Perhaps I was giving off that curious miasma that clings to the satisfied flesh after sex. He was watching me very acutely, despite the demands of the child beside him who wanted icecream, Mummy, love. Indeed he had suddenly turned on me an absolute quality of attention, as if I were someone he had always loved and been away from half a lifetime. He looked at my hair, my eyes, my hands as if he were logging minute changes on which his life and mine might depend.
His eyes were very blue. They looked at me, surely, much too hard. Perhaps he was merely cocky, or rude. I stood up briskly.
‘Oh,’ he said, a little moan of unfeigned disappointment that told me he was not smooth, nor rude, nor a womaniser, nor anything bad. ‘Do you have to go? I mean… what I mean is, we’re going too. Come on Robert. We’ll walk with you.’
Walking with them was such a different thing to the sauntering stroll I’d had alone. Robert was tired, and wouldn’t walk, but felt demeaned by being held, so was up and down like a jack-in-the-box. He glared at me. I smiled at him. He put his tongue out. Stuart didn’t notice, and I pretended not to notice either.
Stuart bent down to pick up Robert’s toy plane, and I looked at the tender pale back of his neck, then saw he had paused to stare at my naked legs in the pale Italian shoes. It was only an instant, but our eyes met, he knew I saw, I saw he knew, he had found the plane, he was back on his feet, we walked side by side up a bright cobbled slope that led into a narrow neck of shade, I no longer knew what the child was saying, our arms touched briefly as we went into the dark. It was very cold. I drew in my breath.
The street was only seven feet wide, medieval houses which rose four storeys to an even narrower ribbon of sky. ‘Look above your head,’ he said. Suddenly my eyes grew used to the dark and I saw it was full of garlands.
‘It’s Corpus Christi,’ he said. ‘They carry the Virgin Mary down here.’
But I felt the garlands were there for me, their colours burning into the dark. The Virgin had little to do with it. Stuart and I had met, and the flesh-coloured city broke into flower.
Is it shocking that I felt such sharp desire on a morning when I’d just fucked my husband? But desire doesn’t live in the sexual parts. Desire lives in the mind. Desire lives in the soul… yes, I have a soul like anybody else. I was ready to fall in love that morning, with the new city, with being alive, with being myself and desirable, with being, if not young, not old.
— I wanted to be surprised. Chris could adore me, but not surprise me. The force of Stuart’s hunger as we stood on a corner and said goodbye, at last, after trailing Robert through half the streets of Toledo, caught at my breath with its novelty. Yet nothing was said or even hinted and afterwards I feared I had imagined it, the merest projection of my lust.
But we had a date. The most innocent date. ‘My husband would really like to meet you… sometimes he longs for an English voice. You’re Scottish, of course, but that’s just as good…’
‘Better,’ said Stuart, ‘but I’ll forgive you.’ Both of our voices were insincere, overhasty with suppressed excitement.
‘You must bring your wife. We’ll go out to dinner. Our treat. Let’s eat at the parador.’
‘That costs the earth,’ said Stuart, kindly. ‘We’ll go some-where local. Anywhere. The food isn’t what matters, after all.’
Instantly both of us were heavy with embarrassment, as if he had just declared himself, though the words were innocent enough. I forced my attention back to the venue.
‘It’s OK, really…’ (But how can I say, ‘As it happens, Chris is a millionaire…’?)
We made a date for Saturday. I don’t think Stuart’s mind was working at all, for he looked astonished when I called him back to ask him if he had a sitter for Robert. If not, perhaps a maid at the parador…
‘What am I thinking of?’ he said. ‘For a second I forgot about the children. It’s not just Robert, it’s his sister Fiona…’
There was a sister, Fiona. This was not getting easier.
‘That won’t be a problem. We’ll pay the girl more.’
— I felt that ‘girl’ slightly grated on Stuart.
‘Well actually, you see… Kirsty doesn’t like to leave the children with strangers.’
‘But what do you do when you go out?’
‘Well actually we hardly ever do.’ This confession caused him great discomfort.
In the face of that I grew bossy and rich. ‘Well tell her she has to go out. Everyone does, or they go crazy. The parador cooking is marvellous. Tell her she owes herself a treat. The children will be under the same roof so she’s hardly leaving them, is she?… We’ll expect all four of you on Saturday. Eight o’clock. Everything will be arranged.’
He looked up suddenly, looked me in the eye, our glances held with grappling hooks — we stood three feet apart, hands by our sides, imagining we were naked, touching.
‘I’ll be there,’ he said. ‘We’ll be there. Robert, kiss the lady goodbye.’
Robert didn’t want to. His Dad held him up. At the last moment he shrugged his mouth away, and his sulky jaw and cheek were presented. Stuart watched as I kissed him, tenderly, twice. I think he knew who I had really kissed.
Love and lovers, lovers and love. Believe it or not, I was glad they were gone; I was free to go my own pace again through the magical streets, smiling at people. I had my secret to hold and polish. And when the afternoon got too hot I was happy to go back to the grand hotel and creep into the high-ceilinged room where Chris was napping behind drawn curtains, kick off my shoes, kick off my dress, curl into the comfort of his half-clothed body.
‘I met a man,’ I said. ‘English. Well, Scottish. Interesting. Writing a book about Spanish cinema. With a boy of three…’ Chris was very keen on three-year-olds. Susy and Isaac, so he affirmed, were angelic at three, and perhaps they were.
‘He has a wife?’ He turned lazily and started to stroke the inside of my thigh. I thought about Stuart’s hand. I moved my thigh appreciatively.
‘Yes, my love. Red-haired like me.’
‘I adore red-heads. Ask them to dinner.’
‘Yes, my sweet. I will.’
Lovers and love. Nothing is simple. I tell you, I loved Chris no less. Water was running outside the window, filling something up or draining away, things were moving and changing inside me, we lay together in an unknown city, loving each other in different languages, for all I said had become a lie. Except that after we made love again I said ‘I love you’, and ‘Thank you’, and nothing had ever been more true; I loved him more, and more gratefully, because I had been so far away, because I had played with our past and future, and yet he was still here for me.
I wanted to talk about love that day. Love and lovers, lovers and love. I wished I could tell Chris everything, and make him see how marvellous it was that I wanted this man so much and come back to find nothing changed between us… But although I like talking, I’m not a fool. I knew that I could never tell him.
Instead I talked into his thick black hair as the world outside began to stir, recovering from the siesta. But sex had made us sleepy again; after all, we didn’t have jobs to do.
‘Thank you for being here,’ I said. ‘It’s wonderful you’re always here.’
(Yet that, in a way, was the trouble; constant presence erodes desire. You can’t long for something that’s always available.)
— I took so much for granted then.
‘You know I’ll always be there for you.’
I wonder if he’s still waiting. He’ll be out of prison, I suppose. I wonder if he has other women. In any case, he must be seventy now. Perhaps he’s impotent — no, can’t bear it.