Love is for Ever (21 page)

She walked away slowly down the length of the room— and for the first time it seemed to her far too long and empty a room, too austere and elegant, with its family portraits and its mirrors, giving back the hollow tap of her high-heeled shoes—and it was not until she was just about to disappear under the arch, her shoulders bowed as if with utter weariness, and her white lace hanging a little limply, although it had looked so crisp earlier in the evening, that he called to her.

“Jacqueline!”

His voice was harsh but urgent.

She did not, however, stop, but went on towards the foot of the stairs, and he called again, peremptorily:

“
Jacqueline
!”

Then she caught the sounds of his footsteps moving swiftly behind her, and sudden fear caused her to break into a panic-stricken little rush for the foot of the stairs, and as with racing heart she flew up them she looked back at him.

“Please!...” she gasped, and her face looked so white and terrified that he stopped dead in his own tracks and stood looking after her as she flew along the gallery to her own room.

As soon as she was safely inside her room she locked the door, and then stood leaning up against it for several seconds while the wild tumult within her died down a little. But even after ten minutes, when she started to undress, her hands were shaking, her limbs felt as if they scarcely belonged to her, and her eyes ached with unshed tears.

She felt that all she wanted to do was to crawl into bed and forget everything and everybody—forget that not only her dreams about one man, but all her beliefs in him, her secret conception of him which she had hugged to herself in spite of everything, were shattered, and that nothing could ever recreate them out of the ruins that were all about her.

She had just slipped into a dressing gown, and was crossing the floor silently towards her bathroom when a faint tap came on her door. She stood as if petrified. The tap was repeated, and then Dominic’s voice called, so softly that only she could hear it:

“Jacqueline, I must speak to you! Come downstairs again, please!”

But Jacqueline remained clinging to the end of her ornate bed until, failing to elicit so much as a sound from her, let alone a response, he gave up and went silently away. Then, not bothering about her teeth, or the fact that her hair needed brushing, and she made no attempt to remove the make-up from her face, she threw off her dressing gown and stole into bed.

But it was hours before she went to sleep, and by that time it was almost broad daylight.

She saw nothing of Dominic next day, and
Tia
Lola made no mention of him, and no one else came near the villa. But the following day, almost as soon as she descended to the main hall after breakfasting as usual in her room, he emerged from the big salon and intercepted her as she was crossing the tiled floor to the verandah.

“Could I have a few words with you, please?” he asked.

There was nothing particularly humble about the request, but his voice was quiet—singularly quiet—and it was even a little remote. His expression was remote, too, remote and removed and, in some curious way, austere. He did not look at her. He was looking out across the sunlit verandah to the garden.

“Of course.” She answered mechanically. She was wearing a pale blue linen dress, and there wasn’t much color in her cheeks. Her eyes were rather heavy and lack-lustre. “Where—where would you like to talk? Here?” carefully avoiding looking at him.

“No, in the verandah, I think.
Tia
Lola is out, so we’re not likely to be disturbed.”

He pulled forward a chair for her in the verandah, but she did not sit down. She remained standing beside the verandah rail, gazing out across all the brilliant loveliness of the garden, and he stood quite close to her side and spoke in the same unfamiliar tone.

In fact, she had the feeling, that although they were so close in reality, they were actually aeons apart. They were at opposite corners of the globe—or they might just as well have been.

“It’s a promise I’d like to extract from you, if you feel you can give me such a thing as a promise,” Dominic told her, after a full half minute of somewhat awkward silence.

“O-oh, yes?” she stammered, gripping the verandah rail.

“You told me the other night that you were planning to go home to England, and that you had made up your mind not to accept my grandmother’s legacy.” He paused. His eyes were still determinedly avoiding her, just as hers avoided his, and the curious vividness of the emerald lawns seemed to hold both of them entranced as if by emerald magic. “My grandmother left you that money not because she was actuated by any charitable motives, but because she had always been extremely fond of your father—her admiration for him was immense—and it was her way of saying thank you to him! In addition to that she took a great fancy to you personally, and if you refuse to take advantage of the security she made possible for you you will be doing her memory a grave injustice! You will be behaving in a fashion not only unworthy of you, but your father, I feel sure, would strongly disapprove—and not only as a result of looking at the matter from your point of view!”

Jacqueline said nothing, and he went on: “Please get rid of the idea that the money is anything to do with me—it is not my money, it never was! It was my grandmother’s money, and she left it to you. I happened to have very strong feelings for my grandmother, and I’d be deeply grateful to you if—for her sake, because I believe you did like her yourself—you would take what she left you, and let it provide the security she intended.”

Jacqueline tried to find her voice. At last she managed:

“If—if you feel so strongly about it, I—I’ll think it over. But I honestly don’t want your grandmother’s money—I don’t want anyone’s money.”

“No?” he said, and for the first time he looked at her, and then away. “You have no use for money?” a little dryly.

“I can always work.”

“In your antique shop?” A smile, curiously gentle, hovered about his mouth, and then vanished as if she had conjured it up out of her imagination as she, too, lifted her eyes to him for a moment. He gripped the verandah rail with both his fine, strong hands. “I suppose you think I know nothing at all about such a thing as work?” he asked, very unexpectedly. “No doubt you imagine that I idle all my time away here on Sansegovia? But I can assure you that is not quite the case. My family’s business interests are rather vast, and I happen to be the one whose job it is to control them. Amongst other things we are exporters, and much of the produce grown here on Sansegovia is exported by us to Britain and other countries. That’s one reason why I spend a good many months here in the year. But I spend many more months in Spain, and as a matter of fact next week I shall be leaving for the mainland and shall be away for some considerable while. And it’s because I’m leaving that I want to ask you something else!”

Jacqueline felt this time that it was impossible to ask him what it was, because her throat had gone suddenly quite dry. He was leaving Sansegovia—for some considerable while!...

In spite of the fact that two nights ago he had filled her with terror of him, she knew that she was shaken—she was much, much more than shaken!...

“I’d like you, if you could bring yourself to do so, to stay on here—at least for a time—with
Tia
Lola. She’s very lonely just now, missing my grandmother more and more as the days pass, and she likes you very much indeed—she would be so grateful if you would stay with her for a little while! I don’t expect you to do this for me—” digging hard at the woodwork he was gripping—“because I’ve a pretty shrewd idea what your opinion is of me! And I know I owe you an apology for the other night... ” He turned deliberately and looked at her. “I do apologize for my behavior, and for my behavior on one other occasion! ... I promise you that it shall not occur again, ever!”

For an instant—rather a long instant—they were looking directly into one another’s eyes, blue eyes and grey eyes searching, probing—but finding nothing, apparently, to justify a lightening of the darkness of two sets of faintly distended pupils.

Jacqueline’s lips parted, but she could say nothing. She moistened her lips and swallowed, and then her eyelashes fluttered down and she stared at the floor on the verandah.

“Will you accept my apologies, and will you—stay on here?”

“I—I’ll stay on for—for a time...”

“That is very generous of you.” But his voice now was formal. “You also accept my apologies?”

“I—you—you seemed to think I was guilty of some sort of deception—”

“I don’t think there’s much point in discussing that,” he replied, very quietly. “I am quite sure you would never wilfully deceive anyone, but sometimes things we say and do are liable to be misconstrued. Shall we leave it at that?”

“But, I’m quite sure I have never said anything—or done anything!—that could be misconstrued.” All at once she was concerned—she felt that there were deeps here that were beyond her, important deeps that ought to be investigated, but to which she had no clue whatsoever. And although he held the clue he was not offering it to her, either because he believed she was not sufficiently interested, or because he had some other reason for withholding it from her.

All at once her eyes actually appealed to him. “If there’s anything I—?”

“There’s nothing, little Jacqueline.” His voice was gentle, as it had often been in the past, but it was also impersonal, and still faintly distant. “Don’t worry your head about things which can’t be helped, and which don’t really concern you. Only let me leave here knowing that you and
Tia
Lola will be company for one another.”

“I won’t leave
Tia
Lola,” she promised, but she had a feeling that she was being defrauded. She had a feeling that

her whole future, which might have been lapped about with sunlight, was being cast into the shadows. She had a feeling, all at once, that she wanted to weep.

“Well, I must go. I have an appointment in the town which I must keep. But we are no longer bitter enemies?” He was smiling at her politely.

“No,” lifting rather dull eyes to him. “We are no longer bitter enemies!”

“Friends, perhaps?” he suggested, and held out his hand. She put hers into it.

“Yes, I—I hope we shall always be friends.”

“Gracias, senorita!”
He gave her a brief, flashing smile this time, and released her hand after grasping it only lightly. “Friendship is an excellent thing—I am sure we shall both find it very satisfying!” But even as he left her and went out to his car she could not make up her mind whether he was mocking her just a little. Or was he—feeling slightly sick— completely in earnest?

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Nearly a week passed, and during that time Jacqueline saw little or nothing of Dominic. He was never in to lunch, he was seldom in to dinner, and on one occasion when he was in to dinner he brought Martine with him, and the family atmosphere which prevailed when there were only the three of them,
Tia
Lola, Jacqueline and Dominic was entirely absent from the meal.

Martine still appeared to be very well satisfied with life, and she was returning to Madrid when Dominic left in a few days time. She had been offered another film part, and she was full of her future, and all that lay ahead of her. Whether she still secretly entertained hopes of persuading Dominic to marry her, instead of Carlotta Consuella, Jacqueline wondered as she watched her occasionally sending melting looks in Dominic’s direction. But if she had given up all hopes where Dominic was concerned she had evidently made up her mind that, when a girl was as beautiful as she was, as talented, and as capable of exuding sex-appeal, there were always plenty of excellent fish swimming about in the sea, and one day, with

any luck, she would succeed in catching one possibly even more to her taste than Dominic, who in some ways was very Spanish and might expect more of a wife than she was willing to give. He might, for instance, expect her to give up her film career, and her film friends, and live a segregated kind of existence such as many Spanish women accepted as completely normal once they exchanged the status of a single woman for that of a married one.

Husband and children and family, and close family friends—that was so often the pattern of it. Martine had seen it for herself during her short sojourn in Spain. Lovely women leading cloistered lives in the very middle of the twentieth century, wearing lovely clothes and living often in beautiful homes, but with none of the freedom an American film favorite would consider necessary. Deferring to a mother-in-law, and considering nursery subjects of great importance. Almost a medieval existence, or so it had struck Martine, and she felt it would be so even with Dominic thrown in.

There was something about Dominic’s mouth and jaw, and an occasional almost austere flash from his eyes, which warned her that he could be difficult to deal with—not easy to cajole. But naturally Jacqueline knew nothing of this, and in her quiet study of Martine—reading admiration into Dominic’s eyes when they rested on the lovely red-head, and which he undoubtedly did feel because she was so lovely— she could only try and fathom the reason why the possessive Martine she had first met now seemed to be merely casual and friendly, apart from those occasional melting looks, and more openly inclined to discuss a future in which Dominic could easily play little part.