Olive gestured at The Orchard. ‘Not like this, not like this!’ She pressed her forehead against the peeling wooden shutter. ‘And if he doesn’t like it, how can we be sure he’ll ship it to my father? It has to go soon. We’ll lose momentum with the Guggenheim woman.’
‘I am sure she will wait for genius.’
Olive wrinkled her nose. ‘That’s a word that gets bandied about too much. I’m not a genius. I just work hard.’
‘Well, she will wait. And if my brother will not do it, I can take it to the port myself, se?orita.’
‘You?’
‘You can trust me.’
Olive kept her face hidden, still leaning her forehead on the shutter. ‘You broke my trust when you put that painting on the easel. I can never work out if you’re my friend or not.’
Teresa was silent for a moment. ‘Se?orita.’ She couldn’t hide her pain. Sometimes Olive was as coquettish as her mother, for all her determination to be different. ‘You cannot see? You can trust me with your life.’
Olive lifted her head and smiled. ‘Never mind about my life, Tere. Do you mean it about the painting? You’ll really take it to the port?’
‘Yes.’
Olive peered down the slope towards the gate, through which Isaac had long disappeared. ‘I’ve never had a true friend.’
‘Neither have I.’
‘Have you ever been in love? Have you ever been with a man?’
‘I have not.’
‘Been with a man – or been in love?’
‘Been with a man.’
Olive turned to her. ‘But you’ve been in love.’
Teresa felt her cheeks flame. ‘No. I do not think so. I do not know.’
‘You would know, if you were. Aha! There is someone. Who is it? Is he in the village?’
‘Yes,’ Teresa said. ‘In the village. But he died.’
‘Oh no – it wasn’t that boy Adrián?’
‘Yes,’ Teresa lied.
‘Oh, Tere. I’m so sorry.’
Teresa in turn apologized silently to Adrián. She’d used him for her own rescue, which was not much better than the politicians had done, dragging the boy’s exposed body through Malaga as a piece of propaganda. Then again, Teresa thought miserably, as Olive smiled at her, waiting to understand one’s feelings does seem the same as being indebted to a corpse.
THAT NIGHT, TERESA DID NOT go back to the cottage. She was permitted to install herself in the corner of Olive’s attic, sorting the artist’s brushes and her clothes in the heady bliss that follows a truce. Olive revealed that she had been painting a portrait of Isaac. It had been a long time coming, Teresa thought – given the speed with which the girl could usually work, the sketchbooks overflowing with the pencilled planes of his face.
Glancing over at Olive by the easel, Isaac’s features developing on the wood before her, Teresa could see it was an astonishing beginning. He had greenish skin, and a consumptive, claustrophobic look in his eye. But his head seemed on fire, sweeps of dandelion and canary yellows up to the top of the painting, where red flecks were being spattered like the wake of murderous thoughts. It was a livid rendering, and Olive looked to be as if in a trance. Teresa knew that the balance between her brother and this girl wasn’t right, but she doubted Olive was even aware of the layers of her infatuation and fear, manifesting in front of her.
OLIVE FINISHED HER FIRST GO at Isaac in the small hours. At three in the morning, exhausted, she lay back on her mattress, staring at the roof beams and flaking ceiling plaster, its rough raised corners illuminated by the weak glow from her bedside candle. A wolf howled, deep and distant in the mountains.
‘Come and sleep here,’ she said to Teresa. Teresa, who’d been reading one of Olive’s books in the corner, put it down and obeyed, climbing onto the old mattress, lying rigidly next to Olive under the dusky pink coverlet, unable to move for fear that to do so might expel her from this magic kingdom.
They lay side by side, staring at the ceiling together as the atmosphere lightened in the room, the energy of Olive’s work and concentration dissipating into the air, until all that was left was the glowing green face of Isaac on the easel. Beyond the window, into the land, no rooster or dog or human cry broke their silence as they fell asleep, fully clothed.
?
Two days later, Olive decided to come with Teresa to Malaga, ‘to make a day of it,’ she said, ‘and why not?’
‘But how long are you going to be?’ asked Sarah. Teresa supposed she was agitated, because for the first time in months she was going to be alone.
‘We’re going to the shipping office for Mr Robles, and then I thought we’d have a lemonade in Calle Larios,’ said Olive.
‘Well, make sure you get that farmer fellow to bring you back before nightfall.’
‘I promise.’
‘He isn’t a red, is he?’
‘Mother.’
The Orchard was a large painting, and it took two of them to carry it down the finca path, as if it was a stretcher missing a body. Teresa looked back up at the house and saw Sarah watching, staying at the window right until they were down in the valley towards the village and she disappeared from their sight. The mule man was waiting for them in the town square. Teresa tried to ignore the uneasy feeling in her gut when she imagined Sarah, on her own up there. She couldn’t pinpoint the worry, so she focused instead on the pleasure of a day trip. She was in her best blue dress, and she’d washed her hair and spritzed herself with the distilled orange blossom Rosa Morales, the doctor’s daughter, sold out of her kitchen. It could almost be feria time, for the sense of abandon and holiday Teresa felt.