Teresa had never missed a person before. It revealed a dependency within herself which outraged her. Olive’s diverted attention was a pulsing wound, a peculiar type of torture; the loneliness hard to quantify when the source of it was before her, walking up and down the staircase, or round the orchard, out of the front door and away. Teresa never knew when the next pang of it was going to hit. And when it did, it was as if the floor had fallen away and her heart plunged into her mouth, stoppering her breath – and there was no one to catch her as she stumbled to a hidden corner of the finca to cry. What had happened to her?
Alone in her cottage at night, Teresa would sit up in bed and move through the pages of the old Vogue like a child with a story--book, savouring each image and paragraph, underlining with her nail the words she didn’t understand. She ran her finger down the side of the model’s face, before lifting her pillow and slipping the magazine under, a perpetual love note to no one but herself.
SARAH WAS GLOOMY, TOO. ALTHOUGH she didn’t weep, she did something worse – she would lie on her bed, not speaking, watching the blue smoke of her husband’s cigarettes disappear towards the ceiling. The telephone would ring and ring, and she would never answer it, and she wouldn’t let Teresa pick it up either. Teresa thought it odd that Sarah would not lift the receiver, to see if it was her husband. She wondered then if Sarah knew full well it would be a different voice entirely; a woman’s voice, whispering in timid German.
Teresa had begun to see Sarah’s faultlines – the telephone left ringing, the champagne bottles, empty by three in the afternoon, the uncracked spines of discarded books, the dark roots growing from her fading blonde head. She stopped dismissing them as a rich woman’s problems, and to her surprise, in her own pitiful state, began to feel pity. Life was a series of opportunities to survive, and in order to survive you had to lie constantly – to each other, and to yourself. Harold had the motor car, the business, the contacts, the cities and spaces he inhabited, manifold and varied. Sarah, despite her obvious wealth, had just this one bedroom and her beauty, a rigid mask that was setting her into an existential rot.
‘I WAS THE ONE WHO discovered him,’ Sarah said to Teresa. It was a late night, and Olive was upstairs. They could hear her, pacing back and forth. Despite everything, Teresa longed to go up there, to knock and be admitted, to see what Olive was painting. Forcing herself to stay put, she picked another camisole from off the floor.
‘I was the one who suggested Isaac painted for us in the first place,’ Sarah went on. ‘And I get no thanks. Harold as usual takes the reins, riding off into the sunset. I don’t even get to keep the painting, because of course he has to go and sell it. He said, “Why would we keep it here, where only the chickens will see it?” Because it was a painting of me, for him, for Christ’s sake.’
Outside, the cicadas had started to rasp in concert, so aggressively that it sounded as if the grass was a sea of vibrating strings. Teresa marvelled that Sarah had managed to see herself in the images of Santa Justa in the Well. Couldn’t they all see that Olive’s painting was of the same woman, repeated twice, once in her glory and again in her despair? Perhaps, Teresa supposed, if you were determined to see yourself in a certain way, you would – however much the evidence presented otherwise.
‘It should have stayed with us,’ Sarah said. ‘It’s wonderful for your brother, of course, but it’s the principle of the thing. It was something he did for us. And Harold just hands it over to the highest bidder.’
‘Did Isaac accept your money, se?ora?’
‘No,’ said Sarah. ‘I did try. I hope he’s happy with Peggy Guggenheim’s, that’s all I can say.’
Teresa knew that Isaac had travelled to Malaga to pick up the money wired from Paris, and gone straight to the Workers’ General Union headquarters, donating two--thirds of it to pay for agitating pamphlets, clothes, an emergency fund for those laid off, and food. In some ways, you had to admire the efficacy of Olive’s plan, turning her painting into a political cause with her father the unwitting middleman in Paris. Isaac had kept the last third of the money, a fact which incensed Teresa. She’d told her brother to give it back to Olive, but he’d said that Olive wanted him to keep it. ‘I have to eat,’ he’d said. ‘We have to eat. Or do you fancy eating rats this year?’
Rats. Was that why she’d been dreaming about rats?
‘Teresa, are you listening to me?’
‘Yes, se?ora,’ Teresa said to Sarah, folding up the last of her camisoles and placing them in the wardrobe drawer.
‘I was his inspiration.’
‘I am sure he is very grateful.’
‘Do you think so? Oh, Teresa. I wish something would happen. I’m really beginning to miss London.’
Teresa plunged her hands into Sarah’s drawer of satins and gripped her fists out of her mistress’s sight. Then go, and take me with you, she screamed silently, even though she knew this was an impossibility. For all the pity she showed Sarah Schloss, the woman would never do such a thing in return.
13
Her father’s absence made it easier for Olive to see Isaac, and they met several times a week, usually in his cottage when Teresa was in the finca working and Sarah was taking her afternoon rest. For days afterwards, Olive could almost physically summon the memory of their meetings, how it felt when Isaac entered her – the indescribable sensation of making space for him as he pushed deeper, and what she believed was his utter bliss, mirrored by that of hers.