Nyctophobia (4 page)

I helped myself to ice from the gargantuan fridge that had no food in it – these were women who didn’t eat, unless you counted Martini olives, nuts and romaine lettuce. I hoped the ice would disguise what was obviously a tumbler full of vodka, and when I closed the door there he was, just standing there, leaning against the wall, regarding me with an amused smile. The only man here in a suit and tie, Gieves and Hawkes, the colour of a summer midnight.

He said, ‘Hielo.’

I said, ‘Hello.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘
hielo
. Ice – in Spanish.’ He pointed to my glass. ‘I didn’t think the English liked ice in their drinks.’

‘You don’t know I’m English.’

He gave a laugh. ‘Really?
Really?
Forgive me but you are the most English-looking girl I have ever seen.’

I bristled, Englishly. ‘I don’t know what you mean by that.’

He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. I am from Madrid. We have the unfortunate tendency to say what is in our heads. Sometimes it gets us into trouble. We don’t have the English way with euphemism.’ He continued to smile and stare at me until I felt uncomfortable and moved away. He followed.

‘Now I have offended you. Please, let’s start again. I’m Mateo Torres.’

The kitchen had emptied out, so I relaxed. ‘I’m Calico Shaw.’

‘Calico? That’s a very unusual name.’

‘Isn’t it though. My mother thought it was hip, but it’s sort of insulting when you think about it, being named after a kind of cheap fabric that tears easily.’

‘Well, I think it’s attractive. These days everyone in London seems to be called Katie.’

‘My friends call me Callie,’ I told him. ‘You have another accent underneath that very careful English one. American.’

‘Well spotted.’

‘I’m good at seeing what’s going on underneath.’

‘I’d hoped it had gone by now. I spent my teens and twenties in New York.’

‘But you didn’t stay.’

‘No, I went home. Eventually everyone goes home, don’t you think?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve only ever been at home.’

‘So I was right. You’re very English.’ He took pleasure in proving the point, and touched his glass against mine.

‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘Until the Second World War, the average English person had only travelled three miles.’

‘Is that right?’

‘Yup. It’s why there are so many accents here. Accents develop at home and vanish with travel.’

‘Is this a specialist subject of yours?

‘I qualified as an architect. Architecture is about knowing what places mean to people, and vice versa.’

‘How long does it take to become an architect?’

‘In total? Around seven years.’

‘You don’t look old enough.’

‘Trust me, I am. Just.’ He was still smiling at me. Beneath his very white shirt cuffs I could see tanned wrists and a silver Breitling watch, discreetly tasteful, the opposite of what everyone else was wearing. ‘What are you drinking?’

He raised his glass and looked through the amber liquid at me. ‘Sherry,’ he said, as if it was obvious.

‘I always think of the stuff my grandmother kept in the sideboard for Christmas.’

‘No, this is very different. It has to be drunk cold and young. A good Manzanilla from Jerez – it means ‘little apple’. Dryer than a Fino, very refreshing. Try it.’

I took a sip. The chill tang awoke something pleasurable on my tongue. I handed it back in approval. ‘So what’s the deal here?’

He looked at me strangely. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you’re obviously not visiting London with the Somerset mafia. Who are you with?’

He leaned forward confidentially. I smelled an aftershave, not the usual variation of lemons, something with musky bite. ‘My wife. Tonight I’m just acting as her chauffeur.’

I chilled down a little, disappointed that he was flirting while his wife was in the next room.
Well, obviously someone like him would be married.
I said, ‘I suppose it must be nice to always have your husband drive you around.’

‘Ah, the English personality. Like the weather. A little warmer, a little cooler, you never know what affects it or where you stand.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Don’t you. Well. It was nice to meet you, Callie.’ He gifted me a wide white smile and took his leave.

Shit,
I thought.

I was annoyed with him but more with myself. He was right; I’d asked the question and shown displeasure when he gave me an answer. There was still time to make it better. He was almost out of the door.

To this day, I don’t know what possessed me to do what I did next.

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘That’s not me. This is me.’ And I stepped forward and kissed him. On tiptoe, with my hands on his shoulders, pressing my lips over his surprised mouth. To his credit, he didn’t jump away. Not at all.

When we returned to the lounge it felt as if everyone was staring at us, a pair of schoolchildren caught behind the bike sheds. Mateo was quickly joined by a well-preserved woman with an upswept lion’s mane of blonde hair, a smart black New York dress and a proprietorial air, obviously the wife. She wore a necklace of heavy glass harlequin panels, matched earrings and nail colour, all sharp angles and edges. She looked as if she could easily leave a scar if she wanted to. The pair started talking together and moved away to the far side of the room.

Sandy Fellowes caught up with me as I was looking idly about, trying to piece the story together. ‘Just what do you think you’re doing?’ she hissed, taking my arm and leading me out of earshot.

‘What are you talking about?’ I was about to pull myself free, and remembered that Sandy was my mother’s biggest client.

‘If you’re planning to practise your seduction technique, you should try doing it in a room that hasn’t got a glass door. You’re a guest here, Callie. You were only invited because your mother and I go back a long way.’

‘I don’t have to answer to you.’

‘You do when you’re in my home, okay? With one of my guests.’ Flecks of white had formed at the sides of Sandy’s mouth; her coke jag was still peaking.

‘It’s okay, I’m going,’ I said, breaking away. ‘There’s a little too much hypocrisy in this room for me.’

Sandy followed me. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘You know. Everyone likes to pretend they have such perfect lives.’

‘Well we all know how perfect yours has been,
lovey
, we’ve seen your wrists.’ I instinctively touched the African bracelet covering the worst of the cuts on my left wrist. ‘It’s your mother I feel sorry for. She’s the one who had to clean up all of your mistakes.’

I could have shot back at her – God knows I had enough ammunition – but I knew Anne would kill me. Instead I walked away, closing my ears. I’d heard it all before.

I found my leather jacket among the conspicuously expensive couture racked in the hall. I knew my mother would be in full flow right now. She never noticed anything when she had an audience and could smell purses being opened. It was better not to interrupt her.

‘You’re going already?’ Mateo was there again, like some kind of magician perfecting his act by selecting the same member of the public twice.

I pushed my arm into a sleeve. ‘I don’t really fit in with this crowd.’

‘Neither do I. Tonight is for the ladies, after all.’ He smiled. ‘And I must go to check on my daughter. Maybe I can accompany you?’

A daughter now as well. But I’ll admit it. He had me at ‘hielo’.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Courtship

I
’LL ADMIT
I was intrigued. I wasn’t as trusting as I had once been, but I decided to give it my best shot.

It was just a short walk across the bridge to the flat where I still lived with my mother, but it had started to rain and he had an umbrella; another reason to accept the offer. We left Pimlico’s streets of antiques shops and bijoux residences, heading for the grim modern apartment buildings of Vauxhall.

Mateo kept the conversation light and casual, but uninformative. He seemed honest, and I sensed he was free in spite of his intimidatingly elegant wife. In the lights on the bridge I took stock of him. He was a good foot taller than me, with a slender band of greying hair and distinctive black eyebrows that signalled his Spanish ancestry more clearly than any passport. A little heavy around the waist. Undeniably handsome, but quite a lot older. Gold cufflinks. Highly polished shoes.

He didn’t speak until we were in the less than salubrious street where Anne had her apartment. I was embarrassed to be living at home again, and didn’t want him to get a good look at the place, not after where we had just come from. Sandy’s world. His world.

‘To answer your unspoken question,’ he said, turning to me with a smile, ‘I was there because Mrs Fellowes and my wife are both on the board of the English National Opera Trust. It’s the last stop on Maddie’s European tour, spreading largesse before she heads back to New York. She leaves tomorrow. My daughter is going with her until the end of the school holidays. She loves having Bobbie come to stay, so long as she can return her.’

‘So you’re divorced.’

‘I would have hoped it was obvious. I wouldn’t have let you kiss me otherwise.’

‘But you
were
flirting.’

He held out his hands. ‘You have me there.’

‘Your wife, is she American?’

‘From Colorado originally. Maddie was very smart, very ambitious, now she’s very successful and very driven. When I met her she had just arrived in Manhattan. But you know, New York is a city that takes over some people. Five years after we married I took her to Madrid. She hated every second of being there and told me she was going back to NYC. I said I didn’t want to, so she asked for a divorce. Bobbie was seven. I think we had both realised by that time that our lives had taken a wrong turn. It was just over two years ago.’

I stopped before the building entrance. I couldn’t let him come up because the corridors reeked of disinfectant and the flat was a mess. I said, ‘I’d ask you up but my mother –’ It was hard to explain the situation. I had more confidence with men of my own age. A sharp remark could always nail the young ones in place but Mateo was different. It was as if he saw who I was, and still didn’t mind.

He had the good grace to gloss over my excuse. ‘Are you doing anything the day after tomorrow?’ he asked. ‘If not, we could make a day of it. Saturday, I’m not working.’

‘Neither am I.’ I didn’t tell him that I was not working any day.

‘Perfect. Then I’ll pick you up at ten o’clock.’

This time I agreed without thinking twice.

‘Good.’ He stopped and looked about himself as if mentally ticking off boxes. ‘So – here. The day after tomorrow. Ten. Till then.’

I don’t really remember much about the next few meetings. All I know is that the more I learned about Mateo, the more I liked him. He was generous and thoughtful, and had high expectations of life which he seemed able to realise without stamping on other people, and
that
made him very appealing. I soon learned that he could also be opinionated and stubborn and rather old-fashioned, but he understood his own limitations. Best of all he took everyone at face value, regardless of age and social standing, with the freshness and innocence of a younger man.

In a carefully chosen selection of expensive bars and restaurants, the kind he sensed I had never been able to afford, we talked late into each night about pretty much everything, although I was careful to avoid going into my past. I know it was cowardly, but I’d spent a long time building up my defence mechanisms, and they weren’t easy to dismantle. Besides, Mateo was seriously old-school Spanish Catholic – albeit one with an eye for much younger women – and I didn’t want to give him any reasons to think less of me.

We began dating in earnest. I realised that because of his job I would be spending a good deal of time alone, but he called me at the same time every night from wherever he had to be. I learned to be patient because I had never met anyone like him, and wasn’t sure if I ever would again.

We made love on our seventh date. I tried so hard to please him that I made the whole thing awkward and embarrassing.

Seventeen weeks later, we got married. Yeah, I know, a shock to me too. Mateo’s parents lived in New York’s Upper West Side near his ex-wife, and showed their disapproval by finding excuses not to attend our wedding ceremony, which was performed at Islington Town Hall in North London. My mother came along with Sandy, and they spent the day finding ways to suggest that I wasn’t good enough for such a saintly man. I stopped talking to Anne after she darkly warned me that Mateo would leave once he knew about my past. I’d wanted to tell him everything but it was complicated; being totally honest involved getting into something I could barely admit to myself.

Mateo’s old college friend Darrell flew over from Jerez to be a witness, and gave us a beautiful wine cabinet which we had nowhere to store because I was still at my mother’s and Mateo was split between a rented apartment in Madrid and a borrowed room in the old mayor’s house in Jerez. I invited a pair of colleagues from my old practice, just to show that I wasn’t entirely friendless. I met Mateo’s daughter, Bobbie, and the relative proximity of our ages helped to make us instant buddies. She was a bright and enquiring almost-nine year-old, with all the openness and confidence I’d never had as a child, but there was a prim stillness about her, too, so that I was never quite sure if she was in the same room with me.

We spent a working honeymoon in Seville and Salamanca, and Mateo took me on a tour of the Rioja region, teaching me the differences in varieties of wine. During this time he often spoke of his family’s birthplace and how he longed to go back there, and as I was anxious to distance myself from his first wife, I agreed to look for a house in Andalusia. He was delighted by the idea, so we rented a hotel room at the coast and began hitting the websites. We shortlisted around fifteen places, and as his time was limited we viewed some of them separately. It seemed amazing to me that I could make someone so happy just by agreeing to do this one thing.