Free Weekend by William McIlvanney

to get home. And quickly. ‘D’you want a ride?’
    She swerved and ran. There was no sound of pursuit, no breaking branches, no battered leaves. Against her own wishes, she stopped and turned. She was gasping but itwas not an unpleasant sensation. He stood exactly where he had been, still visible down a tunnel of leaves, still watching her. He looked forlorn, as if he had been trying to pay her a compliment in a language that was foreign to her.
    It wasn’t foreign now, she thought. As she raised the glass to her lips, she heard herself laughingly whisper ‘Yes!’ into it. She smiled and reflected ruefully that he was too far away to hear her.
    Did such times accumulate till they defined you, trapped you in the refusal of yourself? There had been other times when rules that came from nowhere she could precisely locate (her mother, her father, what teachers said, conclaves of girls comparing notes?) had pre-empted what she felt, so that she prejudged the possibilities before they could happen and sentenced them to death, and thought it good.
    The man at the café table in Madrid came back to her. Alan was visiting the stadium of Real Madrid. She couldn’t remember its name. She didn’t want to. They had spent a morning of loneliness in the Prado like vandals, their mutual displeasure spoiling everything they looked at. Their mood had desecrated Velázquez, defaced Goya. Only one painting hung in her memory from that visit. It was very small, easily missed. It showed the frontal image of a man’s face gazing pleadingly upwards, framed in flames. It was called
Un Alma en Pena
, which she later found out meant a soul in pain. The melodrama of her mood at the time had sympathised with the man in the picture.
    They had been arguing about something she couldn’t recall. That memory lapse wasn’t uncommon. Any relationship, she imagined, must be familiar with those lost quarrels that had seemed so vividly important at the time, graveyards of unremembered angst. Perhaps, though they didn’t retain theirsubstance, they came back to haunt togetherness remorselessly till it proved uninhabitable.
    Whatever discontent had been alive that day, it had breathed its contagion on the city. She had wanted to be anywhere but here. When Alan suggested visiting the stadium, it was no more than she bitterly expected. He knew she hated football. As he walked angrily away from her, she stood still and decided, not for the first time, that their marriage was over.
    She began to walk nowhere briskly, as if she were distancing him from her life. She sat down suddenly at a café table. It was not an action but the absence of an action. She did it because there was nothing she wanted to do. She ordered a brandy, which was something she never drank. But as she sipped it, the very strangeness of what she was doing made her feel different from herself. She felt she might be interested in meeting her. She felt the thrill of being beyond a routine sense of herself.
    She was aware of people all around her, walking, going to places she would never reach, and she wanted to have her own strange places to go. This city excited her.
    She knew that a man at the next table was watching her. She looked at him. He smiled. He had a thoughtful face, dark eyes, a mouth like cruelty waiting to happen. It was an interesting mouth. She looked away.
    An old man and woman were walking down the street towards her. The slowness of their progress was awesome. Each step seemed a task they might never finish. People were passing them as if they were stationary. It looked as if the sun would fell them before they made another yard. Before she could avoid the arrogance of the thought, she found herself wondering what point life could possibly have for them any more.
    Involuntarily, she glanced again towards the man at the next table. She had the disconcerting feeling that he had read her mind. He raised his eyebrows, still watching her. He nodded towards the old couple. He