She tried to explain that she wasn’t showing off about something she didn’t really understand. ‘I’ve heard my brothers talk about him. They thought he would be Wimbledon champion this year if he hadn’t retired from the circuit.’
But even that was wrong.
‘The circuit,’ sniffed the matriarch. ‘In my day lawn tennis was played by gentlemen. Not circus animals.’
Her daughter-in-law winced. Abby blushed harder and hung her head.
‘Oh, be fair, Mama,’ said the daughter-in-law, with compassion for this ugly duckling who always seemed to say the wrong thing, ‘Emilio Diz is a great tennis player and a national hero.’
‘Humph. Then why isn’t he still playing tennis? He’s only, what is it? Twenty-five? Twenty-six? Plenty of time to win something worthwhile. Why has he given up and gone into business?’ She spat the last words out as if they were obscene.
‘They say he’s very intelligent…’ protested the daughter-in-law faintly.
‘That’s why Felipe sold him the Palacio Azul, is it?’ said the matriarch with rancour.
The daughter-in-law knew when she was out of her depth. She looked round for help. It came puffing up the terrace steps.
‘For a very fair price, Mama,’ said Felipe Montijo, arriving slightly out of breath. ‘Unlike us, he has the resources to develop the place into a full sports complex…’
The matriarch swung her dark glasses round on him for an unnerving moment. ‘Develop? The house your grandfather built?’
‘It’s falling down, Mama. We can’t afford…’
‘And this man can?’
‘Oh, he can, all right,’ said Felipe with feeling. ‘He wasn’t just a tennis player, even when he was a professional. He made a killing on entertainment event software. Now he’s going into property in a big way.’
‘New money!’ Rosa Montijo was shocked and did not attempt to disguise it. ‘And you ask him to your home? Let him meet Rosanna?’
Felipe laughed. ‘He’s not interested in Rosanna, Mama. He’s twenty-five and he’s been on the international tennis circuit since he was eighteen, for heaven’s sake. He dates movie stars, not high school girls.’
‘In my day we would never have introduced the daughter of the house to a man like that.’
Her daughter-in-law intervened. ‘Felipe is doing business with him, Mama. Of course we ask him.’
The matriarch was disdainful. ‘His mother used to work for my hairdresser.’
Montijo husband and wife exchanged despairing looks.
Watching silently, Abby saw it with interest. It was the first time this pleasant husband and wife had shown any signs of communicating. They had been very hospitable but there was a coldness at the heart of this house. It worried her. She did not know how to deal with it. Probably that was what made her even more clumsy and tactless than all those rules she kept falling over.
Abby looked across the perfect lawn to the distant tennis court. A cluster of beautifully dressed people were grouped outside the netting, watching the match with palpable excitement. But it was not the fashionable crowd that brought Abby’s heavy brows together in a worried frown. It was not even the duel on court. It was that coldness.
Maybe that is what Daddy meant, when he said they were sophisticated, thought Abby. She sighed.
She knew she was not sophisticated. If she hadn’t already known it, the friends of her host’s daughter would have made her realise it. Their sexy clothes made her blink. And their knowing conversation silenced her. It was like watching one of the international soap operas that they all loved.
Abby never managed to see the glamorous soap operas, though most of them were aired in England. They were for-bidden at her boarding school. And at home she was too busy, mucking out the stables, tearing into the overgrown garden or doing what she could to patch up the worst decayed bits of the Palladian pile that was her home.
Her father would hug her and say she was a good girl but she knew that he was worried about her. Abby did not see why. She was perfectly happy. Well, maybe not perfectly. But as long as the west wing roof did not leak this winter, she had not got much to wish for, she thought.
Her noisy siblings treated her as if she was a fifth brother. The village generally behaved as if she was an apprentice workman, teaching her various tricks of carpentry and plumbing whenever the latest disaster struck the Hall. As for the county, now that she was sixteen, they either asked her to dinner as her widowed father’s partner for the evening or froze her out, as an impediment to his—in their view—long overdue remarriage.
It was the dinner parties that Abby hated. That was why her father had brought her on this business trip with him to Argentina.
She protested. Of course she protested. There was too much to do before Christmas. The pipes might freeze if she was not there to make sure that proper steps were taken when the temperature dropped. She would only be in the way.
‘But I really want you to meet the Montijos.’
Then they could come to Yorkshire in the summer when there was no possibility of freeze or flood.
‘Yes, and they will. But first I’d like you to stay with them. Señora Montijo is a very sophisticated woman. As well as very kind. See what you can learn from her, Smudge.’
‘Learn from her?’ said Abby, wary but disarmed by the nursery nickname.
‘Clothes and things,’ said her father vaguely.
There was nothing wrong with Abby’s clothes that a healthy increase in her allowance wouldn’t put right. But she was too fond of her father to say so. Four sons of super intelligence and expensive hobbies had depleted his resources almost as much as the roof. He worked hard and travelled the world. He made a good income. But the house and the family between them kept pace. There was never much left over for Abby.
Fortunately, so far she had been happy to live in jeans, topped off by shirts and sweaters that she found in the boys’ catalogues of sports and adventure wear. This was the first time she had realised that her father was not as happy with this wardrobe as she was.
‘You want me to be more feminine,’ she said, depressed. ‘Curls and stuff.’
Her father smiled affectionately and ruffled her soft dark hair, currently caught of her eyes in a raggedy pony-tail. ‘Please God, no.’
‘Well, then—’
‘You need a woman to show you how to deal with people, darling.’
‘Oh, come, Pops. We’ve done sex at school,’ said Abby dryly. ‘If we hadn’t, it would be a bit late now, don’t you think?’
He looked uncomfortable. ‘Not just sex.’
‘All right, what then?’
‘I suppose—social know-how.’
‘Social know-how?’ Abby was incredulous. She primmed up her mouth and minced across the room in a very fair imitation of a catwalk model. ‘How to get out of a sports car without showing too much leg? Come into the real world, Pops. Anyway, you don’t think there’s any such thing as too much leg,’ she added practically.
Abby thought he would laugh. He didn’t. He smiled, but absently. It was obvious that he was really worried.
‘Oh, Smudge. If only it was as simple as that.’
Abby began to feel alarmed. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘I know you don’t. That’s part of the problem.’ He sighed. ‘You’re such an open person, Smudge. You’re honest and it never