The Mammoth Book Best International Crime Page 20

  I have spoken of my brother in the past – “Piers was” and “Piers did” – as if those qualities he once had he no longer has, or as if he were dead. It is not my intention to give a false impression, but how otherwise can I recount these events? Things may be less obscure if I talk of loss rather than death, irremediable loss in spite of what has happened since, and of Piers’s character only as it was at sixteen, making clear that I am aware of how vastly the personality changes in forty years, how speech patterns alter, specific learning is lost and huge accumulations of knowledge gained. Of Piers I felt no jealousy but I think this was a question of sex. If I may be allowed to evolve such an impossible thesis I would say that jealousy might have existed if he had been my sister. It is always possible for the sibling, the less favoured, to say to herself, ah, this is the way members of the opposite sex are treated, it is different for them, it is not that I am inferior or less loved, only different. Did I say that? Perhaps, in a deeply internal way. Certain it is that the next step was never taken; I never asked, where then are the privileges that should be accorded to my difference? Where are the special favours that come the way of daughters which their brothers miss? I accepted and I was not jealous.

  At first I felt no resentment that it was Piers Rosario chose for her friend and companion, not me. I observed it and told myself it was a question of age. She was nearer in age to Piers than to me. And a question too perhaps, although I had no words for it then, of precocious sex. Piers had never had a girlfriend and she, I am sure, had never had a boyfriend. I was too young to place them in a Romeo and Juliet situation but I could see that they liked each other in the way boys and girls do when they begin to be aware of gender and the future. It did not matter because I was not excluded, I was always with them, and they were both too kind to isolate me. Besides, after a few days we found someone to make a fourth.

  At this time we were still, Piers and I, enchanted by the beach and all that the beach offered: miles of shore whose surface was a combination of earth and sand and from which the brown rocks sprang like living plants, a strand encroached upon by pine trees with flat umbrella-like tops and purplish trunks. The sea was almost tideless but clean still, so that where it lapped the sand there was no scum or detritus of flotsam but a thin bubbly foam that dissolved at a touch into clear blue water. And under the water lay the undisturbed marine life, the bladder weed, the green sea grass and the weed-like trees of pleated brown silk, between whose branches swam small black and silver fi sh, sea anemones with pulsating whiskered mouths, creatures sheathed in pink shells moving slowly across the frondy seabed.

  We walked in the water, picking up treasures too numerous to carry home. With Rosario we rounded the cape to discover the other hitherto invisible side, and in places where the sand ceased, we swam. The yellow turf and the myrtle bushes and the thyme and rosemary ran right down to the sand, but where the land met the sea it erupted into dramatic rocks, the colour of a snail’s shell and fantastically shaped.We scaled them and penetrated the caves that pocked the cliffs, finding nothing inside but dry dust and a salty smell and, in the largest, the skull of a goat.

  After three days spent like this, unwilling as yet to explore further, we made our way in the opposite direction, towards the harbour and the village where the little fishing fleet was beached. The harbour was enclosed with walls of limestone built in a horseshoe shape, and at the end of the right arm stood the statue of the Virgin, looking out to sea, her own arms held out, as if to embrace the world.

  The harbour’s arms rose some eight feet out of the sea, and on the left one, opposite Nuestra Doña, sat a boy, his legs dangling over the wall. We were swimming, obliged to swim for the water was very deep here, the clear but marbled dark green of malachite. Above us the sky was a hot shimmering silvery-blue and the sun seemed to have a palpable touch. We swam in a wide slow circle and the boy watched us.

  You could see he was not Mallorquin. He had a pale freckled face and red hair.Today, I think, I would say Will has the look of a Scotsman, the bony, earnest, clever face, the pale blue staring eyes, although in fact he was born in Bedford of London-born parents. I know him still.That is a great understatement. I should have said that he is still my friend, although the truth is I have never entirely liked him, I have always suspected him of things I find hard to put into words. Of some kind of trickery perhaps, of having deep-laid plans, of using me. Ten years ago when he caused me one of the greatest surprises of my life by asking me to marry him, I knew as soon as I had recovered it was not love that had made him ask.

  In those days, in Majorca,Will was just a boy on the watch for companions of his own age. An only child, he was on holiday with his parents and he was lonely. It was Piers who spoke to him. This was typical of Piers, always friendly, warm-hearted, with no shyness in him. We girls, if we had been alone, would probably have made no approaches, would have reacted to the watchful gaze of this boy on the wall by cavorting in the water, turning somersaults, perfecting our butterfly stroke and other hydrobatics.We would have performed for him, like young female animals under the male eye, and when the display was over have swum away.

  Contingency has been called the central principle of all history. One thing leads to another. Or one thing does not lead to another because something else happens to prevent it. Perhaps, in the light of what was to come, it would have been better for all if Piers had not spoken. We would never have come to the Casita de Golondro, so the things which happened there would not have happened, and when we left the island to go home we would all have left. If Piers had been less than he was, a little colder, a little more reserved, more like me. If we had all been careful not to look in the boy’s direction but had swum within the harbour enclosure with eyes averted, talking perhaps more loudly to each other and laughing more freely in the way people do when they want to make it plain they need no one else, another will not be welcome. Certain it is that the lives of all of us were utterly changed, then and now, because Piers, swimming close up to the wall, holding up his arm in a salute, called out,

  “Hallo. You’re English, aren’t you? Are you staying at the hotel?”

  The boy nodded but said nothing. He took off his shirt and his canvas shoes. He stood up and removed his long trousers, folded up his clothes and laid them in a pile on the wall with his shoes on top of them. His body was thin and white as a peeled twig. He wore black swimming trunks. We were all swimming around watching him.We knew he was coming in but I think we expected him to hold his nose and jump in with the maximum of splashing. Instead, he executed a perfect dive, his body passing into the water as cleanly as a knife plunged into a pool.

  Of course it was done to impress us, it was “showing off”. But we didn’t mind. We were impressed and we congratulated him. Rosario, treading water, clapped her hands. Will had broken the ice as skilfully as his dive had split the surface of the water.

  He would swim back with us, he liked “that end” of the beach.

  “What about your clothes?” said Piers.

  “My mother will find them and take them in.” He spoke indifferently, in the tone of the spoiled only child whose parents wait on him like servants. “She makes me wear a shirt and long trousers all the time,” he said, “because I burn. I turn red like a lobster. I haven’t got as many skins as other people.

  I was taken aback until Piers told me later that everyone has the same number of layers of skin. It is a question not of density but of pigment. Later on, when we were less devoted to the beach and began investigating the hinterland, Will often wore a hat, a big wide-brimmed affair of woven grass. He enjoyed wrapping up, the look it gave him of an old-fashioned adult. He was tall for his age which was the same as mine, very thin and bony and long-necked.

  We swam back to our beach and sat on the rocks, in the shade of a pine tree for Will’s sake. He was careful, fussy even, to see that no dappling of light reached him. This, he told us, was his second visit to Llosar. His parents and he had come the previous y
ear and he remembered seeing Rosario before. It seemed to me that when he said this he gave her a strange look, sidelong, rather intimate, mysterious, as if he knew things about her we did not. All is discovered, it implied, and retribution may or may not come.There was no foundation for this, none at all. Rosario had done nothing to feel guilt about, had no secret to be unearthed. I noticed later he did it to a lot of people and it disconcerted them. Now, after so long, I see it as a blackmailer’s look, although Will as far as I know has never demanded money with menaces from anyone.

  “What else do you do?” he said. “Apart from swimming?”

  Nothing, we said, not yet anyway. Rosario looked defensive. After all, she almost lived here and Will’s assumed sophistication was an affront to her. Had she not only three days before told us of the hundred things there were to do?

  “They have bullfights sometimes,” Will said. “They’re in Palma on Sunday evenings. My parents went last year but I didn’t. I faint at the sight of blood.Then there are the Dragon Caves.”

  “Las Cuevas del Drach,” said Rosario.

  “That’s what I said, the Dragon Caves. And there are lots of other caves in the west.”Will hesitated. Brooding on what possibly was forbidden or frowned on, he looked up and said in the way that even then I thought of as sly, “We could go to the haunted house.”

  “The haunted house?” said Piers, sounding amused. “Where’s that?”

  Rosario said without smiling, “He means the Casita de Golondro.”

  “I don’t know what it’s called. It’s on the road to Pollença – well, in the country near that road.The village people say it’s haunted.”

  Rosario was getting cross. She was always blunt, plain-spoken. It was not her way to hide even for a moment what she felt. “How do you know what they say? Do you speak Spanish? No, I thought not.You mean it is the man who has the hotel that told you. He will say anything. He told my mother he has seen a whale up close near Cabo del Pinar.”

  “Is it supposed to be haunted, Rosario?” said my brother.

  She shrugged. “Ghosts,” she said, “are not true. They don’t happen. Catholics don’t believe in ghosts, they’re not supposed to. Father Xaviere would be very angry with me if he knew I talked about ghosts.” It was unusual for Rosario to mention her religion. I saw the look of surprise on Piers’s face. “Do you know it’s one-thirty?” she said to Will, who had of course left his watch behind with his clothes. “You will be late for your lunch and so will we.” Rosario and my brother had already begun to enjoy their particular rapport. They communicated even at this early stage of their relationship by a glance, a movement of the hand. Some sign he made, perhaps involuntary and certainly unnoticed by me, seemed to check her. She lifted her shoulders again, said, “Later on, we shall go to the village, to the lace shop. Do you like to come too?” She added, with a spark of irony, her head tilted to one side, “The sun will be going down, not to burn your poor skin that is so thin.”

  The lace-makers were producing an elaborate counterpane for Rosario’s mother. It had occurred to her that we might like to spend half an hour watching these women at work. We walked down there at about five, calling for Will at the hotel on the way. He was sitting by himself on the terrace, under its roof of woven vine branches. Four women, one of whom we later learned was his mother, sat at the only other occupied table, playing bridge. Will was wearing a clean shirt, clean long trousers and his grass hat, and as he came to join us he called out to his mother in a way that seemed strange to me because we had only just met, strange but oddly endearing,

  “My friends are here. See you later.”

  Will is not like me, crippled by fear of a snub, by fear of being thought forward or pushy, but he lives in the same dread of rejection. He longs to “belong”. His dream is to be a member of some inner circle, honoured and loved by his fellows, privileged to share knowledge of a secret password. He once told me, in an unusual burst of confidence, that when he heard someone he knew refer to him in conversation as “my friend”, tears of happiness came into his eyes.

  While we were at the lacemakers’ and afterwards on the beach at sunset he said no more about the Casita de Golondro, but that night, sitting on the terrace at the back of the house, Rosario told us its story.The nights at Llosar were warm and the air was velvety. Mosquitos there must have been, for we all had nets over our beds, but I only remember seeing one or two. I remember the quietness, the dark blue clear sky and the brilliance of the stars. The landscape could not be seen, only an outline of dark hills with here and there a tiny light glittering. The moon, that night, was increasing towards the full, was melon-shaped and meloncoloured.

  The others sat in deckchairs, almost the only kind of “garden furniture” anyone had in those days and which, today, you never see. I was in the hammock, a length of faded canvas suspended between one of the veranda pillars and a cypress tree. My brother was looking at Rosario in a peculiarly intense way. I think I remember such a lot about that evening because that look of his so impressed me. It was as if he had never seen a girl before. Or so I think now. I doubt if I thought about it in that way when I was thirteen. It embarrassed me then, the way he stared. She was talking about the Casita and he was watching her, but when she looked at him, he smiled and turned his eyes away.

  Her unwillingness to talk of ghosts on religious grounds seemed to be gone. It was hard not to make the connection and conclude it had disappeared with Will’s return to the hotel. “You could see the trees around the house from here,” she said, “if it wasn’t night,” and she pointed through the darkness to the south-west where the mountains began. “Casita means ‘little house’ but it is quite big and it is very old. At the front is a big door and at the back, I don’t know what you call them, arches and pillars.”

  “A cloister?” said Piers.

  “Yes, perhaps. Thank you. And there is a big garden with a wall around it and gates made of iron.The garden is all trees and bushes, grown over with them, and the wall is broken, so this is how I have seen the back with the word you said, the cloisters.”

  “But no one lives there?”

  “No one has ever lived there that I know. But someone owns it, it is someone’s house, though they never come. It is all locked up. Now Will is saying what the village people say but Will does not know what they say.There are not ghosts, I mean there are not dead people who come back, just a bad room in the house you must not go in.”

  Of course we were both excited, Piers and I, by that last phrase, made all the more enticing by being couched in English that was not quite idiomatic. But what returns to me most powerfully now are Rosario’s preceding words about dead people who come back. It is a line from the past, long-forgotten, which itself “came back” when some string in my memory was painfully plucked. I find myself repeating it silently, like a mantra, or like one of the prayers from that rosary for which she was named. Dead people who come back, lost people who are raised from the dead, the dead who return at last.

  On that evening, as I have said, the words which followed that prophetic phrase affected us most. Piers at once asked about the “bad” room but Rosario, in the finest tradition of tellers of ghost stories, did not admit to knowing precisely which room it was. People who talked about it said the visitor knows.The room would declare itself.

  “They say that those who go into the room never come out again.”

  We were suitably impressed. “Do you mean they disappear, Rosario?” asked my brother.

  “I don’t know. I cannot tell you. People don’t see them again – that is what they say.”

  “But it’s a big house, you said.There must be a lot of rooms. If you knew which was the haunted room you could simply avoid it, couldn’t you?”

  Rosario laughed. I don’t think she ever believed any of it or was ever afraid. “Perhaps you don’t know until you are in this room and then it is too late. How do you like that?”

  “Very much,” said Piers. “It’s wonderfully si
nister. Has anyone ever disappeared?”

  “The cousin of Carmela Valdez disappeared. They say he broke a window and got in because there were things to steal, he was very bad, he did no work.” She sought for a suitable phrase and brought it out slightly wrong. “The black goat of the family.” Rosario was justly proud of her English and only looked smug when we laughed at her. Perhaps she could already hear the admiration in Piers’s laughter. “He disappeared, it is true, but only to a prison in Barcelona, I think.”

  The meaning of golondro she refused to tell Piers. He must look it up. That way he would be more likely to remember it. Piers went to find the dictionary he and Rosario would use and there it was: a whim, a desire.

  “The little house of desire,” said Piers. “You can’t imagine an English house called that, can you?”

  My mother came out then with supper for us and cold drinks on a tray. No more was said about the Casita that night and the subject was not raised again for a while. Next day Piers began his Spanish lessons with Rosario. We always stayed indoors for a few hours after lunch, siesta time, the heat being too fierce for comfort between two and four. But adolescents can’t sleep in the daytime. I would wander about, fretting for the magic hour of four to come round. I read or wrote in the diary I was keeping or gazed from my bedroom window across the yellow hills with their crowns of grey olives and their embroidery of bay and juniper, like dark upright stitches on a tapestry, and now I knew of its existence, speculated about the location of the house with the sinister room in it.

  Piers and Rosario took over the cool white dining room with its furnishings of dark carved wood for their daily lesson. They had imposed no embargo on others entering. Humbly, they perhaps felt that what they were doing was hardly important enough for that, and my mother would go in to sit at the desk and write a letter while Concepçion, who cleaned and cooked for us, would put silver away in one of the drawers of the press or cover the table with a clean lace cloth. I wandered in and out, listening not to Rosario’s words but to her patient tone and scholarly manner. Once I saw her correct Piers’s pronunciation by placing a finger on his lips. She laid on his lips the finger on which she wore a ring with two tiny turquoises in a gold setting, holding it there as if to model his mouth round the soft guttural. And I saw them close together, side by side, my brother’s smooth dark head, so elegantly shaped, Rosario’s crown of red-brown hair, flowing over her shoulders, a cloak of it, that always seemed to me like a cape of polished wood, with the depth and grain and gleam of wood, as if she were a nymph carved from the trunk of a tree.