The Stars of San Cecilio (20 page)

— but I must say I don’t understand why you should be dismissed like this. Dona Beatriz is not Dr. Fernandez’ wife yet, and there may be some mistake. Perhaps if I spoke to Dr. Fernandez

himself on the telephone----- ’

‘No, no!’ Lisa cried, almost hysterically, at once, and Aunt Grizel felt suddenly very much enlightened.

‘Very well, my dear, but presumably you’ll have to see

him before you leave?’

‘I won’t see him! ’ with a tightening of the lips that was quite unlike the usual gentle Lisa. ‘I’ll never see him again! ’ And she meant it. Once away from Spain she would do her utmost — and only she knew how difficult that would be! — to put him not only out of her life but out of her thoughts, for he had behaved in a way she would never have believed of him. He had talked about her to another woman—the woman he was to marry, admittedly, but a woman who was hostile to Lisa. He had admitted that the English girl embarrassed him, although how, or in what way, she had embarrassed him she couldn’t think. Only last night she hadn’t really thought it wise that they should leave the party together — not without saying a word of farewell to either their host or hostess, and she had reminded him that Dona Beatriz might not like it. But he had said quite curtly that they would leave Dona Beatriz out of it. And not very long afterwards he had kissed her as if he had wanted to do that for a long time!

All night she had lain awake feeling the touch of his lips. The way they had closed almost hungrily over her mouth, and the manner in which he had murmured her name, over and over again, and sought to keep her in his arms, had not at the time seemed a very clear indication that the whole episode was one-sided, and that it was she who had tempted him by some unwary glance. He might be sorry for her — perhaps he was — but he didn’t have to take pity on her to that extent.

After all, she had not been without admirers all the evening! She had not been exactly a wallflower at the party!

But now she was too sick at heart to care much why he had behaved as he had. She only knew that from now on even the thought of his name would cover her in humiliation, and it was a humiliation that felt like dust and ashes in her mouth. She had never known one could feel as despised and rejected as this.

‘Listen to me, Lisa, ’ Aunt Grizel was saying. ‘If you go home to England where will you stay? Have you any friends you can go to?’

Lisa didn’t bother to answer the last part of the question.

‘I’ll find myself a room,’ she said. ‘I’ll go to an hotel for a night or two, and then look for a room. Or maybe I’ll be lucky and get something to do immediately. ’

‘You don’t want to go rushing into the first job that falls vacant. Listen, Lisa,’ she insisted again, ‘I have a little cottage in Cornwall that is empty at the moment but there is a woman who looks after it for me, and she’ll look after you. I want you to go there and stay there until you can find something you like, or something you feel you will like to do. But please don’t rush into anything! I’m terribly fond of you, Lisa,’ she sounded just a trifle wistful, ‘and I’d hoped you might stay with me longer, but I realize you can’t do that. I don’t quite know why, but you’ve got to get away. And that being so will you go to Tressida Cottage?’

‘Tressida Cottage?’ Lisa echoed, a little stupidly.

‘Yes; it’s right on the edge of the cliffs, and very attractive. No one will disturb you, and my woman will cook for you, and do anything else for you you want. And if you can bear it you can have the place right through the winter. Though it can be lonely in the winter months ... ’ she ended doubtfully.

Lisa suddenly made up her mind.

‘Tressida Cottage?’ she repeated. ‘I’ll go there!’ Her face brightened suddenly at the thought of getting away from everything and everyone connected with the past few months, and then it suddenly struck her how ungrateful she was appearing, and she implored Miss Tracey to believe that she would have stayed with her just a little longer if she could, but she couldn’t. ‘You’ve been so kind,’ she said, ‘so terribly kind! And it’s been a wonderful fortnight! Until last night I — I was enjoying it.’

‘Were you?’ Miss Tracey murmured, but she sounded as if she needed convincing. ‘Well, I don’t know how Peter’s going to take your sudden vanishing. . . . And what am I to say to Dr. Fernandez if he comes here?’

‘Nothing,’ Lisa replied immediately, but with great insistence. ‘ Just tell him I had to go! ’

‘And you don’t think it might be fair to let him know why

— or in part why — you had to go?’

‘No; no!’ Lisa sounded horrified. ‘Tell him nothing, please! Just — ask him to give my love to Gia! ’

She thought about Gia all the way to England, and curiously enough she felt that Gia would be as unhappy over this business as she was herself. Gia had grown fond of her, Gia had trusted her, and now she was disappearing out of Gia’s life as she was out of Gia’s father’s. In the case of the child the disappearance might come a little hard, but the father would feel nothing but relief!

Lisa’s cheeks burned so painfully that the color seemed to scorch her skin every time she remembered how much she had embarrassed him, and how proportionately strong his relief would be when he knew that he was never likely to be embarrassed again in the same way!

When she reached England the grey skies and the chill wind seemed to indicate that summer had already departed, and all the way down to Cornwall the impression grew stronger and stronger. There were powerful seas, and the little white cottage was perched rather perilously near to the edge of the cliffs that overlooked the empty beach. It was a cottage that reminded her of a blind eye — or, rather, two blind eyes, which were the windows of the downstairs rooms, one on either side of a narrow hall — looking hopelessly to see if someone wouldn’t come and occupy it, and bring back the warmth of human company.

Lisa felt that she was hardly the human company the cottage craved when the taxi-man deposited her suitcase in the road a dozen or so yards from the gate of the cottage itself. There was no actual road leading up to the gate of the cottage, and the taxi-man seemed anxious not to risk his cab too near to the edge of the cliffs.

‘Sorry, miss, but I don’t mind carrying the case in for you,’ he said. When they reached the green-painted front door he asked for the key. ‘Bit lonely for a young woman like you,’ he remarked, when he had swung open the door, ‘but I expect you like the sea?’

The inference was that he wasn’t very fond of it himself, and remembering the variegated seas that had crashed silkily on the beach of the Costa Brava, and the villa with its garden — which she would never see again! — ablaze beside those perennially sun-kissed waters, and the rose-red and emerald-green rocks to which she and Gia had so frequently clung like limpets in sun-suits, Lisa felt all at once quite appalled to be where she was. Not that she hadn’t once spent a very happy holiday in Cornwall, and admired it at the time. But Cornwall was not — the Costa Brava!

And the Costa Brava was not Madrid!

‘Yes, I’m very fond of the sea,’ she admitted, and then tipped the man with a generosity that surprised him, and walked into the stone-flagged kitchen. Mrs. Pendennis had left a bottle of milk for her in the larder, a fresh loaf in the bread-bin, a quarter of tea beside the kettle that was filled and ready to plug in to the electric point, and a note which explained that her youngest had had toothache, and that she had had to get him to the dentist, which meant that she would not put in an appearance until the following day. But the beds in both bedrooms were aired, and if Lisa switched on the immersion heater she would be able to have a bath.

Lisa looked around the empty, cold little kitchen, and wondered whether she could summon up the energy to have a bath. Her journey from Spain seemed to have exhausted her, mentally as well as physically, and all she craved was oblivion, and the comfort of clean sheets. And perhaps in the morning a touch of sun would restore some of the normality that seemed to have departed from her, and give her more courage to face the future.

But in the night the wind grew stronger, and by morning the sea wasn’t merely pounding the beach, it was thundering against the very walls of the cottage — or so it seemed. Rain drove against the windows, rain and spray and great lumps of spume like soapsuds.

Lisa stayed inside all morning, and then put on a mackintosh and fought her way through the gale to the nearest tiny store where she could obtain supplies, and there learned that Mrs. Pendennis’s youngest had had a bad time at the dentist’s, and that it was unlikely she would put in an appearance that day. The woman in the shop seemed sympathetic to learn that Lisa was quite alone, and expressed the opinion that the storm would get worse.

‘We get ’em in these parts!’ she remarked ominously.

They certainly ‘got ’em’ before nightfall, and by nightfall Lisa’s nerves were beginning to be worn with the constant shrieking of the wind, and the battering of the sea against the cliff which supported the cottage. She lighted a fire in the sitting-room grate and sat by it, trying to lose herself in one of the books left behind by Miss Tracey, and at nine o’clock she made herself a hot drink and put a hot-water bottle in her bed. It was still summer, it was true, but the storm made it very cold — unless it was she who felt cold and unhappy and desperate as she went lifelessly about these attempts to minister to her own comfort.

She thought of herself doing this sort of thing throughout the winter, sheltering from reality in Miss Tracey’s cottage, seeing no one save Mrs. Pendennis and the woman at the shop, and concerned only with keeping her little larder well stocked.

While far away in Madrid! . . .

She went to bed with the hot-water bottle, and perhaps because it really was a comfort she slept well that night — deep and dreamlessly, in spite of the storm that raged without. And in the morning, when she sat up in bed and looked from the tiny window, the storm had abated, and the sun was shining brilliantly, and everything was deliciously green and gold and blue.

A green and gold and blue world! . . . Just a little like the Costa Brava!

She fairly sprang from her bed, and without waiting to make herself any breakfast, or even tea, washed and dressed and went outside and stood in a state of bemused admiration in the tiny front garden. From the garden a path led down to the beach, but it was not an easy path, and the rocks amongst which it meandered were sharp as dragon’s teeth, grey as roof slates that had been touched by hoar-frost, and slippery with receding moisture that was being slowly drawn up into the atmosphere by the warmth of the sun.

And the sun was warm this morning — warm and benevolent, and inclined to act as a false boost to morale. Nothing, in that sunlight, could strike one as quite as bad as it actually was, and Lisa wanted to feel more of it on her body, striking down on to her uncovered head, seeping into every pore of her mental fibre like a lovely, soothing sedative. The garden was partly in shadow because of the walls of the house, so she adventured towards the edge of the cliff, and then started to descend the cliff path.

She wore rubber-soled sandals, and they slithered on the rocks. Half-way down she began to feel uncertain of herself, and when she looked upwards at the wall of cliff behind her her uncertainty seemed to spread, because the tiny cottage now seemed almost inaccessible, and the beach was still a considerable distance below her.

She never had had a very good head for heights, and she realized now that it would have been wiser if she had waited for that early-morning cup of tea. She had lived on practically nothing the day before, having no appetite — and what interest was there in preparing meals when there was only yourself? — and she felt a little hollow inside. In fact, quite disturbingly hollow.

When she looked downwards her head swam. When she looked upwards she wanted to crouch down and cling to the jagged, needle-pointed rocks that were all about her.

And below her the sea swirled, dazzling her, continuing to bemuse her with its shimmer, and the long call of gulls reminded her that they were the only other living creatures near her.

A sense of panic shook her. She’d have to try and get back up the cliff! She didn’t think she could go on down!

And then a voice not very far away ordered her to remain where she was. She looked round upwards, and saw that someone was making his or her way to her — at that distance, and with the blinding light of the sun in her eyes, she couldn’t see whether it was a man or a woman. But when the figure came nearer the voice was unmistakably masculine, and it ordered her more peremptorily not to move. Not to take a single step either backwards or forwards.

‘I’ll be with you in a minute!’ the calm voice said, and this time Lisa’s heart turned over, and her knees started to tremble, because it wasn’t just an ordinary English voice. ...There was a kind of accent to it — an accent she would never forget!

The next moment he landed on the rock beside her, and he looked extraordinarily English in a tweed suit that looked as if it had been made by an English tailor, and a carelessly flowing tie that was caught by the breeze and almost whipped into her face when he was within a foot of her. Then she looked up into a dark, rather shut-in

face that could never be taken as purely English, and into eyes that had often reminded her of midnight pools, because they were so inscrutable. Only now the eyes were blazing with concern, although the mouth was compressed, and the strong chin looked rigid. His black hair shone in the sunlight. ‘Did you lose your nerve?’

His voice was quiet, almost casual, and as she answered she tore at her lower lip in a way that caused a tiny drop of blood to spurt.

‘I must have done. I—I’m not very good at heights! ’

‘But you’re all right now. ’

His arm was round her, and he was holding her tight, and for the moment her amazement was drowned in the miracle of his appearance, and although she didn’t recognize her own reaction she clung to him, and he could feel how she trembled as she did so.

‘How did you get here?’ she asked, after what seemed to her an eternity of blissfully relieved silence.