Chapter Sixteen #2
There is no mistaking the decisiveness in the seated couple’s voices nor its frantic intensity.
The two New York ladies are clearly taken aback.
But hardly more so than the younger pair, whom William and Luisa can of course see but immediately realise that the American visitors, thankfully, cannot.
Meantime, Will and Lu are quite politely trying and failing to seem unfazed by their new acquaintances, who have just screamed with loud and synchronised negativity into the empty air.
The slightly larger newcomer sings to her friend, as if by putting the words to music she somehow cocoons them. “We’ve interrupted somethingggggg, Shelby!”
“Vamos, Marilyn. Adiós todo el mundo,” says the other.
The women smile uneasily and sidle off, hand in hand. William and Luisa, who never go out of their way to offend unless absolutely necessary, nod a pleasant yet still utterly disconcerting goodbye.
“So!” says Will, striving for a normality that is rapidly dissolving in the sultry evening air. “Er – how was Sevilla in 1965?”
“NINETEEN SIXTY-FIVE?” yelp the older couple in bewildered unison, immediately screwing things up again on the ‘normal’ front.
It is William who catches on first. Gamely, he attempts to steer the storm-tossed and by-now seriously leaky craft back into the shallows. “Oh. Yeah! Er – thirty years ago – Fanta? Backwards from today? From 1995?” He is sounding increasingly desperate. “On our honeymoon?”
Out of the corner of his eye he can see his wife of thirty years struggling, as if someone has just told her that the world is flat after all and unfortunately the table she has chosen is perched right on its crumbling edge.
“Yes. Married April 1965!” William laughs, manically. “Well, as the poet Philip Larkin famously said – ‘sexual intercourse began in 1963’. So we were in at the start, Lu.”
“Gordon!” Luisa’s admonishment at least reassures him that she is back in the game.
“I love Larkin!” exclaims Will, clearly delighted to be returning to more stable ground.
“I’m an English graduate. Glasgow Uni. But where on earth did you two meet – a Scot and an Argentinian?
” The solid nudge that Lu gives him doesn’t chasten him in the least. “Hey, you went and married a writer, Mrs S! Everything’s a story. ”
They barely notice the flicker of sadness that sweeps across William’s face. And why should they? He is moving on with some urgency, his apparent quest now to elicit information from them. Information that, of course, he already knows, yet somehow needs desperately to hear again.
“Writer, eh? Aye… well. You must have a fine imagination, Will.”
“Will is so good with the imagining, Gordon,” boasts his new wife. “I say to him, Will, one day you will write the books for children and I am doing the pictures.” She smiles a bit sheepishly. “Is good to dream – yes?”
Luisa looks wistfully yet not unkindly at William, needing with a curious urgency to check on his reaction. To her surprise, he shifts his chair even further away from her, edging himself closer to Lu.
“British Embassy – Buenos Aires – 1963. I was out there to help our Israeli friends find Nazi war criminals—” He is aware that Luisa is staring at him open-mouthed, but he doesn’t care.
‘Gordon’ is on a roll. “—When into my office trots this lovely, young, Argentinian woman. Wanting to tell me of – of an elegant brothel that a notorious ex-SS commandant is known to frequent. Aye. She’d seen through his disguise, Lu – as a…
porcelain salesman. Azulejos.” He is watching their faces – the young couple are riveted.
And why wouldn’t they be? “That was enough for us to find our man – in the bedroom of one of the ‘working girls’. Who just happened to be – you guessed it—”
As the couple gawp, Luisa nearly chokes.
Will – thankfully – has the grace to move things on. “O-kay. So – what do you recommend, Gordon? Y’know, that we do here in Seville?”
“Well—” begins William, but Luisa is in there, before he does any more damage. Perhaps only William can pick up the genuine fear in her voice.
“You must do – exactly what it is you were going to do, Will. Exactly!” She rises abruptly from her chair, realising, as she stands, just how rigid her entire body has become. “Now I think we let you get on with your honeymoon. Gordon? GORDON!”
“Eh? Oh. Yeah. We’d best be—”
“Wait! Por favor.”
Lu is standing too. And holding out her bulky camera to Luisa, who almost instinctively takes it.
Whilst it can’t help but suddenly look its age, it is clearly in the most capable of hands.
She swiftly adjusts it, with a familiarity that might confuse a more suspicious mind.
Now she signals the couple to sit down close together and smile, instructions they are only too willing to obey.
On the move himself and scooping up his precious laptop-bag from beneath his feet, William notices that a shiny paperback book has slipped out of the dark holdall on the ground next to the younger man and fallen behind a chair.
He casually picks it up, noting with a smile that it is indeed Le Carré’s The Night Manager.
Luisa’s recall was, as ever, total. He slips it back into Will’s bag, amongst the notepads and pens and duty-free fags, where it belongs. Enjoy!
Luisa takes the photo. Fortunately, the newly old camera appears still to be functioning. She hopes, for the youngsters’ sake, the roll of film inside it is too.
With waves, nods and some relief they leave the blissfully ignorant, albeit faintly bemused, honeymooners to enjoy their evening. As the older couple have every confidence they will.
Neither William nor Luisa notices Pablo, sitting at a small table beside the café entrance. He enjoys a quiet coffee and a Ducano as he watches his new guests stagger helplessly away.