A Spanish Lover (12 page)

‘I think we won't talk about it,' Frances said, looking at William, unconscious and smiling under his tissue crown.

Robert and Lizzie exchanged a lightning look.

‘No, of course not.'

‘I told Robert,' Frances said, ‘that I went to Juliet's first, this morning.'

‘Why didn't you come straight here?'

‘It was only seven—'

‘Honestly,' Lizzie said. ‘By seven we'd been up two hours and were well into a screaming match about church.'

Frances said, as if she hadn't heard her, ‘I don't know why I never got to know Juliet when I was growing up—'

‘You wouldn't come.'

‘I know. I remember.'

‘Mum started going on about her at six o'clock this morning—'

‘It's Christmas,' Robert said. ‘It has that effect on everyone. If there isn't something that naturally arises to take issue with, you find yourself hunting for an excuse for a row.' He looked down the table at his father-in-law. ‘Sometimes I can't believe that he's actually managed a wife and a mistress for a quarter of a century.
William
, of all people.'

‘He only has because the women did the deciding,' Lizzie said.

Frances looked at her. ‘Are you sure?'

‘Oh yes.'

Robert stood up slowly, as if testing every limb and joint before he trusted it with any weight.

‘I'm afraid I simply have to go to sleep.'

Lizzie glanced at Frances.

‘Do you want to?'

Frances wondered. Weighed down by food, wine and home-coming, she would, like Rip Van Winkle, sleep until this age had given way to quite another.

‘No. I don't think so. We'll clear up.'

Lizzie regarded the table.

‘You're a heroine. Then we'll drag the team out for a walk.'

Frances got up.

‘I'll get a tray.'

In the kitchen, Cornflakes had settled down, paws folded, to take his time over the turkey carcass.

‘Bloody cat!' Frances shouted.

He streaked from the table and out through the cat flap in a single, arrowlike movement, borne of long years of burgling butter dishes and milk jugs. Frances peered at the turkey.

‘Can we tell where he's been?'

‘Well, I'm not throwing it out, cat germs or no cat germs, I'll promise you that. It's a free-range turkey and it cost a fortune. Frances—'

‘Yes?' Frances said, straightening.

‘I really am so sorry, you know. About Spain.'

Frances made a small, dismissive gesture.

‘I know. I know you are.'

‘You mustn't let it weigh on you. Things do go wrong, sometimes, things that could just as easily go right, and for no apparent reason. You mustn't feel a fool.'

Frances gave her a sharp look. She unhooked a plastic apron from behind the door and tied it round her waist.

‘How do you know I do?'

Lizzie gave a little smile and said nothing.

‘I don't think you should assume anything,' Frances said.

‘What were the Gómez Morenos like?'

‘Junior was very attractive and rather hopeless and Senior was solid and dark and European.'

‘Nice?'

‘Yes.'

‘Charming?'

‘Not really. Just nice.'

‘I do so want you to be happy,' Lizzie said, with sudden vehemence.

‘But what
is
happy?'

‘Being fulfilled,' Lizzie said. ‘Using all the capacities you have, emotional, physical, mental. Filling yourself up.'

‘Are you trying to say husband and children and home and an art-and-craft gallery? Because—'

‘Because what?'

‘Because I think we all have different interior landscapes. Even twins.'

‘But you see,' Lizzie said earnestly, putting down the carving knife and fork with which she had been dismembering the rest of the turkey, ‘even if we do have that landscape, it has got to have people in it. I mean, I know you've got us and we all adore you—'

‘Don't patronize me,' Frances said.

‘I'm not—'

‘Yes,' Frances said, ‘you are. You think that I'm a half-empty vessel and therefore I'm inadequate.'

‘Oh no,' Lizzie said, leaning towards her sister, her face full of affection. ‘No, I don't. I just think you are full of potential, and the potential is simply lying there.'

‘Stop sounding so sorry for me—'

Lizzie picked up the knife and fork again.

‘I'm not sorry for you. You know what I think. I think you have taken the career and freedom chances for both of us, and that I've taken – well, other chances. I just don't want your life to become impersonal. That's all. That's one of the things that really got to me about your going to Spain, because by choosing to go now, at Christmas, you were deliberately turning your back on us, on some of your best relationships. It was an impersonal thing to do. Don't you see?'

‘But I've come back.'

‘I know. I'm thrilled. It's made Christmas for me and lunch was lovely, everybody being so nice when they had previously been so horrible.'

‘I'll just go and get a trayload,' Frances said.

She went back to the dining room, a room that spent three hundred and sixty-four days of the year being a playroom. William had gone, no doubt in drowsy instinctive search of an armchair. She began to pile plates, scraping off black lumps of Christmas pudding and creamy lumps of brandy butter, gathering up clattering handfuls of sticky spoons and forks. Did Lizzie, she wondered, ever fill her inner spaces with stories? Or only with arrangements and lists and order books and responsibilities? Did Lizzie in fact
have
any part of her particular interior landscape that wasn't, by now, highly cultivated, productive and fruitful; were there no corners for possibility left, or, if there were, did she simply never consider them?

Frances marshalled glasses into a little regiment. Could it be that Lizzie was trying to tell her that if she didn't attend to the relationships in her life like some enthusiastic gardener in a greenhouse of infant seedlings, they'd simply wither away? But I have plenty of relationships, Frances thought, I have the family and Nicky, who is my second-in-command at Shore to Shore, and I have the London friends that Lizzie knows little about. Why is it that she says she wants us to be
different
yet the same, to complement each other, but she can't see, or won't see, that there are other kinds of lives than hers?

She took a burdened tray back into the kitchen. The newly sliced turkey lay on a big dish under plastic film, and Lizzie was cramming the bones into a stock pot.

‘Did I make you cross?' Lizzie said, turning.

‘No,' Frances said. ‘You almost never make me cross.'

‘I got such a fright, you see,' Lizzie said, and stopped. She put her arm up across her face, holding her turkey-smeared hand well free.

‘A fright?'

‘I felt,' Lizzie said, her voice not quite steady, ‘I felt that you were sort of
leaving
me.'

‘Lizzie!' Frances cried. She left the tray on the table and ran across the room. ‘Lizzie! How could you be so silly?' She put her arms around her sister.

Lizzie whispered, ‘Because we're a deal, aren't we? A sort of double-act deal, about life?'

‘Yes.'

‘I'll always be here, you see, always here for you to come home to—'

‘I know that.'

‘In a way, I'm sort of
for
you, and you for me.'

‘Yes. It's in our blood.' Gently, Frances took her arms away.

Lizzie reached for a roll of paper towel, wrenched off several sheets and blew her nose hard.

‘Sorry. Really sorry. What a display.'

‘It wasn't.'

‘Perhaps it needed to be said.'

Frances nodded, slowly. The kitchen door opened and Harriet stood there in a long violent robe of orange and purple and scarlet and black and yellow and rust. She was in fits of giggles.

‘What
is
it?'

‘It's Granny's,' Harriet said. She doubled up, heaving. ‘She said it was psychedelic—'

‘It's one of her caftans!' Lizzie said, going forward. ‘One of the Marrakesh caftans. What a hoot!'

‘Isn't it gross?' Harriet said.

Frances said, ‘She meant it as a compliment, giving it to you. She wants you to take yourself seriously.'

The mirth was wiped off Harriet's face as if with a cloth. She plucked at the caftan.

‘I don't see—' she said sulkily.

‘Frances,' Lizzie said, ‘aren't you being just a mite priggish?'

Frances shrugged. ‘Mum was three years older than us when she went to Marrakesh.'

‘What's Marrakesh?'

‘It's a place in North Africa. It was one of the pilgrim places for hippies.'

Harriet stared theatrically, widening her eyes like headlamps.

‘Granny was a
hippie
?'

‘Yes, for a bit.'

‘Jesus!' Harriet said, and fell sideways against the doorframe.

‘Harriet!'

‘I know it's hideous,' Frances said, ‘but it's important. Or significant, anyway.'

Lizzie looked up at Frances, from her kneeling position. Frances's eyes were fixed on the caftan, not as if they were taking in the cheap and gaudy cotton, but as if they were seeing something other than the thing they rested on. Her expression was both thoughtful and sympathetic. But why should Frances defend Barbara? Barbara had left them, as ten year olds, for almost a year. Lizzie would rather have her hands cut off than contemplate doing anything so selfish and unmaternal. And then today, Barbara had been frankly
caustic
when Frances appeared in the kitchen. ‘Heavens,' she'd said, still holding the basting spoon, ‘they
do
seem to get Christmas over quickly in Spain.'

‘Frances?' Lizzie said.

Frances stirred, as if from a brief dream. Harriet and Lizzie watched her.

‘Don't you think that sometimes, in every life, people do things that they mightn't do ten years earlier or later but which seem absolutely natural and imperative to do at the time they do them? Does it make you wicked?'

‘If it affects other people in your life—' Lizzie began.

‘No,' said Harriet loudly, interrupting.

‘What does it make you, then?'

Harriet smoothed the caftan over her narrow hips. Her sharp little face looked, for once, quite artless.

‘It just makes you real.'

On Boxing Day evening, Frances drove back to London. She had slept for twelve hours the night before and felt considerably worse for it. Her sole aim now was to get back to the most reliable source of satisfaction and comfort in her life, the office that held her little company.

The roads were almost empty; most people were stretching Christmas into at least the next weekend. In the back of the car was, besides her suitcase, a cardboard box of Christmas presents, and another one of food. Lizzie had terribly wanted Frances to take this, like a mother sending a child off to boarding school with a bursting tuck box. They had had another conversation before Frances left in which Lizzie had pointed out – quite fairly, Frances thought – that they were something of a Martha and a Mary, and that she, Lizzie, being inevitably the Martha one, would like it to be acknowledged that domesticity took a heavy toll of her, and that this should, in their future relationship
after
this hiccup, be remembered. Recalling her reflection in the aeroplane going to Seville that Lizzie had, after all, chosen the life she led, Frances was about to point this out, quite gently, when she saw a sudden gleam in Lizzie's eye, a gleam almost of desperation borne of the complicated kind of fatigue – emotional, physical, administrative – which is all but exclusive to the mothers of large families, and said nothing after all. They had embraced with great affection when Frances left, as had Frances and William, Frances and Robert, Frances and all the children except Sam who affected to loathe being kissed while being, in fact, the most physically affectionate of the four children. Barbara had kissed Frances quite warmly, but wearing the expression of one who wished to say a good deal more than she was at present going to. When Frances drove off, they were all grouped on the front steps of the Grange, above the weedy drive and below the graceful pediment, backlit by the light from the hall behind them, waving in irregular silhouette.

Frances let herself into the side entrance of her narrow building, which gave directly on to the steep staircase up to her flat. She had been away three nights, and already, on the doormat, was a drift of mail, mostly junk, and half a chewed baked potato. Frances was used to these. There was a baked potato take-away shop two doors down her street and people never seemed to remember that the mixed pepper filling was spectacularly disgusting.

She switched on the light. One weekend, she and Nicky had painted this tunnel-like staircase terracotta, hoping to give it warmth and interest, and succeeding only in giving it the feeling, as Frances remarked, that you were climbing up some long internal organ. It was extremely ugly and she had never got round to doing anything further about it, beyond tacking up posters
of
Sienna and Florence and the towery skyline of San Gimignano.

At the top, a narrow door opened directly into a surprisingly large, light room looking over the street. Nicky was intermittently full of ideas for this room – for which she would have given her eye teeth – but Frances didn't seem to see it, or the room behind it, which was her bedroom and had a view of the cherry tree two backyards and one tiny garden away. She had painted both rooms magnolia when she moved in, furnished them with the things that were necessary, and left them. If people gave her objects – pottery plates from their travels, cushions, lacquered boxes, plants in pots – she hung them up or put them down somewhere, but not as if anything was part of a whole. It was all perfectly comfortable and decidedly dull. ‘Like my clothes, really,' Frances said, when Nicky pointed this out. ‘The thing is, I don't really mind. How do you make yourself mind more?'