A Spanish Lover (39 page)

‘Why indeed—'

‘I'm not thinking about it any more anyway,' Lizzie said.

‘Aren't you?'

‘No,' Lizzie said. ‘There's no point. It's not my life any more, it's hers. I mightn't like that, but that's how it is, so—' She put the back of her hand to her mouth and stopped.

Robert put his toothbrush down and then he knelt by the bath.

‘Thank God for that,' he said.

20

WHEN WILLIAM HAD
at last gone, Juliet was filled with a sudden energy, a violent, unnatural, purging energy. It led her to pile all the small pieces of furniture that she could lift on to the big central table where her sewing machine stood, and brush fiercely at the rush matting that covered the floor, raising clouds of dust and legions of aggrieved woodlice. She brushed until her arms ached, then she put the furniture back and stripped all the covers off the cushions to wash, and cleaned the windows and lifted the sewing machine and all the heaps of attendant fabric off the table prior to spreading on the latter, with half an old pair of pyjama bottoms, a thin, nourishing layer of beeswax polish made by a retired dentist in the village, who kept bees.

Then she suddenly couldn't do any more. She stood for a moment by the table, holding the rag and the jar and felt that she hadn't even the energy to unscrew the lid. She put both down on the table, and leaned there for a moment, then, like somebody fainting, groped her way across the room, holding on to things as she went, and half-fell into the wicker chair where the poor denuded cushions lay like a heap of plucked chickens. As she collapsed among them, a few tiny dusty feathers rose into the air and settled gently on her clothes.

‘There's no change without sacrifice,' Juliet said out loud, wearily, to the dishevelled room, ‘and it seems that there is no continuity without it either.' She put
her
hands over her face. They were rough from cleaning, and smelled of dusters. Was life, in the end, just a series of losses, a manifest reflecting image, of those hundreds of thousands of brain cells that one was reputed to lose, impotently, every day from the age of fifteen onwards? I must get a dog, Juliet thought, or a cat or a canary. I must have someone to say these things to, otherwise I shall turn into a muttering old loony up here on my hill, it's what happens to people who live alone and that's what I shall do for ever now, it's what I have just, finally, chosen to do.

‘I'm so sorry,' she had said to William.

He had smiled, a sad, stiff little smile.

‘I expect I'm just being pathetic.'

‘It
is
frightening, getting older,' Juliet said. ‘It is frightening, wondering how one will cope, but I'm not at all sure, except for limited and mechanical purposes, that the presence of another human being actually makes any difference. Unless of course, you're ill.'

William was holding a glass of cider, the flat, potent, amber-coloured cider that came from a local farm.

‘I wonder if I just left it too late—'

‘No,' Juliet said, hating herself for being honest but feeling equally that honesty was the least she owed him, after all these years, ‘I never wanted to live with you, I never wanted to live with anyone. Except perhaps – if I'd had one – with a child.'

William looked at her.

‘Barbara asked me what I would have done if you had had a baby—'

‘I tried to,' Juliet said. ‘I tried and failed exactly as Frances has tried and succeeded. I'm glad, now.'

William tried not to feel aggrieved.

‘Are you?'

‘Yes,' Juliet said. ‘Frances is only just beginning—'

‘Please don't talk about it,' William said quickly.
‘Please
don't tell me what awful things lie ahead for her, please don't tell me you're glad now that you didn't have a child by me, please don't be so self-contained and separate and realistic and female and unreachable, please—' He stopped and took an unsteady swallow of cider.

‘Are you sure,' Juliet said, watching him, ‘that you didn't come up here because you really just couldn't think what to do next?'

‘No,' William said more confidently, ‘I came because—' He stopped. He couldn't, he found, say that he had come to ease the pain of losing Barbara, that Juliet had always been his bolt hole, the person and place he turned to when troubled or unhappy. He looked up. Juliet was wearing the sort of expression that made him wonder, uneasily, if she knew exactly what he was thinking anyway.

She said more gently, ‘Did you really, truly, think that we could live together now? Can you honestly imagine it?'

‘I'm quite easy, you know—'

‘I didn't mean that.'

‘I don't want to know what you meant,' he said. He drained his glass. ‘I expect I'll find a flat in Langworth, near Lizzie, and then I can toddle to the library and the bowling club and the post office on pension days, can't I, in a manner appropriate to a dear old thing—'

‘You aren't a dear old thing,' Juliet said sharply, ‘you're a self-pitying one. It's no good blaming life, William Shore, it's no good blaming anything, you're not a leaf on the wind, you're a person!'

He sighed.

‘That's what Barbara says.'

‘You're like a ping-pong ball,' Juliet went on energetically. ‘You've just let yourself be batted back and forth between Barbara and me all these years saying, “Oh help,” to yourself in mild astonishment
every
so often, but never
doing
anything. I did love you, I do, you're one of the most lovable people I've ever known, but I couldn't live with you in a million years. Who could I bat you away to when I needed my own space and time?'

He gazed at her. She waited, in sudden apprehension, for him to say something exasperating like, Am I really that impossible? but he didn't. He simply gazed as if he were both looking at and thinking a lot of things for the first time and then he said, unexpectedly, ‘The trouble with me is that my life has just been too easy, and if ever it shows signs of getting difficult, I make absolutely sure it stops any nonsense of that kind at once. I'm the original oyster. Always have been. I'd have made a whacking great pearl out of every grain of sand they shoved in faster than any other oyster on record.' He smiled at her. ‘Would you give the oyster a goodbye kiss?'

She was startled.

‘Goodbye? Why, won't we be seeing each other again?'

‘Oh, we'll
see
each other,' William said, ‘of course we will, but this is – the end of this bit. Isn't it?'

She nodded slowly. She thought to herself, in some astonishment: Yes, he is right, this is the end of this bit, but I wonder what else it will be the end of? They both stood up. She stayed where she was, and William came over and put his arms round her and kissed her on her forehead and then, more firmly, on her closed mouth. She felt, he thought, a little more solid than usual; to her, he felt more frail.

Then he stepped back and said, ‘I probably will join the bowling club, you know. To meet lots of nice ladies in white cardigans.'

Then he went. Juliet stood in the open doorway and, as she had done countless times before, watched his car bounce down the track – he was not a natural
driver
and it had never occurred to him to try and avoid the ruts – sending up plumes of smoky summer dust and showers of little stones.

And now she was sitting here with the sewing machine on the floor and a pile of cushion covers in the doorway to the kitchen and the air full of dust and flecks of feather. A chapter had closed. It had closed so that she could go on with life as it had always been, except that in actuality she couldn't, because the closing of the chapter meant, perversely, that her life would never be quite the same again. She had chosen to stay put while the humans in the landscape around her all changed places, and by so choosing she had kept something and lost something and how would she ever know if she had chosen to keep and to lose the right things? All you could do in these matters was trust your instincts, obey your inner voice. She had done it for years, so had William, and it sounded even as if at last inconsistent, caustic, three-cornered Barbara was doing it. And of course, Frances was,
par excellence
. Juliet looked at her sewing machine. She thought, automatically, of the baby clothes it might make and as she thought that she felt a rush of pure alarm for Frances followed, almost immediately, by a rush of even purer envy.

Harriet had earned thirty-three pounds and four pence. Robert had paid her in cash. He had said he would pay her the current under-eighteen basic wage for every hour she worked in the shop in the holidays, with fifty pence per hour extra for any overtime she did outside shop-opening times, unpacking or pricing or cleaning. Harriet could hardly believe it. She knelt on her bedroom floor and spread the notes and coins out on Davy's Rupert Bear rug. He was, in a way, too old for such a rug now, but he still liked it. He had told Harriet one night, when he was still awake when she came to
bed
, that he didn't much want to be bigger.

Harriet had never possessed so much money, had never, in her life before, seen the point, the possibility even, of the choice that it offered. She laid her hands on the money, pressing it to the rug, as if it were dough, as if she wanted to leave some mark on it, as hers. She felt a bit odd, a bit emotional, as if a lot of things that she had taken for granted in her life as forming the necessary, but apparently irrational, background for childhood, in fact had had a pattern and a reason all along. She gathered up the money, put it back neatly into the envelope in which Robert had given it to her, and slid it between the mattress and the divan base of her bed, pushing it right across against the wall.

In the sitting room, Alistair was making a swearwords chart. It had everyone's names across the top, and down the side, a list of swear words with, at Lizzie's request, most of the vowels replaced by asterisks. Alistair had concocted a system of fines and said the proceeds were going to charity. He had made a charity box, which he had hidden in his cupboard and which Harriet had looked for, and found, when he was out. He had covered it in left-over Christmas paper and stuck on neat transfer letters which read, ‘Save the Alistair Fund'. Harriet could read his mind like a book. He had done this because he was jealous of her working in the shop and Robert had said he would have to wait until he too was fourteen and nearly fifteen to work there as well. Harriet was waiting until the appropriate moment to expose the fraud of the charity box.

Alistair looked up as she came in.

‘How much did he give you?'

She went over to the sofa and draped herself across an arm.

‘None of your business.'

‘I can guess, anyway,' Alistair said. ‘I can easily work it out. He gave you thirty-three pounds, and four p.'

‘No he didn't.'

‘Yes,' Alistair said calmly, drawing neat lines under ‘b*gg*r' and ‘b*st*rd', ‘He did. He really is a fool. You aren't worth half that.'

Harriet picked her nails.

‘You're jealous.'

Alistair said nothing.

‘You are,' Harriet insisted. ‘You're jealous because you're no bloody use to anyone.' She bit off a hangnail. ‘You're just a drone, a dead weight on the family, you're like the little ones, you just take and take and you don't give anything back, you're useless.'

Alistair drooped his head lower and lower over his chart. Harriet peered at him.

‘Ally?'

He snuffled. Harriet got off the sofa.

‘You're crying!'

‘No!' Alistair yelled. He snatched his glasses off and hurled them across the room where they fell, with a small clatter, behind the television. His face was scarlet.

‘I don't want to live here any more!' he shouted. ‘I don't want to live with all these awful people. I don't want it to be so confusing!'

Harriet waited a bit, and then she said, ‘Where will you go?'

Alistair banged his fist down on the swear chart.

‘I'm not useless, I'm not, I'm not! I can work Dad's computer better than he can!'

‘Ally—'

‘I want to kill them!' Alistair screamed. ‘Mum and Dad and Granny and Grandpa all fighting and quarrelling!' He swung round on Harriet. ‘What about us?'

She regarded him soberly.

‘They don't ask us, they didn't ask us about the Grange—'

‘Do you want to go back there?'

Harriet thought.

‘No.'

‘I don't know what I want,' Alistair said drearily, ‘I just don't want all this to go on.'

Harriet took a huge breath. She said, ‘I'll lend you ten pounds.'

Alistair looked at her. His face was paler now, blotched red in all the wrong places, and his hair stood up in unkempt tufts at one side of his head.

‘Why?'

She shrugged.

‘I just will.'

He sighed and began to rummage behind the television for his spectacles.

‘It—'

‘Yes?'

‘It'd better be my money,' Alistair said, retrieving them.

‘What?'

‘It's better if it's my money. I mean, it's nice of you but I'd rather—'

‘I can't
give
it to you—'

‘No,' Alistair said. He put his spectacles on and rubbed at the lenses clumsily with his sweatshirt sleeve.

‘Why don't you ask Dad?'

‘Ask him?'

‘Why don't you ask if you can help on the computer?'

‘He'll only say no.'

‘He won't,' Harriet said, ‘he won't.'

Alistair trailed back to the table, picked up his swear chart and crumpled it up in his hands.

‘Why won't he?'

‘Because everything's different,' Harriet said.