The Santiago Sisters. Victoria Fox
She’d never told him. No child would ever come from her womb because her womb was incapable.
Hostile, they’d informed her. A hostile womb. Cripes.
Michelle brought her back to the present. ‘This family is going to get the shock of its life when we turn up,’ she was saying smugly. ‘We told them who you were but of course they’d barely even heard of the bloody Beckhams.’
‘Gosh, it must be remote.’
The car was slowing. ‘Are we there?’ called Michelle.
Their driver pulled over. He consulted the GPS.
‘José, is there a problem?’
The man didn’t speak much English. ‘We are lost,’ he said eventually.
‘Lost?’ Michelle snapped. ‘How can we be?’
‘Ah no, it is right way.’ The car started up again. Michelle and Simone exchanged sidelong glances. Does he know what he’s doing? mouthed Simone. She had visions of being driven to a hilltop plateau and sacrificed like a mountain goat.
Michelle nodded curtly, but didn’t take her hawk eyes off the wavering GPS.
‘We’ve lost signal,’ she said, throwing her hands in the air. ‘Typical!’
José had the indicator on. They came off on to a dirt track.
‘Is this it?’ Simone enquired. She was tempted to light another cigarette, but it was so overheated inside the car that she feared something might explode.
‘I do not know. We follow trail, ask at house.’
Before they could stop him, José climbed out of the car and opened the gate, tying it with rope to a knackered wooden post. The sun beat down. Simone sighed.
‘I want my hotel, Michelle. I’m tired and I’m cranky. I knew it was a bad idea to do this on the day we arrived.’
‘You know what I say: strike while the iron’s hot.’
‘Everything’s hot. Too bloody hot.’
José jumped back in. The engine gunned. They had barely set off when a crunching sound erupted from the belly of the car, quickly followed by a burst and a hiss, like a balloon deflating. ‘What was that?’ shrieked Simone.
‘Tyre is gone,’ said José. ‘Problem with tyre.’
‘So fix it!’ Michelle roared. She wound up the windows and blasted the air-con, as poor José sweated and heaved outside, attempting to jack the vehicle’s considerable weight. Michelle assaulted her phone for a moment, fishing for signal. The networks were down. Simone rolled her eyes. This was hardly shaping up to be the glamorous entrance she’d envisaged, sweeping into the beggars’ idyll like a fairy godmother. This broken-down heap of trash was hardly the ball-bound pumpkin.
José was out there for forty-five minutes. The women became crotchety. Simone finished her bottle of Perrier then admitted to needing the loo.
‘I can’t go here, what if somebody sees?’
‘We’re in the middle of nowhere,’ said Michelle.
‘Yes: a completely flat, no-damn-bushes-in-sight nowhere. What about him?’
‘José?’
‘Of course José—whom else would I be talking about?’
But Michelle lifted a thin eyebrow and nodded through the windscreen.
‘Our knight in shining armour,’ she said. A man of about twenty was riding towards them on a horse. He came in a cloud of dust, his blond hair reflecting the sun. As he neared the Range Rover, his horse began circling and stamping its hooves.
José stood, and the men conversed in Spanish. The stranger climbed down, tied his horse to a shrub and came towards the car. He had a rugged, tanned face and startling blue eyes. The word gaucho ran through Simone’s mind, and it had the same effect as someone pinching the tender skin on the underside of her arm.
Michelle opened the door. ‘What’s he saying?’ she asked José.
‘He say we get help at farm. We leave car here.’
‘And walk? You’re asking Simone Geddes to walk?’
The men exchanged something else, and laughed.
‘May I ask what’s funny?’ Simone got out and slammed the door. She removed her headscarf and held it over her mouth: she had never been anywhere so dusty! Dust was rolling across the landscape; you could see it churning like tumbleweeds. ‘I am perfectly capable of walking, thank you very much—is it far?’
José pointed to a shack in the distance.
‘Right.’ Simone began to pick her way delicately across the rocks. ‘Let’s go.’
It was dusk by the time they made it to the house. Simone’s feet ached and she was so thirsty it was as if someone had spent the entire afternoon sandpapering the inside of her mouth. At Michelle’s insistence she had been persuaded on to the horse, which she found horrifying, because all there was to hold on to was a knotted leather rein. The gaucho had to heave her into the saddle, if a lump of rags and sheep wool merited that description, pushing her backside as she attempted to get a leg over, and, as Simone hung there, close to tears, she thought it was just about the most undignified position she had ever been in. The horse smelled. The reins made her hands black.
She longed for the Kensington mansion. For once, she longed for Brian!
‘We are here,’ said José at last.
‘And where exactly are we meant to be?’ Michelle demanded through gritted teeth. José talked to the stranger before replying:
‘He say this place we need to go is other side of mountain.’
‘We have to cross a mountain?’
‘Sí. I take wrong highway.’
‘Tell me something I don’t know. You’re fired.’
‘I sorry.’
‘Just get me inside and to a goddamn telephone.’ Michelle turned to her client. ‘I’m getting straight on to the agency and they’ll send someone out here ASAP—in a fucking helicopter if they have to.’
The gaucho helped Simone off the horse. This way was slightly less unseemly, but only just. He sort of caught her arse in both his hands, and her legs churned air like a first-time swimmer without armbands. She thanked him in English, only afterwards realising she should have done it in his language, and he grinned and didn’t reply. God only knew what he was thinking.
Simone was being led inside when something happened. She was alert at first to the sound: a sweetly hummed tune, sung by an angel she couldn’t yet see. And then the vision appeared—a girl of about fifteen materialised around the side of the house with the languid, cat-like indifference that was the hallmark of adolescence.
Simone gasped. The girl was hands-down the most ravishing creature she had ever encountered. Her hair was long and sleek, her limbs slender and brown. Her eyes were huge and inky, the lashes impossibly thick. Her mouth was a rose bud.
The girl stopped singing.
‘Hello,’ said Simone.
Another child, nowhere near as appealing though clearly related, came in her wake. She, too, was brought up short at the sight of the uninvited guests.
The gaucho said something to them. Simone held a hand out to the prettiest and tried not to let the other one’s glower put her off. The other one looked feral.
‘Hola,’ she stumbled, ‘me llamo Simone. Soy de Inglaterra. Cómo se llama?’
There was a long silence. Gently does it, thought Simone, unwilling