An Undefended City Page 13

  'My privilege,' he said, which earned him a grateful look from Olivia.

  He bent over the back of his own seat and extracted a length of heavy petersham which had wound itself about the bracing struts of the seat. Thus freed, the heavy buckle proved easier to manage, although the spring was still too stiff for Olivia's small hands.

  `These things were obviously not built for a lady,' remarked Luis, giving her a singularly sweet smile.

  Olivia, who was about to apologise for her clumsiness, relaxed while the pilot volunteered that Don Octavio did not often carry passengers and the back seat was hardly ever used.

  After that the flight was reasonably harmonious. The noise of the machine made conversation an effort and, although Luis was prepared to exchange remarks with the pilot, Olivia found the struggle to shout above the din too much. Inevitably she sank into silence, and thence to contemplation. Much of her embarrassment, which had been dispelled by Luis earlier, now returned. She could not help thinking how annoyed Aunt Betty would be at her escapade. And when she announced her intention of marrying a virtual stranger—Olivia shuddered.

  By the time they arrived she had talked herself into a stew. When the pilot put the craft down on a back lawn and said with some degree of friendliness that she had arrived and the family were coming out of the house to welcome her, she said only,

  'Oh dear!'

  Luis, taking in the situation after one look at her white face, chuckled.

  'You couldn't sound less ready to be welcomed,' he told her in his teasing voice. 'It's all right, you won't have to make a speech.'

  'I think I'm going to be sick,' returned Olivia.

  'Well, that would certainly make a memorable arrival.' He turned round. 'Come along. Or can't you unbuckle yourself? It's not as difficult as doing the thing up. You only have to press the button.'

  But her hands were shaking too much. Her physical agitation was such that she actually appeared to be breathless and her finger ends had gone white, as if in severe cold.

  He undid the belt, saying in a voice for her ear alone, 'It won't take long. And no one is going to berate you the moment you touch down. Don't say anything and stay with me. I'll get you through this and then, when you've been hauled off to rest by your aunt, I'll tell Octavio. Just don't let your aunt start anything.'

  Olivia nodded mutely, by no means sure of her ability to follow instructions. In her own home she was reasonably good at taking evasive action when Aunt Betty was on the warpath, but in a strange house where she did not know the attics and quiet corners, she would be more easily pinned down. And once brought face to face with Aunt Betty she knew of no way of stemming the tide of that lady's eloquence.

  Fortunately for her the problem did not present itself. When she was eventually coaxed out of the helicopter she staggered, as much from the after-effects of flying as anything else, but the family could not be convinced of this. And she did look very pale and troubled. Aunt Betty, who beneath her bullying had a very real affection for her niece, took one look at her and discerned exhaustion.

  Olivia's escapade had been foolish and had caused everyone a lot of worry, but she did not look as if she had exactly enjoyed it herself. Indeed she looked so chastened that it occurred to Aunt Betty that Luis Escobar had taken her to task. As this was a privilege reserved for her aunt, the mere possibility caused offence. Aunt Betty, who had travelled to Cuernavaca as scheduled, had had to endure the complaints of the entire Villa family about Olivia's self-will and lack of consideration. She was therefore in a mood to take on the entire Mexican nation, should it breathe another word of criticism.

  As a result Olivia was tenderly borne off to the room prepared for her after the briefest salutations from her uncle, aunt and grandmother. The latter, terrifyingly ungrandmotherly with peroxide hair and silver-painted nails, was the only one who referred to her adventure.

  'I hope you enjoyed yourself,' she remarked, offering an expensive layer of powder for Olivia to kiss. do think you chose well. If I were your age I would certainly have made off with Luis.'

  Olivia, detecting mockery with that over-sensitivity which was Luis's bane, cringed. She thought that her grandmother was saying that Luis would not normally waste his time with a girl so very different from the sophisticated inmates of e Villa mansion.

  they were certainly all very elegant. Her aunt Isabel was wearing a flowered silk suit, which made Aunt Betty's own tailored skirt and shirt look homespun. While even Grandmother, very daring in jewel-coloured trousers and smock, could have been featuring on the front page of a fashion magazine rather than spending a quiet day with the family in the country.

  When Aunt Betty swept her into the house and away from all that terrifying elegance, Olivia was grateful.

  The peace of course did not last. Olivia, left in her third strange bedroom in three days, was too perturbed to rest as she was instructed and prowled instead round and round the apartment's spacious proportions. Her ears were permanently stretched for the slightest sound of commotion which would indicate that Luis had made his announcement. But she could detect nothing. The house drowsed on in well-bred calm.

  Olivia was on the point of quitting the room and running upon her fate when there came the sound of rapid footsteps and the door was flung open. Aunt Betty stood on the threshold, her eyes flashing. For a moment Olivia was so appalled that she was rooted to the spot. Then she perceived that, though her aunt was indubitably and strongly moved, her anger was not directed at herself.

  `That man!' began Miss Lightfellow, with loathing.

  Her niece, who had seldom before seen her driven out of her headmistressy habit of self-command and then only by mechanical rather than human failures, was impressed. The last time she had seen Aunt Betty in what the good lady herself would have described as such a taking was when the

  Light fellow chariot had broken down on the way to London, thereby ensuring that Aunt Betty lost her flight to Paris. The reflection caused Olivia some amusement and no little relief. Aunt Betty serenely mistress of herself and quite determined to guide Olivia was a formidable opponent. Aunt Betty spitting like a dispossessed cat, she could handle.

  `Luis?' she asked, with rather more ease than she might otherwise have found.

  `Your uncle.' Aunt Betty very nearly ground her teeth. `he has had the—the impertinence—the insolence—oh, words fail me!'

  `I can see they do.' Olivia pushed forward a velvet-covered chaise-longue and spoke in soothing tones. 'Why don't you sit down? What has my uncle done?'

  Aunt Betty took the proffered seat, but her bosom continued to heave and her eyes to dart sparks.

  `He had the gall to tell me—me, how to—oh, I could scream, I am so angry!'

  `How to . . .?' prompted Olivia. She was curious to discover on what subject her uncle had been so daring as to instruct her aunt. She was not left long in ignorance.

  `How to bring you up,' spat her aunt. Her own vehemence seemed to startle her and brought her up short. 'Oh, I'm sorry, Livvy, I shouldn't come and shout at you because Octavio has annoyed me. But a more pompous, overbearing, self-satisfied stick, I have never met.'

  Olivia made sympathetic noises. 'What did he actually say?'

  `Oh, that I should have told you that we had arranged a marriage between you and Diego so that you would have been quite prepared to behave when you got here,' said Aunt Betty disparagingly. 'Good God, the man is mediaeval, and so I told him.' She paused, considering the memory with a pleased expression. 'He went purple and puffed. I don't think he had ever been spoken to like that before in his life. Indeed that's what he told me. He's obviously become a complete despot. Your aunt Isabel has let him get away with far too much.'

  It was becoming apparent to Olivia that she could count

  on her aunt's support in the coming conflict with her uncle, if for no other reason than that the lady had an inbred dislike of being patronised. Uncle Octavio, did he but know it, had made a fatal mistake. -

  `I'm so
rry you quarrelled over me,' said Olivia with smug untruth.

  She received a sharp-eyed look in return.

  `You knew, didn't you? About the project with Diego, I mean? How did you know? Did you read one of Octavio's letters?'

  `Aunt!' Olivia was really shocked. 'Of course not. I overheard something you were saying to—to Luis,' she went pink at the name, but Aunt Betty, still seething from her own Homeric encounter, did not notice the fact. 'I hadn't the slightest suspicion. It would never have occurred to me. I didn't want to get married and I didn't realise that anyone else wanted me to. No one has ever said anything.'

  `Well, we didn't want you to get married to just anybody,' averred her aunt. `Diego seemed suitable, and you'd met him when he spent that summer with us the year your father died.'

  `That hardly counts as knowing him, though. I hardly saw him. What time he didn't spend with my father he was out entertaining himself. I don't suppose I've had more than an hour's conversation with him in my life.'

  `No,' agreed Aunt Betty, sighing. 'And that,' returning to the attack on the absent Octavio, `is exactly why I didn't say anything to you. I thought that if you met Diego and liked him, well and good. But your uncle seems to think that I should have simply informed you you were about to be married and left it at that. I told him,' concluded Aunt Betty with relish, `that women weren't slaves in England any longer, no matter what they might have to put up with in Mexico.'

  Olivia hugged her. 'Oh, you are so brave,' she said. 'How did you dare to talk to Uncle Octavio like that?'

  Aunt Betty sniffed. `Tinpot tyrant! What could he do except look sour and say he was very displeased? I'll bet he was,' she said, descending into a cheerful vulgarity that was

  AN UNDEFENDED cm

  wholly out of character under ordinary circumstances. 'He looked as if he'd got acute dyspepsia.'

  `What do you think he'll do?' asked Olivia in trepidation. Her aunt subjected her to a searching scrutiny.

  livvy, do you really want to marry this man?' she asked, not with obvious relevance.

  The question had been uppermost in Olivia's own mind since she had woken that morning. It had engaged her throughout the flight and given her no peace since she arrived. Turning it over and over in her head, she had achieved a lengthy inner monologue and a migraine of historic proportions. But she still did not know the answer. She did know, however, that she had made him a promise and was not, under any circumstances, going to let him down. She had been prepared for bullying and was all set to withstand Aunt Betty's peculiarly paralysing habit of assuming that she knew best and Olivia could not possibly be serious in her intention to follow her own course. Without auntly sanction. To be met with something approaching understanding was a surprise, but it did not weaken her resolve. Luis had offered to hold her hand and she would not betray him while he was doing that very thing.

  So she nodded. 'Yes, I'm quite sure.

  `But you only met him the day before yesterday.'

  `It was—well, a sort of instant thing,' said Olivia, acutely uncomfortable.

  `Do you,' demanded Aunt Betty, 'love him?'

  The question bereft her niece of words. In her experience Aunt Betty was neither sentimental nor inclined to tolerate sentiment in others. Olivia would have expected her to warn against the unwisdom of marriage for love, rather than demand that passion as a preliminary necessity.

  Uncle Octavio, when she was eventually summoned to his presence, wasted no time in such dillydallying.

  `Well, you've got yourself into a fine mess,' he greeted her, the moment the door had shut behind the servant who escorted her to his study.

  Octavio Villa was a short, square man. He had a broad head, with hardly any neck at all, before he broadened out

  into a barrel. For this twenty years of good living was partly responsible but, though he was portly, he was not flabby and he exuded an air of forcefulness only just short of brutality. To this unfortunate image his sporting of a toothbrush moustache above thin lips added not a little.

  As Miss Lightfellow had deduced, he was used to having his own way in all things. From being a highly indulged only son he had gone, young, into marriage with a gentle, conventional lady whose one idea, throughout her apologetic life, had been to keep the peace. As Octavio's temper was as uncontrolled as his temperament was despotic, this was not an easy task. When her children began to grow up and to argue with their father poor Aunt Isabel had thought wistfully of retiring to a convent. Fortunately, at the point when she was quite convinced life was unbearable, Elena had married suitably and one source of dissension was removed from the household. When Diego subsequently bought a flat in Mexico City and visited his parents only on odd weekends she began to think that peace had come at last to her troubled existence.

  Octavio, however, lacking objects at home over whom to exercise dictatorship, had spent more and more time at work. So while his wife thought that he was growing sweeter-tempered with the years, his employees had the reverse impression. Now that the Englishwoman had arrived and the girl was proving recalcitrant as far as Octavio's plans for her welfare were concerned, there had been a household eruption the like of which Isabel had not seen in ten years and prayed never to see again. She was therefore less than welcoming to Olivia whom she blamed, not unnaturally, for the upset.

  While Olivia was prepared for her uncle's hostility, she had been so cheered by the reasonable attitude of her Aunt Betty that she quite thought Uncle Octavio would be the last stumbling block to her freedom. She had always been rather fond of her Aunt Isabel, who, although they had not even met, never forgot birthdays or Christmas presents and sent her long rambling detters in the intervals. So Olivia was hurt by Aunt Isabel's coldness when she came to ask Olivia

  to go to her uncle, and as a result, entered the study in no very good order.

  I have you to say for yourself?' he demanded, moustache quivering.

  It was clearly a rhetorical question because he went on at length, without pausing for Olivia to reply, on the subject of her foolishness and headstrong ingratitude.

  The last accusation stung Olivia out of her trembling silence.

  `Ingratitude?' she gasped.

  Uncle Octavio eyed her coldly. 'Certainly. When we put ourselves out sufficiently to invite you here. When we have put ourselves out for years to concern our lives with your affairs ! I have very many better things to do with my time, let me tell you, than act as trustee to a selfish girl half a world away. And then, when in our care and consideration for you,' he was working himself up into a torrent of injured outrage, 'we propose a match with our own son, you have not the common courtesy to listen to the proposal, much less the common sense to wait until you meet him before running headlong into another alliance. We are very disappointed in you, Olivia.'

  It was not clear whether he included the rest of the family in his remarks or whether he was using the royal 'we', but in either event, its effect upon Olivia was the same. Normally, as Luis had pointed out, she was inoffensive to the point of timidity. Never easily roused, she had, since her father's death, resisted few of Aunt Betty's opinions and none of her dictates. However, all this windy abuse roused her to long-delayed resistance. The suspicion that Uncle Octavio was enjoying himself as he ranted at her infuriated her. Moreover, while she was perfectly certain that Aunt Betty's occasional bullying sessions were the result of a real if sometimes misplaced concern for her niece's welfare she was very nearly sure that Uncle Octavio had no such disinterested objective. He was simply a dictatorial man who was not used to being crossed and, like a child, was quite happy to make himself thoroughly unpleasant as a result.

  That must surely account for Aunt Isabel's shattered

  look. What he wanted, decided Olivia in a crusading spirit, was a lesson.

  So she now replied, 'You can hardly be more disappointed than I am, Uncle Octavio. I came to Mexico expecting to have an agreeable holiday among my family. I didn't think I was to be bludgeoned into a marriag
e that was distasteful to me.'

  Uncle Octavio began to gobble and his sallow features were suffused with colour.

  `How dare you speak to me like that, miss?' he hissed.

  Olivia drew herself to her full height and fixed a disdainful eye upon him. 'You sound like the villain out of a Chicago gangster film,' she told him. 'Of course I dare. It's my life, isn't it? Something you seem to forget.'

  There was a pregnant pause while their eyes locked. Uncle Octavio, having beaten a lively son and daughter into submission, was unprepared for defiance from this English mouse and was, although he would have died rather than admit it, somewhat at a loss as a result. He took refuge in reproachful bluster.

  `Have you forgotten what is due to your elders? Don't you remember that we are all the relatives that you have in the world? Now that your father is dead, naturally you must turn to me for guidance.'

  `Why naturally?' retorted Olivia, bristling. 'What about Aunt Betty? She's a relative too, you know. And she knows me a good deal better than you do.'

  His wave of the hand said without need of words that Aunt Betty was a woman and therefore did not count, which annoyed Olivia almost more than anything that had gone before. She took an impatient step to his desk. He had not risen when she entered and he did not rise now, merely staring up at her with his jaw outthrust like a belligerent baby.

  `I am going to marry Luis Escobar,' said Olivia with growing resolution. 'You may be my trustee, but you're not my guardian and you can't stop me. What's more, when I marry my husband will take over the duties you have found so onerous as far as my affairs are concerned. You, as I'm