by Rosanna Ley
He held her more tightly. ‘We won’t be scared, love. We need to know the facts. And if there’s anything they can give us to help … Well, we’ll try everything.’
Everything. Vivien let out a deep sigh of relief. It was what she’d longed to hear. ‘Thanks, Tom,’ she said. She could cope with anything if Tom was with her. And once they knew … Well, then they could decide what to do about it – together.
‘And in the meantime … ’ He rolled over so that he was sideways on to her. ‘We could always keep practising.’
‘Practising?’ Vivien closed her eyes.
To have a child. She felt the brush of his lips on hers, his hand on the soft flesh of her upper thigh. And she thought of Pearl – poor Pearl who had only tried to fight for what was hers, who had cancer and who was alone, and who didn’t even know where her daughter Laura might be.
CHAPTER 6
Andrés was sitting at a table outside a café on the beach, a café he had begun to frequent more and more. Soon it would be invaded by summer tourists; this was the lull before the storm – particularly at this time of day when most people were packing up to go home to their families. It gave him what he needed – especially out of season. Space to think, a sense of quiet and a view of the ocean. Si. Bueno. Even the coffee was good.
But today his coffee had grown cold. Yet again, he’d been staring out to sea. Daydreaming. This sea was very different from the sea he’d grown up with on the island. Vast and a gentle blue-grey, it was another creature entirely. And yet, strangely, there were similarities in the landscape and perhaps that was why he had come here to West Dorset, escaping from the city of London where he had first found himself when he came to England. Another similarity about this landscape was that he loved painting it.
Someone he’d once met on the island, an Englishman, someone who had admired his work when he was painting down at the Old Harbour one afternoon, had mentioned West Dorset; it was as simple as that. ‘You should go there one day,’ he’d said. ‘Amazing cliffs – the Jurassic coast, millions of years old, a bit like this place y’know.’ And so – finding himself in England, the land, so they said, of opportunity – Andrés had come here to see. He had wanted, he supposed, despite everything that had happened, to find a small piece of home.
He had put a postcard in the local post office advertising his services. He had done painting and decorating in Ricoroque too – just on a casual basis until he’d decided what he wanted to do, until he made his name as an artist perhaps. And he’d worked on some of the building sites springing up all over the island in order to meet the demands of tourism.
Rather to his surprise, the advert had only been in the window for two days when the postmistress employed him to paint the outside of her house. And that was how it had started. When you were painting the outside of a house, people stopped and talked to you. When you were employed by the village postmistress, people found out about you. Word spread. Andrés Marin was of the old school. He was old-fashioned and reliable and his rates were fair; he did a good job and he could be trusted to be left in an empty house. Andrés had got more work. He could make a living here. And so he’d stayed.
He earned more than enough to live on and began to put money by. He bought a pick-up truck, found a better place to live. In the years since he had left the island, he had built up a small business of his own. He had been right to come here. Here he could make enough money to live as he wished to live and he could paint too – without his father breathing down his neck. He had lived here now for seventeen years. He had studied the English language at his island school and now after so long in England, he was fluent. Andrés watched the waves wash on to the shore, frothing around the tiny pebbles that made up Chesil Beach. Mile upon mile of it, stretching from Weymouth to Lyme Regis. Now, England held fewer surprises. It was a kind of home.
His childhood had been nothing but painting. It was practically all he remembered. Canvases filled not only his father’s studio, but overflowed into the rest of the blue and white stone house on the island. That was all there was. And now … Andrés had finished work early today and he had a purpose in mind. He wanted to do some preliminary sketches for a big seascape he was planning. The art group he belonged to – all linked to the Barn Studios in Pride Bay where Andrés had a small unit to work in – were planning an exhibition for later this summer and he wanted to get as many pieces finished as possible.
Unlike his father, Andrés had to fit his art in with his other work – in the evenings, if he wasn’t too tired, and at weekends. His father … Andrés pulled out his sketch pad and a pencil. He hated to think of him and yet the man was never far from his mind.
When Andrés was a boy, his father used to go out to play dominos in the Bar Acorralado – that was his distraction; what took him away from his work. And when he did … Andrés used to creep up the stone steps to his father’s sanctuary, inhale the rich, dry scent of turpentine and unused paper, touch the stiff newness of canvas and card standing upright in the open cupboard, peer beneath dusty sheets and cloths draped over wooden easels. And dream.
It was the colours. Andrés took in the colours surrounding him now. Not dissimilar, no. English colours were normally subtle and grey. But here on Hide Beach they were also bright – the high cliffs stacked like bricks of honey; Chesil Beach itself rising up and flowing out along the coastline like the mane of a golden lion. And the fields were bright and green as peas – it must be all that English rain. The colours of the island were bright too – especially the sea. The sea could be sweet turquoise and it could be cruel navy. It could be blue as a sapphire or black as ink. He’d never known colour quite like it since.
In his father’s studio, paint would always be splattered everywhere – on paper and card and canvas; big dollops on the once-white tiles of the studio floor; rainbow freckles smattering pale walls. Tears of colour streaming and running and mixing – out of control, and yet under his control, as they all were. Enrique Marin was a man who could never be crossed.
Almost subconsciously, Andrés began to focus on the shapes he wanted to include in the picture. At this preliminary stage he was just doodling really – unsure as to what would go in. He started on the cliffs though; they were his framework. He loved the way the path wound to the top, the grassy cap which was covered in wild flowers, and he loved the scrolled shape of the sandy cliff edge – which over the years had eroded and crumbled on to the beach and into the sea.
His family had more than most on the island. His father and his father’s family before him had reared sheep and goats in the smallholding that surrounded the blue and white stone casa with its postigos, its little wooden shutters, and they grew the prickly pear cactus for the cochineal beetles, but his father’s heart was never in growing crops or keeping animals. He always had other things on his mind.
As soon as Enrique Marin started selling his work, he sold off the land to his neighbour, keeping only two goats and an area for growing vegetables, which Andrés’s mother tended. Sometimes – when his father’s work did not sell – it was all that kept them going.
The Canary Islands were known to the Romans as the Fortunate Isles; Andrés had learned that at school. But they were not perhaps so fortunate for everyone. They were not so fortunate for those who chose to speak up, for those who would not keep a secret, for those who refused to pretend.
*
On the paper, Andrés made a rough marker for where the sea would come, and the line of the horizon. And saw himself – four years old or five, ducking his head round his father’s studio door.
‘Andrés! Out! Hacia fuera!’ His father, wearing his loose pale blue cotton shirt and paint-spat shorts, would yell at him. Stabbing in the air with his brush. In his other hand was the usual thin cheroot; he couldn’t paint without smoking; couldn’t walk or think. He drew on it, coughed, flicked ash vaguely towards the ashtray and missed, as usual. He stooped slightly forwards, his shoulders hunched, his unruly dark hair held back
from his face with a magenta fabric band that made him look like a Red Indian. He was livid. ‘I cannot work if I am to be constantly disturbed!’ Flick, point, ash. ‘Reyna!’
Andrés could hear him still.
Then his mother Reyna would come running and Andrés would scuttle away like a long-limbed cockroach, head down.
‘Never mind, my son,’ his mother would say, smoothing back her raven-dark hair and retying her apron. ‘You can work here in the kitchen with me.’
One day, back up to the studio she went, wiping her hands on a tea towel.
Andrés heard their voices rising and falling, rising and falling into silence. Those were the days when she was still allowed to enter the studio. His mother came back, shaking her head and clicking her tongue. She was carrying an old paint palette, some discarded sugar paper and a frayed brush. Andrés brightened. Work, she’d said. Work. Andrés liked that. It seemed to elevate him to the position of his father, to give him purpose. And he was to paint.
So, while his baby sister slept in her basket near the open door, where the breeze from the sea softly stirred the bamboo tassels hanging from the doorframe, and his mother did the household chores, Andrés worked.
He painted. He painted the fruit his mother placed in the roughly hewn pottery bowl; pockmarked oranges and Canarian bananas – small, sweet and yellow. He painted his mother, dark and industrious, sleeves rolled, apron wrapped around her waist, brisk and efficient as she prepared ropa vieja, meat and potato stew, parrotfish or squid. ‘Never mind your father. He is what he is. You get on.’
On another sheet, now, Andrés drew the red fishing boat coming in to shore at Hide Beach. He drew the fishermen too and their tents, which would be a good spot of colour in his painting. Red, he decided, to match the fishing boat and contrast with the blues of the sea, and the yellow/gold of the pebbles. Red was a good balance, a good draw.
His father was still painting too, of course, still living in the village of his childhood which Andrés had not been back to for years. They loved Enrique Marin on the island of Fuerteventura, for his creativity and his flair. He had transformed the place, they said, with his sculptures, his art work, his vision. Because of him, other artists came and created more objects of beauty. Because of him, more tourists came too, spending money and making the island richer. Because of him, there were galleries, exhibitions and grants. He was adored, deified almost.
His father was well off now. His first most notable successes had been at the beginning of the new millennium – Andrés had read about them, thought, Now will you be satisfied? Since then Enrique Marin had even become known internationally – an artist and sculptor famous in his own right, able to command small crowds at exhibitions and galleries; sought after, in the enviable position of choosing only select commissions. His parents now owned other houses – one in the south of the island and one in the capital city of Puerto del Rosario – but they had kept the house in Ricoroque, and Andrés suspected that they still spent most of their time there. It was their community, Enrique’s landscape – the landscape that he loved and which had given him the success he craved.
He is what he is. Andrés never questioned his mother’s words. Not then. But did she know what her husband was? Chofalmeja. Did she really?
When Andrés ran out of images in the kitchen of his childhood, he turned to his mind’s eye and he painted the sea for the very first time; turbulent waves crashing on the grey-seal rocks by the Old Harbour, great rollers spinning out the surf on Playa del Castillo, turquoise luminescent water looping gently round the sandy lagoon of the bay. Every tide was a contradiction. Every tide brought something new. He painted the sea green, blue, white and every shade in between. He painted it still and he painted it moving. He painted it quiet and he painted it on fire. With people and boats, and alone. And gradually, over weeks, over months, over years, he learnt how to capture its colours and its moods and its energies. He could catch the movement of the surf and the waves, the lilts and the lifts, the curls and the glitter.
Until even his father noticed.
He began to watch what Andrés was working on when he ran home from school to paint. Enrique Marin pointed with the cheroot he held between nicotine-stained fingers, uttered terse comments: ‘More white there.’ Or, ‘Out of perspective. Use your eye. That’s why God gave you two.’ Sometimes his father only nodded. Other times he walked over to the window and looked out, and Andrés’s mother went to him then and put a hand on his shoulder, murmuring, ‘Enrique … ’
One Saturday, Andrés was working on a particularly challenging subject. His friends were out playing football but he was far too absorbed to join them. Mañana. Time meant little to him in those days; there was always enough. There was a fishing boat in the New Harbour painted red, green and blue, emblazoned with a black emblem and the name Halcon. The emblem was a depiction of a hawk swooping on its prey; single-focused – from its outstretched talons to its curved cruel beak and flinty eye. Beside the boat, Andrés drew a netful of glittering silver fish and standing by this a leathery-skinned old fisherman who might or might not be Guillermo, wearing his blue fishing overalls and canvas boat shoes. In the distance the sea was boisterous. The waves were shattering on to El Toston, the spray a thousand droplets in the wind.
His father trudged past, collecting the cup of coffee Mama had prepared for him. He lit another cheroot, muttered something that Andrés could not hear.
Andrés hesitated, his hand holding the brush poised above the fish. He waited for the criticism. Too many fish, the sea is too still, error in the skin tone.
But his father was quiet.
Andrés looked up. His father was stroking the stubble of his chin. His dark eyes had glazed over. He looked angry. ‘What?’ Andrés whispered. What was so bad?
His father turned to his mother. ‘The boy can paint,’ he said. And then he stomped back to his studio.
Just that. The boy can paint. But Andrés was dazzled by it. The words crept into his soul and exploded like a firework into sparks of delight. He felt as if he had been acknowledged. Recognised. For the first time, Andrés knew what he was, who he was. The son of his father. An artist. Painting would be his life.
But he had been wrong. He had been a fool. An idiot. Zurriago.
Annoyed with himself now, Andrés bundled his things back into the canvas bag at his feet. That was enough for now. He was too unfocused. He had let Enrique Marin get to him, the way he had always let him get to him. And when Andrés couldn’t get them out of his mind – his mother, his sister, his father, for whom he would never be good enough – he couldn’t work. He had to shake himself out of it before he could go on.
Because Enrique Marin had not taken his son into his studio and encouraged him to paint. He had not passed down any words of wisdom or tips from the great master. Oh, no. On the contrary. Enrique Marin had become more and more enraged with Andrés for following in his footsteps – for daring to think that he could compete with him, that he could even live in the same house as the great man. His own son …
‘Have you got nothing better to do, boy?’ he would shout, when he came across him hard at work on a drawing. ‘Who do you think you are? Do you think the world will ever want what you do? Look at it!’ And he would stomp over, stab at Andrés’s work with his finger or with the cheroot, criticising, jeering, pulling his work to pieces – literally sometimes. Until Andrés would run away, tears in his eyes, unable – as they all were – to speak, to stand up to him. Why did his father hate him so much? What had he done? Why would nothing ever be good enough for the man Andrés so admired?
Or used to admire, he thought now. Now, he knew better. He had known for seventeen years that there was nothing to admire in a man like him.
But back then … It didn’t matter that his mother and his sister had encouraged him in his painting. What did they know? It didn’t matter that his art teacher at school said, ‘We can all tell whose son you are, Andrés.’ None of this mattered. Becau
se the one voice that did matter was always raised against him.
*
Andrés first noticed the woman when she was up on the cliff path walking towards Hide Beach. She walked with a sense of purpose, short blonde hair swept back in the wind, shoulders hunched, hands thrust into the pockets of her jacket. He noticed her because she was a solitary figure – which was unusual; most people at least had a dog. And because he had the feeling he’d seen her somewhere before.
Since he’d left his home on the island, since that day when he did what he’d never thought he’d do, Andrés had kept in touch with his mother and sister, even though he knew they didn’t tell Enrique Marin.
‘Do not darken this door again,’ he had said to his son, black eyes glowering. ‘Do not dare to come back.’ Not much room for negotiation there. And anyway, Andrés had too much pride. Every time he thought of the island and his family, he reminded himself of those words. He would never go back to a place where he was so hated. And yet he’d had to do it, hadn’t he? How could he not?
Andrés spoke to his mother regularly though. When Enrique was out of the way, she would phone him – two rings and then four – and he would call her back. They didn’t want to risk Andrés’s father seeing the phone bills and guessing that they were still in touch. Andrés told her details of his life, snippets about his clients – Mrs Emily Jones (bedroom and living-room ceilings apricot-white) who curled the coat of her black poodle, dressed it up and took it for afternoon walks along the promenade. Old Ian Hangleton (outside of the house in magnolia and a few broken slates) who peered out into the street through net curtains to catch up with the latest gossip and kept his money under the floorboards in his bedroom with a loaded gun by his bedside. Just in case … Anything that he thought might make his mother smile. He imagined them – Mama and Izabella – sitting with a pot of coffee between them when the old man was out of the way. His mother bringing Izabella up to date on his news, though he called his sister too from time to time and she wrote him occasional long letters in return. She was always careful though, he could always sense her holding back. As if she couldn’t risk their father’s anger. As if she couldn’t allow herself to communicate with Andrés more fully. Until he’d been accepted once more into the family fold.