An Artistic Way to Go Read online

  A black and white sheepdog came racing across to greet him, putting its paws up on his chest and ignoring the shouts to get down. As he crossed the field to where Calvo stood under the shade of a tree, it kept nudging his leg, asking for its ears to be fondled. Working dogs were awarded little overt affection.

  Calvo studied him. ‘You look rough,’ he said, with typical directness and disregard for finer feelings.

  ‘It’s very hot.’

  ‘What d’you expect in July?’

  ‘Also, I am very old.’

  ‘You don’t top me by more’n a couple of years and I climb up here without collapsing.’

  Calvo was fit enough to climb up Puig Major and not be out of breath, Field thought. Sun and wind had sculpted a face with deep lines of stubborn strength, a life of physical toil had kept his body hard.

  Calvo squinted as he looked up at the sun to judge the time. ‘They’ve had long enough. We’ll take ’em down.’ He whistled, jerked his thin olive staff to the right. The dog went off to the left. He shouted a string of obscenities, cursing the dog and its ancestors. It turned and looked at him, tongue hanging over the side of its mouth as it panted, and Field could believe it was laughing. More shouting and a raised staff persuaded it to do as originally ordered and it worked with skill. The sheep and lambs were collected and herded through the gateway and down the slope to the first field, where they spread out, optimistically searching the stubble for something more to eat.

  The two continued on to the house and the patio on the south side, which was protected from the sun by an old vine that grew over a framework of rusty wire stretched between concrete pillars. Three wooden chairs were set around a table that had been made from nailing the side of a packing case to a three-foot length of trunk from an evergreen oak. A casual observer would probably have looked at the table and chairs, at the gaps between the rocks in the wall of the house where the cement had crumbled away, at the shutters with broken or missing slats, and have concluded that the occupants lived at, or even below, the poverty line. It would have been a very wrong conclusion. As did farmers in other countries, the Calvos lived well but would always deny this because in their youth they had experienced poverty, and they would never spend money unless and until it was absolutely necessary to do so.

  They sat. The dog settled at Field’s side and nudged his legs.

  ‘Carolina will be with us tomorrow because her mother goes to Palma for the day,’ Calvo said.

  ‘I’d like to see her. May I?’

  At that moment, Marta came into sight around the corner of the house, trailing the mattock as if she were drained of every ounce of energy. ‘Hey, old woman, listen to this!’ Calvo shouted. ‘He asks if he can come and see Carolina tomorrow. He asks!’

  She looked at Field, her brown eyes expressing puzzlement.

  ‘I was…’ He wanted to say, ‘being polite’, but the concept was not one he was able to put directly into Mallorquin. ‘It is customary for us to ask. That is polite.’

  Calvo’s annoyance was not appeased. ‘You think you have to be polite? Do you know what Elena will say when I tell her that you ask permission to come and see Carolina? She will say that your head contains more feathers than a chicken’s.’ He swung round to face Marta. ‘Where’s the wine?’

  ‘In the usual place.’

  ‘Fetch it.’

  She propped the mattock by its handle against one of the concrete pillars, and went into the house.

  Calvo reached into his mop of wiry, curly grey hair and scratched the top of his head. ‘Does Elena ask if she can come here? Does Carolina?… Of course they bloody well don’t because they are family.’ He slammed his hand down on the table. ‘Have I not told you that you are family?’

  ‘You have.’

  Marta came out of the house, carrying an earthenware jug in one hand and two glasses in another. She put the glasses down on the table, filled them. Then she faced Field. ‘You will eat with us.’

  Calvo drank deeply, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘He is family, yet he asks! Truly, only a fool can be stupider than a lost sheep.’

  As Field sipped the rough wine that would have had any connoisseur searching for a spittoon, he experienced a rush of emotion towards the two that was a form of love. They had lived through hard, occasionally terrible, times and this had taught them that the only certainty, and therefore the most precious thing in the world, was family. So when they said he was family, they were offering him the greatest gift that was theirs to give. How many people were ever prepared to do that?

  CHAPTER 3

  Rachael looked at her watch. ‘I must leave in quarter of an hour. We’ve just time.’

  ‘For what?’ Burns asked.

  ‘You need two guesses? What’s the trouble – no imagination or no stamina?’

  ‘Imagination to spare and stamina for six.’

  ‘So prove you’re something more than a big mouth.’

  He did.

  Afterwards, he lay on the bed as he watched her dress. ‘When are you off on this bloody cruise?’

  ‘On the nineteenth.’ About to step into a pair of lace-edged pants, she paused, turned. ‘And make a good note of this. You start entertaining the tourists whilst I’m away and I’ll castrate you.’

  ‘One law for the rich, another for the poor. I have to lead a life of celibacy, while you’re wearing yourself out.’

  ‘With Oliver? Doing my duty when I have to, which, thank God, isn’t very often these days.’

  ‘Not as athletic as he was?’

  ‘The track’s become too soft for records.’ She pulled up her pants, looked at her watch. ‘Dammit, I’ll be late.’

  ‘You said I was to use my imagination … Anyway, what’s the panic?’

  ‘We’re going out to dinner and he wants to leave sharp at a quarter to eight.’

  ‘He must be the only person on the island who worries about arriving on time.’

  ‘He was born pedantically.’

  ‘Who are you noshing with?’

  ‘The Passmores.’

  ‘The couple with a yacht almost the size of the QE2?’

  ‘He wouldn’t like to hear the “almost”.’

  ‘Why waste your time with the likes of them? She’s a bitch.’

  ‘In my vocabulary, the biggest bitch on the island.’ She picked up her dress from the back of a chair. ‘And is that saying something!’

  ‘It sounds as if she’s been looking at you through her lorgnette.’

  ‘Very droll.’

  ‘Why don’t you stick two fingers up at her?’

  ‘And give Oliver another ulcer? They’re so rich that if they told him Monet was a lousy artist, he’d rush to agree.’

  ‘Your husband’s a creep.’

  ‘Who’s arguing?’

  ‘Divorce him and marry me and learn what life can be like.’

  ‘I learned that before I married him and didn’t know how to pay the electricity bill.’

  ‘Money’s all-important?’

  ‘Lack of it is.’

  ‘I’ve told you, I’ll make the grade.’

  ‘Call again when you do.’

  ‘You’re not so backward at being a bitch!’

  ‘Look, love, get down off your high horse and be practical. If I divorced Oliver, he’d do everything in his power to make me suffer and leaving me penniless would be for starters. As much as you and me see life the same way, we’d start rowing if the money dried up. Two people never did live as cheaply as one.’

  ‘Then we just go on like now, seeing each other when you can snatch a couple of hours away from his pot belly?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Exciting!’

  ‘Why get so steamed up? Start remembering that Oliver’s not as young as he used to be and that he eats too much, drinks too much, and smokes like a chimney.’

  ‘What if he does?’

  ‘Men like him have heart attacks by the score. Especially if t
hey’re not normally all that active, but are encouraged to become frantic and frenetic.’

  ‘You mean … You’re beginning to add a whole new dimension to screwing.’

  ‘Think of me as enthusiastic.’

  He climbed off the bed, kissed her. ‘Think of you as Spanish fly in the night.’ He walked over to the chest of drawers on which were several bottles. ‘What’ll you drink?’

  ‘I told you, I’ve got to rush.’

  He poured himself a gin and tonic. ‘If he does die happy, how can you be certain you’ll end up all right?’

  ‘I’m the sole beneficiary.’

  ‘He may have told you that, but it could be all balls.’

  ‘I’ve seen his will.’

  ‘Seeing the kind of man he is, I’m surprised he showed it to you.’

  ‘He didn’t. I learned the combination of the wall safe a long time ago.’

  He drank. ‘I’m learning more about you every day.’

  ‘That’ll keep you interested.’

  ‘I don’t need artificial aids.’

  She went through to the tiny bathroom, checked her image in the mirror, lightly powdered her cheeks, patted an errant hair into place, returned to the main room. ‘How do I look?’

  ‘I’d never guess that only a short time ago the earth moved so fiercely for you, you thought there’d been an earthquake.’

  ‘Self-flattery is a sign of insecurity.’ She moved forward, ran her hand down his flat, muscled stomach, pinched.

  ‘Why the hell d’you do that?’ he shouted, as he jerked back.

  ‘To give you a taste of what will happen if you ever think of straying.’ She put on a large pair of dark glasses and left.

  * * *

  Had she not been the Right Honourable the Countess Janlin, estranged wife of the seventh earl, a man of vast estate, she would have been cold-shouldered by those expatriates who were alarmed by the unconventional or who believed that a gold or platinum card was the prerequisite to friendship. She lived in a poky, unreformed, Mallorquin house, dressed in what might well have been Oxfam rejects, drove a clapped-out Seat 127, and occasionally had a man to live with her who, on at least one occasion, had been a Mallorquin. But possessed of so exalted a pedigree, the conformists spoke of aristocratic eccentricity and even the richest of the parvenus were quick to declare their liking for her.

  When young and often in the news, she had usually been described as possessing the traditional English peaches-and-cream complexion; years of hot sun, brandy, and a wilful refusal to use any skin cream, meant that prune-like was a more apposite description. Her body, once slender and shapely, had thickened and sagged.

  She sat in the small garden, listening to a tape recorder that was playing Strauss’s ‘Don Quixote’. As Rachael opened the gate, she stopped the music. ‘The booze is in the usual place.’

  Rachael walked caterwise across the patio and on to the lawn of gama grass. ‘I don’t think I’ll have anything.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We’re having dinner with the Passmores…’

  ‘More fool you.’

  Muriel had obviously reached the belligerent stage so it would be stupid to provoke her. ‘Maybe just a small one, then.’

  ‘That’s not what you’ll have been wanting for the past couple of hours. Good, was it?’

  ‘I’ve no complaints.’

  ‘Then you’re bloody lucky! By the time George had finished imitating a rig with a double rupture, I’d nothing but complaints.’

  Rachael crossed to the trolley on the patio and poured herself a weak gin and tonic, added ice, picked up a saucer of baked almonds in their skins. She returned, settled on the second uncomfortable, rusting wrought-iron chair. She raised her glass. ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Good God, how many more times do I have to tell you that it’s only little people from Bagshot who say “Cheers”?’

  She drank. ‘Has Oliver rung?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I told him you were feeling miserable again and needed cheering up.’

  ‘And he swallowed that? There’s something to be said for being married to a pompous fool.’

  ‘In some things, you know, he’s very far from being a fool.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Rachael looked at her watch. She must leave very soon if she were to arrive home in time to shower and dress and be ready to leave by a quarter to eight.

  ‘Make him wait. Do him good.’

  Not for the first time, she wondered why Muriel was so ready to assist in Oliver’s cuckolding? Contempt for him? Because he was so much richer than she? Or was it that because her own marriage had turned into farce, she welcomed the chance to assist in wrecking someone else’s?

  CHAPTER 4

  As Serra approached the large cisterna, made from blocks of sandstone, there were no sounds of flowing water. He swore. He continued past two kumquat trees to the northeast corner of the cisterna, climbed up on to the wall, using rocks which had been extended to form rough steps, and stared down at the narrow aqueduct, also fashioned from sandstone, which ran along the top of it. The channel was dry so the water had flowed for only a short time or not at all. He moved carefully along the top of the wall, legs straddling the channel, until he could look down into the cisterna. The level of water was very low.

  He studied the sky, beginning to lose its intensity of colour, hoping to see rain clouds, even though there had been no rain for weeks and would be none for at least another month; if he hadn’t been an optimistic pessimist, he wouldn’t have been a farmer.

  How many days’ water was left in the cisterna? Not nearly enough. Even though he knew it would infuriate him to do so, he turned and stared into the garden of Ca’n Oliver. The riot of colour should have warmed his heart, but it made him swear afresh. All those flowers, all that lawn, existed only because he was being denied the water he needed to grow his vegetables and fruit.

  It was his brother’s fault. His brother was a good-for-nothing who’d lost to the roll of three dice his half of the land which had been left by their father; he’d have gambled away his wife if anyone were fool enough to accept so sharp-tongued a bitch as a stake. The land had been bought by a German, immensely rich as were all foreigners, who’d built a large house and swimming pool and ordered the rich land to be turned into a garden which needed the water that God had intended should grow food. But the German had been reasonable – for a foreigner, that was. He’d never complained when the aqueduct had not flowed, had never questioned why he was not receiving the water to which he was entitled, but instead had bought what was needed by the lorryload. So he, Serra, had received all the water instead of just half, enabling him to increase production.

  Then the German had died, the property had been sold, and it had been bought by another foreigner (no Spaniard could be so bereft of brains as to pay the kind of money that had been asked; not even a politician). He had naturally imagined Señor Cooper would honour the existing arrangement. If only the señor had proved to be even half the man the German had been! On learning that ownership of the land entitled him to sixteen and a half hours’ of water a week, he had demanded this. When the aqueduct had remained dry, he’d called in a pompous, self-opinionated abogado – was there any other kind? – who had ordered him to stop diverting to his own use water to which he was not entitled. He ignored the order, of course. So the abogado – no honest Mallorquin but from the Peninsula – had threatened legal action and had spoken to Fernando Gelabert, who lived near the mouth of the valley and was in charge of the system of distribution and had warned that if his client didn’t receive his correct allotment, Gelabert would be stripped of his honorary position …

  Desperate problems demanded desperate remedies. He’d spent a great deal of money on a bottle of the strongest weedkiller which one night he’d poured into the señor’s cisterna. Yet no flowers had withered, no tree had shed its leaves, the lawn had not turned brown and, even though they used that water to top up the
swimming pool, neither the señor nor the señora had been stricken with the pox. (She was a puta. Jorge had told him many times that she swam in the nude.) He’d melted down a candle and from the soft wax modelled a figure upon which he’d urinated as he christened it Señor Oliver; he’d heated five needles and stuck them into the figure, one in each eye, one in the centre of the stomach, and one in each testicle, yet during the succeeding days the señor had not been blinded, doubled up with his stomach on fire, or walked as if on hot bricks.

  In desperation, he’d allowed the water to flow into the señor’s cisterna for long enough to make any reasonable man think all was well, then diverted it into his own. Jorge had known what was happening, but he was a friend as well as a Mallorquin. Yet that bastard of a señor had not only checked to make certain the water was running at the beginning of each period, he’d also checked later on. Now Jorge only occasionally dared turn a blind eye other than when the señor was away …

  He climbed down the wall and followed the path around the cisterna, came to a stop. The land sloped away so that he could look out over his crops. Beans, peas, tomatoes, lettuces, sweet peppers, aubergines, cucumbers, radishes, grapes, oranges, lemons, grapefruit, almonds, figs, persimmons … Nowhere on the island grew larger, sweeter, juicier, tastier fruit and vegetables. When his wife set up her stall in the market, the Mallorquins rushed to buy from her before the long-abed foreigners arrived and willingly paid whatever was asked. But if he could not find a way of once more obtaining all the water he needed for such heavy cropping, he would either have to reduce the amount he grew or buy water. The first would make other farmers snigger, the second, laugh.

  * * *

  He lived in the village, not far from the old square, in one of the original, twisting roads that wound its way part way up the conical hill about which Llueso was built. The house had not been reformed beyond the installation of a modern flushing lavatory, as demanded by the ayuntamiento – like all bureaucrats, they spent other people’s money with gay abandon.