DANIEL came in from the garden, laden with lettuces and tomatoes, his face and hands muddy. Ana thought he looked happy, much younger and apparently hangover free. “Was that the phone I heard? Was it your mum checking up that we were managing to cope?”

“She can’t help herself.”

 

It was not, she felt, the time to talk about Sarah Harris.

When Ana’s parents arrived they were hot and slightly out of breath, as they had walked up the hill from their house in the old town and there was little shade. Ana sat them down in the cool of the covered porch and brought out her homemade lemonade.

 

Her father’s first question was how they had enjoyed the beach party the previous night and Ana enjoyed reminiscing about the times he had taken her fishing on that same beach. Seeing Daniel’s expression at the mention of the party, she thought it wise to divert questions about their fellow diners. So she simply said that it had been a lovely picnic,  she had tasted pork pies for the first time and would Papi  please come and look at the monster courgette they had grown under glass in their naya. Did he think it was too big to retain its flavour? And what did he think of the mini glasshouses they had found in the local DIY store?

 

She knew her parents would have preferred them to buy, rather than rent, a house in the town. It would have demonstrated, particularly to her mother, an intention to stay put because Ana was sure her mother harboured suspicions that Daniel would want to move on in due course, and that he was reluctant to put down roots. In reality, Ana had been the one who had insisted on renting, at least at first, wanting to judge how well the return would work out before taking what would, for her, be a big decision, buying a house for the first time.

 

Quite early on in her life Ana had realised that she got on best with her mother when she did not challenge her ideas. Her father, however, was very different and Ana knew he believed in her and trusted her judgement, which had made her self-confident as a young girl, giving her the courage to explore the world far beyond her comfort zone.

 

The house had been a lucky find; one of the oldest houses on the edge of the town, it had unusually been available for a long-term rent in what she thought was a perfect situation. It was probably a couple of hundred years old, no one seemed to know exactly when it had been built from the mellow local stone. It had started life as a small farmhouse, a finca, shared with animals on land where fruit and vegetables for the townsfolk were grown. Over the years, additions had been made, and consequently it was full of unexpected corners; cupboards built into the three-foot-thick original walls, shelves in unexpected places. The part she loved most was the naya, a roofed in porch with arched walls, built onto the south-facing front of the house and the main living area in summer. Sitting in the rocking chair in the Naya, Ana could look down the garden through an avenue of palm trees. She was living in the countryside but so near the town, her town.  

 

Today Daniel seemed at ease with her parents, and she thought he was enjoying himself as part of her family. Would she be able to fit in as well with his friends?  On their first visit to meet her parents, before they were married,  Daniel confessed that he could not imagine that an older, divorced father of two young men was the son-in-law that most parents dreamed of for their beloved only daughter, let alone one who was a foreigner. She had laughed and said they were not quite as old-fashioned as he seemed to think and he must be prepared to give them time to adjust to him.

 

Watching him patiently explain to her mother how he had searched the internet to find the tomato variety most suited to the soil in their garden and seeing her mother trying so hard to understand how the internet really worked but flattered that he thought she did know, she was reminded of the rather wistful note in Sarah’s voice when she told Ana how lucky she was to have a close family. Maybe she needed to understand Daniel’s friends better; the night before she had seen that they were not the over confident group she had first thought; they had tensions, secrets even, in their lives that she knew nothing of. 

 

It was not until around seven o’clock that she and Daniel found the time to sit at the small table under the palm tree at the bottom of their garden and she felt she could bring up the subject of the previous evening. Her parents had left around four and after clearing away the lunch things they had decided a siesta was sine qua non. Daniel had slept on their bed while Ana had preferred a sun lounger in the shade in the garden, where there was just the faintest of breezes wafting the jasmine towards her. 

 

Before she could speak Daniel put his arm around her and said

“I’m so sorry you saw all that last night, sweetheart. I really hoped that everything would go smoothly. Jonathan said he thought Sarah had calmed down now”. She looked at him in amazement. “Calmed down from what, cariño? I have only met the woman twice and I told you I liked her but she seemed sad.”

 

Then Daniel told her what he knew about Sarah Harris, mostly from the occasional confidences that Mark Harris had shared with him, plus some snippets that Lynette passed on, more gossip than fact. The story, as he had heard it, was that around eight years previously Mark, a middle-ranking civil servant in Whitehall, had been posted on loan for five years from the Department for International Development, to the Indian State of Uttar Pradesh as an advisor to the regional authorities, on management systems in local government.

 

The posting was a promotion, and, in any case, his status there was infinitely higher than he enjoyed in London. Mark had told Daniel that although initially he worried about the move, and how it would affect Sarah, his secretary before they married, she settled in well and after six months she found a part-time job in a local library. Their life was very pleasant; a large villa with several servants, a driver, and a full social life - some formal, some pleasantly informal. Sarah had come out of her shell. Through her work in the library, Sarah made contact with a local school and became a reader, going several times a week to read classic English language books with the pupils, discussing the stories with the older ones. She had loved the work. All went well for two years or so until Mark, to his utter amazement and horror, fell passionately in love, for the first time ever he had told Daniel, with another woman.

 

“I can see his face now as he said that” Daniel said “the wry smile, the throwaway words. He is such a private person, it must have been hard to tell me. I am not really sure why he did, we are not that close really. ”

 

The object of this grand passion, Daniel understood, was a fellow civil servant, an Indian woman married to a powerful local politician. The affair became public knowledge and their life fell apart. In the ensuing scandal, Sarah and Mark were hurriedly moved back to the UK, and Mark was advised to take what was, in the circumstances, a pretty generous offer of early retirement. He had decided they could make a fresh start by moving to Spain.

 

“I can’t believe that you have friends with such a dramatic, and sad story, cariño. Why did you never tell me this before?”

 

“Well, we’ve been busy since we moved here, darling, and we haven’t really seen that much of them. Sort of need-to-know, I suppose. I didn’t think it would interest you. You don’t know them that well, and I know you are not much of a gossip; neither am I for that matter. That was one of the things that Lynette and I used to quarrel about. She’s never happy until she knows everything there is to know about people. I know this sounds awfully priggish, but I would rather judge people on what they say and do, not what they might have done in the past.”

 

His face had become older, more serious as he spoke, and he reminded her, not for the first time, of Gregory Peck playing the fair-minded Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, one of her favourite films.

 

“But if he told you that he fell in love with this Indian woman for the first time in his life, does that mean that he is not, never was, in love with Sarah? That must be terrible for her. No wonder she is sad sometimes, and she is so, so beautiful. Sarah had a job, you said. It must have been hard for her, if she had to leave all that.” She had wondered why the Harris couple had no children, she told him, and that she had thought perhaps that was why Sarah seemed sad.

 

She though the story dramatic and it certainly showed Sarah and Mark Harris in a new light, but it didn’t really explain what had happened on the beach the night before.

“But why did Sarah say those things to Ivan? Were they true? I wouldn’t trust Ivan, he is much too handsome, and too arrogant, for my taste but really, can he be working for the CIA and the mafia? It doesn’t sound very likely”

 

“Well, you see, Jonathan told me the other day that Sarah has been acting strangely lately, always asking people about their previous lives and, he thinks, spending lots of time online.” Jonathan had, he said,  told him that she was looking for information about everyone and that perhaps she had been checking up on Ivan.  “I rather think she has been needling Jonathan, too, about something that happened to him, although he didn’t say so.”

 

When Ana raised a quizzical eyebrow Daniel told her that he didn’t want to repeat other people’s stories. As far as he was concerned, Jonathan would tell her himself when he was good and ready, especially if they would be working together on a book.

 

Ana decided to leave the subject alone. Daniel had clearly found the conversation difficult and she didn’t want to push him any further. At the same time, she decided that now was not the moment to tell him she had arranged to meet Sarah in the morning nor about Sarah’s comments on the beach last night. We all, she thought, have limits to the confidences we share.

 

“Well, cariño, I think it is a perfect time for a swim. The water looks very inviting.  And we are so lucky that our garden is private.”
 

She went in the water first and as she waited for Daniel to join her, thinking of the fun and the pleasure of sex in the pool, she imagined what other secrets Daniel’s friends might be concealing. Some were so outrageous that she giggled. She did not want to want to leave any space for thoughts about secrets that Daniel himself might have.