‘They are strict Catholics, you see. Me – I can take religion or leave it. My generation can’t be bothered.’
‘And your father?’
‘He never speaks of religion. He doesn’t like to be serious. Have you a boyfriend?’
‘No,’ said Frances, ‘if it’s any of your business.’
He had laughed. He had recovered his equilibrium once and wasn’t going to lose it again in a hurry, so he refrained from paying Frances fulsome compliments like how a beautiful woman like you should never, etc. etc. Just as well, Frances thought now, spreading butter and jam on her papery Spanish roll, or I might really have flipped. People never seem to use their imaginations, when dealing with those of us who aren’t part of a couple, they never seem to display a quarter of the sensitivity when dealing with you that they simply demand when you are dealing with them. You get used to this in a way, just as you get used to singleness and to not being essential to someone and to both the pleasures and pains of not having someone else to take into account – you get used to it, but you still hate being asked about it. It makes you think about it, all over again, it makes you start to wonder … She bit her roll. Barbara’s theory was, of course, that Frances couldn’t sustain a wholehearted relationship because she was the weaker half of a pair of twins, but Frances was long used to her mother’s theories and told herself she wasn’t much inclined to believe them. And yet, she hadn’t ever had a wholehearted relationship with a man, had she? She had fallen heavily for several men, in a desperate, almost headlong way, but she had never felt satisfied, in bed or out of it, by any of them once the fervour of the first stage was over. Always, it seemed, she would begin to withdraw, disappointed and empty-handed, just as the man was beginning to think that there might indeed be something more than met the eye to this tall girl in her conventional clothes with her funny little travel business and her oddly impersonal flat. But it would be too late then, he would have mistimed his interest, missed the emotional boat, and Frances would have gone, drifting back into her singleness, sadly but unavoidably. So weird, Frances told herself, when I know that I’m a loving person, that I like loving and being loved. Don’t I? Or am I just very short on self-knowledge and very long on self-delusion? Could Mum be even partly right? Could it be, really and in physiological fact, that Lizzie has all the emotional, sensual and reproductive instincts that should by rights have been shared out between us?
Frances finished her roll and her coffee, and wiped her mouth on a tiny, slippery paper napkin. She stood up. She would do, she thought, what she always did on trips abroad, which was to start with the church or cathedral of any town or city, and work outwards. She went over to the bar to pay for her breakfast. The waiter, eyes half closed against the smoke rising from the cigarette in his mouth, was drying glasses. He didn’t look at her. She laid exactly the right number of pesetas down on the bar with emphasis – ‘No tip,’ she said to him in English, ‘because there was no service’ – and walked out of last night’s atmosphere into the new morning’s sharp, cold air.
It was, she remembered, Christmas Eve. It was impossible, somehow, to feel this emotionally, despite the cold. Stuck as she was in the middle of an elaborate and undignified mistake, the day didn’t feel like anything, it simply felt like an odd foreign day, familiar, in its oddness, to many similar foreign days in Frances’s past. She thought of Langworth. The house would shortly be in uproar, the kitchen strewn with bowls of turkey stuffing and piles of vegetable peelings, the house with the litter left by the children’s robust and chaotic approach to Christmas decoration. In the midst of it, pipe in mouth, serenely absorbed in a crossword or in one of Alistair’s endless models, William would be the still centre in the eye of the storm. Frances thought suddenly how nice it would be to have William with her now, impenetrably English in these Spanish streets, gently amazed by the otherness of it all.
‘Extraordinary building,’ she could hear him say of the cathedral. ‘Perfectly extraordinary. Now who do you suppose admires it?’
Frances couldn’t think if she did or not, it was too peculiar at first glance. She paused at a newspaper kiosk – its upper shelves stuffed with pornographic magazines – and bought a guide book to the cathedral, a small, thick guide book printed on shiny paper. ‘All you need to know’, said the title page, ‘about the Cathedral of Seville and the Monastery of St Isidoro del Campo.’
Frances twitched her bag on to her shoulder and risked another glance at her goal. She stood across the street from its western façade, and gazed at it across Seville’s swirling traffic. It was simply enormous, and very complicated, Gothic and flamboyant. Behind it, there appeared to be – could there be? – a minaret. Frances opened her guide book.
‘In this cathedral are many beautiful doors, the Market Door, the St Christopher Door, the Door of the Bells, the Door of the Sticks, the Door of Forgiveness, the Door—’
Frances shut the guide book, and put it in her mackintosh pocket. Perhaps, like some Italian cathedrals, a forbidding, or even hideous, exterior would give way to treasures within. This was not hideous, but it was startling, so vast, so complex, so grand, so – so bragging, Frances thought, that it made one feel apprehensive. Still, there wasn’t much point in standing shivering on the opposite pavement, feeling daunted before one had even begun. She remembered doing that once in front of Parma Cathedral, thinking: What a horror, just like a factory, and nearly, very nearly, bypassing it for a Campari and soda in the nearest bar, and then, driven by her decently cultural conscience, going in reluctantly and being enchanted. There was a painting of the Assumption by Correggio in Parma, full of cherubs tossing flowers about. It didn’t look, from the outside at least, as if Seville Cathedral was the sort of place where anyone, even a defiant cherub, would dare to chuck flowers around.
The thing about southern European traffic, Frances had learned long ago, was to confront it. Northern principles of orderly obedience to red and green lights were pointless, because nobody south of Paris took any notice of them at all. The answer was to turn yourself into a confident pedestrian presence, striding out, as tall as possible, even, if necessary, holding out a commanding hand in a stop-attitude as traffic rushed at you like a pack of mad dogs. It upset Italian traffic policemen, behaving like this, but, in Frances’s view, they were too easily upset anyhow. No doubt being isolated in foolish little comic-opera castles from which they flapped their white-gloved hands and impotently blew whistles at racing tides of impervious Fiats accounted for it. She would discover if Spanish policemen were the same. She turned up her mackintosh collar more resolutely, put her chin up and marched across the Avenida de la Constitución.
On the far side, an old man seized her. Jabber, he said to her in lightning, incomprehensible Spanish. Jabber, jabber, jabber. He pointed at the traffic, at Frances, at the well-behaved clump of people waiting on the pavement corner of the Plaza del Triunfo, he rolled his eyes to heaven, he crossed himself.
‘Thank you,’ Frances said, smiling and disengaging her arm. ‘Thank you for your concern, but I am perfectly all right.’
He shook his finger at her. No, he seemed to be saying. No, it is not perfectly all right to behave like that in Seville.
‘Next time,’ Frances promised, ‘I’ll trot tamely across with the others. Happy Christmas.’ She moved away. He called something after her. She turned to smile at him, but he was scowling. What a place, she thought, what a city, what people! No wonder the English headed off in droves for Italy, as if the rest of Europe hardly existed. An Italian might swear at you or grin at you, but he wouldn’t lecture you. Huh, Frances thought, pushing open a tiny door within an immense door on her way into the cathedral, huh, but at least feeling indignant has got me warm.
Inside, Seville Cathedral was even larger than outside. The spaces were awe-inspiring, vast landscapes of gleaming floors and soaring pillars and vaulted arches, dark, hushed, menacing, and holy. Frances walked a little way inside and then stopped. She had come abreast of
an enormous and sombre queen, made, it appeared, of darkly gilded wood. She peered more closely in the gloom. There were three more queens arranged in formation, two by two, moving with stately tread across a carved stone platform, carrying what looked like a tabernacle on poles across their shoulders. Frances walked round them. Their expressions were at once majestic and far away; their tunics emblazoned with castles and heraldic beasts. Frances took her pocket torch out of her handbag, and shone its beam on the stone carving. She was looking, she found, at the tomb of Christopher Columbus. Poor Christopher Columbus, demoted from the podium of the heroes of history by the obsessive modern need to find feet of clay attached to anyone of stature whom the past had admired. Poor Christopher Columbus, no longer a great adventurer, now merely a greedy pirate. Frances put her hand appreciatively on the nearest wooden foot of the nearest, mighty, impassive queen. Banished to the ranks of the merely self-serving Columbus might be, but at least he had his tomb.
She wandered away from him into the dim and vast spaces of the cathedral. A thousand tapers glimmered from a hundred chapels across the distance of the floor, great screens of wood and forged iron vanished upwards into the shadowy heights of the roof, holy faces, carved and painted, eyes downcast in piety or upcast in agony wheeled slowly past in endless procession. She came to a kind of central room, black carved screens enclosing choir stalls, with huge, gilded metal gates at one end, like the gates of a fortified castle.
Heavens, Frances thought. How fierce this is, how angry the Spanish seem to be—
She turned. There was something extraordinary behind her, a gleaming something, apparently a wall of gold, a sheer, fantastic cliff of gold rising up and up like a broad and shining fountain between dark walls of stone. It too was confined behind a grille. Frances grasped the bars, and stared. The wall was sculptured, sculptured all over with figures and scenes, panels and pillars and little canopies, and at the top, miles above Frances and the dwarfed altar below, Christ hung drooping on his cross, gilded too like a great, broken, golden bird.
Frances gazed and gazed. She had never seen anything like it, she had never, in all her travels, seen anything that was so Christian and so unfamiliar all at once. She let go of the bars in her grasp, and subsided on to a wooden chair near by, taking her gauche little guide book out of her pocket.
‘The great retablo of the main sanctuary,’ said her guide book, ‘was designed by the Flemish master, Dancart, and fashioned between 1482 and 1526.’
So it was there when the Armada sailed. When those little ships came in their straggling groups up the English Channel, and the watchers on the cliffs built their defiant bonfires, this huge golden wall, redolent of all Spain’s ambition and power, was standing here in Seville. It wasn’t often, Frances thought, raising her eyes again, that you really felt, along your arteries and veins, the thud of history, the sensation that the passing of time was at once both everything and nothing. She had felt it sometimes in England, only occasionally in Italy for all her love of the country, but it was really most peculiar to feel it with such intensity in this almost hostile building, full of darkness and swaggering, threatening strength; in a city she had so far considered utterly alien.
She got up and walked slowly away towards the south aisle. Perhaps because it was Christmas Eve there weren’t many people about, and the winter sunshine fell through the high windows of the upper nave in long, dusty shafts on to the empty and shining squares and triangles of the floor. The place seemed ever more timeless, drifting ever further from the newspaper kiosk outside, the scolding old man, the waiters in the bar, the cars on the avenue, whose noise came through the walls and distances like no more than the sound of the sea. Frances leaned against a pillar, putting her head back against its ancient, impersonal, cold bulk. If she closed her eyes – if she half-closed her eyes and gazed up that extravagant aisle through her lashes, at the stupendous stretches of light and shadow, of gleaming marble and soaring stone, of shimmering surfaces and fathomless pools of darkness – she might just see, just glimpse for a second or two, a procession, a fifteenth-century procession, clothed in velvet and damask, heralded by priests and gilded crosses, with at its heart the Catholic Kings, Fernando and Isabel, swaying across the marble spaces to give to Christopher Columbus the mandate to explore the Western world and bring its treasures home to Spain.
She opened her eyes. Someone was blowing a whistle, a hideous, mood-destructive whistle, and vergers and sacristans were hurrying about the cathedral, shooing visitors before them like flocks of bewildered hens. It was time for the first Mass of the day. The cathedral, survivor of Moor and Christian, was preparing itself for its central spiritual function. Frances stood upright, gave her pillar a fond and regretful stroke in parting, and followed the crowd out of the past into the present.
The rest of the morning was unsatisfactory. The mood induced by the cathedral hung about Frances like a dream and made her feel irritable about the need to look at maps, buy coffee, absorb the fact that Seville is the fourth city of Spain, that it started the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side but was seized by the Nationalists, that it was the favourite city of Pedro the Cruel (succeeded to the throne, 1350) and that it suffers now from a sad increase in petty crime. The spirit of the thing, of the place, seemed absent from these facts; something about both Spain and Seville that had seemed, inarticulately, powerfully, comprehensible to Frances inside the cathedral now escaped her. She simply seemed to be back, rather crossly, in a modern foreign city at the one time of year when every instinct told her to be where everything was familiar and of her own kind.
Frances walked and walked. She saw the river and the bridge she had crossed the night before; she saw long, tree-planted formal gardens and buildings with exuberant baroque façades; she saw streets lined with houses and blocks of flats, and streets lined with shops, some selling electrical goods and groceries and plastic buckets, some selling leather clothes and souvenir castanets and ceramic holy figures, sentimental or macabre. She passed churches and garages and high blank walls hiding goodness knew what; she passed dingy newsagents and endless underwear shops and one beautiful building on whose first-floor balcony five skeletons stood dressed in the frocks and hats of high fashion, frozen in a grisly parade. She also passed people, crowds and crowds of hurrying people, absorbed in the admirable European habit of leaving the preparation of Christmas until Christmas Eve instead of exhausting themselves in a heartless, relentless, three-month Protestant hype. Everyone was carrying something, food and flowers, boxes of cakes and chocolates, bottles of wine, Christmas trees, baskets of clementines with their dark glossy leaves still attached, nets of nuts, armfuls of things done up in coloured paper and ringlets of ribbons. Only Frances, it seemed, was carrying nothing but an everyday handbag and a guide book.
At half-past eleven, Frances skirted the northern precincts of the cathedral – she gave it a respectful and grateful glance this time – and threaded her way back to the Hotel Toro, through the Barrio de Santa Cruz. It had been the old Jewish quarter, maze like and secret between white walls, the houses turned in on themselves round their gardens and courtyards. It too was now full of busy people and chatter. A man went past her carrying a huge wooden angel with a pinkly painted face, and another with a lavatory seat slung jauntily over his shoulder. It didn’t feel like Christmas – did Christmas ever feel like Christmas to a northerner in the south, or vice versa? – but it did suddenly begin to feel festive. Frances pushed open the glass doors to the foyer of the Hotel Toro with something almost like high spirits. It was five-past midday.
José Gómez Moreno wasn’t there. He wasn’t there, and he hadn’t been there. There was no message from him by telephone either. Frances went over to the telephone booth that was disguised as a medieval sentry box, guarded by two huge suits of armour, in a corner of the hotel lobby. She rang the Posada de los Naranjos, and asked for José.
An uncertain voice in hesitant English said that he was not available.
&nbs
p; ‘What do you mean, not available? Is he in the hotel?’
‘Yes, he is in hotel but – in meeting.’
‘With whom?’ Frances shouted.
‘Is private meeting,’ the voice said. ‘Of hotel business.’
‘Will you give Señor Gómez Moreno a message?’
‘If you wish—’
‘I do wish. Tell him that Miss Shore no longer wishes to have any further communication with him of any kind.’
‘¿Que?’
‘Tell him—’ Frances began and stopped. She took a breath. ‘Tell him to get knotted,’ she said, and banged the telephone down before the voice could say ‘¿Que?’ again.
She returned to the reception desk. The cherry-lipped girl was tearing a telex form into long, inexplicable strips.
‘Are there any direct flights from Seville to London today?’
The girl picked up the nearest telephone.
‘I enquire.’
‘Don’t you know?’
‘I enquire,’ the girl said repressively.
Frances turned away and began to pace the green floor. The need to be gone was abruptly so urgent that she couldn’t have sat still if she’d been paid to. She knew exactly what was happening at the Posada de los Naranjos. José Gómez Moreno had asked a member of the party from Oviedo to move into the Hotel Toro and he or she had refused point blank. Of course they had, Frances thought, she’d have done just the same in their place. So José was hopping about, pleading and wringing his hands and not daring to come to the Hotel Toro and confront her.
‘Madam,’ the girl called.
Frances went back to the desk.
‘There are no direct flights today. You must fly to Madrid this afternoon, and take a flight to London after. All the flights are full, so you must be standby.’
Frances glared at her. In her present mood, she could see no charm in her cream-skinned, black-eyed Spanish face.
‘Please get me a taxi. For ten minutes’ time.’
A Spanish Lover Page 6