Running in the Family Read Online Free Page B

January issue featured the upcoming events for the year. One year he listed, under October 3rd, Hayley and Kenny’s Annual Fire. This blatant but accurate reference to the way fire insurance was used to compensate for sagging trade was not appreciated and he was sued.
    The Gasanawa group tried to take in all the races. In December they drove down to the Galle Gymkhana, stopping on the way to order oysters and have a swim at Ambalangoda. “Sissy,” Francis’ sister, “was always drowning herself because she was an exhibitionist.” The men wore tweed, the women wore their best crinolines. After the races they would return to Ambalangoda, pick up the oysters “which we swallowed with wine if we lost or champagne if we won.” Couples then paired off casually or with great complexity and danced in a half-hearted manner to the portable gramophone beside the cars. Ambalangoda was the centre for devil dances and exorcism rites, but this charmed group was part of another lost world. The men leaned their chins against the serene necks of the women, danced a waltz or two, slid oysters into their partner’s mouths. The waves on the beach collected champagne corks. Men who had lost fortunes laughed frantically into the night. A woman from the village who was encounteredcarrying a basket of pineapples was persuaded to trade that for a watch removed from a wrist. Deeper inland at midnight, the devil dances began, drums portioned the night. Trucks carrying horses to the next meet glared their headlights as they passed the group by the side of the road. The horses, drummers, everyone else, seemed to have a purpose. The devil dances cured sickness, catarrh, deafness, aloneness. Here the gramophone accompanied a seduction or an arousal, it spoke of meadows and “little Spanish towns” or “a small hotel,” a “blue room.”
    A hand cupped the heel of a woman who wished to climb a tree to see the stars more clearly. The men laughed into their tumblers. They all went swimming again with just the modesty of the night. An arm touched a face. A foot touched a stomach. They could have almost drowned or fallen in love and their lives would have been totally changed during any one of those evenings.
    Then, everyone very drunk, the convoy of cars would race back to Gasanawa in the moonlight crashing into frangipani, almond trees, or slipping off the road to sink slowly up to the door handles in a paddy field.

TROPICAL GOSSIP

    “Darling, come here quickly. There’s trouble behind the tennis court. I think Frieda’s fainted. Look—Craig is pulling her up.”
    “No, darling, leave them alone.”

    It seems that most of my relatives at some time were attracted to somebody they shouldn’t have been. Love affairs rainbowed over marriages and lasted forever—so it often seemed that marriage was the greater infidelity. From the twenties until the war nobody really had to grow up. They remained wild and spoiled. It was only during the second half of my parents’ generation that they suddenly turned to the real world. Years later, for instance, my uncle Noel would return to Ceylon as a Q.C. to argue for the lives of friends from his youth who had tried to overthrow the government.
    But earlier, during their flaming youth, this energy formed complex relationships, though I still cannot break the code of how “interested in” or “attracted” they were to each other. Truth disappears with history and gossip tells us in the end nothing of personal relationships. There are stones of elopements, unrequitedlove, family feuds, and exhausting vendettas, which everyone was drawn into, had to be involved with. But nothing is said of the closeness between two people: how they grew in the shade of each other’s presence. No one speaks of that exchange of gift and character—the way a person took on and recognized in himself the smile of a lover. Individuals are seen only in the context of these swirling social tides. It was almost impossible for