Love is for Ever (10 page)

When she returned to the car she felt rather than saw that he looked at her carefully. Her face was a little pale and moved, and she kept her eyes lowered as he put her into the seat beside him at the wheel.

“The grave is so well kept,” she said. “There were already so many flowers there. Who—who is responsible for that?” looking up at him as if she didn’t really need to be informed.

“My grandmother, of course,” Dominic answered, his fine hands lying idly on the wheel. “She had a great personal

admiration for your father.”

“Yes,” Jacqueline admitted, “I know.” She sighed suddenly. “Your grandmother is so extraordinarily kind.”

He made no attempt to start up the car, and as the spot was so beautiful and so peaceful, with the village of San Agariu lying in a color-washed huddle about them, Jacqueline was well content that they should sit there for a while. Dominic lighted a cigarette without offering her one, because he knew she was not really keen, and the smoke climbed fragrantly to the umbrella pine above them, which provided them with an entirely adequate amount of shade. The afternoon was too warm for many human beings to be visible, apart from one old man who drowsed on a bench outside his cottage door, and from not far away the murmur of the sea reached them. Jacqueline could picture it breaking on a deserted beach almost immediately below them, and the lovely blaze of blue as the waves stole inwards, and then receded in a gentle flurry of spray like soap bubbles.

“It is easy to be kind when one likes a person very much,” Dominic remarked, after several seconds of silence, as if he had been turning Jacqueline’s observation over in his mind.

She stole rather a shy glance up at him.

“But, even so, not many people are as kind and understanding as your grandmother.”

“Perhaps not,” he agreed. He looked directly down at her, and his eyes held hers. “What will you do with yourself when you go back to England, little Jacqueline? Will you return to that job of yours in the antique shop?”

“I—I don’t know,” Jacqueline answered, taken a little by surprise. “I expect so,” she added.

“Do you wish to go back? Or do you approve of Senor Montez’s plan to keep you here?”

She flushed a little.

“Senor Montez was joking, of course. But, I suppose I—I might get a job—some sort of a job on the island?”

“Then you do like it?” he said.

“Of course.” There was no doubt in her voice. “It is an enchanting island. I think,” looking about her dreamily, “it must be the most enchanting spot in all the world.”

“You know nothing of Spain?” he asked.

“No.”

“One day you must see Spain,” he told her. And all at once he started to tell her about Toledo, with its houses and churches rising in tiers against the deep blue of the sky, and the brown hills which surrounded it, sun-baked, fierce—compared with the softer beauty of Sansegovia. He painted a picture of the Tangus slipping beneath its graceful bridges and curving like an arm about the partly walled city; of the Cathedral and the Cathedral square tucked away at the side of it, the equally tucked-away workshops that manufactured sword blades—the famous sword blades of Toledo!

He told her about the woods, not far from Toledo, where, if she was there, she might fancy herself in England, in the country around about Cambridge. He also talked eloquently—and his voice was very eloquent, she had discovered very soon after making his acquaintance, when he chose to make it so—about Madrid, where he had studied for a year, and Seville, which he loved, and Granada, where the landscape vibrated with heat in the summer time, and the silver-grey of olives climbed the high slopes of the
sierra.
In the whole of Spain, he asserted, there was no sight more luscious than the landscape of Andalusia. There were no villages more picturesque than the villages of Andalusia, where the cottages dripped flowers from window-boxes and clinging vines, and patios were ablaze with them. Even Sansegovia, flowery isle though it was, could offer nothing to compare with the Andalusian towns and villages.

“But Toledo is your home, isn’t it?” Jacqueline asked. “Your family come from Toledo?”

“My family’s estates are in Toledo—or outside it,” he admitted.

“And,” with a little smile, “although owning an English father,

I was born there.

So, yes, I belong to Toledo!”

She sat looking at him for a little while in silence, and he returned the compliment by looking closely at her. She thought that nothing could ever turn him into an Englishman, or take away that slight stiltedness which characterized his speech—that formality at times—which made it so attractive.

His father had bequeathed to him his name, but apparently little else, and his mother had undoubtedly bestowed on him that hint of olive in his skin, and that strange burnishing of black hair. Jacqueline had never seen anything quite like it before. Sometimes she wanted to put out a finger and touch it, where the bronze lights gleamed amidst ebon darkness, and gilded the edge of a wave which refused to be disciplined by hair lotion and remained crisp.

And then all at once she became aware how hard she was staring at him, and taking in all those details of his appearance which, for some reason which she failed to understand altogether, were beginning to fascinate her more and more. She felt the self-conscious color sting her cheeks, and she looked away quickly; but Dominic, making no attempt to remove his own eyes from her face, and apparently scarcely heeding her blush, said with a very quiet and almost musing note in his voice:

“One day you will have to visit Spain—that is one thing you will certainly have to do!”

“I don’t think it’s very likely.” She smiled, with just a touch of wistfulness. “Although, of course, I’d love to do so.”

“You will do so.” He sounded suddenly quite sure as he noted that faintly heightened color in her cheeks. For a moment she had the queer feeling that his blue eyes actually caressed her. “There is no doubt about it.”

And then, while he started up the car, she took a last look at the little church, her father’s last resting-place, and the village of San Agariu, and on the way back to the villa they neither of them talked very much, as if neither was in the mood for light conversation.

But now that she was sitting waiting for Martine to complete her dressing Jacqueline began to grow a little impatient. She heard a car stop on the gravel outside, and decided that it was Neville Barr arriving. And that decided her to go downstairs ahead of Martine—a thing she always disliked doing for some odd reason—and join her host and the man who had been invited to act as her escort for the evening.

For there could be very little doubt that that was what he had been invited for.

Both men were in the big main salon when she entered it, and both looked particularly distinguished in evening dress. Neville, with the Englishman’s ability to wear evening clothes with an air of ease and casualness in spite of the fact that he probably loathed the formality of them, actually warmed her heart for a moment because he looked so utterly spruce and even handsome, and Dominic, as always, was absolutely correct in every detail of his appearance.

Dominic, she so often thought, had no right to be so much more than merely handsome—so
disturbingly
handsome, was perhaps a better way of putting it.

Neville’s eyes quite lighted up at first sight of Jacqueline, and he paid her a very forthright compliment as soon as she gave him her hand.

“You look delightful,” he told her. “Absolutely delightful!”

“Oh!—Th-thank you.” Jacqueline looked a little taken aback. Dominic sent her a glance across the room which was a little cool and distant, considering the friendliness of their attitude to one another during the afternoon, and he did nothing to enlarge her ego still further by endorsing the doctor’s expressed opinion. “It’s my dress,” she said, modestly. “I rather like it myself.”

“I don’t know whether it’s your dress or yourself—but the combination of both is a little staggering!” Neville assured her, smiling down into her eyes.

And then Martine entered the room, and as always she became the cynosure of the various pairs of eyes in the room.

Her efforts to make the most of herself, in spite of the fraying of Juanita’s temper, and her inability to control her own temper during the actual process of dressing, had been well worth it. Her skin looked rather like a paper-white rose, and her hair positively flamed. Jacqueline blinked a little, because she thought it the most beautiful hair she had ever seen in her life. And Martine’s lovely white body was not so much clothed as shrouded in a mantle of darkness created out of drifting black net, and there were jade earrings in her ears, and a jade necklace about her white throat.

Jacqueline realized that the reaction of both men was instantaneous. They both stood, for a moment, and stared, and then Martine smiled at them languidly. It was plain that she was still hugging about herself a kind of cloak of reserve, but that was only where Dominic was concerned. Her smile for the doctor was full of seductive, green-eyed allure.

“Well,” she said, looking almost indifferently at Dominic, “do we go?”

They all four piled into Dominic’s car, and Dominic drove. The distance was short, for it was not much more than ten minutes later that they alighted in the square where Dominic had waited for Jacqueline that morning, and leaving the car entered the mouth of one of the narrow lanes which Jacqueline had also explored that morning. But tonight her elbow was held firmly by Dominic, while Martine was similarly guided by Neville, and there was no danger of her high heels catching in one of the ruts between the cobbles, or of her missing the curb when they came to it, for Dominic’s secure hold would not have permitted that, and his quiet voice told her where to place her feet.

They arrived at a high door set in a white wall, and once they had passed through Jacqueline found that they were in the usual kind of enclosed patio. Although it was dark, and the moon had not yet risen, she could see flowers gleaming palely in the shadowy gloom, and there was a sound like the plashing of a fountain near at hand. There was also the monotonous surge of the sea, and she realized that they were very close to it here.

A door with a softly gleaming ornamental lantern above it was opened to them, and inside they might have been in a luxurious private villa, which was what the place had actually once been, although it was now turned into a kind of club. The girls left their wraps in a cloakroom, and then rejoined their escorts in a big room where the tables were all discreetly arranged and softly lighted, and a clear place in the centre was plainly intended for dancing. There was also a kind of raised dais at the far end that was banked with flowers, and an orchestra was already playing softly when they entered, the low throbbing of guitars sending a kind of shivering pleasure through Jacqueline as soon as she heard it.

For her the evening passed in a kind of dream of unreality, for from the outset it became plain that Martine had by no means completely relented towards Dominic following upon what must have been quite a serious quarrel during the morning; and no doubt because she thought it would hurt him badly—perhaps drive home to him the extent of her displeasure—she remained cool and indifferent towards him throughout the entire evening. And Dr. Barr, who had been invited—so Jacqueline had believed—to provide her with someone to talk and dance with, became the recipient of all the exquisite red-head’s carefully calculated smiles, and it was on him that she turned the full battery of her charms and conversation.

While they dined, the conversation was more or less general, and Neville allowed his eyes to rest fairly often upon Jacqueline, in spite of Martine’s deliberate attempts to ensnare every glance from them for herself. But once couples started dancing it became obvious that Martine was having the effect upon him which was almost inevitable and Jacqueline’s claims to attention receded farther and farther into the background.

Jacqueline and Dominic sat watching them as they circled the floor, the most finished pair of dancers moving in the softened rays of amber light. Martine drifted with the ease and grace of a professional, and somewhat to Jacqueline’s surprise Neville was quite obviously a highly accomplished dancer.

She thought of her father, and his years at the clinic during which he had never danced, and it struck her not for the first time that Neville, stepping into his shoes, was as unlike him as it was possible to imagine, and really quite a fresh pair of shoes altogether.

She became aware that Dominic was not watching the

others, but was looking at her.

“Would you like to dance?” he asked.

She looked back at him almost in panic.

“I told you I’ve danced so little! I—I’m not at all sure I won’t disgrace you!...”

“Don’t worry,” he told her, smiling in the way she liked to see him smile best—gently, and as if she was something very young and rather rare—“I wouldn’t really mind if you did, but I’m quite sure you won’t!”

Following upon which reassuring pronouncement she found herself in his arms, and gliding like the others over the polished floor.

She became aware of a rising bubble of excitement and pleasure inside her. The moment his arm had actually slipped about her, and he had taken her hand, she had felt as if the breath caught and remained suspended for a few moments in her throat. And then, when she started to breathe again, she could actually feel the blood tingling in her veins as it coursed through them, and there was an excited quickening of her pulses.