Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [96]
--M. Laruelle, possibly because he was walking on the higher part of the banked street, now seemed even taller than he was, and beside him, below, the Consul felt a moment uncomfortably dwarfed, childish. Years before in their boyhood this position had been reversed; then the Consul was the taller. But whereas the Consul had stopped growing when seventeen at five foot eight or nine, M. Laruelle kept on through the years under different skies until now he had grown out of the Consul's reach. Out of reach? Jacques was a boy of whom the Consul could still remember certain things with affection: the way he pronounced "vocabulary" to rhyme with "foolery," or "bible" with "runcible." Runcible spoon. And he'd grown into a man who could shave and put on his socks by himself. But out of his reach, hardly. Up there, across the years, at his height of six foot three or four, it did not seem too outlandish to suggest that his influence still reached him strongly. If not, why the English-looking tweed coat similar to the Consul's own, those expensive, expressive English tennis shoes of the kind you could walk in, the English white trousers of twenty-one inches breadth, the English shirt worn English-fashion open at the neck, the extraordinary scarf that suggested M. Laruelle had once won a half-blue at the Sorbonne or something? There was even, in spite of his slight stoutness, an English, almost an ex-consular sort of litheness about his movements. Why should Jacques be playing tennis at all? Have you forgotten it, Jacques, how I myself taught you, that summer long ago, behind the Taskersons', or at the new public courts in Leasowe? On just such afternoons as this. So brief their friendship and yet, the Consul thought, how enormous, how all-permeating, permeating Jacques's whole life, that influence had been, an influence that showed even in his choice of books, his work--why had Jacques come to Quauhnahuac in the first place? Was it not much as though he, the Consul, from afar, had willed it, for obscure purposes of his own? The man he'd met here eighteen months ago seemed, though hurt in his art and destiny, the most completely unequivocal and sincere Frenchman he'd ever known. Nor was the seriousness of M. Laruelle's face, seen now against the sky between houses, compatible with cynical weakness. Was it not almost as though the Consul had tricked him into dishonour and misery, willed, even, his betrayal of him?
"Geoffrey," M. Laruelle said suddenly, quietly, "has she really come back?"
"It looks like it, doesn't it?" They both paused, to light their pipes, and the Consul noticed Jacques was wearing a ring he had not seen, a scarab, of simple design, cut into a chalcedony: whether Jacques would remove it to play tennis he didn't know, but the hand that wore it was trembling, while the Consul's was now steady.
"But I mean really come back," M. Laruelle continued in French as they went forward up the Calle Tierra del Fuego. "She hasn't merely come down on a visit, or to see you out of curiosity, or on the basis that you'll just be friends, and so on, if you don't mind my asking."
"As a matter of fact I rather do."
"Get this straight, Geoffrey, I'm thinking of Yvonne, not you."
"Get it a little straighter still. You're thinking of yourself."
"But today--I can see how that's--I suppose you were tight at the ball. I didn't go. But if so why aren't you back home thanking God and trying to rest and sober up instead of making everyone wretched by taking them to Tomalín? Yvonne looks tired out."
The words drew faint weary furrows across the Consul's mind constantly filling with harmless deliriums. Nevertheless his French was fluent and rapid:
"How do you mean you suppose I was tight when Vigil told you so on the phone? And weren't you suggesting just now I take Yvonne to Guanajuato with him? Perhaps you imagined if you could insinuate yourself into our company on that proposed trip she would miraculously cease to be tired, even though it's fifty times farther than to Tomalín."
"When I suggested you go it hadn't quite entered my head she'd only arrived this morning."