The Ivory Swing Read Online Free PDF Page A

know I want to go to India. I would like us to camp in the middle of a bazaar.”
    â€œIt won’t be like that,” he said apprehensively “Not where we’ll be. It’s very isolated, and I’ll have to be away on field work a lot.”
    â€œPerhaps you’re right, then. More isolation I can do without. I’ll get an apartment in Montreal.”
    â€œBut then,” he said quickly, “we could probably do a lot of the travelling together. And just think of the children, what an experience like that —”
    â€œYes. I ought to be thinking of the children.”
    If she was contemplating splitting the children’s world in two, if she was really about to smash things up like the unregenerate bitch she was then this was the best time, the kindest way.
    â€œThere are risks for the children,” he concluded. “Loneliness. And disease. That’s a major anxiety. Perhaps, after all, it would be better … I’d be much freer … to get the research done, I mean.”
    â€œYou would rather go alone then?”
    Alone, he thought fearfully. Suppose when she went to Montreal (on parole as she put it) it was not just the city she lusted after? Suppose she saw someone …? He looked down the rest of his years as down a cheerless cave tunnelling into dark nothingness. Yet there were people willing to add warmth and little tapestries of comfort. (Susan, for instance, would be waiting for him, lying in wait, though he must not think of that. It was shameful the way he could not always predict when she would cavort across his thoughts like a will-o’-the-wisp.)
    â€œYou would really rather stay? In Montreal?” he asked.
    â€œI can’t decide.” She was afraid of loss. Afraid of the irreversible.
    â€œAs you wish.” He was carefully neutral, he would never coerce.
    He had always thought of himself as someone who would stay married to one woman for life. Especially when she had once crackled into his field of vision vibrantly as a lick of sunlight through a turning prism. He had not anticipated this slow fading, the light dwindling like a dream of waking.
    India presented itself as Time Out. A space — empty, and yet busy with difference. If she were going to leave him he would have time to prepare. He could simply lose himself in work, produce a book within the year. He saw its covers edged with black, as on a bereavement card.
    â€œI suppose I would get used to being alone,” he conceded.
    She tasted the permanent absence of David as something sharp and sudden and bitter.
    â€œBut really,” she said urgently, “I think I should go. The children … it’s not right they should miss out on such a —”
    â€œI agree,” he said, folding her into his arms. “I couldn’t bear it if you didn’t come.”
    The children were hurtling down the cement stairway from the roof.
    â€œUgh!” cried Jonathan. “Mommy! That stuff stinks!”
    Her hands and arms were raddled with sticky remnants of intestine and flecked with wisps of feather and fluff from the plucking.
    â€œWhere are the baby eggs?” Miranda asked.
    â€œHere.”
    Jonathan looked troubled.
    â€œThis largest one was almost ready to be a baby chick,” he said somberly. “I can tell by the blood in it. It’s been killed before it even had a chance to be born.”
    â€œOh Jonathan, please! Things are complicated enough”
    She gathered up the maze of intestines, towards which a phalanx of ants was already swarming across the polished stone bench, and set out on the path through the coconut trees to the rice paddy. The light underbrush growing on both sides of the track sprawled across its edges. She fought to keep her fear of snakes under control, ramming it down in her mind to a tight little knot of alertness, her eyes darting back and forth across the ground. This was probably why she did not notice