The Mammoth Book Best International Crime Page 21

  So they were together every afternoon, growing closer, and when the lesson was over and we emerged all three of us into the afternoon sunshine, the beach or the village or to find Will by the hotel, they spoke to each other in Spanish, a communication from which we were excluded. She must have been a good teacher and my brother an enthusiastic pupil, for he who confessed himself bad at languages learned fast. Within a week he was chattering Spanish, although how idiomatically I never knew. He and Rosario talked and laughed in their own world, a world that was all the more delightful to my brother because he had not thought he would ever be admitted to it.

  I have made it sound bad for me, but it was not so bad as that. Piers was not selfish, he was never cruel. Of all those close to me only he ever understood my shyness and my fears, the door slammed in my face, the code into whose secrets, as in a bad dream, my companions have been initiated but I have not. Half an hour of Spanish conversation and he and Rosario remembered their manners, their duty to Will and me, and we were back to the language we all had in common. Only once did Will have occasion to say,

  “We all speak English, don’t we?”

  It was clear, though, that Piers and Rosario had begun to see Will as there for me and themselves as there for each other. They passionately wanted to see things in this way, so very soon they did. All they wanted was to be alone together. I did not know this then, I would have hated to know it. I simply could not have understood, though now I do. My brother, falling in love, into first love, behaved heroically in including myself and Will, in being polite to us and kind and thoughtful. Between thirteen and sixteen a great gulf is fixed. I knew nothing of this but Piers did. He knew there was no bridge of understanding from the lower level to the upper, and accordingly he made his concessions.

  On the day after the jellyfish came and the beach ceased to be inviting, we found ourselves deprived, if only temporarily, of the principal source of our enjoyment of Llosar. On the wall of a bridge over a dried-up river we sat and contemplated the arid but beautiful interior, the ribbon of road that traversed the island to Palma and the side-track which led away from it to the northern cape.

  “We could go and look at the little haunted house,” said Will.

  He said it mischievously to “get at” Rosario, whom he liked no more than she liked him. But instead of reacting with anger or with prohibition, she only smiled and said something in Spanish to my brother.

  Piers said, “Why not?”

  4

  They were very beautiful, those jellyfish. Piers kept saying they were. I found them repulsive. Once, much later, when I saw one of the same species in a marine museum I felt sick. My throat closed up and seemed to stifle me, so that I had to leave. Phylum cnidaria, the medusa, the jellyfish.They are named for the Gorgon with her writhing snakes for hair, a glance at whose face turned men to stone.

  Those which were washed up in their thousands on the shore at Llosar were of a glassy transparency the colour of an aquamarine, and from their umbrella-like bodies hung crystalline feelers or stems like stalactites. Or so they appeared when floating below the surface of the blue water. Cast adrift on the sand and rocks, they slumped into flat gelatinous plates, like collapsed blancmanges. My kind brother, helped by Will, tried to return them to the water, to save them from the sun, but the creeping sea, although nearly tideless, kept washing them back. It was beyond my understanding that they could bear to touch that quivering clammy jelly. Rosario too held herself aloof, watching their efforts with a puzzled amusement.

  By the following day a great stench rose from the beach where the sun had cooked the medusas and was now hastening the process of rot and destruction. We kept away. We walked to the village and from there took the road to Pollença which passed through apricot orchards and groves of almond trees. The apricots were drying on trays in the sun, in the heat which was heavy and unvarying from day to day.We had been in Llosar for two weeks and all that time we had never seen a cloud in the sky. Its blueness glowed with the hot light of an invisible sun.We only saw the sun when it set and dropped into the sea with a fizzle like red-hot iron plunged into water.

  The road was shaded by the fruit trees and the bridge over the bed of the dried-up river, by the dense branches of pines. Here, where we rested and sat and surveyed the yellow hillsides and the olive groves, Will suggested we go to look at “the little haunted house” and my brother said, “Why not?” Rosario was smiling a small secret smile and as we began to walk on, Will and I went first and she and Piers followed behind.

  It was not far to the Casita de Golondro. If it had been more than two kilometres, say, I doubt if even “mad tourists”, as the village people called us, would have considered walking it in that heat. There was a bus which went to Palma but it had left long before we started out. Not a car passed us and no car overtook us. It is hard to believe that in Majorca today. Of course there were cars on the island. My parents had several times rented a car and a driver and two days afterwards we were all to be driven to the Dragon Caves. But motor transport was unusual, something to be stared at and commented upon. As we came to the side road which would lead to the Casita, an unmetalled track, a car did pass us, an aged Citroën, its black bodywork much scarred and splintered by rocks, but that was the only one we saw that day.

  The little haunted house; the little house of a whim, of desire, was scarcely visible from this road. A dense concentrated growth of trees concealed it. This wood, composed of trees unknown to us, carob and holm oak and witches’ pines, could be seen from Llosar, a dark opaque blot on the bleached yellows and greys, while the house could not. Even here the house could only be glimpsed between tree trunks, a segment of wall in faded ochreish plaster, a shallow roof of pantiles. The plastered wall which surrounded the land which Piers called the “demesne” was too high for any of us to see over, and our first sight of the Casita was through the broken bars and loops and curlicues of a pair of padlocked wrought iron gates.

  We began to follow the wall along its course which soon left the road and climbed down the hillside among rocky outcroppings and stunted olive trees, herb bushes and myrtles, and in many places split open by a juniper pushing aside in its vigorous growth stones and mortar. If we had noticed the biggest of these fissures from the road we might have saved ourselves half a kilometre’s walking. Only Rosario objected as Will began to climb through. She said something about our all being too old for this sort of thing but my brother’s smile – she saw it too – told us how much this amused him. It was outside my understanding then but not now.You see, it was very unlike Piers to enter into an adventure of this kind. He really would have considered himself too old and too responsible as well. He would have said a gentle “no” and firmly refused to discuss the venture again. But he had agreed and he had said, “Why not?” I believe it was because he saw the Casita as a place where he could be alone with Rosario.

  Oh, not for a sexual purpose, for making love, that is not what I mean. He would not, surely, at that time, at that stage of their relationship, have thought in those terms. But only think, as things were, what few opportunities he had even to talk to her without others being there. Even their afternoon Spanish lessons were subject to constant interruption. Wherever they went I or Will and I went with them. On the veranda, in the evenings, I was with them. It would not have occurred to me not to be with them and would have caused me bitter hurt, as my brother knew, if the most tactful hint was dropped that I might leave them on their own. I think it must be faced too that my parents would not at all have liked the idea of their being left alone together, would have resisted this vigorously even perhaps to the point of taking us home to England.

  Had he talked about this with Rosario? I don’t know.The fact is that she was no longer opposed to taking a look at the “little haunted house” while formerly she had been very positively against it. If Piers was in love with her she was at least as much in love with him. From a distance of forty years I am interpreting words and exchanged glanc
es, eyes meeting and rapturous looks, for what they were, the signs of first love.To me then they meant nothing unless it was that Piers and Rosario shared some specific knowledge connected with the Spanish language which gave them a bond from which I was shut out.

  The garden was no longer much more than a walled-off area of the hillside. It was irredeemably overgrown. Inside the wall a few trees grew of a kind not to be seen outside. Broken stonework lay about among the myrtles and arbutus, the remains of a fountain and moss-grown statuary. The air was scented with bay which did not grow very profusely elsewhere and there were rosy pink heathers in flower as tall as small trees. Paths there had once been but these were almost lost under the carpet of small tough evergreens. In places it was a battle to get through, to push a passage between thorns and bay and laurels, but our persistence brought us through the last thicket of juniper into a clearing paved in broken stone. From there the house could suddenly be seen, alarmingly close to us, its cloisters only yards away. It was like being in a dream where distance means very little and miles are crossed in an instant.The house appeared, became visible, as if it had stepped out to meet us.

  It was not a “little” house.This is a relative term and the people who named it may have owned a palace somewhere else. To me it seemed a mansion, bigger than any house I had ever been in. José-Carlos’s villa in Llosar and our house in London could have both been put inside the Casita and lost somewhere among its rooms.

  Its surface was plastered and the plaster in many places had fallen away, exposing pale brickwork beneath.The cloisters were composed of eight arches supported on pillars Will said were “Moorish”, though without, I am sure, quite knowing what this meant. Above was a row of windows, all with their shutters open, all with stone balconies, a pantiled over-hang, another strip of plaster, carved or parged in panels, and above that the nearly flat roof of pink tiles.

  Within the cloister, on the left-hand side of a central door, was (presumably) the window that Carmela Valdez’s cousin had broken. Someone had covered it with a piece of canvas nailed to the frame, plastic not being in plentiful supply in those days. Will was the first of us to approach nearer to the house. He was wearing his grass hat and a long-sleeved shirt and trousers. He picked at the canvas around the broken window until a corner came away, and peered in.

  “There’s nothing inside,” he said. “Just an old empty room. Perhaps it’s the room.”

  “It’s not.” Rosario offered no explanation as to how she knew this.

  “I could go in and open the door for you.”

  “If it’s the room you won’t come out again,” I said.

  “There’s a table in there with a candle on it.”Will had his head inside the window frame. “Someone’s been eating and they’ve left some bread and stuff behind. What a stink, d’you reckon it’s rats?”

  “I think we should go home now.” Rosario looked up into Piers’s face and Piers said very quickly,

  “We won’t go in now, not this time. Perhaps we won’t ever go in.”

  Will withdrew his head and his hat fell off. ‘I’m jolly well going in sometime. I’m not going home without getting in there. We go back home next week. If we go now I vote we all come back tomorrow and go in there and explore it and then we’ll know.”

  He did not specify exactly what it was we should know but we understood him. The house was a challenge to be accepted. Besides we had come too far to be daunted now. And yet it remains a mystery to me today that we, who had the beaches and the sea, the countryside, the village, the boats which would take us to Pinar or Formentor whenever we wished to go, were so attracted by that deserted house and its empty rooms. For Piers and Rosario perhaps it was a trysting place but what was there about it so inviting, so enticing, to Will and me?

  Will himself expressed it, in words used by many an explorer and mountaineer. “It’s there.”

  On the following day we all went to the Cuevas del Drach. Will’s parents, whom our parents had got to know, came too and we went in two cars. Along the roadside between C’an Picafort and Arta grew the arbutus that Will’s mother said would bear white flowers and red fruit simultaneously in a month or two. I wanted to see that, I wondered if I ever would. She said the fruit was like strawberries growing on branches.

  “They look like strawberries but they have no taste.”

  That is one of the few remarks of Iris Harvey’s I can remember. Remember word for word, that is. It seemed sad to me then but now I see it as an aphorism.The fruit of the arbutus is beautiful, red and shiny, it looks like strawberries but it has no taste.

  The arbutus grew only in this part of the island, she said. She seemed to know all about it. What she did not know was that these same bushes grew in profusion around the little haunted house. I identified them from those on the road to C’an Picafort, from the smooth glossy leaves that were like the foliage of garden shrubs, not wild ones. Among the broken stones, between the junipers and myrtle, where all seemed dust-dry, I had seen their leaves, growing as green as if watered daily.

  On our return we inspected the beach and found the jellyfish almost gone, all that remained of them gleaming patches on the rocks like snail’s trails. Piers and Rosario sat on the veranda doing their Spanish and Will went back to the hotel, his shirt cuffs buttoned, his hat pulled well down.

  “Tomorrow then,” Piers had said to him as he left and Will nodded.

  That was all that was necessary. We did not discuss it among ourselves. A decision had been reached, by each of us separately and perhaps simultaneously, in the cars or the caves or by the waters of the subterranean lake.Tomorrow we should go into the little haunted house, to see what it was like, because it was there. But a terrible or wonderful thing happened first. It was terrible or wonderful, depending on how you looked at it, how I looked at it, and I was never quite sure how that was. It filled my mind, I could scarcely think of anything else.

  My parents had gone to bed. I was in the bedroom I shared with Rosario, not in bed but occupied with arranging my mosquito net. This hotel where we now are is air-conditioned, you never open the windows. You move and dress and sleep in a coolness which would not be tolerated in England, a breezy chill that is very much at odds with what you can see beyond the glass, cloudless skies and a desiccated hillside. I liked things better when the shutters could be folded back against the walls, the casements opened wide, and the net in place so that you were protected from insects, yet in an airy room.The net hung rather like curtains do from a tester on an English four-poster and that morning, in a hurry to be off to the Cuevas, I had forgotten to close them.

  Having made sure there were no mosquitoes inside the curtains, I drew them and switched off the light so that no more should be attracted into the room. Sentimentally, rather than kill it, I carried a spider in my handkerchief to the window to release it into the night. The moon was waxing, a pearl drop, and the stars were brilliant.While dark, with a rich clear somehow shining darkness, everything in the little walled garden could clearly be seen. All that was missing was not clarity but colour. It was a monochrome world out there, black and silver and pewter and pearl and lead-colour and the opaque velvety greyness of stone. The moon glowed opal-white and the stars were not worlds but light-filled holes in the heavens.

  I did not see them at first. I was looking past the garden at the spread of hills and the mountains beyond, serrated ranges of darkness against the pale shining sky, when a faint sound or tiny movement nearer at hand drew my eyes downwards. They had been sitting together on the stone seat in the deep shade by the wall. Piers got up and then Rosario did. He was much taller than she, he was looking down at her and she up at him, eye to eye. He put his arms round her and his mouth on hers and for a moment, before they stepped back into the secretive shadow, they seemed to me so close that they were one person, they were like two-cypresses interwined and growing as a single trunk. And the shadow they cast was the long spear shape of a single cypress on moon-whitened stone.

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bsp; I was very frightened. I was shocked. My world had changed in a moment. Somewhere, I was left behind. I turned away with the shocked rejecting movement of someone who has seen a violent act. Once inside my mosquito net, I drew its folds about me and lay hidden in there in the dark. I lay there rigid, holding my hands clasped, then turned on to my face with my eyes crushed into the pillow.

  Rosario came upstairs and into our room and spoke softly to me but I made her no answer. She closed the door and I knew she was undressing in the dark. In all my life I had never felt so lonely. I would never have anyone, I would always be alone. Desertion presented itself to me as a terrible reality to be confronted, not to be avoided, and the last image that was before me when sleep came was of getting up in the morning and finding them all gone, my parents and Piers and Rosario, the hotel empty, the village abandoned, Majorca a desert island and I its only wild, lost, crazed inhabitant. Not quite the last image.That was of the twin-trunked cypress tree in the garden, its branches interwoven and its shadow a single shaft.