Stewart uncurled Whytehead's fingers to find the wound. It was an ugly, complex thing of scars both old and fresh. Not so much a cut as a hole – something, or someone, had been digging into Whytehead's hand, then waiting, then digging again. It had been doing so for some time and Stewart feared a parasite, some strangely fixated fungus whose patience was about to be rewarded – being, after months of hurt and healing, nearly through to the other side.
Ί seem to have hit it on a nail,' said Whytehead, when Stewart offered an enquiring look. And in the interests of precision, he picked up the thing from a side table and lifted it for the doctor to see.
'Iron,' he said.
'Ah,' said Stewart.
They both looked at the tip as Whytehead turned the nail between finger and thumb, scoring an imaginary curve on the air of the room.
Well, iron was the man's business after all. Scratching it out of the earth, ounce by painful ounce; smelting, pouring, casting. Sacrificing half a ton of shot because the Minister of War wanted fancy railings around his house, which might have cost the country less if they had been made of solid gold. You can't sink a Brazilian monitor with golden shot. As Whytehead might say at one of his dull dinners, where all the dull men sat, pondering the burdensome fact that they were alive.
Stewart eyed the nail. Perhaps he wanted to say that the colour at the tip was rust, and not blood; or that these two things were the same colour, after a time. Stewart knew better than to touch the thing. Let the man have his comfort, his suck, his gouger. His own little crucifixion.
'Precious stuff,' he said.
The Brazilians were on the river. They were far to the south, but they were there – around a bend somewhere, or the bend after that. Nothing came in and nothing went out. No one could leave Asuncion.
Whytehead put the nail down. Stewart sat in the matching horsehair wing chair. The clock (another clock!) ticked Britishly on. They were both so terribly tired.
It was a pleasant room. The curtains on the windows were moss-green, with little tassels all down the side. There was a framed engraving on the wall of The Queen at Balmoral, seated on her horse Fairy. He would like to marry Whytehead, Stewart thought. There would be enormous comfort in it. No need for speech. Everything ordered and on time. A little woman who works a hole in her hand, when you are away.
And, 'Would you like to see the garden?' said Whytehead.
'That would be lovely,' said Stewart.
They walked out through French windows on to a granite terrace. A row of stone pots held the skeletons of bushes that had been cut into the shape of singing birds. Ordinary birds: sparrows or finches or wrens.
'The ants got to them,' said Whytehead and he stood for a while, looking at the wreck.
Stewart's aunt was of the opinion that all gardeners were insane people masquerading as gardeners. She said the same of men who liked to fish, and she humoured such types in a deliberate, loud voice, so,
'Even in the pot?' Stewart enquired, unflinching.
'Oh they get everywhere,' said Whytehead, and he led the way across the patchy lawn, and on through a gap in the hedge.
The sky was low and kind as they made their way through Whytehead's working garden towards a jumble of sheds. They walked so beautifully together; Stewart could feel the way his own thighs moved as they swung their sticks and paced the land. Beans, manioc, maize: Whytehead pointed them out, with notes of botanical interest, also the decorative rose bushes, carnations and dahlias that were planted between the vegetable rows. They paused at his pigsty. They patted the impossible Jersey cow kept for her milk (made thick as butter, it must be, by this heat).
Stewart was walking the country estate of the Chief State Engineer – Keld Whytehead, thirty-nine years old, half-crucified: whose father was nothing you could mention, whose grandfather had been, at a guess, an Orkney fisherman, which is to say a peasant with three words of English, being 'pence' and 'bailiff and 'Sir'.
'My goodness,' said Stewart. 'Yours?' A tobacco field stretched ahead of them, all alive with the wind and with the shifting backs of peons labouring among the leaves.
Ά good year for it,' said Whytehead. He could not use a word so vulgar as 'mine'. Oh bliss.
They would not talk of the war – like tradesmen, like traitors – they would talk of the weather, like gentlemen, and they would do their jobs, which were to kill and to save on a large scale; to build cannon and hospitals and put their shoulders to the wheel, which was the wheel of History itself.
'And that I grew from a cutting, sent over by Mme Lynch.'
Eliza spent her time these days crusading for the troops. She held grand soirées, at which she stood, taking the ladies' jewellery personally, at the door. 'Gold into guns,' she said, 'gold into guns', and the women went into the ball as though on their way to bed, reaching in a somnolent way to undo the clasps at their wrists and ears and necks.
And still she had time to grow a few lavender bushes, it seemed. Stewart had heard of this slippings and samplers conversation she held with Whytehead across town; a traffic of chutneys and jams, umbrellas for the sun and galoshes for the rain; small comforts such as sisters might send, which were as intimate a sign as might be seen of a nation's grateful solicitation. Eliza Lynch was Paraguay. She had produced, for the honour of the country, three living sons. She was also, since Lopez had deeded his lands to her, one of the richest women alive. And she gave Whytehead dried seedpods she had cut with her own hands and laid in her own wicker basket. Which made it all worthwhile.
'And how is II Mariscal?'
'In excellent health,' said his doctor. 'Excellent.'
'Good. Good. His catarrh?'
'Greatly improved.'
'Thank God.'
They stared at Eliza's lavender bush with gathering regret. The fact was that it was hard for a gentleman (or what passed for a gentleman in Paraguay) to apply himself to the wheel of History when the driver of the Juggernaut was a tyrant like Lopez. Not to mention the slaves toiling at the ropes. Whytehead's miners worked in chains and it disturbed him just to think about it. To use men so degraded, you needed finer blood – blood that flowed somewhere between blue and pitch-black; blood that was not particularly stirred by the sight of green velvet curtains, or even by a framed portrait of The Queen at Balmoral, seated on her horse Fairy.
At the side of the house, they leaned on a very British fence to admire Whytehead's best horse; a big-hearted, gorgeous Colorado who galloped at the sight of them, then stood, trembling, and would not approach.
'The glory of his nostrils is terrible,' said Whytehead and, when Stewart made no attempt to call the verse, he said, 'The horse. Job: 39.'