‘William!’ Barbara screamed. ‘Answer it, for heaven’s sake! I’m in the attic!’
His reluctant footsteps crossed the hall – the parquet shining once again, after Barbara’s initial anti-domestic defiance had abated – and then his reluctant hand rattled the receiver.
‘Hello?’ William said cautiously.
Snorting, Barbara crouched in the hatch.
‘Lizzie!’ William said delightedly. ‘Darling, how lovely. We shall see you tomorrow – What? What about Frances—’ He stopped. Barbara held the ends of the galvanized extending ladder and put one foot, and then the other, on the topmost rung. ‘Good Lord,’ William said. ‘Is she all right? I mean has she—?’ He stopped again, listening. Barbara slithered gracelessly down the ladder and landed heavily on the landing floor. ‘Yes, of course,’ William said. ‘Terribly upsetting for you. Quite incomprehensible. It doesn’t really seem a reason—’ He glanced up. Barbara was coming downstairs at great speed, one hand held out for the receiver. ‘Look, darling,’ William said rapidly. ‘Look, I’ll tell Mum and then we’ll ring you back. No, no, she’s fine but I’ll tell her myself, no need for you to – bye, darling,’ William said firmly, banging down the receiver just as Barbara’s fingers closed about it.
‘What?’ Barbara demanded.
‘Something odd,’ William said. ‘Something very odd—’
‘Tell me—’
‘Frances isn’t spending Christmas with us. Frances is going away.’
‘What? Where—’
William looked at Barbara.
‘She’s going to Spain.’
‘Spain!’ cried Barbara, as if William had said ‘Siberia’. ‘But why?’
‘To see some hotels, apparently.’
‘At Christmas? Is she mad? Spanish hotels will be closed at Christmas!’
‘Not these ones, apparently. They are a tiny private group of hotels called, says Lizzie, the Posadas of Andalucía. The son of the owner is going to show Frances round.’
Barbara seized William’s arm.
‘That’s it! That’s why she’s going! It’s a man, a Spaniard—’
‘Lizzie says not. She says she asked Frances and Frances says she’s never met him. She’s just going. Poor Lizzie, she’s so cut up—’
Barbara let William’s arm go. She suddenly looked thoughtful.
‘Yes. Of course.’
‘Do you think,’ William said slowly, ‘that Frances is running away?’
‘Running away? From what?’
‘From us. From being like me, just drifting and bobbing—’
‘Nonsense,’ Barbara said. ‘She runs a highly successful little business. You can’t drift and bob and run a business,’
‘I said you’d ring Lizzie back—’
‘Yes, I heard you—’
‘It will be so different, without Frances, won’t it, I mean we have never, in thirty-seven years, had Christmas without Frances—’
‘I had one,’ Barbara said, ‘in Morocco. But then, I didn’t have Christmas that year.’
‘You ran away—’
‘Don’t jump to conclusions,’ Barbara said briskly. ‘We don’t know that Frances is doing anything of the sort. I shall ring her before I ring Lizzie.’
‘She’s gone,’ William said.
‘Gone?’
‘Yes. She flew an hour ago. She went straight from Lizzie to the airport. She’s left us a letter.’
‘How melodramatic—’
‘No more melodramatic’, said William with some energy, ‘than running away to Marrakesh.’
‘Why do you keep bringing that up?’
‘To remind you that people do do unexpected things, people who haven’t taken final leave of their senses.’
Barbara seized the telephone and began to dial Lizzie’s number with fierce, jabbing movements. William went slowly back into the sitting room where he had been snugly buried in a drift of Sunday newsprint. He thought he might go down to the pub, buy himself a Scotch and then take his drink over to the pub payphone, as he so often did, and ring Juliet. He thought he knew what Juliet would say, but he wanted to hear her actually saying it. He saw himself standing there, in the corner of the public bar, telephone receiver in one hand, whisky in the other, listening to Juliet.
‘Ah,’ Juliet would say. ‘Ah, William. I’ve been waiting for this to happen …’
3
FRANCES LAY BACK in her aeroplane seat, and closed her eyes. The woman next to her, who was going out to Spain to spend Christmas with her son who had married a girl from Seville, was very anxious to be conversational, so Frances had had to say, gently and untruthfully, ‘I’m so sorry, I’ve got a wicked headache. I’m just going to close my eyes.’
‘Shame,’ the woman said. ‘Poor thing.’
She tried to give Frances two paracetamol tablets, and then a peppermint wrapped in green-and-white waxed paper. Smiling and shaking her head, Frances declined and leaned her head back, closing her eyes to shut the woman out. She heard her turn to the person on her other side, a spindly boy in a black-leather jacket and a white T-shirt with a black and red and yellow sun emblazoned on it, over the word ‘España’.
‘I’ve never flown to Seville before, you see, because formerly my son and his wife lived near Málaga, they ran a bar, called the Robin Hood, a theme bar, you understand, my son used to dress up, you know, but now that my daughter-in-law is expecting the baby, in March, that is, she wanted to be nearer her mother, quite understandable, in my opinion, so you see—’
‘Sorry,’ Frances heard the boy say in thickly accented English. ‘Sorry, madam, not spik English, not unnerstand—’
‘Oh?’ the woman said sharply. She twitched her flight magazine out of the hammock on the back of the seat in front of her. Frances could hear her ruffling indignantly through the shiny pages. ‘Oh indeed,’ the woman said, only half to herself. ‘Fine show of Christmas spirit, I must say.’
Christmas. Frances thought about it. She thought of her room at the Grange, Harriet’s room, with its blue-striped ticking curtains chosen by Lizzie, and its walls of posters of brooding, sulking, pop-star boys, chosen by Harriet. When Frances came to stay, Harriet moved out to share with Alistair, at least technically she moved out, but in fact stayed and lounged on the bed, watching Frances dress and undress, and asking her questions. On Christmas morning, Harriet waited for Frances to say, ‘Please, please don’t eat all that chocolate before breakfast or I shall throw up,’ and Harriet would peel the foil off a chocolate Father Christmas and open her mouth as wide as she could and say, ‘Watch. Watch!’ Frances was very fond of Harriet; it gave her a slight pang, sitting in this aeroplane, that by not being at Langworth for Christmas, she was letting Harriet down.
But then, she was letting everyone down, quite spectacularly, most of all Lizzie. Lizzie had been so hurt, and then so angry, that Frances had had to pretend that her flight was an hour earlier than it was, in order to have a pretext for leaving Langworth.
‘I can’t explain any better,’ Frances had said. ‘I had this invitation to go to Spain a week ago, from Mr Gómez Moreno. I said wasn’t Christmas a bit of an odd time, and he said no, it was an excellent time because his father’s hotels are open, but not full, which meant that I could see everything properly, really meet the staff. He said he and his father usually work at Christmas because his father doesn’t like Christmas.’
‘But you could have gone on Boxing Day,’ Lizzie insisted. She had taken the armful of presents Frances had brought and had dumped them, just anyhow, on the floor by the Christmas tree, as if she didn’t care about them in the slightest.
‘But I didn’t want to,’ Frances said. ‘I wanted to go now.’
‘Want,’ Lizzie shouted. ‘Want! When do I ever get to do what I want?’
‘Lizzie,’ Frances said, trying to take her sister’s hand and finding it snatched away, ‘I’m your sister, but I’m not you. I can’t take your life into every consideration about my life, any
more than you can about mine.’
‘Please don’t go,’ Lizzie had begged then. ‘Please don’t. I need you here, you know what it’s like—’
‘It’s only a day,’ Frances said. ‘Christmas is only a day.’
Lizzie burst into tears.
‘But why won’t you tell me the truth? Why won’t you tell me why you want to go, why you don’t want to be here?’
‘Because I don’t really know,’ Frances said.
Lying back in the plane, she knew that to say that had been an evasion. There were things in Lizzie, aspects of Lizzie, that Frances had always evaded, had learned in fact, to evade. From their earliest times together, those times when they had done nothing separately, not even the most intimate things, Frances had kept something back. It wasn’t a large something, but it was private, an area of herself that was her own and which therefore had to be kept secret. As a little girl, she had loved the physical closeness of Lizzie, but she hadn’t wanted to talk all the time, she had liked lying or sitting cuddled up to Lizzie, but thinking her own, silent thoughts. They hadn’t been very profound thoughts, Frances considered, being mostly dreamy stories set in mysterious and misty places, but they had been very satisfying and very necessary. It was also very necessary that they shouldn’t be told. Lizzie had never asked her what she was thinking; perhaps it had never occurred to her to, perhaps she assumed that they were both thinking the same thing.
Frances loved Lizzie. She loved her strength and her competence and the energy that manifested itself in the Gallery and the house and her brood of children and her love of colour. She had loved it too on the rare occasions when Lizzie’s competence broke down, as it had on the death of Alistair’s twin, and she turned to Frances with a kind of sweet, trusting dependence, all the sweeter for being so rare, and so honest. It was horrible to hurt Lizzie, horrible to see that Lizzie could not, would not, even begin to understand that they were, for the moment, divided by their own needs and preoccupations. Frances felt guilty that Lizzie should be so tired while she, Frances, flew away to Spain. But why should she feel guilty? She hadn’t chosen Lizzie’s life, Lizzie had chosen it herself. So why feel guilty? Because Lizzie had made her feel so, just as, in a smaller way, the woman next to her, who so wanted to tell her about her son dressing up as Robin Hood in order to pull pints for English tourists in a Spanish bar, made her feel guilty.
‘Don’t feel guilty,’ Frances told herself. ‘Just don’t. You aren’t responsible.’
‘Pardon?’ the woman said.
‘Why are women so prone to feeling guilty?’ Frances said, giving up and opening her eyes. ‘Why do women always feel so obliged to everybody else?’
The woman looked hard at Frances for a few seconds, then she picked up her flight magazine again and looked intently at a page of ads for duty-free scent.
‘I’m sure I don’t know,’ she said, and then added, with something like relief, ‘Only another hour and ten minutes to Seville.’
At Seville Airport – battered and abandoned-looking like all minor airports – a small man waited, in a blue suit. He carried a placard which read, ‘Miss F. Shore to Shore’, and which he held over his face so that he resembled a drawing in a game of Heads, Bodies and Legs.
‘Mr Gómez Moreno?’ Frances said. She said it without much conviction, not trusting her phrase-book Spanish not to disintegrate into her, by now, better Italian. The man lowered the placard, revealing a broad, beaming face.
‘Señora Jore to Jore?’
‘Just Shore,’ Frances said.
‘Señor Moreno send me,’ the little man said. ‘I drive you. Hotel Toro. Señor Moreno meet you Hotel Toro.’ He stooped for Frances’s luggage. ‘Coming with me. Señora Jore to Jore.’
He set off at a rapid trot, Frances following with her flight bag and her mackintosh.
‘Please holding bag!’ the little man called behind him. ‘Hold all-a your time. Is tirón in Sevilla!’
‘Tirón?’
‘Boys taking bags, quick, quick from motoring bicycles—’ He reversed deftly into the glass swing-doors of the airport entrance, pressing himself back so that Frances could pass through.
‘Is it far? To Seville?’
‘¿Qué?’
‘Is – ¿está lejos Sevilla?’
‘No,’ said the man. ‘In car, is quickly.’
It was dark, sharp, winter dark with a cold wind, but the sky overhead was brilliant with exaggerated foreign stars. The man stowed Frances away in the back of a car, banged her luggage into the boot behind her, and sprang into the driver’s seat as if they had not a moment to lose, starting the engine and roaring along the airport exit roads like a getaway driver after a bank raid.
I wonder, Frances thought, without much agitation, if I’m being abducted. It was most unlikely, but it wasn’t impossible. Nothing, at the moment, seemed entirely impossible, nor, having broken out in a small way, was there any reason to suppose that she mightn’t find she had broken out in a much larger way than she had intended. She looked out of the window. Buildings, factories perhaps, and high, squared wire fences were racing past in the orange-yellow light of the street arc lamps, looking both industrial and dull.
‘Where is the Hotel Toro?’ Frances said. ‘I mean ¿dónde …?’
The little man was leaning forward now, urging the car to overtake a bus.
‘Barrio de Santa Cruz! By Giralda! By Alcázar!’
Frances had idly supposed that she would be staying at the Gómez Morenos’ own hotel in Seville, the original Posada of Andalucía, which was called La Posada de los Naranjos. Frances had seen a brochure. On the front was a photograph of everyone’s dream of Seville, a tiled courtyard seen through a wrought-iron gate, with a fountain and flowers and lollipop-neat orange trees in tubs. The brochure said that all the bedrooms looked down into this courtyard, which had typical Spanish atmosphere. The bedrooms, it was promised, were gay and modern, and a stay in one of them would not be quickly forgot. There was central heating and telephone and everywhere private bath.
The car swung suddenly left and rushed over a bridge, a long, impressive stone bridge. Beneath it, water glittered and glimmered in the lights from the further shore, the water of the Guadalquivir. Frances said the name to herself, ‘The Guadalquivir.’ In the one serious guide book she had had time to read, Frances had discovered that George Borrow considered Seville to be the most interesting town in all Spain.
‘Plaza de Toros!’ the driver cried, waving a hand at the high, blank, curved walls of the bullring.
‘Horrible,’ Frances said firmly. ‘Cruel and horrible.’ None of her clients would countenance a holiday in Spain that even glanced at a bull fight. Perhaps she would have to make that very plain to Mr Gómez Moreno, both junior and senior. ‘I’m afraid that the English consider such a spectacle barbaric,’ or, more tactfully, ‘I’m afraid that, as a nation of animal lovers, we really cannot bear to see—’ What would they be like, the Gómez Morenos? Would they be small and square and energetic like their driver, similarly dressed in blue suits, with gold teeth and an unshakeable view of the only kind of English person who came to Spain being that in search of sun, sangría and golf courses? Would it be terribly difficult to explain to them that the clients of Shore to Shore knew about Lorca and Leopoldo Alas and the haunting death of Philip II, and had been to the great exhibition of paintings by Murillo at the Royal Academy in London? Had she been too impulsive? Was it, in truth, nothing but insanity to upset everyone in the family at Christmas for the sake of a pretty brochure, a pleasant-sounding chain of small hotels, and a friendly telephone call or two from a young man in Seville anxious to drum up business?
Heavens! thought Frances, and then, a second later: Pull yourself together. This is an adventure—
The car, having sped about a confusing maze of streets, stopped abruptly in front of a high white wall. It had, it appeared, simply run out of road.
‘Stopping,’ the driver said. ‘End. Is Barrio. No motoring c
ars.’
He sprang out and began to open doors and the boot. Frances got out on to the pavement. She was in a small, lopsided square, quite quiet except for her escort’s slamming of car doors and gruntings over luggage. At the far end was a little restaurant, its façade hung with rustling greenery and yellow lamps in its windows.
‘Coming with me, Señora,’ the driver said, and darted down an alley beside the high blank wall.
The alley was narrow, lit only by a pretty wrought-iron lamp on a bracket ten feet above Frances’s head. At the end, the little man vanished to the right, and then to the left, and then led her, panting slightly in his wake, to a broader alley, one side formed by a tall, cream-painted building, its windows obscured behind formidable iron grilles.
‘Is Hotel Toro,’ the man called. ‘Very luxey!’
To Frances, it looked like a penitentiary.
‘Are you sure?’
He performed his reversing manoeuvre into the doors to the foyer.
‘Come!’
‘Why am I not staying at the Posada de los Naranjos?’
‘Señor Moreno is coming,’ the driver said. ‘Coming more later. Is good hotel. Hotel Toro.’
It was, at first glance, the most bizarre hotel Frances had encountered in five years of intensive hotel spotting. The long foyer, floored in green marble chips and with a deeply, richly coffered ceiling, was furnished as an unintentional parody of the antique Spanish style, all carved oak and tooled leather and brass studs as big as walnuts. Between every piece of furniture stood either a suit of armour or an old-fashioned shop-window dummy in full flamenco frills, and the walls, heavily stuccoed as if with a garden fork, were adorned with bull fighters’ capes and swords and also, in lugubrious rows, with the horned heads of their victims mounted on varnished shields. The impression was of a macabre party, halted by the casting of a sudden spell.
‘Ambiente tipicamente español,’ the driver said reverently. He put Frances’s case down on the shining green floor. ‘Mos’ beautiful.’
Behind the reception desk stood a lean, grave young man in a dark suit. He gave Frances a long look and then a slow bow.
A Spanish Lover Page 4