The Sun and Catriona (4 page)

Her brother studied her without emotion. ‘You are going to live here,’ he said firmly. ‘Now go to your room. Carmen will look after you.’

An olive-skinned girl in crisp maid’s uniform appeared in one of the doorways opening off the passage, and with the limp grace of a ballet-dancer Toni got to her feet. Her lovely mouth was set in a sulky line, and she refused to look at her brother, but without another word she followed the maid out of sight.

Uncertain what to do, and feeling vaguely uncomfortable, Catriona stood looking around her. The Count touched her arm.

‘In a moment,’ he told her, ‘Carmen will be back to take charge of you. While you are waiting, however, I would like to talk to you.’

He held open a door on the other side of the passage, and half blinded by the brilliance of the sunlight she moved through into a small, square room. The floor was of black marble, and she noticed that the heavy furnishings looked as if they had come mainly from seventeenth-century Spain. Two tall windows looked out through a grille on to the quiet street. An ebony crucifix hung on the wall beside the door.

The Count waved his hand in the direction of a chair. ‘If you wish you may sit down, but I shall not detain you long.’

Catriona remained standing, her body tense. She was very aware of his dark eyes fixed on her. She had the absurd feeling that his intense dark gaze had the power to penetrate her soul.

‘Antoinette is a spoilt child,’ he said abruptly. ‘She must be controlled. I should tell you that I expect you to do that.’

Catriona raised her eyebrows. ‘I understood that I was to be your sister’s companion, not her governess.’

‘My sister is too old for a governess, but she is not too old for sensible supervision. You are, I understand, several years her senior and you appear to have an unusually strong will.’ He moved over to a large desk that occupied one corner of the room. ‘Use your will to control my sister, Miss Browne. That is all I ask.’

Catriona stared at
him. ‘But
...
she’s just high
-
spirited. Just a schoolgirl!’

‘She’s silly and vulnerable, and liable to cause trouble, both for herself and for other people. I am placing you in charge of her. If you fail to do your job adequately
it will, of course, be necessary to replace you.’

Catriona felt stupefied. She wanted to point out that in England, before they left, his definition of the job she would be doing had been altogether different. But no words would come.

An electric bell had been let into the wall beneath one of the windows, and when he pressed it Carmen appeared. She must, Catriona thought, have been waiting outside the door. The Count spoke to her in English.

‘Carmen, when I telephoned this morning I gave instructions that a room was to be prepared for Miss Browne. I hope everything is ready?’

The maid smiled, revealing perfect white teeth. ‘Yes,
signur
.’

‘Good
...
grazzi
.’
He glanced at Catriona. ‘I suggest that you go now, and rest. I shall hope to see you this evening.’

Catriona found that her room was situated at the far end of the house, overlooking a narrow side street. Its walls were starkly white, almost monastic in their bareness, b
u
t the furnishings were ornate and once again she was reminded of Spain. When Carmen left her alone she went straight to one of the windows and began struggling to open the tightly closed shutters. It was still only a quarter to five, but despite the presence of an electric fan the air was so oppressive that beads of perspiration were beginning to form on her forehead. After a few seconds she succeeded in pushing the shutters back, but. immediately a wave of heat engulfed her, and she realised why it was that the maid had not attempted to open them. It was as if she had unfastened the door of an oven. Quickly she closed them again and in the warm dimness found herself wondering just exactly what kind of life she had let herself in for.

She was to be ‘in charge’ of Antoinette Caruana, but what exactly did that mean? In England the Count had told her that his sister needed nothing more than a companion. She would not have taken the job on any other terms, and she certainly had no intention of allowing herself to be turned into a watchdog. She would do the job she had originally been asked to do, but that was absolutely all.

Anyway, if Peter Vilhena wanted his eighteen
-
year-old sister to stay out of mischief, why had he brought her to live in the heart of the Maltese capital? Most people knew that Valletta was a bustling, cosmopolitan city. Its social life, Catriona would have thought, was likely to be fairly exotic. In such stimulating surroundings it might be extremely difficult to keep Toni Caruana’s adventurous spirit firmly within the bounds imposed by her censorious half-brother. Besides, despite its obvious charm, Valletta clearly wasn’t the best place to be during the last torrid days of August.

Slipping out of her skirt and blouse, Catriona lay down on the embroidered counterpane that covered the big sixteenth-century bed. So much had happened in just a few hours that she still found it difficult to take everything in, and when she closed her eyes she had the strange feeling that the world was revolving round her. Moist afternoon heat prickled on her skin, but she was too deadly tired to let it worry her any more. Valletta was very quiet. The siesta hour had begun, and no sound came to her through the louvred shutters, or through the oak door leading to the corridor.

Within minutes she had dropped into a dreamless, exhausted sleep.

CHAPTER FOUR

When
Catriona awoke, several hours later, she lay for a moment or two with her eyes closed. Then she became aware of a light, flickering draught. It was playing on her cheek, lifting the ends of her hair, and it felt pleasantly cool. Opening her eyes, she lay staring around her, and at first she found it difficult to remember where she was. She was in a very large bed, and the room was very large too, with a high ceiling. It made her feel small. There was nothing even slightly familiar about the place, and because the windows had been covered up she couldn’t even see very much
...

Then everything came back. She sat up. Turning her head, she looked for the source of the draught, and immediately discovered that the electric fan was still humming quietly beside her. She pushed it away and lay back against a pile of pillows, trying to collect her thoughts.

The air was much less stuffy, and her ears detected a vague, distant murmur of sound. It was a sort of muffled hum composed of traffic noises, barking dogs and faint, indefinable rumbling sounds. It meant, obviously, that the siesta hour was over. Valletta was waking up.

Catriona glanced at her watch and made the discovery that it was a quarter to seven. What was it Carmen had said
?
When the Count was at home he usually dined at eight o’clock. She slid off the bed, found some slippers, and went over to one of the windows, pushing the shutters back. Outside, the air was much cooler and the sun had disappeared, leaving the sky a deep glowing turquoise. Already stars were glimmering above the flat rooftops, and evening was closing in on the city.

Catriona hung out, gazing across the narrow street at a building on the other side. Nearly opposite her window, there was a balcony hung with geraniums. As she watched, an elderly woman appeared on the balcony with a watering-can. A small, shrunken figure in rusty black, she watered the flowers thoroughly, then vanished again into the house, emerging a few seconds later with a large birdcage. The cage contained two brightly coloured budgerigars, and as the old woman placed it on a table she seemed to be talking to the birds. After a time she let them out, and one by one they fluttered to the balcony rail, but neither ventured beyond it. They belonged to the old woman’s secret, flower-filled world, and they were held within it as if by a spell. Once again, Catriona was reminded of a half-forgotten fairy-tale, and she wondered if the whole island were enchanted.

Leaning farther out, she turned her head to the right and saw that the narrow side street sloped steeply downwards. At the far end, she glimpsed the slender
campanile
of a church, and beyond the
campanile
a pencil-like shaft of blue betrayed the nearness of the sea. It didn’t look as if it could be more than half a mile away, and she remembered what Toni had said: Valletta was built on a peninsula.

More than anything she wanted to explore, to slip into a pair of old jeans and go for a walk, but that wasn’t possible. When she looked at her watch she saw that it was now well past seven o’clock. She had to freshen up and change for dinner, and before doing that she needed to unpack.

Catriona’s scanty wardrobe had not been improved by incarceration in a tightly packed suitcase. As she began putting things away in the vast hanging cupboard provided for the purpose, she realised, with a shock, that she had hardly anything suitable to wear. In England clothes had not presented any particular problem, and since she had recently purchased one or two summery items, she had imagined, when she packed that morning, that she was fairly well equipped for Malta. Now, for the very first time in her life, she felt almost ashamed of her own skimpy belongings. She only had a couple of crumpled cotton dresses, three pairs of jeans and a small selection of severely practical shirts and tops. None of it seemed exactly suitable for life in an aristocratic Maltese household. She didn’t buy expensive clothes
—
she had never been able to afford them—and she didn’t even own a pair of evening shoes. At least half her luggage was composed of painting equipment and as she looked at it, piled up in a corner of the room, she felt, just for a moment, faintly desperate.

Then she took a firm grip of herself. She was a struggling artist, not a member of the jet set. At the moment, she didn’t spend money on clothes because she had priorities that were more important, and that wasn’t going to change. Not just because she had entered the employment of Peter Vilhena, anyway. In the morning she might go out and buy another dress—perhaps a skirt too, and a top to go with it. But that would be her limit. She wasn’t trying to
compete with Antoinette.

Inspecting the blue, sleeveless dress that was her only possible choice for evening, she told herself firmly that there was nothing wrong with it. It was rather plain, but it had cost quite a lot more than anything else she possessed and it suited her. It had suffered badly in transit, and she wished that she had an iron, or at least that she had the courage to ring the bell and ask for one. The bell was beside her bed, and for a moment she almost pressed it, but then her nerve failed her. In her own way the maid was as well turned out as Toni. What on earth would she be likely to think of a girl who arrived from England with practically nothing to wear?

In the end, she resorted to the simple expedient of hanging the dress beside a window, and by the time she had taken a shower in the tiny bathroom adjoining her room it was beginning to recover fairly well. She brushed her hair and applied a little make-up, at the same time studying her reflection critically. In England the summer had been wet, and she hadn’t acquired any tan at all, but now she noticed that on the way from the airport her nose had come into contact with too much sunshine and the fair, sensitive skin had reacted angrily. It was red and sore, but there was almost nothing she could do about it. Desperately she wondered if there might be some way she could camouflage the damage. It looked so dreadful. Then she suddenly caught herself up.

Did a thing like that really matter? Why was she getting so nervous about her appearance
?
Who was she trying to impress
?
Certainly not Count Vilhena. She told herself that she couldn’t care less what he thought of her.

Cautiously she dabbed her nose with foundation cream, and the burnt area became a little less noticeable. After all, it was the sort of thing that could happen to anybody. By the time she was ready to go downstairs the blue dress had lost most of its creases and she decided that, on the whole, she didn’t look too bad. In any case, it was doubtful whether anyone would even notice her.

Quietly she opened her bedroom door and stepped out into a gallery that seemed to run the entire length of the house. On the way up, attended by Carmen, she hadn’t noticed very much, but now she saw that the walls were adorned with pikes and cutlasses, halberds and rapiers. They were souvenirs, presumably, of Malta’s colourful history. Feeling that she ought to walk on tiptoe, she slipped along the gallery to the head of the uncarpeted marble staircase, her sandals making no sound as she crept downstairs.

In the long hall at the bottom she lingered again, gazing around her in awe. Though there was little furniture in sight, the walls were lined with portraits
—
a long succession of black-eyed men and women. There were Renaissance nobles in doublets of crimson, priests with thin, ascetic faces, veiled women whose white fingers were heavy with rings. All of them, she supposed, were members of the Vilhena family, wealthy, proud Maltese aristocrats.

They made her shiver and she turned away from them quickly. At one end of the hall a door opened into the passageway through which she had entered the house, and she hurried through it. She could hear the sound of voices. There seemed to be several of them and she guessed that they came from the courtyard. Though not usually shy, or particularly nervous, she felt a sudden urge to take flight.

But she knew she couldn’t do that. Whoever these people were, she had to join them. Drawing a deep breath, she walked through the passage into the courtyard.

Between the fountain and some hibiscus bushes a table and chairs had been set out and in the scented coolness she saw a small group of people were enjoying aperitifs. Pete
r
Vilhena was standing beside the fountain, his right hand caressing the head of a magnificent borzoi, and it occurred to her that he looked rather sombre. He didn’t seem to be taking much part in the conversation.

Toni, wearing a glamorous sarong-style evening dress, was curled up on a pile of cushions in the shadow of the orange-tree. Her hair was hanging loose, cascading down her back, and heavy gold bangles weighted her wrists. She looked like a figure from the Arabian Nights.

But it wasn’t Toni, or even her brother, who drew and held Catriona’s attention. It was the third member of the group, a strikingly beautiful woman who was clad dramatically in scarlet.

Feeling more uncertain than she had ever felt in her entire adult life, Catriona stood hovering in the shadow of the archway. By comparison with the two women reclining in graceful attitudes in front of her she was going to look little more than ridiculous, and for the second time she began to consider seriously the possibility of retreat. Then Toni caught sight of her.

‘Catri
o
na
...
come and join us!’

All three heads turned in her direction, and Peter Vilhena accorded her an almost imperceptible bow.

She felt herself flushing, but with a determined effort she went forward to join them.

‘Have a drink, Miss Browne.’ There was no expression whatsoever on the Count’s face, but, she felt certain, nevertheless, that he was taking in every detail of her appearance.

Toni sent a friendly smile in her direction. ‘Have a lemonade, if you don’t want anything stronger,’ she suggested. With an expressive gesture, she indicated the other woman present. ‘This is Jacqueline Calleja. She is a friend of my brother’s. I have been telling her about you.’

The scarlet beauty nodded graciously. She had perfect classical features, and the most beautiful brown eyes Catriona had ever seen, more striking even than Toni’s. Her thick black hair had been twisted into gleaming plaits that coiled themselves around her head, and her mouth, like her dress, was flame-coloured.

‘Hello,’ said Catriona. She was beginning to wish that the ground would open and devour her, complete with the blue dress.

The vivid lips parted, smiling. ‘But what a pity. Your luggage has not arrived, Miss Browne
?
’

Catriona felt as if the-sunburn on her nose were spreading all over her body. ‘I
...
my luggage is here,’ she confessed awkwardly. ‘I didn’t bring much with me.’

‘Ah!’
Jacqueline Calleja smiled again. She gave the impression that she understood perfectly.

Toni intervened. ‘The climate is so different here, and she hasn’t had time to buy anything yet—we whisked her away at a moment’s notice. It was too bad, but I’ll take her shopping in the morning.’ She collected some more cushions, and made them into a second pile. ‘Come and sit here, Catriona.’

Still on fire with humiliation, Catriona sank gratefully on to the cushions. Then she saw that
the Count was bending over her, holding out a glass.

‘Iced lime-juice, with lemonade,’ he said quietly. ‘You will find it quite innocuous. Of course, if you would prefer something stronger
...
’

She shook her head hastily. ‘No. Thank you, that looks lovely.’ As she took the drink from him, she noticed the strength in his lean brown fingers, and when they brushed lightly against her own she felt as if his controlled energy sent a shock through her body. At the same time, in some strange way the contact seemed to calm her, and involuntarily she glanced up at him. But he had already moved away and was leaning against the fountain, paying no attention to her. The Borzoi had lain down at his feet.

‘Jacqueline is having dinner with us,’ Toni said brightly. ‘She is a television actress, and she’s going to tell us about her work.’

‘Not only television, darling.’ Jacqueline sounded slightly piqued. ‘I do take other parts as well, and my ambition is to be a very serious actress. I shall soon be playing in
Twelfth Night
...
I’m to be Olivia. I know an English director who says that part could have been written for me.’

The Count set his glass down beside the fountain. ‘On stage,’ he remarked dryly, ‘one beautiful woman is very much like another. It is in real life that her theatrical ability is put to the test.’

‘Peter!’ The husky, heavily accented voice was reproving and indulgent at the same time. ‘You
should not say things like that. Do you mean that we are always acting for your benefit?’

He looked down at the top of her gleaming head. ‘Nearly always,’ he said lightly. ‘Some women, of course, are more talented than others, and consequently their performance is better—more convincing.’

Somewhere in the depths of the old stone house a gong began to boom. Toni jumped up at once. ‘Let’s go in, I’m so hungry.’

They dined in a quiet, white-walled room overlooking the street. As dusk began to fall, softly shaded lamps were lit and candles were placed on the table in front of them, but despite the approach of night it was still oppressively warm inside the house, and several electric fans whirred monotonously. Far off in the city a convent bell was tolling and Catriona began to feel that nothing was quite real. Could it be true that she had started the day in Berkshire—that only twenty-four hours ago she had been waiting at table in the dining-room of the Calverley Hotel? It was the sort of thing that only happened in novels. It was all too much to take in.

They ate stuffed aubergines, followed by salmon cooked in white wine, and Jacqueline obligingly kept her promise to tell them all about her work. She seemed to lead a busy life, and to be very
much in demand. Watching her lovely, exotic face, following her graceful gestures, listening to her seductive voice, Catriona decided that there was one role she would fill to perfection—and that was the role of Countess Vilhena. It was a part, too, that she obviously wanted. As she sat at Peter’s right hand, her back to a shadowy portrait, her eyes sparkling in the candle-glow, she looked so staggeringly perfect that it was hardly surprising her host seemed to find difficulty in dragging his eyes away from her.

Catriona thought that surely it could not be long before he made up his mind. He had, it seemed, extensive business interests, mainly connected with boat-building, and he didn’t appear to allow himself much free time, but he probably wouldn’t find it difficult to make room in his life for Jacqueline. They would suit one another very well. She found them both almost equally infuriating.

As for the crazy idea that she had been steadied by the touch of his fingers—well, that was something she had imagined. She was probably more tired than she realised.

At last they reached the coffee stage, and Jacqueline drew her chair back. She looked at Peter beneath her lashes.

‘Darling
,
it’s very sad, but I must go.’

He leant back in his chair, tapping lightly on the table. ‘Why?’ he asked.

‘Because there is a party I must not miss.
’
She shrugged, and stood up. ‘I would not bother about it, but it is a family celebration—my sister’s wedding anniversary. You know, she has been married for twelve years.’

The Count’s brow puckered. ‘No, I did not know. You must forgive me, Jacqueline. I had forgotten that you had a sister old enough to have reached such a milestone.’

She looked down at him. With one beautifully manicured finger she touched his hand as it lay on the table. ‘I didn’t say anything earlier because I thought it would spoil dinner. I know you wouldn’t want to
go with me, darling.’

‘No.’ He looked at the slender finger still caressing the fine dark hairs on the back of his hand. ‘No.’ he repeated abruptly. ‘You were right.’

‘Ah, well, never mind.’ She smiled brightly. Then her glance fell on Toni, and an idea seemed to strike her. ‘Antoinette, you’re not doing anything? Not tonight
?
’

Toni looked at her eagerly. ‘No
...
’

‘Well then, you must come with me.’ She turned to the Count, her eyes full of appeal. ‘Let her come. It will be a very respectable party.’

Peter Vilhena glanced at his sister. ‘You may go if you wish. You will be safe with Jacqueline.’

Toni’s eyes lit, and for a moment Catriona thought she was going to kiss her brother, but if any such idea did pass through her head she dismissed it. Instead, she said:

‘Thank you. Thank you, Peter!’

To Catriona’s relief the invitation obviously did not extend to her. She saw Toni looking at her anxiously, and knew that the other girl would have liked to press for her inclusion. But it would clearly have been difficult for Jacqueline Calleja to envisage the possibility of treating a paid employee as an equal.

When they had gone she lingered for a moment in the courtyard, under the far-off night sky. There were thousands of stars overhead, and she supposed the same stars were looking down on England, even if, at the moment, they might be hidden behind rain-clouds, and yet her own familiar world seemed light years away. It was as if she had crashed through a magic barrier into some other dimension, and her old life had been left behind. All at once she felt lonely and rather flat, and that shook her, because she was used to being alone.