A Spanish Lover

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘Secured against the Gallery.’

  ‘Indeed. But against a profitable Gallery. In the current conditions, it’s a lot to ask of a business like the Gallery to support itself, all of you, and a borrowing of that size.’

  ‘Then you think that the last six months’ dip in trade wasn’t just a one-off, and that things will get worse?’

  ‘Correct.’

  Why hadn’t he said, I’m afraid so, Robert thought, flattening himself against a parked car to avoid a passing one. Why didn’t he reply at least in a human way instead of snapping out ‘Correct’ like some heartless robot? Of course, it was his professional duty to point out to Robert that, for the first time in seventeen years of trading, things were not getting better, but worse, and that the steady, happy pace up the path of prosperity was unmistakably giving way to a slide down into something altogether more alarming and uncertain, but why couldn’t he have tried to soften the blow, even a little?

  I’m frightened, Robert thought.

  The rain was getting heavier. He reached the top of Gay Street, turned his collar up, and ran across the circle of green in the middle of the Circus, through the clump of huge lime trees, which were the only living things about looking grateful for the rain, and made for Circus Place. A boy and a girl went past him huddled together and giggling under an old supermarket bag they were attempting to use as an umbrella and it struck Robert with a pang that they were as young and waywardly dressed as he and Lizzie had been seventeen years ago, with all the world before them and nothing to be responsible for.

  When he reached the Gallery, it was ten minutes before closing time, and Jenny Hardacre, who had been their invaluable chief assistant for seven years, was beginning on the process of locking up. Jenny, who had a sweet face and prematurely grey hair held back off her face with combs, had been widowed soon after her only child, now a resolute little boy the same age as Davy, was born.

  Usually, going into the Gallery soothed whatever sore feelings Robert might be afflicted with. The polished floor, the pools of carefully angled light, the racks and piles and shelves of seductive merchandise, the smell of seagrass and wood and pot-pourri were all not just lovely in themselves, but solid proof of achievement. This evening, however, their solidity seemed to have evaporated and instead an air of miserable vulnerability hung over everything as if the bailiffs were poised to march in and seize the pictures and rugs and lamps and bear them away mercilessly, like helpless victims of rape and pillage. Robert gave himself a shake; he was getting horribly emotional. He needed to talk to Lizzie.

  Jenny looked up from the till and smiled.

  ‘OK?’

  ‘Not very,’ he said.

  Her face became instantly sympathetic. ‘Oh dear—’

  ‘Is Lizzie in the office?’

  ‘Yes. She’s got the boys with her. They got dropped here after school.’

  The office at the Gallery was on the first floor, at the back, looking out on to the decayed tangle of a few of Langworth’s very minor industries, now defunct. Knowing that he would have to spend a lot of time there, Robert had designed the office to be the kind of studio he had always wanted and now felt he would never have, with high desks for drawing at, and wonderful lighting and plenty of wall space for pinning up things. As he came in Lizzie, who was on the telephone, turned and gave him a wave, and Sam and Davy, who had been engaged in drawing spaceships all over Davy’s bare knees with a felt-tipped pen, launched themselves at him and clamped him strenuously about the calves.

  ‘Get off,’ Robert said.

  ‘I tell you what,’ Lizzie said into the telephone, ‘make me half a dozen and we’ll see how they go. No, sale or return, that’s how I operate with individual craftsmen because this is a gallery as well as a shop. All right? Yes, different woods would be lovely but they must be English woods.’

  ‘Sam,’ Robert said. ‘Let go.’

  ‘Your shoes are sopping—’

  ‘It was raining in Bath. Let go, Davy.’

  ‘I don’t have to till Sam—’

  ‘You do have to,’ Robert said furiously. ‘I’ve had a bloody awful afternoon and I’m in no mood for bloody awful children.’

  Lizzie put the telephone down.

  ‘Was it awful?’

  ‘Yes,’ Robert said. He had an ominous feeling that he was losing his sense of proportion entirely. Trying to free at least one leg, he lashed out with one imprisoned foot far harder than he meant to and caught Davy a blow on the chin. Davy, never far from tears at the jolliest of times, dissolved at once, clutching his chin with his hands.

  ‘Now look,’ said Sam pleasedly. ‘I expect you’ve broken all his teeth and he’ll only be able to eat yoghurt and yuk like that. For ever.’

  Rob stooped and picked up the sobbing Davy.

  ‘I’m so sorry, darling, I never meant to hurt you—’

  ‘I hate yoghurt,’ Davy wailed through his muffling hands.

  ‘Let me look. Take your hands away and let me look at your mouth—’

  Lizzie said, from where she still sat by the telephone, ‘What was so awful, Rob? Don’t worry about Davy, he’ll be fine, you know how he carries on.’

  Davy opened his mouth hugely wide and Robert peered inside.

  ‘All there, thank goodness—’

  ‘I expect, though,’ Sam said from where he still lay on the floor, ‘that you’ve cracked his jaw.’

  Davy gasped, eyes widening.

  ‘Don’t be daft.’

  ‘What was so awful?’ Lizzie said again. ‘I mean, you knew the figures before you went, you knew we’d had the worst half-year ever—’

  ‘Things won’t pick up,’ Robert said. He stooped again and set Davy on his feet. Davy was trying to arrange his hands like cups to support his cracked jaw.

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘I expect your jaw will just dangle about like some dopey old ape—’

  ‘Sullivan said that there is no sign as yet of a general economic recovery and that we, like all small businesses, will not find trade picking up in the foreseeable future. As he put it so charmingly, shopping in a shop like ours is the kind of luxury people will give up first.’

  ‘Don’t let go!’ Sam hissed at Davy, ‘or it’ll start dangling.’

  Lizzie got up and came across to Robert.

  ‘I wish I’d come with you.’

  ‘So do I, but it wouldn’t have made any difference to the facts. The thing is, the turnover’s not at all bad considering the conditions, but the profit simply isn’t enough to meet our outgoings.’

  Davy leaned against Lizzie and gave a subdued howl. Lizzie bent and firmly took his hands away from his chin. His eyes grew wide with terror, waiting for his lower jaw to flop downwards like a broken shutter. It didn’t.

  ‘See?’ Lizzie said. ‘You are very silly and Sam’s a bully.’

  ‘What’s a bully?’ Sam said hopefully.

  ‘Somebody,’ Robert said, looking down at him, ‘who takes pleasure in being horrible to the weak. It’s a form of weakness in fact, to bully. Bullies are always cowards inside.’

  Sam got up and went over to the nearest desk which he began to kick gently, with his back to them. Lizzie stepped forward and leaned her cheek on Robert’s chest.

  ‘I didn’t order anything this afternoon, in the end. That was a nice young man who makes pot-pourri boxes, turned wooden ones with latticed lids—’

  ‘I expect the Indians make them cheaper—’

  She lifted her head.

  ‘Shall we talk about all this later?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mummy,’ Davy said. ‘Can I have for supper what Sam has?’

  ‘You always have what Sam has!’

  ‘I don’t want yoghurt—’

  Lizzie looked at Robert, smiling almost in despair. ‘We wanted this, didn’t we, we wanted this rich, busy life full of work and children, with everything muddled up together, it’s what we meant to have, isn’t it?’

  He mo
ved away and began circling the room, straightening papers, turning off machines and lights. Lizzie watched him, waiting for his reply, and at last he said, from the far side of the office, bolting the window with its patent safety catch, ‘Of course it is. It’s just life itself that deals you a nasty when you aren’t looking, it’s life that keeps moving the goalposts. We haven’t changed, Lizzie, it’s just the things around us that have.’

  ‘So we’ll have to learn to?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ he said, and she had seldom heard him sound so sad, ‘I suppose we’ll have to.’

  * * *

  The evening passed, as so many evenings seemed to, in a crowd of incidents which made up the necessary, repetitive process of getting everybody fed, home-worked, music practised, bathed, off the telephone, away from the television, and into bed. Lizzie had always intended that, as each child reached twelve, they should have supper with her and Rob, instead of an earlier and more babyish children’s supper, but two things had arisen to frustrate this intention. The first was that neither Harriet nor Alistair ever seemed to show the slightest inclination to eat with their parents, professing not to be hungry, or not hungry then, or not having finished their essay, or their French vocabulary, or being too tired or too deep in a book, which last Lizzie had learned to interpret as too deep in an episode on television of LA Law or Inspector Morse. The second reason was that Lizzie discovered that, by eight-thirty on an average evening, she and Robert had simply had the children. At first she had felt guilty about this – she had intended to have at least four, after all, she was proud and pleased to have a large family, just as she was proud and pleased at the children’s intelligence and strength of character – but then it had occurred to her that she was as much Robert’s wife as the children’s mother and even, if there was time to consider it, her own self, Lizzie Middleton, and that, if she didn’t have a little adult time at the end of a busy day, she would go raving bonkers. So now she cooked pasta, or mince in some form, or sausages, at six-thirty, and two hours later, Robert repeated the exercise, more or less, for himself and Lizzie.

  ‘Of course,’ Barbara said frequently, ‘it’s perfectly ridiculous the way modern children are never sent to bed. You and Frances were in bed by seven until you were fourteen.’

  ‘Were we? I wish somebody would send me to bed at seven now.’

  This evening was no different to a hundred others except that Sam, mysteriously chastened in some obscure part of himself, tenderly tied Davy’s head up with his own Manchester United football scarf to keep his jaw in place, and fed him little scraps of sausage, like a helpless fledgling. Davy glowed in this attention. Harriet too was unnaturally quiet, being, Lizzie suspected, in the grip of a blind and hopeless crush on a sixth-form boy at Langworth Comprehensive, the kind of careless, glamorous boy who would never notice her. Lizzie wished Harriet would talk to her about it, but Harriet had never considered Lizzie a fit recipient of confidences, and when Lizzie came into the room while Harriet was in the middle of one of her interminable telephone conversations to Heather, Harriet’s voice would sink at once to a conspiratorial whisper. Alistair had vanished. He would be in his room as usual, his curious fusty lair, where he lived a powerful and private life among his models and his piles and piles of cherished cartoon books and magazines and comics, which he read with a manic intensity.

  By nine o’clock, the house was almost quiet. Harriet had taken Radio One and her aching heart to the bathroom, Sam and Davy were asleep – Davy still carefully bandaged up in his scarf – Alistair, lying on the floor in his bedroom, was writing fervently about the evil effects of acid rain. Lizzie had loaded the washing machine to turn on before they went to bed, when electricity would be cheaper, had made a few more of her famous lists for the morning and fed Cornflakes. Robert had grilled two chump chops and some mushrooms, made a salad, and put a loaf of brown bread in the bottom oven to warm.

  ‘I sometimes wonder’, Lizzie said, sitting down heavily in one of the kitchen chairs, ‘if what we do every evening is repeated all over England in thousands and thousands of households with several children and both parents working, and that all parents have this alarming feeling that, however hard you run, you are actually slipping further and further behind. I’m so tired I feel I’ve been hit with a sandbag. Are we tireder than people used to be?’

  ‘No,’ Robert said, ‘it just feels like it, which comes to the same thing.’ He put a plate of chops and mushrooms down in front of her.

  ‘Why does it? Do we do more?’

  ‘No, but we want to achieve all the time. We aren’t content with just staying alive, warm and clothed and fed, we take all that for granted. It’s the achieving that’s so exhausting.’

  Lizzie ate a mushroom.

  ‘I told Frances, at Christmas, that fulfilment was the way to happiness.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Yes. I said you had to go into every room in yourself, as it were, and explore it and use it.’

  Robert sat down opposite her and ground black pepper vigorously over his plate.

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘You end up sandbagged, like I said. Frances doesn’t know what it’s like to be this tired. Did I tell you, she’s gone to Spain again?’

  Robert stopped slicing bread.

  ‘Has she? Why?’

  ‘She said she felt she’d made an unprofessional move in walking out on those hotel people at Christmas, and that some of her clients were beginning to say they knew Italy like the backs of their hands and what could she think of next.’

  ‘Sounds fair enough.’

  ‘Yes,’ Lizzie said, helping herself to salad, ‘of course it does. It’ll do her good, she’s been so odd and dreamy lately—’

  ‘She’s always dreamy.’

  ‘Part of me,’ Lizzie said, ‘won’t settle until she’s happy.’

  ‘Till she’s settled, you mean, till she’s married.’

  ‘It isn’t natural to live like she lives. She’s so loving as a person, it’s a waste.’

  ‘Lots of people choose to be single, you know. Men and women. It isn’t because they’re inadequate emotionally, is it? Isn’t it because most of them don’t find the right person to share with, and it’s better to be alone than to share with the wrong person?’

  Lizzie spread butter on her bread. ‘Frances is lonely. She’s too dependent on too few people.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘She’s my twin,’ Lizzie said simply.

  Later, when they had eaten some cheese, and an apple each, and were considering whether or not they wanted any coffee, Robert said he was sorry, but he couldn’t go to bed before they had talked about the problems with the business.

  ‘Tell me, then,’ Lizzie said, yawning.

  ‘The bottom line is this. We are currently paying fifteen thousand pounds a year in interest, and that is, as you know, on top of the mortgage repayments on this house as well as keeping us all fed, clothed, insured and all the other stuff. It cost fifteen hundred quid to heat and light this house last year and the last telephone bill was nearer three hundred than two and that was for only a quarter. Then there’s the running costs of the business, which you know.’

  He stopped. Lizzie, who had been leaning against a cupboard, came and sat on the corner of the table.

  ‘Oh Rob. It isn’t as if we live at all grandly—’

  ‘I know. I’m just scared that if things don’t pick up we won’t be able to live at all.’

  Lizzie looked across at him with a face so tired, his heart smote him.

  ‘What is the difference between what we’re making and what we need to make?’

  ‘About the amount of the interest on the loan. About fifteen thousand.’

  She got off the table and came round to lean against him, holding his head against her bosom. It struck her suddenly, and miserably, that, even though they might be together in their trouble, it didn’t somehow seem to make the trouble any less terrifying. She h
ad an image of herself and Rob and the children in a tiny, fragile, leaking boat on a very rough sea, and the children were crying piteously and she was full of a terrible guilt as well as a terrible fear. She was drowning, and all these little reproachful hands were about her neck.

  ‘I never realized’, she said, holding Robert’s head, ‘how bad it was. I feel awful, that I didn’t realize, that you’ve had to know by yourself—’

  His voice was muffled against her.

  ‘I hoped you wouldn’t have to know. I hoped it was just a bad patch and all we’d have to do would be to tighten our belts for a bit.’

  ‘So,’ her voice faltered a little. ‘The gap of fifteen thousand might get wider.’

  He attempted to nod, inside her embrace.

  She whispered, ‘I must be very naïve, but I never thought money would be a real problem for us, I mean I never thought we’d be millionaires, I don’t want that, but I didn’t think either that we’d be in debt and not – not able—’

  ‘Shh,’ Rob said. He moved his head back so that he could look at her. ‘It’s only money,’ he said, trying to make a joke of it.

  ‘You can’t say that,’ Lizzie said. ‘You can only say that when you’ve got enough of it.’

  * * *

  They neither of them slept well, partly on account of worrying and partly on account of Davy’s fixed belief in his injury, which brought him into their bedroom four times between midnight and six-thirty. In the end, desperate for a last half-hour of attempted oblivion, Lizzie pulled him into bed beside her, where he lay, stiff with anxiety, his head still absurdly swaddled in red-and-white wool.

  ‘I am a sad boy,’ he told Lizzie.

  ‘I’m pretty sad, too,’ she said. She held him and thought of lying there holding him when he was only a tiny baby and they all took their security for granted. She couldn’t believe how much money they had borrowed and, at the same time, she couldn’t believe how easy it had been to borrow, how the bank had constantly and pressingly asked them if they were sure they had enough, and so they had thought: Well, with another few thousand we could paint another room, take the children to Austria (they had walked and cycled through the lovely valleys, carrying Davy on their backs or in a special little pannier), change the car, and they had taken the money and the debt had quietly grown until it now loomed over them, transformed from something manageable into something menacing. And however hard they worked at the Gallery, they couldn’t, it seemed, make any more money out of it by their own efforts, because the only thing that made money was people coming in and buying lavishly, and nobody was feeling lavish just now. There are probably, thought Lizzie, reaching down to hold Davy’s cold feet in her warm hands, people lying awake all over the place worrying like this, people with mortgages and children and this dreadful, impotent feeling that you are dependent upon forces outside your control for anything to improve.