A Spanish Lover (11 page)

‘Is she exploring sex?' Juliet had once asked Lizzie.

Lizzie thought of the head boy at William's school.

‘I think she's
trying
to—'

Juliet had never got to know Frances as she had known Lizzie. Lizzie made it so easy; she was longing to be known, as William was. Even Barbara, between whom and Juliet there should by rights have existed a great awkwardness, was in some ways easier to grasp than Frances. Barbara and Juliet had had one mighty quarrel, in which Juliet said she was not leaving the area, and if Barbara wanted to move William away she'd better get on and do it, and then, except for minor eruptions, no further ones. A kind of strange friendship even grew up, founded on Barbara's tacit acknowledgement for which Juliet was both grateful and respectful, that Juliet wasn't in fact taking anything that Barbara desperately wanted herself. Even Barbara didn't seem quite sure why she still wanted, as it were, the outer husk of William, his body in her life, but she did. Juliet recognized this, just as she recognized that she didn't want William always and all the time, and also that Frances, Lizzie's double to all appearances, was as elusive as Lizzie was accessible.

From her vantage point outside the family, Juliet could see them clearly. She could see that William, although he couldn't bring himself to like much in Barbara's temperament, loved her for being the mother
of
his children and for taking decisions for him. She could see that Barbara was torn, all the time, between the strength of her natural desires for self-fulfilment and the grim and abiding corset of her upbringing in a generation of middle-class women who, by and large, did no work after wedlock but social work. She could see that Lizzie, probably unconsciously, wished to show her mother that a woman could indeed run the whole gamut of womanly possibilities, wife, mother, worker, and be a living proof of the practicality of feminism, not just a noisy inconsistent theorist. But Frances … Juliet could not see so clearly when it came to Frances. There was something both bright and shadowy about Frances, open and yet half-hidden, something playful, a little erratic, vulnerable, something that didn't want to be known. There was a time when Juliet had thought Frances disapproved of her relationship with William, but Lizzie had assured her that wasn't it.

‘Frances never disapproves of anything much, you know, and she thinks if Dad didn't have you, Mum'd leave him.'

‘Really?'

‘Yes,' said Lizzie, who had, the night before, expounded this theory to Frances and not been disagreed with. ‘Yes, really.'

When William had told Juliet that Frances had suddenly decided to go away for Christmas, Juliet had felt a small elation. It was always thrilling to see someone turn protagonist, particularly someone whose life had always appeared a little hazy and evasive. Good for Frances, Juliet had said to William on the telephone, listening to the pubby chink of glasses and rumble of talk behind him, not before time, I was waiting for this, I love seeing people start steering their own lives.

‘I don't think I ever have,' William said sadly.

‘More than you think,' Juliet said, almost sharply. ‘You're sometimes a shameful old poser.'

Nobody seemed at all sure why Frances had gone, and nobody seemed to wish to believe the reason she had given. Lizzie had been deeply hurt. She had come up to Juliet's cottage late on the Sunday evening and sat by Juliet's fire.

‘It isn't that I resent her doing her own thing, it really isn't, but it's the not telling, it's the bouncing of the news on me when the whole plan is already made, as if, somehow, I'd have tried to stop her, as if – oh Juliet, it's as if she didn't
trust
me.'

People went on so about trust, Juliet thought. They spoke of it as if it were a sacred vessel and, once you'd even cracked it, with only a hairline crack, the whole thing was then useless afterwards, thus invalidating relationships.

‘Nobody's to be ultimately trusted,' she said briskly to Lizzie, ‘not me, not you, not Frances, not anyone. It isn't in human nature to be utterly trustworthy, we just can't do it.'

Lizzie had gone home shocked as well as uncomforted, leaving Juliet unable to sleep. As she got older, she had found she had to woo sleep, beckon it seductively with no disturbing shocks of late-night news or quarrels. That night, something about Lizzie, about her real misery and sense of rejection, had set all kinds of wheels of memory in motion that Juliet had hoped would never turn again, reminding her of past pains and rebuffs and unwanted solitariness, from which the road to her present reasonable contentment had been so long and hard and stony.

Having slept poorly, she spent Christmas Eve with a headache. She had asked, as she always did, the other waifs and strays from the nearest village – a retired nurse, a senior county librarian, a silent man who made weather vanes, a widower doctor, a journalist on
the
local paper – up to the cottage for mince pies and mulled wine and saw, as she always saw, the gallantry on their faces as another lonely Christmas challenged them to make the best of it. When they had gone, an uneven procession of red tail-lights jerking down her track like a line of bouncing scarlet stars, she quelled the fire, put the glasses and plates on the slate slab beside her kitchen sink, and went upstairs to fall into the kind of absolute sleep usually only granted to babies and adolescents.

She woke at three. A disagreeable night was in progress outside her window, a whining wind and the lashing slap of either heavy rain or sleet. She got up and went downstairs to make some tea. She felt, when she got down there, alert enough to wash up, rake out the fire and plump the cushions. Then she carried the tea upstairs, remade her bed and prepared to start the night again, remembering to say, ‘Happy Christmas,' to herself, with a satisfaction that was, she told herself, almost smug.

She woke the second time to shouts. She thought at first that it was just the wind, whose many insistent voices she knew extremely well from her upland years, but then she realized that the wind, however ingenious, did not know her name. She climbed out of bed, pulled on the patchwork robe she had made years ago out of scraps of velvet and brocade, and went to the window. It faced the valley, the track and the best view. Juliet pulled back the curtains, opened the window and leaned out. There below her in the dim grey light, stood Frances Shore, with a suitcase.

‘I've come to calm down,' Frances said. ‘I've come to use you as a half-way house. I hope you don't mind. I couldn't face the thought of going back to my flat and waking it up, so I just drove straight here. I came on some Latin American plane which left Madrid in the
middle
of the night and was going on to Rio, or something. I spent hours on a bench in Madrid Airport wondering what I was doing and what I thought I'd been going to do in the first place. I still don't really know. I'll go to the Grange later, of course, but I hope it's all right if I just simmer down a bit here first.'

Juliet smiled but said nothing. She went on spreading things on the table round Frances: a loaf, butter, a coffee pot, a dish of tangerines, a jar of honey.

‘I had to sit in Seville Airport too,' Frances said. ‘And Mr Gómez Moreno came and sat too, to try and persuade me to stay. He was awfully nice, really, not a smoothy at all.'

‘Why didn't you stay?'

‘Because of the mess they'd made. When something goes sour, it not only wrecks the future, but it destroys the past. I went to Seville for a little adventure and I landed in one of those long-drawn-out, tedious, depressing failures and disappointments that you can only have abroad. Instead of being foreign and fascinating, it was foreign and miserable. I've almost never felt like that abroad, but I did in Seville.'

Juliet cut bread and pronged a slice on an old-fashioned toasting fork.

‘So you've come home.'

‘Juliet,' Frances said, ‘I could hardly go back to my flat and lurk there pretending to be in Spain, could I?'

‘I suppose not,' Juliet said. She stooped over the fire, holding out the fork. The thick, greying pigtail in which she confined her hair at night swung over her shoulder. ‘They are all, in varying degrees, very upset about you.'

‘Oh,' Frances said.

‘What else did you expect? You know your family, you know Christmas—'

‘Yes,' Frances said. She poured coffee.

Juliet turned the toast.

‘William thinks that's why you went. To get away from them all.'

‘Only partly,' Frances said. She leaned forward. ‘Juliet—'

‘Yes?'

‘I wanted – I want some richness to things, I want to go to places—' She stopped.

Juliet came away from the fire and dropped the slice of toast on a plate in front of Frances.

‘What places? Foreign places?'

‘Oh no,' Frances said. ‘Not abroad. Inside me, places inside me.'

Juliet looked at her. She poured coffee for herself.

‘Then why run away from Seville?'

‘I told you, it had all gone wrong.'

‘But it sounds as if you finally ran away just as it was all beginning to go
right
. You said Mr Gómez Moreno was a nice man.'

‘He was,' Frances said. She began to butter her toast. ‘He said something to me—'

‘What thing?'

‘I can't remember quite how it came about, but I was telling him about the way, as a child, I used to make up stories and how I sometimes caught myself doing it now, and that I'd almost done it in Seville Cathedral that morning, thinking I could see the ghosts of Fernando and Isabel, and he said' – she reached for the honey – ‘he said, “But, Miss Shore, that's what we humans all do when we have an inner vacuum, we fill the space with stories.” I'd never thought of that before.'

There was a silence. Juliet drank her coffee; Frances drew the knife blade across and across the honey on her toast.

‘He's perfectly right,' Juliet said.

‘I know. It made me think—'

‘About what?'

‘About the inner vacuum. Have you got one?'

‘Everybody has, of some kind. Mine has got smaller with age. What did Mr Gómez Moreno say to you when you got on your plane and said goodbye?'

‘He said, “I am glad at least that you saw the Catholic Kings.” I think it was a joke.'

‘And what did he propose you should do if you had stayed?'

‘He was going to show me his hotels, the one in Seville, the one near Córdoba and the one he likes best, in the mountains south of Granada.'

‘And instead of that,' said Juliet putting down her coffee mug, ‘you are going back to the Grange?'

Frances looked up at her, her wing of hair partly hiding one eye.

‘I want to go to the Grange,' Frances said.

‘I must say,' Robert said, ‘I've almost never been so thankful to see anybody.'

He reached forward and poured more wine into Frances's glass. They were, temporarily, the only ones left conscious around the wreck of the orgy of the Christmas lunch table. The three older children had disappeared with the skill of those long practised at scenting the approach of clearing up; Barbara was upstairs trying to sleep, Lizzie was attempting to persuade Davy to imitate her, and William, at the far end of the table, blissful in a purple paper hat, was snoring.

‘I love this mess,' Frances said. She looked down the table, at the confusion of plates and glasses, the scrumples of cracker paper, the depleted bowls of nuts and fruit, the bottles, and the candlesticks with the candles in them melting fatly into themselves, dripping and spilling scarlet waxy trails. ‘There's something so abandoned about it.'

‘I'm afraid I detest Christmas,' Robert said. ‘I'm just
too
tired to see it as anything more than a nuisance. And everybody quarrels. If you hadn't arrived in the nick of time, there'd have been bloodshed.'

Frances drank some wine. She'd had quite a lot already and felt, after two nights of broken sleep, heavy and dreamy.

‘I went to Juliet's first.'

‘Did you? Why?'

‘I – I thought I probably couldn't arrive at breakfast—'

‘I wish you had. Breakfast was hell. Poor Lizzie.'

‘She does look tired.'

‘She is tired. Of course she's tired.'

Frances looked at her brother-in-law. His strong-featured; high-cheekboned face was wearing well, but the queer, thick, reddish hair that had always given him a romantic, almost Irish air was beginning to recede a little at the temples, sharpening his hairline into a prow.

‘Couldn't you and Lizzie have a bit of a holiday? You know I could fix you up, whatever—'

‘Thing is,' Robert said, leaning forward on his elbows, ‘thing is, we're going to be badly strapped for cash next year. The last six months have been terrible, worst ever. Lizzie knows it's been bad, but I haven't told her how bad and I won't until Christmas is over.' He looked at Frances. ‘You must be feeling it too.'

‘A bit, but you see, so many retired people travel with me, all those flower and bird people, and people who want to paint and take photographs, and they don't feel the pinch in bad times as much as the employed do—'

‘What bad times?' Lizzie said, coming in. She was loyally wearing the earrings Sam had given her, huge irregular holly leaves he had made out of modelling plastic, emerald-green studded with brilliant berries the size of big peas. ‘Davy has finally gone to sleep on
condition
I give his yellow pyjamas to the second-hand shop and never say he looks sweet again. That's going to be hard.'

She sat down next to Frances and borrowed her glass of wine for a gulp.

‘Look at you,' she said affectionately to Frances. ‘Just look at you. I'm really sorry it went wrong, but I'm not really, too.'