Daughter of Catalonia

by Jane MacKenzie

  There was a silence, during which Eric watched his friend with a growing frown.

  ‘You’re not normally this quiet, my friend. Have you swallowed your tongue? It must be serious, then,’ he joked again, more puzzled this time.

  The moment of supreme awkwardness stretched on. Madeleine waited for the earth to open up and suck her in, but nothing happened. All she wanted was to speak to Daniel, but as they stood there the chances of him talking to her were becoming more and more remote.

  Then, surprisingly, Daniel gave a brisk nod of his head, as though he had come to a sudden decision. He nodded at Eric, and said, ‘All right, then, I’ll take your boat! If you want me to take Madeleine to sea, it might as well be today, when there’s no wind, and I can be sure she won’t be seasick.’

  His voice was hard as he spoke, and sounded so unlike the gentle Daniel that Madeleine wanted to cry. She hadn’t really shed any tears yet, but right now she wanted to. Tears for the lost memories, the lost certainties, and tears for Daniel, who had lived with those memories and certainties since the age of nine.

  She rushed to fill an awkward gap as Eric stared at Daniel now in blatant surprise.

  ‘I would love to go out for a boat trip,’ she declared, and realised it was true. She had spent so much time these last twenty-four hours in intense discussions, sitting around tables and in people’s sitting rooms, that she longed for action, to be outdoors and doing. And especially away from this café. She kept looking at the door, or towards the stairs, expecting Martin to appear, or Colette, or, stupidly, and terrifyingly, Jean-Pierre Perrens. She could handle being with Daniel. The others she wasn’t ready for yet.

  ‘Shall we go now?’ she asked. ‘It might be a good idea to go now, while there’s still time before the light goes.’ She looked into Daniel’s closed face. ‘Don’t you think? Daniel?’

  Daniel looked up briefly and then nodded. ‘Do you want a hat?’ he asked, inconsequentially, and she shook her head.

  ‘OK then, let’s go,’ he muttered, and turned abruptly to leave.

  Philippe and Bernard were deep in their chess game, and Bernard merely nodded when she told him where she was going. Philippe, though, gave a small, satisfied smile.

  ‘Have fun,’ he said, as he watched Bernard move his rook.

  Bernard looked up then. ‘Are you going now?’ he asked. ‘And coming back here? Then I’ll wait for you here. This,’ he gestured at the chessboard, ‘may take some time.’

  Eric left the bar with them, and the two young men stood back to let Madeleine pass first through the café doorway, which was open to the warmth of the May afternoon. Madeleine emerged into the street just as Martin came around the corner, his school bag over his shoulder, bursting with untidy bits of paper. Madeleine’s chest pounded on sight of him, and she recoiled involuntarily and stepped back onto Eric’s foot. She apologised, and hoped that her embarrassment at squashing his toes would be cover for her blazing cheeks.

  She was trapped between the two men behind and the young boy in front of her. Her brother. It was useless to call him her half-brother. Blood was blood, and Luis’s son was inevitably her brother.

  Martin greeted her gaily, as he might any family friend. She looked into his face, and he smiled the smile which was different from Daniel’s. Was it like Luis’s, she wondered? Her memory wasn’t good enough to tell her, and she conjured up Robert’s face to try to help her. Robert had such a brilliant smile, one which lit his eyes and dimpled one cheek more than the other, and this boy’s smile was indeed familiar. Martin was his mother’s son, but alongside Robert she suspected that he would be similar enough in looks to be quite troubling.

  ‘Are you going out?’ he asked, and then, when he heard where they were going. ‘Shall I come too? It will be lovely out there today.’

  He looked guilelessly at Daniel, but Daniel, who normally had so much time for him, shook his head in strong denial.

  ‘You have homework to do,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t ever remember that stopping you going to sea after school,’ protested Martin.

  ‘Much you remember! I left school when you had barely started! Anyway, that’s why I’m a fisherman and you’re going to be a doctor, remember?’

  ‘But it’s such a lovely day!’ Martin wheedled, as Madeleine had heard him coax his mother. But Daniel was already walking off.

  ‘Tell Maman I’ll be back long before dinner,’ he instructed, and Madeleine followed gratefully as he strode away from the café. She realised she hadn’t even spoken one word to Martin. She just wanted to escape, and as Daniel headed at a brisk pace towards the sea she allowed herself to be sucked along in his wake.

  At the next corner Eric left them. ‘I’ll leave you with this strange fellow,’ he smiled at Madeleine. ‘Perhaps you can improve his mood today. And as for you, lump head, mind how you treat my launch.’

  Daniel laughed spontaneously, almost his natural laugh. ‘Says the man with the poorest kept fishing boat in the fleet!’ he taunted, and dodged as Eric lunged for him.

  His laugh followed Eric down the side road to his home, but then petered out, and as he looked at Madeleine he simply waved his hand towards the quayside, and then led the way wordlessly to Eric’s small wooden launch. Unlike the shallow fishing boats which were hauled up the beach, the launch floated alongside the small jetty. It was about fifteen feet in length, with a half cabin housing a professional-looking wheel and set of dials. Three fishing rods were tied to the side of the tiny cabin, but on this vessel there was no smell of fish, and the white paintwork gleamed in the late-afternoon sunshine. If Eric was known for his poorly kept fishing boat, he had a different attitude towards his pleasure launch, it seemed.

  It wasn’t until they had negotiated their way out of the harbour and were beyond the sea wall that Daniel spoke at last. Dumbstruck by the sheer beauty of Vermeilla from the water, by the rush of ozone and the fresh kiss of the breeze as the boat gathered speed, Madeleine was gazing towards the horizon trying to decide where the deep blue of the Mediterranean met the sky, when Daniel’s voice hit her, raised above the noise of the engine, as though goaded by the very sight of her.

  ‘Do you find it romantic? That’s what you thought you were coming to find, wasn’t it, when you came down here from Paris? A romantic little village on the edge of the Mediterranean. The village your mother no doubt described to you, full of charming rustics. Well, now you know what we’re really like. Murderers and adulterers. Ugly cowards. The sunshine and the sea and the beaches are just cover, to please the tourists, and our guests from Paris.’

  His voice was angry, but what came through to Madeleine was a deep misery and disillusionment. She fixed on the only part of his tirade that seemed worth answering.

  ‘My mother never described Vermeilla as rustic. In fact she never described it at all. We never had any access to her memories of here after she heard that my father had died. I may have romanticised it, I suppose, like little girls do. I needed it, you see. I clung on to my memories.’

  She forgot to raise her voice above the engine noise, and Daniel craned forward trying to hear her, and then, in exasperation, switched off the engine. The sudden silence was overwhelming, and neither spoke, until Daniel finally replied.

  ‘But your mother was like that man from Paris, full of fancy words and soft handshakes. Like you too, really, I suppose, only you seemed different.’

  ‘You remember my mother?’

  ‘Oh yes, I remember her. Not well, not like I remember your father. She left too early. But he stayed. Oh yes, he stayed.’

  Luis and Colette in the front bedroom, Luis’s hands entwined in her hair. And Daniel on the other side of the door.

  She looked at Daniel. ‘When I arrived in Vermeilla you seemed not to know who I was. In the café Philippe introduced me to you as Luis’s daughter, and you acted as though that meant nothing to you.’

  Daniel didn’t answer. Now he too seemed to be studying the horizon.

&
nbsp; ‘Did you notice my mother that morning?’ he asked. ‘She was so shocked by your arrival. I think I knew then that everything would soon be over. It was a relief, really, although I don’t think I realised it would come so quickly. How long have you been here? A week? Less? Poor Maman, after all these years of pretending nothing had ever happened!’

  ‘Philippe talked about one person being a catalyst which prises open people’s lives. But he also said we needed the truth. Do you think we needed the truth, Daniel? Would it have been better if I hadn’t come? If people had remained in ignorance?’

  He shook his head in irritation. ‘Who was in ignorance? My father knew what he had done, and about my mother. So did Philippe, and so did I. The only thing was that none of us ever admitted it. The only one in real ignorance was Martin.’

  Madeleine thought about the young Daniel playing his lonely part in this silent conspiracy.

  ‘The adults all knew about each other’s part, but none of them thought that you knew anything about it.’

  Daniel’s eyes were fixed on the horizon again. Madeleine tried to find the words to take them forward.

  ‘How did you cope, Daniel, all those years ago? Didn’t you want to tell your mother?’

  ‘No!’ The word was torn from him. ‘I never wanted to tell her! I knew what my father was like. I knew how hard her life was. When I learnt that she was pregnant I just wanted to get to Luis, and make sure he looked after her. She was always so alone. Then when Luis was killed I knew it would have to be me who looked after her. It was my fault for not finding Luis. I should have told him and then she would have been all right. And if she wanted to say the baby was my father’s, then that was fine by me. She wanted me to believe it. She wanted life to be normal, don’t you understand? And it was my job to help her.’

  Daniel’s voice had risen again, and Madeleine longed to soothe him, but there wasn’t anything she could say. She thought of the Daniel she had known since her arrival, so gentle, always smiling, always thinking of others – the brother who stayed at home and helped provide for his family. Maybe this new anger would help him to begin thinking about himself, to become someone different. Now that he had admitted to Colette that he knew, the responsibility shifted to her, surely? Where did it come from anyway, this strange sense of responsibility among the young for the things that adults do?

  ‘I used to think it was my fault, too,’ she managed to say, ‘when my grandfather was foul to my mother. My brother could always charm him out of his bad moods, but I couldn’t, and I used to stand by and watch as he took it out on my mother, and feel hopeless and stupid. I always felt I needed to make it up to my mother, and I guess that’s how you felt too, really. It’s strange how children are.’

  Daniel looked clear at her this time. ‘What happened to you, after we killed your father?’

  ‘You didn’t kill my father!’

  But she told him, the whole story of her pathetic childhood, what happened to her mother, the petty tyranny of her grandfather, the memories and the longing for ‘home’.

  ‘It was a privileged life, really,’ she finished up. ‘Upper class and all the things you were accusing me of. It’s all true, and compared with most people I haven’t had anything to complain of. It was just very narrow and it wasn’t really “our” life, if you understand what I mean. But millions of women lost their husbands in the war, and not all of them reacted like my mother. She just didn’t pick herself up again, and my brother and myself have spent a long time trying to understand that.’

  ‘Maybe she felt guilt too,’ Daniel mused. ‘You say her brothers had both been killed, and she was seen as a failure. She probably felt responsible for her father’s unhappiness.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, you’re probably right. I remember when the news came through about my Uncle John dying. He was killed in action in Italy in the spring of 1944, and when I think about it, it was only a very few months before we heard about Papa being killed. Nobody really knew what had happened to Papa, and what he had been doing, but Uncle John was in the real war, I suppose, as far as my grandfather looked at these things, and he was covered in glory. They never stopped talking about him, and yet my father’s death was never spoken of. Poor Maman. The French were just people the Brits had saved as far as my grandfather was concerned, and had nothing to be proud of. And as for the Spanish, they were unmentionable! I don’t know what my grandmother must have thought, but when I think about it, she never spoke French all the time I was growing up. Never once spoke her mother tongue. And she made a shrine of Uncle John’s bedroom at Forsham.’

  She looked up at Daniel and realised that she’d been speaking purely to herself. How much could any of this mean to him, born and raised here, on these shores, part of this sunshine, and this endless sea?

  But Daniel was watching her with close attention, his face alight with interest. ‘And if your father hadn’t died?’ he asked.

  As she looked at him, she realised with a shock that it would not have been enough. For her life to have been the way she had always dreamt of, not only would Luis Garriga have needed to have survived the war, but Martin needed never to have been born. At the point of visualising her mother returning to Vermeilla after the war, with Colette and her baby in situ, Madeleine’s imagination ceased to function. The fairy tale didn’t exist, the dream was a bubble which had burst long ago, long before that afternoon in the hills of the Vallespir.

  ‘If my father had lived, he had a child here to care for. He was no longer really my father,’ she said bitterly.

  ‘Wasn’t he? You know, I used to hate him. I blamed him and I blamed myself. But listening to you just now, I was thinking, the only real blame lies with the war. It’s what the war did to you, to your grandfather, to your mother, to me and my family. It smashed up lives and left people to live with the consequences.’

  Madeleine contemplated this. Machado’s words came back to her. From sea to sea between us is war, deeper than war.

  Would it go away for people one day, she wondered, this legacy of war? Daniel was right. It was too big, and too callous, and individuals within it were twisted and turned and thrown about like so much flotsam. She glanced again at Daniel.

  ‘Is that what we’re doing, then, living with the consequences?’

  Daniel laughed. ‘Each in our own way, I suppose that’s what we’re doing.’

  He seemed genuinely, if rather morbidly, amused, and perhaps the very craziness of their situation was reason enough for laughter. Or was it merely hysteria? Madeleine was glad to see him looser at any rate, and felt some of her own tension releasing.

  ‘I’ll tell you what, Madeleine,’ Daniel continued, still with the same humour. ‘If we accept that we’re in a situation we didn’t cause and couldn’t have done anything to stop, then the best thing we can do is get on with whatever’s left. I say we should get the engine going again and go towards Collioure to a prime little fishing area where we might catch some sea bream. It won’t actually solve anything if we catch any, but it will give my mother some pleasure, at least. What do you say?’

  They spent a magical, forgetful two hours fishing for bream, returning with not a lot to show for their endeavours, but for Madeleine, the experience was a revelation. Drenched in sun, sweating as she cast and cast again and learnt to send her line skidding through the air before it sank under the water, her hair askew and her dress covered in smears of the stinking bait they found in a bucket, she let Daniel hold her arms and show her how to reel in a fish, and then hit it over the head like him without a second’s compunction.

  As dusk fell they turned back for Vermeilla, aware that they were going to be late for dinner, whoever they were each supposed to be eating it with. Four small fish lay in the bottom of a black bucket, and Daniel was telling her tall stories of fish he’d caught in the past.

  ‘You’ll have to take me out again, in that case,’ Madeleine laughed. ‘To prove you’re the fisherman you say you are. Any brother of mine has to be ab
le to live up to his bragging!’

  Daniel’s smile faded, and he snapped, ‘I’m not your brother, Madeleine.’

  She looked a query. Hers had been a light-hearted remark, and they’d joked more than once this afternoon about their shared half-brother. But Daniel had turned away, and was tidying the rods with one hand while he held the wheel with another.

  ‘I’m sorry, Daniel,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to touch on a raw nerve. It’s just that I’ve had such a good afternoon. As good if not better than I could have had with my own brother. We are kind of family, you know. What do you think you are, my half-brother once removed? Or my step half-brother?’

  Her teasing tone made no impact. He kept his back to her, and busied himself in the corner tying cords around the rods.

  ‘Daniel?’ Madeleine questioned, slightly alarmed.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he mouthed, so that she had to struggle to hear him. ‘You can be whatever you like, Madeleine. Just whatever you like.’

  His meaning was suddenly unmistakable, and Madeleine drew back into the far corner, jolted by an intense consternation which left her with nothing to say. So Daniel had that kind of interest in her! And she hadn’t seen it. How could she have been so naive? And yet she’d been aware of an attraction towards him, earlier in the week. What had happened to make it seem so impossible now? It dawned on her with a jolt that it was Jordi who had changed things. She had a sudden vision of him, angry, challenging, disquieting. Daniel didn’t disquiet her. Oh God, she thought, where will all the complications end?

  She was relieved to see Bernard waiting for them on the quayside. He was on his own, sauntering along looking into the fishing barques, and came towards where they berthed to take a rope from Daniel.