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.

Chapter 4

‘No, she cannot. And you shouldn’t be doing it either!’ Cecilia shouted at Maria as the girl watched the large, hairy mole above her friend’s mother’s upper lip vibrate. Maria was on a mission to help Seňor Suarez recruit volunteers to teach some of the labourers up on the estate to read. She’d successfully enlisted Richard Johnson, thereby making her father a very relieved man as he no longer had to invent jobs for the hapless boy to do. And so, emboldened, she thought she might try her luck with Cecilia in the (what she saw now as foolish) hope that she would allow Paloma to help out too. Paloma was a good reader: Maria had made sure of that. Therefore it seemed reasonable that her friend should be allowed to pass on the skills she’d learnt by teaching others. ‘She’d make such a good teacher,’ Maria insisted. Contrary to appearances Cecilia had a soft spot for Maria and the girl knew it. She’d got round her friend’s mother many times before. Unfortunately, this was not going to be one of them. ‘The answer’s still no,’ the older woman insisted, her arms crossed defensively across an ample bosom.

‘And you can take this back,’ Cecilia said. And with that her friend’s mother thrust the pamphlet that she had given Paloma only hours before back into her hand. As clenched fist met unsuspecting palm, Maria felt Cecilia’s entire body bristle with anger. The gratefully oppressed, that’s how she regarded Cecilia, aggressively tenacious while holding onto the chains that enslaved her. She had no idea what the pamphlet said. But the older woman believed she didn’t need to. If that communist Seňor Suarez had anything to do with it (and he did) then it meant trouble. That was the point. Words, words and more words, probably written by that red troublemaker himself. They spelled out nothing but danger, Cecilia was sure of it. And she didn’t want her daughter to have any part in it. No, Maria would not be getting round her today. She folded her arms one way, then the other, as if to prove it.

In Cecilia’s small world, workers worked on the same estate – El Cortijo del Bosque. Her son Manuel had a labouring job there, her husband Fernando (God bless him) had died while working in its wheat fields, and she herself had gone from kitchen girl to housemaid to housekeeper, also cooking for the landowner and his family when the need arose: all on the same estate, all for the same family. Seňor Suarez and his talk of workers’ rights infuriated her. Divisive talk. She’d heard it all before. That teacher with all his false promises had given her Fernando hope – useless, backbreaking hope that one day he’d have his own plot of land to farm where he would at last enjoy the fruits of his own labours.

Something to do with government land reforms. Government land reforms: as insubstantial as dreams and as flammable as the paper they were written on. And it was that Seňor Suarez who’d sold it to Cecilia’s husband. But she knew, had always known, it was never going to happen. Don Felipe was a latifundista of the old school who believed in tradition, glory, church and the rightness of a social hierarchy where his boot had the God-given right to press down forcefully on the heads of men like her husband, keeping their noses well and truly snuffling in the soil. His soil. It was never going to be theirs. Don Felipe might pay them a few pesetas more, but give them his land? Never.

Fernando had been a fool. For listening to Suarez, for daring to raise his head and hope for something more. And the bitter memory stung like acid in Cecilia’s soul.

He’d got above himself. And look where it had got him. Dead and buried under the very land he’d wanted.

Well, nobody could ever accuse Cecilia of not knowing her place – it was right up there on the estate doing exactly what she was told to do. And she would do her damnedest to make sure her children followed in her footsteps.

It was the only security she knew.

‘There’s no need for any of Don Felipe’s workers to read,’ she said, wagging her finger in Maria’s face. ‘That terrible teacher. Getting the farm workers to bite the hand that feeds them.’ A guttural rattle vibrated at the back of the woman’s throat.

‘But Cecilia, because of him men can now provide for their families. Don’t you remember? Children were going hungry before.’

That was it.

‘Out! Out now!’ Cecilia shouted, pointing Maria towards the door. Maria knew when she was beaten. She didn’t mind that Cecilia had shouted at her. She wasn’t afraid of her friend’s mother, but she wouldn’t convince her, that much was sure. Her eyes squirmed away from the fury in Cecilia’s; she hoped she hadn’t earned a beating for her friend. An unusually subdued Maria went to leave as a tired and taciturn Manuel entered.

‘Maria.’ Manuel greeted her. He had been working all day and his young body was wet with perspiration. His skin, Maria couldn’t help but notice, was a deep, glistening, golden brown, and, his dark hair shone in its blackness, swept back as it was from his strong jawed face, with its dark brows and liquid brown eyes. His stomach was taut with hunger, his throat parched with thirst, while his heart, though she didn’t know it, was heavy. He was perfect. All apart from a small scar on his left cheek. The sight of him reminded Maria why she’d thought him beautiful not so very long ago: because he was.

‘Good evening Manuel.’ Maria forced her eyes to meet his. Cecilia looked on suspiciously. A coil of hair fell about his eyes. He swept it back with a large, strong hand. For a moment his beauty threatened to break through and touch Maria’s soul, but the moment passed quickly. She shook her head to stop it from catching on and commended herself on being made of more cerebral stuff. A smile of relief blew across her face.

Maria held out a pamphlet and offered it to him. ‘Oh no you don’t, my girl!’ said Cecilia, flinging her arm out and intercepting it as though it were a poisoned arrow.

‘It’s tomorrow. Up at the estate—’ But before she could say any more Maria found herself hastily turfed out onto the road.

She looked back at Cecilia, disappointed but not surprised, the faint smile on her lips that signalled superiority enough to push the poor woman into a rage.

‘And if you don’t want tongues to wag you’ll heed my words and not have anything to do with it either,’ the red-faced Cecilia called after her, loud enough to bring all the neighbours rushing to their windows. ‘And,’ she shouted, now to the back of the girl’s head, furious that Maria appeared disproportionately collected in the face of Cecilia’s own fast-burning fury, ‘you’ll ruin your chances of ever getting a husband if you carry on this way! I’ll be having words with your father about this.’

‘Oh, Cecilia!’ Maria said calmly as she walked away.

*

The designated meeting place for the lesson was in the courtyard of the estate. The estate manager, Guido, didn’t like it but the law was against him. Still, he’d done his best to warn the workers off. That was why, when Seňor Suarez turned up, the teacher had only found three boys up for the reading challenge. They looked a little beaten around but the smiles on their faces as they came closer soon blinded him to their bruises. He recognised Manuel, as well as Pedro and Raul, the Espinoza brothers. ‘We’ve come to read,’ poor Fernando’s son said, holding out Maria’s scrunched up pamphlet as proof. Disappointed not to see the girl who had given it to him, Manuel’s eyes searched all around. There, in the distance, he recognised the one known as ‘el inglés’, his hair as golden as the crops all around him, next to whom, Manuel realised with a heavy heart, was Maria. The pair seemed to be in no particular hurry. ‘Manuel? Manuel? Do you agree Manuel?’ The teacher’s words pierced the surface of the boy’s consciousness. ‘Manuel? Manuel? Did you hear me?’ The Espinoza brothers laughed. ‘A teacher each,’ Seňor Suarez repeated. He too had seen the English boy and Maria.

Cecilia was still in the kitchen. She was working later than usual and would be working well into the night. Guido had recently broken the news to her that the landowners, Don Felipe and his wife, Dona Sofίa, were planning to return soon. For good. Guido had said they were back to make Spain great again, but Cecilia hadn’t really been listening. All she knew was that Dona Sofίa in particular would be expecting to find everything in order. The larder would need to be stocked, the rooms opened back up, and every floor, surface and ornament would need to be scrubbed, cleaned and polished. Then there were the menus to plan. Guido could not tell her how soon soon would be, as he walked across her newly mopped kitchen floor in his dusty boots, so Cecilia had no choice but to assume that her employers’ return might be as early as the following week. She mopped the floor once more and went outside into the courtyard while she waited for it to dry.

That was when she saw Maria, walking past the farmhouse, her head, Cecilia noticed, held high like a haughty mare, laughing easily with the strange-looking foreigner by her side. ‘Such an arrogant child!’ Cecilia said to herself, the tinkling, confident sound of the girl’s happiness ringing like an insult inside the older woman’s head. Cecilia was still smarting from the youngster’s cheek the day before. ‘Look at her! With that boy! She’ll get a name for herself and then she really will have trouble finding a husband!’ But Cecilia knew that wasn’t true. The rules that applied to Cecilia and the rest of Fuentes did not apply to Maria. They never had. As Guido crossed the courtyard the girl thrust a pamphlet into his hand. Cecilia almost smiled. But then pulled herself back. Only Maria Alvaro could do something like that and not get punished for it.

Rules. Cecilia wore them round her neck like a hangman’s noose. And the very mention of her employers’ return pulled the rope tight once more around the ageing, hardworking Cecilia’s throat leaving her gasping for air and concerned for her children in a future that, if Guido was to be believed, her employers were intent on forging in the image of their once glorious past.

And so, as she stood in the kitchen doorway, Cecilia’s heart sank when she saw her son chewing his finger, watching Maria. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Maria didn’t even grace him with a glance. ‘Heartless girl!’ Careful what you wish for Cecilia – for no sooner were these words of judgement out of her mouth than the gods took pity on Cecilia’s love-struck son.

Maria beamed at him.

His mother now winced to see her son’s body burst into life at the light in the girl’s eyes. He rushed up to Maria, ran round her, a puppy desperate to please. Cecilia heard the girl’s laugh again. It cut across the courtyard and stabbed her in the heart. Manuel’s mother had seen enough. She went back inside and closed the kitchen door, wounded.

*

Mother and son cadged a lift home on the back of a cart two hours later. Cecilia had scrubbed as many floors as she could face for one day, and Manuel could no longer pick out the words on the page.

‘The great leveller. That’s what education is,’ Manuel said to his mother as he wiped his tired face with a rag, his hand shaking in time to the revolving of the cartwheels over bumpy ground. ‘Great leveller, my arse,’ she mumbled to herself, her voice rising and falling in time. ‘There’s no shame in it, you know, a good day’s work,’ his mother said, irritated to see her son had a book in his shaky hands and hope in his lilting voice. ‘All this talk of education, it will only lead to trouble. The likes of Don Felipe don’t like it, you know.’

‘The likes of Maria Alvaro will break your heart,’ was what she’d meant to say. But her beautiful boy glowed with happiness in the pink-purple twilight and she did not have the stomach to take it away from him. Maria would do that soon enough. Cecilia prayed that she would let her boy down gently, though, recalling how the girl had paraded round the courtyard like a queen earlier in the day, she doubted that she would.

Yet as Manuel talked about Don Felipe’s unfairness, some strike that had happened in Asturias in 1934, and the Russian Revolution (a load of nonsense he must have got from that teacher), it occurred to Cecilia that it wasn’t only Maria who had ignited a flame in his heart. As her eyes fixed on the book her son had clutched in his hands, she saw there were more dangerous fires still that her son had started to play with.

Chapter 5

No one saw it coming – not Paloma, not Manuel, not even the ever-vigilant Cecilia, and certainly not Maria. No one except Lola, and, of course, Richard, had any idea what was happening in full view of everyone.

Maria, Paloma and Richard were going on a picnic. It was Sunday morning and they were all setting off from their respective homes to meet up just outside the village when Cecilia followed Paloma to the door and took her youngest daughter brusquely by the arm. ‘You’re not going unless she can come too,’ she bellowed, nodding in the direction of a well-groomed Lola, dressed up and ready for anything but a picnic in the country. She had her best shoes on and the dress she wore to village parties and her dark wavy hair was gleaming. Paloma stopped in her tracks. No one could accuse Lola of being a shrinking violet, and no one would say she was a girl that was easily overlooked, left behind at home by a callous, selfish sister to hide her light under a bushel. And yet, here she was, standing next to her mother, eyes on the verge of tears, saying, ‘Don’t worry mother. If Paloma doesn’t want me to go with her, I understand.’

‘Oh no, my girl. You’re going. You both go or neither of you go. Those are my conditions. Now go and get whatever it is you need.’ Lola clattered up the stairs making a pretence of getting ready, thankful that her usually observant mother hadn’t noticed that she already was.

That Cecilia should allow her girls to skip church was unprecedented, and that she should allow them to go off into the country with a foreigner as strange-looking as el inglés equally surprising to people who knew her. Ever since she’d got wind of her employers’ return she’d been distracted, yet it was Guido’s latest piece of information that had really set the poor woman off like a whirling dervish: he expected the fine owners of El Cortijo del Bosque any time after lunch on Sunday. That was it. Even the devout Cecilia wouldn’t be attending church now, may the Lord God forgive her. She feared God, but she feared Don Felipe and Dona Sofίa more. Especially Dona Sofίa. There was still a mountain of work to do up at the house and Cecilia knew that if it didn’t get done there would be hell to pay. God would forgive her for not attending church this once, whereas Dona Sofίa on the other hand would not be so gracious if she didn’t make sure all the rooms were aired, all the beds made up, all the silver polished, all the floors scrubbed and, heaven forbid, if the larder was not well stocked. And as for the ugly English boy, Cecilia believed he was as interested in Maria as much as she was interested in him. And they would both be out of sight of her beautiful Manuel. Let that girl do what she wanted. She usually did. It was up to Doctor Alvaro to stop her, not Cecilia. And so when Paloma asked if she could go on a picnic with Maria, her mother screamed ‘A picnic?’ put a hand to her chest, collapsed on a chair, then said in a breathy whisper, ‘Perdoname, Dios mio,’ before saying emphatically, ‘Yes.’

‘I’m ready!’ Lola ran down the stairs, kissed her mother, then charged out. She was on her bike and nearly at the end of the road when she shouted: ‘Hurry up Paloma, you big lump, or we’ll be late!’

Maria was waiting at the stone water trough in full sun. Richard was waiting close by in the shade. At the sight of the sisters Maria gave a whistle to the English boy and set off ahead of them all, leading the way to their chosen picnic spot which was a thirty-minute ride out of the village. The girls cycled there in silence, the only sound coming from Richard as he puffed along in the heat. He struggled to keep up on his bike. A thirty-minute cycle ride hadn’t seemed so very testing when Maria had first suggested it to him. But then he hadn’t reckoned on the ferocity of the sun. As he passed shepherds’ huts he saw their walls perspire, while olive trees throbbed under pounding rays. As for Richard himself, he was starting to melt. Would there be anything left of him by the time he’d reached the destination? That the girls said nothing seemed perfectly reasonable to him. He had no idea that Paloma was sulking because Lola had hoodwinked their mother into letting her come. Nor that Maria was sulking because she thought Lola would spoil their day. The only one of the girls not to be sulking was Lola. She’d wanted to come along and here she was. She hadn’t come to talk to either Maria or Paloma and so the silence suited her perfectly. That the other girls radiated every kind of animosity towards her didn’t bother her in the slightest. They were going to have to try harder than direct bad thoughts at her if they wanted to put her off her stride. She’d come here for a reason and these two silly little girls weren’t going to stop her with their sour looks and huffy puffy ways. The hot air slipped around their bodies. It kept the girls cool, made Richard sticky and red. They cycled along dusty tracks, past fields of corn, olive groves, vineyards, passing the occasional donkey moving slowly under the weight of a heavy load. Richard had never experienced such peace. Nor such heat. He stopped for a while, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the sweat from his brow, his neck, and his palms. It was quickly sodden. ‘How much further?’ he called out, but the girls were too far ahead to hear. As he rubbed his already wet palms, getting ready to set off again, he heard a car.

Toot. Toot, toot, toot. Toooooooot. The horn sounded. Insistent. Furious. It roused the boy’s flagging senses.

A deep voice, raised in anger, yelled out at him, sounding angrier the closer it got. The driver to whom the raging voice belonged was tooting the horn as if he were in heavy traffic in the middle of a city. He’d already encountered the girls and now he was furious. They’d made him slow down when he shouldn’t have to, least of all when he was driving along his own lanes, leading to his own estate.

For a brief moment a cloud in an otherwise cloudless sky blocked out the sun. Richard experienced a strange feeling of menace. He wheeled his bike as quickly as he could into the adjacent field to make way. The car hurtled towards him, the driver’s arms waving in wild accompaniment to the shouts that continued to whip him. The dusty vehicle sped by, its wheels throwing up a spray of small stones and grit in its wake that caught in the boy’s eyes. The driver’s foot pressed down hard on the accelerator. The furious tooting of the horn continued. Richard Johnson shuddered briefly. He rubbed his eyes and looked for the girls through the gravel haze. The car had gone one way, Richard and the girls another: the cloud above had passed. And there, through the settling dust, he saw a sunlit Lola, black hair glinting, white dress dazzling. She was standing next to her bike at the corner up ahead.

She was the only one who’d waited for him.

*

Maria was already at the picnic spot. She’d cycled away from the group. She’d beat Lola there if it killed her, she’d said to herself, Paloma too. Nothing would distract. Not even the car.

‘I’m hot now!’ Maria threw herself under the tree as she hurled her bike to the ground letting the back wheel spin round and round. She gasped as she leant against the trunk and looked on victorious as Paloma followed her, close behind.

Lola turned up ten minutes later.

Paloma watched her sister suspiciously. Lola had nothing more than a few delicate beads of perspiration across her forehead, though she pulled the straps of her dress down to expose her shoulders, fanning herself as if exhausted. She was about to say something to her big sister but bit her tongue, momentarily distracted by the shallow breathing of Richard following on close behind. All three girls looked at him. His face flushed brightly. He nodded, too hot and short of breath to say a word.

Paloma noticed her sister rub her bare shoulder in the way that she’d only ever seen her sister do, in a way that was somehow indecent though she couldn’t explain how. But Richard’s reaction, Paloma was relieved to see, wasn’t the one Lola was expecting. English men with pale skin weren’t made for cycling under an almost cloudless sky in the heat of the day. Richard Johnson let his bike drop to the ground. He let his body fall soon after, grateful that these sun-hardened Spanish girls had seen fit to set their picnic up under the shade of a tree.

‘Who were the people in the car?’ he asked when he’d eventually cooled down enough to speak. ‘Are they from here?’ Maria chose not to answer. The sisters shared a look of deep concern. ‘Owners of the estate, Don Felipe and Dona Sofίa.’ Lola was the first to break the silence. She gave her shoulder another rub as she looked the still panting Richard in the eye. But it was no use. Her heart was no longer in it. The thought of her mother’s employers had unsettled her. ‘Mother said she was expecting them soon,’ she said turning to Paloma and dragging Richard’s attention with her. He sat back and listened.

‘I couldn’t see the son with them.’

Maria pounced on Lola. ‘Disappointed? And anyway, I didn’t know they had one.’

‘You don’t know everything.’ The older girls’ antipathy towards one another was showing through. ‘And yes, it’s a pity he’s not with them. Mother says they’re better when he is.’

‘We’ve never seen him, but I know they sent him away,’ Paloma whispered, waiting for her friend’s questions. Not a single one came – Maria had no wish to expose her ignorance about the mysterious son any further in front of Richard Johnson. She imagined his eyes boring into her wondering what else she didn’t know. She would leave the stage to the sisters while the hole closed up. ‘Poor Cecilia!’

The sisters talked quickly, angrily, conjuring back up for him the image of the dusty black car, thundering its way furiously along the lanes to unleash the blackest of storms upon their mother …

‘They drive her like a slave.’ Lola pulled up her shoulder straps in a temper. Richard, touched by the intensity of feeling in her words, looked at her. She looked straight back and for a moment he was disarmed. The shock of her vulnerability passed through him. He looked away, afraid to relive the experience. Instead he fixed his gaze on the calm, self-assured face of Maria.

She was at the top of the pecking order once more. She smiled at him but in doing so she noticed the damp patches under the armpits of his shirt, observed how his breathing was still heavy, that his face looked like the skin of a blood orange. He didn’t look like much of a catch. Still, his eyes were upon her, not Lola.

She looked at the girl who was not her rival. Lola. Cool, strong, almost regal. Though Maria found her difficult she could not deny that Lola was indeed beautiful. With her dark, long eyelashes framing deep brown, sparkling eyes, glossy dark hair that shone in the light, and her flawless olive skin, she reminded Maria of Manuel. She looked back at Richard Johnson. She crinkled her nose with displeasure at the unwelcome comparison. He really was a rather unimpressive physical specimen, she thought again.

Maria stood up. She walked out into the sunshine, away from Richard in all his weak, disappointing reality in order to better preserve the perfect dream of him. ‘Coming?’ she asked, knowing Richard could not. He’d had enough full sun for one day. Paloma got up. Lola and Richard remained. They sat in silence, watching the two girls walk away, their bodies breaking up in ever-growing ripples of heat.

Richard was the first to speak. ‘I’m sorry about your mother,’ he said to a subdued Lola. She said nothing. She had wanted to flirt with the English boy. That was why she’d put her best clothes on. But now concern for her mother had quashed all lighter thoughts. Confusion filled her mind forcing genuine tears to well up in her eyes. She wiped them away with the back of her hand and apologised. ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me!’ she laughed. He offered his handkerchief and touched her tenderly on the shoulder.

‘Oh, don’t be kind to me,’ Lola said, fighting back the tears.

‘Let’s play a game,’ Richard said. ‘Take your mind off it.’

Instinctively, he pushed Lola’s cascading hair away from her eyes, and cupped her face in his hands. ‘I’ll look after you,’ he said, not really knowing what he was saying nor why he was saying it. The words came of their own accord. Easier to utter for being in a language that wasn’t his own, perhaps. Yet no sooner were they out than he let his hands drop down. His eyes plummeted to the ground.

A small brown hand with pretty pink-tipped nails squeezed his still pale hand gently in response. She didn’t touch him for long but it was enough. The shock he’d felt earlier when he’d looked into her eyes surged through him once more.

Flustered, Richard looked around. What could he speak to her about? English. Yes, he could teach her some English. ‘Say a word, any word. Ask me anything! What would you like to know?’

She looked at him, put her lips to his ear and whispered ‘Qué pasa?’ He cupped his hand around her ear in response. ‘What’s happening?’ he whispered, tickling her neck with his warm breath. An hour slipped past, lips getting ever closer, shoulders rubbing, heads getting thrown back by the strength of the laughter that grew more assured the more comfortable they felt in each other’s company. Lola’s fingers worked their way bit by bit over the back of his hand, along his arm, around his shoulder, until by the time they came to rest on the back of his neck they felt as if they’d always been there. She brushed the fine hair at the nape of his neck lightly. It made him tingle inside. ‘Te quiero.’ Whispered words wove themselves magically around his heart, pulling his lips towards hers.

The sound of Maria’s laughter as she finally decided to grace them with her presence once more shattered the spell. Richard stiffened. Both he and Lola moved as far away from each other as they could. They looked at the ground. A joint expression of guilt. Maria mistook it for boredom. She sat herself down between them as if filling the conversational void she assumed must have occurred in her absence.

‘I’m hungry,’ Maria said as she rummaged through the picnic basket she’d packed. She now knew as much as Paloma did about the landowners’ son having pumped her friend full of questions on their walk: and it wasn’t very much. She couldn’t even tell Maria what he looked like, having seen him only a handful of occasions herself many years ago. All Paloma could remember was that Cecilia had said that he was a ‘good boy’. Maria recalled that Cecilia had also said Dona Sofίa and Don Felipe were ‘good employers’ and so that was no recommendation. She smiled at Richard. ‘You must be hungry too,’ she said, as she handed him some bread and ham. She sighed as she looked into the distance, satisfied that she’d restored him to his rightful place in her heart.

Paloma’s eyes settled a little closer to home. The look on her big sister’s face unsettled her. The more familiar expressions of defiance and self-satisfaction had been replaced by something more reflective and humble. She shot a glance at Richard. There was something different about him too, though she couldn’t identify what it was. But it was clear to her, from the way he repeatedly ran his fingers around the back of his collar and the way he dropped his gaze to the ground each time she caught his eye, that he was feeling more than a little uncomfortable about something.

For the remainder of the picnic Paloma watched Lola and Richard’s every move. She found it uneasy viewing.

‘Oh, I would love to travel,’ Maria chatted on happily, still transfixed by the infinite possibilities she read in the sky as she got up to have a better look. She was oblivious to the fact that Richard was moving, little by little, ever closer to Lola, while on the blank, blue canvas up ahead her imagination was delighting in the creation of a fiction of her life that drew little on reality. There she saw her future as it stretched itself out, on a path as unbroken as the familiar cloudless sky along which she would travel. She could envisage no impediment to her personal plans. Not even a summer shower.

She was of an age at which life is taken for granted and a happy-ever-after assumed.

As for love, she believed that it was something that she could choose. She had no idea that, when the time came, it would choose her, whether she wanted it or not.

And if she only had eyes to see she would have noticed that it had the English boy Richard Johnson in its grip.

‘Excuse me while I break myself some bread.’ ‘Oh, would you pass the ham?’ ‘Oh, would you mind passing me the knife?’ Richard was drawn to Lola like a magnet, her touch as she passed bread, ham, knife to him sending an electric current that brought an altogether different part of him to life. It was true that Lola was not as intellectual as Maria, her conversation not as witty or engaging, that the only English she spoke were the few words he’d given her that afternoon, but when she pushed herself against him it made his eyes gleam and his body melt in the most delicious of ways. He’d told himself only the day before that the warmth he felt for Maria was love. If that was so, then what was the name of the passion that had now taken him over body and soul?

By the time they cycled home together everything had changed for Richard Johnson. And even though Maria did not cycle away from him – she slowed down, kept pace – it made no difference. Lola had awoken something deep within him and he within her.

‘Spain has been a Republic ever since the start of the 1930s, when King Alonso XIII was deposed. The Popular Front, in power since February of this year, is a coalition … left-wing. The right-wing tried to upset ballots with bullets in Madrid and Barcelona but failed. The labourers who work these fields went on strike just after the last election. Don Felipe the landowner had no choice but to pay them more. He wasn’t happy. Oh look! I can see Guido in the field over there. He manages the estate …’ Richard tried to follow what Maria was telling him – about politics, the running of the estate, how far Cordoba was with its beautiful mezquita, that the mezquita had once been a mosque before it was turned into a Cathedral after 1236, that the Moors had ruled southern Spain before that, about the Alhambra in Granada and the gardens of Seville. Did he know that Seňor Suarez had family in Seville, as well as Madrid? … Maria. She was a mine of information if only he cared to listen. But he did not. Instead his mind, heart and eyes were pulled along by a laughing Lola, who, bored by the bombardment of information that was detonating within her head, decided to break away to let off some fireworks of her own.

He let out a complicit laugh as he watched Lola whizz by. Her skirt was pulled up high, exposing her thighs. As she cycled into the warm air, a gentle breeze blew through her hair. Maria was tempted to race her. She resisted the urge. She was ashamed of herself for cycling away from Richard earlier on, felt guilty that she’d recoiled at his inability to cope with the heat. He was cerebral. So was she. And she would prove it. The life she longed for was that of the mind. Bodies were an encumbrance. And so, she chatted on, skating over the history of Spain and around Spanish literature, skilfully encompassing Don Quixote with a figure of eight … And Richard nodded his head as if listening, though his eyes and thoughts were taken up with the vision of Lola, beautifully seductive, cycling into the deepening blue of the late afternoon sky.

The lane widened. Paloma, up until now stuck behind Maria and Richard, manoeuvred around the pair.

‘I’m telling on you,’ she hissed at her sister, when she’d caught up with her. ‘I have no idea what you mean!’ Lola answered, her laugh extending across the summer fields.

Chapter 6

It may have been true that Don Felipe and Dona Sofίa had planned to return ‘sometime next week’ but times and dates, like everything else in life, were theirs to change.

‘Sunday? Sunday? I thought they weren’t coming back until next week. The house isn’t ready. And I always go to church on a Sunday.’ But it really didn’t matter what Cecilia always did. Cecilia had been blindsided.

That was how she found herself allowing her daughters to go off for a picnic with a foreigner and why she was here in the kitchen on her hands and knees scrubbing away at the flagstone floor while perspiration dripped off the tip of her nose. She wondered if Luis, the landowners’ son away at an English boarding school, would be joining them. She hoped so. He would be eighteen years old now. Same age as her Manuel. A broad smile broke out across her face at the thought of the boys.

*

Fifteen minutes away in a speeding car bumping over stones and re-acquainting themselves with their estate were her employers. Their son was not with them. Dona Sofίa was holding on to the door handle for grim death, concerned that her wrist might dislocate at any moment, while Don Felipe was driving as fast as the car would allow. He congratulated himself on the fact that he was master of all he surveyed: land, animals, and people. Dona Sofίa held a handkerchief to her forehead with her free hand, taking care to close her eyes for fear that she might inadvertently poke one of them out as the wheels of the car jolted over small stones.

‘See that Sofίa? Our workers!’ Her husband shouted at her in order to be heard over the sound of the engine. ‘We’ll whip this place back into shape.’ He swerved past two girls causing the wheels of the car to momentarily spin out of control. ‘Unbelievable!’ His wife’s eyelids sprang open, her eyeballs very nearly popping with surprise as she saw the feral creatures wobbling around on their bicycles. Her husband slammed his palm down on the dashboard. Who were these girls getting in his way? And why weren’t they at church? Girls out on bikes on a Sunday morning. The thought of it made his blood boil. He stamped his foot down hard on the accelerator as he saw another one, dressed in white, standing by her bike at a turning. A furious cloud of dust and grit filled the air. The car roared and so did its driver. And he continued to do so as the first thing he saw when the dust cloud settled was Richard Johnson careering off the road and into one of his fields.

‘What was that?’ A fish out of water cooking under the strong sun, the sight of the English boy stunned Don Felipe, and Dona Sofίa no less so.

‘Must be a Bolshevik … or a Jew.’ Inconvenienced by the jerkiness of her husband’s driving, she sat forward and blinked repeatedly, perplexed by the ghostly apparition. She remembered the article she’d been reading only the day before calling for the need of ‘a new Reconquista’ to purge Spain of ‘contamination’. It acknowledged there were few Jews left ‘thanks to their expulsion the first time in 1492 by Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella’, but now their friends, ‘communists, socialists, freemasons, liberals and the like’, were growing ‘like noxious plants’, destroying the very fabric of Spanish culture and tradition ‘from within’. She’d felt it a little extreme at the time. But, seeing this boy, so alien, so near to her estate, it did make her wonder.

‘Thank heavens we’ve come back,’ she said, a loud tut of disapproval punctuating her words. Don Felipe growled.

He pulled up outside the farmhouse ten minutes later. He tooted on the horn six times. Cecilia looked up from the floor she was scrubbing in time to witness Guido the estate manager open the car doors for Don Felipe and his wife. Opening car doors – one of the many jobs her employers couldn’t do for themselves, she caught herself thinking as she pulled herself up to standing. She smoothed out the folds of her apron and rushed into the hall. It was a surprise to her that Don Felipe hadn’t used his chauffeur to drive them here.

As landowner and manager walked around to the back of the house, Dona Sofίa wafted delicately into the house, a forced smile on her face as she greeted Cecilia and the three house staff all lined up at the bottom of the stairs to welcome her.

‘Would you like refreshments Dona Sofίa?’

‘Cecilia! Girls! How lovely to see you all again. Pilar, isn’t it? No? Julietta? Are you sure? Ah well. Never mind. Nothing for me, nothing at all. Just bring an orange juice up to my room, would you? But I can’t answer for Don Felipe.’ With a flick of her wrist, she gestured that her husband was somewhere outside and that Cecilia, or Pilar, or Julietta, or whatever her name was, should go and find him. ‘And now I need to lie down,’ she said abruptly. ‘We’ve had an encounter of the most unpleasant kind. With some hideous cyclists. You wouldn’t happen to know who they were?’ And without waiting for a reply she floated up the staircase leaving Cecilia feeling as though someone had trampled over her grave.

The housekeeper made her way towards Don Felipe.

‘… My workers have been doing what?’ he said to his estate manager, his voice at once angry and incredulous. Aware of his housekeeper shuffling towards him like something brought back from the dead he broke off long enough to snap, ‘Orange juice – verandah,’ while shooing her back inside the house with his own inimitable wrist action.

‘Reading, you tell me!’ Don Felipe’s words rang in her head as Cecilia scuttled away. ‘But why, Guido? Why?’ he bleated with all the emotion of a man betrayed.

In the kitchen Cecilia squeezed, pummelled and beat the oranges, extracting every drop of juice from them that she could. She placed two glasses on one tray, a single glass on another, filled them to the top, then, as she went out onto the verandah, she told one of the house girls to go up to Dona Sofίa’s bedroom. By the time Cecilia had placed the tray down outside her unsettled thoughts had travelled down to her wrists, palms, tips of her fingers, causing her usually steady hands to buckle and shake. The orange juice cascaded over the rim of the glasses, spilt out over the tray, spread across the table, until finally trickling, drop by hard-pressed drop down onto the ground beneath. She watched the scene unfurl before her, and though she willed it to stop, she was powerless to stem the flow now that it had started.

‘Careful! Clumsy woman!’ The clumsy woman dashed off to fetch a cloth.

‘Names! Give me names!’ She felt Guido’s eyes burning into the back of her head as she retreated. They burned no less when she returned.

‘Perhaps Cecilia can help you,’ the sly fox said. ‘Speak, woman!’ Her employer’s words, pushing her to give an answer, shocked her like the point of a sharp knife. She looked at Guido, searching for help. She found none. What was she to do? She had to name someone. Seňor Suarez? No. That English boy? No. Then, before she knew what she’d done she blurted out ‘Maria!’ ‘Maria?’ Don Felipe echoed back at her. ‘Yes,’ Cecilia confirmed. ‘Maria. Maria Alvaro. The doctor’s daughter.’ She felt no guilt. Rules, after all, did not apply to Maria Alvaro.

Chapter 7

It was the day after the landowners had returned to their estate and Don Felipe was having breakfast while scanning the paper looking for news. He put it down in frustration. ‘Still nothing in the papers about any coup, dear?’ Dona Sofίa asked. Her husband gave a loud shush, followed by a hasty glance at the door to make sure none of the servants were listening. ‘Oh, it’s not the coup I’m looking for. Though in view of the strikes all over the country,’ he said, jabbing his finger at some article, ‘it had better come soon.’

Pools of unrest had been bubbling beneath the surface right across Spain since the start of the decade. Tension. Civil unrest. A struggle for the heart and soul of Spain. Made all the worse by an international politics of extremism. The growth of fascism in Germany and Italy whispered to the Spanish masses that the ruling class would never give up its power without a fight. The victory of communism in Russia murmured in the ears of the ruling class that the workers would rise up if not kept down. A tug of war was being played out where right and left struggled for supremacy. Up until now an equilibrium of sorts had been maintained. Up until now Don Felipe had had to allow his workers to form unions, had had no choice but to approve of liberal absurdities such as reading programmes. But all that was about to change. Bullets were about to overcome ballot boxes and the landowner couldn’t wait. It was the reason for his return.

‘You’ll have to talk to her dear,’ his wife said.

‘I know,’ Don Felipe replied, picking up the pamphlet that Guido had handed to him the previous evening. ‘I don’t care if she is the doctor’s daughter!’

‘Oh, I’m not talking about the girl, silly!’ said Dona Sofίa, who, contrary to her show of interest, had little time for some child who wanted to play teacher to the workers. ‘No. I’m talking about Cecilia. It’s her arms. Did you not see them yesterday? They’re hideous. The lower classes have no sense of shame or modesty,’ she said, breathing heavily. She put down her magazine full of beautifully dressed young women and put a hand to her well-coiffed curls checking they were still in place. One had dropped. She closed her eyes and asked for strength. The ceiling fans simply moved hot air around and she couldn’t stand keeping the shutters closed. The heat combined with the sight of her housekeeper’s indecent arms was making Dona Sofίa irritable, as was her husband’s inability to grasp what was truly important. And now her hair was losing its shape. It was really too, too much.

‘Cecilia!’ Don Felipe called. The housekeeper rushed in, her fleshy arms wrapped round a heavy pile of freshly ironed sheets. ‘Why are you doing that?’ Dona Sofίa asked. ‘Put them away, then come back,’ she tutted.

When Cecilia came back in she rubbed her arms repeatedly with worry. She’d been worried about Manuel all night. What if Guido had given him away?

‘Cecilia, dear,’ Dona Sofίa said, a fixed smile nailed to her face. ‘We have something to say to you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Cecilia said, waiting for judgement. If only Luis was here. He had always been able to curb the worst of his parents’ excesses. ‘I promise that I will work hard to make amends.’ Cecilia wasn’t past begging to keep her son in employment.

‘Well, we do expect to be having some very important guests staying with us in the not too distant future,’ Dona Sofίa replied, frankly surprised at her housekeeper’s eagerness to accept responsibility and expressing regret at having let herself go. ‘And so your diligence and commitment will be much appreciated. Behind the scenes.’

Relief flooded Cecilia’s body from head to toe that Manuel’s name still hadn’t been mentioned but Dona Sofίa’s lipstick-coloured lips still moved up and down with unstoppable purpose.

‘I don’t want you serving … Best we keep you in the kitchen.’ She then nodded over to her husband. He coughed three times. ‘Yes. Play to your strengths,’ he said. ‘Cooking, cleaning, stuff like that.’ His wife pushed him on with her eyes and touched her upper arm, ‘Yes,’ he continued. ‘And we’d like you to wear sleeves from now on, old girl. More decent on a woman of your age, don’t you think?’ And with that he turned round and went to look for Guido. It was time to get to the bottom of that unpleasant reading nonsense.

Dona Sofίa gave the old girl, who was five years younger than herself, her most beneficent smile, full of pity. She lowered her eyelids in imitation of the Virgin Mary in her favourite painting by Filippo Lippi, Madonna and Child with Two Angels that she’d seen in Florence.

‘How’s Manuel?’

Dona Sofίa clutched a letter to her chest not really caring to know about her housekeeper’s son one way or the other but the question put the fear of God in poor Cecilia. She needn’t have worried. Her employer’s interest in Manuel was the same as it had ever been – a flimsy pretext for talking about her own sweet boy, Luis. And he was a sweet boy.

‘He’ll be back soon. He has a fine mind. Reads philosophy … and the finest novels – in English, of course.’

That her employer boasted, Cecilia found tedious, but she was grateful for the opportunity to remember the child she’d loved so well. When he’d been first sent away to school he’d been so young. Such a gentle child. His parents weren’t the only people to miss him when he’d gone.

Luis and Manuel were the same age, possessed the same generous natures. Manuel was the only one of Cecilia’s children that had ever been allowed on the estate. Dona Sofίa had even allowed a friendship to blossom between the boys. They’d been inseparable.

Until they’d been forcibly torn apart.

Don Felipe’s gift of a ball to Luis had seen to that. The boy had kicked it around the house, breaking a porcelain ornament. As it had fallen to the floor it had shattered into a thousand pieces, one of which had lodged in Manuel’s left cheek. Luis had called for his mother, called for Cecilia. Both women had come running to find him cradling his injured friend in his arms.

There was to be no friendship after that. ‘Luis knows better than to kick a ball around the house. He knows the value of things, whereas that half-wit of a boy Manuel has no more respect for civilised living than a wild animal,’ Dona Sofίa had cried.

‘But Mama. It was me. It was my fault. All my fault,’ her son had told her bravely. ‘Can I see Manu? See if he’s all right?’

But it was no use. No matter how many times he had reasoned with his mother there was to be no shifting Dona Sofίa from her position. It was all Manuel’s fault. She blamed him for everything. And when Luis had run to the village, determined to see how his dear friend was getting on, Dona Sofίa had blamed Manuel some more. Dona Sofίa had always managed to keep her son away from Fuentes de Andalucía and its inhabitants until then.

That Cecilia wasn’t dismissed there and then was a miracle. A miracle brought about by Luis. He’d pleaded with his mother on Cecilia’s behalf and she had given in. But she was determined not to do so again.

Four months after the ball incident Luis was sent away to school. Dona Sofίa wouldn’t have him going to the village again.

The child was ten.

Poor Dona Sofίa. What had she done? She’d waited for a child for such a long time, had feared she might never be able to find one. And then she’d sent him away.

Of course, his mother missed him terribly when he’d gone. And she would pour out her heart to Cecilia whenever she could to shout about the fact. And Cecilia wouldn’t – couldn’t – condemn her for that. But Luis was homesick. And Dona Sofίa’s eyes were forever red and sore, her nose constantly streaming. ‘What should I do?’ the wealthy landowner’s wife asked her penniless housekeeper. An observer would have thought Dona Sofίa regarded Cecilia as a friend. Cecilia made the fatal mistake of thinking so too. As one mother to another. Cecilia dared to give Dona Sofίa her most truthful counsel.

Oh, the insolence.

Cecilia had very nearly lost her job that day. ‘How dare you Cecilia! We’re providing that boy with a first-class education. But then, I wouldn’t expect you to understand.’ The housekeeper had put her fingers to her hot cheek, her employer’s red hand print upon it. She had momentarily forgotten her place. She wouldn’t do so again. It was clear that to Dona Sofίa, Cecilia was no more sentient than a wooden sculpture that she’d had fashioned to her pleasing.

And so now, though happy to hear that Luis was coming home, Cecilia kept her excitement well and truly to herself.

Chapter 8

Maria looked at the page in front of her; apart from the title, Cumbres Borrascosas, the only marks on it were the rings left by the numerous cups of water she’d had and the ink that had splashed as she’d thrown down her pen. Cumbres Borrascosas. Even that wasn’t original. She’d taken it from the English classic, Wuthering Heights. She looked through her window, exasperated. As she watched the heat vibrate over the expanse of countryside beyond the village, inspiration hit her with its golden arrow. She picked up her pen. Crossed out her first attempt. Replaced it with Campos Sofocantes. There. Sweltering Fields. Much better. Now she could start to write her epic story of love between wonderful strangers from different lands, where the heroine was from Spain and the hero from England. She put pen to paper once more and wrote ‘based on a true story’. She was on fire.

But something had changed, after the picnic. Maria, for all her knowledge of the secrets of the human heart, was the only one who didn’t realise it. Blinded by her own importance she still believed that Richard loved her, and that she loved him, despite her body repeatedly telling her to the contrary – though it had been thankfully quieter of late. Perhaps due to the fact that he wasn’t coming round as frequently as he once had. Not that she minded. In some ways she preferred it. His absence as ever gave her the space to preserve his image, perpetuate the myth that she loved him.

In truth, before the picnic his constant attention and desire to please her had been vaguely irritating. He’d once brushed her fingers with his which she’d found deeply disturbing. And not in a good way. She hadn’t been able to look at him without feeling nauseous for days. She’d convinced herself then that this was because she was lovesick.

But one Tuesday morning, as she anticipated Richard’s visit, she questioned the heavy feeling in her heart. Tuesday was the day when her father would check on the English boy’s health as arranged, and this Tuesday Maria had started to feel anxious about his impending visit the moment her bare feet touched the wooden floor as she got out of bed. She busied herself in the kitchen, peeling the vegetables and getting everything ready for the evening meal. She’d not seen Richard since the Wednesday before; Seňor Suarez had taken him to Seville. She told herself she was looking forward to seeing him, hearing all about his trip, what he’d seen, what he’d eaten, who he’d met. She played at being in love again. But as she set about getting everything ready in the kitchen and as the hour of his arrival approached she could not stop herself from shaking with fear.

This wasn’t love.

She’d gone out to meet Paloma earlier in the day. They’d sat under their olive tree, played their game. But Paloma too had been preoccupied. The heavens were raining down upon her mother up on the estate, thanks to Don Felipe and Dona Sofίa, and something had happened to Lola which she didn’t want to talk about. The future, Maria could see, was not looking bright for Paloma. But her own had also lost its lustre. The thought that she might have to spend the rest of her life with Richard Johnson had turned her winged sandals to stone filled boots. The girls brooded, too ill at ease to let limbs interlace and hopes soar.

They said goodbye and went home, both deep in thought. Dark clouds of their own making were gathering on the horizon for both of them. Little did they realise that these would soon seem as refreshing as summer rain when the real storm broke out.

Chapter 9

On 17th July 1936 Spanish soldiers rose up against their own government in North Africa and mainland Spain. The pools of unrest that had been bubbling away under the surface of the country were starting to erupt. Ordinary working men and women gathered around radios in neighbours’ houses and listened for news. Seňor Suarez and Doctor Alvaro poured over newspapers and relayed their contents to the villagers. Father Anselmo prayed for peace. The mayor called an emergency meeting, then another one, followed by another one. Richard Johnson sent a telegram home. Uprisings were stopped in one part of Spain, re-started in another. These were the stutterings of war. The nation watched and waited, hearts in mouths.

By the 19th and 20th of July the rebellion had been defeated in Madrid and Barcelona. ‘Stopped two days after it started. That means that there will be no war,’ Doctor Alvaro assured his daughter, although the meetings that were being held in the village hall signified the opposite. The military uprising, no matter how many assurances Doctor Alvaro gave his daughter, had begun, and though held at bay in key cities, it was sweeping its bloody way up from the south.

For weeks, rumours seeped on ahead, wraith-like. They rustled through the olive groves at first, too remote and far-fetched to be believed. But as the soldiers got closer so the rumours threw up dust on stony roads, stamped their way down streets and round corners, eventually making their way up the stairs and into the study of Doctor Alvaro.

Soldiers, Spanish soldiers, were on their way. They were marching into Spanish towns and Spanish villages, shooting Spanish men, Spanish women and Spanish children.

The stories were too preposterous to be believed.

The doctor was in shock. Reason told him this shouldn’t be happening – couldn’t be happening. Yet slowly, forced to dredge through the deepest, darkest recesses of his mind, he had to accept that what he was hearing was true. It was a madness, no doubt. He hoped his country would be cured of it soon.

Outside in their village nothing had changed. The sky was still blue. The sun still scorched the fields. The English boy’s skin was still red. Maria still talked to her friend Paloma under the olive tree, for the moment. When the world looked the same today as it did yesterday it was hard to imagine it otherwise. But civil war was marching its way inexorably towards them. Doctor Alvaro knew that it would leave nothing, and no one, unscathed.

Though not everyone feared its arrival.

‘At last! Thank heavens!’

The morning after the rebel forces rose up in Madrid the newspapers were full of it. This was what Don Felipe had been waiting for, ever since his return to the estate. The coup. At last the boil that to him was Republican Spain was about to be lanced. Left-leaning, liberal, lax, it had threatened to destroy everything he and his wife held dear, to rob them of their God-given power and wealth. Not any longer. An atmosphere of breezy excitement permeated every room of the house, even in the stultifying heat of the summer.

Don Felipe attended the emergency meetings in the village to calm proceedings and offer himself up as the voice of reason. The rebellion was coming. And it would save them. Spain would soon be great again. And his farm, no longer prey to the evils of land reform, nor held captive to the destructive demands of workers, would return to its former glory. In a world where everyone knew their place there would be work for everyone.

‘We really must decide on the guests for the dinner,’ Dona Sofίa said to her husband when he returned from the latest village meeting. Don Felipe entered the living room, waving his hand dismissively.

‘There’s a change in the air already,’ he started. He was in no mood for discussing social plans now. It might be guests his wife started with but then she would go on to the menu, the table, the dress … No. He’d felt a growing respect directed at him at the meeting today and he had no desire to dilute the pride this instilled within his breast with a discussion about chiffon or crêpe de chine, chicken or rabbit. He looked anywhere but at his wife so as to avoid the look of utter disappointment that he knew to be on her face.

‘We’re on the brink of greatness again. I feel it,’ he said, determined not to give in to his wife by answering her. ‘Order is returning, I can taste it. With each meeting at the town hall there are fewer dissenting voices. As for the ones that persist, they aren’t as excitable as they used to be.’

‘It’s done. Luis has enlisted in the rebel army,’ Dona Sofίa said with quiet acceptance. ‘Funny how our side is called rebel,’ she sighed. ‘I always think of those terrible communists in Russia with their frightful revolution whenever I hear the word. Can’t we be called something else? I find it such a disturbing, ugly word.’ And with that, having given up on getting her husband to engage in dinner party planning, she handed Luis’ letter over to him to read.

She’d been expecting news of her son’s entrance into the army for days, and although she told herself she was delighted about it, there was something in her that urged caution.

‘I’ve also had word from my father’s friend, Captain Garcia, that he will be in charge of the regiment – Luis’ regiment – when they come to Fuentes.’ Dona Sofίa held out another letter. She attempted to squeeze out a broad smile but could manage only subdued pride.

‘The … the … the … It will turn out well, won’t it, Felipe?’ she asked, unable to bring herself to say the word. War. She’d wanted it to come. Dreamt Luis would sign up for it. But now that he had … flames of truth licked around Dona Sofίa’s icy heart causing a stammer of doubt to creep into her voice.

‘Luis. A soldier. Why, that’s excellent news darling,’ her husband boomed with confidence. He allowed his eyes to meet hers for the first time since entering the room. ‘Of course everything with be all right,’ he thundered with blind belief. ‘Spain will be for the Spanish once more. The Russians have been pulling the government’s strings for far too long. The Republic will be crushed at last.’

‘Will it be so very dangerous?’ his wife asked, still perturbed. ‘The w-w-war?’

‘No,’ he roared. ‘But it will be glorious. Glorious, I tell you Sofίa. We will win the war and crush the rats, snakes and spineless creatures that have tried to ruin this great homeland of ours with their Marxist ways.’

Dona Sofίa felt a fingernail drag itself lightly down her back. War. Its meaning exploded within her mind. ‘Will it be dangerous?’ she asked again, suddenly afraid what war might mean for her son.

‘No, my love. It will be over before it’s begun,’ Don Felipe said. His brow furrowed, vaguely irritated by his wife’s momentary lack of enthusiasm: not least because it threatened to cast a shadow over his own optimism. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘I suggest you draw up a list of the people you want to come to dinner when Captain Garcia is here.’

‘Oh, that reminds me,’ she said as an afterthought. ‘The Captain says that he wants you to draw up a list of troublemakers. Standard procedure. He wants to make sure that once secured, he leaves our village in good hands, disarms the bad. But, apparently, you know about this already.’

Chapter 10

Summer in southern Spain, always hot, usually calm, often sleepy, turned into a screaming hell as rebel soldiers scourged it with their fire and brimstone rain. The region was hit hard, leaving troughs of devastation so deep that rivers of agony trailed in their wake. This too was standard procedure. The earth and people were scorched to ensure that once regained by the rebels the country would never fall back into left-wing hands. For every rebel killed, ten from the opposing side would be destroyed. And that was a promise.

Yet before this hell was let loose upon Fuentes a strange calm descended upon the village and its inhabitants. Many found it unsettling, oppressive. While for the owners of Cortijo del Bosque it heralded a return to the proper order of things, their workers were quiet. Some called it cowed. Little matter the word used to describe it. The point was that this was how Don Felipe (and Dona Sofίa, in spite of her occasional pangs of conscience) liked it. Troops – ‘our troops’ – were bringing with them a new future that, not just Felipe and Sofίa, but landowners all over Spain believed would be the heroic restoration of a golden past. All talk of reading and rights would soon evaporate, becoming nothing more substantial than a quivering mirage in the heat of the day.

As for Dona Sofίa’s pain triggered by concerns for her son, that too would be rendered equally insubstantial once replaced by the excitement elicited by the planning and preparation required for their ‘very special’ dinner party.

‘I really do believe that no guest will have been to a dinner as truly splendid as the one we’re having, Felipe!’ Dona Sofίa beamed as she clapped her hands together and brought her index fingers to rest on her chin.

Her husband nodded as he read an article about Britain and France and their policy of non-intervention in the war. Now here was something to celebrate. ‘Splendid! Truly splendid!’ he mumbled in his wife’s direction.

Dona Sofίa paced the room with anticipation and beamed with delight, clapping her hands some more.

‘There will be twelve at table. You, me, and – of course – darling Luis, then there will be the Captain, and …’ She paused, unable to think of another soul, despite having drawn up a list the day before, and the day before that … ‘You’ve been to all the planning meetings in the village Felipe, who else deserves an invitation? You decide,’ she said to her husband.

Yet while the landowners were in a celebratory mood, back in his house in the heart of the village, Doctor Alvaro was entering a state of mourning. He’d not slept at all the night before.

Not long after the rebellion had broken out, a little-known rebel general had taken to broadcasting daily updates on the progress of the army and Doctor Alvaro had taken to listening to them. Every evening he would sit next to his radio and guffaw at the colourful language, ludicrous claims and comic timing of this bombastic fool.

Queipo de Llano was the name of this trumped up little man, prone to lavish exaggeration, who had entertained the doctor so well. Until reports started reaching him from neighbouring towns and villages confirming that the General’s gruesome stories were true. It was true that working men were being killed for being part of a union, it was true that to have voted Republican was enough to make you a criminal, it was true that having an uncle who had a son who had a friend who had once spoken to a Republican was also a crime. The doctor shuddered at the loss of reason. The world, his world, hadn’t always been like this. He scratched his head. Was it his age that was making him see things this way? Had life always been this absurd? He didn’t believe so.

And last night he knew so when he tuned into the radio to listen to Queipo de Llano once more. Doctor Alvaro was not the one losing his moral sense. As he sat, crouched as if in pain, next to his transistor, he flinched. For one obsessed with purity the General surpassed himself in defining sin. The General’s little tales of appropriate punishments meted out to women struck the noble doctor repeatedly in the heart. Women seen talking to the ‘enemy’, women related to the ‘enemy’, Queipo de Llano shared his methods for converting them all. Shaved heads. Castor oil. And worse. Oh, how his soldiers would teach them a lesson they would never forget.

De Llano. Alvaro had thought him a caricature of a tyrant in an old melodrama, had found his radio broadcasts hugely entertaining, full of bombast and boasting. Until the doctor found out that all that the General threatened he meant.

Which was why, that night, Doctor Alvaro could not sleep. Every time he closed his eyes nightmarish images of punished women appeared to him, and every time they turned to look at him they had his daughter’s face.

The doctor got up, crept quietly to her room and looked at her in the darkness, fast asleep on her bed. She was curled up, her knees tight to her chest, her hands held together as in prayer. He moved closer to her, and the paternal feelings of love and protection became so strong as to cause a strain in his chest. Maria. His daughter. So perfect, so young. Life still hadn’t furrowed her brow. He thought of a time when age would wither this most vibrant of flowers. But the idea didn’t sadden him. He, more than most, knew how a body grows old. There were many trials worse than age, he said to himself. His only hope, as he looked at her at peace in an untroubled sleep, was that he would be able to help her navigate the troubles ahead.

She had health and youth on her side. He had experience.

He went back to his own bed and looked up at the ceiling, wide awake. Her affection for Seňor Suarez, her involvement with the reading programme, that she was his daughter (if his politics came out) – these were things that would all go against her, he feared, if the rebels came into their village and continued to ‘cleanse’ southern Spain.

But she was a child. Surely only the most inhuman of judges would condemn her well-intentioned misdemeanours. And as village doctor, Alvaro hoped that the care he’d shown the inhabitants of Fuentes without exception would be taken into account and sway even the most ardent of rebel supporters in his family’s favour. As he stared into the blackness he reminded himself that he would have to be more vigilant than ever to not ruffle any feathers from this moment on. And anything he did to help so-called enemies of the true Spain would have to be done in secret.

His heart hurt again as he thought of his daughter. Because she had no mother he’d allowed her to grow untethered. She was independent of spirit, unpredictable, outspoken. A wild bloom that knew no bounds. But now he needed her to curb her tongue, rein in her opinions. To persuade her to act with caution would prove difficult, he knew. And he blamed himself for this. He tossed and turned, thinking of ways to contain her.

By the time the sun crept under the shutters the poor man was exhausted. The doctor had wrestled with his conscience for hours over what to do for the best. He got up, pulled his clothes on and let out a sigh. The doctor had wanted to protect his daughter from the horrors of life. But it was no use – de Llano’s little radio chats had told him in the most lurid of terms what was coming to the village. He pulled open the shutters to let the light flood in. He’d made a decision.

It was late afternoon by the time Doctor Alvaro told her that he wanted her to listen to something on the radio.

In truth Maria was excited about the war. Life in a village could be dull, uneventful. Richard Johnson had stirred things up for a while, made her think of love – but not for long. Besides, he would be leaving soon.

And so the idea that battles would be fought, wrongs righted, roused her. Workers of Spain would rise up, united, as they’d done in Russia. That was what she believed. War was coming and it would be good.

Richard Johnson, too, felt the blood pump passionately through his veins at the thought of armies marching towards Fuentes. He had spent a happy time here but that it might soon buzz and crackle into life of a different sort thrilled him. He’d come to Spain hoping to see the strikes and demonstrations he’d read about in the newspapers back in England. But these were happening in the big cities and his parents had had other plans for him. And so now he considered himself fortunate indeed to have war come to the quiet village they’d chosen for him. A war was on its way. He prayed it would arrive soon, before he’d left.

There was a knock on the door. The doctor had asked Richard round: he wanted the boy to hear the broadcast too.

‘Come, children.’ Maria winced and let out a tut while Richard pulled his shoulders back. He opened the heavy wooden door to his study, a grave smile on his face, and ushered them inside, aware of their displeasure and wishing that this could be the only unpleasant blow he was called upon to dish out to the pair.

‘Please, sit,’ he said, careful not to repeat the offence. His daughter smiled at her friend. Her shrug told him she had no idea what was going on. It struck her father how firm and strong the two young people were as they followed him in, whereas the certain knowledge of the disturbing nature of what they were about to hear aged Alvaro beyond his already advanced years. His back appeared rounded, head collapsed forward, legs buckled. ‘It’s nearly time,’ he said.

Richard and Maria arranged themselves on the floor in front of a large wooden cabinet that was home to a transistor radio with shiny knobs. It was clear that some radio address was about to start. Maria’s hand span out on the floor, her head giddy with the thrill of expectation at what she was about to listen to. Richard fidgeted as he tried to get comfortable.

Doctor Alvaro crouched over the cabinet and twiddled with the radio knobs, catching then losing tunes and foreign voices. ‘The reception is not good,’ Maria complained as she wound her arms in and placed her hands together in her lap. Eventually the voice her father was looking for crackled into life, freed from the soaring, discordant sounds either side of the wavelength. ‘Russian interference,’ he said jokingly. Maria and Richard laughed. Neither of them had any idea that it would be a long time before they laughed again.

Alvaro took a last fleeting look at them. There sat Richard, cross-legged in front of the radio, his hair sticking up from his head in tufts, his colour high, face eager. Alvaro noticed for the first time that the boy was attempting to cultivate some sort of beard on his chin but it only made him seem younger, so unnatural did it look. And there sat his daughter, legs folded to her left, hair braided to the side, her expression serious. Alvaro ached to protect them. But they had to know. He braced himself for the attack on their innocence they were about to receive. He smiled at Maria, gave her a knowing nod. She smiled back, behind her eyes a look that said I’m ready although she had no idea for what.

Maria’s father waited, head in hands.

Maria and Richard glanced at each other. Their excitement tinged with the first signs of fear.

Then the great General began. He spoke of ‘my triumph, my heroism’. He was not just a man, he was ‘an emissary sent by God to save Seville … to save Spain … to save Western civilisation.’

Maria sniggered. Richard arched his eyebrows.

‘Pacification’ was coming their way, the shrill voice promised over the radio waves, and, he assured them it would be ‘brutal.’

Maria’s father pushed his fingers against his skull, a need to reach into his own mind and stop this madman with a microphone from sullying everything good within but the excited, angry little voice continued. It threw up fervour, passion, bloodlust. Talked of God and country. Threatened punishment. Promised annihilation.

The harsh voice blasted out of the radio and shrieked in their ears.

Maria shivered. Richard felt a chill. Alvaro got up, unable to bear it. He turned the radio off.

‘Can’t we hear the rest?’ she asked, strangely drawn into the darkness of de Llano’s vile world. Richard nodded to show that he too needed to listen. Alvaro turned the radio back on and walked out. He’d heard enough over the past days and no longer had the stomach for tales of squealing Red women with kicking legs. He didn’t want his daughter to know about them either. But war was always evil, ugly. And she had a right to know how evil and ugly it was becoming.

The young pair sat and listened. When the broadcast had finished neither of them said a word, did not even exchange a glance because they could not bear to look at one another. Maria’s body had lost its youthful, hopeful tingle of only minutes before; Richard felt sickened at the memory of his. De Llano had banished them from paradise.

The English boy got up and left the house. It was perfectly understandable that he should go out and get some air.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.