A Spanish Lover (29 page)

Last Saturday, that was, Frances thought, and last Sunday was the last time I drove down the airport tunnel, except that I was coming the other way, away from Spain and Luis and not, as now, towards him. She felt extremely happy, not just with the still undiminishing anticipation of seeing him, but with a
deeper
happiness borne of certainty, of accomplishment. When she had reached home the Sunday before there had been a message from Luis waiting for her on the telephone answering machine, a message that wasn't exactly an apology in words, but was, because of its warmth and intimacy, a tacit one. He hadn't crowed in victory over her, he had rather implied his profound appreciation of her reaction. He had ended the message in Spanish. Spanish, as she grew better at it, was becoming the private language of their love.

When she had played the message several times, Frances went through the necessary discipline of swift, immediate unpacking. She had found that, if she didn't unpack the moment she got home, her bag lay, partly rummaged through, on the floor, until the next frantic, joyful Friday night forced her either to repack it, or finally empty it before Luis arrived. She hung up her skirts and jacket, lined up her shoes in the way that Luis, meticulous about his personal possessions, lined up his, and took her sponge bag into the bathroom. She tipped it out, as she always did – a habit Luis hated – into the washbasin, toothpaste, face creams, hairbrush, lotions, and began to pick out individual things and line them up on the glass shelf below the shaving mirror. She picked up the flat foil envelope that held her contraceptive pills, and slid them out into her hand. They were arranged round the edge of a small plasticized card, each one neatly in its own sealing bubble, each one helpfully labelled with a day of the week. Frances counted. Ten days left to go of this cycle. She flicked the card once or twice with her thumbnail, then slid it back into the envelope and dropped it into the bin under the basin.

That was five days ago, Frances now thought, emerging from the tunnel into the floodlit glare of the various terminal approaches, five days and I've swallowed nothing but food and drink. Above her, the
signs
for Terminal Two hung huge, clear and kindly instructive. With any luck, Luis's plane would be touching down this very moment, and with even more luck, he would, with the skill of long practice, be one of the first off the plane and one of the first through those impenetrable sliding doors from the customs hall and into her waiting arms.

PART FOUR

April

15

THE CHILDREN, LIKE
domestic animals transported from one side of the country to another, strayed endlessly back to the Grange. Robert said consolingly that this was only because the house's new occupants had a teenage son with even more cool than Jason Purdy, an ice-cream machine and a half-sized snooker table. But Lizzie thought that they were more like poor Cornflakes, torn from their familiar dresser drawer and poignantly trying to find it again. Cornflakes wouldn't use the same dresser drawer in the new kitchen, nor would he adapt, because of being in a flat, to an earth tray. He cowered under tables and chairs and glared at Lizzie with a mixture of deep reproach and malevolence. He made messes beneath beds and behind the sofa. He also learned, in order to revenge himself upon her for the loss of the Grange's garden and its game reserve of voles and shrews, how to open the door of the fridge and help himself to the contents.

It was a nice flat, everybody said so. No-one quite knew where the suggestion had come from that the top two floors of the Gallery building should cease to be uneconomic café and exhibition space and become the Middletons' home instead, but it had arrived somehow, like the slow onset of a new season, and quietly enlarged itself from a notion to an actuality. Robert had worked on the conversion with his own hands all winter, doing almost everything himself except the plumbing and some necessary rewiring, and they now had a kitchen and a family living room and three
bedrooms
and a bathroom, and views of Langworth High Street in front and the decayed small industrial muddle at the back, and really, the change wasn't that bad and the sun came in morning and evening and it was, wasn't it, wonderful just to nip downstairs to work rather than race, late, through the town, and everybody would, of course, get accustomed to living in a quarter of the space they were used to, and it was a relief, surely, not to have the tyranny of a garden, particularly when Langworth had a perfectly good recreation ground, and it must be such a boon to have shops so close and everybody got used to sleeping through traffic after a week or two, didn't they?

Lizzie hated it. Her beloved possessions, the lovingly collected furniture and objects, seemed to huddle miserably in the new featureless rooms, wearing expressions similar to Cornflakes'. The noise, the inevitable chaos of the children's crammed bedrooms – how long, for heaven's sake, could Harriet and Davy share a room? – the fact that a large proportion of their furniture had to be expensively stored, the lack of privacy, the endless domestic difficulties of finding somewhere to hang the washing, or eat in peace with Robert while sharing the same space with the television and Alistair and Harriet breathing elaborately and heavily over their homework, combined to make her feel that she was like a hamster on a wheel, doomed to go round and round without ever advancing one iota. It wasn't, either, as if she and Robert had reached a point where they could raise their glasses of Bulgarian wine to each other in mutual congratulation at being out of debt. They weren't yet. They had had, in order to achieve the quick sale the bank had demanded, to sell the Grange for considerably less than they had paid for it, or than it had once been worth. It had also cost a frightening amount to do the necessary work on the flat, and move into it, and the money spent
that
way aroused in Lizzie exactly the same feelings of repugnance that paying interest on the overdraft did.

The new people at the Grange were very nice, too, she heard. For herself, she had tried to meet them as seldom as possible over the sale, not because she disliked them as people but because she disliked them intensely for being able to live in her house when she couldn't. They were called Michael and Bridie Pringle. He was tall and thin with a fringe-like beard and owned a small, specialized factory that made drill bits for deep-water oil wells. She was Irish and very active in the Green Movement. Harriet reported that she had really improved the Grange.

‘It's all white, it's really cool, and the floors are all pale and shiny and the curtains are huge and have checked bow things tying them back and they have this brilliant mina bird and they don't eat anything that isn't organic and they have this list in the kitchen about recyling things. Why don't you recycle things?'

‘I do, I do, I always go to the bottle bank, I have for ages—'

‘But not paper and plastic and tins and cardboard. And we always have bought ice-cream. Bridie says if we knew what manufacturers put into bought ice-cream, we wouldn't give it to our worst enemy. You should see the kitchen. It's superb.'

‘It was superb before—'

‘It was not,' Harriet said crushingly. ‘It was a pretentious mess.'

‘You don't know what pretentious means—'

‘I do,' Harriet said. ‘Alistair told me. It means pretending to be grander than you are.'

Robert said Harriet was just winding Lizzie up. He said she loved being in the middle of town and that she only seeped back endlessly to the Grange because of
the
welcome she got there, the faint superiority she could feel for having lived there first, and the boy, Fraser. He said, with the slight edge of sharpness his voice had lately developed when speaking to Lizzie, that this was just a new beginning, that it was imperative to see it as such and that what they had done once, from nothing, they could do again.

But Lizzie was disorientated. She found she was even longing for the new term to start at Westondale – her third term, unbelievably – because at least Westondale gave a structure to her days and a focus for her thoughts. She was a good school secretary. Even Mrs Drysdale who had feared the possible consequences of Lizzie's independence of mind was moved to say, with many meaningful nods and becks, that it was amazing, wasn't it, how never a door shut (Mrs Mason) but another and better one opened (Lizzie). The school office, cleared of its craft-sale artefacts (except for the red-and-yellow papier mâché lump for which Lizzie found she had an arcane affection, doubtless because the thing seemed to have a strong and poignant personality without managing or needing to have an identity) and with the Parents' Association computer in working order, was a very different place. The card-index boxes were dwindling, the orange-and-brown folk-weave curtains had been bundled up and hidden at the back of the Lost Property cupboard, the telephone, though still busy, did not utter quite the same steady stream of complaint that had so fuelled Mrs Mason's conviction that parents had been, as a breed, sent only to try her. Lizzie's competence was unquestionably Westondale's gain even if it was, Robert often now felt, the Gallery's loss.

She wouldn't consider the autumn stock.

‘Please,' Robert said.

They were in the office of the Gallery, now piled with boxes as it had to do duty as a stock room as well. Lizzie was doing household accounts. She had always done them, in a broad-brush kind of way, ever since she had learned how, but now she did them with the sort of manic meticulousness Robert remembered his mother applying to her own household accounts book in the Fifties: ‘Four halfpenny stamps, two haddock fillets at nine pence each, a sixpennyworth of old potatoes.'

‘Do you have to do that?'

‘You know I do,' Lizzie said, tapping her calculator. ‘Do you realize that it cost sixteen quid to get your shoes resoled and heeled?'

‘I'll wear espadrilles, then.'

‘Don't be silly.'

‘Lizzie—'

Lizzie wrote on, industriously, down her long, long column. Robert watched her bent tawny head, her face, as usual, hidden from him by her swinging hair. She wore jeans and a dark-blue sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up and a spotted snuff handkerchief knotted round her neck. She was thinner. Quite a lot thinner, now he came to look at her. How terrifyingly easy it was to live closely with someone and look at them without actually seeing what you were looking at for months on end.

‘Lizzie, I want you to come to the gift fair at Birmingham with me, as usual, like we always do.'

She stopped writing and turned in her chair. She looked at him for several seconds.

‘Robert, I don't want to come.'

‘Why?'

She said in a low voice, casting her eyes down, ‘I don't like the Gallery just now.'

‘What?'

‘I don't like it. It feels like our millstone.'

Robert put his hands over his face. Then he took them away and said, with evident self-control, ‘It isn't
our
millstone, Lizzie, it's our lifeline. It's keeping us going.'

Lizzie sighed and turned back to her accounts book.

‘Then I can't explain it.'

‘You can't mean you'd
prefer
to work at Westondale than in the Gallery—'

‘Yes, I can.'

‘Lizzie!'

‘I don't have to think at Westondale, I just
do
. For a few hours every day I can sink myself in other people's lives, in problems I love solving because they are so remote and impersonal. It's a kind of freedom.'

Robert leaned across and slammed the accounts book shut.

‘May I remind you, Lizzie,' he said angrily, ‘that that is a freedom I never have?'

She looked up at him for a fleeting second, and then down again.

‘Sorry—'

He seized her wrist.

‘Come with me.'

‘Where are we going?'

‘Into the Gallery,
our
Gallery, our invention and our livelihood.'

‘But I know it—'

‘I want you to look at it as if you didn't,' Robert said, opening the office door and pulling her through. ‘I want you to look at it with new eyes and see it not just for what it is but for the potential it still has. I want you to look at it properly because it's bloody well time that you remembered it's
ours
.'

‘There'll be customers—'

‘Only a few,' Robert said, opening the door into the shop. ‘It's nearly five-thirty.'

There were two, a woman instructing Jenny to roll, not fold, her two sheets of giftwrap, and a boy of twelve or so, presumably her son, lovingly stroking a
fleet
of Indian wooden ducks with beaks and eyes of inlaid brass. Jenny glanced up as they came in and then returned to her customer.

‘A pound, please.'

‘A pound!'

‘I'm afraid the paper you chose is fifty pence a sheet.'

‘Have you nothing cheaper?'

‘The lower rack has paper at thirty-five pence—'

‘Wait,' the woman said. She darted back to the gift-wrap stand. Patiently, Jenny began to unroll the original roll.

‘But it isn't as pretty.'

‘No.'

‘What am I to do?'

Robert drew Lizzie away to the far end of the shop floor. It was much more crowded now, the kelims hanging layered on the walls, the cushions piled in soft, steep mountains, the display tables stacked densely with lamps and pottery bowls and wicker baskets.

‘There's no room for more stock,' Lizzie said.

‘There will be by the autumn. Sales were better last month.'

Lizzie looked hopelessly at the lithographs Luis had admired.

‘Were they?'

‘Lizzie,' Robert said, ‘I
told
you.' He took her by the shoulders and turned her to face him. ‘I think we should look for cheap, pretty things for the autumn, cotton cushions, Indian brass candlesticks, some of the Shaker tinware, things that people can buy to give their houses a quick facelift without breaking the bank.'