by Isobel Chace
It was soon obvious that she had gone the wrong way, but sooner than turn back she thought she would turn right and then right again as a pleasanter way of backtracking on the way she had come. The narrow street she chose was dark, lit only by the narrow slit of sky overhead, so Megan hurried down it as fast as she could, fearful of she knew not what.
Quite why the door caught her eye she didn’t know, but there it was, painted in scarlet and green, with the legend Banos Arabes written round it. It was half open, inviting her to peer through at the garden beyond, at the brilliant colours of the anemones growing at least a foot high, at the geraniums and the poinsettias, and other flowers that she couldn’t put a name to, and, best of all, the orange and the lemon trees, full of fruit that was actually hanging on the branches.
Megan took a step up into the garden and was beckoned inside by an old man sitting on a wooden form with his back to the wall.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said in English. ‘I was admiring your garden.’
He smiled at her, leaping to his feet and holding out his hand to her, apparently pleading with her to come inside. ‘Buenas tardes, señorita!’
‘Buenas tardes,’ she repeated shyly.
He gave her an encouraging look and stamped off down the path, beckoning her to follow him. She did so, not liking to seem ungracious when he was being kind enough to allow her to look round. He looked completely harmless, she thought, and the sun was shining. He wouldn’t do anything to her while the sun was shining, surely? It was only the shadows in the street that had put it in her mind to be cautious in the first place.
To her surprise there was a door in the wall and he led the way inside, saying proudly that these were the Arab baths. Megan cast a quick look over the ancient arches inside and saw that she had indeed come upon an archaeological site of some kind, a site, moreover, that was considerably older than even its old surroundings. She remembered that Ibiza, another Balearic island, had been a colony of the Punic city of Carthage, and thought that they might well have been in Majorca too. Then the Moors had owned the island for a long, long time, just as they had so much of Spain itself. It wasn’t so surprising that they should have left some of their buildings behind them.
The caretaker began an elaborate pantomime to show how the water had been heated and conducted round the baths. It was, Megan discovered, a typical Arab bath that was worked on the same system as the old Roman baths had been before them and which are now called Turkish baths in the West. The old man dipped up and down, making graphic movements with his hands, and so intent was he on his elaborate explanations that he didn’t hear the footsteps approaching, nor did he notice when they were joined by another girl until she spoke to him, a torrent of angry Spanish coming from her brightly lipsticked mouth.
The caretaker stared at her in silence. Megan smiled hopefully at the newcomer and was surprised to find that the girl’s interest was in her and not in either the baths or the caretaker.
‘I am Inez,’ she began in a quaint lisping English that was quite charming. ‘Inez de la Navidades. You have heard of me?’
Megan shook her head, silent in the face of such superb confidence.
‘But you must have heard of me!’ You are the young English companion of the Senora Vallori, are you not? Then she must have told you all about me. I am the novia of Carlos Vallori. How do you say this in English? That we are going steady, no?’
‘Are you—are you engaged to Carlos?’ Megan asked curiously.
Inez shrugged her shoulders. ‘Engaged? Going steady? I am not sure that I understand the difference! These words have a different nuance?’
‘Yes,’ Megan admitted. ‘Yes, they do.’
‘Then I must explain it better,’ Inez went on. ‘I am very close to Carlos. Is that clear enough?’
Megan nodded briefly. She looked curiously at the other girl and thought she was exactly as she would have imagined Carlos’ future wife to be. She was beautiful in a flashing, fiery way, with soft, mobile lips that asked to be kissed, and a naturally provocative manner that was charmingly feminine and probably very much admired by the men of her acquaintance.
‘How did you know who I am?’ Megan asked.
‘I saw you walking down here. I could see you were a foreigner and who else would you be? Few tourists come down this way and they don’t live in the Calle Morey! I saw you coming out of the house. Whatever brought you here, though? Surely you aren’t interested in this sort of thing? Anyway, I ran after you to ask you to have tea with me. Will you? It will be nice if we can be friends together as I have no one with whom I can talk about Carlos. You will be my friend, won’t you?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then I shall begin by paying for your ticket here, though I can’t think you understood much of what this man had to say about the baths, did you?’
‘No,’ Megan admitted. ‘But he tried to make it interesting. I should like to give him something for himself.’
Inez nodded, frowning. ‘If you want to, but he won’t expect much—’
‘I do want to.’
Megan handed him a coin and was rewarded by a twinkling smile of appreciation. With all the dignity of his race, he picked an orange from one of the trees and handed it to her, murmuring a few words under his breath.
‘What does he say?’ Megan asked Inez.
The Spanish girl looked amused. ‘That you are as beautiful inside as you are on the outside.’
Megan felt herself blushing. ‘Oh!’ she breathed.
‘I think it is probably quite true,’ Inez murmured, laughing at Megan’s expression. ‘Don’t you like to receive the compliments?’
‘Ye-es,’ Megan agreed.
‘It is just as Carlos says I You are completely English! How do you enjoy living in the same house as Margot? She is not nearly so English,’ Inez added. ‘But you have discovered that for yourself?’
‘No,’ Megan said flatly. ‘Of course I haven’t been here long, but Senora Vallori isn’t an easy person to know.’
‘We find her difficult to know, but I thought it might be otherwise with one of her own countrywomen. She confides in no one, that one!’
‘She’s very charming, of course,’ Megan put in dutifully.
Inez’s dark eyes flashed. ‘Very,’ she agreed, trying not to laugh. ‘Come, let us go past the Cathedral and have tea together, no? You shall tell me all about yourself and I shall tell you all about Carlos and me!’
Megan had very little choice but to follow the Spanish girl out of the gardens and back into the shadowed street. It was pleasant to have company, though, as they strolled along the cobbled surface, retracing the way that Megan had come from the Calle Morey. Inez knew exactly where to go, finding her way through the narrow maze of streets with the greatest of ease, turning this way and that, past the Bishop’s House and the Diocesan Museum, round the magnificent Cathedral itself and past the Almudaina Palace, where General Franco now stays when he comes to the island on state business. Inez pointed out each building with a supreme lack of interest as to what lay inside them.
‘I have better things to do,’ she said scornfully, ‘than to follow the tourists through such places. Carlos is ashamed of my ignorance about our history, but I have no interest in such things. What does it matter what our parents did? I am too busy doing myself.’ She turned breathlessly to Megan, her eyes alight with curiosity. ‘Where did Carlos meet you? He tells me you know Pilar? Were you staying with her friends in London? Are you a student?’
Megan stopped walking to look in the window of a shop full of wood carvings of Don Quixote and his faithful servant Sancho Panza. They were all handmade, many of them fashioned to the same pattern, but none the less beautiful for that. Some were made of dark-coloured wood and some in a lighter colour, and their sizes varied from a few inches to several feet high.
‘No, I’m not a student. I’m a singer.’
The reaction was everything she could have hoped for. Inez’s hands flew up in ast
onishment, her mouth round with astonishment. ‘No? But this is something I have heard nothing about! Tell me all about it immediately. I have never heard anything more interesting!’
Megan gave her a pleased smile, flattered by her excitement. ‘I had only just begun professionally,’ she admitted. ‘It’s the most marvellous sensation, though! I can’t describe how it feels when you stand on a platform and have the whole audience in the hollow of your hand, and you know you can make them feel sad or gay just by the change of timbre in your voice. I’ve always wanted to be a singer!’
Inez pointed out a cafe across the road and gave her a little push towards it. ‘But in Mallorca there is no difficulty!’ she exclaimed. ‘It will be easy for you to go on with your career while you are here—’
‘No!’
‘Porque no? There are a hundred night-clubs and places like that where they are always looking for singers! I shall find you a job straight away. My father will help! He owns a great many places of entertainment.’
Megan pushed open the door of the cafe and sat down at the nearest empty table. She felt suddenly empty of all emotion. It was as though she had been borne along by a balloon that had suddenly been pricked, dropping her with indecent haste back on to the earth. It was only in that moment that she realised the extraordinary thing that had happened to her. She had been happy singing with Tony’s band. She had always wanted to sing. And she was going to be perfectly miserable being Senora Vallori’s unwelcome companion and having to live in that museum of a house for she didn’t know how long! ‘I don’t know,’ she said with difficulty.
‘It is clear that this is what you must do!’ Inez insisted. ‘I shall arrange everything. Leave it all to me!’
‘I can’t!’ Megan burst out. ‘I’ve agreed to be Senora Vallori’s companion. She wouldn’t like it if I got a job in a night-club! Nor would Carlos!’
‘That is a difficulty,’ Inez conceded.
Megan summoned up a rather bleak smile. ‘C-Carlos doesn’t approve of singers.’
Inez screwed up her nose thoughtfully. ‘That is true. If it were someone for whom he had no responsibility, he would not mind at all, but in your case he will feel responsible for you—’
‘I can look after myself!’ Megan snapped.
‘But Carlos will not think so,’ Inez pointed out reasonably. ‘If you are living in his house, he will expect you to be like one of his sisters. He would never allow his sisters to sing in public!’
Megan found that she wasn’t at all pleased to be classed with Carlos’ sisters. It gave her the, same uncomfortable feeling that she had when she thought of living in his house as his stepmother’s companion. The whole arrangement dismayed her. She didn’t want to be anyone’s paid companion! She wanted to take to her heels and run as fast as she possibly could, and not just from Senora Vallori and Majorca, but from Carlos too! In fact especially from Carlos!
‘What am I to do?’ she asked, with a helplessness that was unusual in her.
Inez’s eyes narrowed. ‘You could go back to England,’ she suggested.
Megan shook her head. ‘I can’t!’
‘Because of Carlos?’
The sharpness of the question took Megan unawares. She supposed that it was because of Carlos—in a way. He was relying on her to make his stepmother a little more happy and a little easier to live with, and she wouldn’t let him down for anything, which was ridiculous, because Carlos didn’t depend on anyone, and certainly not on an inexperienced eighteen-year-old like herself.
‘And Pilar,’ she said, not knowing quite why she did so.
She was rewarded by a wide smile. ‘I had forgotten that you know Pilar. It was she who persuaded you to look after her mother, no? Ah yes, you are Pilar’s friend and you can do nothing that would upset her. I understand now why you cannot sing in public while you are here.’ With an air of intense satisfaction, Inez turned her head and summoned the young waitress to their table, ordering tea for two and some of the famous Mallorquin puffs, sometimes filled with cream and sometimes not, and dusted with icing sugar. ‘But it is a pity, no? I shall tell my father all about you all the same. One never knows what may happen and I should so enjoy knowing a singer!’
Megan opened her mouth to protest that she wasn’t any more Pilar’s friend than Carlos’, but then she thought she was making too much of the whole business and lapsed back into silence.
‘So,’ Inez’s ready tongue broke the silence, ‘now I shall tell you about Carlos and me. I have lived in Mallorca all my life. Once I have been to Barcelona, but that is all, and then it was to visit with the Valloris. They have always been so very good to me! Of course when we were children I did not have much to do with Carlos because he is older than the rest of us, but always he was the one I loved the best. Pepe is nice, but he teases all the time and now he is in South America. I think one cannot love anyone who is on the other side of the world? He writes sometimes and tells me I am bad because I don’t write back to him!’ Inez’s eyes flashed with a sudden spurt of temper. ‘If he wants to know about me, he can stay here!’
Megan chuckled. ‘That’s hardly very practical! He has his living to earn!’
Inez shrugged. ‘The Valloris don’t need any more money. It is only because Carlos insists that he works that Pepe had to go to South America. He could have stayed here and looked after the Vallori almonds, or something!’ She sounded so passionate on the subject that Megan was amused.
‘Doesn’t Carlos do that?’ she enquired.
‘He comes occasionally,’ Inez admitted. ‘There is a man who looks after the orchards for him. Carlos does nothing himself. He doesn’t work for his money!’
‘But he makes Pepe work?’
‘Pepe is the younger son!’ Inez said meaningly.
Megan refrained from saying that she had thought she was going to hear about Carlos. She eyed Inez thoughtfully, noting the faintly sulky look that came and went round the full, kissable mouth. The thought occurred to her that the Spanish girl was rather spoilt, and she was amused by the thought. Hadn’t that been exactly what people had always said about her?
‘Do you like Pepe better than Carlos?’ she asked aloud, languidly, as though it were of no real interest to her.
Inez flushed. ‘Of course not! Pepe is only a boy. Carlos is a man!’
Megan nearly laughed at the Spanish girl’s tone of voice, but something prevented her. ‘When Pepe comes home he will be a man,’ she pointed out.
‘But not like Carlos!’ Inez denied. ‘That was what I was going to tell you about. When Pepe had gone it was so dull here. You have no idea what it was like! There were a few parties, but nothing that I could interest myself in. Almost everything here is for the tourists—my father works for the tourist industry—and there is hardly anything for people of good family on the island.’ She sighed. ‘That was when I really got to know Carlos! You have no idea how kind he can be! He was staying at the farm for a few days and I told him that he had managed to ruin my whole life by sending Pepe away and taking Pilar and Isabel to Barcelona to live!’ She frowned, remembering her former misery. ‘He said that it would never do for me to be unhappy and he put on a party especially for me, and called often at my parents’ house just to see me. It was natural that I should fall in love with him, don’t you think? Well, I did! And I think he meant me to because my family is quite as good as his, and he has to marry sooner or later, doesn’t he?’
Megan chewed her lower lip thoughtfully. ‘I—I suppose so.’
‘Suppose?’ Inez sounded annoyed. ‘Carlos understands his responsibilities very well. It is necessary that he should marry and have a son to carry on the family name—’
‘Pepe could do that,’ Megan objected.
‘Pepe! That wouldn’t be at all the same!’ Inez’s dark eyes held a tragic look that looked as if it might well brim over into tears. ‘Pepe has no money of his own. All the Vallori estates and businesses were inherited by Carlos. Some of them belonged to his mothe
r, you understand. Anyway, although his father loved his English wife, Pepe didn’t stand a chance when it came to the inheritance.’
‘And what about Carlos’ stepmother?’ Megan knew that she shouldn’t enquire into a matter which was absolutely no business of hers, but she was intrigued to know the exact situation between the Senora and her stepson and whether she was still as jealous of him as she had been when he had been a small boy.
Inez raised her eyebrows. ‘Carlos takes care of her.’
‘Didn’t her husband leave her anything?’ Megan asked in astonishment.
‘But of course not!’ Inez sounded startled and patronising, both at the same moment. ‘Margot has everything she needs. If he had left her any part of the Vallori estate she would have given it to Pepe and that would have been the beginning of the break-up of the Vallori empire. He would have hated that, and so would Carlos!’
Megan swallowed. ‘Do they own much property?’ She hesitated, catching herself up as she thought about the impropriety of her questioning Inez like this. ‘I mean, surely there must be more than enough for them all?’
‘Carlos is one of the richest men in Spain,’ Inez said judiciously. ‘You see what a good thing it would be for me to marry him?’
‘I suppose so,’ Megan agreed.
‘But, Megan, if I married him I should be rich too!’
‘There’s more to marriage than that,’ Megan said. She was beginning to think that her role as Inez’s confidante and friend was going to be a rather trying one. ‘Won’t Carlos expect you to be in love with him?’
Inez wrinkled up her nose, looking highly put out. ‘But I told you! I am in love with Carlos! I want to marry him very much and he wants to marry me. If—If he has other friends, that is no concern of mine!’
Megan gave her an anxious look. ‘Well, if you can look at it that way—she began. She made a further effort to hide the fact that she found it the most coldblooded view of marriage that she had heard for a long time, made all the worse in her view because Inez was actually contemplating entering into such a relationship. ‘I couldn’t stand any husband of mine playing around with anyone else!’
