He had the classical difficulty with his key, but succeeded on his third attempt. Swaying on the doorstep he made a speech from under the Corinthian columns to Doctor Plarr who waited impatiently on the pavement for him to finish.
“It’s been a very agreeable evening, Ted, even if the goulash was damned awful. Good to speak occasionally the native tongue-gets rusty from unuse-the tongue that Shakespeare spoke. You mustn’t think I’m always as happy as this, but it’s the measure that counts. Moments of melancholy too when I’m glad of a friend’s company. And remember any time you need a Consul, Charley Fortnum’s only too happy to be of service. To any Englishman. Or Scotsman or Welshman for that matter. We all have something in common. All belong to the once United bloody Kingdom. Nationality’s thicker than water, though that’s a nasty term, when you think of it, thicker. Reminds you of things better forgotten and forgiven. Did they give you syrup of figs as a boy? Just walk straight up. Middle door on the first floor, but you can’t miss the big brass plate. Wants so much polishing you wouldn’t believe the hours of labour a brass plate needs. Grooming Fortnum’s Pride is nothing to it.” He slipped back into the dark hall behind, disappearing from sight.
Doctor Plarr drove home to the new yellow block and the noise of gravel grating up the pipes and the whine of the rusty cranes. It seemed to him, as he lay in bed and tried to sleep, that in the years to come he was unlikely to find much in common with the Honorary Consul.
Though Doctor Plarr was in no hurry to resume his acquaintance with Charles Fortnum, a month or two after their first encounter he received certain documents which had to be witnessed by a British Consul.
His first attempt to see the Consul was not successful. He arrived at the Consulate about eleven in the morning. The Union Jack fluttered from the dubious pole in the hot dry wind from the Chaco. He wondered why it was flying at all, until he remembered that the day was the anniversary of the armistice of one world war before the last. He rang the bell and soon he felt sure that an eye was watching him through a spy hole in the door. He stood well back in the sunlight to be inspected, and immediately a small dark woman with a big nose snatched the door open. She stared at him with the intense preoccupied gaze of a bird of prey which was accustomed to watch a point from far off for indications of carrion; perhaps she was surprised to find the carrion so close and still alive. No, she said, the Consul was not in. No, she was not expecting him. Tomorrow?… Perhaps. She couldn’t be sure about that. It hardly seemed to Doctor Plarr the proper way to run a Consulate.
Doctor Plarr took an hour’s siesta after lunch and then he returned to the Consulate on his way to some bedridden patients in the barrio popular-if you could call what they lay on beds. He was agreeably surprised when the door was opened by Charles Fortnum himself. The Consul had spoken at their first meeting of having moments of melancholy. Perhaps he was suffering from such a moment now. He looked at the doctor with a frown which was defensive and puzzled as though an unpleasant memory stirred somewhere in his unconscious. “Yes?”
“I’m Doctor Plarr.”
“Plarr?”
“We met one night with Humphries.”
“Oh yes, did we? Of course. Come in.” Three doors opened off a dark passage. From behind one of them there seeped the smell of unwashed dishes. Perhaps another indicated a bedroom. The third stood open and Fortnum led him in. A desk, two chairs, a filing cabinet, a safe, a coloured reproduction of Annigoni’s portrait of the Queen with a crack in the glass-that was about all. And the desk was quite bare except for a stand-up calendar which advertised an Argentinian tea.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” Doctor Plarr said. “I looked in this morning…”
“I can’t always be here. I have no assistant. There are a lot of official duties. This morning… yes, I was with the Governor. What can I do for you?”
“I’ve brought some documents I want witnessed.”
“Show them to me.”
Fortnum sat heavily down and began to open a number of drawers. From one he pulled a blotting pad, from another paper and envelopes, from a third a seal, a ballpoint pen. He began to arrange them on the desk as though they were chessmen. He reversed the position of the seal and the pen-perhaps inadvertently he had put the queen on the wrong side of the king. He read the documents with apparent care, but his eyes betrayed him-the words obviously meant nothing to him-then he waited for Doctor Plarr to sign. Afterward he stamped the papers and added his own signature, Charles Q. Fortnum. “A thousand pesos,” he said. “Don’t ask about the Q. I keep it dark.” He offered no receipt, but Doctor Plarr paid without question.
The Consul said, “I’ve got a splitting headache. You know how it is-the heat, the humidity. This is a damnable climate. God knows why my father chose to live in it and die in it. Why didn’t he settle in the south? Anywhere but here.”
“If you feel that way, why don’t you sell up and go?”
“Too late,” the Consul said, “I’m sixty-one next year. What’s the good of doing anything at sixty-one? Have you any aspirin in that case of yours, Plarr? “Yes. Have you some water?”
“Just give it me as it is. I eat the things. They work quicker that way.” He chewed up the aspirin and asked for another.
“Don’t you find the taste disagreeable?”
“You get accustomed. I don’t like the taste of water here either if it comes to that. My God, I do feel like hell today.”
“Perhaps I ought to take your blood pressure.”
“Why? Do you think there’s something wrong?”
“No, but a check is always good at your age.”
“It’s not my blood pressure that’s wrong. It’s life.”
“Overworked?”
“I wouldn’t exactly say that. But there’s a new Ambassador-he bothers me.”
“What about?”
“He wants a report on the maté industry in this province. Why? Nobody drinks maté in the old country. Never heard of it probably, but I’ll have to work for a week, driving around on bad roads, and then those fellows at the Embassy wonder why I have to import a new car every two years. It’s my right to have one. My diplomatic right. I pay for it myself and if I choose to sell it again it’s my concern not the Ambassador’s. Fortnum’s Pride is more reliable on these roads. I charge nothing for her, and yet I’m wearing her out in their service. What a lot of mean bastards they are, Plarr, at the Embassy. They even question the rent I pay for this office.”
Doctor Plarr unpacked his briefcase.
“What’s all that nonsense?”
“I thought we agreed to take your blood pressure.”
“Then we’d better go into the bedroom,” the Consul said. “It wouldn’t look good if my maid came in. The news would be all over the city in no time that I was a dying man. And then the bills would pour in.”
The bedroom was almost as bare as the bureau. The bed had been disturbed during the siesta hour, and a pillow lay on the floor beside an empty glass. A photograph of a man with a heavy moustache in riding kit hung above the bed like a substitute for the Queen. The Consul sat on the rumpled coverlet and bared his arm. Doctor Plarr began to inflate the rubber band.
“Do you really think there’s something wrong about these headaches?”
Doctor Plarr watched the dial. He said, “I think there’s something wrong in drinking so much at your age.” He let the air run out.
“Headaches run in the family. My father had terrible headaches. He died suddenly. A stroke. That’s him up there. He was a great horseman. He tried to make me one too, but I couldn’t bear the stupid brutes.”
“I thought you told me you had a horse. Fortnum’s Pride, wasn’t it?”
“Oh, that’s not a horse, that’s my Land Rover. You’ll never catch me on a horse’s back. Tell me the worst, Plarr.”