The Time In Between (Sira Quiroga, #1)

by María Dueñas

Devotion, unconditional availability, attention to her most ludicrous whims. Submissiveness, submission. Precisely what her husband had demanded of her in life. I assumed this was why she had gotten rid of him. Félix never told me openly, but like the boy in the fairy tale leaving a trail of breadcrumbs behind him, he left me clues along the way.

The late Don Nicasio had probably been killed by his wife just as one dark night Félix would perhaps end up disposing of his mother.

From then on, the bottle of anisette was his great ally, his one salvation and escape route out to the third dimension of his life. And never again was he just a model son when out in the public eye and a disgusting little rag in private; from then on he also became an uninhibited night walker, a fugitive in search of the oxygen he was lacking at home.

vertiginous /vərˈtijənəs/ I. adjective 1. causing vertigo, especially by being extremely high or steep • vertiginous drops to the valleys below. 2. relating to or affected by vertigo. II. derivatives vertiginously adverb – origin early 17th cent.: from Latin vertiginosus, from vertigo ‘whirling around’ (see vertigo).

her son was fleeing like a just-freed sparrow on the way to seedy dives, to meet up with people whom in daylight and in the presence of his mother he wouldn’t have dared even to greet.

Félix was smart enough to know that there was some unhealthy abnormality hanging over that relationship but not brave enough to put a stop to it once and for all. Perhaps that was why he tried to dodge his pitiful reality by turning his mother gradually into a drunk, escaping like a vampire in the small hours or laughing at his own miseries while searching for blame in a thousand ridiculous symptoms

and contemplating the most outlandish remedies.

Girl, you have a divine sense of style and you sew like the very angels, but on matters of general culture you really are rather in the dark, aren’t you?”

apparently could get away with passing myself off as a young woman with style and an exclusive dressmaker, but I was aware that as soon as anyone scratched beneath my outer shell they would have no trouble finding the fragility on which it was supported. Which was why, that first winter in Tetouan, Félix gave me an odd gift: he began to educate me.

The Rif War (Spanish: Guerra del Rif) was an armed conflict fought from 1921 to 1926 between the colonial power Spain (later joined by France) and the Berber tribes of the Rif mountainous region of Morocco. Led by Abd el-Krim, the Riffians at first inflicted several defeats on the Spanish forces by using guerrilla tactics and captured European weapons. After France's military intervention against Abd el-Krim's forces and the major landing of Spanish troops at Al Hoceima, considered the first amphibious landing in history to involve the use of tanks and aircraft, Abd el-Krim surrendered to the French and was taken into exile.[9

Following his recommendation, for example, I changed the way I spoke. I eliminated any slang and all colloquial expressions from my speech and created a new manner to allow me a greater air of sophistication.

It was only a handful of expressions, just half a dozen of them, but he helped me to polish up my pronunciation and calculate just the right moments to use them. They were all aimed at my clients, those now and those to come.

People of the world

was also at Félix’s suggestion that I ordered a box of ivory-white cards from La Papelera Africana bearing the name and address of the business and had a gilt plaque

made for the door, inscribed in ornate script: Chez Sirah—Grand Couturier.

Just for my own amusement, basically.

knew she was strong and determined; I realized that she would know how to get through the hard times. But all the same, how I yearned to hear from her, to learn how she was managing to get on day to day, how she was coping without any company or income.

fought to ensure that no one discovered that an unscrupulous con man had battered my soul and a pile of pistols had enabled me to set up my business, thanks to which I had enough to feed myself each day.

Look under https://world4.eu/fabric-terms-dictionary/

protracted /prəˈtraktəd/ I. adjective lasting for a long time or longer than expected or usual • a protracted and bitter dispute. II. derivatives 1. protractedly /prəˈtraktədlē / adverb 2. protractedness noun

Mariano Fortuny

embarked on the most unexpected and reckless piece of work in my brief career as a dressmaker on my own.

She’d come back, laughing, unembarrassed at the volatility of her fortunes, and working right there side by side with the owner, she would contrive to reconstruct old outfits to make them pass for new, changing the cuts, adding trimmings, and reconfiguring the more unexpected parts.

she would very sensibly choose fabrics that weren’t too costly and creations that needed only the simplest kinds of production work: in that way she managed to pare down the total of her bills as far as possible without overly

reducing her elegance. Hunger sharpens your ingenuity, she would always ...

was a sort of tunic covered with thousands of tiny vertical pleats. Classic, simple, exquisite. Four or five years had passed since that day,

but my memory had retained intact the whole process of producing that dress because I had participated in every part of it.

aim was to keep it as tightly squeezed as possible while drying so that once all the humidity had gone, the silk fabric would be transformed into a wrinkled object retaining as many pleats as possible. Then

we put the twisted material in a basin and carried it between us up to the roof. We turned the ends of the fabric in opposite directions again until it looked like a thick rope that twisted in on itself in the shape of a big spring. Next we laid out a towel and placed upon it, like a coiled snake, the object that just a few hours later would become the gown

Then the vehicle started up, powerfully, and quickly made its way off into the night, carrying within it a woman filled with hope and the most fraudulent dress in the whole history of falsified haute couture.

“Special, my dear, in that your client is probably the woman with the greatest power to resolve any matter in the Protectorate. Apart from issues relating to sewing, of course, which is what she has you for, the empress of forgery.”

Your client, sweetheart, is the lover of Lieutenant Colonel Juan Luis Beigbeder y Atienza, Spain’s high commissioner in Morocco and governor general of the Spanish enclaves. The most important military and administrative post in the whole Protectorate, to be quite clear.”

“Of course he doesn’t do anything for me, but still he does seem to have his appeal to you people—you’re ever so strange, you women.”

You remember Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Top Hat? ‘I just got an invitation through the mails: “Your presence requested this evening, it’s formal—top hat, white tie, and tails.’

The room was grey, filled with smoke, smelling of tobacco and the rancid stench of concentrated humanity.

Seven men twiddling their thumbs, awaiting my reappearance like the Second Coming, as though it was the first time in their lives they’d seen a presentable woman in that police station.

vague images were forming in my mind of hungry Moors fighting in a foreign land, offering up their blood for a cause that wasn’t their own in exchange for a wretched wage and the pounds of sugar and flour that the army was said to give to families in the Moroccan villages while their men were fighting at the front.

“To the Bank of London and South America. To see if my loathsome husband has sent me my damned allowance once and for all.”

And besides, the company my husband represents has some new products that might be of considerable interest to the Nationalist army. Perhaps with a little push from you we might be able to introduce them into Spanish Morocco.” “And my poor Arnold has got a little tired of his current position in the Bank of British West Africa; perhaps in Tetouan, among your circle, he might be able to find something more on his level . . .”

Unforgettable

The problem is of a more public nature—official, you might say; there are people who think that an Englishwoman could exert influence on him that would be undesirable, and they make their views known to us quite openly.”

The first, simple sentimental patriotism: because I want the country of the man I love to be friends with my own. However, the second reason is a much more pragmatic, objective one: we English don’t trust the Nazis, and things are turning ugly. Maybe it’s a bit risky to talk about another great European war coming, but you never know.

“I said what the hell does it matter where you come from when you’re the best dressmaker in all Morocco? And as for your mother, well, as you Spaniards say, God may squeeze us, but He never suffocates us entirely . . . It’ll all work itself out, you’ll see.”

He didn’t look like an unscrupulous extortionist, just a professional who tried to get by as best he could and who grabbed opportunities that presented themselves to him. Like Rosalinda, like me. Like everyone in those days.

They were discussing things that had nothing to do with me, matters that might not have contained any great official secrets but that nonetheless were far from what I imagined a simple dressmaker ought to be hearing. Several

See https://www.saxonlodge.net/getperson.php?personID=I4480&tree=Tatham

Scarlet Pimpernel, assumed name of the hero of The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905), novel by Baroness Orczy] : a person who rescues others from mortal danger by smuggling them across a border

See https://books.google.com/books?id=9C2K37HUmrwC&pg=PA128&lpg=PA128&dq=Margery+Hill+spain&source=bl&ots=GoODTXcjgW&sig=ACfU3U22HrqmOCJcHCvwLCLEJnpWKGgIzQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiJpIvr3fDwAhVMxZ4KHWr1CzkQ6AEwE3oECBUQAg#v=onepage&q=Margery%20Hill%20spain&f=false

You told me before that your friend Lance doesn’t do things for political motivations, that he’s only moved by humanitarian concerns. You decide whether or not reuniting a mother without means with her only daughter is a humanitarian reason—I don’t know.”

Jamila took charge of trailing him the whole day; for a small tip, a young bellhop at the hotel informed me with equal precision what time Logan retired at night; for a little bit extra he even recalled what the journalist had eaten for his dinners, what clothes he had sent to be laundered, and what time he turned out his lights.