‘I’ll help you,’ she said — in halting Spanish, which was surprising. Under the girl’s fingernails were crescent moons of vivid green paint. Her bob haircut needed a trim — untamed, it coped her head like the cap of a wide mushroom. When Olive smiled, Teresa was struck by how Sarah’s features had been repeated in her daughter’s face, but it was as if they had missed a beat and become a jarring echo.

‘I’m still in my pyjamas,’ Olive said, and Teresa did not know how to reply. That much was obvious, wasn’t it? She picked up the floppy chicken and shunted it into the satchel.

‘It’s beautiful here,’ Olive went on, weighing one of the lemons in her palm. ‘My Baedeker says North Africa isn’t far. “The Catholic kings wrenched this land from the Moorish Caliphates. Crucifying heat in the summer, and skin-peeling cold in the winter, enormous night-time skies all year round”. I memorized it.’

She seemed jumpy. Teresa had watched the girl when Sarah had called her a coward; she’d looked as if she had the words to fight back, but was keeping every single one locked inside her skull. There was an urgency in Olive’s body, in the movements of her hands. She reminded Teresa of a trapped animal, restless because someone had approached the bars of her cage.

‘So,’ Olive said, in Spanish again. ‘How long have you been married?’

Teresa stared at her. ‘Married?’

Olive frowned. ‘Casados — that’s right, isn’t it?’

Teresa laughed. ‘Isaac is my brother,’ she said, now in English. She saw the blush spread over Olive’s face as she pulled a loose thread of wool from her jumper.

‘Oh,’ said Olive. ‘I thought—’

‘No. We have — we had — different mothers.’

‘Ah.’ Olive seemed to gather herself. ‘Your English is very good.’

Teresa removed the lemon gently from Olive’s grip, and Olive gazed in surprise at the fruit, as if she had no recollection of taking it up.

‘There was an American lady in Esquinas. I worked for her,’ Teresa said. She decided not to mention the German family she had also worked for, who, before returning to Berlin merely months before, had given her a rudimentary facility in German. Life had taught her that it was wiser not to play all your cards at once. ‘Her name was Miss Banetti. She did not speak my language.’

Olive seemed to awaken. ‘Is that why you’re here today — you want to work for us? What does your brother do?’

Teresa crossed the veranda and stared out at the skeleton trees in the orchard. ‘Our father is Don Alfonso. He works for the woman who owns the land and this house.’

‘Is it really owned by a duchess?’

‘Yes. Her family is very old.’

‘She can’t have been in this finca for a long time. The dust! Oh — but I’m not saying it’s your fault—’

‘La duquesa is never here,’ said Teresa. ‘She lives in Barcelona and Paris and New York. There is nothing for her to do here.’

‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ Olive replied.

‘You are English or American?’

‘Half English. My father’s from Vienna. He married my mother, who’s English, but thinks she was born on Sunset Boulevard. We’ve lived in London for the last few years.’

‘Sunset Boulevard?’

‘Never mind. . so — you’re from Arazuelo?’

‘Will you stay long?’ Teresa asked.

‘That’s up to my father.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Nineteen,’ Olive replied, and when she caught Teresa’s frown she went on, ‘I know. It’s a long story. But my mother’s not well.’

‘She looks well.’

‘It’s deceptive.’

Teresa’s skin prickled at the hard edge that had crept into Olive’s tone. She wondered what was wrong with the beautiful, brittle woman in the oversized jacket. ‘You will need someone here, señorita,’ she said. ‘This is not London. You cook?’

‘No.’

‘Clean?’

‘No.’

‘You ride a horse?’

‘No!’

‘I will help.’

‘Well, how old are you?’

‘Eighteen,’ Teresa lied, for in truth, she was sixteen years old. She had learned that foreigners often had a romantic, infantilizing attitude to age, keeping their children as children much longer. This girl was clearly a case in point. Teresa herself had never had such a luxury; sometimes she felt as old as stone. ‘My brother—’ she began, but stopped. She didn’t feel like talking about Isaac any more than was necessary. From her pocket, she brought out three envelopes. ‘Tomate, perejíl, cebolla,’ she said in Spanish.

‘Tomato, parsley, onion?’ Olive said.

Teresa nodded. She had not intended these seeds as a gift. She had in fact brought them to the finca in the hope that she could quietly sow them in the duchess’s more fertile soil, and ultimately harvest them for herself. ‘They are for you,’ she said to the other girl. Teresa had never, in sixteen years, given anyone a present.

Olive looked over her shoulder into the dark of the house. From deep within could be heard Sarah’s laughter, and the lower bass of the men. ‘Let’s plant them,’ she said.

‘Now?’

‘Now.’

From the outhouse at the end of the orchard, Olive found two rusting garden forks and handed one to Teresa. Teresa was struck by the other girl’s readiness to be here with her, turning over hard earth, weeding as she went. She didn’t want to be so happy about it, but she couldn’t help herself. Surely it was rare that a girl like Olive might choose to be here, rather than with those inside? When she protested that Olive should put on some boots over those socks, Olive looked down at her feet in surprise. ‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ she said, wiggling her darned toes. ‘I like the feeling of the ground.’

Teresa thought that only a rich guiri, with more pairs of socks than sense, would ever say such a thing. Miss Banetti, who’d also come for the rustic life, might have said it and appeared an imbecile. But there was something different about Olive, her thoughtless determination, her acceptance that was so whole-hearted, that Teresa not only forgave the girl her whim, but was delighted that she had no care for shoes.

Olive rolled up her sleeves and lugged two huge watering cans of spring water from the well at the end of the garden, and Teresa admired the sinews in her forearms, their pale endurance, the fact that nothing was lost along the way. Up and down the newly furrowed earth they walked with the cans, and as the water fell, Teresa spied a rainbow arching in the drops. If Olive felt the hard soil poking into her soles, she said nothing.

III

Harold invited Teresa to start by cleaning the ground-floor rooms, sweeping away the cobwebs that draped from corner to corner. Using rags ripped from a man’s shirt, dipping them in a bowl of vinegar and some of her lemon juice, she scrubbed the windows where dirt had layered round the frames. From the garden, she burned rosemary and sage on the flagstones. In a cupboard in the pantry Isaac found two electric heaters and set them up in the front east room, warming up the bare chalk walls as the sunlight moved over them. He promised them firewood.

Teresa made the Schlosses lunch from the chicken, refusing to eat it with them, although Isaac accepted the offer. By the time the chicken was out of the stove, it was clear to Olive that they had a new servant. But what of Isaac — under what pretence could they keep him near?

The clock in the hall dragged its pendulum four times. ‘God!’ Sarah said, as they sat at the dining-room table. Her mood was excitable, a great improvement on the day before, but not without its dangers. ‘Where’s the day gone? It’s so cold — I thought the south of Spain was supposed to be hot?’ She’d changed into a long-sleeved cream house jacket covering new red woollen trousers, and a blouse in matching scarlet polka dots. At some point she’d painted her toenails, and Olive saw ten small squares of vermilion on the terracotta floor.

‘It will get hotter,’ Harold said.

From the kitchen, Teresa clanged the tin plates on the draining board, a noise like an armoury.

‘Oh well then, I shall fetch my bathing suit,’ said Sarah. ‘Have you ever been to London, Mr Robles?’ she asked, turning to where he sat on her left, pouring coffee into his small white cup. ‘Do you smoke? Would you like an almond?’

‘Yes, I do. And no — thank you.’

‘Please, have one of mine. Harold snaffled some in Malaga. He’ll only smoke German ones, so that’s all we’ve got.’ Sarah fiddled with the box on the table and pulled out a cigarette; her wrists were burdened with bangles, and they clinked together. Isaac removed the cigarette from her proffered fingers and lit it himself.

‘I have not been to London,’ he said, weighing the city’s name with something like awe. London in calligraphic letters, Henry VIII, the Tower, Middle Temple. Olive’s London was not like that — it was a lonely walk through St James’s and along the Mall to the National Portrait Gallery to see her favourite Holbein; a penny bun at Lyon’s on Craven Street after, or a stroll through Embankment Gardens. That was what she missed — certainly not the other London, the stifling cocktail chit-chat, women’s over-rosied flesh, the lemon tang of Trumper’s wet shaves fresh on older men; red acne rashes of boys down from Oxford, with nothing much to say.

‘London’s all right, I suppose,’ Olive said, intending to sound jokily arch. ‘The people can be ghastly.’ Her mother flashed her a look.

‘I have been to Barcelona many times,’ Isaac said. ‘And Madrid.’

Olive thought of their travelling trunks upstairs, the wooden brackets shiny from handling by so many porters, labels from Paris and Buenos Aires, Marseilles, New York; peeling like old skins the Schlosses had shed. She could barely remember any of it now, and nineteen felt like ninety.

‘But have you always lived in Arazuelo?’ Harold asked him.

‘Yes. I am a teacher in Malaga.’

‘What do you teach?’ Sarah asked.

‘Lithography,’ he said. ‘At the San Telmo School of Art.’ Olive stared hard at her plate.

‘Harold’s an art dealer,’ Sarah went on. ‘Kokoschka, Kirchner, Klimt, Klee — all his. I swear he only sells artists whose surnames start with a K.’

‘I admire Kokoschka,’ Isaac said, and Olive sensed her father become alert.

‘Herr Kokoschka painted blue fir trees in Olive’s nursery in Vienna,’ Sarah said. ‘Mr Robles, your English is excellent.’

‘Thank you, señora. I taught myself,’ he said. ‘I have English acquaintances in Malaga, and I practise with Teresa.’

‘Do you paint, or only print?’ asked Harold.

Robles hesitated. ‘I paint a little, señor.’

‘You should bring me some of your work.’

Generally, Harold was allergic to people who said they painted. Whenever a hopeful artist got wind that Harold was a dealer, they always misjudged it. Sometimes, they displayed aggression, as if Harold was withholding something to which they were specifically entitled — or they offered a simpering humility that fooled no one. But here was Herr Schloss, asking this young man for his work. Olive was used to how it was when Harold’s attention was caught — how he would dog, cajole, flatter, act the father, the pal — whatever it took, hoping he would be the one to uncover next year’s genius. It always hurt.

‘What I paint would not interest you, señor,’ said Isaac, smiling.

Harold tipped up the pitcher and poured himself a glass of water. ‘Let me be the judge of that.’

Isaac looked serious. ‘If I have the time, I will show you.’

‘The time?’ said Harold. Olive’s skin tingled.

‘When I am not at San Telmo, I am occupied with the workers’ union in Malaga. I teach them how to read and write.’

There was a pause. ‘Does your father know you’re a red?’ Sarah asked.

Isaac smiled again. ‘I am twenty-six, señora. I do as I must. I supported the workers’ strikes. I travelled to Asturias to help the miners. But I am not a red.’

‘Shame. That would have been exciting.’

Olive sat on her hands, staring at her mother. Sarah’s entire life was predicated on the docility of the workers who propped up her family’s famous condiment business. She saw herself as a free spirit, but it was the work of her great-grandfather — starting with his barrel of oranges in Covent Garden and ending up an industrialist with a seat in the Lords — that paid for their travel, the flat in Curzon Street, the cottage in Sussex, the house off the Ringstrasse, the Schiaparelli dresses. Harold’s business was certainly successful, but Sarah’s inheritance underwrote the lot.

‘You are who you are because of the very people you would never deign to consort with,’ Harold had once shouted at Sarah, after an evening when she hadn’t come home and he’d had to call the police. Sarah, who had in fact passed out on her host’s chaise longue and couldn’t be roused till the morning, had shouted back that he didn’t have a leg to stand on, because he too benefited directly from the family’s Finest Cut Marmalade, so he could shut his mouth, unless he fancied finding himself a proper job and a flat in Camden.

‘My father and I do not often agree,’ Isaac was saying. ‘He works for the duchess. All this land is hers. She is eighty-five years old and she won’t die.’

‘I’m going to be like that,’ said Sarah, and they all laughed.

‘The people who work her land — how do you say in English? — tienen un gran hambre—’

‘They’re starving,’ said Olive.

Isaac looked at her in surprise, and again Olive felt the current that ran through her, the thrill of his attention. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Thousands. Across the region.’

‘How terrible,’ said Sarah.

Olive willed Isaac to look at her again, but he leaned forward and spoke to her mother. ‘La duquesa’s men will give you a job, if you promise to vote for her family and keep her powerful. The poor beg to work her land, for almost nothing, because that is all the work. But she does not remember them if their wife dies, or if their mother is sick. If they are sick. She only shows her face during the time of election.’

Teresa appeared at the door of the dining room, and stood with her arms crossed. Her hair had frizzed from the kitchen’s steam, her apron covered in bloodied smears. Isaac looked up, seeming to hesitate. Olive noticed Teresa almost imperceptibly shake her head, as Isaac blinked away her warning and barrelled on.

‘My father finds her men to work her land,’ he said, ‘but he only picks the young men, the strong men, not the older ones with families. So more people are starving. And there is no rule on the price for your work here, so la duquesa pays you nearly nothing. We tried to change that in the last election, but it has been changed again. And if you complain about how little you get of the harvest — or how bad condition is your house — la duquesa and her people will hear. You will not work.’

‘But the church must help them,’ said Harold.

‘Shall I tell you a secret? They say that our Padre Lorenzo has a lover in the village of Esquinas.’

Sarah laughed. ‘It’s always the priest what done it.’

Isaac shrugged. ‘They say Padre Lorenzo wants to make private the fields between the church and the house of his lover, so no one can see him when he makes the journey.’

‘Is that a joke?’ asked Sarah.

‘Who knows, señora? Padre Lorenzo is the cousin of the duchess. He has more interest in territory maps than prayer books.’ He sighed, tapping the ash of his cigarette into the ashtray. ‘We had a vision. Land, church, army, education, labour — all to change. But we are — how do you say it? Cogidos?’

‘Caught,’ said Olive, and Isaac looked at her again. She blushed. ‘You’re caught.’ She turned away, unable any longer to meet his eye.

‘Mr Robles isn’t caught,’ Sarah said. ‘He speaks English. He’s been to Madrid.’

Isaac inhaled sharply on his cigarette. ‘Action may be the only answer, señora. We need the tyranny gone.’

‘Tyranny?’ said Sarah. ‘What tyranny?’

‘Most people here are just trying to plant their cabbages and eat them in peace,’ said Isaac. ‘But many of the children in Arazuelo do not even go to school because they are working in the fields. They need to know who’s pulling the sheep over their eyes.’

‘Wool,’ said Harold. He’d barely spoken, and they all looked at him as he reached into his pocket for his lighter and dipped his head to ignite his cigarette. ‘The word you mean is wool.’ Being Viennese, he pronounced it voohl.

‘Are you planning a revolution, Mr Robles?’ asked Sarah. ‘Perhaps we should call you Lenin.’

He held up his hands in surrender, laughing as he glanced at Olive once again. She could barely cope; he was looking at her this time because he wanted to, and she felt as if her head might be on fire. He was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. ‘You will see, señores,’ Isaac said. ‘You are new here, but you will see.’

‘Are you a communist?’ Harold asked.

‘No. I am a member of the Republican Union party. And the poverty in our region is visible, it is not in my imagination. Mud huts, ten or eleven children inside them, men asleep on the fields.’

‘Isaac—’ said Teresa, but he interrupted her.

‘It is not just the poor — small farmers, they live on the land, they improve it for the owners — and then they are charged a high rent because they have made the land so productive, that they can no longer afford it. Their labour counts for nothing—’

‘You should be careful when you talk about “tyranny”, Mr Robles,’ Harold said. ‘If you insist on being a revolutionary, you will make the people with means to support you fly to the arms of a fascist.’

Isaac lowered his eyes. ‘But the people with the means to support us will never support us. I believe there is a way to universal happiness.’

‘The coercive redistribution of wealth,’ said Harold, looking grim.

‘Yes, that will do it. The people—’

‘Nothing destroys a country’s sense of balance more than the word coercive, Mr Robles. But look,’ he beamed, ‘we are destroying your sister’s lunch.’

Teresa stared at her brother. Olive thought of the thin wraiths they’d seen in the fields on their way here, stopping their work to stare at the car like it was a vehicle from a land of fantasy. ‘Mr Robles is right,’ she said. ‘I saw it.’

‘Oh, not you too, Liv,’ said Harold. ‘Not after all those bloody school fees.’

Olive looked to Isaac, and he smiled.

*

Late that night, after Isaac and Teresa had left, with promises to return in a couple of days with firewood, Olive went up to her bedroom in the attic and locked the door. Union, onion; this brother and sister had come with their words and their seeds and Olive had never seen their like. Had she and her parents let them in, or had they simply entered, sensing a weakness in the fortifications? No one was like this in Mayfair, or Vienna; you left calling cards, not chicken carcasses. You spoke of the poor with pity, not anger. You did not plough your own land.

Blood alive, head singing from the way Isaac had looked at her, Olive grasped her easel, pulling open its three legs and fastening them tight. She found the wooden panel she had taken from the outhouse, and placed it on the easel. She opened her window to let in the moon, lit the oil lanterns and switched on the electric light beside her bed. She knelt before her travelling trunk like a pilgrim at an altar, and ran her fingers over the paint tubes hidden under the cottons. As she pulled them out, Olive felt a familiar connection, as if her heart was slotting into place, a moment to breathe. Not one of her colours had burst in transit, all her powders intact, the sticks of pastels not cracked in half. They had always been loyal to her, when everything else was falling out of place.

Moths hurled themselves at the bulbs as she worked, but she paid no mind. For the first time in a long time, all else was eclipsed by a purer sense of purpose and the image that was emerging on the old wooden board. It was a view from the bottom of the orchard, in exaggerated colours, the finca behind it, its peeled red paintwork on every window. It had its feet in the earth, but the sky above was enormous and swirling, with a hint of angelic, silver-grey. The scale of the house made it look smaller in the painting, the trees in the foreground laden with such fruit that in reality was not there.

You could just about call it figurative, but it was not realistic. It had a new form of surreality Olive had never executed before. For all its grounded colours on the fields — ochres and grasshopper-greens, the folkloric tenderness of russet furrows and mustard browns — there was something other-worldly about the scene. The sky was a boon of promise. The fields were a cornucopia of cereal crops and apples, olives and oranges. The orchard was so lush you might call it a jungle, and the empty fountain had turned into a living spring, the satyr’s canton now gushing full of water. The finca rose up like a welcoming palace, her father’s house with many mansions, its windows huge and open to her gaze. The brush strokes were loose, and colour dominated technical accuracy.

Olive fell asleep beside it at four in the morning. The next day, she stood before the painting as the sun cracked low along the sky beyond her window. She never knew she was capable of such work. She had made, for the first time, a picture of such movement and excess and fecundity that she felt almost shocked. It was a stubborn ideal; a paradise on earth, and the irony was it had only come from this place, this lonely part of Spain to which her parents had dragged her.

Stiffly, Olive moved to the trunk where the letter from the art school was hidden. She pulled it out, read it, smoothed it, folded it neatly, and kissed it, placing it back at the bottom of the trunk, buried deep and out of sight.

IV

‘Last year,’ Isaac said, in English, ‘I meet a man waiting for my train at Barcelona station. A journalist. We talk. He tells me, “It is coming. It has happened before and it is going to happen again.” ’

‘What’s happened before?’ Olive asked. She was standing with Isaac in the orchard, helping gather the chopped wood as he sliced it in half with his axe. She turned briefly towards the house, and saw a shadow move behind the lace curtains of her mother’s room. To hell with her; this was Olive’s time with him. Sarah always wanted to be the centre of attention, and was very good at it, but Olive loved these stolen moments in Isaac’s company.

Out of the corner of her eye she watched his shirt lift, and saw the flash of dark brown flesh, a trail of hair leading away. She felt such pleasure when he handed her the split pieces of wood, as if he were offering her a bouquet. From a decade of devouring novels, Olive knew that charming men were deadly. Their story had been played down the centuries, unharmed through the pages, whilst girls were blamed and girls were lost, or girls were garlanded, mute as statues. Be Vigilant and Prize Your Virginity was a subtitle many of these stories could have taken, most of them written by men. Olive knew all this and she didn’t care. She didn’t give a damn.

He had been coming to the house with less regularity than Teresa, partly because of his job in Malaga, and partly because he did not have as much of an excuse. It pleased Olive so much to see that their piles of firewood were probably the highest for several miles. If he wanted to tell her about the state of his country, she was more than happy to listen.

He had not noticed her new hairstyle, the gobs of her mother’s pomade she had applied, to try and make it smooth and slick. These were not the sort of things a serious-minded man might notice, of course, Olive supposed. Not when his country was in a state of unrest. Not when he was thinking of the people. She decided that to make the most of her time with him, it would pay to be more politically aware.

‘What happened before? Chapel tombs smashed open, the corpses of nuns on the ground,’ said Isaac. ‘Houses like this one, robbed.’ They both turned back to look at the finca, and the figure at the curtains dipped rapidly away. ‘They say a priest was taken from his sacristy and left hanging on a tree, found next morning with his balls in his mouth.’

‘Isaac!’ Olive cringed. The word balls made her nervous, and she felt childish.

‘The newspapers make it seem worse than it is — but they never ask the question as to why the looting happens in the first place. So, this journalist.’

‘Yes?’

‘He starts talking to me about a polar bear.’

‘A polar bear?’

‘Yes. He tells me he interviewed a duke in his house,’ Isaac said, laying the wood blocks on her open hands. Olive saw how the tips of her fingers were stained red. She hadn’t stopped painting since meeting him. She was working on smaller canvases, filling notebooks with sketches; it was as if she had plugged herself in — to what, exactly, she wasn’t entirely sure — and although she was terrified that this long seam of inspiration was going to end, she felt that as long as Isaac was close, and she was ready for it, for him, her output might continue.

She knew that by staying down here, she had avoided a confrontation about her true self — no art-school confession with her father was required. And yet she was happier than she’d been in a long time.

‘He told me the duke had a polar bear in his drawing room,’ Isaac went on. ‘Lo había cazado?’

‘He’d hunted it down.’

‘Yes. With a gun.’

Olive curled her fingers up, hoping he might comment on their dyed appearance, so she could say, Oh, I paint a bit too. Would you like to see? He would come and see the painting and reply, This is extraordinary, you are extraordinary. How did I not see? And then they would kiss, him taking her face in his hands, bending down to brush his lips on hers, full of astonishment at how good she was. She so desperately wanted him to see how good she was.

But Isaac did not notice her fingers, and so Olive turned instead to the anomalous polar bear in her mind’s eye, a piece of the Arctic, a grotesquery in the Spanish heat, the barbarity and expense of it, the chill in the heart of the home. ‘Why did you tell me about that priest?’ she asked, trying to assert herself. ‘Were you trying to frighten me?’

‘No. I want you to see what’s happening here. So when you go home, you will tell other people.’

‘I’m not going home, Isaac.’

She waited for him to express his pleasure, but he did not. ‘Isaac, you do know I’m not like my parents, don’t you?’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘They’re frightened of things. I’m not.’

Olive wanted to communicate that whatever Isaac thought they were, she was the opposite. She didn’t see things in black and white, like they did. She was nothing like them at all. It felt very important that he should know this.

‘There’s a gypsy camp, out in the hills,’ he said, as if he hadn’t heard her. ‘They lost one of their boys. Not lost,’ he corrected himself. ‘They didn’t lose him. He was beaten by a gang of men. He was twelve. He died.’

‘How awful.’

Isaac put down the axe and walked towards a slope at the end of the orchard. ‘Ven aquí,’ he said. Come here. Together, they surveyed the land before them. A couple of far-off buzzards wheeled in the sky in search of prey along the ground. The skies were so large, the mountains beyond so solid; it seemed the only violence possible here was the violence of the natural world.

‘It’ll be all right,’ Olive whispered. She imagined slipping her hand into his, the two of them, standing here for ever.

His face was hard. ‘The people hold this soil in their blood. That is why the landlords fear them.’ He paused. ‘I worry for my sister.’

Olive was surprised by this. ‘Teresa? She’ll be fine.’

At the beginning, Teresa had come every other day to clean and cook. Now she was coming daily. The house still had its dark corners, and its sense of absent occupancy, but it had benefited from her quiet and watchful presence. She never said much, just going about her business through the rooms, taking the weekly envelope of pesetas from Harold with a nod.

‘Teresa is not married,’ said Isaac. ‘She is not rich. She is nothing that fits.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She’s the daughter of a gypsy—’

‘A gypsy? How romantic.’

He raised his eyebrow. ‘And the sister of a socialist. I do not know which is worse for her.’

‘Why?’

‘The police, the mayor, the caciques. My own father. They do not like me. I’ve been in fights. And she is too close—’

‘Isaac, don’t worry,’ Olive said, attempting a tone of mature assurance. ‘We’ll look after her.’

Isaac laughed. ‘Until you leave.’

‘I told you. I’m never going to leave.’

‘What do you want from this life, señorita?’

‘I–I don’t know exactly. I know I’d like to stay here.’

Isaac looked as if he was going to say something, and her whole body willed him to say how glad he was to hear this — but he was interrupted by the sound of crunching leaves. Teresa appeared at the bottom of the slope, her satchel strapped across her body, a flat expression in her eyes. ‘La señora te necesita,’ she said to Isaac.

‘Why?’ said Olive. ‘Why does my mother want him?’

Teresa and her brother stared at each other, until eventually Isaac capitulated, sighing as he moved back down the slope, not saying another word.

As Isaac moved through the trees, Teresa imagined for a moment that she and Olive were hunters together, watching their prey before deciding to let it go, preferring instead to stand side by side in the cold air. It was not the thrill of the kill they wanted, but simply the companionship that came from sharing a mutual target.

Isaac was fond of saying that Teresa was the kind of girl who’d sell her grandmother if she had to, not that she’d ever had a grandmother to sell. The worst thing was, Teresa sometimes did feel a sort of icy indifference to those around her, who’d never helped her, making it clear that she wasn’t worth the bother. She looked over at the furrows she and Olive had made with the gardening forks. The seeds were still deep in the soil, and would not show green shoots for months. Teresa was relieved that she had wanted to hand Olive those seeds. Olive somehow reminded her that she was still capable of feeling happiness.

‘Let’s go and smoke on the veranda,’ said Olive. ‘I stole three of my father’s cigarettes.’

Only Olive smoked. From above them inside the house came the sound of a slamming door. ‘Do sit,’ she said to Teresa, but only after Harold’s motor car had revved down to the rusting gates at the bottom of the slope did Teresa obey. ‘That’s Daddy out again,’ Olive said.

‘Will your mother see us? I must work.’

‘You don’t have to work every minute of the day, Tere. They won’t get rid of you for sitting down for five minutes. And besides.’ Olive lit the cigarette and took an inexpert drag. ‘She’s talking to your brother.’

Teresa had seen the empty pill bottles in Sarah’s room, the indecipherable stretch of words around the small brown vials. She’d heard Sarah sobbing once, trying to bury the sound in her pillow, and had seen a flash of silvery white scars running down in criss-cross lines at the top of her legs. Surmising from the stolen cigarettes that Olive was in a more reckless mood than the last time she’d brought this up, Teresa asked, ‘Is your mother very sick?’

‘She’s a depressive.’ Olive sat back in the rocking chair, blowing out a funnel of blue smoke.

‘A depressive?’

‘Smiles in ballrooms, weeps in bedrooms. Ill, in her head.’ Olive tapped her temple. ‘And here.’ She touched her heart. ‘She gets worse, gets better. Gets worse again.’

‘That is hard,’ Teresa said, surprised by the other girl’s frankness.

Olive turned to look at her. ‘Do you mean that, or are you just saying it?’

‘No, señorita. I mean it.’ And Teresa did mean it; but really her wish was for Olive to confide in her about everything, and she would say what she had to, in order to make it so. Olive looked out at the orchard. To Teresa, she seemed more at ease in her skin. Her clothes, unusual and boyish, suited her; even her untameable crown of hair seemed intrinsically to fit. Being here in Arazuelo seemed to have brought her out of herself.

‘It is hard,’ said Olive. ‘Daddy calls them her “storm clouds”, but that’s just a nice way of saying that she drags us around. The doctor says her mind’s like honeycomb, chamber upon chamber, broken, rebuilt again. She sees her pain in colours, you know. Steel Blue, Yellowed Bruise, German Measles Red.’ Olive gave a grim laugh and Teresa tried to process the language. ‘It’s an illness we’ve always had in her side of the family. I’ve got a great-grandmother buried in an unconsecrated grave, an aunt — whom no one speaks of — locked in an asylum. Then there’s a cousin, Johnny; he hated boarding school, and tried to drown himself in the Ouse. It’s wretched really, and I’m so selfish, I just worry I’m next.’

Teresa could hear the snag of Olive’s breath in her throat, before she inhaled deeply again on her father’s cigarette. ‘I can feel it sometimes, in my bones — just how easy it might be to catch it off her.’ Olive turned to her. ‘Do you think you can catch it, Tere?’

Worry flickered over Olive’s face, the spray of freckles over her nose, her dark brown eyes, her mouth ajar. ‘I do not think you will be mad,’ Teresa said, and Olive laughed and nudged her, and the touch of her shoulder on Teresa was shocking.

‘Well, that’s that, then. If you don’t think I’ll be mad, I won’t be. Just my mother.’ Olive paused. ‘Do you think she’s beautiful?’

‘Yes.’

‘Of course. I think she’s a sex maniac.’ Olive laughed, but the sound died quickly, because the description had the vague air of medical viability and seemed less of a joke than she might have wanted. The girls sat in silence for a while, watching the kites circle in the distance. Teresa wanted only that time might cease, that this view, and this strange, confiding peace, be all that existed. To have a friend like this would be to own the world.

‘I should be engaged to be married by now,’ Olive said.

‘There is a man?’

‘Oh, no. No. It’s just — most of the girls I know in London — I wouldn’t call them friends — are “taken” now. I’m not. But whenever I see their engagement rings, I feel sad. They’re so eager to run away, change their names. It’s all so uniform. Maybe they all like being the same as each other.’

Olive seemed to be talking to herself now, and Teresa was failing to manage the unstoppered bottle that was Olive’s English, pouring out words and words that seemed to have been waiting inside a long time.

‘And the fiancés!’ Olive said. She hooted ferociously. ‘They’re so peripheral. Do you know what “peripheral” means?’

‘No.’

‘On the outside. Not important. They’ve got interchangeable names, like Philip and Ernest and David. Just one floating face, of a man with no discernible chin. When I said I wouldn’t get married, one of these girls said to me, “You wouldn’t understand, Olive. You’ve been to Paris — I haven’t made it past Portsmouth.” Imagine being so idiotic! Imagine thinking being a married woman is the same as travel!’

‘Perhaps it is?’

Olive glanced at her. ‘Well, there are plenty of miserable wives in Paris. Some of them are my parents’ friends. One of them’s my own mother.’

‘Yes?’

‘Marriage is a game of survival,’ Olive said, and it sounded as if she had heard this somewhere else, before repeating it herself.

‘How did your parents meet?’

‘A party. Paris. Mother was seventeen. “An English nettle” — her words. Daddy was twenty-two. It was a bit shocking, her becoming engaged to a Viennese Jew. Her family took a while to accept it, but then they loved him.’

Teresa nodded, thinking this a simplification. Harold was not easily loveable, she thought. He reminded her of a beetle, deep within the wood and plaster of the finca’s walls. He needed his hard wings to be kept shiny, his antlers polished with a soft cloth, his body buffed and fed so he didn’t bite.

‘He was interned during the war,’ Olive said. ‘They let him out and he worked for the British government. He never talks about that. He represented everything Mummy’s life didn’t, I suppose. She gets bored so easily, and likes to cause a stir. Condiment Heiress, Cocaine Flapper, Rebel with Hun Groom. It’s all so garish,’ she added, and although Teresa did not understand the adjective, she could taste its jealousy.

‘It’s astonishing,’ Olive continued, ‘how easily she can hoodwink other people that she’s whole, when inside she’s spiralling, as broken as a shattered pot. I sometimes wonder whether we could have had a stable life — Daddy, walking daily to the Foreign Office — bowler hat, club on St James’s, mother at home doing embroidery. I doubt it. Don’t you doubt it?’

Teresa didn’t know what to say to this fizzing girl, with her plaintive, open face. The Schlosses were so short-handed with each other that it usually neutralized any depth of reference to their past lives. They were actors in costume, in the moment, performing through the house as if it were a theatre stage and Teresa their sole audience. She desperately wanted to see what happened when they took off their robes and walked into the wings, the darker corners where memories shifted. Olive had now lifted the curtain a little, and shown her the shapes and patterns beyond. Teresa worried that to say something wrong would make that curtain drop again, and break the spell of their solicitude.

‘Do you think you’ll marry?’ Olive said, in the face of the other girl’s silence.

‘No,’ Teresa said, and she felt that this was true.

‘If I do, it will be for love, and not just to annoy my parents, like my mother did. Do you think Isaac will marry?’

‘I do not know.’

Olive grinned. ‘If he does, you’ll be alone in your cottage. You’ll have to come and live with me and my husband. I wouldn’t want you to be lonely.’

‘Your husband?’

‘Let’s call him. . Boris. Boris Mon-Amour.’ Olive laughed and kicked her heels. ‘Oh, Boris,’ she shouted, opening her arms to the sky. ‘Come to me, take me!’ Breathless, she turned to Teresa and beamed. ‘I haven’t felt like this in ages.’

‘What do you feel?’ said Teresa.

‘Happy.’

Teresa drank in the image of this girl, in her Aran jumper and old brown shoes, who didn’t want her to be lonely, who had a foolish imaginary lover called Boris, and who had come to the ends of Spain to discover she was happy. And then she noticed the dried blood, crusted under Olive’s fingernails, and she remembered the axe, and Olive out here with her brother, and panic rose. She grabbed Olive’s hand.

‘What is it?’ Olive looked shocked by the contact, and stopped her rocking.

‘Your fingers.’

Olive stared down at her rust-coloured nails trapped in Teresa’s little paw. ‘I’m fine.’

‘It’s blood. Did he—’

‘Did he what? It’s not blood, Teresa.’ Olive hesitated. ‘It’s paint.’

‘You are in pain?’

‘Not pain, paint. I didn’t clean up properly.’

‘I do not understand.’

Olive considered. ‘Teresa, if I told you something, would you promise to keep it to yourself?’

It was a risky question, riddled with unknowns, but the alternative was being shut away from Olive, and that was something Teresa could not countenance. ‘Of course,’ she said.

Olive held up her little finger. ‘Put your finger round mine. Do you swear?’

Teresa linked her own with Olive’s, feeling the intensity of Olive’s gaze. ‘Lo juro,’ she whispered. ‘I swear.’

Olive reached out and crossed her fingers over Teresa’s heart, and Teresa, as if under a spell, lifted her hand and marked Olive with the same gesture, the heat of the other girl’s skin coming through her woollen jumper.

‘Good,’ Olive said, standing up and pulling Teresa to her feet. From inside the house, they heard Sarah’s laughter. ‘Come on, follow me.’

V

As he sat with Sarah in the front east room, Isaac’s gaze flicked up to the ceiling. The room above their heads was the place, eleven years ago, where he’d lost his virginity. His father had just taken the job of estate manager for the duchess and the finca had been unoccupied. Isaac had stolen the keys from his father’s office and crept in with a couple of his schoolfriends. More young people from the surrounding villages turned up around midnight, and he’d got drunk properly for the first time in his life, two bottles of his father’s Tempranillo to himself.

In the morning, he’d woken sprawled on one of the covered beds with a woman — Laetitia was her name — fast asleep beside him. When she woke, they started kissing, and in the drugged, dry-headed haze of his first hangover, Laetitia and he had sex. Laetitia, Isaac recalled now, had been twenty-seven years old. He had been fifteen. A vase had been smashed downstairs, and when his father appeared at their bedside with the pieces in his hands, he chased Laetitia out of the room and came back to beat his son. Not for the sex — just the vase. I thought you were a poof, his father had said. Thank God.

Isaac wondered where Laetitia was now. She’d be thirty-eight, about the age of Sarah, who was pouring out their glasses of lemonade. He looked out of the window, down the slope towards the village path. He had never been able to hold Arazuelo in proportion. It never stayed the same, and yet it always seemed the same. It was a self-reflecting place, insular and welcoming by turns. He was continually trying to leave it, although he could never exactly say why. Arazuelo was part of his body. Madrid was the moon, Bilbao was outer space, Paris a place of biblical fantasy — but Arazuelo could overtake a man like no place else.

‘Mr Robles?’ Sarah Schloss was talking to him, and he smiled. He could hear his sister and Olive making their way up the creaking stairs to the first floor, and then up again to the attic. If Sarah heard them too, she made no comment. She was smoking again, always smoking, and her legs were tucked up underneath her as she sat on the green sofa. ‘So, do you think it’s a good idea?’ she said.

Well, did he? He knew there was something wrong about it, that he should say no. But he couldn’t put his finger on it. ‘You must be terribly busy,’ she went on, in the face of his silence. ‘But I haven’t had one for years, and it will be such a surprise for my husband.’

‘Does he like surprises, señora?’

‘Well,’ she said. ‘He’s always surprising me.’

Isaac thought about her offer. That he was a good painter, he knew. He might even be a great painter one day. As he and Tere had grown up in the shadows, as Alfonso’s illegitimate children, his father had often bunged them money, on the understanding that Isaac would grow up and leave all this left-wing, artist stuff behind. Alfonso, on hearing that his son was now ‘consorting’ with union leaders, Anarchists and divorced women, had confronted him. Isaac had no intention of leaving his work at the San Telmo school, so Alfonso had stopped his cash flow. He hadn’t told Teresa.

He had very little income from the school, as cuts to government initiatives had affected its ability to run classes and pay the staff. In a few months, Isaac knew he was going to be very poor. But he could never ally with his father, whom he considered the biggest hypocrite this side of Seville.

‘I pay very well,’ Sarah said. ‘Whatever you need.’

Although he bristled at the ease with which she thought she could buy him, he considered what a pleasure it would be to paint a face like Sarah Schloss’s. ‘Thank you, señora. I accept. But allow me to make this a gift.’

Her eyes closed in a brief pause of pleasure, as if she had always known he would assent. As much as Isaac disliked witnessing this, he admired her self-belief. He felt that he did not want to give her any assurance about her beauty. She clearly knew she had it in abundance.

Sarah smiled. ‘Oh, that won’t do. This has to be a transaction. How many sittings will you need me for?’

‘I think six to eight, señora.’

‘And should we do it here, or at your house?’

‘Whatever is easiest for you.’

Sarah leaned over the tray as she lifted a glass of lemonade and handed it to him. ‘This is your sister’s recipe,’ she said. ‘It’s better than any I’ve had elsewhere. What do you think her secret is?’

‘I leave my sister’s secrets to her, señora.’

Sarah smiled. ‘Sensible. I think it should always be like that — everyone’s happier that way. I’ll come to you. Harold is in and out all the time, and I don’t want him getting suspicious.’

‘When is his birthday, señora?’

‘His birthday?’

‘This is not a present for his birthday?’

‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘It’s just a surprise.’ She lifted her glass. ‘Cheers. Here’s to my painting.’

Outside her bedroom, Olive stopped her hand on the old wrought-iron handle and faced Teresa. ‘Remember,’ she said. ‘Keep this to yourself.’

Teresa nodded. She could hear her brother and Sarah talking below. Olive pushed down the handle and let her in.

They were in an unexpected atrium of thick gold light, a huge space that ran along at least half the span of the house, with exposed beams, splintered with age and cracking plaster. Teresa blinked, adjusting her sight, the dust in the shafts of honeyed daylight swirling in Olive’s wake. Isaac had been in this house before, running round it like a mad boy, but Teresa had been too young, and so she hadn’t known such a room existed.

She stood rigid at the door, looking furtively around for whatever it was that Olive had been hiding up here. She could not smell an animal, nor hear any muffled cries; she could see only travelling trunks, a messy bed, clothes on a chair, books piled up in towers. It was the type of room she dreamed of for herself.

‘Shut the door, nincompoop,’ Olive said.

‘Nincompoop?’

Olive laughed. ‘I didn’t mean it. I just — I don’t want them to hear us.’

Teresa was uneasy. Olive was supposed to be the fish out of water, walking round in her socks. But now, standing by the window on the other side of the room, she looked so different. She had walked into the sunlight straight-backed, certain of herself, her arm resting gracefully on the sill, lost in thoughts that Teresa didn’t have the ability to reach.

‘Teresa,’ Olive said. ‘Close the door. Come over here. I want to show you something.’

Teresa obeyed, as Olive knelt down under the bed and pulled out a very large, flat piece of wood. When she lifted it up and turned it round, Teresa’s breath caught in her throat. ‘Madre mía,’ she said, and laughed.

‘Why are you laughing?’

‘You did this?’

Olive hesitated. ‘I did. It’s called The Orchard. What — do you think?’

It was one of the most extraordinary things Teresa had ever seen. Some of Isaac’s paintings were pretty decent, but this one, this one, stood before her like a. . person. It was not a case of thinking, it was a matter of feeling. The painting in its power overwhelmed her.

Her eyes darted all over it. She felt saturated. Who painted like this, a nineteen-year-old in her school pyjamas? Who knew such colours, who could take the land she had only just arrived in, and turn it into something better, and higher, brighter than the sun that flooded the room? For surely, this was the finca and its orchard, reimagined in a riot of colour and dancing shapes, identifiable to Teresa but so essentially changed.

Isaac had talked on occasion about art, about famous painters and what made someone stand out from the rest. Novelty, he always said, makes the difference. It was the fact that they were unlike the rest. You can be a brilliant draughtsman, he said, but that means nothing if you’re not seeing the world differently. Teresa felt almost a wave of pain run through her. This wasn’t just a case of novelty. This was something else, beyond words, an elusive power that was too much for her to comprehend. She didn’t know if she believed in God, but she knew this girl was blessed.

‘You don’t like it,’ said Olive, her mouth thinning to a line. ‘I knew I should have worked more on those fruit trees. And perhaps there should be figures in it—’

‘I like it,’ said Teresa. They stood in silence before it. ‘Is — this what you do, señorita?’

Olive considered the question, laying the painting on the bed as delicately as one might a lover. ‘I got into art school,’ she said. ‘I sent my pictures and I got a place.’

Teresa’s eyes widened. ‘But you are here?’

‘Yes. I’m here.’

‘But you have un gran talento.’

‘I don’t know about that.’

‘If I had the money I would buy your painting.’

‘Would you?’

‘I would be proud to have your painting on my wall. Why are you not at the school?’

Olive looked away. ‘I don’t know. But it’s funny. Just before we left for Spain, I purchased this green, a vivid grasshopper green — and a shade of scarlet, an oil called Night Indigo, a plum and a silvery grey — all colours I’d never used before. I just picked them up and put them on the counter. And it was as if I’d known that only here would those paints come into their own, and help me. That they would flesh out my fears and dreams.’

Teresa could not hide her confusion. ‘Look, Teresa, it’s not easy to explain. My parents, the girls in London. . Something’s clicked down here. It was as if this painting had been stalking my mind and now it’s in the light. I’ve never felt so connected to the doing of the thing.’

‘I see.’

‘But now that it’s done and. . and out of me, I can’t help wondering that the paints didn’t do it on their own. As if my involvement was nothing at all.’

‘No, no. You have done it. If I touch the paints, nothing good will happen. But with you, it is different.’

Olive smiled. ‘Thank you for being so nice about it.’

‘Do you have more paintings?’

‘Not here, but I do have these.’ Olive went over to one of her trunks and pulled out a large sketchbook, handing it to Teresa.

Teresa opened the pages and saw inside small sketches of hands and feet, eyes and bottles, cats, trees, flowers — completely unlike the painting in their realist, engraved style. Over the next page, she saw a portrait of Sarah, called Mother, London, and one of Sarah and Harold together, a still-life sketch in pastel of the lemons Teresa had brought that first day.

She pointed at the lemons. ‘I asked you where they went. You said you didn’t know.’

Olive blushed. ‘Sorry.’

‘You stole them?’

‘If you want to put it like that.’

‘Why is this a secret?’

‘It’s not a secret. I just — don’t tell anyone. Except you.’

Teresa glowed, hiding her pleasure in the pages of the sketchbook. The images were extraordinary, as if they might leap off the page. She kept turning, and was arrested by a double page of her brother; Isaac Chopping Wood, Isaac with Coffee Cup.

Teresa felt a surge of pain and Olive yanked the book from her grip. ‘Just sketches,’ she said. Downstairs, Sarah’s laugh rang out, a little bell.

‘What will you do with this painting?’ Teresa asked.

‘So practical,’ said Olive. ‘Not everything has to have a purpose, you know, an end point.’

Teresa flushed, because this was exactly how she thought; pragmatically, like a jackal hunting for a rib. Still, she had detected a defensiveness in Olive’s responses which mystified her. If she had half of Olive’s skill, she’d be in Barcelona by now, far from Arazuelo. ‘You are going to hide it under your bed for ever, where no one will see it?’ she said.

‘Of course I’m not.’

‘So why do you not show it now? You could put it on the wall.’

Olive went rigid, sitting down on the bed next to The Orchard. The old mattress gave way beneath her, and Teresa thought suddenly how squalid the bed looked, and how stupid Olive was to put up with such a state of being when she could clearly afford something better. They could even go into Calle Larios in Malaga to buy a new one — she could offer to take Olive, letting her try mattress after mattress until they found the perfect one. But Teresa kept silent, the deft pencil edges of her brother’s face reworking themselves in her mind’s eye.

‘I don’t want it on my wall,’ said Olive.

Teresa frowned. It seemed a flat protest. She came up to the edge of the bed, her hands on her hips. ‘You could sell this in Malaga, señorita,’ she said. ‘You could make money.’

Olive flicked her eyes up. ‘Money? We’ve got money coming out of our ears.’

Teresa flushed. ‘You could go away.’

‘But I like it here.’

‘Paris. London. New York—’

‘Tere. I don’t want people to know. Do you understand?’

‘If that was mine, I would show the world.’

Olive looked over at the painting. ‘Say you do show the world. But the world might not like it. Think of that. All those hours, all those days and months — years, even—’

‘But I would like it, so it would not be important.’

‘So why bother trying to please the world in the first place? And, I can assure you, you will never truly like it, if you do it yourself.’

‘Then why are you doing it?’

Olive got up, lit a cigarette and stared out of the window. ‘I don’t know. I’ve never known. I just do it.’ She looked over at Teresa. ‘All right, I know that’s vague. It’s just — it feels as if there’s a place, a shining citadel of perfection I have in my mind. And with each canvas and sketchbook, I’m inching closer and closer to it, to the place where my paintings will be a better reflection of the person I am, a different reflection. And I will fly.’

She rubbed her forehead and came back to lie on the bed. ‘Why are we so trapped by the hours, the minutes of every day? Why can’t we live the life that’s always out of reach?’

Her voice broke, and Teresa reached out a hand to Olive’s arm. ‘I’m sorry, Tere,’ Olive said. ‘I’m probably mad. But it’s how it’s always been. I just wanted to show someone. I’m glad you liked it.’

‘I love it. Me ha encantado.’

‘Here.’ Olive was brisk again, leaping off the mattress with her cigarette still in her hand. ‘Take these. You might like to look at them.’ She reached down for a book on Renaissance painters, and an old Vogue, and handed them over. ‘The magazine is my mother’s, but she won’t mind.’

Teresa flicked through the Renaissance book, colour plates of men and women in their finery, their skin taut as boiled eggs, bulging eyes, delicate ringed fingers and swathes of damask on their shoulders. Strangely elongated Virgin Marys, darted with a yellow beam of the Annunciation; nightmarish scenes of mythical beasts; men with five legs; women turning into pomegranates. She read the names silently: Bellini, Bosch, Cranach. It was another language to learn and assimilate, to wield like a weapon.

The Vogue was well out of date, but Teresa didn’t care. It was hers. She was glad it was already a year old. Sarah barely glanced at her magazines before dumping them on the floor of her bedroom, their colours and allure a siren that Teresa was astonished her mistress couldn’t hear. But she didn’t want Olive getting into trouble.

‘Are you certain your mother will not mind?’ she said.

‘She won’t even notice. Isaac is still here I think,’ Olive said, putting away the sketchbooks and The Orchard under the bed. ‘We should go and see what my mother wants with him.’

Teresa pushed down the cloud that rose in her chest at the mention of Isaac, closed the Renaissance book and followed Olive out.

*

Isaac picked up the second glass of lemonade and clinked it against Sarah’s. He was used to women being like this around him; feline, flirtatious, sometimes giddy. He never encouraged, but this only seemed to make their behaviour more pronounced. It was almost clownish — and yet he had learned not to assume immediately what women wanted from him. It might look like one thing, but it was quite often another.

He thought of how essentially different Olive was from her mother, so innocent, reaching out to him like a drowning girl, more obviously than she probably imagined. And yet she intrigued him in a way that Señora Schloss did not. Sarah dazzled immediately, but there was something supple and interesting about Olive, beneath her awkwardness. She was a survivor of her parents’ marriage. He wondered whether if Olive stayed with them indefinitely it might work out badly for her.

He heard footsteps, and Olive appeared at the door, switching her attention between him and her mother, as if she was trying to work out a difficult sum. Teresa was peering from behind Olive, with a strange look of triumph on her face that made Isaac wary.

‘Liv,’ said Sarah. ‘Guess what?’

‘Do I have to?’

‘Mr Robles is going to paint my picture.’

‘What?’

‘As a surprise for Daddy,’ Sarah went on. ‘I’ve given Mr Robles a commission.’

‘But he hates surprises.’

‘Well, so do I, Olive. But Daddy is getting this painting, whether he likes it or not.’

Olive came forward, seating herself on the moth-eaten armchair, left at a careless angle to the sofa. ‘Have you got time to paint this, Mr Robles?’ she asked. ‘With all the work you have?’

‘It will be an honour,’ he said. Olive looked towards the unlit fireplace, filled with logs that Isaac had piled up for their convenience. Teresa remained in the doorway. She was sneering slightly at him, and he felt irritated with her. She lived in a bubble, she had no idea how many times over the years he’d protected her.

‘I should be in the painting,’ Olive announced.

‘Livvi,’ said her mother after a pause, realigning the crease of her trouser leg. ‘It’s my surprise.’

‘I think Daddy would like us both to be in the painting. We sat for one years ago. We should do it again.’

‘We did?’

‘You’ve forgotten. Yes, we did. Mr Robles, don’t you think that would be a good idea?’

Isaac felt the pressure of the women’s attention like a physical weight. ‘You must decide,’ he said. ‘He is your father, your husband.’

Sarah picked at a bobble. ‘Mr Robles, if I agreed to sit with my daughter, would you need to paint us together?’

‘Not always, señora.’

‘Well then,’ she sighed. ‘We shall work it out between us, won’t we, Olive?’

Olive tipped her chin in Sarah’s direction. ‘Yes, Mother,’ she said. ‘We will.’

VI

Olive and Sarah were to have three initial joint sessions, arranged when Isaac was not teaching in Malaga. Teresa was to guard the secret. ‘Tell Harold that we’re at the market in Esquinas,’ Sarah had instructed her. ‘Or seeing the local doctor. You can think of something, Teresa. You’re so clever.’

By the second session, as Isaac painted Olive and her mother in the dimming light of his cottage kitchen, Olive knew something was wrong. Sarah, in a semi-sheer lavender blouse and a brown silk skirt, kept her spine continuously at a slight arch, one arm draped behind Isaac’s kitchen chair. She was concentrating on being her best self for the artist, but Olive could see how bleak and drawn Isaac looked.

She thought he should be happy; his party had just won the national election. It had been on the wireless, on the front pages of the newspapers her father brought back from Malaga. A left-wing coalition was in power, something that surely must make him feel triumphant.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, when Sarah excused herself for a moment.

He looked up from where he was painting, with a surprised expression. ‘Another boy was killed,’ he said. ‘I knew him a little.’

‘Killed?’

‘Last night. A local boy called Adrián, a member of the Anarchist party. He worked in a factory in Malaga. Started by tying red ribbons on donkeys and bicycles, and ended up burning his boss’s property records. He had a loud mouth, but he was only a kid. Some bastards shot him and tied him to the back of a truck.’

‘Oh, Isaac. That’s awful.’

‘They are calling it a crime of passion, which is a joke. He didn’t have time for love.’

‘Have they arrested anyone?’

Isaac’s expression darkened. ‘No witnesses. He tied himself to the truck, of course. He didn’t have any feet left by the time they’d finished.’

‘Good God. Who would do such a thing?’

‘Everyone, no one. The Civil Guard are saying it was a Communist gang, mistaking him for some rich kid. Others are blaming it on the gypsies. Anarchist, Communist, Falangist or Socialist, oligarco, gitano or what? Maybe his father did it?’ Isaac spat.

Olive wanted to comfort him, but she knew her mother would be back any moment. She tried to be steady. This was a one-off, she told herself, a hideous thing, but still unique. The boy was a symbol of nothing, just an unlucky human put out too soon. But she remembered what Isaac had told her — the polar bear, the priest swinging from a tree, the soil of the land coursing through the people’s veins. She thought of The Orchard, waiting in her attic, her perfect, multi-coloured paradise, and felt ashamed of her ignorance, her foreign and insistent make-belief.

*

The next evening, Teresa sat at the kitchen table in the cottage, whilst Isaac skinned rabbits he’d shot for a stew. She had before her the Vogue which Olive had given her, and she handled it as delicately as if it was a first edition of a precious book. The woman on the cover stared delicately back. She was blonde, wearing a long cream cape, one black-and-white-striped beach shoe peeping out. She was leaning on the side of an open-top car, shading her eyes against the sun but looking upwards nevertheless, at some invisible point. The sky behind her was deep blue. HOLIDAY — TRAVEL — RESORT FASHIONS ran along the bottom of the picture in a clean, attractive font.

‘You’ve been quiet,’ Isaac said. ‘Are you worried about what I’ll do?’ When she remained silent he said, ‘Jesus, Teresa. You should be worried for me.’

‘Just be calm about all this, Isaac. Nothing you do will bring back that boy Adrián. Stealing honey from the duchess’s beehives is one thing, but putting yourself in danger is another—’

‘I could say the same to you.’ He pointed at the magazine with his knife. ‘You should behave, too.’

‘But I’m not in danger.’

‘Are you sure? Remember last time, Tere. I won’t bail you out twice.’

‘I haven’t taken a thing. Olive gave me this.’

Teresa remembered how it had been with Miss Banetti. The loneliness, the drudgery. The woman had had so many belongings that she didn’t even notice when they began to disappear. It had been so tempting, so easy. Small things first, a ring, a silver matchbox. Then on to empty scent bottles, and finally a necklace of emeralds. Teresa had seen these items, always overlooked by the rich foreigners in her care, as fair payment for a grey life. She buried the trinkets in a tin out by the well, and she would visit them sometimes, never actually putting them on her own body, only holding the emeralds to the sun, watching them wink in green complicity. She loved them so much that she felt no guilt.

It was the German family who had caught and dismissed her. Isaac had gone to talk to them, explaining that she had mental problems — which was a lie, but was better than letting the Frau report her to the Civil Guard. He’d returned everything to them, but she kept quiet about the Banetti box, the emerald necklace hidden in their garden. It was her little private escape.

‘Tere,’ Isaac said more softly, bringing her back into the room, the sound of the rabbit innards slick on the blade. ‘Olive can’t be your friend, you know.’

‘You should take your own advice.’

‘I know it must be lonely for you when I’m in Malaga. But she’s some rich kid drifting around after her parents and before you know it, she’ll be gone again. I don’t want you to—’

‘I’m not lonely. And I’m not a child. You don’t need to be so patronizing. I don’t want to be her friend.’

‘Good.’ He began to dismantle the rabbit’s leg. ‘Come and help.’ She slunk from the table and stood next to him. ‘You can’t tell me what to do, either, Tere,’ he said.

‘I can try.’

He laughed, and she did too. ‘Haven’t I always looked after you?’ he asked.

‘Yes, Isa. But I never needed you to.’

*

Harold had not seemed to notice his wife and daughter’s absence particularly. He seemed distracted, sitting at his desk in the middle of his study, marooned on the Moroccan tapestries he’d bought from a rug trader in Malaga, elbows digging into the fraying leather top, barely acknowledging Teresa as she dusted round him, or left him a glass of fino at his side. He looked like the captain of a drowning vessel who had found a piece of driftwood and was clinging on for dear life.

On the day the women were having their last painting session, and Teresa was in the finca preparing a stew, the telephone rang. She waited, but Harold was nowhere to be seen. ‘Señor?’ she called. The house was silent, except for the telephone ringing and ringing. She tiptoed along the corridor towards the study, listening through the door before she went in, making her way across the rugs. As she hefted the Bakelite handle to her ear, she knew she’d made a mistake.

‘Harold, bist du es?’ It was a woman’s voice. Teresa remained silent, listening to the caught pocket of air as the woman inhaled sharply and the line went dead. She looked up; Harold was standing at the door, in his coat, holding his hunting rifle.

‘What are you doing?’ he said. ‘Teresa, what the hell are you doing?’

Teresa looked dumbly at the receiver, wishing in that moment that she’d never come to this finca, that she’d found work elsewhere. It had not been enough for her to move only between the tissue layers of the Schlosses’ lives — she had wanted to be closer, to the scars and the spots and the hot red mass of their hearts. But now she remembered the danger of knowing other people’s secrets.

Harold came towards her as she slammed the receiver down. He put his hand on top of hers, and she was surprised by how warm it was. ‘Teresa,’ he said, smiling, his hand exerting the minimum of pressure. ‘Who could you possibly be wanting to call?’

She looked at him in confusion, and then she understood, rearranging her face into humility, still hearing the echo of the woman’s hopeful voice, her panicked breath when she realized Harold wasn’t on the other end.

‘I am sorry, señor,’ she said. ‘I wanted to speak to my aunt in Madrid.’

They fixed their eyes upon each other and Harold released her hand. He walked round and sat in his chair, opening the breech of the rifle. ‘All you had to do was ask, Teresa.’

‘I am sorry, señor,’ she repeated. ‘It will not happen again.’

‘Good. All right. Off you go.’

She was at the door when he spoke again. ‘Where is my wife?’ he asked her, and Teresa turned back to face him, fear bursting in her stomach.

‘She is at the market, señor.’

‘At six in the evening?’ Harold locked the rifle and pushed back his chair.

‘Yes. But she wanted to visit the church after.’

‘The church?’

‘Yes. La iglesia de Santa Rufina.’

He laughed. ‘You know Mrs Schloss is not well, Teresa. If she keeps wandering off like this, you must tell me. Keep an eye out for her.’

‘An eye out?’

‘Keep watch for her. Wait here until she comes back. And when she does, tell her I’ve got work in Malaga. She’ll understand.’

‘Sí, señor.’

‘Is Olive with her, at the church?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m glad they’re spending time together.’ He laid the rifle on his desk. ‘Teresa, I want your opinion.’

‘Yes, señor?’

‘Do you think the villagers would like us to hold a party?’

Teresa imagined that a party held by the Schlosses would be the most glamorous thing any of the villagers had ever seen — and she would be in the centre, organizing it. They wouldn’t mock her after that — no more gypsy slurs or bastard comments. The power of Harold and Sarah Schloss would reflect in glorious technicolour — on her. ‘I think it would be wonderful, señor,’ she said.

She hurried back to the kitchen to see to the stew, and heard Harold pacing in his bedroom, the stop-start of his feet as he moved back and forth from his closet to try on several outfits. He reappeared in a beautiful wheat-coloured suit, with a blue shirt underneath, which set against his dark hair and made him look incredibly refined.

His motor car revved and when he was gone, Teresa felt heavy again, burdened by Harold, bist du es?, by the secret they both knew he had entrusted her to keep. He had left a trail of cologne. A sharp, ambery echo of dark leather chairs and darker corners.

*

When she returned to the cottage, Isaac was packing away his paint materials in his bedroom. In the kitchen, a sheet was over the painting, as he would not allow anyone to see it before it was completed. Sarah had left, but Olive lingered at the table. She looked tired, and Teresa watched out of the corner of her eye how her hands moved constantly. Teresa could not marry this urchinous twitcher with the stately, confident artist up in her attic. She wondered if Olive had painted anything new, and whether she’d be permitted to see it.

‘Your father asked where you were,’ Teresa said. ‘I told him you had gone to the church of Santa Rufina with your mother.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘In the village square.’

‘My mother doesn’t know about this.’ Olive rose to her feet. ‘I’ll have to get to her before Daddy does.’

‘He’s gone out,’ Teresa said.

Olive’s face fell. ‘Of course he has.’ She sat back down.

‘Are you enjoying being painted?’ Teresa asked.

‘I don’t think I make a very good subject. My mother loves it, of course.’

‘Your father will be very happy to see it.’

‘Maybe. If it’s any good. Isaac won’t let me look.’

‘Your father — he tells me he is going to have a party.’

Olive groaned. ‘Is that what he said?’

‘Do you not want a party, señorita?’

‘You haven’t been to one of my parents’ parties. I think I’d rather visit the church.’

She was in an irritable mood, and Teresa wondered quite how badly the portrait session had gone between Olive and her mother. All Teresa could conclude was that whilst Sarah was born to be watched, Olive was more of a watcher.

She walked to the counter, fetched an onion and a knife, and began to chop. ‘Do you know the story of Santa Rufina?’ she asked, hoping to distract Olive from her gloom.

Olive gazed towards the darkness of the corridor, where Isaac was moving around in his room. ‘No.’

‘It is a story about two sisters. They were Christians. They lived in Seville, in. . la época romana?’

‘Roman times,’ said Olive.

‘Yes. They made pots and bowls. The Romans wanted them to make pots for a party. A pagan party. But the sisters said, “No, no we won’t. Our pots are our own.” And they broke the mask of the goddess Venus.’

‘Goodness me.’

‘They were arrested. They threw Justa down a well. And Rufina — they made her fight a lion.’

Teresa noted with pleasure how Olive had stilled, listening to her story, as the shadows threw black dancers up the walls and the onion sweated in the pan.

‘A big lion,’ she went on. ‘A hungry lion. En el anfiteatro. All the people watching. But the lion did not want to fight. He sat, he did not move. He would not touch her.’

‘What then?’ whispered Olive.

‘They cut off her head.’

‘No.’

‘And they threw it down the well to meet her sister.’

Olive shivered. ‘That’s awful.’

Teresa shrugged. ‘I like the lion.’ Her eye was caught by Isaac standing at the door. ‘He knows the value of peace. He keeps his place.’

‘Maybe he didn’t like the taste of bony girl,’ Isaac said. Olive turned to him. He folded his arms and fixed Teresa with a look. ‘Telling stories again, Tere?’

‘She’s a good storyteller,’ said Olive. ‘Imagine waiting down in the darkness whilst your sister faced a lion. Imagine holding her head in your hands; the rest of her, disappeared. What happened to Justa?’

‘She died of the shock,’ said Teresa.

‘So would I,’ said Olive.

‘You don’t know that, señorita,’ said Isaac. ‘You might be strong.’

‘Oh, no. I’d definitely faint.’ Olive looked thoughtful. ‘Do you know, I might visit that church.’

‘Señorita?’

‘Why not?’ said Olive. ‘At least then we could say that one of our lies was actually a truth.’