Chapter Twenty-Two
Lu Sutherland can’t get the older couple out of her head. And she wonders why.
She wishes she could share her thoughts with her new husband, but it doesn’t feel like particularly rewarding territory.
Not after they already discussed it in the park last night and he had that strange look on his face.
Not when Will wants to immerse himself totally in Seville and discover, with his writer’s eye, everything that had made her fall so in love with the place. Before she did the same with him.
That was the time when she was plain Luisa Montero, daughter of the haughty Monteros of Madrid, chastely studying her art and photography.
The season she met Sandy Matheson, on his university year abroad, a happy meeting that persuaded her to come to Glasgow, of all places, as an au pair to friends of his family, in order to improve her English.
Her “command” of which she now knows Will loves, because – although she can’t herself detect it – her speech still has more than a nip of “Glesga” in the mix.
And, anyway, it’s quite hard to share anything when your hombre walks so fast. She has to expend all her energy just to keep up with him. (You learn to move fast in Glasgow, he tells her, because you’re forever “skedaddling” away from someone.)
This already simmering day they are in the famed Plaza de Espana, for which she deliberately hasn’t prepared Will, as she knows that it will blow him away.
“It’s so frigging old!” he cries, his head turning like one of those slowly revolving cameras they used and abused in his annual school photos, trying to take everything in.
He embraces the vast half-circle of historic brick buildings in all their magnificence, with their landmark tall towers north and south, inevitably tiled alcoves, a multi-bridged, canal-like moat big enough to take small boats and the even more predictably tiled fountain at the centre.
“It’s sort of Arabic, isn’t it, with a bit of your medieval stuff thrown in.
I’d say Renaissance – do you know that word? ”
Of course she does. And now she has her fun. “It is built in 1929,” she exults.
He looks at her, but he isn’t smiling. “You’re taking the piss,” he says.
“No, Will!” She looks suddenly unsettled. “Is not the piss. It is built for the very big Exposicion, yes? You say World Fair, I think. Like many of the buildings in this city. Is funny, sí?” She tries to placate him. “But is in very old style. Of course.”
“Like mock-Tudor,” he says, to total bafflement. “Although some of us peasants don’t awfully care to be mocked.”
Lu may not have known Will Sutherland long, but she’s already familiar with the flashes of anger that can flare up out of nowhere.
They had a few days of it in Madrid, understandable and expected, which she did her very best to tamp down.
She has been hoping it will be calmer here.
Without parents. Without disapproval. And without that casual belittling she more than suspects preceded her by many years and on too many bad occasions.
Yet she knows already that the plates beneath are unstable and the shifts are never far from the surface.
Perhaps, she muses, their meeting with the older couple has unsettled Will too.
Compounded by their subsequent talk in the park, conversation that seemed so harmless and even romantic at the time.
Her dreams of their returning here in thirty years, his of being rich enough to come back in style. His fears perhaps that they might not.
She thinks that maybe marriage is like a collaborative piece of art, such as one of those huge murals in the Alcazar Palace that she loves and wants to show Will, or even a modern performance piece, begun with strangers whom you may have chosen for their gifts but who you can only hope have the same vision as yourself.
And you can’t ever fully know how it will turn out or exactly how the other person sees it, until it is nearing completion and the creators can step back and reassess.
Perhaps this is what that long-wed couple, in whom she detected a certain undefined sadness, are doing this minute.
Stepping back thoughtfully. On their segunda luna de miel.
Yet, as she looks at his tightened face, she is already wise enough to know how to save today’s suddenly fraught situation.
“What is the movie you have seen with this plaza?” she challenges, then smiles at his blank look. “Is one of your favourites.”
She can tell from the way his wary eyes immediately brighten and sparkle, the set of his face softening even as his brow furrows, that he is on a new and thankfully more placid trajectory.
As he silently reels through his personal “ten greatest” in the Odeon, Renfield Street, of his mind.
He revels in challenge and is not going to be defeated.
“Too easy. The Graduate.”
Lu just stares at him until finally he laughs. Relieved, she joins in the laughter. “Don’t tell me,” he warns. “Dinna you dare tell me!”
“I do not dare this,” she promises. “I dinna.”
He walks around, talking to himself, determined not to be beaten.
“None of my fave movies are set in Spain. Except for maybe El Cid and truly it wasn’t that brilliant.
So yon bloody building is probably standing in for somewhere else.
” Will looks at Lu and she is nodding. Unlike her, he can’t of course compute that the emotional temperature of the day is entirely dependent on his solving this devilish riddle.
“Don’t nod. Don’t even think to nod. Okay, you can nod a wee bit – just ‘cos you’re so bloody cute when you nod.”
She nods again, even though no further clues have been offered.
“Right,” he mulls. “It’s Moorish, isn’t it? Like Hula Hoops. They’re very moorish.” She looks totally blank. “Dear Lord, have I consigned myself to a lifetime without wordplay? Me – Glasgow’s future greatest novelist.”
“You have ten seconds, mister the big head. Diez – nueve – ocho—”
“You’re a hard wee woman, Senora Sutherland… Moorish… Moorish… Arabs. Arabic. Oh shit!” He smacks his head, in ecstatic parody of the eureka moment. “It’s Lawrence, isn’t it? DH Lawrence of Arabia!”
She nods her head in glee, although she is still a tiny bit bemused.
“That’s the one thing you still didn’t know about me, Missus S.
I love TV quizzes. Contests. Competitions.
And game shows! Gimme a game show and I’m happy as a pig in – Hey, I just missed being on University Challenge, you know, ‘cos I went to the uni try-outs let’s say a wee bit the worse for wear. ”
Will greets the classic, Twenties building, a civic hymn to Baroque, Renaissance and Moorish revivals, with new admiration, his eruption of mere minutes ago almost forgotten.
Lu Sutherland wonders, for a moment, if this is how it is going to be. That she will have removed herself from a comfortable, privileged world she has always known, in this vibrant and steamy country, to act as a coolant for the pale yet fiery love of her life.
And she knows that, whatever the challenges, she couldn’t be happier than she is right now.
Just to prove it, she takes another photo. Her new husband standing resolutely, if precariously, on the tiled rim of the faux-historic fountain, with a large and not over-clean white handkerchief swept over his mouth, to “protect” himself from the cruel Arabian sand.
She is relieved to notice, too, that whilst he says nothing out loud, Will does gently hold out one of his hands and slap it jokily yet contritely with the other.
At the same time as he looks into her glowing eyes and gently but distinctly mouths the word ‘sorry’.
His entire youthful countenance suffused with a love that couldn’t be more requited.