She went up the track and entered the house with the air of having spent the afternoon climbing the pineclad hills.
On the day she was due to meet Tollo again it was necessary to keep up this illusion, so she donned old slacks and blouse and packed her picnic bag as before. In any case she felt too lowspirited to want to dress up. Slopping around in old clothes suited her mood these days.
She was up at the top of the farm track in good time. To be sure of not missing the old car she stood on the roadside in the glare of the sun. However, after ten minutes of this she had to retire into the shade of the big carob tree. She could still see the route from the village beneath the leaves. She waited. Not so much as a farm cart passed in the following ten minutes.
After half an hour she looked at her watch. Funny that she hadn't seen any car pass. Tollo was due to start work within the next few minutes, so he must have gone. And yet she had left the house with plenty of time to spare. She couldn't imagine how she had missed him.
She waited another quarter of an hour just in case he had been held up somewhere. Then swinging up her bag, she crossed the road and scuffed oft along the pineclad path. It really made little difference to her. She was just as content to idle around the countryside, and she could always catch Tollo tomorrow.
To be absolutely sure she didn't miss him the following afternoon she got up to the road twenty minutes before hewas due to pass. She waited in the shade of the carob tree. The minutes ticked by. Exactly the same as yesterday, the road remained deserted. Not a thing moved to disturb the shimmering silence of the afternoon.
Janet frowned to herself. She couldn't fathom what had become of Tollo. Even if he had forgotten he was taking her to town she would have seen him pass. She knew there was another smaller road leading out of the village which linked up with the main road further on. But why would he take that route? Drifting off on her usual stroll, she decided to tackle him about it, when she saw him again.
The opportunity presented itself that same evening.
During the day the islanders hid from the sun as though they feared it would strike them down on the spot. It was at nighttime that the villages came alive. And San Gabrielle was no exception. As soon as the cool shadows dropped over the hillside it awoke to become the scene of noise and activity.
Children whooped up and down the codes and tethered dogs barked uproariously because they couldn't join in the fun. Mothers supervised their toddlers from their doorways exchanging domestic chat with neighbours in raucous voices. The men tinkered with carts and farm machinery in tumbledown flowerstrewn courtyards or loafed about the cafe tables in the Plaza. The young men of the village congregated around their possessions of old scooters and cars, wherever it was convenient.
Janet was familiar with the scene, as she came into San Gabrielle most evenings to pick up the mail. It was when she was leaving the comestibles with the afternoon's delivery of letters that she saw that Tollo had joined the group of youths on the corner of the square.
He didn't seem in the least perturbed to see her. In fact he strolled to meet her in his brash clumsy way, his brokentoothed smile as wide as ever.
Janet returned his friendly greeting, then tilting an eyebrow at him she asked wryly, 'What happened to my transport this afternoon? And yesterday? I thought you were going to give me a lift into town?'
'Oh...' Tollo shrugged his shoulders with a sheepish grin, 'it wasn't possible. I am sorry.'
'Well, that's all right,' Janet smiled. She turned her puzzled glance over his vehicle parked at the side of them and asked, 'But your car's not broken down, is it?'
Tollo looked more sheepish than ever as he shook his head. He shuffled about. His grin slanted and he lowered his eyes over an impudent light. He admitted at last, 'It was the senior at the villa. He say...' Tollo brought his finger across his throat and made an appropriate slicing sound.
Janet hadn't the faintest notion what he was talking 'bout. Her gaze becoming more puzzled, she looked to him and asked, 'But I don't understand. Which senor at the villa?'
The abogado. The lawyer who drives the fast car into town,' came the lazy reply.
Bruce! With a stirring of something like anger inside her, Janet was beginning to understand. 'Well, what has he been saying to you?' she demanded hotly.
Tollo tilted his head in a bemused way as he replied, 'To use his English words, I think he said he would break my neck if I drove you in my car again.'
Janet's anger exploded into two spots of colour in her cheeks. 'Well, what a nerve!' She fumed at what she'd heard. And to her young companion she said feelingly, 'Look, Tollo. This English lawyer, Bruce Walbrook—he has got nothing whatsoever to do with me. If I want you to take me to town it's no concern of his.' And with a sudden rush of defiance she added, 'I'd like you to take me tomorrow, if you would.'
'All right,' Tollo grinned, not in the least put out that she was asking him to stick his neck into a noose. 'But what shall I say if the senorcomes looking for me in the villageagain?'
'You can tell him from me that it's none of his business.' Janet said crossly. She softened her mood to bid Tollo goodbye, and as he waved her off down the hill she called out to him over her shoulder, smiling, 'See you tomorrow afternoon, about the same time.'
Making her way back home, she felt a stab of apprehension when she thought over what she had done. Quickly she shrugged it off. She didn't see why she should calmly suffer Bruce's interference in her life. And anyway, Tollo, with his carefree attitude and impudent smile, wasn't likely to be too unnerved by anything that Bruce said.
The following afternoon she dressed as usual in old clothes as though she were going roaming the countryside and swinging up her picnic bag she set off up to the main road. She hadn't been waiting long under the carob tree when Tollo came swerving along from the village.
He stopped with his usual eagerness to help her, greeting her as though he hadn't a care in the world. She dropped into the seat beside him of the same accord and together they went careering off along the road on their wild dash into town.
When they arrived, Janet was of the opinion that she must be growing accustomed to Tollo's abominable driving. Either that or she was just too dazed by the experience to react one way or the other.
Having no particular desire to go sightseeing, she spent half the afternoon sitting with a magazine on the terrace of the hotel Morocco. The other half she spent wandering around the shops as they opened.
She felt hot and dusty when she got back to the square. Waiting for Tollo on the corner amidst the accelerating noise and crush of holidaymakers didn't help. When he arrived she asked him if he would mind if she stayed to have a drink first as she was absolutely dying of thirst. As if a Spaniard would grumble at the chance to while away thetime at a pavement café.
Naturally Tollo had no objections and happily led the Way to the tables on the corner beside the car. He was too gauche to know how to proceed in her company. Janet paid for his drink as well as her own.
Though she had quenched her thirst from time to time during the heat of the afternoon with the orange crush in her picnic bag, nothing tasted so wonderful now as this tall glass of icecool liquid with the straw bobbing at her touch. They drank leisurely, watching the lively activity in the square. To add to it, just as they were finishing, Tollo's youthful pals came drifting along the calletowards them. Without a care for originality they made the same derisive comments, all strolling around his broken old car with mocking grins.
Janet gathered that this was a regular performance every night and she took it with the same humour as Tollo. She really wasn't too concerned with the antics of the young Spanish boys. Most of her attention was taken up, and had been since arriving, with the business of surreptitiously searching the crowds with her gaze, for signs of a familiar figure.
Half of her was in fear of spotting Bruce. The other half of her blatantly, wanted to be seen, purely as a gesture of defiance. She was beginning to thi
nk that she was going to be deprived of that pleasure. On the corner Tollo had opened the rickety door of his car for her, and site was dropping into what was just an excuse for a seat amidst the goodnatured taunts and jostlings of his mates. Just as she was laughing at the commotion her glance swung on to that lean tanned face only a street away.
Who Bruce was with she had no idea. She could just make out his dark head and smoothclad shoulders as he stood surrounded by the passersby. One thing she was sure of His gaze was riveted on her. Even from this distance she could see the taut anger on his face as he watched her in the midst of the rough play.
Dusty and dishevelled, she tossed her head at him, prolonging her laughter and ignoring the haphazard thumping of her heart. Too bad if he didn't like the idea of her scruffing around town in Tollo's old car. It happened to suit her!
For all her bravado she was glad when at last her young friend started up and they jerked off to make their way through the busy streets of the town.
As she had half expected, once they were out on the San Gabrielle road the dark blue car came nosing in behind them. She was sure Tollo hadn't seen it. His youthful mind on other things, he hung over the wheel, occasionally bursting into a snatch of Spanish pop song as he tore along the stretch of road.
The dark car didn't overtake them. Though it could easily have eaten up their speed, it stayed behind, following in their swerving bouncing path like some marauding animal.
By the time they reached the farm road Janet was feeling rather limp from the strain. She asked Tollo to drive past a little way and breathed a deep sigh of relief when the polished car swung slowly in a second or two later and crunched off down the farm road.
She watched it out of the back of her head as it were, but once it had disappeared from view she felt considerably irritated with herself and her nervous state. To offset her shakiness she recklessly arranged to meet Tollo again the next day.
She spent a restless evening wondering how he was faring in the village. But if Bruce had been up there again to rap him for his disobedience, he gave no sign of it the following afternoon. Apart from a trace of paleness beneath his dark complexion, he was his usual clumsy, grinning self. Janet guessed that he had given Bruce her message as she had told him to. She half suspected that his defiance was as strong as her own, in a harmless cheeky kind of way.
Most afternoons, after that, found them slewing along the country roads to town, and back again at tea time. Though Janet was well aware that she was watched on the occasions when she met Tollo in the square, she gave no sign of this. The man with a muscle flexing in the jaw of his tanned features, as he followed her movements with his narrowed blue gaze, was just part of the crowd as far as she was concerned. Or so she blithely made it appear.
She became accustomed to seeing Bruce's car trailing them when they careered madly back along the road home. Sometimes when the drive was particularly hectic she thought the dark shape moved in a little as though to come alongside them.
On the other hand this could have been purely her imagination. She did tend to be living on her nerves these days. Tollo's wildness behind the wheel took some coping with, and the jaunts to town had done nothing to help her weighted spirits. If anything they were having the opposite effect. It was all very well pretending to be having a gay time just to defy Bruce, but seeing him every day only made matters worse. She didn't know how much longer she Could keep up this pseudoadventure without breaking in two.
Strangely enough, the glimpses she caught now and again of Bruce's taut features told her that she wasn't alone in feeling the strain.
Then something happened one afternoon that brought the whole thing to a head. Tollo's driving, the source of much of the friction between them, was responsible for what occurred just a couple of miles out of San Gabrielle.
Without an inkling that disaster was round the corner Janet was sitting listening to the description of a film Tollo had seen the night before. The islanders lacked the sophistication of city filmgoers. After a night at the cinema they could talk of nothing else the next day. They relived every scene of the film with all the actions for the benefit of theirfriends, insisting on telling the story from beginning to end.
Janet was getting the full treatment now as Tollo rode a galloping horse in an exciting race. His head down, his hands on the wheel holding the imaginary reins, first he was on the winning horse, then he was on the one coming up behind. When he couldn't find the tight words in English he lapsed into excited Spanish.
Janet gave most of her attention to her young companion's story, because she found it took her attention off his atrocious driving.
The loaded cart taking up most of the narrow road round the bend ahead was as much of a surprise to her as it was to him.
If they had been going at a reasonable pace it would have been simply a matter of slowing down to follow the cart round the bend before overtaking it. As it was there was no time for that.
Her gaze caught a flash of the piles of pine brushwood stacked high on the rumbling cart, then Tollo was jumping on the brakes and they were screeching and squealing to miss it by inches and heading for a bank at the side of the road. They shuddered up it—how they avoided overturning Janet never knew—and shuddered down it again, and after much skidding and squealing around the rest of the bend they found themselves on the straight road ahead once more.
With typical Spanish disregard for danger Tollo grinned, not a little pleased at having shown the old cart who was boss. It was probably his complete lack of nerves that had got them through without mishap, but Janet couldn't share his nonchalant attitude. She was too conscious of the fact that if luck hadn't been on their side they could have been involved in a very nasty accident.
She shuddered when she recalled the sound of the screaming brakes. They had probably been heard all over the countryside. She thought of the dark polished car which sheremembered had been in its usual position just a little way behind them. Bruce would be held up back there. He wouldn't take the risk that Tollo had taken, in bypassing a loaded cart on a bend.
She was glad of the breathing space to get to the house before he appeared. As soon as they stopped at the top of the farm road she rumbled out of the old car, amazed at the weakness in her legs. She watched Tollo swing off with whistling unconcern towards the village, then blundered off along the farm track with as much speed as her shaky legs would allow.
She wasn't fast enough, however, for just as she reached the villa gates she heard the ominous sound of a car swerving in on a squeal of brakes on to the farm road. She struggled on, ignoring the speeding vehicle which was approaching behind her.
She got to the railway track and stumbled along the length of its rocky surface, in time to hear the whoosh of the car swerving in on two wheels after her. She was on the terrace. The car braked hard in a shudder of dust at the side of her. She heard the ear-shattering slam of a door. She reached the patio. The sharp sound of striding footsteps came after her. Her heart thumping in her throat, Janet hurried indoors. She heard her mother working in the kitchen and fled to her, but as the sound of those footsteps came closer across the patio she stayed no longer than it took her to gasp, 'I'll go and see if there are any eggs,' and fled out of the back door leaving her mother openmouthed over the pastry she was mixing.
How Janet got down the meadow she was never really sure. As she walked, or halfran along the path, her nervousness giving her wings, she tried to ignore the striding footsteps that had followed her out of the house.
Down at the hen enclosure, striving to put on a natural air, she snatched up a basin and with trembling fingers searched out three or four eggs. Because she couldn't trustherself to hold them once she had gathered them, she stuck them on top of a square post beside the chicken run, then paced around. She was pretending to be vitally interested in the distant scenery when the striding footsteps came up behind her.
Bruce didn't bother with any preliminaries. His voice sh
aking in an odd way, he rapped, 'If you've got any more plans for riding in that brokendown excuse for a car, you can forget them!'
'Oh?" Quiveringly Janet swung on him. 'Since when have I been having my mind made up for me?'
'Since right now,' he fired back.
Janet's pulses hammered in her throat. Though she knew her own face was white with strain, it came as a cold shock to seeBruce's face, pale and working too.
To cover up her dilemma, she made an attempt at flippancy, saying airily, 'That's funny! I expect to be going to town as usual tomorrow. In fact I'm quite looking forward to the ride.'
Bruce took a step forward. She thought he was either going to hit her or shake her. His voice menacingly low, he got out, 'You realise you could have ended up in a heap back there just now, don't you?'
Janet saw the flames of something like anger in his eyes. She met them with her own unsteady gaze and gave a careless shrug to toss back at him, 'But we didn't. And anyway, why should that be any concern of yours?'
'Because, you young fool___' As though something exploded inside him he grabbed her. His fingers sinking intoher flesh made her wince with pain, but before she couldcry out, he had pulled her roughly against him and droppedhis mouth on hers.
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