The Spanish Promise

by Karen Swan

  Marina tutted. ‘Typical. All the best ones are.’

  ‘Yes,’ Charlotte murmured, not liking to point out that he was fifteen years her junior. ‘He’s got a baby too,’ she added for good measure, wondering if the words would be as diabolical, as painful, said out loud as they were swimming in her head. In fact, they were worse.

  They had walked out of the beautiful gallery and leisure wing, back into the rear hall of the main house. They passed the stairs that led to Charlotte and Nathan’s rooms, and then over to the other wing on the opposite side. It was identically laid out – jaw-dropping curved spaces, rustic textures – but here were the guest suites.

  ‘Check out my room,’ Marina said excitedly, leading her into a space which felt almost holy in its virtues: an emperor-sized bed draped with dove-grey linen faced onto the same smoke-tinted crittall windows of the other wing and Charlotte realized that what added to the coolness there, delivered privacy here. Two crushed-linen curved sofas dominated the expanse of space between all four walls, the worn-smooth floor texturized with an antique Talsint rug. ‘Isn’t it incredible?’ Marina sighed, tipping her head back and spinning girlishly, before collapsing onto the bed.

  ‘Stunning. What amazing taste they have.’

  ‘Is your room as beautiful?’

  ‘No,’ Charlotte replied truthfully. ‘It’s very comfortable, but this is . . . special. You are clearly getting the VIP treatment.’

  Marina sat up on the bed again, looking flattered, and it was true – her body was different. Relaxation seemed to have changed her molecular make-up: that pushed-forward jaw and tense neck, her jerky energy, now smoothed out into languour. ‘What’s he like, my cousin?’

  ‘Mateo? Well I’d say he’s polite, focused, driven, passionate. Very family-oriented. Loves horses.’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘Sixty-six I believe. Fairly recently remarried though. He has a six-year-old son with his second wife.’

  ‘A six-year-old?’ She pulled a face. ‘And I thought my mother was old! She was thirty-seven before she had me.’ She pulled a face. ‘Six miscarriages.’

  It was a blunt thing to say to a near-stranger and indicative again of the new dynamic blossoming between them. ‘My God, how awful for her.’

  ‘Yeah. It meant she doted on me, though. People say it’s not easy being an only child but . . . it never bothered me. She was all I needed. We were best friends.’

  Her voice had thinned out and Charlotte walked over to the sofa, hearing the past tense and sensing they were moving into deeper territory. The more she could learn about Marina’s family life, the better. ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘You mean how did she die?’ Marina asked quickly, defensively. Her expression changed. ‘Nearly fifteen years ago, sepsis. Died from a cut on her ankle, can you believe it?’ It was a rhetorical question, Marina staring unseeing into the garden. ‘I still can’t, even after all this time . . . It was the most stupid thing ever – a bit of metal from an old door stopper was sticking out and she caught it as she went past. That was it. Then she got sick and never thought to connect it to the cut. By the time they discovered the infection, it was too late. Way too late.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Yeah.’ The hardness had come back into her voice, the familiar rigidity threading her limbs again.

  ‘What about your father?’ Charlotte asked.

  ‘What about him?’ Marina asked back, defensively. Charlotte couldn’t blame her – it was the one question she herself could never bear to be asked.

  ‘Are you close?’

  Marina gave a scornful bark. ‘Ha! No. He remarried within the year and moved to Bilbao with the new wife – he said there was more work there, but I don’t believe that. She just wanted to get him away from us. Men, right? They just move on.’ Marina’s eyes flashed up. ‘I’ve never met her.’ Defiance coloured the words, a child’s attempts at spite.

  ‘Your stepmother?’

  ‘She’s not that; she’s not a mother to me in any sense,’ Marina said flatly.

  ‘You sound angry with him.’

  Marina hesitated. ‘Disappointed maybe. He’s not a bad man, just weak; he doesn’t know how to be alone.’ She gave a hopeless shrug. ‘I have always said I would prefer to be happy and alone than together and lonely.’

  ‘You’re strong. Not everyone can do that.’

  ‘Grandmother says I take after her. When I left my husband, I left behind everything about him – his name, the ring, our apartment. I started again from new.’

  ‘Why did you leave him?’

  ‘He cheated on me, drank too much beer, smoked too much weed. Could never keep a job.’ She shrugged again.

  ‘Did he ever hit you?’

  ‘Only once. And I hit him back harder. That was the day I left. And I never looked back.’

  ‘I’m sure he regrets it now.’

  ‘I know he does. He called me up every day for two months trying to get me back. Too bad,’ she said with defiance. ‘You can never go back, right? Our momentum must always be forwards.’

  Charlotte’s smile stuck in place and she merely nodded. She looked away, inhaling deeply and trying to steady her own emotions but Nathan’s reappearance in her life underpinned everything, destabilizing her world.

  ‘So it’s just you and your grandmother? That’s why you’re so close?’

  ‘Yeah, growing up she always said we were like peas in a pod, the two Marinas. I’m her mini-me.’

  ‘Still, your grandmother must miss your father,’ she said simply. ‘To have him live so far away when she’s so old . . . Even if he’s flawed, he’s still her son.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Marina was silent for a long moment before she gave a quiet exhale, her shoulders dropping and rounding again, the gathering fight dissipating in her. ‘Yeah probably. For my sake, she pretends she doesn’t but I can tell she does.’

  ‘Did she have any other children, besides your father?’

  ‘No. She said she had always wanted lots of kids but my grandfather was killed in the war and that was that for her – she never remarried.’

  ‘The Second World War?’

  ‘Worse – the Civil War.’

  ‘Right.’ So there were no further heirs then, the blood line on Marina’s side hadn’t split into multiple tributaries. ‘Marina, do you have any idea why your grandmother left here all those years ago? Why she never mentioned that her family was alive?’

  ‘No. Like I said, we thought she was an only child.’

  ‘But now that you know the truth, has she still not said anything? To be a Mendoza, I mean, it’s not a name you can escape in this country . . .’

  ‘She won’t discuss it.’

  ‘And you’re okay with that?’ Charlotte pushed. ‘This is your family too. Your heritage. Don’t you think you have a right to know where you come from, to at least understand why the opportunities and advantages that were rightfully yours were taken away from you? Your life could have been very different. Perhaps should have been.’

  Charlotte watched her, seeing the bitterness in the set of her mouth, and wondered how her grandmother had just looked on – watching her son cross the country in search of work, her granddaughter’s marriage collapse into violence, all of it under the strain of poverty, knowing that with one admission, they could step out of these circumstances at any moment and claim their birthright. It was one thing to have fled her family all those years ago – she must have had her reasons, whatever they might have been. But to continue to actively choose this life, in the face of the deprivations and hardships of subsistence living . . . Could what she had left in wealth really be worse than what her own family now endured in poverty?

  Marina looked down, plucking at a loose thread on the duvet. ‘I should probably go check on her,’ she said evasively, protectively. If she felt betrayed by her grandmother’s actions, she wasn’t prepared to admit to it yet. ‘She’s been sleeping a long time. I have to watch her or she won�
��t be able to sleep tonight.’

  ‘But—’

  Marina jumped off the bed with a focus that said the conversation was over, and still in her dressing gown, a tattoo of a butterfly evident on her bare left ankle, she walked out of the room and into the one next door.

  Disappointed to have been rebuffed, Charlotte followed at a distance, hesitantly putting her head round the door once she heard their voices.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ she smiled, stepping into a room identical to next door, only here the bed was draped with grass-green linen. Señora Quincy was lying on top of the bed, pillows plumped around her. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Just wonderful,’ the old woman smiled back. ‘I’ve had the most wonderful sleep.’

  ‘All that time, Abuela?’ Marina chided. ‘But I’ve been gone for three hours!’

  ‘The journey wore me out. I needed the rest. I am an old woman, remember.’

  Charlotte frowned as Marina fussed over her. ‘You’ll never sleep tonight,’ she tutted, rearranging the pillows for her.

  ‘Then perhaps I’ll stay up past my bedtime,’ her grandmother chuckled, her eyes flashing up to Charlotte’s. She looked bright. Lighter somehow.

  Charlotte smiled back but it was forced. Señora Quincy was not the frail, dotty old lady she might like others to believe. She had not slept for three hours straight; Charlotte had seen her with her own eyes heading straight for the jacaranda tree. And perhaps there was a simple reason for it – a long-forgotten childhood relic now reclaimed. But if it was innocent enough, it begged one equally simple question: why lie about it?

  Chapter Sixteen

  Madrid, 19 July 1936

  She was part of the crowd, a single speck in the sea of bodies gathered up and down the length of the boulevard. There were more people than she had ever seen, far more than she could ever count, and she felt wonderfully insignificant and anonymous for the first time in her life. It wasn’t just her image that had changed, with her oversized men’s clothes and roughly chopped, boy-cut hair; she had given herself a new name too: Marquez, borrowed from her housemaid. Mendoza carried less social heft in Madrid than in Andalusia but she was taking no chances – not only did she need to stay hidden from the people her family would send looking for her, she also wanted to be judged from now on by her values and intellect, not her pedigree.

  She let the tide gather her up and spirit her along towards the plaza, the fervour of the crowd’s shouts matching the screams that had raged in her heart ever since that day in the stable almost three weeks earlier. Giant speakers had been positioned in front of the Cortes and the crowd swarmed, waiting for the distinctive voice that always put a shape to their thoughts and dreams; her arm joined theirs, collectively punching the sky, as they shuffled ever onwards, some people standing atop cars or climbing on the street lights, making their voices heard and their might felt as they chanted they would rather die on their feet than live on their knees.

  Only yesterday, Franco had declared the overthrow of the Second Republic. After months of violent skirmishes and protests, localized revolutions and repressions, suddenly the country was officially at war – with itself. The Republican government’s measures to liberalize the political, social and religious landscape were being tolerated no longer by the old Establishment and stories were already coming in that the highly trained and skilled Army of Africa – which for years had been fighting savage battles in Morocco – was preparing to invade the mainland, a prospect that chilled the blood of the most hard-boiled Republican revolutionary. For no matter how angry the starving labourers were, how were they supposed to fight their own army? If there was fervour, there was also fear.

  A sudden whine and blast of static made the crowd pause and take a breath as they waited for the low, gathering voice of Dolores Ibárruri. Every single body turned towards the Cortes and the giant speakers relaying the radio broadcast.

  ‘Workers! Farmers! Antifascists! Patriotic Spaniards! . . .’

  Marina felt her heart pound as the voice from the loudspeaker vibrated through her bones. This was it! Revolution! And she was here, a part of it. In an instant, she felt the mood of the crowd lift again. Change would come, it had to. The dynastic traditions of centuries past could not continue as they had. The winds of social change had been blowing through the country for six years – the monarchy was now gone, didactic religion abandoned for education, equal rights being advocated for women . . .

  ‘. . . The country realizes the gravity of the current situation through the bulletins being issued by the government and the Popular Front . . .’

  Someone trod on her foot, the pain sudden and intense, making her gasp out, and she glanced across to see a woman beside her, hair worn up in looped plaits and wearing dungarees. She was gazing up rapturously at the disembodied voice, a cigarette dangling between her lips.

  ‘Oh! Sorry, was that your foot?’ the woman asked, before breaking into a relaxed smile, the cigarette waggling as she spoke. ‘Are you okay? I’m so clumsy.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Marina demurred. ‘It is rather crowded.’

  It was a vast understatement, their bodies compressing into an ever-smaller space as the crowds continued to push in at the back. The woman, taking the cigarette from her mouth, threw her head back and laughed. ‘Yes, it is rather, isn’t it?’ she replied in a hoity-toity voice.

  Marina admired the woman’s bold, frank manner – she seemed somehow fearless – but she realized that she had also inadvertently betrayed herself, her refined speaking style at odds with the coarse and colloquial language of the crowd. She would have to do better at hiding the manners and etiquette that had been steamrollered into her if she wanted to be accepted as a true Republican. This crowd would turn in an instant if they knew who she was: the daughter of an Andalusian landowner.

  ‘. . . Communists, socialists, anarchists, Republican democrats . . .’

  ‘She’s amazing,’ Marina said, jerking her head towards the government building, hoping the woman hadn’t noticed.

  The woman looked at her. ‘Yes. I have seen her before, last month.’

  ‘Really?’ Her excitement and admiration was genuine. ‘Did you meet her?’

  ‘Not yet. But I intend to.’ The woman looked ahead again, her chin raised determinedly. ‘I want to learn from her.’

  Marina followed suit. Me too, she thought, feeling a sense of belonging begin to claim her in this crowd. Though she had not been born into their world, still she shared their concerns.

  ‘. . . the soldiers and services loyal to the Republic have inflicted the first defeats on the insurgents, who drag through the quagmire of treason the military honour they have boasted about so much . . .’

  ‘Want some?’

  Marina looked back to see the woman looking at her, holding out her cigarette between her fingers. She hesitated, then reached for it. ‘Thanks.’ She had never smoked a cigarette before and she felt the cough roil in her throat as she struggled to hold it down. The woman was smiling at her, as though somehow knowing this was her first, that she was an impostor here. Did she sense that Marina was one of the very people this million-strong crowd wanted to see wiped out?

  ‘Where are you from?’ Her eyes narrowed interestedly.

  ‘Seville,’ Marina managed to reply, keeping it vague as she handed back the cigarette. ‘You?’

  ‘Badajoz.’

  ‘What brought you here?’

  The woman tilted her head slightly as though what she had to say tipped her off balance and weighted her down. ‘My husband was mayor of our town, a place where the landowners refused to give work to anyone unless they ripped up their union cards . . .’

  Marina knew from Santi, all those years ago, that the union cards protected the rights of the workers – entitling them to paid overtime, regulated hours and guaranteed jobs to locals. She also remembered Juan Esperanza’s pleas for those very things, for fairness and human dignity, on the steps of her father’s foreman’s office.
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  ‘They were literally starving the workers to death, refusing to give them work. So my husband used municipal money to buy them food.’ Her expression changed. ‘And for that he was found guilty of “misuse of funds”, and murdered.’

  Marina’s jaw dropped down. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  The woman gave a shrug but the movement was raw and brittle. ‘And you?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘What made you come here?’

  She thought of Juan Esperanza, staggering to stay on his feet, eyes wide as the bullet tore through him. She thought of Indigo, slain in his stable – an eye for an eye, the instrument of Santi’s revenge – and felt the tears rush up. ‘Similar,’ she whispered.

  The woman lip-read her mouth, seeing the pain still fresh in her face, and she understood. ‘Have you been in Madrid long?’

  ‘I arrived this morning.’

  The woman arched an eyebrow, raking her gaze over her and taking in her dusty, stained and torn clothes, her ragged hair, the limp sack over her shoulder. ‘Did you come on foot?’

  ‘Pretty much, although I managed to hide on the train from Cordoba to Puertollano.’ Marina nodded and the woman nodded too, something in her eyes changing, as though evidence of this pluck and grit, of her flash-flood tears, confirmed she really was part of the struggle, in spite of her ladylike manners.

  ‘. . . The whole country roils with fury at those savages who want to plunge democratic and the people’s Spain into a hell of terror and death—’

  The woman placed a kindly hand on her shoulder. ‘. . . Got somewhere to stay?’

  Marina hesitated. She hadn’t thought that far ahead. Just getting off the estate, out of Andalusia and into Madrid had been as far as she’d been able to think. She knew plenty of people in the capital, of course; she had visited many times with her parents over the years and her mother’s sisters lived here, as well as some other close friends. But even if she had known where they lived (which she did not, for she had only ever seen the city through the eyes of a child), she could not contact a single one of them; in their eyes, she was a traitor now, that worst of things – a Republican. ‘I will. I’m getting myself sorted,’ she said determinedly.