Chapter Nine
William Sutherland does not have the slightest interest in ceramics.
But he knows of a man who does. Which is why he is on his mobile in one of Seville’s smartest stores, right opposite the cathedral, giving the informed assistants heart failure as he swings his laptop bag millimetres from their well-stacked but vulnerable shelves.
He had done his homework sufficiently to learn that Seville is especially celebrated for her exquisitely decorated tiles.
He now reckons that you would have to be registered blind not to know, as you can’t move for the bloody things.
They’re brightening up every wall, floor and balcony in town, including half of the ceilings, and enhancing indoor and outdoor furniture in neighbourhoods rich and poor.
You’ll find them in the best (and worst) homes and restaurants, public toilets and private palaces, cemented into pavements and even hanging on ladies’ pendants.
Azulejos is apparently the buzzword. William reminds himself to use it whenever the opportunity presents itself. He is on his phone now to ensure that opportunity comes knocking with pipes and drums within the next seventy-two hours. His world apparently depends upon it.
“So – maybe I could take you for a meal,” he invites the recorder of Spain’s longest answer-phone greeting.
“You and your Senora. A ‘night on the tiles’, as we – Oh, are you sure? Well, gracias… No, no, you choose… Of course I know your product. It’s of the highest quality.
And, as for your azulejos, Senor Barbadillo…
mm? … Oh, okay… Cristobal. Well then, you must call me—” He stops talking mid-sentence. Words dangle in the humid air.
The little blond boy, the one from that first procession, the one who he… that boy.
He’s staring in through the window. Now. At William.
The sun and the reflections it creates are quite blinding at first. To William’s confused eye it looks as though the boy is throwing delicate crockery up in the air. But no, it’s his small hand that is moving up and down. The crockery is still, of course, on the shelves behind William.
Yet the boy is hurling something skywards. It’s like a ball of some sort but not smooth, nothing that a child could bat or bounce. Irregular and knobbly, it seems to contain different colours swirling haphazardly within. And quite suddenly he remembers.
Wax!
Yes, from the candles. Children – young kids and even teenagers – would hold out their tremulous hands in the darkness towards a candle’s flames.
Dear Lord, that was such an age ago. And now the child is smiling.
Or at least he is until his father comes along, sees William frozen in the window and snatches the boy away.
Again. The purple birthmark on the man’s cheek, in the shape of a ragged star, looks almost as angry as he does.
Without even thinking, or wondering if he is about to appear on some sort of watchlist, William wanders out of the shop.
He doesn’t hear the sighs of relief from the petrified assistants.
And barely even registers the words he himself employs to close this hitherto most critical of phone conversations.
“We’ll – er – speak tomorrow then. Aye. Good to talk, Pab… Cristobal.”
The heat hits him like a fist as he leaves the impressive air-conditioning behind him.
Hot and blinded, he changes his glasses to the ones he keeps for abroad, the old prescription with the expensive tinted lenses.
An extra for which he couldn’t quite justify forking out again this time round.
It’s a parsimony Luisa tuts about each time he slips them on, even though she knows that with his skin he tries to keep out of the sun as much as possible anyway.
Beetroot isn’t as yet the new shade of black.
William has absolutely no idea why he is walking in the direction of the cathedral.
Luisa must be back at the hotel by now; the parade can’t have taken that long to pass by.
And, as the Gothic Catedral de Santa Maria de la Sede, along with its accompanying bell tower, is the city’s most celebrated landmark on this or any other week, as indeed it was on that earlier Semana Santa, it would undoubtedly be somewhere she would wish for them to revisit together.
Perhaps this is why he is going alone.