The Pavilion in the Clouds

by Alexander McCall Smith

  You remember that I had a governess in Ceylon before I came back to Scotland. I think I showed you a photograph of her once – it was in that album that Mummy gave me before I left. And there were some photographs of her, too, in the papers that the people in Colombo sent over with Daddy’s things after the War. She was that tall, rather skinny woman, who is in the photograph of Mummy and me sitting in the pavilion that we had at the edge of the garden. It was a bit like a summer-house, right on the edge of a steep drop. Mummy fell from it once – I think I told you about that – but wasn’t badly hurt because a tree broke her fall.

  Anyway, she’s that woman – the woman in the photo. She was called Miss White, and she was with us for over a year. Then she went away just before I was sent home. I don’t know what happened to her, as there was a bit of a row, and she never wrote to me nor to Mummy. We weren’t quite sure where she went. She said that she was going to go to Calcutta because she had friends there and she wanted to see them again. She used to tell us that she knew some very grand people there, but Mummy was not sure whether that was quite true. I was too young to know much about that.

  She was Scottish too, although she had gone to boarding school in England. She used to talk about that sometimes, but I can’t remember what she said. That’s not to say that I don’t remember some of the things she said – I do. She talked a lot of French to me, and she was very keen on geography. We spent a lot of time learning about mountains and rivers. I still know a lot about famous rivers, and will tell anybody all about them if asked. But nobody asks, which is just as well, I suppose, as I wouldn’t want to spend too much time with people who could only talk about the Nile and so on. (That’s a joke, by the way, as I’m sure you realise!)

  She crossed out the last sentence: her aunt had a sharp sense of humour – for an aunt – and it seemed condescending to flag up one’s jokes, as if the recipient lacked the understanding to appreciate them. And then she realised that striking through words merely draws attention to them, so she abandoned the page in question and started a new one.

  There’s a professor here who teaches English literature. We enjoy his lectures, although sometimes he loses us a bit. He is some sort of authority on Matthew Arnold and on Wordsworth, on whom he’s written a book. I almost bought it when I was in the bookshop on my very first day here in St Andrews. I picked it up and paged through it. There were three hundred pages, and I decided that I would not buy it because I was not at all sure that I would want to read three hundred pages about Wordsworth. One hundred pages, maybe, but three hundred . . . Anyway, when I started going to his lectures, I thought I might get the book after all. I’ve never known anybody who’s written a book. Do you know anybody? Of course you do: you told me that you knew Compton Mackenzie a bit and that you sometimes saw him walking about Drummond Place. Everybody says that Whisky Galore is the funniest book there is, but I haven’t read it yet. Perhaps I shall read it when I’ve had enough Matthew Arnold and Wordsworth.

  I went back to the bookshop yesterday to buy the Wordsworth book because I felt guilty that here I was at university at last and was too lazy to read three-hundred-page books and also because I thought that if my professor was prepared to go to all the trouble of writing a book about Wordsworth then the very least I could do would be to read it. It had been on a table that they have near the cashier’s desk, but when I went to find it there was no sign of it. Where it had been there was a large book on the history of golf! That had the same sign that I had seen next to the Wordsworth book – the sign that said Highly Recommended. I think they just put that sign next to any book that they want people to buy, whether or not they’ve read it.

  I asked them whether they had a copy, and they said that they had sold five copies of it since the term began and that they thought that everybody who went to his lectures was now buying it. They said that this sometimes happened, as students liked to quote their professors’ books back to them in the examinations and get better marks as a result. They said that was a well-known trick, and it all went to show that professors were just as vain as the rest of us! They asked me if I would like them to order a copy for me, but I said no. I was worried that if I said yes, they would think I was one of those students who wanted to impress their professors, and that I wasn’t the type who would normally read about Wordsworth. I know you shouldn’t worry about what other people think about you, but I do, I’m afraid.

  The point about all this is the professor’s name. He’s called Professor James Alfred White, or J.A. White, as it says on the cover of the book. It took me a while to realise it, but then I remembered something. Miss White said that her father was a university professor, and I remember her saying something about St Andrews. She also read Wordsworth to me – she made me learn that poem about daffodils that everyone has to learn – and she said that her father liked it. I distinctly remembered her saying that. Now surely there are not going to be two Professor Whites who are keen on Wordsworth, and so I think he – my professor, that is – is Miss White’s father. It is an amazing coincidence to be taught by a daughter and then by her father. I should ask him about her, I suppose, but I don’t want to bother him. And I haven’t heard from her since those days, and I doubt if she wants to hear from me. In fact, I’m sure she won’t want to hear from me.

  She concluded the letter with a few anecdotes about the other young women in University Hall, including a story of one who had been given a car by her wealthy parents and had then lent it to her newly acquired boyfriend. He had driven it into the sea one evening after a party, and it was now ruined. That had been the talk of the university for days, she said, and the young man in question was going to be fined by the University as well as be asked to pay for the damage to the car, which he could ill afford. It was rumoured that he was going to join the navy as the only way out of his difficulties. Naval officers were always doing things like that, people said, and so they would not mind too much.

  She posted the letter and went into a tearoom on North Street, where she was planning to meet Anne. Anne had been working on an assignment on Arthur Rimbaud. She confessed to being in love with the work of the poet. “He must have been such a romantic figure,” she enthused.

  “Didn’t Rimbaud shoot Verlaine? Or was it Verlaine who shot Rimbaud?”

  “Verlaine. He shot Rimbaud after an argument. He hit him in the wrist. Another shot missed. He went to prison for two years, where he wrote thirty-two poems.” Anna paused. “Rimbaud was a bit bad, I agree. But all the best poets are a bit bad, don’t you think?”

  Bella thought that Matthew Arnold probably was not – nor was Wordsworth – and so she said that she wondered whether that was an observation that only rang true when applied to French poets. English poets were far too high-minded and respectable to be bad in that way and concentrated more on the sea of faith and daffodils and other subjects on which it was hard to be convincingly dissolute, although one might be able to manage it if one really tried.

  Waiting for her friend, a cup of tea and a buttered scone in front of her, she found herself thinking of Professor White and of Miss White herself. For the first few years following the raid on Ceylon, the loss of her parents had seemed strangely unreal to her, the news of their death merging into memories of war-time news broadcasts of battles, retreats, engagements in foreign theatres of war – footage in the cinema newsreels that she had watched, with her aunt and a cousin, in the news cinema on Princes Street. It was as if their loss were some sort of Pathé News event, accompanied by the stirring music that was the soundtrack to shots of tanks rolling across plains, of jeeps of soldiery entering liberated Italian villages. She had grieved, but in a silent, private way, half believing that it had not happened and that they might somehow be found to have survived, in the way in which so many people, thought to be dead, were turning up, emerging from the throngs of displaced people who made up the human flotsam covering Europe. The reality of what happened came home eventually, and her stunted grief expressed i
tself, allowing memories of her childhood, and of Ceylon, to come to the fore. She had put all that out of her mind – the bungalow on the hillside, the garden in which she had played, the pavilion on which she had spent those long afternoon hours with her mother, enjoying the cool breeze that wafted up the hillside below, with the National Geographic and The Illustrated London News and her two dolls. And the outings to the club, where, when her parents were drinking sundowners with the other planters, she and Richard chased fireflies and told one another stories of what they were going to do with their lives, which they felt had not quite started yet, but that would begin when they were in that place called home that they both longed for and dreaded, in roughly equal measure. Because home, for Richard at least, would be boarding school and the things that happened in boarding school, which they had heard could be horrid, and for her was living with an aunt she had never met and who could, for all she knew, be a strict disciplinarian and not give her enough to eat, as stepmothers were said to do.

  Now, as she sat in the tearoom, waiting for her friend, she thought: I did a terrible thing. She had written in her letter, I doubt if she wants to hear from me. In fact, I’m sure she won’t want to hear from me. She had written that without really thinking it through, but it was what she felt. Miss White would not want to hear from her because of what she had done to her. She had caused her to lose her job. She had done it with all the innocent carelessness of a child, but now the full weight of what she had done came back to her. She had framed Miss White – it was as simple as that. She had framed her.

  The dawning of this realisation brought a sudden feeling of hollowness. She felt sickened by what she had done. In so far as she had been aware of it, she had simply repressed the memory of the injustice, and now it came back to her, in vivid detail, even after more than ten years – the hiding of her father’s clothing, her silence, her half-hearted attempt to own up, and then her connivance in the getting rid of Miss White. She had done all of this. It was not some other little girl in a distant country long ago; it was her. She was the one who had done it to a person who had done her no wrong – who had, in fact, been her teacher, with all that that implied.

  She felt her heart beating within her, responding to the bodily reactions that went with guilt. Adrenaline? Or was that the chemical that went with fear? And yet she felt that there must be a chemistry to guilt and self-reproach. Because she had felt its effect, which seemed as real and as potent in its effect as if she had swallowed some powerful drug.

  Anne arrived, apologising for being late. “The lecture went on and on. And was very boring, I’m afraid. Perhaps I should switch courses. Divinity, maybe?” She laughed.

  “You’ve still got Rimbaud.”

  “Yes, there’s still Rimbaud.”

  Anne was looking at her with concern. “You look upset. Has something happened?”

  Bella shook her head. “No.” And then she said, “Well, maybe yes. It’s complicated.”

  Anne signalled to the waitress, and to Bella she said, “I’ve got all the time in the world.”

  Bella began to explain. She found it a relief to be able to tell somebody about it. That was what they always said, she told herself: a confession to somebody else was often the best way to relieve the burden of guilt. She had read an article in a magazine about that and had not paid much attention. Magazines were full of unsolicited advice about what one should do and what one should not do; she was above all that, and yet now she remembered it.

  At the end of Bella’s explanation, Anne was wide-eyed. “You planted your father’s clothes . . . planted them? To get rid of her?”

  Bella nodded. “Yes. Awful, isn’t it?”

  Anne seemed embarrassed. She hesitated, being unwilling to offend her friend, but then she said, “Yes, not very good.” She gave Bella a searching look. “You aren’t making this up?”

  “I wish I was.”

  Anne leaned forward. “Why? Why did you want to get rid of her? Was she very strict?”

  Bella shook her head. “Not at all. No, I thought that she was somehow going to take my father away from me.”

  Anna frowned. “As in . . . run away with him?”

  Bella nodded. “Something like that. I saw her as a threat.”

  “And was she?”

  “Was she going to take him away? I don’t think so. I think she was totally innocent. I didn’t really understand what was going on.” She paused. “My mother might have – and I say might – have felt that she was after my father, or that my father was after her. I might have picked something up from her. But I very much doubt if there was anything to it.”

  “Yet you couldn’t be sure?”

  “Not really.”

  “Mind you, you were . . . how old?”

  “Not quite nine.”

  “Well . . . Who hasn’t done terrible things when they were not quite nine? My brother shot our neighbour’s pet rabbit with a pellet gun – through the head – when he was seven. Deliberately. Then he buried the body in the garden so that he wouldn’t be found out. But he put a little cross on the grave, and so my parents knew there was something going on. That was rather stupid of him.”

  Bella smiled. “Criminals make mistakes.”

  “You can say that again. But you know something? He forgot about it, and now he denies that it ever happened. But I remember it quite clearly.”

  Bella looked rueful. “I almost forgot about this. Then I remembered – just a few minutes ago, actually. Sitting here, I remembered every detail.”

  The waitress brought Anne’s order of a cup of tea and a scone. “I still feel hungry,” Anne remarked. “After the War and not having much to eat, and shortages going on and on. You’d think they could have stopped rationing sugar by now.”

  Bella had her doubts. “I heard that won’t happen for ages. But people won’t put up with it forever.” She looked at Anne’s scone – at the generous portion of butter and jam beside it on the plate. “At least we can come to places like this if we get too famished.”

  Anne took a sip of her tea. “This governess, this Miss . . .”

  “Miss White.”

  “Yes, what happened to her? She left Ceylon?”

  “She said she was going to. I think she was going to India. Presumably she’s back from there now.”

  “Do you think she got married? Do you think she’s living somewhere with a husband and family and has forgotten all about it? That’s perfectly possible, you know.”

  Bella considered this. “I doubt if she got married. She was a real old maid, you know.”

  “Bluestocking?”

  “Yes. I heard my mother talking about her with my father. She was saying that she thought that Miss White would never get married because no man would ever look at her. I remember her describing her as plain, and I remember wondering what plain meant.”

  “Poor woman. It must be dreadful to be somebody like that – not to have any chance of finding a husband.”

  “You can become a schoolteacher, of course. There’s always that. Or end up looking after ancient parents.”

  Anna rolled her eyes. “Imagine! What a fate. I would hate to be an old maid. I’d hate it.”

  “You won’t be,” said Bella. “You’ll find somebody really romantic. A bit like Rimbaud, perhaps.”

  “Good God, no. Not him.”

  “Well, somebody else then. But a Frenchman, nonetheless, with an open-topped sports car and a house in the South of France. And I’d visit you in your villa, and there would be tennis parties and drinks on the terrace, and your handsome husband would be drifting around lighting people’s cigarettes for them, pouring them drinks and so on. Just think of it. He’d be wearing tennis whites – and you’d have wonderful clothes – whole wardrobes of them – and a maid who would look after just you, and it would be just perfect.”

  Anne picked up her scone and examined it. “I love these scones – I just love them. Scottish scones are far nicer than English scones.” Her g
aze shifted to Bella. “But what are you going to do? Anything?”

  When Bella did not answer immediately, Anne continued, “If you feel bad about it – and you say you do – then why not get in touch with her? Write her a letter. Say that the whole thing’s been preying on your mind and you wanted to apologise.”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

  “She would hardly reject the apology – unless she’s become a fearful old battle-axe.”

  “She might have.”

  “Yes, she might. But what have you got to lose? If you feel bad about it – if your conscience is troubling you, then you’ve got nothing to lose, surely, by telling her how sorry you are that . . .”

  “. . . that I wrecked her life?”

  Anne made a dismissive gesture. “Oh, come on – you haven’t wrecked anybody’s life. And who knows – maybe it was a good thing for her to leave Ceylon. Think of what might have happened to her when the Japanese invaded?”

  “They didn’t. They sent planes. They bombed it a bit. But they didn’t invade. It wasn’t like Burma or Malaya.”

  “All right. But it couldn’t have been much fun being stuck somewhere like that for the whole war. You would have been wondering every day if something like Singapore was going to happen all over again. And then you’d be in one of those camps when people died every day from cholera and beriberi and so on and were as thin as skeletons – you’ll have seen the pictures.” Anne looked at her intently. “Honestly, Bella, you probably did her a favour.”

  Bella had to smile. “A good friend is somebody who makes all the things you do look good. You’ve just shown you’re a good friend.”

  “But what I said is true.”

  Bella toyed with the last crumbs of her scone. “I suppose I could,” she said.

  “Get in touch?’

  “Yes.”

  “How?”