He let a tiny pause fall, and then he said, ‘Well. And why should this not happen?’
‘It isn’t that it shouldn’t,’ Frances said. ‘It’s just that it never has.’ She picked up her glass and took another swallow.
Luis said nothing. She looked, from behind the cover of her hair, at his hand – brownish-skinned, below the pale-blue cuff of his shirt – lying on the tablecloth about six inches from her own hand, whitish-skinned with a plain silver bangle round the wrist, holding her wine glass. Neither hand moved. Then Luis said, ‘I am going to take you now to see some most beautiful gardens.’
Lying now in the beautiful gardens, watching Frances, Luis felt a rush of something much stronger than curiosity, a mixture of protectiveness and possessiveness, of admiration and even, he thought with some amazement, a kind of awe. What was she? Why did she give him, so often, the feeling that she was walking away from him down some mental corridors, and that he longed to follow her and seize her and ask her to explain? And why, as now, when she did some perfectly ordinary thing like taking off her sandals, revealing pale, unexceptional, slightly-too-big-for-beauty feet, did she fill him with desire? He swallowed, making a sound so small, he thought, that nobody could hear him above the sound of the falling fountain.
‘Luis?’ Frances said. ‘Are you awake?’
He sat up, stretching. ‘Yes.’
‘Will you take me to the tombs? The tombs of Fernando and Isabel, that you told me about, with the marble lions?’
Knowing that she wouldn’t like it, he resisted the urge to say, I will take you anywhere you like, and said instead, ‘Of course. I always like to see them. Charles V put up the tombs because he was so proud of his grandparents. Wouldn’t it be something to think you would ever have a grandchild who thought so much of you?’
Frances was impressed by the tombs. They had been made in Italy, of white marble, and in glass cases near by she could see Isabel’s crown and Fernando’s sword and, rather stirringly, the banners used when Granada was conquered for the Catholic Church and poor Boabdil was turned out sobbing into the harsh world outside his paradise. A tiny, low-wattage bulb burned by Isabel’s tomb, which she had, Luis said, specified in her will.
‘An electric light bulb?’
‘Of course not,’ Luis said smiling. ‘When I was a boy, even a young man, it was always a candle.’
Frances did not like the rest of the cathedral.
‘It’s all out of proportion, and it’s far too heavy.’
‘The Spanish like heaviness.’
‘And all this bronzey-gold stuff. It’s so ugly. Why couldn’t they leave the stone?’
‘They wanted it to glow, richly, to look as if it were full of splendid light. This cathedral is regarded as one of the most important works of the Spanish Renaissance.’
Frances leaned against a pillar, a pillar even more massive than the one she had propped herself against all those months ago in the cathedral in Seville.
‘Luis, I can’t look at another thing—’
He said, ‘I should have stopped you long ago, you are exhausted.’
‘Only with looking. With thinking about the Moors. I’ve loved it but I—’
He took her hand.
‘Can you walk? Can you walk back up to the parador, where we have left the car, or will you wait here and I will bring it to you?’
‘I will walk,’ Frances said. ‘I’m all right, truly. Perhaps it’s something about churches, particularly Catholic churches.’
He drew her hand through his arm. She leaned on him, then, feeling that she was leaning too heavily for subtlety, but not as heavily as she would have liked, drew away a little. In response, his arm tightened.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘No more the English miss.’
He led her out into the sunshine.
‘Don’t look back at the façade. Even I, as a loyal Spaniard, think it’s terrible. I am going to find you first a drink. The water here is famous and you shall have it with lemon juice and sugar.’
‘There,’ he said, a few minutes later, settling her into a green-painted metal chair under a canopy. ‘Take your hat off and relax.’
‘I don’t think you like my hat.’
‘Shall we say, I think there are more pretty hats—’
‘It keeps the sun off, otherwise I go pink and get freckles.’
‘Freckles?’
‘Here,’ she said, tapping her nose. ‘Charming on children but not on adults.’
Luis turned his own chair and shouted at a waiter.
‘I must learn Spanish,’ Frances said. ‘For somebody in the travel business, I’m a shamefully bad linguist.’
‘Are you musical?’
‘Not very.’
‘Come,’ he said, laughing at her. ‘What are your advantages then?’
She smiled, and said without coquettishness, ‘You tell me.’
‘Seriously?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘Oh,’ he cried, flinging his arms out. ‘Again you pull away!’
‘Luis—’
‘Listen,’ he said, leaning forward, his dark eyes shining, ‘listen, Frances, I want to know you. I have never talked to a woman in this way, I have never felt I was so much – in a mystery, and then I come a little close and you hide from me. Why always? What are you afraid of?’
She looked right back at him.
‘I don’t know.’
The waiter came with two tall glasses of lemon juice, a jug of water and a little metal dish of white packets of sugar. He put it all down on the table. Luis took no notice of him.
‘Frances, we are friends now. We tease, we laugh, we tell each other things. It’s not long, I know, two or three days, but we have been together most of the time. I am not a dangerous man. Look at me. Forty-eight, three kilos too heavy, a middle-class – my mother-in-law would say bourgeois – businessman. I am not a wolf. We do business together and it turns into a friendship. Do you prefer to go on to Córdoba on your own?’
‘Certainly not,’ Frances said, clutched by a fear that had nothing to do with going to Córdoba alone.
‘Then do not’, he said, almost fiercely, competently pouring and mixing their drinks, ‘behave as if I were a savage person and you were a whipped dog.’
She waited. He finished stirring and handed her a glass.
‘See if that is sweet enough—’
She took a sip.
‘It is. It’s delicious. Luis—’
‘Yes?’
‘I think’, Frances said carefully, ‘that living alone has some good things about it and some bad. It also has some elements that just happen, that aren’t either good or bad, but are just there. One of those, in my case, is that I tend to react to things now with a certain set of responses, and one of the chief of those responses is that when anything disconcerts me – even because it’s simply new to me – I pull away. It’s my defence, I suppose, to withdraw. It’s not meant as a criticism of other people, it’s just how I have come to react.’
He nodded. He looked across the little square where they were sitting, with its small, unenthusiastically trickling Baroque fountain in the middle and cars parked densely round the edge.
He said, ‘But why do you assume that anything new will harm you? Why do you not think that something new could make you more rich, more happy?’
‘I do think it could. I do think I would benefit.’
‘Then why—?’
‘Because I don’t know how,’ Frances said. ‘I want to – open up, but I don’t know how. And don’t—’ she added fiercely, ‘tease me about it.’
His face was perfectly serious.
‘I never even thought of it,’ he said.
He reached for her hat on the empty chair between them.
‘Now, put on this sad thing and we will walk slowly back up to the parador.’
She nodded, obediently putting her hat on, slightly too much on the back of her head, so that it gave her an old-fashioned, innoce
nt air. She looked at him for his approval.
‘I am sorry,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid I cannot bear it.’ He stretched his arms out and lifted the hat gently from her head. ‘It will be my pleasure to buy you another, but this hat must stay here. It will amuse the children of the café owner to find it.’
Frances looked at her hat, lying on the table with an air of mild reproach about it. She had bought it, on impulse, one hot day, from a market stall in the North End Road.
‘Poor hat,’ she said, not meaning it, faintly excited to have it taken from her. ‘What kind of hat will you buy me instead?’
He was counting change and small crumpled notes on to the tray that had held their drinks.
‘One like our donkeys wear,’ he said, without a glimmer of a smile. ‘One with holes for your ears.’
On the journey home, he asked if she would think him very rude if he made some business calls. She said she wouldn’t think it rude at all. He adjusted her seat so that she could, as she had on the day of her arrival, lie back and watch the blue sky soften and fade above her as the sun sank slowly in the west and threw the mountains of the Sierra Nevada into high, dark, dramatic relief. He said, ‘Are you sure you are comfortable?’
‘Very,’ she said. ‘Blissfully. Never been more comfortable.’
On the back seat, behind her, lay her new straw hat. It was more shallowly crowned than her old one, and the brim was three times the size and very supple. Luis had made her try on eleven hats. She wasn’t sure that she had tried on eleven hats in her whole life before, certainly never in the space of fifteen minutes. She only owned one other hat and it was dark-blue felt, a standard, English middle-class hat, the kind worn by mothers at school speech days and friends of the bride at winter weddings, and Luis would certainly hate it too. He would say it had no life in it and he would be right. She thought of her old straw hat lying on the café table waiting for several incredulous Spanish children to find it with cries of comic amazement that any human being could actually have bought, let alone worn, such a thing, and she felt a little surge of triumph. It was as if something tiny but significant, which was hampering her, had been conquered in the abandonment of that hat. When she had finally chosen the new one, and Luis had approved of it, she had said, to her own mild surprise, ‘I think I’d like to buy a scarf, to tie round it, now,’ and he had said, delighted, ‘You are quite right but I shall do the buying.’ So he had bought her a long, fine silk scarf patterned in purple and blue and green, and the woman in the shop had tied it deftly round the crown of the new hat, so that the ends fell in soft streamers over the edge of the big, wavy brim.
‘Better,’ Luis said, looking at her. ‘Much, much better.’
‘Even worn with a Marks and Spencer T-shirt?’
‘Even with that.’
Now the hat lay behind her, its streamers spread carefully over Luis’s folded linen jacket. Absurd, Frances thought, to be so pleased and excited about a hat. It was a very classy hat, to be sure, and Frances would never have contemplated paying a quarter as much for anything that was merely something functional to keep the sun off, but then it wasn’t just functional really, was it, it was elegant and becoming and mildly romantic – and Luis had bought it for her.
Beside her, Luis was talking steadily into the telephone, streams and streams of quick, rasping Spanish, its rhythms so different from Italian rhythms, and so utterly different from English. He was on the board of a shoe-making company in Seville, he had told her, and another that made specialized scaffolding for the construction industry, and he owned a small vineyard and these few hotels and of course there was this new project, the organic farm. He wanted to employ women on his farm because, he told Frances, he thought they worked better. ‘Work is important for them because it is for a purpose, it is to provide for their children.’ He was intending to invest most of the money he had made over the last twenty-five years in this farm. He wanted it to be the biggest in Europe. He asked Frances what the turnover of Shore to Shore was. She told him.
‘With two employees?’
‘One full-time, one part-time, and me.’
He sucked his teeth.
‘Not bad,’ he had said.
Frances had said, without heat, ‘Oh shut up,’ and he had smiled.
‘In ten years,’ he said, ‘when you are my age, you will be talking millions.’
‘I like it small.’
She did, she reflected now, but the trouble was, small things would grow, try as one might to prevent them. After all, here she was in Spain, having vowed that Italy would satisfy her and her clients for ever, and there, on the back seat of the car, lay the hat bought for her by a man with whom she was supposed to be doing business. What business had they talked? Almost none.
‘Speak to Juan,’ Luis said, referring to the hotel manager. ‘Talk prices to Juan. You like my hotel, I like your kind of company. We are agreed on that. All that is left is the money, so talk money to Juan.’
Juan was small and quick and very eager for Luis’s good opinion. This made him slightly deferential to Frances, who, after all, Luis had brought in person to Mojas, and made him smile too much. It did not look as if it would be a very complicated matter between them. Frances would reserve six of the hotel’s ten double rooms for a week in May and a week in October the following year, at a special rate to include breakfast and dinner, and they would, on both sides, regard this as an experiment to see what kind of response they got from the clients of Shore to Shore. Personally, Frances was not very anxious about the response. The hotel itself, with its cool, hidden, crooked courtyards, its bedrooms furnished with a charming mixture of chapel and farmhouse, its pretty shaded garden, its excellent kitchen, couldn’t fail to please. Nor indeed, could the surrounding countryside, where the opportunities for sturdy English walking were so enormous (‘What a race you are for walking for pleasure!’ Luis had said. ‘Here, we only walk to get somewhere’) with spectacular views and interesting birds and plants, and nor, now that she had glimpsed it, could Granada, steep, exotic and extraordinary, where the present Catholics could never even begin to forget those powerful centuries of their Moorish past. So strange, she thought now, gazing dreamily at the sky, that I have hardly had to do business here, it has just come. It’s like standing on the edge of the sea and letting each incoming wave bring you something that you want, even if it turns out to be something you didn’t know you wanted until you have it, when you know you couldn’t bear to let it go.
Luis put down the telephone.
‘Modern economics!’ he said. ‘So stupid. By next year, it will probably be cheaper to import the hides for our shoes from the Argentine than to use Spanish leather. Did I wake you? Were you asleep?’
‘No.’
‘Are you hungry?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Frances,’ he said. ‘There is one more thing I want to show you before we leave Mojas, and then we go on to Córdoba.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Or the next day.’
‘But I must go home on Friday.’
‘Why?’
‘Don’t ask me why. You know why. I have a business to run, just as you have.’
‘Sometimes we must break the rules, or bend them. Are you not enjoying yourself?’
‘You know I am.’
‘Then that is, for now, more important than your business, or my business. There is a terrible English word, “sensible”. I cannot bear this “sensible”. It has nothing to do with the senses.’
‘It used to have. It used to mean being very emotionally conscious.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I forgive it. I will use it in the old way. For now, Frances, I want you to be sensible. I want you to be full of feeling. Will you be?’
But she couldn’t answer, she could only turn away to hide a face full of rapture, so that, after a little silence, he merely grunted, picked up his car telephone again, and began to dial Madrid.
10
THAT NIGHT SHE dreamed of Lizzie. She was trudging up the track towards Juliet’s cottage, and she could hear the sound of someone crying, and the crying got louder and louder and then she saw that the person who was crying was running down the track towards her. As the running person got nearer, Frances could see that it was Lizzie, looking very young, only about twenty, with very long hair, wearing one of Barbara’s caftans, and so Frances held out her arms to catch her sister as they met, but Lizzie took no notice of her, but just rushed on, crying, past her, and went down the track like the wind and then vanished. After that, Frances had several other rapid dreams, one of them set in Granada, among the fretted arches of the Court of the Lions, in the Alhambra, but when she woke, in the morning, it was the Lizzie dream that she remembered.
Her room was wonderful in the morning, cool and blue and light, like a seaside room, with the curtains swishing softly on the tiled floor, and a woman who lived in the first little street directly below the hotel garden calling, as she called every morning, for her little boy. ‘¡Pepe!’ she would call. ‘¡Pepe! ¡Pepe!’ Frances never heard him reply. She supposed he had to go to school, to the little whitewashed school by the church, and that he didn’t want to go, so he hid, a naughty, spirited little Spanish Sam.
She sat up in bed, pushing back the white sheets with their embroidered hems, embroidered, Juan had said, by two old women in the village who had been lacemakers as girls but who couldn’t see well enough to make lace any more. Why should she think of Lizzie? Why, even more, should she dream in that worrying way, of Lizzie? She put her feet down pleasurably on the smooth floor. Perhaps it was raining in England, perhaps it was raining on Lizzie, perhaps, even, the age-old habit of guilt about Lizzie – not telling her everything, wanting some little freedom from her, loving her and her family but not needing them as once she had done – had stirred in Frances’s subconscious as she slept, like a prehistoric monster shifting in the mud of a fathomless lake, and manifested itself as a dream. Frances gave herself a shake, and stretched her arms until they felt ten feet long, and then padded over to the window, and opened the curtains.
A Spanish Lover Page 14