Marbella March 1987
Anastasia balanced her camera daringly on the horse’s withers, but even when he increased his pace from dawdle to stroll, it was not in jeopardy: this cob was built for comfort and had been swapped for a broken racing bike.
‘Coño estúpido! Move, move!’
She kicked her heels into his side, ineffectively. The horse shook his head lazily and the flies that clung to his eyes flew off and outpaced him up the hill.
The horse and his girl meandered up the hill to the village, completely unaware they were being viewed through a pair of binoculars, from a villa roof less than a mile away. Had Anastasia known, she would have shaken her head too, but only with indifference: no flies on her.
The girl reached the village and disappeared from his view behind the sun-bleached adobe houses. Her brother put down the binoculars.
‘Well?’ said his mother. ‘She’s just going to get eggs from the village. You worry too much.’
‘Do I? She’s seventeen, she does nothing but party and ride over to visit her friends. If you won’t send her to school, you should be finding her a husband, not leaving her to misbehave like a vagrant. It won’t do, Mother.’
Mars Rodriguez sighed. Bogdan knew very well that they couldn’t afford the school fees for Ana because all their money went on schooling him and his four brothers. Was it her fault she had had a daughter so late in life? Why didn’t he bother his father the way he cursed her? As for a husband! Who? They couldn’t afford a dowry and Ana didn’t like any of the boys who would take her without. She said the Russians were ugly, that Spaniards were all obsessed by Franco (one way or the other) and she hated the tourists – as she called anyone not born in Marbella. Did other mothers have such difficult children?
‘She takes lovely photographs.’
‘Photographs!’ Bogdan scoffed. ‘You give her a camera, so she can wander around the beaches and villages unattended and now she is David Bailey. Photography, my dear Mama, is not a career for a woman.’
‘But …’
‘OK,’ said Bogdan, ‘if you are not going to do anything about Ana, I will.’
‘Where are you going?’
His mother looked fearfully at her son as he jumped off the roof and headed away, past the pool to the gate. He used to be the easiest of children, but then his wife absconded with a Portuguese sailor from Lisbon and he had become a one-man martinet of moral values.
He stopped. Looked back at his mother. ‘I’m going to talk to the priest. If you don’t understand, he will. He has seen the beaches since Franco died. The pornography, the licentiousness …’
‘Bogdan darling …’
‘Don’t try and stop me, Mother. I will not have my sister turn into a whore like my wife.’
Who would Bogdan’s confessor suggest? She smiled at the thought of the novitiates told to leave their vocation and marry a headstrong young girl: for the love of God. Or was there some elderly layman at the church who, now widowed, would like a younger wife? How did Bogdan think she would entice Ana to accept that? Or was he suggesting a forced marriage?
