‘We both do that,’ he grinned at her, the whiteness of his teeth, against his tanned skin, like a beacon. It drew her attention upon him all over again. ‘I make a walking stick that you can keep…for you or your guests when they come to see you.’
She resumed in her painting, yet glanced his way whenever the opportunity arose, noted the dexterity in how Manolo worked, saw the frown of concentration that belied the confidence, and skill, in all that he did.
‘Did you learn that in the army?’ she was provoked into asking, the silence between them not to be endured for long.
‘No…I do this since I was young. My father…he started me off and then I go out on my own…do this.’ She saw him rise from where he had been seated at the foot of a tree and walk over to where she worked Manolo held out his handiwork, the top of the still green branch carved to imitate the weave of a rope into an end splice. He saw Hannah’s look of wonder upon it, saw how her impossibly blonde hair tumbled around her face, how that blouse of hers shaped the swell of her heavy breasts. The woman brought so much to hold his gaze upon her. ‘Como los marineros…’
‘Si…I can recognise that only too well…and you have skill, Manolo.’
‘Gracias…’
She was disconcerted to meet met his wondering look upon her and then his smile, Manolo’s self-assurance. ‘I must get on…while there’s time and good light…for me to paint.’
Manolo heard the distraction in her voice.
He chose to lean on the stick that he had carved, his hands over one another and covering his work. He looked at her for a moment with stilled eyes, as if considering whether to speak his mind. The woman before him, and what she now wore, really did inflame the senses. His reaction, or response to seeing her, would be thought only too predictable. He would have to flatter her and see where their meeting took them.
‘Mis padres…they tell me how it is or has been. But you are a fine woman, señora, to keep on suffering for the loss of your husband. You must try to live on…’
‘That’s my business…I think!’ she snapped dismayed by his directness of speaking.
‘Don’t concern yourself with that! I am over the worst…if you really need to know!’
Hannah gave him a challenging stare.
‘Perhaps so, but I wonder…I cannot help speaking about it…since I meet you like this,’ he answered only too assuredly. ‘You should not be alone…live your life alone, señora.
‘Is that so?’
‘Si, it is so…’
3
Hannah had wondered on it too, just how she would know if the circumstances were again right and to satisfy the rediscovery of longing for another, who that person was to be or could turn out to be. To know of it with Manolo, or a man so certain in his ways and unafraid to speak out, had not been reckoned on, not at all, flattering and bewildering as the situation between them was now becoming.
She moved out from under the shade of the tree. ‘Perhaps I should paint you, or make a drawing of you…if only to silence you and to stop your chatter?’
‘To keep or to sell?’ he grinned.
‘Neither, but to give to you for your parents to keep,’ she said sternly, moving to grab at a small drawing pad and putting it on the easel. ‘Now, go and sit over there…where you were when you were carving and sit still…or I’ll make you even uglier than you are!’
She cannot help but grin after a moment’s silence falls between them, meets his flirtatious answering stare and knows that there can be no turning back from this.
Manolo picks up on it quickly enough.
‘Uglier? No, you feel otherwise, señora…I know that.’
He had decided to wing it, to take a chance on what he said and to provoke a reaction from her. His prick had been teased long enough, by seeing the woman about the garden and the pool before the family had left. Now, Hannah would be on her own until paying holiday guests arrived at the weekend. His leave would also be drawing to a close, quite soon, so the clock was running down, and the time satisfy his hunger for the woman before him also.
‘Just sit still…and don’t be so foolish…talk nonsense,’ she told him on a dismissive shake of her head. ‘What possible interest can I be to a young man like you?’
Manolo pouted a knowing smile. ‘You have beauty others have still to learn of…brought on by their lives…and experience. I see that in you…señora.’
‘Oh really,’ she scoffed, moving in her seat to get a better look at his features, the wonderful glow on his healthy, deeply tanned and dark skin, the lustre in his closely cropped hair, the evident strength in his broad shoulders, in Manolo’s arms and hands. He is a landsman’s son, used to hard labour…but now, he flirts like a bar-room lothario and does so with her, a much older woman, someone who really should know better but who is, undeniably, captivated by him, possessed by an unquenchable need to live life out a little differently and even recklessly…to ‘kick over the traces’, so to speak.
‘May I see what you do?’
‘Yes, Manolo…but wait a few minutes more. It won’t be long now…and stop looking at me like that!’ She found it difficult to concentrate on what she sought to achieve under the young man’s provocative gaze upon her, a wondering look that she knew was meant to set her wondering…could that lusting look be made real.
‘It is easy to do…very easy to look at you,’ he retorted in his direct ways of it now that they were alone.
Hannah gives him a withering stare.
‘I don’t see, what you tell me you see, staring back at me from the mirror…’ she sighs, her words an expression of the gnawing emptiness that she has felt and that being ‘alone’ has brought. ‘Now, be quiet on that!’
He persists in his flirting with her, and she is dismayed by his evident hunger to be with and…and…and to know of her. She is surprised that their exchanges continue to be conducted in Spanish, her search for answer so much easier after a few days here, the words coming to her lips with little or no thought.
‘It is inside also…what the person…you, the woman, feels about who you are…and the woman I see…whenever we meet, like now. There is hope and there is beauty…still in you.’
‘Beauty…oh really?’ she repeated and beckoned to him, saw the purposeful strides as he closed the space between them, the dry sticks on the ground crunching under his feet. She met again Manolo’s wondering look upon her and took in the young man’s appearance, Manolo wearing a pair of shorts and a T shirt that he seemed to have outgrown, or his military regime had made too tight for his toned physique. Maybe that was all a part of the game…to have her look at him and to wonder…what next?
Manolo came to stand decidedly close and admired her work, looked at it and then at her. ‘Is that the hombre that you see, señora?’
Hannah nodded, the rim of her sunhat brushing his arm.
‘I have drawn the man I see…good looking…a little arrogant in his ways…but I suppose that there are women…or your girlfriends…who like that in you?’
‘But you don’t?’
‘I didn’t say that…Manolo.’
‘That is something…a start,’ he murmurs.