Flames Coming out of the Top

by Norman Collins

  There was of course a debit side to the new arrangement. The invalid Englishman was a stickler for payment. From the moment he was installed inside the desk nothing was forgotten. The old comfortable days when the bill could run on from week to week with a little paid occasionally on account had gone for ever; and in their place was a cast iron régime of accounts and statements. Two of the oldest residents, a retired lime juice exporter and the Chilean agent of an American firm of sewing-machine manufacturers, left the hotel as a protest. Señora Alvarez was distraught at their departure. She swore that it meant the ruin of the Avenida, and it took all Maria’s powers to persuade her to let them go. When they had gone, however, and the retired exporter no longer left his cheroots about on ledges of the furniture to burn themselves out in their own time, and the Chilean agent was not there to spit on the stairs on his way down in the mornings, she did not refer again to the matter. Secretly, she was glad that they had gone: it had been one of the outstanding grievances against her husband that he would never get rid of the two of them. What she really hated was that it should have been left to this intruder who had wished himself into the family, to make the necessary move.

  Also she could never forget that Dunnett was paying nothing for his keep; admittedly she was paying him nothing either, and she tried to comfort herself with this. She used to sit in the evenings, a black shawl over her hair, staring at him. If only there had been a man, a real man in the family, this interloper could never have stayed. It had been too easy for him. She and Maria had argued about it many times, but the girl had been hotheaded and obstinate; and now it had come to this. She tried hard to forget that the man was lame, unemployed, English and a heretic. But the catalogue of imperfections was too long: she could not forget.

  The frowsy side-chapel was as quiet as a cave. It was a good place for thinking, and in the silence everything in Dunnett’s life seemed at last very clear to him; clear and strangely remote. He saw himself setting out from England, green and raw and inexperienced. But no; Dunnett the four-pound a week clerk was a mythical figure who had vanished and passed on. Everything that he had stood for and done and tried to do was now so vague and misty and far away that it no longer mattered; it was as unimportant as the private affairs of a stranger. Even the memory of Kay no longer hurt him. She had been the centre of his life once and now he merely hoped that she was happy. Her mother had not said much about it in that brief letter which had made him tear up his steamboat ticket—merely that she was marrying someone else. Kay herself had not written; was too ashamed perhaps. He recognised without bitterness or resentment that she had broken her word to him, but he did not blame her for it. He supposed that in a way he had been to blame for it; she had been young and pretty and lonely, and whoever it was had come along and carried her off. She had never really forgiven him for going away and leaving her, had not understood that a man had his work to do in the world. But she didn’t count any longer; she was just a pretty vision he had once shared. No, it was not Kay that mattered, but Carmel. She had shattered his life for him, had destroyed everything that he had set out to do; and he still loved her. No matter what happened now, even if he were never to see her again, he would still in a way belong to her for ever. He knew that she had betrayed him, betrayed him far more callously than ever Kay had done, and he was content that it should be so. If those were to be the only terms on which it could have happened he would still not have foregone it. It was through Carmel that he had really come into life.

  Señor Olivares’s confidential clerk plucked at his sleeve. He was standing beside Dunnett, dressed in all his best clothes, his small, pointed chin buried between the points of a large butterfly collar.

  “They’re coming,” he said.

  The door at the back of the church was open now and walls began to light up. Santa Magdalena, in her Nottingham lace vestments and straw hat, came to life again. The figures in the doorway looked strangely diminished by distance; they were like little actors in a big theatre. Señora Alvarez came first. She was leaning on the arm of a distant cousin, a ruffled, embarrassed man whom the family had dug up Somen were in Moliendo. Behind her came Maria. She was pale and beautiful and kept her eyes to the ground. Another cousin, someone whom Dunnett had never seen, was beside her. A mixed company followed. Señor Costello had insisted on being among them: he was there, he said, to protect the interests of one of His Britannic Majesty’s servants. For the rest, there were half the more or less well-to-do of Amricante. Señora Alvarez was astonished by the number of friends whom she did not know. She suspected that it was her future son-in-law who had attracted them; they had all come crowding to see the end of this monstrous mis-alliance. Only Señor Olivares was not there. He was sitting on a small wooden stool in a cell in the Oriente prison awaiting his trial on a charge of conspiracy: he had been waiting for six months already. And Señora Muras was absent; on the day after Señor Muras’s departure she had left with her jewels and crucifixes for her mother in Costa Rica. In the meantime, the unsympathetic authorities had distrained on the hacienda.

  But the body of the Church was nicely full already. In the third row sat Captain Leach. He had borrowed someone else’s coat to make himself look respectable, and sat there with an enchanted leer on his face; someone had given him a prayerbook, which he held, nipped between his two remaining fingers.

  Then the priest came forward from his hidden vestry. He was a small man, a Portuguese, with black, darting eyes set too close together in a smooth, brown face; in his magnificent embroidered alb he looked like a beautified dope peddler. Maria had confessed to him that morning.

  Señor Olivares’s confidential clerk gave Dunnett a little push forward: the time had come. He knelt down on the polished prie Dieu and Maria knelt beside him. He tried to catch her eye, but she avoided him. Beneath her close veil he could see her face, pale and gentle and a little frightened. He could tell now that she had been crying. She raised her hand to her forehead and there was something in the gesture that recalled her as she had been when he first saw her, the day she had shown him to his room at the Avenida. At the memory of it he recognised how much she meant to him. It was thinking of Carmel that had made him forget. But now, looking at her, he was glad. She was the one calm, beautiful thing that had happened in his life.

  Dunnett felt in his pocket and produced the ring and the priest reached out for it. The ring was raised aloft for a moment while the priest blessed it and gave it back to him, and Dunnett realised that the service had gone into regions of faith where he could not follow. But the next moment the priest took hold of Maria’s hand and brought it close to his. When he placed the ring on her finger he could feel that she was trembling. He wanted desperately to put his arm around her.

  Then the priest took the asperges and sprinkled them. The church was in silence except for the sound of Señora Alvarez’s sobbing. An acolyte removed the holy water and the priest made the sign of the cross over them. Someone coughed and the magic was over.

  Maria and Dunnett both rose. For the first time since they had entered the church they were brought face to face. She did not avoid him now. She was looking full at him. In her eyes was the tender, happy expression of a woman who had got the one thing on earth she has wanted. From nowhere Mr. Verking’s words: “Beware of the tropics: once they’ve got hold of you they won’t let you go again,” came back to him. But he knew now that they had a different meaning.

  He reached out and took Maria by the hand.

  Author’s Note

  All the characters in this novel are fictitious as also are some of the places. Amricante is assumed for the purposes of this story to lie somewhere on the Pacific coastline between Arica and Mollendo.

  To

  the memory of my friend

  John Keith Anderson

  M.B., Ch.B

  This electronic edition published in July 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

  Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Squar
e, London WC1B 3DP

  First published by Messrs Victor Gollancz 1937

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  ISBN: 9781448201280

  eISBN: 9781448202607

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