A Spanish Lover Read online

  ‘No,’ said Frances, interrupting. ‘It wasn’t different. It’s just the same, except that I am doing it later, and on my own.’

  Lizzie swallowed. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Why don’t you want me to?’

  Lizzie went back to her bed, and sat beside Davy’s wicker basket, on the patchwork counterpane, one of the range made by a local farmer’s wife, that had proved one of the Gallery’s best sellers. Frances stayed where she was, by the wardrobe, leaning her back against the smooth, cold mirror-glass.

  ‘We’re twins,’ Lizzie said.

  Frances bent her head and studied her feet, her too-big feet encased in good, dull, dark-blue leather loafers. She knew exactly what Lizzie meant. We are twins, Lizzie had said, leaving the subtext unspoken. We are twins, so we are a unit, we have a kind of joint wholeness, together we make up a rich, rounded person, but we are like two pieces of a jigsaw, we have to fit together, and to do that properly we can’t be exactly the same shape.

  ‘You have the domestic life,’ Frances said. ‘I like that. I love it here, this house is home to me, your children are very satisfying to me. I don’t want any of that, that’s your part of our deal. But I must be allowed to expand myself a little if I need to. And I do. It won’t touch your business if I have a business, it won’t touch us, how we are, together.’

  ‘Why do you want to do it?’ Lizzie said.

  ‘Because I’m thirty-two and I know enough about travel now to know I’m better than a lot of people I work for. You want to have Davy christened, you’ve come to a point. I’ve just come to another one.’

  Lizzie looked at her. She remembered their first day at Moira Cresswell’s nursery school together, in green drill overalls, with ‘E. Shore’ and ‘F. Shore’ embroidered on them, for painting classes, and their hair held back by tight Alice bands made of green ribbon and elastic. ‘We won’t have to stay if we don’t want to,’ Frances had said to Lizzie, but Lizzie had sensed that wasn’t true. School had an inexorable feeling about it. She had hated watching Frances realize this.

  ‘What kind of business will it be?’

  Frances smiled. She put her hands under her hair, lifted it off her neck and then let it fall back.

  ‘Secret holidays. Staying in tiny towns and hidden hotels and even people’s houses. I shall start with Italy, because all the English have this passion for Italy.’

  ‘And what will you call it?’

  Frances began to laugh. She did a dance step or two, holding out the sides of her skirt.

  ‘Shore to Shore, of course!’

  Like Davy, Shore to Shore had grown out of all recognition in five years. It began in the sitting room of the Battersea flat, and its beginnings were very shaky, with too few customers and too many mistakes. Then Frances realized that she would have to look at every single bed and table at which she expected her clients to sleep and eat, so she went to Italy for four months, driving herself along the minor roads of Tuscany and Umbria in a hired Fiat she used as an office and a wardrobe and, sometimes, as a bedroom. Before she went, she was apprehensive that she would find it all a cliché, done to death by the remorseless English mania for a civilized release from the shackles of a chilly Puritanism into an acceptable sensuality. But she needn’t have worried. You could read about it in a thousand novels and newspaper articles, you could see it as the richly romantic backdrop to a thousand films, yet still, Frances thought, no sensitive heart could fail to lift, every time, at the sight of that landscape, the lines of the olive-dun and grape-blue hills punctuated by saffron walls, russet roofs and the casually, perfectly placed charcoal-dark spires of the cypress trees.

  She set up little journeys for her clients. Some were through vineyards, some were for painters, or photographers, some were like small investigations, in search of the Etruscans, or Piero della Francesca, or a once mighty, now decayed family, like the Medicis. She sold her share of the flat in Battersea to a brisk girl specializing in venture capital, and moved north, across the river, to a narrow house just off the Fulham Road. She couldn’t afford to buy it, so she rented it, using the ground floor as offices, and living on the first floor with a view, at the back, of someone else’s cherry tree. She hired an assistant, a girl to work the switchboard and run errands, and invested the last of her borrowings in computers. Before the company was four years old, three larger, well-established and better-known businesses had tried to buy her out.

  Lizzie was proud of her. At Frances’s request, Lizzie came up to London, and planned the décor of the ground-floor office, covering the floor with seagrass matting, and the walls with immense, seductive photographs of Italy – bread and wine on an iron table on a loggia, with a distant view of a towered hill-town beyond, Piero’s infinitely moving pregnant Virgin from the cemetery chapel at Monterchi, a gleaming modern girl swinging carelessly down a timeless, mouldering medieval street. They installed an Italian coffee machine, and a baby fridge to hold pale-green bottles of Frascati, to offer customers.

  ‘You see,’ Frances said. ‘You see? I told you it wouldn’t change us. I told you.’

  ‘I was afraid,’ Lizzie said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I’m very ashamed of that now, it seems so selfish, but I couldn’t help feeling it.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And now I’m just proud. It’s wonderful. How are bookings?’

  Frances held out both hands, fingers crossed.

  ‘Solid,’ she said.

  That, Lizzie thought now, had been their only hiccup, the only time when their parallel progress together through life had faltered even a step. Looking back, Lizzie not only felt a twinge of residual shame at her lack of generosity, but a puzzlement. Why had she been afraid? Knowing Frances as she did, what was there to fear in a personality that was almost her own, twined about her own as it was? Frances was, after all, the least greedy of people. Lizzie hoped, with a sudden, small, urgent pang, that she wasn’t greedy. Had she, she asked herself sternly, ever envied Frances those trips to Italy while she stayed in Langworth attending Sam’s measles or Alistair’s cello practice or weary late-night sessions with Robert and the Gallery accounts? Only for a second, she told herself, only for a fleeting second, when beside herself with exhaustion and demands, would she ever have willingly exchanged her richly domestic and effective life for Frances’s free but lonely one. There was no doubt about it, Lizzie reflected with a sigh, sitting down at the kitchen table and pulling towards her one of her endless pads of paper, to make a menu list for Christmas, that Frances was lonely.

  Someone – an egregious customer at the Gallery who was trying very hard to turn herself into Lizzie’s friend – had given her an American cookery book called Good Food for Bad Times. It was written by a person called Enid R. Starbird. Lizzie opened it idly, thinking that it might provide a few economical ideas for feeding a household of nine – the six Middletons, Frances, the Shore parents – for four days. Robert had said last night, in the careful voice he kept for breaking disagreeable news, that the Gallery takings so far, in the run-up to Christmas, looked as if, instead of being twenty per cent up as usual, would be ten per cent down. They had both suspected that this might be so and had had, during the course of the year, a number of superficially philosophical conversations about the possibility of an economic recession. Last night, they had had another one.

  ‘So,’ Lizzie had said. ‘It means a careful Christmas.’

  ‘’Fraid so.’

  Lizzie looked down at the open page of Mrs Starbird’s book. ‘Never forget’, Mrs Starbird said brightly, ‘the cabbage soups of south-west France. A pig’s head, that vital ingredient, is not, as you will find, so very hard to come by.’

  Lizzie shut the book with a slam, to banish the image of a reproachful pig’s head. She seized her pad. ‘Sausages,’ she wrote rapidly. ‘Gold spray-paint, dried chestnuts, things for stockings, cat food, sticking plasters, big jar of mincemeat, second-class stamps, collect dress from cleaner’s, walnuts.’
She stopped, tore off the sheet, and began again on a fresh one.

  ‘Make up spare beds, check wine, finish wrapping presents, ice cake, make stuffings, check mince pies (enough?), remind Rob about wine, clean silver (Alistair), hoover sitting room (Sam), pick holly and ivy (Harriet and Davy), decorate tree (everyone), make garland for front door (me) and quiches for Gallery staff party (me) and brandy butter (me), and clean the whole house from top to bottom before Mum sees it (me, me, me).’

  ‘Help,’ Lizzie wrote at the foot of her list. ‘Help, help, help.’

  The kitchen door opened. Davy who at breakfast had been fully and properly dressed and was now wearing only socks, underpants and a plastic policeman’s helmet, sidled in. He looked guilty. He came up to Lizzie and leaned against her knee. Lizzie touched him.

  ‘You’re frozen!’ Lizzie said. ‘What have you been doing?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Davy said, trained by Sam.

  ‘Then where are your clothes?’

  ‘In the bath.’

  ‘In the bath?’

  ‘They needed a wash, you know,’ Davy said confidingly.

  ‘They were clean, clean this morning—’

  Davy said, almost dreamily, ‘They got a bit pastey.’

  ‘What kind of pastey?’

  ‘Toothpastey,’ Davy said. ‘Toothpaste writing—’

  Lizzie stood up.

  ‘Where’s Sam?’

  ‘Pimlott’s come,’ Davy said. ‘Pimlott and Sam are making a Superman camp—’

  ‘Pimlott?’

  Pimlott was Sam’s dearest friend, a frail, mauve-pale boy with watchful light eyes and a slippery disposition.

  ‘Don’t you have a Christian name?’ Liz had asked him on his first visit. He stared at her.

  ‘’Course he doesn’t,’ Sam said. ‘He’s just called Pimmers.’

  ‘Where are they making the camp?’

  ‘It’s quite all right,’ Davy said, adjusting the helmet so that only his chin showed beneath it. ‘It’s not in your room, it’s only in the spare room—’

  Lizzie shot out of the kitchen and up the stairs. A spaghetti trail of red ribbon lay tangled at the bottom; the banisters were bare.

  ‘Sam!’ yelled Lizzie.

  Thumps came distantly from somewhere, like the sound of road-mending machinery heard through closed windows.

  ‘Sam!’ Lizzie roared. She flung open the spare-bedroom door. The floor was strewn with bedclothes and on the beds, Lizzie’s cherished Edwardian brass beds for which she had so lovingly collected linen of a similar age, Sam and Pimlott were trampolining, grunting with effort.

  ‘Sam!’ Lizzie bellowed.

  He froze, floating down from his last leap as if transfixed in mid-air, landing rigid and upright on the mattress. Pimlott simply vanished, sliding snakelike from on top of the bed to underneath it.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Lizzie shouted. ‘I’ve given you a job to do and you haven’t done it and I said you weren’t to have Pimlott here today, or at least not until you had done everything I asked you to do, and this room is out of bounds, as well you know, and I have to make it nice for Granny and Grandpa and I have a million things to do and you are a naughty, disobedient, beastly little boy—’

  Sam subsided into a sulky heap.

  ‘Sorry—’

  ‘Mum,’ a voice said.

  Breathlessly, Lizzie turned. Alistair stood there, a tube of glue in one hand and a minute grey-plastic piece of model aeroplane in the other. Across one lens of his spectacles was a smear of something chalky.

  ‘Dad’s on the phone,’ Alistair said. ‘And then could you come and hold this bit because my clamp isn’t small enough to hold it while I stick the last piece of fuselage—’

  Lizzie fled across the landing to the telephone beside her and Rob’s bed.

  ‘Rob?’

  ‘Lizzie, I know you’re up to your eyes, but could you come? Jenny’s gone home, feeling ghastly, looking ghastly, poor thing, and the shop’s suddenly terribly busy—’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But Liz—’

  ‘I’m sorry, I mean, I’ll try, but it’s complete chaos here and there’s so much to do—’

  ‘I know, I know. I’ll help you tonight. Just leave things.’

  ‘I can’t come for half an hour. And I’ll have to bring Sam and Davy.’

  ‘OK,’ Robert said. ‘Soon as you can.’

  Lizzie put the telephone down and went back on to the landing. Through the open door of the spare room, she could see Sam and Pimlott, watched by Davy, incompetently piling bedclothes back on to the beds. Alistair still waited.

  ‘Could you—?’

  ‘No, I couldn’t,’ Lizzie said. ‘I have so much to do I feel quite frantic. I want you to clean the silver.’

  Behind his spectacles Alistair’s eyes widened in amazement.

  ‘Clean the silver?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lizzie said. She went into the spare room, pushed out the three children and slammed the door. ‘Men do clean silver. They also cook and change nappies and go shopping. What women don’t do is waste time making something as utterly pointless as a model aeroplane.’

  ‘Heavens, you are cross,’ Alistair said.

  ‘Go home,’ Lizzie said to Pimlott. ‘Please go home and stay there till after Christmas.’

  He regarded her with his light, shifting eyes. He had no intention of obeying her. He had never – unless it suited him anyway – obeyed an adult in his life.

  ‘And you’, she said to Sam, ‘are going to hoover the sitting room, and, Davy, go and put some clothes on and then go and find Harriet. I need her.’

  ‘I’m hungry,’ Sam said.

  ‘I really don’t care—’

  ‘Telephone!’ Davy said excitedly. ‘Telephone! Telephone!’

  Alistair slipped past his mother and into her bedroom, to answer it. He said, ‘Hello?’ and not, ‘Langworth, 4004,’ as she and Robert had told him to, and then, in a warmer voice, ‘Hi, Frances.’

  Frances! Salvation! Lizzie hurried into her bedroom, holding out her hand for the receiver.

  ‘Frances? Oh Frances, thank God it’s you, it’s so awful here this morning, you can’t imagine, a complete madhouse. I’d like to murder Prince Albert and Charles Dickens and anyone else responsible for making Christmas such a nightmare—’

  ‘Oh poor Lizzie,’ Frances said. Her voice was, as usual, light and warm.

  ‘And now Rob wants me to go and help in the Gallery and I only got round to ordering the wretched turkey this morning—’

  ‘Does that matter?’

  ‘Not really, except that I don’t feel in charge, I don’t feel in control, which is madness really as I’ve done Christmas for years and years—’

  ‘I know. Too many years, probably. Next year I’ll set you up for an anti-Christmas holiday.’

  ‘Too likely. What about my horrible children?’

  ‘I’ll look after them.’

  ‘Oh Frances,’ Lizzie said, beaming into the receiver. ‘Oh Frances. Praise be for you. I can’t wait to see you!’

  ‘Lizzie—’

  ‘When are you coming? I know you said Christmas Eve, but couldn’t you just shut up shop tomorrow, at the weekend, and come down on Sunday?’

  ‘Yes,’ Frances said. ‘That’s why I rang. I am coming down on Sunday. To bring your presents.’

  ‘What?’

  There was a small pause the far end of the telephone line, and then Frances said quite easily, ‘Lizzie, I also rang to tell you that, this year, I won’t be coming down to Langworth for Christmas. That’s why I’m coming on Sunday. I’m coming to bring your presents, but then I’m going away again. I’m going – away for Christmas.’

  2

  WHEN BARBARA SHORE had been told she was going to have twins, she had said nothing at all. Her doctor, an old-fashioned, comfortable country general practitioner, who still did his rounds in a baggy suit with interior pockets ingeniously tailored to hold all the tools of his trade, beli
eved her to be struck dumb with delight. That, after all, was the proper response. But Barbara had only said, after a while, ‘How perfectly preposterous,’ and had then gone home to do what she did best in times of crisis, which was to rest in bed.

  Her husband, William, came home from a day’s history teaching at a local minor public school, and found her resting.

  ‘It’s twins,’ she said. She sounded accusing.

  He sat, with some difficulty, on the slippery, satin-covered quilt beside her.

  ‘How wonderful.’

  ‘For whom?’

  ‘For both of us.’ He thought a bit, and beamed at her. ‘Shakespeare had twins. Hamnet and Judith.’

  ‘I don’t want twins,’ Barbara said distinctly, as if speaking to someone hard of hearing. ‘I only just want one baby and I certainly don’t want two. It’s awful being a twin.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Awful,’ Barbara said.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I have an imagination,’ Barbara said. ‘Because you can never be quite your own person, if you’re a twin, because it stunts your relationships with anyone else, because you can’t ever be quite free of the other person.’

  William got up and went over to the window. Outside, the autumn fields lay pleasingly striped with stubble and speckled with partridges. He was full of an utterable delight at the thought of twins, at the completeness that a brace of babies suggested.

  ‘The Americans love twins,’ he said irrelevantly. ‘There’s somewhere called Twinsburgh, in Ohio, where they—’

  ‘Shut up,’ Barbara said.

  ‘We’ll get a nanny, a mother’s help. I’ll buy a washing machine.’ His eyes suddenly filled with tears at the thought of his pair of babies existing there, inside Barbara’s body, only feet away from him, the size, perhaps, of hazelnuts. ‘I’m – I’m so happy.’

  ‘It’s all very well for you,’ Barbara said.

  William turned away from the window and came back to the bed. He looked at Barbara. She had been his headmaster’s daughter and now she was his wife. He wasn’t altogether clear how the transition had come about, nor how he had felt about it, but he knew now, gazing down at Barbara, shoeless and resentful on the satin bedspread in her autumn jersey and skirt, that he loved her deeply and gratefully for being pregnant. He wanted, rather, to put his hand on the heathery-coloured tweed where it lay, flatly as yet, on her stomach, but he refrained. It was 1952, after all, and the New Man, who participates in both pregnancy and his child’s arrival, was still a creature of the future. Instead William kissed Barbara’s forehead.