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28
The helicopter flies in at three o’clock, and the castle limo enters the dock thirty minutes later.
‘This is it,’ says Donatella. ‘Your carriage to the stars.’
‘Shut up,’ she says. Glares at her sister from the seat where she’s been ordered to wait and not get her clothes dirty. Larissa has scrubbed her so clean that her skin feels raw, has ironed until the sweat poured off her face.
‘I’m not having you shame me in front of the duke,’ she’d snarled.
‘Mama, the duke won’t be there!’
‘Well, you say that.’
‘It’s true! He’s going out on the boat!’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘you’re still going to the castle. You never know what the staff will tell him.’
She doubts the staff will be seeking the duke out to report that her skirt was wrinkled, but she accepts her fate. Sits in Tatiana’s old orchid-print dress, hair scraped off her face and plaited, best winter shoes clinging damply to swelling feet, and awaits her fate.
The car goes to the foot of the Princess Tatiana’s gangplank. Again. She’s counted eight guests aboard since the duke arrived and Tatiana left, chin in the air, ignoring Mercedes on the terasa. Men in rich-man casual: cream-coloured trousers and dark dark-glasses, and primary-coloured cotton jersey tops that emphasise their nipples.
She’d thought the party was complete. Evidently not. She sits forward to watch.
The duke’s chauffeur gets out and walks round to open the door nearest the water. A pause. Then, one by one, four young women emerge and hurry up the gangplank. Creatures so exotic – so curvaceous, clad in dresses that look like bandages, in skirts and tops so far apart they will never meet, in boots of shiny white plastic that rise halfway up thighs and shoes so high the soles need platforms to accommodate the heels – that even Mercedes knows what they are there for.
She gasps. Looks around for solteronas. For if they see this, surely, they will be able to tell the difference between Camila Garcia and a genuine puta. But there are none to be seen. They’re up in Plasa Iglesia, tatting and tattling. By the fishing boats, the men’s nets hang frozen in their hands, and Hector Marino administers a firm slap to the back of Felix’s head.
The girls step onto the polished deck, pass the No Stilettos sign and sway along the gangway to where she can see the tops of the men’s heads over the gunwales. She could swear she hears a faint cheer go up.
My God, she thinks. So this is what a Stag is. Does Tatiana know? Do the priests who presided over the St James’s Day mass know that our duke goes out on boats with girls like this? Do I tell her? Do I tell them? What do I say?
The chauffeur gets back into the driver’s seat and the car creeps towards the restaurant. On the boat, music starts up. Some cold, unnatural electric throb that makes the water tremble. Above the gunwales, she sees thin brown arms rise up and wave in the air in time with the beat, as the captain comes down the stairs from the bridge and hauls in the gangplank.
Donatella watches her set sail, fiddles pensively with a curl. ‘It’s a shame you won’t be meeting the duke,’ she says.
‘Don’t you start,’ says Mercedes.
‘You’re so bloody lucky,’ says Donatella. ‘Yachts and castles and all those new clothes.’
She doesn’t feel particularly lucky. The other kids are giving her a wide berth these days. They look at her in her cast-off finery as though she’s sprouted horns. ‘It’s not that great,’ she says.
‘Yeah, well,’ says Donatella. ‘I suppose I’d better go and clean the toilet, then. Apparently the English don’t know how to flush their own shit.’
Her first car ride isn’t as thrilling as she had expected. The interior smells strongly of perfume. Not the subtle aromas that surround the Meades, but a mix of chemical scents, pungent enough to kill insects. And the speed that looks so dizzying when the car passes you on the new asphalt road feels quite ordinary from inside. Slow, in fact. But the seats are covered in the softest kid leather, and indentations in the arm rests of the back seats contain ducky little plastic bottles of sparkling water. The chauffeur watches in the mirror as she takes one out and examines it.
‘Go ahead,’ he says.
‘Really?’
There’s a particular sort of indulgent fatherly nod that men do around young girls. He does it now. ‘That’s what it’s for,’ he says.
It’s finished in a few little gulps. Fizzy, but not that fizzy. She’s not sure what to do with the bottle. Casts around and eventually puts it in the laundry bag of clothes Larissa has forced on her. The chauffeur smiles.
‘You can take the other one too,’ he says. ‘For your sister.’
‘Oh, no!’ She blushes beetroot. ‘I wasn’t—’
‘It’s okay,’ he says. ‘There are a thousand more in the old dungeons. I’ll put more in when I bring you back.’
