The Honorary Consul Read online

  "I'll go and save her if you like."

  "My dear chap, will you? I daren't. These poets are touchy brutes. And I always get their names mixed up. They arc like this fellow Humphries—they write home—to the Arts Council. I won't forget this, Plarr. Anything I can ever do for you... up there..."

  ***

  The doctor found himself with more work than usual on his hands when he returned to the north. He had no time for Humphries, that old troublemaker, and he was not interested in Charles Fortnum's marriage—whether fortunate or unfortunate. Once, when some remark recalled the Ambassador's words to him, he wondered whether Charley might possibly have married his house-keeper that hawklike woman who had opened the door when he visited the Consulate for the first time. A marriage like that seemed not improbable. Old men, like dissident priests, were frequently known to marry their housekeepers sometimes as a measure of false economy, sometimes from fear of a lonely death. Death to Doctor Plarr who was still in his early thirties, appeared in the guise of a fortuitous accident on the road or an unforeseen cancer but in the mind of an old man it was the inevitable end of a long and incurable sickness. Perhaps Charley Fortnum's alcoholism was a symptom of his fear.

  One afternoon, while the doctor was taking an hour's siesta his bell rang. He opened the door and there was the hawklike woman, bristling yet again in the hope of carrion. He nearly took a chance and addressed her as Señora Fortnum.

  The guess would have proved mistaken. Señor Fortnum, she said, had telephoned to her from the camp. His wife was ill. He wanted Doctor Plarr to drive out to the camp and visit her.

  "Did he say what was wrong?"

  "Señora Fortnum has a pain in the stomach," the woman replied with contempt. The marriage had obviouslv pleased her no more than it had pleased Doctor Humphries.

  Doctor Plarr drove to the camp in the cool of the evening. The small ponds on either side of the highway looked like patches of molten lead in the last lingering light. Fortnum's Pride was standing at the end of a mud road under a grove of avocados, the heavy brown pears the size and shape of cannon balls. On the verandah of the rambling bungalow Charley Fortnum sat before a bottle of whisky, a syphon and, astonishingly, two clean glasses. "I've been waiting for you," he said reproachfully.

  "I couldn't come earlier. What's the trouble?"

  "Clara's been in a lot of pain."

  "I'll go in and see her."

  "Have a whisky first. I looked in at her just now and she was asleep."

  "Thank you then, I will. I'm thirsty. There's a lot of dust on the road."

  "Soda? Say when."

  "Right to the top."

  "I wanted to have a word with you anyway—before you went in. You've heard about my marriage I suppose?"

  "The Ambassador told me."

  "Had he anything to say?"

  "No. Why?"

  "There's been a lot of talk. And Humphries cuts me."

  "That's lucky for you."

  "You see—" Charley Fortnum hesitated. "Well, she is very young," he said. It was not clear whether he was excusing his critics or apologizing for himself.

  Doctor Plarr said, "Lucky again."

  "She's not twenty, and, you know, I won't see sixty again."

  Doctor Plarr wondered if he had been summoned to advise the Consul on a less soluble problem than his wife's stomach-ache. He drank to fill what he thought might be an awkward silence.

  "That's not the trouble," Charley Fortnum said. (Doctor Plarr was surprised by his insight.) "I can manage things well enough so far... and afterward... there's always the bottle, isn't there? An old family friend. The bottle I mean. Helped my father too, the old bastard. I just wanted to explain about her. Otherwise you might be a bit surprised when you see her. She's so very young. And shy too. She's not used to this sort of life. A house like this and servants. And the country The country's awfully quiet after dark."

  "Where does she come from?"

  "Tucumán. Real Indian blood. A long way back of course. I ought to warn you—she doesn't much care for doctors. She's had a bad experience of them."

  "I'll try to win her confidence," Doctor Plarr said.

  "This pain," Charley Fortnum said, "it did occur to me it might be, you know, a child. Or something of the kind."

  "She doesn't take the pill?"

  "You know what these Spanish Catholics are like. Superstition, of course. Like walking under a ladder. Clara doesn't know who Shakespeare is, but she's heard all about the Pope's what-do-you-call-it. Anyway I'd have to get the pills somehow through the Embassy. Can you imagine what they'd say? You can't even buy them under the counter here. Of course I always wore a thing until we were really together."

  "So you bore the sin for her?" Doctor Plarr teased him.

  "Oh well, my conscience has got pretty tough with age. Another little thing won't do it any harm. And if she's happier that way... When you've finished your whisky..."

  He led Doctor Plarr down a corridor hung with Victorian sporting prints: riders falling into a stream, checked at a bullfinch, rebuked by the master. He walked softly on tiptoe. At the end of the corridor he opened a door just a crack and looked in. "I think she's awake," he said. "You'll find me on the verandah, Ted, with the whisky. Don't be long."

  One electric candle was alight below the statuette of a saint, a saint whom Doctor Plarr didn't recognize, and he was reminded for a moment of the small cells that stood around the patio at the house of Señora Sanchez, each with a votive candle. "Good evening," he said to the head on the pillow. The face was so covered in dark hair that only the eyes were visible; they peered back at him, like a cat's from a shrubbery.

  "I don't want to be examined," the girl told him. "I won't be examined."

  "I don't want to examine you. I want to hear about your stomach-ache, that's all."

  "It's better now."

  "Good. Then I won't stay long. May I turn up the light?"

  "If you have to," she said and brushed the hair away from her face. Below the hairline Doctor Plarr saw a small gray birthmark in the spot where a Hindu girl...

  He said, "Whereabouts do you feel the pain? Show me."

  She turned the sheet down and indicated a place on her naked body. He put his hand out to touch her, but she moved her body away from him. He said, "Don't be afraid. I'm not going to examine you in Doctor Benevento's way," and he heard her catch her breath. Nonetheless she allowed him to press his fingers on her stomach.

  "There?"

  "Yes."

  "Nothing to worry about," he said. "A little inflammation of the intestine, that's all."

  "Intestine?" He could see the word was strange to her and frightening.

  "I'll leave some bismuth powder for you with your husband. Take it in water. If you mix some sugar with it, it doesn't taste too bad. I wouldn't drink whisky if I were you. You are more used to orange juice, aren't you?"

  She looked at him with a startled expression and whispered, "What's your name?"

  "Plarr," he said, and added, "Eduardo Plarr." He doubted whether she knew the surname of any man apart from Charley Fortnum.

  "Eduardo," she repeated, and this time took a bolder look at him. She asked, "I don't know you, do I?"

  "No."

  "But you know Doctor Benevento?"

  "I've met him once or twice." He stood up. "I don't suppose those Thursday visits were very agreeable." He added, before she could speak, "You aren't ill. You don't have to stay in bed."

  "Charley" (she pronounced the name as "Charlee" with an accent on the last syllable) "said I must stay in bed until the doctor came."

  "Well, the doctor's come, hasn't he? So there's no longer any need..."

  When he looked back from the door he saw she was watching him. She had forgotten to draw up the sheet. He said, "I never asked you your name."

  "Clara."

  He said. "Teresa was the only girl I ever knew there."

  Returning down the passage he thought of the statuette of Saint Teresa o
f Avila which had presided over his own exercises and the more literary ones of Doctor Saavedra. Presumably it was the friend of Saint Francis who now looked down on the bed of Charley Fortnum. He remembered the way he had seen the girl first as she straightened the sheets in her cell, bent like a Negress directly from the waist. He was accustomed by now to too many women's bodies. When he first became the lover of one of his patients it was not her body which excited him but a slight stammer and a scent he didn't recognize. There was nothing distinctive about Clara's body, except for her unfashionable thinness, the smallness of her breasts, the immature thighs, the almost imperceptible mount of Venus. She might be nearly twenty, but she didn't look more than sixteen—Mother Sanchez recruited them early.

  He stopped before the print of a man in a scarlet coat on a runaway horse which had overridden the hounds; the master, purple in the face, was shaking a fist at the culprit, and beyond the hounds lay a vista of fields and hedgerows and a small stream lined by what he took to be willows, an unfamiliar foreign countryside. He thought with a sense of surprise: I have never seen a little stream like that. In this continent even the smallest tributaries of the great rivers were wider than the Thames in his father's picture book. He tried the word "stream." again on his tongue: a stream must have a strange poetic charm. You couldn't call a stream the shallow inlet where he sometimes went to fish and where you couldn't bathe for fear of sting rays. A stream had to be peaceful, gently running, shaded by willows, without danger. This land, he thought, is really too vast for human beings.

  Charley Fortnum was waiting for him with the glasses refilled. He asked with uneasy jocularity, "Well, what's the verdict?"

  "Nothing. A little inflammation. There's no reason for her to lie in bed. I'll give you something she can take in water. Before meals. I wouldn't let her drink whisky."

  "I didn't want to run any risks, Ted. I don't know much about women. Their insides and all that. My first wife was never ill. She was a Christian Scientist."

  "Before you bring me all the way out here another time, do have a word first on the telephone. I'm pretty busy at this time of year."

  "I suppose you think me foolish, but she needs an awful lot of protection."

  Plarr said, "I should have thought—in that sort of life—she would have learned to look after herself."

  "What do you mean?"

  "She worked with Mother Sanchez, didn't she?"

  Charley Fortnum clenched a fist. A bubble of whisky hung on the corner of his lip. Doctor Plarr thought that he could almost see the blood pressure rise. "What do you know about her?"

  "I never went with her if that's what you are afraid of."

  "I thought you might be one of those bastards..."

  "Surely you were one of those yourself. I seem to remember your telling me about a girl called María from Córdoba."

  "That was different. That was physical. Do you know I never touched Clara for months? Not until I was sure she loved me a little. We used to talk, that's all. I went to her room, of course, because otherwise she would have been in trouble with Señora Sanchez. Ted, you won't believe me, but I've never talked to anyone about so many things as I have to that girl. She's interested in everything I tell her. Fortnum's Pride. The maté crop. The movies. She knows a lot about the movies. I was never much interested in them myself, but she always knows the latest dope about a woman called Elizabeth Taylor. Have you heard of her—and a fellow called Burton? I always thought Burton was a kind of beer. We even talked about Evelyn—that was my first wife. I can tell you I was pretty lonely before I met Clara. You'll think it nonsense, but I loved her the first moment I saw her. Somehow from the first I didn't want to do anything, not till she wanted it too. She couldn't understand that. She thought there was something wrong with me. But it was real love, not brothel love I wanted. I don't suppose you can understand that either."

  "I'm not quite sure what the word love means. My mother loves 'dulce de leche'. So she tells me."

  "Has no woman ever loved you, Ted?" Fortnum inquired. A kind of paternal anxiety in his voice irritated Doctor Plarr.

  "Two or three have told me so, but they had no difficulty in finding someone else after I said goodbye. Only my mother's love of sweet cakes isn't likely to change She will love them in sickness and in health till death do them part. Perhaps that's the real true love."

  "You're too young to be a cynic."

  "I'm not a cynic. I'm curious, that's all. I like to know the meaning which people put on the words they use. So much is a question of semantics. That's why in medicine we often prefer to use a dead language. There's no room for misunderstanding with a dead language. How did you get the girl away from Mother Sanchez?"

  "I paid."

  "And she was happy to leave?"

  "She was a bit bewildered at first and frightened too. Señora Sanchez was angry. She didn't like losing her. She told her she wouldn't have her back when I got tired of her. As if that would ever happen."

  "Life's a long time."

  "Mine isn't. Be frank, Ted, you wouldn't give me ten more years would you? Even though I've knocked down a bit on the drink since I knew Clara."

  "What will happen to her afterward?"

  "This isn't a bad little property. She could sell it and go to Buenos Aires. You can get fifteen percent interest now without risk. Even eighteen if you take a chance. And you know I can import a car every two years... Perhaps five more cars to sell before I kick the bucket. I calculate that would mean another five hundred pounds a year."

  "She could eat sweet cakes with my mother at the Richmond."

  "No joking, would your mother consent to meet Clara one day?"

  "Why not?"

  "You don't know what a difference Clara's made to me."

  "You must have made quite a difference to her too," Doctor Plarr said.

  "When you get to my age you accumulate a lot of regrets. It's not a bad thing to feel you've made at least one person a little happier."

  It was the kind of simple, sentimental and self-confident statement which Doctor Plarr found embarrassing. No reply was possible. It was a statement which it would be rude to question and impossible to confirm. He made his excuses and drove Home.

  All down the dark country road he thought of the young woman in the great Victorian bed which had belonged, with the sporting prints, to the Honorary Consul's father. She was like a bird which had been bought in the market in a makeshift cage and transferred to one at home more roomy and luxurious, equipped with perches and feeding bowls and a swing to play on.

  He was surprised by the amount of thought he was giving the girl, who was only a young prostitute he had noticed once in the establishment of Señora Sanchez because of her odd birthmark. Had Charley really married her? Perhaps Doctor Humphries had misled the Ambassador when he spoke of a marriage. Probably Charley Fortnum had taken a new housekeeper—that was all. If that were the case he would be able to reassure the Ambassador. A wife provided worse material for a scandal than a mistress.

  But his thoughts were like the deliberately banal words of a clandestine letter in which the important phrases have been added between the lines in secret ink to be developed in privacy. Those hidden phrases described a girl in a cell leaning down to make her bed, a girl who returned to her table and picked up her glass of orange juice, as though she had been momentarily interrupted by a tradesman at the door, a thin body stretched out on Charley Fortnum's double bed, with immature breasts which had never suckled a child. All three of Doctor Plarr's mistresses had been married women, mature women proud of their lush figures which smelt of expensive bath oils. She must have been a good whore, he thought, to have been taken out by two men in succession with a figure like hers, but that was no reason why he should think of her all the way home. He tried to change the direction of his thoughts. There were two hopeless cases of malnutrition in the 'barrio' of the poor, there was a police officer he was attending who would soon be dead of throat cancer, there was Saavedra's mela
ncholy and Doctor Humphries' dripping shower, and yet try as he would his mind returned continually to that small hill of Venus—mount was a misnomer.

  He wondered how many men she had known. Doctor Plarr's last mistress, who was married to a banker called Lopez, had told him with some pride of his four predecessors—perhaps she was trying to arouse a sense of competition. (One of her lovers, he knew from another source, had been her chauffeur.) The fragile body on Charley Fortnum's bed must have known hundreds. Her stomach was like the site of an old country battlefield where pale grass grew which had abolished the scars of war, and a small stream flowed peacefully between the willows: he was back in the passage, outside the bedroom, staring at the sporting prints and resisting the desire to return.

  He braked sharply as he approached the road which led to Bergman's orange-canning factory, and for a moment he contemplated reversing the car and driving back to the camp. Instead he lit a cigarette. I will not be the victim of an obsession, he thought. The attraction of a whorehouse is the attraction I sometimes find in trivial shopping—I may see a tie which momentarily attracts me, I wear it once or twice, then I leave it in the drawer and it becomes overlaid with newer ties. Why didn't I try her out when I had the chance? If I had bought her that night at Señora Sanchez' she would be lying safely forgotten at the bottom of the drawer. Is it possible, he wondered, if a man is too rational to fall in love, that he may be reserved for a worse fate, to fall into an obsession? He drove angrily in the direction of the city where the reflection of the light lay flat along the horizon and the Three Marys hung on their broken chain in the sky overhead.

  ***

  Some weeks later Doctor Plarr woke early. It was a Saturday and he had a few hours free. He decided to spend them in the open air with a book while the morning was still fresh; he preferred somewhere out of sight of his secretary who read only what she called serious books—those of Doctor Saavedra among them.