‘Dustier than ever,’ she said in her ear. ‘He didn’t want me to come here, but I suspect he’ll get over that.’
Sonia glanced over at the clock above the bar. Their flamenco show was beginning in less than half an hour.
‘We really should go, shouldn’t we?’ she said, slipping down off her stool. Much as she loved Maggie, for the time being she wished to deflect her personal questions. In her best friend’s view no husband was really worth having, but Sonia had often suspected that this might have been something to do with the fact that Maggie had never had one, at least not one of her own.
Coffee had just been served to them on the bar and Maggie was not going to leave without drinking it.
‘We’ve got time for this,’ she said. ‘Everything starts late in Spain.’
Both women drained their rich cups of
café solo
, manoeuvred their way through the crowds and went outside. The throng continued into the street and almost all the way to the Sacromonte where they soon found a sign pointing to ‘
Los Fandangos
’. It was set into the hillside, a white-washed, roughly plastered building, the
cueva
where they were going to see flamenco. Even as they approached, they could hear the alluring sound of someone picking out chords on a guitar.
Chapter Two
THAT NIGHT, BACK in the hotel bedroom, Sonia lay awake staring at the ceiling. As is the way with cheap hotel rooms, it was too dark in the day and too light in the night. Through the unlined curtains a beam of light from the lamp outside illuminated the beige pattern of hallucinogenic swirls on the ceiling and her mind, still stimulated by caffeine, whirled. Even without the light and the coffee, the thin mattress would have been conducive to wakefulness.
Sonia contemplated her happiness at being in this city. Maggie’s rhythmic breathing in the next bed only a few inches away was strangely comforting. She mulled over the evening and how she had deflected her friend’s questions. Whatever she said, Maggie would get at the truth sooner or later and would simply know how things were with her in spite of any words. She could tell merely from a shadow that flickered across a face in answer to the question ‘How are you?’ what the answer should be. This was why James did not like her, and indeed why so many men shared his feelings. She was too perceptive, generally too critical of men and never gave them the benefit of any doubt.
James was, as Maggie so kindly put it, ‘dusty’. It was not his age alone, but his attitudes. Dust had probably settled on him in the cradle.
Their wedding five years earlier, following a courtship of textbook romanticism, had been a vision of contrived but fairy-tale perfection. In this hard, narrow bed, so distant in every way from the expansive luxury of the four-poster where she had spent her wedding night, Sonia thought back to the time when James had appeared in her life.
They met when Sonia was twenty-seven and James was hurtling towards his fortieth birthday. He was a junior partner in a small private bank and for the first fifteen years of his career had worked an eighteen-hour day, ambitiously climbing his way up the corporate ladder. Though he might be in the office for eighteen hours a day, he was at the end of a phone for twenty-four if he was seeing through a deal. Occasionally he picked up a girl late at night in a wine bar, but these were women he would never introduce to his parents, and once or twice he had had relationships with kittenish, stiletto-heeled receptionists who worked in the bank.These never resulted in anything and sooner or later, these girls drifted off, usually to work as PAs in another bank.
Only weeks before his landmark birthday, as the Americans who owned his bank would have put it, James ‘reprioritised’. He needed someone to take to the opera, to dinners, to have his children. In other words, he wanted to be married. Though she was unaware of it for several years, Sonia eventually realised that she had nicely fulfilled an entry in his Filofax ‘to do’ list.
Sonia remembered their first meeting very clearly. James’s employer, Berkmann Wilder, had recently merged with another bank and had taken on the PR consultancy she worked for to rebrand them. Sonia always dressed provocatively for meetings with financial institutions, knowing that men who worked in the City usually had rather obvious taste, and when she was shown into the bank’s boardroom, her attraction was not lost on James. Petite, blonde, with a pert bottom well outlined by a tight skirt, and a neat bosom cupped in a lace bra just visible through a silk blouse, she satisfied several male fantasies. James’s stares made her feel almost uncomfortable.
‘Peachy,’ James described her to a colleague that lunchtime. ‘And quite sparky too.’
The following week when she returned for a second meeting, he suggested a working lunch. The lunch led to a drink in a wine bar and within the week, they were what James called ‘an item’. Sonia was being swept off her feet and she had no desire to feel the ground beneath them. As well as being quite handsome, he filled in all kinds of gaps in her life. He came from a large, terribly English, entirely conventional, Home Counties family. Such firm foundations had been lacking in Sonia’s life and proximity to them made her feel secure. The two significant relationships she had been through in her twenties had ended disastrously for her. One had been with a musician, the other with an Italian photographer. Neither had been faithful to her and the appeal of James was his reliability, his public school solidity.
‘He’s so much
older
than you!’ objected her friends.
‘Why does that matter so much?’ queried Sonia.
It was the very fact of this age gap that probably gave him the resources for lavishly extravagant gestures. On Valentine’s Day, he did not send a dozen red roses, he sent a dozen dozen, and her small flat in Streatham was overwhelmed. She had never been so spoiled, or indeed so happy when, on her birthday, she found a two-carat diamond solitaire ring in the bottom of a glass of champagne. ‘Yes’ was the only possible answer.
Although Sonia had no intention of giving up a job she enjoyed, James offered her long-term security and in return she brought a dowry of childbearing potential and tolerance of a mother-in-law for whom no one was good enough for her son.
As she lay in her cramped Granada hotel room, Sonia thought of their glorious white wedding, the images of it still so clear; a video had been professionally done and was still occasionally replayed. The marriage had taken place, two years after their first meeting, in the Gloucestershire village close to James’s family home.The dingy part of south London where Sonia had grown up would not have provided a picturesque enough backdrop for these nuptials. There was a rather obvious imbalance in the congregation (representation on the bride’s side was noticeably thinner than on the groom’s, which swelled with second cousins, fleets of small children and friends of his parents) but for Sonia the only really noticeable absence was her mother’s. She knew that her father felt it too. Apart from that, everything was perfect. Sprays of freesias festooned pew-ends and scented the air, and there was a gasp as Sonia entered through the arch of white roses on her father’s arm. In a full tulle gown that almost filled the width of the aisle, she floated down the strip of carpet towards her groom. Crowned with flowers, the sun creating a halo of light around her, the silver-framed photographs in her home reminded her that she had looked translucent, other-worldly on that day.
After the reception (a four-course dinner for three hundred in a pink candy-striped marquee), James and Sonia left in a Bentley for Cliveden and by eleven the following morning they were on their way to Mauritius. It was a perfect beginning.
For a long while, Sonia had loved being petted, cared for. She enjoyed the way that James opened doors for her, came home from business trips to Rome with satin lingerie in silk-lined boxes, from Paris with perfumes packaged in boxes within boxes layered like Russian dolls, and with airport scarves from Chanel and Hermès that were not quite her. The habit of clothing her and choosing how she might be fragranced was one he had copied from his father. Sonia’s in-laws, Richard and Diana, had been together for nearly fifty years, so it was clearly a technique that women liked, James had evidently concluded.
They both had careers that absorbed them. Sonia had moved to a younger, smaller company that looked after the PR interests of manufacturing companies rather than City institutions. She felt she had enough bankers and lawyers in her private life. She did not mind the fact that James did not bother to change his working patterns. He would be disturbed at all times of day or night by a ringing phone and the need to deal with some international conference call between London,Tokyo and New York. This was the personal cost of a banker’s salary. Sonia perfectly understood and never minded that, a few times a week, he had to have dinner with clients. On the evenings when he was at home, he had very little energy for anything much apart from a perusal of
Investors Chronicle
and a vacant stare at the television.The only exceptions were the occasional visits to the cinema and the very regular dinner parties that he and Sonia gave and attended.
On the surface of things, all looked rosy. They had everything: good jobs, a Wandsworth house that was steadily increasing in value, and plenty of space to begin a family. They seemed a solid couple, just like their home and the street where they lived. The obvious next stage in their lives was to become parents, but to James’s irritation something held Sonia back. She had begun to make excuses, both to herself and to James, usually to do with it not being the right moment to take a career break. Admitting, even to herself, the real reason was not easy.
Sonia could not put a date on when the drinking had seemed to become a problem.There probably was not an exact moment, a particular glass of wine, a specific bar or an evening when James had come home and she felt he had had ‘too much’. Perhaps the moment had been at a business lunch, or even at a dinner party, possibly the one they had given the previous week when the large mahogany table had been laid with their best china and cut glass, all gifts at their perfect fairy-tale wedding five years earlier.
She could picture her guests standing around sipping flutes of champagne in their comfortable shades of ice-blue drawing room, making conversation that followed a predictable pattern. The men had been uniformly dressed in suits but the women had their own strict dress code too: floaty skirts and kitten heels and what at one time would have been called a ‘twinset’. Some kind of diamond pendant was de rigueur, too, and a set of fine jangly bangles. It was the smart-casual dress style of their generation: feminine, slightly flirty but steering well clear of tarty.
Sonia recalled how conversation had followed its usual pattern: information had been exchanged about when to put children’s names down for nursery, the flattening of property prices, the rumoured opening of a new deli-restaurant on the Common, brief reference to an awful road rage incident in the neighbouring street, and then the men told crude jokes that had been circulating on the internet to try to lighten the atmosphere. She remembered feeling almost at screaming point with the sheer predictability of the middle-class talk and with these people with whom she felt she had nothing in common.
That night, as usual, James had been eager to show off his huge collection of vintage clarets, and the husbands, tired after a long week in the city, had enjoyed knocking back a few bottles of 1978 Burgundy, though even after a glass and a half they began to get disapproving looks from their wives who now realised that it would be their job to drive home.
Cigars had made their appearance at midnight.
‘Go on,’ coaxed James, passing around a box of pure Havana cigars, ‘guaranteed to have been rolled between a virgin’s thighs!’
Though they had heard it said a thousand times before, the men all roared with laughter.
For conservative forty-six-year-old bankers like James, an evening such as this was perfect: safe, respectable and just as his parents would have enjoyed. In fact, it was no different from dinners that Mr and Mrs Cameron Senior had hosted. James once told Sonia that he remembered sitting on the landing peering through the banister rails and catching snippets of conversation that floated up from the dining room and the occasional burst of laughter as doors were opened and closed, his mother hurrying to and from the kitchen, delivering tureens of soup or casserole to her generously proportioned hostess trolley. His childhood spying on the staircase had always come to an end well before the guests left and the conviviality of it all lived on in his imagination. Sonia sometimes wondered if his parents had bickered over the debris of the evening, or how often his mother climbed wearily into bed at two in the morning beside a snoring husband.
That previous week, it had not been until well after midnight that the guests had all departed. Faced with the depressing after-math of the dinner party, James had displayed a level of belligerence that had taken Sonia by surprise, given that it had been, as usual, his decision to fill their home with City colleagues and their shrill wives. It was not exactly her idea of fun either, dealing with glasses that were too fragile to go in the dishwasher, ashtrays full of smouldering dog-ends, tidemarks of soup now stuck to the bowls like green concrete, a tablecloth stained with splatters of claret, and white linen napkins covered with perfect lipstick kiss marks. Someone had spilled coffee onto the carpet and not mentioned it, and there was a splash of red wine on a pale armchair.