The Youngest Sister

‘If you’ve never been to Spain before, and your aunt is a recluse, it doesn’t sound as if the relationship between you is a close one.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ she conceded. ‘But I do know a lot more about her than a stranger would. At one time she and my parents had a good relationship. But then she went off to the Mediterranean and they gradually drifted apart. My parents lead very full lives—and they’d rather go to France for their holidays. My mother wilts if it’s too hot.’

As she spoke she wondered why she was confiding in him. Chatting to strangers had always been one of her foibles. When she was younger, her lack of caution in making friends had been a worry to her elders—especially to Maggie, who’d run the house while Mrs Vale was busy helping to run the country from the House of Commons. Cressy had lost count of Maggie’s warnings that talking to strangers could be hazardous. But that had been when she was younger and less competent to judge whether people were trustworthy or not.

‘How long have you worked for Distress Signal?’ he asked.

‘Two years. What do you do?’

‘I’m a freelance journalist and travel writer. If you ever read travel articles you may have seen my by-line... Nicolas Alaró.’

Her eyes widened in astonishment. She had read a lot of his pieces. He had been to all the places she would have liked to visit. Sometimes she cut out his articles and filed them away against the day when she might meet a suitable travelling companion and take off on a round-the-world trip. She didn’t fancy going alone, which was why she was going with a group to the Galágapagos Islands.

The last clipping she had filed had been about an expedition on a yacht called Endless Summer, sailing the channels of Patagonia.

“‘Alaró” sounds Spanish, but you don’t write as if English was your second language. Are you completely bilingual?’

With his black hair and tanned olive skin, he could pass for a Spaniard in some ways. But his eyes weren’t brown, they were dark indigo-blue—the colour her sweater had been before many washings had faded it.

‘I had a Mallorquin grandfather who left me his house on the island. I also use his name for working purposes. My real surname is Talbot...and you are?’

‘Cressida... usually called Cressy.’

Deliberately, she didn’t mention her surname. He might connect her with her mother. She was proud of her mother’s achievements but she had learnt a long time ago that Virginia Vale was either admired or loathed, and he might be one of the loathers. Many men were.

She said, ‘Travel writing must be a marvellous way to earn a living. I enjoyed your piece about the voyage on Endless Summer.’

‘I enjoyed researching it. South America’s a fascinating continent. I’m going back there early next year. I want to get to the summit of Aconcagua. It’s the highest point in the western hemisphere... the highest mountain outside Asia.’

She saw by the light in his eyes that the project excited him, and she felt her own heartbeat quicken at the thought of such an adventure.

She still hadn’t fully adjusted to the astonishment of finding that, in a sense, he was someone she knew. She rarely bought books in hardback but hadn’t been able to resist buying all his as soon as they came out, the most recent being a collection of his travel essays.

She had bought it at Stanfords, the London bookshop known to travellers from all over the world for its fine range of maps and guides. If she had known beforehand that he was doing a signing session at the shop she would have gone along to have her copy autographed. It had been a big disappointment to discover she had missed the chance of meeting him, if only for the few seconds it would have taken him to write his name on the fly-leaf.

To meet him by chance seemed almost...as if it were fated.

The practical side of her nature made short shrift of this proposition, reminding her sharply that what mattered was his intimate knowledge of Majorca. He could supply her with much-needed information.

Cressy’s practicality was really her only asset. Even her family acknowledged that, although disastrously lacking in academic ability, she was very strong on common sense.

‘What’s the best way to get to Pollensa?’ she asked, when the salmon pâté had been set before them. ‘Is there a bus service to it? Or would a taxi be better?’

‘A taxi will get you there faster but will also cost a lot more. Does your great-aunt have a car?’

‘I don’t know for certain. I’d think so. She certainly had one the last time she came to stay with us in England. But that was ages ago. I must have been about eight then. I remember the car she was driving because a boy I used to play with made such a fuss about it. He was a car fanatic, and Aunt Kate’s was something unusual.’ She searched her memory for the name. ‘He called it a roadster... a Cord roadster. I forget the year it was made, but some time in the 1930s. My father was rather taken with it too.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ said Nicolas. ‘It’s one of the legendary cars from an era of luxury motoring before the roads became choked with assembly-line vehicles. What’s more,’ he went on, ‘that Cord is still running...or was, up to a couple of years ago. I saw it going through Alcudia with an elderly lady at the wheel. She aroused my journalist’s curiosity. I asked around and was told she was Katherine Dexter, once a leading combatant in the battle of the sexes.’

Cressy’s mother and sisters would have corrected that description. She let it pass. ‘How did she look when you saw her?’

‘It was only a glimpse. At that time she looked pretty good. So did the car. I was told it was very rare. The makers went out of business with only about two thousand Cords on the market. According to my informant, your great-aunt’s model was being kept in repair by a garage mechanic who was hoping she would leave it to him. Whether it’s still on the road—quién sabe?’ Remembering she had no Spanish, he translated. ‘Who knows?’

‘Old cars can be temperamental. If it is still running, I don’t think I’d want to drive it,’ Cressy said, thinking aloud. ‘Maybe I can rent a motor scooter.’

‘If you need one, there’ll be no problem. In July and August, yes. But not at this stage of the year. As for reaching Es Vell today, I’ll run you there.’

Again she was taken aback.

Before she could say anything, he went on, ‘My house is in the same part of the island. I don’t know your great-aunt’s place but I doubt if it’s more than a few kilometres off my route.’

‘It’s extremely kind, but I really couldn’t impose—’

‘If you’re worried about the risk of accepting a lift from a stranger,’ he said, looking faintly amused, ‘we can get over that quite easily. By virtue of my distinguished maternal grandfather, I’m quite well-known in Mallorca...as the Spanish call it. There’ll be people at the airport who’ll convince you that you won’t be risking your safety if you accept my suggestion.’

Cressy found it hard to fathom the generosity of his offer. She was attracted to him but didn’t flatter herself that he was attracted to her.

Research had proved men were attracted to women who more or less matched them in terms of physical assets. For that reason the men she attracted were guys whose faces and physiques could be classed as averagely pleasant rather than to-die-for. She had never appealed to anyone with Nicolas’s outstanding looks and she didn’t expect to. He was in her sisters’ league. Therefore, his offer had to be prompted by disinterested helpfulness rather than being the first move in a holiday romance.

Casting about for some reason why Nicolas would want to help out a girl like herself—presentable but nothing special—Cressy suddenly realised the solution was under her nose.

He was a journalist. Aunt Kate, in her day, had been a celebrity. The motive behind his offer of a lift must be the hope of an interview with her. As well as writing travel articles, he did occasionally do profiles of interesting people encountered on his journeys.

In his book there was a profile of Edward James, a millionaire patron of the arts with an extraordinary house in Mexico. The introduction to the profile said that Nicolas had been a backpacking teenager when Edward James had consented to be interviewed by him. It had been his first journalistic coup, the foundation of his career. It could be that he saw Cressy as the means to an end—the end being a profile of Aunt Kate.

The possibility that, far from being genuinely helpful, he was using her, or attempting to do so, was curiously upsetting. But two could play at that game. If he meant to use her, he couldn’t complain at being made use of himself.

‘I don’t think we need to go to those lengths. I can check your bona fides for myself. What is your latest book called, and what is the last place in it?’

Looking amused, he said, ‘It’s called Faraway Places and the last piece was about Nantucket. I called it “Yesterday’s Island”. But, beyond confirming that I am who I claim to be, I don’t see that it proves anything.’

‘It proves you’re a well-known name, unlikely to be a serial killer or “The Mystery Rapist of Majorca”.’ As she said this, she wiggled her fingers to indicate she was quoting the kind of headline seen in the popular Press. ‘I’d be very grateful for a lift to Aunt Kate’s place. Thanks for the offer. How far is it from Palma to Pollensa?’

‘Now the motorway’s finished, it takes less than an hour.’

While they were eating the main course, he said, ‘Tell me about your job. Why did you choose it, and what sort of things do you do?’

Actually, Cressy hadn’t chosen it. The job had been set up for her by her mother, who had met the director of Distress Signal.

‘We do a huge range of things, from emergency child-minding to visiting people in hospital when their next of kin can’t. Last week I drove a rather wobbly old man to spend a holiday with his house-bound sister on the other side of England. This week I was going to look after a Down’s Syndrome child while her mother is in hospital, but now someone else will be doing that.’

‘You must be a good deal wiser and more capable than most twenty-three-year-olds,’ he said dryly.

Cressy shrugged. ‘It’s a question of horse sense. Sometimes clever people don’t have much. I’m a total dud academically, but I’m good at practical things like—’ She broke off, aware that she was letting her tongue run away with her.

‘Like what?’ he prompted.

‘Oh...unblocking drains...that sort of thing.’