The Spanish Promise

by Karen Swan

  He didn’t blink, his eyes never leaving her now, her speech the warrant he needed to watch her.

  ‘So then, taken to its natural conclusion, your view is that History can tell the truth but not the whole truth and certainly not nothing but the truth?’

  She blinked and looked back at him. ‘. . . Yeah.’

  Doc Hall allowed a tiny smile to play on his lips. ‘Mr Marling, what are your thoughts on the matter?’

  ‘The exact opposite, sir. History is vital because it provides the framework by which the lives of every person on the planet are shaped. Learning from the mistakes of the past is the only way to avoid them in the future.’

  ‘Care to elucidate?’

  ‘To study history is to see Darwinism in action: evolution, survival. The brain is the human species’ single greatest weapon; we are unique in the animal kingdom in that we can not just revisit the past, but learn from it and shape our future behaviours too.’

  ‘So you believe it allows the ennoblement of the human race?’

  ‘I do. If we learn from the mistakes of our forebears, we can save ourselves. The mistakes of the father need not be the path for his son. Or daughter.’

  Charlotte’s eyes flashed up sharply, his words searing her skin; they felt targeted and sharp. Mistakes of the father? That wasn’t coincidence. What did he know? Did he know? He was looking straight at her, pity in his eyes.

  He knew. He’d heard somehow. The Cambridge grapevine. The press.

  She looked away, feeling a white-hot spike of rage. He thought she was some tragic fuck-up because of what her father had done? He thought she could somehow be ‘saved’?

  Fuck him. She didn’t need his pity. She didn’t need his patronizing academic theories about how they’d all be okay if they just read some fucking books. She felt her cheeks redden and she knew it was all there on her face for him to read – anger, shame, that for some reason she couldn’t hide from him.

  She knocked back the brandy in one gulp, wincing as it stung the back of her throat, feeling it burn all the way down to her stomach. That burn, then the numbing . . . it was so familiar, so welcome. She closed her eyes. The room felt hot suddenly. Airless. That roaring fire in this tiny room – it wasn’t like there was snow on the damned ground. It was October. She pulled on the neck of her jumper, trying to cool herself, to breathe.

  Nathan was watching her but his guard had dropped too and his hand was now gripping his thigh. Looking tense, primed somehow, he absently swatted Miss Miggins onto the ground. She gave a mewl in protest, slinking over to Doc Hall and interweaving herself sulkily between his legs.

  ‘. . . I’ll pass that sentiment on to my colleagues, Mr Marling. Many of them are quite certain we are doom—’

  A bell started ringing suddenly – loud and insistent – continuously, throughout the college. It made them all jump and Charlotte realized that in fact she had, that she was actually standing. Her body was rigid, as though the alarm had leapt from her own body, out into the world. She had to get out of here.

  ‘Drat that wretched alarm system,’ Doc Hall muttered, reluctantly putting down his brandy and pushing himself out of the chair again. ‘Okay, we’ll have to pick this up next time. File out to the quad. I need to put Miss Miggins back in her carrying crate. The one time I don’t bother will be the one time there is actually a fire—’

  But Charlotte was already throwing open the door, his words receding at her back as she ran down the corridor. She had a clear path. No one else was yet coming out of their rooms, everyone too lazy or stoned or drunk to want to get off their beds and stand outside in the autumn chill for the sake of a fire drill.

  But she needed the cold slap of winter on her skin, she needed the freezing burn of the easterly wind in her lungs. She needed something that would make her feel – not feel better, not feel happier. Just feel.

  ‘Charlotte!’

  He was following, right behind her.

  She ran faster, throwing open the door and running out into the quad, but he was taller and fitter, easily gaining on her. In panic, she grabbed a bike that had been left propped against the wall and threw her leg over it.

  ‘Charlotte!’

  She began furiously pedalling. It had been years since she’d ridden one – not since she was a little girl in fact – and she tore out of the college grounds, through the arch, past the scholars’ garden and turning onto the river bank. The Cam lay dark and inert beside her, seemingly scarcely moving, as she flew along the path, travelling beneath the street lamps from one limpid pool of light to the next. Her eyes were streaming but that was from the wind; she wasn’t crying. It was the wind. It was.

  Breathless, she risked a look behind her but there was nothing to see. He wasn’t there, she had left him in her wake. There was nothing to hear either, the desperate clamour of the Clare fire drill now lost on the breeze, but her legs were still pumping. The crisis was over but she wouldn’t slow down; she could still hear his condescending theories, feel his patronizing pity. Who was he to judge her? Did he believe life lessons came in a particular order and at a set time too? She had already suffered. She had already lost. Her life – though dazzlingly colourful and bright – was like a kaleidoscope, shattered into tiny pieces that could be arranged into attractive patterns but would never again be whole.

  Over the sound of her own breathing, she heard it – the whir of another set of wheels. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw him. He had a bike too. Of course he did, she knew tha—

  She didn’t see the pothole and she was flying through the air before she even knew it was happening, landing on the grass bank – thankfully soft from recent rain – and rolling dramatically to a stop. From her dazed vantage, she saw that she was by a boathouse, a boat strut still up and a half-drunk bottle of fizzy orange left by the wall.

  ‘Charlotte!’ Nathan was there two seconds later, jumping off the bike while the wheels were still spinning and helping her up as she tried to stagger to her feet. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Let go of me!’ she yelled, mortified, humiliated, all her rage overflowing now as she saw the pity in his eyes again.

  His hand dropped away instantly. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Fuck you! I don’t need your sympathy.’

  He looked taken aback, startled by her fury. They both knew she wasn’t talking about the fall. ‘Look, what I said back there, I didn’t mean to imply—’

  ‘Yes you did,’ she spat. ‘You think you know me because of what you’ve read? You think what they’re all saying behind my back is the truth? It’s bullshit. That’s just their version of the past. I saw it all through the prism. So you can take your fucking theories about ennobling yourself and—’

  ‘I’m sorry about your father—’

  ‘Don’t mention my father!’ Her hand flew up, slapping him hard.

  He stiffened, the instinctive anger flashing through his eyes as the sting spread across his cheek; she saw the muscle ball in the side of his jaw again, the way it had that first time when she had pushed him too far.

  ‘Oh my God . . .’ she said, aghast, her hands flying to her mouth. ‘I didn’t mean—’

  He stepped back, out of her orbit, and she could see the effort it was taking to restrain himself, the struggle to override instinct.

  ‘Nathan—’

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

  ‘It’s fine.’

  But it wasn’t. She could see it in his eyes – the disgust at her behaviour, the surprise, the bafflement. Things like this didn’t happen in his world. Girls like her didn’t exist – wild girls, ferals, falling apart . . .

  She felt her shoulders hitch as the oh-so- familiar self-loathing rose up; it was a high tide in her today, the memories coming fast and unbidden. She closed her eyes, trying to black them out, tossed her head, trying to shake them out. But they were stuck to her, part of her; they were her history. Evolution wasn’t going to come fast enough to get her out of
this mess.

  ‘Charlotte.’

  She looked up to find him staring down at her, seeing her suffering, pained by it.

  She jerked her gaze away quickly. Christ, she was a mess. She’d lost it. She was making a fool of herself – yelling, hitting him. What was she going to do now? Cry? She didn’t even cry in front of her own mother.

  With visible effort, she pulled herself up to her full height – not that five foot six was any sort of achievement against six two – and forced a fake smile, pushing her hair back with a trembling hand. ‘Well, sorry again,’ she said, falling into the slightly bored tone she had long ago perfected, albeit with a wobble in her voice. ‘Brandy’s never been my drink.’

  ‘Don’t.’ The word was like a push, forcing her off-balance again, stopping her from saving them both from this. ‘You don’t have to do that. Not with me.’

  She swallowed, looking away, feeling the tears rise up in her, higher and higher. Oh God, yes she did. She had to act it was fine to make it fine, to pretend everything was going to be okay . . . She went to turn away but he blocked her, the bulk of him too much to see round, to get round. He was all she could see. He was her landscape now.

  She swallowed, looking up at him again and knowing that with every breath she was coming apart, stitch by stitch. Her gaze fell to the handprint on his cheek and instinctively her own hand followed it there. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, her voice held aloft as though carried on a sob.

  He didn’t move for a moment, his eyes never leaving her, as though he didn’t trust her not to slap him again or bolt at the slightest stir; but then his hand covered hers on his cheek and he turned his face into it, kissing her palm.

  The simplicity of the act, the tenderness in it, the intimacy . . . no one had ever kissed her there before. It was so unexpected, that the tears she had been holding in abeyance suddenly dropped like a curtain on a play, streaming in silent floods down her cheeks.

  Without a word, he pulled her in to him and, cupping her face in his hands, staunched her tears with kisses. And kiss by kiss, her sobs steadily became gulps, and then gasps, and then they were lost—

  ‘What are you thinking about?’

  His deep voice rumbled against her ear, tickling her. She always had liked lying on top of him, her cheek pressed to his broad chest as she listened to his heartbeat. From where they were, she could see their clothes in a tangle on the floor, Madrid still going about its business outside the windows. It was only their world that had stopped.

  She smiled and turned to face him, playfully digging her chin into his chest and wiggling it side to side, before coming to rest on her overlaid hands. ‘I was thinking about our first time together.’ He was lying on a couple of pillows, his arms splayed out behind his head. Up close, she could see age was suiting him. The delicate, pretty boy features of his adolescence were heavier; he was classically handsome now, and later, in his forties or fifties, when the sharp angularity of his features began to soften and droop a little, she could see he would be rugged. He would always be a beautiful man.

  He arched an eyebrow. ‘In the boathouse?’

  ‘You remember?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She smiled, the memories like an afterglow. ‘Do you ever think about it?’

  ‘Not really.’

  The abruptness of the admission shocked her. ‘Oh.’

  ‘What’s the point? It’s . . . painful.’

  She looked at him, seeing the honesty in his green eyes. Tenderly, she kissed his chest. ‘You always were pragmatic. You haven’t changed.’

  ‘You have.’

  ‘Have I?’ she asked hopefully.

  ‘Absolutely. Where’d all your spark go? You were so . . . polite back there. No use of irony or the F-word at all. I had to keep checking it was really you.’

  ‘Ha-ha. It’s called being professional.’

  He gave a wry grin. ‘I never thought you would end up being a professional.’

  ‘Hey!’

  ‘Professional party girl, maybe.’

  ‘I object to that!’ She flicked one of his nipples and he laughed again, catching her arms easily as she tried to do the same to the other one, and flipping her off him onto her back. There was playfulness in the movement but something else too, simmering below the surface.

  ‘You’re still angry with me,’ she said quietly, looking up at him as he looked back down at her in the same way too: his eyes drinking her in, soaking her up like she was water to his roots.

  ‘I’ll always be angry with you.’ It was a statement of fact, plain and simple.

  She felt a stab of disappointment, a red tint of shame begin to bleed into the pristine perfection of their reunion. She didn’t want to talk about the past. She didn’t even want to think about the future. She wanted to stay in this moment, this one right here, filled up with a golden light. But it couldn’t be ignored. The past clung to them like weeds, the bad memories as well as the good. ‘You know Jules and I . . . didn’t last?’ She almost whispered the words, as though by keeping them hollow they would leave no trace on the here and now.

  He loosened his grip on her at the mention of his name. ‘Well, I won’t pretend to be surprised.’

  ‘It was the biggest mistake of my life, you have to believe that. I’ve never regretted anything more.’

  He was very still now and she could see the pain was still alive in the very furthest reaches of his eyes. ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I do. I do,’ she said urgently, holding his arms harder, pulling him tighter to her. How could she convey to him that for the first time in years she actually felt happy? Fully alive? She had been sleepwalking all this time and she’d never even known it.

  Instead they lay there in still and silent communion, gazes locked, suspended in their own private bubble, the pain and exquisite joy of their first love pulsing between them, before he broke the seal and bent down to kiss her lightly, once, twice, three times . . . She closed her eyes in rapture, the kisses feeling like an answer to a question she hadn’t even asked.

  Her phone rang loudly on the bedside table and, instinctively, they both turned to look at it.

  Oh God, no.

  His expression changed. His voice too. She actually felt him flinch. ‘. . . Aren’t you going to answer it?’

  ‘No, I . . . no.’ She bit her lip and shook her head, but it was too late. They had both seen Stephen’s name on the screen.

  For several long moments, there was nothing: no movement, no sound, just the uncertain hovering between opposite worlds: past and present, love and hate, trust and despair. He stared at her, his eyes travelling over the contours of her face, before he pushed himself up and off her. Decision made.

  He walked across the room – he always had been magnificent, naked; that rower’s physique . . . She felt another stab of longing for him. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘N-no one.’

  He shot her a derisory glance as he stepped into his clothes. ‘Don’t play me for a fool. Not again, Charlotte. Things are different now.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘We’ve both got our own lives,’ he said, doing up the zip on his trousers. ‘It’s fine you’re with someone else now. I’d expect it. Well, maybe not quite this,’ he said scornfully as he shrugged on his shirt.

  She sat up in bed, clutching the sheet to her. She felt exposed, vulnerable suddenly. ‘Nathan, you don’t understand—’

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful, actually.’

  ‘Grateful?’ She stared at him.

  ‘At least we got a proper goodbye at last. The one we never got to have first time around.’

  ‘No. This isn’t goodbye,’ she said in alarm.

  But he wasn’t listening, moving fast. ‘I’ve always thought it’s funny how defining a first experience tends to be, and yet the last one is almost always lost to obscurity.’

  She shook her head, unable to keep up. Why was he talking about first experiences? ‘. . . Huh?’
<
br />   ‘Well, you’d expect that it’s the last time something happens that has more resonance – it’s an ending; that should be more powerful really. Endings are traumatic for humans: we want life to be linear and unbroken.’

  Christ, the man always had a theory. Was this really the time to get philosophical? ‘Nate, what on earth are you talking about?’

  ‘Take our first time together, like you just said. I never really think about it – but I could if I wanted because by virtue of being the first time it was made memorable. Our last fuck on the other hand . . . ?’

  She winced at his language. Swearing had never suited him. And that word wasn’t right, anyway. They’d been in love—

  ‘I just can’t remember it, can you?’ He didn’t wait for a reply as he did up the buttons. ‘But that’s because the last time we slept together, we didn’t know it was the last. Or certainly, I didn’t. And that’s because at the time it was actually happening, it wasn’t defined as the “last” one because there was everything to suggest we would do it again, that there would be another fuck to come, because I thought we were happy.’ He gave a mirthless laugh, as though mocking himself.

  ‘Nate—’ she faltered. She felt the ground begin to drop away, the rush of blood beginning to pound in her ears, adrenaline coursing, panic setting in.

  ‘It was only hindsight that imbued it with the significance of being the last time, by which point, the memory was lost. There had been no ceremony for it, nothing to make it stand out at the actual time.’ He shrugged as he stuffed his feet into his shoes and stared back at her bewildered on the bed. ‘So I guess at least now we have a definitive experi ence with which to round things off. Something we can both remember and look back on with clarity and fondness.’

  Fondness? ‘Nate, stop this!’ she cried, feeling herself begin to crumple, to fall apart.