futile yaps of a dog in a barn would puncture every silence. And yet, since their arrival, Olive personally found the landscape and the house itself energizing, in a way that was unfamiliar and wholly unexpected. She had taken an old wood panel that she’d found in the outhouse at the end of the orchard, carrying it up to the attic as if it was contraband. She had treated it in readiness for paint; but it remained blank.
Her father strode into the room, his large foot skidding a Vogue under the bed. Olive jammed the letter in her pyjama pocket and spun round to face him. ‘How many?’ he asked, pointing at the sleeping figure of his wife.
‘Don’t know,’ said Olive. ‘But more than normal, I think.’
‘Sheiße.’ Harold only swore in German in moments of great stress or great freedom. He loomed over Sarah and lifted a stray strand of hair delicately off her face. It was a gesture from another time, and it made Olive squeamish.
‘Did you get your cigarettes?’ she asked him.
‘Eh?’
‘Your cigarettes.’ Last night, he’d mentioned needing to get cigarettes from Malaga and visiting an artist’s studio – hoping to sniff out another Picasso, he’d said, laughing, as if lightning really did strike in the same place twice. Her father always seemed to slip out of the days like this – bored quickly, yet demanding an audience whenever he turned up again. They’d barely been here two days, and already he was off.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Yes. They’re in the car.’
Before he left his wife’s room, Harold poured his beloved a glass of water and left it by her bedside, just beyond the orbit of her reach.
*
Downstairs, the shutters were still half-closed and the minimal furniture was in shadow. The air had a tinge of camphor laced with old cigar smoke. The finca could not have been lived in for several years, Olive supposed. A large catacomb above the ground, each of its rooms reticent at her presence, long corridors furnished in colonial habits, dark hardwood cabinets empty of homely objects. It felt like everything was as it had been in the 1890s, and they were characters out of time, surrounded by the discarded props of a drawing-room play.
The vague moisture in the air was already evaporating. Olive threw open the shutters and sunlight bleached the room, a day of exposure but no warmth. The view was an uncultivated slope, which led down to the high wrought-iron fence and onwards, to the beginnings of the village road. She looked out; scraggy bushes and empty flower borders, three fruitless orange trees. Her father had said these mansions were always built outside the villages, near to well-irrigated and lush earth, where in summer, he declared, they would enjoy olive groves and cherry blossom, flower gardens of dama-de-noche and jacaranda, fountains and leisure and happiness, happiness.
Olive still had on her winter pyjamas and stockings, and an Aran jumper. The flagstones were so cool, it felt as if rain had just fallen on their large smooth squares. Just do it, she thought. Tell him you’ve got a place, and go. If only it was easy to act on thoughts. If only it was easier to know what was the best thing to do.
In the pantry, she discovered a tin of coffee beans and an old but functioning grinder. It was all there was for breakfast, and she and her father decided to drink it on the veranda at the back of the house. Harold went to the room where the telephone was. He had chosen this finca as it was the only one hooked up to a generator, but it was a surprise they had a telephone, and Harold was very pleased.
He was murmuring in German, probably to one of his friends in Vienna. He sounded insistent, but he was too quiet for her to make out the words. When they’d been in London, and he’d had news of what was happening in his home city – the street fights, the hijacked prayer meetings – he would plunge into dark silences. As she ground the beans, Olive thought of her childhood Vienna, the old and the new, the Jewish and the Christian, the educated and the curious, the psyche and the heart. When Harold said it was not safe for them to return, Olive could not quite take this in. In the circles they moved, the violence seemed so distant.
He’d finished his conversation and was sat on the veranda waiting for her,