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'It was all we could afford,' Quincy muttered. 'We don't have a pop star's income.' No sooner had she said it than she wished she hadn't; it sounded like an accusation, and Joe's brows met.
'I realise that,' he said unsmilingly. 'I was hoping you would be here for longer than that, that's all.'
Quincy felt herself going pink and looked away. For a long time neither of them said anything and the miles zipped by as the sports car weaved and raced along the coast road, leaving every other vehicle behind.
The hotel was large and modern, but was set in beautifully landscaped gardens, lawns sweeping away on every side of the building with trees placed here and there to give a grateful shade, and beds of flowers making splashes of colour in the prevailing green. A swimming pool gleamed very blue beside a raised pink terrace built of some local stone. The terrace was clearly in use as a dining-room; carefully distanced tables under fluttering beach umbrellas, white damask cloths, wine glasses sparkling in the sunlight. People were already eating lunch, waiters moving around between the tables, and from the bar which opened out on to the terrace drifted the sound of a piano.
Quincy followed Joe towards one of the tables, her high heels clicking on the stone floor, looking rather nervously at the two people seated under a blue-striped umbrella.
'Mom, Dad, this is Quincy,' said Joe as they stopped at the table, and his voice had a faint roughness, almost a trace of uncertainty, she felt, although why he should be worried about introducing her to his parents she couldn't imagine, he must often bring strangers to meet them. Perhaps they did not like meeting strangers? That thought did not make her feel any easier, but she managed to smile as Mr Aldonez rose to offer her his hand. He was more or less the same height as his son, his hair thickly grey, his face thin and weathered, the colour of old leather. His eyes were brown and very shrewd, but they smiled at her as she said shyly: 'Hallo, Mr Aldonez,' and as she smiled back she knew what Joe would look like in thirty years' time.
She was even more nervous about meeting Joe's mother. Everything he had said about her had made it clear how much he loved her, and it mattered so much to Quincy that Mrs Aldonez should like her that as she held out her hand towards the other woman, her palm was damp with perspiration.
'Hallo, Quincy,' Mrs Aldonez said in a slightly accented American voice, the slow lazy warmth of the sun in it, a warmth echoed in her face. Her skin was a warm, sallowed gold; her hair black and sleek, wound in a heavy plait across the top of her head and delicately silvered here and there, her eyes exactly the same colour as Joe's, although the little rays of gold around the pupil were brighter in her case, and her lids were heavier, giving her face a charming placidity which made Quincy feel suddenly less nervous. 'Sit down, what would you like to drink
before we order?' Mrs Aldonez asked, and Joe pulled out a chair and stood behind Quincy as she sat down. Briefly she felt his fingertips on her shoulders, the touch something between reassurance and a fleeting caress.
The waiter arrived and cocked an attentive head as Joe repeated: 'Would you like an aperitif?'
Quincy's mind was a blank, she couldn't think, and Joe smiled, glancing at the waiter and ordering for both of them.
'Have you been to Spain before, Quincy?' Mrs Aldonez asked. Her accent, Quincy realised now, was a mixture of American and Spanish.
'No, this is my first visit.'
'Are you enjoying it?'
'Very much, I only wish we weren't going home so soon. I'd like to see more of Spain, it's a fascinating country.'
'You should go into the mountains,' Mrs Aldonez told her. 'You won't get a true impression of Spain from a holiday resort.'
'Perhaps we can take a coach trip one day while we're here,' Quincy agreed.
'Or maybe you can come again soon,' Mrs Aldonez said lazily. 'Spain is a lovely place for a honeymoon.' She slid a smiling look at her husband and then at Joe. 'Isn't it?' she murmured with a distinctly teasing intonation, and both men laughed, although, to Quincy's surprise, Joe flushed slightly. He glanced at her at that second and Quincy felt her heart constrict inside her ribs, making her breathless. She looked away, swallowing. Why had he looked at her like that?
Their drinks arrived and while they sipped them they studied the menu and talked quietly. Quincy said as little as possible, listening intently, however, and absorbing the obvious closeness of the family relationship. Joe's father talked about the weather back home, about his worries for the harvest, his fears mocked cheerfully by Joe, who brushed them aside.
'Every year you say the same,' said Joe, grinning. 'It's always going to be the worst harvest ever. Don't be such a pessimist!'
'It's a professional hazard,' Mrs Aldonez said. 'Farmers are naturally pessimistic, they can't help it.'
'There's nothing natural about it,' said Mr Aldonez. 'We get that way through experience—if there's bad weather around, we always get it right when we're ready to crop.'
'Quincy's not interested in our oranges,' Joe told him, and they all looked at her, smiling.
She flushed. 'I am,' she defended. 'I'm fascinated, until now it never occurred to me that someone grew oranges—they just appeared in the shops and I bought them, I didn't wonder where they came from.'
'Where's your sense of curiosity?' Joe mocked.
'Now that I know something about orange-growing, I'll eat them with far more pleasure,' she promised, and Mrs Aldonez smiled at her.
'Joe plans to give up singing one day and concentrate on the orange groves,' she said. 'He's building himself a new house on some land we just acquired.'
Mr Aldonez nodded approvingly. 'Going to be a fine house,' he said, and Joe asked:
'Are we ready to order yet? The waiters are getting impatient.'
The meal proceeded at a leisurely pace, none of them seemed to be in a hurry and they were the only people on the terrace towards the end of their meal. Quincy sipped her coffee, conscious of a sense of lazy well-being after that superb meal, listening to the talk and looking out over the sunlit gardens. The pool was full of people now, the blue water broken into glittering silver fragments as tanned bodies cut through it. Under a cypress tree the black shadow moved slightly and a girl in a sundress shifted to stay in it, stretching back with a sleepy movement. The air was heavy and somnolent and Quincy felt happy, she did not want to move, to break up the occasion, she wanted to remember this afternoon for ever. She had seen Joe on stage, a public figure; she had seen him tired and drained after a performance. Now she was seeing a very different man and she understood far more about him from the way he talked to his parents—relaxed, casual, lively, laughing as he listened to them. His career rarely got mentioned, they talked about friends or his sister's new baby, about American politics and his father's rheumatism—gradually Quincy realised that Joe's relationship with his family, his involvement with their lives, was the central fact of his world, far more important to him than his career.
