The Man From Madrid

by Anne Weale

  ‘Thank you.’ After making a note of the details, she handed it back, noticing, as he took it, the elegant length of his fingers and the absence of a wedding ring.

  ‘Is there room at the table for me to eat with the rest of your visitors?’ he asked.

  ‘Certainly. We can seat twenty people. If we don’t have a full house, the proprietor and I eat with the guests. But I ought to warn you that, although the others all live in Spain, they’re unlikely to speak more than a few words of Spanish. They come from the expat communities on the coast where they don’t need to be fluent, or even to speak Spanish at all.’

  For the first time, he smiled at her. The effect of it startled Cally. Even when younger, she had never been as susceptible to masculine charm as most of her girlfriends. Now, at twenty-seven, she was almost immune to it. Yet when this man flashed his white teeth at her, she felt almost as powerful a reaction as if he had leaned across the bar and kissed her.

  ‘I have some English,’ he said. ‘Enough to make polite conversation. But they’ll be too busy talking to each other to pay much attention to me. If it’s possible, I’d like to sit where I can talk to you…about this village and the valley,’ he added. ‘Or, if you will be busy keeping an eye on the guests, perhaps I can talk to the proprietor. Does he speak Spanish?’

  ‘Not very much,’ said Cally. ‘Señora Haig has a better command, but she’s away at the moment. I expect I can tell you whatever you want to know.’

  ‘How long have you worked for them?’

  Before she could explain that she didn’t work for them, one of the guests came to the bar to have his glass refilled. ‘Same again, please, love,’ he said to Cally, and then, to the Spaniard, ‘Buenas tardes, señor. Hace bueno hoy.’

  His Spanish accent was terrible, but his intentions were good, and the younger man smiled as he answered, in English, ‘Good evening. Yes, it’s been a very nice day and the forecast for tomorrow is the same. But then Spain’s excellent weather is what brought you to this country, I expect.’

  ‘You’re right there, chum,’ said the Englishman, visibly relieved that he wasn’t going to have to stretch what was probably a very limited repertoire of Spanish phrases.

  Cally was adjusting to the discovery that Nicolás Llorca spoke English with no trace of a Spanish accent. To speak it so perfectly, he must have learnt it very early in life and use it as frequently as she used his language.

  She felt slightly annoyed that he hadn’t made that clear to her. To tell her he had ‘some English’ had been deliberately misleading. Clearly, the man was bilingual and should have said so.

  She wondered if he had minded being addressed as ‘chum’. The Englishman hadn’t intended to be offensive, in fact had been trying to be friendly. The trouble with the British was that they lacked an instinctive sensitivity to the manners and customs of other nationalities. Americans tended to be the same. They both assumed that the kind of easy familiarity they took for granted was acceptable everywhere. But sometimes it wasn’t.

  ‘No need to sit by yourself. Come and meet the rest of us,’ said the Englishman, with a gesture at the other foreigners.

  The Spaniard rose from his stool. ‘Would you excuse me?’ he said to Cally.

  ‘Of course.’ His courtesy pleased her. It would have annoyed her if he had just walked away, as if a general factotum in a casa rural was not entitled to be treated like a lady. It would have shown he was no gentleman.

  She watched him being introduced, or rather introducing himself to the older people: shaking hands with the men, kissing the hands of the women with an easy gallantry that suggested he was at home in circles where the gesture was commonplace.

  When Cally announced that dinner was ready if they would like to take their places at the table, the foreign guests formed pairs and chose seats side by side, leaving the chair at the head of the table to be taken by her father while she and Nicolás Llorca sat at the opposite end.

  Again his sophisticated manners came into play when he drew out a chair for her before seating himself. None of the other men present had done it for their companions.

  ‘Thank you, but why don’t you sit next to Peggy? Then you’ll have someone to talk to when I’m helping Juanita,’ she suggested.

  ‘Yes, come and sit beside me, dear,’ said Peggy, patting the seat of the chair he had been holding for Cally and giving him a skittish look. She was old enough to be his mother but was refusing to surrender to late middle-age. Her hair was an unnaturally vivid auburn, her tan the result of hours of dedicated sun-bathing, her bosom a masterpiece of uplift.

  For the first course there was a choice of fish soup or salad. Juanita ladled out the sopa de pescado for those who wanted it while Cally took round the plates of ensalada and small bowls of alioli sauce. Baskets of bread were already on the table, thick slices of the pan integral she preferred mixed with softer white bread, a concession to guests reared on steam-baked English factory bread whose teeth might not be equal to dealing with crusts.

  Nicolás, as she was starting to think of him, was listening to some dramatic anecdote told by Peggy when Cally slipped into the chair on his other side. Casting an anxious eye in her father’s direction, she recognised—though no one else would—signs that his neighbours’ conversation was boring him. And when he was bored he reached for the carafe of wine more often than when he was interested.

  She thought longingly of the day she was due to fly back to her real life in London. She didn’t mind giving up two weeks of her holiday allowance to give her mother a break from Valdecarrasca, and her parents a break from each other. In some ways she enjoyed being here, surrounded by vineyards and mountains instead of city streets and traffic jams.

  But being a commissioning editor for a major publishing house was no longer the secure, lifetime job it had been in the days when publishing had been famously described as ‘an occupation for gentlemen.’ Today it was a far more cutthroat business with take-overs and redundancies being as commonplace as in most other occupations.

  What was worrying her at the moment was that Edmund & Burke, the imprint she worked for, had been taken over by a global corporation which had a new CEO. Everyone was waiting to see how this formidable woman, Harriet Stowe, would restructure the UK segment of the company. She had the reputation of being a ruthless decision-maker in whose view literary merit was unimportant compared with profitability. Edmund & Burke were famous for the quality of their books, but they didn’t produce bestsellers. It was on the cards that Ms Stowe might decide to axe them.

  This was not, therefore, a good time for Cally to be away from the office. But her mother’s plan to visit a friend had been fixed long before the future of Edmund & Burke became uncertain, and Cally knew that, had the trip been postponed, her parents’ marriage would also have reached a crisis point. She lived in dread of them deciding to separate for neither had the resources to survive on their own. They were not happy together, but apart they would be in deeper trouble, and the burden on Cally would be even heavier than it was already.

  From the other side of the table, Fred, who was Peggy’s companion, leaned towards Cally and said, ‘I suppose the people in the village who own all the little vineyards are rubbing their hands at the thought of selling them off to property developers. They can see themselves getting rich, the way the Spanish who owned land on the coast did back in the sixties and seventies.’

  ‘If the vineyards become building plots, the valley will lose all its charm,’ said Cally. ‘They’ll make money, but they’ll lose their quality of life. It’s a pity there aren’t more stringent planning laws. I don’t think people should be allowed to spoil the mountains by putting up holiday villas wherever they want. There should be a limit above which nothing can be built.’

  ‘There probably is,’ Fred said, grinning. ‘But the builders can get round that with a little of the old…’ He demonstrated his meaning by rubbing his thumb against the tips of his fingers. Then, looking at Nicolás, he ad
ded, ‘No offence meant, señor. But we all know it happens. Always has…always will.’

  ‘My country is not the only place where graft is used to get round the regulations,’ Nicolás answered dryly. ‘Bribery exists everywhere. But I agree with Señorita Cally that it would be a pity if the uncontrolled development that has marred too many stretches of Spain’s coasts were allowed to continue inland. On the other hand, people like yourselves—’ with a gesture at the rest of the diners ‘—want to enjoy your retirement in a better climate, so some over-development here is inevitable.’

  Turning to Cally, he asked, ‘What is your surname?’

  ‘Haig.’ She spelt it for him.

  His black eyebrows shot up. ‘You’re half-British?’

  ‘I’m all-British. That’s my father at the end of the table.’

  ‘So that’s why you speak perfect English. I thought you were Spanish.’

  ‘Your English is perfect too. How does that come about?’

  ‘It’s a long story. I’ll explain some other time.’ Although his answer came smoothly, she had an intuitive feeling that somehow her question had put him on the spot. She couldn’t think of any reason why that should be the case, but she felt certain it was. For a moment she was tempted to press him, but she knew that it wouldn’t be right when he was a guest, albeit a paying guest.

  In any case it was time to clear the first course and serve the second. This was one of Juanita’s specialities, berenjenas mudéjar.

  ‘I know berenjenas are what the Americans call eggplants and we call aubergines,’ Cally heard Peggy say to Nicolás, while she was taking the plates round. ‘But what does mudéjar mean?’

  As no one else was speaking at that moment, everyone heard his reply.

  ‘Mudéjar refers to the Moors who stayed behind when Queen Isabella’s army had forced the Arabs who ruled a great part of Spain into retreat. The Moslems who stayed became slaves, but they were valued for their artistic gifts. You see their influence in what’s called the mudéjar architecture of the thirteenth century. This excellent dish is another reminder of how much this country owes to seven hundred years of Moorish culture.’

  He lifted his glass of wine and looked at Juanita, still busy doling out steaming spoonfuls of baked sliced aubergines in a garlicky sauce. ‘A la cocinera…to the cook.’

  As the others echoed his toast and Juanita beamed her gratification, Cally warmed to him on two counts: for his compliment to someone who was all too often ignored, and his grasp of his country’s history.

  She wished it had been her father who had answered Peggy’s question and proposed the toast, but he never read books and he took the meals set before him, his clean clothes and all other creature comforts totally for granted. Perhaps it wasn’t his fault. He had been spoilt by his mother, her other grandmother, and was not the only man of his generation who thought it a woman’s duty to make things comfortable for the man in her life.

  Which was one of the reasons why Cally had serious reservations about ever allowing another man into her life. She knew they were not all selfish encumbrances like her father, but many were, and it could be difficult to recognise a man’s true nature when, in the early stages of a relationship, he was on his best behaviour.

  ‘Hot plates. Now that is a treat,’ said Peggy. ‘So often, in Spanish restaurants, the plates are cold and it cools down the food before you’ve had time to enjoy it.’ She gave Nicolás a friendly nudge with her elbow. ‘I don’t mean to sound critical ’cos I love Spain. I wouldn’t go back to Birmingham if you paid me.’ She lifted her glass and looked round at the others. ‘Viva España!’

  Cally had just placed a plate in front of Fred. Across the table she caught Nicolás’s eye. His face expressionless, he gave her a barely perceptible wink. It had a similar effect to his first smile: something turned over inside her.

  Then, like the red light that flickered in the notification area of her computer’s monitor screen when her virus protection program detected something nasty in an email attachment, a voice in her head said, Watch it! This guy is dangerously attractive.

  The berenjenas were followed by lamb cutlets with brown earthenware bowls of the vegetables that the Spanish usually served separately but the British liked to accompany their meat course.

  Finally, there was a choice of puddings: Juanita’s homemade flan, Mrs Haig’s home-made ice cream, or Cally’s fruit salad, laced with kirsch.

  ‘You give excellent value for money,’ said Nicolás, who had waited for her to sit down before starting to eat his flan.

  ‘We try to. It’s the way to bring people back. But we have strong competition from other casas rurales in the region. What made you choose this one and how did you find us?’

  ‘I read a book by Rafael Cebrián about the mountains in this area. He describes a place called the Barranc de L’Infern, which sounds an interesting challenge. Have you heard of it?’

  Cally nodded. The name meant the ravine of hell and everything she had heard made it sound a place to avoid. ‘There’ve been several accidents there…some of them fatal. It’s particularly dangerous after rain. You shouldn’t attempt it alone. You might never get out.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m going to go through with some guys who know what they’re doing.’ He paused, looking into her eyes with a curiously intent expression. ‘But I’m glad you’re concerned for my safety. When I arrived here, I had the feeling you didn’t much like the look of me.’

  This was so far from her first reaction on seeing him—that he was the most fanciable male she had seen in a long time—that she almost laughed.

  Instead she said coolly, ‘I’m sorry if I seemed unwelcoming. I didn’t mean to. Excuse me, I need to attend to the coffee.’

  In the kitchen, Juanita said, ‘How long is he staying, the Madrileño?’

  ‘Three nights. How do you know he’s from Madrid?’

  ‘His voice…his manners…his air. He’s very handsome, don’t you think?’

  ‘Paco is handsome,’ said Cally, referring to the best-looking young man in the village who was a worry to his mother and had broken several girls’ hearts.

  ‘Paco es uno desgraciado,’ said Juanita contemptuously. ‘You can’t compare that good for nothing with a man of education and breeding. I worked for the upper classes when I was young. I recognise a gentleman when I see one.’

  ‘You’re a snob,’ Cally told her, smiling. ‘There are as many bad lots among the rich and the aristocrats as among ordinary people. Probably more.’

  ‘That’s true,’ the cook conceded. ‘They’re no better…but also no worse. Wouldn’t you rather be a rich man’s pampered wife than a poor man’s slave like your mother?’

  She was devoted to Mary Haig but, having herself had a husband who spent too much time in bars, took a disapproving view of Douglas.

  ‘I would rather stand on my own feet and be independent,’ said Cally.

  ‘You can say that now, while you’re still at your best. You won’t always be young and attractive. A time will come when you’ll want some babies and a man to keep you warm in bed. I know you have a fine career in London, but when you are thirty-five you may not find it so satisfying.’

  At the dining table, Nicolás was listening to Peggy but thinking about Cally. He had perfected the art of seeming to be engrossed by older women’s conversation while following his own train of thought at his mother’s dinner parties. Sometimes she roped him in to fill a gap and, though such occasions bored him, he felt an obligation to help her out when he could.

  His mother was very rich, and had once been a beauty, but now she was deeply unhappy because cosmetic surgery could not preserve the ravishing face she had had in her youth and none of her husbands and lovers had lived up to her expectations. So now she was a pill junkie, filling her days with meaningless social engagements and pouring out her troubles to several shrinks and any of her five children who could be persuaded to listen to a tale of woe heard many times before.
<
br />   Seeing at a glance that Cally’s father was what his American friends called a lush, Nicolás wondered why a girl of her obvious intelligence was wasting herself as a maid of all work in the backwoods of rural Spain. With her ear for languages, there must be better things for her to do.

  He saw her coming back with the coffee tray and sprang up to take it from her.

  ‘Oh…thank you.’ When their fingers touched as she surrendered the tray to him, a charming flush gave her cheeks an apricot glow.

  She wasn’t tanned like the other women. Her complexion suggested she spent little time in the sun. He preferred her creamy pallor to the almost orange colour of Peggy’s skin. Cally was like a solitary lily in a bed of garish African marigolds, he thought. Not that he disliked his fellow guests. He admired their courage in uprooting and transplanting themselves. They were enjoying their lives, more than could be said for his mother in her palacio in Madrid, or indeed for most of his bored and world-weary relations.

  When Cally went to bed, most of the guests had already gone to their rooms. But her father, the man called Bob and Nicolás were still talking and drinking in the lounge. Nicolás was not drinking as much as the other two. In fact he had had only two or three glasses the whole evening. He wasn’t talking as much either, just asking the occasional question and listening intently to their replies.

  She hoped he would go to his room soon, before it became obvious her father had drunk too much.

  In bed, she turned with relief to the book she was reading, an out-of-print history of the early days of air travel that she found far more absorbing than the current crop of short-lived bestsellers. When the church clock struck eleven for the first time, she put it aside and turned out her bedside lamp. By the time, a few minutes later, it repeated the eleven chimes, she was settled down ready to sleep.

  But when it began to strike midnight she was still awake, her mind in a whirl of uncertainty about the future. At half-past midnight she got up, shrugged on a thin cotton robe and took her small torch from the bedside table.