by Ann Bridge
But all this had the effect of making James, that night, very correct. It had taken him some little time to raise the money for her, but he had managed it, and gave it to her now; enough to last for three or four months—he had satisfied himself that whatever the Duquesa’s “ways and means” might be, they were not equal to maintaining a second person. He gave it to her in cash, but urged on her strongly the desirability of opening a banking account; and she promised to do so the very next day. He got this business over early, while they took their apéritifs; inevitably it was a little awkward, but she was, as always, quite peculiarly gentle and nice about it—using no emphasis, letting most of her thanks be understood rather than uttered. It was a form of genius with her, he felt, this gentle quiet naturalness which robbed almost any situation of its embarrassment.
When it was settled he sat back in his chair, saying “There—that’s over; now we can enjoy ourselves.”
She smiled at him a little oddly.
“Can we?” she said. And set that half-question pulsing in him again. But then her long pale face took on another expression.
“I have something to ‘get over’ too,” she said—and blushed, a thing he had never seen her do before.
“What’s that?” he asked, wondering about the blush.
“It is something, as usual, for you to do for me,” she said, with great earnestness. “Do you ever go to Almadera?”
“I have been there—I might go again, any time,” he answered, guessing what was coming.
“If you should be there, I would like you to go and see Pascual. As a journalist, I suppose you could get into the prison?”
James supposed so too.
“And then to tell him that I am out here, and safe, and with Olivia. And to let him know about—” her voice wavered for a moment—“Pilar. It will not be nice,” she went on, “telling him this; but it would be a relief to me, if you could. He ought to know. And if when you have seen him, you would let me know how he is, I should be grateful.”
She always asked for things like that, perfectly directly, with no cajolery and no emphasis, he reflected. Aloud—“Yes, I’ll do that,” he said, as directly as she, and pulled out his notebook. In it he took down the full name—Major José-Maria Pascual, Conde de Verdura, taken prisoner in hospital at D——, after receiving a slight wound. While he wrote down all the details, in a perfectly business-like way, Milcom’s mind was asking itself a string of questions. How much did she really want to know how this man, her unfaithful husband, was? How much did she think he would mind about the child, even? “He ought to know,” she had said. Was this request perfectly spontaneous, or did it spring from the Spanish tradition of family life? He found that he wanted quite fiercely to know; he even got the length of trying to frame a sentence in which he could conceivably ask her. This he found difficult—and with a sigh he gave it up. Anyhow, as he was going away, there was no point. He put away his notebook with a gesture of finality, and looked up at her. Something in the still concentration of her face as she watched him hit him so hard that he looked away again.
She said—“Thank you; you do a great deal for me.”
And something in the way she said that—said “for me” and not “for us”—made him feel that some time he would be able to ask her that question that he had just stifled, or even that he would not need to ask it. He came back, as he sat opposite to her at the small table, to two constant strands of his thought about her:—how little he knew, really, about the inner lives of Spanish women of her class, well as he knew Spain; and in spite of this, that he always had a feeling of safety with her—that however little he might understand her, there was in her a fundamental sincerity and goodness on which any relationship could find safe anchorage.
They continued eating their dinner, but as the meal proceeded he realised that she had been right—they could not enjoy themselves. They were quiet, and became quieter. He liked the way in which she praised the excellent food—the grilled fresh sardines, the 3-year-old pâté de foie gras and salad—with real discrimination, but also that she made no attempt at “conversation,” to divert, to be gay. They just were there, sad and quiet, watching their long association—so troubled in its surroundings, so peaceful in itself—drawing to a close; both too adult and too serious to trouble with any pretences or any effort. Once, looking at the many-coloured dancing shapes of the sardine-fleet, she said, “I like the little boats,” and he answered—“So do I—I always shall.” But that was all.
After coffee, he suggested going back along the sea-wall. By an unspoken consent they paused and leaned on the parapet above the narrow stone-built entrance to the harbour, down which the dark waves passed at intervals, the black glassy water faintly lit by the green lights above their heads. The air was damp and fresh from the wet stone, and full of the clean turbulent noises of the water, slapping and bouncing; when they turned from it and leaned their backs against the parapet, there were the lights of Ciboure burning steadily across the bay, and beyond them, to the right, the ghostly white spray rising soundlessly above the outer mole, like huge flowers opening in the silvery blue-darkness. He heard her give a tiny sigh.
“It’s nice, isn’t it?” he said.
“Beautiful.” She was silent then for some time, watching the noiseless blooming and falling of those white flowers. At last she said, rather hesitantly—“There is something else that perhaps you could do for me.”
“What is that?”
“To find out about Juanito—my brother, you know. I thought Olivia would have known, but she does not—nothing. Not that he is dead, or a prisoner—but also no word of him being alive and serving still. She who is in touch with so many people! It seems strange.”
“When did you last hear anything definite of him?” James asked.
“Seven months ago, Olivia heard. He was fighting then, with the Navarrese Division—his Division.” Her voice caressed the words with a note of unutterable love and pride. James was struck by the sudden realisation that he need not wonder what dictated this enquiry—it was most clear that it was an adoring devotion to her brother. This touched him. It recalled his mother, who also had loved a brother better than her husband, perhaps better than anything else on earth—loved him and lost him, he thought, with a sort of pang that was half recollection, half foreboding. Oh, God!—he didn’t want her to lose Juanito as well as Pilar—and he had every reason to fear that she had. And little as he liked Whites on the whole, he had heard enough about Juan Torre de Modero to feel that the most exaggerated devotion would hardly be misplaced.
“Right—of course I’ll do that,” he said; and then because he wanted to hear her talk of someone she loved, and above all because he wanted to postpone the moment when she should suggest going in, he asked—“Is he older or younger than you?”
Again that loving caress was in her voice as she answered—“Oh, just older. He is thirty-one. His birthday is the same day as mine—isn’t that funny? We had such fun keeping them together, when we were children.”
“When is it—what time of year?”
“March, just when all the flowers begin; the 27th of March. We used to pick flowers the night before, to strew on one another’s beds in the morning, so that the other might wake up to find flowers on the quilt—but one was always first, and so someone’s flowers were spilt!” She laughed at the absurd recollection. “He used to scold me so gently, if I spilt his flowers. And there was such a fuss if we could not keep our birthdays together!”
“How long did you manage to keep that up?” he asked.
“Oh—but always!” she said, turning to him, as if the question surprised her. “Except twice when I was in the convent, till the war, always. Even when he was doing his military service, as a young man, he came—once in a car and once in a plane! And when I woke there were flowers on my bed, and he was, sitting there, all dusty, laughing at me! Oh”—her voice changed from the happy tone of recollection—“I do wish I knew where he was! I do wi
sh I could have news of him. It is not like him not to find some means to send me word.”
“It would have been very difficult while you were in Madrid,” James pointed out.
“Difficulty was nothing to him! The word did not exist to him,” she said, suddenly very agitated. “No, he must be dead. And yet how could he die, and I not know it? Everything in me would know it, if he was dead! That is what is so strange,” she said, turning to him despairingly. “Do find out! Please manage to find out! I am sure that you too can do difficult things.”
The compliment touched James deeply.
“What is he like?—to look at?” he asked.
“My face, a little—and Olivia’s hair; black, that is.” She remembered the unnatural gleam of cream-colour on the Duquesa’s two winged rolls, and gave a tiny, unsteady laugh. “And he walks as I do—Mamma always used to scold me, that I walked so like Juanito. But I did not do it expressly.”
James smiled in the darkness. Raquel had a very individual walk, some trick of the ankle or instep muscles giving it a little lifting spring when she was walking fast—her English blood, he had always supposed, for it was most unlike the gait that is so often seen in Spain. He had been amused at the contrast of her walk with that of the Duquesa, only to-day. Oh, God, when would he see her walking again? It was too dark now, and by daylight he would be going.
“Well, I will do everything I possibly can to find out,” he said. “You can rely on me for that.”
“Do—oh do! Oh, I know I can rely on you,” she said. “Where should I have been, but for you? But do find Juanito for me.” Quite suddenly, she began to cry—he could hear the small sounds, she saw the pale gleam of a handkerchief put up to her face. “And now you also gone,” she sobbed softly.
James recognised afterwards that it was really her emotion about Juanito that had done it. He came to see, in the weeks that followed, how much their sad sobriety had always depended on her stillness, her gentle fortitude. Once that was broken, he was done. He really had the feeling of having been toppled over a cliff, so immense was the change from the solid ground of their previous behaviour, their tacit convention of pure friendliness, to the cloudy tumultuous depths, shot with raptures as with lightnings, into which he plunged then. He took her in his arms, gently enough, saying “My darling, you know that I have to go,” or some such foolish phrase. But she so settled then into his arms, as into her own place, where she belonged; lifted her face, as directly as a child, to his for the expected kiss, and then so clung to him, to his face—all the force that up till then had gone into keeping her still and quiet, now poured out in the expression of her love. They clung together there in the dark, on the windy sea-wall, while the White flowers of the spray bloomed out to sea beyond them in a sort of desperation of love and sorrow and delight and pain, murmuring wild endearments—clung as helplessly, as inevitably, as if each were a drowning man, that had found a rock at last.
With complete mutuality, at last, they drew apart, and both stood staring in the dark at the pale blur that was the other’s face with the sort of incredulity that follows the first avowal of love. Raquel sighed—and shivered a little.
“Are you cold?” he asked.
“No—it is warm. But I am tired, a little—and you must travel tomorrow. I think we should go in.”
How much more bearable, now, it was to hear those words. James too was tired—exhausted was nearer the mark; and in spite of everything, fulfilled, sunk deep in joy.
“Yes, let’s go,” he said. They turned back, and walked along the unparapeted sea-wall towards the Grande Bretagne, past the silent houses, where only a faint gleam from the lamps of the little side streets, which all end abruptly against the wall’s landward side, now and again broke the peaceful darkness. Before they reached the orbit of the arc-lights outside the hotel, Raquel paused and spoke.
“That could not helped,” she said. “Probably it was wrong, but it could not be helped.”
“My darling, I love you with all my heart—that can’t be helped either,” James said.
“No—I know.”
“Do you? Do you love me?”
“Indeed, yes,” she said, almost sadly. “I love you very much.” She took his hand. “Please say good-bye now, here—then I will go in.”
“Good-bye, my dear love,” he said, and kissed her.
“Oh, good-bye. May God take care of you,” she said, and slipped from his arms and was gone.
“Find Juanito for me”—her voice came back out of the darkness. It was her last word.
Chapter Five
The Far Side—Almadera
Milcom had no difficulty, when he returned to Spain, in reconciling it with his duty to the Epoch to pay a visit to Almadera. With a good harbour and a good railway inland, and even a few factories, it was one of the ports on which the Republicans relied largely for supplies, and it had recently received a lot of attention from the Savoias which plied regularly from the Balearics, in a systematic attempt to block and ruin the ports of Republican Spain. At Barcelona he went to the Dirección General de Prisiones and obtained an authorisation to visit the Conde de Verdura at Almadera. In the ordinary way, as James already knew, such visits took place either in the Office of the Director of the prison, or in the Sala de Visitas; if the latter, one screamed at the prisoner through a wire grille—in either case, the conversation had to take place in Spanish, with a listening guard standing by. James had little relish for this interview anyhow, and to conduct it under such conditions seemed to him almost intolerable; with the help of the Condesa’s Republican cousin he succeeded in obtaining the extraordinary concession that he might visit the Conde in his cell, and a note to that effect was attached to the authorisation. In this way he hoped to secure a reasonable measure of privacy. All this done, he telegraphed briefly to his paper from Barcelona that he was going to visit Almadera, and took a small steamer straight on down the coast—the Electra, under Greek charter, in cotton from Alexandria. The captain, a huge Norwegian, prudently hung about in the offing all the afternoon, and crept in after dusk; the pilot, who chugged out in a small motorboat to meet them, sidled the steamer skilfully in past dismal slanting masts and funnels, sticking up at all angles out of the dirty water, the relics of previous vessels which had neglected to take this precaution. James, by permission, stood on the bridge with the pair of them.
“It gets worse,” the captain said.
“Like bloody hell it gets worse,” answered the pilot, who came from, of all places, Cardiff. “It’s like a flaming bending-race to get in or out now, and what it’ll be if they keep this up, Christ knows.” They tied up at a pier immediately behind a half-sunk timber boat, from whose decks half-naked dock hands were unloading timber by dimmed blue lights, working with feverish speed; James remained for some time on board the Electra, to watch the same process beginning there. The dockers were waiting on the quay, a great crowd of them; the moment the Electra was made fast and the stevedore’s whistle blew, they crowded aboard her like a swarm of ants, pulling off hatches, burrowing into the holds, working with a desperate busy haste that had something insect-like about its concerted purposefulness. During the hour that he watched them, they made astonishing progress. He commented on this to the captain, who had returned to the bridge after disposing of the ship’s papers with the port authorities.
“Yes—they must, now; they have learnt this,” the captain said grimly. “Formerly the Spanish were not quick.”
“Will they finish during the night?”
The captain stuck out his wrist, on which a luminous dial glowed faintly.
“Perhaps—there is more time now than in summer. Yes, they should empty her before daylight.”
“And loading? What are you taking?”
“Lemons—and oil. But I shall go for a little cruise to-morrow,”—he grinned—“and come in again after dark to load, if they are not finished in time for me to get out. Since Nyon”—he grinned again—“the open sea is the best pla
ce.”
“It was the Italians, all those sinkings, was it?” James asked—it was a routine question, but he liked hearing the invariable answer.
“Is a mackerel a fish?’ asked the Norwegian simply, and spat over the ship’s side. And then let drive about the would-be proprietors of Mare Nostrum. “Soldiers, they never were; sailors, they are not—singers and roadmenders, that is all they are. And such will have an Empire, and be great! But to sink unarmed ships from in hiding below the sea, and to throw down bombs from the air on villages and undefended towns—for that they are very good!” He used an unprintable Nordic word, in the plural, and spat again.
James went to his hotel, recommended by the Norwegian skipper. Next morning he presented his various papers and passes to all the relevant municipal and military authorities and set out for the gaol. It stood high up on the slopes behind the town, a large gaunt building; a clerk pointed it out to him from the Plaza. He walked to it, quite glad to see what he could of Almadera. The town was spread fanwise round the harbour, thinning out into villas up on the amphitheatre of hills which surrounded it; factories scattered away down the coast, their chimneys sending dark incongruous streamers of smoke across the sunny air. In one of the main streets he passed an antique shop, and paused to glance in at the window—his eye was caught by a superb bedspread of old lace, laid over heavy green watered silk of the colour of sea below cliffs on a thundery day. A sudden memory of Raquel, lying under a sordid quilt on the bed in the hotel at Perpignan, exhausted after her burst of hysteria, sent him in to ask the price. It was large—too much, he felt, greatly as he wished to think of her as lying under it in the Hôtel Grande Bretagne; it was worthy of her, hard as that was for anything to be; he imagined her in the past as always lying under such a splendour, in bed. He said no. The shopkeeper put on a cunning expression.