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Chapter 1

‘What are you going to do when you grow up?’ It was a clear spring day in 1936 and Maria lay back under the gnarled, black branches of the olive tree and looked up at the Andalucian sky above: vivid blue, and as cloudless as the future she saw for herself. She and her friend Paloma often sought shade and solace in this grove, under this tree, far away from the dust and heat of the village. And here they would dream.

‘When I grow up, I’m going to …’ Paloma began. She flicked out her fingers in frustration, brushing Maria’s own. ‘Oh, I don’t know!’ she cried in answer to the older girl’s question – but she did. She would grow up to do the same as her mother, and her mother’s mother before her. A husband would be found for her, she would have children, and both she and her husband would work up on the landowner’s estate. That was the way it was; that was the way it had always been. Paloma’s fate was as set as if written in the stars. It was only Maria who saw a future full of possibilities for her friend as she gazed into the bright, limitless sky above. And Paloma loved her for it.

Instinctively she turned on her side to wrap her limbs around Maria’s. Legs, arms, fingers interlaced, a tangle as fixed and as complex as the roots of the olive tree beneath.

The girls’ skins squelched, mollusc-like, as Maria pulled herself away. Pushing herself up to sitting, she propped her back up against the solid trunk of the tree.

She looked at Paloma, cheek squashed against forearm. The skin, usually so plump and firm, gathered in folds and pushed her left eye closed. It struck Maria that in that moment her friend took after her mother Cecilia, whose skin cascaded in folds all over her body; ill-fitting, stretched and worn out, through overuse no doubt. Maria’s father would often sing the woman’s praises – how she fed her children well, repaired their clothes, kept a spotless home, worked hard – but the fact remained that Paloma’s mother was irritable, illiterate and limited. There. Maria had thought it again. Guilt ran a feather over her skin, causing her to shiver. Perhaps she’d judged Paloma’s mother too harshly – her father was always telling her so – but the fact remained: if she didn’t show Paloma there was another way to live, a future other than the one she saw mapped out for herself, then her dear, sweet-natured friend would slowly but surely turn into a beast of burden, just like poor old Cecilia.

And Maria wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she allowed that to happen.

‘Sit up,’ she snapped. ‘So, what do you want to do when you grow up?’ She would have a response.

Paloma rubbed her eyes and sighed.

‘If you don’t answer I’ll have to ask somebody else.’ Maria’s voice was sharp and vaguely menacing. Her eyes scanned the olive grove for possible candidates. They alighted upon a herd of goats resting under a nearby tree. She recognised her own stupidity.

Thankfully Paloma did not.

‘No, it’s fine. I’ll play,’ the gentle soul said, her tone one of quiet resignation. Two years younger than Maria, she always felt grateful the older girl had chosen her and not her sister Lola to confide in. Lola was sixteen, the same age as Maria. It would have made sense for the two older girls to be close. But they weren’t. Never had been. They were fond enough of each other, and the fact that they were opposites in every single way was not, in itself, insurmountable. But that Paloma was so easy to be with, so innocent and good-natured, made her a perfect companion. Lola’s little sister had become the little sister that Maria had always wanted. She could love and protect her, and teach her about all the great and good things in life. Lola, on the other hand, came fully formed with a tongue as sharp as a knife.

Paloma brought her chin to nestle in the curve between her knees, her black hair still curled up flat with perspiration around her face. A stray lock misbehaved and draped itself like a dark rope against the deep pink of a cheek that was soft and plump once more. If Cecilia had ever looked like this Maria could not imagine it. She leant over towards her friend and pushed the dark unruly coil back with tenderness and waited for an answer.

‘Well,’ Paloma began, unsure how to proceed. To get married was the pinnacle of her life, and the thought of a wedding with an abundance of flowers, food, finery, and all the froth that went with it, had started to fill many a quiet moment. But to admit this, Paloma knew, would displease her friend. She waited for guidance.

‘Will you have children?’ Maria asked.

‘Y-yes,’ Paloma answered. ‘Once I’m married.’

‘Why?’ Maria asked.

‘Why? Why what?’

‘Why would you get married before having children?’

Paloma’s dark brown eyes widened; Maria’s creased with satisfaction. ‘In fact,’ Maria ventured, emboldened by the surprise in Paloma’s eyes, ‘why would you get married … at all?’ Her young friend’s already wide eyes turned into the fullest of moons.

The evening before, Seňor Suarez, the village teacher who used to work in Madrid and still had family and friends in the capital, had come to eat with Maria and her father, Doctor Alvaro.

The winds of change were blowing and whistling their sinewy path around Spain and though they’d barely touched Fuentes de Andalucía in any significant way, the more travelled citizens, of which Seňor Suarez was one, often brought back stories from the outside world whenever they returned to the sleepy little village. Suarez was teacher, philosopher, and general do-er of good deeds (mostly political), and a frequent dinner guest at Maria’s home where the precarious state of the government and how to best help workers in the area were his topics of choice. But last night, as he had smiled over at Maria and realised for the first time that she was a young woman, his conversation had taken a new turn.

‘You know, in Madrid, and I hear it’s the same in Malaga, things are so very different for women now. They have more freedom. More choice.’ He’d looked over at Doctor Alvaro who’d nodded for him to continue. Suarez had already told them that night about a growing vegetarian movement in the capital. Nothing his friend had to say, Alvaro thought to himself as he chewed on a particularly gristly bit of sausage, could be more challenging for both he and his daughter to swallow than that.

But then again.

‘A woman no longer has to get married if she wants to live with a man.’

The doctor had choked on the wine he’d just poured into his mouth. He’d expected talk of work opportunities, education … not co-habitation. But he was open-minded, fair, forward-thinking; he knew his good friend to be so too. ‘Please, carry on,’ he’d spluttered, waving his hands around as he struggled to keep his eyebrows from arching.

‘And it’s true that some women no longer want to have children.’

This time it had been Maria who’d choked, though her father’s eyebrows, try as he might to stop them, now leapt up to meet his fast receding hairline. This was a strange conversation indeed. Fascinating and embarrassing for Maria in equal measure. The teacher’s words had slapped her full in the face like a wave, waking her from her romantic dreams; as they receded, she’d taken in their meaning.

‘To have or not to have children, women see it as their right, their right to choose. Times are changing.’ And with that Seňor Suarez had coughed most dramatically, prompting the doctor to slap him hastily and heartily on the back while pointing his daughter towards the door with his eyes.

Maria hovered around the old oak table, topping up wine glasses and clearing away dishes as if she hadn’t noticed.

‘How’s the reading programme going up at El Cortijo del Bosque?’ Doctor Alvaro asked his friend.

El Cortijo del Bosque was the name of the local estate owned by Don Felipe, principal employer in the area. Work on his estate was agricultural. His workers were paid a pittance. Don Felipe himself was fabulously wealthy. And that was how it had been for centuries.

But things weren’t only changing in Madrid.

In February 1936 the left-wing coalition, known as el Frente Popular, had won the general election in Spain. This had allowed the good doctor and teacher to push through much needed reforms in Fuentes de Andalucía in general, and up at El Cortijo del Bosque in particular. In the early months of the year both had worked tirelessly to secure better pay and conditions for the estate’s workers, Suarez at the negotiating table, Alvaro behind the scenes. Guido, the estate manager, represented his employer’s interests, at times most savagely. But, snarl as he might, there was little he could do against what was legal; he had the will, but not the right, to resist.

Don Felipe, the landowner, was furious of course: with Guido and with the useless lumps of flesh who worked his land and whom he thought less of than his bulls and horses. As for Suarez and Alvaro, if Guido had ever mentioned them to him he certainly didn’t care enough about them to waste his energy remembering their names; they were men of no consequence. No, he was too busy shouting abuse at Manuel Azaňa, the new prime minister, along with the motley collection of left-wing degenerates that made up the government, to take any notice of them. Don Felipe despaired. Even his beloved Falangist party, a party that believed in the true greatness of Spain, in the monarchy, the Catholic Church and centuries of tradition, was coming under attack.

Don Felipe’s Spain, the Spain he knew and loved, was disappearing.

He had no choice but to whisk his family off to their second home in Biarritz.

And thus Suarez had no choice but to seize the moment and take education to the workers so that at the next round of negotiations they would be able to help themselves. That was what he was doing presently up at El Cortijo del Bosque. And Guido could do nothing to prevent it, no matter what orders his master barked at him from the south of France. But progress was slow.

‘The truth is we need more teachers,’ Suarez had confessed.

‘The truth is very few people in the village can read,’ Alvaro had replied. The sound of a creaking door disturbed him. His eyes had shot round like a searchlight at the top of a watch tower. There, standing in the kitchen doorway, a copy of Don Quixote clutched to her body, was his daughter.

‘You can do it,’ he’d said, knowing she’d been listening to them and confident that she would relish the chance. She’d nodded, pulling back her chair to re-join them. But before her skirt could touch the rush seat her father’s voice had scooped her back up and pushed her out of the room and towards the staircase. ‘Now bed, my girl!’

‘But if I’m to help out surely I need to …’

‘Bed!’

That night Maria hadn’t minded that her attempts to stay up late had failed. She had gone to bed happy and excited. Happy that she would be helping Seňor Suarez with the reading programme, excited at what he’d told her about women in Madrid. All night ideas of choice and freedom had stampeded around in her head looking for somewhere to live.

By morning they’d found a home. The teacher’s words were now her own.

And so that was how Maria was here, under her favourite olive tree, about to take a familiar game in a new direction. Starting to feel sticky, she shook her hair, generating at most a slight, warm breeze. She cast a ‘brace yourself’ look in Paloma’s direction: her friend was about to become the testing ground for her very own liberal education project.

She repeated, as word-perfectly as she could, what Seňor Suarez had said about women, children and marriage the night before. She lingered on the phrase ‘right to choose’.

Paloma said nothing. Maria continued.

‘Seňor Suarez—’ Maria slipped in his name because Paloma liked him ‘—said that women in Madrid have more …’ The older girl paused before opening her arms out wide and shouting out ‘freedom.’ She could not have drawn any more attention to the word if she’d underlined it and decorated it with a bright red ribbon.

Paloma fell back against the tree.

‘Well, you could get married, if you want to,’ Maria backtracked. ‘But you don’t have to. That’s what I’m saying. Things are changing. Gone are the days when parents start planning a wedding the moment a boy looks at a girl.’ Paloma breathed heavily out through her nose as if by the expulsion of air alone she could find room in her head for this shocking revelation. That she dropped her head to one side suggested that she’d failed. It was far too heavy a load for her fourteen-year-old brain to manage. She looked questioningly at Maria and rubbed the back of her head as if it were a magic lamp. A light flickered in her eyes.

‘It’s true,’ Maria insisted. ‘According to Seňor Suarez, women are having babies and they aren’t even married. In Madrid. Even Malaga!’ Paloma screwed up her nose then let out a snort. Madrid and Malaga were both as alien to her as the moon and every bit as inaccessible. ‘And some women in the city don’t even want to have children. At all. Not ever,’ Maria continued. ‘That’s what Seňor Suarez says. They’d much rather have a career.’

The older girl looked up at the sky and hid herself there a while, a smile of satisfaction on her lips. She’d delivered what she told herself was her coup de grâce (a phrase she’d learnt quite recently after having found it in some book or other, and she congratulated herself on having found an opportunity to use it, even if it was inside her own head). She’d chased away all thoughts of husbands and playing children from this game of theirs.

Paloma scrunched up her eyes to scrutinise her friend more closely. Was she teasing? Admittedly, Paloma had trouble imagining a husband for herself. As she went over the list of local prospective suitors she could not deny that they were unappealing. She shuddered as she had them parade across the stage of her mind one by one. Maria liked to re-christen them, as pirates, or book characters, to make them more exciting for her friend, but even that didn’t seem to be working for Paloma at this moment in time. Perhaps, if she were lucky, she might find a husband who came from another village. Or a nearby town. She pulled herself together. She would have a husband, one day, of that she was certain. But there was no point making herself distressed by going through all candidates just yet. As for children, of course, she sighed with relief, on safer and more comforting ground, she most certainly would have them.

Maria must want them too, surely, Paloma thought to herself. ‘That girl has no sense of family!’ ‘She’s always been such a selfish girl!’ Her mother’s unfair criticisms of her friend ricocheted around the confines of Paloma’s own mind. Maria was an only child. She had no mother. Cecilia always used one or other fact as an accusation whenever Maria did anything she didn’t agree with. Although she did not like the damning place that her mother’s reasoning led her to, Paloma found her own thoughts heading in the same direction today. She knew better than to articulate them. Instead, she would enter into the spirit of the discussion.

‘If you don’t want to get married, or have children, then what does it mean to be a girl?’ Paloma wriggled with what she told herself was justifiable indignation as she asked Maria the question. Maria gnawed on her thumbnail. She hadn’t expected rebellion. ‘What indeed!’ she said, dodging the bullet. She sat back and looked up at the infinite blue of the sky yet again. ‘All I know,’ she replied at last, ‘is that I don’t want to tie myself to any man.’ She stood up and brushed the earth from her clothes. And with that she drew the game to a close.

But Paloma hadn’t finished.

‘I don’t believe you!’ she retorted, still indignant. ‘You’re in love with Ricar.’

‘Oh, don’t be so silly!’ said Maria. ‘And if you’re talking about Richard, it has a ch and a d in it. And it would help if you could learn how to pronounce his name. Properly. In English.’ And with that she walked away and headed back to the village.

‘What’s love got to do with it anyway?’ she called back over her shoulder.