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36
‘Mercedes!Jala, look! That’s its name! It’s called Mercedes!’
Matthew Meade’s new car came off the ferry a week ago, black and sleek with tinted windows so you can’t see in. And now it’s here to take them to the housewarming. All the Delia women in a row in their cast-off finery. Mercedes hasn’t told them that they’re in a dead woman’s clothes, and they haven’t asked, but they look beautiful. Larissa in a burgundy wrap dress in silk jersey (a slip underneath to protect her modesty and prevent unintentional mishaps, but still, she looks curvy and elegant) and Donatella like an angel in white. In a dress that would be too short for the solteronas, its bodice fitted and a skirt that flips around her thighs as though she were skating on ice. Mercedes wears her pink dress, and Donatella has painted some smears of brown on her lids and mascara on her lashes and little streaks of pink on the tops of her cheekbones, and she feels, for the first time in her life, like an adult.
‘You don’t think he named it after our girl, do you?’ asks Larissa.
Her parents are like children. Childlike in the things they don’t know. They’re peasants, thinks Mercedes from the lofty heights of her summer serfdom. And then she is filled with shame, for, though it feels like years, she herself only had her first ride in a car a couple of weeks ago. But she can’t keep the superior drawl from her voice. Thank God Tatiana returns to England and her boarding school in three more days. Mercedes knows full well that she’s getting corrupted.
‘It’s a brand name,’ she says. ‘That’s all. Like Gaggia. Or … ’ she searches her brain, remembers the new TV in their sala ‘ … Samsung. You don’t name cars the way you do boats. They don’t have names, just labels.’
‘Ah, I suppose that’s right,’ says Donatella, ‘or it would be the Princess Mercedes.’
They bellow with laughter.
They’re all in high spirits. Sergio because he is on a guest list among the island’s most powerful men. Larissa, because she has watched the fittings and the furniture for the Casa Amarilla come off the ferry week by week and is wild with curiosity. Donatella, because there will be drinks, and a pool and, she hears, a swing that goes right out over the cliff, and because at last, at last, she has somewhere to wear this dress where she won’t draw tuts of outrage. And Mercedes because her servitude is almost at an end, and the summer isn’t finished yet, and there will be hours after school to run across the fields with her old friends and throw themselves into the ocean, and she cannot wait.
Matthew Meade’s driver opens the door. Smiles and smiles as he beckons them inside.
They get in, one by one. The interior smells deliciously of polish and leather.
‘Ooh!’ says Larissa. ‘Oooooh!’ and sinks into her seat with eyes like a moo-cow’s. Sergio settles beside her, and they spread out like pashas, hands running over the seats as though they were stroking a pussycat.
‘It’s so soft!’ Larissa exclaims. ‘Oh, my lord. Like velvet!’
The girls sit facing them, backs to the brand new tarmac road that leads up the hill to the east. Donatella gazes about her as though she were in a museum. Larissa discovers the tiny water bottles and Sergio goes to twist off a cap.
‘No!’ she snatches it from his hands. ‘Sergio! No!’
‘It’s okay, Mama. It’s why they’re there,’ says Mercedes, all insouciance. ‘There’s a whole case in the castle dungeons.’
Just to show that she knows everything about cars, she presses the catch on the arm rest and the top glides smoothly open to show the box of Kleenex hidden inside.
‘Ay, madre de dio!’ cries Larissa. ‘Oh, l’ostia, they think of everything.’
The door closes and the air-con cranks up. Larissa lets out a little shriek as the driver cranks off the handbrake and revs the engine. Grips hard on to the hand rests as they move off.
Sergio casually presses the window button and lets it roll all the way down. He pretends he’s doing it out of curiosity, but of course it’s so that all the neighbours can see who’s in the limousine gliding out of town.
The car drops them on the road by the new enclosing wall with its wrought-iron sign, as though anyone would mistake the only house on these cliffs for anywhere else. The Delias stand in a row again while Larissa fusses: straightens Sergio’s tie and tugs down the hem of Donatella’s dress and drags a comb through Mercedes’ hair. Once she’s satisfied that none of them will bring shame on her, she takes her husband’s hand and they walk in.
‘Oao,’ says Sergio.
Fifty people drink and shout in the grand reception, but still the room feels airy and spacious. Even the roar of their talk doesn’t overwhelm, for it rises up and loses itself on a ceiling higher than Mercedes’ whole home.
Chandeliers. A marble staircase that spirals skywards from a slippery floor of white hardened glass. Fluted columns holding up the roof. Semi-naked marble women, two metres high, that Tatiana says are the Muses but just look a bit mucky to Mercedes, line the walls. A gigantic portrait of their host in a heavy gold frame. A courtyard fountain centred round a glittering cornucopia of exotic fruit, all carved, according to Tatiana, from a single crystal rock. A black marble nymph in a gold bikini who drapes herself over the pool edge, forever handwashing.
‘My lord,’ says Larissa, though she looks quite intimidated, ‘it’s more wonderful than the castillo itself!’
‘Nonsense,’ says Sergio. ‘There are things in the castillo that are a thousand years old.’
‘Yes, but,’ says Larissa, ‘everything here is new.’
Sergio rolls his eyes. Then he spots the harbourmaster by a laden buffet table and strides away, holding out his hand in delighted greeting, for all the world as though they’re long-lost friends rather than two people who three hours ago were squabbling over waste disposal. His family huddle by the door, small and inadequate. Oh, to be a man. To know that you have a place in the world. That even among strangers you are enough.
Mercedes feels Larissa’s hand sneak into hers and knows that the gesture is not intended to give comfort, but to receive it. She squeezes back and feels her mother’s shoulders relax. It’s worst of all for her, she thinks. Donatella’s beautiful, Papa’s a man of status, and I’ve spent all summer play-acting rich. She’s never been anywhere like this in her life. She’s more aware of being no one, right now, than she’s ever been.
One of the women from the boat staff approaches, carrying a little tray laden with drinks. Smiling. The new staff are Filipinas. Tatiana says they make popular staff, because they’re always smiling.
