Breakfast with the Nikolides

by Rumer Godden

  They took Don downstairs while the children were still asleep.

  For Emily the morning broke in streaks of green and white: white on sunlight, and flying bands of green; and she woke in her bed under the white net high above the garden. In the garden on the trees every tip and frond was waving in the morning light; there were the tall exciting shapes of palms, petrified, in colours of greys and greens like palm-trees in old prints; there were the emerald diaphanous sprays of the cassias, and another tree whose leaves were like countless little coins or seals moving in the sun. The sun spread like a fan over the garden, the same shape but upside down as the tails of the cook’s pigeons that sat on the roof and round the stables; one fan-stick of sunlight lay across Emily’s bed and touched her cheek, it had not touched Binnie or anyone else, it touched only Emily. It altered as the sun came up, now it was long and thin like a spear. A golden spear.

  ‘Bring me my spear. O clouds unfold …’

  Charles sang that. Charles’s voice was big and rather rough and it had notes that were so deep and vibrant that they woke a literal echo in Emily, as if she had harpstrings inside her.

  ‘He makes an awful noise,’ said Binnie, her head cocked to listen. ‘It’s like listening to a whole band.’

  ‘I like it,’ said Emily.

  In the early morning, waiting for his horse, he always stood on the steps above the garden and sang ‘Jerusalem.’

  ‘Bring me my bow of burning gold,

  Bring me my arrow of desire,

  Bring me my spear. O clouds unfold,

  Bring me my chariot of fire …’

  ‘Oh, hush!’ said Binnie, scandalized. ‘They’ll hear you the other side of the river.’

  ‘It will do them good,’ said Charles. ‘It’s the most beautiful song in the world.’

  ‘Mother doesn’t think so,’ said Binnie.

  What possessed her to say that? Charles sang no more and called for his pony and Emily beat at the plumbago bushes with the switch that she was carrying. They went a little way with Charles and then suddenly, over some stupidity like this, they lost him; always Emily was turning up, from him or from Louise, continual proof of what she did not want to know.

  ‘There are circumstances over which we have no control.’ Louise said that often, but Emily had never quite believed her … I shall not let them spoil it. I shall stay here, said Emily. Nothing, nothing must happen here to spoil it.

  ‘Jerusalem,’ Binnie was saying, ‘is a place in Palestine. How could it be in England too?’

  She spoke to Charles, and Charles, who had one foot in the stirrup of his nervous and very lively little country-bred, before he mounted paused to answer her; at however inconvenient a time, Charles always answered, ‘That Jerusalem wasn’t a place,’ said Charles, and swung himself up.

  Delilah, the pony, went dancing away, sending up the gravel in a cloud of red dust. Presently she came fidgeting back again.

  ‘What was it then?’ asked Binnie.

  Emily waited for his answer. He hesitated, looking down at Binnie who stood by his foot; from Emily’s view she looked foreshortened, all gathered frock and round pink face and a neat little pate of curls, and her heart gave a jealous pang at the tenderness of Charles’s face. They did – they did like Binnie best.

  ‘What was it then?’ asked Binnie.

  ‘Your heart’s desire,’ said Charles, and Emily forgot her jealousy in her interest. That was the first question he had not answered properly, he seemed to feel that; he was looking not at Binnie but over Emily’s head. ‘Your heart’s desire,’ he repeated, and he said it with a mocking bitterness that appalled her. ‘And if you can’t get it,’ said Charles, ‘don’t lose your temper. Be reasonable. Take something else instead.’

  Emily knew, without turning, that Louise was standing behind her.

  Lying in bed, thinking of that, she shut it quickly out of her mind …

  This is how I used to wake when I was a baby, thought Emily hastily, in another house that seems in some way joined to this. Now I am back again as if I had never been away. I am back again exactly where I started from. I am back. I am back … But was she? Could she be? Was she?… Yes I am, insisted Emily, I have forgotten I have ever been away … But she said it as Charles said the world was square – for Emily had been away …

  She had been in the school room at Bellevue, for instance, where the vine hung over the balcony making a peaceful green light over the little boys and girls. Madame Chastel said, ‘Ecrivez la moitié, jusqu’à: “Hannibal était parti pour les Alpes …”’ when the alarm went and Madame stood up, her dark moustache trembling slightly above her lips and cried, ‘Attention. Marchons!’ And they marched between the desks across the parquet in the hall into the panelled cupboard that led under the stairs to the cellar.

  Emily had been in the cellar. The concrete reinforcements made twisting shapes on the walls, there were dim piles of sandbags, and benches where they sat. Once the light went out and it had been quite dark. Emily sat on her bench and felt a sliding trickle run behind her ears. Somewhere a little girl began to sob, a little girl that might be Binnie. ‘We are not afraid,’ said Madame, ‘we think of our brave airmen, of our soldiers and our nurses and our ships – we are not afraid’…

  (‘Mother, need we, need we go to school?’)

  (‘Why?’)

  (‘Because of – raids.’)

  (‘Why, Emily, you ought to be ashamed, everyone is carrying on their work! You mustn’t be afraid of raids.’)

  (‘I’m not afraid of raids, I’m afraid of the cellar.’ But it was no use telling that to Louise.)

  Louise approved of the cellar. ‘There is no immediate danger,’ said Louise; but she hurried them into the cellar and she snatched them away in one push from Paris to Louvain. ‘No danger’ – in that clear and perfectly toneless voice, when she laid out in the cabin every night their warm coats and their life-belts; when with trembling fingers she tied the life-belts on them up on the deck.

  (‘What is it? Is it a wreck? Is it a mine, or a submarine? Have we been hit?’)

  (‘Nothing. Only a practice.’)

  (‘What? In the middle of the night?’)

  It was a submarine, Emily heard that afterwards. The submarine had missed them. Why couldn’t Louise have said it was a submarine?

  Emily stirred and turned impatiently in bed … Whenever I start to think, said Emily, I come back to Louise. Now – I shall teach myself to stop thinking of you, Mother. I am here, now, safe, away in this place, away from the world, with Charles. Soon, soon I shall think of myself and not of you, and I shall be free. I shall stay here and you cannot touch me here. Nothing, nothing shall happen here …

  She lay and listened to the noise coming up from the bazaar where the day was well upon its way … I see the bazaar, said Emily as she lay; it is interesting and exciting. The first shop you come to is the shop where they make kites; you can buy twelve kites for three annas in colours of pink and green and white and red, and a wicker spool to fly them with, and a pound of thread. The thread is glassed, and – only don’t tell Mother – we fly them with Shah off our roof and challenge other kites and cross strings with them and cut them adrift and then we can put another bob on our kite’s tail.

  The front of the money-changer’s shop is barred, and he sits on a red cloth quilted with black and white flowers – and he is a Marwari with a small orange turban like a doughnut twisted on his head. He has nothing in his shop but a safe, a pair of scales and a table a few inches high. In India jewellery is sold by weight, and the jewellery is made of silver threads woven into patterns and flowers. The moneylender tests every piece of money he is given by weighing it before he takes it, and I think that that is sense. Shah does it too, only he bites the money instead.

  The cloth-shop is inviting with rolls of cloth on the shelves all open to the street; cottons and prints with patterns, and new crisp sari cloth, and children’s dresses with low waists, cut square and flat like paper
dresses, hanging outside in the street. The grain-shops have grain set out in different colours in black wicker baskets, and with them are sold great purple roots and knots of ginger and chillies and spice. The sweet-shops have balls like American popcorn and other balls that are like marsh-mallows, and clear toffee sweets that are made in beautiful spiralled rings. Mother says we must never taste them but we have.

  The temple is very clever and interesting because its outside walls and its floor are mosaic made from broken pieces of china. In one little patch on the floor we counted a hundred and seventeen pieces; the banyan tree grows right down through the roof of the temple; a banyan tree grows out of the earth and sends some of its branches back into the earth again – it sounds like dust to dust – and the walls of the temple are tiled with the same sort of tiles that we had in the bathroom at Bellevue. On the platform are the images of Rada and Krishna, made of two jointed dolls with tinselled clothes, and in front of them a table with offerings of sweets and flowers. A woman came to pray – on the brass tray she put a little powdered sugar and with her thumb she made on it the pattern of the sun for luck.

  There is a mosque in the bazaar too, and it has a minaret shaped like a lighthouse beside it, only instead of a light, the priest goes there to call the people when it is time to come and pray.

  There is such a good idea in the bazaar. There are rickshaws, but instead of men to pull them they are joined to bicycles and pulled along like that.

  We buy bangles in the bazaar, glass ones, and the shop is full of their clear glass goblin colours. Mother forbids us to wear them because she says they are dangerous. They are dangerous; Binnie cut herself to the bone wearing hers – she had to have three stitches in her wrist.

  (‘That’s your fault, Emily. You take no care of Binnie. You are the eldest but you never think of her. You never think of anybody but yourself.’)

  Now Emily called across to Binnie’s bed to see if she were awake.

  The morning did not break for Binnie; there were simply the morning and evening of the next day.

  ‘What are you going to do today, Bin?’

  Binnie answered promptly. ‘I shall go fishing for pearls.’

  This was not such an incredible pastime as it sounded. On the edges of the river, in certain places, were beds of a curious deep-blue river-shellfish, more like a mussel than an oyster, and they could be dislodged and floated up by a hook on a string, sometimes – not very often. The native divers went down for them, naked and unprotected, and they could walk about below the water for minutes together without anything to help them but their muscles. Sometimes, not very often, just occasionally, the shells held a pearl, a real pearl with a gold sheen that was almost apricot. Charles had two in a pillbox on his desk … Why doesn’t he give them to Louise?… Don’t think of that. We shall go fishing for pearls …

  ‘We’ll take Shah and a fisherman,’ said Emily. ‘We’ll take the fisherman’s boat—’

  (‘We shall float down on the sun-green water, trailing our hooks past little bays and promontories in the hard white sand; there will be no sound but the sounds of the boat and the voices of Shah and the fisherman.’) Other boats, the same as theirs, crescent-shaped with a wicker cowl in the middle, would float down past them with dark-skinned crews who did not know their language and could not speak to them any more than the floating clumps of water hyacinth could speak. No one would talk to them or ask them questions; there would be nothing to listen to or to watch, everything would be wrapped in sun and silence, quietness and sun.

  Binnie sat up in bed. ‘Why, where’s Don?’ she said.

  At that moment Louise came lightly down the verandah. ‘Children! Children! You have been asked to go to breakfast with the Nikolides.’

  IV

  For Emily, the Nikolides were as desirable and nearly as distant as on the first day she had seen them. She had met them; they had come; and the Pools had been to their house for tea and to spend the day; but Louise did not approve of Mrs Nikolides nor Mrs Nikolides of Louise.

  (‘Mother, can’t we go and see the Nikolides?’)

  (‘Every time you go there you are upset. Their food is so ridiculously rich.’ And when they did go Mrs Nikolides would feel their elbows and shoulders bare in their sundresses and say, ‘You’ll catch a chill, poor children. I wonder your mother can let you out in the river breeze, without so much as a coat on, or a vest.’)

  Now, direct visits were rare, but the children saw one another occasionally, passing in launches up- and downstream, or in cars on the road; but always they were separated, and in the presence of their mothers only sent small reserved smiles and the wave of a hand across the air or water. Emily did not know whether or not the Nikolides family would have sent more if they could; it was probable that their desires were as well schooled as themselves.

  They were distinguished by their beauty, their obedience and their bravery. Emily felt that she and Binnie were not distinguished in any way at all.

  Alexandra, the girl, was beautiful and dignified; there was beauty in her straight chiselled nose and curved chiselled mouth, and dignity even in the fall of her hair, curling black on a very white neck, and in her grave dark eyes; and her smile was like a queen’s. She bore the weight of clothes with which her mother loaded her without complaining, only keeping still so that she should not feel their heat; and she was perfectly sweet-tempered with the ayahs and governess who followed her everywhere she went; she had beautiful unusual manners and once, when a car door was slammed upon her fingers, she had neither screamed nor cried, but simply fainted.

  Her brother Jason was like her, but more sallow, completely stoical and biddable to the point of death. Binnie, in the rare moments when she had him to herself, liked to find out how far he would go; he had never yet refused her. He would, when she told him, climb out to the end of a branch of a tree, walk on the roof parapet, be pushed out in a tub on the tank – and was rescued each time, just in time, by Shah. It was fortunate perhaps for Jason that the friendship was not encouraged.

  (‘No wonder,’ mourned Emily. ‘Why do you make him do it, Bin?’)

  (‘He never answers back,’ said Binnie with a slow smile. ‘He says nothing; he does it.’)

  So the Nikolides children remained as they first had looked for Emily, like those in a book, all that she herself was not, in another world, unattainable; and when Louise came down the verandah and said, ‘Breakfast with the Nikolides,’ surprise, excitement and delight swept every other thought out of her mind.

  ‘Be quick. Hurry!’ said Louise. ‘I’ve put your clean dresses ready, your spotted cottons and your sandals. The launch is waiting to take you.’

  They ought to have heard the smoothness in her voice, it was much too smooth to be natural; they ought to have seen her hands trembling against her dress; but they leapt out of bed, and cried ‘The Nikolides!’ Without a look or thought they raced away to dress.

  They met Charles on the steps downstairs. ‘Why haven’t you gone riding?’ asked Binnie in surprise.

  Charles, as soon as it was daylight, went out riding – they were not often up early enough to catch him.

  ‘Why do you go so early?’ they had once asked him.

  ‘Because that’s the best of the morning.’

  ‘But it isn’t really morning, it’s hardly even day,’ Binnie objected.

  ‘What is the day like then?’ asked Emily.

  ‘Like a violet,’ said Charles.

  Binnie laughed, but Emily knew what he meant. She had seen the day opening as they came in on the river; the sky opening above the flat land in violet curves with a glimmer of that colour in the water and in the freshness of the dew. Charles said things like that and Emily knew what he meant when no one else did, and he was looking at her now in a way that made her pause.

  ‘Why haven’t you gone riding?’ she asked, and the question made a rift for a moment in the excitement that filled her mind; but it was only for a moment, she did not even hear his answ
er.

  ‘He is taking you to the jetty in the car,’ Louise said hurriedly.

  ‘That little way?’ said Binnie.

  It arrested Emily too; it was strange that Charles should stay in to drive them a few hundred yards; it was out of order, but the morning was already and delightfully out of order and Binnie was in the car. Emily ran down the steps forgetting to say goodbye to Louise, and Charles silently followed her and drove them in a few minutes through the bazaar to the jetty where the launch was waiting.

  ‘Emily, wait—’ he said, but the launch had a feather of steam, like a breath blowing out of its funnel, and it rocked on the water as if it really were alive; and beyond it the green spaces of the river were bright with pin-points of sun. Emily could not possibly wait. She ran in front of Binnie down the jetty planks and jumped down on the deck; Shah saluted and walked down after them, and the loop of rope was lifted from the jetty post, the launch backed away into the stream and turned in a half-circle bearing them away. They saw Charles walk back to the car.

  Something in the way he walked made Emily look again. ‘Binnie,’ she said, ‘there is something wrong.’

  ‘Oh, Emily!’ cried Binnie impatiently; and after a moment she said, ‘If there were anything wrong, would Mother have let us go out? You know she wouldn’t.’

  Emily longed to be convinced but she demurred. ‘Why did Charles take us down in the car?’

  ‘I expect there is something she didn’t want us to see in the bazaar,’ said Binnie practically. ‘Perhaps there is another leper. You remember the fuss she made about the last … I remember him well,’ said Binnie with dispassionate interest, ‘he hadn’t a nose. His nose had quite gone. Mother thought it was dreadful, but I didn’t mind seeing him at all, did you?’

  ‘Not in the least,’ said Emily proudly, but she had to press herself down in her chair and fortify herself by pushing out her ribs and making herself hard and strong, and a comfortable peace replaced the trouble in her mind.

  The launch went on towards the Nikolides’ house, which could be seen with the mill chimney and the sheds at a great distance down the river. The river traffic grew thinner; soon they were quite alone on the expanse of water, and it seemed that the house and the chimney were coming gradually and inevitably towards them while they on the launch were still; now they could see and separate the colours; the chimney and the sheds were red like the house-roof, and the house walls were yellow; and presently they could see the line of trees and the fleet of launches moored there like grey ducks on the water. Emily was looking at them, excitement beating in her chest, but she still saw the figure of Charles walking away from the jetty and the sudden fear started up in her … What is it? What can it be?… And immediately she asked, What has Mother done? And clearly she saw Louise …