The Continental Affair (eBook)

Before

She had wanted to see the Alhambra.

That was how it had begun. Sitting at the kitchen table, only moments after the death of her father, and her first opportunity for freedom, for escape, right there before her. She had looked down at the money – near forty pounds, a vast amount, all things considered – and known that it was not the proper reaction. She was supposed to be feeling grief, shock, even. She was supposed to be planning. There were the coroners to be summoned, payments for the funeral to be made. Bills long past due that couldn’t be avoided much longer. And here was near forty pounds. With that, she could do all those things – she could pay off their debts, she could hold her father a proper funeral – not that he deserved one – and she could continue in the same house that she had lived in all her life, continue in the same job at the same factory that she had worked in since she was school-age, when it became apparent that her father’s disability war pension would not get them far. She could do it – nothing had to change if she did not want it to.

But of course she did.

She had always wanted it to, locked away in her father’s house, imprisoned, as she had often felt, like those heroines in the books she had read as a child. She had spent too many years in the servitude of a man who had never said thank you, had never smiled, had only taken it for granted that she had nowhere else to go, no money to begin again, that she was a woman, and that meant certain things in a world dictated by men. And so she had pushed aside thoughts of duty, of honor.

Instead, she thought of Spain.

She thought of Madrid and that red-roofed Moorish city called Granada that she had once read about as a child, and she decided, in that moment, her father’s cold body in the room above growing slowly colder still, that she would like to see it, that she would like to walk its marbled floors, would like to see the sweep of the Sierra Nevada from one of its many balconies.

Louise had turned twenty-eight years old the week before, and the thought of continuing on in that same vein for another twenty-eight more made her ill. It might be terrible, but then she was terrible, she knew. And that was why, sitting at the table, the lights turned off in a bid to lower that month’s electric bill, she had decided: she would take the money, though it wasn’t hers to spend, and she would go to Granada to see the Alhambra.

Louise made two telephone calls from the village telephone box, asking the operator to first connect her to a travel agent so that she could book a room at the Alhambra Palace Hotel, in Granada, Spain. It was an extravagance, but standing in the dimly lit country lane, it all felt a bit surreal, like something that would never happen, so that when she was finally connected, she found herself emboldened by the seeming impossibility of it, booking a room for three nights instead of just the one she had planned. When they asked for a name, she paused, thought of the book she had only just set aside.

‘Virginie,’ she said. ‘Virginie Varens.’ It seemed silly to use an alias, particularly one that could be found within the pages of a book, but she figured it was unlikely that anyone would notice, that anyone would be bothered to check. Surely people booked into hotels all the time with false names. In fact, it seemed a thing that people most likely did in the real world, and Louise was thrilled to finally be a part of it, in however small a way.

The second call she made was to book a flight to Madrid with British European Airways for the following morning. Louise packed only a few items in a suitcase that she had never had occasion to use. Two pairs of trousers, two blouses, a skirt, as well as a pair of stockings that had been mended several times before. At the last minute she added one of the bottles she had taken from her father’s room weeks earlier – a nearly full prescription for Luminal tablets. It was already past its expiry date, and she didn’t think they even prescribed them anymore, but she had been having trouble sleeping and had started to take a tablet here or there to help settle her down at night or soothe her nerves during the day. Sometimes she took several, reasoning that they were old and not as effective. Finally, she added her passport and the money.

The next day, Louise boarded an airplane and flew – across the English Channel, across the Bay of Biscay – all for the purpose of being able to stand within the thirteenth-century palace, to look out over the sweeping mass of the Sierra Nevada and feel something more than the drudgery of her daily life had ever allowed, weighed down as it had been by her father’s illness and her mother’s absence. She did not allow herself to think about what would happen when her shillings were gone, her pence spent.

She would figure it out later, she told herself.

In Madrid, Louise ate gambas and boquerones con anchoas, drank cana and vermut. She wandered streets with names she could not pronounce, stumbling upon an open-air market, where she was told by one of the sellers, in halting English, that the street used to run with blood when the slaughterhouses would transport animals to the tanneries in the city. He told her the market’s official name in Spanish, before translating it to English – a trail of blood – and Louise found herself unable to look away from the ground underneath her. At night, she favored the same tavern, one that had, in turn, once been favored by Hemingway.

It was small and dark, and she would always occupy a seat in the back, sipping sherry – the only drink they served there – poured straight from the wooden barrels displayed just behind the bar. She laughed often those nights, felt more herself than she ever had. Her third time there, she ordered a carafe of oloroso and a plate of mojama, took up her place in the back, avoiding eye contact, avoiding conversation, and feeding most of the dark-red strips to the cat who had settled beside her. She wore a pair of new stockings that she had purchased in Marks and Spencer before her flight for five shillings and six pence. At the end of the night, she found she didn’t want to be alone anymore, allowed herself to be led through the Latin Quarter and into the bed of a man whose name she could not recall in the morning.

Afterward, she left quietly, walked to the Plaza Mayor, found a place just on its outskirts, tucked away from the more crowded restaurants, and ordered a cana and plate of calamares fritos, despite the early hour. Her lips shone with grease. She had eighteen pounds remaining in her purse.

The next day, she boarded a bus headed farther south.

She knew her decision to leave, to take the money, might have seemed strange to others – callous, perhaps – but then, even as a child, Louise couldn’t bring herself to want what others wanted, to do what others expected. She couldn’t manage to see the future as anything but a sentence waiting to be served. Don’t think so hard, her mother used to tell her, before she left, abandoning her husband and daughter, before she disappeared from the country lanes of their village and into the unknown rues and arrondissements of Paris. Don’t think so hard, it will only make it worse.

Louise could argue that her mother had done the exact opposite – had thought her way out of their small existence and into another life – but by the time she realized the contradiction, her mother had been gone several years already. Louise often wondered whether her mother, wherever she was, was still terribly unhappy. Most days, Louise hoped she was, but on others, she decided that she couldn’t blame her. After all, she had married a man who had promised her a different type of life, but who instead had come back from the war with his body broken and aching, his mind, too, so that all at once their life became something else entirely.

Gone was any possibility of adventure, the money no longer enough to take her far away. And as for weekend breaks to London, well, her father disliked them because of the crowds, because of the filth, because of the grime. And then his injury from the war had worsened, his legs failing altogether, and he had lost his job. The money had become less and the burden more. He had trapped her in the house, just as he would eventually trap Louise. The wheelchair meaning he was dependent on her, meaning she couldn’t move if he did not say so, her whole life, her whole being, wrapped up in his pain. So no, Louise didn’t blame her for leaving – she only blamed her for leaving her behind.

After her mother left, Louise had lost herself in books, the only evidence of her mother’s existence, the fraying spines left over from her mother’s own youth. Louise would hide herself away and read – devouring the words eagerly, greedily, imagining others who had read these same words and feeling angry, somehow, at being forced to share the experience with them, wanting to keep it solely hers and hers alone. Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra had been a particular favorite. That a place could hold...