The Invitation(45)

‘Where did you learn all this?’

‘It interests me. We had a garden when I was young.’

‘You don’t have one now?’ Hal asks. He finds it hard to believe that a man as wealthy as Truss would not.

‘Oh, that’s different. It’s managed by a tribe of gardeners. If I had the chance to plant my own it wouldn’t be like that. I would not want that rigidity, that show. I would want it to look as though it had simply flowered from nature.’

He is confused by the fact that she talks about her own garden as though it didn’t belong to her. ‘Could you not recreate that yourself? Explain to the gardeners how you would want it?’

She hesitates. ‘No.’

Hal looks at her now with her hair in disarray, her face bare and gleaming. He thinks of the other version of her: pristine, finished. He thinks he can guess which of these is to her husband’s taste.

‘Tell me about your garden – the one you had before.’

‘There were orange trees,’ she says, tentatively, ‘below my bedroom window. In the spring I would wake up to the scent of their blossom. And there was the vegetable patch, close to the house. A vegetable patch and a fig, and at the bottom of the garden—’ She stops, abruptly. ‘I’ve forgotten.’

He is certain that she hasn’t. ‘Was this in Spain?’

‘Yes.’

Beneath them the ground falls away sharply on one side for a stretch, so that it feels they are a grass stalk’s breadth from plummeting into the blue below. Hal feels again that strange, almost irresistible pull towards the void. It is hard to believe that one would be dashed to death at the bottom in a place so serene as this. Surely one would merely soar, like the gulls he can see circling, scanning the waves for their prey. He hears Stella catch her breath. She appears to be leaning towards it – so much so that for a second he considers reaching out and catching hold of her, to prevent her from falling forward.

‘I think this is how I imagined it,’ she says. ‘How the sea would look, when we saw it.’ He waits for her to explain, particularly that use of ‘we’, but she seems to have retreated to some private place, far from him.

As they continue to walk the breeze dies away and the heat begins to build – though, unlike the mugginess of a warm day in the city it is a clean heat, and without the ferocity of a summer sun behind it.

Suddenly she says, in a kind of rush, ‘There were beehives, at the bottom of the garden.’

‘Oh?’

‘My little brother looked after them. He taught himself, from a book. The honey they made was …’ she pauses, and he turns to see that she has shut her eyes, as though invoking the memory, ‘I haven’t tasted anything like it since. I suppose it was because it came from particular herbs, flowers.’

There is such longing in the way she says this that he wishes he could find some of it for her, this impossible, lost-to-time taste.

‘Of course,’ she says, ‘it’s hard to know whether you remember things as better, or more special, than they actually were. Do you think that could be it?’

‘Perhaps.’ He remembers now a particular cake his mother makes: a bright yellow sponge, made with polenta and lemons. It is an Italian recipe – and he has had it, since, in Rome. But never have any of these versions, however expertly baked, tasted quite the same. ‘I think there’s something about the person behind it, too,’ he says. ‘If it’s someone you love.’

Immediately he is embarrassed. He feels he has revealed too much feeling, too much of himself, in this.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I think you’re right.’

Then, as if some vault of memory has been thrown open, she tells him, too, of sleeping under the stars with the sounds of frogs and the light of fireflies; of a life lived barefoot beneath a warm sun, a town of red-tiled roofs and green fountains, of olive trees stretching in their marching lines as far as the eye could see. And looking at her as she is now, with her sweat-damp brow and her flushed cheeks, he can suddenly see the girl she might have been then.

‘It sounds like a heaven.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why did you leave?’

‘Because I had to.’

‘Your father?’

‘He died, at the beginning of the war. He insisted on going, to fight for the Republic.’

‘Is that why you don’t go back? Because—’

‘There isn’t anything to go back for.’

‘Tell me.’





16


Her





December 1936


‘Can we take the bees?’

‘We can’t take the bees, Tino.’ And before he can protest, ‘I’m sorry – but they’ll be all right on their own. You’ve always told me that they are good at taking care of themselves.’

I can see him make an effort to be brave. And then he asks: ‘Se?or Bombón? Can we take him?’

‘Well …’ I think. ‘I suppose there’s no reason not to.’

‘And Aunt Aída will be pleased to see him.’

‘Yes. I’m sure she will.’

We have to leave. The war is coming here. We can hear it, only a few miles away. At times it can be seen, too: a whitening on the horizon like false lightning. The planes see us now. We have become a target. Two days ago a bomb fell near the centre of the town, killing a young woman not much older than myself, and an elderly man too far gone in years to have anything to do with war. Even if Tino wanted to run outside to watch them, I would not let him – the thought is unthinkable now. He does not, though. In a few months, he has become a different little boy. His face has altered. I am not feeding him enough, I know – there is not enough food – but I do not think it is just that. It is the change that this war, and Papa’s death, has wrought in him.