Spanish Lace Read online

  Zoe had come early to Europa Tours in order to start off at least on the right foot, but within minutes of Mrs. Fenton’s arrival she had known that to be right with such a woman would be impossible. Mrs. Fenton, after eyeing her up and down and thinning her already thin lips, had regarded the several others who had voted to go surface and made remarks of such petty meanness that Zoe had blushed with shame.

  ‘Look at them,’ Mrs. Fenton had said quite penetratingly, ‘probably not a shilling in the bank, but taking a trip abroad.’

  Of a well-dressed tourist she sneered, ‘All show. I hate a fashion parade.’ Then of a rather shabby traveller, ‘Wouldn’t you think instead of tripping he’d put it on his back?’

  It appeared even at this early juncture there would be no pleasing Mrs. Fenton.

  She grumbled at their seats in the train. She grumbled at the wait to get on the boat. She grumbled right through the crossing. It was hot on the Calais quay and she grumbled again. But at last the coach was moving off to where it would pick up the rest of its load, and John, the courier, trying perceptibly to smile every time he encountered Mrs. Fenton, was breathing a sigh of relief that at least he had his boat load safe and sound.

  At Europa Tours Agency out of Calais the rest waited.

  ‘All aboard!’ called John, then took out his list and read out the names, Mrs. Fenton turning round and snapping her little boot-button eyes every time a tourist responded, often saying something to Zoe, who sat on the inside seat near the aisle, in an audible, or so Zoe feared, sharp voice.

  ‘Misses Cowan.’

  Two bright young girls called, ‘Here,’ and Mrs. Fenton eyed the length of their skirts.

  ‘Mr. and Mrs. Forth.’—Surely this couple should meet Mrs. Fenton’s approval, thought Zoe; they looked quite as uncharitable as she did herself, and had already complained of their seats, of the blind that wasn’t working, of the delay. But no. ‘What ordinary people,’ said Mrs. Fenton.

  On the list went. When it came to Mrs. Fenton, Mrs. Fenton not deigning to answer, Zoe, in desperation, answered for her.

  ‘Kindly mind your own business,’ said Mrs. Fenton, but thank goodness it was drowned in John’s, ‘Miss Zoe Breen.’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Zoe?’ Mrs. Fenton’s mouth drooped even further.

  When everyone laughed at Mr. May’s chirpy, ‘Present, teacher,’ Mrs. Fenton froze.

  But the final straw was John’s rather laborious, ‘Mr. Ra-phael-ina,’ to which a deep but rather soft, ‘I am here,’ brought the boot-button eyes darting back again to be met with two much larger, much darker, in fact very black eyes. Black hair to match. A deeply olive skin. An air of cool detachment.

  ‘These Italians!’ said Mrs. Fenton.

  In a voice penetratingly clear for all its depth and softness, the man said, ‘No, Spanish. I am Don Ramiro Raphaelina.’ A mock bow that deflated more than words ever could. ‘At your service.’

  ‘Huh!’ said Mrs. Fenton, but Zoe could see for all her thick skin that she was embarrassed. As for Zoe herself, her cheeks were carnation pink.

  ‘All present and accounted for.’ John made a gallant effort to be bright and breezy, and he gave the driver the signal to move off.

  Zoe had no idea what route they were taking, and a glance at Mrs. Fenton’s frozen countenance, for the woman had got over her discomfiture and now only harboured an obvious resentment, discouraged her from inquiring.

  Almost as if she had stated her wonderment aloud she found the printed itinerary enclosed in her hand ... Rouen, Chartres, Loire Valley, she began to read abstractedly, for she was not so interested in her programme now as much as the identity of the discerning person who had handed her the printed sheet.

  She glanced quickly around, successfully avoiding Mrs. Fenton’s sharp look, mentally weighing up each of the faces.

  The last face she regarded was the Spanish gentleman’s, a proud, even arrogant face, definitely not the countenance one expected to find on a tourist bus, and instinctively she went to turn her own gaze away, to consider again who had handed her the sheet. But before she could do so, something urged her eyes up to those blacker than black eyes in that deep olive face. Though the sensitive lips did not move she could have sworn there was a sympathetic smile there. Though the eyes did not flick they seemed to confirm.

  So Don Ramon Raphaelina had done her the little service.

  Zoe looked down again to the itinerary.

  ‘Through peaceful countryside in its serenest French beauty,’ she read, ‘to the Cathedral city of Rouen, where the night will be spent in an old but very comfortable historic hotel.’

  Zoe, though interested in history, was more cheered by the comfort; she had a certain feeling that Mrs. Fenton would be very difficult with any degree less than the best. The trouble, she thought, looking out on sweeping fields now at rural France, was that even the best might not be good enough for Mrs. F.

  She found this out for certain at the coffee break stopover in a small quaint village. It was an excellent cafe and the patisseries quite exceptional, but Mrs. Fenton forked over the baba while she sullenly eyed Zoe’s choice of gateau. I must remember, Zoe thought, always to choose something less than Mrs. F. Anything for peace of mind.

  After lunch at another small village ... it was to be a leisurely tour, Zoe decided, no express travelling ... Zoe had no illusions as to what lay ahead of her. After turning her cheese omelette around and around and looking sharply at Zoe’s cold collation, Mrs. Fenton reminded Zoe that she would not pay for any extras, that her companion must keep within the table d’hôte.

  ‘I have.’ Zoe wondered wretchedly if Mrs. Fenton’s ringing voice had reached the next eating nook where the courier and Senor Raphaelina ... they had also eaten together at the coffee break ... were once more in each other’s company.

  As Mrs. Fenton still turned her omelette around, Zoe had the bright idea of changing their lunches, pretending that the waitress had reversed the orders, a suggestion that Mrs. Fenton agreed to at once, but, like the house with the golden windows, the moment she had something, she wanted something else.

  ‘If all the food is going to be this poor,’ she said in her clear carping voice, ‘I will certainly—’

  The courier looked up instinctively, but Senor Raphaelina, leaning intentionally across to him, touched him with a staying hand. At least it seemed like that to Zoe, though she could not have said why the Spaniard acted in such an authoritative way.

  More sweeping countryside during the golden afternoon, and at one period everyone, including the courier, but excepting the driver, of course, and Zoe and the Spanish gentleman, asleep in their seats. The driver kept on his route, but across the aisle the Spaniard smiled at Zoe this time and said, ‘So, senorita, no siesta?’

  ‘No siesta, senor.’ Zoe smiled in return.

  They had ices, not tea or coffee, at wayside Chateau Paul, because dinner at Rouen was not so far off, but Zoe, too ashamed to enjoy her plain vanilla after Mrs. Fenton had complained bitterly about her neapolitan fudge, finished up by leaving it practically untouched, wondering unhappily as she did so how she would fare with tonight’s meal, that the courier had promised would be something quite exceptional in French cooking, if Mrs. Fenton still carried on as she had all day.

  And Mrs. Fenton did.

  The only result that her triumph of receiving the sole single suite in the entire hotel ... all the others, and Zoe, of course, had to share, but to Zoe it was a welcome allotment, it at least would give her time away from Mrs. F ... achieved, the woman was in extra sharpness of tongue and the arrogance to decry the chicken in wine and the fresh peaches that were set in front of her.

  ‘An insult,’ she called. ‘And the French think they can cook!’

  ‘Mrs. Fenton,’ asked Zoe desperately, ‘will you need me?’

  ‘Need you?’ The little eyes looked Zoe up and down. ‘Are you a handmaid, then? Did you plan to iron my clothes? Or perhaps manicure my nails?’<
br />
  ‘No, Mrs. Fenton, but—’

  ‘Then of course I don’t need you. Did you think I required your company to amuse me? Nothing of the sort. I needed a little help, that’s all ... which incidentally you have not afforded me yet. Still, I expected it.’ A deep sigh. ‘You’re all the same.’

  ‘Then it will be all right if I go out and see the Cathedral?’

  Mrs. Fenton did not bother to answer, but as Zoe, excusing herself, left the table she called, ‘You can bring back a packet of hairpins, the small rubber-tipped type.’

  ‘Yes, Mrs. Fenton.’ Before she could call her back again, change her mind about wanting her, Zoe was out of the hotel and walking anywhere at all so long as it was away from the carping voice.

  After ten minutes her tension ebbed away. The air was warm, even balmy. The old streets of Rouen soothed her with that golden bathing radiance that only comes to places of age.

  She passed under an archway with a big, ancient clock to where the statue of St. Joan stood in a flood of light. She felt glad that there were fresh flowers as well as proud light, because, she thought sadly, St. Joan, too, had been young and fresh. Instinctively tears sprang to her eyes.

  ‘Senorita.’’ The voice at her side came deeply and softly as she had heard it in the bus, only she wished it had not come just now, not with her blurred vision.

  ‘I think I’ve lost my way.’ She tried to excuse the tears that were now actually plopping down her cheeks to Senor Raphaelina. ‘I think—’

  ‘That the Senora Fenton ... I believe that is her name ... speaks too long and too loud?’ he suggested with dislike. ‘Or’ ... a pause, then a gentle, comforting though quite impersonal pressure under her elbow ... ‘does a nineteen-year-old heart reach back in love to another young heart, to that Maid of Orleans?’

  ‘What do you mean, senor?’

  ‘She, too’ ... he was leading her away from the statute and past a row of old houses ... ‘was short of twenty.’

  ‘Then you are wrong, senor. I’m two years older than St. Joan.’

  ‘But young,’ he said gravely, ‘and, keeping in mind the person you apparently are here to conduct, also brave, senorita, exceedingly brave.

  ‘Perhaps,’ gallantly, as they reached a hotel vastly smaller than the one in which their busload was housed, ‘you will be kind enough to allow me to toast you on that.’ Taking her silence for compliance, Senor Raphaelina led her into the quiet, brown inn.

  When the waiter came over, Senor Raphaelina spent a long time discussing a suitable wine with him. Instead of becoming impatient, as one might expect, the attendant listened attentively to the Spaniard, occasionally breaking in enthusiastically in rapid French that Zoe’s school standard could not hope to follow.

  She was rather surprised at the amiability of both men; she felt that in Sydney the waiter would have been irked at the deliberation, and have showed it. But such was the nature of Senor Raphaelina that he made a deferential gesture of his carefulness, made the waiter become the connoisseur, himself the one ready to be guided.

  Having agreed on a vintage, the waiter left, and the Spaniard turned smilingly to Zoe.

  ‘Such deviousness irritates you, senorita? I inquired for a Spanish wine, but none was on hand. However, this product of this local vineyard that has been recommended sounds to me much like my own.’

  So he had a vineyard. For a moment Zoe’s fingers stiffened as she held them primly clasped on the old wooden table. However, she thought sensibly, lots of Spaniards would have vineyards and olive groves and—She heard herself asking about his vineyard.

  ‘It is one of my interests. I dabble in many things. It is necessary now in Spain. We are not’ ... he sighed slightly ... ‘riding the high crest of prosperity. Still, there are some favourable results of our stringency. No longer are there the very rich, which is a favorable thing ... though unhappily we still have the very poor. But the fact that we have lost the first makes me hopeful that we will lose, with wisdom, the second. Big difference degrees in monetary status are not good for any country. I myself have benefited by having to have ... what do you call it? more irons in the fire? ... than my more affluent ancestors. My father raised cork trees as well as crushed grapes, picked olives and grew the limon and the naranjada ... the lemon and the orange ... but I do all these as well as some very different things.’ He had taken out a cheroot and was clipping the end of it. ‘I think it is good for me, and even if I am not as rich as he was, I am very enriched in my experience.’

  He inclined his head to her. ‘You permit my cigar, senorita?’

  ‘I like it.’

  ‘Thank you ... and apologies once more for the deliberation over the wine. You were probably laughing inside of you at such care when all you English know that no red vintage in the world is equal to your brown nutty ale.’

  ‘But I’m not,’ she smiled.

  ‘Not laughing? You like red wine?’

  ‘I do, but I meant I was not English but British.’

  ‘Senorita?’

  ‘I am Australian, Senor Raphaelina.’

  ‘Australian!’ The ejaculation was so sharp that it startled Zoe. She flinched instinctively, and at once he was all apologies.

  ‘I forget myself. A thousand pardons. So’ ... sitting back and tapping the tips of his long brown fingers together and looking at her with interest ... ‘Australian, then!’

  Still a little uncomforted by that sharp ejaculation even though he had retracted it at once, Zoe murmured, ‘You know Australia, senor?’

  ‘No, but like many Spaniards I am very interested.’

  ‘Because of migration? I know we have received a percentage of Spaniards, though-so far not so many as from—’

  ‘Not for that reason,’ he cut in smoothly but politely, ‘but for the fact that four hundred years ago, and two hundred years before your Captain Cook, our own Alvaro de Mendana fringed your country, made maps and charts of the “South Pacifick Ocean”, as it was then called, that even now, after four centuries, are so accurate and detailed that it is possible to identify every harbour and islet.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ admitted Zoe humbly. ‘So we could have been Terra Espana. Of Terra Iberia. Is that right?’

  ‘Shall I say the right direction?’ He smiled and bowed to her. ‘I rather think, though, Australia would have been named after some saint, or santa, for Mendana himself was once a misionero, or missionary, and a very good man. Well’ ... as the waiter approached ... ‘let us hope this vintage is as good as Pierre has assured me.’ He sipped the finger-full that Pierre poured, tasted it reflectively and nodded approval.

  ‘Bon,’ he affirmed to the waiter.

  Pierre poured Zoe’s, bowed and left.

  ‘Australia.’ Senor Raphaelina raised his glass to Zoe.

  ‘Spain,’ she toasted back, and sipped the wine, which was sweet, full and fruity.

  ‘Bon,’ she smiled.

  ‘Thank you for raising your glass to my country,’ the Spaniard commended. ‘You are looking forward to seeing it?’

  There seemed no point in admitting that she had already seen it, particularly when she had actually seen so little, after crossing the border only Badajoz and Merida on a deliberately devious route in a little train that puffed prodigiously and finally had not delivered them to Seville after all, for instead Lamona had won them ... so Zoe simply agreed.

  ‘I am sorry that your destination on this particular tour is San Sebastian.’—Was it? Zoe had not read right through the itinerary.—’San Sebastian to my mind receives too much attention for what it is worth. The only reason for its popularity is that it happens to be the first large Spanish town that the traveller emerging from France usually sees. No doubt, being Australian and presumably fond of water, you will enjoy bathing, and no doubt, too, the preponderance of festivals will please you as you are so young—’

  ‘Not so young, senor. I’m—’

  ‘I remember.’ He smiled slightly. ‘You are two years olde
r than the Maid. But apart from the panorama from Monte Igueldo, which if you do not feel energetic can be reached by lift from Ondaretta beach—’

  A little piqued at his dismissal of her years, Zoe inserted, ‘Included in the price, would you say? For if it’s not I’m afraid—’

  Quite seriously he answered, ‘Yes, included. I insisted at least on that.’

  ‘You insisted?’

  He was nodding to the waiter to refill the glasses, and he waited until it was done before he resumed.

  ‘Remember,’ he said, ‘those irons I spoke about?’

  ‘The irons in the fire as well as cork, olives and grapes?’

  ‘Si. This is one. I have interests in this tourist project. That, senorita, is why I am travelling in this manner.’

  She might have known it, she thought. He was certainly not the usual tripper.

  Aloud she asked, ‘And your other interests?’

  ‘The expected commercial ones of trade and barter ... and one, I think, that might interest you.’

  ‘Why do you say that, senor?’

  ‘You have the dreaming blue eyes and the fair hair of the born romantic, senorita.’

  A little embarrassed, Zoe said, ‘My father called the colour of my hair a peeled stick.’

  ‘Called ... He is no longer with you, then?’