II
The interference of the Marquesa continued in our lives, insistent, pervasive, and, because of Carlos, impossible to reject. She now quite often. appeared in her husband’s house, Las Fuentes, a thing almost unknown, Maria Luisa said, before our time. She came to be near our children; Sanlucar was too far for casual visits. We got accustomed to the infuriating high-handedness with which she would send around her carriage with orders that the children were to come to Don Paulo’s house for the comida. Nanny, furious with the break in routine, would bundle them into their best clothes, change her uniform, and go with them. I was never invited. On her return, Nanny’s face would be heavy with wrath and frustration. ‘I pray to the Holy Mother for patience, Miss Charlie! That woman ‒ I beg your pardon ‒ the Marquesa, is ruining them! Just ruining them! She bids me wait in another room while she eats with them. Very unsuitable stuff they eat. Francis was sick on the way home! All over his best suit. And she has the cheek to complain to me that they don’t know their table-manners! She lets them behave any old way, and yet she complains when they take advantage. And take advantage they do! Every child does. It’ll take me days to get them settled down again …’
‘Was Don Paulo there?’
‘Yes ‒ he always comes directly back from the bodega when she is in the house. I heard one of the servants say so.’ It was the first time Nanny had ever admitted to understanding a word of the Spanish which flowed about her. I wondered how accurate the information was, but I would not ask Carlos. ‘Don Paulo,’ Nanny continued, ‘eats with them. Can you imagine a man like that with three young children spilling things all over the place, and shouting and carrying on? It sounds to me as if they turn into a pack of larrikins as soon as they get with her. Showing off. Shouting. Well, she does them no good, I can tell you. They come back here and turn up their noses at nursery food. Every time there are new toys for them. Now she’s promised a whole set of trains and tracks ordered from London. To be set up at Don Paulo’s house, of course, so they have to go there to play with them. Imagine sending for toys for children from London when there’s a war on. Well, there are no rules for some people, that’s all I can say.’
She was right about there being no rules for the Marquesa. No rules of manners or tact. The first news I had of a tutor for Juan came through Carlos. Don Paulo told him at the bodega that the Marquesa had secured the services of one of the young Fletcher cousins ‒ the Fletchers were a long-established sherry family in Jerez ‒ who had been invalided out of the Army as a result of being gassed, and sent to his Jerez relations to recuperate in the Andalucian sun and air. He had, Carlos reported, a double first from Cambridge in History and Mathematics. Juan was very fortunate.
I went myself to protest to the Marquesa. She was not there at Las Fuentes, so I had the long drive to Sanlucar. After keeping me waiting for an hour, she consented to see me. ‘It is impossible,’ I said at once. ‘We cannot have this man as a tutor for Juan.’
‘And why not?’
‘To begin with, I haven’t even met him. He may be totally unsuitable.’
She laughed at me, unpleasantly. ‘I think, Doña Carlota, that I am a better judge of that than you. You are young, inexperienced. What do you know about bringing up children?’
‘What do you know, Marquesa?’
The thrust brought an unaccustomed flush to her face. If I had hoped to be at all persuasive, I lost that hope now. She did not forgive such things.
‘I am a woman of experience, Doña Carlota. I have been about the world, and I know these things. Your children need to be taken in hand. They are good children, intelligent … but they lack polish. That Nanny is, after all, just an ignorant Irishwoman, hardly more than a peasant. Do you expect to leave the teaching of your children to her?’
‘We will teach them. Myself, my mother, Maria Luisa.’
Her laughter was openly scornful. ‘You will teach them! Your mother ‒ that fool! And you are almost as ignorant as the Nanny. What have you seen except a backwater of Ireland? Oh, no ‒ my godsons shall have much better than you!’
I had to accept the insult. There was too much truth in it to invite argument. ‘And you think that this young invalid man, just because he’s a Fletcher, and has a first in History and Mathematics from Cambridge is suitable? Do you not think he will find tutoring a small boy a very boring task? Surely he is looking to better things than that?’
‘At the moment we take what we can get. When the war is over I shall have the pick of tutors, experienced with children, willing and anxious to come. Young Fletcher will do. It may be a boring occupation, trying to bring himself down to the mind of a five-year-old, but I am paying him to be bored. Paying him very well.’
‘And you think the money will somehow make him into a suitable person to mould Juan’s character! What will he talk to him about ‒ ancient Greece? Will he start him on Latin?’
She waved her hand in dismissal. ‘At least he will not talk to Juan eternally about horses! Or the fairies in Ireland ‒ or the prospects of the next harvest, which, I think, is about the extent of the conversational range in your house. This young man speaks no Spanish, and I have forbidden him even to try. Juan must learn everything in English. His accent must be corrected. Now he speaks with an Irish accent, and constantly tells me of how the wicked English stole Ireland from its rightful owners. For the great-grandson of a Protestant Earl, whose title was conferred by the English Crown, that is rather an outlandish view to hold.’
‘It happens to be the correct one, historically. Perhaps this young man’s broad education will allow him to concede that.’
She raised her eyebrows in sardonic amusement. ‘You, also? I can see that someone like Edwin Fletcher is badly needed in your household to counteract these rather dangerous ideas. I have arranged for him to tutor Juan for four hours each morning. If it does not inconvenience you, he will lunch with you, and then return to his cousin’s house. It will do Martin and Francisco good to hear his conversation.’
‘We do not normally eat lunch with the children. They are under Nanny’s care.’
‘Then it is no wonder their manners require correction. I suggest you make the arrangement that all should eat together. Your kitchen can surely stretch to that ‒ or are you afraid of the excesses of your mother being too closely observed?’
I got up and left her, but not before I heard the cruel laughter that followed me. As I climbed into the landau I held my head high for Andy’s sake, but acknowledged defeat. There was that unhappy grain of truth in everything the Marquesa had said. I was as hungry for the good of my children as I was for the good of my land and vines. Education for them was like fertiliser for the soil. I could not pay for both.
* *
So the young man called Edwin Fletcher entered our household. I was prepared to dislike him, and was terribly conscious of the deficiencies in my own education. After all, as the Marquesa had brutally pointed out, what had we three women among us experienced, except a backwater of Ireland, and this small conservative town in Spain? Carlos, at least, had had his time at school in England, his many visits to London and Bristol, but Carlos was too impatient to tutor his children, even if he would give them the time. So Edwin Fletcher had to be accepted with what grace we could muster. Nanny’s revolt against the children joining us at lunch was hard to quell. ‘It’s not done, Miss Charlie!’ Her only experience of life in a big house had been at Clonmara, which had not been the best example of how a house should be run. How did she know such things? The gossip circle of the nannies of Jerez was as far-flung as that of the old aunts. I wondered what embellished tales Nanny told to her friends to make life at Clonmara seem much grander than it had been.
At first all the things I had feared from Edwin Fletcher seemed to be true; he seemed to be aloof, supercilious, with no particular liking for children. The Marquesa must indeed have been paying him handsomely to take this position; it was obvious that he needed the money. Not all the Fletchers were rich.
He was thin and tall, with a pronounced stoop, and a dark, drooping moustache which suggested that he attempted to hide a weak mouth. But the sight of him, the way he moved and walked, brought its own reaction of pity. Under the suntan he had rapidly acquired here, his skin seemed grey, his face was strained. He had an air of fragility. Sometimes he went into terrible spasms of coughing, and seemed to struggle for air. At such times he was embarrassed and profoundly apologetic. Carlos, who had perhaps feared a rival at his table, dismissed him with a shrug. ‘An academic milksop!’
‘One, however, who has served his country,’ my mother said.
‘Oh, we have become very patriotic, haven’t we, Lady Pat? I wonder how your good husband is faring as he renders his patriotic duty? I suppose he really has to try, doesn’t he? These Regular Army men have got to show that all the years on the parade ground produce men, don’t they?’
I very soon saw that what appeared to be aloofness in Edwin Fletcher was purely shyness; he was grateful for the hospitality of his Fletcher cousins, grateful to be in Spain instead of languishing in an England which had no further use for him. He was grateful, also, for his salary. To my surprise he appeared to want to work for it, even to trying to cope with Juan’s waywardness, his short span of concentration, his insistence in breaking into Spanish at every opportunity. It was true that Edwin Fletcher had no special affection for children, but he was prepared to substitute patience. In time Juan sensed that he would not, could not, wear down this thin, ill young Englishman, nor provoke him to the bursts of temper which characterised his father’s behaviour. He was a gentleman, not a servant, and could not be ordered about. Gradually the two drew together, Juan’s efforts to interest Edwin Fletcher in horsemanship equalling Edwin’s efforts to interest Juan in the rudiments of English grammar. They seemed to come out roughly even.
But one thing above all others made me see Edwin Fletcher as a friend ‒ his open and unaffected admiration for my mother. ‘What a perfectly splendid lady!’ he said of her once, as we lingered over coffee while my mother took the children back to Nanny in the nursery. ‘So beautiful. Such great spirit. And I hear all round Jerez that no one is her equal on a horse …’
He did not despise us, then. In terms of his learning, we were very ignorant, but he knew how to see merit in other terms. My mother had a gift of compassion, and it was she, more than any of us, who helped Edwin over his distress and embarrassment when the fits of coughing shook his gaunt frame. She could be sympathetic without seeming to pity him. ‘We are all of us wounded in one way or another, Mr Fletcher,’ she once said to him directly. ‘It just shows with some people more than others. That’s the only difference.’
When he left us to make his way back to the Fletchers’ house, Maria Luisa made a great bustle about getting out her account books, slamming them down on the table with unusual noise, grumbling about bills unpaid, prices rising and rising and our income not at all. I knew it was not the prices or the unpaid bills which so much concerned her. She was used to them.
‘Maria Luisa, what is it? It’s not the bills ‒ I know that.’
Her lips puckered sourly. ‘You have a new favourite, I see. He could do your accounts very well for you, I’m sure. Squeeze out a few more pesetas. After all, isn’t he supposed to be an mathematician, or some such thing?’
I put my arms around her and tried not to laugh at the absurdity of Edwin Fletcher wrestling with household economics. ‘Maria Luisa, how could we live without you? Our lives would fall apart, and you know it.’
Her eyes dimmed. She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyelids. ‘Oh, querida, what a load you have on you. Look at all of us! Look at all of us seated here about this table. And now another. And he is sick, and he will lean upon you as we all do. And look ‒ already he is half in love with you in his stiff English way.’ She reached over and smoothed back the stray wisps of hair from my face. ‘Yes ‒ querida, I’m a selfish, jealous old maid. I want to be first in your life, as if you hadn’t all the others.’ She shook her head. ‘Why can’t you ever have things the easy way? Always the hard way for you, Carlota. Never the calm, sensible, easy way. What is it in you that must always make things so hard for yourself?’
I didn’t even try to answer her. I just closed the books she had spread on the table, and stacked them neatly.
‘It is time for the siesta, Maria Luisa. And one more around the table isn’t so very much, is it?’
But she had frightened me, just the same. I didn’t want to count the numbers around the table.
III
It was Edwin Fletcher, with myself and Juan, who witnessed what happened that sharp, frosty morning in December when my mother’s life was almost ended.
Edwin had looked grey and exhausted when he had arrived to start lessons with Juan. I suspected that his sometimes choking struggle to breathe often left him sleepless. I urged hot coffee on him, and when he had drunk it, I suggested that we take a walk to the stables to watch my mother working with Balthasar. The growing strength of the morning sun would warm him, I thought, perhaps help those tense and tired muscles to relax. Juan was delighted at the prospect of a half-hour’s freedom from lessons. He adored his grandmother, and he displayed an inordinate pride in her accomplishments as a horsewoman.
As we walked the corridors of the house, and through the first courtyard, we talked of the war. I had become reliant on Edwin to interpret the bare facts of the news which reached us. ‘It’s a stalemate,’ he said. ‘And a very bloody stalemate at that. The whole British-French offensive has failed. We are just about in the same places we were at this time last year. And the British have used gas for the first time …’ I had kept my pace at a slow stroll because I had noticed that Edwin could not manage anything faster without gasping for breath. Pepita and Juan raced on ahead, returned to us, and then raced off again. Edwin paused for a moment by the old cracked fountain, holding his face up to the sun. ‘I can hardly believe it’s December. Thank God I’m not in England. I don’t think I could cope with the fogs yet …’ He rarely mentioned his illness, and never talked of his own experience of the trench warfare where it had its beginning. ‘I wasn’t a gallant soldier,’ he had once said. ‘I just served my time. The gas rolled over us, and that was the end of it for me.’
He still gazed up towards the sun, as if he could never have enough of it. ‘How long do you think it can go on? ‒ the war?’ He lowered his face, looked at me, and shrugged. ‘Now that our masters have committed us to this unbelievable blunder, this sort of dreary slaughter could go on indefinitely. We will go on, I’m afraid, until one or other side is too exhausted to make another effort. But don’t look for victory. We will just fall down in the mud and sleep like the dead.’ His tone suddenly sharpened. ‘And watch for trouble in Ireland when it’s finally over. All those likely Irish lads have become very handy with weapons. Such expertise doesn’t go to waste. You think you’ve had troubles in Ireland before this. Just wait until this lot gets back home from the war and finds things aren’t any better and that England’s still trying to hold on there. You should write to your cousin, Lord Blodmore ‒’
I tugged at his arm and pointed to the archway leading to the stable-yard. Juan, who had been jumping about in the crisp morning air, had stopped, and seemed frozen into his posture. Pepita gave a few sharp barks. Then Juan turned to me, his voice thin and shrill with fear. ‘Mama! Mama!’
I ran, leaving Edwin behind. I could hear my mother’s voice calling, pleading; I could hear Balthasar’s voice, his deep whinny, the furious thrust of his breath through his nostrils. And I could hear Carlos’s voice, angry, shouting commands ‒ Carlos’s voice with a note of fear I had never heard before.
Carlos was in Balthasar’s saddle when I reached the arch. He rarely, if ever, mounted the stallion these days, not since he had bought Carmen. He seemed somewhat jealous of the relationship that had grown up between my mother and the stallion; he tended to belittle her achievements in the exercises of the High Sch
ool. I think he begrudged her the praise won for her and Balthasar.
I will never know exactly what had taken place before our arrival; it was never possible to find out. I am certain only of what I saw. Carlos was in the saddle, but the stirrups had been looped up as they are when certain of the High School exercises are performed. I didn’t know whether my mother had permitted him to mount, or he had demanded it, but it was certain that Balthasar did not want him in the saddle, and was determined to be rid of him.
The great stallion was rearing on those huge, mighty hind legs, lunging, pounding down with the terrifying forefeet, rearing again, his voice sounding like a trumpet of wrath. With no stirrups, Carlo had only the grip of his knees and thighs, and he was doing what a rider does only in fear, he was holding on by the reins, tugging at the stallion’s mouth, using his whip in a way that was intended not to control, but to punish. Balthasar’s white flanks were streaming with blood where Carlos’s spurs had sunk. It couldn’t last. The horse was stronger than Carlos, and he was in a sweat of fury. One great last lunge, in which he assumed a savage, crude variation of the classic Capriole, was too much for Carlos’s precarious balance. He came off, over the stallion’s head, landing with a heavy thud on the hard ground.
It was not the end. Carlos’s use of the whip and spurs, perhaps his very presence on his back, had infuriated Balthasar. Those mighty, slashing forefeet came down again. I heard the awful impact as one foot struck Carlos’s arm. Then the stallion reared again, and Carlos lay directly beneath him. The cries from my mother, the screams of rage from Balthasar had brought Pepe and Jaime running, but they, like us all, seemed frozen. Andy was nowhere in sight.
My mother’s commands had had no effect. I doubt that the enraged horse even heard them. Hatred was in his own cries. My mother, as the stallion reared again did the only thing she could do. She leapt for the bridle, managed to loop both her hands through it, and she hung on. Her weight jerking Balthasar’s head around, was just sufficient to deflect the aim of the stallion’s forefeet. He just missed coming down on Carlos’s chest.
The Summer of the Spanish Woman Page 30
