The Moors Last Sigh

fishing-nets had been hauled up for the night. Cochin, city of nets, he thought, and I have been netted just like any fish. Twin-stacked steamers, the cargo ship Marco Polo , and even a British gunboat hung out there in the last light, like ghosts. Everything looks normal, Abraham marvelled. How does the world manage to preserve this illusion of sameness when in fact everything has been changed, irreversibly transformed, by love?
    Perhaps, he thought, because strangeness, the idea of difference, is a thing to which we react with unease. The newly besotted lover makes us wince, if we are truthful; he is like the pavement-sleeper talking to an invisible companion in an empty doorway, the rummy woman staring out to sea with, in her lap, an enormous ball of string; we see them and pass on by. And the colleague at work of whom we learn, by chance, that he has unusual sexual preferences, and the child preoccupied by uttering repeated sequences of sounds without any apparent meaning, and the beautiful woman seen by chance at a lighted window, allowing her nipples to be licked by her lap-dog; oh, and the brilliant scientist who spends his time at parties in corners, scratching at his posterior and then carefully examining his fingernails, and the one-legged swimmer, and … Abraham stopped in his tracks and blushed. How his thoughts were running on! Until this morning he had been the most methodical and ordered of men, a man of ledgers and columns, and here, Abie, just listen to yourself, all this airy-fairy tommyrot, pick up your pace now, the lady will already be in church, for the rest of your life you must do your level best not to keep your young Mrs waiting …
     … Fifteen years old! Okay, okay. In our part of the world that’s not so young.

    At St Francis’s: Who’s this, moaning softly in church? This short-arsed ginger-haired paleface scratching wildly at the backs of his hands? This bucktooth cherub with sweat running down his trouser-leg? – a priest, sirs. What should one expect to find in churchy surroundings if not a dog-collar? In this case, the Reverend Oliver D’Aeth, a young dog of fine Anglican pedigree, not long off the boat, and suffering, in Indian heat, from photophobia.
    Like werewolves, he shunned the light. The sun’s rays sought him out, however; they dogged him, no matter how doggedly he hunted for shadows. Tropical sundogs caught him unawares, they pounced, they licked him all over while he uselessly protested; whereupon the tiny champagne-bubbles of his allergy burst through the surface of his skin, and, like a mangy dog, he began uncontrollably to itch. A hangdog priest indeed, hounded by the unfailing brilliance of the days. At night he dreamed of clouds, of his faraway homeland where the sky rested cosily, in soft greys, just above his head; of clouds, but also – for though it was getting dark the tropic heat still clutched at his loins – of girls. Of, to be specific, a tall girl entering St Francis’s church in a floor-length red velvet skirt with her head wreathed in a distinctly un-Anglican white lace mantilla, a girl to make a lonely young priest perspire like a burst water-tank, to make him turn a most ecclesiastical shade of purple with desire.

    She would come in once or twice a week to sit for a while beside da Gama’s vacant tomb. The very first time she swept past D’Aeth, like an empress or a grand tragedienne, he was done for. Even before he saw her face the purpling of his own was well advanced. Then she turned towards him and it was as if he had drowned in sunlight. At once the violence of perspiration and itching assailed him; inflammations erupted on his neck and hands in spite of the cooling sweeps of the great punga fans that brushed the churchy atmosphere in long, slow strokes, as if it were a woman’s hair. As Aurora approached him, it worsened: the dreadful allergy of desire. ‘You look’, she said sweetly, ‘like a lobster quadrille. You look like a flea-ring circus after all the fleas escapofied. And what waterworks, sir! Let Bombay keep its Flora Fountain because here, Reverend, we got you.’
    She had him indeed. Palm of her hand. From that day on, the pain of his allergy was as nothing as compared to the pain of his unspoken, impossible love. He waited for her contempt, longed for it, for it was all she gave him. But slowly it changed something in him. Earnest and deliquescent and tongue-tied and Englishy-schoolboy as he was, a joke figure