A Spanish Lover (33 page)

‘I will lose you now,' he said more gently. ‘That is what you don't understand.'

‘Never!'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘You can't help it, nor can I. But there is not room for a child and a man with a woman who is a mother.'

‘What utter nonsense!'

‘No,' he said, shaking his head. ‘You will see. You will see what you have done.'

She held hard to the chair back.

‘Oh don't be so theatrical, so
Spanish
—'

‘Enough!'

‘Children
add
to relationships, they are a development of relationships, they're part of the nature of being together – growing together.'

He said softly, interrupting, ‘I don't think so. I don't believe it.'

‘Luis—'

He let go of the window and came over to her. He put his arm around her shoulders, a kindly arm. He said, ‘I am going out now.'

She was horrified.

‘Oh no!'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘What's done is done. You must take care of yourself and I must help you to do it. But not now, not tonight. I will be back later but for now I must go out.'

She nodded. Desolation flooded through her in a cold, heavy wave.

‘As you wish.'

He kissed her. He leaned forward and kissed her cheek, not her mouth, and then he took his arm away from her shoulders, and went into the bedroom. When he came out, he had added a tie and a jacket to his previous shirt and trousers. He paused for a second and looked at her, and then, without speaking, he went across the room and opened the door and went out. Frances didn't move. She stood there, still leaning on the chair back, and longed and longed for him. The longing made her feel quite faint. After several minutes, she managed to feel her way round the table and back to the sofa. She took a gulp of her hardly tasted wine, and sat there, holding the glass in one hand with the other laid across her stomach. There was no thinking to be done. She simply had to sit there and keep breathing and wait for these first moments to be over, to become the past, that was done with, and not the present, that still had to be endured.

There were feet on the stairs, and José's customary tactful tap on the door.

‘Come—'

‘Look,' he said. ‘The little eggs of the
codoniz
, what is the
codoniz
?'

‘The quail,' Frances said.

José looked round.

‘Where is my father?'

‘Gone out.'

‘Out? But—'

‘José,' Frances said, ‘I think you had better leave me. We won't be eating dinner tonight.' She glanced at him. ‘You see, I'm afraid that your father and I have had a quarrel.'

17

ALISTAIR CAUGHT CHICKEN-POX
. He felt rotten but his feelings of rottenness were outweighed by the mortification of having a spot-ravaged face. He could bear nobody to see him, not even his parents, and lay wretchedly in the hot little bedroom he shared with Sam with an old silk scarf of Lizzie's draped across his face. When the spots spread downward into his armpits and across his chest and finally into his groin, he was almost in despair. Consumed by self-disgust and a terror of being seen, he crept to the bathroom wrapped in a sheet like a ghoul, and would only let the doctor examine him if there was no-one else in the room, and the door was shut.

‘It's only chicken-pox,' Lizzie said in exasperation.

‘Not to him,' Robert argued. ‘He thinks he's decaying—'

‘Rubbish.'

Robert glared at her. How could she be so unsympathetic?

‘It's not rubbish. He's about to become an adolescent and you know what that means. He's really suffering.'

Lizzie pulled a face. She had made Alistair a jug of homemade lemonade but he had refused to lift his scarf even to look at it, let alone drink it. She was extremely sorry for him, she told herself, but she also thought he was being hysterical lying there in the dark, shrouded and self-pitying. It was only chicken-pox, for heaven's sake, common or garden old childhood chicken-pox.

‘I don't really want to take time off work,' Lizzie said. ‘As long as you and Jenny can cope. After all, he won't let me do anything for him, he won't even let me stay in the room with him, so there doesn't seem any point in being here rather than at work, does there?'

‘You're his mother,' Robert said.

She shot him a defiant glance.

‘And you're his father!'

‘With work to do—'

‘I've got work to do!' Lizzie shouted. ‘Don't give me that! Who's paying the interest on the rest of the overdraft if it isn't me? Who's—'

‘Shut up,' Robert said. He closed his eyes. ‘Shut up. This isn't a competition, you know, about who's tireder or who's working harder—'

‘You started it!' Lizzie shouted again. ‘You started it by implying it was more my job to look after Alistair than yours!'

Robert glared at her.

‘Don't tell me I don't do my fair share with the children—'

‘When it suits you.'

‘That's monstrous,' Robert said furiously, ‘monstrous and untrue. I asked you whether you'd like it to be me or you who took an outside job, and you chose yourself, so of course, being here all the time, I've been responsible for the children far more than you have. Hell, when I went to Birmingham, you couldn't even cope with them all for two days and had to send the little ones to your mother—'

‘But you took Jenny!' Lizzie screeched. ‘You had Jenny!'

‘Leave Jenny out of this!'

‘Why? Why should I? You have Jenny here and I don't have anyone—'

‘Please,' a voice said.

They both turned. In the doorway of the sitting-room
stood
a medium-sized figure draped in a pink sheet with a yellow-and-white-striped towel over its head and face. At the bottom, two grey wool feet protruded gloomily.

‘You're making my room shake,' Alistair said. ‘I really can't see what there is to shout about. You haven't got chicken-pox.'

‘Sorry,' Lizzie said, ‘sorry—'

‘I don't want to be looked after,' Alistair said. ‘I just want to be better. And I certainly don't want you two yelling all over the place.'

Robert went over and put his arm around Alistair's pink-sheeted shoulders. Alistair flinched.

‘Don't
touch
me!'

‘Sorry, old son. Come back to bed now—'

‘I'll take you,' Lizzie said, rushing forward.

‘No!' Alistair said. ‘Neither of you will and if you touch me again I shall probably bite you.'

‘Darling—'

‘Go to work,' Robert said to Lizzie. ‘Just go to work, would you?'

She hesitated. Alistair suddenly appeared neither melodramatic nor comical to her but full of real pathos.

‘I won't go in today, I'll ring—'

‘No,' Robert said.

‘But—'

‘You can't do anything here,' Robert said. ‘Can you? I mean, you said so yourself.'

Alistair turned and began to shuffle back down the short corridor to his bedroom, trailing his pink-cotton train.

‘OK,' Lizzie said, almost in a whisper.

Alistair's bedroom door banged shut.

‘I'll come up every hour,' Robert said, ‘as I've done since he got ill. As I've done all the time you were away at work.'

‘I'm not at work for fun!' Lizzie cried resentfully.

Robert said nothing. He didn't even look at her. He merely picked up the keys for the Gallery office and went out of the room and down the communal stairs and left her standing there, in a turmoil. After a few minutes, she went along to Alistair's room and knocked.

‘Ally?'

‘Go away!'

‘I just want to make sure you're all right before I go—'

‘I'm fine,' Alistair said flatly, his voice muffled by the scarf.

‘I'll see you tonight—'

‘OK.'

‘Is there anything you'd like, anything you really like to eat—'

‘No.'

‘Ice-cream? That American one? Melon?'

‘No.'

Lizzie put her forehead against the flat, painted surface of the door.

‘See you tonight, then.'

‘OK.'

‘Keep drinking, drink as much as you can—'

‘OK.'

‘I'm not being heartless, going to work, Ally, really I'm not, I have to go, you know that, don't you?'

Silence.

‘Because of money. You do know that, don't you? It's so that we can go on living, so that—'

She stopped. She straightened up.

‘Bye, darling.'

‘Bye,' Alistair said in a voice loud with relief.

After he had seen Lizzie leave the Gallery, Robert came out of the office and went down to the shop floor to see
Jenny
. She was cleaning pictures with some emerald-green liquid in a spray bottle. She looked up as he approached but she didn't stop polishing.

‘I don't think customers ever consider that most of shop keeping is housework, do you?'

‘Did you see Lizzie?'

‘Only briefly,' Jenny said. ‘Because she was late, poor thing, she came through like the wind so we only had time to say hello and goodbye in the same breath. How's Alistair?'

‘Spotty and miserable.'

‘Poor boy,' Jenny said. She squirted glass cleaner on to another picture. ‘I had chicken-pox about his age and it was awful. I suppose the others will get it now.'

Robert groaned. ‘Don't say such things—'

‘They might as well,' Jenny said comfortably. ‘Get it all over with at once.'

‘But how would we manage?'

She looked at him.

‘Manage?'

‘Yes. If the little ones get it too, how on earth would we cope with them and the Gallery?'

Jenny stepped back from the picture, squinting to see if she had left any smears on the glass.

‘Well, I don't suppose many pictures would get polished for a bit, but there'd be no problem with two of us. One down here, one up there, take it in turns. And if Toby gets it, I'll just bung him in with the others.'

She sounded so sensible and ordinary that Robert suddenly felt she was both an angel and a genius.

He said, ‘Don't you ever lose your cool?'

She looked away from him.

‘I try not to. I'm rather frightened of not being in control.'

‘I think everybody feels that—'

‘Maybe they do,' Jenny said, ‘but I think I'm worse than most.'

‘I think you're wonderful,' Robert said.

Jenny blushed, a slow, steady, glowing blush.

‘You mustn't talk like that.'

‘Because?'

‘Because it isn't true,' Jenny said. ‘I'm practical and reliable and useful, but that's all.'

Robert smiled at her.

‘Just now,' he said, ‘being useful and reliable and practical is my definition of wonderful. No tantrums, no screams and shrieks—'

‘No problems either,' Jenny said crisply, moving away towards the next picture.

‘Jenny—'

‘No,' she said, ‘go and get started. I'm not a fool, I know what you're trying to say and you shouldn't talk about it, not when she isn't here, I've
told
you.'

‘Sorry,' Robert said. His heart ached suddenly, as if there was a headache in it. ‘You're quite right. I'll be in the office if you need me.'

She nodded, her grey hair swinging neatly. She didn't dare look at him.

‘See you later—'

As he opened the office door, the private telephone line was ringing, the line whose number was only known to the children's schools, to Barbara and William, to Frances, to a few very favoured suppliers and customers.

‘Robert Middleton,' he said into the receiver.

‘Mr Middleton? Oh Mr Middleton, it's Mrs Cairns here, from Langworth Junior. I'm afraid I have to ask you to come and collect Sam at once, if you would. He's a mass of spots, looks like chicken-pox to me. He says his older brother has it.'

‘Yes,' Robert said.

‘Mr Middleton, you know the quarantine rules—'

‘Yes.'

‘It means that every other child Sam has been in contact with—'

‘I know, Mrs Cairns. I'm so sorry.'

‘Then you'll be here at once?'

‘As soon as I can—'

‘And I think you'd better take Davy home with you too.'

Robert put his hand over his face.

‘Yes, Mrs Cairns,' he said.

Lizzie came home to find Alistair still shrouded like a mummy, and Sam spreadeagled stark naked on the sofa. He said if he put his pyjamas on, or even a T-shirt, the itching was unbearable, and he couldn't even put his legs together or his arms by his sides because then the itches touched each other and he had to scream. He screamed anyway, just to show her. In the kitchen Harriet was eating a raw carrot and reading a teen magazine, with dark glasses on, because she said she had a headache and chicken-pox started with headaches, didn't they. In the bathroom, Robert was bathing Davy who was perfectly certain he had found a spot on his knee and was begging not to have to lie in the dark wound up in sheets and towels and scarves.

Lizzie sat down on the closed lid of the lavatory and took her shoes off.

‘What are we to do?'

‘Carry on,' Robert said grimly, soaping Davy's back.

‘I'll do that,' Lizzie said. ‘You start supper.'

‘No.'

‘Then I'll start supper. What is there?'

‘What you've brought home.'

‘I haven't brought anything home. I worked until five-thirty today, remember? Everything shuts at five-thirty.'

‘Then there's nothing.'

‘No food?' Davy whispered. He peered at his knee. ‘It really tickles—'

‘You haven't got chicken-pox,' Robert said patiently.