The Peacock Spring Read online

  ‘I?’ Una obviously meant, ‘What have I to do with it?’ but, ‘Don’t expect things to be exactly the same,’ said Mrs Carrington.

  ‘They always will be with Edward and me.’ Una had drawn herself up. Then, ‘He plays with Hal,’ she said more naturally. ‘They have fun. I’m not fun.’ She said it as she would have said, ‘I am plain,’ but Mrs Carrington knew that Una had her own brand of fun, her own delights, and she was not plain. There was something of a water nymph about her – perhaps it was the whiteness of her skin – but Una was at the lanky stage and it would take a connoisseur to prefer her to Hal. Hal, with her small plumpness, would never be lanky and Mrs Carrington thought with a pang of Hal’s dimples, the bloom of her skin, the long curls.

  ‘Curls are a disease of the hair,’ Una teased her sister.

  ‘Then it’s a pretty disease,’ Hal retorted, which was true. Most Gwithiam eyes were, to Una, an uninteresting grey-green ‘like mine and Edward’s’; she did not realise how they could blaze true green with anger – or joy, thought Mrs Carrington; she could guess that not much joy had come the way of Sir Edward and Una – interest, yes, but not joy. Hal’s eyes were blue, the same wide-open kitten blue that, in Louise, had briefly captivated – ‘trapped,’ said Great-Aunt Frederica – their father. Una was sure that Hal was the most adorable creature on earth but, ‘Hal can’t follow Edward,’ she said now; she did not know how else to put it. ‘Would you read what he says?’ and she pushed an air letter, forwarded from Great-Aunt Freddie, across the desk to Mrs Carrington.

  … someone to read with and talk to again … We will go for some of our prowls, shall we? ‘He and I,’ explained Una, ‘love walking about the little streets of a city.’ Miss Lamont and Hal can have their music. We will read or play chess. ‘We both love chess,’ said Una. ‘You see … ?’

  ‘I see,’ said Mrs Carrington.

  ‘So …’ Una gave one of her small fatalistic shrugs. ‘I tore up my letter.’

  ‘That was kind, Una.’ Mrs Carrington did not probe. ‘You are probably right. A high position can be lonely.’

  ‘But,’ and Una became an ordinary thwarted child. ‘For me, just now!’

  ‘There are good schools in Delhi.’

  ‘But not Cerne.’

  ‘Una, you must not be a schoolgirl snob.’

  ‘They are still not Cerne.’

  ‘I grant you that – but I had forgotten; you will have individual teaching – a governess.’

  ‘At my age!’

  ‘It would have been better to have called her a companion-tutor,’ Mrs Carrington agreed. ‘But you must have had people looking after you before.’

  ‘Nannies or ayahs when we were young,’ said Una in contempt. ‘While we were in Geneva we had a cook-housekeeper, and Persians in Teheran, but we look after ourselves. You shouldn’t make people level, then put them down,’ and her deepest worry came out. ‘There’s something in this not … straight.’

  ‘Not straight?’

  ‘Yes. Not like Edward. Usually he asks us, consults – after all, we have been through a good deal with him. It’s as if he had suddenly put us into … a different category – children.’

  ‘Well, you are officially children.’ Mrs Carrington felt she had to point that out, and ‘There must be a reason.’

  ‘Yes, but what? Why doesn’t he tell us?’ and Una spoke as Mrs Carrington had never imagined she would speak. ‘I don’t want to go. I don’t. I want to stay here at Cerne. Mrs Carrington, if you wrote to him …’

  ‘I have written,’ said Mrs Carrington.

  Dear Sir Edward,

  A parent’s decision about his daughter’s education is, of course, his own …

  ‘Here we go,’ groaned Edward but, as he read on, his face grew more grave, frighteningly grave to Miss Lamont, sitting beside him. Mrs Carrington had tried to be both tactful and restrained. For Halcyon, Crackers had winced again as she wrote the name, for Halcyon it does not matter so much; if your governess is as musical as it would seem from your letter, and so fluent in French, and insists on good reading, Hal will probably do as well in Delhi as here; she is, to say the least, not academic. Una is different. It may sound absurd to say of a fifteen-year-old that she hasn’t much time, but Una has set her mind on going to university and every month counts. We believe that, given a chance …

  ‘Given a chance!’ The words seemed to shock Edward. He walked up and down the drawing room with the letter in his hand.

  ‘I should have thought simply in being your daughter she had every chance.’ Miss Lamont’s voice was melodiously low and soothing, even if it did have an inflection of sing-song.

  ‘Perhaps this Mrs Carrington has grown stereotyped? Perhaps a little fuddy-duddy?’

  Edward had a sudden vision of Mrs Carrington, groomed, alert and by several years his junior, but deliberately shut it out. ‘Yes, that’s what they all are – stereotyped,’ he agreed.

  ‘And they must not make your Una the same.’

  ‘No, by God!’ said Edward.

  ‘That Miss will stay here as Memsahib.’ Ganesh predicted to Ravi; doing the evening watering, with the smell of wet earth rising from the flowerbeds, they could look in at the lighted drawing room where Edward and Miss Lamont were sitting. Ganesh had seen many employees of high-official families – European, English, American, Indian – and he, like Din Mahomed, the butler, whom everyone called Dino, Dino’s two assistants, Aziz and Karim, and Ram Chand, house bearer-valet and the guests’ valet, Jetha, even Mitchu, the sweeper, had been swift to assess Miss Lamont. They had all known Eurasian half-caste nannies, but those had worn uniform and stayed in the nurseries, not, with head held high and fashionable clothes, sat talking and drinking martinis with Sir Edward, nor given orders in house and garden, ‘While the Sahib, our Sahib stays in a hotel.’

  ‘Why can’t they stay together?’ asked guileless Ravi.

  ‘It will only be until the children come, but she is not a pukka Miss-sahib,’ said Ganesh, ‘pukka’ meaning proper, his eyes shadowed as if he were truthfully troubled. ‘These babas have no mother,’ he said as if he were trying to explain it to himself.

  ‘Then, naturally, there must be a woman to look after them.’

  ‘But she is not pukka,’ Ganesh said again. As if it mattered, thought Ravi.

  Edward was still reading Mrs Carrington’s letter. You say you have found a governess-tutor, but can one woman, however brilliant, give a girl of Una’s potentialities all she needs? It is the specialist teaching that worries me, rather than the all-round subjects …

  ‘Isn’t it a pity,’ asked Miss Lamont, ‘to let a girl specialize so young?’

  ‘Specialist teaching isn’t necessarily specializing.’ Edward did not mean to sound so dry but when worried he was always curt. ‘It seems Una is something of a mathematician.’

  ‘You mean arithmetic? Algebra?’ But Edward was not listening. Without finishing it, he had discarded Mrs Carrington’s letter and, opening a second, gave a deeper groan.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Miss Lamont.

  ‘My Aunt Frederica,’ said Edward.

  Eddie, are you mad? Great-Aunt Frederica was neither tactful nor restrained. It is mad to take Una and Hal out to India! At their age! At this time, when term has started and you will soon be in the hot weather! Aunt Freddie’s exclamation and interrogation marks seemed to fly off the page and hit Edward. And what in the world do you propose to do with them – especially Hal? You can’t keep girls of school age incarcerated nowadays and Hal is her mother’s daughter. I won’t rub that in, wrote Aunt Freddie and proceeded to rub it in. You ought to know what it means. You know she can twist you round her little finger as Louise always could. It is asking for trouble! Then, suddenly: No, I am wrong. The real concern is not for Hal but Una. THINK, Eddie, THINK! When Kate died you sent Una to Kate’s mother. When you married Louise you took her back again. That didn’t last long. Hal was born and Louise turned against Una. Poor mite, she was sent back t
o Lady Osborne. Lady Osborne died, you took Una home – if home it was. Louise left you – which was a mercy – and Una saw Hal, whom she loved and protected, batted back and forth across the Atlantic! – Edward saw a little girl hurled across oceans – and though Una was a child she was old enough to be aware of the long legal battle you fought, quite rightly, to keep Hal. Edward remembered once hearing Una say, ‘Children shouldn’t be posted around like parcels,’ but he did not think it had disturbed Hal. ‘It’s nice to have your father and mother both fighting to have you. It makes you feel wonderfully important,’ Hal had said.

  Then all those changes, Aunt Freddie’s letter went on. School in Geneva, Teheran, Bangkok, dozens of changes of places, names, friends! Now, at last, when you had given in to my pleadings and sent the girls to a proper school – only English schools were proper to Aunt Frederica – and Una is settled at Cerne, absorbed and at ease, and Hal, to put it bluntly, is safe, you uproot them again and decide in this thunderbolt way to take them to India!! THINK, Eddie, think.

  As for the governess, I must say flatly that I should feel a good deal happier if I had chosen her myself.

  Edward had read it aloud to Miss Lamont; those underlinings, question and exclamation marks seemed to call for reading aloud, but he had also read out some of Mrs Carrington’s. ‘They seem to think it serious for Una. Do you?’

  ‘I begin to feel sorry for Hal,’ said Miss Lamont.

  ‘You needn’t be. It is usually Hal who takes the limelight. Una somehow gets left out – except by me, of course – but now all of them at home seem united.’ He was not to know how that casual but certain ‘at home’ made Alix Lamont feel shut out, a hybrid outsider, and ‘Your Aunt Frederica is hardly polite about me, is she?’ Miss Lamont could not help saying.

  ‘She doesn’t know you,’ but Edward said it absently. ‘Could this really spoil Una’s chances?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s for you to decide,’ and Miss Lamont bowed her head. Her fingers pleated the folds of her dress as she sat still and silent; Alix Lamont knew well how potent that stillness and submission could be and, sure enough, ‘What they forget,’ said Edward, ‘is that I am a man, not a machine.’

  ‘Hallo!’ said Edward a few minutes later. ‘Here’s another letter – from Una herself.’ He turned the envelope over and saw the postmark. ‘It’s at least a fortnight old.’

  ‘Indian posts!’ exclaimed Alix.

  ‘It was written before Una knew,’ he said, then chuckled as he read it out:

  Care Pater,

  Supplex tibi scribo impensa vivendi crescet; pecunia ergo, quam mihi liberaliter das, mihi non satis est. Alterum tantum peto, sine quo pauper ero.

  Audi, Pater, et inclina aurem tuam.

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to translate for me,’ said Alix.

  Edward thought for a minute, then, ‘It’s schoolgirl Latin, of course – Well, Una hadn’t learnt any Latin until she went to Cerne. “Dear Father, I write to you as a suppliant. The cost of living rises, therefore the money you generously give me is not enough. I ask for twice as much, without which I shall be a pauper. Listen, Father, and consider.” In other words,’ said Edward, ‘give me more pocket money.’ He laughed again. ‘It’s just a joke. I wrote to her in German; she knows I know she doesn’t like German and is bad at it.’

  ‘Bad! Good enough to read a letter.’

  ‘She has retaliated, that’s all,’ and, ‘Little monkey!’ said Edward and chuckled again.

  ‘Mumma. I’m frightened.’

  ‘Frightened? You?’ The bulk of Miss Lamont’s mother looked up from the long cane chair where she was lying; her eyes, completely trustful, and all that was left of the daughter’s beauty in the ruins of her face, grew wide. ‘But Ally, you are never afraid.’

  ‘Mumma, he writes to her in German, she answers him in Latin.’

  ‘My God!’ said Mrs Lamont.

  Seldom these days did her poised elegant daughter come to see her so late in the evening, but as soon as Edward had left to go to his dinner Alix had taken out his smaller car.

  It was a Diplomat, the government-approved Indian-made car and the despair of Chinaberry, as the United Nations Tamil chauffeur was nicknamed because of his almost blue-black skin. ‘No good. Often going wrong. Six weeks for repair and spare parts,’ Chinaberry had told Edward in disgust. He had tended the UN’s Cadillac for six years now with love and it was discrediting, to Chinaberry, that a cheap Indian car – ‘Not cheap, abominably expensive,’ said Edward – should be seen in his, Chinaberry’s, garage. ‘This is United Nations Number One house,’ he would have said, ‘and my new Sahib is Director of United Nations Environment and Research for Asia, the whole of Asia,’ he boasted, ‘Secretary for the Conference as well,’ but, ‘The Government discourages imported cars,’ Edward told Chinaberry.

  ‘Cadillac was imported.’

  ‘Long, long ago,’ and with the courtesy Edward always used, ‘even towards servants,’ said Alix – ‘Particularly towards servants,’ Edward would have corrected her – he explained to Chinaberry: ‘As a foreigner and a newcomer I must be careful to fall in with your Government’s wishes.’ Chinaberry thought nothing of his Government’s wishes and was certain Edward could have bought another Cadillac, ‘or at least a Buick.’

  ‘If I were an Indian I should have to pay over a hundred-percent tax,’ Edward explained.

  ‘But you are not an Indian.’ Chinaberry could not fathom Edward’s wish to share.

  ‘I can drive the Diplomat if Chinaberry won’t,’ Alix had said.

  ‘Not in Delhi. With all these bicycles and scooter taxis in such teeming streets, it’s so easy to have an accident. You might find yourself in a riot if you touched a child or, worse, a cow. Unfortunately, a cow is holy,’ said Edward, ‘and there are too many children.’

  She looked at him uncertainly; she still did not know quite how to take him. Then, ‘Too many children,’ he added and sighed. ‘No,’ he went on, ‘this is a city where a woman ought not to drive.’

  ‘Hundreds do – because they have to,’ Alix could have added; instead she coaxed: ‘It will only be in New Delhi, to the parade ground or the Gymkhana Club. The girls will want to get about and I shall take great care.’ But now she drove into the Old City, through the Lahore Gate, threading the narrow labyrinth of streets behind the Chandni Chowk, Old Delhi’s ‘moonlight square’ and biggest commercial street. One of Ganesh’s Memsahibs would have driven more courteously but Alix dodged bullock carts and tongas, using the strident hooter, brushed too closely by three-wheeled scooter taxis, bicycle rickshaws, dazed cows, coolies with loads or barrows, pedlars, pai-dogs; she shouted at children, made white-dressed Indian gentlemen leap for the gutters and, putting her bright head out of the window, exchanged invective with Sikh taxi drivers – only Alix’s stream of words was faster. ‘Child of a swine!’ shouted Alix, ‘Ullu-ka-pattha – son of an owl.’ ‘Have you slept with your mother?’ she demanded. Edward would have been astonished.

  She had stopped the car in a space where bullocks and ponies were tethered round a post among cohorts of bicycles and scooter taxis – Alix called them ‘phut-phuts’; some ‘first class’, grander than others, more roomy, were painted scarlet and hung with tassels like a children’s toy. Alix had locked the car and chosen an older urchin among twenty jostling smaller ones to guard it, then picked her way down an unlovely gulley where old car parts were sold. ‘They will take the hubcaps off your car and sell them to you again while you are bargaining,’ she could have told Edward. The line of booths was hung with rusty bicycle chains, spanners, old headlamps and heaped with battered car seats, trays of springs, nuts, bolts; worn tyres were piled in the road and the air was filled with the stench of hot oil, burning rubber and the clang of iron being beaten out.

  Above the lane and overhanging it were houses. Edward, once exploring the Old City, had wondered who had built them, at the turn of the century perhaps, tall, gracious, with scrolled-iron balconies. Some of the
balconies were covered in with fine grilles to screen the women; the pediments were carved or ornamented in plaster, but now the house fronts were hung with boards: ‘Malik Amrit Lal Patney, advocate’, ‘Goodwill Electric Company’, ‘Perfume, Incense, Chewing Tobacco’, ‘Happiness Coffee and Tea House’, but most of the houses were hotels with ambitious names: The Regal Hotel, The Savoy, Metropole, Grand-Mahal and, squeezed between two larger ones, its board hung even more crooked, The Paradise Hotel.

  In the welter of cookshops, stalls, vegetable sellers’ baskets, tea barrows, barrows for sherbet, and sugar cane, for ices – ‘Mango Duet’, ‘Strawberry Delight’ – and a dozen goats with their kids lying contentedly in the dust, it was difficult to find the entrance to any hotel, but Alix was accustomed and quickly threaded her way to the Paradise, stepped over the open drain than ran below the shops, tightening her telltale nostrils as she smelled the gutter cess, and went up the steepest and narrowest flight of the whole of the block.

  ‘Mumma, you will never get up or down those stairs,’ she had said when Mrs Lamont first chose it.

  ‘Why should I want to, m’n?’ said Mrs Lamont. ‘My God, when do I go out?’ Careful not to let the walls touch her dress or her white bag, Alix, this evening, had gone swiftly up the first flight and come out on the landing that was the centre of the Paradise Hotel. Here was the rickety office, much like a ticket office in a station with a communal water filter and refrigerator, while a few old steamer chairs, their cane blackened by twenty years or more of use, stood against the walls. In one a fat man lay asleep, his trousers unbuttoned over his pale stomach, his bare feet up on the boards of the chair, nutshells and betel stains on the floor around it.

  In the peculiar sleaziness of a third-class Indian hotel, rooms led off the landing and their tattered green door curtains showed glimpses of, in one, a dormitory where bunks were let by the night; behind another was a humbly respectable living room with beds, a line of clothes slung along a rope, a table, a cooking stove. In another, Alix could see young Westerners, European or American, in gaudy dirty Indian clothes, their feet bare as they sat or lay on the floor; a couple were twined together, one young man was asleep, his fair hair stirred by the breeze from a creaking electric ceiling fan. There was a sound of women scolding or quarrelling, of children crying; babies crawled in the corridor, children were everywhere while, in one doorway, an old woman, a grandmother perhaps, her legs and feet swollen with elephantiasis, shrilled and scolded at them. Radios sounded from landings far upstairs, raucously mingling with the street noises from below, and from the surrounding rooftops came the perpetual sound of crows.