CHAPTER 28
Joanna
Lisbon
Joanna let her gaze drift over the landscape of northern Lisbon. The air was still warm for the end of October, and the city still had a pinkish, autumnal glow. The ancient grey stone aqueduct – Aqueduto das Aguas Livres – dominated the scene. How could she ever have missed it on the map?
She checked her notes. The aqueduct ran from the north of the city, through thirty-five arches across the Alcantara valley to the M?e d’água reservoir in western Lisbon.
Which was exactly where she was heading.
Following the ancient waterway on her second bridge walk.
Had Emmy done the same thing? Dearest Rufus, my heart’s love, can you taste my lover’s tears?
She had written those poignant words in Lisbon.
But why tears? Emmy was clearly an emotional woman, but she would soon be going home to him, wouldn’t she?
Joanna rested for a moment, leaning against the weathered stone arch.
Was it simply that Emmy was finding their parting very hard?
Was she very young perhaps? Not sure of his love?
Or was there some problem, some added complication that Joanna hadn’t yet discovered?
She took the Lisbon letter out of her bag and skimmed it again, familiar now with the elegant, looped handwriting of her ancestor.
It was mostly in the same vein about love and parting, but: There will be a way through the mire, the right way, my dearest. We must trust in that, she read.
Hmm. The ‘mire’ certainly sounded problematic. Joanna hoped that Emmy and Rufus had found a way through it; their love sounded too special to lose. Joanna felt confident that she too was finding a way through her particular problems, but in her case there was no Rufus around to hold her hand.
She thought of Mulberry Farm Cottage, Mother and Harriet.
Could she sense a breakthrough? She ran her fingers across the rough grey stone.
Harriet hadn’t sounded exactly enamoured of the country and western bloke in the coffee shop, but at least her sister was trying to get a life outside the cottage and Mother – which had to be a good thing.
And surely Joanna wasn’t imagining the fact that Harriet was being a bit less defensive than usual – she’d opened up to her about Jolyon, after all?
Harriet was right, their chat with Mother hadn’t worked out quite as they’d hoped, but Joanna had meant what she said – she was convinced they’d got through to her at last.
She consulted her notes and spoke into the machine again.
‘The aqueduct has a hundred and nine arches across the valley, the tallest being sixty-six metres high.’ And the arches were built to last; the 1755 earthquake that had destroyed so much of the surrounding area had not brought down the stone edifice of the aqueduct. Joanna envied that kind of solidity.
She wanted to include enough information to whet her readers’ appetites, but not enough to sound like a guidebook – that’s not what her walks were about.
Her thoughts returned to her new correspondent, Nicholas Tresillion.
He had seemed to get it. She had finally sent the email to him yesterday.
And was already quite looking forward to his reply.
She slung her rucksack over her shoulder and headed off for the Rua das Amoreiras.
She wanted to make these walks more about discovery – a subject dear to her heart right now.
Portugal’s golden age of discovery was in the late fourteenth and fifteenth century.
What was that old rhyme? In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue .
. . She chuckled. Vasco de Gama had a bridge named after him and wasn’t there also someone called Henry the Navigator?
Emmy had mentioned the Portuguese Age of Discovery in her letter – it was one of the reasons her father was so interested in the city.
All in all, the city of Lisbon certainly had plenty for the traveller to discover.
Joanna scanned the landscape around her as she walked on.
The red clay roofs and elegant creamy pale terracotta buildings combined with a riotous array of patterned azulejo tiles to create the delicious colours of Lisbon.
And she loved the hilly and winding cobblestone streets of the Bairro Alto, the old heart of the city, where her hotel was situated and which was crammed with tiny and charming bars, shops and cafés.
She had only been here for a day, and yet already she felt thoroughly immersed in the city and confident about this walk to come.
She stopped every minute or two, took photos, made more notes.
She wasn’t surprised that Emmy had painted this bridge because it truly belonged to another time.
But where was the painting? If her ancestor had painted all these bridges, if she was in fact an artist – maybe even a successful one – then where were all the rest of her paintings?
Joanna thought of the letters. And most especially, where were the paintings of the aqueduct in Lisbon and the bridge in Prague? Had Emmy sold them?
On this walk, Joanna was instinctively focusing on the old and the new.
The ancient decorative tiles, for example, providing original and stunning fascias for garden walls, houses and apartment buildings epitomised the old, while the modern glass-fronted shops and office blocks encapsulated the new.
There were so many other compelling contrasts too.
The young Portuguese girl in skinny jeans sashaying down the cobbled street past a wizened leather-skinned old woman dressed in black from head to toe.
The traditional funiculars that transported walkers up the steep hills to the lookout points, miradouros, over the city, while underground, the super-fast Metro provided the transport of the twenty-first century.
And not forgetting the new bridges, carrying traffic and people rather than the precious water and nourishment that the old aqueduct had originally brought to the city.
She walked on past houses with faded and peeling paintwork, where vines and climbing bougainvillea had insinuated themselves around wrought-iron gates and latticed balconies.
Like Venice, this part of Lisbon wore an air of decay; there was a sense of age resting in the old stone.
And yet you could turn a corner and be faced with a massive shopping mall, twin towers like giant liquorice allsorts, people thronging across a busy road. The modern world.
Joanna crossed the road, and turned into Rua das Amoreiras, the road of mulberry trees that had caught her attention when she’d been studying the map, back in Dorset, searching for Emmy’s bridge.
And to think she had almost given up on her .
. . The road was wide, lined with tall buildings painted pink, cream and blue.
And as she went further, there in the middle of it, dividing the road into two, was the massive end archway of the aqueduct, Arco das Amoreiras, a baroque monument, like a Roman triumphal arch, constructed from ancient grey stone.
Wow. It was quite something. She stopped and stared; imagined another time – a procession perhaps, an entering of the city.
So much had changed for both men and women when it came to making decisions about life, about love.
Some things, though, would always be the same.
Emmy’s emotions in her letter felt as real to Joanna as if she were experiencing them herself in the here and now.
Some things, like love, hadn’t changed at all.
Was that why she felt compelled to follow in Emmy’s footsteps?
Because she identified so closely with this ancestor of hers?
Or because she knew that Emmy was trying to take her somewhere, show her something that she needed to know?
Somewhere along here, she knew, was the Praca das Amoreiras, a place of calm and reflection, once housing a silk factory but now an ideal point in the walk’s itinerary, she guessed, in which to take a break and have a coffee.
She found it easily, and wasn’t disappointed.
In the centre of the mosaic-cobbled square was a fountain; mulberry trees lined the praca and there was a tiny chapel nestled within one of the arches of the aqueduct that framed the square.
The square was decorated with azulejo tiles and crumbling stone pillars.
She sat on one of the stone benches in the sun and looked around.
Mulberry trees would always remind her of Dorset and of home.
The sun was skating off the bare branches of the mulberry trees and Joanna had to shield her eyes as she looked up.
For a moment she was blinded by the sunlight.
She saw two children up in the branches playing.
Herself and Harriet. Clear as day. Heard their laughter, their excited voices, their shrieks.
It was late summertime. And then it was just Harriet up there shaking the branches so that the fruit fell to the ground like bullets of blood, staining the earth and the grass beneath.
Joanna was on some sort of collision course, she could feel it.
Berry stains on their hands, juice streaked across their clothes, their faces.
She hardly dared breathe; she couldn’t bear for the picture to dissolve.
Because these memories were all too few.
More often it was Harriet and Father she remembered.
Joanna took a swig from her water bottle.
Gathering fruit together, in the tractor side by side, closeted in his study with the books.
Harriet tiptoeing up the stairs late at night, when Joanna was supposed to be asleep . . .
Which was why . . . Joanna blinked up at the mulberry tree.
Damn. The children were gone. Which was why, when he died, she had felt excluded from that small circle of grief.
Mother and Harriet. Who could grieve the most?
Not Joanna, she was in London, she didn’t even live at home anymore.
Nevertheless, he was her father too and she had loved him.
As a girl, she had longed to be the one in the tractor, the one by his side carrying the basket to the orchard while he carried the stepladder, the one listening to all his boyhood stories. Only she never was.
And so, Joanna had done other things with her life. She had left the farm and gone to university, made different friends, gone to other places. She had met Martin and she had married him. They had moved to London. Her family didn’t want her, so she left them behind. Was that really how it had been?
The mulberry tree was blurring now and Joanna realised that her face was streaked with tears.
She brushed them away with the back of her hand.
It was ironic, she thought, that back then, she hadn’t cried over the death of her father and yet now, she could cry so easily; for others, for herself, for the fact that she had lost him without properly knowing him, without getting close.
In the flick of a switch, at thirty-five, she had become an emotional whirlwind.
There were two lovers standing beside the tree now.
She was clasped in his embrace and her eyes were closed, her lips slightly parted.
She had fair hair and delicate features.
She wore a gold chain around her white throat.
Joanna had seen her before – running towards her destiny in Venice, running towards her love.
Already, she seemed familiar. And the man?
His head was bowed, his features blurred, but his hair was red and unruly.
Rufus . . . Joanna strained to see him, but the vision had gone, the lovers faded into the branches, twigs and bark of the mulberry tree.
She pulled her notebook out of her bag and began to write; fast, furious. It was Emmy, she knew it. What was she trying to show her? She thought she knew. Emmy was pulling Joanna into her life, into the past, to tell her something about love.