It was not to be. Rouse was, by this time, a hard man, impossible to reason with, let alone love, and his abrasive manner drove Pelham Bartlett away from the Ananthanarayanan family. More to the point, it drove her out of Australia; she soon married an American businessman, who then moved to Kyoto. Rouse insisted that Pelham Bartlett’s departure did not bother him, as he had felt nothing for the woman when she was present. Nevertheless, he was keenly aware that his friend was suffering from her absence all over again, and this brought on a nervous breakdown that landed Rouse in Sacred Heart Hospital. “You didn’t want her around anyway,” Rouse wrote to Govindan from the hospital. “She had harmed you. Don’t you remember? Why would you want to keep ties with someone like that? I must confess I don’t understand you. But I am sorry if I have harmed you.”
After six months, Rouse was released, and he returned to the Ananthanarayanan home, where he began to work as a driver for the family. When Rouse heard in 1940 that his former girlfriend had died in a car accident, he was at the horse track with Govindan Ananthanarayanan. “A driver killed her?” Rouse reportedly said. “That evens the score.” He took off his driver’s cap, placed it over his heart, and lowered his head. “My failure to understand human cruelty,” he said, and began to laugh.
COUNTRY LIFE IS THE ONLY LIFE WORTH LIVING; COUNTRY LOVE IS THE ONLY LOVE WORTH GIVING
WE SET OFF FOR THE STATION THAT MORNING, LILY AND I. I know it pains you to hear this, my dear wife, but I feel I must tell the tale forward. You and I are one, in ways that we once discussed with regularity and even celebrated when you were my wife and I was your husband. Then we were divided. I am sorry, for I prefer love to war, but the truth is standing in the middle of the room and so I will not ignore it. The truth is your absence and Lily’s presence. I say “presence” euphemistically, when what I mean is something more specific. She is standing here, her dress not quite covering it.
We had been living in the city together for a little less than a year, Lily and I. Most of our time was spent in an apartment, exercising one another and dreaming of the day when we might start again in a finer place. I hadn’t known exactly what I meant by that, “a finer place,” until the postman delivered a letter written to Lily by an elderly friend of her parents, one Mrs. Pritchard. This fine woman had heard from Lily’s parents that Lily was looking for a place to spend part of the summer, and she was writing with a suggestion that took the form of a description of a village, and a road in it, and a house on that road that sounded like nothing so much as perfection. You and I once spent a summer in a village, but it was a dingy thing, with narrow paths that made movement through it nearly impossible. This village, as communicated by Mrs. Pritchard, sounded in me like a high note. Lily did not agree, but she did not have to; I heard her agreement in her silence.
At the train station on the morning of our departure, we were ringed by the denizens of the city that we had not, up until that very moment, met, and a more decrepit and disreputable crew I cannot imagine: There was a blind boy who could say only the words “more” and “money,” a crippled girl who tried to stay faithful to her innocent girlhood but was betrayed by the voluptuous flowering of her figure, and a man with a maimed hand who looked at the girl with a rude hunger that left no doubt as to the eventual destination of the hand. The deformities, both of body and of soul, came out of every corner of the station, and they reminded me of the small cottage in the seaside town where you and I stayed on our honeymoon. That was our village, and it was tolerable only because we went there with a hope that protected us from its reality. Do you remember? There were noises in the walls as something scuttled from left to right and top to bottom, like a text we were afraid to read. That was how I expressed it at the time, and you laughed and said that was too beautiful a conceit to waste on such an ugly sight. “The ugly is a component of the beautiful,” I said. You agreed. You were wrong, though you could not have known it at the time. The train station stands as proof of your error.
The sight of these half-human monsters huddling together beneath the vaulting archways of the station — if the founding architect only knew the ill use to which his wondrous creation would one day be put — sickened me at first, then angered me, and then, finally, struck me stone dumb. What can you say about a species that is so susceptible to the blackening effects of a city, other than that it is weak to the point of rot? It was left to Lily to remark upon the place, once we had boarded the train and were safely on our way. “Beastly,” she said, letting the single word hang like the man’s maimed hand. After a short pause, I took up her thought. “Oh, Lily,” I said, “I am so happy to be traveling with you into the country. It is in a rural setting that a man’s soul — or a woman’s, for that matter — can truly flower. And so I will lavish my attentions on the petals of those flowers.” Whether I said this in so many words or said fewer and imagined the rest does not matter. We were so close at that moment that speech and thought were one and the same. You, too, have experienced this closeness with me, wife, so you will be able to imagine. Lily and I were brought together by our idea of our union, which seems like either a paradox or a tautology but is in fact both. I took Lily’s hand, which was so warm with desire that it seemed to heat the air around us, and pressed it to my breast, and we listened to the click and the clack of the train on the rails and at length fell into faultless sleep.
Time passed. The sun stretched out the shadows of trees, which lay across the tracks like bridges. We crossed under one of those bridges and then the train shuddered to a stop. We were in the village where Mrs. Pritchard lived and where, more important, her house stood amid woods, meadows, and even a little stream that wound through those woods and meadows. I had retained nearly every detail from Mrs. Pritchard’s letter; that fine old woman, though her shaky script betrayed her age, had an appreciation of the power of description that rivaled my own. Lily went out ahead of me, carrying our luggage — we had managed to get most of our clothes in a single hard wheel case, although there were two other small bags that held my books and journals — and I followed. From behind I could read the sentence of her figure (particularly that which lay within parentheses). My mouth began to water. I felt a tremor in my thumb and index finger. Should I feel shame for that reaction? A man’s hunger for a woman is part of nature, wife. In my time with you, I frequently saw the disclosed forms of other women. There is no point in apologizing for this. It was one of the imperfections of our union. I have forgiven you for your part in it, and I know that you will extend me the same courtesy. Since I have been with Lily, I have seen only one other woman in her natural state, and she was seventeen, and as such represented a false promise of fullness and flexibility. Her name was Mona, and she was my student in a course I had designed that sought to communicate the intimate link between poetry and nature. She was a good student, Mona, and she came by one afternoon to discuss the heartlessness of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.” The topic undid us so completely that we had found ourselves, quite by accident, in my apartment, where I first checked to make sure that Lily was not present and then did my level best to direct the conversation toward those “orbs of light and shade” and those “wild and wandering cries” and away from the inevitable. I was not the teacher I hoped to be, though, because when I paused midway through what I thought was a rather convincing discourse, I saw Mona on the bed and her clothing in a heap on the ground beside it. Her hands were rounded in a kind of cage at the tops of her thighs. She opened the cage.