The Liverpool Basque (32 page)

The doctor was resting for a little while, before his evening surgery. He got up immediately, however, picked
up his bag and bundled Ramon into his rusty Austin Seven, to drive the boy home.

While Ramon had been away, Arnador had picked up the thin shadow of a woman, who had been his friend since he was nine years old, and very gently taken her upstairs and laid her on her bed. As he stood panting by the bed, getting his breath back, a slow grief overwhelmed him, almost as if it were his own mother who was there. He bent and closed the already half-shut eyes, and then kissed her on the cheek.

Then he went downstairs to the kitchen to see if he could find some wine. When Ramon returned with the physician, he was slowly drinking a glass. The kettle was singing on the gas stove to make a strong cup of sugary tea for Ramon.

The doctor concluded that it had been, in layman’s language, a silent heart attack which had caused such an obviously quiet death.

After he had gone and a very white Ramon had drunk the tea which his adopted uncle proffered, they went back to Arnador’s house, to await the return of Francesca from work. To keep the boy busy, Arnador asked him to help to prepare the evening meal, and when Francesca opened the front door with her latchkey, she could smell fish frying.

Arnador handed the frying pan over to Ramon, and went to the hall to greet his wife and tell her the news.

She looked at him, stunned, and then burst into tears, to cry helplessly in his arms. Ramon turned off the gas ring on which he had been frying the fish, and came into the hall. When he saw his weeping cousin, he burst into tears himself, and Arnador, himself distressed, hardly knew which to deal with first.

Francesca turned to him and hugged him to her. ‘You must stay with us, darling, until Uncle Leo comes home. Then we’ll think what to do.’

It was comforting to Francesca to have Ramon with them, and even better when Manuel arrived.

When, six weeks later, Uncle Leo arrived, he had already received the news of his sister’s death by cable, kindly sent through the office of his shipping company. He had had time to think what they should do, and he asked Ramon if he would come back and live in Rosita’s house with him, if he got a job ashore.

Since to Ramon, Leo had always been his father, he agreed and they lived together until, at the age of twenty-one, he brought home a happy-go-lucky girl called Julie to be his wife and look after the pair of them.

After leaving school, he had obtained a job in the accounts department of an insurance company. He was quick at figures and had had a couple of promotions by the time he married, but he disliked the daily confinement in a tiny office.

On the first anniversary of his marriage, he took Julie to a Chinese restaurant for dinner. It was a beautiful place and not one that they would normally go to. Afterwards, while Julie went to the ladies’ room, Ramon went to the cash desk to pay the bill.

It was presided over by a stout, elderly Chinese, who first glanced at the young man, and then stared at him, as he took his credit card. After saying that he hoped the young couple had enjoyed their meal and being assured that, indeed, they had, the Chinese said, ‘I know you, don’t I? But I don’t think you’ve been here before?’

Ramon stared back at the amiable Chinese, and assured him that he had not seen him before.

They laughed, and the Chinese looked down at the credit card as he put it into his machine.

‘Barinèta!’ he exclaimed. ‘I bet your grandpa lived by Wapping Dock! There’s a real likeness – that’s why I thought I knew you. Are you any relation to Manuel Echaniz? I used to play with him when I was a little boy. My name’s Brian Wing.’

Ramon had never heard of Brian, but, when Julie rejoined her husband, she found herself invited to a table behind a fine ebony screen. Wine was brought, while Brian poured out the stories of Manuel and himself. Ramon’s credit card was returned to him, with an absolute refusal of payment for their dinner, and anxious inquiries were made as to Manuel’s whereabouts.

Brian was a widower with one son and two married daughters. He owned two restaurants and a small wholesale fish business. Though his son managed the restaurants, his wife had always kept the company’s books and he missed her help sorely.

After a most interesting hour together, the young couple went home. A few days later, Ramon went to see Brian again, to ask for a job as bookkeeper. The salary was not much more than he was getting, but he gradually undertook the supervision of the wholesale fish business.

When Brian died, Ramon bought the fish business from Brian’s son, using the money which Rosita had saved for him and had left him on her death. At the time of Old Manuel’s proposed visit to him, he had also established a retail outlet, which Julie helped him to run. Their one son helped to run the wholesale side. No matter how many baths the family took, they all smelled slightly of fish – but they were quite prosperous; and the odour from the source of their prosperity did not seem to worry them very much.

Although he had been retired for many years, Arnador still belonged to the academic world; as Professor Emeritus, he could always go over to the university and find someone to discuss the latest trends in his discipline.

On the other hand, there were days when Old Manuel felt as if he had lost the art of intelligent verbal communication. Since Kathleen’s death, he had, at times, been beside himself with mental loneliness. Though he had not been as close to his wife as Pedro had been to Rosita, they had managed to get along amiably when he was at home. Even as a marine architect, however, he had been away for protracted periods in various shipyards, and this had been her main complaint during their marriage. ‘It’s all very well for you. You’ve the company of men you work with. Unless I’m nursing, I can get quite lonesome,’ she would say.

‘But you do all kinds of things,’ he would reply helplessly. ‘You’re hardly home when I’m home.’ He would watch her go off to a tea party or to preside over a meeting of some kind, when all he longed to do was to take her to bed, before Faith got home.

It took him a long time to understand that her attitude to their sexual relationship was different from his, though he had, at times, from the beginning felt a stiffness in her response. Sex was way down at the bottom of the list of things to do as far as she was concerned.

Sometimes he laughed ruefully to himself. Was he any different, he wondered, from other men in that it was always at the
top
of his list.

When he went home to Liverpool, which he had done
from time to time, some of the tension and frustration which lay uncomfortably at the back of his life in Canada left him. He was more relaxed, though he was never unfaithful to his wife. It seemed to help him to speak Basque in a Roman Catholic world in Liverpool. Without effort, he understood the subtle nuances of tone and gesture.

He still enjoyed feminine company, he considered, as long as its name was not Veronica. He rather wished that he had not cut himself off from Kathleen’s circle of friends immediately after her death; he could have visited them occasionally and enjoyed conversations with their husbands as well. It was too late, however, to do much about it now. And only this morning, he had collected his plane tickets from the pretty Pakistani girl in the travel agency. In two weeks’ time he would be in Liverpool with Ramon and Arnador – and they would not stop talking for the whole month he proposed to stay there! Blessed thought!

Meanwhile it occurred to him that young Sharon had been looking a bit peaky last time she had popped in to see him. He wondered if she would like a day’s sailing in the
Rosita
. On Sunday, if she were free, they could go up the coast and have lunch somewhere. And she, at least, would be interested in the details of his trip to England; she had urged him to take it. He would phone her this evening.

He chuckled to himself. He still had not told Faith that he was going. She was going to be so annoyed with him when she found out.

Sunday proved to be a perfect day for sailing; not too hot and with a steady gentle breeze. Sharon insisted on bringing a picnic basket as her share in the expedition, and they sat on the rocks in a tiny cove to eat their lunch, while they watched speedboats and other yachts taking advantage of the lovely day.

She was, as he had expected, enthusiastic about his proposed visit, and she asked him who looked after his house while he was away.

‘Well, the post office holds my mail, and Jack Audley’ll pick up the circulars from off the step – if he remembers. He’s done the lawn for me once or twice, when I’ve been away.’ He hesitated, and then told her, ‘I’m not too happy about askin’ him this time – he’s been complaining of a pain in his chest lately, and I know his wife wants him to see the quack.’

‘Oh, don’t worry. I’ll do your lawn for you. Would once a week be enough?’

He was embarrassed. ‘I wasn’t meaning to ask you,’ he assured her. ‘Doing lawns is a man’s job. It can wait until I get back.’

She brushed back her hair from her face, and replied firmly, ‘No, it can’t. Unkept lawns are the first things looked for by thieves – a lawn that hasn’t been cut signals that the owner is away. I’ll do it. Your yard’s a pleasure to be in.’

He grinned at the compliment to his garden, and shyly accepted her offer.

‘I’ll give you a key to the house, so you can go in and get a drink if you like. I keep the wine in a rack in a cupboard next to the fridge.’

She laughed. ‘You’ll probably find me flat on my back on the sofa, when you get back – dead drunk!’

He looked her up and down, pretty as a picture in her blue jeans and white T-shirt. ‘That would be no hardship,’ he said with one of his slow chuckles.

Her eyes twinkled as she accepted the implied compliment. She handed him another sandwich, and then asked, ‘Have you told your daughter about your trip?’

He made a face. ‘No. I’ll phone her the day before I fly.’

‘You are naughty!’

‘I will not have her run my life,’ he responded with
sudden fierceness. ‘She means well – but it is very irritating to be lectured at my age.’

Sharon did not attempt to alter his decision. She suggested instead that he leave Faith’s telephone number with her. ‘So that I can give her a call if anything goes wrong in connection with your house – a break-in, for instance.’ Inwardly, she thought it might be interesting to hear from Faith how she felt about her father some time.

‘That’s a good idea,’ he agreed. ‘Can I give her your name and number?’

‘Sure.’

As he munched his sandwich, he ruminated over the arrangement, and then he said, ‘You’re a true friend.’

She lifted her glass of wine towards him. ‘I hope so,’ she said.

It was with his usual sense of relaxation and freedom that Manuel emerged from Customs at Manchester Airport, to see Ramon running towards him, pushing his way rapidly through a straggling crowd of others on similar errands.

Now in his fifties, Ramon was a stout man with a mass of greying curls bouncing round a bald pate. His shabby, working macintosh ballooned behind him as he opened his arms to embrace Manuel. They hugged each other and got in the way of other, less demonstrative, passengers, and wiped tears from their eyes, as they climbed into the fishy aroma of Ramon’s delivery van parked outside; the blue van had white frothing waves painted along its sides, and
Barinèta and Son Fresh Fish Daily
proudly above them.

During the drive to Liverpool they spoke Basque to each other, and the dear familiar idioms poured out, like water from a fireman’s hose. There was a fine, warm affinity between them as if they were much closer in age than they actually were.

As the van bumped its way into Aigburth, the Liverpool suburb where Ramon had bought a little house, Manuel felt a surge of pure happiness, and he forgot the aching loneliness of his life in Victoria.

When Ramon’s wife, Julie, heard the van pull up at the gate, she hurried to the door and flung it open. She was nearly as stout as her husband and, despite liberal applications of perfume and scented talcum powder, still smelled slightly of fish. Her tiny feet, in high-heeled patent-leather
pumps, took her surprisingly quickly down the path to greet her guest, of whom she had long since grown very fond.

Again, he was hugged and kissed, then dragged into the little home, to be seated by the sitting-room electric fire, and have a glass of wine thrust into his hand, until the kettle had been boiled and tea made. ‘Aye, it’s good to see you,’ Julie assured him.

Old Manuel leaned back in the small fireside chair, and looked around the comfortable room, with its bookshelf, its radio on a side table and television set in the corner. Without hesitation, he said, ‘It’s good to be home.’

He felt as if he had just docked after a long and tiring voyage.

Much later, when Julie had gone up to bed and he and Ramon were seated comfortably in the sitting-room finishing a cup of cocoa each, pressed upon them by Julie, he asked Ramon what he felt he was, now that he was older, Basque or English?

Ramon laughed. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘I don’t know any other place, except Liverpool. The wife and I did a bus tour of Spain once – but Bilbao wasn’t on the itinerary, so I’ve never been there. Julie was tickled pink that I could speak some Spanish, though; learned it from Francesca. I’ve got one or two Basque friends – Uncle Arnador, for one – he comes regularly to see me, and we talk Basque together. The wife thinks we’re
both
learned. Don’t disillusion her!’

‘What about your boy – young Leo?’

‘Ha! Pure Scouse! I used to tell him about his grandfather, Quanito Barinèta, and how he avenged his grandmother’s death. But the Spanish Civil War doesn’t mean anything to him, any more than the Second World War does. They were just dates to learn in school. He’s married now and off my hands, though he works for me.’ In further
explanation of himself, he said, ‘Being a Basque is like being a Welshman whose parents were born in Anglesey; he’ll say, as I would, that he’s a Liverpool man – but you can bet he’ll belong to the Welsh Society – and sing like a lark! The Welsh is still there.’

Manuel laughed. ‘How’s your singing in Basque?’

‘Lousy. The Basque may be still there, but … Uncle Leo was the last person I ever heard sing the old Basque songs – he could hold a tune well, God rest him. I can still put a beret on properly, though!’

Uncle Leo was the only person in our family who died in hospital, remembered Manuel suddenly, and he shuddered visibly; it was the last thing he wanted to happen to himself. Better to be run down and finished in one blow.

The mention of Uncle Leo brought to mind Rosita and his sisters, particularly Francesca, who had been the last of the three women to die. She had died from injuries sustained in a train accident, when, in 1963, she had been returning from a visit to her company’s head office in London. As recorded in a long, heart-rending letter from Arnador, it was as well that she did die from her injuries within forty-eight hours of the accident. ‘Not only was she badly crushed, but her lovely face was hopelessly disfigured,’ he said.

It had taken old Arnie – and himself – a long time to get over that, if either of them ever really had. And, sometimes, considered Old Manuel sadly, another bright spirit, Little Maria, danced in the back of his memory, to haunt him through a sleepless night.

He and Ramon talked a little while longer, and then Ramon took him up to his bedroom, where Julie had turned on the electric fire in case he was cold.

When, afterwards, Ramon climbed into bed with his wife, she was still reading a novel, and he said regretfully to her,
‘He’s gone that thin; he looks as if a breath of wind would blow him away.’

Julie looked up from her love story, and said prosaically, ‘He’s feeling his age – like Uncle Arnie.’