Authors: Victoria Hislop

Tags: #British - Spain, #Psychological Fiction, #Family, #British, #Spain - History - Civil War; 1936-1939 - Social Aspects, #General, #Granada (Spain), #Historical, #War & Military, #Families, #Fiction, #Spain

The Return

VICTORIA HISLOP

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www.headline.co.uk

The right of Victoria Hislop to be identified as the Author of
the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may
only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means,
with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of
reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued
by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2008

All characters - other than the obvious historical figures - in this
publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons,
living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Cataloguing in Publication Data available from the British Library

eISBN : 978 0 7553 5245 6

This Ebook produced by Jouve Digitalisation des Informations

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Table of Contents

For Emily and William, with love

With thanks to: Ian Hislop, David Miller, Flora Rees,
Natalia Benjamin, Emma Cantons, Professor Juan Antonio Díaz,
Rachel Dymond, Tracey Hay, Helvecia Hidalgo,
Gerald Howson, Michael Jacobs, Herminio Martinez,
Eleanor Mortimer, Victor Ovies, Jan Page, Chris Stewart,
Josefina Stubbs and Yolanda Urios.

Granada, 1937

In the shuttered nocturnal gloom of an apartment, the discreet click of a closing door penetrated the silence. To the crime of being late, the girl had added the sin of trying to conceal her surreptitious homecoming.

‘Mercedes! Where in the name of God have you been?’ came a harsh whisper.

A young man emerged from the shadows into the hallway and the girl, who was no more than sixteen, stood facing him, her head bowed, hands concealed behind her back.

‘Why are you so late? Why are you doing this to us?’

He hesitated, suspended in the uncertain space between total despair and uncompromising love for this girl.

‘And what are you hiding? As if I couldn’t guess.’

She held out her hands. Balanced on her flattened palms was a pair of scuffed black shoes, the leather as soft as human skin, their soles worn to transparency.

He took her wrists gently and held them in his hands. ‘Please, for the very last time I am asking you . . .’ he implored.

‘I’m sorry, Antonio,’ she said quietly, her eyes now meeting his. ‘I can’t stop. I can’t help myself.’

‘It’s not safe,
querida mia,
it’s not safe.’

Part 1

Chapter One

Granada, 2001

JUST MOMENTS BEFORE, the two women had taken their seats, the last of the audience to be admitted before the surly
gitano
slid the bolts decisively across the door.

Voluminous skirts trailing behind them, five raven-headed girls made their entrance.Tight to their bodies swirled dresses of flaming reds and oranges, acid greens and ochre yellows. These vibrant colours, a cocktail of heavy scents, the swiftness of their arrival and their arrogant gait were overpoweringly, studiedly dramatic. Behind them followed three men, sombrely dressed as though for a funeral, in jet black from their oiled hair down to their hand-made leather shoes.

Then the atmosphere changed as the faint, ethereal beat of clapping, palm just brushing palm, seeped through the silence. From one man came the sound of fingers sweeping across strings. From another emanated a deep and plaintive wail that soon flowed into a song. The rasp of his voice matched the roughness of the place and the ruggedness of his pock-marked face. Only the singer and his troupe understood the obscure patois, but the audience could sense the meaning. Love had been lost.

Five minutes passed like this, with the fifty-strong audience sitting in the darkness around the edge of one of Granada’s damp
cuevas
, hardly daring to breathe. There was no clear moment when the song ended - it simply faded away - and the girls took this as their cue to file out again, rawly sensual in their gait, eyes fixed on the door ahead, not even acknowledging the presence of the foreigners in the room. There was an air of menace in this dark space.

‘Was that it?’ whispered one of the latecomers.

‘I hope not,’ answered her friend.

For a few minutes, there was an extraordinary tension in the air and then a sweet continuous sound drifted towards them. It was not music, but a mellow, percussive purring: the sound of castanets.

One of the girls was returning, stamping her feet as she paced down the length of the corridor-shaped space, the flounces of her costume brushing the dusty feet of the tourists in the front row.The fabric of her dress, vivid tangerine with huge black spots, was pulled taut across her belly and breasts. Seams strained. Her feet stamped on the strip of wood that comprised the dance floor, rhythmically
one
-two-
one
-two-
one
-two-three-
one
-two-three-
one
-two . . .

Then her hands rose in the air, the castanets fluttered in a deep satisfying trill and her slow twirling began. All the while she rotated, her fingers snapped against the small black discs she held in her hands. The audience was mesmerised.

A plaintive song accompanied her, the singer’s eyes mainly downcast. The dancer continued, in a trance of her own. If she connected with the music she did not acknowledge it and if she was aware of her audience they did not feel it.The expression on her sensual face was one of pure concentration and her eyes looked into some other world that only she could see. Under her arms, the fabric darkened with sweat, and watery beads gathered at her brow as she revolved, faster and faster and faster.

The dance ended as it had begun, with one decisive stamp, a full stop. Hands were held above her head, eyes to the low, domed ceiling.There was no acknowledgement of the audience’s response. They might as well not have been there for all the difference it made to her. Temperatures had risen in the room and those close to the front inhaled the heady mix of musky scent and perspiration that she spread in the air.

Even as she was leaving the stage, another girl was taking over. There was an air of impatience with this second dancer, as though she wanted to get it all over with. More black dots swam in front of the audience’s eyes, this time on shiny red, and cascades of curly black hair fell over the gypsyish face, concealing all but the sharply defined Arab eyes, outlined in thick kohl. This time there were no castanets, but the endlessly repeated, rattling of feet:
clack
-a-tacka tacka,
clack
-a-tacka tacka,
clack
-a-tacka tacka . . .

The speed of movement from heel to toe and back again seemed impossibly fast. The heavy black shoes, with their high, solid heels and steel toecaps vibrated on the stage. Her knees must have absorbed a thousand shockwaves. For a while, the singer remained silent and gazed at the ground, as though to catch this dark beauty’s eyes might turn him to stone. It was impossible to tell whether the guitarist kept up with her stamping or whether he dictated its pace.The communication between them was seamless. Provocatively she hitched up the heavy tiers of her skirt to reveal shapely legs in dark stockings and further showed off the speed and rhythm of her footwork.The dance built to a crescendo, as the girl, half whirling dervish, half spinning top, rotated. A rose that had clung precariously to her hair, flew out into the audience. She did not stoop to collect it, marching from the room almost before it had landed. It was an introverted performance and yet the most overt display of confidence they had ever seen.

The first dancer and the accompanist followed her out of the cave, their faces expressionless, still indifferent to their audience in spite of the applause.

Before the end of the show, there were another half-dozen dancers, and each one conveyed the same disturbing keynotes of passion, anger and grief.There was a man whose movements were as provocative as a prostitute’s, a girl whose portrayal of pain sat uncomfortably with her extreme youth, and an elderly woman in whose deeply furrowed face were etched seven decades of suffering.

Eventually, once the performers had filed out, the lights came up. As the audience began to leave, they caught a glimpse of them in a small backroom, arguing, smoking and drinking from tall tumblers filled to the brim with cheap whisky. They had forty-five minutes until their next performance.

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