Читать книгу A Forbidden Love: An atmospheric historical romance you don't want to miss! - Kerry Postle - Страница 11

The villagers of Fuentes thought the Alvaros an unusual family, and Fuentes was an unusual place for them to settle. People usually dreamt of moving to Madrid, and so when a finely dressed Madrileňo holding a plump, well-fed baby in one arm held out his hand one Monday morning way back in 1921 to help a frail-looking woman out of a carriage, most of them couldn’t believe their eyes. Sturdy trunks followed, full of books, bottles and medical instruments. By the end of the second day the finely dressed man had tended three babies with a fever, lanced twenty-seven boils, treated the infected wounds of seven farm labourers, and diagnosed nine cases of gout.

El doctor had arrived.

Within weeks he had become indispensable, caring for the infirm and curing the sick, usually with his robust-looking baby in tow.

‘Poor doctor! Poor child! What sort of a wife must that woman be to let her husband do so much? She never leaves the house!’ the women of Fuentes enjoyed muttering to each other, their eyes rolling in sisterly condemnation.

The answer came in the winter of 1923 when poor Seňora Alvaro left her home for good, in a coffin – thus putting an end to the muttering.

The response was rapid. All rallied round, some bringing him food, others looking after the poor motherless girl. It wasn’t their fault the woman had died. They weren’t doctors (they bit their tongues from running on to the inevitable conclusion their cruel thoughts had already jumped to). But they were mothers. And they would treat this Maria as one of their own. That she looked like she had sprung from the Andalucian soil made her easier to accept. She was strong and dark and not at all like the frail, colourless woman who had given birth to her (if, one or two of the more spiteful among them whispered, she really had).

And although many of the mothers in the village talked openly amongst themselves over the years that the doctor should show that daughter of his a firm hand, they too indulged the girl. Her growing spirit and fearlessness were a joy to behold. Most of the time.

As for the men, they acknowledged the doctor’s loss at the funeral. They never gave it much thought after that. Pablo Alvaro was their doctor, first and foremost. They had no time to contemplate his suffering. Not when they had to endure so much of their own. The moment they stepped outside the church was the moment they put him back on his pedestal. Oh, they would have the odd drink with him, careful to be on their best behaviour when he was around, but they would never break bread with him. It wasn’t because they didn’t like him – they did. It was because they didn’t understand him. He was good, well-meaning, but he came from a different world. They consoled themselves as the years went by that he had Seňor Suarez, the teacher, and Father Anselmo, the priest, for company, thereby relinquishing themselves of all feelings of guilt and responsibility. To the villagers’ ears these three pillars of Fuentes society may as well have spoken a different language for all the sense they made.

Occasionally people would pass through the village on their way to or from the big cities. And, once or twice, an elderly couple had turned up asking, so the rumour mill had it, after the poor doctor and his girl. But, in truth, very little changed in Fuentes. And that included the people.

That was why, when Richard Johnson arrived in the spring of 1936, fifteen years after the last significant addition to the population, the entire village took a sharp intake of breath. Here was a true stranger, who really did speak an alien language. His presence had the power to clear streets. And so, for the first few weeks of his stay at least, the English boy found the usually pleasantly busy streets of Fuentes absolutely dead.

Yet what repelled the villagers about the English boy was precisely what attracted Maria.

He’d been in the village for less than a month when she told herself she loved him. It was ten o’clock in the morning, a sunny day in late spring 1936, and Richard Johnson had made his way along empty streets to discuss possible work with her father.

Doctor Alvaro had found him a room a few streets away with a family that could do with the extra pesetas. The kindly doctor had thought it would be good to throw the boy in at the deep end by housing him in the heart of the community. Unfortunately, the impact of the splash ensured that no villager would come within striking, spitting or speaking distance of him, not even the family with whom he was staying. It didn’t matter. Alvaro took the boy under his wing: oversaw his progress; invited him round for food; discussed politics, history, family; monitored his health; checked on his happiness. If the rest of the village ebbed away from him, Richard was past noticing. The doctor’s care and concern flowed towards him, warm and comforting, its gentle waves lapping all around. The boy’s father could not have done more, and, in truth, had often done very much less.

That’s why Richard Johnson was melting his way along the already hot streets, a book slipping from a sweaty palm, towards Doctor Alvaro’s, determined to show his appreciation for everything the good man had done. He’d asked before. In fact, he’d asked quite a few times. But the doctor had always been too polite to take him up on his offer. Well, the boy was determined to ask again. He would offer his services to help out the doctor in any way he could (as long as – he made a note of adding as the perspiration dripped off the tip of his nose and sucked the shirt to his back – it was before ten in the morning and after five in the afternoon). Truly. In any way. Though how he could be of help to a medical practitioner when he had nothing more than a rudimentary knowledge of basic human biology (never mind the Spanish vocabulary to go with it), the eighteen-year-old wasn’t really sure.

It was apparent that Pablo Alvaro’s thoughts weren’t any clearer.

‘I’m here to help you, good sir. I am at your disposal. Completely.’ The eager words tumbled out of his mouth the second the doctor opened the door in the boy’s best formal Spanish.

‘Wonderful to see you Richard. Buenos dias. Please, come in. Maria will be delighted you’re here.’ At the mention of her name, the boy gave a blush so intense you could light a cigarette with it. He glowed as he followed the doctor through the dark, cool interior of the house to the tiled courtyard at its heart. ‘I just need to get something,’ the doctor said, turning and bumbling his way back inside. He left his young guest standing in the open doorway.

Maria looked up from a pile of books and leaflets, her expression both amused and knowing. Richard must be here to discuss ‘work plans’ again. That always sent her father scurrying back inside, rummaging through notes and letters in search of a job, any job, for the English boy to do. It would have to be one that kept him out of the sun, Maria thought to herself as she caught sight of his bright red cheeks.

‘Please, sit,’ she said to him, instinctively pointing towards the chair in the shade.

They nodded at one another. Smiled. Waited.

Maria was the first to break the silence.

‘What’s that you’re reading?’ she asked. Then wished she hadn’t.

‘La vida es sueño by Calderón de la Barca. It’s about free will and destiny. But then,’ Richard said, sizzling up once more, ‘you probably know that.’

Maria had heard of it. She smiled but did not reply. She hoped he would assume she’d read it.

‘What are you going to do when you grow up?’

Before she knew where it had come from it was out. She was playing the game she played with Paloma. She put her hand up and shook her head with embarrassment, a gesture to say, ‘What was I thinking of?’ But she needn’t have worried; this childish dreaming about the future provided safer, more fertile ground for the pair of them.

‘I am going to see the world, after Oxford. Travel around the rest of Europe, go to North America, South America, possibly India …’ Richard’s blushes evaporated, his thoughts of Calderón disappeared, while Maria feared her eyes might pop out if he went on listing places much longer. This English boy’s words were confident, his future assured. And that was the moment it happened. His answer, worlds apart from Paloma’s, worlds apart from her own, defined him. He knew that he would do things that Maria, even in her most extravagant of dreams, had never imagined possible. Because he could, and she couldn’t, not here, in Fuentes. It wasn’t even a question of her father stopping her. The freedoms her father spoke of, he believed in. But within the village Maria knew such freedoms would be hard won.

‘What about you? What would you like to do? When you grow up?’

‘Writer!’ Maria blurted out, throwing out the first thing that came to mind. Anyone could do that, she thought, even stuck in Fuentes. ‘Yes! When I grow up I’m going to be a writer!’

She looked to gauge Richard’s response but the sun was blinding. She raised a hand to shield her eyes from the light that was starting to make her squint. ‘Would you like to swap places with me?’ he asked her from his sheltered corner. She declined – she’d already spotted a heat rash on his neck now that his blushes had subsided.

A gust of warm air rustled the sun-dry leaves above Richard’s head. Maria lifted up her eyes, screwing them up tightly to see the precious movement, green against blue, and listen to the music of the rippling leaves. She went over the question in her head again: Would I like to swap places with him? Whether he’d intended it or not, Richard had opened up a world of possibilities to her. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

Richard went to get up. ‘Oh, no,’ Maria laughed, pushing him back down. He laughed in response without truly understanding why. ‘What are you reading, if not Calderón?’ he asked, fixing on something more tangible, with more than a hint of playful impertinence.

‘Oh, these?’ Maria cleared her throat, pointing to the heaps of pamphlets strewn across the table in front of her. ‘Seňor Suarez gave me these to look through. There are some pamphlets on workers’ rights and organisations, as well as extracts from Karl Marx. It’s part of a reading programme he started for the labourers in the area.’

‘Karl Marx?’

‘You must know of him. He’s very popular in Spain.’

Infamous in England was how Richard would have put it, but he said nothing. ‘Only eleven people turned up to his funeral … doesn’t surprise me that he got turned down for a job as a railway clerk because of his atrocious handwriting. So he said religion was the opium of the people. Well, don’t mind if I do …’ Peter Johnson’s rants about Karl Marx danced their spiky rhythm across the revolving surface of the wheel of memory that spun round in his son’s head. No, Karl Marx was not popular, not in his house.

‘… Workers of the world, unite!’ Maria read the rousing words.

‘Isn’t he a … communist?’

‘It’s not a dirty word.’ Maria laughed. ‘And yes, he is. Father is reading Das Kapital. In Spanish, of course. Promises he’ll pass it on to me when he finishes. Says it makes a lot of sense. There’s so much unfairness in this country. So many workers selling their labour at too low a price while rich, old families live lives of luxury on the backs of the profits. Um … capital is dead labour which, like a vampire, only exists by sucking the life out of living labour.’ Her eyes flickered downwards as if reading from one of the leaflets in front of her.

‘But aren’t you causing trouble by reading Karl Marx to them?’ Richard said, his father’s tirades still resounding in his head.

‘No. I wouldn’t say so. Last time there was a problem Seňor Suarez and my father had to help them out of it. It stands to reason that if we help them to read they will be able to help themselves next time. They’ll be able to write letters, read contracts, represent themselves. Things like that. Things that we both take for granted.’ She glanced at the slim volume he had in his hand, reminded of the fleeting ignominy she’d felt at not having read one of Spain’s finest writers.

Richard Johnson thought for a moment. ‘Can I take some of these leaflets? To look at them?’

‘Claro que si. You can take these,’ Maria said, offering him a handful. ‘As long as you get them back to me by next Thursday.’

‘Next Thursday?’

‘Yes. That’s when he’ll … I mean we’ll,’ she added, a look of bashful pride on her face, ‘be needing them. That’s when we’ll be using them.’

It struck Richard Johnson that this was something he could do.

‘If I read all of these and make sure I understand every word, could I help?’ His heart beat with a sense of purpose.

‘I’ve been thinking.’ Doctor Alvaro appeared out of nowhere and was now standing behind his daughter, looking down at his visitor. ‘I don’t really know how I’m going to be able to use your talents. But don’t worry,’ he said reassuringly, relieved not to see disappointment on Richard’s face. ‘I’ll ask around and see if I can find something else for you to do.’

‘No need, father. I think I’ve found just the job. Isn’t that so, comrade?’ Maria gave the English boy a knowing wink. Then she turned round and planted a calming kiss on her grateful father’s cheek.