A Spanish Lover Read Free

quite attractive. I think we look interesting.’
    â€˜To whom?’ Frances said.
    Lizzie looked at her.
    â€˜What were you going to tell me?’
    Frances leaned towards her reflection. She licked her forefinger and ran it along first one dark eyebrow and then the other.
    â€˜I’m starting my own business.’
    Lizzie gaped at her.
    â€˜You aren’t!’
    â€˜Why aren’t I?’
    â€˜Frances,’ Lizzie said, seizing her sister’s arm. ‘Frances, please think carefully. What do you know about running a business? You’ve always been employed, an employee—’
    â€˜Exactly,’ Frances said, ‘and now I’ve had enough.’ Gently, she took her arm away.
    â€˜Where’s the money coming from?’
    â€˜Where it usually comes from,’ Frances said. She turned up her shirt collar and pushed up her cardigan sleeves and turned to look at herself in the mirror, over her shoulder. ‘Some from the bank and some from Dad.’
    â€˜From Dad!’
    â€˜Yes. He lent you and Rob some, didn’t he?’
    â€˜Yes, but that was—’
    â€˜No,’ said Frances, interrupting. ‘It wasn’t different. It’s just the same, except that I am doing it later, and on my own.’
    Lizzie swallowed. ‘Of course.’
    â€˜Why don’t you want me to?’
    Lizzie went back to her bed, and sat beside Davy’s wicker basket, on the patchwork counterpane, one of the range made by a local farmer’s wife, that had proved one of the Gallery’s best sellers. Frances stayed where she was, by the wardrobe, leaning her back against the smooth, cold mirror-glass.
    â€˜We’re twins,’ Lizzie said.
    Frances bent her head and studied her feet, her too-big feet encased in good, dull, dark-blue leather loafers. She knew exactly what Lizzie meant. We are twins, Lizzie had said, leaving the subtext unspoken. We are twins, so we are a unit, we have a kind of joint wholeness, together we make up a rich, rounded person, but we are like two pieces of a jigsaw, we have to fit together, and to do that properly we can’t be exactly the same shape.
    â€˜You have the domestic life,’ Frances said. ‘I like that. I love it here, this house is home to me, your children are very satisfying to me. I don’t want any of that, that’s your part of our deal. But I must be allowed to expand myself a little if I need to. And I do. It won’t touch your business if I have a business, it won’t touch us, how we are, together.’
    â€˜Why do you want to do it?’ Lizzie said.
    â€˜Because I’m thirty-two and I know enough about travel now to know I’m better than a lot of people I work for. You want to have Davy christened, you’ve come to a point. I’ve just come to another one.’
    Lizzie looked at her. She remembered their first day at Moira Cresswell’s nursery school together, in green drill overalls, with ‘E. Shore’ and ‘F. Shore’ embroidered on them, for painting classes, and their hair held back by tight Alice bands made of green ribbon and elastic. ‘We won’t have to stay if we don’t want to,’ Frances had said to Lizzie, but Lizzie had sensed that wasn’t true. School had an inexorable feeling about it. She had hated watching Frances realize this.
    â€˜What kind of business will it be?’
    Frances smiled. She put her hands under her hair, lifted it off her neck and then let it fall back.
    â€˜Secret holidays. Staying in tiny towns and hidden hotels and even people’s houses. I shall start with Italy, because all the English have this passion for Italy.’
    â€˜And what will you call it?’
    Frances began to laugh. She did a dance step or two, holding out the sides of her skirt.
    â€˜Shore to Shore, of course!’
    Like Davy, Shore to Shore had grown out of all recognition in five years. It began in the sitting