Alentejo Blue (23 page)

I found some coins in a little tin with a picture of Harry Potter on the side. Michelle’s got all the books though it’s not what you’d expect her to read. Even eco-warriors can have too much of this world. I’ve borrowed the money and I’m treating myself to a cup of tea and a
pastel de nata
still warm from the oven. I’ve driven over to Lindoso, which is an escape of sorts. From the café I can see the iron tree in the middle of the roundabout. It’s all scraps of junk welded together and it looks just like the kind of tree you’d have in a fairy tale when the children get lost in the woods. I’m making the tea last, even though nobody cares. There’s a Brazilian soap opera on the television. All the women in it have that shuddery way of talking, like they’re about to have an orgasm. I think the heroine’s husband has caught her cheating though it could be the other way round, everyone seems equally worked up.

What I’m thinking now is that I should plead guilty. In England you get life for a murder. A life for a life. But they let you out before you die, there’s no symmetry – which, by the way, is a word I like. You know what, it doesn’t scare me any more. I think I’d like it. All this business of what to do next, how to do it, when to do it, why you’re doing it. Well, they take that off you, don’t they? You don’t get to be small and live under the floorboards, not in the real world, but this is as close as damn it. You don’t have to pretend any more about pushing on, going somewhere. You just have to serve your time. Isn’t that what we’re doing anyway? And there is this as well: I am guilty. How easy that is to forget.

I’d make some Portuguese friends. Isn’t that a laugh? I like that idea. I like everything about this now. Give in and make it easier. Might as well make it easy on yourself.

Today I went to Beja to see my lawyer. All these phrases kept popping into my head. How do you plead? Guilty, m’lud. Take her down. I couldn’t get there fast enough. I was practically holding my arms out to be handcuffed by the time I walked into the office. Silly, I know. He’s supposed to be on my side.

He said, ‘Senhora Potts, allow me a moment to refresh my memory.’ And he started reading through the papers on his desk, like I’d just happened to barge in and he wasn’t expecting me at all. I thought I could save him the bother by saying I was changing my plea, but when you’re in front of a man like that you don’t interrupt. He’s called Senhor Soares de Macedo, he has a brass plaque outside his office, a receptionist with acrylic nails, and a crystal decanter on a mahogany sideboard. He looks like a little bird in a suit, all puffed-up chest and tiny bones.

‘Ah, yes, yes.’ He said it a few times.

He has a really big chair and I glanced down to see if his feet touched the ground but the desk panel came too low. I’ve been to the office before, but last time I was in such a daze I didn’t take anything in. This time I was calm, only a little impatient to get on with things.

Finally he stopped shuffling the papers. He put his elbows on the desk and pressed the tips of his fingers together. ‘Senhora Potts.’ It sounded like Pootz. ‘Senhora Potts, you are a lucky woman.’ He didn’t go on; he stopped and smiled at me as if that was all he was going to say. I knew he’d have to say something else if I kept quiet but I guess I’m just too polite, or too weak.

I said, ‘What do you mean?’

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘the lost hospital notes.’ I thought, this could take a long time, and all for nothing. Did I tell you he has orangey hair? That’s not normal for a Portuguese.

‘They have been found, Senhora Potts. Do you wish to know what they say?’

I didn’t, not really, because it wouldn’t make any difference. I said, ‘Yes please,’ like a schoolgirl.

He bent his head to read and the sun caught across his hair and I could see for the first time how thin it was, how it must really be white with a terrible dye on top. I could see then how old he was, how frail. He looked up again and said, ‘Yes, that’s right. They
have
been found, and they say that the baby, this baby, died in the womb.’

The first thing I thought was, how terribly afraid of forgetting he is that he must keep checking and checking again. The second thing I thought was: this is not fair.

‘That can’t be right,’ I said.

Senhor de Macedo stared at me for a few moments and I stopped digging at my arm. I saw the confusion come over his face. He bent so quickly to his papers it was funny, like he’d dropped off to sleep. Then he did the position again with his fingertips pressing together. It seemed to give him confidence.
‘She can’t believe her luck.
I saw that once on an advertising poster in the London Underground. I was there in the year of nineteen hundred and seventy-six.’ He made it sound like the Middle Ages. ‘It was promoting a – I think you have the same word like us – perfume.’

‘Same word,’ I said. ‘So what do we do?’

‘Give thanks,’ said my lawyer, tipping back in his big chair and looking up, as if to some just and almighty power.

On the drive back I thought about my hens. I thought about a lot of things. I thought about good luck and rotten luck. And I thought about yellow eyes.

I knew he would come and get me. He said, it’s finished now, and I got my things and I didn’t say a word. He carried me inside (Over the threshold, darlin’) and sat me in the high-backed leather chair. I held the back of his neck and remembered how much his skin feels like scars, even where no scars have ever been. He rolled a joint and said, ‘Suppose we’re sort of celebrating.’

I said, ‘I suppose we sort of are.’

8

OUTSIDE BEJA THEY STOPPED FOR PETROL. HUW WENT TO
pay and saw the bar and laughed out loud. Drink and drive. You have to. Dancing round the puddles he returned to the car and rapped on the window. Sophie looked at him but didn’t do anything so he shouted through the glass.

‘Pull over.’

When she got out she held her hands over her head, trying to stop the rain. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘One for the road,’ he said and pointed to the right of the cashier’s booth at the spirit bottles dangling upside down along the back wall.

She sprinted across the forecourt, gaining dark wet tracks up the back of her jeans.

He ordered two large whiskies and they stood at the bar. ‘It’s three o’clock,’ she said, shaking her head.

‘When in Rome.’

‘You’re such an idiot,’ she said, banging her hip into his.

‘That’s why you’re marrying me.’

‘Only out of pity,’ she said.

He slid his hand, briefly, over her backside. ‘I love it when you talk dirty.’

‘Shut up,’ she said, laughing, ‘let’s drink.’

‘Remember that guy,’ he said, ‘in our village?’

‘“If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.”’

‘Quoting himself maybe. Said he was a writer.’

‘Yeah, right,’ said Sophie, digging a band out of her pocket and pulling back her hair. ‘Writing his own excuses.’

‘Well, he wouldn’t have a problem with three o’clock.’

‘And that’s good, is it?’

In the village where they had rented a house for the week they went to a café at lunchtime. The man was there. Drunk but contained, slurring a bit perhaps but rising above it with an elegant kind of self-loathing. It’s only the happy drunks you have to avoid. Huw could imagine, back in Mamarrosa, a late night session, getting down to brass tacks.

‘Don’t beat me up,’ he said. ‘I’m still sore from last night.’

In the car she said, ‘Where are all these damn birds anyway?’

He fiddled with the binoculars, the road going in and out of focus. ‘You know, playing Scrabble. They’ll be out when the rain stops.’

They had taken a circuitous route, on small roads in the region of Castro Verde, traversing the grassy steppe and fallow fields, encountering few houses and most of these lay fallow too. He had seen, he thought, a Lesser Kestrel and a Great Bustard but at such a distance that he could not be sure. Now they were moving slowly, behind a truck, across the rolling plains of wheat north of Beja and if the sun came out he’d ask her to stop and take a walk and hope for some luck: Black-bellied Sandgrouse, Hen Harriers, a Red Kite.

‘I’m sorry about the weather,’ he said. ‘November can be lovely. It just happens not to be.’

She took her hand off the gearstick and laid it on his thigh. ‘I’ve got all the sunshine I need. Right here with me.’

‘What are you doing?’ he said, watching her jerk her shoulders and screw up her nose.

‘Twitching,’ she said. ‘Just twitching.’

‘You’ll pay for this,’ he said. ‘Hey, look. Look at these.’

‘Ohmygod.
What?
Dodos!’

They looked up at the nests, vast, untidy edifices, crowning dozens of telegraph poles. The storks fussed around the neighbourhood, seeking verification of something or other. Huw could almost hear the clatter of long red bills.

‘You’re learning fast,’ he said.

‘Shall we stop?’

‘No,’ said Huw. ‘Let’s just get there.’

They were heading to Évora, an ancient town replete with city walls and Roman ruins. They were splashing out – he was splashing out – on a night in a
pousada,
a state-run, top-of-the-range hotel.

He looked at Sophie, leaning into the wheel as she watched for a chance to overtake; the fine line of her nose, the permanent, promising hunger of her mouth. He breathed deeply and the interior of the hire car smelled of plastic and deodorizers, of cheap and illicit exchange.

If you went to a real down-and-dirty fleapit, that was the exception that proved the flash-hotel-equals-hot-sex rule. In Calcutta, once, he rutted with a girl, a fellow backpacker, in a brown-stained room where water and cockroaches trickled down the walls, and attained not only orgasm but Enlightenment which lasted as long as the night. But, as a rule, sex adhered to star ratings: one star, perfunctory; two stars, businesslike; three stars, comfortable; and four stars – depending on setting and style – lavish, experimental or baroque.

‘You realize,’ he said, ‘that when we’re married we can only have sex twice a week.’

‘As often as that?’ she said.

The rain let up and the sun came through, a nauseous kind of yellow. In the distance roiling black clouds smothered the sky and the fields like a chemical explosion.

‘Look what’s waiting for us,’ said Sophie.

‘I love this kind of landscape,’ said Huw.

The plains spread out on either side. Here and there a cork oak stood grieving. The land rose and fell in modest dimensions. Now and again a gleam of machinery, glittering drops of water on an acacia, a giant eucalyptus shedding its splintery scrolls. Field upon field upon field, wheat and grass and fallow, on and on and on, and in this flat composition there was a depth, both sadness and tremulous joy.

Huw rolled the window down. ‘Lapwings,’ he said. ‘Up there.’

‘Get the map. Let’s find the main road,’ said Sophie, without looking.

Just before the turn there was a house with ochreframed doors and windows, a pigsty fashioned from branches, rough as a stork’s nest, a small stone well and a striated vegetable plot. Planted in the thin soil, an old couple leaned on their hoes and waited for the car to pass, as if this would be the day’s main event. Huw, bending into the open window, raised his hand. The old man pushed his hat up an inch. His wife bowed her back and attended to the earth.

‘In the north of Portugal it’s all smallholdings like that,’ said Huw. ‘Here it’s big landowners.’

‘Come the revolution . . .’ said Sophie.

‘It came,’ said Huw. ‘Collectivization. And it went.’

‘What?’ she cried. ‘When?’

‘Seventies. Didn’t work out. The old landowners started buying their land back on the cheap.’

‘Crafty sods. Why couldn’t the workers just get their own bit each?’

‘Because,’ said Huw. ‘I don’t know. The peasants didn’t have any money, probably, to buy a share. And, anyway, there’s nothing more conservative than a land-owning peasant, in case you didn’t know.’

‘Yes there is,’ said Sophie, ‘there’s you.’

‘Thanks. But it’s over now anyway, this life. How many men does it take to drive that tractor? How many young people have you seen? How many empty houses?’

‘And that makes you happy, I suppose, that a way of life is dying.’

‘Not at all,’ said Huw. He reached across and massaged the back of her neck. It would be raining in Evora. They’d have to stay in and make the most of the room. ‘Peasants are so picturesque.’

She put the radio on and scanned through the stations playing American soft rock until she hit on a mournful Portuguese song and turned it up. Huw stared at Sophie’s face, the small scar at the temple, the artful lift of her eyebrows. He thought about the old couple at the side of the road and how their expressions had not changed, unaltered, it seemed, through the centuries. In their sturdy boots and frayed sweaters they worked side by side and he imagined the understanding between them ran deeper than the well. He tried to swap places with them, he and Sophie forever in the field and the others passing through, but he could not. He thought about growing old with Sophie, about being old with Sophie, and that was real and he thought, yes, we are not so far apart, we are not always passing through and he felt something for the old couple, gratitude, love, that made him cough and begin to sing tunelessly along with the unknown song.