‘Miss Shore.’
‘Yes, I believe—’
‘Señor Gómez Moreno has booked you a room with us. He left you this letter.’
Frances looked at the proffered letter. She wanted very much to say that she was here on business, that she did not wish to stay among the phoney Falstaffian splendours of the Hotel Toro and that she was by now quite certain that there had been considerable confusion over all the arrangements. However, as it seemed plain that she was a guest of the Gómez Morenos, she felt she could not object until she saw one of them, face to face, to object to. She took the letter and opened it:
Dear Miss Shore! Welcome to Sevilla. We hope you will find the Hotel Toro comfortable and the staff obliging. I will, if you will allow me, call for you at the hotel at 9 p.m. this evening.
Yours sincerely, José Gómez Moreno.
Frances turned to her driver.
‘Thank you so much for bringing me here.’
He bowed.
‘Is no problem.’ He gave her another smile flashed with gold. ‘I hope you will be having a good time in Sevilla.’
She watched him trot briskly across the foyer, reverse into the doors and swing himself out into the darkness beyond. The young man behind the desk held out a room key on a huge bronze plaque with a bull’s head in relief upon it.
‘Your room is on the third floor. Miss Shore. Room 309.’
* * *
Room 309 had yellow walls, a yellow-tiled floor, brown wooden furniture and brown-and-yellow folk-weave bedspreads. A single tiny lamp between the beds gave off as much light as a sick glow-worm, and high above, from the ceiling, hung a second unenthusiastic bulb in a yellow glass globe. The walls were quite bare except for a mirror hung at the right height for a dwarf, and a small dark panel which turned out to be an anguished deposition of Christ from the Cross, full of grimaces and gore. In one corner, a small, flimsy plastic cupboard passed for a bathroom, with a notice stuck up above the lavatory which read, ‘By order! Please Use Softly!’ Besides the twin beds – each as narrow as a school bed – was a veneered wardrobe, a table bearing an ashtray and two red plastic gardenias in a pottery vase, two upright chairs and a tiny television set on a wrought-iron trolley. As well as being ugly the room was also cold.
Frances dumped her suitcase down on one of the beds.
‘If I was paying for you,’ she said to the room, ‘I wouldn’t stay in you another second.’
She marched across to the window and flung open the long casements which opened inwards and were lined with grimy pleated net. Behind them brown shutters were firmly bolted against the winter night. Frances wrestled them open, and leaned out. She took a breath, a breath of Seville. It smelled of nothing but cold. Perhaps it was unfair, on a December night, to expect it to smell of orange blossom and charcoal and grilling and donkey dung but really, Frances thought, it could do better than this. I could be anywhere, she reflected crossly, anywhere in Europe, in a shoddy hotel room that isn’t charming enough or comfortable enough or warm enough to justify anybody staying in it, unless they were completely desperate.
She looked down into the alley, lit by gleams from the hotel windows. A couple was coming by, an oldish couple in dark formal clothes with a miniature dog darting about beside them, on a scarlet lead. They paced slowly by, under Frances’s gaze, the dog’s claws clicking on the cobbles, and then vanished round a corner where a blue neon sign said ‘Bar El Nido’ with a helpful indicating arrow. Then the alley was empty again.
‘Seville’s social life,’ Frances said, and banged the shutters shut. She was reminded of a night she had once spent in Cortona, in the rain, in a hotel that had promised so well, being a former monastery, and had turned out to be grim and comfortless with no bar, no extra blankets, and the dining room locked against all comers by eight-thirty in the evening. She had been too tired, that night, to trail out and find another hotel. This night, she wasn’t tired, but she appeared to be under an obligation – which was worse.
She sat down on one of the unfriendly beds and pulled off her boots. It would have been a relief to ring Lizzie. Under ordinary circumstances, and particularly with the wretched Gómez Morenos paying, she would have rung Lizzie at once, to tell her how dreadful the hotel was, and make a joke of the egg-box bathroom and the poor, gloomy bulls’ heads and the pretend Spanish ladies, frozen in vivacious mid-flamenco for evermore. But in the current circumstances, she couldn’t ring unless – unless it was to say look, I’ve made a really bad mistake, backed quite the wrong hunch, and I’m coming home for Christmas after all.
‘And that,’ Frances said out loud, ‘I can’t do. At least—’ She looked at her watch, it said eight-forty-five, ‘at least, not yet.’
At nine o’clock, having brushed her hair and put on more lipstick, but having decided against the tepid trickle that came from the shower head, Frances went down to the foyer and stationed herself between a lady in royal-blue ruffles with a fan and castanets painted with panniered donkeys, and a bull who had lost his nearest glass eye. She watched the doors. Ten minutes passed, and no-one came in or out. A stout couple emerged from the lift and sat as far away from Frances as possible, speaking in some Scandinavian language and studying a guide book. Frances got up and asked the grave young man behind the reception desk for some red wine. He said he was afraid the bar was closed. Frances said then she was afraid that someone from the hotel was going to have to go all the way to the Bar El Nido for her and bring some back. The young man looked at her for a long, long time and then said he would make enquiries.
‘Please do,’ Frances said. ‘And quickly.’
The young man picked up the nearest telephone and spoke a great deal of rapid, quiet, nimble Spanish into it. Then he replaced the receiver and said to Frances, as if he were a doctor speaking to the anxious relation of an extremely ill patient, ‘We will do all we can.’
‘Good,’ Frances said. She went back to her chair. ‘This is a dump,’ she said to the one-eyed bull. The Scandinavian couple stared at her.
‘Good evening,’ she said. ‘Do you think this hotel is comfortable?’
‘No,’ the man said in clear English. ‘But it is cheap.’ Then he went back to his guide book and his Nordic mutterings.
Frances went on waiting. The telephone rang once or twice, a boy in motor-bike leathers came in with a parcel, a handful of depressed-looking guests crossed the foyer on their way out to dinner, but no wine came, nor did young Señor Gómez Moreno.
‘Where is my wine, please?’ Frances called.
‘One moment, Miss Shore,’ the young man said.
An elderly telex machine behind the desk began to chatter out a message, claiming his attention. Frances looked at her nails – clean, unpolished – at the heels of her boots, at the Spanish lady’s bright, fixed, painted face, at the darkly gilded depths of the ceiling, at her watch. At half-past nine, she marched back to the reception desk. The young man saw her coming, and melted, without hurrying, into an inner cubicle, obscured by a curtain. There was a brass bell on the reception desk, shaped – oh my God, I can’t stand it, Frances thought – like a flamenco dancer. She picked it up and rang it ferociously.
‘Where is my wine?’
A cold blast of air swirled into the foyer as the doors were pushed open. A young man came in, a tall, attractive young man in an English-looking camel-hair overcoat and a long plaid scarf.
‘Miss Shore?’
Frances turned, still holding the bell.
‘I am José Gómez Moreno.’ He held out his hand and smiled with enormous warmth. ‘Welcome to Sevilla.’
Frances looked at him.
‘You are late,’ she said.
‘I am?’ He seemed amazed.
‘In your letter, you said you would be here at nine o’clock. It is now almost twenty-five to ten.’
He smiled again, making a balancing movement with his hand. ‘One little half hour! In Spain—’
The foyer doors opened again. A youth in
black trousers and a black-leather jacket appeared bearing a tin tray with a single glass of red wine on it. The receptionist emerged from his retreat.
‘Your wine, Miss Shore,’ he said with quiet triumph.
The youth put the tray down on the reception desk. Frances and José Gómez Moreno both looked at it.
‘Please,’ Frances said. ‘Take it to the couple sitting over there. With my compliments. They can share it.’
‘¿Qué?’ said the youth.
‘You explain,’ Frances said to the receptionist and then, turning to José Gómez Moreno who was gazing at her with an expression of profound puzzlement, ‘and then you can start.’
He took her to a restaurant in the Pasaje de Andreu. It was underground, in a vaulted cellar that had once, he explained, held great oak barrels of wine.
‘White wine,’ he said smiling again, ‘Moriles and Montilla. The best vineyards for these wines are near Córdoba.’
Frances wasn’t interested in Córdoba. She held the menu – ‘Entremeses’, it said in flowing script. ‘Sopas, Huevos, Aves y caza’ – well away from her in order to show José Gómez Moreno that she was not to be side-tracked and said, ‘I think there has been some confusion.’
He smiled. He was really very beautiful, with a decisively boned face and clear dark eyes and the smooth, obedient dark hair that is so rare in England.
‘Confusion? Surely not—’
Frances laid the menu down and folded her hands on it.
‘When we spoke. Señor Gómez Moreno—’
‘José, please—’
‘José, you said that your hotels were open but not busy at Christmas and that, as you and your father would both be working, there would be ample time to show me—’
‘There will be! There is! Please look at the menu. Here is most excellent sopa de ajo, a soup of garlic, paprika—’
‘I don’t want to look at the menu, José. I want to know why I am staying at that most inferior hotel when you are supposed to be impressing on me the suitability of your posadas for my clients.’
José Gómez Moreno gave a deep and sorrowful sigh. He poured wine into Frances’s glass.
‘There comes something surprising.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
He sighed again. He spread his elegant hands.
‘My father goes to Madrid for two nights. All is here as usual. Your room is ready. Then comes the telephone, quite unexpected, quite unforeseen. It is a party from Oviedo, from the north, wishing to stay for four nights, an excellent booking, of much benefit at a quiet time.’
‘So someone from Oviedo, who may never come to your hotel again, is given the room I was to have and I am – am fobbed off with the Hotel Toro?’
‘I don’t understand fobbed off—’
‘José,’ Frances said. ‘Do you think this is any way to do business?’
She leaned forward and peered at him. She saw that he was not only beautiful but also very young, perhaps no more than twenty-four or five.
‘Does your father know about this? Does he know that I have been thrown out for the last-minute party from – from wherever it was?’
‘Oviedo.’
Frances said crossly, ‘It doesn’t matter where it was. I think you are making me far too furious to be hungry.’
‘Please—’ He put a hand out and laid it on hers. ‘I make mistake. Truly I am sorry. The Hotel Toro is—’
‘Dreadful.’
‘You do not like the Spanish atmosphere?’
‘I do not like the cold bath water nor the ugliness nor the lack of service nor the Spanish atmosphere.’
He gazed at her.
‘I have offended you.’
She picked up the menu again and glared at it.
‘You have made me feel that I have come a long way for nothing when I might have been spending Christmas in England with my family.’
There was a silence. Frances read the menu. She was not going to look at her phrase book, with José Gómez Moreno regarding her like a kicked dog, so she stared uncomprehendingly at words like chorizo and anguilas, and tried not to think of family supper in the kitchen at the Grange, with Davy allowed to stay up for the first course, drowsy in his pyjamas.
‘Tomorrow,’ José said soberly, ‘all will change.’
Frances said nothing.
‘Tomorrow, I move some of the party from Oviedo into the Hotel Toro, and you will have the room my father instructed.’
She glanced at him. His eyes were cast down.
‘When tomorrow?’
‘By midday.’
‘Your midday or my midday?’
‘Please?’
‘Punctual English time or unpunctual Spanish time?’
He straightened his shoulders.
‘I come to the Hotel Toro at midday, as it strikes from the cathedral, and take you to our posada.’
She looked at him. He was trying a smile out on her, a hopeful, boyish, pleading smile.
‘You promise?’
He nodded. His smile grew more confident. He even gave the merest wink.
‘Otherwise my father will kill me.’
4
FRANCES SLEPT BADLY. Her bed was hard as well as narrow and there seemed to be no way to get warm. Soon after she had gone to bed, the occupants of the next room spent a long time running taps and pulling plugs, causing the pipes in the communicating wall to bang and gurgle. At three in the morning, someone in metal-heeled shoes went down the tiled corridor outside singing an unsteady song in German, and shortly after five, a party of municipal workers in the alley below threw a few dustbins about and brushed at the cobbles with twig brooms and a sound like hissing snakes. At six-forty, the people next door went back into their bathroom to begin on more water games, and Frances crawled groaning out of bed, and climbed into her makeshift plastic shower cubicle, to stand with her eyes shut under the lukewarm trickle.
A different receptionist – a busty girl with luxuriant dark hair and lipstick the colour of black-cherry jam – said that breakfast was not served until eight.
‘Then I will just have some coffee, brought here, please.’
‘It is not possible until eight, madam.’
Frances held on to the edge of the reception desk.
‘Where,’ she said, spacing her words out in an effort not to smack the cherry-lipped girl, ‘can I get a cup of coffee in Seville before seven in the morning?’
The girl looked at her.
‘At the bar in the next pasaje.’
‘The El Nido?’
‘Yes,’ the girl said.
Frances went out into the alley. High above her shone the kind of blue sky familiar from skiing-holiday advertisements, clear, strong, delphinium-blue sky without a single cloud. There was a sharp wind, too, and a distinct bite to the air. Frances turned up her mackintosh collar and longed for the dark-blue overcoat she had rejected as too heavy for Spain, even in winter, and left hanging in London, an unoriginal coat, but a warm and faithful friend.
The Bar El Nido was only half awake. A skinny, haggard waiter was sweeping the floor of last night’s cigarette butts, and another one yawned behind a coffee machine. Two men in workmen’s clothes leaned against the bar with newspapers and glasses of brandy, and the walls were covered with posters for bull fights and for football matches. Frances seemed to be the only woman there.
She went up to the bar and asked in careful, Anglicized Spanish for coffee and bread and orange juice. She was given exactly that. She asked for butter. She was handed a single minute rectangle wrapped in gold paper.
‘And jam? ¿Mermelada?’
The waiter produced a tiny foil pot of apricot jam, made in Switzerland.
‘¿Mermelada de Sevilla?’ Frances said. ‘¿De naranja?’
‘No,’ said the waiter, and went back to his coffee machine.
Frances carried her breakfast to a little glass-topped table in the window. She felt more weary than hungry, more in need of the comfort of food
than its sustenance. She picked up her coffee cup and held it, for warmth, in her hands.
She took a mouthful. The coffee was bitter, flavoured with chicory. Her eyes were sore, and despite her shower, she felt travel-weary and much rumpled, as she used to feel on the occasions in Italy when she had been stranded for the night and had slept in her car. She wondered if she had, in fact, any inclination at all to trouble to give Seville a second chance, even with the prospect of being made more comfortable by lunchtime. She stared out of the window. A stout young woman went by, in patent-leather shoes and a thick black coat, holding the hands of two sober small children, dressed like miniature adults. Were they going to church? Or going to see Granny? Or even going to the dentist? Once, and only once, Frances had taken Sam to the dentist, and Sam had bitten him, hard enough to draw blood.
‘You little bugger,’ the dentist had said, startled out of his polite professionalism.
Those good little Sevillians would never bite anybody, Frances thought, those good little Catholic children. She tried to put herself in the stout mother’s place, holding those neatly gloved little hands.
‘Come along, María, come along, Carlos, don’t dawdle—’
It didn’t work, she couldn’t convince herself. Those children were inescapably Spanish, utterly foreign. Frances wondered what their father was like: a lawyer perhaps, or a doctor, a smallish, solid man to match his wife, anxious to keep his children safe from the alarming liberalism sweeping Spain.
‘Drugs, sex,’ José Gómez Moreno had said last night over tough little roasted partridges. ‘They are everywhere in Spain now. Sevilla is very bad for drugs. Parents are all the time afraid for their children. The television sex shows,’ he said, his eyes gleaming, ‘are terrible.’
He had talked a good deal about his father. He assured Frances that she would be quite amazed by the beautiful English his father spoke, ‘English,’ said José, ‘just like an English person, no difference’. He said his father was a businessman and that the hotels were only one of his interests, and that he had lived apart from José’s mother for fifteen years, and that this fact had made both the grandmothers angry and disapproving.
A Spanish Lover Page 5