Chapter Nineteen
In a smarter, better-appointed bedroom just a few hundred metres and three decades away, that “old couple” – yet still not what William and Luisa Sutherland, on their better days, would consider over the hill – lie far apart.
William has donned his eye mask, to deter the fusillade of early morning sunlight from disturbing his already rocky sleep.
Luisa wears a tooth guard, which helps to prevent the stressful grinding she gathers she does in the night from giving her headaches in the morning and an arthritic jaw for life.
She has performed her creaming and her plucking and is ready to switch off the light.
They both know, however, that they are not going to grab much sleep tonight.
“What do you think they’re doing right now?” asks William, raising his mask. Yet he doesn’t turn to Luisa. He stares straight up at the ceiling. “Three guesses,” he answers himself ruefully, his imagination filling in where his memory fails.
She doesn’t say anything. So he proceeds to worry out an explanation. For something that he knows can support no earthly rationale whatsoever.
“It’s like, I dunno,” because he doesn’t, “it’s like two parallel lines have just gone whoomph!
” He smacks his hands together at this point with such unanticipated vehemence that Luisa’s teeth almost bite through the plastic.
“We’ve got our own Bermuda sodding Triangle!
” Despite his best efforts, William finds himself reduced almost to tears.
“I don’t understand, Luisa. I just don’t – those two young kids!
I hardly recognised them. They certainly didn’t bloody recognise us. ”
“It is this week. Semana Santa. Some people say there is magic here. I cannot explain this thing, William.”
He turns to her now, removing his eye mask altogether. She registers his look of utter bewilderment and returns it with a look of her own, one not totally drained of affection. Even though the turmoil in her heart and mind, she believes, is quite the equal of his own.
Yet neither expresses any desire simply to pack up and go back home to Richmond. Leave all the madness here, where it belongs. Forget it ever happened; keep calm and carry on. The thought simply does not occur to them.
Very slowly, as if he thinks this might, in some ingenious way, disguise the fact of his moving at all, William shuffles across the massive, king-sized bed, until he can sense the warmth of his wife’s thigh through her summer nightie.
Luisa feels the unexpected yet still-familiar contact of his legs on her skin.
She is surprised, it has been a while, but she doesn’t edge away – and not simply because, were she to do so, she would most probably fall off the bed.
But she does lean over and nudge the bedside light, so that it angles against the wall, its harshness dimmed, without banishing visibility altogether.
Deftly, she seizes the opportunity to slip off the dental guard and toss it in a drawer.
They kiss, gently at first, letting their bodies softly entwine before their mouths confirm that this is more than a friendly goodnight squeeze.
Not that even these have been over-abundant in modern times.
She feels his excitement as she senses her own gradually building, not dynamic as yet but still here and present in a way she might not have anticipated even hours before.
Although she had wondered, as they were planning this trip – and possibly even hoped (admittedly without that level of yearning that borders on distraction) – whether this might indeed be an integral feature of the week’s ‘re-tracings’.
His hands, as they gently caress, making delicate patterns on the soft material covering what she considers her still reasonably firm breasts, don’t leave her totally cold.
Even if she does feel curiously and almost stupidly self-conscious.
The newly redawning familiarity, the quiet comfort of two people grown apart but still so very far from strangers, slowly begins to bring its own welcome and much needed rewards.
Lovingly yet urgently, he slips her nightie over her shoulders.
And then she sees his eyes.
They’re closed, which is fine and as she might have wished, as indeed her own had been for some seconds. But, in that moment, she suddenly knows. It is as if she can journey behind the lids and directly into his mind, intruding on the dreamscape he is trying so desperately to keep to himself.
She can see her. The other woman.
Her younger self.
She cannot be certain of it. Yet she is certain of it.
And now, with a clarity that scares as much as it fascinates, she can see the two of them, young Will and just-as-young Lu, making a love so passionate that it resonates through the years, rocking her life and her world.
She can picture – in fact she can’t stop picturing – their naked, thrumming bodies, clenched and rolling, flesh unblemished and strong, glowing with sweat and youth and hope.
As if their sexual acrobatics are being projected in an open-air theatre, to an audience dumbstruck with admiration.
But now the cast is changing.
It is the older man, the weary fifty-three-year-old currently nuzzling and stroking her with passionate and rediscovered intensity, whom she ‘sees’ with this beautiful young woman.
The woman she once was but clearly is no more.
The woman reintroduced sharply and miraculously into her middle-aged husband’s mind; the girl who has so innocently attracted his interest and so sweetly commandeered his attention.
In a manner this older woman knows that she has not done for so very long.
It hurts more than she can possibly explain.
She wishes with every cell in her overwhelmed body that it could just be over and is at least reassured that it will be very soon.