‘I do not know.’
Olive grinned. ‘If he does, you’ll be alone in your cottage. You’ll have to come and live with me and my husband. I wouldn’t want you to be lonely.’
‘Your husband?’
‘Let’s call him . . . Boris. Boris Mon--Amour.’ Olive laughed and kicked her heels. ‘Oh, Boris,’ she shouted, opening her arms to the sky. ‘Come to me, take me!’ Breathless, she turned to Teresa and beamed. ‘I haven’t felt like this in ages.’
‘What do you feel?’ said Teresa.
‘Happy.’
Teresa drank in the image of this girl, in her Aran jumper and old brown shoes, who didn’t want her to be lonely, who had a foolish imaginary lover called Boris, and who had come to the ends of Spain to discover she was happy. And then she noticed the dried blood, crusted under Olive’s fingernails, and she remembered the axe, and Olive out here with her brother, and panic rose. She grabbed Olive’s hand.
‘What is it?’ Olive looked shocked by the contact, and stopped her rocking.
‘Your fingers.’
Olive stared down at her rust--coloured nails trapped in Teresa’s little paw. ‘I’m fine.’
‘It’s blood. Did he—-’
‘Did he what? It’s not blood, Teresa.’ Olive hesitated. ‘It’s paint.’
‘You are in pain?’
‘Not pain, paint. I didn’t clean up properly.’
‘I do not understand.’
Olive considered. ‘Teresa, if I told you something, would you promise to keep it to yourself?’
It was a risky question, riddled with unknowns, but the alternative was being shut away from Olive, and that was something Teresa could not countenance. ‘Of course,’ she said.
Olive held up her little finger. ‘Put your finger round mine. Do you swear?’
Teresa linked her little finger round Olive’s, feeling the intensity of Olive’s gaze. ‘Lo juro,’ she whispered. ‘I swear.’
Olive reached out and crossed her fingers over Teresa’s heart, and Teresa, as if under a spell, lifted her hand and marked Olive with the same gesture, the heat of the other girl’s skin coming through her woollen jumper.
‘Good,’ Olive said, standing up and pulling Teresa to her feet. From inside the house, they heard Sarah’s laughter. ‘Come on, follow me.’
5
As he sat with Sarah in the front east room, Isaac’s gaze flicked up to the ceiling. The room above their heads was the place, eleven years ago, where he’d lost his virginity. The finca had been unoccupied; his father had just taken the job of estate manager for the duchess. Isaac had stolen the keys from his father’s office and crept up with a -couple of his schoolfriends. More young -people from the surrounding villages turned up around midnight, and he’d got drunk properly for the first time in his life, two bottles of his father’s Tempranillo all to himself.
In the morning, he’d woken sprawled on one of the covered beds with a woman – Laetitia was her name – fast asleep beside him. When she woke, they started kissing, and in the drugged, dry--headed haze of his first hangover, Laetitia and he had sex. Laetitia, Isaac recalled now, had been twenty--seven years old. He had been fifteen. A vase had been smashed downstairs, and when his father appeared at their bedside with the pieces in his hands, he chased Laetitia out of the room and came back to beat his son. Not for the sex – just the vase. I thought you were a poof, his father had said. Thank God.
Isaac wondered where Laetitia was now. She’d be thirty--eight, about the age of Sarah, who was now pouring out their glasses of lemonade. He looked out of the window, down the slope towards the village path. He had never been able to hold Arazuelo in proportion. It never stayed the same, and yet it always seemed the same. It was a self--reflecting place, insular and welcoming by turns. He was continually trying to leave it, although he could never exactly say why. Arazuelo was part of his body. Madrid was the moon, Bilbao was outer space, Paris a place of biblical fantasy – but Arazuelo could overtake a man like no place else.
‘Mr Robles?’ Sarah Schloss was talking to him, and he smiled. He could hear his sister and Olive making their way up the creaking stairs to the first floor, and then up again to the attic. If Sarah heard them too, she made no comment. Sarah was smoking again, always smoking, and her legs were tucked up underneath her as she sat on the green sofa. ‘So, do you think it’s a good idea?’ she said.
Well, did he? He knew there was something wrong about it, that he should say no. But he couldn’t put his finger on it. ‘You must be terribly busy,’ she went on, in the face of his silence. ‘But I haven’t had one for years, and it will be such a surprise for my husband.’
‘Does he like surprises, se?ora?’
‘Well,’ she said. ‘He’s always surprising me.’
Isaac thought about her offer. That he was a good painter, he knew. He might even be a great painter one day. As he and Tere had grown up in the shadows, as Alfonso’s illegitimate children, his father had often bunged them money, on the understanding that Isaac would grow up and leave all this left--wing, artist stuff behind. Alfonso, on hearing that his son was now ‘consorting’ with union leaders, Anarchists and divorced women, had confronted him. Isaac had no intention of leaving his work at the San Telmo school, so Alfonso had stopped his cash flow. He hadn’t told Teresa.
He had very little income from the school, as cuts to government initiatives had affected its ability to run classes and pay the staff. In a few months, Isaac knew he was going to be very poor. But he could never ally with his father, who he considered the biggest hypocrite this side of Seville.
‘I pay very well,’ Sarah said. ‘Whatever you need.’