Bay of Secrets

by Rosanna Ley

  *

  When she got back to the cottage she put on a jazz CD and made herself a cup of tea. She picked up Vivien’s letter – still propped on the mantelpiece – albeit on a different mantelpiece from before. A new track started. ‘Why Shouldn’t We Fall in Love?’ The music wafted over her. It was one of her favourites. She stared at the writing on the envelope. Ruby …

  She remembered an evening a long time ago when she was a girl, maybe ten years old. It was a few weeks before Christmas. Her father had obtained a lucrative commission – he was to make some dining room furniture for a couple living in Uplyme. He came home excited, a bottle of champagne tucked under his arm.

  ‘I got it,’ he told Vivien. His eyes were bright as he thrust the bottle at her, unwound his scarf and pulled off his coat.

  ‘I guessed,’ she laughed back at him. Ruby understood that money had been a worry and that this commission would go some way towards easing that worry, what with Christmas coming up too.

  He bought fish and chips – Ruby’s favourite – and they ate it, accompanied by the chilled champagne. The bubbles got up her nose and made her giggle.

  After supper she went upstairs to have a bath and that’s when she heard it. Her parents had put on some of their music and it was humming through the house, rich and dark and melodic.

  It thrummed through the walls and seemed to vibrate the very bathwater. Ruby heard the saxophone – though it wasn’t till later she found out what it was called – climbing up and down the scale of the song; sometimes in little steps as if it was almost out of breath, sometimes long, stretched and fluid like the infinity pool Ruby’s friend Jasmine’s parents had installed at their posh house on the hill. So mellow.

  And something strange happened to Ruby. She closed her eyes and felt it. She wanted to climb that music too. Jazz …

  After her bath, she’d gone downstairs in her dressing gown for the hot chocolate her mother always made for her. And they were dancing – her parents – her mother’s head resting on her father’s shoulder, his hand on her waist, the other touching her neck where her dark hair curled into the nape, where the apron she was still wearing looped over and around. Her mother’s eyes were closed. Her mother …

  Ruby watched them, mesmerised, then Vivien opened her eyes, spotted her and drew her wordlessly into their special circle. As they moved and swayed, so Ruby moved and swayed. The music was like magic. Black magic. And the saxophone, sinuous and sensual, had wound itself into her heart and soul.

  *

  Ruby sighed, ran her fingers over the seal of the envelope. Why? Why had her parents not had the guts to tell her face to face? She propped the letter back on the mantelpiece, turned away.

  ‘Maybe you should give it up,’ Mel had said the other day when Ruby had called in to the shop to say hello. She seemed a bit brighter and Ruby wondered if Stuart had taken some of the pressure off. If so, she couldn’t help thinking that it was just a matter of time before the subject raised its head again.

  ‘Give what up?’ Ruby had perched a deerstalker on her head. She loved coming in here and trying on the stock. But she knew.

  ‘Trying to find Laura,’ Mel said.

  Easy for her to say. ‘I can’t.’ Just like she couldn’t bring herself to open that letter. She needed to find her own genes, to make contact with the girl who had carried her, given birth to her … And given her away, her heart whispered. Yes, OK. And given her away. And she wanted to find out something about her father too. Who was he? Did he even know of her existence? She knew what Mel was saying. If it ain’t broke … But she needed to find out the reasons, put the pieces all together and create a picture that made sense of her life. Otherwise she’d never find that sense of completion that she was looking for.

  Her tea had gone cold. Ruby returned to the tiny kitchen to make some more. She thought of her interview with Steph Grainger. Was Andrés really that good? She liked to think so. Last night, she’d gone down to the studio where he was working on the pieces he was planning to exhibit, and she’d taken a look. She especially loved his Chesil Beach painting, which was to be a massive centrepiece for the exhibition and which featured her favourite golden stacked cliff and the pathway that she’d seen as a promise of her childhood; a memory that she’d never let go of, no matter what else she discovered. A special picture of her own special place. It meant a lot to her that Andrés had painted it – and he’d captured the feel of it so perfectly.

  Ruby dropped the teabag in the cup and added boiling water. No one could take away from her those Sunday afternoons at Pride Bay with her parents when she was a girl, walking along the cliff tops with a summer breeze blowing their conversations away, jumping the waves with her father, playing frisbee at low tide. Was it her imagination, or were the days longer and sunnier then? They were certainly more carefree …

  What subjects did Enrique Marin paint? Ruby realised she didn’t know. Was there any similarity in their styles? Andrés’s work was mostly landscape – it was easy to see that his passion was for the ginger cliffs, the green fields, the blue ocean with colours so delicious you almost wanted to eat them. But Ruby was curious. She wanted to know everything, she realised, about the man she was involved with. And she was involved. The connection between them was taut as wire, though she had no idea how strong it was, or how fragile. Why shouldn’t we fall in love? Sometimes she felt as if she couldn’t get enough of him. When Andrés was near her, she wanted to kiss him fiercely, to have him inside her, to fuck as if the end of the world was on its way and there were only five minutes left. She hoped it was love; didn’t want it to be desperation.

  What sort of an artist was her lover’s famous father? And what did he look like? Ruby took her tea into the living room, switched on her laptop and went on to Google. She typed in the name. Enrique Marin. It was almost too easy these days. Before search engines, research had been a time-consuming activity. But now … A few clicks and a whole world would open up for you. Ruby still liked using libraries and interviewing people, especially face to face. Email was useful – but it was no substitute. When you were actually talking to people, things came up that you couldn’t have foreseen. And people gave you more – of their lives, their thoughts, their memories. Like Steph Grainger had. It was more personal.

  A list of websites appeared. Ruby scrolled down. No doubt her curiosity had influenced her career choice. As a journalist you got the opportunity to find out about things and then tell everyone else. It gave you the chance to expose what was wrong or corrupt. You could do something, you had a voice. And if your story got taken up in the right places, people would read it; people who could do what needed to be done to make things change. Well, that was the ideal. The reality was often more mundane. Articles on health and beauty, travel and interior design – and even the growth of a local art group – might not be world-changing. But at least they could be informative. And if they were the bread and butter of Ruby’s existence, there was always the chance that one day a more challenging story might raise its head.

  Enrique Marin had his own website and Ruby only hesitated for a moment before clicking on to it. She felt a bit guilty – as if she was going behind Andrés’s back. Because he certainly wouldn’t like it. But … she did a mental shrug. He wouldn’t open up about his father, would he? So why shouldn’t she find out for herself? He was her lover. Why shouldn’t she know more about his life?

  It was a professional and expensive website design, she noted. She stared at the picture of the artist when it appeared. She supposed she had been expecting Andrés’s features; the high cheekbones perhaps? Or a certain look in the eyes? But Andrés must take after his mother because this man was very different. He was dark-skinned – much darker than Andrés – and his face was squarer, his eyes dense, black and glowering. Angry eyes, thought Ruby. The man had angry eyes. He glared out at her from the screen – clearly a charismatic figure, the red bandanna wound around his head making him look a bit like a Red Indian. She smiled.
Not like Andrés at all. But still his father. She touched the image with her fingertip. His father …

  She clicked on to the biography page. It was brief and succinct and there was no family information other than the fact that Enrique lived with his wife in the village of Ricoroque where he had lived as a child. So success had not taken him to a different place, Ruby noted. He was still living in the same village. Ricoroque, the village where Andrés too had grown up.

  She clicked on to Events. There were quite a few – with pictures too. There was the artist working with other artists in a studio in the Centro de Arte, a complex that Enrique Marin had apparently helped set up some years ago to encourage new artists and to give them space in which to work. Which sounded, she thought, like the actions of a nice man, a generous man, a man who wanted to share his good fortune with other up-and-coming artists. Did Andrés know about this initiative? Surely he couldn’t disapprove?

  There was Enrique hosting a dinner, and Enrique at an exhibition of his work in the capital city of Fuerteventura, Puerto del Rosario. He still sported the red bandanna in this photo, and Ruby could see now that his dark hair was greying at the temples, but he was wearing a smart suit – which went with the bandanna surprisingly well – and holding a glass of champagne, a thin cheroot in his other hand. He looked arty and interesting. He didn’t look so angry either, Ruby observed. There were no pictures of his wife or his daughter anywhere. None of Andrés either – but that was hardly a surprise.

  There was also a picture of the artist at work – wearing blue overalls this time and looking wild and dishevelled, working in his studio at home, according to the tag on the photo. And finally one of Enrique opening a supermarket. He was quite a local celebrity then.

  So what had happened between Andrés and his father? Why did Andrés never visit the island of his birth? And if he cared for Ruby as she thought he did – why wouldn’t he tell her?

  She clicked on to Work. Just how good was Enrique Marin?

  Bloody good, she decided, as she flicked through the images. He clearly specialised in portraits – and there were plenty of them. Some had obviously been done in the studio and others were more casual – as if they’d been painted on the beach or in a café somewhere. Most of the studio portraits were of young women; some just head and shoulders; others were life drawings of female nudes. But the artist had captured a certain sensuality in even the simplest poses. He seemed to have the ability to suggest eroticism in the curve of a hip or the swell of a breast in the subtlest way imaginable. Ruby was fascinated. And there was fire and brimstone too. Enrique Marin liked to paint dramatic subjects. There were volcanoes and fires and even biblical scenes – very different from his other work, but also brilliant in their own way.

  The portraits were very sensitively handled. It was a special gift, she supposed, to be able to capture likeness. She had no way of knowing, of course, if Enrique had that talent, but he certainly had the ability to suggest feelings and emotions from facial expressions and movement – through a tilt to the head, a turn of the mouth, a look in the eye. It was as if he found people transparent. As if he could look into someone’s eyes and then right through to the other side of them. As if – through his work – he could lay bare their souls. Ruby shivered. She wasn’t altogether comfortable with it; there was something probing and almost intrusive about some of these pieces. She thought of the look in his eyes. But it fitted. It fitted with the look of the man. She’d answered her own question – the father was a very different artist from the son. And she was glad.

  Ruby was just about to click off the website – she had seen enough, she reckoned, to give her some insight into Andrés’s father, and maybe even why they didn’t get on – when an image caught her eye. She sat up straighter. She clicked on the image to enlarge it. The face filled the screen; larger than life, it seemed.

  It was the portrait of a young woman – probably in her mid-twenties. She had long blonde hair which hung loosely around her shoulders. She was wearing a frilly, peasant-style blouse, but it was just head and shoulders so only the neckline and shoulders were visible. Long silver earrings hung from her ears like teardrops. Enrique had painted her almost as if she were a flower. A flower child. And she certainly looked like one – small and waiflike, with an elfin face and a wistful mouth. Her eyes were blue – blue and innocent. And her eyes were unbelievably sad.

  It was Laura. Ruby stared at it for a long time. But she knew as well as she knew anything that this was a portrait of Laura. Clearly Enrique Marin did have the talent to capture a resemblance. And he had done that with this painting. It was so like the photograph. It was the same girl. Ruby’s birth mother. She let the truth sink in. Laura then had lived – at some point in her life after she’d left Ruby with Vivien – in Fuerteventura. It was astonishing. And yet …

  Ruby remembered what Andrés had said when he looked at the photograph that first night they walked back here together. Hadn’t he said it looked like his island? And that Fuerteventura was the sort of place that someone like Laura might go? At the time she’d taken little notice. It was dark and she’d been distracted. Didn’t one Mediterranean beach look more or less the same as another? But now …

  After several minutes of simply staring, Ruby reached for her bag and pulled out the photograph of Laura holding her, the one where she was wearing the love beads and where she was smiling. She held it up next to the portrait by Enrique Marin. It was the same girl. It was Laura.

  She got up and found the sketch that Andrés had done of her on Golden Cap – the one that had first alerted her to the likeness between herself and her birth mother. And compared that as well. The same gene pool. You could see it in the shape of the mouth and the eyes.

  Why had Laura had her portrait painted by Andrés’s father? Ruby guessed that she was short of money. As an up-and-coming artist – as Enrique must have been then – he would have been looking for models; from the evidence on this website he used a lot of them in his work. She doubted he would have paid much. But for a girl like Laura it would have been enough to at least buy food for a day or two.

  Ruby couldn’t stop staring at the images in front of her. Three faces. But what struck her most of all was that in the photo Ruby had of her birth mother, she looked happy. Whilst in Enrique’s portrait she looked so unbearably sad …

  CHAPTER 32

  Fuerteventura, September 2012

  Sister Julia left the Convent of Nuestra Señora del Carmen and, instead of walking down the sandy track towards the village, walked instead towards the brown velvet mountains over whose gentle peaks the clouds had gathered. Lately, she had taken to doing this, usually in the afternoon, before going back to the chapel to pray. She was old, but she must take her exercise; she could still walk several kilometres, thanks to God’s good grace. And she had begun to walk this way since almost no one else did. This way, she would not come across any of the villagers who might stop and engage her in conversation or want to be blessed or to visit her in the chapel. She knew that this was a selfish act and she was sorry. But for the first time in her life, Sister Julia did not wish to see people; she did not wish to talk. She craved solitude.

  In the chapel at the convent and even in her own plain and simple room, Sister Julia could be alone. To be a nun was to be alone with God for much of the time – this was one of the reasons why the sisterhood were encouraged to be silent and not indulge in idle chatter. But Sister Julia was almost ashamed to admit that now she needed a different kind of solitude. She was old. She had turned her face to her God and she had asked Him to show her the way. But as yet there had been no sign and Sister Julia truly did not know what to do.

  So she walked into the desert campo. She took the trail towards the mountains and as she walked, her steps moved in rhythm with her beating heart. Show me the way, show me the way … This landscape had always seemed to Sister Julia to be a biblical one. Could the natural world provide her with the answer – or at least a sign – that God
would not? Sister Julia did not think this for a moment. The landscape was God’s creation, after all. He was everywhere. Indeed, Sister Julia preferred to believe that the communion with nature would enable her to get closer to God without the distraction of the material world. That here in this desert landscape with only the mountains and the ocean for company, she might at last hear God’s voice.

  When the track divided, Sister Julia hesitated for only a moment before taking the pathway to the coast. Sometimes she saw cars ploughing their way across the campo on this route; young people driving to the sea with surfboards tied to the roof, heading for the big waves. Rarely did they seem surprised to see a nun walking across the brown and dusty earth, although once or twice a car would stop and a friendly young person would smile and ask: ‘Are you well, Sister?’ Meaning, she supposed, Do you know where you are and what you are doing, or do you need a lift back to civilisation?

  ‘I am well,’ she would say, meaning, Yes, I do and no, I do not, and she would continue on her journey.

  On this afternoon the wind was high and the road was deserted. Sand blasted on to Sister Julia’s white habit, but the material was coarse and she felt almost nothing.

  When she arrived at the cliff edge, the waves were wild and crashing violently on to the black rocks below. She watched them for a moment. Sister Julia never walked down to the beach – it would not be a simple matter in these robes and she would probably never make it back up to the top again. She just stood here and admired the elements at their most unfettered and free. Freedom, she had learnt back in Barcelona, had to be fought for. But here on the island it existed naturally. She was sure of that.

  So … Sister Julia could barely hear herself think as she stood and surveyed the scene. And she let the clamour of sea and wind and the shrieking of the gulls wash over her. It was like meditation or prayer; the aim was to clean your mind, free your mind. Let the path be uncluttered. Let God come in.