‘If it affects other people in your life—’ Lizzie began.
‘No,’ said Harriet loudly, interrupting.
‘What does it make you, then?’
Harriet smoothed the caftan over her narrow hips. Her sharp little face looked, for once, quite artless.
‘It just makes you real.’
On Boxing Day evening, Frances drove back to London. She had slept for twelve hours the night before and felt considerably worse for it. Her sole aim now was to get back to the most reliable source of satisfaction and comfort in her life, the office that held her little company.
The roads were almost empty; most people were stretching Christmas into at least the next weekend. In the back of the car was, besides her suitcase, a cardboard box of Christmas presents, and another one of food. Lizzie had terribly wanted Frances to take this, like a mother sending a child off to boarding school with a bursting tuck box. They had had another conversation before Frances left in which Lizzie had pointed out – quite fairly, Frances thought – that they were something of a Martha and a Mary, and that she, Lizzie, being inevitably the Martha one, would like it to be acknowledged that domesticity took a heavy toll of her, and that this should, in their future relationship after this hiccup, be remembered. Recalling her reflection in the aeroplane going to Seville that Lizzie had, after all, chosen the life she led, Frances was about to point this out, quite gently, when she saw a sudden gleam in Lizzie’s eye, a gleam almost of desperation borne of the complicated kind of fatigue – emotional, physical, administrative – which is all but exclusive to the mothers of large families, and said nothing after all. They had embraced with great affection when Frances left, as had Frances and William, Frances and Robert, Frances and all the children except Sam who affected to loathe being kissed while being, in fact, the most physically affectionate of the four children. Barbara had kissed Frances quite warmly, but wearing the expression of one who wished to say a good deal more than she was at present going to. When Frances drove off, they were all grouped on the front steps of the Grange, above the weedy drive and below the graceful pediment, backlit by the light from the hall behind them, waving in irregular silhouette.
Frances let herself into the side entrance of her narrow building, which gave directly on to the steep staircase up to her flat. She had been away three nights, and already, on the doormat, was a drift of mail, mostly junk, and half a chewed baked potato. Frances was used to these. There was a baked potato take-away shop two doors down her street and people never seemed to remember that the mixed pepper filling was spectacularly disgusting.
She switched on the light. One weekend, she and Nicky had painted this tunnel-like staircase terracotta, hoping to give it warmth and interest, and succeeding only in giving it the feeling, as Frances remarked, that you were climbing up some long internal organ. It was extremely ugly and she had never got round to doing anything further about it, beyond tacking up posters of Sienna and Florence and the towery skyline of San Gimignano.
At the top, a narrow door opened directly into a surprisingly large, light room looking over the street. Nicky was intermittently full of ideas for this room – for which she would have given her eye teeth – but Frances didn’t seem to see it, or the room behind it, which was her bedroom and had a view of the cherry tree two backyards and one tiny garden away. She had painted both rooms magnolia when she moved in, furnished them with the things that were necessary, and left them. If people gave her objects – pottery plates from their travels, cushions, lacquered boxes, plants in pots – she hung them up or put them down somewhere, but not as if anything was part of a whole. It was all perfectly comfortable and decidedly dull. ‘Like my clothes, really,’ Frances said, when Nicky pointed this out. ‘The thing is, I don’t really mind. How do you make yourself mind more?’
She carried up the suitcase and the mail, dropped the one on her bed, and the other on the sitting-room coffee table. Then she went back for the boxes, kicking the half-potato out into the street, and then shoving the door shut with her shoulder. She took the food box into her tiny kitchen, and unpacked everything conscientiously out of gratitude to Lizzie, and then, thankfully, collected up her briefcase and the handful of mail, opened a second door in the sitting room and descended an internal staircase to the office.
Even putting the lights on gave her pleasure. It was like being back on dry land after several uncomfortable days at sea in a very small boat. Nicky, the invaluable, conscientious Nicky with her long smooth hair tied tidily back and her air of being the perfect prefect, had left everything immaculate, machines shrouded in their covers, answering service switched on, blinds drawn shut, chairs parallel to desks, plants watered, waste bins emptied. Frances put her briefcase down on her own desk, read Nicky’s brief typed note (‘No problems left by 6 p.m. Christmas Eve except query Mr and Mrs Newby – is hotel in Ravenna in pedestrian zone because they can’t tolerate noise? Also, Mr Pritchard – why is his single supplement for Lucca £20 more in September than in May? Hope Seville a rave! See you Monday? I’ll be in anyway – probably before you see this! Love, Nicky’), and went round the room, touching things lightly. This was one of the glories of her single life, this chance to revel in what satisfied her, in what she had made. Four years of it now, four steadily, quietly expanding years. Surely in four years, a mistake like Seville was not so very terrible?
She opened her briefcase and emptied the papers and tickets inside on to her desk. She began to make piles – one for the accountant, one for the wastepaper basket, one for the file Nicky kept called ‘Possibilities?’. Into this would go the guide books to Seville, into the accountant’s pile would go the air tickets and all invoices, even those tiny scraps, no bigger than big stamps, received for cups of coffee and so tempting to discard, and into the bin would go everything to do with the Gómez Morenos, including Luis’s card, which gave addresses and telephone numbers in both Seville and Madrid.
Frances looked at the card. It was nothing special, just a business card.
‘I have to give it to you,’ Luis had said. ‘Because to give out cards is the reflex action of a businessman. You may then put it in the nearest bin if you want to.’
Frances flicked it with her thumbnail, added it to a few other papers, and dropped it in the wastepaper bin. Then, quick as a flash and driven by no impulse she could give a name to, she bent down and fished it out again.
PART TWO
May
7
LUIS GÓMEZ MORENO waited at Málaga Airport. Dressed in the male-European casual summer uniform of cotton trousers, linen jacket and polished loafers, he stood in the arrivals hall, his briefcase between his feet, and read a newspaper article about the growing dissatisfaction of the enormous number of Spaniards living in the Basque country. A Spanish town councillor in a Basque town said that Basque behaviour in council meetings was a lesson in racism. ‘They only allow their own language in council meetings. They won’t even allow simultaneous translation!’ Basque, said the writer of the article, is a language older than Latin with nothing in common with Spanish. The Basque country is a rural paradise and its invasion by the Spanish is bitterly resented. ‘These’, said the reporter with relish, ‘are a most tenacious people.’
As a small boy, Luis had been told, furtively, about the bombing of Guernica, the Basques’ sacred city, by Hitler’s Condor Legion. He had been told this by a young uncle, his mother’s brother, and furtively, because in Luis’s childhood, General Franco was an object of undiluted veneration. ‘Your mother,’ the young uncle had said disapprovingly, ‘your mother, my sister, was taught to obey Franco, God and your father, in that order!’ That uncle was the first taste of rebelliousness in Luis’s life, the first glimpse of his dominating mother as other than irreproachable. When Luis was twelve, the uncle took his radical political ideas to America; the family story was that he chose to go, but Luis rather thought otherwise, and his mother once, in a temper, confirmed his suspicion.
‘Your uncle F
rancisco’, she had shouted, ‘was a traitor to Spain!’
There had been a good deal of shouting in Luis’s childhood. As in most post-war Spanish households, Luis’s father’s authority over them all was absolute, but this authority had to take into account the size of Luis’s mother’s personality and the strength of her will. She knew her duty and she rebelled against it all the time, buoyed up by the deeply Spanish belief that strength was to be gained through suffering. Her very frustration would, she knew, in the end be rewarded. Luis and his sister Ana, instead of enjoying the home life propounded by Franco, a life of rhythm, discipline and order, lived in fact in a quarrelsome beargarden. By the time he was fourteen, Luis dared to admit to himself that he disliked his mother and by the time he was a father himself, watching his relationship with baby José’s mother disintegrate, he was beginning to wonder if he disliked all mothers; that motherhood was a state likely to turn any woman into a possessive, unbalanced monster. His own mother had screamed at him; now his wife, the minute she was a mother, was doing the same thing. His mother had wanted him to obey her implicitly, especially in matters of religious devotion; his wife wanted something else, something to do with freedom and esteem.
‘It is not easy’, she had once said to him with deadly emphasis, ‘to try and be a feminist in this land of machismo.’
The effect of it all was to make Luis wary of profound relationships with women. He could see that some of his mother’s generation felt cheated after lifetimes spent as virtual slaves in the house; he could see equally well that subsequent generations of Spanish women wished to have the freedom to work and to mix, but it was the handling of women with either of those grievances that seemed so difficult; the barrage of their resentment and mockery seemed to make any kind of mutual understanding almost impossible. He strongly disapproved of hearing his father say – as his father often did – ‘Give a woman freedom, and you get anarchy,’ but he equally disapproved of the violence with which the opposite view was expressed.
Despite those early seductive whisperings from his political uncle, Luis knew he was not a radical. Indeed, there were times when the notion of a life of rhythm, discipline and order seemed not only attractive but civilized and better able to ensure a general level of happiness than the seemingly progressive pursuit of self-fulfilment. As a citizen of one of the more socialist cities of Spain, he sometimes felt out of step with the way things seemed determined to move, while at the same time being unable to share completely a feeling common to many of his countrymen, that General Franco had, in many ways, been no bad thing for Spain. A foreigner, an American businessman with whom he was having dealings, had once said, after an exhausting meeting they had both attended, ‘Luis, what excessive people the Spanish are!’ Perhaps, Luis thought afterwards, it’s the excessiveness of Spanish women that makes them such a big deal to live with. Too big a deal. For fifteen years Luis had lived, apart from visitors, alone.
Above his head, a clear female voice announced over the loudspeaker system that the flight from London Gatwick had just landed. Luis looked at his watch. The airport was quite full so the baggage wouldn’t be through for at least twenty minutes. He considered going to buy a cup of coffee, and then reconsidered it. Even if it took thirty minutes for her to emerge, Luis decided he would not chance not being there when Frances Shore came through customs.
* * *
When he had said goodbye to her at Seville Airport on Christmas Eve, Luis had not thought he would hear from her again. Briefly, he was mildly sorry about this, partly because he was furious with José for being so incompetent – José’s continued incompetence was the source of many new quarrels between Luis and José’s mother – and partly because Frances Shore was quite unlike anybody he had ever done business with in twenty-five years. He had known many Englishwomen during his time at the London School of Economics, but they had, on the whole, been a politically determined breed and not much interested in a young man from what they saw as the land of bull fights, religious bigotry and fascism. In the years since the sixties, he had never done business with an Englishwoman and met very few. His sense of adventure and taste for novelty had been aroused by the thought of defying Christmas and taking this Miss Shore to his three posadas. Then José had effectively scuppered the whole plan and when Frances had said goodbye at the airport – politely but not with any particular warmth – he had thought that was that. Miss Shore, in her unmistakably English mackintosh, would have other travel fish to fry.
But she had telephoned him. He had been in Brussels, discussing the EEC regulations for the setting up of organic farms – he was planning one, with an Andalusian consortium – and arrived back in Seville, to find a message from Frances. It was February. He rang her back immediately, and she said she would like to re-open negotiations with the Posadas of Andalucía. He said he would be charmed.
She said sharply, ‘I don’t want you to be charmed, I just want you to be there, when you say you will be.’
‘I will be here in May.’
‘May is hopeless, I’ve got far too much business in May.’
‘Five days only. Andalucía is at its best in May. Or September. You fly to Málaga and I will meet you.’
‘Not in May.’
‘Then September.’
‘September is worse.’
‘Then—’
‘All right,’ Frances said. ‘I’ll juggle things. I’ll come in May.’
And here she was, in the baggage hall of Málaga Airport. He felt pleased. In fact, he felt more than pleased, he felt a kind of quickened interest, as at the prospect of something unknown, but attractively unknown.
He folded up his newspaper – if the Spanish were excessive, what adjective was left for the Basques? – put it in his briefcase, and moved across to the space of dusty floor in front of the doors that led to the customs hall. They were opening constantly, disgorging passengers with baggage trolleys and the mildly disorientated expressions that are the inevitable effect of air travel. Luis watched them closely; a few Spaniards came through but mostly they were English, and a lot of them the loudly confident, commercial English whose requirements had filled southern Spain with high-rise blocks of flats and mock Moorish villages, to the increase of its prosperity and to the detriment of its spirit. Then, suddenly, there was Frances. She wore a blue linen skirt and a white T-shirt with a cardigan tied over her shoulders, and she carried her own suitcase. She came straight over to him and held out her hand to him, smiling.
‘Mr Gómez Moreno,’ she said. ‘I hope you realize that I intended never to come back to Spain.’
Having stowed her in his car, and climbed into the driver’s seat, he asked if she would mind if he took off his tie.
‘I cannot drive in a tie, somehow. I think I will strangle.’
‘Of course,’ Frances said, startled at the courtesy of being asked. She folded the lengths of her blue skirt around her legs. ‘It’s so lovely to be warm.’
‘Twenty-two degrees,’ Luis said with satisfaction, as if he had arranged it especially for her. He started the car, and turned to look at her briefly, with a broad smile. ‘Well, here you are. Miss Shore, back in Spain.’
‘Frances.’
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Frances. Then Luis also.’
He pulled the car out of the wired-off compound of the airport car park. Above Frances hung the same strong blue sky she had seen on Christmas Eve in Seville, but this sky was full of warmth, not just light.
‘I don’t want us to have any more confusions,’ Luis said, ‘but I am curious to know why you changed your mind, why you decided to telephone me. Of course, I am pleased—’
‘It rankled,’ Frances said, looking out of the window. ‘It wouldn’t stop.’
‘Rankled?’ he said, not understanding.
‘Yes. It irritated me that it hadn’t worked, that it was a good idea that went wrong. And a lot of my clients, the ones who have been with me since the beginning, were beginning to hint that the
y would like new horizons. Where are we going?’
‘Mojas,’ he said. ‘I am taking no chances this time.’ He was laughing.
‘Mojas? I’ve never heard—’
‘You wouldn’t have. It’s a village. It’s a tiny village in the mountains between Granada and the sea. It has my best posada, my favourite. We are too late though, for the almond blossom.’
‘Almonds—’
‘The village used to live by its almonds. Even now, the almond season is the busy season, the village streets full of donkeys with baskets, every house sounding with the tapping of the women and children shelling. We can hardly take the car into the village, the streets are so small. Donkeys are fine, cars are not.’
‘My clients’, Frances said carefully, ‘would like that.’ She thought of them, cultivated, capable, respectful of the places they visited, repelled by the violation caused by mass tourism. ‘They are quite quiet people,’ she said to Luis. ‘They are the sort of people who will read seriously about Spain before they come, and who would never buy dolls dressed as flamenco dancers.’
He laughed again. He was driving very fast through the shade-dappled suburbs of Málaga, slipping in and out of lanes of traffic as if he didn’t need to think about it. Every so often, in bright glimpses between buildings to the right of the road, came a flash of the sea. Frances thought, with a sudden little inward clutch of pleasure: I’m liking this!
It had been truthful to say she had been irked by the Seville episode. Once it was over, she hadn’t meant to think about it any more, but it kept popping up in her mind as something not only bungled, but unfinished. The newspapers seemed to be unnaturally full of pieces about Spain – surely they never were before? – and the telly seemed absolutely obsessed with the place all of a sudden, with programmes about Spanish women and crime and Catholicism, about Spanish gambling and food and drink and about the Spanish Army. Frances had turned the television on one day soon after Christmas, quite idly, while wandering about with a mug of coffee and a slice of toast, and there, instead of a chat show or a police drama or a politician, was a very young Spanish army recruit, stooping in reverence to kiss the Spanish flag. Frances was amazed. It was such a theatrical, passionate, serious thing to do. Imagine telling an English squaddie he had to kiss the Union Jack!
A Spanish Lover Page 10
