Golden Apple Island

by Jane Arbor

  ‘You have to—now? Fran, no! You’re going to marry me! So I haven’t asked you in so many words? Well, I’m asking you now. And now babble about going back to England if you dare!’

  ‘Gil, I must. You don’t understand. There’s something—something that, if Grandfather knew, he wouldn’t want you to marry me. You wouldn’t.’

  ‘Something about yourself? What?’

  Fran shook her head. ‘It’s not my secret and I’ve said too much already. I can’t tell you any more. Don’t make me, please.’

  For a moment his silence seemed to accept that. Then, slowly, making every word count, he was asking,

  ‘This secret that’s not your own that Grandfather mustn’t know—is it, by any chance, that you are not a de Matteor through your mother after all?’

  Shocked past surprise, Fran said dully, ‘Yes. I’m only adopted. I’m really Mother’s niece by marriage, not her daughter. She hadn’t told Grandfather at the time and she thought it was too late now. I promised her I’d do nothing to betray her, and I didn’t think I had. I don’t know how you guessed.’

  ‘I didn’t guess. Grandfather told me.’

  ‘Grandfather?’

  ‘Only since we hatched our plot to keep you here. But he has known for years.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Well, it seems that when you were supposed to have been born, Aunt Raquel hadn’t been very forthcoming with details, and he needed them for the family tree. So he contacted your Somerset House—’

  ‘The night he had his stroke he told me he had applied there for something,’ murmured Fran.

  ‘About you. But there was no trace of a daughter having been born to Aunt Raquel and your father—this, at a time when she was already writing home about you, telling when you first walked and talked and went to school and so on. He says he waited and hoped she would confide whatever was the truth about you one day. But she never did and never came home, even after her Tom died. Then you wrote to him and he insisted that you both came. But for pride’s sake he wouldn’t beg her confidence, believing she ought to trust him enough to tell him herself.’

  ‘She was afraid to tell him,’ interposed Fran. ‘We both suffered agonies of guilt when we realized that only his stroke had prevented his learning the truth, the night he questioned me for the family tree.’

  ‘He remembers nothing of that,’ said Gil.

  ‘I know. But he wrote down as much as I told him that night.’

  ‘And I found the paper later. Between us we think we’ve filled in the gaps. You were the girl—Tom’s niece—who was orphaned when her parents were killed in the war? And your real name? Oh, it would be Page, of course. And Aunt Raquel adopted you, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes, though I only knew that myself the day before we came here.’

  ‘But what is there to be ashamed of in adoption?’

  ‘Mother was afraid there would be, to someone as family-proud as Grandfather.’

  ‘He has been hurt a lot more by her deception. You ought to have made her see she owed it to him to tell him.’

  ‘I have tried. But when you love someone, you bend over backwards to protect them from trouble, however imaginary.’

  Gil puzzled, ‘I still don’t see how your going back to England was supposed to help?’

  There was a pause while Fran looked at a miracle. No secret to be kept any longer. No more fear for Raquel to suffer. No enemy. She could afford to be generous to Elena if Gil would let her ...

  Fumbling for an evasion, she said, ‘I thought you meant to marry Elena, whatever Grandfather wished. I loved you, and I couldn’t bear the thought of it, so I was—running away.’

  But it was a clumsy, unprepared lie, and Gil pounced on its weakness. ‘No, that won’t do,’ he said. ‘Your timing is wrong. Just now, after you knew I loved you and want to marry you, you still claimed you “had to” go. Something else must have been driving you. Tell me!’

  ‘Not now, Gil, please. There was something, but it can’t hurt me or drive me any more.’

  ‘But you were still being driven until I told you Grandfather had known about you all along. Until then your leaving was a must, you thought. But hearing that let you out. Why?’ He looked beyond Fran, frowning and thinking aloud. ‘You had to go, though Aunt Raquel needn’t. Odd, that. Though I wonder—Supposing—? No, that’s fantastic. Cloak-and-dagger stuff. Still, supposing someone else knew and was hounding you out at the price of their silence? Someone here who saw you as a threat, because I might marry you? Yes? No?’

  Fran said nothing, avoiding his eyes.

  ‘So—blackmail, no less?’ His tone was dangerous. ‘And a woman. Only one who had reason to fear the outcome between you and me—Elena, in fact. You know, there’s a word for her. Your Shakespeare had it. “Fair is foul and foul is fair”—something like that. Not that it matters. When?’

  Though he had seemed to be addressing Fran, only the last word was a question. He knew it all!

  ‘Before Grandfather had his stroke,’ she told him.

  ‘But she didn’t act on her threat?’

  ‘She said she would allow me time. But she was expecting me to be gone when she came back from Lisbon.’

  ‘If, all things considered, she thinks it wise to come back from Lisbon,’ said Gil.

  Fran looked at him quickly. ‘ “ If ”? What do you mean?’

  ‘Never mind. Just that de Matteor senior isn’t the uncrowned king of El Naranjal for nothing, that’s all. With dictator’s powers ... One thing more, Fran. How did Elena come by this secret of yours, do you know?’

  Fran told him. ‘It was just one of those coincidences that people often say don’t happen in real life,’ she concluded. Then she appealed, ‘Gil, when Grandfather told you he had always known about me, was he very angry with Mother—or with me?’

  ‘I’ve told you—he was hurt, not angry.’ Gil stood and held out his hand. ‘Come and see. Let’s go home,’ he said.

  Now the day which had begun for Fran as just one more date on the calendar was nearly over, the dark of its recoils and despairs already dispersing in the radiance of the magic she and Gil had created for each other. Alone in her room, with only Raquel’s movements next door and the night sounds from the garden to break the silence, she remembered the grown-ups’ bromide for children—that if you made haste to sleep at the end of a happy day, an equally happy tomorrow would come all the sooner. But tonight she was reluctant to make even the first gesture towards preparing for bed, as if by doing so she wilfully called a halt to a day which had outdone itself in magic—all of it, so far as she was concerned, of Gil’s making, though not all of it directly at his hands.

  For there had been too, when they had come home to the Quinta, the delight of Aunt Lucia’s bland assumption that though Don Diego merited the main credit for having foreseen and arranged the happy outcome, not much less should go to her for so training Fran in Spanish domesticity that she would make Gil a wife in a thousand. Which in fact she, Lucia, had never doubted she would ...

  Then there had been the ordeal of facing Don Diego, which had proved no ordeal at all. There had been his strangely gentle kiss on both her cheeks and, holding her off from him, his rather ponderous joke.

  ‘So, young woman? You dare to masquerade as a de Matteor when you are nothing of the sort? Tell me, are you thumbing a long nose at us or complimenting us—which?’

  She had played along. ‘Complimenting you, of course, Grandfather!’

  ‘Good. In that event you hope to be rewarded, not punished?’

  ‘Please—’

  ‘And how would you suggest we do this? Gil claims the most fitting way would be to marry you into the family. What have you to say to that?’ Whereupon she had told him with some enthusiasm just what she had to say to it.

  And not least there had been what Raquel had had to tell her of the belated courage which had taken her to Don Diego with a confession. As she related to Fran,

  ‘It happened while
I was resting this afternoon. I’d been asleep, and when I woke there was this conviction in my mind. I realized suddenly that not to tell Father that Tom and I had adopted Tom’s brother’s child was a kind of betrayal of Tom. I don’t know why I’d never seen before that Tom had just as good reason to be as proud of his family as we Matteors have of ours. At the time he had let me decide whether or not to tell Father and Lucia, and when I didn’t, we never discussed it again. But think, Fran, just how much of the de Matteor legend I must have absorbed to have made you such a skeleton in my cupboard!’

  Fran had laughed. ‘A skeleton—me? I wish you’d tell the bathroom scales! And hands off the de Matteor “legend” as you call it, for I’m going to be part of it myself soon. But seriously, darling, I’m so glad you told Grandfather of your own accord at last. What did he say? For he needed no telling, did he?’

  ‘No—after all! But he said it was high time, didn’t I think, and what did I mean, keeping him waiting to bring the family tree up to date for—for close on a qu—quarter of a century!’ Raquel had quavered before she dissolved in a flood of happy tears.

  And so, accepting at last that the astonishing day must have an end, Fran had sat down to take off her shoes when she was arrested by a long-drawn whistle from outside.

  She listened. It was repeated. No bird would call so long after dark. Someone below in the garden, then—signalling whom?

  She had long since learned the wisdom of closing her shutters at night, and when she opened them cautiously a whole cloud of night flies danced in. She stepped out on to the balcony and craned over the rail, at first looking out and beyond the foreshortened figure standing directly below. Then her range narrowed and she gasped.

  ‘Gil! What on earth—? What do you want?’

  Her intended whisper came out as a kind of strangled shout.

  ‘Ssh! Silly question. To see you, of course.’

  ‘So you whistled to bring me out? How long have you been standing down there, for goodness’ sake?’

  ‘Don’t bellow like that, girl—you’ll wake the whole house. Do this with your hands’—Gil cupped his own to form a miniature loudhailer—‘In fact, I’m not standing. I’m mounted on my Arab steed, waiting for you to do your stuff.’

  ‘My—stuff?’

  ‘Yes.’ He hummed a few bars of music and waited. ‘Clue? No? “The flower thou gav’st me”—from “Carmen”. This is where you throw one down to me and I—’

  ‘Oh, Gil!’ Fran giggled weakly, loving him for being so—so utterly Gil. ‘I haven’t got a flower to throw.’

  He scanned the wall beside her, starred with white jasmine blossom. ‘Nonsense, you’ve plenty. Or no, I’ll come up.’

  Fran measured the distance between them. ‘Gil, you can’t! It’s sheer. Besides—’

  ‘Watch me. And there’s something I have to give you.’

  ‘Something? What? Can’t you throw it up to me?’

  ‘How can I? I haven’t got it.’

  ‘You haven’t got it?’

  ‘No. You have.’ And leaving her to make what she could of that, he disappeared.

  Next, beyond the edge of a flat roof below to her right, his head was silhouetted, then he straddled the parapet, crossed the roof and gauged the available foot-and hand-holds between it and Fran’s balcony. He had to leap for the gnarled old main stem of the jasmine, then hand over hand he came up, reached for the rail and swung himself over. A second later she was in his arms.

  ‘Fran ... Fran ... Lovely, thorny, English Fran,’ he murmured, and between kisses she was saying equally broken endearments to him. Then they were standing a little apart, swinging hands, their passionate need of each other content for a while with mere gentleness.

  Fran said, ‘Puzzle. If I’ve already got this thing you say you have to give me, how come?’

  ‘Can’t you guess what it is?’

  She could, but she was determined he should tell her. ‘No. What?’ she parried.

  ‘My mother’s ring, of course. Where is it?’ Fran went back into her room, opened a drawer and brought the ring to him. He fingered the fine silver chain from which it hung.

  ‘What’s this? You’ve made a pendant of it,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. Don’t call me silly, Gil. You said I could keep it, that you had no better use for it. So I bought the chain for it and I’ve worn it just at night ever since. As a—a keepsake of you, that was all.’

  ‘Keepsake! That for a good story!’ he scoffed. ‘You’ve admitted being head-over-ears besotted with me for years. Come here—’ Discarding the chain, he thrust the ring on to her third finger and put his lips to it there. ‘And that to keep you safe for me, until I give you gold in church, favorita. Soon, Fran? Soon?’ It was a question which she did not answer in words.

  At last he said, ‘I’d better go.’

  Fran agreed unwillingly, ‘Yes,’ and as he turned to the balcony rail, ‘Not that way, Gill Are you crazy?’

  He pulled a face at her. ‘I want to go this way. It satisfies my romantic instincts.’

  ‘Your ancestral monkey instincts, you mean!’ But he was already straddling the rail. Over it and ready to make a long arm for the jasmine stem, he looked back. ‘This is handsome of me, but if you say so, you weren’t sick on that coach trip to Brighton.’

  She wrinkled her nose at him, searching for an honourable amend to match that.

  ‘And your nose wasn’t as red as all that when you had a cold. Just pink,’ she said, and watched him climb until he was a shadowy figure on the roof, a head and shoulders disappearing and then a hand raised in salute to her from directly below.

  She went back into her room, closing the shutters on the night. Now without regret she could let the day slip from her and turn into tomorrow and all the tomorrows to follow which for her would take their cloud and their sun, their storm and their calm from Gil.

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