A Spanish Lover

by Joanna Trollope

  Beside her Robert stirred, sighed and opened his eyes. He peered across her at Davy.

  ‘How many teeth fell out in the night, Dave?’

  Davy shut his eyes in disgust.

  ‘I was wondering’, Lizzie said, ‘whether I shouldn’t ask Dad for some help?’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t—’

  ‘I know, but he’s awfully easy to ask, bless him, and I’m sure he’d understand—’

  Robert turned on his side so that his profile rested against Lizzie’s nearest shoulder.

  ‘Lizzie, I’m afraid I couldn’t bear it. It’s one thing to ask for money to build with, on the way up, but quite another to ask for it as a lifeline, because you fear you may be on the way down.’

  ‘Don’t talk like that!’

  ‘I can’t help it, it’s what I’m thinking.’

  Davy put a tentative hand inside the football scarf and felt his face.

  ‘Are you going to school in that scarf?’

  ‘No,’ Davy said.

  ‘Then why have you worn it all night?’

  ‘Sam said it would mend me.’

  ‘Sam has a guilty conscience.’

  Davy regarded her.

  ‘Sam said Pimlott might let me play with them.’

  ‘Do you like Pimlott, Davy?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Davy said reverently.

  Lizzie kissed him.

  ‘You’re too like your Aunt Frances,’ Lizzie said. ‘Too grateful for too little.’ She gave a small, ironic smile. ‘Think of Frances! Think of Frances and think of us!’

  ‘You’re always being so sorry for her—’

  ‘I know, it’s just that now, being able to roam about in southern Spain in May seems—’

  ‘Shh,’ Robert said.

  ‘There are footballers in Spain,’ Davy said, feeling for the huge, soft, woolly knot on top of his head. ‘Pimlott said.’

  ‘Would you mind’, Lizzie asked Robert, ‘if I went and talked to Juliet?’

  ‘’Course not. But what on earth could Juliet do?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nothing, probably. But I’d like to see her.’

  Robert began to get out of bed. ‘Suit yourself—’

  ‘Rob, don’t be huffy—’

  ‘I’m not huffy,’ he said huffily. ‘I just can’t see the point of telling Juliet our troubles. But you tell her if you want to.’

  ‘I do want to,’ Lizzie said. ‘I do want to. Because I can’t, at the moment, tell Frances.’

  Juliet was pegging out washing. She wasn’t naturally domesticated in the brisk, domestic science-school way that Barbara was, but there were some soothing domestic tasks she really relished, and hanging out the washing was one. It was partly that the high, windy situation of the cottage was so tailormade for the job, and it was glorious to see sheets and towels cracking and bellying in the wind like the sails of tall ships. Sometimes they cracked and bellied so tremendously that they blew away across the downs and Juliet would have to retrieve her laundry from bramble bushes and five-barred gates. She was just hoisting her clothes prop – she scoured the woods for these, ash and hazel were usually the most promising – into place, when she saw the glint of a car roof catching the sun at the foot of her track. A few seconds later, she saw that it was Lizzie.

  ‘You look like an illustration out of “Mother Goose”,’ Lizzie said, getting out of the car.

  ‘It’s my grey feather hair. You, on the other hand, look exhausted.’

  ‘I didn’t sleep. I hate not sleeping, I simply can’t function the next day at all.’

  Juliet took her into the cottage. There was a sewing machine on the table, and a great chaos of pieces of fabric, and a jar of cow parsley on the hearth. One of the windows was open to the windy morning and the curtains were rippling back and forth in the draught and for no reason she could immediately think of, except sleeplessness, the sight of Juliet’s sitting room made Lizzie feel slightly tearful, because of its timelessness, its air of suspended but constructive activity, its security.

  ‘Have you ever been short of money?’ Lizzie said.

  ‘Always.’

  ‘In debt?’

  ‘Never. Can’t bear it. It’s the one orthodox element in my moral code. I bought this cottage outright thirty years ago for three thousand pounds that my mother left me. I couldn’t have borrowed the money for dear life.’

  ‘We’ve borrowed,’ Lizzie said, crouching down and putting her face against the pepper-smelling heads of the cow parsley.

  ‘I’m sure you have. Everybody does, but me.’

  ‘And now it’s become – very difficult to pay it back.’

  Juliet ran water into her kettle. She thought of the Grange, and Lizzie’s children, and the industrialist she had heard on the radio that morning who had said that, for the first time in twenty-five years, his order books were empty.

  ‘I don’t expect you to have a solution,’ Lizzie said, straightening up. ‘I don’t expect you even to react. I just had to say it to someone who wasn’t Rob, and I don’t want to say it to Mum.’

  Juliet put the kettle on to boil and came back towards Lizzie.

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘I feel we’ve been awful fools, so gullible—’

  ‘You aren’t business people after all, you’re artists—’

  ‘We’ve learned business,’ Lizzie said. ‘At least, we thought we had.’ She looked at Juliet. ‘What I can’t bear is not being able to think of what to do. If I could think what to do, I’d do it.’

  ‘In that case,’ Juliet said casually, ‘why doesn’t one of you go out to work?’

  9

  LUIS TOOK FRANCES to Granada along a tortuous and beautiful road through the mountains. He told her that, although he was born in Seville, Granada was his favourite city in Spain because it was at once so full of vitality and so full of melancholy as well as being full of wonderful buildings. The last Moorish king of Granada, Luis said, had been unromantically called Boabdil, and when he had to flee from the city in 1492 he wept and wept at leaving its courtyards and its fountains and its minarets.

  ‘He had a terrible mother,’ Luis said. ‘His mother said to him, “You weep like a woman for what you could not defend like a man.”’

  ‘That’s the sort of thing my mother might say,’ Frances said.

  ‘And mine—’

  They glanced at each other, laughing.

  ‘I wanted to go to university here,’ Luis said, ‘but my father sent me to London, believing that the London School of Economics was a business school. He had no idea of its politics, and I never told him.’

  ‘Do Spanish children confide in their parents?’

  ‘Not my generation, certainly.’

  ‘And José? Does José talk to you?’

  ‘José’, Luis said, frowning a little, ‘talks to his mother.’

  Frances looked out of the window and then, because the drop her side of the road was so sheer and so deep, looked hastily back again. She wanted very much to ask Luis about his marriage to which he had never referred. Yet he wore a wedding ring, the standard, third-finger, left-hand, married gold band of a standard Catholic husband.

  ‘I’ve forgiven José,’ Frances said. ‘I think you ought to.’

  Luis shrugged. ‘He can be just a charming boy to you, but to me he is a disappointment. He wants only to play.’

  ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t give him so much money.’

  He glanced at her. ‘Do you have much money, Frances?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘just enough.’

  ‘Do you approve of that?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘But then you are a puritan.’

  She glared at him.

  ‘I’m not!’

  He was grinning, teasing.

  ‘Are you sure?’ He began to imitate her. ‘“No, Luis, I won’t have another glass of sherry, even though it was delicious and I would love to … No, Luis, I won’t stay up any later and argue about philosop
hy with you because I am here on business so I must sleep enough and keep a clear head … No, Luis, I will not ask you personal questions because it would not be proper.”’

  She stared ahead soberly for a moment.

  ‘Am I really like that?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘not really. That’s why I tease you. You say these things to me but I don’t think they are true.’

  ‘I hate being flattered,’ Frances said. ‘I distrust it.’

  ‘I don’t flatter you. I tell you often that you are wrong, your views are often too soft—’

  ‘And yours are too hard.’

  ‘I am a Spaniard,’ he said. ‘We are conservative people, and a little tragic. Everything happens on a grand scale here, including the disasters. Look ahead.’

  Frances looked. Across the great agricultural plain they were approaching, she could see a wall of mountain, and snow.

  ‘The Sierra Nevada. Soon you will see the city. I will drive round to the north of it, and take you in through the old Arab gate, the Puerta de Elvira, and we will walk in the Albaicín, where the falcon keepers used to live, which is the poor quarter now, but interesting, and then we shall look at the Alhambra, which is the glory of Granada, and then I will give you lunch at the parador.’

  Frances, filled with joy, said, ‘It’s so kind of you, Luis, to go to all this trouble but really, you know, I’ve decided in favour of the posada anyway, so—’

  ‘It’s not trouble. I like it.’

  She said nothing. She looked for a moment at his hands on the steering wheel, and then quickly away at the advancing mountain wall under its crest of snow.

  ‘I am happy to do this,’ Luis said. ‘I am happy to be with you. You see, I am doing what I like.’

  In the gardens of the Generalife, Frances sat down to make notes. ‘Generalife,’ she wrote in her large, firm handwriting, ‘Arabic for “the Garden of the Architect”.’ She closed her eyes for a moment and briefly turned her face up to the clear, decided, early summer sun. When she elected to open them again – at her leisure and pleasure as everything was being on that day – she would see the long green length of the Patio de la Acequia, and the roses and the myrtles and the orange trees and, arching over them, the ceaseless shimmer of the fountains, rising and falling in a soothing, seductive, hypnotic rhythm. If she looked a little to her left, she would see an ancient arched wall over which bougainvillaea fell, and if she lowered her gaze a little, she would see Luis. He had stretched himself out in the shade of a kind of lookout balcony and had his eyes shut. She did open her eyes; she did look at him. He had arranged himself on the stones, she thought, in a way that was very graceful for such a solid man.

  Frances went on with her notes. ‘These gardens and the palace here were the summer residence of the rulers of Granada. Moorish influence paramount, wonderful planting and views, and water, water everywhere. Excellent for painters, photographers. Food in city also interesting, being Moorish still in large measure’ – Luis had made her eat a particular kind of dried ham at lunch, with beans, broad beans called habas which he said the Moors had loved – ‘in fact, I have a feeling that Moors here knew about real quality of life, air, water, flowers, music, prospects, how to delight the senses.’

  She wondered, briefly, with a kind of professional reflex, about the senses of the clients of Shore to Shore. Would they find that the exotic and sophisticated charms of the Alhambra with its screens and fretted arches and reflecting tanks of water were quite obliterated by the nightmare of trying to park their hired holiday cars? The trouble was, today, did she care about that? Had she, if she was honest, cared at all, since she stepped out of her shoes on to the sun-warmed tiles of her bedroom in the posada at Mojas and felt the unmistakable siren call of something that had nothing to do with that neat office in Fulham, with telephoning punctilious Nicky, with worrying whether the new holidays she had dreamed up that year of Etruscan sites and Renaissance gardens was, in fact, going to involve far too much walking for many of her loyal but elderly clients? Had she not, for these few days at least, simply climbed into the infinitely alluring hammock of quite another kind of life to any she had previously known, and just let herself sway to its rhythm in the sunshine? She put her notebook down and spread her hands on the warm old stones either side of her, the stones laid at the command of the Sultan Abul-Wallid Ismail I over which his wife Zoraya then softly trod on her way to secret meetings with her lover in the Court of the Cypresses. Bewitching stuff, Frances thought, quite bewitching, but am I really just being rather silly? I do hope not, because that would be such a disappointment, and I am so very, very tired of being disappointed. At least today is not disappointing, and nor was yesterday, nor the day I arrived. Since I arrived I haven’t once felt I was being balked of something I wanted, in fact, it’s been rather the opposite, I’ve been given things I hardly dared to hope for. When Luis wakes up, I will ask if we can go and see the tomb of the Catholic Kings. After Christopher Columbus, I feel drawn towards significant Spanish tombs.

  Luis was not asleep. His eyes were closed, certainly, but not completely, and every so often he took a long, covert look at Frances, sitting out there in the sunshine in a straw hat which he would, if she were his, have made a bonfire of, for its quelling and spinsterish qualities. If she were his, indeed, he thought, he would not dress her in the bold and elaborate clothes that Spanish women carried off with such flair, but he would certainly like her to stop shrouding herself in all these anonymous folds of fabric, as if she wished nobody to be able to guess a thing about her, just by looking. But people did look at her; Luis had noticed that. It wasn’t very surprising. After all, he wanted to do it a good deal himself, he wanted to know more about her.

  He had, rather to his surprise, told her quite a lot about himself at lunch. He made a point, on the whole, of not talking about his marriage, whose failure, yet continued technical existence, seemed to symbolize so much in himself that he had never quite resolved, the lifelong girders of Catholicism that seemed to remain whether he took any notice of them or not, the struggle between the order of traditional values and the inevitable confusion but freshness of progressive ones. As a businessman, he applauded the chances offered by European economic unity; as a Spaniard, he deplored the smallest influence that might diminish Spain’s proud, difficult, capricious Spanishness. ‘Every day in Spain is some kind of adventure,’ he said, laughing to Frances. ‘Even catching a train—’ And then, for some reason, he had told her about his marriage.

  She had listened with that kind of stillness people have when everything you say is saturated with importance for them.

  ‘I was in love, certainly, she was very charming, but you must also understand the strictness of a good middle-class family like ours, in the sixties. We could not get to know each other very well in many ways, we could not relax, we could not be’ – he paused and then said circumspectly – ‘be intimate. There could be no easy friendship between boys and girls then, no fooling around, no experiments. Our parents were much involved, as their parents had been with them. I don’t complain. Often it’s as good a way to make a marriage as completely free choice. It’s hard to choose when there is all the choice in the world. José will never choose. Why should he? His mother looks after him like a baby and he has as many girls to play with as he likes. I disapprove but his mother takes no notice. She thinks I disapprove of everything that gives freedom to anyone in Spain but myself.’

  ‘And do you?’ Frances said.

  He looked at her with a flash of something like contempt.

  ‘What a question! I don’t believe anyone on this earth should behave as if they had nothing to prove, neither man nor woman. But my wife thinks she has nothing to prove. It is not possible to live with someone who thinks that, it makes every conversation a farce because the assumption is always that she is right because she is a woman and a mother and I am wrong because I am a Spanish man. I tell you,’ he said, grinning again, ‘there is an armed woman in the Sev
ille police. She is wonderful. I told José’s mother she should imitate her and she threw a big dish at me.’

  ‘I expect she did,’ Frances said. She was eating, with a teaspoon, a thick, dark quince paste that Luis had told her was as much an ancient speciality as the broad beans had been.

  ‘You are so cool,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you shout at me?’

  ‘That would be pretty stupid.’

  ‘I am afraid that perhaps José’s mother is a little stupid. She is my son’s mother and when I married her, I loved her. You can only be sad when love dies because it was living once and everything living is important. Why did you not marry?’

  Frances put her teaspoon down on her now empty plate. She looked at her wine glass. It too seemed to be empty. How many glasses had she drunk?

  ‘I never wanted to.’

  ‘You don’t believe in marriage?’ His voice had a tiny edge of hope to it.

  ‘I do believe in marriage. I don’t think it would have lasted so long, as an institution, if it wasn’t basically the best that men and women could devise for arranging society.’

  ‘Then?’ Luis said, filling her glass.

  Frances bent her head. Her wing of hair fell forward, obscuring her face from him.

  ‘I would like’, Frances said carefully, turning her wine glass by its stem, ‘to have a relationship with someone, with a man, that was enhancing. Suppose we were in a room together, this man and I, I would like him to feel that the room was better for him than any other room because I was in it too. And I would like to feel the same, about him.’