A Spanish Lover (18 page)

‘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, innocent 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.'