The Liverpool Basque Read online

  ‘Like Canada.’ Sharon bit into another piece of toast with strong, even teeth.

  He agreed. She looked much healthier than she had done when Veronica had brought her to his house, and he was glad. Her fair skin had acquired a slight tan, and her blonde hair was blowing in a wild tangle in the wind. She wasn’t exactly pretty, but she had a pleasant open look about her and her figure had a cuddly roundness which reminded him of his mother. She was very likeable, he decided. Easy to talk to.

  ‘I’ve got to get to work,’ she told him briskly, and his wise eyes nearly vanished amid the wrinkles, as he smiled goodbye to her.

  The next time he saw her she was seated on a huge log on the beach, staring disconsolately out on to a placid pale-blue sea. She was obviously crying, her shoulders heaving under her sweater.

  He hesitated in embarrassment. They were the only people on the shore that morning. She must have felt sure of her solitude to cry so openly, he debated uncertainly with himself. Should he go to her or not?

  Aware of a sense of inadequacy at the idea of dealing with a young woman’s tears, he decided to avoid invading her privacy, so he curved up the beach to pass well behind her. He was sure that she had not noticed him, but the crunch of pebbles under his feet drew her attention, and she turned a woebegone face towards him. She lifted a hand in slow salute and, embarrassed, he waved back, continuing to plod slowly on his chosen route.

  She quickly took a paper handkerchief out of her pocket and wiped her face and blew her nose. He had only just passed her when she shouted, ‘Are you walking home?’

  He stopped, and nodded his head a little guiltily.

  ‘Wait a minute, and I’ll walk with you.’

  ‘I’m rather slow,’ he called back. Though her distress troubled him, he hoped she would change her mind and allow him to go on walking alone. She ran lightly over the pebbles, however, until she reached him.

  He looked her up and down in a bemused way. She had cried enough to make her face swollen and her eyes mournful; yet she did not seem to want to hide it. ‘I guess you didn’t hurt yourself, if you can run like that,’ he remarked tentatively, to give her an opening if she wished to explain her distress.

  As she fell into step alongside him, she asked with a tight, wry grimace, ‘You mean you thought I was crying because I’d fallen or something?’

  He considered her query, and then said, ‘Well, I didn’t know. I didn’t want to intrude. I thought I should let you be.’

  She sighed. ‘I’m OK. I was feeling a bit down, that’s all – a bit lonely in a new place, I guess.’

  Walking on pebbles was tiring him, and he wished he had taken the path at the top of the cliff. ‘You’re working in the new ward at the hospital, I think Veronica mentioned?’

  ‘The Palliative Care Unit? Yes.’

  ‘Patients who are going to die are put in there? Must be hard on you.’

  ‘Not really.’ She went on to tell him how worthwhile she thought her work was. Her enthusiasm surprised him.

  Though he was interested in what she was saying, he began to feel that he must sit down to rest; there was an unpleasant tightness in his chest. He stopped, and said, ‘At the top of the cliff staircase here, there’s a little park kiosk that sells coffee. Would you like a cup?’ He was panting slightly and his speech came slowly. ‘We have to get up the cliff, somewhere, to get home.’

  She looked at him with concern. ‘Could you climb the steps all right?’

  ‘If I do a few at a time.’

  She was immediately practical. ‘Let’s sit on the bottom steps for a few minutes – until you get your breath.’

  Manuel thankfully sat down suddenly on the steps, and they listened to the waves lapping on the beach for about ten minutes. Then she asked, ‘Have you seen your doctor lately?’

  Manuel’s mouth turned up in a quick grin; he was feeling better. ‘Saw him in the winter. He always says the same thing – you’re in great shape – for your age! He’s a nice kid.’

  She laughed. A wonderful old dear, gentle to the point of passivity.

  She judged him wrongly. Manuel was feeling a little exhausted – but he was cussing inwardly at his weakness. He got slowly to his feet, and looked down at her quite blankly. What was the girl’s name? For the life of him, he could not recall it.

  Unaware of his dilemma, she took his hand to help him up the wooden staircase.

  ‘I’m all right,’ he told her a trifle peevishly, and she quickly withdrew her hand. Old people could be quite tetchy about being helped, she knew.

  Over coffee and muffins, which he insisted on paying for, he sat quietly for a few minutes, thinking that Jack Audley would be highly amused when he told him that he had, that morning, taken a bright young thing out to coffee!

  ‘Why were you crying?’ he finally asked her baldly, and then felt that he was being inquisitive and should not have said anything. She answered him without hesitation, however, and told him, ‘We lost a patient last night, not unexpectedly. It was her widowed daughter’s reaction that got me. She had lived with her mother for years. She’s got no children; and she was beside herself.’ She paused, her expression desolate. ‘I guess I could relate to her feeling of being bereft.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘The feeling that nobody is left to care what happens to you.’

  ‘Tush. A bright young woman like you must have lots of friends – and even parents still alive!’ He tried to sound cheering.

  Sharon bit her lower lip. ‘Well, you see I’m divorced, and I don’t have any kids – and Mum and Pop live in Florida; I’m their only child.’ She sighed. ‘When I was married, I went to live in Toronto. My husband wasn’t the social type, so we didn’t make any friends to speak of. I was a fool to marry him. We weren’t really suited to each other from day one.’

  He nodded understandingly. ‘So what brought you here?’

  ‘Well, I need to work – and I’m a qualified nurse. I saw the ad for this job at the hospital, and applied. When I was a very little girl, I lived here – and it’s such a truly beautiful place. I’m glad I came – but I’ve got to start again, making friends.’ She smiled suddenly, and said, ‘At least I’ve made one, haven’t I?’

  Manuel gave a little chuckle. ‘Of course,’ he assured her. Loneliness makes strange bedfellows, he thought with amusement; then decided hastily that ‘bedfellows’ was not quite the word – not at your age, old boy, he told himself.

  She caught the smile that flicked across his face. ‘Now, what are you laughing at?’ she demanded, smiling herself.

  ‘I don’t think I can explain it to you,’ he replied with a chuckle. Then he laughed.

  Laughter is infectious and soon they were giggling like a couple of children, about nothing.

  Nevertheless, when he got home, he was thankful to crawl on to his bed. But he was still smiling to himself.

  Chapter Eleven

  In June 1914, Rosita announced that she wanted Pedro’s family to see Francesca, who was their first granddaughter; Pedro himself was at sea, but to Juan and Micaela it seemed a good opportunity to take a holiday, so a visit to Spain was arranged. Little Manuel was thrilled.

  Juan tried to persuade Maria to accompany them. ‘You could go up into the mountains with Rosita to visit the Echaniz family, while your grandmother and I are in Bilbao. It would do you good to breathe mountain air,’ he told her.

  Maria was feeling a little better and, at first, had been tempted to make the journey. Then, when she discovered that the family would be travelling by sea, she said she could not face being seasick.

  Though horribly disappointed, Micaela said she would remain at home to care of her.

  Rosita looked at her mother’s bent, tired figure and, at first, said nothing; instead, she went to see Bridget Connolly next door. Rosita often looked after Mary and Joey, when their mother was helping to nurse a sick neighbour or delivering a baby. Now, she asked a favour on Micaela’s behalf.

  Wou
ld Bridget keep an eye on Maria, if Micaela went to Spain for three weeks in July? If Bridget could watch her during the day and cook for her, she thought that Mrs Saitua’s daughter, Panchika, could be persuaded to sleep overnight in the Barinèta home and give Maria a bit of breakfast.

  ‘Panchika doesn’t have to be at work till eight o’clock,’ she explained to Bridget. ‘She’s got a daily job as a cook-general in a fine house in Princes Road, with very nice people.

  ‘Maria can get herself to the can in the yard, now,’ she added. ‘And she can keep a fire going, if someone’ll bring in the coal for her and start it each morning. And she can wash her hands and face at the kitchen sink. But she’s not strong enough to stand and cook – or go to the shops, or anything like that.’

  Bridget was seated by her own fire, sipping a mug of vintage tea – it had been simmering on the hob for hours. At Rosita’s suggestion, she nodded her head; her black hair was done up in untidy, coiled plaits, from which the hairpins constantly threatened to fall out; before answering Rosita, she absently pushed one back into her hair.

  Plump, patient and very knowledgeable about the needs of the sick, she looked up at her neighbour, and said, ‘Oh, aye, I could do that, if you could manage to pay for the food I’d give her. It’d only be the price of a potato or two and what we’re havin’ ourselves – me housekeeping won’t stretch to feed another.’ At the latter statement, her voice was full of apology.

  ‘I’d get the coal up from the cellar for her, Mam,’ her daughter Mary volunteered; she had been listening avidly to what Rosita had had to say. ‘And I could chop some wood chips for her every day – and put it all in the hearth. It wouldn’t take a minute, then, for Panchika to make her fire for her.’

  Panchika Saitua, a grumbling, middle-aged spinster, was ordered by her mother to sleep in her neighbour’s bedroom and to get up half an hour earlier, so that she could build Maria’s fire for her and give her tea and bread and margarine for breakfast.

  Although she had not seen so much of her since she had been in service, Panchika knew Maria quite well; her working day was long and exacting and the idea of making the effort to visit someone, except, perhaps, on her Sunday off once a month, filled her with added gloom.

  In the event, however, she thoroughly enjoyed her time with Maria, away from under her mother’s thumb. They spent an hour or two each evening before bedtime contentedly commiserating with each other; so much so, that, even after the family returned from Spain, Panchika discovered that she could endure to walk down the road in her carpet slippers, in the late evening, for an hour’s visit to Maria.

  Maria was very appreciative of her visits, and missed her sorely when she failed to let herself in and come through to Rosita’s busy kitchen, to sink on to the chair by the old sofa, and gasp, ‘Ee! Me pore feet!’

  Once the trip to Bilbao had been arranged, the family looked forward to it very much. The summer of 1914 was a gorgeous one and they could hope for a pleasantly calm passage. Grandma included in the food basket a gift of fresh eatables for the crew, whose diet was very monotonous. The present was much appreciated.

  It was clear that Juan enjoyed such temporary returns to sea. It gave him a fresh audience of younger Basques, to whom he could relate stories of his early days sailing before the mast, when they had none of these new-fangled steam engines. ‘Seamanship was seamanship, in those days,’ he told them. ‘Rounded the Horn four times, I did, in storms like you’d never believe – and the cold!’ He shuddered.

  This time, one young man told him, with equal pride, that he’d gone through the Panama Canal on an experimental voyage the previous year. ‘We were scared stiff,’ he said, ‘because we were afraid landslides would block us in, and we’d die of fever if we had to come out overland.’

  ‘Oh, aye. You’re right about the fever. That canal’s a waste of good money. Whole crews’ll get fever going through it – like the navvies building it get sick and die.’

  When they arrived in Bilbao, they were met by Juan Barinèta’s brother, who looked even tougher and older than Juan himself. Little Manuel viewed him with awe. Rosita said he worked in an iron foundry, and that that accounted for the mass of white scars that crisscrossed his hairy arms, his hands and his face. ‘They’re from burns,’ she explained.

  Great-uncle was a widower. His two single daughters looked after him; they also took care of Uncle Agustin, Rosita’s brother, when he was in port or out of work. Both young women did piecework at home, and their eyes were black-rimmed and bloodshot from long hours spent peering at the silk shawls they embroidered. They were gentle creatures, who, much to Manuel’s annoyance, adored baby Francesca and presented her with an exquisitely embroidered bonnet which they had made for her. They patted him on his head and exclaimed at how much he had grown; then they encouraged him to go out into the street to play with another small boy, who had wandered in from next door, to stare at the new arrivals.

  In the narrow, medieval street sloping down to the river Nervión, he felt, at first, closed in, and unnerved at facing a number of strange urchins, who looked him over as if he were a peculiar animal of some kind. When the boys discovered, however, that he had never tried to play pelota vasca, they produced a rock-hard ball and showed him how to hit it against a wall with his bare hands. They approved of him when he bore stoically the pain of it, and he was almost overwhelmed by their friendly advice and instruction; he went back to his great-uncle’s house with several self-appointed coaches in tow, and badly bruised hands.

  Before the evening meal, his hands were washed and regretfully cooed over by his two second cousins. Grandpa laughed, and said they would soon toughen up; he showed Manuel two of his fingers which had been disjointed when he had played as a young man.

  At the end of a week, he was leaping about in front of the wall with the same abandonment – and lack of finesse – as the other youngsters. Then he was told that he and his mother and Francesca would be going up into the mountains to see Grandpa and Grandma Echaniz, while Juan and Micaela remained in Bilbao.

  As a baby and a toddler, he had already made three journeys to Spain, but he had few clear recollections of them. Going first by train and then in a rickety donkey cart up narrow roads into the foothills was a new adventure. He tucked his small aching hands underneath his jersey, and was relieved not to have to play pelota that day.

  Grandpa and Grandma Echaniz were younger than Micaela and Juan Barinèta, and Little Manuel noted that they did not talk so much. They greeted the little family, however, with bear hugs and kind kisses; small in stature, sun-burned and stolid, they were not otherwise particularly demonstrative, but it was obvious that they were fond of their beautiful daughter-in-law and very taken by Francesca’s blue eyes and red hair.

  Rosita explained to Manuel that, once upon a time, his father had had two brothers to play with up here in the mountains, but they were now with God. Later, Manuel felt that perhaps the loss of her two middle sons accounted for Grandma Echaniz’s affection for himself. She took him into the big living-room of their wooden house and made him her special companion. He had a great time, helping to punch down bread dough and learning how to milk a cow – he had stood, astonished, watching a pail slowly fill with milk. His grandmother let him try to milk a particularly patient cow; and he was wild with excitement when he managed to spray himself with milk. She gave him a small basket and showed him where to find eggs from the hens and ducks. He was warned not to go too close to a nanny-goat tethered to a tree in case she butted him. He discovered with amazement that she also produced milk.

  The donkey lived under the house, in a small stable, next to a series of storerooms, though, since it was summertime, it was left to graze in a little field near the house; his grandfather amused him by giving him a ride on it occasionally.

  While Rosita sat on the high front steps in the sun and nursed Francesca, Grandpa Echaniz took him, one morning, further up the mountain to see his father’s surviving elder brother, Uncle Vicen
te, who was shepherding the family’s flock of sheep. The climb made all the aches he had acquired playing pelota ache a lot more.

  At first, he was nervous of the sheep, which looked quite large to him, despite the fact that they had been sheared of their winter coats. The bellwether ram lifted its nose out of a weed patch and looked him up and down with cold brown eyes. Then, satisfied, it returned to its grazing. When Manuel moved, the other sheep bounced away from him, towards the bellwether, whose bell tinkled as he led the flock a little away from the strangers.

  They approached a series of rough shelters, fronted by a stone hut, but could not find Vicente. While his grandfather looked for him further up the mountain, Manuel turned to look back along the path they had just traversed.

  Far below him lay the valley dark with trees, interspersed with tiny fields nearly ready for harvesting. From the chimneys of toy houses curled the smoke from kitchens like Grandma’s. He could see a whole village, with a church spire, and a road winding through it. It was very quiet, except for the occasional jingle of the bellwether’s bell and the shush-shush of the sheep as they followed him. To a child brought up amid the constant racket of machinery and traffic, it felt unearthly, and he was relieved when Uncle Vicente shouted that he was coming down; he had been sitting on a promontory further up, from which he could see the whole flock at a glance. When Manuel looked up, he saw a tall, lanky man coming slowly down towards his grandfather, who had climbed a little way to meet him. From under the man’s black beret fell the same golden hair as his father had, and the sun glinted on his beard, stained with tobacco smoke just as his father’s was.

  Vicente greeted his father, and then came running down the slope towards Manuel. He flung down his staff and picked the boy up to toss him in the air with a friendly shout. Then he put him down on his feet again, and, while he held the child’s hand, he looked into his face. ‘You look exactly like my mother,’ he announced. ‘Her dark hair and eyes. Doesn’t he, Dad?’