‘Granny says that he is unquestionably well off,’ Alistair said, sprawling off his beanbag to pick up A Child’s Guide to Dinosaurs which lay just out of his reach.
‘I wish we were,’ Harriet said gloomily.
Alistair opened the book. The first picture was of a diplodocus standing despondently in a lake, to which Sam had added spectacles and a bow for its tail in red crayon.
‘It’s the recession, I’m afraid. A business like ours was bound to suffer.’
‘Why do you have to talk like that?’
‘Like what?’
‘All la-di-da and pompous.’
‘I merely’, Alistair said, settling back into the beanbag and preparing to read about the brain size of the diplodocus, ‘take trouble to use the English language with some care.’
Harriet got off the window seat. She decided to change her black tights for her other black tights. She stepped over her brother.
‘Even if’, she said precisely, ‘this Spanish person turns out to be a spod, he can’t possibly be as spoddy as you are.’
Alistair sighed. The diplodocus had been an un-enterprising herbivore and had, it seemed, richly deserved its inevitable extinction. Harriet crossed the playroom, opened the door and went out, slamming it behind her.
‘I look forward to this,’ Luis said.
‘You don’t feel it’s too official?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I think it’s interesting. You know my son and my sister, after all.’
Frances glanced at him. He half-lay in the passenger seat beside her, quite relaxed, looking peacefully out at the green miles of Wiltshire and Avon flying past the car windows. She had offered to let him drive, but he had shrugged and said no, he would like to be the passenger this time.
‘I don’t think your sister was very enthusiastic about me.’
He made a little gesture.
‘Give her time. She is used to my leading a bachelor life. And I’m afraid there are a lot of Spanish people who still believe that a man may have a different freedom to a woman. She was also—’ He paused and then said, ‘I think she was surprised to find you were English, that I had chosen a foreigner.’
‘I felt, I must say,’ Frances said, changing gear preparatory to turning off the motorway, ‘that she disapproved.’
‘No,’ Luis said, ‘not that. She is a modern woman, a professional, a doctor. You saw how she was. She is just a little formal at the beginning.’
More than a little formal, Frances thought. She remembered the dinner in the flat in Seville, the dark furniture, the table laid with old-fashioned ceremony and precision, Ana de Mena in her bold, dressed-up Spanish clothes, her silent professorial husband with his long, gloomy face like that of a saint approaching certain martyrdom. They had no children, Luis said, they were a profoundly professional couple. They had a little English and with that, and Frances’s slowly budding Spanish, they struggled through the evening. But there were no jokes. Even Luis didn’t seem inclined to crack jokes, and, when they got down into the street again, he actually took her in his arms and kissed her, almost violently, and she was much startled because he was never, ever, demonstrative to her in public places.
‘Will she tell your mother about me? And José’s mother?’
‘No,’ Luis said. ‘We have neither of us told my mother anything we could avoid telling since we were children, and Ana does not like José’s mother.’
Frances’s heart gave a little lift.
‘Why not?’
‘Because she talks all the time of feminism but wishes not to earn her own living.’
‘Ah,’ said Frances, thinking of Barbara. ‘Why haven’t they any children?’
‘Ana believes she has given up the chance of having children for her medical career. She believes she made the choice.’
Frances had wanted to say, And do you think she was right? but refrained. What was the point, when she already knew Luis’s answer. ‘Ana was brought up by our mother,’ Luis would say. ‘She knows the dangers. She saw the dangers of motherhood at first hand.’
The first time he had said this had caused their first quarrel. Frances had been furious with the free, passionate fury born of a rebellion of the instincts.
‘You simply don’t know what you are talking about! You can’t judge all the world’s mothers just because you didn’t like your own, and you don’t love José’s mother any more! You don’t know anything about it.’
‘I know enough,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean,’ he said, gripping her wrist, ‘I mean that women change when they become mothers, they cease to be themselves, to think with dispassion and freedom, and they are taken over, possessed—’
‘It’s absolute nonsense! I never heard such utter and complete rubbish! Take Lizzie—’
‘Lizzie?’
‘My sister, my twin. She has four children and she hasn’t been perverted by them into something else!’
‘I did not use the word “perverted”.’
‘You implied it—’
‘I should like to meet Lizzie. I should like to see your twin.’
Oh this love, Frances had thought then, wrestling with her anger, this love that made you adore someone with whom you could have such terrible differences as well as such agreements, such glorious unions. It wore you out sometimes, but mostly it exhilarated you, energized you, gave you the feeling that you were like a house, previously sad and shuttered, with all its windows and doors flung wide open to the sun.
‘You may meet Lizzie,’ she said severely. ‘You may meet her as long as you remember how much I love her.’
‘I would not forget that.’
It was easy to love everyone now, Frances thought, easy and natural. She felt full of love, as if she had suddenly come upon a limitless supply of it and could throw handfuls of it in the air over everybody, like confetti at a wedding. Four months now, and still an almost ecstatic incredulity swept over her. To have Luis here, by her side, in her car, here because she was here and that was his sole reason.
‘Only three more miles,’ she said.
He turned his head and gave her profile a long, unhingeing, intense stare. Then he put up his hand and touched her cheek.
‘My Frances,’ he said.
Lizzie had expected Luis to be dark and on the heavy side, and not as tall as Robert, nor so romantic-looking, and definitely middle aged, and all these expectations were comfortably fulfilled, but she had not expected him to be so attractive. As for Luis, he had known that Lizzie would look like Frances, which she did, very like Frances, but it had been very difficult to visualize beforehand the fact that she would look so like Frances but, at the same time, not feel like Frances at all. It would not be easy at all, Luis thought, smiling at her, to take this Lizzie to bed.
‘I am afraid’, Lizzie said, letting her hand lie in his, ‘that we have been shamefully curious to see you.’
‘And I you,’ Luis said. ‘I have never known twins before. Now then, who are all these children?’
Davy said clearly, ‘Sam says you’ve got a Rolex watch.’
‘Davy!’
‘Sam is right,’ Luis said. ‘Which is Sam?’
‘That one,’ Davy said, pointing at the sofa and a pile of cushions from which two legs protruded.
‘Has this Sam no head?’
‘I am afraid he has no idea how to behave,’ Alistair said. ‘I suppose my parents are to blame for that.’
‘And who are you?’
‘Alistair.’
‘And so,’ Luis said, turning to Harriet who blushed to the roots of her hair, ‘you are Harriet.’
Lizzie said, ‘You see, Frances is a very special aunt.’
Luis laughed. ‘You don’t need to tell me she’s special—’
‘I should have had a twin too,’ Alistair said. ‘But the other baby died. Very inconvenient, if you think about it, because if he’d lived I probably shouldn’t have had to put up with Sam.
I mean, Sam simply wouldn’t exist. Rather a blissful thought, one way and another—’
‘Enough,’ Robert said. He was trying not to look at Frances. She was wearing a red silk shirt – red! Frances, of all people, in red! – and black trousers and her hair was longer than usual and paler than usual and her bare feet, in fine black sandals, were brown. She had gold earrings on, like gypsy hoops, quite bold earrings. Robert had never seen her wear any earrings but pearl studs before, small, almost apologetic pearl studs. He glanced at Lizzie. Lizzie was watching Luis with a completely open interest and Luis, while holding out his wrist so that Davy could admire his watch, was watching Frances.
‘Could you be a deep-sea diver with this watch?’
‘Oh sure.’
‘And go in a spaceship?’
‘No problem,’ Luis said. He held his free hand out to Frances, ‘Amor—’
The room suddenly filled with electricity. ‘Amor’, he called her, Lizzie thought, ‘amor’! What a word, what a – what a display of intimacy, of passion, of … Lizzie swallowed. ‘Amor’. If anyone had ever called her that, she thought, she would probably have fainted. Beside ‘amor’, ‘darling’ suddenly had about as much sex appeal as a brown paper bag. She cast a brief, enquiring glance at Frances. Frances was stooping over Davy saying, ‘I shouldn’t admire it too much if I were you, Davy. I think it’s extremely vulgar.’ She both looked and sounded perfectly normal. Perhaps – perhaps Luis called her ‘amor’ all the time? If he did, then what on earth was the atmosphere of their private life like; how could you possibly do ordinary things like brush your teeth or make toast with a man around looking at you like that, and calling you ‘amor’?
‘Lizzie?’
‘Yes,’ Lizzie said, blinking.
‘I just said could I help with lunch. Rob is going to show Luis the Gallery.’
‘Yes,’ Lizzie said quickly. ‘Good idea. Do—’
‘And I’ll stay here,’ Frances said. She was looking directly at Lizzie.
‘Harriet will help—’
Harriet, consumed with the need to be out of the room and away from whatever was the matter with the atmosphere in it, muttered something about her history project.
‘I’d like to help you,’ Frances said. ‘I haven’t seen you for months.’
‘My fault,’ Luis said. He didn’t sound at all sorry. He bent to secure the heavy gold strap of his watch around Davy’s wrist. ‘There you are. Now you look exactly like a European businessman.’
Davy held his wrist lovingly with his free hand.
‘Would you say’, he said, ‘that Sam really shouldn’t have a turn of this?’
Luis was impressed by the Gallery. He told Robert that it displayed a more international and varied taste than you would find in such a shop in provincial Spain. He particularly admired the design of the interior; he said design was very, very highly regarded in Spain, notably in Barcelona. He wanted to know about the qualifications necessary to run such a business in England.
‘Qualifications?’ Rob said. ‘There aren’t any, not for this sort of shop. You just learn as you go along, experience comes with time.’
Luis said that in Spain all the professions were profoundly localized in all the various regions and that you had to be colleged for everything, there was no professional path you could take if you hadn’t been to its specific college. He then talked about labour problems in Spain, about the strength of the unions – either socialist or communist, he said – about the minimum wage, about the conservatism of rural Spain and the socialism of some of her cities.
‘But I am boring you,’ Luis said. He stood in front of a display of tall iron candlesticks, imported from the Philippines, their tops spiked to hold huge, devout candles of ivory wax.
‘Not at all. I know nothing at all about Spain, I’m appallingly ignorant—’
‘No,’ Luis said. He was looking at the candles, but he was smiling. ‘No. You are very polite but really you are thinking about Frances—’
‘Naturally—’
Luis put a hand on his arm.
‘Just say yes to me. Of course you are thinking of Frances.’
‘We are a close family,’ Robert said. ‘We’re all rather bound up together. Lizzie and Frances are very close, of course, being twins, and they’ve stayed close to their parents. I hardly see mine.’
‘Nor I,’ Luis said. ‘My mother is now very pious and my father was a soldier, so he is very right wing, perhaps too right wing for modern Europe.’
Robert moved away across the floor of the shop to where some lithographs hung, impressionistic lithographs he had commissioned from a local artist, of seasonal beasts and birds, which had, to his chagrin, failed to sell. Lizzie thought they were too strong and dark, too powerful.
‘I mean, I know people know that foxes kill pheasants,’ she said. ‘I just think they don’t want to see them doing it.’
‘Do you like these?’ Robert asked Luis.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They would sell well in Spain.’
‘They aren’t selling here. Lizzie says they are too brooding.’ He glanced at Luis. ‘The thing that worries Lizzie is, you see, what will happen?’
‘Always this worries women. I can’t tell you what will happen because I don’t know what the events of the future will be.’
‘But we don’t want Frances to be left without a future.’
Luis straightened up. He turned to Robert. He said, looking straight at him. ‘You should not underestimate Frances. She will never be without a future. I have never met anyone like her for strength.’
‘Frances?’
‘Oh yes. She keeps it very quiet but it is there. My sister. Ana, is strong too but she wears her strength like her clothes, you can see it. Frances is the opposite.’
‘I have known Frances since she was twenty, only about a month or two less than I’ve known Lizzie. And I’ve never seen her so – so deep in any relationship.’
‘So,’ Luis said, putting his hands in his trouser pockets, ‘you are warning me not to hurt her? Or your wife has said to you to warn me?’
‘Please don’t be angry—’
‘I am not in the least angry,’ Luis said, smiling. ‘I am just trying to understand you.’
‘It isn’t interference,’ Rob said earnestly. ‘It’s just a kind of protectiveness, about Frances—’
‘Yes, yes. I too know about that, remember. I may be a poor foreigner, but I am also a human being.’
‘The thing is,’ Rob said, feeling suddenly that he was in an absurd position, a sort of surrogate heavy-father position which he had never sought and which he was disliking very much, ‘that the northern and the southern forms of passion are so very different. Don’t you think? Perhaps we can’t, in the end, understand one another because our instincts are so different—’ He stopped. He looked at Luis. He said, ‘God, I’m so sorry. I never meant to say all this, I’m not sure I even believe it. Will you forget the last few minutes entirely? Can I just say that I have never seen Frances look better or happier?’
Luis looked back. Their eyes met. What was he trying to say, this nice brother-in-law of Frances? Was he trying to wish them well while at the same time saying that he doubted that things could, in the end, possibly be well for them? Did he have, too, this curious English habit of reticence, the habit Frances had had when he had first known her, which made its possessor reluctant to articulate feelings, almost afraid to? It was like a terrible politeness, a kind of courtesy, so self-denying that in the end it was an affliction and imprisoned the sufferer. It wasn’t so much, Luis thought, that the Spanish were better at explaining their feelings, it was rather that they were not afraid of those feelings in the first place. They were, as Frances had pointed out, proud of their qualities and their emotions. ‘It makes you a noble race,’ Frances had said. ‘You’re high-minded. The English are often excellent but they’d be afraid to be high-minded now. They’d feel silly, they’d think they looked imperialist.’ Robert
Middleton didn’t look either silly or imperialist to Luis, he merely looked unhappy, as if he had no outlet for what he was feeling. Luis took his hands out of his pockets, stretched both of them out and grasped Robert’s.
‘If she looks it, I feel it.’
‘Yes, I know—’
‘Sometimes,’ Luis said, ‘we need exactly what is not natural to us, we need to look at everything through different eyes.’
Robert thought suddenly of their situation, of the vulnerable Gallery, of Lizzie’s dreary little job, of the great, weighty burden of the Grange.
‘Sometimes it isn’t need that changes your vision,’ Robert said. ‘Sometimes circumstances mean you just have to.’
Luis dropped his hands. Something else had happened in Rob’s mind, something not to do with Frances.
‘Perhaps,’ he said politely.
‘Couldn’t I just book you a holiday? You and Rob, in Mojas? You’ve no idea how lovely it is.’
Lizzie drained fat off the ducks she had extravagantly bought – and now obscurely regretted – for Frances and Luis, and said she thought not.
‘But why?’
Lizzie put the roasting tin on the draining board and speared the ducks with a fork.
‘We can’t afford it. We can’t afford anything, Frances, not this house, not the cars, nothing. We certainly can’t afford a holiday in Spain.’
Frances said, ‘But it would be a present. From me. I’d like to give it to you. I want to. Just you and Rob.’
Lizzie put the ducks on a plate, and the plate in the warming oven. A dull misery was settling on her.
‘Lizzie?’
‘I can’t – take things from you. I—’
‘What?’
‘It’s so sweet of you,’ Lizzie said desperately. ‘Really kind. But I couldn’t bear it.’
‘Why not? From me of all people—’
‘Yes. From you of all people.’
‘Frankly,’ Frances said, slicing fiercely into the pineapple she had been given to cut up for a fruit salad, ‘I think that’s pretty churlish.’
A Spanish Lover Page 18