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She opened the Gothic front door and walked into a splitlevel, surprisingly spacious room with dust-covered furniture. The walls were faded and stained, the curtains in an advanced state of disintegration. She wandered through silent rooms, coming on a dated kitchen layered with dust before she walked up the cast-iron staircase.
There was a large bedroom, a bathroom, and then one other bedroom. She stopped in the doorway of the third room. It was a child’s room, with little rusty cars still sitting on shelves, yellowing photos curling up on a noticeboard, as if the little boy had just gone away and never come back. It was eerie.
She peered at the photos. One she recognised as Raul’s father. There were two portraits at the ranch that she had assumed were of Raul’s parents. Eduardo, who bore a marked resemblance to Raul, and Yolanda, a regal blueeyed blonde, who resembled him not at all. She didn’t recognise the laughing brunette with the exotic tigerish eyes, although those eyes reminded her of...Raul’s eyes?
The sounds of steps on the metal stairs sent Polly hurrying back out onto the landing. It
was Raul, still dressed in his riding gear, breathing shallowly as if he had been hurrying.
‘What are you doing poking around in here?’ he demanded rawly, a savage glitter in his golden eyes, harsh lines of strain bracketing his sensual mouth.
Polly was thoroughly disconcerted by his reaction. ‘I wasn’t “poking around”...I was just curious. Who lived here? I didn’t realise anyone had actually lived here until I came inside.’
Raul studied her fiercely and then finally lifted a wide shoulder in a jerky shrug of grudging acceptance. ‘I thought you knew. Everyone knows... My family background has been exhaustively dug up and raked over by the media.’
A sense of foreboding touched Polly then, her stomach muscles clenching tight. Raul was reacting like someone in shock, his eyes flickering uneasily over their surroundings and then skimming away again, a far-away look of grim vulnerability in his eyes until he shielded them, his facial bones ferociously prominent beneath his bronzed skin.
‘I lived here with my mother until I was nine,’ Raul told her flatly.
‘Your parents separated?’ she asked in bewilderment.
Raul vented a hollow laugh. ‘My mother was my father’s mistress, Polly, not his wife!’
Floundering in shock, Polly stammered, ‘B-but the blonde woman in the picture in the hall—?’
‘My father’s wife, Yolanda. Our lifestyle was somewhat dysfunctional.’
With a mistress in a flamboyant little house at the foot of the garden? He wasn’t joking.
Raul explained in a very few words. His mother, Pilar, had been the daughter of a llanero, who’d worked on a neighbouring tenant’s ranch. Pilar had already been pregnant with Raul when Eduardo Zaforteza married his beautiful oil heiress bride.
‘When Yolanda found out about my mother, she locked the bedroom door, and my father used that as his excuse to bring us here to live,’ Raul shared tautly. ‘After my mother’s death, he gave Yolanda half of everything he possessed to agree to my adoption.’
‘What age were you when your mother died?’ Polly muttered.
‘Nine. There used to be a swimming pool out there. She drowned in it when she was drunk. She was frequently drunk,’ Raul admitted flatly. ‘What my father called “love” destroyed her...in fact it destroyed all our lives.’
‘Yolanda never had any children?’
‘Frequent miscarriages...sí, the bedroom door was unlocked eventually.’ Raul grimaced. ‘I think my father enjoyed having two women fighting over him. When it became a hassle, he just took off and left them to it for a while. He and Yolanda died in a plane crash almost ten years ago.’
Nausea was stirring in Polly’s sensitive stomach. All of a sudden she was seeing and understanding so much, but recoiling from a vision of the distressing scenes which Raul must have witnessed as he grew up. An unhappy mother with a drink problem. No normal family life, no secure childhood, nothing but tangled adult relationships and constant strife.
She was imagining how much the wronged wife must have loathed Raul and his mother, and didn’t even want to consider what it had been like for Raul to live in the same house with Yolanda from the tender age of nine. An embittered woman, who had forced her husband to pay for the right to adopt his illegitimate son. Little wonder Raul found it a challenge to believe in love or the deeper bonds of marriage.
‘You should have this place cleared out.’ Polly strove for a brisk tone.
‘I haven’t set foot here in years. It was my father who insisted it stay as it was. He liked to come here when he felt sentimental,’ Raul said with lethal derision.
Polly was frankly appalled by what he had told her, but working hard to hide it. She was annoyed that she had blundered in to rouse such unpleasant memories, and exasperated that she hadn’t had more interest that long-ago day at the library in learning about Raul’s background rather than about the women in his life. She started down the curving staircase, eager to be out in the fresh air again.
‘I’ll have this place emptied, then...OK?’ Polly pressed, seeking agreement for what she saw as a necessary act.
Raul shrugged with comforting unconcern. The distant look had gone from his eyes as he scrutinised her appearance and his mouth quirked. ‘So the clothes have arrived... I chose them when I was in Caracas. At least you’ve got something decent to wear until you do your own shopping,’ he pointed out, for all the world as if she had been walking around in rags.
Half an hour later, they got into a four-wheel drive to head out for the picnic he had promised. They left the asphalt lanes that criss-crossed the vast spread of the ranch buildings to hurtle down a dusty trail and then out across the grassy plains. All sign of modern civilisation was left behind within minutes. Yellow poplars, gum trees and the ubiquitous palm grew in thickets on higher ground, where the floodwater hadn’t reached. Great flocks of exotic multi-coloured birds rose from the trees with shrill cries as they passed.
The sky was a clear, cloudless turquoise over the sun-drenched savannah. It was a strange and unfamiliar terrain to Polly, yet the Ilanos, teaming with wildlife in their isolation, had a haunting, fascinating beauty.
