She seized on our entrance with a kind of relief. ‘Ah ‒ so you found her then. More than most of us can do these days. Marvellous horse that of yours, Lord Blodmore. Comes from the Hispano-Arab breed, Lady Blodmore tells me. He looked so fresh you’d never imagine you’d just ridden him down from Dublin.’
‘We stopped overnight on the way, Lady Patricia. But I thought I said that in the telegram.’
‘Telegram? ‒ I didn’t receive a telegram.’ My mother rounded on the maid who was trying to find a place on the littered table for a tray piled with teacups and plates of clumsily made sandwiches, and big wedges of fruitcake. ‘Mary, was there a telegram? No one told me ‒ no one ever tells me anything.’
‘Sure how would I know, m’lady? I’ve not charge of things like that. Mr Farrell always brings the post in here.’
My mother was now feverishly searching the piles of papers and unanswered letters spread on the table, and on the elegant little writing-desk at which she was supposed to write her notes, which were seldom written. Her face grew long as she discovered the telegram form and read it. ‘Oh ‒ how stupid of me! I ‒ I don’t bother much with the post any more. It’s mostly bills. Farrell must have forgotten to tell me there was a telegram.’ She turned to Blodmore. ‘How unmannerly you must think us.’ She gestured at the confusion of the room, and then her voice cracked in a laugh of desperation. ‘But if you’d given us two weeks’ notice instead of two days we still wouldn’t have been ready for you. Isn’t that so, Charlie? Charlie will tell you how hopeless I am.’
I never admired her quite so much as at that moment ‒ her life and immediate surroundings in total disarray, and still laughing, putting a good face on it all. The two men standing at the fireplace began to laugh also, and so, after a small hesitation, did Blodmore. Only Lady Blodmore remained silent. Perhaps the rapid exchange in English had been too much for her.
‘Can you forgive me then?’ my mother asked, and knew she was forgiven by Richard Blodmore, at least. ‘Oh, and I’ve made things even worse, not even introducing my daughter. This is Charlie, Lady Blodmore.’
‘Charlie?’ Lady Blodmore repeated with a small frown. ‘Is it not a boy’s name?’
‘Charlotte,’ Richard Blodmore said quickly. ‘Her name is Charlotte. Charlie is a … a …’ He didn’t know how to finish.
‘A pet name,’ my mother said.
It might have helped, I thought, if she had been plain, or plump or insipid. It might have helped if she had had the kind of dark Mediterranean looks one might have expected in a Spaniard. She was none of these things. She was golden-haired, with vivid blue eyes strikingly outlined with brown lashes; she had delicately modelled features all seemingly perfectly proportioned; she had small delicate hands, soft in my own as I took one of them and stumbled out some words of welcome. She had tiny feet in soft leather boots, and she wore a dark-blue travelling costume. Her whole style was as elegant as the way she wore her hair. I was miserably conscious of my own breeches and shirt, with the dirt of the stables on them, my uncombed hair, the stiff feeling of my face where the salt spray had dried on it. I wished then that I remembered to wear gloves more often when riding, because my hand felt calloused and worn like a scrub-woman’s, like sandpaper against the silk of the other’s hand.
The Countess was young, hardly older than myself, but she had a far greater sophistication; I fancied that she knew not only Madrid, but Paris and London and other great cities as well. Her lips faintly twitched in a smile that revealed perfect little teeth, but it was a smile of judgement, not of friendliness. I guessed at once that she thought she had been dropped suddenly into a land of barbarians, people with titles but no manners. One of the men standing at the mantel, holding a glass, gazing with admiration at the new Countess, was himself a viscount, but he was only half-hiding his delighted appreciation of the whole hideous mess of the room, the chaos of the arrival, my mother’s desperate, but laughing acceptance of it. All the same, Lord Oakes, while admiring the looks of the new Countess of Blodmore, was withholding judgement, waiting to see if she could ever belong here, if she was a ‘sport’. I knew that he was very fond of my mother, and he would not like to see her, and through her, our whole society, condemned in the bright blue eyes of the exquisitely turned-out young Spaniard. As for myself, I wanted to slide out of sight, hide myself, do anything to remove myself from the scene, and from the consciousness of Blodmore, whom I had not once directly looked at since we had walked back from the shore. Never until, or since, the moment of my grandfather’s death had I known such misery. But it was a different kind of misery, some new ache which I had had no experience of, and yet knew I must conceal. I lifted my head, stared straight at Blodmore and found his gaze on me as if there was no one else in the room; then I turned away just in time to take the teapot from my mother’s unsteady hand.
‘Shall I pour, Mother? Do you take milk or lemon, Lady Blodmore?’ There was however, as I should have known, no lemon.
I knew my face blazed crimson. I was cruelly aware of that delicate golden creature seated on the sofa, and how graceless I must appear by contrast. And I was never, for a second of that terrible hour that followed, an hour in which my mother and her friends switched from tea back to their brandy, and the laughter between them grew louder, the tales they told to Blodmore and his Countess ever more tall and uproarious, an hour in which both tea and brandy were spilled, a stack of newspapers was knocked off the table, taking the sandwiches and fruitcake with them, and shortly afterwards one of the dogs was sick from eating too much of both, never was I unaware of Blodmore’s eyes on me, and the awful echo of his words, ‘too late …’
* *
Somehow we managed to put together what passed for a formal meal that evening. My mother prevailed on her two friends to stay. ‘You’ll never desert me!’ she had uttered in a piercing whisper which everyone heard. So grooms were dispatched to their various homes with messages to their wives that they were detained, and they both settled, with a satisfaction which I recognised as being the forerunner of the wonderful story they would have to tell the whole county the next day, to witness the first evening of the new Lord Blodmore in his inherited kingdom.
Everyone was pressed into service in the next hours to do what they could; Nanny was brought out of the nursery to help Farrell clean silver. The maids scurried about, carrying hot water and linen, more anxious to catch a glimpse of the new Earl and his bride than to see to their comfort. There would be a story for them to tell across the countryside the next day, also. As my mother was about to show Richard Blodmore and his wife to the principal guest-room, I abruptly checked her.
‘Mother ‒ don’t you think …? Well, shouldn’t Lord and Lady Blodmore have Grandfather’s room? After all …’ The anguish on my mother’s face halted me.
‘Of course! ‒ how stupid of me.’ She turned and hurried across the passage. ‘I didn’t think.’ The room had not been used since my grandfather had died. It was a light, high-ceilinged room whose elaborate plaster decoration was touched with faded gilt. It smelled faintly of dust and damp. But its occupancy signified more than anything else the new owner of Clonmara had finally come to take possession. My mother flung open a window, and the wind that followed last night’s storm blew in, stirring the hangings on the big four-poster bed. ‘Lovely view of the sea from this room. My father preferred this side of the house ‒ the other looks towards the mountains.’ Her voice was choking a little. She rushed to fling open the door to the dressing-room and there her gaze fell on my grandfather’s belongings still on the bureau ‒ his brushes, his tray of shirt-studs and cuff-links, a silver-framed miniature of my grandmother, an elaborately wrought box which contained a pair of duelling pistols he had prized. She rushed to the bureau and swept all the things together. ‘Here, Charlie, take these. I must get the drawers emptied. I’ll send hot water … There’s a bathroom across the hall, but we’ve had trouble with the boiler recently. The hot water’s … erratic. The bed will need
airing …’ Richard bent and helped me pick up the small, spilled mementoes of my grandfather’s life as my mother hurried from the room. I followed as quickly as possible, desperate to be out of there. As the door closed behind me, a torrent of Spanish broke from Lady Blodmore, answered and cut short, also in Spanish, by her husband. I stood, clutching my grandfather’s belongings, and watched my mother go downstairs. But instead of going to the kitchen to give the necessary orders, she headed at once to the sitting-room where her two friends waited. At the door she paused, and I saw her brush her eyes with her hand. Then she lifted her head and entered and a moment later came the sound of laughter once more.
I left my grandfather’s things in my own room where my mother would not see them; then I went to the kitchen and tried to organise generous amounts of hot water, kindling and scuttles of coal to take the smell of damp from the unused rooms, hot water jars for the big bed. To do anything about the boiler I knew was hopeless; it had been out of repair for months, and no hot water would flow into the marble bathtub.
In the kitchen there had already been some sort of altercation between the Spanish maids and valet, and the Clonmara servants. Since none of them understood what the other lot shouted, it was a stand-off, with neither side willing to give way, and Farrell should have been there to smooth things down, but he seemed to have gone into some state of shock himself, and would concern himself only with the silver and the keys of the wine cellar. The cook glared balefully at the Spaniards, and sullenly at me. Nanny stood in the middle of the big stone-flagged room, her face grim.
‘Miss Charlotte, it is not my place to give orders in this kitchen, or to straighten out the tangles. But someone must do something if we’re not to be disgraced entirely.’
And so I, for the first time, and unwillingly, began to give orders.
I had just time to scramble into the old green velvet dress, too tight now across my breasts, and beginning to split, I noticed, under the arms, before Farrell sounded the gong for dinner. The dining-room looked presentable enough as the soft light shone from the candles on the newly polished silver and the Waterford glass; it was easy to overlook the worn carpet and chair-covers, the stained silk wallpaper which some former Earl of Blodmore had brought from China. The Chinese Chippendale furniture was as beautiful as ever. I wondered then why I was suddenly so conscious of the shabbiness of Clonmara. It had been home, always ‒ beloved, familiar. I saw it now with a stranger’s eyes, and parts of the picture dismayed me. It was all, of course, the result of my grandfather taking too much money from the yield of the estate in his attempts to make a provision for my mother and me. It was a long time since money had been spent on the house or its furnishings. What money there was to spare had gone on horses, always horses. But from now on, the returns from the estate belonged to Richard Blodmore, and he only would decide how and where they would be spent. He would have hard decisions to make, I thought, among the many needs of Clonmara.
My mother looked beautiful, if somewhat disarrayed, in pale green satin, her famous dark red hair drawn up in an enchantingly precarious mass. Since she seldom wore anything but her dark riding-habit, she had never worn black mourning clothes for my grandfather, and I had none either. I wondered if the lack of them made us seem unfeeling to Lady Blodmore. She couldn’t know that for both of us my grandfather’s death had gone deeper than the wearing of black clothes; we had neither spirit nor money to fuss with such things. Lady Blodmore wore blue again, a light blue which gave her the appearance of fragile china. In deference to the hacking-jackets which our two guests still wore, Blodmore had not changed into a formal dinner-jacket, but wore a dark suit. It made him seem older, more sombre. I flushed as I felt his eyes on me again, in the tight old green velvet. Didn’t he know how dangerous it was to look at me like that ‒ and how little poise I had to counter such looks? Those about us weren’t entirely blind, though my mother and her friends had obviously decided that the way to get through this strained occasion was to wash it down with a great deal of wine.
Farrell had seen to it that the best wine had been brought from the cellar, but beyond that, the whole meal was a disaster. We ate a soufflé which had degenerated into something like scrambled eggs. There were potatoes roasted black and hard, and chicken, tough and underdone. I could not remember a dinner quite so bad at Clonmara, but had I ever really noticed the food we ate? It had been adequate, and had seemed all right ‒ until now. Had the altercations in the kitchen unnerved Cook, or had things always been like this, with Farrell and Mary colliding with each other in the service, banging platters, forgetting serving spoons and forks? It was the first time we had entertained at Clonmara since my grandfather’s death, but had things really gone downhill so quickly in those few months?
The wine had loosened their tongues, and Lord Oakes and George Penrose evidently thought it was time they could decently ask a few questions. After all, the Blodmores were going to be neighbours, Richard Blodmore would be Master of Hounds, and they both knew they were going to be closely questioned by their wives when they got home.
‘And what part of Spain, may I ask, Lady Blodmore, are you from?’ Oakes smiled hazily at her across the table. ‘Where was this chap, Blodmore, lucky enough to find you?’
She had taken very little wine, and the edge was not off her reserve. She answered quite coolly. ‘I was mainly brought up in Madrid, Lord Oakes. But during the holidays from the convent I usually went to whatever part of Spain my aunt was. Galicia, Cadiz, Valencia, Asturias …
‘Elena,’ Blodmore put in, ‘was orphaned very young. Her aunt is her only close relative.’
‘How sad,’ George Penrose said. ‘Awful shame not to have a bit of family around. No one to fight with, what? Doesn’t your aunt have any family then?’
She answered as if she were relating the story of someone else’s family, not her own. ‘My two uncles were killed before I was born in a climbing accident in the Alps. They were said to be great sportsmen, and they went to climb some impossible peak. My aunt’s younger sister, who was my mother, was murdered with my father at their estate in Mexico. The aftermath of the revolution ‒ bad feelings as well as bad men lingered. My brother was killed with them. I was only a year old at the time. I remember nothing of it. I was sent back to Spain and placed in the charge of my aunt.’
‘Your aunt is not married?’ George Penrose pressed. ‘She has no family?’
‘My aunt is married to the Marqués de Santander. She has no family,’ Lady Blodmore confirmed quietly.
I could see that Richard Blodmore knew they would go on with the questioning until they had the whole story. The arrival of the Blodmores was, after all, the most interesting thing that had happened in the county since my grandfather’s death. Lord Oakes and George Penrose meant to have their full measure since they had stayed to get it. So Blodmore gave up sawing at the chicken and said, ‘Elena’s aunt once visited Clonmara ‒ many years ago. She was then Marquesa de Pontevedra. That particular title may descend through the female line, and she came here after her brothers were killed.’
Oakes’s mouth dropped open. He took a hasty gulp of his wine and almost choked in his excitement. ‘Good Lord! I remember her! The Spanish Woman! Just imagine that! The Spanish Woman! You remember her, Lady Pat? ‒ Penrose? You remember her. A long time ago. You would have been about … about …?’ He was looking at my mother and suddenly fearing he was being ungallant.
My mother was staring at Elena. Her voice dry and flat. ‘I must have been about ten years old ‒ yes, about ten.’
‘And I’d have been about sixteen-seventeen, thereabouts. A long time ago. About twenty-five years. Good Lord!’ he repeated. ‘The Spanish Woman ‒’ Then he corrected himself. ‘Oh, I say, I do beg your pardon, Lady Blodmore. Terribly rude of me to call her that. But y’see, I didn’t remember her title. Nobody much does, I’d say. But we remember her. We remember the time she was here. Everyone expected Blodmore and she would be married. He followed her to Spain. Stay
ed out there quite a long time, and came back ‒ unmarried. Must have broken his heart. He never remarried. And now you’re here as … as Lady Blodmore. Romantic, what? Very romantic, eh, Lady Pat?’
‘Yes,’ my mother said. She tapped her glass, and Farrell rushed to refill it. ‘Very romantic.’
‘Well then.’ Penrose lifted his own glass. ‘Well then, Lady Blodmore. Permit me a toast. To the return of the Spanish Wo ‒ Lady,’ he corrected himself. I hardly dared look at my mother’s face at that moment.
‘Do you remember, Oakes …?’ They had started once again on the tale of the Spanish Woman, and although it was twenty-five years since she had been here, the way they told it, I could have believed it was yesterday. They enjoyed it, enjoyed the embellishments the years had given the story. They savoured every detail, real or imagined. The years in between lent colour and a kind of enchantment.
‘You remember the string of magnificent horses she brought with her? But she found our own lot suited the hunting better … Took a string of Irish horses away with her when she left …’
I could almost have recited the story myself. Twenty-five years ago a Spanish lady whom my grandfather had met in London had come to visit Clonmara. She had been expected only to stay a few weeks, just until the end of the hunting season. She had been a great horsewoman, and much admired on the hunting-field. She was also, it seemed, a great and very important lady. The Viceroy had given a special reception for her in Dublin Castle. She had been invited to stay at houses all over the country. She had gone, usually in the company of my grandfather, and she had lingered, returning often to Clonmara, all through the summer. People all around here remembered her; the details piled on as the years made them more obscure. They talked of her carriage, her horses, her clothes, her jewels. No one had ever said she was beautiful, but they had never forgotten her presence. And then in the autumn she had set off again for Spain, and my grandfather had followed her. Everyone talked with excitement of the marriage that would surely come. Blodmore was not only lucky, they said, but for once being sensible as well. The lady’s fortune was far greater than his, but wasn’t he the best-looking man in Ireland, they argued. Fair exchange. He had stayed a long time in Spain, and sent no news to friends. Then he had come back, alone. He had not married the Spanish lady, and he had married no one else. It was then he had begun to plunge recklessly with whatever money he could squeeze from the estate. Twenty-odd years ago the rot had begun. The evidence of it was now all about us.
The Summer of the Spanish Woman Page 3
