A Spanish Lover (21 page)

PART THREE

September

11

ON THE FIRST
day of her new job, Lizzie felt quite sick with apprehension. It had taken so long to find the job at all, and the finding of it had been a discouraging experience, with the dawning realization that she was, in professional terms, only fit for the kind of job that would pay her so poorly as to make little sense of the time and energy it would take. It was, in the end, and yet again, Juliet who had come to the rescue with a suggestion. Try schools, she said, try all the private schools in the area.

‘To teach art?'

‘You could try that. But art isn't the only thing you know about, is it? You can bookkeep after all, you can type, you can run things, you understand these disagreeable modern machines.'

Lizzie had been horrified. The image of the school secretary at her grammar school rose up before her, a small, terminally repressed woman in spectacles and grey cardigan and fog-coloured stockings. She never smiled and she treated the headmistress like a deity. She had given the impression of hating girls, of hating all their energy and cleverness and rampant promise.

‘Juliet, I couldn't—'

‘Sir Thomas Beecham once said', Juliet remarked, ‘that one ought to try everything in life just once except incest and morris dancing. Being a school secretary seems to me rather an easier option than either.'

Then Barbara had found the school.

‘Of course, it's hopelessly old-fashioned, still bringing up girls to expect to live lives like their mothers, but what else can you expect from a provincial community? I shouldn't think their fathers read anything except newspapers. It isn't even very well run. Your grandfather would have been appalled.'

Barbara had been oddly sympathetic to their dilemma, oddly because sympathy wasn't something that came naturally to her. William had wanted to lend them money, at once, but Barbara, better understanding the matter of Rob's pride, dissuaded him.

‘Put it into an account for the children if you want to, but don't bail them out. Robert will only resent you for being able to, and I shouldn't blame him. After all, you've hardly worked for your capital, have you?'

And he has, William thought sadly, Robert has worked for nearly twenty years to build up something that he may now lose. I've just pottered along, and the nice little lump my parents left me has pottered along behind me, like a kind and reassuring nanny. I've never been really worried about money in my life, and although you could fairly say I haven't spent much either, it's all been quite easy, too easy. I should feel so much better to give some to Rob and Lizzie – after all, it'll be half theirs in the end anyway – but I do see that
my
feeling better isn't the point.

‘Robert and Lizzie are very young,' Juliet pointed out. ‘Not yet forty. There's plenty of time for a whole new life, even two.'

Lizzie's whole new life was now going to encompass Westondale. Westondale was the kind of school she and Frances used to despise when they were at school themselves, for its decorous social gentility and a narrow, undemanding curriculum whose devisers would never think of teaching Greek to girls and that was heavily inclined towards the domestic sciences. It
was
amazing, Lizzie thought, that such a school should still be alive in this age of conscious equality of opportunity, but, shabby though it was, and abidingly unadventurous, it was still there and so were over two hundred girls dressed in navy-blue and white, from eleven to GCSE-level. If it had been more modern, Rob had rightly said, if it had moved with the times any better, it would never have considered employing Lizzie, whose experience, in a lot of employers' eyes, would never have compensated for her lack of proper qualifications.

Westondale was housed in a pair of large, early-Victorian dwellings on the southern slopes of the hills running down from Langworth to Bath. The houses stood in their two original gardens, linked together by a concrete-and-glass corridor erected in the fifties, and surrounded by a hotchpotch of car-parking spaces (staff, parents, deliveries), tennis courts, hockey pitches and shabby patches of shrubbery in which the younger ones loitered in break and the more rebellious smoked. The no-smoking rule, so easy to avoid for day-school girls, was only any fun to break in school hours and in uniform. At the back of the houses various additional prefabricated classrooms – an art room, a biology lab, rooms nominally dedicated to geography and music – stood about on breeze-block stilts, and against the windowless wall of each leaned long, leaking bicycle sheds for those pupils who cycled up laboriously to school from the city. The whole place gave the impression of having grown at random, rather than ever having had the discipline of a plan, and was badly in need of a coat of paint. The parents told each other staunchly that it was such a happy school; the girls themselves simply knew that it was something boring to be got through before things, with any luck, became more interesting.

Lizzie had been appointed assistant school secretary,
working
under the present secretary, Mrs Mason, until the latter retired at half-term on the very dot of her sixtieth birthday. She was retiring, she said, to devote herself to her local branch of the Townswomen's Guild, of which she aspired to be chairman.

‘Or should we say chairperson, these days!'

Lizzie nodded, speechless. It seemed to her that this part-term with Mrs Mason in her purple jumper and flashing spectacles might seem a very long part-term indeed.

‘As you will find out,' Mrs Mason said, darting plump hands over drawers and drawers of index cards, ‘I have my own little ways, my own little methods. My husband always says to me, “Your mind may not work like anyone else's, Freda, but at least it works!” ' She gave a peal of merry laughter.

‘Yes,' Lizzie said.

She looked round the office. It had, for all its lines of steel cabinets and files, the air of a church bazaar, a small space crammed to bursting with knick-knacks and pointless knitted things.

‘I never throw anything away, you'll find,' Mrs Mason said. ‘And I like to bring a personal touch to the workplace. My grandson made that' – she indicated a red-and-yellow papier mâché lump that might have been a dragon or perhaps a pineapple or maybe just a lump – ‘and the little ones from the first form made me that pop-up calendar for Christmas. So creative!'

‘Yes,' Lizzie said.

She told Robert about Mrs Mason, hoping to make him laugh, but he was too full of anguish at her having to take such a job to feel anything other than anxiety.

‘Oh Lizzie. Can you stand her?'

‘Of course I can. It's only about seven weeks and then I can have a bonfire of all her macramé plant-holders.'

She spoke the truth. It wasn't Mrs Mason she was going to mind; Mrs Mason was just a temporary joke, if not a very good one. What Lizzie minded was that the money she would be earning would not be able to be spent constructively on putting food in their mouths, or clothes on their backs, but merely, and aridly, in paying interest to the bank. What was worse was that the amount she earned probably wouldn't even be enough to cover that interest. It felt, quite literally, like pouring water into sand and it filled her with a misery that she couldn't possibly confide to Rob, because he, for some obscure reason, seemed to feel that he was to blame for their indebtedness, as if he could – and should – have foreseen that the boom times would end, quite suddenly, and that all their hopes and plans would be plunged into frightening darkness.

‘It's
our
business,' Lizzie kept saying, ‘and
our
house. I've been as involved as you all along, we've never taken a unilateral financial decision in our lives. If anything, I wanted the Grange more than you did.'

He was easier to comfort than she was herself. She found she couldn't comfort herself, and for reasons of temperament and this tendency to blame himself, she couldn't ask him for comfort. And all this bleakness of feeling, this dread at the prospect of a long struggle in which something important would inevitably be lost, was made infinitely worse by the fact that, for the first time in her life, Lizzie couldn't talk to Frances.

At least, Lizzie told herself, driving in to her first morning at Westondale in the second-hand car they had bought for this purpose for seven hundred pounds, and in which Lizzie had no confidence, I can talk to her, but there isn't any point because she isn't listening. She hadn't listened for four months, ever since
that
second trip to Spain from which she had returned so glowing and so preoccupied. Lizzie had never seen Frances like this before, even when in the grip of what looked like previous infatuations. Lizzie was sure this latest episode was an infatuation.

‘Frances, you've only been with him a week.'

‘I seem to remember that you and Rob—'

‘But we were young, we were students and impetuous. It was quite different. I'm so worried you'll be hurt.'

Then Frances had turned on her. She turned on her, not with anger, but with a kind of quiet power.

‘I've had enough of this, Lizzie. I've had enough of your lifelong assumption that I am somehow an inadequate human being, that I'm not fit to manage a relationship of any seriousness, that I'm just standing about waiting for other people, notably you, to wind me up like some clockwork toy and send me trotting off in the direction of your choice. I am in love, Lizzie, I am in love, properly, for the first time in my whole life, and nobody will tell me how I should conduct this love, or what mistakes I am liable to make. I haven't just found a wonderful companion, you see, I haven't just found an interesting and sympathetic other mind, I have found a
lover
.' Lizzie had been deeply shaken by this, not least because the evidence of Frances having found a thoroughgoing lover was plain for all to see. You only had to look at Frances, at her skin and hair and eyes, not to mention an indefinable but unmistakable new coherence in her clothes, to know she had a lover. You only had to listen to her, indeed, with your eyes shut, and hear the shining confidence in her voice, to know it.

Of course, Lizzie wanted to meet him, was avid to know every crumb of information about him, but Frances wouldn't allow it.

‘Not yet. This is our private time. We are trying to see
each
other most weekends, but it isn't easy, and there's too little time. You'll have to wait.'

‘Of course, I told you so,' Barbara informed William over breakfast. It was National Prune Week and she had flung herself into it; a huge bowl of them lay glistening in front of William like a threat. ‘Didn't I? I said, when she cancelled Christmas, that there was a man in it somewhere.'

William took a single prune and hid it under his muesli.

‘There wasn't, then.'

‘Nonsense! A Spaniard! Why choose a Spaniard?'

‘We don't choose love,' William said. ‘It chooses us. Not always conveniently, I grant you, but then convenience is not a prime quality of passion.'

‘Passion!' snorted Barbara. She looked at his cereal bowl. ‘Where are your prunes?'

None of them had seen Frances, to speak of, since May. Lizzie had had one snatched visit to London, during the course of which Frances had spoken so sternly, but Frances hadn't been to Langworth once and, instead of telephoning every other day as she used to, only rang once a week, or even fortnight.

‘I suppose she just rings Spain—'

‘Of course she does!' Robert said. ‘What else do you expect? Why aren't you glad for her?'

‘I am.'

‘You do nothing but point out the pitfalls.'

‘Rob, there are so many. He's ten years older, he's married, he's Catholic, he's a foreigner. There are such agonies ahead—'

‘Perhaps she thinks they are all worth it for the present. Anyway, why shouldn't she be able to cope? Why are you the one with a monopoly on coping?'

‘I'm not, I just always feel with Frances—'

‘Lizzie,' Robert shouted, interrupting. ‘Will you please stop going on about Frances and just focus on
us
? We're your priority, not her. I'm your husband, remember, your companion,
your
lover when we're not too bloody tired—'

The trouble is, Lizzie thought, gripping the wheel of this unfamiliar and clattering car that felt as if it might, at any moment, simply disintegrate into a series of nuts and bolts and cogs and wheels spinning over the road, the trouble is that I am jealous. I've been, I have to admit it, jealous of Frances on occasion in the past when she seemed so free and I felt so tied, but I'm not jealous of her now – I simply can't summon up the energy even to imagine having a love affair – but I'm jealous of
him
. I don't know him and I really resent him having all Frances's attention and confidence. Particularly now. After all, I've hardly asked for Frances's help before, I've never needed it, and I'm not exactly asking now, but I could do with her. In this horrible situation when I'm so scared we may just lose everything we've worked for, I really could do with her. It isn't much to ask, is it, for your twin's support in a dark hour? It isn't greedy, is it? Isn't it just natural to turn by instinct to your other self, your other half? Of course I want her to be happy, I always have, but what she's doing is so dangerous, far too dangerous for happiness. Oh dear, thought Lizzie, swerving to avoid a sudden cyclist emerging from a turning, perhaps I am just an awful managing cow, perhaps I am what Rob says I am and Frances – oh
damn
, I'm going to cry, can't cry, mustn't, can't arrive
chez
Freda Mason on my first morning with a nose like a red balloon.

The small staff car-park at Westondale was already full when Lizzie arrived. She drove round to the even smaller one allotted to the collecting parents of juniors – ingeniously designed for the maximum need for quarrelsome reversing – and parked there. A gardener emerged from a bush and said staff couldn't park there.