Stuart’s father was Scottish. He’d never lived in Scotland and yet he had chosen a Scottish wife, partly, I’m sure, out of loyalty to some dim conception of Scottish blood. Stuart denied that; he said that he loved her, but men aren’t perceptive about their motives. His two children were caricature Scots, a tough little girl with scarlet hair and oatflake freckles and sky-blue eyes, a ferocious boy with the small neat nose and heavy black eyebrows Stuart had, the features already cut from granite although when I first saw him he was three years old.
I met them in Toledo, just Stuart and his son. I wonder how much I’d have saved myself if my very first view had included Kirsty, still big from the two young children, her hair a brighter red then mine, cut in a tight cap round her head as if hair might spread diseases… Perhaps it would all have been different if Stuart and his son had been protected by her motherly figure, forever bent to child level, always stooping to soothe a pain or pick up a ball or replace a sunhat, a low-based, gentle triangle who usually stuck to her man like a shadow.
When I think about her, which is rare enough, I try not to see her eyes. Naked eyes which screwed up at the sun. The whites were pure as albumen. Kirsty didn’t drink, unlike her husband, and I never saw a hint of red in those eyes, not until later when the weeping began… The irises were a severe grey-blue, or they seemed severe when they turned on me, but I suspect they were only shy. All the same, they were nun’s eyes, and unprotected, and please God keep those eyes away.
Don’t think I feel guilty. Why should I feel guilty? Preserving a marriage is the business of the married; whatever happened was Stuart’s fault, I had no obligations to Kirsty.
She wasn’t with them, that first morning. It was my first morning in Toledo, too, on the first of so many visits. It was early for me, before 9am; I’d left Chris in the swimming pool and taken a cab across to the city.
I remember waking up that day. A tide of sunshine flooded the room, and I got up rubbing my eyes and went over to the balcony. We’d arrived in darkness the day before. A mile away on the opposite hill the long slope of the city unfolded upwards, a miraculous sequence of pinks and golds, not a modern building to jolt the eye. ‘Come and see this!’ I’d called to Chris. ‘Come and see this,’ he answered. What he had to show me was a lovely erection, so I wasn’t frustrated on that morning walk, indeed I was glowing with everything good, a good sleep, a good fuck, a good big breakfast, a great new city to explore…
There was a little cafe at a turn of the road so steep it was like an elbow, the tables crawling out into the road because the angle of the pavement wasn’t wide enough. There was quite a lot of traffic; people going to work, it seemed outrageous that they had to work with the day full of cedars and bells and starlings, the air still cool but promising heat, the sun making sculptures of every surface…
I sat down at a table. The streets were cobbled. I wasn’t wearing sensible shoes. I fancied a giant café con leche while I rested my feet and watched the people, I could do what I wanted, I was young and free.
And I turned to pity a harassed young man who sat in the sun three tables away with a little boy who was making a fuss. Their belonging were piled round the table, a collapsing island of plastic bags. The little boy had a strawberry ice cream. Because he didn’t speak very clearly, it was a minute or two before I realised they were English — no, Scottish.
‘Don’t want it,’ he was saying. ‘Don’t like it. Want a vanilla one.’
‘Don’t eat it then,’ said his father, patient. ‘I told you it was too early for icecream.’
‘WANTA VANILLA ONE.’
‘Have a biscuit.’ The father began to search through his bags, at first hopefully, then in a despairing fury.
‘Wantit NOW! Mungry, mungry…’
So it went on, for quite some time. I gloried in my childlessness — yes, I tell you, I gloried then — my baglessness, my singleness, though of course Chris waited for me in the shadows… Whereas this poor man was perhaps divorced… perhaps a widower.
All I managed to see was his lean muscled back, plus a perfect view of the sexual characteristic I’ve always found obscurely appealing, the back of his neck, a masculine neck, thicker than a woman’s and yet vulnerable when the neck hair is cut short enough to show it. This young man’s hair was short and dark and ended in a minute duck’s tail, curving to the left, not upwards, then pale skin and gleaming white shirt. They must have come away very recently; so home was still there, for people to leave… we had been away from home five years, and though I had recently given up sunbathing my skin had acquired a dense pale gold colour from living in the sun day after day. I wished the young man would turn round and admire me. My hair was pulled back in a tight red bun which I thought made me look like a ballerina.
‘Thass Mummy!’ said the little boy, suddenly very loud again, pointing at me, then with perfect illogic ‘Not Mummy, no. Want Mummy. Want a wee wee. Wanta go home.’
When the young man turned, he wasn’t so young, perhaps my age or even older. I registered his extreme good looks. He hadn’t an ounce of spare flesh on his face; he had a fine-cut nose with a narrow tip, a strong Scots jaw, and heavy eyebrows which hung like pines over large blue eyes. It was a very masculine face, but his mouth was wide, soft, full, and ready to break into a smile, as it did when he registered that this was Mummy. If I’d known what she looked like I’d have seen why it was funny, since she was never out of an anorak, or in summer a rustling cagoule, for she always felt at risk of rain. I wore a brief straight dress of yellow silk and the delectable primrose shoes Chris had given me.
I smiled with all the force of my approval of his handsomeness, all the joy of sun and sex and the morning and my first glimpses of the flesh-coloured city. He smiled back, a marvellous smile (Chris’s one bad feature was his teeth, too small and very faintly discoloured, so I always admired a set of white teeth; these gleamed at me briefly in the sharp sunlight).
‘I’m English,’ I said, to make things plain.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘This kid adopts people. His mummy has red hair.’
My heart sank briefly to know there was a Mummy. He smiled again, and my spirits rose. ‘Do you think your little boy would like one of my biscuits? I mean, if he won’t eat that icecream.’
‘Well — that would be wonderful. He wouldn’t touch his breakfast, and I promised Kirsty I’d make him eat something…’ Kirsty must be Mummy then. Not a very attractive name. I wished very hard they might be something distinguished, something I wouldn’t be forced to find boring. He could be an actor, a painter, a musician… We could ask him to eat at the parador. And his wife and son, all three of them, or perhaps she’d prefer to babysit. We enjoyed distractions. His looks were distracting.
I handed over the vanilla fingers the waiter had brought with my coffee. Unsmilingly, the child took them. ‘Thank you,’ his father said. The biscuits disappeared with remarkable speed; he was Stuart, I was Alexandra, this was Robert, I had a husband called Chris, we ‘lived abroad,’ he was fascinated, he was fuckable, I mustn’t think like this.
I asked him what he did, dreading the answer. But it turned out he taught Film Studies and was writing a book about the cinema of Carlos Saura and Hector Pañol. They had friends with a flat in Toledo; they had lent them their house in Finsbury Park for the summer. So they knew Toledo quite well already. I accepted these items with grateful joy. They were valid credentials to pass on to Chris, who might not have been too delighted if I’d asked a civil servant to dinner.