Читать книгу A Forbidden Love: An atmospheric historical romance you don't want to miss! - Kerry Postle - Страница 10

The villagers had never seen such a strange looking boy as Richard Johnson. They called him el inglés (among an interesting array of other, more colourful names – all of them unflattering). He was impossible to miss. His colouring was what had distinguished him most from everyone else when he’d first arrived; so white that small children would run to their parents, cries of fantasma trailing behind them. And now, six months on, the reaction he elicited was scarcely any better. Oh, what they called him was different. But their alarm was just the same. Once other-worldly white, now vibrant, throbbing pink; the ghost had been well and truly turned into the gamba, with dark orange freckles seared on burnt crustacean skin, cooking away as he was under the hot flames of the Spanish sun. Ghost or prawn, either way the English boy stood out.

But why had he come to their small village to live under a sun that seemed not to like him in the first place?

What he and his parents told people was that he was in Spain to immerse himself in the language and culture. The eighteen-year-old Richard Johnson had a place to study Modern Languages at Exeter College, Oxford, starting in October 1936, and it was true that he needed to prepare himself for the rigours of academic life, as well as to hear and speak the words he’d spent so many hours thus far only reading and writing in a cold classroom.

But the real reason, the reason that eclipsed all others in his mother Margaret’s mind, was her son’s health. That he was of a delicate constitution was plain to see and his doctor had thought it might do him some good to experience warmer climes. The poor boy suffered from two afflictions. The first was psoriasis for which there was no cure. Other than the sun. At home, where it was chilly, damp and grey, Richard struggled with the condition. It irritated him and distressed his mother. A constant reminder of the genetic legacy she had bequeathed to her only son, handed on down from her father and his father before him. A long illustrious line. The affliction had skipped a generation with her; a blessing which she would have gladly foregone if it had meant not affecting her precious child. Instead, she endured her son’s absence, consoled by the knowledge that the sun would help him.

That his skin wasn’t robust enough to withstand the raw rays of the Andalucian sun for long was a detail that no one had factored in.

As for the second ‘affliction’, it was in some ways more and in some ways less grave than the first. It was also another reason for Margaret to want her son as far away from England, and away from his father and his paternal grandparents, as possible. You see, Richard Johnson had been staring into space. And he’d been staring into space for years while sitting at the back of the classroom of his very expensive, fee-paying school where teachers were employed on the basis of personal academic achievement rather than any particular ability to teach, let alone care about the young faceless charges before them. Not one of them had noticed the red-headed boy with the vacant expression at the back of the class.

It was his grandfather who’d spotted it. One Christmas he’d asked Richard to pass the gravy. He loved gravy. Liked to drench Margaret’s over-boiled sprouts in the stuff. When the damned fool of a boy didn’t answer on the third time of asking, his grandfather knew: the boy was having a mild epileptic episode. ‘Just like my old brother Vernon,’ he’d said. He was promptly taken to see the family doctor who confirmed it. Poor Richard. Another genetic legacy, this time bequeathed (his mother was relieved to say) from his father’s line.

His grandfather demanded that the boy be operated upon. From that day forward Margaret’s mind was made up. Her son had to go to Spain. As far as she could see, if Richard’s condition displayed itself as a little staring into the sunset every now and again, she was convinced that it could do him no harm. And it was infinitely better than submitting him to unnecessary surgery or endless discussions about its possibility.

And so, even with political changes afoot in Spain – news of it was beginning to make it into the nether regions of the press – both Margaret and Peter Johnson were convinced their son would be better off there until the family had stopped picking over the bones of Richard’s epilepsy. And considering they hadn’t noticed it for eighteen years there was a high probability that once out of sight, the vulture known as Family Concern would alight on the carcass of another victim soon enough.

And that was how, with a letter here and a telegram there, Richard Johnson had ended up in the care of a doctor in a village in Spain in the spring of 1936 where he would stay until the start of his first term at Oxford. And where he would become the most unlikely of heart throbs.

Maria hadn’t realised she was restless before the strange vision that was Richard Johnson came to Fuentes.

She did now.

She longed for his visits to her home, reliving them as she went off to sleep. She knew that even Paloma laughed at the look of him when she was at home with her sister; but he, in all his otherness, showed Maria that a big, beautiful world existed out there. And this sign of otherness that leaked out of him she took for his soul, his appearance, like blotting paper, changed by it forever.

That her father should be the person who brought this exotic being to their quiet village did not surprise her. She only had memories of living in Fuentes. Her father had always been its doctor, stitching wounds, administering medicines, making up poultices, visiting the old, the sick and the injured, as well as disappearing on visits that he chose not to explain to her. It was his life. But every few months he would receive a letter that connected him to a time before, to a life spent far away. Then he would hide himself away in his study and look through the album he kept in a drawer in his desk. The people who inhabited the photographs would leave the page and he would let them dance round and round in his mind. And for a few moments he would lose himself.

Maria would too.

Whenever her father was out doing his rounds she would enter his study. Within seconds she would be stroking the flat images of the woman pictured next to him in the album, placing a finger on the delicate young woman’s papery cheek and dreaming of the past. When both her parents were alive.

She would then shuffle through the post, looking at the postmarks on the envelopes of any letters her father had received; ‘Madrid’, ‘Seville’, ‘Malaga’, ‘Granada’, ‘Cordoba’. Each place name had the power to erect exciting new worlds in her mind. She had no need to see what was written inside to be transported there. Not that she had any qualms about reading her father’s letters. It was just that in the main their contents were always the same – disease and politics – and Maria was fed up with reading that people thought her father had the cure for both.

Shortly after Christmas 1935 the letters became more frequent, the postmarks more varied and far flung. An increasing number arrived from Madrid, followed by more still from Cadiz, and Barcelona. The words inside, when she chose to read them, were now feverish, about strikes and demonstrations. Yet they also brought with them a wild optimism for change that galloped off the sheets and into Maria’s heart on the occasions she picked them up.

But for all their unbridled promise, nothing and no one had yet come to wake up their sleepy little village.

Then, one day in early January 1936, Maria noticed an English postmark. As usual the sight of it was sufficient to fire her imagination. Here was another bridge, this time to England. She closed her eyes and conjured up a country that was cold, green, wet, where people drank tea. Those bits did sound horrid to her. But it was also home to Shakespeare, and George Eliot, and well-loved by Voltaire for its religious tolerance and freedom of speech (she had listened well to Seňor Suarez and her father over the years, though, strangely, never been tempted to follow up on their reading recommendations). When her imagination had no further details to draw on she read the letter. She wept with joy at its contents. Someone, an English someone called Richard Johnson, aged eighteen, from England, would soon be walking across that bridge to stay in Fuentes de Andalucía until October. Maria could not wait for his arrival.

She brushed up her English vocabulary, practised her English grammar, fell asleep reading Charles Dickens in translation one painful sentence at a time. Richard Johnson. She didn’t care what he might look like. He would be in her life very soon, providing a window on the big, wide, wonderful world.