This Hell of Mine Read online

  This Hell

  of Mine

  Lara Blunte

  Contents

  At the Bullring

  Tuesday

  A Dinner and a Dance

  A Thought

  Cuernavaca

  The Day of the Innocent

  The Day of the Dead

  A Hotel Room

  A Photograph

  A Note

  A House

  Jal Alai

  A Broken Gate

  Dialogues

  Before Christmas

  Xibalba

  Three Little Words

  Olapa Oibor Inkera

  1948

  A Ranch in the Northwest

  An Omen

  Life or Death

  Sonora

  Celebration

  Manhunt

  Into the Desert

  A Feast

  Greystoke

  The Black God and the Red God

  Of America

  Spring

  Novels by Lara Blunte on Amazon:

  True Born

  The Last Earl

  The Abyss

  To Be King

  Coming in June:

  The African

  Take a visual tour of This Hell of Mine and my other novels in Pinterest:

  https://www.pinterest.com/larablunte/

  At the Bullring

  Mexico City, 1947

  "Who is that?"

  Tony heard the surprise in his friend's voice. He turned to see that James was practically transfixed, staring at the very beautiful woman who had just entered the expensive seating area of the bullring on the arm of a man.

  "That is trouble," Tony replied dryly.

  "What a lovely name..." James muttered, still staring.

  Tony almost rolled his eyes. James was living in Mexico because he had had so many affairs in England that his uncle, the Earl of Halford, had begged him to get out of London for a while.

  "See the world, my boy," the Earl had said.

  "I've seen it," James had replied.

  His poor uncle had hardly thought of the irony in asking a man who had returned from war to go on a tour. But James had followed his wishes. It didn't really matter to him where he was.

  And now Tony thought he looked set to do the rounds of Mexican society as well.

  "The trouble is who her husband is," Tony explained.

  James threw a cursory glance at the young, clean cut man next to the woman who had inspired his admiration.

  "He doesn't look like that much trouble," James said. "How old is he, twenty?"

  "Probably twenty-five. That's Diego Aguirre Zelaya. His family is very rich and owns a good part of Mexico, which means they are not to be fooled with. They're grooming him to be president of the country one day."

  "My family is very rich," James said lazily. "And they were grooming me to be president of the Horticultural Society."

  "James, try and take something seriously ─ I've told you before, Mexico isn't England. Try not to provoke the locals?"

  "Is she Mexican?"

  "English. She was Lady Ashley Wentworth, Sir Harry Wentworth's daughter. Don't you know the family?"

  "I don't know Debrett's by heart."

  James had not yet stopped looking at Ashley Aguirre.

  "She is an English lady who married into one of the greatest Mexican families for love."

  "Touching..."

  "That means you're out of your depth there, old boy," Tony added, lighting a cigarette.

  James wasn't much listening. He was looking at Lady Ashley’s cheekbones, further shaded by her elegant white hat, at her full lips, at the shallow dimple on her chin. The hair on her temple was dark, though most of it was tucked under the hat.

  She was an epiphany in her cool white dress.

  Just then she turned and looked at him with glittering green eyes. It was as if she had felt his attention, as she didn't scan the crowd but instead stared directly at him.

  He might have smiled, had she not been different. But she was different, and he didn't smile. He didn't do anything, but he didn't look away. She seemed startled for a second, then raised an eyebrow, as if insulted that he should be staring at her. She turned back to the spectacle, as if to dismiss him.

  James smiled as she looked at the arena, where the bullfighter was circling the bull, then down at her hands, then at him again. They held each other's gaze for a moment; she finally chose to touch her husband's arm, glancing up at him.

  "Why haven't I seen her before?" James asked.

  "Dash it, James, when I told you to come here I thought it might help you not get into so much trouble. You can't go around making love to everybody's wives."

  "Not everybody's..."

  "Not any wives here. They don't just throw you out of the club, or frown at you, or call you a cad, they kill you here, do you understand me?"

  "That might be less painful than it was to lose my club membership,” James drawled.

  "They make you suffer beforehand. Te matan por nada."

  "Do you mean they kill one over nothing or for little money?"

  "Both.”

  Tony looked at his friend and almost sighed. Women had never been able to resist James, and they fell hard for him almost every single time. He had looks, brains, breeding, and an edge of savagery that made them want to conquer him.

  What James didn't have, apparently, was the capacity to love them back. At thirty-five he was fairly sure love was a myth, as he had said more than once. The war hadn't helped that either, Tony imagined.

  At least James wasn't a cad of the type who would pretend that a woman was the sun and the moon for a while, only to dump her unceremoniously for another one, or carry on with several at a time. He conducted his affairs tidily, one at a time, with months between them. For someone who liked sex and seemed to be good at it, if the despair of his discarded mistresses were anything to go by, he was in fact singularly cool about how often he was supposed to get it.

  But there were always the ladies who decided to leave their husbands and defiantly told them that they had been sleeping with James Hayburn, and that they were in love.

  Bad form. Bad for everyone.

  That's why Tony needed to drive home the point that Mexico wasn't England, that it could be the most civilized or the most brutal of places. Mexicans high and low weren't strangers to bad deaths, and to the old touches of cruelty which were meant to discourage people from ever messing with them. A man like Diego didn't have any Aztec forefathers, he was European through and through, but the Basque in him might still be a little vicious.

  "You survived the bloody war,” Tony said reasonably. “Why do you have such a death wish?"

  James’ dark eyes turned pensive as they fell on the arena, where the bull bled out of several cuts, with flags that looked childish and colorful stuck in them. "At the end of the day we have a lot in common with that bull,” he muttered. “Dumb beasts, angry, confused and set upon unfairly."

  "It was a good idea to bring you here, I see," Tony said with some irony.

  "I'm feeling far too much sympathy for the bull, but I suspect it won't win,” James said in a lighter tone of voice. “I don't feel like a Sunday afternoon tragedy and you won't let me look at the only thing worth seeing here, so why don't we go?"

  Tony nodded eagerly, "Yes, let's go and have a drink somewhere. Maybe you'll forget Lady Ashley and fix your sights on a pretty tourist."

  James looked up a Lady Ashley as they headed for the exit. She glanced at him and this time he did smile, but only with his eyes.

  Tuesday

  James still remembered Lady Ashley two days later.

  He sat in front of the open window of his bedroom, in the sun, wearing only his
pajama trousers. Temperatures in Mexico City could go from chilly at night and in the early morning to fairly hot, but at 7 o'clock this September the sun felt benign on his skin, and the sky was an attractive shade of blue.

  Tata, his housekeeper, walked in carrying a tray with coffee and a few envelopes, and set it in front of him. She didn't mind seeing her employer's chest: Mr. James was no exhibitionist, he had just grown up in jungles, so he was not ashamed of his own body.

  "Gracias, Tata," he told her with a smile.

  "I am bringing you the eggs," she told him in Spanish, and walked out.

  James reached for the coffee; he wasn't the type of Englishman who drank tea. Using his left hand to hold the cup to his lips, he started sifting through his mail. There was a letter from his uncle, and his handwriting always gave James an infinitesimal pause: it looked so much like his father's ─ the result, probably, of their Edwardian primary education with private tutors at Halford Castle.

  But his father was dead ─ and much missed ─ and his uncle was affectionate enough, trying to give James some semblance of a family life. He would read the letter a little later, as it was bound to be long and filled with family news and politics.

  More interesting, at the moment, was an envelope with the crest of the British Embassy in Mexico. It made him laugh, seeing his name preceded by "The Honorable.” Considering that he was practically in exile for his affairs, shouldn't it say "The Dishonorable Mr. Hayburn"?

  It was from the British Ambassador himself, inviting him to a dinner and dance at the embassy that Saturday.

  The beautiful Lady Ashley would certainly be there, he thought. She was English, noble and very prominent in local society, as the newspaper and a couple of magazines he had picked up showed. According to Tony, she and her husband had returned after several years in London and New York, where Diego Aguirre had been consolidating his family's considerable assets. She would be a good reason for James to attend some very boring social events, to "get out a little", as his uncle might say (only to then ask him to stay in, or to leave England).

  "How would she miss a dinner and dance?" he sang to himself as he went to look in his wardrobe. "Tata!"

  Tata must have been round the corner with his eggs, bread and jam, as she walked in immediately. He spoke good Spanish because of summers spent in the south of Spain, but it made Tata laugh that he would lisp when using a "z" or a "c" as the Spaniards did. In spite of ten months in Mexico, he hadn't changed his accent, nor did he think he could. The more straightforward Castilian Spanish suited his personality better than the sing-song formality of the Mexicans.

  "I need you to take this dinner jacket to clean. I need to be very guapo on Saturday."

  "You are very guapo! Una mujer eh?"

  "Tata, don't you know that saying things like that might get you pregnant?"

  She laughed out loud, her hand hiding a gold tooth. Walking out, she turned to say from the door, "It takes more than that to get pregnant. I know what it takes!"

  "Don't scare me!" he cried after her.

  James drained the rest of the coffee, annoyed at the desire to light a cigarette. He had stopped smoking during the war, as he hadn't liked the dependence every soldier felt for those bloody little sticks, how itchy everyone would get when supplies were running out, how they fought over them, how it was the first thing to reach for in case of boredom, or anxiety, or terror –practically the only emotions felt by soldiers.

  Yet the phantom desire to smoke was still there, especially when he drank coffee or alcohol. But he managed to resist the urge. If he resisted it long enough it would disappear.

  He walked into his bathroom and looked at his own reflection. How amusing that he should be considered such a Casanova, when he could abstain from sex more easily than he could from cigarettes; the urge was there, and it was very strong, but he liked to give in to sex as a bodily function even less than to smoking.

  Sex was a wonderful thing when there was desire in it. It could and often did lead to trouble, but at least it was worth it that way, when it was slightly elevated to a human, and not an animal pursuit. He had trained himself to resist the everyday type of lust, the kind that felt almost like a bad chronic illness, and it had not been easy.

  He started to cover his stubble with foam. He knew he was "symmetrical", as his father had told him. Edward Hayburn had been a renowned ethnographer and had always seen everything from the point of view of science. Beauty was symmetry, it indicated health and therefore healthy babies to come.

  James had the square jaw, the strong arms and chest, the long lean frame that women craved. His dark hair was lustrous and thick. He had good eyes, as far as he was concerned: he could see well far and near. Women often talked about his black eyes, though they were dark brown. He was glad that there was a little bit of a twist to the bridge of his nose: it broke the symmetry of his face slightly, changed him from what might have been just a pretty face to something more interesting.

  His father would have said that he and Lady Ashley would make beautiful babies; he would have said that they had won the genetic lottery. But he was far from thinking that he would make any babies with Lady Ashley. He didn't want babies with anyone. What should such fellows as I do, crawling beneath earth and heaven? He wanted to talk to Ashley first, and he probably would, on Saturday.

  And then, if there were a spark between them, he would want to make love to her.

  A Dinner and a Dance

  Tony was at the dinner and dance, of course, and James made a beeline for him after greeting the Ambassador and his wife. Passing by a good number of pale and overly eager British women, Mexican women in bright gowns and beautiful jewelry and men who were not similar to each other but still seemed interchangeable, James reached his friend.

  "It's rather obvious why you've come," Tony said.

  "I don't mind being obvious. Hello!" James managed to snatch a glass of champagne from a passing waiter.

  "Well, then you can start staring," Tony indicated the door with his chin.

  And, indeed, there was Lady Ashley and the husband James never managed to look at for too long, considering how infinitely more attractive she was.

  If possible, Ashley was even more beautiful today. James was not too keen on evening finery in women ─ the great amount of makeup, hair pieces and complicated undergarments they wore; but she had chosen white again, and looked effortless in a long gown that clung to her slender form and her lovely breasts, giving a glimpse of a long, tanned leg. She wore very little in terms of jewelry, only something that looked like a leaf-shaped diamond clasp to pin her hair up and a diamond bracelet. The extent of her make-up was a blood red lipstick, and her nails, which were not worn too long, were also red; her eyes shone with their own light.

  "That's more woman than artifice..." James muttered.

  Ashley did flick her eyes at him, but then seemed engrossed in greeting people as she and her husband turned around the large, bright room.

  James started to move towards the French doors: it seemed as if dinner were going to be held outside, in round tables set around the gardens; and by looking at the band that was already sitting and waiting in their white jackets, dancing was probably going to take place on the stone terrace, under the night sky.

  How romantic of the Ambassador, James thought.

  Tony smoked two cigarettes as they talked and observed the people inside. It was easy to follow Ashley in her white gown and James liked watching her, though normally the habits of high society seemed predictable and uninteresting to him. It wasn't long before everyone started drifting out in a stream of chatter.

  When it was time to sit down for dinner, James was delighted to see that Lady Ashley was on his left, and a rather old Mexican woman, whose hearing didn't seem to be very good, on his right. James pulled out the chair for Ashley, who gazed at him with what seemed to be distrust and sat down.

  "We haven't been introduced," James said in a friendly way. "I am James Hayburn." r />
  Instead of saying her name she looked at him with very wide and very lovely eyes. "The James Hayburn?"

  "Is there only one?" he wondered.

  "Are you Greystoke?" she asked, wonder in her voice.

  James groaned inside. At the very moment Diego Aguirre stopped by, putting his hand on the back of his wife's chair.

  Ashley had seen that James was indeed the person whom she thought he was, and her look had changed from one of exclusion to excitement. She was turning to her husband. "Darling, he's Greystoke!"

  "What is Greystoke, my dear?" Diego asked, not forgetting to smile and stretch his hand to shake James'.

  "It was Tarzan's title, Lord Greystoke, but they used it in a book about Mr. Hayburn!" She turned to James again, "I was so in love with you, when I was a child!"

  James couldn't stay serious at that statement, coming so artlessly from her lips and he smiled. She had seemed bent on avoiding him and yet her enthusiasm for a book she read as a child had taken over her caution.

  "Steady, mi amor," her husband laughed.

  "Oh, I can't believe you haven't read the book! Greystoke: the Noble Savage? His father is the ethnographer, Edward Hayburn, and he is the nephew of the Earl of Halford. Mr. Hayburn grew up in the most extraordinary circumstances, in tribes in New Guinea, in the Kalahari Desert, among the Maasai in Kenya, and then in Asia! He speaks something like twenty languages!

  "Most of them used by no more than twenty people," James said deprecatingly.

  "Oh, but Arabic, Swahili, Japanese and of course such a lot of European languages... And darling, can you believe it, he saved his friend by killing a lion with a spear, and he could fall from trees of great height and not break a bone, and hold his breath underwater for minutes at a time to catch fish!"

  "I assure you, all that is greatly exaggerated," James said. "It was meant to sell books."

  Diego was looking at James with interest, "I would like to hear all about it. But it seems I must go and sit down. I hope to speak to you later, then."