A Spanish Lover

by Joanna Trollope

  Ana sighed.

  ‘I don’t know. This is like some waterfall—’

  ‘I mean it to be, I mean you to feel some of my urgency, some of my intensity, I mean to make you help me.’

  Ana got up. She walked about the room for a few steps, between the tables and the heavy chairs with their ball-and-claw feet, their strips of inlaid brass, their smooth, unyielding damask seats.

  ‘Does Luis know you have come?’

  ‘No. I will tell him if you agree. If you won’t, then I shan’t bother, I’ll simply ask him to pull strings instead.’

  ‘You are very determined.’

  ‘Or desperate,’ Frances said shortly.

  Ana turned to look at her.

  ‘Where will you have your pre-natal care?’

  ‘Wherever I happen to be, here or London—’

  ‘I will talk to a colleague.’

  Frances gripped the arm of the sofa.

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ana said, ‘I will. But don’t ask me why.’

  Luis turned back the sheet on Frances’s side of the bed and piled up the pillows. From behind the closed door to the bathroom came the sound of the shower, splashing down into the bathtub, pattering like rain against the panel of frosted glass that prevented the water from flooding the floor. Usually, Frances left the bathroom door open while she bathed or showered and Luis was obscurely and faintly troubled that tonight she had shut it. If there were going to be decisions taken about shutting each other out in any way just now, he wanted them to be his decisions. He wanted that not because he wished to dominate Frances, but because such decisions seemed to be the only tiny relief he could find just now from being so helplessly, ragingly angry with someone in whom he had come both to believe and trust, and in whom he was now so disappointed.

  He sat down on the edge of the bed and spread one hand out on the space of sheet where she would lie. She astonished him. No, astonished was far too feeble a word, she astonished him, appalled him, terrified him, she took his breath away, she stunned him by her outrageous, bare-faced audacity in making herself pregnant by him against his clearly expressed wishes. He didn’t think he had ever felt so betrayed or so furious or so utterly uncomprehending in his entire life. She hadn’t left him so much gasping for words as gasping for thoughts, and whenever he felt too furiously bewildered to be able to articulate even a simple remark to her, he would then be further confused by a rush of love for her, by a most peculiar tenderness. He sprang off the bed as if he had been burned. What in God’s name was he doing, smoothing sheets and patting pillows? Why did he keep finding cushions for her back, telephoning her in London to see if she was resting, looking at her thickening body with a most complicated mixture of interest, protectiveness and desire? Why did he? Because he couldn’t help himself, that’s why. Because he, Luis Fernando María Gómez Moreno, despite all the social and religious tenets of his rigid upbringing, simply couldn’t help himself, and it was driving him mad.

  And now she had enlisted Ana! She had gone to Ana’s flat and asked her, outright, for help and been promised it! And when he, Luis, had demanded, over supper, to know how she had dared to do such a thing without consulting him, she had said that he couldn’t have his cake and eat it, which was a typically evasive English saying which seemed to mean ‘No puedes tenerlo todo’, or ‘You can’t have everything’, which in its turn was an outrageous thing to say because it seemed to him, at the moment, that he had nothing. Nothing! He had nothing and yet he was still involved. He had protested, as he had once previously protested to her in Granada, that he was a civilized man, not a wild beast, and that of course he was concerned for her welfare!

  ‘Mine perhaps,’ Frances said, ‘but not the baby’s.’

  ‘I don’t know!’ he’d shouted. ‘I don’t think about this baby, I can’t because I know it means the end and I cannot stand that this doesn’t break your heart like it is breaking mine!’

  ‘Yours is only breaking because you are breaking it yourself. You are determined that this baby shall be the end and not the beginning!’

  ‘I don’t want it,’ he said more quietly. ‘I am not determined, I just know. I hate this knowledge, but I know.’

  It was then, looking at her, he’d seen how tired she was, worn-out tired, bleached by fatigue. Have a shower, he’d said, go to bed, you must rest, Frances, really you must, how foolish you are to drive yourself like this.

  ‘But I have to, because you won’t help me—’

  ‘I do help you, I do, I look after you—’

  ‘That’s not what I mean. It’s this relentless fatalism of yours that I have to fight all the time.’

  He’d looked at her across the remains of their supper, the plates strewn with grains of yellow rice, fragments of sweet red peppers, little piles of blue-black mussel shells. He said, ‘I’m not like this because I want to be like this, I’m like this because this is what I am.’

  She’d sighed, a huge deep sigh from the very depths of her.

  ‘And I am what I am too.’

  ‘In Spain, we are not very good at compromise—’

  ‘In England, we look as if we’re very good at it, but deep down, we’re as bad as anyone else. We just harbour resentments.’

  ‘Come,’ he said, holding his hand out, ‘bedtime.’

  She took his hand, and let him lead her across the room towards the bathroom. The man in the house across the alley had started mournfully on his guitar, the long, lamenting strains mixing with the muted chatter of people drifting past below. Luis opened the bathroom door.

  ‘Have a shower, and I will make the bed ready.’

  She turned and gave him a small, tired smile. ‘Thank you,’ she said and then she closed the door on him.

  She was, she discovered later in the tremendously hot night, too tired to sleep. She had climbed into bed almost fainting with relief and had then expected to fall heavily and smoothly into sleep like a stone dropped over a cliff. Luis had waited until she was comfortable and then he had said he would go down to the hotel’s dining room and bar, just for an hour, and give José a bit of a fright. Would she be all right? Yes, she said, nodding slightly on the pillows, eyes already closed, yes, I’ll be fine, I’m nearly asleep already, thank you for looking after me so kindly. But she had then waited and waited for sleep to come in vain, listening to the sounds of Seville from the alley below, remembering Ana in the shadowy room that afternoon, remembering the quiveringly hot streets on the walk home, remembering the odd little look of hurt on Luis’s face when she came out of the bathroom at last having cried her heart out in the muffling cascade of water from the shower.

  She had shut him out deliberately, not because she wanted to, but because she felt she had to, she had to begin to acclimatize herself to not turning to him. Something had frightened her on the walk back from Ana’s apartment to the posada that afternoon, something had made her realize how vulnerable she was now that she was pregnant and how very vulnerable she would become when there was a baby to be cared for before herself. She had been coming along past the walls of the Convent of the Mother of God when she had caught her foot clumsily in a broken piece of pavement and fallen with a cry, not just of surprise, but of sudden panic. She had fallen on her side, not particularly hard or heavily, and had then lain there on the dusty stones, in a most paralyzing, disconcerting state of fear, until a man and a woman came hurrying across the street from a building opposite, and, with much clucking and soothing, had helped her to her feet. She had felt dizzy. The street and the sky seemed to swoop about her in the most sickening way, and she had leaned on the man, who was small and square and in his fifties, as if he were the only thing that prevented her from spinning off into a void.

  ‘I am pregnant,’ she heard herself say in a remote, precise voice to the woman. ‘I must not fall, if I am pregnant.’

  They had assisted her across the street and on to a wooden chair in a slice of black shadow cast by a house wall. They brought
her water, they asked if she would like a doctor. No, she said, I just frightened myself by falling. The woman had then shrieked for her daughter, and between them, they had accompanied Frances through the few streets home, telling her, as they went, unencouraging and dramatic accounts of their own pregnancies and childbirths. They were truly kind, truly sympathetic. They left Frances in the shady green courtyard of the hotel, with many injunctions to take care of herself, and it was only when they had gone that she realized with rising alarm that it was always going to be like this now, that she would always, in some part of herself, be defenceless and in need of other people. In defending this baby of hers, she would not, any longer, always be able to defend herself.

  It was this glimpse of a new, and disquieting, state of affairs that had led her, out of a childish feeling that she must start now as she had to go on, to shut the door on Luis. She must get used to being alone again, she told herself, even if this was a very different kind of aloneness. He insisted upon it, after all, it was he who was determined that their love for one another couldn’t survive Frances’s becoming a mother. She might find it incomprehensible, intolerable, mad, but as the weeks wore on, she couldn’t any longer tell herself that she was imagining it. Nor could she tell herself she hadn’t known what she was doing, or been misled into thinking Luis might turn out to be different from what he said he was.

  He still said, though less angrily now, that she had deceived him. Of course she had. She had been the one to take contraceptive responsibility, had indeed offered to be the one since Luis was not of a generation of men to whom such responsibility came at all naturally, and then she had been the one to drop that responsibility in the bathroom bin, and not confess to what she had done. In the crudest, simplest terms, she had tried to use him to get what she wanted which was a baby, a baby by him, the baby that had come to mean, for her, the rich, natural outcome of everything they were to one another.

  Had she done that, she now wondered, sliding her feet round the too-warm sheets in search of a cool place, because she believed she knew what was good for him better than he knew himself? Had she done it because she felt she was right and he was wrong and that, therefore, her desires took precedence over his objections? Was she therefore being patronizing as well as dishonest? What in the end, Frances demanded of herself in the hot darkness lit by gleams of lamplight from the alley, is the truth? What is true about a person, and is truth the same as worth? I am honest with myself, I do believe I am, and however hard it is, I am not trying to pretend I don’t long for this baby and for Luis. Whether this makes me a less worthy person, I don’t know, I can’t tell. If you’re honest with yourself, then you have to live with the horrible truths about yourself, whatever happens, but surely self-delusion of any kind is only a slow death in the end? I’ve surrendered to myself, to the truth, the instinctive truth of myself, and now look where I am …

  The door opened quietly.

  ‘Luis?’

  ‘I didn’t want to wake you—’

  ‘I wasn’t asleep. It’s so hot—’

  ‘Would you like some water?’

  ‘Oh please.’

  He crossed the room to the bathroom and turned the light on and then she heard him humming and the sound of water pouring into a glass. The tiny domesticity of it was suddenly almost more than she could bear.

  19

  WILLIAM WAITED BY the gate. It was a heavy, thundery, windless day and a queer, grey-gold light lay on the fields opposite, and the poplars in the hedgerow and the distant scattered roofs of the village. While he waited, he tied up wayward fronds of the climbing rose that grew over the wall by the drive gate. He couldn’t remember the name. It was a dreary little rose, pinkish fading to no colour as it opened with flat, fragile petals which fell off at the first draught of wind. Perhaps it didn’t have a name, didn’t deserve to.

  He had come out to watch for Frances, partly because Barbara had made it plain that, if he went on fidgeting round her in the house for one more minute, she might murder him. He knew he was being annoying, restless and aimless, picking things up and putting them down, starting sentences he didn’t finish, wandering about, but that was the sort of thing that happened when you were upset and William didn’t think he had ever felt more wretchedly upset in his life.

  It had never crossed his mind that Frances might start a baby, simply never entered his head as a possibility. He had thought only how lovely it was to see Frances so free and so fulfilled, to see her doing something that took her out of the lifelong controlling habits of her existence. It bad occurred to him once or twice that the love affair might very well end, and that Frances would then be desolated and yet still enriched, and Barbara could say I told you so, over and over, but it had simply never struck him that this enormous complication might arise and change everything in Frances’s life, for ever. And then – and here his hands began to shake as if they had a crazy life of their own – change everything in everyone else’s, too.

  ‘It wouldn’t strike you,’ Barbara said. ‘Things never do. You never think through problems, you never have, you just amble past them as if they were no concern of yours.’

  Frances must be my concern, William thought now, pricking an unsteady finger sharply on a rose thorn. She is my concern because she will now go straight back to where she came from, all the growth of the last eighteen months will be wasted, and the awful thing is that I find I want her to come back. I want her to be where everything is safe and conventional and we – I – can look after her. He glanced at his finger. A bead of blood sat on it, bright and neat. William put his finger in his mouth. He remembered, with sudden acuteness, standing in his tidy kitchen all those years ago rejoicing that the twins were on their way to him. Now Frances was on her way to him again, but oh, in such different circumstances, without that beautiful clean sheet of paper ahead of her which was one of the chief charms of babyhood, of innocence, and without the certainty of a secured future.

  A horn sounded. William dropped his roll of garden twine and hurried out into the lane, waving and gesturing. Frances slowed her car until the window of the driver’s door was level with him. He peered in at her.

  ‘Darling—’

  She wore a dark-blue overshirt and white trousers and sunglasses.

  ‘Dad. Were you watching for me?’

  ‘Of course—’

  She tried a smile. It wasn’t very successful and William realized that he was wearing an expression of consummate anxiety. He changed it at once. Poor girl. What help to her was it to look as if the end of the world was nigh? He reached into the car and patted her hand.

  ‘Drive on in,’ he said. ‘I’ll close the gate behind you.’

  Barbara said they would sit in the garden, under the tulip tree. She said it was absolutely airless indoors, and she led Frances firmly outside and made her sit in the most comfortable chair, a huge old wooden structure that had belonged to William’s father, with a footrest and a bookrest and a shelf with holes in it, for drinks.

  ‘I’m not ill,’ Frances protested.

  ‘No. But probably tired. There is nothing to be said for being pregnant, it’s a frightful state. Do you feel sick?’

  ‘I’m beginning not to—’

  ‘Oh Frances,’ William said suddenly, tremulously. ‘Oh Frances!’

  They both looked at him.

  ‘I never thought—’

  ‘Dad,’ Frances said pleadingly, ‘please don’t, please don’t make things worse—’

  ‘It’s the sight of you,’ William said, hunting furiously for a handkerchief. ‘It’s seeing you there, and knowing.’

  ‘Knowing what?’

  ‘That you can’t get away now,’ William said, blowing into his handkerchief. ‘That you’re trapped now!’

  Barbara said calmly, amazingly, ‘She doesn’t want to get away.’

  Frances stared at her. Barbara stared back.

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘No, I—’

  ‘You want thi
s baby, don’t you? You told me you meant to have it and I imagine I may believe you?’

  ‘Oh yes—’

  ‘Then don’t talk bilge,’ Barbara said to William. ‘Don’t talk sentimental bilge.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘But what?’ Barbara said, standing up. ‘But she’ll be an unmarried mother? Is that it? Does that upset your cosy notions of how life should be organized – adultery is absolutely fine but babies should always have a mummy and a daddy living in a state of married tidiness even if it’s also a state of purgatory, rather than of bliss?’

  ‘Stop it!’ Frances shrieked. ‘Stop it!’

  ‘He makes me so angry,’ Barbara said less heatedly. ‘He’s so idle and hypocritical. He’s so—’

  ‘I didn’t come for this! I didn’t come to umpire one of your quarrels!’

  ‘Sorry,’ William whispered.

  Barbara said, ‘I shall go and get tea.’

  Frances put her head back against the chair and watched her mother move briskly and stiffly away across the grass.

  ‘I want you to come home now, you see,’ William said the moment Barbara was out of earshot. ‘I want you to come home now and have the baby here and let us help you and look after you.’

  Frances rolled her head so that she could look at him.

  ‘So does Lizzie.’

  ‘Ah. Yes.’

  ‘What does Mum want? She wouldn’t say on the telephone. You might as well tell me, everyone else is telling me what they want, after all.’

  ‘She wants you – to do what you want.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ Frances cried. ‘Nonsense! She’s never wanted that in my entire life!’

  ‘Well, she does now.’

  Frances looked intently at him. He looked not so much shrunken as collapsed, his sweet, worn face quite devitalized.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘She thinks’, William said slowly, ‘that if you feel you should have this baby in Spain then you should. I feel quite the opposite. I feel you must be where there are people to support you. I usen’t to feel this, I used to feel you should be away from all of us, all the guy ropes cut, but now I feel you must be where there is some security because – because—’