The Moors Last Sigh

even for his own kind, teased for his inarticulacy by Emily Elphinstone the coir merchant’s widow who gave him steak and kidney pud on Thursdays and hoped for (but had not yet received) something in return, he turned, behind his façade of a churchy joke, into something else entirely; his fixation darkened slowly towards hate.
    Perhaps it was her attachment to the empty grave of the Portuguese explorer that made him begin to hate her, because of his own fears of dying, because how could she come by just to sit beside the tomb of Vasco da Gama and talk to it so softly, how, when the living were hanging on her every gesture, her every movement and syllable, could she prefer a morbid intimacy with a hole in the ground whence Vasco had been removed no more than fourteen years after being placed there, returning in death to the Lisbon which he left so long ago? Just once D’Aeth made the mistake of approaching Aurora and saying, is there some help you seek, daughter; at which she turned on him with all the haughty rage of the infinitely wealthy and told him, ‘This is family business; go and boilofy your head.’ Then, relenting slightly, she told him she came to make confession, and the Reverend D’Aeth was shaken by the blasphemy of seeking absolution from an empty grave. ‘We’re Church of England here,’ he limply said, and that brought her to her feet, she unfurled herself and dazzled him, Venus rising in red velvet, and then she shrivelled him with her scorn. ‘Soon,’ she said, ‘we will drive you into the sea, and you can take along this Church that only startofied because some Piss-in-Boots old king wanted a sexy younger wife.’
    She eventually asked him his name. When he told her she laughed and clapped her hands. ‘O, too much,’ she said. ‘Reverend Allover Death.’ After that he couldn’t talk to her any more, because she had touched a raw spot. India had unnerved Oliver D’Aeth; his dreams were either erotic fantasies of nude teas with the Widow Elphinstone on prickly brown lawns of coir matting, or else torture-nightmares in which he found himself in a place in which he was invariably beaten, like a carpet, like a mule; also kicked. Men with hats that were flat at the back so that they could stand with their backs to walls and prevent their enemies from creeping up behind them, hats made of a stiff and shiny black substance, these men waylaid him on rocky hillside paths. They pummelled him but did not speak. He, however, cried out loudly, giving up his pride. It was humiliating to be made to cry out, but he could not prevent the cries from escaping. Yet he knew, in his dreams, that this place was and would continue to be his home; he would continue to walk along this hillside path.
    After he saw Aurora in St Francis’s Church she started appearing in these terrible, pummelling dreams. A man’s choices are unfathomable , she said to him once, seeing him dragging himself along after a particularly violent thrashing. Did she judge him? Sometimes he thought she must find him contemptible for putting up with such degradation. But at other times he detected the beginnings of wisdom in her eyes, in the solid musculature of her upper arms, in the birdlike angle of her head. If a man’s choices are unfathomable, she seemed to be saying, then they are also beyond judgment, beyond contempt. ‘I am being flayed,’ he told her in his dream. ‘It is my holy calling. We will never gain our humanity until we lose our skins.’ When he woke he was not sure whether the dream had been inspired by his faith in the oneness of mankind, or by the photophobia that made his skin torment him so: whether it was a heroic vision, or a banality.
    India was uncertainty. It was deception and illusion. Here at Fort Cochin the English had striven mightily to construct a mirage of Englishness, where English bungalows clustered around an English green, where there were Rotarians and golfers and tea-dances and cricket and a Masonic Lodge. But D’Aeth could not help seeing through the conjuring trick, couldn’t help hearing the false vowels of the coir traders lying about their education, or wincing at the coarse dancing of their to-tell-the-truth-mostly-rather-common wives, or seeing the bloodsucker lizards beneath the English hedges, the parrots flying over the rather un-Home-Counties jacaranda trees. And when he looked out to sea the illusion of England vanished entirely; for the harbour could not be disguised, and