“How sweet of you to put it like that, darling,” Miss Howard murmured, and she had an attractive American accent which was unmistakable, and which caused Jacqueline to look at her with interest.
The thought struck her at once that if her host—and although no one had actually presented him to her as her host, she realized that he could be none other than Dominic Errol—was an example of masculine elegance, Martine Howard must surely be the embodiment of all the charms a woman ought to possess. For in addition to enormous hazel eyes and red-gold hair, she had a skin like new milk and a provocative scarlet mouth, and her gracefully lounging figure was so exquisitely clothed that Jacqueline all at once felt completely obscure and shabby.
“Did you have a good crossing, Miss Vaizey?” Martine enquired of her, and although she made no attempt to bestir herself in her chair she smiled with a kind of sleepy charm. “Personally, I loathe crossings of any sort—I always feel sick, even if the water’s as calm as a mill pond!”
“Miss Vaizey was looking entirely composed when she came ashore,” Dr. Barr put in, also smiling at Jacqueline, “so I’m quite sure she thoroughly enjoyed her trip.”
“Oh, I did!” Jacqueline assured him.
“All the same, I can’t quite understand why you considered it necessary to meet the clipper,” Dominic interposed, and the cool preciseness of his tone gave away the fact that he had not yet forgotten his annoyance. “Roderigo had his instructions, and the car was waiting for Miss Vaizey. There was no question of any delay, or of no one being there to receive her when she arrived.”
"Nevertheless, I always think that when you’ve had rather a long and tedious journey, and you’re arriving in a strange place, it’s a good thing to find someone waiting for you who, at least, has known someone belonging to you—and as Dr. Vaizey’s assistant for so long I felt that I had a kind of prior right to welcome his daughter,” Neville explained, calmly accepting a cigarette while a servant brought fresh tea across the lawn, and Jacqueline looked at him with open appreciation.
“That was kind of you,” she told him, in her warm and slightly impulsive voice. "In fact, I think it was very kind!”
His blue eyes softened as he looked at her, although out of the corner of her eye she observed that Martine was watching him with rather an odd little smile curving her lips.
“You would like some tea, wouldn't you?” Dominic asked the newly arrived guest formally, moving to a seat beside her. She had the feeling that he wanted to apologize for not being at the harbor to meet her, but she decided not to give him the opportunity. She had slipped out of the jacket of her suit and was looking rather like a schoolgirl in her thin white blouse with the little round collar, and as she felt his eyes studying her she let hers rove over the garden and exclaimed admiringly because it all looked so enchanting, and was even more delightful than she remembered, and at the same time she made up her mind that his decision not to meet her was not altogether incomprehensible.
In addition to the fact that he had Martine to entertain, there was no real reason why he should have put himself out. For she was only the daughter of someone who had worked on the island for years, and whom his grandmother had taken pity on and invited to stay for a few weeks. There was no reason at all why she should have been received as if she was someone with the smallest pretensions to importance, and the fact that a car had been sent for her—a car far more luxurious than any she had ever travelled in! — in the charge of a responsible chauffeur, was surely more than enough?
All the same, as she looked across at Dr. Barr fresh appreciation surged up in her because he had met her, and he looked so casual and pleasantly ordinary, and so much more like the kind of person she was accustomed to coming in contact with, as he lay there in the sunshine with his cigarette between his lips. And once again their eyes met, and once again she smiled at him.
Dominic Errol offered her a cigarette, but she shook her head.
“No, thank you, I don’t smoke.”
She watched him lighting his own cigarette in a way that drew attention to the beautiful shape of his hands, with their long flexible fingers and virile wrists, and she remembered his handwriting that had so aroused the enthusiasm of Mr. Maplethorpe.
“You are very young, Miss Vaizey,” he told her, as he drew thoughtfully on his cigarette and continued to study her.
His eyes, at close quarters, were almost disturbingly blue, particularly as his thick black eyelashes served in some way to emphasize the blueness. “Much younger than I had imagined you would be.”
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “But your grandmother must have known my age.”
He shrugged slightly, elegantly.
“My grandmother’s memory is not what it was, and all
she could recall was a child who visited our island years ago.” A smile crept into his eyes—a cool, amused smile. “I wonder where I was when you visited Sansegovia before,
Miss Vaizey? I’m quite certain I was not on Sansegovia.”
“You were in England,” she told him. “But even if you’d been here, you would not have remembered me.”
“You think not?” he enquired. His English, although as effortless as her own, had a touch of stiltedness about it at times, which betrayed the fact that he was much more truly Spanish than English, in spite of his rather more English than Spanish looks. “But somehow I cannot agree with you. Somehow I feel that I would have been a little more prepared for you as you are, and known a little more what to expect when you arrived.”
“Perhaps,” she agreed. “I was very small and insignificant when I was twelve, and I don’t imagine I have altered a great deal.”
“You are still very small,” he said, and left it at that.
She had a queer feeling of being unable to relax in his company, and those openly interested eyes of his made her uncomfortable. She looked across at Martine and Neville, who were carrying on a desultory conversation, and Neville instantly caught her eyes and leaned towards her.
“You must come and see the clinic some time, Miss Vaizey,” he invited. “I expect you’d like to look over it again, and the bungalow as well. And if you’re staying for some time I hope you'll let me show you a few of the local sights?”
“As someone who worked in close co-operation with your father, Dr. Barr naturally feels that he has a prior right to show you the local sights,” Dominic Errol remarked, and his tone was very dry indeed.
“Naturally,” Martine echoed him, and her flickering glance at him seemed to be touched with malice. “Miss Vaizey and Dr. Barr have probably already got so much in common that you’ll find it difficult to keep them apart. After all, Miss Vaizey was expecting to live in the bungalow where Dr. Barr lives now!”
The host stood up rather abruptly.
“I expect you’d like to be taken to your room, wouldn’t you, Miss Vaizey?” he suggested. “My grandmother always rests in the afternoon, and she’s so frail nowadays that we don’t always see her in the evenings. But you’ll meet her companion, an aunt of mine, at dinner, and if there’s anything you desire before that, Juanita, who
will see you to your room, will obtain it for you.”
Juanita appeared, plump and smiling and very Spanish, with only a very few English phrases at her command, and Jacqueline followed her into the house. As she walked towards it she felt that the others were watching her, and she wondered whether she had expressed sufficient thanks to her host for this invitation that had been extended to her. But somehow her reception had not been as she expected, and her thanks had dried up in her throat.
She had not, for instance, expected anyone quite like Martine Howard to be staying as a fellow guest in the house, and she had expected on arrival to be welcomed by her hostess. Somehow it had not occurred to her that the Senora Cortina, after a lapse of ten years, might indeed be very frail.
Which meant that it was all the more kind of her to have issued her invitation at all.
And Dominic Errol was not in the le
ast as she had imagined he would be. He was far, far too handsome, and she felt certain he was aware of it, and that in his manner there was a certain amount of condescension because she was so unimportant, and he had been faintly bored by even the thought of her arrival in response to his grandmother’s somewhat impulsive invitation.
Otherwise, she was certain, he would have met her when she came off the clipper. He was too well brought up, and too conscious of the dignity of the Cortinas, to show discourtesy to a favored guest. Good manners were as much inbred in him as pride of family, but a young woman from England about whom he knew nothing—or practically nothing—and who had simply jumped at the opportunity to enjoy a free holiday, might very well not be looked upon by him as a favored guest.
She was just a guest he was forced to entertain.
C H A P T E R T H R E E
Juanita was overwhelming in her attentiveness, and Jacqueline had never had so much done for her since she was a child. Her bath run for her, clothes unpacked, the dress she was to wear that evening pressed and returned to her before she needed to put it on.
It was the black cocktail dress, because having no idea how much or how little the other people in the house dressed up for the latter part of the day, she had decided that it was the least likely to let her down when she was making her first appearance at a formal meal.
Once she was dressed, with an extra touch of lipstick and even a smear of eye-shadow, but very little powder, she realized that she was looking her best. Juanita beamed approval, and extracted a scarlet flower from a vase on the dressing table and tucked it into the belt of the dress. Then she stood back and clapped her hands.
The stiff black taffeta had a very full skirt, while the bodice hugged Jacqueline’s slight shape closely, and a tiny upstanding collar acted as a frame for her face. She wore her mother’s pearls, but they were her only adornment. The flower provided the necessary touch of color.
Juanita, who had insisted on brushing her hair vigorously, and then polished the blue-black curls with a silk handkerchief until they shone, told her in Spanish, which Jacqueline understood:
“The senorita is charming! Her appearance is delightful! Bueno!”
And Jacqueline wondered whether, if she assisted Miss Howard with her dressing, she had paid her even more extravagant compliments, because they would certainly be merited.
She wandered out on to the balcony outside her room, since Juanita gave her to understand that she had plenty of time, and watched the soft closing down of the night over the world of color and perfume without. One moment the color was glowing and palpitating like a flame, and then the shadows were creeping across the grass and the carefully tended flower beds, and the arch in the high white wall facing her was a mysterious patch of shadow beyond which lay deeper mysteries.
Behind her the lights glowed softly in her bedroom, amber-shaded lights which made the room appear at its best. Jacqueline had experienced a little thrill of unalloyed pleasure when she had made her first acquaintance with it, for such a bedroom had never before been placed at her disposal in her life. It contained luxuries hitherto associated in her mind with people like film stars—people like Martine Howard, who was probably occupying an even more sumptuous apartment—and linked therefore with stage-sets.
Such luxuries as quilted satin bed-heads, an ivory telephone beside the bed, a dressing-table that appeared to be wrought entirely of beaten silver, and had a lovely Florentine mirror on the wall above it. And adjoining the bedroom there was a bathroom that was a blaze of chromium and turquoise-blue tiles, with masses of monogrammed towels the color of early primroses on the towel rails.
Jacqueline’s clothes had been stowed away in capacious wardrobes, and she knew that they were lost in the amount of space that was there at her disposal, just as she herself felt suddenly rather lost and out of her element as she stood there on the balcony overlooking the now dimly seen garden, with unaccustomed warmth lapping her almost sensuously about, for when she left England it was still only early spring, with typical early spring weather.
She felt a lump rise in her throat as she recalled that other spring when she had come to the island, and been taken straight to the bungalow which was now occupied by a stranger—a pleasant stranger, and one who had known her father well, but nevertheless, a stranger.
She felt the lump begin to hurt her throat as she tried to swallow. Before she left England it had seemed to her that Sansegovia was a paradise she must visit again, but now she was not so sure. Somewhere on Sansegovia her father lay buried, and she would have to get someone to drive her to see his grave—or perhaps, when she got to know her way about a bit, she could visit it for herself, and stand beside it in a little silence that would give him back to her for a moment, and leave a little tribute behind her of island flowers.
It seemed strange to think that her father, after so many years of working for the islanders, wrapped up in their affairs, and with few interests apart from them, should have died here on this flower-scented isle, within sound of the blue seas that piled on the beaches.
And yet, probably, that was the way he would have chosen it if he had been consulted.
If only someone, apart from Dr. Barr, who probably genuinely regretted his demise, had said a few words to her about him when she arrived—said how much he had been appreciated during his lifetime, and that his memory meant something and would linger on in the island. The Senora Cortina would probably have uttered a little speech that would have warmed Jacqueline’s heart, if her frailty had not kept her confined to her room, because she belonged to an old order to whom such little correctnesses were still considered important. But her grandson had had other things to preoccupy him, and it had probably not occurred to him.
As she looked downwards over the balcony rail she thought she caught a glimpse of a light frock in the gloom, and then voices reached her from the flagged path below her window. She realized that two people—a man and a woman—were returning to the house after strolling in that shadowy purple darkness, and following a gay trill of feminine laughter she recognized Martine’s attractive American accent. Martine was saying:
“I really must go and get dressed, Dominic! You know there are people coming to dinner, and it always takes me ages to change.”
Dominic answered, in rather a lazy voice, speaking in English
because Martine, no doubt, had little or no Spanish:
“Only old Senor Montez and his nephew. Rather dull for you, I’m afraid, but I thought it best to invite them.”
“Because otherwise we should be in the ratio of three to one? Three women to one man!” with an appreciative laugh. “Oh, Dominic, darling, how appalling for you!”
“Well, it wasn’t what I was thinking about,” he replied. “As a matter of fact—” And then they moved on, and their voices faded away with them, and Martine’s laugh as it floated back this time sounded soft and satisfied like the cooing of pigeons, and after that all that reached Jacqueline was the pleasing fragrance of cigarette-smoke which drifted upwards to her through the already fragrant night.
When she went downstairs at last, after sitting for half-an-hour in her room because she hated the idea of being the first to make her appearance in public, especially when guests who were unknown to her were expected, the Senora Cortina’s companion, who was also Dominic’s aunt, was in the huge main salon, or reception room, to welcome her. She was a middle-aged, spinsterish-looking woman of nevertheless pleasant appearance, who answered to the denomination of Tia Lola, and she put out both her hands and took Jacqueline’s, and apologized for not having received her when she arrived.
“But you will understand that it was one of the senora’s bad days, and I could not very well leave her,” she explained. “But I am quite sure Dominic deputized for me very well. He saw to it that you were made comfortable, and had everything you required?”
“Oh, yes, thank you,” Jacqueline assured her, and out of the corner of her eye she saw Dominic come into
the room, wearing a beautifully cut white shell jacket and cummerbund, which made him look almost startlingly handsome; and as he sent a look across at her where she stood talking with his aunt she saw a sudden, faint flash of interest appear in his dark face. “But I do hope the Senora Cortina is not—is not very unwell?” she added. “If so, perhaps it was a little inconvenient that I should arrive today?”
“It was not in the least inconvenient,” Aunt Lola reassured her with emphasis, laying a gentle white hand on her arm. “And tomorrow, if her strength has returned to her, our grandmother will be delighted to have you sit with her for a while, and get to know
you.”
She had to pass on because the dinner guests had arrived, and there was a great deal of anxious enquiry about the head of the household. The large room was bathed in pleasantly diffused golden light, which picked out the beauties in choice rugs and elegant pieces of furniture, and every corner of it seemed massed with flowers, so that the general effect was most pleasing. Jacqueline sat down on a damask-covered settee and waited to be introduced to her fellow guests, and as she did so Dominic came across to her, the urbane and polished host, and asked whether she would like something to drink.
“No, thank you,” she answered, and barely looked at him.
"Not even a very small glass of sherry?”
"No, thank you very much.”
One of his dark eyebrows lifted a little, and his mouth twisted in what she was later to discover was a typical smile of his—a little crooked, only barely amused, rather cool and aloof.
Love is for Ever Page 2