The Pavilion in the Clouds

by Alexander McCall Smith

  She got up off the floor and crossed to the window. The night had descended while she was playing with the dolls, and the kitchen window of Miss White’s house was now lit up. She saw a movement within – a dark shape – before a blind was drawn. She thought that Miss White must be in the kitchen, preparing her meal. She was a good cook and would spend hours making meals that she would then eat alone, seated on the veranda, looking out towards the hills. Bella did not like the dishes Miss White made, as they were too hot and spicy for her taste. “I acquired my palate for curries in Calcutta,” Miss White said. “The hotter, the better. There was a marvellous chef at Government House, when we went there for dinner. The Governor loved hot curries. They couldn’t be hot enough, from his point of view.”

  And then she heard a scream. It was sudden, and piercing, and it was accompanied by a loud report – like the firing of a gun. And then there was silence.

  She pushed open the door of her room and ran down the corridor towards the kitchen. Her father was still at the tea office – he often did not return until the last minute before dinner, which was still half an hour away. Her mother might be in the kitchen: she liked to be there to supervise the cooking of dinner by Michael, the Christian Sinhalese cook. Michael worshipped her mother, and she found his company reassuring and restful.

  But she was not there. Michael had heard the scream and was struggling to get out of his apron.

  “There is something happening,” he said, turning to the young boy who was his assistant in the kitchen. He snapped out an order to fetch the boss from the tea office, and the boy ran out, barefooted.

  They went out onto the lawn.

  “Where is your mother?” asked Michael.

  She did not know. She did not want to acknowledge the scream to have come from her, although she knew it was likely. Who else was there to scream like that? Miss White? But she had appeared on her veranda now and was calling out to find out what was wrong.

  Michael had a torch, and he shone this round the lawn while he called out.

  There was a cry from the darkness around the Pavilion, and Michael began to run in that direction. Miss White came too, the white sari in which she wrapped herself flapping eerily in the darkness.

  The beam of the torch played on the Pavilion as Michael crossed the lawn. Bella stared fixedly into the darkness, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. The front barrier had collapsed and was leaning drunkenly over the edge, still attached to the rest of the Pavilion, but only by shattered wooden tendons.

  Miss White ran after Michael. “She must have fallen over,” she called out.

  Bella was mute with horror. She stood quite still, too frightened to go into the Pavilion to see what had happened. Michael and Miss White, though, were peering over the edge of the structure, shining the torch down into the void.

  Michael cried out. “Lady, Lady! We can see you.”

  There was an answering shout from below, and Bella gasped as she realised that her mother was still alive. She closed her eyes, though, and remained where she was. She could not bear the thought of looking down onto the undergrowth that had presumably broken her fall. Had it not been for the trees that clung to the steep drop of the hillside, she would have fallen several hundred feet to the rocky floor of the valley.

  Henry arrived, accompanied by three men, all bearing torches, all shouting out to one another and to Michael. Two of the men were dispatched to fetch ladders and ropes while the third stayed with Henry.

  Miss White was shaking. “She hasn’t fallen too far,” she said to Henry, her voice strained and high-pitched. “She seems to have been caught by the trees.”

  Henry nodded. “They’re bringing ropes,” he said. And then, “You take Bella inside.”

  Miss White nodded and came over to Bella’s side. “Mummy will be fine,” she said, struggling to keep her voice even. “You mustn’t worry. They’ll rescue her.”

  Bella half opened her eyes and then shut them again. She did not want this to be happening. By closing her eyes, it seemed to her that she was shutting it out – making it seem less real, as one could do with inexplicable shadows in the bedroom at night. If you closed your eyes, the shadows were lost in the general darkness and became less threatening.

  Virginia was in no fit state that night to explain what had happened. The estate employed a nurse to run a small clinic for the Tamil families, and she was summoned to tend to Virginia once they brought her up the side of the cliff, strapped to a stretcher. The nurse tended to a laceration on her right forearm and scratches around her neck. She was worried, though, about Virginia’s leg, which she bound up in a splint while they waited for the doctor to arrive from Nuwara Eliya.

  It was almost ten by the time the lights of Dr Pereira’s car were seen on the winding road up to the estate. Henry met him and took him into the room where Virginia was lying on a day bed, the nurse at her side. The doctor gave the nurse a cursory nod and began his examination. He agreed that the leg should be X-rayed – just in case.

  “It would be best to take her down to Kandy,” he said. “They have the equipment, and there’s a good surgeon there.”

  Henry was concerned by the mention of surgery.

  “It depends on whether there’s a fracture in the leg,” said Dr Pereira. “If there is, they sometimes have to operate. We’ll have to wait and see.” The doctor frowned. “She fell, you say?”

  Henry nodded. “We have a summer house on the edge of the cliff. The barrier gave way.”

  The doctor shook his head. “She’s very fortunate. It’s a long way down.”

  “The trees broke her fall about thirty or forty feet down,” said Henry.

  The doctor raised an eyebrow. “How did it happen?”

  Henry glanced at Virginia. The doctor had administered morphine, and she seemed to be dozing off. He shrugged. “I don’t want to bother her right now,” he said.

  Dr Pereira agreed. “Of course not. All in good time.”

  They carried Virginia out on a stretcher, helping her into position in the back of the car, where her sore leg could be propped up on pillows. Then the nurse joined Henry in the front, and they set off for Kandy. Miss White comforted Bella, putting her arm about her and leading her back to her bedroom. “She’ll be as right as rain in a day or two,” she said. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Will you stay?” asked Bella.

  “Of course. I’ll get my things, and I’ll sleep in the spare room.”

  Bella was reassured by Miss White’s presence. It took her some time to drift off to sleep, though, as she kept going over what she had seen: the shattered barrier, the beam of the torches probing the darkness, her mother’s look of confusion as they manhandled her stretcher across the lawn.

  She turned to Li Po and Po Chü-i, whom she had placed on the pillow beside her. They were comforting. Li Po had seen this sort of thing before, of course; you should always be careful with heights, he said. Po Chü-i agreed. Heights and water, he whispered – you had to treat both with grave respect.

  “It was an accident,” said Bella.

  Li Po said nothing; he could just have been too tired to speak, or his silence could have signalled agreement – she could not tell which it was.

  Virginia came home two days later. She had been badly scratched and had sprained a muscle in her leg – nothing was broken – but there had been some concussion, though, and the hospital had wanted to keep her under observation until satisfied that it was safe for her to return. She had been fortunate, they said a twig from the tree had penetrated the skin around her neck and had narrowly missed an artery: half an inch in the other direction would have brought about a very different outcome.

  She took the news of the narrow escape philosophically. “No point in losing sleep over a near miss,” she said. “All of us have those. We turn left rather than right and miss the car that would otherwise have run us over. We slow the car to look at a view and miss the lorry that would have collided wi
th us on the next bend. At the last moment we change our booking on a ship that sinks with the loss of all on board. And so on.”

  “So not only cats have nine lives,” said Henry.

  “Exactly.”

  “Tell me exactly what happened,” he said.

  “It’s a bit of a blur,” she replied. “But I do remember being in the Pavilion, of course: I’d gone out because I wanted to see the Southern Cross.”

  He nodded. They called it their constellation and looked for it together at the right time of the year, when it would be hanging down low over the horizon, pointing south. To them it was a promise of something better: of Australia and New Zealand, where life would be so much easier. He had been offered a half share in a sheep station in New South Wales and had turned it down – a decision he bitterly regretted. The Sinhalese would want them out sooner or later, he thought, no matter what people said. The Portuguese had been here and had gone, and the same was true of the Dutch. The British should not fool themselves into thinking they would be any different. If they had gone to Australia, at least they would have belonged. But it was too late now.

  “Did you lean against the balustrade?”

  “The barrier? Yes, I must have. I don’t remember doing that, though.”

  “You wouldn’t. A major shock can wipe out memory of what happens. That’s not unusual.”

  She sighed. “I must have. I must have leaned a bit too far forward to see the stars. And then . . . That’s the bit I don’t really remember. I suppose I remember a bit of a noise – a sort of crack, rather like a firework going off . . .”

  “Or a gun?”

  “Yes, a bit like that.” She paused. “Though it can’t have been a shot. It must have been the wood splitting.”

  “I imagine so.”

  “And then I don’t really remember much after that. I felt the trees around me; there were leaves in my face and eyes. And there was a pain in the leg. Then I think I went to sleep. That sounds unlikely, though, doesn’t it?”

  “Concussion,” he said. “It can be like dropping off to sleep.”

  He was silent for a while as he thought of what she had said. Then he continued, “It’s a mercy that it was you.”

  She looked surprised. But then she smiled. “I see what you mean.”

  “I put it rather tactlessly,” he said hurriedly. “What I mean is that it was a mercy that it was one of us rather than Bella.”

  “Of course. Of course.”

  “And had it been me,” he went on, “The trees might not have borne my weight. You might be a widow today.”

  She shook her head. “Please don’t talk like that.”

  “Sorry, I was just thinking.” He held her hand. “My blood runs cold to think that Bella was playing right in front of that barrier just a few hours before it happened. It could have given way then.”

  “But didn’t.”

  He was ready to blame himself. “I should have had it checked. I should have made sure it was secure enough.”

  She reassured him that he should not reproach himself. There was no reason to imagine that the barrier was about to give way – it had looked safe and sound in every respect.

  “I’m very sorry about it,” he said. “We were all using the Pavilion – you, me, Bella – and I had no idea it was unsafe. I was in it the day before, and you . . . when were you in it last? Did you see anything?”

  She hesitated before replying – and she started with a repeat of his question. “When was I in the pavilion?”

  He nodded. “Yes. I wondered if you noticed anything.”

  She shook her head. “I hadn’t been in it for two or three days. Wednesday, I think, when I had tea in it with Bella. I was reading to her from Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare.” His eyes fell upon her, and she looked away. “No,” she said. “I saw nothing then.”

  He was watching her, as if he were waiting for her to add something. But she did not. Then he said, quietly, “I see.” And after a moment or two he added, “Sudden structural failure.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Materials just fail. They reach the end of their life. Like people do.” He swallowed these words, realising that they might sound tactless at a sick bed. “Sometimes vibration causes it. And they break. Nobody may be expecting it, but it can be catastrophic.” He paused. “The Tay Railway Bridge. Remember that one? A train was on it at the time, and the whole structure just gave way.”

  “I’m something lighter than a train, I think.”

  He smiled. “I’d never compare you to a train.”

  “Just as well.” The morphine that she was still taking made her feel pleasantly drowsy. “Shakespeare might have written something quite different, you know.”

  He looked puzzled.

  “Shall I compare thee to an express train?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

  She waited for him to laugh, but his mind was on other things.

  4

  Trapped in Ignorance

  O n the morning of her mother’s return from hospital in Kandy, Bella woke up to find that Li Po and Po Chü-i had both fallen out of bed. It was not unusual for one of the dolls to slip off the edge of the bed and be discovered on the floor the next morning, but it was rare for this indignity to be visited upon both of them.

  “You poor things,” she said, scooping them up and dusting them off. “The ants might have carried you away in the night.”

  The dolls took this as a joke, which she expected they would. There were ants that occasionally invaded her bedroom from a ventilation grille at the edge of the floor, but they had business of their own and disappeared as quickly as they arrived. No, Li Po and Po Chü-i were in no danger of anything on the floor, other than a dent to their pride.

  She dressed herself and then spent a few minutes writing the diary entry that she always composed before breakfast. It would have made more sense to write the entire entry for the day in the evening, when there would be more to say, but the morning entry had come to be a form of statement of intent, setting out what she hoped the day would bring. She wrote:

  This morning, my mother is coming back from hospital in Kandy. She hurt her leg when she fell from the Pavilion in the Clouds. It is very steep below, and she could have fallen for a long way – maybe a mile, I’m not sure. But the trees saved her. Their branches stopped her going all the way to the bottom. That is probably because Jesus was watching and did not want her to die just yet. You only go to heaven when it is time for you to go. Before that time, lots of dangerous things can happen to you, and you will still be all right. Miss White says this is not true. She says that God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost have more important things to do than worry about what happens to us. I am not sure who is right about this.

  I will be very good when my mother comes home. I will ask Michael to make her one of those cakes that she really likes. He does not mind making them as long as he does not have too many other things to cook. He has a bicycle that he rides up from the lines. He does not like the Hindu people, particularly those in the lower lines, because he says they fill their houses with idols. He says they are a very low-caste people and will not touch them, even if he is a Christian. He says that they do not know what a waste of time it is to put food out in front of the Hindu gods. He says that the dogs come along and eat the food, and then everybody says that it is a miracle and the food has been eaten by the gods. He says people are very foolish to believe things like that when there are many good miracles in the Bible if only they would look at them. But he says they won’t because they are trapped in ignorance. Miss White also says that there are many people trapped in ignorance. She says that if you don’t pay attention to your lessons you will be trapped in ignorance for the rest of your life.

  I am not going to be trapped in ignorance because I shall be going off to school in Scotland quite soon. They have shown me a picture of one of the schools over there. They have a big gym where the girls can swing on ropes. They
have a school orchestra that has violins and trumpets. I would like to learn the violin.

  I am going to be staying with my aunt when I am at school. I have seen a photograph of her. She is quite tall and wears her hair in a bun. My mother says that that shows how clever she is. If you wear your hair in a bun you are probably very good at mathematics and history. My aunt has a house in a street. I am not sure what it will be like to live in a street. We live on a hill, which is different from a street.

  I hope that my mother’s leg gets better soon. Miss White says she may have to use crutches if her leg is really hurt. My father says he is not sure whether this is so. He says that sometimes you can use a stick to help you walk. He says it all depends.

  Miss White likes my father. She has not got a husband herself as no man has ever asked her to marry him. You have to wait until a man asks you to marry him. You are not allowed to ask a man to marry you, as that is against the law. If nobody asks you to marry him then you are a spinster and have to live in a spinster’s house. You are allowed to keep a dog or a cat, though.

  Miss White says she knew plenty of men in Calcutta. She told me about them and how brave they were. One of them had shot a tiger, she said, and had made the tiger into a rug. I think that is unkind, as tigers never did anything to us, although sometimes they eat people who are not looking. That is probably your fault then, as you would not be eaten if you were keeping a look-out. Miss White says that tigers sometimes eat farmers in India when they make their fields on the edge of the jungle. She said that is a very dangerous thing to do. She says that there was a man who was eaten by a tiger and all that was left of him was his hat. She says that tigers very rarely eat hats, and, if they do, they spit them out.