“Well, that’s just it, isn’t it,” Edwin says, and pours himself another glass.
3
After a month of drinking, Edwin leaves Reginald on his new farm and continues west to meet up with his brother Niall’s school friend Thomas, who entered the continent via New York City and sped west immediately. The train through the Rocky Mountains takes Edwin’s breath away. He presses his forehead to the window, like a child, and openly gapes. The beauty is overwhelming. He maybe took the drinking a little far, back in Saskatchewan. He’ll be a better man in British Columbia, he decides. The sunlight hurts his eyes.
* * *
—
After all that wild splendor, it’s an odd jolt to find himself in Victoria, in those tamed and pretty streets. There are Englishmen everywhere; he steps out of the train and the accents of his homeland surround him. He could stay here for a while, he thinks.
* * *
—
Edwin finds Thomas in a tidy little hotel in the city center, where Thomas has taken the best room, and they order tea with scones in the restaurant downstairs. They haven’t seen one another in three or four years, but Thomas has changed very little. He has the same reddish complexion he’s had since childhood, that perpetual impression of just having stepped in off the rugby pitch. He’s trying to become a member of the Victoria business community, but he’s vague on what kind of business he wants to be in.
“And how’s your brother?” Thomas asks, changing the subject. He means Niall.
“Making a go of it in Australia,” Edwin says. “He seems happy enough, judging by his letters.”
“Well, that’s more than most of us can say,” Thomas says. “No small thing, happiness. What’s he doing down there?”
“Drinking away his remittance money, I’d imagine,” Edwin says, which is ungentlemanly but also the probable truth. They have a table by the window, and his gaze keeps drifting to the street, the shop fronts, and—visible in the distance—the unfathomable wilderness, dark towering trees crowding in around the periphery. There’s something ludicrous about the idea that the wilderness belongs to Britain, but he quickly suppresses this thought, because it reminds him of his last dinner party in England.
4
The last dinner party began smoothly enough, but trouble started when the conversation turned, as ever and always, to the unimaginable splendor of the Raj. Edwin’s parents were born in India, Raj babies, English children raised by Indian nannies—“If I hear one more word about her goddamned ayah,” Edwin’s brother Gilbert muttered once, never finishing the thought—and raised on tales of an unseen Britain that, Edwin couldn’t help but suspect, had been slightly disappointing when they first laid eyes on it in their early twenties. （“More rain than I’d expected,” was all Edwin’s father would say on the matter.）
There was another family at that last dinner party, the Barretts, of similar profile: John Barrett had been a commander in the Royal Navy, and Clara, his wife, had also spent her first few years in India. Their eldest son, Andrew, was with them. The Barretts knew that British India was an inevitable detour in any evening spent with Edwin’s mother, and as old friends, they understood that once Abigail got the Raj out of her system, conversation could move on.
“You know, I so often find myself thinking of the beauty of British India,” his mother said. “The colors were remarkable.”
“The heat was rather oppressive, though,” Edwin’s father said. “That’s one thing I didn’t miss, once we came here.”
“Oh, I never found it terribly oppressive.” Edwin’s mother had a far-off look that Edwin and his brothers called her British India expression. There was a haziness about her that meant she was no longer with them; she was riding an elephant or strolling through a garden of verdant tropical flowers or being served cucumber sandwiches by her goddamned ayah or something, who knows.
“Nor did the natives,” Gilbert said mildly, “but I suppose that climate’s not for everyone.”
What inspired Edwin to speak just then? He found himself dwelling on the matter years later, at war, in the terminal horror and boredom of the trenches. Sometimes you don’t know you’re going to throw a grenade until you’ve already pulled the pin.
“Evidence suggests they feel rather more oppressed by the British than by the heat,” Edwin said. He glanced at his father, but his father seemed to have frozen, his glass halfway between the table and his lips.