Valentina Vizconde opened the shutters and crossed her arms on the sill.
The coupe was coming slowly down the gravel road, its front wheels swerving to and fro unnecessarily. The misty sunlight passed over it again and again as it passed under the line of Eucalyptus trees, until, as it turned into the patchy drive, the sun touched it possessively.
The driver was a matronly woman in a ruffled-collar blouse of pastel green and tan, whose smallish head was set on a neck that always reminded Valentina of a turtle stretching out from its shell.
Professor Maggie Donegal parked beside a chicken-wire fence. A rooster pecked at the right front tire as she stepped out the left side and shouldered her purse. Her skirt's pleated hem settled at her ankles. She smiled at Valentina, bumping the car door shut with her thin hip.
"Hallo!" she called, walking up to the thatch-roofed house, her smile widening but dimming in its brightness. Valentina guessed why.
"And WHERE have you been?" asked Maggie, shaking her head. "Nearly ten years it's been, and shame on you. Ha-ha!"
The contrived laugh fit the circumstances, Valentina thought, groaning inside herself. But she too smiled in that worried, inquisitive manner.
"I've been away," she replied, "away being naughty."
"Oh the devil knows all about it, ha-ha! But all I want to know is, are you happy? Happy you're back?"
Valentina tilted back her head so her hair, long wavy and darkish red, fell back from her shoulders. Her chocolate eyes seemed to melt a little in the damp hazy sun. She knew the sun highlighted her rounded cheeks and the smooth bow of her lips. She wanted Professor Donegal to see that a decade of mystery had not aged her beyond her years, and that it had, in fact, drawn out reserves of youthful vim.
"I'm very happy to be back," she said. It was an exaggeration. Maggie noticed, and it made her smile grow smaller.
"Good for you, then. May I come in?"
Valentina looked away, her eyelids lowered. "I varnished the floorboards in front of the door and they're lacking something of being dry. " Then she smiled bigger than ever at Maggie and said, as if she really meant it, "Won't you come around back?"
But Maggie was not to be distracted by exaggerations nor by a brief look at the vegetable garden along the side of the house, whose ripe tendrils she could see peeping at her from around the corner.
"Valentina," she said like a doctor gently admonishing a patient, a gloved hand on the younger woman's bare forearm, "It was Professor MacGalt who informed me of your return after such a long and silent absence. Here you are, renting his country house, alone, with no children, no architectural career that I, your teacher, was so certain would be yours to make and make good. And he confided in me that as your former psychology teacher he is aware that something quite distressful brought you back to us."
Valentina's expression was at once defensive and amused.
Maggie blushed. "I say 'back to us,' when of course you have come home to your roots. Forgive me, but when a teacher has such a promising student, and when years later the student comes back with no sign of having fulfilled that promise..." The blush deepened. "Oh the devil knows what an old busybody I am, ha-ha! Never mind me. And Gerard MacGalt can just go examine his own skull for a change."
She stroked the arm and patted the tense hand. "Have you time for a cup of tea? I brought my own special blend," she said, slapping her purse.
Valentina opened her mouth to laugh but said instead, "Come around back, I'll let you in."
Maggie brightened her worried smile and nodded, then with her awkward stride, as awkward as her driving, she passed the vegetable garden with a quick sharp look at the tomato vines, and around to the back porch.
Here she paused with her white silk glove on the railing at the foot of the porch steps.
She was staring at a plaster-cast ornament the size of a hubcap. It hung from a nail on the dingy stucco wall at eye level. The embossed figure was that of a hooded angel looking down with bowed head, its mailed gloves on the hilt of a sword. In Latin along the upper curvature it read: VIGILANTES MORTUIS.
This puzzled her. Certainly it was not something Professor MacGalt would hang on the house, not that old liberal pacifist.
The back door, of Dutch design, opened, and Valentina looked out at Maggie. The young redhead's face instantly hardened, the eyes flashing like distant haloes of lightning. But as quickly they softened with an artificial warmth.
"I've got the kettle on," she said.
Maggie had swayed back from the porch steps. But she recovered, too, with the same desperate alacrity. "I brought one of your old architectural drawings with me, ha-ha. The Scottish-style castle, do you remember?"
She came up the steps patting her grey bun. "I always forget my hat. I have more hats than I have heads, and I can never..."
Valentina stepped aside. Maggie went past her into the dining nook.
The black kettle was steaming. As yet there was no whistle. The curtained window to one side of the stove was glowing, a fly buzzing between the pane and the cloth.
The nook had a strange smell. It smelled more like a place that oily parts of an engine are kept, not like what one would expect of a place with a full pantry and cupboards.
"Do sit down," said Valentina with feigned enthusiasm. She waved a hand at the small round table with its wicker-back armchairs. "I'll get the cups. There's the whistle!"
She lifted the kettle off the flame as Maggie hurriedly removed two bags of tea from the paper sack she had leisurely drawn from her purse. She sat at the table, holding the tea bags like an offering to a native.
"Black pekoe from India and China," she announced. Valentina poured boiling water in the blue ceramic cups.
Maggie dipped a bag in each. She sniffed at the steam. Her mind was swirling around images of Dr Gerard MacGalt, a mosaic of conversational snippets issuing from his disapproving mouth.
"I have crumpets," Valentina remarked, a hand on a chairback.
"Wha--? Oh... The devil knows how I adore crumpets, ha..."
While the tea brewed, Maggie took a folded sheet of printing paper from her purse and opened it. "Here," she said in a proud tone, smoothing the drawing on the table. She tapped with a forefinger the mathematical picture of a castle. "Exquisite! I share it with every class, every one of them, since you left us."
There was a prolonged silence. They each picked up their bags by the string, and each wrapping the string around the bag they squeezed it so every drop of tea was saved.
"Will you be staying with us, here in Lornaglen?" asked Maggie, and blew on the steaming tea in her cup. "Professor MacGalt mentioned the wonderful black gown you wore, and the parasol you carried, that afternoon in the village when he saw you after such... a long time."
"Yes, I'll be staying," said Valentina in a musing tone. She looked away, at the glowing curtain, and seemed to be listening to the buzz of the trapped fly.
"I wore the gown for myself," she said.
It was spoken barely above a whisper.
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