Chapter Twenty
The morning sun makes its warm, languorous way over a proudly unchanging city.
A city now miraculously cleaned-up from last night’s processions and anticipating, with the unwavering confidence of centuries, many more to come.
It slowly gilds and brings new life to ancient buildings, as it crosses the easy-flowing and not so easily cleaned-up Guadalquivir, Spain’s only great navigable river, and enters the picturesque district of Triana to the west. A district waking up to yet another day of celebration and service.
Sol takes time out from his full spring schedule to sneak through the gaps in the shutters of a pretty little hostel, alighting first on an apparently thrilling book in English by a writer with an assumed French name.
This is in the possession of a young Scot who didn’t enjoy any apparent literary thrills the night before.
He is dozily blinking-in dawn’s early rays, as he eases himself free from what he was happy to look upon as an alternative source of adrenaline.
And he begins to snort.
The young woman beside him lies with the rumpled sheet half-covering her slowly stirring body, like that proud lady with one exquisite breast exposed on those French coins she herself has seen on trips with parents and friends.
Which, of course, rings no bells with him.
Otherwise he would doubtless be referencing it, instead of just snorting.
Finally she turns, vaguely disturbed by the weirdness beside her.
Result!
“I couldn’t get the bullfight tickets,” Will explains, rearing his head, with its thick red and totally un-bull-like mane, “so I had the bull come to us.”
“It is only your head that is big,” retorts Lu, reaching a lazy hand down under the sheets.
“Give it thirty seconds, darling. What’s the Spanish for Durex?”
She stares at him. “What is the English for Durex?”
“Er… jonnies? Condoms?” Pointing downwards. “Contra—”
“Ah – el preservativo.”
“Aye. El preser… Okay. Well, maybe sometime you could get, you know, more el – por favor. From the—”
“Farmacia.”
“Exactly. Farmacia.” He strokes the unbelievably soft, olive skin below her collarbone. “We don’t want any little accidentes.”
Lu’s still sleepy face doesn’t intimate that this might not be quite the catastrophe her new husband clearly envisages. But she catches him picking up on her slight que sera shrug, so she swiftly lightens up. “Little Willies!” she laughs. “There is only three nights now here. How many do you have?”
He holds up ten fingers. Which makes her give that ethereal yet so very bawdy laugh he loves. And allows the Govan bull to rear once more.