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The Conrad Press - Bea Green

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157 pages

English

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This powerful, engaging, wonderfully evocative novel takes you into the heart of a vibrant community living in southern Spain and their quest to make an olive farm a success. Enthralled by the derelict olive farm Las Nevadas, Sebastia!n Ortez is determined to turn it into a profitable venture. However, as he battles to remain solvent he soon finds that his responsibilities never seem to end. While dealing with the farm's numerous problems, Sebastia!n discovers grim secrets from its tortuous past and falls in love with his head gardener, a feisty, mesmerising young woman called Nuria...

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Publié par	The Conrad Press
Date de parution	03 novembre 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781913227401
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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La Finca
Bea Green

La Finca
Published by The Conrad Press in the United Kingdom 2019
Tel: +44(0)1227 472 874 www.theconradpress.com   info@theconradpress.com
ISBN 978-1-913227-40-1
Copyright © Bea Green, 2019
The moral right of Bea Green to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
Typesetting and Cover Design by:Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk
The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley.

For my gorgeous, gentle and kind daughter Ashley, who loves the sun and will forever be the sunshine in my life.

‘Ya el sol, Platero, empieza á sentir pereza de salir de sus sábanas, y los labradores madrugan más que él.’
(Platero, the sun begins to be reluctant to leave his bed, and the farmers get up earlier than he does.)
Platero y yo by Juan Ramón Jiménez

1
July 2017
A pproximately five minutes before the olive tree farm was officially his, Sebastián felt a wave of nausea hit him.
It was six o’clock on 16th July 2017, a sultry Monday afternoon. Businesses here in the small city of Ronda, located within the province of Málaga, wouldn’t be closing until eight o’clock, if not later.
Trying to ignore the churning in his gut, Sebastián watched in silence as Adolfo, the solicitor, walked confidently into the office and sat at his desk.
Poker-faced, Adolfo looked quickly through Sebastián’s file one last time to check everything was in order. Finally he put it down and pushed back his chair so he could open a drawer in his desk, all the while seemingly oblivious to the discomfort Sebastián was in.
‘And here are the keys to your farm, Las Nevadas,’ said Adolfo with a flourish, reaching down into the drawer for the heavy sack of keys and putting it on the table.
The metallic clunk of the keys landing firmly on the wood resonated throughout the quiet room.
Sebastián tried to speak but he was suddenly feeling faint and the room was starting to spin. He felt beads of sweat gathering on his forehead.
Gasping for breath, he looked at Adolfo, who was saying something to him that he couldn’t hear. Sebastián had suddenly become deaf, as though he were underwater. He quickly pushed back his chair, bent his head down towards his knees and tried to take some deep breaths.
He felt a hand on his shoulder.
‘ ¡Jesús! Sebastián, are you all right?’ asked Adolfo.
Sebastián nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He heard Adolfo sigh with relief.
‘ Hombre , you gave me a fright! You should have seen your face. It went white, really white!’
Sebastián waited for another minute, until the roaring noise in his ears died down slightly, and sat up tentatively.
Adolfo hovered nervously in close proximity for a moment and then went to sit back down.
‘Are you ill?’ Adolfo asked, with his usual bluntness.
Sebastián shook his head, which at last felt firmly connected to his neck.
‘No, I’m fine. I think it was a panic attack. It’s passed now.’
‘ A panic attack? Are you serious?’
‘Yes, I’ve had one before.’
Adolfo stared at him and then looked at the bag of keys. He was speechless for the first time since Sebastián had met him.
‘It’s because of the purchase,’ said Sebastián, reading his thoughts. ‘This whole thing has been so much pressure, so much effort and time.’
Adolfo said nothing in response but Sebastián could detect a faint glimmer of surprise in his eyes.
Sebastián, in turn, couldn’t help but feel annoyed.
Adolfo, like Sebastián’s own father, had played the role of Job’s comforter throughout the lengthy process of buying the olive tree farm.
Now, on completion of the purchase, Adolfo was looking perplexed when told by Sebastián he was overwhelmed with the responsibility of taking on a dilapidated farm and, of course, the colossal task of restoring it to productivity.
The irony of this wasn’t lost on Sebastián.
‘It’ll all be fine,’ said Adolfo, trying to be reassuring but actually sounding as though he was trying to convince himself. ‘As you know, it was built in 1856 by the Governor of Granada, the illegitimate nephew of Queen Isabel the Second. You’re preserving a piece of Spanish history. It’s a noble cause.’
‘Don’t give me that nationalistic nonsense, Adolfo. You know perfectly well that the farm is riddled with carcoma and the building’s falling apart. There’s not a straight floor in the place. The previous owners had the irrigation system switched off so the olive trees are in a very poor condition. In fact many of them appear to be dead. So don’t you dare tell me I’m getting a good deal here.’
Adolfo threw Sebastián an icy look.
‘Well, why did you buy it then, Sebastián?’ he asked, reasonably enough.
Sebastián put his elbows on the table and his hands to his head.
‘I’m really starting to wonder. I was looking to invest in a country estate. I wasn’t looking to take on what’s likely to be a three-year project.’
Adolfo said nothing.
‘The place had something special about it, I guess,’ volunteered Sebastián, after a significant pause.
He gazed out of the window, as though by looking outside he’d bring the farm into sharper clarity in his mind.
‘There’s a magical atmosphere to it,’ he continued. ‘It’s still living and vibrant, even as it’s fighting for its last breath... You can sense it’s a place where people were happy to live, long ago.’
Sebastián looked at Adolfo, noted the confusion on his face and straight away knew he’d lost him.
He could clearly see Adolfo wasn’t up to the poetical nuances of his speech. This didn’t surprise him much. Adolfo’s entire focus in life seemed to consist of the bottom line. Deals, commission, sales targets, these were the things Adolfo understood. The rest of life passed him by.
Sebastián sighed.
He picked up the deeds and the large bag of keys, a bag that was surprisingly heavy until he remembered all the locked doors at the farm.
He stood up.
‘Right, thanks for everything, Adolfo.’
Adolfo nodded his head.
‘Let me know how you get on.’
‘Oh, I have no doubt you’ll hear all about it on the Ronda grapevine. As you’ve told me before, Ronda is a small community.’
Adolfo laughed and they parted on relatively good terms, given the length of their business association. On and off it had taken near enough a year to see this purchase through.
Sebastián stepped outside into the heat of the day and made his way slowly back to his hotel.
He needed time to pull himself together. Most people on receiving keys to their new property would be rushing to enter it. Sebastián knew that he needed a little space to come to terms with the huge commitment in time and money, as well as emotion, he’d just made.
Later on, as he sat in the bar of the hotel, nursing a cold beer with the sound of the radio in the background, he reflected back to the moment the olive tree farm had first captured his heart.

2
August 2016
I t all began in the summer of 2016 when Sebastián booked a second viewing of Las Nevadas... He knew as soon as he picked up the phone to call the solicitor for another viewing that he was going to buy the place.
It was during this second viewing of the property that he first discovered the olive press.
He’d felt a bubble of excitement building up in him as he looked at the old press, with its fibre disks piled neatly on top of each other.
It was a large, heavy-looking, circular contraption dominating one half of the room.
It had two big cone-shaped millstones for grinding the olives, and, positioned above the two millstones, a hollow inverted cone made of metal.
In a bygone age the freshly picked olives would have been poured into the metallic cone. Stacked against the wall were rusting 5-litre tins with Las Nevadas Aceite de Oliva Virgen (Virgin Olive Oil) written on them.
The more he saw of this old olive tree farm the more Sebastián felt captivated by its history and uniqueness.
Sadly, today its olive-processing factory was outdated and redundant but this small slice of Spanish history enthralled him. More than ever he wanted to restore this decaying farmhouse and its surrounding acres.
He wanted the farm despite the undeniable fact that it was sadly neglected. The olive trees, which were neatly planted at regular intervals across the farmland, were in terrible condition, having been abandoned to nature several years ago, and the normally bright rust-coloured earth of the farm was now covered with overgrown yellow grass.
Sebastián had looked back out towards the open door. Outside this dark and enclosed ground-floor room the sun was burning inexorably into the white courtyard.
The air outside was still with the fierceness of the heat but the swifts hidden in the cool leaves of the huge palm tree were still chattering with vigour, undeterred.
Today was 5th August, and it happened to be one of the hottest days of the year in Andalucía.
In the refreshing chilliness of the ground-floor factory Sebastián could feel the wet patches of sweat on his white shirt cool and stick uncomfortably to his skin. No doubt his shirt would be covered with dirt too, now, after exploring this abandoned farmhouse. Little satellites of dust floated in the sunlight streaming through the open doorway.
Sebastián walked up to the doorway to call for his brother.
‘Felipe!’ Sebastián yelled, and waited for a moment for his brother to reply. There was no answer.
Sebastián was in a dark and windowless external room to one side of the courtyard. His brother, meanwhile, had disappeared to inspect the decaying stables at the back of the old farmhouse building.
After a couple of minutes Sebastián stuck his head out of the door, squinting in the glare of the sun, and y