by Susan Barrie
Lisa stood up. She could hardly believe that Senora Cortina had been so ungrateful that she actually complained about her
— or even about the shortage of vegetables for lunch! — but she had seen the way in which Dona Beatriz’s eyes had darted between the two of them, her employer and herself, and that it had not passed her by that at the moment of her entry they had not been discussing either puppies, or the damage Lisa had caused herself as a result of her affection for one of them.
In fact, Dona Beatriz suddenly looked a little grim, especially when she caught sight of the empty brandy glass on the table, and the various medicaments that had been used in the treatment of Lisa’s arm.
‘So much trouble,’ she said curtly, and for such a little thing! ’
‘It was not a little thing to Miss Waring.’ Dr. Fernandez replied, almost as curtly. And then, to Lisa: ‘I think it would be as well if you remained in your room until dinner-time tonight, Miss Waring. I will see that a tray of lunch is sent to you, and I recommend that you undress and go to bed. Tonight, if you are fit, we shall be delighted to see you at dinner.’
Lisa could almost feel Dona Beatriz’s surprise as she went out of the room, and she knew that the Spanish woman would never forgive the slight snub in front of her. But she would vent her displeasure on her, Lisa — not Julio Fernandez!
As she closed the door she heard Dona Beatriz say, more soothingly:
‘Poor Julio! How these things always recoil on you! But I don’t suppose the girl was really hurt, was she?’
‘She might have been badly mauled.’
‘It was a stupid thing to do. And for a bundle of bones that ought not to be given house-room! But, then, you are too kind to your servants, as well as that girl. For the remainder of today I suppose she will consider herself an invalid, and who will look after Gia? She really ought to remember that Gia is her main preoccupation. ’ Lisa did not hear the conclusion of this conversation, but she recognized that Dona Beatriz was right in what she said. Gia was her main preoccupation, and while she received such a handsome salary for looking after her she ought to concentrate on looking after her and nothing else.
Nothing else! . . . She walked to her dressing-table mirror when she reached her own room, and the sight of her dishevelled appearance appalled her, especially when she recalled that Dr. Fernandez had gazed at it quite earnestly — as if he derived a certain amount of rather curious pleasure from doing so!
She picked up a comb and automatically ran it through her hair, having no intention whatsoever of shirking her duties for the rest of that day and retiring to bed. And her pulses quickened as she recalled the doctor’s words:
If you still feel the same way about roses! ’ The one
perfect rose in the garden! But it was hardly likely it would ever be for her.
CHAPTER TEN
The lunch for Peter’s Aunt Grizelda was a great success, and after it was over Lisa was able to admit to herself that she had enjoyed every moment of it.
Aunt Grizel, for one thing, was quite unlike anyone she had ever met before, and if ever a personality had a stimulating quality about her, she had it. She was Miss Grizel Tracey, possibly somewhere in her early sixties, with close-cropped hair, shaggy white eyebrows that overhung a lively and humorous — and shrewd — pair of greyish-blue eyes, and a weather-beaten face that had remained throughout its life as Nature intended it. No light dusts of powder for Miss Tracey, skin tonics or creams to disguise the fine networks of wrinkles that had probably formed soon after she was thirty at the corners of her eyes and mouth, largely because she had a habit of throwing back her head and laughing until the eyes nearly closed, and her lips were so frequently stretched above her excellent dentures that the skin had become loosened at the corners, and lost most of its elasticity. But that would never bother Aunt Grizel. Any more than prematurely white hair had bothered her, and it would certainly never occur to her to use a colorful rinse that would make it look absolutely lovely.
Aunt Grizel had made up her mind in her teens that she was not good-looking, and that marriage would probably pass her by. And the fact that it had passed her by had not embittered her.
She could chat happily about her old school friends’ domestic problems now that they were grandmothers, and chuckle wickedly because they were never likely to overtake her. Such problems as daughters who expected rather a lot in the way of baby-sitting, and older grandchildren for whom some sort of a permanent home had to be maintained in order that they could spend at least a part of their holidays with their grandmother.
‘The only grandchildren I’ve got are the pictures I’ve never sold,’ she admitted, ‘and those I cart happily about the world with me because I can’t bear to be without them. And as I couldn’t bear a permanent home they’re the ideal grandchildren for me. ’
Although it was a very warm day, with the temperature likely to rise a good deal higher during the afternoon, she wore a tweed suit and nylon stockings of heavy mesh, and the only vice she appeared to have cultivated — that of smoking heavily, even between the courses of a meal
— provided Lisa with a real surprise when, during the coffee stage of the lunch, she tried to induce her nephew to accept one of the long, dark, Spanish cigarettes she extracted from a pocket of her handbag.
She caught Lisa’s eyes, with surprise written largely in them, fixed on her, and her own eyes twinkled as she explained:
‘I love Spanish cigarettes, just as I love everything Spanish
— the food, the wines, the people, the scenery, the fiestas, the bullfights! Yes: even bullfights! ’ Her eyes twinkled still more as Lisa strove politely to conceal her surprise. ‘They’re not half as gory as they’re made out to be, you know — when you get over the initial shock, and the excitement begins to get hold of you. Have you ever shared in the excitement of a real Spanish crowd?’ she asked the girl. ‘Felt it make your blood flow more quickly, as if you’d had too much champagne?’
Lisa shook her head. Then she explained, with a faintly humorous smile of her own:
‘But I’ve never had too much champagne, either.’
Aunt Grizel sent her a quizzical glance.
‘Then that’s an experience in store for you — a pleasant experience so long as it is only a little too much! ’ Her eyes seemed to find the girl an interesting study, and the fact that her nephew had been so keen for them to meet had intrigued her before ever the meeting had taken place. ‘My nephew tells me you came to Spain for a holiday. Miss Waring, and remained to look after some child or other. That looking after children is your job. Do you enjoy it?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Lisa assured her, and as she looked around the cool, airy, principal lounge of San Cecilio’s leading hotel — the hotel where she had passed that fortnight of her holiday — she could have added that it was here that she had met the man who was the father of the child since become her charge. But for some reason she didn’t do so. Miss Tracey’s eyes were very shrewd — a little too shrewd, perhaps — and Lisa was afraid she might give herself away if she spoke of Dr. Fernandez. She might color, or her eyes might reveal something. ... So she left it to Peter to explain casually:
‘By the way, Aunt Grizel, you probably know Lisa’s employer. Fellow called Fernandez. Dr. Julio Fernandez.
Practices in Madrid, and looks as if he ought to be terribly well-known. Heart specialist, or something. ...’
‘Julio Fernandez?’ Aunt Grizel looked interested. ‘Oh, yes, I know him. Or I know of him. ’ She explained to Lisa: ‘I have a flat in Madrid, and although I only stay there for a part of each year, I do know quite a lot of people whom I meet frequently when I’m in the capital. Spaniards love entertaining, and they do it very well, and as it happens your Dr. Fernandez is socially very much sought after. He’s a widower, isn’t he? And he isn’t a heart specialist, Peter, he’s a neurologist. ’
‘Well, hearts and minds go together, don’t they? Peter murmured flippantly. ‘The one is never affected,
in an emotional sense, unless the other sanctions the interference with normal routine,’ looking at Lisa with an oblique, amused blue gaze.
Aunt Grizel shook her head at him.
‘Dr. Fernandez is not interested in the mental attitude that is the result of some wayward capitulation of the heart. Although, as a matter of fact’— looking as if she was not above a bit of gossip when it came her way — ‘there is a rather devastating widow who has been doing her best to trap him into a second incursion into matrimony for several years now, and his friends will have it that she’ll succeed one day. The marvel is that she hasn’t succeeded before this, because she’s quite ravishing in the way some of these Spanish women are, and a doctor needs a wife
— particularly a doctor of his eminence. Socially she’s practically indispensible, and it must have been a bit of a handicap to him to struggle along without one for so long. ’
‘I think you’re referring to our Dona Beatriz,’ Peter said, ‘when you speak of a ravishing Spanish widow, and I agree with the doctor’s friends that he won’t have to struggle along with a handicap much longer. ’ Again he looked at Lisa, but questioningly this time. ‘Don’t you agree with me, Lisa? Aren’t all the signs at the moment indicating that your employer will provide his motherless child with a substitute mother before very long?’
‘I ------- ‘ Lisa knew that anyone with any powers
of observation would agree with him, but somehow she couldn’t, and she felt rather than saw Miss Tracey’s eyes become attracted to her as if she was a magnet.
‘You — what, Miss Waring?’ the older woman asked, with a bright sparkle of alertness in her eyes. She put her close-cropped white head on one side, and looked at the girl from that angle. ‘If you’re looking after Dr. Fernandez’ child you probably know a little more about him than we do. Is it true that he’s packing the child off to school in England this autumn?’
‘There is talk of it,’ Lisa admitted. ‘I think,’ she added, ‘Dona Beatriz, who is the doctor’s guest at the moment, is rather keen for him to do so. ’
‘ Ah! ’ Aunt Grizel exclaimed, as if that explained a great deal. ‘Then she’ll probably win, for I believe the child — whom I’ve never met
— is a plain little monkey, quite unlike her beautiful mother, whose death, everyone says, upset the doctor so very much that he never took kindly to his only child. Which always strikes me as a most unnatural attitude on the part of a father. ’ ‘Not if — if her birth caused the death of the woman he loved,’ Lisa felt forced to defend her employer, but the words sounded stiff and unnatural as they left her lips.
Miss Tracey looked at her as if she was really beginning to interest her.
‘Tell me,’ she asked suddenly, ‘how much you like your job? You find that you fit into a Spanish household?’
Lisa hesitated, not because she was uncertain, but because she felt embarrassed.
‘I like it very much,’ she admitted at last. ‘But it will only last until the autumn —or until Dr. Fernandez makes up his mind about his daughter’s future.’
‘Or Dona Beatriz makes it up for him?’
‘Perhaps. ’
‘And after that you will go home? Back to England?’ Lisa nodded.
‘You won’t look for another job in Spain?’
‘I — don’t think so.’
This time it was Aunt Grizel who nodded, as if she understood perfectly, and then she changed the subject by asking her nephew about his cottage, and insisting that they went there for tea.
It was the first time Lisa had actually visited Peter’s cottage, although she had seen the outside of it when she and Gia had been sauntering along the white road from which it lay back in a grove of trees. It was a typical small, whitewashed, Spanish cottage, with a green-tiled roof, and shutters that were fastened back against the walls. The garden was unkempt because nobody ever worked in it, but inside a local
Catalan employ maintained a certain amount of order, and if the furnishings were bare and crude, they didn’t shock his aunt.
‘You could do worse,’ she said. ‘I rented a place like this myself once, on this very same coast, and did some wonderful work, because the light is so extraordinarily perfect, and there were so many subjects for my canvases.’ She looked in the kitchen for tea, and when she discovered that there was none produced a packet from her capacious handbag of stout crocodile skin. ‘I brought this for you,’ she said, ‘because I expected you’d be living on coffee, and I have some sent out from England regularly. The one thing I can’t do without is my cup of tea!’
Lisa rather enjoyed that alfresco meal, with Peter apologizing for the discomforts and the deficiencies, and looking embarrassed when it was discovered that he actually did some of his own washing, because the woman he employed wasn’t very good at it, and she was even worse at ironing.
‘In fact, she’s not a very good cook, either,’ Peter had to admit. ‘Some of the meals she serves up are practically inedible, and run largely to greasy stews and lashings of garlic, so I eat out mostly. But fortunately I don’t have to pay rent for this place, so my currency is being eked out quite comfortably. ’
‘And what happens when it has run out altogether?’ his aunt inquired, sitting on a backless chair in the kitchen and drinking with relish the strong tea she had brewed.
Peter looked vague.
‘I don’t quite know. ’ In addition to the fact that he had been ill recently, he appeared to have the kind of temperament that refused to allow him to settle down in one particular job, and the fact that he had a certain amount of talent as a writer was another reason why the very thought of a routine job was inclined to upset him. He looked at Lisa. ‘I’m like Lisa here
— I drift from one rather uncongenial job to another, and hope that in the next I will find the answer to all my secret dreams and aspirations! ’
His aunt made a disapproving noise.
‘Then the sooner you make up your mind about your secret dreams and aspirations the better, unless you want to turn into a Mr. Micawber, continually hoping that something will ‘turn up’! But I decline to believe that Lisa’ — by this time she had abandoned the more formal Miss Waring — ‘is looking for anything very special from her jobs, apart from the one thing most young women look for. And as an old maid I can voice it as my opinion that it is a good thing to look for, if you don’t want to be lonely all your days — and of course I’m talking about marriage!’ She focused her gaze carefully on the girl, to witness her reactions. ‘Marriage is for young women like Lisa
— and she knows it! Don’t you, my dear?’
Lisa blushed almost painfully, and borrowed a teaspoon to remove a tea-leaf from her cup.
‘I suppose there are other things,’ she murmured, rather inaudibly.
Miss Tracey shook her head.
‘Not for girls who look like you! I never had golden hair, and a skin like a drift of apple blossom (quite a relief after the sallow complexions one sees around here, even to an old woman like me, so I wonder at the effect on some of the younger Spaniards with whom you must already
have come in contact!) and eyes------------‘ She seemed
to run out of descriptive adjectives when she got to Lisa’s eyes, so she suddenly sighed and shook her head. ‘So I got passed over, and remained single, and although it never bothered me at all I wouldn’t recommend it for Lisa! ’
All at once she seemed to have an idea.
‘You must come and stay with me in Madrid when your job comes to an end, my dear. I’ve only a tiny flat, but there’s room enough for you, if you don’t mind sharing what space there is with a lot of artist’s clutter! And I’ll show you Madrid, and believe me there’s a lot to see there — and provide you with some pleasanter memories to carry back to England than the inside of a Spanish nursery. And if Peter is still trying to make up his mind about his future he can come too. I can’t put him up, but we’ll find him a reasonable guesthouse, and I don’t mind footing t
he bill,’ looking at her nephew, ‘if it will enable you to make up your mind what you do want to do with your life, apart from waste it! ’
He smiled ruefully.
‘I shouldn’t think there’s anything I can do in Spain. ’
‘Not anything you can do in Spain, perhaps — but you can always arrive at a few conclusions, and they might enable you to make a few decisions,’ with so much meaning in her look that he appeared suddenly enlightened, and grinned.
‘I see,’ he said. ‘I see!’
‘I wonder whether you do,’ she remarked obscurely, and started to gather up the cups and saucers. ‘We’ll wash these up for you before I go back to my hotel, and Lisa returns to her charge. And remember, Lisa, I shall look forward to seeing you in the autumn — and before that, if you can get away. Perhaps you could get away for a few days’ break? Madrid is bracing in the cooler weather, but the color and the magic are there in the height of summer. ’
Lisa thanked her, but she didn’t think it likely that she would get a few days’ break — and she knew that she would shrink from asking for them. Dona Beatriz would almost certainly elevate her eyebrows and look amazed when the information was passed on to her that the English girl failed to look upon her well-paid holiday post as a holiday post — which of course it was!
Gia was not actually receiving much tuition, and their days were passed in a pleasant monotony of sunshine and aimless attempts to amuse themselves against a background of blue sea and brilliant color. Therefore, what more could the English girl want — or expect?
At least, that was what Lisa imagined would be Dona Beatriz’s reaction if she asked for a few days to go and stay with Grizelda Tracey in Madrid.