Weeks in Naviras

by Wimpress, Chris

  ‘That’s encouraging, and now things have calmed down, maybe you could look at dating someone?’

  ‘Are you kidding? Things won’t calm down, if anything they’re going to get more intense.’ There was a stubbornness to his thinking on the issue, oddly out of kilter with his usual pragmatism. Still I would gently prod him about it, maybe an act of transference on my part.

  Despite James’s comfortable retention of Eppingham and his immediate appointment as prisons minister, his majority was only slightly up and by less than the national swing. ‘I might’ve got a Cabinet job had my majority been more thumping,’ he told me, after Drake formed the government. ‘A few people are asking questions.’

  Had he expected me to pound the streets of Eppingham when I was seven months pregnant? Probably not, but he’d never been very successful at hiding his view that the timing for a second baby was awkward to his mind. Maybe that’s why he’d become so retiring in bed in the year leading up to the election. I pointed out that he’d not been in Parliament particularly long, and that he was still practically the youngest minister in government. That didn’t seem to count for much in James’s eyes, he’d mutter about how some Cabinet members lacked any prior experience, questioned what was so special about them.

  Sadie was born two months after the election, though she came reluctantly and was only days from being induced. She took longer and gave me a lot more pain than Bobby had, and from the moment she was born she screamed. The most unhappy baby I’d ever encountered, she’d bawl almost constantly whenever she wasn’t sleeping or feeding. It went on for the first three months and James couldn’t cope with it, complaining he couldn’t do his job on so little sleep.

  That August I went to Naviras without James, initially we were all due to go but overcrowding in a couple of prisons caused some minor riots and he had to co-ordinate the government’s response. Lottie didn’t pay much attention to the news from Britain, but said the government there could learn a thing or two from the Portuguese. ‘Here, they don’t just lock people up when they go off the rails, they try to work out the root cause of the problem.’ We were sitting down at the beach bar, Lottie cradling Sadie while Bobby played on the sand with another boy about his age, whom he’d befriended earlier in La Roda.

  ‘I think they’ve tried that, Lottie, and there’s always a backlash.’

  ‘That’s because Britain’s essentially a protestant country, darling. All punishment and no forgiveness.’ She never made too many enquiries about Sadie, but she must’ve wondered. After all, it was pretty obvious that James and I were worlds apart by that point. Sometimes I felt aggrieved that Lottie never showed much interest in my life in Britain; perhaps she was still getting her intelligence on me from Gail.

  ‘I haven’t seen much of Luis,’ I said, casually. That was true, although of course there’d been a note waiting for me behind the painting.

  ‘Well, he’s just working out that running Casa Amanhã’s not quite the breeze he expected to be,’ Lottie beamed. ‘I’ve always made it look easy.’

  ‘But he’s doing a good job, no?’

  ‘Oh, it bumps along,’ Lottie smiled as Sadie opened her eyes and giggled at her. ‘But I’m trying as hard as I can to be hands-off. It’d be easier if I had children of my own, grandchildren by this point, no doubt. But that’s always been my decision and you can’t grumble in these circumstances, can you?’ Lottie always found ways of telling me in the abstract what she thought about things.

  Bobby was old enough to stay downstairs in Room Six that week, with Sadie in her cot upstairs with me, remarkably placid and sleeping through every night in Naviras, even when Luis came to see me after the restaurant had closed. It was taking me a lot longer to recover from giving birth second time around, but for Luis it was more about touching; stroking my forearms or my hair, lying on his back and letting me sprawl across him. I’d often lie there, watching as the pre-dawn light gave his tanned body a blueish tinge. He’d always leave us as the sun was rising before Lottie and Carolina woke. I held on to memories of those times, they caused me to somehow accept my joke of a marriage. After all, how much happiness is one person entitled to? I’d known more than many. Once you know what it is, how it feels, how much more of it do you really need or deserve?

  When the time came for us to head off to Lisbon, Lottie kissed Sadie and Bobbie on their foreheads. ‘Don’t wait too long to bring them back, darling,’ she said. ‘I just love the energy they bring to the place.’

  ‘Why don’t you come to see us in Britain?’ I was trying to load our ever-expanding arsenal of children’s belongings into the back of the taxi, the driver none too keen to help.

  Lottie snorted. ‘Britain’s gone to the dogs, darling, people like me don’t belong there.’

  ‘You’re starting to sound old, Lottie.’ It was meant to be a joke but didn’t quite work.

  ‘I’ve still got some life in me, the question on my mind is whether you have, my girl.’ She gave me a hug before I got into the back of the car.

  That Christmas Rosie landed herself a job at the Treasury on the communications team. It annoyed Rav and riled me, too, because it just seemed so symptomatic of Oliver Drake’s administration; mediocrity constantly rising to the top. Those who conformed to groupthink seemed to flourish while anyone who displayed original thought was deemed somehow dangerous. I wondered whether James had put in a good word for Rosie with the Chancellor; if he had, neither of them mentioned it when we took her out for a curry in Westminster to celebrate. I barely ate anything, watching instead how incredibly rude Rosie had become towards Rav, constantly denigrating him in front of us.

  ‘You’re just too all over the place for this game,’ she’d told him as we were waiting for the bill. ‘You need to work out what you’re best at, then get on with it. Whatever that is.’

  ‘Come on, Rosie, Rav’s not had it easy,’ said James.

  ‘It never is, and just wait until Drake falls over,’ she replied. ‘How long do you think a lightweight like him will last - a year? Two at most.’ She often answered her own questions in that way. It reminded me of Lottie, perversely, even though the two were at opposite ends of my value system. Perhaps Rosie had picked up the habit from Lottie on her trip to Naviras, that wouldn’t surprise me given Rosie’s whole personality was little more than aggregated mimicry.

  The start of the following year saw the first signs that Britain was running out of energy. The price of gas leapt without warning, the government was trying to find a way of keeping people’s bills down covertly. James and I discussed it one night in bed as he was going through his ministerial papers. He just snorted and said they were merely managing decline. ‘It’ll take years to work this out,’ he said, not looking up from his work. ‘And before that, things’ll only get worse.’

  ‘This all seems very sudden,’ I said. Energy prices had been a running sore for years, but prices tended to fall in the spring, not rise.

  ‘We’d no idea in opposition how bad things were,’ he said quietly. ‘A few of the old guard warned us, but you always think they’re just itching to interfere. Turns out they were right.’

  ‘So we’re screwed then?’

  ‘Well,’ he closed his ministerial box and looked across at me. ‘What this country needs is a government that lasts the distance. No short-termism. I doubt whether Drake can pull that off, not with a majority so small.’ His lips brushed against mine before he turned off the bedside lamp and lay on his side, facing away from me.

  Time seemed to accelerate, as it often does when you’re too busy to catch your breath and assimilate things. I felt like I was being pulled along each day by an invisible force; the alarm at five fifteen, an hour of going through constituency casework before it was time to get the kids up, feed them, dress them, get them to daycare and nursery. Instructions for Paula scrawled on the whiteboard in the kitchen before a dash to the office, the whole process more or less repeated in reverse ten hours later. The only obvious punct
uation was my twice-weekly visit to Dad, normally on Wednesday evenings and Saturday afternoons. With nothing to do or say during those hours, they were my sole chance to reflect. I wasn’t particularly happy, but was certainly a lot less unhappy than before. It was normal, which was surprisingly comforting as long as I ignored the nagging feeling that I’d have to come down at some point.

  I found out Lottie was missing on a Tuesday in October, when the number for Casa Amanhã flashed up on my phone. I answered it expecting her to speak, instead it was Carolina, who’d come back from college in Lisbon.

  ‘Ellie, have you spoken to Lottie in the last two days? She went to collect some flowers to paint but she hasn’t come back.’

  It was eight thirty in the morning and I was standing at in the hallway of our house in Eppingham, about to set off for work. By that point James was renting a bolt-hole not far from Parliament, Initially he’d stayed there only once or twice a week, then it became three nights away, sometimes four. He’d been moved in a recent reshuffle from prisons to immigration, far more demanding with urgent case reviews cropping up constantly. Sometimes a dangerous foreigner who’d been placed on the watch list would go missing and James’s phone would ring in the middle of the night. For all our sakes it was better for him to have somewhere in London to sleep, he’d insisted.

  I continued to talk to Carolina as I made the short walk to the constituency office. ‘Where’s your father?’

  ‘He went to look for her; he borrowed a car from the beach bar. He told me to call you, but it took me a long time to find your number.’

  ‘And she didn’t mention anything about going away to him, I suppose.’

  Carolina said Lottie hadn’t mentioned anything to Luis, who’d asked around the village to see if anyone knew where she’d gone, nobody had a clue. I texted James when I got to the office; Call me, it’s urgent. He didn’t reply for more than an hour, eventually calling me just after I’d arrived at work. ‘Hi, what’s up?’

  ‘Lottie’s been missing for two days,’ I said quietly, not wanting the constituency staff to hear. ‘Carolina called me earlier.’

  ‘That’s what’s urgent?’ He put his hand over the mouthpiece to talk to someone in the room with him. When he removed his hand from the phone he said he was incredibly busy, couldn’t it wait until the evening? ‘Maybe she’s gone to visit someone. You know how batty she is.’

  ‘She hardly ever leaves the village, James. And there’s no way she’d go off this, not without telling someone at the house.’

  ‘Well maybe it’s a surprise or something. Look, L, I’m really caught up in something here. Try not to worry. There’s not much we can do about it from here, anyway.’

  That evening the Casa Amanhã’s number came up on my phone again. It was Carolina, saying the police had found the wreck of Lottie’s car at the bottom of a cliff down the coast. It was somewhere I’d been before, a dangerous track which served as the back road between two of the less-frequented beaches south of Naviras. Tourists never used it, nor did anyone with the slightest bit of sense because it didn’t have a barrier on the outside edge. It was a hundred foot drop. The local police had investigated the cliffside track and concluded she’d come around it too fast and plunged off. The car had burst into flames on impact, there hadn’t been much of a body left to recover, nothing left really of the car either, save for some twisted hunks of metal and melted rubber.

  ‘I have to go out for her funeral,’ I’d said to James on the phone.

  ‘Well, I hope you’ll understand I can’t come.’ He was somewhere in Parliament, there was a hubbub of noise surrounding him. I almost pleaded with him to make the journey with me. ‘Look, I know she was a good friend, and I’m sorry.’ In the background the Commons division bell rang. ‘We’re in the middle of a crisis, L. You can appreciate that, surely?’

  ‘No, what crisis?’

  ‘Hang on, let me just … go down this corridor,’ he said. Soon the noise of the bells and the chattering MPs died down. ‘The Russians are threatening to cut off our gas supply,’ he said to me, quietly. If that happens then we’d have big problems.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with you?’

  ‘Are you joking? The power could go out. Seriously, it’s possible.’

  ‘But how likely?’

  ‘Look, L, there’s a vote going on here. I haven’t got time to go into it any further. Things will probably be okay, but at the moment it’s all hands on deck. You understand?’

  I suspected he only told me about the gas crisis to get me off his back. Certainly it never made it onto the news, at least not at that stage. I tried to imagine how things might be if the shoe were on the other foot, if one of his close friends was missing. It made me wonder whether James really had any close friends at all. He and Rav had both become desensitised to everything outside of politics. Although I’d tried to take control of our sex life after my encounter with Luis, it was sod’s law that James’ own libido had waned. Perhaps through age, maybe due to the stress of work. The reason was fairly irrelevant; what mattered was that just as I was undergoing a belated sexual awakening, James had suddenly lost interest.

  ‘I’ll go on my own, then,’ I said. ‘But you’ll have to look after the kids, somehow. It’s not fair on them, or on Paula, for her to have to stay with them day and night.’

  ‘Deal,’ said James, and hung up.

  I had new feelings three days later, sitting alone on the plane to Lisbon. I’d only ever felt pleasure and excitement traveling to Naviras, suddenly all I felt was dread. I didn’t want to go, but couldn’t stay in London. As the plane neared the coast after crossing Biscay I willed it to turn around, not to return to Britain but to fly out into the ocean, or perhaps in endless circles until the fuel ran out.

  Lottie’s funeral took place on a Friday, in the little old church on the outskirts of Naviras. Had she died a few years before it would’ve affected the whole village, but Naviras had depopulated so much that the street was almost empty as her coffin made its way to the churchyard, Luis and I walking alongside it. There were a few English expats, along with some Lisboans who’d driven down. Luis had tried to contact as many people as he could.

  The service was very traditional, and I cried during most of it. Not just because she was gone, but because I knew Lottie wouldn’t have wanted such an austere Catholic ceremony. I was angry, frustrated at how my best friend’s death had been circumvented by a religion she’d never had any time for. It undermined her. At least I got to sit next to Luis, who squeezed my hand as the service came to an end and I broke down again.

  ‘Don’t see it like that, Ellie, because she wouldn’t,’ he said, when I explained why I was angry. ‘It’s all just a load of old skin and bones, darling,’ he said, mimicking Lottie’s voice, hoping I’d laugh. We were walking through the little graveyard, heading for Lottie’s burial. I reached out to hold Luis’ hand again. He was speculating about what would happen to Casa Amanhã. ‘I guess it will be sold, but who gets to decide, I’ve no idea,’ he said.

  ‘She didn’t tell you anything about her arrangements?’

  ‘No, but whoever gets the house will have to keep her menu,’ Luis was oddly upbeat. ‘If they try to change it, I’ll make sure nobody eats there again.’

  A small wake was held in the restaurant of Casa Amanhã, attended by most of the village. Everyone from La Roda and the beach bar chipped in with food. I’d been to wakes before but Lottie’s was more sombre than anything I’d experienced. Perhaps it was the shock of it. Lottie left a gaping hole, both in Naviras and in me. There was also the incongruous aspect of the guests who’d been staying in Casa Amanhã; they’d all understood the circumstances, nearly all of them refused Luis’s offer of a refund. But a few still hadn’t left and were lurking, unsure what to do with themselves. Most of the food went uneaten and people began to drift off after an hour or so. Luis and I were left to clear up, Carolina helping initially before Luis told her to go back home. She’d not sl
ept properly for several days and looked terrible.

  ‘But I want to help,’ she’d said, but Luis suggested the best thing she could do was continue to contact future bookings and ensure they knew the guesthouse was temporarily closed. That was the worst part of it, the worry that people who’d made long-standing bookings would continue to show up.

  Carolina took the guest bookings folder and went home to make phone calls. Luis and I cleared up the food, putting most of it in the fridges. Lottie had abhorred waste and it seemed disrespectful to throw food away. It felt like her laughter was lurking in the clink of crockery as we washed up. Once we were done Luis and I just looked at each other. ‘I think I need to lie down,’ I said. There’s nobody in Room Seven, is there?

  ‘No, they cleared out yesterday,’ said Luis. ‘Do you want me to come up with you?’

  I hesitated. ‘Yes, that would be nice,’ I said.

  We went upstairs. We didn’t get into bed but lay on it, both of us fully clothed, Luis with his arm around me. Neither of us slept, I could hear his breathing remain short and shallow. It was quiet, even the waves in the bay seemed subdued. A single sparrow chirped occasionally. Then I heard my phone vibrate, sat up and reached for my handbag on the floor. It was James.

  ‘I’m sorry to interrupt, L, but I need to know when you’re coming back.’ In the background I could hear Sadie having a tantrum.

  ‘My flight’s booked for tomorrow evening,’ I said.

  ‘Can’t you come back tonight? Or early tomorrow? The shit’s really hitting the fan, here, and I can’t deal with this and the kids at the same time. Seriously, L. It’s bad.’

  ‘Can you ask Paula to stay over tonight? She’d said it wouldn’t be a problem.’ I was ruefully amused at how for the first time James actually wanted me to be not in Naviras but London.

  ‘She could, but come on, it’s not fair on the kids to have neither of us here,’ James was making no attempt to calm Sadie down. ‘What more can you do out there, anyway?’