Teresa’s eye. Teresa knew full well that Sarah had her own good reasons to wish her far away, but Teresa held Sarah’s secret too, and so the Englishwoman said nothing.
*
It was a cold afternoon when they left. They were a strange reconfiguration, the most fractured trio on that ship – and that was saying something. There was no glamour in departure to echo the way that they’d arrived; the sky a sheet of changing greys, the sea beyond unending. The noise of the rusty chains loosening from the quay at Malaga caused in Teresa a monstrous sort of happiness. For under her sense of relief that she was leaving, she felt already the pulse of guilt. She had paid her escape with Olive’s blood.
Her own expression was mirrored in the faces of the other passengers, as the land began to diminish and thin. It was a bitter miracle. They’d done it; they’d got away, but at the same time they hadn’t, of course they hadn’t. Teresa knew that part of her would never be able to leave.
She had never been on a ship; she’d only ever known the land. Harold said the vessel was called a destroyer. Teresa thought of her ruined notebook, of how blackly apt an English noun could be. She gripped the rail, resisting the desire to jump, to plunge into the churning waters. It was so many colours, the sea; mud and milk, slate and leaf, and bronze when the light caught the crest of a wave – and at times, where it was still settled beyond, where the bows had not carved through it, a purer blue. Teresa realized that over the months, she’d come to understand how many colours there were that she had never noticed. She wanted the wind to whip her face, to sting and numb her, but it wasn’t happening. No force of nature could erase her.
She thought again about the morning they found Olive. Harold still didn’t know why Olive had gone out into the darkness the night before. In his grief to flee, to get out of this hellhole, his daughter dead, he didn’t stop to wonder why Olive might have been out there in the first place. He didn’t consider that other members of his family might also be looking for love, for some purpose or salvation in another person. But when that morning had dawned, and Olive didn’t come down to breakfast, Sarah and Teresa looked at one another, and assumed between them that silence on this matter would be better. So it remained.
The initial, mild discomfort of that morning had turned to horror, as Harold, realizing his daughter was missing, had taken the car out and found her body on the hillside. An hour later the women heard his motor again, the clang of the gate as he clipped it with the car, Olive’s body lolling on the back seat. Harold staggered towards the women, his daughter in his arms. I’m taking her with us, he’d said, his voice oddly dull, as if he were miles away, speaking down the tunnel of his own body. At the sight of her dead child, Sarah had broken down.
Now, trying to recall all this, forcing herself to face it in order to carry on – Teresa could only remember fragments of these moments. It was the physical that stuck with her; the thud of her knees sinking to the ground, the taste of the cheap acorn coffee coming up her throat as she vomited onto the flagstones. The touch of Olive’s body. White-skinned but bluish, stiff and bloodstained, three gunshot wounds visible through her jumper.
‘She called this place home,’ Sarah had said, slurring, hours later, the three of them sitting in the front east room. Harold was drunk, Sarah was on some pill or other. It was a living nightmare. They had placed Olive’s body in the kitchen, the coldest part of the house, at the back. ‘We must bury her here,’ Sarah whispered, haggard with grief.
‘What happened to my brother?’ Teresa asked. Sarah covered her face with her hands.
‘Jorge came for him,’ said Harold. ‘I only carried Olive.’
‘Jorge?’ said Teresa. ‘Where did he take him?’
‘I don’t know.’
When both Sarah and Harold had passed out – Sarah on the sofa and Harold upright in the armchair, his whisky tumbler beginning to slip – Teresa set the glass on the floor and tiptoed down the corridor. She imagined Jorge, slinging her brother’s body somewhere in the woods, a shallow grave