An Artistic Way to Go (2 page)

‘My middle name's Santa.' Cooper cut the call, replaced the phone on the shelf under the table. Despite a working life in art, he was still surprised that a man could be so devoid of artistic judgement as Field was where his own work was concerned.

CHAPTER 2

As Field replaced the receiver, he thought how ironic it was that he should be optimistic when pessimism was warranted. He knew how slowly and tortuously the art world moved, yet before the call he'd inexplicably convinced himself that he was going to hear good news. Still, he hadn't received actual bad news. The potential buyer was still there. It wasn't the financial success he longed for, it was the artistic success that would prove Mary's faith in his work had been justified.

He turned and as he did so his gaze was caught by the photograph of Mary in the elaborate silver frame that had been a wedding present. It had been taken some ten years after their marriage and she was smiling, apparently happy and contented. Impossible to guess that a month before she had been told by the specialist that there was no point in continuing with the fertility treatment. She had longed for children, yet learned she could not have any with quiet acceptance, determined to get the best out of life.

He'd once read that there was a limit to pleasure, but not to pain. That was true. No pleasure could ever be as intense as the degree of mental agony he had suffered when he'd stared down at her in the hospital bed, unable to ease her suffering, willing her death so that she could find peace, dreading her death because that would be the final parting …

He crossed the small room of the caseta and stepped through the open doorway. He stared at the fig trees, the stone wall which bounded the field, the small orange grove, and the mountains. He heard sheep bells clanging, dogs barking, and a man singing, his voice carrying a Moorish intonation. After Mary's death, Cooper had persuaded him that he needed to make a clean break in life and should move out to the island. To his surprise, it had proved to be good advice. Away from the tourist beaches and concrete jungles, the island offered a sense of peace and a link between past, present and future, that allowed a man to regain a reason for living.

He checked the time, turned, shut and locked the front door. Some things had changed even when one was away from the coast. Calvo had told him many times that fifty years before no one had ever bothered to lock up – indeed, the key had been left in view so that others should know one was not at home; now, to leave a door unlocked was to invite theft. Calvo blamed the foreigners for the change, refusing to admit, as was the case, that some of the thieves were Mallorquins, looking for the money to buy drugs. But then, but for the influence of the foreigners perhaps young Mallorquins would have grown up with the same strict standards as their parents had honoured.

He had been no gardener in England – Mary had been the enthusiast – but here he had created a small garden that was colourful throughout the year, helped by advice from Calvo, despite the other's declared belief that the growing of flowers rather than vegetables was a stupid waste of time, effort, and water. He passed several rose bushes, with very few blooms because this was the time of the greatest heat, petunias, hibiscus and plumbago bushes, and stopped briefly in front of a couple of lantanas to watch several hummingbird hawk moths working the flower clusters, their wings a blur of motion and creating a low humming.

The dirt track met a road and he turned on to this and continued along it for a quarter of a kilometre to a narrow lane that had been needlessly tarmacked in the last few weeks, thanks to the grateful, wasteful generosity of the EU.

In the first of Calvo's fields, Marta, dressed in shapeless, faded clothes and wearing a very wide-brimmed straw hat, looked up and shouted a greeting, then continued to irrigate the lines of sweet peppers. He wound his way between tomatoes and aubergines to reach her.

‘It's hot enough to make the devil sweat,' she complained.

He still understood far more Mallorquin than he spoke, but the fact that he spoke any was unusual. Most English residents thought it unnecessary, perhaps even demeaning, to learn any more Castilian than was necessary to order red or white wine and they consigned Mallorquin to the natives. But arriving on the island with no inbuilt assumption of superiority and possessed of the unusual belief that a man whose way of life was simple compared to his own was not necessarily stupid, he had decided that having come to live in someone else's country, he should try to master the language. It had proved to be a hard task. Age might enlarge one's wisdom, but it diminished one's ability to learn. But he had persevered, his determination strengthened by the obvious gratification his efforts gave the Mallorquins.

She used the mattock to lift out a sod of earth and allow water to flow from the main irrigation channel into a dry side channel, dropped the earth to plug the filled one. ‘He's with the sheep in the olive field.'

‘I'll go up there.'

‘And when you return, you'll have a drink.'

‘Please don't bother…'

‘You visit without having a drink? You think we are Galicians?' She straightened up and stared at him, then had hurriedly to return to her work as the water overflowed the side channel.

He left her and walked towards the house. Time and again, he'd heard the foreigners, and particularly the English, refer to the Mallorquins as crude, money-grubbing liars. Not one of those critics had ever realized how ignorant of the local life this criticism showed him to be. The Mallorquin manners suited their simplified style of life and were not intended for drawing-rooms with Sheraton chairs and Baluchi rugs; their undoubted love of money arose from the fact that it was not so very long since they had had none; they did not lie, unless they were lawyers, they merely told their listeners what those listeners obviously wished to hear because there was no greater kindness one could offer a man than to make him happy. Great would be the surprise of the critics to learn that Mallorquins considered some of their habits extremely bad mannered …

Built out of rock, Mallorquin cement, and Roman roof tiles, the oblong house could not have been of simpler construction yet more adapted to its task, which was no more than to house both humans and animals. Foreigners who bought old farmhouses and reformed them so often destroyed their character by failing to see any merit or beauty in simplicity.

He followed the path round the west side of the house and through a field that had been stubble for weeks and would grow nothing until the winter because it could not be irrigated. Beyond the wide gateway in the stone wall was rising, rough land that became increasingly strewn with boulders, between which grew only weed grasses, brambles, and wild cistus.

At the end of the path was an almost flat area of two hectares on which grew rows of olive trees, the trunks of many so twisted that a fanciful mind could believe they had been frozen in a moment of torment. Beneath the trees, Mallorquin sheep – the lambs were coloured chestnut-brown – grazed the grass which grew thanks to a spring which defied all logic and flowed in the summer to disappear in the winter.

A black and white sheepdog came racing across to greet him, putting its paws up on his chest and ignoring the shouts to get down. As he crossed the field to where Calvo stood under the shade of a tree, it kept nudging his leg, asking for its ears to be fondled. Working dogs were awarded little overt affection.

Calvo studied him. ‘You look rough,' he said, with typical directness and disregard for finer feelings.

‘It's very hot.'

‘What d'you expect in July?'

‘Also, I am very old.'

‘You don't top me by more'n a couple of years and I climb up here without collapsing.'

Calvo was fit enough to climb up Puig Major and not be out of breath, Field thought. Sun and wind had sculpted a face with deep lines of stubborn strength, a life of physical toil had kept his body hard.

Calvo squinted as he looked up at the sun to judge the time. ‘They've had long enough. We'll take 'em down.' He whistled, jerked his thin olive staff to the right. The dog went off to the left. He shouted a string of obscenities, cursing the dog and its ancestors. It turned and looked at him, tongue hanging over the side of its mouth as it panted, and Field could believe it was laughing. More shouting and a raised staff persuaded it to do as originally ordered and it worked with skill. The sheep and lambs were collected and herded through the gateway and down the slope to the first field, where they spread out, optimistically searching the stubble for something more to eat.

The two continued on to the house and the patio on the south side, which was protected from the sun by an old vine that grew over a framework of rusty wire stretched between concrete pillars. Three wooden chairs were set around a table that had been made from nailing the side of a packing case to a three-foot length of trunk from an evergreen oak. A casual observer would probably have looked at the table and chairs, at the gaps between the rocks in the wall of the house where the cement had crumbled away, at the shutters with broken or missing slats, and have concluded that the occupants lived at, or even below, the poverty line. It would have been a very wrong conclusion. As did farmers in other countries, the Calvos lived well but would always deny this because in their youth they had experienced poverty, and they would never spend money unless and until it was absolutely necessary to do so.

They sat. The dog settled at Field's side and nudged his legs.

‘Carolina will be with us tomorrow because her mother goes to Palma for the day,' Calvo said.

‘I'd like to see her. May I?'

At that moment, Marta came into sight around the corner of the house, trailing the mattock as if she were drained of every ounce of energy. ‘Hey, old woman, listen to this!' Calvo shouted. ‘He asks if he can come and see Carolina tomorrow. He
asks!
'

She looked at Field, her brown eyes expressing puzzlement.

‘I was…' He wanted to say, ‘being polite', but the concept was not one he was able to put directly into Mallorquin. ‘It is customary for us to ask. That is polite.'

Calvo's annoyance was not appeased. ‘You think you have to be polite? Do you know what Elena will say when I tell her that you ask permission to come and see Carolina? She will say that your head contains more feathers than a chicken's.' He swung round to face Marta. ‘Where's the wine?'

‘In the usual place.'

‘Fetch it.'

She propped the mattock by its handle against one of the concrete pillars, and went into the house.

Calvo reached into his mop of wiry, curly grey hair and scratched the top of his head. ‘Does Elena ask if she can come here? Does Carolina?… Of course they bloody well don't because they are family.' He slammed his hand down on the table. ‘Have I not told you that you are family?'

‘You have.'

Marta came out of the house, carrying an earthenware jug in one hand and two glasses in another. She put the glasses down on the table, filled them. Then she faced Field. ‘You will eat with us.'

Calvo drank deeply, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘He is family, yet he asks! Truly, only a fool can be stupider than a lost sheep.'

As Field sipped the rough wine that would have had any connoisseur searching for a spittoon, he experienced a rush of emotion towards the two that was a form of love. They had lived through hard, occasionally terrible, times and this had taught them that the only certainty, and therefore the most precious thing in the world, was family. So when they said he was family, they were offering him the greatest gift that was theirs to give. How many people were ever prepared to do that?

CHAPTER 3

Rachael looked at her watch. ‘I must leave in quarter of an hour. We've just time.'

‘For what?' Burns asked.

‘You need two guesses? What's the trouble – no imagination or no stamina?'

‘Imagination to spare and stamina for six.'

‘So prove you're something more than a big mouth.'

He did.

Afterwards, he lay on the bed as he watched her dress. ‘When are you off on this bloody cruise?'

‘On the nineteenth.' About to step into a pair of lace-edged pants, she paused, turned. ‘And make a good note of this. You start entertaining the tourists whilst I'm away and I'll castrate you.'

‘One law for the rich, another for the poor. I have to lead a life of celibacy, while you're wearing yourself out.'

‘With Oliver? Doing my duty when I have to, which, thank God, isn't very often these days.'

‘Not as athletic as he was?'

‘The track's become too soft for records.' She pulled up her pants, looked at her watch. ‘Dammit, I'll be late.'

‘You said I was to use my imagination … Anyway, what's the panic?'

‘We're going out to dinner and he wants to leave sharp at a quarter to eight.'

‘He must be the only person on the island who worries about arriving on time.'

‘He was born pedantically.'

‘Who are you noshing with?'

‘The Passmores.'

‘The couple with a yacht almost the size of the
QE2?
'

‘He wouldn't like to hear the “almost”.'

‘Why waste your time with the likes of them? She's a bitch.'

‘In my vocabulary, the biggest bitch on the island.' She picked up her dress from the back of a chair. ‘And is that saying something!'

‘It sounds as if she's been looking at you through her lorgnette.'

‘Very droll.'

‘Why don't you stick two fingers up at her?'

‘And give Oliver another ulcer? They're so rich that if they told him Monet was a lousy artist, he'd rush to agree.'

‘Your husband's a creep.'