The Muse

12

When the telephone rang in the hallway two days after I was locked out of Quick’s house, I ran downstairs, still in my dressing gown, to pick it up. When I heard the person on the line say, ‘Wha’ happen now, Delly?’ I was so glad, I nearly cried. It wasn’t Quick I wanted, nor Lawrie. Her voice was permission to live.

‘Cynth!’

‘You still alive, girl?’

‘Just about.’

‘Ah — Ah free today. You want to meet up?’

It had been just over two months. I saw her before she saw me. Cynthia was immaculate as ever, leaning on one of the lions in Trafalgar Square, wearing a thick sheepskin coat which I’d never seen before, and a new pair of denim flared trousers. She looked. . cool. She’d let her hair out of its French plait, and it was cut in a new shape; the beginning of a rounded Afro. I felt frumpy in comparison, in my thick tights and sensible heels, my woollen scarf and hat clamped round my ears like something out of a Blyton book. But still. A cold November morning in London; you do not mess.

My heart surged at how wonderful Cynth was. The realization of how far I’d travelled alone swamped me, as I saw her face, my friend, my oldest friend. Cynth caught my eye as I moved towards her, her arms wide open like a flightless bird trying to flap her wings.

‘Ah real sorry, Cynth,’ I said. ‘Sorry. Ah was stupid, I was mess up—’

‘Hey, Delly,’ she said. ‘Ah marry and lef you. Ah sorry too. What I was thinking?’ But there was a twinkle in her eye. ‘Ah miss you real bad, girl.’

‘Me too. Me too. Me too.’

Her face broke open in a smile, and we turned shy. My emotion left me embarrassed — how I, a grown woman, could be so childish, so effervescent. My heart thumped in my ribs to be near her; I was giddy with her, my giddiness exacerbated by the fact she seemed to feel the same. We walked down under Admiralty Arch and into St James’s Park, finding a bench to sit. ‘Sherbets,’ Cynth said, opening her handbag, proffering me a paper sack of sweets. ‘You too thin, Delly. What goin’ on?’

‘Ah pining for you,’ I said, mocking myself, trying to show I still had grit. When she laughed aloud, the sound almost hurt. How good it always was to make her laugh.

‘Nah, come now,’ she said.

So I told Cynth everything — about meeting Lawrie after the wedding, and our dates after that — the mother he lost and the painting she left — and how Quick’s attraction to the artwork seemed mingled with repulsion. I told her how the name ‘Isaac Robles’ came up, Edmund Reede convinced that this was a long-lost artwork by a forgotten genius, and how Quick was more doubtful about this, until her declaration last night that actually, the painting was nothing to do with Isaac Robles at all.

Cynth was much more interested in Lawrie, how it was going, and was it serious — but I tried to keep the focus on the conundrum of Quick, rather than of my own heart. ‘The worse of it, Cynth,’ I said, ‘is that she dyin’.’

‘Dyin’?’

‘Cancer. She tell me is in a late stage. They didn’t catch it early. Pancreatic.’

‘Poor woman,’ said Cynth. ‘She sound scared about it, invitin’ you round. Why she worrying about paintings when she goin’ to dead?’

‘That is what bothering me. Because listen to this; she running out of time on something, I sure of it.’

‘What you sayin’?’

‘Reede find out that the person who first sell Lawrie’s painting in 1936 is an art dealer called Harold Schloss,’ I said. ‘The thing is, I find a letter in Quick’s house addressed to Olive Schloss, inviting her to study at the Slade School of Art.’

‘Delly, were you snoopin’ round a dyin’ woman house?’

I tutted. ‘No! It there in her telephone book she tell me to fetch. But listen — Quick also have telegram address to Harold Schloss, date of July of 1936.’

‘What, just lyin’ there in her telephone book, thirty year later?’

‘I know. I know. But — is like Quick want me to find it. Is like she lef’ it out, because she dyin’ and don’t want the truth to die with her.’

‘Delly. .’

‘Quick too interested in where Lawrie get the painting from. And then she tell me last night is not Isaac Robles who paint it. Olive Schloss is key to this, Ah sure.’

‘But who is this Olive Schloss?’

I exhaled, and my breath made condensation in the air. ‘That is the question, Cynthia. That is it. Clearly a body who could paint, otherwise they wouldn’t have been offered the Slade. Someone probably relate to Harold Schloss.’

‘His wife?’

‘Maybe. But if you going to art school, you usually younger, a student.’

‘His daughter, then?’

‘That’s what I think. Olive Schloss was Harold Schloss’s daughter. And at the Skelton, it have an old photograph of a man and woman standing by Lawrie’s painting. On the back someone write “O and I.” That stands for Olive and Isaac. Quick say that Isaac Robles didn’t paint the pictures. Then who did it, and how she know? I don’t think Quick is who she say she is.’

‘Delly. .’

‘It always bother me, how she never have any painting on her wall. Why’s that? And the thing is, Quick went funny when I ask her about Olive Schloss. She shut the door on me, lock me out. Is like she want me to know, to get closer to the truth of it, and at the same time — she cyan bear it.’

Cynthia appeared to be thinking, staring at the ducks gliding across the pond before us. Beyond the trees, the spindly brown turrets of Westminster poked up into the air. ‘I always thought Marjorie Quick was a funny name,’ she said.

We sat in silence for a moment. I loved my friend for believing, for not saying I was mad, for accompanying me as I moved to and fro over my narrative. It gave me permission to entertain seriously the possibility that Quick might once have gone by another name, lived another life, a life she was desperately trying to remember — and to tell me — before it was too late. I couldn’t imagine the pain of seeing someone else take credit for your work, whilst you languished unnoticed, uncelebrated, knowing death was so near.

‘The English mad yes,’ said Cynth. ‘So you goin’ to ask her about all this commesse?’

‘But what Ah goin’ to say?’ One couldn’t exactly confront Quick, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted the woman I knew to vanish further under scrutiny. I felt that if I could show her my support, this might coax her out of the corner, but I wasn’t sure of the best way to go about it. ‘Ah think she keeping secrets for a reason,’ I added.

‘Shoe shop was never like this,’ Cynth sighed. ‘You put a shoe on woman foot and that is it.’

We laughed. ‘No, that is true,’ I said. ‘But you know what else? Quick help me publish a short story, so I in her debt.’

Cynth only heard the bit she wanted to hear, and her eyes lit up. ‘Oh now, published! Oh, that is good. What it called?’

‘“The Toeless Woman”. Remember that woman who come in and have those blocks of feet?’

‘Oh, my God. Yes. I have to read this.’

Tingling with pleasure at her excitement, I told her it was in October’s London Review, but that if she liked I could send her a copy, I could send her ten. I told her how it had all unfolded, Quick sending the story personally to the magazine.

‘I think she like me,’ I said. ‘I think she trust me. I just don’t know exactly what she trustin’ me with.’

Cynth nudged me. ‘It take some white lady to get you to do it, eh, not me?’ I started to protest that I’d had no idea what Quick was planning, but Cynth put her hands up. ‘I jokin’, I jokin’,’ she said. ‘I just glad. Is about time.’

‘How’s Sam?’ I asked, wanting to change the subject away from me, suddenly nervous that Cynth was going to read the dramatization of our joint life in that story about the toeless woman.

‘He good. He very good.’ She looked shy. ‘It have somethin’ I want to tell you, Dell. I want to tell you first. Ah havin’ a baby.’

She looked very nervous about telling me this, which was a shame. But then again — consider how well I’d handled her getting married and leaving me alone in the flat. But this time, I was not going to get it wrong. I was genuinely excited for her. How could you not be, when you saw her pleasure and fear and wonder — that right now, there was this little thing in there, such a good thing, such a good mother to meet it when it finally showed its face.

‘Oh, Cynthia. Cynthia,’ I said, and to my shock tears filled my eyes. ‘I sitting here talking about mysterious women and you the greatest mystery of all.’

‘Delly, you sound like a poet even when you chokin’ up.’

‘Come here. I proud of you.’

We embraced, I held her tight and she held me, breathing out relief and crying a bit, because my happy reaction just made her happier still.

She was due at the beginning of April. She was terrified but excited, and worried they were not going to have enough money for it. ‘You’ll manage,’ I said, thinking how much Cynth’s life was going to transform, whilst mine was going to stay exactly the same. ‘Sam have a good job. An’ have you too.’

‘So, Lawrie,’ she said, dabbing her eyes with tissue. ‘Don’t wriggle. You had a fight.’

I was unable to hide my surprise. ‘How you know?’

‘Because I know you, Delly. I also know that if things were harmony, you would da be seein’ him today, but you at some long loose end and see your boring ol’ friend instead. Let me guess. He tell you he love you and you run a mile.’

‘Is not like that.’

She laughed. ‘He is miserable, Delly. Mis-er-ab-le. He the one who pining.’

‘What? Come on, how you really know?’

‘I hear it from Patrick, who hear it from Barbara, who see the feller mopin’ around like someone chop off his arm. He lost. And he’s a good one, Dell. Don’t be dotish. He say he love you and you push him off a cliff.’ Even though it was an admonishment, Cynth wheezed with laughter.

‘But what if Ah don’t love him? Why I have to love him?’

‘You don’t have to do anything, Delly. You don’t have to rush. But you could give the feller explanation. If only to give his friends a break.’

‘Lawrie the type of man to push a rhino down a rabbit hole. It won’t work.’

‘You a rhino though, Delly, so it would be amusing at least.’

We laughed, me from relief at being able to talk about it, and Cynth because it refreshed her to tease me, to be her younger self, to pull on the old ties and discover they were still intact. I still didn’t know what I wanted, but it was sad to know Lawrie was going around feeling like someone had severed a limb.

After another hour or so, we embraced outside the Tube station, Cynth descending north on the Bakerloo to her new life in Queen’s Park. We promised to see each other before Christmas, and I thought how bittersweet it was, how once upon a time, we’d have made sure we were catching up within the week.

I watched Cynth move down the steps carefully, thinking that surely she had no need to be so ginger. She stopped and turned back. ‘One thing, Dell. If you do speak to Lawrie again, maybe keep this Olive Schloss story to yourself.’

‘Why? If it true—’

‘Well, yes. But you don’t know it true for a fact, do you?’

‘Not yet, but—’

‘And he want to sell that painting, if I hear it right through Barbara. His stepfather selling the house and that painting is all he have. You goin’ around sayin’ that what he got is not an Isaac Robles — it goin’ to knock his ship right out of the water. Don’t make trouble where it don’t have any, Delly. Think of your heart for once, not that clever head.’

I watched her go, knowing that there was sense in what she said, but also aware that Quick’s behaviour wasn’t something I was going to let lie.

*

I called Lawrie that night, but Gerry the Bastard answered. It was a shock to have him pick up.

‘Who’s this, calling on a Sunday?’ he said.

Immediately, I put on my BBC tones. You couldn’t help it — you heard an Englishman like Gerry, you just tried to make your voice sound the same as his. ‘This is Odelle Bastien,’ I said. ‘Is Lawrie there, please?’

‘Lawrence!’ he yelled. Gerry must have put down the receiver because I could hear him move away.

‘Who is it?’ said Lawrie.

‘Couldn’t catch the name. But it sounds like the calypso’s here.’

There was a wait, and then finally Lawrie put his mouth to the receiver. ‘Odelle? Is that you?’

The sound of relief, mingled with wariness in his voice, was painful to hear. ‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘How are you, Lawrie?’

‘Fine, thanks. You?’

‘Fine,’ I lied. ‘I got a story published.’

‘You called to tell me that?’

‘No — I — it’s just. It’s what’s happened, that’s all. Was that Gerry I spoke to?’

‘Yes. Sorry about that. Well done on the story.’

We were silent for a moment. Ironically, I didn’t know how to shape these particular words, how to tell him that I missed him, that strange things were happening with Quick, that my best friend was having a baby and I felt like a teenager out of my depth.

‘I’m coming to the gallery tomorrow, as it happens,’ he said, his voice more hushed. ‘Is that why you’ve called?’

‘No. I didn’t know.’

‘Reede’s had more information from a fellow who works at Peggy Guggenheim’s palazzo in Venice. A couple of interesting things, apparently.’

‘I see.’

‘So why did you call? I thought you didn’t want anything to do with me.’

‘No — that’s not — I do. I do. I spoke to Cynthia. She said you’ve been miserable.’

There was quiet on the line. ‘I was miserable.’

‘You’re not miserable any more?’

He was silent again. ‘I shouldn’t have rushed in like that,’ he said.

‘No, it’s fine — I mean—’

‘I won’t ever say what I said to you again.’

‘I see.’

‘Not if you don’t want me to.’

‘I don’t really know what I want you to say, or not say,’ I admitted. ‘I just know that when I heard you were miserable, that made me sad. And I realized I’d been miserable too. And I was wondering whether it might be a bit easier — if we were miserable together.’

Quiet on the line again. ‘Are you — asking me on a date, Odelle?’

I didn’t — couldn’t — say anything. ‘Well, there’s a first time for everything,’ Lawrie went on. ‘Thank you. Let me just check my diary — oh, no need. I’m free.’

A pleasurable warmth spread through my stomach and I couldn’t hide the smile in my voice. ‘Convenient,’ I said.

‘Isn’t it?’ he replied. ‘Now, where would you like to meet?’

13

We met early the next morning, as early as we could, in the middle of Skelton Square, before I started work and Lawrie went in to see Reede. He was clutching a bottle of champagne. ‘For your first published story,’ he said, handing it over. ‘That’s vintage, you know. Sorry about the dust. Nicked it from the house.’

‘Gosh, thank you.’

‘Actually. . I knew about the London Review.’

‘What?’

‘We do take modern periodicals in Surrey, you know. I read it.’ He looked down at his shoes. ‘It was just brilliant.’

‘Shut up.’ I took the bottle, my head about to explode with pleasure. I read the label: Veuve Clicquot. ‘Lawrie, can we start again?’ I said.

He sighed. ‘I don’t know if that’s possible.’

I sat down on the bench, trying to bat away my despondence. I was so sure he’d say yes. He was here, wasn’t he? ‘I suppose not,’ I said, looking up at him.

‘You could hit me over the head with that champagne bottle,’ he suggested.

‘What?’

‘Knock the memories out of me. But then I’d lose the first time I saw you, reading that poem. Or the first time I spoke to you; those yellow rubber gloves. Or the way you pretended to like the Bond film, your nose all wrinkled up. Or when you out-danced me at the Flamingo and the manager offered you a job, or when you told me about that idiot in the shoe shop. Or when we had that shepherd’s pie, and I messed everything up. It’s all part of it, Odelle. It’s not going to be perfect. Personally, I don’t want it to be. I’d go through that horrible drive up the A3 again, just for the sweetness of hearing your voice after so long. I wouldn’t change any of it. I don’t want to start again, because that would make me lose memories of you.’

I couldn’t say anything for a moment. Lawrie sat down next to me and I felt the warm solidity of his body. I took a deep breath. ‘I — get scared,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how else to explain it. I get feelings that I’m lost, that I’m no good, that if someone likes me there must be something wrong with them.’

‘But why?’

‘Well, if I knew that, Lawrie. . and when I met you, I told you things I’d never told anyone. Then you swept in with your declaration that you loved me, and — well — it felt like you were filling out a form, obeying some pattern.’

‘A pattern?’

‘Of what people do, what they think they’re supposed to say.’

‘No one tells me what to say.’

‘But I also realized I didn’t want you not to say it. I just wanted you to say it — when I wanted to hear it.’

He laughed. ‘You really are a writer, aren’t you? All right. How about, whenever I feel that I might be about to say I’ve fallen in love with you, or that I love you, or that you’re wonderful, we agree on a sign that such a declaration is coming — and you recognize the sign, and give me the go ahead or not as to whether I can say it.’

‘You make me sound mad.’

‘I’m joking. I’m sorry. Whatever you need. I just want to see you, Odelle. Is that OK?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I hesitated. ‘More than OK.’

‘Good. Right,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and hear what the venerable Mr Reede has to say.’

*

‘Good morning, Odelle,’ Quick said, stopping smoothly at my door. Lawrie had been with Reede for about thirty minutes. Quick looked tired, a little apprehensive. Her appearance was a world away from my first week, when she had breezed up to my typewriter and suggested a light lunch — in order to pick my brains — for what exactly, I still wasn’t sure.

‘Good morning, Quick.’

She froze, her eyes on the champagne bottle standing on the desk. ‘Where did you get that?’ she asked.

I swallowed, intimidated by the look on her face. ‘Lawrie gave it to me.’

She turned her gaze to me. ‘Friends again?’

‘Yes. He’s here. He’s talking to Reede,’ I said. ‘I think they’re discussing the exhibition.’

‘I know they are. I scheduled the meeting.’ Quick came in, closing the door. To my surprise, she walked over and sat down opposite me, taking the bottle in her lap. ‘Lawrie gave this to you?’

‘To say well done for getting “The Toeless Woman” published. Is there something wrong with it?’

She ran her thumb across the neck, leaving a clean smear through the dust. ‘It’s vintage,’ she said.

‘I know that. Quick—’

‘Odelle, what happened on Friday night—’

I sat up straighter. ‘Yes?’

‘It shouldn’t have happened. I broke a professional barrier when I told you about my illness. I’ve compromised you. I’ve compromised myself. I don’t want the attention.’

‘You’ve done rather a good job of getting mine, though.’

She looked at me, sharply, but I refused to shrink away. ‘I want you to know — that whatever happens — your job is completely safe.’

‘Safe?’

Quick seemed to suffer a spasm of pain, and the bottle sagged heavily in her lap. ‘They’ve got me on rather strong painkillers,’ she said. ‘No choice but to take them now. I’m hallucinating. I can’t sleep.’

‘What are you hallucinating?’ I said. ‘What is it that you see?’

I waited, barely able to breathe, my fingers drawing away from the typewriter and resting in my lap.

She didn’t answer, and we sat in silence for a few moments, the clock on the wall syncopating my heartbeat. I took the risk. ‘On Friday night, you said that Isaac Robles didn’t paint the picture. Do you remember that, Quick?’

Quick sat, staring at her hands. She was swallowing hard, her throat constricted.

‘Did he paint any of the pictures, Quick — the ones in the Guggenheim?’

Still, Quick remained silent.

‘If he didn’t paint those pictures, who did—’

‘All I wanted,’ she said, abruptly, in clear distress. ‘I just wanted to see.’

‘What, what was it that you wanted to see?’

I watched in horror as Quick fanned her fingers open on the neck of the bottle, and the entire thing slid between her legs and cracked against the floor. The base smashed clean off and the champagne gushed between us, fizzing and pooling everywhere. She jumped up crookedly, staggering from the mess before us. ‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘It was an accident,’ I said. I stared at Lawrie’s ruined bottle, lying on the floorboards in a puddle of champagne. The green glass was so dark it was almost black, winking as the overhead lights caught its jagged edges. I’d never even got a taste. I swallowed hard and looked at Quick.

She was drained of colour. I knew the conversation was over, that I would get no further now. Would she really go so far as to sabotage my present from Lawrie? I ushered her to her own office, and she leaned on me, snaking her arm through mine. I could feel her bones so easily through the skin. Now I knew about the cancer, I could see how ill Quick was. But it wasn’t just the cancer in her body. I was also witnessing her psychological recalibration.

I wouldn’t say Quick’s mind was diminishing, despite her protests of hallucinations and insomnia. It was almost the opposite to her body; an augmentation, her imagination inhabiting more than just the present. Somewhere inside her memory, a drawbridge had been lowered, and the foot soldiers of her past were pushing through. She wanted to talk; but couldn’t. She didn’t have the words.

‘Please lock the door,’ she said, beginning to rally a little. ‘Odelle, I’m so sorry about your bottle.’

‘It’s all right.’

‘I’ll make it up to you in my will.’

Her black eyes glimmered with gallows humour. ‘Got a cellar in Wimbledon, have you?’ I said in kind, trying to chivvy her spirits.

‘Something like that. Fetch my handbag, would you? I need the pills.’ She moved slowly to the drinks table. ‘Gin?’

‘No, thanks.’

I watched her pour one, breathing deeply, corralling herself as the clear liquid glugged into the tumbler. ‘Those are bloody strong,’ she said as I handed her the pills. ‘I fucking hate them.’

The expletive, the bitterness in her voice, shocked me. I forced myself to sit, reminding myself I was a junior employee, and must be mute and mild. Pushing Quick to tell me things I wanted to know was clearly not going to work. I’d suspected that it wouldn’t, after the night with the telephone book, and now I had one smashed champagne bottle as confirmation. As frustrating as I found it, I had to be her blank canvas. Patience was never my strong suit, but as long as it kept her talking, it was better than silence.

‘There’s a fellow called Barozzi in Venice,’ she said, lowering herself into her leather chair and reaching for her cigarettes. ‘Works for Guggenheim. Around the time Mr Scott’s painting was being made, Peggy Guggenheim was attempting to open a gallery in London.’ Quick stilled herself for a minute, before finding the strength to continue. ‘She succeeded. The place was on Cork Street, before the war turned it on its head and it closed.’

‘I see.’

‘You don’t. The point is, she — or others at her gallery — are good with keeping paperwork. Barozzi found some rather interesting correspondence in her archives, sent it to Reede, and he’s beside himself.’

Cork Street. I knew the name — it was the street that the pamphlet came from. My skin began to tingle.

‘He now has evidence that Mr Scott’s painting was a commission for Peggy Guggenheim, as a twin to Women in the Wheatfield.’

‘A twin?’

‘He’s found a telegram addressed to Isaac Robles, which for some reason was never sent. It was destined for Malaga in Spain, dated September ’36, enquiring how much longer she will need to wait for the “companion piece” to Wheatfield, which Robles had called Rufina and the Lion. Barozzi has acknowledged that no deposit was actually given Robles for the Rufina piece, otherwise Mr Scott could have found himself in a lot of trouble, given that he’s apparently got no proof of purchase. The Guggenheim could have tried to claim it as theirs.’

I marvelled that Quick could talk about another discovered telegram, as if the one hidden in her own house wasn’t inextricably tied up with all this too. Not only was she acting as if the smashed champagne bottle was not deliberate sabotage, she was now pretending that our evening with the telephone book had never happened.

‘Rufina and the Lion,’ I repeated. ‘That’s what Lawrie’s painting is called?’

‘That’s what Reede believes. Ever heard of Saint Rufina?’

‘No.’

Quick sipped her gin. ‘The image of Mr Scott’s painting fits the story perfectly. Rufina lived in Seville in the second century. She was a Christian potter, who wouldn’t kow-tow to the authorities’ rules when they told her to make pagan icons, so they chucked her in an arena with a lion. The lion wouldn’t touch her, so they cut off her head. And with this mention of a “companion piece”, Reede believes he’s found a connection between Mr Scott’s painting and the more famous Women in the Wheatfield, which might change the way we look at Robles entirely.’

I gazed at her, feeling determined, ready to enter into a battle of wills. ‘But you told me that Isaac Robles didn’t paint it.’

Quick slugged back another painkiller. ‘And yet, we have a certified telegram from a world-class art collector, stating that it was intended as a companion piece to one of the most important paintings to come out of Spain this century, currently in the Guggenheim collection in Venice.’

‘Yes, but there was someone else in that photograph too. A young woman.’

I waited for Quick to speak, but she did not, so I carried on. ‘I think she was called Olive Schloss. In that letter at your house, it appears she won a place at the Slade School of Art around the time that Isaac Robles was painting. I think she painted Women in the Wheatfield.’

‘I see.’ Quick’s face was impassive, and my frustration grew.

‘Did you think she made it, Quick?’

‘Made what?’ Her expression turned hard.

‘Do you think Olive ever made it to the Slade?’

Quick closed her eyes. Her shoulders sagged, and I waited for her to reveal herself, to release the truth that had been broiling in her ever since seeing Lawrie’s painting in the hallway of the Skelton. Here it came, the moment of confession — why she was in possession of the telegram from Peggy Guggenheim and the letter from the Slade — how it was her own father who had bought Isaac Robles’s painting, a piece of art she had created herself.

Quick was so still in her chair, I thought that she’d expired. She flicked her eyes open. ‘I’m going to hear what Mr Reede is saying,’ she said. ‘I think you should come too.’

I followed her down the corridor, disappointed. But I was getting nearer, I was sure.

We knocked on Reede’s door and were told to come in. Lawrie and he were sitting facing each other in the armchairs. ‘Can I help you?’ Reede said.

‘Miss Bastien and I will be the ones on the front line once this exhibition gets underway,’ said Quick. I saw how tightly she was gripping the door frame. She was torturing herself. ‘It might be wise if we were to sit and take notes, to understand what you’re proposing.’

‘Very well,’ said Reede. ‘You can sit over there, ladies.’

We looked to where he was gesturing; two hard wooden chairs in the corner. Either Quick was being punished, or Reede was blind to how frail she was. Lawrie caught my eye as I sat down; he looked excited, alive with the possibilities of his painting. Rufina and the Lion was propped up on the mantelpiece, and I was no less overwhelmed by its power than the first time I saw it, by how much that girl and the severed head she held in her hands had already changed my life. If Lawrie hadn’t used it to try and take me on a date, would any of us even be sitting here today — would Quick be unravelling like this, despite her insistence on blaming the cancer and its painkillers?

Directly above Reede’s head sat the lion, imperial and implacable as so many painted lions are. Yet today, it looked so curiously tamed. I gazed at the white house in the distant hills; its painted red windows, how tiny it was compared to the vast, multicoloured patchwork of fields which surrounded it. Rufina and her second head stood looking back at me, at all of us. Thirty years ago, Isaac Robles and a girl I was sure was Olive Schloss stood before this very picture, for a photograph. What had Isaac and Olive been to one another?

Inevitably, I looked to Quick. She seemed to have gathered herself from her earlier distress; sitting straight now, notebook on her lap, eyes on the painting. Whatever the truth was, it seemed to me that she was going to let this exhibition go ahead with no sabotage on her part, and I felt confounded by her capitulation.

‘As I was saying, Mr Scott,’ Reede went on, ‘three years ago, Peggy Guggenheim’s entire Venetian collection came to the Tate on temporary loan. Whilst Women in the Wheatfield was here on the Tate’s public walls, your own Robles painting was hiding in the shadows. It’s extraordinary to think we could have matched them then, had we known. There was so much to-ing and fro-ing over that exhibition, between the British government and the Italian authorities,’ he said. ‘Tax issues, mainly. But that was for a hundred and eighty-odd pieces, and I’ve only asked for three. So the good news is, they’re letting us borrow their Isaac Robles pieces.’

‘That is good news,’ said Lawrie.

‘It’s wonderful. It’ll really bolster the exhibition. I hope the news pages will give us coverage as well as the arts sections. We’re getting Women in the Wheatfield, a landscape called The Orchard, and rather brilliantly, something I wasn’t aware of — his Self-Portrait in Green. And what will be exciting about the reunion of Women in the Wheatfield with Rufina and the Lion is that it could change the way we view Isaac Robles generally.’

‘Why?’

‘Rufina was one of a pair of sisters,’ Reede said. ‘Justa was the name of the other.’

‘Justa?’

‘The story goes that Justa was thrown down a well to starve. I believe that Women in the Wheatfield is actually the story of Saint Justa — and that there’s only one girl in it, not two. We see Justa before and after her punishment, once in happiness, and then in torment. The smashed pots around her back up this idea. It’s the mask of the goddess Venus, broken in half, and that appears in the myth.’

‘I see,’ said Lawrie.

‘There have been different interpretations of the circle that the woman lies in over the wheatfield. Some art historians say it is one of Dante’s circles, others say it’s the moon — and some identify it as the rotundity of planet earth, particularly with those woodland animals around it. But I believe she’s actually lying at the bottom of a well, as per the myth. Here,’ he said, handing Lawrie four pieces of paper, which had copies of paintings on them. ‘Robles wasn’t the only Spaniard to paint Rufina and Justa. Velázquez, Zurburán, Murillo and Goya, all four great Spanish painters, painted those sisters. I’m trying to get a loan of at least one of these paintings to complement the exhibition.’

‘Do you think you’ll get them?’ asked Lawrie.

Reede rose to his feet, and rubbed his hands together. ‘Maybe. Maybe. I really do hope for it.’ He smiled. ‘It would be something extraordinary. The chances are Robles was well aware of these other works. I’ve told the galleries who have these pieces that I want to examine the particular Hispanic pathology around the myth of Justa and Rufina.’

‘The Spaniards have always been incredibly subversive artists,’ said Quick.

‘Yes,’ said Reede, looking at her more warmly, one arm propped up on the mantelpiece. ‘Creative rebellion against the status quo. Just look at the Goya. He would be the one to put in a lion, kissing her toe. And can you imagine what Dalí would do with it?’

‘But why is the Guggenheim Robles called Women in the Wheatfield, with no reference to Saint Justa, if mine’s called Rufina and the Lion?’ Lawrie asked.

‘Harold Schloss might have called it Women in the Wheatfield, not Isaac Robles,’ said Reede. ‘Robles might have easily called it Saint Justa, for example. We’ll never know. He may not have given it a name at all.’

At the mention of Harold Schloss, I glanced over again at Quick. Her head was bowed, and she was massaging her temple. I wondered if she needed another painkiller. She seemed determined to get as close to Reede’s plans as possible, despite the visible trauma it was causing.

‘The salesman in Schloss,’ Reede went on, beginning to pace around us, ‘probably wanted to make the painting more attractive for Guggenheim’s purchasing sallies. She hadn’t bought much before this; he didn’t want to scare her off. It’s the same sort of thing as Picasso wanting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon to be called The Brothel of Avignon, and his exhibitors changing the name, apparently to make it more appealing. And Schloss may not have known that a companion piece to Justa and her well was on its way. Somewhere along the line, I believe that what Isaac Robles wished to communicate in these paintings was lost.’

‘And what did he want to communicate?’ said Lawrie.

I looked at Quick again; she was gazing up now at Reede, with a blank expression on her face.

‘I think Robles was very interested in this myth,’ Reede said. ‘And discovering this connection between the Guggenheim Robles and the Surrey Robles allows us a new window on to his artistic process, to reinterpret his preoccupations — to reinvent him, if you like. This exhibition may be “The Swallowed Century”, but we are still trying to digest it, so to speak.’

‘Reinvent him?’

‘Succeeding generations do it all the time, Mr Scott. Don’t be alarmed. We can never bear to think we haven’t thought of something new. And tastes change; we have to be ahead of them. We are resurrecting an artist at the same time as enacting his retrospective. My approach will allow us to describe Robles’s awareness of a glorious national historical tradition — Velazquez and the rest — whilst being something of a contemporary international star, cut down in his prime.’

‘You’ve really got it all planned, haven’t you.’

‘That’s my job, Mr Scott. I can’t tell you yet what exactly he was trying to communicate, but I want to take a political slant with your painting in particular. Rufina, the defiant worker saint, facing down the lion of fascism. Have a look at this,’ he said, handing over yet another document for Lawrie to read. ‘I was sent that from Barozzi at the Guggenheim foundation. Harold Schloss wrote it to Peggy Guggenheim when he was in Paris again, and she had returned to New York.’

‘Mr Scott,’ said Quick, and the men jumped. ‘Could you read it out loud? Neither Miss Bastien nor I are furnished with a copy.’

Lawrie obliged.

Dear Peggy,

Forgive me for not making my presence known to you in time before you left Paris. Everything, since my departure from Spain to my arrival back in this city, has been very difficult. I tried to bring Rufina with me, but have failed. I know how much you were looking forward to it, and I am deeply sorry.

I have a couple of early Klees you may like to look at instead — I myself will not travel to Vienna, but am organizing them to be sent to London — or perhaps, if you’re staying in New York for some time tying up matters, and are interested, I may send them straight there?

My best to you, as ever,

Harold Schloss’

Lawrie looked up at Reede. ‘He doesn’t mention Robles at all.’

‘I think we can do something with that. I’d like to blow this letter up large, and have it on one side of the gallery wall. We could speculate on what happened to Robles.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t think he made it through the war. We would surely have heard about him if he had. There was a lot of bombing in the south of Spain in those days. Say the rest of Robles’ paintings went up in flames. We could consider how the immolation of Robles’ body of work reflects the disappearance of the artist himself.’

Reede began to pace again, his hands behind his back, lost to us as he expounded his vision. ‘We could extend the metaphor, into the conflagration of the Iberian corpus, and the world war to come. The man is a symbol, as much as an individual. He was a vision of Spain’s future, which was annihilated.’

Lawrie crossed his legs, his voice hard. ‘But you don’t know his works went up in flames. You can’t build an exhibition on a rumour. They’ll laugh at me.’

‘They won’t laugh. People love a rumour, Mr Scott. You can do more with rumour than you can with fact. And the fact is, we have a limited supply of paintings. Another fact: Harold Schloss did not have Rufina and the Lion when he went back to Paris. Where was it? That’s where you come in.’

‘Me?’ said Lawrie. Something in his tone of voice made me turn. I looked to Quick; she had clearly thought the same as Reede, for her eyes were on Lawrie, concentrating hard.

Reede came to sit opposite Lawrie, and spoke more gently. ‘I think that Harold Schloss realized it was untenable to remain in Spain, and in fleeing, the painting fell out of his possession, either through theft or carelessness. It is unusual for a dealer to confess so openly a loss, as he does in that letter. Normally they’re glib, smooth talkers. I think Harold Schloss came back to Paris with his feathers ruffled.’

‘And you think the painting was left behind in Spain?’ said Lawrie.

‘Well, Schloss doesn’t seem to have it. He’s got no reason to lie to his best collector. But I don’t know, Mr Scott. The next person to be attached to it was your mother. And apparently, we have no idea how she got hold of it.’

Lawrie gazed up at the painting, and down again, into the empty grate. ‘It’s always been on her walls,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t remember a time it wasn’t there.’

‘So you say,’ Reede sighed. ‘Well, we can play with the question mark. I don’t think we have a choice. The survival of an artwork through the Spanish Civil War and a world war to a house in Surrey is not without its romantic possibilities.’

‘What do you think happened to Isaac Robles, in the end?’ asked Lawrie.

‘Mr Reede,’ said Quick, her voice hard and clear across the room. ‘What is the timescale for this? When are you planning to open this exhibition?’

Reede turned to her. ‘A delegation from the Guggenheim is coming in two weeks with the paintings. And two weeks after that, I believe we can open.’

Quick looked down at her diary. ‘Four weeks from now? That’s ridiculous. That’s no time at all.’

‘I know, Marjorie. But it’s what I want.’

I watched as Quick marked the day of November 28th in her diary, a slight tremor in her hand, the pen drawing across the page in a thick black cross.

14

That evening, Lawrie and I took the commuter train to Surrey. He told me that he’d already sold the MG. ‘I just didn’t use it much,’ he said, but he sounded wistful. I considered that perhaps there was more pressure than I initially imagined to sell his mother’s painting.

As we pulled out of Waterloo, me with the Xeroxes from Reede on my lap, I looked at the four paintings of Rufina and Justa by the older Spanish artists. I loved the passive lion in the Goya, but my favourite overall was the Velázquez; a young girl with dark hair and an inscrutable gaze, holding two little bowls and a plate in one upturned palm, and a huge plume in the other. Velázquez, like Robles, had painted Rufina on her own too. I moved on to the copy of Harold Schloss’s letter. Schloss had written by hand, and had started it neatly enough, but in places it became barely legible. His rounded arcs and sweeping curves descended into crossings-out and ink blots everywhere. I did not think it was the letter of a happy man.

‘We’re here,’ said Lawrie.

We were not normal passengers getting off at Baldock’s Ridge; the normal passengers were men in their late forties, paunch incoming, signet ring, Telegraph under their arm, an embossed briefcase. Women, country-tweeded, middle-aged with distant faces, thoughts buried deep within their handbags, coming back from a day in town.

‘After you left the meeting, Reede said he could try and sell the painting for me,’ Lawrie said as he opened the door and helped me down. ‘For a commission.’

‘How much does he think it will fetch?’

‘It’s hard to say. “Art doesn’t always behave itself like other things you might put up for sale, Mr Scott”,’ Lawrie said, parroting the pomposity Reede could stray into when on home turf. ‘He said it isn’t like a late Van Gogh coming onto the market.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Well, apparently everyone would want one of those. But Rufina and the Lion is unique in a different way. Reede said he doesn’t want to underplay it, but neither does he want to over-egg the pudding. He said selling always has its risks.’

‘But he’s so enthusiastic about it.’

‘As a historian, maybe. As a personal preference, yes. But perhaps as an auctioneer he wants to manage my expectations. Not everyone’s going to like Isaac Robles.’

‘You could always donate it to a public institution.’

Lawrie laughed. ‘Odelle, I haven’t got any money.’

Quick and I had not had a chance to talk for the rest of the day. She had gone home shortly after the meeting with Lawrie and Reede was finished. She claimed a headache, but I knew of course it was more. I felt torn; I wanted to be with Lawrie, to revel in the rush and headiness of making up, of realizing how much a person means to you, the thrill of having nearly lost them only to be reunited. But at the same time, I was the only person who knew something was very wrong with Quick, that her pain seemed to be worsening, and yet I had no idea how to help her manage it.

‘Are you all right?’ said Lawrie.

‘Just thinking about Quick,’ I said. ‘She’s — not very well.’

‘She didn’t look very well.’

Lawrie leaned in to kiss my cheek as we walked down the station path. There was an intake of breath behind us. I turned; one of the tweed women, trying to look as if she hadn’t made the noise at all.

‘Come on,’ said Lawrie quietly. ‘Let me take you out of the eighteenth century.’

Except it wasn’t the eighteenth century, was it, Lawrie? It was late October, in 1967, in Baldock’s Ridge in Surrey, and you weren’t allowed to kiss me without comment. Or perhaps, more accurately, I was not allowed to be kissed.

When we got to the house, the lights were on. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ he said. I turned; Lawrie looked genuinely frightened.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘I thought Gerry wouldn’t be here. We should go.’

‘I don’t want to go,’ I said.

‘Odelle, Gerry isn’t — I don’t think he — I just want to warn you.’

‘Let me guess. I’m one of the natives.’

‘Oh, God, this is going to be a disaster. He’s — very old-fashioned.’

‘We should get along perfectly, then.’

‘You won’t. You shouldn’t have to—’

‘Lawrie. I don’t want you to protect me. Let me be the judge of Gerry. Just as no doubt he’ll be the judge of me.’

*

How to describe Gerry? Gerry the Bastard, Gerry the Merry. As soon as he clapped eyes on me, his face lit up. ‘I thought Lawrence was a queer!’ The tone with which he said it made me think that Gerry was possibly inclined that way himself. I have never met a man like him since; that particular strain of upper-class English — so camp and Wodehousian, a madness at which no one bats an eye. Anything that was inappropriate to say, Gerry would say it. He was overweight, and handsome, but he looked like a man closing down on himself. I could smell the grief; six months down the line, you’d find him a puddle of skin on the floor.

‘I understand you work at an art gallery, Miss Baschin?’ he said, pouring yet another whisky.

Lawrie winced at Gerry’s mispronouncing my name, and I could see he was about to correct his step-father. ‘That’s right,’ I said quickly. ‘As a typist.’

‘Set up home here, then?’

‘Yes, sir. Nearly six years now.’

‘Odelle’s father was in the RAF,’ said Lawrie. I could hear the desperation in his voice, and it annoyed me. I knew what Lawrie was trying to do, of course — repackaging me in a context the man might understand. But I did not feel I needed my father’s military record as any introduction; I felt, in a strange way, that Gerry was accepting me regardless. By some weird alchemy — perhaps because I was inside his house — Gerry seemed to exempt me from the unconscious hierarchy of colour he also inadvertently revealed now and then. Perhaps he was whitewashing my skin? Perhaps he rather liked the thrill, his colonial days coming back to him? Or perhaps he just liked me. Whatever it was, I felt invited in.

We ate a jumpy dinner — well, Lawrie was the jumpy one; Gerry and I fumbled our way through. At least he didn’t mention calypsos again — or bongos, or the miracle of my excellent English.

‘We went to the Caribbean once,’ Gerry said, as Lawrie cleared the plates. He drained his tumbler of whisky, and stared at it.

‘Did you like it?’ I asked.

Gerry didn’t appear to hear me. ‘Worked in India after I left Oxford.’ I looked at Lawrie’s expression: thunderbolts at the tablecloth. ‘Was there for years. I think the travel bug was in my blood from then on — probably got bitten by something. Beautiful place, India. Difficult though. Incredibly hot.’

‘Which islands did you go to, in the Caribbean?’ I asked.

‘Feels like a lifetime ago now. I suppose it is.’

‘Odelle asked you a question,’ said Lawrie.

‘It’s all right,’ I said.

‘Jamaica,’ the man replied, with a sharp look at his step-son. ‘I’m not senile, Lawrence. I heard her.’

‘I’ve not been to Jamaica,’ I said.

Gerry laughed. ‘How extraordinary. I thought you all just hopped between the islands?’

‘No, sir. I have been to Tobago, and Grenada, and Barbados. I do not know the other islands. I know London better than I know Jamaica.’

Gerry reached for the whisky. ‘It wasn’t my choice to go there,’ he said. ‘But Sarah said everyone went to Jamaica. She loved heat, needed it. So off we went. I’m glad we did. The sand was so soft.’

Lawrie snatched the whisky bottle. ‘Let’s go and listen to that record we bought,’ he said.

‘Who’s Sarah?’ I asked.

Gerry looked at me through bloodshot eyes. ‘Lawrence didn’t even tell you her name?’

‘Whose name?’

‘His mother,’ Gerry said, sighing when Lawrie turned away. ‘My beautiful wife.’

15

Lawrie lunged up the stairs, three at a time.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ I said. ‘He just misses her. He wants to talk about her.’

Lawrie stopped on the landing and whirled round at me. ‘Don’t think he’s some sort of saint,’ he said.

‘I don’t, Lawrie.’

Lawrie seemed to be battling with a particular thought. He looked half fearful, half furious. ‘When my dad died,’ I went on, trying to sound soothing, ‘my mum used to hear his voice in the radio. Saw his face in every man she met. You’ve got to be patient.’

‘She was my mother.’

‘Of course.’

‘I was the one who found her. In that room down there.’

‘Oh, Lawrie.’

I turned to the darkness where he was pointing, and felt a preternatural repulsion, an overwhelming desire to walk in the opposite direction. But I didn’t move; I didn’t want him to see me scared. ‘Gerry’s held together with whisky and sticking plasters,’ I said. ‘You should be kind to him.’

‘And what about me?’

‘I’ll be kind to you,’ I replied, taking his hand.

We lay side by side on Lawrie’s eiderdown, hearing Gerry shuffling beneath us, until a door closed and the house fell silent. ‘You shouldn’t live here,’ I said.

‘I know.’ He turned on his side to face me, propping himself on his elbow. ‘But it’s all I have. This place, Gerry and a painting.’

‘And me,’ I said. ‘You’ve got me.’

Gently, he ran his hand down the side of my face. The window was still open, and I heard a blackbird, so musical and effortless, singing in a tree like it was dawn. ‘Come on, Writer. What’s your favourite word?’ he asked.

I could see he wanted to change the subject, so I obliged. ‘You’re asking me to pick? All right. Lodgings.’

He laughed. ‘You had it ready — I knew you would. That’s so stodgy, Odelle.’

‘Is not. It’s cosy. “My lodgings were clean and comfortable.” You?’

‘Cloud.’

‘Such a cliché,’ I said, inching towards him and giving him a squeeze.

We talked on — for now, mothers and step-fathers and paintings forgotten, or pushed away at least, banishing them to the outer edges of our memories as much as we could. We talked about how beautiful the English language could be, in the right hands — how varied and nuanced and illogical. Hamper and hamper, and words like turn, that seemed boring at first but were deceptive in their depths. We discussed our favourite onomatopoeia: frizz and sludge and glide and bumblebee. I’d never been so happy alone with another person.

Because of the blackbird singing in the tree, we ended up drifting into a game of bird-tennis, our intertwined hands the raised-up net, and a kiss for each bird that we exchanged. Plover to lapwing, honey-creep, lark. Coquette and falcon, manakin, hawk. His hands upon my skin, curlew, oriole, and mine upon his. Jacamar, wren. Then the birds flew away, their names turned to kisses, a silence to spell a new world.

*

The next morning, I woke very early. Lawrie was in a deep sleep, his expression peaceful. I considered the astonishing moment he’d pushed inside me, how that was never going to happen for the first time again. I put on my knickers, his shirt and woolly jumper, slid out of the bed and tiptoed along the corridor to the bathroom. Had Gerry known I’d stayed? How mortifying it would be to cross him now.

I went to the toilet and felt between my legs; a little dried blood, but the more obvious symptom was the stomach pain I could feel, slight, low-seated, a dull ache, a sense of having been opened up and bruised. I had never even been naked with a man, had never been touched like that before; it was strange that one might feel pain over something that had been so pleasurable.

We had broken through a frontier, and I had told him, very quietly, that I loved him, and Lawrie had pressed his ear to my mouth, saying, You might have to repeat that one, Odelle, because I’m getting on and these days I don’t hear so well. And so I said it again, slightly louder, and he kissed me in return.

I looked at my wristwatch; five-thirty. Below me, I could hear Gerry’s snores. What a place to be, I thought; urinating in a clapped-out Victorian toilet in deepest Surrey over a man called Gerry’s head. I would not have predicted it; and I was glad of the lack of forewarning. Had I known such things were going to be promised me, I would have been too intimidated by their weirdness and they probably wouldn’t have happened.

I finished, washed my hands and face and used a little soap on my upper thighs. I felt the sudden desire to tell Pamela that this had happened, to give her the gift of my gossip, to make her birthday present worth it after all.

I came out of the bathroom and was about to head back to Lawrie’s room, when I hesitated. I turned to my right, looking down the long corridor. There would be no other time, I knew; with Lawrie awake it was unlikely he would lead an expedition down here. And for me, the curiosity was too great.

The door was slightly ajar. It was her bedroom, Sarah’s bedroom; you could tell. There were still lipsticks on the dressing table, a silver powder compact in the shape of a shell; paperback novels and old magazines. Along the sill were china and glass ornaments, vases of flowers, now dried out. The curtains were open, but the sun was not yet up. The silhouettes of naked trees were crooked against a lavender sky.

I looked at the bed. Had it happened here? There was no sense of the scene, for which I was grateful. I felt deeply sorry for both these men, clearly lost without her — or confused, at least. Gerry was right — Lawrie had been so evasive about his mother. Gerry, far from being a heartless bastard, appeared to want to discuss her. It was Lawrie who wouldn’t. Only now, being in the house with him and his step-father together, could I see how deeply Lawrie had been affected by Sarah, by this second marriage, by the manner of her death.

In the corner of the room was a large wardrobe. I opened it, and a cloud of camphor hit the back of my throat. Hanging inside was a solitary pair of delicate red trousers, and I pulled them out and held them against my body. If these were Sarah’s, and I assumed they were, she had been tiny. They barely cut the middle of my shins. They were made of scarlet wool, which in many places had been attacked by moth, most unfortunately at the groin. Yet you could tell that these trousers had been particularly stylish. They made me think of Quick. She’d have liked these, holey groin or not.

‘They won’t fit, you know,’ said a voice. ‘But I couldn’t bear to throw them away.’

I jumped. At the door was Gerry; scant, sandy hair on end, large body wrapped in a deep blue dressing gown, his hairy legs and bare feet sticking out at the bottom. Embarrassed, I stammered something incomprehensible as I moved to put the trousers back. I felt terrible for thinking that Gerry had just cleared away his wife without a second thought. This place was like his little shrine. He probably visited it every morning, and I was an intruder. I was beyond mortified. I’d stayed over; I was just wearing a man’s shirt and jumper. I’d had sex under his roof. Thank God Lawrie was much taller than me, in terms of my modesty, but I might as well have had the word SEX emblazoned on my forehead, I felt it was so obvious.

But Gerry seemed uninterested in the morals of his step-son and girlfriend. Perhaps he was more modern than I gave him credit for. That, or he was too mired or hungover in his grief to care. He waved his hand as he padded in. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, sitting heavily on the end of the bed. I was still holding the trousers. ‘You can have a look around. She was a mystery to me too, in many ways.’

With his glum expression and rotund stomach, Gerry reminded me of the morose Humpty Dumpty from Lewis Carroll’s Looking-Glass. And I felt like Alice, being riddled and challenged in every direction I turned.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t be in here.’

‘Don’t be. Lawrie really doesn’t talk about her, does he?’

‘Not much. Mr Scott, can I ask—’

‘I’m not Scott,’ said Gerry. ‘That was Sarah’s maiden name.’

‘Oh.’

‘Lawrence chose to keep her name rather than mine,’ Gerry said, shaking his head. ‘Still, he was sixteen by then, and you can’t tell a sixteen-year-old what to do. Never really understood him.’

‘He didn’t take his father’s name?’

Gerry looked at me shrewdly. ‘Not a very good idea to call yourself Schloss in the school playground in the forties.’

I stood, frozen to the spot, the red trousers hanging limply in my grasp. ‘Schloss?’ I repeated. ‘Lawrie’s father was Schloss?’

Gerry looked up at me, interested by the energy in my voice. ‘Well, strictly speaking, yes. Sarah gave him the surname Scott from the moment he was born, but in terms of his father, it’s Schloss. Her first husband was an Austrian of all things, just before the Great War.’

‘Austrian?’

Gerry looked amused. ‘You seem a little perturbed by all this. Is everything all right?’

‘Oh, I’m fine,’ I said, trying to look as casual as I could, in Lawrie’s oversized woollen jumper, clutching his dead mother’s trousers, as if this news about Lawrie’s father meant nothing to me at all.

‘When she came back to England and had Lawrie, she thought it prudent to give him her own name. Nobody trusted a German name in those days.’

‘What was her husband’s first name?’

‘Harold. Poor bastard. God, when I think what happened. Sarah never talked about it, but I think perhaps she should have, now I look at Lawrence. The man is so pathological when it comes to his parents.’

I tried to recall how Lawrie had behaved, on the occasions that Reede had mentioned the name Harold Schloss. I didn’t remember any particular show of emotion, or moment of recognition. But he had asked if Reede knew what had happened to him — I did remember that.

‘What happened to his father?’ I asked.

Gerry bared his teeth in a grim smile, revealing long incisors. ‘He doesn’t tell you much, does he? Well, it’s a sensitive subject.’

‘Clearly.’

‘Perhaps you two don’t have time spare for talking. I was the same, once.’

I tried to turn my blush into a weak smile, half wanting to flee, half wanting to find out from this man more than Lawrie would ever tell me. ‘He has a point, not talking about it,’ Gerry said. ‘It’s useless for a man to rake over things he can’t even remember. Lawrie never even met the fellow.’ He ran his hand over his head and fixed me with a look. ‘Hitler happened to Harold Schloss, that’s what. Like he happened to us all.’

I went to speak, but Gerry rose to his feet, yellow-nailed against the dark wood floorboards. ‘It’s very early to be talking about all this,’ he said. ‘I’m going for a walk to clear my head. I suggest that you go back to bed.’

16

I returned to Lawrie’s room. He stirred and opened his eyes with a smile, throwing his arms up to let me into the warm, crumpled sheets. I stood at the side of the bed. ‘What is it?’ he said, the smile fading. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘You’re Lawrie Schloss,’ I said. ‘Your father sold Rufina and the Lion. That’s how you have the painting.’

I admit, there might have been a better way to approach the situation — your father this and your father that — talking of a dead man Lawrie had never met, at six fifteen in the morning. I think it was because I had always thought of Lawrie as fundamentally honest; had even defended him to Quick when she was raising her doubts. And I realized now, that time and again, Lawrie had evaded the question not just of his mother, but of how she might have come into possessing such an artwork.

Lawrie lowered his arms and surveyed me. ‘I’m Lawrie Scott,’ he said. He closed his eyes. ‘You’ve been talking to Gerry.’

‘You lied,’ I said.

He opened his eyes again, and propped himself on an elbow. ‘I didn’t bloody lie. I just never told you the whole truth.’

‘But why? What does it matter who your father was?’ He said nothing. ‘Lawrie, have you really sold your car?’

He rubbed his eyes, frowning as if trying to slot his thoughts into place. ‘Yes, I have really sold my car. Gerry’s definitely planning to sell this house. And then what will I do?’

‘He’ll never sell it. There’s a room along this corridor devoted to your mother. It’s even got her clothes and makeup still inside.’

There was confusion in his eyes. ‘How d’you know about that?’

I sat down slowly on the side of the bed. ‘It’s where I just bumped into Gerry.’

‘You were snooping?’

I looked away, embarrassed. ‘He told me about your mother giving you her maiden name when the war was on. When Reede mentioned Harold Schloss — why didn’t you just say something?’

He fell back against his pillow. ‘It would have made things too complicated.’

‘It would have simplified them. That’s how you have the painting in your possession. Provenance and all that.’

‘It might simplify things for Reede, but not for me.’ He clasped his hands together into one fist. ‘Look, we never, ever talked about him, Odelle. My family doesn’t talk about things. And if you’ve spent your whole life never talking about something, do you think you’re suddenly going to be able to discuss it — just like that — to some stranger who’s after your painting?’

‘But why—’

‘I don’t have the words for it, Odelle. I don’t have the words for something that happened when I wasn’t even alive.’

‘But surely your mother talked about him? He was your father.’

‘I knew his name, that’s it. I knew my mother changed hers when she came back to England. It was her and me for sixteen years, and then Gerry came along. I wasn’t going to claim a dead man just to satisfy Edmund Reede’s little genealogy.’

‘All right. I’m sorry.’

‘There’s nothing to be sorry for.’

‘I just. .’ I thought of Quick. ‘I’m just trying to make sense of the painting, that’s all.’

He sat up. ‘My mother never told me how she got that painting, Odelle. I wasn’t lying. My only guess is, my father never managed to get it to this Peggy Guggenheim — and then in the chaos that followed leaving Spain, my mother took it with her and brought it to England.’

‘What happened to their marriage, if he was in Paris and she was in England?’

Lawrie sighed. ‘I don’t know. She came to London; he stayed there. And then the Germans occupied Paris. My mother never even wore a wedding ring before Gerry.’

‘And you never asked her about it?’

‘I asked,’ he said, his voice tight. ‘She didn’t like it, but she told me he died in the war being brave, and that now it was just the two of us. I heard that line at three years old, at ten, at thirteen — and you hear something like that over and over again, it just becomes the way things are.’

‘Perhaps she wanted to spare you the grief of it,’ I said.

Lawrie looked grim. ‘I don’t think my mother ever really thought about sparing me anything. My guess is, either he walked out and chose not to have contact with her, or she was the one who severed ties. It was a nice idea, her and me, against the world, but it got a little claustrophobic. She was very over-protective. Said I was her second chance.’

‘And that’s all she said?’

‘You don’t know what she was like. It just wasn’t something you talked about to her. And lots of people had missing dads, you know. It was after the war, lots of widows. You don’t pick at someone else’s grief.’

‘Of course.’ I knew it was time for me to stop. I wanted to ask if Sarah had ever talked to him about Olive; how she might fit into all this. As I’d discussed with Cynth, a young woman with that surname could easily be Harold Schloss’s daughter — but Lawrie had never mentioned a sister, however much older than him she would have been. And if Lawrie knew as little about Harold as he was claiming to, this hardly came as a surprise. I looked at him, trying to see echoes in his face of Quick’s. I couldn’t imagine how I’d broach the subject that he and Marjorie Quick were possibly related.

Lawrie sighed. ‘I should have told you about it. But things were up and down between you and me, and it wasn’t on my mind. I’m sorry you had to bump into Gerry. I hope he was wearing his dressing gown, at least.’

‘Yes.’

‘Small mercies.’

‘Can I get in?’

He lifted up the blankets and I snuggled under. We lay in silence for a while, and I wondered if Lawrie would ever have told me about his father, if I hadn’t pushed it. When it came to our blossoming relationship, I had to consider whether it mattered, either way. Lawrie was still Lawrie to me, surely, regardless of who his father was. But it did sting a little, the amount I didn’t know about him, what he’d chosen to hold back. I suppose I was holding things back, too. ‘We sat looking at Harold’s writing on the train,’ I murmured into his shoulder.

‘I know.’

‘Did you feel anything, looking at it?’

‘Not in the way you probably want me to. I was a little sad, I suppose. The way life works out.’

‘Yes,’ I said, and thought again of Marjorie Quick. ‘You never quite know how it’s going to end.’

17

Quick telephoned in sick on the Monday, and was still not back by Wednesday, and I was too tied up working with Pamela to get everything ready for the opening night of the exhibition to go and see her. Reede was amassing an impressively eclectic list of attendees for ‘The Swallowed Century’, and had placed Pamela and me in charge of organizing the invitations. Reede wanted coverage, relevance, attention — for the Skelton Institute to be cool and viable, a place where money flowed — and Rufina and the Lion was going to help him. Mixing high culture with pop, there was even a rumour that a Cabinet minister might turn up. And it had to be said, Rufina and the Lion, as both an intellectual challenge and an aesthetic offering, more than stood up to it. Reede had commissioned a frame for the painting, the first it had probably ever had. He had good taste; it was a dark mahogany, and it radiated Rufina’s colours out even more.

Julie Christie had confirmed she was coming, as had Robert Fraser, the art dealer. Quentin Crisp, Roald Dahl and Mick Jagger had all been invited. I thought the Jagger invitation an unusual choice, but Pamela pointed out that earlier in the year, when the Rolling Stone had been put in custody on a drug charge, the papers reported that he’d taken with him forty cigarettes, a bar of chocolate, a jigsaw puzzle, and two books. Pamela knew everything about the Stones. Mick’s first book was about Tibet, she told me. The second was on art.

The newspapers picked up the story of the exhibition, as Reede had hoped they would. The Daily Telegraph ran a headline on page 5: The Spanish Saint and the English Lion: How One Art Expert Rescued an Iberian Gem. According to the journalist, An extraordinary, long-lost painting by the disappeared Spanish artist Isaac Robles has been discovered in an English house, and will be brought to public recognition by Edmund Reede, art historian and Director of the Skelton Institute. I wondered what Lawrie might make of this last sentence — or indeed, Quick — for both of them, in very different ways, were helping Reede achieve his aims. It annoyed me, but it did not surprise me.

In The Times, the art correspondent, Gregory Herbert, wrote a long essay focusing on rediscovered artists like Isaac Robles — and how paintings such as Rufina and the Lion both reflected and extended our understanding of the turbulence of the first half of the twentieth century. Herbert was invited for a private view, and he told us, as he stood before the painting, that he’d fought in the International Brigades in 1937, before the Spanish government had sent the volunteers home.

In Auschwitz and at Hiroshima, Herbert wrote, the toll has been written in ledgers and carved on sepulchres. In Spain, the Republican dead can be tallied only in the heart. There are few marked graves for those who lost that war. In the name of survival, the damage was internalized, a psychic scar on toxic land. Murderers still live near their victims’ families, and between neighbour and neighbour twenty ghosts trudge the village road. Sorrow has seeped into the soil, and the trauma of survivors is revealed only by their acts of concealment.

Even today, Pablo Picasso still stays away from the Andalusian city of Malaga, despite being its most famous son. When Spain broke apart, many artists escaped the cracks, fleeing to France or America rather than endure isolation, imprisonment and possible death. Life in its variety was cauterized, and so was art. For the poet Federico García Lorca, it was too late to escape. One can only surmise that his fellow Andalusian, the painter Isaac Robles, may have met a similar fate.

Spain’s past is a cut of meat turning green on the butcher’s slab. When the war ended, people were forbidden to look back and see the circling flies. Soon they found themselves unable to turn their heads, discovering that there was no language permitted for their pain. But the paintings, at least, remain: Guernica, the works of Dalí and Miró — and now Rufina and the Lion, an allegory of Spain, a testament to a beautiful country at war with itself, carrying its own head in its arms, doomed for ever to be hunted by lions.

By the end of Herbert’s essay, you would imagine that Isaac Robles was well on his way to becoming highly collectible, enjoying a second renaissance of prices the likes of which the humble painter himself would never have dreamed. Herbert sounded so sure that he knew what the painting was about, that Isaac Robles had intended a political commentary on the state of his country. But I thought the painting, combined with the images of Justa in Women in the Wheatfield, seemed more personal — sexual, even.

By the Thursday, when Barozzi and the other Guggenheim people from Venice arrived with their paintings — an ambassadorial art entourage, with better presents and suits — Quick was still not back, and Reede was furious.

‘She’s not well,’ I said. Quick wasn’t answering her telephone. The nearer the exhibition had drawn to opening night, the further she had shrunk away from it. Even though I feared the pressure of the impending opening was crushing her, I almost hoped it would crack her open whatever the consequence, so the secret she was hiding from me would be forced into the light.

‘I don’t care if she’s on her deathbed,’ Reede raged, and I shuddered at his macabre accuracy. ‘This is the most important visit to happen to the Skelton in all my twenty years and she can’t even be bothered to show up?’

He was in an extremely bad temper, for he had failed in his bid to get the Prado museum in Madrid to loan him the Goya. ‘Then who’s the person I can speak to in the convent with the Murillo?’ I had heard him saying through his open door one afternoon.

In Quick’s absence, Reede had directed the hanging of the paintings himself, ordering Pamela and me to oversee the tea-making and the clearing up of boxes, packing crates and twine. The Venetians were very friendly, I recall, and slightly disturbed by the freezing London winter. ‘Have you ever been to Venice?’ one of them asked me.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Go. It is like the theatre has been turned onto the street.’

The photograph of Isaac Robles and the unnamed woman had been blown up to cover four enormous boards. Two archivists were trying to affix it to the end of the gallery wall. No one dared point out that the camera was clearly centred on the slightly blurred face of the smiling young woman, holding the brush. ‘It’s the only photograph we have of him,’ Reede said, ‘so it’s going in.’

The Venetians pulled their own Isaac Robles out of a crate and a gasp went up from Pamela.

‘Oh, Dell,’ she said. ‘Look.’

The Orchard was indeed worth gasping at. It was stunning, far larger than I was expecting, at least five foot long and four high. The colours had lasted well over the past thirty years — it was so vibrant and modern in its sensibility, it could have been painted yesterday. There were echoes in the patchwork fields of Rufina and the Lion, but the detailing was almost hyper-real, diligent on the ground, giving way to a symphony of brushstrokes in the sky.

‘It is my favourite,’ admitted one of the Venetians.

‘It’s beautiful.’

‘Where does Signor Reede want it?’

I looked at the plan. Reede wanted Rufina and the Lion to share a wall only with Women in the Wheatfield, which was still in its crate. The Orchard, because of its size, was unlikely to share wall space. ‘Put it here for now,’ I said, indicating that the Venetians could park it safely in a corner of the gallery.

Although it was very exciting to be in that space that day — opening the wooden crates, like Christmas on a grand scale; sawdust and nails everywhere, and a magical sense of occasion — I had a deep feeling of unease. Yes, there was the momentousness of this being Isaac Robles’ first ever London exhibition — but the one snag was that Quick didn’t think Isaac Robles painted these paintings at all.

I wandered down the gallery to take another look at the photograph, and stood before the woman I was so sure was Olive Schloss, Rufina and the Lion half-finished behind her. It felt imperative that I understand this photograph, that it was the key to unlocking the truth about that painting, and what was happening to Quick. I sought in that girl’s slightly blurred face a younger Quick, full of hope and passion. And although Quick had become gaunt over the past months, I believed I could see in this bounteous, full visage the girl she once had been. But I could not be sure of it. Over the last months, Quick had given me so much, in a way — and yet at the same time, so little. My desire for answers had supplied me with my own, and although they were attractive to me, they were not necessarily true. Looking again at this life-size photograph, and with no time left, I knew what I had to do.

In my lunch break, I sneaked up to Quick’s office and took some Skelton headed paper from her supplies, hurriedly practising Reede’s signature several times on a notepad. I typed up a brief letter of introduction and explanation, with regards to enhancing the contents of ‘The Swallowed Century’, before taking a deep breath and faking Reede’s squiggle at the bottom. With the letter in my handbag, I walked over to the main office of the Slade School of Art on Gower Street, and asked to check their alumni records. They barely glanced at the letter, and I spent the whole hour looking through 1935 to 1945.

No Olive Schloss had ever been registered. It felt like one of the last remaining threads had snapped, but I refused to believe that Olive had truly disappeared. She was in the Skelton, on those walls, surrounded by her work — she was in Wimbledon right now, a person I was determined to pin down. I found a phone box and dialled Quick’s number, praying that she would answer.

‘Hello?’

‘You never made it, did you?’ I said.

‘Odelle, is that you?’ The words came out oddly, her voice slurring. She sounded frail, and my relief at finally hearing her voice soon gave way to fear.

‘Quick, I’ve been to the Slade.’

There was silence on the other end. I went on, frustrated and desperate, my face getting hot, my heart beginning to thump. ‘No Olive Schloss ever registered at the Slade. But you knew that, didn’t you? Just tell me the truth.’

‘The Slade?’ she repeated. ‘The Slade. . why were you at the Slade?’

‘Quick, the exhibition opens tomorrow. Isaac Robles is going to get your glory. I don’t think you should be alone.’

‘I’m not alone.’ She stopped, wheezing for breath. ‘I’m never alone.’

I peered through the phone box’s grimy squares of glass, Londoners rushing back and forth in front of me. I felt as if I were underwater, and their bodies were not really bodies, just smudges of colour, moving across my sight.

‘I’m coming to see you,’ I said, surprised at how adamant I sounded, more than I’d ever dared to sound before.

I could hear Quick hesitate, thinking, the catch of breath as she stopped resisting. ‘What about your work?’ she said. ‘They need you for the exhibition.’

Her protest was weak, and her words were everything I needed to hear. Quick needed me; she knew she did. ‘You are my work, Quick,’ I said. ‘Can’t you see?’

‘I’m not in a good way.’

‘I know.’

‘No — you don’t understand. I’m scared. They’re coming. I never meant to hurt her.’

Suddenly I felt very claustrophobic in this phone box; I wanted to get out. ‘Who didn’t you want to hurt?’

‘I can hear them—’

‘No one’s coming,’ I soothed, but she was unnerving me. I needed air, and her voice was so desperate. ‘Don’t be scared,’ I said. ‘Quick, are you still there? You can trust me, I promise.’

‘What did you say?’

‘Listen, Quick. I’ll be there soon. Quick?’

The line had gone dead. Feeling sick, I pushed my way out of the phone box, and hurried to the nearest Tube.

XVIII

It was still warm by late September, the air in Arazuelo still heavy with honeysuckle, the earth reddened and cracked. Lying beneath this beauteous landscape was sour matter, but it didn’t feel like war; not how the Schlosses thought war was supposed to be. It was something worse, a localized, persistent terror. Italian and German bombers would fly overhead, shooting at stationary planes on airfields, at Malaga port, at petrol tanks. But there was a strange sense of limbo, an intermittent hope that all this would be tied up soon, that the Republican government would sort a resistance against these nationalist rebels and their foreign allies, who were stretching their reach across the country.

The nationalists had gained control of Old Castile, Leon, Oviedo, Alava, Navarre, Galicia, Zaragoza, the Canaries and all the Balearics, except Menorca. In the south, they had seized Cadiz, Seville, Cordoba, Granada and Huelva. Malaga was still in the Republican zone — as was Arazuelo — but nevertheless, the rebels felt very near.

Harold would drive into Malaga in order to bring back supplies. He said some shops and bars would be open, whilst others were closed, and the trains and buses would mysteriously cease and resume their timetables with no warning. Nothing was stable. No one was even wearing neckties any more, for such flourishes were taken as a sign of bourgeois tendency and might make you a target for the reds. Harold hoped the worst the Anarchists might do was steal his car, vehicles requisitioned ‘for the cause’, petrol siphoned off for trucks, elegant motors left to rust.

The days were bearable; the worst was the nights. The family lay awake in the finca as gunshots peppered the fields, ever nearer. Each side of the growing battle saw the other as a faceless, viral mass contaminating the body politic, requiring excision from society. Right-wing and left-wing gangs were taking the law into their own hands, removing opponents from their homes, leaving them in unmarked graves amongst the hills and groves.

In many instances, politics was the cover for personal vendetta and family feud. Most of the right-wing terror was directed against those who had influenced the violence against the priests and the factory owners back in 1934 — union leaders, prominent anti-clericals, several Republican mayors. And yet — mechanics, butchers, doctors, builders, labourers, barbers — they too were ‘taken for a walk’, as the phrase came to be known. And it wasn’t just men. Certain women who had become teachers under the Republic were removed, as were known anarchists’ wives. None of it was legal, of course, but there seemed no means of stopping it, when hate and power were in play.

As for the rogue elements on the left — despite the posters Harold had seen plastered around Malaga, imploring them to stop shaming their political and trade organizations and to cease their brutalities — they went for retired civil guards, Catholic sympathizers, people they knew to be rich, people they believed to be rich. Houses were looted, their property damaged — and it was this fear that often struck first into the imagination of the middle classes, rather than the chance they would be shot.

The Schlosses did not fear for themselves. They thought no one would touch them, as foreigners. They were nothing to do with all this. Death was taking place beyond their village, outside municipal authority and the sight of the people. The violence in the country — against both the body of a village and a villager’s bullet-riddled corpse — was concealed, although everyone knew it was there. Because you couldn’t see it, you carried on. It was odd, Olive thought, how you could live alongside this; how you could know all this was happening, and still not want to leave.

She had long ago abandoned trying to listen to the BBC to seek the facts, for it offered little more than an improbable-sounding hybrid of information from Madrid and Seville, adding it together and dividing it by London. Yet the Republican government stations were one long barrage of victory speeches and claims of triumph, which were rather undermined by actual events. Granada’s frequency always crackled, not a word could be heard — and the same applied to the northern cities, whose radio waves could not penetrate the southern mountains.

The city of Malaga, however, was constantly broadcasting denials, rumours and myths; Republican calls to arms, meeting times and orders to build a new Spain, free of fascists. And on the other side, the alarming nationalist invective was a frequency in Seville. In the daytime, it would play music and personal announcements, as if there was no conflict going on at all. But by night, the insurgents would broadcast, and although there was still much bombast and warmongering in it, Olive used it to deduce the changing state of her adopted country’s fortunes. She listened as Queipo de Llano, the general who had first broadcast from Seville, maintained his unrelenting bloodthirstiness, crying out that there was a cancer in Spain, a body of infidels that only death would remove.

It was unnerving, all of it; and yet there were heartening stories of people refusing to do exactly what the generals wanted. Teresa reported how a priest in the neighbouring village prevented a Falangist gang from shooting the atheists in his parish. She had also heard rumours of leftists reprimanding Anarchists for trying to burn down the local church, even hiding right-wing neighbours in their bread ovens, protecting them from certain death when the radicals turned up.

Olive, listening to these tales, could see how most people were massed in the middle. They wanted no disturbance, desperate just to live their lives away from these demonstrations of power, talks of purge, of brutality sprayed in blood against a whitewashed wall. But their desire couldn’t change the truth of Arazuelo’s atmosphere. She would walk into the village and see people’s pinched faces, worrying who was going to defend whom when Arazuelo’s day of reckoning finally came.

Isaac purchased a rifle in Malaga from a trade-union contact, who was fond of poaching his boss’s boar. He reinforced the bolt across the cottage door, but he knew this would mean nothing to someone determined to get him. More ‘people of interest’ to the nationalist rebels had left their villages to hide out in the countryside, or join the militias run by the Communist party in Malaga. But this wasn’t far enough for Teresa. She wanted him to leave.

‘I think you should go north,’ she said. ‘You’ve made too many enemies here. You don’t fit. The left won’t trust you because of our father, and the right don’t trust you for not being his legitimate son.’

Isaac regarded his sister, the new severity in her face. ‘You don’t fit here either, Tere,’ he said.

‘But you’re the one who put a bullet through the Madonna. You’re the one who’s spent his life teaching peasants their rights. You’re the one—’

‘All right. But you think they’re only going for men? You’d have to come with me.’

‘I won’t leave.’

‘Jesus, you’re as stubborn as the Schlosses.’

‘Well, we all know why they won’t leave. Because of you. If you think about it, Isa, you’re endangering them too.’

*

The British Consulate in Malaga had sent letters out to any of His Majesty’s registered subjects it knew of in the region. Wide-eyed, Teresa handed over the consul’s letter, which was addressed to Sarah. After a thin breakfast, bread being scarcer and the goat milk drying up, the Schlosses discussed whether they should stay or go.

The letter informed them that warships were waiting to take them off Spanish soil into Gibraltar — and on, if they wished, to England. The threat, it said, was not from these nationalist insurgents and their foreign troops, but from those on the Spanish far left, the reds — who might soon loot these British-rented fincas, and confiscate any private property.

Olive was determined that they should stay. ‘We can’t just leave when it doesn’t suit us. What sort of example is that?’

‘Liebling,’ said Harold. ‘It’s dangerous.’

You’re the one still driving into Malaga. We’re foreigners. They won’t come for us.’

That’s exactly why they will come for us,’ said Harold, pointing at the letter. That’s what the consul said.’

‘Liv’s right,’ said Sarah. ‘I don’t think we should leave.’

Harold looked at his two womenfolk in bemusement. ‘You both want to stay?’

Sarah got up and walked to the window. ‘London is over for us.’

‘I’m confused,’ said Harold. ‘Only two months ago, you were clamouring to leave.’ Sarah ignored him. ‘I think,’ he said, that we should leave if it gets any worse, but invite Isaac to come with us.’

The women turned to look at him. ‘It’s my duty,’ said Harold. ‘He’s too valuable.’

‘Isaac won’t leave,’ said Sarah. ‘He’ll fight.’

‘What would you know about it?’

‘It’s obvious. He feels great loyalty to this place.’

‘As do I,’ said Olive, still on the sofa, reaching over to light one of their dwindling supply of cigarettes. Her parents did not stop her. ‘Mr Robles isn’t a coward,’ she said, exhaling deeply, surveying them both. ‘But if you’re planning to take him, then quite frankly, you should take Teresa too.’

‘Has he nearly finished this Rufina painting?’ asked Harold. ‘I keep dangling the bait for Peggy, but have not been given any news.’

‘I do not know, señor,’ said Teresa.

‘You normally know everything, Teresa,’ Sarah said.

‘He’s nearly finished,’ said Olive. ‘It won’t be long.’

‘When you next go to Malaga, darling,’ Sarah said to Harold, ‘buy a Union Jack.’

‘What?’

‘I want to hoist the Union Jack. So whatever bastard comes along to shoot us up, they know that we are neutral.’

‘We’re hardly neutral, Mother,’ said Olive. ‘Have you even looked at the newspapers?’

‘You know I don’t like the newspapers, Olive.’

‘Unless you’re in them.’

‘Liv,’ said her father, a warning in his voice.

‘Well, she lives in a bubble. Our government has refused to get involved. So have the French. They’re saying that defending the Spanish Republic is tantamount to a defence of Bolshevism.’

‘They’re worried, liebling,’ said Harold. ‘They fear revolution, that the situation here will spread to France, up and up across the Channel, into Regent Street, along the Strand and the Pennine Way.’

‘Baldwin’s so scared of Hitler, he won’t do anything.’

‘I don’t think he is,’ said Harold. ‘The Prime Minister is buying time rather than German favour.’

‘Either way — where does that leave you, Mr Vienna?’ said Sarah. ‘Better for you — for all of us — if we stay in Spain.’

*

Rufina and the Lion was in fact completed, and Olive hadn’t painted anything since. She’d never experienced this lack of willingness to approach a canvas, and she didn’t like it at all — feeling useless and frightened by her lack of confidence. She didn’t want to connect it directly to Isaac’s lack of interest in her — she wanted to work independently of him, of any factor outside her own creative impulse — but it was proving impossible. She had begged Isaac to present Rufina and the Lion to Harold, but he wouldn’t do it. I’ve got more important things to worry about,’ he’d said.

‘But you could just hand it over. My father’s waiting. Peggy Guggenheim’s waiting.’

‘I do not care if the Pope is waiting,’ he snapped.

Olive started to feel that Rufina was clogging up her mind. Its power over her had become a reflection, not just of her relationships with Isaac and Teresa, but of the political situation that was swirling around them. Fear was stoppering her. She had painted it as a purge; now she needed it gone. When Isaac wouldn’t take it, Olive suggested that Teresa take the panel down to the pantry, out of her sight.

Teresa refused. ‘It is too cold in there, señorita,’ she said. It might be damaged.’

‘But I can’t paint anything now.’

‘Tranquila, señorita,’ said Teresa. ‘It will come and go.’

‘Well, it’s never gone anywhere before. What if that’s it? What if it’s just been these paintings, and that’s it?’

One evening in early October, the Schlosses invited Isaac for dinner. He was quiet throughout, and afterwards Olive caught him alone, staring into the darkness of the orchard. She slipped her hand in his, but he did not take hers, his own resting there like a dead man’s. She tried to cajole him again, saying that surely he could do with more money for the Republican side, and that giving Harold Rufina and the Lion would be the ideal way.

‘The Soviets have promised us arms,’ he said. ‘We may lose Malaga. We may lose Madrid and half of Catalonia, but we will win the war.’

She leaned over to plant a kiss on his cheek. ‘You’re so brave,’ she said.

He seemed not to notice her kiss at all, as he ground the cigarette under his heel, ash smearing black on the veranda. ‘Teresa thinks I should go north. Our father is becoming more and more. . loud, about those on the left. I represent something that holds him back. He’s ambitious. Ambitious men do well in times like these.’

‘Will he hurt you, Isa?’

‘He will not get his hands dirty. Those days are over. But someone else might.’

‘Isaac, no.’

‘They’re bombing Malaga again. You should leave, Olive. You all should go.’

‘But we live here.’

‘Imagine if you stayed. You might never paint again, all because you wanted to be brave.’

‘If I was dead, I don’t suppose I’d much care. Besides, I haven’t painted a thing since finishing Rufina.’

He turned to her in surprise. ‘Is that true?’

‘Yes, that’s why I keep asking. I know it’s selfish, Isa, I know.’ She could feel a cry coming, but she swallowed it down. ‘Without you I’m stuck.’ He did not respond, and she turned away to the blackness of the orchard.

‘You don’t need me, Olive,’ he said, eventually. ‘You just need to pick up your brush. Why do you insist so much on involving us? Is it so that you can blame us if it goes wrong?’

‘No.’

‘If I had half your skill, I wouldn’t care who loved me.’

She gave a dry laugh. ‘That’s what I thought too. But I’d rather be happy.’

‘Being allowed to paint is what makes you happy. I know that about you at least.’ She smiled. ‘I like you, Olive,’ Isaac went on. ‘You are a very special girl. But you are so young to be thinking of for ever.’

Olive swallowed again, tears pricking at her eyes. ‘I’m not young. You and me — why can’t this be for ever?’

He waved his arm towards the darkness. ‘War or no war, you were never going to stay here.’

‘You don’t see, do you?’

‘What don’t I see?’

‘That I love you.’

‘You love an idea of me.’

‘It’s the same thing.’

They were silent. ‘I have been useful to you,’ he said. ‘That is all.’

‘What is it, Isa? What’s changed?’

He closed his eyes and shivered. ‘Nothing’s changed. It’s always been the same.’

She pounded the veranda rail with her fist. ‘You should want to be with me. You should—’

A muffled explosion from beyond the valley silenced them both. ‘What the hell was that?’ said Isaac, scanning the horizon.

‘Teresa said they’ve started to bomb bridges again. Is it true your father is helping them?’

Isaac’s eyes were so dark with anger, she moved back. ‘I need to go to Malaga,’ he said.

‘At midnight? What use will you be now?’

‘More useful than standing here.’

‘So that’s it, is it? Us?’

‘Our ideas of what this is have always been different. You know that.’

‘What am I supposed to do with that painting?’

‘Give it to your father. I must deal with my own.’

‘What do you mean? I won’t give up on this—’

‘You’re mixing things up, Olive. You’re frustrated you cannot paint—’

She grabbed his arms. ‘I need you. I can’t paint without you.’

‘You painted before me.’

‘Isaac, don’t leave me — please.’

‘Goodbye, Olive.’

‘No!’

Isaac stepped down from the veranda and walked towards the orchard. He turned back to the house, his face half-illuminated by the moon. Behind her, Olive felt a presence at the kitchen door.

‘Where’s he going?’ Sarah said.

‘Suerte,’ Isaac called over his shoulder, before slipping between the trees.

‘What does that mean?’ asked Sarah.

Olive could feel her tears coming, but she refused to let her mother see her cry. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Olive, tell me what he said.’

Olive turned to Sarah, struck by the expression of worry on her face. ‘All it means, Mother,’ she said, ‘is good luck.’

XIX

A few hours after Isaac slipped away from the Schloss women and into the darkness, Don Alfonso’s finca was attacked with fire and a second salvo was launched upon the church of Santa Rufina in the centre of Arazuelo. Later, people whispered that yes, they’d seen a disrobed Padre Lorenzo, running away from the flames into the village square, with a naked woman fast on his heels. Some said there hadn’t been a woman at all, just the priest in a white smock, the bump of his private part visible under the cotton. Others swore on the Holy Bible there’d been a woman — a vision of Rufina herself, running from the godlessness behind her before she took flight into the air.

The only truth Arazuelo could attest to was that by dawn, the church was a shell and Don Alfonso’s estate a blackened skeleton. Wood smoke hung over the air, smarting the eyes of those trying to go about their business, until the whole village fell into an uneasy stupor, knowing full well that retaliation for something like this would eventually come.

When Teresa came running through the grey dawn light, bashing on the front door of the finca, Olive knew something was very wrong.

‘Isaac has done something stupid—’

‘What’s he done? Where is he?’

Teresa looked stricken. ‘I don’t know. The church is gone.’

‘Gone — what do you mean, gone?’

‘Fire. And my father’s house also.’

‘Dear God, Teresa. Come inside.’

Around two hours later, Don Alfonso appeared, his once-pristine suit now smeared with charcoal. He too banged on the finca door, and upstairs with Olive, Teresa cowered. ‘It’s going to be all right,’ Olive whispered.

Teresa gripped her wrist. ‘No, señorita. You do not understand.’

Harold let Don Alfonso in, and the man moved angrily through the hallway into the front east room. Olive crept down the stairs to peer through the crack in the door.

‘You have heard what happened?’ Don Alfonso said.

‘I have.’

‘News travels fast. It is an outrage. I could have been dead. My wife, my children — it is only because my daughter Clara is an insomniac that any of us are still here. Three of my stable grooms, an under-butler and a pot-washing boy had a part in it. I’ve found these men, Señor Schloss, and they are all in the jail, waiting their punishment. And do you know what they tell me? They tell me that Isaac Robles paid them for their help. Where did Isaac get the money to pay those men? It was certainly not from me. I cannot get the answers, because I cannot find my bastard son. Do you know where he is, señor?’

‘No.’

‘And yet you know my finca was set on fire.’

‘Is he not at his cottage?’

‘I sent Jorge and Gregorio there. All they found was this.’ Don Alfonso held aloft an old copy of Vogue. ‘Your wife’s, I assume?’

A look of surprise passed over Harold’s face, but he adjusted quickly back to an impression of calm. ‘She gives them to Teresa.’

‘My son set loose thirty of my thoroughbred horses, señor. He torched my stables. He burned down Lorenzo’s church.’

‘Sit down, Don Alfonso, please. These are severe accusations.’

‘His own friends have turned him in. He is a devil, señor.’

‘I beg to differ,’ said Harold, clearly irritated now. ‘Don Alfonso, your son does not have time for these games. Your son is a gifted man.’

It was Don Alfonso’s turn to look surprised. ‘Gifted?’

‘Have you never seen his work?’

‘What?’

Before Harold could explain further, Olive pushed into the room. Both men jumped and turned to her. ‘Go upstairs,’ said Harold in a tight voice.

‘No.’

Behind Olive, Sarah appeared. ‘What’s going on?’ she said. Her eye rested on the figure of Don Alfonso, and the colour drained from her face. ‘Is he dead?’ she whispered. ‘Is Mr Robles dead?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Sarah,’ said Harold, unable to mask the stress in his voice.

Don Alfonso inclined his head towards Sarah in a curt bow. ‘Is Teresa here?’ he asked her.

‘Upstairs,’ replied Sarah.

‘Mother,’ said Olive. ‘No.’

‘Please bring her to me,’ said Alfonso.

‘No,’ said Olive. ‘You can’t have her.’

‘Liv, don’t be ridiculous,’ said Harold. ‘Be civilized.’

‘Civilized?’

‘Go and fetch Teresa.’

Olive went upstairs, but Teresa was nowhere to be seen. Olive waited, buying time, pretending to look for her, praying that Teresa had got herself somewhere safe. She moved back down with determined steps and returned to the front east room. Don Alfonso narrowed his eyes when he saw she was alone. ‘Are you hiding her, señorita?’ he said. ‘I know you think you are her friend.’

‘I’m not hiding anyone.’

He turned to Olive’s parents. ‘It won’t be good for you, hiding them. Isaac is wanted for theft, arson, criminal damage, attempted murder—’

‘For God’s sake,’ Harold interjected. ‘We are not hiding your children.’

‘They are no longer my children. You should leave here,’ said Don Alfonso. ‘You should go.’

‘On the contrary,’ replied Harold. ‘I think we should protect those who do not enjoy your protection. I am beginning to understand you much better.’

Alfonso laughed. ‘You foreigners, you’re all the same. You think you are protecting Teresa and Isaac? They will be the ones who will have to protect you. And do you think they will? That you are under some magic shroud, that your maid and gardener love you?’

‘Teresa is our maid, yes, and a bloody good one — but Isaac is not our gardener. You have no idea about what your son—’

‘I know him better than you do. What will he use to defend you, señor — a saucepan? Those degenerates he consorts with are more likely to put a hoe through your heart and join up with the Reds.’

*

When Don Alfonso had disappeared in his motor car shortly after, Olive ran through the finca’s rusty gates, down the path, into the village — by this time breathless and leg-sore — and out and up the hill again, to Isaac and Teresa’s cottage. They were not there, but Jorge and Gregorio had turned the place over. God, this cottage was a spare place, sparer than Olive had remembered it to be. In her mind’s eye, it had become a rustic haven, a place to think and breathe and paint. In truth, it was a place one might wish to escape.

Isaac’s room contained nothing but his unmade bed and a jar of dying roses on the windowsill. Teresa’s meagre belongings were scattered on her bedroom floor. Olive was surprised to see one of her old paint tubes — the grasshopper-green shade she’d used for The Orchard. There was a Veuve Clicquot champagne cork, and stranger things; a cut-out square of material that matched her father’s pyjamas. There was a crushed packet of Harold’s cigarettes, and when Olive went to shake it, several stubs had been saved inside, their ends covered in the unmistakeable rouge of her mother’s lips. Lying around the floorboards were loose pages ripped from a notebook, with words and phrases written in English in a diligent, neat hand: palaver — snaffled — crass — gosh — I’m starving — ghastly — selfish. Alongside them were their Spanish meanings.

Olive’s heart began to thump. Looking at this flotsam from her parents’ lives, this notebook of the things they’d probably said in careless passing — she had the chilly sensation that she didn’t really know Teresa at all.

The front door banged, her skin turned to gooseflesh. No footsteps followed and she told herself it was the wind. The noise still unnerved her, and she imagined a wolf, sneaking in from the mountains. She was about to move out of Teresa’s room, when she saw a photograph on the floor. It was a picture of herself and Isaac in front of Rufina and the Lion. Olive was smiling and Isaac, his eyebrows slightly raised, looked ready for his painter’s pose. Olive had never seen this picture before, and without thinking, she rammed it deep into her pocket.

As she passed back down the corridor, she saw Isaac’s original painting, propped against the wall. Teresa must have moved it back here, out of sight. The idealized faces of herself and her mother seemed to loom out, and Olive was struck again by their mannequin look, their monstrous blankness.

She went outside to look at the hills. There was a wreathing pallor of smoke still in the air, the taste of the fire’s aftermath. Isaac knew these hills well, better than Don Alfonso. He knew where to hide — but Teresa had not had as much time to escape. Something terrible was coming, Olive could feel it; and there was nothing she could do.

‘Teresa?’ she called to the land, and her own voice rebounded back. ‘Teresa?’ she shouted again, her panic rising. But all that Olive heard was the echo of Teresa’s name, falling down the hills.

XX

It was Jorge who spotted her, disappearing into the forest on the outskirts of the village. He and Gregorio were on the hunt, but it was only by chance that Jorge had his head turned in that direction; the glimpse of a slim brown leg, the flash of a dark plait. What happened next changed Arazuelo for ever, the place that was always supposed to stay the same. The trauma of it rang out, long and ineradicable down the years to come, however hard those who witnessed it attempted silence.

Had he been any further away, Jorge would have lost her; for Teresa was swift-footed and he was much heavier. But together he and Gregorio stalked her through the trees. When Jorge shot his pistol into the air, she spun to face the direction of the sound, and Gregorio took the opportunity to grab her from behind.

She kicked and screamed, but Gregorio did not let go. ‘Where is he?’ Jorge shouted at her, lumbering through the bracken.

‘What do you mean? Put me down.’ Teresa felt as if her heart was inching its way up her body, weighing down her tongue.

‘Where’s your brother?’

‘I don’t know.’ Jorge moved forward, pushing his face close to hers. She could smell the sour catch of old alcohol on his breath. ‘Come on, Teresa, you know everything, little bird-eye. Little spy. Where’s your fucking brother?’

‘I don’t know,’ she repeated.

‘Tie her to the tree,’ Jorge said, but Gregorio hesitated. ‘You heard me. Do it.’ Gregorio didn’t move.

‘I don’t know where he is, Jorge, I swear,’ Teresa said, sensing a chance. ‘You think he’d tell me? No one tells me anything—’

‘Your brother set half the village on fire last night. When we catch him, he’s a dead man. And you’re going to help.’

He began to drag Teresa by her plait towards the tree. ‘Isa’s known you since you were schoolkids,’ she said, gasping at the pain arcing across her skull. ‘Twenty years your friend. How does your mother look you in the face?’ she hissed.

‘At least I’ve got a mother who does,’ said Jorge.

‘You’re shaking, Gregorio,’ Teresa went on at the softer man, out of her wits with fear, but scenting his discomfort.

‘Jorge,’ said Gregorio. ‘We should take her to the station.’

‘Shut it,’ Jorge said.

‘I mean it. I’m not tying her to this tree. Don Alfonso never said — let’s put her in the truck.’

Jorge eventually relented, and they put Teresa in a cell at the civil guard headquarters, and all night Teresa was silent. ‘Check she hasn’t done herself in,’ Jorge spat. ‘Like her mother before her.’

‘What?’ said Gregorio.

Jorge looked at his colleague. ‘Don’t tell me you never knew. Her mother drowned herself. Probably didn’t want to hang around to bring up that piece of shit,’ he added, directing his voice down the dank corridor, loud enough for Teresa to hear.

The next morning, Teresa had barely slept. She had not been wearing many clothes in the first place, and no one had offered her a blanket — but what hurt more, what made her skin palpably shiver, was that no one had come from the finca to speak for her. In the deep of the night, staring up through the bars, thinking of the cruel words Jorge had uttered, Teresa had convinced herself that any minute Olive would come, Olive would call her name, demanding that these brutish boys let her out. Teresa had to believe it, because if she didn’t believe it, then the firing squad would come instead.

But Olive never came — and neither did Harold, even though he would have had more authority than his daughter. And as dawn broke, Teresa began to think, Of course, of course, why would they come? — and she was glad that no one could witness the pitiful embarrassment of hope.

Jorge and Gregorio came into her cell at eight o’clock in the morning, where she was sitting upright on the bed, every one of her vertebrae pressed up against the cold stone of the wall. ‘Up,’ said Jorge.

She stood, and he approached. ‘For the last time, Teresa. Where is your brother?’

‘I don’t kn—’

He whacked her round the mouth and her head flew back, cracking against the wall.

‘I said, where is he?’

Teresa began to scream, until Jorge punched her again and she heard Gregorio cry out before she fell unconscious. The next thing she knew, she was blindfolded, bumping up and down in the back of their truck again, the iron tang of blood and a loose tooth in her mouth.

She tried to turn her head to the open air to see if she could sense where they were going, but she was still disorientated. Her neck hurt, her skull throbbed. The blindfold had been tied so tight that it cut across her eye sockets. It smelled like sweat, someone else’s blood. Was this it? Deep in her heart, in her dreams she had feared this moment. She was going to be shot in the head, round the back of some hut, fifty kilometres away from her home. And who would miss her? Who would mourn her passing?

The truck stopped. Teresa heard the men jump out of the wagon and swing down the back flap of the truck.

‘Don’t shoot me. Don’t shoot me,’ she pleaded, hearing the crack of her own voice, surprised at this overwhelming passion to live, and how prepared she was to abase herself in order to do it. Anything, to live. ‘Gregorio,’ she said. ‘Please. Please. Save me.’

But Gregorio did not speak. A hand took her arm and walked her a few steps, pushing her down onto a chair. Teresa heard footsteps moving away, crunching against what sounded like gravel. She had been placed in the direction of the sun, and she could feel it warming her face, orange and gold through the blindfold and the tender skin of her eyelids. This is it, she thought.

‘Olive,’ she whispered, ‘Olive.’ She kept saying the name, and the blindfold was lifted. There was silence, then the sound of a few birds as they flapped across the sky. Teresa squinted, blinking to adjust her vision to the light. To her surprise, she saw Olive standing to her right, her head haloed in gold, the buildings behind her squares of white.

‘Am I dead?’ Teresa said.

‘No,’ replied a man.

Teresa could see now that she was in the main square, on a chair placed directly in front of the charred frame of the church. The villagers had started to gather — shrinking away like a shoal of fish as Teresa turned her head. She tried to rise from the chair towards Olive. Olive took a step towards her, her arm outstretched, but Gregorio pushed Teresa back down.

Jorge waved his pistol at the gathered villagers. ‘Keep back!’ he shouted, but Olive stayed forward.

‘What are you going to do to her?’ she shouted in Spanish. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘Shut up!’ Jorge said, going over to the truck and pulling something from the passenger seat. He walked back to Teresa, hands on his hips, assessing her, pacing round her slowly before taking her plait in his hand, weighing it like he was a widow at market, turning his nose up at the produce. With his other hand, he lifted up a large pair of shears, the kind gardeners used to prune their plants and flowers.

‘I’ll be fair,’ he said, his fist wrapped round the plait. ‘Let’s unravel it, bit by bit. I’m going to ask you one more time about your brother, and if you cooperate, you can keep your hair.’

Teresa had turned to stone, the only living thing her plait, coiled and twitching in Jorge’s fist. Her gaze was distant; her body was there, but she was not. As Jorge undid her hair with an air of industry, she didn’t flinch or cry out — she just sat, staring into nothingness. So still, so meditative, The Muse she looked almost complicit in the spectacle, until you noticed her bunched fists, the knuckles whitening through the skin.

‘Don’t do this,’ Olive said to the men. ‘She doesn’t know where he is.’

Jorge swung round to face the other girl. ‘That’s what she says.’

Snip went the shears, a long tendril of black hair falling to the ground, where it lay in the dust like a snake. No one whispered, no one even seemed to breathe. ‘Señorita,’ Gregorio said to Olive. ‘This is not your affair.’

‘Don’t hurt her,’ said Olive. ‘You’ll regret it. Does her father know you’re doing this—’

‘If you don’t shut up, you’ll be next,’ Jorge shouted, lifting the shears again. ‘Where’s your brother?’ he asked Teresa, and still Teresa did not speak. Jorge began to hack the second handful of hair.

Just say something, Tere, Olive thought. Anything, a lie. But Teresa was mute, keeping her eyes on the burned-out church, and Olive could almost feel the whisker-touch of dark hair falling against her own neck. Teresa still did not flinch, but Olive could see fear glimmering in her eye, buried within that blank look.

‘Where is he?’ came the question, again and again. And still, Teresa was silent, so Jorge cut more of her hair, close to the line of the skull, emerging as a clumpy, patchy thing. ‘You’re a furry mushroom,’ Jorge said, laughing. No one in the village joined him, but neither did they move to stop this spectacle.

‘Teresa,’ Olive called. ‘I’m here.’

‘For all the good you’ve done her,’ said Gregorio.

Once the bulk of Teresa’s hair was gone, Jorge produced a barbering razor from his pocket. ‘What are you doing?’ hissed Gregorio. ‘She got the message.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Jorge, placing the blade on the top of Teresa’s head. He began to shave the remaining patchy tufts until she was completely bald, the ancient humiliation, back to the Bible days, the days of blood.

‘This is what happens,’ said Jorge, holding the razor aloft, ‘when you conceal information about a wanted criminal and fail to cooperate with the law.’

‘The law?’ said Olive.

The villagers remained immobile. Teresa’s skull was covered with weeping nicks where he’d cut into her skin. Jorge pulled Teresa up out of the chair, and she moved with him like a puppet.

‘Now take off your skirt and blouse,’ he said.

‘Stop!’ shouted another woman next to Olive, and Jorge stalked towards her.

‘You next, Rosita?’ he said. ‘You want to look like a mushroom too? Because I promise you can be next.’ Rosita shrank away, shaking her head, fear distorting her face.

Slowly, Teresa peeled off her skirt and blouse, revealing her skinny legs, her underwear. Olive wanted to seize her, but she worried that darting forward and grabbing Teresa might now make things worse for her. Jorge seemed so pumped up, and even though Gregorio was less sure of himself, he could be equally dangerous.

From the truck, Gregorio fetched a smock-like dress that looked like it had been sewn in the sixteenth century, and a bottle, the contents of which Olive couldn’t work out. He put the smock over Teresa’s head, and helped her elbows and hands through the heavy sleeves. ‘Take off your shoes, Teresa,’ he said, like a parent to a child, and when Teresa obeyed him, it was absurdly painful.

Teresa’s fingers fumbled over the knot in her shoelaces. Gregorio grew impatient and sliced them in two with his flick-knife. And it seemed to be this — more than the shaving, more than the stripping — that finally unleashed Teresa’s rage. Her one pair of shoes, so neatly polished despite their age, were now unbound flaps of leather lying in the dust. She cried out and fell down.

‘Get up!’ Jorge screamed, but she didn’t move. Jorge thrust the bottle at her. ‘This is what we do to traitors,’ he said.

‘Who’s the traitor?’ Teresa replied, her voice a croak.

‘Do you want me to pour it down your throat myself?’

Teresa stared up at him, still refusing. ‘Gregorio,’ Jorge said. ‘You do it.’

Gregorio was upon her before Teresa could ready herself. He pinned back her arms and drove his knee into her lower back. Pallid and sweating, he grabbed her jaw and hinged it open. ‘Drink it!’ he screamed. The shock of Gregorio turning on her seemed to make Teresa numb with terror, and Jorge worked the neck of the bottle into her mouth with relative ease.

‘Drink it,’ Gregorio hissed. ‘Drink the lot.’

Opening her eyes wide, Teresa turned her head so that Gregorio was forced to meet her gaze, and she kept them open as the contents were emptied down her throat. Some of the villagers ran away at this point, the spell of violence finally broken by this horror.

When the bottle were empty, the men let Teresa go. She gagged, strands of oil falling from the corners of her mouth, pooling into the dust.

‘Who knew we lived next door to the Devil?’ one man near Olive whispered.

‘Go home now, Teresa,’ Jorge said. ‘And try not to shit yourself. If we haven’t found him in the next few days, expect another visit.’

Teresa rose to her feet and stumbled, and Olive pushed past the men to take her by the arm. This time, they didn’t stop her. Teresa sagged against Olive’s side, and the two girls staggered out of the square, the remaining villagers parting to let through this gagging, bald creature, whose bowels might go at any minute, thanks to the dosage of an entire bottle of castor oil.

No one jeered her progress — not even half-heartedly, in the presence of Jorge and Gregorio. No one said a thing, slack-mouthed in horror. They watched the girls up the dusty path, out of the village towards the finca. They kept watching, until they couldn’t see them any more.

Jorge and Gregorio stepped into the truck and revved away in the opposite direction. Gradually, the square fell empty except for the dark clumps of Teresa’s hair, abandoned in the gravel.

XXI

Olive bathed Teresa and burned the filthy smock. She dressed her in her own Aran jumper and a pair of blue silk trousers that Sarah donated. Perhaps the beauty of the blue silk was to distract Teresa, but all it did was make her look incongruous; the luxury compared to the woollen jumper and her bald head. By the time Harold came back late from Malaga, Teresa had been administered two of Sarah’s sleeping pills, and she was upstairs in one of the first-floor bedrooms, fast asleep.

Before she could even tell him what had happened in the town square, Harold unburdened what he’d seen in the city. He was very shaken. The roads were terrible, he said. Since the two main bridges had been destroyed, isolating the centre, no one had done anything to fix them. He called it the perverse Buddhism of the Spaniards. Letting fate flow was all very well — but not at the expense of life. For how else could one explain not mending a bridge that might help feed citizens waiting in the city, let alone the troops?

He’d parked outside and walked in on foot, and when he’d finally made it to the centre, there wasn’t much food to be had. No tins at all, no cheese — no cheese! — no cake. He’d managed to find a kilo of sugar and one of weak acorn coffee, a rationed amount of salted cod, some fresh sardines, a box of cigarettes and a feeble chorizo. He said the place was becoming unrecognizable — where once there were hanging baskets were now bombed buildings, the staring faces of the recent homeless, with nowhere to live and little to eat. Although the hotels were still standing — safe enough, for they were locked at night against marauding gangs — certain parts of the city were now nothing more than a smoking shell.

‘The organization’s hopeless,’ he said. ‘It’s a fucking disaster,’ he spat, and his wife and daughter flinched. What was bothering Harold so much — he, who was not from this place, who could leave any moment he wanted?

He told them that the ex-pats who were staying in the city were holed up in the Regina Hotel, but the vast majority of foreigners were leaving on the second wave of destroyers the British Consulate had sent news of. He saw them down at the dock, their passports in hand, travelling trunks scattered around like a game of dominoes. English, Americans, Argentines, Germans and Chileans, some wealthy-looking Spaniards. ‘They’re saying the red wave will strike them, but it’s Mussolini’s bombers overhead,’ he said. ‘The sea might be the only reliable way of sourcing food from now on. I don’t see, with those bridges down, how it’s all going to get in.’

‘We’re too far from the sea here for that to be of any comfort,’ Sarah snapped, picking up the sardines and chorizo and disappearing with them into the pantry. ‘Did you find the flag to purchase, like I asked?’ she called.

‘Don’t you have a clue?’ he shouted back. ‘The air raids, the Italian warships bombing the port? You think I’ll find a Union Jack in the middle of that?’

But despite Malaga’s terrors, Olive believed it was Teresa who really began to unnerve her parents. Her presence was like a dark mass in the first-floor bedroom, and an atmosphere of guilt pervaded the house. Sarah did not know what to do with her, puffing perfume around the girl, bringing all the Vogues and Harper’s she might desire. On seeing these offerings, Teresa said nothing, fixing Sarah with a surly look. Sarah kept away after that, unwilling to be near such volatility. Harold lugged the gramophone up the stairs, but she played not one of his crackling jazz records.

By the third day in the finca, Teresa had contracted a fever. She lay in bed, muttering, Bist du es? Bist du es? over and over, as Olive dabbed her forehead and prayed a doctor might dare to come. Olive called for Sarah to help, but Sarah did not answer. Teresa’s expression was fixed, her eyes clamped shut, face swollen with fatigue, her skin pale and clammy like a peeled egg.

There was no news of Isaac. Every night in the village, one of the bar owners would turn his wireless towards the hills, so that all those who might be hiding out there in the woods could keep up with the news. General Queipo de Llano, still broadcasting from Seville, told his listeners that he had fifty thousand Italian troops, three banderas of the Foreign Legion, and fifteen thousand North African tribesmen known as the Army of Africa, waiting to come in to Malaga. The report made Olive shiver, but she comforted herself with the idea that Isaac was somewhere near, listening too. She didn’t want him to be in the north, she wanted him here.

Teresa’s fever broke, and she lay on her back in silence for several more days. At night, listening to the whine of the distant bombers, Olive could hear Teresa moving up and down the corridors, a bare-footed catharsis of pacing — but what did she want? Was this a night-time vigil to call back her brother? Why, when he was the reason for her humiliation? Olive remembered Teresa’s scream of rage in the town square, her look of impotence, her terror as Gregorio clutched her. She wondered if, after all this, Teresa really knew where Isaac was.

But Teresa was buried beneath the memory, by day curled up on the bed like a foetus, her face towards the wall. She called for no one. It was a trauma none of them knew what to do with. Olive would wake at dawn and stand in front of a blank canvas, unable to lift the brush. She could not escape the image of the chair in the village square, the smock stained with faeces, Teresa’s head a dull white glow, her feet weaving over the finca hallway. Fearing she might never paint a picture, nor see Isaac again, Olive was ashamed to realize that she couldn’t tell which deprivation struck her deeper. I have been useful to you: Isaac’s words resounded in her head.

As the days progressed, Olive waited for the crust of Teresa’s silence to crack open. Silence like this was Harold’s worst nightmare. He thought people should speak, voice their pain. He became all bluster, trying to force the issue of the prone girl lying up in one of his rooms. But Olive was sure it was coming; she could almost taste the power of Teresa’s humiliation in the air, damming up the door of the spare bedroom, soon to break.

Harold said that as soon as Teresa was better and set up back in her cottage, they were going over the border into Gibraltar. As for Isaac, he had made his bed and was going to have to lie in it. Trying to sleep in her own bed in the attic, Olive could barely picture a proper pavement, a cultivated park, the slate roofs of Curzon Street and Berkeley Square wet with rain. To get to London meant leaping a metaphysical boundary as much as a country’s border, and she didn’t know if she could, if she even wanted to at all. London might be a different sort of suffocation. If she was truly honest with herself, Olive could admit that there was something life-affirming about living here, so close to the possibility of real death.

She began to feel responsible for Isaac’s disappearance. He had been so angry when he departed through the orchard that night on the veranda, calling good luck before he left. How long ago it seemed now, arriving here under the thin January sun, Isaac laying his hands on that chicken. Olive remembered the provocation she felt in her own body as he broke its neck. He’d given her so much. Had she satisfied him in return? No, she did not think so. When she tried to summon the memory of his hands on her, she found that she could not.

‘Do you think Isaac got away?’ Sarah asked her one evening, when it was just her and Olive sitting in the front east room. Harold was in his study, Teresa still upstairs.

Olive rubbed her arms. The firewood was dwindling and they were rationing supplies. ‘I don’t know.’

‘I’m sure he did,’ Sarah said. ‘I’m sure he caught a train.’ Olive noted how well her mother looked, despite the meagre rations, and Teresa’s trauma that was threatening to engulf them. It was as if the stressed situation had finally given Sarah a sense of purpose.

‘Do you want to leave, Liv?’ Sarah asked.

Olive pulled at a thread on the tatty sofa. Isaac had been right after all. They had come here and they would go again. ‘No,’ she said. ‘This is home.’

*

Later that night, Olive heard a knock on her door. ‘Who is it?’

Teresa shuffled forward, hovering on the threshold. She was thinner than ever, and her hair had grown a little bit, but mostly Olive was relieved to see the determined look in Teresa’s eyes.

‘Do you know what your father is saying?’ Teresa asked.

Olive lay back on the bed. ‘He says many things.’

‘He talks about the fatalism of the Spaniards.’

‘Ignore him.’

‘What he says is not fair.’

‘I know it isn’t.’

‘Does he think we are not trying to fight?’

‘He doesn’t think that. It’s easy when you’re an outsider to say these things.’

‘It is not safe.’

‘I know, Tere.’

‘You should go.’

‘I’m not leaving you.’

‘You are not staying for me, señorita. I know why you are still here.’ The girls looked at each other. ‘He isn’t coming back,’ Teresa said.

Olive sat up in the bed. ‘He might.’

Teresa laughed. It was a cracked, bitter sound. ‘You of all people should open your eyes.’

‘I should say they’re pretty bloody open, thank you very much. More than most of the English back home.’

Teresa walked slowly into the room, running her hand over the top of Rufina and the Lion. ‘My brother has done damage,’ she said.

‘To the village?’

‘To this house.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I would like to thank you,’ Teresa said. ‘For taking me away from Jorge and Gregorio.’

‘I wouldn’t have done anything else.’

‘I have tried to fight.’

‘I know.’

‘But it is hard. It is like fighting yourself. And there are times I don’t see why we should have to. Why should we have to fight?’

‘I don’t know the answer to that, Tere.’

‘If you go, Olive — could I go too?’

Olive hesitated. Her father had no plans to take Teresa with them. ‘Do you have papers?’

Teresa made an unconscious gesture with her hand, patting her head where the scabs were beginning to heal. ‘No.’

There was a silence. ‘Let me neaten that situation,’ said Olive.

‘What does it mean — “neaten”?’

Olive got off the bed and came towards her, putting her hands on the other girl’s arms. ‘You need a new notebook of words. Here, I won’t hurt you. I’ll be gentle.’

Placing Teresa on the edge of the bed, she used a razor taken from her father’s dressing table, and slowly shaved away the remaining patches of hair on Teresa’s head. She rubbed calamine over the cuts as Teresa sat motionless, looking out towards the window, listening to the far-off crumps of the guns in Malaga.

‘This is my brother’s fault,’ Teresa said dully.

Olive held the razor above Teresa’s head. ‘Well, we’ve all been foolish. You could blame it on your father. And he’d blame it on the government. And they’d blame it on the last government. I don’t think Isaac meant for this to happen to you.’

‘Isaac thinks about the land, but forgets his doorstep,’ Teresa said.

‘Isaac is a good man.’

‘You think so?’

‘He has a conscience.’

Teresa laughed.

‘You know where your brother is, don’t you? I promise I won’t tell anyone. I just need to know.’

Teresa turned again to the window, her shoulders sagging. ‘It is better that you do not know.’

She heard a snip. Horrified, she turned to Olive and saw that the other girl had removed an enormous chunk of her own hair. ‘What are you doing?’ Teresa said, as Olive cut away another handful.

‘You think I’ve just been playing a game down here, don’t you?’ Olive said.

‘Stop with your hair. Stop it.’

Teresa went to grab for the razor, but Olive pointed it in her direction, as warning to keep back. She began to hack and hack at herself, tufts of her thick hazel-coloured hair floating to the floor. Teresa watched her, mesmerized.

‘Now you shave my head,’ Olive said.

‘You are crazy.’

‘No, I’m not. What do I have to do to make people take me seriously?’

‘Having the same hair does not give you the same grief.’

‘Teresa, just do it.’

As she delicately scraped away every last hair on Olive’s head, Teresa tried to hide her tears. She could not remember the last time she had cried in front of someone. She thought about that first painting of Olive’s she had swapped onto the easel, Saint Justa becoming a woman in a wheatfield. Isaac had been convinced she’d done it because of the kiss she’d witnessed against the rusty gate, that Teresa was punishing him out of jealousy, taking away his opportunity to shine. Teresa had to admit, seeing what happened between them had hurt her at the time, making her feel left out and ignored, although she couldn’t exactly articulate why. But she also knew her impulse had always been something more deep-rooted, not really connected to Isaac. It was something else Teresa couldn’t quite understand herself. The nearest way to describe it was as a bond she had made for herself, and Olive being rightfully rewarded.

‘Tere, I’m going to ask you again. Do you know where he is?’ Olive said.

Teresa almost felt the pressure of the question in her body. ‘Forget Isaac,’ she said. ‘He does not love you in the way he should.’

‘Oh, Teresa. What do you know about love?’

Teresa’s brief time in the house with the Schlosses had taught her more about love and its problems than Olive could ever imagine. But she had also known, long before the arrival of the Schloss family and their overflowing hearts, that whilst everything has a consequence, nothing can simply be put down to fate. Teresa had always made her choice — to see, and stay silent. All her life before Olive, she had kept her own counsel.

But Olive, and her paintings, and her parents, had changed that stance. They had opened Teresa up, made her vulnerable to the worlds of other people. And once again, Olive was forcing her hand. Perhaps there was no good to be had in staying silent any longer. Perhaps it was time for Olive to truly see, and to free herself for ever.

‘A shepherd’s hut,’ Teresa said.

‘What?’

‘Go and look for a shepherd’s hut. You will find him there.’

Olive looked at her in astonishment. ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘You’ll find him. Ask my brother what it means to be in love.’

Teresa watched her depart, and began to sweep away the other girl’s severed hair with a mix of dread and elation. She wasn’t sure exactly what Olive would find, but she had a fair idea. She noted the back of Olive’s newly bared head with something bordering pride. When the reckoning came — and it was certainly going to come now — Teresa knew that they would question her character. At least they would see that she had not left a mark on her mistress. It was not possible to mend Olive’s heart, but at least the girl’s head was finally clear.

XXII

The plane engines over Malaga had grown quieter as Olive pounded down the hill from the finca, in the direction of the cottage. No one seemed to notice as she tiptoed out of the house. It did not occur to her there might have been no one left in the house to hear.

At dusk Arazuelo was a ghost village. The main square was empty, the shutters of the bar on the corner were up; the church was its blackened shell; the butcher was closed; the school and the offices around it blanked of life. Olive patted her pockets, feeling in one the torch she’d grabbed from the kitchen, and in the other, the cold bulk of the pistol Isaac had left with them.

She could barely allow the hope that he might still be near. Teresa, it appeared, was a locked box of secrets, until you found the right combination. Whilst everything outside her seemed quiet, Olive’s thoughts cascaded with a force she found hard to control. If she could find him and bring him back, everything would be all right. Panting, she tried to regain her breath as she scanned the woods beyond, the line of the trees inkier and inkier as the last natural light disappeared into a smoky sky.

Into the growing darkness Olive ran, switching on the torch. Don’t use a torch, Teresa had told her. You don’t know who else is out there.

I’m not afraid, Olive had replied — but now, out in the hills, she couldn’t see a thing without it, and her adrenalin was coursing. She barely knew where she was going, but she supposed it couldn’t be far. Towards the foothills, she would find him; she would, she would. You think he’s gone north? Teresa had said. He hasn’t gone north.

If you hate him so much, why didn’t you tell the civil guard all this? Olive had asked; but she knew the answer to that already. Teresa had revealed nothing about Isaac — not to protect her brother, but to keep Olive near.

I’ll be waiting, Teresa had called out, as she fled the attic. No one had ever said such a thing to Olive before.

The first thing she saw was the sardine tin, glinting in the grass. It had clearly blown from inside the hut, and now rested several metres from where Olive stood. She switched off the torch and watched the shepherd’s hut. A faint light was showing between a hewn-out window hole and a piece of flapping oilskin. Olive crept nearer. She could hear a voice, a low murmur — Isaac’s voice. Teresa had not been lying to her. Her heart rose with joy to know he was here, and she ran forward.

Then she heard a woman’s laugh. She recognized it. She thought she was going to choke. Her throat tightened, her tongue felt too big at the back of her mouth.

A noise, a deep sigh, another and another from inside the shepherd’s hut, and finally Olive understood what Teresa had meant, what she had squirmed to say, resisting the outright truth, sending her here so she could see it for herself. She understood it, even as she couldn’t bear to. And there it came again — regular, deep, and unbearable; an expression of pure pleasure. As the universe above Olive’s head deepened in its darkness, she fixed her fingers on the pistol and pushed open the door.

XXIII

Sarah screamed, pushing back against the wall. ‘No dispares!’ shouted Isaac. Don’t shoot!

Olive lifted the lantern that was on the floor. Isaac and her mother were both naked, their limbs still intertwined. Sarah twisted her body away in a panic, and Olive saw the dome of her stomach clearly risen with a child.

‘Olive,’ said her mother, dumb with shock. ‘What’s happened to your hair?’

They stared at each other. Seconds passed that felt like hours. ‘Does Daddy know?’ Olive eventually said, her voice a husk, the sound robotic. ‘Does Daddy know?’

Sarah scrambled to sit up, clutching Isaac’s coat to her chest, reaching for her trousers. ‘Liv. Livvi. Put the gun down.’

Olive kept the barrel up in the direction of her mother. ‘Does he know?’

‘He doesn’t know,’ said Sarah, gasping. ‘Put that down, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Is it yours?’ Olive asked Isaac. ‘Is the baby yours?’

‘It’s not his,’ Sarah interrupted. ‘It’s not.’

Isaac got to his feet. ‘Olive,’ he said gently. ‘Put the gun down. No one needs to be hurt.’

Olive felt a roaring in her ears. ‘Why?’ she said. ‘Why?’ The question soared into the night.

‘Ssssh!’ Isaac hissed. ‘Keep quiet.’

‘You hypocrite. All that talk about going north, fighting for your country, and you’re less than a mile away, with her—’ Olive put her hand on her mouth, fighting back a sob.

‘Livvi,’ said Sarah.

‘Don’t you Livvi me. Don’t fool yourself it could ever be love with her, Isaac. Is it yours? Is that baby yours?’

The look that passed between Sarah and Isaac was almost worse to Olive than discovering them. The intimacy of it, the fluency; complicity.

‘How long have you— What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I—’

Isaac began to come towards her. ‘Calm down, Olive. Please. I can explain—’

As he approached, Olive fired a shot through the thatch of the roof. ‘Mierda!’ he shouted. ‘Shit! Do you want to get us killed? Now every gang out there will know that someone is here.’

Sarah let out a low moan and began scrabbling around in the dark for the rest of her clothes. ‘I have to go. I have to go,’ she kept repeating. ‘He’ll be back.’

‘You snake,’ said Olive.

Sarah looked up at her. ‘I’m no snake.’

‘I’d say you are. I never want to speak to you again.’

‘How did you know I was here?’ asked Isaac.

‘How else do you think?’

Sarah groaned. Olive closed her eyes, to blot out the scene before her.

‘How long has Teresa known about this?’ whispered Sarah.

‘I don’t know,’ said Olive, and it was the truth. Had Teresa’s silence until now been out of protection, or something else — the power of knowing what Olive did not? Had they all been laughing at her, so in love with her Boris Mon-Amour? Better to have kept Isaac a figure in a book, a man in her imagination, than the monster she had created in real life. She could hear one of the last things Teresa had said to her, up in the attic: Ask my brother what it means to be in love.

‘Olive,’ said Sarah, more in control now she was fully dressed. ‘I know it’s not always been easy—’

‘Oh, God. No, I don’t want to hear it.’

‘I never meant to hurt you.’

‘And yet you always do.’

Sarah got to her feet and faced her daughter. ‘Do you think you’re the only one who’s lonely? The only one who suffers?’

‘I don’t care about your loneliness. You’re married. To my father.’

‘And do you think it’s easy, being married to him?’

‘Shut up. Shut up.’

Isaac was in the corner, hastily putting on his clothes, his face darting between the women with an expression of misery.

‘Isaac isn’t yours, Olive, no more than he’s mine,’ Sarah said.

‘He is mine — we’ve — what are you going to tell Daddy? He won’t take you back.’

Sarah laughed. ‘I never knew you were so old-fashioned.’

‘Old-fashioned?’

‘You know his paintings don’t pay for all this, Liv. The finca, our travel, our lives. It’s not a question of “taking me back”. One day, Olive, you’ll understand what a mess everyone makes of their life. I don’t know a single couple who hasn’t had their problems. Marriage is long, you know—’

‘Stop. I don’t care. When did you first seduce Isaac?’

‘Darling, it was the other way round. In fact, not long after Daddy bought Isaac’s first painting.’

‘Just get out,’ said Olive.

Sarah started to walk out of the hut with all the insouciance of leaving a Mayfair restaurant, but she faltered at the dark. ‘I can’t see anything,’ she said.

‘I’m sure you know the way by now. Watch out for wolves.’

‘I’ll go with you,’ said Isaac.

‘You’re not going anywhere,’ said Olive, lifting the pistol in his direction.

‘Olive, you’re being so bloody foolish,’ said Sarah.

‘Just go.’

‘I’ll see you soon,’ Sarah said to Isaac. ‘Olive, come back when you’ve calmed down.’

Isaac and Olive watched as she disappeared into the night. ‘You shouldn’t have let her go alone like that,’ Isaac said.

‘I wouldn’t have shot her, you know. Or you.’ Olive lowered the gun and switched on the torch. In the bright white light, he looked wary. ‘For God’s sake, Isaac. Have you any idea what happened to your sister?’

‘What happened?’

‘No, I don’t suppose my mother bothered to tell you. How Teresa paid the price for your heroics.’

‘Do not hide things, Olive. I do not like it.’

‘That’s rich, coming from you.’

‘What have they done to her?’

The panic on his face was genuine, so she relented, telling him about Jorge and Gregorio, the hacking of Teresa’s hair, the castor oil, the midnight wanderings through the finca corridors.

His face crumpled in pain. ‘But why have you no hair?’ he asked.

‘To make her feel better. Less alone.’

Isaac looked beyond the torch’s orbit, out into the darkness. ‘So she told you I was here.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did she tell you about the child?’

‘No. Just that you’d be here.’

‘Did she mention Sarah?’

‘No. I asked her what she knew about love, that’s all.’

They were silent for a moment.

‘She is the cause of so much trouble,’ he said.

‘Yes. But at least now I see you for what you are. I suppose that was her intention.’

‘Do you truly think my sister has always had your best interests at heart?’ Isaac said. ‘She is a cat, always landing on her feet.’

‘You overestimate her power. You haven’t seen her. And anyway, she hasn’t hurt me. You have.’

‘Perhaps that’s true. And I am sorry for it. But you just see an idea of me that suits you. You never stop trying to create me. Your mother — how do you say? Clear-sighted. She sees me as I am. She does not want me to change.’

‘Yet. But probably she doesn’t have the imagination. And she’s ill.’

‘Is boredom an illness? She is not ill. It just suits you all to say she is. Even her.’

‘You took advantage.’

‘I did? Olive, I never promised you anything. I never told you I loved you. You heard and saw what you wanted.’

‘You slept with me, Isaac. Several times.’

‘Yes. And I said yes to the paintings too. We all make mistakes.’

‘What are you trying to say? The more I painted, the less you liked me?’

He looked away. ‘I’m trying to say that your mother — it is a different thing. It is a separate thing.’

‘It isn’t separate, Isaac. Her behaviour affects us all, just as my father’s does — and as mine does, I suppose. Did you stay here for her?’

He hesitated. Olive closed her eyes, as if in pain. ‘You think you’re the first,’ she said. ‘She only slept with you to punish me.’

He laughed, putting his hands up to his head. ‘You really are an artist, aren’t you? You think it’s all about you, and you never stop looking for pain. It isn’t about you, Olive. You have nothing to do with this.’

‘I’m going. Good luck, isn’t that what you said?’

Olive turned to the darkness, in the direction her mother had descended.

‘What will you do?’ he asked.

‘I’ll go back to England. You were right. I’ll find somewhere to live. Leave my parents to it. See if the art school will take me.’

‘That is a good plan.’

‘We’ll see. Here.’ Olive handed the pistol to Isaac. ‘You might need this more than me.’

‘And Tere?’ he asked, tucking it into the back of his belt. ‘Will you take her with you?’

Olive sighed. ‘I don’t know, Isaac. She doesn’t have any papers.’

‘She has had a hard time.’

‘A minute ago you were saying how much trouble she was.’

‘She is only sixteen.’

Olive couldn’t hide her surprise. ‘She said she was eighteen.’

‘Well, there you are. But if Jorge decides — if my father—’

‘You don’t need to tell me. I was there when it happened. When you were up here.’

He put out his hand. Olive looked down at it. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I’m glad I painted you with a green face.’

She had meant it as a joke; she had not really meant that he was naive, or sick. It was just an assertion that she was the artist, that she would paint him in the colours that she saw fit. She wanted Isaac to see that she was grown up enough to deal with this, even though she did not feel it. He would always be the man who had changed her life. But as she had gone to take his hand and hold it, and tell him this, Isaac crumpled at her feet.

It seemed unreal to her at first, as she stared down in horror, her torch darting over the blood that was gushing out of Isaac’s head, the red cascading into his eyes. And then she heard what she’d missed the first time; the muted pop of a gun firing in their direction. Two more shots ricocheted around the hills, their reports cracking the air, thinning to nothingness above the woods. She started to run.

Jorge, who had heard Olive’s pistol being fired half an hour earlier, had come up to the hills to see if he could find its source, and had been watching them from a distance. He couldn’t believe his luck; Isaac Robles in hiding, and his bald sister, handing him over another firearm. And the stupid girl had kept her torch on, so after shooting Isaac, he could follow her easily enough, the torchlight juddering all over the place as she stumbled down the hill.

Jorge fired three more times, watching as the torch tumbled, coming to rest like a small white moon upon the ground. He waited. Nothing moved. So close was the quality of silence that followed, so sickening that mute after-note of execution, that it seemed as if the fields were turning in on themselves, and the earth was giving way.