Free Daughter of Catalonia by Jane MacKenzie

silently at Elise with large, questioning blue eyes. And Elise, who understood only parts of what she heard, smiled back at her and thought, if we come to live in Barcelona, these are people I could learn to love. Together they ate rice soup and mountain cheese, and amid the noise of talk she couldn’t follow, Elise felt the peace of Luis’s homecoming …
    ‘You won’t go to Spain now, will you?’
Tante
Louise’s anxious voice penetrated Elise’s reverie, and brought her back to the present. She shook her head to clear the memories, and reached down to feel her swollen belly.
    ‘No, don’t worry. Six months ago we would have gone, but Luis had work to do here so we had to wait, and now … what to do now that Franco has declared war on the Republic? It’s Civil War, and in two weeks I’ll have a baby. Luis would go still, but I won’t go.’
    ‘Thank God!’
    ‘Yes, but it’s tough for Luis, finding himself an exile again. So we won’t disturb his mess and his books, and we’ll let him stay in his little apartment! And now, it’s too hot and I’m too fat to cook, so we’re eating at the café this lunchtime, meeting Luis and Philippe. But
Tante
Louise?’
    ‘Yes, my love?’
    ‘Don’t pester Luis about moving house. Please?’
    ‘Don’t worry, I know when I’m wasting my time. I’m
outnumbered by a bunch of idealistic fools, and there’s no point in appealing to your friends either. Philippe is as bad as the rest of you! But I won’t drink their hellish local wine at that café!’
    Elise enfolded her in a hug.
    ‘Don’t worry,
ma Tante,
Philippe told me he was going to buy you champagne.’
     
    ‘
Tonton
Philippe,’ murmured Madeleine, smiling.
    ‘You remember?’ asked Louise. ‘Your
Tonton
Philippe? How he loved you, child. You were never off his knee. Such a kind, lovable man. He was deeply in love with your mother, of course. Oh, no need to look like that. She wasn’t even aware of it. He was just like a brother to her always, but I could see it in the way he looked at her.’
    ‘Who was Philippe?’ Madeleine asked. ‘I remember him, his face, and his brown jacket and tie, and he had brown hair and he seemed really tall to me, almost bent and very thin. But I don’t know what he did, where he came from, whether he was married, or anything.’
    ‘He was the schoolmaster in Vermeilla,’ Louise explained. ‘He was your father’s greatest friend there. They were both passionately intellectual, and I think Philippe had been a bit starved of such company before your father came to the town. It was just a village, really, but it was big enough to have its own primary school, and Philippe was the headmaster. He wasn’t from Vermeilla. He was from Burgundy, I remember, and had discovered Vermeilla while on a painting holiday, and said he never again wanted to live without the light of Catalogne. That whole coastalways attracted artists. Anyway, I think Philippe had come to the village a few years before Luis and Elise. He wasn’t married, but I often wondered if he was having an affair with the owner of the Café de Catalogne. I can’t remember her name.’
    ‘Colette,’ cut in Solange. ‘I’m sure she was called Colette, and her husband had been injured on the railways.’
    ‘That’s right, it was Colette. A real Catalan woman. Handsome, rather than pretty, and olive-skinned. But a nice woman, I thought.’
    Madeleine stared at the table, conjuring up images in her mind.
    ‘Was there a floor of brown and yellow tiles with green flowers on them?’ she asked.
    ‘My goodness, I don’t know! It was certainly very Catalan. Spanish in style, rather than French, really. Can you remember it?’ Louise was surprised.
    ‘I don’t know. I remember a long bar, and I couldn’t see over the counter. It must have been above my head. I don’t remember people in it, funnily.’ She shook her head. ‘Was it a busy place?’
    ‘As busy as every bar, I suppose, my dear. I only went