by Anne Weale
Rosie wondered what Carolyn would say if she knew Nick was not in his workroom but taking flowers to a Frenchwoman. But if he had slipped out to a rendezvous when he should have his nose to the grindstone that was his affair—in every sense of the word.
'Yes, writers can be a pain in the neck at times,' Carolyn continued. 'A lot of them treat an editor as a cross between a confessor and a psychiatrist. I've had all kinds of troubles dumped on me... not only writer's block but financial and marital difficulties... which I've had enough of in my own life,' she added, with a grimace.
Rosie felt this was a cue for her to ask what had gone wrong with Carolyn's marriage. In her experience, people did not refer to aspects of their lives they preferred to forget. But she was not in the mood to give a sympathetic hearing to the other woman's past problems so she said,
'At least you won't get the "My wife doesn't understand me" spiel from Nick.'
'No, thank God. That's a line we've all heard ad nauseam,' said Carolyn. 'But I'm sure there've been plenty of women who would have liked to marry him regardless of his being away a lot of the time. When you knew him before, did he have a regular girlfriend?'
'He left the News soon after they took me on. He was senior staff, I was a raw recruit. As you can imagine, we didn't have a lot of contact.'
'I suppose not.'
Anna returned with a cup and saucer. As she poured coffee for Rosie, she said, 'I might have still been asleep but the noise of the market below my window woke me up. I'm glad it did. It would have been a pity to waste any of this glorious day. What's the market like, Rosie?
Anything worth buying?'
'Not really. I met Jose Maria and he says the best Spanish pottery comes from Talavera de la Reina but that's a long way from here and most of the stuff they send to the costas is tawdry, made for the tourist market. When his mother was young a lot of the women in this village did beautiful needlework but now they watch television. Some women have knitting machines but the days of fine handiwork are gone.'
'Yes, Encarna told me the same thing,' said Anna. 'I asked her about the smocked dresses all the little girls wore on Sundays when John and I honeymooned here. They are still being made but, as the number of needlewomen diminishes, the prices rise. Only rich people can afford them now, she says.'
Presently Rosie went upstairs to put on a black and white two-piece she had bought on a holiday in the Seychelles with Sasha the previous winter. The intervening summer had been wet, with few opportunities to top up the golden tans they had both acquired on that trip. Her body was now back to its natural creamy colour.
After tying a scarf over her hair, she applied a total sun-block to her face. With her colouring she felt it was better to forgo a facial tan in order to conserve what Nick had called her 'lovely skin'.
It was true that she had never suffered from the common adolescent blemishes and even in her teens had been complimented on her complexion. But she was surprised that Nick had noticed her skin and remembered her 'beautiful eyes'. Had he really been struck by them. Or had both remarks been merely what her down-to-earth brothers would call 'a load of flannel'?
'Roly-poly Rosie'. Had that been what they had called her when she was not within hearing?
At least, as nicknames went, it had an affectionate ring. And there was nothing roly-poly about her now.
A few minutes ago Anna had been bemoaning her spare tyre and, although she hadn't drawn attention to them, Carolyn had what beauticians called cellulite on her thighs. But, although Rosie would have liked to be a couple of inches taller than her actual height of five feet five, at the moment she had no more problems with her figure.
In fact no problems at all, and that was the way she wanted to keep it. They were stretched out on the loungers, half asleep in the sun, when Nick's voice said, 'Time for aperitivos, girls.'
Shading her eyes with her hand, Rosie saw that he was carrying a tray bearing four tall glasses, a jug of orange juice and a bottle of champagne on ice.
'Have you finished your stint for the day?' Carolyn asked, sitting up and giving a hitch to the top of her emerald strapless one-piece.
'Yes, ma'am. For the rest of the day I'm at your disposal,' he said, with a bow and a smile. He looked pleased with himself, Rosie thought. Was it because he had spent the morning in the arms of his mistress?
'You said you would make a copy of your CV for me,' she reminded him.
'Here it is.' He put down the tray and handed her some pages of typescript inside a transparent plastic pocket.
'Thank you.' She was surprised he had remembered.
Nick filled the glasses with Buck's Fizz and handed them round. His long legs were already exposed by his khaki shorts. Now he took off his T-shirt.
The play of muscle under his deeply tanned skin as he tugged it over his head and tossed it over the back of the fourth sunbed stirred an involuntary flutter in the pit of her stomach. She looked away, knowing what she felt was not just an aesthetic response to the beauty of the human body in splendid condition.
Anna, whose lounger was next to his, reached out an arm for the T-shirt. He had already turned it the right way out and her eye had been caught by a logo on the front.
'"Costa Blanca Mountain Walkers' Club",' she read out. "'Hacia arriba"... which means
"To the top"—yes?'
He nodded. 'There are some fine walks in the mountains along this coast but it isn't a good idea to go off alone. Accidents can happen and on the more remote tracks that could be serious. When I first came to Spain there were old men and mules using a lot of the tracks, and many of the isolated c as it as were still in use if not actually inhabited. Since then the drift from the land has made it advisable to walk the mountains with a companion or in a group. Have you tried the pool? Is the temperature warm enough for you?'
'Carolyn and I have wallowed a couple of times. Rosie's the only good swimmer. She's like a dolphin in the water.'
'That remark is a typical bit of publicity director's hype,' said Rosie, smiling at Anna. 'I'm an average swimmer, but I do enjoy it.' She tucked a strand of still-wet hair behind her ear and hoped she was not going to blush because Nick's blue eyes were scanning her body. Her two-piece had been chosen for active swimming, not to show off her figure, but under his slow appraisal it suddenly felt much more scanty than it had before he joined them. Referring to their earlier conversation, he said, 'Buxom is definitely not applicable any more. Svelte is the word I'd choose now if I were composing a handout about you.'
'Rosie writes a very good press release,' said Anna. 'It's not easy to avoid the cliches of our trade, but she always manages to come up with something fresh.'
Carolyn said, 'Are your characters based on real people, Nick, or are they pure invention?'
'Surely the imagination is like a computer? Nothing can come out which hasn't been fed in,'
he answered. 'But the mind is so extremely complex that it's impossible to trace the source of every idea or image it produces. I believe everything in fiction must have its origin in fact, but the facts may have been stored and forgotten for years and so muddled up with other facts that what emerges is quite different from what went in.'
A little later, when he had dived into the pool and was having a vigorous swim before lunch, Anna said, 'I think the women in Crusade must be based on people he's known. They were too true to life not to be... especially the French girl.'
Until that moment Rosie had not connected the French girl called Laure in the book with Nick's close friend Madame Clermont here at Font Vella. But now, all at once, she felt certain that Anna was right.
The girl in the book was too original, too inherently feminine not to have been drawn from life. Nick could never have invented her. Laure had to be a thinly disguised portrait of someone he knew, someone with whom he had been—was still, it appeared—on the most intimate terms.
The realisation was so unpleasant, so much like having the contents of the ice bucket chucked over her, that
in a flash of enlightenment she knew she had never really got over her youthful infatuation.
All these years, deep in her heart, she had remained in love with him, or rather with the way she had wanted him to be. No real man had ever matched up to that idealised version of Nick. No man ever could, unless she could find a way to get Nick out of her system. She watched him reach the far end of the pool, put his hands flat on the sun-baked tiles round the edge and, with an easy movement which flexed every sinew of his broad, powerful back, swing himself out of the water.
As he strolled back to where they were sitting, his wet hair looking as black as Jose's as he raked it back from his forehead, rivulets of water coursing down the smoothly sculpted planes of his body, she wondered if the only way to destroy, finally and completely, her long-dormant feelings for him was to have an affair with him.
If she threw herself at him, would he take her?
At one o'clock Encarna appeared with a tray of tap as. Lunch would not be served until three. By now the sun was so hot it was impossible to believe that, only a short flight away from where they were basking, people were wearing overcoats and probably using umbrellas.
'But it can be cold and wet here at times in the winter,' said Nick, when Carolyn remarked that it was a wonder anyone lived in northern Europe when they could be enjoying this climate. The tapas included three different kinds of olives, pickled anchovies, thin slices of a sausage calledchorizo, snippets of mountain-cured ham and a dip served in spoonfuls on the heart leaves from an endive.
'But this isn't Spanish,' said Nick, urging them to try it. 'Encarna makes this under duress because it's a French idea and she's not keen on the French.'
'Why not?' asked Carolyn.
He shrugged. 'Irrational prejudice.'
'Does she know any French people?' Rosie asked, curious to see what he would say.
'Only one. . .the Frenchwoman who showed her how to make these bouchees which, being very touchy in some ways, Encarna took as an implied criticism of the nibbles she pro vides. In fact Marie-Laure is a charming woman. She would have enjoyed meeting you but unfortunately she's in the Benidorm Clinic for a minor op at the moment.'
So her supposition had been right, though! Rosie, with a pang. He had even used part of his inamorata's name for the character she had inspired.
'I've never heard the name Encarna before. Is it common in Spain?' Anna asked.
'Not as common as Maria and Carmen, but not uncommon,' Nick told her. 'A Spanish girl's name I like is Nieves, from the word meaning "snows". I've called the girl in my second book Snow, but I'm not sure that in English it doesn't sound affected. What do you think?'
Rosie wondered if Snow was based on a Spanish girlfriend he had had. Carolyn said. 'I like it. It's original... at least I don't think it's been used before, apart from Snow-White in the fairy-tale. I think you may have hit on a name as unusual and memorable as Margaret Mitchell's stroke of genius with Scarlett.'
'There might be a shout-line in that,' Anna said thoughtfully.
'What's a shout-line?' he asked.
'A line for the cover of a book or for an advertisement. It might be something staightforward like "best-selling author of Crusade" on the jacket of your next book. Or it could be something on the lines of "Snow. . .the most compelling heroine since Scarlett O'Hara", although that would be more suitable for a novel for women than for your books aimed at men.'
'They may be aimed at men but I think they'11 be bought by both sexes. Women may skip some of the technical bits, but they'll lap up the love scenes,' said Carolyn. She looked at Rosie.
'Don't you agree? If you'd dipped into the book and read one of the scenes Laure is in, wouldn't you have bought the book?'
'Probably, but whether I dipped into the book would depend on the jacket. If the jacket says, in effect, this is a man's book— if it has a gun and a hypodermic needle on the cover—a lot of women won't bother even to dip.'
'I hope I can get that across to Colin,' said Carolyn. 'He's our Art Director,' she explained to Nick. 'He deals with the covers of all our mega-lead titles. The also-rans are left to his assistants.'
The discussion continued until lunch, eaten in the garden, at a table under a canopy of thin canes tied to a frame which, in summer, was covered by the leaves of a parra which, Nick explained, was a climbing grape vine.
After lunch he went to his workroom to fill in the questionnaire Anna had given him and the women returned to the sunbeds, Anna and Carolyn to have an outdoor siesta and Rosie to study the CV he had given her earlier.
It revealed some things she had not known, such as the fact that he was the son of a diplomat and had been born in Washington DC. It gave details of his education and the names of the four newspapers he had worked on before turning to television. It said that his leisure interests included reading, rock climbing, sailing, snorkelling and music. It lisled the countries to which he had travelled for work and pleasure.
But although it made him sound an interesting man, it did not convey his magnetism. Only a photograph could do that. It wasn't that he was handsome in the strict sense of the word. No man who had had the cartilage below the high bridge of his nose punched slightly out of shape in a schoolboys' fight, and whose forehead still bore the scar of a glancing blow from a stone hurled in a Middle Bast fracas, could be described as handsome. His were the rugged looks of an outdoors man, a born adventurer and risk-taker, not the somewhat effeminate face of a male model or a popular heart-throb.
Suddenly restless, Rosie put the CV aside and, moving softly so as not to disturb the two who were dozing, she tied the large square of Indian Paisley-printed cotton she used as a beach wrap over her swimsuit. Then, barefoot, she left the pool area and wandered around the large garden, an idea for a press release beginning to form in her mind. The garden's paths were laid with old clay tiles which were pleasant to walk on. Here and there among the fruit trees and ornamental shrubs, an enormous earthenware jar, which had once contained olive oil and was large enough to hide a man of Nick's size, lay on its side. At various vantage points there were seats of weathered cedar or stone to sit on while enjoying the view.
Under the drooping lace-like branches of what she knew was a false pepper tree because there was another near the pool and Anna had asked him the name of it during lunch, Rosie sat sideways on a bench with her feet on it and her arms clasped round her knees, a favourite position for sessions of creative thought.
She wished she had her files with her. Because there was a part of her which would always be a journalist, and occasionally there were moments when she regretted deserting her first career for PR, she often filed and reread articles by journalists she admired. Thinking about arresting ways to introduce Nick to the Press, the book trade and the public, had reminded her of a guess-who game which gave unusual insights into a person's character. One game-player would think of a famous person, and then everyone else would ask: if this person were an item of furniture, what would he or she be? If this person were a drink, what would she or he be? And so on until somebody guessed the person's identity. Might it not be an intriguing way to present Nick?
If this man were a sweet he would be plain dark chocolate. If he were a drink he would be extra dry c a v a . If he were—
'Rosie?'
This time Nick did not catch her off guard. She heard him calling her name, but not loudly, before he came into view round the edge of the crescent-shaped cypress hedge which screened her seat.
'Ah, there you are! I've just had a message from London for some people who live in the c amp o and don't have a telephone. It's not far. . .half an hour there and back. Would you like to come and see a bit of the countryside?'
As she could see many miles of countryside from where she was sitting and would not have as good a view from inside the Land Rover, she thought he must have another reason for inviting her to go with him.
Still torn between sticking to her original intention to spend as little time a deux with him as
possible, and her more recent thought that perhaps the only way to exorcise him from her heart was to offer herself to him on a plate, she hesitated.
'If you'd rather stay here, don't agree to come out of politeness. I've already got the message that our reunion doesn't please you as much as it does me,' he said drily.
'That's rather a curious statement. You had forgotten my existence.'
'No, I hadn't. As a matter of fact you have quite often been in my mind during the years since I left the News'
'That I donot believe!' she said flatly. 'Why on earth should you remember a teenage junior reporter who was only there for a short time before you left? I shouldn't put it past you to have forgotten Di Preston.'
For some seconds he looked at her blankly, not troubling to hide that at first all memory of the sub-editor's wife with whom he had had an affair eluded him.
'You see? If you can't remember a woman you went to bed with, you can't convince me that you remembered me.'
Irritated by his attempt to soft-soap her, but much more deeply vexed by her own folly in wanting him, she swung her feet to the ground and stood up, intending to walk away. Nick prevented her departure with a hand on her shoulder. The unexpected physical contact of his palm on her bare shoulder made her draw in her breath.
'You shouldn't be walking about with bare feet. There may be thorns and sharp bits of grit on the path and you have soft soles,' he said.
Before she could say that the paths looked well-swept to her, he astounded her by dropping his hand from her shoulder and picking her up.
'What the hell...?' Rosie protested.
'You're a featherweight now. I shouldn't have wanted to carry you far ten years ago,' he said, smiling.
'Put me down, Nick,' she said crossly, her heart beating wildly at being held in his arms.
'I don't want those pretty feet hurt.' He was openly teasing her, amused by her discomfiture.
'If you don't put me down, one of your pretty blue eyes will get blacked,' she said furiously, horrified at the strength of her reaction to being cradled against his chest.