6
The Illustrated London News
T hey were sitting in the schoolroom at the back of the bungalow. It was the dreariest room in the house, a converted storeroom with brown linoleum floors and skirting boards of the same colour. An attempt had been made to brighten the walls with a display of maps and cutout pictures of children in their schoolrooms in various parts of the world. The children, scrubbed for the camera, sat alert at their desks under an African tree; three small Eskimo children, their faces framed in fur hoods, were improbably posed, books on knees, in a large igloo; two attentive Australian children huddled, beaming, about a radio on a sheep-station veranda. All of them, Bella felt, were better placed than she was – particularly the Australian boy and girl with their school-of-the-air; she would far prefer a radio set to Miss White, she thought.
They were working their way through a page of arithmetic exercises, having spent an initial half hour on multiplication tables. Bella was good at those, including the thirteen-times table, which even her mother, she discovered, was hazy about. “We never got quite that far,” said Virginia. “In my day it wasn’t quite so important. There were other things you had to know.”
Bella was curious. “Such as?”
“Kings and queens. Alfred and the cakes. King Canute. Robert the Bruce and the spider. The Amazon. Oh, there was a lot.”
“I’ll never know all those things.”
Virginia told her not to be defeatist. “You pick things up as you go along. Once you get to school – to a proper school – you’ll learn an awful lot.”
But now Miss White was on to the ancient issue of the men digging a ditch and the timing of their labours. “Now listen carefully,” she said. “If it takes two men one hour to dig a ditch, then how long will it take one man?”
She thought for a while. It depended, surely, on how quickly that man would dig. Some people were slow – she had seen them digging the ditches at the side of the road: they leaned on their shovels and smoked; they only really worked when the supervisor came along on his bicycle and berated them. It would take ten such men to dig a ditch in an hour.
“One hour and fifteen minutes,” she said.
Miss White sucked in her cheeks. That was always a sign that an answer was wrong.
Bella corrected herself. “One and a half hours,” she said. “Or maybe three hours if they’re lazy.”
Miss White looked disapproving. “No,” she said firmly. “It’s nothing to do with what the men are like. Let us assume for the moment that the men all work at the same rate. They’re all the same sort of man.”
“Are they Tamils?”
Miss White smiled. “That’s neither here nor there. They could be Tamil, or they could be Buddhist. They could be Mohammedans, or even Parsis, for that matter, but perhaps not them. No, perhaps not Parsis.”
Bella did not know what a Parsi was. “You would be unlikely to find Parsis digging ditches,” Miss White said. “They are a very cultivated people. They usually do skilled work. They’re businessmen and accountants. Engineers. That sort of thing. They have very characteristic names.”
“Such as?’
“Any name with wala in it is likely to be a Parsi name. I met a Mr Bankwala in Calcutta. His people had worked in a bank. And there are families called Cakewala.”
“Who made cakes?”
“Yes, but we are meant to be doing arithmetic. Think again: two men dig the ditch in an hour – will one man take a longer or a shorter time?”
Bella was confident enough about that. “Longer – because he won’t have anybody to help him.”
“Yes, that’s right. But how much longer?”
Bella looked at Li Po and Po Chü-i, who were seated at the top of her desk, propped up against one another. They did not attend all of Miss White’s lessons but appeared at some. They did not like arithmetic.
“Does it matter how long it takes to dig a ditch?” asked Li Po.
Bella had to explain to him that this was not a real ditch. “This is just pretend. All arithmetic is just pretend.”
Li Po thought that there was no point in wasting one’s time on pretend things. Po Chü-i agreed, although he normally agreed with everything that Li Po said.
“How deep is this ditch?” asked Li Po.
“She didn’t say,” replied Bella. “I don’t think she knows.”
Miss White had written something on the schoolroom’s small blackboard. 2 MEN TAKE 1 HOUR – 1 MAN TAKES 2x1 = 2 HOURS. She turned and looked at Bella.
“What are you muttering, Bella?”
Bella did not reply. Li Po was saying something about long division.
“Are you paying attention?” snapped Miss White.
Bella did not hear her. Li Po had confessed that he found long division hard. Po Chü-i agreed. “I’ll never learn it,” he said. “Never.”
“You mustn’t give up,” said Bella. “It doesn’t matter if you’re not very good at something – you have to keep trying.”
Miss White drew in her breath. “Bella, I don’t know what you’re thinking, but I’ve had enough of these wretched dolls. If you can’t keep your mind on your lessons, those dolls are going to have to stay outside.” She paused. “Are you listening to what I’m saying?’
She was not. Li Po was saying something about his breakfast. He liked kedgeree. All dolls like kedgeree.
Miss White moved across the room. Standing over Bella’s desk, she reached for Li Po. “This has gone far enough,” she said. “These dolls are a distraction. You’re letting your imagination run away with you. This is a schoolroom – not a playroom. And you, young lady, are eight – soon to be nine. You’re not a little girl any longer.”
She picked up Li Po. “Li Po can wait outside the door,” she said. “And Po Chü-i too, while we’re about it.”
Bella snatched at Li Po. “No, Miss White, you mustn’t. They’ll stop talking – I promise.”
Miss White was holding Li Po by his right arm – pencilthin – a tiny stuffed tube of material at the bottom of which was a minute hand, the fingers delineated by delicate stitching – not much of an arm, but all that Li Po had. Bella had grasped him by his legs, covered, for the most part, by an ankle-length silk mandarin coat, the coat that a Chinese poet would have worn on an important day – a day on which visitors might arrive at the river jetty.
Miss White pulled, as did Bella, and Li Po was for a brief moment a distended rag doll tugged in two different directions. Then his arm came off, the stitches connecting it to his body giving way in a series of tiny ruptures. Out of the arm came the living flesh, white horsehair, tightly rolled. Bella let out an involuntary scream: “Li Po! His arm . . .”
Miss White stared at the tiny detached arm. For a few moments she said nothing, and then, handing the arm back to Bella, she said, “I’m very sorry. I didn’t mean to damage it.”
The apology added insult. It. He was not a thing; he was Li Po.
Miss White reached for the rest of Li Po. “Let me look,” she said. “Let me see what I can do.”
Bella nursed the broken body of the doll. She began to sob.
Miss White looked pained. “I’m so sorry. It really was an accident, Bella.” She prised the doll out of Bella’s hands. “Look, the body isn’t torn. It’s just the arm that’s come off.”
Just the arm that’s come off . . . thought Bella.Would a doctor say that about a person? It’s just your arm that’s come off . . .
She waited for Li Po to say something, but he was in shock. All that could be heard was a keening sound from Po Chü-i, who had witnessed the incident at close quarters. She shouldn’t have allowed Miss White to hold him – not now, in his injured state. She would be unable to hear anything he said, because only Bella could hear what the dolls said. Adults did not understand – how could they?
“I tell you what we should do,” said Miss White. “Why don’t we go straight to my bungalow? I have needle and thread there, and I’m sure we’ll find a thread th
at matches the original. You won’t notice a thing. It will be as good as new.”
She immediately thought of Po Chü-i. “Po Chü-i will have to come as well. Li Po will need him. Please let me bring him.”
Miss White pursed her lips. Guilt kept her from dismissing this request. “Bring them both, if you must.” She paused. “And I really am terribly sorry, Bella. I know how much you love your dollies.”
She closed her eyes in an effort to get control of herself.
She should not take out her frustration on this little girl and her funny little dolls. It was not her fault that she did not want to think about how long it would take two men to dig a ditch. And it was always men . . . Did women not dig ditches? The answer, of course, was no, they did not. She had never seen a woman digging a ditch. But that was not because women could not dig ditches – clearly they could, and there must be places where they were digging ditches – there simply must be. They picked tea, and they weeded the tea gardens, but ditches were different. It was probably because men took all the ditch-digging jobs while women had to stay at home and perform tasks of domestic drudgery. If it took one woman ten minutes to change a baby, then how long would it take two women to change three babies? Or, more to the point, how long would it take one man to change one baby? A lot longer than ten minutes, she imagined, because he would spend fifteen minutes looking around for a woman to pass the baby onto to be changed. You had to laugh. You had to.
She did not particularly like her job. She had never imagined that she would end up being a governess – of all things. It was so Victorian in its sound. It was what you became if you were not of a class to be a domestic servant and if there was little immediate chance of getting married. You were not even a proper teacher, because you had none of the qualifications of a teacher. You became a governess because there was nothing else that you could reasonably do unless you were prepared to work in a shop or be a secretary. It was so unfair; it was so wrong, and it was all because you were a woman and were denied the opportunities that men took for their right. It made your blood boil – it truly did. And if you showed an interest in being what you really should be – a woman of intellect, with an interest in those things of the mind that men took for their preserve – then they called you a bluestocking.
At least in Calcutta there had been people who could talk about something, people who could hold their own with those back home in places like St Andrews and Cambridge. Whereas here there were the planters and their club and The Illustrated London News to read, and out-of-date copies of The Times, and talk about the same things day after day – about the next trip home and the letters that the children wrote from school and the difficulties of getting supplies of the things you needed and the sense that life was slipping away. Nobody talked about any of the things that mattered: about how science was going to change the way we lived and how psychologists were going to help us to overcome human evil, and about how the Russians were experimenting with a social system that would make war and poverty and competition a thing of the past. There were people talking about those very things, there were people writing poems about them – clever poems – but nobody here knew anything about that.
A reading circle . . . Who did they think they were? Bloomsbury? Virginia Woolf? And they had not invited her to a single meeting – not one – although they knew, right at the beginning, that she was there in her bungalow, a few yards away from the Pavilion in the Clouds, and it would not have been an effort for somebody to come over and say, Would you care to join us, because we’re discussing Mr D.H. Lawrence and we wondered if you might have something to add? That would not have been too hard for them, and yet they did not do it because they knew that if she did join them, they might discover how little they knew about anything, and they did not want to find that out. It would be too depressing for words to have to be them with their tennis parties and at the same time to come to the realisation that you knew nothing about Mr D.H. Lawrence or Sidney and Beatrice Webb, or any of the people who were actually thinking about things.
She sighed. “Is that all right then? Should we go and fix this little tear? And I’ll make you a cup of hot chocolate, and you can have one of my special barley sugars – how about that? Would that help – because I really am terribly sorry about your dolly’s arm, Bella. I really am. Look at me. Just look at me. You can see that I’m sorry, can’t you?”
A reluctant glance was followed by the faintest of nods.
“And Li Po will forgive me, I hope.”
The question remained unanswered, hanging in the air like one of the clouds that moved across the hillside, wispy, drifting, as capable of lifting as of lingering and building up into a larger cloud altogether.
The following day Virginia declared that her period of recuperation was over. “It’s better for me to be up and about,” she said. “I have a few scratches here and there, but there’s nothing wrong with me otherwise.”
She insisted she was fit enough to use the car and drove over to the Macmillan bungalow so that Bella might say goodbye to Richard, who would be leaving for school in a few weeks’ time.
“Richard is a very lucky boy,” said Virginia. “He’s starting off at a school in Dumfriesshire, which has a very strong rugby team. You know how he’s always wanted to play rugby – well, now he’ll get very good coaching. And lots of art, too. His mother was telling me the art teacher in the school has actually had an exhibition in Dumfries – and sold some of his paintings.”
The car slowed down. A small group of women and children were crossing the road ahead, making their way up the hill. One of the children stumbled and had to be picked up by a woman in a red sari. The woman glanced apologetically in the direction of the car; the child’s face was contorted in rage.
“Poor little thing,” said Virginia. “Just a tiny tot, and a long walk, I imagine.”
Li Po was sitting on Bella’s lap. He could not look out of the window, but he could see the sky through the windscreen. His repaired arm must have been throbbing, because you didn’t recover all that quickly from losing an arm. He had lost a bit of horsehair in the process, and he would take some time to get over that. That was Miss White’s fault. She should not have grabbed him like that. You did not grab a Chinese poet. It was a very rude thing to do, and hot chocolate and barley sugar was not really enough to make up for something like that.
Richard’s mother, Heather, was waiting for them on the lawn at the end of her driveway. She had binoculars strung around her neck; she would have been watching for their car as it climbed up the estate road. She always looked so calm, Virginia thought; so fresh, and on top of things. And she was always ready with one of her compliments, which she always seemed to mean. She said, as she greeted them when they emerged from the car, “You are a real marvel! Here you are, right as rain, after a really terrible shock. You’re an example to us all! And you have such a lovely car. My car is black, but yours is that delightful blue. There should be more blue cars – we’d be a lot happier if there were.”
Virginia laughed. “Does it matter? Cars should get you from one place to another – that’s all.”
Heather waved a careless hand. “Possibly, possibly. But look at Bella! Such beautiful hair! Wouldn’t we give a couple of years of our lives just to have hair like that? I would. And look at her pretty dollies! Or are they boys? I believe they’re boys after all.” She smiled. “Boys don’t like to be called pretty, do they?”
Bella looked away. She had never been sure what to say to Richard’s mother and so had never said anything other than to agree with her. So now she said, “No.”
Heather beamed. “Richard is so excited to be seeing you. You can go and knock on his door, and he’ll show you his new trunk, all ready for the voyage. With his initials painted on it!” And to Virginia, she said, “I get terribly sea-sick, you know, but only for a day or two. Then it passes, and I emerge from my cabin. Fresh air is the only solution, you know, but they don’t like you to open the por
tholes in case the weather gets up and everything is soaked. Did you hear about one of the steerage passengers last year who opened his porthole although he was right down below and the waves came in and he almost sank the whole ship?”
“You can imagine what the captain had to say,” said Virginia.
“Oh, you certainly can, although captains are always very tactful. I think it’s their training. They have to converse with all manner of people on board. It’s a great art that some of them have. Others just drink, I’m told.” She paused. “I’m staying at home for four months after I settle Richard. I’ll spend some time with the girls. Then I’m coming back. Poor Jimmy is going to be on his own for rather a long time, but there we are.”
“We’ll have him round.”
“You’re a darling. Thank you. He loves company, and his bridge is improving – it really is.” She looked away. “I’d prefer him not to spend too much time at the club. You know how it is. The bachelors and people. And that woman on the social committee, the one who looks like a paraffin refrigerator – she’s shameless in the way she flirts with any spare man around the place – anything in trousers is fair game. She doesn’t mean anything by it, of course, and that confuses the men. You know how they are.”
Virginia nodded. “I suppose we should be sympathetic. Her husband has a tin leg.”
“Yes, of course he does – poor man. It squeaks, you know. He should really oil it more frequently, but of course nobody can say that to his face. I’m surprised she doesn’t do something about it. If my husband started squeaking I’d be there with my can of oil like a shot – like a shot.”
In Richard’s room, Bella was shown the trunk by its proud owner.
“Brand new,” he said, stroking the domed lid. “It’s made of wood and leather. The wood is really tough, you know. And you see that RM on the side? That’s me – RM stands for Richard Macmillan.”
The Pavilion in the Clouds Page 7