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.‘There have not been any servants here for many years,’ she said, clearly unhappy about being questioned in what she considered to be her domain.I stood my ground.‘Then I don’t understand what the problem is.’‘There is no complete set of keys.I will have to find them.’‘I’d like you to do so.I thought you were going to find a set for the surveyor.’‘I thought I had some copies but I could not find them.The master keys were never properly labelled, and were put in different boxes.’‘Well, I’ll need to get in there sooner or later, because I want to see what needs repairing.’‘Nothing needs repairing,’ said Rosita firmly.‘Senora Delgadillo, my husband and I bought the whole house, not part of it, and now we would like to see what we own.’‘Very well,’ said Rosita finally.‘I will speak to your husband about it.’‘No, you can speak to me.’Rosita sniffed in the subtlest of disapprovals, and continued with her work.I had an ominous feeling that this might turn into a battle of wills.CHAPTER SIXThe Atrium‘SHE WON’T GIVE them to me,’ I explained when I returned to the drawing room.‘She’s been in charge of the place for so long that she thinks she owns it.’Mateo laughed out loud.‘I’m glad you think it’s funny.’‘I’m sorry.This kind of attitude is so typical, if you were from here you’d appreciate it.Don’t worry, I have to talk to her about her wages anyway, I’ll sort it all out then.’‘It’s your property.You have a right to know what’s behind those doors.’‘I’m sure we’ll be disappointed.You heard the same as me; they’re not habitable because there’s no natural light.I’ll leave you to go and freshen up for a few minutes.Then we can make a proper tour of the rest, yes?’He closed the door softly, leaving me alone.Is he expecting me to change my clothes? I wondered, scrubbing a mark from my old blue Just Do It Nike shirt.I couldn’t change who I was, but decided to make a bit of an effort to look more like the lady of the house, at least to start with.I wasn’t about to start creeping about the place in high-necked dresses and court shoes.The shower was black-and-white tiled, with a battered tin head that pumped out a drenching waterfall.Outside, the temperature was rising into the high thirties, but the interior of the house remained pleasant and breezy.Already my pale skin had freckled and was darkening to a smooth caramel.My chest had cleared its persistent passive-smoker cough and my recent nights at the coast had passed silent and uninterrupted.I had spent two weeks there, waiting for Mateo to conclude his business in the wineries of Jerez and Cadiz, so that we could travel to the house together.I’m ready to start our life now, I thought, discarding my jeans and selecting the kind of simple, old-fashioned dress I would never have thought of wearing in London.Things are going to be different from here on in.I’ll make sure of that.As I unpacked, I took stock of the room.As in the drawing room, it was full of heavy dark fin de siècle furniture, with cushions the colour of bad meat, patterned maroon rugs, elaborate tiles and fussy cornicing, bookcases, sideboards, dropleaf tables, lots of hard, uncomfortable surfaces.Looking around, old words came to mind, words used to describe the finishes on old objects; craquelure, patina, foxing.Old school Spanish, I decided, pre-Franco, sturdy and built for generations to come.And yet there was also something paradoxically modern brought about by the pervasive light.Old buildings were usually repositories of shadows, dust and memories.This house had something I’d never seen before.I looked up at the windows, sensing a difference.What was it? Something had changed.Was it the angle of sunlight? A movement in the trees outside? Setting down my clothes, I walked to the window and looked out.A faint gust stirred the uppermost branches of the cork trees, fluttering the leaves.The window knocked slightly in its frame.I listened, and heard the smallest of movements, a shift of weight on a floorboard, a whispering displacement of air…The clocks rang out, startling me.One o’clock, time for luncheon.Not wishing to be late, I hurried from the room, my passage marked by chiming clocks.I felt like the heroine in an old novel.There were timepieces everywhere, a matrix of measurements that included carriages, grandfathers, mantelpiece ceramics, shepherdess figurines with delicate inset dials, monstrous fat-legged ornamentals with convex fascias and high tinging ticks.They all appeared to have been wound and kept at the correct time.They weren’t just correct but meticulous in their regularity, so that even their second hands appeared to move together.The ticking calibrated the passing seconds as if marking off life itself.The sounds followed me from one room to the next, one tick-tock being replaced by a clop-clop, that was in turn replaced by a din-din or crick-crick, each mechanism dividing the hours into quarters, minutes, half minutes, seconds, and it seemed even the sunlight had been ordered to keep time.Making my way down the staircase in search of the dining room, I took a wrong turn and found myself in the octagonal glass atrium, with doors that opened to an internal greenhouse.The tall ceiling led up to a turret filigreed with copper tracery, mostly stained-glass irises and poppies in the art nouveau style.It looked – wrong.‘There you are,’ said Mateo, smiling at me from the door.‘Rosita is waiting to serve.I guess the tour will have to wait until after we’ve eaten.’I knew he was anxious to fatten me up.My mother had been only too happy to warn him.‘Of course you know she was terribly anorexic, and then it was – what do you call that thing where you throw up after you’ve eaten, darling? Bulimia, that’s it.She had terrible breath and the acid ate the enamel off her teeth.Those are veneers, aren’t they, sweetie?’ Thanks, mother.Mercifully, Anne was back in Vauxhall, over a thousand miles away, and she could damn well stay there
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