Polo

40

Angel lived in a rundown housing estate near the airport. Bibi was appalled by his room which was tiny, airless and impossibly hot, with only a minute chest of drawers, a narrow bed little wider than an ironing board, no carpets and no curtains.

‘This is awful. Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Would you have listened?’

‘Why’ve you put tin foil on the windows?’

‘Zee sun gets up earlier than I like to do.’

Down the landing was a grimy bathroom, with a john, a cracked basin and a creaking inadequate shower.

‘Miguel found this room,’ said Angel. ‘He theenk eet five star for spy of Alejandro.’

‘We’ll move you tomorrow, right. I’m so sorry. I feel terrible.’

Bibi moved to the chest of drawers, admiring first the photograph of Pedro. ‘He’s like you, and so handsome.’

‘He’s dead,’ snapped Angel.

‘That’s a purple heart,’ said Bibi in surprise. ‘Dad got one in Korea.’

‘Eet was sent me by American pilot.’ Removing his dinner jacket and black tie, Angel threw them in the corner. ‘He won eet in Vietnam. He say it was the most important of his medal, and he wish to present it as a token of respect to the professionalism and unbreakable courage of Argentine pilots.’

‘But that’s wonderful,’ sighed Bibi.

‘The Eenglish say we were kamikaze, but a fighter pilot ’as to be in complete control. We were fighting for something that was ours. We knew it was dangerous, but we ’ad to go on.’

Slightly frightened by the fanaticism in his eyes, Bibi picked up the jar of earth. ‘What’s this?’

‘Malvinas earth. I brung it back. One day it will be Argentine earth.’

Tears triggered off by champagne filled Bibi’s eyes. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘I don’t need peety,’ snarled Angel. ‘I need vengeance.’

A Simenon paperback lay face down by the bed. Bibi blushed as she remembered how she and Red had bitched in French about Angel at Christmas. As he pulled his shirt out of his trousers, she went over and put her arms round his neck. For a second Angel went rigid. ‘I thought I was the one calling the shoots.’

‘I’m just checking the monitors,’ whispered Bibi.

Looking down, he could see between her breasts to her scarlet pants and breathed in the remains of Giorgio and the acid reek of hot, hopelessly excited woman. Her nose might be like Concorde, but her eyes were dark, long, loving and glazed with desire. She was Bart’s daughter, rich as an Arab sheik and the key to worldly goods.

Angel laid a warm, steady hand on the back of her neck, then stretched his long fingers round to the front to gently stroke her cheek. Bibi gave a moan as he spat on the thumb of his other hand and smoothed away the mascara that had streaked under her eyes. Her mouth, huge, red and smudged, was trembling as Angel ran a lazy tongue along her upper lip then back along the lower one, then, slowly, as his hand slid down her neck to caress her collar bone, he kissed her properly. Simultaneously he turned her sideways, so his left hand could slide into her coral dress to stroke her breasts. The bra was built in. His right hand reached for the zip, and she was naked except for her red pants and her diamonds.

God, thought Angel, what a glorious undreamt-of body. He could have rewritten the Song of Solomon just for her. Comparisons with pomegranates, twin roes and sheafs of corn were totally inadequate. Her hands were shaking so much a pearl button flew off as she undid his shirt. His jockey shorts were made up of two pieces of blue-and-white Argentine flag.

‘You’re so beautiful,’ muttered Bibi burying her face in the silken softness of his chest, ‘I’ve never met anyone as beautiful as you.’

‘Flattery will get you a preek as hard as a truncheon,’ said Angel with a slight smirk.

Dropping to her knees, Bibi very gently put her lips round it, her tongue flickering like a captured moth. Just managing to control himself, Angel drew her to her feet and laid her back on the narrow bed. Running his tongue up the smooth hillock of her breast, he fastened on her nipple and slid two fingers between her legs. Christ, he could restore polo sticks in the slippery linseed oiliness. Rubbing expertly until she was moaning with ecstasy, anxious not to lose the momentum, only when he was sure she was on the brink did he open her mouth with his tongue and drive his cock deep inside her. As his hips had undulated on the dance floor, so they writhed on top of her now, his pelvic bone driving her towards pleasure.

‘Omigod, I’m coming,’ gasped Bibi, bucking as joyously as a pony.

Angel gave a groan that turned into a sob and came too.

‘You are old phoney,’ he whispered in her ear a minute later. ‘All that macho talk and you are soft as marshmallow inside.’

And, despite the repeated roar of landing and departing aircraft which shook the little room as a terrier shakes a rat, he immediately fell asleep.

Bibi lay on her side reliving every moment of the last half-hour, which would spoil her for the fumblings of Trust Fund Babies for ever. As she waited for stubble to darken his cheek, and admired the long lashes sweeping the scattering of freckles like the inside of a tiger lily on his cheekbones, she also counted his ribs, and, remembering how he wolfed his food at dinner, wondered how many meals he’d been skipping. Perhaps he was sending money home to his peasant mother. Bibi imagined her, black-eyed in her black dress, a black scarf over her greying hair, with a certain dignity in her prune-wrinkled face despite her desperate poverty in the slums of Buenos Aires.

She would rescue Angel. She would give him a massive pay rise Bart would never know about. Then she would buy him the best ponies in the world and he would lovingly consult her on every move. Light was creeping along the edges of the tinfoil. Every lining has a window of silver, thought Bibi, gazing down at this glorious animal lying beside her so much in need of her protection.

‘This is adopt-an-underhandicapped-animal day,’ she said out loud, and had to stuff her face into the pillow to stop herself laughing.

Bart was outraged when Bibi drifted into the office at eleven in the morning, still in her coral dress, absolutely bowlegged from screwing, with stars in her eyes far brighter than the diamonds still in her ears. Having languorously closed a deal with a Japanese for twenty-five Skylarks, she went home to bed.

‘You ordered Angel to take good care of me,’ was her only explanation, ‘and, oh boy, he obeyed you almost to the french letter.’

She woke early in the evening adrift with love and, having showered and washed her hair, drove down to Worth Avenue where she bought a wildly expensive, skin-tight, rust-red cotton sweater and tight, off-white jeans. Putting them on, she dropped her $2,000 pin-striped suit in the waste basket and set off for the barn.

As she drove up the colonnade of Iceberg roses, the ground was littered with white petals. Bart liked them swept up on the hour and Bibi was about to give the grooms a rocket, then thought what the hell – it was roses, roses all the way.

Rounding the corner, she found ponies running all round the orange grove and stick-and-ball field and the barn deserted except for two lugubrious-looking men in shiny dark suits.

‘How in hell did you get in here?’ she snapped, trying to catch the $30,000 Glitz who clattered past her covered in drying suds, tail still wet whisking water everywhere, with his duck-egg-blue lead rope flying.

‘We’re from Immigration,’ said the taller and seedier of the men. ‘We’ve got occasion to believe,’ he consulted his notebook, ‘one Rafael Solis de Gonzales is working here without a work permit.’

Bibi’s heart plummeted. She had a sick feeling her father must have tipped them off.

‘Not here,’ she said firmly. ‘I know all the grooms – only by their given names admittedly, but we don’t have a Rafael.’

‘Answers to the name of “Angel”.’

‘No way,’ gasped Bibi, hoping she wasn’t going scarlet.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw a trainer on the end of a slim brown ankle hanging down from one of the rafters of the nearest box. All the grooms must be hiding up there.

‘Everyone’s out in the exercise ring with the ponies,’ said Bibi, quickly walking away from the stables. ‘I’ll make enquiries and call you tomorrow.’

‘Seems weird having horses of this quality running loose,’ queried the taller Immigration Officer.

Fortunately the second, less repulsive, Immigration Officer had a date with his wife’s best friend in half an hour.

‘Right,’ he said shutting his notebook. ‘But you better getcha act together by tomorrow.’

‘You can come down now,’ Bibi shouted up into the rafters as soon as they’d gone. Tentatively, grooms and low-goal foreign players clambered down.

‘Where’s Angel?’ asked Bibi sharply.

‘Gone,’ said Juan’s cousin, rubbing his back where a rafter had dug into him. ‘He caught the six o’clock flight out of Miami.’

Bibi clutched on to one of the white pillars.

‘What did you say?’

‘Herbie from the polo office called at lunchtime, saying Emigration ’ad been tipped off, and were after him, and on their way down.’

‘They search his room,’ said Miguel’s cousin, ‘and found one thousand buck cheque from Mr Alderton.’

‘Shit,’ said Bibi. ‘Did he leave a forwarding address?’

‘’E didn’t have time. But Alejandro know where he live.’

‘Who tipped off Immigration?’

‘Herbie say it was Mr Alderton’s secretary.’

Bibi was devastated. Going home, she cried herself into total insomnia and by dawn had decided to fly to Buenos Aires. Angel hadn’t been paid for the first fortnight of April. He’d left clothes behind at the barn, and she wanted to apologize for Bart shopping him – but these were excuses. She knew she couldn’t live without him.

Miami Airport had been reduced to even worse chaos than usual by polo players who’d been knocked out of the World Cup returning home to Argentina. It was hard to tell if the airport officials were more bemused by the amount of luggage Alejandro and his family had accumulated (which included two vast van loads of prams, toys, furniture, polo sticks, and Worth Avenue clothes which would be flogged for five times their value), or by the bullying of Alejandro’s mistress.

‘Mr Mendoza and his sons must each have five seats to sleep in,’ she was yelling. ‘They’re international polo players who need their sleep.’

Having acquired Angel’s address already from Alejandro, Bibi sauntered into First Class. Wrapped in her own thoughts, she was oblivious of the everflowing champagne, the caviar, the poached salmon, the free scent, the washing kit, the rests for head and feet, the interested glances of businessmen across the gangway.

But when she went to the john she peered round the iron social curtain which divided First from Economy and for the first time saw the red-faced mothers trying to quieten fractious children and puking babies, the men leaning snoring into the gangways, all packed together like sardines, and breathed in the hot foetid air with a shudder. She thought of Angel sitting there last night and vowed he would never go Economy again.

Back in her seat, deeply apprehensive about the morrow, Bibi concentrated on the guidebook, which was so badly translated that she nodded off until six thirty. That was the longest sleep she’d had in months. Waking she felt more cheerful and able to cope.

Reaching Buenos Aires, she booked into the Plaza Hotel, showered and washed her hair, and put on a new, short and clinging, shocking-pink cotton jersey dress. It was the beginning of autumn and the great dark green trees outside were beginning to turn. As she bowled along in a taxi, the wide roads, heroic statues and bosky parkland reminded her of a lusher Paris. The taxi driver didn’t freak out when she told him her destination; perhaps he was used to driving into the slums.

‘This can’t be right,’ she said five minutes later as he drew up outside a row of beautiful mid-nineteenth-century houses with exquisite wrought-iron balconies on the edge of a park.

‘Sí,’ he pointed to the name and number. ‘They are apartments.’

Uncharacteristically overtipping, heart hammering, Bibi went to the door. There beside the bell was the name Solis de Gonzales in copperplate. Perhaps Angel’s mother worked as a maid. Bibi rearranged her mental picture to an ancient retainer, still in black and wrinkled like a prune, but with a white apron and depended upon by all the family.

She pressed the bell.

‘Sí,’ said a voice.

‘Is Angel – I mean Rafael there?’

‘You are not tax inspector?’ said a female voice in fluent, but husky, broken English.

Bibi felt sick. Perhaps Angel lived with a rich mistress. But the woman who answered the door of the private lift, although a charming blonde in a cashmere grey twin-set which matched her eyes, was well into her fifties. The pearls at her neck, and the rings flashing on the hand she extended, were not those of a poor retainer.

‘Come in,’ she smiled at Bibi. ‘Angel go out. He’ll be back soon. Would you like some coffee?’ She tugged a black embroidered bell pull.

‘Please,’ said Bibi, who was gaping at the apartment. At a glance she noticed a Sisley, a Pissarro and a Utrillo of a mackerelled sky, as well as marvellous eighteenth-century oils of dogs, horses and hunting scenes. Making up three sides of a square with the fireplace were white sofas with grass-green and violet cushions to match a beautiful black, violet and green carpet which covered most of the polished floor. On a big, polished table in front of a huge mauve vase of michaelmas daisies were silver-framed photographs of beautiful people playing polo or leading in racehorses. There was Angel as a solemn little boy. There were Pedro and Angel together, arms round each other’s shoulders. Beyond the park outside, which was criss-crossed with rust-pink paths and dotted with trees smothered in shocking pink blossom, huge flat-roofed buildings rose like liners out of an ocean of dark green.

‘It is so beautiful here,’ stammered Bibi. ‘Are you Angel’s mother?’

‘No, I am his Aunt Betty. His mother is in Rio, I theenk, or perhaps Paris. She marry an Italian. Where you stay?’

‘The Plaza.’

‘Angel’s grandmother, my mother, live there. You will perhaps have tea together.’

Bibi’s mind was reeling. ‘Is Angel OK?’

‘He arrive very mad,’ said Aunt Betty, rolling her big grey eyes. ‘He say his boss reported him to Immigration, so he catch next plane. Angel is very impulsive. He regret it, I think. He play polo well?’

‘He plays wonderfully,’ said Bibi. ‘On my father’s team. There was some misunderstanding. I’ve come to beg him to come back.’

This girl is not so plain after all, thought Aunt Betty as the maid came in with coffee, and a plate of croissants and greengage jam. She has good clothes and she love Angel.

Bibi’s eyes returned to the paintings. That was definitely a little Watteau in the corner. Her father would go berserk.

Not having eaten for forty-eight hours, and suddenly feeling dizzy, she sat down and took a croissant.

‘But I don’t understand. Angel’s so poor.’

‘Angel have very extravagant family. He had to sell family land to pay his father’s debts after the Malvinas war. The family has not forgiven him. I would help heem out, but my husband, the brother of Angel’s father, is very tight,’ she rubbed her thumb and forefinger together like a cicada, ‘he go through all my cheques. He would keel me if I gave Angel money but he is away in Europe, so Angel can stay ’ere till he get back.’

‘This is delicious coffee,’ said Bibi gazing into its sable depths. ‘Angel could be a great polo player – but he is so proud.’

Aunt Betty shrugged. ‘We are the eighth-generation Spanish-Irish. Angel have all zee aristocratic insteencts of his father and grandfather, but no money to back it up. It’s difficult for him to, how you say, lick the bottom. When he was eighteen, his mother was so worried about him, she sent heem to a psychiatrist. After two sessions, the shreenk say there is nuzzing I can do: Angel have indelible superiority complex.’

Bibi started to laugh, then jumped out of her skin-tight dress as the lift clanged outside the door.

Reaching for her bag, she frantically fluffed her hair and daubed blusher on her blanched cheeks.

‘I leave you,’ said Aunt Betty.

‘Please don’t,’ said Bibi in panic. ‘He may still be mad at me.’

Angel looked pale and desperately tired, and went paler still when he saw Bibi.

‘Why you ’ere?’

‘To say I’m sorry – to ask you to come back.’

‘Nevair. Your father, he betray me.’

‘Why don’t you both go for a walk in the park? Take the Mercedes, Angel,’ said Betty.

Angel gazed moodily at the maniacal traffic which roared and raced round them and said nothing until they passed a vast heroic statue of a field marshal in a Napoleonic hat astride a prancing horse with a woman with flowing hair in a long dress leaning against the plinth.

‘That is one of my relations on my mother’s side,’ said Angel.

‘Trust an Argentine to ride while the woman walked. I expect she was searching for his fifty-two,’ said Bibi.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ snapped Angel.

Grudgingly he showed her the airport which the anti-pollution lobby were clamouring to close down, and the great Hippodrome at Palermo, where the greatest polo tournament in the world, the Argentine Open, took place, and then down the Avenida del Libertador, full of embassies and softened by huge trees.

‘My cousin Sylvestre lives there.’

‘How beautiful,’ said Bibi, impressed.

‘Not beautiful,’ growled Angel, ‘just beeg. I show you better house.’

Five minutes later he drew up outside some huge iron gates, flanked by a high spiked fence. Inside loomed a truly beautiful house built at the turn of the century and influenced by the petits hôtels of France. The gravel path up to the peeling, dark green front door was choked with weeds. Two lichened urns spilled over with pale pink geraniums. A lawn on the right grew three feet tall and was filled with nettles and willow herb. Angel opened the front door with a latch key.

‘I lived here as a boy,’ said Angel as they wandered from room to vast room. ‘In the holidays we went to the country. This was the Chinese room where the tradesman come and my grandmother pay the bills. This was the drawing room where Pedro and I were allowed down for tea with my parents.’

On the walls was a sepia mural of gods and goddesses. The frame of a vast mirror was covered in gold leaf. The glass itself was so coated with dust that Bibi’s reflection gazed back at her softened, huge-eyed and strangely beautiful. Workmen had left beer cans on the marble fireplace.

‘Who does it belong to now?’

‘It has been bought by a foundation,’ said Angel bitterly. ‘Different designers will decorate each room free to show off their skills, a landscape gardener will redesign the garden to suit the time the ’ouse was built. The public will pay to see over it. The money will go to open a clinic. I wish they give it to me to buy ponies.’

‘You must have been so happy here,’ said Bibi humbly.

‘I didn’t appreciate it then. When the sun shone we were always trying to get to the camp to play polo. My grandmother’s ’ouse down the road has been turned into a school.’

In the garden, two huge trees were covered in the same shocking pink blossom.

‘What’s that tree?’

‘Jacaranda,’ said Angel. ‘No, zat’s blue. It’s called pala borracho, that is drunken stick. It means the end of the summer.’ Standing behind her, he could feel her legs quivering and see the languorous curve of her waist into her hips. What a backview! If she never turned round he could love her. There was an old mattress in the corner. Angel turned her round to face him. Her breasts were pretty lovable too.

‘Why you come here?’

‘To see you.’

‘Where you stay?’

‘The Plaza.’

‘Ouf, don’t tell my grandmother. She’ll try and borrow money off you.’

He examined her face. She wasn’t beautiful, and Argentine men want to feel proud of their wives, and he was reluctant to admit how much he’d enjoyed making love to her and how he now longed to throw her down on the dusty mattress in the corner and set her alight again. He knew she was crazy about him and he could manipulate her like a bendy toy. Her vast income could buy him the best horses and if he took American citizenship he could beat the Argentine ban and play in England. Suddenly he had a vision of the languid British officer with the cold Falklands light falling on his even colder face with the butt of jaw and the turned-down, curiously unemotional, blue eyes. He also remembered the voice which grew softer as it became more brutal: ‘You do want to play polo again, don’t you, Rafael? The sooner they operate on that knee of yours the better. Just give me a few details.’

They hadn’t tortured him except to allow him no morphine and to make him stand on his damaged knee hour after hour. Then, after he’d fainted and come round, the British officer had continued talking: ‘There’s no way Argentina can beat the Brits. No-one will know what you tell us. It’ll just end the war quicker and fewer of your mates will get killed. I play polo too. My handicap would probably have gone up to seven if it hadn’t been for this bloody war. Polo’s an addictive game.’

‘Angel, are you OK?’ Bibi was suddenly terrified of the expression on his face. ‘You’re miles away.’

‘About 1,800 miles,’ said Angel tonelessly.

Bibi took a deep breath. ‘D’you think it’s possible to fall in love in forty-eight hours?’

‘Is possible in forty-eight seconds,’ said Angel and pulled her into his arms.

Under the dusty chandelier, her hair was a light bay.

‘I want to marry you,’ mumbled Bibi into his bomber jacket which said World Cup 1985 on the back. ‘If it didn’t work out, we could always get divorced, but at least you could stay in the States. We could find a home and a barn of our own, away from my father, and you wouldn’t have to work for him any more.’

Angel put up his hand to still her trembling lips.

‘I don’t want to be keeped.’

‘You wouldn’t be,’ sobbed Bibi. ‘It’d be your money too. I’ve got loads for both of us.’

Angel felt quite choked himself. ‘You’re so sweet. You won’t boss me around? I can wear the trousers?’

‘Sure you can.’

Angel looked at her watch. ‘We have time.’

‘All the time in the world,’ whispered Bibi, unhooking her pearl earrings and putting them on the mantelpiece.

‘I am playing in the Mundialito this afternoon,’ said Angel, hooking them on again. ‘There’s a horse in Pilar Chico I very much want to try before. If we ’urry we ’ave time.’

Then, seeing the outrage on Bibi’s face, ‘On zee way we look for a ring, I buy it,’ he added hastily. ‘I sell my watch this morning, and tonight after zee match, I make love to you so you won’t get up for three days.’

Despite such promises, Bibi managed to gird her ransacked loins and meet Angel’s grandmother at the Plaza the next day.

‘But who is she?’ Angel’s grandmother kept saying to Betty beforehand.

‘She’s very rich, Mama. You know Angel hasn’t got any money.’

‘But who are they?’

‘Aeroplanes,’ explained Betty.

‘Better than cars, not as good as railroads. Not a great beauty, is she?’ added Angel’s grandmother loudly as Bibi approached. ‘She’ll never hold him.’

‘My dear,’ she advised Bibi later, ‘you must remember that in Argentina flattering the husband’s ego is of supreme importance. You must constantly demonstrate how much you love him.’

‘Oh, I do,’ sighed Bibi.

‘But I ’ave to warn you, Jean-Baptiste, my ‘usband, was constantly unfaithful to me, my son Pierre was constantly unfaithful to his wife. That’s why she run away with this Italian. Rafael will be unfaithful to you. American women who marry Argentines are always shocked by their promiscuity, but you mustn’t take it personally. They just have to demonstrate their virility.’