A Spanish Lover (25 page)

‘Quite,' Davy muttered, torn between ambition and honesty.

‘Can you see that A there?'

‘Alistair has A—'

‘So does Australia.'

Davy bent close to the watch, and, as he did so, Luis put an arm around him.

‘Now press this.'

Davy pressed.

‘Look what you have done, you have made numbers! Can you read numbers?'

Davy looked up at him. Their faces were inches apart.

‘I can do up to five,' Davy said confidently.

‘You are a clever boy, then.'

Davy watched him for a few seconds, then bent again over the watch.

‘A clever, charming boy,' Luis said, and over Davy's head, he looked across at Frances. She was looking back at him, he thought, as if she had seen a vision.

13

‘IT'S PREPOSTEROUS,' BARBARA
said.

‘You said that', William reminded her, ‘when you were told you were pregnant with twins. You also said—'

‘The whole thing is absurd,' Barbara said. She was wiping the table with a damp cloth and William wasn't even half-way through breakfast. She often did this now, picking up bowls and jars and wiping pointlessly underneath them in the middle of meals. It was a maddening habit. William seized the marmalade and held it against his chest possessively.

‘But you liked him.'

‘Oh,' Barbara said crossly. ‘Of course I liked him, he was a perfectly nice, civil man. That isn't the point. Put the marmalade down or your jersey will get sticky.'

‘No it won't,' William said. ‘The marmalade is
inside
the jar. You said you had never seen Frances look better and that Luis was a nice man.'

‘But he's
foreign
.'

‘Everybody', William said patiently, ‘is foreign to anybody else who isn't of the same nationality. Please leave the toast, I want some more.'

‘Mixed marriages—'

‘Barbara!' William shouted.

‘Don't shout.'

‘They aren't
getting
married!' William shouted, taking no notice. ‘Luis
is
married! They are having a love affair!'

‘And you, of course, would know about such things,'
Barbara
said, taking the butter away in revenge.

‘Frances has had several love affairs,' William said, ignoring her and spreading marmalade thickly on his toast to compensate for the lack of butter. ‘They've none of them been very serious and I think this is the most serious one so far. That's all.'

Barbara put the butter in the fridge and slammed the door shut so hard that all the bottles inside clattered nervously together. Then she stood there, with her back to William.

‘Barbara?'

She didn't say anything. She simply stood there, visibly tense, staring at the wall above the fridge where a regrettably soppy calendar hung, the well-intentioned Christmas calendar sent by their local garage. William waited for half a minute, politely, then he bit into his toast.

‘It's not that,' Barbara burst out.

‘It's not what?' William said, crunching.

She turned round. She was fighting to look normal. All her life, she had striven to prevent any emotion – except temper, William often thought – appearing on her face.

‘It's not that I disapprove of Frances having a love affair. And I don't really mind about his being foreign—'

‘Oh good.'

‘But she's in love this time.'

William stared.

‘What?'

‘She's really in love. Properly. Deeply.'

‘So?'

‘He's married,' Barbara said.

‘Yes, I know—'

‘So she'll be
hurt
,' Barbara said.

William put his toast down.

‘I don't see—'

‘No, of course you don't see, you never see, you are
the
original Mr Have-his-cake-and-eat-it, so I wouldn't even cherish the faintest hope that you
might
see. But Frances is in love with a married Catholic foreigner so it is bound, absolutely
bound
, to end in tears, most of which will be shed by Frances.'

William picked up his toast again. His hand shook a little and a blob of marmalade fell on to the gentle front curve of his jersey.

‘Why can't you let her be happy in peace? Even if there
may
be problems ahead, there aren't problems
now
. Why can't you just rejoice for her instead of cawing round her like some malevolent old rook of a Cassandra?'

‘You have marmalade on your jersey,' Barbara said. ‘I knew you would.'

‘Shut up!' William yelled. He hurled his toast across the kitchen and watched it land face down in a basket of ironing.

‘Men,' Barbara said, witheringly. ‘Hopeless romantics, useless realists. What is the point of rejoicing idiotically over something that is doomed to disaster? Luckily, I don't share your taste for romantic sentimentality.'

William bent his head. He reflected, and not for the first time, that it was a great pity he suffered from a middle-class male reluctance to thump his wife.

‘Don't think I don't love Frances,' Barbara said. ‘And don't think I don't understand her either. It's because I love and understand her that I'm not going to join in this ridiculous game of pretending she's found a solid emotional future when that's the last thing she's done. Now I am going to make our bed and I shall leave you to sort out the childish mess you have made in the ironing.'

She went out, closing the door in what William's mother would have called a marked manner, and William heard her feet going heavily and steadily up
the
stairs. They crossed the landing and entered the main bedroom and were then drowned by the incomprehensible quacking of the distant radio which Barbara switched on, as she always did, at anti-social volume.

William got up and went to the sink and scrubbed at his jersey with a damp cloth. He looked out of the window. It gave on to exactly the same view as it had given on to nearly forty years before when Barbara told him she was going to have twins, the same pleasant, unremarkable fields, the same hedgerows, even the same row of black poplars with their scarred sturdy trunks and their magnificent crimson catkins in spring. The only thing that had changed was that the farm beyond the fields had put up a hideous silage silo and even uglier Dutch barn, painted bright, hard, unnatural green and now blotched with huge brilliant patches of rust.

William held the edge of the sink. Perhaps he was romantic, perhaps he did feel that whatever happened in the future would be worth it because of how Frances felt now, looked now. Perhaps he did feel, with an instinct that had nothing to do with reason – and he had never, after all, had much respect for reason as a creed for living by – that nothing lovely was ever, somehow, wasted, even if it came to an end. Yet of course Barbara, however bloody, was in some ways right to feel chill apprehensions even in the midst of current joy. She was also, however strangely she often expressed it, the twins' mother and therefore bound to feel a kind of protectiveness, even if it did emerge in a weird and strangulated form. It was a wonder, really, that Barbara was taking Frances's present happiness at all seriously, and wasn't simply snorting with contempt that anyone, anywhere, in their right minds, could find the mere notion of romantic love anything other than utterly ridiculous.

William gave an enormous sigh and turned away
from
the window. Poor twins, poor little twins, both now in their various ways so beleaguered, Lizzie by present problems, Frances by the looming threat of future ones, even if she didn't yet perceive them. He remembered how he once used to think, during the twins' turbulent babyhood, that nobody would embark on parenthood if they knew the relentless exhaustion it was going to involve. What a naive view, he now thought, what inexperience! Looking back, those early years were actually the golden years of parenthood, for the simple reason, William told himself, that it had still then lain within his power to make his children happy.

He crossed the kitchen and looked into the ironing basket. The toast lay on a pair of his chainstore pyjamas, pale-blue cotton piped in darker blue, neatly ironed. He decided, after staring at it for a few minutes, simply to leave it there.

The new bank manager in Langworth was youngish, with a narrow face, short hair and the kind of ubiquitous sober suit that everybody seemed to be wearing for work nowadays if they weren't looking after either cows or cars.

He said to Robert, ‘I am glad, Mr Middleton, to have this opportunity of meeting with you.'

Why the ‘with', Robert wondered. Did it signify something different from just meeting someone? Anyway, it wasn't a meeting, it was a summons.

‘You asked me to call.'

‘Indeed I did. I believe my letter was addressed to both you and Mrs Middleton. I rather expected—'

‘Mrs Middleton, as I told your secretary, is working during the weekdays of termtime at Westondale School in Bath.'

The bank manager raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips.

‘Was I informed of this?'

‘Why should you have been?'

‘In your present position,' said the bank manager, in a tone that implied that Robert's indebtedness was some kind of criminal offence, ‘it is necessary to inform us of everything.'

Robert opened his mouth to say, Do not speak to me like that! and shut it again. What would be gained, after all, but a brief, delicious surge of adrenalin followed by the necessity of having to apologize, thereby giving the enemy the upper hand. Robert looked at the manager's reddish hair and pale, almost lashless eyes, and skin that still bore the scars of adolescent acne. He not only looked like the enemy; he looked as if he liked looking like the enemy.

‘Please sit down, Mr Middleton.'

Robert obeyed, reluctantly, and chose a chair upholstered in charcoal-grey tweed. The bank manager sat down behind his own desk and folded his hands on a fat file that presumably contained the Middletons' records.

‘I am afraid, Mr Middleton, that I cannot tolerate this situation any longer.'

‘How dare you use the word “tolerate”?' Robert shouted, forgetting his resolve. ‘How
dare
you? You banks are a service, let me remind you, a bloody expensive
service
, not some kind of moral committee sitting in judgement on erring customers!'

The bank manager looked down at his clasped hands in pained silence as if waiting for an unpleasant smell in the air to evaporate.

‘My loans committee, Mr Middleton, my loans committee at the regional head office in Bath, have made it a requirement that you put in hand immediate measures to repay the bulk of the present outstanding loan. It was granted, if you remember, on the understanding that a substantial reduction would be made
within
a period of nine months. Those nine months are up, and the loan has not been reduced by any significant degree. The bank is anxious, Mr Middleton, that the loan may harden.'

‘Harden?'

‘That you will, Mr Middleton, become used to it and therefore not look further than the paying of the interest.'

Robert looked down for a moment. His head swam. It was not only incredible that this sandy clerk was speaking to him in this way, but also that he was actually saying what he appeared to be saying. He took an enormous breath.

‘Does it not occur to you that we detest this loan a hundred times more than you do, for the simple reason that the sum involved threatens all that my wife and I have achieved over the last eighteen years? Do you imagine we have had a quiet moment since we found ourselves in this situation, and that we aren't straining every nerve and sinew to think of and implement ways of improving it? Why else do you suppose that my wife has taken an outside job if it isn't to try and ease the burden on the business and pay your appalling interest rates? My wife is a highly talented and experienced woman, and she is forced to work at a level I don't think you'd expect of your counter clerks—'

‘Excuse me,' the bank manager interrupted, ‘but it won't help to get personal.'

‘But what else can we do?' Robert almost shouted. ‘We are working harder than we've ever worked for smaller returns than we've ever had. What on earth else can you possibly expect us to do?'

The bank manager shifted his hands so that his elbows were on the desk and his fingertips came lightly together in a gesture which seemed to Robert both authoritarian and sanctimonious.

‘My loans committee—'

For some reason, Robert's stomach sank like a stone.

‘My loans committee', the bank manager continued, looking straight at Robert, ‘now requires a positive indication that the bulk of the loan can be repaid in the near future.'

‘And how the hell am I supposed to do that?'

‘It's quite simple, Mr Middleton. It merely means, I am afraid, that you must put your house on the market.'

Jenny stood on the landing outside the office in the Gallery. She carried an individual-sized bottle of mineral water, and a tuna sandwich, on a tray. Robert had been inside, with the door shut now, for two hours, and it was almost three o'clock and she knew he'd had nothing to eat at lunchtime. She tapped.

He called, ‘Who is it?'

‘Jenny,' Jenny said.

‘Oh Jenny,' Robert said. ‘Come in.'

She opened the door cautiously. He was sitting at his desk with the ring binders of their collected bank statements open all around him.

‘I thought you might like something to eat, I didn't think you'd had any lunch—'

‘I didn't. You're a dear.'

‘The sandwich is tuna. It was all they had left upstairs. I hope that's all right.'

‘It's fine,' he said.

She put the tray down on the table by his desk.