An Undefended City Read online

  She wondered whether Senor Escobar was making a similar comparison with the inevitable, unflattering reflections upon herself and sighed. She would, she found, rather like to stand well with him. It would be nice to have earned for oneself the respect of just one fellow adult during one's life. Although, she acknowledged to herself ruefully, he had probably already been well primed on her failings, and anyway she had never been known to do anything sufficiently independent to entitle her to be thought of as an adult, much less respected by one. Whereas at her present age her mother had uprooted herself from her native land, married a foreigner and borne a child. At the thought of such enterprise Olivia shuddered. To be cast adrift from family and her careful guardians, and in a foreign language too, seemed to her the height of terror. She sighed again, this time audibly, which earned her a lifted eyebrow.

  `Did you know my mother?' she asked, following her own train of thought.

  Ile was quite undisconcerted by the apparent irrelevance. Indeed, she had the oddest feeling that he understood how she had arrived at the question from the care he took over his reply.

  `No, I never met her. I have worked closely with Octavio for about a year only. Before that I only saw him from a distance. We are not such old friends. But of course I have heard a great deal about her. She must have been,' he

  hesitated briefly before choosing his adjective, 'a powerful personality.'

  `I suppose she was,' said her daughter, rather surprised. `I don't remember thinking about her in quite that way before. Everyone always says how vivacious she was, of course. But powerful really describes her much better. She made things happen. Do you know what I mean?'

  Luis Escobar was concentrating hard on the road ahead and gave the appearance of bestowing only the barest attention necessitated by ordinary politeness on Olivia's conversation. She did not mind this. Rather she felt freed by it. She was used to her few confidences being seized upon with avidity by Aunt Betty or one of her aunt's fellow trustees. That their eagerness was the result of a very real affection, Olivia constantly reminded herself. Nevertheless to meet with this not unfriendly indifference was refreshing, and she was, almost unconsciously, lured into revelation by it.

  `It was always exciting when Mama was coming home,' she said dreamily, more than half to herself. 'You never knew who or what she'd bring with her. Or what sort of mood she'd be in when she arrived,' she added with remembered wryness. 'Sometimes it would be splendid and she'd be full of enthusiasm for something and just carry you along with her. Of course, you were always partly willing to follow her lead because it was such a relief that she wasn't feeling black. But even if she was miserable it was thrilling, because she used to bang doors and throw things and the house was suddenly allowed to be untidy.'

  Olivia chuckled. 'I think secretly my father used to look forward to it as much as I did. Most of the time he was very proper and Mama used to torpedo his routine in about five minutes. He grumbled, but I think he wanted it. After she died the house was a lot quieter and neater, but he didn't come home so much and when he did he brought work with him.' She chuckled again appreciatively. 'Nobody could possibly have done any work in a house with Mama in it.'

  `Your father stayed at home while your mother travelled?

  asked Luis Escobar lightly. 'That's a reversal of the usual role, isn't it?'

  Olivia looked at him quickly. She had been almost certain he wasn't listening. At least not sufficiently closely to be able to ask relevant questions of her rambling discourse.

  `Mama had so many relatives abroad,' she replied absently, studying his profile. 'Italy, Spain. She was always travelling while my father didn't like to leave the Works too often—at least not in those days. He never minded her going, though. We used to have a sort of ceremony when she came home. I'd be allowed to stay up for instance, a great concession that.' Olivia smiled reminiscently, stretching as she tried and failed to hide a yawn. 'I suppose she was a sort of engine. When she died everything just ran down.'

  Luis Escobar was driving with concentration, not quite ignoring Olivia, but as if he knew she was talking more to herself than to him and did not want to intrude. Now he gave her a quick unsmiling glance in which concern and curiosity were nicely mingled.

  `Tired?' he asked. 'Or have you got a cramp?'

  Amused, Olivia lifted her arms above her head in a pantomime of exhaustion. 'Absolutely dead beat,' she confessed.

  `Good,' was his somewhat surprising reply.

  `Good?' she echoed. 'In what way?'

  `I wondered why you were stretching. If it's because you're tired that's no problem. We'll be at the house in ten minutes. If it's because you're tense, that's bad. I have never,' he said in a clinical tone which robbed the remark of any personal undercurrent, 'seen a woman so tense in all my life. I thought so at the airport.'

  Olivia was startled and a little wary by this further evidence of his perception. She was used to her bodily comforts being attended to with overpowering attention, but her thoughts had hitherto been her private property. She registered a determination to be careful what she revealed to the talented Senor Escobar.

  `Oh, I hate flying,' she replied lightly, after a slight hesitation. 'Yet another thing in which I am unlike my

  mother. According to my uncle no woman ever had an offspring more unlike herself.'

  He considered that with perfect seriousness. 'Oh, I don't know,' he murmured. 'She was very beautiful.'

  It was only at the kindly teasing glance which followed the remark that Olivia discerned the implied compliment. Unused to compliments of any kind, let alone those delivered with such unobtrusive economy, she gasped, blushed, looked down at her hands and found she had nothing to say.

  He returned to his driving, a slight smile playing about his mouth.

  `At least the portrait that Don Octavio has in the country makes her look beautiful. It may have been flattering, of course?'

  Olivia took a firm grip of herself and answered him with only the slightest flurry in her voice.

  `The Hallam one? In a long green dress?'

  He nodded, the smile growing at her valiant attempts at composure. Olivia noted the smile, was nearly sure he was laughing at her gaucherie, and found to her amazement that she did not resent his laughter. Rather, it made her feel warm and reassured. Half turning to him, she gave him her own shy smile in return.

  `It's not a bad likeness,' she said consideringly. 'Though Aunt Betty always said it made her look younger than she was. I remember it. It was done for my grandfather as a sixtieth birthday present. Hallam came to the house for Mama to sit for him. Actually he was rather nice to me. That was when I first decided I wanted to be a painter—pure hero-worship!'

  Luis Escobar was too subtle a man to miss the wryness in her tone.

  `I'm sure there's a spirit of emulation in most people's earliest ambitions,' he observed. 'Myself I wanted to be a big game hunter like my father. Fortunately, for the big game, before I committed my future to the African continent I discovered that I must be quite the worst shot in the world. If you have the same gifts as your idol, however, it might be

  different. Have you any talent for painting?'

  Olivia's sense of well-being died sharply. Although she was now reconciled to her family's unfaltering conviction that the Lightfellow heiress should not dabble with unnecessary and possibly exhausting occupations, her father's refusal to allow her to take up the place she had won at art college had been a bitter blow at the time.

  `Very little,' she now said therefore with undue coldness.

  Luis Escobar glanced at her again before turning his eyes ostentatiously to the traffic lights suspended above the highway.

  `I see. And what there was you didn't care to do anything about?'

  Olivia flinched at the imputed criticism and drew a long breath to steady herself. It was an old trick she had learned and practised from her childhood; to use deliberately slow respiration to fight tears. It surprised her that a stranger's
criticisms, and relatively gentle and polite ones at that, could induce tears where Aunt Betty's far more outspoken remonstrances failed. She folded her hands on her bag and kept her eyes steadfastly on the car ahead of them.

  `It was thought not to be a good thing,' she said carefully. `My talent was never anything much to speak of anyway, and after I was ill . . .' she let the words fall away and swallowed hard. For a brief horrible moment she had felt a resurgence of the furious disappointment she had felt six years ago and could have wept anew. When she was seventeen she had wept over it incessantly in the privacy of her bedroom. To all outward appearances, however she had bowed to her father's decree with truly philosophical docility. If she had wept in public, or made one of the scenes he so much detested, he would have been coldly angry and Aunt Betty would have been instructed to take her on an expensive holiday in Switzerland to recover her nerves. But he would never have relented.

  It was said that Sir Rowland had been as putty in his pretty wife's hands. If that was so, and Olivia could never remember having seen any evidence of it, the softness had disappeared when she died. In Olivia's experience he had

  never been anything other than selfish, headstrong and domineering, the last a characteristic he shared with his sister.

  But Luis Escobar put an end to these musings. 'That was hard,' he said sympathetically. 'Were you ill long?'

  For ever after, they tell me,' she replied with painful self-mockery. 'I seem to have attached doctors for life anyhow. 'Sometimes I wonder if they'd be quite so solicitous if there weren't all that money ailing with me. No, that's not fair,' she caught herself quickly. 'Everyone has been very good to me and it must be boring to hang around a permanent not-quite invalid. Especially when there's not even an interesting medical discovery to be made out of me.' She gave a small unhappy laugh and then concluded in a neutral tone, 'I had rheumatic fever, you see. And it's said to have affected my heart.'

  For all its careful lack of expression her tone made it plain that she did not want to discuss the matter further and he did not pursue it. After conventional murmurs of sympathy he embarked on an account of the city, pointing out places of interest as they passed.

  `We are now on Insurgentes,' he said. 'This is one of the major highways that divide the city. It is built on what was once the ancient Aztec causeway into the city.'

  Grateful for the turn of the conversation into less private and painful channels, Olivia did her best to respond intelligently. However, she found the remark bewildering.

  `Causeway?' she echoed. 'But surely—I mean, there isn't any water. Don't causeways have to go over water? Or can they go over another road instead, like a viaduct?'

  Luis Escobar laughed. 'No, you're perfectly right. It crossed water. There used to be a great deal of water. Indeed some of it is still left in a sort of floating gardens. I will take you there one day, if you like. When you come back from Cuernavaca and if you have time. But it has receded to the far corner, as it were. Mexico itself was originally a floating city in the middle of a lake. When the Spaniards came there were only three roads into it, all crossing water. Strategically-it was in the textbook an optimum defensive

  position. It should have been able to repel any invaders—or to withstand a siege, because they could fish the lake for food. And anyway the lake was too large to be surrounded successfully, at least by a sixteenth-century army.'

  Olivia was amazed. 'Then how did Cortés win?' she demanded, with vague memories of history classes on the conquest of New Spain. 'I mean, he can't have brought a huge army with him from Spain. He didn't know what he was going to find. The continent might have been empty.'

  `He probably thought it was,' agreed Luis Escobar. 'Or that there were few illiterate natives living in the jungle. He certainly can't have been prepared for one of the most advanced cities in the contemporary world.'

  Olivia was fascinated. 'It was so advanced? I had no idea. But in that case I understand even less how the Spanish conquest succeeded—if the city was sophisticated and its position impregnable.'

  `People aren't impregnable,' he replied drily. 'The Aztecs welcomed the Spaniards into Mexico. They thought they were gods.'

  `But—but why?'

  `Basically because of their physical difference from the Indians. There was a very important god in the Aztec mythology called Quetzalcoatl who was supposed to have fair hair and blue eyes. By all accounts Cortés fitted the description reasonably enough to satisfy Montezuma, the Aztec Emperor. By the time his people realised that the Emperor had been duped it was too late and Cortes was able to raise an armed invasion with the help of some other disaffected local tribes.'

  Olivia pondered this tale of gross ingratitude and found she was shocked. 'You mean Cortés betrayed the Emperor? What was his name? Monti—?'

  `Montezuma. Yes, effectively. Eventually. The Aztecs had quantities of priceless treasure, you see. They were the local super power and received tribute from all the subordinate surrounding nations. Their treasure houses must have been phenomenal. And the Spaniards were all gold-

  hungry. They weren't really interested in conquest at all except as a sideline.'

  They had left the shops and lights behind them and for some time had been on a wide road with tropical palms along the central division. The lights on the road hardly illuminated the sidewalk and all Olivia had been aware of was a succession of high walls with the silhouettes of tree tops behind them.

  Her companion now began to slow the car. He turned it, with no more noise than a faint swish of tires on wet tarmac into the driveway of a walled and gated residence. The gates remained shut, but Luis Escobar did not get out to open them. After a couple of seconds they swung apart with a ghostly automatism and the car passed silently through.

  `Electrically operated,' he told her, assuming her amazement. 'Once you're in the light there is an eye which scans the car and opens the gates if it recognizes the number. It's very convenient.'

  `It must be,' agreed Olivia in a subdued voice.

  Once again she was feeling very alone and on foreign territory. These mechanical toys unnerved her and the bloodthirsty tale of the original conquest had disturbed her deeply. She could not put out of her mind the image of the trusting Aztec Emperor. Indeed she could imagine herself in his place, offering all to a being whose authority one recognized only to find that the authority was a sham and the being in question the meanest kind of cheat. She shivered.

  They swept up a curved drive amid dense vegetation and stopped in front of a door that would not have disgraced a Bavarian castle. Its ornate spiked wooden dimensions were a further indication of how far she was from home. Olivia began to feel like a deported prisoner.

  Stopping, Luis Escobar turned to her and caught her expression.

  `Why, what's the matter?' he asked gently. 'There's nothing to be afraid of, you know. This is your uncle's house and everyone here is very happy to welcome you. And you'll be with Octavio in Cuernavaca tomorrow.'

  Olivia shook herself. 'Of course. It's not that. I was just

  —haunted--for a moment. Your Aztec Emperor has depressed me, poor man.'

  `Don't take it to heart, Miss Lightfellow,' he said in kindly amusement. He touched a gentle finger to her drooping Mouth. 'The Aztecs weren't altogether lovely people. They went in for human sacrifice and were fairly unspeakable to their vanquished enemies. No doubt they got what was coming to them.'

  He leant across to open her door for her and she had a sudden new perspective of his face. It made him look far removed from the courteously indifferent deputy for her uncle that she had first thought him. By some hitherto unrealised combination of light and attitude he was revealed, in that brief moment, to be capable of an expression of savagery comparable with that he had claimed for his Aztec predecessors.

  Olivia drew back a little in her seat, a little alarmed. There was no reason for it, she knew perfectly well. He was not threatening her, merely remarking that most people came by their just deserts.
The door was open and he returned to his own side of the car. He had not missed that instinctive recoil of hers, she was sure, and when he turned his gaze on her she held her breath.

  But he hardly seemed to be looking at her at all and whoever he was addressing she was sure it was not herself. `Most of us,' he concluded obscurely, 'do.'

  CHAPTER TWO

  IN England Olivia was accustomed at this season to wake up to sunshine and birdsong. She seldom spent a night away from the house in Shropshire that she had inherited from her father. It was therefore something of a shock to wake up in a strange—and enormous—bed in near total darkness. The only sounds she could make out were busy urban ones —distant traffic, some heavy machinery even further away, punctuated by an odd jungle bird call. It was this last which coaxed her from her bed and across to the deeply curtained windows. Flinging aside twenty-odd feet of worked damask, she encountered a light so bright that she gasped and staggered.

  As if she had been listening for just such sounds of life a small maid in uniform appeared at the door.

  `Buenos dial, senorita,' she said, smiling. She looked about sixteen, but there was no shyness in the blatantly interested survey to which she subjected Olivia, only a friendliness to which Olivia instantly responded.

  `Good morning,' she replied in careful Spanish. She gave another puzzled look out of the window. 'What time is it, for heaven's sake? It looks like full afternoon.'

  `Oh no,' was the serene reply. 'It is only half past ten.'

  The girl advanced into the room and began to fold the clothes that Olivia had scrambled out of the night before.

  `Half past ten!' gasped Olivia, retreating from the window and beginning to fumble at the locks on the overnight case which she had ignored last night, falling exhausted into bed without so much as brushing her teeth. 'But we're going to Cuernavaca today. I shall be dreadfully late and keep everyone waiting.'