The Invitation(51)

‘It is tragic, certainly.’

‘So now,’ Boyd goes on, almost as though Hal hasn’t spoken, ‘all the women I choose to photograph – the ones I pick myself – seem to have some essence of her. The same look, you know – dark, exquisite bones, rather haunted-looking. I suppose I have this idea …’ he pauses, ‘this idea that through my photographs she is living the life she could have had. Does that make any sort of sense?’

Hal looks down at the book. On the current page, the model sits by a swimming pool reading a novel, a cigarette dangling from her hand. She looks like a woman with a story to tell, someone who lives a large life. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I think it does.’





18


Her


I lie awake. My thoughts move back and forth: between the humiliation of the afternoon, and the walk before it. Both a strange relief and a new burden, telling Hal about Spain. Relief, because I haven’t spoken of it in so long. But in doing so I have created a new tie between us, a bridge of knowing, when I had sought to do the opposite.

I hear my husband come into the cabin. I am turned away from him. I will pretend to be asleep.

‘Stella,’ he says, softly. ‘Kitten?’

I don’t answer.

‘You understand, don’t you? I was worried for you – you were so far out. I was concerned that you would put yourself in danger without realizing it.’

I can’t make myself breathe normally, as I would if I were asleep. The air seems to catch inside me and burn in my chest.

‘Goodnight, Stella.’ He places his hand on my hip and I flinch involuntarily. It is not the reaction of a sleeping person. But it is a tiny movement. He doesn’t mention it – perhaps he doesn’t notice, after all.

I don’t know exactly what happened. I started out with no real sense of purpose. Then, at the point at which I might usually have turned around, I found I wanted to continue. I felt that I could have continued forever, in fact, outswimming all that has been resurfacing around me. When I told him, I saw it again, all that could not be unseen – and how it had altered me. It was more than just a loss, you see. It was a realignment; a sea change.





February 1937


I am lying on my back on the tarmac of the road. Above me the sky rushes, but I seem to be fixed in place. It is too silent. I wait for the one sound that is important: the sound of Tino’s voice.

There are things scattered about me: things that I recognize, out of place here in their domesticity. The brightly coloured pages of a children’s book, a wicker basket: Tino’s things, relatively unscathed.

But where the cabin of the truck used to be is a catastrophe of blackened metal, twisted by incredible force, shattered glass. Somehow, I have landed clear of it.

I understand, as I look about me, that Tino has not. He is in there, still.

I try to stand, but my body won’t obey me. I begin to crawl, instead, through the littered glass, keeping my eyes upon the horror in front of me, waiting for any sign of movement. I have never felt fear like this.

There is something beneath that ruin of metal: a colour that I recognize. Something that insists itself, but that I cannot allow myself to believe. Even as I refuse to do so, and even before I reach him and try to free him, to take him in my arms, I know.

Since I first held him I have done everything in my power to keep him safe. It has not been enough.

Light, pressing pale red through my eyelids. There is pain in my hand, a hot concentration of it, and I hold to it, to distract me from that other pain.

I am in Madrid. I have lost two fingers from my right hand and have a slight concussion. Some of the sounds come to me as though through water. Otherwise, I am unharmed. I was miraculously lucky. The convoy was targeted by a fleet of Heinkel bombers. The driver of the final truck, uninjured himself, had found me beside the wreckage.

‘There wasn’t …’ I sit up. ‘He didn’t see …’ I don’t know why I am asking. I know. I saw. But it is almost still possible to believe in it as a terrible waking dream. Until the nurse stops me and says, ‘There was no one else, querida.’

They need to discharge me: there are others with injuries far worse. They wear their strain heavy about them, these men and women. These are people stretched to their limit. I wonder what they have seen – and then try not to think. Do I have anywhere to go? They ask it, but without the requirement of an answer. Either way, my bed is required – I must be on my way.

‘Your cat,’ the nurse comes to me, holding what appears to be a brown bundle. When she sees my face she says, ‘It isn’t yours? We thought …’

I look into the hoary old face of Se?or Bombón and feel a sudden, brief loathing for the animal, who has somehow managed to live when my little brother has died.

‘No,’ I hold out my left hand, the one without the dressing. ‘He’s mine.’

I am not myself. Madrid, too, is at once the same and strangely altered – like somewhere in a nightmare. I have known it as a place visited for Christmas, holidays, special occasions. Sometimes, when Papa did not want to be disturbed from his work, Tino and I would come here to stay with my aunt and uncle. They would take us for trips into the city, and I understood then what it might be like to have a parent who had a little more time to give.