The Pavilion in the Clouds

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Suddenly, she wanted to cry. She had looked about the landscape of their marriage, and she had discovered a rift, like a scar, a geological fault in otherwise stable terrain. There was something very wrong here – she was sure of it. There was something in his tone of voice – and in what he said – that was insincere. That was the way it sounded to her, even if she could not put her finger on the reason why this should be so. He was praising Miss White because at heart he wanted her to stay – and he wanted her to stay because the governess meant something to him. It may well be that he was not actually having an affair with her, but there was interest there. There was the potential for something more – and, whether or not he recognised that himself, it was still there, beneath the surface, waiting for its moment. That was what happened between men and women: there would be feeling under the surface, perhaps only dimly experienced; there were sentiments unexpressed, and then suddenly, without warning, there was the bursting of a dam within, and all restraint would be swept away. That happened – of course it happened. It had happened between her and Henry, after all. There had been nothing much on their first couple of meetings, and then, rather to her surprise, there had been a heady onrush of passion. It was as if they had both suddenly become intoxicated. They had both been surprised, in fact – Henry as much as she.

  She looked at him. He was nothing special to look at. He might be described as presentable – just – but that would only be to a charitable eye. In a roomful of men you would hardly notice him – he would just be another man, the same as all the others, who would begin to put on weight and start to look battered by life, in the way in which men did. That was because they had to work all the time, just as Henry did, going off every morning to the office and tea factory. When he got up in the morning and looked out of their bedroom window, over the tops of the trees, over the morning mist, what did he have to think about but the long list of things he had to do that day? Whereas she had only to think about whether she might spend a further hour in bed before getting up for breakfast, and then have to decide whether she would have grapefruit or orange juice for breakfast, or kedgeree, or the spicy scrambled eggs that Michael liked to make for her. And then the day lay ahead quite empty, with The Illustrated London News and Somerset Maugham and letters to write about the not very much that was happening. That was all. That was her life. But he was at the heart of it – this man whom she had married – whom she loved, she supposed, or was at least strongly attached to – what was the difference? You loved your old slippers; you loved your favourite bath salts; you loved your little daughter with her dolls and her dancing and her collection of butterflies, pinned to cardboard; you loved all those things, and you loved the husband who was part of all that. And if anything threatened that, then why should you not just make sure that it was simply not there to threaten it?

  And then it occurred to her that if she ever had to do anything desperate to protect her world, she would do it – and have no compunction about it. She would fight to preserve what she had. She would do anything – anything. Unbidden, the troubling question arose: would she be justified in going so far as to push that woman off the Pavilion in the Clouds? She would, she thought.

  Except, she had not done that. She did not bear that stain. But could Miss White do it? What if one looked at it from her perspective? What if she wanted to fight for something that was equally important to her? Would she show any compunction in doing the inconceivable? Or would she think: David Hume would never approve?

  Henry said, “Darling, you’re very dreamy this evening. I know this is an awkward subject, but we have to discuss it. It’s a major decision.”

  She looked at him. “I don’t want to discuss it, Henry,” she said. “I’ve told you what I want. I just ask you to respect my feelings here. I’d prefer not to have Miss White with us. That’s all.” She paused. “And I don’t think I’m being unreasonable. I spoke to Heather about it, and she agrees . . .” She trailed off. She had not intended to mention her lunch at the club.

  But it was too late. He had looked up with interest. “Heather? What’s it got to do with her?”

  She tried to make light of it. “Oh, we had lunch in the club the other day. I told you.”

  “You said you were going to play bridge.”

  She had forgotten that. Had she told him that? There was no reason, of course, why she should not have lunch in the club with Heather – wives met there all the time – but she had obviously not wanted him to know.

  He became silent. She watched him. His silence, she thought, spoke volumes. She had been right in her suspicions.

  “Very well,” he said. “How much notice should we give her?”

  She said the first thing that came into her mind. “Two weeks?”

  He clearly had not expected that. He raised an eyebrow. “That’s rather short. She’ll have arrangements to make. Heaven knows what the poor woman is going to do. Do you have any idea? Do you have any idea where she might go?”

  “We pay her fare,” she said. “To wherever that’s to be.”

  He sighed. “That’s the least we can do – in the circumstances.” Then he added, “And give her salary for the rest of the period we agreed before . . .” He hesitated, and then looked at her accusingly, “. . . before we changed our mind.”

  She said nothing, but nodded her assent.

  He said, “Are you going to tell Bella?”

  “Yes.”

  “She won’t take it well, I fear.”

  But Virginia thought, Don’t be so sure about that – perhaps she will be getting exactly what she wanted. She said, though, “Maybe. Who knows with children?”

  9

  Unpurified Water

  B ella was looking at her scrapbook when Virginia came into her room. Li Po and Po Chü-i were sitting on two tiny chairs, doll’s furniture, their arms hanging down on either side, their faces turned up to the ceiling. Li Po was asleep, she thought, but Po Chü-i was just thinking, as he often liked to do. He had a lot to think about, he had once told her: far too much to think about in the space of a whole day.

  Virginia sat on the end of the bed and peered over Bella’s shoulder at the open page of the scrapbook. There were several pages of pictures of royalty, for the most part cut from the pages of The Illustrated London News, a faithful observer of the doings of kings and queens. Here was the Duke of Windsor in Paris, walking in a garden with Wallis Simpson. “She has large pearls,” Virginia said. “Look at her. Pearls, you see.” And then, on the same page, was a picture from The Times of India of a maharajah bedecked with even larger pearls than the Duchess.

  “They have fabulous jewels, those maharajahs,” said Virginia. “Look at him – isn’t he splendid?”

  “Daddy doesn’t wear jewels,” said Bella, without looking up.

  “That’s different. Scotsmen and Englishmen don’t wear jewellery. They just don’t.”

  “But maharajahs can?”

  “Yes, they can. It’s the way they show the world how rich they are.” She told her of a maharajah who had so many jewels that he had employed a courtier to walk behind him, wearing his excess jewels for him. “Fancy that! What a funny job for anybody to have.”

  It did not seem like that to Bella. To be the official wearer of a maharajah’s jewels seemed like an enviable job.

  Virginia looked up at the ceiling. “There’s something we need to talk about,” she began. “Something important.”

  Bella remained immersed in her scrapbook. She had turned a page now and was gazing at a picture of a whale breaching. Underneath this image, there was a pod of dolphins and a separate diagram of how a crab’s claws worked. She traced the illustration of the mechanism with a finger.

  “They could bite your finger off,” she said. “A big crab could do that, couldn’t it?”

  Virginia glanced at the picture. “They could indeed. You have to be careful of crabs. And lobsters too. They have even stronger claws.” She paused. “You know that you have to
go home to school sooner or later. You’re remembering that, aren’t you?” It was like saying, Virginia thought, that you should remember that the world will end.

  “Like Richard?”

  Virginia seized on this. “Yes, just like Richard. He’s going very soon now, isn’t he? In a week or two’s time, I think.”

  “He has a new trunk. It has his initials on.”

  Virginia said she had heard all about it. “He’s looking forward to it, isn’t he? He told you that, I imagine – when we went round to his house.”

  This brought a nod.

  “So, you’ll be going to school, just like Richard – except that you’ll stay with your aunt Penny and your cousin. That’ll be nicer than being a boarder, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe.” She rather liked the idea of being a boarder. She had read stories about what boarders did: they had midnight feasts, they solved mysteries, they had best friends to whom they swore undying allegiance.

  Virginia decided it was time. “We think – that is, Daddy and I think – that you’ll go a bit earlier than planned. Quite soon, in fact.”

  Bella turned round. She fixed her mother with an intense gaze. “Next week?”

  Virginia laughed. “Oh no, darling, not next week. We have to make arrangements. You can’t just get up and leave, just like that. No, perhaps in a month’s time. Or six weeks. It depends on the boats home. And also, we’ll have to arrange for you to travel with somebody. There’s bound to be somebody going.”

  Bella absorbed this information. She did not seem to be perturbed.

  “And that means,” Virginia continued, “that Miss White will be leaving. Very soon, in fact. Before you go.”

  “She has a big trunk in her bungalow. I’ve seen it. She can use that for her things.”

  She had expected more of a reaction. Children were at heart opposed to change; she had seen this so many times. They constantly surprise us with their bone-deep conservatism. They wanted the familiar, but they were also accepting.

  “You’ll be sorry to see her go, I think.” Virginia was not sure whether she meant this as a question or an observation.

  “Yes.” But the scrapbook had reclaimed her attention. Now she was looking at a page of maps. There was a map of Ceylon. Underneath was printed, in large type, The Pearl of the Orient. Virginia read the inscription from where she was sitting. She had cut the map out for her from a brochure published by one of the tea brokers. We reduced the world to metaphor. A whole country was a pearl. For somebody to take away. To steal.

  She stood up. This had been so much less difficult than she had imagined. That was because children were unpredictable. They accepted so much because they were used to things happening to them, rather than making things happen themselves. And then suddenly, at some point in their lives, the realisation dawned that the world need not be just something that happened to you, and that you could make it happen yourself. And you tried to do that, and you discovered that it did not always work.

  “Miss White has been a very good teacher,” Virginia said. “You’ve learned so much from her.”

  “Lots.”

  “Good.”

  There was silence. In the corridor, just beyond the door, Nikku was sweeping the floor, his broom bumping against the skirting boards. I wish he wouldn’t do that, thought Virginia. It chips the paint. She sighed. Life could so quickly degenerate into an endless nagging of people to do this, to do that – to do things differently from the way in which they had always done them. So quickly could one end up complaining about everything because it failed to live up to standards that you felt you had to impose. They had no right to order these people about – she, at least, understood that, even if none of the others, none of the planters or their wives, understood that. We are uninvited guests, just as we are uninvited guests in every corner of the globe; and yet we take it upon ourselves to dictate how things should be done. That was the massive, almost unbelievable, conceit upon which the whole colonial enterprise was built, and yet which nobody seemed to see. She did not want to be here. She decided that she did not want this life she had created for herself, far away from everything, in a place that was alien however much you built your bungalows or planted your gardens. The jungle was just outside – thick, present, immutable. It did not belong to you. Nothing really belonged to you. You thought you could make it yours, but you were wrong. And now she was facing this entirely unnatural separation from her child, her only child. Oh, they talked about long trips home and how you could end up seeing a lot of the child in spite of everything, but that simply was not true. You gave up the child; you said goodbyes that could be for years, not months. And all the time those women who picked the tea, those women whose names she would never know because nobody bothered about them, those women at least had their children to go home to in the evening after they had put down those great baskets they carried. She closed her eyes. You could not think too much about these things, because there was a limit to the amount of pain you could stand without looking at the world through your tears, all day, every day.

  “I’ve told her,” she said to Henry. “I told her ten minutes ago. We had a little chat in her room.”

  It was mid-morning, on a Saturday, a day on which he only briefly called in on the tea factory. Now he was at home, on the veranda, eating a slice of toast and anchovy paste and glancing through a six-week-old copy of The Scotsman. He would read the newspaper carefully, fold it back into its original wrapper and then give it to Mr Maguire, his Glaswegian assistant in the office. Mr Maguire would then read it himself before passing it on to one of his drinking companions in the club, a taciturn Aberdonian who was the up-country agent of a Colombo firm of hauliers. The Aberdonian had a local wife, who claimed to be a member of a Burgher family. She followed the Scottish news with fascination, revelling in the details of a distant and completely alien existence, as strange to her as any existence led on the shores of Greenland.

  “And?” said Henry, licking anchovy paste from a finger.

  “She took it very calmly. There was no reaction, in fact.”

  Henry was surprised. “I thought she might make a bit of a fuss.” He sounded disappointed; he had warned Virginia that Bella could be upset, and he was not prepared for this. So he asked, “Are you sure?”

  Virginia was certain. “Cool as a cucumber,” she said. “She even said something about Miss White having a trunk in which she could pack all her things. She didn’t express even the slightest concern. Nothing.”

  “That doesn’t mean that she isn’t feeling something,” said Henry, stubbornly.

  Virginia shook her head. “I think I can tell when something’s worrying our daughter – and there was no sign of anything of that sort.”

  She watched her husband. His manner was restrained; it was as if he were calibrating his response to some standard of indifference. This was the dismissal of an employee they were talking about – not the banishing of a lover – and she imagined that he wanted to act accordingly.

  Now Virginia made her suggestion. “I think you should have a word with Miss White now,” she said. “You should tell her about our decision before Bella says something. We wouldn’t want her to learn about it from her.”

  The effect of this was immediate. He stared at her in incomprehension.

  “We have to speak to her,” Virginia said.

  He spoke falteringly. “Yes, but I thought that you would do that. Woman to woman, so to speak.”

  She held his gaze. She saw that his eyes moved away. “But you pay her,” she said. “You’re in charge of all the staff. You always have been.”

  “That’s different,” he said quickly. “She’s not domestic staff, for heaven’s sake. She’s a governess.” He laughed nervously. “I don’t imagine she’d be pleased to be lumped in with the maids or the gardeners or what-have-you.”

  For a few moments she was silent. Then she said, “I’ll speak to her. I’ll go and have a word with her right now.”

>   His relief was palpable. “Remember to reassure her about our honouring the contract.” He looked at her anxiously. “Stress that she’ll get full salary for the next ten months irrespective. And her fare, of course. The equivalent of a full fare home.”

  She nodded, and went off towards Miss White’s bungalow. She could see the governess sitting on her veranda, reading a book. Butter wouldn’t melt . . . she muttered under her breath, but then checked herself. She should not allow herself to harbour bitter feelings against Miss White, who was, after all, an old maid in the making. What must it be like to have no prospect of a husband, to know that one is plain, to know that men are simply not going to be interested and that one is going to have to spend one’s entire life by oneself, as an adjunct to the lives of others? Poor woman; she did not deserve hostility even if she was desperate enough to seek to traduce another woman’s husband under her very nose. Under her very nose . . . the words were sufficient to evoke renewed antipathy, and so she put them out of her mind, took a deep breath, and crossed the lawn towards the veranda from which Miss White was now watching her progress, the book lowered, time suspended.

  It was easier than Virginia had imagined it would be – at least at the beginning. She went straight to the point, explaining that it had been necessary for them to change their plans at short notice. “Family factors,” she said, adding, “quite unforeseen.” And that, she thought, was true: it was indeed unforeseen that a rather plain, bluestocking-ish governess should set her hat at somebody else’s husband.

  Miss White nodded. “I understand,” she said. “You’ll be sending Bella off to school earlier than expected.”

  Virginia was taken aback. “As it happens,” she said. “Yes, that’s what we’re planning to do.”

  “So you won’t need me?” There was no resentment in the governess’s tone, and now she went on to say, “There is always a terminus in this profession. Children grow up – sometimes rather quicker than we think they will.”