Autumn in Catalonia (9 page)

‘Who, my love? Who can hide you that Sergi doesn’t know about? And who can hide you when the baby comes?’

Carla met her grandmother’s eyes and read such a sombre message that she was filled with dread. ‘So what can I do?’ This time her voice would barely come.

Maria reached out and took her hand. ‘I don’t know, child. I don’t know. Perhaps Victor …’

‘Victor?’

‘I just thought maybe he might know someone who can
hide you in the hills. One of his friends with sheep. It’s not what I would want, with the baby coming, but maybe I could go with you, and together we might manage.’

Maria’s voice was hesitant, anxious, and Carla looked at her in despair. To have the baby in a mountain hamlet, or even a hillside shed? She gazed into Grandma’s troubled face and thought, she’s frightened, as frightened as me.

It was Martin who broke the silence.

‘There may be something else we should try.’

‘Something else?’

‘I think I should go back to see your mother.’

Neither Carla nor Maria spoke. Carla wasn’t even sure what he was saying. He continued, his voice growing stronger and more persuasive as he gathered momentum.

‘I don’t think your mother knows that you’re pregnant or what your father is doing to you – not all of it, anyway. I think she needs to be told, and I want to go up there and tell her. You don’t think she’ll help you, but no one has given her a chance, and you’ve run out of other options.’

He held Carla’s gaze, and his eyes were alive with conviction. Her own brain felt dead in comparison. She didn’t agree with him, she knew that, but she was beginning to respect his intelligence, and she had no response to his conviction. But still she couldn’t answer him, and Maria stayed equally silent. It didn’t stop him, and he ploughed on persuasively.

‘If I go up there tomorrow by the earliest bus, I should get to the house before lunchtime. And if Joana lets Toni bring me back I can be here by evening. Do you think your father will feel he needs to work so fast that he’ll raid this
apartment? I can’t see it – he could only do that with the police, surely, and he’d have to have you arrested, wouldn’t he? I think he’ll try to do something less embarrassing to him than that if he can, and maybe lift you in the street – the street was so empty today that a couple of men in a car could pull up and bundle you inside before anyone noticed.’

Carla shivered, and Martin grabbed her arm across the table. ‘Yes, but that’s good news, in a way, Carla! If that’s the easiest way to remove you, then for now you’ll be safe as long as you just stay indoors, and that gives me time to go up and see your mother.’

‘And if she refuses to help?’ It was Maria’s troubled voice that broke into his onslaught.

He paused, but not for long. ‘If she refuses to help us, we can look at other options. Not some mountain hideout, though – we can do better than that. My sister – Luis’s first-born – is married to a Spanish exile in France, and before I left home he gave me the address of his family by the border with France, in La Jonquera, and if we need to I could take you to them, and then get you out to France afterwards. We must be able to get you out somehow.’

‘No!’ Carla was surprised by her own cry. ‘I won’t run away to France! I could never come back, afterwards, and then what will happen when Luc gets out of prison? I have to be somewhere where Grandma can find me.’

Martin was silenced, but his ideas were taking root nevertheless.

‘They won’t take your baby away from you in France,’ Grandma said.

‘And when Luc is freed we can get him to France as
well,’ agreed Martin. ‘But first will you let me go up to the hill house?’

Carla thought back to the last time she had been to the hill house. It would be two summers ago, and relations between her and Joana had never been more strained. Sergi had been there with some friends, for the hunting, and his daughter’s mere presence had annoyed him. What on earth is that girl wearing, he’d asked her mother? What kind of specimen is she? She’s not even half a woman!

She’d clashed with one of his guests too, when he’d asked her why on earth she wanted to get a degree. Mama had agreed with the guest.

‘It would seem that an education is doing nothing to improve my daughter’s manners, Señor, and I apologise on her behalf. Carla is the product of a spoilt background, I’m afraid.’

Later that night Sergi had struck Carla hard, twice, snapping her head from side to side, and Joana had stood by and watched him. He’d threatened to take her out of the university, and after that first threat she’d learnt to toe the line, and stay in the background whenever she was with them.

What on earth was it that Martin had seen in her mother that made him think she would want to help? She asked him, and all he could reply was that Joana had vulnerable eyes.

‘She’s got you besotted,’ she protested, exasperated. She didn’t want to ask her mother for help!

But she was too desperate now to be proud, too frightened to refuse even the remotest possibility of assistance.

‘You won’t get any joy from my mother,’ she told him eventually. ‘I know you won’t, but you’re right that as things stand I have nothing to lose. By all means, cousin, go up there tomorrow and see what she says. I’ll stay indoors and we’ll lock the doors. But Martin?’

‘Yes?’

‘Take care what you tell her! She’s spent her life dong whatever my father wants, and she could even turn your visit against us, and make trouble for us.’

‘More than we’re in right now?’

‘No,’ she said finally, admitting defeat, ‘Nothing can be worse than the trouble we’re in right now.’

The autumn day had grown warm and very still, and not a hint of a breeze stirred Joana’s afternoon peace on the vast veranda. In the parched heat of August such stillness would have been uncomfortable, and the hill house was designed to capture the summer breezes to cool its dark rooms and shaded terraces. But now, in October, this airless Indian summer was a blessing. It held off the sharp mountain winds of winter, which whistled relentlessly around the house and reminded you that it was meant for summer living.

Joana leant back on the cane sofa and lifted her bare feet from the cold tiles. She placed a cushion behind her head and closed her eyes. Even from the depths of the veranda where she lay, she could hear the chirping of the mating crickets in the wild grasses that surrounded the house, burying their eggs before themselves dying off in the winter cold. And from somewhere nearby came the drone of a bee
drinking from the autumn crocuses. Soon Gabriel would come up from the village to harvest this year’s honey from the hives, and the drone bees would die to keep the queen alive. Joana twitched the cushion behind her and shifted position restlessly, then gave an angry shake. It was all too inevitable, too peaceful, too inert.

Reaching out her hand, her eyes half closed, she found her glass of champagne and raised it to her lips. The bubbles trickled slowly down her throat and seemed to ease an itching just behind the vocal chords. She relaxed again and dozed gently, excluding the world from her shaded niche. Beyond the veranda the hillside lay becalmed.

Paula shuffled out from the house and lifted the empty glass from her hand. Joana didn’t move. The half slumber was too precious to let it slip away, and while she appeared to sleep she was safe from Paula’s grumblings. Her soft hair tickled her cheek, and it felt like a caress. She still had beautiful hair, she knew, despite her forty-one years. She had been courted for those golden curls, once upon a time, but it felt like a long time ago.

Joana smiled in her near sleep, remembering those days of innocence and hope, before the war came home to them and all was lost. It was Sergi who’d rescued her then. Sergi who also loved her, who wanted her so badly. She lay on Sergi’s chair, on Sergi’s veranda, and tried to keep the picture.

Paula shuffled back out onto the veranda with a pot of coffee. Smelling it, Joana opened her eyes. Paula was only trying to make her drink something else than her after-lunch champagne, but the coffee smelt good nevertheless.
Sergi always had the best coffee in his houses. He spoke of a supplier in South America – Columbia, he said. Joana suspected it came as a free gift from some local importer in need of Sergi’s favour.

Putting the pot down on the long table, Paula looked over the wall to call Toni in for his coffee. Suddenly she held up her hand to shade her eyes, looking far down the hillside.

‘Is Toni not around?’ Joana asked.

‘Not that I can see. But there’s someone walking up the track towards the house, down there.’ Paula gestured away down the hill.

‘Gabriel?’

‘When did old Gabriel ever walk up as far as here?’ Paula scoffed. ‘He waits for Toni to fetch him, does our Gabriel. No, this is a young man, I’d say. I think it’s that same French man that came here the other day – the one who called himself your cousin.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You didn’t know where she was!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘So Carla?’

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

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