A Spanish Lover

by Joanna Trollope

  Alistair turned and began to shuffle back down the short corridor to his bedroom, trailing his pink-cotton train.

  ‘OK,’ Lizzie said, almost in a whisper.

  Alistair’s bedroom door banged shut.

  ‘I’ll come up every hour,’ Robert said, ‘as I’ve done since he got ill. As I’ve done all the time you were away at work.’

  ‘I’m not at work for fun!’ Lizzie cried resentfully.

  Robert said nothing. He didn’t even look at her. He merely picked up the keys for the Gallery office and went out of the room and down the communal stairs and left her standing there, in a turmoil. After a few minutes, she went along to Alistair’s room and knocked.

  ‘Ally?’

  ‘Go away!’

  ‘I just want to make sure you’re all right before I go—’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Alistair said flatly, his voice muffled by the scarf.

  ‘I’ll see you tonight—’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Is there anything you’d like, anything you really like to eat—’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ice-cream? That American one? Melon?’

  ‘No.’

  Lizzie put her forehead against the flat, painted surface of the door.

  ‘See you tonight, then.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Keep drinking, drink as much as you can—’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I’m not being heartless, going to work, Ally, really I’m not, I have to go, you know that, don’t you?’

  Silence.

  ‘Because of money. You do know that, don’t you? It’s so that we can go on living, so that—’

  She stopped. She straightened up.

  ‘Bye, darling.’

  ‘Bye,’ Alistair said in a voice loud with relief.

  After he had seen Lizzie leave the Gallery, Robert came out of the office and went down to the shop floor to see Jenny. She was cleaning pictures with some emerald-green liquid in a spray bottle. She looked up as he approached but she didn’t stop polishing.

  ‘I don’t think customers ever consider that most of shop keeping is housework, do you?’

  ‘Did you see Lizzie?’

  ‘Only briefly,’ Jenny said. ‘Because she was late, poor thing, she came through like the wind so we only had time to say hello and goodbye in the same breath. How’s Alistair?’

  ‘Spotty and miserable.’

  ‘Poor boy,’ Jenny said. She squirted glass cleaner on to another picture. ‘I had chicken-pox about his age and it was awful. I suppose the others will get it now.’

  Robert groaned. ‘Don’t say such things—’

  ‘They might as well,’ Jenny said comfortably. ‘Get it all over with at once.’

  ‘But how would we manage?’

  She looked at him.

  ‘Manage?’

  ‘Yes. If the little ones get it too, how on earth would we cope with them and the Gallery?’

  Jenny stepped back from the picture, squinting to see if she had left any smears on the glass.

  ‘Well, I don’t suppose many pictures would get polished for a bit, but there’d be no problem with two of us. One down here, one up there, take it in turns. And if Toby gets it, I’ll just bung him in with the others.’

  She sounded so sensible and ordinary that Robert suddenly felt she was both an angel and a genius.

  He said, ‘Don’t you ever lose your cool?’

  She looked away from him.

  ‘I try not to. I’m rather frightened of not being in control.’

  ‘I think everybody feels that—’

  ‘Maybe they do,’ Jenny said, ‘but I think I’m worse than most.’

  ‘I think you’re wonderful,’ Robert said.

  Jenny blushed, a slow, steady, glowing blush.

  ‘You mustn’t talk like that.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Because it isn’t true,’ Jenny said. ‘I’m practical and reliable and useful, but that’s all.’

  Robert smiled at her.

  ‘Just now,’ he said, ‘being useful and reliable and practical is my definition of wonderful. No tantrums, no screams and shrieks—’

  ‘No problems either,’ Jenny said crisply, moving away towards the next picture.

  ‘Jenny—’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘go and get started. I’m not a fool, I know what you’re trying to say and you shouldn’t talk about it, not when she isn’t here, I’ve told you.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Robert said. His heart ached suddenly, as if there was a headache in it. ‘You’re quite right. I’ll be in the office if you need me.’

  She nodded, her grey hair swinging neatly. She didn’t dare look at him.

  ‘See you later—’

  As he opened the office door, the private telephone line was ringing, the line whose number was only known to the children’s schools, to Barbara and William, to Frances, to a few very favoured suppliers and customers.

  ‘Robert Middleton,’ he said into the receiver.

  ‘Mr Middleton? Oh Mr Middleton, it’s Mrs Cairns here, from Langworth Junior. I’m afraid I have to ask you to come and collect Sam at once, if you would. He’s a mass of spots, looks like chicken-pox to me. He says his older brother has it.’

  ‘Yes,’ Robert said.

  ‘Mr Middleton, you know the quarantine rules—’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It means that every other child Sam has been in contact with—’

  ‘I know, Mrs Cairns. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Then you’ll be here at once?’

  ‘As soon as I can—’

  ‘And I think you’d better take Davy home with you too.’

  Robert put his hand over his face.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Cairns,’ he said.

  Lizzie came home to find Alistair still shrouded like a mummy, and Sam spreadeagled stark naked on the sofa. He said if he put his pyjamas on, or even a T-shirt, the itching was unbearable, and he couldn’t even put his legs together or his arms by his sides because then the itches touched each other and he had to scream. He screamed anyway, just to show her. In the kitchen Harriet was eating a raw carrot and reading a teen magazine, with dark glasses on, because she said she had a headache and chicken-pox started with headaches, didn’t they. In the bathroom, Robert was bathing Davy who was perfectly certain he had found a spot on his knee and was begging not to have to lie in the dark wound up in sheets and towels and scarves.

  Lizzie sat down on the closed lid of the lavatory and took her shoes off.

  ‘What are we to do?’

  ‘Carry on,’ Robert said grimly, soaping Davy’s back.

  ‘I’ll do that,’ Lizzie said. ‘You start supper.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then I’ll start supper. What is there?’

  ‘What you’ve brought home.’

  ‘I haven’t brought anything home. I worked until five-thirty today, remember? Everything shuts at five-thirty.’

  ‘Then there’s nothing.’

  ‘No food?’ Davy whispered. He peered at his knee. ‘It really tickles—’

  ‘You haven’t got chicken-pox,’ Robert said patiently.

  Davy looked up, eyes like saucers.

  ‘Suppose they come in the night?’

  ‘You come and tell us,’ Lizzie said.

  ‘Suppose—’

  ‘There must be some pasta,’ Lizzie said, standing up, interrupting.

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Why are you in such a foul mood?’

  Robert said nothing. He lifted Davy up to wash his bottom.

  ‘I’ve done termly bill reminders all day,’ Lizzie said. ‘All damn day, nothing else. It was charming, one phone call after another to parents who don’t answer or are in permanent meetings.’ She stepped over Rob’s legs. She was suddenly so tired she could hardly stand. ‘It’s not my fault’, she said, her voice shaking, ‘that they’ve all got chicken-pox—’

  ‘I never said it was.’

  ‘But
you’re implying—’

  ‘Go and start supper,’ Robert said. He lifted Davy out of the bath as if he were a baby and not, Davy thought, a boy. Davy squirmed free of his father’s hands and seized the towel.

  ‘I’ll do it—’

  ‘As you wish.’

  ‘Robert,’ Lizzie said, looking down at them both, ‘why do we keep bickering like this?’

  He looked back up at her with a look quite devoid of sympathy. Then he turned back to Davy and began to dry his feet with a trailing corner of the towel.

  ‘What a bloody stupid question,’ Robert said. ‘Why the hell do you think?’

  The following day, Lizzie rang Westondale to say she would not be in since two of her children now had chicken-pox and one of the remaining ones, if not both, was bound to succumb any minute. Mrs Drysdale, who had answered the telephone, sounded insincerely sympathetic and said she would ask Freda Mason to come in and hold the secretarial fort for a few days. Lizzie could have wept. She imagined Freda Mason remorselessly undoing in three days all that Lizzie had accomplished in three terms, rehanging the terrible curtains and string holders for spider plants, deliberately feeding stapled paper into the computer’s printer, reraising the parental hackles it had taken Lizzie a year to persuade to lie down.

  ‘Couldn’t you get a temp from an agency?’ Lizzie said. ‘Isn’t it a bit unfair to ask Freda, now that she’s retired?’

  ‘Not unfair at all,’ Mrs Drysdale said firmly. ‘Once part of the Westondale family, always a part of it. She’ll be only too pleased.’

  You bet, Lizzie told herself, you absolutely bet she will be. She shouted to the empty kitchen, ‘She’ll be in her blasted element!’

  ‘What elephant?’ Davy said, coming in wearing only the bottom half of his pyjamas. ‘Could these be kung fu trousers?’

  ‘What?’

  Davy stuck out one foot at an angle and clenched his fist.

  ‘Like this. To go pow, pow in.’

  ‘I expect so.’ She looked down at him. ‘If you’re going to get chicken-pox, could you try and hurry up?’

  By lunchtime, he had obliged. It was a hot day, one of those freakish hot days of early summer, and when Lizzie opened the windows of the flat, traffic noise and fumes seemed to swirl into the room like brown smoke. Sam had the television on, far louder than necessary because he said chicken-pox had made him deaf, and anyway he couldn’t hear above the noise of the cars. He pulled the curtains because Alistair told him he would go blind as well as deaf if he didn’t, and he and Davy lounged in the gloom in front of an old Greta Garbo movie, complaining and scratching. Behind one closed door, Alistair lay as usual even though, as Harriet had pointed out, his spots were fast fading, and behind the other Harriet painted her toenails alternately red and black and fantasized that Fraser Pringle would one day look at her with the look he was now bestowing on her once best friend and now worst enemy, Heather Morgan. Lizzie made a careful invalids’ lunch of thinly sliced ham and new potatoes and tiny frozen peas and everybody groaned and refused it and said why couldn’t they have hamburgers. Then Pimlott came sliding in like a shadow, sent by his mother to catch chicken-pox and get it over with, and immediately, at the sight of Sam, took all his clothes off too, revealing a pale, greenish body that reminded Lizzie of the subterranean roots of bindweed. It also made her panic. She did not, she found, want a naked Pimlott anywhere near Sam or Davy, so she lost her temper out of a primitive apprehension and shouted at Pimlott and ordered him into his clothes and out of the flat. He went, slithering and muttering, his moonish eyes fixed malevolently on her face, and when he had disappeared, Lizzie sat on the stairs out of a pointless but instinctive need to prevent his coming back, and burst into tears of strain and fatigue and disappointment and confusion, which was where Jenny found her half an hour later, coming up during a lull in the shop to see what she could do to help.

  Jenny took over. For the next few days, she said, Robert must mind the Gallery, she would mind the children and Lizzie must go to Westondale.

  Lizzie said, ‘But I can’t have you nursing my children!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it isn’t fair, it isn’t your problem—’

  ‘That’s why it’s easier for me to do,’ Jenny said.

  She got Alistair out of his sheet and his bed and into clothes, she got Sam and Davy into at least T-shirts and she made regular, unremarkable meals which the children ate with stunned docility. At lunchtime, Robert came up to the flat for an hour, and she went down to the shop in his place, and at three-thirty each afternoon she went off to collect Toby, and returned until Lizzie came home. Robert and Lizzie almost fawned over her in their gratitude, but she wouldn’t accept thanks.

  ‘I like this. Everybody likes to be needed, don’t they? There’s something rather exciting about an emergency, anyway. Just let me get on with it.’

  So they let her. They let her nurse their children and wash their kitchen floor and iron their shirts and sheets and leave, in the fridge, for their supper, bowls of soup and salad. They let her, so that Lizzie could drive off to Westondale without leaving in her wake a clamour of complaint and recrimination, and so that she could then work all day without guilt pressing upon her like a migraine. They let her, so that Robert could devote himself to the shop without feeling the fractious pressure of domestic life nagging at him and the accompanying resentment it induced building up in him like a gathering thunderstorm. They let her, because it was so easy to do so and they were so tired, deep down, after all the months of stress, that anything remotely easy seemed to them like unexpected water in a desert.

  And then Robert came up from the shop at closing time, on one of Lizzie’s late days, and found, to his astonished admiration, all five children, Toby Hardacre and his own four, peacefully in the sitting room, without the television on.

  ‘Where’s Jenny?’

  ‘Cleaning the bathroom,’ Harriet said.

  ‘Why aren’t you helping her?’

  ‘I offered but she said no as long as I copied this recipe out for her, so I am.’

  Robert went into the bathroom. Jenny was standing shoeless in the bath polishing the tiled wall behind it.

  ‘Jenny, stop that, really stop that—’

  ‘No,’ she said, smiling, ‘I’m nearly done.’

  He leaned forward.

  ‘I’m not having it,’ he said. ‘You’re not to become our slave,’ and then he put his arms around her and lifted her out of the bath.

  She gasped.

  ‘Stop it!’

  ‘Stop what—’

  She looked at him, eyes wide. She put her hands down, one still holding the polishing cloth, to push his arms away, but he was too quick for her and pulled her to him and kissed her on the mouth.

  Then Lizzie called from the door to the staircase, ‘I’m home!’

  ‘I never kissed her before,’ Robert said tiredly, in the resigned manner of someone repeating something for the umpteenth time, ‘I shan’t kiss her again. I don’t love her, I’m not in love with her, I love you, I just felt full of gratitude to her because she reassured me.’

  Lizzie was standing by the window of their bedroom looking down into the wrecked factory yards behind the building. The western sun shone down on the piles of broken bricks and the rotting fences and the clumps of bright new weeds. She held the windowsill and stared out.

  ‘What do you mean, reassured you?’

  Robert sat on the edge of their bed with his head in his hands.

  ‘By being’, he said wearily, ‘just so bloody ordinary, so soothingly, wonderfully normal.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Lizzie said again.

  ‘You know exactly what I mean.’

  ‘Not like me—’

  ‘Not like you just now.’

  Lizzie stepped out of her shoes and kicked them behind her.

  ‘How long had you been planning to kiss her?’

  Robert flung himself back on the bed and closed his eyes.<
br />
  ‘I didn’t plan it!’

  ‘Don’t shout.’

  ‘You make me shout. I didn’t plan it, it had never crossed my mind, it was an impulse, an impulse borne of shame, and gratitude, to see her ungrudgingly cleaning our bloody bathroom, for God’s sake. I wish I hadn’t. You’ll never know how much I wish I hadn’t. I’ve upset her and you and myself and all for nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘I didn’t kiss her for sex, Lizzie!’ Robert yelled, sitting bolt upright and glaring. ‘I kissed her because I was grateful and ashamed, just as you ought to be!’

  There was a long pause, while Lizzie went on staring out of the window. Then she turned round and collapsed on to the bed beside him. He waited for her to be angry or sad but all she said was, ‘I know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I am grateful. I am ashamed.’

  Robert groaned and rolled away from her.

  ‘Don’t start that, the mortifying of the flesh—’

  ‘Mum!’ Harriet yelled from behind the closed door.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Phone! Frances on the phone!’

  Lizzie sprang up.

  ‘Frances! From where, where’s she ringing from—’

  ‘I dunno,’ Harriet said, her voice receding as she moved away.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ Lizzie said, running from the room. Robert grunted. He shut his eyes. He could have kicked himself. He couldn’t imagine what had led him to be so clumsy, so ludicrous, as to kiss Jenny. It had been such a funny little kiss too, an almost childish kiss with Jenny’s cool dry mouth closed beneath his and her eyes above it wide with amazed disapproval. Hell, he thought now, punching a pillow, am I really that unattractive? Is being kissed by me so revolting that my victim has to bolt home as if she’d been raped? Jenny had bolted all right. She had been distraught. She had gathered up Toby and her bag and Toby’s plastic carrier of sports kit and fled from the flat, almost whimpering. Robert was left with the distinct impression that he had offended her. But offended what exactly? Her person? Her principles? Her self-esteem? Her self-image? She had said almost nothing as she fled, only a few incoherent words of apology to Lizzie and the phrase, ‘There’s nothing, nothing, I couldn’t ever—’ Lizzie had said, stunned herself, ‘Don’t worry—’ Don’t worry about what? Don’t worry that I shall blame you? Don’t worry that my husband is such a lousy kisser? Jesus, Robert thought, isn’t there enough to bear just now without feeling a perfect fucking fool into the bargain?