Chapter Two
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!”
William knows that he should probably replace his old mobile.
But what can he do – he loves it and it seems to like him reasonably well.
So he would defy anyone to respond less vociferously should a rowdy group of guys with “Kevin’s Stag SHAG Do!
!!” crudely printed on identical white T-shirts come roaring through the concourse of Gatwick North Terminal and knock their beloved phone out of their hands, mid-business call, with a loaded trolley.
(But not as loaded as they will be when they pour off the plane in Prague or Kraków or one of those other premarital, cultural high spots.)
He only just manages to catch the cascading object before it can be crushed terminally under foot. Looking up, after another expletive, he spots two small children staring unblinkingly at him, huddled into the folds of their unimpressed mum.
“Oops!” he mutters, in genuine contrition, because these days he is usually quite able to hold himself together and harness his famous temper. “So sorry, guys! Pardon my French.” He smiles warmly at the kids and slaps the back of his own hand in mock chastisement.
“Oh fuh fffffs ake!” says the smallest child.
The family twirls back to face the line, unaware that this exchange is being watched from a distance by a smartly dressed and wearily attractive, Mediterranean-looking woman, a short, middle-aged traveller with medium-length, expressively cut dark hair and a figure that hovers precariously between voluptuous and BMI red flag.
She moves with vague curiosity towards them.
“Making friends?” she says to William. Despite the earliness of the hour and the strain of the occasion, her chestnut eyes still sparkle, should anyone care to notice.
“Connections. Never too soon. Should I give them my card?”
Before he can look up, because he knows who she is, Luisa hangs a small plastic-bag on his hand. Puzzled, he opens it apprehensively, as if it might suddenly ignite, and removes a brand-new copy of The Night Manager, by John le Carré.
“Didn’t I read this…?”
“Back in 1995? Only the half of it. You left it at that café the last time. Our café.”
“Our—?” William glances at Luisa with irritated yet genuine admiration. “How do you remember it all – like it was yesterday?”
She looks down at the rescued phone, now clutched tightly in his hand like an errant child. “Perhaps because I am not always thinking about tomorrow.”
*
Coming across William and Luisa Sutherland, of Richmond, Surrey, as they stroll silently through the final passport control and along the wrinkled corridor that leads, like a birth canal, towards their waiting plane, one would be forgiven for thinking they were strangers simply walking in the same direction.
The balding, slightly stooped, middle-aged man, grabbing more complimentary newspapers than he or his politics could possibly absorb.
The fetchingly mature woman in her tailored navy raincoat, shuffling patiently behind.
Or perhaps the onlooker might just assume they were so long-married that they had no further need to make those wearisome shows of togetherness that younger couples feel obliged to affect.
“I have to make a wee phone call,” mutters William. “When we—”
“Of course you do.”
He senses the urge to respond, but it would be nothing that he hasn’t said or snapped out before.
And – to be honest – he doesn’t have the energy.
Nor has he the least desire right now to prolong conversation, which even he reckons does not exactly augur well for the sort of holiday that traps two people together, like some kind of experiment with mice, without access to friends, family, proper television or, of course, work colleagues.
Not that mice watch a lot of TV or have a particularly cordial working environment, but he still sees a parallel and wonders if the object in both cases isn’t to observe as they tear each other apart.
Which is why William clings to his phone and prays that his laptop hasn’t mysteriously uncharged itself between home and Boeing.
The silence continues on the plane.
William reads the reports that his dutiful PA Suzy has prepared and prioritised for him, whilst Luisa absorbs herself in her brand-new guidebook.
A glossy tourist bible to a city she knows only too well and which William is pretty certain won’t have changed that much in three decades.
Or indeed in several centuries. Isn’t this why people visit in the first place?
Isn’t this why he and Luisa are trundling back?
Yet, even within this familiar silence and almost defining it, Luisa is doing that thing William feels she does so well.
He wonders whether she has always done it.
Whether she was doing it when they first met, in Glasgow of all places, so many years ago.
Wonders if she is, in truth, one long, drawn-out, Iberian sigh.
Right now her audible sighs are over the number of Scotch whisky miniatures William is ordering from the British Airways steward.
An order accomplished with the traditional “waving of the empty” so familiar to catering staff of all nations.
She sighs as a small child in the seat in front of them leans over and duly emits an inevitable sticky dribble onto William’s not particularly smart, yet not especially casual, M&S trousers – and which he won’t let his life-partner wipe away, although she has the tissue primed and waiting in her hand.
She sighs again as he taps out yet another polite email to someone even he is convinced won’t respond.
She sighs loudest when the professionally chirpy announcement finally drifts through the plane.
Before they know it they will be arriving at their destination and thank you for travelling with us.
But William, by now a connoisseur of sighs, knows that this time the expressive exhalation of stale and unwanted air has a certain continental tinge and the definite hint of an excitement that wasn’t there before.
As the massive wheels impact with God knows what force onto the near-to-melting tarmac, the whole plane joins in with the sighing.
William even finds himself doing it. But with the distinctive timbre that only a dour Caledonian, on a particularly grumpy day, in a city he would rather bite off his legs than revisit, can summon up.