‘Only a few more days and she will be out of here,’ Luis said. ‘Then I shall breathe again. And in the meantime, Luisa will be tended by Nanny only. Every ounce of water is to be boiled, even what she washes in. She must have no milk. Nanny will prepare her food on the spirit stove in the nursery. She will not leave there. You have instructed Nanny about scrubbing her hands …?’
‘A hundred times a day.’ I smiled and placed my hand on his own sweating one. ‘Luisa will be all right. It is you I worry about, Luis. You have had so little sleep, and you eat nothing.’
He smiled back. ‘I know. I make a fool of myself. But she is my life, querida. And in any case, I drink sherry. That’s food enough, and no typhoid will live in it … Come, let us have a copita together, and eat a little. Then I must go back to the bodega. Thank God there are no reports of anyone being ill in the town, but I have asked all the doctors to let me know at once if there should be any signs of it …’
I knew he was now counting the hours until his precious child would be away, and safe.
That afternoon I had a telephone message from Maria Luisa. She was abrupt, as she always was on the telephone. To her it was still a strange and unnatural instrument. She much preferred to write notes.
‘Can you come over here, Carlota? Something rather strange … no, I’ll tell you when you come.’
In the heat of the afternoon I went to the Plaza de Asturias. A quiet lay on the old courtyard with its broken fountain. Times were more prosperous for my mother, but money did not extend to repairs of that nature. Besides, she always said she liked things left as they were. I could hear Andy whistling in the stable-yard. I reminded myself that I must go and see him and Manuela and their three children before I left. None of the household here yet knew that all of us were going to England. I hoped the news would not upset my mother.
Maria Luisa greeted me quickly, and kept me away from my mother’s room, where she was resting. ‘I didn’t want to disturb you nor her, but a very strange thing has happened, and I am not sure what to do. Perhaps I’m getting old. You have enough on your hands, and if I’d known you were preparing to go to England …’
‘What is it?’
She sighed. ‘Rather one should ask, “who is it?” She appeared out of nowhere a few hours ago. Got off a cart. Some workers had found her walking on the road some miles outside the town. She would say nothing to them except, “Plaza de Asturias” and one of them heard her say “Blodmore” ‒ or thought it was a word like that. So they brought her to the Plaza de Asturias, enquired at the church, and the sacristan naturally sent them here. He remembered your grandfather’s name, you see. They wouldn’t have taken such trouble about an odd woman wandering on the road, I’m sure, but, you see, she is very well dressed ‒ or was. Her clothes now are in a terrible state, but it’s plain to see she’s no peasant. I suppose they thought there might be a few pesetas in it for them. So they got their few pesetas, and I ‒ well, I got this … this woman.’
‘What woman …?’ I was growing impatient, and now, vaguely frightened.
She shrugged. ‘You may well ask, Carlota. I can’t make sense of her. See if you can … Perhaps I should have sent her to the nuns at once. But they’re so feather-headed at times. Talkative, too …’
She walked ahead of me as she spoke, up the stairs to a room that was one of many seldom entered in this house. It had once been my room. The brass bedstead was still there, the few pieces of mahogany furniture, the old basket chair. The shutters were closed against the afternoon sun. Maria Luisa entered quietly, and very gently pushed back one of the shutters half-way. The light streamed in. I saw, sitting in the basket chair, the figure of a woman, a woman with her straggling white hair tied in blue bows, wearing a dusty and soiled white dress, a dress with many frills of lace, made in the style of many years ago. Her satin shoes were in tatters, as if she had walked a long way. She looked at me with those remembered violet eyes, looked at me blankly. And in her arms she cradled a wax doll.
The face had aged, but it was still the child-like face I remembered; the pock-marks seemed less noticeable because the lines were deeper. Her cracked, parched lips moved, and I had to bend to hear the whisper. Only one word. ‘Blodmore …’
So close to her, I saw that she burned with fever, and yet her teeth chattered as she tried to say the word again.
I straightened, and looked at Maria Luisa. ‘I know who she is. And she has come from Arcos. You know there is typhoid in Arcos …’
IV
Because she was who she was, we could not send her to the hospital or to be nursed by the nuns. We brought Dr Ramírez, who confirmed that it was typhoid. ‘Who is this lady?’ he said, when he had finished laying out the medicines and drugs we were to use. I shook my head.
‘We don’t know. Someone some workers picked up on the road. She asked to be brought here. They left her. She’s … she’s too ill to be able to tell us anything.’
He didn’t believe me, but I stared him down. ‘I had better send a nurse.’
I was afraid of what she might say in her delirium, and so I refused. ‘Maria Luisa and I will take care of her.’
‘But you are going to England.’ He knew all our plans, as he was so often in the house to visit Luisa, whether she needed attention or not.
I looked at the poor creature lying in the big bed, tossing restlessly. Dr Ramírez, after seeing the rose-coloured spots on her chest and stomach, said she had probably been ill for at least a week, her temperature rising each day a little higher. When he had examined her, asked if she had backache, she had not answered, had not seemed to know that he even touched her.
‘I can’t return home now,’ I said. ‘I’ve been in contact with her. I might carry the infection to the household ‒ to Luisa.’
‘Infection of typhoid is rarely carried directly. Go and bathe. Have them send clean clothes from the house. Burn the ones you have on. There should be no danger.’
‘I dare not. If by any chance I have become infected … No, it can’t be. I could never forgive myself if Luisa should become ill.’
He shrugged. ‘You are taking unnecessary risks staying here. A nurse would be more competent, more experienced. This is often dirty and disagreeable work. And for a stranger! Someone you don’t know …’ He began packing his bag. He knew a lot of our secrets, this man, and he had kept them all. He would ask no more about the identity of the unknown lady.
I had to play out the same charade with Maria Luisa, but she was more blunt. ‘You said you know who she is, but you choose not to name her.’ She flung her hands wide in a gesture of impatience. ‘And yet we have to take it on ourselves to nurse her. She may die on us! ‒ this lady from nowhere.’ She looked at me closely. ‘After all these years you can’t trust me, querida?’
‘I gave a promise long ago. I must keep it. I know she is from Arcos. I can’t tell you any more. Forgive me, Maria Luisa. But I gave my word …’
She shook her head. ‘Strange … strange. For this we must sit up at night, perhaps catch this wretched infection ourselves. It is evident this is no ordinary woman. You know her, and yet I don’t ‒ I, who know everything that goes on in Jerez …’ She shrugged. ‘Well, that is what the Maria Luisas of the world are for. We do what we are told, and ask no questions.’
‘You know it isn’t like that.’
‘Yes, it is like that. Now, let us stop this chatter and get to work. We must organise things. The others will have to be kept away. The servants … everyone.’ She had begun making a list. ‘Food we will prepare on the nursery stove. Water boiled. Plenty of clean sheets. We must wear aprons and tie our hair in cotton …’ She muttered other things to herself.
‘One thing, Maria Luisa. My mother must not see her. Tell her what you think best, but she must not see her.’
She paused in her list-making. She looked carefully from me to the figure lying in the bed, her expression one of mingled disgust and compassion. ‘You need not worry. Your mother will co
me nowhere near her. It would be better, perhaps, if she were sent away. To the vineyard house, perhaps, or to Don Luis’s hacienda. They will take care of her there. She has not been in contact with … with this lady. She should be quite safe. We must find some excuse for sending her. The less she knows about this lady, the better. You know how she talks at times …’ After Maria Luisa had gone to start her preparations, I stood looking down for a while at the pathetic and sad figure in the bed. She had been my grandfather’s wife, had borne him a son. Even in her delirium she clutched the doll, and would not be parted from it, though its clothes were as dirty and stained as her own had been. I knew that one of the first tasks, while we sat with her, would be to fashion some sort of nightgown for the doll from clean linen. I even thought it would be safer if we cut off its beautiful golden hair, but I shrank from that.
Then I went downstairs and wrote a note to Don Paulo.
He came at once, his face a mask of fear and worry. ‘We have searched for her night and day. No one knows where she has been. There is typhoid at the castle. The wells ran dry and they had to bring in water. All three of her personal attendants are ill ‒ one is gravely ill, and may die. The others ‒ the ordinary servants ‒ are not so vigilant and they are afraid to go near that part of the castle. The Marquesa is in Galicia, or otherwise she would have instituted a much tighter control. I came too late. Before I had time to make other arrangements ‒ for the nurse to come in to do the nursing ‒ before anyone knew Mariana herself was ill, she had vanished. She has never shown any inclination to leave the castle before. Quite the opposite. She shrank from contact with strangers. Why, in God’s name, did she come here! Has she forgotten her father …?’
He gazed down at the figure of his daughter in the bed but she didn’t see him. Restlessly she turned on the pillow, and fought with me a little when I wrung out a cloth and wiped the perspiration from her face and neck.
‘I think the fever has made her remember the … the other time,’ I said. ‘She may be, in her mind, back in the time when she was so ill, and she was kept from my grandfather. She has remembered his name, and remembered that he had bought a house here to bring her to. The doll she brought with her was his child. I am sorry, Don Paulo … it was so long ago, but I don’t think the years between exist for her.’
He went and stood by the window, staring down into the dusty patio. He seemed hardly to be able to bear the sight of the woman in the bed. His hooded eyes were closed, as if he were in pain. Forty years lay between one event and another, the cataclysmic arrival of the Irishman into his world, and now this poor creature lying clutching her doll on the bed. Forty years was a long time to nurse a hatred, and Don Paulo was old.
‘I was mistaken,’ he said, finally. ‘I thought she had forgotten completely. They had so little time together I thought it could all be wiped out. But it has endured to this day. I should not have interfered with what happened, but accepted it. None of us can foresee the future, nor can we change what will be. Can one interfere with God? You came here as a direct result of that year when Blodmore was denied his wife. And then you and Carlos … I loved Carlos. This one here …’ He nodded towards the bed. ‘How can one love a mindless child who is also nearly an old woman? But I am responsible before God for her. I do not love her, but I pity her. It would be as well if she died, but I am commanded by God’s law to pray for her to live.’
I accompanied him to the big doors that opened on the Plaza. ‘You have been exposed to the infection. You have touched her, changed her clothes, bathed her. You cannot return to your home now.’
‘Not until the incubation period is over. Not until she is better.’
‘Or dead,’ he said. He started to turn away. ‘I will come each day to enquire. I will be as discreet as possible. To the world ‒ to those who must know ‒ she will be what she has always been at Arcos. She is a distant cousin of the Marquesa’s. As few people as possible will know of her presence here. Your being here will be an unfortunate mischance, and you cannot leave for fear of infecting your children. The town will understand such things. It is all anyone will need know …’
He walked across the plaza, a bent figure in his white summer suit and a wide-brimmed panama hat. He had not had himself driven here, and it was a long walk back to the bodega in the heat. He would do it each day, I knew, trying to avoid attention. But the town and its talk was ever-present in his mind. The town … He had always been so careful, so clever in handling this situation. But could one hide the woman upstairs in the bed forever? And as I watched I saw him enter the church. I remembered his words. ‘It would be as well if she died, but I am commanded by God’s law to pray for her to live.’ The stern God of the Spaniards was very much present in Don Paulo.
V
Over my protests Don Paulo sent a nun to help with the nursing. She came from a convent which had been the beneficiary of Don Paulo’s charity for many years, and she clearly saw it as her duty to both pray and give practical help. She was old, silent, tired, and immensely experienced. She coped with the vomiting, and the diarrhoea without fuss, changed the sheets over and over again, took temperature and pulse, even sat and sewed a clean nightgown for the doll. She cut Mariana’s hair and the hair of the doll at the same time. ‘There now,’ she said. ‘Now you’ll both be more comfortable, won’t you?’ She asked not a single question about her patient, only asked Dr Ramírez about certain symptoms. She had seen typhoid before, had lived through it herself. It was she who pointed out the rigid stomach of her patient, and informed him of the first sign of bronchitis, which could lead to the complication of pneumonia. She was both tired and tireless. When she was not tending her patient, she sat in the basket chair with her beads in her hands, her lips moving; she read her daily office from her book. With difficulty we got her to take periods of rest, but she was always ready when she was needed. She was called Sister Mercedes; she had been well-named.
Dr Ramírez brought and injected us with the precious anti-typhoid vaccine. ‘Your children have gone,’ he said. ‘Don Luis didn’t give them an hour in the town. A sherry ship leaves Cadiz this evening.’
It was only when the children were safely away that Luis himself came to the Plaza de Asturias. I made him stay outside and talked to him through the iron grille on the window of one of the long-disused rooms that looked out into the plaza.
‘Carlota, this is madness! Why do you stay to look after this … this woman?’ Don Paulo had been to see him, to explain my presence here. ‘You could get it. You could … you could die, Carlota.’ He was pained and frightened and anxious. He wore the expression of shock an older man suffers when he suddenly realises that a younger wife might die before him. He had been through it with Amelia. He had not thought to suffer it again.
‘I stayed because of the children. I could not put them in danger. Surely Dr Ramírez has explained that to you! Now I must wait until the incubation period is over. She will be better soon. Then I will be home. We will go together to join the children in England. Together … as soon as the harvest is over.’ It was odd that at this time of extremity we had reached out to my father’s regiment for help. Luisa and Tomás and Nanny were to stay with the Colonel’s sister in London until we came. Meanwhile, the Colonel’s sister was renting a house for us, was engaging staff. I was insisting that Luis should come with me. I was trying to tell him that I did not wish to risk another meeting with Richard Blodmore if he should decide to come over to London. I was telling him I needed his help, and he looked at me with grateful eyes …
‘Yes, querida, that is what we will do. We will go as soon as you are ready. We will make a holiday of it. Take Tomás and Luisa about ‒ show them everything. Together. I wish though …’
‘What, Luis?’
‘I wish you did not feel you have to nurse her. Is she so important that you have to do it?’
‘She is just a poor, rather mad woman, Luis. A relation of the Marquesa’s who’s found her way here. Quite unimportant ‒ and y
et important in the way that anyone who comes to one’s door is important. Would you have me look the other way, Luis? Pretend she does not exist? She is important to Don Paulo, because he places importance on all family ties. Would you have me be less than him?’
‘You are the mother of children, Carlota. You are my wife. Your duty is to your own family first.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t understand this. Or Don Paulo. There is something I am not being told. Don Paulo is acting strangely … he is hardly at the bodega, and this harvest time …’
I reassured him. I told the necessary lies, which I loathed doing, to him above all others. I was weary of it all ‒ it had happened so long ago, and now it counted almost as nothing, except in the eyes and feelings of Don Paulo. Then I thought of my grandfather, and thought, too, that if things had been different, the woman lying upstairs would have lived at Clonmara, would have given more children to my grandfather, my mother would have had half-brothers and sisters. It was not nothing. It seemed almost like the hand of God that after forty years I was the one to care for her.
Luis gripped the bars of the grille with frustration, and impatience. ‘If you say so, Carlota, then it must be. I have to charge you to be very careful. You have children … responsibilities.’ He made to turn away. ‘And look at this old place! The grille is ready to come apart in my hands. It’s falling down!’ He stood back and looked along the whole façade of the house. ‘I must either put it all in repair, or your mother must move out and come to live with us. It’s madness for her to stay on here. This part of the town, too … it’s not suitable for her to be here any longer. This place is decaying, just like the rest of the area. What in heaven’s name was your grandfather thinking of when he bought it, and just let it sit here?’ He sighed, and shrugged, and tried to smile. ‘Well … you Blodmores, I’ll never fully understand you …’ He saluted me briefly through the grille, blowing a kiss from his finger tips. ‘How absurd this all is. Anyone would think I was a young man courting his sweetheart ‒ and a duenna sitting in the background. A grille between us! What next?’ But he was laughing, and cheerful again. ‘I will come each day, querida. I will bring flowers. Too bad I no longer play the guitar … what a suitor …’
The Summer of the Spanish Woman Page 45
