by Anne Weale
‘But he seems so nice. Was it all his fault? Wasn’t some of it down to her?’
‘She wasn’t as bright as she is now. She was more like you then—too trusting for her own good. Don’t tell me you’ve fallen for him. If I thought he was after you, I’d come out and send him packing. He wouldn’t make mincemeat of me! Tell him you’re Anna Vale’s sister. Tell him your sister Frances hates his guts. See what he says to that.’
‘I have told him who I am. At least, I told him who my mother is. He didn’t react at all.’
‘Which just proves what a swine he is.’ The pent-up anger in Frances’s voice vibrated down the line. ‘If you need help with the language barrier, find and pay an interpreter. Dad will cover all your expenses. I’m warning you, Cressy—have nothing to do with that bastard. You’ll save yourself a lot of grief. If Anna knew you were seeing him, she’d go berserk. He damn nearly ruined her life.’
‘When is she coming back?’
‘Some time next month. When d’you think you might be back?’
‘I don’t know. It’s hard to say.’ Cressy explained the situation.
‘It’s just as well we’ve got you to sort things out for her. I wouldn’t know where to start,’ said Frances. ‘I must rush, Cress. I have an important appointment, I don’t want to be late. Bye for now.’
Cressy replaced the receiver but stayed where she was for some minutes. As far back as she could remember, Frances had been making dramas out of situations which didn’t merit her histrionics. Especially in matters to do with her love life. Was this another instance of her tendency to exaggerate? Did Nicolas really deserve to be called a bastard? Had he really behaved contemptibly? Of had it, as Maggie would say, been six of one and half a dozen of the other?
When Cressy had been in her teens she had worshipped her sisters for their glamour, their brains, their wit. But Maggie—who loved them too, but saw them with shrewder eyes—had made her realise that they weren’t as perfect as she thought.
‘Your sisters are clever girls, but they’ve been spoilt,’ she had said. ‘The fact is, your father and mother have been too busy to give them proper attention, so they’ve given them everything they wanted to make up for never being there. It happens all the time these days, and I’m glad I shan’t be around to see the results of it. What both your sisters need is a strong man to give them what they should have had when they were growing up—a firm hand, a bit of discipline. But I don’t think they’ll get it, because most of the men they meet are the weak-kneed sort who wouldn’t say boo to a goose.’
Amused by Maggie’s old-fashioned ideas, Cressy asked if she also needed a firm-handed husband.
‘Not you, my lamb, you’re different,’ Maggie told her. ‘All you need is loving kindness.’
Remembering that conversation, Cressy also remembered how, on her first night here, Nicolas had said they were two lonely people, both in need of some TLC.
Had that just been a line he used? Was he an unscrupulous womaniser, as Frances claimed, or could she trust her own instinctive feeling that—whatever he might have done in the past—he didn’t mean to harm her?
‘From England?’ he asked when she rejoined him at the table.
‘From one of my sisters. The same one who rang yesterday. She says she’s met you. They both have. Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘It was a long time ago. Francesca came to one of the college balls, as someone else’s partner but in the same group as us.’
‘Her name is Frances,’ she corrected.
‘Well, it’s a decade ago, and we only danced once or twice. Then I met her again in London. She invited me to a party. Your other sister was there. It was an attraction of opposites which quickly burned itself out. Most people make those mistakes while they’re finding out who they are.’
Could he speak about it so easily if he had behaved as abominably as Frances alleged? Cressy couldn’t believe it.
When lunch was over, Nicolas went back to work and Cressy drove to the cottage. The day before she had noticed there were silverfish about, and other rather nastier insects with a great many legs but different from centipedes. She planned to remove all the books and spray the shelves before replacing them, and also to empty the drawers and put them outside in the sun to get rid of the musty smell.
The books were a task for a day when she felt more energetic than she did today, after her restless night. But clearing out a chest of drawers wouldn’t be too much effort. Kate had some nice pieces of antique furniture, presumably shipped out from England when she’d retired from her post as a university lecturer.
In her bedroom there was a walnut tallboy and an oak chest of drawers. In one of the drawers Cressy came upon some bundles of letters tied with white tape, and an envelope containing an assortment of photographs. Some were of Kate when she’d been about Cressy’s age, and some were of a young man. Only one showed them together, and from the way he was smiling down at her, it was obvious he was in love with her.
Cressy would have liked to read the letters to see if they might explain Kate’s strange remark about regret being the worst pain. But she knew that Miss Dexter must have forgotten they were there, and her consent to having her belongings sorted out certainly wouldn’t extend to having her letters read—even if they had been written many years ago.
It was hot in the bedroom, even with the windows open, and after a while Cressy began to feel drowsy. This morning, to her vexation, she had forgotten about the laundry in the boot of her borrowed car. It would have to be dealt with tomorrow. Meanwhile the bed was stripped, except for its pillows with their old-fashioned black-striped ticking.
Cressy decided to lie down for a short siesta, as Nicolas had recommended. Nicolas...she was thinking of him as she closed her eyes and surrendered to the soporific heat of the Majorcan afternoon.
When she opened her eyes he was beside her on the uncovered mattress, propped on on elbow, watching her. smiling slightly.
She could tell from his face that a moment ago he had kissed her. It was the touch of his lips on hers which had woken her.
For a moment she was flooded with happiness, knowing him to be her love, the only man she would ever want in her whole life. He said, ‘I wasn’t in the mood for work so I came to see what you were doing.’
Then he bent to kiss her again.
CHAPTER EIGHT
WITH his free arm arching across her, Nicolas hovered above her, so close that she could see all the tiny micropoints combining to make the intense blue of his eyes.
He said, in a husky murmur, ‘Do you want to wake up, Sleeping Beauty?’
She felt her will slipping away, like water running out of a bath.
‘Yes.’ It came out as a whisper.
‘You’re ruining my concentration. All I can see on my screen is the shape of your mouth.’ His own mouth was inches above it, deliberately postponing the moment when they would come together.
Cressy began to tremble. She had never felt like this with anyone—as if her body were plugged in to some invisible current which was coursing through her in long, slow tremors of pleasure.
A sound came from deep in his throat, sounding between a growl and a purr. Then his head came down and closed the gap, his lips fastening softly on hers.
This time was better than the first time. She had been nervous then, and shy, conscious that he was a stranger. Now all she knew was that to be here in the shelter of his shoulders, close to his powerful body, parting her lips to the sweet persuasion of his mouth, was to experience a bliss beyond anything she had imagined.
Nicolas shifted closer, the bed creaking under his weight as he slid an arm underneath her, pressing her to him. But there was none of the impatience, none of the urgent gropings she had come to dread. His feelings were under control. This was persuasion and tenderness, not the aggressive lust which had always turned her off.
He released her mouth for a moment. ‘What is it about you?’ he whispered close to her ear, his tee
th softly nibbling the lobe, before his mouth moved down her neck to the base of her throat.
‘Señorita...’
It was Nicolas’s smothered curse rather than the voice of Kate’s neighbour which brought Cressy down to earth.
‘I don’t believe this... first the cat, now that flaming woman. What the hell does she want?’
‘Perhaps she will go away,’ Cressy breathed.
‘No, she won’t...she’ll come barging up here. I doubt tact is something she’s ever heard of.’ He sat up, shaking his head as if to clear it. ‘I’ll go down and tell her you’re busy, and keep her talking while you comb your hair and compose yourself. If you come down now, looking rumpled, in twenty-four hours the whole neighbourhood will believe we’ve been up to no good.’ He gave a reluctant laugh. ‘Chance would be a fine thing.’
As he rose from the bed and moved away Cressy felt laughter bubbling up inside her. She continued to lie where she was, a hand over her mouth to muffle any sounds. She recognised her mirth as being slightly hysterical, the kind of convulsive laughter which came in moments of stress, and sometimes dissolved into tears.
Now that the current was switched off, and her body was returning to normal, was she frustrated or relieved? It was difficult to be sure.
Minutes before, Kate’s bedroom had seemed like a golden cocoon enclosing her with a man from whom, as he already held her heart, it seemed foolish to withhold her body.
But now, when she looked around, it seemed a frowsty place to make love.
She got up and tided herself. Then, quickly gathering up some of the things Kate had kept but would never make use of again, she went down to join the others.
Evidently Nicolas had explained that she was having a clear-out. Now Senora Guillot seemed less interested in the possible impropriety of the situation than in picking over any rejects. Her gaze focused on what Cressy was carrying and Nicolas, seeing the acquisitive look, said something which he then translated.
‘I’ve told her that if there’s anything of use to her in the stuff you’re discarding, she’s welcome to have it,’ he said. ‘Her generation throw nothing out if there’s a possibility it can be recycled.’
When the cottage had been closed up, and they were returning to their vehicles, Nicolas slipped his hand inside Cressy’s upper arm, just above the elbow, and drew her to a halt.
‘Perhaps it’s just as well there is an active neighbourhood watch around here,’ he said quizzically. ‘That wasn’t the best time or place.’
His fingers slid down her arm until, closing on her hand, they lifted it for him to kiss in the traditional gesture of homage and gallantry.
‘Next time I’ll make sure everything is perfect,’ he promised, before walking away to where he had left the Range Rover in the shade of a carob tree.
Later, on the way to the hospital, Cressy said, ‘Kate only wears pyjamas when the weather is chilly. She has no light summer nightclothes. She’s having to wear the gowns the hospital issue, things with tapes at the back. I’d like to buy her a couple of decent nighties. Do you know of a shop where they sell them?’
‘I’ll take you to the one my mother shops at—or did when she lived here,’ said Nicolas.
Like her, he had showered and changed. Cressy was having to wear the same skirt she had worn to the party with a different T-shirt—pale blue with a bunch of white roses stencilled on the chest. It was French, one of Frances’s cast-offs.
Nicolas was wearing a white linen shirt with dark blue cotton trousers. As usual, a cotton scarf gave the opennecked shirt a touch of formality. Cressy had noticed that, while most men who wore scarves either knotted them or pulled the ends through a ring, he put the scarf on backwards, bringing the ends round to the front so that the knot left only very short ends. It was a method which might derive from the cloths worn by Bedouins and other wilderness travellers, where the air was full of sand or bitterly cold. It could only work on a long, lean neck and it had a panache rare in heterosexual men, unless they happened to be artists. She had often wished her family knew more creative people, instead of all the dull power-seekers and moneymakers who made up their milieu. Given a choice, she would have liked her father to be a painter or musician, and her mother a creative homemaker.
‘You’ve gone very quiet,’ said Nicolas. ‘Something on your mind?’
‘Only thoughts about what shapes our lives.’
‘We shape our lives,’ he said firmly. ‘We have to accept our heredity and our childhood environment, but after that it’s up to us. Everyone has the option to go with the flow, whatever it happens to be, or to say, “No, I want something different” and to make it happen. What’s your secret dream, Cressy?’
To love and be loved was the answer. But she couldn’t say that to him. It would sound as if she was fishing for a proposal, holding a gun to his head, implying that without commitment there wouldn’t be a ‘next time’.
‘I’m not sure that I have one,’ she said. ‘Apart from the commonplace things that everyone wants. Perhaps I’m a late developer and some consuming passion will come to me later in life. The grandmother of some children I escorted from Heathrow to spend a holiday with her told me she didn’t discover her métier until she was forty-five. Her husband had been in the Army and they’d lived all over the world in Service quarters. It was only when he retired and they bought a house with a neglected garden that she became a passionate gardener.’
‘That can happen,’ he agreed. ‘I know several people who’ve found their forte late in life.’
As he told her about some of them Cressy realised he was the first man she had ever enjoyed listening to. The previous men in her life—if they could be called that, and if Nicolas could be included with them—had talked about cars, sport, programmes on TV and what Fuzzy called ‘trouble at t’mill’, meaning problems with difficult superiors and office politics in general.
Cressy had listened out of politeness rather than with real interest. But with Nicolas it was different. He had a much broader perspective, and she sensed that his mind was already so richly stocked that if he talked for a lifetime she would never be bored. The question was, could she keep him interested?
Nicolas stayed in the waiting area at the end of Kate’s corridor while Cressy went to see if Miss Dexter felt equal to receiving a visitor.
‘By all means. Wheel him in.’
‘I’ve brought you a couple of nighties. Would you like to change into one of them? Shall I get someone to help you?’ Cressy suggested, thinking the old lady might not like to expose her body to a much younger relation.
‘I’m sure young Alaró won’t give a damn what I’m wearing, so I’ll stay as I am. But it’s a kind thought, Cressida. I’ll change to a nightdress tomorrow. This hospital gown reminds me too much of a shroud...and I’m not ready for one of those yet.’
Cressy went to the door. She could see Nicolas flipping through a dog-eared magazine, but just then he looked up and saw her beckoning.
When he came through the doorway she introduced them, watching him come to the other side of the bed and take Kate’s good hand in his. Would she succumb to his charm? Cressy wondered. Or would it alienate her? In the books written in her heyday, she had seemed to hate men as a sex. But she must have felt differently about the young man in the photographs or she wouldn’t have kept his letters.
To her relief, they seemed to take to each other. It turned out that Kate had been a pioneer backpacker in the days when it had been safe—or much safer than now—for a woman to hitchhike and walk round Europe alone. She had been to Kathmandu before the hippie invasion, and to Goa when no one had heard of it.
When Kate’s supper tray was brought in, Nicolas looked at it and said, ‘That’s not very appetising. There’s a restaurant round the corner where Cressy and I were going to eat—I’ll get them to do some take-out for the three of us. I shan’t be more than half an hour.’
When he had gone, Kate said, ‘There was a time when that authori
tative manner would have raised my hackles. Now I see it differently. My problem was I was brought up by a father who thought men were gods and women were slaves. I was forty-five before I was able to look at the male sex with an unbiased eye.’
Cressy would have liked to ask her about the man in the photographs, but felt it was not the right moment. Instead she asked Kate why she had chosen Majorca as her retirement home.
‘Because twenty-eight years ago it was a cheap place to live. The other reasons—its beauty, its climate, its seclusion—are still valid. The Spanish are generous in their concessions to pensioners, their own OAPs live well. But my pension and savings have shrunk. God knows how I shall manage if I last another ten years.’ She looked thoughtfully at Cressy. ‘You have no idea how fast life passes, Cressida. Make the most of being young and beautiful. It doesn’t last long.’
As if she could read Cressy’s mind, Kate went on, ‘You don’t think you are beautiful, do you? And I didn’t notice it either the first time you walked in here. But now I can see that you are. It isn’t a conventional beauty. You are how I visualise Boudicca, the queen who led a rebellion against the Romans and, when it failed, poisoned herself. You have the looks of a warrior queen... without the temperament,’ she added dryly. ‘I suppose, in the same way that my mother and I were browbeaten by my father, you’ve been intimidated by your mother and sisters.’
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ said Cressy. ‘Although it is a bit deflating to be the only unclever one in a brilliant family.’
Kate gave one of her bark-like laughs. ‘They may be clever in one sense but, judging by what your father writes in his duty letter at Christmas, your sisters have made the same mess of their personal lives that I made of mine. I’m not even sure that your parents are happy. Their incessant round of activities suggests to me that they’re trying to avoid confronting the lack of any real communication between them.’