A Spanish Lover Read Online Free PDF

parents, or his marriage to Barbara, but he did think to himself occasionally that it was perhaps as well that most prospective parents had no real conception of what having children would mean, otherwise hardly anyone – and certainly no-one with any imagination – would even attempt it.
    At fifteen months, everything changed. The twins transformed themselves from undersized, sallow grizzlers into admirable, healthy toddlers, peach-bloomed and enterprising. They walked early, talked early, and showed a pleasing enthusiasm for books. Barbara, who had looked after them with the grim conscientiousness she applied to the kitchen paintwork and the household accounts, began to display something approaching pride in them. She also tried to detach William from his intimate participation in their lives, a participation she had demanded during the first terrible year. William, as with the twins’ names, had refused.
    â€˜I’ve bathed them since they were born, and I’m going on bathing them. I shall also go on feeding them and taking them for walks and reading to them and discouraging them from poking sticks in dogs’ eyes and being impertinent to your mother.’
    â€˜You should be interested in your career,’ Barbara said.
    â€˜You mean you think it’s time I was a housemaster?’
    â€˜You’re twenty-eight, you know. Even headmasters are beginning to get younger—’
    â€˜I don’t want to be a headmaster,’ William said. ‘I don’t want to administer, I want to teach. And I want to be with my daughters.’
    When the twins were four Barbara and William had a serious quarrel. Barbara, reared exclusively in the world of private education, wanted them to go to a nursery school in Langworth, run by the wife of a master at her father’s school. William defied her, and his parents-in-law. Impelled by an instinctive feeling that the rule of convention in lives like his and Barbara’s amounted almost to a stranglehold, he announced that his daughters would go to the local village state school. There was a tremendous row. It went on for several days and evenings and Frances and Lizzie – whose opinion was never considered – listened uncomprehendingly from the landing outside their bedroom, sucking their thumbs and holding opposite ends of the same comfort blanket.
    In the end, there was a bargain. The twins would go to Moira Cresswell’s school in Langworth for two years, then they would go to the village school until the time came for them to sit their eleven-plus examination. Then, said William, they would go to grammar school , in Bath. Over her dead body, Barbara shouted. It was to be Cheltenham Ladies’ College or Wycombe Abbey School, or nothing. The twins sucked and listened. The only school they knew was the one where Daddy taught, full of cold corridors and raw boys and shrilling bells. There were no girls there.
    When it came to it, William had his way almost entirely, because something extraordinary happened. When the twins were ten, and Frances, in particular, was beginning to be naughty, in a dreamy, elusive way that was very hard to pin down and punish, Barbara suddenly went away. One minute, it seemed, she was tweaking chair covers into place, saying organizing things into the telephone, watching you like a hawk to make sure you didn’t put your spinach into the vase of anemones on the kitchen table as once you had ingeniously done, and the next, she was gone. It was very weird. She went as neatly as she did everything else, leaving no sign of her going, and no apparent gaps in the house either. Lizzie and Frances were almost too stunned to cry.
    William said she had gone to Morocco.
    â€˜Where’s Morocco?’
    He got out an atlas and put it on the floor and they all knelt round it.
    â€˜There. That’s Morocco. And there’s Marrakesh. Mummy’s gone to Marrakesh. For a long kind of holiday, I