Stewart was comfortable with none of this. He was not English. He was about to remonstrate – he was quite strongly moved to it – when he remembered that he was not wearing any linen, so instead of banging the table and shouting, he brought his clenched hand up to his mouth, and cleared his throat,
'You are too harsh, Madame Lynch,' he said.
Ί am delighted to hear it,' said Eliza. 'We Celts have enough reason for harshness, we must not renegue.'
It was becoming clear to Stewart that he had missed some essential link in the conversation. Or perhaps it was not just this conversation, but all conversations. Perhaps he would not be fit for society, ever again. Something about this prospect seemed disastrous to him. So,
'And what of the Irish mother?' he bravely said.
'The Irish? Oh we eat them,' said Eliza. 'You should see it. We start at the toes and leave nothing out.'
They all looked at the pork, and there was a small silence, into which Pancho, for some reason, cheered.
'Diabolito,' said his mother, while Stewart's mind nibbled along the legs of some poor woman to arrive at a most unthinkable place. The woman was, of course, Eliza, but it was also, a little, his poor rotten aunt, or the clean bones of his long-dead mother, and Stewart felt the violence of it so keenly he wanted to shout 'Whore!' or some other desecration. 'Irish bitch!' was the phrase that sprang to mind. How strange, he thought. And useless. How could he explain to Paulino Álén, or to any of them, that this woman came of an irksome race?
Then the sorbet appeared, and Stewart tried not to groan aloud as he ate. Through all the meal, not one word had been uttered about the war or their current situation, and the dull splashes of shot landing in faraway mud were, when you remembered to listen out for them, almost pleasant to the ear.
Then Lopez pushed back his chair.
'Senor,' he said to the boy Álén, with mock formality, and Eliza stood to allow them retire. They went to a table in the corner, where a map was unrolled while Pancho's eyes grew wide with rage and pleading.
'You must come with me, Doctor,' Eliza said. 'While Pancho has his war. You must keep me company and pretend to listen to my pulse.'
Ά pleasure,' he said. He offered his arm, hinging it stiffly from the shoulder like an old man. As they left they paused for Lopez to kiss his mistress's hand. And it really was like being in bed with the two of them, the way they looked each other in the eye. The galvanic charge of madness from Lopez (for he was quite mad) made Stewart feel quite dizzy. But Eliza seemed to like it, or soothe it, or take it in – at any rate she looked straight at it, as though she would quite like to bed it, by and by.
'Coffee!' she said into the air in front of her, and she walked on – dragging Stewart a little, who had some difficulty getting past the pathetic piece of tartan under the bird cage, his desire for it still shamed him so.
For a moment, in the small space that was Eliza's reception room, Stewart felt the burden of future conversation. What could he say to this woman? She was too large and he was too tired.
She walked a little away from him, and begged him to sit. Then she paused. Then she walked back to join him, and turned her head a little away as she sank into the matching chair. There was a silence; it seemed easy enough, but a bubble of misery rose quickly to the surface, and broke with,
'You know, Doctor, I am immensely weary of it all.'
Of the war?'
'No. Of this, my dear Doctor. Of all this.' She turned and indicated, it seemed, her own skirts – unless it was the floor she was pointing to; the Aubusson blue of the rug that toned so strangely well with the beige of the mud floor. She swept her hands wide and then let them fall into her lap. Then she lifted her face to his with a gaze that might well have been called 'radiant and sad'.
Ί am immensely weary, Doctor, of being Eliza Lynch.'
Ambushed again, thought Stewart, as the urge to free her came over him, not from the mud or the bullets – though these played their part, as he threw her over the pommel of an imaginary horse and rode her out of there. No, he would grab her and kiss her and take her most violently, and in so doing release her, not from the war, nor the world, but from the terrible prison of herself. This hair, these clothes, this high and graceful look. Come with me and we will simply live. There will be butterflies in the meadow, and so on. Christ, he was tired.
She picked herself off the chair to trail a little across the room. Her dress was the most beautiful thing he had seen for a long time – if you did not count the sunset that daily broke his half-mended heart. It was green. What kind of green Stewart could not say. Green that bristled with a silvery light, there in the dark room. She picked up a photograph of Lopez, then set it down again and drifted on. She had sunk, Stewart realised, at least three bottles of champagne. Eliza always was a hearty girl.
Ί work quite hard you know,' she said.
Ί know that,' he said.
'At table for example, I work quite hard to keep it smooth, and I am not looking for admiration, Doctor, not so much – but these bitter little looks and the sentences that creep out of people's faces, these Ungenerosities, when I have waded through hail and fire to put an acceptable something on the table in front of them. The centrepiece
– those careless flowers in their urn – I copied from an oil by Jensen, the Dane. The work, Doctor. The work! And why do I do it? I do it for love. And high endeavour. I do it so that we should not always be so small, and it is vulgar of me to say so, Doctor, but pearls before swine is one thing, at least the swine don't despise the pearls, the way these men despise me.'
'My dear lady,' said Stewart, surprised by her nonsense. 'You are beginning to sound like…' He was going to say 'my wife', but he skipped, quite quickly, to, 'a quite ordinary woman'.
For one gaping moment Stewart thought he was drunk. Then he remembered that it was the war that made him feel like this; the war and this room within the war; this house
– a bowl of light like a diamond in mud, or a diamond, even, in some man's turd – and he had some memory of a man with his belly slit – or was it the entire length of his intestine? – he had a memory of a man, at any rate, with a jewel inside him at Curupaiti, or Tuiuti, or Curuzú, or in a dream he had right here in Humaitá, a dream of difficulty and kidney stones and something astonishingly beautiful, precious and hard, that was deep inside a man. Which was when he lurched awake to find Eliza still talking; the murmur of her husband's voice in the next room a hushed counterpoint. No time had passed at all.