The Man From Madrid

She thought longingly of the day she was due to fly back to her real life in London. She didn’t mind giving up two weeks of her holiday allowance to give her mother a break from Valdecarrasca, and her parents a break from each other. In some ways she enjoyed being here, surrounded by vineyards and mountains instead of city streets and traffic jams.

But being a commissioning editor for a major publishing house was no longer the secure, lifetime job it had been in the days when publishing had been famously described as ‘an occupation for gentlemen.’ Today it was a far more cutthroat business with take-overs and redundancies being as commonplace as in most other occupations.

What was worrying her at the moment was that Edmund & Burke, the imprint she worked for, had been taken over by a global corporation which had a new CEO. Everyone was waiting to see how this formidable woman, Harriet Stowe, would restructure the UK segment of the company. She had the reputation of being a ruthless decision-maker in whose view literary merit was unimportant compared with profitability. Edmund & Burke were famous for the quality of their books, but they didn’t produce bestsellers. It was on the cards that Ms Stowe might decide to axe them.

This was not, therefore, a good time for Cally to be away from the office. But her mother’s plan to visit a friend had been fixed long before the future of Edmund & Burke became uncertain, and Cally knew that, had the trip been postponed, her parents’ marriage would also have reached a crisis point. She lived in dread of them deciding to separate for neither had the resources to survive on their own. They were not happy together, but apart they would be in deeper trouble, and the burden on Cally would be even heavier than it was already.

From the other side of the table, Fred, who was Peggy’s companion, leaned towards Cally and said, ‘I suppose the people in the village who own all the little vineyards are rubbing their hands at the thought of selling them off to property developers. They can see themselves getting rich, the way the Spanish who owned land on the coast did back in the sixties and seventies.’

‘If the vineyards become building plots, the valley will lose all its charm,’ said Cally. ‘They’ll make money, but they’ll lose their quality of life. It’s a pity there aren’t more stringent planning laws. I don’t think people should be allowed to spoil the mountains by putting up holiday villas wherever they want. There should be a limit above which nothing can be built.’

‘There probably is,’ Fred said, grinning. ‘But the builders can get round that with a little of the old…’ He demonstrated his meaning by rubbing his thumb against the tips of his fingers. Then, looking at Nicolás, he added, ‘No offence meant, señor. But we all know it happens. Always has…always will.’

‘My country is not the only place where graft is used to get round the regulations,’ Nicolás answered dryly. ‘Bribery exists everywhere. But I agree with Señorita Cally that it would be a pity if the uncontrolled development that has marred too many stretches of Spain’s coasts were allowed to continue inland. On the other hand, people like yourselves—’ with a gesture at the rest of the diners ‘—want to enjoy your retirement in a better climate, so some over-development here is inevitable.’

Turning to Cally, he asked, ‘What is your surname?’

‘Haig.’ She spelt it for him.

His black eyebrows shot up. ‘You’re half-British?’

‘I’m all-British. That’s my father at the end of the table.’

‘So that’s why you speak perfect English. I thought you were Spanish.’

‘Your English is perfect too. How does that come about?’

‘It’s a long story. I’ll explain some other time.’ Although his answer came smoothly, she had an intuitive feeling that somehow her question had put him on the spot. She couldn’t think of any reason why that should be the case, but she felt certain it was. For a moment she was tempted to press him, but she knew that it wouldn’t be right when he was a guest, albeit a paying guest.

In any case it was time to clear the first course and serve the second. This was one of Juanita’s specialities, berenjenas mudéjar.

‘I know berenjenas are what the Americans call eggplants and we call aubergines,’ Cally heard Peggy say to Nicolás, while she was taking the plates round. ‘But what does mudéjar mean?’

As no one else was speaking at that moment, everyone heard his reply.

‘Mudéjar refers to the Moors who stayed behind when Queen Isabella’s army had forced the Arabs who ruled a great part of Spain into retreat. The Moslems who stayed became slaves, but they were valued for their artistic gifts. You see their influence in what’s called the mudéjar architecture of the thirteenth century. This excellent dish is another reminder of how much this country owes to seven hundred years of Moorish culture.’

He lifted his glass of wine and looked at Juanita, still busy doling out steaming spoonfuls of baked sliced aubergines in a garlicky sauce. ‘A la cocinera…to the cook.’

As the others echoed his toast and Juanita beamed her gratification, Cally warmed to him on two counts: for his compliment to someone who was all too often ignored, and his grasp of his country’s history.

She wished it had been her father who had answered Peggy’s question and proposed the toast, but he never read books and he took the meals set before him, his clean clothes and all other creature comforts totally for granted. Perhaps it wasn’t his fault. He had been spoilt by his mother, her other grandmother, and was not the only man of his generation who thought it a woman’s duty to make things comfortable for the man in her life.

Which was one of the reasons why Cally had serious reservations about ever allowing another man into her life. She knew they were not all selfish encumbrances like her father, but many were, and it could be difficult to recognise a man’s true nature when, in the early stages of a relationship, he was on his best behaviour.

‘Hot plates. Now that is a treat,’ said Peggy. ‘So often, in Spanish restaurants, the plates are cold and it cools down the food before you’ve had time to enjoy it.’ She gave Nicolás a friendly nudge with her elbow. ‘I don’t mean to sound critical ’cos I love Spain. I wouldn’t go back to Birmingham if you paid me.’ She lifted her glass and looked round at the others. ‘Viva España!’

Cally had just placed a plate in front of Fred. Across the table she caught Nicolás’s eye. His face expressionless, he gave her a barely perceptible wink. It had a similar effect to his first smile: something turned over inside her.

Then, like the red light that flickered in the notification area of her computer’s monitor screen when her virus protection program detected something nasty in an email attachment, a voice in her head said, Watch it! This guy is dangerously attractive.

The berenjenas were followed by lamb cutlets with brown earthenware bowls of the vegetables that the Spanish usually served separately but the British liked to accompany their meat course.

Finally, there was a choice of puddings: Juanita’s homemade flan, Mrs Haig’s home-made ice cream, or Cally’s fruit salad, laced with kirsch.

‘You give excellent value for money,’ said Nicolás, who had waited for her to sit down before starting to eat his flan.

‘We try to. It’s the way to bring people back. But we have strong competition from other casas rurales in the region. What made you choose this one and how did you find us?’

‘I read a book by Rafael Cebrián about the mountains in this area. He describes a place called the Barranc de L’Infern, which sounds an interesting challenge. Have you heard of it?’

Cally nodded. The name meant the ravine of hell and everything she had heard made it sound a place to avoid. ‘There’ve been several accidents there…some of them fatal. It’s particularly dangerous after rain. You shouldn’t attempt it alone. You might never get out.’

‘Don’t worry. I’m going to go through with some guys who know what they’re doing.’ He paused, looking into her eyes with a curiously intent expression. ‘But I’m glad you’re concerned for my safety. When I arrived here, I had the feeling you didn’t much like the look of me.’

This was so far from her first reaction on seeing him—that he was the most fanciable male she had seen in a long time—that she almost laughed.

Instead she said coolly, ‘I’m sorry if I seemed unwelcoming. I didn’t mean to. Excuse me, I need to attend to the coffee.’

In the kitchen, Juanita said, ‘How long is he staying, the Madrileño?’

‘Three nights. How do you know he’s from Madrid?’

‘His voice…his manners…his air. He’s very handsome, don’t you think?’

‘Paco is handsome,’ said Cally, referring to the best-looking young man in the village who was a worry to his mother and had broken several girls’ hearts.

‘Paco es uno desgraciado,’ said Juanita contemptuously. ‘You can’t compare that good for nothing with a man of education and breeding. I worked for the upper classes when I was young. I recognise a gentleman when I see one.’

‘You’re a snob,’ Cally told her, smiling. ‘There are as many bad lots among the rich and the aristocrats as among ordinary people. Probably more.’

‘That’s true,’ the cook conceded. ‘They’re no better…but also no worse. Wouldn’t you rather be a rich man’s pampered wife than a poor man’s slave like your mother?’

She was devoted to Mary Haig but, having herself had a husband who spent too much time in bars, took a disapproving view of Douglas.

‘I would rather stand on my own feet and be independent,’ said Cally.

‘You can say that now, while you’re still at your best. You won’t always be young and attractive. A time will come when you’ll want some babies and a man to keep you warm in bed. I know you have a fine career in London, but when you are thirty-five you may not find it so satisfying.’

At the dining table, Nicolás was listening to Peggy but thinking about Cally. He had perfected the art of seeming to be engrossed by older women’s conversation while following his own train of thought at his mother’s dinner parties. Sometimes she roped him in to fill a gap and, though such occasions bored him, he felt an obligation to help her out when he could.

His mother was very rich, and had once been a beauty, but now she was deeply unhappy because cosmetic surgery could not preserve the ravishing face she had had in her youth and none of her husbands and lovers had lived up to her expectations. So now she was a pill junkie, filling her days with meaningless social engagements and pouring out her troubles to several shrinks and any of her five children who could be persuaded to listen to a tale of woe heard many times before.

Seeing at a glance that Cally’s father was what his American friends called a lush, Nicolás wondered why a girl of her obvious intelligence was wasting herself as a maid of all work in the backwoods of rural Spain. With her ear for languages, there must be better things for her to do.

He saw her coming back with the coffee tray and sprang up to take it from her.

‘Oh…thank you.’ When their fingers touched as she surrendered the tray to him, a charming flush gave her cheeks an apricot glow.

She wasn’t tanned like the other women. Her complexion suggested she spent little time in the sun. He preferred her creamy pallor to the almost orange colour of Peggy’s skin. Cally was like a solitary lily in a bed of garish African marigolds, he thought. Not that he disliked his fellow guests. He admired their courage in uprooting and transplanting themselves. They were enjoying their lives, more than could be said for his mother in her palacio in Madrid, or indeed for most of his bored and world-weary relations.

When Cally went to bed, most of the guests had already gone to their rooms. But her father, the man called Bob and Nicolás were still talking and drinking in the lounge. Nicolás was not drinking as much as the other two. In fact he had had only two or three glasses the whole evening. He wasn’t talking as much either, just asking the occasional question and listening intently to their replies.

She hoped he would go to his room soon, before it became obvious her father had drunk too much.

In bed, she turned with relief to the book she was reading, an out-of-print history of the early days of air travel that she found far more absorbing than the current crop of short-lived bestsellers. When the church clock struck eleven for the first time, she put it aside and turned out her bedside lamp. By the time, a few minutes later, it repeated the eleven chimes, she was settled down ready to sleep.

But when it began to strike midnight she was still awake, her mind in a whirl of uncertainty about the future. At half-past midnight she got up, shrugged on a thin cotton robe and took her small torch from the bedside table.

There were no sounds from below as she padded barefoot down the stairs, the tiled treads cool under her soles. The ground floor was in darkness. Someone, probably not her father, had remembered to switch out the lights.

In the office, she booted up the desktop computer she used while she was here and logged on to the Internet, hoping there might be an email from Nicola.

Nicola and her husband were both publishers. Richard Russell was the head of a big firm, Barking & Dollis, and Nicola was co-director of Trio, a much smaller firm. Having been through the misery of redundancy herself—in fact she had been sacked by the man who was now her adoring husband—Nicola was sympathetic to Cally’s anxieties and had promised to let her know if she heard any book trade gossip concerning Cally’s new boss.

Disappointed when no emails downloaded, Cally went to a favourite website that supplied links to the world of arts and letters. But there was nothing new there and, frustrated, she shut down the machine and went to the kitchen for a glass of water.

Three clean wine glasses were standing upside down on one of the worktops. Had Bob washed and dried them? She doubted it. His wife had said during dinner that he was useless in the kitchen.

That meant that the Madrileño, as Juanita called him, must have dealt with them. Which also meant that he had stayed in the lounge until her father finally called it a day. Cringing at the thought of Nicolás seeing her father in his cups, and perhaps even assisting his unsteady progress up the staircase, Cally put the glasses away.

Everything he had said and done had supported Juanita’s conviction that he was a caballero, the Spanish word that meant literally a horseman, but also the possessor of all the chivalrous qualities that distinguished a gentleman from lesser men.

Cally drank a tumbler of spring water brought from a font in the hills and made her way back up the stairs. Reluctant to return to bed, she decided to spend half an hour sitting outside on the roof terrace. As, unlike most Spanish houses, the casa rural had no patio, the terrace was the only place to enjoy some fresh air.

Except during cold snaps, the glazed door to the terrace was always left open, with a curtain of metal strands preventing flies from getting in. As she drew the curtain aside, she saw that one of the guests had had the same idea.

The cane armchair she had intended to sit in was occupied by Nicolás. His legs were crossed at the ankles and his bare feet were propped on the seat of another chair. Comfortably curled on his long lap was her parents’ cat, Mog, who normally made himself scarce when there were strangers in the house.

CHAPTER TWO

IF HE had been lost in thought, he reacted fast to the metallic rustle of the fly curtain as she swept it to one side. But he didn’t make a startled movement as she would have done.

Nicolás glanced over his shoulder, saw her standing in the doorway, and scooped the cat off his thighs before standing up and saying, in a quiet voice, ‘It’s too fine a night for sleeping. Come and join us. I’ve been making friends with your cat. I assume he’s the house cat. Or is he a neighbourhood cat who uses your terrace?’

‘He’s ours,’ said Cally, stepping on the terrace. ‘My mother was walking the dog she had a few years ago. They were crossing a dry river bed when she heard a kitten mewing. It was inside a plastic bag with the rest of the litter. They were about a week old. All the others were dead.’

Her tone was dispassionate, but even now, years later, remembering the incident made her blood boil with disgust for whoever had been too mean and heartless to dispose of the unwanted kittens humanely.

Nicolás’s response was equally unemotional. ‘There are some rotten people in the world,’ he said.

He was holding the cat as if it were a baby, on its back with his forearm under its spine and his other hand tickling its tummy. Mog, who normally disliked being touched by strangers, wasn’t lashing his tail but purring deep satisfied purrs.

Unbidden and unwelcome, the thought came to Cally that being held and caressed by Nicolás might cause her to purr as well. She rejected the notion as soon as it entered her mind. It must be the time of the month when her hormones were on the rampage.

The man was a stranger. She knew next to nothing about him. Because he had a way with cats didn’t mean he was equally good at making love to women. Even if he were, she was not into casual sex. She was not into sex, period. It was a snare and a delusion devised by Nature to trick people into perpetuating the species, though the trick didn’t work as well now that women had control of their bodies, at least to the extent of not getting pregnant. Controlling their reactions to the opposite sex was harder. But she had seen too many colleagues having their lives made wretched by disastrous relationships to want to risk it herself.

‘It’s very quiet here at night,’ said Nicolás, moving to sit on the low flat-topped wall that surrounded the terrace but in places was ranged with plant pots.

‘Some of our guests find the church clock disturbing.’

Against her better judgment, but reluctant to return to her room when the surrounding mountains were bathed in moonlight and the October night air was as balmy as a fine summer night in the UK, Cally sat down in the armchair he had vacated. Although she had a white lawn nightdress under her ankle-length robe, she was conscious of being without a bra or briefs. Perhaps this was because, apart from having bare feet, Nicolás was still dressed.

‘On the way to bed, I was looking at the bookshelves on the next landing. Would it be all right if I borrowed one to read in my room?’

‘Of course…that’s what they’re there for. But not many of our guests are bookworms. Mostly they’re TV-watchers.’

‘Did your parents build up the library, or did they inherit it from the previous owners of the house? Your father mentioned that he and your mother only set up the business about six years ago and had a bit of a struggle to get it going.’

‘It wasn’t easy at first. Some of the Spanish and all the German books came with the house. The last owner was a German botanist. A lot of the books I’ve found on rastros or in the secondhand paperback libraries catering to foreigners. The prices are low because most people take them back for a half-price refund, but I usually keep them.’

‘You would enjoy the bookshops and book fairs in Madrid. Have you been to my home town?’

‘Once, when we were living in the south, we had to get to England in a hurry for a family funeral. We put the car on the train at Algeciras and got off in Paris, with a stop of some hours in Madrid en route. I wanted to see the Goya paintings in the Prado, but it was closed that day. Juanita, who is cooking for us because my mother is away, went to Madrid last spring on a coach with other pensionistas from the village. She had a wonderful time. Have you always lived there?’

‘No, I was born and grew up in the country. I enjoy Madrid, but—’ He broke off as the cat suddenly sprang from his arms to the ground and then jumped onto another part of the wall and peered over the outer edge of it.

‘He’s heard something moving about under our neighbour’s roof tiles,’ said Cally, as Mog vanished. ‘He fancies himself as an ace hunter, but I’ve never known him to catch anything. You were saying you enjoy Madrid, but…’

‘But I wouldn’t want to live in a city all the time. It’s exciting and stimulating, but it can get a bit frenetic. I like to escape now and then.’

Cally was struck yet again by the fluency of his English but hesitated to press him for the explanation he had promised ‘some other time.’

‘Your situation is the reverse of mine,’ he went on. ‘Don’t you ever feel bored with Valdecarrasca? Does it offer enough excitement and stimulus for you?’

She debated telling him that she didn’t live here on a permanent basis and in fact was only an occasional visitor. But she didn’t feel inclined to talk about herself while there seemed to be things about himself he preferred not to divulge.

She said, ‘Nowhere is dull or isolated now that we have all resources of the World Wide Web at our fingertips.’

‘Do you spend a lot of time on the Web?’

‘Quite a lot. How about you?’

‘I subscribe to a couple of forums and read certain online columnists. What sort of things do you do?’

Cally had the feeling they were fencing with each other, neither wishing to reveal themselves. Yet all the time she was conscious of how attractive he was. She liked the way his hair sprang from his broad high forehead, the clear definition of his chin, the way the moonlight accentuated the slant of his cheekbones under the taut dark skin.

In her late teens, when she had sometimes indulged in romantic daydreams, this was the kind of face she had visualised but never seen in real life. Her parents had been living in Tarragona province then, and the Catalan men in that area had not been remarkable for their looks.

‘Mostly I read the book reviews at online bookshops. Sometimes I look at what’s on offer at the auction houses. The great thing about the Web is that it’s all things to all men…and all women,’ she said, smiling. ‘Whatever you’re interested in, you can find stuff about it and people who share your enthusiasms.’

‘Some people even find partners, one hears.’

Cally shrugged. ‘So they say. Perhaps, if one’s looking for a partner, it’s a good place to find one. I’ve often thought that people who aren’t good-looking are at a huge disadvantage in the real world. They may have wonderful minds but they get written off because their faces aren’t pretty or handsome.’

The church clock struck a single note. It was one o’clock in the morning, she realised, and in five hours’ time her alarm clock would wake her so that she could have an hour on the Internet before it was time to shower and dress and fetch barras of freshly baked bread for the guests’ breakfast.

‘Would you like a packed lunch tomorrow?’ she asked.

‘Is that part of the service?’

‘When we have mountain walkers staying with us—yes. We charge for the ingredients but not for the preparation. If you have a flask, we’ll fill it with coffee or tea. What would you like in your bread? Jamón serrano…cold chicken…sheep’s cheese and lettuce…chorizo?’

‘Jamón serrano would be excellent. I’d like to leave about nine, if that’s convenient? What time is breakfast?’

Cally stood up. ‘Most people have it between eight and nine. But you can have it as soon as I get back from the baker’s at half-past seven, if you like.’

‘Let’s say quarter to eight.’

‘Okay…goodnight.’

As she moved towards the doorway, he stepped ahead of her and swept the curtain aside.

‘Thank you.’ She had to pass very close to him to go through the opening. As she did so, she found herself wondering what she would do if he put his hand on her waist and turned her to face him.

But he only said, ‘Buenas noches.’

As the curtain fell into place behind her, Nicolás wondered what she would have done if he had obeyed his impulse to kiss her goodnight.