by Dan Holloway
“That’s my job,” Tommy said. “You brought dinner. Here, try this.” He poured a vermouth glass of white Lillet that he’d taken out of the cupboard after talking to Bonnard.
“Spicy,” Rosie said. “And sweet. Put some ginger with the squid and it’ll be perfect.” He’d been right about her taste, he thought to himself.
She watched whilst Tommy sliced garlic and fresh ginger as fine as if they were slide samples. “I told Emily about Sunday night,” she said.
“I hope it hasn’t made life too difficult for you,” Tommy said. He wasn’t interested whether Emily had been jealous. That was strange, he thought. He’d had a lovely time with Em on Sunday afternoon. He’d felt closer to her than he’d thought he ever would again. He definitely wanted to see her again. Lots. But the thought of he and Rosie going round for dinner with her and David seemed just as pleasant as seeing her on her own. Provided David behaved himself, of course.
“I think she’s pleased.”
Tommy held her hand as he put the slices into sizzling chilli oil. “Oops,” he said. “I’m afraid that was the garlicky hand.”
Rosie smiled. She looked slightly awkward. He knew what she wanted to say. He knew she was worrying that she’d sound jealous; but he was pleased that she was confident enough to come out and say it. “So you don’t wish you were with her instead?”
“You must be joking,” he said. He put a generous handful of fresh tagliatelle into boiling water, and the spinach into another pan of hot butter.
“Last week,” she said. “She told me she thought we’d be good together. I thought she was having a joke.”
“Well, I’ not sure I’d have taken it as a compliment given our history.” He added the squid and squeezed the ink sacs into the wok, gave a quick flick of the wrist and turned the heat off. By the time he had drained the pasta the squid was cooked.
“So,” she said. He could tell she was as glad as he was to have got the Emily conversation out of the way, and had a feeling they’d both drawn a healthy line under it. That seemed like a very good foundation for a relationship. “You help rich people with no taste not to look silly in front of their friends, then, Tommy?”
“That’s one way of describing it I suppose.”
“What are you working on at the moment?”
“I don’t have any clients at the moment.”
“So what do you do with your day?”
Here we go, he thought. Here’s the other conversation he wasn’t exactly looking forward to. He wondered how much he should tell her. Keeping secrets wasn’t great. Then again, she was a detective sergeant. That was sure to involve some kind of professional ethics about following correct procedures in if he was up to no good. Not that he was, but he didn’t think she’d see it like that. And he really didn’t want to put her in an awkward spot.
“Snooping around,” he said casually.
“Snooping?”
“Basic Miss Marple kind of stuff,” he said, deciding to follow the liar’s code of sticking as close to the truth as he could get away with. “Becky Shaw wants to know about her father. She was just getting to know him then he died. I think she wants to know what he thought of her at the end. I’m trying to fill in some gaps for her.”
“I’ll have to watch out then if you’re chasing around after a younger woman.” Rosie sucked in a strand of tagliatelle that slapped on her lips and they fell about laughing.
“Not a chance,” Tommy said. He got up and stood behind her. He put his arm around her waist from behind, pushed aside her hair, and kissed the nape of her neck.
“So why does she want you to help her?” She reached her hand back and wrapped it around his neck.
“Because I was, apparently, his star pupil. She thinks I understand him.”
“And do you understand him?” She pulled his head against her neck and he kissed her again.
“No. I think I hardly know him.” With the hand that was around her waist he lifted her out of the chair and turned her to face him. He ran his eyes over the lines of her face, not embarrassed any longer. His fingers followed, and then his lips. “I have to leave at two tomorrow morning,” he said, realising there was never going to be a perfect moment to break it to her.
“Where are you going?”
“Jerez. For one night, maybe two. Charles spent a couple of years there. I want to speak to his friends. Come with me,” he found himself saying before he’d had a chance to think what he was saying.
“Really?” Rosie beamed, and kissed him eagerly.
“Really.”
“Thank you, but I don’t think Emily would go for it somehow. Will you bring me something back?”
“Yes.”
“Do you need to get an early night?”
“Yes.”
“To get some sleep?”
“No.”
WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 12, 2007
____
45
The heat hit the back of Tommy’s throat the moment he stepped off the plane at Jerez. Jerez lies in a basin of south western Spain that forms the frying pan of Europe, where temperatures regularly press 40 degrees even in mid September. The tiny airport is laid out in a giant dustbowl lined with palms and sherry casks stacked solera style. Tommy skipped over the sun-bleached tarmac to the terminal building. Flying always exhilarated him, as did this part of Spain. He had hardly slept for a day and a half but he didn’t care. The dark thoughts of the past few days burned to nothing in the sun.
This was where he felt truly at home, researching in the field. He spent at least half of his life abroad looking for new things to transfer to the homes of the greedy and the rich, and his happiest times were those he spent in the markets and bazaars, the souks and the backstreets, talking and negotiating with anyone who had something that caught his impeccable eye. The thought of merging into the local background of Jerez for a day or so filled him with almost as much excitement as the thought of going home to Rosie.
He hadn’t checked in any luggage. He had a few travel size toiletries with him in his leather duffel bag, spare Egyptian cotton underwear, a couple of white linen shirts, a sketchbook that would double as a notebook if he got round to asking questions rather than sitting sketching in the town squares, and the tiny bottle of Stanza from Haydn. Nothing else except the clothes he was wearing, chinos as white as a Frontera village, an equally white linen shirt, and soft suede loafers.
It was still only midday when Tommy reached the centre of Jerez, and the heat temperature was rising into the mid thirties. He parked his bike at the Hotel Doña Blanca on the Calle Bodegas, just a hundred metres or so from the Calle Caballeros, where Shaw had lived in the heart of the old town for two years. An unlikely bolt hole, Tommy thought, in the hubbub of such a close community. He checked in, washed the sand off his face and took a couple of puffs of Number One from his little atomiser before heading out into the sun in streets empty for siesta, perfect for catching people at home. He had a photo of Shaw in his top pocket, sketchbook and pencil in his chinos, and a plan to knock on some doors, but that was about it. When the town reopened he would ask shopkeepers if the elegant Englishman ever shopped there. He didn’t think people would forget someone so striking as Charles Shaw, even after this much time. And if they remembered him then the answer to the question he really wanted to ask would be easier still: did he have a young child with him?
The Calle was empty and all the houses shuttered. Where to start? Tommy felt like an encyclopaedia salesman. Excuse me, señora, can I interest you in a dead English professor? May or may not come with additional baby. He looked up and down the Calle. Nothing except a tourist stopped on the corner of the Plaza Del Arenal smoking a cigarette. Nothing for it. Start next door to Charles’ house and work from there. Hope the locals don’t see you coming and set the dogs on you.
Hostility wasn’t a problem as soon as Tommy broke into his best Seville accent, “I’m very sorry to bother you in the heat, but I’m trying to find out about an old
friend of my family who lived here fifteen years ago.” He showed the picture. “He was English.”
“Ingles? Si, Señor Shaw.”
“You knew him?”
“Of course, everyone knew him. Come in, you must eat.”
Everyone knew Professor Shaw. Everyone wanted to offer Tommy tortillas and beer. Everyone said the same. Charles was a writer; he wrote during the day in the Plaza del Arenal, stayed there most of the evening talking with the locals. He always held a big feast at the weekend and everyone was always invited. Hardly the lifestyle of a man with a baby in tow.
It was four o’clock by the time Tommy had asked enough questions to know that he wasn’t going to get any further with the door to door approach. The streets were alive with the sound of people talking and shopping, youngsters zig-zagging on their scooters and groups of tourists milling and snapping. The sun was below the halfway point in the sky and buildings and trees glowed as though they were coated in a fine gold varnish. He headed into the Plaza del Arenal, where tables spilled into the square, golden beers shining amber in the sunlight, vast boards with pictures of hundreds of different tapas that waiters would point at with one hand for the benefit of the tourists as they steered them into a table with the other. Tommy thought it would probably be easier to resist their patter than the eager insistence of Spanish matriarchs but he was beginning to get hungry so he simply smiled, sat down at the nearest table, and ordered prawn croquettas and beer.
He took his small Moleskine sketchbook out of his back pocket and began to draw the scenes in front of him. Wherever he was he always drew the people, only the people and the motion in their limbs, the dynamism of arguments and passion, or the relaxed to and fro of conversation. From the lack of buildings his drawings could have been set anywhere but his eye for local manner was as perfect as his ear for dialect. He drew the waiters’ confident sway as they brought beer, the kids stopped on their scooters on the other side of the square to chat to their less mobile friends who were trying to look cool with exaggerated puffs of their cigarettes, tourist couples trying to spy out the menu boards from far enough not to attract the waiter’s eye, the lady at the table next to him shucking out a Camel and offering it to him for a light.
Tommy looked up and smiled, “Lo siento, Señora.”
She shrugged her shoulders and held the cigarette up just as a waiter was passing, who had his Zippo out of his pocket and flipped open in one movement, not even slowing down as he sparked her up. She breathed deep and blew the smoke pointedly away from Tommy, giving the stick a small look of disdain through Bulgari specs that matched his before returning to pick through a bowl of anchovies and tapenade with the non-smoking hand.
Taking little more than a minute with each, Tommy drew sketches of the neat little series of events, the chutzpah of the waiter and the nonchalance of the arm that held out the cigarette. He captured every movement perfectly. Action drawing, he chuckled to himself, thinking of Pollock and De Kooning and their grand action paintings of the 1950s. He looked at the lines on the page, the way he had captured the implied movements in her long, tanned legs, the sweep of her spiky hair. Funny how he always found short, gelled up hair attractive and now he was falling in love with Rosie and her sleek shoulder length locks. He stopped. God, had he really said that to himself?
“Not going to finish your drawing?” He could hear every cigarette in her voice like the low purr of a TVR Tuscan. Beautiful Spanish but not local.
“Sorry?”
“Your drawing. Aren’t you going to finish it?”
Tommy looked down at his sketchbook. The waiter still had no legs. “I think I’ve just realised I’m in love.”
“You don’t even know me.”
Tommy smiled. He flicked back to the previous page and tore out the sketch of her leaning back, arm outstretched, sunglasses catching something on the other side of the plaza, “Here. Have this.” He slid it under her ashtray, left 10 Euros under his beer glass and headed for the shops.
____
46
Emily sat at the back of the small screen at the Phoenix Cinema. It was several months since she’d been here, and she was in danger of not getting full value from her membership. Recently she’d done most of her film watching at Rosie’s, but that was the last place she wanted to go at the moment. Goodness knows what she might walk in on, if anyone was even in. An afternoon showing of Forbidden Planet was perfect. She could close her eyes to and have some space to herself to think; and possibly to cry. She really must get some more friends, she thought. Rosie and David were the only people she would normally go to if she needed to cry, but if both of them were part of the cause where did she have left to go? The back seat of the cinema and her old friend toffee popcorn.
She knew what she’d been thinking the moment she walked into Tommy’s flat. It wasn’t until she was on her own that she would let herself realise it, of course, but she knew that it had been there as a glimmer, somewhere she would never usually let her introspection go. What kind of father would he make? She hadn’t thought about it at all since she’d been with David. She’d always had Tommy pegged as too flighty for it even to be an issue. Too flighty, and totally lacking the emotional maturity or constancy necessary for a relationship with a woman, let alone any children they might have had.
Now she wasn’t sure. Kind, funny, and reliable. Those were the words she would use for the man she had got to know over the last week, if she hadn’t known him before. She’d found herself playing games of what if that she’d cut off before she could put the thoughts into words. Now she let the thoughts come. What if David didn’t work late? What if he was seeing someone else? How much would she hurt? How much would she take it gladly as a reason to get out? If that was the case shouldn’t she leave him anyway? But of course then it would be her fault. She wondered if she was waiting for him to slip up, had been for the last year. She thought of all the times she had encouraged him to stay over at conferences and pitches. “I care about your career”, she would say. “It’s lovely that you want me to come but this is your time”. He never gave a hint, never a flicker of infidelity or inattentiveness. He was so good. He loved her so much.
She loved him too. She certainly didn’t love Tommy, or maybe that was just another place she couldn’t let herself go yet. She thought about him lying beside her years ago, about the sheen on his taut skin, tangled curls falling over dark eyes, and the sound of his breathing. She superimposed the kindness of the smile that she knew now, let the hunger in his eyes sit side by side with the warmth. He had strong, gentle eyes, a father’s eyes, and a lover’s eyes, and the ability to change between the two the moment the children’s bedroom door was closed. Or theirs was opened. She didn’t stop the tears coming or wipe them away when they did.
It was too late now, she thought. No, it was too late the moment she married David. That was when she made her choice, when she chose friendship and affection. Chose steadiness. She had made a choice she could never renege on. No, she’d made a choice she would never renege on. Maybe some day she would be really happy for Tommy and Rosie. No, she was happy already, she just didn’t feel it yet. Soon she would, and she would be grateful that Tommy was back in her life and that she had an extra friend. And if he and Rosie had kids? That was a thought for another day, for a time when there were tears enough left.
___
47
There was little twilight in southern Spain as the day turned dark, and after a late afternoon in local shops Tommy soon found himself walking in the moonlit blue. Lights threw shadows across the sandstone churches. The deep red Alcazar glowed like an ember on the sky. Some people remembered the Ingles. They commented on his courtesy or his exactness of taste. None recalled shopping patterns that would indicate he had an infant in train, and none recalled anything to suggest he came into a sudden fortune.
Where were you, Carol? When did Shaw know what happened to you? Did he come here because he needed the hot, clean air to wash out the
hurt of what he knew? Or had he already sold you into God knows what? Tommy thought of the magnificent cathedral in Seville, and he wondered if Shaw had finally caught a glimpse of the divine and gone there to atone, setting his sins free to float away into the vast, hollow, vaulted emptiness where we set aside the things we want to forget. The emptiness that we call God.
He watched the groups of youngsters laughing over their cigarettes and wished for a moment that he smoked. Then he breathed in and felt the swelling of his lungs in his chest and was glad that he didn’t. He headed back to the hotel, less than a five minute walk away.
After a shower and a change of shirt Tommy lay on his bed. He was as tired as he ever got in this part of the world. Too tired to think but not tired enough to sleep. That’s why he still lived in England, he reminded himself, although he had thought about it many times, teaming up with Angel and working as much or as little as he wanted in the heart of Seville. Seville. Angel’s terrace garden, with its trellises of jasmine and honeysuckle. He wondered how easy it would be to transfer from Thames Valley CID to the Policia in Andalucia.
It was already ten and he was no nearer sleep. Jasmine and Rosie alternated in his head, pleasantly idling away the early night until the knock came.
Tommy opened the door, and felt the clap of a palm between his shoulder-blades. He pulled away to see the bronzed face and slick, black hair of his old friend.
“Angel, que tal?”
“Muy bien, Tommy. Muy muy bien.” Angel reached out his right hand to take Tommy’s, and thumped him on the back in a bear hug with his left. His accent was Seville, just like Tommy’s. Unlike Tommy’s it had a whiff of the south coast ports, of Algeciras, Cadiz, and Tarifa. Angel Gomez was one of Tommy’s oldest friends. He ran an import business in Seville, bringing in tiles and textiles from north Africa. They had met at a Domotex, the big textile trade show held annually in Hanover shortly after Tommy started out as a designer, and they had seen each other two or three times a year since.