‘Is very busy,’ the girl said remorselessly. ‘Will be fifteen, twenty minutes.’
‘Just get one.’
The lift-indicator light revealed that the lift was presently on the top floor. Frances jabbed at the summoning button. The lift took no notice. She turned away, and rushed up the staircase instead, three flights of green marble stairs and black-carved wooden balustrades with, on every landing, a glittering shrine containing a highly made-up madonna and surmounted by a pair of bull’s horns. Frances arrived breathlessly at her door and flung it open. The chambermaid had left the room immaculate, ugly and as dark as pitch, having shut all the windows and shutters tightly as reproof against sunlight and air.
The telephone shrilled.
‘Yes?’ Frances shouted into it.
‘Miss Shore?’
‘Yes—’
‘Miss Shore, my name is Gómez Moreno—’
‘Go away!’ Frances shrieked.
She put down the receiver and dived into the bathroom to retrieve her sponge bag. The telephone rang again. She sped across the room and seized it and cried, ‘Listen, I want nothing more to do with you, ever. Do you understand?’
‘Madam, taxi is here,’ the girl from reception said. ‘Is urgent taxi.’
Frances swallowed.
‘Thank you.’
‘He is waiting.’
‘I’ll be right down.’
She flung her possessions into her case, her nightie, her extra jerseys, her tidy dress and shoes, her hairbrush, underclothes, paperbacks, hairdryer, sponge bag. It now seemed to her not just imperative to get out of Seville before she exploded, but to do this before the Gómez Morenos could catch up with her. That one had been the father – deeper-voiced, with more confident English. José said his father had learned English at the London School of Economics in the sixties, and had insisted his children learn to speak it too.
‘For Europe, you see. It is necessary for us all to be brothers and sisters in Europe.’
Frances shut her case and locked it, slung her bag on her shoulder and picked up the case. What a performance, what a waste of time, what a stupid, amateurish, exhausting muddle the whole thing had been, and almost all her own fault for backing a hunch, indulging a whim.
‘I’ll tell you something,’ she said to Room 309. ‘And that is that I’ll make sure I never see you again, or Seville, or Spain, for that matter.’
Then she stamped out into the corridor and slammed the door behind her.
Downstairs, the taxi driver was flirting idly with the receptionist. She wasn’t taking much notice, being engaged in adding up Frances’s bill very slowly on a calculator with a dark, red-nailed forefinger.
‘My bill is being settled by Señor Gómez Moreno.’
‘I have no instruction—’
The taxi driver looked at Frances without admiration – too little make-up, no visible curves, small jewellery – and leaned across the reception desk to whisper something to the girl. She gave the calculator a tiny smile by way of response.
‘I shan’t sign that bill,’ Frances said. ‘I am not paying it.’
The girl took no notice.
‘When is the next flight to Madrid?’
The taxi driver turned his head. ‘Two hour,’ he said. ‘No hurry.’
‘I want to get out of here.’
The glass doors opened and a man came in at a run, a solid, middle-aged man. The girl stopped tapping at her calculator and smiled at him, a wide, charming smile full of white teeth.
‘Miss Shore?’
Frances moved back.
‘Miss Shore, I am Luis Gómez Moreno. I don’t know how to apologize enough, I am mortified.’
He had a square, open face, not the kind of long, grave Spanish face that had stared at Frances from the churches and streets of Seville that morning, but a more genial one, more extrovert.
‘I’m afraid it’s too late,’ Frances said. ‘I’ve been dragged here for nothing. I’ve been cold, uncomfortable and neglected and all I want to do is go home.’
‘Of course you do,’ Luis Gómez Moreno said. He turned to the girl at the desk and uttered a rapid instruction. She picked up the bill she had been preparing and began, as she had with the telex form, to tear it into careful strips. Then he said something to the taxi driver.
‘Don’t dismiss him,’ Frances said sharply. ‘He is taking me to the airport.’
‘May I not do that?’
‘No,’ Frances said. ‘I haven’t any patience left for the Gómez Morenos.’
Infuriatingly, he smiled at her. He smiled as if she had made a really good joke.
‘I like your spirit.’
She said nothing. She turned to the taxi driver and indicated her suitcase.
‘Please put that in your taxi.’
‘Is there nothing’, Luis Gómez Moreno said, ‘that I can say or do to make you stay? I had no idea of this dreadful confusion until one half hour ago. Now I want you to try and forget the last twenty-four hours, and allow me to assist you in every way to do the business you came for.’
Frances snorted.
‘You’ve got a nerve—’
‘I also have a heart and a conscience. I am truly sorry. You shall have a suite at the Hotel Alfonso XIII—’
‘I don’t want a suite at the Alfonso XIII. I don’t want any more dealings with you or your son or your hotels. I don’t want to see Spain ever again.’
‘Not even—’
‘Never,’ said Frances.
‘How sad,’ he said, ‘when there is so much to see, so much that no one European knows about except the Spanish.’
She looked at him. His face, framed by the upturned collar of his overcoat, was full of warmth, and hope and humour. He held out his hands to her, palms upward.
‘Please, Miss Shore,’ said Luis Gómez Moreno. ‘Please give Spain, including me, just one more chance.’
5
ON CHRISTMAS MORNING, Lizzie woke quite unnecessarily at five and waited for Davy to come in, urgently requiring an audience for opening his stocking. He didn’t come. She strained her ears into the chill darkness; the house was quite quiet. Beside her, Robert breathed with what seemed a most selfish regularity, deeply, evenly, comfortably. Nobody, Lizzie realized with indignation, was awake except her.
She wondered whether to lie there and attempt to go back to sleep. She humped over on to her other side, away from Robert, and closed her eyes. Immediately, on the inside of her eyelids, was printed a list which began, ‘Empty dishwasher from last night, lay breakfast, check time turkey ought to go in oven, lay sitting-room fire.’ She tried to replace the list with images of colour and shape that were her usual sleep-inducers, and saw instead a clear picture of Frances at a restaurant table lit by candles, with a glass of wine in her hand and being offered a dish of glistening paella to the sound of guitars. Lizzie groaned. She waited to see if Robert had heard her. He hadn’t. She groaned again. He slept on. Lizzie sat up, swung her feet out from under the muffling warmth of the duvet, and stood up.
She padded out to the bathroom and looked sourly at her Christmas face in the mirror above the basin.
‘You are being very childish,’ she told herself out loud. She brushed her teeth and hair, pulled on her dressing-gown – a handsome, full-length, hooded one, stocked by the Gallery and much admired by Frances who still wore the old kimono Lizzie had given her for Christmas at least ten years ago – and went firmly downstairs. All the bedroom doors, even Davy’s, were shut. Nobody, it seemed, was in the least interested in Christmas.
The kitchen, fragrant still with the clove-breathed memory of last night’s supper, was at least quite warm. Everybody had been too tired – or unhelpful – last night to clear up properly, and there were still pans, unwashed up, in the sink and newspapers on chairs, and trails of black pepper and breadcrumbs across the table. Rob had been terribly tired; the Gallery had been humming until after seven with last-minute customers, mostly men, and he hadn’t got
home until nearly nine, by which time Davy was asleep and Sam, having sneaked two glasses of wine, was being both obstreperous and silly. Harriet had wondered, out loud and far too often, whether Frances would ring from Seville, William had looked too much as if he was just longing to go away quietly and telephone Juliet, and Alistair had provoked his grandmother into an instant rage by saying, quite casually, that he didn’t see the point of girls going to university if they were just going to shop and cook and have babies afterwards. In the midst of this, Lizzie had produced baked gammon, potatoes, cauliflower cheese and red cabbage, followed by mince pies and tangerines, and refrained – just – from thumping Harriet every time she said, ‘Honestly, it doesn’t feel a bit like Christmas does it, it just feels like a weekend, doesn’t it, any boring old weekend. I wish Frances was here.’
Lizzie filled the huge Aga kettle and set it on the hotplate. The cat, named Cornflakes by Davy, emerged from the dresser drawer where he slept and which had to be left half open at night for this reason, and began his steady whining for attention and milk around Lizzie’s ankles. He was, Lizzie thought, like a spider, he had nothing to do all day but besiege her, just as spiders had nothing to do but spin webs, endlessly, patiently, in every corner of the Grange. Outside the house, nature wasn’t any better, either; it had all the time in the world to knit bindweed painstakingly round the rose trees and stifle the lawn with creeping moss. Lizzie yawned and put a teabag in the pot.
The door to the hall opened with a bang and Davy trailed in, sobbing, towing his stocking like a dead and lumpy snake. Lizzie stopped pouring water into the teapot.
‘Darling! What is it, Davy? Why are you crying?’
‘Sam!’ wailed Davy. He dropped his stocking and began to tear at the jacket buttons of his primrose-yellow pyjamas.
‘Sam?’
‘Yes! Yes! I hate my pyjamas!’
Lizzie knelt down by Davy and tried to take him in her arms.
‘Why? Why do you when they are brand new and you look so sweet in them?’
‘I don’t, I don’t. I hate them!’ Davy wept, still wrestling inside Lizzie’s embrace. ‘Sam said I looked sexy.’
‘Sam is very silly,’ Lizzie said. ‘He doesn’t know what sexy means.’
Davy glared at her.
‘He does! He does! It means showing your bottom and your—’
‘Davy,’ Lizzie said, ‘it’s Christmas. Have you forgotten?’
‘Sam said—’
Lizzie stood up, lifted Davy and set him on the edge of the table.
‘I don’t want to know what Sam said.’
‘He was going to open my stocking, he said he was perfectly allowed to.’
Lizzie retrieved Davy’s stocking from the floor.
‘How’s about you opening it now, with me?’
Davy looked doubtful.
‘You ought to open stockings in a bed, you know.’
‘Not necessarily. You’ve got me and Cornflakes for company. Won’t we do?’
Davy twisted round and wriggled off the table on to the floor. He bumped his stocking down beside him.
‘No,’ he said, and trailed out of the kitchen again. Lizzie heard him going up the stairs, one step at a time, on his way back to certain persecution. Sam was a horror, but at least you didn’t lie awake worrying about his fragile self-esteem and his chances of emotional happiness. He was like a terrier, cheerful, inquisitive, pugnacious and unsquashable. Lizzie adored Sam. In no time at all the girls were going to start adoring Sam too, and the kitchen would then be full of his sobbing discards being comforted by Alistair, who had always liked mending things and would find the transition from mending model aeroplanes to broken hearts perfectly comfortable. Lizzie smiled ruefully. How shocking it was to take a small but certain pleasure in thinking of Sam as a future heart-breaker, while knowing that, if anyone tried to break his heart in return, she, Lizzie, would probably murder them. Oh God, the mothers of sons …
‘Good morning,’ Barbara said, coming in, in a blue chenille dressing-gown. ‘Happy Christmas.’
‘Oh Mum,’ Lizzie said, going forward for a kiss. ‘Did they wake you, the boys? I’m so sorry.’
‘Davy came in to ask if his pyjamas were sexy. I told him that in my view and in the view of ninety-nine per cent of sane women, pyjamas were the least sexy garments in the world, after galoshes and string vests.’
‘It was Sam,’ Lizzie said. She poured tea into mugs. ‘So typical of Sam, to try and wreck Christmas morning before it even has time to draw breath.’ She held a mug out to Barbara. ‘Tea?’
‘I was awake anyway,’ Barbara said, taking the mug.
‘Oh dear—’
‘William was snoring.’
‘Why don’t you wear ear plugs?’
‘I thought of that,’ Barbara said. ‘But then I thought I wouldn’t hear a fire, if one started, so I’ve gone back to kicking him.’
‘Separate rooms, then.’
‘Oh no,’ Barbara said firmly.
Lizzie swallowed some tea. Nothing all day, not the champagne Robert had finally bought after saying they couldn’t afford it, not the prune and chestnut turkey stuffing she had taken such trouble over, not the brandy butter nor the smoked salmon planned for supper nor the cashew nuts nor the Belgian truffles, would taste one tenth as good as this first, strong, hot swallow of tea.
‘Why not? I mean, surely, after being married so long there’s hardly much left to prove—’
‘There’s Juliet,’ Barbara said shortly.
Lizzie groaned inwardly. Davy’s anxiety about the sex appeal of his pyjamas, followed by Barbara wishing to discuss Juliet, seemed more than she could bear before six o’clock on Christmas morning.
‘He telephoned her last night,’ Barbara said. She went over to the Aga and leaned against its warm bulk, gripping her mug.
‘Mum,’ Lizzie said, ‘you have known about Dad and Juliet for twenty-seven years. You could, if you had found the situation intolerable, have left him at any point during those twenty-seven years. But you haven’t. You’ve chosen to stay. It doesn’t seem to me to fit in with any of the things you say you believe about women, but never mind, that’s what you’ve chosen. Dad always rings Juliet at Christmas, sometimes you even talk to her yourself. Juliet is a nice woman, Mum. Remember?’
‘I did not like it last night,’ Barbara said. ‘I don’t really know why, but I didn’t. He looked—’
‘Stop it, Mum,’ Lizzie said, putting her mug down and beginning to open cupboards in search of plates and jars and packets for breakfast. ‘It’s Christmas morning.’
There was a series of thumps upstairs, then a crash, then a squeal and then silence.
‘I’ll go and see,’ Barbara said.
‘Don’t bother. I’ve stopped going every time it sounds like disaster, or it’s all I ever do.’
Doors began to open and shut above them. Robert’s voice, thick with sleep, shouted, ‘Shut up, will you?’ and then Alistair’s shouted back, ‘Happy Christmas, actually.’
‘Think of Frances,’ Barbara said, ‘waking alone in a hotel room in Seville and spending the day with a strange foreign businessman who doesn’t believe in Christmas.’
‘I’m trying’, Lizzie said, peeling the paper off a new block of butter, ‘not to think about Frances. At all.’
‘I wonder if that’s what’s the matter with William, I wonder if that’s why he was so peculiarly pathetic about ringing Juliet—’
The door opened. Robert, his hair tousled, tying himself into a towelling bathrobe, came in yawning and said there was a notice on Harriet’s door saying she was not to be woken under any circumstances whatsoever. He stooped to sketch a kiss on Barbara’s cheek and plant one on Lizzie’s.
‘Why is everyone being so frightfully un-Christmassy?’ Lizzie demanded.
‘The boys are all in bed together,’ Robert said, pouring tea. ‘I dread to think what’s going on. They are under Alistair’s duvet.’
‘Davy was preoc
cupied earlier with looking sexy.’
‘Alistair is far too prissy for sex. God, is it really only five past six? I’ll go and get some wood in.’
‘Was William awake?’
Robert thought about this.
‘Someone was singing in the loo—’
‘He always sings in the loo,’ Barbara said. ‘It’s the mark of a public schoolboy of his generation because they weren’t allowed locks on the lavatories and sometimes not even doors.’
Lizzie began to rub vigorously at a sticky jar with a damp cloth.
‘Why not?’
‘Because of buggery.’
‘Honestly,’ Lizzie said. ‘Honestly. What a disgusting conversation. Don’t you realize,’ she went on, raising her voice, ‘don’t you realize that it’s Christmas?’
‘Is this Christmas?’ Davy said to his grandfather.
‘Yes.’
‘It feels quite cross for Christmas—’
‘Yes,’ William said. ‘It does.’
Breakfast had happened, in an atmosphere of acrimony, and without Harriet, soon after seven because everyone was up. Alistair pointed out that this was far, far earlier than a school day. Robert was the only one who had dressed, having gone out to get logs for the sitting-room fire in his dressing-gown, and having then got locked out by mistake, and been temporarily forgotten by Lizzie and Barbara, so that he was forced to roam about in the sleety dark outside alternately bellowing furiously and pleading piteously, for readmittance. It was William who finally heard him and came down to let him in.
‘My dear boy, I do hope you haven’t been there all night.’
Robert resisted the temptation to say, Don’t be perfectly fatuous, and went upstairs for a bath. He was fond of William, and grateful to him, but easily irritated by him too. Either William’s bumbling benevolence hid a mind like a steel trap, or else his father-in-law had the luck of the very devil. Robert found the relationship with Juliet both incomprehensible and old-fashioned, a sort of babyish, comforting, retarded habit, never grown out of. Robert had never been unfaithful to Lizzie in seventeen years. He didn’t want to be. How somebody like Lizzie could emerge from that family of near half-wits, Robert couldn’t imagine. There was William, there was Barbara with her bossiness and her phoney, half-baked feminism, there was Frances, drifting about through life like a ship without a pilot – and then there was Lizzie. Running a bath, and draping his sodden robe over the bathroom radiator to dry, Robert decided he would not tell Lizzie how badly the Gallery had done in the run-up to Christmas this year, until she had less on her plate. He longed to tell her, to share the anxiety and the burden, but not telling her for now was kinder.
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