Frances leaned forward.
‘Because what?’
‘Because there is so little security in the end, in anything, so that we must seize what we can, like love—’
‘Dad,’ Frances said, ‘are you talking about me, or you?’
He looked at her. She noticed that his eyes, for the first time, had a milky, elderly film to them.
‘You,’ he said, and then, after a pause, ‘me.’
‘What—’
‘We have quarrelled all our lives. Mum and I, you know that. But we have quarrelled so badly over this baby of yours, we have quarrelled from the depths of ourselves, from our instincts, we have really been quarrelling about the most primitive thing of all, about our sense of survival. And they are so different, our senses of survival, so very different. I want to cherish, to cling to things, she wants self-sufficiency. She says that’s what you are doing. She says that Lizzie and I are passive in the end because we are terrified of our own thoughts and that you and she, though possessed of equally alarming thoughts, aren’t afraid to confront them. She admires you. She has said so over and over.’
Frances climbed out of the huge chair and came to kneel by William. She put her hands on his which were gripping his handkerchief as if it were the last branch hanging out over a ravine.
‘Dad—’
‘I expect she’ll say all this to you herself, only more forcefully. But she may not say—’ He stopped, swallowed, and then hurried on, ‘She may not say that it’s you who have brought everything to a head, by having this affair and now by having this baby, and you should know that, not because I blame you, I don’t, I couldn’t blame you for anything, ever, but because it will explain things for you, you see. You will understand why it’s happened.’
‘What things?’ Frances demanded. ‘What things? What’s happened? What are you talking about?’
William took his hands away from Frances, and blew his nose and sat up straighter.
‘Your mother—’
‘Yes!’
‘Your mother wants us to sell this house and divide the proceeds so that she can go and live in Bath, in a little flat, on her own.’
Frances stared at him.
‘She’s leaving you—’
‘Yes. That’s what she wants.’
‘Oh Dad—’
‘I suppose – I suppose she’s had perfect reason to leave for thirty years—’
‘But she loves you, in her way, needs you. She’s – she—’
‘No,’ William said. He seemed to be a little calmer. He managed a small, faint smile. ‘No. That’s where we’ve all been so wrong. It’s always been assumed by her and by me that I never really loved her, which is why I fell in love with Juliet, and that she always loved me, in a curious way, which is why she never left me, despite Juliet. But it seems, my darling Frances, that it has always, in fact, been the other way about. I am the loving, she the loved. Or perhaps love has nothing to do with it, and it’s merely habit and we’ve got so used to it we can’t tell the difference any more. She said – she said she felt she had done me an injustice, letting me go on like this all these years, clinging to me. She said she always wanted me to love her, even though she didn’t love me in return. She is remarkably honest, remarkably.’
Frances got up, bemusedly, from her knees.
‘I don’t see where this baby comes in—’
William leaned back in his chair. He flapped a hand at Frances.
‘Go and ask her. Ask her yourself.’
‘Dad?’
‘Yes—’
‘Dad, do you want me to come back here because you think it will make Mum stay?’
‘No,’ William said.
Frances looked at him but he would not meet her gaze.
‘I see,’ she said.
‘I’ve mismanaged the whole of my emotional life,’ Barbara said, slicing cucumber. ‘I’ve dissipated all my energies, I’ve never let myself go. I’ve had fads, as substitutes for emotions. You know that.’
Frances said nothing. She sat by the kitchen table and buttered bread.
‘I think I’m rather an unpleasant woman,’ Barbara said. ‘I say dreadful things and sometimes I get a little shaft of pleasure out of saying them. I’m all the wrong generation too, too young to accept being just a dutiful, dependent wife; too old to be independent of marriage. But I mean to have a go.’
‘Isn’t it – a bit late?’ Frances said. She laid the buttered slices out on the table top. ‘I mean, what’s the point of creating such an upheaval after all these years?’
‘There’s always a point! There’s never a moment when it’s too late! What makes you think that life is of more value to you at thirty-nine than to me at sixty-nine? If anything, it’s more valuable to me because there’s less of it left.’ She glared at Frances. ‘I’ve worried about you all your life.’
Frances sighed.
‘I know. You’ve always thought me incompetent and weak—’
‘No,’ Barbara said, ‘no, not exactly that. It’s more that I’ve always thought you such an unsuitable person to be a twin. Just as I am an unsuitable person to be a wife.’
‘Oh Mum—’
Barbara began to arrange the cucumber in overlapping rows on the bread.
‘You really want this man, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re lucky. I’ve never really wanted anyone except, I suppose, to stop someone else having them. Will you go and live in Spain?’
Frances looked up.
‘I might—’
‘I can’t advise you. I can’t advise anyone, I’m not fit for it. But I’ll support you.’
‘Will you? Oh, will you?’
‘I was in such a temper when you started this affair. I thought: How could you be so stupid, when it couldn’t possibly have a future, how could you lay the foundations so carefully for pain? Then I thought: What’s pain, for heaven’s sake, and what’s life if all you do is try and avoid it? I considered your love affair. I asked myself: If you hadn’t done that, what would you have done? Married one of those feeble young men who always found you so attractive or just gone trailing on sending tidy tourists to Tuscany and ended up just like me, in essence, frustrated and futile. But then you started this baby and I thought: She’s done it! Frances has damn well gone and done it! I hadn’t felt that exhilarated since I decided to go to Marrakesh which was, incidentally, not at all what it was cracked up to be and full of extremely second-rate drop-outs who were mostly too stoned to make sense. And I thought: Hurray, at last William and I will see eye to eye about something, and I found that, instead of rejoicing, he was shaking with respectable anxiety. I told him, I’ve had enough of the only permitted unorthodoxies being for William. What would you have done, I said to him, if Juliet had had a baby?’
‘And?’ Frances said, amazed.
Barbara slapped top slices of bread on the sandwiches.
‘He hadn’t an answer. I don’t think he’d ever thought about it. I know he’s a dear, you needn’t leap to his defence, but he’s also intolerable in some ways. I’m tired of him and I’m even more tired of the sort of person that living with him makes me be.’
Frances put her hands over her face.
‘Will you divorce?’
‘Shouldn’t think so. What would be the point?’
‘Have you told Lizzie?’
Barbara stopped slicing off crusts.
‘Not yet.’
‘Then I will,’ Frances said. ‘I’d like to. Please let it be me that tells her this!’
‘All right. If you want to. It would probably be best anyway—’
‘Why?’
‘Because’, Barbara said carefully, ‘Lizzie and I had a bit of a quarrel last week. They’d had the chicken-pox and then some upset about the girl who works in the shop and she’d flounced out, and then your news came, and Lizzie started creating so I went over and I said now look here, Lizzie, you’re jealous and that’s a problem you ha
ve to confront because it’s poisoning you and you keep calling it by other names that are easier to live with and you’ve got to stop. I probably shouldn’t have said it in front of the children.’
‘No, you shouldn’t—’
‘But it had to be said.’
‘Did it?’
‘If she wants any future relationship with her husband or sister, yes it did.’
Frances crossed her arms flat on the table, and laid her face down on them. The thought of Lizzie suddenly made her feel deeply sad, troubled sad, as it had done that long ago lovely morning in Mojas with the curtains swishing on the tiles and the woman in the alley below calling for her little hiding boy.
‘I shall go and see Lizzie,’ Frances said. ‘I shall go and see her tomorrow. I ought to anyway, I haven’t seen her for so long. Mum—’
‘Yes?’ Barbara said.
‘What will happen to Dad if you go and live in Bath?’
Barbara paused. She arranged the sandwiches on a plate in a little block.
‘He can do,’ she said, ‘what he probably should have done twenty-five years ago. He can go and live with Juliet.’
Lizzie said she didn’t want to talk in the flat, she said it was too crowded with children because of the school holidays having begun. She didn’t look well, Frances thought. The children, on the other hand, despite the last vestiges of chicken-pox, looked in rude health. Harriet was helping Robert in the Gallery because since Jenny had gone, they were very short-handed. Lizzie said Harriet had amazed everyone, and most of all herself, by liking working in the Gallery. Lizzie also said that Frances must speak to Harriet on her own.
‘Must I? Why?’
‘Because she’s hurt.’
‘Hurt?’
‘Yes,’ Lizzie said, ‘because you didn’t tell her yourself about the baby, you just assumed I would. It didn’t matter with the boys. You know boys. I sometimes think they simply don’t have the mechanism for receiving information of any human kind, but Harriet is different. Harriet has always thought you and she have something special, that you feel differently about her.’
‘I do.’
‘Then you should have told her about this baby.’
‘It isn’t this baby,’ Frances said, ‘it’s my baby.’
She went down the staircase to the Gallery. There were quite a lot of customers, some of them with the holiday-clothed, questing air of tourists, and Robert was sitting on a rush-seated stool behind the till, smiling and counting out change and putting purchases into the Gallery’s new buff-and-dark-blue recycled bags. Frances waved to him and he gave her a returning wave, almost like a salute. Then she went towards the back of the shop and found Harriet holding up Indian rag rugs while a customer colour-tested a scrap of cotton fabric against them.
‘Not quite the same beige—’
‘Won’t it look a bit dull’, Harriet suggested, ‘if it’s exactly the same?’ She glanced up and saw Frances, and blushed.
The customer sighed. ‘I’m afraid I’ll simply have to think about it.’
Harriet laid the rugs down.
‘I do like the blue, though,’ the customer said, ‘and the green is very pretty. But then, the rust has more character—’
‘Yes,’ Harriet said, scowling with self-control.
‘Is Mrs Hardacre here?’ the customer asked. ‘She has such an eye for colour—’
‘I’m afraid she’s on holiday just now.’
The customer looked as if she thought that this was very inconsiderate. She put the piece of curtain fabric away in a little zipped compartment inside her handbag, and then she glanced at Frances.
‘I mustn’t keep this lady waiting—’
‘Thank you,’ Frances said, adding, ‘I am in rather a hurry—’
‘Are you?’ Harriet said when they were alone. She stood behind the piles of rugs, as if to keep a barrier between herself and Frances. ‘Are you in a hurry?’
‘No,’ Frances said, ‘I just wanted to get rid of her. I came to say sorry.’
Harriet said stonily, ‘I expect Mummy sent you.’
‘She did say that I had been thoughtless and that I’d offended you and I wanted to say I am truly sorry about that.’
Harriet lifted a foot as if to kick the rug pile and then remembered her position as shop assistant, and desisted.
‘Doesn’t matter. It’s your baby—’
‘Yes, but you’re my niece and we’ve always been particular friends.’
‘Until—’ Harriet said, and stopped.
‘Yes,’ Frances said, ‘until.’
‘I think,’ Harriet said, too loudly, ‘I think you’re being unfair.’
‘To you?’
‘No. To this baby. Mum says you aren’t getting married.’
There was a beat and then Frances said as lightly as she could, ‘No, it doesn’t look like it.’
‘That’s not fair on the baby. People can talk and talk and say it doesn’t matter if kids don’t have a mum and a dad, but it does matter, it does, otherwise it’s just grown-ups doing what they want, as per usual, it’s just one more poor kid having to explain why their name isn’t the same as their mum’s name or their dad’s name, it’s just some awful battle you’ve started that your kid will have to do the fighting in, not you!’ She tossed her head so that her hair flew up in a plume before it fell back again across her face. ‘You should have thought of that, you should have thought of all that before you started!’
‘Harriet—’
‘I don’t want to talk to you,’ Harriet said. ‘I don’t care whether you told Mum first or me first, I don’t care. I’m just pissed off you turned out to be like all the others, all the other grown-ups with their secrets and their lies. I’ve got to help Dad now, anyway.’
‘Yes,’ Frances said. She put a steadying hand out against a sturdy pine dresser filled with pottery plates painted with hens. ‘I hope – I hope that, when your cousin is born, you won’t take your anger with me out on it.’
‘’Course not,’ Harriet said scornfully. ‘What do you take me for?’
Lizzie and Frances lay on a rug under an enormous horse-chestnut tree on the edge of Langworth recreation ground. At some distance away, a group of boys were being given net practice for cricket by a ginger-headed man with unnaturally long arms, like a chimpanzee, and Sam and Davy had drifted enviously towards the group, full of shy longing. Sam adored cricket, as he adored all games; Davy was trying to accustom himself to not being afraid of the ball.
Lizzie lay on her stomach, plucking at grasses at the edge of the rug. Frances sat beside her, legs outstretched, propped on her arms. She had told Lizzie about Harriet’s angry reaction and Lizzie had said well, you know how conventional teenagers are.
‘But she has a point.’
‘Maybe. But we all have points. That’s the trouble, all of us having points and wanting them heard.’
Frances looked at her sister, took a deep breath and said, ‘And now Mum wants hers heard.’
She waited for Lizzie to spin round, but Lizzie went on weaving three stiff grasses into a little rigid plait.
Then she said, ‘You mean this plan to go and live in Bath?’
‘You know about it!’
‘Mum has dropped so many heavy hints, I couldn’t fail to. I suppose we ought to try and stop her, but frankly, I can’t take on another single emotional thing just now, I simply can’t. They’re our parents, I know, but it’s their marriage, if you can call it a marriage.’
‘I think they think it is. Anyway, it appears to be my fault.’
‘Does it?’
‘Dad said my pregnancy had brought everything to a head and made them quarrel so badly that Mum can’t stay any more.’
Lizzie said dully, ‘It isn’t you.’
‘Oh?’
‘Well, it’s only partly you, it’s really Luis.’
‘Luis?’ Frances demanded.
‘He’s made you behave so differently, he’s taken you away from u
s and now he’s going to abandon you.’
Frances said furiously, ‘If you ever say anything remotely like that again—’
‘Sorry!’ Lizzie shrieked. ‘I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean—’
‘I thought we were beyond all this, we’d done with this kind of rubbish—’
‘We have, we have, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—’
‘Lizzie—’
‘Listen,’ Lizzie said, speaking rapidly, her head bent low over her plaiting fingers, ‘I’ve got rather a lot to say to you and I’m not quite sure what order it will come out in. Perhaps I’ll do Jenny first, shall I? Poor Jenny. I caught Rob kissing her, or rather, having kissed her, which he said was out of relief and gratitude to her for being so normal when I’ve been so bonkers. I don’t know if I believe that or not, but I’ve decided to try to. I went to see Jenny who was behaving as if she and Rob had had a full-blown affair and it was perfectly plain she was in agony because she had found Rob very attractive and therefore couldn’t disentangle what had happened and what she had fantasized might happen. She’s sacked herself from the Gallery, which is the worst thing she could possibly do from everybody’s point of view including her own, but I can’t persuade her otherwise. And then you. This awful situation you’ve got yourself into. I mean, you’re my sister and I’ll help you all I can, of course I will, but I can’t pretend I think you’ve done a wonderful thing, because I don’t, I think the whole thing’s been a disaster, from that first trip to Spain, an utter disaster—’ Her voice broke a little and then, without warning, she reared up and said, gazing at Frances, ‘Oh Frances, what am I going to do?’
Frances knelt up and put her arms round her.
‘Nobody’, she said, ‘can feel very normal when there’s a situation like mine around. Nobody can.’
Lizzie clung to her.
‘Are you going to be all right?’
‘I don’t know. How can I possibly know?’
A Spanish Lover Page 29
