The Santiago Sisters

The man kept going, raising his hips and thrusting. Gonzalez was thrown into an upright position, her breasts bouncing hectically, and Teresa almost laughed, but she was about to cry as well so it was confusing. In seconds, the man groaned.

It was over.

But that groan lingered on. It released something in Teresa, like a flesh wound in that pale instant before it splurges blood. All at once, she despised her papa. She despised his weakness. She despised his nakedness. She despised that pathetic, defenceless, self-serving groan. She despised him for liking her tyrant teacher, for choosing her over them. She despised him for loving her twin more than he loved her. She despised him for pretending that evil woman was her mama, who was tired and sick and ignorant of his sin. Teresa was filled with rage, but within that rage sat a nugget of conviction that smacked her with total clarity. Her father had committed a basic, unequivocal transgression that she would never forgive and never forget.

Gonzalez lifted herself and tied her hair back. They said something to each other, Teresa didn’t hear what, and laughed softly.

She found herself staring at it. The thing was relaxing now, less stiff and angry than before, and smaller, almost shy as it rested against her father’s thigh.

Soundlessly, Teresa retreated from the stable door. She stumbled back into the house, the lavender forgotten, and went to the bathroom and thought she might be sick.

Later, Teresa decided she would not tell her sister what she had seen. It was something she should keep to herself, a burden she alone must carry, and it would be the very first thing she ever kept from Calida.

Summer turned to winter and winter turned to spring. Skies were bracing and boundless blue, wisps of clouds drifting high in the ether, and far away the snow-capped mountains surveyed their kingdom of open plains. In the evenings, Teresa sat on the veranda to watch the horses run free, their manes wild in the hot wind.

She spent less time with her father, and resisted his embrace.

‘Chica, what’s the matter?’ Diego would ask. But she couldn’t answer him. She couldn’t look at him. She kept remembering what she had seen—it came at her in flashes, accompanied by that pitiful, animal groan, and she could not bear to be kissed good night or even touched by him. In lessons with Gonzalez, she became surly and distant. Gonzalez smacked and mocked her—’What are you doing?’ Calida whispered when their tutor’s back was turned. ‘Stop making her angry!’—and despite the number of times Teresa longed to put Gonzalez in her place and confess to what she’d seen, she never did. She was afraid of hurting Julia, of disappointing Calida, of Diego’s denial, of the question she kept returning to: Why didn’t you run? Why did you stay and watch? And the more she rejected Diego, the closer he grew to Calida, and the more Teresa felt the cool shawl of loneliness close around her shoulders.

What was there left for her here?

Her mama was right. Her mama told her she didn’t belong on the estancia. She was fated for greater, more important things. She had outgrown this life.

How could Calida be content to stay? There were so many worlds to see, so much more to discover, beyond the gate at the foot of the track. Teresa felt the draw of possibility as a physical force, beckoning her, tempting her. Stay here and you’ll never amount to anything. You’ll always be second best. She imagined her existence twenty years from now, as unhappy as Julia, her hopes and dreams snuffed to dust.

Julia hadn’t always been like this. Hers was a cautionary tale, so she said, as she combed Teresa’s hair and gazed in the mirror at the decades between their reflections. Once, Julia had bathed in banknotes and showered in glittering coins. She had been raised in a mansion many miles away and, as the only daughter of a rich man, had had her every need catered for; surrounded by servants, banquets, and ball gowns, she was the girl whose hand every suitor sought to claim. Then Diego Santiago had swept into her life, so different from the polished men of whom her father approved, and they had fallen in love. Julia, as spirited and defiant as her daughter, refused to be cowed by her father’s ultimatum. Given the choice between her family and her lover, she had chosen her lover. Teresa thought this romantic, but Julia was quick to clarify her mistake. She had been left with nothing. No money. No luxury. No furs or sapphires or silk sheets. When her parents died, they left it all to a distant cousin and not a peso came Julia’s way. Her sacrifice lost her everything.

What Julia wouldn’t give to swap her fortunes now! Look where romance had got her: a house that was falling apart, clothes that were tatty and shapeless, a husband who had changed, or so the story went, when he left to fight on the Islas Malvinas, leaving Julia behind with her pregnancy and a rapidly swelling depression. Now, her only refuge was in her romance novels, which she read to Teresa late into the night. The Billionaire’s Mistress, The Diamond Tycoon, The Handsome Magnate …

She informed Teresa how her beauty would serve her well; it was a pass into an exclusive club beyond the reach of ordinary people, and it meant she never had to settle. ‘These are the kind of men you must find,’ Julia counselled. ‘Rich men.’ She told Teresa that love was a trap only fools fell into. ‘Men will let you down—all men, eventually, no matter how much you think you can trust them—but money never will. If you have money, you have power … and if you have power, you have everything.’

That night, watching the stars through the window, silver cobwebs in a deep and soundless purple, Teresa prayed for the courage to make her mama’s vision come true. Diego’s betrayal proved that this was a cutthroat, adult world, that the innocence of her childhood was over, and, if she intended to succeed, she couldn’t hide away.

‘Recognise fortune when it comes for you,’ her mama said. ‘And when it does, be ready.’ Teresa was ready. She sensed it like a current at her fingertips. Something vital was about to change, something big: she could almost touch it.

She closed her eyes and took a breath, filling her lungs with promise. In the bunk below, she heard the yield of the mattress as Calida turned in her sleep.

3

London

Seven thousand miles across the sea, in a townhouse in Kensington, actress Simone Geddes faced the wall-mounted mirror as her husband drove into her from behind.

Shit, Brian was a lame fuck. He had never made her come—not once. His technique, if that wasn’t too grand a word, was to pound as hard and as fast as he could until her groans of boredom could be mistaken for cries of ecstasy, and so when the time came for him to collapse on her back in a sweaty, sticky heap (three minutes later), he could feel satisfied that she had also reached climax. This made her suspicious that Brian had never made a woman come, because otherwise he’d know.

‘That feel good, baby?’ he growled, rutting away, lightly slapping her bottom.

Do it properly! Simone wanted to scream. If you’re going to slap me, give it some welly! But as with everything with Brian, it was lame. Lame, lame, lame.

‘Let me get on top,’ she instructed. Her husband was close to spunking and she wouldn’t be in with a shot unless she took matters into her own hands. As she flipped his pale, bloated-from-too-many-lunches-at-Quaglino’s body between her thighs and clamped him into place, she thanked God for the mirror she’d had the foresight to install in the mansion’s master suite. At least this way she could get off on her own image, and no one could deny she looked incredible. At forty-eight, Simone Geddes was the ultimate English screen siren: cool, composed, with a chiselled sort of beauty that could freeze even the most experienced co-star into submission. She wore not an ounce of fat. Her ribcage was visible, delicate as a toothcomb beneath flawless white skin. Her breasts were high and small, the nipples tight. Her thighs were long and lean, smooth as the curves on a cherished motorcar. Her bush was honey-blonde and waxed into a neat landing strip. Her arms were slender and sinewy.

‘Baby, you are so sexy …’ Brian echoed her thoughts. She watched his hands reach up to knead her tits, quickly followed by the back of his head, then the feel of his wet, insistent tongue lapping her nipples as she mused on how much hair he had lost from that area. It was turning into a veritable monk’s patch!

‘I’m ready, hot stuff,’ he murmured—what were they living in, the 1970s? ‘Can you feel me deep inside you? D’you want this cock to make you come?’

Brian’s cock was mediocre. Simone would deal with it as one might a sticky gearbox, grinding it into position until finally she was cruising. She kept an eye on her own reflection as she hit orgasm, enjoying the pink flush that built and spread across her chest, and the way her breasts bounced and shook as she surrendered.

Brian shot his load a second later. He did this disagreeable wiggly thing with his hips, like he was stirring the contents of a mixing bowl with a big wooden spoon.

Efficiently, Simone dismounted. ‘Time to get ready,’ she ordered, stalking into the bathroom. Before entering, she called out, ‘Wear the Armani, would you? And the shirt. That shirt’s good. It’s slimming.’ She slammed the door.

Ugh. Doubts over her marriage were at an all-time high. At first, she had been seduced by the muscle of a big-shot director—not that she wasn’t a big shot herself, but Brian Chilcott was one of the hottest names in British film and together they were dynamite. Of course she had hoped the sex might get better, but then, when it didn’t, she’d given up. Brian did nothing for her, erotically. She didn’t even fancy him. Had she ever? Or had she just been in love with his plethora of awards and the allure of being half of the UK’s reigning power couple? No wonder she took other lovers. Men who knew where a woman’s clitoris was located—who knew women had one, for a start—and would happily spend an hour down there sending her to the brink, until the marital sheets were crumpled and soaked. Vera, the Spanish maid, asked no questions. The day Vera did, Simone would fire her so fast her head would spin.

Simone ran a scented bath and climbed in. The hot bubbles soothed her and she applied her cucumber facemask and closed her eyes. Brian’s latest movie was premiering tonight at Leicester Square and she had to look the part: they’d been married five years now and it was always around this time that the gossip columnists decided to speculate. A glowing joint appearance every couple of months normally did the trick. Just remember to smile! Simone told herself, attempting to practise underneath the mask, which had now set solid and cracked like cake icing.

She was beginning to relax when a caterwaul sounded from the bedroom.

‘But Daaaaad!’

Brian’s voice followed immediately: ‘I said no, darling.’

‘You are such a shit, Dad! All my friends are going. It’s only a fucking party—why do you have to be such a moron all the time?’

‘It’s only because I care—’

‘No, you fucking don’t. If you did, you’d fucking well let me go. It’s like I’m a fucking criminal—it’s like you’re keeping me fucking prisoner!’

‘Stop swearing.’

‘Like fuck I will.’

That was enough! Simone rose from the bath and wrapped herself in a towel. Damn Emily Chilcott! The thirteen-year-old was the bane of Simone’s life—she and her elder brother, the awful Lysander. Who would have stepchildren? Soon after Simone had moved in, Lysander and his friends had ‘done a waffle’ in the first-floor wet room, which involved defecating into the shower grill and, well, she couldn’t bear to think of the rest. Vera the maid had been forced to clear it up. Simone had been appalled, but all Brian did was to roll his eyes and chuckle, ‘Boys will be boys.’

Not on her watch, they wouldn’t. Emily and Lysander were begging for a smack of discipline; if they were her own, they wouldn’t get away with a second of it.

But they’re not yours, are they?

And now you’re a dried-up old husk. Barren. Shrivelled. Sterile.

Simone swallowed hard. She put her hand on the bathroom doorknob and stopped, watching her hand, focusing on it, because when she thought of that time, of that secret, it stole her breath away and it was all she could do to keep standing.

It wasn’t like that. I had no choice.

Emily’s tirade shattered her thoughts. ‘I hate you!’

Simone tore open the door. ‘What the hell is this?’ she demanded.

‘Oh, perfect,’ sang Emily, who privately loved Simone getting involved because that meant she could access her favoured armoury: the ‘you’re-not-my-mother’ diatribe. ‘Now your little bitch on the side is coming to tell me off.’

‘Emily, no!’ objected Brian, who was sweating. ‘You mustn’t say that!’

‘Bloody well let me go to the party, Dad, or I’ll say a lot worse.’

For a pretty girl, Emily Chilcott made an ugly mess of herself. Her permanent scowl erased the loveliness of her blue eyes, and her filthy mouth better belonged on a black-toothed hooker than an heiress to London’s greatest film dynasty. She was attractive, but her attitude made her a grim proposition. The same went for Lysander. Since their mother had left Brian for a female German show jumper named Trudi (a well-publicised scandal ten years ago), it had all gone tits up: all four tits up, if you thought of it that way. Brian’s laissez-faire attitude was one big long apology, and the kids took every advantage of it. When would he grow a ball-sack, for heaven’s sake?

Simone met Emily’s glare and raised it several notches. She would not lose.

‘Don’t you dare speak to me like that, madam.’

‘Screw you, Simone.’

‘You shut that mouth right now or I’ll shut it for you!’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘With pleasure.’

Brian stepped in. ‘Now, now, ladies …’

‘Lysander’s allowed to do whatever the fuck he wants,’ raged Emily. ‘He’s in his room this minute getting high off his nuts and neither of you two gives a shit.’

‘He’s doing what?’ Simone stormed into the hallway. Behind, Brian crooned, ‘OK, let’s everyone take it easy …’

Simone headed for Lysander’s room and threw open the door. But the sight that met her eyes wasn’t of Lysander—handsome, dark, rangy Lysander, with a curl to his spoiled, upper-class lip—skinning a joint or bent over one of his elaborate bongs; it was Lysander, butt-naked, reclining against his pillows and receiving a dedicated blow job from a redhead. Simone’s lips parted in shock. She didn’t know where to look. Lysander was coming hard. His eyes met hers as he ejaculated into the redhead’s mouth. In the corridor, Emily giggled. ‘Oops,’ she trilled, ‘my mistake!’

Post-climax, Lysander was unfazed. ‘All right … Mummy?’

Lysander’s accent was so sharp you could skewer cubes of meat on it.

‘What on earth is going on?’ Simone rasped. The redhead jerked up, clocked their audience and flung herself off the bed. She grappled for her clothes, her breasts jiggling as she tried and failed to cover her modesty. From the front Simone saw she was older than Lysander—quite a bit older, in fact. Lysander lit a cigarette.

Simone fought to keep her eyes off Lysander’s dying erection. He made no attempt to conceal it. It was huge. Why couldn’t Brian share that family trait?

‘You’re disgusting!’ Mortified, Simone turned on her heel. ‘Do not touch me, Brian!’ She flapped him off. ‘Whatever you do, do not bloody touch me!’

Before she disappeared back inside the master suite, she heard Emily wheedle: ‘So, Daddy, can I please go to the party? See, I’m not as bad as ‘Sander …’

And, predictably, depressingly, Brian’s castrated consent.

‘I just don’t understand why you can’t take control of them more!’

In the back seat of a blacked-out Mercedes rushing through Piccadilly, Brian placed a hand on his wife’s knee. Simone resisted the urge to recoil against the window: after all, they soon had to put on a convincing show for the cameras.

‘I try,’ he said pathetically. ‘You know how strong-willed they are.’

‘Or how weak-willed you are.’

‘They’re yours, too, you know.’ Brian said it as if he were sharing a prized chain of Umbrian holiday homes, not a host of cancerous growths in the armpit.

This time, she did flinch. ‘They already have a mother.’

‘But only one stepmother.’

God, it made her sound like some gnarled old thing in Cinderella. Oh, for a child of her own! Simone dreamed of it night and day. A girl—yes, a daughter, it had to be a daughter—whom she could mould in her own image. The girl would be her legacy, her gift to the world long after Simone’s own legend died. She would raise her as the ravishing, well-mannered, and impeccably groomed young lady that Emily Chilcott wasn’t and never could be. Simone wished for this immaculate creature so fervently that she thought she might explode. Yes, she had fame. Yes, she had riches. Yes, she had a wardrobe, and a stylist, and an army of fans that could topple the fucking monarchy, but all she yearned for was that most prized possession: a girl.

It would never happen. Simone was biologically unable, even before the first flushes of menopause. She hadn’t always been. No, it hadn’t always been that way …

‘Here we are, baby,’ said Brian, as they pulled up at the red carpet.

Their driver opened the door and the wall of sound that crashed in almost knocked her off her feet. Simone gripped her clutch and pasted on a smile. Cameras flashed and sparked. ‘Simone! Brian! Let’s see a kiss for the fans!’ And so on.

Simone had picked out her outfit personally, a Versace emerald-green drape dress with scoop neckline. Everyone said that, after forty, one should cover one’s décolletage, but Simone disagreed. She hadn’t been using five-hundred-pound face and neck creams the last twenty years for nothing.

‘You look tired.’ Michelle Horner, Simone’s manager and one of the most cutthroat women in the business, stole her at the end of the press queue. Simone had always thought Michelle resembled a whippet, especially tonight, in a grey trouser suit and pumps, her nose appearing even longer under the lighting. Michelle wore glasses on the end of her nose, amplifying the effect. ‘All OK on the home front?’

‘Same old.’

They entered the atrium, where champagne was circulating. Heads turned. In certain spheres Simone was known as The Ice Queen. She wasn’t sure where or how she had picked that up, but it was certainly an easier façade to maintain than the poor joke-a-minute suckers who had cultivated a comedy precedent and had to spend the rest of their days working the room like a court buffoon.

‘Terry Sheehan wants you for January Fight,’ Michelle was saying. ‘I told him we’d consider the script but it would have to be something special what with the Jonasses ringing off the hook and Sindy Reinhold at Paramour calling every hour of the day. I said, “Terry, we’re not getting out of bed in the morning for less than ten, and if you don’t like it you can bite me.” Between you and me, he’ll be scrabbling in his toilet bowl for coins. This is a waiting game and we’ll wait.’

Simone was only half paying attention. Across the space, a fellow forty-something actress had arrived. The woman was single, attractive if not ragingly successful, and in her arms she carried a gorgeously sweet black baby boy.

‘Where’d she get that from?’ Simone cut in.

Michelle followed her gaze. ‘The kid?’

‘Of course the kid—I thought her husband ran off with that bit of fluff.’

‘He did. She wanted a child, though. So she adopted.’

Simone narrowed her eyes. That sounded awfully simple. ‘Is it awfully simple?’

‘For ordinary people, I shouldn’t think so. For her, maybe.’

‘Where do you get them from?’

‘That one came from Africa.’

‘The internet? Are they in a catalogue or something?’

Michelle stepped back. ‘You’re not considering it, surely,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

‘What does Brian think?’

Right then, Simone couldn’t give a hooting crap what Brian thought. He wouldn’t know what it was like to go through life with no child to call her own. He wouldn’t understand. As with all else in their marriage, Simone would make the decision herself and then she would inform him of it. His opinion mattered not a jot. ‘Michelle, I want you to look into it for me.’

Michelle was used to dealing with her clients’ whims—this one would blow over in a week. ‘OK,’ she agreed. ‘Do you want a brown one?’

‘No.’

‘A Chinese one?’

‘No.’

‘Mexican? Filipino?’

‘I’m not ordering a goddamn takeaway. I don’t know.’

‘I’ll get you some information.’

‘Good. This could be the missing piece, Michelle. It really could.’

Brian joined them. On a happy impulse, Simone leaned in to kiss his cheek. A passing paparazzo captured the moment. ‘Hello, baby,’ he said, chuffed.

Hello, baby …

Except it wouldn’t be a baby. She had her own reasons for that. It would be a child. Hello to the child who was somewhere out there, halfway across the world, waiting to be plucked from poverty to riches, from obscurity to the spotlight, from nothing to having it all. What little girl wouldn’t want that?

She smiled. It would happen—and soon.

For, when Simone Geddes put her mind to something, she did not fail.

4

Argentina

In the autumn, without explanation, Señorita Gonzalez was fired. Diego appeared to make the decision overnight, and Calida didn’t dare question it—except to her sister.

‘What happened?’ she whispered.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you think he found out what she was really like?’

‘Maybe. Who cares? She’s gone now.’

Teresita was flicking through one of their mama’s romance novels. Calida frowned: she could read her twin just as easily as the words on the page.

‘You know something,’ she said. ‘About Gonzalez—I can tell.’

‘No, you can’t. You don’t know everything about me.’

‘I know you can’t actually like those books. Come on, A Prince’s Affair?’

Teresita bristled. ‘What’s wrong with them?’ she countered.

Calida could list the reasons from the covers alone—plastic men in open shirts with chests like dolls, smooth and hairless, and bright white teeth; how Julia swooned over their aeroplanes and chunky watches and forgot about the life that was right here in front of her. Calida thought the books looked like nonsense, but she didn’t say so, because she didn’t want to prove her twin right. They did know everything about each other—and in that case Calida didn’t need to explain what she disliked, nor Teresita what she enjoyed, so it seemed safer to walk away, and to try not to think about what Teresita was keeping from her, and why she hid it so deep, out of sight.

A month later, the girls were watching television in the barn when the phone rang.

Calida went through to the house. She lifted the receiver.

‘Hello?’

The voice on the line sounded far away. It was a woman.

‘Es la policía,’ it said. ‘My name is Officer Puerta and I need to speak with Julia, wife of Diego Santiago. Is that her?’

They manoeuvered Julia into the back of the Landrover with difficulty: she hadn’t taken the car out in years and professed to have forgotten how—and besides, how could she operate a vehicle at a time like this? She was a wife in crisis.

‘My husband,’ she kept gasping. ‘What’s happened to my husband?’

‘We have to get to him, Mama,’ said Calida. She was terrified but she couldn’t show it. She had to stay strong. She helped her sister into the passenger seat and held her hand. ‘Don’t worry,’ she told her firmly. ‘It will be all right.’ Teresita gazed back at her with a stoic expression, and it was an expression Calida couldn’t decipher. She couldn’t find a way into it. It closed on her as firmly as the car door.