Landscape With Clouds
Orphaned Catherine Mortimer is brought up by her uncle and aunt, and when they are killed she devotes herself to constructing a happy life for her young cousin Jamie. They live in a rented house in Tewkesbury, where she is the accounts manager of a printing firm.
Catherine and Jamie, returning to England from Arcos, south of Spain, stop off in Madrid. They are in the walled garden of the monastery of El Escorial when they meet Henry Galdos Powell, an American boy who has only recently arrived to stay with his father. His mother is dead. Henry is lost and frightened, and Catherine and Jamie wait with him until the arrival of his father. Luis Galdos de Herrera is 37 years old, the head of a mining corporation and the bitter survivor of a divorce. Catherine is struck by his cool, detached strength, while he notices her devotion to her cousin. Each makes a profound impression on the other.
Back in England Catherine finds herself jobless and unable to meet the costs of keeping Jamie at the school where he is a weekly boarder. In the car when his parents were killed, he still suffers nightmares. Concerned about his state of mind she hides her anxieties, but Jamie is not fooled. He writes to Henry. Luis, recognising Catherine’s unremitting drive to protect Jamie and needing someone to take care of his own son, arrives in Tewkesbury and proposes that Catherine return to Spain to take full control of both boys, a job for which she will be well paid. Henry is also to be enrolled in Jamie’s school, and Jamie’s education will be assured. Catherine agrees to the plan.
From the start Luis, through attracted to Catherine, keeps a strained but correct distance, while Catherine, whose world has been turned upside down and who sees that she is dependent on her employer’s good will, emerges from shock-induced compliance fully determined to take for Henry and Jamie, every advantage of the undeniably rich culture of her new surroundings. She finds that the boys are passionately interested in just about everything. At the house in El Escorial she meets Maria Teresa Perez, the housekeeper, and Julia Baroja, an acquaintance of Luis whom the boys don’t like. She visits the Galdos family, who receive her with genuine warmth. Felipe Martinez Galdos, a cousin, invites her to Segovia to meet his sister, an invitation which she accepts. Her relationship with Luis remains formal, that of employer and employee, but he is far from pleased when he learns of the outing with Felipe, while Catherine is appalled at his coldness when he tells her more about the death of Henry’s mother. But Luis is plainly a generous man, and as Catherine learns more and more about him she finds herself more and more overwhelmingly attracted, so much so that she begins to fear having to return to England when the boys start their autumn term.
