You could just about call it figurative, but it was not realistic. It had a new form of surreality Olive had never executed before. For all its grounded colours on the fields – ochres and grasshopper--greens, the folkloric tenderness of russet furrows and mustard browns – there was something otherworldly about the scene. The sky was a boon of promise. The fields were a cornucopia of cereal crops and apples, olives and oranges. The orchard was so lush you might call it a jungle, and the empty fountain had turned into a living spring, the satyr’s canton now gushing full of water. The finca rose up like a welcoming palace, her father’s house with many mansions, its windows huge and open to her gaze. The brush strokes were loose, and colour dominated technical accuracy.
Olive fell asleep beside it at four in the morning. The next day, she stood before the painting as the sun cracked low along the sky beyond her window. She never knew she was capable of such work. She had made, for the first time, a picture of such movement and excess and fecundity that she felt almost shocked. It was a stubborn ideal; a paradise on earth, and the irony was it had only come from this place, this lonely part of Spain to which her parents had dragged her.
Stiffly, Olive moved to the trunk where the letter from the art school was hidden. She pulled it out, read it, smoothed it, folded it neatly, and kissed it, placing it back at the bottom of the trunk, buried deep and out of sight.
4
Last year,’ Isaac said, in English, ‘I meet a man waiting for my train at Barcelona station. A journalist. We talk. He tells to me, “It is coming. It has happened before and it is going to happen again.” ’
‘What’s happened before?’ Olive asked. She was standing with Isaac in the orchard, helping gather the chopped wood as he sliced it in half with his axe. She turned briefly towards the house, and saw a shadow move behind the lace curtains of her mother’s room. To hell with her; this was Olive’s time with him. Sarah always wanted to be the centre of attention, and was very good at it, but Olive loved these stolen moments in Isaac’s company.
Out of the corner of her eye she watched his shirt lift, and saw the flash of dark brown flesh, a trail of hair leading away. She felt such pleasure when he handed her the split pieces of wood, as if he were offering her a bouquet. From a decade of devouring novels, Olive knew that charming men were deadly. Their story had been played down the centuries, unharmed through the pages, whilst girls were blamed and girls were lost, or girls were garlanded, mute as statues. Be Vigilant and Prize Your Virginity was a subtitle many of these stories could have taken, most of them written by men. Olive knew all this and she didn’t care. She didn’t give a damn.
He had been coming to the house with less regularity than Teresa, partly because of his job in Malaga, and partly because he did not have as much of an excuse. It pleased Olive so much to see that their piles of firewood were probably the highest for several miles. If he wanted to tell her about the state of his country, she was more than happy to listen.
He had not noticed her new hairstyle, the gobs of her mother’s pomade she had applied, to try and make it smooth and slick. These were not the sort of things a serious--minded man might notice, of course, Olive supposed. Not when his country was in a state of unrest. Not when he was thinking of the -people. She decided that to make the most of her time with him, it would pay to be more politically aware.
‘What happened before? Chapel tombs smashed open, the corpses of nuns on the ground,’ said Isaac. ‘Houses like this one, robbed.’ They both turned back to look at the finca, and the figure at the curtains dipped rapidly away. ‘They say a priest was taken from his sacristy and left hanging on a tree, found next morning with his balls in his mouth.’
‘Isaac!’ Olive cringed. The word balls made her nervous, and she felt childish.
‘The newspapers make it seem worse than it is – but they never ask the question as to why the looting happens in the first place. So, this journalist.’
‘Yes?’
‘He starts talking to me about a polar bear.’
‘A polar bear?’
‘Yes. He tells me he interviewed a duke in his house,’ Isaac said, laying the wood blocks on her open hands. Olive saw how the tips of her fingers were stained red. She hadn’t stopped painting since meeting him. She was working on smaller canvases, filling notebooks with sketches; it was as if she had plugged herself in – to what, exactly, she wasn’t entirely sure – and although she was terrified that this long seam of inspiration was going to end, she felt that as long as Isaac was close, and that she was ready for it, for him, her output might continue.
She knew that by staying down here, she had avoided a confrontation about her true self – no art--school confession with her father was required. She was still stuck with her parents, but she was happier than she’d been in a long time.
‘He told me the duke had a polar bear in his drawing room,’ Isaac was saying. ‘Lo había cazado?’
‘He’d hunted it down.’
‘Yes. With a gun.’
Olive curled her fingers up, hoping he might comment on their dyed appearance, so she could say, Oh, I paint a bit too. Would you like to see? He would come and see the painting and reply, This is extraordinary, you are extraordinary. How did I not see? And then they would kiss, him taking her face in his hands, bending down to brush his lips on hers, full of astonishment at how good she was. She so desperately wanted him to see how good she was.
But Isaac did not notice her fingers, and so Olive turned instead to the anomalous polar bear in her mind’s eye, a piece of the Arctic, a grotesquery in the Spanish heat, the barbarity and expense of it, the chill in the heart of the home. ‘Why did you tell me about that priest?’ she asked, trying to assert herself. ‘Were you trying to frighten me?’
‘No. I want you to see what’s happening here. So when you go home, you will tell other -people.’
‘I’m not going home, Isaac.’
She waited for him to express his pleasure, but he did not. ‘Isaac, you do know I’m not like my parents, don’t you?’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘They’re always frightened of things. I’m not.’