These were not the jejune ecstasies of pimpled youth. We led one another to the winding heart of the eternal rose itself. O Mnemosyne, paint for me once more the fine bone china of her skin that afternoon with its film of perspiration; the wetness of her parted lips; the pungent shag tobacco of her nether hair.
And then?
The time until my departure for India was ebbing like the tide that would float my ship out of its harbour. I surrendered to this larger current. Out of fear? Perhaps. It was impossible for me to stay. I lacked the passionate courage, I lacked the determination to please myself, I lacked the knowledge of my own heart that would have made me a different man and might have granted me a different fate.
In age, I have come to share the fatalism of the Mussulmans, to believe, as they do, that the tortuous paths of each man’s destiny have been inscribed since Creation in the infinite Book of the Almighty. On its secret pages are written the place of each man’s birth, the travails of his life, the names of his enemies, the number of his children, the manner and the hour appointed for his death. Each year I pass in ignorance the future anniversary of my final day. I offer prayers to the infinite mercy of this Creator, who spares us the knowledge of our destinies, who, in denying us choice, takes upon Himself the authorship of our sins. Inshallah
That I would be the best scholar of my generation; that I would be distracted by indolence, that I would be parted from my lover, that I would never marry, never raise children — these were preordained, shards of a future that lay in wait for me, to be lifted from the dust year by year and fitted together like an Etruscan jar.
Serena and I made no plans; we did not discuss our future. We lived each moment together as though nothing could impinge on our happiness. And then on my last night in London, she met me at the dock. The yellow moon was snagged in the rigging of a tea-clipper.
‘I would stay if you asked me,’ I told her.
Her stiff bonnet shaded her face. ‘I think you and I both know’, she said coldly, ‘that I’m not the kind of girl who asks for anything.’
When I said farewell, she showed no emotion, but promised to write to me.
The torturers of the Ottoman Caliphate pride themselves on prolonging a man’s suffering by impaling him on a sword in such a way as to cause no mortal injury. I felt this pain then: as though a rapier had been run expertly through my innards. I stayed in my cabin and wept for two days.
I have to be truthful, some part of me was glad to be separated from her: the same part that exults in solitude and the smoky light of a solitary winter evening. It has always been easier to follow this unilateral instinct, and I can see now that the pattern of my life (I am writing this alone, in an empty house, in silence) owes everything to it.
I arrived in Bombay after a journey of six weeks to find letters from Serena that had preceded me on the outward voyage of a faster ship. Her tone was warm but there was no mention of the intimacies we had enjoyed. She offered me her cordial regards.
I was poised on the edge of a strange continent, wondering inwardly whether to go on or go back. But as the weeks and miles had passed between us, the draw of my beloved had grown correspondingly weaker. At the very least, I reasoned, I must fulfil the minimum requirements of my contracted service.
I travelled by train to the eastern city of Madras to take up my post. It was a diagonal journey across the width of the subcontinent. I could see from the outset two Indias. The India I saw by day was full of the familiar reassurances of a life I knew well, but the India of dusk, of orange light settling across the flat plains behind the western ghats, the silhouettes of the spiky palmyras, was like another continent, vast and indifferent to our presence.
Those of my countrymen with whom I was stationed were uncongenial company. Belonging for the most part to the middle-ranking classes, they were willing to undergo the rigours of life in the tropics because the recompense was a pantomime of social advancement. They held dismal dinner parties where we sweltered in formal attire and ate approximations of our national dishes. Pig-sticking, whist and sleeping with prostitutes constituted the whole of their interest in their new surroundings. Sedulous in prosecuting the smallest details of their offices, they lacked the perspicacity to see the comedy of British rule in India. Ours was the folly of the cockerel who takes credit for sunrise; the vanity of the swimmer in the Thames who claims he controls the tides because they rise and fall as he does.
A map of India hung above my commode. I fell ill with malaria and in my fevered dreams confounded the shape of the country with the musky triangle of my forsworn lover.
FOUR
THE PASSAGE ENDED more suddenly than it had begun: a full stop after the last sentence and then nothing. I read it twice more on the flight, wondering who the unnamed ‘I’ was supposed to be. The character reminded me of a redoubtable Victorian explorer — a Burton, or a Livingstone — but he also resembled Patrick in various ways: the compulsive need for solitude, the self-advertising eggheadedness. He was an emotional retard too, which made me think of my father.
As prose, it wasn’t my cup of tea. The high style leaves me cold — invocations to the muses and all that stagey dialogue. Was ‘pungent shag tobacco of her nether hair’ supposed to be a turn-on? It sounded like a description of the fur on a chimpanzee.
One small detail pleased me especially, though: that unfinished monograph. When I was at school I did a project on the life cycle of the house fly. I was flattered to think that this fact had somehow stuck in Patrick’s brain. House fly, sand fly — it came to the same thing.
What struck me most about the story was Miss Eden. It seemed possible that she was a real person, a fancy-dress version of a woman Patrick had once been in love with. Her reply on the dock when the narrator makes his mealymouthed offer to stay and marry her — that sounded like something someone might have really said.
Compared with the little that was revealed about her — that she’s beautiful, passionate, and brave enough to defy convention — the hero came off pretty badly. It’s not clear why he’s so wedded to the idea of leaving for India. Doesn’t he see the risks Serena’s taken for his sake? He won’t stay unless she demands it, which is almost as odd and anachronistic as her making the first move in the seduction. There was something disingenuous about the narrator: this old chap who is haunted by a memory of a woman he says he wanted, but whom he gave up in favour of his job; a man who makes a foolish decision and can’t admit it, who passes the buck on to the Almighty. There was something pathetic and very human, too, about his making a mistake and then disclaiming all responsibility for it.
Of course, it’s possible that the narrator was going to come to his senses, jack in his job in India, and go back to the woman who loved him. But Patrick’s narrator seemed to be one of those people who are in love with the idea of love. I wondered if he would have written about Miss Eden in the same way if they had been living together for ten years and the pungent shag tobacco of her nether hair was turning up on his face soap.
Overall, I didn’t know what to make of it. Notes for a novel? A short story? A meaningless five-finger exercise? Or something else entirely?
Once when I was eight Patrick and I fell out over a game of Frisbee. My grandfather had given him a tin for cigarette butts that hung from a stake on the lawn. It was an ugly thing Grandpa had salvaged from the dump. My cousins had the idea of seeing who could knock it off with a Frisbee. No one could hit it and the game was losing its momentum when Patrick arrived, put fifty dollars in the tin and squatted behind the target like a catcher at home plate.