to those around her, who’d never helped her, making it clear that she wasn’t worth the bother. She looked over at the furrows she and Olive had made with the gardening forks. The seeds were still deep in the soil, and would not show green shoots for months. Teresa was relieved that she had wanted to hand Olive those seeds. Olive somehow reminded her that she was still capable of feeling happiness.
‘Let’s go and smoke on the veranda,’ said Olive. ‘I stole three of my father’s cigarettes.’
Only Olive smoked. From above them inside the house came the sound of a slamming door. ‘Do sit,’ she said to Teresa, but only after Harold’s motor car had revved down to the rusting gates at the bottom of the slope did Teresa obey. ‘That’s Daddy out again,’ Olive said.
‘Will your mother see us? I must work.’
‘You don’t have to work every minute of the day, Tere. They won’t get rid of you for sitting down for five minutes. And besides.’ Olive lit the cigarette and took an inexpert drag. ‘She’s talking to your brother.’
Teresa had seen the empty pill bottles in Sarah’s room, the indecipherable stretch of words around the small brown vials. She’d heard Sarah sobbing once, trying to bury the sound in her pillow, and had seen a flash of silvery white scars running down in criss-cross lines at the top of her legs. Surmising from the stolen cigarettes that Olive was in a more reckless mood than the last time she’d brought this up, Teresa asked, ‘Is your mother very sick?’
‘She’s a depressive.’ Olive sat back in the rocking chair, blowing out a funnel of blue smoke.
‘A depressive?’
‘Smiles in ballrooms, weeps in bedrooms. Ill, in her head.’ Olive tapped her temple. ‘And here.’ She touched her heart. ‘She gets worse, gets better. Gets worse again.’
‘That is hard,’ Teresa said, surprised by the other girl’s frankness.
Olive turned to look at her. ‘Do you mean that, or are you just saying it?’
‘No, señorita. I mean it.’ And Teresa did mean it; but really her wish was for Olive to confide in her about everything, and she would say what she had to, in order to make it so. Olive looked out at the orchard. To Teresa, she seemed more at ease in her skin. Her clothes, unusual and boyish, suited her; even her untameable crown of hair seemed intrinsically to fit. Being here in Arazuelo seemed to have brought her out of herself.
‘It is hard,’ said Olive. ‘Daddy calls them her “storm clouds”, but that’s just a nice way of saying that she drags us around. The doctor says her mind’s like honeycomb, chamber upon chamber, broken, rebuilt again. She sees her pain in colours, you know. Steel Blue, Yellowed Bruise, German Measles Red.’ Olive gave a grim laugh and Teresa tried to process the language. ‘It’s an illness we’ve always had in her side of the family. I’ve got a great-grandmother buried in an unconsecrated grave, an aunt – whom no one speaks of – locked in an asylum. Then there’s a cousin, Johnny; he hated boarding school, and tried to drown himself in the Ouse. It’s wretched really, and I’m so selfish, I just worry I’m next.’
Teresa could hear the snag of Olive’s breath in her throat, before she inhaled deeply again on her father’s cigarette. ‘I can feel it sometimes, in my bones – just how easy it might be to catch it off her.’ Olive turned to her. ‘Do you think you can catch it, Tere?’
Worry flickered over Olive’s face, the spray of freckles over her nose, her dark brown eyes, her mouth ajar. ‘I do not think you will be mad,’ Teresa said, and Olive laughed and nudged her, and the touch of her shoulder on Teresa was shocking.
‘Well, that’s that, then. If you don’t think I’ll be mad, I won’t be. Just my mother.’ Olive paused. ‘Do you think she’s beautiful?’
‘Yes.’
‘Of course. I think she’s a sex maniac.’ Olive laughed, but the sound died quickly, because the description had the vague air of medical viability and seemed less of a joke than she might have wanted. The girls sat in silence for a while, watching the kites circle in the distance. Teresa wanted only that time might cease, that this view, and this strange, confiding peace, be all that existed. To have a friend like this would be to own the world.
‘I should be engaged to be married by now,’ Olive said.