A Spanish Lover by Joanna Trollope

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.
    â€˜Thank you so much for bringing me here.’
    He bowed.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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