About the Author

KERRY POSTLE left King’s College London with a distinction in her MA in French Literature. She’s written articles for newspapers and magazines, and has worked as a teacher of Art, French, German, Spanish, and English. Kerry’s first novel, The Artist’s Muse, about the relationship between Wally Neuzil and the artist Egon Schiele, came out in 2017.

She lives in Bristol with her husband. They have three grown-up sons.

Kerry is currently working on her third novel about the artist Raphael.

A Forbidden Love is her second novel.

Follow her on twitter @kerry_postle

A Forbidden Love
KERRY POSTLE

HQ

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2019

Copyright © Kerry Postle 2019

Kerry Postle asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008330798

E-book Edition © April 2019 ISBN: 9780008310271

Version: 2019-02-25

Table of Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Acknowledgements

Extract

Dear Reader …

Keep Reading …

About the Publisher

To Paloma

and all the women who lost their lives during the Spanish Civil War

‘The poem, the song, the picture, is only water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty so that they may drink – and in drinking understand themselves.’

Lorca

Prologue
March 1940, Malaga

Luis de los Rios ran out of the university building onto the Avenida de Cervantes, black jacket in one hand, tan leather folder in the other. The porter called after him, ‘Running late today, Seňor?’ But the unlikely academic had already been swallowed up by the bushes on the other side of the road.

He was on the Paseo del Parque, a long pathway shaded by trees that ran between the harbour and Malaga’s old town. Every Friday morning between ten and eleven Luis walked up and down it. Always on the same day, always at the same hour. He never taught then. He’d insisted it be written into his contract. No one knew why. And today he was running late.

At 9.50 a.m. a student had turned up at his door. Luis’ instinct had been to brush him aside but the better part of him had won out. He’d sat back, listened to the boy. Or tried to. He’d looked at his watch – 9.52 – and rolled his eyes. Looked at his watch again: 9.57. He thrummed his fingers loudly on the desk. Why was he not able to focus on anything the boy was saying? By seven minutes past ten Luis had had enough. The wooden chair he’d been sitting on went crashing to the floor. ‘I must go,’ he’d said, running to the door, hurtling along the corridor and flying out of the building. And wishing he’d listened to his instinct in the first place.

It was ten minutes past ten by the time Luis set foot on the path in the park. Lined by tall plane and palm trees, it felt like a cool, dark, cavernous cathedral and it calmed him instantly. He blinked. His eyes adjusted to make out strips of light and shade on the path beneath his feet. He looked upwards. The sun shot through the green ceiling above. He blinked again. His eyes focused further. He saw people as they walked back and forth under the high, fringed canopies, an optical illusion of unbroken movements bathed in radiance.

Was she here?

He was later than usual – ‘but not too late,’ he said to himself.

He proceeded to walk along the path. Purpose pumped through his veins. His skin tingled, senses crackled, as parakeets flew through the air, their plumage igniting into a vivid green. Their fiery wings blazed a trail into his soul, lifting him on his way.

He went past the old men, acknowledging them as he passed, just as he did every week; nodded to the widows, and the young women who shared their grief. They were here, survivors all, leading a semblance of a normal life, just as he was, refusing to let the past destroy them. They milled around, sat on benches, talked about the weather. Luis winced, moved by the dignity of the everyday in the face of a memory of the horror they all shared: civil war. A nation could not recover from it easily.

Yet if innocence had gone forever, hope had not. That’s why he was here, making his way to a clandestine meeting, the details of which he’d written in a note and handed to a girl over four years ago.

He didn’t even know if she’d read it.

Meeting place: the Antonio Muñoz Degrain monument, Parque de Malaga

Time: 10–11 a.m.

Day: Friday

I’ll wait for you.

Luis sat on a bench and looked at his watch: 10.45. He thought back to the last time he’d seen her. He’d pushed her away. He’d had to. It was time for her to go. But he had given her the letter. She had it. He hoped she’d read it.

He leant back against a bench and cast another glance down at his watch. 10.55. Time to start making his way back to the university. He’d always been a good timekeeper. A smile broke out across his face as he remembered that the girl he loved had not. He ran his fingers through his hair, resigned to the fact he’d not found her. This time.

He went to pick up his jacket and folder when the screech of a parakeet overhead distracted him. Threat or warning, either way it was too late. The brilliantly coloured bird had already left its dull coloured deposit on the shoulder of his crisp, white shirt.

‘Filthy beast!’

An old gypsy woman dressed in tattered clothes, a black shawl wrapped around her wiry grey hair, smiled at him through cataract-misted eyes. ‘Supposed to be lucky,’ she laughed at him. In the haze of her fading sight Luis had something of the angel about him. To Luis, she looked like a fat, old bird, too large and heavy for the tree above, sat as she was on a nest made of cloth, her skirts billowing up all around. He watched as she plunged her hand in amongst the many layers that surrounded her. She pulled out a dull-coloured patch with frayed edges and waved it at him.

For want of anything better to clean himself up with, Luis accepted her tattered offering. He rubbed away at his shirt as quickly as he could, his head nodding in the gypsy woman’s direction, grateful that all that was left of the parakeet’s slimy gift was a suspicious, damp stain on his left shoulder. She flashed her crucifix at him in response with a smile that made her eyes disappear. But now he really had to go. He walked swiftly back along the dry, dusty path, shouting back his thanks.

He’d very nearly packed all the emotions he’d allowed to spill out over this last hour back into the neat compartments he’d allotted them in his mind when he lurched backwards, pulled back by a familiar voice. ‘Don’t run off now, Paloma!’ A little girl, swift as a comet, hurtled past him, her flaming hair dragging his eyes along with her. When the speeding ball of fire screeched to a halt back along the path, not far from the Antonio Muñoz Degrain monument, Luis’ heart missed a beat.

The child clung on to a young woman with long, dark hair.

It was her. It was Maria.

Chapter 1

‘What are you going to do when you grow up?’ It was a clear spring day in 1936 and Maria lay back under the gnarled, black branches of the olive tree and looked up at the Andalucian sky above: vivid blue, and as cloudless as the future she saw for herself. She and her friend Paloma often sought shade and solace in this grove, under this tree, far away from the dust and heat of the village. And here they would dream.

‘When I grow up, I’m going to …’ Paloma began. She flicked out her fingers in frustration, brushing Maria’s own. ‘Oh, I don’t know!’ she cried in answer to the older girl’s question – but she did. She would grow up to do the same as her mother, and her mother’s mother before her. A husband would be found for her, she would have children, and both she and her husband would work up on the landowner’s estate. That was the way it was; that was the way it had always been. Paloma’s fate was as set as if written in the stars. It was only Maria who saw a future full of possibilities for her friend as she gazed into the bright, limitless sky above. And Paloma loved her for it.

Instinctively she turned on her side to wrap her limbs around Maria’s. Legs, arms, fingers interlaced, a tangle as fixed and as complex as the roots of the olive tree beneath.

The girls’ skins squelched, mollusc-like, as Maria pulled herself away. Pushing herself up to sitting, she propped her back up against the solid trunk of the tree.

She looked at Paloma, cheek squashed against forearm. The skin, usually so plump and firm, gathered in folds and pushed her left eye closed. It struck Maria that in that moment her friend took after her mother Cecilia, whose skin cascaded in folds all over her body; ill-fitting, stretched and worn out, through overuse no doubt. Maria’s father would often sing the woman’s praises – how she fed her children well, repaired their clothes, kept a spotless home, worked hard – but the fact remained that Paloma’s mother was irritable, illiterate and limited. There. Maria had thought it again. Guilt ran a feather over her skin, causing her to shiver. Perhaps she’d judged Paloma’s mother too harshly – her father was always telling her so – but the fact remained: if she didn’t show Paloma there was another way to live, a future other than the one she saw mapped out for herself, then her dear, sweet-natured friend would slowly but surely turn into a beast of burden, just like poor old Cecilia.

And Maria wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she allowed that to happen.

‘Sit up,’ she snapped. ‘So, what do you want to do when you grow up?’ She would have a response.

Paloma rubbed her eyes and sighed.

‘If you don’t answer I’ll have to ask somebody else.’ Maria’s voice was sharp and vaguely menacing. Her eyes scanned the olive grove for possible candidates. They alighted upon a herd of goats resting under a nearby tree. She recognised her own stupidity.

Thankfully Paloma did not.

‘No, it’s fine. I’ll play,’ the gentle soul said, her tone one of quiet resignation. Two years younger than Maria, she always felt grateful the older girl had chosen her and not her sister Lola to confide in. Lola was sixteen, the same age as Maria. It would have made sense for the two older girls to be close. But they weren’t. Never had been. They were fond enough of each other, and the fact that they were opposites in every single way was not, in itself, insurmountable. But that Paloma was so easy to be with, so innocent and good-natured, made her a perfect companion. Lola’s little sister had become the little sister that Maria had always wanted. She could love and protect her, and teach her about all the great and good things in life. Lola, on the other hand, came fully formed with a tongue as sharp as a knife.

Paloma brought her chin to nestle in the curve between her knees, her black hair still curled up flat with perspiration around her face. A stray lock misbehaved and draped itself like a dark rope against the deep pink of a cheek that was soft and plump once more. If Cecilia had ever looked like this Maria could not imagine it. She leant over towards her friend and pushed the dark unruly coil back with tenderness and waited for an answer.

‘Well,’ Paloma began, unsure how to proceed. To get married was the pinnacle of her life, and the thought of a wedding with an abundance of flowers, food, finery, and all the froth that went with it, had started to fill many a quiet moment. But to admit this, Paloma knew, would displease her friend. She waited for guidance.

‘Will you have children?’ Maria asked.

‘Y-yes,’ Paloma answered. ‘Once I’m married.’

‘Why?’ Maria asked.

‘Why? Why what?’

‘Why would you get married before having children?’

Paloma’s dark brown eyes widened; Maria’s creased with satisfaction. ‘In fact,’ Maria ventured, emboldened by the surprise in Paloma’s eyes, ‘why would you get married … at all?’ Her young friend’s already wide eyes turned into the fullest of moons.

The evening before, Seňor Suarez, the village teacher who used to work in Madrid and still had family and friends in the capital, had come to eat with Maria and her father, Doctor Alvaro.

The winds of change were blowing and whistling their sinewy path around Spain and though they’d barely touched Fuentes de Andalucía in any significant way, the more travelled citizens, of which Seňor Suarez was one, often brought back stories from the outside world whenever they returned to the sleepy little village. Suarez was teacher, philosopher, and general do-er of good deeds (mostly political), and a frequent dinner guest at Maria’s home where the precarious state of the government and how to best help workers in the area were his topics of choice. But last night, as he had smiled over at Maria and realised for the first time that she was a young woman, his conversation had taken a new turn.

‘You know, in Madrid, and I hear it’s the same in Malaga, things are so very different for women now. They have more freedom. More choice.’ He’d looked over at Doctor Alvaro who’d nodded for him to continue. Suarez had already told them that night about a growing vegetarian movement in the capital. Nothing his friend had to say, Alvaro thought to himself as he chewed on a particularly gristly bit of sausage, could be more challenging for both he and his daughter to swallow than that.

But then again.

‘A woman no longer has to get married if she wants to live with a man.’

The doctor had choked on the wine he’d just poured into his mouth. He’d expected talk of work opportunities, education … not co-habitation. But he was open-minded, fair, forward-thinking; he knew his good friend to be so too. ‘Please, carry on,’ he’d spluttered, waving his hands around as he struggled to keep his eyebrows from arching.

‘And it’s true that some women no longer want to have children.’

This time it had been Maria who’d choked, though her father’s eyebrows, try as he might to stop them, now leapt up to meet his fast receding hairline. This was a strange conversation indeed. Fascinating and embarrassing for Maria in equal measure. The teacher’s words had slapped her full in the face like a wave, waking her from her romantic dreams; as they receded, she’d taken in their meaning.

‘To have or not to have children, women see it as their right, their right to choose. Times are changing.’ And with that Seňor Suarez had coughed most dramatically, prompting the doctor to slap him hastily and heartily on the back while pointing his daughter towards the door with his eyes.

Maria hovered around the old oak table, topping up wine glasses and clearing away dishes as if she hadn’t noticed.

‘How’s the reading programme going up at El Cortijo del Bosque?’ Doctor Alvaro asked his friend.

El Cortijo del Bosque was the name of the local estate owned by Don Felipe, principal employer in the area. Work on his estate was agricultural. His workers were paid a pittance. Don Felipe himself was fabulously wealthy. And that was how it had been for centuries.

But things weren’t only changing in Madrid.

In February 1936 the left-wing coalition, known as el Frente Popular, had won the general election in Spain. This had allowed the good doctor and teacher to push through much needed reforms in Fuentes de Andalucía in general, and up at El Cortijo del Bosque in particular. In the early months of the year both had worked tirelessly to secure better pay and conditions for the estate’s workers, Suarez at the negotiating table, Alvaro behind the scenes. Guido, the estate manager, represented his employer’s interests, at times most savagely. But, snarl as he might, there was little he could do against what was legal; he had the will, but not the right, to resist.

Don Felipe, the landowner, was furious of course: with Guido and with the useless lumps of flesh who worked his land and whom he thought less of than his bulls and horses. As for Suarez and Alvaro, if Guido had ever mentioned them to him he certainly didn’t care enough about them to waste his energy remembering their names; they were men of no consequence. No, he was too busy shouting abuse at Manuel Azaňa, the new prime minister, along with the motley collection of left-wing degenerates that made up the government, to take any notice of them. Don Felipe despaired. Even his beloved Falangist party, a party that believed in the true greatness of Spain, in the monarchy, the Catholic Church and centuries of tradition, was coming under attack.

Don Felipe’s Spain, the Spain he knew and loved, was disappearing.

He had no choice but to whisk his family off to their second home in Biarritz.

And thus Suarez had no choice but to seize the moment and take education to the workers so that at the next round of negotiations they would be able to help themselves. That was what he was doing presently up at El Cortijo del Bosque. And Guido could do nothing to prevent it, no matter what orders his master barked at him from the south of France. But progress was slow.

‘The truth is we need more teachers,’ Suarez had confessed.

‘The truth is very few people in the village can read,’ Alvaro had replied. The sound of a creaking door disturbed him. His eyes had shot round like a searchlight at the top of a watch tower. There, standing in the kitchen doorway, a copy of Don Quixote clutched to her body, was his daughter.

‘You can do it,’ he’d said, knowing she’d been listening to them and confident that she would relish the chance. She’d nodded, pulling back her chair to re-join them. But before her skirt could touch the rush seat her father’s voice had scooped her back up and pushed her out of the room and towards the staircase. ‘Now bed, my girl!’

‘But if I’m to help out surely I need to …’

‘Bed!’

That night Maria hadn’t minded that her attempts to stay up late had failed. She had gone to bed happy and excited. Happy that she would be helping Seňor Suarez with the reading programme, excited at what he’d told her about women in Madrid. All night ideas of choice and freedom had stampeded around in her head looking for somewhere to live.

By morning they’d found a home. The teacher’s words were now her own.

And so that was how Maria was here, under her favourite olive tree, about to take a familiar game in a new direction. Starting to feel sticky, she shook her hair, generating at most a slight, warm breeze. She cast a ‘brace yourself’ look in Paloma’s direction: her friend was about to become the testing ground for her very own liberal education project.

She repeated, as word-perfectly as she could, what Seňor Suarez had said about women, children and marriage the night before. She lingered on the phrase ‘right to choose’.

Paloma said nothing. Maria continued.

‘Seňor Suarez—’ Maria slipped in his name because Paloma liked him ‘—said that women in Madrid have more …’ The older girl paused before opening her arms out wide and shouting out ‘freedom.’ She could not have drawn any more attention to the word if she’d underlined it and decorated it with a bright red ribbon.

Paloma fell back against the tree.

‘Well, you could get married, if you want to,’ Maria backtracked. ‘But you don’t have to. That’s what I’m saying. Things are changing. Gone are the days when parents start planning a wedding the moment a boy looks at a girl.’ Paloma breathed heavily out through her nose as if by the expulsion of air alone she could find room in her head for this shocking revelation. That she dropped her head to one side suggested that she’d failed. It was far too heavy a load for her fourteen-year-old brain to manage. She looked questioningly at Maria and rubbed the back of her head as if it were a magic lamp. A light flickered in her eyes.

‘It’s true,’ Maria insisted. ‘According to Seňor Suarez, women are having babies and they aren’t even married. In Madrid. Even Malaga!’ Paloma screwed up her nose then let out a snort. Madrid and Malaga were both as alien to her as the moon and every bit as inaccessible. ‘And some women in the city don’t even want to have children. At all. Not ever,’ Maria continued. ‘That’s what Seňor Suarez says. They’d much rather have a career.’

The older girl looked up at the sky and hid herself there a while, a smile of satisfaction on her lips. She’d delivered what she told herself was her coup de grâce (a phrase she’d learnt quite recently after having found it in some book or other, and she congratulated herself on having found an opportunity to use it, even if it was inside her own head). She’d chased away all thoughts of husbands and playing children from this game of theirs.

Paloma scrunched up her eyes to scrutinise her friend more closely. Was she teasing? Admittedly, Paloma had trouble imagining a husband for herself. As she went over the list of local prospective suitors she could not deny that they were unappealing. She shuddered as she had them parade across the stage of her mind one by one. Maria liked to re-christen them, as pirates, or book characters, to make them more exciting for her friend, but even that didn’t seem to be working for Paloma at this moment in time. Perhaps, if she were lucky, she might find a husband who came from another village. Or a nearby town. She pulled herself together. She would have a husband, one day, of that she was certain. But there was no point making herself distressed by going through all candidates just yet. As for children, of course, she sighed with relief, on safer and more comforting ground, she most certainly would have them.

Maria must want them too, surely, Paloma thought to herself. ‘That girl has no sense of family!’ ‘She’s always been such a selfish girl!’ Her mother’s unfair criticisms of her friend ricocheted around the confines of Paloma’s own mind. Maria was an only child. She had no mother. Cecilia always used one or other fact as an accusation whenever Maria did anything she didn’t agree with. Although she did not like the damning place that her mother’s reasoning led her to, Paloma found her own thoughts heading in the same direction today. She knew better than to articulate them. Instead, she would enter into the spirit of the discussion.

‘If you don’t want to get married, or have children, then what does it mean to be a girl?’ Paloma wriggled with what she told herself was justifiable indignation as she asked Maria the question. Maria gnawed on her thumbnail. She hadn’t expected rebellion. ‘What indeed!’ she said, dodging the bullet. She sat back and looked up at the infinite blue of the sky yet again. ‘All I know,’ she replied at last, ‘is that I don’t want to tie myself to any man.’ She stood up and brushed the earth from her clothes. And with that she drew the game to a close.

But Paloma hadn’t finished.

‘I don’t believe you!’ she retorted, still indignant. ‘You’re in love with Ricar.’

‘Oh, don’t be so silly!’ said Maria. ‘And if you’re talking about Richard, it has a ch and a d in it. And it would help if you could learn how to pronounce his name. Properly. In English.’ And with that she walked away and headed back to the village.

‘What’s love got to do with it anyway?’ she called back over her shoulder.

Chapter 2

The villagers had never seen such a strange looking boy as Richard Johnson. They called him el inglés (among an interesting array of other, more colourful names – all of them unflattering). He was impossible to miss. His colouring was what had distinguished him most from everyone else when he’d first arrived; so white that small children would run to their parents, cries of fantasma trailing behind them. And now, six months on, the reaction he elicited was scarcely any better. Oh, what they called him was different. But their alarm was just the same. Once other-worldly white, now vibrant, throbbing pink; the ghost had been well and truly turned into the gamba, with dark orange freckles seared on burnt crustacean skin, cooking away as he was under the hot flames of the Spanish sun. Ghost or prawn, either way the English boy stood out.

But why had he come to their small village to live under a sun that seemed not to like him in the first place?

What he and his parents told people was that he was in Spain to immerse himself in the language and culture. The eighteen-year-old Richard Johnson had a place to study Modern Languages at Exeter College, Oxford, starting in October 1936, and it was true that he needed to prepare himself for the rigours of academic life, as well as to hear and speak the words he’d spent so many hours thus far only reading and writing in a cold classroom.

But the real reason, the reason that eclipsed all others in his mother Margaret’s mind, was her son’s health. That he was of a delicate constitution was plain to see and his doctor had thought it might do him some good to experience warmer climes. The poor boy suffered from two afflictions. The first was psoriasis for which there was no cure. Other than the sun. At home, where it was chilly, damp and grey, Richard struggled with the condition. It irritated him and distressed his mother. A constant reminder of the genetic legacy she had bequeathed to her only son, handed on down from her father and his father before him. A long illustrious line. The affliction had skipped a generation with her; a blessing which she would have gladly foregone if it had meant not affecting her precious child. Instead, she endured her son’s absence, consoled by the knowledge that the sun would help him.

That his skin wasn’t robust enough to withstand the raw rays of the Andalucian sun for long was a detail that no one had factored in.

As for the second ‘affliction’, it was in some ways more and in some ways less grave than the first. It was also another reason for Margaret to want her son as far away from England, and away from his father and his paternal grandparents, as possible. You see, Richard Johnson had been staring into space. And he’d been staring into space for years while sitting at the back of the classroom of his very expensive, fee-paying school where teachers were employed on the basis of personal academic achievement rather than any particular ability to teach, let alone care about the young faceless charges before them. Not one of them had noticed the red-headed boy with the vacant expression at the back of the class.

It was his grandfather who’d spotted it. One Christmas he’d asked Richard to pass the gravy. He loved gravy. Liked to drench Margaret’s over-boiled sprouts in the stuff. When the damned fool of a boy didn’t answer on the third time of asking, his grandfather knew: the boy was having a mild epileptic episode. ‘Just like my old brother Vernon,’ he’d said. He was promptly taken to see the family doctor who confirmed it. Poor Richard. Another genetic legacy, this time bequeathed (his mother was relieved to say) from his father’s line.

His grandfather demanded that the boy be operated upon. From that day forward Margaret’s mind was made up. Her son had to go to Spain. As far as she could see, if Richard’s condition displayed itself as a little staring into the sunset every now and again, she was convinced that it could do him no harm. And it was infinitely better than submitting him to unnecessary surgery or endless discussions about its possibility.

And so, even with political changes afoot in Spain – news of it was beginning to make it into the nether regions of the press – both Margaret and Peter Johnson were convinced their son would be better off there until the family had stopped picking over the bones of Richard’s epilepsy. And considering they hadn’t noticed it for eighteen years there was a high probability that once out of sight, the vulture known as Family Concern would alight on the carcass of another victim soon enough.

And that was how, with a letter here and a telegram there, Richard Johnson had ended up in the care of a doctor in a village in Spain in the spring of 1936 where he would stay until the start of his first term at Oxford. And where he would become the most unlikely of heart throbs.

Maria hadn’t realised she was restless before the strange vision that was Richard Johnson came to Fuentes.

She did now.

She longed for his visits to her home, reliving them as she went off to sleep. She knew that even Paloma laughed at the look of him when she was at home with her sister; but he, in all his otherness, showed Maria that a big, beautiful world existed out there. And this sign of otherness that leaked out of him she took for his soul, his appearance, like blotting paper, changed by it forever.

That her father should be the person who brought this exotic being to their quiet village did not surprise her. She only had memories of living in Fuentes. Her father had always been its doctor, stitching wounds, administering medicines, making up poultices, visiting the old, the sick and the injured, as well as disappearing on visits that he chose not to explain to her. It was his life. But every few months he would receive a letter that connected him to a time before, to a life spent far away. Then he would hide himself away in his study and look through the album he kept in a drawer in his desk. The people who inhabited the photographs would leave the page and he would let them dance round and round in his mind. And for a few moments he would lose himself.

Maria would too.

Whenever her father was out doing his rounds she would enter his study. Within seconds she would be stroking the flat images of the woman pictured next to him in the album, placing a finger on the delicate young woman’s papery cheek and dreaming of the past. When both her parents were alive.

She would then shuffle through the post, looking at the postmarks on the envelopes of any letters her father had received; ‘Madrid’, ‘Seville’, ‘Malaga’, ‘Granada’, ‘Cordoba’. Each place name had the power to erect exciting new worlds in her mind. She had no need to see what was written inside to be transported there. Not that she had any qualms about reading her father’s letters. It was just that in the main their contents were always the same – disease and politics – and Maria was fed up with reading that people thought her father had the cure for both.

Shortly after Christmas 1935 the letters became more frequent, the postmarks more varied and far flung. An increasing number arrived from Madrid, followed by more still from Cadiz, and Barcelona. The words inside, when she chose to read them, were now feverish, about strikes and demonstrations. Yet they also brought with them a wild optimism for change that galloped off the sheets and into Maria’s heart on the occasions she picked them up.

But for all their unbridled promise, nothing and no one had yet come to wake up their sleepy little village.

Then, one day in early January 1936, Maria noticed an English postmark. As usual the sight of it was sufficient to fire her imagination. Here was another bridge, this time to England. She closed her eyes and conjured up a country that was cold, green, wet, where people drank tea. Those bits did sound horrid to her. But it was also home to Shakespeare, and George Eliot, and well-loved by Voltaire for its religious tolerance and freedom of speech (she had listened well to Seňor Suarez and her father over the years, though, strangely, never been tempted to follow up on their reading recommendations). When her imagination had no further details to draw on she read the letter. She wept with joy at its contents. Someone, an English someone called Richard Johnson, aged eighteen, from England, would soon be walking across that bridge to stay in Fuentes de Andalucía until October. Maria could not wait for his arrival.

She brushed up her English vocabulary, practised her English grammar, fell asleep reading Charles Dickens in translation one painful sentence at a time. Richard Johnson. She didn’t care what he might look like. He would be in her life very soon, providing a window on the big, wide, wonderful world.

Chapter 3

The villagers of Fuentes thought the Alvaros an unusual family, and Fuentes was an unusual place for them to settle. People usually dreamt of moving to Madrid, and so when a finely dressed Madrileňo holding a plump, well-fed baby in one arm held out his hand one Monday morning way back in 1921 to help a frail-looking woman out of a carriage, most of them couldn’t believe their eyes. Sturdy trunks followed, full of books, bottles and medical instruments. By the end of the second day the finely dressed man had tended three babies with a fever, lanced twenty-seven boils, treated the infected wounds of seven farm labourers, and diagnosed nine cases of gout.

El doctor had arrived.

Within weeks he had become indispensable, caring for the infirm and curing the sick, usually with his robust-looking baby in tow.

‘Poor doctor! Poor child! What sort of a wife must that woman be to let her husband do so much? She never leaves the house!’ the women of Fuentes enjoyed muttering to each other, their eyes rolling in sisterly condemnation.

The answer came in the winter of 1923 when poor Seňora Alvaro left her home for good, in a coffin – thus putting an end to the muttering.

The response was rapid. All rallied round, some bringing him food, others looking after the poor motherless girl. It wasn’t their fault the woman had died. They weren’t doctors (they bit their tongues from running on to the inevitable conclusion their cruel thoughts had already jumped to). But they were mothers. And they would treat this Maria as one of their own. That she looked like she had sprung from the Andalucian soil made her easier to accept. She was strong and dark and not at all like the frail, colourless woman who had given birth to her (if, one or two of the more spiteful among them whispered, she really had).

And although many of the mothers in the village talked openly amongst themselves over the years that the doctor should show that daughter of his a firm hand, they too indulged the girl. Her growing spirit and fearlessness were a joy to behold. Most of the time.

As for the men, they acknowledged the doctor’s loss at the funeral. They never gave it much thought after that. Pablo Alvaro was their doctor, first and foremost. They had no time to contemplate his suffering. Not when they had to endure so much of their own. The moment they stepped outside the church was the moment they put him back on his pedestal. Oh, they would have the odd drink with him, careful to be on their best behaviour when he was around, but they would never break bread with him. It wasn’t because they didn’t like him – they did. It was because they didn’t understand him. He was good, well-meaning, but he came from a different world. They consoled themselves as the years went by that he had Seňor Suarez, the teacher, and Father Anselmo, the priest, for company, thereby relinquishing themselves of all feelings of guilt and responsibility. To the villagers’ ears these three pillars of Fuentes society may as well have spoken a different language for all the sense they made.

Occasionally people would pass through the village on their way to or from the big cities. And, once or twice, an elderly couple had turned up asking, so the rumour mill had it, after the poor doctor and his girl. But, in truth, very little changed in Fuentes. And that included the people.

That was why, when Richard Johnson arrived in the spring of 1936, fifteen years after the last significant addition to the population, the entire village took a sharp intake of breath. Here was a true stranger, who really did speak an alien language. His presence had the power to clear streets. And so, for the first few weeks of his stay at least, the English boy found the usually pleasantly busy streets of Fuentes absolutely dead.

Yet what repelled the villagers about the English boy was precisely what attracted Maria.

He’d been in the village for less than a month when she told herself she loved him. It was ten o’clock in the morning, a sunny day in late spring 1936, and Richard Johnson had made his way along empty streets to discuss possible work with her father.

Doctor Alvaro had found him a room a few streets away with a family that could do with the extra pesetas. The kindly doctor had thought it would be good to throw the boy in at the deep end by housing him in the heart of the community. Unfortunately, the impact of the splash ensured that no villager would come within striking, spitting or speaking distance of him, not even the family with whom he was staying. It didn’t matter. Alvaro took the boy under his wing: oversaw his progress; invited him round for food; discussed politics, history, family; monitored his health; checked on his happiness. If the rest of the village ebbed away from him, Richard was past noticing. The doctor’s care and concern flowed towards him, warm and comforting, its gentle waves lapping all around. The boy’s father could not have done more, and, in truth, had often done very much less.

That’s why Richard Johnson was melting his way along the already hot streets, a book slipping from a sweaty palm, towards Doctor Alvaro’s, determined to show his appreciation for everything the good man had done. He’d asked before. In fact, he’d asked quite a few times. But the doctor had always been too polite to take him up on his offer. Well, the boy was determined to ask again. He would offer his services to help out the doctor in any way he could (as long as – he made a note of adding as the perspiration dripped off the tip of his nose and sucked the shirt to his back – it was before ten in the morning and after five in the afternoon). Truly. In any way. Though how he could be of help to a medical practitioner when he had nothing more than a rudimentary knowledge of basic human biology (never mind the Spanish vocabulary to go with it), the eighteen-year-old wasn’t really sure.

It was apparent that Pablo Alvaro’s thoughts weren’t any clearer.

‘I’m here to help you, good sir. I am at your disposal. Completely.’ The eager words tumbled out of his mouth the second the doctor opened the door in the boy’s best formal Spanish.

‘Wonderful to see you Richard. Buenos dias. Please, come in. Maria will be delighted you’re here.’ At the mention of her name, the boy gave a blush so intense you could light a cigarette with it. He glowed as he followed the doctor through the dark, cool interior of the house to the tiled courtyard at its heart. ‘I just need to get something,’ the doctor said, turning and bumbling his way back inside. He left his young guest standing in the open doorway.

Maria looked up from a pile of books and leaflets, her expression both amused and knowing. Richard must be here to discuss ‘work plans’ again. That always sent her father scurrying back inside, rummaging through notes and letters in search of a job, any job, for the English boy to do. It would have to be one that kept him out of the sun, Maria thought to herself as she caught sight of his bright red cheeks.

‘Please, sit,’ she said to him, instinctively pointing towards the chair in the shade.

They nodded at one another. Smiled. Waited.

Maria was the first to break the silence.

‘What’s that you’re reading?’ she asked. Then wished she hadn’t.

‘La vida es sueño by Calderón de la Barca. It’s about free will and destiny. But then,’ Richard said, sizzling up once more, ‘you probably know that.’

Maria had heard of it. She smiled but did not reply. She hoped he would assume she’d read it.

‘What are you going to do when you grow up?’

Before she knew where it had come from it was out. She was playing the game she played with Paloma. She put her hand up and shook her head with embarrassment, a gesture to say, ‘What was I thinking of?’ But she needn’t have worried; this childish dreaming about the future provided safer, more fertile ground for the pair of them.

‘I am going to see the world, after Oxford. Travel around the rest of Europe, go to North America, South America, possibly India …’ Richard’s blushes evaporated, his thoughts of Calderón disappeared, while Maria feared her eyes might pop out if he went on listing places much longer. This English boy’s words were confident, his future assured. And that was the moment it happened. His answer, worlds apart from Paloma’s, worlds apart from her own, defined him. He knew that he would do things that Maria, even in her most extravagant of dreams, had never imagined possible. Because he could, and she couldn’t, not here, in Fuentes. It wasn’t even a question of her father stopping her. The freedoms her father spoke of, he believed in. But within the village Maria knew such freedoms would be hard won.

‘What about you? What would you like to do? When you grow up?’

‘Writer!’ Maria blurted out, throwing out the first thing that came to mind. Anyone could do that, she thought, even stuck in Fuentes. ‘Yes! When I grow up I’m going to be a writer!’

She looked to gauge Richard’s response but the sun was blinding. She raised a hand to shield her eyes from the light that was starting to make her squint. ‘Would you like to swap places with me?’ he asked her from his sheltered corner. She declined – she’d already spotted a heat rash on his neck now that his blushes had subsided.

A gust of warm air rustled the sun-dry leaves above Richard’s head. Maria lifted up her eyes, screwing them up tightly to see the precious movement, green against blue, and listen to the music of the rippling leaves. She went over the question in her head again: Would I like to swap places with him? Whether he’d intended it or not, Richard had opened up a world of possibilities to her. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

Richard went to get up. ‘Oh, no,’ Maria laughed, pushing him back down. He laughed in response without truly understanding why. ‘What are you reading, if not Calderón?’ he asked, fixing on something more tangible, with more than a hint of playful impertinence.

‘Oh, these?’ Maria cleared her throat, pointing to the heaps of pamphlets strewn across the table in front of her. ‘Seňor Suarez gave me these to look through. There are some pamphlets on workers’ rights and organisations, as well as extracts from Karl Marx. It’s part of a reading programme he started for the labourers in the area.’

‘Karl Marx?’

‘You must know of him. He’s very popular in Spain.’

Infamous in England was how Richard would have put it, but he said nothing. ‘Only eleven people turned up to his funeral … doesn’t surprise me that he got turned down for a job as a railway clerk because of his atrocious handwriting. So he said religion was the opium of the people. Well, don’t mind if I do …’ Peter Johnson’s rants about Karl Marx danced their spiky rhythm across the revolving surface of the wheel of memory that spun round in his son’s head. No, Karl Marx was not popular, not in his house.

‘… Workers of the world, unite!’ Maria read the rousing words.

‘Isn’t he a … communist?’

‘It’s not a dirty word.’ Maria laughed. ‘And yes, he is. Father is reading Das Kapital. In Spanish, of course. Promises he’ll pass it on to me when he finishes. Says it makes a lot of sense. There’s so much unfairness in this country. So many workers selling their labour at too low a price while rich, old families live lives of luxury on the backs of the profits. Um … capital is dead labour which, like a vampire, only exists by sucking the life out of living labour.’ Her eyes flickered downwards as if reading from one of the leaflets in front of her.

‘But aren’t you causing trouble by reading Karl Marx to them?’ Richard said, his father’s tirades still resounding in his head.

‘No. I wouldn’t say so. Last time there was a problem Seňor Suarez and my father had to help them out of it. It stands to reason that if we help them to read they will be able to help themselves next time. They’ll be able to write letters, read contracts, represent themselves. Things like that. Things that we both take for granted.’ She glanced at the slim volume he had in his hand, reminded of the fleeting ignominy she’d felt at not having read one of Spain’s finest writers.

Richard Johnson thought for a moment. ‘Can I take some of these leaflets? To look at them?’

‘Claro que si. You can take these,’ Maria said, offering him a handful. ‘As long as you get them back to me by next Thursday.’

‘Next Thursday?’

‘Yes. That’s when he’ll … I mean we’ll,’ she added, a look of bashful pride on her face, ‘be needing them. That’s when we’ll be using them.’

It struck Richard Johnson that this was something he could do.

‘If I read all of these and make sure I understand every word, could I help?’ His heart beat with a sense of purpose.

‘I’ve been thinking.’ Doctor Alvaro appeared out of nowhere and was now standing behind his daughter, looking down at his visitor. ‘I don’t really know how I’m going to be able to use your talents. But don’t worry,’ he said reassuringly, relieved not to see disappointment on Richard’s face. ‘I’ll ask around and see if I can find something else for you to do.’

‘No need, father. I think I’ve found just the job. Isn’t that so, comrade?’ Maria gave the English boy a knowing wink. Then she turned round and planted a calming kiss on her grateful father’s cheek.