by Joanna Glen
Perhaps at the wine company, I mused in my Quest Book, there were fields of sunflowers and blue sky and orange sunshine like the paintings in the hall, and perhaps I was born there and put in a wine barrel, like Moses got put in a basket. Perhaps I floated down a river and Pink Mother pulled me out and kept me, like the Pharaoh’s daughter kept Moses.
After my grandfather gave my father the wine company, he started to offload his Andalusian property portfolio as well, and my father would leave gorgeous photographs of glimmering white buildings on his desk, which I described at length in my Quest Book.
I tried asking Pink Mother some leading questions about my Spanish family, in particular my Spanish grandparents.
‘Did they come to see me at the hospital when I was born?’ I asked.
‘I think they were too busy with the vineyards,’ she said, taking hold of the corner of her cardigan.
‘Were they picking grapes then?’ I said.
She laughed.
‘Not exactly,’ she said, pulling at the tiny bobbles on her cuff with her long nails. ‘Your grandmother was probably at church.’
‘I thought you said she was busy with the vineyards?’
She changed the subject.
‘When your father was a boy, your grandmother used to list his sins on a little blackboard and send him to confession.’
‘What? With a priest in one of those wooden boxes?’ I said.
‘He never went,’ she said. ‘He used to put the blackboard in his pocket and go fishing instead. And his mother never knew!’
‘That’s lying,’ I said.
‘Oh, your father always loved to tell stories,’ she said. ‘And that hasn’t changed!’
The truth was this: by the time my father was an adult, he’d made up so many stories about his own life, sometimes he couldn’t remember which one he was living in.
My father also loved stories in books, and that was perfect because English was my equal-favourite subject (alongside history, religious studies, and French, which Bridget was terrible at, and definitely not maths, which she liked best).
My father’s favourite book was Peter Pan (of course it was, he never really wanted to grow up). And like Peter Pan, my father just said anything that came into his head.
Peter Pan was my favourite too (though I longed to grow up), and I knew it almost off by heart.
My father used to let me stand on the marble table on our roof terrace so he could point out the different landmarks of London, and we’d make up stories where Peter Pan jumped onto the hands of Big Ben and stopped time, or where the tick-tock crocodile swam up the Thames and ate Albert Bridge.
‘If you think about it, Eva,’ said my father, ‘the Darling children were very boring before they met Peter Pan.’
‘Yes, but in the end,’ I said, ‘though they liked being in Neverland, they were homesick.’
My father looked at me strangely.
‘I think I feel sort of homesick too,’ I said, thinking that this might be a way into an important quest conversation, and he stopped very still, like he never did.
‘Homesick for what?’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, stammering. ‘Something. Somewhere. Before.’
‘But we’re giving you a wonderful life here in London, your mother and I.’
I shut my eyes and breathed deeply.
‘Can you explain what you mean, Eva?’ he said.
I wished I’d never got started.
I opened my eyes.
‘Come on!’ said my father.
‘I feel like …’ I said, hesitating.
‘You feel like what?’ he said.
I opened my mouth to speak, and he opened his in time with mine.
‘I feel like …’ I said.
‘Yes …’ said my father, his mouth trying to urge my mouth into action.
‘I feel like … when the thieves stole the albums, they stole a bit of me.’
I was hot all over, but at least I’d tried to find a way of saying what I felt inside.
I walked straight off the roof terrace, through the room with the wicker furniture in it and downstairs into my bedroom, where I couldn’t stop myself exploding into sobs. I decided it was a very bad idea indeed to let my thoughts out into real life.
The next day, my father brought me a wallet of photos.
‘This is your home in Jerez,’ he said, coming into my bedroom, speaking very quickly and stopping to clear his throat. ‘This is where you lived with your mother and me, and your Spanish grandpa, and some of your uncles and aunts and cousins. And hundreds of horses and fighting bulls. And fifty billion grapes!’
He laughed.
I had no idea why.
‘When I was a baby?’ I said.
He nodded.
‘Until we came here?’ I said.
He nodded.
‘What about the beach house in Alvera?’ I said.
‘That was for holidays and long weekends.’
I spent a long time looking at my supposed home and my supposed life: the horses, the cows, the fighting bulls.
‘You loved the horses best,’ said my father firmly.
‘Have you got a picture of me with the horses?’ I said.
‘Ah, this one was your favourite,’ he said. ‘Blanquita.’
‘Have you got a picture of me with Blanquita?’
‘I’m not sure I have.’
He moved to the photos of the vineyards.
‘This is where you ran about,’ said my father. ‘Up and down!’
‘I thought I was a baby,’ I said.
‘And here are the sherry bodegas, and look at all those wine barrels!’
I looked at the sherry bodegas and the wine barrels and not one thought came into my head.
Then I stared at the multiple photos of the many dark-eyed Spanish relatives sitting at the big shiny mahogany dining table, the inner courtyard with yellow stone walls and the long sandy driveway through the vineyards.
It was all very beautiful, but I wasn’t there.
Not in a single one of my father’s photos.
Chapter 12
‘Do you have any photos of me at the house in Jerez?’ I asked Pink Mother.
She stiffened, and said she’d have a look.
‘What actually happened in the first three and a half years of my life?’ I asked, firmly, as I’d had enough of my questions never being answered.
‘You’re like a dog with a bone,’ she said, backing away from me.
‘You already mentioned that,’ I said, trying to be a bit cocksure and funny like Bridget, even though I was feeling fragile underneath.
‘Nothing happens when you’re a baby,’ she said, adjusting her silk scarf, which had horse stirrups printed on it, I had no idea why.
‘Well, we must have done something,’ I said.
She moved across the sitting room and sat down in one of the upright velvet armchairs.
‘I’ve told you,’ she said. ‘We divided our time between the beach house in Alvera and our house in Jerez.’
‘With the vineyards?’
I took a step towards her.
‘Ghastly Jerez,’ she said.
‘Why was it ghastly?’ I said.
She made a gesture with her hand, which seemed to be a way of flapping me away.
‘What was I like as a baby?’ I said, heart thumping.
‘You were like all babies are,’ she said, picking up a magazine.
So there was nothing memorable or special about me at all?
I felt horribly winded, and then, a second later, horribly frightened.
Because perhaps she didn’t know what I was like when I was a baby.
‘Bridget’s twin sisters are going through the terrible twos!’ I said, and I tried smiling at her, to see if she might smile back. ‘Did I have the terrible twos?’
‘You were quite normal,’ she said, not smiling back.
Tears welled up inside my ducts.
She
eventually found another of those pocket albums, this one with six photos of me – wearing a pistachio-green outfit, everything matching – at the house in Jerez, in the inner courtyard, which was totally bare except for a stone fountain with three stone basins on three levels in the centre and arched windows in all the yellow stone walls. The fountain had no water in it.
‘How old am I there?’ I said.
‘Three and a half,’ said Pink Mother briskly.
‘Papá says I liked a horse called Blanquita,’ I said. ‘How old was I when I rode Blanquita?’
‘You were three and a half,’ she said.
‘Was I always three and a half?’ I said. ‘My whole life?’
‘Maybe you were younger,’ she said, getting that red patchy rash under her pearl necklace.
‘Why can’t I remember Blanquita?’ I said, and the tears tried to come up my tear ducts again and my sinuses ached. ‘It feels like I would remember her.’
‘Children don’t remember things,’ she said.
‘Children do remember things,’ I said to her, squeezing my eyes shut and forcing myself to drag my inside thoughts out. ‘I have strange blurry memories. There’s a huge table.’
‘There was a big table in Jerez,’ she said very fast, and when I opened my eyes, she was clutching her hands together and scratching at her eczema.
‘But the one I remember is different,’ I said, breathing deeply, needing to be brave. ‘It’s not like the dark shiny one in the photos of Jerez. It’s a lighter colour, and there are lots of people round it, men I think, with beards, but I can’t see their faces.’
‘You have a huge family in Jerez,’ she said, making the skin on the back of her hands bleed.
‘And there are flowers,’ I said, heart racing but making myself keep talking. ‘Yes, flowers everywhere. Literally everywhere.’
A smell of hot rust caught in my throat.
‘All houses have flowers,’ said Pink Mother.
The courtyard in Jerez definitely didn’t have flowers in the photos. I’d noticed this because I loved flowers from the beginning. I used to go into our patio in Chelsea before I left for school and tell the geraniums and hydrangeas how beautiful they were.
‘It’s not normal to talk to flowers,’ Pink Mother would say repeatedly.
‘Then please may I have a sister?’ I’d reply. ‘Or a kitten?’
When I told her I remembered the flowers from another life, she said, ‘Stop talking nonsense.’
But I did remember them – red geranium petals and huge hydrangeas, bluey-mauve with pale green centres.
Those flowers weren’t in Alvera, where there were two hundred palm trees and a blue gate. And they weren’t in Jerez, where the courtyard was yellow and empty, and where, in the photos, I was always alone.
Chapter 13
I wasn’t alone any more – hurray!
I had Bridget by my side, and together we got through everything, even terrible Sports Day, where the Populars won medals, and Bridget and I walked around with stickers saying Well Done on our chests, which meant we’d come last.
But Bridget wasn’t at my side during the dreaded school holidays.
I remember the awful last day of every term, especially the summer term, when it would be weeks without her – and it rained, and was cold, and my father said this bloody country doesn’t have a summer, and days dragged on, with outings to see the grey parrot at the pet shop in Fulham, and damp boat trips along the river, and lying on my bed reading for hours.
My father and mother couldn’t stop shouting at each other: she lay pinkly on the chaise longue crying and saying he’d never loved her. I put my hands over my ears but still heard.
One evening, I was reading about Islam in my library book on world religions: it started in Mecca and moved to Spain, and Muslims believed in angels, and prophets, like Adam and Abraham and Moses (who confusingly cropped up in the section on Jews and Christians too) and also Jesus (as in, Away in a Manger) who they called Isu.
It was all getting a bit bewildering, when I heard my father’s footsteps on the landing.
I assumed that he was heading downstairs to his study, but he came in, looking agitated.
‘I don’t want you reading these kinds of books,’ he said, because his mother had made him hate religion by writing his sins on the little blackboard.
Although I would normally have nodded and said OK, I didn’t.
I stood up for myself like Bridget would have done.
I said, in a Bridget-confident voice, ‘I’m looking for answers.’
‘You won’t find any answers in religion,’ said my father. ‘People made up religions to give themselves an excuse to hate each other.’
‘Or because they need a story to help them make sense of their life,’ I said. ‘That’s what Miss Philips said in religious studies.’
I thought my father was going to shout at me, but he smiled in a way that made me wonder if I was a little bit his darling.
‘I wish there was just one religion,’ I said. ‘I’m getting a bit confused.’
‘In the Middle Ages,’ said my father, ‘in the south of Spain, Islam, Christianity and Judaism lived together happily. For two hundred and fifty years. And, if God existed, that would have been what he wanted, don’t you think?’
I noted the if, and I knew for sure that grown-ups didn’t have all the answers.
‘What are we?’ I said to my father. ‘Out of those three religions?’
My father looked at me.
‘What are we indeed?’ he said, without answering.
‘Seriously?’ I said. ‘I think we’re Christians, aren’t we?’
‘Your grandmother was more Catholic than the Virgin Mary,’ he said.
‘I thought the Virgin Mary was Jewish,’ I said.
My father looked as if he’d never realised that.
My head was dancing with so many questions I couldn’t think which one to start with, but my father didn’t leave any space for questions that day, like he usually did.
He seemed in a great rush to tell me things.
He said, ‘Just remember this – religion always starts well and ends badly.’
Then he said, ‘Come to think of it, lots of things that start well end badly. Perhaps all things.’
I could see his jaw clenching under his skin as I said, ‘What do you mean?’
He said, ‘You’ll see. It’s just how life is. Write that down and see if I’m right.’
He sounded slightly mad, but I still wrote it down.
I said, ‘Are you OK?’
He said, ‘I’m sorry, Eva, I’m sorry.’
He fastened the middle button of his jacket and then unfastened it, and he said, ‘I’m just not very good at being moored. Like Peter Pan.’
That’s the line I remember most.
He opened the door, and I caught sight of two large brown leather suitcases on the landing, as well as his normal cylindrical travelling holdall with the gold initials JMM, and also a matching brown rucksack.
‘You’ve got a lot of luggage,’ I said, with my heart sinking into my belly.
He left my room without looking back and closed the door, and I heard his feet and his suitcases thump, thump, thumping down the stairs, not once but twice, and the front door slamming. I stood at the landing window and saw the pale sole of my father’s left shoe disappearing into a black London taxi.
I wrote in my diary: Papá has gone somewhere else, with a sad face next to it, crying one fat tear.
Then I wrote: With loads of luggage. I don’t think he’s coming back.
I opened my Quest Book, and I wrote: Papá gone, and the date – 25 August 1982.
I felt a horrible fluttering, as if a flock of birds were in my belly wanting to fly up my throat, and tears were pouring out of my eyes, and I wanted to chase him to the airport with the birds and beg him to come home to me.
I went downstairs, my belly aching so hard I almost had to bend in half.
Chapter 14
I walked onto the patio feeling sick and shaky.
I gently touched the soft petals of the flowers, but they didn’t comfort me like they normally did.
My hands were shaking.
Pink Mother was holding a glass of wine and speaking in a strange slurry voice, ordering Rory the gardener to smash up all the terracotta pots and rip out the geraniums and the fuchsias, the strawberry plants, the bougainvillaea, the hydrangeas, ‘the whole damn lot!’
Everything felt precarious to me when she was like this, when she might suddenly shout or shriek or burst into tears.
‘The whole damn lot!’ she kept slurring at Rory, pointing at the plants.
‘I’m afraid I couldn’t do that, Mrs Martínez-Green,’ said Rory, and he put his hand through his sandy hair. ‘It would break my heart.’
‘You will do it!’ she shouted, with her lipstick a bit smudged, looking like a plaster puppet in a Punch and Judy show. ‘Or you will be sacked!’
‘I’m afraid I’ll have to be sacked then,’ said Rory, and he went and collected his box of gardening tools and his old green anorak from the tiny shed in the corner of the patio.
He turned and winked at me before he opened the side door, and I knew that I would never see him again, and that turned into a horrible fear that I would never see my father again either.
‘The cheek of the man!’ shrieked Pink Mother as Rory the gardener left.
‘Cherie,’ I said nervously, bravely. ‘I don’t want you to destroy Papá’s special patio either.’
‘Papá has destroyed my life!’ she said, pouring herself another glass of wine. ‘What is a patio compared to a life?’
And that’s true, I suppose – what is a patio compared to a life?
But the patio seemed more tangible, and prettier.
Also, I realised, I didn’t really understand her life, what mattered to her, what made her happy.
She drank a whole bottle of wine, one glass after another, but that didn’t make her happy. No, instead, it made her pick up some clipping shears and take a swipe at one of the huge terracotta pots, which didn’t break.
In bed that night, I couldn’t stop thinking about her lunging at the pot, with her twisted smudgy face – it made me feel shaky inside. I consoled myself that she often had these strange outbursts, particularly in the evenings, and that by the next morning, she’d often changed back into a normal woman.