Gang of Four

by Liz Byrski

  ‘Oh, ages. Sixties, p’raps; no – earlier. Fifties, I think she said. I don’t know the details. You’ll have to ask Antonia about it.’

  ‘How did you find all this out? You only met her a couple of times.’

  ‘I’m a journalist.’ Sara grinned. ‘We have ways of making you talk.’

  Sweat trickled down Isabel’s back. The temperature in the bus was mounting and the window beside her seat wouldn’t open. Alongside her an elderly woman dressed entirely in black nursed a wicker basket in which a rooster grumbled and squawked. The woman’s head nodded forward until the bus turned the sharp corner for the upward climb to Monsaraz. Her head jerked up and she resettled herself, occupying even more of the seat. Isabel sighed and craned her neck to look ahead. It was just as she remembered – a mythical place, white and hazy in the afternoon heat. The bus rattled under the archway and clattered to a halt. The woman shuffled to the exit and Isabel handed the rooster’s basket down to her, then, picking up her own bag, she swung off the bus into the magic stillness of the square. Heat bounced off the cobbles as she crossed the street into the shade to make her way up the hill. They met halfway.

  ‘I was coming to meet the bus,’ Antonia said. ‘But it was a little early today.’

  Isabel put down her bag, running her hand across her forehead.

  ‘I’m so pleased to see you, Isabel.’ Antonia reached out to take both her hands, and kissed her on both cheeks.

  ‘And I’m so pleased to be here. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve imagined coming back.’

  Antonia picked up her bag and led the way back to the house. ‘You must be exhausted. First a cool drink and a shower. We have the house to ourselves for a few days at least.’

  Isabel looked around her room, loving the deep cool shade of the shutters closed against the afternoon sun. The church clock chimed four and the only other sound was the bleat of the goats on the hillside. She sighed with pleasure. It was like coming home. She wanted to savour every delicious moment with Antonia in this exquisite place, but she also wanted to rush things, to have quick answers to her questions, to probe and parry, and satisfy her burning curiosity. She took a cool shower and washed her hair, towelling herself dry in the white-tiled bathroom, trying to talk herself into calmness.

  ‘And so, Isabel, your husband enjoyed his visit to Germany?’

  Isabel poured some homemade lemonade from the jug and sat down beside Antonia on the balcony. ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘It was a difficult time for us. Being away created a lot of changes for me. We both have to come to terms with that, find a new way forward, I suppose. And you? How are you, Antonia?’ Ice clinked in the tall glasses.

  ‘Ah, well. How can I say it? How can I begin? The time has been difficult for me, Isabel, since you left … I …’ She paused, seeking the words. ‘I was not entirely honest with you in Évora and then here …’ Silence again.

  ‘In Évora something happened between us,’ Isabel said. ‘Something I couldn’t understand or name.’

  Antonia nodded, looking down into her glass, clearly unable to speak. Isabel waited a moment and then went on. ‘At first it was like … well, like a sexual attraction. It was so powerful, I thought you felt it too. But after that you shut me out. That energy is still there – it’s something intimate, as though we’re linked in some way.’ She knew she was rushing things, that it would be better to wait and let things evolve more naturally. But she had waited so long that every minute now seemed burdensome. Their silence hung heavy in the late afternoon. The town heaved and shuffled with the small sounds of people emerging from siesta, but Isabel and Antonia sat side by side as if cast in stone.

  ‘You knew my mother.’

  It was a statement not a question, and Antonia nodded and looked up at Isabel with tears in her eyes. ‘Yes, Isabel, I knew your mother, briefly, in 1953. We met in Nice. I will tell you all about it. It is not easy for me, and for you … well, I don’t know, I think maybe it will be hard for you to hear it. But I must tell you just the same.’ She took a deep breath. ‘José, my brother, was working for the government at the time, and he was posted to Nice. He and your stepfather became friends. It was through José that Eunice and Eric met.’

  ‘How strange,’ Isabel cut in. ‘Your brother never mentioned it to me.’ She paused. ‘In fact, he barely spoke to me.’

  Antonia shook her head. ‘No, he would not mention it. He never speaks now of Eunice and Eric, it is a taboo subject. But I did tell him that you are Eunice’s daughter.’ She sighed again as though the effort of talking wearied her.

  ‘Eunice and José, they were going out together. It was nothing serious, you understand, just a flirtation. Then, one evening at a party, José introduced her to Eric and the next thing was that Eunice and Eric were lovers. They very quickly became engaged to be married.’

  ‘And José was jealous?’

  ‘Oh no!’ Antonia laughed lightly, reaching for the jug of lemonade and refilling her glass. ‘No, José was not jealous, he was very happy for them. Eric was his best friend and José was a flirt. He had no serious intentions towards Eunice. He liked to play the field, as you say. He was pleased for them both. They were very happy.’

  ‘She was living in Monaco then,’ Isabel cut in. ‘I went to the theatre, through the archives, I found a photograph.’ She got up and picked up the folder that she had left on the table. She drew out the photograph and handed it to Antonia. Antonia stared at it in disbelief and Isabel, standing just behind her, saw her shoulders shaking with silent sobs. She put her hands on Antonia’s shoulders. ‘Antonia, what is it? I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to upset you. I thought you’d be pleased to see it.’

  Antonia shook her head. ‘No, no, of course I am happy to see it, but it also brings memories, great sadness. Sit down again, Isabel. I have to tell you this. Maybe when you know you will want to leave here straight away, and of course I understand.’ Isabel slipped back into her chair, looking again at the photograph, filled with anxiety and anticipation.

  ‘So,’ Antonia began again, ‘I was living in Lisbon but I went to Nice to have a short holiday with José, and he says that he will take me to see Compagnie Fluide at the Théâtre des Beaux-Arts. It is a very well-known company, as you said yourself, Isabel, somewhat avant-garde, and I am a dancer myself, so of course I am delighted. It is a very special night because it is the birthday of the director and there is also a party. We will go to the party, José says, because he has a friend who is a soloist and she is fiancée with his best friend.’

  Antonia picked up the photograph again, tapping it with her finger. ‘It is this night, the performance for which I send you the program. The first time I saw Eunice was that night. She was like a spirit, such a dancer – oh, Isabel, if only you could have seen her. How she moved, such a presence on the stage. She was, how do you say? Bewitching. The audience was ecstatic.’ She stopped and sighed. Isabel handed her the photographs that had been taken of Eunice that night and Antonia studied them, sighing deeply, her eyes filling with tears again.

  ‘Yes, yes, this is it, but the photographs cannot really capture … do her justice.’ She put the photographs on her lap and folded her hands on top of them. ‘So we go to the party. It is a very beautiful party in the theatre, many important people. I was almost twenty and I thought myself very sophisticated. I hope I will have the chance to meet this wonderful dancer and suddenly there she is, taking my hand, kissing me and telling me she is so happy to meet José’s sister. I thought I was in heaven. Eunice had such wonderful eyes, you remember? Hypnotic almost … well … How will I say this? There is no easy way.’ She turned to face Isabel.

  ‘We fell in love, Isabel. Eunice … your mother … and I. That night – like the song says, an enchanted evening, across a crowded room. Before they left the party I wrote her telephone number on my program. We met the next day, and three weeks later she came with me to Lisbon. We were lovers.’ Antonia paused, seeming uncertain whether she should go on.
>
  The sun was lower in the sky now, sinking slowly towards the horizon. Beyond the town wall a man called to the goats and they responded with plaintive bleats. Isabel watched the fading rosy gold light above the charcoal shapes of the distant hills. She had known it before Antonia had said it. She wondered if she had known since that moment in the cloisters.

  ‘We were together for several months in Lisbon and then in October, Eric finally persuaded Eunice to leave and go back to France with him. He came to fetch her and we … we said goodbye. You are shocked, Isabel. I am sorry, it is not a nice thing to learn … you are angry.’

  Isabel felt her own tears starting and she reached for Antonia’s hand. ‘No, oh no, please don’t think that. I’m not shocked at all, or angry. Just, well … I don’t really know … Surprised, I suppose, but not shocked. Tell me more, Antonia. You were happy together? How did it end?’

  ‘Yes, we were happy, very happy. It was not easy, you understand – the times, of course … These days people are more open, but in the fifties, here in Catholic Portugal, it was difficult. We behaved outside like friends sharing a home. In the theatre, of course, these things have always been more acceptable, but one has to live in the world, which is more narrow. We were not open as one could be today. But I’ll go back a little. There was a terrible time while we were still in France. A week or so after we met, Eunice came to the house where I was staying with José. He and Eric had arranged to go sailing on the yacht of the British consul, and they will be away all day. So I telephone Eunice and she takes Eric’s car and drives to Nice. It was our first chance to be alone together in private, intimately, you understand. We had met for a drink, for lunch, gone shopping together, but always we were in public places. Now at last we are alone. And we are in heaven with hours to spare because they would be away until the late evening, staying for dinner on the yacht. The whole day is ours. Except that it was not.

  There is a problem with the yacht, they could not go out, so the men come back to the harbour in the dinghy, they go to have lunch in their favourite restaurant and then, together they come back to the house. And we, Eunice and I, well, we do not hear them, but they hear us, and then they are standing in the bedroom doorway and it is … oh, I can’t tell you how terrible. José is like the mad bull and Eric, poor Eric, he is devastated, weeping, angry … everything …’ She paused as a tremor shook her.

  ‘Always,’ she went on, ‘always I remember it, that moment and the days that followed.’ Antonia shook her head, wiping her eyes. ‘They treat us like children, keeping us apart. Listening if we make a phone call. And the anger and hurt is unbelievable. And for Eunice and I – we long so much for each other, if only we can just talk to each other. Eventually we are able to talk on the telephone and we decide we must go away together. Eunice tells the director that she is not well. It is easy to convince him because the strain, you know, it showed. She asks for one month congé, and she does not tell Eric. She can’t bear to hurt him by telling him but she knows all the time it will hurt more when he finds we have gone. But we take the train to Lisbon together.’

  The sun had sunk behind the hills and the balcony was suddenly cool. Antonia began to shiver and seemed unable to stop. Isabel got up, fetched a shawl and draped it around her shoulders. ‘Can you tell me some more?’ she asked, her hand on Antonia’s arm. ‘Or is it too painful?’

  ‘No, no, of course I tell you. I tell you all you want to know. You have a right, and I have not talked about this for so many years. Just give me time.’

  ‘Shall I make us some tea?’ Isabel asked, and Antonia nodded, so she went to the kitchen, returning a few minutes later with a pot of peppermint tea and two delicate china cups. She poured the tea and sat down again. ‘Did they know where you’d gone?’

  ‘Oh yes, they knew. José guessed. He knew I had nowhere else to go. I was living in an apartment in Lisbon in the house of my aunt, the one you have in the photograph. My aunt was away but José was terrified that she would find out and will tell our parents. We are not in Lisbon more than perhaps two days and José and Eric arrive. There is more terrible fighting and weeping. Eric is quieter, so sad – he is bereft, as you say. But José, he is wild and angry. He blames Eunice, he is furious with her because she is older. She is thirty-two and I am not yet twenty. He says I am an innocent girl and she has seduced me. He calls her corrupt and evil, he tells her he wants to thrash her, she has ruined my life and brought shame on our family. If our parents discover what has happened to their daughter, it will kill them. For him there is great disgust. He is always what we say now – macho. The thought of two women together, it is disgusting to him. Not so for Eric, he seemed to understand. Love between two women, that in itself does not threaten him – it is Eunice’s desertion and infidelity that destroy him.’

  ‘Were you innocent? Did she seduce you?’

  Antonia smiled. ‘Oh yes, both, really. Yes, I was innocent. I have been on dates with boys, I have had some physical love, but I was a virgin, yes.’

  ‘And other girls?’

  ‘No, not me. I never even knew such a thing was possible before I met Eunice. That night in Monaco I could not understand how I could have such intense feelings and attraction for another woman.’

  ‘And Eunice? What about her?’

  ‘Eunice, yes. She told me she had lovers, both men and women. But nothing like this, she promised me, nothing so intense, so passionate … she had not been in love. Did she seduce me? Maybe, maybe not – I was more than willing, I adored her. It was strange and new, my sexuality, you know. I did not really understand this.’

  ‘So what happened next?’ Isabel asked. ‘Eric and José didn’t manage to break you up at that time. I’ve seen the theatre records. She applied to stay away longer. It was October before she went back to Monaco.’

  ‘That’s right. We were together all that time. They couldn’t separate us that first visit. But they would not leave us alone. There were all the time letters and telephone calls, they came back three times and each time it was terrible. In the end it was Eric who persuaded her. He wore her down. He told her always, “Your daughter, Eunice, you owe it to her, you must make a life for her. All this time you have left her and now you mean to stay here like this, it’s not fair to the little girl.” He was right of course, and he was genuine. He wanted her himself and he thought he could use you to persuade her, but his intentions were good. At the time I hated him for it, but that changed a long time ago. She did what she had to do, she needed to be with you. It was you she chose, Isabel. She loved Eric too, but in another way. She did the right thing. That was her consolation – and mine too, I suppose – to think that her child at least would have her mother, and that’s as it should be.’

  Isabel leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, tears running silently down her cheeks. ‘Her diary,’ she said. ‘The pages are gone for that period. She tore them out.’

  ‘Yes,’ Antonia nodded. ‘I know, she tore them out and gave them to me when she left. I have them still, Isabel. If you wish you can read them, but I will never part with them. She was gone only a few weeks and then the accident. So cruel! I think she must never have recovered from that in her heart. To dance was everything – without that she would be desolate. But she had you and that would be what she lived for. Poor Eric, after the accident he thought it his fault, because he persuaded her to leave.’

  Antonia sighed. ‘It is like some storybook, the passion and the pain. I am sorry to have to tell you all this, Isabel. When I realised who you were, it was like some magic had brought you here. But I couldn’t tell you. It was so many years ago, and I have not been able to talk about it. I had to pretend I knew nothing. And then in Évora, that moment in the cloister, I thought perhaps you knew. It felt as though you could see into my soul, saw it was like looking into Eunice’s eyes. I already loved you – not just as Eunice’s daughter, but as yourself. I wanted us to be friends, I did not want to spoil it, but instead I spoilt it by telling you not
hing, by pretending. So, now you know it all and perhaps you wish to leave …’

  Isabel was standing by the balcony rail, looking out across the flat plains to the tiny pinpoints of light of another hilltop village. She turned around to face Antonia, almost too full of emotion to speak. She paused, swallowing hard several times before she could manage the words. ‘I don’t want to leave, Antonia,’ she said. ‘I want to stay here as long as I can. I want to know more, and to tell you about Eunice, about her life after she left you. What you’ve told me is such a gift, it’s as though you have given me back my childhood. You see, she was away so long, and while she was away she seemed such a magical creature, but when she came back she was broken, she seemed to have lost everything she cared about. I thought she just missed the dancing. I was angry with her because she wanted that back and didn’t want to be with me. But I couldn’t show her my anger, so I took it out on Eric, who treated me better than any real father. I thought she didn’t really love me, you see, not in the way she should.’

  ‘She adored you, Isabel, and she was so proud, always talking about you, showing your pictures, always promising to bring you to Portugal one day. She worked hard for you, you know. Oh, she danced because she loved it, yes, but she also worked hard because she wanted good things for you. When she came to Europe after the war she had nothing. The dance companies worked people to exhaustion. She wrote to me once from Perth saying that she knew she had done the right thing. In the end it was you who mattered … you were all the things she could no longer be – young and free and beautiful. She had her daughter.’

  ‘And you, Antonia? What happened to you after that?’

  She shrugged, pulling the shawl closer around her shoulders. ‘I was alone for a very long time. I kept dancing. José’s job brought him back to Lisbon and we shared the apartment but he made me feel like a child. I went to Spain for a while and then moved back again when José was transferred to Germany. There were lovers and I was married briefly, but it didn’t work out. I think I was supposed to be alone – it has become my life. I chose it and it suits me. I am responsible only for myself and I give of myself only what I can afford to give. Eunice was my one real love, my sadness has been always to have to hide it, never to be able to publicly acknowledge the loss. But you, Isabel, have given her back to me. I see you now, a beautiful woman, loving and wise and forgiving. In the end, you see, I know it was worth the parting.’