The Peacock Spring Read online

  ‘Una, you’re not awake. Wake up. I had to come to you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To beg you.’

  ‘Beg?’ Una was still stupid.

  ‘Beg you not to tell.’ Alix was weeping now, her hands clutching Una. ‘I know it was wrong. It’s true – I cannot teach you, but I didn’t know how high the standard was, even that there was such a standard. How could I know? You are quite right – I didn’t go to the Sorbonne, but the nuns sent me to the conservatoire with the idea I should come back and teach for them, but it all went a little to my head and I … left after a year. I have always been counted so clever and I thought I could get away with this but I didn’t know what clever meant until I met Edward and you.’

  At that Una wriggled uncomfortably under the bedclothes. ‘I’m not clever,’ she muttered, ‘just ordinary.’ She was awake and clear now.

  ‘You are brilliant, you and Edward. If you tell him, he will send me away.’

  ‘Not while he’s like this,’ but Una did not say it, only, drearily, ‘He won’t.’

  ‘He will. I am – only new,’ and, for a moment, Una almost took Alix into her arms to comfort her – almost, not quite. ‘You have had his love from the day you were born,’ Alix was saying. ‘It’s – rooted. You are secure. You don’t have to build your life on lies.’

  ‘I wouldn’t, not if I were a sweeper’s child,’ but Una did not say that either.

  ‘You don’t know what it’s like to be poor, to grow up in squalor.’

  ‘Not squalor,’ objected Una. ‘It couldn’t have been squalor.’

  ‘You can’t imagine, can you, what the poor parts of an Indian city are like to live in? Not just to look at, but to live in; or what it is to be a nobody and have to fight for every chance you get? Be shut out, swallow people’s insults – and their charity.’ Una knew how Alix’s nostrils widened when she was angry. ‘I know I sometimes used … doubtful means, but I had only my wits and, Una, I have an old mother to keep who is helpless. It has been bitter, sometimes disgusting.’ There was a ring of truth in that and Una raised herself on her elbow to look at Alix. ‘You mean Mr Chaman Lal Sethji?’ she asked.

  ‘Who told you about him?’ Alix flared. ‘That vulture Srinevesan!’

  ‘It wasn’t Lady Srinevesan. I – heard,’ and Alix bowed her head.

  ‘I suppose everybody knows. Yes – Sethji.’ She shuddered. ‘But now … when I met Edward, I couldn’t believe my luck. I thought we were all happy. I tried …’

  ‘I know you did.’

  ‘Then why break it?’ asked Alix. ‘Oh, Una, if you will have a little patience, I will talk Edward round, be able to explain. We can get you professors or, perhaps, I can persuade him to let you go to the American International School. We can make some pretext but let me do it in my own time – in my own way. Una, promise – I beseech you. Promise you won’t tell.’

  Una had had enough. ‘I won’t tell,’ she said, lay down and turned her back.

  ‘Mrs Porter, may I ask you something?’

  The weather had turned unexpectedly warm and they were at the American Embassy pool. ‘The first swim of the season,’ Alix had said. ‘Soon all the pools will be open.’ Mrs Porter had invited them and, ‘I have asked Wilbur and Terry, our Ambassador’s twin boys, to meet you. They are just your age,’ Mrs Porter told Hal. ‘Older,’ said Una, but Hal looked coldly at the two freckled thirteen-year-olds, with their tow-coloured heads, shy grins, at their jeans and sweatshirts printed with names ‘of baseball teams, I suppose,’ and crinkled her nose. She played ping-pong with them but treated the boys loftily and hardly spoke at tea when they devoured doughnuts, ice cream and glasses of milk. Wilbur after Vikram Singh! Hal’s nose had been eloquent, but now she was swimming and diving happily with them. Una was not bathing; as usual, when any trouble came, her menses came too, ‘out of period’, as Matron at Cerne would say, and this afternoon Una was looking pallidly plain and hollow-eyed in a way that seemed to touch Mrs Porter’s capacious heart and she was so kind that Una could gather herself to say, ‘May I ask you something?’

  ‘Of course you may, my dear.’

  ‘Please tell me what it is you know about Miss Lamont.’

  ‘What it is,’ not ‘what you know.’ Mrs Porter’s plump freckled fingers drummed on the table and the sun sent flashes from the jewels in her rings – she had unexpectedly magnificent rings. ‘Una, I don’t want to upset the apple cart.’

  ‘It is upset.’

  Then Mrs Porter asked, ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Fifteen,’ – and today far far older than that, Una wanted to add.

  ‘Then you should be old enough.’ Mrs Porter looked across the pool; everyone was out of earshot and, ‘She isn’t Miss Lamont,’ said Mrs Porter. ‘She is a Mrs Tanson. They say her husband was a coffee planter who fell in love with her out here – she must have been most beautiful – and followed her to Paris where they married. Perhaps she was dazzled – he, too, was good-looking. He brought her back to India, but it didn’t turn out well, and he disappeared. Of course, she has a perfect right to use her maiden name, and she must have had a hard time, poor girl.’ Mrs Porter spoke as if trying to keep a fair balance in what she said. ‘I believe her father was a Canadian sergeant in the Veterinary Corps; at one time he was attached to the Remount Depot in Calcutta, where the army horses come in from Australia to be broken and tamed. The mother is Eurasian from Pondicherry.’

  ‘Not French?’ asked Una.

  ‘Well, Indian–French,’ said Mrs Porter. ‘The girl – Miss Lamont – went to school there to a convent where Amina Srinevesan often gave away the prizes. Amina comes from Southern India too.’

  ‘I see,’ said Una.

  ‘Una, those sort of things don’t matter nowadays.’

  ‘Lady Srinevesan thinks they do. She treats Alix as she wouldn’t treat a servant.’

  ‘Indians are more suspicious of mixed blood than we are – but with Amina Srinevesan it wouldn’t be that.’

  ‘What is it then? Mrs Porter, what did Alix do when she was with Mr Chaman Lal Sethji?’

  ‘I believe she was companion to his wife.’

  ‘Was she his mistress?’

  Una had expected Mrs Porter to be strait-laced but Mrs Porter only said, ‘They say she was – Delhi gossip, which often isn’t true. What is true is that Sethji dismissed her very suddenly.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Nobody knows but it seems there was – a lack of probity.’

  ‘Probity.’ It was a grave word and Mrs Porter was grave.

  ‘I feel it in her, Una, so does Amina Srinevesan; so, I think, do you. That is why I do not like you, Kate’s daughter, and Hal of course, being in her charge.’

  ‘She isn’t in charge.’ Una would dearly have liked to say that, but could not deny it.

  ‘Mr Sethji may be sharp in business, but he is an honourable man. I don’t believe he would have done anything unfair; but in any case,’ said Mrs Porter, ‘to pretend you are what you are not, to know what you do not, is lack of probity. Your father has given Miss Lamont his trust, and that’s why I am uneasy. You and Hal are young; no one knows what you may do next, not even yourselves.’

  ‘We ?’ Una was startled. She had not thought they were talking about her and Hal. ‘What could we do?’

  ‘You don’t know,’ said Mrs Porter. ‘That’s why, in a strange country like this, Eddie needs someone completely trustworthy.’

  Alix, brought up in what Bulbul Misra called ‘old India’, had a siesta every afternoon. Hal, as usual, followed her idol. ‘After all, we are out early.’

  ‘I wish, Una, that you would rest too,’ said Alix.

  ‘I can’t sleep in the day.’ Besides, Una liked what she called ‘the empty time’. The servants, off duty, went to their quarters and were probably asleep as were Alix and Hal; even the birds were silent, even the lizards still, the whole garden drowsed in the warmth and sun, but Una was not drowsy; she was too harrowed with
despair.

  ‘You can’t really want to do those ghastly-sounding sums,’ said Hal.

  ‘They’re not ghastly when you understand them.’

  ‘But can you?’ Hal asked it doubtfully. It did not seem to her that anybody could.

  ‘I could if they were explained to me. I have to. They’re – they’re my language,’ said Una.

  ‘Then?’

  ‘Then nothing. I expect I’m done for,’ and Una tried to shrug.

  Long ago, when she was three or four, she had been given a little doll – by Mrs Porter, she thought suddenly. Why, I do remember her! It was in Calcutta; it was really the figure of a doll, so small it had fitted into a matchbox but, cast in metal, it was weighted so that if it were knocked over, at once, or slowly, depending on the hardness of the knock, it stood upright again. ‘A ninepin doll,’ Edward had told her.

  ‘Ninepin?’

  ‘Made to be knocked over.’

  ‘And stand up again.’

  Una had made it a private little garden in sand; she remembered the feel of the hot sand as she stuck flowers into it, scarlet and yellow flowers, gōl mohur, she remembered – the gōl-mohur trees with their brilliant sprays would be out soon here in Delhi. She had made a pool from a river shell; the Shiraz Road fountain tinkled into the pool in the pavilion; it seemed to Una much the same as her shell and as secret, but why should she think of it now? The doll had been lost, probably in one of their innumerable packings, but it was as if it sent her a message.

  She did not believe for one moment in the professors Alix had talked of, nor that she would go to the International School. At my age, the pupils would be going back to their own countries to take examinations. She was, too, tied by her promise not to tell Edward, but, ‘Don’t just lie down,’said Una to Una. ‘There must be other ways. If you write to Crackers, she might find a correspondence course – there must be such things. Meanwhile, you try by yourself.’ And, the next afternoon, she found her Elementary Mechanics that Ram Chand had carefully put in the bookcase. Someone had cleaned it – she was sure the book had fallen into the wet flowerbed – probably the someone was Monbad – but then she saw it had a marker; neither she nor Alix had put one there; it was marking page seventy-one, not a usual marker, but a feather, a tip feather from a peacock’s train, lucently blue and green, with the iridescent eye in a feathered fringe that scintillated with colour as it caught the light.

  Who had put it there? Someone who cares, thought Una. For the first time since the scene with Alix she felt warmed – and titillated; she picked up the book, a pad and her pencils and went out to the summer house.

  At first the green and shade seemed cool, inviting and, sitting down to the rough table, she began to work: ‘If the slope of the plane is 30 degrees to the horizontal and the force of gravity vertically downwards,’ she murmured aloud, ‘then the component of the acceleration perpendicular to the plane in the upward direction will be -10 cos 30° m/s2.’ She wrote The cos of 30° is √3/2 so that will make the acceleration -√5/3.

  In the same way the acceleration along the plane would be -10 cos 60° or -5 m/s2 since the cos of 60 is ½ …

  She looked it over and could see no fault in it. ‘But how do I do the next part?’ She knew the formula v=u+at, ‘But how do I apply it to this?’ she asked hopelessly. ‘How can I find t if I don’t know v? The acceleration will be negative but that doesn’t get me far.’ It was closer under the creepers than she had imagined and there was sweat on her forehead. ‘V=u-gt. But where do I go from there?’ She had looked up the answer and knew that the time of flight should be 2/√3 seconds. ‘But how do I get this? How?’

  The sun glare from the garden hurt her eyes; the scent of the honeysuckle made her dizzy but she kept doggedly on, writing the equation out again and putting in the value for t, v=u-2g/√ 3, but still it seemed to make no sense, and she sat staring at it. It was hopeless. I can’t, thought Una, I can’t. I’m beaten.

  She heard a rustle, as if creepers had been pushed aside, then, behind her, a warmth; there was another soft movement, as of muslin clothes – indeed a muslin sleeve brushed her cheek – and a new smell mingled with the honeysuckle scent, freshly washed skin, a slightly onion-scented breath and something she was to learn was coconut hair oil. Then a hand came over her shoulder; it was a brown hand on a strong wrist that wore an amulet, a darkened silver seal on a red cord, and on to Una’s scrubbed and tormented page it laid another feather with another iridescent eye. ‘Just to tell you,’ said a voice in English, ‘that I am I. Then, please do not be frightened.’

  Una was not frightened, not even startled; in the dreamy, scented warmth, the voice simply seemed natural and it seemed natural too when she looked up and whispered, ‘Ravi!’

  ‘You know my name?’

  ‘I asked Dino. I … I have been watching you.’

  ‘I know you have, Miss Spy. Very well, I watched you back.’

  ‘You write poems,’ she said. ‘That’s why you put the feather as a marker. I should have guessed at once.’

  ‘And what did you think of my feather?’

  ‘In England we should say a peacock feather brought bad luck.’ How strange, thought Una, that she should be able to say to this particular young man exactly what she thought.

  ‘Here not at all,’ said Ravi. ‘On the reverse, the peacock is sacred, very emblem of India; and I hope the book was properly cleaned.’ His pronunciation was a little stilted – ‘proper-lee’. ‘The earth was wet and you threw the book hard. Hard! Ari bap!’ He laughed again and stopped. ‘That Miss Lamont is no good for you, I think.’

  ‘I knew you were listening but didn’t think you would understand English.’

  ‘No, Ravi the chota mali shouldn’t understand or speak English. Perhaps I am master spy.’ Una thought she had never seen such white and even teeth.

  She seemed small and pale sitting there below him who was so large, brown, golden brown and merry; that was the word that suited him as he stood laughing down at her. I was right, thought Una. He is far more attractive than Vikram Singh, by far the most attractive person I have ever seen.

  He moved round and sat on the summer house’s other wooden chair – the honeysuckle and creepers hid them both from the upper garden. ‘I suppose I should ask you, Miss-baba, may I sit down?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ and Una found herself laughing; there was something in Ravi that stirred happy, easy laughter – and I said I should never laugh again, thought Una.

  ‘I have spoken English since little,’ Ravi was saying, ‘and I was reading it at St Thomas’s College. Had I stayed at college I should have taken a first, probably with honours.’ He said it curiously without conceit, with the assurance of a young cock bird.

  ‘And you didn’t stay?’

  ‘No.’ There was a momentary shadow. ‘I – I was persuaded into a – a group the authorities do not like,’ then he cheered. ‘And had I taken a first, immediately everybody would have wanted me to do something: my father would have wanted I come home and manage our estate; my mother that I should become a doctor; my uncle would have wanted me in government service, diplomatic. My group wanted me in politics. But, you see, I did not want any of those things. I wanted writing poems.’

  ‘Are they good poems?’ Una had been to one of Lady Srinevesan’s evenings where she had stayed mute, watching and listening; she had not, of course, been able to judge the poems in Indian languages, though she had liked their rhythms; but had secretly thought most of those in English worse than poor and, ‘Are yours good?’ she asked warily.

  ‘Very good.’ He was serious. ‘Better now than I could have believed. I wanted peace in which to write them and it is peaceful in your father’s garden,’ said Ravi. ‘Until someone throws a book into a flowerbed.’

  ‘I am sorry.’ But Una could not feel sorry.

  ‘No, no. You were brave,’ and Ravi said, ‘That Lamont! But why do you not tell your father?’

  ‘I promised I wouldn’
t.’

  ‘Even at your expense?’

  ‘Even at my expense.’ This seemed so strange a philosophy to Ravi that for a moment he did not talk. Then, ‘Unfortunately,’ he said, ‘I have chiefly forgotten my mathematics but I am arranging for you. I have a mathematical friend, Hem, Hemango Sharma. He is at present in medical school, but he is most good at mathematics. He took them at St Thomas’s. Hem shall come here and teach you.’

  ‘But … how?’

  ‘At the back of my hut is a loose – do you call it a “paling”?

  – in the fence. No one can see, but it is my entrance and exit – and Hem’s. He comes through it to visit with me. Hem will bicycle here one, two times a week in these afternoons when no one is about and slip in here with me.’

  ‘You will be seen.’

  ‘Hem and I have the art of disappearing.’ Again there was that shade in Ravi’s voice, ‘and I shall stand guard while he instructs you.’

  ‘But … suppose he doesn’t want to.’

  ‘What I want, Hem wants,’ Ravi was certain. ‘He will come.’

  ‘I certainly will not,’ said Hem.

  ‘Hem, you said yourself she is only a little girl.’

  ‘She cannot be all that little if she is doing calculus,’ and,

  ‘Ravi, don’t! Don’t …’ pleaded Hem.

  Five

  ‘If you consider,’ explained Hem, ‘the component of velocity perpendicular to the plane, there will be an instant when the ball is still, when v equals 0.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Una. ‘Of course.’

  What, asked Hem, had made him give in to Ravi and come? Pity? ‘She is so badly treated,’ Ravi had said, but how could a poor medical student pity Miss Una Gwithiam? ‘No, it was purely the mathematics,’ said Hem.