Kate is running away. The hide-out she chooses is Menorca, the simple, beautiful island she knew as a child. But is anywhere truly simple? A chance encounter with an old friend enmeshes her in a web of family and island secrets that have endured since the Spanish Civil War, warping the lives of three generations. The last person to champion truth over reticence, she is nevertheless the catalyst for breaking a sixty year ‘pact of forgetting’. Until the only secret left is her own.
“Having begun it, I couldn’t put it down…The descriptions of the landscape are very alluring and the feeling for the divisions and strains in Spanish society – which still exist – exact.” Anne Stevenson, Winner of the Poetry Foundation’s Neglected Masters of American Poetry Award
Wife
A gripping, beautiful and surprising exploration of love and the things that can rise up to thwart it.
the Faithless
Sun, sex, secrets and a very uncivil war
J O E A M E S
Cover Image: ©Estate of Martin Munkacsi, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYC
The Faithless Wife
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The Faithless Wife Jo Eames
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A Peach Publishing Book Copyright © Jo Eames The moral right of the author has been asserted. All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. First published in 2010 by Peach Publishing The Peach Barns North Aston Bicester Oxfordshire OX25 6HX British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-907672-01-9 All rights reserved. Nor part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Peach Publishing. Cover: Healthy Bodies, Harper’s Bazaar, July 1935 © Estate of Martin Munkacsi, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYC Typeset by Regent Typesetting, Hackney, London Printed and Bound by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall www.peachpublishing.co.uk
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For Hamish
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So I took her to the river Believing she was a maiden, But she already had a husband. Federico Garcia Lorca
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1 On the edge of the cliff I lean all my weight against the wind. A less ferocious wind would relent from time to time and then I’d fall. But this is the north wind, la tramuntana, the one that sends people crazy in the head, so the islanders say, and it does not relent for a moment. Not out here on the headland where the storm is striking land with dizzying force for the first time in a hundred and fifty miles. Far from letting me fall, it is doing its damnedest to push me away from the edge. I daren’t even spread my arms wide in case it picks me up and dashes me down somewhere back amongst the broken rock and scrub. Instead I hug myself tight and lean into its raw power , exhilarated more than terrified. Of course, the wind could always choose to let me fall and, if it did, I wonder if I would recognise the moment of no return. I wonder if I would struggle and flail and fight my way back towards a solid footing, or if I would simply accept its will and embrace the drop. Though half-blinded by the stinging rain, I stand and stare at the angry sea for a long time. The wind’s roar is so loud it batters my ears and fills my head but I feel oddly at home in the maelstrom, oddly comforted. And beneath me the waves continually heave themselves up into great grey rolls before smashing down in a confusion of spray. The base of the cliff shakes under the repeated assault and, as I finally turn to go, white water comes arching over the cliff to my left where the sea has worn an almost circular cove. The wind tries
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to hurry me away now but something makes me want to look down and see how the water surges around the arc it has spent so long in carving. A slab of granite at the back of the cove tilts steeply towards the cliff edge, dangerously slick with rain and spray, and I find myself kicking off my sandals before placing first one foot and then the other on the cold wet slope. My toes grip so tight to avoid slipping that my calves begin to tremble. It seems that today is not the day. Down below, the waves roll in and around the cove until they run up against three jagged rocks, where they detonate into white fireworks. Roman candles and rockets explode in the air , water droplets sparkling as they separate from the solid wave. Spray spatters me at the top of the cliff even before the wind can snatch it away, and I lick salt from my lips. All is confusion, black and grey and white water roiling together and scraping clean the little crescent of pebbles that is normally cluttered with driftwood, plastic bottles and old tyres. There is nothing on the shore now. The sea has reclaimed its motley treasure to bestow elsewhere. Yet even as this thought occurs to me, the sea throws something back. It lies on the shingle for a moment until the next wave covers it and smuggles it away. I toss my head to fling the dripping hair out of my eyes. What was it? A seal, a dolphin, a sack of rubbish, a coil of rope? My stuttering heart tells me it was none of these things, but all I can do is wait and see if it is carried ashore again. Something rolls in the waves that is not a wave itself, but the sea is playing a rough game and refuses to let me see what it has in its grasp. Now and then I catch glimpses of a brown barrel shape, paler at the ends, that flops and dips. It has mass, weight, but no momentum of its own. Whatever it is, it is at the sea’s mercy. My teeth are beginning to chatter , but I can’t move
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until I know what the thing is. And then suddenly the sea loses interest. It tosses the thing onto the shore a second time, with such a heave that the next waves cannot reach far enough up to drag it back into the water. So there it lies, a brown barrel shape with pale extrem ities, arms flung out now as if to grasp dry land, the grey head bare, one cheek nestled against the cold pebbles, legs and pale feet still pounded by the surf. It is not a dolphin, or a seal, or a sack of rubbish or a coil of rope. It is what I’d known it would be, from the first glimpse. A body. Dead. And in the very place I expected it. I stand for a moment longer , looking down at a sight I have imagined a hundred times, but never thought to see for myself. Then I turn my back to the tramuntana and run with the wind.
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