* *
It was an almost unbelievable joy to learn that there was something else I could give. I undressed that night in the room Amelia had used, which adjoined Luis’s. I felt comfortable there, not a usurper; Amelia and I had been too close friends for her to have begrudged me this place, and I looked at the things she had used with affection. I felt mellow with the wine, happy and tired but relaxed. I had dismissed the maid who had wanted to fuss over me. I smiled at the image in the mirror as I brushed my hair. Outside the cicadas sang.
Without awkwardness I went then to Luis’s room. He was already in bed, a book, which he was not reading, held in his hands.
‘Carlota …?’ He half sat up. ‘Is there something wrong?’
‘What should be wrong?’ I kicked off my slippers and perched cross-legged on the bed. ‘I just felt like gossiping. What a good day it’s been … I’ve laid my blue dress with the wine stain on it away in tissue-paper. I’ll laugh every time I think of it. What a good party it was! ‒ Jerez never went to a wedding quite like this one before.’
‘There never has been a wedding like this before. It was the most muddled party I ever saw, and the best.’
I took the book from his hands. ‘Don’t go to the bodega tomorrow, Luis. Let’s take a picnic to the vineyards. I can sit in your vineyard house and look across at Las Ventanas Verdes and remember all the hours you spent there instructing me in caring for the vines. Remember how Amelia named it? Remember how she came there only a few days before she died? She loved it too, Luis.’
Then I added quietly, ‘We do not need to remind each other of the night Carlos died. You have spent some of the worst hours of my life with me, Luis ‒ and some of the best.’ I moved up the bed, and slipped beneath the sheets, placing my head against his shoulder. I felt his body go rigid. ‘Oh, Luis, hold me. Just hold me like a child. I feel safe with you. No need to be brave any more, because you will take care of me. We have been such friends, and now we need never be parted.’
‘Querida … querida …’ His body relaxed against mine; one arm slipped beneath me, while the other stroked my hair. ‘We will go anywhere you want. A real journey, perhaps. Not just to the vineyards, but a real journey together. You have had so few treats in your life, Carlota. Let me spoil you a little as if you were my child. The way I hold you, as if you were my beloved child ‒ my dearest companion.’
‘Your wife, Luis.’ I placed his hand against my breast.
What he had thought impossible was happening. I felt the sweat break on him, I felt the surge of his manhood against me. We clasped each other, but not like children. It was over swiftly, because for Luis it could not long be sustained, but we became lovers. The marriage was a real one.
* *
It was a fact that Luis, in his happiness, could not help proclaiming. Not that he ever spoke to anyone but myself about it, but it was self-proclaiming in the way he bore himself, the ease with which he slipped into the new relationship with me. Before all Jerez he talked of the coming child, and from his talk no one could have doubted that it was his own child he looked forward to.
Maria Luisa smiled and shook her head. ‘You have been a sly one, Charlie. You have used some magic and transformed that man. Now he acts and talks like a man, and one would think there had never been a child born in the world before.’
‘It is his first child, Maria Luisa. When a man is over fifty and has given up hope …’
‘But two wives and no children. It does not look so well for him.’
I shrugged. ‘The first wife may have been barren. Amelia was ill before she married him. What does the town say, Maria Luisa?’
‘The town thinks you are a seductress, and a shameless hussy ‒ and a very clever woman. And Don Luis thinks you are the Madonna. And he struts like a man. For the first time he struts like a man.’
I smiled, and cradled the baby growing in my womb. ‘That is good. That is very good.’
We did not make the wedding journey Luis had suggested. I wanted to savour the first utterly peaceful period I had ever known in Jerez. My children had settled down happily in Luis’s house. My mother and Maria Luisa stayed on at the Plaza de Asturias. My mother glowed in a kind of reflected happiness. ‘I will not be a silly old woman spoiling your time with Luis. You should be able to sit at your own table at nights, talk as you and Luis have always been able to talk. Maria Luisa and I do very well where we have always been. We are two old women together, and we suit each other.’
So I left it that way. I stayed quiet as the summer advanced towards another harvest. I stayed in the shade of Luis’s garden, watching the swans on the lake, remembering as if it were a far-off dream, the first night I had come to the party here and Carlos had kissed me, and Don Paulo had watched us. Sometimes I seemed to hear the haunting flamenco music of the gypsy woman, the mournful guitar. I thought of these things only occasionally as my children played about me, or did their lessons with the quiet young Scot, Ian Frazer. Perhaps the memories were more persistently invoked because Martin seemed more serious and more determined than most other young Spaniards to develop his evident skill with a guitar. He sat with me very often in the garden and played while I waited for my child. I tried not to think of Richard Blodmore. I thought of my baby, and of Luis. I wanted it to be his baby. Despite my love for Richard, if I could have willed it, this would indeed have been Luis’s child.
But when our son was born, no man could have made it more his own. The child had the light-greenish eyes of the Blodmores as the other three did; he had the Blodmore cast of feature. My mother smiled over the cradle. ‘He looks like my father. Will you call him Luis?’
‘No,’ Luis said. ‘I think he should be called after Carlota’s father. We shall call him Tomás.’
When she was alone with me Maria Luisa adjusted her glasses and examined him closely. ‘All Blodmore,’ she pronounced. ‘He will grow up looking just like you and your mother. Looks as if he’ll have red hair, too ‒ when he gets a bit more.’ She gave a wicked little chuckle. ‘And the town is saying that you snared Luis by being able to give him a child. They do not believe this is a premature baby, any more than they were deceived by Juan. They remember the ring Luis gave you before you went to England. They see everything, these people, and forget nothing.’
‘Let them remember ‒ it can do no harm.’ I said it thankfully. Luis’s reputation was safe. Let them think I had seduced him. Let them think anything so long as they did not think that Richard Blodmore was Tomás’s father. I knew I could trust absolutely the discretion of the Marquesa, if indeed she did know the truth of my relations with Richard that brief week in the English spring. It was in her own interest to keep the established position, if she wanted to keep her own position with my children. If she wished to remain ‘Tía Isabel’ she must accept this new situation. We were no longer poor and friendless. She was less needed, and so her own need grew.
She came, having for once announced her arrival, and quite humbly for her, suggested that she should again be godmother. I felt myself stiffen, and the words of refusal formed. But Luis merely smiled; he was always smiling these days. ‘Why not, Marquesa? You might as well have them all under your wing.’ I bit my tongue against the words that wanted to come. It was true that Luis had no close women relatives, and that the Marquesa was indeed a distant cousin; there seemed no reason to exclude the Marquesa now from the position she held with the other children. I realised that it would appear better if this child did not seem different from the others. Anything that bound us together as a family was important, more for Luis’s sake than my own. My independence had been stated the morning I had crashed the Marquesa’s jewels to the floor. It was possible that she believed I had known then that I would marry Luis, and that had been the basis for my display of arrogant confidence. If she had suspicions about Richard Blodmore, let them remain just that ‒ suspicions. So long as the child continued to show such a strong resemblance to my mother and to me, then no one could say for
certain that he was not the child of Luis.
I nodded towards the Marquesa. ‘I will agree to whatever Luis wishes.’
She looked at me sharply, knowing that never in the years of marriage to Carlos had I ever played the role of the submissive wife, although I had had to submit. So much had changed in the years of our unequal relationship. I was no longer a frightened young girl, and she had come, at last, to ask rather than command, the favour of being godmother to my child.
So once again Isabel, Marquesa de Pontevedra, stood at the baptismal font in the Collegiate church, an ageing woman, but still erect and formidable, and swore, in the name of my son, Tomás, to renounce the devil and all his works. I could have wept at the sight of Luis’s face as the sacrament was administered, the mingled pride and love gave him a strange and moving beauty, his humped, uneven shoulders were transformed to an ascetic attribute, not a near deformity. And Tomás’s lusty screams as the water touched him, gave the promise of rude health. Luis himself held the child for almost an hour at the reception which followed the baptism. The long lace robe flowed over his arms. It was a very unusual thing for a man to do in Spain; they loved and were proud of their children, but babies were women’s business. But it was only with reluctance that he surrendered Tomás into Nanny’s arms when she protested that the noise and excitement around the child were too much. Luis would have gone himself and laid the child in the flounced and frilled cradle if I had not held him back. ‘Your friends want to drink your son’s health with you …’
‘Ah, yes …’ But his eyes followed the child carried away in Nanny’s arms.
IV
It was January when Tomás was born. By February I was able to ride out every day to visit the vineyards, to watch the work as I had loved to do. Luis owned a number of vineyard houses but the one I went to most frequently was the one lived in by Mateo and his family on the rise opposite Las Ventanas Verdes. I often walked the slope to visit Conceptión and Antonio. This could not now be forbidden me; I was the wife of his partner in the bodega. Conceptión and Antonio always greeted me enthusiastically, bringing out the best wine, urging a few tapas on me. I promised I would bring Tomás to show them when the weather was a little warmer. ‘When the blossom comes on the vine,’ I said. The evidence that the Marquesa had kept her word of help to them and their children in return for their silence about the night Carlos had died was plain. It was there in small ways, but ways that counted. The roof over the whole house had been mended, the range in the kitchen was new, water could now be pumped directly into the kitchen, an almost unbelievable luxury for Conceptión; piles of wood were heaped about the courtyard so that they could be lavish with fires. More important for them, their two eldest sons had been sent to live with a family in Jerez, and were receiving instruction, along with other boys, from a curate. They would be able to read and write and add columns of figures, Conceptión told me. They were assured of a place among the clerical staff in the bodega; that was a promise made for all their sons. If they showed ability, they could rise further. ‘They will not be field workers, my sons,’ Conceptión said. ‘In good times and hard times there will be work for them at the bodega. They are even learning some English so in time they will be able to write the letters necessary to be sent. Vicente shows some ability with French, the curate says. He will go far.’ The boys walked the six miles every Sunday to visit their parents and their younger brothers and sisters. But it was not the same as it used to be. ‘It is natural, is it not, Doña Carlota? What interest can Antonio and I hold for them? They are good sons, but we grow apart. The Marquesa has promised a small dowry for the girls, so they will all find husbands. We will be secure in our old age …’
That much Carlos’s death, and the manner of his death had brought them. No sudden riches, but a secure old age, with the children slightly ashamed of the parents.
Sometimes I would go to the Plaza de Asturias and join my mother as Andy drove her out to the hacienda to ride Balthasar. The foals of Half Moon and Balthasar had reached the point at which the best of them were now producing their own progeny. It was becoming a notable line, and the foals now brought good prices. The management of the prices, the expenses and the stud book was something that fell to Maria Luisa. My mother cared only for her ‘darlings’, as she called them. The buyers were as carefully selected as the sires and the brood mares. She had been known to refuse a good sale because she did not trust the qualities of the man who wished to buy. ‘Some people are not fit to have a cat, much less a horse … or a child. Let him go elsewhere.’ Maria Luisa would sigh over the loss of a good sale, but my mother would never be shifted. ‘She is right,’ Luis said. ‘Why should she not be careful? Why should she not see that they are well-placed? A horse that is well treated gives of his best, and the reputation of the stud benefits. Your mother has as good an eye for a horse as any man in Andalucia, and more than that, she has a strange influence. She is a calming force among the mares. To see her walk those paddocks among the mares and foals is a revelation. They seem to breed easily and well because she is there. They drop their foals easily.’ She had an uncanny knack of seeming to know just the hour when a mare was at her time. She would have Andy harness up in the middle of the night to drive her to the hacienda. If it was a difficult birth she was there on her knees in the straw beside the mare. More often the mare slipped her foal with ease, and the little creature on its spindly legs was out at pasture with its dam the next morning.
A modest prosperity now sat on the house in the Plaza de Asturias. There was the growing money which the sale of the horses brought, there was the war-widow’s pension from the British Government, there was the money from the bodega. And that money no longer had to support me and my children. ‘We are, in a manner of speaking, rich,’ Maria Luisa said to me. ‘That is, we are not beggars, scraping along from loan to loan. Don Ramon has us posted in black in his ledgers. He pours us generous copitas when we visit the bank.’
‘But he always has.’
She nodded. ‘You’re right. Even the way your mother is now, she still fascinates him. He can’t forget what she was once. He’s growing old. He wants to remember the best things.’
In a strange way my mother had carved her own place in the society of Jerez. Some might say she was mad, but then they quickly recalled that the accident which had caused her madness had come about when she had saved the life of Carlos. Others, with more kindness, simply described her as eccentric. She was a woman who drank too much at times, but who had a way with horses and children. Her strange habits were overlooked and forgiven, as if she were one of those who has been touched by God.
On the mornings when I went with my mother to the hacienda, I would leave her when she returned to the Plaza de Asturias and go on to the bodega to wait there for Luis to be ready to come home to lunch. I knew it pleased him when I did this. He had grown rather proprietorial of me, showing off just a little that I was his woman, a young and good-looking woman who enjoyed the society of men, and yet waited patiently for him to be finished his business and ready for the late lunch and the siesta. I always waited for him in the sala de degustación. This was always the liveliest place in the bodega, where friends and customers of the firm were entertained, and invited to ‘taste’. When the serious business of ordering had been done, the men came here for their copitas. I heard many languages, and I often joined the talk when the visitors were English. It was a world of men, mainly, but I was accepted as if I had slipped in through a back door.
Another thing which gave me pleasure, and which I often did before going to the sala de degustación was to walk through the bodega itself, the tall, vaulted buildings with the tiers of dark butts, which I thought, though I did not say it because it might have sounded blasphemous, were more beautiful than the cathedrals they so strangely resembled. I loved the quiet, the smell of the damp from the earth floors, the smell of the wine. It was almost as if age had a sound of its own there. There was, of course, constant activity ‒ wine
being transferred from one scale of the solera to another, bodega workmen examining the casks, racking the wine off its lees, taking samples to be carried to the cuarto de muestras, the sampling room, to be graded by the expert ‘noses’ of the trade. I found it soothing and interesting to walk there among the tiers of butts, sometimes stopping to talk to the capataz, the foreman, or some of the workers, pleased that my Spanish was quite adequate to the task. And how they loved to talk, to explain. I got to know the foremen well, and they would produce the venencia and the glasses for me to do my own smelling and tasting. Perhaps they thought it unusual to see a woman there alone, interested, asking questions, but as the wife of Don Luis I could do as I pleased. One day, at one of these informal, unarranged smelling and tasting sessions, I found that a silence had fallen on the capataz. He couldn’t get his tongue around the words he wanted to say; he stared past me, and I turned to see what it was that distracted him. The bulky figure of Don Paulo stood there.
The Summer of the Spanish Woman Page 40
