by Iris Danbury
A further question pierced her mind. Why should she care? Brooke was surely capable of looking after himself without Caran’s protection, but the question was not one to which she could offer a convincing answer.
She did not see Brooke again until New Year’s Eve and then only for a minute or two as he hurried from the car park to his villa. ‘See you tonight?’ he queried. ‘The grapes, remember?’
‘Possibly,’ she answered non-committally. She remembered Don Ramiro’s invitation for tonight, but he had done nothing to renew it and it was too far to take the journey to Almeria merely to eat a few grapes.
There was another matter, though, which she wanted to discuss with Brooke—the pitiful shed at the back of the stable which was now Gabriela’s home.
‘You must work up more enthusiasm than that,’ he now scolded her. ‘It’s a ceremony.’
‘All right. What time?’
‘Let’s make it a quarter to twelve, say. I can see you’re not going to be in a festive mood, so you can make your visit as brief as you like.’
‘I’ll tell Julie and Paul.’
‘Tomorrow it’s my turn to provide a dinner, so I’ve booked for the four of us at the Marroqui. That suit you?’
‘Supposing I say I prefer cheese and a crust of bread at home?’ she countered.
‘I shouldn’t believe you. Besides, you want to see the goings-on in Albarosa, don’t you?’
She smiled. ‘I suppose you want me to take notes for you?’
‘Not this time. I can do my own note-taking.’
‘I’ll come if it’s only to make the numbers even.’
She did not see either Paul or Julie during the rest of the day, so she assumed that they knew of the midnight rendezvous tonight. During the evening she prepared a simple meal, read for a short while and discovered that she could not keep her glance from straying constantly to her watch. Only eleven? Too soon. At half-past eleven she put a coat around her shoulders, took a torch and set off through the dark, whispering gardens. Before she was halfway, the flickering light of another torch danced before her.
‘Good girl! I was just coming to call for you,’ said Brooke. In his villa there was no sign of Julie or Paul,’ Caran mildly wondered what Brooke was up to and, indeed, if Paul or Don Ramiro had invited her in this way and she found herself the sole guest, she might have been more apprehensive. As to Brooke, she could have few scruples since it was Julie, not herself, whom he evidently wished to capture.
His table was littered with papers and books as usual, but in a cleared space he had set a bunch of grapes on a plate and beside it two saucers each with twelve grapes.
‘Julie and Paul not coming?’ she asked, noting that there were only two saucers.
He shrugged indifference. ‘Now you have to look slippy to keep in time with the strokes of twelve midnight. On each stroke you cat a grape.’
‘What’s the meaning of it?’
‘To ensure good luck during the next twelve months, of course.’ He switched on a transistor radio. ‘Listen!’ he said, glancing at his watch. ‘Any moment now.’
The first ‘dong’ caught her unawares and she had to stuff two grapes into her mouth for the second stroke. Now she and Brooke both had the rhythm, but when he suddenly popped one of his grapes into her mouth and invited her to reciprocate, she lost count and began to laugh.
‘Be serious!’ he ordered, his mouth full of grapes.
By the time the last stroke sounded they were both laughing helplessly, their cheeks bulging with grapes as though with bull’s-eyes.
‘I need practice,’ gasped Caran as she swallowed the last of her quota.
Brooke moved to the window-sill and poured two glasses of manzanilla. ‘Happy New Year!’ He raised his glass. She echoed his words and sipped her wine.
He put down his glass and came towards her, when a violent knocking on the outer door sent him to open it.
‘Really, Brooke!’ came Julie’s voice, shrill and indignant.
‘We’ve been waiting for ages—’ She broke off when she caught sight of Caran. ‘Oh! You seem to have had the correct information. Paul and I have been wasting our time in his villa.’
‘Sorry about that!’
Caran was amazed at the cool, sardonic note in Brooke’s voice.
‘You distinctly told us to eat these blessed grapes in Paul’s place,’ continued Julie hotly. ‘Now I suppose it’s too late.’
‘Wait another year, Julie,’ said Brooke in a wholly different voice, silky and smooth. ‘You don’t really believe that a dozen grapes can influence your luck for a whole year, do you?’
‘Of course it can’t,’ put in Paul.
Brooke poured more wine and offered it to the other two.
Julie tossed hers off with a barely audible mumble of ‘Happy New Year’. She sat down in one of the vacant chairs while Paul perched on the edge of a small table.
After a few minutes of desultory conversation Caran sensed the hostile atmosphere.
‘I’ve seen the New Year in,’ she remarked casually, ‘so I shall go home. Thanks for the grapes, Brooke.’
Paul immediately offered to accompany her through the darkness, but Julie remained where she was, swinging one elegant leg across the other. ‘PH stay,’ she said. ‘I’ve something to discuss with Brooke.’
Caran and Paul hastily removed themselves. Julie could not have made it plainer that she intended to give Brooke a large piece or her mind.
‘I really do wish you’d accepted Don Ramiro’s invitation,’ complained Paul as they walked through the garden.
‘A long way to go for about one minute’s ceremony,’ she replied smoothly.
‘Oh, you know perfectly well there was more to it than that,’ he said testily.
‘Not as far as Brooke’s concerned. We ate the grapes, drank the wine and that was all.’
She would not allow herself to think of that movement he had made towards her, his arms raised a little as if to embrace her. Had that really been his intention? Or just a chaste New Year kiss? A pity that Julie and Paul had not arrived five minutes later. She would have known then Brooke’s treacherous purpose, for she suspected that his idea might be to play one girl off against the other, so that he did not become too deeply involved with either.
By now she and Paul had arrived at her villa. ‘Good night, Paul,’ she said quietly. ‘Don’t be too depressed about Julie.’
‘I don’t know what she sees in that fellow Eldridge,’ he grumbled.
‘He’s rather different from the more usual type she meets. At home she wouldn’t look twice at him, but here in Spain, he’s a kind of novelty.’
‘Then I hope the shine wears off him pretty quickly. Can’t be too soon for me. Good night, Caran. Bless you.’
Caran feared that Brooke’s dinner party at the Marroqui would prove a complete flop, for Julie was sulky or sarcastic by turns, Paul gloomy except when Julie threw him a kind word, but Brooke maintained a lively conversation apparently quite oblivious of any hostile undercurrents. He related some of his experiences in various parts of Spain, spoke of villages off the beaten track where old customs still existed.
‘When we’ve finished eating here, we’ll go out into the streets and watch the children enjoying themselves with their lighted brooms.’
‘At this hour?’ queried Caran. ‘So late?’
‘It’s the one day of the year when they can stay up until long past midnight,’ Brooke replied.
In the streets children of all ages from about six to sixteen were running about flourishing their brooms, some of which were flaring almost dangerously while others were only smouldering.
‘The idea is that the children will all fan out to the fringes of the town to drive out the old year,’ explained Brooke, ‘so the best place for us to see the most is up at the top.’
At first Julie was walking with Brooke up the narrow alleys and stepped streets, but then after pausing in a small square, now deserted except for a blac
k and white cat stalking across the cobbles, Caran found herself beside Brooke, while Julie and Paul followed closely behind.
Street lighting was sparse in this district and Brooke took Caran’s hand to guide her through the steep alleyways. Whether Julie and Paul were too tired to follow Caran could not be sure, but the fact was that by the time she and Brooke arrived at the summit of the town, the other two were nowhere in sight.
Caran recognised the wall where Don Ramiro had brought her that evening after dinner and showed her part of his kingdom.
In almost a complete circle below the brooms flickered like fireflies until breaks occurred, where the brooms guttered out.
‘In some villages or towns the children wait until the eve of Epiphany for their sport with the brooms,’ Brooke murmured. ‘Then they sing carols about the Three Kings, but in Albarosa, they like to be ahead.’
‘Would it be possible to see from here that part of the town where Gabriela and Felipe and their family are living in a poor little shed?’ she asked quietly.
He turned sharply towards her. ‘How did you know where? Who told you?’
‘I discovered it by accident. If I hadn’t found out the truth, I should have blamed Don Ramiro.’
‘It was the best I could do for them at the time,’ he snapped. ‘Gabriela and Felipe were quite willing to put up with it for a week or two.’
‘But why make them go at all?’ she asked. ‘The position wasn’t so urgent as all that.’
‘You tell me that now! Between the lot of you, Gabriela was fast becoming a nervous wreck. Don Ramiro wasn’t interested, of course, but Paul kept nagging and you in your quiet, martyred way were almost as bad. The final straw was the day when Paul cut off their gas supply. He took away the cylinders and threatened that the next day he would cut the electricity.’
‘But I didn’t know about this. Why didn’t Gabriela tell me? I’d have done what I could to help.’
‘And what accommodation could you have found, my dear Caran?’
‘At least I could have persuaded Paul not to be too drastic,’ she answered with spirit.
‘He wouldn’t have been listening,’ Brooke said incisively. ‘No pleadings on your part would have made the difference. He’s tougher than you think.’
Caran was silent for some time. Then she said, ‘What’s to happen to Gabriela now?’
‘If you’d only been more patient and less of a Paul Pry, you wouldn’t have known about the stable episode. I’ve found them part of a house. One of my workmen told me of an address where there are three comfortable rooms vacant and next week Gabriela and her brood will be better housed.’
‘Thank you, Brooke,’ she murmured humbly. ‘But what about furniture? They haven’t enough even for sleeping. One of the children was compelled to curl up like a dog in a box.’
‘I’ve arranged for a few bits and pieces, hut if you like to add some extra comforts, I think they’d accept gifts from you. But later on—I’m not telling you the address yet. You’ll go along and start interfering and criticising.’
Caran burst into indignant laughter. ‘You talk as though I were an over-fussy busybody. I shall wheedle the address out of Benita.’
‘Ha!’ he shouted triumphantly and the echoes reverberated around the walls. ‘You’ll get nothing out of Benita if I tell her not to talk.’
‘I wonder where the other two are,’ she murmured idly after a pause. It was useless to pursue the subject of Gabriela any further.
‘Need we worry about them? Here, I’ve something ‘
He rummaged in one of his pockets and handed her a small flat parcel.
‘Thank you, Brooke.’
‘New Year present. I hope you’ll like it. I intended to give it to you last night, but the other pair arrived and then you scurried off in no time.’
She was looking down at the package in her hands, undecided whether to open it here and now. The thought uppermost in her mind was that he had given Julie a Christmas present and now belatedly deemed it advisable to give Caran a little token for New Year.
He placed his hands lightly on her shoulders and drew her towards him. As he kissed her she thought with unusual savagery, Oh, yes, kiss the nice gentleman who gives you a New Year gift. Her response was negligible, but his embrace tightened and his mouth became demanding, so that against her will she relaxed. He held her in his arms, his cheek against hers. ‘I shall have to go away soon,’ he whispered. ‘Another job.’
Her mind leapt with shock, but she controlled her actions. So this was a night of farewell; parting gifts and goodbye kisses. For a second she wondered if he were cutting loose when a business opportunity offered because he wanted to be free from Julie.
Treat all the girls alike! That was his motto. And disappear before he became involved too closely.
‘Is your new job far away?’ she managed to ask, stifling the ominous tears in her voice.
‘Not sure. I go where the firm sends me and where the Spanish authorities think they need my help. I shan’t forget you, Caran.’
‘I wonder how many girls you’ve said those words to,’ she said with a gentle laugh.
His arms instantly loosened her. He turned slightly away from her so that he was gazing over the darkened town, pierced by sporadic lights, all that remained of the circle of brooms. ‘A few. There were one or two I left with regret, but in my job I’ve found it wiser not to become too involved.’
Exactly, Caran thought. No one could have phrased it more correctly—or bluntly—than that.
He took out a thin cigar and lit it and in the glow of the match his face was rock-hard. What did he expect her to do now? Fall into his arms, weep on his shoulder and beg him not to go away?
She would do none of these things. She would let him see that she was entirely indifferent to his casual caresses. She would impress upon him that she hadn’t taken this job in Spain in order to find a husband.
‘If I’m sent to another part of Spain, will you write to me, Caran?’ His quietly-spoken words interrupted her train of thought.
‘I daresay I can find time to type an occasional letter, telling you of all my mishaps with the summer visitors and Paul’s progress in his development plans—or his reverses.’
‘I might also like to hear of Don Ramiro’s progress,’ he said, ‘and I don’t mean hotels or swimming pools. Are you really taken with him, Caran?’
‘Taken?’ she echoed. ‘A curious word to choose, as though he were a dress I might like to buy or a cookery recipe.’
‘He has a great deal to offer.’ Brooke’s further words saved her the trouble of finding a judicious answer to his question.
‘He’s hardly likely to offer it to me,’ she pointed out.
‘Unpredictable things happen here in Spain, the same as everywhere else. But some marriages can become merely mergers and one partner is completely subordinated.’
‘Was anyone talking of marriage?’ she demanded. ‘What makes you so anxious to marry me off—to a Spaniard at that?’
Vaguely she was beginning to see the drift of this extraordinary conversation. Brooke, who had shown her few favours, other than the contents of the small package she si ill held in her hand, now wanted to make sure that she had other masculine companionship in sight, even though he was warning her about the consequences of marrying into an aristocratic Spanish family.
Paul was evidently dismissed out of hand, and to some extent Caran was glad. She would have hated Brooke if he had suggested any closer link with Paul, whom even Benita and other girls in Albarosa viewed with distrust and distaste.
‘Oh, I’m not anxious to marry you off to anyone,’ he said now, leaning against the stone parapet. ‘No doubt when the summer season starts, you’ll have innumerable young men ousting each other for a tender glance from your—what colour are they?—hazel eyes.’
‘Holiday romances!’ she said scornfully. ‘I shall be too busy to be able to dally in the moonlight.’
‘Or even dally in
the darkness—as at this moment.’ He sighed, and she wondered what was the reason. Surely it was the girls who were entitled to sigh when he took his departures. ‘Come along. We’d better go home.’
‘The others, Julie and Paul, must think we’re lost.’
‘They’re not worrying. I know this town better than they do and it wasn’t difficult to shake them off.’
As he helped her down the steep street from the summit, she glowed a little, realising that he had deliberately isolated her from the others. But of course, only to give her the present and break the news that he was soon leaving Albarosa.
When they came to a cafe still open, he suggested a final coffee. She took the opportunity to undo the parcel and find out what Brooke had given her.
‘Oh!’ Her exclamation was one of pure delight when she saw the beautiful leather wallet and purse to match in a warm, sandy brown. Both were embossed intricately on one side with a design of a pair of flamenco dancers and on the other with a conventional pattern of stars and flowers. ‘Thank you, Brooke. They’re exquisite. I shall use them with great pleasure.’ Momentarily she forgot her resolve to be casual and distant, and when she looked up into his face she surprised a dancing gleam in his eyes, tantalising, disquieting and thrilling all at the same time. Then the waiter brought the coffee and the moment vanished.
On the way down through the town, Brooke tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow, and she thought what a pity it was that his determination not to be entrapped prevented what might develop into a pleasant friendship. Caran would have been glad to give him her unstinted and harmonious fellowship if she could have been sure that he would not mistake it for an unintended infatuation.
