The Man From Madrid

by Anne Weale

  ‘I agree with you there. All the so-called “partnerships” I know are a cop-out on the guy’s part. He wants all the benefits of a wife without the responsibility. The women involved must know that, but they choose not to face it, half a loaf being better than no bread. Why do women undervalue themselves? Why don’t they say, “No, if you want me, it’s all or nothing”? They have this enormous power over men, but they almost never exert it.’

  ‘I suppose it’s hard to be strong when you’re in love with someone. I haven’t been in love, so I wouldn’t know.’

  But even as Cally said it she knew that it was a lie. She had fallen in love with Nicolás. Exactly when, she wasn’t sure, but before she had sent him packing. That was why it had made her so angry to discover what, then, had seemed like his treachery.

  His black eyebrows rose. ‘You’ve never been in love. How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-seven. Well, I’ve been through calf love,’ she conceded. ‘But that doesn’t really count. Have you ever been in love…seriously in love?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not so far. I like women. I enjoy their company. But to commit to one person for the rest of one’s life is a pretty scary undertaking. When you meet people like Todd and Leonora, who obviously care for each other as much now as when they first got together, it looks a great way to live. But couples like them aren’t thick on the ground.’

  ‘I wonder why it has worked for them?’ Cally said thoughtfully.

  ‘From what I was told about them by other people at the party, I should say it’s because they’ve given each other a lot of back-up.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She followed him round the world when he was in the oil business, and he’s always encouraged her to paint and helped finance her flair for restoring old properties which she used to do a lot when they first settled in Spain. I’m going to consult her about my place. Are you ready to eat?’

  ‘Whenever you are. Can I do anything to help?’

  ‘You can put these on the table.’ He handed her two place-mats and a handful of cutlery.

  When she had arranged them, Cally debated asking if she should draw the long curtains at the two tall living room windows and the single window in the dining area. The back door was also glazed but, as was often seen in Spain, had a hinged wooden shutter on the inside. She decided not to suggest drawing the curtains but to leave it to him to close them if he wished.

  In the light of that shattering moment of self-discovery—when her claim never to have been in love had revealed to her that she was in love—and now that her curiosity about his project had been satisfied, it would have been more sensible to have declined his invitation to stay. After tonight, she would have to be strong-minded and resist any more friendly overtures.

  He had made it clear that he wasn’t in the market for any serious relationship, and she wasn’t in the market for an affair, however enjoyable it might be at the beginning.

  Anyway, as he had said himself, women’s power over men lay in resistance not surrender. As long as she kept him at arm’s length, she would be a challenge to him. Once she succumbed, she would join the list of women he had enjoyed and discarded. Because clearly he hadn’t spent his twenties in monastic celibacy. As someone at E&B had said of another attractive man, ‘If the girls he’s laid were laid end to end, they’d stretch from London to Birmingham.’

  Cally didn’t want to think about how far a line of Nicolás’s past amours might stretch. But she knew she was not going to join the line. The only kind of relationship she wanted was one like the Drydens had. Failing that, she would rather live life on her own.

  They had finished eating and were having coffee in the living room when he suggested they watched the CNN news. Cally seldom watched TV in London and almost never in Spain.

  When the bulletin was over, she rose. ‘I must go now. Thank you for supper.’

  He made no attempt to persuade her to stay, but insisted on walking her home.

  Outside the casa rural she offered her hand. ‘Thank you again for the meal.’

  ‘My pleasure.’ He lifted her hand and brushed her knuckles, repeating the gesture she had witnessed the night before when he greeted Leonora Dryden.

  ‘Goodnight.’ He turned and walked back up the street, the way they had come.

  When Nicolás returned to La Higuera, it seemed to him that a faint fragrance of her scent lingered in the air.

  He washed the few dishes by hand, thinking how much better it would have been had she stayed the night so that, waking late, they could have had breakfast together.

  His bachelor pad in Madrid had a different atmosphere. This house was designed for two people. It made him conscious of his oneness. He had always protected his privacy, enjoyed his own company. But tonight he was suddenly aware that solitude, like everything else, had its downside: it was a near neighbour of loneliness.

  The living room was not the only room with books. They were everywhere; in the hall, on the landing, in all the bedrooms. Before going to bed, he trawled the shelves looking for the Edmund & Burke colophon. He found three of their titles and put them on the bedside table to look at later. Then he booted up his laptop, checked his emails and, having dealt with them, did a search for the publisher’s website. He spent some time there, making notes to discuss with Cally the next time he saw her.

  In bed he examined the three books, not intending to read them, but interested in their presentation. He felt that, generally speaking, British book production was not as good as American. But these books had excellent jackets, decent bindings and were printed on good quality paper without skimped margins.

  In one he found a dedication which concluded ‘…and to Cally Haig, my editor, who made the whole process so much less painful than it might have been. Without her constant encouragement—and occasional, well-deserved raps on the knuckles—it would never have been finished on time. Unquestionably, she is one of the pearls of her profession.’

  The tribute had been written by a man who, judging by his photo on the back jacket flap, had a good deal of charisma.

  Nicolás wondered if their relationship had been personal as well as professional. Changing his mind, he began to read.

  Cally spent a restless night. In several long wakeful periods, she grappled with the catastrophic revelation that her heart was no longer her own but, against her conscious will, had found its way into someone else’s keeping. It was an uncomfortable feeling, which was obviously why her mind had tried to deny that it had happened.

  Getting up at her usual early hour, despite lack of sleep, she composed a brief thank-you note to be emailed to Nicolás when she picked up the incoming emails. To her surprise, when they downloaded there was one from him with the subject line E&B’s website.

  She was even more surprised when she opened the message and saw that it was an itemised and highly critical analysis of her previous employer’s website. Later, reading a print-out she was surprised yet again by his comment, ‘Obviously whoever is in charge of the site is not looking at other publishers’ sites and learning from them. A good way to attract visitors is to have messageboards where readers can discuss books they have/have not enjoyed. See, for example the messageboards at www.eharlequin.com.’

  Cally knew that Harlequin was arguably the world’s best-known romance publisher, but she wouldn’t have expected him to know it. How and when had he acquired that esoteric bit of knowledge? Had one of his girlfriends been a romance reader? Next time they met she would ask him.

  And next time she would also have to admit that she wasn’t with E&B any more. However humiliating it might be to explain that she had been sacked, it was time to be upfront with him. If she went on deceiving him and somehow he found out, that would be even more damaging to his opinion of her.

  She wished his opinion was a matter of indifference to her. But, if she were honest, suddenly it mattered a lot.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  AT THE end of November, Valdeca
rrasca was the scene of a small but popular arts and crafts fair that attracted people of all nationalities. For a couple of weeks beforehand, banners proclaiming a Feria de Artesanía hung across the main street to catch the eye of motorists passing through.

  The fair took place in the plaza mayor where about thirty stalls were crowded together, and the local bars sold more drinks and coffees in two days than they did in a month of normal business. Every available street parking space in the village was occupied and the visitors’ cars lined the roads outside it and some of the lanes through the vineyards.

  The fair continued after dark and this year there were some Christmas-style illuminations suspended above the square to show that, despite its small population, Valdecarrasca was keeping up with the times.

  A similar feria took place in the spring. A few years earlier, Cally had been home for Easter and bought several presents at the fair, including one for herself, a hand-printed silk scarf in the sea-water colours she loved. This time she hoped to find gifts for Olivia, Deborah and other friends in the UK.

  She had her first look round the stalls at mid-morning on the Saturday. At the previous fair, so her parents had told her, there had been complaints that professional street vendors were taking over an event intended to be a showcase for local artists and craftsmen. But this time the balance was in their favour though, to Cally’s disappointment, the woman from whom she had bought her beautiful scarf was not there.

  She was looking at hair ornaments made from old silver forks with their tines fashioned into curls and squiggles when there was one of the traffic snarl-ups that punctuated feria days. The stall where she was standing was close to the road when the usual barrage of hooting broke out.

  She heard a British voice say, ‘Cor…I wouldn’t mind having that!’

  Another voice replied, ‘You’d need to win the lottery to buy it…and to pay for the petrol. A car like that doesn’t go far on a tankful.’

  Looking round, Cally saw that the car they were discussing was a sleek metallic silver drophead coupé with its roof down. The man at the wheel was the only one in the lineup who wasn’t using his horn or shouting advice to the village policeman who was trying to sort out the bottleneck. He looked both relaxed and amused.

  The man at the wheel was Nicolás.

  Cally moved to the railing which separated the central part of the plaza from the roadway for a closer look. Not being much interested in cars, she had no idea what make or model it was. But, as the two men had said, it was obviously very expensive. It was just as well that La Higuera had a garage, she thought. Street-parking a car like that would be asking for trouble, not only in the way of accidental damage but also malicious damage by the sort of people who resented anyone having something they could never afford themselves. Not that acts of vandalism happened in places like Valdecarrasca on the scale that they did in big cities like London. One of the things she liked about village life was not having to be on one’s guard all the time.

  Suddenly Nicolás looked up and saw her. The change in his expression from resigned patience to active pleasure sent a shiver of delight through her. Just then the traffic started moving. As he drove past where she was standing, he said, ‘Don’t go away. I want to talk to you. I’ll be with you in a few minutes.’

  An old man from the village who spent a lot of his life leaning on the railing, watching the world go by, turned to look at her.

  ‘What did he say to you?’ he asked, with the uninhibited curiosity of countrymen of his generation. ‘Was it a piropo?’

  A piropo, Cally knew, was an amorous compliment paid by men to passing women, usually something more imaginative and flattering than the sort of remarks shouted by building site workers in England.

  She shook her head. ‘He’s renting a house in the village. He wants to speak to me.’

  ‘Hmph…seems a strange place for a young fellow with a car like that to want to stay.’ The old man shook his head in perplexity at the incomprehensible vagaries of human behaviour. Then, peering at her more closely, he added, ‘Still you’re as pretty a girl as he’ll find in any big city. If I were a young man I’d want to talk to you too.’

  Cally laughed, ‘Gracias, señor. I’m sure when you were a young man, all the prettiest girls hoped you would talk to them.’

  He chuckled. ‘Perhaps…it’s a long time ago. Enjoy being young while you can. Before you know it, you’ll be as old as I am.’

  He shuffled away to join another old man, leaving Cally to wait for Nicolás.

  It was not long before she saw him entering the plaza from its upper end. As the square was now very congested, she went to meet him.

  ‘How about a coffee…if we can find a free table?’ he said, when they met by a stall selling hand-made toys.

  They were lucky. A party of four well-dressed Germans were about to vacate one of the tables under the pepper tree.

  ‘You stake a claim and I’ll go in and get the coffee,’ said Nicolás, who evidently knew that the café did not have table service.

  As she waited for him to join her, the loudspeakers around the plaza began to relay an old-fashioned love song that she had been hearing at intervals all her life. The singer had been one of Spain’s most popular artistes since before Cally was born. When she was small, and her parents were living in the south of Spain, her ambition had been to become a flamenco dancer.

  As her feet tapped in time with the music and her eyes followed the ebb and flow of people, Cally knew she would remember this sunlit morning and these moments, waiting for Nicolás, all her life. She had no idea why he wanted to talk to her. It was enough that he did.

  This was happiness…fleeting…unjustified…but authentic.

  He came back with two cups and saucers, two glasses of wine and two boat-shaped dishes of almonds on a tin tray. Having arranged them on the table, he took the tray back inside and then came and settled his tall frame in the chair beside hers.

  ‘I’ve been reading River of Life, Death and Love. I found it upstairs, the night you had supper with me. It’s a marvellous book…with high praise for your input in the foreword. Has the author got another book in the pipeline?’

  ‘Yes, but unfortunately I shan’t be editing it, and he may have to move to another publishing house.’

  Nicolás raised an eyebrow. ‘How come?’

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve misled you. I was with Edmund & Burke, but I’m not any more. I’ve been “let go” as they say. I—I didn’t mean to deceive you. I just didn’t want to talk about it at first.’

  ‘When did it happen?’ he asked.

  ‘It was in the air when you were staying with us, but the axe didn’t fall until I got back to London. It’s one of those corporate reshuffle things that happen more often than they used to. There’s really no such thing as job security these days. I imagine it’s much the same here, though I don’t have many contacts in the Spanish big business world…well, actually, none.’

  ‘I do,’ he said. ‘Have you thought about looking for an editing job in this country?’

  ‘I’ve thought about it, but, although my Spanish is OK for everyday purposes, I don’t think I could do a good job editing in Spanish. I was educated in England so I know about English literature and English allusions, but I don’t have the same sort of grasp of Spanish literature. You have to have an absolutely perfect command of a language to write in it, or to edit it, and translators need a perfect command of two languages to do their job really well.’

  Looking thoughtful, Nicolás drank some coffee. ‘I take it you’ve already made efforts to find another job in London?’

  ‘Of course, and I’m keeping a close eye on the job ads on publishers’ websites. The trouble is that this isn’t the only purge that has happened recently. There are a lot of people in the same boat. If River had been a bestseller, Rhys and I could both have relocated fairly easily. But it didn’t get the kind of promo that makes a bestseller. Excellent reviews after publication, but not enough
hype beforehand.’

  ‘Where is Rhys now?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s gone to India again, hoping to find another subject for a book. We keep in touch by email. I think one of the most surprising things in River is the fact that so many of the villages along the banks of the Ganges have facilities for sending emails.’

  ‘It didn’t surprise me as much as it would many people,’ said Nicolás. ‘When I was working in Silicon Valley in California, I discovered that India has produced an amazing number of guys who are brilliant Net technologists. If they all took their expertise home, India could lead the world in that field…and may yet do so. Tell me more about Rhys. What did he mean by the reference to you rapping his knuckles?’

  Cally laughed. ‘He has a problem sticking to a routine which is what authors have to do. It’s no use waiting for inspiration. They have to work every day, no matter what. Mental exercise is exactly like physical exercise. You have to stick with it, regardless of all distractions.’

  ‘Do you miss him?’

  The question perplexed her. ‘Miss him? What do you mean?’

  ‘Did you have a personal relationship as well as a working one?’

  Cally shook her head. ‘What made you think we might have?’

  ‘It happens when people work closely together.’

  ‘Actually we didn’t…not in a physical sense. It was almost all done by email.’

  ‘People can fall in love by email,’ said Nicolás. ‘Being attracted by someone’s mind is probably a better basis for a solid relationship than the physical attraction which is the usual starting point.’

  ‘Possibly…but Rhys’s emotions were already engaged when he sent the first chapters of the book to me and I commissioned it. He’s still in love with the woman who canoed down the Ganges with him. Didn’t you get the message that his companion on the trip was the most important person in his life? If not, what did you think the “love” in the title referred to?’

  ‘The book’s ending seemed to suggest that the love element was a transitory thing, that there was no future for them.’