The Liverpool Basque

by Helen Forrester

  Francesca was delighted to hear his voice, she said. She told him that, for once in her life, being trilingual was proving an asset. ‘When the nuns realized that Maria and I could both speak a little Spanish – because we’d heard it at home and in the Church, like you did – they pushed us to take it as a subject. And I thought it was such waste of time! But nobody’s interested in cosmetics at present, so it’s a lifesaver for me.’

  She sounded happy, and said she was sharing a flat with a Scottish lady, who had been the governess to a rich Egyptian family and had learned good Egyptian Arabic. ‘She’s a wonderful old bird – and she works in the same building as I do. We have a good time together.’

  Arnador sounded lonely in his Manchester flat. He did not say exactly what he was doing, but told Manuel that he worked long hours – and that it was just as well. He would be glad when he could go back to his own kind of work, and get a decent post.

  It was not like Arnie to complain, so Manuel stayed on the phone until the very last penny had been expended and he had been cut off. It was then that he thought of writing to Arnie once a month without fail, to keep his spirits up.

  Arnador responded with alacrity, and they kept up the habit for the rest of their lives. We put the world to rights – by mail, thought Old Manuel with a wicked grin. And we’re still doing it.

  As he slit open Arnador’s latest epistle, he chuckled to himself. Before he went back to sea, he told his mother about Kathleen. ‘I’m going to ask her to marry me,’ he told her.

  They were sitting on the cellar steps, while outside an air raid raged noisily, and Ramon snuffled softly in his bed beneath the stone steps. Leo had already sailed.

  Rosita did not answer immediately. She was glad enough that the boy had found someone at last, but a sharp fear pierced her, and she asked, ‘Where will you live?’

  ‘Probably in Halifax,’ he replied. ‘It depends on her. I’ve been earning better since the war began – things are more expensive there – but they’ve got everything, Mam – not like us here.’

  She nodded. She felt suddenly old. With Little Maria gone and Francesca in Glasgow and now Manuel, it seemed as if there would be no family any more. And for what else had she struggled and fought?

  She made a tremendous effort, as, in the candlelight, Manuel turned to look at her. She patted his hand, and said, ‘She sounds a lovely girl, dear. I hope I shall be able to meet her.’

  ‘Of course you will, Mam. When the war’s over, you and Uncle Leo must come to stay with us. And probably I’ll be docking in Liverpool regularly – and be able to see you.’

  But Kathleen had other ideas. They were married while the war still raged; and she continued to nurse. But once peace was declared, she persuaded Manuel to move to Montreal, where he could go back to college to study – this time, marine architecture – while she continued to work.

  It was the autumn of 1953, when he was already in a good post as a marine architect, before Rosita was able to come to see them. In the years immediately after the war, half the world was trying to get home again, and reasonably priced passages were hard to obtain. It was a stroke of luck that Arnador managed a visit before she did. He had been to a conference in Chicago, and returned to Britain via Montreal.

  Faith was six, Manuel remembered, preparing to begin school that September. He took a week off to be with his friend. To give Kathleen some relief from the child, they took her up to Mount Royal, and she played with the dog, while they lay in the summer sunshine and poured out their souls in Basque.

  It was then that Arnador told him that he had always loved Francesca and that they were going to be married shortly. ‘Rosita seems very pleased,’ he said. ‘And my mother is delighted – she’s expecting a few Basque grandchildren. Neither Frannie nor I have the courage to tell her that we don’t want any children. Frannie wants to continue with Pond’s – she loves her job – selling Hope, as she calls it, to plain women.

  ‘Neither of us is that young, anyway – I couldn’t ask her until I had a tenured position – something to offer her.’

  ‘I suspect she would have married you if you hadn’t got a bean. Frannie’s like that.’

  ‘Well, I can take care of her, now.’ He was sprawled on the grass, and he turned to face his friend. ‘It’ll be great being brothers-in-law!’

  Manuel laughed. ‘For sure. We’re as good as brothers, anyway.’

  After he sailed, Manuel missed him badly.

  Kathleen looked forward to Rosita’s visit with no little trepidation. She could not visualize what Rosita would be like.

  She kept Faith with her in the car, while Manuel went down to the dock to meet his mother, having thought mother and son might appreciate being together for a few minutes.

  When Manuel saw Rosita coming down the gangway of the liner, he had been shocked. Dressed in dead black, she looked like a small dark wraith. She looked elegant, as always, but under her hat, her pageboy hairstyle was snow white, and she peered at him through plastic-rimmed spectacles, her face wizened like a walnut shell.

  ‘Mannie!’ she exclaimed softly, and he took her in his arms. For a moment she murmured endearments in his ear in tremulous Basque, and then she asked, ‘Where’s Kathleen – and little Faith?’

  ‘In the car,’ he said. ‘She was afraid of Faith getting knocked about in the rush to meet the boat.’

  Though Rosita looked frail, she was very alert. When first meeting Kathleen she was kind but wary, concentrating on Faith, who, at first, clung to her mother; this grandma was not at all like the brightly clad grandma who came on the train from Vancouver.

  Once they reached their apartment and she had carefully hung up her best black coat and hat and had drunk a dreadfully weak cup of tea with no milk in it, Rosita looked around the living-room. She was generous in her praise, as if no one else in the world had managed to produce such a pretty child or so cleverly arranged such a nice apartment. She finally succeeded in persuading Faith on to her knee, and slowly produced a whole family of tiny golliwogs out of her skirt pocket. They were beautifully made and just the right size to inhabit Faith’s new doll’s house. From the very bottom of the pocket she drew out an old-fashioned paper poke of dolly mixtures and handed them to the child. Together they spread out the tiny coloured sweets on the coffee table to be admired and tasted.

  At the sight of the little bag of sweets, Manuel’s throat contracted. He remembered two other little girls, long ago, kneeling on a rag rug and, regardless of dust, spreading out halfpennyworths of the same sweets, each trying to be first to claim the heart-shaped ones.

  On the whole, the visit went very well. Kathleen learned to cook some good Basque dishes, and Rosita revelled in the plenitude of food in the shops.

  At the end of a month, they saw Rosita on to her ship, promising to visit England soon, but Kathleen never did; she always seemed to have some good reason why she should not. So Manuel went over, shortly after Rosita’s visit, to attend Arnador’s and Frannie’s wedding, and to be the best man.

  A few months later, he went for his mother’s funeral, five days in a ship, which seemed to crawl.

  Ramon was in his last year at the Liverpool Institute. He had said firmly that he did not want to go to university, and, although Arnador thought he could do it if he wanted to, the boy said firmly that he would rather go to work.

  One icy February day, in 1954, he came home from school, to find Rosita apparently asleep in Grandma Micaela’s rocking chair. She had sewing resting on her lap, and the needle was dangling. Thinking that the needle might fall to the floor and that someone might tread on it, he went quietly towards her with the intention of pinning it back into the doll’s dress she had been sewing. It was then that he discovered that she was not breathing.

  He was a sensible youth, but he had never seen anyone dead before and he was afraid. Behind his first primeval fear was another terror – that of being alone, bereft.

  He backed away, trying not to panic.


  Francesca, that was it! He ran into the kitchen, and found Rosita’s change purse in its usual place in the kitchen drawer. He took out all the pennies it contained, ran out of the house, forgetting to shut the front door, and went to the public phone box to call Francesca.

  Because she was in town arranging a special promotion for her company, in Lewis’s Store, there was no reply.

  Ramon put down the phone and stood shivering. Then he picked up the battered telephone book and found the university number. He asked the telephonist who replied to his call if she could trace Dr Arnador Ganivet, Demography.

  Mercifully, Arnador was not lecturing, so he came immediately, tearing down the street on his old bicycle, known to the family as the Flying Bedstead.

  While Ramon dithered behind him, he checked that Rosita was indeed dead. Then he sent the lad with a written message to the doctor on Parliament Street with whom, Ramon said, Rosita was registered for health care. ‘Not that we’ve ever had to call him,’ Ramon assured Arnador.

  The doctor was resting for a little while, before his evening surgery. He got up immediately, however, picked up his bag and bundled Ramon into his rusty Austin Seven, to drive the boy home.

  While Ramon had been away, Arnador had picked up the thin shadow of a woman, who had been his friend since he was nine years old, and very gently taken her upstairs and laid her on her bed. As he stood panting by the bed, getting his breath back, a slow grief overwhelmed him, almost as if it were his own mother who was there. He bent and closed the already half-shut eyes, and then kissed her on the cheek.

  Then he went downstairs to the kitchen to see if he could find some wine. When Ramon returned with the physician, he was slowly drinking a glass. The kettle was singing on the gas stove to make a strong cup of sugary tea for Ramon.

  The doctor concluded that it had been, in layman’s language, a silent heart attack which had caused such an obviously quiet death.

  After he had gone and a very white Ramon had drunk the tea which his adopted uncle proffered, they went back to Arnador’s house, to await the return of Francesca from work. To keep the boy busy, Arnador asked him to help to prepare the evening meal, and when Francesca opened the front door with her latchkey, she could smell fish frying.

  Arnador handed the frying pan over to Ramon, and went to the hall to greet his wife and tell her the news.

  She looked at him, stunned, and then burst into tears, to cry helplessly in his arms. Ramon turned off the gas ring on which he had been frying the fish, and came into the hall. When he saw his weeping cousin, he burst into tears himself, and Arnador, himself distressed, hardly knew which to deal with first.

  Francesca turned to him and hugged him to her. ‘You must stay with us, darling, until Uncle Leo comes home. Then we’ll think what to do.’

  It was comforting to Francesca to have Ramon with them, and even better when Manuel arrived.

  When, six weeks later, Uncle Leo arrived, he had already received the news of his sister’s death by cable, kindly sent through the office of his shipping company. He had had time to think what they should do, and he asked Ramon if he would come back and live in Rosita’s house with him, if he got a job ashore.

  Since to Ramon, Leo had always been his father, he agreed and they lived together until, at the age of twenty-one, he brought home a happy-go-lucky girl called Julie to be his wife and look after the pair of them.

  After leaving school, he had obtained a job in the accounts department of an insurance company. He was quick at figures and had had a couple of promotions by the time he married, but he disliked the daily confinement in a tiny office.

  On the first anniversary of his marriage, he took Julie to a Chinese restaurant for dinner. It was a beautiful place and not one that they would normally go to. Afterwards, while Julie went to the ladies’ room, Ramon went to the cash desk to pay the bill.

  It was presided over by a stout, elderly Chinese, who first glanced at the young man, and then stared at him, as he took his credit card. After saying that he hoped the young couple had enjoyed their meal and being assured that, indeed, they had, the Chinese said, ‘I know you, don’t I? But I don’t think you’ve been here before?’

  Ramon stared back at the amiable Chinese, and assured him that he had not seen him before.

  They laughed, and the Chinese looked down at the credit card as he put it into his machine.

  ‘Barinèta!’ he exclaimed. ‘I bet your grandpa lived by Wapping Dock! There’s a real likeness – that’s why I thought I knew you. Are you any relation to Manuel Echaniz? I used to play with him when I was a little boy. My name’s Brian Wing.’

  Ramon had never heard of Brian, but, when Julie rejoined her husband, she found herself invited to a table behind a fine ebony screen. Wine was brought, while Brian poured out the stories of Manuel and himself. Ramon’s credit card was returned to him, with an absolute refusal of payment for their dinner, and anxious inquiries were made as to Manuel’s whereabouts.

  Brian was a widower with one son and two married daughters. He owned two restaurants and a small wholesale fish business. Though his son managed the restaurants, his wife had always kept the company’s books and he missed her help sorely.

  After a most interesting hour together, the young couple went home. A few days later, Ramon went to see Brian again, to ask for a job as bookkeeper. The salary was not much more than he was getting, but he gradually undertook the supervision of the wholesale fish business.

  When Brian died, Ramon bought the fish business from Brian’s son, using the money which Rosita had saved for him and had left him on her death. At the time of Old Manuel’s proposed visit to him, he had also established a retail outlet, which Julie helped him to run. Their one son helped to run the wholesale side. No matter how many baths the family took, they all smelled slightly of fish – but they were quite prosperous; and the odour from the source of their prosperity did not seem to worry them very much.

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Although he had been retired for many years, Arnador still belonged to the academic world; as Professor Emeritus, he could always go over to the university and find someone to discuss the latest trends in his discipline.

  On the other hand, there were days when Old Manuel felt as if he had lost the art of intelligent verbal communication. Since Kathleen’s death, he had, at times, been beside himself with mental loneliness. Though he had not been as close to his wife as Pedro had been to Rosita, they had managed to get along amiably when he was at home. Even as a marine architect, however, he had been away for protracted periods in various shipyards, and this had been her main complaint during their marriage. ‘It’s all very well for you. You’ve the company of men you work with. Unless I’m nursing, I can get quite lonesome,’ she would say.

  ‘But you do all kinds of things,’ he would reply helplessly. ‘You’re hardly home when I’m home.’ He would watch her go off to a tea party or to preside over a meeting of some kind, when all he longed to do was to take her to bed, before Faith got home.

  It took him a long time to understand that her attitude to their sexual relationship was different from his, though he had, at times, from the beginning felt a stiffness in her response. Sex was way down at the bottom of the list of things to do as far as she was concerned.

  Sometimes he laughed ruefully to himself. Was he any different, he wondered, from other men in that it was always at the top of his list.

  When he went home to Liverpool, which he had done from time to time, some of the tension and frustration which lay uncomfortably at the back of his life in Canada left him. He was more relaxed, though he was never unfaithful to his wife. It seemed to help him to speak Basque in a Roman Catholic world in Liverpool. Without effort, he understood the subtle nuances of tone and gesture.

  He still enjoyed feminine company, he considered, as long as its name was not Veronica. He rather wished that he had not cut himself off from Kathleen’s circle of friends immediately after her death; he could
have visited them occasionally and enjoyed conversations with their husbands as well. It was too late, however, to do much about it now. And only this morning, he had collected his plane tickets from the pretty Pakistani girl in the travel agency. In two weeks’ time he would be in Liverpool with Ramon and Arnador – and they would not stop talking for the whole month he proposed to stay there! Blessed thought!

  Meanwhile it occurred to him that young Sharon had been looking a bit peaky last time she had popped in to see him. He wondered if she would like a day’s sailing in the Rosita. On Sunday, if she were free, they could go up the coast and have lunch somewhere. And she, at least, would be interested in the details of his trip to England; she had urged him to take it. He would phone her this evening.

  He chuckled to himself. He still had not told Faith that he was going. She was going to be so annoyed with him when she found out.

  Sunday proved to be a perfect day for sailing; not too hot and with a steady gentle breeze. Sharon insisted on bringing a picnic basket as her share in the expedition, and they sat on the rocks in a tiny cove to eat their lunch, while they watched speedboats and other yachts taking advantage of the lovely day.

  She was, as he had expected, enthusiastic about his proposed visit, and she asked him who looked after his house while he was away.

  ‘Well, the post office holds my mail, and Jack Audley’ll pick up the circulars from off the step – if he remembers. He’s done the lawn for me once or twice, when I’ve been away.’ He hesitated, and then told her, ‘I’m not too happy about askin’ him this time – he’s been complaining of a pain in his chest lately, and I know his wife wants him to see the quack.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry. I’ll do your lawn for you. Would once a week be enough?’