Love is for Ever

by Barbara Rowan

  “Thank you,” Neville replied, in that rather indolently pleasant voice of his. “That will be delightful. I will get in touch with your aunt and thank her personally, and suggest tomorrow evening if that is not too soon.”

  Then the big grey car slid away from the foot of the verandah steps, and Jacqueline felt her breath catch as the instant acceleration caused them to skim like a bird up the brief rise which led to the broader main road. And once on that Dominic proceeded to let her see what the car was really capable of, and she watched the speedometer swing from fifty to sixty miles an hour, and finally touch eighty. As it was an open car, and the heat of the afternoon had not yet even started to abate, the rush of air past her ears and over her head was, Jacqueline found, both pleasant and exhilarating, but after only a few minutes devoted to this sort of thing Dominic slowed the car and glanced at her sideways.

  “If we travel too fast we shall get there too soon,” he remarked, “and there is something I wish to say to you.”

  “Oh, yes?” Jacqueline enquired, and sent a sideways glance at him also. She had the feeling that something was coming.

  “Were you so anxious to see Dr. Barr again that you had to rush off and visit him on only the first day after your arrival here?” he asked.

  Jacqueline was so surprised that for a few moments she found it impossible to frame a reply. Then a quick little spurt of anger leapt in her.

  “How—how dare you say a thing like that?” she demanded.

  He shrugged his white-clad, beautifully held shoulders.

  “Because it is obvious that you were touched by the fact that he met you yesterday, that you found his appearance—or something else about him—charming, and today you could not resist the temptation to see more of him. You are as transparent as that!”

  “I—I—” Jacqueline stammered, anger causing her to do so.

  The car was now doing no more than a gentle thirty miles an hour, negotiating the rough surface of the road with effortless ease, and he sent her another deeply blue look—and this time she thought it was full of contempt, and his lips curled also.

  “If it were not so nothing would have induced you to visit your father’s bungalow so soon—the place where he lived and died, and which must be full of memories for you, some of them a little painful to recall! And certainly if you had felt you must visit it you would have contented yourself with seeing over his clinic, which he not only started but regarded as his life-work, and not taken tea instead with Dr. Barr!”

  “Dr. Barr assured me that there was nothing in the bungalow which would remind me of my father.” Her hands were clasped tightly together in her lap, and she had actually turned a little pale. “I—I did not want to be reminded—so soon! —but I was out walking by myself and his car caught me up and he offered me tea. It never occurred to me that to take tea with one of my own fellow countrymen would be to present you with an opportunity to insult me!” she concluded, with a slight tremor in her voice.

  “Oh, come now—” his voice was smooth and drawling, and his beautifully-shaped hands looked relaxed on the wheel—“it isn’t insulting to suggest that Dr. Barr has made a conquest! Or that you were a willing victim!”

  “I think you’re insufferable,” she told him.

  “And I think you’re far too attractive to be permitted to wander alone on our island roads. Why was it that you decided to take a

  solitary walk?”

  “Because there was no one else to walk with,” she shot back at

  him, in a kind of triumph. “And presumably I may take a walk

  when I wish to do so?”

  “Only when there is someone to accompany you.” His black brows were frowning at the road ahead. “And I imagined that with Tia Lola and my grandmother you would find enough to occupy

  you for today.”

  She looked at him in amazement.

  While he, and Martine, went out on some excursion together—which she realized was nothing at all to do with her!— he expected her to conform to some undiscussed plan, and display no initiative on her own account! Even his grandmother had not laid down hard and fast rules as to how she was to amuse herself during her visit.

  “I think,” she said, quietly, “that you forget that I am not Spanish—and that goes for sudden infatuations, too! In England,

  when you've been brought up to earn your own living, you don’t form them all that hurriedly!”

  “Don’t you?” There was a sudden note of whimsicality in his voice, and all at once he sounded a trifle penitent. “I’m sorry,” he said, “if I’ve annoyed you.”

  “You haven’t annoyed me,” stiffly. “But if my visit here means that I am not to be permitted any freedom I think it would have been better if I hadn’t come.”

  “But, most decidedly not!” he told her. “I think it would have been a great pity if you hadn’t come, and it is merely that I object to your taking solitary country walks which result in your being overtaken by enterprising young men like Neville Barr.” She was so obsessed by her resentment that she hadn’t noticed that, once more increasing his speed, he had allowed the car to sweep past the rosy-roofed villas she had admired earlier that day, and even the curly wrought-iron gates leading to the Cortina villa had been left behind, and that the country was becoming far less civilized, but infinitely beautiful. “Tell me,” he said, before she suddenly realized that instead of being in a hurry he was taking her on a kind of tour of the island, “what would a young woman like you do in order to earn her own living in England?”

  “I was a shop assistant,” she answered, and felt that she had staggered him a trifle.

  “A—shop assistant?”

  ‘Yes.” She looked round at him in cold amusement. “I sold antiques in a little shop off the King’s Road, Chelsea. I imagine you do know London?”

  “Oh, yes,” with a return of the bent brows. “I know London very well. But how long have you been disposing of antiques in Chelsea?"

  “Oh,” she made a rough calculation, “about three years. For two of them I lived with my mother, but for the last year my employer, a dear old man called Maplethorpe, let me occupy the tiny flat above his shop.”

  “Alone?” he asked.

  “Why, naturally, alone!”

  He brought the car to a sudden standstill, and she looked about her and uttered a little gasp of appreciation. They had climbed, without her realizing it, from the level of the waterfront to a peak of the island from which all the beauties of it fell away from them on all sides, and wherever they turned their eyes it meant looking over a wilderness of color to the sea which surrounded them. Amongst such a collection of hues green predominated, for there were so many trees on the island—the dark green of pines, the dusty green of palms, the shimmer of eucalyptus. And here and there were the vivid clumps of hibiscus, of jacaranda, of plumbago, and the unexpected white of arum lilies.

  The scents of heavenly perfumed growing things floated on the air, and Jacqueline thought suddenly that such intoxicating perfume might well drug the senses if one inhaled deeply enough of it. But nevertheless she inhaled deeply, while her charmed eyes followed the path of the sun as it slipped westwards over the sea. Already the blue of the sky was turning to gold low down on the horizon, and the sea itself looked like a blaze of larkspur.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed. “What a—what a wonderful view!” And then she turned to him. “But I thought you were in a great hurry! Why have we come up here?”

  “Because I thought you would like to see the view,” he told her. “Because it’s one of the finest views on the island, and this being your first day here is surely the day when you should receive your most favorable impressions.”

  She had the feeling that he was laughing at her a little—that his indignation with her was over, and that now he was extracting amusement from her.

  “Tell me,” he said, “something more of the kind of life you lead in London.”

  “It would be too dull to offer you any d
iversion.”

  “I am not seeking diversion. I am seeking information—about you!”

  She looked sideways at him again under the sloping brim of her coolie-shaped straw hat, and her grey eyes looked all at once a little perplexed and doubtful.

  “There is no reason why you should seek information about me, Mr. Errol. I am your grandmother’s guest. My father worked here on Sansegovia—”

  “I’m sorry about your father,” he said quietly, with sudden complete seriousness. “In fact, I’m terribly sorry. I should have told you so before.”

  “That’s all right,” she said, and fumbled with the clasp of her handbag.

  He looked at her thoughtfully.

  “For you it has meant a complete change of plans. Instead of the shop and the antiques you had hoped to come out here and keep house for your father?”

  “Yes,” Jacqueline admitted, but checked the sigh that rose up in her throat.

  Dominic produced his cigarette case and offered it to her. As she was about to refuse he said:

  “Smoke a cigarette with me—it is companionable,” and there was a hint of persuasion in his voice.

  "Very well,” she said, and somewhat to her surprise he lighted one for her and passed it to her.

  For one instant before she put it to her lips, after coming straight from his, she felt the oddest sensation attack her. She found herself looking at him, noting the sheer beauty of the lines of his face, and particularly the lines of his mouth—the hint of a curious kind of sweetness at the corners, especially when he was half smiling and looking at her, as he was looking at her just then. And his eyes seemed to be set a little obliquely, unless it was the way his eyelashes grew, and his eyebrows were beautifully marked. And his hair grew in a slight, interesting wave back from his forehead.

  “Well?” he said, as she hesitated before placing her cigarette between her lips; and then she drew at it rather hurriedly and looked away.

  “Tell me,” he said again, “why was it you waited so long before you joined your father? Why did you not come to him, for instance, straight from school?”

  “Because,” she answered, with a sigh which she was unable to check this time, “there was my mother, and I couldn’t leave her. ”

  “Yet your father—” a little dryly—“had to fend for himself!”

  “That,” she admitted, “was something which always worried me, but there was nothing very much I could do about it. You see,” she explained, “my father and mother parted when I was very young.”

  “That,” he admitted, “was unfortunate.” His voice sounded sober. All at once, she thought, as she stole a look at him, his whole expression was extremely sober, and he looked away from her out over the island and the sea. “It is always a pity,” he observed, “when two people who marry—no doubt for love in the beginning—find it impossible to go on living with one another. That is why one should be very careful about choosing a marriage partner.”

  “But in Spain,” she reminded him, “there is not very much question of any choice, is there? These things are arranged.”

  “In many cases they are arranged, but in just as many cases a man, or a woman, is selected because—at the time he or she seems to be the most desirable of his or her sex! And that means that even in Spain men and women marry for love, and love

  alone!”

  “Which doesn’t always prove sufficient to keep a marriage on an even keel!”

  “That is because it is the wrong sort of love. Love is for ever—or should be once it is actually acknowledged!” He was still staring dreamily at the skyline, where the phantom shape of a passing vessel showed up against the widening band of gold. “Love, like lightning, devastates when it strikes, and having struck creates havoc which can never be repaired, and therefore the mark it leaves is there for all time.”

  Jacqueline felt faintly amazed to hear him utter words of this kind, and when he turned and looked at her some of the amazement was plainly written in her eyes for him to see.

  He smiled in his attractively crooked fashion. “Is it that you do not agree with me?” he asked. “You have, perhaps, a poor opinion of love?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered, simply. “I've never been in love.”

  ‘You feel that it is necessary to be cautious, looking upon the experience of your parents as something which should warn you to take care?”

  “No,” she answered, after a moment’s pause, looking down at the flower she had tucked into her belt, and which now was sadly wilting. “I shouldn’t think it is possible to take heed of warnings when one meets someone with something so compelling about them that all one wants to do is to link one’s life with theirs.”

  “I quite agree with you, little one,” he told her, and reached out and took the flower she was gently caressing from her fingers and fastened it in his lapel. “In love it must be ‘all or nothing’! There can be no retreat and no pretense, and no shrinking even from the thought of disaster.”

  She looked at the crumpled pink blossom in his buttonhole. ‘You can’t wear that,” she said. “It is practically dead.”

  “Never mind," he replied. “I shall keep it and press it in a book and it will remind me always of this afternoon.”

  Jacqueline studied his face carefully, but although she was sure there was a little mockery in his eyes the curve of his mouth was almost gentle.

  She looked away from him and out once more across the island of Sansegovia. For perhaps five minutes they both sat there without saying a word, a curious peacefulness in the atmosphere between them, a feeling that although their acquaintance was so brief—and she, at least, had disapproved of him in the beginning, and been indignant with him only a short half-hour before—their minds just then were entirely in tune, and the beauty surrounding them was more than enough for them both. In his case familiarity might have bred contempt, but it obviously had not, because of the absorbed expression on his face as he sat beside her and quietly enjoyed one of his favorite views, and Jacqueline forgot to wonder what he had done with Martine, and why at that moment he was not dancing attendance on her, and felt the spell of the island growing moment by moment. Until at last he roused himself and asked her, with a faint smile:

  “And what are you thinking of now, little Miss Jacqueline Vaizey?”

  “I was wondering,” she admitted at once, her small face a little shadowed, “whether perhaps you could tell me where my— where my father ...?”

  “Over there,” he said at once, indicating the pink tower of a church, and she felt instant appreciation because he understood her so readily. “It is a little village called San Agariu, and your father was particularly fond of it. I will drive you to it whenever you wish to go, as naturally you will wish to do.”

  “Thank you very much, Mr. Errol,” she responded gratefully.

  “My name is Dominic,” he told her, as he started up the car.

  “Nevertheless, I think I—I think I would prefer to call you Mr. Errol!”

  “It was Senor Errol last night,” he reminded her, with a faintly amused smile. “Do you feel that I have grown a little more English overnight?”

  She did not reply to this, but as they drove back by the way they had come she turned his question over in her mind and decided that, even if he still did not strike her as particularly English, at least there was something—at times—very likable about him.

  Which, Dr. Barr would no doubt have warned her, was one of Senor Cortina’s grandson’s dangerous attractions. He could be extremely likeable at times.

  They dined that night at the house of Senor Montez, where his nephew was still staying, and Jacqueline found it a far pleasanter evening than the evening of her arrival. For one thing she was feeling considerably more relaxed and refreshed than just after her journey from England, and Senor Montez laid so much emphasis on the fact that she was a particularly welcome guest that she could not but feel a little flattered, although the nephew was still sunk in moroseness and was
not much help to his uncle when it came to entertaining guests.

  And Dominic, to her amazement, accorded her almost as much attention as he accorded Martine. This might have been because Martine was plainly in rather a bad temper about something, and was inclined to snub him when she came down from her room after changing for dinner, and he offered to provide her with a drink before they left.

  “I don’t want anything to drink,” the American girl answered pettishly, “and I can’t think what happened to you this afternoon after we got back from our picnic. I told you I was going to rest, but I didn’t expect you to disappear altogether, and you where nowhere about when I came down after tea.” She was looking so lovely in an emerald gown that left her shoulders quite bare, and fitted the rest of her body like a glove, and so almost childishly injured that Jacqueline found herself wondering how Dominic could content himself with merely smiling at her as if he was quite undisturbed, when she herself felt almost guilty. For it was she who had been responsible for keeping the host away from his own particular guest.

  Dominic, as he had done the night before with Jacqueline, insisted on Martine accepting a drink, but she was not easily mollified. She looked across at Jacqueline and enquired rather sulkily:

  “Have you had a good day, Miss Vaizey? And do you think you’re going to like Sansegovia?”

  “I’ve loved Sansegovia since I was twelve,” Jacqueline answered truthfully.

  Martine’s slim eyebrows ascended a little. “I’ve never been particularly fond of islands. They give me a feeling of being cut off.” She glanced at Dominic as if expecting to see him betray concern, but his expression remained quite unrevealing as he quietly smoked a cigarette. “And island peoples are rather primitive.”

  Jacqueline felt a little shocked. Surely she wasn’t referring to the Cortinas and their friends, who in any case hailed from Toledo and looked upon the island as a kind of summer paradise?