Troubled Deaths (3 page)

‘Why are you going on and on about it?’ ‘Because I want you to realize he isn’t the layabout you seem to think he is.’

‘Jason told me he’s lazy and hopelessly incompetent.’ ‘You know that Jason doesn’t like anyone who doesn’t dress in silk shirts and manicure his nails twice a day. And I happen to know why Jason’s talking like that. He got Teddy to revarnish the deck of his yacht and now he won’t pay up, but keeps making excuses and inventing complaints. It’s terrible when you think that Jason’s as rich as Croesus and Teddy hasn’t a penny.’

‘If he hasn’t any money, he won’t be able to pay the million and a half, will he?’

‘No . . . Not unless he can borrow it.’

‘No bank’s going to be that stupid. Give him one and a half million and he’d be out of the country as fast as he could run.’

‘That’s being ridiculous.’

‘You haven’t learned what men are like.’

‘But Teddy could be trusted with a hundred million . . . Mabel, if you can, will you lend it to him? It could all be done legally and if you’re still so worried the money could be paid directly to Ramon. Teddy would give you full interest and so you’d be benefiting and you’d be giving him the chance of a lifetime.’

‘The chance to go on drifting.’

‘Don’t be so prejudiced . . .’

‘I’ve seen dozens like him. They come out here because the drink’s cheap and the women are even cheaper and they just drift around expecting to live on charity. There’s a very crude word for them - beach-bums.’

‘That’s not Teddy.’

‘No? Then why didn’t he have the courage to come and ask me for the money face to face instead of making you do it?’

‘He doesn’t even know I’ve asked. It was entirely my idea.’

‘Nonsense! He’s hiding behind your skirts, but you’re far too nice to realize it. You’re too kind-hearted. Someone’s only got to invent a new hard-luck story for you to get all worried and upset about him. You must stop believing everything you hear and learn to be suspicious. If you don’t, one of these days you’re going to find out the truth about men in the nastiest way.’ Her mouth twisted into bitter lines.

Caroline had always had tremendous sympathy for the underprivileged, but her sympathy was far from uncritical, as Mabel supposed. She had the intuitive ability to be able to sort out those whose misfortunes were due to circumstances beyond their control from those whose misfortunes were due to their own inadequacies, which could be overcome if only they fought. It was Edward Anson’s fighting spirit which had so appealed to her from the moment she had first met him.

The world had given him a tough ride. His parents had been poor and the marriage bitterly unhappy and he had become a shuttlecock of emotional contention between them long before he could really appreciate that fact. His memories of childhood – he seldom spoke about those times – were of rows and causeless blows. Just before his seventh birthday, his father had gone off with another woman to leave his wife penniless. She had moved to Hampshire where she had obtained a job as housekeeper in a house which bordered the River Test. There, Anson had found the world of boats.

He was not an articulate man, except where boats were concerned, and therefore could not readily explain the psychological meaning boats had come to have for him, but Caroline was certain that for him they were freedom from all the emotional unhappiness found ashore. A boat sailed one away from the land where a man would try to prove his manhood by subjugating a woman: at sea, only the wind and the waves were truly powerful and they were neutral.

When his mother had died, after a painful illness, he had had to leave the house by the river. He’d drifted, in the sense that he had moved from job to job and place to place, but his goal had always been crystal-clear to him. On a May day he had landed in Palma from the Barcelona ferry and three weeks after that he had wandered into Puerto Llueso. He had stood on the front and looked at the harbour and he had suddenly known that here was where his destination had lain from the beginning. He had gone to the two boatyards and the three boat-builders in the Port and had asked for a job and each one had refused him. The next week he’d visited them again and they’d refused again: and each week after that. He’d swallowed his pride - of which he had far too much - and he’d badgered English yacht-owners, whom he stupidly despised just because they were, by definition, wealthy, asking, pleading to be given some work. One man, attracted by the chance of having the work done cheaply, had offered him the job of rubbing down and varnishing the deck and superstructure of a thirty-foot cruiser. He’d worked on that boat with all the care of a restorer working on an old master, not only because he wanted to create an impression, but also because where boats were concerned he was a perfectionist. The owner had been duly impressed, by the standard of workmanship and by the reasonable size of the bill.

When the boatyards were busy, no one worried that a few odd jobs were carried out by a foreigner who had no work permit. But as the world went into economic recession, the number of yachts in the Port became fewer and owners of those which remained cut back on the work they had carried out on them. Then, the men who ran the boatyards began to concern themselves with the work they were not getting because a foreigner was undercutting their charges. This was how Ramon Mena had first met Anson.

Mena had intended to lay a denunciation, which would quickly have removed the nuisance. But he also had a passion for boats and when he saw the work Anson was doing he realized that here was someone after his own heart. He delayed the denunciation and spoke to Anson about many things, and the upshot was instead of having him removed from the island, he offered him a partnership. For Anson, it was a dream desperately trying to come true.

Caroline walked along the front, past the bars where a gin and tonic cost fifty to sixty pesetas, and then down one of the cross streets to a back bar where it cost twenty. Anson had not yet arrived, so she sat at one of the tables. The barman came out from behind the counter - normally he refused to serve the tables - and asked her how things were and how was she? She understood enough of what he said to reply that she was fine. She asked him if she could have a coffee.

She saw Anson cross the square and then wait in the shadow of a palm tree for a couple of cars to pass. He was strong, she thought, like an oak tree, but like an oak tree he had not learned to bend to the wind. He refused to practise discretion, to temper his instinctive and baseless dislike of wealth and heritage, to stop preparing to bite the hand which might feed him . . .

He opened the door, stepped into the cafe, came to the table, and sat. He ran a hand, stained with grease, through his mop of curls and then rubbed the tip of his nose on the back of his hand. His craggy face was browned by sun and wind so that there was the look of a gypsy about him.

‘I could murder a brandy. Have you ordered anything, Carrie?’

‘Pedro’s bringing me a coffee.’

He turned and called for a large brandy. ‘The wind’s a bit of a bite to it today. I’ve been reeving some new rigging and got bloody chilled.’

‘Why on earth haven’t you been wearing a sweater?’

‘Didn’t think I’d need one,’ he answered uninterestedly. He brought a pack of Ducados from his pocket and offered her a cigarette.

‘Teddy, I . . .’ She stopped. She was a little afraid how he would react to what she was going to say. She leaned forward to light her cigarette on the match he had just struck.

‘Well?’

‘Please don’t look at me like that.’

‘I’m wondering just what in the hell you’ve been up to. When you’ve got that expression on your face, it’s got to be something dramatic’

‘It isn’t really. It’s just . . . Teddy, I’ve been having a word with Mabel.’

‘A word about what?’

‘Well, I . . . I tried to persuade her to lend you the money you so need.’

‘You did what?’ His voice thickened. ‘What d’you think you . . .’

‘I knew you’d never ask her yourself. And you said the banks won’t help. I just thought she might lend it to you . . . Teddy, it’s no good sitting back on your dignity and dislikes. You may never get a chance like this again and you’ve got to do everything you possibly can to try to grab it. If she’d lend the money to you . . .’

‘You should have saved your breath for cooling porridge: and kept your nose out of my affairs. I wouldn’t ask that old bitch for the time.’

‘She’s not that kind of person at all when you get to know her.’

‘Pass me by on that pleasure.’

‘You’re being very stupid.’

‘Now there’s one thing I’m really good at.’

‘You can say that again sometimes!’ She shook her head. ‘Look, all I was trying to do was help you, so don’t jump down my throat too hard.’

‘But can’t you see that she’s the last person to ask for anything?’

‘No, I can’t. Underneath, she’s really quite nice and kind.’

‘Carrie, you’re soft enough to see a Prince Charming inside every frog.’

‘Everything’s so much nicer like that. And quite often there really is one, you know.’

‘OK, Cinderella.’

She smiled.

The bartender brought the coffee and brandy. He asked Anson how he was and Anson answered in rough, but serviceable Spanish that things weren’t too bad.

After stirring in a spoonful of sugar and sipping the coffee, she put down the cup and said: ‘If Mabel won’t help, you’ve got to find some other way of getting the money and I think I’ve found one. The banks won’t lend it to you now because you can’t offer them any security. But suppose you put down half a million and then only asked for the remaining million? You’d be showing them how you believe in yourself and that means a lot. I think they’d let you have it.’

‘If I’d half a million, I’d have already tried that.’

‘I’ve that much which I could bring out from England.’

‘No,’ he said sharply.

‘Why not? It’s not as if I wouldn’t get it all back. And if it would make the bank lend you the rest . . .’

‘I’m not taking a peseta from you.’

‘But this is your chance in a lifetime.’

‘It’s the chance I’ve longed for from the day I first saw a dinghy in a stiff wind tacking across the Test with her gunwale almost under and the sail as tight as a drumhead. But I’m still not touching a peseta of yours.’

‘You can be terribly stubborn.’

‘I was born plain, bloody awkward.’

‘Then I’ll go back and ask Mabel again. Maybe I could get her in a more sympathetic mood.’

‘I’ve told you once. Keep your nose out of my business.’ She was not upset by his rudeness. She understood that it concealed emotions which he did not wish to be identified.

Luis Blanco had grey hair, a leathery, creased complexion, dark brown eyes, and a wide, thick-lipped mouth. He walked with a slight limp which became pronounced whenever he was tired: a .303 bullet had nicked his femur – a fraction to the right and it would have shattered the bone, perhaps beyond repair. He wore a badly fitting grey suit which hung about him and the collar of his shirt was so large that it gaped away from his neck and the tie sagged: his beret had once been brown, but now it was more nearly black. He carried a medium-sized suitcase, one corner of which was badly worn so that the middle layer of cardboard showed through the plastic.

He stopped half-way along the drive, put down the suitcase, and waited patiently for Orozco to finish the work he was doing: one hurried only for birth or death. He took a large red handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose, so loudly that the dog in the courtyard barked a couple of times.

Orozco finished what he was doing, dropped the mattock to one side, and plodded along the side of a flower-bed to the drive. ‘Are you off now, then?’

‘Hernandez’s brother is driving his lorry into Palma and he says he’ll take me.’

‘Have you heard how your brother is?’

‘They say he is very ill. Perhaps he is dying.’

‘Please God they are wrong and there will be no bells and long-faced priests.’

Blanco shrugged his shoulders with a fatalistic acceptance of whatever the future might be. A tomato seed sewn in January grew into a plant which fruited in June and died in October and no man could alter that rhythm: death came when it wished, not when man willed. ‘I’ve spoke to Matilde and said I must be with my brother until he gets better or dies. Perhaps I will be there many days. See all goes well, Lopez.’

‘Don’t worry, Luis, I will look after her.’

Blanco nodded. He blew his nose again, hawked, spat. TU be on my way.’ He picked up the suitcase.

‘God go with you,’ said Orozco. He watched Blanco walk to the end of the drive, pass through the gateway, and turn right on to the camino.

He went back along the drive and from behind an oleander bush he picked up a leather porron and drank some wine from it. He wondered what Barcelona looked like now. He remembered it as a city of hatred and revenge, where God had been forgotten and the Devil ruled in high state.

As he replaced the porron, Matilde came out of the courtyard and walked towards him. She was beautiful, he thought without lust. She smiled at him and said: ‘I suppose you saw Luis a moment ago?’

‘Yes. He told me that Hernandez is taking him into Palma. He says his brother is very ill.’

‘Did he ask you to look after me?’

‘Yes.’

‘He always used to fuss and now he fusses more than ever. Of course I shall be alright. I am not a child.’

He said nothing. It was obvious to anyone that she was not a child.

‘And he is ridiculous to think I am too friendly with Garcia. I talk and laugh with Garcia when I meet him, but that is all. I said to Luis, “Do you think Garcia can be anything to me but someone to laugh with and talk to? You are my husband. He is just a boy!” ’

Her friendship with Garcia was no concern of his so long as Garcia did not try to come to Ca’n Ritat whilst Luis was away. And no matter what, no woman in full bloom was going completely to ignore the admiration of a handsome man of her own age. Still, it was right a husband should be jealous.