by Anne Weale
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…’
‘But after my husband died…’ was probably what she had intended to say but had changed her mind. Suggesting that, even after four years, remembering him still upset her.
Cam had never been in love, and in his world marriages seldom lasted. But he had not forgotten how lost his grandfather had been after his grandmother’s death. He had enough imagination to guess what a devastating blow to Liz her husband’s death must have been.
She was too young and attractive to live alone and, despite her making it clear that she wasn’t in the market for an affair, should he have had that in mind, her body was ready for sex even if her mind rejected the idea of making love with anyone but her late husband.
The proof of that was in the way she had reacted when he stopped her walking out on him.
‘I’m not amused,’ she had stormed at him, and then something had sparked between them that he had recognised as mutual desire. Whether she had known what it was he was inclined to doubt. In four years of living as chastely as a nun, her senses atrophied by grief, she might have forgotten the buzz of physical attraction.
One of the Ancient Greek philosophers—probably Aristotle—had said that human beings had three basic motivations: hunger, thirst and lust. Liz was the kind of woman who would repudiate lust unless love was involved.
The idea that she could want a man whom she didn’t trust would be repugnant to her. But for a moment or two she had wanted him, and he her. Not that he was going to do anything about it. You couldn’t mix business with pleasure, and Liz was too much of an asset in her triple roles as gardener, Alicia’s supervisor and the designer of his website for him to risk having a more personal relationship with her. Not that he wouldn’t enjoy bringing her back to life and making her glow again. He could visualise how lovely she would be with her blue eyes sparkling with vitality instead of shadowed by unhappiness. But, at least for the time being, it was more important to establish a friendship, getting her to the point where she could take his teasing without getting uptight.
The day after Cam left, Liz went for her usual walk through the vineyards. Though the sky was blue, the air was cooler and the outlines of the surrounding mountains were more sharply defined than in warmer weather. Though in certain lights they seemed to merge with each other, there were seventeen mountains visible from the village. She was beginning to know them by name and keep their shapes in her mind’s eye.
Her own house could not be seen from where she was walking, but La Higuera stood out from the smaller houses around it. When the persianas were down, the windows looked like closed eyes. She wondered how long it would be before Cam came again, and if he would keep in touch by e-mail or, now that she knew what sort of website he wanted, he would leave it to her to contact him.
She had not seen him again after he had brought her shawl back. He had said goodbye by means of a brief e-mail. By the time she read it, he was already on his way to Valencia airport.
The strange feeling she had experienced in his garden, while he had hold of her arm, continued to fidget her. She had never felt anything like it before, except occasionally when a passage in a book or a scene in a movie had started a quiver of excitement deep inside her.
But it had been anger she felt towards Cam, and how could anger change to that deep pulsing excitement in a matter of seconds?
She did not like the feeling that, however briefly, she had lost control
of the situation and might not have resisted if he had chosen to…
Closing her mind to the thought of what might have happened, she promised herself she would make sure that all their future encounters were kept on a strictly business footing.
CHAPTER THREE
En la batalla de amor, el que huye es el vencedor
In the battle of love, he who flees is the winner
BY THE time Cam came back, a month later, the valley had changed.
Two days of strong west winds had blown away most of the vine leaves. Some of the old vines had been grubbed up and the reddish clay soil rotavated. Shepherd’s purse was springing up in the spaces between the vines, attracting flocks of noisy little finches. There were also some white egrets flying about, Liz had noticed on her daily walks.
Notifying her of his arrival twenty-four hours beforehand, Cam had added a postscript— ‘I’ve had what I hope is a brainwave. Looking forward to talking it over with you.’
In his absence she had made good progress with the design and coding of his website. But whether it would come up to his expectations remained to be seen. She could have sent the documents for him to view on his Internet browser, but she wanted to see his facial reactions the first time he looked at them.
On the evening he was due to arrive, Liz went to the eight p.m. showing of an English language film at the cinema at Gata de Gorgos, a town nearer to the coast.
She liked going to a movie occasionally but, more importantly, she wanted to be out in case he rang up and suggested they dine together to discuss his brainwave. Rather than make excuses, which he might overrule, it was easier not to be at home.
Although she knew that, in Spain’s big cities, people dined as late as ten o’clock and the streets were still busy at midnight, this was not the norm in Valdecarrasca. When, coming home, she drove through the village, the square was deserted and all the houses in the main street had their shutters closed or their blinds down.
While the kettle was boiling for a cup of tea, she checked for e-mails. There was a message from Cam. ‘If you’re free tomorrow morning, could you come round at ten?’
Liz typed a one-word answer. ‘Yes.’
As she logged off and closed down her PC, she was reluctantly aware that tomorrow was going to be a more exciting day than any since his last visit. It annoyed her that this should be so, but she couldn’t deny it.
Next morning she washed her hair two days sooner than was strictly necessary. After breakfasting in her dressing gown and, aided by a dictionary, reading a page of a Spanish novel she had found on Cam’s shelves, she went upstairs to dress. What to wear? Jeans and a sweatshirt? Or the kind of outfit she had worn to work in her previous life?
After looking through her wardrobe, she compromised between rustic casualness and city smartness by selecting the same gabardine trousers she had worn to lunch with him and a plain dark blue cashmere sweater bought in a sale. As a finishing touch she knotted a blue and grey kerchief round her neck with the ends above her left shoulder.
‘Hello…good morning,’ said Cam, as he opened the door.
The double greeting was one she had learnt to use with the Spaniards she met on her walks. But most of them were elderly men who might have exuded machismo, as he did, when they were younger but had long since lost it apart for a vestigial sparkle in the eye when she smiled at them.
‘Good morning,’ she said, rather formally, as she entered the hall.
‘Coffee’s on.’ He gestured for her to precede him into the kitchen. ‘Thank you for stocking the fridge. Here’s what I owe you.’ He indicated some banknotes placed on the kitchen counter where she had left the receipt from the supermarket.
‘Thank you.’ Seeing at a glance that the notes amounted to more than she had spent, Liz took her wallet from her bag. ‘I’ll give you your change.’
‘No change is necessary,’ he said. ‘You forgot to charge for your petrol and your time.’
‘I shouldn’t dream of charging you for either,’ she said firmly, putting down the change before she picked up his notes. ‘I have to go shopping for myself. It’s no trouble to pick up a few things for you occasionally.’
Cam gave her a thoughtful look. ‘OK, if you insist. But what did that large piece of mirror glass you’ve found for me cost?’
‘It was only a mil, but if it’s not what you want I can take it back.’
‘It’s exactly what I want, and where you’ve positioned it is perfect.’ He handed her a thousand-peseta note. ‘It must have been an awkward thing to transport and put in place…or did you have help?’
‘My car has a hatchback so it wasn’t a problem getting it here. The man down the road, Roberto, saw me getting it out of the car and offered to help. I wondered if I ought to give him the price of a drink, but then I thought it was better not to risk offending him.’
‘I’ll buy him a drink and thank him next time I go to the bar,’ said Cam.
‘Which bar do you go to?’ she asked, surprised that he went to either. The village bars were fairly rough-and-ready establishments with fruit machines and a TV permanently on, not the sort of places he was used to.
‘I have a drink in both of them occasionally. The noise level is hard on the eardrums, but the gossip can be amusing. Most foreigners aren’t aware of it, but the village is a hotbed of politicking and rivalries.’
‘It must be great to be fluent in Valenciano as well as Spanish. I don’t think I’m ever likely to achieve that. Even if I did, the women don’t seem to use the bars. The older ones get together in small sewing-bees outside each other’s houses.’
‘Do you miss the company of women of your own age?’ he asked, making the coffee.
‘No, not at all. There are lots of special interest organisations run by and for the expat community. I could go to a different meeting every day, if I wanted. But the Peñon Computer Club is the only thing I’ve joined. I’m not like someone who has retired. I don’t have hours of spare time to fill.’
‘No, but we all need congenial company. Is the computer club fun?’
‘It’s very male-orientated,’ she said, before it occurred to her that this might be a contentious comment to make to someone as manifestly masculine as Cam.
‘In what way?’ he asked.
‘Men have an affinity with machines that I don’t think most women do. The guys at the club love tinkering with their computers’ innards. I would rather not know about what goes on inside the systems unit. I just want it to run as smoothly as the washing machine or the fridge. If something does go wrong, I want to be able to call an engineer to fix it, not have to do it myself.’
‘I should have thought the guys at the club would be falling over themselves to come and fix it for you. Or are they the ones who have made unwelcome passes?’ he asked.
‘I haven’t had any serious computer problems since I’ve been here. If I did, I wouldn’t expect someone who lives on the coast to come trailing out here to help.’
‘There must be youths in the village who could sort out any but the most complex problems for you. Ask Alicia if she knows any teenage computer buffs. There are bound to be some around.’
‘I’m sure there are, but the language barrier would be even worse with technical matters.’
‘Not necessarily. Like cars, computers work in much the same way the world over. Shall we have our coffee on the terrace?’
When they went outside, she found he had put out two director’s chairs, a dark green sunbrella and a camp stool to support the tray.
‘I expect you like to sit in the shade. After last week’s weather in London, I can’t get enough of the sun,’ said Cam. ‘Do you mind if I take my shirt off?’
‘Of course not.’ Liz was beginning to wonder if, even sitting in the shade, she was going to be too hot in her sweater. The temperature inside her house was many degrees lower than on his sun-baked terrace. She should have put on a shirt.
Cam was unbuttoning his. She focused her gaze
on the mountains to the south, and said, ‘I’m very keen to hear about your brainwave. Do I gather it has to do with your website?’
‘It will, if you think it’s workable. But you may not.’
‘Tell me about it.’
Without looking, she was aware that he was tugging his shirt free from his shorts. She had already taken in that his long legs were tanned, suggesting that, even if he hadn’t been in Spain much this year, he had spent time in the sun elsewhere.
‘I got the idea from a television advertisement that ran for a while last year, or maybe the year before,’ he said. ‘You may have seen it. I can’t remember the product it was advertising, but it was a spoof dinner party and the guests included Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein and other celebrities whose names I’ve forgotten.’
‘I didn’t see it,’ said Liz. ‘But I did see an advertisement for a car which showed Steve McQueen apparently driving it years after he had died. Rather spooky, I thought…technology being able to resuscitate someone like that.’
‘It is spooky,’ Cam agreed, ‘but also very clever. My idea has nothing to do with reviving the famous. What I have in mind is simply to interview six or eight interesting people about a particular subject and present the results as table-talk written in hypertext—that is with illustrations and links and perhaps sound clips. The overall title would be “Cam Fielding’s Dinner Parties”, each with a subtitle indicating the subject.’
‘I think it’s a terrific idea,’ Liz said eagerly. ‘Not complicated to do, and a wonderful draw to your site. Have you started making guest lists and choosing subjects?’
‘Not yet. I wanted to see if you thought it was workable. I did do a quick Web-search to check if anyone else was already using the idea, but all I came up with was recipes and tips for holding real-world dinner parties.’
