The Rendezvous and Other Stories

by Patrick O'Brian

  At the top of the path she stopped, turned round and sat on a hummock. Their house lay below her, and she gazed studiously down upon it, calming herself with an enumeration of its charms: there were plenty of them, in all conscience; and once the water was piped from La Higuela there would be even more. Lawns …

  La Higuela. She raised her eyes to look in the direction of the hidden village, and because they had been staring down for so long she saw the whole landscape with a sudden freshness – the colours all tuned sharper, the perspectives subtly changed, everything much more important. No longer blunted by familiarity, the view acquired a mysterious significance: a false significance, perhaps, but for the moment this was a portentous landscape, one that might be waiting for some huge event, the Second Coming or the Antichrist, a chariot of fire, the Annunciation.

  The feeling of imminence passed almost as soon as she had formulated it; but the freshness stayed. This was how they had first seen the country: rounded bosomy little hills in the foreground, all neatly planted with almonds, precise little trees on a pink ground, like embroidery; beyond them, filling the middle distance, an ocean of olives; and then the sierra, sharp against the sky. She let her eyes run from the far left, run steadily along the deserted scene, strangely empty and uninhabited apart from the innumerable host of the olive-trees, along the crests beyond, some snowy and remote, some craggy and quite near; from left to right, taking in the ruined castle, the half-seen abandoned monastery (it had a lovely baroque court, grass-grown and silent, invisible from here), the crumbling triumphal arch among its cypresses, until she reached the hermitage. Here she paused for a moment, gazing affectionately at its little rounded apse, and then swung her head full right for the dramatic contrast, the spectacular set-piece that never failed to come off-the dazzling sweep of sea, the whole pure curve of the bay with the mountains running down to the Mediterranean at the far end, the long coastal plain, bright green with sugar-cane and checkered with different-coloured fields (they were already cutting in some places), the villages flashing white, the round walled town on its mole-hill, the Moorish fortress on the island, and all along the shore the white hem that meant there had been a storm in Africa.

  This was how they had first seen it. There was the same even all-embracing light from the sun behind her, gently warm in the soft unclouded midwinter sky, ripening the bananas and the custard-apples and reflecting colour so brilliantly that she could see that the cloth hanging from a window three miles away was blue. Even the flecks of sail on the luminous sea might have been the same, unmoved.

  One change there was, but it lay below her, not in the general scene: they had found the house dead and now it was alive. That made a great deal of difference, she thought, looking down on it as objectively as she could. In all this vast expanse of country there were only about seven houses visible, and two of them were ruined. A landscape had to have living houses in it (the remote toy villages of the plain did not count), and this was a living house, beautiful, reasonably-sized, deep in its own land for privacy, built round a patio and surrounded by gardens; and although from this plunging angle she could see little but its pale tiles – nearly all their pink drained out by the sun – she could place the arches of the covered walk exactly and each wrought-iron screen, each well-proportioned opening on to the outside world. The two courts lay open to her view; but so, she noticed with distress, did her little walled garden. Or at least parts of it: all the lily-bed and most of the tamarisks. They had overdone the trimming of the trees, which was a bore, because the walled garden was where she sun-bathed; and much as she liked the local peasants she had no wish to play Susannah to any yokel’s elder, however picturesque. They would have a pool there, she reflected, when the water came from La Higuela, or a fountain at the very least; and what was now a tawny patch would be real grass, and Irish green.

  She was above the house but no great way from it through the air, quite near enough to hear the singing. It was Conchita, of course. After a moment she attended to the song, a flattened version of a record the radio had been plugging these last months, and shrugged with a slight impatience. Conchita could sing flamenco so beautifully … but it was no use going on and on. She must be singing in the drawing-room. How odd. Conchita had a strong sense of the proprieties, stronger than Paula Grattan’s, and she had never been heard to utter except in the kitchen or the court outside it. She was in the drawing-room: Paula saw the window open and a mop come out. What of it? she said, faintly disgusted at having stared so long to prove her tiny point. What did it matter? Yet it added a little to her returning sense of – not exactly of displeasure, which sounded pompous, but of not being pleased. And although she went on in a more equable state than she had started out, this feeling came back to her more than once in the course of her walk.

  It was a damned thing, this going to La Sartén. A damned thing. But it was no good anticipating the encounter. She knew what she had to say, had rehearsed it several times: why go through the whole process twice in the same day?

  She walked along the sandy road through the olives, trying to keep her mind serene and blank; and for a while she thought she was succeeding. She took an intelligent interest in a hoopoe that was obviously wintering here, well north of its usual limits, a charming cinnamon-coloured bird with black and white bars that walked busily, short-legged, in front of her, rising every now and then to flit a hundred yards farther on, raising its crest each time it took off or landed; but then she found that her fingers were picking convulsively at her balled-up handkerchief and must have been doing so for the last half mile.

  They had talked over their plan so often and for so long now that it had come to seem quite reasonable, even quite ordinary: no longer wildly abnormal, grotesque, impossible to phrase with any decency. Surely, with each encouraging the other, they had distorted their perspective? Now that she was alone, actually walking along the cart-track to La Sartén, with no one to prop up her conviction, the whole thing was beginning to look to her as it must look to the rest of the world. Or was she being stupid again?

  Now that it was becoming a practical issue, a matter of immediate action, with such disconcerting speed, the whole thing seemed to her profoundly distasteful. An ugly business. Was it so in fact? Was she not merely trying to shirk the interview ahead? How much was plain jealousy?

  The house came in sight. She found herself dawdling, looking with an exaggerated interest at the olives, their ancient trunks split, rent in three, sawed and mutilated over the centuries, standing images of torture, confined in round walls like well-heads, imprisoned; but each with its boughs inhabited by a luminous aerial being that lived on the wind.

  This would never do. Half-consciously she checked her hair, face, clothes; and achieving a real silence of mind for the first time that day, she walked straight on through the trees.

  Mrs Grattan sat on a straight-backed black chair that had been set for her where the beaten earth met the hearthstone: on her right an immense pot hung darkly over a glow in the cavernous fireplace; to her left the twilight held two or three women dressed in black: aunts. Only in front, sitting on a broken chair and two boxes was there a clearly visible group – Conchita’s mother, a female cousin, and another aunt. They were all dressed in black cotton, with black shawls, black stockings, and black rope-soled shoes; they all had eyes screwed up and watering, red-rimmed from their work in the shifting glare of the olive-leaves; they were all of the same indeterminate age, between forty and eighty; and she could not certainly tell one from the other. Her chair-leg was slowly sinking where an undetected spill of soup had softened the ground, and a good deal of her attention was taken up with keeping her balance and at the same time concealing the fact; but enough was free to have received a number of impressions – the oilcloth on the round table smelt just like the oilcloth in the kitchen at Killeen: the hens that walked in and out seemed to be house-trained: the ornaments were of a fair-ground tawdriness past belief: the everyday pots were fit for a museum:
they did their washing-up in what must surely be an alabaster sarcophagus. The anecdote about the health of an unknown child at a great distance was drawing to a close, and with it the period of necessarily-wasted time.

  Very well, she thought, so this is it. At least I have a better lead-in than I could have expected. In an unemphatic voice she said, ‘As you know, ladies, there are no children in my house. My husband and I had always hoped for a child, but now the doctors say we shall never have one. It is I who am barren, not my husband. We had thought of adoption, but you cannot tell whose child it might be; and it rarely succeeds. What we hope is to find a young woman of good character and a very respectable family whose parents will allow her to bear my husband a baby. We know that this might injure the young woman’s chances of marrying, but we should provide her with a handsome dowry. We have often discussed it …’

  Yes: very often. It was her suggestion in the first place: she had never forgotten Edward’s delight at her supposed pregnancy long ago, nor the way he had sung about the house, laughing and saying, ‘Now we shall not all die.’ And apart from that there were so many, many reasons: everything in favour of it.

  And now this had seemed the perfect – not opportunity, that odious, exploiting word, all wrong – but rather combination of circumstances. This family was healthy, desperately poor, and manless, having been on the losing side in the civil war; they were anti-clerical and therefore not subject to the priest; the girl herself was clean, beautifully built, and now that she had been fed properly, outstandingly attractive. How brutish and ugly it all sounded: but those were the raw facts, and they were unchangeable.

  Ugly. Yet in their own private language it had all become so quickly stylized, dulcified, attenuated; they had been facetious about the patter of little feet, the happy event, bawds, interesting condition, the onlie begetter.

  Then again they had had one of their enthusiasms about Conchita and her family; had been silly, attributing all sorts of earthy virtues to them. Why were they both still so silly, after years and years of adult life? She did not even like these people at all, she reflected, looking at them. Those who were in the light might just as well have been in the dark: there was nothing to be told from those closed, lined, concerned faces. Dim, dim creatures, almost extinguished by the burden of their life. No human contact. She could not tell what they thought of the proposal nor what they thought of her.

  Having said what she had to say right to the very end, she sat there, physically relaxed now that the chair had stopped sinking, but exhausted and empty. The sun, coming in at a wider angle, lit the side of her small head, still held up quite straight: with her ash-blonde hair and her grey eyes, and with a composed, even remote expression on her face, she looked incredibly distinguished; and, in that dark, huddled room, incredibly foreign. She also seemed indifferent to the outcome of her speech.

  The aunt who spoke the heaviest dialect was still going on and on about some place of pilgrimage far away to the north, in the Pyrenees, where childless people went on foot, climbing the mountain to couple with their heads in a holy saucepan: at least that was what it sounded like. She could only be sure of understanding Conchita’s mother, who spoke something like standard Spanish.

  What did they think? Many and many a time had she inveighed against the Spaniards’ stupid affectation of being high and proud, of never smiling, of concealing their emotions in this silly, theatrical way; often had she wished to bang their heads together and make them behave naturally; but never so much as now. ‘They caught it from the Moors,’ she repeated, and all at once she became aware that for some minutes past she had been driving her wedding-ring into the knuckle of the opposing finger with painful force. Her hands were clasped on her lap: she looked at them. They clasped, loosened, moved over one another, and clasped again. Dear me, she thought, I am wringing my hands: so people really do: I am amazed.

  The hoopoe was still there, drinking at a pool left from the autumn rain: it lowered its long curved beak, raised it vertically, closed its eyes and swallowed glug-glug-glug, like a hen. ‘Lord,’ she said, ‘what wouldn’t I give for a drink! A stiff one.’ For a while she hesitated between the cold, roborative kick of a martini and the immediate lift of whiskey: gin was the right thing for a bawd, however, and she would have it the moment she reached home. She could see the misted glass with the olive looming faintly through and a sliver of lemon from their own untreated tree: a bowl of pine-kernels too, and some salted almonds. Conchita was very good with drinks. Edward had taught her the whole ceremony.

  How astonishing that she should have come from La Sartén, thought Paula: practically a cave-dwelling. In her maid’s uniform – long black dress, frilly apron, cap and streamers – she looked like a drawing from an old bound volume of Punch. To be sure, the clothes were natural enough in Spain, where so many things looked as though they had escaped from the nineties; but Conchita also behaved like a maid in one of those archaic pictures. You would have said she was the product of generations of good service, trained by the housekeeper of some big place in the country: she looked so much the part that it was absurd to hear Spanish coming from her mouth rather than a gentle brogue. Modest, good, and oh so pretty. It made one smile to look at her.

  It was astonishing. But at one time she had thought it even more so: in those days she had thought Conchita quite the prettiest, brightest girl she had ever seen, and had meant to teach her to read – to bring out her innumerable latent virtues, intelligence, taste and all the rest of it. How grossly unfair, and at this point how horribly suspect, to blame the child for not being what she had never claimed to be: Conchita might be rather stupid, resistant to learning, a besotted and firmly illiterate watcher of the television, but she still remained pretty, diligent, honest, industrious, reliable … And she could sew beautifully, insisted Paula Grattan, topping the hill above their house, and as for washing – ‘Oh my God,’ she whispered, stock-still on the hidden path.

  Clear below her in the small walled garden stood a figure wearing a familiar housecoat, poised there in the sun. Another squeal pierced up through the still air, and as she uttered it Conchita darted into the tamarisks. The soft branches waved; from beneath their feathery covering came another cry, the excited whoop of amorous pursuit and ritual flight. For a moment the girl reappeared at the edge of the tamarisks, struggling, the blue coat held by unseen hands in the bush, pulled open and showing her long white legs, her belly, her high young bosom. Then she toppled beneath the heavy foliage: shrill protests, diminishing; a slap. Silence.

  Her first reaction was incandescent anger. She stood rigid there with her fists and her teeth clenched and all the foul words she had ever heard rushed through her mind. ‘In my garden,’ she said hoarsely. ‘In my garden – in my housecoat – under my very eyes, the bitch.’

  Her knees were trembling and she sat down, turning her head away from the garden. She scrabbled blindly in her bag for a cigarette: her face was set and very pale.

  She could not light the cigarette and she threw it impatiently away. Her whole being was seething with fury and malignance: a torrent of disconnected ejaculations raced through her injured spirit: ‘Couldn’t wait for it – the putrid little whore – the odious, lecherous bastard – bald and fat – I always thought she was a tart – sly, sly as a cat – a cat on heat – in my own garden, the swine – turning the house into a brothel.’ But all this only served to relieve her immediate rage; beneath it a monstrous suspicion was taking form, thrusting up through the anger.

  How long had this been going on? Had they been making a fool of her since the beginning? Did they do it every time she went out? She remembered Conchita’s singing ‘the moment they had the house to themselves’. But with a far deeper stab she returned to the knowledge that Edward had asked her to go round by La Higuela: under the stress of her interview she had entirely forgotten about his cigars and she was back long before they could have expected her. Had he really done that? Had he really sent her out of the wa
y? She could almost swear she had seen a handful of cigars in the box last night when she was tidying round his chair. In that case it was just a pretext; his painfully awkward words were … oh surely not? The mounting cold put out her anger: her intelligence swept the declamatory nonsense to one side and began to probe the real question. She searched back and back into her memory: who had started the idea in the first place? Who had renewed it when Conchita arrived? She thought she had. Most probably, though she could not remember the occasion. But had it been planted in her mind? She wanted the truth, nothing else at all; but it was terribly elusive. Even in this last discussion, which had brought things to the plane of action and which had ended so clumsily, who had been the real initiator? Where had this dreadful lack of sympathy come from? At one time she had thought it was from her own suppressed jealousy; was it really from his awareness?

  Suppose he had already got the girl with child, wouldn’t he then send her off for this ghastly interview so as to have it all legalized after the event? This was a new theory that came forcing itself in, together with a bitter resentment of the heartless insenstivity that could ask her to walk another couple of miles after such a party, that could agree to her offer to make all the arrangements singlehanded, that could send her to say, ‘My husband wishes to use your daughter for breeding purposes. What will you take for her virginity?’ without a scrap of moral support. Though indeed he spoke almost no Spanish, cried another of her voices; and it was true that he – it was not fair to …

  She brushed all that aside and with passionate concentration she burrowed through the history of words, gestures, moods, tones of voice, to find the truth; but she could not ever be sure that she had it; she could not ever be sure that she was not successfully lying to herself, either believing what she wanted to believe or insisting upon martyrdom.

  She turned her head from side to side: she could not keep her mind needle-sharp and cold. She was too tired, dispirited, and sad, sad. The renewed desolation of loneliness struck her with infinitely greater force and she bowed her face into her hands: tears ran between her fingers to the dusty ground.