The Peacock Spring Read online

  Mrs Porter, the American lady of the Gymkhana Club, was at the luncheon and when, after the buffet, the guests strolled out into the garden, Una found herself alone with her. ‘I wanted a quiet word with you,’said Mrs Porter. ‘You have grown so like your mother – my dear Kate.’

  ‘Most people think I am like my father. But, did you know my mother?’

  Mrs Porter nodded. ‘Kate and I were at school together. I knew you as a mere baby.’ Her eyes seemed troubled as they dwelt on Una. ‘My dear, are you happy here in Delhi?’

  ‘I am – in waves.’ Una could not explain more than that but Mrs Porter put a hand on Una’s shoulder. ‘If there should be anything too difficult, Una, please, please come to me.’

  Why should there be anything too difficult? Yet, once again, Una was struck by the honesty of ugly Mrs Porter’s eyes. ‘Your mother gave me her confidence,’ said Mrs Porter, then, with a pat, let Una go.

  She was not the only one who asked Una about Delhi and it was then that she brought out the word ‘fabulosity’. ‘There is such a word, and I do think India is fabulous.’

  ‘My dear child!’ said Lady Srinevesan; again those expressive eyebrows lifted. ‘India may have been fabulous once; it certainly isn’t now. For one thing we haven’t the money. Oh yes, a few of the rajahs and rogues like Chaman Lal Sethji have it salted away in gold somewhere, but for most of us it is taken away in taxes. If I were not a minister’s wife, I should count myself lucky to be able to have a house bearer and share a sweeper as Bulbul has to – she does all her own cooking,’ and Una thought unhappily of the galaxy of servants at Shiraz Road.

  ‘My husband, of course, has official cars which I can use,’ Lady Srinevesan went on, ‘but when he retires we shan’t be able to afford a driver. Ostentation is frowned on now.’

  ‘It would be – out of keeping?’ Una had flushed at the word ‘ostentation’.

  ‘Indeed yes.’ Then Lady Srinevesan added, ‘When your father first came out he decided to live in one of the flats over the offices. He said your big house, 40 Shiraz Road, was to become the United Nations guest house. He told my husband he liked the new simplicity. I wonder,’ said Lady Srinevesan, ‘who made him change his mind.’

  No one, thought Una, could know Alix who had not heard her bargaining in the bazaar. Alix had taken them to the Westernised shops. Indian crafts were gathered together there in the politeness of fixed prices, guarantees. She had taken them to the Tibetan booths where flat-faced women in wide-sleeved robes and striped aprons, plaits wound round their heads, sold curios – ‘Highly pseudo,’ said Alix. They had explored the copper shops round the Jama Masjid, Delhi’s great mosque, and penetrated to the horse-copers’ caravanserai where Alix seemed equally at home. They went to the ivory marts where the craftsmen worked in a courtyard, each in his own niche, not needing models or sketches. ‘Each knows in his mind,’ said the shopkeeper, ‘what he wants to carve.’

  Hal was particularly fascinated by the small ivory carved balls that had other balls carved inside them, yet were all in one piece. ‘How do they carve the inner ones?’ she marvelled. The work was exquisite, but the price was far beyond her. Alix had been surprised by the smallness of their pocket money. ‘Is that all Edward gives you?’

  ‘It’s usually enough,’ said Una at once.

  ‘In your Latin letter you teased him for more.’

  ‘You read that!’

  ‘He read it to me,’ which, for Una, was worse, but Alix had gone swiftly on to say, ‘Never mind, Hal, I know a little shop where perhaps you could get a ball with four inner balls for fifty rupees.’

  ‘Fifty rupees.’ The shopkeeper pretended to faint. ‘Miss-sahib, I tell you: because you are new customer, because little Miss-baba comes from England, I give this ball, give it to you, for ninety-five.’

  ‘Come girls, we’ll go to the Ivory Palace.’

  ‘I give what it cost me – no profit – I take ninety.’

  Alix rose; the shopkeeper flung himself between her and the door. ‘At least, take a little lemonade, a Coca-Cola. Mohan, Mohan,’ he called to his ragged boy assistant. ‘Bring Coca-Cola. Sit down! Sit down!’ he begged.

  ‘No, we waste your time,’ said Alix. ‘The Miss-baba has no more than forty rupees.’

  ‘Forty! You said fifty!’ This time the cry was so shrill it seemed to pierce the roof. ‘Miss-sahib, I swear by my father and mother …’ He broke into Hindi, Alix matched it and the real battle was on: imprecations, abuse, appeal, stony indifference on Alix’s part; drama on the shopkeeper’s. Twice he put the ball back on the shelf. Twice Alix got up to go. ‘Mohan, Mohan, bring Coca-Cola.’

  Hal was distressed but, ‘Don’t you see, they are enjoying it?’ whispered Una.

  ‘Indeed yes.’ Sushila, who had come with them, was an experienced shopper.

  ‘The shopkeeper too?’ whispered Hal.

  ‘Of course.’ Sushila’s eyes were sparkling behind her spectacles.

  A crowd had gathered. Even Chinaberry, who had escorted them, was smiling and when, swearing and tearful, the shopkeeper reached down the ball at fifty-five rupees, if Indians ever applauded, Chinaberry would have clapped.

  ‘Too much loss! Too much loss!’ the shopkeeper moaned as he dusted the little ball. ‘My children will starve.’ He packed it in bright-pink tissue paper and gave it to Hal who hardly liked to take it but, ‘Take. Take,’ he urged, ‘and see, this is my card.’ He gave Una an ivory peacock holding cocktail sticks as a tail.

  ‘But … I don’t want it.’

  ‘Not for buying,’ he said. ‘As souvenir,’ and, ‘Come again,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘Come tomorrow.’

  ‘You see,’ said Una to Hal.

  Alix was breathing as hard as the shopkeeper; both their eyes were bright, both were mysteriously happy. ‘I had to go to another five rupees, Hal,’ said Alix, ‘but I will make that up to you, and I think you have a bargain.’

  ‘Alix, that was splendid,’ said Una.

  ‘I don’t know how you did it,’ said Hal, cherishing her ivory carved ball and, ‘You are a better bargainer than my old ayah,’ said Sushila. They did not understand why Alix’s colour rose and why her voice was curt as she said, ‘Come along, back to the car.’

  Chinaberry had opened the door for them when a man came pushing through the crowd that had increased round them. He was not an Indian, but near white, thought Una; fat, unkempt, a black stubble on his jowl, a bald spot in his greasy black hair. His coat and trousers, once white, were crumpled and unbuttoned and a fat paunch showed through a dirty mauve singlet. He was an unlovely object but Una saw his eyes, the colour of prunes, she thought, soft and alight with admiration and joy. ‘Miss Ally,’ he called. ‘Miss Ally.’

  Alix looked at him and, ‘Get in the car,’ she told the girls.

  ‘But, Miss Ally, I am Lobo. Mr Lobo, friend of Mummy.’ He had almost reached them. ‘Bring your young ladies in for a glass of sherbet. Ice-cream soda I have got or Coca-Cola.’ The eyes were pleading. ‘It will give me such happiness, Miss Ally.’

  ‘Take your hand off the door.’ Alix got in and slammed it. ‘Chelo – go on,’ she said to Chinaberry.

  ‘Miss Ally.’ A pitiful knocking on the window. ‘You know Lobo. Ice-cream soda.’

  ‘Jaldi chelo,’ and Chinaberry drove away.

  ‘Who was he?’ asked Una.

  ‘Some drunken tramp.’

  ‘But he knew your name. He called out “Miss Ally”’ said Una.

  ‘That … that was a form of Muslim greeting. “Mis-Ali.”’

  ‘Alix!’ Una, unnerved, began to laugh. She laughed so much she had to wipe away tears. Hal and Sushila joined in and they were overcome with giggles. ‘A Muslim greeting! Oh, Alix!’

  ‘Mumma, you will please tell Lobo he is not to speak to me again – ever – anywhere.’

  ‘Mr Lobo not to speak! Ally!’

  ‘Don’t call me Ally! My God! On top of everything else, do I have to put up with that?’ Alix was walking u
p and down, her handkerchief twisted into a ball. ‘It is you, Mumma, that causes all this, living in this shamble place where you have to meet such dregs.’

  ‘No one is dregs.’ Mrs Lamont was calm. ‘I am Ally’s whipping goat,’ she often told people and now, ‘You are speaking of my friend,’ she said with unperturbed dignity.

  ‘Friend! A dirty, drunken, greasy swine.’

  ‘Ally!’ Now Mrs Lamont was stern. ‘You are not to speak of him like that. It is yourself you demean, not him. A little drunk he may be at times—’

  ‘A little!’ Alix snorted.

  ‘But he is … courtly … and courtly to you.’

  ‘He made me make a fool of myself.’

  ‘Well?’ Mrs Lamont was so accustomed to being a fool that she saw nothing derogatory in that. ‘Sometimes it happens, m’n? Even to you! Don’t make an enemy, I advise you. They can take revenge.’

  ‘Pooh! What could Lobo do? How dared he come near us?’ flared Alix again.

  ‘Ally! Ally! Be careful. I think you are on the urge …’

  ‘Verge, not urge, Mumma.’ It was almost a scream, as if Alix could bear no more and, ‘Come here,’ commanded Mrs Lamont. ‘Come here to Mumma.’

  A ramrod back was turned, the handkerchief was compressed to the size of a walnut now, and Mrs Lamont knew tears were running down Alix’s face. ‘Girlie, come here,’ and Alix, as usual, came.

  ‘Aie, that temper!’ Mrs Lamont sighed as she rocked Alix against her breast. ‘One of these days you will do more than you mean, but never mind now.’ Then, ‘Ally,’ she whispered. ‘I suppose you didn’t bring …’

  ‘My God, Mumma! I dropped the girls at Paralampur House and haven’t even been back to Shiraz Road.’

  ‘Not to mind. Not to mind,’ said Mrs Lamont. ‘Next time …’ She paused and looked over Alix’s head to the image above the small lamp. ‘Ally,’ she said after a while, ‘I am thinking Mr Lobo is right. You should bring those girls here.’

  ‘Are you mad?’ Alix drew sharply away.

  ‘No. I am right.’ Mrs Lamont nodded her head. ‘You should tell them – of me and of us. Tell them all.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’ Alix’s voice was biting. ‘They laugh at me.’

  ‘Laugh? Well?’ Mrs Lamont was bewildered. ‘Laugh? But isn’t that nice?’

  ‘That girl,’ Ravi told Hem, ‘is spying on me.’

  ‘What nonsense talk is this? Why should she spy?’

  ‘She is a girl – do girls not like me?’

  ‘Hardly a daughter of Sir Gwithiam,’ said Hem drily, but Una seemed drawn to walk, hidden in the darkness, down the lower garden and watch this strange young gardener/poet going about his work – and minding his own business, thought Una longingly. ‘Ravi is far too selfish to do anything else,’ Hem would have warned her but, as yet, Una had not met Hem; two or three times she had seen another young man in the hut but had always shrunk hastily away.

  ‘I wonder who made him change his mind,’ Lady Srinevesan had said of Edward; Una had been quick to hear ‘who’ instead of ‘what’. ‘If anything is too difficult …’ – she remembered Mrs Porter’s troubled look and felt she was being caught in a web of insinuation she did not understand; and, ‘Mis-Ali’ a Muslim greeting. That had been funny, but it was a lie. Yes, Alix/Miss Lamont told lies. Why, thought Una? – and Edward ought to know. The thought of Edward calmed her; he must soon be back, then I can talk to him, she thought, and pressed closer against the flower hedge to let herself be drowned in scent; but she saw Hem and vanished.

  ‘I tell you she does,’ said Ravi.

  ‘Does like you? Or does spy?’

  ‘If she spies she must like me. I shall have to leave,’ said Ravi.

  ‘That would be madness. Ravi, what could be more ideal for you than this?’ and Hem went on to entreat, ‘Think. No one will dream of looking for you here.’

  ‘Right under their noses!’ Ravi had to laugh. ‘But all that has blown over long ago,’ he said.

  ‘Has it? I must remind you again. Injit and Prasad are still in jail,’ and, ‘You have not been chained.’ Hem said it with sudden fierceness. ‘You have never had the warders steal your food when you were desperate with hunger …’ Hem choked then became his usual controlled self. ‘Ravi bhai – you cannot be sure. In any case, a little girl cannot harm you. Stay here and write your poems. It is unique opportun-ity,’ he urged in English which he did not speak nearly as well as Ravi.

  ‘Hem, you are always so pompous.’

  ‘And you are always silly. Think what Doctor–Professor Asutosh said of you when you took the English prize.’

  ‘Babbletosh Asutosh!’

  ‘The mantle of Tagore.’ Though Hem, too, half-mocked, he was impressed. ‘For an astute boy Hem Sharma is strangely simple over this young Ravi,’ Doctor Asutosh, vice-chancellor of their college had said, and, ‘The mantle of Tagore,’ breathed Hem.

  ‘Bull shit,’ said Ravi, yet, in this garden, the words were not offensive because they fell into their right place; bull shit was manure, welcome for flower and vegetable beds, and Ravi ceased to be annoyed. ‘Anyway, I should prefer Kalidasa’s mantle.’

  ‘Not really?’ Hem was sarcastic. ‘Who was Kalidasa?’ Una was to ask and Ravi to answer, ‘Our equivalent of your Shakespeare, only better,’ but now he was haughty and told Hem, ‘I don’t want anyone’s mantle. I shall make my own.’

  ‘Then it will be pyjama kurta in the brightest possible colours,’ said Hem and Ravi laughed and clapped him on the shoulder.

  In the evenings at Shiraz Road, when they were alone, Alix and Hal played and sang while Una listened, or Alix read aloud in French. ‘Edward would be pleased to know we were studying something,’ said Alix. She read Lettres de mon moulin, ‘A bit easy for Una, but I think right for Hal.’

  ‘Una thinks I ought to have Les Malheurs de Sophie,’ said Hal, who had not forgiven Una about the bangles.

  Alix read French simply, without the elaborations of her singing and piano playing; she did not swell her voice, nor use her hands; probably nothing had overlaid the stern standards of the martinet Parisian nun of whom she had told Una – Alix’s Mrs Carrington, guessed Una – and the passion of the old teacher in that classroom of Alsace, the flag and the children, the patriotism came alive, even for Hal. ‘And now, something for Una,’ Alix said one evening as she closed the book. ‘Una must read.’

  ‘I learn more by listening to you,’ said Una. ‘Alix, read that Charles d’Orléans poem about the spring.’

  ‘Le temps a laissié son manteau,’ read Alix,

  ‘De vent, de froidure et de pluye,

  Et s’est vestu de brouderie,

  De soleil luyant, cler et beau …’

  The cadences brought into the Delhi drawing room all the freshness of France in spring and Una sat entranced. If only we could keep to things, she thought, things, not people; those words have lived for almost six centuries, while people come and go, and if only we could be big … Then, ‘Leave off thinking,’ said Una to Una. ‘Give yourself up. Listen,’ and, ‘Alix, read it again,’ she begged aloud.

  ‘Riviere, fontaine et ruisseau

  Portent, en livree jolie,

  Gouttes d’argent d’orfaverie

  Chascun s’abille de nouveau …’

  and ‘Le temps a laissié son manteau’ finished Edward’s voice in the doorway.

  He had not warned them, nor ordered Chinaberry to meet him but, arriving on a late flight, had quietly taken a taxi from the airport. As he waited in the doorway until the poem was finished, no scene could have been more after his own heart: Alix reading, with Hal hanging adoringly over the back of her chair, Una close beside her, all three in complete accord. Then, at his voice, ‘Edward!’ The girls almost tumbled over their feet to meet him; the book fell forgotten. ‘Edward! But why didn’t you let us know? Why didn’t you tell us?’

  ‘I wanted to take you by surprise.’

  ‘Or see how we were doing?’ What Al
ix really meant was, ‘See how I was doing,’ and Una paused. Alix’s eyes were bright with temper. Why?

  ‘Edward, you must have some dinner,’ but this offer was brushed aside. ‘I had it on the flight.’ He and Alix were looking over Una and Hal’s heads at one another and, ‘Come along, Hal,’ said Una, her voice tight. ‘Edward’s tired. You and I had better go to bed.’

  Alix waited till they had gone then let it break. ‘You trusted me.’ He had not heard her voice as high. Then, as if panic had struck her, she stopped and, ‘You trusted me with them,’ said Alix. ‘Edward, I should like to give that trust back to you as the complete and shining thing it was.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ asked Edward.

  ‘Never mind,’ and she was back in her accusation. ‘You said this was to surprise us. Wasn’t it rather to catch us unawares so that you could see how things were with Hal and Una – particularly Una?’

  ‘Alix! I never dreamed …’

  ‘And what did you see? What did you see?’ she taunted.

  ‘You,’ said Edward.

  Alix had been beautiful, her head bent over the book, light falling over his favourite mulberry, gold-shot dress; she looked more beautiful now. ‘Upbraiding me,’ said Edward and, ‘Hasn’t it gone well?’ he challenged her.

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘Haven’t they both been happy? Interested? They look new girls.’

  ‘You do trust me then?’

  ‘The only thought I had,’ said Edward, ‘was that I couldn’t kiss you there and then. When is this going to end?’ he groaned.

  ‘We must be patient.’

  ‘Patient! When you are so close … when I must look at you and only look. Be so near and not touch you. Oh Alix! Alix!’

  ‘We didn’t ask Edward about a horse for Alix.’ Hal, in her pyjamas, had come into Una’s room.