“Ach, you’re just a wee bit bairn!” he said promptly with a creditable imitation of her accent that made her grin, “but a very intelligent one for a’ that!” He spoke more soberly then. “If you can see that this island tends to make people a bit - oh, I dunno - over-romantic maybe, is what I mean, then you’ll be okay. Too many girls come here and get swept away by some Spanish grandee type, thinking they’re going to live a life of glory for ever and ever, and find out just how unglorious it is. I know - distant cousin of mine did it. They lasted six months, and now she’s back home trying to get a divorce - ”
“Oh, Biff, come on! We’re talking about a man I’ve had one date with - just one date - and you’re already jumping around talking about divorces! Like, do me a favour!” and at her imitation of his accent he grinned hugely, and then drained his glass and reached for the jug.
“You’re great, Isabel! You’re my kind of people! Come on - we’ll forget it! Have another drink, and something to eat - ” and he pulled towards her one of the row of flat filled dishes on the bar at which they were sitting perched on high stools. “Try this - it’s local and it’s great.”
“What is it?” she peered into the dish, filled with blackish coloured objects in a dark heavy sauce, which smelled delectable though it looked a shade repellent.
“Calamares,” he said, watching her lift a piece out with a fork, and put it in her mouth. “Good, hmm?”
He took some too and they chewed happily for a moment, and then as Isabel reached for a second piece - for it did indeed taste delightful - he added casually.
“Calamares - squid.” “Squid?” she dropped the fork and almost squealed. “You mean octopus?”
“That’s it! Cooked in its own ink - don’t look like that! It tasted all right, didn’t it?” He began to laugh then at the look of horror on her face. “You’d better not go to a Moorish feast anytime, honey! There they give you sheep’s eyes - oh, come on! If you can eat anything as ghastly as haggis you ought to be able to manage a tender little squid without any trouble!”
“Haggis is not ghastly! It’s the greatest food there is - great chieftain of the puddin’ race - ”
And so they went on, giggling a lot, teasing each other, eating and drinking, and eventually getting involved in a long and complex conversation with several of the Spaniards in the little bar who joined in Biff’s attempts to teach Isabel more about Spanish food. She sat there surrounded by friendly happy people, with the warmth and security of Biff’s solidity at her shoulder, and laughed more than she had for months. The men greeted her pert attempts at their language with great gusts of approving laughter, and Biff smiled and watched her contentedly and altogether she felt very special. Very special indeed.
As they strolled back to the hotel along the Bay-fringed Paseo Maritimo, watching the boats bobbing on the wine-dark sea (“This place!” she thought briefly. “Makes you even think in poetic quotations!”) she tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow and looked up at his nice square face in the fitful light of the lamps they passed and the swooping traffic headlights. And he smiled down at her and patted her hand and they walked on companionably while she tried to find words to tell him how grateful she was.
“It’s just that - I suppose you turned up at a time when I really needed a friend, you know?” she floundered. “And you really make me feel good, Biff. That I’ve got someone to lean on if I have to and - ”
“That’s great, Isabel,” he said quietly. “That’s - well, you couldn’t have said anything that could make me feel happier.” He patted her hand again. “It’s a privilege to be your friend, believe me, and I want you to know that I can be leaned on any time you want. You just shout, and I’ll be there, I promise.”
It wasn’t until they had almost reached the hotel that he spoke again, and then his voice was a little strained. “If you want to tell me to mind my own affairs again, Isabel, then you go right ahead and do it - but let me ask you just one question. And try not to be sore at me? I mean, just say you’ll answer me, or say you don’t want to talk about it, but still be friends?”
“That sounds very solemn!” she said lightly, looking up at him and smiling, but now his face was serious.
“Well, you got sore at me before, talking about old Fancy Pants - sorry, your boss in there - ” he smiled very briefly then - “so maybe you’ll get sore again:”
“I won’t!” she said. “Honestly, to hear you go on, you’d think I was a bramble bush! I’m no’ that prickly! So ask away, and if I don’t like to answer, you can be bound I’ll say so.”
But when the question came, it made her stand quite still so that her hand was pulled out of his elbow’s crook, and he had to turn on his heel to look at her.
“Who is Jay?”
They stood there on the pavement looking at each other as other strollers pushed curiously past them, and after a moment she said in a tight little voice, “How do you know about Jay?”
“On the plane,” he said simply. “You were dreaming, you remember? And talking - calling out - I woke you.”
She nodded slowly, and then started to walk again, but this time she did not hold his arm. There was a long silence while she thought, while she let memories of Jay go romping uncontrolled through her mind, his face, the sound of his voice, the places they had been and the things they had done together, his kisses, his passionate demands and caresses and her own abandonment to them, and finally, the things he said when he was ending it all -
And then, with an almost physical effort of will, she pushed the memories back, downwards, collecting them and tying them and pushing them away, and shutting a door on them somewhere in the deepest recesses of her mind, and she turned her head to look at Biff, walking tensely beside her and looking down at her with his face anxiety-creased, and said quietly, “Jay was the man I was in love with. Very much in love with. We - it was a very real and complete relationship, Biff. And now it’s over. He - he put an end to it. So I came here to get over the whole affair. I’m not sure what’s going to be the hardest thing to get over - the way I felt about Jay, or the way my - I suppose you could call it pride - was chopped up when he said ‘no more, thank youy’. Either way, I’ll get over it, given time.”
She smiled at him then, and tucked her hand into his elbow once more. “I’ll tell you this much, Biff. If it was just my pride that was hurt you gave it a splendid lift, being so friendly on the plane and being so nice now. And so of course has Sebastian Garcia, because I’d have to be a real idiot not to admit it makes a girl feel great to have nice personable men showing they think she’s not so bad.”
“You’re not so bad,” he said quietly, and his hand closed warm and strong over hers, and held on so that she felt again that sense of being specially protected. “Your Jay must have been out of his tiny mind. If I had the good fortune to be loved by a girl like you - well, you can be sure she’d never have cause to run off to get over me! Thank you for telling me, Isabel. I shouldn’t have asked, maybe, but you said you saw me as a friend, and I thought - well, what are friends for?”
They had reached the Cadiz now, and stopped on the pavement outside for a brief moment.
“Shall I come in for a while, Isabel?” he asked, and after a second she shook her head but smiled as she did so.
“Do you mind not, Biff? Not tonight, I - oh, it’s been a lovely evening, and I’ve so enjoyed it and laughed so much but now I want to think for a while. Just be quiet and think. Do you mind?”
“No - as long as you think of me as well as of Jay and Garcia and whoever else is in line for your company!” and she laughed and raised her face to kiss his cheek, for it seemed such a natural and happy thing to do, and he hugged her briefly and let her go very quickly.
“I’ll call you tomorrow, Isabel,” he said and his voice was somehow flattened. “And we’ll make plans for some expeditions. Good night, my dear.” And he was gone, leaving her with a warm and comfortable glow inside.
And long after s
he had gone to bed, to lie staring up at the ceiling with its mottled patterns of dim light reflected from the sea beyond her balcony, feeling the cool breeze that moved the curtains at her open window creeping delicately across her face, she went on thinking, but this time not about Jay alone, but about herself, and her own reactions to the men she knew, and the way her feelings would sway from side to side. And eventually she laughed softly at herself in the darkness, and turned over to curl up and fall tranquilly asleep, her last thought being a firm decision to stop thinking about herself quite so boringly much, and to remember she was here to do a job. And to get on with it.
And the decision seemed to hold. For the next two weeks she lived happily and busily, enjoying her clinic sessions with her patients, adding to her care for cuts and bruises and aches and pains a little discreet health teaching for the chamber maids on such matters as reducing diets and personal hygiene (which seemed to amuse and fascinate them in roughly equal proportions) and dealing with the trickle of visitors who came to see her with insect bites or symptoms due to overeating and over-drinking and occasionally sunburn (for it was still too early in the season for any severe cases).
Vanda Connaught seemed to have gone into a sort of voluntary retirement, for although she was undoubtedly still in the hotel, Isabel never saw her, and heard no more about the disagreement between them.
But she saw a good deal of small Fred-Daniel on most days, for his parents seemed rarely to be in the hotel with him. They were booked to stay for a full six weeks (“Vairy rich, the Señor Rendell,” Jaime Mendoza said in reply to her discreet inquiries about the family. “He has the factory, you understand, that makes the dresses for the cheap shops, and he makes much, much money from this”) and Isabel, angered at their neglect of the child, for she felt he was missing school for far too long, set about providing him with daily entertainment that disguised some solid education in the middle of the fun.
He would sit in her office, his head bent sideways and his tongue protruding with concentration over his moving fist as he made maps, and laboriously wrote long lists of the equipment that would be needed for a safari adventure in Darkest Africa, and made graphs of the amount of mileage they would do, he and Isabel, as they made their way through the trackless Wastes Infested with Wild Ferocious Animals, a plan they discussed with great relish and at considerable length. And as long as Fred-Daniel didn’t notice he was learning a good deal of arithmetic and geography in the process - not to mention spelling and similar tedious matters - Isabel was content.
And her private life, too, was giving her as much interest and amusement as her working one. She rode several times with Sebastian Garcia in the foothills of the mountains, she on a quieter and darker coloured mare than Sebastian’s Donna Clara, but quite lively enough an animal for her to control, and breathed the heady scent of the acres of pink and white almond blossom he showed her, billowing and shimmering in the Spring sunshine under the china blue sky like some vast expanse of candy floss. They rode for miles until she was breathless and almost numbed by the aching of her muscles, to sit peacefully in a small village bodega beside a log fire, which, surrounded by hard wooden settles with goatskins tossed across them for comfort, burned smokily in the centre of the whitewashed room. She would sit staring dreamily at the flames and sipping ice cold sherry drawn from great barrels of ancient timber, and sometimes talking a little to Sebastian, but more often just sitting and listening to him.
And she went out with Biff too, different outings entirely, when they giggled and joked a great deal, quite unlike the quiet seriousness of her expeditions with Sebastian. Biff would choose absurd fun things to do, like riding donkeys in a farmyard, and going on noisy touristy excursions where everyone sang and behaved as though they’d known her for years; none of Sebastian’s slightly remote and patrician air about Biff, she would think, amused, watching him tossing a delightedly shrieking two-year-old ear-ringed moppet in the air while her stall-keeping mother filled Isabel’s arms with flowers, and nodded and beamed her approval at the Americano’s friendliness.
It was this contrast between the two men that made them both seem so particularly interesting to her, she decided. Sebastian would take her in her elegant new dresses (specially made for her at incredible speed and cheapness by a little dressmaker to whom Consuelo had introduced her) to large and splendid restaurants where there were huge mirrors and acres of marble and stiffly correct venerable waiters who bowed all the time, for all the world like a setting for a turn-of-the-Century French play where she would sit in rather agreeable tension, enjoying the role of sophisticated lady in which he seemed to cast her, being quiet and elegant and a little blasé. But Biff would take her in her casual slacks and shirt to the bustling jostling street market that sprawled across the centre of Palma on Saturdays, where donkeys and chickens and rabbits in cages added their personal farmyard smells to the odours of spices and hot fried foods and fruits and vegetables that littered the pavements and would make her feel very young and giddy and giggly. With Sebastian, there was talk of books and music and plays; with Biff inconsequential chatter that meant little, but was easy and relaxed.
And as well as discovering different aspects of her own personality, as each man drew out of her the sort of response he needed, so did she learn about them. She discovered that Sebastian, for all his seeming aloofness, was in fact quite communicative about himself. He was the only son of a widow who lived quietly and very much wrapped in her religion in Valldemosa, in the mountains, and who clearly demanded - and obtained - from her son a filial duty and affection that he gave unstintingly. “La Madre” clearly figured large on Sebastian’s horizon, as it did for any well-bred Spaniard.
That the family he came from was one that had once been rich and fairly powerful in a local sort of way was implied in what he didn’t tell her, rather than in what he did. His calm assumption of authority, his personal success in all his dealing with other people, made it clear that there was this aristocratic streak in him, but she found it, to her surprise, quite unoffensive. Herself brought up in a tradition of sturdy independence with a healthy scorn for the effeteness of “top people” and an even healthier respect for the virtues and values of the ordinary man, she would have expected herself to be resentful of and hostile towards this calmly superior man. But somehow she wasn’t, accepting him entirely at his own valuation, for always he was kind and gentle and completely punctilious. And though he still made her, quite often, feel that special internal shiver, never again did she fall into the trap of thinking he was going to make some physical overture towards her.
But Biff, for all his openness and friendliness and streams of talk and banter, in fact told her very little of himself. Within a couple of weeks she felt she had known Sebastian since his childhood, for all his remote air, but with Biff it was as though he had appeared readymade with no background at all. For he talked not at all about his family, his home, or his life in the States, sheering off into jokiness whenever she made some glancing reference that could have been construed as a question. Even about his work he said little, though she knew he worked hard during the days when he was not with her, and he somehow never seemed to notice her offhanded requests to see the building he was working on away on the Andraitx side of Palma. She found this a little puzzling at first, but then shrugged it off and forgot it; the main thing was that he was an easy friend, a delightful companion, and someone who made her feel gay and relaxed and cheerful. She asked no more.
And so it could have gone on, the weeks drifting together into months while her emotional sores healed and she became heart-whole again. It could have gone on - but it didn’t.
She came cheerfully down to breakfast that bright and shining morning in late March, whistling under her breath, and thinking pleasurably of the projected trip to some splendid caves on the far side of the island to which Biff had promised to take her that evening, and as she went towards the restaurant and her morning ensaimadas and orange juice, Jaime Mendoza
called her name.
“Isabella! Please to wait - I have here for you some post. I would have sent it to your room, but I thought if I saw you I give it you myself!” He came bustling across the hallway towards her, holding out a letter, a long white envelope spattered with stamps.
She frowned for a brief moment; who would write to her? She had quite deliberately not given her address to any of her friends at the Royal, wanting only to cut herself right away from the place and its memories, at least for this summer; and her cousin Fiona who was the only relation she had left since her father’s death and with whom she had left her Spanish address in case of emergencies was far too busy with her own life and husband and children to start writing letters just for the sake of it. Unless something was wrong with one of her family Isabel thought and for a moment her heart sank. Although Fiona was not a very close relation, she was all the relations she had, and Isabel put her hand forwards with a sense of sudden dread.
“Letters from home are always good to have, verdad?” Mendoza said busily, peering interestedly into her face as she looked down at the thick white envelope. “Perhaps you ask some of your people to come from Scotland to visit us? Now you are such good friends with Señor Garcia - ” and here he leered a little “ - perhaps he can arrange the special terms for them, hey? This would be very nice for you - ” But she let the sound of his voice run on over her head, not hearing a word. For the handwriting on the envelope was not Fiona’s neat and boxy script, but the untidy sprawling scribble that she knew so well, and had thought she would never see again.
Jay had written to her.
11
The letter, unopened, sat against her hip inside her uniform pocket, burning its imprint against her skin, and yet she left it there. She ate her breakfast mechanically but drank more coffee than she usually did. She prepared her clinic, and then dealt with her patients, giving them her bright smiles and interest and correct and careful care, but showed even more concern than she usually did. She cleaned the clinic when the last patient had gone, but scrubbed and polished more thoroughly, if that were possible, than she usually did. And all the time, Jay’s letter sat there inert but almost malevolently active in her hip pocket; nothing she could do would eradicate its shadow from her mind.
Nurse in the Sun Page 12
