The Moors Last Sigh

no matter how Anglicised the land might be, it was contradicted by the water; as if England were being washed by an alien sea. Alien, and encroaching; for Oliver D’Aeth knew enough to be sure that the frontier between the English enclaves and the surrounding foreignness had become permeable, was beginning to dissolve. India would reclaim it all. They, the British, would – as Aurora had prophesied – be driven into the Indian Ocean – which, by an Indian perversity, was known locally as the Arabian Sea.
    Still, he thought, standards must be upheld, continuity must be maintained. There was the right way and the wrong, God’s road and the Left-Hand Path. Though obviously these were but metaphors, and it would not do to interpret them too literally, to sing too loud of Paradise or damn too many sinners to Hell. He added this codicil with a kind of ferocity, because India had been nibbling away at the edges of his mildness; India, where Doubting Thomas had established what one might have thought would be a Christianity of Uncertainty, in fact met the gentle reasonableness of the Church of England with great clouds of fervent incense and blasts of religious heat … he looked at the walls of St Francis’s, at the memorials to the young English dead, and became afraid. Eighteen-year-old girls came over with the man-hunting ‘fishing fleet’, set foot on Indian soil, and seemed to dive straight into the ground. Nineteen-year-old scions of great families had the earth rattling on their coffin-lids within months of arriving. Oliver D’Aeth, who wondered daily when the mouth of India would gobble him down as well, found Aurora’s joke about his name as tasteless as her chats with da Gama’s empty grave. He didn’t say so, of course. Wouldn’t be right. Besides, her beauty seemed to thicken his tongue; it increased his hot confusion – for when she transfixed him with her scornful, amused gaze, he wished the ground would swallow him up – and it also made him itch.

    Aurora, with lace-covered head, and smelling strongly of sex and pepper, awaited her lover by Vasco’s tomb; Oliver D’Aeth, bursting with lusts and resentments, skulked in the shadows. The only other occupants of the darkening church, in which a few yellow wall-lamps did little to lift the gloom, were three English mem-sahibs, the sisters Aspinwall, who had clucked disapprovingly when Catholic Aurora swaggered past them in scarlet – one of them went so far as to raise a perfumed handkerchief to her nose – and had at once been rewarded with the rough edge of her tongue. ‘Who are you making chicken-noises at?’ Aurora had demanded. ‘Like chickens you don’t look. More like fishes with fishbones stuck in their throat.’
    And the young priest, unable to approach her, unable to leave her be, driven half-mad by her powerful odour, felt the Widow Elphinstone recede to the back of his mind, even though, at only twenty-one, she was a handsome woman, by no means without admirers. We may not have much but we are choosy , she had told him. Many men knocked at a young widow’s door, not all of them with gentlemanly intentions. Many call but few are answered , she said. A line must be drawn that is not easy to cross . Emily Elphinstone, an upstanding young woman and a poisonously vile cook, would be at her stove, expecting Oliver D’Aeth to happen by; and so he would, so he would. In the meanwhile, however, he stayed where he was, even though his stolen glances at the woman of his dreams felt like a kind of infidelity.
    Abraham arrived in a rush, and all but ran to Vasco’s tomb. When Aurora clasped his hands between her own, and the two of them began to speak in urgent whispers, Oliver D’Aeth felt a surge of anger. He turned abruptly and walked away, the heels of his black boots clicking on the stone floor, the yellow pools of light revealing, to the watching Aspinwall sisters, that the young man’s fists were clenched. They rose, and intercepted him at the door: had he smelled what, fanned across the church by the long, slow pungas, was unmistakable and could not be denied? – Ladies, he had. – And had he observed her, the Papist hussy, making love before their very eyes? – And perhaps he did not know, being so recently arrived, that the fellow pawing at her in God’s house was not only her family’s lowly employee, but, in addition, it has to be said, of the Jewish faith? – Ladies, he did not know, he was most grateful for the