The Honorary Consul (19 page)

       "I'm sure of this, Plarr, I've seen Wilbur twice and the Americans won't budge. If they can discourage kidnapping by letting an Honorary British Consul, in an obscure province, take the rap, they'll be very satisfied. Wilbur says Fortnum is an alcoholic—he brought two bottles of whisky to their picnic at the ruins and the Ambassador only drinks Coca-Cola. I looked up our file on him, but there wasn't anything very definite about alcoholism, though one or two of his reports... well, they did sort of ramble. There was a letter too from that man—Humphries?—saying he had flown the Union Jack upside down. But you don't need to be an alcoholic to do that."

       "All the same, Sir Henry, if the kidnappers could be persuaded to delay only a little..."

       Sir Henry Belfrage knew the time for his siesta was irrevocably lost—the new Agatha Christie would have to wait. He was a kind man and a conscientious one, and he was modest into the bargain. He told himself that in Doctor Plarr'o situation he would have been unlikely to fly in the November heat to Buenos Aires to help the husband of a patient. He said, "There is something you might try to do. I very much doubt if you would be successful, but all the same..."

       He hesitated. With a pen in his hand he was a master of compression: his reports were admirably short and lucid, and a telegram never presented him with the least difficulty. He was at home in his Embassy as he had been at home in his nursery. The chandeliers glittered like the glass fruit on a Christmas tree. In the nursery he could remember building neatly and quickly with his colored bricks. "Master Henry is a clever boy," his nurse always said, but sometimes when he was let out on the vast green spaces of Kensington Gardens he strayed wildly. There were moments with strangers—just as there still were at his annual cocktail party—when he nearly panicked.

       "Yes, Sir Henry?"

       "I'm so sorry, my dear chap. My mind was wandering. I've got a terrible head this morning. That wine from Mendoza... Cooperatives! What can a Cooperative know about wine?"

       "You were saying..."

       "Yes, yes." He put his hand into his breast pocket and touched his ballpoint pen. It was like a talisman. He said, "A delay would be only useful if we could get people sufficiently interested... I've been doing all I       can, but nobody at home knows Fortnum. Nobody cares about an Honorary Consul. He doesn't belong to the Service. And to tell you the truth I advised getting rid of him six months ago. 'That' letter will certainly be on the files. So everyone at home will be relieved when the dateline is passed and there are no more minutes to write—and he's released as I believe."

       "And if he's killed?"

       "I'm afraid the P. O. will take the credit for that too. It will be a sign of firmness; it will show they won't treat with blackmailers. You know the kind of words they'll use in the Commons. Law and order. No Danegeld. They'll quote Kipling. Even the Opposition will applaud."

       "It's not only Charles Fortnum. There's his wife... she's having a baby. Suppose the press took it up..."

       "Yes. I see what you mean. The woman who waits, etcetera. But from what that man Humphries wrote I don't think the kind of wife Fortnum has married will arouse the right sort of sentiment in the English press. Not family reading. 'The Sun' might use the real story of course or the 'News of the World', but it would hardly have the effect we want."

       "What do you suggest, Sir Henry?"

       "You must never, never quote me on this, Plarr. The F. O. would put me out to grass if they knew I had suggested anything of the kind. And I don't suppose for a moment my idea would do any good. Mason is not the right material."

       "Mason?"

       "I'm sorry. I meant Fortnum."

       "You haven't suggested anything yet, Sir Henry."

       "Well, what I was getting at... There's nothing a civil servant hates more than a yelp in respectable papers. Sometimes the only way to get action is the right publicity. If you could organize some reaction in your city... Even a telegraphed appeal from the English Club to 'The Times'. Tribute to his..." He touched his pen again as though he might draw from it the correct official jargon. ".... his untiring pursuit of British interests."

       "But there is no English Club, sir. I don't think there are any other English in the city except Humphries and me."

       Sir Henry Belfrage took a quick look at his fingernails (he had mislaid his nail brush). He said something so rapidly that Doctor Plarr couldn't catch a word.

       "I'm sorry. I didn't hear..."

       "My dear chap, I don't have to spell it out to 'you'. Form an English Club immediately and telegraph your tribute to 'The Times' and 'Telegraph'."

       "Do you think it would do any good?"

       "No, I don't, but there's no harm in trying. There's always some Opposition M. P. who will take it up whatever his leaders say. At least it might give the Parliamentary Secretary 'un mauvais quart d'heure'. And then there are the American papers. It's just possible they might copy. 'The New York Times' can be quite virulent. 'Fighting Latin-American independence to the last Englishman.' You know the kind of line the antiwar chaps might take. It's rather a forlorn hope, of course. If he'd been a business tycoon everybody would be a great deal more interested. The trouble is, Plarr, Fortnum is such pitiably small beer."

       There was no plane by which he could return north before the evening, and Doctor Plarr could think of no excuse with which to ease his conscience if he failed to meet his mother. He knew very well what would please her most, and he made a rendezvous by telephone for tea at the Richmond in the Calle Florida—she had no liking for inescapable family conversations in her apartment which she kept almost as airless as the dome over the wax flowers she had bought at an antique shop near Harrods. He always had the impression in her flat that there were secrets from him lying about everywhere, on shelves and on tables, even pushed away under the sofa, secrets she didn't want him to see—perhaps only tiny extravagances on which she had spent the money he sent her. Cream cakes were food, but a china parrot was an extravagance.

       He had to move at a snail's pace through the crowd that filled the narrow 'calle' every afternoon when it was closed to traffic. He was not displeased, for every minute he lost before meeting his mother was pure gain.

       He saw her at the far end of the crowded tea room, sitting in unrelieved black before a plate of sweet cakes. She said, "You are ten minutes late, Eduardo." From his early childhood they had always spoken Spanish together. Only with his father had he spoken English, and his father was a man of few words.

       "I am sorry, mother. You should have begun." When he bent to kiss her cheek he could smell the hot chocolate in her cup like a sweet breath from a tomb.

       "Call the waiter, dear, if there is not a cake here that pleases you."

       "I don't really want to eat anything, mother. I'll just have a cup of coffee."

       She had heavy pouches below her eyes, but they were not, Doctor Plarr knew, the pouches of grief, but of constipation. He had an impression that if they were squeezed they would squirt cream like an éclair. It is terrible what time can do to a beautiful woman. A man's looks often improve with age, seldom a woman's. He thought: a man should never love a woman less than twenty years younger than himself. In that way he can die before the vision fades. Had Fortnum insured himself against disillusion when he married Clara, who was more than forty years younger than himself? Doctor Plarr thought, I'm not so wise, I shall outlive her attraction by many years.

       "Why the mourning, mother?" he asked. "I have never seen you in black before."

       "I am mourning for your father," Señora Plarr said and wiped the chocolate off her fingers with a paper napkin.

       "Have you had news then?"

       "No, but Father Galvão has been speaking to me very seriously. He says that for the sake of my health I must give up vain hopes. Do you know what day it is, Eduardo?"

       He searched his mind without success—he was even uncertain of the day of the month. "The fourteenth?" he asked.

       "It is the day we said goodbye to your father in the port of Asunción."

       He wondered whether his father, if he were to walk into the tea room now, could possibly recognize the stout and pouchy woman who had a smear of cream at the corner of the mouth. In our memories people we no longer see age gracefully. Señora Plarr said, "Father Galvão held a Mass this morning for the repose of his soul." She scrutinized the plate of cakes and picked a particular éclair, not noticeably different from the others. Yet when he searched his memory he could still just remember a lovely woman who lay and wept in her cabin. Tears at the age she had been then enhanced the brilliance of her eyes. There were no pouches to mar them.

       He said, "I still have hope, mother. You know the kidnappers have named him on the list of prisoners they want released?"

       "What kidnappers?" He had forgotten she never read the papers.

       "Oh well," he said, "it's too long a story to tell you now." He added politely, "What a very nice black dress."

       "I am glad you like it. I had it made specially for the Mass this morning. The material was quite inexpensive, and I had it run up by a little woman... You must not think I am extravagant."

       "No, of course not, mother."

       "If only your father had been less obstinate... What was the use of staying on the estancia to be murdered? He could have sold it for a good price, and we could have been happy here together."

       "He was an idealist," Doctor Plarr said.

       "Ideals are all very well, but it was very wrong of him and very selfish of him not to put his family first."

       He wondered what kind of bitter and reproachful prayers she had muttered that morning at Father Galvão's Mass. Father Galvão was a Portuguese Jesuit who for some reason had been transferred from Rio de Janeiro. He was very popular with women—perhaps they were more ready to confide in him because he had come from a long way off.

       All around him in the Richmond he heard the chatter of women's voices. He could hardly distinguish a single phrase. He might have been in an aviary, listening to a babel of birds from many different regions. There were those who twittered in English, others in German, he even heard a French phrase which his mother would appreciate, "'George est très coupable'." He looked at her as she tipped her mouth toward the chocolate. Had she ever felt any love for his father or himself, or had she just played the comedy of love like Clara? He had grown up, during the years he spent alone with his mother in Buenos Aires, to despise comedy. There were no sentimental relics in his apartment—not even a photograph. It was as bare and truthful—almost—as a police station cell. Even during his affairs with women he had always tried to avoid that phrase of the theater, "I love you." He had been accused often enough of cruelty, though he preferred to think of himself as a painstaking and accurate diagnostician. If for once he had been aware of a sickness he could describe in no other terms, he would have unhesitatingly used the phrase "I love," but he had always been able to attribute the emotion he felt to a quite different malady—to loneliness, pride, physical desire, or even a simple sense of curiosity.

       Señora Plarr said, "He never loved either of us. He was a man who never knew what love meant."

       He wanted to ask her seriously, "Do we?" but he knew she would take it as a reproach, and he had no desire to reproach her. With more justice he could reproach himself for equal ignorance. Perhaps, he thought, she is in the right and I resemble my father. He said, "I do not remember him at all clearly, except that, when he said goodbye, I noticed how gray his hair had become. I remember too how he would go round locking all the doors at night. The noise always woke me up. I do not even know how old he would be if he were alive now."

       "He would have been seventy-one today."

       "Today? Then was it on his birthday...?"

       "He told me the best present he could receive from me was to watch the two of us go off down the river. It was very cruel of him to say that."

       "But, mother, I don't think he could have meant it cruelly."

       "He had not even told me beforehand. I had no time to pack properly. I forgot some of my jewels. There was a little watch with diamonds which I used to wear with a black dress. You remember the black dress? But of course you would not remember. You were always such an unobservant boy. He said he was afraid I would tell my friends and they would gossip and the police would stop us. I had prepared a very nice birthday dinner for him, with a cheese savory—he always liked savories better than a dessert. That is what it is like to marry a foreigner. Our tastes were never the same. This morning I prayed very hard he might not be suffering too much."

       "I thought you believed he was dead."

       "Suffering in purgatory of course I mean. Father Galvão says that the worst pain in purgatory is when people see the consequence of their actions and the suffering they have caused to those they love." She picked out another éclair.

       "But you said he loved neither of us."

       "Oh, I suppose he did feel a certain affection. And duty. He was very English. He preferred the company of other men. I have no doubt he went to the Club after the boat left."

       "What club?" For years they had not spoken so much of his father.

       "It was not a safe club for him to belong to. It was called the Constitutional, but the police closed it. Afterward the members met in secret—once even at our 'estancia'. He would not listen to me when I protested. I said, 'You have a wife and child.' He said, 'Every member of the club has a wife and child.' I said, 'In that case they should have more important things to talk about than politics.' Oh well," she added with a little sigh, "those are old quarrels. Of course I have forgiven him. Tell me a little about yourself, dear," and her eyes glazed over with lack of interest.