Chapter 20

Chapter 20

Violet

Flowering Beans

One of the first things she spots are the scarlet petals. There are no flowers planted in the garden but in the vegetable patch the runner-bean wigwams look like they have been painted with hundreds of red dots. She hopes this means the boys are being well fed. Vegetables. And meat maybe? Fish on a Friday.

She wonders if anyone reads to them. They are too old for fairy tales about beanstalks, but maybe they would like stories about adventures and far away countries. Perhaps she will find a book to bring them next week. She could read it to them. The nuns do not seem to be the sort of women who would curl up with a book. She wonders if they even bend.

When her mother was appointed stewardess for a shipping company, the boys went to live at the orphanage. She would be away at sea for many weeks, her mother said; it was enough that her eldest daughter had to look after her sister on her own. There had been no discussion, she wasn't given any choice in the matter. Nonetheless, she carries the burden of guilt as if she packed it herself.

No one else can see the guilt she carries; most people think she is a young mother living quietly with her daughter. She is now twenty and can pass for older, and her sister is only six, so she can see that it is an easy mistake to make. When she holds the warmth of her sister on her lap, counting out numbers on her chubby fingers, she wonders if her heart is making the same mistake, too.

Each week she visits the boys in the orphanage, reading out letters that her mother has sent. They never know when a letter will come, so sometimes she re-reads a letter two or three times, emphasising different things to reassure them.

‘She is being kept busy, but the tips are good.'

‘She says they saw dolphins yesterday following the ship. Imagine that.'

‘Now it is only three more weeks until she's back.' She tries to decipher the date in her mother's slanting handwriting– 10 th or 20 th ? August 1907. ‘This time she'll be home for two whole weeks.'

They listen as she reads, but sometimes she catches them glancing out of the window and she wonders who she is reassuring.

She is finding it hard to adjust to the quiet. She cannot believe that she ever used to dream of a peaceful day all to herself. Her world is still filled with noise– the calls in the street, banging doors, their downstairs neighbour singing or shouting as the mood takes her– but inside she feels like someone has stuffed an onion in her ear and wrapped a big muffler around her head, as her mother used to do when she had earache. Without the boys, the flat is so still; the floorboards don't bounce as they used to. When she visits her brothers, she is struck by the unnatural quiet of them. They are washed-out versions of the boys they used to be. The nuns have achieved what their mother never could: they have become as quiet as mice.

Something else has changed, too, but she can't quite put her finger on it. Her father used to talk of the feeling and rhythm of a song; he said these were a song's heartbeat, as important as the melody. She would like to hear the boys singing again to check that their hearts still beat the same.

Even her sister is quieter now. Her presence is something she has taken for granted, like her shadow, but now her sister has made friends with girls from their street and often disappears with them into another world, leaving her alone in the silent flat.

This afternoon, she is back.

‘… we were running away from a dragon with black eyes…'

She knows the dragon is the coalman who is certainly sooty but cannot, as far as she knows, fly and breath fire.

‘… we hid and made a boat out of an old tree trunk and sailed away. Dragons can't swim,' her sister recites with borrowed confidence.

But they can fly, she thinks, and tries to smile.

Her sister senses sadness in the half-smile and urges her. ‘You could come and play with us, too.'

But she knows she cannot follow her sister into this world. She has forgotten where the door is, and even if she could find it, she would be too tall to get through. She remembers her father calling her, ‘Something of a se?orita'. She wonders when she finally grew up.

She thinks back to Dia de Los Muertos, when the fragrance of incense and flowers mixed in the warm Argentinian air to welcome home the dead. Her mother told her that the gates of Heaven swung open on that day to let the souls slip through and visit their loved ones. First to come would be the children, welcomed by sweets and toys piled on family altars. Then it was the turn of the adults. Graves were scrubbed clean and houses filled with the smell of baking. In pride of place was the marigold– its colour so fierce, its fragrance so distinctive, that even the dead could not fail to notice it. Her mother said some of the souls might get lost and need guiding. Marigold petals strewn on the path would show them the way.

There is no one left to lay petals for her father and the sea would soon drown her path of flowers, so instead, in the quiet of the flat,she speaks to her father. She talks to him in Spanish, eventhough she knows he struggled with the language. Somehow she's sure he will be able to understand her, and the words that flow and spin from her remind her of when she was a little girl and ran round and round in circles just for the pleasure of it.