The terms of Luis’s will had been precise. One third of his estate went to me, one third to Tomás, and one third to Luisa. This gave me voting rights at board meetings of the sherry company of Fernandez, Thompson; I would exercise these rights also for Tomás and Luisa until they came of age. My mother had signed a proxy which gave me voting control of the shares my grandfather had purchased so long ago. Don Paulo had nodded over all this speculatively. ‘You have become a small power among us, Doña Carlota. Be very careful how you use it.’ He did not offer again to buy my mother’s shares. That ambition seemed to have left him.
I knew that Juan had been shaken by his exclusion from Luis’s will. He and his brothers, Martin and Francisco must now look to Don Paulo and the Marquesa if they were to have more than an ordinary position at the bodega. Perhaps Luis had foreseen this and known that it was probable that these three children of Don Paulo’s most loved son would benefit from their special place in the affection of the old man, and from the possessiveness of the Marquesa over them. So he had given Tomás weapons of ownership to use against them when the time should come. Giving Tomás so much, singling him out from his half-brothers was Luis’s way, after his death, of proclaiming to the world that Tomás was his son. No one, he seemed to say, could ever doubt it now, since he had not. Luisa’s place, of course, was secure.
Luisa was too young to know or care about any of this. Her whole world had turned upside down with her father’s death. She had returned from England and shrieked in anguish at the reality of finding him truly gone. Nothing we could do for her seemed to comfort her for his absence. No indulgence was enough, no distraction would suffice for the loss of his undivided attention. She, who had always been so biddable, suddenly gave way to tantrums. She broke her toys and screamed with rage at trifles. She had bad dreams, and wept at night, and frequently I would take her, crying, from the nursery, to sob herself to sleep against my shoulder in the big bed where she had so often romped with her father. ‘Papa … Papa …’ the suddenly querulous voice would cry. ‘I want Papa.’
I began to take her with me to the bodega. Each day I would order out the carriage and the horses in their full festive harness, and we would drive there and walk the aisles of the bodega together. She would solemnly sip a tiny copita with Don Paulo, looking alarmingly like one of those beautiful wax dolls in the castle at Arcos. I don’t know if the whole exercise did any good, but at least the walking tired her, the wine soothed her, and she was ready for the siesta.
She added something also to the life of Don Paulo. He had granddaughters ‒ five of them ‒ the daughters of Ignacio and Pedro. But beside Luisa, I thought, they seemed dull little girls, who might have his affection, but did not engage his attention. He saw the problems of Luisa’s anguished longing for her dead father, and as she had charmed Luis, now the charm began to work on Don Paulo. He ordered toys from Seville, and even from London. Some were successful, others not. Luisa had, at this time, no stock of politeness to cover what didn’t interest her. But when she was pleased, the smile that came on that grave little face brought a look of delight to Don Paulo which I had never seen before, not even in his dealings with Carlos or Juan. ‘With girls it is different,’ he would say, trying to excuse himself. ‘One may indulge them without ruining them.’ It wasn’t true, of course, but I didn’t argue. I granted that Don Paulo had been sincere in his judgement that he had been too harsh with his own daughter. It would have been cruel not to give him the relief of being excessively indulgent with Luisa. Perhaps Don Paulo was making this effort with her in an attempt, in some way, to try to make up this loss. But it seemed to me now that we both, Don Paulo and myself, had become exhausted by keeping the score, tired of our animosities towards each other. If one looked back on it, it was a long and sorry list to tally ‒ my grandfather’s unsanctioned marriage to his daughter, Mariana; my own marriage to Carlos; Carlos’s life at the expense of my mother’s grievous and permanent injury; Carlos’s own death blamed on me, then the coming of Mariana to the Plaza de Asturias and so being, inadvertently, the cause of Luis’s death. There was too much now to weigh in the balance, and I think in the year that followed Luis’s death we decided to abandon the whole battle, like two opposing gladiators who realised that there can be no winner. We allowed ourselves, in that year, in the guise of helping Luisa, to become friends. I did not blame Don Paulo for the waste of time. He could be a friend of the woman in a way he could not have been a friend of the girl. I had had to grow up to him.
Luisa needed the male influence in her life. We were now a household of women. After the scene I had witnessed from the window in the Plaza de Asturias, I felt it no longer safe to leave my mother in such close proximity to the barrio and the focus of discontent represented by the church across from her door. So she and Maria Luisa, Andy and his family moved to Los Cisnes. Serafina and Paco resumed the duties of caretakers which had been so unexpectedly taken from them seventeen years ago. Peace and dust could descend on the house once more. I thought of how Serafina and Paco must have settled back into the kitchen on the first night after everyone had left. They hadn’t expected seventeen years of the sort of turbulent existence we had brought them. They had expected us to be gone within the year. Instead of which I was now inextricably woven into the texture of Jerez life, and my children with me. I thought of the first night when Don Paulo had waited to give us what had seemed to be a welcome, but had really been some sort of warning. I thought of the stables where Balthasar had ruled, and had almost killed Carlos. I thought of my children being born there. For a time the old place had teemed with the life for which it had waited so long. My grandfather’s intentions had been carried out, but not in the manner he had expected. Now it was deserted again, and was sinking back into a dreaming state, and into decay.
‘You should sell it,’ I said to my mother. In a sense, its purpose had been served, though only I knew it. Mariana had come there to die, to the home my grandfather had prepared for her. But I wasn’t surprised when my mother shook her head.
‘No ‒ let it be.’ I didn’t press her. Perhaps she thought of the other homes that had gone ‒ Clonmara, the vineyard house. She wanted to keep something that was her own, even a mouldering mansion in a no longer desirable part of the town. I never mentioned it again, though Maria Luisa often pointed out to me the drain of keeping it in even minimum repair, the cost of Serafina and Paco, ‘eating their heads off and doing nothing’. But she said that only to me because she thought she should. She had learned not to trouble my mother with such things.
The three boys had made their visits to Clonmara, and now usually expected to be invited there each Easter. They seemed to enjoy Ireland, and were friends with the Blodmore boys, Edward and Paul. Their bond, of course, was the love of horses, and they even spent a Christmas there, to get a taste of Irish hunting. I did not want them to go, and yet I could find no real reason for stopping them, especially since the visits were encouraged by the Marquesa. ‘But don’t talk to Granny about it,’ I cautioned them. ‘It only upsets her. She remembers Clonmara in a different way …’ Yet sometimes she would talk of Clonmara to them with perfect good sense, asking about the changes ‒ she preferred to call them changes, rather than improvements ‒ and other times she would talk of it and the people she had known as if no time at all had elapsed since she had last ridden to hounds, following her father. There were the times when the boys learned to be silent, to let her talk. They had almost ceased to be embarrassed by her.
But Juan, after Luis’s death, began showing more interest in remaining in Jerez. Perhaps it was that he saw his position threatened by Tomás, and by the sons of Ignacio and Pedro. Everything lay in the future for him; it promised bright. But it was only a promise. The future was not secured. He was torn that first summer by the decision whether to accept the Marquesa’s usual invitation to escape to the cool greenness of Galicia, or to stay and endure the heat of the Andalucian summer so as to begin to learn the work of the bodega. In
the end he achieved his object by the diplomatic device of riding out to Sanlucar to visit the Marquesa, and putting the matter directly to her, asking her advice, appearing to rely on it.
‘I told her,’ he said when he returned, ‘that it was time I began to learn from my grandfather. I shall never have a better teacher. She advised me to stay.’
So when the summer heat descended on us, it was Juan instead of Luisa who walked the aisles of the bodega with me, though he had not much time to do this. He was working regular hours at the bodega, filling in with whatever tasks were required of him, and learning what he could pick up along the way. He was dissatisfied. ‘I have hardly anything to do with the sherry. Mostly they send me round with messages from one office to the other. I file papers. I translate into English. I try to get into the sample room whenever I can, but Tío Pedro always finds a reason to get me out …’
‘That you must expect. He has two sons of his own.’
‘And Tío Ignacio has three. So we must all fight it out to see who can get what. If my father had been alive ‒’
I cut him short. ‘Learn what you can from your grandfather.’ He nodded silently, and in some mysterious fashion he always seemed to know the days when Don Paulo and I met in the bodega, and he would contrive to join us. He listened respectfully to whatever Don Paulo had to say, and he waited hopefully for the invitation to join us in the sala de degustación. If Don Paulo required his presence, then every other task was excused him. I knew that Ignacio and Pedro believed I contrived these meetings to advance Juan with his grandfather, and perhaps they were right. I knew that the meetings were happy ones for Don Paulo; I had begun to care for that.
It was now quite proper for me to appear in the sala de degustación once again, among the customers and visitors to the bodega, especially since I was accompanied by Don Paulo and my eldest son. It seemed to me that Juan began to eye with hostility any man who came near our table, especially if the man was unmarried.
‘They will come sniffing round, Mother,’ he said. ‘When you marry again, you must choose very carefully.’
‘You expect me to marry again?’
‘Well, of course. You’re quite pretty, still. You’re well off. You could do the family a lot of good by the right marriage.’
I ached to slap that handsome, too worldly-wise face. ‘Mind your own business, Juan.’
‘I think it is my business.’
A little coolness grew up between us after that. I was glad when the time came for the others to return from Galicia, and the three boys to go back to school in England. I had Tomás and Luisa to myself again. The harvest was over, the days were quiet. I wrote in my book for that year, 1927: ‘Very lean crop and poor quality.’
Edwin Fletcher, who, as usual had spent the summer in Galicia with the boys and Luisa on the Marquesa’s estate, came to me and suggested that he should get another tutoring position. I looked at him in surprise.
‘Whatever for?’
He was slightly embarrassed. Even since he had returned from England after the war, after I had married Luis, his salary had been paid by Luis, not the Marquesa. ‘Am I of any use to you now? One small boy of seven, and one little girl to teach. Is that enough? People will say I have become a parasite on you.’
I rounded on him. ‘You are not going to desert me, Edwin Fletcher!’ Then another thought occurred. ‘Or perhaps you want to go? Someone else has made you a better offer. I’ll match it.’
‘There has been no better offer. I haven’t even got another position in mind. I just thought … well, maybe you’d like a governess instead.’
‘What rubbish!’ I asked, angrily, ‘Tell me, Edwin, has Juan been hinting anything to you? He talks in a pretty vulgar way of men coming “sniffing” around me. Is that what’s troubling you? You have to tell me.’
His silence answered me.
‘Haven’t you got the courage to stay with us through a little gossip, Edwin? What can anyone say except that you come daily to teach my children? You were a member of the family when both my husbands were living. Will you let the nasty hints of a boy upset all that? After all, aren’t I properly chaperoned? My mother and Maria Luisa both in the house with me, a child hanging on my hand wherever I go? Everyone knows we are lucky to have your services. Are you going to desert me, Edwin? You are needed. Think of what it would do to Tomás and Luisa to have one more of the linchpins of their lives taken away at this time. They would grieve for you, Edwin. They need you. I need you.’
He flushed deeply. ‘That is what the Marquesa said.’
‘You discussed it with her! That isn’t fair, Edwin. She doesn’t run this household.’
‘She brought up the matter. She has a long vision. She can see the dangers of my staying, and yet she thinks it is better, on the whole, that I do. That is what she told me. She had it all thought out.’
‘Perhaps you should go home for a time. Back to England. Have a holiday. After all, it’s very selfish of me to say you can’t go elsewhere because you’re needed here. You might have other plans. I’ve always expected that one day you would marry …’
‘Carlota!’ He used my name this way only when we were in private. ‘Have you forgotten how long I have lived here in Jerez? How long I’ve been away from England? I’ve only lived this long because I’ve lived here, because I’ve had this dry air and the sun. Marriage, you say? Who wants to marry a man with no money, and only one lung? ‒ and that one none too good! Would any of the young ladies of Jerez have me? I think not. Even the poor and the plain would look on me as a pretty bad bargain.’
‘Then why are you talking all this nonsense about leaving us?’
‘Because of you … your reputation. I would do anything in the world rather than hurt you. But even a devoted dog has feelings of his own …’ He broke into a fit of coughing which he couldn’t control. He struggled to his feet and left the room. I heard his hurrying footsteps in the passage, and the sound of a door to the garden being opened and slammed closed.
‘Oh, God,’ I said aloud. ‘Not Edwin. I can’t stand it if anything happens to send Edwin away.’ But I realised the truth of his accusation. For too long I had placed him in almost the same category as Maria Luisa, reliable, patient, always there. A fixture in my life that I didn’t have to think would ever change. ‘Even a devoted dog has feelings of his own …’
After that, Edwin made a bid for some sort of independent existence. He bought a few hectares of land on the edge of the sierra near Medina Sidonia. ‘It’s very poor land,’ he said. ‘I’ll never be able to raise fat cattle on it. But it’s the first place I’ve ever owned.’ He had a well dug, and began to build a very simple house. ‘Hardly more than a hut. But it will serve.’ Once a month he took four days off, and went and stayed there alone. He began to move books there, and he said he was trying to write. ‘Just a few ideas I have about history. No one will ever publish them ‒ but just the same.’ He would come back from those spells away looking lean, but somehow toughened. I began to envy him the freedom of his time alone. ‘The Señoritas Hernandos Delgado are very kind, but at times a little overwhelming. I like my rustic retreat.’ He had a war disability pension from the British Government, and his savings. ‘It’s my stake in the world, Carlota,’ he said. ‘I know I’ll never go back to England permanently. I’ll die in Spain.’
* *
I went on with all the things that Luis had left in my hands. I attended the board meetings at the bodega, only cautiously venturing any opinions at first, listening very closely to what was being said, trying to make sense of the financial statements, tending to follow Don Paulo’s lead in everything, but determined that I must, in time, gain some independent opinions against the day when he would not be there, and I must then face Ignacio and Pedro, and whomever else would be then on the board. Although I had not wanted to, at last I broke down and asked Edwin to explain the financial statements to me. ‘I can hardly read them,’ I said, ‘much less see where they’re heading. It
was simpler in the old days when I just had the vineyard. So many butts of must, so many pesetas, set against what I had to pay out for labour.’
He sighed. ‘I studied mathematics, Carlota. That doesn’t mean I’m an accountant. I’m more used to theory than practice.’ Then he laughed. ‘This is where we people with theories always fall down … But I’ll try.’
The bodega was a complex business in terms of what I had previously known, and it was a sometimes precarious business. The labour costs were increasing continually, and the sales had to be made abroad to keep pace. We carried the burden of the bad seasons, and scrambled to make up in the good ones. I worried about exports now as I never had before. Sherry was an expensive wine to produce, and it had to compete on the market. I began to realise that of the sherry shippers who were rich, most of them had other interests. And so I began to understand more fully Luis’s concern with the breeding of his bulls, the careful experimentation with his cattle, the growing of sugar beets, the tending of his olive groves. If there was a loss on one enterprise in one year, there was a chance to make a profit on something else. Having made Edwin a party to the accounts of the bodega, I now opened the books of all the other concerns to him.
‘Carlota, I’m not a businessman. I can read the balance sheets, but I can’t take the risks for you.’
‘I’ll take the risks, Edwin.’
I also showed him the stocks that Luis had left me in other businesses, ones in which he had no active control, but which, however, yielded, mostly, a good dividend, money which was quickly swallowed up by the house, the family and the other expenditures. ‘I had no idea we cost Luis so much,’ I said. ‘I am very stupid, and thoughtless. I would have tried to make economies. But Luis never said anything …’
The Summer of the Spanish Woman Page 47
