C hapter One

 

S

uspended like a small glider on a windless day, Tessa floated through the silent dining room, across the hallway, into the sun-lit drawing room and back again. As her white clad form passed by, she snapped blooms from the vast displays. She did not hesitate as she dropped each perfume-laden flower into the cotton basin that she’d made by pinching up the hem of her nightgown with her eight-year-old fingertips. She gathered her harvest noiselessly, her undersized bare feet soundless on both carpet and wood. Her reflected figure glinted in the dark, polished surfaces and brass inlay handles of the sideboards.

She paused at the foot of the stairway’s wooden banister and glanced with dark, hopeful eyes at the imposing front door. It was too early for the rattle of the milk cart. Too early for the postman. Too early to be downstairs alone in the Garcia household. But not too early to garrotte heady blooms from Tessa’s mother’s carefully arranged Covent Garden flowers.

Tessa blossomed in the silence of the house and had made her flower harvesting at this hour a weekly ritual. She anticipated it. She planned it, washed out the bottles begged from the cook, re-arranged her sleep and waited patiently for the dawn to rise the day after their delivery.

She dangled out of the Nursery window as the Covent Garden van arrived, angering her elder sister, Mariquita, with her apparent recklessness. She hovered in the kitchen as Abigail lifted the lids of the long boxes. Peering inside, she inhaled, as the Cook paused with the wooden spoon, offended that Tessa preferred the scent of the flowers to her freshly baked cakes. Whilst little Carmen screamed to lick out the bowl, Tessa quietly stored away any dropped flower heads for further dissection.

Inwardly holding the peace of the house like the cradled blooms in the curve of her nightgown, Tessa turned from the front doorway and carefully mounted the stairs. The second tread from the top creaked underfoot and Tessa paused, listening to hear if the air in the bedrooms stirred. It did not. Not this morning. Not this perfume-filled day.

Black-haired Mariquita snored. Auburn-headed Carmen lay abandoned to her dreams. The room was warm and cocooned by sleep. The cream curtains and the closed door suspended awakening. Tessa’s feet stepped exposed across the wood, then hidden over the rug and once more touched polished floorboards.

In the small bathroom that Mr. Garcia had insisted on installing for his daughters, Tessa lowered the plug over the hole and turned the taps. The water washed into the day all the anticipated noise of the house. It bounced off the hard white surfaces until it formed a pool that grew until it was a deep lake into which a tumble of scented colours cascaded. Blues and mauves, purples and creams, pinks and whites and reds ranging from velvet to vermilion. Tessa sank her long fingers into the flower filled depths. The petals stroked her lowered hands under the water and the flower heads jostled against her wrists. She bowed over until her nose broke the surface and she smiled, the rosy light reflected in her cheeks. She inhaled. In that inward breath she sensed the fields where the flowers grew in unleashed sweeps of scent. She flew with the bees, entering opaque boudoirs to douse herself in pollen and emerge saturated in honey thick powder. She tilted her face to the warm sunshine and wriggled her fingers in flight as the colours began to merge.

‘What are you doing?’ Mariquita shadowed the doorway.

Tessa turned, her arms prisoners to the flower wardens. She smiled with pleasure.

‘Buenos dias, Mariquita.’

 

 

Chapter Two

 

F

orty-five year old Joseph Garcia popped a Liquorice Allsort into his mouth. He let the smooth black cylinder roll around intact. He preferred the exotic black to the sweeter white filling. In some unconscious place, it reminded his senses of home. Of silent siestas where young boys could not sleep. Of darkened rooms and the sound of grasshoppers. The liquorice was warm and syrupy on his tongue like a long Jerez de la Frontera afternoon. He sat at his well-used desk in his study and savoured the start of the day.

His wife lay in bed with her eyes open. Her door, like his, was closed. However, even closed doors could not prevent the noise of the house from entering each room. Mrs. Garcia pulled the sheet and the eiderdown and the crotched quilt up to her cheekbones. The sun sent a beam through an opening in the curtains. Dusty particles randomly avoided each other in the light. The beam settled on the dressing table. A glass dragonfly shimmered.

With her hands pressed over her ears, Tessa sat on the bottom stair in the hallway, facing the front door. From her point of view near the ground, it was a huge pale grey barricade of impenetrable wood. It was not improved by a large black cage suspended halfway down into which arrived, courtesy of a horizontal rectangle, the news from the outside world.

She was now dressed and she knew, from the sounds of the house, that the other occupants were in various states of attire. She closed her eyes. Even with her hands over her ears and her eyes closed, she could still hear and see her brothers and sisters. Doors opening and closing, drawers rifled through, then rammed shut. Wardrobe doors and chairs and brushes and combs. All noisily used by eight pairs of hands. Nine including her own. But hers were still, listening to all that noise. Without the noise of the house, Tessa felt scared. Hearing it, she wanted to scream. Too many sisters and brothers. And a mother, still as a sarcophagus in bed. Their mother was a presence in the house that continually threatened to pounce. The assaults were never anything but verbal, stroked with acid. All the children waited. It was the only influence that silenced the noise. When it came, that torrent of ice over stones, it always thundered in the same direction. It flooded towards the same person every time. The others always hesitated, wondering if it might, on that particular occasion, be directed at one of them. Apart from the odd stray shard, it never was.

Mrs. Garcia’s torrent of anger was always aimed at the eldest daughter, Mariquita. Mariquita, who was more of a mother than Ann Loughlin, as she had previously been known, had ever been. The Garcia children did not hate her. They had built a dam to protect themselves from that. They all knew that she was rising behind that carefully constructed wall and that despite their efforts, cracks were beginning to show. Mariquita did her utmost to repair the damage whenever the others weakened. The wall was now so patched that it resembled the quilt on Mariquita’s bed. And because she stood closest to the barrier, the spray over the top caught her alone. On the day that the dam would eventually explode, the noise would be deafening. But they knew that more cracks would appear before then.

Suddenly, Tessa’s eyes snapped open. She bounded across the tiles towards the door. She reached up on her tiptoes to release the latch and although she heard someone from upstairs calling her name, she heaved open the front door. The postman smiled down at her.

‘Good morning, Mr. Brookes,’ said Tessa.

‘Good morning, Miss Teresa,’ he replied. He glanced over her head into the house, ‘I hear the Garcia family are in good voice, as usual.’

Tessa turned to follow the direction taken by his eyes.

Upstairs, in the boys’ bedroom, Tony and Nacho were jumping off the bed onto the polished floor. By the window, a book slid accidentally from Frank’s fingers as he stretched to replace it on the shelf. Joseph banged himself closed inside the bathroom. Matty dropped his boots and laughing, Alfonso fell over them.

In the girls’ bathroom, the taps gushed into the sink as Mariquita wiped away the remains of pollen, muttering under her breath.

‘It’s always me. Always me.’

On the landing, at the top of the stairs, a doll hung precariously over the banister. Carmen opened her mouth. As she screamed, she let go of the doll and it plummeted, landing on the tiles with a crack, and lay broken next to its ragged friend.

Through all of this, Mrs. Garcia did not move from her bed. In the study, Mr. Garcia popped another Liquorice Allsort into his mouth.

Tessa held out her hands.

‘Papa is waiting,’ she said.

Mr. Brookes presented her with the day’s post and turned to walk back down the steps. Tessa’s running feet grew distant. The study door was flung open and she rushed inside. She breathed quickly.

‘What have we today?’ Mr. Garcia closed the top drawer of his desk and smiled at the only daughter who appeared to take an interest in him.

Tessa shuffled onto his knee as she reached across the leather expanse for the letter opener. He waited patiently as she lifted each envelope carefully, sliced it open with the silver knife and placed each open missive onto a new pile. Tessa again heard her name being called, but she ignored it, even though Mr. Garcia heard it too. When every envelope was open, Mr. Garcia looked at Tessa. She looked back at him. After a moment, she jumped down and walked towards the door.

‘Tessa!’ Her father called her. She turned back to him. ‘Don’t you want payment for a job well done?’

A black and white square Allsort spiralled through the air towards her. She put her head back and with mouth and eyes wide, caught it with a click, in her teeth. She turned and with her left cheek bulging, re-entered the noise of the house.

 

 

Chapter Three

 

T

he nursery was where the Garcia girls gathered. It was a pale room with lace curtains that obscured the outside world. The shelves held their well-turned books, boxes of paints and utensils with which to draw. Carmen’s badly repaired dolls lay in a cot, caught in suspended sedation. Games frequently lay strewn across the floor in un-associated pieces until Mariquita demanded they be boxed in once more.

It was raining. Tessa and Carmen sat at the round table by the window. Carmen knelt up on the window seat, reaching across to swish her paintbrush in the jar of brownish-purple water and then to twirl it in the coloured palette, before daubing an unidentifiable display of vivid flowers on a rectangle of paper. Tessa crouched too close over her painting. She had cut tiny squares and drawn on them delicate violets and roses. One had already been glued onto a bottle of insipid coloured liquid which had gathered a sediment of what looked like lavender grains, crushed rose petals and tiny spots of a deep purple, all shrouded with a dusting of mould. Other similar bottles stood awaiting their labels and the flourish of a floral name to capture their scent. Tessa painted the drawings meticulously, carefully dipping the tip of her brush into an appropriate colour, with a little water to dilute it, and touched the paper in the chosen place. With a black ink pen, she wrote the perfumes’ names. ‘Violet Water.’ ‘Rose Dream.’ ‘Herbal Time.’

Mariquita sat on a stool at the other side of the room. Her eyes scanned the large elaborate scrawl on the two sheets of paper in her hands. She held them side-by-side so that the ‘Dearest Mariquita’ and ‘Your loving Grandmamma’ were always in her sight. She read silently, disregarding Carmen’s discordant nursery rhymes and Tessa’s resounding concentration. Clearing her throat, she then read the letter again, aloud.

‘Dearest Mariquita, Teresa and Carmen ..’

‘Why doesn’t she say, Tessa?’

‘Because it’s Teresa,’ Mariquita replied to Carmen’s question. ‘Shall I continue?’  Carmen nodded and returned to her painting. Tessa did not look up.  ‘Dearest Mariquita, Teresa and Carmen …’

‘You’ve read that bit.’

‘Who’s going to clear up your mess, Carmen?’ There was silence. ‘Don’t interrupt.’

Mariquita cleared her throat.

‘Dearest Mariquita, Teresa and Carmen.’

She paused for barely a breath before continuing, but in that instant, their relatives in Spain slipped into the room.

‘What a time we have had. You will be pleased to hear that your cousin Rosa is now married. It was perfect timing. The grapes were in and it was a good harvest. We all breathed easy. It didn’t matter whether it rained now or not. Of course, the sun shone. We prayed you all could have been with us, but I suppose your Papa explained why that was not possible.’

‘Why was it not possible?’ Carmen wanted to know.

‘Business,’ said Tessa, filling in a forget-me-not.

Mariquita continued from the sheets held side by side.

‘Rosa was very beautiful. The Perez family are lucky to have gained such a daughter-in-law. The babies will be beautiful if they take after her, as long as they do not have the misfortune to inherit the Perez chin. But they are not without money, so we can live with that. They will have to live with Rosa’s temper. I told her mother, she may be beautiful, but what is her temper for? She does not need it. Men look at her and give her what she wants. Old women, reminded of their own youthful good looks, find themselves doing her work, and children adore her because she is like a princess. We all adore her, but she insists on throwing her temper across the table for all to hear. José laughs. Not for long, I guarantee. I hope none of you three have a temper. If you do, try and lose it somewhere if you can, and don’t go looking for it again. Lose it with a Protestant and have done with it. There must be plenty of those in England. I have to say, we missed your Mama’s singing. Guaxara is a good Soprano, but I like a little more meat. A lot more! Your Mama has a wonderful voice. Make sure you ask her to teach you to sing like her. She must be very popular there in London.’

‘I didn’t know Mama could sing,’ said Carmen.

‘She can’t. It is just Grandmamma’s wishful thinking. Old people do that,’ said Mariquita.

‘Grandmamma may be right,’ said Tessa.

‘Have you heard Mama sing?’ demanded Mariquita.

Tessa returned to her painted labels. There was something missing, but she didn’t know what. They looked like a young girl’s first flower waters, instead of a woman’s perfumes lining a dressing table. She continued to paint carefully ‘Rose Dream’ because for now that was what she could do.

Mariquita didn’t finish the letter. She folded it, slotted the two sheets back into the envelope and thrust it into her pocket.

Carmen forgot to insist on the meaning of senile, to ask what the bride’s dress was like or whether the bride loved the groom. She swirled her vivid brush across the page, unconcerned about whether their mother could sing or not or that they had a host of relatives in Spain she would never meet.

Mariquita watched her younger sisters from her chair. She had no desire to join them. She knew she would clear up the dirty jar of water and wash out the brushes. She would throw away Carmen’s paintings and as they crumpled in her hands, the thick paint would crack through the daubed layers. Carmen never asked about her discarded works of art because she always loved to create more.

The younger sisters did not see Mariquita watching them. They were absorbed in their creations. This was their time.

In Jerez de la Frontera, the Garcia relatives and their friends sat on the shaded terrace and dissected the wedding day. It had been a success as are all weddings in the heat of southern Spain. The crickets provided the music now that it was over and the old women sat and thought of their supple youth, whilst the old men smoked and thought of the harvest. All of them tried not to think of the price they had paid.

 

Meeting Coty Reviews:

“A Damn Good Read” by Philip Emanrouy *****

Let me say first and foremost that this is NOT girly literature. This is GOOD literature. I am not a lover of romantic fiction and when I am sick in bed I take Chandler and Hammett with my whiskey rather than Austen and Bronte, but in spite of its romantic look, this book is so well written and the characters are so rounded and interesting, that you are simply carried along by their lives. This book is above and beyond genre. It is that rarest of things: good writing, a good novel, a damn good read.

Quite aside from the interest of the story itself, which is intricate, tense and emotionally charged and quite aside from the characters who are, each and every one of them, interesting people, the beauty of the prose is what stands out about this book. The writing is exquisite without ever being tedious or pretentious. Estevez is clearly in love with words and as she uses them she makes them beautiful, vibrant and even succulent.

 

“…an evocative story, beautifully written and imaginative.”

Dorothy Mclean.

 

“..unable to put it down, wishing to find out how it would end.”

Norma Parkinson

 

“…quirky, perceptive and so real – I felt like I was watching a film. It put me in mind of ‘I Capture the Castle’ by Dodie Smith.”

Caroline Swindells

 

“..So beautifully written and loved your character building.”

Tina Scott

 

1st November 2009

By Christina Wolf

Meeting Coty is populated with believable characters and an intriguing family dynamic. I really enjoyed the effortless prose and the Merchany Ivory type visual world this book creates; at times I felt I was watching a film as well as reading a book. There is nothing comfortable or predictable about the plot but at the same time I felt I was in a world of luxury. Beautiful.

 

..."quite lovely."

Roja Dove, RDPR and Haute Perfumerie, Harrods