The Flower Garden

by Margaret Pemberton

  He had not asked Syrie if she had had the forethought to bring it with her. Syrie always prepared for every contingency. He would hire private nurses at Athens to make it look better. No damned arrogant Portuguese or senseless wife was going to stand between him and the White House.

  There was a discreet knock at the door and Sanfords’resident doctor entered.

  ‘In there,’ Jack said unnecessarily, and pulled on a clean shirt.

  It was half an hour before Nancy left the bathroom. Her face was white; her eyes haggard. She leant heavily on Ramon and seemed oblivious to Jack’s presence. He watched them go, took another shuddering look into his bathroom and rang room service to demand removal to another suite.

  ‘Rest,’ Dr Serrado said impassively, as Ramon swept Nancy into his arms and carried her over the threshhold of the Garden Suite.

  Nancy gave him a shaky smile. ‘I’m all right now, Doctor. It was only a nosebleed.’

  The doctor looked at her queryingly and Nancy’s eyes slid uncomfortably away from his.

  ‘Thank you, Serrado. I’ll see to Mrs Cameron,’ said Ramon.

  The doctor shrugged, his face grim as he returned to his duties elsewhere.

  Ramon laid her tenderly on the bed and sat beside her, his strong hands imprisoning hers. For a few seconds he didn’t speak and a deep frown drew his eyebrows together so that they met. At last he said:

  ‘Are you ill, Nancy?’

  Her mouth felt dry and her breath came short and hard. She could tell him: share the burden. She closed her eyes and ran her tongue nervously along her lower lip. If she told him, she would destroy his happiness. Whatever his reaction, he would not be able to be natural with her. Their whole relationship would be strained by the knowledge that it was so soon to be curtailed. He would pity her, feel obliged to stay with her even if he no longer wished to do so. It was better as it was. She had learned to live with the truth, but the process had been agonizing. She could not submit Ramon to the same pain.

  Her smile was tender as she opened her eyes. ‘I’m a little tired, that’s all. A nosebleed isn’t the end of the world.’

  She saw the tense line of his jaw relax, the worry in his eyes subside.

  ‘I want, very much, to return to the ballroom. Will you ring Maria for me so that I can bathe and change.’

  He drew her hands to his mouth and kissed them, then he slipped his arms around her with infinite care and held her close.

  ‘I love you, lady,’ he said, his mouth warm on her cheek.

  She turned her face so that her lips met his. ‘I love you, my darling. More than you’ll ever know,’ and in the bliss of his kiss she forgot all about her illness; about Jack; even about Maria and her need to bathe and change her dress.

  It was Ramon who said at last, reluctantly, ‘If we are to put in an appearance again this evening, we will have to hurry. On the other hand, if you’ve changed your mind …’

  She pushed him away, laughing, as he lowered his head to her breasts and kissed her.

  ‘I haven’t changed my mind. I’ll join you in the ballroom in twenty minutes.’

  With a deep sigh he relinquished his hold on her and said threateningly, ‘If you’re not there on the exact minute I shall come back and lock us both in here until morning.’

  She laughed and picked up the telephone receiver to speak to Maria.

  ‘You’re late,’ he said grimly as he met her halfway down the corridor. ‘Five minutes and thirty seconds.’

  Her eyes danced and the colour had returned to her cheeks. ‘Darling, you look like an avenging angel,’ she said, and slipped into his arms, her body fitting as neatly in his as if it had been constructed for no other purpose.

  When his lips finally released hers he said, ‘I’ve just been in to see Zia and she’s feeling stronger. She also has some news. Your father is on his way here.’

  ‘Because of Jack?’ Her gaiety vanished to be replaced by horror.

  ‘No. Apparently his request for a booking was sent before Cameron arrived.’

  She relaxed. Her father had wanted to come to Madeira with her and had fought the impulse. Apparently he had now given in to it. She frowned. When he had been tempted into accompanying her, it had been because of Zia. He could have no inkling that Ramon was here. She had told him quite categorically that it was the last place in the world Ramon would be found. She smiled and held on to him.

  ‘Quite the gathering of the clans,’ she said drily.

  ‘An interesting assortment, certainly,’ Ramon agreed. They laughed, entering the crowded ballroom as the band began to play ‘I get a kick out of you’.

  ‘Ramon, darling!’ A handsome matron in dove-grey silk with a white plume in her hair, bore down on them. ‘I’d heard you were here, but simply refused to believe it.’

  ‘Let me introduce Lady Penelope Lovesy,’ Ramon said, ‘Penelope, Nancy Leigh O’Shaughnessy.’

  Lady Lovesy took Nancy’s hand. The face was familiar but the name didn’t fit. She tapped Ramon’s cheek chastisingly with her closed fan.

  ‘You really are too bad. You told me implicitly that you were not returning here until you returned with the girl you intended to marry!’

  ‘I did, and I meant it.’

  Lady Penelope looked startled.

  ‘I have met her and she’s with me now.’

  Lady Penelope’s eyes went unhesitatingly to the third finger of Nancy’s hand and the thin gold ring encircling it.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Ramon was saying, and Lady Penelope was left behind as they approached the Indian lady and Sonny Zakar. Nancy felt as if there was a band of steel around her chest.

  ‘Ramon …’

  ‘Glorious music,’ the Indian lady was saying in unaccented English.

  ‘Ramon …’

  ‘He’s producing Catherine the Great with Garbo …’

  ‘Ramon …’

  At last he heard her, and turned, his eyes smiling down into hers.

  ‘Yes, sweetheart.’

  ‘Ramon, I never said I’d marry you. I can’t …’

  There was a dreadful silence. The smile faded from his eyes. ‘Why not?’ he asked, and it was the voice of a stranger.

  ‘I can’t, because of Jack. It would ruin his career.’

  People were beginning to look in their direction. He grasped her wrist so tight that she cried out in pain.

  ‘Who’s been labouring under an illusion?’ he asked through clenched teeth. ‘Me or Cameron?’ and to the amazement of his guests he strode from the ballroom, a captive Nancy struggling to keep pace with him in her tight-fitting satin dress.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘Ramon, please …’

  The pianist faltered in his rendering of ‘Blue Moon’. Potted palms swayed perilously as Ramon strode past them, the bejewelled, bemedalled throng parted hurriedly to let them through.

  ‘Ramon …’

  The gold-embossed doors of the ballroom closed behind them.

  ‘Well!’ the grand duchess’voice could be heard saying with loud disapproval, and then the pianist gathered his scattered wits and, backed by his startled drummer, began to play a tango that drowned the flood of excited speculation.

  Her wrist felt as if it were broken. ‘Ramon …’

  He swung her round to face him, frowning fiercely, his handsome features satanic in anger.

  ‘When I said we were going away together, I didn’t mean a mild diversion. A month’s frolic in the sun and then back into the well-worn international trap for a change of bed companion. I thought I made it quite clear. I’ve had enough of that particular kind of musical chairs.’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘Of course, I was only speaking for myself. It hadn’t occurred to me that your ideas on the subject might be different. That once making the traumatic break from that pompous, hypocritical, monumental bore that you married, you might find your sights set on a very different kind of future. One that contained not only me but Vasileyev and Minter and
Golding and anybody else in pants that moves as well.’

  Hot, angry tears stung the back of her eyelids. She blinked them away fiercely. ‘You’re being unfair, Ramon. The only future I ever envisaged was with you.’

  ‘Then why?’ he repeated through clenched teeth, ‘… the reluctance to set yourself free from Cameron?’

  ‘Oh my darling, it isn’t necessary. Please believe me, we can be together, be happy …’

  ‘I want a wife,’ he hissed, his eyes flashing sparks that would have set wet wood alight. ‘Not a mistress. God knows, there’s been enough of them. End to end they’d probably circle the globe!’

  The tears in her eyes were brilliant. She began to giggle, hysteria only a hair’s breadth away.

  ‘What’s so damned funny?’ His face was frightening, his hold on her merciless.

  She was laughing and crying at the same time. ‘Nothing. Nothing at all. I love you with all my might, mind and body and strength. I’d give anything in the world to be your wife. I’d give my life if I could have only a few years of being Mrs Ramon Sanford, bearing your children, loving you, living with you.’ She was half incoherent. ‘But you can’t barter with your life. It gets taken from you and you can’t make bargains with it! And I can’t bear your children because I’m barren!’

  ‘For Christ’s sake.’ At the agony in her eyes his volcanic rage fled. ‘I don’t care about children, Nancy. It’s you I want. You, with your feline eyes and laughing mouth; with your ridiculous changes of style – looking as unapproachable as a goddess one moment in diaphanous chiffon, and like the latest sex screen symbol the next, in clinging satin that makes every man that looks at you break out in a sweat. I want you. I want you to make me laugh and make me cry; to understand what I feel without my having to put it into words. I want to love you, be angry with you. I want to have you within my sight and within my gaze every minute of every day. Don’t you understand that? I want utter commitment. I want what I have always scorned. I want marriage, Nancy. Marriage with you. I want my ring on your finger – my name on your signature. I won’t settle for anything less. Not if it means changing the whole damned constitution of the United States of America and getting a dispensation from the Pope!’

  ‘Oh, Ramon!’ She twisted violently from his grasp and flung her arms around his neck. ‘I want you as well. I need you. I love you.’ Her face was wet with tears as he brought his mouth down savagely on hers.

  Later he said huskily, ‘Then you’ll divorce Cameron?’

  She nodded, hating herself for her duplicity yet knowing it was the only way to spare him unbearable pain.

  ‘Yes. It will take a while: six months or a year. I won’t know until I speak to my lawyer.’

  ‘I can wait six months,’ he said, and the harsh line of his mouth had softened. ‘Six months is only a heartbeat away.’

  ‘Oh Ramon!’ Her voice broke and she clung to him with the ferocity of a lonely child.

  ‘It’s time the sex screen symbol reverted to naked reality. How the devil do I get you out of this? It fits like a second skin.’

  With enormous self-control she steadied her voice. ‘I’ll show you,’ she said, ‘but not in Sanfords’Bridge Room.’

  ‘Good God,’ he looked around him for the first time. ‘Is that where we are?’ and with a sudden grin he swept her up in his arms as if she weighed no more than a feather, and carried her to her room.

  There was no need for Nancy to dismiss Maria, who would usually have been in attendance to help her undress and prepare her for bed. Maria knew that Sanfords’balls did not end until three or four in the morning. Nancy had told her repeatedly that she had no need of her services at such an hour, but Maria stubbornly refused to allow her beloved mistress so much as to hang up a dress on her own account. Nancy had long since given up the battle. If she returned to her room accompanied, Maria melted away diplomatically. Tonight, no diplomacy was needed. It was not yet midnight and Maria had thought herself free of her self-imposed duties for at least another three hours.

  She was with Luis, not walking the fragrant sub-tropical gardens as other, more privileged lovers were doing, but strolling hand in hand up the darkened rough and narrow road that led eventually to Camara dos Lobos. Hand-holding was the furthest intimacy Maria allowed. Luis, unused to such chastity, was finding his desire for the little Puerto Rican maid increasing daily.

  ‘A swim?’ he coaxed. If she swam she would have to remove the demure high-necked dress under which her breasts pushed so tantalizingly. Maria, reading his mind, laughed.

  ‘No swimming. The cliffs are too steep. I’m not a mountain goat.’

  ‘You’re a damned nuisance,’ Luis said, reverting to frankness for the first time in years.

  Maria laughed again, pleased at her ability to tease and torment him. ‘If I am such a nuisance, why do you spend so much time with me?’

  ‘I don’t!’ His male vanity was stunned. ‘I had nothing else to do. It was a nice night and I fancied a walk.’

  ‘It makes a change from your usual occupations,’ Maria said lightly.

  ‘I’ve no idea what you mean.’

  ‘Oh.’ Maria’s voice was studiedly careless as their clasped hands swung to the rhythm of their steps. ‘Countess Zmitsky, Viscountess Lothermere, that ridiculous Mrs Peckwyn-Peake and I think, though I’m not sure, the greedy Miss Mancini as well.’

  Their handclasp was broken abruptly.

  ‘Have you been spying on me?’

  ‘No.’ Maria’s voice was indignant. ‘I wouldn’t waste my time.’

  Luis’sun-bronzed face was troubled. If Madame Sanford or Mr Sanford found out he was in the habit of offering small services for rather large rewards, then he might very well lose his job. If Maria had guessed, why had not other members of Sanfords’staff? Perhaps she had already spoken of it to them. Perhaps even now his comfortable life style was in jeopardy.

  ‘My position at Sanfords is that of swimming coach,’ he said icily. ‘That entails not only coaching the guests in the pool, but also discussing technique with my pupils at other times.’

  Maria could barely keep the amusement out of her voice. ‘Is your … technique … very interesting for the ladies? I would have thought some of them might be too old to learn new skills.’

  ‘Mae de Deus! Is that what this is all about. Why you keep me at arm’s length: do not even permit me, Luis Chavez, to kiss you goodnight? Because you are jealous of the time I have to spend with these old ladies? Jealous of my job?’

  ‘Not all your pupils are old,’ she said as they stood high on the cliffpath, Luis bad-temperedly scuffing pebbles with the toe of his tennis shoe. ‘The English viscountess is very beautiful and Miss Mancini …’

  Miss Mancini was rapacious and had not even offered him a glass of wine, let alone a gift.

  ‘Miss Mancini is the girlfriend of the Greek. She has also discontinued her lessons.’

  ‘I’m pleased to hear it,’ Maria replied complacently. ‘She is also the girlfriend of the Egyptian, the Englishman who writes the books, and the American president of the Chetwynd Cork Company. It would not give her much time for swimming,’ she added considerately.

  Luis cursed again. In the moonlight Maria’s kitten face and large eyes looked infinitely more desirable than the blonde and soignée sophistication of Viscountess Lothermere. As for the Czech countess, Luis shuddered. Once, when coaching a young Englishman who was carrying on a conversation with his friend on the poolside, he had heard the Englishman use the expression ‘whitened sepulchres’. Ever eager to enlarge his education and his English he had liked the strange expression and stored it away at the back of his mind. Whenever he thought of the countess and her waxen body, the expression came forcefully to mind.

  His visits to the countess’red velvet and brocade bedroom were only made bearable by the largesse of her gifts: a gold chain bracelet that he would sell on his next visit to Oporto; several bottles of the very best English whisky. And, for a service that da
unted even the hardened Luis, a blood-red stone that could only be a ruby.

  With an expertize that had never before failed him, he pulled Maria into his arms and lowered his head. Maria moved as deftly as an eel, running away from him down the darkened track.

  ‘Nice girls do not come second to ladies of great age and ladies with husbands,’ she called back over her shoulder, and at the amusement in her voice Luis ground his teeth and gave chase.

  ‘If I promise to stop seeing them?’ he asked as he caught her arm and halted her flight.

  She raised her slim fingers to his chest, pushing him away. ‘Ah,’ she said and her eyes were dark and searching. ‘But would you? For me? For Maria Saldhana: a maid?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said rashly. ‘I would, Maria.’ And this time when he kissed her she did not resist.

  It was like kissing a fresh spring day. His first thought had been that he would have to be more discreet, more careful. His second, as Maria’s soft lips parted beneath his, was that he was twenty-five and that a man had to have sons. In Portuguese eyes he was already old to be starting a family. With another girl it would have been different. She would have remained in his parents’house in Oporto and he would have visited two, three, perhaps four times a year. Maria would not be content to live in Oporto under the stringent gaze of his mother whilst he continued his career and intrigues at Sanfords. Perhaps a home in Funchal? He could afford it. He had been prudent with the gifts showered on him. All had been turned into hard cash. The bracelet and ruby alone were worth twenty years’pay.

  ‘Maria,’ he said, but she was already moving away from him.

  ‘I must go. Mrs Cameron will be needing me.’

  ‘Maria!’ She was off, running with the agility of a peasant down the velvet black track.

  ‘Mae de Deus!’ he repeated, under his breath. No girl had ever received a kiss from Luis Chavez and sped away as if it were no more than a handshake. They waited, trembling, willing and hopeful.