Chapter Three
My cutlery rests across the plate. The white wine is gone. I don't want to get my phone out; nothing on it will make me feel better, but I don't quite know what else to do with myself.
“The potatoes were good.” I say this to Emma.
She looks at me, then laughs softly. “Do you tend to circle back to earlier conversations after a significant interval? As a strategy?”
“Not normally. I'm… a little out of sorts. I’ve been used to my own company, and I'd read the itinerary carefully and hadn't pictured —” I gesture, vaguely, at the table, the room, the whole situation. “It threw me a bit.”
Understanding moves across Emma's face like a change in the light. Her shoulders drop a fraction. She nods, as though she's taken the information and found somewhere useful to put it. “Are you looking forward to the rest of the evening, at least?” she asks.
I turn my empty wine glass slowly by the stem. Consider whether to answer honestly. Decide, against my better judgement, that I will. “That's rather why I'm here,” I say. “The dinner was incidental.”
Emma's eyes don't leave mine. “The stargazing.”
“The stargazing.” I set the glass down and tap the brochure lying between us.
“The brochure described Mount Teide National Park as —” I pause, aware of how this is going to sound.
“— a viewing platform to heaven.” I look at her evenly.
“I'm not sure what possessed me to find that compelling. But there it was.”
Emma holds my gaze, her eyes softening. The table moves on around us. I am not listening to it.
“I can't see them,” she says, and her focus lands on the brochure too.
“From London. The lights take everything.” Her hand now moves towards the brochure, a finger tracing the vivid stars along the cover.
“My grandad had this video — one video, practically the only tape in the house — about the solar system. I must have watched it about fifty times. Every weekend I was there, that was it. That was what we could watch.” She gives a small, private smile, turned inward.
“I've wanted to see them properly ever since.”
“You watched it every weekend?”
“Every weekend, right before bed, I’d get to watch it.”
“And your grandfather didn't object?”
“He suggested it.” Another small smile. “He loved it as much as I did.”
I consider this. There is something in it — a small Emma and an old man watching planets weekend after weekend — that I cannot be cold about.
“So, you'll know a lot about them.”
“A fair amount.” She tips her head. “You?”
“I can usually find the moon.”
A breath of a laugh escapes her. My eyes trace her mouth as it happens. I wouldn't mind being the cause of it again. She catches me looking, and the corner of her lip curves.
“Tonight should be good for seeing a lot more. No cloud forecast, and we’ll be high enough to get away from most of the light pollution.
” Her face does something when she says this.
Brightens isn't quite the right word. Settles, maybe.
Like the subject fits her. I wonder, briefly, what she does for a living.
Something in the way she holds information suggests a certain kind of work, though I couldn't say what.
“Teide's one of the best spots in the world for it, actually,” she continues. “You won't have seen anything like it.”
“Well. That’s what I wanted. To see something I haven’t before… and if I have questions —”
“Gabe's your man. He seems like a great guide, knows everything, very enthusiastic.” A small pause. “Or you can ask me.”
“Good to know,” I say.
She stacks my plate beneath hers as the waitress passes, barely a gesture, eyes still on me.
A small chocolate mousse arrives, dark and dense, scattered with what appears to be crushed pistachios, a curl of something candied across the top. The older woman sets them down one by one along the table. Across the table, Emma has already picked up her spoon and I’m not long after her.
We eat in silence for a few moments, and this dessert is, I will admit, excellent. Dark and serious, not overly sweet; the kind of thing that improves the longer you sit with it.
Emma scrapes the last of the dessert from the edge of the glass and sets her spoon down with quiet satisfaction. I have done the same without noticing.
She looks at my empty dish. Then at hers. Then at me.
“Well,” she says.
“Indeed,” I reply.
She laughs, properly this time. It lasts only a second but changes her face entirely. “I'm going to find the toilet before the bus,” she says quietly, already reaching for her bag. She stands — that captivating height of her — and then pauses. Looks at me directly. “Don't go anywhere.”
She's gone before I can decide what to make of that.
I sit for a moment. The table has the deflated quality of a meal that has finished but hasn't quite acknowledged it yet — empty glasses, pushed-aside plates, the French man finishing his wife’s mousse.
I turn my own empty glass once in my hand.
I think of that popular television programme; the one with strangers at a restaurant, cameras everywhere, the whole thing observed and dissected.
The restaurant empties slowly, the way groups always do — chairs scraping and bags gathered.
I turn my empty glass once more. Don't go anywhere.
She was being sociable. Friendly. It is what people say.
Emma will go back to her evening, and I will go back to mine.
That is fine. That is what I came for. I just need some air first.
Outside, the evening has shifted slightly.
The amber at the edge of the sky has deepened now, the air cooler than it was.
The bougainvillea is losing its colour in the fading light.
I stand with my arms loose at my sides and hope, in a vague and unexamined way, that Emma doesn't return to the table, find me missing and think I have done it deliberately.
I haven't. I simply needed to be outside.
The cat has reappeared. It is no longer under the umbrella but moving between legs at the edge of the terrace, permitting attention from several people at once. A woman crouches to scratch behind its ears. A child offers a hand. The cat permits all of it.
From near the bus, Gabe’s voice carries with clipped efficiency. “Ladies and gentlemen, if we could begin making our way to the coach, please. It’s a short drive to our final destination.”
On the coach, Gabe is cheerful and immovable with his clipboard. “Same seats please, ladies and gentlemen, same seats. It avoids any confusion, yes? Thank you, thank you.”
I locate my row, slide in, and immediately remember why hard seats and I are not currently on good terms. I shift once, acknowledge this is not going to improve, and settle my bag on my lap.
The coach fills around me. I look out the window at the restaurant wall, the stacked wine barrels, the umbrella where the cat had been.
I am not looking for Emma. I am simply looking.
My eyes move along the rows of heads in front of me. The French man talking to the man across the aisle. A couple bent together over a phone, their heads almost touching. And there, just a few rows in front, the ash-blonde bun, a few loose strands caught in the light from outside.
She made it back then.
The coach lurches forward and my knees meet the seat-back with a quiet but firm thud.
I stretch my legs sideways into the empty space beside me as much as the narrow row will allow, which is not nearly enough, and resign myself to the indignity of being tall in a vehicle designed for someone considerably less so.
Gabe lifts his microphone with enthusiasm. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the second part of your evening. My name is Gabe, as you know — Gabriel, actually. I am originally from Barcelona, but Tenerife has been my home for thirty years now and I would not change it —”
I tune in and out. The road climbs steeply, the bends pulling the coach slowly upward, the lights of the town falling away below us. My eyes move back to the ash-blonde bun, which is very still, facing forward.
I hope she gets her stars tonight. I hope they're better than anything a childhood video could have promised her.