The Return Page 11

  ‘Well . . . Paco rang on Saturday. Apparently his car broke down that night and he couldn’t get to the club . . . And he couldn’t get a signal on his mobile. He was genuinely, really, really sorry.’

  ‘That’s good. So he should have been, given how upset you were.’

  ‘But there’s more than that. He wants me to go out there again - to stay with him this time.’

  Sonia hesitated.Though she knew that good sense never played much of a part in Maggie’s decision-making, she felt it was occasionally her role to suggest it, to voice caution.

  ‘Do you really think that’s such a good idea?’

  Maggie looked slightly quizzically at her friend. ‘I can’t really think of a good reason why I shouldn’t go,’ she said. ‘In fact I’m thinking of giving everything up and going out there to live. It’s been on my mind for ages.’

  ‘But what about Candy?’

  ‘Candy wants to move into a flat with some friends from art school, so she won’t miss me too much.’

  ‘And your work?’

  ‘It’s all freelance. I could give it up tomorrow. And Spain is fantastically cheap to live in. I’ve got a bit saved up.’

  ‘It all seems a bit speedy to me.’

  ‘Yes, but let’s face it, Sonia, what do I have to lose?’

  Maggie was right.The boundaries of her life were fluid.Though Sonia might have been anchored down to the last detail, Maggie was tied by very little. Her daughter was already independent and she had no financial commitments.

  ‘Even if things don’t work out with Paco,’ she said, swirling the wine round in her glass, ‘at least I’ll be in a country that I love.’

  As far as Sonia was concerned, there were only two reasons for telling Maggie not to go: first, that she would miss her friend and second, that she doubted the sincerity of the Spaniard.

  She voiced neither. At the end of the evening, it became clear that Maggie already had her flight booked, confirming what Sonia had half suspected, that her opinion was not being sought at all.

  Maggie was so full of her own exciting plans that Sonia only got round to telling her about her problems with James at the end of the evening.

  ‘So you fell out pretty much as soon as you came home? Because of some markings in a novel? And then he decided you’d been having an affair with some waiter?’

  ‘That’s about the sum of it,’ admitted Sonia sheepishly.

  ‘But it’s so ridiculous. He really is an idiot, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

  ‘No, I don’t mind. It’s not as though you haven’t always thought that,’ laughed Sonia.

  ‘So what are you going to do about the Friday dance class?’ asked Maggie, as though this was the main concern.

  ‘I’m dreading telling him. But I have to go. I can’t just stop dancing, can I?’

  ‘No, you can’t. I shall ring you next week and I’ll expect to hear that you have made the right decision.’

  They drained the bottle of wine and finished the mean little bowl of olives that they had ordered to remind themselves of being in Spain.

  On the pavement they hugged each other.

  ‘Take care, Maggie,’ said Sonia. ‘You will keep in touch, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course I will.You’ll be coming out to see me. If you don’t visit, I’ll come and drag you over there.’

  Ten days later, the various threads of her life all tied up as neatly as they ever could be, Maggie left to pursue her infatuation.

  Chapter Ten

  SONIA COUNTED UP the weeks since she had visited her father. Nearly two months had passed since she had last seen Jack and a wave of the unshared guilt of the only child passed through her.

  She wished he lived closer, but Jack had always assured her that he was perfectly happy and that he would not want to leave the familiar territory of the area where he had been born and lived for his adult life. Occasionally she wondered what would happen if he ever became infirm, and tried to picture him moving in with her and James. Somehow it was an image impossible to conjure up. As she left the leafy Wandsworth streets behind her, and drove through Balham, Tooting and Norwood, she told herself that she must not worry her father by letting slip her problems with James.

  Croydon. If ever there was a place more antithetical to Granada, it was this grey suburb. Its lack of romance, magic and beauty must be unparalleled in the Western world, thought Sonia to herself. It hurt the very soul to drive down its grey streets. She wondered if the architects of the nineteen sixties ever came back to view the way their work had aged. Had they ever imagined the pale concrete streaked with jagged stains and the huge panes of dark, smoked glass opaque with dust? Why on earth would those who designed it ever return? It was, however, the place that her father loved, and even though he had seen it change beyond recognition, he saw only the ghost of how it once had been. It was where his heart was.

  The ritual was the same as ever.That Saturday afternoon in his flat, Jack Haynes had set out some Nice biscuits on a plate decorated with now faded flowers.

  ‘How is your dancing going?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s going really well,’ Sonia smiled. ‘I’m so enjoying it.’

  ‘That’s good. I wish I could still do it,’ he chuckled. ‘I could have taught you some of our favourite steps. Though I expect you’d find them too old-fashioned now.’

  ‘I’m sure I wouldn’t,’ responded Sonia kindly. ‘Dance is dance, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that. But anyway, I’m so pleased that you are still doing it.’

  ‘I can’t ever imagine giving it up.’

  ‘And how was Spain?’ he asked.‘I got your postcard. Did Maggie have a nice birthday?’

  Sonia had rung her father just before she went, to tell him that she was going away with her old school friend.

  ‘It was fabulous,’ Sonia told him, sipping from the fine china cup. ‘We took some dance lessons while we were there.’

  ‘How lovely. And where did you stay?’

  ‘Granada . . .’

  Hardly had the word left her lips when she heard her father repeat it, softly under his breath.

  ‘Granada? Your mother was born in Granada.’

  ‘Was she?’ exclaimed Sonia. ‘I don’t think I ever knew that. I loved it.’

  After that came a barrage of questions from Jack. He wanted to know all about the city, what it looked like, what and where she had eaten, and whether she had visited any of the monuments. At the best of times, he was always interested in her life, but today he seemed hungry for information.

  She described the networks of cobbled streets, the wonderful tree-filled squares, the grand boulevards and the way in which snow-capped mountains formed a backdrop of almost film-set unreality to the city. She enthused about the warm, red-hued Alhambra and the atmospheric Moorish quarter just below it, unchanged for centuries and still unspoiled by cars. He listened with rapt attention but, more than anything, he was eager to hear about the dancing.

  She described the school, the teachers and the nightclub where they put it all into practice, and the kinds of dancing they had done.

  ‘We did salsa, merengue and even a little flamenco,’ she told him.

  Jack poured himself some more tea. As usual, a goods train rumbled past and their cups rattled gently in their saucers.

  ‘Granada is such a beautiful place. Why on earth did Mum leave?’ asked Sonia.

  Stirring in some sugar, Jack Haynes looked up at his daughter. ‘It was something to do with the Civil War. Lots of people left about that time, I believe.’

  ‘But didn’t she ever want to go back?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Anyway, she met me,’ he smiled, his old face creasing into as many wrinkles as his years.

  ‘Of course she did,’ responded Sonia. ‘And I can’t imagine you ever living in Spain.’

  It was not easy to imagine her father in a foreign country. He was uncomfortable in the heat, disliked eating anything but plai
n food, and had no grasp of any language apart from his own.

  ‘But didn’t she have relatives to visit?’

  ‘I don’t believe there was any family left there.’

  Her father sounded sufficiently vague for Sonia to realise that there was little point in asking too many questions, but they began to reminisce about Sonia’s mother. Usually, Jack never dwelled on the subject of Mary for long. Though he had lived with her infirmity and nursed her for fifteen years, when death came it had been a shocking blow for him. Strangers who met him usually assumed that her mother had only recently died. It still seemed so raw. Today, though, she was emboldened to pursue the subject.

  ‘I do have a vague memory of something from when I was about ten or eleven,’ she mused.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘That Mum was very disapproving when people started to go to Spain on holiday.And that when one of my friends from school came back and said how fantastic it was, she hit the roof.’

  ‘Yes, I remember that too,’ said Jack quietly.

  ‘And one summer I asked if we could go there.’

  Jack recalled it vividly. Though Mary Haynes was physically frail, her reaction to the suggestion had been violent. Occasionally she displayed traces of a fierce Mediterranean temper, and he could remember almost to the syllable the words she had used, each one spat out with venom.

  ‘I would rather have my fingernails pulled out than set foot in that country . . . until that Fascist is dead and buried,’ she had said.

  At the time, Sonia had no comprehension of who her mother meant by ‘that Fascist’. At first she wondered if she had simply been insensitive, asking for a trip to a faraway place when her parents could scarcely afford any kind of holiday at all. Later on, though, her father had explained the problem to her.

  ‘Franco is still in charge,’ he had told her when her mother was out of earshot. ‘He brought about the Civil War that was the reason for your mother leaving Spain. She still hates him.’

  It was 1974 and a year later Franco died. Even then Sonia’s mother had shown no desire to return and never mentioned Spain again.

  They drank more tea, and Sonia ate one of her father’s sugary biscuits.

  ‘It’s so sad that she never saw Granada again,’ reflected Sonia. ‘Did she keep up her Spanish?’

  ‘Not really, after a while. In the very beginning she couldn’t speak a word of English but I remember the morning when she woke up and realised that she no longer dreamed in her native tongue. She wept.’

  Jack Haynes did not want his daughter to dwell on the sadness of her mother’s exile from her homeland. As far as possible, he wanted her to have a positive image of her mother and he pulled himself up sharply.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I have a few pictures of your mother from when she was in Granada.’ He opened the heavy desk drawer and burrowed under some papers before finding a dog-eared envelope.

  As he settled himself back into his armchair, a few pictures fell out onto his lap and he passed them to Sonia. There was one picture of Mary taken outside a church, perhaps at her first communion, but it was the second and third that arrested her. In one her mother was wearing traditional flamenco costume. The eyes were playful, teasing, flirtatious, but nearly half of her face was tantalisingly concealed behind a fan. If she had not known this was Mary Haynes, it would have been difficult to identify her.What was hard to imagine was that the woman in this picture could really be one and the same person as the frail woman of her memory. In this photograph she was raven-haired, majestic, unmistakably Andalucian.

  Then Sonia looked at the next. For a moment she simply stared. Her mouth went dry. In this one Mary was totally unrecognisable as her mother, but she reminded Sonia of someone else. She bore a striking resemblance to the girl in the pictures in the bar. It was a notion that Sonia knew she should dismiss as absurd but one she could not entirely put out of her mind.

  She could tell that these pictures were well thumbed and she always suspected that her father spent more time leafing through his past than he would ever have allowed her to know about. The last thing she wanted to do was to upset him with more unnecessary questions.

  The woman behind the fan could have been any girl with characteristic Granadino features, she told herself sternly, but when her father went to the kitchen to refill the teapot, Sonia slipped a couple of photographs into her handbag. She stayed for one more cup of tea and then kissed her father goodbye.

  The stalemate with James could not continue. Sooner or later they had to speak.

  Sonia knew that it would be her job to instigate some kind of rapprochement, as James was even more stubborn than she. She left him a note on the kitchen table one night before she went to bed, suggesting they had supper together the following day, but the following morning when she came down to breakfast she saw that the note had not even been touched. She went up to their bedroom. Though James always neatly made the bed, she could tell he had not made it that morning. The laundered shirts that their cleaner had left in a pile on the middle of the bed the previous day had not been moved. James had not been home.

  That evening, Sonia met him in the hallway. She said nothing about his absence the previous night.

  ‘I think we should eat together tonight,’ she said.

  ‘OK. If you want.’

  ‘I’ll do some pasta,’ she offered as James brushed past her into the bathroom.

  They never got as far as eating the tagliatelli putanesca. Before Sonia had even finished preparing the sauce, James was draining the first bottle of wine.The touchpaper had already been ignited.

  As she poured herself a glass from a second bottle, which was already uncorked and standing on the table, she could sense James’s aggression.

  ‘So, been dancing lately?’ he slurred.

  ‘Yes,’ Sonia replied, trying to keep herself calm, neutral.

  ‘You must be a bloody professional by now.’

  She sat down, playing with the stem of her glass and took a deep breath. A glass of wine had emboldened her too.

  ‘I’m starting lessons on Fridays now,’ she said.

  ‘Fridays . . . That’s kind of the weekend, isn’t it?’

  In spite of herself, she began to trickle oil onto the flames. ‘It’s the day that they hold intermediate lessons. I’m not really a beginner now,’ she continued.

  ‘Yeah, but Fridays will be a pain in the arse. It’ll bugger up Friday nights, Sonia.’

  James’s tone to her now was friendly but slightly mocking, and she found this strange mix mildly threatening.

  James poured himself another glass and slammed the bottle down on the table.

  ‘It’s a fucking nuisance, Sonia!’

  ‘You don’t need to put it like that, James.’

  ‘Well, tough! That’s the way I see it,’ he slurred. ‘This dancing thing just doesn’t fucking well fit with our life, Sonia.’

  Our life, thought Sonia, turning this pair of words over in her head. Our life?

  The words sounded alien to her. She couldn’t identify with them any more than she could picture an existence without dance. There was a degree of menace in a six-foot drunk, even sitting at his own kitchen table in a pinstripe suit. He rocked back on his chair and glared at Sonia. Wine splashed onto his yellow silk tie and she watched the spreading stain. At all costs she wanted to avoid confrontation.

  The pasta was cooked. Sonia switched off the gas and just as she lifted the pan she heard James roar, ‘WELL? Are you going to give it up or not?’

  The volume of his voice almost made her drop the pan. Scalding water splashed across the floor and, realising that her hands were shaking violently, she put the pan down on the draining board.

  ‘Look, I don’t really feel like eating at the moment,’ she said. ‘I’m going to have an early night.’

  She had genuinely lost her appetite and left the room, nauseous with fear and shocked by the realisation that she was married to someone who now instilled s
uch terror in her.

  It looked as if the new ‘normality’ of sleeping in separate rooms would continue. A knot tightened in her stomach. She had never imagined it would get to this.

  The next afternoon an envelope icon appeared on her mobile phone. It was a text from Maggie asking her to come out to Spain for a few days. It took Sonia less than a second to write her three letter answer. There was nothing pressing in her diary and another trip to Granada would be a welcome escape. She could do with a few days to mull things over, and she would visit the old man at the bar. It was just the opportunity she had wanted.