A Spanish Lover

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘I suppose she just rings Spain—’

  ‘Of course she does!’ Robert said. ‘What else do you expect? Why aren’t you glad for her?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘You do nothing but point out the pitfalls.’

  ‘Rob, there are so many. He’s ten years older, he’s married, he’s Catholic, he’s a foreigner. There are such agonies ahead—’

  ‘Perhaps she thinks they are all worth it for the present. Anyway, why shouldn’t she be able to cope? Why are you the one with a monopoly on coping?’

  ‘I’m not, I just always feel with Frances—’

  ‘Lizzie,’ Robert shouted, interrupting. ‘Will you please stop going on about Frances and just focus on us? We’re your priority, not her. I’m your husband, remember, your companion, your lover when we’re not too bloody tired—’

  The trouble is, Lizzie thought, gripping the wheel of this unfamiliar and clattering car that felt as if it might, at any moment, simply disintegrate into a series of nuts and bolts and cogs and wheels spinning over the road, the trouble is that I am jealous. I’ve been, I have to admit it, jealous of Frances on occasion in the past when she seemed so free and I felt so tied, but I’m not jealous of her now – I simply can’t summon up the energy even to imagine having a love affair – but I’m jealous of him. I don’t know him and I really resent him having all Frances’s attention and confidence. Particularly now. After all, I’ve hardly asked for Frances’s help before, I’ve never needed it, and I’m not exactly asking now, but I could do with her. In this horrible situation when I’m so scared we may just lose everything we’ve worked for, I really could do with her. It isn’t much to ask, is it, for your twin’s support in a dark hour? It isn’t greedy, is it? Isn’t it just natural to turn by instinct to your other self, your other half? Of course I want her to be happy, I always have, but what she’s doing is so dangerous, far too dangerous for happiness. Oh dear, thought Lizzie, swerving to avoid a sudden cyclist emerging from a turning, perhaps I am just an awful managing cow, perhaps I am what Rob says I am and Frances – oh damn, I’m going to cry, can’t cry, mustn’t, can’t arrive chez Freda Mason on my first morning with a nose like a red balloon.

  The small staff car-park at Westondale was already full when Lizzie arrived. She drove round to the even smaller one allotted to the collecting parents of juniors – ingeniously designed for the maximum need for quarrelsome reversing – and parked there. A gardener emerged from a bush and said staff couldn’t park there.

  ‘I’m not staff,’ Lizzie said locking the driver’s door. ‘I’m administration.’

  ‘Mrs Drysdale won’t have it.’

  Lizzie ignored him. Mrs Drysdale was the headmistress, a big, handsome woman who dressed in scarlet and turquoise and orange as if to indicate that, whatever she had, she was going to flaunt it, tremendous bosom included. She had interviewed Lizzie in a flash, with the fluent, patronizing, know-all manner of a professional agony aunt, saying that she relied utterly on Mrs Mason’s judgement and that she so approved of Lizzie’s being a mother and why didn’t she send her own daughter to Westondale? Because we can’t afford the fees and also because Langworth Comprehensive is pretty good, Lizzie had said, whereupon Mrs Drysdale’s eye had hardened and she had flourished Lizzie briskly out of her office with a clash of bracelets and a wealth of false smiles. Lizzie had not been left with the impression that Mrs Drysdale was the sort of headmistress to worry about car-parks; the grand gesture, the broad sweep, was more in her line.

  ‘I shall have to report you!’ the gardener shouted.

  Lizzie hurried away from him across the stretch of tired, late-summer grass between the car-park and the front door. She tried very hard not to remember, as she climbed the steps to the door, that this was the first day she had ever spent in someone else’s employ. Needs must, she told herself sternly, I chose this, I have to do it.

  Freda Mason had arranged a trembling card table for her to use as a desk in the corner of the office, and ostentatiously placed upon it a welcoming bunch of dahlias. Lizzie hated dahlias.

  ‘How kind,’ she said.

  ‘My husband’s pride and joy. These are his speciality, these pom-poms. This one is Pride of Berlin, and the sweet little orange one is New Baby. Personally—’

  The door of the office opened and a girl came in. She had frizzy dark hair and a hunted expression.

  ‘Georgina, you know you should knock.’

  ‘I did,’ the girl said. ‘I came to ask if I could ring my mother because I forgot my violin.’

  Mrs Mason shook her head. She looked at Lizzie.

  ‘The day Georgina doesn’t forget something will be a day to remember.’

  Georgina looked furious. She trudged across to the nearest telephone and wearily dialled a number. She was Harriet’s age, Lizzie guessed, and plainly, from her resentful stoop, hated the way she looked, from her untamed hair to her polelike legs.

  ‘We add these calls to the individual bills,’ Mrs Mason hissed at Lizzie. ‘Surname Fellows, address St James’s Square. The bigger filing cabinet, top drawer.’

  Georgina thumped the telephone down.

  ‘No-one there.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ Lizzie said, anxious to help. ‘Couldn’t I take you home to get it?’

  Mrs Mason looked appalled.

  ‘No,’ Georgina said.

  ‘Georgina!’

  ‘I mean, no thank you. I hadn’t practised anyway.’

  ‘Then why—’

  ‘I had to have tried,’ Georgina said desperately. ‘I’ve got to tell Mr Parsons I’ve tried.’

  She trudged back to the door again, and vanished. The telephone rang. Mrs Mason pounced on it.

  ‘Westondale!’

  She paused, flapping her free hand at Lizzie for something to write with.

  ‘I’m afraid that, unless it’s an emergency, Mrs Drysdale only sees parents between three and four on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I will try and make an exception, Mr Murray, but I’m afraid I can’t promise anything. May I take your number?’

  ‘Parents,’ she said, putting the telephone down. ‘You’ll find they’re the bane of your life. That father wanted to see Mrs Drysdale, at nine in the morning, if you please!’

  ‘Perhaps he’s working, perhaps he has to take time off.’

  ‘If you ask me,’ Mrs Mason said, ‘parents these days simply don’t put their children first.’ She looked at Lizzie. ‘Now, before that menace takes it into its head to ring again, shall we just get started?’

  It was a long and weary morning. Even Lizzie, who had been with Robert to evening classes to learn how to keep accounts and who had since developed her own eccentricities about doing them, was startled at the laborious confusion in which Mrs Mason worked, with every item of information cross-referenced in longhand across a perfect wilderness of index cards. A small computer stood in one corner of the office, and, when Lizzie enquired about it, she was told, with an air of distaste, that it had been a gift from the Parents’ Association which was very kind of them, Mrs Mason was sure, but wholly unnecessary. Mrs Mason had been trained as a librarian and there was nothing, therefore, about the organization of information that she couldn’t do in her sleep. Lizzie listened, answered the telephone to queries she couldn’t answer, gazed uncomprehendingly at everything that she was shown, drank an unpleasant cup of instant coffee brought by a woman in a green overall, and tried not to think about the Gallery, or the leaking pipe in the bathroom at the Grange she had forgotten to telephone the plumber about, or the pain Alistair had suddenly said he had at breakfast.

  ‘What sort of pain?’

  ‘Here,’ he said, laying a hand briefly against his lower stomach, but not taking his eyes off the comic that had come with last Sunday’s paper.

  ‘How long have you had it?’

  ‘Oh, weeks—’

  ‘Weeks?’

  ‘Well, a week anyway.’

  Robert had said, a little testily, that he would take him t
o evening surgery if the pain was still there after school.

  ‘But I’ll be back then. I can take him.’

  ‘You’ll be tired,’ Robert said with a kind of finality.

  ‘So will you.’

  ‘I know, but it’s part of the deal that I do more for the kids. I said I would if you took this job.’

  ‘Perhaps Jenny might?’ Lizzie suggested.

  They looked at each other.

  ‘We mustn’t exploit her—’

  ‘I know, but she said she’d be thankful to help. I think she’s lonely.’

  ‘We have our lunch in the staff room,’ Mrs Mason said now.

  ‘Not with the girls?’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘I’d like to have lunch with the girls.’

  ‘Just as you please. You’d better speak to Mrs Drysdale.’

  ‘I can’t possibly need to bother Mrs Drysdale about anything so trivial—’

  Mrs Mason looked deeply offended.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that creating a precedent was trivial.’

  In the end, Lizzie ate her lunch – shepherd’s pie and carrots followed by an apple pudding in which the apple seemed to be merely nominal, and custard – in the staff room. The talk was all of girls she didn’t know, problems she had never heard of, past examination results she could feel no interest in. She was given water to drink out of a plastic tumbler and was otherwise largely ignored. At one point the person next to her, a middle-aged man dressed in brown corduroy who said he taught geography, gave her a brief lecture on the misguidedness of the new national curriculum and the iniquities of any educational system based on continual assessment, but apart from that, he behaved as if she wasn’t there.

  After lunch, she eluded Mrs Mason who seemed to wish to have a confidential few minutes over another cup of instant coffee, and went out into the grounds. Clumps of girls stood about gossiping or lay ostentatiously in the declining sun, their school shirts unbuttoned at the throat and tucked into the tops of their bras for maximum exposure. The ones with the best tans were being treated like stars. Lizzie spoke to several of them and explained who she was, but although they weren’t at all rude in reply, they made it plain that during break they never mixed with the enemy – alias adults – and that after a long summer holiday, they had so much that was vital to report to one another. Only a solitary girl with a clever face reading alone seemed pleased to speak to Lizzie. She was reading Anna Karenina, and she said it was absolutely transfixing her. After a few minutes’ desultory chatter, it was clearly kind to move away and let her return hungrily to the torments of poor Anna.

  Lizzie fought yawns all afternoon. The strangeness, the mixture of boredom and frustration engendered by being in a small room with Mrs Mason from nine until three-thirty – two days a week it would be until five-thirty – the self-discipline required to remember what she was there for, and simultaneously not to remember how little she was being paid for it, were, when combined, more exhausting than Lizzie would have believed possible. It was incredibly difficult not to be in charge, to have to submit to Mrs Mason’s pace of work and way of work. By three-thirty, still burdened by her unaccustomed weight of lunch – how eagerly everyone else had devoured theirs! – Lizzie tottered out into the pale-gold afternoon and found the grounds swarming with girls and an illiterate notice on her windscreen telling her that the place she had parked her car was reserved strictly for parents.

  She reached Langworth soon after four, and went straight to the Gallery. It was quite quiet, with only a handful of customers drifting about with the air of sightseers rather than people bent upon purchase. In the café on the top floor, a few women were eating flapjacks (made of organically grown oats) and drinking coffee, and at a corner table, Jenny Hardacre sat with Sam and Davy and her own son, Toby, having, as prearranged, collected them all from school.

  ‘Oh Lizzie,’ Jenny said. ‘How was it?’

  Davy and Toby went on drinking milk through straws, but Sam, on sight of his mother, pretended to have been shot, and sprawled backwards in his chair with crossed eyes and lolling tongue.

  ‘I’m afraid that it was absolutely awful. Where’s Rob?’

  ‘In the office. With the rep from the candle people.’

  Lizzie sat down. Sam immediately reared up in order to flop down dead again across her.

  ‘Don’t,’ Lizzie said. He took no notice. ‘I won’t tell Rob how dreadful it was because the poor thing’s worried enough about me doing it as it is.’

  ‘I know. Perhaps it’ll get better.’

  ‘It’s the most frightful mixture of inefficiency and petty bossiness. Get up, Sam. How’s today been?’

  Jenny pulled a little face.

  ‘Sort of average. I thought I’d sold a quilt this morning, but she turned out to be one of those I-must-go-away-and-think-about-it types, who never come back.’

  ‘Pity. There’s so much stock still—’

  ‘Lizzie,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Yes.’

  Jenny leaned forward, her face full of concern.

  ‘I really do want to help, you know. I don’t mind doing extra things, I promise I don’t. I mean, I don’t need to be paid for extra things and I’d so like to feel you would lean on me a bit, about the children and so on, if you need to.’

  Lizzie said, ‘You are a dear and a salvation, but we are terrified of exploiting you.’

  Toby took a full straw of milk out of his glass and blew it out into a pool on the table. Delighted, Davy did the same. Sam watched them enviously.

  ‘Boys—’

  In silence, Jenny took Toby’s glass and straw away. Davy watched Lizzie, waiting for her to do the same. She didn’t.

  ‘I shall not bring you to public places’, Jenny said quietly to Toby, ‘if you behave like a baby.’

  He went pink. He made as if to slide from his chair.

  ‘Sit still,’ Jenny said. He stopped sliding.

  ‘How do you do it?’ Lizzie said admiringly.

  ‘By only having one. He’s all I’ve got to think about. That’s why I wish you’d lean on me more. It would be doing me a kindness, Lizzie. Thanks to what Mike left me, I’m not too badly off, I don’t need to work for money, but I do need to work for myself.’

  Davy began to play in his milk pool with his finger, drawing the milk out into points and promontories. Without speaking, Jenny gently took his hand out of the milk, and then removed his glass and his straw. Sam rose from the dead across Lizzie’s lap and gazed at her. Then he returned to his chair and gathered his own milk possessively to him, drinking it with diligence.

  ‘Brilliant,’ Lizzie said.

  ‘I don’t want to interfere—’

  ‘You couldn’t. Do you know if Rob has done anything about Alistair?’

  ‘No. Shall I—’

  ‘Alistair had a pain at breakfast, and Rob said he would take him to evening surgery after school if it hadn’t gone.’

  Jenny half-rose.

  ‘Let me check. I’ll get you a cup of tea, you look worn out, and then I’ll check.’

  ‘I could kiss you.’

  ‘Yuk,’ Sam said.

  ‘I can bite my big toe,’ Toby told Davy. Davy looked nonchalant.

  ‘Here’s Rob,’ Jenny said, standing up properly.

  ‘Darling,’ Rob said, stooping to kiss Lizzie. ‘How was it?’

  ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I’m just a bit bushed because it was so new.’

  He picked Davy up and sat down in his chair instead, placing him on his knee.

  ‘I bet it wasn’t fine. I bet it was dreadful.’

  ‘She said it was awful,’ Sam said.

  ‘Oh Lizzie—’

  She put her hand on his.

  ‘It wasn’t. It wasn’t that bad, I was just having a little whinge to Jenny.’

  Robert smiled up at her.

  ‘She’s been great. Actually, I didn’t know you were back or I’d have come and got you to speak to Frances.’

  Lizzie star
ed.

  ‘Frances?’

  ‘Yes. She rang ten minutes ago, wanting you, not realizing you’d started at Westondale.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She asked if she could come down this Sunday. For lunch.’

  ‘Yes, of course—’

  Robert bent his head and absent-mindedly kissed the top of Davy’s.

  ‘She wants to bring the famous Spanish lover. To meet us. I said fine, so I hope it is.’

  12

  ‘I BET HE’LL be spoddy,’ Harriet said.

  Alistair, who was reading a book of Davy’s about an owl who was frightened of the dark, said, without raising his eyes from the page, ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, he’s foreign. Remember those French boys we had to have at school? They were utterly spoddy.’

  Alistair began to twiddle a piece of hair on top of his head.

  ‘He’s quite old, though. Mum said.’

  ‘Spoddiness isn’t a matter of age,’ Harriet said scornfully, ‘it just happens. It’s like all those awful poets maundering on about the first pathetic aconite of spring. They’re as old as the hills and they’re all spoddy.’

  Alistair chucked his book on the floor. The owl had been coaxed out into the night and found it could see better then than by day, so that the ending was both happy and feeble.

  ‘Well, our aunt seems to be pretty gone on him—’

  Harriet flushed. The notion of love stirred her up and created an unpleasant inward physical turmoil.

  ‘It’s going to be so embarrassing—’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Watching them.’

  ‘Well, don’t look then.’

  But Harriet was longing to look. Clearly Frances was having sex with this potentially spoddy Spaniard and this, because they were not married to each other, (married sex was too disgusting and embarrassing even to contemplate), was both panic-making and completely fascinating. Harriet had several times, drifting elaborately in and out of her bedroom, seen Frances naked. She had looked a lot like Lizzie – whom Harriet did not, at present, ever wish to see naked – except that she was both thinner and smoother. Their bottoms were too big, Harriet considered, but their legs were all right and their b … well, their bosoms were awful, really embarrassing, and as for their … Harriet swallowed and twisted round on the window seat to gaze furiously out into the street. If she let herself think about a man touching Frances with no clothes on, she thought she might just blow up.