The Shell Seekers (10 page)

"Didn't you find that something of a tie?"

"No. She was no trouble at all. There's a nice couple, Tomeu and Maria, who have a little farm down the lane. Tomeu helps me in the garden and Maria comes in to clean the house and keep an eye on my daughter. They're all the best of friends. Antonia's bilingual as a result of this."

Now, it was much cooler. Olivia sat up and reached for her shirt, put her arms into the sleeves and did up the buttons. Cosmo also stirred, announcing that all this conversation had made him thirsty and he needed something to drink. Olivia said that she felt like a nice cup of tea. Cosmo told her that she didn't look like one, but he got to his feet and ambled off, disappearing up through the garden towards the house in order to put the kettle on. Olivia stayed by the pool, revelling in being alone, because she knew that in a little while he would be back. The water of the swimming pool was motionless. At the far end of this stood a statue of a boy playing a pipe, his image reflected in the water as though in a mirror.

A sea-gull flew overhead. She tipped back her head to watch its graceful passage, wings painted pink by the light of the setting sun, and she knew, in that instant, that she would stay with Cosmo. She would give herself, like some wonderful gift, a single year.

Burning your boats, Olivia discovered, was more traumatic than it sounded. There was much to do. First they made the journey back to the hotel, Los Pinos, to pack up her belongings, pay the bill, and check out. They did all this in the most clandestine fashion, terrified of being spotted, and instead of seeking out her friends and explaining the situation, Olivia took the coward's way and left an inadequate letter at the reception desk.

Then there were cables to be sent, letters to be written, tele-phone calls made to England on crackling incoherent lines. When all was accomplished, she thought that she would feel elated and free, but instead found herself trembling with panic and sick with fatigue. She was sick. She kept this fact from Cosmo, but when later he found her prone on the sofa weeping tears of exhaustion that she could not stop, all was revealed.

He was very understanding. He put her to bed in Antonia's little room where she could be alone and quiet, and left her to sleep for three nights and two days. She only stirred to drink the hot milk he brought her, and to eat a slice of bread and butter or a piece of fruit.

On the third morning, she awoke and knew it was over. She was recovered, refreshed, filled with a wonderful sense of well-being and vitality. She stretched, got out of bed and opened the shutters to the early morning, pearly and sweet, and smelt the dew damp earth and heard the crowing cocks. She put on her robe and went upstairs to the kitchen. She boiled a kettle and made a pot of tea. With the teapot and two cups on a tray, she went through the kitchen and down the other flight of stairs to Cosmo's room.

It was still shuttered and dark, but he was awake.

As she came through the door, he said, "Well,
hello
."

"Good morning. I've brought you early-morning tea." She set down the tray beside him and went to fling wide the shutters. Slanted rays of early sun filled the room with light. Cosmo stretched out an arm for his watch.

"Half past seven. You're an early bird."

"I came to tell you that I am better." She sat on his bed. "And to say I'm sorry that I've been so feeble, and to say thank you for being so understanding and kind."

"How are you going to thank me?" He asked her.

"Well, one way had occurred to me, but perhaps it's too early in the morning."

Cosmo smiled and shunted himself sideways to make space for her.

"Never too early," he said.

Afterwards, "You are very accomplished," he told her.

She lay, content in the curve of his arm. "Like you, Cosmo, I have had some experience."

'Tell me, Miss Keeling," he said, in the voice of someone doing a bad imitation of Noel Coward, "when did you first lose your virginity? I know our listeners would love to be told."

"My first year at University."

"What college?"

"Is it relevant?"

"It could be."

"Lady Margaret Hall."

He kissed her. He said, "I love you," and he didn't sound like Noel Coward any longer.

The days slipped by, cloudless, hot, long and idle,, filled with only the most aimless of occupations. Swimming, sleeping, strolling down to the garden to feed the bantams or collect the eggs, or to do a little harmless weeding. She met Tomeu and Maria, who appeared quite unruffled by her arrival and greeted her each morning with broad smiles and much handshaking. And she learned a little kitchen Spanish and watched Maria make her massive paellas. Clothes ceased to matter. She spent her days with no make-up, slopping around, barefoot, in old jeans or a bikini. Sometimes they ambled up to the village with a basket to do a little shopping, but by tacit agreement they did not go near the town or the coast.

With time to consider her life, she realized that this was the first time she had not been working, striving, hauling her way up the ladder of her chosen profession. From the earliest age, her ambition had been to be, quite simply, the best. Top of her class, top in the list of examination results. Studying for scholarships, for O levels, for A levels, revising into the small hours in order to achieve the sort of grades that would ensure her a place at University. And then Oxford, with the whole process starting all over again, a gradual buildup to the final nerve-racking peak of Finals. With First Class Honours in English and History, she could rea-sonably have taken a bit of time off, but her built-in driving force was too strong; she was terrified of losing momentum, of missing chances, and went straight to work. That was eleven years ago, and she had never let up.

All over. Now, there were no regrets. She was suddenly wise, realizing that this meeting with Cosmo, this dropping out, had happened just in time. Like a person with a psychosomatic illness, she had found the cure before diagnosing the complaint. She was deeply grateful. Her hair shone, her dark eyes, thick-lashed, were lustrous with contentment, and even the bones of her face seemed to lose their stressful angles and become rounded and smooth. Tall, rake-thin, tanned brown as a chestnut, she looked in the mirror and saw herself, for the first time ever, as truly beautiful.

One day, she was alone. Cosmo had gone down to the town to collect the papers and his mail and to check up on his boat. Olivia lay on the terrace and watched two small, unknown birds flirting together in the branches of an olive tree.

As she idly observed their capers, she became aware of a strange sense of vacuum. Analysing this, pinning it down, she discovered that she was bored. Not bored with Ca'n D'alt, nor with Cosmo, but bored with herself and her own emptied mind, standing bare and cheerless as an empty room. She considered this new set of circumstances at some length, and then got up out of the chair and went indoors to find something to read.

When Cosmo returned she was so deep in her book that she did not even hear him, and was quite startled when he suddenly appeared beside her. "I'm hot and thirsty," he was telling her, but then stopped short to stare. "Olivia, I didn't know you wore spectacles."

She laid down the book. "Only for reading and working and having business lunches with hard-headed men I'm trying to impress. Otherwise I wear contact lenses."

"I never guessed."

"Do you mind them? Are they going to change our relationship?"

"Not at all. They make you look enormously intelligent."

"I am enormously intelligent."

"What are you reading?"

"George Eliot.
The Mill on the Floss
."

"Don't start identifying with poor Maggie Tulliver."

"I never identify with anyone. You have a marvellous li-brary. Everything I want to read, or reread, or have never had time to read. I shall probably spend the whole of the year with my nose in a-book."

"That's all right by me, provided you emerge every now and then to satisfy my carnal lusts."

"I'll do that." He bent and kissed her, spectacles and all, and went indoors to fetch himself a can of beer.

She finished
The Mill on the Floss
and started in on
Wuther-ing Heights
and then Jane Austen. She read Sartre,
Recherche du temps perdu
, and, for the first time in her life,
War and Peace
. She read classics, biographies, novels by authors she had never even heard of. She read John Cheever and Joseph Conrad, and a battered copy of
The Treasure Seekers
, which took her straight back over the years to the house in Oakley Street where she had been a child.

And as these books were all familiar old friends to Cosmo, they were able to spend their evenings deep in long literary dis-cussions, usually to the background accompaniment of music; the "New World," and Elgar's "Enigma Variations," and symphonies or operas in their entirety.

To keep in touch, he had
The Times
sent out from London each week. One evening, after reading an article on the treasures of the Tate Gallery, she told him about Lawrence Stern.

"He was my grandfather, my mother's father."

Cosmo was gratifyingly impressed. "But how enormously exciting. Why did you never tell me before?"

"I don't know. I don't usually talk about him. Anyway, nowadays most people have never even heard of him. He went out of date and became forgotten."

"What a painter he was." He frowned, deep in calculations. "But he was born . . . when was it ... in the eighteen-sixties. He must have been a very old man when you came into the world."

"More than that, he was dead. He died in nineteen forty-six, in his own bed, in his own house, in Porthkerris."

"Did you used to go to Cornwall for holidays and things?"

"No. The house was always let to other people, and finally my mother sold it. She had to, because she was perpetually strapped for cash and that was another reason we never went away for holidays."

"Did you mind?"

"Nancy minded most dreadfully. And Noel would have minded too, except that he was particularly good at looking after himself. He always made friends with the right boys, and managed to wangle invitations to go sailing and skiing, and join jolly parties in villas in the south of France."

"And you?" Cosmo's voice was loving.

"I didn't mind. I didn't want to go away. We lived in a huge house in Oakley Street with an equally huge garden at the back, and I had all the museums and the libraries and the art galleries right there, just for the taking." She smiled, remembering those full and satisfying days. "Oakley Street belonged to my mother. At the end of the war Lawrence Stern made it over to her. My father was a fairly—" she sought for the right word—"lightweight sort of person. Not a man with drive or many resources. I think my grandfather must have known this, and was anxious that she should be independent and at least have a home in which to bring up her family. Besides, he was eighty then, and crippled with arthritis. He knew that he would never live there again."

"Does your mother live there still?"

"No. It became too unwieldy and expensive to run, so this year she finally decided to sell, and move out of London. She had dreams of going back to Porthkerris, but my sister Nancy talked her out of that and instead found her a cottage in a village called Temple Pudley in Gloucestershire. To give Nancy her due, it's perfectly charming, and Mother is very happy there. The only gruesome thing about it is its name. Podmore's Thatch." She screwed up her nose in distaste and Cosmo laughed. "Admit it, Cosmo, it is a bit twee."

"You could rename it. Mon Repos. Is it filled with beautiful paintings by Lawrence Stern?"

"No. Unfortunately. Only three. I wish she had more. I think, the way the market's going, they could be very valuable in a year or two."

The conversation turned to other Victorian artists, and finally to Augustus John, and Cosmo went off to find the two volumes of his biography, which she had read but wished to read again. They discussed him at length and agreed that, for all his wicked ways, they had nothing but admiration for that randy old lion, and yet both considered his sister Owen to be the better artist.

And after that they showered and put on reasonably respectable clothes and walked up to the village, to Pedro's bar, where you could sit out under the stars and have a drink. And a young man with a guitar materialized and sat on a wooden chair and quite simply, with no ceremony, began to play the second movement of the Rodrigo
Guitar Concerto
, filling the warm darkness with that plangent and stately music, the very essence of Spain.

Antonia was due to arrive in a week's time. Already Maria had started in on spring cleaning her bedroom, hauling all the furni-ture out onto the terrace, whitewashing the walls, laundering curtains and blankets and covers, and beating rugs with much venom and a cane switch.

Such urgent activity brought the appearance of Antonia that much nearer and Olivia was filled with apprehension. This was not entirely selfish, although the prospect of sharing Cosmo with another woman, even if she was only thirteen and his daughter, was dismaying, to say the least of it. The true anxiety lay within herself, because she was frightened of failing Cosmo, of saying the wrong thing, or doing something tactless. According to Cosmo, Antonia was both charming and uncomplicated, but this did nothing to reassure Olivia, because she had never had anything to do with children. Noel had been born when she was almost ten, and by the time he was out of babyhood, Olivia had virtually left home and gone out into the world. There were Nancy's offspring, of course, but they were so unattractive and unbearably bad-mannered that Olivia made a point of having as little to do with them as possible. So what did one say? What did one talk about? What were they all going to do with themselves?