In the end, Frances had given in. Spain was clearly campaigning for her, and so, in a quieter way, was Mr Gómez Moreno Senior, whose business card, wherever she tucked it away, wormed itself to the surface of drawers and piles of paper like a fragment of broken china in a flowerbed.
‘I’m jinxed,’ Frances said to Nicky. ‘Bloody Spain.’
‘Ring him, then,’ Nicky said. ‘Go and see his hotels. If they’re great, hurray, and if they’re grotty you’ll defeat the jinx.’
‘They’re in wonderful places—’
‘I know. I read that piece about the cathedral in Córdoba that’s inside a mosque.’
‘And it’s a much better spring and autumn climate than Italy—’
‘Ring him,’ Nicky said.
‘And flights to Málaga are frequent and reasonable—’
‘Then ring him.’
‘And the hotel that’s in the mountains sounds as if it would be good for the flora and fauna lot—’
‘Frances,’ Nicky said, raising her voice almost to a shriek, ‘ring him!’
So she did, and he said he would be charmed to see her. Then he wrote and said he would escort her personally to all three posadas, that he would show her the countryside and the glories of Granada, Córdoba and Seville. He said, in his letter, that he would devote himself to her.
‘Wow,’ said Nicky.
‘Don’t be silly—’
‘You watch it. Mediterranean men—’
‘He’s a middle-aged, married Catholic and I hardly know him.’
‘Do you disapprove of associating with married men?’
‘Yes,’ Frances said.
Nicky pecked a bit at her typewriter. ‘Trouble is, there aren’t many others. If they aren’t married, they’re either gay or they’re goofy.’
Frances gave a quick glance sideways at Luis. He didn’t look at all goofy. He didn’t, if it came to it, look particularly married either, in the way that William looked married, arranged and ordered by somebody else. Luis Gómez Moreno looked very independent, almost detached. Perhaps that was what happened to you when you had chosen your own shirts and socks for fifteen years; you stopped looking as if somebody else had a hand in you, you stopped looking owned. That excellent haircut – curlier hair than his son’s – that well-laundered shirt, that collection of maps and objects in the glove pockets and on the dashboard of the car, the efficient-looking car-telephone, were all his choices just as her blue skirt and the things in her suitcase and the fact that her toenails weren’t varnished were hers. That’s the single life, Frances thought, married or not; you decide everything for yourself, all the time, and sometimes that’s exciting, and sometimes it makes you very tired.
‘What are you thinking of?’ Luis said.
They were bowling along a stretch of open road, with only a few garages and half-finished buildings between them and the shining sea. Frances turned to look at it.
‘I’m afraid’, she said primly, ‘that I don’t know you well enough to say.’
He laughed again. Frances caught the glimmer of a gold tooth-filling.
‘Do you think, by the end of the week, we shall tell each other everything?’
‘I’ve never told anyone everything in my life, not even my twin sister.’
‘A twin? You have a twin sister? Are you very alike? Can I be sure I have the right one here?’
‘Quite sure,’ Frances said. ‘My sister has a wedding ring and four children.’
He gave her a quick look.
‘Don’t envy her the wedding ring.’
‘I don’t. She has one kind of life and I have another.’
‘This is interesting. Differences are always interesting. The difference between the Spanish and the English is interesting. If I met you in the middle of the Sahara Desert, I should know you were English.’
‘And if I met you,’ Frances said, slightly nettled, ‘I should think you were any old Mediterranean or Latin American, just one of millions of olive-skinned, dark-haired men with brown eyes.’
‘Black,’ he said, grinning, hugely enjoying himself.
‘Nobody has black eyes. Not really black.’
‘Mine are. And yours are blue.’
‘Blue-grey.’
‘Like English sky.’
‘Luis, I can’t bear that kind of talk.’
He smiled broadly, took one hand off the wheel, and lightly touched Frances’s forearm.
‘Nor me,’ he said. ‘Just testing.’
They drove for two hours. The road went along stretches of flat coastal plain, through scruffy, concrete ribbon developments and the odd anonymous resort with signs to ‘La Playa’ nailed to every tree and building, and then, in a vast, delta-like area filled with the torn and flapping remains of abandoned plastic greenhouses – ‘The melon madness,’ Luis said. ‘The courgette craziness. It was like a gold rush’ – there appeared a great fork in the road, the coastal arm running on towards Almería, the other swinging left into some low, advancing hills.
‘The mountains now,’ Luis said. ‘The lovely mountains.’
Frances turned regretfully to look at the sea.
‘Can we see the sea, from Mojas?’
‘Far away. A small sparkle. I have put in a pool, a little blue pool, and around it there is a jasmine hedge.’
‘Do you know about gardening?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Certainly not.’ He waited a moment and then said teasingly, ‘In Spain, gardening is for women.’
Frances ignored the implication of this remark. ‘Then how come the jasmine?’
‘Because I am a very rare Spaniard.’
‘I see.’
‘You don’t see,’ he said. ‘But you will. When you see the Mojas posada. Look at that, look at the view.’
The road was running up rapidly into drama. Behind them lay the shore, the nondescript little towns, the failed market gardens, but ahead the hills were beginning to heave and fold themselves into mountains – brown, russet, rose-red and saffron – splashed with the new green growth of spring and backed by the steady blue sky.
‘I love it here,’ Luis said. ‘The land is so big and so ancient, and tourism hasn’t found it yet. The seashore towards Almería isn’t so friendly for the sunbathers and these’ – he waved an arm at the slopes beyond the road – ‘are not good for golf. You cannot make a playground from a country like this.’
She murmured, ‘Your English is so good—’
‘Twenty-five years I have it now. Are you tired?’
‘Only a little.’
‘It is not much further, not so much as an hour. Shall I stop for you to walk a little?’
‘No thank you,’ Frances said, ‘I want to get there.’
‘Come,’ he said. He twisted slightly in his seat, and with his right hand turned something behind Frances. The back of her own seat sank backwards. ‘There now. Relax a little.’
Through the raised glass of the sunshine roof, the sky shone like a blessing. Frances watched it idly, contentedly, reminding herself of Davy, as a baby, in his pram, watching the moving apple-tree leaves above him with the same lazy satisfaction.
‘Europe thinks we Spanish are all Castilians, very formal and stately, always deep in thought,’ Luis said. ‘But we are all different, region to region, even village to village. There is the story of the mayor of a tiny place near Madrid who declared war on Napoleon personally, himself. You will find Mojas like that, with its own personality, very local. Everybody thinks of Andalusians as gypsies, as flamboyant, and these people are so, in their way, but they are also, most of all, just the people of Mojas, just—’ He glanced sideways. Frances was asleep.
He slackened speed at once, to avoid having to brake abruptly and wake her. How extraordinary, how confident of her to go to sleep so suddenly and completely, her hands folded in her lap, her face turned up to the square of sky visible through the sunshine roof. He drove even more slowly so that he could have a good look at her, at her thick, heavy h
air, at her peculiarly English skin with the suggestion, on its surface, of all the components underneath that went to make it up – never visible on a darker skin – at the pronounced lines of her eyebrows and eyelashes. It was not, he decided, a beautiful face but it was an arresting one. He liked looking at it. Asleep, it was calm and strong, awake, it was full of movement. He glanced at the rest of her. Why dress, he wondered, to say nothing? Why choose clothes that could be anybody’s, any age? José had reported her as being good-looking but not at all sexy. Letting his eyes linger on the blurred lines of Frances under the white cotton and blue linen, Luis was inclined to agree with the former assessment but not with the second. Yet why should she be sexy? She was almost gawky; her hands and feet were far too big and she—
‘Don’t stare,’ Frances said calmly, waking up but not moving.
‘l am so sorry.’
‘Are we almost there?’
‘A few more kilometres. There.’ Luis pointed. ‘On that hillside. That is Mojas.’
Frances sat up. Across the valley a village lay scattered across the ribs of the hillside like a handful of white sugar cubes.
‘The green in the middle is the posada, the posada garden.’
‘Aren’t you tired, driving so fast for so long?’
‘This isn’t long,’ he said.
The road zigzagged down into the valley, crossed a swampy bottom filled with whispering bamboo and a few dried-up, unharvested clumps of Indian corn, and began to climb again. The slopes either side were terraced in graceful curves along the contours of the hill, the terraces held up with low walls of grey-and-ochre stone. They passed a boy in a baseball cap with a herd of piebald goats, jingling softly with bells, and then a man with a tiny donkey almost obscured under a giant bundle of firewood.
Frances said, without meaning to, ‘It’s hard to remember that I’m here on business, somehow—’
‘We think too much of business. We think too much of purpose.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘Miss Shore—’
‘Frances.’
‘Thank you. Frances, we will have a philosophical conversation later, but now I am the guide and you are the tourist. There you see to the right an almond orchard.’
Trees as gnarled and twisted as those in an illustration to a fairy-tale stood in rough russet earth, stony and harsh.
‘And now we are here,’ Luis said, ‘close your eyes. We are going in.’
‘But you said no cars—’
‘No cars but my car and a few others.’
The road twisted sharply to the left to continue climbing the hillside. To the right, there was a wall, a high white wall with an opening in it, a narrow, dark opening that looked hardly wide enough for a bicycle.
‘We can’t—’
‘Shut your eyes,’ Luis said. ‘Usually with guests, we tell them to leave their cars out here by the orchard, and the hotel staff will guide them in.’
The car slid through the opening with centimetres only to spare. Having shut her eyes obediently, Frances found that this was more nerve-racking than opening them, so opened them and stared about her. White lanes, white alleys, whitened steps, cobbles, cascades of something brilliant – could it be bougainvillaea? – pots of geraniums, shutters tightly fastened, gates closed, vines across terraces, flashes of view, of sky, of cats, of kitchen chairs outside doorways, all steep and slanting and crooked and impossible; then a tiny, angled square with acacia trees and two old men on a bench.
‘Here,’ Luis said.
‘Where?’
‘There,’ he said, braking and sliding the car into a black square of shade. ‘In the corner.’
In the corner was a miniature cul-de-sac, and at the end of it a saffron-washed building, windowless with a big wooden door in a white frame, and beside it, a brass plate.
‘The Posada of Mojas,’ Luis said.
They led her to a room on the first floor. The way to the room was through a series of irregular interior courtyards, balconied and full of lemon trees in pots and blue trails of plumbago. The courtyards were painted white and the balconies were painted deep russet and on the floor were tiles the colour of the ribbed roofs of the village, apricot and terracotta, earthy and soft.
‘You will be comfortable here,’ Luis said, in the same tone of pride with which he had announced the temperature. ‘From this room you can see the garden and all the valley.’
It was a long room. In one wall there was both a conventional window and a casement window that reached to the floor with a balustrade across it to waist height. Both halves of this window stood open and the sunshine fell in across the floor, and the breeze blew the curtains in soft billows, new cotton curtains striped in yellow and white and blue, their hems whispering on the tiles. There was a carved bed and high white pillows and a dark chest like a small altar. On the floor there were cotton rugs, and on the walls, washed so pale a blue they were almost white, hung two old wooden panel paintings, one of a lily and one of an angel’s head, curly and haloed.
Frances took off her shoes, stepping from the cool shadowed spaces of the floor on to the warm sunlit ones.
‘I will be in the garden,’ Luis said. ‘We will have tortillas in the garden when you are ready. There is no hurry, there is never a hurry here.’
She crossed the room and held the sun-warmed wood of the balustrade. Below her lay the garden, fashioned, like the fields outside the village, from several tiny terraces, their edges and the several sets of steps punctuated with amphorae, jars and pots in earthenware, cascading flowers and variegated leaves. There were trees too, another acacia, several eucalyptuses waving their greeny-grey branches in swooping arcs across the sky, and in their shade were garden chairs, made of white wrought iron. Below the garden, the tilting roofs of the village fell headlong down the slope towards the valley, the rush only halted here and there by the occasional level roof terrace across which strings of washing blew, bright and orderly.
It was almost silent. From faraway down the valley came the faintest sound of bells – those goats? – and from the hotel kitchen, sleepy in mid-afternoon peace, came the distant clatter of a tortilla pan. Frances closed her eyes. Sometimes in life, just sometimes, she thought, there comes a moment of happiness that is close to rapture because it is so innocent, so natural, so right, a moment when you feel that everything’s in tune, when …
‘Frances?’
She opened her eyes again and looked down. Luis was standing on the middle terrace below her.
‘Everything is all right for you?’
‘Yes, oh yes—’
‘Then come and eat,’ he said. ‘I am waiting for you.’
8
IT WAS RAINING, not hard but with the soft, slightly sticky rain of early summer. Bath’s tourists – now all year round – had put up umbrellas and were drifting along the greasy pavements in exasperating, aimless hordes, the dangerous ends of their umbrella ribs exactly, Robert thought crossly, at his eye level. Every year, the tourists in Bath, despite the comforting amount they spent, annoyed him more. Did it ever occur to them, he wondered, that other people used Bath too, to try and get their shoes mended, and their teeth seen to, and as a place to buy washing powder and rashers of bacon, and that these weary people were being tried to the limit by the sheer numbers of visitors in persistent pursuit of Jane Austen and Beau Nash and King Bladud and glasses of revolting spa water? You could hardly, even on a wet Wednesday in May, get up Gay Street in comfort, for the press of neat polyester rainwear coming down, Royal Crescent and the Assembly Rooms behind them, the Roman Baths and the Abbey ahead. They were decent people, these tourists, well-behaved and obedient, trotting in and out of their coaches like good schoolchildren, but even their decency seemed aggravating to Robert, a symptom of fundamentally incurious minds and passionless hearts.
He gave up the pavement, and stepped into the street. To be truthful, anything and everything was likely to aggravate him that afternoon, and it was unfair to ta
ke his feelings out on inoffensive women protecting their holiday perms under plaid umbrellas. Lizzie had known Robert was coming in to Bath to see their accountant, indeed she had suggested that they go together, as they often did, but Robert had said no, don’t bother, it’s just a routine visit to tidy things up after the end of the financial year. Lizzie hadn’t pressed the point, had seemed, in fact, rather grateful to be let off. She was busy thinking about autumn stock, she said; did he mind?
‘No,’ said Robert. ‘Just don’t order anything until I get back. Not finally, that is.’
‘I won’t,’ she said, but she wasn’t really listening. She was looking at some samples of silk-screen printing an art student had brought in, chalky pastels and black in abstract designs, faintly reminiscent of the work of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. ‘Five years ago, I’d have snapped this up, but now I don’t know, looks a bit passé—’
Robert kissed her. ‘I’ll be back before five. Anything you want from Bath?’
She shook her head. He had paused for a fraction of a second, wondering whether to change his mind and insist she come – there was no reason to, only an instinct which might well have simply been his preference for having her with him – and then he had gone.
Now, two hours later, he was on his way up Gay Street back to the car which he had left in a little street somewhere behind the Circus. The meeting with the accountant had begun by being what he had anticipated – a final review of the last year’s accounts – and had then turned into something else, something more unpleasant. The accountant had pointed out that if the Gallery business did not pick up significantly and quickly, Robert and Lizzie would be in trouble over mortgage repayments on the Grange.
‘You have borrowed’, the accountant said, ‘a hundred and fifty thousand pounds in the last five years.’
A Spanish Lover Page 11