Juan had now completed his time at Cambridge, and put in a year in the London office of Fernandez, Thompson. He was back home, and had taken his place permanently at the bodega. He now exercised his right to vote the small number of shares which had become his under Don Paulo’s will, and he resented that, shared out among so many grandchildren, they had been watered down to comparatively few. He resented, at the same time, that I should vote so many.
‘Have you thought, Mother, that now I’m of age, it would be better if I handled your affairs at the bodega? There is no need for you to go there so often, or concern yourself with its affairs. Women do not usually ‒’
‘I have no need to be told, Juan, what women do and do not usually do. My place here has always been different from most women’s. The town is used to it.’
‘Now that you have sons old enough …’
‘We’ll talk of it later, Juan, when I’m old.’
‘As old as the Marquesa, I suppose,’ he said as he turned away.
That was the year Martin had gone to Paris, enrolled at the Sorbonne, and found himself a teacher of the guitar. He had followed, for a while, the travels of Segovia, and taken some lessons from the master. Martin seemed, at last, to have emerged from the shadow of Juan, and become his own man. ‘I’ll come back to Jerez some day, Mother,’ he wrote, ‘but for the time being I want to taste the world, and listen to music.’ He talked of going to spend some time in Vienna. I showed the letter to the Marquesa. She nodded her head. ‘Just as well. He will like it better here when he knows what the rest is about. I don’t expect he’ll ever be a great, much less a famous musician, like Segovia. But let him try his wings …’ And she insisted on paying his expenses. Unlike Juan, who seemed inclined, though with a little more eye to prudence, to repeat his father’s extravagances, Martin lived modestly. ‘It’s too conspicuous to have more to spend than other students,’ he wrote. ‘Ah!’ the Marquesa exclaimed over that letter. ‘Here we have either a budding Republican, or the beginning of a wise man.’ She looked forward to Martin’s letters, and I always brought them to her; it seemed to me that she lived again a little of her youth as he travelled the cities of Europe. ‘He will be worth talking to when he returns,’ she said. ‘Not a village boy any longer. We should be looking to see whom he should marry. Though it’s difficult to know whose fortune is secure these days.’
‘Perhaps we shall just have to let Martin choose for himself, and leave the fortune to chance. Who knows, he may bring back a little Bohemian from his travels.’
She looked outraged. ‘He will not go that far!’
Francisco had followed Juan to Cambridge, and then into the London office. He remained as he had always been, a faithful follower of everything his eldest brother said and thought. They formed a sort of alliance, feeling that their solidarity made them a stronger force at the bodega against the influence of their father’s half-brothers.
‘There’s a nice little civil war shaping up there,’ Maria Luisa commented. ‘And so much still depends on how the Marquesa disposes of her estate. If they leave her any estate, that is.’
It was Tomás who gave the heartache, and perhaps the most promise. He had been sent off to school in England the September after the last gathering at Sanlucar. He had returned eagerly for the Christmas holidays, persuaded the Marquesa to open up Sanlucar again so that they could go each day to Doñana. But he didn’t go to hunt, except the necessary culling of the deer herds. More often he stayed alone with a guide, his binoculars on every living thing that moved, bird and beast. He had saved his money and bought himself a camera; he taught himself how to develop his own film. A record of Doñana began to emerge. He marked the sightings of the Imperial Eagle and the Spanish lynx; he studied the old notebooks of previous visitors to Doñana, and warned that the numbers of these rare creatures were dwindling. He wanted stricter controls in Doñana. ‘You do not own Doñana,’ the Marquesa reminded him. ‘Nor do I. You go there only as a guest.’
He nodded, unhappy. ‘I wish I were rich enough so that I could buy it.’
‘Places like Doñana are rarely for sale.’
He knew his way about the bodega; when there, he left off his formal suit and his formal manners and joined the workers at whatever they were doing. Some of them didn’t like it; those with Republican sentiments must have seen it as some sort of extra privilege which this sprig of Don Paulo’s tree had taken to himself. But after a while they forgot who he was, and just let him learn, which was what he wanted. ‘Perhaps he has the nose,’ the Marquesa said. But I think she said it more to upset Ignacio and Pedro than out of any conviction that this raw boy had any particular gift except curiosity and the ability to get along smoothly with the workers.
‘You should keep him more in check, Mother,’ Juan said. ‘I see him eating with the workers, and sometimes talking like a peasant. It doesn’t do. It makes things more difficult for the rest of us.’
‘Times are changing, Juan. Perhaps Tomás is wise to learn how a peasant thinks.’
But he shook his head, refusing to believe that Republican ideals could triumph. ‘It would be the ruin of Spain,’ he said simply. ‘We cannot let that happen.’
‘Then you go and get yourself elected President!’ Tomás shouted at him. ‘See what you can do for Spain!’
‘But they say Mr De Valera will soon be elected President,’ my mother objected, proud to show that she was following the conversation.
‘That, Granny, is Ireland. You’re getting your Republicans mixed up.’ Juan had less patience with his grandmother these days. She was no longer a romantically eccentric figure, but an untidy, ageing woman, who drank too much, whose mind was too often clouded, and was hardly to be trusted alone. She merely nodded at him, and smiled. ‘Ah, yes, Ireland. When shall we be going back, I wonder?’
Nanny, who divided her time between acting as a substitute duenna for Luisa when Maria Luisa could not do it, and as a sort of unofficial guardian of my mother, snapped awake out of a doze at the sound of the word. ‘Ah, Ireland! Wouldn’t it be grand if we could go back, Lady Pat? Go back to Clonmara. There never was a place like Clonmara.’
‘Stupid old biddy,’ Juan commented as he left. ‘She’s getting too old to know what she’s doing. She should be pensioned off. She’ll be talking about the fairies next. It isn’t right to let Luisa listen too much to her. She’ll be getting fanciful notions.’
But I thought there were few fanciful notions in Luisa. She was the perfect child she had always been, calm, serene almost, in an oddly grown-up fashion; and she grew more beautiful. She was clever, and took care with her studies, even the subjects which interested her least. In this she was the opposite of Tomás, who could show brilliance where his attention was completely engaged, and utter indifference when it was not. Luisa and Tomás seemed to form the same sort of alliance as Juan and Francisco, except that Luisa was irked by the restrictions placed on her because she was a girl. But she seemed to please everyone without effort. She even took an interest in rather old-fashioned styles of needlework because it gave Maria Luisa pleasure to teach her. ‘Rich you are now, child,’ Maria Luisa said, ‘but you never know when it may be a blessing to know how to sew a fine seam ‒ or stitch on a plain old button. Look at your poor mother there. She always has been hopeless ‒ and helpless.’
‘I think Mama is very capable,’ Luisa said, and rattled off what she counted as my accomplishments, my spheres of influence ‒ the bodega, the vineyards, the bull ranch, the farms, even my mother’s stud, which was now largely left to me to manage, my mother only going there for the pleasure of looking at her ‘darlings’. ‘Perhaps one day I shall be like Mama, and be able to see to everything.’
I thought that times had indeed changed in Jerez, in Spain itself, when a daughter like Luisa could display pride in a mother who had once been considered more than faintly scandalous. Perhaps there were more things on people’s minds these days than to drag up old memories of the girl who was thought t
o have seduced and captured Don Paulo’s favourite son. People had stopped counting the months between my marriage to Luis and Tomás’s birth. I tried to see myself as the town must now see me, the one who had become the friend of Don Paulo, who appeared to have formed an alliance with the Marquesa. To some of the younger ones I must have seemed as much a part of the established old order of things as the Marquesa herself. I stood for a traditional way of living in a world that threatened to turn itself upside down.
The Marquesa had now moved permanently to Las Fuentes. Less and less did she travel to Sanlucar, though a retinue of servants was kept there awaiting her pleasure. It was ironic that only after Don Paulo’s death did she take up the residence of her husband as if it was her home. That summer, for the first time since I had been in Spain, she made no plans to travel to the estates in Galicia. ‘I’m getting too old for that sort of journey,’ was all she said. But I wondered if even such a formidable courage as hers might not be daunted by the hazards of the long journey in these troubled times, and by the thought of the Republican sentiments which would await her there. Although she hardly ever talked of the disturbances, the riots, the strikes, I think she took them hard. Hardest of all, I guessed, for her to bear was the fact that the King had been driven from his own country. The declaration of the Assembly that he had been guilty of high treason in the mismanagement of the country was almost as if we, the nobles and the landowners, had been condemned with him. She, Isabel, sprung of both the Hapsburg and the Bourbon dynasties, was aligned by history and fate with the deposed monarch. She could only wait and watch the events that swept the country onward to what none of us could truthfully predict. She was quite powerless to change anything. I thought it was the growing knowledge of this, more than her actual years, which made her now appear an old woman.
But she still enjoyed the privileges of her position. She had taken to visiting the bodega regularly, and always Don Paulo’s empty office awaited her. ‘I enjoy keeping Ignacio and Pedro out of it,’ she had once said to me spitefully. ‘And who knows, if I turn my back, you might have it.’ She seemed to share my enjoyment of walking the bodegas. Quite often she would be driven with me at her side, to one end of the long row which housed our treasury of sherry, or would pick one at random. ‘Might as well let them all see me ‒ let them know there’s still someone from the old days in charge,’ she said. She would walk the aisles with me at her side, slowly, her stick making a dull tapping on the ground. ‘I wonder can it survive?’ she asked once, a question which she didn’t expect me to answer. ‘The anarchists would blow it all up, and then say the aristocracy was depriving them of their wine!’
She had also adopted a custom which I had begun. Each day she was at the bodega she would appear in the sala de degustación. Her arrival there would bring every man to his feet, though there were some murmurings that between us, she and I were turning it into a women’s sewing circle. Customers and visitors were brought forward to be presented. She was all graciousness as she sipped her copita, extending her hand, still unabashedly displaying those magnificent rings on the old, wrinkled fingers.
II
It was the spring of that year, 1932, just when the vines were putting out their new shoots, that we had the message from Tomás’s school that he was missing. The Easter holidays had been too short to allow him to return to Jerez, and he had gone to Clonmara. This had been much against my will, but I had not dared to oppose it, lest it seemed to single out Tomás too much from his half-brothers. They had all in their turn visited Clonmara; there seemed to be some sort of agreement between Elena and the Marquesa about inviting them, as if it were the Marquesa’s will that they should get to know it well, and Elena had acceded to her wishes. Two weeks after he had returned to school Tomás disappeared one Wednesday afternoon, sports afternoon, when he had not been missed until time for prep. The school sent a telegram to Jerez. They had tried to telephone, but it was one of the many times the telephone system was not working. At the same time that they sent the telegram to me, they had also telephoned Clonmara. Richard, in response, was on the first boat to England the next day.
He telephoned me from the school. ‘Tomás left with only a little money. He couldn’t have drawn it all out from the bursar without attracting attention.’
‘But he left? You’re sure of that, Richard? He’s not … Not … Not what? I couldn’t think; I didn’t want to think. Nothing could have happened to Tomás.
‘Well, of course the police are making enquiries. They’ve already searched the woods around here. Today they’re dragging the pool at the old gravel quarry. They’ve made enquiries at the local railway station, but no one remembers seeing him take a train. Of course it’s only a five mile-walk to Burston, and that’s a major junction. If he went there he could have taken a train to almost anywhere in England, providing he had the money.’
‘My mother says she sent him extra money at Easter. He said he wanted to buy special attachments for his camera. He probably didn’t tell them at school about it. Richard, he didn’t want to go back. I know that. It isn’t the school. He just didn’t want to be away from here. I thought he’d get over it. After all, it’s his first year. I thought he needed time to settle down …’
‘Charlie, I’m trying everything. The London office … the routes to Ireland. He doesn’t know England that well.’
‘He’s tough, Richard. He knows the land very well. He knows how peasants live. He could last a long time on a little money.’ I was gnawed by the thought that in these depression years, a young boy on the road, a boy speaking perfect English, able to take care of himself, would attract little notice. The country was full of men and boys walking the roads, earning a few shillings here and there, moving on again in the hope of the next few shillings. That would be Tomás’s style. I did not let myself think of the woods and the gravel quarry.
It was Edwin Fletcher who made the suggestion. ‘Have them try the sherry shippers in Bristol. It’s nearer than London. They go directly to Cadiz, most of them.’
I sat up all night trying to contact Richard by telephone at the hotel near the school. About four o’clock in the morning we finally made contact. There was a long wait while the night porter went to bring Richard to the phone, and I had to beg the operators, in Spanish and English, not to cut us off.
‘Try Bristol, Richard,’ I shouted into the phone. ‘Try Harvey’s. Try every sherry firm who ships into Bristol. For God’s sake, Richard, find him!’
I thought he answered, ‘I’ll find my son ‒’ but the words were distorted and blurred, and then the line went dead. I was left weeping, and then Maria Luisa, who had waited up with me, was beside me with some brandy.
‘Why, Maria Luisa? ‒ why would he do such a thing? If he has done it, and now I pray God he has. The alternative is unthinkable.’
‘He’s different from the others, Carlota. He is not shaped the way they are. He does not conform. Be brave, querida. You will hear.’
We did not hear. Richard went to Bristol, and then to London and none of the sherry shippers knew anything about Tomás. Ten days later, when we were sitting down to a supper none of us would eat, he arrived at Los Cisnes. He was lean, dirty and cheerful. ‘I’m sorry. Mama. I just couldn’t stick it. I’m Spanish. England isn’t for me.’
He had spent four days searching out a ship in the Bristol docks which was bound for Cadiz with a load of machine parts. He had got a few hours’ casual employment helping to load it. It wasn’t legal to employ him, but when he spoke English to the Spaniards, and Spanish to the English, each had assumed that he was in some way connected with the other. He looked dirty enough to have been a Spanish peasant employed by the line, or one of the millions of English looking for any sort of work they could find. When the ship sailed no one had realised he was aboard. They had found him, hungry and still cheerful, just a few hours out of Cadiz. The captain, who might have had no particular love for the sherry dons who ran Jerez, had simply let him find his own way
to us, without sending a message that he was found. What did one boy, more or less, matter in a country where so many were looking for some way to scrape a living? Even if the boy did speak English, it was no proof he belonged to the family of Fernandez, Thompson. And if he was not who he said he was, why hand him over to the police who would beat the information out of him? The boy had given no trouble, had stolen nothing but the passage. He had some money on him, Spanish and English money. He was better off than most. Tomás had bought food in Cadiz, and a ride with a man heading for Seville.
There was no way to punish him, none I would countenance. ‘Didn’t you think how frightened I have been? You might have thought of that, Tomás. That has been the worst of all. Sometimes I thought you … thought you dead.’
He looked ashamed. ‘I thought of it. But if I’d contacted you from Bristol, they’d have had me back at school. I wasn’t going to have that. There was no way I could send a message from the ship, was there? They don’t send radio messages for stowaways. I thought of telephoning from Cadiz, but that was too conspicuous. Mother, you must have known I was on the way home. Where else would I have gone? This is where I want to be.’
The Marquesa thought she devised a punishment for him which turned out to be no punishment at all. ‘I have written to the Duchess. I have asked permission for him to spend the summer at Doñana, living with one of the guides. No luxuries for him. Let him work the way they do. Let him burn charcoal, watch for poachers. Let him broil in the heat there, and eat what they eat. Afterwards we will see about school. There are some rather strict ones, they tell me, in Seville.’
He spent the summer at Doñana, and it hardened and toughened him as nothing else could have. He lived as a peasant and learned things the Marquesa had not dreamed of. He had the luxury of his binoculars and camera, and a supply of film given by my mother. He went on compiling his schoolboy’s record of Doñana; he was isolated, there were no parties, no entertainment, only a little guitar music, rough wine to drink and simple food. He was happy, he said later. He had helped teach a boy of his own age to read. Of all the other things he himself had learned we had only the sketchiest knowledge. But he had learned what it was like to be a Spanish peasant, and that was more education than any of his brothers had had.
The Summer of the Spanish Woman Page 51
