The Moors Last Sigh

ime’ – the city’s finest citizens had risen early and taken the place of the highly strung, pedigreed local steeds, both in the paddock and on the track. No races were scheduled; only the shades of departed jockeys in their bright-hooped shirts, the phantom echoes of once and future hooves and the fading notes of the chargers’ steaming whinnies, only the tumbling rustle of old, discarded copies of Cole’s race-day booklets – O invaluable guides to form! – might be discerned, by the eyes and ears of fancy, glimmering like the faint traces of an overpainted picture beneath this weekly rus in urbe scene, this parasolled procession of the leisured great. Swiftly in running-shoes and shorts with their babies strapped to their backs, or gently perambulating with walking-sticks and wearing straw panamas they came, the nobles of fish and steel, the counts of cloth and shipping, the lords of finance and property, the princes of land and sea and of the powers of the air, and their ladies too, dolled up to the nines in silks and gold, or track-suited and pony-tailed, with pink headbands stretched like royal circlets across athletic brows. Some there were who sped past furlong markers, stop-watches at the ready; others who sailed slowly past the old grandstand, like ocean liners coming in to dock. It was a time for encounters both licit and il-; for deals to be done and hands to be shaken on their doing; for the city’s matriarchy to eye up its youth and plot its future nuptials, and for young men and women to exchange glances, and make choices of their own. It was a time for family members to come together, and a gathering of the metropolis’s mightiest clans. Power, money, kinship and desire: these, concealed beneath the simpler benefits of an hour’s health-giving stroll around the old course, were the driving forces behind the Mahalaxmi Weekend Constitutional, a horseless race with a class field, a derby without a starter’s gun or photo-finish, but one in which there were many prizes to be won.
    That Sunday six weeks after Ina died we were making an effort to close the family’s sadly depleted ranks. Aurora in elegant slacks and open-necked white linen shirt made a point of displaying the family’s solidarity by walking arm-in-arm with Abraham, who was white of mane and magnificently straight of back, at seventy-four every inch the suited-and-booted patriarch, no longer a country cousin among the grandees, but the very grandest of them all. The morning had not begun auspiciously, however. On our way to Mahalaxmi we had picked up Minnie – Sister Floreas – who had been excused, on compassionate grounds, from morning worship at the Maria Gratiaplena convent. She sat beside me on the back seat in her coiffed nun’s get-up, fidgeting with her rosary and mumbling hailmarys under her breath, looking – I thought – like a version of the Duchess in Alice; much prettier, of course, but just as absolutist; or like a gamine court card – Funny Face meets the Queen of Spades. ‘I saw Ina last night,’ she pronounced without preamble. ‘She says to tell you she is happy in Heaven and the music is very nice.’ Aurora flushed purple, jammed her lips shut and set her jaw. Minnie had started seeing visions lately, although Aurora was not convinced. The Duchess’s view of her baby boy could, if paraphrased, apply to my holy duchess of a sister, too: She only does it to annoy, because she knows it teases .
    Abraham said, ‘Don’t upset your mother, Inamorata,’ and now it was Minnie’s turn to frown, because that name belonged to her past, it had no connection with the person she was becoming, the wonder of the Gratiaplena nuns, the most ascetic of all the faithful, the most uncomplaining of workers, the hardest-scrubbing of floor-scrubbers, the gentlest and most dedicated of nurses, and – as if seeking to atone for a lifetime of privilege – the wearer of the roughest and itchiest undergarments in the Order, which she had sewn for herself out of old jute sacks stinking of cardamoms and tea, and which brought her tender skin up in great weals, until the Mother Superior warned her that excessive mortification was itself a form of vanity. After that rebuke Sister Floreas stopped wearing sackcloth next to the skin, and the visions began.
    Alone in her cell on her plank of wood (she had quickly dispensed with a bed) she was visited by a genderless elephant-headed angel who issued a strongly worded critique