Jessie Burton - The Muse

‘God knows, Odelle. But it ain’t nothing to worry about. If they wanted to arrest you for something, they’d just do it here.’

Pamela had a point, as ever, and so that Thursday I went. Would I have been less terrified or more had I known that I was going to hear the final will and testament of Miss Marjorie Quick? I cannot say. The choice was made; there was only ever one path, and just as in life, Quick kept me on it from beyond the grave.

They buried her under an olive tree in the orchard. Teresa didn’t remember much about it, but she could always remember the sound of the earth being flung on top of the casket, the same earth they’d once dug together, the rainbow through the falling drops. Padre Lorenzo had left the village, so Doctor Morales led a makeshift service. Harold and Teresa stood by and watched, virtually propping each other up, and Sarah was sedated upstairs.

The doctor would not look Teresa in the eye. Did he truly believe the rumour that she’d been the one to pull the trigger? She knew what was happening in the village. Jorge, probably in a pre-emptive strike against any guilt falling on his own head, had been going around saying that he’d bet a month’s wages it was Teresa who’d shot Isaac and Olive up on the hill. She’d probably wanted to punish her brother. Teresa was sure Jorge was responsible for the shootings, but had no evidence to prove it. And in times like these, the truth was no barrier to men like Jorge. She did not sleep at night, wondering what would happen to her when people started to take Jorge at his word.

And in some ways, Teresa believed that what Jorge was saying was true. She had wanted some punishment for her brother. She had been responsible for sending Olive out, so that Olive might learn the truth about the man she considered the key to her success. Teresa came to believe that Olive had died because of her, and at night, she howled the guilt into her pillow. That Harold might hear of Jorge’s rumour was both Teresa’s greatest worry and her dearest wish. Harold might kill her in his grief — but at least it would end her misery.

In the days after Olive was buried, Harold, Sarah and Teresa moved around as if underwater. Teresa felt she was choking for the lack of air. Marbella and Alhama fell to the rebels, and still the Schlosses did not move. It was not until a 500-kilo bomb killed fifty-two people in one building in Malaga, and at the Regina Hotel a girl lost both her legs on the eve of her wedding day, that the family shook the stupor off their grief.

The naval bombardment was stepping up, as were the aerial attacks. There were five warships in the waters round Fuengirola. In Malaga, they reported, there was no longer anyone in control, nobody in authority. No public services, no organization whatsoever. The militia were half-crazed, there was no electricity, no trams, no police. Madrid looked like a picnic after its air attacks, they said, compared to Malaga.

‘We must leave,’ Teresa told Harold. ‘Please. Isaac is dead, and half of the village already think that I am guilty — how will I ever live?’

‘You’ll survive,’ he said.

‘Please, señor, I have worked hard. I am innocent.’

He looked at her. ‘Are you?’

Teresa held his gaze. ‘Señor. I have always kept your secret.’

She watched the comprehension dawning on Harold’s face, keeping her own expression neutral, although her heart was thumping. She had no choice. ‘Señor,’ she went on, ‘would your wife keep you in money if she knew about the German?’

‘We’re taking Teresa out of Spain,’ Harold said to his wife, the very next day. ‘It is the least we can do. She will go on Olive’s papers.’

‘Fine,’ Sarah said, unwilling to catch Teresa’s eye. Teresa knew full well that Sarah had her own good reasons to wish her far away, but Teresa held Sarah’s secret too, and so the Englishwoman said nothing.

*

It was a cold afternoon when they left. They were a strange reconfiguration, the most fractured trio on that ship — and that was saying something. There was no glamour in departure to echo the way that they’d arrived; the sky a sheet of changing greys, the sea beyond unending. The noise of the rusty chains loosening from the quay at Malaga caused in Teresa a monstrous sort of happiness. For under her sense of relief that she was leaving, she felt already the pulse of guilt. She had paid her escape with Olive’s blood.

Her own expression was mirrored in the faces of the other passengers, as the land began to diminish and thin. It was a bitter miracle. They’d done it; they’d got away, but at the same time they hadn’t, of course they hadn’t. Teresa knew that part of her would never be able to leave.

She had never been on a ship; she’d only ever known the land. Harold said the vessel was called a destroyer . Teresa thought of her ruined notebook, of how blackly apt an English noun could be. She gripped the rail, resisting the desire to jump, to plunge into the churning waters. It was so many colours, the sea; mud and milk, slate and leaf, and bronze when the light caught the crest of a wave — and at times, where it was still settled beyond, where the bows had not carved through it, a purer blue. Teresa realized that over the months, she’d come to understand how many colours there were that she had never noticed. She wanted the wind to whip her face, to sting and numb her, but it wasn’t happening. No force of nature could erase her.

She thought again about the morning they found Olive. Harold still didn’t know why Olive had gone out into the darkness the night before. In his grief to flee, to get out of this hellhole, his daughter dead, he didn’t stop to wonder why Olive might have been out there in the first place. He didn’t consider that other members of his family might also be looking for love, for some purpose or salvation in another person. But when that morning had dawned, and Olive didn’t come down to breakfast, Sarah and Teresa looked at one another, and assumed between them that silence on this matter would be better. So it remained.

The initial, mild discomfort of that morning had turned to horror, as Harold, realizing his daughter was missing, had taken the car out and found her body on the hillside. An hour later the women heard his motor again, the clang of the gate as he clipped it with the car, Olive’s body lolling on the back seat. Harold staggered towards the women, his daughter in his arms. I’m taking her with us , he’d said, his voice oddly dull, as if he were miles away, speaking down the tunnel of his own body. At the sight of her dead child, Sarah had broken down.

Now, trying to recall all this, forcing herself to face it in order to carry on — Teresa could only remember fragments of these moments. It was the physical that stuck with her; the thud of her knees sinking to the ground, the taste of the cheap acorn coffee coming up her throat as she vomited onto the flagstones. The touch of Olive’s body. White-skinned but bluish, stiff and bloodstained, three gunshot wounds visible through her jumper.

‘She called this place home,’ Sarah had said, slurring, hours later, the three of them sitting in the front east room. Harold was drunk, Sarah was on some pill or other. It was a living nightmare. They had placed Olive’s body in the kitchen, the coldest part of the house, at the back. ‘We must bury her here,’ Sarah whispered, haggard with grief.

‘What happened to my brother?’ Teresa asked. Sarah covered her face with her hands.

‘Jorge came for him,’ said Harold. ‘I only carried Olive.’

‘ Jorge? ’ said Teresa. ‘Where did he take him?’

‘I don’t know.’