Night of the Singing Birds

by Susan Barrie

  But it was too late—too late! —to do anything about it. She and Felipe had parted, very likely for ever, and the fact that she had fallen desperately in love with him was the final bitter pill that she had to swallow.

  ‘You are comfortable in the back there, senorita?’ a quiet voice enquired from behind the wheel.

  Angela almost froze in her seat. There was something about that voice, despite its lowered tones, that was as familiar as her own right hand.

  ‘If you would prefer that I close one of the windows I will do so,’ the chauffeur offered amiably, drawing in towards the side of the long and empty coast road. ‘There is quite a noticeable breeze from the sea tonight, and we cannot have you catching cold.’

  The car came to rest beneath an umbrella pine, with a breathtaking view of a moonlit sea on their left hand, and not a soul in sight anywhere on their other hand, behind or ahead of them. Angela made a sound in her throat which sounded as if her utterance was being slightly strangled, and then following another, greater, effort she said quite clearly:

  ‘Felipe!’

  ‘Would you like me to close a window?’

  He had alighted and was peering in through her rear window at her. Then he opened the door and tossed his chauffeur’s cap on to the back seat of the car with her.

  ‘Of course it is I, Felipe! Whom else did you expect would be driving you back to Granada?’

  She put a hand up to her mouth and was silent for a moment. Then she gave an uncontrollable sob of relief.

  ‘Oh, Felipe, I am so happy!’

  He indicated by means of holding the rear door wide that he expected her to alight and join him in the front of the car. And as she fell in with this new arrangement with the maximum amount of hurry she found that his arms seized her as her feet touched the grassy verge, and she was crushed up against him and his mouth was pressed against hers almost brutally; but as soon as they were both in a position to speak he reviled her in no uncertain terms for making it necessary for him to stoop to this piece of deception, and putting her grandmother to a good deal of unnecessary strain in the process.

  ‘I really ought to put you across my knee and slap you,’ he told her, kissing her feverishly at the same time to prove that he had no intention of doing anything of the kind. ‘You have harped upon the subject of Willow Ruddock for so long and so persistently that to-day I honestly felt I couldn’t endure any more! Just because she was my guest and I had to look after her.... Just because she would insist on returning with me from Madrid, and I had to appeal to your grandmother to help me to get rid of her!’

  ‘And what was Grandmother’s suggestion?’ she asked, as she leaned against him languidly in the full splendour of the moonlight, and felt so full of gratitude and thankfulness that she knew she could never express the extent of it.

  ‘To do nothing,’ he replied, ‘except put forward the date of our wedding. And as a matter of fact, that was one thing I did in Madrid, and if it’s any comfort to you I never saw anything of Willow once I got her to Madrid, and I certainly wouldn’t have brought her back

  here with me if I could have talked her out of it. But she had left all her things behind, and she put forward the excuse that she wanted to pack them herself. And there was Johnny Hainsforth.... She wanted to collect him.’

  ‘Was it because you were not on very good terms that she took such a risk in the sea yesterday morning?’

  ‘I imagine so. I am not a vain man, but it was difficult to dislodge her.... Why, I cannot tell you, because she is an extremely rich widow. If, as you imagined, it was my possessions that attracted her, they did not.’

  ‘She is in love with you, of course,’ Angela told him, clinging to his arm passionately and looking up at him adoringly. ‘Who, in their right senses, would not be in love with you?’

  ‘I can think of one young woman who wasn’t only a very few weeks ago,’ Felipe replied with a certain dryness.

  She shook her head at him in wonder, her silky golden head which he was stroking.

  ‘I must have been mad,’ she declared. ‘Or else I was just obstinate! You see, I’m sufficiently English to want to make my own decisions, and my grandmother treated me constantly as if I was wholly Spanish. It was simply a question, I suppose, of asserting myself. But now! know that I couldn’t.... Oh, Felipe, I couldn’t live without you!’

  He answered in a somewhat uncertain voice:

  ‘You don’t have to, querida.’

  ‘And you’re not in the least in love with Mrs. Rudd—?’

  ‘If you say that again,’ he warned her, in a far from uncertain voice, ‘I really will do something violent to you that I shall afterwards regret!’

  ‘Such as?’ she tempted him, her eyes like stars as they hung upon his.

  ‘Until we are married there is nothing very much I can do to you except kiss you,’ he replied in a frustrated manner. ‘But once we are married, I warn you, my provoking little one, that unless you submit to me absolutely I will be quite ruthless with you! ’

  ‘I will submit to you absolutely, Felipe,’ she promised him, and even as she did so she wondered what had happened to all her English independence.

  They stood there for several minutes longer at the side of the deserted road and the sea, under the umbrella pine, and then she stirred in his arms and finally disengaged herself.

  ‘And what now?’ she asked. ‘Where are we going now?’

  ‘To Granada,’ he replied. ‘I am taking you, as arranged, to your grandmother’s house, and then I shall return and pick up your grandmother, and after that we will all proceed to Madrid—and after that we will be married! ’

  Suddenly Angela heard herself laughing a little hysterically. For the first time it had struck her as funny—really funny—that her dignified grandmother should have lent herself to this masquerade.

  ‘I always thought I knew her—really knew her,’ she told Felipe, as he opened the car door for her, and she got in beside the driver’s seat. ‘I imagined she would never do anything that was not absolutely correct. But to allow us to travel like this to Granada together, with not

  a duenna in sight, is not correct, is it?’

  ‘If you are Spanish it is not perhaps correct, but if you are English ... why, certainly.’ And Felipe showed her his white teeth gleaming in his dark face as he smiled at her sideways. ‘But do not forget, my darling, that in a very brief while you will be wholly Spanish, and then, most certainly, it will be a different matter! Everything you do from now on will be very Spanish!’ Angela lay back against the luxurious car upholstery, and she sighed with delight because in future she would not be in a position to exercise her independence. And she marvelled that she had ever imagined it was the one thing she wanted to do.