Authors: Unknown
‘Oh, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, James. You can put up with us for a bit longer, can’t you, young lady? We haven’t treated you too badly up to now?’
I shook my head smiling. ‘I’ve enjoyed it, thank you, sir.'
‘That’s settled, then.’ He looked at his watch and stood up. Immediately we all got to our feet too. ‘Tell Eve,' he smiled to Mr. Fitzgerald who had already opened the door, ‘there’s no more to be said.’
I had the feeling that in his own tactful way he was talking to Mr. Fitzgerald as well as Eve. Maybe he was telling him that he was a generation older and wiser, and that for once Mr. Fitzgerald couldn’t send me packing and have his way.
His Excellency had other things to tell. ‘Young lady,' he leaned across the table and addressed me at family supper almost a week later.
In contrast to the official receptions, H.E. wore a short-sleeved shirt. Mrs. Mallenport wore a flowered summer dress. Hester looked ravishing and radiant in pale green cotton. ‘Mrs. Mallenport and have I some personal news which we want you, my dear, to be the first to hear.'
He smiled at me benignly while my heart stood still. I looked down at my hands. I had guessed what was coming, and it wasn't really that I minded. If it was a choice between Hester and Eve, as it so obviously was, then I’d infinitely rather Mr. Fitzgerald married Hester. Despite her waywardness she was a warm-hearted person underneath. She’d settle down and be good to him, and I wanted that. Once the news was announced, I must accept it and get over it. And in a little while I would myself be going away.
‘Yes,' H.E. went on ruminatively, ‘it's been very much an up-and-down affair. She’s given us some anxious moments, hasn’t she, my dear?' His affectionate gaze slid to his wife. ‘But then I seem to remember some decades past that you, my love, were somewhat hard to . . .'
Mrs. Davenport blushed a little, and reminded her husband that he did not want to get diverted from his announcement. ‘Madeleine must be dying to know what we’re talking about.’
‘Hester,' H.E., said promptly.
I smiled. ‘I thought so.'
‘She is about to become officially engaged.'
I drew in a deep breath and kept my smile wide and bright. ‘Congratulations. I’m delighted.' I leaned across the table and patted her hand.
‘Of course you’re delighted,' Hester's hazel eyes gleamed mischievously. ‘You’ve got quite a soft spot for him yourself.'
‘Have I?'
‘Yes, of course you have. You were quite fierce in his defence that time before Mother and I went up to Washington.'
‘So I was.'
‘Well, there you are!'
‘Madeleine is fond of him in a brotherly way,' Mrs. Mallenport murmured.
‘I seem to remember that you, Hester, were very fierce to him at times,' H.E. put in. ‘It was a stormy courtship, as you might expect between two strong- willed people. First they hated, then they loved. At one time I had to come the heavy father and forbid their seeing each other.'
Hester winked at me.
H.E. looked at his watch and stood up. ‘They flouted that rule on occasion, I have no doubt.' He bent and kissed his wife’s cheek. ‘Well, I must go back to my study for a couple of hours, if you’ll excuse me. I shall leave you to your feminine talk.'
‘He must be terribly in love with you
,
' I remarked, ‘to have flouted H.E.’
‘Of course,' Hester looked dewy-eyed. ‘Especially as he’s been brought up so strictly on such matters.’
‘They were very naughty,’ Mrs. Mallenport said trenchantly. ‘We were most anxious, though we kept it to ourselves. They flirted so outrageously with other people. You have no idea, Madeleine.’
‘She has, Mother.’
‘They threw sand in each other’s eyes as well as ours.’ Mrs. Mallenport patted my hand. ‘I’m sure you will not be like that, my dear girl.’
‘Don’t bank on that, Mother dear. A lot of people are hateful to each other till they’re sure.’
‘Then there comes a day,’ I said quietly, ‘when you are sure. Everything falls into place somehow.’
‘Exactly. I can remember when it began to,’ she sighed. ‘Remember the barbecue and cat-dance at the Hacienda?’
‘Yes.’
‘I realised then that I loved him. But I still went on being incredibly difficult.’
‘Obviously my daughter is in a confiding mood,' Mrs. Mallenport rose. ‘And I must see Bianca about tomorrow’s menus. There will, of course, be a year’s engagement according to Charaguayan custom. Tomorrow they’ll choose the ring.’
‘An antique one of Inca gold and Charaguayan gems,’ Hester said, spreading the fingers of her left hand as if she could already see it so adorned.
‘He’s very fond of Charaguay,’ I said.
‘Fond?’ Hester exclaimed, tossing her head proudly. '
Fond.?
Ramon
is
Charaguay!’
‘You can see that I’m not about to lose a daughter but gain a country!' Mrs. Mallenport squeezed my shoulder and laughed. If she noticed my stunned and astonished silence she made no comment. Though I thought she threw me a maternally anxious glance as she crossed the terrace.
I tried to assemble my thoughts. I had assumed that Don Ramón and Hester disliked each other, almost as much in fact as Mr. Fitzgerald disliked me.
‘We shall have an engagement party,' Mrs. Mallenport called from the reception room doorway. ‘And with luck Eve will be back for it. It wouldn’t be the same without Eve—and of course James. And naturally, you, Madeleine.'
‘So the Charaguayan legend is about to come true,' I remarked to Hester when her mother had gone.
‘Which one?' Hester laughed. ‘Ramon has one to suit every occasion. No, that's not fair. He is really a truthful person—and he isn't really wild. He simply has new ideas. Most of them like our own.'
‘You don't have to defend him,' I replied. ‘I like him very much. You'll both be very good for this place, like the first Carradedas and his bride. That was the legend that I meant—the one that says this time the Carradedas bride will come to him.'
She nodded, and squeezed my hand emotionally. 'I'm sorry I let you meet him alone that first Sunday. We used often to meet there. I thought if I met him with you, you’re such a sweet soul, you’d somehow keep the peace between us. Then I,' she shrugged, ‘just got cold feet. He’d been away, and I thought his feelings might have changed.'
‘That’s all right. I'd probably have done the same myself.'
‘Do you know what it’s like when you love someone, and resent them at the same time?’
I nodded.
‘And when I saw him kissing you in the car, I felt shattered. But he says it was the only way to make me see sense.'
‘I expect it was.’
‘And he swears that it was the only time he ever kissed you. That is true, isn’t it, Madeleine?’
I hesitated. I could still not forget that kiss at the Hacienda, but neither could I ignore that vulnerable look in her wide hazel eyes.
I crossed my fingers under the table, and in a good cause I said, ‘Yes, that was the only time.’
It was minutes later before I realised that I might indeed have affirmed the truth. But if Don Ramon had not kissed me at the Hacienda,
then who had
?
I had not solved that problem by the time Hananda Day arrived, and I did my best to put the question firmly out of my mind. As arranged, I met Petiso in the square outside the hostel shortly before eight that fateful Sunday.
The rest of the boys were gathered like a flock of starlings, making the same excited high-pitched twittering noise. All were dressed in the Charaguayans' favourite Sunday colour of shiny black. All were clean and scrubbed, hair slicked, wearing new and unaccustomed shoes, shined like patent leather as befitted their calling.
As we left, Don Ramón arrived in his red Jensen to collect a group who all came from the same village. Morag was driving an old Cadillac, donated by an American lady, with another lot. Hester had borrowed Mrs. Mallenport’s Mini. Some, who lived near the coast, were travelling by the famous old steam train. Petiso and I, because of the devious route to his village, had to go mostly by bus and then lastly by foot.
The buses, Charaguayans tell you, are the main reason why people travel by air or taxi. In its sudden lurch into the twentieth century the country had to improvise. The buses are hasty conversions from old lorries. The seats are unsprung and packed close together. Because many of the customers can’t read, they are painted a colour according to the route.
But for those who can read, they have grandiose destinations lettered on their sides. Pacific to Atlantic (that’s for the ones going in a west—east direction). South America to the United States of America for those driving to the north.
Despite their old engines the buses travel at a spanking pace with a great woolly ball of black smoke from their exhaust. Frequent hooting of the horn, even along deserted roads, is obligatory. Standing is permitted outside and in.
Our route was served by a yellow bus. It was half full when it came to the stop by Central Park West, but Petiso burrowed a way till he found me a seat. Morag had written down exactly where I was to ask for. Petiso squeezed in between me and the seat in front. Occasionally he sat on my knee. He couldn’t have weighed more than about three stone.
He had brought with him a very modern bright red clock for his great-grandmother. For though they completely disregarded time, clocks are much favoured as presents by Charaguayans. He had also brought her a small radio, some tins of corned beef, and some packets of trifle mix. He was in high good humour as we set off through the city of Quicha.
Everything was bright and clear in the morning air. The sounds of a city waking up, the smells of freshly baked bread and exotic flowers, the brilliance of blossoms mingling with the bright stalls and the colours of the pedlars’ wares spread out over the flagstones.
The nine o’clock carillon of bells rang like a fading waterfall of sound as we left the outskirts of the city behind and began to climb. Round and up and round again, the bus groaned as it negotiated hairpin bends that fringed nightmare falls. At times it scraped its battered tail paint on a sharp outcrop. At times a wheel slid just enough over the tarmac to make my skin crawl. We stopped with a shrill squeak of brakes at small villages that were little more than a huddle of houses. One at a time, passengers got on or off, with huge carrier bags of provisions, or baskets of mangoes and naranjas, and damp canvas bags smelling strongly of fish. Everyone, men and women, smoked, mostly little white clay pipes, or chewed something that smelled sweet and sickly and left their teeth stained grey-green.
For two hours we jolted and swayed and coughed and smoked, both inside the bus and out, through ever more bleak and rocky country. On either side the road was hedged by high dun-coloured boulders, where only a few white flowers grew in the crevices. The surface ahead was full of little jagged cracks, like the one that had suddenly sprung across the concrete at the Residence, as if the earth, in its mild spasm, had shaken that much more up here.
But Petiso greeted this forbidding country with delight. He bounced up and down, his nose pressed to the dusty window. When the bus abruptly stopped—as I thought for a herd of mountain goats, or with engine trouble—he pulled me urgently down past the line of people standing in the aisle, past the conductor, gesticulating wildly and shaking his head at the dimness of the
inglesa,
down the two rickety steps and out into the breathless beauty of the mountain air.
Before, it seemed, we had time to change our minds, the driver revved the engine harshly, smothered us in exhaust smoke, and went bouncing off, the huge black woolly ball unwinding as he went on and round and out of sight.
When the black smoke cleared, I looked around. We were alone. There was no sign of habitation at all, except an old two-storey building built of stone, with an untidy reed roof that would have made a Devon thatcher weep, its four windows shuttered, its door padlocked; a roofless building that was once a barn, a goat pen, and a rusty Coca-Cola sign.
‘ ’otel,' Petiso said. '
Grande
.’ He waved his arms wide, then brought his hands together with a sigh. He covered his eyes like shutters, indicating the hotel’s magnificence was now a thing of the past.
‘For . . .' He made a bridge of one hand, and then walked two fingers of the other over it.
‘And how far is that?' I asked him in Spanish. But I was wasting my breath. Distance, like time, was difficult for him to estimate. So I brought out Morag’s map from my pocket, Petiso’s magnificent hotel was marked on Morag’s sketch as Old Rest House with three exclamation marks. The path she arrowed us towards led down the side of the mountain from the road, snaking down a sheer gorge. I could hear the sound of rushing water, but I couldn’t see the faraway bottom of the gorge.
Petiso led the way, parting the spiky shrubs that had obliterated the path, turning to smile and shouting incomprehensible comments. The noise of rushing, racing water was louder, but I still couldn’t see it. Then we rounded a great granite outcrop of rock, and I saw the sun gleaming on the slender rope bridge that spanned the gorge. I almost let out an exclamation of horror as I saw a great black-winged bird alight on it, then take off again, and gently the bridge swayed.
Ashamed of my cowardice, I pulled Morag’s map out of my pocket, surveyed it and shivered. Matter-of-factly Morag had written ‘bridge' and arrowed us over it.
'Hermoso
,
si?’
he asked, mistaking my dismay for wide-eyed admiration.
'Si, si,'
I smiled.
He smiled with pleasure and by extravagant mime and much pointing he asked me if we had anything so fine and handsome in my country.
I shook my head and told him indeed we had not.
Yet that chasm was as deep and wide as the Avon Gorge, and a few steps further on I glimpsed, far below in the shadows, the dark swift river cascading down to lower levels, in a series of waterfalls of awe-inspiring beauty and power.