As the days progressed, Olive waited for the crust of Teresa’s silence to crack open. Silence like this was Harold’s worst nightmare. He thought -people should speak, should voice their pain. He became all bluster, trying to force the issue of the prone girl lying up in one of his rooms. But Olive was sure it was coming; she could almost taste the power of Teresa’s humiliation in the air, damming up the door of the spare bedroom, soon to break.
Harold said that as soon as Teresa was better and set up back in her cottage, they were going over the border into Gibraltar. As for Isaac, he had made his bed and was going to have to lie in it. Trying to sleep in her own bed in the attic, Olive could barely picture a proper pavement, a cultivated park, the slate roofs of Curzon Street and Berkeley Square wet with rain. To get to London meant to leaping a metaphysical boundary as much as a country’s border, and she didn’t know if she could, if she even wanted to at all. London might be a different sort of suffocation. If she was truly honest with herself, Olive could admit that there was something life--affirming about living here, so close to the possibility of real death.
She began to feel responsible for Isaac’s disappearance. He had been so angry, when he departed through the orchard that night on the veranda, calling good luck before he left. How long ago it seemed now, arriving here under the thin January sun, Isaac laying his hands on that chicken. Olive remembered the provocation she felt in her own body as he broke its neck. He’d given her so much. Had she satisfied him in return? No, she did not think so. When she tried to summon the memory of his hands on her, she found that she could not.
‘Do you think Isaac got away?’ Sarah asked her one evening, when it was just her and Olive sitting in the front east room. Harold was in his study, Teresa still upstairs.
Olive rubbed her arms. The firewood was dwindling and they were rationing supplies. ‘I don’t know.’
‘I’m sure he did,’ Sarah said. ‘I’m sure he caught a train.’ Olive noted how well her mother looked, despite the meagre rations, and Teresa’s trauma that was threatening to engulf them. It was as if the stressed situation had finally given Sarah a sense of purpose.
‘Do you want to leave, Liv?’ Sarah asked.
Olive pulled at a thread on the tatty sofa. Isaac had been right after all. They had come here and they would go again. ‘No,’ she said. ‘This is home.’
?
Later that night, Olive heard a knock on her door. ‘Who is it?’
Teresa shuffled forward, hovering on the threshold. She was thinner than ever, and her hair had grown a little bit, but mostly Olive was relieved to see the determined look in Teresa’s eyes.
‘Do you know what your father is saying?’ Teresa asked.
Olive lay back on the bed. ‘He says many things.’
‘He talks about the fatalism of the Spaniards.’
‘Ignore him.’
‘What he says is not fair.’
‘I know it isn’t.’
‘Does he think we are not trying to fight?’
‘He doesn’t think that. It’s easy when you’re an outsider to say these things.’
‘It is not safe.’
‘I know, Tere.’
‘You should go.’
‘I’m not leaving you.’
‘You are not staying for me, se?orita. I know why you are still here.’ The girls looked at each other. ‘He isn’t coming back,’ Teresa said.
Olive sat up in the bed. ‘He might.’
Teresa laughed. It was a cracked, bitter sound. ‘You of all -people should open your eyes.’
‘I should say they’re pretty bloody open, thank you very much. More than most of the English back home.’
Teresa walked slowly into the room, running her hand over the top of Rufina and the Lion. ‘My brother has done damage,’ she said.
‘To the village?’
‘To this house.’
‘What do you mean? I’m the one who’s responsible.’
‘I would like to thank you,’ Teresa said. ‘For taking me away from Jorge and Gregorio.’
‘I wouldn’t have done anything else.’
‘I have tried to fight.’
‘I know you have.’
‘But it is hard. It is like fighting yourself. And there are times I don’t see why we should have to. Why should we have to fight?’
‘I don’t know the answer to that, Tere.’
‘If you go, Olive – could I go too?’
Olive hesitated. Her father had no plans to take Teresa with them. ‘Do you have papers?’
Teresa made an unconscious gesture with her hand, patting her head where the scabs were beginning to heal. ‘No.’
There was a silence. ‘Let me neaten that situation,’ said Olive.
‘What does it mean – “neaten”?’
Olive got off the bed and came towards her, putting her hands on the other girl’s arms. ‘You need a new notebook of words. Here, I won’t hurt you. I’ll be gentle.’
Placing Teresa on the edge of the bed, she used a razor taken from her father’s dressing table, and slowly shaved away the remaining patches of hair on Teresa’s head. She rubbed calamine over the cuts as Teresa sat motionless, looking out towards the window, listening to the far--off crumps of the guns in Malaga.
‘This is my brother’s fault,’ Teresa said dully.
Olive held the razor above Teresa’s head. ‘Well, we’ve all been a bit foolish, haven’t we? And you could blame it on your father. And he’d blame it on the government. And they’d blame it on the last government. I don’t think Isaac meant for this to happen to you.’
‘Isaac thinks about the land, but forgets his doorstep,’ Teresa said.
‘Isaac is a good man, Tere.’
‘You think so?’
‘He has a conscience.’
Teresa laughed. ‘Does he?’
‘You know where your brother is, don’t you? I promise won’t tell anyone. I just need to know.’
Teresa turned again to the window, her shoulders sagging. ‘I cannot tell you. It is better that you do not know.’
She heard a snip. Horrified, she turned to Olive and saw that the other girl had removed an enormous chunk of her own hair. ‘What are you doing?’ Teresa said, as Olive cut away another handful.
‘You think I’ve just been playing a game down here, don’t you?’ Olive said.