A Spanish Lover

by Joanna Trollope

  Frances liked her doctor. She was called María Luisa Ramírez, and she had come to Seville with her mother, after her father died, and her mother, a Sevillian, had longed to return home. Dr Ramírez had been born in the rainy, green Atlantic region of the north, and she said her parents were both spiritually and politically conservative. She told Frances that her childhood had been very happy, orderly and settled, belonging to an almost vanished era whose annual cycles were punctuated by family occasions, schooling, and the frequent festivals of the Catholic Church. At the feast of Corpus Christi, she said, her family’s whole town combined to cover the streets with the innumerable petals of flowers painstakingly arranged in complicated patterns, like a carpet, for the holy procession to walk over. They stayed up all night, making these flower carpets, and although Dr Ramírez said she was now an atheist and a socialist, she still remembered those nights before Corpus Christi as some of the happiest times she had ever spent.

  She never asked Frances personal questions that didn’t relate either to Frances’s or the baby’s welfare. They both referred to Luis simply as ‘the father’. Dr Ramírez had known Ana de Mena for three years, so Frances supposed that she must also make the connection, but if so, she didn’t speak of it. She handled Frances, both physically and psychologically, with great sympathy. She loved working as an obstetrician, she said, it gave her both satisfaction and hope. For her first years in Seville, before she had taken a special course in gynaecology and obstetrics, she had worked in the huge hospital that served Triana, the poorer quarter of Seville, on the other side of the river. She had worked mostly in the casualty department there, but had grown afraid of what such work was doing to her.

  ‘If death becomes commonplace,’ she told Frances, ‘your sense of morality diminishes.’

  Frances thought that they were probably about the same age. She tried to imagine Dr Ramírez’s home life with her mother in the flat they shared in the west of the city, behind the Fine Arts Museum. For all Frances knew, Dr Ramírez simply lived with her mother and worked in the hospital, a steady, uneventful, useful life, undisturbed by the tempest of falling in love or longing for a baby. The thought of the English equivalent – working in a hospital in Bath and living in Barbara’s newly acquired flat there – was somehow both ludicrous and impossible, yet the alternative Frances had chosen, she told herself, was hardly less so, in its way.

  She had, in the late summer, suggested to Nicky that she become a partner with her in Shore to Shore, with responsibility both for the English end of the business and for the lease on the office and flat in Fulham, an arrangement to take effect on the 1st of December, a week before the baby was due. Nicky had been serenely pleased about this, just as she had been calmly congratulatory about the baby and reticent on the subject of Luis. Frances had then informed Luis that she would like his help in setting up an office in Seville.

  ‘Hopeless,’ he had said at once. ‘Wrong nationality, wrong Spanish city, wrong timing.’

  ‘I can’t help that,’ Frances said, ‘I have to be here. English people do set up businesses in Spain all the time. Look at all those bars and blocks of flats and golf courses all along the Costa del Sol—’

  ‘You need connections,’ Luis said.

  ‘You are my connection!’

  ‘Frances,’ Luis said, ‘what is it you intend?’

  She had tried not to sound impatient.

  ‘I am trying to stay in the place where our child has the best chance of seeing both parents. And for myself, I am trying to stay in Spain.’

  He had shrugged, but he hadn’t argued further. He had simply said in that level, calm, kind voice he now used with her most of the time that she could not just set up a business on her own in Seville, it simply wouldn’t work, she would have to buy into one. He told her that the bureaucracy involved would put all that she had already encountered at the hospital in the shade.

  ‘It is very difficult to get residency in Spain. It might involve you in visits to a dozen offices. Are you prepared for that? Also as many visits for bank accounts, for getting the utilities connected to a flat or an office. And your fiscal identity number. Every Spaniard has one. More visits, more bureaucracy, more red tape. It could take you months, very repetitive, very slow. Do you really want to face all that?’

  ‘Yes,’ Frances said.

  He had introduced her, down a labyrinthine chain of business friends, to a man who owned, among other things, a travel company at an excellent address in Seville, just off the Calle Sierpes. There had been several meetings conducted, on the Spanish side, with perfect courtesy and, at the same time, with a palpable amazement at Frances’s proposals, nationality and condition.

  ‘This is most unusual,’ the owner of the travel company had said, over and over again. ‘This is not at all common in Spain. How will it be financed? How will it proceed? Is it practical? Is it possible?’

  Frances had brought her company accounts out to Seville, proud of the turnover they showed. They were taken from her politely but very gingerly, as if her pregnant state somehow invalidated and made preposterous the pages of satisfactory figures, as if her presence in the office was like a bomb ticking quietly in an airline bag, and she might just explode, without warning, there and then, and make a farce of a sober business meeting. There were many glances at her left hand. On it she wore, as she had now worn for over a year, a silver ring Luis had given her set with an intaglio of chrysoprase, as green as jade. It was definitely not a wedding ring, was it, the glances said, but on the other hand, it was on the wedding finger. Yet this determined Señorita Shore had been sent by Luis Gómez Moreno with whom the owner of the travel company had, all those years ago, taken his first communion. And the figures were excellent, the rate of growth of her company steady, her proposals for offering English holidays in small, selected hotels to Spanish people certainly possible … He smiled at Frances.

  ‘These holidays would have to be most carefully planned. The Spanish, as a race, like to keep moving—’

  ‘I’ve noticed,’ Frances said.

  Except now, she thought, leaning forward in the taxi. The driver, now well clear of the procession, was still driving with reverent slowness, gazing at the scene behind him in the driving mirror.

  ‘Please,’ she said urgently, ‘please, I would like you to hurry—’

  His eyes met hers in the mirror. He smiled again, and jerked his right thumb backwards towards the painted idol in her tinsel crown behind them, smiling her vacant red smile.

  ‘You should pray to her,’ the taxi driver said. ‘You should pray to the Virgin, to grant you a fine son.’

  Frances fell back against the seat. Could he mean what he had just said, could he literally mean it? If so, it wasn’t just another language he spoke in, it was another world of concepts he inhabited, a world she had elected to join. A contraction seized her. She gave a little gasp.

  ‘It’s exactly,’ she said, ‘nine months too late for that.’

  The hospital was new. Half of it was finished and orderly, with lawns and car-parks and bossy notice-boards planted in beds of begonias, and half of it was still a building site. Frances had been there once before to register as a future patient and to fill in a thousand forms, some for the Spanish regional health authority, some for the Spanish national health system and some for the relevant department of the European Community, sanctioning Miss Frances Shore to the benefits of the English National Health Service within the boundaries of member states. The staff who had dealt with her had shown no surprise; presumably, to them, to wish to have a baby in Seville was as natural as breathing.

  Between them, Ana and Dr Ramírez had done Frances proud. She was taken into a small single room off the general labour ward, with a view, not of cement mixers and cranes, but of a grove of new young palm trees planted in an equally new lawn of tough Spanish grass, and scattered about with metal seats painted in the colours so beloved by Seville, ochre and white and dusty-pink. There were a few round flowe
rbeds empty yet of any flowers, whose reddish earth an old man in faded overalls was tenderly sprinkling with water. Beyond the palm grove and the lawn, the blocks of flats of northern Seville began again festooned with strings of washing, and further away still was a church tower and a bell tower and the dome of something – a convent perhaps – on which a golden crucifix glimmered in the sun.

  The room itself was scrupulously new, bare and clean, white walls, white floor, white bed, white bedside cupboard, white basin, pale-green slatted blinds. On the bedside cupboard stood a vase of yellow roses with a tiny card propped beside it. ‘From Ana,’ the card said, ‘with very best wishes.’ There were no other flowers, no other card. The little room was more impersonal than any room Frances had ever entered, yet it still held an unmistakable air of adventure, a sense that it was a blank sheet waiting to be scribbled on, that it was there, anonymously, noiselessly, just to serve some great purpose.

  Frances sat down on the white plastic chair by the window. She would undress when she was told to, get into bed when she was told to, but not before. A nurse had said she would be with her in five minutes, and Frances believed her. For five minutes, she would sit dociley on her chair, timing herself, and peer out through the slats of the blind at the old man in the gardens watering the empty earth. Perhaps he was going to plant something. Should you plant anything in December, even in Seville, even on a soft day like today which might so easily turn into a piercing day, like Frances’s first day in Seville almost two years ago, when Luis had followed her fleeing taxi to the airport and had then sat there, for hours, attempting to persuade her to stay?

  She hadn’t stayed; she’d been adamant about not staying, and now look at her, pregnant by him in a Spanish hospital. The last few months had been so peculiar, so disorientating, that she could hardly remember the feel of that other Frances, the Frances she had always been before. And in a short time, she would be yet another Frances, a mother Frances, and a lifetime’s journey would have begun.

  The last few weeks, since her arrival in Seville, had been spent in Ana’s apartment. Luis had been perfectly happy with the prospect of Frances remaining in his flat in the hotel – he would himself, he made it plain, retreat to Madrid – but there had been a problem in this arrangement in the form of José. José was outraged at Frances’s pregnancy. He had liked Frances, trusted her, admired her, and now she had appalled him. For his father to have a girlfriend was fine by José; for his father to have an English girlfriend was initially not so fine by José but he had grown to accept it, but for that girlfriend to become pregnant by his father and then declare she would have the baby in Seville, in the city where José lived, where his mother and grandmothers lived, where the Gómez Morenos were known, were respected, was not only not at all fine, it was intolerable. It was also intolerable, almost to the point beyond bearing, for José to think that his father would soon have another child. Even though that child would initially only be a baby, it would still threaten José’s lifelong position as Luis’s only child and heir. José could not bring himself to think that this situation was in any way his father’s fault. That was out of the question! It was all Frances’s fault, she was wholly to blame. José would not see her. He would not speak to her on the telephone. When appealed to by Frances, Luis said that there was nothing he could do.

  ‘You knew all this,’ he said gravely to Frances. He was never angry with her now, only kind and quiet, telephoning faithfully every day to ask after her health, deflecting all talk of feeling. ‘You know how my family is, how Spain is. If you make decisions, you must accept the consequences, and you have made the decisions, for you and for me.’

  ‘I thought José was my friend—’

  ‘He feels betrayed,’ Luis said.

  ‘But Ana—’

  ‘Ana is different. Ana is more modern than José, even though she is his aunt. But why am I saying this? Why am I troubling? You knew it all, Frances, you knew it, you knew it, I hid nothing from you, I told you everything just as it is. Why do you imagine that, just because you have changed, everyone else must change to suit you?’

  ‘Because’, Frances said, ‘what is happening seems to me so utterly natural that I can’t—’

  ‘Please, don’t go on,’ he said. ‘Please stop.’

  Frances bent now and picked two letters out of her bag, one from Barbara, one from Sam. They were both about houses, about the new places they were living in or about to live in. Frances had read them several times and was amazed at the comfort they gave her, the feeling of support. Barbara said her flat was quite high up, in a tall house off Lansdown, and it had a balcony and a view and plenty of sunshine. She said the stairs were a nuisance, but that the landlord was planning to install a lift, which would be an asset when Frances came to stay with the baby. She said William came to see her a lot, bringing books and flowers and pieces of interesting cheese.

  ‘I think he is still going up to see Juliet too, so I suppose very little has changed for him, in essence, but then, he would be the first to admit he has always fought change tooth and nail. You are about to face a lot of change on the other hand, and I hope you won’t be dismayed. It’s perfectly possible, in life, to choose something that is absolutely right for you, but not subsequently find the results of the choice either easy or always likeable. But we can’t go against our natures, especially if we only discover the truth of them rather late in the day. I think about you.’

  It was signed, ‘Love from Mum.’ Barbara had, long ago, hated being called ‘Mum’, she had wanted to be called ‘Mother’, but Lizzie and Frances called her ‘Mum’ because that was the word everyone else at school used, ‘my mum’, ‘Lynne’s mum’, ‘Sally’s mum’. It was an odd name in any case, for Barbara, who would never have sprung to anyone’s mind as a shining example of motherliness. But that was a good letter, a heartening letter, a better letter in all sorts of ways than William’s more openly loving, anxious, unhappy ones, brimming with his own apprehensions for her. William’s letters did not permit Frances the dignity of her own choices, and of living by the consequences of them, they were too full of fear for her, for that.

  Sam’s, on the other hand, was blithe. He had had to write a letter, he explained, as part of his English homework so he thought he might as well write to her. He said their new house was going to be pretty superb because it backed on to the recreation ground and he could have his bed in a sort of attic thing at the top with a funny roof. Grandpa was going to live in some rooms stuck on the side and Mum was going to have a studio in the garage. He said he had new football boots with red laces (pretty superb also) and that Davy was learning the violin and practised all day and all night and it sounded like a cat being strangled. Harriet had had all her hair cut off, Dad had a cold and Alistair was in love with the new school-dinner lady. Sam hoped Frances knew that oranges came from Seville but that they had a rotten football team, nothing like as brilliant as Madrid or Bilbao. Then he wrote, ‘Phew, 150 words, end of prep, I can stop. Have a nice baby. Love from Sam.’

  There was nothing from Lizzie, even though she had addressed the envelope, not even a quick little message at the end of Sam’s smudged sheet. It was no good feeling anything about that because to be left alone was what she had asked for. Or rather, demanded. Count your blessings, she’d said to Lizzie, make plans, stop talking. Well, now Lizzie had a plan involving one of that row of sturdy semi-detached Edwardian villas Frances remembered along one side of Langworth’s recreation ground, villas decorated with patches of half-timbering and stucco. There was a row of lime trees between their back gardens and the football pitches, and their small front gardens had low double-gates with latches, giving on to the road. They could all walk to school from one of those houses, to the Gallery, and the bowling club which William said he had joined, as a joke, to annoy Juliet and which he had then discovered he liked. ‘I also discover,’ he wrote, ‘that I have a certain aptitude. It is not a heroic sport but it’s subtler than you think.’


  A vision rose before Frances, a domestic, English small-town vision of a front garden strewn with bicycles, of banging doors and running children, of bus routes and neighbourly disapproval of washing hung out on Sundays, of music practice and bowling practice and meals eaten round the kitchen table without a single mouthful of what was being eaten being discussed as a matter of serious concern, of rain and shrub roses and Cornflakes mewing at the window to be let in. It seemed, all at once, to be as familiar as the back of her own hand, and as distant as the moon.

  The door of her room opened. A nurse came in, a neat little dark-haired nurse, her white shoes silent on the white floor.

  ‘Señora Shore?’

  ‘Yes,’ Frances said.

  ‘Are you timing your contractions?’

  ‘About every five minutes,’ Frances said. She stooped and slid the letters back into her bag. They were England, and then. This was Spain, and now.

  ‘Frances?’

  She opened her eyes. Luis was bending over her, dressed in a business suit and holding a long paper cone of flowers.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Are you all right? Was it all right?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, pulling herself up into a sitting position. ‘It was. It was quite easy. Perhaps it’s one of the few things I’ll turn out to be good at.’

  He laid the flowers on the foot of the bed. He did not seem quite composed.

  ‘I came as quickly as I could—’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said politely.

  He looked down at her for a few seconds, and then he bent and kissed her.

  ‘It did not hurt too much?’

  ‘Oh, of course it hurt, it’s bound to hurt, but Dr Ramírez was wonderful and anyway, it’s a different kind of pain to any other pain because it’s constructive. Aren’t you going to look at him?’