A Spanish Lover (32 page)

It had been a relief to get on the plane to Málaga. In an airport crowd, talking to several of her clients who had, by now, become friends and were apt to send her Christmas cards enclosing photographs of themselves on a Shore to Shore holiday, or of their grandchildren, Frances began to feel real again. The ordinariness of what was going on – people asleep wretchedly, half on seats, half on their luggage, people glazedly eating and drinking, people mooning through the duty-free shops stupefied by artificial decisions about alcohol and tobacco, watches and chocolate – was an effective restorative for her sense of proportion. Barbara, she reflected, had always flung herself into whirlwind domestic activity the moment there was an emotional crisis. Perhaps this was not only instinctive, but an excellent instinct at that. It reminded you that, at bottom, life was quite literally a matter of survival, of making sure that you were still there, living and breathing, at the dawn of a new day. It was no bad thing to remember that sometimes. It put all the sweaty struggles of achievement firmly in their proper place.

The moment the plane had touched down in Málaga,
Frances
had felt better still. There was the sun, there was Spain, there, in three days, would be Luis. There was also the
posada
at Mojas which Frances thought she could probably never visit without emotion, and would be disappointed if she did. She had elected, in order to spare the room of her first visit for two of her clients, to take a much smaller single room without a view, whose door opened into one of the irregular internal courtyards. She couldn't help reflecting, while unpacking in it, how miraculous it would have been if this baby had been conceived in Mojas, even, best of all, in the very bed where Luis had first become her lover and in which Mr and Mrs Ballantyne from Amersham now lay, no doubt, as trimly and separately side by side as figures on a tomb. But it hadn't been conceived in Mojas, it had been, almost certainly, conceived on a Saturday afternoon in Fulham after a morning spent buying Luis some English shoes (‘Brogues? What is this word “brogues”? Irish? These are
Irish
shoes?') and a bottle of wine with lunch. It had been good lovemaking, but not remarkable. Looking back, it seemed wrong, somehow, that the making of a baby such as this baby should have been good but unremarkable.

Whatever it had been, it had been done more than a month ago now. Everything in these shabby Spanish gardens, the palm trees, the myrtles, the leggy box hedges, the oleanders with drifts of litter underneath them, had all been standing there then as they were now, and as they would be in the coming darkness of the evening when she, Frances, would tell Luis that she was, without question, going to have a child.

José came up to the flat for dinner. They had ordered, as they often did, from the restaurant of the hotel, and José, as he often did, came up to eat at least one course with them. He preferred doing this while Frances was in Seville, because if she wasn't there, his
father
was not so restrained with him and was likely to tell him that he was overindulged, incompetent, and only kept on as manager of the hotel because of blood ties which he, Luis, was beginning to feel was the worst reason in the world for employing anybody. If Frances was there, Luis was more moderate, and made something of a joke of his exasperation. José liked Frances. He thought her an incomprehensible choice for a mistress strictly on physical grounds – his taste ran currently in the direction of golden-skinned, golden-haired Californian dreams – but he could see why his father liked her company. He liked her company himself, he liked her straightforwardness, her strange sense of humour, her lack of melodrama. He thought she'd had a good effect on his father, made him happy, relaxed him, given him other things to think about than scaffolding and hotels and boots and shoes. One of José's friends, a young woman who was rising rapidly through the civil service ranks of the Andalusian health service, asked if José thought his father would marry his English girlfriend. José had been horrified.

‘
Marry
her? Of course not, it's absolutely out of the question. You must be mad even to ask me such a thing!'

It had quite disturbed him. He was perfectly used, now, to his mother's relentless vendetta against his father, and his grandmothers' lamentations and recriminations about the separation between his parents – after all, plenty of his friends had parents in the same situation and divorce was becoming as common as marriage – but for his father to marry Frances was quite another matter altogether, a matter not to be thought of without indignation amounting to outrage. The next time they met, after this suggestion had been made to José, he had looked at Frances quite differently, with suspicion and disapproval. But she not only
hadn't
seemed to notice his cold and furious glances, she had also behaved with exactly the same unpossessive collectedness in his father's presence as she had always shown. It struck José suddenly that perhaps she might not
want
to marry his father, her choice not his, and this thought threw him into quite a reverse turmoil of angry feelings. He also had a dreadful apprehension that, if Frances wasn't actually laughing at him, she was certainly smiling a little. He began to avoid Frances in case this was indeed true, and he wouldn't go up to the flat when she was there. Nobody commented on this and nothing, emotionally, seemed to change. José began to miss both his dinners in the flat and Frances, who, even by her silent presence, seemed to defend him from his father. He told himself he had rightly made a stand in defence of the honour of his family; he began to appear again at the Friday and Saturday night dinner table. In time, as with every other crisis in José's life, he ceased even to think about what had troubled him. He brought Frances flowers occasionally and took, as a pretty Austrian student at Seville University, and on whom he had his eye, had taught him to do, to kissing Frances's hand.

‘Oh, fol-de-rol,' Frances said to him.

‘Why do you say this?'

‘Because it makes me think of the way people behave in operettas. Oh fie, sir, and la, sir, and I shall tap you playfully in reproof with my fan.'

‘I do not understand you.'

‘No,' Frances said. ‘You wouldn't.'

‘Why would I not?'

‘Because you're Spanish.'

‘It is magnificent to be Spanish!'

‘José,' Frances said affectionately, ‘you are an ass.'

He grinned at her. She looked tired, he thought, even a little transparent, as if her skin was about to bruise,
out
of fatigue, of its own accord. It was probably overwork, he decided. He himself did not know the meaning of overwork – he took enormous care not to – but he knew that it could easily afflict people who weren't constantly on their guard against it.

‘Where is my father?'

‘In the shower.'

‘Did you order the
ajo blanco
tonight? It is excellent. And also the
salmonetes
, what is it—'

‘Mullet,' Frances said. ‘Red mullet. I don't know. Luis has ordered it all. I spent the afternoon at the Alcázar.'

‘The Alcázar?' José said in amazement. ‘But what were you doing there?'

‘Thinking.'

‘You are a most extraordinary person. I think you also are a little tired.'

‘Yes.'

‘Then you should be sitting and I shall bring you a glass of wine.'

‘Yes please,' Frances said. She stepped out of her shoes and folded herself up on the sofa by the window, open to the darkening alley.

Luis came out of the bedroom running his hands over his still damp hair. José went up to him and they embraced, easily, without words. Frances thought of how naturally Davy and Sam kissed their father but how Alistair would now stand a little at a distance, stiffly, shackled by the onset of self-consciousness.

‘English men, I mean fathers and adult sons, hardly ever kiss each other.'

Luis cast himself down on the sofa beside her.

‘Often I do not want to kiss José, I want to smack him.'

‘Used you to?'

‘Often,' José said, bringing wine in thick, pale-green glasses with bubbles of air trapped in them. ‘My
childhood
was terrible. He beat me with sticks and shut me in cupboards.' He winked.

‘Poor you,' Frances said. She could feel Luis lying against her, heavy and clean.

‘And now he kisses me but he shouts.'

‘I don't shout,' Luis said. ‘I never raise my voice. I merely say things you do not want to hear so you imagine that I am shouting.'

Frances looked at him.

‘Do you imagine that, too? What do you do when people say things you don't want to hear?'

He turned his head. Their eyes were only inches apart.

‘Why do you ask me that?'

There was a tiny beat and then she said, ‘Oh, idle curiosity. To see if things run in families—'

‘Oh?' he said.

José went to the telephone.

‘I am going to check on your order for dinner. You must eat the mullet—'

‘I don't want it,' Luis said. ‘I want the crayfish.'

‘But—'

‘In a minute, I
will
shout,' Luis said. ‘I own this hotel, I want the crayfish; you may be my son but you are also my manager.'

José's hand hovered over the telephone.

‘Why don't you', Frances suggested, ‘go down to the kitchen and see what looks best and we will eat that, even if it's neither mullet nor crayfish?'

Luis laid his cheek on her shoulder.

‘How diplomatic.'

‘Or practical. I'm hungry.'

‘I shall bring
tapas
also,' José said, moving towards the door. ‘You want the little mussels?'

‘Yes.'

‘Anything—'

‘The little mussels and the big olives—'

‘José,' Luis said in Spanish, ‘get lost.'

The door opened, and closed.

‘An exasperating boy.'

‘Just rather young for his age perhaps—'

Luis took his cheek away from Frances's shoulder and picked up her free hand, the one not holding the wine glass.

‘Frances?'

‘Yes—'

‘What do you wish to say to me that I will not want to hear?'

She gave a tiny, involuntary gasp. This was not in her plan. Her plan had been to wait until Luis was replete with wine and food, and José had taken himself back downstairs to his end-of-the-day managerial duties; and then to say, by way of many gentle introductory sentiments and expressions of love and personal happiness, what she had been planning how to say all the long afternoon in the gardens of the Alcázar. But Luis, with that powerful human instinct that he had used like a sword to cut through to the heart of her had, at a stroke, wrecked her plan. She panicked.

‘Not now—'

‘Yes. Now.'

‘No, later, when we're alone—'

‘We are alone now,' he said. His hold on her hand had become a grip.

She swallowed. She leaned forward and put her wine glass on a little lamp table near by.

‘It's very important. I don't want to tell you badly, or in a hurry—'

‘Now,' Luis insisted.

She turned her head. She said, looking at him. ‘You don't want to hear this. It's the one thing you don't want to hear.'

‘Tell me!'

‘Let go of my hand. You're hurting.'

He dropped her hand abruptly, as if it were an impersonal object not in any way attached to her.

‘Now then. Tell me.'

‘I am pregnant, Luis,' Frances said, and her voice seemed to echo in the small room, as if she were speaking in a church. ‘I am going to have a baby.'

He shouted, ‘No!'

‘Yes,' she said.

‘How dare you?' he shouted. ‘How could you? How dare you deceive me?'

She got up and moved away from him, behind the table already laid for the three of them with spoons for the white
gazpacho
and knives and forks for the fish, and glasses, glimmering in the fading light.

‘I wanted to,' she said. ‘I needed to. I wanted your baby with a want I can't really describe to you because it's more like a need, a craving. I decided to risk it. To risk—' She paused, took a breath and added, ‘You.'

He stood up too. He was almost incoherent with fury.

‘You know what I said to you!'

‘Yes—'

‘You will become a mother, you will change, it is too horrible to think of! Is this a trap? Do you suppose you will force me to marry you this way?'

‘No.'

‘Then you are right! I will never marry you! Do you hear me? You have deceived me, betrayed me,
deliberately
you have done this, you even admit it! You were the one woman I have ever known who I thought was honest and now you are not honest, you are like all the rest, you play tricks, you cheat, you break our trust and our faith!'

She held on to a chair back. She was shaking and her heart was thudding.

‘And', he yelled in Spanish, ‘you don't even care! You think you have won! You think you have tamed me! But you will see, I will show you, you will see what it is to betray me.'

‘You're quite right,' she said in English. ‘I'm not sorry. I meant to do it and I'm glad.'

He went over to the open window and held the bottom of the frame, gripping it, his shoulders shaking as if he were weeping.

‘You don't know what you have done, you stupid Frances—'

‘I do—'

‘No,' he said, turning round. ‘No. You think you know, and perhaps you may know for yourself but you don't know for
me
.'

She said, idiotically, ‘Well, I've clearly made you very angry.'

He gave a little snort of exasperation.

‘Not that—'

From the alley outside rose the sudden broken strains of someone strumming on a guitar, a strolling someone, tuning up, humming a little. Luis gave a shuddering sigh.