| Chapter : | Introduction |
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of antipodean reversal: “On the study wall there was a photograph of a girl in a fur coat standing in snow, like the Christmas cards” (59). Ida’s mother, here returned to her own childhood—which itself merely reflects, as a “carbon copy,” the idealised tropological, sentimental scene from a Christmas card—enacts an antipodean shift that demands Ida’s relinquishment of her, and the maternal intimacy is ruptured:
Jock, the Airedale, who was nosing about in the field, suddenly began to bark and came running up through the orchard. The abrupt activity shook the trees, or so it seemed, and sharpened the light. The shoe button shifted out from under Ida’s finger as her mother rose to look through the glass of the verandah. (59)
Into this broken space comes the third figure, a woman who further disturbs the chronological and generational proprieties that have already been troubled by Ida’s mother’s childhood photo: “By her face and her figure she was not old, but her walk was old.” Ida resents her entry into the scene, but the woman’s departure at the end of the story, taking with her Ida’s doll and her father’s shoes, effects Ida’s own substitutive departure from the family, breaking apart the maternal space and creating the possibility for flight.
“Sir Cecil’s Ride” centres on another bounded space, the island as a figure for colonial interiority. The story was named for a walking trail inland on Hong Kong Island; the trail itself was named for a former colonial governor:
[Constantin] would explain to her about the path. Constantin knew all kinds of things, every thing. “It was an early governor who laid it out. Just as you wanted to walk, he wanted to ride. The roads of the island, such as they were then, palled. In any case, roads take the shortest route. By winding round and round these hills you get an illusion of distance, as if you were not on an island. Thus Sir Cecil rode.” (30)