by Anne Weale
‘My mother was brought up in England. She has friends there whose children are now friends of mine. I have plenty of opportunities to keep my English updated.’
As he spoke the Spaniard’s dark eyes were ranging over the rest of the room. ‘You don’t have a TV or a telephone?’
‘We used to have a rented television. I’ve given it up. It was company for Father when he hadn’t the energy to paint, but there wasn’t much I wanted to watch. We didn’t need a telephone.’
‘When is your day off?’
‘I don’t have a regular day off now. If I need time off I can have it, but I enjoy my job and I’d rather be working than not working.’
‘Don’t you have any friends?’
‘Only among the hotel staff. My father wasn’t very sociable. Creative people often prefer their own company.’
‘So they may, but their children need friends.’
‘Your friend will be wondering where you’ve got to,’ Cassia pointed out.
‘Unlike you, Isa laps up TV. She won’t notice how long I’m gone if she’s watching the latest crisis in one of her favourite soaps. But I can take a hint. You’d rather I pushed off.’
Cassia didn’t contradict him. It was growing dusk now, and as they left the studio the stairs and landings were almost in darkness. She switched on the lights, although there were not enough of them to illuminate the staircase properly.
The Marqués went down ahead of her, and again she was struck by the fluid grace of his movements. When they passed under one of the light bulbs, dangling from a long flex, she noticed the healthy gloss of his thick dark hair. She couldn’t remember ever being more strongly aware of someone’s physical attributes.
At the doorway he turned to shake hands—a normal politeness in all walks of Spanish society, but one often mocked by her father, an undemonstrative man who had never gone in for the kissing, hugging and handshaking indulged in by granadino families.
‘Goodnight, Cassia.’
She could feel the latent strength in the fingers enclosing hers.
‘Goodnight, señor. Thank you for carrying the flowers for me.’
‘My pleasure. Until tomorrow…’
The following morning, after taking the flowers to the cemetery, Cassia was tempted to call in at the hotel on her way back. She was curious to find out if the Marqués had gone skiing or was keeping Isa company until she recovered. However, she resisted the impulse and spent the rest of her free time window-shopping.
She enjoyed looking at fashionable clothes and shoes, even if she couldn’t afford them. But this morning she was more than usually aware that most of the other women doing the same thing were in pairs—mothers and daughters, or sisters, or friends, often walking with arms linked. She felt strangely lonely and restless.
When she returned to the Castillo to take over from her colleague, she found that a drama had taken place in her absence. Apparently Simón de Mondragón had waited for the doctor’s second visit, soon after nine o’clock. Shortly after the doctor’s departure, the Marqués had come downstairs and asked for a maid to help Señorita Sanchez re-pack her cases. He had also arranged for a car to take her to the station in time to catch the midday train for Madrid.
‘You could see she was in a raging temper when she left,’ Rosita told Cassia. ‘But whether she broke the mirror while the Marqués was with her or in a tantrum after he walked out on her, we can’t be certain. It could be that he sent her packing because she threw an onyx ashtray at him, which, being fast on his feet, he dodged. Or she could have hurled it at the mirror afterwards, because she was furious at being left on her own.
‘Luckily for him it’s insured, or he’d have had to pay. It’s a valuable antique, with its original glass. Señor Alvarez is very annoyed about it. He won’t say so, of course. You know how he bends over backwards for anyone important. But he didn’t mince words about Señorita Sanchez when his wife rang up. I was quite surprised at the way he described her. She’d have thrown an ashtray at him if she’d heard him.’
‘She was probably spoilt as a child…and we don’t know what the Marqués said to provoke her to throw it,’ said Cassia. ‘I wouldn’t mind betting it was aimed at him, not the mirror. They were well matched, if you ask me. She was only interested in having a good time at his expense, and his only interest in her was for sex. Not very nice people, either of them.’
Yet even as she said it she knew that she was being a hypocrite. Somewhere deep down inside her a part of her envied Isa Sanchez. Both for her panache and her escort.
Since Cassia had been on her own, she had often been woken at night by noises peculiar to old buildings, which hadn’t disturbed her while her father had been there. Last night, unable to get back to sleep after a loud creak had woken her, she had imagined herself in Isa’s place.
But in the scenario she had visualised the Marqués had come to Granada alone, and Cassia had first set eyes on him in the rápido—the fast gondola from Pradollano up to Borreguiles, where chair-lifts and skilifts took skiers to the start of the pistas suited to their abilities.
In her imagination she had been skiing every weekend since their arrival in Granada. She and the Marqués had been the only two people going almost to the top of Veleta, the peak which, at 3,470 metres, was only a few metres lower than the sierra’s highest pinnacle.
They had skied down the Olimpica, a long difficult pista eventually connecting with a very difficult stretch on the way back to Borreguiles. There the Marqués had admired her prowess, offered her a lift back to the city and, on the way, invited her to dine with him.
At what point she had fallen asleep, her conscious imaginings causing her subconscious mind to invent a long, vivid dream, Cassia wasn’t sure. But she could remember very clearly how, over a candlelit dinner in his suite, the Marqués had invited her to become his mistress, and she had accepted.
The memory of how easily she had succumbed to the inducements he’d offered—a jet-set lifestyle, an unlimited dress allowance, her own car—had shocked her when she’d woken up. Of course it had been only a dream. But, if it was true that under hypnosis people could not be made to perform acts unacceptable to their conscious minds, why had her subconscious allowed her to say yes to him? At the end of the dream she had been in his arms, about to be kissed, soon to be taken to bed.
The kiss had been averted by the ringing of a telephone…actually Cassia’s alarm clock. Her reaction on waking up had been disappointment that now she would never know what it would be like to feel his firm lips on hers.
Rosita took a more tolerant view of the Marqués and his amiguita. ‘I don’t see any harm in guys and girls getting together, as long as they’re not doing it behind other people’s backs,’ she said. ‘If he had a wife or she had a husband I wouldn’t hold with it. But Manolo says the Marqués is still single, and I’d be surprised if Sanchez had ever trotted up the aisle and promised to spend the rest of her life having babies and washing dishes.
‘You can bet she had an eye to the main chance from the day she started to sprout those spectacular bosoms. If I had her looks I wouldn’t be doing this job. I’d be swanning around with a boyfriend like the Marqués…but not chucking ashtrays at him. You only live once. If you’ve got what it takes to catch the eye of a guy like that, you’re a fool not to make the most of it.’
‘You say that, but I don’t think you mean it, Rosita. If the Marqués came back this evening and invited you to have dinner with him in the Mirador, you wouldn’t stand up Tomás. You know you wouldn’t.’
Cassia had met Rosita’s boyfriend. He worked in a bank and they were planning to marry as soon as he got his next pay rise.
‘Sometimes I think I ought to break it off with Tomás,’ the other receptionist said worriedly. ‘I was in love with him—or thought I was—at the beginning, but now…he’s beginning to bore me, Cassia. All he ever talks about is sport, and he’s not the world’s greatest lover either.’
Lowering her voi
ce to a confidential undertone, she said, ‘He never makes me feel the way you’re supposed to. He doesn’t switch me on at all. He did at first, before I let him go the whole way. But now he doesn’t bother with the things I used to enjoy. He only does what he likes.’
To Cassia’s relief these unexpected revelations were cut short as Rosita caught sight of the time and realised she would have to run or miss her regular bus. She had only been gone a few minutes when a party of four Americans checked in. They had been to Sevilla and Córdoba, and now wished to make the most of a twonight stay in Granada.
When all the other guests who were skiing had returned from their day on the snowy shoulders of Veleta, with the exception of Simón de Mondragón, Cassia began to wonder if he might have had an accident.
According to Rosita, he had not looked in a temper when he’d left the hotel, but he might have been raging inwardly. When people were angry it impaired their concentration, and skiing down pistas which were graded ‘difficult’, and driving a powerful sports car on a busy mountain road, were both activities calling for care and attention.
She was on the point of speaking to the manager about him and suggesting a call to the clinic up at Borreguiles when the Marqués strode in, picking up his key from the porter’s desk before turning towards the lifts. The indicators showed that one lift was travelling upwards and the other was on the top floor. Rather than pressing the button to call it to ground level, he chose to go up the stairs, taking them two at a time with a long, lithe stride which suggested that he wasn’t as tired as the other skiers had looked when they’d returned.
Cassia was still on duty when, a couple of hours later, he stepped out of the lift and headed for the dining room. He had a book in his hand but she couldn’t see its title. He didn’t look in her direction. He had probably forgotten her existence.
* * *
Next morning she was working the early shift when he came down the stairs in his black salopette with an apricot-coloured T-shirt—another colour which complemented his tawny skin and black hair and eyebrows.
‘Good morning, Cassia.’
On his way out he gave her a friendly smile. For no sensible reason, being noticed lifted her spirits.
She went off duty before he came back, and spent the evening washing her hair, doing her nails and pressing two white blouses left out to dry on the roof terrace. As she mended the start of a run in one foot of a pair of black tights she wondered if the Marqués was dining alone and would remain on his own for the rest of his time here, or if he would find a substitute for Isa Sanchez.
There were plenty of beautiful girls in Granada who would be glad to keep him company—not only the toplevel call-girls, but young women of good family and more discriminating habits.
At nine o’clock the next day she was inserting tariffs on separate slips into the Castillo’s stylish brochures, before replenishing the perspex stand that displayed them, when he came to the desk.
‘Good morning, Cassia. How are you this morning?’
‘I’m fine, thank you. And you, señor? Did you have a good day yesterday?’
‘Very good. Better in the morning than in the afternoon, when the sun makes the snow rather slushy. If you’re free this evening, will you have dinner with me?’
She couldn’t believe her ears. Why should he want her, of all people, to dine with him? She wasn’t beautiful. Her figure was nothing outstanding. She wasn’t witty and amusing. She certainly wasn’t available.
‘You did say you could take time off when you wanted it, and I have a proposition to put to you,’ he went on. ‘The dining room can be noisy when the hotel is full. Let’s eat in my suite, where we can talk in peace. I’ll expect you at seven-thirty. There’s no need to change. Come as you are.’
Before Cassia could recover her wits and her voice, someone else came to the desk. The Marqués stepped politely aside. Taking her acceptance as read, he gave her a smiling, ‘Adiós,’ before turning away to give his key to Manolo.
CHAPTER THREE
FOR the rest of the morning Cassia found it an effort to keep her mind on her job and not let her thoughts wander off in futile speculation about what the Marqués might have meant by ‘a proposition to put to you’.
When her lunch break came, instead of eating a hot meal in the staff room she asked the assistant chef to make her up a snack to take up the hill to the Generalife gardens.
After paying for a ticket at the gate, she walked up the cypress-lined drive leading to the open-air theatre. A young man with a rucksack beside him was sitting there, writing postcards. He looked up and smiled at her. Cassia smiled back, giving him a friendly ‘Hola!’ before walking on to find a secluded seat with a closer view of the Alhambra’s towers than the one she saw from her terrace.
It was a peaceful spot in which to ponder why Simón de Mondragón wanted to ‘talk in peace’ with her. Unwrapping her lunch—a crusty loaf slit lengthwise and filled with lettuce-heart leaves, asparagus and slices of mountain ham—she bit off a mouthful and sat thoughtfully munching.
She knew what Rosita would say if asked to give an opinion on the motive for his behest. She could hear her colleague’s response as clearly as if she had consulted her. ‘There’s only one sort of proposition a man like the Marqués makes to girls like us,’ Rosita would have answered, with a cynical shrug.
But Rosita, with her full breasts and merry dark eyes, was far more propositionable than Cassia felt herself to be.
She couldn’t believe that the Marqués’s reading of her character would be so wide of the mark that he’d think she would succumb to his blandishments. Nor, to give the devil his due, did she feel that he was the kind of man who would attempt to seduce an inexperienced girl.
It would have been such a mean thing to do, and somehow she didn’t want him to turn out to be an ignoble nobleman. There were many worse vices than being a womaniser, provided that he only made love to women who knew the rules and that no one else was hurt.
But supposing he was less scrupulous? Supposing he did make a pass? What was the best way to handle it?
‘Do you speak any English?’
In the act of pouring herself a beaker of mineral water, she looked up to find the young man with the rucksack standing near her.
He introduced himself: an American from a small town in New England who was touring Spain on a rented bicycle, at present chained to the entrance gates.
Cassia returned to the Castillo with her dilemma unresolved. Even if she hadn’t had to talk to the American, she doubted if she would have decided how to react if the worst came to the worst. She could only hope and pray that it wouldn’t.
Most girls of her age would have known how to tackle the situation, because they would have experienced it before. But her father’s possessive vigilance during her teens, followed by his dependence while he was ill, had meant that most of her knowledge was theoretical, gleaned from books.
First by choice, and later by circumstance, John Browning had kept her as cloistered as a nun. Only by running away could she have freed herself from his controlling influence. But where could she have run to? Besides, she had loved him, and love was as inescapable as the web a spider bound round a captive fly. Loving someone, you couldn’t deliberately hurt them—not even if their way of loving was unintentionally hurting you.
All afternoon she was on a mental treadmill, her thoughts in continuous motion but only going round and round, never reaching a conclusion.
When the skiers began to return she became increasingly tense. Those who had been at the hotel for a few days or longer were sporting deep golden tans, except one or two who had neglected to take the necessary precautions and were now lobster-pink and peeling.
The Marqués had the type of skin which would never burn unless he was lost in a desert. By the end of the week he would be even more deeply bronzed—as dark as the Moorish invaders of long ago, and in some ways as exotic and fearsome as they must have seemed to the indigenous populati
on.
When she saw him entering the lobby, carrying his ski-boots, his thick hair still in some disorder from the hours on the long, fast runs, her heart began to pump uncomfortably fast.
He collected his key and an envelope the porter on duty had already taken from the Mirador suite’s pigeonhole. Cassia knew that the envelope contained a long facsimile transmission to the machine in Señor Alvarez’s office. She had been talking to his secretary when it came through and had watched her clip the pages together. Evidently it was something the Marqués had been waiting for. Pocketing his key and slinging his boots, already linked together, over one shoulder, he slit the envelope and started to read the contents.
She watched him crossing the lobby, a slight frown contracting his eyebrows. It seemed that he was too preoccupied to remember his invitation and verify her acceptance.
As he entered the open lift, still reading, she felt angry with herself for spending all day in a state of conjecture while doubtlessly he had dismissed her from his mind when he’d left, and now that he was back was too intent on his fax even to notice and acknowledge her.
The lift did not go to the top floor as she’d expected. It stopped at the first floor. Seconds later the Marqués appeared at the top of the stairs and came down them, looking at her, smiling.
Reaching the desk, he said, ‘Some news from Madrid made me forget for a moment that we have a dinner date. Is the time I suggested all right for you? What time are you off duty?’
She found herself saying, ‘I finish at seven.’
‘In that case, why not come up as soon as you’re free? Until seven.’
In fact it was a quarter past seven when she arrived at the door of the Mirador suite, after spending ten minutes in the women’s staff washroom, redoing her hair and repairing her make- up.
