A Spanish Lover Read Online Free PDF Page A

out completely, quite justified in saying it’s all very well for him …
    â€˜It’s all very well for you,’ Barbara said. ‘But I’m simply not even going to contemplate—’
    â€˜No,’ William said. ‘Of course not. Just as you like.’
    She relaxed her grip a little.
    â€˜Lovely flowers,’ she said, in a more normal voice. ‘Mother sent horrors. Look over there. Mauve Chrysanths, only fit for a funeral. How could she find such a thing in May?’
    â€˜I’m going to look at the girls,’ William said.
    â€˜They look quite intelligent,’ Barbara said. ‘Luckily.’
    To William, they looked vulnerable, beautiful, and heart-stoppingly his. He couldn’t believe them. He couldn’t believe that they were so tiny, so complete, that they were there in the world at all and not in some confused and obscurely imagined arrangement upside down inside Barbara.
    â€˜Oh,’ William said. He touched each cheek with a rapturous forefinger. ‘Oh, thank you!’
    Barbara almost smiled.
    â€˜They’re going to be called Helena and Charlotte.’
    William touched his daughters again. One of them stirred and sucked briefly at the air with a miniature mouth.
    â€˜No they’re not.’
    Barbara, unable to sit up on account of inches of post-natal stitchery, raised her head commandingly.
    â€˜Yes they are. I’ve decided. Charlotte and Helena.’
    â€˜No,’ William said. He straightened up and looked at Barbara, glaring at him from her blank white pillows. ‘On the day you told me you were going to have twins, I called them, in my mind, Frances and Elizabeth. I knew they wouldn’t be boys – don’t ask me how, I just knew. They have been Frances and Elizabeth for months.’
    â€˜But I don’t like Frances.’
    â€˜I don’t like Barbara much, either,’ William said, adding after a pause, but without any urgency, ‘as a name, that is.’
    Barbara opened her mouth, and then shut it again. William waited. Gradually, she subsided back on to her pillows, and closed her eyes.
    â€˜As you wish.’
    â€˜This one is Frances,’ William said. ‘The one with the bigger nose.’
    â€˜Neither of them have any nose to speak of. Elizabeth is the older. Frances gave me far more trouble, I thought I—’
    The door opened. A nurse put her head in.
    â€˜Bottle time!’ she said.
    William thought improbably of black bottles of stout, amber bottles of cider, green bottles of gin …
    â€˜I’m not feeding them,’ Barbara said. ‘I mean—’ She gestured at the blue frills of her nylon nightgown. ‘I mean, I’m not feeding them myself. I refuse.’
    â€˜I see,’ William said, never having given any previous thought to how babies were sustained.
    â€˜And another thing—’
    â€˜Yes?’
    â€˜The moment I can get out of bed, I’m going up to London. I’m going to the Marie Stopes Clinic. To arrange’, said Barbara loudly, ‘for really effective contraception.’
    The twins were exhausting babies, colicky and fretful. William and Barbara took it in turns to get up in the night for them, and in the afternoons the daughter of the school’s head groundsman, who was waiting for a place at a training college for nursery nurses, came up so that Barbara could get a couple of hours’ sleep.
    It was a peculiar existence for a year. William forgot what ordinary life was like, life where adult priorities really could be priorities, where one wasn’t dazed and fuddle-headed from lack of sleep, where conversations with Barbara weren’t exclusively about how many ounces Frances had taken and how often Elizabeth had been sick. He wasn’t in the least resentful of the twins’ tyranny over their lives, merely accepting it as he had accepted so many changes previously, like the early death of his