Tell the Moon to Come Out Read online

  Something was coming. Nick felt uneasy. It could be the sergeant and his mate out on the hunt for them. His absence might have been discovered. Isabel’s, too. Could they have really managed to escape without being heard? It all seemed too simple. How had Isabel managed to get the key? And his bedroll and knapsack?

  A vehicle came into view, its headlights fanning the road in front of it. It looked greyish in colour and was very much like an army truck.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ whispered Isabel. ‘They won’t be looking for us.’

  How could she be so sure? Her father might have phoned the nearest army base and asked them to put their security forces on alert as there was a spy on the run with his daughter.

  They were about to leave their cover when they heard another vehicle coming. In the next fifteen minutes ten more army trucks rattled past. They must be on manoeuvres. Isabel and Nick waited another five minutes before they risked crossing, then they did it at top speed.

  On the other side of the road the campo became more undulating and Nick realized from the strain on the backs of his legs that they were gaining altitude little by little. After a while they dropped down again, to a river bed. There was some water in this one, not a great deal, but enough to make them take off their shoes to ford it. Crossing through water was said to throw a dog off your scent. With luck it would thwart the wolfhound with the red eyes and evil fangs.

  Nick was forced to stop at intervals to rest. As the night progressed the intervals became longer and more frequent. On one occasion when he lay down he thought he would never get up again, but he did. He felt as if Isabel was transmitting her strength to him, willing him forwards.

  Most of the time there were tracks to follow, though every now and then they ran out and the terrain became wilder, strewn with boulders and stunted trees. Nick wondered if Isabel could possibly know where she was going in this dark wilderness. She was pressing on as if she had an end in sight, hesitating only when they came to a fork in the paths. She’d stop, frown, then say, ‘Yes, I’m sure this is the right one.’

  In more fertile parts they passed scattered habitations, small farmhouses mostly. Only one of them showed a light, and this they gave a wide berth. Near another a dog began to howl as if warning its masters of impending danger. They lay low until it had ceased.

  They talked very little, even when they stopped, needing to conserve every bit of energy. On one stop Nick took the last of his painkillers.

  ‘I have a couple more for you in my bag,’ said Isabel. ‘I got them from Marina. And some dressings. I’m sure your hand must need to be cleaned up.’ So she had let Marina into their secret.

  They moved on again. The sky was gradually taking on colour.

  ‘Not much further,’ said Isabel. ‘I’d hoped to make it before dawn but I don’t think we will quite.’

  And then it was sunrise, with the great orange ball edging up over the horizon, climbing gradually higher and higher to flood the sky with light. It looked so beautiful they had stop. Nick was able to see Isabel clearly now and he saw that she had cast off her mourning in favour of a blue cotton dress.

  By the time the sky had become a calm azure blue, the same colour as her dress, they had arrived at their destination. Ahead of them, on the slope of a hillside, lay a ruined shepherd’s hut, with no other building in sight, nor any sheep either.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Isabel. ‘Our fonda.’ Their lodging house.

  Nick staggered the last few metres and then he collapsed.

  ‘You can rest now,’ said Isabel. ‘We shall be safe here.’

  One wall of the hut had partially crumbled away and the door hung loose, half off its hinges, but the roof was more or less intact. There were no windows – the door when open served as one. Isabel took a stick and began beating about the straw-littered earth floor, to make sure that no snakes were lurking. Then she put down their blankets and laid out the food she had brought with her.

  ‘We can’t eat too much. We have to make it last. You won’t be fit to move on for a day or two.’

  ‘How did you know this place?’

  ‘I used to come here with my brother Juan. It was our hideaway.’

  ‘It’s a long way from the village.’

  ‘That’s what we liked about it. It took us almost half the morning to get here, and half the evening to get back. We were faster, of course, and we were fit and didn’t have heavy packs to carry. We came in summer, when the evenings were long. We walked a lot in the campo together, Juan and I.’ Isabel’s voice dropped and she gazed out through the open doorway.

  Nick now asked the question he’d been bursting to ask all night. ‘How did you get the key of the cell?’

  ‘It’s kept in a locked cupboard in my father’s office and the key is kept in the drawer of his desk, which is always left unlocked. He doesn’t expect anyone to come breaking into his office.’

  Maybe not anyone, but what about his daughter? Nick could imagine his rage when he found out. It would be terrifying.

  ‘But how did you get into the station itself? It must have been locked.’

  ‘I took the key from the table in his bedroom.’

  ‘Did he not notice?’

  ‘He was sleeping.’

  ‘But weren’t you worried he’d wake up? Or your mother?’

  ‘No.’ Isabel took an olive and bit into it. ‘I knew they wouldn’t. My mother has to take sleeping draughts so that she can sleep. They both drink warm milk before going to bed. I put a draught in his milk too.’

  ‘Wow!’ It was all Nick could think to say. ‘What about Pedro, or does he sleep soundly anyway?’

  ‘I gave him one as well, to make certain.’

  ‘And the dog?’

  ‘I gave him double.’

  Now Nick had to laugh.

  ‘I had to be sure he would sleep for a long time. He’s such a nasty brute.’

  ‘And what about the constable?’

  ‘He was on duty. My father had told me to take him in a cup of coffee earlier. I gave him a draught too. By the time I came back he was asleep.’

  ‘Isabel, you are wonderful!’ Nick then wanted to know how her father had found him in the cave. ‘Was it Pedro?’

  ‘I thought I’d been able to buy him off but he didn’t go away, he hung around watching us. And when he saw you kissing me he went wild. He waited until I left you, then he came after me. He asked me how I’d dared let one of the enemy kiss me. I told him you were not an enemy but he didn’t believe me; he went running home ahead of me.’

  ‘What did your father do to you? Did he beat you? He did, didn’t he? Isabel, I am so sorry. And it’s all because of me!’

  ‘My bruises will heal, just as yours will.’

  They might have scars to show for it afterwards, though. Nick covered his face with his hands. He could accept that he might have scars but he couldn’t bear to think that Isabel would as well. She had suffered too much on his behalf.

  ‘Don’t blame yourself, Nick. Please! You mustn’t. It won’t help.’

  He took his hands away to look at her. ‘You are so strong, Isabel. How were you able to do all those things?’

  ‘Nick,’ she said, ‘I don’t think you realize just what the war has done to all of us.’

  Fifteen

  They slept for several hours, making up for sleep lost overnight. Nick wakened to find the hut empty and Isabel’s blanket neatly rolled up on the floor. For a moment he panicked, thinking she’d gone, but then he told himself that she wouldn’t have left her bedding behind. He struggled to the door. There was no sign of her. She might have gone to a spring, but no, the water-bottles were there, and when he lifted his he found it to be full. She must have been to the spring already.

  She didn’t come back until late in the afternoon and by then he was anxious. He was worried that something might have happened to her. He was worried that her father might somehow have found her, that the dog might not have slept all day and tracked their scen
t, in spite of their having crossed water.

  ‘I just wanted to be up on the hill for a while.’ Alone, she meant. In her hand she had a small posy of yellow and lilac flowers which she held to her face. She was much quieter than he had known her and he felt she had withdrawn from him.

  She dressed his hand, they ate, and afterwards sat at the door to watch the sun go down. They spoke a little, commenting on the sunset, the heaviness of the air. Nick wondered if it might be the sultry weather that was affecting Isabel. He felt as if the air was pressing down on his own skull. He was not used to such heat. He preferred the cooler breezes of northern Scotland in summer. But perhaps Isabel’s change of mood had nothing at all to do with the weather. Perhaps she was regretting what she had done. She had burned her boats, after all. It would be impossible for her to go home now, probably ever.

  The sky in the west had turned a molten red and ochre, smudged with long trails of purple cloud. It was a troubled, menacing sky.

  ‘I wish it would break,’ said Nick, trying to dry his forehead with the back of his hand. He felt hot and sticky and there were mosquitoes about. They were attacking him as if with little sharp knives, whereas they seemed to leave Isabel alone.

  ‘A storm will come,’ she said. ‘Later.’

  They were woken in the early hours of the morning by loud claps of thunder and frantic flashes of forked lightning. The storm raged for two hours. Nick had never seen such a violent one; it was as if someone up there was bent on destroying the earth. It was disturbing and frightening, yet, at the same time, enthralling. Gradually the thunder moved further and further away until it was only a rumble in the distance. And then came the rain, torrential, unremitting, blinding, shutting them off from the outside world.

  ‘There will be flash floods,’ said Isabel. ‘In the dried-up river beds.’

  Nick knew that flash floods could be dangerous; they were capable of sweeping away houses, villages, people, animals, anything in their path. This was a country of extremes. Extremes of intense heat and freezing cold, of drought and deep floods. Extremes of passion, too. Nick knew that from his father, who was much more volatile than his mother, and more impulsive. When he had decided to go off to fight in Spain’s Civil War he had wanted to leave immediately. Nick and his mother had gone to see him off at the railway station. He remembered the terrible moment when his father had put his head out of the window to wave for the last time and the aching sense of emptiness he’d been left with when, finally, the train, chugging slowly, had disappeared round the bend, taking his father away.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ his mother had said.

  They had gone home and stayed there until, in March this year, they had heard that the Civil War had ended, and then they had set off for France.

  Nick sat in the tiny stone hut with all these memories and thoughts drifting through his mind, watching the curtain of rain falling. At home, it seldom rained all day; it might be wet in the morning but would clear up later. This rain looked set for the day.

  He turned his head to look at Isabel. She was crying.

  ‘What is it? What’s wrong, Isabel?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘You must tell me!’

  ‘I’m worried about my mother.’ He could only just make out what she was saying above the drumming of the rain.

  He moved closer but did not touch her. The only thing he could think to say was that he was sorry, and that would sound lame. And he had said it before.

  ‘I feel terrible that I’ve left her. She needs me.’

  Guilt consumed Nick again, like a fiery furnace. If Isabel had not met him she would be at home looking after her mother. He knew even less now what to say. He hated to see her crying like this. Tentatively he put an arm round her shoulders, ready to withdraw it if she shrank from him, but she did not. She allowed herself to lean against his shoulder and after a while she dried her tears. They stayed like that for a long time, silently watching the rain.

  It was still raining when they settled down again, but when they wakened finally they found it had stopped. The air smelt clean and fresh, with scents of grass and rosemary and lavender brought out by the rain.

  ‘We’re going to have to move on,’ said Isabel, when they had eaten the last of their food. ‘We won’t find anything to eat round here. There might be the odd berry but nothing more.’

  ‘Where to, have you any idea?’

  ‘None. I don’t know the campo further on. We’ll just have to start walking until we hit a road.’

  Going into civilization might be dangerous, but staying up here to starve wouldn’t do them any good, either. They would have to take a chance.

  Nick was feeling stronger and his headaches were lessening. The blows inflicted by the sergeant had caused lurid bruises to flower on his face and arms, but the pain was no longer severe. He thought of the man always as ‘the sergeant’, not as ‘Isabel’s father’.

  ‘Are you sure you want to come on with me, Isabel?’ he asked.

  ‘I can’t very well go back, can I?’

  He acknowledged that.

  ‘It was my own decision to come. You didn’t ask me to do it.’

  She might have felt she’d had no choice, since it was her brother who had betrayed him.

  ‘I’d have had to leave home eventually, anyway,’ she said. ‘Living with my father, and my brother, was slowly killing me. They could be cruel, both of them, each in their own way. They treated me like a slave. That is how they see women.’

  ‘And your mother, how will she manage?’

  ‘She has a sister in the village who will stand by her. Perhaps she’ll live with her.’

  They rolled up their blankets, filled their water-bottles, and set off.

  After walking for some time they reached a road, a minor, unpaved one, much potholed, greatly in need of repair, like most roads in the country, but at least it was a sign that there might be life near by. Their heels kicked up little clouds of dust as they walked. It looked as if it had not rained here for weeks. A mule cart rattled past, followed by a motor cycle. Shortly afterwards they came upon a house, a poor affair. A woman pegging out washing on the strip of ground at the side stopped to stare at them but did not return their ‘Buenas tardes’. Good afternoon. They felt her eyes on their backs. A man passing on a donkey, his feet swaddled in rags, did grunt in response to their greeting, as if to say, ‘I see you there, I acknowledge your presence as fellow travellers on the road, but don’t expect me to be friendly since I don’t know who you are or where you’re from or what you’re doing.’

  ‘They’re bound to wonder about us,’ said Isabel. ‘But I think most people just want to mind their own business these days.’

  Ahead they saw the beginnings of a village.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Nick.

  ‘We have to risk it.’

  They soon saw that the village was very small, with not even a sign to identify it, but it did have a shop, not much more than a hole in the wall. Every village seemed to have one like it. Nick had no money since all of his had been taken from him.

  ‘I have my savings,’ said Isabel. ‘I took it back from Pedro when I realized what he’d done. He’d broken the contract.’

  They pushed through a beaded curtain and went inside the shop. For a moment, after leaving the glare of the sun, they could see nothing, then gradually they made out shelves against the wall, virtually bare, and a few empty glass jars on the counter.

  The woman behind the counter was not going to be friendly, that was plain. She was eyeing them stonily.

  ‘Buenas tardes, señora,’ said Isabel. ‘Have you any bread?’

  ‘No bread.’

  ‘Cheese?’

  ‘No cheese.’

  Isabel pointed to a tin on the top shelf. ‘Olives?’

  ‘Only for customers. Regular customers.’

  ‘Have you anything we could buy?’

  The woman shrugged. ‘Stomach powder,’ she said, indicating
a dusty packet on the shelf behind her.

  ‘We don’t need that.’

  The woman stared them down until they left.

  ‘Not much of a shopping trip, was it!’ said Nick, trying to sound cheerful.

  They were tired and hungry and there would probably not be another shop in the village. They walked on and after the houses ran out they came to an inn, a low ramshackle building up an earthen path. The door was standing open.

  ‘Shall we see if they can give us something to eat?’ Isabel led the way in.

  They found themselves in a small dark lobby, buzzing with flies. Off it, to the right, was a door which, when they pushed it open, revealed a bar, equally small and dark, with a dirt floor. Two men in grimy overalls sat at one of the two small tables, playing dominoes. They looked up momentarily at the new arrivals. Behind the bar, a bald man wearing a stained canvas apron was in the middle of pouring a shot of brandy into a glass. For himself. He tossed it back before addressing Isabel and Nick.

  ‘Buenas tardes, señorita. Señor!’ Was he actually welcoming them? They could hardly believe it. ‘What brings you to these parts?’

  ‘We are on our way to Madrid to visit our grandparents,’ said Isabel. They had decided that this would be their story.

  ‘You are walking all the way?’

  ‘Well, no, we hope not. We hope we may get a lift with someone.’

  ‘I wish I had grandchildren who would come to visit me! Well, now, what can I do for you two young people?’

  ‘We would like something to eat, that is if you have anything.’

  ‘I expect I can find something.’ The man came out from behind the bar and gave each of them his hand in turn. ‘Call me Pepe! And you?’

  ‘María and Paco,’ said Isabel.

  ‘Now, María and Paco, what about some soup, eh? And a tasty morsel of nice juicy blood sausage? Come into the kitchen!’

  The soup was bubbling in a cauldron, looking and smelling rather like a witch’s brew. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble. The jingle from Macbeth ran through Nick’s head, though there didn’t seem to be much sign of trouble here and perhaps not too much toil either. There was a big wooden table in the centre of the room which looked no cleaner than the floor. Pedro seated them at it and, with a flourish, ladled out two large bowlfuls of soup. They dipped their spoons in straight away. The liquid was greasy and tasted of cabbage that had been too long boiled but, even so, it was welcome on their empty stomachs. Pepe also produced a hunk of bread and a piece of reddish rubbery sausage that took a lot of chewing.