Dorrigo Evans—Amy

Dorrigo Evans’s attachment to Amy Mulvaney remains powerful precisely because it cannot become a settled part of his life. Even as he proposes to Ella, and later moves through marriage and a succession of other women, Amy occupies the emotional space against which Dorrigo measures desire and love. Their remembered room at the King of Cornwall Hotel once seemed like the center of the universe; afterward, that intimacy survives for him less as a present relationship than as an absence that keeps returning.

The Engagement to Ella and Amy’s Presence

In 1941, on what Dorrigo remembers as his final leave with Ella before embarkation, he asks her to marry him. His recollection makes the proposal less a declaration of uncomplicated commitment than an action entangled with desire, guilt, and avoidance. Ella has repeatedly asked why he has not proposed; Dorrigo wants relief from that questioning, from his persistent thoughts about Amy, and from the guilt those thoughts produce. He works toward the question through the intimate physical closeness of the moment, using the proposal as a way to kiss Ella’s breasts. The memory presents the engagement not as an answer to his attachment to Amy but as something formed in its shadow.

Dorrigo wonders whether Ella understood what he was really thinking. The question remains unanswered, but his recollection makes clear that he was ashamed then and feels worse when looking back. Physical intimacy with Ella had not given him oblivion: everything about her brought Amy to mind more painfully. The contrast is central to the relationship’s continuing force. Amy is not present in the proposal scene, yet she shapes its emotional meaning, turning what might have been a straightforward beginning for Dorrigo and Ella into a moment marked by divided attention and concealed feeling.

The Room at the King of Cornwall

Years later, a conversation about love draws Dorrigo back to Amy through the memory of the room they thought of as theirs at the King of Cornwall Hotel. He recalls its sea and sunlight, the shadows, the peeling white paint on the French doors, their rusty lock, the afternoon and night breezes, and the sound of waves breaking. These precise details make the remembered intimacy concrete: the relationship is attached not only to Amy as an absent person, but to a shared place and a particular arrangement of light, weather, and sound.

The recollection also places that room beside another imagined center: a remote house that Dorrigo pictures as having once seemed to its occupants like the universe. The parallel does not make the two relationships identical. Instead, it reveals how Dorrigo understands intimacy through the sense of a bounded world made complete by the people within it. The hotel room once held that meaning for him and Amy. From the distance of later life, he can recover the scene in detail, but the remembered center cannot be re-entered as a present reality. Its vividness makes the loss more, not less, apparent.

Love as an Absent Object

Dorrigo’s later relationships do not displace Amy. As he grows bored with the routines of public and domestic life, he pursues adulterous affairs with increasing ardor, imagining that someone might break through his torpor. Yet the narration distinguishes this pursuit from genuine interest in the women themselves: Dorrigo discovers the object of his love where it is absent, among women who are not Amy. The repeated search therefore cannot resolve his attachment. Each new affair points back toward the person it cannot replace.

The passage links this pattern to the Greek punishments of Sisyphus and Tantalus. Sisyphus repeatedly rolls his boulder uphill only to watch it fall; Tantalus reaches for water and fruit that recede from him. Dorrigo considers whether hell might be an endless repetition of failure, and whether he is already living it. The comparison gives his attachment a cyclical form: movement and pursuit continue, but fulfillment remains out of reach. Amy’s absence is not a brief interruption in an otherwise completed love story; it is the condition through which Dorrigo repeatedly recognizes what he wants.

Lasting Significance

The relationship’s continuing importance is measured by the contrast between memory and substitution. Dorrigo can recall the King of Cornwall room with sensory precision, but later desire leads him toward women who are not Amy and leaves the underlying absence untouched. His proposal to Ella had already revealed how the thought of Amy could enter another relationship at its point of commitment; his later affairs repeat, in altered circumstances, the same inability to leave Amy behind.

The result is not a reunion or a resolution, but a lasting emotional reference point. Dorrigo’s recollections preserve the room, its rusty lock, and the sound of the sea as evidence of an intimacy that once felt complete. In later life, however, the images function alongside the Greek myth of unattainable desire: what he most wants remains elsewhere, and each attempt to find it in another person renews the recognition of its absence. His love for Amy endures less as a practical bond than as the measure of what every subsequent attachment fails to recover.