A Spanish Lover

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘Marry her? Of course not, it’s absolutely out of the question. You must be mad even to ask me such a thing!’

  It had quite disturbed him. He was perfectly used, now, to his mother’s relentless vendetta against his father, and his grandmothers’ lamentations and recriminations about the separation between his parents – after all, plenty of his friends had parents in the same situation and divorce was becoming as common as marriage – but for his father to marry Frances was quite another matter altogether, a matter not to be thought of without indignation amounting to outrage. The next time they met, after this suggestion had been made to José, he had looked at Frances quite differently, with suspicion and disapproval. But she not only hadn’t seemed to notice his cold and furious glances, she had also behaved with exactly the same unpossessive collectedness in his father’s presence as she had always shown. It struck José suddenly that perhaps she might not want to marry his father, her choice not his, and this thought threw him into quite a reverse turmoil of angry feelings. He also had a dreadful apprehension that, if Frances wasn’t actually laughing at him, she was certainly smiling a little. He began to avoid Frances in case this was indeed true, and he wouldn’t go up to the flat when she was there. Nobody commented on this and nothing, emotionally, seemed to change. José began to miss both his dinners in the flat and Frances, who, even by her silent presence, seemed to defend him from his father. He told himself he had rightly made a stand in defence of the honour of his family; he began to appear again at the Friday and Saturday night dinner table. In time, as with every other crisis in José’s life, he ceased even to think about what had troubled him. He brought Frances flowers occasionally and took, as a pretty Austrian student at Seville University, and on whom he had his eye, had taught him to do, to kissing Frances’s hand.

  ‘Oh, fol-de-rol,’ Frances said to him.

  ‘Why do you say this?’

  ‘Because it makes me think of the way people behave in operettas. Oh fie, sir, and la, sir, and I shall tap you playfully in reproof with my fan.’

  ‘I do not understand you.’

  ‘No,’ Frances said. ‘You wouldn’t.’

  ‘Why would I not?’

  ‘Because you’re Spanish.’

  ‘It is magnificent to be Spanish!’

  ‘José,’ Frances said affectionately, ‘you are an ass.’

  He grinned at her. She looked tired, he thought, even a little transparent, as if her skin was about to bruise, out of fatigue, of its own accord. It was probably overwork, he decided. He himself did not know the meaning of overwork – he took enormous care not to – but he knew that it could easily afflict people who weren’t constantly on their guard against it.

  ‘Where is my father?’

  ‘In the shower.’

  ‘Did you order the ajo blanco tonight? It is excellent. And also the salmonetes, what is it—’

  ‘Mullet,’ Frances said. ‘Red mullet. I don’t know. Luis has ordered it all. I spent the afternoon at the Alcázar.’

  ‘The Alcázar?’ José said in amazement. ‘But what were you doing there?’

  ‘Thinking.’

  ‘You are a most extraordinary person. I think you also are a little tired.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you should be sitting and I shall bring you a glass of wine.’

  ‘Yes please,’ Frances said. She stepped out of her shoes and folded herself up on the sofa by the window, open to the darkening alley.

  Luis came out of the bedroom running his hands over his still damp hair. José went up to him and they embraced, easily, without words. Frances thought of how naturally Davy and Sam kissed their father but how Alistair would now stand a little at a distance, stiffly, shackled by the onset of self-consciousness.

  ‘English men, I mean fathers and adult sons, hardly ever kiss each other.’

  Luis cast himself down on the sofa beside her.

  ‘Often I do not want to kiss José, I want to smack him.’

  ‘Used you to?’

  ‘Often,’ José said, bringing wine in thick, pale-green glasses with bubbles of air trapped in them. ‘My childhood was terrible. He beat me with sticks and shut me in cupboards.’ He winked.

  ‘Poor you,’ Frances said. She could feel Luis lying against her, heavy and clean.

  ‘And now he kisses me but he shouts.’

  ‘I don’t shout,’ Luis said. ‘I never raise my voice. I merely say things you do not want to hear so you imagine that I am shouting.’

  Frances looked at him.

  ‘Do you imagine that, too? What do you do when people say things you don’t want to hear?’

  He turned his head. Their eyes were only inches apart.

  ‘Why do you ask me that?’

  There was a tiny beat and then she said, ‘Oh, idle curiosity. To see if things run in families—’

  ‘Oh?’ he said.

  José went to the telephone.

  ‘I am going to check on your order for dinner. You must eat the mullet—’

  ‘I don’t want it,’ Luis said. ‘I want the crayfish.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘In a minute, I will shout,’ Luis said. ‘I own this hotel, I want the crayfish; you may be my son but you are also my manager.’

  José’s hand hovered over the telephone.

  ‘Why don’t you’, Frances suggested, ‘go down to the kitchen and see what looks best and we will eat that, even if it’s neither mullet nor crayfish?’

  Luis laid his cheek on her shoulder.

  ‘How diplomatic.’

  ‘Or practical. I’m hungry.’

  ‘I shall bring tapas also,’ José said, moving towards the door. ‘You want the little mussels?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Anything—’

  ‘The little mussels and the big olives—’

  ‘José,’ Luis said in Spanish, ‘get lost.’

  The door opened, and closed.

  ‘An exasperating boy.’

  ‘Just rather young for his age perhaps—’

  Luis took his cheek away from Frances’s shoulder and picked up her free hand, the one not holding the wine glass.

  ‘Frances?’

  ‘Yes—’

  ‘What do you wish to say to me that I will not want to hear?’

  She gave a tiny, involuntary gasp. This was not in her plan. Her plan had been to wait until Luis was replete with wine and food, and José had taken himself back downstairs to his end-of-the-day managerial duties; and then to say, by way of many gentle introductory sentiments and expressions of love and personal happiness, what she had been planning how to say all the long afternoon in the gardens of the Alcázar. But Luis, with that powerful human instinct that he had used like a sword to cut through to the heart of her had, at a stroke, wrecked her plan. She panicked.

  ‘Not now—’

  ‘Yes. Now.’

  ‘No, later, when we’re alone—’

  ‘We are alone now,’ he said. His hold on her hand had become a grip.

  She swallowed. She leaned forward and put her wine glass on a little lamp table near by.

  ‘It’s very important. I don’t want to tell you badly, or in a hurry—’

  ‘Now,’ Luis insisted.

  She turned her head. She said, looking at him. ‘You don’t want to hear this. It’s the one thing you don’t want to hear.’

  ‘Tell me!’

  ‘Let go of my hand. You’re hurting.’

  He dropped her hand abruptly, as if it were an impersonal object not in any way attached to her.

  ‘Now then. Tell me.’

  ‘I am pregnant, Luis,’ Frances said, and her voice seemed to echo in the small room, as if she were speaking in a church. ‘I am going to have a baby.’

  He shouted, ‘No!’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘How dare you?’ he shouted. ‘How could you? How dare you deceive me?’

  She got up and moved away from him, behind the table already
laid for the three of them with spoons for the white gazpacho and knives and forks for the fish, and glasses, glimmering in the fading light.

  ‘I wanted to,’ she said. ‘I needed to. I wanted your baby with a want I can’t really describe to you because it’s more like a need, a craving. I decided to risk it. To risk—’ She paused, took a breath and added, ‘You.’

  He stood up too. He was almost incoherent with fury.

  ‘You know what I said to you!’

  ‘Yes—’

  ‘You will become a mother, you will change, it is too horrible to think of! Is this a trap? Do you suppose you will force me to marry you this way?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then you are right! I will never marry you! Do you hear me? You have deceived me, betrayed me, deliberately you have done this, you even admit it! You were the one woman I have ever known who I thought was honest and now you are not honest, you are like all the rest, you play tricks, you cheat, you break our trust and our faith!’

  She held on to a chair back. She was shaking and her heart was thudding.

  ‘And’, he yelled in Spanish, ‘you don’t even care! You think you have won! You think you have tamed me! But you will see, I will show you, you will see what it is to betray me.’

  ‘You’re quite right,’ she said in English. ‘I’m not sorry. I meant to do it and I’m glad.’

  He went over to the open window and held the bottom of the frame, gripping it, his shoulders shaking as if he were weeping.

  ‘You don’t know what you have done, you stupid Frances—’

  ‘I do—’

  ‘No,’ he said, turning round. ‘No. You think you know, and perhaps you may know for yourself but you don’t know for me.’

  She said, idiotically, ‘Well, I’ve clearly made you very angry.’

  He gave a little snort of exasperation.

  ‘Not that—’

  From the alley outside rose the sudden broken strains of someone strumming on a guitar, a strolling someone, tuning up, humming a little. Luis gave a shuddering sigh.

  ‘I will lose you now,’ he said more gently. ‘That is what you don’t understand.’

  ‘Never!’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You can’t help it, nor can I. But there is not room for a child and a man with a woman who is a mother.’

  ‘What utter nonsense!’

  ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘You will see. You will see what you have done.’

  She held hard to the chair back.

  ‘Oh don’t be so theatrical, so Spanish—’

  ‘Enough!’

  ‘Children add to relationships, they are a development of relationships, they’re part of the nature of being together – growing together.’

  He said softly, interrupting, ‘I don’t think so. I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Luis—’

  He let go of the window and came over to her. He put his arm around her shoulders, a kindly arm. He said, ‘I am going out now.’

  She was horrified.

  ‘Oh no!’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘What’s done is done. You must take care of yourself and I must help you to do it. But not now, not tonight. I will be back later but for now I must go out.’

  She nodded. Desolation flooded through her in a cold, heavy wave.

  ‘As you wish.’

  He kissed her. He leaned forward and kissed her cheek, not her mouth, and then he took his arm away from her shoulders, and went into the bedroom. When he came out, he had added a tie and a jacket to his previous shirt and trousers. He paused for a second and looked at her, and then, without speaking, he went across the room and opened the door and went out. Frances didn’t move. She stood there, still leaning on the chair back, and longed and longed for him. The longing made her feel quite faint. After several minutes, she managed to feel her way round the table and back to the sofa. She took a gulp of her hardly tasted wine, and sat there, holding the glass in one hand with the other laid across her stomach. There was no thinking to be done. She simply had to sit there and keep breathing and wait for these first moments to be over, to become the past, that was done with, and not the present, that still had to be endured.

  There were feet on the stairs, and José’s customary tactful tap on the door.

  ‘Come—’

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘The little eggs of the codoniz, what is the codoniz?’

  ‘The quail,’ Frances said.

  José looked round.

  ‘Where is my father?’

  ‘Gone out.’

  ‘Out? But—’

  ‘José,’ Frances said, ‘I think you had better leave me. We won’t be eating dinner tonight.’ She glanced at him. ‘You see, I’m afraid that your father and I have had a quarrel.’

  17

  ALISTAIR CAUGHT CHICKEN-POX. He felt rotten but his feelings of rottenness were outweighed by the mortification of having a spot-ravaged face. He could bear nobody to see him, not even his parents, and lay wretchedly in the hot little bedroom he shared with Sam with an old silk scarf of Lizzie’s draped across his face. When the spots spread downward into his armpits and across his chest and finally into his groin, he was almost in despair. Consumed by self-disgust and a terror of being seen, he crept to the bathroom wrapped in a sheet like a ghoul, and would only let the doctor examine him if there was no-one else in the room, and the door was shut.

  ‘It’s only chicken-pox,’ Lizzie said in exasperation.

  ‘Not to him,’ Robert argued. ‘He thinks he’s decaying—’

  ‘Rubbish.’

  Robert glared at her. How could she be so unsympathetic?

  ‘It’s not rubbish. He’s about to become an adolescent and you know what that means. He’s really suffering.’

  Lizzie pulled a face. She had made Alistair a jug of homemade lemonade but he had refused to lift his scarf even to look at it, let alone drink it. She was extremely sorry for him, she told herself, but she also thought he was being hysterical lying there in the dark, shrouded and self-pitying. It was only chicken-pox, for heaven’s sake, common or garden old childhood chicken-pox.

  ‘I don’t really want to take time off work,’ Lizzie said. ‘As long as you and Jenny can cope. After all, he won’t let me do anything for him, he won’t even let me stay in the room with him, so there doesn’t seem any point in being here rather than at work, does there?’

  ‘You’re his mother,’ Robert said.

  She shot him a defiant glance.

  ‘And you’re his father!’

  ‘With work to do—’

  ‘I’ve got work to do!’ Lizzie shouted. ‘Don’t give me that! Who’s paying the interest on the rest of the overdraft if it isn’t me? Who’s—’

  ‘Shut up,’ Robert said. He closed his eyes. ‘Shut up. This isn’t a competition, you know, about who’s tireder or who’s working harder—’

  ‘You started it!’ Lizzie shouted again. ‘You started it by implying it was more my job to look after Alistair than yours!’

  Robert glared at her.

  ‘Don’t tell me I don’t do my fair share with the children—’

  ‘When it suits you.’

  ‘That’s monstrous,’ Robert said furiously, ‘monstrous and untrue. I asked you whether you’d like it to be me or you who took an outside job, and you chose yourself, so of course, being here all the time, I’ve been responsible for the children far more than you have. Hell, when I went to Birmingham, you couldn’t even cope with them all for two days and had to send the little ones to your mother—’

  ‘But you took Jenny!’ Lizzie screeched. ‘You had Jenny!’

  ‘Leave Jenny out of this!’

  ‘Why? Why should I? You have Jenny here and I don’t have anyone—’

  ‘Please,’ a voice said.

  They both turned. In the doorway of the sitting-room stood a medium-sized figure draped in a pink sheet with a yellow-and-white-striped towel over its head and face. At the bottom, two grey wool feet p
rotruded gloomily.

  ‘You’re making my room shake,’ Alistair said. ‘I really can’t see what there is to shout about. You haven’t got chicken-pox.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Lizzie said, ‘sorry—’

  ‘I don’t want to be looked after,’ Alistair said. ‘I just want to be better. And I certainly don’t want you two yelling all over the place.’

  Robert went over and put his arm around Alistair’s pink-sheeted shoulders. Alistair flinched.

  ‘Don’t touch me!’

  ‘Sorry, old son. Come back to bed now—’

  ‘I’ll take you,’ Lizzie said, rushing forward.

  ‘No!’ Alistair said. ‘Neither of you will and if you touch me again I shall probably bite you.’

  ‘Darling—’

  ‘Go to work,’ Robert said to Lizzie. ‘Just go to work, would you?’

  She hesitated. Alistair suddenly appeared neither melodramatic nor comical to her but full of real pathos.

  ‘I won’t go in today, I’ll ring—’

  ‘No,’ Robert said.

  ‘But—’

  ‘You can’t do anything here,’ Robert said. ‘Can you? I mean, you said so yourself.’