‘I’ve come to calm down,’ Frances said. ‘I’ve come to use you as a half-way house. I hope you don’t mind. I couldn’t face the thought of going back to my flat and waking it up, so I just drove straight here. I came on some Latin American plane which left Madrid in the middle of the night and was going on to Rio, or something. I spent hours on a bench in Madrid Airport wondering what I was doing and what I thought I’d been going to do in the first place. I still don’t really know. I’ll go to the Grange later, of course, but I hope it’s all right if I just simmer down a bit here first.’
Juliet smiled but said nothing. She went on spreading things on the table round Frances: a loaf, butter, a coffee pot, a dish of tangerines, a jar of honey.
‘I had to sit in Seville Airport too,’ Frances said. ‘And Mr Gómez Moreno came and sat too, to try and persuade me to stay. He was awfully nice, really, not a smoothy at all.’
‘Why didn’t you stay?’
‘Because of the mess they’d made. When something goes sour, it not only wrecks the future, but it destroys the past. I went to Seville for a little adventure and I landed in one of those long-drawn-out, tedious, depressing failures and disappointments that you can only have abroad. Instead of being foreign and fascinating, it was foreign and miserable. I’ve almost never felt like that abroad, but I did in Seville.’
Juliet cut bread and pronged a slice on an old-fashioned toasting fork.
‘So you’ve come home.’
‘Juliet,’ Frances said, ‘I could hardly go back to my flat and lurk there pretending to be in Spain, could I?’
‘I suppose not,’ Juliet said. She stooped over the fire, holding out the fork. The thick, greying pigtail in which she confined her hair at night swung over her shoulder. ‘They are all, in varying degrees, very upset about you.’
‘Oh,’ Frances said.
‘What else did you expect? You know your family, you know Christmas—’
‘Yes,’ Frances said. She poured coffee.
Juliet turned the toast.
‘William thinks that’s why you went. To get away from them all.’
‘Only partly,’ Frances said. She leaned forward. ‘Juliet—’
‘Yes?’
‘I wanted – I want some richness to things, I want to go to places—’ She stopped.
Juliet came away from the fire and dropped the slice of toast on a plate in front of Frances.
‘What places? Foreign places?’
‘Oh no,’ Frances said. ‘Not abroad. Inside me, places inside me.’
Juliet looked at her. She poured coffee for herself.
‘Then why run away from Seville?’
‘I told you, it had all gone wrong.’
‘But it sounds as if you finally ran away just as it was all beginning to go right. You said Mr Gómez Moreno was a nice man.’
‘He was,’ Frances said. She began to butter her toast. ‘He said something to me—’
‘What thing?’
‘I can’t remember quite how it came about, but I was telling him about the way, as a child, I used to make up stories and how I sometimes caught myself doing it now, and that I’d almost done it in Seville Cathedral that morning, thinking I could see the ghosts of Fernando and Isabel, and he said’ – she reached for the honey – ‘he said, “But, Miss Shore, that’s what we humans all do when we have an inner vacuum, we fill the space with stories.” I’d never thought of that before.’
There was a silence. Juliet drank her coffee; Frances drew the knife blade across and across the honey on her toast.
‘He’s perfectly right,’ Juliet said.
‘I know. It made me think—’
‘About what?’
‘About the inner vacuum. Have you got one?’
‘Everybody has, of some kind. Mine has got smaller with age. What did Mr Gómez Moreno say to you when you got on your plane and said goodbye?’
‘He said, “I am glad at least that you saw the Catholic Kings.” I think it was a joke.’
‘And what did he propose you should do if you had stayed?’
‘He was going to show me his hotels, the one in Seville, the one near Córdoba and the one he likes best, in the mountains south of Granada.’
‘And instead of that,’ said Juliet putting down her coffee mug, ‘you are going back to the Grange?’
Frances looked up at her, her wing of hair partly hiding one eye.
‘I want to go to the Grange,’ Frances said.
‘I must say,’ Robert said, ‘I’ve almost never been so thankful to see anybody.’
He reached forward and poured more wine into Frances’s glass. They were, temporarily, the only ones left conscious around the wreck of the orgy of the Christmas lunch table. The three older children had disappeared with the skill of those long practised at scenting the approach of clearing up; Barbara was upstairs trying to sleep, Lizzie was attempting to persuade Davy to imitate her, and William, at the far end of the table, blissful in a purple paper hat, was snoring.
‘I love this mess,’ Frances said. She looked down the table, at the confusion of plates and glasses, the scrumples of cracker paper, the depleted bowls of nuts and fruit, the bottles, and the candlesticks with the candles in them melting fatly into themselves, dripping and spilling scarlet waxy trails. ‘There’s something so abandoned about it.’
‘I’m afraid I detest Christmas,’ Robert said. ‘I’m just too tired to see it as anything more than a nuisance. And everybody quarrels. If you hadn’t arrived in the nick of time, there’d have been bloodshed.’
Frances drank some wine. She’d had quite a lot already and felt, after two nights of broken sleep, heavy and dreamy.
‘I went to Juliet’s first.’
‘Did you? Why?’
‘I – I thought I probably couldn’t arrive at breakfast—’
‘I wish you had. Breakfast was hell. Poor Lizzie.’
‘She does look tired.’
‘She is tired. Of course she’s tired.’
Frances looked at her brother-in-law. His strong-featured; high-cheekboned face was wearing well, but the queer, thick, reddish hair that had always given him a romantic, almost Irish air was beginning to recede a little at the temples, sharpening his hairline into a prow.
‘Couldn’t you and Lizzie have a bit of a holiday? You know I could fix you up, whatever—’
‘Thing is,’ Robert said, leaning forward on his elbows, ‘thing is, we’re going to be badly strapped for cash next year. The last six months have been terrible, worst ever. Lizzie knows it’s been bad, but I haven’t told her how bad and I won’t until Christmas is over.’ He looked at Frances. ‘You must be feeling it too.’
‘A bit, but you see, so many retired people travel with me, all those flower and bird people, and people who want to paint and take photographs, and they don’t feel the pinch in bad times as much as the employed do—’
‘What bad times?’ Lizzie said, coming in. She was loyally wearing the earrings Sam had given her, huge irregular holly leaves he had made out of modelling plastic, emerald-green studded with brilliant berries the size of big peas. ‘Davy has finally gone to sleep on condition I give his yellow pyjamas to the second-hand shop and never say he looks sweet again. That’s going to be hard.’
She sat down next to Frances and borrowed her glass of wine for a gulp.
‘Look at you,’ she said affectionately to Frances. ‘Just look at you. I’m really sorry it went wrong, but I’m not really, too.’
‘I think we won’t talk about it,’ Frances said, looking at William, unconscious and smiling under his tissue crown.
Robert and Lizzie exchanged a lightning look.
‘No, of course not.’
‘I told Robert,’ Frances said, ‘that I went to Juliet’s first, this morning.’
‘Why didn’t you come straight here?’
‘It was only seven—’
‘Honestly,’ Lizzie said. ‘By seven we’d been up two hours and w
ere well into a screaming match about church.’
Frances said, as if she hadn’t heard her, ‘I don’t know why I never got to know Juliet when I was growing up—’
‘You wouldn’t come.’
‘I know. I remember.’
‘Mum started going on about her at six o’clock this morning—’
‘It’s Christmas,’ Robert said. ‘It has that effect on everyone. If there isn’t something that naturally arises to take issue with, you find yourself hunting for an excuse for a row.’ He looked down the table at his father-in-law. ‘Sometimes I can’t believe that he’s actually managed a wife and a mistress for a quarter of a century. William, of all people.’
‘He only has because the women did the deciding,’ Lizzie said.
Frances looked at her. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Oh yes.’
Robert stood up slowly, as if testing every limb and joint before he trusted it with any weight.
‘I’m afraid I simply have to go to sleep.’
Lizzie glanced at Frances.
‘Do you want to?’
Frances wondered. Weighed down by food, wine and home-coming, she would, like Rip Van Winkle, sleep until this age had given way to quite another.
‘No. I don’t think so. We’ll clear up.’
Lizzie regarded the table.
‘You’re a heroine. Then we’ll drag the team out for a walk.’
Frances got up.
‘I’ll get a tray.’
In the kitchen, Cornflakes had settled down, paws folded, to take his time over the turkey carcass.
‘Bloody cat!’ Frances shouted.
He streaked from the table and out through the cat flap in a single, arrowlike movement, borne of long years of burgling butter dishes and milk jugs. Frances peered at the turkey.
‘Can we tell where he’s been?’
‘Well, I’m not throwing it out, cat germs or no cat germs, I’ll promise you that. It’s a free-range turkey and it cost a fortune. Frances—’
‘Yes?’ Frances said, straightening.
‘I really am so sorry, you know. About Spain.’
Frances made a small, dismissive gesture.
‘I know. I know you are.’
‘You mustn’t let it weigh on you. Things do go wrong, sometimes, things that could just as easily go right, and for no apparent reason. You mustn’t feel a fool.’
Frances gave her a sharp look. She unhooked a plastic apron from behind the door and tied it round her waist.
‘How do you know I do?’
Lizzie gave a little smile and said nothing.
‘I don’t think you should assume anything,’ Frances said.
‘What were the Gómez Morenos like?’
‘Junior was very attractive and rather hopeless and Senior was solid and dark and European.’
‘Nice?’
‘Yes.’
‘Charming?’
‘Not really. Just nice.’
‘I do so want you to be happy,’ Lizzie said, with sudden vehemence.
‘But what is happy?’
‘Being fulfilled,’ Lizzie said. ‘Using all the capacities you have, emotional, physical, mental. Filling yourself up.’
‘Are you trying to say husband and children and home and an art-and-craft gallery? Because—’
‘Because what?’
‘Because I think we all have different interior landscapes. Even twins.’
‘But you see,’ Lizzie said earnestly, putting down the carving knife and fork with which she had been dismembering the rest of the turkey, ‘even if we do have that landscape, it has got to have people in it. I mean, I know you’ve got us and we all adore you—’
‘Don’t patronize me,’ Frances said.
‘I’m not—’
‘Yes,’ Frances said, ‘you are. You think that I’m a half-empty vessel and therefore I’m inadequate.’
‘Oh no,’ Lizzie said, leaning towards her sister, her face full of affection. ‘No, I don’t. I just think you are full of potential, and the potential is simply lying there.’
‘Stop sounding so sorry for me—’
Lizzie picked up the knife and fork again.
‘I’m not sorry for you. You know what I think. I think you have taken the career and freedom chances for both of us, and that I’ve taken – well, other chances. I just don’t want your life to become impersonal. That’s all. That’s one of the things that really got to me about your going to Spain, because by choosing to go now, at Christmas, you were deliberately turning your back on us, on some of your best relationships. It was an impersonal thing to do. Don’t you see?’
‘But I’ve come back.’
‘I know. I’m thrilled. It’s made Christmas for me and lunch was lovely, everybody being so nice when they had previously been so horrible.’
‘I’ll just go and get a trayload,’ Frances said.
She went back to the dining room, a room that spent three hundred and sixty-four days of the year being a playroom. William had gone, no doubt in drowsy instinctive search of an armchair. She began to pile plates, scraping off black lumps of Christmas pudding and creamy lumps of brandy butter, gathering up clattering handfuls of sticky spoons and forks. Did Lizzie, she wondered, ever fill her inner spaces with stories? Or only with arrangements and lists and order books and responsibilities? Did Lizzie in fact have any part of her particular interior landscape that wasn’t, by now, highly cultivated, productive and fruitful; were there no corners for possibility left, or, if there were, did she simply never consider them?
Frances marshalled glasses into a little regiment. Could it be that Lizzie was trying to tell her that if she didn’t attend to the relationships in her life like some enthusiastic gardener in a greenhouse of infant seedlings, they’d simply wither away? But I have plenty of relationships, Frances thought, I have the family and Nicky, who is my second-in-command at Shore to Shore, and I have the London friends that Lizzie knows little about. Why is it that she says she wants us to be different yet the same, to complement each other, but she can’t see, or won’t see, that there are other kinds of lives than hers?
She took a burdened tray back into the kitchen. The newly sliced turkey lay on a big dish under plastic film, and Lizzie was cramming the bones into a stock pot.
‘Did I make you cross?’ Lizzie said, turning.
‘No,’ Frances said. ‘You almost never make me cross.’
‘I got such a fright, you see,’ Lizzie said, and stopped. She put her arm up across her face, holding her turkey-smeared hand well free.
‘A fright?’
‘I felt,’ Lizzie said, her voice not quite steady, ‘I felt that you were sort of leaving me.’
‘Lizzie!’ Frances cried. She left the tray on the table and ran across the room. ‘Lizzie! How could you be so silly?’ She put her arms around her sister.
Lizzie whispered, ‘Because we’re a deal, aren’t we? A sort of double-act deal, about life?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll always be here, you see, always here for you to come home to—’
‘I know that.’
‘In a way, I’m sort of for you, and you for me.’
‘Yes. It’s in our blood.’ Gently, Frances took her arms away.
Lizzie reached for a roll of paper towel, wrenched off several sheets and blew her nose hard.
‘Sorry. Really sorry. What a display.’
‘It wasn’t.’
‘Perhaps it needed to be said.’
Frances nodded, slowly. The kitchen door opened and Harriet stood there in a long violent robe of orange and purple and scarlet and black and yellow and rust. She was in fits of giggles.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s Granny’s,’ Harriet said. She doubled up, heaving. ‘She said it was psychedelic—’
‘It’s one of her caftans!’ Lizzie said, going forward. ‘One of the Marrakesh caftans. What a hoot!’
‘Isn’t it gross?’ Harriet said.
Frances said, ‘She meant it as a compliment, giving it to you. She wants you to take yourself seriously.’
The mirth was wiped off Harriet’s face as if with a cloth. She plucked at the caftan.
‘I don’t see—’ she said sulkily.
‘Frances,’ Lizzie said, ‘aren’t you being just a mite priggish?’
Frances shrugged. ‘Mum was three years older than us when she went to Marrakesh.’
‘What’s Marrakesh?’
‘It’s a place in North Africa. It was one of the pilgrim places for hippies.’
Harriet stared theatrically, widening her eyes like headlamps.
‘Granny was a hippie?’
‘Yes, for a bit.’
‘Jesus!’ Harriet said, and fell sideways against the doorframe.
‘Harriet!’
‘I know it’s hideous,’ Frances said, ‘but it’s important. Or significant, anyway.’
Lizzie looked up at Frances, from her kneeling position. Frances’s eyes were fixed on the caftan, not as if they were taking in the cheap and gaudy cotton, but as if they were seeing something other than the thing they rested on. Her expression was both thoughtful and sympathetic. But why should Frances defend Barbara? Barbara had left them, as ten year olds, for almost a year. Lizzie would rather have her hands cut off than contemplate doing anything so selfish and unmaternal. And then today, Barbara had been frankly caustic when Frances appeared in the kitchen. ‘Heavens,’ she’d said, still holding the basting spoon, ‘they do seem to get Christmas over quickly in Spain.’
‘Frances?’ Lizzie said.
Frances stirred, as if from a brief dream. Harriet and Lizzie watched her.
‘Don’t you think that sometimes, in every life, people do things that they mightn’t do ten years earlier or later but which seem absolutely natural and imperative to do at the time they do them? Does it make you wicked?’
A Spanish Lover Page 9