A Spanish Lover (28 page)

‘Juliet,' Frances said, ‘shall we go now? Nicky will hold the fort.'

Nicky, smooth-haired and serene, smiled at them from behind her computers and her telephones.

‘Wonderful Nicky,' Juliet said politely. Nicky, she thought, had a face like an egg, perfect, bland and featureless. What would happen to a face like Nicky's when it got into a rage?

Frances led Juliet back down past the kebab houses and the Chinese take-aways and the baked potato place
outside
which a huge, smiling plastic potato stood on a stand and held out a fillings menu towards them in grotesque little plastic hands, and round several windy corners to an Italian restaurant called the Trattoria Antica. It was small and pretty, with pink tablecloths and rustic rush-seated chairs and Frances, being plainly well known there, was given a table in the window.

‘I never go out to lunch,' Juliet said pleasedly. ‘At least, sometimes I take one of my poor lonely hearts lot from the village to a pub, but there is something about a country pub at lunchtime that is very disheartening. I've eaten more microwaved steak and kidney pie without enough seasoning in it than I care to contemplate.'

‘What are you going to eat now?'

Juliet rather thought mixed salamis and then the three-coloured tagliatelle and a salad. Frances said she loved people who could make up their minds about menus.

‘Talking of love,' Juliet said, ‘you look wonderful.'

Frances looked up at her with a dead straight gaze that had, she thought, always been one of the twins' chief charms.

‘I feel it.'

‘So your Mr Moreno has satisfactorily filled up your inner spaces and there is presently no need for stories?'

Frances blushed faintly and nodded.

‘Well, I'm glad,' Juliet said. ‘There's nothing like love for giving the emotions a really good gallop.'

‘It's more than that, it's better—'

‘Of course it is. I'm teasing you, really. And I'm delighted for you, delighted, and luckily everybody seems to like him.'

A waiter put down two plates of pink and white and red salamis in front of them, studded with shining black olives.

‘Actually', Frances said, ‘it wouldn't make me change my mind for one second, even if they didn't'.

‘I know'.

‘Of course, Lizzie thinks it's estranged us—' She stopped.

Juliet rolled a disc of salami into a neat parcel with her fork, and ate it.

‘Lizzie is why I've come.'

‘Yes.'

The waiter leaned between them and poured white wine into their glasses.

‘Lizzie is in a bad way.'

‘The house—'

‘And Robert.'

‘Rob?' said Frances, startled.

‘Yes,' Juliet said. She ate an olive. ‘It is a common and absolutely mistaken supposition that trouble brings two people closer together. It doesn't, of course, it makes them snarl and snap at one another because they are worried and frightened. It's only when trouble is safely past that people feel devoted to one another out of sheer relief that they've weathered the storm. Lizzie and Robert haven't got to that stage yet. The storm is still raging.'

Frances picked up her wine glass and took a slow sip.

‘I've tried to help, you know. I've offered them money and I've offered them a holiday. Lizzie doesn't want either. At least, she doesn't want them from me.'

‘She is terribly ashamed of herself,' Juliet said.

‘For what?'

‘For being frightened and worried, for blaming Robert when she knows it isn't his fault, for being hysterical about putting the Grange on the market, for envying you your love affair and for resenting your closeness to Mr Moreno, which last emotion is
complicated
by both liking him and finding him, I suspect, rather attractive.'

Frances went on eating, not hurriedly, but with a kind of determination that suddenly looked to Juliet almost stubborn.

‘She desperately wanted your happiness, Frances, but she never bargained for how she might react when you got it.'

‘I'm sorry,' Frances said.

‘Sorry about what?'

‘I'm sorry that Lizzie is in this tangle. I'm sorry that you had to come all the way to London to say things to me that I can't help feeling she might have said herself. I'm truly sorry about the house and the loss of all their profits and success.'

‘But?'

‘But,' said Frances, eating a piece of bread, ‘beyond loving Lizzie and offering her such help as I can give her, there isn't any more I can do. I can't', she said with sudden fierceness, ‘adjust my life any more in order for it to be something that Lizzie can live with.'

Juliet was amazed.

‘My dear Frances—'

‘No,' Frances said, ‘just listen a moment. I may be a twin, as Lizzie is, and we may, largely at her instigation and by my acquiescence, have divided life somehow between us up to now, but none of that means that I am not whole, independent and separate any more than it means she isn't. I am not responsible for her choices. She isn't for mine. I'll do anything in my power to help her but she doesn't want me to. She wants help on her terms just as she wants my happiness on her terms too. I think her current situation is horrible for her, but it's no less horrible for Rob and it isn't the end of the world. If I was her, I mean them, I'd turn the café and the exhibition floor of the Gallery into a flat and move in there. It would halve the administration and the
work
and the expenses. And I also would leave me alone to develop my life as I want and need to, just as I have always left her alone to do. I don't think I've ever criticized Lizzie. I once asked her quite mildly why she was having Davy christened when she and Rob were once full of such high-minded ideas about not imposing spirituality on the older children, and I truthfully think that was the closest I've got to seriously questioning
any
of her decisions. Well, I've had enough. I'm not a sort of honey pot she can just stick a finger in for a lick when she fancies it. I'm me and I'm free and when she can honestly respect that and, what's more, put it into practice, then we'll be getting somewhere. In the meantime, I may ache with sympathy for her but I don't, any more, ache with guilt. Right?'

Juliet gave her a long, astounded look.

‘Right,' she said faintly.

‘Good,' Frances said. She picked the wine bottle out of its perspex cooler. ‘Drink up, then.'

Later, driving out to the airport to meet Luis on an early-evening flight from Madrid, Frances waited out of habit to feel a twinge of remorse. She didn't. As she had said to Juliet, it wasn't that she didn't feel sorry for Lizzie, but it was rather that she had stopped feeling tied to her by some primordial cord of responsibility, largely because her perceptions of responsibility were now deflected in quite another direction; that direction which was presently, with any luck, beginning its descent in an aeroplane over Heathrow. There was also the added element, Frances told herself, of having her own preoccupations now, preoccupations which were of enormous importance to her, and which it was as much in her nature to keep private as it was in Lizzie's to make public.

All of these preoccupations centred inevitably
around
Luis. Their love affair, carried on in snatches between their business lives in two countries, might have looked to the outside eye the epitome of glamour – the travel, the infrequency of meeting and frequency of telephoning, the emotional partings and reunions, the consequent novelty sustained at an intoxicating and high-octane level – but Frances had discovered, quite early on, that the organic nature of the relationship had set its own inevitable time clock ticking the moment Luis had said to her, with such urgency, that they must understand each other's national natures if they were to become lovers. You could not, she had learned, stop that time clock. You could not, whatever tricks you attempted to play on it by getting on aeroplanes and flying off or by not being available for telephone calls, halt the steady, relentless tread of a love affair's development. Whatever you did, however you disciplined yourself, it
would
progress, it
would
change and in the process, it would force you to progress and change with it. And the stark measure of that, Frances told herself, beating the palm of one hand lightly on the steering wheel, is that in May I would have sold my soul to be his mistress, and now that I've been his mistress for six months, I want to be something more.

She had said this to him, outright, and the consequences had been two extremely thunderous weekends. Luis said he did not consider himself married to José's mother any more, he considered himself wholly committed to Frances, but that he did not wish to raise the storm of seeking a divorce since, even if he were free, he wouldn't marry Frances, he wouldn't marry anybody again, ever, he wasn't a married kind of man. He said he hadn't told his mother about Frances, and he wasn't going to because he knew exactly what her reaction would be, which would distress Frances deeply even if she was prepared for
it
, and no, Frances couldn't meet her, ever.

‘But you have met my parents, I have taken you to my family, I have been open and honest and generous with you—'

‘Yes.'

‘So why can't you, even out of mere decency and courtesy, reciprocate with a little honesty and generosity with me?'

‘Because I am different from you. I am a man, I am a Spaniard, I was born and reared a Catholic.
Querida
, we have been over and over this. My father is a deeply traditional, right-wing ex-soldier. My mother is a devout Catholic with a will of iron and a fondness for anger and scenes. They would probably refuse even to meet you, and if they met you, they would be, at best, cold and hard. There is no
point
, Frances. You would be badly hurt, and nothing would be gained.'

‘So I have to stay a secret? You tell me I'm the most important person in your life and I have to stay a
secret?
'

‘José knows you, so does Ana and my brother-in-law—'

‘But I'm a secret for them, too!'

‘Listen,' Luis said, taking her by the shoulders and putting his face close to hers, ‘there is no other way. Do you understand me? There is
no other way
.'

She hadn't gone on pleading. She didn't want to whine, she didn't want to lose any of that life-enhancing self-esteem he had given her by whining and pleading, so she had stopped. Not particularly gracefully, she now thought, but at least she had stopped. In any case, she had growing inside her, more strongly with every day that passed, a far greater preoccupation even than the one of being somehow miraculously accepted into Luis's family and his public life. Of course she wanted to be his wife because she wanted him to acknowledge before the world what
she
meant to him, and she wanted them to live together so that the lows of life were woven into their every days as well as the highs, so that they could build upon the foundations they had so splendidly laid within the security of marriage and so that, most of all – Frances stopped herself. The stream of traffic swirling round the roundabouts before the airport was demanding all her attention, and in any case, the conversation that had arisen only last weekend from the voicing of this, the most powerful of her desires, took a great deal of courage to recall. But then, Frances had recently grown rather used to courage, both of the stoical kind that accepts and bears the unacceptable and the unbearable, and also of the adventurous kind that goes out either to seek or to defend. Frances had definitely been seeking when she had said to Luis, in his flat in Madrid last weekend, that she would be thirty-nine on her next birthday, and that, because of meeting him, she now badly wanted to have a baby before she was forty.

He was making a salad. He was both deft and competent domestically, and he was standing at the island unit in the centre of his tiny, urban kitchen, slicing vegetables. She was sitting the other side of the unit on a stool, wearing a bathrobe of his because she had just had a shower and because they both liked her to wear his bathrobe, his shirts, his jerseys. When she had spoken, she sat and waited, her elbows on the unit close to his chopping board, and her face in her hands. He went on slicing. She watched the fine wafers of peppers and tomato and cucumber fall brightly on to the board, and the flash of the knife blade. He stopped every so often, and scooped up the slices in his cupped hands and dropped them into the deep pottery bowl they had bought together in Córdoba, blue and white and butter-yellow, with a single scarlet rose painted in the bottom.

Then Luis said, ‘If you have a child, Frances, then I must tell you that that will be the end of everything.'

She had got off the stool then, and gone into the small, darkish bedroom, with its wide bed and its view down into an ordinary Madrid street lined with blocks of flats and news vendors. She sat on the bed, and folded her hands together, back very straight. She knew he meant it. She knew that if she pointed out how fond he was (however occasionally exasperatedly) of José, how sweet he had been with Lizzie's Davy, how much they loved one another, how natural and right a baby would now be as the fruit of their sexual harmony and passion, it would be like trying to shout at somebody with the wind snatching your words away as you uttered them. He simply wouldn't hear her. Nothing would change him, nothing, even though she used every weapon in her armoury, emotional, moral, rational. There was no point in battering on the closed door of his mind until her knuckles were raw, because he would never admit her. Assault, in this vital matter of a baby, would achieve nothing but an estrangement which would, she knew, simply break her heart. So she got up from the bed, dressed herself in the blue jeans and oversized white shirt he liked to see her in, went back to the kitchen and said in a friendly voice that, after they had eaten, she would like to go out to the cinema. He had looked at her. He had looked at her for a long, steady time, and then he had stopped what he was doing and had taken her straight back to the bedroom.