A Spanish Lover (19 page)

‘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.

The windows were already open, as they had been all night. Down in the green and flowery garden, Juan was watering the pots and the fat waiter – there was a fat one and a thin one – was putting yellow cushions on the white iron chairs and brushing fallen leaves and petals off the white iron tables. On one of the tiny patches of grass, Juan's dog, a cheerful small mongrel with an absurdly curly tail, sat and scratched. Her clients would like that dog, Frances thought, just as they would like the spilling stone jars of pelargoniums and the plumbago that wound gracefully round the wrought-iron balustrades. All that would be missing, for them, would be deckchairs, in which to read fat novels and fatter biographies and three-day-old copies of the
Daily Telegraph
, bought in Málaga. She must tell Juan about the deckchairs; she would tell him that they were an English eccentricity, as necessary to a certain type of English person as marmalade for breakfast.

Below the garden, the falling roofs of the village were pale-apricot in the early sun. The washing was,
of
course, already out, and so were a few cats, and there was that particular sound of Spanish sweeping, bristles on stones, and the echoing sound too, of hoofs in narrow alleys, mules and men going out into the fields for the day. The mules lived, Frances had noticed, in stables that were such integral parts of the houses of Mojas that they were simply like downstairs rooms, and sometimes the family bicycles and motor bikes lived there too in a companionable way. It seemed such a natural life, so uncontrived, so properly concerned with the business of actual living, so rooted in these rolling, reddish hills and mountains with their olive groves and almond orchards and sudden, neat green vegetable plots, as brilliant as billiard tables. But it was poor too, Luis had said, poor and harsh still, and, when Juan had advertised for waiters, thirty-seven boys from local villages had come to Mojas, seeking one of the only two positions on offer.

‘The sun is a deceiver,' Luis said. ‘It makes people from the north think that life must be easy. You would be amazed how monotonous is the diet of the people of this village.'

It was a sobering thought. So, too, was the memory of the dream with Lizzie in it, running and crying. Frances went back to her rumpled bed, sat on the edge of it, picked up the bedside telephone and asked for an outside line.

‘Frances! Oh Frances, how lovely!'

‘I dreamed about you,' Frances said. ‘And it was a worrying dream and so I'm ringing. Are you all right?'

‘Fine,' Lizzie said.

‘Lizzie? Really?'

‘Yes,' Lizzie said. ‘We had to do the end-of-year accounts and you know how they are—'

‘Rob said at Christmas that they mightn't be very good.'

‘They aren't.'

‘Seriously not good?'

There was a small, crackling pause.

‘Lizzie?'

‘I think I'll have to get a job,' Lizzie said. ‘To help pay the mortgage. It isn't a big deal. I don't want to waste expensive telephone time—'

‘A
job
? But you've got a job, in the Gallery—'

‘An outside job. Rob and Jenny can manage the Gallery between them. Rob asked me if I'd like to get a job or I'd like him to, and I chose me and now I feel rather awful, as if I'm taking the easy option.'

‘When did this happen?'

‘Yesterday, I suppose. I went to see Juliet. We could ask Dad for a loan but Rob doesn't want to, and I don't really.'

‘Can I help?'

‘Frances, you haven't got any money—'

‘I've got some, enough to help a little—'

‘No. You're sweet, but no. We mustn't get this out of proportion, heaps of people are in the same boat. We just have to change our lives a bit and that's the hard part because we didn't think we'd ever have to. Don't let's talk about it any more, it's so depressing and it's pouring with rain here. Are you having a lovely time?'

‘I'm afraid I am—'

‘Why are you afraid?'

‘Because I feel a pig, when you aren't having a lovely time at all.'

‘Frances,' Lizzie said sternly, ‘I really am not as small-minded as that. What's it like?'

‘Sunny,' Frances said. ‘Simple, charming and quite fierce too. Spain seems to be fierce.'

‘Even your Mr Whatsit Moreno?'

‘No,' Frances said. ‘He isn't fierce. He's—'

‘What?'

‘Wonderful,' Frances said.

‘Frances—'

‘I'm very happy, you know.'

‘Frances, what's
happening?
'

‘Nothing's happening,' Frances said. ‘Except he takes me to look at things and we talk a lot, and I make arrangements with the manager here, business arrangements.'

‘Frances!' Lizzie called from wet England. ‘Frances, are you falling for him?'

‘Yes,' Frances said. ‘And for Spain and this village and—'

‘And what?'

‘For myself. I really like myself here.'

‘You sound quite unhinged!' Lizzie cried.

‘Well, I'm not. I'm just relaxed and happy.'

‘
Please
be careful!'

‘Lizzie, I'm thirty-eight, you know.'

‘I do know. I'm sorry. Is it –
very
sunny?'

‘Yes.'

‘I'm so pleased for you, really I am—'

‘I'll be home at the weekend, or soon after. Then we'll talk properly. I know thinking about you isn't much help—'

‘It is. I went to see Juliet because I couldn't see you.'

‘But you've got Rob to talk to—'

There was another tiny pause.

‘Yes,' Lizzie said. ‘Ring me when you get back. Don't worry about us, we're fine really. Bless you for ringing, it's a big help, truly. Bye, Frances.'

Frances heard the tiny click as the telephone receiver went down in Langworth. She should have asked Lizzie what kind of job she was thinking of, she should have asked after Rob who was so prone to anxiety and would be, at the moment, so much in need of Lizzie to reassure him. She should – stop this, Frances said sternly to herself, stop this at once. Lizzie's misfortunes
are
not your fault, you stupid, over-emotional, guilt-ridden …

There was a knock at the door. Frances pulled up a slipped nightgown strap.

‘Yes?'

‘Good morning,' Luis said from the other side of the door. ‘I saw your curtains were open. Are you going to eat breakfast?'

‘You bet.'

‘May we eat it together?'

‘Of course.'

‘Then I will go down', he said, ‘and wait for you.'

‘I'll be ten minutes.'

‘This is Spain,' Luis said. ‘Do I have to remind you all the time? Ten minutes, one hour—'

She was laughing. She tipped herself sideways into the heap of sheets and laughed and laughed.

‘Don't laugh with yourself,' Luis said. ‘It is so selfish,' but his voice sounded as if he were laughing too. Then she heard him going down the staircase outside into the little courtyard below and she thought she heard him singing.

‘I want to take you to Mirasol,' Luis said. ‘The road will be very rough, over the hills—'

‘Why don't we walk?'

‘Walk? Frances, it is perhaps ten kilometres!'

‘So? Can't you walk that far? Think how good it would be for those three extra kilos.'

He patted his stomach.

‘I am fond of them now—'

‘Let's compromise. We'll take the car part of the way, and walk the rest.'

‘This is a terrible prospect,' Luis said.

‘You are just lazy.'

‘In my youth, I play beautiful tennis, really beautiful—'

‘That doesn't interest me at all. I want to walk in these hills and I want you to come with me. After all, I must be able to tell my clients that the walking is good, from first-hand experience. Why are we going to Mirasol, anyway?'

‘There is something to show you.'

‘A church? A castle?'

‘No,' Luis said. ‘Something simple and sad. Go and get your hat.'

When she came downstairs again with her hat in her hand, Luis and Juan were standing in the tiny white courtyard off the bar, where weeping figs grew and where hotel guests drank glasses of iced sherry before dinner.

‘We have water problems, Juan says. They are the curse of this region. Two of the roof tanks didn't fill in the night.' He turned and spoke rapidly to Juan. ‘Frances, we may have to go to Motril later, to shout at the authorities, but we will do that after Mirasol.'

‘Do you want to do that first, the water, I mean?'

‘No,' Luis said. He smiled at Juan. ‘Juan is the manager here, the water is his problem. It is merely mine to pay for it. Come.'

Out in the little square, Luis's car, blond with dust, waited under an acacia tree. It was too early for the old men, so the square was empty apart from a hen in one corner, investigating the contents of a litter bin through the wire mesh, and a spindly cat in another, watching the hen with a show of elaborate indifference. The bar was shuttered, so was the post office, a decayed Baroque building with great lumps of plaster moulding missing from its façade, and only the single shop gave faint signs of life, the plastic strips that screened its open doorway half-heartedly against flies twitching in the slight breeze.

Luis drove out of the village to the north-east, first through the maze-like lanes, no wider than passages in
a
house, with their glimpes of courtyards and flowers and dark workshops and darker interiors, and then through a few more open streets where businessmen from Motril had built themselves raw and ugly modern villas behind fearsome fortified walls and grilles. In front of some lay great holes which might one day become swimming pools, and beside all of them were double garages. It was, Frances thought, almost a Spanish Langworth, with a dangerous philistine fringe of new building threatening the timeless old heart. Beyond the new villas, the village cemetery lay like a little township of its own, secure behind white walls topped with apricot-coloured tiles, and guarded by an imposing chapel and a sentinel host of cypress trees.

‘When the last mayor of Mojas was buried here,' Luis said, ‘every single person in the village came out to his funeral. He lived in the house that is now the
posada
and he ruled the village like a tyrant. The house had no sanitation and every morning, four men would carry him out, in his wooden chair, to the fields, and when he had finished, they carried him back again. They feared him and they hated him, and when he died, the village mourned for him, every man and woman and child. They raised a subscription for a statue of him to be put in the village plaza, but the priest would not allow it because he said that the man had been a communist.'