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to go next, and she decided to make it easier for him. I want him to let me out of here, she thought, without any further struggle.
    ‘Papa,’ she began again, in the gentler voice she’d used earlier. ‘You can’t just keep me chained up, you know that. And I am going to finish my studies. But don’t worry, I’ll do it on my own, and I won’t make any waves, or cause you any embarrassment. I won’t even go on any more student marches. I’ll be the quietest student in Barcelona, and you have nothing to worry about.’
    She stepped back and turned to pick up her handbag and the overnight holdall she’d brought with her following his summons. She shot him one more look, and he was standing rigid, disbelieving.
    ‘If you walk out of that door now it’s for good,’ he said. ‘You’ll never enter this house again!’
    She didn’t answer. She shot one more look at her mother, sitting staring at her, her face completely void of expression, and then she made her way towards the hallway and the exit, trying not to look rattled or distressed. The maid Mireia was standing beside the telephone table in the hallway, bobbing nervously, her uniform strangely stark against the flock wallpaper, which looked to Carla suddenly more absurd than any decoration she had ever seen. She nodded at Mireia, determined not to cry, and stepped towards the door. Behind her came Sergi’s voice, one final bellow, like an angry boar.
    ‘Watch what you do there in Barcelona, my girl. I’ll be watching you, all the time! You’re a shame to my name and I wish you didn’t bear it. But while you’re known to be my daughter you’ll toe the line or I’ll simply make you! Don’t forget it. If you ever overstep the line I’ll come for you, and next time you won’t walk away so easily.’

C HAPTER F OUR
    Carla walked away from the house as quickly as possible, looking back just once at the high stone wall with its carefully guarded gate, hiding the house where she had grown up, and played with friends in the garden with its old swing – long removed, and part of a distant past which only the child in her could still view with pleasure. Tears were hot at the back of her eyes, but she was determined not to give in to them. It was no hardship to say goodbye to the house – if she never set foot there again it would make her very happy, and she’d been alone in it for years. The focus now must be on working out how to survive and finish her studies.
    She wanted to see Grandma. Suddenly it was all she wanted, and she turned off the manicured, residential street into the park, empty at this hour of the mothers and their playing children, inhabited only by pedestriancommuters scuttling home, and by one old lady trailing a bag of shopping. Ahead of her rose the magical old town of Girona, medieval and Roman stone buildings side by side, dark now against the deepening blue of a lovely November evening.
    She turned onto the busy thoroughfare that led past the old town and towards Grandma and Uncle Victor’s apartment. New utilitarian buildings juggled here for space alongside older, more gracious facades, which had lined this broad boulevard for nearly two hundred years. They were darkened now by years of grime, so that they looked better in this evening light than in the full light of day, but they bore witness nonetheless to more elegant times, when men in top hats had held parasols for long-skirted ladies as they promenaded towards the park.
    As she turned off the boulevard and made her way through the sprawling network of backstreets all vestige of elegance faded. So many of the poor from the villages who had poured into Girona in the last twenty years were crowded together here, in mean tenements with washing hanging from every leaky window. When Uncle Josep had first brought her here to meet her grandmother, she had been shocked to her bourgeois core by the squalor and neglect, worse than any of the areas she knew in Barcelona, but now she