Kitabı oku: «The Man From Madrid»

CHAPTER ONE

THE muffled jangling of a distant bell made Cally give a soft snarl, the way Mog did when something annoyed him. Though, by nature, both she and the large tabby cat were good-tempered beings from whom smiles and purrs were more characteristic. It was just that right now she was busy preparing the bedrooms for tonight’s guests and didn’t want to be interrupted.

Leaving the floor mop propped against the wall, she crossed the landing, catching a glimpse of herself as she passed a large mirror. Any resemblance between the figure in jeans, T-shirt, sneakers and household gloves and her real self, the high-flying young businesswoman, designer-suited and always immaculately groomed, was ‘purely coincidental’ as the disclaimers in books said, she thought with wry humour. Who, seeing her now, would guess that a week ago she had been chairing a meeting in London?

Running down the three flights of stone stairs that connected the floors in the tall old Spanish house, she hurried to open the left-hand section of the massive door. In times gone by, when it was fully open, it had allowed a mule and cart to pass through to the stable at the rear of the premises.

In the street outside the great door stood a man of the type Cally had sometimes imagined but never actually met: a Spaniard to die for.

Well over six feet tall and built in proportion to his height, he had hair as dense and glossy as a black labrador’s coat and features that were a replica of those on the Moor’s head fountain in the village. Unlike the Moor he didn’t have a beard, only what might be designer stubble or merely the result of a mountain walker not bothering to shave for a couple of days ‘on the hill’ as the British walkers called their excursions into the mountains.

It was the heavy backpack he had shrugged off his broad shoulders and propped against his long legs that made her think he was a walker looking for a bed for the night.

He said, in Spanish, ‘Good afternoon, señorita. I’ve reserved a room for three nights. My name is Nicolás Llorca.’

When someone, a woman, had made the reservation by telephone, Cally had assumed that Señor Llorca was a company representative, using the casa rural owned by her parents as an inexpensive base for his sales sorties in the area. During the week they rarely had Spanish guests and not many at weekends. Most of their visitors were foreigners like her father and mother.

‘Please come in, señor. We weren’t expecting you to arrive until later, but everything is ready for you,’ she answered, in the fluent Spanish he was unlikely to guess was not her native tongue.

‘Have you come far?’ she asked, as he ducked his head to avoid hitting the lintel of the wicket door made in an era when Spanish country people were rarely if ever six-footers.

‘Not far.’ He left it at that. So far he had not smiled as men usually did when they met her—especially Spanish men.

Not the friendly type, thought Cally.

She said, ‘I expect you’d like to dump your pack before you do anything else. I’ll show you your room.’

Leading the way back to the top of the house, she wondered if the bed in the room she had planned to give him would be long enough for someone of his height. Perhaps it would be better to switch him to the room with a cama de matrimonio where he could lie diagonally.

The other double rooms had twin beds, but then most of the couples who came here looked as if, like her parents, they had given up sex some time ago. Cally had been told by a Spanish friend that, in rural Spain, the hurly-burly of the marriage bed came to an end at the menopause. After that husbands had to look elsewhere for those pleasures. If true, it seemed a sad state of affairs.

Opening the door of the room she had decided to give him, Cally walked in ahead of him.

‘I hope you’ll be comfortable here. There’s a shower with plenty of hot water.’ She indicated the door leading off the bedroom. ‘Dinner is from half-past seven because we have a lot of foreign guests. We’d be grateful if you’d be at the table not later than nine. Our cook doesn’t live in and likes to go home by ten. If there’s anything you need, you have only to ask.’

While she was speaking, Señor Llorca had been giving the room a comprehensive glance, taking in the furniture that had seen better days before being refreshed and made harmonious by a coat of paint and some simple stencils, the inexpensive rush mats and the pictures picked up for a few hundred pesetas at rastros.

What he thought of it—whether it was better or worse than the rooms he was used to sleeping in—was impossible to tell.

‘Thank you,’ he said politely.

‘There’s a roof terrace with a nice view of the valley just across the landing. If you’d like a cold beer, there’s an honour bar on the landing,’ Cally informed him. ‘It would be helpful if you’d bring used glasses down to the main bar when you’ve finished with them.’

With that she removed herself from his presence.

Left to himself, Nicolás opened his pack, took out his wash pack, put it on the end of the bed and started to strip off.

For reasons of his own, this morning he had left his car in the care of a reputable garage in a town ten kilometres away and spent the day following tracks through the mountains which eventually had led him here, to the village of Valdecarrasca, where he intended to stay for as long as was necessary to achieve his several objectives.

As the girl who had let him in had promised, there was an ample supply of hot water. Removing the fiddly little freebie of wrapped soap from the soap rack, he replaced it with his own larger bar, and enjoyed an all-over lather to remove the sweat brought on by a long tramp under a hot sun.

Although it was October, and the leaves on the vines he had passed on the road leading into the village were turning brown or dark red, the weather was still very hot by northern European and North American standards.

Thinking about the girl, as he used the freebie mini-bottle of shampoo on his hair, he was puzzled by her. All the people in these parts spoke two languages: Valenciano, the language of this region of Spain, and castellano or Castilian, the lingua franca of all Spain.

She had welcomed him in castellano, speaking it with an accent that would not have surprised him in his own milieu in Madrid but was unusual coming from a cleaner in a small village environment. But then her whole manner had surprised him: her self-possession, amounting almost to an air of authority, and her total lack of what he categorised as girly come-ons. He might have been sixty for all the personal interest she had shown in him.

Accustomed to a level of interest that might have flattered him when he was eighteen but that he could do without now, Nicolás found her indifference to him refreshing.

Thinking about her narrow waist and trim but rounded backside going ahead of him up the staircase, he found himself becoming aroused. Amusing oneself with country girls had been acceptable in his father’s and grandfather’s time. But it was not his style. There were plenty of sophisticated young women in Madrid willing to co-operate when he needed feminine companionship, and perhaps, one day, he would marry one of them. But unlike his brother he was under no obligation to choose a bride. Also having seen at close quarters the uncomfortable relationships into which marriage usually deteriorated after a few years, he was in no hurry to try it.

Turning the shower’s control from hot to cold, he also switched his thoughts to the reasons he was here.

At six o’clock, Cally was laying the long table where everyone staying with them would eat, when she heard male footsteps on the stairs. Moments later she heard the Spaniard asking if anyone was about.

She went round the corner from the dining area of the ground floor into the lounge area. ‘I’m here. How can I help you?’

He had shaved, she noticed, and changed into light-coloured chinos and a check cotton shirt in place of the jeans and navy T-shirt he had been wearing on arrival.

‘I suppose it would be too much to hope that, in a building of this age, you have a socket where I can plug in the modem of my computer?’ He was carrying a small black case.

When she was in Spain, a computer was Cally’s lifeline. But she didn’t tell him that. She said, ‘The office has a modem socket. We’re too rural to have broadband here, but we do have two telephone lines so you won’t be blocking incoming calls. Just make a note of how long you’re online, please.’

She showed him the small room, off the lounge, she had fixed up as an office. As it had no window, she switched on a wall light and desk lamp. The desk was clear of clutter. She gestured for him to use it.

‘If your cable isn’t long enough to reach the socket—’ pointing to where it was ‘—there’s an extension lead you can use.’

‘Thanks, but that won’t be a problem. Do you have many guests who want to use the Internet?’ He sounded surprised.

‘Not many, but we do have business people staying here on week nights. Until you arrived with your backpack, I thought you were probably one of them. If you have any problems, just call. My name is Cally.’

When she would have left him, he forced her to pause by asking, ‘What is Cally short for?’

‘Calista…but no one uses it.’

‘Would you rather they did?’

She shrugged. ‘I’ve been used to the short form since childhood. Can I get you something to drink while you’re picking up your mail?’

‘A lager would be good.’

‘Coming up.’ She went to fetch it.

Like him, she had changed, he had noticed. Now she was wearing a black skirt that hugged her hips but was full at the hem and a T-shirt that showed the shape and size of her breasts, neither too small nor too heavy. Her waist was cinched by a red belt, and her shoulder-length hair, which earlier had been secured by one of those stretchy things, was now held by a red plastic clip. Like all Spanish women, she had pierced ears. He hadn’t noticed her earrings earlier, but this evening she was wearing small silver beads that caught the light when she turned her head.

By the time she came back with a tall glass and a bottle of San Miguel on a small tray, Nicolás had logged on and was waiting for his emails to finish downloading.

He looked up at her and said, ‘Gracias.’

Without glancing at him or the bright screen, she murmured, ‘De nada,’ and turned away.

She had a musical voice and good ankles, he noticed before she disappeared. Then, starting to open the emails, he forgot about her.

As Cally finished laying the table, her father came home. Shortly before Señor Llorca’s arrival, he had gone to the ferretería in a neighbouring village to buy some screws. She knew why the errand had taken so long but, unlike her mother, she wouldn’t make a sarcastic comment and he wouldn’t make an excuse.

Cally had learnt long ago that her father and mother were not like ordinary parents. They were the adult equivalent of juvenile delinquents: irresponsible, bolshie, sometimes endearing, more often exasperating.

She had loved them when she was small but gradually, over the years, her affection had been eroded by the realisation that neither of them loved anyone but themselves.

Fortunately she had also had a grandmother—dead now—who had rescued her from some of her parents’ worst excesses by paying for her to go to a boarding school in England and having her to stay for much of the holidays.

‘Have all the punters shown up?’ her father asked. When they were not in earshot, he always referred to his paying guests as the punters.

It had not been Douglas Haig’s idea to take on a casa rural. As with most of their attempts to make money, or at least keep a roof over their heads, it was Cally’s mother who had been the driving force. But he didn’t mind running the bar and playing the genial host.

‘Yes…all present and correct,’ said Cally. ‘I expect they’ll be down before long.’

As she spoke, the wicket door opened and a small plump woman with an old-fashioned cotton wraparound pinafore over her dress came in. This was Juanita, a widowed neighbour who cooked the evening meal when Mary Haig had one of her migraines or, as now, was away.

Juanita and Cally were chatting in Valenciano when a couple who had introduced themselves as Jim and Betty came down the stairs. Their room had been booked by Jim whose surname was Smith. But it wouldn’t have surprised Cally to learn that Betty had a different surname. That they might be in a partnership rather than a marriage mattered not a jot to her. She had never had a long-term partner or relationship herself. What other people did was their business. But Jim and Betty were of the generation who had grown up when ‘living in sin’ was something people frowned on, and it might be that they did not feel entirely comfortable about their present status. There has been an occasion when two elderly couples who hadn’t met before had been staying at the casa rural and one of the women had made a remark about ‘your husband’ to the other, causing visible embarrassment. Since then, Cally had been careful never to jump to conclusions that might not be correct.

‘Good evening. Would you like a drink? The bar is open,’ she told them, as Juanita bustled away to start preparing the menu they had agreed on earlier.

Sometimes, when all the guests were reserved types, it was necessary to do some ice-breaking to encourage them to socialise. Tonight, however, they were all outgoing personalities and were soon talking nineteen to the dozen, the men discussing golf courses and the women comparing notes about children and grandchildren.

To her surprise, while pre-dinner drinks were still in progress, Señor Llorca appeared. This was unexpected. Even in country areas the Spanish had their evening meal much later than most of the foreigners, and in the big cities they dined very late indeed.

Her father had joined the golfing-talk group, and Cally was behind the bar, reading El Mundo, a Spanish paper she had bought that morning but hadn’t had time to look at. As the Spaniard approached the bar, Juanita came to the hatch that connected the bar with the kitchen and asked a question.

Cally answered her, then turned back to face the Spaniard. ‘Another San Miguel?’ she asked.

‘No, I’ll have a glass of wine—red, please.’ He sat down on one of the bar stools, which reduced his height slightly but still kept his eyes on a level well above hers.

‘The house wine is “on the house”, but if you’d prefer something better we have quite a good cellar.’ She handed him their wine list.

As he scanned it, she studied his face, taking in the details that combined to give it as powerful an impact as the lean and authoritative features of the Moor who had once ruled this region and whose followers, by intermarrying with the indigenous people of Spain, had bequeathed their dark eyes and proud profiles through many generations to people living today.

In this man the evidence of his lineage was particularly striking. His cheekbones, the cut of his jaw, the blade-like bridge of his nose and, above all, his dark-olive skin and black eyebrows and hair, combined to give him the air of having stepped down from a painting of a time in Spanish history that had always strongly appealed to her.

He gave the list back to her. ‘I’ll try your house wine.’

Perhaps he couldn’t afford the expensive wines, she thought, as she filled a glass for him. Though he didn’t give the impression of being hard up. Lightweight, slimline computers, such as the one he had been using in the office, were usually a lot more expensive than bulkier laptops.

‘You speak Valenciano,’ he said, referring to her brief exchange with Juanita. ‘Were you born in this village?’

Cally shook her head. ‘I was born in Andalucia. I’ve lived in several parts of Spain. Which reminds me, I forgot to ask for your identity card when you arrived. We have to keep a record of our visitors. If you don’t have it on you, later will do.’

‘I have it.’ He reached into his back pocket and produced a wallet. His identity card was slotted into one of the pockets designed for credit cards, of which he had an impressive array, she noticed.

‘Thank you.’ After making a note of the details, she handed it back, noticing, as he took it, the elegant length of his fingers and the absence of a wedding ring.

‘Is there room at the table for me to eat with the rest of your visitors?’ he asked.

‘Certainly. We can seat twenty people. If we don’t have a full house, the proprietor and I eat with the guests. But I ought to warn you that, although the others all live in Spain, they’re unlikely to speak more than a few words of Spanish. They come from the expat communities on the coast where they don’t need to be fluent, or even to speak Spanish at all.’

For the first time, he smiled at her. The effect of it startled Cally. Even when younger, she had never been as susceptible to masculine charm as most of her girlfriends. Now, at twenty-seven, she was almost immune to it. Yet when this man flashed his white teeth at her, she felt almost as powerful a reaction as if he had leaned across the bar and kissed her.

‘I have some English,’ he said. ‘Enough to make polite conversation. But they’ll be too busy talking to each other to pay much attention to me. If it’s possible, I’d like to sit where I can talk to you…about this village and the valley,’ he added. ‘Or, if you will be busy keeping an eye on the guests, perhaps I can talk to the proprietor. Does he speak Spanish?’

‘Not very much,’ said Cally. ‘Señora Haig has a better command, but she’s away at the moment. I expect I can tell you whatever you want to know.’

‘How long have you worked for them?’

Before she could explain that she didn’t work for them, one of the guests came to the bar to have his glass refilled. ‘Same again, please, love,’ he said to Cally, and then, to the Spaniard, ‘Buenas tardes, señor. Hace bueno hoy.’

His Spanish accent was terrible, but his intentions were good, and the younger man smiled as he answered, in English, ‘Good evening. Yes, it’s been a very nice day and the forecast for tomorrow is the same. But then Spain’s excellent weather is what brought you to this country, I expect.’

‘You’re right there, chum,’ said the Englishman, visibly relieved that he wasn’t going to have to stretch what was probably a very limited repertoire of Spanish phrases.

Cally was adjusting to the discovery that Nicolás Llorca spoke English with no trace of a Spanish accent. To speak it so perfectly, he must have learnt it very early in life and use it as frequently as she used his language.

She felt slightly annoyed that he hadn’t made that clear to her. To tell her he had ‘some English’ had been deliberately misleading. Clearly, the man was bilingual and should have said so.

She wondered if he had minded being addressed as ‘chum’. The Englishman hadn’t intended to be offensive, in fact had been trying to be friendly. The trouble with the British was that they lacked an instinctive sensitivity to the manners and customs of other nationalities. Americans tended to be the same. They both assumed that the kind of easy familiarity they took for granted was acceptable everywhere. But sometimes it wasn’t.

‘No need to sit by yourself. Come and meet the rest of us,’ said the Englishman, with a gesture at the other foreigners.

The Spaniard rose from his stool. ‘Would you excuse me?’ he said to Cally.

‘Of course.’ His courtesy pleased her. It would have annoyed her if he had just walked away, as if a general factotum in a casa rural was not entitled to be treated like a lady. It would have shown he was no gentleman.

She watched him being introduced, or rather introducing himself to the older people: shaking hands with the men, kissing the hands of the women with an easy gallantry that suggested he was at home in circles where the gesture was commonplace.

When Cally announced that dinner was ready if they would like to take their places at the table, the foreign guests formed pairs and chose seats side by side, leaving the chair at the head of the table to be taken by her father while she and Nicolás Llorca sat at the opposite end.

Again his sophisticated manners came into play when he drew out a chair for her before seating himself. None of the other men present had done it for their companions.

‘Thank you, but why don’t you sit next to Peggy? Then you’ll have someone to talk to when I’m helping Juanita,’ she suggested.

‘Yes, come and sit beside me, dear,’ said Peggy, patting the seat of the chair he had been holding for Cally and giving him a skittish look. She was old enough to be his mother but was refusing to surrender to late middle-age. Her hair was an unnaturally vivid auburn, her tan the result of hours of dedicated sun-bathing, her bosom a masterpiece of uplift.

For the first course there was a choice of fish soup or salad. Juanita ladled out the sopa de pescado for those who wanted it while Cally took round the plates of ensalada and small bowls of alioli sauce. Baskets of bread were already on the table, thick slices of the pan integral she preferred mixed with softer white bread, a concession to guests reared on steam-baked English factory bread whose teeth might not be equal to dealing with crusts.

Nicolás, as she was starting to think of him, was listening to some dramatic anecdote told by Peggy when Cally slipped into the chair on his other side. Casting an anxious eye in her father’s direction, she recognised—though no one else would—signs that his neighbours’ conversation was boring him. And when he was bored he reached for the carafe of wine more often than when he was interested.

She thought longingly of the day she was due to fly back to her real life in London. She didn’t mind giving up two weeks of her holiday allowance to give her mother a break from Valdecarrasca, and her parents a break from each other. In some ways she enjoyed being here, surrounded by vineyards and mountains instead of city streets and traffic jams.

But being a commissioning editor for a major publishing house was no longer the secure, lifetime job it had been in the days when publishing had been famously described as ‘an occupation for gentlemen.’ Today it was a far more cutthroat business with take-overs and redundancies being as commonplace as in most other occupations.

What was worrying her at the moment was that Edmund & Burke, the imprint she worked for, had been taken over by a global corporation which had a new CEO. Everyone was waiting to see how this formidable woman, Harriet Stowe, would restructure the UK segment of the company. She had the reputation of being a ruthless decision-maker in whose view literary merit was unimportant compared with profitability. Edmund & Burke were famous for the quality of their books, but they didn’t produce bestsellers. It was on the cards that Ms Stowe might decide to axe them.

This was not, therefore, a good time for Cally to be away from the office. But her mother’s plan to visit a friend had been fixed long before the future of Edmund & Burke became uncertain, and Cally knew that, had the trip been postponed, her parents’ marriage would also have reached a crisis point. She lived in dread of them deciding to separate for neither had the resources to survive on their own. They were not happy together, but apart they would be in deeper trouble, and the burden on Cally would be even heavier than it was already.

From the other side of the table, Fred, who was Peggy’s companion, leaned towards Cally and said, ‘I suppose the people in the village who own all the little vineyards are rubbing their hands at the thought of selling them off to property developers. They can see themselves getting rich, the way the Spanish who owned land on the coast did back in the sixties and seventies.’

‘If the vineyards become building plots, the valley will lose all its charm,’ said Cally. ‘They’ll make money, but they’ll lose their quality of life. It’s a pity there aren’t more stringent planning laws. I don’t think people should be allowed to spoil the mountains by putting up holiday villas wherever they want. There should be a limit above which nothing can be built.’

‘There probably is,’ Fred said, grinning. ‘But the builders can get round that with a little of the old…’ He demonstrated his meaning by rubbing his thumb against the tips of his fingers. Then, looking at Nicolás, he added, ‘No offence meant, señor. But we all know it happens. Always has…always will.’

‘My country is not the only place where graft is used to get round the regulations,’ Nicolás answered dryly. ‘Bribery exists everywhere. But I agree with Señorita Cally that it would be a pity if the uncontrolled development that has marred too many stretches of Spain’s coasts were allowed to continue inland. On the other hand, people like yourselves—’ with a gesture at the rest of the diners ‘—want to enjoy your retirement in a better climate, so some over-development here is inevitable.’

Turning to Cally, he asked, ‘What is your surname?’

‘Haig.’ She spelt it for him.

His black eyebrows shot up. ‘You’re half-British?’

‘I’m all-British. That’s my father at the end of the table.’

‘So that’s why you speak perfect English. I thought you were Spanish.’

‘Your English is perfect too. How does that come about?’

‘It’s a long story. I’ll explain some other time.’ Although his answer came smoothly, she had an intuitive feeling that somehow her question had put him on the spot. She couldn’t think of any reason why that should be the case, but she felt certain it was. For a moment she was tempted to press him, but she knew that it wouldn’t be right when he was a guest, albeit a paying guest.

In any case it was time to clear the first course and serve the second. This was one of Juanita’s specialities, berenjenas mudéjar.

‘I know berenjenas are what the Americans call eggplants and we call aubergines,’ Cally heard Peggy say to Nicolás, while she was taking the plates round. ‘But what does mudéjar mean?’

As no one else was speaking at that moment, everyone heard his reply.

‘Mudéjar refers to the Moors who stayed behind when Queen Isabella’s army had forced the Arabs who ruled a great part of Spain into retreat. The Moslems who stayed became slaves, but they were valued for their artistic gifts. You see their influence in what’s called the mudéjar architecture of the thirteenth century. This excellent dish is another reminder of how much this country owes to seven hundred years of Moorish culture.’

He lifted his glass of wine and looked at Juanita, still busy doling out steaming spoonfuls of baked sliced aubergines in a garlicky sauce. ‘A la cocinera…to the cook.’

As the others echoed his toast and Juanita beamed her gratification, Cally warmed to him on two counts: for his compliment to someone who was all too often ignored, and his grasp of his country’s history.

She wished it had been her father who had answered Peggy’s question and proposed the toast, but he never read books and he took the meals set before him, his clean clothes and all other creature comforts totally for granted. Perhaps it wasn’t his fault. He had been spoilt by his mother, her other grandmother, and was not the only man of his generation who thought it a woman’s duty to make things comfortable for the man in her life.