A Spanish Lover (24 page)

‘Not at all. I know nothing at all about Spain, I'm appallingly ignorant—'

‘No,' Luis said. He was looking at the candles, but he was smiling. ‘No. You are very polite but really you are thinking about Frances—'

‘Naturally—'

Luis put a hand on his arm.

‘Just say yes to me. Of course you are thinking of Frances.'

‘We are a close family,' Robert said. ‘We're all rather bound up together. Lizzie and Frances are very close, of course, being twins, and they've stayed close to their parents. I hardly see mine.'

‘Nor I,' Luis said. ‘My mother is now very pious and my father was a soldier, so he is very right wing, perhaps too right wing for modern Europe.'

Robert moved away across the floor of the shop to where some lithographs hung, impressionistic lithographs he had commissioned from a local artist, of seasonal beasts and birds, which had, to his chagrin, failed to sell. Lizzie thought they were too strong and dark, too powerful.

‘I mean, I know people
know
that foxes kill pheasants,' she said. ‘I just think they don't want to see them doing it.'

‘Do you like these?' Robert asked Luis.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘They would sell well in Spain.'

‘They aren't selling here. Lizzie says they are too brooding.' He glanced at Luis. ‘The thing that worries Lizzie is, you see, what will happen?'

‘Always this worries women. I can't tell you what will happen because I don't know what the events of the future will be.'

‘But we don't want Frances to be left
without
a future.'

Luis straightened up. He turned to Robert. He said, looking straight at him. ‘You should not underestimate Frances. She will never be without a future. I have never met anyone like her for strength.'

‘
Frances?
'

‘Oh yes. She keeps it very quiet but it is there. My sister. Ana, is strong too but she wears her strength like her clothes, you can see it. Frances is the opposite.'

‘I have known Frances since she was twenty, only about a month or two less than I've known Lizzie. And I've never seen her so – so deep in any relationship.'

‘So,' Luis said, putting his hands in his trouser pockets, ‘you are warning me not to hurt her? Or your wife has said to you to warn me?'

‘Please don't be angry—'

‘I am not in the least angry,' Luis said, smiling. ‘I am just trying to understand you.'

‘It isn't interference,' Rob said earnestly. ‘It's just a kind of protectiveness, about Frances—'

‘Yes, yes. I too know about that, remember. I may be a poor foreigner, but I am also a human being.'

‘The thing is,' Rob said, feeling suddenly that he was in an absurd position, a sort of surrogate heavy-father position which he had never sought and which he was disliking very much, ‘that the northern and the southern forms of passion are so very different. Don't you think? Perhaps we can't, in the end, understand
one
another because our instincts are so different—' He stopped. He looked at Luis. He said, ‘God, I'm so sorry. I never meant to say all this, I'm not sure I even believe it. Will you forget the last few minutes entirely? Can I just say that I have never seen Frances look better or happier?'

Luis looked back. Their eyes met. What was he trying to say, this nice brother-in-law of Frances? Was he trying to wish them well while at the same time saying that he doubted that things could, in the end, possibly be well for them? Did he have, too, this curious English habit of reticence, the habit Frances had had when he had first known her, which made its possessor reluctant to articulate feelings, almost afraid to? It was like a terrible politeness, a kind of courtesy, so self-denying that in the end it was an affliction and imprisoned the sufferer. It wasn't so much, Luis thought, that the Spanish were better at explaining their feelings, it was rather that they were not afraid of those feelings in the first place. They were, as Frances had pointed out, proud of their qualities and their emotions. ‘It makes you a noble race,' Frances had said. ‘You're high-minded. The English are often excellent but they'd be afraid to be high-minded now. They'd feel silly, they'd think they looked imperialist.' Robert Middleton didn't look either silly or imperialist to Luis, he merely looked unhappy, as if he had no outlet for what he was feeling. Luis took his hands out of his pockets, stretched both of them out and grasped Robert's.

‘If she looks it, I feel it.'

‘Yes, I know—'

‘Sometimes,' Luis said, ‘we need exactly what is not natural to us, we need to look at everything through different eyes.'

Robert thought suddenly of their situation, of the vulnerable Gallery, of Lizzie's dreary little job, of the great, weighty burden of the Grange.

‘Sometimes it isn't need that changes your vision,' Robert said. ‘Sometimes circumstances mean you just have to.'

Luis dropped his hands. Something else had happened in Rob's mind, something not to do with Frances.

‘Perhaps,' he said politely.

‘Couldn't I just book you a holiday? You and Rob, in Mojas? You've no idea how lovely it is.'

Lizzie drained fat off the ducks she had extravagantly bought – and now obscurely regretted – for Frances and Luis, and said she thought not.

‘But why?'

Lizzie put the roasting tin on the draining board and speared the ducks with a fork.

‘We can't afford it. We can't afford anything, Frances, not this house, not the cars, nothing. We certainly can't afford a holiday in Spain.'

Frances said, ‘But it would be a present. From me. I'd like to give it to you. I want to. Just you and Rob.'

Lizzie put the ducks on a plate, and the plate in the warming oven. A dull misery was settling on her.

‘Lizzie?'

‘I can't – take things from you. I—'

‘What?'

‘It's so sweet of you,' Lizzie said desperately. ‘Really kind. But I couldn't bear it.'

‘Why not? From me of all people—'

‘Yes. From you of all people.'

‘Frankly,' Frances said, slicing fiercely into the pineapple she had been given to cut up for a fruit salad, ‘I think that's pretty churlish.'

‘It isn't. Believe me, it isn't. It's just that I feel control is slipping from me.'

‘Look,' Frances said, ‘what are we doing eating duck
and
pineapple if things are so bad? Did you buy them specially for us?'

Lizzie winced at the ‘us'.

‘Of course I did—'

Frances threw the knife down.

‘Oh
Lizzie
. Why? Why go on as if nothing's changed when everything has?'

‘Because I hate some of the changes. I hate them so much—'

‘Is your job really terrible?'

‘No,' Lizzie said, pouring stock into the roasting tin for the gravy. ‘No, of course it isn't terrible, it's just dull and wearing and a bad anti-climax after what I'm used to. You think, don't you, that shock is a sudden thing, a horrible fright, but once it's over, it's over and you slowly recover. But the trouble about our kind of shock is that there is wave after wave of it, each blow seems to be followed by another because anything to do with money seems to have such an appalling capacity for building up, when you aren't looking. I'm sorry, I'm not being at all clear and I know I seem terribly ungrateful but I feel absolutely trapped, Frances, as if I can't
affect
anything in our lives any more, and I can't bear that because I always
have
affected things. I expect people who are made redundant feel like this, suddenly powerless, as if they'd become victims of some remorseless machine. It's just awfully hard, somehow, to accept kindness, even from you. I don't want kindness, you see, I just want to
punish
somebody.'

Frances dug out the horny little eyes from the remains of the pineapple skin with the point of her knife.

‘But mightn't a holiday restore your sense of proportion, of perspective?'

‘Of course. I just feel – I just feel that if I went away I could hardly bear to come back. I feel so guilty, you
see
, guilty about the children, as well as being worried and angry. I couldn't go off to Spain and leave them, not at the moment.'

‘But
they
aren't worried, are they? I don't expect they've even noticed.'

‘I don't want them to notice. Mum says it's about time they knew a bit of hardship and I just can't stand her saying things like that. Actually, I don't think I can stand this topic any longer. Can we talk about something else?'

‘I could talk to you about Luis,' Frances said simply.

Lizzie turned round. Frances was sitting there at the table, slicing pineapple, her hands and face pale-golden against her gleaming shirt. Nobody, Lizzie thought, had ever considered the twins beautiful, for the very simple reason that they weren't, couldn't be, because they lacked that necessary classical purity of line and feature, but by God, at that moment Frances came close. Lizzie went across and put an arm around Frances's shoulder.

‘I'm sorry to be such a killjoy and a prize cross-patch, because I really,
really
am pleased.'

Frances regarded her.

‘Do you like him?'

‘So far, so very good.'

Frances leaned a little and kissed Lizzie.

‘That's all right then,' she said contentedly. ‘He's changed everything for me.'

‘Everything?'

‘Even the business,' Frances said. ‘He's finding me guides for the Spanish holidays next year. You know what headaches I've had with the guides for Italy, how difficult it is to find somebody good and responsible enough, who doesn't then want so much money that the cost of the holidays goes rocketing? Well, it won't be like that in Spain. If you want to get anything done
in
Spain, you have to know someone, and Luis knows
everybody
.'

‘Oh Frances,' Lizzie said, laughing. ‘You have got it badly.'

‘I know. Really badly. And I don't in the least care if I get it even worse. We're going to see Mum and Dad after this—'

‘Heavens—'

‘Why “heavens”?'

‘Well,' Lizzie said, abruptly losing her nerve for what she really wanted to say, which was that anyone would think Luis was a prospective
son-in-law
, for goodness sake, ‘it just seems a bit of an ordeal for him.'

‘He wants to meet them.'

‘Does he?'

‘Yes,' Frances said with decision.

The outer kitchen door opened from the garden and Robert and Luis came in.

Luis said at once, ‘You have a beautiful shop.'

‘I know,' Lizzie said, smiling at him, ‘I just wish it was a more profitable one just now.'

‘I smell something wonderful—'

‘Duck.'

‘Magnificent! I adore duck!
Querida
, what are you doing with that dangerous knife?'

‘
Querida
' now. Heavens, what a language!' Lizzie said quickly, ‘Rob, do find Davy, would you? I'm worried about Luis's watch—'

‘Luis, however, is not at all worried about his watch,' Luis said.

‘All the same,' Robert said, opening the door to the hall, ‘we'd feel awful if anything happened to it.'

‘Frances, on the other hand, would be pleased.'

‘Yes,' Frances said, composedly, ‘she would. There now. Shall I add these grapes?'

From the hall, Robert could be heard shouting for Davy. There was a long silence, then a door opened,
letting
out a blast of television, then it banged shut and slow feet came across the hall.

‘Sam was far too frightened to touch this watch,' they heard Davy say.

‘I'm pleased to hear it.'

‘Alistair told him that if he even touched it with his baby finger he'd be landed the big one by Frances's man—'

‘Davy,' Rob said, ‘our guest is called Mr Moreno.'

He reappeared in the doorway with Davy in his arms. Luis was laughing.

‘Frances's man!'

Davy went pink. He turned a little in Rob's arms and hid his face against his father's neck. Lizzie went over to them, putting her hand up to Davy.

‘It's all right, darling, you couldn't know, look, Mr Moreno doesn't mind a bit—'

‘No, he certainly doesn't,' Luis said.

‘Darling,' Lizzie said coaxingly, her hand on Davy's ruffled hair. He turned his head and looked down at her gravely, and at that moment Frances glanced up and saw the three of them there, Rob holding his son, Lizzie reaching up to him, their three faces tender and united. A pang shot through her, a nameless, powerful pang. She opened her mouth to say. You look like a painting of the Holy Family, and shut it again. It suddenly seemed too absolutely true to be uttered.

Luis was by her side at once, pulling out another kitchen chair from the table and sitting down.

‘Come,' he said to Davy, ‘come and let me show you how the watch will tell you what time it is in Australia.'

Robert set Davy gently on the floor. Davy hesitated, pressed against Robert's thigh.

‘Come,' Luis said. ‘We are friends, Davy?'

With infinite slowness, Davy sidled round the table and stopped, three feet away.

‘But I cannot see the watch from there. I am so old now, Davy, that I have to have things close to my face to see them at all. You must help.'

Gradually, Davy inched forward.

‘Which arm did we put the watch on?'

Stiffly, like a soldier, Davy thrust out his right arm. Luis took his hand.

‘Come a bit closer.'

Davy came.

‘Closer still. This dial is so small. Look now. I press this and we look in this tiny window and we see the places in the world. Are you a good reader, Davy?'