The Return Page 2

  Beyond the lobby, everything else in this hotel was tawdry. Nose to nose, they went up in a tiny box of a lift, their luggage balanced in a tower, and on the third floor emerged into a narrow corridor. In the darkness they clattered along with their suitcases until they could make out in large, tarnished figures the number ‘301’.

  Their room had a view of sorts. But not of the Alhambra. It looked out onto a wall and, specifically, onto an air-conditioning unit.

  ‘We wouldn’t spend much time looking out of the window anyway, would we?’ commented Sonia, as she drew the thin curtains.

  ‘And even if there was a balcony with gorgeous furniture and far-reaching views over the mountains we wouldn’t use it,’ added Maggie, laughing. ‘It’s a bit early in the year.’

  Sonia quickly threw open her suitcase, squashed a few T-shirts into the small bedside drawer and hung the rest of her things in the narrow wardrobe; the scrape of metal coat hangers on the rail set her teeth on edge. The bathroom was as economically sized as the bedroom, and Sonia, though petite, had to squeeze behind the basin to shut the door. Having cleaned her teeth she tossed her brush into the single glass provided and reappeared in the bedroom.

  Maggie was lying on top of the burgundy bedspread, her suitcase on the floor, still unopened.

  ‘Aren’t you going to unpack?’ enquired Sonia, who knew from experience that Maggie would probably spend the week living out of a suitcase that frothed over with bits of flirtatious lace and tangles of ruffled blouses, rather than actually hang anything up.

  ‘What’s that?’ Maggie asked distractedly, engrossed in reading something.

  ‘Unpack?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I might do that later.’

  ‘What’s that you’re reading?’

  ‘It was with a pile of leaflets on the table,’ Maggie replied from behind a flyer, held close to her face in an attempt to make out the words.

  The low-voltage lighting lifted the gloom of the dark beige room only a little and scarcely provided enough illumination to read. ‘It’s advertising a flamenco show somewhere called Los Fandangos. It’s in the gypsy area, as far as my Spanish can tell, anyway. Shall we go?’

  ‘Yes. Why not? They’ll be able to tell us on reception how to get there, won’t they?’

  ‘And it doesn’t start until ten thirty, so we could go and eat first.’

  Shortly afterwards, they were out on the street, a map of the city in hand.They wound their way through a labyrinth of streets, partly following their noses, partly the orientation of the map.

  Jardines, Mirasol, Cruz, Puentezuelas, Capuchinas . . .

  Sonia remembered the meaning of most of these words from her schooldays. Each one held its magic. They were like brush strokes, painting the landscape of the city, each one helping to build up a picture of the whole. As they got closer to the heart of this city, the street names clearly reflected the dominance of the Roman Catholic religion.

  They were making for the cathedral, the city’s central point. According to the map, everything emanated from here.The narrow alleyways seemed an unlikely way to reach it but it was only when Sonia saw some railings and two women sitting begging in front of a carved doorway that she looked up for the first time.Towering above was the most sturdy of buildings. It filled the sky, a solid mass of distinctively fortress-like stone. It did not reach up to the light, like St Paul’s, St Peter’s or the Sacré-Coeur. From where she stood, it seemed to blot it out. Nor did it announce itself with a huge empty space in front of it. It lurked behind the workaday streets of cafés and shops, and from most places in these narrow streets was unseen.

  On the hour, however, it reminded the world of its presence. As the two women stood there, the bells began to toll.The volume was enough to make them reel back. Resoundingly deep, metallic clangs banged inside their heads. Sonia cupped her ears with her hands and followed Maggie away from the deafening noise.

  It was eight o’clock and the tapas bars around the cathedral were already filling up. Maggie made a speedy decision, drawn to the place where a waiter stood outside on the pavement, smoking.

  Once they were perched on high wooden stools, the women ordered wine. It was served in small stubby tumblers with a generous plate of jamon and each time they ordered another drink, more tapas magically appeared. Although they had been hungry, these small offerings of olives, cheese and pâté slowly filled them up.

  Sonia was perfectly happy with Maggie’s choice of venue. Behind the bar, ranks of mighty hams hung from the ceiling, like giant bats suspended upside down in trees. Fat dripped from them into small plastic cones. Next to them were chorizos, and on shelves behind sat huge tins of olives and tuna.There were rows and rows of bottles just out of reach. Sonia loved this dusty chaos, the rich, sweet smell of jamon and the hum of conviviality that wrapped itself around her like a favourite coat.

  Maggie interrupted her reverie. ‘So, how is everything?’

  It was a question typical of her friend. As heavily loaded as the cocktail stick onto which she had speared two olives and a cherry tomato.

  ‘Fine,’ answered Sonia, knowing as she said it that this response would probably not do. It sometimes annoyed her that Maggie always wanted to get straight to the heart of things. They had kept conversation quite light and superficial since they had met up at Stansted early that day, but sooner or later, she knew Maggie would want more. Sonia sighed. This was what she both loved and loathed about her friend.

  ‘How’s that dusty old husband of yours?’This more direct question could not be deflected with one single word, especially not ‘Fine’.

  Since nine o’clock, the bar had filled up rapidly. Earlier in the evening the clientele had been mostly elderly men, gathered in tight-knit groups. They were neat figures, Sonia observed, small and smartly jacketed, with highly polished shoes.After that, slightly younger people began to pack the place out and stood chatting animatedly, balancing wine and plates of tapas on the narrow ledge that ran around the room especially for this purpose.The volume of noise meant that conversation was more difficult now. Sonia drew up her stool so close to Maggie’s their wooden frames touched.

  ‘Dustier than ever,’ she said in her ear. ‘He didn’t want me to come here, but I suspect he’ll get over that.’

  Sonia glanced over at the clock above the bar. Their flamenco show was beginning in less than half an hour.

  ‘We really should go, shouldn’t we?’ she said, slipping down off her stool. Much as she loved Maggie, for the time being she wished to deflect her personal questions. In her best friend’s view no husband was really worth having, but Sonia had often suspected that this might have been something to do with the fact that Maggie had never had one, at least not one of her own.

  Coffee had just been served to them on the bar and Maggie was not going to leave without drinking it.

  ‘We’ve got time for this,’ she said. ‘Everything starts late in Spain.’

  Both women drained their rich cups of café solo, manoeuvred their way through the crowds and went outside. The throng continued into the street and almost all the way to the Sacromonte where they soon found a sign pointing to ‘Los Fandangos’. It was set into the hillside, a white-washed, roughly plastered building, the cueva where they were going to see flamenco. Even as they approached, they could hear the alluring sound of someone picking out chords on a guitar.

  Chapter Two

  THAT NIGHT, BACK in the hotel bedroom, Sonia lay awake staring at the ceiling. As is the way with cheap hotel rooms, it was too dark in the day and too light in the night. Through the unlined curtains a beam of light from the lamp outside illuminated the beige pattern of hallucinogenic swirls on the ceiling and her mind, still stimulated by caffeine, whirled. Even without the light and the coffee, the thin mattress would have been conducive to wakefulness.

  Sonia contemplated her happiness at being in this city. Maggie’s rhythmic breathing in the next bed only a few inches away was strangely comforting. She mulled over the
evening and how she had deflected her friend’s questions. Whatever she said, Maggie would get at the truth sooner or later and would simply know how things were with her in spite of any words. She could tell merely from a shadow that flickered across a face in answer to the question ‘How are you?’ what the answer should be. This was why James did not like her, and indeed why so many men shared his feelings. She was too perceptive, generally too critical of men and never gave them the benefit of any doubt.

  James was, as Maggie so kindly put it, ‘dusty’. It was not his age alone, but his attitudes. Dust had probably settled on him in the cradle.

  Their wedding five years earlier, following a courtship of textbook romanticism, had been a vision of contrived but fairy-tale perfection. In this hard, narrow bed, so distant in every way from the expansive luxury of the four-poster where she had spent her wedding night, Sonia thought back to the time when James had appeared in her life.

  They met when Sonia was twenty-seven and James was hurtling towards his fortieth birthday. He was a junior partner in a small private bank and for the first fifteen years of his career had worked an eighteen-hour day, ambitiously climbing his way up the corporate ladder. Though he might be in the office for eighteen hours a day, he was at the end of a phone for twenty-four if he was seeing through a deal. Occasionally he picked up a girl late at night in a wine bar, but these were women he would never introduce to his parents, and once or twice he had had relationships with kittenish, stiletto-heeled receptionists who worked in the bank.These never resulted in anything and sooner or later, these girls drifted off, usually to work as PAs in another bank.

  Only weeks before his landmark birthday, as the Americans who owned his bank would have put it, James ‘reprioritised’. He needed someone to take to the opera, to dinners, to have his children. In other words, he wanted to be married. Though she was unaware of it for several years, Sonia eventually realised that she had nicely fulfilled an entry in his Filofax ‘to do’ list.

  Sonia remembered their first meeting very clearly. James’s employer, Berkmann Wilder, had recently merged with another bank and had taken on the PR consultancy she worked for to rebrand them. Sonia always dressed provocatively for meetings with financial institutions, knowing that men who worked in the City usually had rather obvious taste, and when she was shown into the bank’s boardroom, her attraction was not lost on James. Petite, blonde, with a pert bottom well outlined by a tight skirt, and a neat bosom cupped in a lace bra just visible through a silk blouse, she satisfied several male fantasies. James’s stares made her feel almost uncomfortable.

  ‘Peachy,’ James described her to a colleague that lunchtime. ‘And quite sparky too.’

  The following week when she returned for a second meeting, he suggested a working lunch. The lunch led to a drink in a wine bar and within the week, they were what James called ‘an item’. Sonia was being swept off her feet and she had no desire to feel the ground beneath them. As well as being quite handsome, he filled in all kinds of gaps in her life. He came from a large, terribly English, entirely conventional, Home Counties family. Such firm foundations had been lacking in Sonia’s life and proximity to them made her feel secure. The two significant relationships she had been through in her twenties had ended disastrously for her. One had been with a musician, the other with an Italian photographer. Neither had been faithful to her and the appeal of James was his reliability, his public school solidity.

  ‘He’s so much older than you!’ objected her friends.

  ‘Why does that matter so much?’ queried Sonia.

  It was the very fact of this age gap that probably gave him the resources for lavishly extravagant gestures. On Valentine’s Day, he did not send a dozen red roses, he sent a dozen dozen, and her small flat in Streatham was overwhelmed. She had never been so spoiled, or indeed so happy when, on her birthday, she found a two-carat diamond solitaire ring in the bottom of a glass of champagne. ‘Yes’ was the only possible answer.

  Although Sonia had no intention of giving up a job she enjoyed, James offered her long-term security and in return she brought a dowry of childbearing potential and tolerance of a mother-in-law for whom no one was good enough for her son.

  As she lay in her cramped Granada hotel room, Sonia thought of their glorious white wedding, the images of it still so clear; a video had been professionally done and was still occasionally replayed. The marriage had taken place, two years after their first meeting, in the Gloucestershire village close to James’s family home.The dingy part of south London where Sonia had grown up would not have provided a picturesque enough backdrop for these nuptials. There was a rather obvious imbalance in the congregation (representation on the bride’s side was noticeably thinner than on the groom’s, which swelled with second cousins, fleets of small children and friends of his parents) but for Sonia the only really noticeable absence was her mother’s. She knew that her father felt it too. Apart from that, everything was perfect. Sprays of freesias festooned pew-ends and scented the air, and there was a gasp as Sonia entered through the arch of white roses on her father’s arm. In a full tulle gown that almost filled the width of the aisle, she floated down the strip of carpet towards her groom. Crowned with flowers, the sun creating a halo of light around her, the silver-framed photographs in her home reminded her that she had looked translucent, other-worldly on that day.

  After the reception (a four-course dinner for three hundred in a pink candy-striped marquee), James and Sonia left in a Bentley for Cliveden and by eleven the following morning they were on their way to Mauritius. It was a perfect beginning.

  For a long while, Sonia had loved being petted, cared for. She enjoyed the way that James opened doors for her, came home from business trips to Rome with satin lingerie in silk-lined boxes, from Paris with perfumes packaged in boxes within boxes layered like Russian dolls, and with airport scarves from Chanel and Hermès that were not quite her. The habit of clothing her and choosing how she might be fragranced was one he had copied from his father. Sonia’s in-laws, Richard and Diana, had been together for nearly fifty years, so it was clearly a technique that women liked, James had evidently concluded.

  They both had careers that absorbed them. Sonia had moved to a younger, smaller company that looked after the PR interests of manufacturing companies rather than City institutions. She felt she had enough bankers and lawyers in her private life. She did not mind the fact that James did not bother to change his working patterns. He would be disturbed at all times of day or night by a ringing phone and the need to deal with some international conference call between London,Tokyo and New York. This was the personal cost of a banker’s salary. Sonia perfectly understood and never minded that, a few times a week, he had to have dinner with clients. On the evenings when he was at home, he had very little energy for anything much apart from a perusal of Investors Chronicle and a vacant stare at the television.The only exceptions were the occasional visits to the cinema and the very regular dinner parties that he and Sonia gave and attended.

  On the surface of things, all looked rosy. They had everything: good jobs, a Wandsworth house that was steadily increasing in value, and plenty of space to begin a family. They seemed a solid couple, just like their home and the street where they lived. The obvious next stage in their lives was to become parents, but to James’s irritation something held Sonia back. She had begun to make excuses, both to herself and to James, usually to do with it not being the right moment to take a career break. Admitting, even to herself, the real reason was not easy.

  Sonia could not put a date on when the drinking had seemed to become a problem.There probably was not an exact moment, a particular glass of wine, a specific bar or an evening when James had come home and she felt he had had ‘too much’. Perhaps the moment had been at a business lunch, or even at a dinner party, possibly the one they had given the previous week when the large mahogany table had been laid with their best china and cut glass, all gifts at their perfect fairy-tale wedding five y
ears earlier.

  She could picture her guests standing around sipping flutes of champagne in their comfortable shades of ice-blue drawing room, making conversation that followed a predictable pattern. The men had been uniformly dressed in suits but the women had their own strict dress code too: floaty skirts and kitten heels and what at one time would have been called a ‘twinset’. Some kind of diamond pendant was de rigueur, too, and a set of fine jangly bangles. It was the smart-casual dress style of their generation: feminine, slightly flirty but steering well clear of tarty.

  Sonia recalled how conversation had followed its usual pattern: information had been exchanged about when to put children’s names down for nursery, the flattening of property prices, the rumoured opening of a new deli-restaurant on the Common, brief reference to an awful road rage incident in the neighbouring street, and then the men told crude jokes that had been circulating on the internet to try to lighten the atmosphere. She remembered feeling almost at screaming point with the sheer predictability of the middle-class talk and with these people with whom she felt she had nothing in common.

  That night, as usual, James had been eager to show off his huge collection of vintage clarets, and the husbands, tired after a long week in the city, had enjoyed knocking back a few bottles of 1978 Burgundy, though even after a glass and a half they began to get disapproving looks from their wives who now realised that it would be their job to drive home.