She found Dolores slumped in a chair sipping mate. She looked like a benign old lady, hardly the fiend who had ruled the kitchen for the last forty odd years.
‘Are you all right?’ Agatha asked in Spanish. She tried to soften her tone but was aware that she sounded unconcerned.
‘What does it matter?’ Dolores groaned. ‘I’m on the way out.’
‘Don’t talk such nonsense,’ Agatha replied, wanting to add that she’d been trying to get rid of her without success for the last two decades. ‘Señor Jose Antonio tells me that you have something growing in your stomach.’ The melon sounded too absurd to mention.
‘He should mind his own business,’ Dolores snapped.
Agatha dropped her shoulders. ‘Bueno, we shall all mind our own business then,’ she replied with equal briskness, and left the kitchen, relieved that she didn’t have to take the matter further.
George knew he would be happy in his new home. He took a swim in the evening then sat on the flagstones watching the gnats and flies dance upon the smooth surface of the water and allowing the scents of eucalyptus and gardenia to flood his senses. He felt blissfully detached from England. Both physically and mentally he was thousands of miles away and, for the first time since the war, he was at peace. The gentle mooing of cows accompanied the clicking of crickets and the light twittering of birds, and the setting sun brushed the plains with amber.
That night they ate in the courtyard beside a sprawling tree whose red flowers burst into the air every now and then with a loud pop. Dolores appeared to have recovered from her haunting and could be heard shouting at poor Agustina and Carlos. The children drank wine and conversed with the adults. George, weary from his trip, retired before they did. He slept a dreamless sleep, lulled by the sweet night air and the gentle snorting of ponies.
A couple of days later he started work. It felt good to ride out across those plains and there was much to learn. Another cloudless day to lift his spirits and sharpen his sense of freedom. With the wind in his hair and the sun on his face he rode with the gauchos, rounding up the herds and surveying the thriving fields of maize and wheat. He was keen to belong and watched them carefully, copying their casual way of riding, their backs slouched, reins in one hand, their hats pulled over one eye. They only spoke Spanish and George wished he were able to communicate in more than gesture. But they smiled at him roguishly and sensed that he was a good sort. They chuckled at his enthusiasm, the reckless way he rode and the endless cigarettes he smoked. When they offered him a sip of mate he gagged and choked at the sharp taste in spite of the honey they added to sweeten it. Consequently he filled a flask with orange brandy and drank that instead. Jose Antonio told them he had been a brave fighter pilot in the war and so they named him El Gringo Volante – The Flying Foreigner – and for once he was grateful for his inability to communicate because it saved him from having to tell them about the war.
Agatha sent him off to Jesús Maria to learn Spanish with a languid young woman called Josefa. With raven hair and moist brown skin she was plump and fragrant and as idle as a sloth in sunshine. She had a couple of textbooks she had obviously retained from her school days and a fondness for conjugating verbs. Fortunately she was blessed with an easy nature and limitless patience. She corrected George’s errors over and over again without irritation and listened to his first faltering attempts at forming sentences. That she grew fond of him there was no doubt. She splashed herself with cologne, braided her hair, applied makeup and adorned her sensuous body with lotions and jewellery. The heat allowed her to wear as little as was decent, exposing more and more cleavage with his every visit. But George was too busy learning to notice. His heart was locked to her endeavours in spite of her heaving breasts. She sensed the ghostly presence of another woman and resigned herself to the impossibility of her desires.
November passed quickly, overshadowed by Dolores’ increasing wrath and by Agatha’s declining patience. George was now able to communicate in Spanish and was riding like the gauchos, although his lasso-throwing left much to be desired. He joined them around their camp fires at night and had even picked up the words and tunes to some of their songs, accompanied by the skinny lad they called El Flaco who played the guitar like an angel. He insisted that he would never grow to love mate, but killing and skinning an animal was well within his capability. Pedro, the white-haired gaucho who kept his age as secret as the names of the mistresses he visited in Jesús Maria, gave George a silver knife as a gift, telling him proudly that it was to use on the occasion of his first castration.