Alentejo Blue (27 page)

What she was going to suggest was a postponement. She couldn’t just rush ahead and get married when it would mean something different to each of them. When she didn’t even know what it meant.

It seemed, suddenly, ridiculous that they so lightly, so casually, had agreed to be bound together for life.

They had left the bag in the car when they checked out so they went straight round to the car park. There were citrus trees set in the gravel and Huw picked a couple of oranges.

‘Don’t,’ said Sophie.

‘What?’ said Huw. ‘Don’t be so uptight.’

‘You would be. If someone took something of yours.’

Huw bent and set the oranges beneath a tree. He held up his hands. ‘All right. I’ve put them back. Now let’s be nice.’

‘You started it,’ said Sophie.

Huw took both her hands. ‘Sophie. Have you been spending too long in the playground?’

She smiled but pulled away. ‘Probably.’ She walked back to the tree and picked up the oranges. ‘May as well have them now. They’ll only rot on the ground.’

‘Whatever.’

‘If my kids say that I tell them off.’

Huw zipped his finger across his mouth.

‘So what happened to your foot?’

‘Tripped,’ said Huw. ‘You’ll have to drive.’

‘I don’t mind.’

He was about to throw the keys over but changed his mind and walked round. He hugged her into his chest and said, ‘Next holiday we’re going to Vegas.’

‘How about Ibiza? Hit the clubs?’

She looked up and it seemed that they might kiss but they did not.

‘Huw,’ she said.

‘Hang on,’ said Huw, ‘I can hear a Pipit.’

‘–’

‘I can’t see one though. No, no, no. It’s . . . what is it . . . can you hear how he keeps changing the call? He’s whistling . . . now he’s buzzing . . . listen to that clear note now, completely different tone.’

‘It’s all different birds,’ said Sophie.

‘It’s not. It’s the same one. It’s a Lark. He’s having fun. Calandra Lark maybe, if I could see him then I’d know.’

‘Shall we get in the car?’ She opened the door and threw the oranges on the back seat. Then she closed the door again. ‘Or do you want to look for him?’

‘Hey,’ he said,
‘we
are going to have some fun here, you know. I like our little village, don’t you?’

‘I do, actually. It’s lovely. I might just potter around tomorrow if you drive out to the lagoon.’

He rubbed her shoulders. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘OK. And we’ll go out for a few drinks in the evening. Observe the locals. That writer guy might be there. Bet he’s got a few stories to tell.’

Sophie wrinkled her nose. ‘Best avoided.’

‘Well, if he’s there, he’s there.’

‘But not with us.’

‘Not
with
us, no.’

‘I mean,’ said Sophie, ‘that I didn’t like him.’

Huw stopped massaging. He passed a hand over his face. ‘Right. I should have known.’

‘What does that mean?’ cried Sophie. ‘You mean you should have known that I’d be so
uptight
?’

‘All I said is we might have a drink with someone and you get fucking hysterical. Some people might call that a little uptight.’

Sophie held her throat. ‘Oh, oh, if a woman makes a strong statement she’s hysterical. That’s right! And why would I want to have a drink with that awful, fat-lipped, drunken old cynic? Why would you even suggest that, why?’

Huw stared at her. He backed away slightly and put more weight on his bad foot than he had intended. He winced and drew breath and looked around and kneaded his thigh. He laced his fingers together at the back of his neck and pulled his head forwards. Then he looked up and opened his mouth and closed it again.

Sophie’s lip trembled as she started to speak. ‘You don’t even know . . .’ she said.

Huw thumped the bonnet. ‘What do
you
know about him?’ he shouted. The sound of his own voice appalled him. He wanted it to stop. But it went on. ‘What’s so special about you?’

‘I’m not going near that man,’ she screamed, though she could barely remember him now. ‘He was horrible. I hate him. And . . . and . . . I don’t want you to talk to him at all.’

Two kitchen boys came out of a service entrance for a cigarette break. Huw looked at them and they studied their toes.

‘You’re crazy.’ He almost whispered it, hobbling round to the passenger seat.

She looked at him over the gleaming red roof of the hire car. Her eyes were full of reflected light. ‘That’s just it,’ she said softly, ‘I am.’

A window on the first floor opened and a maid shook a duster outside. The kitchen boys squatted with their backs to the wall, blowing smoke from the sides of their mouths.

Huw sniffed and cleared his throat. ‘I want to make you happy, you know.’

‘I know,’ said Sophie. She stood on tiptoe and reached her arms across the roof.

Huw stretched out and held her wrists and she grabbed his as though they were drowning there in the car park, clinging on to this bright red raft.

9

THE STATION AT GARVÃO WAS THREE WINDING
kilometres from the village, where it could sleep in peace, and it was a hall of dreams: a yellow-stone fantasy of fin-de-siècle Paris, broached through a Manueline porch, heightened with Italianate finials, and crowned with a Moorish cupola. The cupola, though it often leaked, had been greatly admired through the generations by a colony of mouse-eared bats.

At seven fifteen on the twelfth day of October a ferret, looking sensibly left and right, crossed the tracks. A minute later the wind woke a bunch of leaves and dust and chivvied them across the platform and beneath a bench where they settled down again. At seven seventeen a voice clanged down a distant metal nose and through the tannoy to announce that the arrival of the seven twenty-one was delayed by six minutes exactly. The message was delivered in a peremptory manner as though nobody, in any case, would hear.

When the train pulled in two people got off, a man and a woman from separate carriages. The woman wheeled her case straight off the platform, through the hall and into the car park but the man set down his bag.

He looked up at the dreaming edifice, the powdery sheen of the stones, and down at the new-laid double-gauge tracks that the train was leaving behind. For a few moments he held still, as though there was something he was trying to hear or smell or recall.

The man was neither young nor old. His head, which was shaved, was dependable and smooth except for the two creases where it joined the back of his neck. His eyes were dark and wide-set, sloping gently back and up. He wore black jeans, scuffed black shoes, a blue shirt, and a black cape, fastened with a gold chain and clasp.

He hoisted his bag and in long, even strides dispensed with the station, emerging just as the woman drove away. The car disappeared round a bend and the man stared down the empty road.

In a few minutes he would go home for a nap but first, as was his custom at the end of every morning shift, the baker took a bread roll and a
bica
, and sat out on the pavement in the broken-backed chair.

He sat with his legs splayed, leaning forward, his hands planted high up his thighs, thumbs hooked back and fingers curled so that he looked like a boxer waiting to go back in the ring. Baking, he thought, is tough and nobody knows it. The weight you lift, the heat you take, the hours you work, the time all spent on your feet.

He knocked back his coffee like a shot of medicine.

He was a small man, dark and hard, like a loaf left in too long.

Women, he thought, have never been bakers. Now that – now
that
– was a fact.

The man walked up the middle of the road, a holdall slung over his shoulder. ‘
O senhor
,’ he said, ‘I need a taxi.’

The baker nodded. ‘You’ve walked from the station.’

The man said nothing.

‘You’re not from here?’ the baker asked but the man gave no reply.

The baker cracked his knuckles. He changed his mind. He thought he knew this man. ‘You’ve been away?’ he said.

The man looked at him evenly and smiled. ‘I’m looking for a taxi, please.’

The baker brushed flour from his knees. ‘Be lucky, you would. If Silvio’s up before noon I’m a cat’s arse. On the drink last night.’

‘Which house?’ said the man. ‘If you would be so kind as to direct me.’

What the hell, thought the baker. Let him wake the lazy bastard up. Some people were up before dawn. ‘Second turn on the right, third house on the left.’ But he was sure he knew this man.

‘Thank you. You are very kind indeed.’

‘Oi!’ called the baker, as the man walked away. ‘I’ve seen you. On the television. What show? What show are you on?’

The man turned, smiled, shook his head and continued up the street.

The baker tried to crack his knuckles but none of them obliged. Big shot, he thought. Arsehole. Stuck up. If you would be so kind.

Silvio opened the door in a rage and his underpants. ‘Somebody better be dead. Can’t a man sleep? Is somebody dead or have you woken me up to tell me . . . What? What? What is it?’

The stranger with the strong, shaved head looked him straight in the eye.

Silvio’s anger receded and he was filled with a sudden dread. For a moment he was certain that he was about to be called to account. I’ve always done my best, he argued. What else is a man supposed to do?

‘You are Silvio?’ said the man.

Silvio plucked at his underpants. ‘So what if I am?’ He was still half asleep and very hungover. Whose heart wouldn’t race a little when they got pounded awake like that?

‘This is your taxi?’

The man had a way of looking at you. Like he knew everything already and had never been surprised in his life.

‘OK, OK, I’ll take you,’ said Silvio. He tried to sound angry to cover his relief. He dressed quickly, brushed his teeth and spat and though his head was still foggy there was light in his heart, as if he had been given a second chance.

Silvio wore his sunglasses. It was a pre-emptive move. The sun was not yet out.

‘You came in on the early train, huh? From Lisbon. Or it’s the Portimão train gets in first?’ He glanced in the rearview mirror and nodded to the passenger, who was looking back at him. ‘I’m usually there,’ he said. ‘I try to be there, pick up whoever, you know. Nine times out of ten.’

‘Nine out of ten,’ said the man. ‘Top marks, more or less.’ There was something about his voice, something peaceful or soothing, the way it flowed. When you fell asleep by a river it made you feel the same way.

‘Ha!’ said Silvio. ‘Try telling my wife.’ He let the window down. ‘You want a cigarette? No? That’s another thing. The cigarettes. She gets these ideas. Me – I’m a smoker. So what?

‘You had a good journey? From Portimão, you said? Well, it’s fast now, isn’t it? Too fast. Wham, bam, you’re here. Right in the middle of nowhere. All that EU money, they spent it all right. New tracks, new trains. You can really get nowhere fast.’

Silvio tossed his butt out of the window. ‘Too breezy for you in the back?’

The man didn’t say anything.

A lot of fares today, Silvio thought. He could feel it in his bones.

‘Want me to raise the window?’

‘Up or down. Doesn’t matter,’ said the man. ‘It’s all good to me.’

‘Wish some people had your attitude.’ Silvio slowed the car so he could spit without getting it on the door. ‘The way some people go on.’

‘Some things are important,’ said the man. ‘Most things aren’t.’

‘Every little thing! My God! As though it’s the end of the world.’

Silvio nodded and kept on nodding. He thought he didn’t feel too bad, considering. But tonight he would not drink. Give it a rest for a while.

‘So you’re not from round here? Knew it from your accent. Not from round here myself.’ He checked on his passenger; he was obviously listening, most people looked out at the grass. ‘The wife’s family, you see, Alentejanos. That’s how come we’re here. Up in Porto, the first few years. Well, you know that’s where life gets lived. Had my own business, everything sweet, all the extras, but the minute things get a little bit complicated she’s screaming because she wants to come back. Business, you know, it’s complicated, but she just wants to run away.’

‘Natural instinct,’ said the man and Silvio could tell that though he understood that did not mean he approved.

‘You a . . . what? . . . psychologist or something?’ It was the cape that gave it away. ‘Anyway, so we’re here but that’s not good enough either. I drive this taxi ten, twelve hours a day, and all her family expect rides for free and I’m telling you there are a lot of members of that family, lot of free riders all round. Most times, like I was saying, up at daybreak, at the station, nine times out of ten. At least. And she’s still going on. “Silvio, we’ve got to do something. Silvio, what about that mess we left behind? Silvio, you’ve got to stop wasting money.” I’m a very patient man, you see. Very, very patient.’ Silvio breathed through his mouth. There was a pain in his stomach, a stitch, like he’d run all the way up a hill. He put a hand beneath his T-shirt and massaged the soft, furry flesh.

‘Yes,’ said the man.

‘Extremely patient,’ said Silvio. ‘I keep telling her, “We left our troubles behind. It’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Don’t push me too far, Jacinta.” Every man has his limit, you know.’

‘It’s been proven many times.’

‘Hey, you speak like a professor. We don’t get a load of those round here.’ Silvio laughed. He saw his brown teeth in the mirror and the blackheads dotting his nose. They annoyed him but he looked forward to squeezing them later when he got home. If Jacinta was still out he’d sneak back to bed, just until his head cleared. It wasn’t professional to drive with a hangover. Except in emergency cases like this.

‘You heard the one about the Alentejano,’ said Silvio, ‘he has a race with a snail?’ He bashed the horn to let a car know he was overtaking and was rewarded by the sight of it swerving. Must have made him jump. ‘Who wins? You’re thinking the snail, right? Has to be. No, the Alentejano wins. The snail is disqualified after two false starts.’ He laughed and turned round. ‘Ha, ha, ahaa . . . you’ve heard it before, I guess.’