A Spanish Lover Read Free Page A

room of the Battersea flat, and its beginnings were very shaky, with too few customers and too many mistakes. Then Frances realized that she would have to look at every single bed and table at which she expected her clients to sleep and eat, so she went to Italy for four months, driving herself along the minor roads of Tuscany and Umbria in a hired Fiat she used as an office and a wardrobe and, sometimes, as a bedroom. Before she went, she was apprehensive that she would find it all a cliché, done to death by the remorseless English mania for a civilized release from the shackles of a chilly Puritanism into an acceptable sensuality. But she needn’t have worried. You could read about it in a thousand novels and newspaper articles, you could see it as the richly romantic backdrop to a thousand films, yet still, Frances thought, no sensitive heart could fail to lift, every time, at the sight of that landscape, the lines of the olive-dun and grape-blue hills punctuated by saffron walls, russet roofs and the casually, perfectly placed charcoal-dark spires of the cypress trees.
    She set up little journeys for her clients. Some were through vineyards, some were for painters, or photographers, some were like small investigations, in search of the Etruscans, or Piero della Francesca, or a once mighty, now decayed family, like the Medicis. She sold her share of the flat in Battersea to a brisk girl specializing in venture capital, and moved north, across the river, to a narrow house just off the Fulham Road. She couldn’t afford to buy it, so she rented it, using the ground floor as offices, and living on the first floor with a view, at the back, of someone else’s cherry tree. She hired an assistant, a girl to work the switchboard and run errands, and invested the last of her borrowings in computers. Before the company was four years old, three larger, well-established and better-known businesses had tried to buy her out.
    Lizzie was proud of her. At Frances’s request, Lizzie came up to London, and planned the décor of the ground-floor office, covering the floor with seagrass matting, and the walls with immense, seductive photographs of Italy – bread and wine on an iron table on a loggia, with a distant view of a towered hill-town beyond, Piero’s infinitely moving pregnant Virgin from the cemetery chapel at Monterchi, a gleaming modern girl swinging carelessly down a timeless, mouldering medieval street. They installed an Italian coffee machine, and a baby fridge to hold pale-green bottles of Frascati, to offer customers.
    â€˜You see,’ Frances said. ‘You see? I told you it wouldn’t change us. I
told
you.’
    â€˜I was afraid,’ Lizzie said.
    â€˜I know.’
    â€˜I’m very ashamed of that now, it seems so selfish, but I couldn’t help feeling it.’
    â€˜I know.’
    â€˜And now I’m just proud. It’s wonderful. How are bookings?’
    Frances held out both hands, fingers crossed.
    â€˜Solid,’ she said.
    That, Lizzie thought now, had been their only hiccup, the only time when their parallel progress together through life had faltered even a step. Looking back, Lizzie not only felt a twinge of residual shame at her lack of generosity, but a puzzlement. Why had she been afraid? Knowing Frances as she did, what was there to fear in a personality that was almost her own, twined about her own as it was? Frances was, after all, the least greedy of people. Lizzie hoped, with a sudden, small, urgent pang, that she wasn’t greedy. Had she, she asked herself sternly, ever envied Frances those trips to Italy while she stayed in Langworth attending Sam’s measles or Alistair’s cello practice or weary late-night sessions with Robert and the Gallery accounts? Only for a second, she told herself, only for a fleeting second, when beside herself with exhaustion and demands, would she ever have willingly exchanged her richly domestic and