Oh God, thinks William, turning back to the Nazareno. But, whoever he was, he has gone.
An elderly man is sufficiently moved to render a croaky but impassioned saeta from his balcony, which makes Tazmin think it really is time to move on.
***
Pablo is manning the lift when they return but this doesn’t appear to impede the flow.
“I didn’t do politics at Warwick to produce tacky game shows all my life. No offence. The thing about television is you have to think outside the box. Are you ok, Willo?”
“Buenos noches, Pablo,” says William tiredly, ignoring the man’s exaggerated winks and knowing smiles. He realises that there is no way in this incarnation that he could have known the name of the old fellow – the man wears no identifying badge – but Pablo doesn’t appear in the least surprised.
As soon as they enter the room, Tazmin hurls her bulging bag of souvenirs onto the table. They hear the clack of all the “hand-carved”, genuine flamenco castanets she has bought for her many nephews and nieces. In one smoothly choreographed movement, she swivels and switches on the TV. Clearly she has no intention of watching but it appears to be the natural background to whatever it is that she does intend and which cannot apparently be effected in silence.
“When you picked me out of all the candidates – even though I knew sod all about TV-prod, well, I thought – he must see something in me. And I don’t mean ‘you know’. You’re not that sad. Are you?”
“Possibly,” admits William. He watches her kick off her sandals and begin to massage her feet. He finds himself thinking that she does have sensational legs. Perhaps he really is this sad. “Time for a drink!”
“Haven’t you—?”
“Drunk enough?” He knows that he had been hitting the Rioja pretty hard at that tapas bar. Who wouldn’t? Yet he also knows that the blurriness in his aching head has nothing to do with alcohol. “Couldn’t happen.”
She suddenly shoots up and scurries across the room at some speed. “Lu!” she cries.
William is immediately alert.
“WHAT did you say?” he shouts back.
For a moment the young woman looks alarmed. “I need the loo, William.” She smiles through the discomfort. “This is a killing place, isn’t it? What on earth made you think of it?”
She closes the bathroom door, emphasising the question’s rhetorical nature. But he answers her anyway.
“I have absolutely no idea,” he replies, quite honestly.
46
As it becomes increasingly clear that Tazmin Whoever is in the bathroom for the long haul, William Sutherland – Willo, to Lord knows who – mixes himself the strongest drink he can take without collapsing and walks out onto the balcony.
He gazes over the sparkling old city, its celebrated monuments cleverly illuminated to enhance their grandeur whilst still preserving their dignity. But they give him no pleasure. The ironwork of this elegant balcony might as well be bars of a cage, he thinks, or a prison cell designed by a master sadist. No, by Kafka. By a sadist who has read Kafka. He has no idea what the night has in store nor whether he will even survive it. Perhaps this is what those pills were for.
He really does feel quite sorry for himself, this new William Sutherland, sorry for what he is fast becoming and for what he has wrought. Sorry too for Luisa, thinking he is “in Madrid” (finger-quotes) on some spurious game show business. And also for young Tazmin, who apparently knows Luisa (and even resembles her!) yet inexplicably is here with him this holy, tawdry week. Although he does wonder if such compassion will soon vanish, along with the rest of his world view, and those former, now unsupported memories.
Without pleasure, he takes a deep, audible breath, as if hoping the orange and jacaranda-infused bouquet of a spring evening might clear his befuddled head.
And then he hears it.
Another breath, equally deep yet infinitely more embracing. It seems to come from the balcony adjoining his own.
William turns slowly, to see the confidently elegant woman he believes he first glimpsed when she arrived here earlier today with Pablo. But he sees her now in angled profile. She sips white wine and is smoking a slim cigarette. As her head moves slowly round towards him, he decides his own serious drinking must have kicked in after all. Because he can’t really be seeing this.
“LUISA?”
The woman spins round.
“Madre de Dios! Is it? William?”
The glass falls from her hand and smashes into jagged crystals on the solid, tiled floor, the wine trickling swiftly down into the runnels. Her feet are bare, so she skitters instantly away from the danger, causing her to move even closer towards him.
There’s no question now, thinks William, in total shock. This woman, in a casually smart outfit he has never seen before, with a cool and clearly expensive hairstyle she has never worn, is Luisa.
Yet a strangely different Luisa.
More stylish and sophisticated than he has ever known her. Trimmer, certainly; firmer, possibly; with a harder, more brittle edge that is evident in every movement she makes, every syllable she utters.
The woman he knows so well, whom he left sleeping only this morning. In the same bed that is behind him now. Before he set off on his mischief.
The woman who, even in this seriously warped scenario, should be waiting for him back home, in some upmarket Greater London suburb.
So how—?
Smoking?
“What are you doing here?” he demands, in fearful wonder. “Next door to me?”
“I ask you same thing! What do you do in Sevilla? Business?”
She looks genuinely surprised. As if he, William Sutherland, is the last person she would have ever expected to see here in Seville, this week of all weeks. In the next room. At the same hotel.
And the awful – yet now so painfully obvious – truth smacks William right in the heart.
He realises with a sad immediacy that if he is not to jump, screaming, off the balcony or collapse into a gibbering heap right here on the omni-bloody-present tiles, he has to work unquestioningly within these new rules that he has just been given. To be a serious player in this topsy-turvy, down-the-rabbit-hole game.
At the same time, he has to sound like this is all perfectly, delightfully normal.
“Oh. No. Not business,” he says, ever so casually. “Just, y’know, passing through. Bit of much needed R ’n’ R. But you look—”
“Older.”
“No! Well, yes. Mebbe. But – you look – different. Aye. Different.”
She smiles at this, as she tries delicately to avoid the wine-spill. He notices that she wears turquoise varnish on her toes. When did she start doing that, for pity’s sake? But he soon has larger concerns than her pedicure.
“Different to who?” she smiles. “The young girl who went off in a London taxi twenty-eight years ago?”
Excuse me?
For quite some moments, William finds that he can’t respond. The calculator in his brain is trying to convert a random figure into something that makes at least a scintilla of sense. “TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS?”
It still comes out as a shriek that screams into the orange-blossomed air. Which he hopes no one else can hear.
“Si. Time fly, eh? But you look – well, at least you have kept your hair.” She moves closer to him. “Or somebody’s.”
He shrugs. He’s certainly not going to justify a hair weave to this person, nor in fact anything else that has been done to him, at most probably enormous cost. Stuff that he can’t as yet recall but is pretty certain he will in time. It just depends how long the fifty-three-year-old brain takes to reboot – when its wiring has been drastically tampered with and its memory given a cataclysmic shock.
Luisa can’t help but register the look of total bewilderment on the face of her short-lived ex-husband, no m
atter how hard he strives for normality. Not unnaturally, she puts it down to his surprise at encountering her once more. Here, in the very city where they honeymooned, exactly three decades ago. She also notices that he keeps looking behind him into the bedroom.
“You are with someone. Your wife?”
“No. She’s – nothing like my wife – I’m assuming.” The look of instant disapproval on her face makes William bristle. “Oh come on, you can talk!”
She seems quite taken aback by this. He realises that, of course, in this new reality, she most probably can talk and indeed just has. “So – what about you, Luisa?” he asks, adroitly changing the subject.
“I did marry again. Si. After our ‘quickie’. But you know this.” I don’t as yet, Luisa, he thinks, but I’m bloody sure I will. “I am the optimist, yes? The glass half-full!” She looks down at her bare feet and smiles. “Well, until I see you.”
“Yeah.”
He realises that he has always loved Luisa’s feet. He finds large feet rather intimidating but hers were and still are, even with their vivid embellishments, quite delightful. He also realises he shouldn’t spend many more seconds admiring them. He nods towards her bedroom. “Is he—?
“We are not together.”
“Oh, that is excellent!” he says, almost punching the air, until he realises she isn’t quite so exultant. “I am so sorry, Luisa. Kids all grown up?”
She shakes her head with a motion so swift and firm that he immediately understands this is not an area ripe for further exploration. At least not yet. “And how about you?” she offers.
“What?”
“Did you find a ‘window’ for children?”
Now, quite unexpectedly, the thought that has been lurking half-formed in his reeling head comes barrelling in, with a force that sucks the breath from his body and sends him grasping for the handrail.
“CLAIRE!”
He cries it out as his hand burrows into the unfamiliar, too-tight trousers for his wallet. He produces a Gucci billfold, which feels like someone else’s that he has pocketed in error. There is no photo “frame” inside. No picture of his smiling, gap-toothed, wee daughter.
No Claire.
There is little mistaking his desolation, yet Luisa does just this. Although even she is alarmed by the vehemence with which the man just yelled out his daughter’s name.
“Well, I am glad for you. Fathers and daughters. Is special, yes?”
He doesn’t answer. He has turned his ravaged face skywards, as if the heavens might in some way provide a solution. Cursing himself that his beloved daughter hadn’t been the first thing on his broken mind.
“So. Quite a coincidence,” she continues. No response. “William?”
“Eh? Er – well, we did say we’d come back here in thirty years, Luisa. Ha! A promise is a promise.”
“But I have a meeting here.”
“A meeting? Oh. Right.”
He is at a total loss as to where they go from here, but he knows for sure that they have to go somewhere, or he is indeed totally lost.
“Luisa, you don’t fancy—?”
“Climbing over the balcony? No, William.”
“No. No. A drink. You know, a – wee nightcap. Not in here. Obviously.”
“It is very late, William,” she protests.
“It isn’t! Not for Seville. Sevilla. Please, Luisa? For – old time’s sake.”
“If I remember, they were not so good. The old times.”
Weren’t they?
“Here they were. On our honeymoon. I’ll square it with – whatsername.”
Luisa shakes her head, but she is smiling. It’s not a smile he recognises. It is a smile that belongs to a different Luisa, a Luisa who has had a life of which he hasn’t been a part and that he doesn’t know at all.
But it will do. For now.
It will have to.
She checks her watch, which he can tell is more expensive than anything he might or could have bought her. Or that she – the other she, the one who no longer exists – would have dared to buy for herself.
“In the lobby. Ten minutes,” she says.
He nods gratefully and walks back into his room.
47
William is not accustomed to stealth, or built for it.
Even on tiptoes he can usually be heard through tightly closed doors. He is also not completely sure that right now stealth is the most sensible solution. But he allows himself some slack. When you encounter your wife of thirty years, whom you only recently left in bed, and she tells you that she walked out on you in 1990, you can probably be forgiven for lacking a foolproof strategy.
“Willo?”
The proof that he’s a fool is calling to him from the bathroom.
“Mm?”
“Sorry, babe. Bit of a dodgy tapas.”
William feels like pointing out it could be any one of twelve. “Well, you just stay there, T-Thomasina, till you feel better.”
“Sorry? – I think it was probably the—”
“Probably.” He picks up the ice bucket sitting on top of the minibar. “Just going to get some ice.”
Before the poor young woman can reply, he is out of the door and summoning the next lift. He leaves the ice bucket on the floor, reminding himself to fill it on his way back, from the machine he noticed way down at the other end of the corridor. Knowing that he will undoubtedly forget.
Inside the empty lift, which feels more like home than anything else on this lunatic trip, he checks himself out in the mirror. Whilst still vaguely appalled, he is not entirely unimpressed. For the first time in his life he looks – aye, successful. Even if it isn’t something he has ever hungered to be successful at.
Or maybe he has. Which is even more scary.
On its way down from tweaking his new hair, his hand – darker than before and still as tentative as if he were stroking a barely tamed ferret – brushes over an inside-pocket of his gaudy blouson. It discovers a bulge. Curious, he fishes out a compact portable dictaphone, which he doesn’t recall having ever owned. Yet, to his surprise, he knows exactly how it works and what he is going to recite excitedly into its eager memory. “Idea for game show! Warring couples go back to where they honeymooned.”
He immediately hurls the dictaphone into a bin in the corner of the lift. “Shut the FUCK up!” He can’t help thinking of Jekyll and Hyde and recalls that as a kid he yearned to write like Stevenson. He wonders what his fellow Scot would make of this nightmare.
A notion briefly enters his head. He can kill himself before the new, glossy, deeply superficial Willo Sutherland takes over completely. It’s no more than he deserves and there’s a bloody great tower right over there off which he could probably jump. Taking in both Christian and Moorish features on his descent.
Yet, as he waits in the lobby, he realises that he actually wants nothing more right now than to see her again, if only for just a few minutes, even if this is so different a Luisa to the spouse he has clearly loved and lost. This new, slightly intimidating Luisa Montero, it appears, had only briefly been his and, on the evidence available, most surely never will be again.
He’s pacing the reception area, too buzzed to keep still, when he hears the slow click of high heels on the surprisingly untiled flooring.
Luisa appears, casually cool in a cream, silk blouse and minty-blue denims, shoulders draped in a striking red pashmina shawl. He recalls that she always did have a passion for the most vivid red and it always looked so good on her. He smiles admiringly.
“How is the Wi-Fi in your room?” she asks.
William is thrown by this, although it is invariably the first thing that he himself checks out on arrival. “Huh? Well, I can’t say I… You look terrific, Luisa.”
“I know this.”
Well, get you, he thinks, although this
unexpected degree of self-assuredness is both scary and exciting. But mostly scary.
Before he can continue, although he can’t actually think where exactly to lead this conversation or indeed whether leading anything is currently in his gift, he spies the New York ladies. They can hardly free themselves from the revolving doors, so laden are they with store bags and souvenirs. Instinctively he turns away, then realises there is absolutely no need, as they are not giving the slightest indication that they recognise him. And why would they – he arrived only this afternoon.
“You can’t imagine them holding an Inquisition,” says the slightly larger one. “They’re so darling.”
“Okay. Where do we go?” says Luisa, checking her watch. “On our – ‘reunion’?”
“Wherever they don’t have castanets,” says William. “Or Lady Gaga.”
On their way out, they pass Pablo at the door. He looks at the two of them, then up at William, and simply shakes his head.
***
It is William’s idea to take a horse-drawn carriage ride through the city.
This feels suitably romantic, the sound of clopping hooves, buildings touched with the arrogance of history gliding slowly by in the luscious night air. He finds himself wanting more than anything to impress the hell out of this mesmerising person he knows so well, yet hardly knows at all. She doesn’t exactly leap at the notion with the enthusiasm he recalls the last Luisa having for soppy stuff, but neither does she sniff too overtly when he signals to the first driver in the rank.
As his persona right now seems to be about as fluid as a person can get, William sees no harm in answering whatever questions she may throw at him with answers that will most advance his cause. Although he is hardly any more solid as to what this cause may be.
A Meeting in Seville Page 20
