The Peacock Spring Page 3

  The fat man opened one eye. ‘Going to see Mummy?’ he asked. ‘That’s nice!’ Alix had not answered him, but had swept past disdainfully, and his eyes, wistful and brown, had followed her as she went along the corridor to a door hung with a curtain that was not stained or torn but new; it led to the hotel’s best room overlooking not the booths of car-parts gulley, but a fruit market and a lane of shops. Alix lifted the curtain and went through.

  ‘You!’ It had been a cry of delighted surprise. ‘You! Ally!’

  ‘Don’t call me Ally.’

  A crone of an old woman was crouched at Mrs Lamont’s feet, pressing them with her hands, as her mistress, wearing a bright flowered wrapper, lay in the long chair made soft with cushions. In Mrs Lamont, Alix’s curves had turned to a mound of soft flesh; she was almost as swollen as the elephantiasis grandmother, but her eyes were as large as Alix’s, the same deep brown but without their watchful glitter; Mrs Lamont’s eyes, though, saw a long way and for a while she let the only noise in the room be the sound of the palm-leaf fan she was lazily using and the chink of the old woman’s, Terala’s, bangles that slid up and down on her arms as she worked. Terala’s bangles were twisted wire, two iron studs made her earrings and her white cotton sari was limp and grey. She herself was thin and light as a withered leaf. She did not dare to look at Alix but, ‘Ally, where are your manners?’ said Mrs Lamont. ‘You should wish Terala, m’n? and you haven’t wished me.’

  ‘Mumma, I haven’t time …’ But Alix bent and kissed her mother – again the telltale nostrils drew in. Mrs Lamont’s face was powdered thickly as a clown’s and, ‘Why do you use that filthy powder? Its scent is horrible.’

  ‘It is called Flowers of Heaven,’ said Mrs Lamont undisturbed. ‘It only costs six paise.’

  ‘Phaugh!’ But Mrs Lamont liked everything strong and highly coloured, everything that smelled and tasted. Her room was crammed ‘with life’, Alix had to admit. It was a hotchpotch of good and poor: the rugs might be soiled but they were genuine Agra – Alix could remember them from her childhood homes in Pondicherry and Calcutta. There was sandalwood and brass; the bed had a red quilt and was heaped with dirty silk cushions like the long chair. There were Kashmir embroideries, Persian copper-fretted lamps, carved tables and brackets; on a shelf was a statue of the Virgin Mary, carved long ago in Goa, but beside it a bazaar mirror was painted with staring roses. The doors were open to the balcony ‘and all the street noises and smells!’

  In most of these hotels the ground floors were given over to restaurants and cookshops, their smells even more pungent than the lane and pervaded by the smell of frying in mustard oil; there were lesser smells of curry and spices, decaying vegetables, orange peel, of cess, and every hotel had at its steps that centre of gossip, the paan seller’s stall, his betel leaves spread on blocks of ice, his pastes in doll-sized brass bowls among cigarettes and newspapers. Terala haunted the paan seller – she would not look at Alix now because she knew her teeth were stained red with areca nut – and Mrs Lamont was forever sending her to the cookshop to buy samosa, kebab or kulfi, the Indian version of ice cream, to keep ‘just in case’. ‘But you shouldn’t keep food,’ Alix often expostulated. Now she found that the meat safe on the window sill was clustered black with flies feasting on a cloth Terala had hung there and, ‘Mumma, can’t you tell Terala to wash out that filthy cloth?’ In the Paradise Hotel her ‘filthy’ lapsed into ‘filthee’ and she had almost screamed it. But, ‘What do a few flies matter?’ Mrs Lamont was quite comfortable. ‘Where there is food, there will be flies, and if they kill me, I am old.’ At that moment, a pair of cockroaches, alarmed by Alix’s violence, scuttered into the bathroom. ‘Ugh!’ Alix shuddered. ‘Where is the phenyl? I brought you a bottle of Jeyes Fluid only last week. Where is it?’ At the shrillness of her voice the palm-leaf fan paused, was still, then, ‘Ally, come here to me,’ said Mrs Lamont and, after a moment, Alix turned, dropped to the wicker stool beside her mother and buried her head in that capacious lap.

  ‘She wrote it with a dictionary,’ declared Mrs Lamont.

  ‘Mumma, she’s at Cerne. That’s a famous school. They teach them there. That’s why it’s so expensive.’

  ‘The more expensive the school, the less they learn. Your father always said it. I’m sure she did it with a dictionary.’

  ‘Mumma, send Terala outside.’

  ‘But, Girlie, she doesn’t understand a word we say.’

  ‘She will watch, gossip,’ and Alix jerked her head towards the door. Terala, standing, was almost as bent as when she crouched; she salaamed and, emaciated, crept towards the door; it was again like the passage of a leaf.

  ‘Mumma, do you know what A and O Levels are?’

  ‘Roads,’ said Mrs Lamont promptly. ‘A is for important roads, O are less important.’

  ‘They are school examinations,’ said Alix.

  ‘That is Junior and Senior Cambridge.’ Mrs Lamont was certain. ‘And didn’t you pass your Senior Cambridge with honours?’

  ‘This is something … more modern and much higher.’

  ‘What could be higher than honours?’ Like a big downy pelican Mrs Lamont plucked soft feathers of reassurance from her own breast though she was bleeding with apprehension. ‘Come, Ally, take heart. If she has German, you have French.’

  ‘Pondicherry French,’ said Alix bitterly and her head went down.

  ‘Pondicherry! What nonsense, I ask you? Mère Geneviève was a Parisian from Paris and she said your accent was perfect, perfect! And see how fluent you are.’

  ‘Una may be fluent too. They have lived in Geneva and Persia.’

  ‘In Persia they speak Persian,’ to Mrs Lamont that was fact, ‘and you went to France and England.’

  ‘I didn’t go to England, Mumma. I only said I did.’

  ‘You nearly went. England is only across the channel – you have only to look at the map. My God, even with the nuns’ help, how we scraped and saved to keep you at the conservatoire.’

  ‘And I threw it all away. Fool that I was.’

  ‘And wasn’t that natural?’ cried Mrs Lamont. ‘You so high-spirited, so lovely? And there was no reason, no reason at all for the nuns to withdraw their grant. I stopped praying for them im-me-diately.’

  ‘Anyhow, I wouldn’t have gone back to teach in their old school.’ But Alix was still brooding. ‘I only had one year …’

  ‘And look what you did with that year. Look what you know!’

  ‘Very very little,’ said this new, frightened Alix. ‘You should meet Sir Edward.’

  ‘And didn’t he choose you?’ demanded Mrs Lamont.

  ‘Wasn’t it he who came after you, not you after him?’

  ‘In … a way.’

  ‘So accomplished, so stylish,’ Mrs Lamont went on. ‘One has only to see you to know how stylish you are. “What a fine lady”, Mr Lobo said that.’

  ‘Mr Lobo!’

  ‘Mr Lobo is a man of taste.’ Mrs Lamont was as dignified as Alix was withering. ‘He may be run-down but that is what he is, a man of taste.’ Her voice, like Alix’s, was rich and comforting, but its sing-song was unashamed, as was her love and pride as she looked down at the beautifully dressed head in her lap and her hand, that had a permanent tremor, stroked its red sheen. ‘No, no,’ said Mrs Lamont. ‘You are never afraid. My beauty. My queen,’ crooned Mrs Lamont.

  Alix raised her head and looked beyond her mother to the hotel’s whitewashed wall; a small Indian votive lamp, a deeva, burnt in front of the statue – well, Hindus and Catholics are alike in many, many ways, thought Alix; the smell of the warm sweet oil was somehow comforting.

  ‘And haven’t you your music? Look how you can play. Look at the prizes for pianoforte you have won.’

  ‘Prizes!’ But Alix sounded more convinced.

  ‘And your voice! “That is a glorious voice.” Soeur Marietta said that often to me. “It isn’t fair,” she said, “that one girl be given so much.” Ally, you can swim, you can ride –
your dear father saw to that. You dance, drive a car. None of these things could I do. Show me another teacher,’ demanded Mrs Lamont, ‘who can do half as much. I see a brilliant future.’ Mrs Lamont had become a soothsayer. ‘But not too brilliant for my girl. Come, Ally. Afraid? Of what? Two little schoolgirls, m’n?’

  That is what they looked like, coming down the gangway from the plane into the Delhi noonday. Una and Hal were pale from the long flight, their skirts and blouses crumpled from being slept in, and they were wearing their green school cloaks. ‘Do we have to take those ghastly uniforms?’ Hal had almost wept but, No waste, Edward had written to Great-Aunt Freddie. ‘At least we can’t wear our berets and blazers,’ said Hal. ‘That wouldn’t be allowed.’ Long afterwards Edward was to find Cerne’s crest, worn embroidered on the blazer pocket, among Una’s private things.

  Una and Hal were used to packing at short notice and travelling unquestioningly by land, sea or air; even at Cerne, until last holidays when Edward had left them at Gwithiam with Great-Aunt Freddie – ‘And not come himself even though it was Christmas,’ said Hal – he had sent for them no matter where he was.

  ‘You ought to have stamps on you,’ their housemistress had said. ‘We never know where you have come from.’

  ‘Well, I suppose these high officials have to be a kind of gypsy,’ Mrs Carrington had said once to Mr Rattray.

  ‘Gypsies’ children,’ said Mr Rattray, ‘have disadvantages – if they want to be educated.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Carrington and sighed.

  A year ago she had sent for Una. ‘They tell me you could do quite well in mathematics, Una, given the chance.’ It was odd how often, with Una, Mrs Carrington found herself using those three words.

  ‘But I’m so far behind,’ said Una, No one was more conscious than she of what she called her ‘gaps’. ‘I have been to so many different schools.’

  ‘You are behind.’ Mrs Carrington had agreed, ‘but Mr Rattray has offered to give you some special coaching himself.’

  Mr Rattray was the senior mathematics master and Mrs Carrington might well have expected Una to be dazzled but, ‘That will be very pleasant,’ was all that she said.

  ‘Your father has agreed.’

  ‘It seems the shrimp has brains,’ Edward had teased Una in Washington. ‘Of course you get them from me.’

  ‘You are not a mathematician.’ Una had said it so flatly that Edward had not known whether to be nettled or amused.

  ‘Most men,’ said Mr Rattray, ‘would be proud to have a daughter with a brain as uncommon as that.’

  ‘He is,’ said Mrs Carrington. ‘I know he is. It’s a puzzle. In spite of his brilliance, Sir Edward, I should have said, was thoughtful …’

  ‘He isn’t thinking now.’

  ‘Or not letting himself think. Well, I suppose he couldn’t have reached the height he has without being a little ruthless.’ Mrs Carrington sighed again.

  ‘You will have to work hard,’ she had told Una in that interview.

  ‘I will try,’ and Mrs Carrington had guessed that behind those ordinary quiet words Una had vowed herself to Mr Rattray and mathematics and, I thought I had three years. Fool that I was, thought Una.

  The plane was flying now over the Alps and through the small window Una could look down at the cruel peaks coldly white and blue in the moonlight. She had seen them in this way before, by moonlight and daylight, she thought. The shape of the plane made a small lonely shadow among them.

  Hal, beside her, was curled comfortably in sleep; Hal had a knack of adapting herself no matter where she went. ‘Put her in a Siberian prison camp,’ Edward had said, ‘and she would soon be friends with every guard and prisoner and settle quite contentedly,’ but Una was not a Hal. What would Edward do, she wondered, if she, Una, had to be dragged kicking and screaming from the plane? Say I have hysterics and probably send for a doctor; she knew the wry answer.

  In a few hours they would land. ‘Once you have felt the Indian dust, you will never be free of it.’ Edward often said that and, even in this unwilling journey, Una, from that long-ago babyhood, felt the faint stirrings of nostalgia, of remembrance, but she pushed them down in her mind. ‘There is nothing there for me. I won’t like it,’ said Una in the night. ‘I won’t like anything or anyone in India ever again.’

  Edward was there to meet us, Hal wrote in her diary, but at a special entrance, not with ordinary people. We were whisked through before anyone else by a police officer. There was a clerk from the office to see our luggage through the customs, a car and a chauffeur; the car had the blue, white-crossed UN flag flying. We never had anything like this before. How I love to be important. Hal’s diary had been given her for Christmas; it was of the kind that had brass clasps and locked, but she had already lost the key; that did not matter because the diary was as open as Hal; anyone could read it, and ‘It isn’t we who are important,’ Una was to point out. ‘It’s Edward.’

  ‘Dads!’ In her excitement, Hal had shrilled out their baby name for him and all heads turned to stare. ‘They were staring already,’ said Hal at Una’s sharp pinch and, when they reached Edward, she threw her arms round his neck and hugged and kissed him. ‘You looked so silly and what would Indians think?’ Una said afterwards. ‘That I was glad to see him,’ said Hal, but Mrs Carrington had told Una that she had seen Indian children, after a long absence from their father, bend down and touch his feet with their folded hands, taking his dust. ‘I should have looked a good deal sillier doing that,’ said Hal and, ‘Una! Don’t be so prim,’ but Una had had to take refuge in primness.

  In spite of his importance Edward, standing on the asphalt outside Hal’s ‘special entrance’, had looked small and lonely. Perhaps I never really looked at you before, thought Una on the gangway. I didn’t know you were so slight, and you are a little stooped, from working too long at your desk, I am sure. At this distance, Edward might have been anybody – or nobody – yet Una knew that at a snap of his fingers the big police officer standing beside him, all the policemen, probably the whole airport, would spring to attention. When Sir Edward Gwithiam wants a thing done, it is done, willy-nilly, a profile in a newspaper had said. He has tremendous drive … and yet Una felt such a pang of pity for him that all her animosity faded. His hair was ruffled, as he always ruffles it under a strain, thought Una; then another thought came – Why should she and Hal be a strain? And there was reserve in the way, when Hal’s exuberance had worn off, that Una said, ‘Hello. Hello, Edward.’

  ‘Don’t I get a kiss?’ As soon as he held her, Una felt his tenderness, his concern, and her own came up to meet it. Dear wonderful Edward! And – I’m glad I tore up that letter. I’m glad, yes, glad I came.

  If Edward were slight, Una was slighter and, ‘What have they been doing to you?’ asked Edward. ‘They couldn’t have given you enough to eat.’

  ‘They did, Edward, truly.’

  ‘You’re nothing but a sheaf of bones. Never mind, Miss Lamont will fatten you up.’

  Wary glances from both girls. ‘Where is she?’

  Alix had not come to the airport. ‘Better not force myself on them,’ she had told Edward. ‘They may resent having a governess, you know.’

  ‘Resent?’ He was defensive.

  ‘Yes. Remember their ages.’

  ‘Little girls.’

  ‘Not little, young – and old to have a governess. I will wait for you here.’

  The music seemed to roll through the rooms and down the steps of the house to meet them; someone, somewhere, was playing the Appassionata with strong capable hands that made the melodies throb and sing, not at all the way it was played at Cerne.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Miss Lamont.’

  ‘She can play like that?’

  ‘Indeed she can – and do many other things too – as I told Mrs Carrington.’ Edward’s voice was crisp; evidently he had not liked Crackers’s letter.

  Una had been so filled with herself and Edward that sh
e had given scarcely a thought to this governess, Miss Lamont; nor had Hal. When they had wondered about her at all, they had visualized someone not young, not old, like their housemistress, plainly dressed and pleasant – ‘Edward is sure to have chosen someone pleasant,’ Hal had consoled Una.

  ‘But what shall we do with her when we and Edward want to be together?’ asked Una.

  And we went into the drawing room, wrote Hal in the diary, and we met Miss Lamont. Wow!

  The music stopped at once and Miss Lamont rose; she did not come to meet them, but waited for them to come to her as she stood by the piano.

  It was a grand piano and, When have we ever had one? thought Una. This was a monster; she was to discover it was a concert grand, but it did not make Miss Lamont seem small; she was large, larger and taller than Edward and the first feeling she gave Una was of power. Una was to see that first sight of Miss Lamont again and again in her mind – One of your hands was resting on the polished wood, your nails were polished too … I think you take great care of your hands, but they are big, the fingers wide at the top; no wonder you played so forcefully. You choose your clothes carefully too. Miss Lamont’s dress was pleated into soft folds – I guessed it was Indian cotton. It was not the sort of dress you can buy and I knew you had had it made, and chosen it because its deep yellow colour set off your hair and eyes.

  The hair was dark red which was startling in contrast with a slight dusky tinge in the rose and ivory of the skin, but ‘quite common Eurasian colouring,’ Lady Srinevesan, Edward’s experienced Indian friend, was to tell Una. ‘Some Kashmiris have it too, but their eyes are usually pale, almost aquamarine – brown eyes with red hair are uncommon. The Lamonts’, I must say, are superb.’ Indeed, in that first vision, Una found herself almost dazzled by the glow and colour of Miss Lamont. You made us, at least me – and Edward – look like creatures kept under a stone. Then Una saw that the brown eyes, for all their grandeur, had a watchful glitter and, You are not quite as much at ease as you seem, thought Una.