Chapter Thirty-Five
William Sutherland thinks that there is probably nothing more poignant than a long-married couple lying next to each other in the darkness, neither partner sleeping, neither party acknowledging the other’s state of wakefulness.
Yet, somehow, rather than saddening him, this seems to etch resolve even deeper into his mind.
When finally, some hours into the night or perhaps early morning, he hears those familiar sounds that tell him his sleeping partner really has succumbed to the weariness overwhelming her, William slips gently out of bed.
He begins to dress in the dim light seeping through the curtains.
After he has completed this tricky endeavour, and is hopefully not resembling the unmade bed he just left, William stares down at Luisa. He whispers into the darkness, at a level he knows, from his own restless nights’ experience, is unlikely to wake her.
“Goodbye, Luisa,” he says, tenderly. “We’ll get there, carino. It’s going to be okay.”
Of course, William has no idea if this is true, nor indeed whether the “there” to which they’re going to get is even attainable in this jumbled world that exploded for both of them just a couple of days before.
He simply knows that anything has to be better than where, disastrously, they are in this moment.
And where, as he realises now, they have been for far too long.
Now that he has, in some revelatory way, been reintroduced to the beguiling woman he married and with whom he has managed to live for three sometimes turbulent decades – this occasionally infuriating yet so often disarming woman, the unique and intrinsically decent person to whom he has been forced by some rare phenomenon to realise, over these past few unreal days, that he genuinely owes so much and for whom he believes, despite yesterday, despite a host of yesterdays, he has genuinely learned to feel “forgivingness” and perhaps a long-lost or at least much misplaced love – he is certain that he has to try to make things right again.
To make things work again. For both of them.
Before he loses her forever.
William has never felt more resolute nor more determined in his life.
Nor more convinced that resolution and determination count for bugger all when you don’t have even the vaguest notion what you’re doing.