The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Amy visits Dorrigo in a room at the hotel, after the help have gone. She tells him that once she was pregnant, before she was married to Keith. He had not wanted to marry her yet but arranges for her to visit a doctor in Melbourne and have an abortion. When she returned, Keith wanted to marry her: “Maybe to make it up. […] I hated him for his kindness. I hated him until he hated me back. He said I’d tricked him into marriage” (126). They fall asleep together.

When they wake, she says that she loves Keith. Dorrigo thinks that if it were actually love, it wouldn’t make her feel miserable and alone, but he also knows that his relationship with Ella is a pantomime of its own. She asks him what his intentions are:

He felt she was trying to trap him into some expression of commitment that she could then reject as outright as possible. It was as if she wanted him to name whatever it was they had, but if he did that it would kill that very same thing (128).