Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry Page B

should: even though she hated drinking in the morning she undoubtedly should: it was what she had made up her mind to do if necessary, not to have one drink alone but a great many drinks with the Consul. But instead she could feel the smile leaving her face that was struggling to keep back the tears she had forbidden herself on any account, thinking and knowing Geoffrey knew she was thinking: ‘I was prepared for this, I was prepared for it.’ ‘You have one and I’ll cheer,’ she found herself saying. (As a matter of fact she had been prepared for almost anything. After all, what could one expect? She had told herself all the way down on the ship, a ship because she would have time on board to persuade herselfher journey was neither thoughtless nor precipitate, and on the plane when she knew it was both, that she should have warned him, that it was abominably unfair to take him by surprise.) ‘Geoffrey,’ she went on, wondering if she seemed pathetic sitting there, all her carefully thought-out speeches, her plans and tact so obviously vanishing in the gloom, or merely repellent –she felt slightly repellent — because she wouldn’t have a drink. ‘What have you done? I wrote you and wrote you. I wrote till my heart broke. What have you done with your –’
    â€˜â€“life,’ came from beyond the glass partition. ‘What a life! Christ, it’s a shame! Where I come from they don’t run. We’re going through busting this way –’
    â€˜â€“ No. I thought of course you’d returned to England, when you didn’t answer. What have you done? Oh Geoff – have you resigned from the service?’
    â€˜â€“ went down to Fort Sale. Took your shoeshot. And took your Brownings.– Jump, jump, jump, jump, jump – see, get it –’
    â€˜I ran into Louis in Santa Barbara. He said you were still here.’
    â€˜â€“ and like hell you can, you can’t do it, and that’s what you do in Alabama!’
    â€˜Well, actually I’ve only been away once.’ The Consul took a long shuddering drink, then sat down again beside her. ‘To Oaxaca. – Remember Oaxaca?’
    â€˜â€“Oaxaca?–’
    â€˜ – Oaxaca. –’
    â€“ The word was like a breaking heart, a sudden peal of stifled bells in a gale, the last syllables of one dying of thirst in the desert. Did she remember Oaxaca! The roses and the great tree, was that, the dust and the buses to Etla and Nochitlán? and: ‘
damas acompañadas de un caballero, gratis!
’ Or at night their cries of love, rising into the ancient fragrant Mayan air, heard only by ghosts? In Oaxaca they had found each other once. She was watching the Consul who seemed less on the defensive than in process while straightening out the leaflets on the bar of changing mentally from the part played for Fernando to the part he would play for her, watching him almost with amazement: ‘Surely this cannot be us,’ she cried in her heartsuddenly. ‘This cannot be us – dying, to sigh at last, with a kind of weary peace: Oaxaca —
    â€”‘The strange thing about this little corpse, Yvonne,’ the Consul was saying, ‘is that it must be accompanied by a person holding its hand: no, sorry. Apparently not its hand, just a first-class ticket.’ He held up, smiling, his own right hand which shook as with a movement of wiping chalk from an imaginary blackboard. ‘It’s really the shakes that make this kind of life insupportable. But they will stop: I was only drinking enough so they would. Just the necessary, the therapeutic drink.’ Yvonne looked back at him.’ —but the shakes are the worst of course,’ he was going on. ‘You get to like the other after a while, and I’m really doing very well, I’m much better than I was six months ago, very much better than I was say, in Oaxaca’ —