The Peacock Spring Read online

  ‘We can’t ask him now.’ Una was terse.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He’s tired.’ She could not be more explicit than that.

  ‘He didn’t look a bit tired. He looked excited. Come on.’

  ‘Hal, come back. Come back,’ but Hal had gone. Una had to go after her.

  The servants were in their own quarters so that Hal had not stopped to put on her dressing gown and slippers, nor had Una, and, in pyjamas and bare feet, they made no sound on the verandah. ‘I expect she’s telling him all about us,’ Hal whispered. ‘Hope to goodness she’s tactful about Vikram,’ but there was no sound of voices from the drawing room. They looked in at the open doorway and stopped.

  Hal gave a gasp. Una clapped a hand over Hal’s mouth and silently as two white shadows they raced down the verandah to Una’s room. ‘I don’t think we were meant to see that,’ quavered Hal.

  Four

  ‘I didn’t know they ever lived in,’ said Hal.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Love women.’

  She and Una had separated the night before without another word and Una still felt she could not speak. At breakfast Hal had looked from Edward to Alix, Alix to Edward until Edward had asked, ‘What is the matter, Hal? Haven’t you seen us before?’ at which Hal went scarlet, Una white. ‘If they had had any sense they would have guessed we had seen them,’ Hal said afterwards, but Edward was too jovial to notice, while about Alix there was a quiet arrogance; it showed in the way she spoke to Dino, told Hal to sit up. ‘You are too old to fidget.’ Now Una was changing for dinner and Hal had come into her room.

  ‘And I thought it might be Vikram,’ said Una bitterly.

  ‘It probably is,’ said Hal, ‘as well. Men need women. Sushila and I were talking about it the other day; her father has dozens.’

  ‘Hal! You don’t know …’

  ‘Sushila should. Una, you’re so innocent!’ Hal was bouncing up and down on the bed. ‘All the same, I think we should keep Alix. At least she is interesting and fun. Suppose she had been some prissy old governess. Why, we might have found a Crackers!’

  ‘Don’t!’ Una cried out as if Hal had said something unbearable. For her it had been a tragic day.

  As she had guessed, on Edward’s coming back, the schoolroom table had been made ready on the verandah. ‘It will be pleasant to work out here,’ said Alix, and it had certainly begun pleasantly. Una had been glad to feel her books, her work-tools, under her hands again; then, ‘Where are your exercise books from Cerne?’ asked Alix.

  ‘We didn’t do exercises exactly – not in the senior school. We made notes and did our studies on file papers like these.’

  ‘Oh!’ Alix had looked swiftly through them and as swiftly closed them. ‘Very impressive, Una,’ she said, ‘but we shall have to do things my way.’ Una was silent and, ‘No two teachers are alike, are they?’ Alix had asked. Una had not answered but her hands under the table had been pressed tightly together.

  ‘Were you praying?’ asked Hal.

  ‘It wasn’t much use if I was.’

  Today we did dictée. In her diary, Hal noted down everything Alix ordained. We did arithmetic revision.

  ‘But that’s Hal’s book,’ Una had said when Alix gave her the exercise.

  ‘Una, I find you conceited.’

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t be so cocky,’ Hal told her afterwards. ‘You made plenty of mistakes in your dictée.’

  ‘Because she went too fast. She wanted me to make mistakes.’ Una had to write them out ten times. ‘Like a baby,’ she said, writhing. As the week went on, her dismay deepened.

  Alix read us Appreciation of Mozart. Una guessed it was from one of her old papers at the conservatoire. ‘Well – if it was?’We did Indian history from the book Crackers gave Una, dreadfully boring, but then we went into the kitchen to Christopher who taught us to make prawn koftas. Yum! Yum! We did English Essay and World Literature.

  There had almost been open trouble over the world literature. ‘I have a beautiful book,’ Alix had said. ‘It opens with the first books in the world, scratchings on rocks, or clay tablets, then on papyrus, up to the present day.’

  ‘Does it include the Indian epics?’ Una was interested.

  ‘It may include them but it is more important to read what the world has written. I collected this outline in magazine numbers,’ Alix said proudly.

  ‘Magazine?’ Crackers’s ‘Don’t be a schoolgirl snob’ echoed in Una’s ears. But … but … she thought.

  ‘What is the matter, Una?’

  ‘For literature one needs books.’

  ‘Isn’t this a book?’

  ‘Of course it is,’ said Hal. ‘The pictures are splendid.’

  ‘Thank you, Hal.’

  Hal, nowadays, was no help to Una; from that moment on the verandah, when she had seen them, for Hal, Edward and Alix had a rosy aureole of romance. ‘Alix really is lovely,’ she said to Una. ‘Have you seen her with her hair down?’

  ‘I expect I will,’ said Una wearily.

  We went riding, chronicled Hal. Snowball bucked me off but Alix did not mind. Alix took us to polo. Alix is teaching me Funiculi Funicula on the mandolin. Alix … Alix …

  The lessons suited Hal exactly, especially the singing and cooking with Christopher. ‘He says I’m a natural cook.’

  ‘A natural greedy,’ but Una hardly had the heart to tease and she knew Hal was not listening.

  ‘My koftas turned out perfectly this time,’ she said. ‘When I marry Vikram he will be surprised.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. You won’t marry Vikram or he you,’ but things Hal said had a way of coming true and Una would not be surprised.

  We did dictée. Dictée seemed to be Alix’s refuge. Today we looked at photographs of books written on papyrus and of The Book of the Dead …

  ‘It sounds interesting,’ said Lady Srinevesan after one of her cross-examinations of Una.

  ‘It is, but …’ and Una was inspired to say, ‘It’s all sugar biscuits and I need bones. Bones!’ said Una desperately.

  ‘Her French isn’t sugar.’

  ‘Damn her French.’ Lady Srinevesan was caught unawares by Una’s passion, but, ‘There is nothing,’ Mrs Carrington could have told her, ‘more likely to be furious than a young thing frustrated.’ ‘If it wasn’t for Alix’s French,’ Una yearned to say, ‘Edward wouldn’t have been taken in’ – or would he?

  We did needlework, wrote faithful Hal. ‘I’m not asking you to make buttonholes or do darning,’ said Alix.

  ‘They would at least be useful,’ muttered Una. Alix had bought embroidery frames and found tapestry designs. ‘The chair seat is for Una to make and Hal, this little stool cover is for you.’ Alix spread out the silks. ‘Well?’

  ‘I like the colours,’ said Una, ‘but …’

  ‘I don’t want any “buts”.’ Alix was crisp. ‘Put the canvas in your frames and start.’ ‘I’m afraid Una objects,’ she told Edward that night.

  ‘Nonsense. Girls ought to learn to sew.’

  ‘It isn’t sewing,’ said Una. ‘Edward, do I have to do it?’

  ‘You will do as Alix tells you.’

  ‘But Dads …’ That private name was only used in moments of real appeal. ‘This is fancy work and there are so many serious subjects I ought to be doing in the time.’

  ‘But are you the best judge?’ He came and sat beside her and gently put back her hair.

  ‘Mrs Carrington said it.’ Una was dogged.

  ‘Mrs Carrington has one person’s point of view. There are others.’ He kept his patience. ‘Una, I do know how hard it is to change methods and schools …’

  ‘You don’t. You didn’t have to. You went straight on. Dads, at Cerne …’ She knew she was estranging him again; he had seen Alix’s gesture of despair when she heard the name Cerne and, ‘At Cerne it seems they have made you into an ambitious little prig,’ he said.

  Tears pricked Una’s eyes but she held them back. ‘If you
can be ambitious, why can’t I?’ but, before she could speak, ‘I am not going to have this, Una. Understand?’ said Edward. ‘Understand?’

  Una was beginning to understand – only too well.

  Today we did Appreciation of Bach – I don’t appreciate him, wrote Hal. Una had dictée. I found the same dictée in an old book of Alix’s labelled Sainte Marie High School for Girls, Pondicherry. She has been using her old books for us.

  Alix had not been pleased. ‘You two ought to have been detectives,’ she said.

  ‘You left them in the table drawer,’ Una pointed out. ‘Besides, they hardly apply to us.’

  ‘Why not?’ Alix’s colour had come up; her voice had risen too.

  Una did not answer.

  ‘Why not? Una, I want to know.’

  ‘They are old-fashioned – and limited, if you want to know.’ Una said it deliberately.

  ‘Limited?’

  ‘Yes. If we had stayed at Cerne,’ Una went on, ‘I should have sat my Additional Mathematics at the end of this year. Here, in two weeks, we haven’t done one hour, not one hour, of maths.’

  ‘Indeed we have,’ said Alix. ‘Haven’t we been revising your arithmetic …?’

  ‘Decimals, fractions, percentages. I did those when I was nine. I need mathematics, Alix, pure and applied.’

  ‘Pure and applied …’ Alix’s voice rose higher and, below the verandah, a dark head with a red cloth tied round it looked up from the flowerbed.

  ‘Pure and applied mathematics and Latin as well as your French. There are examinations, Alix.’

  ‘Examinations are not the be-all and end of everything.’

  ‘No, but they may be the beginning. I want to go to university …’

  ‘Want, always want,’ said Alix. ‘What you want, Una, regardless of anyone else. Couldn’t you think of Edward? Of Hal? Of me?’

  ‘Don’t you want things – all of you? Of course you do.’ Una still spoke quietly, but her eyes were dangerously green. ‘Anything else is cant.’

  ‘Una, you had better stop. Stop now,’ Hal whispered urgently.

  ‘I can’t stop,’ but Una found that, oddly, she was out of breath.

  Ravi waited with interest. There was something in the way this foreign little creature stood up to the Mem that found a fellowship in him – he had not forgotten Alix’s ferocity with the durzi and, ‘That girl is brave,’ he told Hem afterwards.

  Then Alix spoke, not with the force she had used on the durzi, but as if Una were an animal that might bite. ‘Una, I – I sympathize … and I will see what I can do, if you will settle for a little interlude of … less ambition.’

  ‘Una, please,’ begged Hal.

  Una did not know where she found the necessary hardness but, ‘I haven’t time for interludes,’ she said. ‘Mrs Carrington would tell you …’

  Then Alix lost her temper. ‘Mrs Carrington! Mrs Carrington! My God, your Mrs Carrington! It was she who taught you to behave in this arrogant way. May I remind you that Mrs Carrington isn’t here and I am,’ and recklessness possessed Alix. ‘You want to do mathematics. Very well. You shall do them and do them and do them. Give me the books you were using at Cerne.’

  ‘I was using this Elementary Mechanics.’

  ‘What,’ Alix’s look seemed to say, ‘can mechanics have to do with mathematics?’

  ‘We had reached this page,’ Una showed her.

  Alix turned the pages, trying to control her fingers. ‘Take this down.’

  ‘That’s too far on.’

  ‘Take it down.’

  ‘May I take it from the book?’

  ‘No. I shall dictate it,’ and Alix began: ‘An inclined plane is such that the line of greatest slope makes an angle of 30° with the horizontal. Given that the acceleration due to gravity is 10 m/s vertically downwards …’

  Ravi’s head was up from the border. ‘That girl does quite senior mathematics,’ he told Hem. He was caught unawares with surprise and this time Una saw him. He can’t understand English, of course, but he knows there is trouble, thought Una.

  ‘A ball is thrown …’went on Alix with more directions and finished, ‘Find the time when the ball meets the plane again and the range of the ball up the plane.’ She shut the book and said, ‘You can work through that on your own.’

  ‘On my own?’ Now the dismay was on Una’s side. ‘I haven’t done inclined planes before. I need to be taught.’

  ‘Take it out to the pavilion and try.’ It was obvious Alix wanted Una out of her sight. ‘Try. Then, if you can’t …’

  ‘If I can’t, you can’t show me, can you? Can you?’ Una demanded. Alix did not answer, her fingers were openly trembling as she pretended to arrange her pencils. ‘Teach!’ said Una scornfully and threw the book over the verandah rails. ‘You couldn’t teach a junior. I don’t believe you have ever taught. You have never studied projectiles or even calculus, have you?’

  ‘N-no,’ said Alix.

  ‘You may have been at the conservatoire,’ said Una, ‘but I don’t believe you ever set foot in the Sorbonne. This is a … governess sham!’ She did not know where she found that word, but Alix paled – from fear? or fresh anger?

  ‘Go to your room.’

  ‘I should prefer it.’

  ‘You will stay there until I tell you to come out.’

  To be treated like a child suited Una. The more Alix did that, the more she played into Una’s hands – but presently Hal came tiptoeing in.

  ‘Una – Alix cried.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘She has tried so hard,’ pleaded Hal. ‘Una, she is nice.’

  ‘Is she?’

  ‘Everything is so happy and easy.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes. Why can’t you be? Why do you always have to be so prickly and difficult? Why?’

  ‘Because I am honest, that’s why. I wish I were not, but I am.’

  ‘Is that why you called it a sham?’

  Una nodded with her back to Hal. Her throat felt too choked to speak.

  Hal was perplexed. ‘Edward and Alix are lovers, but that’s not really our concern.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Una, do stop answering questions with questions.’

  ‘But isn’t it? Don’t you see,’ Una choked. ‘She said I wanted things. Edward wanted Alix living here with him, but he couldn’t have her, not while he is God Almighty, Goddamn-blasted Director of United Nations Environmental Research for Asia.’ Una mocked the titles that had filled her, as much as Great-Aunt Freddie, with pride, ‘and Secretary of the Conference and Sir Edward Gwithiam, KCB …’

  ‘Why couldn’t he?’

  ‘Because of Lady Srinevesan and Mrs Porter and Bulbul and – yes, the Paralampurs; because of Delhi, because of the world. There was only one way to make it respectable,’ Una almost spat out the word, ‘and that was to bring us out from Cerne and say Alix is our governess. He is so in love he couldn’t wait. He didn’t think of us.’

  ‘Sushila says he’ll get tired of her,’ Hal offered. Hal, of course, had told Sushila at once. ‘She says they always do.’

  ‘I don’t think Edward will,’ said Una hopelessly.

  ‘He got tired of Louise,’ said Hal.

  ‘No, she got tired of him. Edward is … faithful.’ Una said it even more hopelessly.

  ‘Will he marry her?’ Sushila had asked.

  That had startled Una. ‘Would Vikram?’

  ‘Vik!’ It had been Sushila’s turn to be startled. ‘Of course not. Besides, Vik will soon be betrothed. Papa is arranging it. Our family is traditional but English people are so different.’

  ‘I thought Edward was.’ Una had said it in a whisper, and now, ‘He wrote that he was lonely.’ Her voice was so thick with tears that the words came unsteadily. ‘He said he needed me to talk to – needed us. Now I think he would like us to go to bed at eight so he could be alone with her. He said he and I would play chess.’ She looked down at the chess set she had loved so m
uch standing untouched on its board: the kings in their howdahs on the elephants; the palanquinned queens holding their bunches of roses; the bishops on camels; the knights’ horses; the bowmen. ‘I suppose it was meant as a consolation prize. Booby prize!’ said Una. ‘He hasn’t played chess with me once!’ and she swept the pieces on to the floor.

  ‘Wake up. Please, wake up.’

  Una was heavily asleep after the dragging miserable day. Hal had brought lunch to her on a tray, taken it untouched away. At four o’clock Alix had come in. ‘You are playing tennis at the club with Bulbul Misra. Get dressed; and Una, this afternoon Edward makes his long speech to the ministers; there will have been a great deal of argument and he will be tired and strained. He is not to be worried. Do you hear?’

  Una had said, ‘I hear,’ but that evening, when she had changed for dinner, Ram Chand’s ‘May I in-coming?’ sounded at the door of her room. ‘Tsst!’ He had found the chess set on the floor and was picking up the pieces; those that were unbroken he put back on the squares, the ones that were shattered or splintered he wrapped in his soft duster. ‘I take and get mended.’

  ‘Throw them away,’ said Una. ‘I don’t want them.’

  ‘No, Missy, no,’ and the old bearer had said, ‘Our hearts much sorry for you, Miss-baba,’ and Una had seen why Alix had not let the servants come near her. It seemed there was a rising tide amongst them against Alix. Why did they dislike her? And why should they like me, wondered Una? She could have understood it if it had been Hal. Already Hal knew of all their families, their home villages; she was knitting a jersey for the sweeper’s, Mitchu’s, little boy, and had bestowed her new pink cardigan on Ram Chand’s granddaughter who was getting married; English woollens were prized, but Ram had made Hal get Edward’s permission before he would accept it. Una had done nothing, said almost nothing. Like her? Why did they not dislike her too? Yet Monbad had followed Ram bearing something on a silver salver; the salver was a sign of honour – Monbad, nearer their age and less punctilious than Ram, usually handed things to the girls. ‘The mali found this in the garden. It is Miss-baba’s book.’

  Una nearly said of it too, ‘Throw it away. I can’t use it,’ but their sympathy, chiefly unspoken, made her feel less forlorn and she had taken the book and had not, as she had meant to do when she reached the privacy of bed, cried; instead, almost too tired to care, she went straight to sleep. Now someone was shaking her, speaking through the clouds of sleep. ‘Una, wake up. Una. Una.’ Struggling with sleep Una opened her eyes; kneeling by her bed was Alix, Alix in a kimono, the famous hair down and streaming over it. Una could catch the fragrance of her skin, see her white face. ‘Is anything … the matter?’ Una asked stupidly.