Chapter Eighteen
“Hello – this is William Sutherland…”
It isn’t. Yet, of course, it is.
Will Sutherland, cocky yet pensive, is trying to adopt the weathered tones of a considerably older man, a gentleman of curiously similar origins to himself (and, unbeknownst to him, of very similar name), whilst he holds a cheap plastic sunglasses case to his ear.
Will intends this to represent a phone. Not a mobile phone, as he still knows relatively little of these.
Nor is he aware that in just a few, swiftly passing years these quiet, scented gardens in which he promenades, on this short-sleeved, starry night, will be infested with them, like luminous bats.
“…Aye, the famous novelist and millionaire playboy. That one!” His amused and adoring wife of a matter of days gives him a look of mock disapproval.
“…Monogamous millionaire playboy. And this time round we’d like something just that bit snazzier, por favor…
Certainly with a minibar! And a jacuzzi…
Aye – no, two helipads, my wife and I never heli together. ”
He hears that glorious chuckle and turns, as ever, to drink her in.
She seems to glow in the moonlight, as if the night has switched her on like a singular son et lumière, giving her flawless skin and that flowing, midnight-dark hair a lustre that, at least to a young man hot with love, matches the dazzling floats in their glory.
She holds an orange in her hand, plucked from one of the trees lining their way, and is stroking it tenderly.
“Lu…?” His voice has become more serious, which causes her to stop and look at him. “D’you reckon we will come back here? But, you know, rich – like that old couple.”
“Together, carino, like that couple,” she responds, equally serious. “Rich or not rich. We make this promise also, yes? Our thirty aniversario. Two thousand and – and twenty-five, sí? That we are here again, in this place.”
Will looks at her, his eyebrows raised and that wry, worldly-wise smile, one she already knows so well, on his barely shaven face. That he should react to this notion with such scepticism both surprises and unsettles her.
“We are surviving Madrid. And my parents,” she protests. “What can be worse than this?”
“Their sodding dog,” he replies, which at least lightens the mood, if not the sentiment.
A little boy is skipping towards them, with his parents. He holds a knobbly sphere of wax, which he tosses up into the air and catches clumsily in both small hands. They notice a distinctive, star-shaped birthmark on his cheek.
“Is very old tradition,” explains Lu. “Their balls grow bigger every year.”
“Yeah, well, they would,” says Will, seriously.
So seriously that she completely fails to register the joke.
He smiles anyway, happy to amuse himself, then points to the orange in her hands, which she is caressing so sensually that he can hardly believe it isn’t deliberate. “Do you mind not doing that?” he says.
She glances down, as if to examine what she is doing.
If it wasn’t intentional at the outset, it most certainly is now.
She raises the ripe orange to her lips and sniffs it, then slowly rolls her tiny tongue around its bumpy outer edge, finally taking it in both hands and rubbing it sensuously over her full lips, her chin and down onto her soft, warm throat.
By the time it reaches the undone top buttons of her light, summery dress, Will has decided you can only have so much promenading of an evening.
“Come on, Senora Sutherland. And bring your Jaffas with you.”
*
If there is a particularly Andalusian way of making love, it may well involve rolling around naked in a tiny, moonlit room, on a narrow and rather lumpy double-bed made even more lumpy by a generous helping of Sevillian marmalade oranges.
Whilst all the time these natural aids to romance explore and massage the body’s most sensitive zones.
Giggling is most probably optional but in this case the option builds to such a crescendo that the persons responsible actually roll off their bed of warm citrus and onto the hard, wooden floor.
Fortunately, this does not unduly interrupt the task at hand, as Will and Lu Sutherland are nothing if not tenacious.