A Spanish Lover (9 page)

‘My bill is being settled by Señor Gómez Moreno.'

‘I have no instruction—'

The taxi driver looked at Frances without admiration – too little make-up, no visible curves, small jewellery – and leaned across the reception desk to whisper something to the girl. She gave the calculator a tiny smile by way of response.

‘I shan't sign that bill,' Frances said. ‘I am not paying it.'

The girl took no notice.

‘When is the next flight to Madrid?'

The taxi driver turned his head. ‘Two hour,' he said. ‘No hurry.'

‘I want to get out of here.'

The glass doors opened and a man came in at a run, a solid, middle-aged man. The girl stopped tapping at her calculator and smiled at him, a wide, charming smile full of white teeth.

‘Miss Shore?'

Frances moved back.

‘Miss Shore, I am Luis Gómez Moreno. I don't know how to apologize enough, I am mortified.'

He had a square, open face, not the kind of long, grave Spanish face that had stared at Frances from the churches and streets of Seville that morning, but a more genial one, more extrovert.

‘I'm afraid it's too late,' Frances said. ‘I've been dragged here for nothing. I've been cold, uncomfortable and neglected and all I want to do is go home.'

‘Of course you do,' Luis Gómez Moreno said. He
turned
to the girl at the desk and uttered a rapid instruction. She picked up the bill she had been preparing and began, as she had with the telex form, to tear it into careful strips. Then he said something to the taxi driver.

‘Don't dismiss him,' Frances said sharply. ‘He is taking me to the airport.'

‘May I not do that?'

‘No,' Frances said. ‘I haven't any patience left for the Gómez Morenos.'

Infuriatingly, he smiled at her. He smiled as if she had made a really good joke.

‘I like your spirit.'

She said nothing. She turned to the taxi driver and indicated her suitcase.

‘Please put that in your taxi.'

‘Is there nothing', Luis Gómez Moreno said, ‘that I can say or do to make you stay? I had no idea of this dreadful confusion until one half hour ago. Now I want you to try and forget the last twenty-four hours, and allow me to assist you in every way to do the business you came for.'

Frances snorted.

‘You've got a nerve—'

‘I also have a heart and a conscience. I am truly sorry. You shall have a suite at the Hotel Alfonso XIII—'

‘I don't want a suite at the Alfonso XIII. I don't want any more dealings with you or your son or your hotels. I don't want to see Spain ever again.'

‘Not even—'

‘Never,' said Frances.

‘How sad,' he said, ‘when there is so much to see, so much that no one European knows about except the Spanish.'

She looked at him. His face, framed by the upturned collar of his overcoat, was full of warmth, and hope
and
humour. He held out his hands to her, palms upward.

‘Please, Miss Shore,' said Luis Gómez Moreno. ‘Please give Spain, including me, just one more chance.'

5

ON CHRISTMAS MORNING
, Lizzie woke quite unnecessarily at five and waited for Davy to come in, urgently requiring an audience for opening his stocking. He didn't come. She strained her ears into the chill darkness; the house was quite quiet. Beside her, Robert breathed with what seemed a most selfish regularity, deeply, evenly, comfortably. Nobody, Lizzie realized with indignation, was awake except her.

She wondered whether to lie there and attempt to go back to sleep. She humped over on to her other side, away from Robert, and closed her eyes. Immediately, on the inside of her eyelids, was printed a list which began, ‘Empty dishwasher from last night, lay breakfast, check time turkey ought to go in oven, lay sitting-room fire.' She tried to replace the list with images of colour and shape that were her usual sleep-inducers, and saw instead a clear picture of Frances at a restaurant table lit by candles, with a glass of wine in her hand and being offered a dish of glistening paella to the sound of guitars. Lizzie groaned. She waited to see if Robert had heard her. He hadn't. She groaned again. He slept on. Lizzie sat up, swung her feet out from under the muffling warmth of the duvet, and stood up.

She padded out to the bathroom and looked sourly at her Christmas face in the mirror above the basin.

‘You are being very childish,' she told herself out loud. She brushed her teeth and hair, pulled on her dressing-gown – a handsome, full-length, hooded one,
stocked
by the Gallery and much admired by Frances who still wore the old kimono Lizzie had given her for Christmas at least ten years ago – and went firmly downstairs. All the bedroom doors, even Davy's, were shut. Nobody, it seemed, was in the least interested in Christmas.

The kitchen, fragrant still with the clove-breathed memory of last night's supper, was at least quite warm. Everybody had been too tired – or unhelpful – last night to clear up properly, and there were still pans, unwashed up, in the sink and newspapers on chairs, and trails of black pepper and breadcrumbs across the table. Rob had been terribly tired; the Gallery had been humming until after seven with last-minute customers, mostly men, and he hadn't got home until nearly nine, by which time Davy was asleep and Sam, having sneaked two glasses of wine, was being both obstreperous and silly. Harriet had wondered, out loud and far too often, whether Frances would ring from Seville, William had looked too much as if he was just longing to go away quietly and telephone Juliet, and Alistair had provoked his grandmother into an instant rage by saying, quite casually, that he didn't see the point of girls going to university if they were just going to shop and cook and have babies afterwards. In the midst of this, Lizzie had produced baked gammon, potatoes, cauliflower cheese and red cabbage, followed by mince pies and tangerines, and refrained – just – from thumping Harriet every time she said, ‘Honestly, it doesn't feel a bit like Christmas does it, it just feels like a weekend, doesn't it, any boring old weekend. I wish Frances was here.'

Lizzie filled the huge Aga kettle and set it on the hotplate. The cat, named Cornflakes by Davy, emerged from the dresser drawer where he slept and which had to be left half open at night for this reason, and began his steady whining for attention and milk around
Lizzie's
ankles. He was, Lizzie thought, like a spider, he had nothing to do all day but besiege her, just as spiders had nothing to do but spin webs, endlessly, patiently, in every corner of the Grange. Outside the house, nature wasn't any better, either; it had all the time in the world to knit bindweed painstakingly round the rose trees and stifle the lawn with creeping moss. Lizzie yawned and put a teabag in the pot.

The door to the hall opened with a bang and Davy trailed in, sobbing, towing his stocking like a dead and lumpy snake. Lizzie stopped pouring water into the teapot.

‘Darling! What is it, Davy? Why are you crying?'

‘Sam!' wailed Davy. He dropped his stocking and began to tear at the jacket buttons of his primrose-yellow pyjamas.

‘Sam?'

‘Yes! Yes! I hate my pyjamas!'

Lizzie knelt down by Davy and tried to take him in her arms.

‘Why? Why do you when they are brand new and you look so sweet in them?'

‘I don't, I don't. I hate them!' Davy wept, still wrestling inside Lizzie's embrace. ‘Sam said I looked
sexy
.'

‘Sam is very silly,' Lizzie said. ‘He doesn't know what sexy means.'

Davy glared at her.

‘He does! He does! It means showing your bottom and your—'

‘Davy,' Lizzie said, ‘it's Christmas. Have you forgotten?'

‘Sam said—'

Lizzie stood up, lifted Davy and set him on the edge of the table.

‘I don't want to know what Sam said.'

‘He was going to open my stocking, he said he was perfectly allowed to.'

Lizzie retrieved Davy's stocking from the floor.

‘How's about you opening it now, with me?'

Davy looked doubtful.

‘You ought to open stockings in a
bed
, you know.'

‘Not necessarily. You've got me and Cornflakes for company. Won't we do?'

Davy twisted round and wriggled off the table on to the floor. He bumped his stocking down beside him.

‘No,' he said, and trailed out of the kitchen again. Lizzie heard him going up the stairs, one step at a time, on his way back to certain persecution. Sam was a horror, but at least you didn't lie awake worrying about his fragile self-esteem and his chances of emotional happiness. He was like a terrier, cheerful, inquisitive, pugnacious and unsquashable. Lizzie adored Sam. In no time at all the girls were going to start adoring Sam too, and the kitchen would then be full of his sobbing discards being comforted by Alistair, who had always liked mending things and would find the transition from mending model aeroplanes to broken hearts perfectly comfortable. Lizzie smiled ruefully. How shocking it was to take a small but certain pleasure in thinking of Sam as a future heart-breaker, while knowing that, if anyone tried to break his heart in return, she, Lizzie, would probably murder them. Oh God, the mothers of sons …

‘Good morning,' Barbara said, coming in, in a blue chenille dressing-gown. ‘Happy Christmas.'

‘Oh Mum,' Lizzie said, going forward for a kiss. ‘Did they wake you, the boys? I'm so sorry.'

‘Davy came in to ask if his pyjamas were sexy. I told him that in my view and in the view of ninety-nine per cent of sane women, pyjamas were the least sexy garments in the world, after galoshes and string vests.'

‘It was Sam,' Lizzie said. She poured tea into mugs. ‘So typical of Sam, to try and wreck Christmas
morning
before it even has time to draw breath.' She held a mug out to Barbara. ‘Tea?'

‘I was awake anyway,' Barbara said, taking the mug.

‘Oh dear—'

‘William was snoring.'

‘Why don't you wear ear plugs?'

‘I thought of that,' Barbara said. ‘But then I thought I wouldn't hear a fire, if one started, so I've gone back to kicking him.'

‘Separate rooms, then.'

‘Oh no,' Barbara said firmly.

Lizzie swallowed some tea. Nothing all day, not the champagne Robert had finally bought after saying they couldn't afford it, not the prune and chestnut turkey stuffing she had taken such trouble over, not the brandy butter nor the smoked salmon planned for supper nor the cashew nuts nor the Belgian truffles, would taste one tenth as good as this first, strong, hot swallow of tea.

‘Why not? I mean, surely, after being married so long there's hardly much left to prove—'

‘There's Juliet,' Barbara said shortly.

Lizzie groaned inwardly. Davy's anxiety about the sex appeal of his pyjamas, followed by Barbara wishing to discuss Juliet, seemed more than she could bear before six o'clock on Christmas morning.

‘He telephoned her last night,' Barbara said. She went over to the Aga and leaned against its warm bulk, gripping her mug.

‘Mum,' Lizzie said, ‘you have known about Dad and Juliet for twenty-seven years. You could, if you had found the situation intolerable, have left him at any point during those twenty-seven years. But you haven't. You've chosen to stay. It doesn't seem to me to fit in with any of the things you say you believe about women, but never mind, that's what you've chosen. Dad always rings Juliet at Christmas, sometimes you
even
talk to her yourself. Juliet is a nice woman, Mum. Remember?'

‘I did not like it last night,' Barbara said. ‘I don't really know why, but I didn't. He looked—'

‘Stop it, Mum,' Lizzie said, putting her mug down and beginning to open cupboards in search of plates and jars and packets for breakfast. ‘It's Christmas morning.'

There was a series of thumps upstairs, then a crash, then a squeal and then silence.

‘I'll go and see,' Barbara said.

‘Don't bother. I've stopped going every time it sounds like disaster, or it's all I ever do.'

Doors began to open and shut above them. Robert's voice, thick with sleep, shouted, ‘Shut up, will you?' and then Alistair's shouted back, ‘Happy Christmas, actually.'

‘Think of Frances,' Barbara said, ‘waking alone in a hotel room in Seville and spending the day with a strange foreign businessman who doesn't believe in Christmas.'

‘I'm trying', Lizzie said, peeling the paper off a new block of butter, ‘not to think about Frances. At all.'

‘I wonder if that's what's the matter with William, I wonder if that's why he was so peculiarly pathetic about ringing Juliet—'

The door opened. Robert, his hair tousled, tying himself into a towelling bathrobe, came in yawning and said there was a notice on Harriet's door saying she was not to be woken under any circumstances whatsoever. He stooped to sketch a kiss on Barbara's cheek and plant one on Lizzie's.

‘Why is everyone being so frightfully un-Christmassy?' Lizzie demanded.

‘The boys are all in bed together,' Robert said, pouring tea. ‘I dread to think what's going on. They are under Alistair's duvet.'

‘Davy was preoccupied earlier with looking sexy.'

‘Alistair is far too prissy for sex. God, is it really only five past six? I'll go and get some wood in.'

‘Was William awake?'

Robert thought about this.

‘Someone was singing in the loo—'

‘He always sings in the loo,' Barbara said. ‘It's the mark of a public schoolboy of his generation because they weren't allowed locks on the lavatories and sometimes not even doors.'

Lizzie began to rub vigorously at a sticky jar with a damp cloth.

‘Why not?'