Eva Peterborough watches her in stillness for what feels like an age. Then says, “Bravo, darling. Of course you may paint here.”
“Really?” With shaking hands, Hannah replaces her cup and saucer to the table. “Thank you, Mrs. Peterborough. Thank you very much.”
“I believe in a woman’s right to meaningful work. I’m better known around here for what I don’t believe in. They can’t seem to get past that.”
“Oh, yes, right.” The Peterboroughs are atheists. That is their scandal. At the moment, Hannah couldn’t care less whether the lady stuffed cloven hooves into her shoes and hid a tail under her frumpy dress.
They sip tea and trade happy glances for a minute or two before Eva says, “Really what you need, Hannah, is a patron. Like Michelangelo had Pope Julius.” Her laugh is an awkward wheeze.
That the woman knows about the ancient master’s patronage makes Hannah want to squeal with joy. “Well, I thought I might do some paintings for you and Dr. Peterborough in return for your hospitality. I could paint your estate, or the mansion, if you like. Or your portraits? Or if you’d prefer, you could choose something from my existing collection.”
“How kind of you.” Eva opens the portfolio and begins flipping pages, but soon shuts it. “Is it truly a question of having the colonel’s permission?”
“Goodness, I didn’t think. Am I putting you in an awkward position with your husband?”
“Not at all.” She looks out the open casement window. Past an enormous weedy planter, a scrubby meadow slopes away from the house. “Charles will take no notice of us, I’m sure. He’s very busy these days with his research.” Eva gets to her feet and Hannah rises, on cue. “In fact, he and I hardly take any notice of each other. It suits us that way.”
“Sounds heavenly!” she blurts out, feeling her face redden. “But then, I’m frightfully anti-social.”
Twenty
The entrance to Idlewyld is two stories in height, incorporating the main spiral staircase to the upper floor. Several enormous gilt-framed mirrors decorate the walls, refracting the light into multiple channels and creating, in certain angles, reflections of reflections of reflections. Descending the winding staircase from the upper floor, Hannah feels a small shock—part delight, part discomfort—seeing fragments of Sergeant Singh copied in the mirrors. The original Sergeant Singh is standing a few paces from the double doors of the entry, inhabiting a fiercely professional attitude that is only briefly disturbed when he notices Hannah on the landing.
Eva, it seems, has already welcomed him in and now dismisses the servants.
“I believe you’ve met Mrs. Inglis,” Eva says to the sergeant.
Hannah flashes her a look. Already she regrets the way they’ve summoned him: on false pretenses.
The three of them move to a nearby room. Not the Souvenir Shop, as Eva has dubbed the formal sitting room, but a much smaller, barer space with yellow papered walls and wooden chairs set round a wooden table. On the table, a surveyor’s map has been unfolded.
“I have title on two hundred and fifty acres to the southeast of the formal grounds,” Eva tells him. “As I’m sure you’ve noticed on your ride here, Sergeant, the terrain is hilly. Outside of the orchards, and the main road of course, it remains completely untouched. Please, do sit down.”
Hannah clutches her elbows, avoiding both of their glances. What on earth is Eva doing? They summoned him to report a theft, yet she isn’t reporting it.
“I would ask that the two of you stay out of the orchards and off the formal grounds,” Eva continues, “but you are welcome to any part of my jungle acreage. Now, the easiest and most convenient point of entry would be behind the stables. The woods come in closest there and you will have some privacy whilst—”
“Madam, forgive me, but—”
“Yes, perhaps we should explain?” Hannah interjects.
Eva clears her throat. “I was mistaken about the ring, Sergeant. I’ve just now found it in the pocket of an apron I rarely use.”
The sergeant draws himself up even taller on his chair. He has the decency to look perplexed.
“Heaven knows how it ended up there!” Eva throws up her hands. It is a terrible piece of acting. “Seeing as you’ve come all this way, Sergeant… Well, as I say, the two of you are welcome to any of our jungle for your trekking.”
Sergeant Singh looks from Eva to Hannah and back again, his eyes darkening and his frown deepening. She’s never seen him like this. Hopping mad, she thinks.
At last he replies, barely able to unclench his jaw. “The first thing I would suggest, madam, is that before you summon the police in a criminal matter, verify the missing item is indeed missing.”
“I am truly sorry for the inconvenience, Sergeant. However, I’m not sure how I could have verified that status without actually finding the ring. Which I’ve only just done.”
After a stretch of silence, he rises.
“And the second thing you wish to suggest?” Eva asks. “You said, ‘the first thing I would suggest’…implying…there were others? Other suggestions?”
“No. There are not, madam. Good day to you both.”
In Hannah’s ear, Eva says, “I’ve had them pack you a pannier for the first outing.”
“If I am not needed here,” Sergeant Singh announces, “I will return to work.”
“You are needed!” Hannah exclaims, desperate at how things are unraveling. “Please, Sergeant, give me a chance to explain.”
The white picnic basket bobbing along in front of her is shrinking again as Sergeant Singh lengthens the gap between them.
“Do hang on a minute,” Hannah says, but not loudly. She’s in no position to make demands.
Her ankle, healing well these past weeks, is sorer than she expected. There is nothing quite like forest walking. Each step a little different from the last, with roots and rocks and saplings to dodge. The flora at Idlewyld is lighter and more delicate than the forested sites in the river valley she and the sergeant have explored. Over each new rise and around every corner is a miniature clime with its own unique inhabitants. It seems incongruous for such a subtle, charmed world to take her breath away and make her thighs burn and her back ache.
“Clearing,” the sergeant announces.
They struggle through a thicket of thatch palms, tumbling into a wide ditch that has been recently scythed. The open air strikes her like a furnace blast. Even the sergeant staggers.
“Oh, it’s the road!” she says.
He sets down her easel and stool and wipes his face with his sleeve. “The road to Ipoh.”
Hannah, likewise, drops her satchel. “This isn’t the road to town?”
“It goes in both directions, madam.”
Fixing him with a mock glare, she rolls her eyes. Then climbs up onto the empty carriageway and looks backwards and forwards, shielding her face with her hands. Cicadas whine loudly. “We haven’t had much luck today, have we?”
“Depends on how you measure it, madam. There is nothing that pleases you to paint.”
“I’ve been holding out for a parasol flower, I must admit.”
At this he brings his chin to his chest, pulling a sour face. She made it clear, at the house, that she couldn’t pay him; the opportunity to trek would be strictly voluntary. In fact, she repeated that he mustn’t feel obligated, that he could simply decline and she would heartily wish him well. Hannah sighs, trooping back down from the roadway. Probably she’d sounded like one of the cleaning supply salesmen who used to call at her mother’s inn. No wonder Sergeant Singh is rankling. In a single afternoon he is lied to, inconvenienced, and prevailed upon. And now he is carrying a pannier the size of a tortoise.
“I hope you aren’t missing anything important at the station,” she frets, squinting up at him. “We could decide on a schedule, couldn’t we? Choose some mutually convenient
days and times.”
He makes no reply, but stands looking through her, rubbing at his chin. White is creeping into the stubble on his neck and runs in thin rivulets through the longer hair of his beard.
“Shall we find some shade?” she suggests.
They retrieve their supplies and head for a lemon tree that escaped scything some years ago and is casting an oval pool of shade up the bank of the ditch. Hannah plonks herself down, not bothering to spread the blanket they’ve brought, and takes a swig from her wineskin. “Oh, how marvelous water can taste!”
The sergeant is occupied with the straps on the picnic basket. “What is in this thing, the crown jewels?” he mutters. “No, something heavier.”
“Sergeant?”
“Madam, I feel I must make clear… This is the strangest turn of events. To be summoned out here on false portenses.”
“Yes,” she agrees heartily, smiling a little at his bastardization of the word. Hannah reiterates the apology she offered him at the house and admits, “We simply got carried away, I’m afraid. It was like something out of a childhood novel; the mistress of the great house summons the fretful butler and the local constabulary in order to put a secret plan into action. Though, there was no butler in our case.”
He puts his hands to his waist. “This is the problem, madam. I am but a pawn for your secret game.”
“No! No, that was bad comparison.”
“I am not a game, madam.”
“Of course not. I-I felt I made the situation very clear in the end. Unfortunately I’m not able to pay you—”
“I am not caring about money!” he thunders. He makes several adjustments to his turban, his long nose twitching. “So what has happened, eh? Has the colonel changed his mind about tigers?”
“Oh, I see what you mean. As a matter of fact, no.” She debates for a moment or two and says, “I don’t have the colonel’s permission to paint. In fact, everybody we know in town is quite against it. So I asked Mrs. Peterborough if I might paint here at Idlewyld.”
He looks up at the gathering clouds for a long moment. “You came here without your husband knowing. You don’t wish your husband’s permission?”
“Of course I do. I would. But he’s not going to give it.” Suddenly she feels as winded as if she’s just climbed Cinnamon Hill. “Well, it’s a solution, isn’t it? If we came here.”
“We are here. We have come already!”
“Sergeant, Eva seems discreet and quite willing to help, believe me. She’s given me a room in the house for my studio that will serve perfectly. And the trekking, well, I’m sure you can tell already how promising it is. I really believe there may be a parasol flower in bloom here. Or even a whole slope of them. Can you imagine? Waiting to be discovered. Ever since you mentioned that incredible flower…” She closes her eyes. “It’s almost as if I have seen it already.”
The sergeant has closed his eyes too. When they flick open, he shakes his head, brushing invisible dust from his jacket. “No. No. I cannot do this, madam. Not any further.” His dark eyes flash. “Do you think I have nothing to lose from this…arrangement?”
She opens her mouth and cannot speak for a few beats. “Oh,” she says lamely.
“My character. My job. My sanity!” He shakes his fist in the air. “I will not be accused of ruining you.”
“That’s absurd.”
“I know. You, who are the one so willing to deceive your husband.”
“What I mean is that it’s absurd to think of either of us…or both of us… Ruination is an absurd prospect.” Yet he’s right. This is exactly how Lucy and the other ladies, not to mention the men, would frame her disloyalty.
“If you are not paying me,” he grumbles, “then I must ask myself: what am I doing this for? Who am I?”
She jumps up, for he is striding away. “Sergeant? You’re not going to leave me here? What about the pannier? Sergeant!”
He halts with his back to her, bunching his fingers to his temples. Then stalks back to heave the pannier over his shoulders and stuff her folding stool under one arm. “There is a roadway, madam. And…we can both use this roadway to return to the estate.”
Hobbling along behind Sergeant Singh, Hannah occasionally urges her body into a shuffling sort of jog to try to decrease the gap. Her feet throb, along with her entire left ankle. The road enters the woods after a time, mercifully, so that the worst of the sun is blocked by the treetops, and the voice inside her settles into a kind of numbed babbling, her mind touring, as it were, the same subjects—ruination, her Idlewyld studio, tiger hunting, Eva’s friendship—until they are nearly entirely drained of excitement and prospect. Has the sergeant increased his pace, or she is she growing slower? Her legs are sluggish and stumbling, her sight spins dizzily. Too proud and too ashamed to show she is suffering, Hannah remains quiet as long as she can.
“We must have…set out in the wrong direction…don’t you think?” she calls to him at last.
Sergeant Singh turns toward her. “Sun is here.” He points. “Village, here. If we are not getting anywhere it is only that we are moving very slowly.”
“Village!” she gasps. “But we’re returning to Idlewyld, aren’t we?”
With a grunt, Hannah thrusts herself forward and stumbles over the toe of her boot. She’s forced to put a hand down to the dusty road to break her fall.
“Damn these boots! They’re impossibly confining.”
He dashes to her side. “They are not the proper size?”
“Yes, of course they’re the proper size!”
“Can you rise, madam?”
She cannot, is her estimate. Why not sit? “What are we going to do if nobody ever finds us?” Hannah laughs at him, spinning from all fours onto to her bottom. “Then again, what would we do if somebody were to find us? It would be ruination. Oh dear, Sergeant, I’m feeling a little light-headed. So terribly hot. And life is…life is such a puzzle.”
His eyes well with feeling. “Water, Mrs. Inglis!” He hoists her to her feet and walks her from the road to a shady glade along the shoulder. Locating her empty wineskin, he then fishes an extra one from his pack and thrusts it into her hands, gently commanding her to drink. He watches closely as she sucks at the lukewarm water.
“Sometimes I act against my better nature,” he tells her. “Please, accept my apology.”
“We all do, Sergeant. It’s civilization that corrupts us, don’t you think?”
He looks thoughtful. “I’m quite fond of civilization, madam. I’ve seen how badly men act without it. Come,” he says, smacking the picnic basket. “Let us eat something.”
As she sips water, he unpacks the basket. Eva’s kitchen staff has made a five-course meal, it appears. There is a full silver table setting for each of them, salt and pepper, serving utensils….
“No wonder it was so heavy,” he comments.
“Roast turkey! She’s incredible. Naturally, they’ve included the carving knife.”
“What is this?” he asks.
“It was a jelly.”
They discover, too, a bowl of potatoes marie and a tiffin filled with tapioca pudding.
“I would sooner have my nuts and cucumbers.” The sergeant’s trekking staples. Durable and convenient for packing, refreshing and sustaining by nature, as she often heard him say. He pulls out a bottle with a Harrod’s label. “Cranberry pickle,” he reads.
After the water and a few bites of food, Hannah is already feeling relief. The pain in her feet and ankles has subsided.
“Good,” he says, when she reports this. “Very good.” He is studying the land survey, moving his compass this way and that against the map.
“Eva’s writing a book. Sexual Selection, it’s called. In many species, apparently, there are striking differences between the males and the females. In peacocks, for instance, only the males deve
lop the colorful tail feathers. And in butterflies—males are brilliant and shiny while the females are mostly drab and brown. It’s fascinating. If you want to explain why they are so different, Eva says you have to use this idea of sexual selection.”
Partly to see if she is able, Hannah goes on to describe the difference between natural selection and sexual selection. It takes some time for it all to come out as it should. Natural selection refers to adaptations that are preferential for fitness, she tells him. Adaptations created by the struggle to survive. Whereas sexual selection refers to the business of mating, which may or may not be a struggle, may or may not be a choice. She says, “Some animals seem to choose partners based on preferences about certain traits. Even if the traits aren’t helpful for survival. Like the cumbersome tail of the peacock.”
“You are indeed feeling better.” It is a warm appraisal, colored by relief.
“So why do they have these preferences?” she asks.
He admits he does not know.
“They are aesthetic preferences. That is Mr. Darwin’s theory.” She is pleased by this punch line, the central role of art in this story of what is. It is surprising, though only in the way of something that one has long been looking for, when it turns out to be right under one’s nose.
“I think,” he consults his compass, “if you are able, we ought to head northeast from here. It will be a quicker return than the roadway.”
“It’s such an odd branch of study, biology. Listen to this, Sergeant. A female spoon worm is two hundred times larger than her mate. But this is so that Mrs. Worm may inhale Mr. Worm and he will live inside her body! This is the best vantage point, apparently, for fertilizing her eggs. Eva said to me, ‘If Charles and I were spoons worms, he’d be the size of a pea.’” Hannah hiccups loudly. “That man might well be living in her gullet, for all I’ve seen of him.”
The Parasol Flower Page 14