Alentejo Blue (14 page)

I wish I were a bit lighter on my feet and could contemplate a dash to the church first. I was looking at this menopause website (incredible how the internet hypnotizes you) and it had a list: menopause myth and fact. One of the myths, apparently, is that you always put on weight. A lot of women don’t. Another myth is that you suffer some kind of memory loss. And another is that you lose interest in sex.

I’m afraid I must be one of those women who generate the myths in the first place.

With sex it’s not that I don’t like the
idea.
I can see a young couple walking along, their hips brushing, and remember how it was. I don’t mean I get nostalgic. I mean I feel it: a surge in every body cavity, a tingle in my toes.

My husband has a way of holding my hand that means
he
has the idea, though in his case he means to act on it. He holds my hand but works his index finger loose and strokes my palm, the edge of my thumb, the inside of my wrist.

He’s a good man, my husband, one of the best. Ask anyone. The girls at the factory all love him. I say girls but they’re grandmothers mostly, working for pin money, or perhaps for the rent, I don’t know. He teases them (‘On a go-slow today, eh, Sylvie? We’ll get you embalmed one of these days, put you in a case on the landing.’) and they tease him right back (‘Come over here, Mr Mowatt, June’s got a twist in her stocking and she wants you to set it straight.’).

He’s got a robust way about him, I know. Any sane person, Eileen. But that’s just him: his energy, his life bursting out. Let’s get this show on the road.

The factory’s never been enough for him. Cake decorations are not enough for him. Business is business, he says, but you know he doesn’t mean it. Has to be twice the man, that’s what he thinks.

Hands. I used to spend a lot of time looking at hands. It was my party trick when I was young. I read people’s fortunes. My husband-to-be called me Gypsy Rose Lee and studied my palm.

He said, ‘You’re going to be proposed to by a dashing young man in possession of a Triumph Stag and a birthmark behind his right ear and you’re going to have five children and live happily ever after.’

He didn’t know how to read the lines. I knew we’d only have one child.

Today, in the car, waiting for a flock of sheep to cross, I said, ‘Isn’t this more like it? More like a
holiday
?’

He said, ‘You know the etymology of the word, Eileen? Do you? Well, that’s how I feel about
holidays
. That’s what they are to me.’

When did he start doing that? Using my name only when he wants to make me feel stupid.

I’ve got sweat patches under my arms that have spread right round to the front of my bra. Like I’ve been leaking milk. What a sight for sore eyes! We’ll go back to the
pousada
and I’ll freshen up. I fancy sardines for dinner. We’ll have a bottle of Mateus Rosé, I’ll insist on it though he can be quite the wine snob, and I’m going to cut right through the sarcasm with cheeriness. You can always defeat sarcasm in the end with cheeriness. It’s quite a good weapon actually; a blunt instrument but a strong one.

It’s easy to forget that sometimes. About a month after Richard first told us he was gay, I sat my husband down to talk about it. Not that he’d said he had a problem with it. He just hadn’t said anything at all. So I got the coffee and biscuits ready and I sat him down and said, ‘I think we ought to discuss it. You know, Richard’s being gay and all that.’

He said, ‘Right. Go on then.’

I took a bourbon cream and tucked my feet up on the sofa, all casual, and said, ‘Well, how do you
feel
about it?’

And he said, ‘This isn’t one of your daytime shows, Eileen.’ He pointed to the biscuit plate and the coffee pot and screwed up his face like he was just disgusted by it all and then he got up and it was over and I was sitting there chewing on a bourbon cream and I think I finished the lot.

I know what he meant though. All that pawing away at emotion. Sharing. Half the time it’s only making the problem worse. Sometimes it seems like it’s inventing the problem in the first place. There’s this other menopause website and on the ‘home page’ it has this quotation, I don’t know who said it, about menopausal women having to ‘mourn the loss of fertility’. Have you ever heard such rot? Your childbearing years are long gone. I mean, I’m fifty-six. It’s ridiculous. I got over that a long time ago.

It has occurred to me that it’s not Richard he’s angry with but me. You can’t be angry with your son for being gay, not in this day and age, not unless you
are
one of those dads on the morning shows. Maybe he thinks I should have known. Maybe he thinks I did know, that I read it in his stars or in his palm and kept quiet about it and that’s made him really seething inside.

Though of course he doesn’t believe in any of that nonsense, so I don’t even know why these things occur to me. But you can know something’s not true and still think it anyway. There’s only so much you can do with reason and rationality. They don’t take you all the way. Whatever my husband says. And if they do then what’s his problem? If they do, then why has he spent the last two years avoiding his own son?

He’d never admit it though. I asked him once, ‘Why do you always sniff your book before you open it? What are you smelling?’

‘I don’t,’ he said, ‘I don’t
sniff
my book.’

‘You just did. Just now. Right before you opened it.’

He looked at me and chewed his lip like he always does when he’s thinking something through and I could see him remembering, realizing I was right. ‘Oh
that,’
he said, ‘that is a pause, a moment of reflection to locate myself in the text, where I left off the previous night.’

‘Do they all smell different?’ I said.

‘Do you mind?’ he said. ‘I’m trying to read.’

There’ll be no grandchildren, of course. I don’t mind that, not really. I wouldn’t have time, not with all the donkeys to take care of.

Oh, I can see him crossing the square now, heading towards me. He must have looped down another way to the Gaip station and come back up again. He’s seen me now; I can tell by the way he’s shifted down a gear, pretending he wasn’t at all worried. I hadn’t noticed how shabby that seersucker jacket had got. I’m going to take it down to Oxfam when we get home. It looks too big for him anyway, and his trousers are hanging off him too. A proper Jack Sprat he is!

‘Eileen,’ he says, taking off his hat, ‘you’re here.’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I am.’

‘Clearly. Well, what do you want to do?’

‘It’s my holiday,’ I say.

‘Correct,’ he says and looks straight at me so I look straight back and see the sun light up the stray hairs on his cheeks, the red glow behind his ears, the dark shadow of his eyes.

‘And I’d like to sit here and do nothing.’

He looks around him like a man who has entered a room and realized he is in the wrong place. Then he sits down next to me on the bench, takes out a handkerchief and wipes his head.

The parrot scratches its chest and in its drag-queen voice says, ‘
Obrigado. Porfavor. Obrigado
.’ The canaries glide back and forth like trapeze artists. I lean on my husband, or he leans on me. We are, in any case, girded together. I smell the jasmine now on the pergola. It is always stronger later in the day. I look out across the
praça
, at the winding street, the red roof tiles and rusting iron balconies, and watch the human traffic: a policeman kneeling to polish a shoe, a young girl in white fluttering up towards the church, housewives dipping in and out of shops and doors, the old men gathering, with barely a nod, on the stone bench by the fountain.

‘You see,’ I say to my husband.

He does not answer and we just stay like this, watching. I think, now is the time to say something. Now is the time to talk. I don’t say anything. But I feel I could. I could talk about anything: Aunt Betsy and her blue legs, the old woman sweeping and closing the door, the house martins or swallows and how I really want them to be swallows. I could say too that I’ve had enough of ‘my’ holidays and ‘his’ holidays, that from now on they’ll be
our
holidays if he wants me to come. I don’t say anything though because we’re staying another week and there will be time. Maybe tonight, over the Mateus Rosé. Maybe then.

He’s heavy on my shoulder and I think perhaps he’s dropped off to sleep but then he stirs and says, ‘I do. I do see.’

So we stay as we are, and watch the shadows lengthen and smell the evening loaves being baked and feel the sun, slipping low, blushing over our necks like the first taste of wine.

6

THE LETTER WAS IN THE BACK POCKET OF HER JEANS AND
if she shifted her weight as she did now she could hear the sigh and release of the paper. She determined not to think of the letter, but this was plain conspiracy: it would return to her mind and she wanted the shock, the thrill of it.

Teresa glanced up at the clock, a habit she could not break though the clock had for several weeks been resting at twenty past three. She stood up, leaving the cashier’s chair swivelling at the till, and patted a stack of long-life milk cartons into symmetry on her way to the door. Taking hold of one half of the blue plastic strips that kept the flies from the shop she stepped into the doorway and pinned them aside with her shoulder.

The square was empty save for a tan and black dog jumping up at the rubbish bins. His claws clattered along the side each time he slid down again. He looked around briefly before making his next assault and his long muzzle parted in a sheepish grin. The dog is excited and also a little embarrassed, thought Teresa, pleased with this formulation. She twirled her ponytail and tapped her sandalled toes on the doorstep to mask a flush of pride. Today she was alive to everything.

When she came into work this morning, the letter crackling in her back pocket, she slipped on the pink-and-white check nylon coat and the static along her arms ghosted around her body for minutes afterwards. She unpacked a box of tinned soup and marvelled at her arrangement of the cans on the shelf, detecting there an industrial beauty that would otherwise go unhymned. As a matter of routine she switched on the lights at the back of the shop but then turned them off again because the gloom over the cold counter wrapped the fat dangling hams and wrinkly smoked sausage in an inviting layer of tradition. When Senhor Mendes came in for a packet of rolling tobacco she saw at once that the way he scratched his ear had nothing to do with an itch and everything to do with the fact that she was twenty years old and – nose aside – not bad to look at. Dona Linda came in for washing powder and Nutella and said, ‘What are you hiding back there? A dead body? You’ll take your finger off on the meat slice, my girl.’

‘Yes, Dona Linda,’ said Teresa.

Dona Linda leaned across the tower of wire baskets on the counter and Teresa smelled eggs and the faint carbolic scent of freshly dyed hair. ‘Has he told you to keep the lights off?’ she said, referring to Senhor Jaime. ‘Next thing, he’ll start charging us to breathe the air.’

‘Yes, Dona Linda.’ Teresa rang the prices up on the till and put the washing powder and the chocolate spread in a plastic bag.

The woman clucked on, her voice a scattering of affront, alarm and inquisition, so that all by herself she managed to sound like a shed full of chickens.

‘And it won’t be long before you and Antonio tie the knot, I expect. Bless you, there, I’ve made you blush. Well, it’s a sign. I’ll say nothing more. My lips are sealed on the subject. This village could do with a good wedding. Look at my lips. Closed, closed, I’m saying nothing, you see.’

‘I see, Dona Linda,’ Teresa replied. ‘Will there be anything else?’

She jumped out of the doorway and stood with one foot up against the whitewashed wall. Summer was coming to an end and it was possible now to be outside in the late morning without being punched by the sun. The square was a large patch of dusty gravel broken only by a gathering of hard-leaved bay trees and a couple of cars parked at careless angles.

Teresa stared across the square after the dog, which had run off seeming to think she would chase him. She looked right, towards the back wall of the Casa do Povo, and left towards the hardware shop and butcher’s. She reached up for her ponytail, which she wore high on the crown so that it spurted like a black fountain from her head. Sighing, she twisted it round her finger. It was all very well, she thought, to be alert. But what was there to see?

She often felt, and she hoped it was not conceited, that her powers of observation were somehow keener than those of other people. In the spring, when the wildflowers came, she never said in that cheap way, oh how pretty, to hide the fact of indifference. How many others, in all honesty, had noticed that SenhorVasco was building a wall of fat to conceal his deep, deep sadness? It was possible that she was the only one to shiver inside when Dona Linda licked the tip of her finger and stroked her son’s moustache.

It was a blessing and also a curse and there was nothing she could do but live with it.

She wished someone would come and see her now. She took the letter out of her pocket and tapped it on her sleeve as if it were bait. Her spirits ran so high she could scarcely breathe. She wanted someone – Clara, Paula, anyone – to see her and wonder what it was that was making her glow. Of course she couldn’t tell them, she couldn’t say, not before breaking the news to her mother, and to Antonio – oh, how would she tell Antonio? – but she needed a witness now, someone to declare that
something
was up with Teresa.

‘Senhora Carmona! Good morning.’ Teresa sprang off the wall and stuffed the letter back in her pocket. Senhora Carmona had arrived silently like an old black cat, whiskers twitching.

She came forward and held Teresa’s wrist. Teresa felt the tremble in the old woman’s hand. ‘My dear, my dear. But is it closed?’ Her face shook with the effort of speech.