Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [34]
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 glasses 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 glasses 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 tönt 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, damn 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 analogy 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--"
"Even, I wouldn't say, if that town seems to be going about its business again, though in a somewhat stricken fashion, I admit, and its trams running more or less on schedule." The Consul strapped his watch firmly on his wrist. "Eh?"
"--Look at the red bird on the tree-twigs, Geoffrey! I never saw a cardinal as big as that before."
"No." The Consul, all unobserved, secured the whisky bottle, uncorked it, smelt its contents, and returned it to the tray gravely, pursing his lips: "You wouldn't have. Because it isn't a cardinal."
"Of course that's a cardinal. Look at its red breast. It's like a bit of flame!" Yvonne, it was clear to him, dreaded the approaching scene as much as he, and now felt under some compulsion to go on talking about anything until the perfect inappropriate moment arrived, that moment too when, unseen by her, the awful bell would actually touch the doomed child with giant protruding tongue and hellish Wesleyan breath. "There, on the hibiscus!"