Juliet gave her a long, astounded look.
‘Right,’ she said faintly.
‘Good,’ Frances said. She picked the wine bottle out of its perspex cooler. ‘Drink up, then.’
Later, driving out to the airport to meet Luis on an early-evening flight from Madrid, Frances waited out of habit to feel a twinge of remorse. She didn’t. As she had said to Juliet, it wasn’t that she didn’t feel sorry for Lizzie, but it was rather that she had stopped feeling tied to her by some primordial cord of responsibility, largely because her perceptions of responsibility were now deflected in quite another direction; that direction which was presently, with any luck, beginning its descent in an aeroplane over Heathrow. There was also the added element, Frances told herself, of having her own preoccupations now, preoccupations which were of enormous importance to her, and which it was as much in her nature to keep private as it was in Lizzie’s to make public.
All of these preoccupations centred inevitably around Luis. Their love affair, carried on in snatches between their business lives in two countries, might have looked to the outside eye the epitome of glamour – the travel, the infrequency of meeting and frequency of telephoning, the emotional partings and reunions, the consequent novelty sustained at an intoxicating and high-octane level – but Frances had discovered, quite early on, that the organic nature of the relationship had set its own inevitable time clock ticking the moment Luis had said to her, with such urgency, that they must understand each other’s national natures if they were to become lovers. You could not, she had learned, stop that time clock. You could not, whatever tricks you attempted to play on it by getting on aeroplanes and flying off or by not being available for telephone calls, halt the steady, relentless tread of a love affair’s development. Whatever you did, however you disciplined yourself, it would progress, it would change and in the process, it would force you to progress and change with it. And the stark measure of that, Frances told herself, beating the palm of one hand lightly on the steering wheel, is that in May I would have sold my soul to be his mistress, and now that I’ve been his mistress for six months, I want to be something more.
She had said this to him, outright, and the consequences had been two extremely thunderous weekends. Luis said he did not consider himself married to José’s mother any more, he considered himself wholly committed to Frances, but that he did not wish to raise the storm of seeking a divorce since, even if he were free, he wouldn’t marry Frances, he wouldn’t marry anybody again, ever, he wasn’t a married kind of man. He said he hadn’t told his mother about Frances, and he wasn’t going to because he knew exactly what her reaction would be, which would distress Frances deeply even if she was prepared for it, and no, Frances couldn’t meet her, ever.
‘But you have met my parents, I have taken you to my family, I have been open and honest and generous with you—’
‘Yes.’
‘So why can’t you, even out of mere decency and courtesy, reciprocate with a little honesty and generosity with me?’
‘Because I am different from you. I am a man, I am a Spaniard, I was born and reared a Catholic. Querida, we have been over and over this. My father is a deeply traditional, right-wing ex-soldier. My mother is a devout Catholic with a will of iron and a fondness for anger and scenes. They would probably refuse even to meet you, and if they met you, they would be, at best, cold and hard. There is no point, Frances. You would be badly hurt, and nothing would be gained.’
‘So I have to stay a secret? You tell me I’m the most important person in your life and I have to stay a secret?’
‘José knows you, so does Ana and my brother-in-law—’
‘But I’m a secret for them, too!’
‘Listen,’ Luis said, taking her by the shoulders and putting his face close to hers, ‘there is no other way. Do you understand me? There is no other way.’
She hadn’t gone on pleading. She didn’t want to whine, she didn’t want to lose any of that life-enhancing self-esteem he had given her by whining and pleading, so she had stopped. Not particularly gracefully, she now thought, but at least she had stopped. In any case, she had growing inside her, more strongly with every day that passed, a far greater preoccupation even than the one of being somehow miraculously accepted into Luis’s family and his public life. Of course she wanted to be his wife because she wanted him to acknowledge before the world what she meant to him, and she wanted them to live together so that the lows of life were woven into their every days as well as the highs, so that they could build upon the foundations they had so splendidly laid within the security of marriage and so that, most of all – Frances stopped herself. The stream of traffic swirling round the roundabouts before the airport was demanding all her attention, and in any case, the conversation that had arisen only last weekend from the voicing of this, the most powerful of her desires, took a great deal of courage to recall. But then, Frances had recently grown rather used to courage, both of the stoical kind that accepts and bears the unacceptable and the unbearable, and also of the adventurous kind that goes out either to seek or to defend. Frances had definitely been seeking when she had said to Luis, in his flat in Madrid last weekend, that she would be thirty-nine on her next birthday, and that, because of meeting him, she now badly wanted to have a baby before she was forty.
He was making a salad. He was both deft and competent domestically, and he was standing at the island unit in the centre of his tiny, urban kitchen, slicing vegetables. She was sitting the other side of the unit on a stool, wearing a bathrobe of his because she had just had a shower and because they both liked her to wear his bathrobe, his shirts, his jerseys. When she had spoken, she sat and waited, her elbows on the unit close to his chopping board, and her face in her hands. He went on slicing. She watched the fine wafers of peppers and tomato and cucumber fall brightly on to the board, and the flash of the knife blade. He stopped every so often, and scooped up the slices in his cupped hands and dropped them into the deep pottery bowl they had bought together in Córdoba, blue and white and butter-yellow, with a single scarlet rose painted in the bottom.
Then Luis said, ‘If you have a child, Frances, then I must tell you that that will be the end of everything.’
She had got off the stool then, and gone into the small, darkish bedroom, with its wide bed and its view down into an ordinary Madrid street lined with blocks of flats and news vendors. She sat on the bed, and folded her hands together, back very straight. She knew he meant it. She knew that if she pointed out how fond he was (however occasionally exasperatedly) of José, how sweet he had been with Lizzie’s Davy, how much they loved one another, how natural and right a baby would now be as the fruit of their sexual harmony and passion, it would be like trying to shout at somebody with the wind snatching your words away as you uttered them. He simply wouldn’t hear her. Nothing would change him, nothing, even though she used every weapon in her armoury, emotional, moral, rational. There was no point in battering on the closed door of his mind until her knuckles were raw, because he would never admit her. Assault, in this vital matter of a baby, would achieve nothing but an estrangement which would, she knew, simply break her heart. So she got up from the bed, dressed herself in the blue jeans and oversized white shirt he liked to see her in, went back to the kitchen and said in a friendly voice that, after they had eaten, she would like to go out to the cinema. He had looked at her. He had looked at her for a long, steady time, and then he had stopped what he was doing and had taken her straight back to the bedroom.
Last Saturday, that was, Frances thought, and last Sunday was the last time I drove down the airport tunnel, except that I was coming the other way, away from Spain and Luis and not, as now, towards him. She felt extremely happy, not just with the still undiminishing anticipation of seeing him, but with a deeper happiness borne of certainty, of accomplishment. When she had reached home the Sunday before there had been a message from Luis waiting for her on the telephone answering machine, a message that wasn’
t exactly an apology in words, but was, because of its warmth and intimacy, a tacit one. He hadn’t crowed in victory over her, he had rather implied his profound appreciation of her reaction. He had ended the message in Spanish. Spanish, as she grew better at it, was becoming the private language of their love.
When she had played the message several times, Frances went through the necessary discipline of swift, immediate unpacking. She had found that, if she didn’t unpack the moment she got home, her bag lay, partly rummaged through, on the floor, until the next frantic, joyful Friday night forced her either to repack it, or finally empty it before Luis arrived. She hung up her skirts and jacket, lined up her shoes in the way that Luis, meticulous about his personal possessions, lined up his, and took her sponge bag into the bathroom. She tipped it out, as she always did – a habit Luis hated – into the washbasin, toothpaste, face creams, hairbrush, lotions, and began to pick out individual things and line them up on the glass shelf below the shaving mirror. She picked up the flat foil envelope that held her contraceptive pills, and slid them out into her hand. They were arranged round the edge of a small plasticized card, each one neatly in its own sealing bubble, each one helpfully labelled with a day of the week. Frances counted. Ten days left to go of this cycle. She flicked the card once or twice with her thumbnail, then slid it back into the envelope and dropped it into the bin under the basin.
That was five days ago, Frances now thought, emerging from the tunnel into the floodlit glare of the various terminal approaches, five days and I’ve swallowed nothing but food and drink. Above her, the signs for Terminal Two hung huge, clear and kindly instructive. With any luck, Luis’s plane would be touching down this very moment, and with even more luck, he would, with the skill of long practice, be one of the first off the plane and one of the first through those impenetrable sliding doors from the customs hall and into her waiting arms.
PART FOUR
April
15
THE CHILDREN, LIKE domestic animals transported from one side of the country to another, strayed endlessly back to the Grange. Robert said consolingly that this was only because the house’s new occupants had a teenage son with even more cool than Jason Purdy, an ice-cream machine and a half-sized snooker table. But Lizzie thought that they were more like poor Cornflakes, torn from their familiar dresser drawer and poignantly trying to find it again. Cornflakes wouldn’t use the same dresser drawer in the new kitchen, nor would he adapt, because of being in a flat, to an earth tray. He cowered under tables and chairs and glared at Lizzie with a mixture of deep reproach and malevolence. He made messes beneath beds and behind the sofa. He also learned, in order to revenge himself upon her for the loss of the Grange’s garden and its game reserve of voles and shrews, how to open the door of the fridge and help himself to the contents.
It was a nice flat, everybody said so. No-one quite knew where the suggestion had come from that the top two floors of the Gallery building should cease to be uneconomic café and exhibition space and become the Middletons’ home instead, but it had arrived somehow, like the slow onset of a new season, and quietly enlarged itself from a notion to an actuality. Robert had worked on the conversion with his own hands all winter, doing almost everything himself except the plumbing and some necessary rewiring, and they now had a kitchen and a family living room and three bedrooms and a bathroom, and views of Langworth High Street in front and the decayed small industrial muddle at the back, and really, the change wasn’t that bad and the sun came in morning and evening and it was, wasn’t it, wonderful just to nip downstairs to work rather than race, late, through the town, and everybody would, of course, get accustomed to living in a quarter of the space they were used to, and it was a relief, surely, not to have the tyranny of a garden, particularly when Langworth had a perfectly good recreation ground, and it must be such a boon to have shops so close and everybody got used to sleeping through traffic after a week or two, didn’t they?
Lizzie hated it. Her beloved possessions, the lovingly collected furniture and objects, seemed to huddle miserably in the new featureless rooms, wearing expressions similar to Cornflakes’. The noise, the inevitable chaos of the children’s crammed bedrooms – how long, for heaven’s sake, could Harriet and Davy share a room? – the fact that a large proportion of their furniture had to be expensively stored, the lack of privacy, the endless domestic difficulties of finding somewhere to hang the washing, or eat in peace with Robert while sharing the same space with the television and Alistair and Harriet breathing elaborately and heavily over their homework, combined to make her feel that she was like a hamster on a wheel, doomed to go round and round without ever advancing one iota. It wasn’t, either, as if she and Robert had reached a point where they could raise their glasses of Bulgarian wine to each other in mutual congratulation at being out of debt. They weren’t yet. They had had, in order to achieve the quick sale the bank had demanded, to sell the Grange for considerably less than they had paid for it, or than it had once been worth. It had also cost a frightening amount to do the necessary work on the flat, and move into it, and the money spent that way aroused in Lizzie exactly the same feelings of repugnance that paying interest on the overdraft did.
The new people at the Grange were very nice, too, she heard. For herself, she had tried to meet them as seldom as possible over the sale, not because she disliked them as people but because she disliked them intensely for being able to live in her house when she couldn’t. They were called Michael and Bridie Pringle. He was tall and thin with a fringe-like beard and owned a small, specialized factory that made drill bits for deep-water oil wells. She was Irish and very active in the Green Movement. Harriet reported that she had really improved the Grange.
‘It’s all white, it’s really cool, and the floors are all pale and shiny and the curtains are huge and have checked bow things tying them back and they have this brilliant mina bird and they don’t eat anything that isn’t organic and they have this list in the kitchen about recyling things. Why don’t you recycle things?’
‘I do, I do, I always go to the bottle bank, I have for ages—’
‘But not paper and plastic and tins and cardboard. And we always have bought ice-cream. Bridie says if we knew what manufacturers put into bought ice-cream, we wouldn’t give it to our worst enemy. You should see the kitchen. It’s superb.’
‘It was superb before—’
‘It was not,’ Harriet said crushingly. ‘It was a pretentious mess.’
‘You don’t know what pretentious means—’
‘I do,’ Harriet said. ‘Alistair told me. It means pretending to be grander than you are.’
Robert said Harriet was just winding Lizzie up. He said she loved being in the middle of town and that she only seeped back endlessly to the Grange because of the welcome she got there, the faint superiority she could feel for having lived there first, and the boy, Fraser. He said, with the slight edge of sharpness his voice had lately developed when speaking to Lizzie, that this was just a new beginning, that it was imperative to see it as such and that what they had done once, from nothing, they could do again.
But Lizzie was disorientated. She found she was even longing for the new term to start at Westondale – her third term, unbelievably – because at least Westondale gave a structure to her days and a focus for her thoughts. She was a good school secretary. Even Mrs Drysdale who had feared the possible consequences of Lizzie’s independence of mind was moved to say, with many meaningful nods and becks, that it was amazing, wasn’t it, how never a door shut (Mrs Mason) but another and better one opened (Lizzie). The school office, cleared of its craft-sale artefacts (except for the red-and-yellow papier mâché lump for which Lizzie found she had an arcane affection, doubtless because the thing seemed to have a strong and poignant personality without managing or needing to have an identity) and with the Parents’ Association computer in working order, was a very different place. The card-index boxes were dwindling, the orange-and-brown folk-weave cu
rtains had been bundled up and hidden at the back of the Lost Property cupboard, the telephone, though still busy, did not utter quite the same steady stream of complaint that had so fuelled Mrs Mason’s conviction that parents had been, as a breed, sent only to try her. Lizzie’s competence was unquestionably Westondale’s gain even if it was, Robert often now felt, the Gallery’s loss.
She wouldn’t consider the autumn stock.
‘Please,’ Robert said.
They were in the office of the Gallery, now piled with boxes as it had to do duty as a stock room as well. Lizzie was doing household accounts. She had always done them, in a broad-brush kind of way, ever since she had learned how, but now she did them with the sort of manic meticulousness Robert remembered his mother applying to her own household accounts book in the Fifties: ‘Four halfpenny stamps, two haddock fillets at nine pence each, a sixpennyworth of old potatoes.’
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