Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [7]
Though it was not the first occasion the Consul and he had stood looking into an abyss. For there had always been, ages ago--and how could one now forget it?--the "Hell Bunker': and that other encounter there which seemed to bear some obscure relation to the later one in Maximilian's Palace... Had his discovery of the Consul here in Quauhnahuac really been so extraordinary, the discovery that his old English playmate--he could scarcely call him "schoolmate"--whom he hadn't seen for nearly a quarter of a century was actually living in his street, and had been, without his knowledge, for six weeks? Probably not; probably it was just one of those meaningless correspondences that might be labelled: "favourite trick of the gods." But how vividly, again, that old seaside holiday in England came back to him!
--M. Laruelle, who had been born in Languion, in the Moselle country, but whose father, a rich philatelist of remote habits, had moved to Paris, usually spent his summer holidays as a boy with his parents in Normandy. Courseulles, in Calvados, on the English Channel, was not a fashionable resort. Far from it. There were a few windy battered pensions, miles of desolate sand-dunes, and the sea was cold. But it was to Courseulles, nevertheless, in the sweltering summer of 1911, that the family of the famous English poet, Abraham Taskerson, had come, bringing with them the strange little Anglo-Indian orphan, a broody creature of fifteen, so shy and yet so curiously self-contained, who wrote poetry that old Taskerson (who'd stayed at home) apparently encouraged him with, and who sometimes burst out crying if you mentioned in his presence the word "father" or "mother," Jacques, about the same age, had felt oddly attracted to him: and since the other Taskerson boys--at least six, mostly older and, it would appear, all of a tougher breed, though they were in fact collateral relatives of young Geoffrey Firmin--tended to band together and leave the lad alone, he saw a great deal of him. They wandered together along the shore with a couple of old "cleeks" brought from England and some wretched gutta-percha golf balls, to be driven on their last afternoon gloriously into the sea. "Joffrey" became "The Old Bean." Laruelle mère to whom, however, he was "that beautiful English young poet," liked him too. Taskerson mère had taken a fancy to the French boy: the upshot was Jacques was asked to spend September in England with the Taskersons, where Geoffrey would be staying till the commencement of his school term. Jacques's father, who planned sending him to an English school till he was eighteen, consented. Particularly he admired the erect manly carriage of the Taskersons... And that was how M. Laruelle came to Leasowe.
It was a kind of grown-up, civilized version of Courseulles on the English north-west coast. The Taskersons lived in a comfortable house whose back garden abutted on a beautiful, undulating golf course bounded on the far side by the sea. It looked like the sea; actually it was the estuary, seven miles wide, of a river: white horses westward marked where the real sea began. The Welsh mountains, gaunt and black and cloudy, with occasionally a snow peak to remind Geoff of India, lay across the river. During the week, when they were allowed to play, the course was deserted: yellow ragged sea poppies fluttered in the spiny sea grass. On the shore were the remains of an antediluvian forest with ugly black stumps showing, and farther up an old stubby deserted lighthouse. There was an island in the estuary, with a windmill on it like a curious black flower, which you could ride out to at low tide on a donkey. The smoke of freighters outward bound from Liverpool hung low on the horizon. There was a feeling of space and emptiness. Only at week-ends did a certain disadvantage appear in their site: although the season was drawing to a close and the grey hydropathic hotels along the promenades were emptying, the golf course was packed all day with Liverpool brokers playing foursomes. From Saturday morning till Sunday night a continuous hail of golf balls flying out of bounds bombarded the roof. Then it was a pleasure to go out with Geoffrey into the town, which was still full of laughing pretty girls, and walk through the sunlit windy streets or to look at one of the comical Pierrot shows on the beach. Or best of all they would sail on the marine lake in a borrowed twelve-foot yacht managed expertly by Geoffrey.