A Spanish Lover by Joanna Trollope

Author:Joanna Trollope
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781409011644
Publisher: Transworld

12

‘I BET HE’LL be spoddy,’ Harriet said.

Alistair, who was reading a book of Davy’s about an owl who was frightened of the dark, said, without raising his eyes from the page, ‘Why?’

‘Well, he’s foreign. Remember those French boys we had to have at school? They were utterly spoddy.’

Alistair began to twiddle a piece of hair on top of his head.

‘He’s quite old, though. Mum said.’

‘Spoddiness isn’t a matter of age,’ Harriet said scornfully, ‘it just happens. It’s like all those awful poets maundering on about the first pathetic aconite of spring. They’re as old as the hills and they’re all spoddy.’

Alistair chucked his book on the floor. The owl had been coaxed out into the night and found it could see better then than by day, so that the ending was both happy and feeble.

‘Well, our aunt seems to be pretty gone on him—’

Harriet flushed. The notion of love stirred her up and created an unpleasant inward physical turmoil.

‘It’s going to be so embarrassing—’

‘What is?’

‘Watching them.’

‘Well, don’t look then.’

But Harriet was longing to look. Clearly Frances was having sex with this potentially spoddy Spaniard and this, because they were not married to each other, (married sex was too disgusting and embarrassing even to contemplate), was both panic-making and completely fascinating. Harriet had several times, drifting elaborately in and out of her bedroom, seen Frances naked. She had looked a lot like Lizzie – whom Harriet did not, at present, ever wish to see naked – except that she was both thinner and smoother. Their bottoms were too big, Harriet considered, but their legs were all right and their b … well, their bosoms were awful, really embarrassing, and as for their … Harriet swallowed and twisted round on the window seat to gaze furiously out into the street. If she let herself think about a man touching Frances with no clothes on, she thought she might just blow up.

‘Granny says that he is unquestionably well off,’ Alistair said, sprawling off his beanbag to pick up A Child’s Guide to Dinosaurs which lay just out of his reach.

‘I wish we were,’ Harriet said gloomily.

Alistair opened the book. The first picture was of a diplodocus standing despondently in a lake, to which Sam had added spectacles and a bow for its tail in red crayon.

‘It’s the recession, I’m afraid. A business like ours was bound to suffer.’

‘Why do you have to talk like that?’

‘Like what?’

‘All la-di-da and pompous.’

‘I merely’, Alistair said, settling back into the beanbag and preparing to read about the brain size of the diplodocus, ‘take trouble to use the English language with some care.’

Harriet got off the window seat. She decided to change her black tights for her other black tights. She stepped over her brother.

‘Even if’, she said precisely, ‘this Spanish person turns out to be a spod, he can’t possibly be as spoddy as you are.’

Alistair sighed. The diplodocus had been an un-enterprising herbivore and had, it seemed, richly deserved its inevitable extinction. Harriet crossed the playroom, opened the door and went out, slamming it behind her.

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