Her father was not interested in poetry, nor in the Children’s Encyclopaedia. She thought that he knew a lot, but it was mostly about tea – a subject on which she believed he knew everything there was to know. He was a benign figure in her eyes, gentle in his manner, although she occasionally heard him shouting. That happened only when somebody did something stupid, such as allowing the water in the bungalow’s heating system to boil. That was dangerous, he said. All that was required was that enough wood should be put on the fire to keep the water at a hundred and forty-nine degrees. That was quite hot enough for people’s baths and for the shaving water he needed every morning. Why people had to stoke the fire until it was a raging inferno was beyond him. Did people not think about what they did before they did it?
She realised that Miss White admired her father. She noticed the way in which she looked at him from the schoolroom window when he was out in the garden, inspecting the orchids he grew under the trees. Miss White’s eyes would follow him, as if waiting for him to do something. But he never would, because all that he ever did was to go to the tea office and the factory and then come home and drink a whisky on the veranda. It was the same with Richard’s father – he had exactly the same routine. “He’s very busy,” said Richard. “There’s a lot for him to do in the office. Write letters and so on. When I grow up, I’m going to do something quite different. I’m going to drive a Bugatti in races. Maybe be a soldier too. Who knows?”
“If you’re a soldier you might get shot,” said Bella. “You don’t want to get shot.”
“Not all soldiers get shot,” Richard replied. “A lot of the time the other side misses. Then they get shot themselves. That’s the way it works, you see. But I don’t think I’ll be a soldier anyway. I’ll work in a laboratory, I think. Or be a surgeon, cutting people up.”
She winced. She did not like the sight of blood.
“With an anaesthetic,” he conceded. “I’d always give them an anaesthetic. That means they go to sleep and don’t feel it while you’re cutting.”
The reading circle liked Rupert Brooke; Miss White did not. Virginia had mentioned that her friends would be discussing him when they came round for their regular meeting on Friday afternoon. Miss White had sniffed.
“He has his merits,” she said. “But I must confess I find him a bit precious.” And then added quickly, “He’s very popular – I’ll grant you that.”
But the damage had been done. Virginia affected to make light of the criticism, but her reply was barbed. “He’s not for everyone, perhaps. Not everybody understands him, I suppose.”
“Possibly,” said Miss White, after a slight hesitation. “Although there might not be such a great deal in his work not to understand, so to speak. Of course, adulation of any sort is bad for writers, I think. It inures them to criticism.” She emphasised inures, giving it its full value.
Virginia stared at her. We, she thought, are employing this woman and yet . . . and yet she deliberately uses words that I shall have to go and look up.
Miss White had not finished. “It’s significant, I think, that Brooke’s mother would have none of that sort of thing – wise woman. When somebody wrote an over-enthusiastic account of her son’s life and said he left Rugby in a blaze of glory she changed in a blaze of glory to in July.” She paused. “I thought that rather funny.” And added, “Almost a zeugma, and it would have been had she said he left Rugby in a blaze of glory and July.”
Virginia remained tight-lipped, but her enjoyment of the Friday-afternoon meeting was dampened.
“You do like this poem?” asked one of the ladies, after she had read out, slowly and deliberately, ‘The Great Lover’. “I find it very romantic. The rough male kiss of blankets . . . What an extraordinary line that is. So powerful.”
One of the other members tittered. “I suppose that some of us understand that more than others.”
They looked at her, and she blushed. “I mean . . .” she began, but the conversation had moved on.
Bella watched them from across the lawn. She was allowed to greet the visitors when they arrived but not to linger. And as for Miss White, she had never been invited to join the reading circle and made a point, whenever it met, of going into Nuwara Eliya to visit one of the nuns at a mission school there – a friend from Calcutta days.
It did not occur to Bella that Miss White was lonely. It seemed to her that the governess had plenty to occupy her time – she had friends to whom she was always writing, she had her gramophone and collection of records, she had her sketchbook in which she did her drawings of the birds that inhabited the high forests. Miss White was an accomplished watercolourist and had given Bella a framed picture of a blue magpie. A charming and colourful thief, she had pencilled in below the picture.
With all those things to do, you might expect Miss White to be too busy to be unhappy, but that was not the way it was. There was something about her, Bella thought, that made you feel sad yourself.
“Is Miss White unhappy?” Bella asked her mother.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because I’ve seen her crying.”
Her mother was busy with her embroidery when this question was asked. Her needle paused.
“Really? Are you sure?”
“She was crying. I saw it with my own two eyes.”
Virginia resumed her needlework. “People cry for all sorts of reasons. And sometimes for no reason at all.”
“Like when you’re peeling onions?”
“Well, there’s a reason there. Onions contain a chemical that makes your eyes water. That’s not real crying.” Virginia hesitated. “Where was she? Do you remember?”
“Where was she when I saw her crying?”
“Yes.”
Bella said, “She was on her veranda. She didn’t see me. I was hiding in the rhododendrons.”
Virginia shook a finger. “You shouldn’t go into those rhododendrons. What about snakes?”
“They run away.”
This brought a sharp response. “Snakes do not run away. I saw a krait there. You are not to go into the rhododendrons. People die. One of the pickers died six months ago. She died. That was a krait bite.”
The warning delivered, Virginia returned to the subject of Miss White. “Why do you think she was crying? Did you speak to her?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t. After a while she got up and went inside.”
Virginia looked thoughtful. “It wasn’t anything you did? You haven’t been difficult, have you?”
There was a firm denial. “It’s not my fault.”
“Because her job is hard enough as it is,” Virginia went on. “You wouldn’t want to make it even harder.”
“I think sometimes she’s sad when Daddy doesn’t talk to her.”
At first Virginia was silent. The needle moved into the embroidery; the thread was tightened. Then, “Did she tell you that?”
“No, but I can tell. I can tell from the way she looks out of the window when Daddy is in the garden.”
“I see.”
Virginia put the embroidery aside. “I’m going to go for a walk.”
“May I come too?”
“No. I want to go by myself. We’ll go for a walk together tomorrow.”
Virginia left the house. A path led through the garden and then disappeared up the slope directly behind the property to join, higher up, the path on which Miss White had met her assailant. There were points on this path that afforded views of the entire hillside below, green upon green, stretching out to lower summits. When the cloud came in, those summits would protrude above the mantle of cloud that cloaked the lower ground. They would be to all intents and purposes like little islands in a white sea stretching out to a distant horizon.
She went over what she could do. She was unwilling to talk directly to Henry, as she could not bring herself to make any accusations, particularly ones for which she had no evidence. Bella’s view of what was happening was a child’s view – and childr
en got these things wrong. They observed the adult world from down below but did not really understand it. But if a wife failed to act, then she could hardly blame anybody if things got out of control. Men were weak: even the best of men – and Henry was a decent man, by any standards – could be tempted by a younger woman, especially one who was a member of the household. There was nothing new in that; in fact, it was a very old story. And if she felt that she could not talk directly to Henry about it, then she could talk to Miss White. She could confront her and tell her that it would be best, all things considered, if she sought alternative employment. That was a polite way of firing somebody, and they would, of course, give her excellent references, particularly if Miss White put in her resignation herself. Now that she thought of it, it occurred to her that she could do all this without Henry even hearing about any of the background. She would be as surprised as anybody. “Governesses tend to do this sort of thing,” she might say. “They don’t stay.”
By the time she reached the first vantage point on the path, her mind was made up. Henry had directed the Tamil gardeners to create a small clearing in which a stone bench had been constructed. She sat on this now and looked down over the tea gardens climbing up the hillside. A line of women moved slowly along the bushes, baskets on their backs. They did that all day, every day throughout the year, with the exception of a few begrudged religious holidays. That was their lot. And her lot, it seemed, was to sit on this stone bench and watch them. That came about through an accident of birth; through good fortune; through the operation of karma. But just about everything came about in that way, if one thought about it: where you started was almost always where you ended up, except in a few unusual cases, where effort or sheer luck overcame disadvantage. That had happened to Thomas Lipton, whose house was not all that far away. He had been born in the Glasgow Gorbals, in the humblest of circumstances, and had risen to the top of the tea world through his own efforts. The boy who started off as a messenger, running errands, ended up consorting with presidents and princes. By contrast, she had done nothing to deserve what she had, and might be viewed askance by some for that precise reason. But at least the Tamils, with their Hinduism, would not resent her for her easy life, she thought. That was the great attraction of a belief in reincarnation, at least to those born to ease and privilege: it justified what you had and what others did not have.
She rose from the bench. The walk had cleared her mind, and she had decided what she was going to do – or rather, what she was not going to do. She would see how the situation developed. She would not do anything precipitate, but she would be vigilant. She would watch Miss White and act only if it became necessary. If the governess put one foot wrong, she would deal with her. There were plenty of others who could take the job and who would, she imagined, resist any temptation to condescend to her intellectually; who would not use the word inure with a view to confusing her; who would not send predatory looks in her husband’s direction. There was no shortage of such people, and any one of them could easily be engaged to see Bella through to the next milestone in her education.
She felt better for her decision. In one sense she was threatened by Miss White; in another she thought that magnanimity was the least that was required of her. She had so much in this life – money, a husband, a child, a house in the clouds – and the self-assurance that came from the possession of all of these advantages, whereas Miss White had so little: a tenuous position, held at the pleasure of others; no man to support her; single status that kept her on the periphery of so much; and very modest talents, in spite of ill-concealed displays of patchy learning. Even her father, whom she referred to as my father, a member of St Andrews University, was not quite the scholar she made him out to be. Where were his books? She had asked Miss White whether he had written anything they might discuss in her reading circle – she knew that he had not – and her question had gone unanswered.
So poor Miss White might be tolerated and her faults overlooked. That was the right thing to do; it was a turning of the cheek from which a warm glow of satisfaction might be derived. And it could always be reviewed should Miss White get up to anything – which was still possible, although rather improbable.
She walked back to the house. She would call in at Miss White’s bungalow and offer her tea. Kindness cost nothing, was simple to perform and was noticed, she imagined, by the Recording Angel – if such an unlikely being existed, which was highly doubtful. The Recording Angel was actually within us – as our conscience: that was the modern view, and one to which she could subscribe. She approached Miss White’s door with resignation, as one who has a duty to perform but is not looking forward to it. She was beginning to resent the governess, and for a moment her charitable impulse wavered – to the point where she almost turned round and went on, instead, to her bungalow.
3
If You Were Riding in a Coach
B ella had put Li Po and Po Chü-i on the windowsill of her bedroom. The two dolls were seated side by side, like the old friends they were, looking out over the lawn towards the Pavilion in the Clouds. It was early evening, and the last of the sunlight was touching the top of the pavilion’s pagoda roof. Dusk came quickly, and in no more than ten minutes or so the evening sky would have begun to darken.
“Are you hungry?” Bella asked Li Po. “Because I am.”
Li Po was silent. His painted face was, as ever, impassive. He was not one to reveal his feelings – unlike Po Chü-i, whose temperament, Virginia had decreed, was a stormy one.
“You can have more rice if you like,” said Bella, and passed a tiny invisible plate on which imaginary rice had been heaped.
“It has all the things you like to have in your rice,” she said. “Boiled fish. And peas. And a bit of ginger. You like ginger, Li Po.”
Li Po did not dispute that.
Bella looked out of the window, past the dolls.
“See?” she said. “See over there? That’s Miss White, walking across the lawn. You know her, I think. You’ve heard her talking French. She thinks you don’t understand French, but I know you do. You understand everything because you’re very clever.”
Halfway across the lawn, Miss White stopped to look up at the sky. The pale round disc of the moon was floating up now from the horizon, as light as a balloon, its faintness and delicacy contrasting with the vivid colours it gazed upon below – the dark greens of the vegetation, the red-brown of the land where the earth had been scarred by earthworks, the sharp blue of the distant hills. She stood still for a moment, watching the moon inch up the sky, before she continued towards the Pavilion in the Clouds.
Bella observed Miss White going into the Pavilion. She expected her to sit down in one of the wicker chairs arranged in a crescent for people to admire the view, which was what adults liked to do, but she did not, going forward instead to stand at the parapet and look down over the canopy of treetops far below. Bella did not like to see people do that, at least not while she was standing nearby, as she had no head for heights and was frightened by the sheer drop below.
She turned to speak to the dolls. “Would you like me to read to you?” she asked.
Li Po inclined his tiny, stuffed head. Po Chü-i conveyed his response through his eyes, which were small painted dots. He had no objection.
She had her own copy of A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems now, a gift from her mother for her eighth birthday. She fetched this from the bookcase beside her bed before retrieving the dolls from the windowsill and seating them on the rug in the centre of the floor.
She chose a poem she liked. Many meant little to her, although she loved the sounds of the words. Some, though, she understood, and this ode to friendship was one such. She read it solemnly, pausing after each line before proceeding to the next:
If you were riding in a coach
And I were wearing a coat of straw,
And one day we met in the road,
You would get down and bow.
If you were carrying
a cheap umbrella
And I were riding on a horse,
And one day we met in the road
I would get down for you.
Her mother had explained it to her. “This means that even if the poet were rich and his friend were poor, he would still be his friend. You understand that, don’t you?”
To begin with she had not, but then the truth of the poem had dawned on her, and she nodded.
“So, a person who’s strong should be nice to a person who’s weak,” her mother continued. “Yes, it means that too. It doesn’t matter what’s on the outside – what counts is what’s on the inside.”
The dolls listened. They were the most uncomplaining of audiences. And now she let them sit closer together, and she put Li Po’s arms around Po Chü-i, so that they looked like two old friends comforting one another. They had no secrets from one another, she said, and they had promised to live with one another until the day they died. Nothing would ever part them.
She lay down on the rug and looked up at the ceiling. The room was in semi-darkness now, because she had not switched on a lamp, although the generator that provided electricity for the whole estate could be heard thudding away in its shed. It was turned on promptly at sunset by the man who then walked down the path to stoke the fire for the hot-water boiler, and it would remain on until nine o’clock, when everyone would have retired to bed. After that, tilly lamps would be used, especially for reading, for which their hissing white light was so suitable.
She shivered.
“It’s cold now,” she said to the dolls. “You’ll need to put on more clothes.”
She had several spare outfits for the dolls, including padded jackets of the sort that she knew Chinese poets liked to wear. Some of the A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems made reference to the cold, especially up in the mountains – like everybody else, the Chinese poets preferred the warmth of summer to the harshness of winter. Now she took the minute padded jackets out of a drawer and put them on the dolls, taking care with the stitching, which was apt to give way if put under stress. Then she added miniature felt boots that she herself had made, easing them over the dolls’ feet, and a small striped scarf for Li Po and a chequered one for Po Chü-i.
The Pavilion in the Clouds Page 3