Doctor at Villa Ronda (25 page)

Micaela gave Nicola a cup of hot soup and, glancing at the suitcase, asked if Nicola was leaving Orsola. When Nicola nodded, the girl asked why not by automobile.

Nicola answered vaguely that she had not wanted to bother anyone at the Villa to take her down to the station.

“But there are no trains!” exclaimed Micaela in Spanish. “The last one goes at twenty hours.”

Nicola mentally kicked herself for not finding this out sooner. Eight o’clock. The train had already gone before dinner at the Villa Ronda.

She had made the best of a bad job. “Perhaps when the rain stops, I can go to the station and wait until the morning.”

A glance passed between Micaela and her mother. “You must stay here,” said Se
n
ora Gallito. “The storm will last a long time.”

The two women made up a bed for Nicola and Micaela promised to wake her very early in the morning for the first train, but there was no sleep for anyone in the house.

Thunder shook the walls and the noise of heavy rain was like a waterfall. All the windows were shuttered and Nicola could see nothing, but she could hear the constant drumming on the roof. She was glad when at last, after
only the most fitful dozing, she could see daylight through a chink in the shutters.

Micaela brought her hot coffee and rolls and explained that Nicola’s clothes were not yet dry.

“
No importa
,”
replied Nicola. She added that she could find dry clothes in her suitcase. She wondered how she could repay the Gallitos’ hospitality and decided to leave a little money in an unobtrusive place where they would find it after she had left.

When Nicola said her thanks and goodbyes and stepped out of the door she was amazed at the scene. The road was still awash although the rain had stopped, the sun shone as though there had never been a storm. But boulders and stones had been washed down by the torrent and Nicola found it difficult to thread her way through the debris.

Micaela caught her up, saying that she must come to the harbour and wait for the boats to come in. Nicola guessed how anxious the girl was about her brother Barto.

At the foot of the hill where the road led into the village the devastation was something that Nicola had only read about or seen on newsreels. The harbour was dotted with wrecked or capsized boats, the railway line was completely submerged and down the wide
Rambla,
normally a dusty street, the river had returned to its old bed and was coursing down lapping against the walls of shops and houses. Tree trunks and boulders had acted as battering rams and destroyed the footbridge over the lower end of the
rambla.

Nicola and Micaela stared at the damaged village, then at each other.

“There will be no trains,” said Micaela.

“Nor anything else,” replied Nicola quietly. Several cars had been caught by the flood and were overturned or jammed against a tree. The whole roadway that came round the coast and led to Barcelona had risen in a great bulge, then cracked with the force of water above and below it.

M
icaela said she must now join her mother at the
harbour to wait for Barto’s boat, and Nicola stood disconsolately on part of a wall from which the water had slightly receded. What on earth was she to do now? She was unlikely to find any kind of transport at all in this flood-devastated village, and to crawl back to the Villa was unthinkable.

It occurred to her that the floods farther up the railway line might not have been so bad and perhaps there were trains running along that part of the coast. If only she could cross this roaring river somehow, she might be able to skirt the worst flooded areas by keeping to the higher parts.

Encumbered as she was with the suitcase, it was not easy to pick her way over the rough, slippery ground and when she was faced with another fast-moving stream, she retraced her steps to the centre of the village. Scores of men and women were either barricading their shops and houses against the rushing water, or where it had receded, they were baling or pumping out the basements and cellars. One enterprising boatman was already ferrying people from one side of the
rambla
to the other, and Nicola shouted to catch his attention. She had to wait her turn until he had made several journeys. Then she scrambled in, dragging her suitcase with her.

Somebody shouted, “Nicola! Nicola!”

She shaded her eyes from the sun and peered up. Sebastian stood there, dressed in yellow nylon oilskins.

“Come back! Come back!” he shouted.

But there was no turning back now, for the boatman had started his precarious journey. Nicola realised that the most sensible thing to do was to stay in the boat on its return journey. Naturally Sebastian would be down here at the earliest moment for as a doctor he was needed in such an emergency as this. Then the decision whether to return to safety or try to continue her crazy journey was taken out of Nicola’s hands. A fully grown tree, its boughs turning and twisting helplessly, came swirling down the wide stream. Before he could evade the branches, the boatman was caught, his loaded boat pushed towards the walls of a house and jammed there.

Something hit Nicola a heavy blow on the head and the sun was blotted out.

Nicola opened her eyes. It was a curious sensation to imagine that she was back in her former room at the Villa Ronda, instead of on this jogging, throbbing train. How had she managed to get on the train? she wondered. There were floods and the line was to
rn
up.

She blinked, trying to focus the passing landscape, but the walls that enclosed her were cream. Here was the pale green carpet, the green and white curtains at the half-shuttered windows. She tried to sit up and the top of her head nearly jumped off.

A quiet voice said in Spanish, “Please lie still.” Inez, Adrienne’s maid, was by the bedside. “You are safe at the Villa Ronda,” murmured Inez.

A few moments later, or perhaps it was hours, Adrienne came towards the bed.

“Oh, it was such a fright!” she exclaimed. “You are now much better?”

N
icola nodded, but even that hurt her head. She put up her hand to feel a bandage around her forehead. “What happened? How did I get here?”

“We did not even know that you had gone away, but Sebastian went to the village as soon as it was daylight. Many people have been injured, so he went to help.”

“Of course.” Nicola had a vague impression of seeing Sebastian in yellow oilskins, and he had shouted at her.

“Then,” continued Adrienne, “I sent Inez to your room to find how you had slept through the terrible storm. You had gone and there were your letters. My father—” and even in her present vague state, Nicola noticed the pride in Adrienne’s voice. “My father advised us to send someone down to the harbour to find Sebastian so that he could look for you.”

“Micaela took me to her house when the storm began.
I stayed there all night.”

A
drienne sighed. “They have trouble, too. Barto is missing and all the men on his boat. Other boats are also missing.”

“
Poor Barto,” murmured Nicola. “His family were very kind to me.”

“
You must now sleep or else Sebastian will scold me for talking,” said Adrienne.

N
icola must have dozed, for when she was next awake she became aware of someone holding her hand in a firm grip. Sebastian sat by the bedside and his clasp was totally unlike that of a doctor taking a patient’s pulse.

“
Querida
!”
he said softly. “Darling Nicola!” She could not believe her ears. She was still dreaming. Then he spoke again. “Why did you run away? And why did you choose such a stormy night? Did you
want
to drown?”

“
No.” She gave him a timid smile. “I started out before the storm broke.”

“
Then why didn’t you turn back?” he demanded, his eyes bright with concern.

H
er gaze fell. “I—I hadn’t the courage, I suppose.”

“
But you knew how much I wanted you to stay here for always. Couldn’t you see that I loved you?”

N
icola’s heart thumped about so much that she was sure that Dr. Sebastian Montal could hear it.
”

“I thought you’d be glad to be rid of me—both of us, my sister and me.”

“
I loved you long before your sister came here. Oh, Nicola, there is so much to tell you, but it can wait. First I must hear something from you.”

“
Yes?”

“
Do you love me? Enough to marry me and stay here at the Villa?”

N
icola’s face became radiant. “How could you doubt it? Of course I do!”

H
e stood up, then stared down at her. “It is most improper for a doctor to embrace his patient, but perhaps he may be allowed to kiss his future wife?”

W
ith his arms around her, his lips against hers, his tender words of endearment, she forgot her aching head,
her foolish, false pride, and remembered only that her own love for him had brought far more than its just reward. She was luckier than she had ever imagined in her wildest dreams.

“
What happened to my head to give me such a knock?” she asked.

“The boat crashed into a building at the foot of the
rambla.
Luckily no one was drowned, but most of the passengers were knocked about and you were thrown against the wall.”

“Have they found Barto yet?”

He nodded. “Yes. All the others, too. The three boats kept together and decided to go far away from land and ride out the storm. But they’re home now, although Barto has a broken arm.”

“I’m glad he’s safe, for his mother’s sake and Micaela’s.”

“Not Adrienne’s?” he teased.

“Not now. She’s happy enough with Ramon, her fish.”

“Her fish?” he echoed, puzzled.

But she would not explain to him, fearing that he might also believe that he had been successfully hooked and landed.

It was another two days before Sebastian would allow Nicola to get up, and then only to sit in the garden. She did not rebel, for she realised that he had scores of casualties to attend to in the village.

Her suitcase had been irrevocably lost when the boat crashed, so it was fortunate that she had not taken quite all her clothes with her, for she still had two or three dresses at the Villa, and Adrienne was glad to provide her with whatever else she needed.

Nicola was relaxing in a long garden chair on the ‘Mediterranean balcony’ when Sebastian came to her at the end of another gruelling day of attending his injured patients, inoculating hundreds of others against typhoid owing to the lack of drinking water.

She had already seen for herself the damage in the Villa Ronda gardens, the magnolia, cracked and broken, the flower beds scoured and swept clear of bushes and
plants, the red mud left behind. Even the swimming pool had to be emptied and cleaned, for mud and debris had been swept into it.

Adrienne came bustling up behind
him
and he frowned slightly at her.

She bent to kiss Nicola. “At last he has fallen in love with someone young!” she cried at the top of her voice for the whole landscape to hear. “I was so afraid he would let Dona Elena choose him.”

“
There was no question of that,” murmured Sebastian.

“No?” Adrienne queried disbelievingly. “If Nicola had not arrived here, I would have had Dona Elena for both aunt and sister-in-law. Now Nicola shall be my aunt. Dear Tia Nicola!” Adrienne made an elaborate curtsey. “When it is possible, Nicola, you must give Sebastian a small medal—a decoration. He fished you out of the water when the boat sank. Of course, he could not save everyone, but you were special.”

Adrienne whisked away leaving behind her a momentarily silent couple.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” asked Nicola at last
.

“There was so little to tell. When I saw what had happened, I was able to get into another boat, then clamber along the small bridge which was wrecked. Then I brought you here,” he ended simply. After a pause he asked, “Why didn’t
you
tell me about those bills of your sister’s?”

“I thought it better not to.”

“And all the time you were here, your salary was going to pay all those debts for your sister. You must forgive me for believing that you were like her.”

“Of course.” She stretched out her hand to him.

“But there is still a long story to tell you,” he said.

“Not unless you want to tell me,” she said quietly.

“I must
.
Otherwise you will never understand why I was so angry because a mere photograph had been pulled out of a drawer. Eduardo is much older than I, more than ten years. He married in France, then he and Heloise spent some time there, then in the Pyrenees and
other parts of Spain. When I had qualified as a doctor and returned here for a short time,
I
fell in love with Heloise. Until then I had not known her very well, a few meetings, a few visits. But now—she was so beautiful, so gay and accomplished. She made my world, but she was my brother’s wife. She loved Eduardo and she had a child, Adrienne.”