The Man From Madrid

by Anne Weale

  It would have happened. In those seconds it seemed inevitable. But then, from somewhere downstairs, they heard someone calling her name, the calls becoming louder and more urgent.

  ‘Cally…Cally…where are you?’

  ‘It’s your father,’ said Nicolás, stepping back and heading for the landing.

  Pulling herself together, wondering what could require her urgent attention, she followed and heard Nicolás call down the staircase, ‘Cally is up here.’

  They met Douglas Haig as, puffing from unaccustomed exertion, he was about to start up the last flight.

  ‘It’s Fred…he’s been taken ill. I think he may be having a heart attack.’

  Nicolás’s reaction was instantaneous. He shot down the staircase ahead of her. Hard on his heels, Cally said, ‘I’ll call an ambulance.’

  ‘First let’s make sure it’s not indigestion,’ he said, over his shoulder.

  Two hours later, having followed the ambulance to the nearest hospital, and supported Peggy through the formalities of her husband’s admission, they drove back to Valdecarrasca in Douglas Haig’s car.

  Cally had driven on the outward journey, but Nicolás insisted on driving on the return journey.

  ‘You’ve had a long, tough day,’ he said, holding out his hand for the car key.

  She gave it to him, grateful for the unaccustomed solicitude, but hoping he wouldn’t persist in trying to confirm that his hunch about her distress had been correct.

  To her relief, he didn’t attempt to have a conversation, but concentrated on driving an unfamiliar car on an unfamiliar and, once they had left the urban environs of the hospital, winding country road.

  In the passenger seat, Cally relaxed. Out of the corner of her eye she watched his hands on the steering wheel and gear lever. She could have dealt with the emergency on her own but, when they found Fred collapsed in the lounge with the others crowding round him, had been happy to let Nicolás take charge.

  He had done it so efficiently and knowledgeably that she had begun to wonder if he was a doctor. But if that were the case, surely he would have revealed his occupation to the staff at the hospital?

  Peggy, whom Cally would have expected to become distraught and hysterical in any emergency situation, had been surprisingly calm. While they were waiting for the ambulance to arrive, she had changed her evening outfit for more sensible clothes and packed their belongings, leaving one suitcase behind and taking the other to the hospital where she was staying overnight.

  When they were nearing the village, Cally said, ‘I’m sorry this has happened the night before you go through the Barranc de L’Infern. What time are you meeting the others who are going through with you?’

  ‘We’re convening at nine at a bar called Oasis at the village of Benimaurell. Do you know it?’

  ‘Only by name. I’ve never been there. How are you going to get there?’

  ‘I’m being picked up at eight-fifteen.’

  There being nowhere else for it, Douglas Haig had to keep his car in the village car park. Nicolás remembered the way without needing directions.

  By this time Cally was feeling totally bushed. He seemed as clear-eyed and energised as he had been at breakfast. But presumably, whatever he did for a living, his job was not in jeopardy.

  ‘Thank you for going with me,’ she said, as they walked through the narrow, deserted streets between the car park and her parents’ house. In the English village where her grandmother had lived, at this time of night the residents had either been in bed, or the blue glow of television screens had been visible through their curtains. Here the roll-down blinds called persianas concealed any signs of life from passersby. Nor did the façades of the houses give much clue to the size or comfort of their interiors.

  ‘Glad to be of service,’ said Nicolás. ‘Not that you couldn’t have managed perfectly well without me.’

  ‘Perhaps…but I was grateful for your backup.’

  When they entered the house, she was surprised to find that some of the others were still up.

  ‘Go to bed, Cally,’ said Nicolás, giving her a gentle push towards the stairs. ‘I’ll tell them as much as we know. Goodnight.’

  She murmured goodnight and went wearily up the stairs.

  Early next morning she downloaded an email from her publisher friend Nicola Russell.

  Hi Cally

  Things are not looking good at E&B. I have a sinking feeling that you’re going to be in the same boat that I was when Richard came from the US to ‘restructure’ Barking & Dollis. But as that turned out to be all for the best in the long run, I shouldn’t be too depressed if I were you. Often what look like disasters have a way of turning into opportunities.

  If Richard or I could offer you a new home, we should be delighted to do so. But as you know we have both taken on board some casualties from the last wave of purges so, sadly, neither of us can come to the rescue. But you may be sure we have our ears close to the ground and, if we hear of anything suitable, will let you know at once.

  I would telephone for a gossip, but don’t want to call at an inconvenient moment when you’re coping with guests. The beauty of email is that it doesn’t intrude on people’s lives the way the telephone does.

  As soon as you get back, come to supper. Three heads are better than one in these situations.

  Meanwhile, keep your chin up. Easy to say, I know, but I have been on the receiving end of the ‘We’re sorry, but…’ message so can empathise better than those who haven’t been axed.

  Love and telepathic hugs from us both—Nicola

  PS I hope your mother appreciates how lucky she is to have a daughter to hold the fort for her. Most twentysomethings of my acquaintance ignore their parents, except when they want to make use of them. Richard thinks you’re a Trojan, and so do I.

  Comforted by Nicola’s support, Cally took a quick look at the websites of two British book trade weeklies and at the online version of Publishers Weekly, bible of the US book trade. But none had any more news on the subject of most interest to her.

  As he had the day before, Nicolás came down to breakfast early, but so did two other guests and she had no private conversation with him until he collected his packed lunch while she was in the kitchen.

  ‘Have a good day. Take care,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you…I always do,’ he said, with a smile.

  Several times, during the day, she found herself worrying about him. Men had died in the Barranc de L’Infern. It was said that a shepherd had drowned there, after searching for a lost sheep, falling into a pool inside the ravine and being unable to clamber out because of the smoothness of the rock. More recently, two climbers had attempted to get through but one had fallen and been killed. His companion had been left hanging in his harness for several days until rescuers had found him.

  It was true that many experienced rock-scramblers did negotiate the ravine safely. But some photographs Cally had seen made it look a sinister place, its fascination hard to fathom.

  By all accounts, if anyone did have an accident, breaking an arm or a leg, it would be extremely difficult for their companions to get them out.

  Nicolás did not think about Cally while he was in the Barranc. The nature of the terrain required all his concentration.

  But after he and his companions had got through, there was more than an hour’s walk back to where the car had been left. He thought about her then, wondering what had upset her the night before, and how she would have responded if he had kissed her.

  In his early twenties, he had had an American girlfriend, but had never been on close terms with a British girl. Not that Cally was British in any practical sense. Toiling as a general factotum to her parents, she was completely unlike the ambitious, self-centred twentysomethings who worked, played and shopped in Madrid and other big cities in Europe and the US.

  Last night, on the roof terrace, when he had tipped up her chin, preparatory to kissing her, the expression on her face had been
a curious mixture of eagerness and uncertainty. It had not been the confident expression of a woman who knew she was beautiful and was accustomed to enjoying sex with selected partners.

  Perhaps she didn’t know she was beautiful. Because she didn’t look like a model or a pop singer, the icons of female allure promoted by the media, she might not realise how much rarer and more lasting her kind of beauty was. Even in cheap chain store clothes, she had style. Dressed in the kind of clothes his sisters wore, she would be a knockout.

  Nicolás was out to dinner that night. Cally gathered he was going to a booze-up with the guys he had spent the day with. As the rest of the guests had checked out, Juanita had a night off and Cally cooked supper for herself and her father.

  Anticipating that Nicolás was likely to sleep late after a macho drinking session, Cally went out early for an aerobic walk on the plana. In London, during the summer months, she walked in the park near her studio flat. In winter she went to a gym. Here she had to adapt her walks to the other demands on her time.

  Striding along the narrow lanes and dirt tracks between the small family-owned vineyards, she forced herself not to think of the catastrophe happening in London but to concentrate on the pleasures of the moment: the fresh air, the sunlight, the wide ring of sheltering mountains whose contours changed as the light changed.

  On the other side of the valley, in the direction she was going at the moment, there was a small wooded hill whose trees had escaped the summer fires—usually caused by careless smokers or deliberately set by arsonists—that plagued many parts of Spain in the long hot summers.

  She had heard that, hidden by the trees, there was a rather grand house which had been empty for decades. One day she meant to find out if the story was true, but there was seldom time to wander at will.

  On the return stretch of the walk, when she was looking towards the village, her eye was caught by the house belonging to Cameron Fielding, a television reporter and Valdecarrasca’s most famous inhabitant.

  Neither Cally nor her parents had ever met him, but the day after her return she had run into a friend of his who also lived in the village. Mrs Dryden had told her that, to everyone’s surprise, Fielding had fallen in love with the English widow who had looked after his garden.

  Now they were married and living in Washington DC, leaving the house called La Higuera closed up. As told by Mrs Dryden, it was a romantic story of an unlikely pair of soul mates finally finding each other and being destined to live happily ever after.

  Being happily married herself, Mrs Dryden was a believer in what, from Cally’s perspective, was an unrealistic outcome. Even if she hadn’t grown up with mismatched parents, the milieu she moved in, in London, was littered with broken or doomed-to-end-unhappily relationships.

  Richard and Nicola were the only people she knew who were perfectly matched. Maybe Cameron Fielding and his former gardener were another. But in Cally’s view the operative word was maybe.

  She had finished the strenuous part of her walk, checking her pulse to make sure she had achieved the necessary acceleration, and was heading back to the village, when she heard someone running on the road behind her.

  Expecting to see a German jogger with whom she sometimes exchanged a ‘Bon día’, the local form of Buenos días, she was surprised to see Nicolás catching her up.

  ‘Good morning. I thought you would still be in bed after your night out,’ she said as, slowing to a walk, he came abreast.

  ‘Good morning. I was back by midnight. The others are climbing on the Peñon d’Ifach today, and late nights and climbing don’t mix.’

  ‘Aren’t you going with them?’

  ‘I have something else I want to do. Are you busy today? Would you have time to drive me somewhere?’

  Against her better judgment, she found herself saying, ‘I’m fairly free today, once I’ve got all the bedrooms sorted.’

  ‘I can help you. When I was small, I was taught how to make my bed with proper hospital corners.’

  ‘Really?’ said Cally, smiling. ‘You don’t look at all the sort of person one would expect to know how to do that.’

  ‘You shouldn’t judge by appearances,’ said Nicolás, also smiling. ‘I have many unlikely skills. If you gave me a ball of wool and an old-fashioned wooden cotton reel with some fine nails stuck in one end, I could make you a long length of cord.’

  ‘I know how to do that. My grandmother taught me when I was very small.’

  ‘The world is full of abuelas with arcane skills they pass down to their grandchildren. Though perhaps that kind of grandmother is now an endangered species. She had time on her hands. Nobody has time on their hands any more,’ he added sardonically.

  ‘Not only that, I don’t think today’s children would be interested. They are far more sophisticated than I was at five or six.’

  ‘Mostly they are what you call couch potatoes,’ Nicolás said, with a shrug of broad brown shoulders. ‘My nephews and nieces spend all their time glued to TV or playing games on their computers. God knows what sort of health problems they are stacking up for when they’re adult.’

  ‘Well, you’re no couch potato,’ said Cally. ‘I looked round a few minutes ago, when I was checking my pulse rate, and there was no sign of you. I would certainly have spotted that yellow running top if you had been in view.’

  ‘I know it’s a horrible colour, but it shows up well in motorists’ headlights if I’m running at night which I sometimes do to unwind after a difficult day.’

  ‘It’s a good colour on brown skin. It would only look horrible on the lobster-pink skin you see at the beach in summertime. Why are your days sometimes difficult?’ She was impatient to know what he did for a living.

  ‘Actually they’re not that bad…no worse than average,’ he said. ‘But I work in an office environment and I’m basically an outdoor person. Though I doubt if I should have been happier working on the land as everyone in these parts used to do,’ he added dryly. ‘It’s back-breaking work, tending vines. Nobody wants to do it if they can do something easier.’

  Cally decided that she wasn’t going to press him about the exact nature of his work. He would either tell her or he wouldn’t.

  ‘Where is it you want me to drive you?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh…not far. About half an hour inland. Could we leave about one o’clock and come back about five? Would that be convenient?’

  ‘Perfectly. But where are we going…and why?’

  He gave her a teasing glance. ‘Don’t you like surprises?’ Then, quickly, he added, ‘Sorry…I was forgetting we haven’t been introduced in the conventional sense. You’re right to be wary of taking off into the blue with someone who walked in off the street.’

  ‘That hadn’t occurred to me,’ said Cally. ‘I went with you the other night without any worries.’

  ‘It was an emergency. You didn’t have time to think about it. Today is different. I should explain myself. I would like you to have lunch with me at a hotel I saw in the mountains yesterday. But perhaps you’ve been there already?’

  ‘I’ve heard of the place you mean. I haven’t been there, but some of our guests have. They were impressed. It’s in a wonderful location and I gather the architecture is very sympathetic to the landscape.’

  ‘I only saw it from a distance but, yes, it seemed so.’

  ‘I’d like to come. Oh…’ Her exclamation was caused by the sight of a Spanish hunting dog streaking towards them.

  The dog—in shape like a greyhound and the colour of toffee—belonged to an elderly man who lived in the village. It was young and exuberant and a couple of times had collided with Cally, not meaning any harm but once nearly throwing her off balance and the second time grazing her thigh with the buckle on its collar. On other occasions its owner had shouted a command, making it race back to him. Today he was gazing in another direction and hadn’t noticed it hurtling towards her and Nicolás.

  When it was almost on them, he stepped in front of her
and fended the dog off, engaging it in the kind of playful tussle that only people with total confidence in their rapport with animals attempted. Then with a wave of dismissal he sent it racing back to its master.

  ‘He ought to keep it under better control. It could knock an old lady down, charging at her at that speed.’

  ‘She would probably shout whatever it is that he shouts,’ said Cally. ‘I haven’t mastered the words they yell at their dogs.’

  ‘Dogs respond to a tone of voice. Have you never had a dog of your own?’

  ‘No, I haven’t. Have you?’

  ‘When I was a boy. Not in Madrid. Cities and big dogs don’t mix. I’m not keen on small dogs…lapdogs.’

  They passed and exchanged polite greetings with the old man who looked with open curiosity at Cally’s companion.

  Back at the house, she had a quick shower before going down to lay the breakfast table. Nicolás came down soon afterwards and insisted on helping her. Compared with her father who was hopeless domestically, he was surprisingly competent.

  He was chatting to her father when she slipped away to start sorting out the bedrooms. She had stripped the beds and washed all the sheets and pillowcases the day before, but not mopped the floors or remade the beds.

  She was cleaning the shower room adjoining Peggy’s and Fred’s room when Nicolás put his head round the door.

  ‘What can I do to help?’

  Cally’s first reaction was to say, ‘Nothing, thanks. I can manage.’ Then, for a reason she couldn’t analyse, she said, ‘You could make up the beds, if you would.’

  ‘Right.’ He disappeared.

  A few minutes later she looked to see how he was getting on. One bed was already made up with its quilt on. He was making the other, dealing with it as efficiently as an experienced chambermaid.

  Intent on his task he didn’t notice her watching him. How odd, she thought. A Madrileño, working in an office environment—whatever that meant—who knew how to make a bed properly. According to her girlfriends, shaking up a duvet was the limit of their boyfriends’ domestic skills.