A Meeting in Seville

by Paul A. Mendelson

  And perhaps a historian in this field of conflict might explain how you can quite happily have enjoyably noisy sex with a person with whom you are still quietly at war.

  “So. What do you want to do today?” he asks, but she has already closed the bathroom door. He tries to be as casual as he can with the next question. “Where did we go – this time today? Y’know, the first morning of our trip. Last time round?”

  For some reason, possibly because he hasn’t entirely woken up himself, he reckons that this is sufficiently subtle for her to regard it as no more than a sentimental, even endearingly nostalgic, enquiry, rather than what even he senses it might really be – an attempt to take whatever cataclysmic oddness happened yesterday to its far-from-logical conclusion. Or at least onwards to a further and possibly terrifying stage.

  William hasn’t ever regarded himself as a man with an addictive personality, despite the smoking and the whisky. All right, there’s the work too, which Luisa mentions at every opportune moment, but of course this is so far from being an addiction as to be laughable. Unless the addiction is to pure, unadulterated survival. And the whole human species has that monkey on its back. He reassures himself that he has seen first-hand true addiction at play and this simply isn’t him.

  Yet he feels those strange and not totally alien stirrings inside of him. A fluttering as if a dynamo is slowly charging up within his gut and a hollowing even further down, that say to him something is happening in my life, something devouring and all-consuming, quite possibly even dangerous, which I’m not totally certain I wish to curtail. Were this even one of my available options.

  “Luisa—?”

  She clearly hasn’t heard him. Or is choosing not to respond.

  He switches on the bedroom light and checks himself out again. He realises, with genuine regret, that he really doesn’t look that great – especially compared to the younger, hairier guy, that one just across the bridge, who is most probably still rutting for Scotland. But perhaps “distinguished” might hold the fort for attractive or striking. And at least his colours don’t clash today. He is almost sure of this.

  “Me, Lu?” he answers an unasked question from the mirror. “I’m a novelist. And a scriptwriter. Oh, you know, London, Cannes, LA. You’ve probably seen some of my work. I subtitle well.”

  If it freaks William Sutherland out that he is having an imaginary conversation in a hotel bedroom – located somewhere that he hadn’t particularly wanted to be – in which he lies to his innocent young wife of another era (who has no idea who he really is and thinks he’s a man in his fifties, living contemporaneously with her in 1988) then he manages to hide it well. Perhaps it might just begin to strike him as total bloody insanity, with God knows what permanent consequences to his psyche, if Luisa’s mobile, on her bedside table, doesn’t buzz at this particular moment.

  He is suddenly and overwhelmingly angry.

  An anger that bubbles up with boiling fury, like an unstoppable geyser, from the pit of his stomach. Although, in fact, it is quite stoppable – he has developed some mastery over the years and is rather proud of the fact. He barely even raises his voice these days. He rarely has the time or the energy.

  He isn’t the least disgruntled that an incoming text has been flagged – she’s entitled to these. But Luisa has clearly forgotten to restore the offending mobile to the recesses of her bag and switch it off, so that it wouldn’t ping loudly during the night and wake him from his ever-precarious sleep. A slumber that, once disturbed, might never have been resumed.

  Of course, it hadn’t actually done this. He had slept unusually well, due to a bodily reaction no prescription drug has at yet replicated. But it is still worth reminding his thoughtless wife of her oversight, as it might even the score just a fraction and elicit a rare apology. Some momentary contrition to temper the series of sniping altercations and exchanges, alternating with brooding silence, that have become the bedrock of their lives.

  He moves slowly round the bed and picks up the phone. Perhaps he will return it to her bag, with the ringer pointedly off.

  But first he will just steal a wee peek.

  It takes him seconds to read the few, tiresomely abbreviated, words. Yet he knows, once read, that their resonance will last him a lifetime.

  He also realises, with some surprise, that he is not really surprised at all.

  William carefully sets the mobile back down then just as softly picks it up again. He is not so familiar with the iPhone, even this older model, but it doesn’t take him long to check through his wife’s text history. He finds nothing of interest, although he does feel slightly envious of the girly “chats” she has with their daughter. Nor do the old photos she has preserved in digital form, with skills he can still admire, astonish him. The smiling young girl at school, the cheeky, fair-haired little boy. The family dog, currently in kennels for his Easter break. The usual suspects.

  Silence. The sounds of the shower have subsided.

  William feels that by rights he should storm straight into the bathroom, full of husbandly wrath, Apple-confirmed evidence in hand. He would most certainly be entitled to do so and can’t really explain what is stopping him. Or perhaps he can. Perhaps he senses, if only vaguely, those accusations she may throw back, misguided though they would undoubtedly be. Accusations he doesn’t particularly want to hear at this moment. But now is hardly the time for self-analysis.

  Although he does wonder, just briefly, if he has been waiting for this. And even, somewhere, wanting it. Like that second shoe dropping onto the floor above. But this was, of course, before yesterday. Before last night. Before he lost all grounding and his time went out of joint.

  What was it Lu had said in the cathedral? Something about being lost.

  He looks around, taking in the joyous flowers, the old-fashioned, memorial photo album, the celebratory bottle of champagne, which is as flat as he suddenly feels and so far has only been enjoyed by one.

  Snatching up his laptop bag, William crams it with the contents of his bedside cabinet as if he is somehow grabbing hold of his own life or what’s left of it.

  He leaves without slamming the door.

  ***

  On his departure from the bedroom that his daughter has kindly booked for him, William Sutherland is pleased to discover one of the hotel’s lifts, directly across the corridor, with its steel doors open.

  As if it has been waiting just for him.

  He thinks to himself once again that, had he been the one making the booking, he would have ensured that their room was situated a good few yards from such an obvious sleep-disturber, and finds himself surprised that Claire has never picked up the clues in all these years.

  The lift isn’t empty.

  Pablo is there, nodding to him, although William can find no obvious need for a lift attendant. Perhaps he is simply on his way down and for some reason has opened the doors to this floor. William is almost pleased to see him.

  He begins to talk to the older man before the doors are even closed. Even though he knows that his words are pure gibberish to his smiling companion.

  “Ever know something about someone, Pablo? I mean, deep down? But you really didn’t want to know you knew it?”

  “Manchester United,” says the wise Sevillano.

  ***

  William doesn’t see the look of surprise on Luisa’s face as she emerges from the bathroom, encased in her gown once again. His absence is, of course, the cause of it. Alongside the discovery of her mobile phone, which she is almost certain she hadn’t flung onto the recently vacated bed.

  22

  Lu Sutherland can’t get the older couple out of her head. And she wonders why.

  She wishes she could share her thoughts with her new husband, but it doesn’t feel like particularly rewarding territory. Not after they already discussed it in the park last night and he had that strange
look on his face. Not when Will wants to immerse himself in Seville and discover, with his writer’s eye, everything that made her fall in love with it. Before she did the same with him.

  That was the time when she was plain Luisa Montero, daughter of the haughty Monteros of Madrid, chastely studying her art and photography. The season she met Sandy Matheson, on his university year abroad, a happy meeting that persuaded her to come to Glasgow, of all places, as an au pair to friends of his family, in order to improve her English. Her “command” of which she knows Will loves, because – although she can’t herself detect it – her speech still has more than a nip of “Glesga” in the mix.

  And, anyway, it’s quite hard to share anything when your hombre walks so fast. She has to expend all her energy just to keep up with him. (You learn to move fast in Glasgow, he tells her, because you’re forever “skedaddling” away from someone.)

  This already simmering day they are in the famed Plaza de Espana, for which she deliberately hasn’t prepared Will as she knows it will blow him away.

  “It’s so frigging old!” he cries, his head turning like one of those slowly revolving cameras they used and abused in his annual school photos, trying to take everything in. He embraces the vast half-circle of historic brick buildings in all their magnificence, with their landmark tall towers north and south, a multi-bridged, canal-like moat big enough to take small boats and the inevitable tiled fountain at the centre. “It’s sort of Arabic, isn’t it, with a bit of your medieval stuff thrown in. I’d say Renaissance – do you know that word?”

  Of course she does. And now she has her fun. “It is built in 1929,” she exults.

  He looks at her, but he isn’t smiling. “You’re taking the piss,” he says.

  “No, Will!” She looks suddenly unsettled. “Is not the piss. It is built for the very big Exposicion, yes? Like many of the buildings in this city. Is funny, si?” She tries to placate him. “But is in very old style. Of course.”

  “Like mock-Tudor,” he says, to total bafflement. “Although some of us peasants don’t awfully care to be mocked.”

  Lu may not have known Will Sutherland long, but it’s already long enough to be familiar with the anger that can rumble up out of nowhere. They had a few days of it in Madrid, understandable and expected, which she did her very best to tamp down. She has been hoping it will be calmer here. Without parents. Without disapproval. And without the casual belittling that she more than suspects preceded her by many years. Yet she knows enough to be certain that the plates beneath are unstable and the shifts are never far from the surface.

  Perhaps their meeting with the older couple has unsettled him too, she thinks. Along with the talk that ensued between the two of them, conversation that seemed so harmless and even romantic at the time. Her dreams of their returning here in thirty years and his of being rich enough to come back in style.

  She thinks that maybe marriage is like a collaborative piece of art, such as one of the huge murals she loves and wants to show Will in the Alcazar Palace, or even a modern performance piece begun with strangers whom you may have chosen but who you can only hope have the same vision as yourself. And you can’t ever fully know how it will turn out or exactly how the other person sees it, until it is nearing completion and the creators can step back. Perhaps this is what that long-wed couple, in whom she detected a certain undefined sadness, are doing this minute. Stepping back thoughtfully. On their segunda luna de miel.

  Yet she is already wise enough to know how to save today’s suddenly fraught situation.

  “What is the movie you have seen with this plaza?” she challenges, then smiles at his blank look. “Is one of your favourites.”

  She can tell from the way his wary eyes immediately brighten and sparkle, the set of his face softening even as his brow furrows, that he is on a new and more placid trajectory. As he silently reels through his personal “ten greatest” in the Odeon, Renfield Street, of his mind. He revels in challenge and is not going to be defeated.

  “Too easy. The Graduate.”

  Lu just stares at him until finally he laughs. Relieved, she joins in the laughter. “Don’t tell me,” he warns. “Dinna you dare tell me!”

  “I do not dare this,” she promises. “I dinna.”

  He walks around, talking to himself, determined not to be beaten. “None of my fave movies are set in Spain. Except for maybe El Cid and it wasn’t really that brilliant. So the bloody building is probably standing in for somewhere else.” He looks at Lu and she is nodding. Unlike her, he can’t deduce that the emotional temperature of the day is entirely dependent on his solving this devilish riddle.

  “Don’t nod. Don’t even think to nod. Okay, you can nod a wee bit – just cos you’re so pretty when you nod.”

  She nods again, even though no further clues have been offered.

  “Right,” he mulls. “It’s Moorish, isn’t it? Like Hula Hoops. They’re very moorish.” She looks totally blank. “Dear Lord, have I consigned myself to a lifetime without wordplay? Me – Glasgow’s future greatest novelist.”

  “You have the ten seconds, mister the big head. Ten – nine –”

  “You’re a hard, wee woman, Señora Sutherland… Moorish… Moorish… Arabs. Arabic. Oh shit!” He smacks his head, in ecstatic parody of the eureka moment. “It’s Lawrence, isn’t it? DH Lawrence of Arabia!”

  She nods her head in glee, although she is still a tiny bit bemused.

  “That’s the one thing you still didn’t know about me, Missus S. I love TV quizzes. Contests. Competitions. Give me a game show and I’m happy as a pig in – Hey, I just missed being on University Challenge, you know, cos I came into the uni try-outs a wee bit the worse for wear.” He greets the classic, Twenties building with new admiration, his eruption of mere minutes ago totally forgotten.

  She wonders, for a moment, if this is how it is going to be. That she will have removed herself from the comfortable world she has always known, in this warm and steamy country, to act as a coolant for the pale yet fiery love of her life.

  And she knows that, whatever the challenges, she couldn’t be happier than she is right now.

  Just to prove it, she takes another photo. Her new husband standing resolutely, if precariously, on the rim of the fountain, with a large and not over-clean white handkerchief swept over his mouth, to “protect” himself from the cruel desert sand.

  23

  The guitarist isn’t doing William any favours.

  It may be a genuinely old bodega, with its gnarled beams and its hanging hams, an air conditioned, five-star haunt for TripAdvised, pre-processional tourists (“best tapas in town – be prepared to stand”), but he thinks it is far too early for music.

  Not too early, however, for the overpriced and rather large Scotch he is downing morosely in the semi-darkness. He glares at the offending musician, back-lit by a morning sun that lingers, like an underage customer, at the doorway. If the guy rashly asks him for a request, he already knows what it is likely to be.

  William rummages in his laptop bag. Even he is sufficiently self-aware to know that he is totally obsessed with – and permanently lopsided by – the contents of this particular hand luggage. His bulky computer, the old-fashioned jotting pads, diary, power bank, back-up power bank, EEC travel adaptor plugs, his selection of coloured pens. And, of course, the stacks of business cards and company brochures. Luisa jokes with him, although the digs are not so jokey these days, that he carries enough cards to give one to every person he passes in the street. And that most people already have one.

  He slips out one of the glossy brochures. Matheson Sutherland, Marketing Consultants. He had wanted a pithy slogan stripped across the bottom of the front cover (‘we mind your own business’ or the like) but Sandy had thrown that idea right out of the park. Told him it was the old advertising copywriter coming out. Prospective clients, he had opined (as he tends to do,
in that smarmy, seductive brogue) want testimonials from their fellows or, even more potently, their betters, not off-the-shelf platitudes.

  He flicks open the brochure.

  Staring out is his photograph, that familiar and to him rather bland face, smiling with appropriate yet not overweening confidence. Neighbouring him, in a similar square of his own, is Sandy Matheson. His oldest pal, his dearest friend, his partner, looking unnecessarily handsome and un-balding. The wavy, dirty-blond hair has hardly changed, thinks William, either in style or generosity, from that picture in Luisa’s accursed album. Nor has that smile, reeking of well-born assurance he hasn’t just slapped on for some smarmy photographer.

  William closes the brochure and throws it back with some force into his bag. It lands next to the paperback he has just bunged in there, more out of habit than design. He knows bloody well he is not going to waste good festering time on a novel, however tense and well written.

  Yet something about it catches his eye.

  It’s probably the deliberate dimness of the bodega, in contrast with the already glaring sun, but there’s the vaguest disconnect that registers in his 40%-proof-breakfasted brain.

  He removes the paperback until it picks up the light.

  The just-downed whisky moves swiftly back up into his throat.

  In his hand he holds a brand-new, albeit slightly thumbed, paperback copy of The Da Vinci Code.

  What the hell—?

  He turns it over and around, as if – like some basic yet still impressive conjuring trick – it will revert to John Le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl before his very eyes.

  It doesn’t.

  So he burrows somewhat frantically back inside his bag, just in case the little girl is still drumming away, cushioned in one of the many convenient nooks. Perhaps the rogue newcomer has simply been slipped in, while he wasn’t looking, by some kindly, book-sharing stranger.