The Years That Followed Read online

  Calista will never forget his face as they stepped out of Prague Airport to hail a taxi. His eyes were dark with shock. He looked at her in amazement. “You never warned me it would be this cold!”

  “You’re the one who’s the seasoned traveler!” Calista laughed. “What else is the middle of Europe going to feel like at Christmas?”

  “Must be why I never traveled here in December,” he grumbled.

  “Come on, follow me.” Calista took him by the hand. “I know where we can get the best mulled wine ever.”

  Yiannis looked at her in surprise. “I thought you’d never been here before,” he said. “I thought that was why we chose this city together.” He looked crestfallen.

  “I haven’t.” Calista grinned. She waved her guidebook under his nose. “I just believe everything I read. Let’s go—here’s our taxi.”

  She remembers how they’d walked the city in the snow, how they’d visited the castle and the museums and listened to music in all the concert halls dotted across the city. To Yiannis’s own surprise, he’d loved the ballet. Swan Lake, Calista remembers. That was probably one of the happiest nights of her life, sitting in that darkened, magical space, watching dancers glide across the stage. Yiannis held her hand throughout, turning to smile at her when something in the music moved him. Calista remembers how loved, how safe, how privileged she felt.

  * * *

  It is Yiannis who comes to tell Calista what has happened in the summer of 1983—six long years ago now.

  He traveled from Limassol to London on the last flight, arriving well after midnight.

  The sound of a key in the door puzzles Calista at first, then frightens her.

  She puts her book facedown on the table and stands up from the sofa, tying the belt of her dressing gown more tightly around her. It is as though she is girding herself; she feels an alertness that is like a warning.

  A moment later, he steps into the room. He looks crumpled; a rucksack sags across his shoulders.

  “Yiannis,” Calista says, almost laughing with relief. “You startled me! I wasn’t expecting you.” She begins to move towards him, then stops.

  Something is not right. He has brought a strange feeling with him into the room, something that has not been there previously. The air seems to have stilled all around him, and he has not yet spoken. He looks at Calista, and she sees how gray his face is, how strained is the flesh around his eyes.

  She feels a great surge of love for this man, a rush of sympathy for how suddenly tired and worn he seems. For the first time, Calista thinks how old Yiannis looks. She wants to comfort him, to care for him, the way he has so often cared for her.

  But Yiannis stands there, facing her, his hands by his sides. How odd, Calista thinks. He has no luggage with him.

  “Calista,” he says, and his voice breaks.

  In two steps she is at his side. “Sweetheart, you look exhausted. Come and sit down.”

  “Calista,” he says again, almost raising one hand, but letting it fall again at once. She sees, to her horror, that his eyes have filled.

  Instantly Calista backs away from him. Somewhere, deep in her gut, she knows.

  “What is it?” she says. “Tell me. Something has happened to my children. Tell me. Has something happened to my children?” She hears her voice become shrill; she hardly recognizes it as her own.

  Yiannis nods, unable to speak. Calista sees the sweat on his forehead, although it is not warm.

  “Tell me!” she screams. “Tell me! Tell me what has happened to my children!”

  “Calista . . .” He moves towards her now, his arms open.

  But Calista is beyond fear. She steps back farther, her hands warding off whatever news he is about to tell her. “Is it Imogen?” she asks.

  Yiannis nods. “Yes,” he whispers. “My darling—”

  “Don’t,” she says. “Don’t try and soften it! Tell me. Tell me!” Her voice fills the room, and Yiannis flinches. She keeps her arms extended against him. She cannot bear comfort. All she wants is to know what it is, this news he brings with him.

  “There has been an awful accident,” he blurts. “At sea.”

  Calista does not hear any more, although she knows Yiannis keeps speaking. She can see his lips move.

  But she is howling, an unearthly sound that is high and deep and filled with despair, and she clutches at her hair and falls to her knees and wails and wails until she cries herself to quietness in the useless shelter of Yiannis’s arms.

  pilar

  Madrid, 1983

  * * *

  Pilar settles herself comfortably into the hire car. Four hours along the motorway from Madrid to Badajoz, if she doesn’t stop. She will, though, in Trujillo. She’s always had a fondness for Trujillo. She likes its ancient air, its wide plazas, the way the bell towers at evening are conquered by flights of swifts, swooping and chittering as dusk leaches into darkness.

  Pilar is filled with optimism these days. Florencia will soon be back, and Pilar’s final search can begin in earnest. She knows that every day brings her closer to her son. She can feel it. And she has kept herself busy while she waits.

  In the past year, Pilar has concluded some very satisfactory negotiations on another apartment building. Something for Francisco-­José, for his future, for the children he may have someday. Pilar is pleased with herself. No more poverty, Mamá, she thinks. Not for the next generation either.

  She has installed Maribel and Alicia as the porteras of her new building. Pilar was truthful with them about her ownership. She’d watched as a mix of gratitude and envy washed across their faces; they had always been so transparent, those two. But Pilar did not reveal to them the full extent of her property portfolio; instead, she followed Señor Gómez’s advice about playing her cards close to her chest. Never let the right hand know what the left hand is doing. Business is business.

  Pilar has also kept her promise to Señor Gómez. She has visited Paco a couple of times each year. Despite her urgings, he will not come to her in Madrid. His duty to the land and to his father, he tells her, must come first.

  The first time she went back, Paco’s joy at seeing her brought tears to Pilar’s eyes. He was waiting for her as she made the final turn into the farm. She wondered how long he’d been standing there; she was at least an hour later than she’d hoped to be.

  “Pilar,” he said, coming towards her as she stepped out of the car. They hugged, and Pilar was grateful for the few moments this gave her to hide her face. Although it had only been a couple of years since she last saw him—four, he later corrected her—Paco’s physical resemblance to Señor Gómez had grown stronger with each passing year. A life on the land had not coarsened him. His features had all the elegant refinements of his father’s.

  Pilar’s father, Miguel, did not seem at all pleased to see her. He was distant, monosyllabic, and turned his face away from her whenever she entered the room. She ignored him.

  For the next few days, Pilar helped Paco around the farm. She went with him—only because he had begged her—to visit her brothers Javier and Carlos and their bitter wives, Mercedes and Paquita.

  Once she went with him to Bar Jaime. She had never been there before, but Paco insisted that she visit with him. “It belongs to José Martínez,” Paco told her. “He owns his family vineyard now. He and his wife are really nice. Do you remember him?”

  “I remember the name,” Pilar says. “If it belongs to José, why is it called Bar Jaime?” She is curious.

  “It’s named after José and Inmaculada’s son, Jaime. He’s away at school. The bar is for him when he finishes university—and the vineyard, too, I suppose, eventually.”

  “Assuming he wants to come home,” Pilar said. “I wouldn’t bet on it, if I were his parents.” She grins at Paco. “Torre de Santa Juanita for a twenty-something-year-old man? I don’t think so
.”

  “Ah, but he has a lovely girlfriend called Rosa,” Paco says. “That would make a difference to any man.”

  Pilar glances at her brother. She sees the sudden loneliness etched across his face. For a moment she is tempted to tell him about Francisco-­José, but she stops herself. You never knew where such a conversation might lead.

  That evening, as they enter the bar, Pilar immediately feels its warmth, its lightness, its air of welcome and optimism; something unusual for the village—or at least for the village as Pilar recalls it. But then, she supposes, things can change.

  “You remember José and Inmaculada?” Paco says, introducing Pilar to the smiling couple behind the bar. They shake hands.

  “Yes,” Pilar says, surprised at herself. “I do remember your names. It was your parents who used to own the vineyard, isn’t that right?”

  “That’s right.” José beams. “You have a good memory.”

  “I left for Madrid twenty-six years ago,” Pilar says, “but some things about Torre de Santa Juanita remain unforgettable.” Everyone laughs.

  “I would have been in my mid-twenties then,” José says. “I was tempted by the bright lights myself, but I took over the vineyard around that time.” He nods towards his wife. “So I stayed. And that’s when we got married.”

  “And I was a child bride,” Inmaculada jokes, “as you can clearly tell.”

  It’s an evening that Pilar still remembers with pleasure.

  * * *

  Before she returned to Madrid that first time, Paco asked her to accompany him to Badajoz. He had some business there, he said, but he didn’t like driving on the main roads. Pilar can still see her father’s sour expression as she and Paco drove off. He refused to go with them. He refused to waste his time, he said. Pilar did not encourage him to change his mind.

  She wondered if her father still remembered—as she did—the last time, the only time, they visited that city together. Miguel took her there just the once, when Pilar can have been no more than seven. “She has reached the age of reason,” he insisted, when Pilar’s mother tried to prevent him from taking her. “It is time she knew.”

  Pilar had looked from one face to the other, bewildered, afraid that she was the unknowing cause of yet more trouble between Mamá and Papá. The house was filled with something uneasy all over again—something that felt heavier than air and might fall to the ground at any moment, bringing her father’s rage with it.

  “She’s a child,” her mother said, warning her husband with her eyes.

  But Miguel shrugged and took Pilar by the hand anyway, none too gently.

  They arrived at the plaza de toros in Badajoz; all she remembers is being there and her father’s words as they stood together, sharing an awkward closeness, looking out over what seemed to Pilar to be a vast, sandy wasteland.

  “You asked me,” her father said, not looking at her but at something in the middle of the plaza that Pilar could not see, no matter how she strained, “about your grandfather and grandmother. Did you not?”

  Pilar nodded, feeling guilty. Should she not have asked? The grim set of Papá’s face made her wish she hadn’t. Somehow, she knew then that she didn’t want to know more. She didn’t want to hear whatever it was that was making Papá look the way he did at that moment. She preferred his angry face, not this black and twisted one that looked, astonishingly, as if it might collapse into tears at any moment.

  “They were murdered,” he said. His tone was cold, blunt. “My parents were both murdered. Think how lucky you are to have yours.” His arms were folded and held tightly against his chest, although it was not cold, not that day.

  But it was, however, silent. No birdsong. No wind. No movement that created a rustling of any kind. The stillness made Pilar suddenly afraid. She wanted to go home, but her father had not finished yet.

  “The fascists shot them,” he said, and something about his tone sounded almost curious, wondering, as if he still couldn’t quite believe it himself. “And then they burned their bodies. Four thousand of them. This is what people do to one another.”

  Pilar began to cry. She didn’t know who the fascists were, and she didn’t like this story.

  The sound seemed to remind Papá of her presence. “What are you crying for?” he demanded. “Nothing bad has ever happened to you.”

  Pilar had no answer for that. She remembers feeling that, in some way she did not understand, her escape from suffering must have been the cause of Papá’s, maybe even the cause of her grandparents’. She felt guilt settle itself around her, a thick, hairy blanket that chafed against her skin every time she moved.

  “Come,” her father said at last. “It is time to go home.”

  Pilar does not remember the journey back to the farm either. But that afternoon, the silence of the bullring, her father’s face, his tightly folded arms, these have all stayed with her. The Butcher of Badajoz, she learned later. One of Generalísimo Franco’s henchmen; one of the many atrocities of the civil war. And Juan Yagüe had done his butchering a mere three years before she was born. Pilar wonders now, as she has often wondered in the intervening years, what happens to people when all that brutality seeps its poisonous way through the generations.

  As she drives the final few kilometers to the farm now, Pilar promises herself once again that she will try to be kind and tolerant towards her father. If not for his sake, then for Paco’s. That day in Badajoz has come back to haunt her more than once.

  This is what people do to one another.

  Pilar does not forgive Miguel; she can never forgive him for the life he gave her mother. But she has often asked herself what drove him to become the man he was. His fists, his boot, his rage.

  In Carlos and Javier both, Pilar has seen some of her father’s darkness. She thinks of their wives, Mercedes and Paquita, and she wonders.

  You never know what goes on behind people’s front doors, she thinks. All those gleaming surfaces hiding something.

  imogen

  Limassol, 1983

  * * *

  Imogen makes her way down the jetty towards where Alexandros’s yacht is moored. The Cassandra is a thing of beauty. Imogen has always felt this, despite its having been named for her stepmother. The arrival of Sandra into her father’s life, into all of their lives, is something that Imogen prefers not to think about. She prefers to remember other things instead, such as the summer her father taught her to sail: the summer she was eight. Three whole years before British Sandra made her appearance.

  Imogen remembers the Mermaid, her own tiny sailing boat; remembers the solid heft of the wave, the slap of the canvas, the sheer slick saltiness of flying before the wind. She remembers, too, the day she finally grasped what her father had been trying to teach her, patiently, almost doggedly, for months.

  That is a day that stands out above so many others, something Imogen can still see and hear and feel with a bright, brittle clarity. Learning how to master the wind and the waves was only one part of the exhilaration she felt. Knowing that her mother would visit again as soon as she could was the other. Imogen hugged that secret knowledge to herself, storing up her memories until the next time.

  “Well done, Imogen!” Her father’s face was filled with pride. “You’ve done it; you’re a sailor!” He lifted her into his arms and strode hugely towards the beach. The Mermaid bobbed and ducked along behind them.

  Old Karolis came running towards them. He was panting, anxious. “Is everything all right, Mr. Alexandros?”

  “Yes, Karolis, everything is fine, just fine!”

  The older man relaxed at Alexandros’s jovial tone. He grinned, years falling away from his face, smoothing out his weathered skin so that he looked just like his son, twelve-year-old Young Karolis.

  “I’ll take care of the Mermaid,” Old Karolis said, already reaching for the painter.

  �
��Which one?” Alexandros rocked with laughter. “Which mermaid? That Mermaid there, or”—he swung Imogen around, dipping her scarily towards the sand and then scooping her back up into his powerful arms again—“this one, my lovely daughter!”

  But it wasn’t really a question, and Old Karolis seemed to know that, because he didn’t answer. He just nodded and smiled and took the rope from Alexandros. He pulled the Mermaid smoothly up onto the sand, where it sat, becalmed. Imogen thought the little boat looked relieved to be there, as though it had fulfilled some secret purpose of its own and could rest now.

  Alexandros strode up the beach to where the car was parked. As he walked, he patted Imogen’s back from time to time, murmuring endearments. He kissed her wet and salty cheek.

  Imogen rested against his shoulder, could hear his voice rumbling away beneath her.

  She, too, felt becalmed.

  At last.

  * * *

  Today, as Imogen approaches the end of the jetty, she has time to admire the sleek lines of her father’s yacht, the white sheen of the hull. She can already imagine the smooth warmth of its varnished wood under her bare feet.

  Young Karolis is already there, hosing down everything above the water line. Alexandros is very particular about the appearance of the Cassandra.

  Imogen watches Young Karolis now, sees the way he coils up the hose and places it around the base of the tap that is dedicated to the Cassandra’s mooring. All the lines are similarly coiled: they lie neat and flat on the jetty. Everything is ready for an afternoon departure.

  He looks up, finally, at Imogen’s approach. And he smiles. “Kalimera,” he says.

  Imogen is glad she has her sunglasses on. Without them, Young Karolis might be able to read what he should not be able to read in her eyes. Alexandros had caught her looking at the boy once, late last summer, watching him as he unloaded crates of supplies for the Cassandra—food, wine, bottles of beer and lemonade. She watched as he moved with an unconscious grace, a loping ease that made her breath catch somewhere towards the back of her throat. She was fifteen then, Karolis an unattainable nineteen; but a girl could dream, couldn’t she?