Worthy of Marriage

by Anne Weale

  That night when, driving Alice Henderson’s car, he dropped Rosemary and Lucia at No 12, he mentioned that in the morning he would be driving back to Barcelona.

  ‘A charming young man, but an incorrigible flirt, so Alice tells me,’ said Mrs Calderwood as they went indoors. ‘His family want him to marry and settle down, but he prefers playing the field. No doubt Barcelona is teeming with beautiful girls.’

  ‘I expect so,’ Lucia said absently, thinking of Julian’s advice and wondering if she would have the nerve to take it.

  ‘Are you disappointed he isn’t staying longer?’ the older woman asked.

  ‘No, not really. I liked him, but I wasn’t smitten,’ Lucia said lightly, wondering how Rosemary would react if she knew that it was her son to whom Lucia had lost her heart.

  Several days passed pleasantly and uneventfully. When they painted in the village, people would come and look over their shoulders and pass incomprehensible remarks. Rosemary found this off-putting. Lucia had learned long ago to ignore it.

  It seemed to her a huge waste that Rosemary’s talent had gone unused for so many years. To her own generation, Rosemary’s decision to turn her back on it was incomprehensible. Equally puzzling was the fact that any supposedly loving husband could have wanted his wife to neglect her gift.

  Would Grey be like his father and insist that his wife concentrated on him and their children? Could I marry a man like that…even if I loved him? Lucia asked herself.

  One lesson life had taught her, from observation rather than experience, was that people never changed their fundamental characteristics, though a lot of women believed they could change the men in their lives. She had never known or heard of anyone succeeding. She wasn’t ever going to make that mistake herself.

  Grey called his mother every evening, but not always at the same time. One evening he called early, when they were not long back from a painting expedition and Mrs Calderwood was in the shower.

  Lucia picked up the phone. She knew that what Spanish people said to callers was Digame, but as the only people who rang them were Grey and Alice, she said, ‘Hello?’

  ‘Grey here. How are you?’ From his tone no one would have guessed what had happened the night before his departure.

  ‘We’re both fine. Your mother is having a shower. Shall I ask her to call you back, or will you ring later?’

  ‘I’ll be out until past her bedtime. We’ll talk tomorrow. What did you do today?’

  ‘We went to an art gallery and then we pushed on to a village recommended by Alice. It has an old-fashioned wash-house still in use…mostly by little old ladies in black dunking their smalls but mainly having a gossip.’

  The fact that he wasn’t there in the room with her made it easier to sound relaxed, Lucia found. At the same time, talking to him by telephone made her more aware what an attractive and sexy voice he had. Its timbre activated some of the responses she had felt while locked in his arms.

  ‘Sounds as if it might make a good genre painting,’ he said.

  She knew he meant the type of picture depicting a domestic scene or an incident from everyday life. They were not in fashion at present, but she had always liked them. It sounded as if he did too.

  ‘That’s what we thought. We made a lot of sketch notes to work up when we get home.’ She used the word ‘home’ without thinking. She wondered if it would annoy him.

  ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’

  ‘We’re going to look at the castle and have lunch at a seafood restaurant.’

  There was a slight pause before he said, ‘Is Julian still around?’

  ‘He’s gone back to Barcelona.’

  ‘Tell Mum I’ll call her tomorrow. Goodnight…Lucia.’

  Her answering goodnight was interrupted by the click as he cut the connection. But at least he had called his mother ‘Mum’. Perhaps he saw the absurdity of being aloof when, if only for a few minutes, they had been on terms that made a nonsense of his previous formality.

  Lucia replaced the receiver. It would have been encouraging to think that his enquiry about Julian had been prompted by something akin to jealousy. But she couldn’t quite believe it.

  She wished she had a recording of their conversation. She would have liked to play back ‘Goodnight…Lucia’, to play again and again the sound of his voice saying her name.

  What would it be like to hear him say Lucia darling?

  She was never likely to find out, but she couldn’t stop herself wondering.

  In his bedroom in London, Grey was tying a black silk bow tie with fingers made deft by long practice. He was going to a formal dinner after which he was going to speak. But as he had already memorised what he was going to say, and had long ago ceased to be nervous on such occasions, his mind was free to visualise the sitting room in Spain and the girl who, since his last night there, had been in his thoughts far too often.

  Having kissed her, he knew it was going to be impossible to stop the situation there. The scent of her skin, the feel of her, would not leave him in peace.

  Fixing platinum links left to him by his father into the cuffs of his dress shirt, he scowled at himself in the shield-shaped antique mirror on the top of the tall chest of drawers. You are being a fool, he thought angrily. Your life is complicated enough without adding another impasse to it. The other situation has no solution. This one you can at least try to resolve. Take her to bed and get her out of your system.

  But, as he shrugged into his dinner jacket, he wasn’t at all sure he could get Lucia into bed. Taken by surprise, she had not resisted being kissed, in fact had responded with unexpected enthusiasm. Bed, however, was something else. That she might strenuously resist, making an already uneasy relationship even harder to handle than it was at the moment.

  It would have been better for them both if their paths had never crossed, he thought irritably. No satisfactory resolution was possible. But while it remained unresolved, the situation between them was a constant irritant. She was on his mind half the time…more than half. He was losing his greatest asset, his ability to concentrate on the matter in hand to the exclusion of everything else. She was becoming the matter in hand, by day, by night, all the time.

  Raging, he left the room and, a few minutes later, stepped on deck and made his way ashore to where a taxi was waiting to drive him to the hotel where the dinner was being held.

  Three hours later, from the hospital, Lucia rang the number of Grey’s mobile phone. She didn’t get through to him and had to leave a message.

  ‘Grey, this is Lucia. Your mother has been taken ill. I think she has had a slight stroke. They can’t be sure until they’ve done some more tests. She’s in hospital in Denia, being very well looked after. I’ve been advised to go back to the house now and come back here in the morning. The number to call at the hospital is—’ She referred to the slip of paper she was holding, read it out and repeated it.

  ‘I’ve also left a message on Jenny’s answer-machine. Rosemary was most insistent that I shouldn’t worry you, and I don’t think you need be alarmed. But I felt you ought to know what was happening. Whatever time you get back, please don’t hesitate to ring me.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  IN THE taxi taking him home, Grey switched on his mobile and picked up four messages, the last being from Lucia.

  She sounded as calmly in control as the sensible middle-aged woman who was his personal assistant and on whom he could rely to remain unflustered in all circumstances.

  Yet he found that, while deeply concerned about his mother, he was equally worried about Lucia having to cope with a situation that must remind her of her father’s illness and death. She wasn’t ready to handle another crisis yet. She needed more time to recover from all she had been through before life dumped a fresh ordeal in her lap.

  Leaning forward, he said to the driver, ‘An emergency has come up. I need to get to Heathrow or Gatwick, or maybe even Stansted. It will take me ten minutes to change and pack. Can you drive m
e to whichever airport I can get a flight from?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s OK with me, mate.’

  Grateful for modern technology that took most of the logistical hassle out of situations like this, Grey set about organising his unexpected return to Spain.

  Lucia was not asleep when the telephone rang in the sitting room. She sprang out of bed and ran barefoot down the stairs. It might be Grey, or it might be the hospital. Wishing she had resisted their insistence that her presence there wasn’t necessary, she prayed it was not the hospital.

  ‘It’s Grey. Did I wake you?’ His voice sounded as close as if he were standing out of sight in the kitchen.

  ‘No, I was still awake.’

  ‘I’m on my way. I’m at Gatwick with a batch of charter passengers whose flight out has been delayed by the usual “technical trouble”. Luckily there are a couple of seats to spare. We should be in Alicante by zero two hundred hours, local time. I’ll check into a hotel and catch a few hours’ sleep. Then I’ll get a taxi to the village and we’ll drive to Denia together. I’ll be with you about half past eight.’

  ‘Poor you…poor passengers,’ she said, visualising the scene around him.

  A planeload of weary people who had set out from home in a buoyant holiday mood that, after a long delay, had changed to exasperation. Probably there would be some exhausted, grizzling children among them. It would be a far cry from Grey’s usual mode of travel in the pampered seclusion of first class.

  ‘Yes, they’re not a happy-looking bunch,’ he said dryly. ‘By the way, I’ve called the hospital and told them I’m coming. But I left strict instructions for them not to tell Mum. It might fuss her. Like a lot of her generation, she has a phobia about being a nuisance…would rather suffer in silence than cause even minor inconvenience to others. Crazy, but that’s the way they are.’

  ‘Your mother may protest when she sees you, but I have to admit that I’m very glad you’re coming,’ said Lucia. ‘It’s not that I can’t cope. There are people at the hospital who speak excellent English. But when anyone is sick they need someone near and dear to them.’

  Guessing how anxious he must be feeling, she added, ‘According to some other foreigners who were in the hospital’s waiting area, medical treatment in Spain is very good, even outside the big cities. I don’t think you need to worry that she won’t get the latest treatment for whatever the problem is.’

  ‘I’ll make sure of that,’ he said. ‘Get some sleep, Lucia. See you soon.’

  As seemed to be his way, he rang off before she could reply.

  For breakfast, Lucia peeled and chopped an orange into a bowl, added some cornflakes and topped them with a couple of dollops of queso fresco, the Spanish equivalent of fromage frais.

  Taking the bowl and a mug of tea outside, she sat in the sun on the steps leading down to the courtyard. Despite a poor night’s sleep, and her concern about Rosemary, she had the same sort of feeling she used to have on the day before her birthdays when she was a child. A sense of excited expectation.

  She knew why: because Grey was coming. In an hour, or less, he would be here. They would be face to face for the first time since he had kissed her.

  How wonderful it would be if she could greet him with the cheek kisses the Spanish exchanged whenever they met a relative or a close friend.

  After he had rung off, she had gone back to bed and lain awake wondering why, when he had a bed here, he had chosen to stay in a hotel in Alicante for what remained of the night after his flight touched down.

  The only explanation she had been able to think of was that he thought it inappropriate for them to sleep under the same roof without someone else being present. It seemed a rather old-fashioned view for someone like him to hold, but perhaps it was in deference to his mother’s attitudes.

  Rosemary, though broad-minded in many ways, would almost certainly disapprove of two single people being in a house on their own overnight. More than once she had admitted to holding old-fashioned views on sexual relationships.

  Perhaps, if she had lived with her fiancé for six months before their wedding, she would have realised he was a control freak and broken the engagement, thought Lucia. But would she necessarily have been happier with a less controlling man? Rosemary had loved her husband. He had given her every comfort. They had had four children, all of whom had turned out well. Maybe the loss of her chance to make a name for herself as an artist wasn’t really such a high price to pay for a much better life than many people had.

  Lucia was standing at the kitchen window when the taxi drew up outside and Grey emerged from the rear offside door. Seeing her, he raised his hand before bending to speak to the driver.

  While he was paying the fare, she went to unlock the front door and open it for him.

  The woman who lived in the house diagonally opposite, who had twice tapped on the window and presented them with a bag of freshly-picked lemons from the tree in her yard, was sweeping the path in front of her house.

  ‘Hola…buenos días,’ she called.

  Lucia smiled and echoed her greeting, intensely conscious that in a moment or two she might be shaking hands with Grey.

  But when she turned to look at him, he had a small grip in one hand and the case containing his notebook computer in the other. Clearly they were not about to ‘press the flesh’, as the saying went.

  ‘Hello…are you exhausted? Was the flight a nightmare of unruly children and short-tempered parents?’ she asked, stepping back for him to enter.

  ‘The stewardess took pity on me. She found me a seat away from the main centres of bedlam,’ said Grey.

  She was probably hoping you would ask for her telephone number, thought Lucia. From what she had heard, debonair businessmen were in short supply on charter flights where most of the unattached men were likely to be the kind who spent their holidays sleeping off last night’s hangover on the beach.

  ‘Have you had breakfast?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, but I’d like a cup of coffee before we leave. I’ll just dump my kit in my room.’

  The coffee was made when he reappeared. ‘Shall we have it in the garden?’ Lucia suggested, picking up the tray she had laid.

  ‘Good idea.’ As Grey took the tray from her, he gave her a searching look. ‘How much sleep did you get?’

  Did the question imply that she looked a wreck?

  ‘More than you did, I expect,’ she said, on her way to open the back door for him.

  ‘According to last night’s forecast, it will be pouring in London now,’ said Grey when, having placed the tray on the garden table, he looked up at the sky where the only clouds were a few wispy mares’ tails, indicating windy conditions at high altitude.

  He sat down on the wooden bench. ‘Now, fill me in on what happened.’

  At the hospital, when they had been given permission to go to Mrs Calderwood’s room, Lucia hung back.

  ‘I’m sure your mother would like some private time with you. I’ll go up and see her later.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Grey firmly. ‘She’ll want to see us both.’ He took her arm and propelled her into the lift.

  Rosemary was not in bed, but sitting in a chair by the window in her cornflower blue silk mannishly-cut dressing gown.

  ‘Grey!’ she exclaimed, her face lighting up at the sight of him.

  He crossed the room to embrace her. ‘I decided to take another break,’ he said, as he straightened.

  Rosemary looked suspiciously at Lucia. ‘You didn’t send for him, did you?’

  ‘No, she didn’t send for me,’ said Grey. ‘But she did, quite properly, leave a message to say what had happened and that you were in good hands. I should have been very angry with her if she hadn’t. Anyway I was planning to come back.’

  Presently, on the pretext of going to the loo, Lucia left them together and did not return for about a quarter of an hour. She found that they had been joined by a doctor she hadn’t seen before, with whom Grey was having a conversation in S
panish.

  She was introduced to the Spaniard and then the men resumed their conversation and Rosemary beckoned Lucia towards her and asked, ‘Were you nervous, all by yourself at No 12 last night?’

  ‘I might have been in an isolated country house, but not in a village house.’

  Rosemary surprised her by saying, ‘Tonight you’ll have Grey there. In my day it would have raised eyebrows, a man and a woman alone in a house together. But nowadays anything goes. But if you’re not comfortable with him being there without me, you have only to say so and he can find an hotel.’

  ‘Unless he would rather stay close to the hospital, I’m quite happy about his being there,’ said Lucia. ‘As you say, lots of men and women share houses these days.’

  ‘But usually not on a one-to-one basis, unless they’re “partners”,’ said Rosemary. ‘Anyway I’m hoping that tomorrow they’ll let me come home. Today they’re doing lots of tests. I’m beginning to feel a fraud. I feel perfectly well.’

  Presently, after insisting they should not hang about but get out and enjoy the sun, she was taken away in a wheelchair to have the first of the tests.

  ‘How do you think she is looking?’ Grey asked, when his mother had been wheeled out of earshot.

  Lucia thought it was best to be honest with him. ‘Rosemary claims to be feeling fine, but I don’t think she looks it. Do you?’

  He shook his head. ‘But hopefully this is the warning shot across the bows that will enable them to prevent something more serious happening later. Come on: let’s do as she asks and find ourselves a sunny café.’

  They spent the rest of the day to-ing and fro-ing between the hospital and various cafés in the surrounding town.

  Late in the afternoon Mrs Calderwood said she was tired. Not having slept too well the night before, she was going to take a nap.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, my dears,’ she said, holding out her arms to her son and then, after he had kissed her, to Lucia.

  ‘Shall I drive?’ said Lucia, when they reached the car park. ‘You’re beginning to look rather bushed. If you reclined your seat, you could have a nap on the way back.’