Chapter Forty-Six
As it becomes increasingly clear that Tazmin Whoever is in the bathroom for the long haul, William Sutherland – Willo, to Lord knows who – mixes himself the strongest drink he can take without collapsing and walks out onto the balcony.
He gazes over the sparkling old city, its celebrated monuments cleverly illuminated to enhance their grandeur whilst still preserving their dignity.
But they give him no pleasure. The ironwork of this elegant balcony might as well be bars of a cage, he thinks, or a prison cell designed by a master sadist. No, by Kafka.
By a sadist who has read Kafka. He has no idea what the night has in store nor whether he will even survive it.
Perhaps this is what those pills were for.
William really does feel quite sorry for himself, sorry for what he is fast becoming and for what he may well have wrought.
Sorry too for Luisa, innocently thinking that he is ‘in Madrid’ (finger-quotes) on some spurious game show business.
And also for young Tazmin, who apparently knows Luisa (and even creepily resembles her!) yet inexplicably is here with him this holy, tawdry week.
Does she have an agenda or is it he who is power-broker and the cards are unfairly stacked?
He does also wonder if such compassion on his part, or at least insight, will all too soon vanish, along with his long-established world view and whatever values he may once have had. Plus all those former, now clearly unsubstantiated memories.
Without pleasure, he takes a deep, audible breath, as if hoping the orange and jacaranda-infused bouquet of this unending spring evening might clear his befuddled head.
And then he hears it.
Another breath, equally deep yet infinitely more embracing. It seems to come from the balcony adjoining his own.
William turns slowly, to see the confidently elegant woman he believes he first glimpsed when she arrived here earlier today with Pablo.
But he sees her now in angled profile. She sips white wine and is smoking a slim cigarette.
As her head moves slowly round towards him, he decides his own serious drinking must have kicked in after all. Because he can’t really be seeing this.
“LUISA?”
The woman spins round. And stares at him really hard. She shakes her head. Moves closer. Stares even harder.
“Madre de Dios! Is it? No! William?”
The glass falls from her hand and smashes into jagged crystals on the solid, tiled floor, the wine trickling swiftly down into the runnels. Her feet are bare, so she has to skitter instantly away from the danger, causing her to move even further towards him.
There’s no question now, thinks William, in total shock. This woman, in a casually smart outfit he has never seen before, sporting a cool and clearly expensive hairstyle that is totally unfamiliar, is Luisa.
Yet a strangely different Luisa.
More stylish and sophisticated than he has ever known her. Trimmer, certainly; firmer, possibly; with a harder, more brittle edge that is evident in every movement she makes, every syllable she utters.
How can this be the woman he knows so well, whom he has known for over thirty years and left sleeping only this morning? In the same bed that is behind him now. Before he set off on his mischief.
The woman who, even in this seriously warped scenario, should be waiting for him back home, in some upmarket Greater London suburb.
So how comes she barely recognised him? Or he her?
And smoking?
“What are you doing here?” he demands, in fearful wonder. “Next door to me?”
“I ask you same thing! What do you do in Sevilla? Business?”
She looks genuinely surprised. As if he, William Sutherland, is the last person Luisa would have ever expected to see here in Seville, this week of all weeks. In the adjoining room. At the same hotel.
And the awful – yet now so painfully obvious – truth smacks William right in the heart.
He realises with a sad immediacy that if he is not to jump screaming off the balcony or collapse into a gibbering heap right here on the omni-bloody-present tiles, he has to work unquestioningly within these new parameters that he has just been given.
To be a serious player in this topsy-turvy, down-the-rabbit-hole game.
At the same time, he has to sound like this is all perfectly, delightfully normal. That his mad fantastical storybook world hasn’t just segued in moments from Gabriel García Márquez into Noel Coward.
“Oh. No. Not business,” he says, ever so casually. “Just, y’know, passing through. Bit of much needed R ’n’ R. But you look—”
“Older.”
“No! Well, yes. Mebbe. No – you look – different. Aye. Different.”
She smiles at this, as she tries delicately to avoid the wine-spill. He notices that she wears turquoise varnish on her toes. When did she start doing that, for pity’s sake? But he soon has larger concerns than her pedicure.
“Different to who?” She smiles. “The young girl who went off in a London taxi twenty-eight years ago?”
Excuse me?
For quite some moments, William finds that he can’t respond. The calculator in his brain is trying to convert a random figure into something that makes at least a scintilla of sense.
“TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS?”
It still comes out as a shriek that screams into the orange-blossomed air. Which he hopes no one else can hear.
“Sí. Time fly, eh? But you look – well, at least you have kept your hair.” She moves closer to him. “Or somebody’s.”
He shrugs. He’s certainly not going to justify a hairweave to this person, nor in fact anything else that has been done to him, at most probably enormous cost. Stuff that he can’t as yet recall but is pretty certain he will in time.
It just depends how long the fifty-three-year-old brain takes to reboot – when its wiring has been drastically abused and its memory given the most cataclysmic shock to its system.
Luisa can’t help but register the look of total bewilderment on the face of her short-lived ex-husband, no matter how hard he strives for normality.
Not unnaturally, she puts it down to his surprise at encountering her once more.
Here, in the very city where they honeymooned, exactly three decades ago.
She also notices that he keeps looking behind him into the bedroom.
“You are with someone. Your wife?”
“No. She’s nothing like my wife – I’m assuming.” The look of instant disapproval on her face makes William bristle. “Oh come on, you can talk!”
She seems quite taken aback by this. He realises that, of course, in this new reality, she most probably can talk and indeed just has. Without any trace of adulterous guilt. “So – what about you, Luisa?” he asks, adroitly changing the subject.
“Well – I did marry again, William. Sí. After our ‘quickie’. But you know this.” (I don’t as yet, Luisa, he thinks, but I’m bloody sure I will.) “I am the optimist, yes? The glass half-full!” She looks down at her bare feet and smiles. “Well, until I see you.”
“Yeah.”
He realises that he has always loved Luisa’s feet. He finds large feet rather intimidating but hers were and still are, even with their vivid embellishments, quite delightful. He also realises he shouldn’t spend many more seconds admiring them. He nods towards her bedroom. “Is he—?
“We are not together.”
“Oh, that is excellent!” he says, almost punching the air, until he realises she isn’t quite so exultant. “I am so sorry, Luisa. Kids all grown up?”
She shakes her head with a motion so brusque and firm that he immediately understands this is not an area ripe for further exploration. “And how about you?” she offers, swiftly enough for it to appear a change of subject, although it is very much the same.
“What?”
“Did you finally find that ‘window’– for children?”
Now, quite unexpectedly, the terrible thought that has been lurking half-formed in his reeling head comes barrelling in, with a force that sucks the breath from his body and sends him grasping for the handrail.
“CLAIRE!”
He cries it out as his hand burrows into the unfamiliar, too-tight trousers for his wallet. He produces a Gucci billfold, which feels like someone else’s that he has pocketed in error. There is no photo “frame” inside. No picture of his own wee smiling, gap-toothed, adopted daughter.
No Clairey.
There is little mistaking his desolation, yet Luisa does just this. Although even she is alarmed by the vehemence with which the man just yelled out his daughter’s name.
“Well, I am glad for you. Fathers and daughters. Is special, no?”
He doesn’t answer. He has turned his ravaged face skywards, as if the heavens might in some way provide a solution. Cursing himself that his beloved daughter hadn’t been the first thing on his broken mind.
“So. Quite a coincidence,” she continues. No response. “William?”
“Eh? Er – well, we did say we’d come back here in thirty years, Luisa. Ha! A promise is a promise.”
“But I have a meeting here.”
“A meeting? Oh. Right.”
He is at a total loss as to where they go from here, but he knows for sure that they have to go somewhere, or he is indeed totally lost.
“Luisa, you don’t fancy—?”
“Climbing over the balcony? No, William.”
“No. No. A drink. You know, a – wee nightcap. Not in here. Obviously.”
“It is very late, William,” she protests.
“It isn’t! Not for Seville. Sevilla. Please, Luisa? For – old time’s sake.”
“If I remember, they were not so good. The old times.”
Weren’t they?
“Here they were. On our honeymoon. I’ll square it with – whatsername.”
Luisa shakes her head, but she is smiling. It is not a smile he recognises. It is a smile that belongs to a different Luisa, a Luisa who has had a life of which he been no part for decades and that sadly he doesn’t know at all.
But it will do. For now.
It will have to.
She checks her watch, which he can tell is more expensive than anything he might or could have bought her. Or that she – the other she, the one who clearly no longer exists – would have dared to buy for herself.
“In the lobby. Ten minutes,” she says.
He nods gratefully to this stranger and walks back into his room.