by John Harris
‘Looks like a blasted family outing,’ he said. ‘Dad, Mum and the young hopeful.’
Grace said nothing. Her earlier boisterous friendliness forgotten in his hostility, and he tried to think of something to say that would stir her into a retort, so he could start a blazing row and get it off his chest. Always better to clear the air before you started off, he always felt, instead of goggling at each other like last week’s kippers and keeping it all inside until you felt as if you had an attack of indigestion. Then he realized that at that moment there was nothing he could say that would jolt her out of her enforced silence and he climbed into the car with ill-concealed annoyance and let the clutch in violently.
The engine roared as the back wheels spun in the dust then, as the tyres gripped, they were all flung back in their seats, their heads rolling at the violence of the movement.
‘Sorry,’ Ash said brusquely.
He swung the car fiercely round the side of the church and through a group of tumbledown one-storey houses. They bounced heavily as he hit the suggestion of a kerb, and there was a clang as the rear end of the car caught the corner of a fence.
Grace glanced back. A man was standing in a doorway shouting after them, a dog barking beside him.
‘You’ve demolished a fence,’ she pointed out calmly.
‘Good,’ Ash said bitterly. ‘I’m glad. I feel like demolishing fences at the moment.’
Four
Ash drove furiously, crouched over the wheel, unspeaking, his face alternately angry then morose.
Grace Rodrigo said nothing, holding on to the door with difficulty, trying to avoid rolling against him in the swaying car.
‘Bad road,’ she said breathlessly, clinging on for dear life, while the child bounced unhappily about between them.
‘Railways are worse,’ he said cryptically, ignoring the hint.
He swerved instinctively as a plover rose up in front of them, a gold, black and white flash shrieking its noisy warning, and they all rolled together with a squeak of alarm from the child, as the car’s wheels jumped in the deep tracks where the dusty surface of the road had been worn away until it had become almost like a set of railway lines.
The sun was dropping in a blaze of colour, sinking like an overripe pomegranate into the shadow that lay across the plain. The wide sky glowed with fleeting tints of jade and salmon pink and amber, scars of flame spreading out into the fading blue like the ribs of a fan, overlaid as though with mother-of-pearl with delicate whorls of cloud frail as vapour. Over the waving grassland there was a faint mist now which empurpled the first clover and the thistles that grew like a lush hedge in places, the scarlet and white verbena and the twining convolvulus by the roadside. Already there was a smoky quality of evening about the landscape that gave it a look of unreality in its never-ending monotony.
The wire-fenced road that ran across the vast green and tawny sea of grass had been deserted and bare for mile after mile, except for an occasional ridge of trees or an iron-ribbed windmill. Once a group of soldiers had challenged them at a crossroads which was little more than an intersection of two tracks, but Ash had silenced them with a quick jabber of Spanish and a series of imperious gestures which probably impressed them more than his command of the language. Once a Glenn Martin fighter had roared low over their heads so that they had all instinctively ducked, but otherwise they seemed to be drowned in the space of that vast lonely plain with nothing to see except for a group of wandering cattle with their accompanying tick birds, or an occasional covey of partridges or quail bursting out of the grass and brushing the muddy nests of the horneros that hung on every fence pole; a minute moving oasis of humanity in the middle of a long straight road, hypnotizing in its absence of variety right to the shimmering horizon, rolling up the unending miles in choking clouds of dust from which the heat had breathed on them during the afternoon in dazzling draughts.
Then finally, as evening began, the road had started to turn, breaking into a series of quick twists until they knew they were not very from the great river that came down from the north; spinning in great lazy loops and curves far to the right and left, the sickly colour of milk chocolate, its surface smeared with patches of twisted grass and twigs like little islets that looked as solid as the mud-banks stirred up in the seasonal floods when the floor heaved and changed and the channels became a navigator’s nightmare.
There seemed to be water everywhere now, the land cut into a thousand meaningless tangled gulleys through the alders and the willows, so that the road crossed the ditches by clumsy bridges or narrow fords and curved round pools of stagnant water, with their rank marigold smell and the strong rich scent of the foliage that came from among the cane-brakes and the thickets of espinillo.
Once they saw a humming bird and a group of rose-pink flamingoes fishing in the shallows among the thickly growing water-weeds, and once a flight of ducks exploded from the undergrowth, honking like a traffic jam, and clattered noisily over their heads.
Ash’s first grim-faced incommunicativeness had relaxed a little by this time under the combined assault of the woman and the child by his side. Their first hesitant efforts to get him into conversation after they had left Flores had been brushed aside ungraciously but silence was virtually a torment to him and his surliness had not lasted long. He liked to talk and he liked company – particularly women’s company – and as he found himself obliged to answer the questions they kept throwing at him, his determination to be thoroughly uncivil with them had finally begun to wear a little thin and he had started at last to make comments addressed to nobody in particular, pointing out in monosyllabic phrases the need for petrol or for food.
In his disappointment, though, and the feeling that he had been cheated, he was still not prepared to go the whole way towards friendliness, and several times he told the child to stop chattering when she pointed excitedly at the ash-grey screamers and the swans they saw. Each time, as he spoke, she subsided between them, turning her eyes inquisitively towards Grace’s, her expression puzzled, but eventually she had stopped taking too much notice of him and finally, throwing caution aside as she grew more excited, she began to bombard him with questions.
‘Mr Ash, where are we going?’ ‘Mr Ash, why was all that shooting going on in Flores?’ ‘Mr Ash, why do flamingoes have such long necks?’
‘Oh, my God,’ he said, dazzled by the speed at which the queries were flung at him, ‘because if they had short necks, they’d have to kneel down to get at their breakfasts.’
She laughed with delight at his reply and started to comment on their speed so that he began to warm up further under her praise.
‘Ninety,’ she said, staring at the speedometer with a modern child’s interest in mechanical things that went strangely with her small face and squeaky voice. ‘That’s about sixty miles an hour in England. Coo! On this road too! They have kilometres in this country,’ she explained.
‘I know,’ Ash said, his expression relaxing a little more.
‘That’s a jolly good speed, you know, on this road.’
Ash grunted. ‘Experience,’ he said. ‘That’s what it is. Drove an armoured car in the desert for three years. Worse roads than this.’
The child dragged herself upright with a hand under the dashboard, and clung on, her sharp elbows jabbing at his ribs.
‘Were you a solider?’ she asked. ‘In the war, I mean.’
‘Not half. Sometimes I wish I still was.’
‘Were you an officer?’
‘Yes.’
‘What in?’
‘Only one thing for a man like me – cavalry.’
‘Horses?’
Ash chuckled. ‘Awkward things, horses. Need feeding. We used cars and tanks.’
‘Did you get wounded?’
Ash glanced round at her quizzically, but she stared at him without embarrassment.
‘Not a scratch,’ he said.
She was looking up at him in starry-eyed wonderment, as though his size
filled the whole of her landscape, a giant of red-brown flesh topped by that blazing red hair.
He presented a splendid figure which could not have been more magnificent to the child even in shining armour and caparisoned in gaudy drapings. His big raw-boned frame would still have looked the same to her, topped by that magnificent head and long commanding nose, even if it had been dressed in tweeds and shadowed by a poacher’s lurcher.
‘Did you win any medals?’ she asked, as though she confidently expected him to have a chestful.
‘One,’ he said. ‘A big one.’
‘How big?’
‘Big as a Ford hub-cap.’
She stared at him, open-mouthed. ‘Not really?’
He grinned. ‘I meant, it was an important one.’
She looked suitably impressed. ‘I bet you’re good at lots of things,’ she said. ‘I bet you’ve had lots of experiences.’
Ash grinned again, his face lighting up with a quick sly humour. ‘You bet your sweet life I have,’ he said, and as her eyes caught his over the child’s head, Grace looked away quickly from the ribald suggestions his glance contained.
The child was watching him now with the same dumb adoration she bestowed on film stars. With that grin of his and the air of supreme self-confidence he wore, he had a robber-baron appearance that gave him a racy, raffish look, as though he were capable of anything and everything.
‘I bet this sort of car isn’t much of a one for you,’ Teresa went on, her face eager as she started at him. ‘I bet you go in for Rolls-Royces and Cadillacs and that sort normally.’
‘You bet I do when I get a chance.’
‘I bet in your job you have the best, don’t you?’
‘Not half. Impresses the customers.’
‘Is it a very important job?’
‘You’re telling me.’
‘Are you something to do with the government?’
Ash chuckled and, as he glanced out of the corner of his eye at the child, he caught Grace Rodrigo looking at him again. He smiled at her, finding that now he had emerged from his anger, it was hard to retreat again, especially with the child regarding him with awe and admiration.
‘Well, not exactly,’ he admitted. ‘Not in the way you mean.’
‘But you’ve got lots of influence?’
‘Oh, bags of it.’
‘I bet you’re the sort who can get things done. You have to have influence to get things done here.’
‘You’re dead right, chum! You do too.’
‘I bet you could get almost anything done if you wanted, couldn’t you?’
‘Almost. I’m a pretty important person.’
‘Honest? Truly important?’
‘Sure.’
‘It’s wrong to lie, you know. The sisters at the Convent used to wallop us if we lied.’
‘Good for the sisters at the Convent.’ The set expression on Ash’s face had gone completely now. He liked the sort of company that made him laugh, and he laughed easily.
‘I’m glad we’re with you, Mr Ash,’ Teresa said happily. ‘If anything goes wrong, I know we’ll be all right.’
Ash’s eyes met Grace’s once more over her head.
‘No more of that turning us off trains and things. No more buses that get stuck. You speak Spanish well, Mr Ash. I can tell that. Me, I can only speak it a bit. I had to ask all the questions for us both. It was jolly difficult, I can tell you.’
By the time they stopped for a meal by the river, swinging the old car off the road on to a patch of hard ground underneath a clump of willows, the child was hanging on to Ash’s every word, and he seemed to have accepted her presence at last. He made no further reference to her until he was struggling to open a tin of meat in the boot of the car.
‘Never thought of kids when I stocked up on food,’ he said, looking across at Grace. ‘Now we shall have to get some more. I thought there was only going to be the two of us and I suppose she eats like a wolf.’
‘All kids eat like wolves.’
‘You can have my share, Mr Ash,’ Teresa said immediately. ‘I don’t mind.’
She gazed at him, her small face adoring, completely under the spell of his accomplished charm, her dark eyes big with hero-worship.
‘Thanks, chum!’ He looked up from where he was about to open a tin of fruit with a pocket knife. ‘Where are we going to head for the night?’ he asked. ‘Got to make up our minds. I’m looking forward to the old couch, believe me.’
He glanced at the sky. It had changed now from blue to green and from yellow to red until the patches of water were the colour of crimson silk, and the teal and the shovellers darting over its surface were black specks edged with gold.
‘We’re well south now,’ he pointed out. ‘And there’s a place near here called José Lorenzo. We could try for that!’
‘What’s it like?’ Grace asked.
‘Nice bar.’
‘I didn’t mean that.’ She gave a sharp gesture of irritation. ‘Are there many people?’
He looked at her quickly. ‘They’re about as thick as usual over the ground,’ he said. ‘Like fleas on a dog.’
She looked up at him and he sensed that she was uneasy and for the first time doubtful.
‘I’d rather we kept away from the towns,’ she pointed out.
‘Why?’ Ash was intrigued by her secretiveness.
She avoided his eyes, clearly intending to tell him nothing. ‘I’d hate to miss that ship,’ she said. ‘That’s all.’
She was sitting on the only suitcase they possessed between the lot of them, indifferent to his curiosity. The blue frock she wore was smudged now with the yellow stain of the dusty road that had poured in through the broken window of the Ford in clouds all afternoon. Ash studied her for a moment before he spoke.
‘Well, I for one don’t fancy some grubby little country hotel that smells like a stable,’ he said. ‘Six people to a room. Fleas carrying out manoeuvres up and down the mattresses and a barmaid who looks as dull as a Dutch nun.’
‘Why can’t we stay here?’
Teresa stared at Grace for a moment as she made the suggestion, then she jumped up. ‘Yes,’ she yelped enthusiastically. ‘Let’s sleep here.’
‘Here?’ Ash swung round and swore as he cut his finger on the tin he was opening. He straightened up, knocking the tin over, his great fist in his mouth, his face indignant. Then he saw the fruit had spilled and the syrup was running across the floor of the boot. For a second he stared at it and, cursing again, he pitched out the bread and the rest of the food and began to mop up the boot with a piece of dirty rag, muttering fiercely to himself as the sticky liquid gummed up his fingers.
‘Here?’ he repeated at last. ‘Here? At the side of the road?’
His expression was one of incredulity and disgust. Never once had he managed his life so badly that he had been entirely unable to find himself a comfortable bed somewhere. That presumptuous charm of his had always stood him in such good stead in difficult times with the long string of women he’d known that there’d always been one willing to offer him her home and her bed in return for the privilege of being see about with him. Not one of them, not even the most difficult, the most demanding, had ever had the nerve to suggest he slept out of doors.
‘But why not?’ Grace was saying, deliberately ignoring his indignation. ‘It’s warm, isn’t it?’
‘It won’t be warm later,’ he exploded.
‘It’s not much to put up with for one night.’
She was being quietly stubborn, and he was baffled, for he wasn’t used to stubborn women. Mostly, he had found, they melted easily enough before his persuasion and it had never required much effort on his part to change their minds for them once he gave his mind to it. With Grace, however, he had a feeling persuasion wouldn’t work. It was a situation he wasn’t used to and didn’t like, and his reply was more like a complaint than anything else.
‘What are you going to sleep on?’ he asked.
; ‘We can sleep in the car.’
‘That’ll be fine,’ he said, full of scorn. ‘It’ll be hard as the hobs of hell and draughty as a railway station.’
‘Mr Ash’ – Teresa fixed him with her adoring black eyes – ‘why can’t we camp out? It’ll be fun.’
‘It’s nothing to do with you,’ he snapped angrily, as he found himself at bay against both of them. ‘You leave it to me.’
‘Well, why can’t we?’
‘Wolves. That’s why. Wolves’ll eat you.’
‘There aren’t any wolves. Not nowadays.’
‘Well, bears then,’ he said desperately, conscious for the first time in his life of his inadequacy in this department.
‘There aren’t any bears either,’ Teresa said scornfully. ‘Didn’t you know that?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake! Frogs then. Maybe a plague of frogs.’
‘They can’t get inside the car, Mr Ash.’ Teresa grabbed his arm and swung on it, worshipping and wheedling at the same time. ‘Go on, Mr Ash. Let’s have a bash.’
The rhyme seemed to please her and she stood in front of him tormenting him with it – ‘Let’s have bash, Mr Ash. Go on, let’s have a bash, Mr Ash’ – while he stood awkwardly, his expression one of mingled annoyance and baffled ineffectualness.
Grace laughed at him then her voice interrupted them, gentle and firm, and Teresa stopped singing and turned to her.
‘It won’t hurt us,’ Grace said. ‘We’re not made of cream puffs. I’m not anyway and you certainly don’t look as though you’ve been stuck together with flour and water.’
He snorted. ‘I’m getting too old to play at boy scouts,’ he said.
‘Go on with you’ – she laughed out loud, richly and without mockery – ‘an upstanding young man like you.’ Her tone changed and became pleading. ‘Just for once,’ she begged and he knew that pleading wasn’t normally part of her nature. She looked the sort of woman who could hand out clumps on the noggin a lot more easily than she could humility.
‘Tomorrow we’ll have reached the ship,’ she pointed out gently. ‘Then it’ll be different.’
