Bay of Secrets

by Rosanna Ley

  Was the convent in Barcelona the right place for Julia? She bowed her head and felt a final solitary tear weave down her face. Her father had said that the Church would provide. And what choice did she have? Their family had no money. Otherwise they would starve.

  She walked back into their house with her head held high. She would be strong. She would not let them see what this had done to her. She would accept her parents’ decision. She was an obedient daughter and she would obey.

  CHAPTER 9

  On Friday night Andrés made his way to the Jazz Café. Gone were the days of people sitting at the bar with a beer and a cigarette and yet somehow the place retained its smoky atmosphere. Low lighting. A guy on the piano. Wooden tables scattered cabaret-style with red cloths and tea-lights in stained glass holders. The walls – like the music – were deep blue.

  The Jazz Café was part of Pridehaven Arts Centre – an art deco building that housed exhibitions and had a small theatre; the café at the back echoed the centre’s sinuous curves – the room was oval and the mahogany bar followed the line of the top wall’s curve like a comforting arm around a shoulder.

  ‘Andrés.’ Tina was behind the bar. She looked pleased to see him. She leant forward to kiss him on the cheek, once, twice. He tried to inhale her perfume but he was too slow. ‘Beer?’

  ‘Please.’

  Tina was a brunette with generous curves and a shapely head which Andrés had drawn on several occasions. In fact he’d done a painting of her behind the bar, hand on the beer pump, showing the reflection of her back in the mirror behind, which he liked to think was reminiscent of the café images favoured by Manet – an impressionist painter he admired. Not that he aspired to those dizzy heights. But he rather liked the idea of painter as flaneur – strolling and observing life rather than loitering, of course. He’d definitely put that one in the exhibition. He enjoyed the sweep of Tina’s eyelashes as she surveyed her clientele, the angle of her cheekbones, the faintest aura of superiority she assumed. Tina had worked here for a long time – she was most definitely in charge of the Friday night Jazz Café.

  A well-cut bob swung back and forth as she walked, as she bent to fetch a San Miguel from the fridge behind her. Nice.

  ‘You OK?’ She flipped off the bottle top. Tina always asked him if he was OK. He knew she worried.

  ‘Fine, thank you.’ He was looking forward to the auction next week. He needed something more in his life – wasn’t Tina always telling him he needed something more in his life? – and he hoped the project of doing up Coastguard’s Cottage would be that something.

  ‘Yeah. Right.’ Tina raised an eyebrow. She was wearing a close-fitting black T-shirt and jeans that were surely too tight to be comfortable. It had to be said though, she looked good.

  It was a spider’s web, thought Andrés. Which was beautiful. Which could be supportive – and flexible too. It could catch you in its sticky threads, stop you from falling. On the other hand – it could trap you, and eat you right up. Once you were in, you were in. There was no moving on. There was no escape.

  ‘You are busy tonight.’ Andrés nodded towards the rest of the room. The place was maybe half full, which was healthy for just after eight p.m. By nine it would be buzzing. And it was good sometimes to be in a place which was buzzing. It stopped you from brooding. Though Andrés had got used to his own company, his own self ticking away the evening like a railway station clock waiting for the next train. But other nights his head was screaming with images of the island, of his father, of his mother and his sister, and he needed something to drown it out. When a place was buzzing, you could let it slip over you, you could melt into it, even feel you were part of it for a while.

  ‘There’s a band in. Last minute, but we put up a poster.’ Tina shrugged. ‘People get to hear.’ She took his money and turned towards the till.

  This time he caught the faint waft of her perfume. Geraniums. In Ricoroque they always grew geraniums in the tubs outside the front door. Geraniums grew well in picon, the dew-collecting gravel of the Canaries, and they didn’t mind being thirsty. ‘Any good?’ he enquired.

  ‘Yeah. They’re good.’ She gave him his change. ‘They used to play here every week. Then they broke up. Because—’

  But Andrés didn’t get to hear why they broke up because another customer wanted a drink and Tina was already sashaying to the other end of the bar to serve him.

  So he waved a hand to her and grabbed a stool.

  He liked to sit here at the end of the bar. He could have his back to the wall – so there’d be no surprises – he could talk to Tina when she was free, and he had a decent view of the stage and the rest of the room. Sometimes the music absorbed him, sometimes he liked to people-watch, sometimes he forgot where he was and it was a shock when it came to closing time and he realised he’d spent the entire evening in Ricoroque.

  I’m a voyeur, he thought, as he settled himself more comfortably on the bar stool and took a pull of his beer. A flaneur. For ever on the sidelines of life. Watching everyone else have a good time.

  Andrés had first met Tina several years ago. She and Gez were his first friends in West Dorset; real friends, that was, as in people who cared. He’d wandered into the Jazz Café one night when it was quiet, and got talking to Tina. She was easy – light to talk to, quick to smile, direct; no games. He liked that. He even toyed with the idea of asking her out for a drink. She wasn’t really his type. But then again, what was his type? He wasn’t sure that he knew.

  But Tina had made it clear early on that she wasn’t available. ‘You’ll have to come in another night and meet Gez,’ she said. ‘You’ll get on. I can tell.’

  ‘Your husband?’ Andrés asked, though he hadn’t seen a ring.

  ‘Boyfriend,’ she said. ‘Lover.’ And she fixed him with her direct gaze. Hazel eyes, he guessed, though in the dim light of the café it was hard to tell. ‘You?’

  ‘Me?’ For an awful moment, Andrés had thought she was proposing a threesome.

  ‘Do you have someone? A girlfriend? A lover? A wife?’ She laughed. Even then she could read him like a book.

  He laughed back – pure relief. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No one.’ Idiot. There had been women – of course. He wasn’t a monk, for God’s sake. But as soon as things began to get serious, as soon as they tried to get too involved in his life or wanted to move in with him, he cut himself free. Maybe he wasn’t meant to have a woman in his life. Maybe what he’d seen of his own parents’ marriage had put him off. Maybe he wasn’t the type to make a commitment. Tina had her theories – well, she would, she was a woman, wasn’t she? Her theory was that he hadn’t yet met the Right One.

  At the time, she’d just shrugged and said, ‘Come in on Sunday. Meet Gez.’

  But she’d been trying to fix him up ever since.

  As Tina had predicted, Andrés and Gez did get on well and suddenly Andrés realised he had acquired a social life. Easy, really, like finding a key. He could wander into the Jazz Café and talk to Tina whenever he chose, he was invited for supper at Tina and Gez’s at least once a fortnight and he played tennis with Gez most Sunday mornings – followed by a pint at the Black Lamb near the tennis courts. And – thanks to Tina – he had a succession of blind dates.

  These were not so easy.

  Andrés put the bottle of beer to his lips. Not that he blamed Tina for trying. She thought it would make him happy because Gez made her happy. Man needed woman; woman needed man. We were never meant to live alone. But Andrés knew his life wasn’t quite so simple. He suspected it wasn’t just a case of him not having met the right girl.

  The first date was shy and self-conscious and made Andrés feel so nervous that he knocked over his glass and spilt beer all over her dress; the second date spent most of the evening surreptitiously texting her ex; the third tried to get him into bed after two gin and tonics and scared him half to death.

  ‘What’s wrong with all my friends?’ Tina complained one evening at supper. She
counted them off on the fingers of one hand. ‘You are so damned fussy, Andrés.’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Andrés. ‘They’re all really nice ladies.’ For someone else, just not for him.

  ‘Women,’ corrected Tina, spooning out generous portions of lasagne.

  Andrés exchanged a conspiratorial glance with Gez, but Tina being Tina neatly intercepted it. ‘Fuck you,’ she said genially.

  ‘OK.’ Every time Andrés considered himself fluent, some cultural nuance of the English language raised its confusing head. ‘Women.’

  ‘Which one did you fancy the most?’ Tina was in analytical mode. She threw some salad into a glass bowl in the centre of the table and passed around kitchen towel for napkins. ‘To help me for next time.’ Her suppers were always simple and always delicious. Tina had a warmth, a way about her that made Andrés feel comfortable and welcomed.

  He frowned. But what was the correct answer? He glanced again at Gez, but Gez was looking innocent in a kind of You’re on your own this time sort of a way. ‘Er, number three?’

  ‘You mean Jane,’ snapped Tina. She tossed balsamic vinegar on to the salad leaves and added a deft swirl of olive oil.

  ‘Yes, Jane.’

  ‘You like women to be small and slim then. And blonde.’ Tina narrowed her eyes. ‘Do you have protective issues, Andrés?’

  ‘Protective issues?’ He blinked at her. ‘Not that I’m aware of.’

  Gez helped himself to a heap of salad. Andrés followed suit.

  ‘Small, blonde, fluffy, needs looking after,’ Tina pressed.

  ‘I never said anything about fluffy.’ And she was quite wrong. He liked independent women, those who had opinions and something to say for themselves. He wasn’t interested in a doormat he could walk all over – you could get those from the Pound Store in town.

  Tina frowned. ‘You need to loosen up a bit,’ she said. ‘You’re a bit stiff, a bit too formal.’

  Andrés shrugged. He was what he was. It was how he had been brought up.

  Tina put a hand on his arm. ‘And you would tell me, wouldn’t you, Andrés?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If you were gay?’

  He laughed. Though it would be easier, perhaps, if he were. Knowing that the next weekend some vaguely Jane lookalike would no doubt be dangled before him like a bone in front of a dog.

  *

  From the other end of the bar, Tina gestured to him. Another? He nodded, realising he’d drunk the first already. He was thirsty, but now he’d slow down.

  After a few months of non-starters in the blind-dating department, most women would have given up. Not Tina. Even now, she still made regular offerings and Andrés had to admit he’d met a lot of interesting people, been on quite a few dates and made several more friends. Where did she get them all from? Had she advertised? He didn’t have a girlfriend, but he had a social life. It had wrapped itself around him with strong, silken strands.

  Tina brought over another beer. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Nothing.’ He dipped into his pocket for change. Though lately he’d been thinking about them more and more often. His family. The island. Part of him ached to go back there. But how could he go back where he wasn’t wanted? Nothing has changed, his mother had said. And she was right.

  The music changed now, though. The pianist shifted rhythm and the notes seemed to vibrate through Andrés’s body. He closed his eyes. If he were deaf, he thought, he would still hear this music. He would feel it in every fibre of his being. He knew it.

  The vibrations took him back to the drumming in his old island home. The villagers were always practising the drumming for festa time. They would gather after dark in the square outside the cultural centre for singing, drumming and dancing. The islanders had their own traditions; the Malagueña, the folias and seguidillas; their own folk dancing in national costume for festa. And on holidays – Sundays and festa days – there would be a barbecue down in the village square; pungent fragrances and smoke billowing from huge baths on wheels filled with charcoal with meshing over them, roasting sausages, ribs of pork and slabs of goat meat; boiling vats of small wrinkled Canarian potatoes. Dozens of trestle tables set up in the square, the local wine flowing, the drums pounding, their heavy vibrations spinning through the night air.

  Later, their family would sit in the casa, their mother working at her embroidery or making a dress for Izabella from a piece of bright scarlet cloth, perhaps. Ricoroque had once been a port for cochineal – the red dye from the beetle had made the village prosper; a stone jetty had even been built down in the bay. Cochineal had coloured the Spanish conquistadors’ bayetas and the Navajo women used to unpick these vibrant blankets and reweave the threads to create their own colourful garments.

  Andrés vividly recalled one time when he was still a boy. Mama had pinned the cloth around Izabella, fastened a red flower in her dark hair and as they opened the windows and the doors to the thudding rhythms of the primeval drumming, so Izabella had begun to dance. His quiet and shy sister seemed to be under a spell that night. She swayed and swirled, arched and twisted, her raven hair opening behind her like a fan. On and on drove the drums into the night. Faster and faster Izabella danced. Until Andrés joined in too, his limbs responding instinctively to a rhythm he didn’t even understand. Laughing, he had pulled his mother up to join them.

  Enrique Marin though, would never dance. He watched his family and his eyes were as black and unreadable as the volcanic rock of their island.

  *

  Andrés wiped a tear from his cheek. He didn’t look at Tina just in case she was watching him. A spider’s web …

  The music stopped and some different people emerged on to the stage of the Jazz Café. Some of the audience clapped and someone cheered. This must be the band Tina had mentioned, Andrés thought.

  There was a drummer, a keyboards man, someone on double bass and … A girl came on to the stage. No, a woman. Andrés blinked. She was wearing a red dress and, rather spookily, she too had a red flower pinned in her spiky blond hair. He knew who this was. The woman from the cliff top, the woman who he had thought he might have seen before. And he had. It was coming back to him now. This was where he had seen her. Years earlier – back in the days when he had first come here to the Jazz Café. He had seen her before onstage with this band. And then she had disappeared.

  They did a bit of a warm-up. The keyboards guy said something into the mic and then the woman in red picked up an instrument from its case, a gleaming saxophone. She held it lovingly, almost caressing it with her fingers.

  And the band began to play. ‘Summertime’. Unbearably slow, achingly sad.

  *

  When they’d finished their set, people began to drift away and Tina slowed down. She was collecting glasses from tables, stacking them on to the bar.

  ‘Who is she?’ She had played with such melancholy and Andrés wondered how anybody could be so sad. He was mesmerised. Her sadness had wrapped itself around him. He wasn’t sure whether it was her playing or his own state of mind. Maybe both.

  ‘She … ?’ Tina stood next to him hands on hips. ‘You mean Ruby?’

  ‘Ruby.’ The name was perfect.

  ‘Well, don’t get your hopes up.’ Tina went back behind the bar. ‘Tonight’s a one-off. Ruby doesn’t live here any more. She’s been based in London for a while.’

  London. Was he interested? Andrés slid off his stool. He wasn’t interested in long-distance relationships, that was for sure. Not even in relationships. Still … ‘I just liked her playing,’ he told Tina, ignoring her smirk. ‘I’ve seen her around lately. I just happened to notice—’

  ‘About time,’ she muttered.

  He ignored this too.

  But maybe Tina was right about what was missing from his life. Maybe the cottage would not be enough. Maybe he should try harder. And on the way back to his place, Andrés actually found himself whistling.

  CHAPTER 10

  Ruby headed for the auction on
her new bike. She’d bought it from the Dutch bike shop in town when she was walking back from lunch with Mel yesterday. Couldn’t resist really. It was shiny black, had a basket in front and made her feel windborne, almost carefree. She wouldn’t allow herself to be beaten down by circumstances, loss and discovery, she decided. And today she had every intention of buying herself a cottage.

  Even Mel had been forced to admit that the words ‘delayed registration’ on her birth certificate suggested that all was not quite as it seemed. ‘Stop protecting me,’ Ruby had told her in the end as they left the café. ‘Say what you really think.’ And so Mel had. ‘I think you should talk to someone who was around at the time you were born,’ she said. ‘What about your grandparents?’

  Her grandparents … The memory slammed into her.

  Bolt from the blue, her grandmother had said at the funeral. Ruby had assumed she’d been referring to the accident, the motorbike crash which had killed her daughter – certainly a bolt from the blue, a terrible shock, a tragedy. But her grandmother had been looking straight at Ruby when she said it. And she’d been so confused.

  Ruby stared at Mel in horror.

  ‘What?’

  She shook her head. ‘Nothing.’ But supposing Ruby’s birth had been the bolt from the blue? Combined with the shoebox, the letter and the lack of early photographs … It all made a horrible kind of sense.

  ‘Or one of your mother’s friends?’ Mel said gently when they got to the hat shop.