"Yet the street looks different somehow." Yvonne relapsed into silence again. Actually she was making a tremendous effort to control herself. What she could not have explained was that recently in her picture of Quauhnahuac this house hadn't been here at all! On the occasions imagination had led her with Geoffrey down the Calle Nicaragua lately, never once, poor phantoms, had they been confronted with Jacques's zacuali. It had vanished some time before, leaving not a trace, it was as if the house had never existed, just as in the mind of a murderer, it may happen, some prominent landmark in the vicinity of his crime becomes obliterated, so that on returning to the neighbourhood, once so familiar, he scarcely knows where to turn. But the Calle Nicaragua didn't really look different. Here it was, still cluttered up with large grey loose stones, full of the same lunar potholes, and in that well-known state of frozen eruption that resembled repair but which in fact only testified facetiously to the continued deadlock between the Munic.i.p.ality and the property owners here over its maintenance. Calle Nicaragua!--the name, despite everything, sang plangently within her: only that ridiculous shock at Jacques's house could account for her feeling, with one part of her mind, calm as she did about it.

The road, broad, sidewalkless, ran with increasing steepness downhill, mostly between high walls overhung by trees, though at the moment there were more little carbon shanties to their right, down to a leftward curve some three hundred yards away where roughly the same distance again above their own house it was lost from sight. Trees blocked the view beyond of low rolling hills. Nearly all the large residences were on their left, built far back from the road towards the barranca in order to face the volcanoes across the valley. She saw the mountains again in the distance through a gap between two estates, a small field bounded by a barbed-wire fence and overflowing with tall spiny gra.s.ses tossed wildly together as by a big wind that had abruptly ceased. There they were, Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, remote amba.s.sadors of Mauna Loa, Mokuaweoweo: dark clouds now obscured their base. The gra.s.s, she thought, wasn't as green as it should be at the end of the rains: there must have been a dry spell, though the gutters on either side of the road were brimful of rushing mountain water and-- "And he's still there too. He hasn't budged an inch either," The Consul without turning was nodding back in the direction of M. Laruelle's house.

"Who--who hasn't--" Yvonne faltered. She glanced behind her: there was only the peon who had stopped looking at the house and was going into an alleyway.

"Jacques."

"Jacques!"

"That's right. In fact we've had terrific times together. We've been slap through everything from Bishop Berkeley to the four o'clock mirabilis jalapa"

"You do what ?"

"The Diplomatic Service." The Consul had paused and was lighting his pipe. "Sometimes I really think there's something to be said for it."

He stopped to float a match down the br.i.m.m.i.n.g gutter and somehow they were moving, even hurrying on: she heard bemusedly the swift angry click and crunch of her heels on the road and the Consul's seemingly effortless voice at her shoulder.

"For instance had you ever been British attache to the White Russian Emba.s.sy in Zagreb in 1922, and I've always thought a woman like you would have done very well as attache to the White Russian Emba.s.sy in Zagreb in 1922, though G.o.d knows how it managed to survive that long, you might have acquired a certain, I don't say technique exactly, but a mien, a mask, a way, at any rate, of throwing a look into your face at a moment's notice of sublime dishonest detachment."

"Although I can very well see how it strikes you--how the picture of our implied indifference, Jacques's and mine that is, I mean, strikes you, as being even more indecent than that, say, Jacques shouldn't have left when you did or that we shouldn't have dropped the friendship."

"But had you, Yvonne, ever been on the bridge of a British Q-ship, and I've always thought a woman like you would have been very good on the bridge of a British Q-ship--peering at the Tottenham Court Road through a telescope, only figuratively speaking of course, day in and day out, counting the waves, you might have learnt--"

"Please look where you're going!"

"Though had you of course ever been Consul to Cuckolds-haven, that town cursed by the lost love of Maximilian and Carlotta, then, why then--"

--BOX! ARENA TOMALiN. EL BALON VS EL REDONDILLO.

"But I don't think I finished about the little corpse. What is really so astonishing about him is that he has to be checked, actually checked, to the U. S. Border of Exit. While the charges for him are equivalent to two adult pa.s.sengers--"

"However since you don't seem to want to listen to me, here's something else perhaps I ought to tell you."

"Something else, I repeat, very important, that perhaps I ought to tell you." "Yes. What is it?" "About Hugh." Yvonne said at last: "You've heard from Hugh. How is he?" "He's staying with me."

--BOX! ARENA TOMALiN. FRENTE AL JARDIN XICOTANCATL.

Domingo 8 de Noviembre de 1938.

4 Emocionantes Peleas.

El balon vs el redondillo.

Las Manos de Orlac.

Con Peter Lorre, "What!" Yvonne stopped dead.

"It seems he's been in America this time on a cattle ranch," the Consul was saying rather gravely as somehow, anyhow, they moved on, but this time more slowly. "Why, heaven knows. It couldn't be he was learning to ride, but still, he turned up about a week ago in a distinctly unpukka outfit, looking like Hoot S. Hart in the Riders to the Purple Sage. Apparently he'd teleported himself, or been deported, from America by cattle-truck. I don't pretend to know how the Press get by in these matters. Or maybe it was a bet... Anyhow he got as far as Chihuahua with the cattle, and some gun-running gun-toting pal by the name of--Weber?--I forget, anyway, I didn't meet him, flew him the rest of the way." The Consul knocked out his pipe on his heel, smiling. "It seems everyone comes flying to see me these days."

"But--but Hugh--I don't understand--"

"He'd lost his clothes en route but it wasn't carelessness, if you can believe it, only that they wanted to make him pay higher duty at the border than they were worth, so quite naturally he left them behind. He hadn't lost his pa.s.sport however, which was unusual perhaps because he's still somehow with--though I haven't the foggiest in what capacity--the London Globe... Of course you knew he's become quite famous lately. For the second time, in case you weren't aware of the first."

"Did he know about our divorce?" Yvonne managed to ask.

The Consul shook his head. They walked on slowly, the Consul looking at the ground.

"Did you tell him?"

The Consul was silent, walking more and more slowly. "What did I say?" he said at length.

"Nothing, Geoff."

"Well, he knows now that we're separated, of course." The Consul decapitated a dusty coquelicot poppy growing by the side of the gutter with his stick. "But he expected us both to be here. I gather he had some idea we might let--but I avoided telling him the divorce had gone through. That is, I think I did. I meant to avoid it. So far as I know, honestly, I hadn't got around to telling him when he left."

"Then he's not staying with you any longer."

The Consul burst out in a laugh that became a cough. "Oh yes he is! He most certainly is... In fact, I nearly pa.s.sed out altogether under the stress of his salvage operations. Which is to say he's been trying to 'straighten me out'. Can't you see it? Can't you recognize his fine Italian hand? And he almost literally succeeded right off with some malevolent strychnine compound he produced. But," just for one moment the Consul seemed to have difficulty placing one foot before another, "to be more concrete, actually he did have a better reason for staying than to play Theodore Watts Dunton. To my Swinburne." The Consul decapitated another poppy. "Mute Swinburne. He'd got wind of some story while vacationing on the ranch and came after it here like a red rag after a bull. Didn't I tell you that?... Which--didn't I say so before?--is why he's gone off to Mexico City."

After a while Yvonne said weakly, scarcely hearing herself speak: "Well, we may have a little time together, mayn't we?" "Quien sabe?"

"But you mean he's in the City now," she covered hastily.

"Oh, he's throwing up the job--he might be home now. At any rate he'll be back today, I think. He says he wants 'action'. Poor old chap, he's wearing a very popular front indeed these days." Whether the Consul was being sincere or not he added, sympathetically enough, it sounded, "And G.o.d alone knows what will be the end of that romantic little urge in him."

"And how will he feel," Yvonne asked bravely all at once, "when he sees you again?"

"Yes, well, not much difference, not enough time to show, but I'd just been about to say," the Consul went on with a slight hoa.r.s.eness, "that the terrific times, Laruelle's and mine, I mean, ceased on the advent of Hugh." He was poking at the dust with his stick, making little patterns for a minute as he went along, like a blind man. "They were mostly mine because Jacques has a weak stomach and is usually sick after three drinks and after four he would--start to play the Good Samaritan, and after five Theodore Watts Dunton too... So that I appreciated, so to speak, a change of technique. At least to the extent that I find I shall be grateful now, on Hugh's behalf, if you'd say nothing to him--"

"Oh--"

The Consul cleared his throat. "Not that I have been drinking much of course in his absence, and not that I'm not absolutely cold stone sober now, as you can readily see."

"Oh yes indeed," Yvonne smiled, full of thoughts that had already swept her a thousand miles in frantic retreat from all this. Yet she was walking on slowly beside him. And deliberately as a climber on a high unguarded place looks up at the pine trees above on the precipice and comforts himself by saying: "Never mind about the drop below me, how very much worse if I were on top of one of those pines up there!" she forced herself out of the moment: she stopped thinking: or she thought about the street again, remembering her last poignant glimpse of it--and how even more desperate things had seemed then!--at the beginning of that fateful journey to Mexico City, glancing back from the now lost Plymouth as they turned the corner, crashing, crunching down on its springs into the potholes, stopping dead, then crawling, leaping forward again, keeping in, it didn't matter on which side, to the walls. They were higher than she recalled and covered with bougainvillea; ma.s.sive smouldering banks of bloom. Over them she could see the crests of trees, their boughs heavy and motionless, and occasionally a watch-tower, the eternal mirador of Parian state, set among them, the houses invisible here below the walls and from on top too, she'd once taken the trouble to find out, as if shrunken down inside their patios, the miradores cut off, floating above like lonely rooftrees of the soul. Nor could you distinguish the houses much better through the wrought-iron lacework of the high gates, vaguely reminiscent of New Orleans, locked in these walls on which were furtively pencilled lovers' trysts, and which so often concealed less Mexico than a Spaniard's dream of home. The gutter on the right ran underground a while and another of those low shanties built on the street frowned at her with its dark open sinister bunkers--where Maria used to fetch their carbon. Then the water tumbled out into the sunlight and on the other side, through a gap in the walls, Popocatepetl emerged alone. Without her knowing it they had pa.s.sed the corner and the entrance to their house was in sight.

The street was now absolutely deserted and save for the gushing murmurous gutters that now became like two fierce little streams racing each other, silent: it reminded her, confusedly, of how in her heart's eye, before she'd met Louis, and when she'd half imagined the Consul back in England, she'd tried to keep Quauhnahuac itself, as a sort of safe footway where his phantom could endlessly pace, accompanied only by her own consoling unwanted shadow, above the rising waters of possible catastrophe.

Then since the other day Quauhnahuac had seemed, though emptied still, different--purged, swept clean of the past, with Geoffrey here alone, but now in the flesh, redeemable, wanting her help.

And here Geoffrey indeed was, not only not alone, not only not wanting her help, but living in the midst of her blame, a blame by which, to all appearances, he was curiously sustained-- Yvonne gripped her bag tightly, suddenly lightheaded and barely conscious of the landmarks the Consul, who seemed recovered in spirits, was silently indicating with his stick: the country lane to the right, and the little church that had been turned into a school with the tombstones and the horizontal bar in the playground, the dark entrance in the ditch--the high walls on both sides had temporarily disappeared altogether--to the abandoned iron mine running under the garden.

To and fro from school..

Popocatepetl It was your shining day...

The Consul hummed. Yvonne felt her heart melting. A sense of a shared, a mountain peace seemed to fall between them; it was false, it was a lie, but for a moment it was almost as though they were returning home from marketing in days past. She took his arm, laughing, they fell into step. And now here were the walls again, and their drive sloping down into the street where no one had allayed the dust, already paddled by early bare feet, and now here was their gate, off its hinges and lying just beyond the entrance, as for that matter it always had lain, defiantly, half hidden under the bank of bougainvillea.

"There now, Yvonne. Come along, darling... We're almost home!"

"Yes."

"Strange--" the Consul said. A hideous pariah dog followed them in.

3.

The tragedy, proclaimed, as they made their way up the crescent of the drive, no less by the gaping potholes in it than by the tall exotic plants, livid and crepuscular through his dark gla.s.ses, perishing on every hand of unnecessary thirst, staggering, it almost appeared, against one another, yet struggling like dying voluptuaries in a vision to maintain some final att.i.tude of potency, or of a collective desolate fecundity, the Consul thought distantly, seemed to be reviewed and interpreted by a person walking at his side suffering for him and saying: "Regard: see how strange, how sad, familiar things may be. Touch this tree, once your friend: alas, that that which you have known in the blood should ever seem so strange! Look up at that niche in the wall over there on the house where Christ is still, suffering, who would help you if you asked him: you cannot ask him. Consider the agony of the roses. See, on the lawn Concepta's coffee beans, you used to say they were Maria's, drying in the sun. Do you know their sweet aroma any more? Regard: the plantains with their queer familiar blooms, once emblematic of life, now of an evil phallic death. You do not know how to love these things any longer. All your love is the cantinas now: the feeble survival of a love of life now turned to poison, which only is not wholly poison, and poison has become your daily food, when in the tavern--"

"Has Pedro gone too then?" Yvonne was holding his arm tightly but her voice was almost natural, he felt.

"Yes, thank G.o.d!"

"How about the cats?"

"Perro!" the Consul, removing his gla.s.ses, said amiably to the pariah dog that had appeared familiarly at heel. But the animal cowered back down the drive. "Though the garden's a rajah mess, I'm afraid. We've been virtually without a gardener at all for months. Hugh pulled up a few weeds. He cleaned out the swimming-pool too... Hear it? It ought to be full today." The drive widened to a small arena then debouched into a path cutting obliquely across the narrow sloping lawn, islanded by rose beds, to the "front" door, actually at the back of the low white house which was roofed with imbricated flower-pot-coloured tiles resembling bisected drainpipes. Glimpsed through the trees, with its chimney on the far left, from which rose a thread of dark smoke, the bungalow looked an instant like a pretty little ship lying at anchor. "No. Skulduggery and suings for back wages have been my lot. And leaf-cutter ants, several species. The house was broken into one night when I was out. And flood: the drains of Quauhnahuac visited us and left us with something that smelt like the Cosmic Egg till recently. Never mind though, maybe you can--"

Yvonne disengaged her arm to lift a tentacle from a trumpet vine growing across the path: "Oh Geoffrey! Where're my camellias?--"

"G.o.d knows." The lawn was divided by a dry runnel parallel with the house bridged by a spurious plank. Between floribundia and rose a spider wove an intricate web. With pebbly cries a covey of tyrant flycatchers swept over the house in quick dark flight. They crossed the plank and they were on the "stoop."

An old woman with a face of a highly intellectual black gnome the Consul always thought (mistress to some gnarled guardian of the mine beneath the garden once, perhaps), and carrying the inevitable mop, the trapeador or American husband, over her shoulder, shuffled out of the "front" door, sc.r.a.ping her feet--the shuffling and the sc.r.a.ping however seemingly unidentified, controlled by separate mechanisms. "Here's Concepta," the Consul said. Yvonne: "Concepta. Concepta, Senora Firmin." The gnome smiled a childlike smile that momentarily transformed its face into an innocent girl's. Concepta wiped her hands on her ap.r.o.n: she was shaking hands with Yvonne as the Consul hesitated, seeing now, studying with sober interest (though at this point all at once he felt more pleasantly "tight" than at any time since just before that blank period last night) Yvonne's luggage on the stoop before him, three bags and a hatbox so bespangled with labels they might have burst forth into a kind of bloom, to be saying too, here is your history: Hotel Hilo Honolulu, Villa Carmona Granada, Hotel Theba Algeciras, Hotel Peninsula Gibraltar, Hotel Nazareth Galilee, Hotel Manchester Paris, Cosmo Hotel London, the S.S. Ile de France, Regis Hotel Canada, Hotel Mexico D.F.--and now the new labels, the newest blossoms: Hotel Astor New York, the Town House Los Angeles, S.S. Pennsylvania, Hotel Mirador Acapulco, the Compania Mexicana de Aviacion. "El otro senor?" he was saying to Concepta who shook her head with delighted emphasis. "Hasn't returned yet. A right, Yvonne, I dare say you want your old room. Anyhow Hugh's in the back one with the machine."

"The machine?"

"The mowing machine."

"--por que no, agua caliente," Concepta's soft musical humorous voice rose and fell as she shuffled and sc.r.a.ped off with two of the bags.

"So there's hot water for you, which is a miracle!"

On the other side of the house the view was suddenly s.p.a.cious and windy as the sea.

Beyond the barranca the plains rolled up to the very foot of the volcanoes into a barrier of murk above which rose the pure cone of old Popo, and spreading to the left of it like a University City in the snow the jagged peaks of Ixtaccihuatl, and for a moment they stood on the porch without speaking, not holding hands, but with their hands just meeting, as though not quite sure they weren't dreaming this, each of them separately on their far bereaved cots, their hands but blown fragments of their memories, half afraid to commingle, yet touching over the howling sea at night.

Immediately below them the small chuckling swimming-pool was still filling from a leaky hose connected with a hydrant, though it was almost full; they had painted it themselves once, blue on the sides and the bottom; the paint had scarcely faded and mirroring the sky, aping it, the water appeared a deep turquoise. Hugh had trimmed about the pool's edges but the garden sloped off beyond into an indescribable confusion of briars from which the Consul averted his eyes: the pleasant evanescent feeling of tightness was wearing off...

He glanced absently round the porch which also embraced briefly the left side of the house, the house Yvonne hadn't yet entered at all, and now as in answer to his prayer Concepta was approaching them down its length. Concepta's gaze was fixed steadfastly on the tray she was carrying and she glanced neither to right nor left, neither at the drooping plants, dusty and gone to seed on the low parapet, nor at the stained hammock, nor the bad melodrama of the broken chair, nor the disembowelled day-bed, nor the uncomfortable stuffed Quixote's tilting their straw mounts on the house wall, shuffling slowly nearer them through the dust and dead leaves she hadn't yet swept from the ruddy tiled floor.

"Concepta knows my habits, you see." The Consul regarded the tray now on which were two gla.s.ses, a bottle of Johnny Walker, half full, a soda siphon, a jarro of melting ice, and the sinister-looking bottle, also half full, containing a dull red concoction like bad claret, or perhaps cough mixture. "However this is the strychnine. Will you have a whisky and soda?... The ice seems to be for your benefit anyway. Not even a straight wormwood?" The Consul shifted the tray from the parapet to a wicker table Concepta had just brought out.

"Good heavens, not for me, thank you."

"--A straight whisky then. Go ahead. What have you got to lose?"

.".. Let me have some breakfast first!"

"--She might have said yes for once," a voice said in the Consul's ear at this moment with incredible rapidity, "for now of course poor old chap you want horribly to get drunk all over again don't you the whole trouble being as we see it that Yvonne's long-dreamed-of coming alas but put away the anguish my boy there's nothing in it," the voice gabbled on, "has in itself created the most important situation in your life save one namely the far more important situation it in turn creates of your having to have five hundred drinks in order to deal with it," the voice he recognized of a pleasant and impertinent familiar, perhaps horned, prodigal of disguise, a specialist in casuistry, and who added severely, "but are you the man to weaken and have a drink at this critical hour Geoffrey Firmin you are not you will fight it have already fought down this temptation have you not you have not then I must remind you did you not last night refuse drink after drink and finally after a nice little sleep even sober up altogether you didn't you did you didn't you did we know afterwards you did you were only drinking enough to correct your tremor a masterly self-control she does not and cannot appreciate it"

"I don't feel you believe in the strychnine somehow," the Consul said, with quiet triumph (there was an immense comfort however in the mere presence of the whisky bottle) pouring himself from the sinister bottle a half-tumblerful of his mixture. I have resisted temptation for two and a half minutes at least: my redemption is sure. "Neither do I believe in the strychnine, you'll make me cry again, you b.l.o.o.d.y fool Geoffrey Firmin, I'll kick your face in, O idiot!" That was yet another familiar and the Consul raised his gla.s.s in token of recognition and drank half its contents thoughtfully. The strychnine--he had ironically put some ice in it--tasted sweet, rather like ca.s.sis; it provided perhaps a species of subliminal stimulus, faintly perceived: the Consul, who was still standing, was aware too of a faint feeble wooling of his pain, contemptible....

"But can't you see you cabron that she is thinking that the first thing you think of after she has arrived home like this is a drink even if it is only a drink of strychnine the intrusive necessity for which and juxtaposition cancels its innocence so you see you might as well in the face of such hostility might you not start now on the whisky instead of later not on the tequila where is it by the way all right all right we know where it is that would be the beginning of the end though a d.a.m.ned good end perhaps but whisky the fine old healthful throat-smarting fire of your wife's ancestors nacio 1820 y siguiendo tan campante and afterwards you might perhaps have some beer good for you too and full of vitamins for your brother will be here and it is an occasion and this is perhaps the whole point for celebration of course it is and while drinking the whisky and later the beer you could nevertheless still be tapering off poco a poco as you must but everyone knows it's dangerous to attempt it too quickly still keeping up Hugh's good work of straightening you out of course you would!" It was his first familiar again and the Consul sighing put the tumbler down on the tray with a defiantly steady hand.

"What was that you said?" he asked Yvonne.

"I said three times," Yvonne was laughing, "for Pete's sake have a decent drink. You don't have to drink that stuff to impress me... I'll just sit here and cheer."

"What?" She was sitting on the parapet gazing over the valley with every semblance of interested enjoyment. It was dead calm in the garden itself. But the wind must have suddenly changed; Ixta had vanished while Popocatepetl was almost wholly obscured by black horizontal columns of cloud, like smoke drawn across the mountain by several trains running parallel. "Will you say that again?" The Consul took her hand.

They were embracing, or so it all but seemed, pa.s.sionately: somewhere, out of the heavens, a swan, transfixed, plummeted to earth. Outside the cantina El Puerto del Sol in Independencia the doomed men would be already crowding into the warmth of the sun, waiting for the shutters to roll up with a crash of trumpets...

"No, I'll stick to the old medicine, thanks." The Consul had almost fallen backwards on to his broken green rocking-chair. He sat soberly facing Yvonne. This was the moment then, yearned for under beds, sleeping in the corners of bars, at the edge of dark woods, lanes, bazaars, prisons, the moment when--but the moment, stillborn, was gone: and behind him the ursa horribilis of the night had moved nearer. What had he done? Slept somewhere, that much was certain. Tak: Tok: help: help: the swimming-pool ticked like a clock. He had slept: what else? His hand searching in his dress trousers pockets felt the hard edge of a clue. The card he brought to light said: Arturo Diaz Vigil Medico Cirujano y Partero Enfermedades de Ninos Indisposiciones Nerviosas Consultas de 12 a 2 y de 4 a 7 Av. Revolucion Numero 8.

"--Have you really come back? Or have you just come to see me?" the Consul was asking Yvonne gently as he replaced the card.

"Here I am, aren't I?" Yvonne said merrily, even with a slight note of challenge.

"Strange," the Consul commented, half trying to rise for the drink Yvonne had ratified in spite of himself and the quick voice that protested: "You b.l.o.o.d.y fool Geoffrey Firmin, I'll kick your face in if you do, if you have a drink I'll cry, O idiot!" "Yet it's awfully courageous of you. What if--I'm in a frightfully jolly mess, you know."

"But you look amazingly well I thought. You've no idea how well you look." (The Consul had absurdly flexed his biceps, feeling them: "Still strong as a horse, so to speak, strong as a horse!") "How do I look?" She seemed to have said. Yvonne averted her face a little, keeping it in profile.

"Didn't I say?" The Consul watched her. "Beautiful... Brown." Had he said that? "Brown as a berry. You've been swimming," he added. "You look as though you've had plenty of sun... There's been plenty of sun here too of course," he went on. "As usual.., Too much of it. In spite of the rain... Do you know, I don't like it."

"Oh yes you do, really," she had apparently replied. "We could get out in the sun, you know."

"Well--"

The Consul sat on the broken green rocker facing Yvonne. Perhaps it was just the soul, he thought, slowly emerging out of the strychnine into a form of detachment, to dispute with Lucretius, that grew older, while the body could renew itself many times unless it had acquired an unalterable habit of age. And perhaps the soul thrived on its sufferings, and upon the sufferings he had inflicted on his wife her soul had not only thrived but flourished. Ah, and not only upon the sufferings he had inflicted. What of those for which the adulterous ghost named Cliff he imagined always as just a morning coat and a pair of striped pyjamas open at the front, had been responsible? And the child, strangely named Geoffrey too, she had had by the ghost, two years before her first ticket to Reno, and which would now be six, had it not died at the age of as many months as many years ago, of meningitis, in 1932, three years before they themselves had met, and been married in Granada, in Spain? There Yvonne was at all events, bronzed and youthful and ageless: she had been at fifteen, she'd told him (that is, about the time she must have been acting in those Western pictures M. Laruelle, who had not seen them, adroitly a.s.sured one had influenced Eisenstein or somebody), a girl of whom people said, "She is not pretty but she is going to be beautiful": at twenty they still said so, and at twenty-seven when she'd married him it was still true, according to the category through which one perceived such things of course: it was equally true of her now, at thirty, that she gave the impression of someone who is still going to be, perhaps just about to be, beautiful: the same tilted nose, the small ears, the warm brown eyes, clouded now and hurt-looking, the same wide, full-lipped mouth, warm too and generous, the slightly weak chin. Yvonne's was the same fresh bright face that could collapse, as Hugh would say, like a heap of ashes, and be grey. Yet she was changed. Ah yes indeed! Much as the demoted skipper's lost command, seen through the barroom window lying out in harbour, is changed. She was no longer his: someone had doubtless approved her smart slate-blue travelling suit: it had not been he.

Suddenly with a quietly impatient gesture Yvonne pulled her hat off, and shaking her brown sunbleached hair rose from the parapet. She settled herself on the daybed, crossing her unusually beautiful and aristocratic long legs. The daybed emitted a rending guitar crash of chords. The Consul found his dark gla.s.ses and put them on almost playfully. But it had struck him with remote anguish that Yvonne was still waiting for the courage to enter the house. He said consularly in a deep false voice: "Hugh ought to be here before very long if he comes back by the first bus."

"What time is the first bus?"

"Half past ten, eleven." What did it matter? Chimes sounded from the city. Unless of course it seemed utterly impossible, one dreaded the hour of anyone's arrival unless they were bringing liquor. What if there had been no liquor in the house, only the strychnine? Could he have endured it? He would be even now stumbling through the dusty streets in the growing heat of the day after a bottle; or have dispatched Concepta. In some tiny bar at a dusty alley corner, his mission forgotten, he would drink all morning celebrating Yvonne's coming while she slept. Perhaps he would pretend to be an Icelander or a visitor from the Andes or Argentina. Far more than the hour of Hugh's arrival was to be dreaded the issue that was already bounding after him at the gait of Goethe's famous church bell in pursuit of the child truant from church. Yvonne twisted her wedding-ring round her finger, once. Did she still wear it for love or for one of two kinds of convenience, or both? Or, poor girl, was it merely for his, for their benefit? The swimming-pool ticked on. Might a soul bathe there and be clean or slake its drought?

"It's still only eight-thirty." The Consul took off his gla.s.ses again.

"Your eyes, you poor darling--they've got such a glare," Yvonne burst out with: and the church bell was nearer; now it had loped, clanging, over a stile and the child had stumbled.

"A touch of the goujeers... Just a touch." Die Glocke Glocke tont nicht mehr... The Consul traced a pattern on one of the porch tiles with his dress shoes in which his sockless feet (sock-less not because as Sr Bustamente the manager of the local cinema would have it, he'd drunk himself into a position where he could afford no socks, but because his whole frame was so neuritic with alcohol he found it impossible to put them on) felt swollen and sore. They would not have, but for the strychnine, d.a.m.n the stuff, and this complete cold ugly sobriety it had let him down into! Yvonne was sitting on the parapet again leaning against a pillar. She bit her lips, intent on the garden: "Geoffrey this place is a wreck!"

"Mariana and the moated grange isn't in it." The Consul was winding his wrist-watch. .".. But look here, suppose for the sake of argument you abandoned a besieged town to the enemy and then somehow or other not very long afterwards you go back to it--there's something about my a.n.a.logy I don't like, but never mind, suppose you do it--then you can't very well expect to invite your soul into quite the same green graces, with quite the same dear old welcome here and there, can you, eh?"

"But I didn't abandon--"