A Spanish Honeymoon

‘It’s protected. How effectively I’m not sure. The hackers seem to invent new viruses faster than the anti-virus guys can pile up the barricades.’

While they were talking he had been pouring the coffee. After placing a cup in front of her, he put a glass alongside it and reached for the bottle.

‘Not for me, thank you,’ said Liz.

‘You don’t like liqueurs…or you don’t like poire William.’

‘I’ve never tried it, but I think any more alcohol might give me a headache.’

‘You’ve only had three glasses of wine. That’s not heavy drinking, especially with meat and two veg. Come on, let me give you a small one.’

‘I don’t want it, Cam. Please don’t press me.’

‘I shouldn’t dream of pressing you to do anything you didn’t want to.’ He took the glass away from her cup and placed it next to his own, pouring a generous measure of the liqueur for himself. ‘But your nervousness does make me wonder what you’ve been told about me. Am I accused of luring respectable women into my garden and plying them with potent liqueurs before attempting to have my wicked way with them?’

Liz grabbed the strap of the shoulder bag she had hung on the back of the bench. Jumping up, she said crossly, ‘If you’re going to take that tack, I’m going home…now.’

She was halfway to the steps when he hooked his hand in the bend of her elbow and stopped her. As, angrily, she swung to face him, he said, ‘You’re making a fuss about nothing. I was only teasing you.’

‘I’m not amused,’ she said hotly.

And then, as they faced each other, her indignation evaporated, replaced by a different and unfamiliar emotion.

For a long, tense moment they looked at each other and she saw his expression change from a smile to a look she could not define or describe.

All she knew was that, for several seconds, some kind of current was switched on and flowed between them.

Then he released her arm and said quietly, ‘Come back and drink your coffee and let’s talk about the garden.’

Dazed and disturbed by what she had just experienced, Liz returned to the bench and sat down. As if nothing had happened, Cam began to outline his ideas. Forcing herself to concentrate, she listened to him.

‘The last time I was here, I went to a party in a garden where the owners had made clever use of a large piece of mirror glass. They’d placed it so that it appeared to be an ivyclad archway leading to another garden. Do you think we could copy that here?’

Liz drank some coffee and thought about the suggestion. ‘You would have to try it out with a small piece of mirror. I go to the rastro at Benimoro most Saturdays. I could probably pick up a mirror for a few hundred pesetas.’

‘Could you? That would be great.’ He explained his other ideas, one of which involved getting a local builder to construct a walled bed for shrubs against the side of the terrace.

Eventually the conversation came to a natural end and when Liz got up to go he did not attempt to detain her.

She left by way of the house in order for Cam to give her a Time magazine he had bought for his flight down and thought she might like to read.

She had turned the corner into the short length of downhill street that connected his street and her street when she encountered a middle-aged woman she knew by sight who was holding a baby in one of the quilted bags in which recently born infants were often carried about.

By now Liz knew that baby girls could be recognised by the earrings they wore from soon after birth. The appropriate comment was an admiring, ‘Qué guapa!’ if the child was female or, in the absence of earrings, the masculine form of the word meaning pretty or handsome.

Often the babies were beautiful only to their parents and grandparents, but this tiny boy was a charmer with large dark eyes and a mop of quite thick black hair. As Liz touched his petal-soft cheek with a gentle finger, a wave of sadness washed over her.

She controlled her feelings until she was safely indoors, but then the repressed emotion welled up again and she found herself in tears. It was most unlike her to cry. Perhaps it was partly reaction to the stresses of lunching with Cam. But mostly it was the reminder that in a few years it would be too late for her to have a baby of her own.

She had wanted to start a family two years after her marriage, though Duncan had been less keen. When she was twenty-five, after tests, her doctor had assured her there was no medical reason for her failure to conceive. At his suggestion, Duncan had undergone tests. The results had shown that the only way they could have children was by adoption, which her husband had not wished to do.

She was drying her eyes and pulling herself together when there was a knock on the door. She expected the caller to be the woman across the street who, if the postman left a package on Liz’s doorstep while she was out, would take charge of it till she returned. But when she opened the door, it was Cam who stood outside.

‘You forgot your shawl,’ he said, handing it to her.

‘Oh…thank you. I’m sorry you had the bother of bringing it down. Thank you very much.’ Was her mascara smudged? Would he see she had been crying? Flustered, she closed the door.

Cam walked back to La Higuera wondering what had made her cry. She didn’t seem the weepy type. He felt sure it had nothing to do with her angry flare-up in the garden. It would take more than that to reduce her to tears. Anyway, by the time she left that had been smoothed over.

He remembered that when, during lunch, he had asked her about her working life in England, she had spoken of the probability that she would have succeeded the crafts editor. She had started to say ‘But after…’ and then paused and begun again with ‘There came a point when I suddenly realised…’

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