I’m thinking now, Lizzie thought. I don’t much like it, I’d rather do, but when it becomes apparent that almost everything you do is at best clumsy and at worst wrong, you have to stop and think, even I have to. She unfolded her hands and laid them on the arms of the chair. It was a lovely chair, a really good piece of design, a really good buy too, since Robert had ordered six and this was the last one left. Lizzie couldn’t wait for it to go. It was evidence – and evidence was the last thing she wanted just now – of areas of life she had not controlled recently, areas that had plainly got on with themselves more than adequately without her.
But it was no good thinking, however much she wanted to, that she could simply take back the control now that she was ready to, because she couldn’t. Most of those people – Robert, the children, her parents, Frances – whom Lizzie felt to be like spokes of a wheel of which she was the hub had, somehow, detached themselves and gone bowling off on their own. It was no use, Lizzie told herself, thinking that she could just snap her fingers now and bring them all to heel, because she couldn’t. They wouldn’t come, for one thing. When people used that phrase about resuming life after an upset, they didn’t really mean that, they didn’t mean you could go on where you had left off as if nothing had happened, they meant looking at what you had now, which was never exactly what you used to have, and going on from there. Technically, Lizzie still had one husband and four children and two parents and one twin sister and a home and a business and a job, but only technically. The essence of her old life, that busy, authoritative life at the Grange, was now gone for ever. The essence of her new life was something she had to look at, very seriously, because everybody, including Robert, or perhaps particularly Robert, had made it abundantly plain that they weren’t going to look at it for her.
‘My marriage’, Barbara had said to her, not especially kindly, ‘is none of your business. Certainly I’m your mother, certainly we have the natural concern for one another of mother and daughter, but my marriage is mine, good or bad. It was there long before you came along, and you only know as much about it as you can see. You can’t affect it, you can’t tell your father and me what to do about it, just because you’re younger, just because you think you know.’
The trouble is, Lizzie thought, lifting her feet up on to the chair and wrapping her arms round her knees, I did think I knew. In a way, I suppose I still do but I’ve got to learn not to say what I think I know all the time. Rob hasn’t said that but I know he’s thinking it, like he’s thinking he’s absolutely sick with relief that Frances is going to Spain because, even though he’s fond of her, he really can’t bear her and me any more. Or, let’s be completely truthful, please, Lizzie, he can’t bear the way I behave about her. Well, I can’t behave about her in any way at all any more because she won’t let me. Mum says she should never have been a twin which may be right and all very well for Frances, but what about me? I think I’m a natural twin, I feel one, but it seems I have to stop thinking like that or else, if they’re all right, I’ll find I’m not a wife or a mother either, and I’ll just end up the kind of useless neurotic mess I’ve always despised.
She stood up and began to pad softly round the shop in her bare feet. Robert said Harriet was properly useful, not just apparently so in order to earn this coveted money. He also said that he was going to explain the stock-taking and marking-up systems to Alistair. Alistair had asked him. Lizzie had opened her mouth to say that Alistair was too young to be of any real use and shut it again without uttering. There had been something distinctly unhelpful in Rob’s expression, something that had been there a lot lately, a patient, wary, weary something. She had found herself, most uncharacteristically, on the verge of asking him if he was tired of her and had only refrained because she had discovered she was terrified of risking the answer being ‘yes’. He made it eloquently, mutely plain just now that he didn’t want to talk any more, that he was sick of talking, that it was his opinion that talking could very easily become a substitute for living. And loving.
‘I don’t have to say I love you!’ he’d shouted at her not long ago. ‘I don’t have to say another word! Why don’t you look at what I do? What I do for you, for us, for the children? Why don’t you just look at that?’
So now she was looking at some of it, looking at this thoughtfully, ingeniously stocked shop, at the steadiness it represented, at the hours and hours of lonely minding it had taken over the last two years, grimly holding on, while too few people came, and even fewer bought. But they were coming now. Harriet had told her, Harriet had said this week had been a better week. Alistair had worked out that it was about seventeen per cent better. Lizzie stopped by a display table. On it was a pile of turned wooden boxes with latticed lids for filling with pot-pourri, boxes that Lizzie remembered ordering from that strange young man who said that he was a Buddhist and that he could also make her spinning wheels if she wanted them. The boxes wouldn’t do there, in a pile. Nobody could see the point of them in a pile, how they fitted in. They ought to be next to a lamp, singly, near a pile of books and a vase, they ought to be placed in such a way as to suggest the effect of them, the use of them. Lizzie reached out, picked up the nearest two boxes and began on a little purposeful rearrangement.
Later, over supper, they talked about the children. It was the sort of conversation they used to have, long ago, and had not had, for ages, because of what Lizzie called, well – other things. They discussed Alistair’s solitariness and Davy’s babyishness with mild anxiety and discreetly congratulated themselves on a dawning sense of responsibility they perceived in both Harriet and Sam. They said at intervals, ‘Of course, he or she is terribly young yet,’ and Sam came drifting in, in search of something to eat, and said what were they talking about but please don’t tell him actually, because it was bound to be boring. They said, ‘You,’ and he was enchanted. He lay down on the kitchen floor in one of the narrow spaces between the table and the cupboards, to eat his Marmite sandwich, and listen in case they talked about him a bit more. When they didn’t, he began a chant, muffled by chewing, of, ‘Bor-ing, bor-ing, bor-ing,’ until Robert threw him out. They heard him go banging cheerfully along the passage singing the theme tune for the World Cup, and this made them smile at one another, and the smiling suddenly made Lizzie feel rather vulnerable.
‘Lizzie—’
‘Yes?’
‘I’ve got something to ask you,’ Robert said.
‘If it’s about Westondale—’
‘It isn’t, though it might be, later. It’s about William.’
She pushed a few last pasta shells that she didn’t want to eat round her plate with her fork.
‘Juliet turned him down.’
‘I know that.’
‘I suppose we could all have seen it coming, I mean, if she’d ever really wanted him or he her, they’d have done something about it sooner—’
‘Exactly,’ Robert said, ‘a William-style cop-out. William never wanted to lose what he had; Juliet never wanted all the clutter and rows of family life. Just as I always said.’
Lizzie nodded.
‘Yes, you did. I suppose we just got used to it, like we got used to Mum complaining about it and not doing anything. Frances and I were at school once with a girl called Beverley Lane-Smith. Her parents lived together but they weren’t married, her father was called something Lane and her mother was called something Smith, and we didn’t think anything of it and nor did she until suddenly, at about twenty-two, she got frightfully indignant about her parents never considering her and her brother in the matter, and she changed her name to Burton, to spite them, because she had a crush on the actor.’
‘Yes,’ Robert said patiently, ‘but what has that got to do with William?’
‘Only as an illustration of waking up to something you’ve always unthinkingly gone along with—’
‘Lizzie,’ Robert said, ‘where is William going to live when the house is sold?’
Lizzie put her fork down.
‘He’s going to buy a flat, he says. He’s thinking of buying a flat here, in Langworth. There are some new ones, behind the police station—’
‘Those are for people on zimmers.’
‘Well, he’ll be on a zimmer one day—’
‘Not for years.’
‘No, but I suppose—’
‘Lizzie,’ Robert said, ‘I think he ought to come and live with us.’
Her mouth fell open.
‘Us!’
‘Yes.’
‘But – but you’d go mad, he drives you mad, bumbling about, forgetting things! And there isn’t room, there isn’t an inch, how could we have any privacy at all, it’s bad enough with the children, but how could there be any privacy at all with Dad here?’
‘Not here,’ Robert said. He leaned forward. ‘We’d buy another house. William could use his half of the proceeds of his house to put down on a house for all of us, and we would let this flat and use the rent to service the mortgage on the remainder.’
‘But you didn’t want help from him! You refused help from him!’
‘That was then,’ Robert said. ‘This is now. I couldn’t bear help while we were going down. I can bear this kind of structured help now that I think we are going slowly up.’
‘Are we?’
He looked at her.
‘What do you think?’
‘Why do you ask me?’
‘Because the answer really depends on you.’
Lizzie looked down at the wooden table top, at the burns and scars and rings lurking under its shiny surface like fish in a pool.
‘We might have him for twenty years—’
‘Yes.’
‘Rob,’ she said, ‘don’t you mind that?’
‘I mind it less than a lot of other things. He could help in the shop.’
Lizzie thought.
‘Could he?’
‘Yes; for the odd hour. When neither of us can be there.’
‘Neither of us?’
‘Yes. Do you really intend to go on at Westondale?’
‘I have to.’
‘You don’t.’
‘I do!’ Lizzie cried. ‘The interest on the bloody loan!’
‘I could get a job,’ Robert said. ‘My turn.’
Fear clutched her.
‘But why, when I’ve got one already—’
‘I need a change. We all do. We need to have a kind of life now where we feel we’re building, not just standing around in a panic with our fingers in the hole in the dyke. You can get as stuck in panic as you can in boredom. I want to make things happen now, I want to move things.’
She said, controlling herself, ‘But what might you do?’
‘Teach.’
‘Teach!’
‘Yes. Picture framing, furniture restoration, that sort of thing. There’s a vacancy, in Bath, on a course for retraining people who’ve been made redundant—’
‘Not students, then—’
‘No,’ Robert said, grinning faintly at her tone. ‘Why should you be frightened of students?’
Lizzie wanted to say she seemed to feel frightened of most things at the moment and said instead, untruthfully, ‘I’m not. But surely that wouldn’t pay very well?’
‘Slightly more than Westondale pays you, for fewer hours.’
‘Because you’re a man!’
‘I’m not a sculptor,’ Robert said deliberately. ‘Why don’t you think of starting that again?’
‘Nobody wants that—’
‘People always want that. What about starting with children, our children even, for practice?’
‘Where would I do it?’
‘Lizzie! What’s the matter with you? You’ll do it, if that’s the only thing holding you back, in a special studio in the new house we will buy with your father when he has sold his present one! You’ll do it in the holidays when I’m not teaching and at weekends when the children or part-timers can help in the shop! You’ll do it so that you have something creative to do that will take the pressure off all of us.’
Lizzie swallowed. He suddenly seemed so necessary to her that she could hardly look at him.
‘I’d like that.’
‘Good,’ Robert said. ‘About bloody time.’ He stood up. ‘Right, now. Will you ring your father or shall I?’
‘I will.’
‘Good.’
‘It’s all – really nice of you—’
‘And self-interested too. Self-interested for us.’
‘I know.’
‘Us,’ Robert said emphatically.
Lizzie got up and went round the table to lean against him.
‘Frances’s baby is going to be like Beverely Lane-Smith, isn’t it?’
Robert kissed her hair.
‘Shore-Gómez Moreno—’
‘Oh Rob, it’s so sad, it’s so lonely, poor baby—’
Robert put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her away from him, shaking her a little.
‘Won’t you ever learn?’
She turned her face away, smiling faintly.
‘I’m so tired of learning—’
‘Listen,’ Robert said fiercely, ‘listen to me. It’s our parents’ shortcomings that make us, they made you, they made me, our shortcomings will make our children, you see if they don’t. How do you learn to swim along otherwise? How do you learn about a wider world if you have everything you could ever need at home? Endless happiness isn’t formative, it only makes you vulnerable, or else it makes you smug. And another thing. Wearing a wedding ring doesn’t mean you’re automatically a better mother! And one good parent is a lot more than most people get!’ He stopped and drew a breath, ‘OK?’
‘OK,’ Lizzie said. She was really smiling now.
‘Then go and ring your father,’ Robert said, ‘and I shall go and do a little formative shouting at the children.’
‘Rob—’
‘Yes?’
‘I wasn’t jealous on purpose,’ Lizzie said. ‘I didn’t ask to be, I didn’t mean to be. It’s terrible being jealous, it’s like being chained to someone else, who’s completely mad. And it’s so destructive—’
‘I know all this,’ he said politely, ‘really I do. Remember, I was the one with a seat in the stalls.’
Lizzie pushed her fringe off her forehead.
‘I’m trying to say sorry.’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘But I need to somehow, I—’ She paused and then she said, ‘I know I went absolutely over the top about Frances, I know that, and I don’t blame her for wanting to have her baby miles away from me, but it does haunt me that I may have damaged something between us that won’t ever be mended.’
Robert gave a little bark of laughter.
‘Oh no.’
‘No?’
‘Not you two,’ he said. He leaned forward and gave her a quick, rough kiss. ‘As far as you two are concerned, I reckon you’ll always feel the twitch upon the thread.’
PART FIVE
December
21
‘IT’S A SAINT’S day,’ the taxi driver said. He had had to slow the cab to a crawl.
Ahead of them some local Sevillian cofradía swayed along the street in procession, carrying a statue on a primitive litter draped in spangled blue cloth. The statue was draped in spangles too, in a robe of white brocade that glittered like hoar frost edged in what looked like white marabou. When the taxi finally managed to overtake the procession, Frances knew she would be alarmed and repelled by the statue’s face, the highly painted, sentimental, doll-like face of an obscure Catholic saint, or even of one of the myriad versions of the Virgin, the Virgin of the Dews, or the Rosary, or the Holy Blood.
‘Can’t we overtake them?’ Frances asked.
The taxi driver shrugged. ‘When the street is wider.’ He glanced at Frances in his driving mirror. ‘Will two minutes make so much difference?’
‘I don’t know,’ Frances said. She held her belly. ‘I’ve never done
this before.’
‘I have five—’
‘No,’ Frances said, ‘your wife had five. You don’t know what it feels like.’
‘True,’ he said, smiling. He was a little man, like so many Andalusians, and he had helped her into the cab very tenderly, with great solicitude and without any embarrassment. Luis had not been there. He hadn’t suggested he should be, and Frances hadn’t either.
The members of the brotherhood in the procession wore dark suits and ties. The men were at the front with the glittering saint and behind them the women bunched together, the old ones in black with black mantillas as if for Holy Week, the younger ones in respectful finery and high-heeled shoes. The little boys had ties, like their fathers, the little girls wore bows in their hair. There was about everybody, and even from behind, an air both of formality and of devotion.
‘Now,’ the taxi driver said.
The street had widened by a few feet between the shuttered shop fronts, closed in honour of the day. The driver gave a small polite touch to his horn, and edged the taxi first level with the procession and then slowly past it. The nearest people in the long line turned their heads without any particular curiosity and regarded Frances, both unmistakably pregnant and unmistakably not Spanish, as she slid by, and then turned back again towards the swaying white back of their image.
‘It is so easy to feel left out in Sevilla,’ Ana had said once. ‘Life here is so much for the people of the city. Strangers come here for the feria, expecting to be swept up into a great flamenco carnival, and find that they are asked to nothing. The whole of Sevilla is having a party, but it is not for outsiders.’
‘It is a very local city,’ Frances’s Spanish doctor had said on another occasion. She came from Galicia and was mildly contemptuous of her southern compatriots. ‘It isn’t even like the rest of Andalucía, it isn’t like anywhere!’
A Spanish Lover Page 31
