The door opened again. Lizzie came in quietly and shut it behind her equally quietly. She sat down on the very edge of the bed, as far away from Robert as possible, and folded her hands.
‘I’m going to ring Frances again later, when all the children are in bed, when I’m not having to compete with all of them telling me how awful they feel—’
Robert sat up. He glanced at her. She was white as a sheet.
‘Lizzie?’
‘I’m all right,’ she said. She put her hand to her head, as if to reassure herself that it was still there. ‘It’s just that Frances is pregnant, you see.’
‘Pregnant!’
‘Yes,’ Lizzie said, ‘Pregnant.’ She looked at him with a straight, blank gaze. ‘That’s rather taken the wind out of our sails, hasn’t it?’
Later, much later, Lizzie sat at the kitchen table nursing the third mug of tea she had made but had not seemed able to drink. Robert had gone to bed. She had been in to see him and he was asleep, on his back, with, as was his wont, one arm flung up across the pillow. He looked exhausted, even though he was asleep, it was as if sleep wasn’t enough for that kind of exhaustion, as if it would only provide a temporary, partial remedy. Lizzie had gazed at him enviously. How marvellously men managed to sleep as a refuge, seeming to switch oblivion on as easily as turning off a light. She’d seen it in William, all her life, snoozing off the effects of Barbara’s attacks and discontents; she saw it in Alistair, seizing the fusty cavern of his duvet as a place of sanctuary from the pain of being himself, of being, now, thirteen. I’m not sure I’ll ever sleep again, Lizzie thought, gazing at Robert, I feel that I’m quite beyond it, every nerve cracking but grimly, eternally awake. She went back to the kitchen and plugged the kettle in. It was a completely automatic action, she thought dazedly as she did it, she might as well have turned the washing machine on, or the iron. Why do people always make tea when their wits are scattered like a burst pillow? What did they do in a crisis before there was tea? There, there, they said to each other, no doubt, there’s a nice mug of mead to set you right. What is mead made of anyway? Honey? Barley? And what, precisely, does it matter what it’s perishing well made of while Frances has been pregnant for three months and told nobody, and particularly not me?
‘I meant to get pregnant,’ Frances had said during their second call. ‘I wanted to be. I want Luis’s baby. Best of all, I want Luis and his baby, but it doesn’t look as if I shall get both.’
‘But you knew,’ Lizzie cried. ‘You knew what he felt! You knew how he’d react! I mean, I can’t quite think how you can really love a man who thinks like that, but you seem to, and he never made any bones about it, did he?’
‘No. He didn’t. And the thing about love, you see, real love, is that when you love someone as I love him, you have to learn to accommodate yourself to qualities in your loved one that you would really detest in someone you didn’t love. That’s the nature of the beast, that’s it—’
‘Yes,’ Lizzie said, chastened. She sat on the sitting-room floor, in her dressing-gown, with the telephone on the sofa beside her. Frances said she was sitting on the floor too, in Fulham, but that she was wearing Luis’s dressing-gown, because that was what she always did now, what she liked to do.
‘Did—’ Lizzie began, and then stopped.
‘Did what?’
‘Did he – ask you for an abortion?’
‘No,’ Frances said sharply.
‘Have you got views on abortion? Odd, but we’ve never talked about it—’
‘If I had an abortion,’ Frances said loudly, ‘I’d be denying everything Luis and I’ve had, everything we’ve been to each other—’
‘Been? Aren’t you seeing him? Oh Frances—’
‘Yes, I’m seeing him. As much as before. He’s very loving to me.’
‘Then—’
‘Lizzie,’ Frances said, ‘I knew his mind and my mind, and I knew what I was doing and I’ve done it and I’m thrilled and I’m terrified and I think I’m right and I think I’m wrong. Got it?’
‘Yes,’ Lizzie whispered. She gripped the telephone. ‘Can – can I help you now?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I – I don’t know, specifically,’ Lizzie said, flailing about in her instinctive thoughts. ‘I mean, I suppose, about being pregnant, about having the baby. Where will you have it? Will you have it in Bath?’
‘I don’t think so—’
‘But London would be so bleak—’
‘Not London, either.’
‘Then—’
‘I shall probably have the baby in Spain,’ Frances said, ‘in Seville.’
Lizzie gave a little scream.
‘But why? You’re mad!’
‘Don’t be idiotic. Spain has wonderful hospitals, people have babies in Spain all the time.’
‘I don’t mean that!’ Lizzie cried. She was crouching on the floor, holding the receiver with it and her face almost touching the carpet. ‘I mean far away, from all of us, from your family.’
‘But it isn’t your baby,’ Frances said calmly. ‘It’s my and Luis’s baby.’
‘But he doesn’t want it!’
There was a little pause and then Frances said carefully, ‘He doesn’t want me to have it, but that isn’t quite the same thing.’
‘Oh Frances,’ Lizzie moaned, worn out, beyond being able to make much sense. ‘Oh Frances, are you all right?’
‘I don’t know,’ Frances said. Her voice sounded tight, as if she were restraining tears or feelings. ‘I really don’t know.’ She paused and then she said, ‘I just love him, you see. All the time. I just love him,’ and then she put the receiver down.
Robert had wanted, yawning and swaying with fatigue but still concerned and conscientious, to know what Frances had said. Lizzie could hardly tell him. She said Frances wasn’t even considering an abortion and that she was probably going to have the baby in Spain and then her voice died away. Robert waited for a little while and then said, with a kind of diffident politeness that he thought, if it was all right, that he’d go to bed. Lizzie nodded and automatically held her face up for a kiss which he gave her, too quickly, on the cheekbone. Then he had left her, making tea and not drinking it, going over and over what Frances had said as a way, among other things, of blotting out a horrible little voice that said, deep inside her and with piping insistency: But I’m the one who has babies!
18
IT WAS DESPERATELY hot. Even in the dark, cavernous hallway of the block of flats, the heat was like a muffling blanket. Out on the July streets, where there was no wind except perverse little gusts whose sole aim seemed to be to blow dust in your eyes, it had really been quite difficult to breathe.
The lift that served the flats lived inside a huge black-and-gilded cage ornamented with grotesque metal lilies and acanthus leaves. It was, Frances thought, a thoroughly Spanish piece of ironwork, heavy, ornate, grandiose, ridiculous and undeniably impressive. On a panel beside the portcullis-like folding lift-gates was a row of illuminated bells next to a row of neat white cards with names engraved on them; Dr Lurdes Piza, Señor e Señora J. S. Lorenzo, María Luisa Fernández Preciosa, Professor J. and Dr A. María de Mena. Frances counted to three and pressed the bell.
A faint crackling sound emerged from a small nearby grille, like the sound of an old-fashioned tannoy system at an English village fête, then a woman’s voice said, ‘¡Diga!’
‘Is Dr de Mena there?’ Frances asked. ‘Dr Ana de Mena?’
The voice thought a little.
‘¿Quién habla?’
‘Frances. Frances Shore.’
‘I will enquire.’
Frances waited in the dark vestibule by the little grille. At one end of the vestibule, half-glazed doors led back to the baking streets, and at the other end an archway framed the shabby little door to the apartment where the building’s concierge lived an apparently lightless existence. The door had been left propped open by a plastic bucket, presumably for
a gasp of air, and out of the bucket rose, in slow enquiry, the face of a tabby cat, who regarded Frances for some seconds, without approval, and then subsided again.
The grille crackled again.
‘Frances? Frances, I am sending the lift down. Come up.’
‘Thank you, oh thank you—’
A vast structure wreathed in cables and pulleys clanked ponderously downwards inside the iron cage. It shuddered to a halt, level with Frances, and allowed her to open and shut two sets of gates and to enter its gleaming mahogany interior, offset with bevelled looking-glasses and gilded sconces holding light bulbs like candle flames. Then it gathered up all its mighty strength and bore her heavily upwards to the de Menas’ apartment on the second floor.
Ana did not kiss Frances. She took her hand, held it for a moment quite firmly, and then dropped it. She was wearing a short-sleeved summer suit of saffron-yellow linen with gold buttons, and her hair, as sleek as if it were painted to her head, was held back by a black silk scarf spotted in white.
She led Frances into the salon. It was shrouded against the sun so that the furniture appeared to be a series of huge humped beasts crouched on the carpet. Only by the windows had a single slice of sunlight managed to sneak in under the blinds and lie there in defiance, no doubt bleaching the rug on which it had alighted.
‘It is too hot,’ Ana said. ‘Sevilla is terrible in July and August. I would never stay here in the summer if I didn’t have to. Would you like a granizado?’
‘Oh yes,’ Frances said gratefully. She sank down on the sofa she had sat on when Luis had brought her here to dinner, a ceremonial great sofa upholstered in tapestry. ‘It’s very kind of you to see me. I should have telephoned, I know, and I don’t quite know why I didn’t. I knew perfectly well, you see, that you aren’t in the hospital on Wednesdays, so I suppose I was trying to kid myself that it was an impulse.’
‘An impulse? To see me?’
‘To talk to you. To ask you something. That is, when I have told you something else.’
Ana went over to the door of the salon and called out for drinks to be brought. The voice that had first answered Frances replied that it would oblige when it had finished doing what it was currently busy with.
‘It’s María,’ Ana said. ‘She was like a nursemaid to Luis and me, and she came to me when I got married. She is more obstinate than a mule.’ She came back into the room and sat down at the opposite end of the sofa to Frances. ‘If she hasn’t appeared in five minutes, I will get the juice myself, even if it means ten minutes’ scolding for going into the kitchen, which is her kingdom.’
‘Ana—’ Frances said.
‘Yes?’
‘Ana, I think I just have to plunge in and tell you why I’ve come—’
‘I think so, too.’
Frances took a deep breath. This business of telling people she was pregnant ought to be getting easier with practice, but it didn’t seem to be. Each time she felt like a terrified child on the edge of a diving board above an icy and fathomless pool, holding her nose, closing her eyes, and leaping simply because the path of retreat was blocked.
‘I am pregnant,’ Frances said. ‘I am going to have a baby.’
There was a short pause in which neither of them moved, and then Ana said. ‘This is serious.’
‘I know.’
‘I will get this juice—’
‘I don’t need it—’
‘You do,’ Ana said, rising to her feet. ‘We do. We need something to occupy us while we talk about this.’
She went rapidly out of the room. Frances sat on the uncomfortable sofa and heard her calling to old María, and then old María’s voice rising in a squawk of protest. That squawk was what Frances had expected from Barbara when she had told her about the pregnancy but, to her amazement, it hadn’t come.
‘I see,’ Barbara had said, down the telephone.
‘What d’you mean, you see?’
‘I mean’, Barbara said, ‘that I have heard and taken in what you have just said, but that I haven’t yet got a reaction. At least, not over the telephone.’
‘I have to go to Spain next week,’ Frances said.
‘Do you?’
‘Yes. But when I’m back, I’m coming down to see you and Dad.’
‘I see.’
‘Mum, please don’t keep saying “I see” like this!’
‘You may find’, Barbara said unexpectedly, ‘that I see more than you think. Are you all right?’
‘Not particularly—’
‘No,’ Barbara said, ‘how could you be? But it was brave to ring. Better than writing—’
‘Writing!’
‘Letters,’ Barbara said witheringly. ‘Letters. The last refuge of the coward. You aren’t a coward—’
‘Oh Mum—’
‘Go to Spain,’ Barbara said. ‘Go to Spain and then come home and see us.’
And here she was in Spain, in Ana’s salon, being given a tall glass of translucent, whitish liquid, clattering with ice.
‘Now,’ Ana said, sitting down again, ‘does Luis know?’
‘Of course.’
‘And he is angry?’
‘Yes.’
‘You knew his views.’
‘Yes.’
‘It was an accident, of course.’
‘No,’ Frances said. ‘I meant to. I wanted a baby. I want Luis’s baby.’
Ana took a neat swallow of her drink. She sat bolt upright, raising the glass high with one smooth, olive-skinned arm, the other lying, in a controlled manner, in her lap. Frances bowed her head.
‘This, Frances, is a very bad situation.’
Frances waited.
‘It isn’t just the facts,’ Ana said, ‘though these are quite bad enough, but the complications. There are many moralities here in Spain, you have seen that with your own eyes, you have seen that the old conservative view and the new liberal view do not live easily together, that there is still so much – too much you will think, no doubt – that is allowed for a man and not for a woman. May I advise you a little?’
‘I wish you would,’ Frances said.
‘You know Luis’s and my family situation. You know about our mother, about José’s mother. You know about all the secrecy, the feuds. This – this pregnancy – cannot be known. You do understand that?’
‘You tell me so,’ Frances said. ‘Frankly, coming from England, it sounds perfectly extraordinary, so archaic, so melodramatic—’
‘I don’t know,’ Ana said firmly, interrupting. ‘I don’t know about English ways, I just know about my family here in Sevilla, in Spain. We are different, OK, so you must accept that.’ She leaned forward and pointed a forefinger at Frances, as if she were chastising her. ‘You must also, Frances, give up all claims now, on Luis, on his family. You must go home now and have this baby in England. I will talk to Luis about the money.’
Frances gazed at her.
‘Oh no.’
‘What?’
‘Oh no, Ana,’ Frances said. ‘I didn’t come for that. I didn’t come to be told like some nineteenth-century servant girl to take my shameful bundle out into the streets and never to darken these respectable doors again. I came for help.’
‘I gave it. I told you the best thing for you.’
‘You didn’t. You told me the best thing, or at least, the most convenient thing, for the de Menas and the Gómez Morenos. Spain is old-fashioned in lots of ways, it is stuffed with pride and family honour and Catholic guilt, but it is partly my country now too because I am carrying a half-Spanish baby.’
‘Half-English, too.’
‘Of course. But if I go to England, this baby will never see its father.’
‘Would that not be best?’
‘For whom?’ Frances cried indignantly. ‘For whom? For your mother?’
Ana looked away.
‘I am afraid that in some ways my mother is impossible.’
‘You will find,’ Frances said, ‘that if you don’t help
me, I will become impossible too.’
Ana turned back.
‘But what can you do? Luis is married and, even if he weren’t, he would not marry again. He doesn’t want this child—’ She stopped suddenly. She leaned forward. ‘Did he ask you to have an abortion?’
Frances flinched. She did not want to remember hating him so much.
‘Yes.’
‘And you refused?’
‘Of course I refused! How dare he? How dare he? I made this choice, I am not asking for anything, never mind what I hope and long for, except that he doesn’t abandon me just yet and that he never abandons the child! I wanted to kill him, I was so angry.’
Ana’s face was briefly shaken by some strong emotion. Then she said, not quite steadily, ‘It is a tragedy, this life of ours. Men want women, but women want children.’
‘Yes,’ Frances said harshly, not caring if she were being tactless. ‘Didn’t you?’
‘Oh, I can’t remember.’
‘Of course you can!’
‘You train yourself,’ Ana said. ‘You train your desires—’
‘And your instincts?’
Ana looked at her.
‘Not so easy.’
Frances finished her granizado and set the empty glass down on a table beside her.
‘I told a lie to my sister. I told her Luis had not asked for an abortion. That was instinctive, to protect Luis. I will tell her so much and no more and I can’t quite explain, even to myself, why I do this. But I know exactly why I’ve come to you.’
‘Yes,’ Ana said.
‘I’ve come because you are a doctor and I need your help in getting a bed in a hospital here to have my baby in December. I could, I suppose, have asked Luis, but I didn’t want to. I prefer to ask you. I want to have the baby here because it is our baby, not just my baby, and also because I want to have it in the country where I have been happier than I’ve ever been anywhere else and which is also the country of the man I love. These aren’t very rational reasons, I know, but they are quite tremendously powerful ones and if anyone in my life told me to stop listening to reason and to listen to my feelings instead, it was your brother, and if it’s all led to my downfall, it’s led to my bliss as well and I shan’t forget that ever, ever, as long as I live. Do you understand me?’
A Spanish Lover Page 27