‘What about your mother?’
‘We told her nothing about what had happened. After a while she assumed that he had simply left her, and she was happy.’
‘And what about Irena, and Gerard?’
‘She went back to Cartagena. He talked about going to bring her back, but he never did. Instead he went back to church, to our old friend the priest, and a few months later went to the seminary. A little while after that, I tried to trace Irena. When I did, I found that she’d committed suicide, a couple of years after the rape.’
‘Does Gerard know?’
‘Yes.’ He shuddered, as if to shake off the horror, then stood up. I felt pretty numb myself. I could understand why Gerard had no desire to go home.
‘Come on,’ he said, briskly. ‘That’s enough family history for a while. What would you like to do?’
I looked at him; blankly, I suspect. ‘Do?’ I repeated.
‘Yes, do. You’re in Granada; far away from your trouble. You don’t need to hide away here. Let me show you around.’
And that’s what he did. He stilled all my nerves and protestations with his calmness, and led me out into the day, my personal tour guide. We walked back down to the Paseo, then back along the riverside road until it opened out into the Plaza Nuevo, through which I had driven around twenty-four hours earlier. It was Monday, and so it was noticeably quieter, as we strolled down towards a blue booth on the shady side of the street. There were a few people before us in the queue, but it cleared fairly quickly. Santi had a quick conversation with the attendant and came away with two white tickets. ‘These are the bono turistica,’ he told me, ‘the best value in Granada. They’ll let us into all the monuments, including the Alhambra. We’ll go there this afternoon, but they also get us a ride on the tour bus, so let’s find it.’
The stop turned out to be next to the cathedral, beside some steps where gypsy women were selling sprigs of lucky white heather and telling fortunes with it. Normally I don’t go for such stuff, but that day of all days, I couldn’t resist. It’s probably the most expensive heather I ever bought, but the show made it worth it. The woman seized my hand and stared at the palm, which had half the number of lines, I reckon, that there were on her brown forehead, knitted with concentration as it was.
‘I see happiness and sadness,’ she announced, ‘both in the past and yet to come. I see fine children. .’ Hold on, I thought, I’m forty-two; the plural’s unlikely now. ‘. . and grandchildren to come.’
‘How about the immediate future?’ I asked her.
She peered once more, and a funny thing happened; she squeezed her eyes shut and seemed to go into a trance. ‘I see death,’ she moaned, ‘but not yours. It is the father who dies.’ My blood ran cold. ‘I see difficult times, but you come through them. I see evil, I see a fall, I see tears, I see separation. The father,’ she repeated, ‘the father. He dies.’
And then she fainted; she folded up and fell to the ground. I had to yank my hand free to avoid being pulled over. Two other Roma women came across and bent over her; one was grinning. An act, I thought. Sucker.
‘That looked pretty dramatic,’ said Santi, as I rejoined him at the bus stop.
‘All bullshit,’ I told him.
‘Don’t you mean cowshit, in this case?
‘I suppose. Here, you can have this.’ I handed him the sprig of heather; he pushed its stalk through an unused buttonhole in his shirt, just as the open-topped tour bus pulled up at the stop.
We took seats upstairs, right at the front; there were audio guides available, but with Santi as a commentator, I didn’t need one. He began as soon as we pulled away, explaining where we were, place by place. The tour began by taking us out of the city and up towards the Alhambra. It was a clear day, and so we had a fine view of the Sierra Nevada, the mountain range that’s one of the great surprises of southern Spain. Think Spain, think Pyrenees; that’s how it is for most people, but the Snowy Mountains are more dominant, and those who do such things tell me that the skiing and snow-boarding are more reliable there than in the north. Santi was a skier, as it turned out; he had taken it up once he could afford it, but in his youth and Gerard’s it had been a luxury scorned by their father.
He knew just about everything there was to know about the city and its history, ancient and modern, from the expulsion of the Moors. . ‘In case you haven’t noticed,’ he joked as the bus passed a gaggle of young mothers, all with heads covered, ‘they’ve found their way back’. . and the death of the poet Lorca during the Spanish Civil War. ‘Granada Airport is named after him,’ he told me. ‘One thing I’ve noticed in my job is the number of airports named after people who’ve been shot. Think about it; apart from him, there’s JFK, La Guardia, also in New York, John Lennon in Liverpool, Abraham Lincoln in Illinois, Ronald Reagan in Washington. . although he survived. . and Charles de Gaulle.’
‘De Gaulle wasn’t assassinated,’ I pointed out.
‘Only because of incredible luck. So many people tried to shoot him, he deserves to be on the list.’
I laughed. In truth I was grateful for the distraction, because for all that I was interested in what he was telling me, my mind kept drifting back to the gypsy woman and what she had said. I’ve always convinced myself that fortune telling, be it centred on palmistry, tea leaves, tarot cards or anything else, is based on probability, and on intelligent guesswork. But her insistent use of the word ‘father’ had lodged itself in my brain. Did she mean my dad? That was possible; most of us outlive our fathers and the way she had put it, that’s where she was most likely to have been taking me. But had she meant Tom’s father? I wear a wedding ring, so it was a fair chance that I was a mother. I was alone, for she hadn’t noticed Santi, I was sure. Yes, another good guess. But. . the thought that wouldn’t go away, however hard I pushed it, what if there was something in the whole claptrap nonsense? What if she’d meant Father Gerard?
The bus tour ended where it had begun, but we stayed on board until it arrived at the Alhambra for the second time. Santi explained that the greatest benefit of the bono turistica lies in the fact that it includes an advance booking time for the Alhambra, or specifically, for entry to the Nazrene Palaces, the heart of the place, and it lets you bypass the regular ticket queue, which can be enormous.
By the time we got to the main concourse, breakfast had worn off; we grabbed sandwiches and beer before Santi led me into the Alcazabar, the castellated fort that was the earliest construction on the great rock.
There’s a lot I could tell you about the Alhambra, but I’ll restrict myself to three things: one, although the place as a whole is vast, the Nazrene Palaces are smaller than I’d expected; two, there is a very fine art collection in the Carlos Five palace; and three, it has the finest public toilets in all of Spain. After three hours we’d visited the lot, and were ready to leave. I’d have taken the bus, but Santi promised me that it would have been a nightmare, so we settled for a taxi, back to Goats’ Hill, or as close to it as the driver could take us.
‘Put your feet up for a while,’ said Santi, as we stepped back indoors. ‘I’m going to see what’s in my mailbox.’
‘Do you have a computer here?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘No. I have an iPhone; for my job, it’s best.’
He left to get on with it, and I went outside, on to the patio. The sun was still high, so I unrolled the awning that was fixed above the doors. As I settled myself into a chair, I couldn’t help wondering what state my email must have reached, and from that to those people who were likely to have sent me messages. As I scrolled down my mental contacts list, I paused at a name, and found myself wondering why I hadn’t thought of him before.