The Summer of the Spanish Woman

by Catherine Gaskin

  ‘You must pay for your own hotel in London,’ my mother insisted … ‘You must be independent to that degree. You owe yourself a few days there, darling, to be beholden to no one. So long here in Jerez, and no fun at all …’ She was living, vicariously, the journey, the excitement, the nervousness. She was living it, but glad she didn’t have to participate except once removed. She was gayer and brighter than I had seen her for a long time.

  And then the Marquesa appeared. ‘You have no jewellery to wear,’ she said peremptorily. ‘You will represent Jerez there in England. You must represent us well.’

  I was furious at her sudden appearance, unannounced as always, her calm assumption that her decisions would be accepted without question. ‘I have the jewellery Amelia left me.’

  She dismissed that with a single wave of her hand. ‘A few trinkets.’

  ‘I cannot wear jewellery to the Palace,’ I pointed out. ‘It is a very simple morning ceremony when others will have medals presented. Many of them will be enlisted men.’

  ‘The regiment will give at least a dinner for you. There will be other invitations. I have written to our Spanish Ambassador in London. You must have a tiara and a necklace. These I have chosen for you. They are quite suitable to your age. I wore them myself when I was young.’

  ‘I cannot accept such things.’

  ‘It is not a matter of acceptance. It is merely a loan.’ Before the startled eyes of us all, she placed a velvet-lined box on the table and withdrew a delicately-made tiara in emeralds and diamonds; the necklace matched it. ‘The emeralds my ancestors brought back from the New World,’ the Marquesa said as if Spain still owned the Americas.

  I saw the hunger in my mother’s eyes as she gazed at them. Unable to help herself, her hands stole forward until she held the things, turning them to catch the light. ‘How beautiful,’ she said softly. ‘How lovely you will look in them, Charlie.’

  ‘I don’t think I should ‒’

  ‘You must, Charlie,’ she said. ‘I always dreamed of wearing such things. You will do it for me, won’t you, darling? While you’re in London you must have a photograph taken in them. And get a velvet frame. Then I shall have you as you are now, forever. This is the time, Charlie. It doesn’t come again.’

  And so I went, dressed as I’d never been in my life, carrying the Marquesa’s jewels, fully insured, she told me, and not worn for more than thirty years. The way she dismissed them indicated that there were things much more magnificent shut away in some vault. I was to take a P&O steamer from Gibraltar. It seemed a lifetime since we had disembarked there on that hot day almost ten years ago.

  Edwin Fletcher was travelling back to England with me, taking up a post as research assistant in an economics study being set up in Cambridge. My children clung around us as the boxes were strapped on the carriage the Marquesa had lent for the journey. There were tears for Edwin Fletcher in Juan’s eyes as he said good-bye. ‘I’ll be at school in England soon, Tía Isabel says. I’ll come and see you, won’t I, Mr Fletcher?’

  ‘Of course. And one day you’ll come to Cambridge to take your degree.’ Edwin Fletcher did not seem as cheerful as a man should who has turned his face again towards home.

  And then, just as we were about to leave, Luis came. He held out his hand. ‘A good voyage, Carlota. We are proud of your father’s achievement.’ Then he drew me aside, away from the others. ‘Will you wear this for Amelia? If she had been alive she would have been more delighted than any of us.’ It was a large solitaire diamond ring which must certainly have come from the collection of his family’s jewels. ‘Gems seem to fade when there is no woman to wear them. It’s time this piece had its turn in the light.’

  I could not refuse him, though the ring was more than I ever wanted to wear. But when I looked at the ragged scar across his cheek I knew the debts Don Paulo had discharged would, in truth, never be repaid.

  ‘My father’s rather obscure regiment will think we are very rich, I’m afraid.’

  ‘They will know that you have good friends in Jerez, that’s all. I will see to your mother while you’re gone. Have no worry about that. Maria Luisa knows she can call on me. Try to enjoy yourself, Carlota. Forget for a while the things you leave behind here …’ His glance indicated my mother, her hair in disarray, laughing with Edwin Fletcher so that she wouldn’t cry, the three boys clustered about them, Maria Luisa examining every luxurious detail of the Marquesa’s carriage, the courtyard with its cracked, waterless fountain, and all the evidences of poverty. ‘Put off our Spanish sombreness for a while. Laugh and dance and flirt with all the officers. We make our women old by dressing them in black and shutting them in dark houses. It is time to stop praying in dark churches with only candles to light against the dark. It is time to fling open the windows.’

  IV

  Edwin and I parted at Southampton. He wished me good-bye and I wished him good luck in the presence of Captain Carton, who had been sent from the regimental headquarters near Winchester with a staff car to meet me. I hadn’t realised until I saw that tall, stooped figure turn and move through the crowd, and finally become lost in it, how much I would miss him. ‘My sons’ tutor,’ was how I had described him. But as he walked away I felt as if I had suddenly lost a brother I hadn’t known I possessed.

  It was the first car I had ever ridden in, and the first time I had seen England, except for those few hours when we had transshipped in Liverpool so long ago. Captain Carton seemed to find these two circumstances quite amazing. ‘It’s all much tidier than Ireland,’ I said. ‘But then, Ireland is much poorer.’ I had almost forgotten quite how tender were the greens of the northern spring, how muted the skies. The noisy engine and the smell of petrol did not at all blend with the gentle curving beauty of the countryside. ‘The horses must hate these things,’ I said. And then I laughed. Captain Carton wanted to know what was so amusing. ‘I sound just like my mother,’ I said. ‘Yes, Luis was right. It’s time to fling open the windows.’

  Since we were travelling with the hood down, he must have thought me quite as mad as he had probably heard all the Blodmores were.

  There was a slight air of nouveau riche about the regiment headquarters. They had been established less than a century and seemed faintly self-conscious. I sensed that more men with money now joined the regiment than had been so in my father’s early times with it. They would probably have come from rather minor public schools, sons of men who had made their way in industry and could afford to donate a new barracks wing, donate the regimental silver, splendid cricket pitches and rugby grounds. What they could not buy was tradition, and that was why my father’s Victoria Cross was so important.

  The car came to a halt before a Georgian house where the Colonel lived. Even the ivy seemed new and washed. Colonel Saunders was a lean, spare man, red-faced, unsmiling, his wife was plump and soft, wearing clothes that were frilled and laced so that I could not discern the outline of the garment. She clearly hadn’t decided whether fashion would return to the pre-war look, or retain the war-time simplicity. I decided that my Jerez clothes would do very well. Probably we had more time there to study the fashion magazines from London. I was welcomed effusively. A family of creamy Pekinese dogs swirled around our feet, and one nestled in the lace of Mrs Saunders’ bosom.

  ‘So good of you to come all this way,’ she said. ‘We are so happy you are here. It is a great occasion for the regiment.’

  We walked into the polished, shining marble hall. ‘I’m sure you’ll be glad,’ Colonel Saunders said, ‘that you aren’t quite among strangers. Your cousin, Lord Blodmore, has kindly agreed to come over.’

  He stood with his back to a long window that gave a view of a vivid green lawn behind the house. I couldn’t see his face clearly, but the outline of his body seemed thinner, and therefore taller; he seemed slightly stooped. I hardly heard now the noise around me, the fluttering talk of Mrs Saunders, the barking of the many small dogs. He began to walk towards me, and I to him. I saw then t
hat the cheekbone where the shrapnel had hit was smashed; an attempt to repair it had not been successful. One side of his mouth was dragged upwards. The handsome man of my memory was gone. It didn’t matter. Richard Blodmore remained, and I still loved him.

  He held out his hand formally. ‘Hello, Charlie.’

  Chapter Seven

  I

  There was a kind of agony in being so close to Richard, and not alone with him. We were in the same room, seated side by side and yet we could not talk to each other. Mrs Saunders, or some other officer’s wife was nearly always in attendance, as if I were some sort of royalty whose every request must be granted. That afternoon I met most of the officers’ wives at a tea Mrs Saunders gave. I talked about Jerez, and the life there, and it all sounded quite romantic and beautiful. The wife of the youngest lieutenant sighed as I described the bodegas, the time of the harvest, the beautiful horses, the countryside. ‘How wonderful it must be to live there.’ She reminded me of myself ten years ago. I looked across at Richard and marvelled that my wildly romantic, impossible love for him was the only thing which had not changed in that time.

  Elena was not with him. We managed to pace the Colonel’s rose garden at the end of the clipped green lawn between tea and the time to go upstairs to dress. ‘She didn’t want to come,’ he said. ‘No ‒ I don’t think it was because of you being here. She just doesn’t care that much. Not any more. She … well, I think she’s been enjoying herself with Theo Wareham. Before that, it was Simon Lawson. He was invalided out early, and was around most of the war. We haven’t been very close, and we grow further apart. It wasn’t much of a marriage, as you know. At first she was jealous and possessive, and then she stopped caring. Now, she can hardly bear to be in the same room with me. The very sight of me sickens her, I suppose.’

  I looked at him fully in the face. ‘I love you, Richard. For however long I live, it’s never going to change.’

  His shattered features twisted still further. ‘Charlie, it’s never going to work for us, you know. Carlos is no longer there, but Elena is, and she’ll stick. There’s no possibility of a divorce. She’s Catholic, and she’s determined to remain my wife.’

  ‘Richard, don’t you think I know all this? The Marquesa wishes you to remain married, and Elena will not oppose her, no matter what her feelings are. These years … have taught me some things. I know that one does not really choose where to put love, what person to love. It just happens. You’re lucky if it happens with the person you eventually marry, and you’re lucky if you stay in love with that person. My mother got the man she wanted, and see what happened to that. I told you before, it would have been a fairy-tale if we had fallen in together at the right time. Life isn’t that tidy. The ends don’t come out even.’ The buds were forming on the roses in the Colonel’s tidy garden; they all seemed to rise to regulation height. The whole place had the aura of beeswax and brass polish about it. ‘Tell me about Clonmara.’

  Elena’s money had restored the house, he told me. For ten years he had worked on bringing back the land into good heart. He had managed to acquire several smaller farms which had been sold off by my grandfather, which had been outside the entail. Now the estate was beginning to round out again. His sons had each been sent to boarding school when they were seven. They would go on to Eton. ‘They’ve been brought up as Catholics,’ he said. ‘Elena insisted on that, and I didn’t care enough to make an issue of it. Perhaps for their future in Ireland it’s a good thing. The Protestants in the South are hardly a force to be reckoned with any more, Charlie. England can’t hold on there much longer, I think. But I think, too, that there’ll be bloody battles before the Ulster thing is settled, if it ever is. So … I till and sow my acres, and I think of you, who should be there. It’s not fair at all, is it?’ Then he added quickly, ‘I never wrote to you after Carlos’s death. I didn’t know how to. I didn’t know what to say.’

  ‘If you had, I couldn’t have replied. Best leave it alone, Richard.’

  My fingers found one small lone sucker which grew unsanctioned from the root of a rose bush. I bent and plucked it off. ‘And the rose garden?’ I said.

  ‘Just as you left it. I’ve learned how to take care of it myself. We still go on grafting from the same root stock your grandfather planted. The locals think I’m mad. There are many better roses to be had these days, and nurseries to supply them. They still call it the Countess’s Garden, and many of them are so young they don’t even know about your grandmother, and why the garden was made. They think it is Elena’s garden, but she hardly ever goes there. For me, it’s Charlotte’s garden.’

  I thought of my bare feet on the soft grass that morning, the end of my robe soaked in dew. ‘You shouldn’t hold on to things like that Richard. There’s no sense in it. And you’re a sensible man.’

  ‘I used to believe I was. That was why I married Elena. That was an eminently sensible thing to do. Practical, pragmatic. And look what all that got me. Clonmara would be better as I first saw it, half falling to pieces, if I could have had you there with me. So what if I keep the rose garden? And what if I ride on the shore alone, and remember? What else have I got?’

  A gong sounded in the house, and we turned obediently to answer its summons. To watching eyes from the house we were just very distant cousins, admiring the Colonel’s perfect turf, his budding roses, and catching up on family gossip.

  II

  We dined with the Colonel and his closest staff that evening and the next day they drove me around the countryside. We visited Winchester Cathedral, and had tea with the Dean, who was related to Mrs Saunders. Richard and I were together all day, and yet never alone. I noticed that people tended to look past Richard rather than at him, the way they skirted around my Catholic upbringing when we visited the Cathedral. They chose to ignore Richard’s face as they ignored the fact that Lieutenant-Colonel Drummond had been separated from his wife for all but a few months of their long marriage. My mother did not exist, in the way Richard’s injury did not exist. In the way that, when his untouched profile was turned towards me, it was possible to reconstruct what he had once been, I kept remembering my mother at her gayest and best and bravest. If they, these strangers surrounding me, had only known it, I believed my mother a match in courage to the man the King and the nation would honour with its highest award. And yet, from all the talk that flowed, still nothing emerged that gave me any more knowledge of my father. They used his name quite often, but they didn’t talk about him, just the things he had done.

  ‘Of course,’ Colonel Saunders said, ‘one might have tipped him for great things when he got the DSO in South Africa. Damn bad luck he didn’t survive the last do. He’d been in the trenches in France through the whole four years. Wounded twice, and went back each time. Needn’t have gone back. He had an offer to go to the General Staff. Refused it.’

  I thought of the worn brushes, and the virtually unread Bible. I thought I would like to meet his batman, but when I suggested it, the Colonel said he had been injured in the very last days of the fighting, and had been demobilised as soon as he left the hospital.

  That night they gave a splendid dinner in the Officers’ Mess and there was to be dancing afterwards. Senior officers from older, better-established regiments had been invited, and had agreed to turn out to honour the occasion. The Dean of Winchester was coming, and the Lord Mayor. Some of the silver that graced the long table looked very new, as if officers’ families had dug further into their pockets to put up a good show. In the display of silver on the long sideboards I saw that some of the pieces had sad little commemorations of fallen officers. Even among the invited guests from other regiments there were few young faces. ‘We lost almost all our young men,’ an old general said to me. ‘Every year a fresh batch straight out of school and basic training would arrive, and so many of them lasted only a few months.’ He fixed his monocle and stared at me. ‘You had a brave father. Hear you’ve got three boys yourself, and you’re widowed. Sorry. Hear
that part of the world you’re in is very attractive.’

  I had asked for Edwin Fletcher to be invited, and was startled to see him present in his officer’s dress uniform. I had never thought of him as a soldier. And Richard wore his uniform, and a medal. I thought we hardly recognised each other, their uniforms as little part of their personalities as the emerald and diamond tiara and necklace was part of me. Edwin was placed at a table in one of the adjoining rooms, which would be cleared when the dancing began. The long main table was only for the most distinguished guests. Amelia’s ring glittered in the candlelight, and I knew that many of the women guests wondered where the jewellery had come from. It was generally known that the Blodmores of Jerez were not well off. The ring would fit only my little finger; Luis must have had it altered to fit Amelia’s growing thinness. At the last minute as I dressed, I pinned the little ruby-filled venencia she had given me beneath a frill of lace. It could not compete with the emeralds, but it represented Amelia, Luis and the vineyards we had created together. The dress had had to be cut high on the shoulders, though low at the neck, to hide the scar where Carlos’s knife had ripped my skin. I viewed the faces of the distinguished strangers about the table, trying to remember each of them, every detail of uniform and dress so that I could relate it to the eager ears in Jerez; I was startled to realise that I was quite desperately homesick, and it was for Jerez, not Clonmara.

  I listened to the speech Colonel Saunders gave, welcoming me, mentioning Richard as though he had been a close relative of my father’s, honouring my father’s valour. The Drummonds of Scotland seemed forgotten. But again nothing of my father came through the words. There were no fond or funny reminiscences of times shared, or times of danger lived through together. My father seemed to be a name in a book, a name that would go on the regimental roll of honour. If they had not, of necessity, worked closely together, I should have imagined that Lieutenant-Colonel Drummond was a stranger, someone Colonel Saunders had read about.