The Return

by Victoria Hislop

  ‘I’m Javier. Javier Miguel Montero.’

  Sonia gasped in disbelief.

  ‘Javier! But . . .’

  There was only one gesture that seemed a natural response to this revelation. She gently took his old hands, and for a while they looked into the watery depths of each other’s eyes. Sonia recognised what Mercedes had seen all those years earlier, and Javier gazed at the reflection of Mercedes that he saw in the face of her daughter.

  Eventually Sonia spoke.

  ‘Javier,’ she said. It seemed strange to use this name now and the old man interrupted her.

  ‘Call me Miguel,’ he said. ‘I’ve used the name for so long now. Ever since I first arrived back at El Barril.’

  ‘Of course, if that’s what you prefer, Miguel,’ said Sonia. There were so many burning questions, but she did not wish to cause him any more pain.

  ‘Can you tell me what happened?’ she asked gently. ‘When did you come back to Granada?’

  ‘I was released from my duties at El Valle de los Caídos - the Valley of the Fallen - in 1955,’ he said. ‘I had “redeemed myself through labour”, that’s what they said. The fact that I hadn’t committed a crime in the first place was neither here nor there. I turned up at El Barril one day, completely unannounced. I had no family left in Málaga or in Bilbao, and I was physically destroyed by my time at Cualgamuros. Two of the fingers on my left hand had been broken and were badly deformed, so I knew I couldn’t make my living out of being a guitarra any more. I didn’t really know what to do with myself.’

  Miguel paused for a moment.

  ‘Quite simply, I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. Concha made me welcome and invited me to make my home with her. She treated me like her son.’

  ‘But Concha died not long after you came back,’ commented Sonia.

  ‘Yes, she did. She became sick quite quickly, but I nursed her as well as I could.’

  ‘Did she ever write to Mercedes to tell her that you were here?’

  ‘No,’ Miguel answered bluntly.

  ‘I suppose it would have come out that she had known for years that you might still be alive . . .’

  ‘. . . but she had told me that Mercedes was living in England and that she was settled.’

  ‘But she loved you so much.’ Sonia choked as she spoke. ‘And you loved her?’

  ‘I did,’ he said, ‘but I knew she was happy and I was glad for her. It would have been cruel to take that away. She had experienced enough unhappiness . . .’

  The pair of them sat in the sunshine for another hour or so. Sonia felt in no position to judge her grandmother’s decision to withhold information from her daughter. If she had not done so then Sonia would not be here now.

  She sat there admiring this nobility, this fathomless love.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  UNLIKE SPAIN, WHICH was moving into summer and not looking back, April in England still seemed caught in the depths of winter. It was icy cold when Sonia’s plane landed that night, and there was a thin layer of snow on the ground in the car park. Sonia’s hands were blue by the time she had scraped her windscreen.

  She arrived home to an empty house and felt like a stranger breaking and entering. It was as though she was examining the clues to someone else’s life. She peered into the drawing room. A vase of dead roses sat in the middle of the coffee table and petals were scattered over copies of Country Life and Tatler. On the mantelpiece, there was a row of invitations to drinks parties and a couple of what James called ‘stiffies’, invites to formal corporate events, which required the use of card several millimetres thick. One of them was to a buck shoot in Scotland. The invitation was for that day. Perhaps that was where James was now.

  On the floor by the kitchen door were a dozen empty bottles of red wine and in the sink, uncharacteristically for James, who loathed anything not to be washed up and put away, was a glass with sediment encrusted in the bottom.

  Sonia took her bag upstairs and went to bed, automatically going into the spare room. It had almost slipped her mind, until of course she turned the key in the lock, that her growing estrangement from James had been one of her reasons for going to Granada. London had seemed so remote while Miguel was telling his story.

  The week passed frostily. Sonia would not have expected anything different. Her highlight was a salsa class that Friday from which she came home invigorated.

  After the deadening few days of being back in the office and the strange domestic atmosphere, the life-enhancing, heart-lightening enchantment of dancing lifted her once again.

  That weekend there was a long-standing invitation to visit James’s parents. She dreaded it even more than usual but James clearly expected them to go. Appearances needed to be kept up, and cancelling would raise all sorts of questions. For James and Sonia it was much easier to continue in silence and they managed to maintain it for the entire journey. It would have been the perfect opportunity to tell James about her extraordinary discoveries, but she had no desire even to mention them. These were precious things and she could not bear the thought of either his mockery or his lack of interest.

  Some old family friends, including James’s godfather, were invited for dinner and Sonia observed that she was the only one of the five women not wearing pearls. For her this defined absolutely her sense of not quite fitting. She looked across the tarnished silver and best Wedgwood at James and realised that there was not the slightest possibility that anyone would give the lack of warmth between them a second thought. None of the married couples around the table seemed to address any remarks to each other. Perhaps this froideur within marriage was completely normal in the shires.

  The big, draughty rectory had last been redecorated in the 1970s, and in the twin room she and James always shared when they were staying, there was an apricot-coloured sink in the corner and shreds of wallpaper hanging from the walls like peeling skin.The curtains must have been grand once, with their swags and drapes and silk trimmings, but now they looked depressing. Diana, James’s mother, barely noticed the gradual stages of dilapidation and left her husband to fix the odd broken door handle or dripping tap.This, Sonia told herself, was how the English upper-middle classes liked to live, in a sort of genteel decay, and perhaps it explained why James was so fastidious about the décor of his own home.

  After she had renovated the house all those decades ago, Sonia’s mother-in-law had turned her attention to the garden and was now a slave to its carefully laid out borders and tyrannical vegetable garden, which supplied them with astonishing gluts of courgettes or lettuces at certain times of year, obliging them to live at times on a very limited diet, and then for months providing nothing at all.As an essentially urban creature, Sonia found this lifestyle baffling.

  The single beds had allowed Sonia and James to keep their distance, but that night, when James came upstairs after a late session of port and cigars with his father, he sat clumsily on the edge of her bed and poked her in the back.

  ‘Sonia, Sonia . . .’ he drawled, the last word right in her ear.

  Already rigid with cold, in spite of the hot-water bottle she clasped to herself for comfort as much as warmth, Sonia stiffened.

  ‘Please - leave - me - alone,’ she willed him.

  He reached under the blanket and shook her shoulder.

  ‘Sonia . . . come on, wake up, Sonia. Just for me.’

  Though she was good at playing dead, he knew full well she was awake. Only the truly dead would have slept through the level of noise he had made and the roughness of that shaking.

  ‘Bugger it, Sonia . . . for Christ’s sake.’

  She listened to him stamp across the room and the sound effects of his clumsy preparations for bed. Without looking, she could picture the corduroy trousers, shirt and pullover lying in a twisted heap on the floor by the bed and the highly polished brown brogues randomly left, ready to trip them should they have to get up in the night. Then she heard the noisy spitting as he cleaned his teeth and dro
pped his brush back into the tooth mug, yanking the cord to turn off the light above the sink and her ears, acutely tuned in to these sounds, picked up the sound of the little plastic knob gently banging against the mirror.

  He threw back his quilted counterpane in the darkness and the bed springs creaked as he finally lay down. Only then did he realise that he had left the ceiling light on.

  ‘Bugger, bugger, bugger . . .’ It was his mantra. He stomped across to the switch by the door and then stumbled in the darkness back to bed, tripping predictably over his own shoe. There was one further expletive and then silence.

  Sonia exhaled with some relief and then rolled over. James’s consumption of port would keep him soundly asleep all night.

  Early the following morning, Sonia went downstairs to make herself some tea, her breath emerging in clouds of vapour. Her mother-in-law was already sitting at the kitchen table, her gnarled, gardener’s hands wrapped around a steaming mug.

  ‘Help yourself,’ she said to Sonia, pushing the teapot across the table towards her, scarcely looking up from the newspaper.

  Perhaps it was their draughty houses that made these people so cold inside, reflected Sonia, watching the stewed brown liquid splash into the chipped mug that sat on the table.

  ‘Thanks . . . so how’s the garden?’ she asked, knowing this was one thing that her mother-in-law had feelings for.

  ‘Oh, you know. So-so,’ she said still not lifting her eyes from the newspaper.

  To an outsider this understatement would have been hard to interpret, but Sonia knew her dismissive attitude conveyed a level of indifference to her daughter-in-law.

  As was routine, they all went for a walk with the Labradors that morning. Diana looked imperious in her full-length Barbour, and mocked Sonia for her urban faux fur jacket. She strode ahead with James, determined to keep the pace of the outing going while her husband Richard brought up the rear, a slim figure limping slightly, still dependent on the stick he had used since a hip replacement a year ago.

  For some inexplicable reason Sonia felt slightly sorry for her father-in-law today. He looked worn out, faded like a very old shirt. When she tried to make conversation he was monosyllabic, with the coolness of someone who preferred the company of his own sex. On the whole he was a man who was quite happy with silence as long as it was occasionally punctuated with the sound of a barking dog.They continued their walk around the lake.The cold had now penetrated the soles of her boots and Sonia felt chilled to the bone. In his own time, Richard broke the silence.

  ‘So when are you going to give James a son and heir?’ he asked. The bluntness of it, though quite typical of the man, took her breath away. What sensible answer could she possibly give? What answer of any kind at all?

  Part of her wanted to deconstruct the question, to challenge him on every single word: on the notion of her ‘giving’ James a son, as though it would be a gift to him, the ludicrous idea of a baby being an ‘heir’, which she supposed simply reassured them they were landed gentry, and, most important of all, why the emphasis on ‘a son’?

  She swallowed hard, astonished at the impertinence of the question. A response was expected and the options were limited. She could not tear this man to shreds or use the one simple word she would like to use, to tell him the probable, shocking truth:‘Never’.

  A nervous laugh and a noncommittal response would probably do.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she answered.

  By the time they arrived back at the house, they were all numb with cold.

  For the first time in the past couple of days, the house actually felt warm. James stirred the embers of the fire in the drawing room and soon it came to life.

  It was a solid enough scene, observed Sonia, as she set the big kitchen table for lunch. For a moment she questioned her own restlessness. Then James walked into the kitchen and she remembered at least one reason for her dissatisfaction.

  ‘Where will I find the corkscrew?’ he demanded, swinging a bottle of claret in each hand.

  ‘In the top drawer, darling,’ replied his mother indulgently. ‘Lunch is nearly ready.’

  ‘We’re just having a pre-prandial,’ he told her. ‘It can wait half an hour, can’t it?’

  It was a statement rather than a question, as he proved by leaving the room before his mother had time to protest.

  After lunch, James and his father drained a second bottle of wine and the remains of a bottle of port, retiring eventually for a game of snooker in the old derelict stable. By the time they returned, Sonia was ready to go and her bag was packed in the hall.

  ‘What’s the hurry?’ asked James groggily.‘I need some caffeine!’

  ‘OK. But then I would quite like to get back to London.’

  ‘We’ll go when I’ve finished my coffee.’

  Sonia let him have the last word. She was already bored with the exchange and would conserve her energy for when it mattered.

  Diana appeared in the hall now. ‘So are you leaving soon?’ she said, addressing the question to James.

  ‘Sonia seems to think so,’ said James facetiously, hamming up the part of the hen-pecked husband.

  During the four-hour journey to London, while James listened to an entire Dan Brown novel, Sonia mulled over the proposition Miguel had made before she had left Granada: that she should now inherit the family business.

  At five o’clock the following morning, James threw open her bedroom door.

  ‘I’m still waiting,’ he said.

  ‘What for?’ asked Sonia sleepily.

  ‘An answer.’

  Her genuinely quizzical expression irritated him.

  ‘Dancing or our marriage.You remember?’

  Sonia looked at him blankly now.

  ‘I’m flying to Germany until Friday and it would be nice to have the answer when I get back.’

  Sonia picked up the hint of sarcasm in his voice and she could see he had not quite finished.

  ‘I assume you won’t be out as usual,’ he added.

  Sonia literally had nothing to say. Or nothing that she wanted to say now. James picked up his bag and a moment later he was down the stairs and gone.

  Chapter Forty

  SONIA WENT TO the office and worked furiously that day. At lunchtime she rang her father and asked if she could come and see him in the evening.

  ‘I promise I won’t get there too late,’ she said. ‘And there’s no need to worry about supper or anything.’

  Jack Haynes liked to have eaten by six and was normally in bed by nine thirty.

  ‘All right, darling, I’ll make you a sandwich. I think I’ve got some ham. Will that do?’

  ‘That will be lovely, Dad. Thank you.’

  She had a lot of ends to tie up in the office that afternoon and by the time she left it was already six thirty.The rush-hour traffic out of London was heavy and it was gone eight by the time she rang her father’s bell.

  ‘Hello, my sweet. This is a lovely surprise. A Monday evening! How lovely. Come in. Come in.’

  Jack’s delight in seeing Sonia never diminished. He bustled about as usual, putting on the kettle, finding a napkin for her, getting out the biscuit tin. Her sandwich, on white bread, cut into triangles with a few slices of cucumber arranged on the side, was already on his small dining table set against the wall.

  ‘Thanks, Dad.This is lovely. I hope you didn’t mind me coming in the week.’

  ‘Why would I mind? The day of the week doesn’t make too much difference to me, does it?’

  He went off to make the tea. When he returned, she had not touched her food. She could not eat.

  ‘Sonia! Come on. Eat up. I bet you haven’t had anything all day. Do you want me to get you something else?’

  ‘No, Dad, really I’m fine. I’ll eat it in a minute.’

  ‘Are you feeling all right, darling?’

  Sonia smiled at her father. Nothing seemed to have changed in thirty-five years. He had always fussed over her eating and worried abo
ut her looking ‘peaky’.

  ‘I’m fine, Dad,’ she said gently. Sonia was so nervous she could see her hands shaking, but she had come here to tell him something and she could not leave without doing so.

  ‘I’ve been in Granada again,’ she said quietly. ‘I met someone who knew Mum. I never knew her name was really Mercedes.’

  ‘I always called her Mary. No one here could pronounce her Spanish name.’

  Jack carefully pulled out the chair opposite Sonia and sat down.

  ‘How wonderful to come across someone from her past! You lucky girl! And did they remember much about her?’