From Barcelona, with Love (5 page)

Standing next to the car, Lorenza saw her and laughed. “It wouldn't be the same without you here, Buena.” She walked across the gravel, careful in her high red heels, took the single wide step in one stride, and flung her arms around her old friend.

“How many years has it been since we were first here?” she asked into the tangle of hairpins above Buena's left ear.

Buena said, “Must I remind you again that
I
was here first. I arrived the day before you, yourself, came. The bride.”

Of course Lorenza didn't need to be reminded. Buena's had been the only welcoming face she'd encountered that day. The others—Juan Pedro's family, his children, had stared sullenly at her over their glasses of chilled Ravel Manzanilla sherry, then had kissed the air next to her cheek.

“You were so lovely, Señora,” Buena said, stepping aside so Lorenza could enter. “All in white satin, with a long train embroidered with pearls and a white orchid in your hair.”

“And Juan Pedro's gold ring on my finger. The family didn't like that then, Buena. And you know only too well, they don't like it today. To them I was always the interloper, stealing their mother's thunder, even her name. Of course, I understood. She died too young. But I was young too, and it was my wedding day and I was damned if I was going to knuckle under and wear a beige dress and a hat. I wanted Juan Pedro to see me as his bride.”

Lorenza's dark eyes crinkled with laughter as she met Buena's. “After all, he had to see he was getting his money's worth, didn't he?”

She looked around her house. It had started life a couple of centuries ago as a tiny theater, dedicated to operetta, the only reminders of which were the two ornate little boxes curving out from the mezzanine, one each side of the wide marble staircase. Their red plush upholstery had faded to a silvery blush, entwined cupids blew golden trumpets across their stucco fronts, and pairs of narrow wooden doors, pale green and gilt, enclosed their privacy.

Naturally, there had been stories of a shadowy “diva,” a ghostly lady in an elegant wide-brimmed hat and a gleam of diamonds. She was, so the story went, still waiting for the lover who never showed up.

“Then she should get herself up and out and get another lover,” practical Lorenza snapped, when Juan Pedro first told her the tale. She had no time for ghosts. Of course she had never seen her. “That's because no ‘other woman' would dare show her face in Lorenza's house,” her husband had said, laughing. And that was probably true.

To the left was the
salón,
used only for formal parties, and later for Juan Pedro's memorial. His “wake” as Lorenza preferred to call it, because she liked the way the Irish gave a party to say goodbye to the dead instead of a somber meeting.

To the right was the formal dining room, painted on her orders, a glowing yellow that at night reflected the candlelight like sunshine. They had held dinner parties for twenty there, with her favorite old-fashioned Coquille St. Jacques—scallops on the half shell—for starters and chocolate/sherry soufflés for dessert, served with the local Catalonian white wine with its slight fizz known as Txakoli, as well as a good deep red from Rioja.

Looking round, Lorenza now said to Buena, “We built memories around that table.”

“And you will again, Señora,” Buena said firmly, following her as she walked down the hall to the library.

The door was open and Lorenza stood there, looking into her past, seeing herself and Juan Pedro, him on the sofa with the cat lolling against him, and she opposite, long legs tucked under, listening to Joni Mitchell singing about tearing down paradise and putting up parking lots, or else the soft Brazilian sambas of Bebel Gilberto, and sometimes Schubert's Unfinished Symphony played so loud her husband would cover his ears, groaning. She'd watch him reading the morning papers, catching up with the news, checking his messages on the laptop he hated because he was old enough to prefer things on paper that he could handle, and not messages winged at him through thin air.

He was still so good-looking; those fine wide cheekbones held his face firmly, his chin had only a hint of fullness—she would never call it “sag”—his deep-set eyes under the heavy brows, his sensual mouth that often she would get up just to kiss. In their year of courtship—seduction, she always called it, making him laugh—and their eight years of marriage, she had never tired of making love with her husband.

“You know why I look this good?” she would ask, curled up next to him in bed at night, or very often in the afternoons, because making love was what she said a Spanish siesta was really for. “It's because I'm a woman who gets fucked a lot.” His snort of outraged laughter made her laugh too. “Well, what else can I call it?” she asked, licking his mouth that still tasted of her. “People can tell, you know. I have that kind of glow about me.”

He sat up and looked at her. “That you do,” he said solemnly. “I don't know if I can keep up with you.”

“Don't worry, I'll help you,” Lorenza remembered saying, making him laugh again.

“I always was a sexy bitch,” she'd added, and Juan Pedro had put his hand over her mouth to stop her. “Don't tell me,” he'd begged. “I don't want to know about the others.”

So she had told him nothing about her past, other than her childhood on the Iberian island of Majorca, and of being sent to a strict convent school in Brussels at the age of thirteen, and then breaking all the rules in a glorious few years of newfound freedom at university, in Florida.

Now, alone, she walked into their library, their “special” place, and took her usual seat on the big pale yellow wing chair opposite Juan Pedro's sofa. She'd had the walls painted when she moved in, a pale azure, hand-rubbed to a smudgy softness. She'd always liked the way her yellow chair looked against them. The sofa, though, was amber linen, indented on the side where Juan Pedro always sat. The cashmere sweater he had thrown over his shoulders the night he died lay where she had left it across the back of the sofa, neutral color, soft, the sleeves neatly folded together.

“I wonder,” Lorenza said softly, to herself, “I wonder if I can really ever come back here.”

“Your room is ready, Señora,” Buena said from the doorway. “And the children will be here soon. Better hurry. You know how impatient they always are.”

Lorenza sighed. Didn't she just?

 

Chapter 6

Lorenza walked upstairs
and into the large sun-filled bedroom she had shared with her husband. She stood for a moment, sniffing the air; she could swear she still smelled him, and if she closed her eyes she knew she would see him, lying on the bed waiting for her, the gray silk coverlet thrown back, naked but for his shorts and with a sheaf of papers in his hand because Juan Pedro never wasted a moment, he was always working.

Sighing, she gathered herself together. She put her handbag down on the ottoman at the foot of the bed, a habit that always annoyed her husband—he said it got in the way of his feet. He was very tall but even so, Lorenza told him that was just plain ridiculous. He simply liked everything to be put away in its rightful place and not scattered around “his” room. It's
our
room, she would remind him.

She went and stood by the window, arms folded over her chest, gazing down at the quiet courtyard, thinking about the past, and then about the future. About what was to come.

There was no love lost between Lorenza and Juan Pedro's children. They'd resented her from day one and they resented her even more when their father left her the controlling shares in the Ravel sherry business, along with the estates and the other vineyards and houses that went with it. Of course they had all been amply taken care of, earlier, with handsome trust funds as well as shares in the business, even though none of them had even the remotest interest in the family wineries. Things had changed, though, since Lorenza was in charge.

Expected today were Juan Pedro's only son, Antonio, and two of his daughters, Jassy and Floradelisa, all by his first wife, and all of whom stood to inherit from Lorenza, who had no children of her own. And then there was Bibi of course, the youngest, the daughter of his second wife, who died when she was born.

Turning from the window, she sat at the gilded Venetian satinwood vanity table that Juan Pedro had complained was out of place in this heavy-beamed Spanish room, with the hint of stone exposed through the pale creamy paint.

“The stone is to let reality in,” Lorenza told him solemnly when she'd done it. “Just in case things go wrong and we have to return to that old Ravel stone cottage.” Of course that had made him laugh; “There is no old stone cottage anymore,” he'd said. “This is it. And it's all yours.” And now it was.

She ran a comb through her mass of shoulder-length black hair, bemoaning the fact that it was totally uncontrollable. Always had been. It floated around her face in a movable dark cloud and God help her if she were ever caught in a wind because then it stood on end and she looked ready for takeoff. Her hair, she decided, was not her best feature, though others felt differently. And indeed it gave her somehow too-round face character, as did the widely set dark brown eyes, and the too-big mouth she colored again with Lancôme's fuchsia lipstick. Beauty was in the eye of the beholder, she thought, amused, and she had never seen herself as that.

She wasn't bad though, for forty-one, thinner than she had been at twenty, still bosomy, though now trimmer from hard work and the stress that also showed on her face. She turned away from the too-revealing mirror. The truth was anyone but the owner of that face would have called her lovely. A lovely woman, Doña Lorenza de Ravel. And a woman to be reckoned with.

She went and checked herself in the long mirror: plain black suit, skirt just to the knee, pearls at the neck. The grieving widow, she thought with a pang.

Nervous, she pulled at her three-strand pearl choker, suddenly feeling as if it were strangling her. Juan Pedro's beautiful gift had once upon a time belonged to a famous French aristocrat whose head had been chopped off, come the revolution and the guillotine, while those
tricoteuse
knitted away, screaming with delight. Lorenza had been relieved to hear they had not been on the poor woman's pretty neck at the time.

“There's no blood on these pearls,” Juan Pedro told her, seeing her stricken look. “She was young, and, they say, quite lovely and I have no doubt she would smile to see you wearing them.” Sometimes though, in moments of stress, like now, those pearls seemed to tighten up on Lorenza's neck.

Tires spun on the gravel. She went to look. It was Antonio, Juan Pedro's only son, his eldest child. In fact Antonio was almost exactly the same age as Lorenza, something that had certainly not pleased him when his father had introduced her as his new wife-to-be.

Of course, Antonio
would
be first to arrive. Lorenza would bet he couldn't wait to hear what was going on, hoping she was going to give it all up and hand over the reins to him. We'll see, she thought, as she walked down the stairs and took a seat on one of the two cream-brocade sofas fronting the empty marble fireplace, that instead of crackling logs held a haphazard display of flowers hastily flung together by Buena.

She did not get up when Antonio strode into the room, but she did smile and hold out her hand, while thinking that Antonio never simply “walked” into a room, he always “strode.” He was tall and dark, not handsome but with his father's compelling eyes and beaky nose.

“Lorenza,” he said, in the same hearty tones that made you understand he was very much a presence. “Good to see you,” he added, not meaning it, as he bowed over her hand, then took a seat opposite.

“Good to see you too, Antonio,” she said, not meaning it either. It had hurt once but no longer mattered, except that he was Juan Pedro's son and now ran the sherry business. Lorenza had handed him that job a year or two after she'd inherited the vineyards, after she had learned all she could about vines and grapes and terrain, and also made the decision to make wine as well as sherry. Antonio had been reluctant at first, though now he did a good job, even though he was a playboy who liked the good life and the clubs and cheated on his wife.

Antonio's home was, of necessity, in Jerez, in Andalusia, where sherry is produced, and where the Ravel family vineyards had existed for a couple of centuries. With easy access to the playgrounds of Marbella, and the Costa del Sol, where Antonio was a well-known figure, always with a pretty woman—who was definitely not his wife—the location suited him just fine. Anyway, he knew he was better off away from Barcelona and Lorenza's long reach and knowing eye.

“You look beautiful,” he told her now, insincerely. “As always.”

“Why, thank you, Antonio. I wish your father could have been here to hear you say that. He always believed you thought me vulgar and too sexy for my own good. Or his.”

“Oh, God, Lorenza.” Antonio rolled up his eyes and fiddled with his Hermès tie, a pattern of tiny green turtles running on a pink background, a frivilous contrast to his impeccably cut dark blue pinstripe suit.

“I like your tie,” Lorenza said, with a flash of mischief. “I've never figured out why men hate wearing ties when really it's the only pretty thing they're allowed. A touch of color, you know. Though,” she added, eyeing him up and then down again, “somehow I've always envisioned a winemaker as a man of the earth. You know, in khakis or blue jeans, an old plaid shirt. A man comfortable with himself.”

Antonio had been given his hardworking grandfather's name, plain and simple, but there was nothing plain and simple or hardworking about the grandson. He smoldered, silently now, thinking about his stepmother. He had never, ever, referred to Lorenza as his father's “wife,” eliminating her any way he could from “the family” even though she now
owned
that family. Right now, Antonio felt like killing his stepmother but contented himself with a dark glare that, had Lorenza been looking, would have told her so. Before he could make a stinging reply the doorbell rang and Buena, who had been lurking behind it, quickly flung it open.