Black Narcissus Read online

  ‘The Sunnyasi, he’s one of the family and surely they’d listen to him,’ she spoke out of her interest in the boy. ‘Wouldn’t he help?’

  Mr Dean smiled. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t concern himself with things like that. The fact that Kundra dies and Dilip has to go on living is nothing to him.’

  ‘You can’t call that holiness,’ she cried.

  ‘It’s a different kind of holiness,’ he said.

  ‘It’s inhuman.’

  ‘I think that’s what he means it to be,’ he answered, pulling down his stirrups. ‘Well, thank you for taking in my little lovebird.’

  He was looking at her with the same gleam in his eye, but she had not heard him. She was thinking of the girl again and Sister Briony’s face when she had seen her. Kanchi had not said a word, her lids were dropped over her eyes, but she saw everything; she had done what Mr Dean had told her like a little dog, but Sister Clodagh remembered that reluctant hand and the quick breaths agitating the nose ring. She looked swiftly at Mr Dean and met his eye.

  ‘You’re sure there’s no question you’re dying to ask me?’ he mocked.

  She hesitated. Then she answered firmly: ‘None.’

  He laughed and put his leg over his pony. ‘Then good morning, Saint Clodagh,’ he said, and, hitching up his feet, clattered away in the rain.

  11

  By the end of November the house was finished, except for the class-rooms and dispensary and the chapel. The Refectory and the cubicles and guest rooms were ready, the corridor floors mended and oiled, not a pane was missing in their windows; the roof had been painted a glistening red and the grass on the terrace squared and cut. Inside and out, the house was decent and shining, only the salon was left with its old French colours, and the life around the back doors was as strong and noisy as ever.

  Mr Dean was seldom in the house now, but he came up every evening to see the work on the west lawn and usually he came out on the terrace to report to Sister Clodagh.

  ‘I can’t tolerate him any longer,’ she said on the morning he had brought Kanchi to them. ‘I don’t see why I should. Why should he suddenly be rude and mock at me like that?’ Secretly she knew the answer to that, she had known it as soon as she had uttered that wretched ‘None’.

  ‘But I couldn’t have asked him that,’ she cried. ‘I’d taken the girl in, against my own judgement for charity’s sake. What more could he expect. Naturally I couldn’t help wondering –’ She made up her mind that she would not speak to him again.

  But she had to listen to his reports on the work; she had to direct it and though that ‘Saint Clodagh’ still rankled, she seemed to be talking to him most evenings of the week. They talked of plans and dimensions and the difficulty of getting seasoned wood, of a leak in the passage and the sink for the chapel cloakroom; but Sister Ruth saw their faces turned to one another, full of interest, earnestly talking, and she watched them hungrily. Sometimes he would take a catalogue out of his pocket and show it to Sister Clodagh, pointing to an illustrated window catch or a fertilizer for the garden, and she saw their heads close together as they bent over the book. She never failed to watch them, but she never dared to go near enough to hear what they said. It was at the time that she had to tidy the class-rooms and get the work ready for to-morrow; usually she had Kanchi and Joseph then for English, and she would leave them with a column of letters to write and step out on to the grass, walking softly round the corner of the house. She could hear nothing in the wind, only see them pacing backwards and forwards, Sister Clodagh holding her veil down, Mr Dean’s hat over his eyes, while Phuba and the pony waited on the drive.

  Kanchi and Joseph knew very well why she left them. Into Kanchi’s eyes would come a little flicker, she looked sideways at Sister Ruth, wetting her pencil with her tongue; but Joseph would keep his eyes down and work busily at his letters.

  It was a new habit of Sister Clodagh’s to come out after tea. That was the time, in these short evenings, that the sun went down, leaving the valley and the foot-hills first, drawing away from the hills higher and higher until only the sky was in light. The light spread in ripples; they lapped the terrace while the tea and the bamboos were lost in the dusk and the buttresses had heavy shadows against the walls. The sun flashed on the corridor windows and dazzled her eyes as she looked at the people going down the steps; the workmen going to their homes, the garden coolies who had left their spades in the earth until tomorrow. She turned to Mr Dean with a smile, but best she liked to be alone with the garden, in its brilliant light that would presently change to dusk.

  This was the time that she used to walk on the shore at Liniskelly or, if the men were coming home early, on the lawn, or go through the fields with the dogs. In the greyness the waves lapped the shore and the boats were getting ready to go out; in the fields the dogs ran on, the chestnut sweep of the setter Roderick’s tail busy among the rabbit warrens, Gamble and Morna, the spaniels, breaking the bracken; and on the lawn, the light fell from the lamp in the drawing-room and she heard the car wheels on the gravel and smelt a cigar as her father came home.

  ‘Father, is Con coming over?’

  ‘Well, the old man’s coming in to play a game with me. How should we know but the young one might be along?’

  Often Mr Dean found her with that softness on her face, and the girls going home from the Lace School had to step up to her before she heard their salaams. ‘Salaam, Lemini, Salaam.’ How long had they been standing there, Maili and Jokiephul giggling into their shawls, fat Samya fidgeting with her umbrella? ‘Salaam, Lemini. We’ll find you in the morning.’

  She was fond of these people. She could not remember when it was that she began to think of them as people; not as natives, persons apart, but as people like themselves, and she was beginning to see with their eyes. Ayah’s brown hands carrying a bowl of water no longer seemed alien, but, rather, her own hands stretched out to take it seemed insipid. There was a richness in the brown skins that she liked; in the peasants’ red and brown, in the children’s coloured rosiness, in their cheerful Mongol faces.

  Every Wednesday, she and Sister Briony went to the market, with Joseph as a go-between. The market was in the village square, which was not level but slanted up the hill under the wall of the General’s house. Sister Clodagh found that if she were not careful, she would look at it and begin to wonder about the young General and then fall into a day-dream.

  They walked between the booths with the people, and there was so much to look at that they were a long time over the things they had come to buy. There were the Bhotiya women at the stalls with their bowls of curds and butter tea; Sister Briony stared at their jewellery, at their girdles and necklaces that were like breast-plates, and their earrings and a coronet they wore of blue and red beads in their hair, which was oiled and plaited round their heads.

  ‘It’s like a tiara,’ she breathed. ‘Fancy finding tiaras here! And you wouldn’t think, with all that money, they’d need to keep shop, would you?’

  Sister Clodagh liked the kingfisher colours of their clothes and their aprons which were striped and plaqued with embroidery at the corners, and the corn and green of their sleeves.

  ‘What is it they daub their faces with?’ asked Sister Briony. ‘It’s brown, but do you think it’s rouge?’

  ‘It’s pig’s blood,’ Sister Clodagh told her and Sister Briony shuddered.

  The State men had cropped heads and round black hats; their women were dressed in print skirts and jackets, the Italian folds of their shawls falling about flat gilded faces. Then there were the Lepchas, Ayah’s people, who were lazy and lusty and bawdy, who wore dark crossed robes and their back hair in two pigtails; their men wore pigtails too, though they had no hair on their faces. The men all wore earrings and had a passion for Homburg hats, Lepchas, Bhotiyas and Tibetan traders. ‘Why are they all so much dirtier than the women?’ Sister Briony wondered, ‘they positively stink’; and she held her large handkerchief to her
nose as she stopped to stare at a Lama, dirtier than them all, shouting at the crowd for alms, while his disciple walked behind him, bellowing even more loudly.

  There were odd things to buy and to find in that far corner of the world. Among the eggs and grain and fruit and oil, were yaks’ tails and umbrellas and Lucky Strike cigarettes and Roger and Gallet soap; there was a second-hand bottle shop and a cloth shop with prints from Manchester and Japan, printed with patterns of feathers and shells and moons and stars and daisies. There was always a side-show going on, a story-teller or someone dancing to a drum and a metal fife.

  When the village children first saw the nuns out of school they pretended to be frightened and run away, but soon they followed in a pack at their heels, talking about them with Joseph.

  ‘What do they say?’ Sister Briony asked, smiling indulgently at them.

  ‘They say white teeth look funny in white faces, and they want to know if it’s true that you have no ears.’

  ‘No ears! Of course we have ears.’

  ‘Then why do you keep them bandaged up?’

  ‘How do they think we hear if we have no ears?’ asked Sister Clodagh.

  ‘They think she hears with her mouth,’ he said, pointing at Sister Briony. ‘It’s always a little open; but they don’t know about you, you keep yours so tight shut.’

  ‘Ridiculous children,’ they said, but they went down to the Convent, both feeling a little displeased.

  Sister Honey knew all the children; long before Sister Ruth who taught them could tell them apart, she knew all their names and ages and which were brothers and sisters and which were good or naughty. Every day she saw Om to the gate because she thought he was too young to be trusted down the steps alone. ‘He can hardly do more than toddle,’ said she indignantly, ‘and his mother never knows where he is.’

  Hand in hand they would go to the gate at half-past eleven and at four, and they talked to each other all the time, though they hardly knew a word of one another’s language. Outside the gateposts the children had drawn a sort of hopscotch on the ground and Sister Honey had been known to pick up her skirts when no one was looking and hop there with the best of them.

  ‘Oh dear. There’s the bell. I must go,’ she would cry. ‘Why, it’s twelve o’clock already.’

  ‘Stay, Lemini, stay,’ the children cried, catching hold of her veil and her habit and her hands.

  ‘Really I must go. That’s the Angelus.’ Reluctantly she turned away from them, her veil fell into prim flat folds and her lips moved quickly, as she hastened to say her first ‘Hail Mary’ and the Office of the hour. They went quickly away behind her back.

  They had a great respect for holiness, these children, as whole-hearted a respect as they had for Bhûts or ghosts; not one of them would go near the Sunnyasi and they would not have dared to stay with Sister Honey while she prayed.

  It was amazing how quickly the hours came round; it seemed that the bell had hardly rung when it rang again.

  ‘Really, no sooner have I started than I have to stop,’ said Sister Philippa, looking feverishly at her half-cleared flower beds, ‘and there’s so much that has to be done.’ Sister Briony complained that she took time from the laundry to work in the garden, certainly she took it from her own recreation, but she had to interrupt her work it seemed to her continually, she hardly found time to work at all. She took to going into chapel at the last minute, not even waiting to wash her hands. ‘What am I thinking of?’ she said, ‘interrupting my work to go to chapel! What has come over me to make me think like that. It used to be, it ought to be, the other way round.’

  But she was beginning to love her work in the garden. The winter green of the trees and hills was mixed with the frosty colours of the ground; it was hard for the coolies to drive their spades into the earth, the stream seemed to run more slowly and the wood cracked on the bonfire, where she offered up the last stems of the cosmos before returning them in ashes to the beds. Her cheeks burned from the sun and frost as she lay in bed at night, and the walls of her cubicle were bright with visions, not of saints but of flowers.

  Nowadays Sister Ruth was often ten minutes late ringing the bell and sometimes none of them noticed except Sister Briony, who was as punctual as any bell under any circumstances. Sister Clodagh herself was sometimes curiously absent-minded as she read the prayers; occasionally she said a prayer through twice, and once, at the end of Compline, she kept them kneeling there for nearly ten minutes. Then she stood up with such a gentle apologetic smile that she did not look like Sister Clodagh at all, and they glanced at her, half awed, as they bobbed to her for their good-nights.

  They left her standing by the altar with the candle snuffer in her hand, but for a long time the candles flickered and smoked in the wind of the open door before she put them out.

  12

  Father Roberts was to ride out once every two months from Darjeeling and spend the night at St Faith’s; it was the best he could do for them, he had a wide parish of his own. ‘I wish he could have been with us for All Saints,’ said Sister Briony. ‘It’s one of the happiest days of the year and this year it will seem very empty, I’m afraid. Still, the sacrifice is all the greater, and Our Lord will make it up to us in other ways, I’m sure. Let’s be glad Father Roberts can come at all. I’m sure we all need his visit.’

  He came in the third week of November and the day of his visit was like a day from another world, their own world that they had done so long without. It was a long joyous day of services and prayers. On the evening of his arrival, tired though he was, he heard Confessions and next morning celebrated Mass. All work was put on one side; the girls and children in the schools sat in orderly and excited rows. Kanchi was sent for to the office, even the workmen came in for their share when the building was inspected. The nuns were suddenly alert, their faces exhilarated and their eyes bright; even their footsteps sounded crisp and the air was disturbed by the constant ringing of the bell. Father Roberts blessed the temporary little chapel in a special service, and took Vespers and Evensong. Sister Clodagh knelt with the other Sisters in the first row. He seemed very tired. She noticed that he prayed for ‘Our Gracious King Edward’ and that his hands were shaking. ‘He’s too old for such arduous work,’ she thought.

  He felt her eyes on him once or twice. ‘I don’t know what there is about her,’ he wrote afterwards to Mother Dorothea, ‘that I find so puzzling.’ ‘It’s a kind of innate superiority,’ Mother Dorothea wrote back. ‘She has always felt herself just a little better than anyone else. What makes it so hard to deal with, is the fact that she undoubtedly is. She has great gifts and one can’t deny it. But one day I think she’ll learn to know herself. I have always found that it is wiser to let God teach His own lessons in His own time, haven’t you?’

  In the early morning of the third day he rode away up the hill. They stood in the porch to see him off.

  ‘I must congratulate you, Sister,’ he said. ‘You’ve been more successful than I believed was possible. All the work seems excellent. Excellent. I’ll be here in January.’

  When he had gone, the Convent sank back into its everyday life; the stimulus died down, quiet closed over it and hardly a trace of his visit was left. Sister Philippa, working late in the dusk on the high terrace, missed saying her Office altogether.

  13

  Sister Clodagh had made up her mind that rainy morning that she would not talk to Mr Dean again, and how easily she had drifted into it. She had tried to keep up her barrier, but it was so easy to slip into talking when she was with him, that she forgot it; he was so refreshing to talk to after the sameness of the Sisters, such a change that, even when he talked about Kanchi, it was hard to remember that she was offended. She could not be bothered with it; she did not try to bother in these happy relaxed days, she simply let herself drift with the present or sink into the past.

  It was like practising the piano; at first your fingers feel cold and stiff, and the notes seem a little sharp on the air
and the phrases stupid and meaningless. Then you are warm, it flows, it becomes music and it seems to take you where it flows. It was getting to be a habit with her, to let her mind flow away, to spend minutes and hours back in the past with Con.

  When Mr Dean came into her office and put two canvas bags on her desk she looked up at him with an absent smile; she seemed so far away that he nearly said to her: ‘Where have you been? Where are you?’ Instead he clinked the bags sharply together as he put them down.

  ‘What are those for?’ she asked at once.

  ‘The thin one is from me for Kanchi’s keep,’ he said. ‘I suppose ten rupees a month would do it, and ten for all you’re teaching her. Anyhow, I’ve put in twelve notes to last her six months.’

  ‘But you needn’t do that, you know,’ she said. ‘We’re endowed.’

  ‘I foisted her on to you, so it’s my responsibility. I’d thankfully pay twenty rupees a month to avoid being worried by her, but you needn’t let that go any further. The other is money I’ve extracted from her uncle for her dowry. It’s not as imposing as it looks, as it’s mostly in four-anna bits and pice, but I want you to keep it like that for her. I’ll get some more from him later. You see, if I pay her dowry the husband would certainly think he’d been cheated, it’s got to be small and authentic in bits and pieces like this. Is she being a nuisance?’

  ‘She’s settling down amazingly well. She’s very good.’

  There were only two things in the world that Kanchi cared about, and one of them was herself. It was for that reason she stayed at the Convent; she knew she had been behaving very foolishly and that Dean Sahib had been right to bring her here, but she had to be careful or she might have betrayed herself again.