Chapter Twenty-Eight
Luisa Sutherland can’t recall exactly when her fear of heights began to take hold.
She certainly doesn’t recall having had it as a young woman.
Perhaps it isn’t a fear exactly, but an unease, a preference for not being in a place where she may be obliged to look a long way down.
And a sense of – fragility. A certainty that everything in this world is breakable.
She read once that vertigo at its core is an almost-overwhelming desire to jump.
She may be feeling this now, as she clings so tightly to the balcony railing.
Yet she cannot make herself loosen her grip and go back into the empty hotel room.
A room in which she has already spent – and wasted – most of her long day.
The German couple next door have already returned, hot and sticky, from whatever attractions the afternoon had provided.
They have showered and dressed for the evening’s entertainment (after having, perhaps, become more pleasantly hot and sticky).
Finally, they have taken the air on their own adjoining balcony, exchanging a few polite words with their neighbour, who clearly had even fewer words for them, despite speaking excellent English for a foreigner, and have then departed arm-in-arm to enjoy their still-sandalled evening.
And yet here she stands, staring out at the stern cathedral, its Gothic countenance lit starkly against the dark, velvet sky.
She doesn’t even turn when she hears the door to the bedroom open.
“Everything’s going to be okay, Luisa!”
She wants even less to turn round now. Her husband sounds wired, manic. As if his voice is running, even though his body is still.
“You won’t understand,” he continues, elatedly. “But don’t worry.”
She stands unmoving, her fists firmly around the wooden rail. Not understanding, yet still worrying.
She only alters her posture when she hears sounds of a rummage – and is slightly relieved to discover that this time it isn’t her shoulder bag William is plundering but his own.
The worn-out old laptop sack that is almost like an extra organ.
She had only appreciated quite how exercised he must have been on his last flying visit to their room, when she’d noticed that he had left this precious holdall ungrabbed on the bed.
William appears beyond excited, sliding his hand almost sinuously into one of the soft, protective pockets. She watches, transfixed, as this elation switches instantly to alarm, as once again he brings his own slim consultancy brochure out into the light.
He glares at it, as if it is the most repellent item ever to have emerged from a person’s work case, even though he himself had carefully packed it there, alongside several of its glossy fellows, just the day before.
Now he’s opening it, although God knows he could quote the whole document by heart.
She can see by the way the pages fall that it’s their photos he is gawping at, like an idiot.
His and Sandy’s. Matheson and Sutherland.
Partners and pals. Luisa recalls the morning of the photo session – William checking in with her for any catastrophic shirt ’n’ tie clash.
Without wishing further to unbalance whatever is going on for him, but curious to know what exact manner of lunacy this is, Luisa treads lightly across the room.
What she sees makes the situation no clearer.
William is slowly running a shaky finger along the broken, off-centre nose of his partner, a ‘blemish’ the man had clearly contrived to make even more of a feature for the photographer by adopting a slightly cocky, off-centre stance.
As indeed he usually does, thinks Luisa.
Like a cheesy yet still appealing James Bond poster.
The only word that springs to mind to describe her husband’s face is devastated.
But, as she watches, a lot more words spring almost unbidden from between her tight and angry lips.
“Why do you stare at this photo?” William isn’t listening.
“TALK TO ME, WILLIAM! I don’t know – get angry this one time.
Sí? Throw something! An ashtray – no, in here it is no-smoking – a vase!
Make the passion. Instead of being a – a robot.
Yes. A fucking, walking-in-and-out-of-fucking-hotel-rooms robot! ”
He looks at her now, but it is a look of such helpless puzzlement that her heart almost goes out to him.
Concerned that he might suddenly flare up, but not necessarily in the borderline-acceptable, vase-throwing manner she has just mapped out for him, she lowers her voice and speaks from a well of shared memory, from which he might yet manage to sup.
“What happened to the boy who would break a man’s nose just because he is looking at me?”
If William appeared astonished before, this seemingly innocent statement threatens to poleaxe him totally. And, yet again, his response to her is entirely off the wall.
“You REMEMBER that? It only just—”
She looks at him expectantly, even if his wording is a bit weird. At least he is raising his voice. Preps for a good, old-fashioned, perfectly normal fight?
The trouble with being pretty obviously in the wrong, she muses, despite whatever all-too-human motivation may have landed her there, is that it makes it a wee bit more difficult to lead the charge onto the moral high ground.
But not, she assures herself, impossible.
And they’re finally engaging with each other. Aren’t they?
But no – it’s back to his bloody brochure. Jesus!!!
Luisa does a lot more sighing in Spanish, as she watches her clearly demented husband flicking through the brochure’s familiar pages – pages he himself designed and supervised to the very last bullet point – in stupefying disbelief.
Finally she scrambles across the newly-made bed (she did at least allow the maids to do that – she needed the company).
Hitting the room phone with shaky fingers, she is astonished at how swiftly the summons is answered.
“Aah! El conserje, por favor.”
Perhaps it is fortunate that she doesn’t hear William address the photo of his now asymmetrical colleague. “What sort of an idiot would still be partners with a guy who smashes him into a wall? Still be pals?”
“Hola? Necesito un boleto de avión a Londres… Londres… Sí. Emergencia. Inmediatamente!. Sí… sí… Okay. Muchas—” She turns back to him, hoping for the slightest reaction. He clearly hasn’t heard a loud Spanish word she has been saying. “How long do you keep looking at his bloody picture?”
“Until it bloody vanishes!”
Their eyes lock in a tableau of mutual bewilderment. And then her husband is across the room and out of the over-used door again.
This time with the laptop bag clutched firmly in his hand.
*
William doesn’t even nod to Pablo when the lift doors open immediately upon his arrival.
To be fair, he can hardly see the man anyway, squashed as he is behind the two ladies from New York. They greet him silently and not without suspicion. The sort of greeting you might give a wife-beater, should you suspect that his spouse may be lying in a crumpled heap just beyond the bedroom door.
Yet, being both friendly and trapped, they decide to give him the benefit of the doubt. The slightly broader one, Marilyn, as he recalls, taps a guidebook. Between them they appear to own an entire shelf.
“Going to the processions?” she asks, although she knows it would be pretty hard not to, as throughout this remarkable week they proceed to you.
William is not in a talkative mood. So he just nods.
“Y’know,” adds Shelby, gamely, “we shouldn’t really be here. Not this week of all weeks.”
Despite his preoccupations, William sees no mileage in being rude. “Oh, I don’t think the locals have burned gays for a while now.”
“She meant because we’re Jewish and it’s Passover,” says Marilyn.
The elevator opens and William scoots. Without even pausing for one of his Pablo chats.
There is somewhere he has to be.