The Moors Last Sigh

bloody shame?’
    ‘But what you said about your family. And the “uncle”.’
    ‘What gives you the right to know everything about me? You were pushy and I didn’t want to tell you. Bas. That’s all.’
    ‘But it wasn’t true, Uma. Your parents are alive and the uncle is a husband.’
    ‘It was a metaphor. Yes! A metaphor of how wretched my life was, of my pain. If you loved me you would understand that. If you loved me you would not give me the third degree. If you loved me you would stop shaking your poor fist, and put it here, and you would shut your sweet face, and bring it here, and you would do what lovers do.’
    ‘It wasn’t a metaphor, Uma,’ I said, backing away. ‘It was a lie. What’s scary is, you don’t know the difference.’ I stepped backwards through her front door, and closed it, feeling as if I’d just leapt from her balcony towards the wild palms. That was how it felt: like a falling. Like a suicide. Like a death.
    But that was an illusion, too. The real thing was still two years away.

    I held out for months. I lived at home, went to work, became skilled in the art of marketing and promoting Baby Softo Talcum Powder and was even appointed marketing manager by a proud father. I got through the hollow calendar of days. There were changes at Elephanta . In the aftermath of the débâcle of the retrospective, Aurora had finally got round to throwing Vasco out. It was icily done. Aurora mentioned her increased need for solitude, and Vasco with a cold bow agreed to clear out his studio. If this was the end of an affair, I thought, then it was creditably dignified and discreet: though the Arctic coldness of it made me shiver, I confess. Vasco came to say goodbye to me, and we went together to the cartoon-nursery, long unoccupied, where everything had begun. ‘ That’s all, folks,’ he said. ‘Time for V. Miranda to go West. Got a castle to build in the air.’ He was lost in the flood of his own flesh, he looked like a toady, fairground-mirror reflection of Raman Fielding, and his mouth was twisted in pain. His voice was controlled, but I did not miss the blaze of feeling in his eye.
    ‘She was my obsession, you must have guessed that,’ he said, caressing the exclamatory walls (Pow! Zap! Splat!) . ‘As she was and is and will be yours. Maybe one day you’ll feel like facing up to that. Then come to me. Come before that needle hits my heart.’ I had not thought for years about Vasco’s lost point, his Snow Queen’s splinter of ice; and reflected, now, that the heart of this altered, swollen Vasco had more conventional attacks to worry about than needles. He left India for Spain soon afterwards, never to return.
    Aurora also fired her dealer. She informed Kekoo that she held him personally responsible for the ‘public relations fiasco’ of her show. Kekoo went noisily, arriving at the gates each day for a month to entreat Lambajan for admission (which was refused), sending flowers and gifts (which were returned), writing endless letters (which were thrown away unread). Aurora had told him that as she no longer intended to exhibit any work, her need for a gallery no longer existed. But Kekoo, pathetically, was sure she was deserting him for his great rivals at the Chemould. He begged and pleaded with her by telephone (to which Aurora would not come when he called), in telegrams (which she would contemptuously set on fire), even via Dom Minto (who turned out to be a purblind, blue-spectacled old gent with the huge horse-teeth of the French comedian Fernandel, and whom Aurora instructed to stop carrying his messages). I could not help but wonder about Uma’s accusations. If these two alleged lovers had been disposed of, then what of Mainduck? Had Fielding, too, been dumped, or was he now the sole tenant of her heart?
    Uma, Uma. I missed her so. There were withdrawal symptoms: at night I felt her phantom-body move under my broken hand. As I was falling asleep (my misery did not prevent me from sleeping soundly!) I saw before my mind’s eye the scene in an old Fernandel movie in which, not knowing the English word for ‘woman’, he uses his hands to trace the outline of a curvaceous female form.
    I was the other man in the dream. ‘Ah,’ I nodded. ‘A bottle of Coke?’
    Uma walked past us, swinging her hips. Fernandel leered and jabbed a thumb in the direction of her departing posterior.
    ‘My bottle of Coke,’ he said, with understandable pride.

    Ordinary life.