María Dueñas - The Time in Between

I tried to hide my unease with another question.

“How did your husband react?”

“Ah, marvelously!” she said sarcastically. “The doctors who saw me advised me to return to England; they thought—albeit not all that optimistically—that perhaps an English hospital would be able to do something for me. And Peter could not have agreed more.”

“Thinking of what was best for you, no doubt…”

A bitter laugh prevented me from finishing my sentence.

“Peter never thinks about what’s best for anyone, querida, but himself. Sending me far away was the best possible solution, but rather than it being for my own health it was for his own well-being. He had lost all interest in me, Sira. He stopped finding me fun, I was no longer a precious trophy to take around with him to clubs, to parties, and on hunts; the pretty, fun young wife had transformed into a burdensome invalid whom he had to get rid of as quickly as possible. So the moment I was able to stand on my own two feet again, he arranged tickets for me and Johnny for England. He didn’t even deign to come with us. With the excuse that he wanted his wife to receive the best medical treatment possible, he dispatched a grievously sick woman who hadn’t yet turned twenty and a little boy barely old enough to walk. As though we were just another couple of pieces of luggage. Adiós, and good riddance, my dears.”

A couple of thick tears rolled down her cheeks. She brushed them away with the back of her hand.

“He pushed us away from him, Sira. He spurned me. He sent me to England, purely and simply to be rid of me.”

A sad silence settled between us, until she recovered her strength and went on.

“During the journey, Johnny began to have high fevers and convulsions. It turned out to be a virulent form of malaria; he would need to spend two months in the hospital to recover. My family took me in, in the meantime; my parents had also lived in India for a long time but had returned the previous year. I spent the first few months relatively peacefully, and the change of climate seemed to do me good. But then I got worse, so much so that the medical tests showed that my intestine had shrunk till it was almost totally constricted. They ruled out surgery and decided that only with absolute rest might I manage to get even a tiny bit better. That way, they thought, the organisms that were invading me wouldn’t continue advancing through the rest of my body. Do you know what that first period of rest was like?”

I didn’t know, and I couldn’t guess.

“Six months tied to a board, with leather straps holding me still, over my shoulders and my thighs. Six whole months, with its days, its nights.”

“And did you get better?”

“Very little. Then my doctors decided to send me to Leysin, in Switzerland, to a sanatorium for tuberculosis. Like Hans Castorp in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain .”

I guessed that she was talking about some book, so before she could ask me if I’d read it I encouraged her to continue with her story.

“And Peter, meanwhile?”

“He paid the hospital bills and established a routine of sending us thirty pounds a month to support us. No more than that. Absolutely nothing else. Not a letter, not a telegram, not a message via some acquaintance, or, needless to say, any intention of visiting us. Nothing, Sira, nothing at all. I never heard anything personally from him again. Until yesterday.”

“And what did you do with Johnny during that time? It must have been hard on him.”

“He was with me in the sanatorium the whole time. My parents insisted that he should stay with them, but I didn’t accept. I hired a German nanny to entertain him and take him out, but every day he ate and slept in my room. It was a rather sad experience for such a small boy, but I didn’t want him away from me for anything in the world. He’d already lost his father, in a way; it would have been too cruel to punish him further with the absence of his mother.”

“And did the treatment work?”

A little laugh lit up her face for a moment.

“They advised me to spend eight years in the sanatorium, but I was only able to bear eight months. Then I asked to be voluntarily discharged. They told me it was foolish, that it would kill me; I had to sign a million pieces of paper releasing the sanatorium from any responsibility. My mother offered to come to collect me in Paris for us to make the journey home together. And then, on that return journey, I made two decisions. The first, I wouldn’t speak of my illness anymore. The truth is, in recent years only you and Juan Luis have heard about it from me. I decided that perhaps tuberculosis might grind down my body, but it wouldn’t crush my spirit, so I chose to keep the idea that I was an invalid out of my thoughts.”

“And the second?”

“To begin a new life as though I were a hundred percent healthy. A life outside of England, away from my family and the friends and acquaintances who automatically associated me with Peter and with my chronic illness. A different life that to begin with would include only me and my son.”

“And it was then that you decided to go to Portugal…”

“The doctors recommended that I settle somewhere temperate—the south of France, Spain, Portugal, perhaps northern Morocco; somewhere between the excessive tropical heat of India and the miserable English climate. They designed a diet for me, recommended that I eat a lot of fish and little meat, relax in the sun as much as possible, not do physical exercise, and avoid emotional upsets. Then someone told me about the British colony in Estoril, and I decided that that might be as good as anywhere else. And that’s where I went.”

Now everything fitted much better into the mental map that I’d built up to understand Rosalinda. The pieces began to link to one another; they were no longer fragments of a life that were independent and hard to connect. Everything now began to make sense. I wished with all my strength that things would turn out well for her: now that I finally knew her life hadn’t all been a bed of roses, I thought her more deserving of a happy fate.

The following day I accompanied Marcus Logan to visit Rosalinda. As on the night of the Serrano reception, he came to fetch me at my house, and together we walked the streets. Something had changed between us, however. The hasty flight from the reception at the High Commission, that impulsive run through the gardens, and the leisurely walk through the shadows of the city in the small hours had somehow managed to break through my feelings of reticence toward him. Perhaps he was trustworthy, perhaps not; maybe I’d never know. But in a way, that didn’t matter to me. I knew he was making an effort to evacuate my mother; I also knew he was attentive and polite toward me, that he felt at ease in Tetouan. And that was more than enough: I didn’t need to know any more about him or try to go in any different direction, because the day of his departure wouldn’t be long in arriving.

We found her still in bed, but with a bit more color in her cheeks. She’d had the room tidied, she’d bathed, the shutters were open, and the light was gushing in from the garden. On the day after our visit she moved from the bed to a sofa. On the next she changed her silk nightgown for a flowery dress, went to the hairdresser’s, and took up the reins of her life again.

Although her health was still unsettled, she decided to make as much as she possibly could of the time she had left before her husband arrived, as though those weeks were the last she had left to live. She resumed the role of the great hostess, creating the perfect setting so that Beigbeder could devote himself to public relations in an atmosphere that was relaxed and discreet, trusting implicitly in his beloved’s efficiency. However, I never learned what many of their guests made of the fact that those gatherings were hosted by the young English lover, and that the high commissioner of the pro-German faction felt so at home at them. But Rosalinda was still active in her plans to bring Beigbeder closer to the British, and many of those less formal receptions were planned with that end in mind.