“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 of 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 Cordoba.”
“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 Seńora 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. Seńora 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 Seńora 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 melancholy 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.