Under an Amber Sky

by Rose Alexander

  It all happened so quickly and unexpectedly – Sarah had never met someone in Inês’s front garden before – that by the time she thought about asking him who he was and what he was doing, he was gone. She glanced towards the house, at the navy blue front door with the peeling paint, and was sure that she just caught the sound of the lock clicking shut on the inside. He looks like an estate agent, she thought, but why on earth would he be visiting Inês?

  She stood for a moment, gazing up and down the elegant Georgian terrace where rows of tall sash windows threw dark shadows onto the street below, and frowned. What the hell was Inês up to?

  “Meninas bonitinhas! My beautiful girls! How lovely to see you.”

  Having noisily climbed the stairs to the first floor, Sarah, Honor and Ruby found Great-Aunt Inês sitting as usual in her high-backed chair, whose purple velvet fabric was a riot of lush peonies and roses. Her eyes lit up as they entered and her gentle smile welcomed them in her graceful Portuguese way. She was tiny, delicate in every aspect, with impeccable manners and a fragility that matched that of her favourite bone china teacup. The elegant lines of her face were smudged and softened by her ninety-five years like a faded, half-erased pencil drawing, but even so, anyone would understand that she had been beautiful, once.

  That afternoon her tortoiseshell table-lamp shone a soft, warm glow around her, catching every strand of her white hair in its halo of light. Sarah bent down and gently kissed the top of her head; Honor and Ruby flung themselves at her and then just as rapidly rushed away. Their destination, once they had raided the biscuit barrel, was the corner where the toys were kept, and where the bureau that held their favourite treasures also stood; the ancient music box, a set of antique Portuguese azulejos and the ivory card case that had been brought back on a tea clipper from India by a distant Goanese relative two centuries before.

  “So how are you, my dear?” Inês’s voice was bright, but wavered slightly. She was weary, at this time in the afternoon.

  “Not too bad.” Sarah threw her coat onto a chair, along with the girls’ book bags, coats and cardigans.

  “You seem tired.” Despite her own great age, Inês always worried about her niece. “You both work too hard, you and Hugo. I used to think that about John, too, but he was always home by 6pm. Times have changed, não é?”

  “We’re all right,” replied Sarah, slumping into a chair. “But yes, there is a lot on at the moment. Hugo’s business is a constant challenge – well, you know how it is; the world and his wife thinks they can design a website these days. Clients demand the earth, and they want everything the day before yesterday. I think his colleagues Big Phil and Tommo see more of him than I do.”

  She grimaced and then tried to turn it into a smile. Inês had few enough visitors; time spent with her should not be wasted in moaning. She wanted to share her news, hoping that talking about it might make the way forward clearer – but something even more pressing was niggling at her.

  “Inês?”

  “Yes, my dear?”

  “Who was that at the front door just now?” Sarah tried to sound casual and unconcerned, twiddling her ponytail and smiling in what she hoped was an encouraging way.

  The pause before Inês replied was minute but noticeable. “What do you mean?”

  “When we came up the path – there was a man leaving the house, we almost fell over him on the path. He gave me quite a fright.”

  A flicker of something that Sarah could not quite decipher – was it discomfort? embarrassment? – crossed Inês’s face, and she shifted awkwardly in her chair. “I don’t know who he was, my dear. Trying to sell me something as usual, something I don’t want. Gas, I think, or was it electricity?”

  “Oh, really?” Honor had come close by, the lamplight catching the silver clips in her hair and sending diamonds shooting in all directions. Sarah absent-mindedly kissed her cheek, contemplating Inês’s answer.

  “Yes, of course, gas. I’m sure that’s it. My memory these days…” Inês shook her head sadly, mourning her inability to remember something that had only just happened.

  Sarah felt suddenly ashamed of herself for challenging Inês, for insinuating that she did not believe her. She strolled idly to the window and looked out, her eyes following the direction in which the man had disappeared, although she knew he was long gone. The rush hour traffic rumbled on Highgate Road, backed up now all the way from the lights that were a good fifty metres further down. She noticed from this high vantage point that the wide-lawned area that separated Inês’s house from the main road was newly mown and that the spring plantings of tulips and primroses were nearly over. The trees were almost in full leaf; London planes, horse chestnuts and the one single ash that stood right outside Inês’s front garden. Soon its long green fronds would shield her from the busy world outside once more.

  Sarah realised, despite the awkwardness, that she couldn’t let the matter of the strange visitor rest there. “Inês, he didn’t look much like an energy salesman.”

  Inês did not reply, just opened her hands in a gesture that reinforced her explanation, that implied that indeed it might seem strange, but there it was.

  “Are you sure he wasn’t some kind of con man? You know, one of these confidence tricksters who prey on…on older people?” As soon as she’d said it, Sarah regretted it. Inês hated to be made to feel as if she couldn’t cope. “The thing is, I’m not sure that you should be answering the door to anyone you don’t know,” Sarah continued hastily, trying to assuage the guilt that was sweeping across her. “I never do, and I’m not…” Sarah faltered and tried again. “I mean, even if they’re trustworthy themselves, they might tell someone there’s an elderly lady living all alone in this big house.”

  As she spoke, Sarah saw that although Inês’s face was serene as always, her hands were tightly gripping the edge of the crocheted blanket on her knees.

  “It worries me.” Sarah’s cheeks reddened as her voice tailed off lamely and for a moment, neither of them said anything, and all they could hear was Inês’s old music box, wound up by Honor, playing a tinny and irregular ‘Au clair de la lune’, again and again.

  “It’s fine, Sarah. I can still look after myself perfectly well.”

  Inês’s voice was sharp, harsh and unfamiliar. Sarah wondered what she had said to so inexplicably upset her; it was so unlike her. She looked carefully at Inês, noticing how small she suddenly seemed in her chair, the roses and peonies appearing to have doubled in size and to be smothering her with their untrammelled lush exuberance. Her tiny hands were locked together so tightly that the baggy skin on her knuckles was stretched thin and white.

  “I don’t know about me being tired – it’s you who is exhausted,” murmured Sarah, softly. “I’m sorry, I think that the girls and I have worn you out. We’ll be off very soon. Let you have a rest.”

  Inês seemed to have to muster all her energy to reply. “I do feel rather weary today. Must be my age.” She smiled a small, weak smile, her soft, drooping cheeks trembling with the effort. Her eyes seemed many miles away, seeing something that Sarah couldn’t, and she sighed deeply before continuing. “I’m feeling every one of my years these days.”

  And then Sarah knew. Knew that one day, and maybe not that long into the future, Inês would die. The time was coming. The realisation hit her with a hammer blow that she could not ignore and caused a surge of icy cold panic to flood her veins.

  “Goodness! I can’t believe I’ve been here all this time and I haven’t even made the tea,” she exclaimed. “What are we thinking of?” She needed the distraction of something as banal as tea-making to take her mind off the fact of Inês’s mortality.

  In the upstairs kitchen that had been installed a few years ago to make things easier for Inês, she put the kettle on and threw some tea leaves into the pot. She could see Billy the gardener still hard at work even though it was getting dark now. He was tying a clematis to its support, completely absorbed i
n his task, his shiny balding head the most visible part of him in the early evening gloom. Sarah could imagine, but not make out, how the laces of his gardening boots would be trailing in the damp brown earth as usual.

  She picked up her phone and checked her messages as she waited for the kettle to boil. There was one from Hugo, telling her he would be late home again. No surprises there. She felt irritation bubble up within her like the boiling water in the kettle and fought to suppress it. Hugo had to work long hours. That was the way it was.

  She carried the tray into the sitting room, put the lemon into the cups and poured the tea, watching as the slices rose to the surface and floated there, yellow flowers brightening a clear brown pond. The girls were getting restless so Sarah instructed them to go into the garden and help Billy clear up his tools; that always occupied them for a while.

  The tea appeared to revive Inês a little. Sarah relaxed; she had panicked unnecessarily. Inês was as fine as ever.

  “So – at last. Now perhaps you can tell me what you really came for.” Inês’s cup rattled slightly as she replaced it into her saucer with unsteady hands.

  Sarah laughed, the constrained atmosphere of earlier forgotten. “I can never keep anything hidden from you, can I? It was the same when I was a little girl – you always knew if I’d stolen a cookie or snatched a nibble from the pasteis de nata.”

  She knitted her fingers together, leant forward and took a deep breath. “The news is – that I’m going to Portugal.” Was it really the right thing to do? Was the pain not better left untouched, buried beneath the years? “What I mean is – I might be going…possibly.”

  “How marvellous for you, my dear. Is it a holiday?” Inês’s eyes, under their heavy lids, were suddenly bright and questioning. She could not know what turmoil the prospect was causing.

  “No,” explained Sarah, her tone as measured as she could make it. “It’s for work. I’ve been commissioned – offered a commission – to write an article all about cork.”

  Inês looked down at her teacup, the lemon’s citrus shine stained nicotine-brown now.

  “What a wonderful surprise. How you will love to see the country again after so long. But a shame you and Hugo couldn’t be having a nice break there together.”

  “The state our finances are in? Not likely. And anyway, I’m not sure…” Sarah glanced around her vacantly as she searched for the right words. “What I mean is, it’s a work trip, not a vacation. I’ll be very busy while I’m there – it wouldn’t be any fun for Hugo, I’d have no time for him.” She drained her tea and picked up the pot to give them both a refill. “Plus all we seem to do these days is argue,” she added as an afterthought, fighting the frustration she felt over the dismal state of her marriage as the last of the liquid trickled into the cups.

  “Anyway, if I go, I’ll need to visit a montado just like the one where you grew up,” she continued and then paused, suddenly unable to carry on.

  “Why would you not go?” interjected Inês, gently.

  Sarah looked down at her hands, folded around her knees. How to begin to explain? It was the only thing she’d never shared with Inês, never really spoken about to anyone. “Well – no reason, I suppose. I mean, I’m sure I will go,” Sarah flannelled, hastily. “It’s just childcare, school runs – you know, all that boring stuff!”

  Inês’s quizzical expression indicated that she was not finding this explanation satisfactory.

  “Anyway,” Sarah continued, steering the conversation away from any more awkward questions. “The thing is that I thought maybe you could help me with my research, tell me more of your memories? Get me started.”

  “Oh, I don’t remember much these days, my dear, as you know – not even who has just been at the door.” Inês gave a grim smile. “Time has taken its toll on my mind along with everything else.”

  She looked down at herself, at the loose skin and brown spots on the backs of her hands, seeming to be seeking confirmation, however reluctantly, of her own ageing. “But I’ll tell you what I can recall.”

  She looked towards her tall sash windows as if beyond them lay the expansive plains of the montado, filled with glades of ancient cork oaks, instead of the chilly acres of Hampstead Heath.

  “Stripping the cork bark from the trees is hard work, Sarah – skilled work – in the sweltering heat of summer. We always threw a huge party for the men – the tiradors – and their families, once every tree had been harvested. Music and dancing under the stars… They were wonderful times. There seemed to be so much more colour there, in Portugal, than there is here. Cowslips, purple heather, the blazing red of the strawberry tree fruits. Or maybe that’s just how I remember it.”

  “It sounds idyllic,” responded Sarah, wanting Inês to carry on painting the picture of her youth.

  “We spent our summers at the beach, all the cousins together, sometimes at Zambujeira do Mar, but usually Melides. Oh, the sea was cold, but we swam and swam like dolphins. I always loved to swim.”

  Inês paused, her thoughts lost in those faraway times and Sarah joined her there, in the wild, sparkling sea under the intense glare of the southern sun.

  “It was all so different when I married and moved to Porto. Grapes dictated the pace of life there, not cork; nearly everyone seemed to have something to do with producing the port wine. There were good times, too, though. One Easter, John and I joined a family party on their estate in the high Douro. The family booked an entire railway carriage to get there, and they even took their piano! You could do things like that, then.”

  An image of a baby grand balanced on the seats of an Intercity train to Manchester popped into Sarah’s mind, and she smiled to herself. These were the stories that she had grown up with and when she’d finally got there herself, she’d discovered the truth was twice as good. Portugal’s sounds and tastes had assailed her senses and overwhelmed her: the roar of the scooter engines that raced up and down Lisbon’s ancient streets; the pungent, exotic aroma of fresh coriander; the thick, sensual sweetness of a sun-ripened peaches. And then love – the kind of love that tears the heart apart with its intensity, that makes the world turn faster, brighter.

  The sudden, harsh clatter of Inês’s teaspoon sliding from her saucer and onto the wooden floor was exacerbated by the deep silence that had preceded its descent. The discordant sound echoed Sarah’s emotions, the bittersweet nature of her Portuguese memories.

  She picked up the spoon and put it on the tray. “Is there anything else you’d like, before we go?” she asked.

  But Inês wasn’t listening, lingering as she was in decades past.

  “Of course, I was still very young when I moved away,’ she murmured, her voice and demeanour almost trance-like. “I had fallen in love with John, married him and moved to the north, all by the time I was twenty.” She pulled her shawl tighter around her as if suddenly cold although the temperature had not changed. “It’s strange to think now how little I knew him when I bound my life to his. The innocence of youth, I suppose.”

  Inês’s gaze wandered from the tall windows back to Sarah and she started slightly, as if surprised to find her still there. It seemed to remind her of something.

  “I have something that might help you, my dear,” she said.

  Sarah looked at her questioningly but said nothing, waiting patiently for Inês to carry on. Her speech was very slow these days.

  “My journal. It’s in my bedroom, next to my bed. Please take it, I’d like you to have it. I started it when I got engaged and kept it for a few years, writing in it regularly, until…” Inês stopped suddenly, as if unable to continue.

  “Until what?” probed Sarah, gently.

  “There are things in it you might find interesting,” Inês continued, ignoring Sarah’s question. “That might…” She trailed off again. Her eyes, seeking the light, returned to the tall windows and then her heavy lids closed over them as if it were too bright, too intense.

 
“That might what?” asked Sarah, more urgently now.

  But Inês was silent, dozing in her chair, her hands fallen to her sides.

  I dreamt this book up whilst on playground duty one sunny October day in 2016, in the heart of urban London, gazing up at a tree dripping with ripe conference pears that I had never noticed before. Why a pear tree led to a book, I don’t really know, but that is often the way with ideas. Perhaps it was because it captivated me in the same way that the beautiful country of Montenegro, and its warm and wonderful people, did on my first ever visit in 2015.

  So thank you, Montenegro and thanks, also, to all those loyal friends, family, bloggers and complete strangers, plus my agent and publisher, who read my first book, GARDEN OF STARS and loved it, giving me the confidence and self-belief to write another.

  Acknowledgements

  Note to readers: if this book inspires you to visit Montenegro, you will not be disappointed. The country is pristine and unspoilt in a way we have almost forgotten anywhere in Europe possibly could be. There are glacial lakes and primeval forests, high mountains and golden beaches, UNESCO world heritage sites and forgotten villages, not to mention the second-deepest river gorge in world.

  Please go – but please take care of this country’s spectacular beauty.

  Many years ago, when I lived in Brazil, I visited the tropical island of Tinharé and stayed in the now über-touristy Morro de São Paulo. At the time, it was a surfers’ and backpackers’ haunt and everyone walked barefoot through the sandy lanes (no cars are allowed, then or now). There’s a zip wire from the top of one of the hills to the beach – it’s that cool.

  The island’s motto or slogan was ‘Preserve este paraíso’ – preserve this paradise – I had the T-shirt to prove it. I’ve searched online but can find no trace of this plea remaining. I’m not sure that I trust Google translate to turn it into Serbian/Montenegrin, but if Brazil no longer wants or needs it, I’d like to steal it and make the same entreaty for Montenegro.