The Men in her Life

looks.
    In the cab, she craned her neck waving until they disappeared out of sight, her sister and her nephew.

Chapter 17

    When the tour left Seville , Philippa stayed on. She found she had not wanted to visit monuments with guides, nor eat companionable meals with other well-educated, early-retired people in five-star hotels with air-conditioning. She wanted to be by herself in a place where she would not be alone, and this city with its stark contrast of light and shade seemed as good as anywhere. She would go on to Cordoba and Granada in her own time. Or not. There was nothing to hurry her, or to take her home. If she wanted to, she thought, she could live the rest of her life in the room she had taken, in a whitewashed house in the Barrio de Santa Cruz . It was as simple and dark as a prison cell, but when she stepped into the courtyard outside each morning, the sunlight was blinding.
    In the mornings, Philippa sat in a nearby square drinking thick china cups of café con leche, watching from behind sunglasses the first groups of hungover tourists wandering through the quarter. No-one noticed her. There was a harshness about the city that she found almost comforting. The citizens bore the cruelty of the past on their shoulders with defensive pride, like blood on a matador’s suit of lights. There was no pity here save for the great outpouring at Easter, when the Virgin La Macarena cried crystal tears for her crucified son.
    Sometimes, in the afternoons, Philippa went to the bullring, La Maetranza, and sat alone in the shade under pretty white arcading, mesmerized by the orchestrated brutality of los toros. No-one there had any interest in trying to cheer her up as Lanny and May, an American couple on the tour, had done, insisting she sit with them at dinner, making extensive well-intentioned efforts to turn her into a merry widow. The rest of the day she wandered until it was too hot to wander, seeking sanctuary in the gardens of the Alcazar or the deep shade of the Parque de Maria Luisa. She took with her one of the paperbacks she had bought in the departure lounge at Heathrow, and sat on a stone bench staring at the open page. Nobody disturbed you if you were reading. She was not reading, but the book was like the insect repellent she sprayed all over her body each night, keeping unwanted intruders at a safe distance.
    Very slowly her head began to empty. Since Jack’s death it had felt crammed, as if a whole log-jam of thoughts had gathered, all bobbing and jostling to find their way out of her brain, and she had pushed them down, fearing that if one were allowed to surface then they would all follow with uncontrollable force, knocking her down, perhaps even drowning her. Now, freed by the anonymity of a strange city, she began to be able to think and remember.
    Her mind kept flitting back to the day he asked her to invest in his first movie. She had inherited a tidy sum from her father, and the management consultancy she had set up on leaving advertising was far more profitable than she could have ever dreamed. They were in bed one Sunday morning. You’ll get a good return, Jack had told her cockily, flirting with her for her money, even though they had been married many years. I just need you to trust me, he said, rolling on top of her pinning her to the bed and staring close into her face, his pale blue eyes sparkling with sport. Trust me.
    He had repaid the money ten times over, but not the trust. Not the trust. And then he had died before she could find out whether there was anything left without trust. He had left her without a future. And without a past, she suddenly thought, because what she had thought was their past turned out not to have been.
    Every memory she had of their life together was now tainted with not knowing.
    She was angry with him for lying and angrier for dying, leaving her with her life half-answered. Why? Why me? What did I do to you, Jack, to deserve this? Lying on her hard, narrow bed in the afternoons with a damp flannel on her forehead and the rhythmic breeze of the electric fan she had bought in El Corte Inglés blowing up and down her body, she would try to relax the anger out of her body, but it kept her stiff like an effigy on a tomb.
    In the evenings she drank two glasses of fino in her breakfast cafe, chewing on a few olives and little scraps of jamon, watching passers-by from the shadows. Then she moved on to a dark tapas bar where the natives ate, tasting the little