A Spanish Lover Read Online Free PDF Page B

suppose.’
    â€˜Why did she go?’
    â€˜I’m breaking out,’ Barbara had said to William. ‘Living here is like living in a strait-jacket. I’m forty. If I don’t break out now I never will and I’ll break down instead.’
    â€˜But are you telling me in all seriousness’, William said, ‘that you’re joining the hippie trail?’ He looked at Barbara. It was early autumn and she was wearing a corduroy skirt, a Viyella blouse and a profoundly middle -aged lovat-green cardigan. ‘The
hippie trail
? Seriously? Caftans and love beads?’
    â€˜Yes,’ said Barbara.
    â€˜I think’, William said to his daughters, ‘that she has gone away because she has been too well-behaved for too long. Perhaps it’s being a headmaster’s daughter. She’s gone away to behave badly for a bit, to get it out of her system.’
    â€˜Do you mind?’ Frances said.
    â€˜William looked at her. ‘Not really. Do you?’
    The twins exchanged glances. ‘I should have preferred her to have said goodbye,’ Lizzie said severely.
    She was away for ten months. In those ten months, the twins took their eleven-plus examinations and gained places at the grammar school. William put the brochures for Cheltenham Ladies’ College and Wycombe Abbey School in the dustbin. He also, supposing that Barbara was both smoking marijuana and being unfaithful to him, started having a single glass of whisky in the evenings, and taking to bed a local woman called Juliet Jones, who lived in an isolated cottage and was an excellent and successful potter. The twins completed the last year of their junior school, acquired gentle Somerset accents without Barbara there to correct them, grew used to having Juliet about (she was a better cook than Barbara) and wrote long joint letters to Marrakesh describing their daily rounds, and asking Barbara to bring them back gold-thonged sandals, worry beads and some desert, in a jam jar.
    Barbara came home and no-one recognized her. She was very thin, with kohl-smudged eyes and hennaed hair and the backs of her hands and tops of her feet were painted with indigo-blue patterns. She gave each of the twins a little silver hand of Fatima, to ward off the evil eye, and told William, in front of the children, that she loved him and was thankful to be back.
    â€˜But I’m also’, she said firmly, ‘thankful that I went.’
    William didn’t know what he felt about her, but then, he never had. While she was away, he had considered leaving her for Juliet, but now he reconsidered this. Barbara went upstairs to the bathroom and was locked inside for a time. When she came down, her hands were still painted, and her hair was still burnished, but she was wearing conventional clothes and her eyes had reverted – rather boringly, the twins thought – to normal.
    â€˜I think I shall make a shepherd’s pie,’ Barbara said.
    â€˜Please don’t,’ Frances said. She held her hand of Fatima very tightly for courage. ‘We’d so much rather have Juliet’s.’
    â€˜Who’s Juliet?’ Barbara said. She looked at William.
    He looked back at her. Even Frances, at eleven, noticed how elated he looked, quite unafraid.
    â€˜I was just coming to that,’ William said.
    Life was quite different, after that. The twins were suddenly given their independence, great dollops of it, going in and out of Bath for school on the bus, on their own, allowed to go to the cinema, or for bicycle rides, permitted to help themselves to food from the refrigerator. Barbara continued to live with William, and William continued, with unaffected discretion, to see Juliet. Books began to appear, books of a kind that William had never even conceived, let alone heard of, books by Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir. Barbara, at forty-two, her adventure behind her and her marriage determinedly still ahead, had taken to