Edwin Fletcher studied them with interest. ‘One day you may have to pull those two apart. They’re born to scrap, I think. Be a good thing for Juan if Tomás was able to give him a run for his money …’
Perhaps he used the last phrase unconsciously. A run for money might be what it all turned into. Juan, as Carlos’s son, had no money of his own, nor did Martin or Francisco. All they had was a natural hold on their grandfather’s affections, and the special standing they had with the Marquesa. Juan by now knew that he ranked first among all of Don Paulo’s grandchildren ‒ and that included the children of Ignacio and Pedro ‒ with them. He fully understood the significance of being the favourite godchild. He had marked the fact that the Marquesa had not become godmother to any of the children of his father’s half-brothers. He knew also that Carlos had been the most loved son of Don Paulo. He was even beginning to hear hints and old stories of his great-grandfather Blodmore, the Irishman that the Marquesa had been said to have been in love with, at a time very long ago, a time that stretched back past his comprehension. He heard, as children always hear, recollections of the time that the Irishman had come to Sanlucar with the Marquesa, and had been expected to marry her. But instead she had married Don Paulo very suddenly, and Lord Blodmore had bought the house in the Plaza de Asturias which Juan’s grandmother, Lady Pat, now occupied. He had begun asking questions about the place called Clonmara. It was a tangled, confused history, about which he was able only to build a sketchy outline. He would ask a question, and someone would answer vaguely. His interest would wane. What did it all matter? At his age it had all happened so long ago it belonged in the realms of the fairy-stories he had once listened to so eagerly, the ones that invariably began, ‘Once upon a time …’
What mattered was that he was the favourite, however history had woven itself to make him that.
But there was little Tomás, and even more important, it sometimes seemed, there was the tiny child, Luisa. These were the children of his stepfather, and must, for that reason, be favoured by him. And they were also the godchildren of the Marquesa. It dismayed me sometimes to see the evidence of these facts being worked out in Juan’s young mind. Juan could easily remember the days of our poverty in the Plaza de Asturias, when the only good things came as gifts and favours from the Marquesa. But he had accepted the world of plenty, the beautiful house, the many servants provided by Luis, without question. He had seen what a provident marriage could bring. I noticed that he was very careful in his manner towards Luis, polite, respectful, as he was to Don Paulo and the Marquesa. He had learned very young how to use his charm, the charm and good looks inherited from Carlos. It was a rather frightening knowledge in someone of his age.
I had feared, at first, that our family would split in two parts, both by the gap in the ages between Carlos’s children, and the younger two, and by the knowledge that they were the stepchildren of Luis. But it was Luis himself who prevented that. He talked always of ‘my sons’. He took care to spend time with the older ones, talked with them, rode with them. He was un-Spanish in his attitudes to them, in that he did not leave all their training to me. He involved himself actively in everything that went on in the house. He visibly relaxed, and that rather mournful face took on a look of peace, as if he had at last attained what he had waited for for so long. If anything he was too indulgent, too tolerant with misdemeanours. ‘You’re spoiling them, Luis,’ I warned.
He smiled at me. ‘Love cannot spoil them, only harshness. Look how your mother breaks a horse. She does not ruin a tender mouth with hard hands. They are still so young, querida, and all too soon the world will take over and offer its own hard lessons. Let them be children while they can.’
I could not quarrel with him over them. I could quarrel with him over nothing. His rather withdrawn personality had expanded like a cactus which soaks up rain after a long arid spell. ‘I have a beautiful wife,’ he said. ‘I have a family. After so many years of quiet, this house now has life. Let me enjoy it, querida.’
But while he could talk lovingly of his sons, it was evident that Luisa was a child apart. Her, he worshipped. Each day on his return from the bodega he would go to the nursery to see her, as if to reassure himself that she really existed. He would hold her in his arms, in his lap, the way no Spaniard did with a young baby. Luis didn’t care how he appeared to others. ‘Let them think me a foolish old man,’ he said. ‘Why should I worry? I have my Miraglo, my miracle.’
And the baby seemed to take it all as perfectly natural. She seemed more at ease with Luis even than with me. She learned to recognise him at a very early stage. Luis swore that her first word had been ‘Papa!’ He may have been right, since he seemed to hear a distinct word where the rest of us just heard some sort of gurgle. But there was no doubt of her response to him. Her quiet, calm, beautiful little face would light up at the sight of him. She was a grave, sober little girl, but for him she would laugh. He would pretend to toss her in the air, holding her very gently, and she would laugh with toothless gums. He would carry her about the house, Nanny hurrying to try to keep up; it was to Luis she took her first steps. If she had a childish fever, Luis himself was nearly ill with worry. Watching them together I was aware of a fear, a fear of what might happen to Luis himself should something happen to her.
Because, for all our care, for all the advice we took from doctors, she was delicate. It wasn’t just the naturally slighter physique of the girl compared to her brothers. She seemed to go through the illnesses of childhood with alarming rapidity, and with each of them she took a long time to recover. What with Tomás would be a mild head cold, with her it would accompany a high fever. She was often in bed, listless, but not fretful. ‘Sure she’s like an angel,’ Nanny would say, and kept on saying it until I asked her to stop. If she said it in the presence of Luis his face would grow grey with fear, as if the miracle child he loved so much might indeed become the angel spirit Nanny talked of.
But she reached her second, and her third birthday. She still was guarded against the possibility of every ill; in the winter she was not allowed out when the wind was cold, in the summer she spent every afternoon resting until the worst heat was past. In his garden, Luis began to grow every sort of delicacy of fruit and vegetable which might tempt her appetite. She was never forced to eat food which she didn’t want, but instead coaxed with something else. But Luis insisted on the cod-liver oil and malt, which she hated, and an abundance of orange juice, which she loved. But when she was ill she would accept the most foul-tasting medicine if it came from Luis’s hands.
She was a princess in her little kingdom, and she soon learned it. But she never took advantage of this knowledge, as Juan did. I could almost have wished to see a childish tantrum occasionally, to prove she was like other children. But the usual faults and tempers of childhood seemed missing in her. She didn’t even soil the tiny white dresses she wore.
‘More like an angel than a child,’ Nanny would say, but out of Luis’s hearing.
In only one aspect did the Blodmore blood seem to come through strongly. Luis had imported a tiny Shetland pony especially for her, and it was my mother, with all the family watching, who first lifted her into the saddle, showed her how to hold the reins, and herself took the bridle for Luisa’s first ride around the ornamental lake. She returned, her dark eyes shining, her tinkle of a laugh carrying to us as we stood and watched. ‘Papa ‒ isn’t it wonderful? Granny says I can soon learn to jump just like her …’
And Luis was torn between delight in her animation, and dread of the times when she would suffer the inevitable falls.
‘He’s called Colonel, after Grandfather.’ She had, of course been told many times by Nanny about her grandfather who had won the great medal for bravery. She was yet another Jerezano who looked naturally to England as part of her heritage.
* *
So my world was peaceful and serene, and my children were growing and flowering, like Luis’s beautiful garden. I wanted for nothing in the wo
rld except the one thing I did not often allow myself to think of. But it was there, the thought, shut away in my memory, as if in a room locked, and seldom visited ‒ the thought of Richard Blodmore. No one, I told myself, could have everything. It was against all sense, all logic, to go on remembering and wanting the experience which I had so briefly tasted, and would never have again. But it remained, the canker in the bud.
II
But these years of serenity were also a time of growing awareness for me. Now that I had the leisure, and the urgent necessities of life did not press upon me, I began to look about me, to look at the far reaches of Spain, the world beyond our bodegas and our vineyards. At last there was time, and the money, to travel. Luis took me to Paris and Rome, Vienna and London. We never discussed the possibility of visiting Ireland. I was always, in the end, happy to return to Jerez. I came back with new insights that stimulated me, but also disturbed me. I suppose these things would have thrust themselves upon me, whatever the circumstances, but now there was more time to ponder them, to ask questions. And, more often than not, it was Edwin Fletcher who answered them.
It was from him I got the books, in English, of Spanish history. Up to then, I had seen Spain only as the power which had threatened England with invasion by the Armadas, the land which had sent out those who had explored and conquered the New World, and brought the gold and the silver pouring back to fill the coffers of the King, and set him firmly on the pinnacle as Holy Roman Emperor. This had been my picture of Spain, and the history books had not caught up with what had followed in the long years of decline.
‘You were still toddling round, Carlota,’ Edwin said, ‘when Spain lost the last of her possessions in the New World. It was the dark night of the Spanish soul in 1898 when Cuba and the Philippines were lost to the United States. Spain once ruled half the world, and most of Europe … Think how the British will feel when their Empire is stripped from them, piece by piece, as it will surely be.’
I began to look closely at my own Andalucia to learn ‒ as I did from talking with Luis, and the increasing trust he put in me, forgetting most of the time that I was a woman, and these things were not supposed to be my business. Andalucia was an example of the great latifundia, the vast estates owned by people like the Marquesa, and to a lesser degree, by people like Don Paulo and Luis himself. We had always lived a privileged life, even in the days of the most stringent economies in the Plaza de Asturias. The peasants were without land, not only in Andalucia, but all over Spain. We had seen, in our corner of the world, little of the disturbances which had rocked Catalonia and the Basque country. We read about strikes in the factories of Barcelona and the mines of Asturias, about bomb-throwing and convent-burning, and yet our little world, the world close about us, remained calm. It was Edwin who told me about the ‘Tragic Week’ in 1909, when more than fifty convents and churches in Barcelona were burned, and in reprisal hundreds of people were shot by troops. All I could remember of July 1909 was that it had been the time we came to Spain, and my mind and feelings had been numb with misery and longing for Richard Blodmore. It was Edwin who pointed out to me the grim consequences of the final humiliation of the Spanish Army in Morocco where it had for years been trying to keep the tribesmen at bay. In 1921, an outpost at Anual was overwhelmed, and in the retreat some fourteen thousand men were lost. Even I, though, was aware of the uproar through the whole country as the incompetence and corruption within the ruling structure was made clear. There was a clamour for strong, effective rule, and in 1923 Primo de Rivera, the captain-general of Barcelona ‘pronounced’ against the government. The coup succeeded, and Spain had a dictator, which most of the ruling class welcomed because he stood for the iron rule which upheld their position. We listened to his demands for a purified government, listened and approved. For us, in Jerez, it was the time of the harvest, and we were busy bringing in our grapes.
The King, Alfonso XIII, whom I had met at Doñana, welcomed the dictator, because he scorned the parliamentary system. We didn’t know it then, though Edwin predicted it, that these coming years would be the last gasp of constitutional monarchy in Spain. We thought, we let ourselves believe, that the people would see the sense of Primo de Rivera’s rule, that they would be satisfied with slow reform.
‘You will see, Carlota,’ Luis said, ‘that this has all been a violent fermentation, like the must at the time of the harvest. It will fall bright, like the wine.’
I made a note about the harvest that year, as I had been doing each year since I had planted my first vineyard. ‘Lean crop. Good quality.’
We did tell ourselves that it would be all right, but that was the year when Juan came home with his head bloodied after a fracas in front of the Collegiate church.
‘You wouldn’t believe what they are saying, Mother,’ he told me as I bathed his slight wounds. ‘This Communist stuff. They’re going to overthrow everything ‒ and the Church is first. They’re going to confiscate everyone’s property. Take the land from us. Take the Church’s property first. Every peasant will have land, they say. Every man will be his own master ‒ so long as he does what the State tells him. They can’t do it, can they? The Army would never let them …’
‘I don’t think they can do it, Juan, but perhaps there’s a case for some of the things they say.’
‘They didn’t think it could be done in Russia, either,’ Edwin said, with a certain laconic detachment.
Juan looked from one to another in disbelief. ‘You sound as if you’re in favour of that rabble!’
Edwin smiled. ‘Don’t count me with them, Juan. Just don’t forget I’ve been trained to see both sides. I wouldn’t fight for them. I’d try not to fight against them. But if it comes right down to it, the historian gives way to the man. I like my privileges. Even the privileges a poor Fletcher has.’
III
These were ripples on the surface of our seemingly placid world, but in Ireland there had been revolt and now civil war.
Richard and Elena Blodmore and their sons, Edward and Paul, came to Jerez after spending a summer at the Galicia estate with the Marquesa. People, now worried by what they had experienced and heard of terror and anarchy in their own land, pressed them for reports on what was going on in Ireland. As always it was too complex to explain simply, as we could not easily explain the Spanish situation to those who came freshly to it.
I wished Richard and Elena had not come, but they had. With Elena as the next holder of the title of Pontevedra, and the eldest son, Edward, to inherit after her, it was natural that the Marquesa wanted her great-nephew trained in the language and customs of Spain. There was no way of avoiding our duty to entertain them. For a time they were the focus of every party, the ones who brought the freshest news, and people were avid to hear it, even though it frightened them. The first reception for them was given at Don Paulo’s house, with the Marquesa there as hostess, one of the few occasions she deigned to appear in the social life of the town. I watched her as she greeted the guests, Don Paulo beside her, then Elena and beyond her, Richard. I knew, of course, that the Marquesa had the power to command Elena to come to Jerez, or to any place else. It was the Marquesa’s money which had arranged the marriage between Elena and Richard; no doubt she held the purse strings for other favours as well. I thought of all the children now influenced by the sway this woman held, by the power of her money. She had been godmother by proxy to Richard and Elena’s sons. Almost as if she knew every detail of our lives and thoughts, she seemed to delight in playing each off against the other.
The lights were bright; the soft candlelight of the earlier era had given way, and we were all revealed more starkly than we would have wished. As I joined the line of guests who waited to be received, I looked at them all closely, critically, as I looked at myself in a wall mirror opposite. The Marquesa and Don Paulo were revealed as aged. How old was she now? I began to calculate her years. She had been twenty-five, they said, when she led my grandfather through the courting dance which had e
nded with him falling in love with another woman ‒ no, not a woman, but that eternal child who still lived on in the castle at Arcos. The lights were harsh on the Marquesa’s lean, lined aristocratic face, gave added brilliance to the fabulous jewels she wore on her hands. In honour of the occasion she wore a necklace ‒ not the emeralds and diamonds which she had wanted to thrust on me as a kind of tip for good behaviour. No, these were rubies, and fit for an empress, but the light they flashed back into her face was unkind. Beside her, Don Paulo seemed indifferent both to her, and to the whole proceedings. He seemed bent, folded in upon himself. People had said he had never recovered from Carlos’s death. It could have been true.
I greeted the Marquesa, and she gave me her thin smile. Don Paulo’s lips twisted in some form of greeting, but really we said nothing to each other. Then I went on to greet Elena; she gave me a brilliant smile, murmured something about Clonmara, laughed at whatever it was she had said. She was wearing the Marquesa’s emeralds, both the necklace and the tiara, and her manner made it clear that they were no loan; they were hers. She had accepted what I had flung back at the Marquesa, and she probably knew it. But they were hers, and she triumphed in them, and all that the bestowing of them implied. My mother saw them at the same time. ‘Oh, Charlie ‒ but they were yours!’
Quickly I placed my hand on my mother’s arm and gave it a little shake. She didn’t understand what was required of her, but at least she was quiet.
The Summer of the Spanish Woman Page 42
