A Spanish Lover (16 page)

‘Of course,' Barbara said frequently, ‘it's perfectly ridiculous the way modern children are never sent to bed. You and Frances were in bed by seven until you were fourteen.'

‘Were we? I wish somebody would send me to bed at seven now.'

This evening was no different to a hundred others except that Sam, mysteriously chastened in some obscure part of himself, tenderly tied Davy's head up with his own Manchester United football scarf to keep his jaw in place, and fed him little scraps of sausage, like a helpless fledgling. Davy glowed in this attention. Harriet too was unnaturally quiet, being, Lizzie suspected, in the grip of a blind and hopeless crush on a sixth-form boy at Langworth Comprehensive, the kind of careless, glamorous boy who would never notice her. Lizzie wished Harriet would talk to her about it, but Harriet had never considered Lizzie a fit recipient of confidences, and when Lizzie came into the room while Harriet was in the middle of one of her interminable telephone conversations to Heather, Harriet's voice would sink at once to a conspiratorial whisper. Alistair had vanished. He would be in his room as usual, his curious fusty lair, where he lived a powerful and private life among his models and his piles and piles of cherished cartoon books and magazines and comics, which he read with a manic intensity.

By nine o'clock, the house was almost quiet. Harriet had taken Radio One and her aching heart to the bathroom, Sam and Davy were asleep – Davy still carefully bandaged up in his scarf – Alistair, lying on the floor in his bedroom, was writing fervently about the evil effects of acid rain. Lizzie had loaded the washing machine to turn on before they went to bed, when electricity would be cheaper, had made a few more of her famous lists for the morning and fed Cornflakes. Robert had grilled two chump chops and some mushrooms, made a salad, and put a loaf of brown bread in the bottom oven to warm.

‘I sometimes wonder', Lizzie said, sitting down
heavily
in one of the kitchen chairs, ‘if what we do every evening is repeated all over England in thousands and thousands of households with several children and both parents working, and that all parents have this alarming feeling that, however hard you run, you are actually slipping further and further behind. I'm so tired I feel I've been hit with a sandbag. Are we tireder than people used to be?'

‘No,' Robert said, ‘it just feels like it, which comes to the same thing.' He put a plate of chops and mushrooms down in front of her.

‘Why does it? Do we do more?'

‘No, but we want to achieve all the time. We aren't content with just staying alive, warm and clothed and fed, we take all that for granted. It's the achieving that's so exhausting.'

Lizzie ate a mushroom.

‘I told Frances, at Christmas, that fulfilment was the way to happiness.'

‘Did you?'

‘Yes. I said you had to go into every room in yourself, as it were, and explore it and use it.'

Robert sat down opposite her and ground black pepper vigorously over his plate.

‘What's wrong with that?'

‘You end up sandbagged, like I said. Frances doesn't know what it's like to be this tired. Did I tell you, she's gone to Spain again?'

Robert stopped slicing bread.

‘Has she? Why?'

‘She said she felt she'd made an unprofessional move in walking out on those hotel people at Christmas, and that some of her clients were beginning to say they knew Italy like the backs of their hands and what could she think of next.'

‘Sounds fair enough.'

‘Yes,' Lizzie said, helping herself to salad, ‘of course
it
does. It'll do her good, she's been so odd and dreamy lately—'

‘She's always dreamy.'

‘Part of me,' Lizzie said, ‘won't settle until she's happy.'

‘Till
she's
settled, you mean, till she's married.'

‘It isn't natural to live like she lives. She's so loving as a person, it's a waste.'

‘Lots of people choose to be single, you know. Men and women. It isn't because they're inadequate emotionally, is it? Isn't it because most of them don't find the right person to share with, and it's better to be alone than to share with the wrong person?'

Lizzie spread butter on her bread. ‘Frances is lonely. She's too dependent on too few people.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘She's my twin,' Lizzie said simply.

Later, when they had eaten some cheese, and an apple each, and were considering whether or not they wanted any coffee, Robert said he was sorry, but he couldn't go to bed before they had talked about the problems with the business.

‘Tell me, then,' Lizzie said, yawning.

‘The bottom line is this. We are currently paying fifteen thousand pounds a year in interest, and that is, as you know, on top of the mortgage repayments on this house as well as keeping us all fed, clothed, insured and all the other stuff. It cost fifteen hundred quid to heat and light this house last year and the last telephone bill was nearer three hundred than two and that was for only a
quarter
. Then there's the running costs of the business, which you know.'

He stopped. Lizzie, who had been leaning against a cupboard, came and sat on the corner of the table.

‘Oh Rob. It isn't as if we live at all grandly—'

‘I know. I'm just scared that if things don't pick up we won't be able to live at all.'

Lizzie looked across at him with a face so tired, his heart smote him.

‘What is the difference between what we're making and what we need to make?'

‘About the amount of the interest on the loan. About fifteen thousand.'

She got off the table and came round to lean against him, holding his head against her bosom. It struck her suddenly, and miserably, that, even though they might be together in their trouble, it didn't somehow seem to make the trouble any less terrifying. She had an image of herself and Rob and the children in a tiny, fragile, leaking boat on a very rough sea, and the children were crying piteously and she was full of a terrible guilt as well as a terrible fear. She was drowning, and all these little reproachful hands were about her neck.

‘I never realized', she said, holding Robert's head, ‘how bad it was. I feel awful, that I didn't realize, that you've had to know by yourself—'

His voice was muffled against her.

‘I hoped you wouldn't have to know. I hoped it was just a bad patch and all we'd have to do would be to tighten our belts for a bit.'

‘So,' her voice faltered a little. ‘The gap of fifteen thousand might get wider.'

He attempted to nod, inside her embrace.

She whispered, ‘I must be very naïve, but I never thought money would be a real problem for us, I mean I never thought we'd be millionaires, I don't want that, but I didn't think either that we'd be in debt and not – not able—'

‘Shh,' Rob said. He moved his head back so that he could look at her. ‘It's only money,' he said, trying to make a joke of it.

‘You can't say that,' Lizzie said. ‘You can only say that when you've got enough of it.'

* * *

They neither of them slept well, partly on account of worrying and partly on account of Davy's fixed belief in his injury, which brought him into their bedroom four times between midnight and six-thirty. In the end, desperate for a last half-hour of attempted oblivion, Lizzie pulled him into bed beside her, where he lay, stiff with anxiety, his head still absurdly swaddled in red-and-white wool.

‘I am a sad boy,' he told Lizzie.

‘I'm pretty sad, too,' she said. She held him and thought of lying there holding him when he was only a tiny baby and they all took their security for granted. She couldn't believe how much money they had borrowed and, at the same time, she couldn't believe how easy it had been to borrow, how the bank had constantly and pressingly asked them if they were sure they had enough, and so they had thought: Well, with another few thousand we could paint another room, take the children to Austria (they had walked and cycled through the lovely valleys, carrying Davy on their backs or in a special little pannier), change the car, and they had taken the money and the debt had quietly grown until it now loomed over them, transformed from something manageable into something menacing. And however hard they worked at the Gallery, they couldn't, it seemed, make any more money out of it by their own efforts, because the only thing that made money was people coming in and buying lavishly, and nobody was feeling lavish just now. There are probably, thought Lizzie, reaching down to hold Davy's cold feet in her warm hands, people lying awake all over the place worrying like this, people with mortgages and children and this dreadful, impotent feeling that you are dependent upon forces outside your control for anything to improve.

Beside her Robert stirred, sighed and opened his eyes. He peered across her at Davy.

‘How many teeth fell out in the night, Dave?'

Davy shut his eyes in disgust.

‘I was wondering', Lizzie said, ‘whether I shouldn't ask Dad for some help?'

‘I'd rather you didn't—'

‘I know, but he's awfully easy to ask, bless him, and I'm sure he'd understand—'

Robert turned on his side so that his profile rested against Lizzie's nearest shoulder.

‘Lizzie, I'm afraid I couldn't bear it. It's one thing to ask for money to build with, on the way up, but quite another to ask for it as a lifeline, because you fear you may be on the way down.'

‘Don't talk like that!'

‘I can't help it, it's what I'm thinking.'

Davy put a tentative hand inside the football scarf and felt his face.

‘Are you going to school in that scarf?'

‘No,' Davy said.

‘Then why have you worn it all night?'

‘Sam said it would mend me.'

‘Sam has a guilty conscience.'

Davy regarded her.

‘Sam said Pimlott might let me play with them.'

‘Do you like Pimlott, Davy?'

‘Oh yes,' Davy said reverently.

Lizzie kissed him.

‘You're too like your Aunt Frances,' Lizzie said. ‘Too grateful for too little.' She gave a small, ironic smile. ‘Think of Frances! Think of Frances and think of us!'

‘You're always being so sorry for her—'

‘I know, it's just that now, being able to roam about in southern Spain in May seems—'

‘Shh,' Robert said.

‘There are footballers in Spain,' Davy said, feeling for the huge, soft, woolly knot on top of his head. ‘Pimlott said.'

‘Would you mind', Lizzie asked Robert, ‘if I went and talked to Juliet?'

‘'Course not. But what on earth could Juliet do?'

‘I don't know. Nothing, probably. But I'd like to see her.'

Robert began to get out of bed. ‘Suit yourself—'

‘Rob, don't be huffy—'

‘I'm not huffy,' he said huffily. ‘I just can't see the point of telling Juliet our troubles. But you tell her if you want to.'

‘I do want to,' Lizzie said. ‘I do want to. Because I can't, at the moment, tell Frances.'

Juliet was pegging out washing. She wasn't naturally domesticated in the brisk, domestic science-school way that Barbara was, but there were some soothing domestic tasks she really relished, and hanging out the washing was one. It was partly that the high, windy situation of the cottage was so tailormade for the job, and it was glorious to see sheets and towels cracking and bellying in the wind like the sails of tall ships. Sometimes they cracked and bellied so tremendously that they blew away across the downs and Juliet would have to retrieve her laundry from bramble bushes and five-barred gates. She was just hoisting her clothes prop – she scoured the woods for these, ash and hazel were usually the most promising – into place, when she saw the glint of a car roof catching the sun at the foot of her track. A few seconds later, she saw that it was Lizzie.

‘You look like an illustration out of “Mother Goose”,' Lizzie said, getting out of the car.

‘It's my grey feather hair. You, on the other hand, look exhausted.'

‘I didn't sleep. I hate not sleeping, I simply can't function the next day at all.'

Juliet took her into the cottage. There was a sewing
machine
on the table, and a great chaos of pieces of fabric, and a jar of cow parsley on the hearth. One of the windows was open to the windy morning and the curtains were rippling back and forth in the draught and for no reason she could immediately think of, except sleeplessness, the sight of Juliet's sitting room made Lizzie feel slightly tearful, because of its timelessness, its air of suspended but constructive activity, its security.

‘Have you ever been short of money?' Lizzie said.

‘Always.'

‘In debt?'

‘Never. Can't bear it. It's the one orthodox element in my moral code. I bought this cottage outright thirty years ago for three thousand pounds that my mother left me. I couldn't have borrowed the money for dear life.'

‘We've borrowed,' Lizzie said, crouching down and putting her face against the pepper-smelling heads of the cow parsley.

‘I'm sure you have. Everybody does, but me.'

‘And now it's become – very difficult to pay it back.'

Juliet ran water into her kettle. She thought of the Grange, and Lizzie's children, and the industrialist she had heard on the radio that morning who had said that, for the first time in twenty-five years, his order books were empty.

‘I don't expect you to have a solution,' Lizzie said, straightening up. ‘I don't expect you even to react. I just had to say it to someone who wasn't Rob, and I don't want to say it to Mum.'

Juliet put the kettle on to boil and came back towards Lizzie.