They clung to him shyly, watching George with the same dark eyes as their father’s. Neither resembled their mother. Pia was destined to be a beauty and Tonito a giant. They belonged to the Argentine as the ombu belongs to the pampa. George was surprised to discover that neither spoke good English for their parents talked to them in their native tongue, more out of laziness than intention.
‘Vamos a casa a tomar el té,’ said Tonito. He turned to George and translated in pidgin English. ‘Teatime.’
Tea was laid out on the veranda, the silver and china neatly placed on a clean white tablecloth. The children drank their milk and told their parents what they had done at school. Jose Antonio was indulgent, Agatha mindful of their manners and deportment.
‘Children, we must all speak English now we have an English guest,’ said Jose Antonio, running a large hand over his son’s hair. ‘Show us what you have learned in school.’
‘Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,’ said Tonito with a giggle.
‘Surely you know more than that?’ Agatha exclaimed, unimpressed.
‘I don’t want,’ Pia complained, looking up at her father beneath thick black lashes. She had already mastered the art of flirting.
‘George flies aeroplanes,’ said their mother, attempting to engage them. ‘He fought in a war.’
‘Like a bird,’ said Pia, pointing to the sky.
‘Just like a bird,’ George agreed, smiling at her. ‘But once I crashed. Fell to the ground. Not like a bird!’ The children giggled, clearly understanding more than they let on.
‘Good God, George. Did you?’ Agatha’s eyes widened.
‘Damned nearly killed me,’ he said, then added softly, ‘Saved by the grace of God.’
Suddenly the sound of breaking china, scraping chairs and Dolores’ inimitable screech alerted them to trouble in the kitchen. They all stiffened and strained their ears, looking at one another in bewilderment. Pia giggled nervously into her hand. Jose Antonio got to his feet, still chewing on a piece of cheese and membrillo, and walked unhurriedly across the terrace. He entered the kitchen to find the old woman standing in the middle of the room wielding a knife at an invisible aggressor. Like an angry crow she was dressed in her usual black gown and sensible black shoes, her hair pulled up into a severe bun. ‘Out! Out!’ she shouted, rigid with fury. When she saw her boss she turned on him too. ‘Señor, if you have come to take me away I ask God in advance to forgive me my actions.’
‘Dolores, why would I want to take you away? No one cooks empanadas like you do!’ His voice was calm but forceful.
‘I have a melon growing in my stomach. For that they have come to take me away.’ Jose Antonio looked at her quizzically. He towered over her and it wouldn’t have been difficult to wrest the knife from her, but her eyes shone with terror more than rage.
‘Who has come to take you away?’ he asked patiently. ‘I see no one there.’ She stuck out her jaw and nodded to the wall.
‘Spirits. They come when your time is up, to take you on to the next world. But I tell them I’m not ready yet. Váyanse, váyanse!’
Jose Antonio’s face darkened and he frowned. This wasn’t the ranting of a crazed woman for he knew of spirits and had seen them himself. ‘Who is there, Dolores?’ he asked. His voice was barely a whisper.
‘Mama and Ernesto.’
‘Put down the knife. You cannot harm spirits with knives.’ He walked a few paces towards her. She raised her eyes, now bloodshot and moist, bit her thin lip and placed the knife in his hand. ‘By all means tell them to go, but politely,’ he said, placing the knife back on the table. This she did. He watched her wave her hand as if to dismiss a tiresome dog. Then she turned, patted her grey hair and nodded at him gravely.
‘My time is near, señor,’ she croaked.
Jose Antonio put his hands on his hips and sighed ponderously. ‘A knife and a few obscenities cannot delay your meeting with God, Dolores. No, they come with a warning. I will call la señora.’
When he returned to the table Agatha was busy telling George all the famous Dolores stories. The time she was nearly killed by a wild pig, the fight she had had with a whore in Jesús Maria, and the discovery that her husband, Ernesto, had been leading a double life with another family in La Cumbre. ‘Of course he died shortly after,’ Agatha was saying. ‘She made life impossible for him as you can imagine.’ When she saw her husband approach her voice trailed off and she raised her eyebrows enquiringly.
‘What the devil is wrong with her now?’
‘Gorda, go and see her. She says she has a melon growing in her stomach. I don’t believe it is a real one.’ He turned to George. ‘This is women’s business.’
‘Is she going to die?’ Pia asked as she watched her mother fold her napkin neatly and place it on the table.
Jose Antonio patted her shoulder. ‘Of course not, mi amor,’ he replied.
‘Qué pena!’ said the child to George’s astonishment. He knew few phrases in Spanish, but there was no doubt in his mind that she had just said ‘pity!’.
‘Pia, have more respect, please!’ Agatha chided irritably. She hated getting involved in the personal lives of her staff, much less in their bodily functions. The idea of a melon in the woman’s stomach made her head swim. She didn’t want to know any more about it. But she did as her husband asked.
She found Dolores slumped in a chair sipping mate. She looked like a benign old lady, hardly the fiend who had ruled the kitchen for the last forty odd years.
‘Are you all right?’ Agatha asked in Spanish. She tried to soften her tone but was aware that she sounded unconcerned.
‘What does it matter?’ Dolores groaned. ‘I’m on the way out.’
‘Don’t talk such nonsense,’ Agatha replied, wanting to add that she’d been trying to get rid of her without success for the last two decades. ‘Señor Jose Antonio tells me that you have something growing in your stomach.’ The melon sounded too absurd to mention.
‘He should mind his own business,’ Dolores snapped.
Agatha dropped her shoulders. ‘Bueno, we shall all mind our own business then,’ she replied with equal briskness, and left the kitchen, relieved that she didn’t have to take the matter further.
George knew he would be happy in his new home. He took a swim in the evening then sat on the flagstones watching the gnats and flies dance upon the smooth surface of the water and allowing the scents of eucalyptus and gardenia to flood his senses. He felt blissfully detached from England. Both physically and mentally he was thousands of miles away and, for the first time since the war, he was at peace. The gentle mooing of cows accompanied the clicking of crickets and the light twittering of birds, and the setting sun brushed the plains with amber.
That night they ate in the courtyard beside a sprawling tree whose red flowers burst into the air every now and then with a loud pop. Dolores appeared to have recovered from her haunting and could be heard shouting at poor Agustina and Carlos. The children drank wine and conversed with the adults. George, weary from his trip, retired before they did. He slept a dreamless sleep, lulled by the sweet night air and the gentle snorting of ponies.
A couple of days later he started work. It felt good to ride out across those plains and there was much to learn. Another cloudless day to lift his spirits and sharpen his sense of freedom. With the wind in his hair and the sun on his face he rode with the gauchos, rounding up the herds and surveying the thriving fields of maize and wheat. He was keen to belong and watched them carefully, copying their casual way of riding, their backs slouched, reins in one hand, their hats pulled over one eye. They only spoke Spanish and George wished he were able to communicate in more than gesture. But they smiled at him roguishly and sensed that he was a good sort. They chuckled at his enthusiasm, the reckless way he rode and the endless cigarettes he smoked. When they offered him a sip of mate he gagged and choked at the sharp taste in spite of the honey they added to sweeten it. Consequently he filled a flask with orange brandy
and drank that instead. Jose Antonio told them he had been a brave fighter pilot in the war and so they named him El Gringo Volante – The Flying Foreigner – and for once he was grateful for his inability to communicate because it saved him from having to tell them about the war.
Agatha sent him off to Jesús Maria to learn Spanish with a languid young woman called Josefa. With raven hair and moist brown skin she was plump and fragrant and as idle as a sloth in sunshine. She had a couple of textbooks she had obviously retained from her school days and a fondness for conjugating verbs. Fortunately she was blessed with an easy nature and limitless patience. She corrected George’s errors over and over again without irritation and listened to his first faltering attempts at forming sentences. That she grew fond of him there was no doubt. She splashed herself with cologne, braided her hair, applied makeup and adorned her sensuous body with lotions and jewellery. The heat allowed her to wear as little as was decent, exposing more and more cleavage with his every visit. But George was too busy learning to notice. His heart was locked to her endeavours in spite of her heaving breasts. She sensed the ghostly presence of another woman and resigned herself to the impossibility of her desires.
November passed quickly, overshadowed by Dolores’ increasing wrath and by Agatha’s declining patience. George was now able to communicate in Spanish and was riding like the gauchos, although his lasso-throwing left much to be desired. He joined them around their camp fires at night and had even picked up the words and tunes to some of their songs, accompanied by the skinny lad they called El Flaco who played the guitar like an angel. He insisted that he would never grow to love mate, but killing and skinning an animal was well within his capability. Pedro, the white-haired gaucho who kept his age as secret as the names of the mistresses he visited in Jesús Maria, gave George a silver knife as a gift, telling him proudly that it was to use on the occasion of his first castration.
Whenever George looked up at the moon he thought of Rita. He wondered how his family was, Mrs Megalith, his friends in town. But he knew for certain that life at Frognal Point would always remain the same. How tired he had grown of the sea and those cliffs and how refreshing the fertile plains and hazy mountain range of Córdoba were to him. He thought of Susan too. When his mind wandered free, when he was caught unawares, when his thoughts were let loose to do as they pleased in dreams. Always the same image of her leaning against the railings, curling a stray piece of hair around her ear, her reluctant smile and those sad blue eyes that hid secrets he would now never know.
But then the winds of fate, so often blowing an unfavourable course, blew to his advantage. It all began with the melon. Agatha had dismissed the problem as another warped turn in the never-ending drama that was the life of Dolores. The old woman ranted and screeched and berated poor Carlos for the smallest oversight. Agustina was at her wits’ end and often tearful. George grew accustomed to the shouting and, like Jose Antonio, he ignored it. The food she cooked was always good. Then one day in early December Pia ran out onto the terrace during tea shouting for her father. ‘Papa, Papa, Dolores está muerta!’ George now spoke enough Spanish to understand that the child had declared Dolores dead. Agatha pushed back her chair with such vigour one could have been forgiven for thinking her impatient to see with her own eyes the evidence of the fiend’s demise. Jose Antonio strode through the house with the same haste. Even George, who rarely dared enter the kitchen, followed them.
Dolores lay inert on the floor but, much to Agatha’s disappointment, her pulse still throbbed and her lungs still sucked in air, albeit weakly. The doctor was called and Jose Antonio lifted the woman into the sitting room as if she were nothing more than a bundle of twigs. He placed her on a sofa and George noticed at once her distended stomach. He thought of the melon and felt his own stomach heave. She was not a pleasant sight. Old and wrinkled like one of his father’s walnuts. He thought of Trees and smiled inwardly.
The doctor declared that Dolores did indeed have something vast and uncomfortable in her stomach. Not a melon, he added hastily after one of the children mentioned it, but a tumour. It had to be removed without delay. Agatha had no choice but to drive her to Buenos Aires for the operation. The idea of spending hours in a car with the fiend, tumour and all, made her dizzy with repulsion. But she knew it was her duty. Jose Antonio didn’t acknowledge the degree of self-sacrifice this trip involved. But she had to vent her frustrations to someone, and was swift to complain to George.
‘Good God!’ she exclaimed, throwing clothes into a suitcase. ‘What a bloody nightmare. I’ve spent all the years of my married life putting as much distance as possible between me and that ghastly creature some see fit to call a woman. I call her a ghoul or a monster, there’s very little evidence of anything human. And now she goes and develops a tumour. Why God didn’t just take her when he had the chance, I don’t know.’
‘How long will you have to stay in the city?’ George asked.
Agatha huffed furiously. ‘A lot longer than I would like, of that I am sure. I don’t know, ten days, two weeks. It’s a bugger.’
‘Where will you stay?’
‘That isn’t the problem. We have enough friends in Buenos Aires to populate an entire town. Not a word of gratitude from Jose Antonio. Never was very quick with the thank yous! Not that I’m complaining. He’s a good man, just not very sensitive. He considers the domestic side of life my responsibility entirely! That I understand and don’t mind. It’s just a bugger that Dolores falls into that category.’
‘Why don’t I take her?’ George heard himself suggesting, somewhat rashly. ‘Or at least let me accompany you.’
‘No, no. That’s not necessary. Thank you so much, dear George, for offering. What a selfless young man you are.’ Of course there was nothing selfless about his offer. He couldn’t help but hope that, perhaps, if he were in the same city as Susan, their paths might, by some miracle, cross.
George watched the two women depart for the city and felt suddenly deflated. He consoled himself with the fact that he was hardly likely to bump into her in a city of millions. He was naïve to have even imagined it.
Twelve days passed. George longed for Agatha and Dolores to return because, while they were in Buenos Aires, he couldn’t help but imagine Susan was close by, unknown to his aunt. Perhaps they took tea in the same café, or stood side by side in a shop somewhere. If only he had gone with her he might have chanced to see her. Even if Agatha did find herself beside the woman with the dreadfully scarred face, she wouldn’t know how her nephew’s heart pined for her.
Eventually Agatha returned with Dolores. George was out with the gauchos, but Jose Antonio was quick to bring the good news. ‘Dolores is cured,’ he beamed, expressing his delight by gesticulating wildly with his large hands. George wondered how his aunt felt about that. ‘What’s more, the melon contained poison that infected her whole body, her very nature. She is much changed. She smiles!’
‘And Aunt Agatha?’ George enquired.
‘La Gorda seems to be incapable of going to the city without returning with some human token of her visit.’
‘I think she deserves a reward for driving all that way with Dolores,’ George suggested diplomatically.
‘One woman cured, another scarred. It doesn’t rain then it pours,’ he exclaimed jovially, shrugging his shoulders. George’s heart froze. ‘She’s invited a woman to keep you company, gringo. But of course,’ he joked, slapping his thigh, ‘you have eyes only for Rita.’
‘What?’
‘She’s now running a sanctuary for recovering women. I might as well move in with Molina. Think nothing of it, gringo. She’s not for you. God has cursed her beauty by slicing through it.’ He ran a rough finger down the side of his face. ‘Come, we have work to do!’
Chapter 12
In little more than a dressing gown and slippers, Rita ran outside to meet the postman, as she did every morning, with a hopeful spring in her step and a silent prayer on her lips. Today, surely, there
would be a letter for her. It was a frosty November morning. Another Christmas without George, she thought gloomily. Mr Toppit, the postman, smiled broadly and waved a fat brown envelope in the air. He recognized George Bolton’s handwriting from all the letters he had sent Rita during the war. Why the young man had gone away again he didn’t know, but he thought it a mighty silly thing to do to leave a pretty girl like Rita Fairweather on her own. ‘A love letter for you from overseas,’ he exclaimed, watching his breath curl on the air like smoke. Rita took it from him and pressed it to her lips. Her whole body seemed to inflate as if she had trouble keeping her feet on the ground. Mr Toppit felt proud, as though he were the cause of her happiness.
‘Oh thank you, Mr Toppit. You’ve made my day!’ she replied with a laugh, feeling the lumps with her fingers, trying to guess what the envelope contained. He noticed her eyes shining in the cold and thought how happiness enhanced a girl’s looks. If he weren’t married, if he were a young man again, if arthritis hadn’t begun to knot his joints, if he had the confidence of young George Bolton, he could lose his heart to Rita Fairweather. George was a lucky man, he mused. There was something about Rita that placed her out of reach, as if she belonged to the sea, like a mermaid. Not only was George lucky, he was blessed.
‘Would you give these to your mother?’ he said, rousing himself from his daydream.
‘Of course,’ she replied, taking the letters and turning to walk back into the house. ‘I’m going to open this all by myself on the cliff top. That’s our special place, you see. Up there on the cliffs.’
‘Mind you don’t fall off,’ he teased.
‘I won’t fall off. Life’s much too good!’ With that she skipped lightly into the house.
When she returned to the kitchen, her family could tell by the smile on her face that she had finally received a letter from George. ‘About time too!’ exclaimed Humphrey, who vehemently disapproved of George’s decision to leave Rita for another year. If it hadn’t been for the engagement ring he would have taken the boy aside and had strong words. As it was he had doubts that George would return. He was a bag of contradictions. An old man of the war in the body of a boy. Emotionally immature, yet wise and jaded, cynical even, disillusioned perhaps, keen for novelty and adventure but most of all for freedom. Why would he want to settle down to a quiet life in Frognal Point? Of course the war had changed him. It was inevitable. But it hadn’t changed Rita.
The Swallow and the Hummingbird Page 14
