got.’ Sarah fiddled with the box on the table and pulled out a cigarette; her wrists were burdened with bangles, and they clinked together. Isaac removed the cigarette from her proffered fingers and lit it himself.
‘I have not been to London,’ he said, weighing the city’s name with something like awe. London in calligraphic letters, Henry VIII, the Tower, Middle Temple. Olive’s London was not like that – it was a lonely walk through St James’s and along the Mall to the National Portrait Gallery to see her favourite Holbein; a penny bun at Lyon’s on Craven Street after, or a stroll through Embankment Gardens. That was what she missed – certainly not the other London, the stifling cocktail chit-chat, women’s over-rosied flesh, the lemon tang of Trumper’s wet shaves fresh on older men; red acne rashes of boys down from Oxford, with nothing much to say.
‘London’s all right, I suppose,’ Olive said, intending to sound jokily arch. ‘The people can be ghastly.’ Her mother flashed her a look.
‘I have been to Barcelona many times,’ Isaac said. ‘And Madrid.’
Olive thought of their travelling trunks upstairs, the wooden brackets shiny from handling by so many porters, labels from Paris and Buenos Aires, Marseilles, New York; peeling like old skins the Schlosses had shed. She could barely remember any of it now, and nineteen felt like ninety.
‘But have you always lived in Arazuelo?’ Harold asked him.
‘Yes. I am a teacher in Malaga.’
‘What do you teach?’ Sarah asked.
‘Lithography,’ he said. ‘At the San Telmo School of Art.’ Olive stared hard at her plate.
‘Harold’s an art dealer,’ Sarah went on. ‘Kokoschka, Kirchner, Klimt, Klee – all his. I swear he only sells artists whose surnames start with a K.’
‘I admire Kokoschka,’ Isaac said, and Olive sensed her father become alert.
‘Herr Kokoschka painted blue fir trees in Olive’s nursery in Vienna,’ Sarah said. ‘Mr Robles, your English is excellent.’
‘Thank you, señora. I taught myself,’ he said. ‘I have English acquaintances in Malaga, and I practise with Teresa.’
‘Do you paint, or only print?’ asked Harold.
Robles hesitated. ‘I paint a little, señor.’
‘You should bring me some of your work.’
Generally, Harold was allergic to people who said they painted. Whenever a hopeful artist got wind that Harold was a dealer, they always misjudged it. Sometimes, they displayed aggression, as if Harold was withholding something to which they were specifically entitled – or they offered a simpering humility that fooled no one. But here was Herr Schloss, asking this young man for his work. Olive was used to how it was when Harold’s attention was caught – how he would dog, cajole, flatter, act the father, the pal – whatever it took, hoping he would be the one to uncover next year’s genius. It always hurt.
‘What I paint would not interest you, señor,’ said Isaac, smiling.
Harold tipped up the pitcher and poured himself a glass of water. ‘Let me be the judge of that.’
Isaac looked serious. ‘If I have the time, I will show you.’
‘The time?’ said Harold. Olive’s skin tingled.
‘When I am not at San Telmo, I am occupied with the workers’ union in Malaga. I teach them how to read and write.’
There was a pause. ‘Does your father know you’re a red?’ Sarah asked.
Isaac smiled again. ‘I am twenty-six, señora. I do as I must. I supported the workers’ strikes. I travelled to Asturias to help the miners. But I am not a red.’
‘Shame. That would have been exciting.’
Olive sat on her hands, staring at her mother. Sarah’s entire life was predicated on the docility of the workers who propped up her family’s famous condiment business. She saw herself as a free spirit, but it was the work of her great-grandfather – starting with his barrel of oranges in Covent Garden and ending up an industrialist with a seat in the Lords – that paid for their travel, the flat in Curzon Street, the cottage in Sussex, the house off the Ringstrasse, the Schiaparelli dresses. Harold’s business was certainly successful, but Sarah’s inheritance underwrote the lot.
‘You are who you are because of the very people you would never deign to consort with,’ Harold had once shouted at Sarah, after an evening when she hadn’t come home and he’d had to call the police. Sarah, who had in fact passed out on her host’s chaise longue and couldn’t be roused till the morning, had shouted back that he didn’t have a leg to stand on, because he too benefited directly from the family’s Finest Cut Marmalade, so he