A Spanish Lover by Joanna Trollope Read Free Book Online

see everything properly, really meet the staff. He said he and his father usually work at Christmas because his father doesn’t like Christmas.’
    â€˜But you could have gone on Boxing Day,’ Lizzie insisted. She had taken the armful of presents Frances had brought and had dumped them, just anyhow, on the floor by the Christmas tree, as if she didn’t care about them in the slightest.
    â€˜But I didn’t want to,’ Frances said. ‘I wanted to go
now
.’
    â€˜Want,’ Lizzie shouted. ‘Want! When do I ever get to do what I want?’
    â€˜Lizzie,’ Frances said, trying to take her sister’s hand and finding it snatched away, ‘I’m your sister, but I’m not
you
. I can’t take your life into every consideration about my life, any more than you can about mine.’
    â€˜
Please
don’t go,’ Lizzie had begged then. ‘Please don’t. I need you here, you know what it’s like—’
    â€˜It’s only a day,’ Frances said. ‘Christmas is only a day.’
    Lizzie burst into tears.
    â€˜But why won’t you tell me the truth? Why won’t you tell me why you want to go, why you don’t want to be here?’
    â€˜Because I don’t really know,’ Frances said.
    Lying back in the plane, she knew that to say that had been an evasion. There were things in Lizzie, aspects of Lizzie, that Frances had always evaded, had learned in fact, to evade. From their earliest times together, those times when they had done nothing separately, not even the most intimate things, Frances had kept something back. It wasn’t a large something, but it was private, an area of herself that was her own and which therefore had to be kept secret. As a little girl, she had loved the physical closeness of Lizzie, but she hadn’t wanted to talk all the time, she had liked lying or sitting cuddled up to Lizzie, but thinking her own, silent thoughts. They hadn’t been very profound thoughts, Frances considered, being mostly dreamy stories set in mysterious and misty places, but they had been very satisfying and very necessary. It was also very necessary that they shouldn’t be told. Lizzie had never asked her what she was thinking; perhaps it had never occurred to her to, perhaps she assumed that they were both thinking the same thing.
    Frances loved Lizzie. She loved her strength and her competence and the energy that manifested itself in the Gallery and the house and her brood of children and her love of colour. She had loved it too on the rare occasions when Lizzie’s competence broke down, as it had on the death of Alistair’s twin, and she turned to Frances with a kind of sweet, trusting dependence, all the sweeter for being so rare, and so honest. It was horrible to hurt Lizzie, horrible to see that Lizzie could not, would not, even begin to understand that they were, for the moment, divided by their own needs and preoccupations. Frances felt guilty that Lizzie should be so tired while she, Frances, flew away to Spain. But why should she feel guilty? She hadn’t chosen Lizzie’s life, Lizzie had chosen it herself. So why feel guilty? Because Lizzie had made her feel so, just as, in a smaller way, the woman next to her, who so wanted to tell her about her son dressing up as Robin Hood in order to pull pints for English tourists in a Spanish bar, made her feel guilty.
    â€˜Don’t feel guilty,’ Frances told herself. ‘Just don’t. You aren’t responsible.’
    â€˜Pardon?’ the woman said.
    â€˜Why are women so prone to feeling guilty?’ Frances said, giving up and opening her eyes. ‘Why do women always feel so
obliged
to everybody else?’
    The woman looked hard at Frances for a few seconds, then she picked up her flight magazine again and looked intently at a page of ads for duty-free scent.
    â€˜I’m sure I don’t know,’ she said, and then