by Anne Weale
The warm winter sunlight, the fronds of the palms stirred by a light breeze from the sea, the animated Spanish conversations going on around her, the personable man with whom she was sharing a table: all these combined to make a memory that would still be vivid half a century on, if she lived that long.
‘Do you like boquerónes?’ Cam asked, offering her a dish of pickled anchovies that, for easy eating, had been curled up and speared with toothpicks.
‘Very much.’ She took one. ‘I like albóndigas too.’ She looked at the small meatballs in a red sauce. ‘Compared with Spanish nibbles, crisps and peanuts seem seriously boring.’
Presently, on the way to the restaurant, Cam produced from his pocket a rolled-up pale yellow tie. ‘I’d better put this on. In the States, it’s OK not to wear a necktie, as they call it, as long as you have a jacket. Here, except in the tourist resorts, they tend to be more formal.’
He threaded the tie under his shirt collar and tied it with the swift deft movements of long practice. Watching his lean brown fingers adjusting the knot, she felt a fluttering sensation that she recognised as excitement. She had read that champagne was an aphrodisiac, but surely one glass was not enough to kindle thoughts and feelings she would prefer to stay dormant? Closing her mind to them, she made herself pay attention to the shop windows they were passing.
Only a handful of people had arrived at the restaurant before them. While they were being shown to their table by the head waiter, they passed a table occupied by four Spanish businessmen of around Cam’s age. Both the men seated on the outward-facing banquette gave Liz an interested glance that she felt was probably more attributable to her escort’s charisma than to her own looks. Even off-screen, in a country where he wouldn’t be widely recognised, Cam had the ineffable quality known as presence. When she was with him some of it rubbed off on her; waiters were more deferential, people who might have ignored her had she been alone looked at her with attention. It was a curious sensation to be caught in someone else’s spotlight and she wasn’t sure that she liked it.
By the time they had chosen their lunch and eaten their montaditos, the tempting morsels presented on little squares of toast, the restaurant was filling up with affluent Alicantinos. Seafood and savoury rice dishes were the mainstays of the menu here, and they both had a shrimp starter followed by suquet de peix which the head waiter translated as fisherman’s pot.
‘I hope you are going to let me share this,’ said Liz, when Cam asked for the bill.
‘Absolutely not,’ he said firmly.
Seeing that it would be futile to argue, she said, ‘Then at least let me contribute something towards the petrol and cost of the motorway.’
‘I appreciate the offer…but no. I was going to come anyway. Your company has made it more enjoyable.’
It was said in a matter-of-fact tone, but she could not help feeling a glow of pleasure. ‘It’s been a wonderful meal. The whole day has been fun,’ she said.
‘Good. We must do it again.’
The rest of the afternoon passed as pleasantly as the morning. Soon it was time to drive to the airport on the southern outskirts of the city. There, in the car park, Liz transferred the presents bought for her mother and aunt to her suitcase and Cam wheeled it as far as the entrance of the departure section of the terminal.
There he set the case down and said, ‘I’ll say goodbye here. I may not be at home when you come back so I won’t arrange to pick you up in case I can’t make it.’
‘You’ve been more than kind already. I’m very grateful. I hope you enjoy your stay at the casa rural. I shall wish you a Merry Christmas,’ she said, smiling and offering her hand.
Cam took it, but then, to her surprise, he leaned forward and brushed a light kiss first on one cheek and then the other. ‘Goodbye, Liz. Take care. See you soon.’
He released her hand and turned away, striding across the road where coaches, taxis and cars were allowed to put down and pick up their passengers to where he had left the Mercedes in the car park.
Liz watched him go in a daze of surprise and uncertainty. Kissing on meeting and parting was widely practised in Spain, and many of the expat community had adopted the habit and exchanged social kisses with each other at every opportunity, to an extent that she found rather absurd. But she had not expected Cam to kiss her goodbye and, if she had, would not have expected the commonplace gesture to give her such a buzz.
Her parents had not been demonstrative with each other. She had never seen them embrace. Nor had Duncan and his family been given to affectionate gestures. As far back as she could remember, Liz had wanted to hug and be hugged but had adapted herself to the ways of the people closest to her. That was one of the reasons why not having a baby had been such a disappointment. With a child she could have acted on her impulses. Babies and toddlers enjoyed being cuddled and kissed.
Inside the terminal, she joined the long line of passengers waiting to check in for her flight. It was forty minutes before she reached the desk, was given her boarding card and could take the escalator to the departure lounge level where there was also a cafeteria and a shop selling papers and paperbacks. Liz had a look at the books but did not buy one as she meant to spend the flight planning the site she would need as a website designer. It would be separate from the site that showcased her skills as a crafts designer.
Having coffee in the café reminded her of the previous occasions when she had flown back to England from this airport. The first three times had been after holidays with her in-laws at the villas they had rented in Denia, Moraira and Altea. The last time had been after she had flown down to sign the papers that made her the owner of Beatrice Maybury’s house.
At the outset, she would have preferred to go further afield, to the Greek islands or to Italy. But Duncan, who had been careful with money, had seen staying with his parents as a useful saving. It had never crossed her mind that she might one day live here. Or that a few years hence another man’s kiss on her cheek would make her heart beat as fast as when, in her early teens, she had said shy hellos to the son of the new people next door when he and she happened to be in their parents’ back gardens at the same time.
Presently, sitting in the departure lounge—perhaps the only person there who was looking forward to the return flight more than to the outward flight—Liz thought about Cam’s toast to ‘new directions’.
The year that would soon be ending had been a momentous one for her. Would next year be even more life-changing?
Her mother, Mrs Bailey, and her aunt, Mrs Chapman, were both television addicts. The small set in the kitchen was switched on before breakfast and, except when they were out shopping, the big new set in the lounge remained on till they went to bed. They planned their day’s viewing as carefully as people preparing for an expedition. When there was a gap between their many favourite programmes, they filled it with a video of a programme that had conflicted with something they liked even better.
Television had taken over their lives, Liz realised. She had no quarrel with that, if it kept them happy. But it drove her mad. There were times when she had to escape by going for a walk even though the weather was terrible.
She was herself an addict of another kind, she discovered, during the first week with them. Without e-mail and the Web, her life had lost an important dimension. After seven days without a ‘fix’, she was driven to buying herself a laptop.
She justified this expensive outlay by telling herself that it was unprofessional to depend on her desktop computer. She needed to have a backup machine. But she knew that the real reason was that, if Cam e-mailed her while she was out of Spain, she wanted to be able to pick up his message and perhaps reply. That she could have accessed her mailbox from a cyber café was something she chose to ignore.
‘Is it OK if I plug my computer into the telephone jack?’ she asked her mother, after unwrapping the laptop in her bedroom. ‘You aren’t expecting any important calls in the next half-hour, are you?’
‘The only person who rings me is you,’ said Mrs Bailey. ‘I don’t know what the world’s coming to. People are lucky to see their children once a year these days. Families used to be close.’
Liz was tempted to say, But now that I am here you don’t want to talk to me. You’re more interested in your favourite presenters’ lives than in mine. But she knew that, even though it was true, to say so would hurt her mother’s feelings. Instead, she said, ‘It’s nice that you and Auntie Sue are still bosom buddies. Not all sisters get on as well as you two.’
‘We have to, don’t we? If we relied on our children where would we be? You’ve gone off to Spain, and Sue’s two hardly ever visit her.’
Between them, Liz’s cousins had five children. ‘You haven’t room to put them up and they can’t afford to stay at a hotel. Why not go and visit them…or come and stay with me?’ she suggested.
‘You know I’m not keen on flying.’ Mrs Bailey caught sight of the clock. ‘Oh…it’s almost time for Oprah.’ Her expression brightened. Of all her television idols, the American chat show hostess topped the list. ‘Sue, hurry up, dear. Oprah’s starting,’ she called from the doorway.
Liz’s homeward flight was delayed by two hours, but she didn’t mind. She liked airports. It was drizzling when the plane took off from Gatwick, but the sun was shining at Alicante. She took a taxi to the coach station in the city and, after half an hour’s wait, climbed on a bus that would drop her off at a town not far from Valdecarrasca. There she could call another taxi to take her the last ten kilometres.
She enjoyed the bus journey with its views of the mountains through the offside windows and nearside glimpses of the blue Mediterranean and the coastal towns.
‘The topless towers of Benidorm,’ Cam had said sardonically, as they drove past the high-rise blocks of the famous resort a fortnight earlier.
She had known it was a literary reference and in England had looked it up and found it was part of a poem about Helen of Troy.
Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss!
Reading it, she had wondered if Cam would ever meet a woman who would have the effect on him that Helen, wife of a king, had had on the prince who abducted her. Was Cam capable of that kind of overwhelming passion?
She could not help being disappointed at receiving no e-mails from him during her absence. Now he was probably away, as he had said he might be. But even if he was not there, she looked forward to seeing the garden after a fortnight’s absence. Her trip had proved one thing: the village was ‘home’. Any lingering doubts about the wisdom of her decision to uproot herself had evaporated.
There was only one letter in the metal box attached to the wall beside Liz’s front door. The envelope had no stamp. An unfamiliar hand had written ‘Mrs Harris’ and, in the bottom right-hand corner of the expensive envelope, ‘By hand’.
Liz stuck it in the pocket of her jacket to be looked at after she had unlocked the front door and lifted her book-heavy suitcase over the threshold. When she and her luggage were inside, her first task was to open the curtains and let in some light. It was only then that she noticed a small parcel on the table that had not been there when she left home. For a moment or two she was baffled by how it could have got there. Then she remembered the spare key she had had cut in Alicante and given to Cam.
Wrapped in plain brown paper fastened with transparent sticky tape, the parcel was roughly the size of a 500 gramos box of margarina, but considerably heavier. Inside the outer wrapping were several layers of tissue that, unfolded, revealed an object that Liz had often admired when she saw it on the front doors of the more opulent Spanish town-houses.
Formed in the shape of a woman’s hand emerging from a lace cuff, the brass doorknocker was clearly an antique, not one of the cheap reproductions she had sometimes seen for sale at junk markets. Probably this one had come from an old house that had been demolished. Cam could not have given her anything that would have delighted her more.
Taped to the back of the knocker was a card on which he had written—
Hope you like this. If so I’ll fix it for you when I get back on Jan 4th. Happy New Year. Cam.
The news that in three days’ time La Higuera would have its blinds up made her feel even more cheerful.
Valdecarrasca had two small general stores of the type that, in England, when she was a child, had been known as ‘corner shops’. Like that of their now largely vanished counterparts in the UK, the village shopkeeper’s livelihood was under threat from the supermarkets. But for the time being they were surviving and Liz made a point of using them.
It was not until after she had been to the shop run by Maria, a forty-something mother of several children, that Liz remembered the letter she had put in her pocket. She fished it out and slit the envelope. The letter inside was typewritten but topped and tailed in the same elegant hand that had addressed the envelope.
Dear Liz (if I may?)
Cam has told us how well you are looking after his garden. I am also an enthusiastic gardener. We are having a party for friends on January 4th and should be delighted if you can join us? Buffet supper. Smart casual. 8 p.m. If you can’t make it, please ring me.
Hoping you will be free, Leonora Dryden.
The following morning, Liz put a note accepting the invitation in Mrs Dryden’s letter box. For the rest of the day, at odd moments, she wondered what she should wear.
It was Deborah, her friend at the computer club, who told her about the nearly-new shop in Denia where the wealthy expats who lived in the urbs on the coast disposed of their cast-offs.
Liz had first heard someone say ‘urb’ while staying with her parents-in-law. It was short, she discovered, for urbanización, the Spanish word for the clusters of villas that had sprung up like colonies of mushrooms wherever the land near the sea could be built on and now were spreading relentlessly inland.
‘Why don’t we go together?’ Deb suggested. ‘After we’ve shopped, we can lunch. There’s no point in taking two cars. There must be somewhere on the main coast road where you can leave yours for a few hours while we drive the rest of the way in mine.’
The outing was a success. They both emerged from the nearly-new shop with bulging recycled carrier bags. As they finished lunch at a restaurant close to the sea’s edge, Deborah said, ‘Let’s not go back the way we came. Let’s go by the mountain road. You haven’t been over Montgo yet, have you? There’s a lovely view from the flat bit on top of the seaward end.’
The mountain called Montgo, its skirts now dotted with villas, was a major landmark along this stretch of the coast. Liz had assumed the only way round it was on the inland side. She had not known there was a winding road over the mountain connecting the town of Denia with the neighbouring small port of Jávea. She wondered if Cam knew about it and supposed he must. Uneasily aware that thoughts of him kept popping into her head with increasing frequency, she was also conscious that the uncharacteristically dropdead dress she had just bought had been chosen to stop him in his tracks rather than to cut a dash with the Drydens or their other guests.
‘I wonder if you’ll meet anyone interesting at this party you’re going to?’ said Deborah, as she drove round the tight hairpin bends ascending the mountain. ‘If there are any eligible singles in this area, I never meet them.’
‘Do you want another man in your life?’ Liz asked.
‘I certainly don’t want a dud like the last one I had, but I’m over that fiasco now and, yes, I’d like to try again. Chance would be a fine thing,’ Deborah added dryly.
At the top of the mountain road, but still well below the actual summit, a byroad led to the lighthouse at the seaward end of the massive promontory. There Deborah parked the car and they got out and strolled about.
‘I guess it’s different for you,’ said Deborah. ‘If someone has been happily married and then lost their partner
through an accident, as you did, it must take longer to recover than from a marriage like mine that started going downhill almost from the end of the honeymoon.’
Liz liked Deborah and valued their friendship. But she didn’t really want to get into in-depth discussions about their personal lives. ‘Maybe a slow decline is more painful than a sudden ending,’ she said. ‘I can’t say that living alone for the rest of my life bothers me. I’d rather be single than married to the wrong person.’
‘I’m not going to argue with that!’ Deborah said emphatically. ‘But hopefully I’m wiser as well as older. Next time I won’t lose my head as well as my heart.’
Later, when Deborah had dropped her off near her own car, and she was driving back to Valdecarrasca, Liz thought how easy it was, on the basis of insufficient evidence, to make false assumptions about people. She had probably done it herself. Maybe one day she would correct Deborah’s assumption about her. Or maybe not. Usually it was better to let sleeping dogs lie.
On the afternoon of the party, she gave herself a top-to-toe beauty treatment starting with a luxuriously long bath and finishing with a pedicure and manicure.
From time to time she looked out of her kitchen window to see if the persianas at La Higuera were up. At sunset they were still down. Perhaps Cam’s return had been postponed for some reason.
Normally she picked up e-mails every two hours. At six o’clock the Inbox was empty. At seven, half an hour before starting to dress, she logged on and checked again. Nothing. Why should he let her know he wasn’t coming? she asked herself. They were neighbours and business associates, not close friends. But she couldn’t help feeling miffed that he hadn’t made any contact since kissing her goodbye at the airport almost three weeks ago.
Before taking the new-to-her dress out of the wardrobe, she put on a new bra and briefs and a pair of sheer black tights. Then she spent twenty minutes putting on a party face and adding sheen to her newly washed hair with a tiny amount of wax spread on her palms.