The Moors Last Sigh

murder me and watch my death while hallucinogens blew your mind. Later, no doubt, you would have announced my tragic suicide: ‘Such a sad family quarrel, poor tender-hearted man, he could not bear. And the death of a sister too.’ But farce intervened, a lunge, a slapstick clash of heads, and then, like the great actress and gambler you were, you played the scene out to the end; and came out on the wrong side of a fifty-fifty bet. Even absolute evil has its impressive side. Lady, I doff my hat; and so goodnight.
    That rabbity scream again; it hangs on the air, and fades. As if some ancient malignity, unable to bear truth’s light, were dissolving into dust … but no, I will permit myself no such fancies. She was a woman, of woman born. Let her be seen as such …  Mad or bad? I no longer have a problem with that question. Just as I have rejected all supernatural theories (alien invaders, rabbit-screechy vampires), so also I will not allow her to be mad. Space-lizards, undead bloodsuckers and insane persons are excused from moral judgment, and Uma deserves to be judged. Insaan , a human being. I insist on Uma’s insaanity.
    This, too, is what we are like. We, too, are planters of winds, and harvesters of hurricanes. There are those among us – not alien but insaan – who eat devastation; who, without a regular supply of mayhem, cannot thrive. My Uma was one of those.
    Six years! Six years of Aurora, twelve of Moor, lost. My mother was sixty-three when she died; I looked sixty myself. We might have been brother and sister. We might have been friends. ‘I need an answer,’ my father had said at the races. Yes, he must have one. It must be the plain truth; everything about Uma and Aurora, Aurora and me, me and Uma Sarasvati, my witch. I would set it all down, and surrender myself to his sentence. As Yul Brynner, in Pharaonic mode (that is, a rather fetching short skirt), was so fond of saying in The Ten Commandments: ‘So let it be written. So let it be done.’

    There had been a second note, placed beneath my pillow by an unseen hand. There had been instructions, and a master key, which had unlocked a certain unguarded service entrance at the rear of Cashondeliveri Tower, and also the door to a private elevator leading directly to the thirty-first floor penthouse. There had been a reconciliation, an explanation accepted, a son gathered to his father’s bosom, a broken bond renewed.
    ‘O my boy your age, your age.’
    ‘O my father and also yours.’
    There was a clear night, a high garden, a talk such as we had not had before.
    ‘My boy, hide nothing from me. I know everything already. I have eyes that see and ears that hear and I know your deeds and misdeeds.’
    And before I could make any attempt at justification, there was a raised hand, a grin, a cackle. ‘I am pleased,’ he said. ‘You left me as a boy and you have come back as a man. Now we can talk as men of manly things. Once you loved your mother more. I do not blame you. I was the same. But now it is your father’s turn; a turn, I should more rightly say, for us. Now I can ask if you will join your force to mine, and hope to speak freely of many hidden things. There is at my age a question of trust. There is a need to speak my heart, to unlock my locks, to unveil my mysteries. Great things are afoot. That Fielding, who is he? A bug. At best a Pluto of the Under World and we know from Miranda’s nursery what is Pluto. A stupid collared dog. Or now, one can maybe say, a frog.’
    There was a dog. In a special corner of the soaring atrium, a stuffed bull terrier on wheels. ‘You kept him,’ I wondered. ‘Aires’s old Jawaharlal.’
    ‘For old times’ sake. Sometimes on this leash, in this little garden, I take Jaw-jaw for a walk.’
    Now came danger.
    Having agreed with my father to be his man, to know what he knew and assist him in his enterprises, I agreed, also, to remain for a time in Fielding’s employ. So to betray my master to my father I returned into my master’s house. And told Mainduck – for he was no fool – something of the truth. ‘It is good to heal a family quarrel but it does not affect my choices.’ Which Fielding, being kindly disposed towards me by reason of my six years of service, accepted; and suspected.
    He would watch me always from now on, I knew. My first mistake would be my last. I am a part of the battlefield, I thought, and they are the bloody war.
    When my team-mates – my old comrades in