“She isn’t here yet,” Edmund said, swallowing a mouthful.

“I wonder what she’ll be wearing,” Albert said. He was a trim, dapper young man, who affected a monocle.

“Awfully hot, isn’t it?” Edmund said.

“If she wears anything like last year I’ll simply fall at her feet.”

They looked at each other with displeasure.

“You’re as besotted as I am,” Albert said.

Edmund broke off more cake.

Albert drank his tea, squeezing his eye around his monocle. “Probably won’t be either of us. Almost certainly. Except women do such odd things. That’s all that gives me hope.”

If Mrs. Simpson surveyed as from a pediment, Mrs. Laird was suggestive of a large ornamental gate. Impressive; attractive even, if you could see the attraction in heavy iron, manipulated by supreme technical skill. Violet was always trying to look past her, to get a proper view of things. She had given up on being properly seen herself. She hoped only to offer glimpses from behind the bars.

“Do you think they’re only flirting?” she said eventually. “Or is it love?” The band had finished and were preparing to start again. The couple were still holding each other, smiling and talking, his head sunk toward hers, hair hanging lankly, sipping at her forehead.

“Oh, one or the other, I expect,” Edmund said, his eyelashes beating, and his Adam’s apple dipping in his throat.

The band started, and the couple whirled away. Violet followed the woman’s red wrap as it licked around the man, like a flame licking at meat.

More people were coming to watch, and Violet was now standing at the edge of the wooden floor. She and Edmund were very near together. They were both aware of it, both watching the couple, not daring to take their eyes off them. Their hearts were fast, as though it were they who were dancing. The red wrap flew about, and the man and woman laughed as they whirled, their hands clamped tight together, disappearing behind other dancers and then appearing again.

Edmund stared blinkingly at the dancers again. He was the happiest he had ever been, and he needed to put an end to it. If the moment were drawn out, if he and Violet were to talk, he knew he would spoil it somehow. If only he could get away! He veered his head and saw Mrs. Simpson a few yards off. His and Violet’s fingertips were still touching. What on earth had made him do it? His great-uncle had been at Waterloo. Perhaps this was the last dreg of heroism left over. For a while longer he kept his fingertips there. Then he fluttered them in temporary, yearning farewell. He hoped Violet would understand that this was what the flutter meant. But oh God, he had not removed them. He had fluttered for nothing.

Violet knew it was a mistake, letting Edmund Bliss hold her hand. Not holding her hand⁠—only cradling her fingertips. It was most unlike him, yet like him all the same. This was how it would be, she told herself, to be married to him: a vague, tentative, fingertipping sort of love. If she ever married Edmund, it would mean she had become vague and tentative herself. It didn’t bear thinking about. She continued thinking about it as she searched for her mother, stopping to gaze all about her and seeing the couple from the marquee, the man with the wet dark hair and the cap that clapped at the seat of his trousers, and the woman with the red wrap that licked. The cap was placid on his head now, and the wrap lay quiescent. Violet saw that the man and woman were also altered: gentle, talking closely and quietly, him with his hands in his pockets, thumbs stretched on the outside, and her with arms lightly folded, head tilted back. Violet wondered about them again, with that guilty, jealous ache.

Violet did not think of Edmund being carried away. Already this buried hook of pain was what remained of him. She ran and seized the woman, falling on her knees too. The woman’s shouts pulsed into her chest and Violet began to sob, gripping tighter, squeezing her tears against the woman’s neck. She heard someone saying her name and stared up through the strands of the woman’s hair at Albert in his mustard waistcoat, stricken, his monocle trapped and blurred in his eye. The woman shouted again into her chest, wrestling in her grip, and Violet put her mouth to her ear, whispering. “Was it love?” she said. “Please, tell me, please, was it love?”

Oh, I don’t know. Those voices are remorseful, too⁠—they’re voices of regret. In any case, when we write novels, we can’t choose sides. We have to be on everyone’s side⁠—the woman’s, the man’s, the child’s. That’s what I find marvelous about novels, anyway⁠—that they allow us to hear everyone.

I suppose that character was a way of exploring what it is when one’s life is one’s art. But her extreme asceticism, the way she rejects whatever doesn’t serve her art⁠—that’s not me at all. I don’t know if it’s obvious from reading that book, but I hate the Cheffe’s intensity⁠—the way, for instance, she astounds the family she works for, laying out meals for them that they have absolutely no way to appreciate, or even to comprehend. And her intensity makes her totally unreliable, or at least means she can’t operate at her highest level. I hate all fanaticism, actually. What I aspire to in my own life is a certain kind of harmony. I don’t subscribe to the idea that we’d write better in a cave, alone⁠—quite the opposite. When it comes to writing, one has to live as much as one can.

[...] She’d always assumed her mother was averse to abstract or speculative thought, but she became doubtful of this assumption now as she remembered how often she’d seen her mother reading in Tamil when she was younger, newspapers, magazines, novels, and biographies, anything she could get her hands on. Maybe, it struck her, the issue all these years had been purely linguistic, maybe her mother had shut down her attempts at conversation only because they were expressed in a language that she could, at best, speak haltingly, a language in which she inevitably appeared less intelligent than she really was.

[...] The obvious issues with her outfits started coming up, that her bra straps were visible beneath the straps of her tank top, that the pants she wore when going out were too low-rise, but what bothered her mother often had less to do with how revealing her clothes were than with the strange ideas of style they seemed to involve, for example the ripped, intentionally distressed jeans she’d begun wearing, which her mother found especially offensive. Her mother would claim the jeans made her look poor, like she didn’t have anyone to take care of her, and her insistence that what her mother found ugly or ridiculous was in fact stylish only seemed to confirm her sense that her daughter was drifting away from her, falling under the sway of powerful, obscure, occult influences in the outside world. The only clothing her mother was still buying for her by the time she graduated from college was underwear⁠—maybe she assumed there was no such thing as style when it came to underwear⁠—and even after Navini had started working full-time her mother would furtively inspect her bras and panties whenever she did the laundry, taking note of all the fraying pairs she saw and then going out later to buy replacements, leaving them for Navini to find on her bed or dresser. Navini had found the heart to halt this practice only after the end of her first year in New York, confessing finally that she hardly wore the underwear her mother got her, that it wasn’t the kind of thing she or her friends wore these days. Her mother took the rejection in stride, but in retrospect the disclosure had come to seem needlessly cruel, and maybe it was for this reason, seeing all the tourists with their shopping bags in Midtown a couple of days earlier, that she’d decided to take her mother shopping during her visit, not just because it would be a way to spend time indoors, away from the cold, but also because it felt like a way of making amends, especially if it was her money they spent this time. She would help her pick out a few nice, stylish, more expensive items, some trousers and sweaters, an elegant coat to replace the ugly parka with the Scotiabank logo she’d gotten for free years before, things she could take back to Scarborough and wear proudly around the neighborhood, telling people they were gifts from her daughter in New York. It was true that her mother had never liked receiving gifts from her children, that she considered them a waste of money, but the more Navini considered it, the more drawn she was to playing the role of the hardworking, magnanimous daughter, the grown-up child who bought her working-class mother things she’d never been able to afford. She’d shared the idea hesitantly and her mother had, after some resistance, seemed genuinely moved, taking her by the hand and telling her she’d accept the gift proudly, that she’d be so happy to wear something that her daughter had bought her with her own hard-earned money.