A Night To Remember

by Anne Weale

  They were looking for a place where Jack could teach abseiling and climbing on a bluff of sound rock. There were many spectacular bluffs within a few miles’ radius of the village, but not all were stable. They looked at one where several huge chunks of rock, each weighing many tons, had fallen away from the face. It looked as if it might jettison others before long.

  After some more exploring they arrived at a cliff which looked more promising. This was half an hour before their planned lunch break. Leaving Cassia to relax after the strenuous walk from where they had left the Range Rover, the two men set out to climb the cliff and, if successful, to abseil down it.

  To her it looked unclimbable. But, starting in different places, each man found his own route up it, and she couldn’t help wondering if there was a competitive element in the way they tackled the ascent, perhaps both hoping to reach the top first. Or perhaps not, for although his relations with women might suggest the reverse she didn’t think Simón was an irresponsible man in the other areas of his life. He didn’t drive recklessly, and she didn’t think he would take chances on a rockface in order to beat Jack to the top.

  Shading her eyes to watch their slow but steady upward progress, she wondered if she could do it. Perhaps when Simón had gone back to Madrid she would ask Jack to give her a lesson. With him, she wouldn’t mind finding out that she had no aptitude or even a poor head for heights.

  Women did climb, and climb well. She remembered reading a feature in a French magazine left behind by one of the guests at the Castillo about the woman who was one of France’s most daring and expert rock climbers. Cassia didn’t aspire to reach that level, but suddenly, watching the technique the men were using to climb the escarpment above her, she wished she were up there with them instead of being left behind.

  But the first time she tried it she didn’t want Simón to be there, in case she chickened out. Not that she thought he would despise her or mock her—he wasn’t that sort of person—it was just that she wanted him to respect and admire her, to take her more seriously than any of his other women. Not that she was in that category, and she had no intention of joining it.

  But it was one thing to tell herself that while she was down here, with her feet firmly on the ground, and he was up there with his mind focused on scaling a rockface. Later today he might find an opportunity to focus his attention on her. If and when he did, she knew it would be much harder to stick to her resolution not to succumb to the almost overwhelming magnetism he could exert—had exerted on her last night.

  She hadn’t forgotten the feel of his hands on her shoulders, his fingers moving against her neck. She had no illusions about her own vulnerability if he was determined to have her.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  AFTER spending some time out of sight, presumably admiring the views from their higher vantage point, the men came down the escarpment in a fraction of the time it had taken them to haul themselves arduously up it.

  Abseiling also looked fun, thought Cassia, watching Jack descend in a series of swoops, on a line attached to a harness round his hips, his feet keeping him clear of the rockface.

  During lunch, as they discussed other climbs that they had done in other places, their conversation was peppered with words—arête, traverse, slabby rake, flake—which had little meaning for her. She felt that in some way the climb had put them on a new footing, their shared enthusiasm for the sport making other differences irrelevant.

  ‘This must be boring for Cassia,’ said Simón, suddenly turning to her.

  ‘She might like to try it,’ said Jack. ‘I’ve met some first-rate women climbers.’

  ‘Have you?’ Her eyes lit up with interest. ‘Where did you meet them?’

  Before he could answer, Simón said, ‘Some women do climb well, but the ones I’ve met have been very tough and not very feminine. Would you agree with that, Jack? I’m not saying they looked aggressively masculine—except for having more muscle to call on than most women—but they had different mind-sets from other women.’

  ‘I couldn’t say about that. I’ve seen them climbing but I haven’t had a lot of direct contact.’ Jack turned to Cassia. ‘Climbing goes on everywhere, but the public don’t see much of it because they’re not usually near the places where it happens. You don’t see it on TV often, because of the technical problems and because it’s either a loner’s sport or co-operative, not competitive. I’ve climbed in France and Corsica, where I was based as a para. I’ve also—’ He broke off to look through binoculars at something which had caught his eye on a shoulder of hillside further along the valley.

  A few moments later he said, ‘Seems like someone’s in trouble.’

  Simón put aside his bread roll to have a look through his glasses. With the naked eye Cassia could only see a number of people moving slowly downhill.

  ‘A party of walkers…one of them injured by the look of it. Perhaps we’d better get down there and see if they need any help,’ he said, scrambling to his feet and beginning to gather his belongings together.

  Jack followed suit. ‘At the rate they’re going down, it’ll take them a month of Sundays to get up that steeper track on the other side of the valley…assuming they set out where we did.’

  ‘There’s nowhere else they could have started from in the area,’ said Simón. ‘Ready, Cassia? Right—let’s get going.’

  With him setting a cracking pace, it took them about twenty minutes to catch up with the four elderly people who had stopped for a rest when his party joined them.

  The others turned out to be Belgians. One of the two women had tripped and fallen off the path, which at that point had skirted a drop of two or three feet. She was not only badly shaken but had a gash on her forehead and couldn’t walk on her right foot. The two men—one tall, but overweight and unhealthily florid, and the other much shorter—had been carrying her down, but with difficulty. She was now in tears, being fussed over by the other wife.

  ‘Would you look at their shoes, for heaven’s sake?’ Jack murmured to Cassia. ‘This lot belong on the esplanade at Benidorm. What the hell are they doing out here, got up like that?’

  She gave a nod of agreement. It seemed an act of madness for two women, both in open-toed town shoes and tights, to be where they were. Looking at the two men, both of whom had been sweating heavily in the midday heat, she thought it wouldn’t be long before they became dehydrated.

  Between them, Simón and Jack attended to the hurt woman’s cut and the worst of her scratches and gave her a painkiller. Then they took turns to carry her on their backs, the one who wasn’t transporting her carrying both their packs.

  Cassia, left in charge of escorting the other three up, found it an anxious assignment. They went up the steep track like snails on what at the outset, she learned, had begun as a leisurely ramble before lunching on leg of lamb at a restaurant in the village.

  As she gave her hand to the second woman and heaved her up the steepest sections while keeping an eye on the two men, she was worried that one of them might collapse before reaching the top.

  Earlier, Jack had been saying how quickly mishaps could escalate into disasters when people were badly equipped or mentally unequal to coping with the unexpected. What had befallen these four townies seemed a good example of that.

  Presently Simón reappeared. ‘We assumed they had come by car,’ he said to her. ‘Unfortunately not. They came in a taxi which is coming back to pick them up—but not until four.

  By this time Cassia had discovered that both couples lived on one of the many urbanizaciónes near the coast—enclaves of holiday and retirement houses built to accommodate the droves of sun-seeking foreigners who had been colonising Spain since before she was born.

  ‘They can’t hang about until then,’ she said. ‘Can’t we contact the taxi driver and get him to come back immediately?’

  ‘Jack has a better idea. He can squeeze them into the Range Rover and take them to the nearest hospital for the other old girl to have her
foot X-rayed. You and I can either wait for the taxi or try to hitch a lift back.’

  ‘Before they go anywhere these three need something to drink, or they’re going to flake out with heat exhaustion.’

  ‘Yes, they’re all in bad shape,’ he agreed. ‘Couch potatoes trying, in a moment of madness, to be mountain goats.’ His smiling glance lingered on her slimmer contours.

  The look took her back to the evening before, in her bedroom.

  Half an hour later, rehydrated with water supplied by the village bar, and with ham rolls to eat on the way, Jack’s charges left for the coast—the injured woman in front with him, the other three squeezed in the back.

  ‘Better expect me when you see me,’ he said, leaning out of the window. ‘As they don’t have a word of Spanish, I can’t dump them at the hospital and leave them to it. I’ll have to hang around. Dios!’

  With a wave of the hand, he drove off.

  ‘Let’s have some coffee, shall we?’ said Simón as the vehicle disappeared round a bend in the narrow village street. ‘I’ll bring it out.’ He went back inside the bar, leaving Cassia to sink gratefully into a chair at one of the two metal tables on the pavement outside.

  The morning’s brisk walking hadn’t tired her. It was the laggardly drag up the hill with the elderly Belgians which had been fatiguing. She felt hot and sticky, and longed for a cooling wash, but a brief visit to the bar’s loo had discouraged her from attempting to freshen up there. In her experience it was unusual in Spain for the washrooms in bars to be squalid. But they were at this establishment.

  When Simón came out with the coffee he said, ‘I’m told there’s a path we can take that cuts across country, connecting with a road going in the general direction of Castell. If you feel equal to walking a few more kilometres, we stand more chance of picking up a lift from there.’

  ‘It sounds a better idea than hanging about for nearly an hour and a half for the Belgians’ taxi to come back.’

  ‘That’s what I think.’ He stretched his long legs. ‘The driver won’t be pleased when he finds he’s come back for nothing and has to chase up his fare.’

  ‘It’s a long way to come by taxi from where they live. It seems strange they don’t have their own cars.’

  ‘Perhaps they don’t often leave their urbanisation,’ he suggested. ‘It has its own supermarket and shopping arcade, so our piggy-back passenger was telling us. Most of the residents have their own pools, so they don’t need to go to the beach. It’s a world of its own. In Spain, but not of Spain.’

  ‘You’ve certainly done your good deed for the day, lugging the one who hurt herself up that steep bit. She’d be where we found them still if you and Jack hadn’t turned up.’

  ‘I’d rather have carried you the day you blistered your heel. Are you sure it’s not hurting today?’

  ‘No, no…it’s fine,’ she assured him.

  After they’d left the bar their way led them past a lavadero similar to the one they had passed on the first walk, except that this wasn’t in use.

  ‘I’d like to wash my face and hands,’ said Cassia.

  ‘A good idea,’ he agreed. ‘I could do with a clean-up myself.’

  To her surprise, while she washed her face and hands with a small piece of soap from her pack, and dried them with a cotton kerchief, Simón stripped off his shirt to sluice his chest and arms as well as his face and neck. Then, after drying himself with his discarded shirt, he produced a clean white T-shirt.

  ‘That feels better.’ He raked back his wetted hair which, being thick, clean and well cut, seemed not to need a comb to make it look presentable.

  They moved on, their pace more leisurely than earlier in the day. Where the path was too narrow for them to walk abreast, Simón drew back to let her go ahead of him.

  That morning they had passed a mountain which took its name from a legend going back to Moorish times. Now they talked again about the Moors—a subject on which he was unexpectedly well-informed, although she was less surprised by that now than she would have been in the early days of their acquaintance. Then it had seemed unlikely that he would have any seriously intellectual interests.

  Talking, they reached the road much sooner than she expected. She felt a twinge of regret that this enjoyable interlude—the easy path with its peaceful views, an interesting conversation free from personal undercurrents—had ended so quickly.

  ‘Shall we wait, or continue walking until something comes along?’ Simón asked.

  ‘Which would you rather do?’

  He glanced up and down the road. ‘In the absence of anywhere to sit, I think we may as well stroll on. Unless you’ve had enough of St Ferdinand’s car, as my nurse used to call going on foot.’

  ‘No, I don’t mind walking,’ said Cassia. ‘Did you see much of your parents when you were small? Or were you mostly with your nurse?’

  ‘Unfortunately my father was an invalid. A riding accident had damaged his brain. It was very hard on my mother and says a great deal for her character that she stayed with him and never allowed herself to become over-possessive with me. She’s remarried now, and lives in America, but we see quite a lot of each other. She’s an extraordinarily strong, fine person.’

  This was a different version of the story that Cassia had heard, and she would have liked to hear more about his mother. But Simón changed the subject. Perhaps he felt that the conversation had become too personal.

  The first car to come along was a large Mercedes. Although the back seat was empty it swept past them, with the driver and his passenger averting their eyes from the two would-be hitchhikers.

  ‘As they’ve probably both got gold watches and wallets stuffed with five mil notes, maybe they’re right not to pick up strangers,’ said Simón, watching the opulent car glide round the bend ahead of them.

  ‘Here comes another,’ said Cassia, a few minutes later.

  This time the car was a small blue saloon. As they saw when it pulled up in response to his signal, it had only one seat to spare, the back being occupied by the elderly mother of either the portly Spanish driver or his buxom wife.

  ‘Where are you going, my friend?’ the driver enquired.

  ‘To Castell de los Torres. But I can see you haven’t room for us. It was good of you to stop,’ said Simón.

  ‘We’re going near Castell. We can fit you in, if you don’t mind a bit of a squeeze. You’re a big fellow, but the young lady isn’t. She can sit between you and my mother.’

  The invitation was seconded by the driver’s wife and parent with smiles and beckoning gestures.

  In view of Simón’s height, it would have made sense for him to sit in front with the three women sharing the back seat. However, as this wasn’t suggested, after Cassia climbed in, making polite remarks about their kindness, he followed her.

  Instructed by her husband, the driver’s wife did adjust her seat to give Simón a few more inches to accommodate his long legs. But, as her mother-in-law weighed at least a stone more than she did, there was very little room for Cassia, squashed between the billows of female flesh on her left and the less yielding male physique on her right.

  As the driver let in his clutch Simón lifted the arm pressing against hers and, shifting sideways, laid it along the shelf behind the backrest, a manoeuvre that made better use of the space available but left her less comfortable inwardly, because now she was tucked against him in a far more intimate way than merely shoulder to shoulder.

  The Spaniards were curious to know who their passengers were, where they had come from and why they were going to Castell. Cassia left it to Simón to answer their questions, and to fire back several of his own, so that soon the others were telling him their life stories without gleaning more than the bare essentials from him.

  Presently they came to a succession of bends which made the driver’s mother grasp the handgrip above the window and caused Cassia, with nothing to hold, to sway from side to side until Simón again moved his arm, this time to
hold her against him.

  Turning her face towards the offside window, in the hope that he wouldn’t see her heightened colour, she met a beady look from the old lady.

  ‘You are novios—yes?’ she asked.

  Cassia shook her head.

  The old lady clicked her tongue. ‘It’s different from my young days. I wouldn’t have been allowed to go for a walk in the country with a man, not even if we were engaged to be married.’

  ‘That was fifty-five years ago, Madre. The world has changed,’ said the driver.

  ‘You’re telling me! And not for the better,’ his mother said tartly. She laid her hand on Cassia’s arm. ‘I was younger than you when I married his father, and we stayed married until his heart attack, two years ago. Life was never easy for us, but we managed. I still miss him. He was a good husband and father.’ With her other hand, she fumbled in the pocket of her grey and black print dress for a handkerchief and mopped her eyes.

  Cassia patted the hand still resting on her arm. ‘I’m sure you were a very good wife to him, señora.’

  Unembarrassed by her tears, the old lady said, ‘What part of the country do you come from? Not from round here, by your accent.’

  ‘I’m a foreigner.’

  ‘You’re not an American, are you? My eldest brother Alfonso went to America. He liked it there and did well for himself.’

  By this time the road was running fairly straight again, but Simón didn’t take his arm away. All the time that the old lady was talking about her brother’s decision to try his luck on the other side of the Atlantic, his fingers were moving lightly over Cassia’s outer arm, several fingers slipping gently under her rolled-up shirt sleeve—not far, but far enough to send a slow quiver through her.

  She tried to pay attention to Alfonso’s experiences, to ignore the sensations engendered by having her back heat-sealed to Simón’s chest.

  The driver’s wife rolled down her window, increasing the current of air fanning the interior of the car and ruffling Cassia’s hair. A strand must have blown across Simón’s face. He removed it and tucked it behind her ear, his fingertips lingering on her neck.