“I don’t know what to make of it,” she said. “You said – if I remember correctly – you said that Miss White said . . .”
He interrupted her. “That sounds a bit complicated: you said that she said . . .”
“But you did. You said that she told you that she had been in her bungalow all afternoon. You said she claimed not to have gone out to the Pavilion until after it happened – when she went with you and Michael.” She paused. “That’s what you told me, isn’t it?”
He shrugged. “I can’t really remember. Perhaps I did. I was in a bit of a state, of course – I still am, to tell you the truth. This has been a bit of a shock to the system.”
Now his demeanour changed. The lightness left, and he reached out to touch her arm gently, in a gesture of concern. “I’m not sure that you should be bothering yourself over all this. Is it important?”
She sighed. “I don’t know – I really don’t know. It’s just that Bella has come up with this rather odd comment, and, frankly, I don’t know what to make of it.”
He became decisive. “If I were you, I’d forget about it. Children are imaginative little creatures. Talking dolls and so on. For all we know, she has some sort of grudge against Miss White and is having a go at her.”
Virginia considered this. “By trying to get her into trouble? By making us think she was somehow responsible for my fall? Is that what you’re suggesting?”
“Not suggesting. I don’t think that it’s necessarily what’s happening – but it could be, don’t you think?”
She was not sure what to think. Bella was a truthful child – or had been up until now. When confronted with some bit of wrongdoing, some failure to do what she had been asked to do, she tended to own up rather than deny. And even her invention of the talking dolls was an open one – shared with anybody who cared to listen. That was unusual – many children were secretive about their private worlds. Many had imaginary friends whom their parents never met. Bella was not like that: Li Po and Po Chü-i were out in the open, there for anybody to see.
“I don’t know what to think,” said Virginia. “Have you looked at the barrier? I’ve been assuming that the wood was rotten. Have you found anything that points to . . .”
He waited.
“. . . to another explanation?” she continued.
He smiled. “Darling, the last thing in the world that I expect is another explanation, as you so tactfully put it. No, I’ve had a look, and I got the carpenter to do so too. You remember him? That man with the scar on his chin? He’s one of the Lankan Tamils, and he’s pretty genned up on anything to do with wood. Not surprisingly. Anyway, he looked, and he said that one of the spars was a bit suspect. He said that if water gets in around a bolt or a nail it can result in weakness. He said that’s probably what happened.”
“I see.” She was relieved. She did not want to believe otherwise.
“Anyway, he’s already fixed it. He’s going to paint the new section to match the rest of the Pavilion. He does a very good job, usually.” He paused, straightening the crease in his trousers before he stood up. “I asked him to look at the struts below – you know, the beams that keep the Pavilion in position. They go into concrete that’s been put in the rock immediately below – on the cliff face, if you see what I mean. He’s done that now. His men lowered him on a rope – there was an awful lot of shouting of instructions. I told them that they were not to drop him, and that led to a lot more shouting, I can tell you. I told them they’d have their pay docked if they dropped the carpenter.”
She smiled weakly. “And?”
“And he gave everything a clean bill of health.”
He rose to his feet.
“I think we should have lunch. Michael has made lamb chops, I believe.”
She took his extended hand and got gingerly to her feet. “Goat. He calls goat lamb.”
“What’s the expression? Mutton dressed as lamb?”
She laughed. “Yes. I heard somebody use that in the club the other day. They referred to Mrs Wilson – you know her – that rather forbidding-looking woman who’s on the social committee – they referred to her as mutton dressed as lamb.”
“And is she?”
“I’m afraid she is.”
He smiled. “We all have our faults. Even the best of us. Our strengths and our weaknesses.”
She thought: weaknesses. But she said nothing and took his arm as he led her into the dining room, where the goat dressed as lamb would soon be put before them, along with over-boiled potatoes and spinach to which Michael would have added far too much grated nutmeg.
5
Just the Way It Is
F rom her vantage point on the veranda, Virginia watched the pair of Ceylon green pigeons preening each other on their favourite branch. They were creatures of habit, these birds, and this couple were regular mid-morning visitors to one of the trees bordering the lawn. She was not particularly interested in the bird life of the surrounding forest and felt embarrassed when a visitor asked her the name of some bird. “Heaven knows,” she would reply. “I suspect even the bird is not quite sure what it’s called.” This usually brought a smile on the visitor’s part and on her part a resolution, never carried out, to learn something of the bird life of the island. After all, this was where she belonged, even if she had spent those long years of schooling back home, and would end up there, she suspected, at some vague point in a future of reminiscence and struggle against encroaching cold. She had been aware of such people – some of them relatives – who inhabited villas on the outskirts of places like Dundee after lives spent on the banks of the Hooghly or in some other spot of a rambling and outrageous empire. She would join them in her turn, she feared, with her albums of black-andwhite photographs, wooden carvings of water buffalos and Buddhas, remembering a more colourful, more passionate life somewhere far away. But the future is always hypothetical for those under a certain age – the age at which the penny of realisation drops – and for the present there was plenty of time to put off such projects as learning the names of the local birds or identifying the trees and shrubs populating the surrounding slopes.
Her conversation with Henry had taken place the previous day, and she had had an afternoon and evening to think about it. She had thought of little else and had, as a result, been too distracted to read, other than to page through magazines she had already perused several times. What concerned her most was Henry’s body language: his normal manner was relaxed, and she could always tell, from a certain tenseness in his expression and in his posture, if he was on edge about something. There had been a defensiveness about his manner that had crept into his tone of voice. It had been as if he was expecting an accusation of some sort and was readying himself to rebuff it. It had been unmistakable.
And yet there was a perfectly innocent explanation for this. Henry himself had said that he felt guilty about her fall – that it had happened at all was an implicit reproach to his attentiveness. Nature here was not benign: there were all sorts of dangers that had to be guarded against, ranging from the minor irritation of biting insects to the potential catastrophe of a snake bite. There were flash floods, there were lightning storms, there was the ever-present threat of rabies in both wild and domestic animals. The attention of the pi-dogs frequenting the outskirts of villages was potentially fatal, as might be the almost undetectable nip of a fruit bat. Stories abounded throughout the country of people who had ignored a dog bite, or even the lick of an unknown dog, developed hydrophobia and gone on to die an agonising death. “If that ever happens to me,” Henry had said, only half jokingly, “I’d like you to take a gun to me right at the beginning. Don’t make me go through all those stages.” It would not be murder, he said – it would be mercy killing, which was something quite different.
Henry had always been the one to protect her from such things, and yet on his watch, within sight of the house itself, she had almost plunged to her death. It was only natural that he should feel guilty abou
t that and that this guilt should translate itself into a tense manner. And yet it seemed to her that there something more than this at play here. Henry was not telling her the truth: that was what she picked up. You could always tell if people close to you were lying: it was almost impossible for them to dissemble in the way in which a stranger might do.
But what was he seeking to conceal? Her greatest concern was that he and Miss White were having an affair. It was the stuff of a thousand stories: into a household comes a stranger whose very presence threatens an otherwise stable marriage. And who better to exert that baneful influence but a governess? Men were weak – everybody knew that – and they grew tired of the inevitable monotony of married life. Henry seemed happy enough, but that did not mean that he might not be enticed by the thought of an occasional adventure. The club was full of such stories, most of which had no dramatic denouement but fizzled out in time, with everybody returning to their old routines. Very rarely, a wife or a husband would go off with a lover and never be heard from again, but that had not happened for a long time. Henry was not one to go anywhere very much: he was too involved in the estate to abandon it. “We have eight hundred people dependent on this business,” he said to her one evening. “Eight hundred, if you count the children and grandparents and the various hangers-on. Then there are the nurses. The teachers. The sweepers. Not to forget the priests and the astrologers.” He looked at her, as if for support, and she made a gesture of acceptance with her hands.
“That’s just the way it is,” she said.
“Yes,” he said, simply. “I suppose that’s so. Just the way it is.”
He had not intended to mention the priests, but they were on his mind. There were two of them, theirs and one on a neighbouring estate. The priest on the neighbouring estate had a reputation as an astrologer and was much in demand for casting wedding horoscopes. One of the men in the factory, a Buddhist electrician who had no use for Hindu priests, had told Henry, in a confidential aside, that the priest had cast a horoscope that suggested the Japanese would come and would kill him.
He looked at the electrician open-mouthed. “Me? The Japanese?”
The electrician lowered his eyes. He was clearly embarrassed. “I only tell you so that you should be careful,” he said.
“But you don’t pay any attention to that nonsense, do you?”
The electrician hesitated. But then he remembered he was a Christian, and so he said, “It is all first-class rubbish.”
“Exactly, Mr Gunawardena – first-class rubbish is precisely what it is.”
Henry had made light of it, but it had unnerved him. These priests are a nuisance, he thought: they make it difficult for anybody to do anything without taking the auspices – and paying for them. If he could, he would show them the door – ban them from the estate, with all their fakirs’ tricks – but there would be a labour revolt if he did that. So he left them to work their spells and magic, their elaborate purification rituals, their mumbo jumbo, as he thought of it. And he would not tell Virginia about what had been said. It was beyond ridiculous.
Now, as she lay on her day bed, her leg propped up with a pillow as Dr Pereira had recommended, she watched the two pigeons in their cooing solicitation – a perfect allegory for matrimonial bliss. But their example seemed only to underline her discomfort and to remind her of the course of action she had first thought about earlier that morning and that now seemed to her to be inevitable.
The house was silent. Henry had left shortly after breakfast to supervise the final drying of a large batch of leaf. It was a process that he liked to attend to in person, as there were delicate decisions to be made as to the point at which drying was stopped. The misjudgement of the moment could spoil the taste of the tea, making it bitter, as had happened a few weeks ago. It was an expensive mistake, and he did not want it repeated. Bella was on Miss White’s veranda, working with the governess on her arithmetic, a subject she enjoyed. She had Li Po and Po Chü-i with her, seated on a shoe box, allowed to attend the lesson on condition of noninterference. Li Po, she said, was good at figures, while Po Chü-i struggled with even the simplest sums. “He’s good at other things,” she said. “He knows a lot about history.” Miss White listened to this but simply rolled her eyes.
There was a house servant, who moved from room to room sweeping and tidying, but he was dealing with the washing in the small laundry block behind the bungalow. He was adept with the iron, heated by small lumps of glowing charcoal, and in due course would deliver piles of smartly pressed sheets and clothing, but it would take up most of the morning. So the only person in the house, apart from Virginia, was Michael. He was mixing bread dough in the kitchen, dusting his hands with flour to allow him to feel the dough into just the right consistency.
She had a small brass bell, of the sort imported from the foundries of India. It was decorated with monkeys in relief around the rim, the handle formed by the curling tail of one of them. She picked this up and rang it firmly.
Michael appeared after a couple of minutes, wearing his apron and wiping flour off his hands.
“I see you’re making bread,” said Virginia.
Michael nodded. “I am making two loaves. Big ones. Then I will make soup for your lunch. I have some chicken.”
Virginia fiddled with the bell. He watched her. “Good. I like chicken soup. Don’t put any peppers in it. I don’t like it if it’s spicy.”
“I will not,” he said.
She waited for a few moments. She put down the bell and then smoothed the surface of the pillow under her injured leg. “Where is Nikku?”
“He is doing laundry, Lady.”
“I’d like you to fetch somebody for me, Michael.”
He waited. The flour was off his hands now, but he still rubbed them gently.
“You know the carpenter? The head carpenter?”
Michael inclined his head. “The very fat man?”
She smiled. “He enjoys his food, I think. Yes, that man. Can you fetch him from his workshop? You know the place?”
Michael did. “I can fetch him.”
He began to leave, but she stopped him. “No, wait a moment. I want you to fetch him without anybody knowing. I want to talk to him privately.”
Michael looked confused. “It is light. People will see me . . .”
“No, that’s all right. I just don’t want to bother my husband about this.”
He said nothing, but she saw that he bit his lip.
“It’s not important,” she said quickly. “I just want to ask this man something. And I want you to be here to interpret. I don’t think he has very good English.”
He waited for further instruction, but she indicated by a movement of her hand that he should set off on his errand. After he had gone, she reached for The Illustrated London News and began to page through it. The duchess was still launching her ship, the bottle of champagne swinging through the air on its brief journey. She examined the photograph, studying the woman’s outfit and the fashionable people standing around her. She felt a pang of resentment, of envy, over a world that she was cut off from, here on this distant hillside where nothing happened. She turned the page. Italian troops were pictured in a village in Abyssinia. They were smiling. In the background, two small boys, holding hands, were staring at them with the frank, unblinking curiosity of childhood. And there was Mussolini in Rome, visiting a hospital, escorted by nuns wearing wimples topped with twin peaks. The nuns were smiling at Mussolini. The brute, she thought. The brutes were taking over the world: nuns seemed not to understand that.
It did not take Michael long to complete his errand. Announcing his presence with a knock on the door leading off into the corridor, he brought the carpenter onto the veranda. Virginia indicated a chair, and the man lowered himself onto it. The chair squeaked in protest at his weight, and Virginia thought, Well, at least if he breaks it, he’ll know how to fix it. She glanced at Michael. “Tell him we can speak in Tamil if he likes.”
Mi
chael explained, and the man nodded his assent. He looked anxious.
“I just wanted to ask you about our pavilion,” she began. “That’s all.”
Michael translated, and the man relaxed. He had been gripping his hat in his hands; now he stopped kneading the brim.
“You told my husband that the wood on the barrier there was rotten. You said that’s why it gave way.”
The translation was made. The man nodded.
Michael translated his reply. “He says that he’s very sorry that you fell. He said that it was very good fortune that you landed in a tree.”
“Tell him thank you.”
This was done. Then Virginia said, “So the wood was rotten?”
Michael spoke quickly. The carpenter shook his head and gave a lengthy reply.
“He says he did not say it was rotten,” Michael said. “He said that he told Mr Henry that there was nothing wrong with it.”
Virginia frowned. “No rotten wood?”
The carpenter understood this without the translation. He shook his head. He switched to English. “Wood good. The wood is good. Very good wood.”
Virginia did not say anything for a few moments. Then, “But what happened?”
The man launched into a torrent of Tamil. After a couple of minutes, Michael reached out and tapped him on the arm to stop him.
“This man,” Michael began, “says that he does not know what happened. He says that sometimes things happen for no reason. He says that they just happen. He says it is like that.”
Virginia looked at Michael. “Ask him this: is he sure that he did not say anything about rotten wood? Is he one hundred per cent sure?”
Words were exchanged.
“One hundred per cent,” said Michael at last. “He says that he is telling the truth.”
“Thank him – from me. Tell him that it is best if he doesn’t discuss this with anybody. Tell him that I mean that. There’ll be trouble if he talks to anybody about it. Make sure he understands that.”
Michael explained, and the man nodded. He arose from the chair, which creaked once more. Virginia looked away, over towards the pavilion, which she could not quite see, and by the time she looked back, they had gone. People moved quietly here, she thought. Like shadows.
The Pavilion in the Clouds Page 6