Chapter Twenty-One
William Sutherland is dressing carefully in front of the full-length mirror.
He knows that this is something he rarely does these days, unless he has an important client meeting. So virtually never on holiday. (Although, hopefully, this week will be different.)
The husband is having to make do with whatever natural light is teasing through the blinds, as he doesn’t wish to disturb his sleeping wife.
He realises that he could simply wait and she would be more than willing to tell him exactly what fashion crimes he is committing.
But curiously, on this first full day of his hardly longed-for trip, he fancies a brisk start and a tad more personal grooming.
William looks over at his huddled bedmate, recognising the tiny shifts and movements that signify her slow, reluctant transition towards day.
Luisa could sleep for Britain – or siesta for Spain – yet this time William senses in himself none of the usual resentment.
In fact, there’s something approaching affection here.
Or, if not quite those dizzy heights, at least a hiatus in the conventional irritation.
William Sutherland is actually feeling not too bad about himself.
He ponders if yesterday – despite its almost heart-clogging madness – hadn’t concluded far better than he might have expected.
The fact that this outcome also makes him feel strangely uneasy is one he will park for the time being.
It seems clear to him now that any attempt to resist phenomena currently doing the Andalusian rounds will prove less than futile. So he might as well simply surrender.
Yet isn’t he that guy who always needs to be in control?
William convinces himself, in the language of lunacy, that normal service will naturally be resumed when they return home to Richmond.
As indeed he has been convincing himself, for some years, that his life, or at least what passes for it, is as normal as he can expect – indeed, as anyone could expect.
Even if normal isn’t the same as good. Or satisfactory.
Even if it is in fact dry, slow and nagging, like a tiny, repetitive throb that doesn’t ever convulse or cripple yet never actually abates.
He is not usually in favour of holidays or trips, as he feels that they only stir things up. Which is why, William suspects, his more passionate wife is so keen on them.
But perhaps yesterday – last night – was a watershed. One that he may never fully acknowledge and certainly could not easily explain – yet equally clearly will not ever forget. He will have to see how the rest of this craziest of (holy) weeks plays out.
He wonders if there might be a further mystical encounter any time soon, in this spiritual Disneyland. He wonders also, with some alarm, whether in fact this might be exactly what he is wishing for. Dear Lord! He reminds himself not to forget to take his morning blood pressure pill.
Behind him the gentle rumbling builds.
“Buenos días,” he says, with a warm smile. “Sleep well?”
Luisa doesn’t answer. She simply nods, as she struggles out of bed, unrumpling her nightwear in the direction of decency, and pads towards the bathroom.
William is fully aware that his wife isn’t a morning person, so he won’t take offence at the lack of conversation.
But he can’t help but find it curious that she should be so intent on covering herself even further, with the flimsy robe she has left draped over a chair, when she’s going to be removing the lot in a matter of seconds.
He knows that this hardly reflects well on him, but he can’t help but compare his wife’s ample figure, one that William did genuinely appreciate last night, with that of the slender young woman who keeps lingering to the last detail, like a seductive melody, in his mind.
Yet he immediately feels better about such thoughts when he realises that they may, in some legitimate way, be flattering.
In fact, he might just compliment Luisa on how grandly she has managed over the decades and indeed, so far from letting herself go, as others in their circle have done, how well preserved and attractive she still is.
Then he realises that this is just as monumentally crass and incorrect as his original thinking and wonders whether there shouldn’t be some sort of marital Geneva Convention to afford immediate guidance on the spousal battleground.
And perhaps a historian in this field of human conflict might explain how you can quite happily have comfortably enjoyable sex with a person with whom you are still quietly and attritionally at war.
“So. What do you want to do today?” he asks, but she has already closed the bathroom door.
He tries to be as casual as he can, albeit louder, with the next question.
“Hey, remind me, just out of interest, where did we go – this time today, last time round? Y’know, the first full morning of our trip. ”
For some reason, possibly because he hasn’t entirely woken up himself, William reckons that this is sufficiently subtle for her to consider it as no more than a sentimental, perhaps endearingly nostalgic enquiry, rather than what even he senses it might really be – an attempt to take whatever cataclysmic oddness happened yesterday to its far-from-logical conclusion.
Or at least onwards into a further and probably even more terrifying new stage.
William hasn’t ever regarded himself as a man with an addictive personality, despite the smoking and the whisky.
All right, there’s the work too, which Luisa mentions at every opportune moment, but of course this is so far from being an addiction as to be laughable.
Unless the addiction is to pure, unadulterated survival.
And the whole human race has that monkey on its back.
He reassures himself that he has seen first-hand a true addiction at play and this simply isn’t him.
Yet he feels those strange and not totally unfamiliar stirrings inside of him.
A fluttering as if a dynamo is slowly charging up within his gut and a hollowing even further down.
Sensations that say to him something is happening in my life, something devouring and all-consuming, quite possibly even dangerous, which despite every sane impulse I’m not totally certain I wish to curtail.
Should this even be one of my available options.
“Luisa—?”
She clearly hasn’t heard him. Or is choosing not to respond.
He switches on the bedroom light and checks himself out again.
He realises, with genuine regret, that he really doesn’t look that great – especially compared to the younger, hairier guy, that one just across the bridge, who is most probably still rutting for Scotland.
But perhaps “distinguished” might hold the fort for attractive or striking.
And at least his colours don’t clash today. He is almost sure of this.
“Me, Lu?” he answers an unasked question from the mirror. “Well, I’m a novelist. And a scriptwriter. Oh, you know, London, Cannes, LA. You’ve probably seen some of my work. I subtitle well.”
If it freaks William Sutherland out that he is having an imaginary conversation in a hotel bedroom – located somewhere that he hadn’t particularly wanted to be – in which he lies to his innocent young wife of another bygone era (who has no idea who he really is and thinks he’s a man in his fifties, living contemporaneously with her in 1995) then he manages to hide it well.
Perhaps it might just begin to strike him as total bloody insanity, with God knows what permanent consequences to his psyche, if Luisa’s mobile, sitting on her bedside table, doesn’t decide to ping at this particular moment.
He is suddenly and overwhelmingly angry.
An anger that bubbles up with boiling fury, like an unstoppable geyser, from the pit of his stomach.
Although, in fact, it is quite stoppable – he has developed some basic mastery over the years and is rather proud of the fact.
He hardly even raises his voice these days. He rarely has the time or the energy.
William isn’t the least bit disgruntled that an incoming text has been flagged – Luisa is entitled to these.
But it tells him that not for the first time she had clearly forgotten to switch off her phone, so that it wouldn’t ping loudly during the night and wake him from his ever-precarious sleep.
A slumber that, once disturbed, might never regain full traction.
Of course, it hadn’t actually done this.
William had slept unusually well, due in good part to a simple bodily reaction no prescription drug has at yet managed to replicate.
But it is still worth reminding his thoughtless wife of her oversight, as it might even the score just a fraction and elicit a rare apology.
Some momentary contrition to temper the endless series of sniping altercations and exchanges, alternating with brooding silence, that have become the bedrock of their lives.
He moves slowly round the bed and picks up the phone. Perhaps he will return it to her bag, with the ringer pointedly off.
But first he will just steal a wee peek.
It takes him mere seconds to read the few, tiresomely abbreviated words. Yet he knows, once read, that their resonance will last him a lifetime.
He also realises, with some surprise, that despite the mounting fury, he is not overly surprised at all.
William carefully sets the mobile back down then just as softly picks it up again. He is not so familiar with this particular model, but it doesn’t take him long to check through his wife’s text history. Or at least that history she hasn’t judiciously deleted.
He finds nothing more of interest, no more fuel to the rising flame, although he does feel slightly envious of the girly “chats” Luisa has with their daughter.
Nor do the old photos, some of which she has preserved in digital form, with skills he can still admire, astonish him.
The smiling young girl at school. Their family dogs over the years.
The cheeky, fair-haired little boy. The usual suspects.
Silence. The sounds of showering have subsided.
William feels that logically he should storm straight into the bathroom, full of righteous husbandly wrath, textual evidence in hand.
He would most certainly be entitled to do so and can’t really explain what is stopping him.
Or perhaps he can. Perhaps he senses, if only vaguely, those accusations she may throw back, misguided though they would undoubtedly be.
Accusations he doesn’t particularly want to hear at this moment.
But now is hardly the time for self-analysis.
Although he does wonder, just briefly, if he has been waiting for this. And even, somewhere, wanting it. Like that second shoe dropping onto the floor above. But this was, of course, before yesterday. Before last night. Before William lost all grounding and his time went out of joint.
What was it Lu had said in the cathedral? Something about being lost.
He looks around, taking in the joyous flowers, the old-fashioned photo album, the celebratory bottle of champagne, which is probably by now as flat as he suddenly feels and so far has only been enjoyed by one.
Snatching up his laptop bag, William loads it instinctively with the contents of his bedside shelf, as if he is somehow grabbing hold of his own life or what’s left of it.
He leaves without slamming the door.
*
On his quiet departure from the bedroom that his daughter had kindly booked for him, William Sutherland is pleased to discover one of the hotel’s lifts, directly across the corridor, with its steel doors open.
As if it has been waiting just for him.
He thinks to himself once again that, had he been the one making the booking, he would have ensured that their room was situated a good few yards from such an obvious sleep-disturber, and finds himself surprised that Claire has never picked up the clues in all these years.
The lift isn’t empty.
Pablo is there, nodding to him, although William can find no obvious need for a lift attendant. Perhaps he is simply on his way down and for some reason has opened the doors to this floor. William is almost pleased to see him.
He begins to talk to the older man before the doors are even closed. Even though he knows that his words are pure gibberish to his smiling companion.
“Ever know something about someone, Pablo? I mean, deep down? But you really didn’t want to know you knew it?”
“Manchester United,” says the wise Sevillano.
*
William doesn’t see the look of surprise on Luisa’s face as she emerges from the bathroom, encased in her gown once again. His absence is, of course, the cause of it. Alongside the discovery of her mobile phone, which she is almost certain she hadn’t simply flung onto the recently vacated bed.