by Don Boyd
By this time Archie had eaten his fritters and was tucking into Margot’s.
“I am used to being accused of shrinking. God, I so loathe that word… but Robert? He wanted to have an affair with Tilly. He was in love with her. We all know that. But, maybe we have all missed something about Robert?”
“That was Hugo’s point.”
“He is going to interview you and Robert. No stones unturned as he put it! Rather smugly!”
In one sense, Archie was as involved in the saga as Margot herself. She mentioned almost casually that Carlos had come to see her but they then agreed to try to stay away from the subject.
“I was reading through my…” she began, but Archie cut her off.
“Please, can we give it a break? I just can’t deal with it anymore. Do you mind, darling?”
He hugged her and changed the subject rather abruptly. She had wanted to ask him about Paolo and Strathalmond.
“What does seventeenth-century British baroque music have in common with exquisite Catalan food?” Archie asked, rather self-indulgently.
“Nothing whatsoever!”
She was thinking about frogs.
“I am going to prove you wrong! The court of King Arthur and an exclamation of admiration and awe! What power art thou! à la that glorious English composer, Purcell.”
Archie loved a challenge. He jumped up and almost ran to his vast CD collection filed neatly on shelves above their Bang and Olufssen, a wedding present from Margot’s parents. Margot was now staring out at the orange glow of the bay just as the daylight was disappearing. Magic hour! She was spectacularly disinterested in listening to Purcell, or anybody else, for that matter. And then Archie’s music exploded from the six tiny speakers he had placed around their large open-plan kitchen and dining area. Archie, by some accident of fate, had let loose an aria which quite literally was the inspiration for vaginal flood – a mini climax. Margot blushed. She was thinking about Xavier again.
An exquisite, sensational, high-pitched baritone voice (which had been somewhat amplified) was evoking a series of very carefully constructed and repetitive chords which then transformed into what was almost a soprano or counter tenor voice – and became the vocal equivalent of a long, sustained female orgasm. The harpsichord accompaniment was uncharacteristically restrained and the voice had a passionate and breathy desperation, enhancing its sensuality. Archie returned to the table and kissed Margot suggestively on the mouth.
Within seconds he had coaxed her into their bedroom. The fan provided them with some cool air and for the first time, Margot altered her usual pattern of vocal sexual responses. In place of the quiet restraint to which Archie had been accustomed, her orgasm was prolonged, passionate, deafening and her spectacular sexuality echoed in crescendo across the small square underneath their apartment building. When she finally calmed down and began to relax, silent again after the screams and moans of her climax, a congenial smattering of appreciative applause and affectionate laughter echoed back from the restaurant opposite their bedroom window.
Archie and Margot couldn’t help laughing aloud by way of response. They laughed and laughed and laughed. Hysterically. And then Archie asked the question she was dreading.
“Where did that come from?”
Margot didn’t really know the answer and kissed him gently by way of a non-committal reply.
“I have hidden depths which I have been saving for your old age!”
“I see. I am a wasted old man, am I? Some people think that I am a closet queen!”
“If tonight’s performance is anything to go by, I hope you continue as such. Nobody else can turn me on like that!” she lied.
Archie was all but asleep now. He moaned an inaudible reply and Margot kissed his back as he inched slowly over to his side of the bed. Within seconds he was asleep. Margot waited a minute or so, and then slid very carefully out of the large bed, put on her silk nightgown and walked quietly over the cool, tiled surface of the corridor floor, into the spare bedroom at the other end of their apartment. She opened the shutters and looked out over the rooftops of ancient Barcelona and towards its harbour, now glowing with twinkling fairy lights and the neon nightlife of the Barceloneta. The tower of the cable car, which during the day ferried tourists across the bay to the Montjuic and the Colm, were both resplendent in floodlight. The distant outbursts of drunken mirth from a late-night dinner party were mingled with the crickets and cicadas echoing around their beautiful villa. The bitch owned by their neighbour in the apartment below began to whimper and whine. A dog barked back intermittently, and Archie had begun to snore.
Margot shivered. Archie had sensed that she was hiding something from him. How much had he guessed? Of course, a guilty conscience can be the catalyst for unnecessary anxieties. But they can also spark subconscious, uncharacteristic signals. He was a clever man and their emotional connection from the beginning had been both visceral and intellectual. They shared erudite word game jokes about ‘finishing each other’s sentences’. Silly jokes about ‘ut’ clauses in Latin, which end in verbs. He had even taught her the rudiments of cricket, that most poetic of English sports – another of his obsessions. They had never lied to each other. There had been no need. Of course, they kept secrets. Who doesn’t? Particularly about the emotional landscapes of past transgressions. Archie had always been particularly unforthcoming about his early professional life but then it had never really featured as being that important. But Margot’s new secret was going to lead to a series of lies. Lies about her behaviour. Lies about her feelings. Lies about her whereabouts. Dangerous lies. Unacceptable lies in the context of their precious marriage. Betrayal.
She slid out of her nightgown, placing it neatly at the end of the bed, and walked through to their bathroom with its enclosed and luxurious shower room. She turned the cold tap to its extreme. The water was icy and powerful but after a few seconds of shock, Margot began to relish it as much as if it had been hot. Using the hand-shower element like a cheap vibrator, she allowed the force of its jet to vibrate against her vagina and began to masturbate. She brought the shower back to her face, and then again down to her now hard, erect nipples. She lay down on the floor of the shower and stroked her body, squeezing her breast with her other hand. Methodically, she placed the hand-shower back in its rest on the wall, turned off the tap, wrapped herself in a huge towel and then walked slowly back to Archie. She kissed and bit his lips, and then slid her tongue down his back. Within seconds he had stirred and turned on his back. She mounted him, softly massaging his half erect penis, and then guided him into her cool body. He opened his eyes.
“Paradise! The Dream of a Ridiculous Man! Rape!”
They tried to make love for what seemed like an hour or so, but was probably only a few minutes. Their bodies became too sweaty. Awkward and uncomfortable. They were trying too hard. Neither of them was satisfied.
“I am too hot, I am going to shower and sleep in the spare room. Good night, my darling!”
He kissed her and went back to the shower.
“I want to ask you about St. Eulalia tomorrow… I am treating you to breakfast?” she called after him.
“St. Eulalia! The martyr? Wonderful. I look forward to it. Sweet dreams.”
Margot was now certain that Archie knew that she had been unfaithful to him. What he didn’t know was that she was determined to be so again.
She fell asleep wondering how to deal with Xavier. The risks to her marriage seemed irrelevant. She knew that she was out of control in every sense of that phrase and that she was as excited as she was petrified.
What am I going to do about Xavier?
I have had patients who have been sexually obsessed. How have I handled them? The standard, almost formulaic, unpicking of their motives and neuroses is the route towards identifying simple links with obvious emotions – fear, for example. Am I afraid of Xavier? Does he excite me because I am afraid? I can’t analyse myself. I so miss Marie-Christine. Is there anybody els
e I can talk about this with? Archie? As sophisticated and as worldly as he is, he would be devastated. Appalled. It would destroy our marriage. His life. My life. Jesus, I have been so stupid! I feel so ashamed. I have never dreamt of being unfaithful. I have never had the need…
Let me think this all through. From the get go, Archie always said that we should have no secrets between us and he knew from the start that I would never discuss my clients. Or very rarely, and then only with codes. And I have always told him that I would only tell him about an infidelity because it would be by definition threatening our marriage. And that I would no longer be in love with him. I never imagined that such a devastating, animal-like, physical compulsion would come along which has nothing to do with my love for Archie… Do I want to see Xavier again? Can I resist him? I am behaving like one of my more desperate clients.
She dreamed that night of her childhood in La Jolla, California, and her mother and father who had been married for forty years.
Chapter Thirteen
The two priests were huddled in their usual corner. Low voices, although this didn’t look like an extension of some religious dialectic, more a conspiracy. Margot ushered Archie next to the Timba slot machine – its gaudy lights flashing as if it, too, wanted a breakfast of noisy Euros from some sad hobo, to start its day. They sat while they waited for Elvira to bring their solos from the grinding coffee machine, and two glasses of freshly-squeezed juice from an even older and noisier machine. These machines intermittently drowned the silly giggles of an overweight woman, sitting at the bar nursing an early morning bottle of beer. She held a tiny electric fan to her brow.
Margot tried to occupy her mind by analysing the crude iconography of the bar: she would normally have laughed with Archie about them. A Schweppes plaque depicting a goddess draped in a late nineteenth century velvet wrap. Old Red Fox Kentucky Bourbon, Lucky Strike and 1950’s Coca Cola clock. Elvira flamboyantly threw a sugar pack towards the goatee-bearded man in the yellow and brown check shirt before sweeping the solos and the juice onto a tin tray.
“Buenos Dias, Diego,” she smiled, as a grey-suited man with sweptback hair ambled into the bar as if he was about to close it down. He hunched his frame onto a barstool. Elvira nodded at Margot.
“Carlos told me he came to see you. I am so sorry. The funeral of Paolo is tomorrow. They are flying Domatilla back to England today.”
Archie took the tiny black coffee glasses, Margot the orange juice.
“Thank you, Elvira. Archie has a meeting at the assembly today. He is going to give me another history lesson over coffee.”
Elvira understood perfectly.
“I now see why Margot kept this place as her special secret all this time,” Archie smiled at Elvira, who was obviously delighted.
“You will be there tomorrow at the funeral?”
“I had known Domatilla since she was born. Her father is one of my oldest friends.”
“I loved her too…” She crossed herself.
Archie whispered to Margot as Elvira went over to the priests, wiggling her perfect bottom suggestively.
“Did she know him well?”
“I introduced Paolo to this bar… He loved the bar and adored Elvira. Tilly loved it as well! ”
“Okay. St Eulalia. And then it will be your turn to tell me a story.”
“I am a hopeless storyteller!”
“It won’t matter.”
“Not today.”
They smiled awkwardly at each other and he leant over to kiss her but she avoided him.
“The St. Eulalia lecture and tour!”
“Two hours to the minute – I have a client at twelve!”
Archie, methodical when it came to sharing expertise, had planned to combine his careful academic speaking style, as if Margot was his PhD student, with a guided tour of the key locations associated with Barcelona’s famous mediaeval saint. Margot tried to goad him out of being too stuffy with a series of sly questions, prompted by some of the scenes in Tilly and Paolo’s DVD.
“In fact, there may have been two Eulalias. The one buried in the Cathedral La Seu just around the corner from here, is St Eulalia of Barcelona who was martyred in the fourth Century, on the February 12th, 304 in the year of our Lord. She was thirteen. According to a variety of sources, she was a particularly precocious young woman, incensed at the Roman emperor Diocletian’s persecution of Christians. She was forced to confess her faith publicly in front of a pagan consul who, legend has it, ordered her public deflowering. She was thrown into jail, continuing her invective against her persecutors where she was subjected to thirteen tortures, one for each of her years alive. The last being nailed to the cross in the Angel di Barcelona in front of what is now the Cathedral. There are all kinds of other stories about her. Her miracles, for instance. A well ran dry and her tears refilled it. An angel is supposed to have appeared to her in a wood of cypress trees and told her that she would one day be patron saint of Barcelona. There is one silly myth: when her bones were finally discovered and identified about a century later, a dozen men tried to move them, when in the short journey from the place of execution to the burial ground, the bones temporarily turned into stone. Her remains are supposed to now be buried in the crypt of Santa Maria. Some people think that both Eulalias are one and the same person, the mythology blurred over the centuries. One of the great Pre-Raphaelite paintings is a powerful and highly sexually charged depiction of St. Eulalia’s death. It was painted by Waterhouse, John William Waterhouse, who was like me, half Italian, although he spent most of his life in England.”
Margot’s heart skipped a beat.
“What does she look like in his painting?”
“She looks as if she has just been raped. She is naked from the waist upwards and is covered scantily with a simple cloak. Her hair is scattered out above her body. Why are you so interested in her, Ms. Wilkin?”
Archie never used her name in this way, and his soft, Scottish-Italian accent had deliberately exaggerated the English phonetics. Even when he had been lecturing to her in classes at Chicago he had always called her Margot.
“Will you continue your story, Archibald, please? I want to know who she was, why was she murdered, what had she done, and how old was she?”
Margot was feeling a little giddy, the tone of her voice both insistent and anxious.
Archie laughed nervously. A measure of their intimacy was their ability to be easy-going with each other in almost any situation. Margot’s behaviour was far from normal.
“Sadly, that painting is in the Tate, but there is a portrait of Eulalia here in Barcelona at the Cathedral… According to the fourth century Spanish monk, Prudentius, Eulalia was a twelve year-old girl who refused to denounce the Christian faith and was tortured ruthlessly by a local pagan Diocletian consul. In the story, she was left in the marketplace at the foot of a crucifix, bleeding to death. Her body was then covered by an extraordinarily mysterious fall of snow, which became her shroud. All of this Waterhouse incorporates and much more.”
“What is the colour of her hair in his painting?”
“This has something to do with Tilly, doesn’t it?”
“It’s red?”
“More red than auburn. She is very, very young! And Waterhouse gives her a bracelet of rope – a remnant of the crucifixion or the torture. The painting has a sado-masochistic atmosphere.”
Margot gulped down her orange juice. She was transfixed. Archie drained his solo and they began to leave.
“Let’s go to the cathedral right now. I want the guided tour. Do you mind, Archie?”
He laughed again. “But you have been there hundreds of times before. There is going to be a payback moment, you realise that, don’t you? You are going to have to explain yourself. I feel like a character in a murder mystery.”
“Archie, you know my rules about clients. Total secrecy.”
Strictly speaking, Margot could have told him about the DVD, but she held back, using her work as the usual
smokescreen. As Archie walked out of the café, Margot waved at Elvira.
“See you tomorrow. Where is the funeral?”
“At the Cementiria del Sud-Est, the new cemetery which looks over the sea… in the morning. We can walk; it is on the Montjuic, near the sea.”
When Margot walked out to find Archie, he had disappeared. She walked along the narrow corridor which masqueraded as a street, towards the Plaça Reial. Archie was flicking through the local newspaper.
“Nothing!”
“Carlos would have kept the story out of the press.”
As they crossed the square towards the Cathedral, Margot realised that they would pass directly by Xavier’s apartment.
“Let’s go the long way around, Archie. I love these old streets. It will give some colour to your story.”
The Barri Gotic has so many routes, part of its appeal. Archie was used to Margot’s whims about how they walked around.
“We can walk through the Jewish quarter. Did you know that the synagogue is the oldest surviving synagogue in Europe?”
Margot giggled. Archie was echoing an old private joke between them, which harked back to their first few weeks in Barcelona when they had been invited to dinner by a friend of Archie’s, a Catalan philosophy professor, who had taken a rather lecherous shine to Margot. After a raucous alcoholic dinner he had insisted on taking them on a very late-night guided tour of El Call, including the old synagogue. He hadn’t uttered a word of English all night until he led Margot by the hand in front of the synagogue, announcing aloud in perfect English: “This is the surviving oldest synagogue in Europe!” and then whispering into her ear, with a lascivious nibble that they should “make wild love with each other one evening”. Margot hadn’t been able to resist telling Archie about this at home later on, and so the episode was the catalyst for a family joke. Archie was not a possessive man but when Margot mischievously wielded her considerable sexual charms with a little innocent flirtation, he would evoke the old lecher’s broken English phrase. Margot allowed his harmless dig to ride and disguised her relief that they were taking a different route to the cathedral with a mock chaste kiss.
