Troubled Deaths (7 page)

She was hysterical and needed a sedative, thought Caroline.

‘I went to his place on Thursday because I thought that was when he’d asked me to lunch.’ Mabel walked over to the table with the brandy on it and picked up the bottle. ‘I swear I thought he said Thursday.’ She poured out a drink, drank, looked across the room at Caroline and then walked towards the kitchen.

‘I don’t want anything, thanks,’ said Caroline.

Mabel ignored her and went into the kitchen, to return with a glass into which she poured a generous brandy. Then she crossed to a wooden chest from which she brought out a siphon. She added soda to the brandy before handing Caroline the glass. ‘I’d been looking forward so much to having lunch with him.’

How could she so have failed to come to terms with life and herself? wondered Caroline. How could anyone so lumpy and awkward, so ill-equipped for romance, have remained as unthinkingly romantic as any schoolgirl?

‘I didn’t know so I went straight in because the front door was ajar. Well, we often do that out here, don’t we? We don’t always knock and wait. He’d got a friend, a woman. She . . .’ Mabel drank, finishing the brandy. She put the glass down. ‘They were . . .’ She poured herself another brandy. ‘She was naked and her hands . . . Oh God, it was terrible! I felt sick. And all he did was tell me I’d got the day wrong.’

Life dealt her only jokers, thought Caroline. Or did she deal them to herself?

‘He kept on and on telling me it was all my fault because I’d got the day wrong.’

‘I suppose that really was to try and hide his embarrassment.’

‘But he didn’t apologize. Not once. And the woman was laughing at me.’

That seemed very unlikely, in the circumstances.

‘It doesn’t matter what happened, though, I ought to have gone and seen him when he was ill. But I didn’t know he was so ill that he was dying.’ Tears suddenly spilled down her cheeks. ‘You’ve got to realize, I didn’t know he was dying.’

Caroline met Anson at the back bar which overlooked the square in Puerto Llueso. He was dressed in dirty, paint-stained sweater, jeans, odd socks, and plimsolls.

He studied her face and saw the lines of worry and said: ‘What the hell’s up, Carrie? Are you in trouble?’

‘Nothing’s the matter with me, but a lot’s wrong with Mabel. I went to see her earlier and can’t stop thinking about her.’

Anson crossed to the bar and ordered a coffee and a brandy, returned to the table with the brandy. He cradled the glass in his hand. ‘Stop worrying so hard about other people, Carrie. You can’t carry everybody’s troubles on your shoulders.’

‘She was in such a state.’

‘She’s never in anything else.’

‘You might be a bit more sympathetic,’ she said indignantly.

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘How can you sympathize with someone who never ever gets anything right? Look at her finding Geoffrey with some woman. She not only gets the day she’s invited totally wrong, she just barges into the house without waiting to see if she’s welcome. Anyone but her knows that Geoffrey spends more time horizontal than vertical.’

‘You can’t blame her for going inside. The front door was open and she was so certain she’d been invited for Thursday.’

‘An ounce of common sense would have told her to ring the bell and wait to see if he was occupied.’

‘I think that’s being silly.’

‘Realistic’

‘Just because you can’t stand her . . .’

‘Listen, Carrie, I don’t actively dislike her, but between us there just aren’t any smoke signals. And I’m not talking like I am just because I don’t get on with her. There was a woman in the village back home just like her. She fell down the stairs in her house three times before she finally fell a fourth time and broke her neck.’

‘So what does that prove?’

‘That this woman was mighty clumsy.’

The barman called out and Anson stood up and went over to the bar and collected the coffee. Caroline unwrapped the two cubes of sugar and dropped them into the cup. ‘I tried to get her to let me stay the night with her because she was in such a state.’

‘If you’re not careful, you’ll be nominated for a sainthood.’

‘Stop jeering,’ she said, with sudden anger.

‘Not jeering, just laughing. And if I couldn’t laugh at trouble, I’d’ve cut my throat years ago.’

She stared up at him and thought that he would always fight back by laughing. But what lay behind that laugh? A compassion which life had taught him could come too expensively, or an indifference towards other people’s troubles? She could never be quite sure.

‘Carrie, you’ve done ten times as much for her as anyone else in this place, so stop worrying. And just remember something when you’re in danger of getting too upset. It’s always possible that Mabel likes to be kicked around by life.’

‘What a damn fool thing to say! You know what she thought of Geoffrey. She’s absolutely beside herself with grief.’

‘But she must have realized what kind of bloke he was. And how he’d chase after anything under twenty-five which wore a skirt. So why did she keep after him unless she liked to be hurt?’

‘I don’t think I like you very much tonight. Something’s happened to you, hasn’t it? Something not very nice. Has Ramon laid down a deadline for you becoming a partner?’

He finished his brandy. ‘Carrie, you still have the capacity to amaze me. Who’d imagine that someone so far removed from the more sordid aspects of life would be able to pinpoint them so accurately?’ He looked at his glass, then very casually reached down to his trouser pocket to feel how much money he had left. ‘The next round’s on me,’ she said. He swore silently as he shook his head, but when she looked at him he picked up the glass and went over to the bar.

‘What did Ramon say?’ she asked, as he sat down again.

‘He wants to expand, he wants a partner who can really work and deal with the English-speaking tourists or residents, and he wants both in a hurry so he can plan for the next season. Can I or can’t I find the million and a half? . . . Very soon, I told him. Not to worry. But he’s a good Mallorquin and won’t believe a word until he’s got the pesetas in his hand.’

‘You must let me lend you the half million so that you can persuade a bank to give you the rest.’

‘I told you, forget the idea.’

‘But it’s ridiculous for you to sit back on your pride. . .’

‘You force me to further confessions . . . Despite my previous high-minded refusal of your money, I crept round to two of the local banks and put the proposition to the managers: I find half a million, you lend me a million. Nothing would give us greater pleasure, honoured customer . . . I’ll swear there were tears in their eyes. But money is so very short. All business is difficult and so have I a little security? Say a million pesetas’ worth? I’d have flogged it a long time ago, wouldn’t I? I told ‘em. So very sorry, honoured customer. We’d so have liked to help you . . . Always very polite, you see.’

‘Then maybe a third bank will help, or if not, a fourth. There must be one manager around with imagination.’

‘I doubt it: imagination isn’t a banking characteristic’ He smiled sardonically, mocking himself ‘In any case, I was only stringing them along. I’d never really borrow that half million from you.’

‘Not even when it’s the one chance you’ve always longed for?’

His expression momentarily hardened.

Alvarez awoke, remembered it was a Sunday, and relaxed.

How to spend the day? If it was fine, a drive up into the mountains where there were no tourists and there remained space and solitude? . . . But, of course! He’d promised to take the two children along to one of the beaches so that they could fly the new kite. He smiled. Children completed a home. If Juana-Maria had lived they would have filled their house with children and then through them they would have lived after death. Perhaps a little of him would live on through his cousin’s two children, even if she wasn’t really a cousin and his relationship to them had become too remote to be readily explained.

He remembered the cauliflower from Ca’n Ritat. He experienced the fierce longing to own land which so often gripped him. One day he would buy some and grow cauliflowers even larger and denser-headed than the one he had been given. Perhaps if he stopped drinking and buying so many presents for the children he could save enough money. But children ought to be given toys and when he drank brandy he could forget Juana-Maria for a little while.

He climbed out of bed, crossed to the window, opened it, and pushed back the shutters. It was a sunny day, warmer than expected because the wind was coming in from the south. He stared over the roofs of the houses, their tiles forming a mosaic of soft pinky-browns, at the hermitage and church on Puig Antonia, now looked after by nuns, and he wondered whether Santa Antonia would listen to his plea to own a little land? He wasn’t certain how a saint saw worldly ambitions, yet felt that his ambition was surely one of which he need not really be ashamed.

Downstairs, his nephew, Juan, was reading a comic. ‘Hullo, Uncle. You promised to take us to the beach today.’

‘I haven’t forgotten,’ said Alvarez, scrumpling Juan’s already untidy hair.

‘Mother said you would probably forget because you’d drunk so much coñac when you said you’d take us.’

‘I am very fond of your mother, but sometimes she does tend to exaggerate. Report back to her that you are quite definitely going to the beach this afternoon.’

‘Why not let’s go this morning? After lunch you’ll sleep and snore and it’s getting dark so early now.’

He sighed. ‘All right. But you’d better understand that I’m making a very great sacrifice on your behalf.’

‘You mean you won’t be able to go boozing at the club?’

‘The young of today are far too smart for their own good.’

Juan laughed and at that moment the telephone rang. ‘It’ll be for your mother,’ said Alvarez hopefully.

He was wrong. ‘The Institute of Forensic Anatomy has rung through, Enrique,’ said the Guard. ‘The English señor died from eating a poisonous fungus called Amanita Mallorquinas?

‘I suppose that means it was a llargsomi?’

‘I wouldn’t know about that. Superior Chief Salas says that you’re to investigate very carefully how the Englishman came to eat a poisonous fungus and to take whatever steps are necessary to see it doesn’t happen again.’

‘Well, it won’t happen again to him, will it? . . . Why in the hell is Salas getting in on the act?’

‘The captain rang him to make a full report because it is a matter of public urgency.’

‘The captain’s a stupid bastard.’

Juan laughed and Alvarez looked at him through the opened doorway and shook his fist, daring him to tell his mother what he had said.

‘I’m not arguing with you over that, Enrique . . . Have a happy working Sunday.’

Alvarez replaced the receiver. If the captain had minded his own business, nothing need have been done until tomorrow. But thanks to that interfering idiot, he was now going to have to spend Sunday trying to discover how an Englishman could have eaten a llargsomi when Orozco and Matilde swore blind that in the kitchen there had been only esclatasangs.

He crossed the sitting-room and went through into the kitchen. ‘Juan, that was a call telling me I’ve got to work today. So the trip to the beach is off unless I can wrap up everything before the afternoon.’

After breakfast he drove into the square, which for the morning was ringed by ‘No Entry’ signs, and parked by the steps.

The raised part of the square was a mass of people and stalls selling all the vegetables in season, and some imported from the Peninsula or the Canary Islands which were out of season, nuts, cheese, eggs, dried herbs, and bedding-out plants. He pushed his way through the crowd to the church, against the wall of which was a barrow selling sweets. He chose several packets of the more sickly-looking kind which he knew his nephew and niece liked, then walked past the cafe - this one was patronized far more by the locals than the one on the south-east side of the square - and along to a toy shop where he spent quite a long time deciding which two toys to buy. That done, he returned to the Club Llueso and had two brandies.

He drove out of town and along the Puerto road to the islands and there cut up past the new football ground to the camino and Ca’n Ritat.

Matilde was in the kitchen, washing down the tiled floor which was spotless. She was clearly glad to have someone to talk to and she offered him a coffee.

He sat at the table set close to the far wall and while she made the coffee he stared at all the electrical equipment and wondered what it could do that an efficient wife couldn’t. And what happened when there was a power cut?

She poured out two large cupfuls of coffee and put one in front of him, together with milk in a plastic bottle and sugar in a bowl. C I can’t get used to it,’ she said, as she sat. ‘I mean, not having to get his breakfast and find out what he wants for lunch and all that sort of thing.’

‘Have you any idea what’s going to happen here?’

She shook her head.

‘Are you sorry this job will come to an end?’

She pursed her lips. ‘Luis will be. But I didn’t like the way the señor entertained.’

‘Because it made your work so hard?’

‘Not that. Hard work’s never worried me.’

‘Then it was all the women he had along?’

‘That’s right.’

‘It must have been upsetting for someone like you, señora, but the English have very different standards from us.’

‘How can women behave like that? And some of them were even married!’ She spoke with genuine amazement. She knew only virtuous women who honoured their marriages.

He stirred sugar into his coffee and drank. ‘Did he ever have his family along: you know, parents, brothers, and sisters?’

‘Never once, not all the time we worked here.’

‘Which is how long?’

‘Just about three years.’

The English seemed to take their family ties about as seriously as their marriage vows. ‘All in all, would you have called it a good job?’

‘I suppose it wasn’t too bad. We had Monday afternoon and evenings off and one week-end in four. And if one or other of us wanted an extra day, he usually gave it to us unless he was in a mood. You could find worse jobs and that’s a fact. Except for all the women. He was a . . . But he’s dead now, God rest his soul.’