Well, that excluded the brother, Manfred, but it hardly narrowed the field of lanky young men who moved in the elevated circles of the Maidstone Club. Only an hour before he had seen two such specimens at the Wallaces’ house, friends of Gayle.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘It’s nothing,’ he shrugged. ‘Are you going to the funeral?’
‘I think so.’
‘I’ll see you there. Chief Milligan’s got me on traffic duty.’
Her eyes held his for a moment. ‘Don’t let him get you down,’ she said. ‘He’s just a big old blowhard.’
Hollis laughed.
‘What?’
‘I don’t know. Yes, I suppose he is, isn’t he?’
Driving away, his thoughts returned to the scene he’d glimpsed at the Wallaces’ swimming pool—the young couple romping in the water, the other couple observing from the shade, Gayle stretched out in the sun, all limbs, her face shaded by the brim of her straw hat.
People dealt with grief in different ways, but somehow he couldn’t see himself lounging by a swimming pool just four days after his dead sister had been plucked from the ocean in a fisherman’s net.
Ten
Conrad uncoiled. The cane rod bowed under the strain then whipped through the air, the reel singing as the lead weight arced high up over the surf into the flat water beyond.
Not as far as the last cast, but far enough if they were out there.
He started to reel in—inexpertly. When it came to rod-and-line fishing there was a certain truth to the phrase ‘beginner’s luck’. The jerky, unskilled actions of a child were, if anything, more likely to attract a fish to the bait.
It was a lesson first learned on the stubby harbor breakwater at Guethary, back in the old country. His first fish, caught under the watchful eye of his father—a three-pound sea bream—enough to feed the family that evening. Conrad on his father’s lap at the table in the kitchen, swollen with pride, his father’s meaty paw wrapped around his little hand, steering the gutting knife. His mother slashing the sides of the fish then grilling it over coals, serving it with a garlic sauce, the cloves browned in a pan then crushed in the stone mortar. Everyone agreeing that it was the finest sea bream they had ever tasted, though the same couldn’t be said of the local txakoli, the sharp dry white wine made by their grandfather, and which both boys were permitted to taste for the first time. The wine driving them to early slumber, curled at their mother’s feet while she read to them, the logs in the hearth crumbling to embers.
Was that really how it had been? Or had sentiment got the better of him over the years? He no longer knew, or cared. He was entitled to the memory, for it was the last pleasing one he had of his mother before she was taken from them.
The menace, when it came, was from a completely unexpected quarter. The war rumbling away in a distant corner of France had barely touched their village, their lives. It was spoken of, but not feared. One boy, the mayor’s son, had headed north, carried on a tide of patriotism, only to lose a leg on a muddy hillside near Amiens. Remarkably, he survived and was shipped back to Guethary.
In view of what followed, it would have been far better for all if that German artillery shell had caught Tomas Errekart squarely between the eyes, for when he returned home he carried Death with him.
In Guethary, it became known as ‘Spanish flu’. A few miles to the south, across the frontier in Spain, it was referred to as ‘French flu’. The disease itself respected no boundaries, spreading like wildfire, laying waste to whole communities in a matter of days. To the puzzlement of all, ‘La Grippe’ appeared drawn to those in the prime of their lives, passing over the young, the elderly and the infirm; and the end came fast to those touched by its hand. A burning fever rapidly gave way to a crippling pneumonia that flooded the lungs.
Conrad’s father was the first in the family to be struck down. By then the whole village was firmly in the grip of the disease and Dr Barron was able to do little more than pay a cursory visit and wish their mother well in the trial ahead.
Terexa Labarde nursed her ailing husband for two days and nights, the boys ferrying buckets of icy water from the well in the yard. On the morning of the third day, she was too weak to wring out the rags with which she cooled his body. Breathing hard, her own clothes sodden with perspiration, she pleaded exhaustion and asked the boys to take over, instructing them from a chair across the room.
Just before noon, she slid silently to the floor.
She didn’t die immediately, but lay there on her back, the shallow rise and fall of her chest almost imperceptible, a reddish foam oozing from the corners of her mouth, the veins in her slender neck standing out like cords of rope. Antton insisted that he go for help, but she wouldn’t release his hand, a feat of superhuman strength given her condition. She wanted to die with her boys at her side. And that she did, just a few minutes later. Mikel Labarde, lost in delirium, did not witness his wife’s passing.
Antton displayed great presence of mind for a seven-year-old, turning his attention once more to their father, placing Conrad on bucket duty. Just before dusk he went for help, only to return an hour later in tears. The mayor, the doctor, even the priest, they were all dead. Guethary was like a rudderless ship, with everyone looking to their own affairs, their own survival. Antton had been driven off, at gunpoint in one case, by people he’d known all his life.
The boys hacked ham from the bone in the pantry and settled in for another long night.
Mikel Labarde’s fever broke at dawn the next morning. He woke to find his naked body covered in damp rags, his two sons intertwined on the bed beside him, fast asleep, and his wife dead on the floor in the corner of the room. He was too weak to do anything but cry; Conrad and Antton were woken by his sobs.
Life never returned to normal, not for their father. He became sullen and withdrawn. In spring of the following year, when a second, more deadly wave of the disease swept the country, Guethary was spared. But while others
