Bay of Secrets (45 page)

‘Rather conveniently,’ Trish added.

She could say that again. ‘How long have you been here?’ Ruby asked her. She seemed pretty established and at home.

‘Twenty years.’ Trish pulled a face. ‘I came over here with my boyfriend originally. We were trying to escape.’ She leaned confidentially towards Ruby. ‘Most people here want to escape from something.’

Ruby could imagine. What had Laura been trying to escape from? Her parents splitting up, perhaps? The loss of her mother? Her baby? She stared out at the ocean. And what happened when you no longer needed an escape route? Or when you got tired of the sun and the waves and the wind? It probably didn’t happen – for some people.

‘And you met Laura?’

‘Pretty much.’ Trish nodded. ‘I’d just been dumped and I was getting very low on cash. I was walking on the beach one day and I heard someone playing the guitar. The music seemed to weave its way through the wind and the waves. It was magical.’ She smiled.

‘Laura?’

‘Uh-huh.’ She sipped her drink. ‘We got talking and I told her what had happened. She said I could move into the beach house. “People do,” she said, “it’s no big deal.”’ She sat back. ‘It was a kind of open house. Anyone was
welcome so long as they didn’t abuse the hospitality.’ She gave Ruby a long look. ‘But it was a big deal to me, of course.’

‘Of course.’ And it gave Ruby a good feeling – like the one she’d got when she’d talked to Sister Julia about Laura. It was nice to know that your birth mother –
even though she’d given you away
, some small voice whispered – had actually been a decent person.

‘She helped a lot of people.’ Trish became thoughtful. ‘She did little things. She let people be. At first she let me share her food and her house, and then later I got another job waitressing in the tapas bar by the Old Harbour and I was able to give her something back – a bit of money for rent.’

‘And you never left?’

‘I never left.’

Ruby could see why. Even now, sitting here in this wicker chair, listening to the wind and the ocean, she could feel herself relaxing, unwinding and letting go, as if all the stress of the past months since her parents’ death were gradually leaking out of her. To be replaced by … What? Just a sense of being, she supposed. If that didn’t sound too cheesy.

‘What was she like?’ she asked Trish. She guessed that Laura had experienced that too – the sense of just being. It seemed to go with everything she’d heard about her so far.

‘Non-judgemental. Calm. Kind. A bit kooky.’ She smiled. ‘She used to play and sing in the Beach Bar back in Los Lagos.’

Ruby nodded. She had passed by the place earlier.

‘And in a bar in the village. In return for her meals and a bit of cash, that was all. But she created an atmosphere. A warmth.’ She smiled at Ruby. ‘People liked her. She did some cleaning too, in the holiday rentals.’

Ruby had seen them as well – a couple of complexes built on the beach on the outskirts of the village.

‘She lived simply,’ Trish said. ‘When I got a small inheritance through from my parents … ’ Her eyes dimmed – as if she too was remembering whatever it was that she had been escaping from – ‘I took over the responsibility of this place, and I try to keep the ethos going.’

‘Anyone welcome?’

‘More or less.’ Trish shrugged. ‘I tried to give Laura some money but she just wasn’t interested. It’s not about that, she used to say. I knew what she meant. But we can’t all be as strong as Laura.’

Ruby thought of the young girl who had gone to England and given her baby to Vivien and Tom Rae to bring up while she scooted back to Fuerteventura to live with her Spanish boyfriend, making a living from having her portrait painted by Enrique Marin, from playing and singing in bars, from cleaning in holiday rentals. Had she been strong? Was that why she had been able to give Ruby up to what she might have seen as a better life? Because she was strong? Had Ruby been coming at this from an entirely mistaken perspective? She frowned. She’d felt compassion for the girl who had lost her mother, who must have been at her wits’ end and who had wanted to be free of her own baby because she simply
couldn’t cope. And she knew that Vivien had felt that compassion too. But now Ruby realised that it might not be so simple. Laura had different values, a different belief system – perhaps she always had. And she had denied herself her own child because not only might Ruby not have fitted into the lifestyle Laura loved, but also because Laura was strong enough not to need to keep her. It was weird. But it made perfect sense.

‘Why did she leave?’ she asked Trish.

‘I don’t know.’ Trish spread her hands. ‘I got up one day and her bag was gone. Laura too. She’d just … moved on.’

‘For good, do you think?’

‘I don’t know why … ’ Trish hesitated. ‘And I probably shouldn’t tell you this. But ever since Laura left I’ve had a really strong feeling.’

‘What sort of a feeling?’ Ruby asked. What shouldn’t she tell her?

‘That she might come back one day.’

There was something different in his father’s manner, Andrés realised. Yes, he was still a miserable old bastard, probably more so than ever, since he was ill. But … Was it the cancer? Had the old man lost his fire? And what could he possibly have to tell him? That he was sorry? That he took back everything he’d ever done to belittle him or make him feel unloved? Some hope.

But his father didn’t enlarge on whatever it was he had to say. He just walked over to the opposite window and stared out towards the mountains. God alone knew how they were going to help him.

‘What about your subjects?’ Andrés asked Enrique, hoping to lead the way into the questions he wanted to ask. ‘Are you still painting the same stuff?’

‘You can see for yourself.’ Enrique flung out an arm to encompass the contents of the light and airy studio.

And yes, Andrés had already spotted some of his father’s favourite images on canvases in the studio: biblical scenes of fire and flood, dramatic and dripping colours of flame and blood; the colourful pantomime of the
festa
procession in the village, an ancient forest being razed to the ground, a
volcano pouring a river of hot, molten lava on to the brown earth …

But more to the point: ‘Are you still painting the women?’

‘Ah, the women.’ Enrique sat forward in his chair, looking pensive. ‘They are always too beautiful, don’t you think? The women? Too tempting?’

‘For Christ’s sake.’ Andrés strode off to the far end of the studio, ashamed, as he had often been in the past, of his own father. What was the point of being a great and talented artist if you misused your craft in that way? His mother had once said that every great artist must have his dark side, but Andrés couldn’t believe that. It was just a cop-out, wasn’t it, a way of excusing bad and inappropriate behaviour? Would he never change? He was a man in his seventies with lung cancer but he was still a lecherous old bastard – in his mind at least.

‘I confess that I went further than I should have.’

Andrés twisted around. Had he heard right? Was his father admitting that he had done wrong?

Enrique had raised his hand. But now he let it drop, looked rueful. ‘You are right. You were right – back then – to try and stop me.’

Andrés was speechless. In that case, what had all these years of exclusion been about? Why the hell hadn’t his father got in contact, told him that he would now be welcomed back home?

‘And that side of things finished a long time ago, I assure you.’ He nodded, though Andrés thought he could see a note
of wistfulness in his expression. Well, a man like Enrique Marin could not have changed that much.

‘Thank God for that.’ Andrés was pleased for his mother, at least. No doubt Enrique found other ways to humiliate her. But the women … That had been the worst.

‘I didn’t do right by your mother.’ Enrique got caught in another coughing fit.

He held his side. He was in pain, Andrés realised. He took a step forwards. ‘Papa?’

‘And I bloody hated you for pointing it out to me,’ he growled.

That made sense too. Andrés stopped in his tracks. There was Enrique, the great man. And there was his young son, a mere stripling, a nothing, telling his father what to do. Andrés was surprised now that he’d ever had the nerve. ‘What did I know?’ he said softly.

‘Exactly. What did you know?’ Enrique sat back in his chair and pulled the pack of cheroots out of his pocket. He tapped one out and held it between paint- and nicotine-stained fingers. Let out a deep-throated cackle. ‘Marriage, eh? They don’t warn you, do they? For some people it cannot be for ever. You try, but … Eugh!’ He took out a sleeve of matches and lit the cheroot, sucking and coughing at the same time.

Andrés wanted to try and stop him but what was the point? He would always go his own way – now, just as he had back then. No one could tell Enrique Marin what to do. And besides, whether he smoked or not, from what his mother had told him, it made little difference now.

‘For others, they try to find ways to make that marriage last.’ He looked appraisingly at Andrés. ‘Do you understand, boy?’

Boy
. He would always be that to Enrique Marin.
Boy
. But still, it was perhaps the first time that his father had ever spoken to him like this. If he had done it – even once – when Andrés was growing up, if he had tried to explain, if he had given him just a few minutes of his time now and then, things might have been very different. ‘I understand that you put me off marriage for ever,’ he said with feeling. What a role model his father had been.

‘Hah!’ Enrique’s shoulders shook. ‘I did, did I? Well, I’ve done something in my life worth boasting about then.’

Andrés shook his head in despair. There was no telling him. He might have admitted that he’d done wrong but he always had an excuse; an answer for everything. Other people managed to make marriages last for ever – or at least they didn’t go around seducing girls young enough to be their daughters. On which note …

Andrés took a deep breath. ‘I want to ask you about one of those women,’ he said. He moved closer to the far window.
Now or never.

Enrique drew hard on the cheroot and held back a cough. ‘Funny that,’ he said. ‘I had someone else here asking about one of the women.’

Ruby. Andrés straightened his shoulders. ‘Yes, I know.’

‘Ah.’ His father let out another harsh laugh. ‘I see how it is.’

Did he? Did he see how it was? Or at any rate how it could be? Andrés braced himself for the reply. At least he’d come here. At least he’d tried.

‘So you want to know about Laura.’ Enrique seemed deep in thought. ‘The English girl. The free spirit.’

‘I do, yes.’

‘Then I’ll show you what I showed her – your girlfriend, is it?’ Slowly he got to his feet, stubbed the cheroot out in a glass ashtray.

Andrés watched as he went over to where a pile of canvases lay stacked against the wall. He flicked through them, back bent, sighing and muttering. Pulled one away from the rest.

Andrés held his breath. What kind of a picture would it be? But as his father held it out at arm’s length to show him, he saw to his relief that it was inoffensive – a portrait of a woman on the beach. It was bloody good, actually. And it was Laura Woods,
si
, most definitely. He nodded. ‘Nice,’ he said. The artist in him had to give credit where it was due.

‘Plenty more where that came from.’ And the old man brought out another from the pile, then some drawings from a stack on the desk, then a charcoal sketch from a drawer in the chest by the wall, and finally a set of pastels done in a small spiral-bound notebook.

‘Bloody hell.’ Andrés looked at him, horrified. His father clearly hadn’t been able to get enough of her. Which seemed – didn’t it – to answer his question? They must have been
lovers. Which meant that his own father could have been responsible for the girl’s pregnancy. Which meant … Fuck. So where the hell did he go from here?

Looking at all these pictures of her – done, he imagined in the late seventies, Andrés was struck again by the resemblance between her and Ruby. It wasn’t obvious – you wouldn’t notice it at first glance unless you were looking at bone structure and face shape in the way that an artist might. But it was there. No doubt, it was there. It had always been there. And he’d been stupid really to try and deny it, to try and stop Ruby from coming over here. What had he thought to achieve? The truth would always come out. It was just that he couldn’t bear the thought, the possibility that now seemed almost a certainty.

‘Did you have sex with her?’ he asked.

Enrique snorted. ‘What kind of a question is that?’ He started putting everything back where it had come from.

Andrés’s fists were clenched. ‘I need to know.’

‘Ah.’ He shut the drawer and turned around. ‘I see how it is. You are worried. That girl … ’

‘Ruby.’

‘Ruby, yes.’

‘So, did you?’ He’d swear he’d kill him. If he had messed this up for Andrés by his philandering ways, he would kill him.

Enrique gazed at the picture of Laura on the beach and sighed heavily. He picked up the canvas and put it back in the pile. ‘I would have if I could have.’

So … In a rush, the anger left Andrés’s body. He hadn’t then. Thank God. ‘Truly?’ Even now he wondered if the old bastard was lying.

His father shot him a look of disgust. ‘Do you think I would not tell you?’

It must be true then. He felt his shoulders relax, his head stop spinning. ‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘What happened between you? Why are there so many paintings?’

‘She wouldn’t, would she?’ He wheezed and coughed. ‘That was part of the attraction, was it not? Is this not how these things work?’

Andrés shrugged. His father would know better than he about such things. But thank goodness she had more sense. To think that he had imagined … But it had all made a horrible sort of sense. Laura becoming pregnant here on the island with an unwanted child, going over to England, abandoning the baby …

‘I kept trying.’ His father stuck his hands in his pockets. ‘Who wouldn’t? Every time I painted her I thought, “This time.”’