The Summer of the Spanish Woman

by Catherine Gaskin

  I went downstairs to the library, a room seldom used since my grandfather had died. He had liked this room, spent much time in it, his presence seemed to linger, as did the smell of his cigars. How typical it suddenly seemed of the chaos of our lives that it took me so long to find the dictionary. The painful knowledge that had come to me last night that I would have to go out and fashion a life for myself and my mother pressed upon me still harder. What had I been taught? ‒ almost nothing except how to read and write and sit a horse. I didn’t even have the traditional skills of a woman; I couldn’t sew, I knew nothing about cooking or menus. Those sort of things had meant little to my grandfather, and he had been foolishly indulgent of my reluctance to learn, just as he had been with my mother. I felt that I wasn’t stupid, but I knew I was ignorant, and the time for easy learning was gone.

  I couldn’t spell the word whose true meaning I sought. How could one look up a word one couldn’t spell? Because the early morning light had not penetrated as far as my grandfather’s desk, I lighted a candle, and the light fell on the yellowed pages as I hunted, and at last found the word. Primogeniture. There were several meanings, but one thrust itself from the page at me. The principle, custom or law by which the property or title descends to the eldest son. Then I sought the other word, the more familiar one, the one so often used as I grew up and one which must have assumed nightmare proportions in my grandfather’s mind so that the had taken enormous risks to try to secure something that stood outside its restrictions for his daughter to inherit. Entail. Settlement of succession of landed estate, so that it cannot be bequeathed at pleasure by any one possessor. Thus Clonmara and the title had been my grandfather’s for his life, but no part of it could be sold to provide for his daughter. They were ancient laws by which the English had held together large estates so that they should not be broken into small pieces, and the power and wealth pass away from the man who held the title. That was how my grandfather had explained it, and never before had I troubled to look for its meaning in the dictionary. He had also explained that in penal times in Ireland, its reversal had been used by the ruling English against the native Catholic families of the land, a special law passed which determined that any inheritance must be evenly divided among all the children; thus, within a few generations, the Catholics, their land divided again and again, were reduced to the level of peasants, each owning only a few acres on which to raise yet another family among whom it must be divided. It was not unknown for the eldest son of a Catholic family to become a nominal Protestant, to take the oath of loyalty to the English Crown in order to escape this law. Most of the others had been driven off their lands and herded west of the Shannon. Thus they had the choice of turning Protestant or going to the poor and rocky land in the phrase my mother had used last night ‘To Hell or Connaught’. I knew the history of Ireland was strewn with the wreckage of families who had torn themselves apart for these reasons, sons who had turned Protestant and dispossessed their own Catholic fathers. There were bitter memories of rebellions which had failed, of leaders executed. Catholics were seldom now found among the land-owning classes. For so long the right to sit in Parliament or even to vote had been forbidden them. They had been excluded from the bar the bench, the university, the navy, and all public bodies. They had been forbidden to possess arms, or a horse worth more than five pounds. No Catholic could keep a school, or send his children to be educated abroad. These laws had changed, of course, but the Blodmores were still very much Protestant, a part of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy which had ruled this land for so long.

  But my grandfather had ignored all this, the whole system by which the country was ruled, when he defied tradition and expectation and married the daughter of a small shipping merchant from Waterford. Her beauty, and a true love of her could have been the only reason, I thought, because she had had no fortune of her own, and she had been a Catholic. My grandfather had been very young, and had only just inherited the title and Clonmara when that had happened. A typical act, though, for one of the ‘mad’ Blodmores. We had never been a family noted for prudence. It was an academic point now to wonder, if a son had been born of the marriage, whether my grandfather would have insisted on his being brought up a Protestant. But there had been no sons, and my grandfather had honoured his promise, and the Catholic Church’s demand that his daughter, Patricia, be brought up in her mother’s faith. And so, in my turn, had I followed her. I was inclined to think it a lot of nonsense. My mother only attended Mass when she felt like it, and I scrambled through my ‘Hail Marys’ without thinking there could be much difference between the God of one church or the other. But it meant, in Ireland, that my mother and I were hopelessly divided from those who ruled. Not only lack of money made me ineligible for, in Nanny’s words, ‘any of the young gentlemen around here’. I was also the wrong religion.

  And Uncle Bertie, too, I thought. He’d failed in his duty to marry and produce a son, to which the title and estate would have gone. Perhaps, though, families being what they are, my mother and I wouldn’t have fared much better if he had. When money and property came in the door, I had noticed that sentiment and family feeling usually went out the window. But Uncle Bertie had died in the Boer War, and that point too was academic. The Blodmores seemed to have singularly failed to do what was expected of them.

  I looked around the still shadowed walls of my grandfather’s favourite room, and to the view he had so much loved. The windows faced the break in the dunes where the distant, and now calm and shining light of the Irish Sea could be seen. It was here, opposite the desk, he had hung the portrait of his wife, who had lived only five years after their marriage. If the artist had not flattered outrageously, the beauty of the shipping merchant’s daughter would have been enough to make many men act as madly as people considered my grandfather had done. My mother’s portrait, painted when she was about fifteen years old, characteristically in hunting clothes, hung on the same wall. She had a strong measure of her mother’s beauty, along with the red hair she had inherited from her father. My own portrait hung on the wall behind my grandfather’s desk out of his direct gaze. Perhaps I had reminded him too strongly of the man who had stolen his daughter ‒ my father whom I had never seen.

  I wondered if Elena Blodmore would pack away the portraits when we were gone. ‘When we are gone …’ I said the words aloud, trying to force their reality into my tired brain. I thought of that strange revelation last night that my grandfather had property in a place called Jerez, a place he had never spoken of, and something my mother had shied away from speaking of because, to do so would have acknowledged with too much finality, the fact of the Earl’s death. In those first frighteningly lonely weeks when I had shunned the company of the hunting-field, and my mother desperately sought it, she had thrust my grandfather’s keys into my hands. ‘We must clear out his papers, darling. There are probably old letters and things … things we wouldn’t want to leave.’ The task was beyond my mother at that time, perhaps at any time. So during the winter afternoons when the darkness had come early, and my mother had entertained her friends in the little sitting-room, I had come here and unlocked the drawers and the cupboards under the bookcases. The litter of a lifetime seemed to pour out. Most of the estate books of Clonmara were in the steward’s office near the stables, and no concern of mine. Richard Blodmore would have the task of reading them, and learning how the money had been drained away from Clonmara. But I found the jumbled accounts, going back over generations, of the place out in Galway. It did not now even pay the wages of a steward to administer it. I had wondered, but did not dare to speak of it to my mother, how it would support us. In one of the desk drawers, carefully preserved, I found the few letters that had been exchanged between my grandfather and the girl he had married ‒ few, because the courtship had been so brief, and they had never been separated after marriage. My grandmother’s letters surprised me. Passion I would have expected from my grandfather; he had never been a man of half-measures, never lukewarm
. But his letters had been answered with an equal, perhaps even a stronger passion, by the woman he married. I was glad to find she had been no coy little girl, given to Victorian simperings. Her legacy was clearly evident in my own mother. Perhaps it had shown itself in me, yesterday, with Richard Blodmore, on the shore.

  But along with the jumble of our life, one set of papers was clear and separate. They had been tied with faded pink legal tape, each a separate sheet, and they went back more than twenty years. Each was dated on the first day of the year. Each contained the same words. Each was headed Jerez, and each was signed, in the same hand, with the name, Santander. Each of them repeated the same words. ‘Ella está viva.’

  The words puzzled me, and burned on my memory. Now the words Jerez and Santander had taken on a troubling familiarity, two words my grandfather had not spoken either to me or to my mother, and yet were in some way, part of his life. I took the keys from the place I always left them in the top drawer, and opened the one below it. It was quite a deep drawer, but it contained only this one ribboned sheaf of notes. I took them out, shuffled through them, stared at the words for a long time. ‘Ella está viva.’ The handwriting had remained almost the same over the more than twenty years the single sheets of paper represented, handwriting firm and strong, with a hint of impatience in it. Santander … Jerez. I sat and stared at the words, growing chill in this early summer dawn, and then the candle beside me flickered in the draft as the door opened.

  He didn’t hesitate, but came directly to me. I was forever to remember that this man always acted with almost unbearable directness towards me, as if the feeling of truth between us was not only harsh, but inescapable as well, and that we had better do without formalities. If we had indeed fallen in love yesterday as we had raced each other, and then walked beside the swollen sea, then now how he acted with me had been the only way. It had not been the wise, the prudent way, but that was how it had been. I had an instant to wonder if he was possessed of that seemingly fatal flaw of the Blodmores in having no caution in the way or the place they gave their hearts.

  ‘I’m sorry, Charlie.’ He was close to me, leaning across the desk, his eyes fixing mine so that I could not look away. ‘God, how sorry I am. I can’t be sorry that I love you. But I’m sorry I let you know it. If I hadn’t kissed you … If I’d any streak of decency I’d never have let you know.’

  The warm blood mounted in my face; I was both angry and hurt. He had the power now to hurt. ‘You really think I’m such a child? The very last of being a child went out of me yesterday. Don’t you think I would have known? ‒ I would have known if you’d never touched me, never even spoke to me. The way you look at me ‒ no one has to be very wise or old to understand that. Do you suppose the others didn’t see it ‒ didn’t wonder and guess? You have a beautiful wife, but you don’t love her. She’s everything I’m not. She despises me because I’m poor and badly dressed, and I don’t cut much of a figure in the drawing-room. She thinks my mother’s a disgrace, and that we’re probably two of a kind. But still she knows. She knows now that you’d rather have had me. Me ‒ a nobody!’

  ‘It’s only the truth she knows, Charlie. I can’t help it if she’s shrewd and can discern the truth. Elena is far from being a fool.’

  ‘But you don’t love her, do you? You married her, but you don’t love her. If you loved her you wouldn’t even have seen me.’

  ‘Charlie, I never even asked myself if I loved her. Love has never seemed important to me until this time. I never believed in it. Romantic love was for fools and dreamers, and I didn’t have any of that in my nature ‒ that’s what I thought. I just wanted Elena. I’m an opportunist, Charlie. I have been, all my life. I’ve had to be. Your noble, well-born friends around here would probably describe me as a bounder and a cad, and they’d be more than half right. Elena is a glittering prize. She’s rich and she’s beautiful. And I didn’t have a hope in the world of marrying her until your grandfather was killed.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I’m saying what everyone in Jerez knew. I was nothing. My hopes and prospects were nothing until Lord Blodmore died. And he died before his time. He could still have married and had a son …’

  ‘Yes … yes. We knew that. My mother used to urge him, and it was the only time he seemed to get angry and upset with her.’

  ‘So, you see how it was. He had sent me to school in England and paid for it, probably because he didn’t want Clonmara inherited by an ignorant buffoon. But there his patronage ended. I had to make my own way after that. I found out he had some slight connection with the sherry trade, so I hunted around in London, using his name, until I found a position as a clerk with the London office of Diez, O’Neale. Not Fernandez, Thompson. That door seemed to be firmly closed. Then I was sent out to Jerez to learn the shipping side of the business. I wrote to your grandfather and asked for letters of introduction. He refused them. He said he had no acquaintances left in the sherry business. He knew no one in Jerez. So when I went out there I introduced myself to Don Paulo, the Marqués de Santander, because I knew it was in his bodega that Blodmore had some small interest still. Quite obviously he wanted nothing to do with me. I was nothing but a clerk working for a sherry shipper. The fact that I was possibly Blodmore’s heir made no impression. So I was stuck there in Jerez, writing out bills of lading all day, and living on next to nothing. There were no blooded Arabian horses for me then, I can tell you. Sometimes, perhaps out of pity, someone would invite me to a social function. I got my riding by being willing to get up at dawn and exercise other men’s horses and their polo ponies. Of course no one took me as being eligible for any of their precious, guarded daughters. They remembered Blodmore, although he claimed they would not. Twenty-five years isn’t so long in the memory of a small community like that. They hadn’t forgotten him, any more than your friends have forgotten the Spanish Woman, as they choose to call her. I may tell you, she bears one of the most ancient and noble titles in Spain, to which are attached many privileges. She outranks her husband, Don Paulo, the Marqués de Santander, and being the sort of woman she is, she is known by her own title, the Marquesa de Pontevedra. Sometimes I wonder if she even remembers she once married Don Paulo ‒’

  ‘Richard, what is this? Why do you tell me these things? I don’t care what happened before. I only know what’s happened now.’

  He put his hand on mine, as if to quiet me. ‘Be patient, Charlie. I want you to know how it happened. I want you to know the sort of person I was before ‒ before yesterday.’

  I nodded, but half my attention was in feeling the warmth of his hand in the chill of my own. Had the hands, which until now had been sensitive only to horses, suddenly expanded to be able to respond to the sensual touch of a man? It had been a swift growing-up.

  ‘I was there in Jerez for a few years. I met Elena once or twice, but she was still a child, a young girl. You understand that her aunt has a number of estates apart from the one at Sanlucar, and quite apart from the house where one would normally expect the wife of Don Paulo to be living, which is in Jerez. When the Marquesa de Pontevedra pays her husband a visit, the whole town knows it, it is so rare. She’s a strange woman ‒ very independent. Hardly a woman you’d expect in Spain ‒ except that she’s been so used to her own freedom, the freedom that her wealth and position give her. A grandee of Spain has a natural freedom that’s not given to ordinary people, men or women. And believe me, if your friends around here expected Blodmore to marry the Spanish Woman, then so did the whole of the sherry district down there in Andalucia. They remembered how she brought Blodmore to Sanlucar. They came in the autumn for the hunting at Doñana. Then, quite suddenly, she married Don Paulo, and Blodmore was left high and dry. He stayed on about a year in Jerez ‒ bought that house. What he hoped to gain by it, no one knows, since the Marquesa had married elsewhere. And then he went away, and never came back. But he’s remembered. Oh yes, he’s remembered. They remember him as a very handsome man, someone who
rode well, and shot well. And they laugh a little, perhaps spitefully, to think that she dragged this handsome Irishman all over Spain, and then right under his nose, married someone else. The town still nods its head over that, believe me, because Don Paulo, although he’s good-looking and of a noble family, was very hard pressed for money at that time. To marry the Marquesa de Pontevedra was something quite unexpected. He’d been married before ‒ had a young daughter, sixteen or so, who died. His sherry business was floundering ‒ which was probably why he permitted your grandfather to buy into it. He needed the money. Now he’s rich in his own right. Being able to borrow from his wife had given him the chance to take the opportunities as they came. He’s in many things beside the sherry trade. It was a lucky day for Don Paulo when the Marquesa threw over Blodmore and chose him instead.’

  ‘But Elena ‒’

  ‘I’m coming to Elena. I told you I met her once or twice, no more. She wasn’t often to be seen in Jerez society ‒ too young, still at school. After a few years I was sent back to the London office. It was supposed to be a promotion, but I missed having even the few things I’d enjoyed in Jerez. I missed the climate, the horses, even the little bit of society I had there. London’s a dreary place for someone who’s hardly more than a clerk. I thought of chucking it, trying Australia or Canada. And then your grandfather was killed and everything changed.’

  ‘It changed here,’ I said.

  ‘It changed for me. Almost at once I was invited by Don Paulo ‒ just about commanded, you’d say, to visit Jerez. I went, rather gladly. I didn’t want to appear here at Clonmara too soon. I wanted you and your mother to have time to adjust. Perhaps, if I really told the truth, I hoped you’d just pack up and go. So I accepted the invitation, and found myself staying at Don Paulo’s house ‒ which I’d only been in once before ‒ and finding the Marquesa and her niece, Elena, in residence. It was clear, almost from the first day, that the Marquesa intended Elena and me to marry. Why, I’ll never exactly understand. I wasn’t rich ‒ and Elena could have had her pick in Spain. But why should I question what most other men would envy me? Why ‒’