Chapter Twenty-Five
“Yes… yes… no… bollocks!”
There is a skill to pouring cheap Spanish wine down your forehead, from a glass pitcher or porron, and allowing it to glide past your eyes and along your nose and trickle into your waiting mouth. Despite his steady hand and patrician nose, Sandy Matheson has yet fully to perfect this skill.
As the young women at the table laugh, along with some of the more indulgent onlookers at the Café Amarillo this pleasant spring evening, the misdirected red wine spills gently across the table and onto Will’s open notepad.
The pad sits right next to him, alongside his trusty ballpoint, so that, should inspiration decide to strike, its target will have the tools neatly to hand.
Unfortunately, the previous strike now looks like being alcoholically blurred or at least partially sodden.
Its creator can only moan in anguish, as the more practical Sandy quickly grabs the dripping page and begins to lick it dry.
“Mm!” he enthuses. “Sutherland. His fruitful Rioja period.” Will finally manages to retrieve the precious pad. “I tell you, Wullie,” says the erstwhile best man, wiping his damp face with a napkin, “I’d bite my arms off to be a writer—”
“—But you ‘never had my disadvantages’. Yeah – yeah. Your bloody wedding speech. I was there, pal, remember?”
“Only just! I had to dance with the bride for you! Crap job but—”
“Tough Guys Don’t Dance. Ask Norman Mailer.”
Lu and Paloma laugh, accepting that this is their role, just as it is the guys’ job description to prance around like overgrown schoolboys and chatter in an English neither young woman could possibly understand.
Paloma, almost as dark as Luisa and a good six inches taller, drapes a long, slender arm lovingly around her old art school friend, delighting in the occasion that has brought them together, first just a few days earlier in a wet and chilly Glasgow and now proudly back here in this bridesmaid’s own home town.
Sandy begins to talk in his unaccented Spanish and Lu immediately responds. Closely followed by raucous laughter from all but the slightly irritated groom.
“Queen’s English, por favor!” Will insists, taking another swig of wine from his glass.
Sandy turns to him and whispers softly, “She says she loves a canny linguist. Least I think that’s—”
Will roars and spits his half-gulped wine back over his notepad. It is the girls’ turn to look baffled. He simply smiles at them and pours more cheap Rioja.
Lu, realising that no translation will be forthcoming (and that this is possibly for the best), hands Paloma her camera with detailed instructions.
She manages at the same time to pick up most of the ensuing conversation between the hombres, which is now quieter and appears to have taken a more serious turn.
“Listen, amigo, I wasn’t kidding,” she overhears Sandy inform her new husband.
“What I ‘telt’ you back home. If the old novellas don’t pay off.
I mean, I hope they do, sure I do, but awful tricky.
The two of us could always team up and make a pile.
Maybe not day one, but bloody soon thereafter.
My business skills and impeccable family connections, your – godgiven talents.
Hey, matey, you can still write! Ad copy… press releases… invoices!”
Before Will can respond, Lu is there. Friendly but firm.
“No, Sandy! Will and me – Will and I, yes? – we make the big deal. I do my working – I am a good teacher, I think; I have assisting job in a very nice Glasgow school – Spanish and art. And I have little bit of money from my abuelita. While my husband is writing his book.”
Will shrugs to Sandy. What can he do – the boss has spoken.
They hear Paloma whistle and the three of them turn as one, smiling broadly, arms around each other, to be captured forever in a memory that will survive the years.
But Sandy isn’t letting go so easily. “I’m just saying, Lu – classy Madrileno like you deserves all the happiness money can buy.”
“Ayy!” shrieks Paloma, her statuesque body made even taller by both bronzed arms waving dramatically into the air. “Is bad time! I must go – to my work!”
Sandy, for reasons best known to himself, takes this as a cue.
Leaping up – and narrowly avoiding another major spill – he segues into a rarely performed rock version of that heartfelt historical plea to Bonnie Prince Charlie to return from France.
As taught more traditionally to disinterested Scottish schoolkids of a certain vintage.
“Will ye no come back again?
Will ye no come back again?”
Will is not going to be out-sung on his own honeymoon, having already been out-danced at his wedding. Luisa only just stops him from clambering onto his chair.
“—Better loved ye canna be,—
Will ye no come back again?”
Paloma laughs at the duo as she scuttles off with an elegant wave.
The young friends are totally unaware of a new voice now entering the mix. A voice from another age.
It is a gruffer, some might say more mature voice, with a Scottish accent only slightly tempered by years of Home Counties conversation.
Yet this middle-aged voice can only be heard, whether they might wish it or not, by strollers chancing on a certain square in the Barrio Santa Cruz, on a sultry spring evening in Seville, during Holy Week 2025.
“Will ye no come back again?” sings William Sutherland, ageing marketing consultant and erstwhile tartan rocker, as he observes his younger self, who he knew would turn up here if he waited long enough, joining in vigorously with someone this older version can’t see at all.
Yet someone who, even allowing for the apparently rigid ‘rules’ of this existential chaos, he can picture in his mind only too well.
A friend whose impromptu performance is being enjoyed, alongside that of her husband, by a beautiful young woman from whom William Sutherland is finding it extraordinarily hard to remove his gaze.
“Will ye no come back again?”
The trio conclude their curious, time-defying performance to audience responses that are much the same in both eras.
Onlookers simply roll their eyes and shake their heads.
Although a suspicion, by those encountering William singing totally on his own, of serious mental health problems adds a certain piquancy to the mix.
The older man watches as a thoroughly satisfied Will lifts his replenished glass and starts to move away from the table, towards the interior of the café.
The man even manages a smile, almost as if he has enjoyed being transported for a few moments back to what was clearly a more liberating, less burdensome time.
Yet this nostalgic glow is short-lived, replaced almost immediately by a searing blast of anger that rages through William and scalds him at his core.
This is sparked by nothing less than his being obliged to watch, in pure helplessness, as his young wife shuffles up close – too damn close – to nothing that William can actually see.
But then he doesn’t actually need to.