A Spanish Lover (41 page)

‘
Us
,' Robert said emphatically.

Lizzie got up and went round the table to lean against him.

‘Frances's baby is going to be like Beverely Lane-Smith, isn't it?'

Robert kissed her hair.

‘Shore-Gómez Moreno—'

‘Oh Rob, it's so sad, it's so lonely, poor baby—'

Robert put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her away from him, shaking her a little.

‘Won't you ever learn?'

She turned her face away, smiling faintly.

‘I'm so tired of learning—'

‘Listen,' Robert said fiercely, ‘listen to me. It's our parents' shortcomings that make us, they made you, they made me,
our
shortcomings will make
our
children, you see if they don't. How do you learn to swim along otherwise? How do you learn about a wider world if you have everything you could ever need at home? Endless happiness isn't formative, it only makes you vulnerable, or else it makes you smug. And another thing. Wearing a wedding ring doesn't mean you're automatically a better mother! And one good parent is a lot more than most people get!' He stopped and drew a breath, ‘OK?'

‘OK,' Lizzie said. She was really smiling now.

‘Then go and ring your father,' Robert said, ‘and I shall go and do a little formative shouting at the children.'

‘Rob—'

‘Yes?'

‘I wasn't jealous on purpose,' Lizzie said. ‘I didn't ask to be, I didn't mean to be. It's terrible being jealous, it's like being chained to someone else, who's completely mad. And it's so destructive—'

‘I know all this,' he said politely, ‘really I do. Remember, I was the one with a seat in the stalls.'

Lizzie pushed her fringe off her forehead.

‘I'm trying to say sorry.'

‘You don't have to.'

‘But I need to somehow, I—' She paused and then she said, ‘I know I went absolutely over the top about Frances, I know that, and I don't blame her for wanting to have her baby miles away from me, but it does haunt me that I may have damaged something between us that won't ever be mended.'

Robert gave a little bark of laughter.

‘Oh no.'

‘No?'

‘Not you two,' he said. He leaned forward and gave her a quick, rough kiss. ‘As far as you two are concerned, I reckon you'll always feel the twitch upon the thread.'

PART FIVE

December

21

‘IT'S A SAINT'S
day,' the taxi driver said. He had had to slow the cab to a crawl.

Ahead of them some local Sevillian
cofradía
swayed along the street in procession, carrying a statue on a primitive litter draped in spangled blue cloth. The statue was draped in spangles too, in a robe of white brocade that glittered like hoar frost edged in what looked like white marabou. When the taxi finally managed to overtake the procession, Frances knew she would be alarmed and repelled by the statue's face, the highly painted, sentimental, doll-like face of an obscure Catholic saint, or even of one of the myriad versions of the Virgin, the Virgin of the Dews, or the Rosary, or the Holy Blood.

‘Can't we overtake them?' Frances asked.

The taxi driver shrugged. ‘When the street is wider.' He glanced at Frances in his driving mirror. ‘Will two minutes make so much difference?'

‘I don't know,' Frances said. She held her belly. ‘I've never done this before.'

‘I have five—'

‘No,' Frances said, ‘your wife had five. You don't know what it feels like.'

‘True,' he said, smiling. He was a little man, like so many Andalusians, and he had helped her into the cab very tenderly, with great solicitude and without any embarrassment. Luis had not been there. He hadn't suggested he should be, and Frances hadn't either.

The members of the brotherhood in the procession
wore
dark suits and ties. The men were at the front with the glittering saint and behind them the women bunched together, the old ones in black with black mantillas as if for Holy Week, the younger ones in respectful finery and high-heeled shoes. The little boys had ties, like their fathers, the little girls wore bows in their hair. There was about everybody, and even from behind, an air both of formality and of devotion.

‘Now,' the taxi driver said.

The street had widened by a few feet between the shuttered shop fronts, closed in honour of the day. The driver gave a small polite touch to his horn, and edged the taxi first level with the procession and then slowly past it. The nearest people in the long line turned their heads without any particular curiosity and regarded Frances, both unmistakably pregnant and unmistakably not Spanish, as she slid by, and then turned back again towards the swaying white back of their image.

‘It is so easy to feel left out in Sevilla,' Ana had said once. ‘Life here is so much for the people of the city. Strangers come here for the
feria
, expecting to be swept up into a great flamenco carnival, and find that they are asked to nothing. The whole of Sevilla is having a party, but it is not for outsiders.'

‘It is a very local city,' Frances's Spanish doctor had said on another occasion. She came from Galicia and was mildly contemptuous of her southern compatriots. ‘It isn't even like the rest of Andalucía, it isn't like anywhere!'

Frances liked her doctor. She was called María Luisa Ramírez, and she had come to Seville with her mother, after her father died, and her mother, a Sevillian, had longed to return home. Dr Ramírez had been born in the rainy, green Atlantic region of the north, and she said her parents were both spiritually and politically conservative. She told Frances that her childhood had been very happy, orderly and settled, belonging to an
almost
vanished era whose annual cycles were punctuated by family occasions, schooling, and the frequent festivals of the Catholic Church. At the feast of Corpus Christi, she said, her family's whole town combined to cover the streets with the innumerable petals of flowers painstakingly arranged in complicated patterns, like a carpet, for the holy procession to walk over. They stayed up all night, making these flower carpets, and although Dr Ramírez said she was now an atheist and a socialist, she still remembered those nights before Corpus Christi as some of the happiest times she had ever spent.

She never asked Frances personal questions that didn't relate either to Frances's or the baby's welfare. They both referred to Luis simply as ‘the father'. Dr Ramírez had known Ana de Mena for three years, so Frances supposed that she must also make the connection, but if so, she didn't speak of it. She handled Frances, both physically and psychologically, with great sympathy. She loved working as an obstetrician, she said, it gave her both satisfaction and hope. For her first years in Seville, before she had taken a special course in gynaecology and obstetrics, she had worked in the huge hospital that served Triana, the poorer quarter of Seville, on the other side of the river. She had worked mostly in the casualty department there, but had grown afraid of what such work was doing to her.

‘If death becomes commonplace,' she told Frances, ‘your sense of morality diminishes.'

Frances thought that they were probably about the same age. She tried to imagine Dr Ramírez's home life with her mother in the flat they shared in the west of the city, behind the Fine Arts Museum. For all Frances knew, Dr Ramírez simply lived with her mother and worked in the hospital, a steady, uneventful, useful life, undisturbed by the tempest of falling in love or
longing
for a baby. The thought of the English equivalent – working in a hospital in Bath and living in Barbara's newly acquired flat there – was somehow both ludicrous and impossible, yet the alternative Frances had chosen, she told herself, was hardly less so, in its way.

She had, in the late summer, suggested to Nicky that she become a partner with her in Shore to Shore, with responsibility both for the English end of the business and for the lease on the office and flat in Fulham, an arrangement to take effect on the 1st of December, a week before the baby was due. Nicky had been serenely pleased about this, just as she had been calmly congratulatory about the baby and reticent on the subject of Luis. Frances had then informed Luis that she would like his help in setting up an office in Seville.

‘Hopeless,' he had said at once. ‘Wrong nationality, wrong Spanish city, wrong timing.'

‘I can't help that,' Frances said, ‘I have to be here. English people do set up businesses in Spain all the time. Look at all those bars and blocks of flats and golf courses all along the Costa del Sol—'

‘You need connections,' Luis said.

‘
You
are my connection!'

‘Frances,' Luis said, ‘what is it you intend?'

She had tried not to sound impatient.

‘I am trying to stay in the place where our child has the best chance of seeing both parents. And for myself, I am trying to stay in
Spain
.'

He had shrugged, but he hadn't argued further. He had simply said in that level, calm, kind voice he now used with her most of the time that she could not just set up a business on her own in Seville, it simply wouldn't work, she would have to buy into one. He told her that the bureaucracy involved would put all that she had already encountered at the hospital in the shade.

‘It is very difficult to get residency in Spain. It might involve you in visits to a dozen offices. Are you prepared for that? Also as many visits for bank accounts, for getting the utilities connected to a flat or an office. And your fiscal identity number. Every Spaniard has one. More visits, more bureaucracy, more red tape. It could take you months, very repetitive, very slow. Do you really want to face all that?'

‘Yes,' Frances said.

He had introduced her, down a labyrinthine chain of business friends, to a man who owned, among other things, a travel company at an excellent address in Seville, just off the Calle Sierpes. There had been several meetings conducted, on the Spanish side, with perfect courtesy and, at the same time, with a palpable amazement at Frances's proposals, nationality and condition.

‘This is most unusual,' the owner of the travel company had said, over and over again. ‘This is not at all common in Spain. How will it be financed? How will it proceed? Is it practical? Is it possible?'

Frances had brought her company accounts out to Seville, proud of the turnover they showed. They were taken from her politely but very gingerly, as if her pregnant state somehow invalidated and made preposterous the pages of satisfactory figures, as if her presence in the office was like a bomb ticking quietly in an airline bag, and she might just explode, without warning, there and then, and make a farce of a sober business meeting. There were many glances at her left hand. On it she wore, as she had now worn for over a year, a silver ring Luis had given her set with an intaglio of chrysoprase, as green as jade. It was definitely not a wedding ring, was it, the glances said, but on the other hand, it was on the wedding finger. Yet this determined Señorita Shore had been sent by Luis Gómez Moreno with whom the owner of the
travel
company had, all those years ago, taken his first communion. And the figures were excellent, the rate of growth of her company steady, her proposals for offering English holidays in small, selected hotels to Spanish people certainly possible … He smiled at Frances.

‘These holidays would have to be most carefully planned. The Spanish, as a race, like to keep moving—'

‘I've noticed,' Frances said.

Except now, she thought, leaning forward in the taxi. The driver, now well clear of the procession, was still driving with reverent slowness, gazing at the scene behind him in the driving mirror.

‘Please,' she said urgently, ‘please, I would like you to hurry—'

His eyes met hers in the mirror. He smiled again, and jerked his right thumb backwards towards the painted idol in her tinsel crown behind them, smiling her vacant red smile.

‘You should pray to her,' the taxi driver said. ‘You should pray to the Virgin, to grant you a fine son.'

Frances fell back against the seat. Could he mean what he had just said, could he literally mean it? If so, it wasn't just another language he spoke in, it was another world of concepts he inhabited, a world she had elected to join. A contraction seized her. She gave a little gasp.

‘It's exactly,' she said, ‘nine months too late for that.'

The hospital was new. Half of it was finished and orderly, with lawns and car-parks and bossy notice-boards planted in beds of begonias, and half of it was still a building site. Frances had been there once before to register as a future patient and to fill in a thousand forms, some for the Spanish regional health authority, some for the Spanish national health system and some
for
the relevant department of the European Community, sanctioning Miss Frances Shore to the benefits of the English National Health Service within the boundaries of member states. The staff who had dealt with her had shown no surprise; presumably, to them, to wish to have a baby in Seville was as natural as breathing.

Between them, Ana and Dr Ramírez had done Frances proud. She was taken into a small single room off the general labour ward, with a view, not of cement mixers and cranes, but of a grove of new young palm trees planted in an equally new lawn of tough Spanish grass, and scattered about with metal seats painted in the colours so beloved by Seville, ochre and white and dusty-pink. There were a few round flowerbeds empty yet of any flowers, whose reddish earth an old man in faded overalls was tenderly sprinkling with water. Beyond the palm grove and the lawn, the blocks of flats of northern Seville began again festooned with strings of washing, and further away still was a church tower and a bell tower and the dome of something – a convent perhaps – on which a golden crucifix glimmered in the sun.