Unknown (5 page)

We settled on twelve-thirty. James, she reckoned, would have shown me the ropes by then. I wondered if she thought he might also buy the new girl some lunch. In which case there was no doubt whatsoever that she would be disappointed.

Despite my tiredness I took a long time to get to sleep that night. I kept turning over the events of the day, the people I’d met and the people I’d yet to meet, and nervously I suppose anticipating my session with Mr. Fitzgerald tomorrow. I wondered if he was deliberately dragging me in on a Sunday when only a skeleton staff worked, as a punishment. To show who was master, as it were. And just before I fell asleep I wondered about Mrs. Mallenport’s strangely romantic theory about the key to the young Head of Chancery’s heart. The words of an old song came into my mind. As far as I was concerned whoever held that key could put it in a box, tie it up in ribbon, drop it in the deep blue sea.

I slept through my first dawn. Chico roused me with a glass of iced orange juice at seven o’clock saying rather reproachfully that the
senorita
had missed '
Madruga'.
He pulled back the curtains flooding the room with full bright daylight. Now from my balcony I could see the terraced city with its terracotta roofs, delicate ornate spires, and the soft green of many parks. The air was very still, and so fine and clear that colours hit the eye with an almost painful immediacy.

The Residence garden was full of the drone of bees, the whisper of the fountains and bird song. Little sparrowlike creatures, called chingolos, Chico said, perched on the branches of flame trees and oleander and hibiscus, warbled in a full-throated song like that of the nightingale. Whatever the redoubtable Mr. Fitzgerald might say, this was something very like Shangri-La or the Land at the top of the Beanstalk. Complete even with its ogre, I thought, showering, and dressing myself for the coming confrontation with care.

I breakfasted alone on the terrace. A table for one was already set. The
senora
and the
senorita
usually ate a little late on Sundays, Chico said, wheeling out a trolley, laden with fresh fruit and a variety of freshly baked rolls and coffee. The
senorita
had returned home late. He smiled fondly; she had been to a divertissement, with Mr. . .. he seemed not quite able to remember the name.

‘Mr. Fitzgerald?’

‘
Gracias
,
senorita
.
’ He almost burst himself with gratitude. ‘As you say, Mr. Fitzgerald.’

I looked towards the deserted tennis courts, and thought wryly that there was one game at least to Hester.

While I ate Chico stood attentively beside me, ready to pass me a roll or snatch up an orange and peel it the moment my eye happened to rest upon it.

He told me in halting English, prompted by my halting Spanish, that he and his wife Bianca, who was the Residence cook, came from a little village on the other side of the mountain.

‘And now I will tell you,’ Chico said when I refused the second cup of coffee, ‘when your transport has the pleasure of waiting for you.’

I did not allow it to have the pleasure for long. Mindful of what awaited me at nine o’clock, I was on my feet as soon as the Embassy Land Rover appeared in sight. This time an official driver was at the wheel.

‘
Buenos dias, senorita
,’ he addressed me courteously, and opened the door. There were no other passengers. We drove at a smart pace in the opposite direction from the airport towards the city centre. It was quite different from anything I had ever seen. It seemed more like a series of parks and flower gardens and beautiful old buildings than a commercial centre. We passed beautiful squares of Spanish style architecture, all, it seemed, with their central statues and fountains and all filled with flowers. All the houses that lined our route had brightly coloured windowboxes. Flowers were planted by the roadside, in between the traffic lanes, in tubs at every entrance. There were even pompoms of wild flowers which I later found out were wild orchids growing along the telegraph wires.

Food stalls had already been set upon the pavements and were doing a brisk business. Donkey carts laden with pumpkins and figs and melons were trotting towards the city centre. All the carts were driven by an Indian, with his women trotting on behind. The women wore their hair in a multitude of thin small plaits, the arrangement surmounted by a battered trilby hat.

And then in all too short a time, the Land Rover left the old part of the town, raced past some new villas and stopped precipitately outside a modest two-storey building. It was of modern glass and concrete architecture, double-fronted with large windows discreetly net- curtained. It looked to me rather like a dentist’s surgery, except that there was a Union Jack this time flying from a flagpole on the flat roof. And even the most hamhanded dentist doesn’t usually have iron bars over his waiting room windows.

There was also a shield beside the door announcing that this was Her Britannic Majesty’s Embassy, and discreetly behind the inner door, a sentry on duty. He inspected my security card and waved me inside.

There were enormous pictures of Concorde, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and the Forth Bridge on the walls. A pretty Charaguayan girl with jet black hair and thickly fringed dark brown eyes sat behind a desk marked Inquiries. She knew who I was, however, before I opened my mouth.

‘The Head,’ she said, ‘awaits you upstairs in Chancery.’

Somehow it carried me back over the years to school. I’d been to a mixed grammar school, where the only time you were summoned to the Head’s office upstairs was for a ticking off, or worse. I climbed the same sort of staircase with the same sort of feeling in the pit of my stomach. I reached the landing, half expecting to see a small queue of similar offenders waiting to be dealt with outside the grilled brass doors of Chancery.

There was none. The landing was deserted. The barred doors of Chancery were unlocked. The door of an office beyond was also open. Through it a familiar voice bade me enter.

Mr. Fitzgerald was standing with his back to the window. The office faced the town and was so full of sunlight that his face was shadowed and I couldn’t read his expression.

‘Good morning, Miss Bradley. Sit down.’ He waved me to a chair in front of the desk and then sat himself down in the swivel chair behind it. The jacket of his lightweight tropical suit was draped over the back of it. His shirt sleeves were rolled up. He had very muscular brown arms, which he folded across his chest, leaning back comfortably, surveying me from under half-closed lids.

‘Rested up, have you?’ he asked me after a moment’s unhurried appraisal. ‘Getting used to the altitude, are you?’

There was a quickly swallowed amused quirk at the comers of his well-disciplined mouth. But his eyes remained cool. Grudgingly I admitted that in his own way he wasn’t bad-looking—if you preferred those tough good looks to Don Ramón's enigmatic and aristocratic ones. I certainly didn’t. But I could understand Hester’s infatuation, and also, if it were to be believed, Eve Trent’s. His mouth was perhaps inclined to be hard, and the jaw overly so. But there was a breadth about his forehead and a surprisingly open look about his face, at variance with the secrecy of his work, and if Mrs. Mallenport’s theory was correct about his heart.

On his side, Mr. Fitzgerald did not appear to be cataloguing my physical effects and defects. Nor did he appear to be trying to decide the exact colour of my eyes and hair. He looked at me shrewdly as one assessing work potential.

His voice when he spoke again was cool and noncommittal. ‘I brought you in today so that I could show you the ropes while there’s no one around to distract us.'

I remember thinking that both Hester and Eve, and probably thousands of girls for that matter would give their eye-teeth for the chance of being closeted in the secrecy of Chancery with such a young man. And thinking how mistaken they would be.

‘And also,' he went on, ‘I want to give you a little talk
a propos
of yesterday.’

He seemed to expect me to say something, but I kept silent.

‘This is the first time you’ve worked in an Embassy?'

I nodded.

‘This is a very small one, but there’s always the same pattern. In Chancery, where you are now, are the Registry, codes and cyphers, the radio room, the safes and my office. No visitors may enter Chancery, and only the British Embassy staff are allowed on this first floor. Except, of course, for people with appointments, and they must be accompanied. Understand?’

I nodded again.

‘The Ambassador’s office is opposite the Chancery gates, with his Secretary’s room, your room for the present, connecting. My deputy lives next door. The third official lives downstairs just off the Library. That’s the layout. As for your duties, they’ll be simply the other end of what you’ve been doing at the Foreign Office. You can familiarise yourself with the files tomorrow.’ He paused and turned his head away from me to look out of the window. ‘Now we come to the bit about where I fit in. As you probably know, I am responsible for discipline and security. Security
is
important, as I’m sure you’ll understand.’

I nodded.

‘Each of the staff has a security cupboard which is, of course, kept locked at all times. The keys are kept in the special key box in the Ambassador’s office. On no account must those keys be taken out of the building. Understand?’

I nodded again.

‘Charaguay is very friendly and very peaceful. H.E. and Mrs. Mallenport are held in great affection. H.E. is a very even-tempered, philosophical man, famed for having a proverb to suit every occasion.’ Mr. Fitzgerald smiled as if to warn me he was a
very
different cup of tea. ‘Being on an Embassy staff carries an extra responsibility and an extra risk. You become suddenly not Miss Bradley but a representative of Great Britain. Take proper precautions. Don’t go out too late on your own. If you do go for a trip anywhere let me know the time and place. It’s just common sense, isn’t it?’

I agreed that it was.

‘Charaguayans will treat you well. They are a very circumspect race. Which brings me back,’ James Fitzgerald said evenly, ‘to your friend of yesterday, Don Ramón de Carradedas.’

‘You’ve already told me,’ I protested mutinously, feeling that this man sitting: across the desk from me intended to keep me like a puppet on a string.

‘I’ve already told you that you must not encourage him,' James Fitzgerald corrected sharply. ‘I now propose to give you some indication of why.’

If the measured explanation which followed was meant to put me off Don Ramón it did quite the reverse.

It would appear that when Don Ramón had said proudly that he was Charaguay, he had been partially right. Not only was he one of the descendants of the noblest of the Spanish conquistadors, but rumour had it that he was also descended from the Incas themselves. About this alliance there was a story, James Fitzgerald told me, possibly apocryphal and certainly romantic. At this point the Head of Chancery, that man of the locked and secret heart, raised his level brows and his grim mouth curled cynically.

According to folklore, the sixteenth-century Don Ramón Carradedas had been one of the conquistadors who had daringly captured the Inca, whom the Indians revered as a god. These conquistadors, dazzled by the gold and jewels of the Inca temples, had demanded literally a king’s ransom. All except Don Ramón Carradedas. A man of humanity as well as courage, he had allowed the captive Inca’s family to visit him in prison, among them his beautiful sixteen-year-old daughter.

‘You can guess the rest,’ the Head of Chancery said briskly as if it demeaned him even to repeat such a foolish story.

‘Not completely.'

I could guess it, but for some reason I wanted him to tell me.

‘He fell in love with her,' James Fitzgerald said impatiently. ‘He renounced his share of the ransom for her hand in marriage.'

‘Did he get it?’

‘Of course,' Mr. Fitzgerald replied drily. ‘The Incas were highly intelligent men who knew the value of such an alliance.’

‘You’re a cynic,' I protested, thinking I could imagine the present-day Don Ramón acting in exactly that manner—giving up all his fortune if he really loved a woman.

‘No, I’m a realist, Miss Bradley.'

‘Was she in love with him?'

‘That I am not competent to answer.'

‘Were they happy?'

‘If folklore is to be believed, extraordinarily so. But we digress. Carradedas never returned to his native Spain. He brought over his possessions. He imported Spanish horses. He farmed the land, and built settlements. His young wife bore him many children, of which El Presidente and Don Ramón are descendants. El Presidente is Don Ramón's elder half-brother. There has always been a Carradedas in power. El Presidente takes his duties very soberly and seriously, but Don Ramón takes pleasure in flouting the conventions.'

‘And is that the problem?'

‘Happily that is only Charaguay and El Presidente’s problem. What would be
my
problem, Miss Bradley, is if he induces anyone from our country to partner him in the flouting of Charaguay's or
our
conventions.'

I flushed and lifted my chin. ‘And you think I would be easily induced?'

‘I haven’t known you long enough to form an opinion,' James Fitzgerald replied crushingly, ‘but for your sake I hope not. I am simply warning you,’ he stood up to indicate that my time with him was now over, ‘that to try to pursue your friendship with Don Ramón would be unwise, and that you in the end would be the sufferer.' He opened the door and stood facing me. ‘Don Ramon has the kind of persuasive tongue that can turn black into white and ugly into beautiful. Young women, I am told, are peculiarly susceptible to that sort of flattery.’