‘I understand, Persephone, so don’t go all tense on me.’ His smile became warm and indulgent. ‘Believe me, I wouldn’t want anything to spoil this meeting, for I know you aren’t a wife who goes out searching for kicks when her husband’s back is turned. I’ve only to look at you to see you’re a lady - a real one and not the kind who’s stale candy wrapped up in sugar-floss. Look, I know a place where we can have a pot of tea and a plate of buttered scones? How does that grab you?’
‘Oh, right here.’ She pressed a hand to her midriff. ‘Where is this dream place?’
He hesitated a moment, and then came a step nearer and looked down at her with frank grey eyes. ‘My apartment, honey. It’s only a few steps from here, and I promise you’ll be as safe as a kitten in a cat’s mouth with me. I won’t eat you.’
It was Persepha’s turn to hesitate, and to feel again that warning tremor, almost as if the ground moved beneath her feet. It was so palpable that she actually caught at Gil’s sleeve. ‘I - I could do with a cup of tea,’ she said. ‘And I think I trust you.’
‘Then let that be enough,’ he smiled. ‘Shall we go?’
‘All right,’ she said, and as she fell into step beside him, the ground faintly quivered again, and Persepha silently called herself a weak-kneed little fool. The Don was miles away and he’d never know that she had snatched an hour to be with another man.
CHAPTER SEVEN
GIL’S apartment was on the ground floor of one of those Latin houses with a circular courtyard and rooms leading from it. High cool rooms with louvred shutters and colour-washed walls, against which he had hung red and green gourds, a guitar with scarlet ribbons, and some quaint pots of plants that trailed their leaves down the walls.
He invited Persepha to take a seat on the couch, over which was slung a gaily fringed silk shawl, with big tapestry cushions at either end. In front of it stood a low table, with his American cigarettes in a box beside a lighter in the form of a silver owl. Across the floor lay a tufted rug in a variety of bright colours.
‘This is a nice room,’ said Persepha, looking around her with a smile from which the nervousness had vanished, which was partly due to the fact that it had taken them no more than a few minutes to reach the house, and she was convinced that she had not been seen by Juan Feliz., Now she could relax, and she did so against the silk shawl, and caught Gil’s eyes studying her slender figure in the turquoise dress, whose soft bloomy material gave her a very vulnerable look. His eyes slid to her small arched feet in pink suede shoes.
‘You should be nervous,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ve got to admit that if I had a wife like you, I’d be an angry man if you took tea with another guy.’
‘Don’t spoil things by paying me compliments,’ she pleaded. ‘It’s the clothes - fine feathers always make fine birds.’
‘You’d look fine to me in a piece of sacking,’ he rejoined. ‘Now how do you like your tea, with milk or lemon?’
‘With milk, please. Shall I make it?’
‘No, you sit there and make this place look pretty. Besides, I know where everything is, and my kitchen is always in a bit of a muddle, being rather on the small side. However, this apartment is close to the avenida and it has that courtyard attached, added to which the landlady isn’t a bad sort and she doesn’t come snooping around when a guy has a visitor.’
As he went into the kitchen, which adjoined his living-room, Persepha smiled to herself. By visitors he probably meant girls, for he was good-looking and virile, and he obviously liked female company. She let out her breath in a little relaxed sigh and heard him moving about in the kitchen, clattering spoons against china, and whistling softly and tunelessly to himself. It surprised her that he was divorced. She would have thought that any girl who was lucky enough to get him would have hung on tight to him, not gone looking for someone else when he was away working at such a dangerous job as diving for a sea-oil company.
‘Do you have many visitors?’ Persepha called out to him, her gaze upon the guitar with the scarlet ribbons, the sort that Latin girls were adept at playing, making that evocative music that somehow played on the senses, especially on a moonlight night. Sometimes at the hacienda she caught the sound of guitar music, and she would lean on the balustrade of her balcony and listen as it stole through the silence of the night, holding a promise that seemed forever out of reach.
‘I do have the occasional guest for a meal,’ Gil replied, coming into the room with a tray on which stood a teapot, cups and saucers, and a plate of scones, butter and strawberry jam. He placed the tray on the couchside table, and then brought the bowl of cube sugar and the jug of milk.
‘Will you be mother?’ he asked, putting a big plump floor-cushion to the other side of the table, on which he sat, stretching out his legs.
Persepha gave a tiny uncontrollable shiver at his words, but masked the tremor by leaning forwards and picking up the teapot. ‘This is nice,’ she said. ‘I could almost believe I was back in England, smelling tea and jam, and being in a room as cosy as this one.’
‘I should imagine the rooms at the hacienda must be very beautiful, and filled with rare objects, eh?’ Gil busied himself buttering a scone and applying a generous helping of jam. Don’t they appeal to you? I should think a girl like you would get a lot of satisfaction out of the unusual and the rare?’
‘I didn’t, you know, marry Don Diablo for his money,’ she said, and a slightly hurt look came into her eyes as she handed Gil his cup of tea. ‘The hacienda is beautiful, but it’s a prison to me.’
‘Then how come you married him, Persepha? If you didn’t love the guy, then there’d have to be a pretty strong reason. Help yourself to scone and jam. Strawberry has always been my favourite.’
‘Mine too,’ she agreed, but right now she was dry and she settled back with her cup of tea and realized that she was going to have to talk about her marriage; that it was a subject that couldn’t be avoided. ‘The Don came into my life at a time when I lost someone very dear to me. I had no home, nowhere to go, and I hadn’t really been trained for any kind of a job. I let myself be persuaded that marriage was my only safeguard against a world which had suddenly become empty of affection and filled with problems I had never had to face or deal with before. My guardian had always been there to make life easy for me, to cushion me against the sharp edges, and somehow I had become so used to doing what pleased him that when I learned that it was his last wish that I marry the Don, then I - I drifted into it, rather like a sleepwalker not wanting to wake to reality.’
Her voice died away, and she wasn’t fully aware of just how significant was her silence to a young man very much of the world.
‘But he soon brought you back to reality, eh?’ Gil leaned a little forward and his grey eyes were very serious, without a hint of a smile in them. ‘So he really did snatch you from the fields of play, seeing how lovely you were, and wanting you as he might want a Degas painting or a rare porcelain. Only he didn’t put you on a pedestal... It was a marriage in every meaning of the word except that of love. He took possession of you, his real-life Persephone.’
‘Yes.’ She gave him a diffident smile. ‘It sounds incredible, doesn’t it, as if I had made it up? In this day and age there can’t be many girls who allow themselves to be led up the aisle as I was. He even selected a Catholic church and we were married by a Latin priest. He has bound me with gold and letters of fire, so he’ll never divorce me or let me go of his own free will.’
‘Then you’d have to run away,’ Gil said quietly. ‘You’d have to flee across the border into the States and find sanctuary there. You can’t go on living a life of hell with a man you don’t love, having to give yourself to him at a click of his imperious fingers. It’s immoral!’
Persepha hadn’t quite seen it in those terms, and she was taken aback by Gil Howard’s vehemence. She hadn’t realized that there was a streak of Puritanism in many Americans, inherited from forebears who had sailed to the new world in ships blessed by t
he priests of their own stem church. That he had been divorced didn’t alter the fact that he was shocked by the idea of a girl living with a man against her will.
The angry glint in his eyes worried Persepha ... she didn’t want him to become personally involved in her problem; all she had hoped for was that he might know someone who could be well paid to drive her out of Mexico when the time came.
‘It’s turn of the century,’ Gil muttered, ‘that a guy should live as he does, in feudal splendour way out there in the high country, and I suppose he thought it safe to leave you as he has most of the local residents on his payroll, none of whom would risk their jobs or their necks in order to help you get away. Well, he never reckoned on me, did he? The guy he looked at me on that beach as if I were a sand lizard he’d like to squash with his foot. He’s damned arrogant for a guy with Indian blood in him!’
Persepha stared at Gil and the way his lip curled.
‘Did you know that?’ he asked her.
‘Of course.’ She looked faintly bewildered. ‘He told me himself.’
‘Before you married him?’ Gil sat there frowning at her, his fair brows drawn together in almost a scowl.
‘No - after we came here to Mexico. I hadn’t given it much thought, except to think that he had exceptionally well-marked bones and a nose that might have been chiselled - what’s the significance? It’s the Spanish blood in him that makes him so possessive and ruthless in his attitude towards me. There are Indians on the estate and some of them are extremely gentle, with deep soft voices and a great love of children.’
‘They’re still Indians!’ Gil said it explosively. ‘My dear girl, you really are the most innocent thing I’ve ever encountered, so it’s no wonder that hidalgo could trap you into his kind of marriage. What a quiver in his bow, a lovely English bride with skin like milk and hair like a sunbeam. No wonder he’s chief of his tribe - he’s clever!’
Persepha drew back against the shawl covering of the couch on which she sat, and the cup and saucer suddenly trembled in her hand and she put them down on the table. Her face had gone rather white. ‘Stop that, Gil! I don’t like the way you’re talking!’
‘I don’t mean to upset of frighten you, honey, but I’ll certainly do all I can to help you get away from Don Devil - that’s what you want, isn’t it? You’ve realized that you can’t go on living with him - it must be pure hell for a girl like you. I bet before he happened along you’d never even had a real boy-friend and gone through all the normal flirtations, not if you had an elderly guardian looking after you. They can be more strict than even a real father.’
‘Marcus wasn’t elderly,’ she protested, ‘but he did ensure that I was kept rather sheltered, and I so liked his company that I didn’t want to flirt with rather silly young men. Marcus always wanted me to make what he called a good marriage—’
‘A super marriage!’ Gil scoffed. ‘Money’s great to have around, if there isn’t someone else holding the purse strings, and along with them the whip hand. You’ve thought about getting away, of course?’
‘I - I’ve thought about it,’ she admitted. ‘But there are complications—’
‘Bound to be,’ Gil broke in, ‘but they’re not insoluble, not if you don’t want them to be. You don’t feel any love for the guy! You couldn’t! He’s of a different race and creed, and he’s years older than you. He’s made of you what we call in the States a rich man’s plaything! And gee, you’re so beautiful!’
Gil leaned forward and caught hold of her hands, looking at their pale slenderness and the valuable rings that weighed upon them, ‘These are worth a devil of a lot and could be sold, you know that?’
‘I - I couldn’t sell the rings,’ she said hastily. That would be stealing, somehow, for they’re Ezreldo Ruy family property, engraved on the inside of the bands with Latin words. I do have something else, a brooch he gave me, which is not an heirloom. I had thought about selling that—’
‘Yeah, I remember it! a gorgeous dragonfly which was pinned to your dress that first time we met!’ Gil looked into her eyes. ‘Was that how come you walked into the jewellery store? You were going to ask if we’d buy it?’
‘I was going to say that I’d like it valued, just in case I needed the money.’ Persepha bit her lip, and though her hands moved in Gil’s she didn’t try to pull them away. ‘I have thought about leaving the Don, but he has my travel documents and my passport, and I can’t go far without them, and if I couldn’t get out of Mexico he’d be bound to find me, and it would be worse for me afterwards.’
‘Worse?’ Gil gripped her hands. ‘What do you mean? He doesn’t beat you, does he? That would be intolerable!’
‘I mean he’d keep an even closer watch on me, for he’s too subtle, Gil, to actually beat a woman. He doesn’t need to use brute tactics.’
‘You mean he can make you quail with a look, eh?’
‘Something like that.’ She pulled her gaze from Gil’s and looked instead at the coloured gourds on the wall; they had a bright irrelevance about them that made her envious of Gil’s freedom and his present carefree way of life. He probably made just enough at the shop to keep him in food, clothes and rent, and Persepha thought how cowardly she had been to distrust her own ability to find work and be independent. She had let the Don take control of her life, and now like a moth in a net she was struggling to get free, and terrified that he’d clip her wings before she got beyond his reach.
‘Do you happen to know where your husband keeps your papers?’ Gil asked. ‘Surely you can get hold of them?’
‘They’re locked in his desk, and as you can imagine I daren’t ask for them; right away he’d guess why I wanted them.’
‘So he’s under no delusions about the way you feel about him? He knows you hate him, but he’s not letting go, huh? Well, it’s typical of his kind; they don’t credit women with any real human rights and want them for -well, I won’t put it into words. I’ll spare your blushes, Persepha, for you know well enough what I mean, don’t you?’
She knew and didn’t want to discuss that aspect with Gil Howard. It was far too personal and painful, and pulling free of his grip she rose to her feet and went to the archway that led out to the courtyard, the oval-shaped door thrown open to let the air and the fragrance of roses and carnations into the apartment. They grew in colourful profusion around an old fountain and over the circular walls, and Persepha thought again how fortunate Gil was to have this unpretentious and undemanding life.
‘I do like this place,’ she exclaimed. ‘What about you, Gil? Do you enjoy living in Mexico?’
‘Sure, it has its advantages, and here you can live a bit cheaper than in the States, for there’s so much fruit around, and I’m crazy for buttered corn and chilli. The clothes are lightweight and inexpensive, and there’s always the sea and the sunshine.’
‘And the pretty Latin girls,’ she smiled. ‘Some of them are incredibly attractive, with that raven hair and those huge brown eyes.’
‘Sure,’ he drawled, ‘but have you seen how they get when they’re about thirty? A girl like you, honey,’ and as he spoke he came and stood behind Persepha at the archway, ‘you’ll still be lovely when you’re sixty, slim and fine-boned, with silvery hair.’
‘Don’t let’s get sentimental, Gil,’ she said lightly, though her body tensed from the touch that she felt was imminent. She couldn’t ignore the fact that she had come willingly to Gil’s apartment, and he could be forgiven for thinking that an unhappy wife was in need of consolation from a man a little kinder and more lighthearted than her husband. However, she was in enough of a pickle without getting emotionally involved with another man, and Gil Howard had to be held at arm’s length.
‘Have you a girl-friend, or two, here in Mexico?’ she asked him. ‘You don’t strike me as the type who likes his own company.’
‘A girl or two drifts in and out of my life,’ he admitted. ‘Since my break up with Lois I’ve been a little wary of getting deeply involved, for
I really was fond of that kid. She was a singer in a Santa Monica club and she just wouldn’t take to the travelling life with me. It’s ironical that now I’m a bit more settled I no longer have a wife to share my home.’
‘Poor Gil.’ Persepha reached a hand to a vine that clung and scrambled around his doorway and her fingers fondled the mauve flowers that grew among the ferny green leaves. Land of a rampant sun and a rich flowering, and a rueful way of life ... for her. She might almost have grown fond of it, had she come here to Mexico of her own free will.
‘And poor Persephone.’ His hands closed over her slim shoulders. ‘Was there a knight who came along to console her, who in every way looked and behaved differently from her dark lord?’
‘I - don’t know.’ Persepha smiled a little, drew herself out of his hands and walked out to the courtyard, where the warmth had a sultriness she hadn’t noticed before. She glanced up at the sky and instead of being a clear blue it had a saffron tinge to it, as if the sun had gone molten and some of the brazen gold had seeped into the sky.
‘Are we in for a storm?’ She turned in some alarm to Gil, for soon she had to leave and she had heard that when it rained in Mexico the heavens opened and the rain poured down mercilessly. Driving in such a deluge would be a nerve-racking experience, for part of the country on the way back to the hacienda was like a desert, scattered with strange clumps of cacti and outcrops of rock and sand. With the rain beating down hard it would be like driving into the sea itself.
Gil studied the sky and his fair brows drew together in a frown as he pulled at the neck of his brown shirt. ‘Boy, it has grown murky, and I do recall one of the old guys in the market-place remarking that the earth was grumbling, which is their way of saying that rain is needed. If this country goes too long without rain, then the earth cracks open and great yawning mouths appear into which people have fallen.’
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