she could explain that she didn’t work for them, one of the guests came to the bar to have his glass refilled. ‘Same again, please, love,’ he said to Cally, and then, to the Spaniard, ‘Buenas tardes, señor. Hace bueno hoy.’
His Spanish accent was terrible, but his intentions were good, and the younger man smiled as he answered, in English, ‘Good evening. Yes, it’s been a very nice day and the forecast for tomorrow is the same. But then Spain’s excellent weather is what brought you to this country, I expect.’
‘You’re right there, chum,’ said the Englishman, visibly relieved that he wasn’t going to have to stretch what was probably a very limited repertoire of Spanish phrases.
Cally was adjusting to the discovery that Nicolás Llorca spoke English with no trace of a Spanish accent. To speak it so perfectly, he must have learnt it very early in life and use it as frequently as she used his language.
She felt slightly annoyed that he hadn’t made that clear to her. To tell her he had ‘some English’ had been deliberately misleading. Clearly, the man was bilingual and should have said so.
She wondered if he had minded being addressed as ‘chum’. The Englishman hadn’t intended to be offensive, in fact had been trying to be friendly. The trouble with the British was that they lacked an instinctive sensitivity to the manners and customs of other nationalities. Americans tended to be the same. They both assumed that the kind of easy familiarity they took for granted was acceptable everywhere. But sometimes it wasn’t.
‘No need to sit by yourself. Come and meet the rest of us,’ said the Englishman, with a gesture at the other foreigners.
The Spaniard rose from his stool. ‘Would you excuse me?’ he said to Cally.
‘Of course.’ His courtesy pleased her. It would have annoyed her if he had just walked away, as if a general factotum in a casa rural was not entitled to be treated like a lady. It would have shown he was no gentleman.
She watched him being introduced, or rather introducing himself to the older people: shaking hands with the men, kissing the hands of the women with an easy gallantry that suggested he was at home in circles where the gesture was commonplace.
When Cally announced that dinner was ready if they would like to take their places at the table, the foreign guests formed pairs and chose seats side by side, leaving the chair at the head of the table to be taken by her father while she and Nicolás Llorca sat at the opposite end.
Again his sophisticated manners came into play when he drew out a chair for her before seating himself. None of the other men present had done it for their companions.
‘Thank you, but why don’t you sit next to Peggy? Then you’ll have someone to talk to when I’m helping Juanita,’ she suggested.
‘Yes, come and sit beside me, dear,’ said Peggy, patting the seat of the chair he had been holding for Cally and giving him a skittish look. She was old enough to be his mother but was refusing to surrender to late middle-age. Her hair was an unnaturally vivid auburn, her tan the result of hours of dedicated sun-bathing, her bosom a masterpiece of uplift.
For the first course there was a choice of fish soup or salad. Juanita ladled out the sopa de pescado for those who wanted it while Cally took round the plates of ensalada and small bowls of alioli sauce. Baskets of bread were already on the table, thick slices of the pan integral she preferred mixed with softer white bread, a concession to guests reared on steam-baked English factory bread whose teeth might not be equal to dealing with crusts.
Nicolás, as she was starting to think of him, was listening to some dramatic anecdote told by Peggy when Cally slipped into the chair on his other side. Casting an anxious eye in her father’s direction, she recognised—though no one else would—signs that his neighbours’ conversation was boring him. And when he was bored he reached for the carafe of wine more often than when he was interested.
She thought longingly of the day she was due to fly back to her real life in London. She didn’t mind giving up two weeks of her holiday allowance to give her mother a break from Valdecarrasca, and her parents a break from each other. In some ways she enjoyed being here, surrounded by vineyards and mountains instead of city streets and traffic jams.
But being a commissioning editor for a major publishing house was no longer the secure, lifetime job it had been in the days when publishing had been famously described as ‘an occupation for gentlemen.’ Today it was a far more cutthroat business with take-overs and redundancies being as commonplace as in most other occupations.
What was worrying her at the moment was that Edmund & Burke, the imprint she worked for, had been taken over by a global corporation which had a new CEO. Everyone was waiting to see how this formidable woman, Harriet Stowe, would restructure the UK segment of the company. She had the reputation of being a ruthless decision-maker in whose view literary merit was unimportant compared with profitability. Edmund & Burke were famous for the quality of their books, but they didn’t produce bestsellers. It was on the cards that Ms Stowe might decide to axe them.
This was not, therefore, a good time for Cally to be away from the office. But her mother’s plan to visit a friend had been fixed long before the future of Edmund & Burke became uncertain, and Cally knew that, had the trip been postponed, her parents’ marriage would also have reached a crisis point. She lived in dread of them deciding to separate for neither had the resources to survive on their own. They were not happy together, but apart they would be in deeper trouble, and the burden on Cally would be even heavier than it was already.
From the other side of the table, Fred, who was Peggy’s companion, leaned towards Cally and said, ‘I suppose the people in the village who own all the little vineyards are rubbing their hands at the thought of selling them off to property developers. They can see themselves getting rich, the way the Spanish who owned land on the coast did back in the sixties and seventies.’
‘If the vineyards become building plots, the valley will lose all its charm,’ said Cally. ‘They’ll make money, but they’ll lose their quality of life. It’s a pity there aren’t more stringent planning laws. I don’t think people should be allowed to spoil the mountains by putting up holiday villas wherever they want. There should be a limit above which nothing can be built.’
‘There probably is,’ Fred said, grinning. ‘But the builders can get round that with a little of the old…’ He demonstrated his meaning by rubbing his thumb against the tips of his fingers. Then, looking at Nicolás, he added, ‘No offence meant, señor. But we all know it happens. Always has…always will.’
‘My country is not the only place where graft is used to get round the regulations,’ Nicolás answered dryly. ‘Bribery exists everywhere. But I agree with Señorita Cally that it would be a pity if the uncontrolled development that has marred too many stretches of Spain’s coasts were allowed to continue inland. On the other hand, people like yourselves—’ with a gesture at the rest of the diners ‘—want to enjoy your retirement in a better climate, so some over-development here is inevitable.’
Turning to Cally, he asked, ‘What is your surname?’
‘Haig.’ She spelt it for him.
His black eyebrows shot up. ‘You’re half-British?’
‘I’m all-British. That’s my father at the end of the table.’
‘So that’s why you speak perfect English. I thought you were Spanish.’
