Espresso Tales - Alexander Hanchett Smith [156]
“I told you, didn’t I, about how I had moved to Mobile and opened a restaurant which I was running with my wife? Well, we ran that restaurant for six months and then I discovered something really hard for me. My wife was carrying on with one of the waiters. I had no idea that this was happening until I discovered them together at a fun-fair. She had said that she was going to see her aunt and I believed her. But then I telephoned the aunt and she said that she wasn’t there. So I knew that she was lying.
“I went out for a drive. It was a way of calming my anger that she should have lied to me, and by chance I found a funfair on a bit of wasteland near this big causeway that we have in Mobile. I don’t know why I stopped, but I’m glad that I did, as I found the two of them going round and round on the great wheel. I got into one of the cars behind them and up and round we went. They had not seen me, but I could see them and I could see him put his arm around her and kiss her. That was hard, Lou – it was very hard.
In the Bookshop
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“I did nothing for a while, and then I shouted out: I can see you!
“She turned round and spotted me up above them and I thought she was going to fall out of the car. But she did not, and when they went down again they signalled to the operator to let them out and they ran off to the car park and climbed into his van. That’s the last I saw of her. I shouldn’t have married her, Lou. She was too young for me. Sixteen’s too young for a girl to marry.
“So I divorced her and now I’m coming back to Scotland and I want to know two things. The first is whether you will be prepared to see me again. And the second is whether you will agree to marry me. That is what I want to know. I hope you do, Lou, because you are the lady I have always loved, even when I told myself that I loved somebody else. I didn’t. I loved you. That’s all, Lou. That’s all there is to it.”
Lou put the letter down, and then, fumbling with the strings, she tore off her apron, picked up a sign that said CLOSED, and half walked, half ran, out of the coffee bar and up the steps to the road above. She had to tell somebody, and Matthew would do. He would not be particularly interested, she knew, but she would tell him anyway. She had to share her joy, as Lou knew that joy unshared was a halved emotion, just as sadness and loss, when borne alone, were often doubled.
101. In the Bookshop
Seated on a comfortable blue sofa in the coffee shop of Ottakar’s Bookshop, Domenica Macdonald was in conversation with her old friend, Dilly Emslie. Beside her, in a plastic shopping bag, lay Domenica’s haul from her trip to the bookshop: a racy biography of an eighteenth-century German princeling (or Domenica hoped it was racy – the cover certainly suggested that, but covers were notoriously meretricious), a history of aspirin, and a novel about a young woman who went 330 In the Bookshop
to London, discovered it was a mistake, and returned to her small town in Northumbria, where nothing happened for the remainder of the book.
“I almost bought a book about pirates,” Domenica remarked.
“Pirates are such an interesting subject, don’t you think? And yet there are very few anthropological studies of pirate life.”
“It must be rather difficult to do,” Dilly said thoughtfully.
“Presumably pirates wouldn’t exactly encourage anthropologists.”
Domenica took a sip of her espresso. “I’m not sure about that,” she said. “Most people are flattered by attention. And remember that anthropologists have studied all sorts of apparently dangerous people. Head-hunters in New Guinea, for example. Those people became very used to having an anthropologist about the place. Some of them became quite dependent on their anthropologists – rather like some people become rather dependent on their social workers.”
“But of course it’s a bit late now, don’t you think?” said Dilly.
“Today’s pirates must be rather elusive.”
“There are more than you imagine,” said Domenica. “I gather that the South China Seas are riddled with them. And they