The Man From Madrid. Anne Weale

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ