Chapter Thirty-Eight
Wherever I walk in this city, thinks William, I find myself beside the sodding river.
When he comes across what looks like a massive park, he beams at his young companion with genuine gratitude.
“Here is my favourite place in all of Sevilla!” she exclaims, throwing her slender arms wide, as if better to express her appealingly childlike delight.
William feels he could almost pick her up and swirl her around, but he would most probably rupture something, even before she could begin fending him off with her small but powerful fists.
“I think I remember it. The park I mean, not the Exposition! Isn’t there a very grand building somewhere round here? Aye. They may have used it in some sort of film.”
For a moment he notices a curious sadness wash over the young woman’s face.
But just as swiftly it has gone. “Sí,” she smiles.
“It is DH Lawrence of Arabia!” Suddenly William remembers and feels some of this sadness, yet he can’t quite recall why.
“Is also Jardin Botanico. Many beautiful trees and flowers. And palomas. The doves, yes. As my friend!”
As they walk along the tree-lined avenues and into the heart of the massive park, they occasionally side-step people who, to each other, aren’t there at all.
To William it looks like she’s a wee bit tipsy and he can only assume that he must appear very much the same to her.
So he tries to do his swaying just outside her eyeline.
Then Lu says something that takes him completely by surprise.
“You and Fanta are having the big argument yesterday at corrida, yes?”
He hadn’t realised that they had begun the row to end all rows even before they had fully quit the Sol.
Or perhaps the young woman, an artist and photographer primed to observe, had simply picked up from their body language that a major storm was brewing.
Yet, before William can explain or perhaps even defend himself, she surprises him once more.
“This is wonderful.”
Wonderful?
“Is it? How so?” He is going to add “pray tell me” but she wouldn’t understand and facetiousness is not the look he is going for.
“Sí. You are still together!” she explains in delight, as if it is just so obvious. “This is what marriage is, I think. The fighting and the making it up. The staying with each other. You are – how is it – an ‘example’.”
She laughs at this, almost as if she is embarrassed.
William just smiles thoughtfully. Perhaps this is the “example” he and Luisa have kept in their heads all these years.
From their own honeymoon. He decides he won’t go there – it’s a maze out of which he’ll never find his way and he’s learning that, when magic intrudes, logic flies straight out of the window.
And, of course, the “still together” bit sadly doesn’t ring quite true.
They reach a waterlily pond. William is reminded of being dragged screaming by Luisa to Monet’s home at Giverny and, to his surprise, rather loving it. He waits for this younger version of his cultural personal trainer to sit on a bench.
Her body language leads him to believe there is room beside her.
As there is clearly still a bench there, albeit most probably not the same one, he parks himself next to her and prays that some predatory stranger from the past doesn’t decide to sit down on top of him and strike up conversation with a beautiful young lady.
One who is sitting quite on her own and appears to be talking to herself.
(Hopefully, this latter activity would deter even the most determined lothario.)
“Fanta, she works, yes?”
He still can’t quite get used to his wife being a fizzy drink, although it is not totally inapposite, so he just nods. Yet it appears that his inquisitor is after more.
“Ah. Yes, indeed she does. But you know, Lu,” he says, thoughtfully, “I do think her main ambition was always to be a mum. Just that. Mama. And she was a bloody good one… Twice.”
He shakes his head. Too much information.
“But eventually, Lu,” William continues, happy to be telling the truth for once, “she did go back to college – when our wee Clairey was nine or ten. And Fanta’s a full-time conservator now.
” He smiles at Lu’s puzzled face, as she repeats the meaningless word to herself.
“She preserves things. You know, old documents. Photos…” He smiles, wryly.
“Memories.” Now one of his own memories flutters back, one at which he is certain the young woman will be utterly amazed.
“D’you know, she has actually held Shakespeare’s will – right there in the palm of her hands. ”
Lu’s face registers not so much amazement as shock bordering on total disgust. “NO?! Dios mío!” She cries out. “They still keep it? And they let the ladies to touch it?!”
It’s William’s turn to be puzzled. “Eh? A will is just a document, Lu, that— Whoa! You didn’t honestly think—?”
She blushes sweetly. She did honestly think. At exactly the same moment, they each begin to roar.
“I cannot believe you thought—”
“Yes, okay, Gordon.”
As if current complications aren’t sufficient, an elderly nun chooses this moment to approach William with a collecting bowl. He hasn’t the least intention of talking to her, nor of dropping coins into what will undoubtedly appear to Lu like thin air or worse, so he simply waves her off.
“I think you like the ninos,” says Lu, staring in the nun’s direction, with a soft smile.
“Huh?” says William.
It takes him a while to work out that there must be small children in Lu’s vicinity, or at least in her eyeline.
Kids who most probably have their own children by now, but nonetheless it is at them she believes William is waving.
He is certainly not going to disabuse her.
Especially not when she has led him straight onto the avenue towards which he has been struggling so tortuously.
“Ah. You want a lot of ninos, don’t you?”
“Oh, sí,” she laughs, although she is clearly deadly serious. “Many. But Will, he say that for the kids, you are needing much money.”
“They aren’t cheap to run, Lu.”
“I know this. I do know this thing.” She stares out at the lily pond, and perhaps also at the children. “But sometimes, Gordon, I think Will he will never have enough of the money. To be happy. Never enough to have the kids. Not even one kid. Even if he wins at the bloody casino every single day!”
Turning to William, Lu registers his shock. He knows he does good shock. Yet he also knows this doesn’t mean that the shock isn’t real.
“Excuse me, please, Gordon,” says Lu. “Will, he say to me, Lu, bad things they are always around the corner. I say to him, we are not around this corner! We are here.” William tries vainly to interrupt.
“I tell him, Will, you are a good writer. I say this to him. But it takes the time. He wants to make the money from it now. He wants all the nice things he never had. I understand this. I do, Gordon. But not tomorrow. He wants it yesterday!”
William stays silent for a while, watching the water lilies gently bob. So much life beneath the stillness. He wonders if there are frogs here this time of the year.
Finally he responds, still gazing at the water. “It’s hard to imagine what it’s like to be poor, Lu. If you’ve never been there.” She starts to pick at her hands. William watches. “What do your parents think of him?”
He has no idea why he asks this. It’s not as if he isn’t all too aware of the disapproval, the sneery rumblings that used to cause such pain and anger and feed his own lack of self-worth, like blood to a tumour.
Perhaps it still smarts, he thinks with some sadness, even after so many things – and people – are dead and buried.
Even after he had thought these feelings were buried with them.
“WHO CARES WHAT MY PARENTS ARE THINKING?! I am NOT my—”
He wonders if they can hear the shouting, back where she is. She’s certainly looking around, a bit shamefaced. “Oh, excuse me. I am Spanish – always the shouting.”
Shame the nun didn’t hear it, he thinks. It might have finally sent her packing. (Where, sadly, a middle-aged Scot talking to his imaginary friend clearly hasn’t.)
But now he’s stumped.
He knows that there is something he has to tell her, some important wisdom that he needs to impart. A gentle but firm warning from a friend that will hopefully change her life going forward and equally hopefully his.
Yet this is something so out of left field, so intrusive and intimate, not to mention fundamental, that there is absolutely no way he can get there with this person. Someone who believes that he is nothing other than a kindly, if somewhat eccentric, stranger.
Then the drums begin.
They’re still far off but he notices that Lu has unclasped her slim fingers and is tapping her guidebook.
His old Seville guidebook with its Semana Santa section, the fragment so recently quoted by Luisa in her ‘rain-warning’.
The tiny sapphire in her ring sparkles as it catches the light.
He bought that ring for their engagement, he recalls, from a stall in The Barrers, the huge Glasgow bric-a-brac market.
Luisa had it reset in an elegantly thin, silver band, on – when was it – of course, their twenty-fifth.
Okay, so Lu can hear them too. Not the same drums surely – he has no idea how long drums survive – but most probably played to the same rhythm, accompanying the local procession at a similar time.
There are not so many options and the great cathedral figures in them all.
The idle tapping on the guidebook continues.
A long-buried memory now suddenly surges, sparked by the drums and the guidebook.
Yet a memory of something not in truth experienced. Neither then nor this time round.
Never too late.
He leaps up, looking back down at her hands as they grip the precious volume, encouraging her to join him. “You know, Lu, there’s something I’ve been wanting to see for thirty years.”
She knows that she should be getting back to Will. But he has told her that he wishes to write. Just for a couple of hours. Hours in which she could have found that watch.
But there is still time.