A Spanish Lover Read online

  ‘You shall have anything you want,’ William said. ‘Anything to make things easier for you. I shall make you a cup of tea.’

  He went downstairs to the kitchen, blowing his nose because his eyes again seemed to be full of tears. The kitchen, cream-painted and orderly, was a monument to Barbara’s fearsome domestic competence: nothing out of place, nothing smeared or grimy or sticky, not even a single intrepid fly buzzing against the speckless windows. He took the kettle over to the sink and filled it, and then lit the gas and set the kettle to boil on the hissing ring of blue-and-orange flames.

  ‘Twins,’ he said to himself. The luck of it, the sheer blessed good fortune of the prospect of twins filled him with awe. What had he done to deserve this? What, indeed, had he ever done to deserve anything, except stumble amiably through life falling obligingly into events and circumstances as if led ever onwards by some unseen and guiding hand? He had been just too young even for the war, still safe at school, and had only learned about its true and terrible nature from the men he had found himself at university with, men whose own education had been interrupted by six years of fighting. William had felt humbled then. He felt humbled now.

  ‘I am twenty-five,’ he said to the empty kitchen. ‘I am twenty-five, and quite soon after my twenty-sixth birthday, I shall be the father of twins.’ He paused and straightened his shoulders, as if for the National Anthem. ‘The father of twins.’

  Barbara did not want to tell the nursing home in Bath, where she went for the twins’ birth, her age. She did not want the nurses to know that she was older than William, and she had also convinced herself that thirty was an embarrassingly late age at which to start having babies. So she simply stared at them all, when they asked her how old she was, and in the end had to write it down for them in silence, daring them, with a furious glance, to read the date aloud.

  The twins were born steadily, slowly and painfully. William, tiptoeing in afterwards with a bunch of lilies of the valley, was alarmed at Barbara’s gaunt, grey face and air of being drained of every drop of energy.

  ‘I’m so glad they’re girls,’ William said in a whisper. He kissed Barbara’s hand. She gripped him with her free one.

  ‘Don’t make me do it again.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Never,’ Barbara said. ‘You don’t know, you can’t know. I thought it would never stop.’

  ‘Of course,’ William said. He badly wanted to go and look in the pair of grim little hospital cradles at the foot of Barbara’s bed, but Barbara still held him. If she never wanted another baby, did that mean that she would never again allow …? Help, thought William, and swallowed. Mustn’t think of it, quite the wrong moment, terribly selfish, poor Barbara, worn out completely, quite justified in saying it’s all very well for him …

  ‘It’s all very well for you,’ Barbara said. ‘But I’m simply not even going to contemplate—’

  ‘No,’ William said. ‘Of course not. Just as you like.’

  She relaxed her grip a little.

  ‘Lovely flowers,’ she said, in a more normal voice. ‘Mother sent horrors. Look over there. Mauve Chrysanths, only fit for a funeral. How could she find such a thing in May?’

  ‘I’m going to look at the girls,’ William said.

  ‘They look quite intelligent,’ Barbara said. ‘Luckily.’

  To William, they looked vulnerable, beautiful, and heart-stoppingly his. He couldn’t believe them. He couldn’t believe that they were so tiny, so complete, that they were there in the world at all and not in some confused and obscurely imagined arrangement upside down inside Barbara.

  ‘Oh,’ William said. He touched each cheek with a rapturous forefinger. ‘Oh, thank you!’

  Barbara almost smiled.

  ‘They’re going to be called Helena and Charlotte.’

  William touched his daughters again. One of them stirred and sucked briefly at the air with a miniature mouth.

  ‘No they’re not.’

  Barbara, unable to sit up on account of inches of post-natal stitchery, raised her head commandingly.

  ‘Yes they are. I’ve decided. Charlotte and Helena.’

  ‘No,’ William said. He straightened up and looked at Barbara, glaring at him from her blank white pillows. ‘On the day you told me you were going to have twins, I called them, in my mind, Frances and Elizabeth. I knew they wouldn’t be boys – don’t ask me how, I just knew. They have been Frances and Elizabeth for months.’

  ‘But I don’t like Frances.’

  ‘I don’t like Barbara much, either,’ William said, adding after a pause, but without any urgency, ‘as a name, that is.’

  Barbara opened her mouth, and then shut it again. William waited. Gradually, she subsided back on to her pillows, and closed her eyes.

  ‘As you wish.’

  ‘This one is Frances,’ William said. ‘The one with the bigger nose.’

  ‘Neither of them have any nose to speak of. Elizabeth is the older. Frances gave me far more trouble, I thought I—’

  The door opened. A nurse put her head in.

  ‘Bottle time!’ she said.

  William thought improbably of black bottles of stout, amber bottles of cider, green bottles of gin …

  ‘I’m not feeding them,’ Barbara said. ‘I mean—’ She gestured at the blue frills of her nylon nightgown. ‘I mean, I’m not feeding them myself. I refuse.’

  ‘I see,’ William said, never having given any previous thought to how babies were sustained.

  ‘And another thing—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The moment I can get out of bed, I’m going up to London. I’m going to the Marie Stopes Clinic. To arrange’, said Barbara loudly, ‘for really effective contraception.’

  The twins were exhausting babies, colicky and fretful. William and Barbara took it in turns to get up in the night for them, and in the afternoons the daughter of the school’s head groundsman, who was waiting for a place at a training college for nursery nurses, came up so that Barbara could get a couple of hours’ sleep.

  It was a peculiar existence for a year. William forgot what ordinary life was like, life where adult priorities really could be priorities, where one wasn’t dazed and fuddle-headed from lack of sleep, where conversations with Barbara weren’t exclusively about how many ounces Frances had taken and how often Elizabeth had been sick. He wasn’t in the least resentful of the twins’ tyranny over their lives, merely accepting it as he had accepted so many changes previously, like the early death of his parents, or his marriage to Barbara, but he did think to himself occasionally that it was perhaps as well that most prospective parents had no real conception of what having children would mean, otherwise hardly anyone – and certainly no-one with any imagination – would even attempt it.

  At fifteen months, everything changed. The twins transformed themselves from undersized, sallow grizzlers into admirable, healthy toddlers, peach-bloomed and enterprising. They walked early, talked early, and showed a pleasing enthusiasm for books. Barbara, who had looked after them with the grim conscientiousness she applied to the kitchen paintwork and the household accounts, began to display something approaching pride in them. She also tried to detach William from his intimate participation in their lives, a participation she had demanded during the first terrible year. William, as with the twins’ names, had refused.

  ‘I’ve bathed them since they were born, and I’m going on bathing them. I shall also go on feeding them and taking them for walks and reading to them and discouraging them from poking sticks in dogs’ eyes and being impertinent to your mother.’

  ‘You should be interested in your career,’ Barbara said.

  ‘You mean you think it’s time I was a housemaster?’

  ‘You’re twenty-eight, you know. Even headmasters are beginning to get younger—’

  ‘I don’t want to be a headmaster,’ William said. ‘I don’t want to administer, I want to teach. And I want to be with my daughters.’

  W
hen the twins were four Barbara and William had a serious quarrel. Barbara, reared exclusively in the world of private education, wanted them to go to a nursery school in Langworth, run by the wife of a master at her father’s school. William defied her, and his parents-in-law. Impelled by an instinctive feeling that the rule of convention in lives like his and Barbara’s amounted almost to a stranglehold, he announced that his daughters would go to the local village state school. There was a tremendous row. It went on for several days and evenings and Frances and Lizzie – whose opinion was never considered – listened uncomprehendingly from the landing outside their bedroom, sucking their thumbs and holding opposite ends of the same comfort blanket.

  In the end, there was a bargain. The twins would go to Moira Cresswell’s school in Langworth for two years, then they would go to the village school until the time came for them to sit their eleven-plus examination. Then, said William, they would go to grammar school, in Bath. Over her dead body, Barbara shouted. It was to be Cheltenham Ladies’ College or Wycombe Abbey School, or nothing. The twins sucked and listened. The only school they knew was the one where Daddy taught, full of cold corridors and raw boys and shrilling bells. There were no girls there.

  When it came to it, William had his way almost entirely, because something extraordinary happened. When the twins were ten, and Frances, in particular, was beginning to be naughty, in a dreamy, elusive way that was very hard to pin down and punish, Barbara suddenly went away. One minute, it seemed, she was tweaking chair covers into place, saying organizing things into the telephone, watching you like a hawk to make sure you didn’t put your spinach into the vase of anemones on the kitchen table as once you had ingeniously done, and the next, she was gone. It was very weird. She went as neatly as she did everything else, leaving no sign of her going, and no apparent gaps in the house either. Lizzie and Frances were almost too stunned to cry.

  William said she had gone to Morocco.

  ‘Where’s Morocco?’

  He got out an atlas and put it on the floor and they all knelt round it.

  ‘There. That’s Morocco. And there’s Marrakesh. Mummy’s gone to Marrakesh. For a long kind of holiday, I suppose.’

  ‘Why did she go?’

  ‘I’m breaking out,’ Barbara had said to William. ‘Living here is like living in a strait-jacket. I’m forty. If I don’t break out now I never will and I’ll break down instead.’

  ‘But are you telling me in all seriousness’, William said, ‘that you’re joining the hippie trail?’ He looked at Barbara. It was early autumn and she was wearing a corduroy skirt, a Viyella blouse and a profoundly middle-aged lovat-green cardigan. ‘The hippie trail? Seriously? Caftans and love beads?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Barbara.

  ‘I think’, William said to his daughters, ‘that she has gone away because she has been too well-behaved for too long. Perhaps it’s being a headmaster’s daughter. She’s gone away to behave badly for a bit, to get it out of her system.’

  ‘Do you mind?’ Frances said.

  ‘William looked at her. ‘Not really. Do you?’

  The twins exchanged glances. ‘I should have preferred her to have said goodbye,’ Lizzie said severely.

  She was away for ten months. In those ten months, the twins took their eleven-plus examinations and gained places at the grammar school. William put the brochures for Cheltenham Ladies’ College and Wycombe Abbey School in the dustbin. He also, supposing that Barbara was both smoking marijuana and being unfaithful to him, started having a single glass of whisky in the evenings, and taking to bed a local woman called Juliet Jones, who lived in an isolated cottage and was an excellent and successful potter. The twins completed the last year of their junior school, acquired gentle Somerset accents without Barbara there to correct them, grew used to having Juliet about (she was a better cook than Barbara) and wrote long joint letters to Marrakesh describing their daily rounds, and asking Barbara to bring them back gold-thonged sandals, worry beads and some desert, in a jam jar.

  Barbara came home and no-one recognized her. She was very thin, with kohl-smudged eyes and hennaed hair and the backs of her hands and tops of her feet were painted with indigo-blue patterns. She gave each of the twins a little silver hand of Fatima, to ward off the evil eye, and told William, in front of the children, that she loved him and was thankful to be back.

  ‘But I’m also’, she said firmly, ‘thankful that I went.’

  William didn’t know what he felt about her, but then, he never had. While she was away, he had considered leaving her for Juliet, but now he reconsidered this. Barbara went upstairs to the bathroom and was locked inside for a time. When she came down, her hands were still painted, and her hair was still burnished, but she was wearing conventional clothes and her eyes had reverted – rather boringly, the twins thought – to normal.

  ‘I think I shall make a shepherd’s pie,’ Barbara said.

  ‘Please don’t,’ Frances said. She held her hand of Fatima very tightly for courage. ‘We’d so much rather have Juliet’s.’

  ‘Who’s Juliet?’ Barbara said. She looked at William.

  He looked back at her. Even Frances, at eleven, noticed how elated he looked, quite unafraid.

  ‘I was just coming to that,’ William said.

  Life was quite different, after that. The twins were suddenly given their independence, great dollops of it, going in and out of Bath for school on the bus, on their own, allowed to go to the cinema, or for bicycle rides, permitted to help themselves to food from the refrigerator. Barbara continued to live with William, and William continued, with unaffected discretion, to see Juliet. Books began to appear, books of a kind that William had never even conceived, let alone heard of, books by Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir. Barbara, at forty-two, her adventure behind her and her marriage determinedly still ahead, had taken to feminism.

  Barbara’s version of feminism coloured the whole of the twins’ adolescence. Lizzie was discouraged from domesticity for which she showed such aptitude, and Frances from the wayward introspection which was her natural inclination and which wasn’t, in Barbara’s view, positive enough. Barbara went up to London for meetings of a women’s group, and brought members of it home to a house which no longer gleamed and smelled of polish and Dettol. Lizzie took to going up to Juliet’s cottage, where she was introduced to clay, and the first principles of sculpture. Frances, brandishing a copy of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook as cover, vanished for fumbling and frustrating assignations with the head boy of William’s school. William himself, performing a quiet juggling act with his four women, wondered, every so often, how things had come to pass as they had.

  He was quite pleased when Lizzie got married, but only quite. He liked Robert, who he rightly believed would look after her and respect her, but he thought she was too young to be married. He had been delighted by her choice of going to art school and had looked forward to using some of the capital his parents had left him thirty years before and setting her up in a studio of her own – helping her get commissions for the portrait heads she seemed to have a gift for. But Lizzie chose to get married. Barbara was strongly opposed to it.

  ‘I see you are simply conforming to stereotype,’ Barbara said.

  ‘Look here,’ Frances had said indignantly, defending her sister. ‘Don’t you go for Lizzie. How dare you, anyway? Deeply married for twenty-five years, it’s sheer hypocrisy—’

  ‘You are the first generation with real choices,’ Barbara said, interrupting. She frowned at Frances. Frances had been to Reading University and had read English Literature, which was completely useless, instead of something with a purposeful application, like sociology. She seemed to have no driving career ambition but merely said, vaguely and annoyingly, that she thought she’d get a job. Barbara sometimes despaired that Frances was much less of a personality than Lizzie, too dependent upon her sister, too content to see Lizzie take decisions for them both. After Lizzie’s marriage, Barbara counted the numb
er of weekends that Frances shot down to Langworth, like a rabbit bolting home. It seemed to her far too many, and she wrote Frances long, articulate, reproving letters, explaining how unfair this was on Lizzie and Robert, and how she, Frances, would never grow up if she continued.

  ‘I told you,’ Barbara said to William, ‘I told you how it would be, with twins. Frances will never come to anything.’

  William, adept now at saying nothing, said nothing. When Frances started Shore to Shore, Barbara was elated. She forgot she had despaired of Frances. She even urged William to lend her money.

  ‘You must! You must!’

  ‘I was going to anyway,’ William said.

  ‘Of course,’ Barbara said, in the course of the talks she now gave to provincial women’s groups, ‘my daughters are prime examples of young women who are profiting from what we fought for in the sixties. There is no question for them of underestimating their own career potential.’

  When the telephone rang on the Sunday before Christmas, Barbara was up in the roof loft, hunting for one of her old caftans, to take to Harriet. She rather hoped Harriet would see it as a talisman. She had found what she thought was the right suitcase – an old one of her father’s covered with the remains of pre-war P&O labels – when the telephone began ringing, two flights down in the hall. Barbara went to the square hatch above the landing.

  ‘William!’

  William hated answering the telephone; always had. If he knew Barbara was within earshot, he’d let it ring ten or twenty times, lurking somewhere with his breath held, as if he were afraid of it.

  ‘William!’

  A door opened cautiously downstairs.