Jacqueline once again said nothing for several minutes; and then she returned to a subject they were discussing earlier.
“You said that you would take me—this afternoon—to San Agariu?”
“Yes; after tea, when it is a little cooler. Will that suit you?”
“It will suit me excellently. But, what about—what about Martine—?”
“Martine?” he echoed, and now it was his voice that was very dry, while all at once a curious kind of taunting smile visited the corners of his shapely mouth. “Martine is going to submit herself to the hands of Juanita after tea. She wishes to gild the lily a little—and in her case any attempt at beautifying herself is gilding the lily, don’t you agree?—because we are going out for the evening. You, and Dr. Barr, are going out for the evening, too. We are all four going together to a certain rather popular local night-spot, where we shall dine, watch a cabaret, perhaps, and dance—that is, of course, if you care for dancing?”
“I haven’t danced very much since my schooldays,” Jacqueline admitted.
“But you enjoy it?”
“Oh, yes, I enjoy it.” And then, all at once, a tiny glow of pleasure appeared in her face, not so much because of the thought of the evening ahead of her, but because an evening of the type he had planned was an extremely rare thing in her life—in fact, she had never actually enjoyed such an evening. An odd young man had taken her to the theatre occasionally, and even out to dinner—but not dinner at a restaurant where one watched a cabaret, and then danced. “I think,” she said, with a sudden, impulsive note of enthusiasm in her voice, “that it will be very nice!”
“Because you will be able to dance with Dr. Barr?”
She looked at him sideways, and her look was heavy with disapproval.
“Touche.” he exclaimed, and then laughed softly, and she laughed back, and all at once it seemed that they were on excellent and quite understanding terms with one another.
When they got back to the Villa Cortina they were both amazed to make the discovery that the Senora Cortina, dressed in one of her stiffest gowns, with jet bracelets on her wrists and brooches pinned to the front of her dress, and her best lace mantilla hiding her silvery hair, was ensconced in the patio in one of the deep wicker chairs, with Tia Lola beside her doing some complicated drawn-thread work.
Jacqueline, once Dominic had helped her from the car, went forward at once to say how delighted she was to the little old lady, and the Senora Cortina smiled at her as if she found her a very pleasant sight, in spite of her very modern dress, and patted her
hands with pleasure.
“This is one of my very good days,” she said, “and so I decided to emerge from my room and drink an aperitif with you all before lunch.”
“But this is marvellous!” Jacqueline exclaimed. “Maravillosa!” she added, in Spanish.
Dominic bent over his grandmother’s tiny, frail figure and kissed her with a kind of exquisite gentleness. Jacqueline was quite touched by the way in which he did it, and by the instant clinging response of the old lady’s beringed fingers. She looked up at him as if she adored him.
“Provide me with a drink, Dominico, mi querido,” she said softly, pushing him from her at last. “A little of that very dry sherry which I can sometimes take.”
He hastened to obey her request, and Jacqueline sat down on the grass at her hostess’s feet, and accepted a glass of sherry also. The Senora Cortina looked a little surprised.
“But where is the so beautiful Miss Howard?” she asked. “Was I misinformed when I was told that you had all gone to the beach together?”
Dominic explained. Miss Howard was in her room, resting. If she didn’t appear at lunch something would have to be sent to her on a tray, for she suffered very badly from migraine, and the heat had brought on one of her bad heads. In fact—and he summoned Juanita, who was waiting on them—it might be as well if an enquiry was made at once, and Juanita was despatched to the house to find out the latest intelligence concerning Miss Howard; and when she returned it was with the information that Miss Howard would not be appearing at lunch, but that her headache was better. However, she thought she would keep her room for the rest of the afternoon.
The same thought must have passed through the Senora Cortina’s mind that passed through Jacqueline’s—and that was that a lover’s quarrel might have resulted in a certain amount of temporary tension—for they looked at one another with the same silent and not too discreetly veiled question in their eyes, and the senora’s eyes even twinkled a little, as if the vagaries of youth amused her. But Jacqueline was wondering whether perhaps Martine’s sudden indisposition had anything to do with Dominic’s offer to drive her, Jacqueline, into the town that morning from the beach.
“Ah, well,” the Senora Cortina observed, “it would seem that I am not to have both my guests and my family around me at the same time; but at least it is very pleasant to set eyes on you again, my dear child,” she told Jacqueline. “You look like a pretty boy in that dress, and when I was your age it would have caused something worse than consternation if I had appeared in even twice as much clothing. But times change, and we must all adjust ourselves,” with a little sigh.
Jacqueline felt herself flushing faintly because Dominic’s eyes were on her, and she realized that they were smiling a little mockingly and saying to her:
“What did I tell you! ... At least my grandmother does not know that you have been anywhere other than the beach dressed like that! And with me to protect you if the need arose!”
“Perhaps,” she suggested, attempting to get to her feet, “I ought to go in and change ...?”
“No, no, my dear!” Her hostess prevented her with a hand on her shoulder. “It is so pleasant here in the sunshine, with you and my grandson and Lola, and soon I shall have to go in, and then you can change if you wish.”
She sighed as she lay back in her chair, obviously supremely content. Jacqueline felt strangely touched by her inclusion in that little speech—“with you and my grandson and Lola!” It had sounded as if she belonged, somehow—as if she had a right to be included.
She looked away across the patio, with its beds of colorful flowers, it scents of lemon and verbena and orange blossom imprisoned by the high white walls, the long shadows falling across the grass, that was short and sweet and thick and heady with a perfume all its own, and suddenly a kind of wistfulness dropped upon her like a cloak. For before very long she would have to leave all this behind—say goodbye to it for ever!—and it was Martine who should have been included in the senora’s little speech.
She stole a look at Dominic, and he was lying back in his chair, looking curiously relaxed and happier almost than she had seen him before, with a faint smile on the mouth that was so perfectly shaped—so perfectly shaped that Jacqueline felt her heart do something extremely odd inside her as she looked at it; for one moment her heart seemed to expand with admiration, with a sudden upward rush of approval. And when she looked at his eyes, with their smoky screens of eyelashes—the lazy blue gleam that appeared beneath the eyelashes as he caught her watching him—her heart started to contract.
For he was far, far too handsome, too wealthy, too assured— too much belonging to another world— to mean anything at all in her life.
She wasn’t a Martine, who had appeared in films, and wore gorgeous, slinky dresses—she was just Jacqueline Vaizey, at the moment without a job, and with no one of her own to return to when she went back to England.
Her small face looked suddenly clouded and overcast.
Dominic looked at her keenly for a moment, and then as she ventured to glance at him again he lifted ids glass to her.
“To you, Miss Vaizey, and your stay on Sansegovia!”
“Why do you call the little one Miss Vaizey?” Senora Cortina demanded of her grandson. “She is the daughter of my dear old friend Dr. Vaizey, and her name is Jacqueline. It is too formal to call her Miss Vaizey.”
Dominic smiled.
Jacqueline felt that sudden, revealing color, over which she always had such little control, rising up in her cheeks, and it made her look young, and shy, and embarrassed. The Senora Cortina touched her cheek almost tenderly with a gnarled finger, and at the same time she looked across at her grandson. She looked at him and her quiet old eyes looked suddenly wise and knowledgeable.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Jacqueline dressed that night with a feeling of excitement and pleasurable anticipation she found it impossible to deny. She put on a misty blue chiffon dress with a very full, ballerina-length skirt, and with it she wore silver-gilt sandals and a stole that matched the dress. When she was finally ready she decided that there was not much wrong with her appearance, and that was an opinion heartily endorsed by Juanita when she arrived hastily after lending a great deal of assistance in the room next door.
Juanita looked a trifle flushed, and even put out, which was unusual with her.
“That one!” she exclaimed, spreading her hands dramatically, and rolling her eyes a little. “That Senorita Howard!... Tonight I fail to please her! Eso no es possible!” Her hands continued to wave, and her plump shoulders to lift. “First it is the hair that is not right, and then the dress—the fastenings are all wrong! I alter the fastenings, and what then—? The hem itself is wrong!”
She uttered a sigh of exasperation, and turned away to Jacqueline’s dressing-table and proceeded automatically to straighten the articles on the top of it.
Jacqueline sat down in a chair and ran a buffer over her pearly-pink nails, which she never varnished.
“I wouldn’t worry,” she said soothingly. “But have you any idea how soon Miss Howard will be ready?”
Juanita shrugged her shoulders again.
“It might be any time, senorita.” And then, her conscience pricking her because she had done so little for Jacqueline: “I will fetch you a glass of sherry and a biscuit to partake of while you are waiting? Si?”
“No, thank you, Juanita.” Jacqueline dismissed her, and told her not to get too agitated, and went on with her gentle burnishing of her nails. She could picture the scene in the next room, with Martine in one of the moods which caused her green eyes to flash dangerously, and as she had been more or less imprisoned since morning—as a result of some whim of her own—her mood was probably almost explosive.
Juanita had reported that she had, however, completely recovered from her headache, and as there was nothing Jacqueline could do she decided to sit there patiently until word was received that Martine was about to emerge from her room.
She herself had enjoyed her afternoon, although there had been moments when it had been weighted with a considerable amount of sadness. That was when Dominic drove her to the little English cemetery at San Agariu, and she had left flowers on her father’s grave.
Dominic had waited for her outside the gates of the cemetery, adjoining the pink walled English church, obviously deciding that she would prefer to be alone while she laid her tribute of creamy-white roses on the grave. The roses had been selected for her beforehand by Dominic, and she felt grateful because he had obviously instructed one of the gardeners at the villa to cut them for her.
When she returned to the car she felt rather than saw that he looked at her carefully. Her face was a little pale and moved, and she kept her eyes lowered as he put her into the seat beside him at the wheel.
“The grave is so well kept,” she said. “There were already so many flowers there. Who—who is responsible for that?” looking up at him as if she didn’t really need to be informed.
“My grandmother, of course,” Dominic answered, his fine hands lying idly on the wheel. “She had a great personal
admiration for your father.”
“Yes,” Jacqueline admitted, “I know.” She sighed suddenly. “Your grandmother is so extraordinarily kind.”
He made no attempt to start up the car, and as the spot was so beautiful and so peaceful, with the village of San Agariu lying in a color-washed huddle about them, Jacqueline was well content that they should sit there for a while. Dominic lighted a cigarette without offering her one, because he knew she was not really keen, and the smoke climbed fragrantly to the umbrella pine above them, which provided them with an entirely adequate amount of shade. The afternoon was too warm for many human beings to be visible, apart from one old man who drowsed on a bench outside his cottage door, and from not far away the murmur of the sea reached them. Jacqueline could picture it breaking on a deserted beach almost immediately below them, and the lovely blaze of blue as the waves stole inwards, and then receded in a gentle flurry of spray like soap bubbles.
“It is easy to be kind when one likes a person very much,” Dominic remarked, after several seconds of silence, as if he had been turning Jacqueline’s observation over in his mind.
She stole rather a shy glance up at him.
“But, even so, not many people are as kind and understanding as your grandmother.”
“Perhaps not,” he agreed. He looked directly down at her, and his eyes held hers. “What will you do with yourself when you go back to England, little Jacqueline? Will you return to that job of yours in the antique shop?”
“I—I don’t know,” Jacqueline answered, taken a little by surprise. “I expect so,” she added.
“Do you wish to go back? Or do you approve of Senor Montez’s plan to keep you here?”
She flushed a little.
“Senor Montez was joking, of course. But, I suppose I—I might get a job—some sort of a job on the island?”
“Then you do like it?” he said.
“Of course.” There was no doubt in her voice. “It is an enchanting island. I think,” looking about her dreamily, “it must be the most enchanting spot in all the world.”
“You know nothing of Spain?” he asked.
“No.”
“One day you must see Spain,” he told her. And all at once he started to tell her about Toledo, with its houses and churches rising in tiers against the deep blue of the sky, and the brown hills which surrounded it, sun-baked, fierce—compared with the softer beauty of Sansegovia. He painted a picture of the Tangus slipping beneath its graceful bridges and curving like an arm about the partly walled city; of the Cathedral and the Cathedral square tucked away at the side of it, the equally tucked-away workshops that manufactured sword blades—the famous sword blades of Toledo!
He told her about the woods, not far from Toledo, where, if she was there, she might fancy herself in England, in the country around about Cambridge. He also talked eloquently—and his voice was very eloquent, she had discovered very soon after making his acquaintance, when he chose to make it so—about Madrid, where he had studied for a year, and Seville, which he loved, and Granada, where the landscape vibrated with heat in the summer time, and the silver-grey of olives climbed the high slopes of the sierra. In the whole of Spain, he asserted, there was no sight more luscious than the landscape of Andalusia. There were no villages more picturesque than the villages of Andalusia, where the cottages dripped flowers from window-boxes and clinging vines, and patios were ablaze with them. Even Sansegovia, flowery isle though it was, could offer nothing to compare with the Andalusian towns and villages.
“But Toledo is your home, isn’t it?” Jacqueline asked. “Your family come from Toledo?”
“My family’s estates are in Toledo—or outside it,” he admitted.
“And,” with a little smile, “although owning an English father,
I was born there.
So, yes, I belong to Toledo!”
She sat looking at him for a little while in silence, and he returned the compliment by looking closely at her. She thought that nothing could ever turn him into an Englishman, or take away that slight stiltedness which characterized his speech—that formality at times—which made
it so attractive.
His father had bequeathed to him his name, but apparently little else, and his mother had undoubtedly bestowed on him that hint of olive in his skin, and that strange burnishing of black hair. Jacqueline had never seen anything quite like it before. Sometimes she wanted to put out a finger and touch it, where the bronze lights gleamed amidst ebon darkness, and gilded the edge of a wave which refused to be disciplined by hair lotion and remained crisp.
And then all at once she became aware how hard she was staring at him, and taking in all those details of his appearance which, for some reason which she failed to understand altogether, were beginning to fascinate her more and more. She felt the self-conscious color sting her cheeks, and she looked away quickly; but Dominic, making no attempt to remove his own eyes from her face, and apparently scarcely heeding her blush, said with a very quiet and almost musing note in his voice:
“One day you will have to visit Spain—that is one thing you will certainly have to do!”
“I don’t think it’s very likely.” She smiled, with just a touch of wistfulness. “Although, of course, I’d love to do so.”
“You will do so.” He sounded suddenly quite sure as he noted that faintly heightened color in her cheeks. For a moment she had the queer feeling that his blue eyes actually caressed her. “There is no doubt about it.”
And then, while he started up the car, she took a last look at the little church, her father’s last resting-place, and the village of San Agariu, and on the way back to the villa they neither of them talked very much, as if neither was in the mood for light conversation.
But now that she was sitting waiting for Martine to complete her dressing Jacqueline began to grow a little impatient. She heard a car stop on the gravel outside, and decided that it was Neville Barr arriving. And that decided her to go downstairs ahead of Martine—a thing she always disliked doing for some odd reason—and join her host and the man who had been invited to act as her escort for the evening.
For there could be very little doubt that that was what he had been invited for.
Love is for Ever Page 7
