Second Spring in Lisbon – Part 2: April

“You’ve lost your mind,” said Joan.

Margaret’s older sister was sitting in the kitchen in Harrogate with a cup of tea she wasn’t drinking. She had driven over the moment Margaret told her. She had brought biscuits, which meant it was serious.

“I haven’t lost my mind,” Margaret said. “I’ve booked a flight.”

“To see a man you met for ten days.”

“Ten very good days.”

“A Portuguese man,” Joan said, as if this were a medical condition. “Who owns a bookshop. Margaret, you don’t even like Portugal. You’ve been once.”

“I liked it very much.”

“You liked him.” Joan put her cup down. “What would Peter say?”

It was the question Margaret had been asking herself for seven months. She had asked it in the garden, deadheading Peter’s roses. In the supermarket, buying one chop instead of two. At night, in the double bed that was still far too big.

She got up and fetched the old guidebook from the shelf. The one from 1998, full of Peter’s handwriting. She opened it to the last page and put it in front of her sister.

At the bottom, in faded blue biro, in Peter’s careful slanting hand, were words she had only found in February. Hidden in the back, after the index, where nobody ever looks.

Maggie. If I don’t make it, go anyway. Go and be happy. Don’t you dare be sad in Yorkshire. — P.

Joan read it. Her face crumpled.

“He knew,” she whispered. “Before the hospital. He knew.”

“I think so.” Margaret sat down beside her. “I’m going, Joan.”

Joan wiped her eyes with a biscuit napkin.

“Then I’m coming with you,” she said. “Someone has to make sure he’s not a murderer.”

---

Lisbon in April was everything António had promised in the margins.

The jacaranda trees weren’t in flower yet, but everything else was: orange blossom on the hillsides, bougainvillea pouring down white walls, the smell of grilled sardines drifting out of every doorway. The river was blue instead of silver. The light was so bright and so gold it made Joan put on two pairs of sunglasses.

“It’s very steep,” Joan complained, climbing the hill in Alfama. “Why is everything so steep?”

“It’s a city of seven hills.”

“Well, that’s six too many.”

They reached the green door. It was open, as always. The cat was asleep on the atlases, as always. And inside, standing behind a mountain of books in his moss-coloured cardigan, with his glasses pushed up on his forehead, was António.

He looked up. He saw Margaret.

The book in his hands fell to the floor.

“You said May,” he said.

“I couldn’t wait,” Margaret said.

He came around the counter, stepping over a stack of encyclopaedias, and stopped in front of her. For a moment neither of them moved. Then he took her face in both of his ink-stained hands and kissed her, right there in the doorway of the bookshop, in front of the cat and her sister and half of the street.

Joan cleared her throat loudly.

António let go of Margaret, turned, and bowed very slightly.

“You must be Joan,” he said in perfect English. “Margaret wrote to me that you would probably think I was a murderer.”

Joan opened her mouth. Then shut it. Then looked at Margaret.

“He’s very tall,” she said accusingly.

---

António cooked dinner for the three of them in his apartment above the shop.

Bacalhau, salted cod baked with potatoes and olives and onions, the way Helena used to make it, the recipe written in her handwriting on a card stuck to the fridge. He opened a bottle of green wine. He put a fado record on the old turntable, very quietly.

Joan was suspicious for the first course.

By the second, she was asking him about the bridges he had built.

By dessert, a tart with almonds that António said he had been practising for three months, she was telling him about her late husband, Derek, who had died eleven years ago and whom she had not talked about to anyone in at least five.

Margaret watched her sister cry into a napkin and laugh at the same time, while António listened, really listened, with his grey eyes steady and kind, and she felt something in her chest go very warm and very quiet.

At eleven, Joan stood up.

“I’m going back to the hotel,” she said firmly. “On my own. In a taxi.” She looked at António. “You’ll walk her home in the morning.”

It wasn’t a question.

“Of course,” António said seriously.

At the door, Joan hugged Margaret hard. “He’s lovely,” she whispered fiercely in her ear. “I hate him. Be happy.”

---

When the door closed, the apartment was very quiet.

The fado record had ended. The lamp by the window threw a soft circle of gold light on the old floorboards. Outside, the city was murmuring, a tram somewhere, voices on the street below, a radio.

“She likes you,” Margaret said.

“She threatened me three times.”

“That’s how you know.”

António laughed softly. Then he came across the room and took both of her hands in his.

“Seven months,” he said. “I wrote to you every week.”

“Twenty-nine letters,” Margaret said. “I have them all in a box. Joan thinks I’m mad.”

“Did you read them?”

“Every one. Twice.” She looked up at him. “I found something, António. In Peter’s book. A note in the back.”

She told him. About the faded biro. Go and be happy.

António was quiet for a long time. When he finally spoke, his voice was thick.

“Then he was a good man,” he said. “And a wise one. I would have liked him.”

“He would have liked you,” Margaret said. “He’d have argued with you about football.”

“I don’t like football.”

“That’s why he’d have argued.”

António laughed, and pulled her gently into his arms, and kissed her. It was slower than in the bookshop. Softer. A kiss with seven months of letters in it, and two lost loves, and the strange, astonishing gift of a second chance.

What happened after belonged only to them: to the lamplight and the old wooden floors and the city breathing softly through the open window, to two people who had both learned, the hard way, how precious every hour is, and had decided not to waste a single one.

---

In the morning, he walked her down the hill as promised.

But he didn’t walk her to the hotel. He walked her to the viewpoint at the top of Alfama, where the old men played cards, to the bench under the jacaranda tree.

It was in flower.

Not all of it. Just one branch, low over the bench, covered in soft purple blossom, weeks early. The only one in the whole city.

“It’s April,” Margaret whispered. “You said May.”

“Some things,” António said, “don’t want to wait either.”

They sat on the bench. Below them, Lisbon was waking up, red roofs and white walls and the blue river shining all the way to the sea.

Margaret took a small wooden box out of her bag. Inside was a little cloth bag, tied with a ribbon.

“Peter,” she said quietly. “Some of him. I kept it for three years. I didn’t know where.” She looked out at the river. “He planned this trip for years. He never got to see it.”

António didn’t say anything. He just put his hand over hers, very gently.

Margaret untied the ribbon. She stood up and walked to the edge of the viewpoint, and the morning wind came up off the river, warm and smelling of the sea. She opened the bag.

“You made it, love,” she whispered. “Lisbon. Our thirtieth.”

The wind took the ashes out over the rooftops and the river and the jacaranda flowers, and they were gone.

When she turned around, António was standing behind her with tears on his face. He didn’t wipe them away.

“Margaret,” he said. “I don’t want you to visit anymore.”

Her heart stopped.

“I want you to stay,” he said. “I know you have a house. A sister. A whole life. But the shop has an empty corner, by the window. Helena always wanted an English section. Nobody to run it.” He took a breath. “You were a teacher. You love books. You could,”

“Yes,” Margaret said.

He blinked. “You haven’t heard the rest.”

“I don’t need to,” she said. “I’m fifty-seven, António. I’m done waiting for the right time.”

He laughed, the deep, warm, astonished laugh, and pulled her into his arms on the hilltop under the one flowering branch of the jacaranda tree, and kissed her while the old men playing cards on the next bench pretended very hard not to notice.

One of them started clapping anyway.

---

Joan flew home to Yorkshire alone, a week later. She cried at the airport and made António promise four separate things, one of them involving a cricket bat.

Margaret stayed.

The English corner opened in June, by the window, with a hand-painted sign. Livros Ingleses — English Books. Below it, in smaller letters, someone had added a line in careful slanting handwriting that looked very much like it had been copied from an old guidebook.

Go and be happy.

---

The End.

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