The wedding presents started arriving at the beginning of June. Since Atticus had been away for several months and the bride’s address was off the map, everything was sent to the house in Kent, which allowed Moira to keep tabs on who gave what. This information came into its own when she made the table plan, because she was able to seat people according to the value of their gifts. The drawing room became a gallery with all manner of artworks, silver, porcelain, glass, and other fine objects on display.
In her black notebook Moira wrote a list of names followed by a description of the gift and an estimate of its price, as well as a note on the effort each person had made depending on his or her economic situations. In other words, the silver jug from the Cromwells deserved less thanks than the tray from the Snowdons, given what a bad time of it they had been having since the property market crashed.
Victoria Bestman, as always, won the prize for generosity, because she sent a Cartier box with diamond earrings that had belonged to her mother, together with a note that said they were a hereditary gift and should pass directly to Atticus’s daughters, bypassing Soleá, who wasn’t really family after all.
Grandmother Craftsman, meanwhile, took the prize for lack of common sense. She turned up unannounced one Sunday at teatime, driving a convertible Bentley, with her chauffeur in the passenger seat, and shouted that she couldn’t think of a better gift for her grandson than a two-seater racing car. She had driven from London, dicing with death on the narrow lanes, with Albinoni’s Adagio at full volume and a cigarette in a holder between her fingers. They had tea in the library, the silence as thick as hummus after Grandmother Craftsman said in passing, “I didn’t like you all that much to start with, either,” which Moira took personally despite Marlow’s best efforts to convince her otherwise.
“How do you want me to take it, Marlow?”
“In the abstract, Moira, in the abstract.”
• • •
One of the biggest setbacks in the process of organizing the wedding was the church. The Craftsman family didn’t often attend services at the church in Sevenoaks, even though they were generous benefactors and owned a mausoleum in the rear part of the cemetery. However, they were respected by the community and had always maintained a good relationship with Reverend Fellow, so they invited him to dinner as soon as they had set the date for the wedding, to give him the news and ask him to take care of the ceremony.
“Impossible,” he said. “They’ve already been married by the Catholic Church.”
“Well, now they’ll be married by ours,” replied Moira.
“The thing is, Mrs. Craftsman, as far as I know, your son Atticus was baptized and received the sacraments of the Catholic Church prior to his wedding. That is to say, he has changed religion.”
Moira had an almighty fit when the reverend revealed that unsavory news, then threw him out, cursing his lack of authority with regard to his flock. Then she started to weep inconsolably as she remembered her misfortune when it came to her sons’ weddings: first, Holden, with a bride who was six months pregnant, and now Atticus, with a Spanish Roman Catholic.
There would be no church, what an embarrassment, but there would be an altar with flowers in the small chapel at their house, someone would recite a few verses by Keats, and a choir would sing. The bride would enter on Marlow’s arm and the groom on her own lilac muslin-clad arm; Moira would walk solemnly, putting on a brave face, and the guests would believe that the tears she was holding back were of emotion and not of anger. She would spread out a red carpet from the living room, crossing the hall. Soleá would walk down the stairs and Atticus would come out from the library and meet her in the chapel. It would be a bit odd, but it would have to do.
They put up a white marquee in the garden, between the rose garden and the lake; they hung eight chandeliers from the canvas roof and decorated the walls with family portraits brought out from the house. They planted real trees between the tables, and the centerpieces were ordered from a famous florist in London, the same one the Middletons chose for their daughter’s wedding.
Planning the menu required masterful diplomacy. Back in 1979, before his sons were even born, Marlow had promised his great friend the Count of Bradford that his restaurant, Porters, would provide catering for each and every celebration at his house. And so it had been, however much Moira cursed her luck. She preferred French cuisine to traditional English food, and would have given her life to serve soufflé and sole meunière instead of the overly familiar roast tomato and basil soup, terrine of smoked salmon, and beef Wellington with mushrooms and brandy sauce, but when she suggested a change to her husband, he went on about a gentleman’s word and its resistance to the passing of time, the principle of loyalty, the value of honor, and the British people’s inevitable, inherited, and deep-seated hatred of the French. Then he slammed his fist down on the table, convincing Moira that her efforts were utterly useless. In the end, her only victory was to swap the dessert and have crème caramel instead of jelly with cranberries, and she comforted herself with being able to offer menus adapted to meet the special dietary requirements of certain guests. In this way, hiding behind allergies, intolerances, religious prohibitions, orthorexia, vegetarianism, or difficulties with chewing, she was able to devise a parallel and almost clandestine menu that she quietly recommended to every single one of her guests.
The final straw came at the last moment when she discovered that on top of the wedding cake there was an edible miniature of Atticus and Soleá astride each other in a rowing scull; the detail had been added by Holden, who had decorated his own wedding cake with a figure of his pregnant bride dragging him toward the altar.
And so, victory by victory, failure by failure, Moira just about managed to survive until the first Saturday of September and appear elegant and smiling before the guests, none of whom wanted to miss the intriguing wedding of the heir and the Gypsy girl.
CHAPTER 57
What happened that day in the old house in Kent had no more scientific basis than elves or witchcraft. How else to explain the sun bursting through the gray clouds, or the thousands of migratory birds that flew over the garden all at once, or the mesmerizing blue of Soleá’s Hemingway eyes as she came downstairs, or the irresistible power of her enchantment, the same one that had made Atticus fall in love, which made the men cling tightly to their wives so they didn’t lose their heads and made all the women happy to anchor them to reality.
Soleá, looking like a vestal virgin with long black hair like a runaway thoroughbred’s mane, came down the stairs like a dream from an ancient Roman temple and walked down the hallway toward Atticus, floating on the cloud of her silk dress, not touching the floor, not looking at anyone, because for her no one else existed but the blond soldier waiting for her at the altar with open arms.
No one listened to the music or the poems during the ceremony. The only thing that anyone heard all day, as clearly as broken silence, was the persistent, rhythmical beating of two racing hearts. No one tasted the delicacies that arrived at their tables, or listened to the speeches, or appreciated the quality of the champagne or the sweetness of the meringue, because all their senses were fixed upon Soleá and Atticus; a gravitational force of supernatural proportions, a bona fide electrical charge that at around midnight was finally liberated as an explosive orthogenesis, an earthquake measuring nine on the Richter scale, a terrifying tsunami that inexplicably affected everyone there.
The only person who did know exactly what had happened was Moira, but, for all the ups and downs of the years to come, she managed to keep the secret until the day she died and feign ignorance when anyone asked her (in private, of course) what she had put in the food to make everyone experience the same orgasm at the same time. It had been particularly shocking in the case of couples who hadn’t slept in the same bed for years.
“It must’ve been a collective hallucination,” she would reply, flustered, while trying to erase from her mind what she had seen by chance and could n
ever get over, for all the intensive therapy sessions she went to. At midnight, bored of champagne and dancing, Atticus and Soleá had slipped away from the party under the cover of darkness and taken refuge in the library. Because they had arrived barely in time that morning, disheveled and sweaty in the car given to them by Grandmother Craftsman, they hadn’t had a chance to fully explore the house. Moira had been nervously waiting for them in the circular gallery with the hairdresser, the stylist, the interior decorator, the photographer, little Oliver dressed as a tin soldier, the hostesses dressed as nineteenth-century maids, and in such a tizzy that no forced smile could hide her annoyance. She whisked Soleá away as soon as she got out of the car and marched her up to Atticus’s room, on the first floor, where the white dress was hanging from the ceiling lamp so that it didn’t get crumpled, her shoes, her tiara, and even her fancy underwear, bought in a well-known shop on Regent Street, awaited her. At first, Moira objected to the bride wearing the awful gold crucifix that for some reason she refused to take off, but when Soleá threatened to run away barefoot across the fields behind the house, she had to give in to the only condition imposed by the otherwise docile, resigned young woman.
“Today is proof of my love for you, Tico,” Soleá had told her husband when they were driving under the chestnut trees that lined the drive. “I’ll do anything your mother asks me, I’ll be like a passive little lamb, but promise me that we’ll go back to where we’ve come from as soon as we can, before I go crazy.”
“I promise,” Atticus replied. “I swear by these,” he added, kissing the tips of his fingers as he had seen the Gypsies do in El Albaicín.
So the literary heart of the house—the library containing eight thousand books, with its open fire, velvet sofa, and the armchair where Atticus recovered from his rowing injury, the same chair where he learned to love Duras, Lawrence, Miller, Nabokov, and Sade—had remained closed, fascinatingly dark until that moment.
Atticus led his wife hastily down the hall, under the portraits of the Craftsman grandparents, opened the library door, settled Soleá on to the sofa, and went to light the fire, which immediately burst into life with yellow flames.
She got up silently and went to stroke the leather-bound volumes. She and her colleagues at Librarte had always dreamed of living surrounded by books like these, some of which were hundreds of years old.
“One day,” Berta liked to say, “we’re going to get an amazing library together. We’ll fill it with all the books we’ve read. It’ll be like Borges’s library, a metaphor for the universe: circular, with hexagonal walls, and infinite. And even if the world ends and the human race becomes extinct, our library will endure, ‘illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret.’ ”
The others would close their eyes and imagine a place that was different for each of them and yet identical: exactly like the library in the house in Kent.
While Atticus lit the fire, Soleá wandered around the room, her hands gently stroking the spines of the books, until one in particular caught her attention because its red leather was so hot.
“This book’s on fire,” she said in surprise.
Atticus left the bellows on the floor and went over to his wife.
“Let me see,” he said with a strange tremor in his voice.
Among the innocent novels of Jack London, an anonymous book was pulsating, as red and furtive as its five erotic siblings.
“I’ve never told you about my private library, have I?”
“The five books piled up on your bedside table?”
“Yes,” said Atticus. “Well, it seems that you’ve just found the sixth.”
They opened it together, burning the tips of their fingers, and discovered, not the least bit surprised, that it was no less than Richard Francis Burton’s translation of the Kama Sutra, with hand-drawn illustrations inserted into the book on creased pieces of card.
“The man who owned this collection was a talented artist as well as an avid reader,” Atticus managed to say.
“Or the woman,” whispered Soleá.
But Atticus had already ripped off her dress and let it fall to the carpet. And Soleá had lain down on top of it, in front of the fire; she had let her hair down, removed her shoes, peeled off her tights, and adopted one of the positions cataloged by Vatsyayana in around the year 300 of the Christian Era. Atticus was trying to adapt to her movements when, unexpectedly, the library door opened and there appeared the rigid, statuesque face of Moira Craftsman. She had been looking for them everywhere, irritated at finding them missing, and, guided only by her prison officer’s instincts, had found them in the library.
Soleá and Atticus were completely unaware that for the first time in her life, Moira watched a couple so entwined that it would have been difficult to separate one from the other or identify the body parts that belonged to each one. If at that moment the fire had raged out of control and they had both burned to death, the only way to tell them apart would have been with a DNA test of the charred flesh and, given the challenge presented by that task, it would have been better to put their ashes into the same urn and grieve for them together: one of life’s ironies.
Moira stood with her hand on the door frame, paralyzed, and looked over at the corner of the room where she saw a wise-looking man of about eighty, smoking a pipe and accompanied by a little hobbit. The man greeted her affably, lifting his hat. “It’s been a long time, dear Moira,” he said wordlessly. “How we’ve changed since those distant times when you and Marlow shared your illicit love in his room in Exeter College. You were able to reach ecstasy in under ten minutes, simply by reading passages from the six erotic books that he gave you, young and inexperienced as you were, when he realized how poorly your imagination matched your desire. How we three enjoyed those forbidden games, Moira Craftsman, and what a shame that we so quickly forget how exciting love can be when it’s no longer clandestine. My hobbit and I prefer these two; they’re thoroughbreds, they’re Formula One, they’re like pressure cookers.”
Moira didn’t want to stay to the end of the scene. Tolkien had lost interest in her and was concentrating on the lovers writhing on the carpet. She carefully closed the door to the library, and in the hallway, short of breath, she felt the same ecstasy as all the guests that starry night, a feeling that not one of them would be able to forget for as long as they lived, no matter how many loves and pleasures they experienced.
Atticus and Soleá, exhausted and conjoined, cemented together, lived a hundred years in a single body, a single flesh, united forever, man and woman, just as God imagined, sculpted, and breathed life into them: in his image and his likeness.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mamen Sánchez is a deputy editor at ¡Hola! magazine and editor of ¡Hola! México. A bestselling author in Spain, she has published three books for children and the novels Gafas de sol para días de lluvia, Agua del limonero, Juego de damas, and La felicidad es un té contigo. She lives in Madrid and is married with five children.
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ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Lucy Greaves translates from Spanish and Portuguese. She won the 2013 Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize and was Translator in Residence at London’s Free Word Center during 2014. She lives in Bristol.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by Mamen Sánchez
English language copyright © 2015 by Lucy Greaves
Originally published in Spanish as La felicidad es un té contigo in 2013 in Spain by Espasa
Originally published in English in Great Britain in 2015 by Doubleday, an imprint of Transworld Publishers
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Altogether Unexpected Disappearance of Atticus Craftsman Page 23