A Spanish Honeymoon

‘Not what you could call handsome, but madly attractive…my goodness, yes, as attractive as the devil and totally without morals. Still, as he isn’t married, can you blame him for grabbing his opportunities?’ was another comment that had stuck in her memory.

Liz, who had had her childhood and teenage years blighted by a man of the same stamp who had been married, was disposed to dislike all philanderers. She had no time for people who treated sex as a game. She despised them all.

Despite a disturbed night, she was up at her usual early hour the next day. Brushing her teeth in the bathroom, she thought for the umpteenth time how different she looked today from the way she had looked on arrival, pallid-faced and drawn after a cold and wet northern European winter and a succession of head colds caught while commuting from her home in the outer suburbs to her workplace in central London.

Now, even after a disturbed night, she had three times as much vitality as she had ever had in England. She had never been a beauty. Her dark blue eyes and her clear skin—once pale but now lightly tanned—were her best features, counterbalanced by a disastrous nose and a rather unfeminine chin.

In her other life, as she had begun to think of it, she had adapted her hairstyle to a conservative version of whatever was the prevailing fashion. Here, to save money, she had given up going to the hairdresser and let it grow to a length she could tie back or pin up. Her basic colour was mid-brown. In place of professionally-done highlights, these days she had only sun streaks, helped by rubbing selected strands with a cut lemon. There was always a lemon to hand because there was a limonero, that bore fruit all year round, growing in her little back yard.

After a quick hot shower, she dressed in a plain white T-shirt, a navy blue cotton skirt and navy sneakers. Later she was driving to the weekly produce market in a larger village a few kilometres away. She had planned, immediately after breakfast, to spend half an hour working in the walled garden of La Higuera.

In the same way that Alicia was supposed to look after the interior of the house, the previous owner of Liz’s house, an elderly Englishwoman called Beatrice Maybury, had undertaken to take care of the neighbouring garden. Beatrice had asked if Liz would be willing to continue this work and Liz had agreed. She had always liked gardening, and the generous fee paid to her predecessor in return for an hour’s work a week would be a welcome addition to her limited funds. At that time, of course, she had not known the kind of man the house belonged to. Beatrice had never mentioned his predatory tendencies. Perhaps she had been unaware of them since, by all accounts, she had kept herself to herself and not been part of the expatriates’ grapevine.

After their late arrival, and whatever had followed that passionate kiss, it seemed unlikely the people staying at La Higuera would be up and about before mid-morning. Liz decided to stick to her plan and do some weeding and watering before they surfaced for the day.

She entered the property by a gate at the side of the house that, by way of a narrow passage, led down to the ‘secret’ garden at the rear. Most of the larger houses in the main part of the village did not have gardens, only patios. In the rest of Europe, a patio meant any paved sitting-out area. But in Spain it was an open area within the structure of a building. In Valdecarrasca, many of the houses too small to have a patio had a small garden or yard. But the garden behind La Higuera was the size of a tennis court.

Her first task today was to plant out some cuttings she had taken from a clump of silvery-grey artemisia and kept, in water, in a dark green wine bottle until they put out small roots.

She was on her knees by the narrow bed at the foot of the wall clad with variegated ivy that spilled over the top and cascaded into her own little yard on the other side, when a man’s voice said, ‘Hello…who are you?’

The question gave Liz such a start that she let out a muffled squeak and, in scrambling to her feet, almost overbalanced. He stepped forward, grabbing her arm to steady her.

‘Sorry…I didn’t mean to scare you. I suppose you thought the house was still empty. I got back late last night, or rather early this morning. I’m Cam Fielding, the owner. And you are…?’

She had known who he was immediately. ‘Madly attractive’ had not been an exaggeration. He was unquestionably the most attractive man she had ever encountered.

Last night she had taken him for a Spaniard and he did have some of their characteristics: the black hair and eyebrows, the olive skin that tanned easily, and the hawk-like features that often indicated Moorish ancestry. But although by no means all Spanish people had brown eyes, she had yet to meet one whose irises were the colour of steel.

‘I’m Liz Harris,’ she said, acutely aware of his grip on her arm and also of the fact that, under a white terry bathrobe, he was undoubtedly naked. Glancing downwards, she saw that his feet were bare, which was why she hadn’t heard him approaching. Looking up again, she noticed his hair was damp. He must have just had a shower, come downstairs to make coffee and seen her from the kitchen window.

She had never been inside his house but Beatrice had described its layout so she knew that the two doors set close to each other led into the kitchen and the garage.

‘Are you Mrs Harris’s daughter…or her daughter-in-law?’ he asked.

‘Neither…I’m Mrs Harris.’ She wished he would let go of her arm and move back a bit. At such close quarters his physical magnetism was uncomfortably strong.

He lifted an eyebrow. ‘I see. I expected you to be much older…the same age as Beatrice Maybury. When she wrote that an English widow was buying her cottage, I assumed that you were contemporaries. How old are you?’

‘Thirty-six,’ said Liz, relieved that he had finally let go of her arm so that she could step back and widen the distance between them. It was rather a cheek to ask her age at this early stage of their acquaintance, she thought. ‘How old are you?’ she countered.

‘Thirty-nine,’ he replied. ‘Was your husband much older than you…or did he die untimely young?’

‘He was a year older. He died four years ago.’ She had never met anyone who asked such personal questions so soon. Most people carefully avoided mentioning anything to do with her premature widowhood.

‘What happened?’

‘He was drowned trying to rescue a child in a rough sea. He wasn’t a very good swimmer. They were both lost,’ Liz answered flatly. Duncan’s heroism was still a puzzle to her. He had been a cautious man, not one who took risks or chances. The courage and folly of his last act had been totally out of character.

‘That makes his action even braver,’ said Fielding. ‘Were you living in Spain when it happened?’

‘No, in England. We had stayed in Spain several times with his parents. They used to rent a villa to escape the worst of the winter. But I like the mountains better than the seaside resorts. Beatrice Maybury’s brother—the one she’s gone back to look after—knows my father-in-law. Mr Maybury thought my parents-in-law might like to buy her house. I came out with them to look at it. They didn’t like it, but I did.’

‘And how is it working out?’ Fielding asked. ‘The majority of the British expats in this part of Spain are retired…though the number of young working expats is building up, so I’m told. Do you have a job apart from keeping this garden in order?’

‘I’m a freelance needlework designer…mainly for women’s magazines. It’s work I can do anywhere—thanks to e-mail.’

Her attention was distracted by colour and movement on the terrace built out from the house. The girl she had seen last night was coming to join them. Like Fielding, she was wearing a robe, but his was utilitarian and hers was designed to be more decorative than practical. Made of irregular layers of chiffon in sunset colours, it floated, cloud-like, round a spectacular figure of the kind displayed at movie premières and Oscar presentations.

‘Cam…the fridge is empty. There’s no orange juice,’ this vision said plaintively, wafting down the steps that connected the terrace and garden.

‘I know. I’ll get some from the shop. I didn’t expect you to get up until later.’ He introduced them. ‘Mrs Harris…this is my house guest, Fiona Lincoln. Fiona, this is my neighbour from over the wall. Mrs Harris keeps the garden in order.’

Liz removed the cotton gardening glove from her right hand. She was not surprised to find that Fiona had a limp handshake. She didn’t look the sort of person who would shake hands firmly. Glamorous women hardly ever did, in Liz’s experience. Perhaps they thought it was unfeminine to exert any pressure.

‘I thought you had a maid to look after things,’ Fiona said to Cam.

Despite not being dressed for the day, she was already fully made up, Liz noticed.

‘I have a cleaning lady, but it doesn’t look as if she’s been in recently,’ he answered. ‘Do you know my home help, Mrs Harris? Is she ill or something?’

‘Beatrice mentioned that you had help…someone called Alicia. But we don’t run into each other,’ Liz told him. ‘I’m usually here before breakfast or in the late afternoon. I expect she comes in the middle of the day.’

‘I know where she lives. I’ll call round there. Now we’ll leave you in peace while we get ourselves organised. Catch you later.’ As they turned away, he put a possessive hand on the other woman’s slender waist.

Watching Fiona leaning against him as far as the foot of the steps, Liz felt a moment of envy. She would have given a lot to have a man in her life against whom she could lean like that. At the same time she knew that a relationship such as theirs—she felt sure it wasn’t ‘serious’ and would probably end as casually as it had begun—would not satisfy her. She could never take a lover purely for physical pleasure, or be a temporary girlfriend.

The stairs to the terrace were narrow, with succulents growing in clay pots placed at the outer edge of each tread. Before mounting them, Fiona furled her floating layers of chiffon, wrapping the garment more closely around her and, in so doing, drawing Fielding’s attention to the curves of her shapely bottom.

Watching him admiring it, Liz wondered how men like him and her father could be satisfied with making love to women for whom they felt no real affection or even liking. To her, the idea of going to bed with someone you didn’t love was repugnant.

Because she had married so young, she had missed the sexual freedom enjoyed by most of her generation. Duncan had been her first boyfriend and her only lover. That she might marry again seemed doubtful. Unattached men of the right age were thin on the ground. And anyway did she want to marry a second time? Marriage was such a huge risk.

With a sigh, she resumed her planting.

After lunch, Liz went for a walk on the dirt lanes and narrow tarmacked roads criss-crossing the vineyards that stretched from the edge of the village to the far side of the valley. When she arrived the grapes had been tiny, no larger than orange pips. She had seen them grow and ripen until they were ready to be picked. Now the vine leaves were turning red or purple.

On the way back, she followed a lane that gave her an overall view of Valdecarrasca. Its clustered rooftops were dominated by the church and a sloping line of cypress trees leading up to the small white-walled cemetery where coffins were placed in banks of narrow vaults marked by their occupants’ photographs as well as their names and dates.

Even for an outsider, it was a comfortable feeling to be part of a small close-knit community where each generation had been at school together and had many shared memories.

The rest of the afternoon was spent working on a design for a tablecloth and matching napkins for a ‘garden lunch’ feature scheduled for publication the following summer.

At six o’clock she went downstairs to fix herself a gin and tonic and started preparing the salad she would eat at seven. Some of the foreigners who lived here had adapted to Spanish meal times and had a siesta after lunch. For the time being, in her own home, she was sticking to the timetable she had always been used to.

She was about to halve one of the avocado pears that were so much cheaper here than in London, when someone knocked on her front door. To her surprise, when she opened it, she found Cameron Fielding standing on the narrow pavement outside.

‘I hope this isn’t an inconvenient moment to call. Do you have five minutes to spare?’