A Spanish Lover (2 page)

It was just before Davy's christening that Frances had
first
surprised them. They had been in the Grange for a year, and half the house was painted in just the rich, strong colours that Lizzie so loved. The stairwell was yellow and white, the sitting room deep-green, the newly extended kitchen blue and russet and cream.

‘Why is Davy being christened?' Frances said. ‘You've never christened the others.'

‘I just feel I want him to be. So does Rob. We wish we had christened the others, now. It seems – it seems more traditional, somehow—'

Frances looked at her sister. Then she looked at the kitchen, its back door open to the sunny garden, its windowsills charmingly crowded with scented geraniums, and pygmy amphorae of parsley, the trug of lettuces on the table, the rag rugs on the wooden floor, the shining new Aga, the rustic Spanish candelabra of greenish metal. She winked at Lizzie.

‘Watch it, Liz. You're getting to be such a solid citizen.'

‘Am I?'

Frances waved an arm.

‘Look at all this!'

Lizzie said, slightly defensively, ‘It's what we want.'

‘I know. And now you want Davy christened.'

‘People change,' Lizzie said stoutly. ‘We're bound to change. It would be affected to stay rigidly as we were at twenty-five.'

Frances went to the mirror hanging by the garden door and opened her mouth.

‘What are you doing?'

‘Looking at my teeth.'

‘Why?'

‘Because they look the same as they always have. The thing is, I don't feel so different, I don't feel I've changed—'

‘No. Well—'

‘But then,' said Frances comfortably, coming away
from
the mirror, ‘I haven't had a husband and four children, have I?'

‘I didn't want to say—'

‘Let's go up and look at Davy, shall we?'

Davy lay in his wicker Moses basket in the centre of Lizzie and Robert's bed, shrouded in a muslin cat net, like a joint in a larder. They peered down at him. He was fast asleep, snuffling faintly, his shrimp-sized fingers balled into tiny fists. Lizzie breathed down through the net at him with helpless yearning. Frances wondered how he would react if he opened his eyes. Would he yell?

‘Lizzie,' she said.

‘Yes,' Lizzie said, adoring Davy.

Frances straightened up and walked over to the huge wardrobe that held Lizzie's clothes. It had a long oval mirror set into the door, a mirror that gave back the moony, soft reflection of old glass.

‘I want to tell you something.'

Lizzie came to join her sister. They stood side by side and gazed at their reflections, two tall, big-boned English girls, broad-shouldered, long-legged, with thick tawny hair cut in longish bobs. Lizzie's had a fringe; Frances's was cut to fall forward in a heavy swathe on one side, like a bird's wing, when she bent her head.

‘We aren't glamorous, are we—'

‘No, but I think we're quite attractive. I think we look interesting.'

‘To whom?' Frances said.

Lizzie looked at her.

‘What were you going to tell me?'

Frances leaned towards her reflection. She licked her forefinger and ran it along first one dark eyebrow and then the other.

‘I'm starting my own business.'

Lizzie gaped at her.

‘You aren't!'

‘Why aren't I?'

‘Frances,' Lizzie said, seizing her sister's arm. ‘Frances, please think carefully. What do you know about running a business? You've always been employed, an employee—'

‘Exactly,' Frances said, ‘and now I've had enough.' Gently, she took her arm away.

‘Where's the money coming from?'

‘Where it usually comes from,' Frances said. She turned up her shirt collar and pushed up her cardigan sleeves and turned to look at herself in the mirror, over her shoulder. ‘Some from the bank and some from Dad.'

‘From Dad!'

‘Yes. He lent you and Rob some, didn't he?'

‘Yes, but that was—'

‘No,' said Frances, interrupting. ‘It wasn't different. It's just the same, except that I am doing it later, and on my own.'

Lizzie swallowed. ‘Of course.'

‘Why don't you want me to?'

Lizzie went back to her bed, and sat beside Davy's wicker basket, on the patchwork counterpane, one of the range made by a local farmer's wife, that had proved one of the Gallery's best sellers. Frances stayed where she was, by the wardrobe, leaning her back against the smooth, cold mirror-glass.

‘We're twins,' Lizzie said.

Frances bent her head and studied her feet, her too-big feet encased in good, dull, dark-blue leather loafers. She knew exactly what Lizzie meant. We are twins, Lizzie had said, leaving the subtext unspoken. We are twins, so we are a unit, we have a kind of joint wholeness, together we make up a rich, rounded person, but we are like two pieces of a jigsaw, we have to fit together, and to do that properly we can't be exactly the same shape.

‘You have the domestic life,' Frances said. ‘I like that. I love it here, this house is home to me, your children are very satisfying to me. I don't want any of that, that's your part of our deal. But I must be allowed to expand myself a little if I need to. And I do. It won't touch your business if I have a business, it won't touch us, how we are, together.'

‘Why do you want to do it?' Lizzie said.

‘Because I'm thirty-two and I know enough about travel now to know I'm better than a lot of people I work for. You want to have Davy christened, you've come to a point. I've just come to another one.'

Lizzie looked at her. She remembered their first day at Moira Cresswell's nursery school together, in green drill overalls, with ‘E. Shore' and ‘F. Shore' embroidered on them, for painting classes, and their hair held back by tight Alice bands made of green ribbon and elastic. ‘We won't have to stay if we don't want to,' Frances had said to Lizzie, but Lizzie had sensed that wasn't true. School had an inexorable feeling about it. She had hated watching Frances realize this.

‘What kind of business will it be?'

Frances smiled. She put her hands under her hair, lifted it off her neck and then let it fall back.

‘Secret holidays. Staying in tiny towns and hidden hotels and even people's houses. I shall start with Italy, because all the English have this passion for Italy.'

‘And what will you call it?'

Frances began to laugh. She did a dance step or two, holding out the sides of her skirt.

‘Shore to Shore, of course!'

Like Davy, Shore to Shore had grown out of all recognition in five years. It began in the sitting room of the Battersea flat, and its beginnings were very shaky, with too few customers and too many mistakes. Then Frances realized that she would have to look at every
single
bed and table at which she expected her clients to sleep and eat, so she went to Italy for four months, driving herself along the minor roads of Tuscany and Umbria in a hired Fiat she used as an office and a wardrobe and, sometimes, as a bedroom. Before she went, she was apprehensive that she would find it all a cliché, done to death by the remorseless English mania for a civilized release from the shackles of a chilly Puritanism into an acceptable sensuality. But she needn't have worried. You could read about it in a thousand novels and newspaper articles, you could see it as the richly romantic backdrop to a thousand films, yet still, Frances thought, no sensitive heart could fail to lift, every time, at the sight of that landscape, the lines of the olive-dun and grape-blue hills punctuated by saffron walls, russet roofs and the casually, perfectly placed charcoal-dark spires of the cypress trees.

She set up little journeys for her clients. Some were through vineyards, some were for painters, or photographers, some were like small investigations, in search of the Etruscans, or Piero della Francesca, or a once mighty, now decayed family, like the Medicis. She sold her share of the flat in Battersea to a brisk girl specializing in venture capital, and moved north, across the river, to a narrow house just off the Fulham Road. She couldn't afford to buy it, so she rented it, using the ground floor as offices, and living on the first floor with a view, at the back, of someone else's cherry tree. She hired an assistant, a girl to work the switchboard and run errands, and invested the last of her borrowings in computers. Before the company was four years old, three larger, well-established and better-known businesses had tried to buy her out.

Lizzie was proud of her. At Frances's request, Lizzie came up to London, and planned the décor of the ground-floor office, covering the floor with seagrass matting, and the walls with immense, seductive
photographs
of Italy – bread and wine on an iron table on a loggia, with a distant view of a towered hill-town beyond, Piero's infinitely moving pregnant Virgin from the cemetery chapel at Monterchi, a gleaming modern girl swinging carelessly down a timeless, mouldering medieval street. They installed an Italian coffee machine, and a baby fridge to hold pale-green bottles of Frascati, to offer customers.

‘You see,' Frances said. ‘You see? I told you it wouldn't change us. I
told
you.'

‘I was afraid,' Lizzie said.

‘I know.'

‘I'm very ashamed of that now, it seems so selfish, but I couldn't help feeling it.'

‘I know.'

‘And now I'm just proud. It's wonderful. How are bookings?'

Frances held out both hands, fingers crossed.

‘Solid,' she said.

That, Lizzie thought now, had been their only hiccup, the only time when their parallel progress together through life had faltered even a step. Looking back, Lizzie not only felt a twinge of residual shame at her lack of generosity, but a puzzlement. Why had she been afraid? Knowing Frances as she did, what was there to fear in a personality that was almost her own, twined about her own as it was? Frances was, after all, the least greedy of people. Lizzie hoped, with a sudden, small, urgent pang, that she wasn't greedy. Had she, she asked herself sternly, ever envied Frances those trips to Italy while she stayed in Langworth attending Sam's measles or Alistair's cello practice or weary late-night sessions with Robert and the Gallery accounts? Only for a second, she told herself, only for a fleeting second, when beside herself with exhaustion and demands, would she ever have willingly exchanged
her
richly domestic and effective life for Frances's free but lonely one. There was no doubt about it, Lizzie reflected with a sigh, sitting down at the kitchen table and pulling towards her one of her endless pads of paper, to make a menu list for Christmas, that Frances was lonely.

Someone – an egregious customer at the Gallery who was trying very hard to turn herself into Lizzie's friend – had given her an American cookery book called
Good Food for Bad Times
. It was written by a person called Enid R. Starbird. Lizzie opened it idly, thinking that it might provide a few economical ideas for feeding a household of nine – the six Middletons, Frances, the Shore parents – for four days. Robert had said last night, in the careful voice he kept for breaking disagreeable news, that the Gallery takings so far, in the run-up to Christmas, looked as if, instead of being twenty per cent up as usual, would be ten per cent down. They had both suspected that this might be so and had had, during the course of the year, a number of superficially philosophical conversations about the possibility of an economic recession. Last night, they had had another one.

‘So,' Lizzie had said. ‘It means a careful Christmas.'

‘'Fraid so.'

Lizzie looked down at the open page of Mrs Starbird's book. ‘Never forget', Mrs Starbird said brightly, ‘the cabbage soups of south-west France. A pig's head, that vital ingredient, is not, as you will find, so very hard to come by.'

Lizzie shut the book with a slam, to banish the image of a reproachful pig's head. She seized her pad. ‘Sausages,' she wrote rapidly. ‘Gold spray-paint, dried chestnuts, things for stockings, cat food, sticking plasters, big jar of mincemeat, second-class stamps, collect dress from cleaner's, walnuts.' She stopped, tore off the sheet, and began again on a fresh one.

‘Make up spare beds, check wine, finish wrapping presents, ice cake, make stuffings, check mince pies (enough?), remind Rob about wine, clean silver (Alistair), hoover sitting room (Sam), pick holly and ivy (Harriet and Davy), decorate tree (everyone), make garland for front door (me) and quiches for Gallery staff party (me) and brandy butter (me), and clean the whole house from top to bottom before Mum sees it (me, me, me).'

‘Help,' Lizzie wrote at the foot of her list. ‘Help, help, help.'

The kitchen door opened. Davy who at breakfast had been fully and properly dressed and was now wearing only socks, underpants and a plastic policeman's helmet, sidled in. He looked guilty. He came up to Lizzie and leaned against her knee. Lizzie touched him.

‘You're frozen!' Lizzie said. ‘What have you been doing?'

‘Nothing,' Davy said, trained by Sam.

‘Then where are your clothes?'

‘In the bath.'

‘In the
bath
?'

‘They needed a wash, you know,' Davy said confidingly.

‘They were clean, clean this morning—'

Davy said, almost dreamily, ‘They got a bit pastey.'

‘What kind of pastey?'

‘Toothpastey,' Davy said. ‘Toothpaste writing—'

Lizzie stood up.

‘Where's Sam?'

‘Pimlott's come,' Davy said. ‘Pimlott and Sam are making a Superman camp—'

‘Pimlott?'

Pimlott was Sam's dearest friend, a frail, mauve-pale boy with watchful light eyes and a slippery disposition.

‘Don't you have a Christian name?' Liz had asked him on his first visit. He stared at her.