Love Over Scotland - Alexander Hanchett Smith [84]
had ever taught them how to do calculations like that in school. There were so many things that were just not being taught any more. Poetry, for example. Children were no longer made to learn poetry by heart. And so the deep rhythms of the language, its inner music, was lost to them, because they had never had it embedded in their minds. And geography had been abandoned too – the basic knowledge of how the world looked, simply never instilled; all in the name of educational theory and of the goal of teaching children how to think. But what, she wondered, was the point of teaching them how to think if they had nothing to think about? We were held together by our common culture, by our shared experience of literature and the arts, by scraps of song that we all knew, by bits of history half-remembered and half-understood but still making up what it was that we thought we were. If that was taken away, we were diminished, cut off from one another because we had nothing to share. The light thrown out by the Tilley lamp was soft and forgiving, a light that did not fight with the darkness but nudged it aside gently, just for a few feet, and then allowed it back. Looking out through her open door, she saw that here and there in the village other lights had been lit. In one of the houses a kitchen was illuminated and she could make out the figures within: a woman standing, holding a child on her hip; a man in the act of drinking something from a cup or beaker; the moving shadow of fan-blades. She had yet to adjust to where she was, and it seemed to her to be strange that the people she was looking at through the window were outlaws – contemporary pirates. How peculiar it was that ordinary life should take place in spite of this sense of being beyond the law. She would get used to that, of course; anthropologists in New Guinea came to accept even head-hunting after a while.
The house servant, who had gone off to his hut shortly before dusk fell, had left a meal for her in the kitchen: a bowl of noodles, a plate of stewed vegetables and a pot containing pieces of grilled chicken. Domenica was not particularly hungry; she always lost her appetite in the heat, but now she tackled the meal almost for want of anything else to do. It was, she found, tastier than 176 By the Light of the Tilley Lamp
she had expected, and she ate virtually everything prepared for her. Then, sitting in an old planter’s chair, she read for two hours by the light of her Tilley lamp.
It was nine o’clock when she went to bed. Taking the lamp with her, she made her way through to her bedroom, the only other room in the small house. Above her bed, suspended from an exposed rafter, hung a voluminous mosquito net. It was a comfort for her, a luxury, the only means of ensuring a night untroubled by stinging insects.
Sitting on the edge of her bed, she blew out the lamp’s flame and slipped behind the net. The bed was narrow, but not uncomfortable, and it seemed to her that the sheets had been freshly laundered, for they were crisp and sweet-smelling. She wondered who had gone to all this trouble. It was unlikely that the pirates themselves – crude types, she suspected – would have bothered to ensure her comfort in this way, and if they had not done this, then it could only be Edward Hong who was behind it. In fact, the more she thought of it the clearer it became to her. In Edward Hong M.A. (Cantab.), she had a protector, a man who cared for her welfare. It was a reassuring feeling, a feeling that can normally be expected to induce in many single women a warm feeling of contentment. And Domenica, for all that she was a distinguished anthropologist, was a woman; and what woman would not be pleased to know that there was a lithe young man