The Narrow Road to the Deep North

by Richard Flanagan

  Dorrigo’s life at the King of Cornwall, which was measured in hours and which could have added up to no more than a few weeks, seemed to be the only life he had ever lived. Amy used expressions such as When we return to our real lives, When the dream ends, but only that life, those moments with her, seemed real to him. Everything else was an illusion over which he passed as a shadow, unconnected, unconcerned, only angry when that other life, that other world wished to make claim on him, demanding that he act or think about something, anything other than Amy.

  His army life, which once consumed him, now failed even to interest far less excite him. When he looked at patients they were just windows through which he saw her and only her. Every cut, every incision, every procedure and suture he made seemed clumsy, awkward, pointless. Even when he was away from her he could see her, smell her musky neck, gaze into her bright eyes, hear her husky laugh, run his finger down her slightly heavy thigh, gaze at the imperfect part in her hair; her arms ever so slightly filled with some mysterious feminine fullness, neither taut nor flabby but for him wondrous. Her imperfections multiplied every time he looked at her and thrilled him ever more; he felt as an explorer in a new land, where all things were upside down and the more marvellous for it.

  She lacked the various conformities that made Ella so admired and drew comparisons with various Hollywood stars; Amy was far too much flesh and blood for that. When he was away from her he tried remembering more of her perfect imperfections, how they aroused him and delighted him, and the more he dwelled on them, the more there were. That beauty spot above her lip, her entrancing snaggle-toothed smile, the slight awkwardness in her gait—a pensive roll that was almost a swagger, as though she were trying to control the uncontrollable, to pretend to being demure without also exposing something at once feminine and animal. She was always inadvertently tugging at her blouse, pulling it up over her cleavage, as though if she didn’t her breasts might at any moment escape.

  He would remember how the more she tried to evade and cover her nature, the more it rioted in the gaze this brought. She was a moving paradox, at once embarrassed and yet excited by the very thing she oozed. When she laughed she cackled, when she moved she swung, and for him there was always about her the smell of musk and the erratic breath of sea wind puffing through the hotel’s verandah and softly rattling the open French doors. In bed she sometimes ran her hand over parts of her body and stared at her hips or thighs in strange perplexity: her body was as unanswerable a mystery to her as it was to him. She described herself in terms of a faulty construction—the shape of her legs, the width of her waist, the shape of her eyes.

  Her feeling for him he at first refused to believe. Later he dismissed it as lust, and finally, when he could no longer deny it, grew puzzled by its animality, its power and its scarcely believable ferocity. And if this life force sometimes felt too large and too inexplicable for a man with as low an estimate of himself as Dorrigo Evans it was also, he came to recognise, inexorable, inescapable, and overwhelming, and he surrendered himself to it.

  Desire now rode them relentlessly. They became reckless, taking any opportunity to make love, seizing shadows and minutes that might abruptly end in discovery, daring the world to see them and know them as them, partly willing it, partly wanting it, partly evading it and partly hiding it, but always thrilling in it. The ocean rising and breaking through the King of Cornwall’s thick bluestone walls; their exertions inside, slowly merging into one, bodies beading and bonding in a slither of sweat. They made love on beaches, in the ocean, and, less easily, in the Cabriolet, the street behind the King of Cornwall, over a barrel of Coopers Red in the cool retreat of the cellar, and once in the kitchen very late at night. He could not resist the undertow of her.

  After lovemaking he was haunted by her face, expressionless, so close, so far away; looking up into him and through him, beyond him. At such times, she would seem lost in some trance. The eyebrows so definite, so strong; the burning blue of her eyes, silver in the night light, seemingly not focused on him but staring straight at him; her slightly opened lips, not smiling, only the gentlest of slowing pants that he would lean down and turn his cheek to, in order to feel their slightest breeze on his skin, so he might know that this was not a vision, but her, her in bed with him. And he knew not joy, or pride, but amazement. In the darkened hotel room he thought he had never seen anything so beautiful.

  Once, when Keith had gone to town early for a meeting, she came to his room in the morning. They chatted, and when she went to leave they embraced, kissed and fell to the bed. With her legs spilling over the bed and him half-standing, half-crouching, he entered her. And when he looked down at her face she seemed not to be there or even conscious of him.

  Her eyes grew brighter and brighter but were strangely unfocused. Her lips were parted just enough for her shallow pants to escape, a short, repetitive cascade of sighs in part response to him and in part to some ecstasy that was hers alone. It frightened him how lost her face seemed to be. As though what she really sought from him was this obliteration, an oblivion, and their passion could only lead to her erasure from the world. As if he was only ever a vehicle for her to ride to another place, so distant, so unknown to him that a dull resentment momentarily rose in him. And as she began violently clutching and pulling him into her, he understood that his own body was somehow making the same journey. Did she think all this was him? he wondered. It was not him. It was a mystery to him also.

  So it went on, that never-ending summer that ended like a joyriders’ car smash on the Sunday night Keith told Amy he knew, and that he had always known.

  23

  KEITH MULVANEY BEGAN at the beginning, and it was clear nothing had escaped him. He drove even more slowly than he copyrightly did, for with the blackout laws there were no streetlamps, no visible houselights, and all car headlights were covered with slotted shades.

  I know, he said. I’ve always known.

  The car floor shuddered beneath Amy’s feet. She tried to lose herself in its vibrations but the vibrations just seemed to be saying to her DORRY—DORRY—DORRY. She did not dare look at her husband, instead staring straight ahead into the night.

  From the first, he said. When he came to the bar asking for me.

  Miles seemed to pass between sentences. The car seemed to be lost in an endless, rattling blackness. She was trying very hard to push it out of her mind but all she could feel was the sadness emanating from Keith, a sadness that seemed to empty the world. Though the car shuddered and thrummed, all about her seemed only silence, solitude and the most terrible stillness. She had only ever known him like this when his beloved sister had died of tuberculosis the summer before.

  Perhaps this, too, is a form of grief, she thought. There is no joy, no wonder, no laughter, no energy, no light, no future. Hope and dreams are cold ash from a dead fire. There is neither conversation nor argument. For, in truth, what is there to be said? It is death. The death of love, thought Amy. He sat there, leaning ahead, so many split sticks of despair protruding out of a sack of ill-fitting clothes: brown Oxford bags, green twill shirt, a muddy woollen tie.

  I thought that was cheeky, Keith said.

  Amy Mulvaney objected as best she could without telling the truth, that the truth was there was nothing going on then. She said that they were at that time strangers, save for one chance meeting—at the bookshop, which, as she reminded Keith, she had told him about, which, after a fashion, she had—where nothing had happened.

  Nothing? Keith Mulvaney said. He was as ever smiling, a smile that horrified her and shamed her in equal measure. Your stomach didn’t bunch up? he continued. You didn’t feel somehow excited or nervous talking to him?

  Not wishing to lie, she said nothing, knowing that silence was a damning admission but that words were somehow worse.

  You see, I know you, Amy. And I know you were.

  How could he know? she wondered. How could he have known when they hadn’t? And yet he did.

  I
f he had been a different man, she might have thought he was bluffing. But Keith Mulvaney was guileless. He had an unfortunate relationship with truth that she had made herself lose since meeting Dorrigo. She never said the first thing that came to her, but rather the third or fourth, and then only after it had been tested and checked for faults and flaws. But when Keith spoke, he said exactly what was on his mind. He had known, he had always known, and he had carried his terrible knowledge as he did so much else, silently, patiently, uncomplainingly until that night, returning from the Robertsons’, something had opened up in the blackness in front of him and made it impossible for him to carry it any longer.

  Their marriage had remained comfortable over the summer—perhaps, when Amy thought about it, it had grown even more so. It felt like the Edwardian horsehair furniture he had refused her requests to replace after their marriage: sagging, comfortable if one nestled in the soft spots and avoided the hard. He was unselfish and he was kind. But he was not Dorrigo. And she was finding it more and more difficult to delude herself that this was love. She felt their marriage withering. She returned to his presence, to their bed, with its thinning yellow corduroy cover she folded back each hot night, amicably, quietly, but hiding an inner life, a turmoil, that took her elsewhere.

  Sometimes she had the strongest urge to fall to her knees and confess. Her guilt she could live with of a day. But of a night, early in the hours of the morning, it filled her stomach and pressed so hard on her chest that she had to slow her breathing to bear its crushing weight. She did not want his absolution, only the purity of reconciling her truth and her life, and, having done so, of standing up, turning away and leaving forever.

  24

  IF AMY HAD enjoyed the attentions, the gifts and the flattery of the ageing, bearish publican in the first few months that she worked at the King of Cornwall—perhaps even unconsciously encouraged them—she had also begun to be disturbed by them. One night, after the bar had closed, she ended up with Keith alone. She did so because she thought it would offer the right moment when she could tell him kindly that his silly attentions must end, that nothing would or could come of them. But instead of that happening she found herself in a labyrinth of caresses and touches. She did not know when or how to escape him, and finally it just seemed easier and wiser to go along with it all, and wait for another moment to tell him.

  And one thing, as they sometimes do, led not to another, but shattered a world.

  After the abortion, when guilt took hold of Keith and his mind turned to marriage, Amy was too undone and too lost to make any decisions, and Keith worked assiduously at bringing her so fully into his world and that of the hotel that she had little time for anything else. Perversely, his proposal of marriage—in its certainty and its respectability—seemed the only way out of the mire. She told herself that their differences, which seemed so pronounced, were perhaps really no greater or less than those of any other couple.

  And perhaps they weren’t. She came to discover a gentle, generous, caring man. She had for the first time in her life security and moderate wealth. And in deference to the difference in their ages—some twenty-seven years—Keith accorded her a certain freedom to come and go as she wished, and she was not ungrateful. No, it was not hellish.

  She knew there was much to like about Keith. He could be easy company. He made sure the hotel was in good repair, provided well for her, kept the fires loaded with wood in winter, the kitchen with ice in summer. He cared for her. She felt she existed as the hotel did for him, as a part of his life with needs that must be serviced, in all of which he had an interest but no fundamental passion. The emptiness of their life he kept at bay with industry, working hard at the hotel, and in what little spare time remained in his capacity as secretary of several sporting clubs and as an alderman.

  But Amy wanted more than maintenance, comfort, split kindling and iced milk; more than a fading yellow corduroy bed cover falling neatly into creases worn into the fabric by years of identical folding back. She wanted disrepair, adventure, uncertainty. Not comfort, but the inferno.

  Sometimes of a night he would lie at her back, caress her hips, her thighs. She would feel his hand on her breast and think of a fat huntsman spider. Then those same fingers would be between her legs, seeking to pleasure her. She never responded. She found that the best way to deal with his attentions was to do nothing. She neither resisted nor accepted. When he placed one leg here, when he entered her there, she just went with him, saying nothing. But always she refused his kisses. Her mouth was her own.

  Sometimes this enraged him, and he would grab her by the chin, bring her face round to his and roll his lips on hers, his tongue snaking back and forth over her clenched mouth—she imagined it must be like licking a door lock—and then he would let her face fall out of his hands and sometimes moan, a strange, terrible, animal lowing.

  Over time, he came to accept her compliance on her terms. At the end, she would throw off the bedclothes and, without a word to him, without a gesture, stride to the bathroom in sullen anger.

  It hurt her to hurt him, but she felt it somehow truthful and necessary. And if he was left feeling like dirt, slime, a disgusting vile thing, there was reason for it, strange, contradictory reason. She at once wanted him to know and know everything, and equally she would do anything in her power to keep her affair with Dorrigo secret from him and not hurt him so. She wanted a crisis that would end it all, she wanted nothing to change; she needed to provoke him and desperately desired that he never be provoked.

  When she returned she would never touch him or talk to him, but lie in bed with her back turned to him. He would lean across and try to kiss her forehead over and over, perhaps in a panic, perhaps wanting some sign, some affirmation that he was not mistaken, that she did love him, that she did feel for him as he did for her. But there was none.

  Amy would feel his body behind her short of breath, and she would know that love is not goodness, and nor is it happiness. She wasn’t necessarily or always unhappy with Keith, nor were her feelings about Dorrigo always or exactly those of happiness. For Amy, love was the universe touching, exploding within one human being, and that person exploding into the universe. It was annihilation, the destroyer of worlds.

  And as she lay in bed feeling Keith silently sobbing behind her back, she understood that love does not end until all its power is exorcised in misery and cruelty and obliteration as much as in goodness and joy. And every night as she lay there, she could feel rolling in her stomach shards of broken glass—cutting, cutting, cutting.

  25

  THERE WAS NO one to whom Amy could talk of such things. Love is public, one of her friends had said during the evening of playing five hundred that she and Keith were now returning from, or it’s not love. Love is shared with others or it dies.

  Keith and Amy played cards with the Robertsons on the first Sunday night of each month, and they had been discussing a recent scandal in which a well-known lawyer had left his wife for a doctor’s daughter. This had led to several stories of lurid abandonments and contemptible adulteries. Invariably, the sympathy of the table was with the partner who was left. The spouse who found another was a figure of contempt, of mockery and exorcism. Mostly exorcism. A casting out.

  Amy longed for that, for its dramatic finality. But instead things bled. They bled and bled and would not stop bleeding. There would be no dramatic end, she realised, only a slow withering, like Keith’s sister’s wretched end with tuberculosis. Bleeding and more bleeding.

  There were so many things that she wanted to ask, to know. Do you really think that? she wished to ask. Is a hidden love not love at all? Is it really doomed never to exist? Does it never stop bleeding until it dies?

  She wanted to upend the card table and scatter the cards to the winds, to stand up and demand that they said what they really thought. Answer me, she wanted to say. Can a love that is not named not be love too? Could it even be a greater love? I love another man, she wanted to say to them all.
As the cards fluttered to earth, as everyone’s hand was revealed as worthless, as every point won was shown to be a pointless charade, she would tell them how wonderful this other man was, and how if she didn’t see him for another thirty years she would still love him, how she would still love him if he was dead until she was dead too.

  But instead she watched as Harry Robertson played the right bower, and he and Keith, who always played as partners, won the hand.

  Cheating is so easy, said Elsie Robertson, sweeping up the cards and shuffling the pack in readiness for the next round. It’s pathetic. You just lie and abuse trust.

  Amy thought they were talking about love. Cheating wasn’t easy, thought Amy. It was hard; so very, very hard. It wasn’t some failure of character. It just was. It wasn’t even cheating. Because if it was being true to yourself, then wasn’t the real cheating the charade you played out with your spouse? And wasn’t this, the real cheating, what the world and the Robertsons wanted and approved of?

  She waited for some sign, some insight, some words from another woman that she was not alone. But there was none. Dorrigo had told her that very afternoon that his unit was shipping out on Wednesday. And perhaps he would die, or perhaps he would live but never return to her. She thought back to what he had said about the Greeks and the Trojans—were the Greeks to win again?

  And she wondered: was hers a great love that was no love at all? And why, when she felt that she had come to exist only through another person, did she feel such a terrible solitude?