Jenny shook her head. She was full of sympathy, dangerous, luxurious sympathy. She watched Robert go back to the self-service counter, shoulders square in his corduroy jacket. He always wore corduroy jackets, they were his trademark and they made him, Jenny thought, look both distinctive and very faintly raffish. Poor man. Poor Robert. Yet poor Lizzie too, so unhappy and burdened. Families could be so terribly oppressive, she could see that even though she was herself an only child and mother of – so far, she always said privately – another one. Jenny hardly knew Frances, she only knew her as a quieter, dimmer version of Lizzie, sometimes, in the past, in the shop on Saturdays, but never now. This was because of her love affair. Jenny said the words over to herself again: love affair. She hadn’t had a love affair with Mick, it had been more of a courtship, starting at a tennis-club dance and ending on a Saturday afternoon at Langworth Parish Church in a frightfully outmoded white lace crinoline chosen by her mother and now lying folded up in a box in Jenny’s attic, never even to be glanced at again. Love affairs were by all accounts very different to the tidy ritual Jenny and Mick had followed, like people going through their allotted paces in a square dance. In love affairs, Jenny suspected, you took your clothes off emotionally and psychologically as well as literally, you let yourself go, you flung yourself in. In their case, Jenny had to confess, she had never really let herself go, and when Mick began to, after their wedding, she didn’t really like it. She didn’t seem to recognize him when he wasn’t controlling himself. She looked up. Robert was coming back holding a coffee cup. You could tell, just by looking at him, that he was sensitive. Mick had been sensitive too, in his way, but more about himself than about other people. Robert put the coffee cup on the table amidst the debris of their lunch and sat down.
‘I am very sorry’, he said, ‘to have blown like that. But if it’s any kind of consolation, I feel better for having done it.’
She smiled at him. She wanted to say something to express the sympathy she felt, but at the same time was afraid to dip her toe in the boiling waters that presently seethed about Robert and Lizzie. ‘You’re a good girl,’ she heard her father’s voice say, in despair.
‘What are we looking at this afternoon?’ she said instead.
He got out his catalogue and spread it open on the edge of the table. He had ringed various stands on the map of the exhibition with red biro circles.
‘Tinware,’ he said. ‘Posters and cotton rugs. For starters at least.’
He smiled at her. She smiled back. He held his hand to her.
‘Come on, Mrs Hardacre,’ he said. ‘What are you sitting there for? It’s time you earned your lunch.’
16
FRANCES SAT IN the neglected gardens of the Alcázar in Seville. It was warm. The clear spring sun shone down out of a bright spring sky. She sat on a tiled seat in one of the brick walks and gazed at the sprouting ungainly palms and the orange trees, already dusty, even in April.
Luis had first brought her to the Alcázar the summer before, on a day of such blinding heat that she had felt she was in a dream. He had led her through the colonnaded courts and tiled rooms of the Palace, the Moorish arches and domes and arabesques so strangely muddled up with the Renaissance columns and galleries. Luis had said the place seethed with stories. One of them concerned King Pedro the Cruel who had murdered a guest from Granada, one Abu Said, for the sake of his jewels, among which was an uncut ruby that Pedro then presented to the Black Prince at a Court ball given in his honour, in 1350. It was firmly believed that the ruby had gone back to England and that Henry V had then worn it during the battle of Agincourt.
‘And where is it now?’
‘Where do you think? In the crown of your Queen Elizabeth!’
Frances thought about it and pictured the Queen wearing Abu Said’s ruby together with her bifocal spectacles as she was wont to do on State occasions. She told Luis about it. He loved the idea. They had been out in the gardens by a great still tank of water and Frances had looked down and seen the reflection of Luis laughing and laughing about the Queen. Pedro the Cruel had kept two queens at the Alcázar, first a Bourbon princess whom he had rejected in favour of María de Padilla, his beloved second wife, so beloved that the gallants of his court were reputed to have queued up to drink her bathwater. One of them had refused, Luis said. He’d claimed that, if he tasted the sauce, he might covet the partridge afterwards. Frances had gone down into the vaulted basement to look at the place where María’s famous baths had been and then climbed to the upper floor of the palace to inspect the bedroom King Pedro had made for her because, he said, the winter coldness of the ground floor might damage her. It was, six centuries later, a weird bedroom. It had Moorish arches and panels and very bad nineteenth-century ceiling paintings and a terrible silver table that had belonged to Queen Isabel II. Over the door lintel was painted a row of five skulls. It made you wonder, Frances thought, about the private life of Pedro the Cruel and María de Padilla; it made you wonder too, as she so often did now, about the essential, ancient and utterly different nature of Spanishness.
Frances had flown to Málaga three days before to escort her first party to the posada at Mojas. It had been a huge success. Her clients were charmed with the hotel, with the countryside, with Juan and the smiling waiters, with the look of the dinner menu, with the new yellow deckchairs waiting for them in welcome under the acacia trees. There had been the usual tiny hitches – a dripping shower, not enough coat hangers, a jammed window – but nothing serious. Frances had stayed two nights, overseen the first walks and meals, collected her congratulations and left them plotting the best route to Gerald Brenan’s village and the order of priority for the glories of Granada. She had then driven back to Málaga and caught an internal flight to Seville for the weekend.
Luis’s flat in Seville was in reality a small suite of rooms at the back of the Posada de los Naranjos. They were cool, dim rooms – cold in winter, Frances had found; Andalucía seemed, like Tuscany, to have no idea of how to comfort itself in cold weather – that looked down into an alley Frances loved, whitewashed as usual, but with whitewash that was peeling a little. The walls were all of different heights, and some were pierced by windows, and some, the lower ones, had russet-tiled tops and the stiff, shiny-leaved branches of orange trees thrust themselves over them. There were balconies in the alley too, and lamps on brackets, and a lot of rather shabby back doors through which people went with shopping and ladders and bicycles, and on all the balconies and ledges there were flowerpots, held in place by loops of wire, and already cascading starry geraniums, scarlet and white and pink. At night, in summer, a man in the opposite house, in a room with a balcony on which no-one ever sat, played a guitar and sang the long, plangent, melancholy strains of the cante jondo. Those summer nights had introduced Frances to the spirit of the south.
Luis had a bedroom and a sitting room looking down into this alley, and a bathroom with no window except a skylight which made you, Frances thought, think about the weather in a way that no ordinary window ever did. In that bathroom, as in the even smaller bathroom in Madrid and in the slightly larger one in Fulham, Frances now kept a toothbrush and a bottle of cleansing lotion and a pot of moisturizing cream. Every time she came, she added something. Luis liked that; he wanted her to add more, he wanted her to keep shoes and shirts and pairs of jeans in both his flats. He said they gave him comfort during the long and frequent times when she was at home in London. He said that, if he felt particularly melancholy without her, he would sometimes brush his teeth with her toothbrush and there was certainly something piquant, even piercing, to think of him standing in that bathroom with a square of huge Sevillian stars shining down through the skylight above his head, with her toothbrush in his mouth.
Bathrooms were a preoccupation with Frances that afternoon in the gardens of the Alcázar. Ten days before, on two successive mornings, Frances had gone through a little private ritual in her London bathroom with two home-testing pregnancy kits, bought
from two different chemists. She had done this twice quite deliberately, out of a most enormous need to be entirely sure, a need which seemed to rise out of her like a physical reflex she couldn’t possibly control.
The ritual had taken place as such rituals commonly have to do, first thing in the morning, one involving two separate plastic phials, and one a kind of plastic dropper, whose tip, said the accompanying leaflet, would turn blue if the result were positive. In the first kit, a circle would form, a blue or purplish circle, and hang there, signifying the beginning of the world or the end of it, depending upon your circumstances. The leaflets were written in chatty nursy prose, using the kind of language in which Frances half-expected any mention of a foetus to be described as ‘a little stranger’. The assumption, in both, was that the blue dropper tip and the blue circle would be greeted with relief and delight, the result, naturally, of careful, rational, adult planning.
Precisely what her own feelings were, she could have described to nobody; chiefly, she was conscious of the sheer strength of them. Above everything, she knew, as she had known for months that she wanted – no, desired – Luis’s baby, not just a baby because the time clock was ticking on towards forty, but his baby. Every hour with him, even if they were quarrelling, confirmed this, notwithstanding his having said that, if she were to become pregnant, it would be the end of everything between them. He could not, from the point of view of his circumstances, have been a more wrong-headed choice, but that seemed to Frances to weigh as nothing against the rightness of him as a human being; as a man, for both her and for a potential baby. Yet besides all this surging conviction and instinct, there was fear. Sitting on the edge of the bath in Fulham and looking at the two little phials of urine side by side on the closed lid of the lavatory, Frances would have said that her feeling was actually closer to terror than to fear, and a very complex terror at that, composing, as it did, an equal desire to see and not to see the blue circle. As she sat there, during the interminable five minutes the instructions had told her the chemicals would take to react, she had, it felt, all the unwanted time in the world to reflect upon the size of the gamble she had taken.
It did not seem to her possible that Luis could, in any way, simply switch off loving her, like turning off an electric current, if she were pregnant. They were too deep in for that, too involved, too twined about one another. He would be furious and then he would relent. He might even consider at last divorcing José’s mother and marrying her and they would, all three, be a family in a flat in Madrid and she would push the baby out for walks in the Botanical Gardens near the Prado – stop this, Frances told herself sternly, stop this, it’s absurd and will not happen. Or – will it? And, besides Luis, there will be Lizzie to tell, and Mum and Dad, and Nicky. And the business! What will happen to the business? And what will Lizzie say to hearing that I am pregnant? If I am … She stared at the two phials. She was cold now, still only in her nightgown and bathrobe, her feet bare on the bathroom floor. She sat up straight, pushing her hair off her face, then holding her hands together in front of her, almost in an instinctive attitude of prayer.
It was there. In the right-hand phial a blue circle was suspended, clear and symmetrical. The blue circle. The test was positive. She, Frances Shore, was pregnant by Luis Gómez Moreno. She had longed for it to happen and now it had and she was filled first with disgust that this huge event should be represented by a cold blue ring in a horrible little test tube, and then, in a deluge, with panic and rapture and misery and relief. She stared and stared at the phial. Then she unlocked her hands and laid one of them, with a kind of enquiring amazement, on her belly under the bathrobe. She looked out of the bathroom window. The April sky was an undecided mixture of blue and grey and white, but it seemed, suddenly, to have enormous significance for Frances, as confused and full of conflict, as she felt herself.
‘I am pregnant,’ she said out loud to the empty bathroom. ‘And nobody knows but me.’
The second morning she performed the second test and was unsurprised to see the tip of the dropper turn blue and very surprised to feel all the enormous engulfing emotions she had felt the previous day all over again. The second day, the joy seemed slightly less and the fear slightly more, as were a whole tide of wretched, unavoidable preoccupations with advancing practicalities – what to do, who to tell, when to tell whom, how to phrase it. She was terribly tired that day, and had a headache, and Nicky, thinking it must be about the time for Frances’s period, suggested she go up to the flat in the afternoon and lie down. Frances shook her head. She did not, that second day, wish to think. The prospect of being shut up alone with her thoughts reminded her too much and too wretchedly of those long wastes of solitary life before Luis and this was because, for the first time in their relationship, there was a secret between them, and a potentially explosive secret at that.
It was not difficult for Frances not to tell anybody, but it was extremely difficult to speak to Luis on the telephone when he rang, as he did, every evening, for a long and comfortable conversation. Of course he felt no constraint, but she felt absolutely trussed up by it, and she also felt, unhappily, as if she were, for the first time since they met, a long and chilly way away from him. He asked, on a couple of evenings, if she was feeling all right.
‘Fine. Just a bit tired. There’s so much work always as the season begins. You’d think you’d done all the work, all winter, and all you’d got to do now was pop the people neatly on to aeroplanes, but it doesn’t seem to happen like that—’
‘You must look after yourself, querida.’
Her heart leapt. That was what contented, proud, protective fathers-to-be said to their pregnant beloveds in romantic novels. Could he …?
‘In one week you will be here, and I will look after you. I think it is time you came to the bull fight.’
‘No! Luis, you promised—’
He was laughing. He loved to startle her, ruffle her feathers.
‘You are so satisfactory to tease.’
‘I know,’ she said, mortified.
‘I love you.’
‘I know that, too.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘You ought to, by now. Go to bed early. Take care of yourself.’
‘I will. I am—’
Bed was the one place she wanted to be until she got there. She wasn’t physically tired, only emotionally so, which was confusing and landed her flat on her back by nine o’clock with her brain whirling like a windmill. It was the prospect of radical change that had begun to haunt her, a change that would involve coping with almost nothing at present known to her. Falling in love with Luis had been a change, of course, from her reticent and single life, but that had been a change that was all too easy to accommodate because it brought nothing that wasn’t enriching and expanding, did nothing to curtail her freedom, nothing to increase her vulnerability or decrease her independence. But this change was of another order altogether; she had brought it about of her own free will, and now that it had happened it was going to take a lot of that free will straight back again. Those first few nights after the ritual in the bathroom had been, to say the least, profoundly unnerving.
It had been a relief to get on the plane to Málaga. In an airport crowd, talking to several of her clients who had, by now, become friends and were apt to send her Christmas cards enclosing photographs of themselves on a Shore to Shore holiday, or of their grandchildren, Frances began to feel real again. The ordinariness of what was going on – people asleep wretchedly, half on seats, half on their luggage, people glazedly eating and drinking, people mooning through the duty-free shops stupefied by artificial decisions about alcohol and tobacco, watches and chocolate – was an effective restorative for her sense of proportion. Barbara, she reflected, had always flung herself into whirlwind domestic activity the moment there was an emotional crisis. Perhaps this was not only instinctive, but an excellent instinct at that. It reminded you that, at bottom, life was quite literally a matter of survival, of making sure tha
t you were still there, living and breathing, at the dawn of a new day. It was no bad thing to remember that sometimes. It put all the sweaty struggles of achievement firmly in their proper place.
The moment the plane had touched down in Málaga, Frances had felt better still. There was the sun, there was Spain, there, in three days, would be Luis. There was also the posada at Mojas which Frances thought she could probably never visit without emotion, and would be disappointed if she did. She had elected, in order to spare the room of her first visit for two of her clients, to take a much smaller single room without a view, whose door opened into one of the irregular internal courtyards. She couldn’t help reflecting, while unpacking in it, how miraculous it would have been if this baby had been conceived in Mojas, even, best of all, in the very bed where Luis had first become her lover and in which Mr and Mrs Ballantyne from Amersham now lay, no doubt, as trimly and separately side by side as figures on a tomb. But it hadn’t been conceived in Mojas, it had been, almost certainly, conceived on a Saturday afternoon in Fulham after a morning spent buying Luis some English shoes (‘Brogues? What is this word “brogues”? Irish? These are Irish shoes?’) and a bottle of wine with lunch. It had been good lovemaking, but not remarkable. Looking back, it seemed wrong, somehow, that the making of a baby such as this baby should have been good but unremarkable.
Whatever it had been, it had been done more than a month ago now. Everything in these shabby Spanish gardens, the palm trees, the myrtles, the leggy box hedges, the oleanders with drifts of litter underneath them, had all been standing there then as they were now, and as they would be in the coming darkness of the evening when she, Frances, would tell Luis that she was, without question, going to have a child.
José came up to the flat for dinner. They had ordered, as they often did, from the restaurant of the hotel, and José, as he often did, came up to eat at least one course with them. He preferred doing this while Frances was in Seville, because if she wasn’t there, his father was not so restrained with him and was likely to tell him that he was overindulged, incompetent, and only kept on as manager of the hotel because of blood ties which he, Luis, was beginning to feel was the worst reason in the world for employing anybody. If Frances was there, Luis was more moderate, and made something of a joke of his exasperation. José liked Frances. He thought her an incomprehensible choice for a mistress strictly on physical grounds – his taste ran currently in the direction of golden-skinned, golden-haired Californian dreams – but he could see why his father liked her company. He liked her company himself, he liked her straightforwardness, her strange sense of humour, her lack of melodrama. He thought she’d had a good effect on his father, made him happy, relaxed him, given him other things to think about than scaffolding and hotels and boots and shoes. One of José’s friends, a young woman who was rising rapidly through the civil service ranks of the Andalusian health service, asked if José thought his father would marry his English girlfriend. José had been horrified.
A Spanish Lover Page 24
