They pulled up at an unpretentious eating house on the Avenida de Espana by the name of Cafe de la Concha. The tables were bare, scrubbed and solid round blocks, rather like butchers’ chopping blocks, but fortunately spaces had been carved for knees and legs.
‘You will permit me to order, Senorita Zoe?’
‘Si,’ Zoe said, and was rewarded with his pleased smile ... pleasure came easily to these Spaniards, she thought.
When the waiters came ... again Zoe was impressed at the number in service and the gusto with which they served ... the senor wasted no time.
When they had gone he turned to Zoe and explained that he had not ordered an orthodox meal, that is soup, savoury and what comes after, since Jamon Serrano challenged every corner of the appetite, and he was quite sure she would need nothing else, except, perhaps ... a small smile ... helado.
‘Ice-cream.’ Zoe recalled the excited children this afternoon. ‘What is Jamon Serrano?’
‘It is sun-cured ham, sun-cured in our mountain snow. With it will come gazpacho, an old Andalusian special, rich with spice and peppers. And to wash it down, our camarero ... our waiter, senorita ... will naturally bring vino tinto.’
‘Red wine,’ Zoe claimed.
‘Good girl! Si.’
The meal came, and once Zoe accustomed herself to the spicier flavours she loved the food. But she was very relieved, she informed the senor, that he had not ordered any more courses.
‘But you will take helado to cool you down?’
‘I don’t want to be cooled down.’
‘Is that a Britisher talking?’ he laughed.
After the meal they lingered a while, listening to a strolling musician, for although the cafe was not a luxury one, Ramon informed Zoe that most eating places provided a fiddler or guitarist.
After he had smoked his cheroot, they got up, returned the bows of the proprietor and strolled out to the Avenida de Espana again, then into the Plaza de Vantes, facing the sea.
It was here, at first to Zoe’s horror, that they ran into their coach companions. Stopping short, Zoe felt she would have turned and run, but for Ramon’s firm fingers.
‘Courage, little one,’ he whispered, and guided her forward.
But she need not have worried, for she was greeted enthusiastically. Mrs. Macdonald stepped forward and asked after the children—it appeared she had called on her sister after all. Madame Gisbert, she informed Zoe, was improving.
All the time they were talking, relating, exchanging experiences, Zoe’s eyes were darting nervously around for Mrs. Fenton. At last the Englishman who had supplied ‘Beer and skittles’ for the senor roared cheerfully, ‘But she’s gone, Miss Breen, gone with the wind.’
‘That’s true,’ seconded Mrs. Macdonald. ‘She took a dislike to all of us after that episode, and asked John to put her down at the nearest railway station.’
John, who was conducting the group around San Sebastian, inquired anxiously of Senor Raphaelina, ‘She spoke about refunds, sir. Will that be all right?’
‘Never,’ Ramon assured him, ‘will money be paid back with more alacrity.’
‘With Her Ladyship gone, we all decided to make better time, and we came right through,’ related Mrs. Macdonald. ‘And then something else happened. We all think that you and Senor Raphaelina were the cause.’ She was smiling at Zoe.
‘Oh, dear.’ Zoe was apprehensive.
‘It’s pleasant. It’s—romantic.’
‘Romantic?’
‘Felicity ... you roomed with her, I believe?’
‘Yes.’
‘She and Brett ... do you remember that young American?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, they’re pairing off together. Quite significantly. That’s why they’re not with us now. We’re all thrilled with our coach romances.
‘Romances?’ Zoe echoed blankly, looking helplessly at Ramon to come to her aid.
He did so at once, and effectively.
‘Where are you off to now? May we join you?’—Safety in numbers, thought Zoe with relief. This should scotch any romantic talk.
‘I’ve suggested watching the dancing in the Moorish quarter.’ It was John again. ‘Please come, sir.’ He turned to Zoe. ‘And Miss Breen.’
Not so enthusiastic now, Zoe noted, and wondered why since it had been he who had suggested the intermingling, Ramon, on Zoe’s behalf, agreed.
It was not far to walk, and soon their crowd was watching groups of girls in vivid dresses with rippling flounces clicking castanets and posturing at men in high-waisted trousers and fancy shirts.
Zoe enjoyed it ... enjoyed the bubbling rhythm, but she could sense Ramon stirring impatiently by her side.
He still sat it out, though ... made his farewell later of the coach travellers with gaiety and gallantry, but once away from them he said, ‘What a show! It is not really authentic, you know, it is only for the amusement of foreigners.’
‘I was amused, but then I am a foreigner.’
His face darkened. ‘You are not, you are—’
‘I’m an Australian, and that’s a foreign country, which makes me—’
‘Come,’ he said, ‘before I grow angry with you and show what angry Spaniards do to tiresome little girls.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘To see the real Spain. Genuine flamenco musicians and dancers.’ He began leading her up some steep steps, then down some more steps, and then through a painted gate in a white wall.
What followed, Zoe knew she would never forget. The colour! The verve! The spilling music! The rising tempo! The reeling intensity of the music that rose to such a pitch that she felt she must either get up and join in, or run wildly away.
She did neither, of course. She listened. She watched. She returned with Ramon to the car. He tucked her in, he went round to the driver’s seat. He drove back along the coast road to the Court of the Myrtles. Neither of them spoke.
Inside the suite he shut the door behind them, then stood looking at Zoe from across the room.
Then, with an instinctive, almost predestined movement they were coming towards each other. His big arms were on her shoulders. His dark face was quite near—barely a breath away.
It was the music, of course. It was the dancing. She was still intoxicated with it. Still in a pink cloud.
What would have happened then, Zoe did not know ... did not pause to think ... had not Fleurette cried out in her sleep, not the usual drowsy baby bird cry of a child, but the fretful ... possibly fevered? ... one that a mother’s ear immediately picks up.
And Zoe picked it up at once ... wasn’t she their mother for these few weeks? ... and spontaneously, and a little thankfully, came out of her pink cloud. She went in to the child.
She was all right. Probably had played too long and too hard; she was not so tough as young Henri. Zoe brushed back the hair from the little brow, adjusted a pillow, pulled up the rugs, with a dampened tissue moistened the lips.
Across the cot Ramon watched her in silence; his eyes were gentle, sympathetic ... entirely different from those flashing black eyes of only a moment ago.
‘The time and the place,’ he whispered ruefully, ‘you had a poet who said that.’
‘Yes. “Never the time and the place And the loved one all together.” ’—Oh, why had she given him the whole quotation? He would think that she—
‘Si, and Browning was right. Oh, yes, I knew it was the husband of Elizabeth who wrote Songs from the Portuguese. You see, pequena, there is more between us than the care of children. We are almost related by poems.’ He gave a soft, low laugh. ‘But I am thankful for your poet for reminding me that at the cotside of a baby is not the time and place.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Only the time and place for the attention of the young. Tend the small one, senorita, until I return in several days. I will be gone by the time you awaken in the morning, but I will write from Oporto. Then when I come back...’
‘Yes,
senor?’
Fleurette was fretful again. Zoe went through the routine of touching, soothing, adjusting.
When she looked up from the cot, the Spaniard had gone, gone silently, completely; there was not even a trace of the aromatic whiff of his cheroot in the outer room.
The time, thought Zoe, standing by the window before she got into bed, hearing the eager rush and the soft withdrawal of the waters of the Golfe de Gascoyne, and the place.
Time for what? What place?
CHAPTER SIX
‘The senor departed very early, senorita,’ Elena, the wife of the hotelier, Bernardo, told Zoe when she brought the morning trays.
Zoe had known she would naturally miss the tall Spaniard ... after all, he had scarcely been out of her sight since she first had met him ... but she had not bargained, and she was quite sure that Ramon had not bargained either, otherwise, being the warm-hearted person he was, he would not have gone without them, on the reaction of the children as well.
Henri’s face clouded over; Fleurette’s lip dropped and her eyes filled with tears, quite angry tears.
‘But he was going to teach me to swim,’ disbelieved the boy.
‘He still is, darling, in a few days. In the meantime I could start you off, and one never knows, you may pick it up quite quickly, and look how pleased he’ll be on his return.’
Henri nodded agreement, but not an over-enthusiastic agreement. ‘You’re a girl,’ he reminded her succinctly.
Fleurette was more difficult to console.
‘I have trouble getting my sand puddings out of my bucket, he said he would show me a good way.’
Surely puddings, even the sand variety, were something in which woman was on a par at least with man?
‘I’ll show you,’ Zoe promised.
‘Do you know how?’ Fleurette looked doubtful, to say the least.
Zoe watched the child covertly. Last night she had had the feeling she might have been sickening for something. She seemed all right now, though ... a little waspish, but so was Henri. The pair were distinctly put out at Ramon’s departure.
‘Time will soon pass,’ declared Zoe. ‘After breakfast we’ll go down to the beach. We’ll build castles with moats and ramparts and lookout towers.’ She remembered the lookout tower on that castle that had decided two girls to alight at Lamona instead of travelling on to Seville, the other lookout towers she had seen since.
‘We’re finished.’ The pair pushed their plates aside. ‘Let’s go.’
Because she had promised, Zoe deprived herself of her second cup of coffee.
On the pale sands the children brightened up considerably. Zoe put up the umbrella and sat and watched them. Very soon it was the same United Nations, junior variety, as yesterday. The mammas, too, added their international touch. Zoe discussed Heinz’s peeling nose with a German mother, Rosa’s hair that went so limp with salt waiter with an Italian parent. Mrs. Wolhar, who said she was Ukrainian, spoke busily on her Anton’s childhood ailments, and Zoe quickly reassured herself again by Fleurette’s pink cheeks and abundance of energy that her fears last night had been definitely unfounded.
All the same when Henri came up for a small rest between the labours of removing sea to sand and sand to sea, she asked him if he had had measles and things.
‘All those things,’ he assured her cheerfully. ‘Measles, tonsils, pumps.’
‘Mumps.’—Thank goodness the children would be immune to the more contagious ailments. In a prevalently child community like this little beach an epidemic could spread like wildfire. Besides, she remembered her. father infinitely preferring a child to have ‘a list’, as he called it, behind him; in his opinion a successful recovery from an infection set the child up should something graver occur.
‘But that is me,’ informed Henri with pride. ‘Fleurette, nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Nothing. Only that thing.’
‘What thing?’
‘That thing that she has on her shoulder.’
‘What kind of thing?’
‘It’s not there now.’ Henri wandered off again and after pondering a few moments, Zoe shrugged the matter away.
There was absolutely no need to guard the small ones. In such a safe bathing place they could not have come to harm even had they tried.
Zoe got up and wandered along to the deeper end for adults, where the channel led out to the island. But she did not fancy swimming out to the island alone. She had just made it yesterday, and then she had had the moral support of an able swimmer by her side.
Her cheeks flushed as she remembered that epic return ... that stroke by stroke with her stroke that deliberate authority. That—that mastering. And all to make her submit to admitting she wanted to listen to what he had to say. How dared that Spaniard! What did Ramon Raphaelina think he was?—and what, and Zoe heard her heart beating hard, did she think he was?
‘I must stop all this.’
She was not aware she said it aloud until a voice by her side demanded’
‘Stop what? And don’t tell me I track Miss Zoe Breen down at last? I’d just about given you up.’
It was David Glenner.
‘David!’ shrieked Zoe.
‘Then you do admit that at least this time?’
‘What do you mean, David?’
‘Oh, come off it!’ David was striding beside her now towards the small headland from which she could watch the children ... if she could pick out their heads among those scores of heads ... and at the same time have a measure of privacy. ‘You know as well as I know that we saw each other yesterday.’
‘David—’ she began.
‘You know?’ he repeated, and she fell silent, a silence which he took for agreement, and at the same time did not take at all well.
After his tirade at her, he asked reproachfully, ‘Dunno why you would cut me like that. Why did you, Zoe? I never stepped out of place on the ship.’
‘No, you didn’t,’ she agreed. She looked around her. There were rocks to sit on and she sank down on one. David sat down beside her.
‘I’ve brought my togs in the hope of a swimming companion,’ he informed her. ‘Where can I change?’
‘It’s a child’s beach, you can see that for yourself.’
‘We could go out to the island.’
‘Oh, no.’ She said it far too hurriedly, and he said discerningly back at once, ‘That way, is it, Zoe? You’ve been there before.’
‘It’s too far.’
‘You say that!’ he laughed. She had won the ship’s swimming competition for women.
‘Who is he?’ David asked. ‘How deep has it gone? Where is he? What’s it leading to? And no “what do you mean, David?” ’
‘He’s Spanish,’ she told him.
‘I could see that.’
‘It hasn’t gone any depth.’
‘I couldn’t see that.’
‘He isn’t here,’ Zoe went on.
‘I can see that.’
‘It’s leading to nothing, of course.’
‘I can’t see that.’
‘David, if you want to be difficult—’ she protested.
‘I don’t want to be. I want your company. I’m sick of trekking around Europe and—not knowing anybody. I should have disembarked at Lisbon along with you girls.’
‘That,’ Zoe said sadly, ‘was the whole trouble.’ She told him the bones of the story, that is the story of why she had pretended she had not seen him, her foolish omission to tell the truth in the first place, her subsequent pretence. It was rather a relief to relate it all.
‘Sounds very mountain out of molehill-ish to me,’ he judged. ‘Why lie in the beginning, Zoe?’
‘That’s another story again. It involves Diana.’
‘The beautiful redhead?’ he laughed. ‘I bet it’s an involvement! Shoot.’
She told him the second tale.
He whistled when she had finished. ‘You really believe she’s fallen for this guy?’
/>
‘This Miguel, yes.’
‘What is it about Spaniards, then? The two prettiest girls on the ship and they—’
‘We’re speaking of Diana,’ Zoe said firmly.
‘I’m speaking of you, Zoe.’ David’s voice was serious. ‘One: You won’t swim out to the island. Reason: You swam there yesterday with someone else and it’s become “Our place” like “Our song”. Two: You pretended I wasn’t there yesterday, that I was as substantial as thin air. Reason: You didn’t want me there, nor anybody else there, not with this Spanish don.’
‘It’s not like that,’ she protested.
‘Not that you’d notice.’
There was silence a while. Zoe saw the heads of Henri and Fleurette and remarked, ‘There’s our children.’
‘Fast, wasn’t it? Or has he been married before?’
‘David!’ Something in her voice must have reached him, for he said, ‘Sorry, kid.’
He tried to divert her by a quick resume of what had happened to him since he had left the ship at Tilbury.
‘I took a job, did some Mother Country tours, took another job, then beetled across to the Continent to finish off that part of my trip abroad. I intended to go back to England and spend the rest of the time there until I go home at the end of the year.’ He was offering her a cigarette, lighting one of his own. She watched the wreath of smoke, thinner and less aromatic than Ramon’s cheroots, and she was missing that aromatic tang quite abominably. ‘Any questions?’ he asked.
Spanish Lace Page 8
