time, pretending to look for her, praying that Teresa had got herself somewhere safe. She moved back down with determined steps and returned to the front east room. Don Alfonso narrowed his eyes when he saw she was alone. ‘Are you hiding her, señorita?’ he said. ‘I know you think you are her friend.’
‘I’m not hiding anyone.’
He turned to Olive’s parents. ‘It won’t be good for you, hiding them. Isaac is wanted for theft, arson, criminal damage, attempted murder—’
‘For God’s sake,’ Harold interjected. ‘We are not hiding your children.’
‘They are no longer my children. You should leave here,’ said Don Alfonso. ‘You should go.’
‘On the contrary,’ replied Harold. ‘I think we should protect those who do not enjoy your protection. I am beginning to understand you much better.’
Alfonso laughed. ‘You foreigners, you’re all the same. You think you are protecting Teresa and Isaac? They will be the ones who will have to protect you. And do you think they will? That you are under some magic shroud, that your maid and gardener love you?’
‘Teresa is our maid, yes, and a bloody good one – but Isaac is not our gardener. You have no idea about what your son—’
‘I know him better than you do. What will he use to defend you, señor – a saucepan? Those degenerates he consorts with are more likely to put a hoe through your heart and join up with the Reds.’
*
When Don Alfonso had disappeared in his motor car shortly after, Olive ran through the finca’s rusty gates, down the path, into the village – by this time breathless and leg-sore – and out and up the hill again, to Isaac and Teresa’s cottage. They were not there, but Jorge and Gregorio had turned the place over. God, this cottage was a spare place, sparer than Olive had remembered it to be. In her mind’s eye, it had become a rustic haven, a place to think and breathe and paint. In truth, it was a place one might wish to escape.
Isaac’s room contained nothing but his unmade bed and a jar of dying roses on the windowsill. Teresa’s meagre belongings were scattered on her bedroom floor. Olive was surprised to see one of her old paint tubes – the grasshopper-green shade she’d used for The Orchard. There was a Veuve Clicquot champagne cork, and stranger things; a cut-out square of material that matched her father’s pyjamas. There was a crushed packet of Harold’s cigarettes, and when Olive went to shake it, several stubs had been saved inside, their ends covered in the unmistakeable rouge of her mother’s lips. Lying around the floorboards were loose pages ripped from a notebook, with words and phrases written in English in a diligent, neat hand: palaver – snaffled – crass – gosh – I’m starving – ghastly – selfish. Alongside them were their Spanish meanings.
Olive’s heart began to thump. Looking at this flotsam from her parents’ lives, this notebook of the things they’d probably said in careless passing – she had the chilly sensation that she didn’t really know Teresa at all.
The front door banged, her skin turned to gooseflesh. No footsteps followed and she told herself it was the wind. The noise still unnerved her, and she imagined a wolf, sneaking in from the mountains. She was about to move out of Teresa’s room, when she saw a photograph on the floor. It was a picture of herself and Isaac in front of Rufina and the Lion. Olive was smiling and Isaac, his eyebrows slightly raised, looked ready for his painter’s pose. Olive had never seen this picture before, and without thinking, she rammed it deep into her pocket.
As she passed back down the corridor, she saw Isaac’s original painting, propped against the wall. Teresa must have moved it back here, out of sight. The idealized faces of herself and her mother seemed to loom out, and Olive was struck again by their mannequin look, their monstrous blankness.
She went outside to look at the hills. There was a wreathing pallor of smoke still in the air, the taste of the fire’s aftermath. Isaac knew these hills well, better than Don Alfonso. He knew where to hide – but Teresa had not had as much time to escape. Something terrible was coming, Olive could feel it; and there was nothing she could do.
‘Teresa?’ she called to the land, and her own voice rebounded back. ‘Teresa?’ she shouted again, her panic rising. But all that Olive heard was the echo