Nyctophobia (18 page)

‘Actually it was me who chose it,’ I said defensively, ‘It’s not very far from the coast, and there’s a village nearby. I’ve already made friends there.’

‘But Calico darling, there’s no
culture
. I mean what on earth do people do of an evening? How’s my darling little girl?’

Bobbie was staying back in a corner of the drawing room, and had to be drawn forward to accept a branding kiss. ‘Look at you,’ Anne cooed, ‘so big and grown-up, and that colouring, so very Spanish, with the dark eyes and such severe hair.’ Bobbie was on her best behaviour, but was visibly anxious to get away. Rosita served lunch, but she and Julieta wisely left to eat in the peace and seclusion of the atrium, the invisible lines of class making themselves felt.

‘I was thinking that perhaps Roberta would like to come and stay with me in Somerset,’ said Anne as we finished our salads. ‘You’d love it, there are horses and lots of other little girls like you. And as you’re not at a proper school you could come whenever you like.’ It wasn’t the right thing to say, or the right way to say it. Bobbie remained silent.

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ I replied. ‘Bobbie’s being tutored here for now, but she’s about to start school at the coast. And anyway, Mateo wouldn’t like it.’

‘He wouldn’t or you wouldn’t? Why would you want to deny me the pleasure of having a little visit? It’s not as if you’re going to have any children of your own, is it?’ She topped up her glass for the third time.

‘Bobbie, why don’t you see if Senora Delgadillo has left some chocolate cake in the kitchen?’ I said. The girl slipped gratefully from her chair and ran off. ‘Why did you have to say that?’ I asked.

Anne’s eyes widened in mock-innocence. ‘I was only stating a fact, darling. You remember what the doctor said. After that terrible termination and all those complications, it’s hardly likely you’ll ever be able to conceive. We all have to make choices in our lives. You always did make the wrong ones.’

‘I just wanted to be happy. That meant getting away from you.’

‘Hm. I suppose you probably regret having had the termination, and now you like to think of Roberta as your own daughter. That’s only natural. Oh.’ Her stare held an ill-concealed look of triumph. ‘Mateo doesn’t know, does he? Of course, you wouldn’t have told him. Surely there are no secrets between the two of you?’

‘He mustn’t ever know,’ I said quietly, staring down at my plate.

‘Because he’s a Catholic, I suppose. I thought they were more modern these days. Particularly after all those skeletons have fallen out of their own cupboards. I mean, they could hardly be critical of anyone else, could they? Well don’t worry, your secret is safe with me.’

No it’s not,
I thought,
it can never be. Not if it gives you some power over me.

‘Speaking of which, are you still on your meds? You know how you get if you stop taking them. You always had an overactive imagination.’

‘It wasn’t my imagination, and you know it, mother.’ I had been determined to say nothing about the past, but it was a matter of self-defence now.

Anne raised a hand to stop me. ‘Please don’t start all that again. We’ve been over it a hundred times.’

‘And yet you still won’t admit the truth, even to yourself.’

She turned and held my eyes. ‘Your father left because he knew he was ill, and he wanted to spare us the pain of watching him die.’

‘And why do you think I stopped eating before he left? Why do you think I cut myself?’

She sighed. ‘You chose to do it. You entertained these – fantasies –’

‘I wanted to make myself ugly. I wanted to be so unbearable to look at that he would never try to touch me again.’

‘Yes, I’ve heard all this many times before. I thought perhaps that now the poor man was in his grave you could finally let it rest.’

‘Why did you always believe him over me? I’m your daughter –’

‘And he was my
husband
. For Heaven’s sake can’t we speak of something else? It’s a lovely sunny day.’ She drained her glass of rosé and refilled it.

‘As you wish.’ I let silence fall between us.

‘You’re happy here?’

‘Yes, very much so.’

Anne looked longingly at the garden and made a show of checking her watch. ‘Perhaps I could stay for a while, if Mateo’s back at five. It would be nice to see that deliciously handsome profile again.’

In that instant I knew what she was up to. ‘You’re not having Bobbie come to stay,’ I said. ‘You’re just playing your usual games.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, darling, why would I do that?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps you just want to get back at me –’

‘For what? For doing drugs and getting pregnant and falling down the stairs at some drunken party? For trying to kill yourself?’

‘For accusing my father –’

‘Why is it that all little girls accuse their fathers these days? They’ve read about it in the papers and create false memories to blackmail their parents –’

‘– and for denying you grandchildren.’

‘I wish you could hear yourself, Calico. All this dreadful pop-psychology. I only wanted what was best for you. If only you hadn’t spent so much time trying to hurt me. You were always your father’s girl.’

‘And the only way he could get away from you was by dying.’

‘That’s an evil thing to say. Poor Mateo, I don’t suppose he had an inkling of what he was getting himself into, thinking he was marrying a blushing English rose.’

‘I think it’s time you left,’ I said, rising from the table. ‘I don’t need you trying to poison my husband against me.’

Anne had one last weapon to use. ‘I don’t suppose,’ she said imperiously, ‘that you told him you were sectioned.’

‘I got sick because you refused to admit what was happening right under your nose.’

‘No, Calico, you made yourself sick because you simply couldn’t handle the real world.’

‘Well I’m married now and I have a step-daughter, and I’m handling this world perfectly well,’ I said. ‘I have friends and a life and people who treat me with honesty and respect, which is more than you ever gave me.’

I think Anne’s slap came as a shock to both of us. She stepped back from the table, looking at her open right palm.

I rose and moved away, my hand to my burning cheek. A plate slid off the dining room dresser behind me and split in two on the boards. Moments later my mother had put on her coat and was leaving in a display of theatrical temper, and as I watched her rush out to her car I was just glad that it was over once and for all.

After all the years of pretending that there were still ties between us, there was no more need for us to try and behave like mother and daughter. We were enemies.

I went to the door, expecting to hear the car crunch gears and speed away, then returned to the dining room. My hands shook violently as I cleared up the broken plate and binned the pieces. To calm myself, I went to sit in the glass atrium. When Bobbie finally came back and woke me an hour later, it was evident that she had not heard our argument, and all was right once more.

I decided that if I spoke to Anne again – and I would, because in a month or so she would pretend we had never fought and would Skype me to chat about her work – I would always keep a wide, cold ocean between us.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The Storm

‘I
HEARD YOU
were coming to see Maria,’ said Jordi, holding open the door into the little library. ‘I’m glad I could catch you on the way.’

‘I guess it’s impossible to do anything in this town without everyone knowing,’ I said, following him into the gloom. It was a pleasant kind of dimness, not like the smothering dark deep inside Hyperion House.

Jordi pulled back the shutters from the small window nearest the books. ‘We have nothing else to talk about here. I found the pages you were looking for. Here,
The Hyperion Society.
It had fallen behind the shelf.’ He proudly handed me a tattered final section to the monograph. ‘It was written and published by Marcos Condemaine for the British Architectural Library.’

I turned it over. ‘Did you read it?’

‘Sure. He wanted to explain the principles on which his older cousin built the house. The Hyperion Society was basically a bunch of philanthropists who believed they could improve society by studying the alignment of the stars.’

‘Studying alignments? You mean they were astrologers?’

‘Maybe not so much astrologers, as the followers of Hyperion,’ he said with a shrug. ‘I don’t know what that means either, but maybe you can find this out.’

‘Some kind of philosophical group, perhaps. Something founded on Greek ideals?’

‘I don’t know. There are still some pages missing but I think they’ve gone forever. We have rats in the annexe, they chew through everything.’

I gave the matter some thought. ‘Elena Condemaine died in an asylum and her cousin Marcos took over the house until Franco’s men requisitioned it. It would be useful to know why her children didn’t inherit.’

He grinned. ‘Don’t worry, I will keep looking for you.’

‘That’s really kind of you, Jordi, but I don’t want to take you away from your work.’

‘There is nothing to do here,’ he shrugged. ‘It’s more interesting to help you.’

I took the booklet and headed through the baking white streets to Maria’s shop. My knowledge of Hyperion House remained frustratingly opaque. The previous night I had sat in the dining room with Bobbie and annotated what I had written so far. There were too many gaps in the story to write a full history of the building yet. I felt uncomfortable in the drawing room, knowing that something on the other side of its connecting door brought my worst fears to life, even if they turned out to be only in my imagination. I was scared of the dark, but there was a more disturbing place inside my head.

Maria Gonzales had a laugh like dried leaves being swept up, the result of smoking herbal cigarettes that had left her with a worse cough than any sailor’s rolling tobacco might have done. Several ladies were seated in her shop surrounded by dusty jars and frightening hand-knitted clowns that no-one would ever buy, but Maria didn’t care. She survived on the money her sons sent her, and the store was somewhere for the ladies to sit that wouldn’t charge them. When they tired of Lola whisking their wineglasses away in the town square, they came here to complain about the world.

‘
Hhhh
yperion
Hhhh
ouse,’ said Maria, using far too many Hs before continuing in Spanish.

‘She says she doesn’t know why you didn’t ask her about it in the first place,’ Celestia translated.

‘It didn’t occur to me,’ I replied.

‘She says you didn’t tell her you were writing a book. I told you, Maria, you don’t remember anything.’

Maria said something and rasped with laughter again. ‘She says she buried two husbands and she remembers every detail of their funerals,’ explained Celestia.

‘What do you know about the house?’ I asked, but Maria was talking to another woman now who also only spoke Spanish, even though she seemed to understand questions in English. I was still at the stage where I could roughly follow conversations but not express myself.

‘You remember Amancio Lueches?’ said Maria in a sudden impassioned burst of heavily accented English. ‘Healthy and happy one day, dead the next.’

The other woman replied in Spanish and they both laughed again. ‘She says the Devil took him,’ said Celestia, in some hilarity at the idea.

‘This was the man who owned Hyperion House before we bought it?’ I asked.

‘The last of the Condemaine family,’ Celestia confirmed. ‘I think they were all either Condemaines or Lueches, the two sides of the family.’

‘Did any of you ever go over there?’

‘Oh no, we never went near the house. The Condemaines were private people,’ said another of the women. ‘They were better left alone. They didn’t need anyone.’

‘But I read that Senor Lueches was taken away suffering from dehydration…’

‘After his wife died he stopped caring for himself,’ she said. ‘We thought the state would buy the house because it had once been an observatory. It should have gone to the state. But it didn’t meet the requirements –’

Because it turned out not to be an observatory at all,
I thought.

‘– so it continued in private hands. Of course we’re glad it did,’ she added hastily. ‘You are nice people, and the little girl –’

‘
Una nina tan bonita,’
said Maria, and they all agreed.

Maria’s friend added something in Spanish. ‘She says they all avoided the house because of the
loco
old man,’ Celestia told me.

‘But you’d come back to the house now, all of you? If we held another party, for the adults this time?’

‘
Ay, no!
’ Maria and her friend threw up their hands. ‘Ask Jerardo,’ said Maria, continuing to Celestia in Spanish.

‘She says Jerardo won’t set foot inside the house itself, he says it has a history of madness,’ said Celestia. ‘The Condemaines, very nice people but all
loco
.’ I wanted to tell her that I was sure Jerardo had been inside – he had helped Mateo move the chest of drawers – but I knew they wouldn’t listen.

Maria leaned forward and waved a wrinkled finger at me. ‘Ask your Rosita, she knows about
Hhhh
yperion. She knows everything. None of the older women will
ever
go there.’

‘I’ll come back anytime,’ said Celestia brightly, ‘if you’re serving a decent drop of plonk.’ We raised our glasses in a toast, touching them together.

‘I was thinking of having a few people over for drinks on Friday, after my husband gets back from Madrid,’ I said. ‘The fiesta’s on Saturday, isn’t it? It would make a good start to the weekend.’

‘There will be a
muy
malo
storm on Saturday,’ said Maria, squinting up at the clear azure sky.

‘Really?’ I had already checked Accuweather on my mobile; the weather was due to remain the same as always, hot and clear and fine. I didn’t want to argue, but the prediction seemed typically doom-laden.