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He was dressed formally and impeccably in a white dinner suit, his dark hair carefully groomed. He looked, I thought, incredibly handsome. Yet I thought it at a distance removed.
Un
moved.

‘What you mean,
senorita
, is that I am not often at these formal receptions here, that I prefer to go around and see my country and its ordinary people?’

‘And sometimes other countries’ people,’ I smiled.

‘Ah, you tease me. You remind me of my unconventional appearance at the Hacienda del Ortega?’

I nodded. I suppose I must have looked rather bleak, for he asked with concern, ‘I did not displease you, did I,
senorita
?’

I shook my head.

‘But that night when I kissed you in my car, when you had found Petiso,’ he bowed, ‘for that I deeply and humbly apologise.’

‘That’s all right. It was just a goodnight kiss.’

‘But unforgivable. I am too, what you say, quick off the mark. Too impetuous. I had no right to use you in that way.’

Treat would have been a better word than use, I thought. But naturally I didn’t correct him.

‘I am a very imperfect person.’ He looked genuinely and, unnecessarily really, penitent.

‘That’s all right,’ I assured him with conviction. ‘I like imperfect people.’

‘And I like you,
senorita
.’

Though we were surrounded by groups of elegantly dressed people brightly talking, laughing and clinking glasses, there seemed just then to be a lull in the conversation. A few heads turned and then politely looked away again.

‘Might I interrupt long enough to take a glass?’ an all-too-familiar voice asked pleasantly enough. I glanced round. Mr. Fitzgerald, similarly attired to Don Ramon, looked not just handsome, but strong and capable as well. And I noticed all this with a dreadful immediacy. ‘What is it they’re serving tonight, Madeleine?’

‘I don’t know, Mr. Fitzgerald. Some sort of fruit julep, I think.’

‘James,’ he corrected gently, ‘on social occasions.’

‘Forgive me, Senorita Madruga,’ put in Don Ramón, ‘I am monopolising your attention and distracting you from your duties.’

He bowed to me, clicked his heels to James and drifted away towards the group surrounding H.E.

‘What was it he called you?’ Mr. Fitzgerald asked derisively. ‘Madruga?’

I nodded, flushing with embarrassment that I should ever be called, even in Charaguay, by such a glamorous name.

He eyed me over the rim of his glass. Then he said coolly, changing the subject, ‘You don’t need to help Chico much longer with the drinks. Mrs. Mallenport wouldn’t want that.’ He looked at his watch. ‘About another fifteen minutes, then circulate. That’s what Eve used to do,’

I said nothing. I watched his tall head and shoulders as he made his way through the throng. Once or twice I heard his voice and his oddly infectious laugh. At the end of the fifteen minutes I left Chico and began the rather daunting task of trying to circulate.

Kind-hearted as always, Morag beckoned me over. She wore a freshly laundered white blouse, and the tapestry skirt had been washed. But in all the time I was in Charaguay I never saw her in anything else. I rarely saw her in off duty time without the faithful Alex Ashford in tow.

‘We’re just checking up on the transport and escorts for Hananda Day.’

I’d had most of them already from Hester. I knew I’d been roped in for this big day for the shoeshine boys— rather like our nineteenth-century Mothering Sunday— when they return to the villages of their origin. I also knew that Petiso came from one of the more inaccessible and deserted ones, and that he’d specially asked that I accompany him. But she went through it all again with me.

‘It’s a frightfully grotty journey, but Petiso has quite lost his black wee heart to you, Madeleine.’

‘Nice to know someone has,’ I smiled, meaning it as just a laughing disclaimer. But somehow it came out wrongly.

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say he was the only one by a long chalk,’ Ashford assured me diplomatically, puffing away at his pipe.

‘Nor would I,’ Morag supported him loyally, squeezing his big freckled hand.

But I knew it wasn’t true. No one had lost their heart to me. I had not the dramatic looks of Hester Mallenport, or the beauty and perfection of Eve Trent. Nor had I anything like all Morag’s marvellous qualities.

They all liked me well enough, I think, with the certain exception of Mr. Fitzgerald and the possible exception of Eve. But no one would break their hearts when I went. Petiso might if I didn’t go with him on Sunday week, and when I finally left for London he’d probably remember me for a day or so.

I left Morag and Alex Ashford and drifted round making polite dutiful conversation. I caught a glimpse of Hester’s dark red hair shimmering under the light of the crystal chandelier, of Mrs. Mallenport in earnest conversation with El Presidente’s wife. Everyone seemed to be chatting away happily in their own little groups. I found myself alone by the glass doors. They were open.

I wandered out on to the terrace. Well above the tree tops a huge full moon rode high and clear in an empty sky. Not a trail of cloud, not a puff of wind. Not a star bright enough to withstand the blanching white light.

The garden was deserted, but full of little sounds and scurries. The moon flung the shadows of the trees and the shrubs on the lawn. I leaned my arms on the cool stone parapet, as on the deck rail of a ship, and stooped over, drawing in the soft scents. I could identify many of the flowers and shrubs now
—terciopelo
and
copo de oro
,
ara- fuaney
and
bucade
, just as I could identify the sound of the
chingolos
who sang so sweetly at dawn.

I don’t know how long I stood there. I heard H.E. announce in the room behind me, in his relaxed easy way, that dancing was now beginning in the sitting room —and oh, yes, as an afterthought, Quicha had just been put on Earthquake Red Alert.

After that, the voices dimmed in the room behind me. I heard music floating out through the sitting room window and dancing feet mixing in with the sound of the imperturbable bullfrogs. I heard revving car engines as those on that night’s alert duty left the party.

It was, I thought, listening to the music, like the night of Waterloo. I looked up at that romantic equatorial moon, that mysterious magnet of the earth’s unstable crust, as well as of mere mortals’ more unstable hearts. Earthquakes, like falling in love, nearly always happen at the full of the moon. I shivered—and then I stopped shivering.

I didn’t know how long he’d been beside me, resting his arms on the stone balustrade. My eyes had been fixed like Juliet’s on the inconstant moon. Now they came to rest on James Fitzgerald’s face, half in moonlight, half in shadow. But constant. And I must not, as Eve had said, mix kindness with anything else.

I suppose I must have drawn my breath in with a sobbing sigh, because he asked gently, ‘Not frightened, are you?’

I was very frightened—frightened of myself, frightened of him. But I shook my head.

‘You know yourself that ninety-nine times out of a hundred these warnings come to nothing.’

I crossed my fingers and nodded. It seemed quite wrong, at a time like this, to think about one’s own affairs when the whole immediate world might come tumbling down. But I suppose that’s exactly the time one does.

‘Is there something else worrying you, then?’ He put his hands on my shoulders and turned me round to face him. I could feel his fingers warm and firm through the thin silk of my dress. Before an earthquake, I’d learned, everything goes very still and silent. No birds sing, not an insect moves. The world holds its breath.

I held mine. I couldn’t hear any rustling in the undergrowth. I couldn’t hear the bullfrogs any more. The rush of traffic along the roads seemed to have stopped. The only thing that hadn’t stopped was my heart.

I raised my eyes slowly and miserably to his face. It was now fully in shadow, but I sensed that his expression was regretful, pitying. I felt my eyes fill with tears, and then the worst ten minutes of my grown-up life began.

No, the earth didn’t open—at least only metaphorically. In a quiet measured voice Mr. Fitzgerald began, in the nicest, gentlest possible way, wrapping it up as best he could.

‘Madeleine.’ He gave my shoulders a gentle shake, brotherly and boyish. ‘Don’t look so miserable.' He removed one hand from my shoulder to tilt up my chin. He removed the other to take out, from his elegant white trousers, a handkerchief, warm from his body. Gently he dabbed my eyes. That done, he rested his hands once more on my shoulders. ‘This sort of thing happens to everyone sooner or later.'

‘I don’t know what sort of thing you mean,’ I said thickly.

‘Yes, you do.’ He shook my shoulders. ‘You’re an intelligent girl, a
nice
girl.'

I shuddered.

‘But for all you’ve got dash and spirit, you’ve got a streak of innocence a mile wide.’

‘Like the earthquake fault?’ I tried to laugh but didn’t succeed.

‘Oh, it’s not a fault,’ he corrected, ‘it’s a virtue. But it leads you into trouble, especially when you’re romantic as well.’

‘I am?'

‘Very.’

‘I’ve always been very level-headed.'

‘On the surface. But underneath you’re not. You imagine romance,’ he spoke regretfully, ‘where frankly none is.’

I tried not to let him feel my shoulders stiffen under his hands.

‘You seem to know me better than I know myself,’ I said coldly, wrapping what remnants of dignity I had around myself.

He nodded curtly, but did not declaim it.

‘Then the situation,’ he went on quietly, ‘is romantic. You’re not used to this sort of thing. It’s easy to imagine oneself in love.'

‘What exactly are you telling me?’ I asked, knowing exactly what he was saying.

‘I’m telling you, for your own good, that there’s someone else.’

There was a small silence. I couldn’t even feel my heart. Perhaps like Don Ramon’s it had been turned to stone. The rest of me seemed to have been. Nothing stirred in the garden. An unseen shadow crept up over the moon. And as if to emphasise my world’s little downfall, a low rumble began.

Far out among the mountains, it gathered strength. I felt the terrace shimmer under my feet. And as if an invisible drunken hand had brandished a cake knife, a crack appeared in the white concrete between the lions at the bottom of the steps.

Then the rumbling faded like thunder. Normal sounds returned. Bullfrogs croaked, as if never interrupted. Small animals scrabbled and scrambled in the dry undergrowth. Traffic honked and hummed along the road. The dance music played—maybe it had never stopped. My heart found its unhappy rhythm.

‘Was that all it was?’ I asked James Fitzgerald. I’m not sure whether I meant the earthquake or his warning to me not to fall in love with him.

He interpreted it as the latter.

‘That’s all,’ he replied stiffly. ‘I just thought I’d warn you.’

‘Unnecessarily, as it happens, thank you.’ I held my head up high. The moon shone bright and clear again. ‘I’m not in love with anyone,’ I said.

‘No one?’

‘No one.’

I half expected there to be another louder tremor at the magnitude of that lie. But there were no more. Only my private earthquake of self-discovery. That I loved James Fitzgerald. And no doubt I would go on counting the cost of that for the rest of my life.

On the surface everything was unchanged. Next morning Chico filled up the crack at the bottom of the steps with concrete, and all that week, round the city, similar small cracks were plastered and cemented over. The sun shone. The dangerous full moon waned to its late rising third quarter. My private cracks, my own landslide remained undetected.

That other cracks could so remain did' not then dawn on me. I was busy, both at the Embassy and out of office hours. Several trade delegations were visiting Quicha, and H.E. was busy advising, negotiating, entertaining. There were numerous letters, reports, figures, field studies to be typed and circulated. I saw little of Hester, but I heard much of Eve. Her progress continued. I got into the habit of measuring my time in Charaguay by that progress.

‘She’s hobbling around quite effectively now, sir,’ Mr. Fitzgerald said in answer to H.E.’s query at the end of our monthly staff meeting. ‘If it weren’t for the stairs,’ he raised one eyebrow deprecatingly, ‘she’d have been back at her desk in a couple of weeks.’

‘Should have put in a lift when they built this place. Penny wise, pound foolish.’ H.E. shook his head. ‘All the same, no sense in Eve rushing things. Nature won’t be hurried. You’ve just got a report from her medical man, haven’t you, James?’

Mr. Fitzgerald nodded. Since he was in charge of personnel, and security and discipline, all such things eventually found their way to him. Even my visit to the Charaguayan doctor selected by the Embassy, the fresh dressing he’d put on my hand, the anti-tetanus jab he’d given me, a report on this would have found its way to his office and be scrutinised by his unimpassioned gaze.

‘He did, in fact, recommend convalescence,’ Mr. Fitzgerald said.

‘But Eve doesn’t want to go?'

‘She doesn’t like to leave us . . .'

‘With me?' I asked sharply. ‘Or in the lurch?’

‘Don’t interrupt, young lady. He meant neither,' the Ambassador said with kindly severity. ‘James was about to say that Eve did not want to leave us when we’re so busy. But you must prevail upon her, James.’

‘I’ll do my best, sir.’

‘If anyone can persuade her, you can.'

‘On the other hand, the F.C.O. will probably be wanting Miss Bradley back.' His voice was carefully neutral.

From the other side of the room, Bill Green blinked disbelievingly. He turned his rosy face to his two seniors. Ashford crossed one leg over the other and blew a thoughtful puff of pipe smoke to the ceiling.