A Spanish Lover (17 page)

‘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 philosophy 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 Seville 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.'

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.