Kitabı oku: «A Spanish Honeymoon»

CHAPTER ONE

La mujer sin hombre es como el fuego sin leña.

Woman without man is like fire without wood.

THERE were nights when Liz couldn’t sleep.

Memories…regrets…doubts…unfulfilled longings…elation at breaking free…panic at her recklessness; all these fizzed about in her brain, like the firecrackers the village boys let off in the street on fiestas, and made sleeping impossible.

When this happened she would get out of bed, make a mug of herb tea and, unless it was raining, which was blessedly seldom in this benign climate, climb the outside staircase to the flat roof where she dried her laundry and sunbathed.

One night she was up there, gazing at the moonlit mountains surrounding the valley, when she was startled by noises. They came from the big house that had its front door on the next street up the hillside on which the small Spanish village of Valdecarrasca was built.

Named after the fig tree in a corner of its walled garden, the big house was called La Higuera. Its rear windows overlooked the rooftops of the terrace of much smaller houses on the street below, where Liz lived. But as La Higuera had been empty since her arrival, six months ago, she had almost forgotten that, some day, its owner would return and her flat roof would no longer be as private as it had been up to now.

The first intimation that someone had arrived was the rattling sound of the persianas being rolled up, releasing a glow of light from each of the ground-floor windows.

Liz’s instinctive reaction was to leap up from the lounger, hurry down the staircase and disappear into her house before anyone at La Higuera noticed her.

Standing in her unlighted kitchen, she waited to see if the blinds hiding the upstairs windows of the big house would be rolled up. It might not be Cameron Fielding, the owner, who had arrived. Sometimes, she had been told, he lent the house to his friends.

To many of the foreigners living in or around the village, Cameron Fielding was a household name. Liz had never heard of him until she started living in Valdecarrasca. Nor, from what she had been told, did she like the sound of him. However, being a fair-minded person, she took some of the more scandalous stories with a pinch of salt.

Whoever it was who had arrived at La Higuera must have come without Alicia being notified, she thought, as she watched and waited.

Alicia was the portly Spanish lady paid a retainer to keep an eye on the house while it was empty, and to air and clean it before anyone used it. According to village rumour, she was supposed to do this once a month so that it was always in order. In practice, so Liz had heard, she did it only a day or two before Mr Fielding or his guests were expected.

This time, it seemed, she had been caught napping. To Liz’s certain knowledge, Alicia had not set foot in the place for months, which meant that every horizontal surface would be thick with dust and the rooms would have a musty smell.

Wondering if tomorrow Alicia would find herself out on her ear, Liz saw one of the upstairs persianas being hauled up by the stout tape that reeled the slats into a box at the top of the window. Many village houses, including her own, still had the old-fashioned wooden-slatted blinds that were pulled up by cords into a roll that remained visible. But La Higuera had been altered and modernised.

The person who had lifted the blind was a man but, because he was silhouetted by the lights in the room behind him, all she could see was that he was tall and broad-shouldered, with dark hair. In fact he looked like a Spaniard. Although many of the elderly locals were short and often bandy-legged, owing to an inadequate diet in the years when Spain was a poor and backward country, the younger Spaniards had much better physiques and were as well-built as their contemporaries in other parts of Europe.

Then a second person came into view, a woman. As the man, whoever he was, stood looking out at the moonlit valley, she moved close behind him and put her arms round him. Immediately he swung round to return her embrace. Liz saw his head bend towards the girl’s and, for quite a long time, they engaged in what was clearly a passionate kiss.

It was still going on when, almost as if some sixth sense told him they were not as private as they might expect to be in a small Spanish village at one o’clock in the morning, he reached out an arm towards the side of the window. The next moment Liz’s view of the embrace was blocked by the pair of curtains whose draw-cord he must have pulled.

Feeling as guilty as if she had been caught watching something far more intimate than a kiss, Liz drew the kitchen curtains and felt her way to the light switch. Then she made another cup of tea and took it up to her bedroom, intending to continue reading the book on top of the stack on her night table.

But, like a love scene in a movie or on TV, what she had seen had stirred up the powerful yearnings that, as they had no hope of being realised, she did her best to keep battened down.

She was also curious to know if the man in the bedroom at La Higuera was, in fact, the legendary womaniser whose amorous exploits provided so many titbits of gossip for his fellow foreigners to relish.

‘…a different girlfriend every time he comes here,’ was one of the allegations Liz had heard about him.

‘Not what you could call handsome, but madly attractive…my goodness, yes, as attractive as the devil and totally without morals. Still, as he isn’t married, can you blame him for grabbing his opportunities?’ was another comment that had stuck in her memory.

Liz, who had had her childhood and teenage years blighted by a man of the same stamp who had been married, was disposed to dislike all philanderers. She had no time for people who treated sex as a game. She despised them all.

Despite a disturbed night, she was up at her usual early hour the next day. Brushing her teeth in the bathroom, she thought for the umpteenth time how different she looked today from the way she had looked on arrival, pallid-faced and drawn after a cold and wet northern European winter and a succession of head colds caught while commuting from her home in the outer suburbs to her workplace in central London.

Now, even after a disturbed night, she had three times as much vitality as she had ever had in England. She had never been a beauty. Her dark blue eyes and her clear skin—once pale but now lightly tanned—were her best features, counterbalanced by a disastrous nose and a rather unfeminine chin.

In her other life, as she had begun to think of it, she had adapted her hairstyle to a conservative version of whatever was the prevailing fashion. Here, to save money, she had given up going to the hairdresser and let it grow to a length she could tie back or pin up. Her basic colour was mid-brown. In place of professionally-done highlights, these days she had only sun streaks, helped by rubbing selected strands with a cut lemon. There was always a lemon to hand because there was a limonero, that bore fruit all year round, growing in her little back yard.

After a quick hot shower, she dressed in a plain white T-shirt, a navy blue cotton skirt and navy sneakers. Later she was driving to the weekly produce market in a larger village a few kilometres away. She had planned, immediately after breakfast, to spend half an hour working in the walled garden of La Higuera.

In the same way that Alicia was supposed to look after the interior of the house, the previous owner of Liz’s house, an elderly Englishwoman called Beatrice Maybury, had undertaken to take care of the neighbouring garden. Beatrice had asked if Liz would be willing to continue this work and Liz had agreed. She had always liked gardening, and the generous fee paid to her predecessor in return for an hour’s work a week would be a welcome addition to her limited funds. At that time, of course, she had not known the kind of man the house belonged to. Beatrice had never mentioned his predatory tendencies. Perhaps she had been unaware of them since, by all accounts, she had kept herself to herself and not been part of the expatriates’ grapevine.

After their late arrival, and whatever had followed that passionate kiss, it seemed unlikely the people staying at La Higuera would be up and about before mid-morning. Liz decided to stick to her plan and do some weeding and watering before they surfaced for the day.

She entered the property by a gate at the side of the house that, by way of a narrow passage, led down to the ‘secret’ garden at the rear. Most of the larger houses in the main part of the village did not have gardens, only patios. In the rest of Europe, a patio meant any paved sitting-out area. But in Spain it was an open area within the structure of a building. In Valdecarrasca, many of the houses too small to have a patio had a small garden or yard. But the garden behind La Higuera was the size of a tennis court.

Her first task today was to plant out some cuttings she had taken from a clump of silvery-grey artemisia and kept, in water, in a dark green wine bottle until they put out small roots.

She was on her knees by the narrow bed at the foot of the wall clad with variegated ivy that spilled over the top and cascaded into her own little yard on the other side, when a man’s voice said, ‘Hello…who are you?’

The question gave Liz such a start that she let out a muffled squeak and, in scrambling to her feet, almost overbalanced. He stepped forward, grabbing her arm to steady her.

‘Sorry…I didn’t mean to scare you. I suppose you thought the house was still empty. I got back late last night, or rather early this morning. I’m Cam Fielding, the owner. And you are…?’

She had known who he was immediately. ‘Madly attractive’ had not been an exaggeration. He was unquestionably the most attractive man she had ever encountered.

Last night she had taken him for a Spaniard and he did have some of their characteristics: the black hair and eyebrows, the olive skin that tanned easily, and the hawk-like features that often indicated Moorish ancestry. But although by no means all Spanish people had brown eyes, she had yet to meet one whose irises were the colour of steel.

‘I’m Liz Harris,’ she said, acutely aware of his grip on her arm and also of the fact that, under a white terry bathrobe, he was undoubtedly naked. Glancing downwards, she saw that his feet were bare, which was why she hadn’t heard him approaching. Looking up again, she noticed his hair was damp. He must have just had a shower, come downstairs to make coffee and seen her from the kitchen window.

She had never been inside his house but Beatrice had described its layout so she knew that the two doors set close to each other led into the kitchen and the garage.

‘Are you Mrs Harris’s daughter…or her daughter-in-law?’ he asked.

‘Neither…I’m Mrs Harris.’ She wished he would let go of her arm and move back a bit. At such close quarters his physical magnetism was uncomfortably strong.

He lifted an eyebrow. ‘I see. I expected you to be much older…the same age as Beatrice Maybury. When she wrote that an English widow was buying her cottage, I assumed that you were contemporaries. How old are you?’

‘Thirty-six,’ said Liz, relieved that he had finally let go of her arm so that she could step back and widen the distance between them. It was rather a cheek to ask her age at this early stage of their acquaintance, she thought. ‘How old are you?’ she countered.

‘Thirty-nine,’ he replied. ‘Was your husband much older than you…or did he die untimely young?’

‘He was a year older. He died four years ago.’ She had never met anyone who asked such personal questions so soon. Most people carefully avoided mentioning anything to do with her premature widowhood.

‘What happened?’

‘He was drowned trying to rescue a child in a rough sea. He wasn’t a very good swimmer. They were both lost,’ Liz answered flatly. Duncan’s heroism was still a puzzle to her. He had been a cautious man, not one who took risks or chances. The courage and folly of his last act had been totally out of character.

‘That makes his action even braver,’ said Fielding. ‘Were you living in Spain when it happened?’

‘No, in England. We had stayed in Spain several times with his parents. They used to rent a villa to escape the worst of the winter. But I like the mountains better than the seaside resorts. Beatrice Maybury’s brother—the one she’s gone back to look after—knows my father-in-law. Mr Maybury thought my parents-in-law might like to buy her house. I came out with them to look at it. They didn’t like it, but I did.’

‘And how is it working out?’ Fielding asked. ‘The majority of the British expats in this part of Spain are retired…though the number of young working expats is building up, so I’m told. Do you have a job apart from keeping this garden in order?’

‘I’m a freelance needlework designer…mainly for women’s magazines. It’s work I can do anywhere—thanks to e-mail.’

Her attention was distracted by colour and movement on the terrace built out from the house. The girl she had seen last night was coming to join them. Like Fielding, she was wearing a robe, but his was utilitarian and hers was designed to be more decorative than practical. Made of irregular layers of chiffon in sunset colours, it floated, cloud-like, round a spectacular figure of the kind displayed at movie premières and Oscar presentations.

‘Cam…the fridge is empty. There’s no orange juice,’ this vision said plaintively, wafting down the steps that connected the terrace and garden.

‘I know. I’ll get some from the shop. I didn’t expect you to get up until later.’ He introduced them. ‘Mrs Harris…this is my house guest, Fiona Lincoln. Fiona, this is my neighbour from over the wall. Mrs Harris keeps the garden in order.’

Liz removed the cotton gardening glove from her right hand. She was not surprised to find that Fiona had a limp handshake. She didn’t look the sort of person who would shake hands firmly. Glamorous women hardly ever did, in Liz’s experience. Perhaps they thought it was unfeminine to exert any pressure.

‘I thought you had a maid to look after things,’ Fiona said to Cam.

Despite not being dressed for the day, she was already fully made up, Liz noticed.

‘I have a cleaning lady, but it doesn’t look as if she’s been in recently,’ he answered. ‘Do you know my home help, Mrs Harris? Is she ill or something?’

‘Beatrice mentioned that you had help…someone called Alicia. But we don’t run into each other,’ Liz told him. ‘I’m usually here before breakfast or in the late afternoon. I expect she comes in the middle of the day.’

‘I know where she lives. I’ll call round there. Now we’ll leave you in peace while we get ourselves organised. Catch you later.’ As they turned away, he put a possessive hand on the other woman’s slender waist.

Watching Fiona leaning against him as far as the foot of the steps, Liz felt a moment of envy. She would have given a lot to have a man in her life against whom she could lean like that. At the same time she knew that a relationship such as theirs—she felt sure it wasn’t ‘serious’ and would probably end as casually as it had begun—would not satisfy her. She could never take a lover purely for physical pleasure, or be a temporary girlfriend.

The stairs to the terrace were narrow, with succulents growing in clay pots placed at the outer edge of each tread. Before mounting them, Fiona furled her floating layers of chiffon, wrapping the garment more closely around her and, in so doing, drawing Fielding’s attention to the curves of her shapely bottom.

Watching him admiring it, Liz wondered how men like him and her father could be satisfied with making love to women for whom they felt no real affection or even liking. To her, the idea of going to bed with someone you didn’t love was repugnant.

Because she had married so young, she had missed the sexual freedom enjoyed by most of her generation. Duncan had been her first boyfriend and her only lover. That she might marry again seemed doubtful. Unattached men of the right age were thin on the ground. And anyway did she want to marry a second time? Marriage was such a huge risk.

With a sigh, she resumed her planting.

After lunch, Liz went for a walk on the dirt lanes and narrow tarmacked roads criss-crossing the vineyards that stretched from the edge of the village to the far side of the valley. When she arrived the grapes had been tiny, no larger than orange pips. She had seen them grow and ripen until they were ready to be picked. Now the vine leaves were turning red or purple.

On the way back, she followed a lane that gave her an overall view of Valdecarrasca. Its clustered rooftops were dominated by the church and a sloping line of cypress trees leading up to the small white-walled cemetery where coffins were placed in banks of narrow vaults marked by their occupants’ photographs as well as their names and dates.

Even for an outsider, it was a comfortable feeling to be part of a small close-knit community where each generation had been at school together and had many shared memories.

The rest of the afternoon was spent working on a design for a tablecloth and matching napkins for a ‘garden lunch’ feature scheduled for publication the following summer.

At six o’clock she went downstairs to fix herself a gin and tonic and started preparing the salad she would eat at seven. Some of the foreigners who lived here had adapted to Spanish meal times and had a siesta after lunch. For the time being, in her own home, she was sticking to the timetable she had always been used to.

She was about to halve one of the avocado pears that were so much cheaper here than in London, when someone knocked on her front door. To her surprise, when she opened it, she found Cameron Fielding standing on the narrow pavement outside.

‘I hope this isn’t an inconvenient moment to call. Do you have five minutes to spare?’

‘Of course. Come in.’

She stood back while he ducked his head to avoid cracking it on the rather low lintel. Two of the things that had put her parents-in-law off the house were the absence of a hall and the lack of light in the room facing the street. It only had one small window guarded by an iron reja as was standard in Spanish houses whether they were palaces or cottages.

‘Come through to the kitchen,’ she said, after closing the door.

Fielding waited for her to lead the way. Perhaps it was the first time he had been here, she thought. Because Beatrice had been to his house it didn’t mean he had been to hers.

But a moment later he corrected this assumption by saying, ‘You’ve had the kitchen altered. It’s much better now…much lighter.’

‘Beatrice wasn’t keen on cooking. I enjoy it,’ said Liz. ‘I’m having a gin-tonic.’ This, she had read, was what trendy young Spaniards called what her parents called a G and T. ‘Can I offer you one?’

‘Thank you. Ice but no lemon, please.’

Liz fixed the drink and, with a gesture, waved him to the basket chair in the corner. ‘What did you want to see me about?’

‘I’ve always suspected that not a lot of cleaning went on when I wasn’t around. This unexpected visit has confirmed it. The house obviously hasn’t been touched since the last time I was here.’ His powerful shoulders lifted in a philosophical shrug. ‘Well, that’s not unusual. It happens in lots of countries where foreigners have vacation houses. Incomers are usually regarded as suckers with more money than sense. Cheers!’ He raised his glass to her.

‘Cheers!’ she echoed. Was he going to ask her to take on the housework as well as the garden? Surely not.

‘Alicia is not a bad worker when she gets down to it, but she needs keeping an eye on,’ he went on. ‘I was wondering if you would be willing to provide that supervision…to make sure she does what she’s supposed to do. Also I’d like to have someone I can rely on to stock the fridge and maybe arrange some flowers. But perhaps you’re far too busy with your own work to tackle anything more?’

Liz had been preparing a frosty answer if he asked her to take over the cleaning. Not because she considered housework beneath her, but because she resented him thinking her own work was little more than a hobby.

While she was rethinking what she had intended to say, he went on, ‘By the way, it’s obvious that you’re doing far more in the garden than Beatrice did. I don’t think I’m paying you enough. If you were willing to oversee Alicia’s work, I’d be happy to increase your fee.’

He then suggested an amount, in pesetas. It seemed such a massive increase that, at first, Liz thought she must have made a mistake converting it into pounds. Even after six months here, she still tended to think in sterling except with small everyday transactions.

‘If you feel that isn’t enough, I’m open to negotiation,’ he said, watching her with those curiously penetrating grey eyes.

‘It’s enough…more than enough. But I need time to think it over. I’m not sure I want to take on the double commitment. For one thing, my Spanish is still pretty basic. I get by with the man at the bank who comes from away, but the village people seem to have a problem with my accent. Do you speak Spanish?’

He nodded. ‘Try out your Spanish on me.’ He suggested some sentences for her to translate and, when she had done her best with them, said, ‘You’re coming along very well. Remember that the people here speak Valenciano, the regional language, from choice and Castilian Spanish to communicate with outsiders. Nowadays, with supermarkets everywhere, the expats who live near the coast can get by without learning any Spanish, and most of them do.’

‘How did you learn the language?’

‘My grandparents retired here after spending most of their lives abroad. My parents were also abroad a lot and I used to come here during the school holidays. Children pick up languages faster than adults do.’

‘Was La Higuera your grandparents’ house?’

‘No, they lived on the coast, before it became overcrowded. When my grandfather died, he left their house to me. But by then it was surrounded by elaborate “villas” with swimming-pools, so I sold it and bought La Higuera for when I retire.’

Liz picked up the critical note in his voice. ‘What have you got against swimming-pools?’ she asked.

‘In a country like this, with a chronic shortage of water, they’re an unsustainable extravagance. The main blame lies with the planners who, up to now, haven’t introduced legislation to make it obligatory for all new houses to have cisternas filled by rainwater, not mains water. People without cisternas should swim in the sea, or have very small exercise pools and swim against power-jets.’ He finished his drink and stood up. ‘We’re here until Saturday evening. When you make up your mind, call me. The number is in the book.’

She saw him out. Returning to the kitchen, she was uncomfortably conscious that she would have liked him to stay longer. Yet, apart from his looks and his charm, what did he have to recommend him? Nothing. He was just like her father, a despicable charmer whose infidelities had caused her mother years of anguish. Even as a parent, Charles Harris had been unreliable, the pursuit of his numerous affaires often taking precedence over his paternal responsibilities. Though she hadn’t discovered until later the reason why he broke promises to attend school plays and other functions.

Closing her mind to thoughts of past unhappiness, Liz washed Fielding’s glass and put it away in a cupboard, as if removing the evidence of his presence would eradicate him from her thoughts. But, try as she might to concentrate on other matters, the impact of his personality, and the extra income he had offered her, continued to preoccupy her throughout her solitary evening meal.

It was the sort of wage that people paid for domestic and garden help in London, and no doubt he could well afford it. People who worked in television seemed to earn massive salaries. But was it right for her to accept it? It would certainly make a big difference to her somewhat straitened finances.

At eight o’clock, when Spanish telephone charges became cheaper than during the working day, she went up to the larger of the two small bedrooms which was now her workroom and where she used her computer.

After checking for incoming e-mails, her link with colleagues and friends now far away, she clicked on her Internet browser and went to a favourite website. The World Wide Web offered an escape from the problems of the real world. Sometimes she felt she might be becoming a Web addict, but at least it was a harmless addiction, not like taking to the bottle as some lonely widows did.

On Friday afternoon she rang his number.

‘Cam Fielding.’

She would have recognised the distinctive timbre of his voice if he hadn’t given his name. ‘It’s Liz Harris. If your offer is still open, I’d like to give it a try.’

‘Splendid…that’s excellent news. If you’ll come round, I’ll give you a set of keys and a quick tour of the house.’

‘Now?’

‘If it’s convenient.’

When, five minutes later, he opened the door to her, he was wearing a coral linen shirt and pale khaki chinos.

Unlike her little house, his had a spacious hallway and a staircase with a beautiful wrought-iron balustrade that looked antique.

‘Fiona is in the garden having a siesta,’ he said, as he closed the door. ‘We went to a nightclub on the coast. I hope our return in the small hours didn’t disturb you.’

‘A car wouldn’t wake me,’ she said. ‘In the summer, when the nights were hot, the local dogs were a bit of a nuisance.’

He showed her around the ground floor. The windows on the street side were small, with protective iron rejas, but those on the south side had been replaced with tall windows with no rejas to obstruct the view of the mountains. There was a large kitchen with a big family-sized dining table at one end. Folding doors connected this to a living room lined with bookshelves and paintings. There was also a bedroom-cum-study lined with more books and, next to it, a spacious bathroom.

‘This serves as the downstairs loo, and upstairs there are more bedrooms and bathrooms,’ he told her. ‘Let me give you a cup of coffee and then we’ll discuss the new arrangements.’

The daughter and wife of men with no domestic capabilities, Liz was always surprised by men who knew their way round a kitchen and could keep themselves fed and laundered without female assistance. Whether Fielding’s competence extended beyond making coffee, she rather doubted. Though perhaps it might if his life as a roving reporter for a television news channel had, from what she had heard, taken him to many of the world’s trouble spots where hotel facilities were not always available.

‘I expect to be down here more often in the next twelve months,’ he said, putting cups and saucers on a tray. ‘How often, in your view, does the place need cleaning to keep it in reasonable order?’