The House of Adriano (14 page)

CHAPTER VII

The
dinner party seemed well on the way to becoming a complete success. The food was wonderful, although Aileen was quite sure she did not have the faintest idea what she was eating half the time. She did recognise one of the dishes as chicken, though, and it seemed to have been braised in some manner with ham and different vegetables and seasoned with peppers. Some of the other dishes could have been composed of just about anything.

Toying with a little fancy mould of cream and fruit, Aileen glanced around her, trying to keep her interest as unobtrusive as possible, as she had been doing all evening.

It had started with the introduction to Alesandra Pereira - and the girl was so breathtakingly beautiful that for the moment Aileen had not been able to say anything. Only of medium height, but every inch of her figure exquisite, sleek black hair drawn back into an exotic chignon and large dark eyes that could be veiled and enigmatic, or glow with slumbrous fires. Clearly the type of woman for Duarte Adriano. Clearly the type of woman that any man would appreciate. But Aileen found she did not like her in the least. Whether it was imagination or not, she thought she detected something just slightly supercilious in the girl’s manner.

Looking across the table at her, Aileen watched how the dark eyes smiled when Duarte looked at her, how her hand touched his arm in an attitude that was surely possessive, as if she knew that she would be the girl he married. Well, she was quite welcome to him, Aileen decided, annoyed at her interest in the matter. Such a position might have its advantages, but it would also most definitely have its disadvantages, one of which would most surely be very little personal individuality. She had already noticed how one or two of those very aristocratic ladies around the table seemed to follow their husbands’ every lead, as if they had no ideas at all of their own.

“Looking at the gorgeous Alesandra,” Renfrew whispered
a
t her side, and she turned to him with a smile and admitted that she was. “Beautiful, but not really my type,” he added in the same soft whisper that would not carry to anyone else.

Aileen could not help smiling. “I thought she would be any man’s type, Mr. Renfrew.”

“Not every man likes sugar, spice and an empty mind,” he retorted.

Aileen shook her head. “I’m sure she’s very intelligent.”

“I didn’t mean that.” He gave an almost derisive little smile “I’m sure the lovely Alesandra knows which side her bread’s buttered - nice thick Adriano butter,” he added.

“So you too think she’ll marry Duarte,” Aileen commented.

“Everyone is more of less expecting an announcement. He’ll have to marry some time to keep that
el
ite family of his going,” which was more or less what Dona Teresa had implied.

Again Aileen could not help smiling. “You don’t mince your words, do you?”

“Do you mind?” he countered.

“Not really, I suppose.” She gave him a curious glance. “Why do you think she has an empty mind? She has probably been very well educated.”

“There’s more than one sort of education. Now take that little Italian girl who’s married to that stiff-necked Luis Colini. She came from a progressive family, but she had to fall in love with a Colini, and they’re worse than the Adrianos when it comes to timeworn customs. She’s been educated to use her mind, to talk about serious things, but he doesn’t believe a woman should be like that. He can’t accept the idea that you can really talk to a woman. Most of these Spaniards are like that. They think a woman is made to make love to, to flatter and, if you’re rich, surround with beautiful things. She has charge of the home. It’s her whole life and the focal point is her husband and taking care of her children. He goes out in the evenings and chats with his cronies. He doesn’t think of staying home and having a serious conversation with his wife. It wouldn’t occur to him, because most of them couldn’t hold a serious conversation anyway.”

She remembered that Eric had more or less said the same thing, but it seemed strange to hear it coming from a man who was almost a stranger to her.

“You’re an odd man,” she said after a moment. “Do you talk to everyone like that?”

He grinned. “Not everyone. Maybe I’m making sure you understand what Spanish marriage is like, in case you ever get the idea of marrying one of them.”

She shook her head instantly, yet at the same time wondered why there should be a strange pain in her heart.

“I assure you, there’s nothing like that in my mind, Mr. Renfrew. If I ever get married, I’d like it to be a partnership.”

“Only
if
-
you probably will,” he retorted with another grin. “And call me Bart. We’re not these stiff-necked Spanish. I’m damned if I’m going to wait a couple of months before I decorously ask if I can call you Aileen.”

“You’re very sure of yourself.” Her smile told him she was not annoyed. “All right, Bart.”

“It gets results.” That grin of his was too infectious. She shook her head, laughing again.

“I’ve heard all sorts of things about the Lone Star State. After meeting you, I’m beginning to believe them.”

“Don’t let it frighten you.”

“I won’t.”

Suddenly, as if some instinct had made her glance round, she saw Duarte watching her, but it was impossible to guess anything from his expression. It remained completely enigmatic until the familiar trace of a mocking smile crossed his face.

“Drat the man!” she muttered under her breath, but it must have been loud enough for Bart to hear.

“Don’t go falling for one of Madrid’s most eligible bachelors,” He grinned again. “I won’t mention any names. I think you know who I mean.”

Aileen stiffened. "Duarte, you mean?” she asked deliberately, then shrugged with a cool little laugh. “I’m hardly likely to. I don’t even like the man.”

“Why did you accept the job, then?”

“Because of Peter, of course.”

The infectious grin that hardly ever seemed absent from his face came back again.

“So the estimable Duarte knocks sparks off you, does he?”
His smile died momentarily. “Don’t let him worry you. He’s just not used to your type of girl.”

That was probably the whole reason for his almost deliberate jibing at her, Aileen told herself. He was so used to the clinging, ultra-feminine women of his own country that the sharp little digs he threw out occasionally were probably designed to find out what, in slang terms, made her tick. The very first time they had met he had called her unnatural for preferring a career to marriage. Of course that was more or less her own fault, for allowing him to believe that she had no interest in marriage, but her own fault or not, it did not give him the right to criticise. Only a little while ago he had had the audacity to suggest an experiment with moonlight and soft-scented gardens, to see if she was as emotionally invulnerable as she made out. She was quite certain what he meant by that - and equally certain that if he ever did do anything like it she would detest him even more than she did now. Anyway, she could not imagine him descending to anything like light philandering, whether in a derisive manner or not. As a man he could be quite infuriating, but he never entirely forgot that he was Duarte Adriano, Conde de Marindos, and that was the whole crux of the matter. He might take a passing interest in deriding her independence, but it would never go any further than that.

After dinner, finished off with coffee, they went into an adjoining salon. Dona Teresa sat on an exquisite little sofa, almost like a queen holding court, and Duarte circulated among his guests, courtly and charming. The tropical dinner suit he wore suited his dark good looks to perfection and there was not a trace of the mocking amusement a certain Aileen Lawrence usually called forth in him. Probably if she had met him for the first time like this she would have come to the undivided opinion that he was completely charming.

After a little while she found herself with the group around Dona Teresa. Alesandra and her mother, Senora Pereira, were also there, and once again she felt the lovely dark girl’s eyes on her with that subtle hint of supercilious hostility.

“You must tell us about this Australia you come from,” Senora Pereira said, for all the world as if the country was some
unknown little island, Aileen thought crossly, or some unearthly place on another world one of those space rockets everyone was shooting up might have discovered.

Nevertheless she smiled as charmingly as she could, even though she was beginning to dislike the elder Pereira as much as her daughter.

“You should hardly have asked an Australian to tell you about her country,” she said lightly. “I can’t help being biased. I don’t think there’s another country like it.”

“It is a pleasant thing to like one’s country above all others,” Alesandra commented in her exquisitely toned voice. “You would not wish to live in another country permanently, then?”

“Not unless there was a very good reason,” Aileen replied, feeling the hint of something implied in the Spanish girl’s remark. Probably dropping a hint that when she was the Condesa de Marindos she would not want any young girl around whose status in the family was rather undefined.

“One understands that you are the aunt of the little Peter,” Senora Pereira commented, as if she had hesitated whether or not to change the name into its Spanish form.

“Yes,” Aileen confirmed, just a little shortly. She did not mind answering questions, but there was something about this inquisition that annoyed her strangely, as if it was based on hostility and not just curiosity.

“Then his mother was your sister?” the Senora persisted.

“No, merely a friend. When she and her husband were killed, I adopted Peter.”

“And when Duarte found you he had to take both and not just his nephew?” Alesandra laughed.

The words were quite joking on the surface, but again Aileen sensed that hidden hostility, although why on earth somebody like Alesandra Pereira should feel hostility towards her after only a single meeting was beyond her. Although life was like that sometimes, she told herself. It was very easy to dislike a person on a single meeting, or just a brief encounter even, without any words being spoken. She did not like Alesandra, so perhaps her own dislike was being communicated in some manner, even though she had been just as polite and courteous, on the surface, as the other girl. Alesandra might sense it and was reciprocating
the feeling in the same manner.

“Something like that,” she said, making her reply a joke too. “Actually ... Senor Adriano
...
”
she did not know what to call him, so played safe by remaining quite formal, “thought it would be better if somebody Peter knew and was quite used to came over here with him, so that it would not be such an upheaval as if he had been brought here on his own, knowing nobody.”

“I think she intended to be here only for a short while,” Dona Teresa said, entering the conversation, “until Peter was well settled, but I am hopeful of persuading her to remain here permanently. I find I like her company very much,” and she turned and smiled directly at Aileen, so that the latter had to restrain an impulse to hug her.

An elderly gentleman whose name Aileen had forgotten shook his head almost regretfully.

“
And
the young man who no doubt waits for her?”

“There is no young man,” Aileen said with a smile.

“No young man!” He shook his head chidingly this time. “Have the men of Australia then no eyes? We see pictures of them from the Olympics ... so big and bronzed ... and yet they pass over a very pretty girl like you?”

“I think you mistake the matter,” Duarte’s voice put in suddenly from behind her. “I am told that a career is more important than marriage. That is why none of these bronzed Australians have been allowed to place a ring on her finger.”

“But what career is more important to a woman than marriage?” Alesandra asked with a puzzled glance, an attitude Aileen was sure was quite assumed, not because the Spanish girl was of the opinion that any career
was
more important than marriage, but to give the impression that anyone who did think so was a very strange creature indeed. “This ... this career of yours
...
?”
she said, turning to Aileen with an enquiring little glance, still smiling though.

“I was doing secretarial work,” Aileen told her.

“And your parents did not object?”
Senor
a Pereira asked.

“Why should they have done?” Aileen countered evenly. “Most girls go out to work as soon as they are old enough to. And, in any case, my parents were dead.”

“We are behind the times,” Dona Teresa put in with a twinkle in her eyes. “In other countries they encourage their daughter to commence a career, so that if she does not wish to marry, then she need not do so.”

“How strange,” Alesandra said in that little wondering voice, and Aileen felt she could have strangled her. “And having commenced this career, you became convinced that you would prefer it to marriage?”

“Shall we say that I found it made me a little too independent for marriage?” Aileen answered calmly.

Dona Teresa laughed softly, with a return of the almost impish twinkle in her eyes.

“Perhaps independence will fly out of the window when love comes in the door,” she suggested.

“I’ll face that when it happens - if it ever does.”

“It will happen,” Dona Teresa said confidently. “And strangely I have the feeling that it is near.” The twinkle in her eyes became even more pronounced. “Perhaps love will come to you in Spain and we shall find you a Spanish husband.”

“Then you will learn how sweet marriage can become,” Alesandra said with an almost dreamy smile. “Love is a woman’s whole existence and her husband and children the heart of her life. Nothing else matters. Her husband’s every wish and every word becomes her law and she desires nothing but to please him.”

“One would think you were already married,” Duarte said almost teasingly.

Alesandra smiled and said nothing, but her large, soft eyes darted one quick glance at him, demure and yet with a secret invitation. It was an invitation he had probably half accepted, if the rumours around Madrid were true.

The conversation changed after that and, finding herself on the outskirts of the group, Aileen looked around the room, taking in the conventional dinner attire of the men, the exquisite dresses of the women, fairly simple, as it was only a small dinner party, but all of them giving the impression that they had never known the feeling of being short of money. Self-assured men - and Duarte the most self-assured and distinguished of them all - silken soft, luxurious women and the beautiful, exquisitely appointed room with its suggestion of restrained wealth.

Bart caught her glance and came over to her. “How are you making out?”

Aileen smiled and held up crossed fingers. “So far so good. I seem to have set up quite a flutter among the ladies, though. They think I prefer a career to marriage.”

“I hope you don’t. I’ve seen enough career women in my own country.”

Aileen smiled slightly. “And you don’t like them?”

“No man really does at heart, I suppose.” That irrepressible grin came back. “We don’t like to think the little woman can get along without us.”

Aileen laughed, because somehow she could not get annoyed at the way he said it, although she knew quite well that such a remark coming from Duarte would have most certainly rubbed her up the wrong way.

“Conceited,” she said jokingly.

“I guess we are in a way,” he said, with no sign of apology. “You don’t really mean this career racket, do you?”

“Of course not. I’m just like any other girl. I’d like to get married and have a home of my own, but I wouldn’t marry just for those reasons. You can laugh if you like, but I’m old-fashioned enough to think there should be love as well.”

“Good girl,” he said with quiet sincerity. “Guess I’m old-fashioned too.” There was a slight pause and he slanted a quizzical glance at her. “Then how come this idea that you’re obsessed with having a career and wouldn’t even entertain the idea of marriage?”

Aileen laughed and told him how it had happened. “He infuriated me so much I just couldn’t help it,” she ended. “Now I’m stuck with it.”

He laughed uproariously at that, and Aileen had the feeling that everyone suddenly turned to look at them.

“Please,
Bart...” she
whispered, but could not help
laughing
herself, because his mirth was so infectious.

“It seems that you find much to amuse each other,” Alesandra’s exquisitely modulated voice remarked.