The Invitation(69)

He steps outside a few minutes later. Stella, he sees, has been joined by an elderly woman, and both sit deep in conversation. It takes him a moment to recognize the language they are speaking in as Spanish.

As he approaches they both glance up, and the old woman springs to her feet with surprising agility. She is quite incredibly small: not much taller standing than Stella sitting, and Hal wonders whether she has always been that height, or whether it is the press of age. They have been drinking coffee. The woman now is gesturing to the cups, hurrying inside a door behind them that he had not noticed before.

‘She’s going to bring you one,’ Stella tells him. ‘She has a café here.’

Hal looks at the solitary table, and thinks that it is possibly the smallest café in existence. ‘You were speaking Spanish?’

‘Oh,’ Stella says. ‘Yes. Her parents were Spanish – the family moved here before the turn of the century. We got talking about the town, and I asked her how long she had lived here.’ She takes a sip of her coffee, frowns. ‘I’m not sure how it happened. Suddenly, I was no longer speaking English … and it was so easy. I thought I had forgotten it. I hoped that I had.’

‘But it came back?’

‘Yes. Surprisingly well.’

‘She wanted to know why I knew it.’

‘What did you tell her?’

‘That I’d spent some time in Mexico. I’m not sure she believes me … my pronunciation is too different. But I didn’t want to get into a long discussion—’ Stella breaks off, looking up as the woman appears with a cup for Hal, and a metal pot, from which she pours a thick dark stream of coffee. Then she disappears inside and returns with a plate of little cakes, which she places proudly between them.

‘Please,’ Hal says, gesturing to the remaining chair. ‘Sit with us.’

‘Ah, no, grazie, no.’ She looks between them and grins, broadly. Then she leaves them. They sip their coffee in silence for several minutes, and eat their cakes, which are delicious. Almost immediately tiny birds appear to search out the crumbs, scurrying about on feet as fragile as leaf skeletons.

For the first time since they started out for Cervo, Hal finds himself properly aware of their aloneness together.

‘When was the last time you spoke Spanish?’ he asks.

‘A long time ago – 1937.’

‘That was when you left Spain?’

‘Yes.’

‘Tell me about it.’





Her





New York, June 1937


In New York, I discover that he is rich. It feels less a part of the metropolis, the area in which he lives, than it does some exclusive settlement. There are manicured box hedges, ivy wending its way up old stone. Of all the grand buildings on the street his apartment is grandest of all, a gothic tower spearing the sky, the lights glittering like so many precious stones.

I left Madrid with him, when he made his offer, because I had no other choice. If I had stayed I might have become another Maria, but I knew that I had nothing of her strength, at least not any more. Here was an opportunity for a new life – if one could look at it in that way. Really it was more like dying. It was a relinquishing of the struggle to survive, the shedding of a self. Though my grief crossed the ocean with me. It was the one thing I brought with me from my old existence to this new.

In the second week, I find myself left for a couple of hours in the apartment. His home is so different from everything I have known. The two guiding principles are wealth, and order, neither of which had any place in the farmhouse. Hard, gleaming, geometric. Metal and glass. It feels like being caught inside a vast lantern. Every so often I catch a glimpse of myself in one of the many reflective surfaces, and see a small pale being: a moth who has flown in by accident.

It is in good taste – even with no knowledge of such things, I can tell that much. But then I already knew that my husband was a man of taste: it is evident in the elegance of his person. What I want now is to discover new, as yet unknown aspects of him, to educate myself about this man who fascinates and frightens me. Furtively, I find myself looking for things that might reveal these. The home is where one learns such things about a person, isn’t it? The private self, of which they only expose choice glimpses to the world.

Papa claimed that a person’s bookshelf revealed most about them, so I go to these first. I don’t quite know what to make of what I find. There are a great many volumes, but they are anonymous in their ubiquity. The complete works of Shakespeare. Boxed collections of Dickens, of Thackeray, of Austen. Sets of encyclopaedias, the histories of the Romans, Ancient Greeks, the Americas. They are beautiful editions. But where are those idiosyncrasies of appetite? The odd preoccupations, the dog-eared indulgences? Our house had more than most, perhaps, but everyone must have them.

I look for photographs. I have a sudden need to find a picture of my husband at another stage of his life – in a more fragile, unformed phase, perhaps as a fat baby, or in adolescence. Best yet, a family member – to lend context to who he was before, his history. I begin to look in drawers, to open cupboards.

‘What are you doing?’ His tone is one of curious amusement. I am pleased that he isn’t angry – the idea of him angry is horrible. But I am also humiliated, aware of how ridiculous I must look, caught red-handed like this.