The Moors Last Sigh

information. – But it was not to be tolerated, he was not to stand for it, and did he intend to act? – Ladies, he would; not at this moment, there must be no ugly scene here, but action would certainly be taken, most decisively, they need have no fear on that account. – Well! He should see to it that it was. They were returning to Ooty in the morning, but would certainly wish to see progress by their next descent. ‘You samjao that baysharram pair’, said the eldest sister Aspinwall, ‘that this sort of tamasha is simply not the cheese.’ – Ladies, your humble servant.
    Later that night, Oliver D’Aeth, while taking a little port wine with the young widow, and recovering from the heaped platefuls of burned and leathery corpses which she had set before him, mentioned the evening’s events in St Francis’s Church. But no sooner had he spoken Aurora da Gama’s name than the sweating and itches returned, even her name had the power to inflame him, and Emily burst out in shocking and uncharacteristic rage: ‘Those people don’t belong here any more than we do, but at least we can go home. One day India will turn against them, too, and they’ll have to sink or swim.’ No, no, D’Aeth demurred, here in the South there was little communal trouble of that sort, but she rounded on him ferociously. They were outcasts , she shouted, these peculiar Christians with their unrecognisable hobson-jobson services, not to mention these dying-out Jews, they were the least important people in the world, the tiniest of the tiny, and if they wanted to, to rut , then it was the least interesting thing on Earth, certainly not a thing she wished to ruin such an agreeable evening thinking about, and even if those old gargoyles from snooty Ootacamund, those tea-ladies , were raising a hue and cry she had no intention of spending another instant on the subject, and she was bound to say that he, Oliver, had gone down in her estimation, she would have thought he would have had the delicacy not to raise such a topic, let alone turn bright red and start dripping when he spoke that person’s name. ‘The late Mr Elphinstone’, she said, her voice unsteady, ‘had a weakness for chhi-chhi women. But he did me the politeness of keeping his nautch-girl infatuations to himself; whereas you, Oliver – a man of the cloth! – you sit at my table and drool.’
    Oliver D’Aeth, having been informed by the Widow Elphinstone that he need no longer trouble to call upon her, took his leave; and vowed revenge. Emily had put it well. Aurora da Gama and her Jew were no more than flies upon the great diamond of India; how dare they so shamelessly challenge the natural order of things? They were asking to be squashed.

    By the empty grave of the legendary Portuguese, Abraham Zogoiby placed his hands between his young beloved’s and confessed: quarrel, chucking-out, homelessness. Tears, once again, were brimming. But he had left his mother for an even tougher cookie; Aurora took charge at once. She spirited Abraham away and installed him in the refurbished Western-style Corbusier folly on Cabral Island. ‘Unfortunately you are too tall and broad in the shoulder,’ she told him, ‘so my poor dead Daddy’s little suits won’t fitto on you. Tonight, but, you will not require suits.’ Both of my parents would afterwards call this their true wedding night, in spite of earlier events on high among sacks of Malabar Gold, because of what happened,
    after the fifteen-years-young spice-trade heiress entered the bedchamber of her lover the twenty-one-years-older duty manager dressed in nothing but moonlight, with garlands of jasmine and lily-of-the-valley plaited (by old Josy) in and out of the loose black hair which hung down behind her like a monarch’s cloak, reaching almost to the cool stone floor over which her bare feet moved so lightly that for a moment the awestruck Abraham thought she was flying;
    after their second spice-fragrant love-making, in which the older man surrendered completely to the will of the younger woman, as though his ability to make choices had been exhausted by the consequences of the act of choosing her;
    after Aurora murmured her secrets in his ear, because for many years I have confessed only to a hole, but now, my husband, I can tell you everything , the murder of her grandmother, the old woman’s dying curse, everything, and Abraham without flinching accepted his fate; banished from the fellowship of his own