Meet Me Under The Ombu Tree Read online

  Table of Contents

  Also by Santa Montefiore

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  The Solanas Family tree

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Acknowledgements

  Born in England in 1970, Santa Montefiore grew up in Hampshire. She is married to historian Simon Sebag-Montefiore. They live with their two children, Lily and Sasha, in London. Visit her at www.santamontefiore.co.uk and sign up for her newsletter.

  Praise for Meet Me Under the Ombu Tree:

  ‘All the ingredients of a classic romantic read - thwarted love, exotic locations and lifestyles of the rich and famous’ Daily Mail ‘A brilliant first novel and a classic piece of storytelling’ OK Magazine An enjoyable tale of heat, dust and lust that maintains the tension to the very end’ Mail on Sunday

  Ambitious . . . contains all the basic ingredients of a satisfying saga. It is impossible not to root for Sofia’ Sunday Telegraph

  ‘The descriptions of Argentina are fascinating, there is enough of a sprinkling of politics to keep readers on their toes and, as ever, the predicament of star-crossed lovers is the stuff of delicious escapism’ Sunday Times Praise for Santa Montefiore:

  ‘Santa Montefiore is the new Rosamunde Pilcher’ Daily Mail A superb storyteller of love and death in romantic places in fascinating times -

  her passionate novels are already bestsellers across Europe and I can see why. Her plots are sensual, sensitive and complex, her characters are unforgettable life forces, her love stories are desperate yet uplifting - and one laughs as much as one cries’ Plum Sykes, Vogue

  ‘A gripping romance ... it is as believable as the writing is beautiful’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘Anyone who likes Joanne Harris or Mary Wesley will love Montefiore’ Mail on Sunday

  ‘One of our personal favourites and bestselling authors, sweeping stories of

  love and families spanning continents and decades’ The Times

  ‘The novel displays all Montefiore’s hallmarks: glamorous scene-setting,

  memorable characters, and as always deliciously large helpings of yearning

  love and surging passion’ Wendy Holden, Sunday Express

  ‘Engaging and charming’ Penny Vincenzi

  Also by Santa Montefiore

  The Secrets of the Lighthouse

  The Summer House

  The House By The Sea

  The Affair

  The Italian Matchmaker

  The French Gardener

  Sea of Lost Love

  The Gypsy Madonna

  Last Voyage of the Valentina

  The Swallow and the Hummingbird

  The Forget-Me-Not Sonata

  The Butterfly Box

  First published in Great Britain by Hodder & Stoughton, 2001

  An Hachette Livre Company

  This paperback edition first published in 2014 by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © Santa Montefiore, 2001

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  ® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.

  The right of Santa Montefiore to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd 1st Floor

  222 Gray’s Inn Road London WCiX8HB

  www.simonandschuster.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Paperback ISBN 978-1-47113-212-4 Ebook ISBN 978-1-47113-213-1

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely

  coincidental.

  Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRo 4YY

  To my beloved Sebag

  Chapter 1

  When I close my eyes I see the flat, fertile plains of the Argentine pampa. It is like no other place on earth. The vast horizon stretches out for miles and miles - we used to sit at the top of the ombu tree and watch the sun disappear behind it, flooding the plains with honey.

  As a child I was unaware of the political chaos around me. Those were the days of General Peron’s exile; turbulent years from 1955-73 when the military ruled the country like incompetent schoolchildren playing Pass the Parcel with political power. They were dark days of guerrilla warfare and terrorism. But Santa Catalina, our ranch, was a small oasis of peace, far from the riots and oppression taking place in the capital. From the top of our magical tree we gazed lovingly down onto a world of old-fashioned values and traditional family life punctuated with horse riding, polo and long, languorous barbecues in the dazzling summer sunshine. The bodyguards were the only indications of the trouble that simmered on our borders.

  My grandfather, Dermot O’Dwyer, never did believe in the magic of the ombu tree. That’s not to say he wasn’t superstitious, he used to hide his liquor in

  a different place every night to fool the leprechauns. But he just didn’t see how a tree could possess any kind of power. ‘A tree is a tree,’ he’d say in his Irish drawl, ‘and that’s all there is to it.’ But he wasn’t made from Argentine soil; like his daughter, my mother, he was an alien and never did fit in. He didn’t want to be buried in our family tomb either. ‘I came from the earth and to the earth I’ll return,’ he was very fond of saying. So he was buried on the plain with his bottle of liquor - I guess he was still anxious to outsmart those leprechauns.

  I cannot think about Argentina without the craggy image of that tree, as wise and omniscient as an oracle, rising to the surface of my thoughts. I know now that one can never recapture the past, but that old tree holds all the memories of yesterday and the hopes invested in tomorrow within the very essence of its boughs. Like a rock in the middle of a river the ombu has remained the same while all those around it have changed.

  I left Argentina in the summer of 1976, but as long as my heart beats, its resonance shall vibrate across those grassy plains, despite all that has happened since. I grew up on the family ranch or campo as they say in Spa
nish. Santa Catalina was set in the middle of that plain which is part of the vast eastern

  region they call the pampa. Flat as a ginger nut biscuit, you can see for miles in every direction. Long, straight roads cut through the land, which is arid in summer and verdant in winter, and in my day those roads were little more than dirt tracks.

  The entrance to our farm resembled the entrance to those spaghetti western towns; it had a large sign that swung in the autumn wind saying Santa Catalina in large black writing. The drive was lengthy and dusty, lined by tall maple trees planted by my great-grandfather, Hector Solanas. In the late nineteenth century he built his house, the house I grew up in. Typically colonial, it was constructed around a courtyard and was painted white with a flat roof. At the two front corners stood two towers; one housed my parents’ bedroom, the other my brother Rafael’s. As the firstborn he got the nicest bedroom.

  My grandfather, also called Hector just to make everyone’s lives more complicated, had four children - Miguel, Nico, Paco (my father), and Alejandro - and each one built a house of their own when they grew up and married. They all had several children, but I spent most of my time in Miguel and Chiquita’s house with Santi and Maria, two of their children. I liked them the best of all. Nico and Valeria’s and Alejandro and Malena’s houses were always open to us as well, and we spent as much time there as we did at home.

  At Santa Catalina the houses were built in the middle of the plain, divided only by large trees - pines, eucalyptus, poplar and plane trees mostly, which were planted equidistant from each other in order to resemble parks. At the front of each house were wide terraces where we would sit and gaze over the uninterrupted fields that stretched out before us. When I first arrived in England I remember how the houses in the countryside delighted me, their gardens and hedges were so neat and groomed. My Aunt Chiquita loved English gardens and tried to emulate them, but it wasn’t really possible at Santa Catalina; beds of flowers simply looked out of place due to the vastness of the land. My mother planted bougainvillea and hydrangeas and hung pots of geraniums everywhere instead.

  Santa Catalina was surrounded by fields full of ponies; my uncle Alejandro bred them and sold them all over the world. There was a large swimming pool set into a man-made hill screened by bushes and trees, and a tennis court that we all shared. Jose managed the gauchos who looked after the ponies and lived in houses on the farm called ranchos. Their wives and daughters worked as maids in our houses, cooking, cleaning and looking after the children. I used to yearn for the long summer holiday, which lasted from the middle of December to the middle of March. During those few months we wouldn’t leave Santa Catalina. My fondest memories are of that time.

  Argentina is very Catholic. But no one embraced the Catholic religion as fervently as my mother, Anna Melody O’Dwyer. Grandpa O’Dwyer was religious in a sensible way - not like my mother, whose life was inhibited by the need to keep up appearances. She manipulated religion to suit herself. Their arguments on the Will of God used to keep us children amused for hours. Mama believed that everything was the Will of God - if she was depressed God was punishing her for something, if she was happy then it was a reward. If I gave her trouble, which I managed to do most of the time, then God was punishing her for not bringing me up right.

  Grandpa O’Dwyer said she was simply shirking responsibility. ‘Just because yer testy this morning don’t go blaming it on the Good Lord; it’s the way you look at the world, Anna Melody, that makes you want to change it.’

  He used to say that health is a gift from God while happiness is up to us. To him it was the way you saw things; a glass of wine could be half full or half empty depending on the way you looked at it. It was all about having a positive

  mental attitude. Mama thought that was blasphemy and used to go quite pink in the face if he ever mentioned it, which he did often as he enjoyed tormenting her.

  ‘Slap me with a kipper, Anna Melody, but the sooner you stop putting words into God’s mouth and take responsibility for yer moods the happier yer gonna to be.1

  ‘May you be forgiven, Dad,’ she’d stammer, her cheeks clashing with her sunset red hair.

  Mama had beautiful hair. Long red locks like Botticelli’s Venus, except she never looked serene like Venus, or poetical. She was either too studied or too cross. She had been unaffected once - Grandpa told me she used to run barefoot around Glengariff, their home in Southern Ireland, like a wild animal with a storm in her eyes. He said her eyes were blue but sometimes they were grey like a drizzly Irish day when the sun’s pushing through the clouds. That sounded very poetic to me. He told me how she was always running off up the hills.

  ‘In a village of that size you just couldn’t lose anything, least of all someone as lively as Anna Melody O’Dwyer. But once she’d been gone for hours. We searched those hills, calling for her to the skies. When we found her she was under a tree by a stream, playing with half a dozen fox cubs she’d found. She knew we were looking for her, but she just couldn’t tear herself away from them cubs. They’d lost their mother and she was crying.’

  When I asked him why she had changed, he replied that life had been a disappointment. The storm’s still there, but I can’t see the sunshine pushing through no more.’ I wondered why life had so disappointed her.

  Now my father was a romantic figure. His eyes were as blue as cornflowers and his lips curled up at the corners even when he wasn't smiling. He was Señor Paco and everyone on the farm respected him. He was tall, slim and hairy. Not as hairy as his brother Miguel - Miguel was like a bear and so dark-skinned they called him El Indio (the Indian). Papa was fairer like his mother and so handsome that Soledad, our maid, would often blush when serving around the table. She once confessed to me that she was unable to look him straight in the eye. Papa understood that as a sign of humility. I couldn’t tell him it was because she fancied him, she would never have forgiven me. Soledad didn’t have much contact with my father, that was Mama’s department, but she didn’t miss a thing.

  In order to understand Argentina through the eyes of a foreigner I have to cast my mind back to when I was a child, riding along in the horse-drawn cart called a carro, with Grandpa O’Dwyer commenting on things that to me were commonplace and mundane. Firstly the nature of the people. Argentina was conquered by the Spanish in the sixteenth century and ruled by the viceroys who represented the Spanish crown. Independence from Spain was won on two days - 25 May and 9 July 1816. Grandpa used to say that having two dates to celebrate was typical of the Argentines. They always have to do everything bigger and better than everyone else.' he’d grumble. I suppose he was right; after all, the avenue in Buenos Aires called Avenida 9 de Julio is the widest in the world. As children we were always very proud of that fact.

  In the late nineteenth century, in response to the agricultural revolution, thousands of Europeans, mainly from Northern Italy and Spain, immigrated to Argentina to exploit the rich land of the pampas. That is when my ancestors arrived. Hector Solanas was the head of the family, and a fine fellow he was too; were it not for him, we might never have seen an ombu tree or the ginger nut plain.

  When I cast my thoughts to those fragrant plains it is the rough brown faces of the gauchos that emerge with all their flamboyance out of the mists of my memory and cause me to sigh from deep within my being, because the gaucho is the romantic symbol of all that is Argentine. Historically they were wild and untameable mestizo (people of mixed Indian and Spanish blood) - outlaws who lived off the large herds of cows and horses that roamed the pampas. They’d capture the horses and use them to round up the herds of cows. They would then sell the hides and tallow, which was very profitable, in exchange for Mate and tobacco. Of course, this was before beef became an exportable commodity. Now Mate (pronounced ‘matay’) is the traditional herbal tea they sipped from a decorated round gourd through an ornate silver ‘straw’ called a bombilla. It’s quite addictive, and according to our maids it was also good for weight loss.

  The li
fe of a gaucho is on horseback — his skill as a horseman is possibly unmatched anywhere else in the world. At Santa Catalina the gauchos were a colourful part of the scenery. The gaucho attire is showy as well as practical. They wear bombachas, baggy trousers with buttoned ankles that go into their leather boots; a faja, a woollen sash they tie around their waists which they then cover with a rostra, a stiff leather belt decorated with silver coins. The rostra also supports their backs during the long days on horseback. They traditionally carry a facon, a knife which is used for castrating and skinning as well as for self-defence and eating. Grandpa O’Dwyer once joked that Jose, our head gaucho, should have been in the circus. My father was furious and thankful that his father-in-law didn’t speak any Spanish.

  The gauchos are as proud as they are capable. On a romantic level they are part of the Argentine national culture and there have been many novels, songs and poems written about them. Martin Fierro’s epic poem ‘El Gaucho’ is the best example of these — I know because we were made to memorize large portions of it at school. Occasionally when my parents entertained foreign visitors at Santa Catalina the gauchos would put on fantastic displays for them. This would involve rodeo, the breaking-in of horses and much riding around at terrific speed with their lassoes snapping the air like demonic snakes.

  Jose taught me how to play polo, which was rare for a girl in those days. The boys hated me playing because I was better than some of them, and certainly better than a girl should be.

  My father was always very proud of the fact that the Argentines are indisputably the best polo players in the world, even though the game started in India and was brought to Argentina by the British. My family would go and watch the top tournaments played in Buenos Aires in the summer months of October and November at the polo ground in Palermo. I remember my brothers and cousins using those tournaments to pick up girls, rather like at Mass in the city where no one paid too much attention to the priest because they were far too busy eyeing each other up. But at Santa Catalina polo was played almost all year round. The petiseros, stable-hands, would train and care for the ponies and we had only to call the puesto to let them know when we’d be playing and the ponies would be saddled up and ready, snorting in the shade of the eucalyptus trees, for when we wanted them.