Chapter One
“I do know how to pack a suitcase, Luisa.”
William Sutherland is not in a holiday mood.
He rarely is when he’s about to go on holiday and seldom even when he’s actually there.
Apparently it’s something to do with his never having had holidays as a child.
Or being Glaswegian. Or both. William is not prone to self-analysis.
He only gleans this particularly unhelpful observation from his wife, Luisa, the one who’s trying to help him pack his suitcase and getting little thanks for it.
The one who had bags of holidays as a child.
“I know you do, William. I know also you are angry if your shirts have the creases.”
“I should have packed last night,” he mutters. “If I hadn’t had that bloody report to write for Sandy. We don’t want to keep the kids waiting.”
Luisa shakes her head. She knows they will be packed and sorted in plenty of time and the kids – who aren’t really kids at all, not any more – wouldn’t mind waiting. Not after a lifetime (at least for one of them) of being hurried.
She is feeling slightly lightheaded, which she thinks may be because she is teetering on the cusp of diabetes and hasn’t yet eaten, even though it is still very early.
But somewhere she knows that this particular feeling isn’t her pancreas playing up. It is because she is sick with fear.
“Can I make you some eggs?” she offers.
He doesn’t answer. She is sure that he has heard but she can’t yet be certain, even after thirty years, whether he is mulling or simply ignoring.
Finally. “Er, no. No, thank you. I’ll just have my cereal.”
Luisa knows that, to William Sutherland’s Catherine -wheel mind, eggs take time but cereal you just pour straight out.
So she isn’t going to argue that they’d be ready for him by the time he’s through.
That in fact it would be swifter for him than preparing his own morning muesli and fruit concoction.
She simply nods and closes the bedroom window, muffling the familiar sound of Surrey rain they’ll soon be leaving well behind.
He can hear her walk into the kitchen and the humming begin.
It’s a humming of childhood Spanish melodies, of which she’s not even aware but which either enchants or irritates him. More often, these days, the latter.
William sits on the newly-made bed, removes his glasses and releases the breath he has been holding in. He realises that this will waste valuable packing seconds, but he also feels that he deserves a brief breather, given the circumstances.
He looks blearily around the bedroom.
He can’t deny that it is a comfortable room, sunny even, despite the weather.
And most probably decorated and furnished in the best of taste, albeit a tad continental.
Luisa is the one with the flair – this has never been his province.
The bed works, at least for sleeping, although his sleep is never great.
(This reminds him – he must ensure that he has packed all his pills.
Some in the suitcase and the same again in the front compartment of his battered laptop bag, just in case their baggage goes to La Paz.)
The only feature in this expensively cosy room he could definitely live without is the painting, if you could call it that, mounted above the bed.
It’s there because William refuses to hang it in the living room, a decision that Luisa has tactfully passed off to its creator, their son-in-law, as wanting to have it where they can wake up to it every morning.
Which they bloody do, although William tries very hard to keep it just outside his peripheral vision.
At least this is one opinion he shares with his wife – it really isn’t a very good painting.
And unfortunately, in this case, knowing the artist doesn’t afford it the least extra cachet.
Luisa has left her wardrobe door ajar. Moths will get in while we’re away, he thinks crossly, although he’s not totally sure if moths still do this.
He suddenly recalls the smell of mothballs in the old tenement flat, one of several lingering smells from childhood, still there on his mother when they’d carried her out.
A potent smell yet one of the comparatively harmless ones. Except, of course, to moths.
This week, he is being told, is a time for remembering. As if he didn’t have enough to do.
He catches himself in the mirror and puts his glasses back on.
William has never been taken with the way he looks, although Luisa has often told him how attractive she finds him.
Not for some time now, that’s for sure, but he does believe that on those historic occasions she genuinely meant it.
Even if he sensed there was always the implication that others might see things differently.
For the life of him he can’t see it now, even with his vision restored.
All he can see is that proud terrain where his once-untamed, almost maple-red hair ran luxuriantly free, now a somewhat desolate archipelago of wispy, balding grey.
And below the still half-closed, pastel-blue eyes lie clearly permanent gullies that time and life have dug into milky, Scottish, sun-shy skin.
Bit jowly too, Father William, he thinks, and a future candidate for Red Nose Day – probably the result of too many business lunches, mostly at his expense and for too long not converted into business.
Perhaps he should go easy on the paella this week, although he suspects that eating for Britain might be the one thing he will enjoy.
The doorbell interrupts his assessment.
“William,” calls Luisa, “they’re here!”
“ Damnation!” he mutters, before telling himself that he should be quite relieved they’re early when he had been expecting them to be artistically late.
He stuffs a final shirt into the case. One that Luisa recently bought for him, on her way back from quietly delivering six others to the Help the Aged shop.
Sod the creases.
*
“You’re going to have such a wonderful time, you two. I’m so jealous.”
“Sí. I cannot wait, Marcus. It has been so long,” says Luisa to her son-in-law from the back seat of the small car, with appropriate excitement. Then she remembers to add, once again, “Thank you so much for – everything.”
The eager young man swivels round awkwardly in his seat, to nod acknowledgement.
A gangly nod, trendy NHS-style glasses bobbing on his beaky nose, dirty-blond hair in need of a good cut swirling with the motion of car.
It’s a kind face, she thinks again. A face that will keep her beautiful daughter happy, she decides, if never in luxury, although can we ever truly know about these things?
“Oh, Mummy, you don’t have to keep thanking us,” laughs Claire. “It’s our pleasure. Really.”
William can see his daughter smiling in the driving mirror. That adorable, gap-toothed smile. The darkly beautiful, wonderfully mischievous face. Their eyes meet and for a moment he softens. His face lights up, as it always does when he sees her. For a moment the familiar numbness recedes.
“It’s a huge thank you from me too, darling,” he says, which sounds almost sincere. “Think you’re ever going to learn to drive, Marcus?” he asks. He can hear his wife sigh softly beside him. William doesn’t care.
“Doubt it, William,” laughs Marcus, trying bravely if unconvincingly to rise above the familiar disdain. “Artists make rubbish drivers – ask the insurance companies.”
“Make rubbish pictures too,” mutters William, but mercifully almost to himself.
“You’ll probably be amazed how all the memories come flooding back to you,” says Claire, who hasn’t been alive long enough to have the sort of memories she’s talking about but has an unshakeable faith in romance.
“And remember how you guys told me that you promised yourselves you’d go back there one day? ”
“Did we?” says William, who remembers no such thing. “Well, that must have been a long time ago, darling.”
Nobody comments, so the words hang uneasily in the still-dark, pre-rush hour air. Not unexpectedly, their English-teacher daughter moves things along with a vaguely appropriate quote.
“‘The past is another country. They do things differently there.’”
William immediately responds, as if challenged. “Oh easy-peasy! LP Hartley, The Go-Between.”
“Loved that old movie!” cries Marcus. “Julie Christie and—”
“We’re talking about the book,” grumbles William, his favourite game with his only daughter crassly interrupted. His wife throws him a look. “Film was good too,” he offers. “But, at the risk of being a wee pedant, sweetie, it’s ‘foreign country’.”
“Correct! Just testing. So what’s your holiday book this time, Daddy?”
“What do you think?” interrupts Luisa. “Company Report numero 6432!”
The entire car must feel Marcus tense. It certainly hears his intake of breath.
“Away ye go!” William mutters, crossly. “I do read other things. Mebbe I’ve got a lot of work on, eh? A few wee bills to pay?”
Luisa can see her daughter wince at the familiar question marks in her father’s voice.
The younger woman leans over to stare concernedly at her parents in the mirror.
Not easy, as their older heads aren’t exactly together.
She stares for a few seconds too long, considering she’s also switching lanes on a tricky, four-lane motorway. Words unspoken, shrugs exchanged.
William thinks, not for the first time, that life is so full of looks and shrugs and winces and nods that perhaps we need never really speak at all. Which would suit him just fine and cut out all that unnecessary small-talking he’s never fully mastered.
It would certainly save him having to tell Luisa about the meeting he intends to set up while he’s out there.
“Will you peeps be needin’ to book a pick-up for the way back, guvnor?” chirps Marcus, in an accent of his own devising, to break the silence. Yet somehow it appears to do quite the opposite.