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.