The Man From Madrid. Anne Weale

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      She could visualise him in a doctor’s white coat, or an airline captain’s uniform or even, because he had so much charisma, as a TV presenter on one of the more intelligent programmes. But if he were the latter, Juanita would have recognised him from the pages of Hola! the popular Spanish magazine that had spawned Hello!.

      ‘Something scientific perhaps?’

      He shook his head but, before he could tell her what he did, they were joined by Peggy and Fred.

      To Cally’s annoyance, after Peggy had said good morning, she added archly, ‘Are we interrupting something. Are we de trop, as the French say?’

      Nicolás had risen to his feet. He said pleasantly, ‘Not at all. I’m just off. That was an excellent omelette, Cally. Thank you. I’ll be back in good time for dinner.’

      Disappointed that she hadn’t found out what he did, Cally said, ‘You’ll find your packed lunch and your flask on the worktop just inside the kitchen door.’ She turned to the others. ‘Would you like something cooked for breakfast?’

      After all the guests had gone out for the day, and her father had gone to play golf with his two particular cronies, Cally heaved a sigh of relief at having the house to herself for a few hours. She left Nicolás’s room till the last. As she made beds, changed towels, mopped floors and emptied the contents of waste paper baskets into a black bin bag, she thought about Nicolás’s occupation and found herself wishing she were with him, climbing some steep mule track surviving from the days when most journeys were made on foot and the quickest route between many villages was by way of trails laid by the Moors long ago.

      When she unlocked the door of his room, she felt a bit like Bluebeard’s wife entering the forbidden chamber. Which was a silly feeling to have. He was just another guest, a transient visitor she would most likely never set eyes on again.

      He had left the plastic laundry bag on the upright chair near the door. It contained the T-shirt and jeans he had worn on the day he arrived, the sports shirt he had worn last night and his running kit. But no undershorts or socks. Their absence was explained when she went into the shower room and found them hanging on the shower rail, already almost dry. He must have washed them the night before.

      He had also made the bed and, instead of the clutter of possessions left lying about in the other guests’ rooms, tidied away most of his belongings. On the bedside table were two books borrowed from the shelves on the landing, the top one being The Wandering Scholars, a classic, written in the twenties, about life in mediaeval Europe. The one underneath was a travel book she would have liked to publish had the typescript been offered to her instead of to a commissioning editor with another publisher.

      Cally took his laundry downstairs to load it into the washing machine. Then, in an involuntary act that troubled her all afternoon when she used her mother’s car to drive to the coast, she lifted his bundled-up shirt and buried her nose in its folds. She knew that even scrupulously clean people left traces of their natural scent on their clothing, but he hadn’t worn the shirt for long enough to do that. But his running singlet did carry his scent and, far from being unpleasant, it conjured up a vivid memory of his athletic body and its polished bronze sheen. She found herself trembling slightly, swept by feelings long repressed and believed to be under control. But, suddenly, they were not, and she was afraid of where they might lead her.

      At first, when he mentioned extending his visit, she had been pleased. But now she thought that the sooner he went the better for her peace of mind. She had enough on her plate, professionally, at the moment without getting out of her depth on a personal level.

      Nicolás ate his lunch sitting in the sun in the garden of a long-deserted house.

      As well as the long brown barra filled with Spanish mountain ham and cut into three sections, Cally had provided him with a banana, an apple and some green-skinned but sweet tangerines. For dessert there was a bar of plain black chocolate and a substantial chunk of pan de higo which was made from dried figs embedded with almonds.

      Thinking about their conversation earlier, he had the feeling that Cally was in a no-win situation that was fine for her parents but a disaster for her. In his own family, some members made use of other members, though never of him. He had learnt early on to make his own decisions and stick to them.

      A possible reason for her failure to assert herself and get a life of her own was the fact that she had grown up in a country of which she was not a national. In practical terms, she wasn’t British but nor, despite her fluency with the language, was she Spanish. He had noticed that the children of diplomats often felt a sense of displacement. They lacked the deep roots of people raised in the country where they were born.

      He had spent a lot of his own life outside Spain because his father’s profession had taken him overseas and, after his parents’ divorce, Nicolás had spent more time with his father than with his capricious, self-centred mother. But despite this cosmopolitan background, at heart he felt wholly Spanish. This land was where he belonged. Where did Cally feel she belonged? Probably nowhere.

      Remembering her remark that, on the autopista, it wasn’t much more than an hour’s drive to Valencia or Alicante, he thought of the fast car he had left in a garage because it would attract too much attention in the village car park.

      Maybe, if he extended his time here, he could take her out for an evening of sophisticated pleasures. Unless there was a boyfriend in the background.

      It was hard to believe that an attractive chica of what—twenty-four? twenty-five?—would not have a man in her life, but his feeling was that she didn’t.

      By the time he had finished eating, it was the hottest part of the afternoon. As a child he had seen the workers on his maternal grandfather’s estates lying down in the shade for a siesta. Having read The Wandering Scholars until the church clock struck three this morning, he decided to take a nap under the drooping branches of an old fig tree.

      When he woke up it was cooler. He went back inside the house and prowled its large empty rooms, considering various possibilities for its future.

      When the guests assembled for pre-dinner drinks that evening, they all had tales of their days’ activities to tell.

      Fred and Peggy had had lunch at another casa rural an hour’s drive away. ‘But we didn’t like it as much as yours,’ Peggy told Douglas Haig. ‘It was modern. It had no atmosphere.’

      Tonight she was wearing a clinging red dress and dangling diamanté earrings which Cally felt were over the top for the setting which was rustic rather than glitzy. She suspected that Peggy was hoping to make an impression on Nicolás, which seemed ridiculous in the light of their respective ages. But perhaps Fred didn’t give her the attention she craved. He seemed the down-to-earth type. Cally would have expected Peggy to be married to someone more dashing: the kind of man who, when going out in the evening, wore a blazer with a foulard cravat inside the collar of his shirt and had a moustache or a carefully trimmed beard.

      When Nicolás appeared and came to the bar, he was wearing the shirt she had washed and ironed for him.

      ‘Did you press my shirt?’ he asked.

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Thank you.’

      She used the phrase often heard in Spain when someone was responding to thanks. ‘De nada. It’s part of the service. What would you like to drink?’

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