Luis took her hand in both his.
‘Yes, yes, of course—’
Frances glanced at the foot of the bed where a clear plastic cradle was neatly parked on its rubber wheels.
‘Usually, he’s beside me, so I can gaze voluptuously at him, but when I go to sleep, for some reason they always wheel him down there. Go and see.’
‘Yes,’ Luis said, not moving. ‘A boy.’
‘Yes. A little boy. A little fair-haired, dark-eyed boy. Where could he have come from?’
‘You sound so happy!’
‘Of course I do!’ she almost shouted. ‘I’m ecstatic, I’ve never achieved anything like this in my life! I’m due to start crying tomorrow, apparently people always do, but today I could rule the world—’
He gave her hand a little squeeze and dropped it. Then he went to the end of the bed and looked down into the cradle, standing almost to attention above it as if apprehensive of what he was about to see.
‘Pick him up,’ Frances said.
He made a helpless kind of gesture, half-laughing.
‘Shall I? How shall I?’
‘Use your wits, Luis!’ Frances cried. ‘Just do what’s natural! Just put your hands under him and pick him up!’
He stooped. He put his hands into the cradle. His face was suffused with a sudden dark colour as it sometimes was when he was furious. Heavens, Frances thought, watching, is he going to cry? Luis slowly lifted the sleeping baby and put him against his shoulder and he instantly curved himself into Luis, relaxed and comfortable. Luis gave Frances a look almost of anguish and then shook his head, as if trying to understand something quite impossible. Then he walked slowly over to the window, and stood there with his back to the bed, holding the baby.
Frances sat upright in bed and waited. She considered saying that she had chosen a name for the baby, and that Ana had been to see her, and that there was a possibility of a nice-sounding flat, near the river, about a quarter of a mile from the Maestranza Bullring. All these were factual things she could say as a substitute, for the time being, for all the nonfactual things she longed to ask, and they might provoke him into saying something in reply instead of just standing there, with his back to her and the baby’s head tucked into the side of his neck, thinking thoughts that she would, at this moment, have given her soul to know.
‘Luis?’
He didn’t reply. He didn’t move. He simply stood there and she could see neither of their faces. She leaned sideways in the bed, towards them, gripping the edge of the thin mattress in its clean stiff layers of rubber and cotton.
‘Luis? Luis, what are you thinking?’
He turned round. His cheeks were wet with tears, shining as if they had been varnished.
‘Luis?’
‘I – I don’t know what to say to you—’
‘Are you happy?’ she demanded, joyfully. ‘Aren’t you happy now?’
‘Happy,’ he said scornfully, ‘such a silly little word—’ He turned his head and kissed the baby. Then he moved one hand to hold him more securely, pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket, and blew his nose thunderously. The baby didn’t stir. Frances, watching them, thought she might faint. She looked down at the floor past her gripping knuckles. Wasn’t this it, wasn’t this what she had hoped and hoped for, this moment when all the natural elements came together and she could actually see Luis, unable to help himself, adoringly kissing their baby?
‘He is perfect,’ Luis said. ‘He is beautiful.’
‘I know.’
‘He looks so intelligent—’
‘Of course.’
‘He looks like you.’
‘And you.’
‘Yes,’ he said delightedly, ‘he does, doesn’t he, he looks like me!’
Frances let go of the mattress edge and inched herself backwards across the bed to her pillows.
She said, ‘He’s called Antonio.’
‘Is he? Why is he? There is no Antonio in my family.’
‘Nor in mine—’
‘Then why?’
‘Because I like it, because it’s easy to say in English too. Because—’ She stopped.
‘Because what? Because he can be, you think, Anthony Shore, if he chooses?’
‘Yes.’
‘But—’
‘Luis,’ she said, and looked at him with mock sternness.
He kissed the baby again.
‘He loves me already, look at him, you can see it!’
‘Yes.’
‘You are wonderful,’ Luis said, suddenly, passionately. ‘You are so wonderful to have this baby!’
She held her breath. He stood above her, holding the baby tightly to him, his face full of fervour, of ardour even, but when she looked up, to meet his gaze, she saw – and there could be no mistaking it – that the ardour was no longer for her.
22
‘MY FLAT IS quite high up too,’ Frances wrote to Barbara, ‘and it gets the sun in the morning, and there’s a balcony just big enough for Antonio’s pram. It was terribly difficult to find a pram fit for a boy. Spanish prams are perfectly awful, covered in ruffles, all ready for flamenco. Lizzie would have a fit at my furniture, everything looks like reject props from an amateur production of Carmen, but I don’t really mind. It’s light and it’s convenient, and when I start work in earnest next month there’s a wonderful crèche for Antonio two streets away, run by nuns.’
The nuns wore pale-grey habits over white stockings and sensible black shoes. They were a tiny order, founded by two wealthy and pious sisters in the fifteenth century, with the aim of looking after the orphaned babies of Seville and, more importantly, bringing them up to be devout Catholics. There was even, in the whitewashed wall beside the main entrance, an iron flap, like a huge letterbox, with a metal cage behind it, for the long ago depositing of unwanted babies. The flap was sealed up now, from behind, with a wooden board, but Sister Rufina – named, she said proudly, after one of Seville’s two patron saints – who ran the crèche for the babies and small children of working mothers, told Frances that the sisters still, very occasionally, opened the door in the morning to find a baby, now in a plastic laundry basket, on the step. Sister Rufina thought that girls came over the river at night from Triana, where there was a serious drug problem, because several of the babies, in the last few years, had been diagnosed as already drug dependent. These babies went straight to hospital because the sisters no longer ran an orphanage, only a clinic for mothers and babies, in this local quarter, and the crèche. Sister Rufina had been very admiring of Antonio.
‘What a beautiful baby!’
‘And so happy,’ Frances said. ‘A really merry baby.’
‘Is he a good sleeper?’
‘No,’ Frances said, ‘he’s a true Spaniard. He’s an all-night song and dance man.’
Sister Rufina would look after Antonio from eight in the morning, until three in the afternoon, five days a week, throughout the coming summer. While she did that, Frances would work from the dark suite of offices, where she was now, after extraordinary patience and persistence, a partner in a travel company whose new name couldn’t quite be decided upon. Frances favoured ‘Special Journeys’; her new, and senior, partner Juan Carlos María de Rivas preferred ‘The Spanish-English Travel Company’. Frances had already discovered a handful of interesting-sounding small hotels scattered across the western end of Andalucía, some of them run by expatriate English on the broad lines of English country-house hotels, and was at the same time working up Spanish interest in similar kinds of hotels in England, suggested by Nicky. She also retained a business relationship with the Posadas of Andalucía. She received polite, formal letters from José, and one or two, occasionally, from Luis, signed by a secretary on his behalf.
‘Money is a bit of a juggling act,’ she went on, in her fortnightly letter to Barbara, ‘but I think we shall manage. It’s odd how different things are cheap and expensive abroad and also how differently you seem to spend money. The doctor who
delivered Antonio has become rather a friend – she wants us to learn to ride together – and I see something of Luis’s sister, Ana. I don’t know if I really like her or not, but she seems to like me which of course I’m grateful for. I see Luis when he comes to collect Antonio—’
This was most weekends. He hardly missed one. He bore the baby away as if he were a trophy on Saturdays and returned him on Sunday nights. It was exactly the kind of involvement Frances had planned for, but she had not planned for how difficult it would be, this endless seeing but not seeing, this sharing, this conflicting, painful tug between gain and loss. She wouldn’t let Luis pay for anything, except for when Antonio was with him, and Luis had wanted to pay for everything, for a bigger flat for them, for the best in nursery furniture, for domestic help. It had taken great strength to hold him off, of course it had, how could it be otherwise when it was the last thing she wanted to do?
She put her pen down. Faint crowing noises from the balcony and the occasional flash of a small, fat brown foot indicated that Antonio was now awake and would soon require company. He would be thrilled to see her; he always was, his face brilliant with enchanted smiles at the sight of her, of shop keepers, of his Aunt Ana, of his father. There was so much that couldn’t be written, so much that privately coloured Frances’s life now, so much that was more different than even her wildest imaginings had catered for, from her almost overwhelming passion for this baby to the startled realization that, although her state of single motherhood wasn’t uncommon, it still didn’t have, plainly and amazingly, the status of having been divorced.
‘Señora Shore,’ Sister Rufina had said firmly.
‘I am Señorita—’
‘Señora Shore.’
‘I am not divorced, you see, I have never been married—’
Sister Rufina smiled and made a little gesture towards the other babies in the crèche, the toddling children, as if their social sensibilities had to be considered.
‘Señora Shore.’
And then there was Luis. To nobody did she wish to confide that moment in the hospital when she had seen him fall in love with his son, and out of love with her, and, at the same moment, realize with a kind of awe how much he had loved her. He hadn’t said anything, but he hadn’t needed to. Frances had understood as plainly as if he had carefully explained himself to her, just as she understood that what now bound them together, as far as he was concerned, was their son. How she was finally going to cope with this, she didn’t know, she didn’t even, if she could help it, ask herself. William had written to her repeating his lifelong belief that nothing lovely in life was ever, in the final analysis, wasted. At the moment, however, Frances wasn’t much interested in waste. Waste seemed quite a trivial thing beside pain. That was why – and this again she would spell out to nobody – she was in Seville. She could not go back, like Lizzie, into the detail, the almost domestic detail of her old life: only in Spain, for her and for now, lay the continuing vision.
And that is what, Frances told herself, folding up her letter, is what it comes down to. Doesn’t it? We follow where the light beckons. A squawk came from the balcony. Frances looked up, waiting lovingly for a glimpse of the kicking feet. She would go on a step at a time, beset, no doubt, by many threatening things but never by regret. Regret was out of the question; regret simply didn’t make sense. She might have died the first death, of loss, but she would never, ever – and this she promised herself – die the second death, of forgetting.
THE END
About the Author
Joanna Trollope has written eleven highly-acclaimed contemporary novels: The Choir, A Village Affair, A Passionate Man, The Rector’s Wife, The Men and the Girls, A Spanish Lover, The Best of Friends, Next of Kin, Other People’s Children, Marrying the Mistress and Girl From the South. Other People’s Children has recently been shown on BBC television as a major drama serial. Under the name of Caroline Harvey she writes romantic historical novels. She has also written a study of women in the British Empire, Britannia’s Daughters.
Joanna Trollope was born in Gloucestershire, where she still lives. She was appointed OBE in the 1996 Queen’s Birthday Honours List for services to literature.
Also by Joanna Trollope
THE CHOIR
A VILLAGE AFFAIR
A PASSIONATE MAN
THE RECTOR’S WIFE
THE MEN AND THE GIRLS
THE BEST OF FRIENDS
NEXT OF KIN
OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN
MARRYING THE MISTRESS
and published by Black Swan
By Joanna Trollope writing as Caroline Harvey
LEGACY OF LOVE
A SECOND LEGACY
PARSON HARDING’S DAUGHTER
THE STEPS OF THE SUN
LEAVES FROM THE VALLEY
THE BRASS DOLPHIN
CITY OF GEMS
THE TAVERNERS’ PLACE
and published by Corgi Books
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
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Originally published in Great Britain
by Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd
Bloomsbury edition published 1993
Black Swan edition published 1994
Copyright © Joanna Trollope 1993
Joanna Trollope has asserted her right under the Copyright Designs and Patents act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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is available from the British Library
Version 1.0
Epub ISBN: 9781409011644
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A Spanish Lover Page 33