‘Harden?’
‘That you will, Mr Middleton, become used to it and therefore not look further than the paying of the interest.’
Robert looked down for a moment. His head swam. It was not only incredible that this sandy clerk was speaking to him in this way, but also that he was actually saying what he appeared to be saying. He took an enormous breath.
‘Does it not occur to you that we detest this loan a hundred times more than you do, for the simple reason that the sum involved threatens all that my wife and I have achieved over the last eighteen years? Do you imagine we have had a quiet moment since we found ourselves in this situation, and that we aren’t straining every nerve and sinew to think of and implement ways of improving it? Why else do you suppose that my wife has taken an outside job if it isn’t to try and ease the burden on the business and pay your appalling interest rates? My wife is a highly talented and experienced woman, and she is forced to work at a level I don’t think you’d expect of your counter clerks—’
‘Excuse me,’ the bank manager interrupted, ‘but it won’t help to get personal.’
‘But what else can we do?’ Robert almost shouted. ‘We are working harder than we’ve ever worked for smaller returns than we’ve ever had. What on earth else can you possibly expect us to do?’
The bank manager shifted his hands so that his elbows were on the desk and his fingertips came lightly together in a gesture which seemed to Robert both authoritarian and sanctimonious.
‘My loans committee—’
For some reason, Robert’s stomach sank like a stone.
‘My loans committee’, the bank manager continued, looking straight at Robert, ‘now requires a positive indication that the bulk of the loan can be repaid in the near future.’
‘And how the hell am I supposed to do that?’
‘It’s quite simple, Mr Middleton. It merely means, I am afraid, that you must put your house on the market.’
Jenny stood on the landing outside the office in the Gallery. She carried an individual-sized bottle of mineral water, and a tuna sandwich, on a tray. Robert had been inside, with the door shut now, for two hours, and it was almost three o’clock and she knew he’d had nothing to eat at lunchtime. She tapped.
He called, ‘Who is it?’
‘Jenny,’ Jenny said.
‘Oh Jenny,’ Robert said. ‘Come in.’
She opened the door cautiously. He was sitting at his desk with the ring binders of their collected bank statements open all around him.
‘I thought you might like something to eat, I didn’t think you’d had any lunch—’
‘I didn’t. You’re a dear.’
‘The sandwich is tuna. It was all they had left upstairs. I hope that’s all right.’
‘It’s fine,’ he said.
She put the tray down on the table by his desk.
‘Mineral water seems so dreary. Would you like some coffee, too?’
He looked up at her. He was very pale.
‘Jenny.’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Sit down a moment.’
She sat on a nearby swivel chair, folding her hands in her lap. There was a silence for a moment and then Robert said suddenly, with no preamble whatsoever, ‘We’ve got to sell the Grange.’
She gasped. Her hands flew to her face.
‘Don’t—’
‘We have,’ he said. ‘I went to the bank this morning. We had nine months in which to start reducing the overdraft, and of course, we haven’t been able to; we’ve hardly been able to pay the interest, so they are putting on the slammers.’
Jenny had a fleeting glimpse in her mind’s eye of her own cottage which had represented to her, since Mick died, so much more than just somewhere to live. She saw its dear and familiar façade, with the Maigold rose climbing over the porch and the dormer windows set in the roof like surprised eyebrows, and felt, with a pang so violent that it frightened her, what unrelieved agony it would be to have it taken from her.
‘Oh Rob—’
He picked up half the sandwich and took a dutiful bite.
‘How am I going to tell Lizzie?’
‘I don’t know—’
‘She adores that house,’ Rob said, laying the rest of the sandwich down again. ‘She had her eye on it the moment we got to Langworth, we used to walk past it at weekends saying, “One day, one day,” to each other and having fantasies of what we would do to it. Then we got it and you know how she flung herself into it. Now I’ve got to tell her it has to go.’
‘Perhaps—’
‘Perhaps what?’
‘Perhaps’, Jenny said, twisting her neat, small hands together, ‘it’ll satisfy the bank if you just put it quietly on the market, and then maybe business here will pick up and you won’t actually have to sell it after all.’
Robert said, ‘They want a hundred thousand pounds, minimum, before the end of six months.’
They looked at one another. A hundred thousand pounds, Jenny reflected, was far more than her capital had been after the insurance company had finally paid up for Mick’s dying in a car crash. Everything she owned, including the cottage, amounted to less than the sum of the Middletons’ debt. It made her feel cold to think about it.
‘Lizzie’s so brave,’ Jenny said, ‘and strong. I’m sure she’ll be able to take it. I’m sure she’ll think of something.’
‘Are you?’ Robert said. He looked at Jenny’s sweet, ordinary little face, at the crisp, piecrust-frilled collar of her striped shirt, at the graduated pearls lying in a perfect loop against her green jersey. She suddenly wore, for him, an air of such absolute security and unchangeableness that it was all he could do not to fling himself at her and bury his face in her reassuring bosom and beg her to tell him soothingly that it would all be all right in the morning, she promised it would.
‘The trouble is’, Robert said, restraining himself, ‘that I don’t think there is anything left to think of, or we would have thought of it, and done it.’
Later, he left Jenny to lock up the Gallery and went home early, taking Sam and Davy whom Jenny had, as usual, collected from school and given tea to. Sam disliked this collecting arrangement very much, being in awe of Jenny for some reason he simply couldn’t fathom – she was after all only a mother and a small and quiet mother at that – and finding that he was inclined, in consequence, to behave soberly in her presence. This was against his own unarticulated code of conduct, so, in order to compensate himself for having let himself down, he was always perfectly awful on the brief walk from the Gallery to the Grange, using forbidden words at the top of his voice and darting insanely into the road like a kamikaze pilot, so that Robert usually reached home in a state of enraged nervous collapse. If Lizzie left Bath in time to take the boys home, she drove them in her clattering car, and this, in some measure, deprived Sam of the best opportunity to be awful because the journey only took three minutes.
When Robert got Sam and Davy back – Davy sniffing ominously because Sam had told him he had a face like a baboon’s bottom – he found Alistair in the kitchen eating cereal by the handful straight out of the packet while reading a comic called The Rules of Id. Harriet was nowhere to be seen.
‘Hello,’ Robert said.
Alistair, scattering cereal flakes as he crammed another handful approximately into his mouth, ignored him.
‘Stop that,’ Robert said. ‘Speak to me when I speak to you and don’t eat cornflakes at all if you aren’t going to eat them in a civilized manner.’
Sam slithered from the room in beady-eyed search of television and Davy, still grizzling faintly, trailed after him. Alistair raised his eyes slowly from the comic strip as if perfectly amazed at what he had been asked to do.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You heard me,’ Robert said. He reached forward and snatched both the cereal box and the comic.
‘Excuse me—’
‘Go and get a dustpan and brush and sweep up the mess you’v
e made. Then go and do your homework until I tell you supper’s ready.’
‘I am most unlikely, at this rate,’ Alistair said, ‘to feel remotely inclined for supper.’
‘Then you can go hungry,’ Robert said. ‘And see if I care.’
Alistair stepped back prudently, just out of reach.
‘Temper, temper I must say. I wonder what’s brought this on?’
Robert went over to the fridge and opened it and began taking out packets and objects wrapped in plastic film and greaseproof paper.
‘Do as you’re told, Alistair. Where’s Harriet?’
‘Don’t ask me. Last sighted in the Market Place with Heather, no doubt lying in wait for Jason Purdy which does, if you ask me, show a singular lack of taste even in someone as utterly desperate as my dear sister.’
‘Alistair,’ Robert said, getting out a baking sheet and laying chipolata sausages on it in neat, pale ranks, ‘if you don’t go and get the dustpan now, I shall clobber you.’
Alistair went out, very slowly, remarking to Cornflakes, who had risen interestedly from his dresser drawer to watch the argument, that losing one’s rag was commonly recognized to be the surest sign of conceding victory in battle to the other side. Robert added halved tomatoes to the baking sheet and a few tired mushrooms – the boys would never eat these, but Harriet might, if she ever bothered to come home – and put the whole thing in the top of the oven. He longed suddenly for some whisky, but was restrained by its being only twenty to six and more effectively by there being no whisky in the house as there hadn’t been, now, since last Christmas.
Alistair came back in and swept approximately two thirds of the scattered cornflakes into the dustpan, which he then angled into the mouth of the kitchen swing bin in such a way as to drop most of the contents back on to the floor again. He then said, with heavy sarcasm, ‘Well, Father, I do most earnestly hope that you are now satisfied,’ and lounged out of the room once more, leaving the door open.
Robert went out of the kitchen into the larder next door – a Victorian larder of great charm with slate shelves and huge hooks for hams – and retrieved a bag of oven chips from the deep freeze, and a separate bag of frozen peas. The peas’ bag was already open, its torn plastic loosely tied up with a twist of paper-covered wire, which fell off as Robert picked the bag up and several handfuls of peas pattered gently out and filtered themselves down through three feet of frozen food to the bottom. Robert swore, slammed the freezer lid shut and took what remained back to the kitchen.
In about twenty minutes Lizzie would be home, her arrival coinciding, almost exactly, with the moment the children’s supper would be ready. Clearly, Robert could say nothing until the children had eaten, and he reflected that it would be better to delay saying anything still further until they both had a glass of supermarket Bulgarian Country Wine inside them. There had been a period, a brief, luxurious period, when Robert had had an account with a wine merchant in Bath, and went to tastings and read serious articles about the oenological promise of New Zealand and Chile. Now, he and Lizzie, during the great, weekly, two-trolley binge of household shopping, allowed themselves three bottles of whatever was on special offer. It was, he told himself severely, three bottles more than plenty of people ever aspired to, let alone got, but he had had a glimpse once of something more carefree and he missed it.
How, he wondered, shaking the chips on to a second baking sheet, was he going to phrase it to Lizzie? Was he going to come at it obliquely, or simply say it, straight out, looking straight at her, wham, bang, there you have it? Once upon a time, he’d have opted without thinking for the second method, it was what she’d liked, how she’d operated herself. She never flinched, when she was younger; it was one of the first things Robert had loved in her, this direct, sturdy taking of whatever you told her, asked of her. But not only was this thing a worse thing to have to say than any previous thing, but Lizzie had changed. Of course, being older, she was both tireder and less optimistic, more disillusioned, but she had also been, since Frances brought her Spaniard down, more withdrawn. She seemed preoccupied, as if she was turning over a lot of deep and important things in her mind, reassessing them. If he was honest, Lizzie’s recent abstraction was driving Robert mad. He was used – after all, there’d been twenty years of it – to Lizzie having Frances in her thoughts frequently and absorbingly, but this was different. He got the distinct impression that Lizzie was prowling round and round the idea of Frances and Luis in a way that could only be described as fixated. How, frankly, dare she, Robert now thought, tipping the few remaining peas into a pan of boiling water, how dare she absent herself, even for a moment, from him and their problems in such a time of need?
The outer kitchen door opened and Harriet banged in, hurling her school bag on the floor and kicking the door shut with a foot clad like a navvy’s.
‘Hello, darling.’
‘Hi,’ Harriet said. She had plainly been crying and her eyes, carefully mascaraed for school and/or Jason Purdy, were smudged like a sad panda.
‘You all right?’
‘What does it look like?’ Harriet said.
Robert put down the tongs he was using to turn the sausages and went across the kitchen. He put an arm round Harriet.
‘Boys?’
‘Among other shitty things—’
‘Don’t say shitty. What things?’
‘Oh,’ she said, wrestling herself free. ‘School, history, Miss crappy Phelps, that bitch Heather Morgan—’
‘Do you want to tell me about it?’
‘I can’t,’ Harriet said. ‘I can’t tell anybody. What’s for supper?’
‘Sausages.’
‘Again?’
‘Again.’
‘I’m going to watch telly—’
‘No,’ Robert said. ‘You’re going to lay the table.’
Across the hall, the door of the playroom opened. Davy emerged, tunelessly singing the words of a television commercial for a multi-surface kitchen cleaner.
‘Shut up!’ Sam yelled after him.
Davy appeared in the kitchen doorway, still singing.
‘When I want you to sing, man,’ Sam yelled again in an American gangster accent, ‘I’ll stick a nickel up your ass!’
Davy stopped singing.
‘What’s a nickel?’
Robert looked at Harriet. She was grinning.
‘It’s an American coin,’ he said, grinning too, thankful to grin. ‘It’s a piece of American money.’
Davy felt the corduroy seat of his trousers anxiously.
‘Ow,’ he said.
When the children had eaten and at least roughly stacked their plates in the dishwasher, and Lizzie, who had returned home very tired with two card-index boxes she said she wanted to sort out before she went to bed, was over half-way down her glass of wine, Robert suddenly told her, with no preamble, and against all his intentions and plans, about his visit to the bank. Then he waited for her reaction.
For at least a minute, there wasn’t one. Lizzie simply sat there, in the armchair she had so carefully covered three years earlier in a pretty checked fabric imported from Sweden, and gazed down into the dark-red liquid in her glass, in silence. Then, equally quietly, she began to cry, still looking down, so that her tears, which seemed unnaturally large to Robert, slid down her cheeks and fell on to her hands and lap and into her glass. It was a profoundly upsetting sight. Lizzie never cried. She disapproved of crying for any reason except that of deep and genuine grief. She always said that to cry over anything less than the loss or pain of another human being was sheer self-indulgence, yet here she was, weeping and weeping, the tears coming more and more heavily, pouring out from under the curtains of hair swinging forward either side of her bowed head.
‘Lizzie,’ Robert said in terror and anguish. He came and knelt by her side and tried to take her glass away, because she had begun to tremble, but she gripped it tightly.
‘No—’
‘Lizzie, darling, my darlin
g Lizzie—’
‘No!’ Lizzie said between sobs. ‘No!’
‘We have to,’ Robert said. He put his own hands awkwardly over hers around the wine glass. ‘We have to, Lizzie. But it isn’t the end of the world. We’ll pick up again in a year or two and then we can buy it back—’
‘I can’t bear it, I can’t, I can’t—’
‘Lizzie, it’s only a house—’
‘No!’ she wailed. She flung his hands off, spilling wine across her skirt. ‘It’s everything that’s going, simply melting!’
‘Nonsense,’ he said, trying to smile, trying to peer in under her hair and see her face. ‘Don’t get this out of proportion. Come on, darling. We’re all right, the children are all right, and that’s what matters.’
Lizzie raised her head. Her face was flushed and shining with tears, glistening with them as Davy’s sometimes did when in a paroxysm of Sam-induced grief.
‘I can’t face any more,’ she said, dragging the back of one hand uselessly across her cheeks. ‘I just can’t. I can’t go on.’
Robert handed her his handkerchief.
‘Come on,’ he said, half facetiously, half reprovingly. ‘Don’t overdo it. It isn’t the end of the world.’
‘It’s the end of mine,’ Lizzie said, blowing.
‘Thanks a million—’
She turned on him.
‘Why can’t I say I’ve had enough? Why can’t I? Why can’t I speak the truth and say I’m at the end of my tether and that I haven’t the heart to go on with this stupid, pointless, miserable pretence that we are waving when in fact we’re drowning?’
‘We are not drowning.’
‘Oh yes we are!’ she shouted, her voice rising. ‘We’re giving up everything we’ve made, we haven’t even got a home now, it belongs to the bloody bank, it always has, everything has, we’ve just lived a lie because everything’s been built on sand, nothing’s real, nothing’s solid’ – her voice rose to a scream – ‘and none of it’s been worth it, has it, none of it, it’s all just been a stupid, self-deluding charade!’
A Spanish Lover Page 20
