The Return

by Victoria Hislop

  ‘She’s been looking after children all this time!’ exclaimed her father, studying her daughter’s neat handwriting. ‘She was only a child herself the last time we saw her!’

  ‘And she’s still dancing . . .’ said Concha. ‘It’s so wonderful that she’s still dancing.’

  They endlessly pored over the letter, and then they discussed how to reply.

  ‘It will be so wonderful to see her again. I wonder when she’s coming,’ enthused the old man for his only daughter.

  Concha came straight to the point. She tended to lead discussions and decisions these days. Pablo had been slow since his time in prison.

  ‘I think she should stay in England,’ she said bluntly. ‘We can’t let her come back here.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Pablo. ‘The war is over.’

  ‘It’s still not safe, Pablo,’ Concha said dogmatically. ‘It’s not the best thing for Merche. However much we want to see her.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said, slamming his glass down on the table. ‘She’s just an innocent young woman!’

  ‘Well, the authorities wouldn’t see her that way,’ Concha insisted. ‘She left the country. That’s seen as a hostile act, and she has delayed returning. Believe me, Pablo, she’s likely to be arrested. I have to know she’s safe.’

  ‘But what about Javier?’ appealed Pablo. ‘She’ll want to come back to visit him.’

  This was what Concha feared more than anything. If Mercedes knew that Javier was alive and at Cualgamuros she would almost certainly return. For her daughter’s own sake, she chose to keep this information from her.

  At Winton Hall, Mercedes eagerly awaited the response. Eventually, with other letters that came from Spain with stamps showing the new dictator, an envelope arrived from Granada. Even her mother’s handwriting made Mercedes tremble. Its familiarity made her seem so unbearably close. She tore it open, hoping for news of everyone, only to be disappointed. There was a single sheet and two stark sentences.

  ‘Father and I look forward to having you at home again soon. Your sister sends her love.’

  There was so much to read between the lines. Mercedes was thrilled by the news that her father was at home again, but she was puzzled and disappointed by the lack of mention of Antonio. She feared the worse. The second sentence was blatantly clear, though. Her mother’s nonsensical reference to a sister gave out a clear message: ‘I don’t mean what I say.’ Even if Concha Ramírez could not say it in so many words, for fear of the censor’s eye, Mercedes knew she was being told not to come home.The rebellious child had long since gone. The mature young woman now heeded her mother’s advice.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  IN MAY 1939, as Winton Hall finally said goodbye to the last of its niños from Bilbao, Mercedes knew it was time for her to go too. The house had provided her with security and a roof for two years and she knew she would look back on its grand spaces and romantic gardens with fondness.

  Many of the señoritas were taking up domestic positions and others trained as secretaries.All of them now began English lessons. In the past two years in England very few of them had learned more than a handful of words. Living and socialising only with fellow Spaniards, their main concern had been to preserve their own language and culture. Staying in the United Kingdom had been the last thing on their minds.

  Like Mercedes, Carmen could not return home. Her father and brother had both been arrested during the early months of Franco’s regime. They had joined the resistance and when the authorities caught up with them, they had just destroyed a bridge outside Barcelona. Both were now sentenced to death. Carmen’s mother had also been imprisoned.

  When the time came to say farewell, Lady Greenham was almost warm.They suspected this was because she was happy to see them go, but her thin-lipped smile gave nothing away. By contrast, Sir John’s eyes were brimful of tears. He did not shed them, but they could see he was awash with emotion. They promised to come and visit, and he nodded silently before turning away.

  Mercedes looked forward with both excitement and trepidation to the next few months. Just as she had done when she got on the boat in Bilbao, she hoped that this time of exile would not continue for ever.

  The obvious place to go was London. There was a sizeable Spanish community there now, and job opportunities too once she had learned the language.

  ‘It’s strange being back in a city,’ said Mercedes to Carmen, as they walked out of Victoria Station into a busy street.

  ‘A bit of a relief really,’ replied Carmen. ‘I’d had enough of the countryside.’

  ‘I’d had enough of Bilbao by the time we left, though,’ commented Mercedes.

  ‘Well, London isn’t Bilbao.We’re going to enjoy ourselves here! I’m certain of it.’

  The London street was packed with people. They all looked smart and purposeful to the two Spanish women.

  They had already been offered a room to share in Finsbury Park by a Spanish couple and took a bus to their destination. Sitting on the top deck, in the front row, they enjoyed their journey through the city. They could hardly believe their luck in being here. Hyde Park Corner, Oxford Street, Regent’s Park, all these places they had heard of, but the reality of them exceeded expectations. They were full of colour and glamour and vitality. Eventually the conductor called out their stop and they got off. It was only a five-minute walk to their new home: a Victorian terraced house in a pretty street where cherry blossom was in full, glorious bloom.

  Their landlords had come to England before the conflict and had eagerly supported the efforts of the Basque Children’s Committee. Mercedes and Carmen were made to feel very welcome. Even the pretty painted ceramic tiles they had stuck on the walls and some framed scenes of the Sierra Nevada made them feel at home.

  But the threat from fascism grew, just as those who had supported the Republic in Spain had feared, and war broke out across Europe. In September 1940, London was blitzed, and for eight months afterwards was under constant attack.

  ‘So now our own country is at peace and we’re being bombed . . .’ said Mercedes one night as she and Carmen cowered, terrified, in the Anderson shelter at the bottom of the garden.

  ‘There is something ironic about us sitting here in a foreign country, still being targeted by Germans,’ Carmen mused. ‘But anyway, you’re wrong. Our country isn’t at peace. How can it be when there are hundreds of thousands of political prisoners?’

  This war against Hitler was a terrible one but when it came to the point where children were being evacuated out of London, there was no comparison between the atmosphere there and that in Bilbao when people had decided to leave. In Spain the country had turned against itself.There was nothing so poisonous happening in England. There was fear, but no terror.

  The residents of the terrace often spent the whole night in the shelter. It was the safest place. Mercedes and Carmen would talk for hours about their pasts and what might happen in the future. The latter could take almost any course so there were no boundaries or limits to their dreams. The territory was unmapped.

  English lessons and domestic work kept Mercedes busy. From autumn 1941, what kept her happy was El Hogar Español. The exiled Prime Minister of the Republic, Negrín, had signed a lease on a building in Inverness Terrace, which became the focal point for Spanish exiles who could not return to their own country.

  It was the heart of their social and cultural life, and everyone mixed in to socialise and sometimes to sing, from those like Mercedes who were polishing English mantelpieces, to intellectuals and exiled politicians. They even held fiesta weekends. For these events, Mercedes put aside her feather duster and danced. The whirl of her tiered skirt and the sound of her metal-tipped shoes made her feel whole each time.This was who she was and in her mind she was transported home. There were others who could sing, dance, and play the guitar or the castanets, and on a warm night when the windows were open, people would gather in the street below and listen to the gunshot cracks of the
stamping feet and the soulful tunes of the flamenco guitar. From time to time a few of them, including Mercedes, would even perform to the public.

  She had begun to receive regular letters and some favourite photographs from her mother now and in return finally wrote to tell her story. She deduced from the way Concha described her father that he was not the man he had been. This saddened her, and made her yearn to be at home to help. Subsequent letters told her a little more about what had happened to Antonio, and also relayed general news of Spain. She concluded that Carmen was right.While men were being wrongly imprisoned and treated as slaves, theirs was not a country at peace. Every time she received a letter with a Spanish postmark, she hoped for a moment it might be from Javier. She knew her mother would forward anything he sent. Not even for an hour did Mercedes give up hope.

  As the years went by Mercedes’ English improved. In 1943 it was good enough for her to train as a secretary. Shortly afterwards she applied for a job in Beckenham, which she was lucky enough to get, and realised that the journey from Finsbury Park would be too long. Carmen was happy to move as well, and they found a flat of their own in south London.

  Life was as good as it could be, given their sense of displacement. They did not manage to get to El Hogar Español as often now, though Mercedes was invited to dance at least once a month there and her vibrant performances always drew an appreciative crowd.

  Mercedes tried not to think too much about the strain her parents were living under.They were running the café reasonably successfully under the new regime, but the continuing grief over the deaths of their three sons never lessened. Concha sometimes thought there were no more tears left to fall, but that was the great deception of a sadness that lasts a lifetime. It is constantly renewed. Each day meant another walk across freshly broken glass. Each step had to be so careful and tentative, simply to allow them to negotiate the pain of getting from morning to night.The quiet ticking of the clock was about as much noise as they could bear once their customers had left for the evening.

  Letters got to England, if slowly. Concha always tried to sound cheerful, but she was keen to discourage her daughter from returning. ‘You must be having a lovely life there,’ she wrote, ‘and if you come home you will find it so different.’ It was her way of keeping Mercedes away from a country that would be full of memories and empty spaces.

  Mercedes’ letters to her parents gave the impression that she was settled in her new life. Though their daughter always read between the lines of their correspondence to her, her parents never thought to look beyond the surface of hers, or to question the impression of contentment that she spent so much time creating.

  The lack of truth in their correspondence did not mean there was no love between them. It merely meant that they loved each other enough to want to protect the other party.

  There was one event that Concha could not conceal. In 1945, Pablo died. It had been one of those severe Granada winters when the raw air reaches into the chest and curls around the lungs, and he had not been strong enough to survive it. It was the hardest moment for Mercedes to bear since she had sailed away from Bilbao.

  When the war in Europe ended and men returned from the front, the Spanish girls’ social life became focused around the local dance hall, the Locarno. After six years of conflict and anxiety, dancing was the perfect antidote. It was a way of sharing what it was to be alive and it did not require any coupons. Everyone of their age danced the waltz and the quickstep, and as the craze for Latin American dancing swept in, Mercedes and Carmen easily picked it up.

  Dance halls were where young men and women conducted their courtships, and most had one clear objective: to find a spouse. Mercedes was an exception. The last thing on her mind was to find a soulmate. She already had one, and when she went out on a Friday and a Saturday night she had no desire for anything beyond the life-enhancing thrill of the dance.

  The men danced with different girls each night, some of them that they had known for their whole lives, and others they got to know, but all the while they had in the back of their minds the question of whether they might marry one of them.

  The first time Carmen and Mercedes had appeared at the Locarno, they caused a stir.With their dark looks and thick accents, they seemed really foreign and exotic. Although they wore the same kind of dresses as the local girls, that was where the similarity ended. ‘They’re as dark as gypsies,’ people muttered.

  They had been going to the Locarno every Friday and Saturday for more than a year when Mercedes was asked to dance by a young Englishman she had not noticed before.

  ‘May I?’ he asked simply, holding out his hand.

  It was a tango. She must have danced with a hundred men before, but he was a cut above the rest. Later that night, she went over the dance again in her mind and every note of the music came back to her.

  For this young man the experience of dancing with Mercedes had held its magic too. The feeling of her light, slight body responding to the merest touch of his palm was very different to the measured clumsiness of most English girls. At the end of the dance, when he was once more sipping a pint with his friends and she was back with her friend, he was not sure that he had really danced with her at all. It was just a memory, something insubstantial.

  The following week, Mercedes hoped that the slim, fair Englishman would ask her to dance again. She was not disappointed and smiled her acceptance when he approached. This time it was a quickstep.

  He had felt something keen and urgent in the way she danced. Without comparison, she was better than anyone he had ever danced with before, and he realised that her movements were not just a sequence of responses to him. Occasionally he felt her giving him direction. This dark Spanish girl was much more powerful than she looked.

  ‘I’ve met someone who is a wonderful dancer,’ Mercedes wrote to her mother. ‘Even when they are trying their best, most of them are so clumsy.’

  Mercedes’ letters to her mother always talked about dancing. It was a cheerful subject unlike any other, and Concha was delighted when Mercedes wrote one day to say that she had won a competition.

  ‘I’m partnering that very good dancer I told you about. And we have done really well. We have the County finals next weekend, and if we get through we’ll be in the Regionals,’ she wrote excitedly.

  For several years this partnership continued and they never met anywhere but on the dance floor, and occasionally for a cup of tea beforehand. They won every competition they entered and their style and grace as a partnership dazzled everyone. No other dancers had a chance against them. Watching them was sheer exhilaration and the judges always spotted the joy on Mercedes’ face as she whirled past them.

  It was not until 1955 that he proposed, nearly a decade after their first dance. Mercedes was taken aback. In all that time it had not occurred to her that her partner was in love with her. She was completely devastated by the proposal. As far as she could see it had come out of the blue. She loved Javier and only him, and was full of irrational guilt.

  Carmen was tough with her. She had found a husband for herself three years earlier and already had her second child on the way.

  ‘You need to face something, Mercedes,’ she said. ‘Are you ever going to see Javier again?’

  It was a question Mercedes had not dared to ask herself for more than five years now.

  ‘Don’t you think that if he was still alive you would have heard from him?’

  She knew Carmen was probably right. Javier knew her mother’s address, and if he was alive he would have written and Concha would have forwarded the correspondence. All the time, though, there was the nagging doubt that letters could go astray and that somewhere, somehow the man she loved so much was still alive.

  ‘I don’t know. But I can’t give up on him.’

  ‘Well, you mustn’t give up on this one either. He is here now, Mercedes.You would be mad to let him go.’

  The next time they danced, Mercedes tried to see her partner i
n a different light. She had always regarded him more like a brother than a lover. Could that ever change?

  After the session, they had a cup of tea. Mercedes felt it was appropriate. They needed to talk.

  ‘All I wanted to say was that you can take as long as you like to think about it. I shall wait. Twenty-five years, if necessary,’ said her dance partner.

  Mercedes studied his face as he spoke. She saw such warmth and kindness that she wondered if she might melt. The pale blue eyes looked into hers and she could see that his words were completely sincere. There was no mistaking his love.

  It took her much less than twenty-five years to make her decision. Within a few months she realised that she would be a fool to let this sweet man go.

  ‘You can’t be doing the wrong thing by marrying him,’ teased Carmen. ‘If you’re as compatible as that on the dance floor, imagine . . .’

  ‘Carmen!’ exclaimed Mercedes, blushing. ‘What a thing to say!’