Beneath the Earth by John Boyne Page B

speaking Italian, while Agatha, forgetting a wide-brimmed hat one afternoon, suffered a sunburn on her shoulders and had her purse stolen in the Piazza San Marco. They were glad to move on, continuing east to Athens, then a ship to Egypt, a cruise along the Nile and a train journey across Mesopotamia. To her surprise, Agatha had liked all these places, with their welcoming people, unfamiliar languages and colourful bazaars. She bought a set of notebooks and started to write down the sights and sounds that she observed, thinking that one day she might be able to use some of them in a novel. Might her detective not find himself sailing down the Nile one day too? And if so, might a murder not take place for him to investigate? The boat that she and Archie sailed on held an eclectic group of people and she overheard many intriguing conversations. Characters were appearing in her head in search of a story, like guests arriving at a party where they only vaguely knew the host.
    She longed to be at home where she could concentrate.
    Asia did not prove quite so much of a success. Pakistan, India, Burma, Siam: these places excited Archie but frightened her. There were so many people. Animals on the streets, the pink-tongued dogs walking with their heads bowed low, copulating in public. Children with missing limbs, enormous eyes staring at her in pitiful desperation. Men and women emptying their bowels in narrow laneways. And the heat, the heat, the heat. Always the heat. At times she felt something approaching terror.
    In the East Indies, they stayed with Major Blenchley, an old school friend of Archie’s, in a tumbledown, sprawling shack that had pretensions to respectability. Archie and the Major spent most of their days big-game shooting, leaving Agatha and the Major’s wife, Norma, together on the porch, struggling to make small talk. Norma was a wisp of a thing, lacking any confidence whatsoever, living in fear of her bloated brute of a husband whose bulbous nose was capillaried with red veins. She confided in Agatha how she had suffered eight miscarriages over eight years and seemed overly interested in Rosalind, asking questions that all seemed to have one subtext:
how could you leave her?
    There were other women there too, native women, and Agatha observed moments between the Major and several of their number that bordered on the scandalous. Seated alone with a book in their stifling lounge one afternoon she overheard him in the porch telling his man-servant that Archie had married an ugly woman with a fine body while he had married a beautiful woman with a terrible body and so they were both miserable with their lot. ‘Mrs Blenchley’s face with Mrs Christie’s body,’ he said laughing, ‘that’s what I want,’ and the manservant laughed along saying, ‘Yes, Sahib, quite right, Sahib, very funny, Sahib.’ She had been very happy to leave.
    And then it was on to Australia.
    They arrived in Perth and, although everyone knew that Australians were brutes, she almost felt as if she was among civilized people again. But the further she got from home, the more depressed she grew. Still, the people were friendly, too friendly she thought at times, and couldn’t suffer any class distinction, unlike the Indians, who resented their British overlords but seemed to venerate them at the same time.
    Archie had some connection with the brother of the Governor-General, who took them for a day trip around King’s Park, where they picnicked in sight of the Swan. The menthol scent of the eucalyptus trees in their nostrils led to an unsuccessful hunt for sleeping koalas. The brother, whose name was Greene, flirted with Agatha so much that she rather enjoyed it, particularly since this Greene fellow was young and handsome and some sort of local celebrity for his abilities on the tennis court. Throughout their back and forth, she glanced at Archie, wondering whether he was annoyed by her flirting,