Separate Bedrooms

by Anne Weale

  They reached the country house at noon and, after a swim in the pool, lay in the sun until lunch. Because of the fine weather in England and her hours of sunbathing in the garden at Campden Hill, Antonia was already tanned. Nevertheless she felt it wise to continue to use a sun-screen and, having changed her wet bikini for a dry one, she smoothed the non-sticky, lemon-scented gel on her arms, legs, shoulders and midriff.

  ‘Would you do my back for me, please?’ she asked, holding the plastic bottle towards her husband who was lounging with the backrest of his sun-bed propped up, whereas her bed was flat for basking.

  All the time she had been applying the gel, she had been thinking about the touch of his fingers on her warm bare skin, and feeling tremors of anticipatory excitement.

  Cal swung his feet to the ground and took the bottle from her. She stretched out, face down and, having already untied the ends of the halter, reached behind her to unclip the catch between her shoulder-blades.

  It was an awkward fastening to undo and, when she had fumbled unsuccessfully with it for some seconds, he said, ‘I’ll do it.’

  She let her arms fall to her sides, and turned her face away and closed her eyes. As he trickled the gel down her spine from her neck to the small of her back, she found herself holding her breath and had to make a conscious effort to relax.

  But when he began to spread the stuff, he did it without any of the deliberately caressing movements which she had hoped to feel. Using the flat of his palm rather than his fingertips, he smeared it over her back as quickly as if she were a skinny child or an elderly person. Not once did his fingers stray into the space between her upper arms and her ribs, nor did they linger between her waist and the bottom part of her bikini.

  ‘There you are.’ His tone was as brisk and impersonal as his touch had been.

  ‘Thank you.’ Her disappointment was acute. She had wanted him to stroke and fondle her as intensely as, once, she had dreaded his caresses.

  He said, ‘I’m going to swim again,’ and, moments later, she heard him plunge into the water.

  She was sure now that, while in New York, he had been unfaithful to her. No young, virile man would resist the allurements of his own wife unless he was fresh from the arms of another woman.

  Antonia refastened her top and sat up. She adjusted the end of her bed to an angle of forty-five degrees and, leaning back, watched him swimming back and forth from one end of the pool to the other. He swam very well and it gave her pleasure to watch him.

  Presently, shading her face from the brilliance of the noonday light with a broad-brimmed straw hat, she became aware that Cal must have swum twenty lengths and showed no sign of stopping. On and on he surged, his powerful arms rising and falling in a stylish crawl, his head face down in the water except when, twice in each length, he turned to inhale.

  She watched him swim another ten lengths. Was it possible that touching her had excited him, and that he was swimming not for pleasure or exercise, but to work off feelings he did not want to act on? If Diana knew the truth about his marriage, she might have persuaded him that it could easily be annulled.

  Towards the end of what she guessed must be the fiftieth length, his flailing arms suddenly slackened and, when he touched the wall of the pool, he hauled himself out and sat on the edge of the deeper end, breathing hard from the exertion, his tanned body shining in the sun as the water streamed off it, soon leaving only glistening drops which would quickly evaporate in the heat.

  Antonia strolled round the pool, intending to sit down beside him. But as she approached he swung himself on to his feet with the lithe action of an extremely fit man. She was still some distance away when he said, ‘I’m going to tidy up for lunch. If I were you, I’d cover up for the next hour or two. You could still burn in this heat.’

  Providing her skin was sun-screened, the risk of her burning was actually so slight that she felt the remark could only mean that he found her presence less disturbing when she was dressed.

  When she followed him to the air-conditioned bedroom prepared for them by Maria, a woman from the village who kept the house aired and dusted when it was unoccupied, and cooked when the owners were staying there, Cal had changed his trunks for a pair of white denim shorts. He was combing his wet dark hair.

  He ignored her entrance but when, having crossed the room to where he was standing, she tapped him lightly on the back, he could not continue to ignore her.

  He turned, his expression guarded.

  Antonia laid her palms on his chest. ‘Don’t you think we might now go on from where we stopped at the airport?’

  For a long moment, meeting his eyes, she saw no answering warmth in the deep blue irises. But an instant later his mouth was locked hard on hers. Soon she was breathless and trembling, not with alarm or revulsion, but in an extremity of pleasure. Now, loving him, she felt none of the timidity which had wrecked their wedding night. Today nothing he did could offend her, and everything he could teach her she was ready and eager to learn.

  But, to her dismay, the kiss was not a prelude to the storm of bliss for which she longed. All at once he wrenched his mouth away from hers, and released his hold so abruptly that she almost overbalanced.

  ‘Oh, God! I shouldn’t have done that.’ His voice was husky and curt.

  ‘Why not, Cal? Why not?’ she exclaimed.

  He turned away from her. His shoulders were heaving as they had after his fifty-length swim. It was obvious that he was having a tremendous struggle to control himself.

  ‘Because something has happened ... because I have something to tell you.’

  He turned and she saw, with a pang, how haggard his face was suddenly. ‘You must brace yourself for a great shock. Someone you thought was dead is, in fact, alive. The boy you loved, Paco Benitez, is alive.’

  ‘Paco is alive?’ she said disbelievingly. ‘How can he be? They told me he’d been killed.’

  ‘No, I think if you cast your mind back you’ll find that nobody actually told you the boy had been killed. You formed that misapprehension, and none of them corrected it.’

  It took her some time to digest this. At length: ‘How could they? How could they?’ she cried, in passionate outrage.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Cal answered quietly. ‘The world is full of people who believe that the end justifies the means, and it would appear that your aunt is one of them.’

  ‘But my mother ... how could she do it?—knowing the misery it caused me.’

  ‘I suppose she thought a few months of intense misery was preferable to years of regret.’

  ‘But they didn’t know I should regret it—that was only their opinion. I might have been happy with Paco. Oh, it was a wicked thing to do!’

  ‘Yes, I think so, too,’ he agreed. ‘Which is why, having found out the truth, I can’t be a party to carrying on the deception.’

  ‘How did you find out?’ she asked.

  ‘Your mother let it slip. She was telling me how relieved she was to see you looking happy because she had never felt easy about deceiving you. But now she could see that, although it had seemed a drastic measure at the time, her sister’s judgment had turned out to be right in the long run.’

  Antonia said, in a low voice, ‘I shall never forgive Tia Angela or my mother for deceiving me; but I can’t deny they were right to oppose a marriage between Paco and me. It wasn’t love I felt for him. It was just a young infatuation. I was immature for my age then. I’ve grown up a great deal since you took me to England.’

  ‘You can only be sure of that when you’ve seen him again,’ Cal replied. ‘He’s working in Madrid. Under pressure from your aunt, your uncle arranged a good job for him there, a much better one than he had in Valencia.’

  ‘How much he must have loved me, to be willing to do that to me for the sake of a better job!’ she exclaimed bitterly. ‘But how could they induce his mother to play her part in the charade? I know she didn’t approve of me, but she seemed an honest, decent person. Yet one
day when I met her in the Plaza del Caudillo she was all in black, and she shouted at me that it was my fault he was dead.’

  ‘Perhaps she’d gone into mourning for somebody else,’ he suggested. ‘And are you sure she referred to his death in so many words? Might she not have used some other expression, such as “gone” or “lost”? If she is one of the poorer classes, and has never been anywhere much herself, she might consider Madrid far more remote than you and I should.’

  ‘I can’t remember her exact words. I know I was very upset. It’s a terrible feeling to have someone’s death on your conscience. I felt as guilty as if I had run him over by driving dangerously.’

  ‘But you were not driving, he was. Didn’t you know that?’

  She shook her head. ‘I thought the whole thing was my fault. I can’t remember anything about the accident, and the doctor told me I might never remember, or eventually it might come back to me. I hoped it wouldn’t. I had enough weighing on me without remembering whatever I’d done to cause it ... to cause Paco’s death.’

  ‘You had done nothing,’ said Cal. ‘Nor had Benitez. The smash was entirely the fault of some other motorist.’

  ‘Even so, if Paco really had been killed, it would have been my fault just as much as if I had caused it. Running away was my idea, not his.’

  Suddenly the stresses of the past eighteen hours, culminating in this amazing denouement, were too much for Antonia’s over-strained nerves. She began to cry, hiding her face in her hands, her slim shoulders shaking. Her relief at the loss of her guilt was counterbalanced by a sickening sense of betrayal and disillusionment.

  Cal came close and put his arms round her, and she leaned against him like an unhappy child until the force of her distress subsided from weeping into deep shaky breaths. At that stage he picked her up and carried her the short distance to the bed. There was a box of tissues on the night-table and he extracted a couple and put them into her hand. While she dried her eyes and damp cheeks, he drew the light bedclothes over her legs and tucked her in, dressed as she was.

  ‘You’ve had a bad shock. You need sleep. Lie down now and try to relax.’ His voice, so often incisive, was quiet and soothing.

  Obediently she slid lower down and turned on her side with another long, quivering sigh. Drained of every feeling but a deep weariness, she fell asleep within seconds.

  When she woke it was late afternoon.

  ‘The Senor has gone to the village to use the new telephone,’ she was told by Maria, when she went to the kitchen for a cup of coffee.

  Antonia had noticed the newly-erected aluminium telephone kiosk when they drove through the plaza that morning. Before the only public telephones had been in Bar Carmen and Bar Antonio.

  When Cal returned, he said, ‘I’ve been talking to your uncle. He’s going to arrange for Benitez to be in Valencia tomorrow.’

  ‘Why? Why is he going to arrange that?’

  ‘Because I want you to meet him. Only then can you both be sure how you feel now about each other.’

  ‘If Paco had ever loved me as I want to be loved, he would never have let them buy him off. I don’t want to see him. I—I despise him.’

  ‘Love is a peculiar emotion. It doesn’t depend on admiration. Often it overrides peoples better judgment,’ Cal said dryly.

  ‘No, no—I don’t believe that. If love is to last it must spring from respect for a man ... respect for his character or his brain, for the qualities which he’ll have when he’s not young and handsome any more,’ she answered, .with all the earnestness of a new and strongly-held conviction.

  He stared at her for a long moment. ‘Yes, you have grown up,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Nevertheless I want you to see Benitez. The future goes better with no loose ends from the past to trip people up. We won’t go back to your mother’s house tonight. It’s better for you not to see her or your aunt until you’ve had rather more time to accept that they acted from the highest motives.’

  ‘I can believe that Mama did, but not Tia Angela. She never approved of my father, and she’s never liked me. I think her only concern was to prevent a marriage with someone she considered inferior.’

  ‘Your aunt’s views are long out of date. As you’ve just said, it’s a man’s own quality which counts, not his income or his antecedents. But it may be that Benitez was not bought off as easily as you imagine. Even nowadays there are hazards when a girl from a well-to-do family marries a boy from a poor one. No doubt your aunt and your mother convinced him that if he really loved you, giving you up was the unselfish, right thing to do.’

  ‘Yes, I’d like to believe that, but how can I when he took the reward they offered him? If he had loved me, he’d have told them to go to hell,’ she said fiercely. ‘You would have done in his place—wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Grand gestures are a luxury which the poor can’t afford,’ he said dryly. ‘But yes, I think in those circumstances I should have told them what they could do with their inducements. No, on second thoughts, what I should have done would have been to bargain with them—their job in exchange for my promise that I wouldn’t see you for a year, but that if at the end of that time we still loved each other, they wouldn’t stand in our way. I should have insisted on saying goodbye to you, of course.’

  For their supper Maria had prepared one of her specialities, rolled ribs of veal marinated for hours in Madeira and cinnamon before being cooked with parsley. Antonia had only a small helping, leaving the lion’s share for Cal, whose appetite seemed unaffected by the strain of the situation.

  After Maria had gone home, they spent some time listening to records and then he suggested she should go to bed.

  ‘Rather than puzzle Maria by making up a bed in another room, I’ll doss down on a sofa. It won’t be the first time.’

  For the second night in succession, Antonia slept badly and woke unrefreshed and with a curious feeling of doom hanging over her. She shrank from the meeting with Paco, and could not understand why Cal had insisted upon it. Did he hope her first love would revive at the sight of the Spaniard, leaving him free to renew his relationship with Diana?

  Next day, shortly after breakfast, they said goodbye to a somewhat mystified Maria, and returned the way they had come the day before.

  About forty kilometres south of the city, Cal turned the car off the main road towards Cullera, a small town with its name cut in huge letters on top of the hill which loomed over it. From there a lesser road hugged the coast and passed the grounds and the golf links of the Parador Luis Vives which took its name from the famous Valencia-born scholar of the sixteenth century.

  ‘Who was Vives?’ Cal asked, as they cruised up the wide, hedged drive.

  ‘He wrote books and taught the Spanish royal children, and later he went to England and taught Latin to Catherine of Aragon’s daughter Mary Tudor.’ Antonia refrained from adding that one of his books had been entitled The Office and Duty of a Husband.

  In general the paradores did not cater to fixed visitors but to travellers staying for a night or two en route to somewhere else. As Cal had foreseen by arriving early in spite of the time of the year, they were shown to a pleasant room overlooking the sea and the sand-dunes.

  It was an extremely hot day and, although they had not driven far, she was glad to wash her hands and to hold her wrists under the cold tap. When she emerged from the bathroom, Cal was concluding a telephone conversation.

  ‘That was your uncle,’ he said, having rung off. ‘Benitez will be here at four. We shall have to leave a message at the airport, telling him where to meet you. Where do you suggest? One of the hotels?’

  ‘Oh, no—not an hotel. I might see someone I knew, and it could be embarrassing.’

  ‘What about one of the places where you used to meet him?’

  She thought back to her furtive assignations with Paco. They seemed a lifetime ago, as insubstantial as dreams. Reality was here, in this room, with this man whom she loved with all her heart, but to whom
she dared not declare herself for fear of seeing in his eyes that he could not return her love for him.

  ‘We used sometimes to meet at a churreria called Santa Catalina. It’s an old-fashioned place, not a smart one.’

  When he had telephoned the airport and left the message, he said, ‘We have some hours to kill. The sea looks inviting. Shall we try it?’

  They swam, then lay on the beach. Cal seemed completely relaxed, half asleep in the sun. But Antonia sat upright, watching the sea and thinking that the clear pale-green water must have lapped the beach in exactly the same way in the lifetime of Luis Vives, and would still be gently lapping the sand when the twentieth century was as far in the past as the sixteenth seemed now to her.

  They lunched late, in the Spanish manner. Cal had his normal good appetite; Antonia pecked at her food. She wondered what Paco had made of the sudden summons to present himself in Valencia, and what he would think when they intercepted him at the airport with the message that he was to go to the place where, unnoticed by all the black-clad elderly women who went there to rest their feet and gossip, he and she had held hands under the table.

  ‘What will you do while I’m at Santa Catalina?’ she asked suddenly.

  He had been watching some people at another table.

  Now he turned his gaze on her and said, as calmly as if they were talking about some quite normal event, ‘I’ll drop you and come back here. There’s no point in my hanging about. You don’t know how long you’ll be, and you can easily get a taxi when you want one—if you want one.’

  ‘What do you mean “if I want one”?’

  ‘You don’t have to come back unless you choose to.’

  Her eyes widened, but she managed to keep her voice from rising as she said, ‘I’m your wife!’

  ‘But not my slave. I shouldn’t want to hold you against your will.’