by Francis King
The two girls have returned from their walk and now stand in the doorway behind the ayah, their belted raincoats and their hoods dripping water, and their faces seeming to the boy, now gazing at them over his mother’s shoulder, to be mysteriously transformed. He stretches out a hand first to one and then to the other, but neither of them moves.
‘What’s all this about?’ Helen asks.
He stops crying abruptly when he hears her. It is not like a voice that he has ever known.
He is a beautiful child. Everyone – army officers, tea-planters, missionaries, civil servants, even those who sense something effeminate and, yes, not quite wholesome about him – agrees on that. His face, with its long, dark lashes, its pointed, dimpled chin and its skin so soft and so translucent that it seems as if a mere touch might break it and cause the blood to seep through, has about it a vulnerable girlishness. It is not only his mother who feels, when she holds him in her arms, that if she were to squeeze him too tightly his fragile limbs might snap. His hair is so blond that in certain lights – under the coppery sheen of an imminent thunderstorm or in the orange circle thrown by the drawing room standard lamp with its bell-like, beaded shade – it acquires an unearthly pallor, making his mother call him ‘my changeling’. Unlike other children, he is always clean and neat, washing his face and hands deliberately with a large sponge in the bathroom which, like his bedroom, he shares with Clare, even when no one has told him to do so. He fusses if the ayah has not cleaned his shoes or brushed the mud off his shorts. He does not like the feel of wool against his skin and his eyes water, as though he were about to cry, when a comb is jerked and tugged over his scalp or his nails are cut.
He has always been a happy child, even if so solitary, with few white children in the small hill-station and of those even fewer with whom he is encouraged to make friends. He paints, either curled up in the window-seat in the drawing room, if he is allowed in there, or else on the floor of the schoolroom, the glass tumbler fascinating him with its swirling colours each time that he dips in his brush. Everyone says how ‘artistic’ he is; but for many of the army officers, tea-planters, missionaries and civil servants, that word carries a certain taint. Such people are not merely touched but also embarrassed when he gives them one of his paintings of purple trains, with white and brown people waving out of them, or of lurid sunsets over a lake that has the flatness and hardness of one of those disks with which he plays tiddlywinks with his grandmother, Clare and Helen. He is happy in being spoiled intermittently by his family and constantly by the servants. The latter call him chotah sahib or Little Master, they bring him saffron-coloured cakes or emerald-green sweets from the bazaar, which his mother takes away from him in case they should be dirty, they carry out his peremptory commands and they listen in wonder as he sings in his thin, clear, slightly eerie treble. In remote villages, further up in the hills or down in the plains, they have children of their own; but they love this alien child more than they love them, just as a monk or nun loves God more than kith and kin. Angry with the syce, he lashes out at him with the crop he carries for his pony; but the syce only laughs and later tells the other servants with pride of the incident.
He is a loving child, if capricious in his loving. When his mother has one of her bridge parties, he will be allowed into the drawing room when the servants are bringing in the tea. ‘Come and talk to me,’ one of the more elegant of the guests will cajole him, her face heavily powdered under her hat. But he will deliberately go to some plain, unimportant guest, not because he feels sorry for her with a wart on her chin and straggling grey hair which peeps out from under a plaid tam-o’-shanter, but because he wishes to show the others that he will never belong to any one person, however beautiful, charming or generous, for more than a few minutes at a stretch. The women coax him with bits of cake from their plates or slabs of chocolate and bags of sweets from their handbags. Politely, he either takes what they offer or, more often, refuses.
He loves Clare, who is Eurasian, whose father is a ticket collector for the BB and CI Railway, and who, here up in the hills, is so far from her family and friends. Even more he loves Helen. Secretly, he has been making her a bead bookmarker under the instruction of his grandmother. His grandmother, who has little to do in a household not her own, is always making bead-fringed doyleys as covers for bowls, jugs and glasses. In a paper bag he has all the multi-coloured beads, which he and his grandmother bought in the bazaar. Carefully he threads them, screwing up his eyes, at the table by the schoolroom window. ‘Oh, you are a clever boy!’, his grandmother exclaims in genuine admiration for a skill which neither of her daughters, much less Toby, possessed when they were children. Peter has come to want the bookmarker for himself as it grows, millimetre by millimetre, under his fingers, but that wanting makes it all the more valuable as an offering for Helen. The fact that Helen does not kiss him, does not hug him, does not give him presents or exclaim how sweet, attractive and intelligent he is, in the manner of the other women, makes him wish all the more to do something for her. He so much longs to attain what has so far been teasingly unattainable.
Helen says that he is a terrible tale-bearer and he knows, with shame, that she is right. It was he who told his father and mother of how the young soldier, in the uniform permeated with a not disagreeable guava-like smell of sweat, stopped him and Clare when she was taking him to the German refugee dentist and talked so long to her that he was late for his appointment and had to wait until the patient who should have been after him had had a tooth removed. Clare later said, defensively indignant, that the soldier was a cousin of hers, but no one believed her.
Clare sensed that lack of belief. ‘Anyway, even if he isn’t a cousin, why shouldn’t I speak to him?’ she demanded.
Isabel’s reply was chilly. ‘What you do in your free time is no concern of ours. But when you’re with Peter …’
After he and Clare had gone into their bedroom, she cried out, ‘Oh, you little beast!’ and raised a hand to strike him. But, miraculously, the long, prehensile fingers, their nails painted scarlet (‘You should speak to her about those nails,’ Peter once overheard his mother tell his father) stopped a fraction of an inch from his cheek.
He let out a bellow from the shock of it. ‘You’re not allowed to do that! I’ll tell Mummy and Daddy!’
‘Tell them what you like!’
She sat down at the dressing-table and for a long time stared at the reflection of her pouting, dissatisfied face with a rapt intensity, as though she were seeing it for the first time. Peter was transfixed by remorse and, never felt before for her, also by pity. He sidled up and put an arm round her shoulder, his cheek to hers. But she pushed him away, not brutally but with an irritable absent-mindedness. ‘ Oh, leave off, do!’
At that, she opened one of the dressing-table drawers and took out first a packet of De Reske Minors and then the long cigarette holder, the ivory of which was streaked with nicotine. She was not supposed to smoke in their bedroom; indeed, Isabel did not like her to smoke at all – ‘filthy habit’ she would say. But, for once, Peter did not betray one of Clare’s many infringements of the rules laid down for her.
Peter also tells tales about the servants. There is, for example, the one that, originating with him, has come to be repeated, with more and more embellishments and exaggerations by the grown-ups, to illustrate that, however long and however hard you try, you can never turn an Indian servant into an English one. The cook, Ahmed Ali, was with Toby and his first wife, Eithne, Helen’s mother, before the First World War, coming to them, a skinny, pock-marked boy, from a remote Rajputana village to assist their then cook. The first wife and the second both, in turn, taught him their skills, so that ‘You won’t eat better at Government House’ is something which some missionary or planter, who has never had more than a drink at Government House, often tells a newcomer. Since so much of the lives of Ahmed Ali, Muhammed and the other servants remains a secret to him, Peter, fascinated, is constantly spying on them. T
hough forbidden to do so, he is always wandering about their quarters behind the house, peering, with a mixture of excitement and apprehension, into the dimly lit, shed-like buildings. Standing on tiptoe, chin on ledge, he also watches what goes on in the kitchen and scullery.
It was while spying on the kitchen, shortly before Sunday supper, that he discovered Ahmed Ali carving what was left of a cold leg of lamb in a manner of which his parents would have hardly approved. The cook was seated crosslegged on the flagged floor, the carving knife in his right hand and the carving fork in his left, while the joint, also on the floor, was held between his left big toe and the toe next to it. Slice after slice of meat fell to the floor, to be picked up and nonchalantly tossed on to the silver platter beside him. That Sunday evening the family had supper, not off that cold joint, but off chunks of ham hacked clumsily thick by Isabel, who, Toby being away on business, had taken over from Ahmed Ali as a less expert but more fastidious carver.
Not for the first time Isabel told Ahmed Ali that he would have to pack up and go, she had had enough, this was really the last straw; and not for the first time he went through an elaborate charade, curiously satisfying to both of them, of pleading with her on his knees and in tears. ‘Well, I’ll have to talk to the sahib about it, we’ll see,’ she eventually relented. And there the matter ended.
Peter also spies on the mali or gardener and the gardener’s ‘boy’. The latter’s coughing, like the raw squawking of a fledgling bird, often makes the family speculate as to whether he has tuberculosis or not, though none of them has any inclination to do anything further about the possibility.
This summer has been an unusually warm one in the hills and the mali, a hillman, goes about his duties, weeding and planting on his hunkers or swaying perilously as he transports buckets of water down the narrow path from the well above the tennis court to the rose garden below it, in nothing but a dhoti. His legs are streaked with mud and mud is also caked between his strong, bare toes, on his hands and even on his hair; but as in the case of the huge, garish dahlias blossoming all the way down the cud between the verandah and the Collector’s chalet-style bungalow hundreds of feet below it, the soil from which he seems first to have sprung and now to derive all his sustenance, has produced in him a beauty so surprising that more than once Peter has caught Clare gazing out of the window of their bedroom or the schoolroom, dreamily fascinated, as he carries out his tasks. Peter also watches him, thrilling precociously to the sheen of his flesh between the daubs of mud and to the muscles, so hard and solid that they might have been carved from mahogany, of his straight back, chest, legs, arms, hands. ‘Let him get on with his work, don’t be a nuisance to him,’ Isabel calls out from her writing-desk by the open window of the drawing room when, with a stirring of unease, she sees the boy, in his open-necked, short-sleeved shirt, grey flannel shorts, fastened with a snake-belt, and his sandals, trailing behind the gardener as he moves back and forth between the well and the rose garden.
The gardener’s ‘boy’ is so tiny that, seen from a distance, people assume him to be a child; but a close view of the delicate, sad, huge-eyed face, as of an ailing marmoset, shows him to be of an age even greater than the gardener’s. He does not interest Peter, any more than he interests anyone else, except when he coughs.
Above the well, bowered by the overhanging branches of a deodar, there is a shed, narrow and whitewashed, which the child has been forbidden ever to enter. He has asked repeatedly what it is and has first been told nothing, only a godown, and then at last, his mother by now exasperated, that it is a servants’ outdoor lavatory, rarely used now that a new one has been built for them by their quarters. It is dirty, Isabel says, adding: ‘I don’t want you going in there and picking up germs.’
But that prohibition merely encourages him to creep inside when no one can observe him. The interior of the shed is almost as dark as the locked cellars to which he never descends except with his father on an expedition to bring up wine and it has the same chilly clamminess, despite the heat of the afternoon, and the same odour of mustiness and decay. This is because of the bushes crowding around it, the layers of deodar, green on darker green, going up and up above it, and the absence of any window other than a narrow, unglazed rectangular aperture high up in a wall. Peter feels apprehensive, yet excited. At the far end, there is a concrete platform, covered by a wooden slat with a hole in it. At first, he wills himself not to look down into that hole for fear of what he might find. Then he has to look, he cannot contain himself.
Dark objects lurk beneath a viscous slime, with an iridescent sheen, as of oil, on top. He stoops, peers. He opens his mouth and then closes it, swallowing the saliva with which it has filled. He is horrified, yet he cannot look away. Beside the concrete platform there stands a huge lota or pot, full of stagnant water. When at last he tears himself away from the hole and looks into the pot, he sees that this water has the same rainbow sheen on it as the water in the hole. He has no idea that the servants, on their rare visits here, use this water, not paper, to cleanse themselves. He shudders, suddenly cold, and stares up at the narrow, rectangular aperture above him, noticing, for the first time, that a huge spider’s web all but fills it. The spider is motionless near the centre, a large, black scab. He puts out a hand and, on an impulse, rocks the pot to and fro. Then, lowering it, slowly so that it should not break, he tips it on its side and watches as the water gushes out from it between his legs, splashing his bare ankles.
Giggling to himself, he then rushes out. No one sees him and no one mentions what he has done.
After that, he often creeps back into the whitewashed shed, though he never again tips over the pot. Once Clare sees him from the tennis court, where she is playing a lethargic game of pat ball with Helen, and she shouts up at him, her coarse black hair pulled back from her face in a pale blue bow so that her features look unnaturally taut: ‘ Peter! What are you doing? Come out of there – at once!’
Helen laughs: ‘Oh, leave him!’
But Clare persists: ‘Come out! Do you hear me? You could pick up anything in there. We don’t want you down with enteric.’
The child comes out; but he returns both that same day, after the game of pat ball is over and the girls have gone back into the house, and on other days. So it is that, one afternoon, when his mother is asleep, his grandmother is down in the bazaar shopping for wool, and Clare, Helen and his father are seated out on the verandah aimlessly talking, he stealthily creeps up the narrow path, through the bushes and into the shed.
It is not empty. Two people are in there. They start apart from each other, their faces in shadow but their naked bodies gleaming in the light filtering down from the narrow, rectangular aperture above them. There is something about those bodies, slowly recognized as those of the gardener and his ‘boy’, which the child finds monstrous and terrifying. Yet he is also obscurely thrilled. The gardener snatches up his dhoti from the floor and rapidly winds it about his loins. The ‘boy’, eyes wide with shock in his marmoset face, seems to be paralysed, as a glue-like fluid trembles on a thigh and drips from a hand. Then the gardener shouts something, his usual sleepy expression transformed into one of extraordinary ferocity. The child runs out of the shed and races down the path and across the tennis court. Breathless, he arrives on the verandah. The adults stare at him.
‘What is it, Peter?’ His father raises a hand to shade his eyes from the sun behind the boy.
Peter tries to tell him; but there are no words to describe what he has witnessed. He stammers, his voice becomes tearful, he falls silent. But Toby knows from the jaggedly broken phrases what he is struggling to express. A large man, already in his fifties, with reddish eyebrows, scant reddish hair and a reddish tint to his skin, he jumps up and, with a barked ‘ Keep him here!’ to the girls, marches along the verandah and vanishes from sight.
The two girls gaze at each other, as though neither is sure how the other will take all this. Both have paled and there is sweat, not from their gam
e, in small beads on the down above Clare’s wide, heavily lipsticked mouth. Helen is the first to speak: ‘Disgusting.’ She grimaces.
Clare gives a high-pitched laugh. ‘Well, they’re different from us. What do you expect? And, anyway, what does it matter?’
They talk as if the child were not there.
‘Father thinks it matters. Perhaps he’ll kick them out.’
‘I doubt it. You don’t find another gardener as good as that in a hole like this.’
Now Helen also laughs, throwing back her head so that a thread of spittle between her teeth glitters in the sunlight. ‘ You’d no business to be there in the first place,’ she tells Peter. ‘None at all.’
‘Sneak!’ Clare puts in, out of the rancour of the many tales which he has repeated about herself. ‘ Why do you always have to tattle?’
Peter feels an irresistible urge to throw himself into the lap of one or other of the girls in an easy luxuriance of repentance and self-humiliation. But, head erect and arms held stiffly to his sides as though he were a toy soldier at attention, he merely blinks ahead of him.
‘They won’t like you at school back in England if you play the sneak,’ Helen says.
He hates to be reminded that one day, in two or three years, he too, like Helen in the past, will have to make the long journey away from India and his mother and father to a country of which he knows only what he has read in those magazines which arrive, weeks late, in the house on the hill above the violet eye of the lake. People always speak as if, when he has reached there, some retribution will overtake him.