A Spanish Lover (37 page)

He had come out to watch for Frances, partly because Barbara had made it plain that, if he went on fidgeting round her in the house for one more minute, she might murder him. He knew he was being annoying, restless and aimless, picking things up and putting them down, starting sentences he didn't finish, wandering about, but that was the sort of thing that happened when you were upset and William didn't think he had ever felt more wretchedly upset in his life.

It had never crossed his mind that Frances might start a baby, simply never entered his head as a possibility. He had thought only how lovely it was to see Frances so free and so fulfilled, to see her doing something that took her out of the lifelong controlling habits of her existence. It bad occurred to him once or twice that the love affair might very well end, and that Frances would then be desolated and yet still enriched, and Barbara could say I told you so, over and over, but it had simply never struck him that this enormous
complication
might arise and change everything in Frances's life, for ever. And then – and here his hands began to shake as if they had a crazy life of their own – change everything in everyone else's, too.

‘It wouldn't strike you,' Barbara said. ‘Things never do. You never think through problems, you never have, you just amble past them as if they were no concern of yours.'

Frances must be my concern, William thought now, pricking an unsteady finger sharply on a rose thorn. She is my concern because she will now go straight back to where she came from, all the growth of the last eighteen months will be wasted, and the awful thing is that I find I
want
her to come back. I want her to be where everything is safe and conventional and we – I – can look after her. He glanced at his finger. A bead of blood sat on it, bright and neat. William put his finger in his mouth. He remembered, with sudden acuteness, standing in his tidy kitchen all those years ago rejoicing that the twins were on their way to him. Now Frances was on her way to him again, but oh, in such different circumstances, without that beautiful clean sheet of paper ahead of her which was one of the chief charms of babyhood, of innocence, and without the certainty of a secured future.

A horn sounded. William dropped his roll of garden twine and hurried out into the lane, waving and gesturing. Frances slowed her car until the window of the driver's door was level with him. He peered in at her.

‘Darling—'

She wore a dark-blue overshirt and white trousers and sunglasses.

‘Dad. Were you watching for me?'

‘Of course—'

She tried a smile. It wasn't very successful and William realized that he was wearing an expression of
consummate
anxiety. He changed it at once. Poor girl. What help to her was it to look as if the end of the world was nigh? He reached into the car and patted her hand.

‘Drive on in,' he said. ‘I'll close the gate behind you.'

Barbara said they would sit in the garden, under the tulip tree. She said it was absolutely airless indoors, and she led Frances firmly outside and made her sit in the most comfortable chair, a huge old wooden structure that had belonged to William's father, with a footrest and a bookrest and a shelf with holes in it, for drinks.

‘I'm not ill,' Frances protested.

‘No. But probably tired. There is nothing to be said for being pregnant, it's a frightful state. Do you feel sick?'

‘I'm beginning not to—'

‘Oh Frances,' William said suddenly, tremulously. ‘Oh Frances!'

They both looked at him.

‘I never thought—'

‘Dad,' Frances said pleadingly, ‘please don't, please don't make things worse—'

‘It's the sight of you,' William said, hunting furiously for a handkerchief. ‘It's seeing you there, and knowing.'

‘Knowing what?'

‘That you can't get away now,' William said, blowing into his handkerchief. ‘That you're trapped now!'

Barbara said calmly, amazingly, ‘She doesn't want to get away.'

Frances stared at her. Barbara stared back.

‘Do you?'

‘No, I—'

‘You want this baby, don't you? You told me you meant to have it and I imagine I may believe you?'

‘Oh yes—'

‘Then don't talk bilge,' Barbara said to William. ‘Don't talk sentimental
bilge
.'

‘But—'

‘But what?' Barbara said, standing up. ‘But she'll be an unmarried mother? Is that it? Does that upset your cosy notions of how life should be organized – adultery is absolutely fine but babies should always have a mummy and a daddy living in a state of married tidiness even if it's also a state of purgatory, rather than of bliss?'

‘Stop it!' Frances shrieked. ‘Stop it!'

‘He makes me so angry,' Barbara said less heatedly. ‘He's so idle and hypocritical. He's so—'

‘I didn't come for this! I didn't come to umpire one of your quarrels!'

‘Sorry,' William whispered.

Barbara said, ‘I shall go and get tea.'

Frances put her head back against the chair and watched her mother move briskly and stiffly away across the grass.

‘I want you to come home now, you see,' William said the moment Barbara was out of earshot. ‘I want you to come home now and have the baby here and let us help you and look after you.'

Frances rolled her head so that she could look at him.

‘So does Lizzie.'

‘Ah. Yes.'

‘What does Mum want? She wouldn't say on the telephone. You might as well tell me, everyone else is telling me what they want, after all.'

‘She wants you – to do what you want.'

‘Nonsense!' Frances cried. ‘Nonsense! She's never wanted that in my entire life!'

‘Well, she does now.'

Frances looked intently at him. He looked not so
much
shrunken as collapsed, his sweet, worn face quite devitalized.

‘Dad?'

‘She thinks', William said slowly, ‘that if you feel you should have this baby in Spain then you should. I feel quite the opposite. I feel you must be where there are people to support you. I usen't to feel this, I used to feel you should be away from all of us, all the guy ropes cut, but now I feel you must be where there is some security because – because—'

Frances leaned forward.

‘Because what?'

‘Because there is so little security in the end, in anything, so that we must seize what we can, like love—'

‘Dad,' Frances said, ‘are you talking about me, or you?'

He looked at her. She noticed that his eyes, for the first time, had a milky, elderly film to them.

‘You,' he said, and then, after a pause, ‘me.'

‘What—'

‘We have quarrelled all our lives. Mum and I, you know that. But we have quarrelled so badly over this baby of yours, we have quarrelled from the depths of ourselves, from our instincts, we have really been quarrelling about the most primitive thing of all, about our sense of survival. And they are so different, our senses of survival, so very different. I want to cherish, to cling to things, she wants self-sufficiency. She says that's what you are doing. She says that Lizzie and I are passive in the end because we are terrified of our own thoughts and that you and she, though possessed of equally alarming thoughts, aren't afraid to confront them. She admires you. She has said so over and over.'

Frances climbed out of the huge chair and came to kneel by William. She put her hands on his which
were
gripping his handkerchief as if it were the last branch hanging out over a ravine.

‘Dad—'

‘I expect she'll say all this to you herself, only more forcefully. But she may not say—' He stopped, swallowed, and then hurried on, ‘She may not say that it's you who have brought everything to a head, by having this affair and now by having this baby, and you should know that, not because I blame you, I don't, I couldn't blame you for anything, ever, but because it will explain things for you, you see. You will understand why it's happened.'

‘What things?' Frances demanded. ‘What things? What's happened? What are you
talking
about?'

William took his hands away from Frances, and blew his nose and sat up straighter.

‘Your mother—'

‘Yes!'

‘Your mother wants us to sell this house and divide the proceeds so that she can go and live in Bath, in a little flat, on her own.'

Frances stared at him.

‘She's leaving you—'

‘Yes. That's what she wants.'

‘Oh
Dad
—'

‘I suppose – I suppose she's had perfect reason to leave for thirty years—'

‘But she loves you, in her way, needs you. She's – she—'

‘No,' William said. He seemed to be a little calmer. He managed a small, faint smile. ‘No. That's where we've all been so wrong. It's always been assumed by her and by me that I never really loved her, which is why I fell in love with Juliet, and that she always loved me, in a curious way, which is why she never left me, despite Juliet. But it seems, my darling Frances, that it has always, in fact, been the other way about. I am the
loving
, she the loved. Or perhaps love has nothing to do with it, and it's merely habit and we've got so used to it we can't tell the difference any more. She said – she said she felt she had done me an injustice, letting me go on like this all these years, clinging to me. She said she always wanted me to love her, even though she didn't love me in return. She is remarkably honest, remarkably.'

Frances got up, bemusedly, from her knees.

‘I don't see where this baby comes in—'

William leaned back in his chair. He flapped a hand at Frances.

‘Go and ask her. Ask her yourself.'

‘Dad?'

‘Yes—'

‘Dad, do you want me to come back here because you think it will make Mum stay?'

‘No,' William said.

Frances looked at him but he would not meet her gaze.

‘I see,' she said.

‘I've mismanaged the whole of my emotional life,' Barbara said, slicing cucumber. ‘I've dissipated all my energies, I've never let myself go. I've had fads, as substitutes for emotions. You know that.'

Frances said nothing. She sat by the kitchen table and buttered bread.

‘I think I'm rather an unpleasant woman,' Barbara said. ‘I say dreadful things and sometimes I get a little shaft of pleasure out of saying them. I'm all the wrong generation too, too young to accept being just a dutiful, dependent wife; too old to be independent of marriage. But I mean to have a go.'

‘Isn't it – a bit late?' Frances said. She laid the buttered slices out on the table top. ‘I mean, what's the point of creating such an upheaval after all these years?'

‘There's always a point! There's never a moment when it's too late! What makes you think that life is of more value to you at thirty-nine than to me at sixty-nine? If anything, it's more valuable to me because there's less of it left.' She glared at Frances. ‘I've worried about you all your life.'

Frances sighed.

‘I know. You've always thought me incompetent and weak—'

‘No,' Barbara said, ‘no, not exactly that. It's more that I've always thought you such an unsuitable person to be a twin. Just as I am an unsuitable person to be a wife.'

‘Oh Mum—'

Barbara began to arrange the cucumber in overlapping rows on the bread.

‘You really want this man, don't you?'

‘Yes.'

‘You're lucky. I've never really wanted anyone except, I suppose, to stop someone else having them. Will you go and live in Spain?'

Frances looked up.

‘I might—'

‘I can't advise you. I can't advise anyone, I'm not fit for it. But I'll support you.'

‘Will you? Oh, will you?'

‘I was in such a temper when you started this affair. I thought: How could you be so stupid, when it couldn't possibly have a future, how could you lay the foundations so carefully for pain? Then I thought: What's pain, for heaven's sake, and what's life if all you do is try and avoid it? I considered your love affair. I asked myself: If you hadn't done that, what would you have done? Married one of those feeble young men who always found you so attractive or just gone trailing on sending tidy tourists to Tuscany and ended up just like me, in essence, frustrated and futile. But then you
started
this baby and I thought: She's done it! Frances has damn well gone and done it! I hadn't felt that exhilarated since I decided to go to Marrakesh which was, incidentally, not at all what it was cracked up to be and full of extremely second-rate drop-outs who were mostly too stoned to make sense. And I thought: Hurray, at last William and I will see eye to eye about something, and I found that, instead of rejoicing, he was shaking with respectable anxiety. I told him, I've had enough of the only permitted unorthodoxies being for William. What would you have done, I said to him, if Juliet had had a baby?'

‘And?' Frances said, amazed.

Barbara slapped top slices of bread on the sandwiches.

‘He hadn't an answer. I don't think he'd ever thought about it. I know he's a dear, you needn't leap to his defence, but he's also intolerable in some ways. I'm tired of him and I'm even more tired of the sort of person that living with him makes me be.'

Frances put her hands over her face.

‘Will you divorce?'

‘Shouldn't think so. What would be the point?'

‘Have you told Lizzie?'

Barbara stopped slicing off crusts.

‘Not yet.'

‘Then I will,' Frances said. ‘I'd like to. Please let it be me that tells her this!'

‘All right. If you want to. It would probably be best anyway—'