A Spanish Lover (40 page)

‘Yes,' Alistair said. He nodded. ‘You're telling me.'

The Gallery was empty. It was Friday night, after closing time, and the shop was dusky, except for the carefully angled spotlights in the window, timed to turn themselves off at eleven o'clock. Lizzie sat at the back of the shop in an Italian garden chair made of rough natural canvas slung on a polished teak frame. It was an extremely handsome chair, but Robert and Jenny had bought it.

She had taken her shoes off. She sat very still in the Italian chair, with her hands in her lap and her bare feet resting on the harsh fibre matting on the floor, and looked out through the silhouetted shapes of all the things in the Gallery, past the brightly lighted stage of the window, into the High Street. There weren't many people about but then, it was after seven o'clock, and after seven, in Langworth, people were either firmly at home or firmly in the pub or firmly at Bingo in the old cinema where Lizzie and Frances had once gone, illegally, because they were then way under-age, to see Anthony Perkins in
Desire Under the Elms
. It was the word ‘desire', coupled with Anthony Perkins, that had made them want to go. When they came out, Lizzie had been full of things to say but Frances had said, ‘Shh,
shh
, I'm thinking.'

I'm thinking now, Lizzie thought. I don't much like it, I'd rather do, but when it becomes apparent that almost everything you do is at best clumsy and at worst wrong, you have to stop and think, even I have to. She unfolded her hands and laid them on the arms of the chair. It was a lovely chair, a really good piece of design, a really good buy too, since Robert had ordered six and this was the last one left. Lizzie couldn't wait for it to go. It was evidence – and evidence was the last thing she wanted just now – of
areas
of life she had not controlled recently, areas that had plainly got on with themselves more than adequately without her.

But it was no good thinking, however much she wanted to, that she could simply take back the control now that she was ready to, because she couldn't. Most of those people – Robert, the children, her parents, Frances – whom Lizzie felt to be like spokes of a wheel of which she was the hub had, somehow, detached themselves and gone bowling off on their own. It was no use, Lizzie told herself, thinking that she could just snap her fingers now and bring them all to heel, because she couldn't. They wouldn't come, for one thing. When people used that phrase about resuming life after an upset, they didn't really mean that, they didn't mean you could go on where you had left off as if nothing had happened, they meant looking at what you had now, which was never exactly what you used to have, and going on from there. Technically, Lizzie still had one husband and four children and two parents and one twin sister and a home and a business and a job, but only technically. The essence of her old life, that busy, authoritative life at the Grange, was now gone for ever. The essence of her new life was something she had to look at, very seriously, because everybody, including Robert, or perhaps particularly Robert, had made it abundantly plain that they weren't going to look at it for her.

‘My marriage', Barbara had said to her, not especially kindly, ‘is none of your business. Certainly I'm your mother, certainly we have the natural concern for one another of mother and daughter, but my marriage is mine, good or bad. It was there long before you came along, and you only know as much about it as you can see. You can't affect it, you can't tell your father and me what to do about it, just because you're younger, just because you think you know.'

The trouble is, Lizzie thought, lifting her feet up on to the chair and wrapping her arms round her knees, I did think I knew. In a way, I suppose I still do but I've got to learn not to
say
what I think I know all the time. Rob hasn't said that but I know he's thinking it, like he's thinking he's absolutely sick with relief that Frances is going to Spain because, even though he's fond of her, he really can't bear her and me any more. Or, let's be completely truthful, please, Lizzie, he can't bear the way I behave about her. Well, I can't behave about her in any way at all any more because she won't let me. Mum says she should never have been a twin which may be right and all very well for Frances, but what about me? I think I'm a natural twin, I feel one, but it seems I have to stop thinking like that or else, if they're all right, I'll find I'm not a wife or a mother either, and I'll just end up the kind of useless neurotic mess I've always despised.

She stood up and began to pad softly round the shop in her bare feet. Robert said Harriet was properly useful, not just apparently so in order to earn this coveted money. He also said that he was going to explain the stock-taking and marking-up systems to Alistair. Alistair had asked him. Lizzie had opened her mouth to say that Alistair was too young to be of any real use and shut it again without uttering. There had been something distinctly unhelpful in Rob's expression, something that had been there a lot lately, a patient, wary, weary something. She had found herself, most uncharacteristically, on the verge of asking him if he was tired of her and had only refrained because she had discovered she was terrified of risking the answer being ‘yes'. He made it eloquently, mutely plain just now that he didn't want to talk any more, that he was sick of talking, that it was his opinion that talking could very easily become a substitute for living. And loving.

‘I don't have to
say
I love you!' he'd shouted at her not long ago. ‘I don't have to
say
another word! Why don't you look at what I
do
? What I do for you, for us, for the children? Why don't you just look at that?'

So now she was looking at some of it, looking at this thoughtfully, ingeniously stocked shop, at the steadiness it represented, at the hours and hours of lonely minding it had taken over the last two years, grimly holding on, while too few people came, and even fewer bought. But they were coming now. Harriet had told her, Harriet had said this week had been a better week. Alistair had worked out that it was about seventeen per cent better. Lizzie stopped by a display table. On it was a pile of turned wooden boxes with latticed lids for filling with pot-pourri, boxes that Lizzie remembered ordering from that strange young man who said that he was a Buddhist and that he could also make her spinning wheels if she wanted them. The boxes wouldn't do there, in a pile. Nobody could see the point of them in a pile, how they fitted in. They ought to be next to a lamp, singly, near a pile of books and a vase, they ought to be placed in such a way as to suggest the effect of them, the use of them. Lizzie reached out, picked up the nearest two boxes and began on a little purposeful rearrangement.

Later, over supper, they talked about the children. It was the sort of conversation they used to have, long ago, and had not had, for ages, because of what Lizzie called, well – other things. They discussed Alistair's solitariness and Davy's babyishness with mild anxiety and discreetly congratulated themselves on a dawning sense of responsibility they perceived in both Harriet and Sam. They said at intervals, ‘Of course, he or she is terribly young yet,' and Sam came drifting in, in search of something to eat, and said what were they talking about but please don't tell him actually, because it was
bound
to be boring. They said, ‘You,' and he was enchanted. He lay down on the kitchen floor in one of the narrow spaces between the table and the cupboards, to eat his Marmite sandwich, and listen in case they talked about him a bit more. When they didn't, he began a chant, muffled by chewing, of, ‘Bor-ing, bor-ing, bor-ing,' until Robert threw him out. They heard him go banging cheerfully along the passage singing the theme tune for the World Cup, and this made them smile at one another, and the smiling suddenly made Lizzie feel rather vulnerable.

‘Lizzie—'

‘Yes?'

‘I've got something to ask you,' Robert said.

‘If it's about Westondale—'

‘It isn't, though it might be, later. It's about William.'

She pushed a few last pasta shells that she didn't want to eat round her plate with her fork.

‘Juliet turned him down.'

‘I know that.'

‘I suppose we could all have seen it coming, I mean, if she'd ever really wanted him or he her, they'd have done something about it sooner—'

‘Exactly,' Robert said, ‘a William-style cop-out. William never wanted to lose what he had; Juliet never wanted all the clutter and rows of family life. Just as I always said.'

Lizzie nodded.

‘Yes, you did. I suppose we just got used to it, like we got used to Mum complaining about it and not doing anything. Frances and I were at school once with a girl called Beverley Lane-Smith. Her parents lived together but they weren't married, her father was called something Lane and her mother was called something Smith, and we didn't think anything of it and nor did she until suddenly, at about twenty-two, she got frightfully indignant about her parents never
considering
her and her brother in the matter, and she changed her name to Burton, to spite them, because she had a crush on the actor.'

‘Yes,' Robert said patiently, ‘but what has that got to do with William?'

‘Only as an illustration of waking up to something you've always unthinkingly gone along with—'

‘Lizzie,' Robert said, ‘where is William going to live when the house is sold?'

Lizzie put her fork down.

‘He's going to buy a flat, he says. He's thinking of buying a flat here, in Langworth. There are some new ones, behind the police station—'

‘Those are for people on zimmers.'

‘Well, he'll be on a zimmer one day—'

‘Not for years.'

‘No, but I suppose—'

‘Lizzie,' Robert said, ‘I think he ought to come and live with us.'

Her mouth fell open.

‘Us!'

‘Yes.'

‘But – but you'd go mad, he drives you mad, bumbling about, forgetting things! And there isn't room, there isn't an inch, how could we have any privacy at all, it's bad enough with the children, but how could there be any privacy at all with Dad here?'

‘Not here,' Robert said. He leaned forward. ‘We'd buy another house. William could use his half of the proceeds of his house to put down on a house for all of us, and we would let this flat and use the rent to service the mortgage on the remainder.'

‘But you didn't want help from him! You refused help from him!'

‘That was then,' Robert said. ‘This is now. I couldn't bear help while we were going down. I can bear this
kind
of structured help now that I think we are going slowly up.'

‘Are we?'

He looked at her.

‘What do you think?'

‘Why do you ask me?'

‘Because the answer really depends on you.'

Lizzie looked down at the wooden table top, at the burns and scars and rings lurking under its shiny surface like fish in a pool.

‘We might have him for twenty years—'

‘Yes.'

‘Rob,' she said, ‘don't you mind that?'

‘I mind it less than a lot of other things. He could help in the shop.'

Lizzie thought.

‘
Could
he?'

‘Yes; for the odd hour. When neither of us can be there.'

‘Neither of us?'

‘Yes. Do you really intend to go on at Westondale?'

‘I have to.'

‘You don't.'

‘I do!' Lizzie cried. ‘The interest on the bloody loan!'

‘I could get a job,' Robert said. ‘My turn.'

Fear clutched her.

‘But why, when I've got one already—'

‘I need a change. We all do. We need to have a kind of life now where we feel we're building, not just standing around in a panic with our fingers in the hole in the dyke. You can get as stuck in panic as you can in boredom. I want to make things happen now, I want to move things.'

She said, controlling herself, ‘But what might you do?'

‘Teach.'

‘Teach!'

‘Yes. Picture framing, furniture restoration, that sort of thing. There's a vacancy, in Bath, on a course for retraining people who've been made redundant—'

‘Not students, then—'

‘No,' Robert said, grinning faintly at her tone. ‘Why should you be frightened of students?'

Lizzie wanted to say she seemed to feel frightened of most things at the moment and said instead, untruthfully, ‘I'm not. But surely that wouldn't pay very well?'

‘Slightly more than Westondale pays you, for fewer hours.'

‘Because you're a man!'

‘I'm not a
sculptor
,' Robert said deliberately. ‘Why don't you think of starting that again?'

‘Nobody wants that—'

‘People always want that. What about starting with children, our children even, for practice?'

‘Where would I do it?'

‘Lizzie! What's the matter with you? You'll do it, if that's the only thing holding you back, in a special studio in the new house we will buy with your father when he has sold his present one! You'll do it in the holidays when I'm not teaching and at weekends when the children or part-timers can help in the shop! You'll do it so that you have something creative to do that will take the pressure off all of us.'

Lizzie swallowed. He suddenly seemed so necessary to her that she could hardly look at him.

‘I'd like that.'

‘Good,' Robert said. ‘About bloody time.' He stood up. ‘Right, now. Will you ring your father or shall I?'

‘I will.'

‘Good.'

‘It's all – really nice of you—'

‘And self-interested too. Self-interested for us.'

‘I know.'