William adds this to his list of things rarely said at Easter. As evidently do those around him who understand English. Unfortunately, this would appear to be almost everyone. A young Australian couple, who have their cameras at the ready for the procession, swiftly snap off a couple of Sutherlands, just in case anyone should ask them if they met a still-attractive, middle-aged, Argentinian Nazi-screwer on their travels.
The bystanders appear to be awaiting William’s response with some interest. To their everlasting disappointment, his phone rings. They don’t pick up Luisa’s long-suffering sigh and of course William has heard that particular sound so often that it ceases to register. It probably wouldn’t resonate even if she shimmied up onto that balcony and turned it into a song.
“Sutherland,” he answers, although he can barely hear anything over the drums and the irreverent, yet paradoxically deeply respectful, Spanish crowd, most of whom appear to William to have brought their entire families along: from crib to crone, as he might have phrased it, were he still writing ad copy (which, somewhat to his own regret, he hasn’t done for quite some time).
Mary is now staring indulgently down at him, so he turns away.
“Oh, hello, Señor Barb – Cristobal. Good of you to… yes, I can talk. Just… oh? Well, thank you. Yes. Er – si. I’m sure that would be grand.” He looks to Luisa warily, as if to check out whether it would indeed be grand. “… No, no, she’d be delighted. Really.”
William watches his wife as she stares up at the majestic float, which appears to sail past them into the blue-black, sultry night on a bed of flame. And he wonders, for a moment, why she is gently stroking her no longer unlined and quite unadorned throat.
18
“Hello – this is William Sutherland…”
It isn’t. Yet, of course, it is.
Will Sutherland, cocky yet pensive, is trying to adopt the weathered tones of a considerably older man, a gentleman of curiously similar origins to himself (and, unbeknownst to him, of very similar name), whilst he holds a cheap plastic sunglasses case to his ear. Will intends this to represent a phone. Not a mobile phone, as he knows nothing of these. Nor that the quiet, scented gardens in which he promenades, on this short-sleeved, starry night, will be infested with them, like bats, in just a few, swiftly passing decades.
“… Aye, the famous novelist and millionaire playboy. That one!” His amused and adoring wife of a matter of days gives him a look of mock disapproval. “… Monogamous millionaire playboy. And this time round we’d like something just that bit snazzier, por favour… Certainly with a minibar! And a jacuzzi… No, two helipads – my wife and I never heli together.”
He hears that glorious chuckle and turns, as ever, to drink her in.
She seems to glow in the moonlight, as if the night has switched her on like a vivid son et lumière, giving her flawless skin and that flowing, dark chocolate hair a lustre that, at least to a young man hot with love, matches the dazzling floats in their glory. She holds an orange in her hand, plucked from one of the trees lining their way, and is stroking it tenderly.
“Lu…?” His voice has become more serious, which causes her to stop and look at him. “D’you reckon we will come back here? But, you know, rich – like that old couple.”
“Together, cariño, like that couple,” she responds, equally serious. “Rich or not rich. We make this promise also, yes? Our thirty perla anniversary. Two thousand and – and eighteen, si? That we are here again, in this place.”
Will looks at her, his eyebrows raised and that wry, worldly wise smile, one she already knows so well, on his barely shaven face. That he should react to this notion with such scepticism both surprises and unsettles her.
“We are surviving Madrid. And my parents,” she protests. “What can be worse than this?”
“Their sodding dog,” he replies, which at least lightens the mood, if not the sentiment.
A little boy is skipping towards them, with his parents. He holds a knobbly sphere of wax, which he tosses up into the air and catches clumsily in both small hands. They notice a distinctive, star-shaped birthmark on his cheek.
“Is very old tradition,” explains Lu. “Their balls grow bigger every year.”
“Yeah, well, they would,” says Will, seriously. So seriously that she completely fails to register the joke. He smiles anyway, happy to amuse himself, then points to the orange in her hands, which she is caressing so sensually that he can hardly believe it isn’t deliberate. “Do you mind not doing that?” he says.
She glances down, as if to examine what she is doing. If it wasn’t intentional at the outset, it most certainly is now. She raises the ripe orange to her lips and sniffs it, then slowly rolls her tiny tongue around its bumpy outer edge, finally taking it in both hands and rubbing it sensuously over her full lips, her chin and down onto her soft, warm throat. By the time it reaches the undone top buttons of her light, summery dress, Will has decided you can only have so much promenading of an evening.
“Come on, Señora Sutherland. And bring your Jaffas with you.”
***
If there is a particularly Andalusian way of making love, it may well involve rolling around naked in a tiny, moonlit room, on a narrow and rather lumpy double bed made even more lumpy by a generous helping of Sevillian marmalade oranges, whilst all the time these natural aids to romance explore and massage the body’s most sensitive regions.
Giggling is most probably optional but in this case the option builds to such a crescendo that the persons responsible actually roll off their bed of warm citrus and onto the hard, wooden floor. Fortunately, this does not unduly interrupt the task at hand, as Will and Lu Sutherland are nothing if not tenacious.
19
In a smarter, better-appointed bedroom just a few hundred metres and three decades away, that “old couple” – yet still not what William and Luisa Sutherland, on their better days, would consider over the hill – lie far apart.
William has donned his eye mask, to deter the fusillade of early morning sunlight from disturbing his already rocky sleep. Luisa wears a tooth guard, which helps to prevent the stressful grinding she gathers she does in the night from giving her headaches in the morning and an arthritic jaw for life. She has performed her creaming and her plucking and is ready to switch off the light.
They both know, however, that they are not going to grab much sleep tonight.
“What do you think they’re doing right now?” asks William, raising his mask. Yet he doesn’t turn to Luisa. He stares straight up at the ceiling. “Three guesses,” he answers himself ruefully, his imagination filling in where his memory fails.
She doesn’t say anything. So he proceeds to worry out an explanation. For something that he knows can support no earthly explanation whatsoever.
“It’s like, I dunno,” because he doesn’t, “it’s like two parallel lines have just gone whoomph!” He smacks his hands together at this point with such unanticipated vehemence that Luisa’s teeth almost bite through the plastic. “We’ve got our own Bermuda sodding Triangle!” Despite his best efforts, William finds himself reduced almost to tears. “I don’t understand, Luisa. I just don’t – the two of them! Thirty years! I hardly recognise them. US! They certainly don’t bloody recognise we two.”
He turns to her now, removing his eye mask altogether. She registers his look of utter bewilderment and returns it with a look of her own, one not totally drained of affection. Even though the turmoil in her heart and mind, she believes, is quite the equal of his own.
Yet neither expresses any desire simply to pack up and go back home to Richmond. Leave all the madness here, where it belongs. Forget it ever happened; keep calm and carry on. The thought simply doesn’t occur to them.
Very slowly, as if he thinks this might, in some ingenious way, disguise the fact of his moving at all, William shuffles across the massive, king-sized bed, until he ca
n sense the warmth of her thigh through her summer nightie. Luisa feels the unexpected yet still-familiar contact of his legs on her skin.
She is surprised, it has been a while, but she doesn’t edge away – and not simply because, were she to do so, she would most probably fall off the bed. But she does lean over and nudge the bedside light, so that it angles against the wall, its harshness dimmed, without banishing visibility altogether. Deftly, she seizes the opportunity to slip off the dental guard and toss it in a drawer.
They kiss, gently at first, letting their bodies softly entwine before their mouths confirm that this is more than a friendly goodnight squeeze. Not that even these have been over-abundant in modern times. She feels his excitement as she senses her own gradually building, not dynamic as yet but still here and present in a way she might not have anticipated even hours before. Although she had wondered, as they planned this trip – and possibly even hoped (admittedly without that yearning that quite borders on distraction), whether this might indeed be an integral feature of the week’s ‘re-tracings’.
His hands, as they gently caress, making delicate patterns on the soft material covering what she considers her still reasonably firm breasts, don’t leave her totally cold. Even if she does feel curiously and almost stupidly self-conscious. The newly redawning familiarity, the quiet comfort of two people grown apart but still far from strangers, slowly begins to bring its own welcome and much needed rewards. Lovingly yet urgently, he slips her nightie over her shoulders.
And then she sees his eyes.
They’re closed, which is fine and as she might have wished, as indeed her own have been for some seconds. But, in that moment, she suddenly knows. It is as if she can journey behind the lids and directly into his mind, intruding on the dreamscape he is trying so desperately to keep to himself.
She can see her. The other woman.
Her younger self.
She cannot be certain of it. Yet she is certain of it.
And now, with a clarity that scares as much as it fascinates, she can see the two of them, young Will and just-as-young Lu, making a love so passionate that it resonates through the years, rocking her life and her world. She can picture – in fact she can’t stop picturing – their naked, thrumming bodies, clenched and rolling, flesh unblemished and strong, glowing with sweat and youth and hope. As if their sexual acrobatics are being projected in an open-air theatre, to an audience dumbstruck with admiration.
But now the cast is changing.
It is the older man, the weary fifty-three-year-old, currently nuzzling and stroking her with such apparently passionate intensity, whom she watches with this beautiful young woman. The woman she once was but clearly is no more. The woman reintroduced so sharply into his mind, who has so innocently attracted his interest and so sweetly commanded his attention. In a manner this older woman knows she has not done for so very long.
And it hurts more than she can possibly explain.
She wishes with every cell in her overwhelmed body that it could just be over and is at least reassured that it very soon will be.
20
The morning sun makes its languorous way over a proud, unchanging city, now miraculously cleaned-up from last night’s processions and anticipating, with the unwavering confidence of centuries, many more to come. It slowly gilds the ancient buildings, as it crosses the easy-flowing and not as easily cleaned-up Guadalquivir, Spain’s only great navigable river, and enters the distinctive district of Triana to the west. A district waking up to yet another day of celebration and service.
Sol takes time out from his full spring schedule to sneak through the gaps in the shutters of a pretty little hostel, alighting first on an apparently thrilling book in English by a writer with an assumed French name. This is in the possession of a young Scot who didn’t enjoy any apparent book thrills the night before. He is dozily blinking-in dawn’s early rays as he eases himself free from what he was happy to look upon as an alternative source of adrenaline.
And he begins to snort.
The young woman beside him lies with the rumpled sheet half-covering her slowly stirring body, like that proud lady with one exquisite breast exposed on those French coins she herself has seen on trips with parents and friends. Which, of course, rings no bells with him. Otherwise he would doubtless be referencing it, instead of just snorting.
Finally she turns, vaguely disturbed by the weirdness beside her.
Result!
“I couldn’t get the bullfight tickets,” Will explains, rearing his head, with its thick red and totally un-bull-like mane, “so I had the bull come to us.”
“It is only your head that is big,” retorts Lu, reaching a lazy hand down under the sheets.
“Give it thirty seconds, darling. What’s the Spanish for Durex?”
She stares at him. “What is the English for Durex?”
“Er… jonnies? Condoms?” Pointing downwards. “Contra—”
“Ah – el preservativo.”
“Aye. El preser… Okay. Well, maybe sometime you could get, you know, more el – por favor. From the—”
“Farmacia.”
“Exactly. Farmacia.” He strokes the unbelievably soft, olive skin below her collarbone. “We don’t want any little accidentes.”
Lu’s still sleepy face doesn’t intimate that this might not be quite the catastrophe her new husband clearly envisages. But she catches him picking up on her slight que sera shrug, so she swiftly lightens up. “Little Willies!” she laughs. “There is only three nights now here. How many do you have?”
He holds up ten fingers. Which makes her give that ethereal yet so very bawdy laugh he loves. And allows the Govan bull to rear once more.
21
William is dressing in front of the full-length mirror.
He knows that this is something he rarely does these days, unless he has an important client meeting. So virtually never on holiday. (Although, hopefully, this week will be different.)
He is having to make do with whatever natural light is teasing through the blinds, as he doesn’t wish to disturb his sleeping wife. He realises that he could simply wait and she would be more than willing to tell him exactly what fashion crimes he is committing. But curiously, on this first full day of his unwanted trip, he fancies a brisk start and a tad more personal attention.
He looks over at her, recognising the tiny shifts and movements that signify her slow, reluctant transition towards day. Luisa could sleep for Britain – or siesta for Spain – yet this time William senses in himself none of the usual resentment. In fact, there’s something approaching affection here. Or, if not quite those dizzy heights, at least a hiatus in the conventional irritation.
William Sutherland is actually feeling not too bad about himself.
He ponders if yesterday – despite its almost heart-clogging madness – hadn’t ended far better than he might have expected. The fact that this outcome also makes him feel strangely uneasy is one he will park for the time being. It seems clear to him now that attempts to resist phenomena currently doing the Andalusian rounds will prove less than futile. So he might as well simply surrender.
Yet isn’t he that guy who always needs to be in control?
William convinces himself, in the language of lunacy, that normal service will naturally be resumed when they return home to Richmond. As indeed he has been convincing himself, for some years, that what passes for his life is as normal as he can expect – as indeed anyone could expect. Even if normal isn’t the same as good. Or satisfactory. Even if it is in fact a long, slow, nagging torment, like a tiny, repetitive throb that doesn’t ever convulse or cripple yet never actually abates.
He’s not usually in favour of holidays or trips, as he feels that they stir things up. Which is why, William suspects, his more passionate wife is so keen on them.
But perhaps yesterday – last night – was a w
atershed. One that he may never fully acknowledge and certainly could never explain – yet equally clearly will never forget. He will have to see how the rest of the week plays out.
He wonders if there might be a further, mystical encounter any time soon, in this spiritual Disneyland. He wonders also, with some alarm, whether this might not be exactly what he is wishing for. Dear Lord! He reminds himself not to forget to take his morning blood pressure pill.
Behind him the gentle rumbling builds.
“Buenos días,” he says, with a warm smile. “Sleep well?”
Luisa doesn’t answer. She simply nods, as she struggles out of bed, unrumpling her nightwear in the direction of decency, and pads towards the bathroom. William knows that his wife isn’t a morning person, so he won’t take offence at the lack of conversation. But he can’t help finding it curious that she should be so intent on covering herself even further, with the flimsy robe she has left draped over a chair, when she’s going to be removing the lot in a matter of seconds.
William knows that this hardly reflects well on him, but he can’t help but compare his wife’s ample figure, the one he did genuinely appreciate last night, with that of the slender young woman who keeps lingering to the last detail, like a seductive melody, in his mind.
Yet he feels better about such thoughts when he realises that they may, in some legitimate way, be flattering. In fact, he might just compliment Luisa on how well she has managed over the decades and indeed, so far from letting herself go, as others in their circle have done, how well preserved and attractive she still is.
Then he realises that this is just as monumentally crass and incorrect as his original thinking and wonders whether there shouldn’t be some sort of marital Geneva Convention to afford immediate guidance on the spousal battleground.
A Meeting in Seville Page 9