He couldn’t find her.Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 20:03:07 Boxid IA40055507 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier The curtains wound themselves around him, but he fought free, for somewhere in this house, waiting for him, combing her long hair and singing a sweet song, was his mother, whom he had lost so long ago, whom he mourned every day, and to whose bosom his dreaming self hastened to return. In the dream Sir Darius was once again a young boy in short trousers, and the mansion was a magnet drawing him forward across its perfect lawns, past the topiary hedges and the ornamental fountain pullulating with figures from ancient Greece and Rome, the hirsute, lecherous gods, the naked heroes with their upraised swords, the serpents, the ravished women, the severed heads, the centaurs. White curtains were blowing at the open French windows of the great house’s orangery wing. Whenever he dreamed, he dreamed of England: England as a pure, white Palladian mansion set upon a hill above a silver winding river, with a spreading parterre of brilliant green lawns edged by ancient oaks and elms, and the classic geometry of flower beds orchestrated by unseen master gardeners into a four-seasons symphony of colour. It wasn’t just the great San Francisco earthquake of 1984: the 1980s had beenīutton-back leather chesterfield sofa in his Apollo Bunder library with his eyes closed and a cut-glass tumbler and a decanter of whisky by his side and dreaming. I could be your official tour photographer. She said, You don’t know how alike you are, you two, except that he’s going down for the third time and you’re coming up for air. She said she was disoriented, confused, she needed time to think, all of that. It had been their story now, at long last, it was mine too. For too long it had been a case of Ormus and Vina sailing along with Rai clinging to the side of their racing yacht. I was no longer an occasional snack, a side dish.

In those days before the tour she at last admitted what I’d waited my whole life to hear, namely that I had become a factor, a problem.

The ground beneath her feet rushdie