Daughter of Catalonia

by Jane MacKenzie

  But as she looked again into Robert’s impulsive, hopeful face, it came to her with complete certainty she would leave, and that if Tante Louise would have her, she would go to France. But the money. How to get the money? She looked down at her mother for inspiration, and was surprised by a smile on her face. The merest whisper of a smile, in sleep.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Elise Garriga died early the following morning, without regaining consciousness. A rather timid sun was nudging over the horizon, and Robert had opened the curtains and the window, to the nurse’s dismay, so that a fresh breeze caressed her cheeks and hands. Grandfather and Grandmama had visited the night before, after dinner, and Madeleine had been surprised to see a rim of tears in her grandfather’s eyes as he gazed down at his daughter, and held her hand in the sombre gloom.

  But as day broke only Robert and Madeleine were with their mother, and when she stopped breathing the change was so subtle it took them time to realise that she had gone. Before they called the nurse, they unearthed her favourite flowered bedspread from a cupboard, and put it back on the bed, and brought the vase of roses from the dressing table to the bedside, so that their mother slept as she had always slept, surrounded by flowers.

  ‘Say your goodbyes now, Lena,’ Robert had said, as they stood together looking at Elise for the last time alone. ‘Her burial won’t have much to do with us, if I know Grandfather. She has peace now for the first time in years, but they won’t give her much peace from now until she’s finally in the ground.’

  Robert stayed until after the funeral. It was strange to be burying Maman from the gloomy, Gothic village church which she had refused to attend ever since her return to England. This was another aberration for which Grandfather had blamed the atheist Luis Garriga, but now the English were fully reclaiming Elise, burying her in the local churchyard after a decently low-Anglican service, followed by sandwiches at the house, in the large, musty, front drawing room. The funeral and reception, and all the condolence visits which had preceded it, were a dreary trial dominated by the rural genteel, their faces set in platitudes, their feet in sensible shoes. The rector hovered around them, benignly haughty, drinking sherry in painstaking minuscule sips. Having barely known Elise, he focused on his more amenable parishioners, talking in soft tones about the prospects for the summer weather and the best dates for the pruning of roses.

  Four figures enlivened the day, descended from London to give some family representation. An uncle, aunt and two cousins from Grandfather’s family, they came from another world, from the world of restaurants and cinema and theatre and London shops. From the world of work and colleagues and gossip and movement. Grandfather had climbed further in society than his brothers, but had paid heavily with his middle-class soul. His brother’s son, a prosperous trader, mocked gently the studied gentility of life at Forsham, while his two daughters talked of rock and roll and Marlon Brando, of cabriolets and American fashion. Forsham society looked on, bemused, and Grandfather glowered as his beloved Robert blossomed. Cousins Cicely and Eve enfolded Robert in their casual sophistication, and made clear their admiration of his charms, rendering him almost sheepish by their side. Cicely had a particular radiance, with her dark hair loosely curling inside the enormous raised collar of her tight-waisted jacket, and her slender pencil skirt skimming her calves. She lived with another girl in an apartment in Chelsea, and worked for a property agency.

  ‘Not much of a job, really,’ she laughed, ‘And just a tiny apartment, you know, very modern – such small rooms they give you these days. But it’s so close to everything I want in London, and it’s so dusty to live at home with the parents, don’t you agree?’

  Madeleine could only murmur in what she hoped was easy agreement. For her Cicely and Eve were a revelation, they were so vibrant and pleasure-seeking, people whose conversation bubbled and who wanted to amuse and be amused. The way they embraced modern fashions and ideas was electrifying Robert and shocking Grandfather, but for Madeleine it held out a simple glimmer of promise. Could she be like this, she wondered, if she made it to Paris? It seemed a million miles away. Get the funeral over first, and finish sorting Maman’s affairs, then think about the future. Cicely had thrown her an easy invitation to stay ‘any time you are in London’.

  Madeleine also overheard her saying to Robert, ‘Your sister has such sultry looks, so sexy and Mediterranean. It’s the eyes, of course, and that amazing mouth. I’m so jealous. Does she live buried down here? No boyfriend or anything? Surely she needs more than this?’

  How right you are, thought Madeleine. How very right you are. To hear herself described as sultry and sexy was a little mind-blowing.

  Peter was at the funeral, of course. He was a good-looking young man, tall and very slender with long, elegant hands and a face which Grandmama described as being ‘full of refinement’. He came up to Madeleine while she was talking to Cicely, and it amused her to see the play between him and her London cousin, Cicely interested and full of smiles, Peter quite ruthlessly dismissive. He was the type, Madeleine thought, who pursued single-mindedly whatever was his current objective, and didn’t even notice what was in the periphery. It made him successful, but rather narrow of vision.

  Right now his objective was clearly Madeleine, not some shallow London cousin.

  ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t call round before the funeral,’ he said, holding her hand. ‘I’ve been away – a conference – I only heard yesterday about your mother’s death. I hope the end was as easy as possible, for her and for you.’

  ‘She went peacefully, yes, thanks, and Robert was with me.’

  ‘I’m glad it was peaceful.’ Peter’s hand shifted slightly in hers, his fingers tightening slightly as he held her gaze. ‘It’ll take you some time to adjust.’

  Was he calculating how long, wondered Madeleine? A month, two months, before he could make his move? She wasn’t sure what he saw in her, but something had settled in his mind that she was a suitable wife. He certainly wasn’t passionate – Robert was right about that. But he was keen. She wondered what he would say if she asked him why. All of a sudden she wanted him gone. She wanted to talk to Cicely again – happy, frivolous Cicely.

  Let me out, oh please, God, get me out of here! The thought was so vivid she wondered if she had spoken aloud. She drew her hand away from Peter, and muttered her excuses as she turned to attend to other guests. He followed her.

  ‘I’ll call to see you tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Maybe we can go for a drive.’ His voice was gentle, but confident and dominant.

  ‘Maybe,’ she replied. ‘Maybe later in the week, though. Robert is still here, you see.’

  ‘Yes, I can understand you want to spend time together. I’ll telephone and find out when he has gone.’

  The words were fine, but the faintly smug tone was unbearable. Madeleine simply nodded and made her escape, looking for Robert and finding him happily surrounded by the cousins. As he and Cicely turned to smile at her, at once the day seemed brighter again, and she could even imagine her mother taking comfort. These cousins were perhaps shallow, but they were from the world she yearned for. Their laughter was a comfort and their insouciance for now seemed infinitely more real than Peter’s careful sympathy.

  The next day she wrote to Tante Louise. It was the first time in her life she had ever written to her. As she sat with her pen poised above Grandmama’s best inlaid paper, she conjured up a picture of the tiny Parisian woman, with her deeply lined, very mobile face and expressive kohl-lined eyes, topped by expertly dyed hair tied back in a heavy French chignon, and the whole head perched on a bird-like neck which seemed too thin and fragile to support her. The last time Madeleine had seen her was in London, when Louise and her daughter Solange came on a visit, and Madeleine had gone with her mother and grandmother to tea with them at the Ritz. Grandfather had, of course, refused to come, and also refused to invite them to Forsham. They’d had the most elegant English tea, she remembered, and Tante Louise seemed to dance verbal
ly among them, while Grandmama rigidly tried to control the conversation. But after a while, Louise had woven a spell over Grandmama as much as the rest of them, and she had unbent, and begun talking hungrily about the old days in Paris. Louise was Grandmama’s cousin, a few years younger than her, but they had partied their way through the twenties together in Paris, in the days when they were the closest of cousins, before Maman’s disastrous visit in 1935.

  Madeleine had watched Grandmama’s transformation with wide eyes; this elderly woman emerged from a tired life in rural England, her soul taking flight once more under the influence of the little, wrinkled Frenchwoman with incessantly mobile hands and a tantalising smile. Louise was quite simply bewitching. Even Maman had come alive with this woman she had always known as her beloved Tante, and gained the confidence to talk about her summer in Paris, for once forgetting the cloak of shame which her parents had thrown over the whole episode. For Maman the summer had been a turning point in her life, and a period of liberation. Solange and she had gone to parties and fashion shows, theatre premieres and the ballet, part of a fashionable Paris set following a determined social scene which defied Europe’s financial and political troubles. They had been girls together, and for a while Maman had been a girl again that afternoon in London.

  At fifteen, Madeleine couldn’t remember ever seeing her mother like this, so happy and free. Later that day, as they returned to Forsham by train, as Tante Louise’s personality receded and Grandmama became her normal controlling self, Madeleine watched with a sense of loss as her mother withdrew inexorably again into herself. She had a sudden burning vision of her mother in earlier years, and thought that just as she had stored away jealously the memories of moments from her childhood, of her mother laughing alongside her father, so she must store the memory of Maman’s extraordinary blossoming this afternoon. But at fifteen she hadn’t imagined herself writing this letter to Louise nearly seven years later.

  ‘Tante Louise,’ she wrote in French,

  I need you. Maman loved you, and the only time I have seen her blossom in recent years was in your company. I know so little about her days with you in Paris, but now that she is dead I need to leave here or I will stay imprisoned all my life. Robert believes that if you invite me to Paris I may be able to get away. It is presumptuous to ask you, but could you possibly write to Grandmama inviting me to stay with you? Grandfather is unlikely to agree, but they’ve been worried about me becoming withdrawn and depressed, so they may at least talk about it. If they don’t agree, I may have to leave home without their approval, and I could perhaps get a job in London, but I would have to sell Maman’s jewellery to pay my way at first. Without their approval I couldn’t come to Paris, because I know they would blame you, and it wouldn’t be fair.

  The letter written, and quickly posted before she could worry about her words or what she was doing, Madeleine had nothing to do but wait for an answer, breaking the idleness of the imposed period of mourning at Forsham by frenetic walks on her own through the Berkshire countryside, largely soaked by a spell of prolonged rain which sluiced through raincoats. Madeleine welcomed the rain which spattered her face under her rain hat, and tingled her ungloved fingers. It was a sign of life, a world of sensation outside the dead interior of her grandparents’ house. What she would do if she didn’t hear from Tante Louise she could no longer imagine. The yearned-for letter had become her link of hope to the future.

  And when the letter finally arrived it was so simple, so astonishingly simple. Tante Louise replied,

  Ma chère Madeleine. Your mother loved us and we also loved her. It would be the greatest pleasure in the world to get to know her daughter. I remember you being born, such a beautiful baby. How proud your parents were. I cannot believe that your grandfather will permit a visit to us, but I will write anyway, as you suggest. But if he does not approve, and if you want to come here, we urge you to come anyway. The opinion of your grandparents is of no significance to us. I will most certainly not come again to London, and without your mother, England has little appeal for Solange. Your mother found happiness in France, and no one could have known Luis would die. Your grandparents didn’t know him, and could never have appreciated him. Come to us, ma fille. I do not go out as much as before, and we do not have a young girl to keep you company, but I am sure that life here will be more amusing for you than in that terrible English countryside. You were a beautiful girl seven years ago. I am sure you are a truly beautiful young woman now.

  As she read the words Madeleine surprised herself in floods of tears. Here were people who had loved Maman, and who had known and appreciated her father. ‘I remember you being born,’ Tante Louise had written. Suddenly Madeleine felt a hunger she could hardly contain for this acceptance and belonging. Whatever happened now she would definitely go to Paris, with or without her grandparents’ approval.

  But first she had to run that particular gauntlet, whatever the outcome. She just wanted it to happen now. Soon her grandparents would receive their own letter from Paris. She could barely eat and certainly not sleep as she waited for the storm to break.

  Tante’s letter to Grandmama arrived the following day. Madeleine saw it arrive, but at first all was quiet. No one said a word to her, and by the end of the day she realised that the elders were going to ignore the letter completely. She could appreciate the strategy, but her need to bring the issue into the open was now stronger than any fear of confrontation. So she waited until lunchtime the following day, as they sat over a beef casserole, and with hammering heart she brought it up herself, pouring the words out in one breath.

  ‘I had a letter from Tante Louise,’ she said, trying desperately to keep her tone light, ‘inviting me to Paris. She said she was writing to you as well. Have you had the letter?’

  There was a long silence. Then Grandmama looked at Grandfather, who wiped his hands painstakingly on his napkin before replying in a deep rumble of impending thunder. ‘We had a letter. There is no question of sending you to them, though. What an impertinence even to suggest it. Typical of Louise!’

  ‘But I would like to go.’ Madeleine clenched her hands under the table and made her voice as natural as possible. ‘It’s been such a long, hard time recently, and I won’t get back to normal life while I’m here in the same house where Maman died. I needn’t stay there long, but I would like to go to Paris.’

  She encountered Grandfather’s severest frown. ‘I said it’s out of the question, Madeleine. I agree that you need a change, and we can maybe look at a trip away for you and Grandmama. Or you could take up a secretarial post locally. It would give you something to do. Both Grandmama and myself agree that you should have some occupation.’

  Madeleine armed herself, and continued. Force came from somewhere, maybe from Paris, and her voice came stronger. ‘You know I don’t need your permission to go, don’t you? I just don’t have any money, that’s all. But if necessary I could sell Maman’s jewellery to pay for my ticket.’

  There was an astonished silence. Then the storm really broke, lashing at her across the table. What on earth did she think she was going to get up to in Paris? She was nearly twenty-two years old. It was about time she thought about settling down, not gadding about. She was ungrateful. How could she even think of selling her mother’s jewellery? Such a terrible thing to think of doing.

  Madeleine sat tight through the storm, finding it all surprisingly easy. She could hear Robert’s voice, very calm and positive, and it pushed her grandfather’s rantings into their proper place. Her own voice when it came was equally calm. ‘All right,’ she answered them. ‘Then I’ll go to London first and stay with Cicely or Uncle, and work to raise my fare. I’m very sorry, but you can’t stop me.’

  And still the storm raged. That girl Cicely! Fast and cheap, that’s what she was. What kind of people did Madeleine think she would meet in her company?

  ‘I don’t know!’ Madeleine spat the words, no longer calm. ‘That’s the point! I don’t know any ot
her company than the people I meet here. I’m twenty-one and have no experience of life at all. I wear tweeds and flat shoes, and the world is passing me by. You lived when you were young. You didn’t think Tante Louise was unsuitable then. You seemed to spend most of your lives in Paris.’ Madeleine shivered involuntarily, shaken by her own anger, and deliberately paused, calmed herself. ‘It’s my turn. I want some life, and I’m going to stay with Tante Louise – with my own family. What could be more normal?’

  There was silence then, which was eventually broken by Grandmama. Her voice was surprisingly gentle.

  ‘So much heat, Madeleine! It’s been such a short time since your poor mother passed away. You are not yourself, and I can fully understand that you want a change of scene. You must miss her so much – we all do. Leave us now, and we’ll discuss it some more. There’s no need to be hasty.’

  Madeleine looked across at Grandmama and tried to speak, but her throat constricted and no sound came. She brushed tears from her eyes and walked blindly out of the room, out of the house, onto the small patch of lawn in front of the house. There she stopped, the cold March wind whipping the tears from her eyes, chilling her wet cheeks. She took deep breaths, gulping the cold air, feeling it cooling her throat, opening her lungs, expelling the dead, suffocated air of the dining room. She walked through the trees to the little stream which ran to the side of the house, and followed the path to the bridge, and to the road. The trees were bare of leaves, hard and angular, and their barrenness suited her mood. As she reached the bridge, the deep chill of the air by the stream was wonderful, crisp, unsullied. She walked down to the stream, and bent to wash her face. The icy water hit her cheeks and she laughed out loud, for the first time in months. She crossed the bridge and walked briskly down the road, heading for the open fields, every step a liberation, and skipped like a child as she looked up at the leaden sky, allowing the wind to tousle her hair and blow around her uncovered neck.