by Anne Weale
She could still feel the fleeting pressure of his lips on her knuckles, and her thoughts and emotions were in a confusion induced by their conversation up at the mirador as well as by the unexpected caress.
A kiss on the hand at meeting or parting was a courtesy normally reserved for married women. On one or two occasions she had seen Señor Alvarez greet the wives of regular guests with the old-fashioned salutation, ‘At your feet, señora.‘
It seemed a shame that the expression had fallen into disuse. From what she had seen at the hotel, young Spaniards rarely kissed women’s hands—not even those of girls they appeared to be in love with.
What had prompted Simón to kiss hers she couldn’t imagine. Unless, in the absence of any better entertainment, it amused him to see how she would respond to his flirting with her.
She watched him until he was lost to view, envying him the freedom to go where he pleased at night. Not that the lanes through the vineyards held the hazards of city streets, but it wouldn’t have occurred to her to go for a walk at this hour.
* * *
Jack looked displeased when, next morning, he learned that Cassia was going with them.
‘Have you got boots?’ he asked.
She shook her head. ‘Won’t trainers do?’
‘Not in the mountains.’
‘She can buy some boots on the way,’ said the Marqués. ‘Not as good as yours and mine, but adequate for the easy terrain we’ll be covering.’
Both men had come down to breakfast in sweatshirts with shorts and wool socks but the Spaniard’s long legs were tanned and Jack’s thicker legs were white under a heavy furring of curly hair.
Cassia was wearing jeans and one of her father’s shirts, with a patchwork waistcoat bought from an arts and crafts shop in an alley at the foot of the Albaicín.
‘You’ll need a sweater and a waterproof,’ Jack told her.
‘But it’s going to be another hot day. There isn’t a cloud in sight.’
‘Not now. There could be later. No one who knows what they’re doing ever goes mountain-walking without the gear they’ll need if the weather changes. If you haven’t got a cagoule, I’ll lend you one.’
He also lent her a knapsack in which to carry her lunch and a litre of water.
‘One would think you were going to walk to the other side of Spain. What do you have in there?’ asked Laura, voicing Cassia’s curiosity about the contents of Jack’s much larger pack.
‘First-aid stuff, flares, emergency rations, a survival bag. People who go off the beaten track can get lost or have an accident which might involve staying out overnight,’ he told her. ‘It isn’t likely that will happen today, but I never take chances. If you’re always prepared you never get caught out.’
The Marqués also had a pack, although not as large as Jack’s. After they had stowed their gear in the back of the Range Rover, he opened the front passenger door but, instead of climbing in, waited for Cassia to take the seat next to the driver’s.
‘She can go in the back. I’ll need you in front to direct me,’ Jack said abruptly.
With a slight movement of one eyebrow, Simón opened the rear door for her.
The small town where they stopped en route had a shop selling all the equipment used by hunters, from shotguns to cartridge jackets. The proprietor produced a pair of boots in a boy’s size which Cassia found comfortable and Jack considered adequate if not ideal. They were not expensive, and she had brought some money with her, but the Marqués insisted on paying.
‘They’re not something you’d have bought if you hadn’t come to work for me,’ he said. ‘I’ll cover any expenses to do with the job.’
‘I didn’t realise you spoke Valenciano,’ she said as they left the shop.
‘The gift of tongues is a family characteristic. One of my uncles was a diplomat, and I also spent a few years in our foreign service.’
‘How many languages do you speak?’
‘Half a dozen,’ he said casually. ‘If those boots start to feel uncomfortable you must tell us. Ideally they need to be used for several short periods before being worn on a long walk.’
‘At the moment they feel very comfortable.’
‘They’re to light for serious walking,’ Jack said critically.
She felt that he was still annoyed at having her with them.
* * *
The village where they left the Range Rover to continue on foot was even smaller than Castell de los Torres. Only one old woman was using the lavadero—a long, waisthigh tank of running water, roofed but open on three sides—when they passed it. She gave them a friendly greeting, her small, black-clad figure making Cassia aware of the vast gulf between her own life and opportunities and those of the Spanish widow—the growth of her generation stunted by malnutrition, the pattern of her life determined by lack of education.
The Marqués was leading the way, with Jack behind him and Cassia at the rear. As the path wound downhill between plots of vegetables and small orchards of fruit trees with their blossom season approaching, she noticed how differently the two ahead of her moved, and wondered if a man’s gait was a reflection of his character.
The Marqués was light on his feet, even in thick-soled boots. Jack walked with a heavier tread. In summer, when snakes might be sunning themselves on the less used parts of the mountain tracks, they would feel the reverberations of those clumping footsteps in plenty of time to glide out of sight.
Jack’s smile at the granny in the washhouse had been the first sign that he could smile. For a moment it had changed him into someone different from the man whose manner so far had been anything but friendly.
Presently they came to a spot where Simón stopped to point out a zigzag line on the hillside on the far side of the valley below them.
‘That’s one of the ancient trails.’
He had a small pair of field-glasses hanging from a strap round his neck. Lifting it over his head, he handed the glasses to her. As their fingers touched she felt the same unnerving tingle induced by his caress last night—like a very slight electric shock.
They walked for an hour, then stopped for a fiveminute break and a drink from their water bottles.
‘In April this will be a botanist’s paradise,’ said Simón, with a gesture at the scrubby vegetation around them.
Cassia took the opportunity to apply some more suncream to her nose, eyelids and hairline. She debated offering the tube to Jack, but decided that he had probably applied some protection of his own before coming out.
When they set off again he took the lead, setting a pace which presently made Simón glance round to ask her, ‘Are you OK with this?’
‘I’m fine, thanks.’
Even if she had not been happy with their present rate of knots, she wouldn’t have admitted it. She was determined to keep up, not to confirm Jack’s evident feeling that her presence was a liability.
All morning the temperature rose. This still being wintertime, it wasn’t hard to understand why only the hardiest plants survived the scorching heat of the summer months on these almost treeless mountainsides.
They had lunch where an overhanging rock created a patch of shade. The backs of the men’s shirts when they took off their packs were soaked with sweat where the packs had rested. Both stripped to the waist, spreading their shirts in the sun to dry. Cassia had already removed her waistcoat, and wished that she had had the forethought to put on a bathing top instead of a bra. The one she was wearing was too transparent for her to sit shirtless.
‘Where did you come by your tan?’ Jack asked Simón as they unwrapped their food.
His own torso was pale, like his legs, but Simón’s shoulders and chest were as brown as his face and legs.
‘I spent Christmas in the Seychelles. A friend of mine lives there. His island, Praslin, is a great place for sailing and fishing, but there isn’t much else to do there unless you’re a painter, as my friend is.’
‘I don’t go for the Tropics mys
elf. I don’t like the humidity,’ said Jack. ‘I was in Canada at Christmas. A pal of mine in the Legion asked me over. He’s in security now…a married man with a family. It was nice and warm in his house, but outside it was cold enough to freeze the—’
‘Jack served in the French Foreign Legion,’ Simón cut in. ‘For how long? Five years, wasn’t it?’
‘Ten,’ the other man said tersely, and bit off a mouthful of roll.
‘Spain also has a legion, but it no longer accepts foreign recruits,’ Simón continued smoothly. ‘There were never as many foreigners in our Legión Extranjera as in the French one.’
Cassia wondered if he had intervened to prevent her hearing an expression he thought would embarrass her, or to spare Jack embarrassment. In her view, the Englishman was much too plain-spoken to care if his barrack-room language offended people like Laura and herself.
She could see that Simón’s upbringing would make him aware that women of Laura’s age and older were put off by coarseness, but she doubted if his own girlfriends would have minded the expression Jack would have used if he hadn’t been interrupted. Her impression of Isa Sanchez had been that plenty of four-letter words would have been screeched at Simón before he’d dodged the ashtray that Isa had hurled at the mirror.
‘Your friend was a French Canadian, presumably?’ said the Marqués.
The other man nodded. ‘He spoke the lingo from day one. I had to pick it up. I reckon now I speak it better than the teachers who thought I hadn’t the brains to learn it at school.’
It was after the lunch stop, when they had set off again, that Cassia became aware that her right boot was starting to rub the back of her heel. She was wondering whether to ask Jack if his first-aid equipment included a plaster which, applied now, would prevent the slight soreness from becoming a blister, when Simón called, ‘Hold it, Jack!’
The Englishman stopped and looked round. ‘What’s up?’
‘I thought I heard bells.’
As they listened a muffled tinkling could be heard from somewhere nearby.
‘There must be sheep grazing near here,’ said Jack.
‘I doubt it. Not at this height. The shepherds stay lower down. I think we’re about to meet some much larger animals.’
‘Bulls, do you mean?’ asked Cassia rather apprehensively.
‘Either bulls or their mothers and sisters…who also need to be treated respectfully. Don’t worry—they’ll be with a herdsman. I’ll go ahead and have a word with him.’
Passing Jack, Simón went ahead towards a gap between two large crags forming a gateway into the adjoining valley.
‘Rather him than me,’ Jack remarked to Cassia as she closed the gap between them. ‘The cows can be more dangerous than the bulls from what I’ve heard.’
She had heard the same thing, but in Jack’s place would have held her tongue. She had a feeling that he wasn’t worried himself but expected her to be afraid and was testing her nerve.
‘I’ve never heard of any walkers being attacked by Spanish cattle,’ she said calmly.
‘You wouldn’t, would you? They keep that sort of news out of the papers. Gorings aren’t good for the tourist trade,’ he said, with a wicked grin.
He was obviously trying to alarm her. She felt the best way to handle him was with a succinct comment used by her father to dismiss something as nonsense.
Having said it, she didn’t pause to see his reaction but moved quickly past him to follow Simón between the crags.
The valley through which they had to pass as part of a circular route back to their starting point presented a peaceful scene—except that the beasts grazing in it were not dairy cattle but the fighting bulls bred not only for the corrida but also for running through the streets and being challenged in small rings by youths during the many town and village fiestas.
Only one animal was belled—a large cow who stood out from the others, not only because her movements caused the bell on her leather collar to make a clanking sound, but also because she was a brown and white piebald, while the rest, apart from a couple of brown cows and calves, were black.
They were spread out across the valley. There was no way of avoiding them. Among them, clearly their leader, was one very large bull who seemed to be gazing directly at her. At the thought of walking past him, expecting at every moment that massive head to swing low before a charge, Cassia felt her stomach clench.
But Simón had been right. There was a herdsman, and he and Simón were walking towards each other, the bulls’ guardian with the assurance that his charges wouldn’t harm him, and Simón with an air of confidence which Cassia wouldn’t have felt had she been in his place.
After some conversation the two Spaniards came over to where she and Jack were waiting and Simón introduced the herdsman.
‘He’s going to escort us through,’ he told them. ‘These cattle aren’t usually aggressive when they’re grazing, but they’re not used to seeing anyone but him when they’re up here.’
Even in the herdsman’s charge, and with a stalwart man on either side of her, passing through the herd was not an experience that Cassia wished to repeat. Every step of the way she was conscious of the large bull turning his head to follow their progress. It made her respect more than ever the courage of men who duelled with such formidable animals.
The herdsman seemed pleased to have someone to chat to, and they were delayed for some time while he and Simón talked. Then, with thanks and more handshakes, they resumed their walk.
By half a mile further on, the chafing inside Cassia’s boot was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. But she thought that they would probably stop to drink water again before long, and then, on the pretext of going behind a bush, she could take a quick look at her heel. It might be that a wad of tissue would serve better than a plaster. If she could avoid it she didn’t want to let on that she had a problem.
Unfortunately her plan was thwarted, because neither of the men seemed to want another stop. Instead of keeping an eye on her, as he had during the morning, Simón now took it for granted that at least on this route anything they could do, she could do.
With Jack in the lead and Simón close on his heels they were talking about cars, and, on the downhill sections, moving very fast, their thick soles designed for these rocky tracks.
Cassia found that she had to concentrate hard to avoid losing her balance on pockets of loose stone or rocks worn and weathered to a slippery smoothness. As well as the pain in her heel, the fronts of her thighs were beginning to ache from several hours’ unaccustomed exercise. But she gritted her teeth and pressed on, determined not to let them know that, for her, the day’s outing was turning into an ordeal.
By the time they got back to the village the pain was intense, like a red-hot wire lancing her heel at every step. Somehow she managed neither to limp nor to wince. But when Jack suggested having coffee in the bar she almost groaned aloud at the thought of having to walk past the Range Rover in search of some smoky bar full of men with loud voices and a television going full-blast.
‘I think Cassia might prefer a long, iced drink in the patio at home,’ said Simón. ‘You look tired,’ he told her.
‘I enjoyed it,’ she said, half-truthfully. ‘But I am looking forward to a shower and taking these boots off. They feel much heavier than the loafers and sandals I mainly wear.’
‘I wear boots most of the time. I’m more comfortable in them,’ said Jack, unlocking his vehicle.
Simón said, ‘You have the front seat on the way back, Cassia.’
It was bliss to sit down. Her blistered heel was still painful, but less agonising than when she had been walking on it.
An hour later, in the privacy of her room, Cassia took off her left boot and then, with gritted teeth, the right one. On Jack’s advice she was wearing two pairs of socks—an inner pair of white cotton and an outer pair of brown wool. Both were sticking to the back of her foot, and what the white sock revealed as she peeled it away from h
er heel made her grimace with dismay. She had had small blisters before but never one this big. It had blown up and burst, and now the raw flesh was bleeding.
Hours too late, she regretted not asking Jack for a plaster as soon as it had started to hurt. Now it was long past the stage when a plaster would cover the damage and protect it from infection.
After a few moments’ thought she decided that the first thing to do was to have a refreshing shower. Then, wearing her flip-flops, she would slip out to the pharmacy and hope to buy dressings large enough to cover the site of the blister while it healed.
After the day’s exertions it was good to stand in the shower and feel her energy reviving as the hot water streamed down her body. Probably Simón and Jack had already had their showers and would soon be having a beer together in the patio. She would have to sneak out the back way, and cut through the alley connecting the road at the rear with the street leading to the chemist’s shop with its distinctive green cross.
As far back as she could remember, her father had always sought advice from chemists rather than doctors. In his view they knew as much as many GPs, and their advice was free. Thinking of her father, she sighed. He had been a difficult man, but there were times when she missed him with an almost physical ache, and this was one of them. The painful smarting of her heel reminded her of all the times in her childhood when he had patched her up after some minor injury.
There was still a small scar on her wrist where another child had accidentally jabbed her with one blade of a pair of scissors. The mother of the child had panicked and wanted to rush Cassia to hospital, but John Browning had told her to calm down. He had pressed the lips of the cut together and fastened them with a butterfly suture made from a strip of plaster. A week later it had healed, leaving only the small pearly mark now hidden by her watch strap.
There being no one about when she left the first-floor shower room a few doors away from her bedroom, she allowed herself to limp. Simón and Jack had rooms on the floor above and, the main staircase being on the other side of the building, had no reason to come past her room whether going down or up.
