The Man From Madrid

All the time they had been talking, he had been conscious that under her modest dressing gown and long filmy nightgown she had been naked. For some reason, although there was nothing overtly sexy about her, in her presence he was always aware of how soft she would feel under his hands. While he had been stroking the cat, a part of his mind had been thinking about stroking Cally.

Looking over the wall, he saw that the cat had its nose close to the edge of a Roman tile and was quivering with frustration because it couldn’t reach whatever was lurking under the tile.

I know the feeling, amigo, thought Nicolás. Leaving the cat to its fruitless vigil, he left the terrace and, switching on the landing light, selected a couple of books he had noticed earlier to distract him from thinking about Douglas Haig’s tempting daughter.

When, next morning, Cally went downstairs, the first thing she did was to fill the kettle with font water that had also been filtered to remove some of the cal that quickly furred up the kettle. Her mother was always complaining about the hardness of the local water and the damage it did to her skin.

A little later she was walking back from the village bakery when to her surprise Nicolás came out of a sidestreet leading towards the vineyards. He was wearing a yellow singlet and black shorts and had obviously been for a run. He wasn’t out of breath but his skin was glistening with sweat and his black hair was damp, showing a tendency to curl at the nape of his neck.

‘How far have you run?’ she asked, as he fell into step beside her.

‘About five or six kilometres. The lanes through the vineyards are perfect…hardly any traffic.’

‘I know. I use them for walking. Do you run every day?’

‘Most days.’ He used his forearm to wipe some trickles from his forehead.

He was not, she noticed, as hairy as many Spaniards. Some women liked hairy men but her preference was for a smooth chest and only a light dusting of hairs on a man’s arms and legs. Enough to be unmistakably masculine but not reminiscent of a gorilla.

She caught herself thinking that Nicolás had exactly the right amount of body hair, at least as far as she could see. The thought was followed by another: what the hell am I doing appraising his body like this?

She was not the only one. A couple of young village women, on their way to the bakery, eyed him with interest as they exchanged good mornings with Cally. Knowing how their minds worked, she guessed that they would be wondering if he was one of the casa rural’s visitors, or someone she had in tow.

At the house, he pushed open the door for her, but did not follow her in. ‘I need to do some cool-down exercises. I won’t be long.’

Carrying the bread to the kitchen, Cally wondered if the woman across the street who kept a close eye on the comings and goings from their house was getting an eyeful of the tall stranger stretching various areas of his muscular anatomy. He must be in great physical shape to be able to run that distance and get back looking as if he could do it again if necessary. Occasionally she met holiday-makers jogging among the vineyards and looking fit to collapse.

The next time she saw him he had showered and changed into clean clothes. He had brought down a flask to be filled.

‘The notice on the back of the bedroom door says you have laundry facilities? What does that mean?’ he asked.

‘If you leave whatever you want washed in the big plastic bag that you’ll find in the wardrobe, it’ll be collected when your room is done and ready to wear by tonight.’

‘That’s better than five-star hotels. They often take twenty-four hours to turn around personal laundry.’

‘We aim to please,’ said Cally, smiling. ‘Would you like a cooked breakfast? I can do you a French omelette, or bacon with a fried egg and mushrooms, or a piece of grilled haddock with tomatoes.’

‘Is an omelette with tomatoes and mushrooms possible?’

‘Certainly. But I won’t cook it till you’ve finished your selection from the breakfast buffet. You’ll find it round the corner. I take it you’d like coffee to drink?’

‘Yes, but descafeinado rather than the real stuff, please.’

He didn’t drink much. He didn’t kick-start his day with strong shots of caffeine like many of the people she knew in London. What were his vices? she wondered. Most people had some.

When she brought him a cup of coffee, he had already drunk a tumbler of orange juice from the jug on the buffet and was eating a bowl of muesli.

‘Is it today you’re doing the Barranc de L’Infern?’ she asked.

‘Tomorrow. Will the people I met last night still be here this evening?’

She nodded. ‘I’ll start your omelette.’

When she brought it to him, he said, ‘Don’t go away. Stay and talk to me. Apart from surfing the Web, how else do you amuse yourself?’

‘There’s no shortage of things to do. There are cinemas not far away, and art exhibitions and reading groups. Also, once you get on the autopista, it’s not much more than an hour to Alicante and Valencia, both of them very lively cities.’

‘I know. I’ve been to them. Do you go there often?’

‘Fairly often.’

This was true. When flying to and from Spain, as she did several times a year, she used both cities’ airports. She liked Valencia’s airport best. It was quieter, used mainly by Spanish business people rather than the package holiday tourists who poured into Alicante, the gateway to such popular resorts as Benidorm and Torrevieja.

‘You haven’t explained how you found us,’ she reminded him.

‘On the Web. I was looking for sites about the rock-climbs in this area and found a site belonging to two professional climbers. There was a link to another site with a list of all the casas rurales. Yours seemed the most convenient for the things I wanted to do. Do you get many enquiries via your webpage?’

‘Not at first, but now more and more people are using the Web for looking for and booking holidays. I picked up an email from a prospective visitor this morning. He wanted to know if we do vegetarian meals.’ Remembering that Nicolás’s reservation had been made by telephone, she said, ‘You had someone telephone us rather than booking by email. Why was that?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m not sure. Perhaps the person I asked to make the booking was more comfortable with the telephone than email. If I wanted to extend my time here, could I do that?’

‘Certainly.’ It annoyed her that the prospect of him staying longer pleased her on a personal level as well as from a business point of view.

‘I’ll let you know tonight. How will you spend your day?’

‘This morning I’ll work. This afternoon I might drive to the coast and swim. The sea will still be warm but the beaches won’t be as crowded as they are in the summer.’

‘Yesterday, when I arrived, you were doing housework. Do you do that routinely, or is your parents’ regular cleaner off sick?’

The frank answer was that her mother had a problem keeping household help. She tended to lose her temper when things weren’t done her way. At the time Cally was born, so she had been told, it had been possible for retired ex-colonials, settling in Spain, to employ several staff and pay them low wages. But those days were long gone. Young Spanish women had jobs in offices, shops and supermarkets, and even for their mothers and grandmothers there were now alternatives to domestic service. Those who still did cleaning expected to be treated as equals and Mrs Haig’s haughty manners had not endeared her to the helpers who had come and gone, usually after a stormy altercation.

But Cally was not about to reveal this to Nicolás. She said, ‘Not many women want to do other people’s housework as well as their own nowadays. It’s understandable. Actually I find it rather satisfying.’ Though I wouldn’t want to do it full-time, was her unspoken addendum.

He gave her another of those disconcertingly intent looks. ‘It seems a waste of your capabilities.’

‘You don’t know that I have any other capabilities,’ she said lightly.

‘You read. You’re a linguist. Your whole appearance and manner indicates intelligence and initiative. You have the computer skills that are essential in most jobs today. I’d say you could handle any number of interesting careers.’

It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him she had a career that delighted and fulfilled her, but somehow to say that seemed to be tempting fate to snatch it away from her.

‘Thank you for your confidence,’ she said, with more warmth than she had shown him so far. ‘Normally I don’t pry into guests’ backgrounds unless they volunteer information. But I have to admit I’m curious about what your work is.’

He smiled and it had the same effect as before. Something inside her melted.

‘Have a guess?’ he suggested.

She could visualise him in a doctor’s white coat, or an airline captain’s uniform or even, because he had so much charisma, as a TV presenter on one of the more intelligent programmes. But if he were the latter, Juanita would have recognised him from the pages of Hola! the popular Spanish magazine that had spawned Hello!.

‘Something scientific perhaps?’

He shook his head but, before he could tell her what he did, they were joined by Peggy and Fred.

To Cally’s annoyance, after Peggy had said good morning, she added archly, ‘Are we interrupting something. Are we de trop, as the French say?’

Nicolás had risen to his feet. He said pleasantly, ‘Not at all. I’m just off. That was an excellent omelette, Cally. Thank you. I’ll be back in good time for dinner.’

Disappointed that she hadn’t found out what he did, Cally said, ‘You’ll find your packed lunch and your flask on the worktop just inside the kitchen door.’ She turned to the others. ‘Would you like something cooked for breakfast?’

After all the guests had gone out for the day, and her father had gone to play golf with his two particular cronies, Cally heaved a sigh of relief at having the house to herself for a few hours. She left Nicolás’s room till the last. As she made beds, changed towels, mopped floors and emptied the contents of waste paper baskets into a black bin bag, she thought about Nicolás’s occupation and found herself wishing she were with him, climbing some steep mule track surviving from the days when most journeys were made on foot and the quickest route between many villages was by way of trails laid by the Moors long ago.

When she unlocked the door of his room, she felt a bit like Bluebeard’s wife entering the forbidden chamber. Which was a silly feeling to have. He was just another guest, a transient visitor she would most likely never set eyes on again.

He had left the plastic laundry bag on the upright chair near the door. It contained the T-shirt and jeans he had worn on the day he arrived, the sports shirt he had worn last night and his running kit. But no undershorts or socks. Their absence was explained when she went into the shower room and found them hanging on the shower rail, already almost dry. He must have washed them the night before.

He had also made the bed and, instead of the clutter of possessions left lying about in the other guests’ rooms, tidied away most of his belongings. On the bedside table were two books borrowed from the shelves on the landing, the top one being The Wandering Scholars, a classic, written in the twenties, about life in mediaeval Europe. The one underneath was a travel book she would have liked to publish had the typescript been offered to her instead of to a commissioning editor with another publisher.

Cally took his laundry downstairs to load it into the washing machine. Then, in an involuntary act that troubled her all afternoon when she used her mother’s car to drive to the coast, she lifted his bundled-up shirt and buried her nose in its folds. She knew that even scrupulously clean people left traces of their natural scent on their clothing, but he hadn’t worn the shirt for long enough to do that. But his running singlet did carry his scent and, far from being unpleasant, it conjured up a vivid memory of his athletic body and its polished bronze sheen. She found herself trembling slightly, swept by feelings long repressed and believed to be under control. But, suddenly, they were not, and she was afraid of where they might lead her.

At first, when he mentioned extending his visit, she had been pleased. But now she thought that the sooner he went the better for her peace of mind. She had enough on her plate, professionally, at the moment without getting out of her depth on a personal level.

Nicolás ate his lunch sitting in the sun in the garden of a long-deserted house.

As well as the long brown barra filled with Spanish mountain ham and cut into three sections, Cally had provided him with a banana, an apple and some green-skinned but sweet tangerines. For dessert there was a bar of plain black chocolate and a substantial chunk of pan de higo which was made from dried figs embedded with almonds.

Thinking about their conversation earlier, he had the feeling that Cally was in a no-win situation that was fine for her parents but a disaster for her. In his own family, some members made use of other members, though never of him. He had learnt early on to make his own decisions and stick to them.

A possible reason for her failure to assert herself and get a life of her own was the fact that she had grown up in a country of which she was not a national. In practical terms, she wasn’t British but nor, despite her fluency with the language, was she Spanish. He had noticed that the children of diplomats often felt a sense of displacement. They lacked the deep roots of people raised in the country where they were born.

He had spent a lot of his own life outside Spain because his father’s profession had taken him overseas and, after his parents’ divorce, Nicolás had spent more time with his father than with his capricious, self-centred mother. But despite this cosmopolitan background, at heart he felt wholly Spanish. This land was where he belonged. Where did Cally feel she belonged? Probably nowhere.

Remembering her remark that, on the autopista, it wasn’t much more than an hour’s drive to Valencia or Alicante, he thought of the fast car he had left in a garage because it would attract too much attention in the village car park.

Maybe, if he extended his time here, he could take her out for an evening of sophisticated pleasures. Unless there was a boyfriend in the background.

It was hard to believe that an attractive chica of what—twenty-four? twenty-five?—would not have a man in her life, but his feeling was that she didn’t.

By the time he had finished eating, it was the hottest part of the afternoon. As a child he had seen the workers on his maternal grandfather’s estates lying down in the shade for a siesta. Having read The Wandering Scholars until the church clock struck three this morning, he decided to take a nap under the drooping branches of an old fig tree.

When he woke up it was cooler. He went back inside the house and prowled its large empty rooms, considering various possibilities for its future.

When the guests assembled for pre-dinner drinks that evening, they all had tales of their days’ activities to tell.

Fred and Peggy had had lunch at another casa rural an hour’s drive away. ‘But we didn’t like it as much as yours,’ Peggy told Douglas Haig. ‘It was modern. It had no atmosphere.’

Tonight she was wearing a clinging red dress and dangling diamanté earrings which Cally felt were over the top for the setting which was rustic rather than glitzy. She suspected that Peggy was hoping to make an impression on Nicolás, which seemed ridiculous in the light of their respective ages. But perhaps Fred didn’t give her the attention she craved. He seemed the down-to-earth type. Cally would have expected Peggy to be married to someone more dashing: the kind of man who, when going out in the evening, wore a blazer with a foulard cravat inside the collar of his shirt and had a moustache or a carefully trimmed beard.

When Nicolás appeared and came to the bar, he was wearing the shirt she had washed and ironed for him.

‘Did you press my shirt?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Thank you.’

She used the phrase often heard in Spain when someone was responding to thanks. ‘De nada. It’s part of the service. What would you like to drink?’

‘A glass of the house red, please.’

As she filled a glass for him, she asked, ‘Did you have a good day? Where did you go?’ She assumed he had a map of the area and would know where his route had taken him.

‘An excellent day…and I enjoyed my lunch. It’s years since I had any pan de higo.’

‘It’s one of my weaknesses. I like fresh figs best, when they’re available, and dried figs are good too, but the local dried figs are small and at this time of year the figs imported from Turkey tend to be past their best, so I go for pan de higo. But it’s dangerously more-ish.’

Because his English was as idiomatic as her own, she took it for granted he would understand the expression.

‘It doesn’t appear to be doing any damage to your figure.’ Switching to Spanish, he added, ‘I’m sure all the somewhat overpadded ladies behind me have looked enviously at your slim waist.’

To her annoyance, Cally felt herself blushing. She had always thought of Italian and French as being more musical languages than Spanish, but when Nicolás spoke castellano, in that caressing tone of voice, it sent a quiver down her spine.

She was relieved when her father joined them. It was not until many days later that she remembered that Nicolás had not answered her question about his day’s route.

For dinner that night, instead of serving a first course, Juanita and Cally handed round big dishes of hot and cold tapas including barquetas de espárragos which were boat-shaped pastry containers filled with parsley and chive sauce topped with asparagus tips.

‘Mm…I’d like the recipe for these,’ Cally heard Peggy say to Nicolás. They were both eating chorizo puffs, she noticed.

‘They’re good, but they’re seriously fattening I’ve heard,’ she heard him answer.

Peggy gave a little shriek of dismay. ‘Why did you have to tell me that? Still, men like a curvy woman, don’t they?’ The flirtatious look she gave him made Cally feel embarrassed for her.

‘I don’t think most of us are attracted by model girls’ figures,’ was his reply. Then Cally had to move out of earshot.

When everyone moved to the table, he sat next to her father, leaving Peggy to exercise her femme fatale manner on one of the other men. Cally sat at the other end of the table, as she had the night before, but this time with different neighbours. Fulfilling her role as hostess and watching to see that everyone was enjoying their food and had wine in their glasses prevented her from listening to more than an occasional snatch of the conversation at the far end of the table. But she did observe that her father was in what she thought of as his Expert on Everything mode, and Nicolás was listening but saying little himself.

When the meal was over and Juanita had gone home, the guests seemed inclined to stay up later than they had the night before. When she felt her absence for quarter of an hour wouldn’t be noticed, Cally went to the office to pick up her email.

Every day she received an email news update from The Bookseller, a weekly magazine that was the bible of the British book trade. What she read in the latest update about the firm she worked for made her groan aloud.

Edmund & Burke sees sales and profits dive. The third-quarter figures will increase fears that E&B will be forced into a period of retrenchment by its US parent. Results released show that sales at E&B fell 7% in the three months ended 30th September. The previous year’s figures had been bolstered by the inclusion of one of its titles in the Oprah Book Club selection (see Media Watch below).

Cally scrolled down to the Media Watch section. What she read made her even more depressed. According to a report in the Financial Times, Edmund & Burke’s parent company would have to cut costs by two hundred million dollars over the next twelve months. Inevitably drastic cuts would have to be made by the UK subsidiary.

She read the update again. Then, too upset to open the rest of the emails, none of which was important, she logged off. For three or four minutes she sat slumped in the chair, knowing that by the time she returned to London the imprint she worked for would have been axed and her name would have been added to the long list of editors made redundant in recent years.

And where else, when publishing was awash with unemployed editors and other publishing industry discards, was she going to find another niche to suit her particular talents?

Cally returned to the lounge only because she felt she ought to be around in case anyone wanted more coffee or drinks. She didn’t join the cheerful group sitting on the comfortable chairs and sofas, but slipped unobtrusively behind the bar to be there if she was wanted but unnoticed if she wasn’t.

A few minutes later, while she was pretending to read the paper but thinking about the dire news from London, Nicolás came over.

‘Are you all right?’ he said, as she looked up. ‘When you came back, you looked upset.’

‘You imagined it,’ she said lightly. ‘I’m fine. Like another drink?’

‘No, thanks. What I’d like is to go with you up to the roof terrace and talk about books. Will you come?’

‘I can’t. I’m on duty.’

‘You’ve been on duty all evening. I’m sure your father can cope. Come on…let’s get some fresh air,’ he said persuasively.

At that moment Peggy gave a screech of raucous laughter that made Cally wince. Fleetingly, she saw the same pained expression on his face. Suddenly the thought of the peace and quiet of the terrace, with a congenial companion, was irresistible.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Why not?’

But even as she said it, several reasons why it wasn’t a wise move occurred to her. She ignored them.

CHAPTER THREE

‘DID you enjoy the roast lamb?’ she asked, as she went up the stairs ahead of him.

‘It was excellent…real home-cooking,’ said Nicolás. ‘In restaurants it’s usually been cooked earlier and re-heated in the micro. It never tastes the same. This morning, you mentioned that a vegetarian rang up. Do you get many of them?’

‘Not many, but we have a good repertoire of vegetarian dishes when they do come.’

‘Did you go for a swim as you said you might?’

It was flattering that he remembered the details of their breakfast-time conversation in such detail.

‘Yes, I enjoyed it…as long as I kept looking out to sea and not at the poor old coast which seems to have sprouted more villas and apartment blocks every time I go.’

‘You don’t go often?’

‘Not very often. I used to be mad about swimming as a child, but it seems to be losing its allure. It takes forty minutes to get there and my mother’s clapped-out old car has started to make worrying noises.’

‘You haven’t a car of your own.’

‘I don’t need one.’ She didn’t want to start explaining about living in London, especially now when her whole way of life there was hanging in the balance. ‘Dad doesn’t often go out at night so I have the use of his, which is newer and more reliable, if I want to go to a movie or wherever.’

‘There isn’t a steady boyfriend to take you about?’

‘No,’ said Cally. ‘No, there isn’t. Do you have a steady girlfriend?’

They had reached the top landing. As he had the night before, Nicolás moved ahead of her to draw aside the fringe-like curtain. But before he did, he said, ‘If I had, I shouldn’t have suggested a tête-à-tête with you.’

‘I don’t see why having a girlfriend would debar you from friendly conversations with other women,’ said Cally, as he moved the curtain out of her way.

‘From friendly conversations—no. But are our reactions to each other purely friendly?’ he asked, as he followed her onto the terrace.