The great slaughter had begun, and it was years before Stewart cared again.
Then, in June of 1867, a man came up to him and spoke a sentence so clearly that Stewart wondered at the path this news had taken – it had travelled such distances to hit with precision the side of his head, where nature had placed an ear to receive it. The Doterelhad been let through in June with a new English envoy; perhaps the news had come in a letter that Venancia opened on his behalf. Was it her voice he heard through the man's face, as he came up to him in the middle of a busy afternoon and said, Ί am to tell you that Miss Steerat of Edingbur is dead.' It was news, he said, for Έ1 Doctor' – who indeed had an aunt called Miss Stewart who was by now long dead in Edinburgh as opposed to any other town. Where the news had come from, or who had paid for it, Stewart did not know. When he lifted his suddenly heavy face to thank the man, he had already turned to go.
'She was a mother to me,' said Stewart, pathetically, to his back, and the man looked over his shoulder at him, very like the statue of Perseus at Albani.
And so the previous, ordinary months of siege became extraordinary months, in which he had been alive, while his dear aunt was dead. If it was possible to experience life in retrospect then that was what he was doing now – a rush of sensibility pouring through the days, a lurch in time, a doubling back – as though he had dropped her death along the path, all unawares, and was returning to collect it, now.
The heavens were open to him. There was no one between him and the wide blue sky any more. Stewart looked up, as though for the first time, and decided that there was none so peculiar a colour as blue. The woman who reared him was dead, and he had felt nothing – no intimation before the news, no emotion on its receipt. And so his thread theory of human connection itself unravelled, many miles from home.
Of course, when he last embraced her, he knew that he would never see the woman again. Which is just as we all do, he thought, because 'Farewell' with a woman is always for all time. Even the small partings. Even if she puts her bonnet on and walks as far as town, which is not very far. Farewell. Because that is what women are for. For leaving, and loving from a distance, very like the way we love the dead. And he thought of the slender angel he would like to set on her grave – he spent his time inscribing the headstone beneath with one phrase or another. Finding the right words and forgetting them, re-making them in his head. Some day the thing would be settled with a pen and paper, but in the meantime he managed and forgot sentence after sentence until the moment when his mind was stilled with some lines that Whytehead had recited to him that day in Asuncion.
But Ο for the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still.
And with this, a sadness filled his (already much engorged) heart, and although Stewart still, in general, liked the war, he could not remember how it started, any more.
But now that his aunt was dead, he felt a need to dress in the evenings and to look at the men about him with social eyes. Instead of a jaundice, he might see, for example, a tendency to cut corners. He applied his aunt's horse language to them: that one was a bolter, another a swerver, when faced with the great ditch of life. And, as though Eliza realised this from a distance, one morning, busy (as a man might occasionally be) with his lice, he was interrupted by a small girl with a card.
Mme Eliza Lynch
requests the pleasure of
Dr William Stewart's
company at dinner
on Saturday evening July 7th
at half past seven o'clock.
It was this that brought him, finally, to tug at the sleeve of the woman who walked the walls. He found her ordering the wicker gabions into a high gap and he interrupted her for so long as to request a piece of paper, if it could be found. It arrived that afternoon – quite a good sheet – in return for some future life saved, or lost (she would tell him when the time came), and he rinsed his hands with dry grit before picking it up.
Humaitá, July 4th
Dr William Stewart
accepts with pleasure
the kind invitation of
Mme Eliza Lynch
for dinner
on Saturday evening July 7th
at half past seven o'clock
Spacing one line after the next, so sweetly, filled him with a quiet elation. Just this – the simple cross and return of a pen, made him feel almost noble again.
Her recent confinement, and the birth of a fourth son, meant that it was many months since Mme Lynch had entertained in her little house in the compound behind the church. This was a pity, because Eliza by candlelight was a wonder. She gave her guests the gift of an easy, profound attention, and the liquid approval of her lovely black eyes. Her voice, when she spoke, was both light and proud; her whole conversation so carefully matched to the male mind that one was never obliged to stall or defer. This all he told his aunt as he scraped his face with a bloodied bistoury on the eve of the dinner, and followed the line of cut hair with a blind hand. But because she was dead, his aunt kept asking him questions, as though vetting a woman he might bring through her own door. (Eliza there – good Christ! – in his aunt's parlour. And when her dress falls away there is nothing under the whalebone but more bone, and then more bones. Eliza falling at his dear aunt's feet in a clatter.)
He stepped into what was left of his broadcloth, and attacked a green and spreading stain that fed on its map of sweat. He unfolded the revers across his chest, for lack of linen, and knotted a rag around the collar to keep it all in place; all the time attempting to answer his aunt in his head.
Eliza's Irishness, for example – was she really Irish? And what kind of Irish, while we were at it? The right kind, Stewart answered, in the main – her manners seemed bred, not learned. Though it was possible she was about as Irish as any woman who wanted to do well in Paris where they thought the Irish sauvage and the English only spinsters.
But why should she doubt it? (His aunt was being most vexing.) Of course Eliza was Irish. There was the whole business of those 'laughing eyes'. There was the embarrassing tendency towards politics. An insistence, almost.
There was the frankness of her habits; a sometimes comic sense of cunning, which seemed to wander wherever, and tease at a man, particularly at his privates.
And what of it? She is more than all that, he told his dead aunt, as he made his way through the muck – she is also Eliza.
Her house was a lantern. A low, ordinary bungalow, quite large; instead of walls there were curtains of canvas hanging from the eaves. The lights glowed through the greased cotton until the whole shallow cube seemed to float in front of a man's eyes: particularly if he was hungry. If he was very hungry, the place seemed to dance and recede, and then it seemed to be in front of his nose and very bright, just a little bit too soon.