She would have done anything then, as Nancy and George walked down the aisle together, to join the side of sweetness, certainty and innocence, knowing she could begin her life without feeling that she had done something foolish and hurtful. No matter what she decided, she thought, there would not be a way to avoid the consequences of what she had done, or what she might do now. It occurred to her, as she walked down the aisle with Jim and her mother and joined the well-wishers outside the church, where the weather had brightened, that she was sure that she did not love Tony now. He seemed part of a dream from which she had woken with considerable force some time before, and in this waking time his presence, once so solid, lacked any substance or form; it was merely a shadow at the edge of every moment of the day and night.
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 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.
When negotiation and compromise fail, then your only course is to destroy your enemy. Before they wake in the morning, have the axe in your hand.
She told stories, gave them news, went errands in the town, and on the sly lent the big girls some novel, that she always carried in the pockets of her apron, and of which the good lady herself swallowed long chapters in the intervals of her work. They were all love, lovers, sweethearts, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, postilions killed at every stage, horses ridden to death on every page, sombre forests, heartaches, vows, sobs, tears and kisses, little skiffs by moonlight, nightingales in shady groves, “gentlemen” brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous as no one ever was, always well dressed, and weeping like fountains. For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.
He is my favorite smell, my favorite sound, my favorite sight. He will never know how much I love him because he does not remember the day Darrow and I conceived him, or the months I carried him inside me, or the minute he came into the world, the moment he said his first word or took his first step, or made me laugh for the first time. I remember all those things, and all the things about them. Where the sun lay in the sky, how his father’s eyes sparkled, what I feared in those moments, what I hoped for his life to be. That season of life is a haze to him, but when I die and reflect on my life, I know I will still believe that season was the meaning of mine.
If I figured anything out in these last six years, it is this: human beings are unknowable.
You can never know a single person fully, not even yourself. Even if you think you know yourself in your safe glass castle, you don’t know yourself in the dirt. Even if you hustle and make it in the rough, you have no idea if you would thrive or die in the light of real riches, if your cleverness would outlive your desperation.
If I could have ceased what pendulums swung, or wheels turned, or water clocks emptied, then, in order to keep the Fates from marching in time, I would have, for though it is what a boy naturally wishes when he fears change will come upon what he loves and take it away, a man remembers it, too, and in his heart wishes the same when all around him he feels only loss, loss that has been his companion for some time, and promises to remain at his side.
“No, Plymouth would suit me well enough,” I said, grinning at his understandable misperception.
“The air is fresher, for one. A view of the sea would suit me, but not too near a view.”
The picture unfolded itself still further. “A modest white-painted cottage, a little orchard, perhaps even a wife, if she tolerates my day-dreaming. I should call it Hilltop Cottage. There would be vines and honeysuckle, and perhaps some fine oaks about.
I should like enough patients to balance my books, and sufficient that I may be of some service to the townsfolk, but not so many that they interfere with my writing. Does that seem unreasonable?”
“I think you are better suited to the sea than you realise.”
“And I am content that this will be my first and last voyage. I have not been truly happy at any time since we set sail. If I am not seasick, I am cold. If I am not cold, I am exhausted. When I am none of those things, I am frightened. Yet if there is one part of it that I shall not regret, it is our acquaintance.”
“It is not every friend that drills into another friend’s head.”
“Human affairs would be curious indeed, if that were the custom.”
His marriage was a maze nobody had ever mapped. An infinity of habit and hurt and betrayal, down which Ina and he wandered separately, meeting occasionally in the children.
Were you in love with her?
The question is in a way meaningless, she knows, but one must ask. Love in such situations is rarely real. Sex is the engine, exalting and ruining people, sex and frustration. Love is what people believe is worth the path of devastation.