Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [28]
"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 TOMALÍN. 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 passengers--"
"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 TOMALÍN. FRENTE AL JARDIN XICOTANCATL
Domingo 8 de Noviembre de 1938.
4 Emocionantes Peleas.
El balón vs el redondillo.
Las Maños 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 passport 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 passed 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."