‘You could just ask me,’ she said, her knee now against his.
‘Ja, I could.’ Finn turned a fraction, so he was facing her.
Once again, she felt sure that he was going to kiss her, but rather than lean over towards her, Finn shifted his weight to the other side of his sofa cushion instead. Feeling foolish, Pepper grabbed her glass only to knock it over sideways, flooding the basket of nuts and half the table with beer.
‘Bugger!’ she swore, lurching over sideways to save her dress from the overspill.
Finn was already on his feet fetching a cloth from the bar and laughed at the stricken look on Pepper’s face as he knelt down to mop up the mess.
‘I’m so sorry.’ She cringed. ‘I’m a liability – you should escape while you still can.’
‘Escape?’ he said, mock solemn. ‘No, sorry – it is far too late for that.’
‘Really?’
Just like that, Pepper felt awash with happiness again.
Still on his knees, Finn shuffled forwards until his nose was level with hers.
‘Really,’ he said. And then, before she knew what was happening, he had leant over and finally, blissfully, pressed his lips against hers.
Chapter 17
It was with an almost dreamlike serenity that Pepper wafted around the Royal Palace at Sintra the following morning. With its brightly coloured walls, toilet-roll turrets and endless swathes of exquisite tiles, the palace could easily have been plucked right out of the pages of a fairy tale, and it felt fitting to Pepper to be somewhere so otherworldly.
She still could not quite believe the events of the previous evening, of Finn kissing her with such tenderness that even the merest recollection made her lungs and stomach contract. She had known him for such a short time, but already he felt like an intrinsic piece of her life – one that had slotted in with such ease.
Josephine had known at once, of course. She had taken one look at the expression on Pepper’s face and rubbed her hands together with glee.
‘I’m very happy for you,’ she said. ‘It’s high time you met a chap who put a proper leap in your lollop.’
Finn had stayed in the cluttered bar with Pepper until the dark beyond the windows was absolute, then afterwards, the two of them had wandered through the streets hand-in-hand, sharing stories, kisses and trading wishes as they picked out the stars far above. She knew it was corny, but it hadn’t felt at all contrived. She liked him and he liked her – it was as simple as that.
Hopelessly caught up in the romance of the moment, Pepper only thought to check the time when it was long past midnight and found four messages from Josephine on her phone as promised – one for every hour she had been away. Finn saw her back to the entrance of the hotel, but he made no move to accompany her inside, instead giving her a final, lingering kiss and promising that he would be in touch the following day. Pepper had stood and watched him as he walked away, clutching her arms around herself and feeling the thud of her heart as it tried in vain to keep up with her whirling thoughts.
She had accepted the fact that sleep would most probably remain elusive, only to be surprised when she fell into an effortless slumber almost as soon as her head was down. It wasn’t until Josephine knocked loudly on her door just after six a.m. that she awoke. Her friend had enjoyed her solo amble through the old streets of Alfama the previous evening, she told Pepper – had discovered the restaurant once owned by Jorge’s family and gone inside to enquire after him.
‘I don’t know what I expected to find after all these years,’ she said to Pepper, as the pair of them boarded the train that would take them from Sintra back to Lisbon. ‘My former lover sitting there behind the counter, simply waiting for me to turn up and find him.’
‘If he managed to make it as an artist, then there would be information about him online,’ Pepper said, taking out her phone. ‘What’s his surname?’
‘Montalvo,’ Josephine said, rolling out the ‘L’ across her tongue.
Pepper opened her Internet browser and typed it in. Several results came up for Facebook and Twitter accounts, but when she clicked through and showed the corresponding profile pictures to Josephine, the older woman shook her head each time. There was also a film actor called Jorge Montalvo, who was – as Josephine succinctly put it – ‘a handsome beast’, but not only had he been born around thirty years after the Jorge they were seeking, he was also Spanish. It was a dead end, but the search had only made Pepper more determined.
‘We can find him,’ she said. ‘I know we can. There will be a way.’
‘Let me think about it some more,’ Josephine replied. ‘See if I can’t rustle us up some better clues.’
They were two stops away from the city when Pepper’s phone chimed with a message.
‘Finn wants to know if we’re both free this afternoon,’ she said, unable to keep the smile from spreading across her face. ‘He says he has a surprise planned.’
‘Gosh!’ Josephine exclaimed. ‘For both of us? That is kind. How could I possibly refuse?’
It had been another overcast morning, but now the sky was an optimistic blue. Lisbon was beginning to feel familiar to Pepper now, and thanks to her endless wandering, she had become far more confident at finding her way around. It was impossible to get lost in small, linear Aldeburgh, but here it felt at times as if they had wandered into a labyrinth. The fact that Pepper had mastered the higgledy-piggledy lanes with relative ease made her love the city all the more, and she had switched rapidly from being anxious to leave Suffolk to reluctant to return. She couldn’t believe she had waited so long to travel – and been so scared. It felt utterly ridiculous now.
Finn did a little bow as they approached the Alfama café he had chosen as a meeting place, and Josephine curtseyed back without missing a beat.
‘Hello,’ he said then to Pepper, bending to brush his lips against her cheek and making all the hairs stand up on the back of her neck. Instinctively, she touched him – put a hand on his arm and closed her fingers around it, the shape of him still so unknown, yet wonderfully familiar. Her breath caught for a moment in her throat, and when she smiled, she found that he was smiling too.
‘We can walk there,’ Finn told them. ‘It is not very far.’
They set off in the direction of Baixa, passing yet more houses painted in shades of peach, jade, primrose, sage and marshmallow pink. Every time a new spread of azulejos came into view, Pepper scanned each one with eager eyes, committing the pictures and patterns to memory. Being surrounded by so much art was making her itch for her own materials, for her studio workbench or even a simple pencil and piece of paper on which she might sketch. She was so accustomed to pushing the urge back down when it reared its head, that at first it made her feel strange and exposed, but the further they ventured, and the tighter Finn held her hand, the more she began to relax and give in to what she was feeling.
Finn took them in multiple circles once they reached the town centre, frowning as Pepper pointed out that they’d walked past the same sardine shop four times. Not once did he drop so much of a hint as to where he was taking them, though, and when he did finally give in and consult his phone for directions, he held it up out of reach so she wouldn’t be able to snoop.