by Anne Weale
‘If you liked it, why did you leave?’
‘I liked it and I miss it,’ he said, staring at the horizon. ‘But there’s more to life than being a fighter, which is what the Légion is about. They’re crack fighting men—France’s best—but it’s like being a monk—except that a légionnaire doesn’t swear to give up women,’ he added, with a fleeting grin.
‘Are they allowed to marry?’ Cassia asked.
‘They’re allowed to, and some do. But they can be away from their families for months on end. It’s better for a légionnaire to be single and screw around,’ he went on bluntly. ‘There’s no shortage of willing birds for any guy wearing the képi blanc.’ Suddenly turning his head to look directly at her, he said quietly, ‘That’s OK in your early twenties, but after a while it’s not what you want any more. You want a woman of your own. Someone to love…to love you.’
Cassia found this statement, coming from such a tough-looking man, profoundly touching. It brought a lump to her throat.
‘Everyone wants that, I guess,’ she said, hunting for a comb to sort out her tangled hair. ‘How old were you when you joined the Légion, Jack?’
‘Seventeen, but I looked older. I’ve been out four years. I’m thirty-one. How old are you?’
‘Twenty-two.’
‘At times you seem younger…other times older,’ he told her. ‘I guess that’s because you’re quiet. Most young girls make a lot of noise. I don’t like all that giggling and chattering. Shall we go up and have a coffee?’
It was late afternoon when they returned to the village. Laura and her friend were still out.
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Cassia asked.
‘Good thinking. While you’re making it I’ll rinse the salt out of our beach stuff and hang it out to dry.’
Handing over her rolled-up towel, she cautioned, ‘My swimsuit won’t stand a lot of vigorous wringing. It needs to drip dry.’
While they were drinking tea, and Jack was eating a wedge of Manchego cheese in a chunk of barra negra to keep him going until suppertime, he said, ‘Would you like to see my photo gallery of the guys I was with in sauteurs ops?’
Thinking he meant to bring down a photograph album, she said, ‘Yes, please.’
‘They’re taped to the door of my cupboard. Let’s take a refill up with us,’ he said, reaching for the teapot.
Mindful of Simón’s warning, she searched for a tactful pretext for changing her mind, but couldn’t think of one. Anyway, she was sure that Jack had no ulterior motive for inviting her up to his room. Or was she being foolishly naïve? They were alone in the house.
‘What does sauteurs ops mean?’ she asked on the way upstairs. ‘Something to do with parachuting?’
‘It’s a special operations force—the equivalent of the Special Air Service in the UK. At the end of my basic training I went on to do parachute training.’
In his room he opened the wardrobe, revealing that both doors were covered with mementoes of his service life.
‘That’s a picture of Capitaine Danjou’s wooden hand,’ he explained, pointing to a photograph of an articulated hand lying on top of an elaborate, glass-sided casket. ‘It’s the Légion’s most revered relic.’
While she peered at the finely carved and polished hand, Jack brought a chair for her to sit on and named and described some of his brothers-in-arms. As he talked she began to understand the strength of their camaraderie and to sense how much he missed it.
She was about to ask him if he could re-enlist if he wished, when they heard a sound from below.
‘That’ll be Laura coming back.’ Jack swallowed a mouthful of cooling tea.
‘Was that your everyday headgear?’ Cassia asked, looking at the green beret hanging near the top of the door.
He took it down from its hook. ‘Yes, the képi blanc is for walking out and parades. We wear these pulled down to the left, not to the right like the British.’ Suddenly he put it on, moulding it to his head, his expression remote, as if the feel of it took him back to the world he had left and still missed.
‘You’ve been swimming, I see,’ said a voice from the doorway, making Cassia jump. It wasn’t Laura who had come up to join them.
It was Simón.
Jack whipped off the beret, as if he felt foolish to have been caught wearing it. Cassia rose to her feet, also feeling uncomfortable. Suddenly the atmosphere was full of tension.
‘Ah, Capitaine Danjou’s famous hand,’ Simón said, his eyes on the photograph.
‘You know about him?’ Jack sounded surprised.
‘Of course,’ said Simón. ‘The stand at Camerone is one of the most famous incidents in modern military history. Sixty men against two thousand…and, when the Mexican commander demanded the last three légionnaires surrender to him, although they were wounded they would only give up on condition that they kept their arms and were allowed to look after their comrades with worse wounds. He’s on record as saying, “One can refuse nothing to men like you”.’
As he spoke Cassia saw the reason they hadn’t heard him coming was that he was wearing tennis clothes and rubber-soled shoes, suggesting the decision to return to Castell today had been an impulse.
‘We weren’t expecting you,’ she said. ‘Laura’s still out with her friend. As we’ve all had lunch out today, it’s going to be a cold supper…if that’s all right with you?’
She was thinking that if he hadn’t had his main meal at lunchtime she had better start preparing something hot for him. It was possible that Laura might not get back until late if, after their drive, the two women had gone to Benidorm.
‘Fine with me,’ he answered, giving her the briefest of glances before returning his attention to the array of mementoes.
‘The founder and hero of Spain’s Foreign Legion was Colonel Millan Astray,’ he told Jack. ‘He was wounded five times and lost a leg and an eye. His battle cry was “Viva la muerte!” Long live death. He borrowed a lot of ideas from the French Legion.‘
Cassia knew that he was angry with her. It would not be apparent to Jack, but she knew it was so—even though it must be clear to Simón that nothing had been going on except a demonstration of the other man’s ongoing allegiance to the army which had, in his own words, made a man of him.
In a gap in the men’s conversation she excused herself and slipped away. It had not needed Simón’s return to remind her of his parting kiss. It had been at the back of her mind every hour of every day since he’d left. Why he had kissed her goodbye she was still not sure. To tease her, seemed the most likely answer.
In her room, tidying herself for the evening, she remembered the feel of his palm against her cheek and the pressure of his lips on hers. Not technically her first kiss, because when she was fourteen a boy of fifteen had planted an inexpert kiss on her startled mouth while they’d gathered shellfish together. And there had been a couple of one-off kisses since then. But Simón’s kiss had been the first to make her long for more.
She had changed her T-shirt for a butter-coloured cotton sweater, replacing the pinafore over it and adding a twisted scarf to the neck of the sweater, when there was a knock on her door.
Unless Laura had returned, it could be Jack or it could be Simón. She couldn’t see any reason for Jack to come to her room, which meant that it was probably Simón. She debated calling out that she wasn’t decent at the moment, but she knew that would only postpone the reprimand she was expecting. She went to the door and opened it.
Simón was still in his tennis kit, but the cable-knit sweater which earlier had been thrown over his shoulders with the sleeves loosely tied at the front was now pulled on over his white shirt.
His expression unrevealing, he said, ‘How have things been going?’
‘Pretty well.’ She took a step back. ‘Come in.’
He walked into her room, looking round it, taking in the changes she’d made—the shawl and cushions on the bed, the books on the chest of drawers, the other personal touches.<
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‘Won’t you sit down?’ She gestured towards the basket chair by the window, seating herself on the upright chair by the table. ‘I think I know what you’re going to say.’
The other chair creaked as he settled himself, crossing his long brown legs, their colour emphasised by the whiteness of his shorts and socks.
‘What am I going to say?’
‘My guess is you’re going to repeat what you said before…about my being in Jack’s room.’
‘Actually, no…it would be wasting my breath. I told you what I thought. You chose to ignore it. That’s that,’ he said astringently.
‘I didn’t ignore what you said. I did think about it. When Jack offered to show me his Legion photos I didn’t realise where he kept them. I thought they’d be in an album he meant to bring down to the kitchen. When I found out they weren’t, how could I refuse to go upstairs with him? It would have been hurtful and insulting.’
‘If Jack were half as au fait with the outcome of recent battles in the sex war as he is with successful actions carried out by the Légion Étrangère, he might have been wary of asking you to his room,’ he said coldly. ‘These days a woman has only to claim sexual harassment and a man is in serious trouble.’
‘Jack knows I wouldn’t do that.’
‘You might, if something happened you couldn’t cope with and you panicked. According to my mother, a lot of the things defined as “harassment” now were, in her day, considered the natural hazards of being an attractive female.’
‘I thought Spanish girls of your mother’s generation always had a duenna keeping an eye on them.’
‘Most of them did, but my mother happens to be English. She had to cope on her own…and, judging by what she’s told me, did it with great aplomb.’
‘You mentioned that your mother was brought up in England, but I didn’t realise she was English,’ said Cassia. ‘You look totally Spanish.’
‘The de Mondragóns are mongrels. We have Moorish genes, Genoese genes—all kinds of genes in our bloodline. Fifty-seven varieties. Being mostly diplomats or soldiers, the majority of my ancestors found their wives outside Spain, although my grandfather married a girl who gave us a transfusion of undiluted Spanish blood.’
His eye fell on the photographs on her dressing table. ‘Are those your parents?’
‘Yes.’
Simón rose, crossed the room and picked up the picture of her father—a snap she had taken herself while John Browning had been at work on a painting.
‘A very distinguished-looking man,’ he said as he replaced it.
The photograph of her mother was a print of a studio portrait that Cassia had found between the pages of a book. Fearing that her father might order her to destroy it, she had said nothing about it, and had not bought a frame for it until after his death.
‘Very pretty,’ observed Simón, studying the oval face and then turning his head to compare it with Cassia’s. ‘Much prettier than her daughter,’ he said, with deflating frankness. ‘But you, as your father could have told you but probably didn’t, have the makings of a beauty.’
‘Me…a beauty?’ she said, staggered.
‘Certainly…in a few years. Even now you’re…very taking.’ He replaced the photo beside that of her father and cast his eye over the other things on the dressing table, which luckily she had dusted and tidied that morning. They included the silver hoop earrings that she had been going to put on when his rap on the door had deflected her. He picked them up. ‘Are you wearing these tonight?’
She nodded, intensely aware of his nearness. Being close to him like this disturbed her more, she discovered, than lying against Jack’s bare chest.
Simón removed the butterfly fastener from the pin of one of the hoops. Holding it between his finger and thumb, he put the tip of his longest finger behind the lobe of her ear and inserted the pin in the hole, then made it secure with the butterfly. The touch of his hand against her cheek, and the intimacy of the service he was performing, made her heart lose its normal rhythm and beat in palpitating thumps. He did the same with the other hoop.
‘Spanish girls have their ears pierced as babies. When were yours done?’
‘When I was sixteen.’
‘Was it very painful?’
‘Only for a few seconds.’ She had fixed her eyes on the V of the neck of his tennis sweater, unable to meet his gaze at such close quarters. ‘The jeweller did something to deaden the pain. He was very quick and expert.‘
‘Take care to choose someone equally expert to perform that other, not dissimilar rite of passage in a woman’s life,’ he said, resting his hands on her shoulders.
As she grasped what he meant she flashed a quick, upward glance and saw his dark eyes glinting with wicked amusement.
On an uneven breath, she said, ‘What makes you think someone already hasn’t?’
‘If they had, you wouldn’t be blushing so deliciously. You may have been kissed before, but you haven’t had a lover, have you?’
‘No, I haven’t,’ she admitted. ‘I suppose in your world that makes me some kind of freak.’
‘It makes you a rarity,’ he said drily. ‘Do you understand the term “sport” in its botanical sense?’
She shook her head.
‘I picked it up from my mother, an enthusiastic gardener. A sport is a plant that differs from others of the same species in some significant way. That can make it very desirable.’ His hands shifted slightly, his forefingers gently caressing the sides of her neck.
She knew that he was making love to her and she didn’t know how to deal with it, so she did nothing, submitting in pulse-racing silence to his touch and his look, waiting for what he would do next, which she was almost certain would be to kiss her again.
It was one of those moments in life when time seemed to come to a stop.
‘Cassia…Cassia…telephone…’
Laura’s urgent voice, coming up from somewhere below, made the world start spinning again.
Simón took his hands from her shoulders and Cassia pulled herself together. ‘It can’t be for me. I don’t know anyone who would telephone me. It must be for you.’
‘Perhaps it’s Alvarez, calling to find out how you’re getting on,’ he suggested.
‘I did write to him last week, but he wouldn’t ring me on a Sunday. He’ll be at home with his family,’ she said as, with Simón moving more leisurely at her heels, she hurried downstairs.
‘Ah, there you are!’ exclaimed Laura, starting to come up the stairs as they came quickly down.
‘Who is it, Laura? Did they say?’
‘A girl…she didn’t give her name. I had only come in a few moments before the telephone started ringing. When did you get back, Don Simón? I didn’t see your car outside.’
On her way to the telephone, Cassia heard him say, ‘I came in a friend’s private plane and he dropped me off in his car.’
The call was from Rosita, wanting to know how Cassia was getting on. ‘Señor Alvarez said he’d heard from you, but he didn’t pass on any details. How’s it working out?’
‘Very well up to now. We haven’t really got going yet. How are things with you?’
‘The same as they were when you left. I could do with some excitement in my life, I can tell you,’ Rosita said, with a loud sigh. ‘So how are things going with your new boss? Has he made a pass at you yet?’
Cassia said firmly, ‘Absolutamente!’ in the negative sense of ‘Absolutely not!’
But even as she said it she was wondering if what had happened upstairs had been the beginning of a pass that Simón would have followed through if her ex-colleague hadn’t chosen this moment to call.
Whether he would do that later was the thought paramount in her mind while she helped Laura prepare some tapas, and listened to the housekeeper describing her lunch out with her French friend.
When the men joined them conversation became general. Jack had heard that the king of Spain, Don Juan Carlos, was the owner
of a Harley-Davidson motorbike on which, his identity concealed by his crash helmet, he had been known occasionally to give a lift to one of his subjects.
Simón confirmed that this was so, and was then asked by Laura if he had met the king and Doña Sophia, the popular queen of Spain.
‘Only in formal circumstances—receptions and so on,’ he told her, clearly not as interested in the life of his country’s royal family as Laura.
Cassia was still digesting the surprising fact that his mother was an Englishwoman.
After supper Jack said that he was going to stroll down to the bar for a tercio, which she knew was a third of a litre of beer, and Simón said that he would join him.
‘There’s no side about him, is there?’ said Laura when they had gone. ‘I know people much lower down the scale than Excellency, who would turn up their noses at that scruffy little bar.’
Cassia suspected that going to the bar was a deliberate PR exercise on Simón’s part. In small doses he might find the company of the men of the village interesting. But she doubted if he liked the noise level in the bar.
The two men were still out when she and Laura retired to their rooms. Cassia spent ten minutes resewing a couple of buttons which had been coming adrift on the shirt she would be wearing tomorrow.
As she stitched them on more securely she wondered what would have happened if Rosita hadn’t rung up. Had Simón been toying with the idea of initiating her so far non-existent love-life? He certainly had the expertise, if indeed a long list of experienced ex-girlfriends was a qualification for teaching a girl with no experience.
She had always hoped that when, at long last, her curiosity was satisfied it would be with someone she loved, who loved her. Perhaps, if she hadn’t met Simón, she could have fallen in love with Jack. They had a lot in common. With Simón she had nothing in common, except that he seemed to fancy her and she was irresistibly drawn to him.
The next day, her heel having healed, she accompanied the men on another day in the mountains.