The Island Villa_The perfect feel good summer read Page 9

  Isla, who’d arrived to my amazed delight with one of her beautiful seascapes as a housewarming gift, was dressed in a flowing purple dress and leather sandals with little charms that jingled when she walked. After we’d eaten she said that it was one of the most authentic paellas she’d tasted. ‘Maybe it is in your blood,’ she’d said, as she took a bite and closed her eyes in delight.

  I’d decided on taking the party outdoors. I’d found an old blanket in a cupboard and put it under the orange trees in the garden, with a few well-placed candles to create some ambience, and though I only had four mismatched plates and more forks than I had knives, my guests didn’t seem to mind.

  ‘Shabby chic,’ said Sue, and raised a toast, with a glass of sangria from the jug that she’d made. Her plump cheeks were rosy, and her short blonde curls shimmered in the fading light.

  We’d given up on Jim’s friend’s costa wine after a couple of glasses. It was the sort of thing that could strip paint and cause brain haemorrhages, but I decided I’d worry about that in the morning, when I’d no doubt be feeling the effects.

  Big Jim dunked large pieces of sourdough into the remaining stew and sopped it up, declaring it a ‘triumph,’ and I felt something inside me shift, something lighten for the first time in ages.

  As the sun went down, the sky a paint swirl of magenta and salmon against the backdrop of turquoise ocean in the distance, Isla played guitar and sang a song about the long road home, and I got that feeling I’d had the first time I’d seen the villa, as if maybe this place could offer me something I was missing – a small feeling of home. It was that feeling that had vanished from my life now that James was gone and Sage was at uni. It was like a tiny green shoot of joy, the kind of thing I didn’t want to hold too close to the light in case it withered away – but I had found some of it these past few days, meeting Maria and now sitting beneath the sunset sky, in the company of my new friends. As I sat and listened to Isla sing, and looked from Big Jim to Sue, I realised it was people who turned a house into a home.

  The other thing that turned a house into a home was a funereal, dark-eyed man by the name of Emmanuel Sloviz, who arrived on my doorstep shortly after dawn one morning when the air smelt of olives and sea salt.

  He’d been given my name by Big Jim, after I’d told him that I was in need of some assistance with the house. He was thin, with short, curly hair and the patched-together look of someone who had recently been down on his luck.

  ‘Big Jim mentioned that you might need some work done around the house,’ he said, eyeing Marisal’s outside walls. Walls that were in desperate need of a fresh coat of whitewash.

  His jeans were covered in paint, and he looked like he could do with a good meal inside him.

  ‘I do,’ I said, hoping I wouldn’t regret the decision. Big Jim was a kind-hearted soul, the sort who’d give his money away to strangers. He was also enormous, and anyone who took advantage would no doubt soon regret it if his massive arms were anything to go by.

  Still. You just had to trust sometimes.

  A week later, while Emmanuel was finishing up painting the outside walls, which he’d primed and damp-proofed, I had to admit that he was an excellent worker. And with a few more nutritious meals in him, he might even lose his lost, haunted look.

  In the afternoons, when I came home after seeing Maria, we’d speak. At first it was halting, mostly monosyllabic, but later he opened up more.

  ‘So, you’re a writer?’ he asked one afternoon, seeing me in the garden, my notebook in hand. He’d helped me to lug an old, weather-worn table from out of the spare bedroom into the garden, and I’d placed it under the orange trees.

  ‘Yeah, though it’s more in theory than anything else these days. I wrote a few books a decade ago – then life just seemed to get in the way.’

  ‘Yeah, I know how that can work,’ he said. Though he didn’t elaborate, and I couldn’t seem to find the words to pry. We seemed to have come to an amiable solution, him working on the house and me out in the garden, and I didn’t want to make things awkward by getting too personal.

  ‘Anything I might have read?’

  I laughed. ‘Doubtful. Mysteries mainly, mostly airport sort of reads.’

  ‘No airport here,’ he said, his mouth almost curling into a smile before it stopped itself.

  ‘Yeah.’ I snorted. ‘Maybe, that’s why I’m here.’

  ‘So that’s why you’re still there?’ came Allan’s incredulous voice down the line that evening. I was standing at the bottom of the garden, next to an old tyre that was once part of a swing. It seemed to be the only place where I could get mobile reception.

  I’d filled my brother in on meeting Maria and some of the things she’d told me over the past week, and told him that I was thinking of staying for a while.

  ‘So that you can hear all this stuff about Gran’s past?’

  ‘Well, not her past exactly – but our past, about what life was like back then.’

  Allan had been just as shocked as I had to find out about our secret Jewish roots. ‘I still can’t believe she kept this from us for all these years. Do you think Dad knew?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe. I want to ask Mum, but you know her…’

  He groaned in sympathy, and did an impersonation. ‘What do you mean James bought you a house on an island in Spain? You can’t move to an island! Why don’t you come home, love, and I’ll make you an appointment with my lovely naturopath, there are fantastic herbal treatments for insanity nowadays. I’m sure he can mix you up one.’

  I laughed, though it was a bit too close to home. My mother and I had had a fallout based on her beliefs about natural healing methods when James was first diagnosed and it was still a sore point. Still, I knew deep down that she had meant well and I did love her. I knew I should just phone her and explain things properly. For now, I’d resorted to just telling her that I’d extended my holiday by turning it into a writing retreat. Apparently, the words were simply flowing and I couldn’t stop them. If only.

  It had made me feel a little guilty, how pleased she was about that: ‘Darling, you’re writing again? How lovely. That’s my girl, never let the critics keep you down. I’m so proud.’ Which of course had made me feel even worse.

  How could I tell her that I spent my nights speaking to James’s ashes and my days thinking about the ghosts from my father’s side of the family? It hardly seemed sane.

  Though there were positives too, ones she’d approve of. Like the fact that I was now actually getting out of the house, and not simply lying about it like I used to – although ‘out’ mainly consisted of going to Maria’s house, and the Blues Bar occasionally to hear Isla’s band sing – but it was a start. I was enjoying going to Maria’s every day, the long cycle through the countryside and past the beautiful sweep of turquoise sea, the scent of wild rosemary and salt in the air and the feel of summer on my skin.

  For now, this was like a secret reprieve, a space where for a moment I could hit pause on my old life, and I was enjoying that, along with the new people I’d met. People who, apart from Big Jim, didn’t really know about what I’d been through in the past year. Hadn’t been there to witness it like my other friends and my family. For the first time in ages there were gaps in my day where I didn’t have to think of all that I had lost, and that was helping more than I could have realised.

  Part of this was keeping busy. It was a cliché, sure, but it was one that worked. It was one of the best things I could do for myself right now, and the villa provided enough to keep me occupied when I wasn’t visiting Maria or attempting to write. Attempting being the operative word.

  Despite the plot I’d written on the back of a napkin the other evening, the furthest I’d got was two lines in the cheap notebook I’d got from Francisco’s corner shop, with blue lines and a dusty cover, along with a black Bic pen from the same shelf. You didn’t need much more, I had thought to myself a bit smugly at the time. But you do need a story – and for now that
was eluding me.

  ‘Just show up, that’s all you need to do,’ used to be my motto when I was stuck with a scene I hadn’t a hope of finishing. Enough time in the chair plus a deadline was the cure for any block – or so I used to think. Before I got it, I thought writer’s block was nothing more than myth meeting lack of discipline. Until I got it and found that I couldn’t write anything. For ten bloody years. That showed me, didn’t it?

  ‘The good news is that no one is expecting anything, so the pressure’s off, so why not try something just for practice? Maybe try writing something else for a change,’ said James’s voice inside my head while I sat trying to write.

  I heard his voice sometimes, just before I was about to fall asleep, or just before I woke up, like he was right there talking to me. Like maybe he was just in another room.

  Some days I looked for him without realising that’s what I was doing.

  I’d find myself getting up and going to find him, only to pause en route when I realised that it had all been in my head.

  When Emmanuel was around, I found that I couldn’t bring myself to take James’s ashes everywhere I went. Unless I put him in a beach bag to hide the urn — but even I knew I had to stop myself from going that far. Perhaps now I was substituting having him with me by conjuring up his voice in my head.

  Was it mad to listen to voices in your head? Maybe not. It seemed like a good idea, to try something different. Just to get the words flowing, perhaps. So, I turned the page and wrote about the leaves on the orange tree, and the way the sun filtered through them, and how beyond that tree lay a turquoise ocean, and before I knew it I had developed sunburn and written the start of the first chapter. It wasn’t the story I’d been meaning to write, the one I’d started plotting on a napkin the other night; it was something new and different, set on an island in the middle of nowhere, about a family who’d had to live in secret for all their lives.

  And though it took a while, what I said to my mother soon became true – the words did indeed, at long last, begin to flow.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Formentera, 1718

  Cesca was alone when the man in the cellar finally woke up. They’d moved him there because he had been tossing fitfully, muttering in a babble of Spanish and French, and they worried about who might hear if they walked past the house.

  She tried to soothe the babble, now, by dribbling water into his parched lips. He swallowed, slowly, painfully. Then his eyes opened, fevered and glazed with sickness, but bright blue, like the sky, and blinking up at her in clear confusion.

  ‘Paulo?’ he asked.

  ‘Shh,’ she said, ‘you’re fine now,’ her hand on his arm, and he relaxed. Before she could say any more he had fallen back asleep.

  Antoni had mentioned that the man was travelling with a brother. Was that who he’d been asking after? Was that Paulo?

  She left him to sleep and got started on a soothing herbal blend that could be made into a tea to help ease the pain of a young girl who had just begun her menses and was suffering from cramping. It was cases like these that had decided the local doctor on training Cesca in the first place, when she’d showed an interest in medicine. He knew that most women and young girls would feel more comfortable being examined by a female nurse when it came to such matters. Cesca had been a model student, throwing herself into learning all that he could teach, so that now, still only nineteen years old, she could almost have passed for a doctor herself.

  When she came back in to check on the man some time later, she startled. He was sitting up, wide awake. He stared at her in equal surprise.

  She blinked. He was thin, and half naked, but with his hair clean and the bruises fading from his face, she saw he had high cheekbones and full lips. He was more handsome than she had imagined, and she coloured, realising that he had been watching her this whole time.

  He spoke something that sounded a little like the word for angel in French and she laughed a little, responding in Spanish, as her French was limited at best. ‘I fear you may have just knocked your head, Señor, you aren’t with the angels – but you are with us. My mother, my sister and me.’

  He tried to sit up, then winced, feeling his ribs.

  She winced with him. ‘You have two broken ribs, I’m sorry.’

  He frowned, then nodded, looking back at her. ‘Where am I?’

  ‘Formentera.’

  He gazed at her, not understanding. ‘The little island off Ibiza? But how? Why?’

  ‘My brother, Antoni, brought you here, don’t you remember?’ She’d responded in the dialect of the island, and then repeated it in Spanish when she realised what she’d done.

  He shook his head, and the action caused him to grunt and hold a hand to his head like it was causing him pain. Almost naturally he slipped into Catalan, perhaps for her benefit, and she felt a part of herself sag with relief. It would make it much easier if he could speak like a local.

  ‘No, I remember that we were running… then there was a ship, a pirate ship,’ he said, frowning.

  ‘Then—’ suddenly his eyes widened and he looked around. ‘Paulo, is he here, too? What have they done with him?’ He made to stand, but she rushed over. ‘No, you must rest.’

  He nodded as a wave of nausea hit him and he doubled over, coughing and wincing, holding his side. Cesca felt helpless. It must be so painful with his broken ribs.

  ‘Where is Paulo?’ he repeated eventually.

  She stared at him, biting her lip. Her green eyes full of remorse. ‘I- I’m so sorry.’

  He closed his eyes, his face a mask of pain, and leant his head back against the wall. ‘It’s my fault.’

  ‘No, you mustn’t say that. He was ill, he’d caught a fever – you both had, there was nothing you could have done,’ she said, rushing over to his side.

  Antoni had told her about how his brother had died while they were at sea, how the sickness had caught him and taken hold of his malnourished body and never let go. It was a miracle that the same thing hadn’t happened to the man here now in her cellar.

  He opened his eyes and stared into her own, wanting, needing someone to understand. ‘We wouldn’t have needed to run if it hadn’t been for me.’

  She shook her head. ‘Don’t speak like that, it won’t help you now.’

  He clenched his jaw, nodding.

  He looked around the dark cellar with its small solitary window high above their heads.

  ‘How did I get here?’

  ‘My brother, Antoni. He brought you from the ship to hide here, with us.’

  He frowned, trying to understand.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we are like you.’

  He blinked, then his eyes widened in understanding. ‘You are marranos? Jews?’ he whispered.

  The word made her wince, but she nodded. No one ever said it aloud. Or even whispered it.

  ‘But how?’

  She explained about the island, about the people like her, the families that had come from Majorca all those years ago to come and live here and in Ibiza, and the secret community that had lived on the island ever since.

  ‘I can’t believe it. Most of the people here, they are Jewish?’

  She nodded. ‘On this island, yes. With the coast so often attacked by pirates, not everyone thinks to look here or wants to come and investigate. Most people still think it is abandoned.’

  ‘They are only rumours, then, about the pirates? Made to deter strangers?’ he guessed.

  She shrugged. ‘Now, yes. Though pirates have come here before.’

  She left him lying in the cellar and went to make him something to eat, something that wouldn’t be too rich on his empty, starved stomach. She returned with a thin porridge from a pot she had placed on the fire. She handed him a wooden bowl with a spoon and advised him to eat it slowly. It was wasted advice; the starving man fell upon it fast, shovelling it into his mouth. She snatched it out of his hands. ‘No, you’ll make yourself sick!’

&nbs
p; Unfortunately, they knew too well about starvation here on the island, and Cesca had learned from an early age that a starved man could only eat the smallest amount of the plainest food or risk getting sick. She had to take the bowl away, even though he protested. ‘I will give you more soon. Just give your stomach a chance to take that in first.’

  She was right. Within seconds his face turned green and he started to gag. He broke out into a cold sweat and choked out the little bit of porridge he’d had on to the cold, hard cellar floor.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he gasped, wheezing and holding his broken ribs in pain.

  ‘Don’t apologise,’ she said, getting a cloth and wiping his face, not looking into his bright blue eyes that seemed to bore so fiercely into her own. She got up, away from his gaze, and swept up the mess.

  ‘You must go slow, trust me.’

  When his colour had returned to normal and he’d tried some more of the porridge, giving his body a chance to adjust, he introduced himself.

  ‘My name is Benito Nuñez.’

  That name was being spoken on the island already. The Nuñez brothers and their escape by pirates.

  ‘I am pleased to meet you. But we must call you something else. People will have heard of your escape.’

  He blinked. ‘Then I should leave. I will be putting you all in danger,’ he said, sitting up, trying to stand. ‘It’s only a matter of time before they come here.’

  She shook her head and helped him sit back down. ‘They wouldn’t think to come here, not at first, anyway. My brother took you in a rowing boat at night from his ship, the Invictus, which was docked in Ibiza. It will take some time – they’ll be searching the main island before they think to look here, if at all.’

  Though she said the words to help ease his fears, she wasn’t sure how much she believed them. It would have been easier to have hidden the man on the bigger island. It was easier to hide in a crowd.