The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Amy watches Dorrigo get dressed. She again thinks that she is a wicked woman but tells herself that she has no regrets: “Suddenly she wished he would just disappear. She wanted to push him away, and would have but she was terrified of what might happen if she touched him” (131). She asks him if it would scare him if she said she loved him. He says no and they have sex again.

Dorrigo begins spending any free time he can create with Amy. His life with her “seemed to be the only real life he had ever lived” (133). He has no interest in the army or in his surgical patients. Eventually he realizes that what she feels for him is more than lust, and he sees her love for him as a “scarcely believable ferocity” (134). Their desire makes them reckless, and they begin taking risks as if they want their spouses to catch them. When they make love, Dorrigo often feels that she is not there, “[a]s if he were only ever a vehicle for her to ride to another place, so distant, so unknown to him that a dull resentment momentarily rose in him” (136). They continue throughout the summer, until one Sunday night when Keith “told Amy he knew, and that he had always known” (136). 

Keith tells her that he had known from the first time Dorrigo had returned to the hotel. Amy envies him because he always says what is on his mind. She, on the other hand, tests all her potential replies in her head, examining them several time for flaws before speaking. She realizes that she still does not know if she loves Keith or not. 

When Keith—27 years older than she—had first begun paying attention to her, Amy had been both flattered and disturbed. The first night they were alone in the bar, she meant to tell him that he must stop, and instead wound up kissing him. After they married, “she came to discover a gentle, generous, caring man” (139). She has security and moderate wealth for the first time. But Amy wanted adventure and uncertainty: “Not comfort, but the inferno” (140). She never stopped him from trying to have sex with her, but she refused to kiss him, believing that her mouth must remain her own.

When she would return from time with Dorrigo, and Keith touched her, she would think that “love was universe touching, exploding within one human being, and the person exploding into the universe. It was annihilation, the destroyer of worlds” (141). There were many nights when Keith would lie at her back in the bed, sobbing, and she felt as if her stomach was filled with broken glass. 

Keith and Amy play cards with the Robertsons one Sunday a month. They would often talk about scandals in the in the community, and “[i]nvariably, the sympathy of the table was with the partner who was left” (142). Amy is disturbed by their insistence that love is public and must be shared in order to be real: “Cheating is so easy,” says Elsie Robertson. “You just lie and abuse trust” (142). However, Amy knows that cheating is hard. If cheating with someone you love is being true to yourself, she sees the real cheating as the one perpetrated by continuing the marriage: “Why, when she felt that she had come to exist only through another person, did she feel such a terrible solitude?” (143).

On the night Keith told her he had known about her infidelity, he said he had hoped that she would come back to him after her infatuation with Dorrigo had burned out. He talks about the abortion and says, “I killed the baby and that killed us” (145). 

Amy calls Dorrigo when he is at work and tells him that Keith knows. He immediately knows that this is when they will leave their spouses and begin their new life together. Amy instead tells him to go back to Ella: “Everything now was inverted. The more he wanted her, the more she pushed him away” (148). Dorrigo also feels relieved. He feels free, and that he can now devote himself to loving Ella. For reasons he does not understand, he says, “I’ll be back when it’s over. For you, Amy. And we’ll marry” (148). He is soon called to the war ahead of schedule and knows that he may never see her again. 

Amy comes home from a swim to find Keith listening to the end of a radio program. She has come to hate the sight and sound of him. He tells her that, “it’s very bad news about our boys in Java” (150). Keith says that a man named Ron Jarvis told him that Dorrigo is most likely now a POW in Asia, but that he could also be dead. He smiles while he talks. It has already been three years since they have heard from Dorrigo. Jarvis says that the men are starving to death in the camp, and that they are suffering all manner of atrocities. Keith claims that Jarvis also told him that a man escaped from the camp and reported that Dorrigo has been dead for six months. Amy runs out of the room.

Keith lied to her about the death. Dorrigo’s name is on the list of those captured, but the death has not yet been confirmed. Later, he is sitting in his chair smoking: “He never heard the explosion that, with the subsequent fire, reduced the gracious four-storey, stone hotel to smouldering rubble, charred beams, and a two-sided façade” (156).