The Peacock Spring Page 4

  ‘So these are the girls.’ The voice was lilting, dominant, as Miss Lamont put out her hands to Hal, who took them as if she were mesmerized. ‘Halcyon! Why, you are perfectly named!’ Una saw Hal blush – a phenomenon she had not seen before – then, ‘And Una! Let me look at you too. Edward, she is just like you!’

  ‘Edward!’ If Una had had hairs on the back of her neck they would have risen. ‘Why should she call him Edward?’ she was to demand. ‘Probably they were friends before we came,’ said Hal. ‘She isn’t an ordinary governess.’

  Releasing Hal, Miss Lamont had stretched out her hand to draw Una near, but Una had not consented to be drawn. ‘You were horribly stand-offish,’ Hal told her. Una had shaken the hand, politely but briefly, and let it drop. For perhaps half a second Miss Lamont was disconcerted, but only half a second, then, ‘I expect you are hungry and tired,’ she said. ‘Put down your cloaks and have a drink of lemonade; Christopher, our cook, makes it fresh every day.’ ‘Our cook?’ Una wanted to query but, ‘Edward, you must be dying for a drink,’ Miss Lamont went on; a white-dressed manservant was already busy at a tray of bottles, glasses and chinking ice. ‘Luncheon will be ready as soon as we are,’ and Miss Lamont pulled chairs forward, brought a small table for Edward. ‘The girls can see their rooms afterwards.’ Does she arrange everything? thought Una.

  ‘Have the babas come?’ Ravi asked Ganesh.

  Ganesh laughed. He had met them and Edward at the steps with celebration buttonholes of violets tightly twisted with maidenhair. ‘Babas!’

  ‘Why do you laugh?’

  ‘Look.’ Ravi took one glance through the long drawing-room windows and retreated behind the jasmine hedge to the lower garden.

  ‘Sit at the foot of the table, Una, opposite your father. That’s your place now.’ Miss Lamont was smoothly tactful. ‘You see, you are his official hostess,’ at which Una gave her a horrified glance.

  Lunch began with slices of golden fruit that Una dimly remembered as papaya. Servants, led by an elderly butler whom Edward had introduced to her as Dino, offered hot food in silver dishes. Miss Lamont led the conversation with the same deft tactfulness, asking about their journey, England’s January cold; Hal chattered and Una, almost against her will, was drawn in; she had seldom heard Edward talk as much.

  Outside, sun flooded over the vivid scented garden and Edward was right – Una was back in India, or India in Una; she remembered the garden-bird calls and crow caws: saw a swoop of green wings – a flight of parakeets. There was the subdued sound of voices speaking the, to Hal, mysterious language, but of which a few words came back to Una. Even the smell in the room of polish from the stone floors, the scent of sweet peas in the bowl on the table, of papaya, the prawn curry and poppadums ordered, Una guessed, especially for them. Her babyhood might have been back – only, of course, I didn’t have curry … ‘There was something called pish-pash,’ she said aloud.

  Miss Lamont nodded. ‘They give it to children in India. Fancy you remembering that.’

  ‘I remember it too,’ said Edward with distaste. ‘A baby brew of chicken with rice. I used to have to eat it or you wouldn’t, you little wretch! You do not know,’ he said to Miss Lamont, ‘the trouble I had bringing up these girls.’

  It was all affection and a gaiety Una had not seen in Edward before; was it this that made her feel that something was, if not wrong, what she had described to Crackers as ‘not straight’.

  To both girls, the Shiraz Road house was astounding. In the hall, there was a fountain – a fountain in the house – splashing under a bougainvillaea plant big as a young tree. Una had taken in too the size of the drawing room with its long windows opening on vistas of garden; the room was so big it stretched out of sight – there was an alcove round its corner – and it seemed filled with flowers, those narcissi and vases of roses. It had Persian carpets – she had counted three of them in the drawing room, and here, in the dining room, was another; she looked down at its border of leopards bounding away from hounds and horsemen in a tapestry of turquoise, tawny browns and pinks and, ‘It’s a hunting carpet,’ Edward told her. ‘I bought it in Agra. I think I am going to collect carpets.’

  Edward collecting things? And, ‘Wouldn’t Teheran have been the place?’ asked Una.

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Edward, ‘but – funny,’ and he looked puzzled, ‘I didn’t want to collect them then.’

  ‘India is such an unhappy troubled country,’ Una had said to Mrs Carrington.

  ‘It can’t all be unhappy.’

  ‘Then it ought to be. How can people eat and drink and work when there’s all that hunger and misery and disease?’

  ‘You will find they can because they have to. Your father does. He leads a busy social life, entertains as, in his position, he must.’

  ‘Edward is frugal.’ Una had been up in arms at once but, ‘frugal’ she thought now and, ‘Isn’t this rather a sumptuous house for us?’ she asked.

  ‘Well the United Nations took it over from an American oil company. Their official houses are inclined to be lush,’ said Edward.

  ‘It may be lush but I like it,’said Hal, and Miss Lamont gave her an approving nod. ‘So you should. It is beautiful.’

  ‘Alix chose new covers and curtains for us,’ said Edward.

  ‘Alix!’ Una’s hairs rose again. How dare she choose things for us, and her eyes, as Una’s eyes could, grew bright and green. ‘Did it always have a concert grand?’ she asked deliberately.

  Edward did not answer, his hand went to his hair but, ‘We need a piano – for Hal,’ said Miss Lamont.

  ‘We?’ ‘Hal is used to any old school piano,’ said Una.

  ‘I hope we can do better than that.’ Again Una saw the watchfulness in Miss Lamont’s eyes and how swift she was to smile sweetly at Hal, reassuringly at Edward in a glance across the table – a private glance, thought Una, who immediately became more captious. ‘Three servants to wait on four people!’ she said when Dino and his underlings had left the room.

  That touched a tender spot in Edward. When he had come to Shiraz Road he had tried to reduce the staff and failed. ‘Few households in Delhi keep to the old standards,’ he had told Dino. ‘We too must reduce,’ but, ‘Three table servants right,’ Dino had insisted, ‘Sahib will see. Here much much entertaining’, and when Edward had answered that there should not be ‘much much entertaining,’ in such poverty-stricken times, Dino’s adroit, ‘Yes, peoples very poor. Aziz has been here eleven years, Sahib, Karim seven. Where they get other work and they having families?’ It was the same with Ram Chand and his assistant Monbad. ‘Two men needed for the rooms, Sahib. Many many peoples staying. Come and go, many many.’ It was the same in the kitchen, though Christopher, the Goanese cook, had now to manage with one cook’s mate, not two; the same with the sweepers and the garden and, ‘Yes, we have a galaxy,’ said Edward now and sighed.

  ‘You can afford it.’ Miss Lamont meant to soothe.

  ‘That’s not the point.’

  ‘I think the house should be worthy of you.’

  ‘A Chinaberry point of view,’ said Edward. He had no idea, of course, how that remark cut; Miss Lamont bent her head over her plate and a hot stain spread up her neck to her face; Una saw it but, oddly enough, not with satisfaction. As if the sun had gone in over the garden, the affection and gaiety had stopped – spoilt by me. thought Una. Hal gave her a vicious kick under the table; I deserve it, thought Una. Edward had put down his knife and fork and was looking grieved, then Miss Lamont lifted her head and Una saw that it was Edward, not she, who had made the slightest dint in her composure.

  ‘I suggest hot baths and bed,’ she said, getting up from the table. ‘Come along. I will show you your rooms.’

  They were in an L of the house where a wing was built out into the garden; the sitting room, with tables, a bookcase, was at the end. ‘This, or the verandah, will be our schoolroom.’ Miss Lamont’s own room had another verandah and, in between, right under her eye, tho
ught Una, were two small bedrooms for her and Hal. As they were shown there was a certain tenseness. Miss Lamont had obviously been busy here as well. ‘You needn’t be cross, Edward,’ she had said. ‘There was hardly any expense. I did it myself with Monbad and a durzi and found the things in the bazaar.’ She did not tell him that there had been trouble over the durzi. He was not the expensive haughty tailor who sometimes came to the house to make shirts or dresses, curtains or loose covers, but a humble little man she had brought from the Old City, an old man with silver-rimmed spectacles, his needles and pins stuck in his small embroidered hat that itself was like a thimble. He had cut the muslin for the dressing-table skirts too short, and the upbraiding Alix had given him shattered Shiraz Road.

  ‘Is that how Mems talk?’ Ravi, who had never met one, asked Ganesh. This sounded more like the vituperation of a sweeper woman. ‘Owl! Pig! Son of a pig!’ ‘And he a Muslim, remember,’ said Ganesh. To a Muslim, pig was doubly unclean and, ‘Certainly she is not a pukka Miss-sahib,’ said Ganesh. The finished rooms, though, looked peaceful enough – each, Alix thought, a dream of a young girl’s room, pink for Hal, and, ‘Somehow I thought pale green suited Una. Are they all right?’ Alix had asked Edward, who had nonplussed her by being silent. ‘Are they – not all right?’

  ‘You must be prepared for Hal to plaster hers with photographs of pop stars,’ he said and made the worst of male comments: ‘It might have been better to have let them do the rooms themselves.’

  ‘But why, Edward? So unwelcoming.’

  He had not answered, ‘Una – and all that muslin!’ Instead, ‘They ought to have bookcases,’ he said.

  ‘They have.’ Alix showed him two white-painted wicker bookshelf brackets hung on the walls, and Edward had laughed. ‘Una grows books like grass. She would bring that down in ten minutes,’ and then, seeing Alix’s distressed face, he had said, ‘All I can say is, if they don’t like their rooms, they are ungrateful little girls.’

  They were not – at least not on the surface; good manners took over, of which, ‘Heaven be blest for them,’ Great-Aunt Frederica often said. ‘At least they avert immediate collision.’ Hal’s ‘How dainty!’ would have been wholehearted if she had not been certain of what Una was thinking, but, ‘You must have taken a great deal of trouble – thank you,’ said Una.

  For Hal there was a mandolin. ‘Can you teach me to play it, Miss Lamont? Oh, can you?’

  ‘I can,’ and Hal took it at once into her room and, sitting on her bed, began to strum.

  Standing on a small table by Una’s window a set of chessmen was arranged on an inlaid board. The men were of sandalwood and ivory. ‘Ivory!’ whispered Una, going down on her knees beside them. The sandalwood had the faint old Indian smell she remembered – though I haven’t smelt it all these years. There was no mistaking her pleasure. ‘Edward, they are exquisite!’

  ‘Moghul,’ said Edward, this new extravagant Edward, but when extravagance is after one’s own heart it ceases to matter, and Una, with awe, touched the little ivory white queen who held a bunch of delicately carved roses; the queens were in palanquins while each king rode in a carved howdah on a state elephant, the castles were mounted on war elephants, the bishops on camels; the knights had prancing horses, while the pawns were kneeling bowmen. ‘Moghul!’ said Una in ecstasy. Alix heard the difference in the tone and abruptly left the room; neither Edward nor Una saw her go.

  ‘That’s what I brought you out for,’ said Edward. ‘To play chess with me.’

  ‘Of course.’ Then Una looked up at him, her face back in its pale hardness. ‘Does Miss Lamont play chess?’

  ‘So that’s the trouble! You silly little skinnymalink,’ and Edward swept her up in his arms and kissed her.

  ‘A monkey man. Somewhere near me, in the garden perhaps, there is a monkey man.’ It was strange that Una had so immediately recognized the sound that woke her. I could only have been about three years old when I last heard it, she thought, but it was unmistakable: the rattling of lead pellets fastened to strings round a small-waisted hand drum. The monkey men always rattled them with one hand while the other led a pair of dressed-up monkeys. There must be a monkey man here now. Una swung her feet to the floor.

  ‘We couldn’t sleep,’ she and Hal had protested to Edward when he had ordered them to bed that afternoon. ‘We couldn’t possibly,’and in a few minutes had been fast asleep. ‘Well, you were tired and in a new element,’ Miss Lamont was to say. While Una had been asleep, someone had come in and unpacked her cases; her brush and comb were on the flounced dressing table, her travelling clock by the bed, her slippers put ready. When she opened the wardrobe her dresses were hanging there; linen blouses, jerseys neatly folded on shelves. Had a servant done it, or was it Miss Lamont? The same someone had switched on the electric fire. It was kind but, to Una, an intrusion; she did not like anyone to handle her intimate things just as, at school, she had disliked having them identified by nametapes, even initials. ‘I never met anyone so private,’ Hal used to say in exasperation. Hal had no private things; with her, everything was open, to be shared. ‘But then Hal is much nicer than I am,’ said Una.

  In their big bathroom – Miss Lamont had her own – Una washed and towelled her face and hands, then brushed out her hair and put on a dress, because surely it would soon be time for supper or dinner – she did not know yet which they had in Shiraz Road.

  The dusk had a chill, the Indian winter chill, and she took a cardigan before she stepped out on the verandah.

  She had dreaded finding Miss Lamont there, reading perhaps, watchful, but the verandah was empty as was the garden in the evening light. Then, over the rattle of the drum, further away now – it must be at the back of the house, thought Una – she heard the piano. Miss Lamont was safely in the drawing room.

  Rays from the setting sun were slanting low over the garden, giving its colours a last brightness, but in shadows and corners already the light was growing dim and she remembered how brief twilight was in India. From the rapid transit through space and time, Una felt exhilarated, out of herself; at Cerne now it would be midday; she would have been among the other girls in the classroom, not wandering alone in the dusk of this tropical garden.

  She stepped soundlessly along the path that surrounded the big house; in pots along the gravel were carnations that brushed her bare legs; she could smell their clove scent as she went round the L and paused at the back of the house to look into the drawing room. Through its smaller back windows she could see the French doors open to the light beyond; a lamp by the piano cast a wide pool of brighter electric light that shone down on Miss Lamont and her hands on the keys; she had changed and was wearing something mulberry-coloured; its fabric held gleams of gold. She knows how to dress, thought Una.

  She herself seemed to have gone back in time, hiding from grown-ups and with a governess. Even the drum sound belonged. ‘Una, baba, come and watch the funny monkeys.’ Una remembered how they somersaulted in their patchwork clothes, walked on their hands, held one out for praise and how, given a slice of orange, they seized and pouched it, first picking out the pips with minute black fingers.

  Across the grass from where she stood and behind a screen of poinsettias, a rough nasal voice was chanting or singing; there were catcalls and bursts of laughter, and soon Una was looking through the bushes to a row of garages with, above them, what must be servants’ rooms; some were lighted – she could see clothes hung below the ceilings on a string, pots of marigolds, a mirror. Her nostrils caught whiffs again familiar: the smell of a hookah – hubble-bubble – and of biris, the pungent native cigarettes, and on the concrete forecourt lit by the outside garage lights, she saw a small crowd, all the house servants and, perhaps, some of their friends. The butler, Dino, and two men – the other table servants? Una hardly recognised them without their turbans – were smoking the hookah; others, among whom she identified the old bearer, Ram Chand, smoked biris, but all of them were watching a space where a pair of monkeys c
apered as their master, in dirty white clothes and a dark red turban, sang, jerked their strings, commanded, or rattled his drum. If Una had shut her eyes she could have been back again, squatting on her heels as she still could, brought by Jetti, her Nepali ayah, to watch the monkeys.

  Were they funny? No more now than when she was three did Una know what story the man was chanting, the monkeys acting; she was too far away to see them well but she heard guffaws, the men’s excited laughter. Perhaps I ought not to be here.

  Then a car drew up, its door slammed and Edward strode into the courtyard. The drumming and chanting ceased abruptly; the hookah was left, biris stubbed out, turbans hastily reached for. ‘Turn that man out at once!’ Edward spoke in English and Una could tell he was angry. ‘I will not have such things in the compound. Ram Chand, Dino, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves.’

  If he finds me here he will be angrier still, thought Una and disappeared like a wraith but, as she came back into the garden, she found she was trembling, and still hearing the drum, the guffaws, Edward’s angry voice. ‘Well, people like obscene sights, you know they do,’ she told herself, but with monkeys, poor pitiful monkeys! I’m glad I couldn’t see it, but I hate all humans, thought Una.

  Then, in the gathering dusk, she saw a light at the far end of the garden. It was coming from behind another screen of flowers, a tall hedge so fragrant that its white flowers flooded the air with scent. Una stole closer to look. Behind the screen was a thatched hut, low to the ground with a courtyard of sun-baked earth; it had a standpipe with a tap and a small bush in a pot. Mats were hung over the entrance but two were rolled up showing a lighted room, and she knew there was one servant who was not watching the monkeys.