The Return Read online

  The Return

  VICTORIA HISLOP

  headline

  www.headline.co.uk

  Copyright © 2008 Victoria Hislop

  The right of Victoria Hislop to be identified as the Author of

  the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may

  only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means,

  with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of

  reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued

  by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2008

  All characters - other than the obvious historical figures - in this

  publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons,

  living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data available from the British Library

  eISBN : 978 0 7553 5245 6

  This Ebook produced by Jouve Digitalisation des Informations

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette Livre UK Company

  338 Euston Road

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  www.headline.co.uk

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Part 1

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part 2

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Part 3

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Author’s Note

  For Emily and William, with love

  With thanks to: Ian Hislop, David Miller, Flora Rees,

  Natalia Benjamin, Emma Cantons, Professor Juan Antonio Díaz,

  Rachel Dymond, Tracey Hay, Helvecia Hidalgo,

  Gerald Howson, Michael Jacobs, Herminio Martinez,

  Eleanor Mortimer, Victor Ovies, Jan Page, Chris Stewart,

  Josefina Stubbs and Yolanda Urios.

  Granada, 1937

  In the shuttered nocturnal gloom of an apartment, the discreet click of a closing door penetrated the silence. To the crime of being late, the girl had added the sin of trying to conceal her surreptitious homecoming.

  ‘Mercedes! Where in the name of God have you been?’ came a harsh whisper.

  A young man emerged from the shadows into the hallway and the girl, who was no more than sixteen, stood facing him, her head bowed, hands concealed behind her back.

  ‘Why are you so late? Why are you doing this to us?’

  He hesitated, suspended in the uncertain space between total despair and uncompromising love for this girl.

  ‘And what are you hiding? As if I couldn’t guess.’

  She held out her hands. Balanced on her flattened palms was a pair of scuffed black shoes, the leather as soft as human skin, their soles worn to transparency.

  He took her wrists gently and held them in his hands. ‘Please, for the very last time I am asking you . . .’ he implored.

  ‘I’m sorry, Antonio,’ she said quietly, her eyes now meeting his. ‘I can’t stop. I can’t help myself.’

  ‘It’s not safe, querida mia, it’s not safe.’

  Part 1

  Chapter One

  Granada, 2001

  JUST MOMENTS BEFORE, the two women had taken their seats, the last of the audience to be admitted before the surly gitano slid the bolts decisively across the door.

  Voluminous skirts trailing behind them, five raven-headed girls made their entrance.Tight to their bodies swirled dresses of flaming reds and oranges, acid greens and ochre yellows. These vibrant colours, a cocktail of heavy scents, the swiftness of their arrival and their arrogant gait were overpoweringly, studiedly dramatic. Behind them followed three men, sombrely dressed as though for a funeral, in jet black from their oiled hair down to their hand-made leather shoes.

  Then the atmosphere changed as the faint, ethereal beat of clapping, palm just brushing palm, seeped through the silence. From one man came the sound of fingers sweeping across strings. From another emanated a deep and plaintive wail that soon flowed into a song. The rasp of his voice matched the roughness of the place and the ruggedness of his pock-marked face. Only the singer and his troupe understood the obscure patois, but the audience could sense the meaning. Love had been lost.

  Five minutes passed like this, with the fifty-strong audience sitting in the darkness around the edge of one of Granada’s damp cuevas, hardly daring to breathe. There was no clear moment when the song ended - it simply faded away - and the girls took this as their cue to file out again, rawly sensual in their gait, eyes fixed on the door ahead, not even acknowledging the presence of the foreigners in the room. There was an air of menace in this dark space.

  ‘Was that it?’ whispered one of the latecomers.

  ‘I hope not,’ answered her friend.

  For a few minutes, there was an extraordinary tension in the air and then a sweet continuous sound drifted towards them. It was not music, but a mellow, percussive purring: the sound of castanets.

  One of the girls was returning, stamping her feet as she paced down the length of the corridor-shaped space, the flounces of her costume brushing the dusty feet of the tourists in the front row.The fabric of her dress, vivid tangerine with huge black spots, was pulled taut across her belly and breasts. Seams strained. Her feet stamped on the strip of wood that comprised the dance floor, rhythmically one-two-one-two-one-two-three-one-two-three-one-two . . .

  Then her hands rose in the air, the castanets fluttered in a deep satisfying trill and her slow twirling began. All the while she rotated, her fingers snapped against the small black discs she held in her hands. The audience was mesmerised.

  A plaintive song accompanied her, the singer’s eyes mainly downcast. The dancer continued, in a trance of her own. If she connected with the music she did not acknowledge it and if she was aware of her audience they did not feel it.The expression on her sensual face was one of pure concentration and her eyes looked into some other world that only she could see. Under her arms, the fabric darkened with sweat, and watery beads gathered at her brow as she revolved, faster and faster and faster.

  The dance ended as it had begun, with one decisive stamp, a full stop. Hands were held above her head, eyes to the low, domed ceiling.There was no acknowledgement of the audience’s response. They might as well not have been there f
or all the difference it made to her. Temperatures had risen in the room and those close to the front inhaled the heady mix of musky scent and perspiration that she spread in the air.

  Even as she was leaving the stage, another girl was taking over. There was an air of impatience with this second dancer, as though she wanted to get it all over with. More black dots swam in front of the audience’s eyes, this time on shiny red, and cascades of curly black hair fell over the gypsyish face, concealing all but the sharply defined Arab eyes, outlined in thick kohl. This time there were no castanets, but the endlessly repeated, rattling of feet: clack-a-tacka tacka, clack-a-tacka tacka, clack-a-tacka tacka . . .

  The speed of movement from heel to toe and back again seemed impossibly fast. The heavy black shoes, with their high, solid heels and steel toecaps vibrated on the stage. Her knees must have absorbed a thousand shockwaves. For a while, the singer remained silent and gazed at the ground, as though to catch this dark beauty’s eyes might turn him to stone. It was impossible to tell whether the guitarist kept up with her stamping or whether he dictated its pace.The communication between them was seamless. Provocatively she hitched up the heavy tiers of her skirt to reveal shapely legs in dark stockings and further showed off the speed and rhythm of her footwork.The dance built to a crescendo, as the girl, half whirling dervish, half spinning top, rotated. A rose that had clung precariously to her hair, flew out into the audience. She did not stoop to collect it, marching from the room almost before it had landed. It was an introverted performance and yet the most overt display of confidence they had ever seen.

  The first dancer and the accompanist followed her out of the cave, their faces expressionless, still indifferent to their audience in spite of the applause.

  Before the end of the show, there were another half-dozen dancers, and each one conveyed the same disturbing keynotes of passion, anger and grief.There was a man whose movements were as provocative as a prostitute’s, a girl whose portrayal of pain sat uncomfortably with her extreme youth, and an elderly woman in whose deeply furrowed face were etched seven decades of suffering.

  Eventually, once the performers had filed out, the lights came up. As the audience began to leave, they caught a glimpse of them in a small backroom, arguing, smoking and drinking from tall tumblers filled to the brim with cheap whisky. They had forty-five minutes until their next performance.

  It had been airless in the low-ceilinged room, which reeked of alcohol, sweat and long-ago smoked cigars, and the crowd was relieved to emerge into the cool night air. It had a clarity and purity that reminded them they were not far from the mountains.

  ‘That was extraordinary,’ commented Sonia to her friend. She did not really know what she meant, but it was the only word that seemed to fit.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Maggie. ‘And so tense.’

  ‘That’s exactly it,’ agreed Sonia. ‘Really tense. Not at all what I imagined.’

  ‘And they didn’t look particularly happy, those girls, did they?’

  Sonia did not bother to answer. Flamenco clearly had little to do with happiness.That much she had come to realise in the past two hours.

  They walked back through the cobbled streets towards the centre of Granada and found themselves lost in the old Moorish quarter, the Albaicín. It was pointless to try to read a map; the tiny alleyways hardly had names and sometimes even petered out in sets of narrow steps.

  The women soon got their bearings again when they turned a corner and were confronted with a view of the Alhambra, now gently floodlit, and though it was already past midnight the warm amber glow that bathed the buildings almost convinced them that the sun was still setting. With its spread of crenellated turrets that stood out against a clear black sky, it looked like something from The Arabian Nights.

  Arms linked, they continued their walk down the hill in silence. The dark and statuesque Maggie reduced the length of her stride to match Sonia’s. It was a habit of almost a lifetime between these two close friends, who were physical opposites in every way.They did not need to talk. For now, the crisp sound of their feet on the cobbles, percussive like the claps and castanets of the flamenco dancers, was more pleasing than the human voice.

  It was a Wednesday in late February. Sonia and Maggie had arrived only a few hours earlier but even as they were driven from the airport, Sonia had fallen under Granada’s spell. The wintry sunset illuminated the city with a sharp light, leaving the snow-capped mountains that were its backdrop in dramatic shadow, and as the taxi sped into the city along the freeway, they caught their first glimpse of the Alhambra’s geometric outline. It seemed to keep watch over the rest of the city.

  Eventually their driver slowed to take the exit into the centre and now the women feasted their eyes on regal squares, palatial buildings and occasional grandiose fountains before he turned off to take a route through the narrow cobbled streets that spread through the city.

  Even though her mother had been from Spain, Sonia had visited this country only twice before, both times to the coastal resorts of the Costa del Sol. There she had stayed on the slick stretch of sparkling coast, where all-year sun and all-day breakfasts were marketed to the British and Germans who came in droves. Nearby plantations of matching villas, with ornate pillars and fancy wrought-iron railings, were so close and yet a million miles away from this city of confused streets and buildings that had been built over many centuries.

  Here was a place with unfamiliar smells, a cacophony of ancient and modern, cafés overflowing with local people, windows piled high with small, glossy pastries, served by serious men proud of their trade, tatty shuttered apartments, glimpses of sheets hung out on balconies to dry. This was a real place, she thought, nothing ersatz here.

  They swung this way and that, left and right, right and left and left again, as though they might end up exactly where they had started. Each of the small streets was one-way and occasionally there was a near miss with a moped that was going the wrong way up the street and approaching them at speed. Pedestrians, oblivious to the danger, stepped off the pavement into their path. Only a taxi driver could have negotiated his way through this complex maze. A set of rosary beads suspended from the rear-view mirror clattered against the windscreen and an icon of the Virgin Mary watched demurely from the dashboard. There were no fatalities on this journey, so she seemed to be doing her job.

  The sickly, boiled-sweet smell of air-freshener combined with the turbulence of the journey had made both women feel nauseous, and they were relieved when the car eventually slowed down and they heard the grating sound of the handbrake being yanked into position. The two-star Hotel Santa Ana was in a small, scruffy square, flanked by a bookshop on one side and a cobbler on the other, and along the pavement was a row of stalls now in the process of being packed up. Smooth golden loaves and hefty tranches of flat, olive-studded bread were being wrapped, and the last remaining segments of some fruit tarts originally the size of wagon wheels were being stowed away in waxed paper.

  ‘I’m ravenous,’ said Maggie, watching the stallholders loading up their small vans. ‘I’ll just grab something from them before they disappear.’

  With typical spontaneity, Maggie ran across the road, leaving Sonia to pay off the taxi driver. She returned with a generous section of bread that she was already tearing into pieces, impatient to satisfy her hunger.

  ‘This is delicious. Here, try some.’

  She thrust some of the crusty loaf into Sonia’s hand and they both stood on the pavement by their bags, eating and scattering crumbs liberally on the stone slabs. It was time for the paseo. People were beginning to come out for their evening saunter. Men and women together, women arm in arm, pairs of men. All were smartly dressed and though they enjoyed a stroll for its own sake they looked purposeful.

  ‘It looks attractive, doesn’t it?’ said Maggie.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Life in this city! Look at them!’ Maggie pointed at the café on the corner of the square, which was packed with customers
. ‘What do you think they talk about over their tinto?’

  ‘Everything, I expect,’ replied Sonia with a smile. ‘Family life, political scandal, football . . .’

  ‘Look, let’s go and check in,’ said Maggie, finishing her bread. ‘Then we could go out and have a drink.’

  The glass door opened into a brightly lit reception area that was given a sense of grandeur by a number of chocolate-boxy arrangements of silk flowers and a few pieces of heavy baroque furniture. A smiling young man behind a high desk gave them a registration form and after photocopying their passports, told them the time of breakfast and handed them a key.The full-size wooden orange attached to it was an absolute guarantee that they would never leave the hotel without handing it in for replacement on the row of hooks behind reception.