Sleeping Tiger (10 page)

“Perhaps Rudolfo at the Cala Fuerte will help us.”

“It seems a lot to ask.”

“He's used to it.”

“It isn't just the six hundred pesetas for the taxi. I'll have to buy another air ticket.”

“Yes, I know.”

The soup was still too hot to drink. Selina stirred it again, and said, “You must think I'm the most awful fool.” He did not deny this, and she went on, “Of course I should have written or something, but I couldn't bear the thought of waiting for a reply.” He still made no comment, and she felt she must try to justify herself. “You'd think that you'd get used to not having a father, particularly if you'd never known him. But I never did get used to it. I used to think about it all the time. Rodney said I had an obsession about it.”

“It's not a bad thing to have an obsession about.”

“I showed Agnes the photograph on the back of your book, and she was struck all of a heap, because you look so like my father. That's what really made me come, because Agnes knew him very well. And I wouldn't seem quite so stupid if I hadn't had my wallet stolen. Up to then I'd done quite well. I caught all the right connections, and it wasn't my fault my luggage got sent to Madrid.”

“Did you never travel on your own before?” He sounded incredulous.

“Oh, yes, heaps of times. But only on trains going to school and things.” Something in his expression compelled her to be entirely honest. “And then there was somebody to meet me.…” She shrugged. “You know.”

“No, I don't, but I believe you.”

She began to eat the soup. She said, “If my father really was your second cousin, then we must be related.”

“Second cousin once removed.”

“It sounds terribly remote, doesn't it? And rather royal. Did you ever know my father?”

“No, I never knew him.” He frowned. “What did you say your name was?”

“Selina.”

“Selina. Well, if I ever needed proof that you're not my daughter, there it is.”

“How do you mean?”

“I'd never saddle any girl with a name like that.”

“What would you call her?”

“A man seldom imagines daughters. He only thinks of a son. George Dyer Junior, perhaps.” He raised his glass to this mythical son, finished his drink and set down the glass. “Now, come on, eat up that soup and we'll go and find the taxi-driver.”

While he piled the soup bowl and the glasses into the sink and fed the hungry Pearl, Selina washed her hands and face in the sink in his bathroom and combed her hair and put on her stockings and shoes again. When she emerged, he was out on the terrace once more, his cap on the back of his head, watching the harbour through his binoculars. Selina came to stand beside him.

“Which is your boat?”

“That one.”

“What's her name?”

“Eclipse.”

“She looks big to sail single-handed.”

“She is. I usually have a crew.” He added, “I get a bit edgy when this heavy weather blows up. A hell of a sea comes in round that headland, and I've known her pull anchor.”

“Surely she's safe there.”

“The rocks come too far out into deep water for comfort.”

She glanced at the sky. It was overcast and leaden. “Is there going to be another storm?”

“Yes, the wind's changed. It was a rotten forecast.” He lowered the binoculars and looked down at her. “Did you catch the storm last night?”

“It chased us over the Pyrenees. We could scarcely land at Barcelona.”

He said, “I don't mind a storm at sea, but a storm in the air scares me paralytic. Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“We'll take the car.”

They went back into the house and he put down his binoculars on the desk, and Selina collected her bag and said a silent good-bye to the Casa Barco. She had thought so much about coming to it, and now, after only a few hours, she was leaving it again. For good. She picked up her coat. He said, “What the hell's that for?”

“It's my coat. It's cold in London.”

“You know, I'd forgotten. Here, I'll carry it for you.” He slung it over his shoulder and added, “One thing about losing all your luggage, you do at least travel light.”

They went out of the house, and Selina didn't know whether his car was meant as a joke or not. It looked as if it had been decorated for a Students' Rag Week, and she longed to ask if he had painted the wheels yellow himself, but somehow hadn't the nerve. They clambered in, and George piled Selina's coat on her knee, then started the engine, jammed in the gear, and turned the car in a series of hair-raising forward and backward jerks. Disaster loomed. At one moment they seemed about to ram a solid wall. The next, their back wheels teetered at the edge of a steep alley of steps. Selina shut her eyes. When at last they shot forward and up the hill there was an overpowering smell of exhaust, and sinister clanking sounds came from somewhere beneath her feet. The seats sagged and had holes in them, and the floor, which had lost its carpeting years ago, resembled nothing so much as the bottom of a dustbin. For George's sake, Selina hoped that his yacht was more seaworthy.

But, for all that, there was something very friendly about driving through Cala Fuerte in George Dyer's car. All the children screamed with laughter and waved, and shouted joyous salutations. All the women sitting in their gardens, or gossiping at their doors, turned to smile and send a greeting after them. All the men, sitting outside the cafés, walking home from work, stopped to let them go bowling by, with shouted pleasantries in Spanish which Selina didn't understand, but which George Dyer evidently did.

“What are they saying?”

“They want to know where I found my new Señorita.”

“Is that all?”

“Isn't that enough?”

They came with a flourish up to the Cala Fuerte Hotel, and stopped so suddenly that a cloud of white dust rose from their wheels and coated the tables, and the drinks of the clients who sat on Rudolfo's terrace enjoying the first aperitifs of the evening. An Englishman was heard to say, “Bloody cheek,” but George Dyer ignored him, climbed out of the car without bothering to open the door, and went up the steps of the terrace and through the chain curtain with Selina behind him.

“Rudolfo!”

Rudolfo was behind the bar. He said, in Spanish, “There is no need to shout.”

“Rudolfo, where is the taxi-driver?”

Rudolfo was not smiling. He poured a tray of drinks and said, “The taxi-driver has gone.”

“Gone? Didn't he want his money?”

“Yes, he wanted his money. Six hundred pesetas.”

“Who paid him?”

“I did,” said Rudolfo. “And I want to talk to you. Wait till I serve my customers.”

He came out from behind the bar, walked past them without a word, and disappeared through the chain curtain and on to the terrace. Selina stared at George. “Is he angry?”

“At a guess I'd say he was annoyed about something.”

“Where is Toni?”

“He's gone. Rudolfo paid him off.”

It took a second or so for the enormity of this to sink in. “But if he's gone … how am I going to get back to San Antonio?”

“God knows.”

“You'll have to take me.”

“I am not driving back to San Antonio this evening, and even if I did, we still can't buy you a plane ticket.”

Selina bit her lip. She said, “Rudolfo seemed so nice before.”

“Like all of us he has two sides to his character.”

Rudolfo returned, the chain curtain clashed behind him, and he put down his empty tray and turned on George.

He did it in Spanish which was perhaps just as well, for the language he employed was not for the ears of a delicately-nurtured young English Señorita. George, with spirit, defended himself. As their voices rose, Selina, unable to ignore the obvious fact that a good deal of the references were to herself, would say, “Oh, please tell me what it's all about,” or “Couldn't you say some of this in English so that I could understand?” but neither of them took the slightest notice of her.

The argument was interrupted at last by the arrival of a fat German who wanted a glass of beer, and while Rudolfo went behind the bar to serve him, Selina took the opportunity to tug at George's sleeve and say, “What's
happened?
Tell me what's happened!”

“Rudolfo is annoyed because you said you would wait at the Casa Barco, and he thought that the taxi-driver would wait there with you. He doesn't like stray taxi-drivers sitting round his bar, getting sloshed, and he seems to have taken a particular dislike to this one.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, oh.”

“Is that all?”

“No, of course it's not all. In the end, to get rid of the man, Rudolfo paid him. And now he says I owe him six hundred pesetas, and he's got cold feet because he doesn't think I'll be able to pay him back.”

“But, I'll pay him.… I promise.…”

“That isn't really the point. He wants it now.”

The fat German, sensing a bad atmosphere, carried his beer outside and he was no sooner away than Rudolfo and George turned on each other once more, but Selina moved swiftly forward.

“Oh please, Mr.… Rudolfo, I mean. It's all my fault, and I'll see you get paid back, but you see, all my money was stolen.…”

Rudolfo had heard this before. “You said you would wait at the Casa Barco. With the taxi-driver.”

“I didn't know he would be here for so long.”

“And you,” Rudolfo turned to George again. “Where were you, anyway? Going off to San Antonio, and not coming back, and nobody knows where you are…”

“What the hell's it got to do with you? Where I go and what I do is my own bloody business.”

“It has to do with me when I have to pay your bills.”

“Nobody asked you to pay it. And it wasn't my bill, anyway. And you've loused everything up, because now the Señorita can't get back to San Antonio.”

“Then take her yourself!”

“I'll be damned if I will!” yelled George. And with that, he stormed out of the bar, was down the terrace steps in a single stride, and into his car. Selina shot after him. “What about me?”

He turned to look at her. “Well, are you coming or are you going to stay here?”

“I don't want to stay here.”

“Come on, then.”

There was no alternative. Half the village, and all Rudolfo's customers, seemed to be enjoying the scene. George leaned over to open her door, and Selina got in beside him.

At this moment, as if on a signal from some celestial stage manager, the storm broke.

There was a flash of lightning that split the sky, a roll of thunder and a sudden upsurge of wind that sent the pines shaking. The tablecloths on the Cala Fuerte terrace rose and flapped like badly-set sails, and a hat blew from the rack outside Maria's shop, and went bowling, a big pink and yellow wheel, down the main street. Dust rose in spirals, and behind the wind came the rain, a sudden sheet of it, the drops so big and heavy that in seconds the gutters were flooded.

Everybody rushed indoors. Rudolfo's customers, the gossiping women, the scampering children, the two men who had been working on the road. There was a general air of impending disaster as though an air-raid siren had gone, and in no time the place was deserted. Except for Selina and George, and George's little car.

She started to get out, but he had the engine running and he yanked her back again. She said, “Can't we shelter too?”

“What for? You're not afraid of a little rain?”

“A
little
rain?” His profile was stony and he didn't deign to answer. “Doesn't the hood go up?”

He pushed the car into gear and they started with the suddenness of an exploding rocket.

“It hasn't done for ten years,” he shouted over the din of the car and the rain and the wind. Already they seemed to be up to the hubcaps in water, and Selina's feet were awash. She wondered if she should start baling.

“Well, what's the good of a hood if it doesn't go up?”

“Oh, stop bellyaching.”

“I am not bellyaching, but…”

He accelerated, and her words died in a grasp of fright. They roared down the road, cutting corners with screeching tyres and sending up waves of yellow mud. The sea was the colour of lead, and the gardens of the delectable little villas already devastated by the wind. The air seemed to be filled with flying flotsam—leaves and scraps of straw and pine-needles—and when at last they came over the hill and down the lane towards Casa Barco, the water, penned between high walls, had reached the proportions of a deep stream, and their progress in George's car was like shooting rapids.

The bulk of this water, by force of gravity, was diverted down the flight of steps which led to the harbour, but a good deal had invaded the old net-store where he kept his car, and which already appeared to be in a state of flood.

Despite this, he drove straight into it, stopping a perilous inch from the far wall. He switched off the engine and jumped out, saying, “Come on, get out, and help me to get the doors shut.”

Selina was too frightened to rebel. She stepped out into four inches of cold, dirty water and went to help him drag shut the sagging doors. They got them closed at last, leaning against them until, by sheer brute force, George was able to jam the primitive bolt into position. This done, he took her by the wrist and ran her into the Casa Barco, as another flash of lightning split the black sky to be followed by a roll of thunder so close that she thought the roof was going to fall in.

Even in the house, they did not appear to be safe. He went straight out on to the terrace, and began to struggle with the shutters. The wind was so strong that he had to prise them away from the walls of the house. The pots of flowers had already gone, some over the edge of the wall, others on to the terrace, where they lay, a mêlée of broken earthenware and spilt mud. When at last he got the shutters closed, and the inner doors, the house seemed dark and unfamiliar. He tried the light switch, but the electricity had gone off. The rain, coming down the chimney, had put out the fire, and the well was gurgling as though it might at any moment overflow.