An Artistic Way to Go (3 page)

‘Who's arguing?'

‘Divorce him and marry me and learn what life can be like.'

‘I learned that before I married him and didn't know how to pay the electricity bill.'

‘Money's all-important?'

‘Lack of it is.'

‘I've told you, I'll make the grade.'

‘Call again when you do.'

‘You're not so backward at being a bitch!'

‘Look, love, get down off your high horse and be practical. If I divorced Oliver, he'd do everything in his power to make me suffer and leaving me penniless would be for starters. As much as you and me see life the same way, we'd start rowing if the money dried up. Two people never did live as cheaply as one.'

‘Then we just go on like now, seeing each other when you can snatch a couple of hours away from his pot belly?'

‘That's right.'

‘Exciting!'

‘Why get so steamed up? Start remembering that Oliver's not as young as he used to be and that he eats too much, drinks too much, and smokes like a chimney.'

‘What if he does?'

‘Men like him have heart attacks by the score. Especially if they're not normally all that active, but are encouraged to become frantic and frenetic.'

‘You mean … You're beginning to add a whole new dimension to screwing.'

‘Think of me as enthusiastic.'

He climbed off the bed, kissed her. ‘Think of you as Spanish fly in the night.' He walked over to the chest of drawers on which were several bottles. ‘What'll you drink?'

‘I told you, I've got to rush.'

He poured himself a gin and tonic. ‘If he does die happy, how can you be certain you'll end up all right?'

‘I'm the sole beneficiary.'

‘He may have told you that, but it could be all balls.'

‘I've seen his will.'

‘Seeing the kind of man he is, I'm surprised he showed it to you.'

‘He didn't. I learned the combination of the wall safe a long time ago.'

He drank. ‘I'm learning more about you every day.'

‘That'll keep you interested.'

‘I don't need artificial aids.'

She went through to the tiny bathroom, checked her image in the mirror, lightly powdered her cheeks, patted an errant hair into place, returned to the main room. ‘How do I look?'

‘I'd never guess that only a short time ago the earth moved so fiercely for you, you thought there'd been an earthquake.'

‘Self-flattery is a sign of insecurity.' She moved forward, ran her hand down his flat, muscled stomach, pinched.

‘Why the hell d'you do that?' he shouted, as he jerked back.

‘To give you a taste of what will happen if you ever think of straying.' She put on a large pair of dark glasses and left.

*   *   *

Had she not been the Right Honourable the Countess Janlin, estranged wife of the seventh earl, a man of vast estate, she would have been cold-shouldered by those expatriates who were alarmed by the unconventional or who believed that a gold or platinum card was the prerequisite to friendship. She lived in a poky, unreformed, Mallorquin house, dressed in what might well have been Oxfam rejects, drove a clapped-out Seat 127, and occasionally had a man to live with her who, on at least one occasion, had been a Mallorquin. But possessed of so exalted a pedigree, the conformists spoke of aristocratic eccentricity and even the richest of the parvenus were quick to declare their liking for her.

When young and often in the news, she had usually been described as possessing the traditional English peaches-and-cream complexion; years of hot sun, brandy, and a wilful refusal to use any skin cream, meant that prune-like was a more apposite description. Her body, once slender and shapely, had thickened and sagged.

She sat in the small garden, listening to a tape recorder that was playing Strauss's ‘Don Quixote'. As Rachael opened the gate, she stopped the music. ‘The booze is in the usual place.'

Rachael walked caterwise across the patio and on to the lawn of gama grass. ‘I don't think I'll have anything.'

‘Why not?'

‘We're having dinner with the Passmores…'

‘More fool you.'

Muriel had obviously reached the belligerent stage so it would be stupid to provoke her. ‘Maybe just a small one, then.'

‘That's not what you'll have been wanting for the past couple of hours. Good, was it?'

‘I've no complaints.'

‘Then you're bloody lucky! By the time George had finished imitating a rig with a double rupture, I'd nothing but complaints.'

Rachael crossed to the trolley on the patio and poured herself a weak gin and tonic, added ice, picked up a saucer of baked almonds in their skins. She returned, settled on the second uncomfortable, rusting wrought-iron chair. She raised her glass. ‘Cheers.'

‘Good God, how many more times do I have to tell you that it's only little people from Bagshot who say “Cheers”?'

She drank. ‘Has Oliver rung?'

‘No.'

‘I told him you were feeling miserable again and needed cheering up.'

‘And he swallowed that? There's something to be said for being married to a pompous fool.'

‘In some things, you know, he's very far from being a fool.'

‘I don't know.'

Rachael looked at her watch. She must leave very soon if she were to arrive home in time to shower and dress and be ready to leave by a quarter to eight.

‘Make him wait. Do him good.'

Not for the first time, she wondered why Muriel was so ready to assist in Oliver's cuckolding? Contempt for him? Because he was so much richer than she? Or was it that because her own marriage had turned into farce, she welcomed the chance to assist in wrecking someone else's?

CHAPTER 4

As Serra approached the large cisterna, made from blocks of sandstone, there were no sounds of flowing water. He swore. He continued past two kumquat trees to the northeast corner of the cisterna, climbed up on to the wall, using rocks which had been extended to form rough steps, and stared down at the narrow aqueduct, also fashioned from sandstone, which ran along the top of it. The channel was dry so the water had flowed for only a short time or not at all. He moved carefully along the top of the wall, legs straddling the channel, until he could look down into the cisterna. The level of water was very low.

He studied the sky, beginning to lose its intensity of colour, hoping to see rain clouds, even though there had been no rain for weeks and would be none for at least another month; if he hadn't been an optimistic pessimist, he wouldn't have been a farmer.

How many days' water was left in the cisterna? Not nearly enough. Even though he knew it would infuriate him to do so, he turned and stared into the garden of Ca'n Oliver. The riot of colour should have warmed his heart, but it made him swear afresh. All those flowers, all that lawn, existed only because he was being denied the water he needed to grow his vegetables and fruit.

It was his brother's fault. His brother was a good-for-nothing who'd lost to the roll of three dice his half of the land which had been left by their father; he'd have gambled away his wife if anyone were fool enough to accept so sharp-tongued a bitch as a stake. The land had been bought by a German, immensely rich as were all foreigners, who'd built a large house and swimming pool and ordered the rich land to be turned into a garden which needed the water that God had intended should grow food. But the German had been reasonable – for a foreigner, that was. He'd never complained when the aqueduct had not flowed, had never questioned why he was not receiving the water to which he was entitled, but instead had bought what was needed by the lorryload. So he, Serra, had received all the water instead of just half, enabling him to increase production.

Then the German had died, the property had been sold, and it had been bought by another foreigner (no Spaniard could be so bereft of brains as to pay the kind of money that had been asked; not even a politician). He had naturally imagined Señor Cooper would honour the existing arrangement. If only the señor had proved to be even half the man the German had been! On learning that ownership of the land entitled him to sixteen and a half hours' of water a week, he had demanded this. When the aqueduct had remained dry, he'd called in a pompous, self-opinionated abogado – was there any other kind? – who had ordered him to stop diverting to his own use water to which he was not entitled. He ignored the order, of course. So the abogado – no honest Mallorquin but from the Peninsula – had threatened legal action and had spoken to Fernando Gelabert, who lived near the mouth of the valley and was in charge of the system of distribution and had warned that if his client didn't receive his correct allotment, Gelabert would be stripped of his honorary position …

Desperate problems demanded desperate remedies. He'd spent a great deal of money on a bottle of the strongest weedkiller which one night he'd poured into the señor's cisterna. Yet no flowers had withered, no tree had shed its leaves, the lawn had not turned brown and, even though they used that water to top up the swimming pool, neither the señor nor the señora had been stricken with the pox. (She was a puta. Jorge had told him many times that she swam in the nude.) He'd melted down a candle and from the soft wax modelled a figure upon which he'd urinated as he christened it Señor Oliver; he'd heated five needles and stuck them into the figure, one in each eye, one in the centre of the stomach, and one in each testicle, yet during the succeeding days the señor had not been blinded, doubled up with his stomach on fire, or walked as if on hot bricks.

In desperation, he'd allowed the water to flow into the señor's cisterna for long enough to make any reasonable man think all was well, then diverted it into his own. Jorge had known what was happening, but he was a friend as well as a Mallorquin. Yet that bastard of a señor had not only checked to make certain the water was running at the beginning of each period, he'd also checked later on. Now Jorge only occasionally dared turn a blind eye other than when the señor was away …

He climbed down the wall and followed the path around the cisterna, came to a stop. The land sloped away so that he could look out over his crops. Beans, peas, tomatoes, lettuces, sweet peppers, aubergines, cucumbers, radishes, grapes, oranges, lemons, grapefruit, almonds, figs, persimmons … Nowhere on the island grew larger, sweeter, juicier, tastier fruit and vegetables. When his wife set up her stall in the market, the Mallorquins rushed to buy from her before the long-abed foreigners arrived and willingly paid whatever was asked. But if he could not find a way of once more obtaining all the water he needed for such heavy cropping, he would either have to reduce the amount he grew or buy water. The first would make other farmers snigger, the second, laugh.

*   *   *

He lived in the village, not far from the old square, in one of the original, twisting roads that wound its way part way up the conical hill about which Llueso was built. The house had not been reformed beyond the installation of a modern flushing lavatory, as demanded by the ayuntamiento – like all bureaucrats, they spent other people's money with gay abandon.

He looked across the kitchen, which was also their dining- and sitting-room. ‘I'm going to see Jorge.'

Ana nodded. Years of working in the fields in sun and wind had left her with a complexion of leather, a thickset, muscular body, and rheumatism and arthritis.

‘He'll help.'

‘If he can.' She seldom said more than was necessary.

He went through to the front room and out on to the road that was so narrow that however considerately a car parked, it caused problems to moving vehicles. At the bottom, a flight of stone steps led down at the point where the road turned sharp left. The steps ended almost directly opposite a bar that was popular because it had not been modernized, and it retained the air of shabbiness that deterred any but the most determined foreigner in search of local colour. He spoke to the owner behind the bar. ‘Has Jorge been in?'

‘Not yet.'

‘Give me a coñac.'

Some minutes later, Barcelo, considerably younger than he, entered, crossed to where he sat on a stool. ‘How are things with you?'

‘No worse than usual.'

Barcelo ordered a drink. ‘Is it right you're retiring?'

‘What bloody fool's saying that?'

‘The story's not true?'

‘What story?'

‘The English señor is so angry over you pinching his share of the water that he's going to court to ask for all the water for the next three years to make up for what he's lost.'

‘Where d'you hear that?'

‘It's only fair.'

‘You call it fair, him using it for his garden and pool?'

‘If it's his, he can do what he wants with it.'

‘It belongs to the land.'

‘It'll belong to him when the court says. Your old woman won't have anything to sell in market 'cept a few almonds and figs.' Barcelo sniggered as he took the glass and bottle of beer he was handed. ‘But I'm a generous kind of a bloke. I'll find you a job. Even pay you what you're worth … Ten pesetas an hour.'

‘Which is ten more than you've ever earned honestly.' Serra stood, crossed to one of the tables, sat. He saw Barcelo talk to the owner, whereupon both men laughed. Rejoicing at his coming misfortunes. The story had to be nonsense, born of bitter jealousy. Yet … yet the señor had proved himself time and again to be ignorant of the customs of the countryside and if he were egged on by a lawyer whose ambition was to retire richer than the clients he swindled … In his mind, he saw his land deprived of all water; the vegetables withered, the fruit rotting on the ground because the trees could no longer support their crops …

Amoros entered and ordered a glass of wine. Short and stocky, his character was as phlegmatic as his heavy, lined face suggested. He crossed and sat opposite Serra.