The Liverpool Basque

by Helen Forrester

  He was embarrassed. ‘I wasn’t meaning to ask you,’ he assured her. ‘Doing lawns is a man’s job. It can wait until I get back.’

  She brushed back her hair from her face, and replied firmly, ‘No, it can’t. Unkept lawns are the first things looked for by thieves – a lawn that hasn’t been cut signals that the owner is away. I’ll do it. Your yard’s a pleasure to be in.’

  He grinned at the compliment to his garden, and shyly accepted her offer.

  ‘I’ll give you a key to the house, so you can go in and get a drink if you like. I keep the wine in a rack in a cupboard next to the fridge.’

  She laughed. ‘You’ll probably find me flat on my back on the sofa, when you get back – dead drunk!’

  He looked her up and down, pretty as a picture in her blue jeans and white T-shirt. ‘That would be no hardship,’ he said with one of his slow chuckles.

  Her eyes twinkled as she accepted the implied compliment. She handed him another sandwich, and then asked, ‘Have you told your daughter about your trip?’

  He made a face. ‘No. I’ll phone her the day before I fly.’

  ‘You are naughty!’

  ‘I will not have her run my life,’ he responded with sudden fierceness. ‘She means well – but it is very irritating to be lectured at my age.’

  Sharon did not attempt to alter his decision. She suggested instead that he leave Faith’s telephone number with her. ‘So that I can give her a call if anything goes wrong in connection with your house – a break-in, for instance.’ Inwardly, she thought it might be interesting to hear from Faith how she felt about her father some time.

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ he agreed. ‘Can I give her your name and number?’

  ‘Sure.’

  As he munched his sandwich, he ruminated over the arrangement, and then he said, ‘You’re a true friend.’

  She lifted her glass of wine towards him. ‘I hope so,’ she said.

  Chapter Forty-nine

  It was with his usual sense of relaxation and freedom that Manuel emerged from Customs at Manchester Airport, to see Ramon running towards him, pushing his way rapidly through a straggling crowd of others on similar errands.

  Now in his fifties, Ramon was a stout man with a mass of greying curls bouncing round a bald pate. His shabby, working macintosh ballooned behind him as he opened his arms to embrace Manuel. They hugged each other and got in the way of other, less demonstrative, passengers, and wiped tears from their eyes, as they climbed into the fishy aroma of Ramon’s delivery van parked outside; the blue van had white frothing waves painted along its sides, and Barinèta and Son Fresh Fish Daily proudly above them.

  During the drive to Liverpool they spoke Basque to each other, and the dear familiar idioms poured out, like water from a fireman’s hose. There was a fine, warm affinity between them as if they were much closer in age than they actually were.

  As the van bumped its way into Aigburth, the Liverpool suburb where Ramon had bought a little house, Manuel felt a surge of pure happiness, and he forgot the aching loneliness of his life in Victoria.

  When Ramon’s wife, Julie, heard the van pull up at the gate, she hurried to the door and flung it open. She was nearly as stout as her husband and, despite liberal applications of perfume and scented talcum powder, still smelled slightly of fish. Her tiny feet, in high-heeled patent-leather pumps, took her surprisingly quickly down the path to greet her guest, of whom she had long since grown very fond.

  Again, he was hugged and kissed, then dragged into the little home, to be seated by the sitting-room electric fire, and have a glass of wine thrust into his hand, until the kettle had been boiled and tea made. ‘Aye, it’s good to see you,’ Julie assured him.

  Old Manuel leaned back in the small fireside chair, and looked around the comfortable room, with its bookshelf, its radio on a side table and television set in the corner. Without hesitation, he said, ‘It’s good to be home.’

  He felt as if he had just docked after a long and tiring voyage.

  Much later, when Julie had gone up to bed and he and Ramon were seated comfortably in the sitting-room finishing a cup of cocoa each, pressed upon them by Julie, he asked Ramon what he felt he was, now that he was older, Basque or English?

  Ramon laughed. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘I don’t know any other place, except Liverpool. The wife and I did a bus tour of Spain once – but Bilbao wasn’t on the itinerary, so I’ve never been there. Julie was tickled pink that I could speak some Spanish, though; learned it from Francesca. I’ve got one or two Basque friends – Uncle Arnador, for one – he comes regularly to see me, and we talk Basque together. The wife thinks we’re both learned. Don’t disillusion her!’

  ‘What about your boy – young Leo?’

  ‘Ha! Pure Scouse! I used to tell him about his grandfather, Quanito Barinèta, and how he avenged his grandmother’s death. But the Spanish Civil War doesn’t mean anything to him, any more than the Second World War does. They were just dates to learn in school. He’s married now and off my hands, though he works for me.’ In further explanation of himself, he said, ‘Being a Basque is like being a Welshman whose parents were born in Anglesey; he’ll say, as I would, that he’s a Liverpool man – but you can bet he’ll belong to the Welsh Society – and sing like a lark! The Welsh is still there.’

  Manuel laughed. ‘How’s your singing in Basque?’

  ‘Lousy. The Basque may be still there, but … Uncle Leo was the last person I ever heard sing the old Basque songs – he could hold a tune well, God rest him. I can still put a beret on properly, though!’

  Uncle Leo was the only person in our family who died in hospital, remembered Manuel suddenly, and he shuddered visibly; it was the last thing he wanted to happen to himself. Better to be run down and finished in one blow.

  The mention of Uncle Leo brought to mind Rosita and his sisters, particularly Francesca, who had been the last of the three women to die. She had died from injuries sustained in a train accident, when, in 1963, she had been returning from a visit to her company’s head office in London. As recorded in a long, heart-rending letter from Arnador, it was as well that she did die from her injuries within forty-eight hours of the accident. ‘Not only was she badly crushed, but her lovely face was hopelessly disfigured,’ he said.

  It had taken old Arnie – and himself – a long time to get over that, if either of them ever really had. And, sometimes, considered Old Manuel sadly, another bright spirit, Little Maria, danced in the back of his memory, to haunt him through a sleepless night.

  He and Ramon talked a little while longer, and then Ramon took him up to his bedroom, where Julie had turned on the electric fire in case he was cold.

  When, afterwards, Ramon climbed into bed with his wife, she was still reading a novel, and he said regretfully to her, ‘He’s gone that thin; he looks as if a breath of wind would blow him away.’

  Julie looked up from her love story, and said prosaically, ‘He’s feeling his age – like Uncle Arnie.’

  Chapter Fifty

  It was a joy to Manuel to walk into the spacious lobby of the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, to see his old friend waiting for him. Arnador was leaning on a walking-stick, but with such self-assurance that onlookers could be convinced that he did not really need such support. They greeted each other warmly. In some ways it was barely necessary to talk; after seventy-six years of friendship, carefully nursed through wars, depressions and uneasy peace, they knew each other more intimately than did men who lived closer to each other. Both Manuel and Arnador believed that you could express ideas and feelings in letters which you would never mention face to face.

  They were to dine together, and, once they were seated in the restaurant, they spoke Basque, with old-fashioned idioms and exclamations no longer heard in the streets of Guernica or Bilbao or Pamplona. Although Arnador had had the advantage of speaking Basque with his wife, Francesca, and with his ancient sister, Josefa, his language was as outdated as was Manuel’s. />
  Manuel inquired after Josefa’s health, something he had forgotten to do when he had telephoned Arnador on his arrival at Ramon’s. He was told that she was still quite spry. ‘Her daughter – my niece, Josephine – you know her – keeps an eye on both of us, when she’s not on tour with her Chamber Music Group.’ He laughed when he added, ‘She’s not that young herself – must be over fifty now.’

  ‘Does she speak Basque?’

  ‘No, despite Grandma Ganivet’s best efforts when she was small.’

  ‘My Lorilyn’s the same. I suppose it’s the first thing that goes, with immigrants.’

  Arnador carefully poised some green peas on his fork, and then, before he put them into his mouth, he replied philosophically, ‘It has to go – children want to be like the others round them – and they know that they must speak English to get a job.’

  After a good dinner, and a bottle of wine split between them, they retired to the lounge for coffee. It was a fine Edwardian room, full of gilt and mirrors. The coffee drinkers already there seemed small and insignificant, drowned in the room’s huge proportions. After a while, Arnador began to fidget, and he remarked, ‘It’s too damned quiet. Let’s go over to the Big House. We could have a drink there.’ He put his coffee cup down and pushed it into the middle of the small table in front of him, as if to discard more than an empty cup.

  Manuel hastily drained his cup, and got up. He beamed at Arnador, as he also rose, carefully using his stick to balance himself. In spite of being very bent, his head thrust forward from years of study, he still gave an impression of height. Manuel had always been shorter than him and was still fairly upright in his carriage, though half a bottle of wine and a liqueur had made his balance a trifle uncertain, and he held on to the back of a chair for a moment before setting out across the vast carpet to the door.

  Arnador had insisted on paying the restaurant’s bill and for the coffee.

  They tottered down the marble steps and across the fine lobby, oblivious of the stifled giggles of the girls behind the reservation counter; berets were not seen too often in Liverpool any more.

  Chattering expansively in Basque, they descended a series of front steps, once trodden by kings and princes, and walked slowly along the pavement, to cross a narrow street to The Vines, known to seamen as the Big House. It seemed a long way to both of them, and they sank thankfully into mahogany chairs in the bar, to sigh with satisfaction at a glittering array of bottles and mirrors and to notice and remark that the Victorian Walker paintings were still hanging there. This had been the haunt of seamen, flush with pay, since before they were born, and they opened their coats and settled back happily for a long session.

  After a couple of measures of the best Jamaican rum that the house could provide, they fell into conversation with two retired excisemen, full of wild stories of their adventures in search of taxes. When the excisemen left they grinned at each other. The soft lighting glanced warmly off the fine wooden panelling; and the rise and fall of Liverpool voices around them added to their sense of well-being. Arnador said comfortably, as he looked around, ‘Just like old times!’

  ‘Remember when you were seventeen, and you bet you could get me and Joey Connolly into here and buy us both a drink?’ Manuel asked. ‘And we got kicked out in short order, because we were all too young – and you stood outside and called them everything you could think of – in Basque?’

  Arnador giggled, like a young girl. ‘Of course I remember. I’d more courage in those days!’ He took another sip of his rum and savoured it, before letting it slide down his throat. ‘I’m getting old, Mannie!’

  ‘That’s why I made this trip. Feeling old myself. Don’t have the steam I used to have,’ Manuel replied with studied solemnity. ‘Felt I might not be able to do it – next year.’ He ruminated on this sad fact, and then added dejectedly, ‘Wish I’d never left Liverpool. Could’ve brought Kathleen here.’

  ‘Come on. You live in a lovely place.’

  ‘Boring. Full of old people,’ Manuel announced with the certainty of the very drunk.

  They had a heated and laborious argument about why one man’s boredom was another man’s paradise; and Manuel invited Arnador to come with him, when he returned to Victoria, to spend the rest of the summer with him. ‘I’ve still got a car – take you all over the island,’ he promised. ‘Beautiful to look at – you’re right there. And good fishing.’

  Arnador considered this offer, and then responded dampeningly, ‘We’ve already done it.’ He stopped, to collect words which seemed to be fluttering disorientingly around his brain. Then he suggested, ‘We could go to Vizcaya from here. Strange – but I’ve never been there – and, come to think of it, neither did Frannie.’

  ‘Except when she was a baby.’ Manuel drained his glass, as he remembered a little boy looking down into a flawless, fairytale valley, from a shepherd’s hut. ‘Most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen most places.’ He sighed heavily. ‘Let’s have another drink.’

  While another two rums were ordered, the idea of going to Bilbao began to be discussed between them. ‘We could stay in a hotel there,’ suggested Arnador, ‘and take bus tours wherever we wanted to go. Easier than trying to rent a car – I’ve not had a driving licence for years, anyway.’

  And so the idea grew. They planned to meet the following day for lunch and then go together to Thomas Cook’s to discuss the details of the journey.

  ‘I want to go down to Wapping,’ Manuel announced suddenly. ‘Never seem to get there when I come on a visit. Ramon always wants to go to Wales or up to the Lakes, when I suggest it!’

  ‘That’s easy,’ responded Arnador promptly, though his speech was slurred. ‘Remember the Baltic Fleet? Josephine mentioned recently that it’s a very nice restaurant, now. We could meet there for lunch, and you can see your old home.’ He stopped to yawn mightily. ‘And then we can go into town and see about going to Spain. Haven’t been down to Wapping since your mother went to live in Toxteth.’

  When the barman called, ‘Time, gentlemen, please,’ and put a white cloth over his beer pumps, they could barely stand on their feet as they got up from their seats.

  ‘Like me to call you a taxi?’ asked a barmaid as she quickly mopped their table.

  They looked at each other, and giggled foolishly as they clung swaying to the edge of the bar.

  ‘Yes, please,’ Manuel said to the girl. ‘Wanna go Aigburth – and then Grassendale, for this gentleman.’

  That night, helped by a laughing Julie, it was with a huge sense of satisfaction that Manuel climbed the stairs to bed, while singing an unprintable song in Basque.

  Around two in the morning, moonlight flooding into the room woke him.

  Though his jacket and shoes had been removed, he still wore the rest of his clothes. An eiderdown had been tucked around him. He had no idea where he was.

  Disoriented, he found it difficult to breathe, and his mouth was dry and foul. He felt he was suffocating, and he threw off the eiderdown.

  It did not help.

  He lay very still, taking short breaths, while his brain went round and round like a roundabout. Where was he? And why was there such a sense of weight on his chest – as if old Mr Wing was pressing his big iron down on him?

  He began to be frightened and to sweat. Maudlin tears ran down his face.

  ‘Drunk!’ he suddenly recollected. ‘Very tight!’

  He must have made some slight noise, because a rumpled Ramon in striped pyjamas came quietly into the room, bringing with him the usual slight tang of fish. ‘You all right, Mannie?’ He came over to the bedside and peered down at the old man.

  His presence was comforting. Manuel whispered, ‘Could you open the window – and give me a drink of water?’

  Ramon took a glass of water from the side table and Manuel sipped it eagerly, while Ramon steadied him with an arm round his back. Then he laid the old man back on his pillow, and went to open the window.

  The cool nig
ht air flooded in, and Manuel immediately felt easier. ‘Bevvied,’ he announced carefully to the younger man, and closed his eyes.

  ‘It were just like holding a bird,’ Ramon told Julie the next morning. ‘No weight in him at all.’

  Resplendent in a red silky-looking dressing-gown, Julie woke Manuel about nine o’clock the next morning. She carried a steaming cup of tea.

  He smiled weakly at her, as he eased himself slowly upright. He felt tremendously, overwhelmingly tired.

  ‘How’s your head?’ There was a gurgle of laughter in her voice.

  ‘Fine,’ he answered truthfully, as with a trembling hand he took the cup of tea from her. ‘We drank good stuff. I feel a bit tired, that’s all.’ The effects of the rum had not yet worn off.

  While he drank the tea, she sat down on the bed. ‘What do you want to do today?’

  He grinned his wide, slow grin at her over his cup, as he told her about the luncheon engagement. ‘Would you like to come?’ he asked her.

  ‘I can’t. It’s Friday,’ she said regretfully. ‘I’ve got to help Ramon and young Leo in the shop. Funny how a lot of people still eat fish on Fridays – but never go near a church! And we’re one of the few places, now, that still sells really fresh fish – so we get a big crowd – I should be down there now.’

  She made him promise to take a taxi down to Wapping. ‘I’ll leave the telephone number on the kitchen counter for you,’ she said.

  Manuel was resigned to the idea that Liverpool had altered greatly since the days of his youth; but he was ill-prepared for the shock, when his taciturn taxi driver drew up in Hurst Street at the entrance to the Baltic Fleet. Before descending, he paid the driver. When the man had left, he stood, bewildered and forlorn, with his back to the restaurant, surveying, with unbelieving eyes, the view across the narrow street.