The Stars of San Cecilio Page 4
‘Forgive me, mi querido,’ she said softly, ‘if I seem to doubt your judgment, but there is such a thing as being over-hasty sometimes. And from what you have told me you and Miss Waring do not really know very much of one another. An acquaintance struck up while she is on holiday! The situation is unorthodox, to say the least!’ She smiled in a strange, cold, arch fashion across at the English girl. ‘And from your point of view, Miss Waring, it could be disastrous
— accepting a position in a household unknown to you. And in a country completely unknown to you. But on that head, at least, I can reassure you — you could not be more fortunate than to be offered a position by Dr. Fernandez, particularly when it involves the care of his only daughter. ’
Lisa was silent. Dr. Fernandez, she thought, looked embarrassed.
‘The good fortune is going to be mutual, I am quite certain,’ she heard him say. ‘And if you saw them together you would have no doubt that Miss Waring is absolutely right for Gia. The child took to her at once, and I predict that they are going to get along famously together. What do you say,
Miss Waring?’
‘I hope so,’ Lisa answered stiffly. ‘At least I shall do my best to improve upon the Nurse Grimthorpe interlude. A nurse is not good for a girl of nine. She would be better off at school.’
‘That is for Dr. Fernandez to say! ’ Dona Beatriz snapped, and then she looked at her diamond-studded wrist-watch. ‘I must be off, Julio! I am leaving for the airport at ten, and it is very nearly half-past nine.’ She gave him a languishing, regretful look—so regretful that Lisa felt acutely uncomfortable. ‘But we will meet again in Madrid in a few days? You will be leaving here the day after tomorrow?’
‘ Yes, after I have seen Miss Waring and Gia settled in at the villa. ’
The arrogant Spanish beauty held out her hand to Lisa — or, rather, she extended her gloved fingertips towards her.
‘Take good care of Gia, Miss Waring,’ she said, as if she was laying an injunction upon her. ‘I have no doubt at all that we shall meet again before very long. I have Dr. Fernandez’ interests very much at heart, and if he cannot visit you at the villa I shall certainly do so.’
‘We will both visit her at the villa,’ Dr. Fernandez promised.
When they had vanished into the darkness, presumably to enter a waiting car, Lisa got up and wandered away to the far end of the terrace, and from there she descended into the purple gloom of the garden. She felt disturbed and anxious, and almost upset. Never in her life had she come up against such naked hostility as that which Dona Beatriz had displayed towards her, and she felt that she wanted to wait for the doctor’s return and then rush upon him and ask to be released from the obligation of working for him.
And then the thought of Gia, and the small hand that had stolen into hers that afternoon, affected her like a douche of common sense. The child was lonely, and needed her, and she herself needed someone to be responsible for. They could be happy together in that vivid garden by the sea, and she would be mad to turn down a first-class job — a job that Dona Beatriz had vouched for herself! — because a pair of slumbrous dark eyes with malicious dislike in them had gazed
at her across a table on the terrace.
After all, so far as she knew Dona Beatriz was only a friend of Julio Fernandez — and she might never become anything more than a friend. It took two to come to a decision about such a thing as marriage, and the doctor had been a widower for nine years. Why had he waited all that time if the woman who was his wife’s cousin had been ready and willing to become his wife (as, judging by her possessive attitude, she was), at more or less the drop of a handkerchief? Why hadn’t she long ago become Senora Fernandez, and undertaken the selection of a governess for Gia herself?
Lisa spent a long time on the balcony outside her bedroom later that night trying to fathom this out. She did not know that two floors below her, almost exactly beneath her balcony, but with a good deal more space at his disposal, and a far more luxurious room behind him, Dr. Fernandez was doing the same thing.
He had returned to the hotel after driving his dinner-guest back to hers, and gone straight to his room, and started to smoke numerous thin Spanish cigarettes as he started to pace up and down. He didn’t look exactly troubled, but there was a lack of ease in his expression as the light that was burning on his bedside table sent golden beams out to discover burnished lights in his sleek black hair, and enrich the pale olive of his complexion.
Tonight he was wearing a white flower in his buttonhole, and it was Beatriz’s fingers that had plucked it on their way down the drive, and inserted it in the lapel of his dinner-jacket. He took it out and looked at it, and then absent-mindedly his long fingers played with it until it fell apart, and the petals went falling like snow over the balcony rail. He could hear Beatriz’s voice saying softly, when she tucked the flower into his buttonhole:
‘That is something that you can keep and remember me by until we meet again, Julio! ’ Her voice was honey-sweet and a trifle husky, and her eyes were heavy and languid as she lifted them to his face. But there was fire behind the languor, and he knew it, and because it was fire that sought to compel him he deliberately looked away, and reminded her that she had little time to lose if she was to leave her hotel at ten.
But in a couple of nights from now he would be back in
Madrid, and Beatriz would be having dinner with him in his flat. It was a sumptuous flat, and because he had an excellent manservant they often dined there together in preference to seeking a restaurant. Beatriz, being a widow, had no qualms about sharing the isolation of a man’s flat, or any fears that her reputation would suffer if she did so, for everyone — or practically every single one of their mutual friends
— expected they would marry one day, and she knew how to behave correctly. With Julio it would have been dangerous to do anything else!
He was not the susceptible type, not affected by such a thing as an altered glance, a new note introduced into an already lowered voice — at any rate, not noticeably. So Dona Beatriz had learned to be careful in her dealings with him, and in spite of the fact that he sometimes filled her with impatience, their friendship had an excessively immaculate quality about it, and she did not know that only lately he had begun to realize that it could not go on like that.
It was not fair to keep a woman as beautiful, of such unblemished reputation, and with so many friends as Dona Beatriz possessed, dangling on a thread, because he could not make up his mind about her.
For one thing there was the past, with its unhappiness and its bitterness, rising up around him so constantly even at this late stage, and Beatriz, even more than anyone else, knew all about that unhappiness. It would be like keeping it with him, chaining it to him always, to share it with her. And then there was the question of Gia — Gia disliked her. And as for himself . . .
He leaned over the balcony rail and stared upwards at the stars. He found his thoughts drifting. Somewhere in the hotel there was a young woman who looked as if she ought to have someone to take care of her, instead of accepting the responsibility for looking after someone else. She had hair that swung in a silken cloud to her shoulders, and there was a suggestion of moonbeams tangled up with cobwebs about it when the light streamed over it. Tonight she had looked very young and defenceless, in that gauzy, patterned dress of hers, and he had been able to tell immediately that Beatriz hadn’t taken to her, Indeed, on that short journey down the drive to the spot where he had left his white-colored car she had stated quite definitely:
‘I think you are making a mistake, Julio. That girl is not at all the right type for Gia. And in any case, if she were practical and reliable would she have spent all her money on such a thing as a holiday in a place like San Cecilio when she hadn’t a job to go back to? She sounds to me much more like an adventuress! Did you really get in touch with her former employers and make inquiries about her?’
No,’ Julio had answered, and she had looked really shocked.
‘But, Julio! ... Chiquito, are you mad?’ she had demanded. ‘Perhaps,’ and he had shrugged his shoulders slightly, dismissingly, as if he wished she wouldn’t dwell upon the affair. ‘But I had the feeling she might be good for Gia. ’
‘You had the feeling! ...’
Dona Beatriz’s eyes had suddenly sent forth sparks.
And now as he leaned on his balcony rail the man knew she was right. He had behaved quixotically, and he couldn’t think why. The girl probably was an adventuress, and she had come to San Cecilio to look for a husband, or something of the sort. She looked young and unawakened, and he was fairly sure she was unawakened, but one could never tell. The best thing he could do would be to give her a month’s trial, and then, if she wasn’t satisfactory, pack her off home again.
If she wasn’t satisfactory he would be quite ruthless about getting rid of her.
And then he returned to the problem of Madrid in a couple of nights’ time. How did one continue to stave off the inevitable, when it was the inevitable?
CHAPTER FIVE
Lisa and Gianetta ran happily through all the rooms at the villa, finding out all there was to find out about them. The bedrooms were luxurious, and there were no fewer than six of them, and of these the main three bedrooms had private bathrooms attached. The rooms allocated to the governess and her charge formed a kind of nursery suite, and in the daytime they were very bright and pleasant, and it was only at night that Lisa found them a little lonely and cut off.
Of course, she could have dined downstairs in state in the main dining-room, but Senora Cortina, the housekeeper, might have thought it odd — perhaps even inconsiderate — to be expected to lay a huge dining-table for one, especially when the room itself was so huge. So Lisa had a tray upstairs in the suite with Gia, and on the whole this was much more fun, because Senora Cortina thought up amusing dishes for their evening meal, and Gia had it in a dressing-gown after her bath, and the atmosphere was very relaxed.
Senora Cortina was quite a character. She was a shrivelled little Catalan woman, with a sharp tongue and a very bright eye — especially when her husband, who was her second husband, did something to offend her. His job was to keep the tangled wilderness of a garden in some sort of order, but he was much older than she was, and work seemed an effort to him. He much preferred to sit with a pipe in the shade, while the delectable smell of her spiced buns reached him through the open doorway to the kitchen. Sometimes she relented after scolding him in a manner that raised the echoes in the villa, and permitted him to sample the buns. But sometimes the scoldings went on and on, and upstairs on her balcony, with the evening calm around her, Lisa wondered where such a diminutive woman got so much energy from.
But she recognized in the housekeeper a completely trustworthy type, with her employer’s interests at heart, and with no outside assistance she kept the interior of the villa at a shining pitch of perfection. Every piece of mellowed oak shone, silver fairly dazzled the eye, and the household linens and other fabrics were looked after religiously. And in addition to all this Senora Cortina was really a splendid cook. Lisa had never sampled fish soup until she arrived in Spain, but Senora Cortina’s fish soup left an echo in the mind, like a piece of pleasing harmony. She could do things with chopped nuts, honey and raisins and ice-cream that left an even more indelible impression, and Lisa knew she would never forget her new-baked bread. Such bread had nothing to do with bakers’ shops. It was something to start the day on in a contented frame of mind.
She and Gina had their day fairly well planned once they had been at the villa a week. In the mornings they did lessons in English, and Gia helped Lisa improve her Spanish. This had the effect of causing Gia to concentrate on the grammar of her own language, and was therefore of benefit to herself as well as the governess.
The afternoons were too hot for anything apart from siesta — at any rate, the early part of the afternoon. And after tea they went down on to the beach.
Sometimes in the early mornings, too, they visited the beach. And it was on one of their morning excursions to the glorious strip of shelving sand, at the edge of which the larkspur seas encroached, that Lisa ran literally into the arms of a young man she had known for one brief weekend as Peter Hamilton-Tracey.
Before Senora Cortina took her hot breakfast rolls out of the oven, and the smell of freshly-made coffee filled every corner of her kitchen, the atmosphere in the villa garden was as cool and sparkling as an English summer morning. The roses sparkled with dew, and it hung in great diamond drops on the glossy green leaves of the orange-trees. The scent of the pines was moist and earthy and penetrating.
Down on the beach the sea came rolling in without any of that oily swell that made it seem leaden during the heat of the day, and the green and gold uncovered rocks looked like green and gold monsters against the incredible purity of the sky, with the rosy flush of sunrise dying out of it. Wearing cotton sun-suits, and with their hair streaming out behind them, Lisa and Gia had formed the habit of racing out to and clambering over these rocks, and sometimes they sat for a quarter of an hour or so while the sun climbed higher in the sky, and the bleached beach became a stretch of burning gold, acquiring a tan which in both cases was badly needed.
Gia looked painfully thin in a swim-suit, but her sunsuits were beautifully cut and expensive, like everything else in her wardrobe. When unpacking for her, Lisa had wondered who selected these delicious outfits for her, and once again it had struck her that Dr. Fernandez must be rather more than a man of substance.
By contrast even with Gia’s gay little bathing-costume, Lisa’s was neat and unpretentious. But already her skin was turning to gold, and her hair gleamed like molten gold in the sunshine. When she was playing on the edge of the water — not being nearly a strong enough swimmer to risk giving Gia any instruction, particularly as she had absolutely no knowledge of the currents that affected that part of the coast—Gia stood on the rocks and called to her that she looked like a mermaid, and afterwards they would race back across the sands to the villa.
She was running at full tilt, with a delighted Gia attempting to catch her, when a man on his way to bathe suddenly strolled round a rock, and, appearing in her path too suddenly for her to avoid him, opened his arms to catch her.
Gasping, she clung to him for a moment, and he smiled white-toothed at her.
‘Well, well!’ he exclaimed. ‘Well, well!’
The fact that he spoke in English was an immediate relief, and then she knew as she poured forth apologies that she was looking up into a face that was familiar. Not a face she had got to know very well, but she had seen it before.
It was bronzed and typically English, the eyes blue and audacious, the hair a glowing thatch as yellow as her own.
‘Why,’ Lisa exclaimed, as if she could hardly believe the evidence of her own eyes, ‘you are
— you must be! — you’re Mr. Hamilton-Tracey’s brother! ’
‘Peter,’ he supplied. ‘Peter Hamilton-Tracey. But,’ looking down at her with frowning brows, although his eyes still laughed, ‘I don’t think I remember you. Am I supposed to know you?’ She carefully extricated herself from the lightness of his hold, and stepped back a pace or two on the sand. She shook her head, so that her hair swung like a cape.
‘No, I don’t think so. At least’ — there was the glimmer of a smile in her own eyes as she looked up at him—’you saw me once, but it’s hardly likely you would remember me. At that time I wore a uniform — a linen dress with a white collar and cuffs — and my hair was short. I’ve allowed it to grow in the last six months. ’ ‘Have you?’ He looked at it appreciatively. ‘ And a very wise thing to do, too, if I may be permitted to say so! But ... a linen dress, with a white collar and cuffs! . . He whistled suddenly. ‘Were you in charge of infants? My brother’s infants?’
‘I was.’ She looked down demurely at her present charge, and Gia slipped a hand into hers and held it tight as if she didn’t altogether enjoy this sudden
encounter.
‘ Then of course I remember you! ’ But Lisa was certain he was merely trying to make up for a lack of gallantry.
‘ And you must have had the patience of Job to put up with those two children of John’s! I’m their uncle, but talk about a couple of pestilential imps! . . .’ And then he seemed to become aware that Gia was looking at him very doubtfully indeed, and he tweaked an end of her lank hair. ‘Hullo!’ he said. ‘Are you the present incumbent?’
Gia’s English wasn’t apparently quite up to that one, and Lisa translated for her.
‘ This gentleman means am I looking after you, and I am, aren’t I? And that means that I must take you back to breakfast before Senora Cortina wonders what has become of us, and starts getting in touch with the police. ’ She nodded in a friendly fashion at Peter Hamilton-Tracey. ‘Good-bye, Mr. Hamilton-Tracey,’ she said, rather shyly. ‘It’s strange that we should have met again so far from our own country. ’
But the man wasn’t going to let her go after such a brief interchange—not that she looked like a sea-nymph with that golden tangle of hair caressing her bare shoulders, her blue and white sun-suit crisp in the sunshine, her slim legs like a schoolgirl’s terminating in pretty, shapely feet with natural pink toe-nails. She was much too good to let go altogether, without any hope of seeing her again, and he simply couldn’t understand how he could ever possibly have forgotten her, having seen her once.
‘You must let me know where you’re staying, and where I can get in touch with you,’ he begged. ‘After all, we’re both English, and . . .’
He looked into her smoke-grey eyes, and thought that they were certainly very English. ‘Please! I can’t even
remember your name,’ he confessed wryly.
She told him.
‘Elizabeth Waring. ’
‘How unlike the Costa Brava that sounds,’ he commented.
And then he admitted that he had been ill, and that an artist friend had placed at his disposal a tiny cottage, where he looked after himself, and was beginning to feel much more like himself again.