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‘We’ve been apart for a long time. There’s bound to be—er—teething problems,’ Sarah said, opting for a bold retort.
‘This is a problem I would place my teeth in quickly.’ Dona Isabel had a nice touch with irony. ‘I suspect that Rafael is spending his nights with a bottle of tequila.’
‘Tequila?’ This was news to Sarah.
‘He should be spending them with his wife.’
Flags of mortified colour burnished Sarah’s cheeks. This was all Rafael’s fault and so she intended to tell him. ‘You think he’s drinking?’ she just couldn’t help prompting.
Dona Isabel dealt her a haughty look of reproach. ‘You misunderstand me. Rafael does not have intemperate habits. But…’ her lips pursed anxiously ‘…there is a wildness in him, a darkness which none of my children had. He must have taken this from his mother. What he feels, he feels too strongly. It disturbs me.’
‘It’s the artistic temperament,’ Sarah soothed.
‘I do not believe in artistic temperaments,’ Dona Isabel informed her. ‘Rafael is merely a little unconventional in his behaviour occasionally. This too he obviously takes from his mother.’
After pressing the bell to bring the nurse at the old lady’s request, Sarah wandered aimlessly downstairs. Consuelo was clearing the coffee-cups from the sala. Rafael hadn’t even touched his, Sarah recalled with growing annoyance. Once the twins were in bed, Rafael disappeared. If they talked at all over dinner, they talked about Gilly and Ben or something strictly impersonal but not about anything that really mattered. If he came to bed at all it was in the early hours and he still rose as usual at sunrise.
In contrast the hours of daylight had been packed with hectic family activity. Rafael had taken them all over the estate. He had also taken them to Cordoba…Granada…Seville. The twins had bounced and skipped exuberantly through the rich pageant of Andalucia’s Moorish heritage. Rafael could bring history alive in a marvellously entertaining way. Sarah had endeavoured to enter fully into the spirit of the occasion and when the children were around Rafael was full of charm and sweetness and light. Gilly and Ben would not suspect for one moment that there was anything wrong between their parents but Sarah knew it every time Rafael looked at her and didn’t quite seem to see her, every time he carefully avoided touching her.
In turning away from him that night she had made the biggest mistake she had ever made in her life. Only now was she appreciating that before she had sunk for the space of twenty-four hours into the depths of embittered self-pity and resentment they had been growing close, closer than they had ever been before. Never mind the arguments or the hot exchanges of conflicting opinions. Weren’t those the perfect vehicle for saying all those things she had always wanted to say to him but had never had the nerve to say?
And she understood herself, at least, better now. Holding Rafael at an emotional distance had made her feel safer but he moved too far, too fast…he crowded her, sent her imagination off on wild forays into the unknown. From where had she received the idea that he might love another woman? Since when had she become such an acute observer that she read minds? She had no facts on which to base the suspicion and the more she thought about it the more unlikely that suspicion seemed. Rafael was not of the stuff of which martyrs were made.
Yet what had she done? She had let jealousy rise to monstrous proportions in her stupid head. By the time Rafael had slid in positive innocence into that bed, the other woman she had dreamt up had had a face and it had been the face of that woman in New York, that face that was so indelibly imprinted on her memory banks. Someone impossibly glamorous with diamonds in her ears, someone who could emerge with complete cool from a married man’s hotel room at dawn without even looking crumpled, someone who was married herself and didn’t even seem to care when a photographer caught her full face. Rafael’s sort of woman, she had often thought bitterly. Brazen, unashamed.
Blinking rapidly, Sarah was shaken by the effect that that episode could still have on her. And it wasn’t healthy to brood and burn with pain over something that happened so long ago. They had both been very young and other couples managed to keep their marriages together despite the disloyalty of one partner, didn’t they? Rafael wasn’t like her father; he never had been. It wasn’t his fault that he couldn’t walk a hundred yards without attracting enthralled female attention. So why was she still punishing him? And she was punishing him still, she realised that now.
‘Can I get you something, senora?’ Consuelo gave her a concerned and questioning glance from the door of the sala.
‘A bottle of tequila,’ Sarah said with sudden decision.
‘Tequila, senora?’ Consuelo was aghast and then her homely face reddened fiercely. ‘Si, senora, en seguida.’
Sarah smiled. ‘I’m not angry, Consuelo.’
‘I worry for him, senora,’ Consuelo muttered apologetically.
Sarah collected the bottle and went back up to her room. She knew exactly what she was going to put on. The mistake. Karen had nagged her into buying it the previous summer. It had never been worn. She had only packed it out of guilt. It was a scarlet effort with shoestring straps, a low-cut, laced neckline and an above the knee narrow skirt. If it had been in Karen’s size, she would have been flattened in the stampede.
Disconcertingly, Rafael was not slumped on the studio sofa with a glass in his hand and the air of anybody feeling anything too strongly. He was painting, and so intent was he in what he was doing that he didn’t see her hovering, suddenly feeling grossly underdressed. He had produced a series of internationally acclaimed portrayals of gypsy life and this canvas was clearly another set to join the hall of fame. A clutch of dirty, handsome children were begging with hungry but curiously hard eyes. It was not a comfortable painting. Few of his paintings were.
‘Hi,’ she said depositing the bottle on the window sill.
‘To what…’ as he took in the outfit, he faltered ‘…do I owe the honour?’
Had she really raced out here thinking that he might be miserably drinking himself into oblivion all on his own? Had there been something highly alcoholic in her coffee after dinner? Elegantly clad in beautifully cut khaki cotton trousers and a loose-knit Armani sweater in cream, Rafael looked as extravagantly gorgeous and as alarmingly cool and detached as he had over dinner.
The silence was beginning to stretch to an uneasy length. He was still raking questioning eyes over the scarlet dress. Her knees began to feel exposed, to say nothing of the rest of her. ‘Your grandmother’s very set on this dinner,’ she said hurriedly. ‘From what she said, I gathered that you were originally against the idea.’
‘For months she has been telling us that she is on her deathbed. Once I agreed with that premise and urged her not to over-exert herself, she suddenly became very keen to prove me wrong.’ He set his paintbrush down, still watching her keenly. ‘Don’t let her suspect that you could arrange the dinner without her assistance.’
‘I’m not stupid.’
‘I know you are not but she needs to feel necessary. Which of us does not?’
Sarah took a deep breath. ‘She’s worried about you.’
‘Why should she? Ah!’ A faint glimmer of contempt coloured his gaze. ‘What are you trying to say, Sarah? I believe we can dispense with Abuela as a mouthpiece.’
Unfortunately, Sarah was already primed for her next sentence and keen to get it off her chest. ‘She thinks you’re avoiding me.’
His beautifully expressive eyes, alight with bitter amusement, were veiled by dense black lashes. ‘So, I have Abuela to thank for your unexpected visit.’
‘No. You don’t,’ she protested. ‘It was an impulse. Maybe boredom with my own company drove me out here in desperation.’
An ebony brow quirked. ‘Did it?’
Sarah was not feeling as forgiving as she had felt ten minutes earlier. Rafael was not helping her out. Olive branches were supposed to be graciously received and he was standing there emanating positive waves
of ungracious antagonism. ‘It’s a possibility, isn’t it?’ she snapped defensively.
‘Why did you change out of the outfit you were wearing at dinner?’
Two could play at this game, she decided. ‘I spilt coffee on it.’
‘Why did you bring a bottle of tequila?’
‘Maybe I felt like a drink!’ Sarah was steadily becoming more and more annoyed.
‘Do you like tequila?’
‘Why shouldn’t I?’ Sarah tilted her chin challengingly. ‘Where do you keep your glasses?’
‘In the kitchen.’ Crossing the floor, he swiped the tequila off the sill and strode gracefully out into the hall.
‘Do you want it straight?’ he enquired smoothly.
‘Why not?’ she called on the ‘in for a penny, in for a pound’ principle.
He thrust a glass in her hand, knocked his own against it in salutation. ‘Let us drink to straight speech.’
