Heading back to Haría, Ann took the circuitous route, driving north along the coast road that skirts the edge of La Corona’s outpourings. The solitude—there was no other car in sight—interrupted by that annoyingly cautionary school mistress lodged in her head, berating her for accepting Richard’s invitation.
Before long, La Corona swept into view to the west, singular in the landscape, a decapitated cone of russet-black rock. Ann drove slowly, taking in the malpais, a lava plain sustaining only lichens and euphorbias, the shore-side broken now and then by pockets of creamy sand. With La Corona in view to her left, the ocean to the right, the scene was primordial. Travelling by car seemed out of joint with these surroundings. She felt an impulse to throw her arms wide and yell into the wind. Yet there were few places to pull over.
Another kilometre and she spotted a turning up ahead. She slowed and eased the car into a small and empty parking bay. She left the car and followed a narrow path through boulder and scree to a lick of white sand nearby. The beach felt desolate, the silence cut by the wind and the slap of small waves.
She stood at the waterline, watching the gentle swell, the black terrain closing in all around her, and the misgivings she felt in accepting Richard’s dinner invitation gave way to a familiar moiling. She yearned to expunge the hurt that had taken up residence in her heart like an unwelcome lodger. Running away from her marriage hadn’t achieved much. She had distance, but she was still who she was, who’d she’d allowed herself to become. Two decades of study and research, in recent years wading through the murky waters of the Isis, all the while paddling about in the murk of her personal life and suffering the occasional flood. He’d frightened her this time, with that frustrated fist of his in their final row. What was that about? Burnt toast? It might as well have been. They’d been arguing the same old ground. It always came down to her career and his ego.
She wanted to forget. Let this atmosphere of tremendous isolation consume her. She thought she must be the only living creature on this beach; she saw no birds, no lizards, no crabs, not even a fly. She took a deep breath of the cooling ocean air then slipped off her sandals and paddled her feet in the wash, enjoying the chill and the gentle push and pull.
Her thoughts wandered back to the night before she left Willinton for the airport. Too distraught to stay another moment in her house, she spent those hours ensconced in her office with nothing to occupy her frazzled mind. So she’d researched the island—its topography, its geology, its history—trawling the tourism sites, frustrated by the shallow summaries and contradictory information, eventually stumbling on a book freely available with the noble title The Canarian. Two pages in, immersed in the journals of two priests who had set sail on the voyage that conquered Lanzarote, she’d forgotten the Hydrology Centre, her tattered marriage, the tumult of her heart.
The CanarianNow she was here, it was easy to imagine that past. Beyond the bay, the wind and the ocean swell pushed south, the flow of the Atlantic perfect sailing for the ambitious conqueror, Juan Bethencourt. The year was 1402 when he set sail, determined to take possession of the Fortunate Islands on behalf of any kingdom willing to strike a good deal.
Marauding Spanish adventurers covetous of the profits procured from dyes and slaves had long favoured Lanzarote. Beholding the ocean, she could imagine the sickening undertow in the bellies of the beleaguered islanders each time they saw a ship on the horizon. Guardafía, the island’s king and ruler of a peaceful and amiable tribe of one thousand islanders, was understandably tired of the pillaging and enslavement of his people. When he met with Bethencourt he granted permission for the conquering party to stay and build a fort in the island’s south in exchange for the islanders’ protection. It must have seemed to Guardafía a reasonable agreement. Neither man could have foreseen the treachery that lay ahead.
She walked along the shore with her feet in the shallows, picking her way around the smattering of black boulders, scanning about for a small rock to take with her. She went out on the flat rocks that flanked the bay, then slipped on her sandals and picked her way into the malpais. She didn’t get far. The terrain was impossible.
Returning to the waterline, she ambled about some more. She wanted to take with her something distinct but, like the tourists, the rocks were uniform. Eventually she settled on a pebble of grey-black basalt partially embedded in the sand. The pebble was smooth and cold and oddly comforting. She put it in her pocket and went back to the car.
After another sandy cove, the road curved east and she drove towards the barren massif that ran along the western coast. The sun backlit the massif, the ridge silhouetted against streaks of apricot merging into the azure of the sky. Several volcanoes pimpled the land to the southwest. The lava plain, to the south of her now, rose to meet its mother, La Corona, a monolith of black in the fading light.
She felt herself expand in the face of what she saw. Ever since her first geology field trip in the Lake District she had known there exists something profound and ineffable in the relationship between nature and the human beholder, a capacity to feel exhilarated by nature’s beauty, as if she could transcend her little life in the face of the earth’s grandeur. A picturesque scene of rolling green and copses of oaks; a paradise of tropical rainforest meeting turquoise lagoon; the drama and majesty of rugged mountains and cliffs; the desert plains of Australia, vast and unchanging in every direction; or like here, a simplicity of contrast. Nature never failed to seduce Ann with its charm.
It wasn’t long before she approached Órzola, a small fishing village of squat and square whitewashed buildings with flat roofs and the occasional turret, their doors and shuttered windows painted blue. Situated on the fringes of the malpais, Órzola appeared an inauspicious place to live. The surroundings, for all their magnificence, were imposing. The mountain range loomed only a kilometre away, with its steep-sided valleys and prominent volcanoes, the jagged edge of the cliff that flanked the western coast, tailing off and disappearing into the ocean, giving the area an edge-of-world feel.
The streets were deserted, with not even a parked car to remind Ann of its inhabitants. Perhaps the locals were hiding from the tourists, a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It was here, an outpost furthest from the island’s capital, on this rugged tongue of land poking into the great expanse of the Atlantic that the locals lived out their lives. Behind shuttered windows, mothers, fathers and children went about their day steeped in tradition, mundane and as predictable as the movement of the sun. Perhaps it was dinnertime. What did they eat? How did they eat? With plates and knives and forks, with spoons, with fingers? Did they have kitchens filled with modern appliances? Or were they still reliant on more basic cooking apparatus? Were they religious? Surely yes. Superstitious? That too. Ann considered it a travesty that tourism afforded no insight into a land temporarily occupied for the purposes of leisure and pleasure.
She drove through Órzola, relieved that her villa was in Haría. Taking the only other road south she headed straight for La Corona, passing below the saddles and deep valleys of the massif. Farmhouses were dotted here and there, the land divided up with dry-stone walls into a quilt of haphazardly shaped fields. Wily farmers mulched their ground with picón, black volcanic ash that must have fallen like infernal hail when La Corona erupted. The fields were as black as the walls, save for the prickly pear and the neat rows of maize and potatoes. As she neared La Corona, amid the western reach of the malpais, the choppy green crests of figs and grapes nestled in depressions fortified with arcs of rock against the fierce prevailing wind.
, Below the volcano she reached a T-intersection and turned right, following the curves through the black and rugged land. Soon she passed through the farming village of Ye, a huddle of whitewashed houses hugging the road, all their doors and shutters painted the same bottle green, and on through a narrow valley whose left flank was the volcano itself. Every cell in her being was awed by what it must be like to live here. There is nothing cosy about an isolated valley squashed between a volcanic monolith and the backside of a precipice.
The land opened up again once she crested the head of the valley and entered the elevated land south of La Corona. A tapestry of black and green fields and terraced hillsides, in the centre a cluster of white that was the village of Máguez, the scene was a welcome contrast to the ruggedness of the malpais. There were a few other cars on the road now, some cruising along, others whipping by. On both sides of the road were low dry-stone walls. Every now and then a break in the wall indicated a farm or a cottage. At one she saw a sign, a lizard, carved into a slab of timber and painted white. Here, the only lizards she’d seen were geckos. The lizard in her sentence had a blue tongue, the blue tongue lizard of Australia. The sentence pulled her back, her imagination a trickster confronting her with a switchback in the otherwise straight road of her life.
Ann and Penny walked along disused railway tracks in the vast undulations of the baked-to-crisp farmland of the Adelaide Plains. It was summer. To the west, a smattering of gum trees broke the horizon. A few scruffy shrubs clung to the edge of the paddock ahead. Above the tracks was a shimmery haze. The heat was unrelenting, the dusty desert wind scalded her nostrils. The sun blazed, rendering pale the blue of the sky, burning her scalp through her hair. They didn’t wear hats in those days. Ann was a scrawny little thing, a timid pipsqueak. Her sister, Penny, walked ahead on the railway lines, holding her arms out as if she were balancing on a tight rope. She was tall, a lot taller than last year; her seersucker dress reached down only to mid-thigh. Ann didn’t have her sister’s sense of balance. She lagged behind, walking on the sleepers. Only, her stride couldn’t quite make the distance between them. She stretched out her hips, swung her skinny arms, but still the heel of her foot landed on the sharp rocks between.
She had to focus on every giant step, on not giving in to the heat.
The sleepers all looked the same.
The lizard made pretence of its own absence.
And her foot landed on the sleeper an inch from that chunky full-grown blue tongue’s tail. Startled, the lizard hunkered down, opened its mouth, unfurled its tongue and emitted a menacing hiss. Certain at first the lizard was a snake, she screamed and leapt back in terror, stumbling on the rocks and falling down hard on the bleached-to-blond grass.
Penny had turned in time to see her fall. She laughed long and hard, holding her stomach and bending double in an exaggerated display of mockery. She recovered enough to say ‘you i***t’, and bent over again in another apparently uncontrollable bout of mirth before standing up tall and grinning mercilessly. She was a slender girl, tanned, wavy auburn hair tied back in a ponytail, the wisps of a fringe held in place by a red Alice band accentuating a high forehead, exposing at the hairline a cow-lick that gave her half a widow’s peak. At fourteen, she had bumps and curves, haughty eyes and thin lips, stretched now in a supercilious smile.
Ann wanted to kick her.
Instead, she picked herself up and brushed the dust from her dress. Now she was upright, the humiliation was more intense than her fright.
The event marked the end of Penny’s childhood and the end of their close filial bond.
Beyond the humiliation, Ann felt hollow, as if overnight her sister had changed into an irascible witch. She sensed, without knowing why, that she had lost her greatest ally, confidant, playmate and friend. Penny was the one who had held her close when she cried, tended her cuts with dabs of mercurochrome, plaited her hair for Sunday best. Penny was almost like a mother. She occupied the void their mother left in the wake of a growing preoccupation with the floral kingdom. Penny had always been there for Ann throughout the five years they endured living in that village north of Gawler. Right up until that very day.
It was their father’s idea to leave England and move to this rain-forsaken part of the world. Through some family connections and his own reputation in the field of viticulture, Dr Frank Salter secured a lectureship at Roseworthy Agricultural College. He was a bulldozer of a man, with a deep gravelly voice. He had bushy eyebrows, flaring nostrils, and a coat hanger of a moustache. Both of his daughters were frightened of him. He seemed to have no trouble assimilating to the great Australian way of life. He swallowed the whole Aussie ethos in one acquisitive gulp, adopted his own style of back-slapping mateship with the neighbours, oblivious to the anti-Pom sentiment, sometimes a tease, other times hateful and vicious, directed at his wife and his daughters.
Ann was only four when they arrived.
Those first two years were lonely. While Penny fended off the bullies at the village school, Ann spent most of her days in the garden. She swung on the old tyre suspended from the branch of a gum tree, jumped through the sprinkler when it was hot, played in the shade with her collection of farm animals, and trailed after her mother.
Marjorie was a neat, petite and fey woman, with curly fair hair framing a fine-boned face. Her porcelain eyes wore a vacant, almost translucent expression. Gardening was her one true love. From the day they moved in she tended every plant, shrub and tree in that quarter-acre block as if it were as fragile as she.
The hardy daises and natives that were dotted here and there responded with vigorous new growth. Hydrangeas burgeoned, roses bloomed, the lemon tree was never without fruit, grape vines behaved themselves and produced huge clusters of the sweetest grapes, and the lawn, patchy and w**d-strewn before, soon became soft and green. She even had names for her plants. There was Bertha the bougainvillea, Quincy the quince and Ophelia the orange tree. Ann helped her christen the rose bushes after characters in her favourite books—Alice, Heidi, Lucy and Jemima.
Her mother’s triumph was the long and narrow bed of Flanders poppies by the front gate. Bobbing about on tall stems, their vibrant blooms broke the monotony of the chain-link fence. ‘They’re like us,’ her mother said whenever they passed by. Ann had no idea what her mother meant.
Marjorie rarely went out. She couldn’t adjust to the brash attitude of the local women. She wouldn’t even walk down to the village shops, sending Penny and Ann instead. The only memory Ann had of her mother beyond the house and the garden was a shopping trip to Gawler.
It was a Saturday morning, two weeks before the start of her first year of school. Frank took them to Gawler in his Holden Torana—Marjorie didn’t drive. Penny sat behind Marjorie and leaned her head against the door so that her hair flew out the window. Ann sat beside her sister on the vinyl back seat and stared out her window at the endless undulations of the plain. The backs of her thighs were glued to the vinyl and had begun to burn. When the car hit a bump she thought her skin would tear right off. She sat as still as she could, with one hand gripping the arm rest, compensating for the sway of the car, anxious for more of her sweat to break the seal.
About half an hour later, their father pulled up outside the department store. He set off in the direction of the hotel across the street, and Penny and Ann followed their mother inside. The store maintained a stable cool with its high ceiling and cavernous spaces. Women in gaudily printed dresses talked loudly while their children mucked about around them. Ann and Penny trailed Marjorie, who went straight to the back of the store. Bolts of fabric lined an entire wall. They queued behind a wide-bottomed woman in a floral dress who was being served by a sour-faced assistant. They seemed to know each other. The assistant unrolled a bolt of navy-blue check fabric and measured it in lengths against the yardstick stuck to the counter. When she came to cut the fabric she glanced at the woman then around the store, placed her hand over the end of the stick and cut about a foot wide of the mark.
‘Good onya,’ the woman said.
‘No worries.’
As the woman took her purchase and headed in the direction of the cash desk, Ann’s mother said to the assistant, ‘Oh, before you put it away, I’d like to purchase five yards of the same please.’
The assistant stiffened. Then she unrolled the fabric. She measured with precision, cutting a little short of the yard mark. Ann sensed her mother had also seen generosity become meanness at the flick of an English accent.
Penny hadn’t noticed a thing. She was standing, back against the counter, arms folded, staring disdainfully at the girls they’d passed on their way through the store.
At the cash desk, Marjorie paid with a twenty-dollar bill. The assistant, this one young and smarmy, raised her eyebrows and stuffed the money along with an invoice into a small cylinder and yanked a cord. The cylinder shot along a thick wire suspended from the ceiling. Ann watched it disappear somewhere up the back, reappearing some time later, whizzing its way down to the counter.
‘What’s that for, Mummy?’ she said.
‘The pulley?’ It was her mother’s turn to look hard and cold, uncharacteristic for her, and there was indignation in her voice when she said, ‘They used to have them in England.’ She paused. ‘Years ago.’ She snatched her change and marched straight out of the store.
YearsIt took Marjorie many hours of many days to make the school uniform, a tunic with short upturned sleeves, a side zip and a Peter Pan collar. Ann had to step carefully in and carefully out of it about five times a day for various fittings, feeling the prick of pins on her skin, tiny harbingers of the torments she anticipated at school.
Penny was in her last year when Ann started primary school. By then Penny had learned the sneering, ‘What are you looking at?’ art of the playground thug and took on the role of Ann’s heavy. No one dared intimidate Penny’s little sister. Ann had acquired a gentle Aussie accent and was accepted by her peers almost immediately. But she made few friends and no one close. Years later, Ann put this down to their mother’s refusal to let them have friends over. There were various excuses. Sometimes it was the delicate furniture. Or the tender annuals that had just come into bloom. Ann sensed, without really understanding it, that her mother had built a psychic fortress around the house, the chain link fence a symbol of impenetrability that kept out any chance the female Salters had of fitting in.
They lived in an old sandstone house, with red brick quoining, bull-nose verandas and sash windows. All the rooms had high ceilings, polished hardwood floors and Queen Ann style furniture, wide at the hip and slender of leg, with feet resembling cat’s paws. Their mother had insisted on bringing the entire contents of their former home in England: large dressers, tall boys, tables, book cases, wardrobes and beds. In the living room, four wingback chairs faced each other like sentinels before a Persian rug.
That evening, the family were seated across the hall, round the dining table of fine polished oak. Still bruised after her fright earlier in the day, Ann looked past Penny and out the east-facing window where a pair of galahs were mucking about on one of the lower branches of a lemon-scented gum tree. A grass fire had been burning out of control to the south-west, belching smoke over Gawler for most of the day, the northerly wind sparing the village until the wind change that came in around five. At six the radio announced the fire was under control. Now it was seven and outside was an acrid haze.
Inside, the house was stuffy, the doors and windows shut tight against the smoke. Marjorie wiped a rivulet of sweat that had trickled down the side of her cheek and almost reached her jawline. Her pallor, normally pale as china, flushed. Penny stabbed at the boiled carrots on her plate. Ann, yet to learn the guile of not dobbing, had confided the cause of her grazes and her sister’s reaction. Penny, duly remonstrated, was in a huff.
‘Eat your meat, Penny,’ her mother said.
‘I hate it.’
‘Nothing wrong with corned beef,’ said Frank.
‘They call it silverside here,’ Marjorie said.
‘Well, we better stick to calling it corned beef because we won’t be living here much longer.’
There was a heavy silence.
Penny dropped her fork on the table. Her eyes had darkened. Marjorie looked at Frank with alarm. Ann fixed her eyes on the galahs outside, who were now perched on the chain-link fence that divided their place from Australia.
‘Roseworthy College has been good to me,’ Frank said, maintaining an even tone. ‘But I’ve been offered a better job back home.’
‘I’m not going!’ Penny stood abruptly and her chair fell back on the floor with a resounding clap.
‘Pick up the chair, Penny,’ Marjorie said, raising a placating hand at her husband.
‘I thought you’d be pleased. None of you like it here.’ His tone was still surprisingly soft. He must have been practising exceptional self-control. He kept a wary eye on Penny who was so upset she was shaking.
‘What about Mum’s garden?’ Ann said, almost to herself.
Frank glanced at Marjorie. ‘You always complain it’s too dry.’
Marjorie nodded passively.
‘And what about my friends?’ Penny wailed. ‘I’ll never see them again.’
‘Stop being difficult. You’re upsetting your mother.’
‘I’m not changing schools!’ Penny glared at her father, clenched her fists, then ran out of the room. A few moments later a door slammed.
‘Perhaps you might have chosen a better moment to tell them,’ Marjorie said tentatively.
‘I don’t mind, Daddy,’ Ann said.
Frank patted her hand.
After they’d returned to England, Marjorie wilted like a petunia in a hot wind. She’d spent those last weeks in Australia wandering around the garden, pausing before every plant in a backyard, grieving. In their semi-detached house in Cirencester she still spent all her time tending her plants, but her passion no longer seemed to afford her comfort.
The living room faced south and had a large bay window looking out on the leafy street. The late-summer sun filtered through the heavy greenery of the garden, casting dappled light on an array of indoor plants below the window. Frank was at work. He spent long hours establishing his Senior Lectureship at the Royal Agricultural College. Penny was upstairs in her room. Ann was not allowed in Penny’s room. If she so much as tapped on the door, Penny would yell, ‘Go away!’ So she did.
While her mother fussed over begonias, spider plants, African violets, Easter cacti, maidenhair ferns and tradescantia, all vying for space and sunshine, Ann sat on a wingback chair pretending to read Matilda, not daring to speak, not wanting to break her mother’s trance-like concentration.
MatildaHer mother sighed. She pulled off some dead leaves from around the base of the African violet, then rearranged the pots so that the tradescantia were closest to the window. ‘They’re getting a bit leggy,’ she murmured. She dusted the leaves of the spindly-looking philodendron and left the room, returning with some old newspaper, a trowel, a small bag of potting mix and a few pots.
A question welled in Ann. ‘How is soil made, Mum?’
Her mother sighed. ‘At a factory.’
It was the most unsatisfying answer she’d ever heard. She went back to being quiet.
Marjorie laid the newspaper on the living room floor and carefully filled the pots. Then she cut several baby spider plants from their mother and snuggled them down into the soil. She worked in an aura of hush. She left the room again and returned with a small watering can.
When she’d finished she folded the newspaper in upon itself to avoid mess and looked at Ann. ‘Bring that for me.’ Ann dutifully picked up the watering can and followed her mother outside to the greenhouse.
It was the same every day for the whole summer. It took Ann a long time to feel comfortable in that house. The rooms seemed small and the Cotswolds crowded in on her. She hankered for her old life in Australia, the space, the freedom, her school, her few friends, even her mother’s garden. Her old life took on a pleasant hue now that she was here. Her mother never mentioned it, but she was sure she felt the same.
It wasn’t until she was eighteen, long after she discovered the pills – Valium and anti-depressants – that she found her mother was not without influence over the inhabitants of the house. By then Ann had developed an interest in what went on below the ground, beyond the roots of living things, and an equally strong interest in what went on between the covers of works of fiction. She’d endured five years of Penny’s new-age explorations. It was her last year of high school and her application form for undergraduate studies was set out on the dining room table. Her father was reading the form over her shoulder.
‘What is that?’ he said, pointing at her entry in the subject box.
‘English.’
‘What is it doing there?’
‘I want to study the Arts.’ She stared at the page.
‘The Arts!’ He gasped. ‘What on earth would you do with an Arts degree?’
She couldn’t explain to him her love of literature and her unexplored passion for writing, kindled after she won a short story competition in Grade Three. He’d see it as a wayward pursuit. Ann knew her father couldn’t bear to lose both his daughters to wayward pursuits. Still, she tried to defend her aspiration.
‘Mum has an Arts degree.’
‘And look where it got her.’ Even as he said those words, he seemed shocked at himself and he quickly softened. ‘You are good at the earth sciences like me,’ he said persuasively. ‘You must choose a subject of that sort.’
‘I don’t want to,’ she said half-heartedly.
It was the only time she’d tried to go against his wishes. The application form stayed on the dining table for days. Frank’s floor pacing drove her mother to her bed. Ann watched the plants in the living room droop. She soon knew his obstinacy and her mother’s complicity were not going to change. So she acquiesced.
When Ann reached Haría the last arc of sunlight had slipped below the ridge, the western sky illumed in soft amber. In the twilight the whitewashed walls of the village looked mellow. She pulled up outside her villa, indistinguishable from the rest save for the street number, displayed on a mosaic tile mounted on the wall beside the green front door. She thought about going inside for a shower, a change of clothes, but knew once she closed the door reticence would consume her. Even parked outside, the immediacy of her attraction and Richard’s interest, apparently innocent, had once again begun to unnerve her.
She’d come here to escape from her troubles, but she’d managed to imbue the villa with all her self-recriminations, outrage and indignant realisations that tramped about inside her like ghouls. Coming here, she’d escaped nothing beyond the material plane. Even Penny was with her, infiltrating her thoughts. Planes – she could have thought ‘worlds’. Penny was always going on about the planes; etheric and astral were her favourites. Those few times she’d seen her sister in those months before she left for the ashram in Poona and Ann went to Oxford to study Geology, Penny would accuse her of being as dense as matter itself. Since she was oh-so-very clever she ought to know that humanity evolves up the planes. Geology, the study of the densest matter of all, was retrograde and therefore evil. Ann didn’t entirely disagree. Most geologists work for oil or mining companies, complicit in the ravages of that which was millions, billions of years in the making.
Still she couldn’t fathom why Penny was occupying her thoughts. As if one rejection, the break-up with him, begot another. Now she had two pools of discontent swilling about in her. Both imposed their worldview. With him, Andrew Cain, microbiologist for Wonderfoods, it was the glory of molecular manipulations and man’s right—divine of course—to control nature at the cellular level. Penny’s impositions were many and varied. Before she found the Bhagwan, she was a serial born-again, reborn each time she found a new technique to pop in her spiritual shopping basket: astrology, numerology, past life recall, Wicca–not only did she try them all, she imposed them on Ann with the zeal of a missionary despot.
Ann could only hope that Richard Parry was different. She locked the car and walked down to the plaza, mellowed by the cool air and the quiet, dimly lit streets.
The restaurant was rustic, with a lath and rafter ceiling, whitewashed walls and a floor of unpolished terracotta tiles. A smell of fried fish and garlic filled the air. Richard was seated in a far corner. She made her way past the smattering of diners over by the windows. Noticing her approach, he stood. He’d changed into chinos and a lightweight sweater of dark blue. He seemed awkward, yet his eager smile and come-hither eyes were beguiling.
‘There isn’t much on the menu,’ he said almost as an apology once she’d sat down.
She smiled. ‘They do a reasonable arroz con pollo.’
‘You’ve eaten here before?’
‘I have.’
‘A safe choice,’ he said. ‘I’ll have the same.’
A matronly-looking woman ambled over from a table nearby and they ordered the chicken and a bottle of local wine.
‘How was the concert?’ Ann said as the waitress walked away.
He momentarily lost his composure. ‘Terrific,’ he said, recovering. ‘Can’t wait to see the whole group.’ He gave her a broad smile. ‘They’re playing on the last night of the Fiesta.’
‘Maybe I’ll come.’
‘You must. The plaza will be packed. The whole village will be celebrating.’
‘Okay,’ she said doubtfully.
‘No, you must.’
must‘Okay.’
‘Sorry. I’m getting carried away.’ He explained he hadn’t been either. It was his first stay on the island in June.
The waitress came with the wine and the glasses. Richard poured. Ann reached for her glass and took a sip. The wine was crisp and fruity. She watched Richard hold his glass to his lips, sniff, then take a large gulp. She was wondering where to take the conversation when he asked her how she knew the language.
Ann had learnt Spanish in high school and spent one glorious summer when she was fifteen romancing Spanish exchange student Juan, who had stayed in the spare room at her parents’ house in Cirencester. He was her first crush. Along with him, she’d taken the language and the culture to heart. She related the story, discretely pared to omit the romance.
Richard listened attentively, then related his own tale of adventures travelling as a freelance journalist in Central America back in the eighties, the days of guerrillas and gringos, when North America took a keen interest in installing and propping up right-wing tyrants. He’d become Dean Martin in a Hollywood rendition of a Graham Greene novel in the telling.
Still, she found herself captivated by his storytelling. He brought his past alive with finesse. Before long she’d forgotten all of her discontents, and become a part of his world.
She took another sip of wine. ‘Sounds terrifying.’
‘It was. And b****y. And amazing too. I was a leftist idealist. Wore my Che Guevara T-shirt with pride.’ He put a hand on his chest and gave an affected sigh that undermined in an instant the apparent sincerity of his vignettes. ‘Those were the days,’ he said wistfully. ‘The eighties. It was a painful, and in hindsight almost fruitless, struggle.’
‘Surely not.’ She was perplexed. Richard’s personality had all the constancy of a whirligig.
‘You don’t think so? I find it pitifully sad.’ He topped up their glasses. ‘I was a hippy in those days.’ He gazed dreamily in the direction of the far wall. ‘Now I like stillness and solitude. But that’s enough of me.’ He returned his gaze to her face. ‘So why a hydrologist?’
Now that the light of conversation shone her way she felt uncomfortable; under his scrutiny she fought a compulsion to hide. She wished she could manufacture an illusory version of herself, full of brightness and joy, but she’d never been one to create veils.
‘I’d rather hydrology than work for an oil or mining company,’ she said. ‘I guess I’m into conserving the earth’s freshwater resources.’
‘Noble of you.’
‘Not so noble. My work concerns the pollution of the Isis. I do impact studies on trout farm waste.’
‘Sounds smelly.’
They both laughed.
‘The Isis?’
‘I’m based near Oxford.’
‘Fine old city.’ He paused, giving her an appraising smile. ‘Hey, you’ve relaxed. Good to see you’re not prickly anymore.’
‘As a drago tree.’
‘Good memory. Also known as the dragon’s blood tree on account of its red sap. Used for dyeing, I’m told.’
There was something about the authoritative tone of his voice. He seemed to her then the sort of man who suffered from an incurable case of expert’s disease. She immediately chastised herself for being too harsh.
The food arrived as the last of the other diners filed out the door.
He winked at her and picked up his fork. ‘Here goes.’
She traced the tines of her fork through the unpalatable mound of overcooked chicken and undercooked rice on her plate. She ate slowly. He nibbled a few grains of rice, then ate several small forkfuls in hurried succession before frowning in distaste and setting down his fork.
She pushed her plate to one side. ‘Not a good choice.’
‘Not to worry.’ He looked thoughtful for a moment and she wondered if he were about to confront her with another personal question but he surprised her with, ‘Do you know how the island got its name?’
‘Lanzarote?’ she said, inwardly relieved. ‘Means broken lance.’
‘Some say the Norman knight Juan Bethencourt baptised the island when he arrived, triumphantly breaking his sword in two.’
‘Really?’ There was no mention of that in The Canarian.
The Canarian‘Apparently.’
‘A rather controversial naming ceremony.’
‘More likely the island was named after Lancelotto Malocello, a Genoese sailor.’
‘And that was…?’ She strained to recall the information gleaned during her last night in Willinton.
‘Early 1300s. Recent history for you. And for the islands too.’
‘The island had a name before Lanzarote,’ she said, wanting to match his knowledge as if to prove her worth.
‘One of the Fortunate Islands.’
‘But that was Pliny. The islanders had their own name. Titer…’
‘Titeroyugatra.’
‘That’s it.’
‘The red mountains.’
‘A more suitable name.’ For Ann, names were important. A change of name wasn’t just about change of ownership; it involved a change of identity. Even married to Andrew, she’d held onto Salter.
‘You haven’t told me what you’re writing,’ she said.
‘A novel. It’s set here on the island. Spans four generations, from the time of Bethencourt.’
‘So you’re conquering the island again, in a literary sense.’
He seemed affronted. He picked at his half-finished meal before reaching for his napkin and dabbing at the corners of his mouth, setting down his napkin, neatly folded, on his plate. There was a succession of loud bonks over by the counter. He glanced up. Ann followed his gaze as the chef, an ugly oily brute of a man, staggered into the restaurant visibly drunk, berated the waitress and left, slamming the door behind him.
‘Well, that accounts for the food,’ Richard said with a laugh.
The waitress came to take their plates. Once she’d gone, he rested his elbows on the table and said in a low conspiratorial voice, ‘Ann, I’d really like to hear that sentence you wrote, if you can remember it.’
‘I’m embarrassed.’ She could feel herself blushing.
‘Don’t be. I told you before, I don’t bite.’
‘Hard. You said you didn’t bite hard.’
‘Please.’
She took a breath. ‘Not until the lizard flashed its cerulean tongue did she see it camouflaged on the sleeper.’
‘Hey, that’s really good.’ He grinned at her.
‘Thanks.’
‘You have it in you to write creatively,’ he said with keen interest.
‘You can’t tell that from one sentence.’
‘True. Call it gut instinct.’
She was doubtful and thrilled all at once. His interest had rekindled that creative eagerness she found so compelling, although she wasn’t sure she could take her creative self that seriously. Yet Richard was smiling at her, all benevolent affection, and she saw in his early assessment the validation she’d been denied her whole life.
‘You flatter me,’ she said.
‘I’m serious. Trust me.’ His gaze lingered on her face. ‘I’ve never been wrong about this. What you have to ask yourself is where the sentence is leading.’
‘Nowhere I want to go,’ she said ruefully. She drained her glass. Better to give the lizard a different colour tongue and set the story here on Lanzarote.
‘Ann, you’ve nothing to lose and everything to gain, so don’t give up.’
‘I just don’t want to start with that sentence.’ She tried to sound indifferent, but the sentence oozed significance and she could barely contain her reaction.
‘Then write another,’ Richard said. ‘I’d love to hear what you come up with.’
Thankfully he hadn’t asked her why.
The waitress, already clearing and laying tables all around them with undisguised impatience, handed Richard the bill.
‘Can we meet again?’ he said, reaching for his wallet.
She hesitated, unable to discern what sort of man Mr Parry the author was. Yet he was an author and that, above all, was alluring. ‘Okay.’
‘There’s a market in the plaza tomorrow. I’ll see you there?’
‘Why not.’
‘Excellent.’
A keen smile lit his face. She couldn’t tell if his interest was friendly or amorous.
The ambiguity was affecting Richard as well. He was standing outside the restaurant, watching Ann round the corner at the end of the plaza. She was honey-sweet and sharp as a needle. Not a fawning fan or a dewy-eyed librarian, all blushes and fluttering eyelashes. In the space of a few hours she’d become his quarry, which put him in an impossible situation. He’d never betray his wife. And he was troubled for another reason. He’d lied. Not to save face, that pretence at having seen Los Campesinos wasn’t troubling him. It was pretence of another sort. How could he claim that he knew she had the makings of a writer when his literary gut instincts had led him astray on at least two occasions that he could recall? The first time involved a passionate young poet he’d met in a Hare Krishna café who turned out to be a pisspot. The second time was his wife.
Trish walked into the room on the Millennium Eve like she was walking onstage at the Baftas. Richard had been invited to seven parties that night but chose his neighbour’s because it was close by. Five champagne flutes into the celebrations and he was leaning against the mantelpiece of a boarded-up fireplace listening with half-interest to Ian, a corpulent stock broker from Kew, bemoan the outlandish costs of the London Eye. The door to the living room opened and she glided in, head held high, luscious in a dark blue cocktail dress with a low scalloped neck, a diaphanous wrap draped about her shoulders, gloves reaching to her elbows. Men did their best to disguise their ogles, and women shot her envious glances from behind. Oh, and what a behind! Richard had been going through a dry spell since his last live-in girlfriend moved out and, at forty-one, he was feeling his age. He found it hard not to look in her direction.
Ian slugged his tenth whisky and started to sway, launching into a tedious diatribe on the Millennium Dome. Some pre-midnight fireworks went off in the distance. A waiter with a tray of flutes hovered nearby. Richard flashed intermittent looks about the room. She came in and went out of his line of sight. He stood up tall, hearing only snatches of Ian’s monologue, willing that goddess to walk his way.
Come on. Come on. Oh God, please…
And now at last she was heading straight for him.
‘Hi,’ she said and he felt light-headed.
The three of them talked, all too briefly. After a tedious explanation from Ian in response to her polite, ‘What do you do?’ Richard managed to tell her he was running a seminar the following weekend on memoir writing, capitalising on the success of his own: My Life and other Rollicking Rants. Perhaps she’d come across his work? No, she hadn’t. He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and handed her a leaflet as she turned to walk away.
My Life and other Rollicking RantsHe hadn’t expected her to come.
He hadn’t expected her to write such elegant prose. She was sitting with one leg crossed over the other, the side slit in her cream knee-length skirt revealing a glimpse of stockinged thigh. The workshop was in a library in Twickenham, ten middle-class and middle-aged women with little talent and high aspirations, gathered in an annex to the library’s main room. The room was spacious with a raked ceiling and wood-panelled walls. Trish was the only interesting person there. Leaning over her shoulder in the first tea break of the day, he praised her paragraph.
‘You have a natural talent,’ he said, trying to pull back from breathing in her ear.
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. You must read this to the group.’
‘Oh, I couldn’t.’ She brought a hand to her neck.
‘You must.’
‘I’m too embarrassed.’
‘Please.’
She hesitated, giving him a coy smile. ‘All right.’
When the others were seated in the arc of chairs before him, he beckoned her to come forward.
She blushed as she stood, smiling tentatively at the woman seated to her left. Her hands trembled yet she read her paragraph in a clear strong voice. There were murmurs of praise. He was impressed.
It was at the end of the day, when most of the others had left, that a prim woman with hair pinned back in a neat bun drew him aside.
‘Forgive me, but I thought you might be interested in this.’
She handed him a book, open at the second chapter. It was one of the copies of his memoir that he’d had on display over by the entry desk. The open smile he’d been wearing all day faded as he read. He looked over at Trish, who was putting on her coat. He felt sick. He didn’t know whether to be angry with her or disappointed with himself for not recognising his own writing.
‘Thank you,’ he whispered to the woman and walked her to the door.
He joined Trish standing by a window. She looked at the book, open in his palms at the plagiarised page.
‘Sorry.’ Her bottom lip quivered.
He reached out and touched her arm. ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘Please don’t cry.’
She looked down at the floor. ‘My own past is too tragic to put into words.’ Then she looked up at him, wide-eyed.
‘That’s okay,’ he said.
It was many more months before he learned of her past. They were lying in bed in his flat in the dark when she described the death of both her parents in a horrific head on collision on the motorway.
She was an only child, alone in the world, until he came along.
‘The truth is,’ she said as they left the seminar room, stopping to gaze at him with eyes filled with longing, ‘I only came to your seminar to get to know you better.’
Richard walked through the plaza and sat on a bench under a laurel tree, reassuring himself that in Ann’s case, unlike his wife’s, he could trust his instincts. The air was still. He gazed at the church on the corner, wondering what had possessed the architect to design something so austere, the façade broken only by a wide and gated porch, the simplicity reinforced by a single cross atop the unadorned tower. He heard singing, high and faint, coming from inside. Otherwise, the plaza was quiet. Streetlights filtered through the broad canopy of the trees. Plastered on the wall of the building opposite was a row of fliers advertising the Fiesta del San Juan. Two weeks from now, not a foot square of paving would be empty.
His thoughts arced back to Ann. He imagined her pressed closely to him by the burgeoning crowd. He would sweep her into his embrace and together they would twirl to the mellifluous tunes of Los Campesinos.
A door opened in the side wall of the church and worshippers filtered into the plaza, heading his way. Keen to avoid any human interaction, however brief, he paced all the way round the bench beneath the laurel tree, then, once the worshippers had drifted by, he walked the church and on home, reaching his front door with a slight bounce in his step.
Aksara