I force myself to look back at it. The two men sitting together in our garden. My father, handsomer than even my memory of him. Both broadly smiling for the camera, small cups of coffee on the table between them, the overflowing ashtray suggesting a long afternoon spent in the same spot. I can almost taste that coffee: thick and black in the Turkish style. It was my father’s favourite way to drink it. I remember how he laughed at me when I tried it, and told him it tasted like boiled earth.
There are other photographs. The garden, with the orange blossom in bloom. My father must have been taking the picture, because the rest of us are all there. Tino is very young here. He isn’t looking at the camera. In the corner of the frame I see the thing that has no doubt caught his attention: a furred tail, disappearing out of sight.
Of all the faces in the image, only my uncle and I are left.
He is looking, with me.
‘I sent a telegram,’ I say. ‘I came to Madrid. We came—’ I pause, try to collect myself, ‘We had nowhere else to go, after Papa. The farmhouse wasn’t safe, any more. And I was a child …’
I realize that despite my efforts to remain in control, I am crying again. My life would have been different, I want to say, if you had been there. I know, of course, that this is a false way to think. It was my mistake alone. But I was so young.
‘Little Estrella,’ he says. ‘Peque?a Estrella.’ So strange to hear my name like this, with his use of it tethering the two back together somehow – me to her. ‘I’m so sorry. I had just lost Aída, our house. I knew a man – a Frenchman – who could get me out, but it had to be then. I had a chance, and I took it.’ He puts out his hands, palms facing up, in a gesture of contrition. ‘I can admit that I was afraid. I am not a brave man. I have never pretended to be anything other than a coward.’
‘So you left.’
‘Not before I had tried to make contact with you and your brother. I sent a telegram myself. I had a feeling that if you had survived I would hear of you. Or you would see Gregorio’s book, somehow, and know … and come to find me.’ He looks at me, hopefully. ‘And you did.’
I look at him, this elderly man who is in some ways exactly as I remember him – his short-sighted squint, the uniform of the badly buttoned cardigan with the poorly matched shirt. And yet so terribly changed, at the same time: hunched and crumpled by age, and perhaps a little by his guilt, too.
I realize that what anger I have for him is slipping from me, is being replaced by something like pity. It is a feeling almost like powerlessness, this loss. But it is also the setting down of a great burden.
If I had come here with him, I think, all those years ago … I can see how it would have been. He would have become a father to me. I would have been safe. And then, one day, I would have left him to start my new life. But always with the security of knowing that I could return whenever I needed to, that I was loved. The sort of security that would, by its very existence, have allowed me my independence. I would have had a different life. But this cannot matter now. I am still young, still almost whole.
EPILOGUE
I can see her, down on the sand. She has long dark hair, which she is towelling dry. It is a very dark colour – not a natural colour, I think. There is something about her that renders me transfixed. I cannot take my eyes from her. Why?
She seems to be alone. All around her there are groups of people – fishermen, elderly women talking, some local children playing with a cat. Yet she appears to be no part of any of these tribes: no recognition passes between her and any of them. She moves through them, alone. She is like a wisp of dark smoke among them: a wraith, a wanderer from another world.
I move a little closer. For some reason – I know it is madness – there are tears pricking behind my eyes. And when I lift my hand to catch them before they spill, I understand that it is too late; my cheeks are wet where they have already fallen. I had not noticed that happening. What is happening to me? Am I, finally, falling apart?
But no, I do not feel like I am coming undone. I feel the opposite, if anything: a concentration of feeling. It is something to do with her, this slender figure before me, this smoke-woman, this ghost.
It seems as though she is making straight for me. Certainly, she is moving in my direction. I realize now that I was wrong, before. She is not smoke: she is the flame: burning so brightly that I can hardly stand to look at her. But I must look at her – she has absolute command of my attention.
Why is no one else staring? I cannot be the only one beneath her power. And yet the hubbub of the beach goes on around me, loud, oblivious.
She is so near now. For the first time I see not a flame, nor a curl of smoke, but a human being. And she is …
But it can’t be.
She is smiling, though her eyes are watchful.
‘Hello, Hal,’ she says.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS