A Spanish Lover (6 page)

Heavens! thought Frances, and then, a second later: Pull yourself together. This is an adventure—

The car, having sped about a confusing maze of streets, stopped abruptly in front of a high white wall. It had, it appeared, simply run out of road.

‘Stopping,' the driver said. ‘End. Is Barrio. No motoring cars.'

He sprang out and began to open doors and the boot. Frances got out on to the pavement. She was in a small, lopsided square, quite quiet except for her escort's slamming of car doors and gruntings over luggage. At the far end was a little restaurant, its façade hung with rustling greenery and yellow lamps in its windows.

‘Coming with me, Señora,' the driver said, and darted down an alley beside the high blank wall.

The alley was narrow, lit only by a pretty wrought-iron lamp on a bracket ten feet above Frances's head. At the end, the little man vanished to the right, and then to the left, and then led her, panting slightly in his wake, to a broader alley, one side formed by a tall, cream-painted building, its windows obscured behind formidable iron grilles.

‘Is Hotel Toro,' the man called. ‘Very luxey!'

To Frances, it looked like a penitentiary.

‘Are you sure?'

He performed his reversing manoeuvre into the doors to the foyer.

‘Come!'

‘Why am I not staying at the Posada de los Naranjos?'

‘Señor Moreno is coming,' the driver said. ‘Coming more later. Is good hotel. Hotel Toro.'

It was, at first glance, the most bizarre hotel Frances had encountered in five years of intensive hotel spotting. The long foyer, floored in green marble chips and with a deeply, richly coffered ceiling, was furnished as an unintentional parody of the antique Spanish style, all carved oak and tooled leather and brass studs as big as walnuts. Between every piece of furniture stood either a suit of armour or an old-fashioned shop-window dummy in full flamenco frills, and the walls, heavily stuccoed as if with a garden fork, were adorned with bull fighters' capes and swords and also, in lugubrious rows, with the horned heads of their victims mounted on varnished shields. The impression was of a macabre party, halted by the casting of a sudden spell.

‘
Ambiente tipicamente español
,' the driver said reverently. He put Frances's case down on the shining green floor. ‘Mos' beautiful.'

Behind the reception desk stood a lean, grave young man in a dark suit. He gave Frances a long look and then a slow bow.

‘Miss Shore.'

‘Yes, I believe—'

‘Señor Gómez Moreno has booked you a room with us. He left you this letter.'

Frances looked at the proffered letter. She wanted very much to say that she was here on business, that she did not wish to stay among the phoney Falstaffian splendours of the Hotel Toro and that she was by now quite certain that there had been considerable confusion over all the arrangements. However, as it seemed plain that she was a guest of the Gómez Morenos, she felt she could not object until she saw one of them, face to face, to object to. She took the letter and opened it:

Dear Miss Shore! Welcome to Sevilla. We hope you will find the Hotel Toro comfortable and the staff obliging. I will, if you will allow me, call for you at the hotel at 9 p.m. this evening.

Yours sincerely, José Gómez Moreno.

Frances turned to her driver.

‘Thank you so much for bringing me here.'

He bowed.

‘Is no problem.' He gave her another smile flashed with gold. ‘I hope you will be having a good time in Sevilla.'

She watched him trot briskly across the foyer, reverse into the doors and swing himself out into the darkness beyond. The young man behind the desk held out a room key on a huge bronze plaque with a bull's head in relief upon it.

‘Your room is on the third floor. Miss Shore. Room 309.'

* * *

Room 309 had yellow walls, a yellow-tiled floor, brown wooden furniture and brown-and-yellow folk-weave bedspreads. A single tiny lamp between the beds gave off as much light as a sick glow-worm, and high above, from the ceiling, hung a second unenthusiastic bulb in a yellow glass globe. The walls were quite bare except for a mirror hung at the right height for a dwarf, and a small dark panel which turned out to be an anguished deposition of Christ from the Cross, full of grimaces and gore. In one corner, a small, flimsy plastic cupboard passed for a bathroom, with a notice stuck up above the lavatory which read, ‘By order! Please Use Softly!' Besides the twin beds – each as narrow as a school bed – was a veneered wardrobe, a table bearing an ashtray and two red plastic gardenias in a pottery vase, two upright chairs and a tiny television set on a wrought-iron trolley. As well as being ugly the room was also cold.

Frances dumped her suitcase down on one of the beds.

‘If I was paying for you,' she said to the room, ‘I wouldn't stay in you another second.'

She marched across to the window and flung open the long casements which opened inwards and were lined with grimy pleated net. Behind them brown shutters were firmly bolted against the winter night. Frances wrestled them open, and leaned out. She took a breath, a breath of Seville. It smelled of nothing but cold. Perhaps it was unfair, on a December night, to expect it to smell of orange blossom and charcoal and grilling and donkey dung but really, Frances thought, it could do better than this. I could be anywhere, she reflected crossly, anywhere in Europe, in a shoddy hotel room that isn't charming enough or comfortable enough or warm enough to justify
anybody
staying in it, unless they were completely desperate.

She looked down into the alley, lit by gleams from the hotel windows. A couple was coming by, an oldish couple in dark formal clothes with a miniature dog darting about beside them, on a scarlet lead. They paced slowly by, under Frances's gaze, the dog's claws clicking on the cobbles, and then vanished round a corner where a blue neon sign said ‘Bar El Nido' with a helpful indicating arrow. Then the alley was empty again.

‘Seville's social life,' Frances said, and banged the shutters shut. She was reminded of a night she had once spent in Cortona, in the rain, in a hotel that had promised so well, being a former monastery, and had turned out to be grim and comfortless with no bar, no extra blankets, and the dining room locked against all comers by eight-thirty in the evening. She had been too tired, that night, to trail out and find another hotel. This night, she wasn't tired, but she appeared to be under an obligation – which was worse.

She sat down on one of the unfriendly beds and pulled off her boots. It would have been a relief to ring Lizzie. Under ordinary circumstances, and particularly with the wretched Gómez Morenos paying, she would have rung Lizzie at once, to tell her how dreadful the hotel was, and make a joke of the egg-box bathroom and the poor, gloomy bulls' heads and the pretend Spanish ladies, frozen in vivacious mid-flamenco for evermore. But in the current circumstances, she couldn't ring unless – unless it was to say look, I've made a really bad mistake, backed quite the wrong hunch, and I'm coming home for Christmas after all.

‘And that,' Frances said out loud, ‘I can't do. At least—' She looked at her watch, it said eight-forty-five, ‘at least, not yet.'

At nine o'clock, having brushed her hair and put on
more
lipstick, but having decided against the tepid trickle that came from the shower head, Frances went down to the foyer and stationed herself between a lady in royal-blue ruffles with a fan and castanets painted with panniered donkeys, and a bull who had lost his nearest glass eye. She watched the doors. Ten minutes passed, and no-one came in or out. A stout couple emerged from the lift and sat as far away from Frances as possible, speaking in some Scandinavian language and studying a guide book. Frances got up and asked the grave young man behind the reception desk for some red wine. He said he was afraid the bar was closed. Frances said then she was afraid that someone from the hotel was going to have to go all the way to the Bar El Nido for her and bring some back. The young man looked at her for a long, long time and then said he would make enquiries.

‘Please do,' Frances said. ‘And quickly.'

The young man picked up the nearest telephone and spoke a great deal of rapid, quiet, nimble Spanish into it. Then he replaced the receiver and said to Frances, as if he were a doctor speaking to the anxious relation of an extremely ill patient, ‘We will do all we can.'

‘Good,' Frances said. She went back to her chair. ‘This is a dump,' she said to the one-eyed bull. The Scandinavian couple stared at her.

‘Good evening,' she said. ‘Do you think this hotel is comfortable?'

‘No,' the man said in clear English. ‘But it is cheap.' Then he went back to his guide book and his Nordic mutterings.

Frances went on waiting. The telephone rang once or twice, a boy in motor-bike leathers came in with a parcel, a handful of depressed-looking guests crossed the foyer on their way out to dinner, but no wine came, nor did young Señor Gómez Moreno.

‘Where is my wine, please?' Frances called.

‘One moment, Miss Shore,' the young man said.

An elderly telex machine behind the desk began to chatter out a message, claiming his attention. Frances looked at her nails – clean, unpolished – at the heels of her boots, at the Spanish lady's bright, fixed, painted face, at the darkly gilded depths of the ceiling, at her watch. At half-past nine, she marched back to the reception desk. The young man saw her coming, and melted, without hurrying, into an inner cubicle, obscured by a curtain. There was a brass bell on the reception desk, shaped – oh my God, I can't stand it, Frances thought – like a flamenco dancer. She picked it up and rang it ferociously.

‘Where is my wine?'

A cold blast of air swirled into the foyer as the doors were pushed open. A young man came in, a tall, attractive young man in an English-looking camel-hair overcoat and a long plaid scarf.

‘Miss Shore?'

Frances turned, still holding the bell.

‘I am José Gómez Moreno.' He held out his hand and smiled with enormous warmth. ‘Welcome to Sevilla.'

Frances looked at him.

‘You are late,' she said.

‘I am?' He seemed amazed.

‘In your letter, you said you would be here at nine o'clock. It is now almost twenty-five to ten.'

He smiled again, making a balancing movement with his hand. ‘One little half hour! In Spain—'

The foyer doors opened again. A youth in black trousers and a black-leather jacket appeared bearing a tin tray with a single glass of red wine on it. The receptionist emerged from his retreat.

‘Your wine, Miss Shore,' he said with quiet triumph.

The youth put the tray down on the reception desk. Frances and José Gómez Moreno both looked at it.

‘Please,' Frances said. ‘Take it to the couple sitting
over
there. With my compliments. They can share it.'

‘
¿Qué?
' said the youth.

‘You explain,' Frances said to the receptionist and then, turning to José Gómez Moreno who was gazing at her with an expression of profound puzzlement, ‘and then
you
can start.'

He took her to a restaurant in the Pasaje de Andreu. It was underground, in a vaulted cellar that had once, he explained, held great oak barrels of wine.

‘White wine,' he said smiling again, ‘Moriles and Montilla. The best vineyards for these wines are near Córdoba.'

Frances wasn't interested in Córdoba. She held the menu – ‘
Entremeses
', it said in flowing script. ‘
Sopas, Huevos, Aves y caza
' – well away from her in order to show José Gómez Moreno that she was not to be side-tracked and said, ‘I think there has been some confusion.'

He smiled. He was really very beautiful, with a decisively boned face and clear dark eyes and the smooth, obedient dark hair that is so rare in England.

‘Confusion? Surely not—'

Frances laid the menu down and folded her hands on it.

‘When we spoke. Señor Gómez Moreno—'

‘José, please—'

‘José, you said that your hotels were open but not busy at Christmas and that, as you and your father would both be working, there would be ample time to show me—'

‘There will be! There is! Please look at the menu. Here is most excellent
sopa de ajo
, a soup of garlic, paprika—'

‘I don't want to look at the menu, José. I want to know why I am staying at that most inferior hotel when you are supposed to be impressing on me the suitability of your
posadas
for my clients.'

José Gómez Moreno gave a deep and sorrowful sigh. He poured wine into Frances's glass.

‘There comes something surprising.'

‘I beg your pardon?'

He sighed again. He spread his elegant hands.

‘My father goes to Madrid for two nights. All is here as usual. Your room is ready. Then comes the telephone, quite unexpected, quite unforeseen. It is a party from Oviedo, from the north, wishing to stay for four nights, an excellent booking, of much benefit at a quiet time.'

‘So someone from Oviedo, who may never come to your hotel again, is given the room I was to have and I am – am fobbed off with the Hotel Toro?'

‘I don't understand fobbed off—'

‘José,' Frances said. ‘Do you think this is any way to do business?'

She leaned forward and peered at him. She saw that he was not only beautiful but also very young, perhaps no more than twenty-four or five.

‘Does your father know about this? Does he know that I have been thrown out for the last-minute party from – from wherever it was?'

‘Oviedo.'

Frances said crossly, ‘It doesn't matter where it was. I think you are making me far too furious to be hungry.'

‘Please—' He put a hand out and laid it on hers. ‘I make mistake. Truly I am sorry. The Hotel Toro is—'