Second Spring in Lisbon – Part 1

The guidebook was from 1998, and it was wrong about almost everything.

The restaurant on page 42 had become a phone shop. The museum on page 67 had moved across the city. The hotel her husband, Peter, had circled three times in red pen was now a block of very expensive apartments with a doorman who looked at Margaret Hale as if she were lost.

She was lost. That was the point.

She sat down on a stone bench on a steep street in Alfama and opened the book again. Lisbon spread out below her in a jumble of red roofs and white walls, the river shining silver beyond. Yellow trams groaned up the hills. Somewhere, out of an open window, a woman was singing fado, slow and sad and beautiful.

On the inside cover, in Peter’s handwriting: Lisbon. Our 30th. I promise, Maggie.

Their thirtieth anniversary had been five years ago. They’d put the trip off. The roof needed fixing. His mother was ill. There was always something. And then, three years ago, in a hospital in Leeds, there was nothing left to put it off for.

Margaret closed the book. She was fifty-six years old, and she had flown to Portugal alone because she was tired of being sad in Yorkshire.

She thought she might as well be sad somewhere with better weather.

---

The bookshop was halfway down the hill, so narrow she almost walked past it.

There was no sign. Just a green door, open, and inside, books stacked from floor to ceiling, on shelves, on chairs, on the stairs, in teetering towers on the floor. It smelled of old paper and coffee. A cat was asleep on a pile of atlases.

Margaret went in because it was the first place in Lisbon that felt like home.

“Good afternoon,” said a voice from somewhere behind a mountain of books. Then a man appeared, tall, silver-haired, in a cardigan the colour of moss, with reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. “English?”

“Is it that obvious?”

“You said ‘sorry’ to the cat,” he said.

She laughed, surprised. She hadn’t laughed in a while.

“I’m looking for a guidebook,” she said. “A new one. Mine is,” she held it up, “slightly out of date.”

He took it from her gently and turned it over. His eyes went to the year on the spine. Then he opened it, and his eyebrows rose. Every page was covered in notes. Peter’s small, slanting handwriting filled the margins: Must try this. Maggie will love the view. Ask about the custard tarts. Sunset here?

The man turned the pages slowly, carefully, the way you would handle something precious.

“Someone planned this trip very well,” he said.

“My husband.” Margaret heard her voice go thin. “He passed away. Three years ago. We never came.”

The man looked up from the book. He didn’t say I’m sorry. He didn’t look away. He just looked at her, steadily, with grey eyes that had clearly seen their own share of loss.

“Then you’ve come for both of you,” he said.

It was such a simple thing to say. It made her eyes sting.

“I’m António,” he said, and held out his hand.

“Margaret.”

His hand was warm and dry, with ink stains on the fingers.

“Margaret,” he said. “Your husband’s book is wrong about the restaurants, but he was right about the custard tarts. Come. The best ones are around the corner. I will close the shop.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I own the shop,” António said. “I can do whatever I like. And the cat will mind it for me.”

---

The custard tarts came warm from the oven, dusted with cinnamon, the pastry so flaky it shattered at the first bite. They ate them at a tiny metal table on the pavement, with two small, strong coffees, while trams rattled past close enough to touch.

“Oh,” Margaret said, with her mouth full. “Oh, Peter was right.”

“He usually was?”

“Almost never,” she said, and they both laughed.

António told her about the shop. It had belonged to his wife, Helena, who had loved books more than anything. She had died seven years ago. He had been an engineer for thirty-five years, building bridges, and he had known nothing about books. But he couldn’t bear to close her shop, so he had kept it open, one day and then another, and now he knew a great deal about books and almost nothing about bridges anymore.

“Do you like it?” Margaret asked.

“I love it,” he said. “It took me three years to admit that. It felt like a betrayal, to be happy in her place.”

Margaret looked down at her coffee.

“I know that feeling,” she said quietly.

---

He showed her the city.

Not the places in the guidebook. His places. A tiny chapel covered in blue and white tiles, completely empty, where the light came through the windows in long gold stripes. A viewpoint at the top of a hill where old men played cards under a jacaranda tree. A restaurant in a basement with six tables and no menu, where the owner brought them grilled sardines and green wine and a fado singer sang in the corner, eyes closed, with a voice that seemed to come from somewhere very old.

Margaret found she was crying during the song. Not unhappily. Just quietly.

António didn’t say anything. He passed her a clean handkerchief, ironed and folded, from his jacket pocket. She hadn’t known men still carried handkerchiefs.

“It’s called saudade,” he said softly, when the song was over. “The fado. There is no English word. It means missing something that is gone. But also, being grateful that you had it.”

Margaret wiped her eyes.

“That’s exactly it,” she said.

---

She was supposed to stay four days. She stayed ten.

Every morning she walked down the steep hill to the green door, and every morning António had coffee waiting and a new place to show her. They took the yellow tram to Belém. They walked along the river at sunset. He took her to the sea at Cascais and she took off her shoes and walked in the cold Atlantic like a girl, shrieking, while he laughed at her from the sand.

On the ninth evening, they sat on the bench at the viewpoint, under the jacaranda, and watched the whole city turn pink and gold as the sun went down.

She was holding his hand. She didn’t remember when she had started doing that.

“Margaret,” he said. “I want to ask you something. You can say no. You can laugh at me.”

“I won’t laugh.”

“You might.” He looked at their hands. “I am sixty years old. I have not kissed a woman in seven years. I do not know if I still remember how.”

She looked at him, at the silver hair and the moss-coloured cardigan and the ink stains on his fingers, and she felt something she had forgotten she could feel. Something warm and fluttering and terrified, like a teenager at a school dance.

“I’m fifty-six,” she said. “I haven’t been kissed in three years. And I don’t think either of us forgets.”

He turned toward her slowly, and kissed her.

It was gentle and unhurried, the kiss of someone who knew how precious things were and how quickly they could go. The city glowed below them. The jacaranda dropped purple flowers on their shoulders. When they parted, his forehead stayed against hers, and he was smiling.

“You see,” Margaret whispered. “You remember.”

---

His apartment was above the bookshop, up a narrow wooden staircase that creaked on every step.

It was full of books too, of course, and of plants, and of photographs: a dark-haired woman laughing on a beach, the same woman older, in the shop, holding the sleeping cat. António saw her looking.

“Helena,” he said. “Does it bother you?”

Margaret thought about the guidebook in her bag, with its margins full of Peter’s handwriting.

“No,” she said. “We both loved someone. That’s why we know how.”

He took her face in both of his hands. His hands were shaking very slightly. So were hers.

“I am not as young as I was,” he said, almost apologetically.

“Nor am I,” Margaret said. “Thank God. I was terrible at all of this when I was young.”

He laughed, a deep, warm, surprised laugh, and the nervousness went out of the room.

What happened after belonged only to them: to the soft lamp by the window and the sound of the city drifting up from the street below, to the unhurried tenderness of two people who knew exactly how rare this was. There was laughter in it, and gentleness, and a kind of wonder. Margaret had thought this part of her life was finished, closed, like a book on a shelf.

She had been wrong. It had only been waiting.

---

On the tenth day, she stood in the doorway of the bookshop with her suitcase.

“I have to go back,” she said. “My sister. My house. My whole life is in Yorkshire.”

António nodded slowly. He didn’t argue.

“Before you go,” he said, “I have something for you.”

He handed her a book. A new one, a Lisbon guidebook, this year’s edition, crisp and clean.

She opened it. The margins were full of handwriting. His handwriting, careful and upright, in blue ink.

The chapel with the gold light. You will cry again. That’s fine.

Sardines, the basement, no menu. Ask for the singer.

Cascais. Bring a towel this time.

The bench under the jacaranda. Spring is the best. It flowers in May.

On the inside cover, he had written:

Margaret. For your second trip. I promise. — A.

She read it standing in the doorway, with the cat winding around her ankles and the trams groaning up the hill, and she pressed the book against her chest and couldn’t speak.

“May,” she said finally, her voice unsteady.

“May,” António said.

“That’s seven months.”

“I’m a patient man.” He smiled. “I kept a bookshop open for seven years for a woman who wasn’t coming back. Seven months for one who is,” he shrugged, “that is nothing.”

Margaret put down her suitcase. She crossed the little shop, past the towers of books and the sleeping cat, and kissed him, right there among the shelves.

Then she picked up the new guidebook, and Peter’s old one too, and put them side by side in her bag.

She went home to Yorkshire.

She came back in April. She couldn’t wait until May.

---

Next: Part 2, April. Margaret comes back, and her sister thinks she’s lost her mind.