Chapter Four — The Birthday

On Friday morning at eleven Jon was at the kitchen table of the family flat with a magnifying visor pushed up on his forehead and a thin sable brush in his right hand, and a tiny grey plastic soldier, armless, a centimetre and a half tall, braced between two fingers of his left, because he had found the figure at the bottom of a shoebox while looking for a belt and had sat down without meaning to and had started to paint it.

The flat was quiet. The light through the kitchen window was the morning light a Madrid flat received in the springtime, filtered through the balcony shutters so that it fell across the table in narrow strips and picked out every grain of dust. On the windowsill a small battery of paint pots — the same paint pots Jon had been using on and off since he was eighteen — stood in the row he had left them in, before Asia. They had not been moved. Someone had dusted them once.

He put down the brush. He put down the soldier. He had not finished painting the coat; one sleeve was still grey primer and the other was a dark olive that had gone on, after too many years in the pot, a little thicker than it should have. The mismatch would bother him at some point in the next week, or it would not, and he had stopped, long ago, being able to predict which.

He stood up. He rolled the visor off his forehead and set it on the shelf above the table.

He made another coffee.

He had four calls to make. At twelve, Abraham. At twelve-thirty, Encarna, who had cooked lunches at the Galician house for longer than Jon had been alive and who did not trust a phone call that went on for more than six minutes. At one, Rafa, who had gone up to the mansion two days before. At half past, Maribel.

He made all four of them early.

#

"Hermano," Abraham said, on the third ring. "I am at the airport. Pecas is in the toilet, I don't know why. We are going to be late onto the plane because someone has lost his hat and Pecas has insisted on going back for it. Tell your father we will be in Santiago at four."

"He is not listening," Jon said.

"He is always listening. Tell him anyway. Tell him I have the aguardiente."

"You have it on you."

"I am stopping for it on the way from Santiago. Pecas will sit in the car. The man at the farmhouse likes me. Ten minutes—"

"Abraham."

"What."

"Is she okay. Pecas. Is she actually in the toilet?"

"She is actually in the toilet. She is also very awake. She has been awake since four. She is nervous. She has not been home in a year."

"She is from Lugo, not the mansion."

"She is from Galicia," Abraham said. "Close enough for her. She has packed too many cardigans. Do not say anything."

"I would not say anything."

"You would say something. She would take it personally. This is why I am telling you now."

"Okay."

"See you tonight, hermano."

"Tonight."

"I hope she is pretty."

"Abraham—"

"I hope she is pretty and I hope she is difficult. In that order. Your father has bad taste in women for you and good taste in women for him. Bye."

Abraham hung up first.

#

"Encarna."

"Señor Jon. You fly at what time."

"Three."

"Will you have eaten."

"No."

"Will I make soup."

"A little soup."

"A little soup, he says. It will be a big soup, Señor Jon. Big soup. The young lady. Does she eat."

"Encarna."

"Señor."

"Yes. She eats."

"Good. A big soup."

Encarna hung up before she said goodbye. Encarna always hung up before she said goodbye.

#

Rafa answered from what sounded like the terrace of the house, because Jon could hear the particular kind of wind that only came off that particular hillside.

"Primo."

"Primo," Jon said.

"You are coming."

"I am coming."

"I have put her in the second bedroom, not the guest bedroom. Encarna agrees."

"Why."

"Because the second bedroom is further from yours."

Jon did not answer.

"Primo," Rafa said.

"What."

"Do not be the man your father thinks you should be this weekend. Be the man you actually are, which, for the record, nobody in this family can remember right now, and we would all like to be reminded."

"Rafa—"

"That is all I am going to say about it. Tell Abraham not to forget the aguardiente."

"Abraham is bringing the aguardiente."

"Abraham has been bringing the aguardiente for fifteen years, primo. Bring the chocolate. For Encarna."

"I have the chocolate."

"Good. See you tonight."

"See you tonight."

#

Jon had Maribel's number written on a piece of paper in his shirt pocket. Jesus had given it to him the night before, in the way Jesus gave people's numbers — folded, torn from an older piece of paper, the pencil crossed out and rewritten. Jon had looked at the number without memorising it and had put the paper in the pocket. In the kitchen now, he took the paper out. He spread it flat on the table beside the unpainted soldier. He dialled.

She answered on the fourth ring.

"¿Sí?"

"Maribel."

"Señor."

"Jon."

"Don Jon."

"Just Jon."

A silence.

"Jon," she said.

"I am calling to tell you the plan."

"Your father told me the plan."

"He told you his plan. I am telling you mine."

"Okay."

"A car will come for you at four. It will bring you here first. Alfonso the Twelfth, forty-seven, fourth floor, left. From there we will go to the airstrip together."

"The airstrip."

"The plane to Galicia is a small plane. Four seats. My father's."

"Okay."

"Have you ever been in a small plane?"

"No."

"You will be all right."

"Okay."

"I am the pilot."

Another silence.

"Okay," she said.

"You do not sound afraid."

"Señor—"

"Jon."

"Jon. I do not know what I would have to be afraid of."

Jon smiled. He did not let her hear him smile; he only smiled into the kitchen.

"Four o'clock," he said.

"Four o'clock."

"See you this evening."

"This evening, Jon."

She hung up first.

#

He did not know, now, what to do for the next four hours.

He walked the length of the flat once and then, at the far window, stood and looked at the street he had watched at one in the morning and had watched, for most of the nights since his return, from the same spot. Madrid on a Friday before the weekend was not as busy as Madrid was on any other weekday, because people had gone home, or had not yet come out, or were in the particular pre-weekend calm of knowing they would not be working on Monday either.

He thought about the party.

He had been thinking about the party for a month, in the way he thought about parties, which was to say he had let his father's assistant make most of the decisions and had intervened only where the decisions had to do with people he knew better than his father did. He had drawn up the list himself. The list was long and it was stratified: there was the childhood friends group, who had known him since he had been someone's son in short trousers and who had kept the habit of treating him as that person; there was the secondary-school group, in which half of them were now doctors or lawyers and the other half were still waiting to decide what they were going to do after the recession had ended; there was the university group, a small group that met twice a year and was losing its members one at a time to foreign cities; and there was the mini-wars group, which was his oldest, loudest, and most honest group, a collection of men and — increasingly, over the last decade — women who spent their Saturdays painting tiny figures and moving them across tables the size of football pitches, and who, by virtue of having sat across tables from each other for twenty years, knew each other better than most families did.

He had invited members from each group. He had not invited whole groups. He had never invited whole groups.

There would be, by Saturday afternoon, perhaps forty people at the house. There would be Abraham and Pecas. There would be Rafa. There would be, he thought, for the first time in nine years, the doctor — not the doctor he had dated but another doctor, his oldest friend's wife, whose husband had told him on the phone two weeks ago that she had asked, carefully, whether it was going to be all right. There would be Maribel.

He did not know, yet, what Maribel was supposed to be to this day.

He thought about her standing in his kitchen at dawn with a coffee she had found without asking — except she had not yet stood in his kitchen, and the image was the image of a woman he had imagined, not a woman he had met. He had imagined her, over the Thursday night and this morning, in a few different postures. He had imagined her laughing. He had imagined her making him uncomfortable. He had imagined her being exactly like the women in the room last night, and he had imagined her being nothing at all like them, and he had imagined, for a minute, his father sitting across the lunch table three days earlier and saying, I do not think I am wrong about this, and he had imagined, unkindly, that his father was always wrong about this.

He turned from the window.

He went to the bedroom and packed a bag. He packed the bag in fifteen minutes because he had packed versions of this bag his whole life and was no longer interested in it. He put the bag by the door. He came back to the kitchen. He sat down at the table.

He picked up the brush.

He finished the second sleeve of the soldier's coat. He did not make it match. He let the mismatch stand.

#

At ten minutes past four the buzzer rang.

He stood up. He rolled down his sleeves. He walked to the door. He pressed the intercom. He said, Fourth floor, left.

A voice in the entryway, cautious, careful: Señor Jon.

"Jon," he said. "Come up."

He left the door open.

He heard the lift rise. He heard it stop on the fourth floor. He heard the soft tap of heels in the corridor. He heard, as they reached his threshold, the tiny sound of a travel bag set down on the landing tile.

She was here, with an overnight bag.