A Kind of Eden by Amanda Smyth Page A

loudly.
    â€˜Conan is our early-warning system. Anyone comes to the gate and he barks.’ The dog’s tail is wagging, and he seems friendly enough.
    â€˜What happened to his leg?’
    â€˜He was down in the village chasing chickens, and someone chop him with a cutlass. The cut get bad and the vet had to take it off.’
    â€˜That’s pretty brutal.’
    â€˜The vet or the man who chop him?’
    Terence smiles and he catches sight of a gold tooth.
    â€˜Let me tell you, sir, Tobago people can be savage.’ Conan rolls down on the ground and tips back his head. Terence puts his foot on the dog’s stomach.
    â€˜I need to show you how to work the metal shutters. They only put them in the living room; the rest of the place has bars.’
    From the doorway, he watches Miriam unpacking her suitcase. She has turned on the overhead lights and it is bright. She is tired but determined, her dark hair pulled back from her thin face.
    â€˜There’s plenty of space. If I put mine on this side, you can have the other,’ she says, cheerfully. ‘And there’s lots of drawers too.’
    He glances around the room, and in particular at the large four-poster bed; her folded nightdress is on top of the sheet along with a clean pair of underwear, no doubt for after her shower.
    He says, ‘Are you hungry? There’s bread; I can rustle something up.’
    Miriam nods. ‘Georgia is probably starving; she hardly ate on the plane.’ She steps towards him, cautiously. ‘I’m really pleased we came.’
    â€˜Me too,’ and he rubs her arm awkwardly. He can see that this confuses her slightly and he doesn’t know what else to do. At one time he would have kissed her mouth, put his arms around her.
    Glad of an excuse, he leaves the room and goes to the kitchen. He opens a bottle of cold beer and leans for a moment againstthe tiled worktop. There is a large stone arch, and through it he can see the living room, and a painting of a woman with her breasts bared. It is a strange and erotic painting to hang in a family holiday villa. The buttery-coloured woman is wearing a headscarf and her arm is back, above her head. She is boldly showing herself to someone, someone she must like very much. At one time Miriam might have shown herself to him like this. Not now. At least he hopes not now. How do feelings change? Is it a slow, ongoing metamorphosis or a quick and sudden thing?
    When he first met Miriam, she had seemed somehow familiar. She was attractive; her features were too hawkish to be pretty. Her cousin, a colleague and friend, introduced them. She seemed carefree and plucky, opinionated; different from any other girls he knew. That summer, she was visiting from northern Spain where she taught English as a foreign language in a small school.
    At the time, Miriam warned him that she had a boyfriend, José, who lived in Barcelona, and they had been together for almost a year. For two weeks, Martin pursued her as if his life depended on it. When he finally persuaded her to cut loose, she discovered that she was six weeks pregnant with José’s baby. Miriam was inconsolable. She said her life was over. He reassured her; she could stay in England and decide about her future. He would support her.
    They moved together into a tiny semi-detached house, in Roundhay, Leeds. He had finished his two-year induction, and was about to start working shifts. For a while Miriam played homemaker. She stripped and painted the walls. She dug up the tiny garden and planted shrubs; where there had once beengravel, grass soon grew. When the house was finished, Miriam enrolled on a teacher-training course. There was no use in wasting her language skills, she said; she would teach Spanish.
    For a long time, they didn’t talk about the abortion. Yet he felt, instinctively, that she was sometimes disappointed in the path she had chosen; that she regretted leaving Spain and all it had