She was of an age at which life is taken for granted and a happy-ever-after assumed.
As for love, she believed that it was something that she could choose. She had no idea that, when the time came, it would choose her, whether she wanted it or not.
And if she only had eyes to see she would have noticed that it had the English boy Richard Johnson in its grip.
‘Excuse me while I break myself some bread.’ ‘Oh, would you pass the ham?’ ‘Oh, would you mind passing me the knife?’ Richard was drawn to Lola like a magnet, her touch as she passed bread, ham, knife to him sending an electric current that brought an altogether different part of him to life. It was true that Lola was not as intellectual as Maria, her conversation not as witty or engaging, that the only English she spoke were the few words he’d given her that afternoon, but when she pushed herself against him it made his eyes gleam and his body melt in the most delicious of ways. He’d told himself only the day before that the warmth he felt for Maria was love. If that was so, then what was the name of the passion that had now taken him over body and soul?
By the time they cycled home together everything had changed for Richard Johnson. And even though Maria did not cycle away from him – she slowed down, kept pace – it made no difference. Lola had awoken something deep within him and he within her.
‘Spain has been a Republic ever since the start of the 1930s, when King Alonso XIII was deposed. The Popular Front, in power since February of this year, is a coalition … left-wing. The right-wing tried to upset ballots with bullets in Madrid and Barcelona but failed. The labourers who work these fields went on strike just after the last election. Don Felipe the landowner had no choice but to pay them more. He wasn’t happy. Oh look! I can see Guido in the field over there. He manages the estate …’ Richard tried to follow what Maria was telling him – about politics, the running of the estate, how far Cordoba was with its beautiful mezquita, that the mezquita had once been a mosque before it was turned into a Cathedral after 1236, that the Moors had ruled southern Spain before that, about the Alhambra in Granada and the gardens of Seville. Did he know that Seňor Suarez had family in Seville, as well as Madrid? … Maria. She was a mine of information if only he cared to listen. But he did not. Instead his mind, heart and eyes were pulled along by a laughing Lola, who, bored by the bombardment of information that was detonating within her head, decided to break away to let off some fireworks of her own.
He let out a complicit laugh as he watched Lola whizz by. Her skirt was pulled up high, exposing her thighs. As she cycled into the warm air, a gentle breeze blew through her hair. Maria was tempted to race her. She resisted the urge. She was ashamed of herself for cycling away from Richard earlier on, felt guilty that she’d recoiled at his inability to cope with the heat. He was cerebral. So was she. And she would prove it. The life she longed for was that of the mind. Bodies were an encumbrance. And so, she chatted on, skating over the history of Spain and around Spanish literature, skilfully encompassing Don Quixote with a figure of eight … And Richard nodded his head as if listening, though his eyes and thoughts were taken up with the vision of Lola, beautifully seductive, cycling into the deepening blue of the late afternoon sky.
The lane widened. Paloma, up until now stuck behind Maria and Richard, manoeuvred around the pair.
‘I’m telling on you,’ she hissed at her sister, when she’d caught up with her. ‘I have no idea what you mean!’ Lola answered, her laugh extending across the summer fields.
It may have been true that Don Felipe and Dona Sofίa had planned to return ‘sometime next week’ but times and dates, like everything else in life, were theirs to change.
‘Sunday? Sunday? I thought they weren’t coming back until next week. The house isn’t ready. And I always go to church on a Sunday.’ But it really didn’t matter what Cecilia always did. Cecilia had been blindsided.
That was how she found herself allowing her daughters to go off for a picnic with a foreigner and why she was here in the kitchen on her hands and knees scrubbing away at the flagstone floor while perspiration dripped off the tip of her nose. She wondered if Luis, the landowners’ son away at an English boarding school, would be joining them. She hoped so. He would be eighteen years old now. Same age as her Manuel. A broad smile broke out across her face at the thought of the boys.
*
Fifteen minutes away in a speeding car bumping over stones and re-acquainting themselves with their estate were her employers. Their son was not with them. Dona Sofίa was holding on to the door handle for grim death, concerned that her wrist might dislocate at any moment, while Don Felipe was driving as fast as the car would allow. He congratulated himself on the fact that he was master of all he surveyed: land, animals, and people. Dona Sofίa held a handkerchief to her forehead with her free hand, taking care to close her eyes for fear that she might inadvertently poke one of them out as the wheels of the car jolted over small stones.
‘See that Sofίa? Our workers!’ Her husband shouted at her in order to be heard over the sound of the engine. ‘We’ll whip this place back into shape.’ He swerved past two girls causing the wheels of the car to momentarily spin out of control. ‘Unbelievable!’ His wife’s eyelids sprang open, her eyeballs very nearly popping with surprise as she saw the feral creatures wobbling around on their bicycles. Her husband slammed his palm down on the dashboard. Who were these girls getting in his way? And why weren’t they at church? Girls out on bikes on a Sunday morning. The thought of it made his blood boil. He stamped his foot down hard on the accelerator as he saw another one, dressed in white, standing by her bike at a turning. A furious cloud of dust and grit filled the air. The car roared and so did its driver. And he continued to do so as the first thing he saw when the dust cloud settled was Richard Johnson careering off the road and into one of his fields.
‘What was that?’ A fish out of water cooking under the strong sun, the sight of the English boy stunned Don Felipe, and Dona Sofίa no less so.
‘Must be a Bolshevik … or a Jew.’ Inconvenienced by the jerkiness of her husband’s driving, she sat forward and blinked repeatedly, perplexed by the ghostly apparition. She remembered the article she’d been reading only the day before calling for the need of ‘a new Reconquista’ to purge Spain of ‘contamination’. It acknowledged there were few Jews left ‘thanks to their expulsion the first time in 1492 by Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella’, but now their friends, ‘communists, socialists, freemasons, liberals and the like’, were growing ‘like noxious plants’, destroying the very fabric of Spanish culture and tradition ‘from within’. She’d felt it a little extreme at the time. But, seeing this boy, so alien, so near to her estate, it did make her wonder.
‘Thank heavens we’ve come back,’ she said, a loud tut of disapproval punctuating her words. Don Felipe growled.
He pulled up outside the farmhouse ten minutes later. He tooted on the horn six times. Cecilia looked up from the floor she was scrubbing in time to witness Guido the estate manager open the car doors for Don Felipe and his wife. Opening car doors – one of the many jobs her employers couldn’t do for themselves, she caught herself thinking as she pulled herself up to standing. She smoothed out the folds of her apron and rushed into the hall. It was a surprise to her that Don Felipe hadn’t used his chauffeur to drive them here.
As landowner and manager walked around to the back of the house, Dona Sofίa wafted delicately into the house, a forced smile on her face as she greeted Cecilia and the three house staff all lined up at the bottom of the stairs to welcome her.
‘Would you like refreshments Dona Sofίa?’
‘Cecilia! Girls! How lovely to see you all again. Pilar, isn’t it? No? Julietta? Are you sure? Ah well. Never mind. Nothing for me, nothing at all. Just bring an orange juice up to my room, would you? But