Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [29]
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 God 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 hoarseness, "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; massive 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 Parián 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 María 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 passed 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.