A Spanish Lover (3 page)

‘'Course he doesn't,' Sam said. ‘He's just called Pimmers.'

‘Where are they making the camp?'

‘It's quite all right,' Davy said, adjusting the helmet so that only his chin showed beneath it. ‘It's not in your room, it's only in the spare room—'

Lizzie shot out of the kitchen and up the stairs. A spaghetti trail of red ribbon lay tangled at the bottom; the banisters were bare.

‘Sam!' yelled Lizzie.

Thumps came distantly from somewhere, like the sound of road-mending machinery heard through closed windows.

‘Sam!' Lizzie roared. She flung open the spare-bedroom door. The floor was strewn with bedclothes and on the beds, Lizzie's cherished Edwardian brass beds for which she had so lovingly collected linen of a similar age, Sam and Pimlott were trampolining, grunting with effort.

‘Sam!' Lizzie bellowed.

He froze, floating down from his last leap as if transfixed in mid-air, landing rigid and upright on the mattress. Pimlott simply vanished, sliding snakelike from on top of the bed to underneath it.

‘What are you doing?' Lizzie shouted. ‘I've given you a job to do and you haven't done it and I said you weren't to have Pimlott here today, or at least not until you had done everything I asked you to do, and this room is out of bounds, as well you know, and I have to make it nice for Granny and Grandpa and I have a million things to do and you are a naughty, disobedient, beastly little boy—'

Sam subsided into a sulky heap.

‘Sorry—'

‘Mum,' a voice said.

Breathlessly, Lizzie turned. Alistair stood there, a tube of glue in one hand and a minute grey-plastic piece of model aeroplane in the other. Across one lens of his spectacles was a smear of something chalky.

‘Dad's on the phone,' Alistair said. ‘And then could you come and hold this bit because my clamp isn't small enough to hold it while I stick the last piece of fuselage—'

Lizzie fled across the landing to the telephone beside her and Rob's bed.

‘Rob?'

‘Lizzie, I know you're up to your eyes, but could you come? Jenny's gone home, feeling ghastly, looking ghastly, poor thing, and the shop's suddenly terribly busy—'

‘No.'

‘But Liz—'

‘I'm sorry, I mean, I'll try, but it's complete chaos here and there's so much to do—'

‘I know, I know. I'll help you tonight. Just leave things.'

‘I can't come for half an hour. And I'll have to bring Sam and Davy.'

‘OK,' Robert said. ‘Soon as you can.'

Lizzie put the telephone down and went back on to the landing. Through the open door of the spare room, she could see Sam and Pimlott, watched by Davy, incompetently piling bedclothes back on to the beds. Alistair still waited.

‘Could you—?'

‘No, I couldn't,' Lizzie said. ‘I have so much to do I feel quite frantic. I want you to clean the silver.'

Behind his spectacles Alistair's eyes widened in amazement.

‘
Clean the silver?
'

‘Yes,' Lizzie said. She went into the spare room, pushed out the three children and slammed the door.
‘Men
do clean silver. They also cook and change nappies and go shopping. What women don't do is waste time making something as utterly pointless as a model aeroplane.'

‘Heavens, you
are
cross,' Alistair said.

‘Go home,' Lizzie said to Pimlott. ‘Please go home and stay there till after Christmas.'

He regarded her with his light, shifting eyes. He had no intention of obeying her. He had never – unless it suited him anyway – obeyed an adult in his life.

‘And you', she said to Sam, ‘are going to hoover the sitting room, and, Davy, go and put some clothes on and then go and find Harriet. I need her.'

‘I'm hungry,' Sam said.

‘I really don't care—'

‘Telephone!' Davy said excitedly. ‘Telephone! Telephone!'

Alistair slipped past his mother and into her bedroom, to answer it. He said, ‘Hello?' and not, ‘Langworth, 4004,' as she and Robert had told him to, and then, in a warmer voice, ‘Hi, Frances.'

Frances! Salvation! Lizzie hurried into her bedroom, holding out her hand for the receiver.

‘Frances? Oh Frances, thank God it's you, it's so awful here this morning, you can't imagine, a complete madhouse. I'd like to murder Prince Albert and Charles Dickens and anyone else responsible for making Christmas such a nightmare—'

‘Oh poor Lizzie,' Frances said. Her voice was, as usual, light and warm.

‘And now Rob wants me to go and help in the Gallery and I only got round to ordering the wretched turkey this morning—'

‘Does that matter?'

‘Not really, except that I don't feel in charge, I don't feel in control, which is madness really as I've done Christmas for years and years—'

‘I know. Too many years, probably. Next year I'll set you up for an anti-Christmas holiday.'

‘Too likely. What about my horrible children?'

‘I'll look after them.'

‘Oh Frances,' Lizzie said, beaming into the receiver. ‘Oh Frances. Praise be for you. I can't wait to see you!'

‘Lizzie—'

‘When are you coming? I know you said Christmas Eve, but couldn't you just shut up shop tomorrow, at the weekend, and come down on Sunday?'

‘Yes,' Frances said. ‘That's why I rang. I
am
coming down on Sunday. To bring your presents.'

‘What?'

There was a small pause the far end of the telephone line, and then Frances said quite easily, ‘Lizzie, I also rang to tell you that, this year, I won't be coming down to Langworth for Christmas. That's why I'm coming on Sunday. I'm coming to bring your presents, but then I'm going away again. I'm going – away for Christmas.'

2

WHEN BARBARA SHORE
had been told she was going to have twins, she had said nothing at all. Her doctor, an old-fashioned, comfortable country general practitioner, who still did his rounds in a baggy suit with interior pockets ingeniously tailored to hold all the tools of his trade, believed her to be struck dumb with delight. That, after all, was the proper response. But Barbara had only said, after a while, ‘How perfectly preposterous,' and had then gone home to do what she did best in times of crisis, which was to rest in bed.

Her husband, William, came home from a day's history teaching at a local minor public school, and found her resting.

‘It's twins,' she said. She sounded accusing.

He sat, with some difficulty, on the slippery, satin-covered quilt beside her.

‘How wonderful.'

‘For whom?'

‘For both of us.' He thought a bit, and beamed at her. ‘Shakespeare had twins. Hamnet and Judith.'

‘I don't want twins,' Barbara said distinctly, as if speaking to someone hard of hearing. ‘I only just want one baby and I certainly don't want two. It's awful being a twin.'

‘Is it?'

‘Awful,' Barbara said.

‘How do you know?'

‘Because I have an imagination,' Barbara said. ‘Because you can never be quite your own person, if
you're
a twin, because it stunts your relationships with anyone else, because you can't ever be quite free of the other person.'

William got up and went over to the window. Outside, the autumn fields lay pleasingly striped with stubble and speckled with partridges. He was full of an utterable delight at the thought of twins, at the completeness that a brace of babies suggested.

‘The Americans love twins,' he said irrelevantly. ‘There's somewhere called Twinsburgh, in Ohio, where they—'

‘Shut up,' Barbara said.

‘We'll get a nanny, a mother's help. I'll buy a washing machine.' His eyes suddenly filled with tears at the thought of his pair of babies existing there, inside Barbara's body, only feet away from him, the size, perhaps, of hazelnuts. ‘I'm – I'm so happy.'

‘It's all very well for you,' Barbara said.

William turned away from the window and came back to the bed. He looked at Barbara. She had been his headmaster's daughter and now she was his wife. He wasn't altogether clear how the transition had come about, nor how he had felt about it, but he knew now, gazing down at Barbara, shoeless and resentful on the satin bedspread in her autumn jersey and skirt, that he loved her deeply and gratefully for being pregnant. He wanted, rather, to put his hand on the heathery-coloured tweed where it lay, flatly as yet, on her stomach, but he refrained. It was 1952, after all, and the New Man, who participates in both pregnancy and his child's arrival, was still a creature of the future. Instead William kissed Barbara's forehead.

‘You shall have anything you want,' William said. ‘Anything to make things easier for you. I shall make you a cup of tea.'

He went downstairs to the kitchen, blowing his nose because his eyes again seemed to be full of tears. The
kitchen
, cream-painted and orderly, was a monument to Barbara's fearsome domestic competence: nothing out of place, nothing smeared or grimy or sticky, not even a single intrepid fly buzzing against the speckless windows. He took the kettle over to the sink and filled it, and then lit the gas and set the kettle to boil on the hissing ring of blue-and-orange flames.

‘Twins,' he said to himself. The luck of it, the sheer blessed good fortune of the prospect of twins filled him with awe. What had he done to deserve this? What, indeed, had he ever done to deserve anything, except stumble amiably through life falling obligingly into events and circumstances as if led ever onwards by some unseen and guiding hand? He had been just too young even for the war, still safe at school, and had only learned about its true and terrible nature from the men he had found himself at university with, men whose own education had been interrupted by six years of fighting. William had felt humbled then. He felt humbled now.

‘I am twenty-five,' he said to the empty kitchen. ‘I am twenty-five, and quite soon after my twenty-sixth birthday, I shall be the father of twins.' He paused and straightened his shoulders, as if for the National Anthem. ‘The father of twins.'

Barbara did not want to tell the nursing home in Bath, where she went for the twins' birth, her age. She did not want the nurses to know that she was older than William, and she had also convinced herself that thirty was an embarrassingly late age at which to start having babies. So she simply stared at them all, when they asked her how old she was, and in the end had to write it down for them in silence, daring them, with a furious glance, to read the date aloud.

The twins were born steadily, slowly and painfully. William, tiptoeing in afterwards with a bunch of lilies
of
the valley, was alarmed at Barbara's gaunt, grey face and air of being drained of every drop of energy.

‘I'm so glad they're girls,' William said in a whisper. He kissed Barbara's hand. She gripped him with her free one.

‘Don't make me do it again.'

‘But—'

‘Never,' Barbara said. ‘You don't know, you can't know. I thought it would never stop.'

‘Of course,' William said. He badly wanted to go and look in the pair of grim little hospital cradles at the foot of Barbara's bed, but Barbara still held him. If she never wanted another baby, did that mean that she would never again allow …? Help, thought William, and swallowed. Mustn't think of it, quite the wrong moment, terribly selfish, poor Barbara, worn out completely, quite justified in saying it's all very well for him …

‘It's all very well for you,' Barbara said. ‘But I'm simply not even going to contemplate—'

‘No,' William said. ‘Of course not. Just as you like.'

She relaxed her grip a little.

‘Lovely flowers,' she said, in a more normal voice. ‘Mother sent horrors. Look over there. Mauve Chrysanths, only fit for a funeral. How could she find such a thing in May?'

‘I'm going to look at the girls,' William said.

‘They look quite intelligent,' Barbara said. ‘Luckily.'

To William, they looked vulnerable, beautiful, and heart-stoppingly his. He couldn't believe them. He couldn't believe that they were so tiny, so complete, that they were there in the world at all and not in some confused and obscurely imagined arrangement upside down inside Barbara.

‘Oh,' William said. He touched each cheek with a rapturous forefinger. ‘Oh, thank you!'

Barbara almost smiled.

‘They're going to be called Helena and Charlotte.'

William touched his daughters again. One of them stirred and sucked briefly at the air with a miniature mouth.

‘No they're not.'

Barbara, unable to sit up on account of inches of post-natal stitchery, raised her head commandingly.

‘Yes they are. I've decided. Charlotte and Helena.'

‘No,' William said. He straightened up and looked at Barbara, glaring at him from her blank white pillows. ‘On the day you told me you were going to have twins, I called them, in my mind, Frances and Elizabeth. I knew they wouldn't be boys – don't ask me how, I just knew. They have been Frances and Elizabeth for months.'

‘But I don't like Frances.'

‘I don't like Barbara much, either,' William said, adding after a pause, but without any urgency, ‘as a name, that is.'

Barbara opened her mouth, and then shut it again. William waited. Gradually, she subsided back on to her pillows, and closed her eyes.

‘As you wish.'

‘This one is Frances,' William said. ‘The one with the bigger nose.'

‘Neither of them have any nose to speak of. Elizabeth is the older. Frances gave me far more trouble, I thought I—'

The door opened. A nurse put her head in.

‘Bottle time!' she said.