Chapter Forty-One
William had no idea that, in his absence, Seville has become such a modern, dynamic, avant-garde city. He feels that someone should have told him.
He realises that he is far more at home here, in the shadows of groundbreaking architecture such as he has just unwittingly encountered: the startling high-rise towers, the stunning new bridges, vibrant thoroughfares where history and ritual don’t assail him at every turn.
And he can maintain the comforting sense that commerce is still the major religion of the world.
He left Lu, somewhat reluctantly, a while ago.
Hopefully now with more pressing thoughts in her head than simply buying him the watch he has been constantly wearing these past thirty years.
Since then he has been wandering aimlessly around the throbbing new city, smoking his anxious way through his first ever packet of Ducados, which he reckons taste as bad as they smell.
He must have a Scotch.
Just one.
Or a couple.
While he waits for the world as he knows it to end. Or, more hopefully, to begin.
It’s in the lap of – whoever, now.
*
Will isn’t touching his beer.
It has been warming beside him, on his usual table at the Yellow Café, all the time he has been writing.
He is perfectly aware that, when he is in creative mode, the drink – whether it be soft or hard, hot or cold – is simply his entry fee to sit for hours and piss off busy waiters.
The guys who clearly prefer a table to be occupied by customers who drink like fish, eat like pigs and tip like they don’t know the exchange rate.
He once expressed curiosity as to whether Jean Paul Sartre did the same at Les Deux Magots in Paris, but Lu didn’t know what he was talking about, so he pursued the conceit no further.
He hasn’t yet noticed Lu, who watches him from a corner of the square.
He is rarely aware of her observing him “at work”, which she does quite often, or of the overwhelming love she feels at these moments.
A love combined with an envious awe that someone can be so lost in the world of his own imagination that he is totally untouched by any of life’s more readily accessed wonders.
As she finally approaches his table, she notices, on the vacant seat next to him, a small gift-bag from a local store.
It could, of course, be something he has bought for himself.
But, as he never buys anything for himself, because somewhere rooted deep inside him is the sense that he doesn’t ever merit a treat or reward, it’s a pretty safe bet that the gift is for her.
The first time he is aware of her approach is when she leans over to kiss him away from his narrative and simultaneously scoops up the gift-bag in a single whisk.
Before he can stop her, she manages to pull out a little red beret, almost the same shade as the leather bag she is carrying.
She has it halfway to her head before he shakes his own.
“Hey, you! That isn’t for now.”
“When it is for?”
“I’ll tell you when it is for when we get to when it is for.”
“You are the spoiling-sport,” she chides, dropping the soft beret back, with exaggerated regret, into its temporary home. “Well, then, you cannot have what it is I have for you, until this time also.”
He laughs, pulls her close to him for a hug and swiftly rummages in her bag as it hangs on her shoulder.
Before she can stop him, he whips out a small, paper sack nestling on the top and withdraws it with an almost theatrical flourish.
She grabs it back in some desperation, before he can open it, most probably because she doesn’t want the world to see what she has just purchased from the local farmacia.
“This is not the thing!” she admonishes. “Now you must buy me fino and you read me what it is you have written.”
He shrugs and lifts his pad with a flourish, preparing to impress her with flowery paragraphs she cannot yet fully understand.
He is perfectly content to know that she will praise him unreservedly, regardless of comprehension, and give him the simple strength to carry on.
He has never loved her more than at these moments and hopes that this will go on forever, although he strongly suspects that honeymoons never do.
A chill suddenly passes over him, as he thinks that he won’t ever again be as happy as he is right now. And yet still he wonders, just for a moment, how he might enjoy right now even more.