The Moors Last Sigh

six-guns riding on his hips, and that at the moment they were pronounced man and wife, a rodeo cowboy in chaps, and with a polka-dotted bandanna round his neck, had stepped up behind them with a mighty yahoo and lassoed them tightly together, crushing Ina’s bridal bouquet of yellow roses against her chest. Its thorns had pricked her bosom until it bled.
    My sister was unmoved by such secularist excuses. ‘That cowpoke’, she pronounced, ‘was – don’t you see? – the Messenger of God.’
    The encounter with Minnie intensified the flight-response which Mynah’s monologue had already prompted; and next, I must admit, I also did my inadvertent bit. When Minnie and Jimmy arrived outside Ina’s room I was leaning against a corridor wall, daydreaming. Absent-mindedly, as I saw in my mind’s eye a huge young Sikh bearing down upon me in a crowded alley, I spat on my deformed right hand. Jamshed Cashondeliveri leapt backwards in fright, colliding with Mynah, and I realised that I must have looked like the avenging brother, a six-and-a-half-foot giant preparing to strike down the man who had caused his sister so much misery. I tried putting up my hands in peace but he mistook this for a boxer’s challenge, and plunged into Ina’s room with a look of pure terror on his face.
    He skidded to a halt a few inches away from Aurora Zogoiby herself. Behind my mother, on the bed, Ina had gone into a routine of moans and groans; but Jimmy had eyes only for Aurora. The great lady was at that time a woman in her fifties, but time had only increased her allure; she froze Jimmy like a dumb animal caught in the headlamps of her power, she turned the great beam of her attention upon him, wordlessly, and made him her slave. Afterwards, when that tragic farce was over, she told me – she actually admitted – that she should not have done it, she should have stood aside and let the estranged couple make what they could of their wretched lives. ‘What to do?’ she told me (I was her model then, and she was chatting as she worked). ‘I just wanted to see if an old hen like me could still stoppofy a young fellow in his tracks.’
    I couldn’t help it , my scorpion-mother meant. It was in my nature .
    Ina, behind her, was quickly losing control. It had been her pathetic plan to win back Jimmy’s love by telling him how slim her chances were, how the cancer was systemic, it was pernicious, it was invasive, the lymph nodes were diseased, and the odds were that it had been discovered too late. Once he had fallen to his feet and begged forgiveness, she would allow him to sweat for a few weeks while she pretended to undergo chemotherapy (she was prepared to starve, even to thin her hair in the pursuit of love). Finally she would announce a miracle cure and they would live happily ever after. All these schemes were undone by the look of mooncalf adoration with which her husband was regarding her mother.
    At that moment Ina’s panicky need for him spilled over into insanity. In her frenzy she made the irreversible mistake of accelerating her plan. ‘Jimmy,’ she shrieked, ‘Jimmy, it’s a miracle, men. Now that you are here I am fixed, I know it, I swear it, let them test me and you will see. Jimmy, you saved my life, Jimmy, only you could do it, it is the power of love.’
    He looked carefully at her then, and we could all see the scales falling from his eyes. He turned to each of us in turn and saw the conspiracy standing naked in our faces, saw the truth we could no longer hide. Ina, defeated, unleashed a foaming cascade of grief. ‘What a family,’ said Jamshed Cashondeliveri. ‘I swear. Absolutely crack .’ He left the Gratiaplena nursing home and never saw Ina again.

    Jimmy’s parting shot was a prophecy; Ina’s humiliation was a cracking-point in our family history. After that day and for all the next year she was mad, entering a kind of second childhood. Aurora had her put back into Vasco’s nursery where she–where all of us – began; when her madness increased she was placed in a straitjacket and padding was put up against the walls, but Aurora would not permit her to be committed to a mental home. Now that it was too late, now that Ina had snapped, Aurora became the most loving mother in the world, spoonfeeding her, washing her like a baby, hugging and kissing her as she had never been hugged or kissed when she was sane – giving her the love, that is to say, which, had it been offered earlier, might have