“I particularly wished you to see my Donna Clara,” he said, as they stood in the doorway and she blinked at the light and smoke. “For it is important to me that you are also interested in horses.”
He looked down at her, and as though he had actually pulled her round to face him, she looked up to meet his serious dark gaze. “One day soon you shall come and ride with me. There are other good mares here who will bear you well. We shall ride and you will find the difference between your little Scottish cob and our highbred Spanish palomino ladies. But now - we dance, yes?”
And with a sudden gaiety he took her hand and drew her forward and they were dancing, and whether it was the headiness of the atmosphere or the strange beating lilt of the music or the specialness of his dancing she never knew; but she danced as she never had, feeling as light as dandelion down, letting the music move into her bones and merge with them, telling her feet to go where they wanted, swooping and bending to the guiding pressure of his hand on the small of her back, dreamily yet exhilaratedly floating her way through and with and beyond the sound of music.
It was late when they stopped dancing, and drank some coffee laced with rum - “to keep out the chill of the evening” he said gravely. “It is still only February, you must remember, and the nights can be treacherous here” - and made their way back to the car.
His chauffeur, an elderly man who seemed to communicate only in grunts, was waiting for them and they drove back through the darkness, side by side and silent. But it was a companionable silence that had nothing of shyness in it. She just sat there with her head resting back against the squabs of the leather upholstery, dreamily watching the dark trees and small houses beside the road swish by, and relaxed happily.
Until she remembered the way she had been convinced Sebastian had been about to kiss her, out there in the darkness of the farmyard, and was glad now of the darkness of the car, for she felt the hot colour flood up her cheeks. And then, as so often happened, her native humour took over, and she laughed softly in her throat at her own absurdity.
“And it is permitted that I share the joke?” His voice came suddenly loud in the darkness and she turned her head to peer at him. “No joke,” she said easily. “I was happy, that is all. So I laughed.”
“You are interesting people, you Scottish ladies,” he said, and she could hear the amusement below the surface of his voice, “You laugh when you are startled, you laugh when you are happy - when else do you laugh?”
“When I’m stupid - ” she said, suddenly sharp, for it had happened again. Again an unwanted memory had come curling up from the depths of her mind. There was Jason, sitting and staring anxiously at her, and saying again “You do see what I mean, Isabel? You do understand? It’s not that I don’t love you - God knows I do - but I just can’t go on doing this to you - ” and herself, laughing in a crisp offhand sort of way, and shrugging her shoulders and saying “Oh, I suppose I know when I’m beaten, Jay! I’ve done all I could, pleaded all I’m about to. From here on it’s just a great big joke,” and she had laughed again.
“When I’m stupid,” she repeated, and then gave herself a little shake. “It was a lovely evening, Señor Garcia. Thank you for taking me,” she said formally, and now it was his turn to laugh softly in the darkness.
“You sound now like a very well brought up Spanish young lady. Such careful etiquette! Please, you will now call me Sebastian, yes? It is my name. And you - I will call you Isabella - so Spanish a name, Isabella - ” and there was a note in his voice as he said it that made that little shiver of pleasure come back again.
“By all means,” she said lightly. “Except, if you’ll forgive me, in working hours. I’d not be too happy about being anything but very proper and correct then - ”
“But of course!” he said equally lightly, and then lapsed into silence for the rest of the journey into Palma.
He led her into the hotel and to the entrance to the lift, apparently quite oblivious of the swift knowing glances of the guests and staff who were still about, and shook hands with her gravely to say goodnight. And, after a moment of hesitation, raised her hand and brushed the back of it with his lips.
“Your company has been an enchantment, Señorita Isabella,” he said softly. “And soon, I hope we will be able to repeat our evening. Buenas Noches, Señorita.”
“Buenas Noches,” she said, and turned to walk into the lift, which had now arrived and was standing, doors open waiting for her. And then as she pressed the button and the doors closed she added swiftly “Hasta la vista!” and saw the rare smile break out across his face again. And she went on, up to bed in her lovely cool room feeling a delicious contentment, and a great deal more happy than she had been that morning when she left it.
She had almost finished the morning clinic next day when the telephone on her desk rang.
“Well, hi, Isabel! How are you?”
“Biff! How nice of you to call. I’m fine, thanks! How are you? Working hard?”
“No more’n I have to!” he said gaily, but then his voice changed a little. “Oh - I called by last night to see how you were. I thought maybe we could go out again, you know? You were very sweet the other night, Isabel, and well - I just thought. But they told me you were out. With that Señor Garcia. So, I was a bit - well, you were pretty hot against that guy the last time we spoke, so I thought maybe the man at the desk had it all wrong - ”
“No, he had it right, Biff,” she said, and then looking over her shoulder at the waiter she had left sitting patiently with a bandage half applied said quickly: “It’s a long story, Biff, and I can’t stop now. I have a patient waiting - ”
“Gee, I’m sorry!” he sounded so contrite that she felt guilty herself for having upset him. “Look, I’ll call by tonight, okay? We’ll go have a drink and a meal at one of the little bodegas I know - like, taverns? and we can talk - I’ll pick you up at around eight thirty, okay?” and the phone clicked and then buzzed as he hung up.
As she finished the clinic she wondered briefly whether she should have accepted that date with Biff, and then shrugged her doubts away. It wasn’t as though she owed him any sort of special loyalty, she told herself. I mean, if Sebastian asks me out again I’ll go, just as I’m going out with Biff. There’s nothing special about either of them, is there? Not like the days when I was with Jason; then to have made a date with someone else would have seemed to her impossible, the worst kind of disloyalty. And anyway, she’d never had eyes for anyone but Jason, then -
Sebastian came for a renewal of his dressing just before lunch, and as she took off the bandage and examined his wound she thanked him politely for the previous evening’s entertainment. It was somehow easier to do so while she had her head bent over his hand.
“It was indeed a great pleasure for me, Señorita Cameron,” he said gravely, and she looked up swiftly and smiled at his careful observance of her own rule about the formal use of names in working hours, and he smiled back, fully understanding her amusement.
“It occurred to me that on Sunday next if you wished it we could return to the farmhouse to ride. We are not yet too far into the season, and I will not be too busy on Sundays for at least another month or two - so I would like to use the opportunity and show you the paces of the horses, and also to show you the Island’s great beauty - the almond blossom. It is nearly at its best, and it will be very agreeable to take you to the almond groves and let you see the loveliness of the blossom. We will take a picnic, yes? It will be very enjoyable.”
And she agreed it would and pushed her vague sense of unease about Biff to the back of her mind. There were no rules that said she couldn’t enjoy the company of both men, and enjoy it she would, she told herself firmly, as she locked the clinic and went to lunch. Enjoy it she would.
She had swum and sunbathed and swum again, and was lying spreadeagled on the warm mattress, letting the sun lick her skin dry and filling her nose with the mingled smells of flowers and fruit and hot dust when the orange light behind her lid
s darkened to a deep red, and she opened her eyes to squint upwards.
A small boy was standing with his legs apart and his fists on his diminutive hips, staring down at her.
“Hello, Fred,” she said. “How are you? Enjoying your holiday?”
He scowled heavily, and then squatted down beside her to pick at the sand between the flagstones with restless fingers.
“All right, I s’pose,” he muttered.
She sat up, and curling her arms round her knees looked on the rough curly head, and smiled a little. “What’s gone wrong with it? No other people your own age to play with? I saw quite a few sensible looking types about who looked around ten, like you.”
He beamed up at her then, and she knew her intended compliment had hit its target. “Well, akshully, I’m not quite eight. And those other fellas they’re nearly nine and you’d think they was the only people in the world the way they go on.” He brooded darkly for a moment. “I mean, why shouldn’t a person who’s nearly eight be as good as a person who’s nearly nine? Why shouldn’ he? An’ when I said it all they did was to make faces and call me stinky and go off on their own, and they said if I went with them they’d chop my arms off, and I said I don’t want to go with them anyway, because no-one would want to go with anyone so stupid as them and I wasn’ scared of them, and I’d come if I wanted only I didn’t.” He scowled even more. “Want to play with ’em, I mean.” And then he looked up at her and said with a sudden burst of confidence, “Only I did really, but I couldn’ say it, could I? Not if they di’n want me. So I got nothin’ to do, an’ I’m fed up!”
“It’s a problem,” Isabel said sympathetically after a moment. “I can quite see it’s a problem. Er - have you discussed it with your mother?”
“Her!” he said in fine disgust. “I tol’ her, and she said - you know what she said? She said ‘go and play with the other boys, darling’ - after I tol’ her what they’d said and what I said and everything! She never listens to nothin’ I say. Anyway today she was goin’ with rottenunclestinkyjack to get a new fur coat so she hadn’t any time to talk about it.”
“With who?” Isabel said weakly.
“Rottenunclestinkyjack” he said again and grinned. “He’s her new husband and I’m s’posed to call him Uncle Jack, and I hate him because he calls me Sunny Jim. So I call him rottenunclestinkyjack. Only he doesn’t know. One day I’ll tell him. When I’m nearly nine.” And he sank again into a silence in which he mulled over the injustices of his short life, and Isabel looked down at him, and could have wept for him.
“What ideas have you had so far?” she ventured at last. “I imagine you’ve thought of a few things you could do this afternoon - ”
“Oh, yes,” he said, and now he stretched out on the hot paving stones beside her to lie with his head cushioned on his arms and squinting up at the sun. “I thought of swimmin’ and I’ve done that. And I thought of going down to the beach and kickin’ sand around only the others is down there and they’ll think I’ve followed ’em which I wouldn’t do for anythin’, and I thought of mountaineerin’ on the balconies only the chambermaid saw me and shrieked like a train.” He giggled suddenly. “She was ever so funny. She shrieked like a train, and she waved her arms like the signals.”
“I am sure she did,” Isabel said absently, and then with all the delicacy she could muster - “Ah - what exactly is mountaineering on the balconies?”
“Oh, it’s a game I thought of. You tie a string round your middle and you climb on one balcony and then across to the next one, and then you slide down to the underneath one and keep on till you get to the bottom.”
He sighed a little sadly. “I can do it side to side but I can’t do it downwards yet. Every time I want to try there’s someone wavin’ their arms and shouting. So I’m fed up.”
“Uh, Fred - ” Isabel said and then stopped.
“What’s matter?” he squinted sideways at her.
“Uh - do me a favour, Fred, would you? Next time you think of going mountaineering, will you take me with you?”
“Take you? Would you come?” he said eagerly.
“Oh, yes, indeed I would! Promise me, word of honour and hope to die you’ll come and get me to come with you next time you decide to go mountaineering?”
He frowned at her. “You’re bein’ like the others. You’re not shoutin’ and waving your arms yet, but you are inside your head, aren’t you?” he said accusingly.
Perceptive child, she thought, and grinned at him. “Well, yes, just a bit. It’s dangerous, you see. You do see, don’t you?”
“Well, o’ course!” he said disgustedly. “Tha’s why I want to do it!”
“And that string round your waist - it’s supposed to be tied to someone else at the other end, isn’t it?” she said swiftly.
“Ye - es - ”
“So if you let me come with you, I can be tied to the other end, can’t I?” she finished triumphantly. “So we’ll do it right, and then no-one can be a train and wave their arms at you because I’ll be there.”
After a moment a long slow smile curled over his face, and he nodded. “You’re sensible. I said you was, I tol’ all of ’em. All right. I’ll call you first. Where will you always be?”
“Oh, you can ask them at the desk in the hall - they’ll always know. I’m in the clinic most of the day, and if you come down sometime I’ll show you how we do operations. You’d like that - Er, Fred, let’s swear a horrible oath.”
“Ooh, let’s,” he said enthusiastically. “What about?”
“About being blood relations that will call each other to go mountaineering. All right?”
“All right,” he agreed, and held out both his hands, and she held out hers and they crooked their little fingers and crossed their wrists, and he chanted “Swear, swear, swear” and she repeated it after him, phrase for phrase until he’d finished.
“Swear, swear, swear, cut your throat and hope to die, horrible blue in the face with your tongue sticking out, if me or you goes mountaineering without the other one. Swear, swear, swear.”
“That was very horrible,” she said approvingly as they let go each other’s hands, and he grinned his gap toothed grin at her and said cheerfully, “It’s my best one. Would you like some ice cream, blood relation?”
“Yes, please,” she said promptly, and he jumped up and went running off towards the little bar in the corner where the barman always kept ice cream lollies for the children, and she watched him go, her face creased anxiously.
To have behaved like the average adult and shown anxiety about his fantasy of climbing the balconies - for she was pretty hopeful it was a fantasy - would have been foolish, in case he was in fact absolutely serious. Isabel had spent too long working in children’s wards in the days before becoming a theatre sister not to know that. There was nothing like adult opposition to make a lonely unhappy child follow a particular course of action. Yet had she made sufficiently sure he wouldn’t attempt any dangerous climbing without telling her first? She could only hope so.
As she watched him come back, carefully if indiscriminately licking the drips off the ends of both lollies, she thought, “I must talk to his mother about him. Tactfully, but she’ll have to know, he’s a very unhappy little boy, this one - ”
“What’s bright orange and comes out of the ground voom?” demanded Fred.
“Don’t know,” Isabel said after the necessary pause.
“An E-type carrot of course!” shouted Fred triumphantly.
And until she had to dress to return to the clinic at four she sat with Fred, and they talked and exchanged riddles and generally enjoyed each other’s company.
Isabel took him with her to see the clinic when she did go, for there was still no sign of his mother and stepfather, and even though Fred had exhibited no further interest in balcony mountaineering, she wanted to take no chances.
It was almost six by the time a message came down from the desk in the foyer (for she had told them the child
was with her) to say his parents had returned, and she sent him off to them with a cheerful smile and the promise of a swim with him the next day, determined that one way or another she would have to make that handsome girl with the mane of fair hair see just how unfair she was being to her small son.
And then, she finished her afternoon’s work, and hurried up to change for her date with Biff, and grinned cheerfully to herself in the mirror as she did her hair. Really, life in this island was turning out to be interesting as well as great fun. The decision to spend her summer here would prove, she was quite sure, to be one of the best she’d ever made.
10
“Well, I suppose he could be an okay guy,” Biff said moodily. “But for my part, he’d have to go one hell of a long way to convince me he was. After the way he behaved that night? Like some - ”
“Now, Biff, please! This is my boss you’re talking about, remember? He’s apologized and done his best to show he means it - what more can you ask?”
“Is that all he is to you?” Biff said abruptly after a moment.
“All? How do you mean?”
“Just a boss?” He sounded a little shy suddenly. “I mean - oh, hell! It’s none of my concern, really, I guess, but he - you were so mad at him when I talked to you before, and now all of a sudden it’s like he was some special sort of boyfriend!”
“You’re right it’s none of your concern!” she said sharply and he reddened and nodded, and for a while they sat in stiff silence, staring at the people sitting round the marble topped tables and talking with a great wealth of gesticulation, and Biff twisted his sangria glass between his hands and looked miserable.
“Oh, Biff, I’m sorry!” she said at length, looking at his downcast face and feeling ashamed of her own sharp tongue. “That was very rude of me. Of course you’d a right to be interested! It was just - ” she stopped and now it was her turn to look down at her glass and feel uncomfortable. “Oh, I don’t know. He’s being very nice to me, now, and I can’t deny he’s an attractive man, but as for boyfriend - oh, it’s daft!” she looked up at him and smiled ruefully. “I barely know the man! I’ve a suspicion I’m being affected by all this Spanish romance, the whole Majorcan glamour bit - at my time of life!”
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