by Joanna Glen
‘Definitely!’ said Carrie.
‘To Alvera!’ I said. ‘I can’t believe I never dared come before.’
‘So many exclamation marks!’ said Bridget. ‘Heaven!’
‘To Sister María Soledad!’
‘I really can’t drink to her,’ said Carrie. ‘I can’t forgive her for selling you.’
‘I still think she loved me,’ I said. ‘And I still hope we find her face some time.’
‘How can you forgive her so easily?’ said Carrie. ‘And not the others?’
‘Maybe because she doesn’t have a face,’ I said.
‘Let’s drink to all the faces we’d love to see again!’ said Bridget. ‘Especially M!’
‘And Billy!’ I said. ‘He had the loveliest face.’
‘And Sister Ana!’ said Carrie. ‘She was so irreverent.’
‘And also so reverent,’ I said.
‘I love a contradiction,’ said Carrie.
‘Let’s drink to contradictions,’ I said.
‘And let’s drink to your real mother!’ said Bridget. ‘Though she doesn’t have a face yet either …’
‘My life is full of headless women,’ I said.
‘Is finding her better than not finding her?’ said Carrie, looking worried.
‘I guess so,’ I said. ‘Notwithstanding the commas.’
We clinked our glasses again.
Bridget opened another bottle.
Carrie said, ‘You never opened your letter.’
I took it out of my pocket, saying in a monotonous voice: I got up, I went to work, it was raining, love from Jhazmin.
But when I opened the envelope, I could see that this was not like her normal letters.
No, this was a long letter – with paragraphs.
Something had changed.
Maybe I’d asked the right questions.
‘Make yourselves comfortable!’ I said.
‘Dear Eva,’ I read, the words a bit champagne-slurry.
You asked me what my favourite food was.
It’s funny, but the way I remember things is by food.
My childhood is ceviche made with prawns and chilli and herbs, with a twist of lemon juice. We used to buy it from stalls on the street in Lima, and Papas a la Huancaina, eggs and cheese and spices, creamy as anything.
And then Córdoba is sugary ensaimadas for breakfast, and pastry pasteles for lunch, and doughnuts oozing custard at that lovely bakery on Calle Cervantes, your father loved my home-made tortilla, and Sister María Soledad used to feed the homeless with tortilla.
Córdoba makes me think of tiny budgerigars on balconies, the sun in the sky, and your father and I driving out in his campervan to the countryside in May 1974, to the sunflower fields, did you know that there are 45,000 hectares of sunflowers in Córdoba, they bloom in May.
The day your father left, he arrived at my little flat with thirty-one sunflowers, for each of the days we’d had together, then he left for the priesthood.
Sunflowers stand tall through the hottest days of summer, and they turn their heads to the sun, their Spanish name is girasol, turn-to-the-sun.
‘Stand tall, Jhazmin,’ he said, and he left.
Later, I found out that sunflowers come from Peru, the American Indians cultivated them and the Incas worshipped them, and they were symbols of holiness and fertility.
So when I got home to London without you, I planted sunflowers in our garden in Tooting, and they grew to be ten foot tall.
‘Stand tall,’ I say to the sunflowers every morning, although perhaps I’m saying it to you, Eva.
So, this is a very long way to say that my favourite colour is YELLOW.
Love,
Jhazmin x
I paused.
Finally, a kiss.
Stand tall – have I stood tall?
‘That was actually beautiful,’ said Carrie.
We clinked glasses again.
‘My father had a campervan!’ I said. ‘I love people who love campervans. Michael hated them.’
I imagined my real father and my real mother driving out among the sunflower fields, and my real mother looking at the sunflowers in her damp little Tooting garden every morning for the last twenty years and thinking of me.
‘Maybe you were conceived in a sunflower field,’ said Carrie. ‘In a campervan – a VW split-screen, a light blue and cream one!’
‘Let’s drink to that!’ said Bridget.
‘I’ve really got a proper past,’ I said. ‘Like your dad said, Bridge. A history! A real family tree!’
‘To your yellow mother!’ said Bridget.
We clinked glasses again.
‘I never really loved the colour yellow,’ I said.
‘But you bought a yellow van?’ said Bridget.
‘It was very cheap,’ said Carrie.
‘Wasn’t there a yellow mother in that book you were obsessed by at St Hilda’s?’ said Bridget.
‘You’re right, Bridge. You actually remembered something!’ I said.
‘This girl has a photographic memory,’ said Bridget.
‘I didn’t do very well in the mothers department,’ I said. ‘But let’s raise our glasses to girlfriends. Where I aced it!’
‘What was Yellow Mother like?’ said Carrie.
‘She wore a dress that looked like a yellow nylon nightie, and she had a slightly tense look about her,’ I said. ‘Yellow Mother is pretty and happy and full of energy. She goes about being busy, tending her lemon orchard and looking after her bees. I always thought she sounded a bit annoying.’
‘Lemons and bees – could be sinister,’ said Carrie, sounding a bit slurry.
‘Buttercups?’ said Bridget.
‘Are we just saying any yellow things?’ said Carrie.
‘Swimming hats,’ said Bridget.
‘Lemon sherbets,’ I said. ‘You remember how they made your tongue hurt?’
‘Spanish postboxes,’ said Bridget.
‘Bath ducks,’ said Carrie.
Bridget squeezed my hand.
The magnitude of bath ducks was possibly not explainable to Carrie – some things really aren’t.
‘Have we had too much to drink?’ said Bridget.
‘Tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree?’ said Carrie. ‘That’s a beautiful song.’
I can still see us sitting together on the huge great beach in Alvera, which sweeps round in an arch, with grass at the back where wild ponies graze.
Our arms were around each other and we were singing: tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree. And I was imagining that my mother – Jhazmin Benalcazar – might eventually come home to Córdoba singing that it had been twenty long years and did I still want her?
And did I still want her?
You always want your mother.
Whatever she’s like.
Chapter 101
Over breakfast, Bridget asked us whether we ever felt broody.
‘For babies?’ said Carrie, looking at me meaningfully.
‘Well, what else would you be broody for?’ said Bridget.
‘Cats?’ I said, hiding as usual.
I told Bridget about my endometriosis.
‘You don’t have to be a mother to have a good life,’ said Carrie. ‘Look at Sister Ana.’
Bridget said she was so sorry and why hadn’t I said, and I said, because I’m crap at saying except when I’m drunk, and she said do you want to talk about it, and I said not that much.
‘Except – if you two have babies and I don’t, I’m scared of feeling left behind,’ I said. ‘Like when I actually prayed to God for pubic hair because you got ahead of me.’
‘Do remember you’re talking to the Virgin Mary here,’ said Bridget.
Luisa came over to clear the table, and we got talking, and she told us that she and Elvira had been on holiday when they saw the hotel for sale and thought why not?
‘That’s what your dad used to say,’ I said to Bridget.
‘Did he?’ sa
id Bridget.
‘You know what,’ I said. ‘Once I’ve finished my degree, I could turn the house into a hotel.’
‘You could,’ said Bridget. ‘You actually could.’
And there was this little glint inside me, like the sun coming out.
‘You could give tours and lectures,’ said Carrie. ‘You’d be brilliant at it!’
‘And we could call it Historical Holidays,’ I said.
‘And I could help you run it,’ said Carrie.
‘And I could be your first guest,’ said Bridget.
And I said, ‘Why not?’
Back in Córdoba, I took Bridget to the station, and hugged her goodbye.
It was so sad coming home without her.
I picked up my notes on the Spanish picaresque novel, but couldn’t find the energy to write my essay.
I stared out of the window of my bedroom over the courtyard, imagining guests eating dinner by the stone walls, beneath rows of geranium pots, with tealights flickering, perhaps a flamenco guitarist sitting over there in the corner and San Rafael keeping watch.
Chapter 102
I aced my not-Hons degree, put away my files and phoned my not-father to tell him about my tentative hotel plans.
‘Make it exactly how you want it, Eva, and I’ll cover the cost,’ he said, showing either that all of us are better than our worst behaviour, or that you can buy love, or both, maybe.
‘We’re going to call it La Convivencia,’ I told him.
Carrie and I met with an architect called Susana, and we started dreaming, and she started drawing.
First, a flat for me and Carrie (and often Gabriel), with white-washed walls and turquoise doors and a spiral staircase to the flat roof, where we toasted San Rafael at sunset as he stood angelic guard over the city on top of the bell tower which was once a minaret.
On the first floor, eight bedrooms with ceramic-tiled floors and shuttered arched windows. Eight more on the top floor. We hung one of Lorenzo’s clocks on every bedroom wall, put coloured Moroccan rugs on the floors and imported lamps from Tangiers which spread patterned light over the white ceilings.
We made a dining room in the huge cavernous room on the left, and let it spill into the courtyard, with tables arranged around San Rafael, and blue-and-white porcelain fountains, overhung with cascades of flowers, and a covered section, with low leather pouffes and couches, brass tables, shelves of books, and lanterns with coloured glass.
In every corner, on every wall, terracotta pots, bursting with hydrangea and jasmine and bougainvillaea and geraniums.
The big room on the right we kept for lectures and exhibitions and concerts, decorating it with a wooden cross, geometric Islamic tiles and engraved Jewish Sephardic poetry.
We were ready to open, so Carrie left her job at the dance shop to help me. As a leaving present, the owner gave her a pair of purple flamenco shoes with yellow dots, which she might have been struggling to sell.
We hung the wrought-iron sign over the door – La Convivencia – and we embedded a ceramic plaque into the external wall, September 1997, and we asked the homeless people from the orange-tree courtyard to come and drink champagne with us, as Sister Ana would have wanted. Carrie flamencoed around the stone courtyard in her garish shoes, tap tap tap, serving them drinks and tapas.
Bridget arrived with a suitcase for the weekend because she absolutely had to be my first guest. We visited Medina Azahara and walked in the hills with my butterfly guide, ticking off species.
‘Why did we grow apart?’ I said. ‘Was it because my letters were terrible and you had no phone at the kibbutz? Or was it something else?’
‘Was it true that those three letters of mine never arrived?’ said Bridget. ‘And did you really move out of the Chelsea house? Or was that an excuse so you didn’t have to deal with me.’
‘Deal with you?’
‘And my depression.’
‘I can’t believe you thought I lied,’ I said.
‘It’s just you sounded so weird in that letter, like you were hiding something.’
‘Maybe I didn’t want to admit how unhappy I was with Michael.’
‘Unhappy?’ said Bridget. ‘I thought you were madly in love.’
‘I was very young,’ I said. ‘I had no idea how to have a proper relationship.’
‘In those letters you didn’t get, I told you everything,’ said Bridget. ‘How bad it was with D. His depression, the whole thing. That’s why we all moved to the kibbutz. He couldn’t handle living with us. So I left with the little ones. But I was really a child myself.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you say?’
‘I did say. In those letters.’
‘Why didn’t you say again?’
‘Because I didn’t think you’d be interested. And I felt like a failure. And you were halfway on your way to being some kind of posh wife. I didn’t think you wanted me once you had Michael,’ said Bridget.
‘I always wanted you,’ I said, taking her arm.
‘You sounded so together,’ she said. ‘And so grown-up.’
‘I so wasn’t together,’ I said. ‘I was scared and miserable and I had insomnia and panic attacks and had to move back home. I think I just latched onto Michael because there wasn’t anybody else and he was handsome and he asked. But that sounds mean.’
‘Isn’t that what most people do?’ said Bridget, laughing.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said.
‘I wish I’d known,’ said Bridget.
‘I wish I’d known,’ I said. ‘I’m really sorry, Bridge. How bad were you?’
‘Really bad,’ she said. ‘But I still wouldn’t see a doctor, you remember, I never would. Not after visiting M. The trauma of it.’
‘What? You still won’t?’
‘I can’t make myself,’ said Bridget. ‘It’s a phobia of doctors. It’s got a name. And everything.’
‘Which is?’
‘Iatrophobia.’
‘You should maybe see someone about that, Bridge,’ I said.
And we burst out laughing, like eleven-year-olds in the playground, and then we stopped.
‘I talked to a doctor by phone in the end and I got myself some pills.’
We hugged.
‘I’m so much better now,’ she said. ‘I don’t think it’s just the pills.’
‘I’m so so sorry,’ I said. ‘For being completely shit.’
We sat holding each other’s hands.
‘Why don’t you stay here?’ I said. ‘I’ll look after you, and we’ll be happy again. Like we were before. You can get a job.’
‘I can’t speak Spanish!’ said Bridget.
‘It’s very easy,’ I said.
‘Because you’re Spanish,’ she said. ‘I was always bottom in French, don’t you remember?’
‘You’ve actually remembered something,’ I said.
Bridget went back to London, joined a beginners’ Spanish course and started mudlarking again by Battersea Bridge.
Chapter 103
I employed a serious-looking manager by the name of Adriana, who wore mannish suits and lace-up shoes. If you left anything on her desk, it would disappear into the shredder in seconds.
‘Only touch things once,’ she said.
‘Even lovers?’ said Carrie.
Adriana didn’t smile. She flicked happily through her to-do lists and her spreadsheets, dreaming up systems and processes, tick tick shred shred, flushed with the thrill of her own capability. Carrie went on a Moorish cookery course, and threw herself into becoming the hotel cook. I gave tours of the city and historical lectures with slides, and sat about answering the guests’ questions on Córdoba, in a swooning joy – the joy of being an expert.
A joy not often talked about, the joy of expertise.
I recommend it.
Finding your thing.
Your place in the scheme of things.
Carrie cooked and cooked and cooked, tossing herbs into frying pans and si
nging, and she also ordered boxes of souvenirs which she put in baskets along the reception desk: Mezquita magnets, geranium-painted thimbles, Córdoba pens, silver earrings, palm tree pendants and postcards. Then Gabriel started a children’s history programme, and he set up special holiday weeks and school discounts and fancy dress.
Carrie and Gabriel were a proper grown-up couple now, with couple-friends, and it was time for them to move out and rent a flat over the river. Although I was happy for them, it felt sad having nobody to say goodnight to.
I wrote and told my Jhazmin-mother my news, and I asked for the second time if we could meet.
She didn’t answer.
Time passed, in a haze of guests arriving and guests leaving.
She still didn’t answer.
Barnaby arrived to give a lecture on Medina Azahara at the newly opened Research Centre. I watched him from my window over the courtyard, trying to argue myself out of my desire, telling myself it was a pathetic childhood crush, and I’d turned him into something he wasn’t, and he was married, and what was the matter with me, I was a grown-up now, and it was only a kiss.
I must sort myself out, I said sternly, but I was still a river flooding its banks.
I went downstairs to greet him.
‘How’s Naomi?’ I forced myself to ask.
‘She’s doing well,’ he said.
‘Good,’ I said. ‘I hope the talk goes well.’
‘Thank you,’ he said.
He stayed two days.
I stayed away from him.
When he left, he said it was a shame he hadn’t seen more of me, oh yes, what a shame, I agreed, but he said he’d be back to give another lecture, and he’d definitely stay at La Convivencia.
Oh lovely, I said, treading water, yes do stay, if the place isn’t ten feet underwater, you’d be most welcome to stay.
‘Your taxi’s here,’ said efficient Adriana to Barnaby, tick tick shred.
And he was gone.
What a relief.
Mop the floors.
‘There’s a letter for you, Eva,’ said Adriana.
Dear Eva,
I can’t meet you.
No one knows you exist.
It would be too much of a risk.
Please know I think of you, wrote Jhazmin.