Helping her over a small irrigation channel, he added, ‘And I do not think the castel on the hill is to be restored because of that, I mean because restoration is Ramon’s work, I rather think...’ He stopped and regarded the vineyard casa that they had now reached, cream-washed, blue-roofed, shutters of Mediterranean blue. Looking sidewise at him, Zoe could see the dreams in his eyes.
All at once her own eyes were pricking at his happiness. At Diana’s happiness. At a cream-washed house with blue shutters that waited for the fulfilment of their love.
CHAPTER NINE
Instinctively blue became the colour note of Di’s and Miguel’s wedding. Spain, thought Zoe, was a blue place. Not the floating blue of Australia, with its hazy lilac blue of distances, its grey blue of eucalyptus leaves, but the same colour as the vineyard casa shutters, glowing Mediterranean blue.
Blue interpreted in a soft pale shade for Josefina, for Fleurette refused pointblank to become a flower girl, and Josefina, quite enraptured at the idea, was to be brought back from school to Lamona for the event: and a deep, almost midnight blue for the attendants to give Di’s own traditional white a more dramatic contrast.
Zoe had been a little dubious over the deep blue that Di had raved over in the Esterella fabrics boutique, declaring that it was just what she wanted for Vittoria and Zoe, and had pointed out that whereas such a flamenco type of colour would be an excellent choice for dark Vittoria, she was not sure that her own peeled sticks—
‘Pardon? Peeled sticks?’ Vittoria had come with the girls to the Esterella stores.
Laughingly Zoe had explained.
‘But your hair is moonlight, and this dark blue is the night itself. You will look wonderful, whereas I will look like a bruise. For I am black and it is blue.’ Vittoria gave that characteristic shrug of the Spanish.
‘What do we wear on our heads?’ asked Zoe. ‘A small whimsy? A circlet of flowers? A—’ She stopped at Vittoria’s shocked look.
‘But of course we wear a mantilla,’ Vittoria informed her. ‘In all Spain at all such events it is always the mantilla.’
‘Spanish lace,’ Zoe murmured with a sudden sharp pang in her heart.
But one could not be dispirited for long. It was joy to watch Miguel’s and Di’s joy, to join in, as literally everyone in Lamona seemed to be joining in, in the preparations and fun.
For instance, from every bodega favoured vintages were being proudly brought to the casa to help out the wine supplies at the wedding feast. Vino tinto, vino bianco, deep amber and pure golden wines, and in flagons that made Zoe’s fingers fairly itch to turn them into bases for lamps, so beautiful they were, so unusual.
Bottles of esparragos ... asparagus, jars of aceitunas ... olives, both black and green, arrived daily. Women offered to provide huge churnings of helado ... ice-cream. Men came forward to say they would be camareros ... waiters ... at the big tables to be spread on the terrace under the trees. The one thing missing that Zoe did notice were invitations, but it appeared that no chaste white notice requesting you to attend was needed, for everyone was expected to come.
Judging by the presents that came rolling in, everyone was coming.
Vittoria had temporarily forgotten her concern over Juan in the excitement of being an attendant, and any spare moment was put into the embroidery of the exquisite cushion that was to hold the two rings.
The village modista ... dressmaker ... proved to be as well as a gifted, a very obliging seamstress. Having finished the attendants’ dresses in a manner that would have been approved in any haute couture house ... Di and Miguel had chosen their first love for Di’s gown ... she insisted on running up the new casa drapes.
Much of the material for the curtains came from wedding gifts. Hand-loomed. Hand-embroidered. Quite often hand-dyed. All the window colours glowed, except the simple white muslin that was Zoe’s gift for Di’s and Miguel’s bedroom ... their habitation. She had been delighted when she had found a length of the old-fashioned fabric in a small overlooked Esteralla shop. Not only had it suited her purse, but she had known Di would love it because it would be a little bit of home ... plain white muslin was home ... in a new and throbbing world.
She was hanging the simple curtains ... no frills, no bows ... when someone came into the room and stood behind her.
‘Ah!’ The intake of breath was genuine, there was no doubt of the warm approval. ‘Ah, that is very beautiful, very right, Senorita Zoe.’
Senorita Zoe ... so Don Ramon was back! Zoe turned, a little pink with pleasure at his sincere praise.
‘You don’t think it’s ... well, all the other colours ... I mean ‘
‘It is right. I have said so. You are indeed an excellent decorator. I have been through all the casa. You have done a wonderful job.’
‘You must praise the people who sent in the lovely materials, praise the modista who made them up.’
‘And not the girl who stood on chairs to fix them so that they flowed, not just hung? Oh, no, senorita, if praise is to be meted out you must accept your share. Also’—he was taking out his cheroots—‘a request.’
‘Yes, senor?’
‘To attend the decorations of the castel on the hill.’
‘Isn’t it already done?’
‘Only the restorations have been completed. It is quite bare.’
‘But you know yourself what you want.’
‘Not in this instance,’ he said briefly and a little significantly.—Significance?
‘But—’ she began.
‘Look, it will be a paid assignment. Will you take over the castel, please? Your work here is done. Your unpaid work. But up there it will be different. I will pay you—’ He gave a number of pesetas that Zoe was not used to sufficiently yet to realize in pounds and shillings.
However, it sounded large.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s a way to gather up some money to pay you back.’
‘Pay me back?’
‘My transit from France. My hotel bill. Remember, senor, how you told me I was in your debt?’
‘I also informed you ... or intended you to infer ... that staying on here was the price of wiping out the debt. However, I still hope you will consider this assignment.’
Zoe was considering it, she was thinking that it would pay her passage back to England.
‘Everything is completed now,’ she told him. ‘I won’t be letting Diana down. I’ll be pleased to work up at the castel.’
‘I have to go away again on business. If I complete it this week I will be quite free for the wedding. Here is the key of the castel. Take paper and pencil, senorita. Also take your time, since decorations, if lovingly done, are timeless. When I return I will go through it with you and act on your advice.’
‘You might not like my choice.’
He looked at the perfection of the simple white curtains and shook the dark head.
‘Am I to think “Cuanto?” ’ she asked roguishly. ‘How much?’
‘You learn quickly when it pleases you,’ he frowned. ‘But when it doesn’t please you, you take a long time.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘No matter now. Just do a very good job.’
No longer needed to assist the bride, Zoe climbed the hill to the castel the next morning, thinking as she went slowly ... it had to be slowly, for the old palacio was on the highest crest of all Lamona ... how it had really been the castle that had started everything for Diana. Yes, and for herself. If the pair of them had not leaned out of the window of the prodigious little train, calling in delight, knowing they simply must get off at the nearest station, Di would not have met Miguel. She herself would not have had this very intimate experience of Spain. Nor, placing the huge key into the lock and turning it, the unusual post of decorating an old castle of Iberia.
It was not as dark within as she had expected, but then there were no drapes of any sort at the mullioned windows. Also, the castle was so situated that daylight caught it at every angle of the su
n, and being on a hill aspect would see to it that it would receive both the first and last rays.
It was not a large castle as castles go, she decided. Indeed, as a paradore went ... a luxury hotel ... it was not at all a good choice. It would cater for far too few guests. Its beauty was undeniable, though. Every line, every niche and nook was lovely. The ceilings were beamed, the window settings alcoved. It was almost exquisitely presented, thrilled Zoe.
It puzzled her, though, that Don Ramon would want her to decorate it, he who had done this sort of thing, and so wonderfully, before.
However, he did want it, and she went day after day, sketching and itemizing, often having to change her first instinctive schemes, for she found herself planning for a home, not a castle for accommodation, and she had to pull herself up. Because of the smaller size, she had to try to afford the impression of space where sometimes space was not. It was quite a task, she found, and because she had come to love the castle as it was, every alteration hurt, everything in her cried out to leave it alone.
But still it was a labour of love, and she came to long for the mornings to go up the hill to it again. To hate the evening because she had to shut it up and come down once more.
She had been across to the watch tower ... quite useless as regarded accommodation, she found, but still perfectly if minutely proportioned; it would have made a superb study, she thought, or a children’s refuge from the world of adults. She had paused as that thought had struck her, then smiled and shook her head. It was not a home she was decorating, it was a paradore, a place for tourists to stay in.
She was still wondering how she could expand the reception porch with colours that would suggest space where there was really insufficient space, at least for a hotel, the afternoon that Don Ramon returned.
‘Ah, pequena!’ She had heard the footfalls on the flags before she had seen him, but she had known it would be he, no one else she knew took those long, firm steps. ‘You have been working hard,’ he greeted her. ‘Rosina tells me you even bring up with you a packed lunch. That was not necessary, you know. I am known as a firm employer, but I do not grind. Is that the word?’
‘Si, senor, but it was never that for me, for I’ve loved every minute of it. And I love this castel.’
He looked inordinately pleased. Even though he had restored many others before this, gone through all this before, he had that look of it being the first.
‘May I see the sketches, Senorita Zoe?’
She handed them across rather shyly. She still felt she had not achieved what a paradore needed. It has been difficult, she thought ruefully; the main essential to afford space is simply space.
She became sharply aware that Ramon was silent. Recalling his warm praise of Diana’s and Miguel’s habitacion as she had interpreted it, she looked at him anxiously. He did not look displeased, though, he looked puzzled.
‘You don’t like it?’ she queried.
‘For a paradore, for a place of accommodation, si, but this is not so, senorita, this castel is not so. It is far too small. Also Lamona is a village, not a tourist centre, so a paradore is not needed, nor will it ever be needed, not here. But there, poor child, I should have explained, have let you know. I just naturally thought that you would realize from the smaller size that...’ He bit his lip in annoyance at his omission.
Before she could say anything, he went on, ‘Besides my own stupidity, these sketches’—he waved around the sheets—‘are undoubtedly since you have not yourself experienced a paradore. For that reason you have been working against odds. There is, in a castel suitable for a paradore, no need to convey space, for there is space. But it will be simpler for me to demonstrate than relate, and then you will see how this castel is too intimate for what you evidently believed I wanted designed. And we shall do just that, senorita. We will leave early tomorrow for the most recent of my restorations, a longish run, perhaps, yet not by your Australian standards, nor for my fast car. We will depart at daybreak. I will have Rosina pack a transit meal for us so that we will not waste time searching out a cafe on the way.’
In a rather faint voice, for already a premonition was nudging at her, Zoe asked, ‘Which direction?’
‘Already you have orientated yourself, you understand north, south, east and west in our Iberia?’ he asked. ‘We will be going north, senorita, but for time’s sake we will deprive ourselves of Madrid.’ He was prompting her to the door, finding nothing amiss in the way she kept her face away from his. ‘Some other day,’ he promised, ‘for Madrid.’ She did make a feeble effort to plead a responsibility to Diana ... a need to report up at the Casa Rosada. It was useless.
‘Tomorrow I show you the difference between a large castel and a family one,’ he ruled.
Family! That’s what had struck her forcibly when she had started her designing. A family, not guests, for the hill castel.
Wondering miserably if she could plead a headache tomorrow morning, she went down the slope behind him. But she knew it would be difficult to deceive this man. Also it might not be that castle where she and the children and David had spent the night. It might not be ...
They were on the road before dawn, Ramon’s car eating up the miles more easily than had David’s small model. Sometimes she thought she could remember the scenery, sometimes she was confident she could not. But, wretchedly, that might be because there were dual tracks at times, the south-bound road over a different route from the north one.
Then all at once she could remember, remember clearly. They were doing, in reverse, back to front, what David had done on their final lap to Lamona. Sometimes cultivated country, sometimes wild, even forbidding terrain, then stretches of nothing but locust trees.
And, barely deciphered as they flashed by but still undeniably it, a small eating place by the name of Cafe Flores. Yes, the Cafe Flores.
There was not the least doubt, thought Zoe miserably, they were on the same road that she had previously come. And bound to the same place?
‘I have brought you all this distance.’ Ramon was telling her, ‘because demonstration is so much better than a spoken word. You will see, and that will be the best lesson of all. It is not far now. We will lunch there’ ... they had eaten sandwiches and drunk from a flask around eleven ... ‘then take a quick look. Having satisfied ourselves, we will return. Who knows?’ ... A glance at his watch and a satisfied nod at the fast time they were making ... ‘we might even have a quick view of the capital of Spain as we return.’
‘Si, senor? What a reply! she thought in disgust. Why don’t you get it over now, say, ‘I have seen this place previously.’ Why don’t you say it before?
But hope kept her tongue still; it could be a different hotel.
‘Another mile,’ said Don Ramon, and he put his foot down and the countryside fairly raced past them. The rather dull village loomed up, the village whose only claim for existence seemed to be that it was the junction of two roads.
She remembered the sober castle that looked as though, David had said, religious hermits with long beards had contemplated life here, and contemplated it, she recalled, from many wings and numerous rooms. Comparing it with the hill castle it was a very large place.
Don Ramon was leading her up the slope, pointing out architectural features as he went, indicating the more abundant design, the more lavish scale, the vastly more commodious building.
‘Yes,’ she said blankly. There had been servants in the paradore whom she had not seen although she had received their attentions. With luck they could greet the senor, the others might not be there.
It was a remote hope, she realized a moment later, as both the manager and his wife came down the huge flagged hall to greet Don Ramon. One might be absent, but never two, and as it wretchedly happened both man and wife were here.
They greeted the senor exclusively ... after all, he was their patron. As he spoke with them, evidently explaining that it was not an overnight stop, just a rest and a luncheon break, they nodded smilingly
.
Then he must have added that he wished the senorita to inspect the paradore, for their eyes turned on Zoe.
It was absurd to hope, she thought wretchedly, that they were undiscerning people, either that or forgetful. However, she stood her ground and looked steadily back at them. Perhaps if she looked boldly, challengingly enough—
The woman said something. The man said something. Quite distinctly Ramon answered, a negative, flashed his teeth in an amused smile, shook his head.
Then they were repeating it, more emphatically this time, and Don Ramon’s denial was a little puzzled.
He turned to Zoe.
‘They say a ridiculous thing. They wonder why you wish to inspect now when before you showed little interest, barely left your room. I answered that they are mistaken, that you have not been here previously, but they say indeed you have, that you were accompanied by a young man. They are simple people and probably mistaken.’
He waited, and Zoe let him wait.
‘They do not mean it rudely,’ he went on at length when it appeared patent that she was not going to speak, ‘they are just wondering why you have come all this way to see a paradore that not only have you seen earlier but have rested in overnight. I am not blaming them for making a silly mistake, we all make mistakes, but I am censuring them for persisting in such a stubborn story.’ His mouth took that line that Zoe now knew so well.
Had it just been a matter of annoyance she might have left it at that, pretended that the proprietor and his wife were as prone to mistakes as he implied, but though he was a generous taskmaster Zoe knew this man would also be a hard one, an exacting one, and she could not see the pair suffer an injustice because she did not speak out.
Spanish Lace Page 16
