Her father was smiling, eager, curious to know everything Sonia had been told.
His daughter told a carefully edited version of the story. She mentioned Javier once in passing but decided that her father should not be made to feel second-best to anyone. He had given Mercedes Ramírez the happiest years of her life and that bright gem should never be tarnished. She would work out how to introduce Miguel when the time came.
Jack Haynes had known none of this. He had respected his wife’s desire to leave her past behind.
‘She always told me that she could dance away sadness and bad memories,’ he said reflectively. ‘And I believe she did. While we were spinning around the dance floor, she became as light as a feather. She couldn’t have danced like that with the weight of the world on her shoulders!’
‘It must have been such a huge help to her,’ said Sonia. ‘Perhaps it really was all that dancing, all that exhilaration, that helped her to survive. I know exactly what she meant by dancing away sadness.’
They sat for a while. Jack looked at his watch. It was hours past his bedtime.
Sonia sipped a glass of water.
‘And the man who took El Barril has offered the café back to me.’
‘What? He’s giving you the café?’
‘Not exactly, but technically it still belongs to the Ramírez family, and I am the only surviving member of it.’
Jack was more astonished by this than anything.
‘What would you say if I went to live in Spain? Would you come and see me?’ said Sonia, her voice now full of unconcealed excitement. ‘Because I wouldn’t go unless you did.’
‘But what about James? Does he want to go?’
‘James isn’t coming with me.’
Her father needed no further explanation. He would not have dreamed of prying into her relationship with James.
‘Oh, I see,’ was all he said.
It all seemed rather sudden to Jack, whose life had only changed in small increments from one decade to another, but this younger generation saw things differently.
‘Yes, of course I would come and see you. As long as you cooked me something nice and plain! And would you still come and see me?’
‘Yes, Dad, of course I would,’ she said, touching her father’s hand. ‘We will probably even see more of each other than we have done in the past. The flights are really cheap, too. And there was something I wanted to ask you. Do you mind looking after a few boxes of mine? Just for a while?’
‘Of course not - they can go under my bed. I’ve got a bit of room there.’
‘I’ll pop back with them tomorrow, if that’s OK?’
‘It will be lovely to see you twice in one week! Just ring and say when.’
Jack Haynes had not seen his daughter looking so happy for years. They held each other in a long embrace.
‘You do understand why I’m going, don’t you?’ Sonia asked him.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think I do.’
After a small whisky, Jack Haynes slept soundly and had sweet dreams of doing the paso doble with a dark-eyed Spanish girl.
The journey back to Wandsworth took less than twenty minutes at this time of night. When she got in, Sonia collapsed on to her bed. At seven the following morning, she woke up, still fully clothed. There was a busy day ahead of her and she needed to get going.
She began with her clothes. Most of them would be completely inappropriate in her new life. Suits and long dresses she packed into carrier bags, along with winter coats she had hoarded for a decade, and scores of high heels that she would never wear on the Granadino cobbles. There were hats that she had worn to weddings, and handbags in every shade of most colours. She had dozens of scarves, most of which she did not even recognise. By the time she had finished, there were twenty-three bags bursting with contents. She drove them immediately to the Oxfam shop, in case she had a change of heart. There was one garment over which she had demurred. It was the dress she had been wearing at her engagement party in a champagne bar in Mayfair. It was a flimsy piece of lilac chiffon that James had bought and she had been obliged to wear. It had not been quite ‘her’, but its association with a time of happiness lingered on.
There were other things that went straight into the dustbin: a filthy old Barbour and some wellies that would definitely not be needed in Spain. She had files full of old paperwork, job application letters, CVs and bank statements dating back to university days. All of these could be thrown away.
She made up a box with her favourite CDs. Most of it was music that James did not listen to anyway, so he would not miss them, and on the top of the box she threw in the few stuffed toys from childhood that she would never part with.
Sonia kept herself busy all day, deliberately burying herself in trivia in order to detach herself from the enormity of her actions. Only when she stopped for ten minutes to make a cup of tea did the reality of what she was doing hit her. She was removing herself from James’s life. There was terrible sadness but as yet no guilt. As she stirred milk into her tea, she looked around the kitchen and realised that she had left no impression on this room. It had always been James’s place and it still was.
There were a few more things to sort out in the bedroom so she climbed the stairs with her tea. One thing she was absolutely resolute about was that she should take nothing that was not hers. The house would remain absolutely intact; she had no desire even to take anything that was jointly theirs. Men are rarely on their own for long, she mused to herself, and she was fairly certain that someone else would soon slot in to take her place. It was as this thought came into her mind that the jewellery box on her dressing table caught her eye. She opened the lid and took out some of the junk jewellery on the top layer. Underneath, there were some small drawers and inside these some family heirloom jewellery that James’s mother had given her to wear for formal occasions: emerald earrings, a ruby pendant and some rather hideous if very valuable brooches. Sonia removed them and put them in the safe, which was where James had always told her to keep them. In a little drawer all on its own, she remembered there was a gold chain. Her father had given it to her when her mother had died. She found it now and put it round her neck. Her hands trembled as she did up the clasp.
Then she went back to see her father. He was his usual sweet self, if a little subdued.
‘Are you sure you are doing the right thing?’ he asked as they stowed two boxes under his bed. ‘I’m a little worried about you.’
‘I know what I’m doing looks rash, but I have never felt so sure of anything, Dad,’ Sonia answered.‘I promise you I’ve thought about it.’
‘Very well, darling. But if you change your mind, you can always come back here, you know that, don’t you?’
He said nothing else.
‘I’ve got something here,’ said Jack, shuffling across to the other side of the room. ‘I thought it would be nice for you to have these now.’
On top of the dresser was a brown paper bag. He handed it to her.
Sonia knew immediately from the shape and weight what was inside.
‘Your mother never even considered throwing these away,’ he said.‘She would love to think of them being taken back to Granada.’
The paper rustled as Sonia pulled out the shoes. There they were. The soft leather and the steel toe- and heelcaps worn right down, just as Miguel had described them.
‘They even look my size,’ said Sonia. ‘Perhaps I shall wear them one day . . .’
They were both silent for a moment.
‘Why don’t you come out soon, Dad?’ she said to break the tension, caressing the shoes absent-mindedly as she spoke. ‘Come in a few weeks. I’ll have sorted out where I’m living by then.’
They embraced warmly, and Jack watched as she disappeared down the stairs.
It was her last day in London; tomorrow she would be flying back to Granada. She rang Miguel and told him she was returning.
‘I’m so glad,’ he said. ‘I hoped you would be back soon.’
Dear James,
I think you probably know my answer now. It’s as simple as this: for me, dance is an expression of being alive. I can’t give it up, any more than I can give up breathing.
I don’t expect you to forgive or understand my decision.
I do not want to take anything from you. I have no interest in a share in the house or a proportion of your income. I think what we owe each other now is simply our freedom.
The solicitor has my address, so he will forward correspondence to me there.
I wish you well, James, and I hope in time you will wish me the same.
Sonia
She wrote several drafts of the letter, many of them much longer, but this simple, uncomplicated note seemed to express all that she wanted to say. It was left on the kitchen table. That was the first place James would go to on Friday, when he arrived from the airport and needed a drink.
She had already packed a suitcase, essentially containing favourite clothes that had not gone to the charity shop, and ordered a cab for the following morning.
At five o’clock, the alarm went off. After she had showered and made the bed impeccably, Sonia went downstairs. Taking a final, sad glance around, she dragged her case over the threshold, double-locked the door and posted the key back through the letterbox. She walked towards the waiting car.
Flying north to south later that morning, she watched the changing landscape of Spain through the plane window. She observed the jagged peaks of the Pyrenees melting into gentle foothills and then giving way to the vast open expanses of land now cultivated on an almost industrial scale. Images of Jarama, Guadalajara and Brunete flashed through her mind but the scars of warfare had long since been erased.
When the plane began its descent from a cloudless sky, she thought of how many weeks it had taken her mother to travel the same distance. For Mercedes it had been months, for her less than an hour. There was a glimpse of Granada in the distance as they came in to land and her heart raced with anticipation.
The plane was half full so it was only moments before Sonia was at the top of the steps and feeling the sweet warmth of the Andalucian breeze on her face. Soon she was crossing the tarmac. It was only a short distance to the terminal building and she knew that Miguel was waiting for her.
Her footsteps were light. Her heart was dancing.
Author’s Note
The military coup led by General Francisco Franco in July 1936 in Spain was meant to be swift and decisive. Instead, it led to a three-year civil war that devastated the country. Half a million people died and an equal number went into exile, some of them never to return. After 1939, hundreds of thousands of Republicans still languished in prison and many faced the firing squad and burial in unmarked graves. Those who had fought against Franco experienced years of repression and even when the fascist dictator died in 1975, many people in Spain still maintained their silence about their experiences.
Under the Socialist Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, whose grandfather was executed by Francoists, a new Law of Historical Memory was passed in October 2007. The law formally condemns Franco’s uprising and dictatorship, bans symbols and references to the regime on public buildings and orders the removal of monuments honouring Franco. It also declares the political trials of Franco’s opponents during the dictatorship to be illegitimate and obliges town halls to facilitate the exhumation of bodies of those buried in unmarked graves.
The ‘pacto de olvido’, the pact of forgetting, is finally being broken.
Victoria Hislop
June 2008
The Return Page 46