The Summer of the Spanish Woman

by Catherine Gaskin

  I danced every dance, the partners changing all the time. I danced with Richard and Edwin Fletcher. ‘You look very beautiful, Doña Carlota,’ Edwin said, teasing me with the Spanish title and speaking in Spanish. ‘I shall write Juan and describe every single thing about it all. Lady Pat, too.’ Then he added, unexpectedly, ‘I miss Jerez. I suppose I’ll fall back into the rhythm at Cambridge, but it feels strange now.’

  When I danced with Richard we didn’t talk at all.

  When Colonel Saunders approached me for the dance I had promised, I felt I knew him well enough to ask if we might sit it out. He looked relieved. I think by then he had had a good deal to drink, and didn’t want the public scrutiny of the dance floor. Because the room was hot we sat close to an open window, half hidden from the dancers by a bank of flowers and ferns. He brought me champagne, and a mess orderly hovered just slightly out of ear-shot with a tray and a full bottle, so that our glasses were never empty. We sat silently, almost companionably for a time. I said suddenly to him, ‘My face aches from smiling. You don’t mind if I don’t smile for a while?’

  ‘My dear young lady, you must do exactly as you please. You’ve put up with a great many pompous old bores like myself this evening. You’ve done us proud, very proud. Quite a sight, you are.’ I realised he was truly drunk. Just his soldier’s ingrained discipline kept him completely upright.

  ‘I’ve found it difficult, Colonel. I can’t talk about my father, since I never knew him.’

  ‘No, you didn’t. I remember your mother, you know. I was in Ireland with Drummond the time they ran away to be married. They nearly kicked him out of the regiment, but decided to smooth things over because it would have made things even worse for Lady Pat. Wasn’t a bit surprised when she left him.’

  ‘You weren’t …?’

  His speech was a little slurred. Captain Carton approached to claim his dance, and was peremptorily waved away by his senior officer. He withdrew. The orderly refilled our glasses.

  ‘Not a bit surprised. She was far too good for him. One of the most beautiful girls I’d ever seen. Only a girl then. Couldn’t imagine what she saw in the fellow. Of course he was handsome. Had a way with the ladies, I suppose. But hardly a gentleman, and when I remember what Lady Pat’s father was like I’m still surprised she couldn’t tell the difference between one sort and the other.’

  ‘You mean my father wasn’t a gentleman?’

  He was drunk enough to answer. ‘No. Never was. Opportunist. Always an eye for the main chance. Played cards to pay his mess bills. Nearly always won. But no one ever found him out in cheating. Either he had the devil’s own luck, or he was far cleverer than any of us knew. Oh, what am I saying? ‒ of course he was clever. If he’d had the right connections he’d have been made a general in time. But insisted on staying in the bloody trenches.’

  He waved to the orderly, and the glasses were filled again. ‘We’ve got to go through all this, because, after all, he did get a VC. But we all wish it had been someone else.’

  Despite the heat of the room, I felt cold. I had wanted to know my father, and now I was hearing what none of the speeches or citations would say. ‘He wasn’t liked, then?’

  ‘No. That’s the truth. Kept himself to himself except to play cards. No one ever refused to play with him because he was so damn good, and it was considered something to beat him.’

  ‘The men ‒ the enlisted ranks. Your letter said he kept up their morale.’

  ‘And he did. Never let a thing go. They were spit and polish even when they were in the trenches. He would wangle all kinds of things for them, little bits and pieces, anything that would make that hell a bit more bearable. He cared for them. But he didn’t care for them as individuals, although he knew everyone’s name. He cared for them as a fighting force. And, by God, he made them into that, even the rawest replacements they sent. You could always tell what sector of the lines Drummond commanded. Always in better shape than anyone else’s. It was a nonsense because someone of his rank should have delegated more, but he insisted on keeping his finger in, even with all the other work he had to do.’

  ‘So he was a good officer?’

  ‘He was a bloody fine officer. And as the men probably said, he was a right mean bastard into the bargain. No friends. No favours. And he was possibly the bravest man I’ll ever know.’

  III

  It was, after all, very simple. I went to the Palace, escorted by Colonel Saunders and Richard, stood in a long line of those who were to be honoured with various orders and decorations. The citation was read; I received the box containing the Victoria Cross from the King’s hand; I heard him say something and could never remember afterwards just what words he had used, so I had to invent them to tell my children. I curtseyed, walked a few steps backwards and it was the turn of the next person in the line. There were those in wheelchairs, some on crutches, and those led by others because they were blind. There were also others like myself who had come to receive a posthumous decoration for a dead relative. There were no feelings of celebration; the whole occasion was touched with sadness.

  We drank champagne with Mrs Saunders and the Colonel at lunch. There was a sense of relief that it was all over. The regiment now had its VC, and a small piece of tradition called Drummond had been grafted to its pedigree. We stayed at Brown’s Hotel, and that night the Colonel and Mrs Saunders would attend a small reception and dinner given by the Spanish Ambassador. Richard was also attending, as were a number of representatives of the sherry trade in London. The Colonel and the Spanish Embassy had co-operated to see that the presentation to the daughter of a Victoria Cross winner rated several paragraphs in most newspapers. There was added interest in the story that I had come from Jerez to receive it. A little more sherry might be sold because of it. It was too good an opportunity to miss.

  Many invitations had come from the London representatives of the sherry shippers. Mrs Saunders beamed at me. ‘My dear, you could make a regular season of it. It would take you weeks to get through all these. And just think, you’ve never been in London before! Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to stay a little longer ‒ with the Colonel’s sister? She would be delighted to have you stay … such a nice house, a large one, in Mayfair. It would be no trouble, I do assure you.’

  ‘Everyone is most kind,’ I said. ‘But there is a lot to attend to in Jerez. I don’t like to be away from my children for too long ‒ especially now that Mr Fletcher has just left.’ It was, of course, a fiction. I was urgently needed in Jerez for nothing. There was nothing Maria Luisa could not see to. The Marquesa’s distant eyes were on the household, and a new tutor had been engaged, again a relative of one of the sherry shippers, this time, a Scot. The only thing I longed to return to was the ongoing work of the vineyards, and that was denied me. But the honour of Jerez and the family demanded that I should not seem to have too much free time.

  ‘I shall stay just a few days, so I think it is best if I stay here at the hotel.’

  ‘And I shall make sure Charlotte sees something of London,’ Richard said. ‘How can she go home and confess to her children that she hasn’t seen the Tower? She’s been to Buckingham Palace, but she has to see the changing of the Guard. There are presents to buy for her sons …’

  That was the first time I knew that Richard intended to stay on with me after the Saunders had gone. The champagne suddenly came to life. Through a kind of blur I heard the Colonel saying something about my sons coming to school in England. ‘Must come and visit the regiment,’ he said. ‘Very glad to show them around. Who knows … one of them might take a fancy to join. Grandsons of the Marqués de Santander, aren’t they? Now there’s a great name to be remembered from the Peninsula War …’ The hunger for tradition was strong. But I knew that if it was the choice of the Marquesa to thrust one of my sons into the British Army, it would be into a regiment much grander than my father’s. I smiled at the Colonel over the champagne. And my heart was alight with the thought that I should be wit
h Richard for at least a few days. The luncheon party took on a rosy glow; I was almost able to forget the sombreness of the scene that morning at the Palace. It was a time to live ‒ even if just for a few days.

  * *

  I wore the Marquesa’s jewels again that evening to the Spanish Embassy. I greeted those guests who should have been so greeted, in very passable Spanish, giving them their correct title, getting around the intricacies of the Spanish names. The Ambassador seemed pleased. He was an old friend, he said, and very distantly related, to the Marquesa de Pontevedra, and that she had sent, in me, a most welcome ambassadress for Jerez. I wasn’t sure if he meant the town, or the wine. But whichever, the report would be favourable, I knew. I wanted it to be favourable for my sons, for my mother, for Maria Luisa. I saw many eyes on me that evening and I knew that the ten years since I had left Clonmara had changed me in a subtle fashion. I would never have my mother’s beauty, but maturity had brought its own grace. And most of all I saw Richard’s eyes upon me, and remembered he had loved the gauche girl by the seashore, the girl in her dew-wet gown in the rose garden. He had loved me without emeralds and diamonds.

  And I knew that I would wait no longer to give him that physical love that we both hungered for. The hours of that splendid evening passed with aching slowness as I did everything that politeness demanded. I talked, and I didn’t remember a word I said. I was complimented many times, and the words meant nothing. All I knew was that Richard’s eyes were upon me, and that we promised each other that when it all was ended, however many hours more we must wait, after ten years of loving we would finally give ourselves to each other.

  * *

  Colonel and Mrs Saunders bade me good-night, and good-bye, at the door of my suite. Richard had remained downstairs to smoke a cigar. The Saunders would leave by an early train tomorrow. I must come again to England very soon, they said. I would be the welcome guest of the regiment at any time I chose, and the Colonel’s sister, who had been a guest at the Embassy that evening, would be delighted to have me stay with her in London. I said my thanks, many times over, and was not impatient. After ten years there was no need to begrudge a few minutes more. I found myself inviting the Saunders to Jerez, and then was horrified at the thought of revealing our true poverty. I was growing like a Spaniard, I thought, and it was this that I first said, laughingly to Richard when he came.

  He smiled. ‘You’re more than half-way there, Charlie. You’ve got a strange sternness about you. You’ve got their dignity. You’ve caught some of their best qualities. And even asking the Saunders is their sort of hospitality. They can give everything, their last real, their last peseta, with supreme grace. And as for the rest, well, you’re Irish, and a mad Blodmore …’

  ‘But we’re both Blodmores, and at this moment there is no such thing as madness. There is only the inevitable good sense of something too long delayed. Richard, my love … It’s almost worth having waited, because now I know what I have. I have you. I can love you as a woman, not a girl. Not an ignorant, trembling girl on the shore, or in the rose garden. Spain taught me that, also …’

  I laid aside the tiara, and unclasped the necklace. I put Amelia’s great diamond aside, taking time to look at it and remember her. I remembered her anguished words. ‘Carlota, I am still a virgin.’ I was not a virgin, had not been when I married. But I was a new and a different woman when I lay in Richard’s arms. We made love as if we had all the years before us. There was no haste, no desperate urgency, but the climax was an explosion of joy and sweetness. Parts of the few memories we had were shared in those moments ‒ the wildness of the race by the shore mingling with the faint sadness of the rose garden. There was the assuaging of the great longing that days of Doñana had brought forth. I travelled the journey from a young girl to a woman in Richard’s loving that night. I was reborn and renewed by his body that night. It was the first time, in loving, that I had known the spirit as well as the body. I gained, and grew. I woke, better, older, wiser, infinitely happy, in Richard’s arms, as the first sound of the mingled traffic of the motors and the horses’ hooves began in the street below.

  IV

  A week later Richard saw me off on the P&O liner from Southampton. It had been a week on which I must feed for the rest of my life, and even after a few hours away from him the hunger was growing again.

  I had gone sightseeing in London only because he had insisted on my having something to tell my children; I had bought presents for everyone. I had had the photograph taken for my mother. I had accepted the most important of the invitations from the sherry families, for it would not do to arrive back in Jerez and have seemed to have snubbed them. It seemed right that Richard was my escort; he was accepted as such. Perhaps there was talk about us because of Elena’s absence, but if there was I did not care. I had done without for too long; I could not let the concern for convention eat away at the precious hours we had together. He lay in my bed each night, and I cursed the coming of the dawn, the sounds of the city waking.

  ‘I love you, Charlie,’ he said each time as he left me. And then, ‘Don’t go back to Jerez.’

  I thought about what he asked, but never seriously. Not to return to Jerez would be to abandon my children to the Marquesa, for I knew she would make sure that I never saw them again. My mother would be alone with Maria Luisa. Richard could not return to Clonmara, or his own sons. It was too great a price, and I could not ask him to pay it, nor could I pay it myself. It was too great a burden to place on our love. I knew I was reckless in my love for him, but I was not quite mad.

  ‘Good-bye, Richard,’ I said in the cabin of the steamer in Southampton, and I was ready to accept that it was the end.

  ‘I’ll come to Jerez,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t. It wouldn’t be like this. We would never be together. Why do you want to make it harder?’ And then I stopped his next objection by kissing him. ‘Go now ‒ please go. I don’t want to come on deck. I couldn’t bear to see you standing on the dock, and the water growing wider between us. You have always been a figure on another shore for me …’

  A figure on another shore. I counted over our times together as the ship ploughed on through rough seas to Gibraltar. A feeling of frightening emptiness had overtaken me. I was no longer brave as I stared out to the Atlantic horizon. As we neared Cadiz I remembered us walking the dunes at Doñana, I remembered sharing the boat as we crossed the river each day. Pitifully little I had to remember, and yet I had had the whole man. A bond that the years and the events they held had been welded. We had been one flesh, and now we had to go on alone. The rock of Gibraltar thrust itself up. I was returning; the slow cycle of my life would begin again. I felt it reach out, and I could not resist. There were other things beside loving, though in those moments I wondered, in a panic-stricken way, if I could make them enough. And then I shut the thought and the memory of Richard into that separate compartment it had occupied for these last ten years. I would have to make whatever there was enough; it would have to be sufficient, because there was nothing else.

  The presence of the Marquesa waited on the dock as we berthed. She had sent her very latest acquisition, a Bentley motor car, and an English chauffeur, to collect me. Her hand was there, and I was under it once more. The illusion that I had ever been free to make a choice of not returning had been only that ‒ a dreaming illusion.

  Chapter Eight

  I

  The hurt grew less as I saw and embraced my children; the hunger was still there, but they gave me food of a different sort. I knew from the way they clung to me that my absence had been real to them; for a time they forgot to ask for their presents. I saw the look that lighted my mother’s face, a brief return of the old beauty, as she emerged into the courtyard to greet me. Maria Luisa pressed me to her bony chest. ‘We have missed you, querida.’ From such things my comfort came.

  Half the town seemed to file through our house in the next few weeks. I had to tell the story of the Palace, the regiment, the sightsee
ing over and over. I did not try to hide the fact that Richard Blodmore had been there. I let it be thought, though I did not say, that the Saunders had been in London with us all through the visit. ‘The Colonel’s sister lives there … Elena had been unable to come.’ Half lies, but necessary. I brought greetings from the London partners to many of the sherry shippers. There was a pleasant round of the bodegas, to sit in the salas de degustación, sampling their sherries, and telling them of the reception at the Spanish Embassy, delivering the messages from their business associates. There was no strict need for it, of course. These people exchanged letters all the time. But it was an enjoyable courtesy. I took my mother with me, and saw her pleasure in getting dressed up, but noting how slipshod that dressing had become, rather wild and disarrayed, like her hair. She was heroically careful about the number of copitas she drank on these occasions; the salas de degustación at the bodegas were notoriously generous with their hospitality.

  I drove in person with Andy to Sanlucar to return the Marquesa’s jewels. She received me at once, and ordered tea to be brought. It was a fine day, so the long windows that looked down on the Guadalquivir were open; the sun poured into the room. The river traffic up to Seville was busy. It had always fascinated me to think that the gold and silver from the Americas had flowed into Spain at this point. The Marquesa in her black dress, her face in profile to the light, could have come from the seventeenth century, when the riches of the Indies had passed beneath these walls on the way to Seville. Perhaps her ancestors had sat in the same place and calculated what wealth those ships held that was theirs.

  ‘You have done well,’ she said. ‘I have excellent reports from our Ambassador.’

  ‘Then there is no need to tell you more. You already know everything that has happened.’

  She turned her face, and her lips twisted into a thin smile. ‘There are a few details I am not acquainted with. It matters that we were well represented. You should, however, have been more discreet with Richard Blodmore. I do not care for my godchildren to be associated with any scandal.’