Love is for Ever (22 page)

This was the first time Jacqueline had seen Martine since the night of the
fiesta,
and she was acutely embarrassed when the American girl referred in an openly amused manner to her ‘disappearance’, as she called it, with Neville Barr.

“You made it so plain that you both wanted to be alone that Dominic and I thought it best to give you a free run, didn’t we, darling?” looking with that bright flash of amusement in her eyes at Dominic. “We’re neither of us spoil-sports, I hope, and although we did call at Neville’s bungalow it was not with any genuine expectations of finding you both there. Although I understand you were there later on!” the green eyes positively glistening with amusement of a decidedly arch kind.

Jacqueline stared away from her at the flowers in the centre of the table. So Dominic had told Martine how he, Dominic, had found her with Neville!... Or had Neville himself told her? No; that was hardly likely.

But when she stole a look at Dominic’s face he, too, was staring at the silver epergne, cascading creamily pink roses, in the centre of the polished table, and from the grimness of his lips it was difficult to believe that he would pass on an item of information such as Martine had obviously obtained from somewhere, since it was no more than the truth. Dominic looked as if he would disdain any mention of either Jacqueline or Neville.

But later in the evening, when she and Martine were alone together for a few minutes in the verandah Jacqueline discovered how Martine had gained her information.

“Poor Neville!” she exclaimed, still as if the incident struck her as more amusing than otherwise. “He was positively fuming when I ran in to him yesterday morning! Apparently Dominic came over all feudal and ‘mine hostish’ on the night of the
fiesta
and fairly tore you away from him because the hour was late and he thought his aunt might disapprove, and Neville is simply livid! He’s thinking of throwing up his job at the clinic here and bearing you off to the mainland, so you’ll send me an invitation to the wedding, won’t you?”

Jacqueline, feeling as if she was being deliberately goaded, and feeling secretly certain that. Martine had a pretty shrewd idea of how she felt about the man who was her host, and was goading her because of it, looked at her with eyes as cool and blank as she could make them, and told her:

“There isn’t likely to be any wedding.”

“Isn’t there? Oh, what a pity!” Martine exclaimed. “I do adore weddings!” Then, looking at Jacqueline with a snake-like gleam in the green eyes: “But you’re almost bound to have a wedding on the island before long, unless it takes place in Madrid! I understand Dominic is having extensive alterations and improvements carried out on the family home near Toledo, and that’s almost certainly because he’s thinking of getting married! And he’s going straight to the

Consuellas when we fly to Madrid next week—I know that, because he told me so himself! They’re having a very big ‘do’ of some sort, and I’ve even been invited. So what do you make of that?”

Jacqueline decided there was only one thing anyone could make of it, but just then she couldn’t bear even to think about it. Before Martine left she excused herself on the grounds of a headache—not caring that Martine must have felt secretly more than satisfied—and went up to and locked herself into her room. And she wondered how she was going to keep her promise to Dominic and remain on Sansegovia.

The day before Dominic left for Madrid another of those violent storms to which the island was addicted swept over it. Jacqueline was out walking when it broke in full fury, sweeping down over all the carefree loveliness of Sansegovia and blotting it out as if at the whim of a horde of spiteful demons.

There was no reason why she should have been caught in the storm, for she had had plenty of warning before she set out that the day was not going to remain bright and fair. Even when she woke that morning it had been heavy and thundery, with a sinister hot haze over the sea which, when the lightning smote and struck, was ripped like a sheet of sullen gauze.

Tia
Lola had said at lunch that she thought there was going to be a storm. Dominic was not with them, and Jacqueline hardly heeded her hostess’s observations. She had no interest in the weather, whether it remained bright or became stormy, because all she could think about was that in another twenty-four hours—or less—Dominic would have gone away from them, and would be away for weeks! The weeks could become months, and they would be scarcely endurable months—especially when all one had to do was to think of him making plans for his wedding, watching over the alterations to his house, spending weekends in Madrid with the parents of the girl he was to marry! Supremely fortunate Carlotta Consuella, who was pretty as a bird, charming and wealthy, and just the right bride for him!...

For Jacqueline knew that, however much she might delude herself by pretending that Dominic, with his inflammable Latin temperament that permitted him to make brutal love to a girl who was not only a guest in his house but had very little protection from such assaults when and if he chose to make them, was not the type of man she would wish to marry, there were moments when the memory of the kisses he had showered on her, the way he had held her, the recollection of the terms of endearment he had lavished on her—
querida, chiquita
—in that strange, husky, passion-choked voice of his, made her weak with longing to live such an experience all over again, even if it did terrify her at the same time.

Dominic might know little of tenderness, little of constancy—since apparently he
was
planning to marry another woman! —little of any of the qualities essential in a husband whom a woman could look up to and admire, and with whom she could feel absolutely safe and secure for the rest of her life; but when one fell in love with him as Jacqueline had done almost from the moment of meeting his blue eyes across the width of an emerald green lawn in the sunshine, and knew that one was never in the least likely to recover from that love, then there was only one thing one wanted of life, and that was to spend it at his side.

Under
any
circumstances she said to herself—not once a day, but almost every minute of every day! If she could only be near him, somehow or other, always and forever!...

And then the next second she knew that, when news of his wedding actually taking place reached her ears, she simply couldn’t endure to go on living near any of his friends, and certainly not in close daily contact with one of his closest relatives!

She would have to leave Sansegovia before very long!...

That was inevitable!...

Therefore, when the storm threatened, and
Tia
Lola talked of it at lunch time, Jacqueline had no interest in the topic of conversation, except to hope vaguely and rather wearily that, if the storm did break, the fierce heat abate, and the whirlwind of noise which had occurred before occurred all over again, then as the result of the temporary fear with which it would fill her she would not, for a short while at least, find it possible to think about Dominic. And therefore some sort of relief would be vouchsafed to her, because fear of the elements was not half as bad or agonizing as torturing thoughts about a man one loved.

Tia
Lola said to her before she left the table:

“You won’t leave the house this afternoon, will you?”

“I don’t expect so,” Jacqueline answered. And because she was very fond of
Tia
Lola and wished to reassure her: “Or if I do go out I won’t go far.”

And she had no intention of going far when she set off. But it really was appallingly hot, and as she climbed the rough road which led past the villas and eventually led to the centre of the island it did seem to grow just that little bit cooler, because the air reached her from off the sea, and there was something moist and reviving about it.

A car passed her on the road, and she thought she recognized a friend of the Cortinas, who smiled at her in faint surprise as she flashed past on the downward slope. She paused once or twice to admire the tangle of blossom that was now making a bower of the island, and as she plucked an exquisite, waxen flower and held it between her fingers she remembered that spray of delicate creamy-pink she had plucked those many weeks earlier, when she was taking her first solitary walk on the island, and Dominic’s lean brown fingers taking it from her and inserting it into the buttonhole in his lapel.

Those many weeks earlier ...

Then she had vaguely suspected that Dominic was the possessor of a kind of deadly charm. Now she knew it only too well. And she remembered him saying that he would keep the flower and press it, saying it with a mocking glance at her which meant that he would do nothing of the kind!

A spot of rain fell on her, and then another. Already her clothes were sticking to her from heat, and if this rain continued she would be drenched through in no time at all— certainly long before she could get back home.

She looked about her as the first clap of thunder rolled and reached her ears, and the first gust of angry wind slapped at her face, and was surprised to find that she really was quite a long way from the villa, and that the country immediately surrounding her was wild and open. There were no houses near—nothing but a kind of open common, ringed by the tall umbrella pines, now already bending in the wind, and some

sturdy looking palms.

She looked up at the sky, and fear struck through her suddenly as she realized how dark it was. She must have been walking in a kind of dream, for she had hardly noticed it before; while she walked the world had turned angrily purple around her, and the lurid hue was shot through with some vivid streaks of tawny orange and flame. It was just as if the heavens were about to open above her, while out at sea there was nothing but inky darkness.

She looked round for the road, and could see it slipping like a white thread some considerable distance from her, and realized that the first thing she must do was to make for it. But long before she reached it the rain had saturated her to the skin, her linen dress was plastered upon her body, her hatless head beaten like a flail by the icy cold rain that drove at her. But worse than that was the wind which forced her back, shrieked in her ears, and wrested the air from her lungs.

Frantically she strove to reach the road, but the wind caught at her as if it was the hand of a whimsical giant and lifted her and whirled her about, and after battling with it madly for several seconds she found herself lying flat on the ground, flung there so hard that the breath seemed to be finally driven out of her body. A kind of panic came upon her then, because she found it impossible to get back on to her feet, and in the shrieking tumult that was all about her it seemed to her that the elements unleashing themselves so suddenly, had made up their mind to destroy her and keep her flattened to the face of the earth.

But desperation forced her to keep on trying to reach the road, and on hands and knees she crawled towards it over the sodden ground. A tree crashed in her path—missing her by nothing short of a miracle—and then she got protection from a cluster of other trees that were reaching out madly towards her. Lying huddled in this insecure protection, or bulwark from the worst of the weather, it seemed to her that hours passed, and while they passed the lightning constantly played over her and blinded her by its brilliance, and the rain continued to drive at her until she no longer seemed to have any feeling in any part of her body.

And then, in a lull, she thought she heard a car coming along the road, and terrified lest it should pass her by she made a supreme effort and crawled once more out into the open. But she could not get upon her feet, and she had no strength left either to call out or to make any sign to attract the driver’s attention. But through the curtain of rain she saw the car, a grey one, stop, its door was flung open and a man fought his way through the tumbling cascade of water to her side. He picked her shuddering body in the drowned blue linen up in his arms and carried her back to the car, placed her in the seat beside the wheel, and then got in beside her.

With the doors shut, and the windows securely fastened, the silence inside the car seemed absolute after the noise and tumult without. Jacqueline was almost stunned by it, and her eyes were completely dazed as she gazed up at Dominic. He wrapped her in a rug from the back seat of the car, and then holding her in his arms strove to infuse some warmth from his own body into her frozen one, voicing his relief because he had found her over and over again, while the endearments he used to her this time made him, for the first time since they had got to know one another, seem almost completely English.

“Oh, darling, darling!... My little one, my sweetheart!” He wiped the rain from her face with a crisp linen handkerchief whipped from his pocket, and did his best to free the tangled curls from moisture, too. But the thing which comforted her most was the feel of his arms about her, and in spite of her utter exhaustion she knew that there was utter security in his hold, and that the eyes that looked down at her were in some strange way blazing both with tenderness and concern. And in addition to the tenderness there was something she had so often yearned to see in them— something that made her own eyes grow large, and round, and wondering.

“Dominic,” she whispered.

“Beloved,” he told her, “don’t talk—don’t attempt to talk yet! Just rest here in my arms, and then I’ll take you back and you’ll soon be safe and warm in your own bed! Oh, my darling,” his lips shaking as they brushed her forehead, and then with the same feather-light touch closed each of her weary eyes, “I’ve been half out of my mind with anxiety, and if I hadn’t found you—! ”