The Summer of the Spanish Woman

by Catherine Gaskin

  They had just about exhausted their memories of the Spanish Woman, during which time Lady Blodmore had remained perfectly silent, letting them say what they pleased, correcting them in no detail, though probably she knew the story from another point of view. That certain smugness that stamped her, that confidence which came from more than the knowledge of her own beauty, was now explained. It was very likely that she had brought with her a very handsome dowry, and that Richard Blodmore would not have to pick his priorities when he set about putting the house and estate of Clonmara in order. There would be, I thought, money for that, and a lot more. And still he looked at me in a way he should not have done.

  So George Penrose returned to his first subject. ‘Then tell us, Blodmore, how you were fortunate enough to meet up with Lady Blodmore?’ There was just the faintest tinge of envy. I thought of him comparing notes with Lord Oakes on the luck of Richard Blodmore in marrying not only a beautiful girl, but one who had no family, and was the closest relative of the Spanish Woman of local legend and fable. I could almost see them wondering why, indeed, a much more advantageous match had not been arranged for this one niece. Richard Blodmore was handsome enough, they probably conceded, but with the run-down state of Clonmara’s finances, he was nothing out of the ordinary as a marriage catch. So they probed. And I could almost hear the story run through the county the next day, the excitement, the callers, the curiosity. It was all coming, and my mother knew it too. Her face was white and strained. She had had nothing to add to the tales the two men told.

  Elena Blodmore then permitted herself her only indulgence. She answered for Richard. ‘My aunt has an estate at Sanlucar de Barrameda, in the province of Cadiz. Don Paulo ‒ her husband, the Marqués de Santander, has sherry vineyards and a bodega and a house in Jerez, which is only a short ride from Sanlucar. My husband and I met some years ago, at various social functions in Jerez and then …’

  ‘And then,’ Richard said, ‘I went back again early this year …’ He sipped his wine gravely. ‘I may tell you gentlemen, that I was employed for some years in a very humble capacity in the bodega of Diez, O’Neale. Then I was sent to work in their London office. Also in quite a humble position. Don Paulo was kind enough to invite me back to Jerez for a visit …’ He straightened, as if determined to say what he wanted to be said. ‘No, I was invited back to Jerez when it became known that I had inherited the earldom of Blodmore.’ He held up his hand, as if to silence any objection. He refused, it seemed, to put a polite face on it. ‘Yes, they did know in Jerez, that I was next in line to the title but after all, Lord Blodmore was not an old man. He might have married. Produced a son. In fact, it was expected of him, one would have thought.’

  The two men were embarrassed by such frankness. Everyone had thought the same about my grandfather, but no one was supposed to say it this way.

  ‘So … I had the good fortune to meet Elena again, and she consented to be my wife.’ It sounded so cold, a formal arrangement.

  ‘Well, then ‒’ Lord Oakes strove to cover the silence. ‘That must be an interesting part of the world. Near Cadiz, eh? Old Wellington and all that. Nelson off Cape Trafalgar. Seville. Yes, lots of British connections down there. This town … Her … What did you call it, Blodmore?’

  ‘It’s pronounced Hereth ‒ which is simply the Spanish name for what we call sherry. It’s the centre of a rather small, unique wine-growing region which produces the grape that becomes sherry. But they don’t produce it the way any other wine is made. The system is unique, and is practised only in this small region. The grapes for sherry are grown only in the area outside Jerez itself, the Puerto de Santa Maria, and Sanlucar de Barrameda, where my wife’s aunt has her estate. Sherry is produced by something called the solera system. Something that gives a uniquely consistent, fortified wine. There are, therefore, no vintage years in sherry. The system is one of constantly renewing ‒’ He gestured. ‘Forgive me. One tends to break into lectures on the subject, especially if one has ever worked for a sherry shipper.’

  ‘My grandfather …’ I said. Everyone turned to look at me. Perhaps it was the first time I had spoken during the whole meal. ‘My grandfather used to have his sherry and brandy shipped in by the butt. Different kinds …’

  ‘Uncommonly fine it is too,’ Lord Oakes affirmed. ‘First rate sherry, always ‒ and brandy that’s better than any of the French stuff I’ve tasted. Perhaps a trifle sweeter, but excellent. Any rate, there’s always been plenty of it on tap at Clonmara. Blodmore was always a very gracious host ‒’

  My mother broke in, her voice still flat and too calm. ‘This Hereth ‒ did you say? Is it spelled J-E-R-E-Z?’ She continued as Richard Blodmore nodded. ‘Then that was the place my father went when he went to Spain ‒ at least, that was one of the places.’ She looked at Lady Blodmore. ‘He must have gone there with your aunt ‒ to that estate near there.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I asked. ‘Grandfather never said anything about that time in Spain.’

  She passed her hand across her forehead, as if striving to pull together her thoughts. ‘No, he never talked about it. But it was there he went, just the same. The solicitors told me after he was killed. There’s some sort of property there. A house, and a small vineyard, which seems to be no longer in production. The information was in a letter he gave them only to be opened after his death. They had no more idea than I that he had actually bought property while he was in Spain. There’s been no income from it all these years, or at least, none that came here to Ireland. There are also some shares in some sherry company.’ She turned to Blodmore. ‘Is there a company called Thompson?’

  ‘Fernandez, Thompson is the sherry firm headed by the Marqués de Santander.’

  ‘Yes, that’s it. That’s the name. Father’s solicitor, Siddons, wanted to write at once to this Thompson place, enquiring about it. They asked if I wanted someone to go out there to investigate, but I hadn’t made up my mind. Solicitors keep pushing these things at people at times when they don’t want to think about them. You’ve no idea what those solicitors are like ‒ two of them here within days of Father’s death, worrying at me like terriers, urging me to do this and that. Telling me I had to leave. I had to pull myself together. Send someone out to look at this property in Spain and see what it could be sold for. Things like that. I wouldn’t be pushed. Father hadn’t meant it to be that way. After all, if he’s had these shares and some sort of house there all these years, he kept them for some reason. They can’t be worth much. Everyone knows he sold everything except what was entailed. But Siddons thought if he could get a decent price, it might be enough to set us up in the place in Galway. Heaven help me, I’d as soon be in Spain as that place out in the bogs. Did you ever see it, Oakes?’ She shuddered. ‘The back of nowhere. Miserably poor land, no society within about thirty miles’ travelling. The house falling down. The Blodmores owned a lot of land out there years ago, not all of it so bad. But they sold everything they could ‒ the way they sold the other place down in Cork. No one would take what’s left in Galway, or the house ‒ a great damp horror of a place with buckets in the attics to catch the water from the leaks. It doesn’t bring in any money. The tenants are so poor, and you can’t get blood from a stone …’ She switched the subject abruptly. ‘And are all your horses from that part of Spain, Lord Blodmore?’

  He nodded. ‘They claim, and with justice, that the finest horses in the world are bred in Andalucia, and in Jerez the conditions for breeding are perfect. The Andalucian-Arab was bred by the Carthusian monks there, and I’d match it for grace and intelligence and stamina against any in the world. It was this strain which first supplied the Spanish Riding School of Vienna.’

  My mother was all attention now. The talk turned to the technicalities of horse breeding, as it did so often in my mother’s circles. I let it flow past me, while I pondered what I had just learned, and wondered why this was the first time I had ever heard of this place in Spain my grandfather had bought. Surely my mother sho
uld have told me ‒ perhaps she had, and in those first days of shock and grief, I hadn’t heard her. But it was possible she had barely registered the fact, and it had been too trifling in the opinion of Siddons to press my mother about it. But she rarely allowed herself to be pressed when she didn’t want it. To talk of such things, to begin to make arrangements, even to tell me what she had learned would have been to admit that my grandfather was truly dead, and we had come to the end of our time at Clonmara. We had, each of us in our own way, shut our eyes and refused to look towards the future.

  Now the future was with us, and I wanted to know. I grasped at this frail straw.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said, breaking into the sacred subject of horses, ‘about this place ‒ Jerez. Did you know the house my grandfather bought?’

  ‘The house has been pointed out to me, but I’ve never been inside it. It’s been shut up all these years, I believe. Oh, there are caretakers there, but they don’t open up to people like me. It’s a large house, in the middle of town.’

  ‘And the town ‒ what’s it like?’

  He considered for a moment. ‘Very pleasant. Very ancient. And, surprisingly, until you know its history, very English ‒ or should I say a nice blend of English, Irish and Scottish. England has traditionally been Jerez’s best customer for sherry, though of course it goes everywhere in the world. But the trade brought the English there, and a lot of them liked what they saw. And a lot came because it seemed as good a place as any to start up in business when they’d been driven from their homes by religious persecution. It was a haven for the Catholics who fled these islands. Catholic Spain welcomed them, but they have evolved to this day into a close-knit little group, all of whom, I’d say, have some strain of English, Irish or Scottish blood in them. Most of them speak English like their own language, and it’s a custom to send boys to school in England, and for the girls to have English governesses. All of them have nannies, and some of them speak their first words with a distinct Scottish accent.’

  ‘I say, Lady Pat, sounds nice,’ Oakes said. ‘Biggish sort of place, is it, Blodmore?’

  ‘Because of the bodegas ‒ the places where they store the sherry ‒ it looks big. It has, however, all the manners and preoccupations of any small town. It has a strain of old Spanish nobility there because it was once a border town between the Christian and Moorish kingdoms ‒ hence its full name, which is Jerez de la Frontera. The monarchs demanded that certain nobles settle there to give the place some sense of permanence. They built great fortresses, and walls, to hold out the Moors. Medina-Sidonia is up in the mountains near there, and the Dukes hold huge estates in the region. It has rich and poor, of course. Some people live in what are truly palaces. And then, of course, there are the others … the poor who own nothing.’

  ‘The vineyard?’ I demanded. ‘Do you know anything about the vineyard?’

  He shook his head. He looked questioningly at his wife who also shook her head. ‘No. But then as one sees the miles of vineyards outside these three towns where the sherry is born, it is impossible to say who owns what. In 1896 the disease, phylloxera, which began in France and ruined the vineyards there, finally reached Jerez. Since then a good deal of the albariza soil, which is best for the sherry grape, has never been replanted. Many families of sherry shippers were bankrupted. Some, who had other resources, hung on. Slowly they are getting their vineyards back into production. It requires a full replanting, the grafting of an American root stock, which is resistant to the phylloxera on to the native vine. An expensive and slow business. You can never hurry the wine.’

  ‘Sherry wine and horses, eh?’ Oakes said reflectively. ‘Marvellous combination.’

  ‘And beautiful women,’ George Penrose added, with heavy gallantry, nodding to Lady Blodmore.

  She took this as coolly as she took everything else. She turned to my mother. ‘Perhaps you should investigate Jerez yourself, Lady Patricia.’

  At these words my mother jerked herself out of her dreaming state. They were the first words of banishment that had actually been spoken. Her voice was terse. ‘Oh, don’t worry. We’ll be taking ourselves off. But not to Spain.’ She turned to Richard Blodmore. ‘Do you remember that old saying they used to have when the Catholic landowners in Ireland were all either supposed to become Protestant or give up their land and go west of the Shannon? They used to say “To Hell or Connaught”. Well, it’s Connaught for Charlie and me, I suppose, and it surely will be hell. Father hadn’t meant it to be that way. There was always a sporting chance that one of his flyers would come home. There would have been money. After all, no one expected him to die when he did. He wasn’t old, just unlucky. That last bank …’

  Then, for the benefit of the Blodmores, if they didn’t already know it, the two men recounted once more the story of how my grandfather had died. I didn’t want to hear it again. Hadn’t I followed him blindly, as I had followed him in everything, over that last bank and almost ridden down his fallen body? They kept on remorselessly. ‘Always led the field he did, by God …’ The supreme tribute. ‘There never was a finer Master if you looked from here to Cork …’ They relived famous hunting days, days when the scent had been strong, the hounds keen, the horses unwearying, and the chase had lasted until almost the coming of the dusk. How many kills had I been in on myself, proudly at my grandfather’s side? But was that all he’d taught me? I was acutely, belatedly conscious of how little I was ready for this life which had suddenly been thrust upon me. Why did they ‒ the men ‒ continue to leave girls in such ignorance? ‒ always with the thought that some man would come along, marry them, and take charge? But as my mother’s eyes grew more misty over her wine, as her speech grew more slurred, as more and endless stories of the hunt were told, I began to realise that it was I who would have to take charge. The thought made me gulp down my wine in sudden fright. I coughed and spluttered, and they all turned to look at me. As I coughed the split under the arm of my dress became a long rent. Tears of breathlessness and humiliation stood out in my eyes.

  And that cool little beauty, that well-endowed niece of the Spanish Woman of long ago looked at me, and barely concealed her smile.

  The dessert was served; it was a heavy lump of sponge smothered in whipped cream; its only saving grace was that it had been soaked in my grandfather’s best cream sherry. Lady Blodmore toyed with it. She would, I thought, be making plans for the changes that would come when we were gone. Cook and Farrell and Mary might look for other positions. Lady Blodmore was used to better than this. But she betrayed no impatience. She could afford not to. It was all hers; she had all the time in the world, and all the money too, I thought. And she had Richard Blodmore.

  I tried to attract my mother’s attention. If we didn’t leave the table soon, my mother wouldn’t be able to stand. The hunting stories would go on forever. I tapped my finger lightly on the glass to get Farrell’s attention, and he, understanding at last, went and whispered in my mother’s ear. As the meaning of the words penetrated, she got to her feet so abruptly that the slender chair tipped over behind her. She didn’t notice it. ‘Ladies, I think we might …’

  She walked from the room with a serene dignity, not at all aware that she swayed.

  ‘Coffee in the drawing-room, Farrell,’ she said. ‘Gentlemen, don’t be too long over the port.’ I doubted that the drawing-room had been dusted in a month. ‘Come, Charlie, dear,’ she said as she left the room, loudly enough for the men to hear. ‘We must begin to make plans. We mustn’t impose on Lady Blodmore longer than necessary. They do say the Galway Blazers are a very good hunt. We’ll have to find out about that …’

  * *

  It was very late before my mother could be persuaded to go to bed. I helped her undress. When she lay back against the pillows, her hair tumbled down about her shoulders, she looked at me and she hiccuped. This seemed to bring on a fresh spell of weak, helpless laughter. ‘Well, Charlie, he’s here at last and he’s married. Rotten luck you and I have, don’t we, dar
ling?’ The laughter left her voice, and the tears she had fought were back. ‘And he’s so damned good-looking, isn’t he? In so many ways he reminds me of Father. Would have been easy to fall in love with him. Quite easy …’

  Then she turned her head away from the light of the candle, and in a little while I heard her deep breathing, and later, a gentle snore.

  Sleep came reluctantly for me. My nerves thrummed with the kind of exhaustion I had never known before ‒ the strain of that terrible dinner, staying up to see our guests off, checking that more hot water and coal was brought to the Blodmores’ rooms, waiting to see my mother into that merciful sleep. Even as I dozed, and woke, and dozed again, I heard once more the talk at the dinner table, and along with it remembered the silences of Richard Blodmore. He had said so little, except to give the information asked of him. But his very silence had been more telling than words. I woke finally from my few hours of sleep to escape my dreams of him, and waking, he seemed to be more urgently present. The first twitters of the birds had begun about the house, the soft beginning that would swell to the full throat of the dawn chorus. I got up and went to the window. Yesterday’s fresh wind had gone, and, as always when it was still, I could hear the crash of the waves on the long strand behind the dunes. There was the dewy fragrance of early summer on the air.