Ellis Peters - George Felse 11 - Death To The Landlords (3 page)

Lakshman gazed back at him serenely and amiably, but did not return his smile. Indian people, except those of the hills, do not find it necessary to smile whenever they catch your eye, but will gaze back at you directly with faces unyieldingly grave and thoughtful. In the hills they smile because they obviously enjoy smiling. And Indian people, Dominic thought critically, studying the two golden amber faces beside him, who can be the noisiest people on earth, also know how to be securely silent and to withhold even an eloquent gesture. Priya’s delicate face, silken-skinned and serene, betrayed nothing at all beyond a general, detached benevolence. Suddenly he felt more curiosity about her than about her companion.

‘Now we’ve all declared ourselves, except you, Miss Madhavan.’

‘I am not at all novel or interesting,’ she said in her quiet, lilting voice; and now she did smile, her chiselled lips curving and unfolding as smoothly as rose-petals. ‘I am a nurse at the General Hospital in Madras. I have a large family of brothers and sisters, and my eldest sister happens to be a teacher in Bengal, and a colleague of Patti’s. So now that I have my long leave, and Patti is free to visit the south, I invited her to meet me in Madras and come home with me for a visit. That is all about me.’

It was very far from all about her; there were reserves behind that demure face and those cool, thoughtful, purple-black eyes that would take half a lifetime to explore.

‘So you’ve actually known each other, apart from letters, only a matter of days? We’re all starting more or less equal,’ said Larry. ‘I picked up Dominic in Madras only five days back. We’d corresponded, just fixing things up for the trip, but we’d never seen each other until then.’ He took a banana from Patti’s hospitably offered bowl, a bulbous bow in an incredible colour between peach and orange and old rose. ‘This at least I’ll never forget about India, the fruit. Did you ever see such a shade as that in a banana before?’

‘Never!’ she agreed vehemently. ‘And I’ve seen them all kinds and sizes, from the three-inch curvy ones like a baby’s fingers, to hedge-stakes a foot long and pale, greenish lemon. I saw these when we passed the stall in the bus, and we simply had to walk back and get some.’

‘Where was that?’ Larry asked. ‘I never noticed any stall as we drove up.’

‘It was getting dusk then, and he hadn’t lighted his little lamp, you wouldn’t notice us. But we saw you go by. Two turns down the road – I expect he’s packed up long ago, probably just after we were there, there wouldn’t be much traffic up here after dark. One turn down the road there’s what’s left of a shrine of Siva. It looks pretty old, too, the carving’s nearly worn away, but they still bring oil and marigolds.’

‘No, really? As close as that? I might take a flashlight down and have a look at that presently.’

‘Wouldn’t tomorrow morning do?’

‘Not a hope! We’ve got to be afloat before six, or we shall miss the best of the show. They might not hold the boat for us, either – don’t forget it’s Sunday. The best times, the two periods in the day when the animals come down to water, are from six on in the morning, and about half past three in the afternoon until dusk. And it takes a little while to get out to the best vantage-points – there’s a whole lot of lake up there.’

The Bessancourts were withdrawing, with polite good nights to the Manis. They passed by Larry’s table on their way to the door, and bowed comprehensively to the company, uttering in assured, incongruous duet: ‘
Au ’voir, m’sieurs, m’dames
!’ Everyone turned to smile startled acknowledgement, for once united: ‘Good night,
m’sieur
,
madame
!’

‘The French,’ said Patti with conviction, as soon as they were out of the room, ‘are
formidable
!’ It was a good word for the Bessancourts. ‘What can they want here?’ she demanded in a feverish whisper. ‘What brought them here? I don’t understand!’

Dominic, still charmed and touched by that courteous departure, so reminiscent of a respectable couple quitting a small restaurant in St Dié or Chaumont, wondered if it was so vital to understand. Wasn’t it their business? Why not just be glad about that impressive, three-dimensional reality of theirs? But Patti wanted to recognise, to docket, to know all her landmarks.

‘Where did you first see them?’

‘At Mahabalipuram, among all that fabulous free sculpture. In the Mahishasura-Mardini cave, actually, standing like another rock, staring at the sleeping Vishnu. She looked exactly as if she was studying the joints in a butcher’s window before buying, but I’ll swear for ten minutes and more she never moved. Her old man stands just as still and gazes just as attentively, but in a different way. As though he were standing respectfully but impregnably in a church that wasn’t his own, but still he saw the point for those who belonged there.’

‘You like them,’ said Priya suddenly, in her soft, detached voice, and smiled at him with her eyes as well as her lips.

‘Yes, I like them.’ Heaven knew he wouldn’t have the art ever in this world to achieve communication with them, short of a miracle, but he believed confidently there was everything there to like.

The Manis were leaving, too, in a series of short, abortive starts and stops. ‘Sushil Dastur, my bag – you have left it behind!’

‘Sushil Dastur, please arrange about the breakfast and early tea…’

‘Sushil Dastur, don’t forget you must see to that letter, there will be a post from the hotel… And the alarm at five, remember!’

(‘That goes for us, too, don’t forget! ’ Larry warned in an undertone. )

They passed in procession, pausing momentarily to exchange valedictory compliments.

‘You’ll be making the morning run?’ asked Larry politely.

‘Ah, but not with the public launch! ’ Mr Mani wagged a triumphant finger and beamed his superiority. ‘We have an introduction to an influential resident here. He has a villa on the lake, and the hotel places a boat at his disposal. He has invited us to be his guests tomorrow. It is a great honour.’

‘A privilege!’ sighed Mrs Mani, adjusting her green and silver sari over her plump and tightly-bloused shoulder. ‘He is a most distinguished man – and wealthy!’

‘A business associate of Ganesh, our son-in-law. Ganesh has very important connections…’

They departed in a cloud of self-congratulation, and Sushil Dastur, trotting behind, turned his lustrous eyes in a timid smile and said: ‘Good night, ladies – gentlemen!’ with almost furtive goodwill, as if he feared he might be doing the wrong thing.

And with that the evening ended, since the next day was to begin at five. Except that Larry had sufficient energy left to light himself down the two coils of road between the black, perfumed walls of the forest, to examine the Siva stele. Lakshman felt it to be his duty to go with him, and even to repeat, very seriously, his warnings about never going out in the dark in open country without a strong torch, for fear of snakes.

When they came back, Dominic and the girls were still standing beside the Land-Rover, looking up at the immensely lofty black velvet sky coruscating with stars, and festooned here and there, as in India only the hill-skies and the shore-skies normally are, with coiling plumes of cloud.

‘That’s a find you made down there, Patti,’ Larry said approvingly. ‘I want to stop off before we go down again to Madurai, and get some slides. I’d need to consult somebody who knows more about style than I do, but my guess is that figure wasn’t carved any later than about the seventh century. It could even link up with some of the stuff at Mahabalipuram, to my mind, only it’s had a rougher passage.’

‘I suppose the sadhu isn’t still sitting there?’ said Patti idly, withdrawing her zircon-blue eyes from the heavens.

‘Sadhu?’ said Larry in vague surprise, dropping his torch into the front seat of the Land-Rover. ‘What sadhu?’

The hotel stood on slightly rising ground, the length of a dark, moist drive from the road, and resembled nothing so much as an over-sized and under-maintained mid-Victorian rectory, complete with untrimmed shrubberies and too tall trees growing too close to the windows. Even the hard earth drive and the few slightly ragged flower-beds fitted into the image. And though they had climbed over the crest of the ridge and begun to descend again, there was still no sign of the lake; nothing but forest, sometimes thick as a creeper-draped stone wall on either side of the road, sometimes opening into what was almost park-land, with lush turf in which the trees stood gracefully spaced, waist-deep in grass.

Larry was a fanatical time-keeper, having learned the necessity the hard way. They had been the first party away from the bungalow and would probably be the earliest afloat here. The few people moving around at parked cars in the hotel grounds, or in and out of the open door, were almost all staff.

‘If you will wait five minutes for me,’ Lakshman said, scrambling out from among the gear stowed in the back of the Land-Rover, ‘I must check in with the hotel desk, and find our boatman.’

By the time he emerged again they had secured the Land-Rover’s steering with an ingenious padlocking device of Larry’s own invention, briefly examined the palm-decked amenities within the hotel, still dim and almost unpeopled in the dawn, and moved round to the small terrace at the rear of the building.

And there at last was the Periyar Lake, or at least the first glistening reach of it, curving in to lip the soft green swell of turf some forty feet or so below the level of the terrace, and winding away in the distance to lose itself among folded green slopes of grass and trees. The far-off ranges modulated from green to blue, to smoke-grey, and dissolved into the pearly light of a morning as yet sunless. A flight of steps led down from the terrace to the grass, and thence a long, curving causeway swept away righthanded into the water, like a Devonshire hard, its coral-coloured surface breaking gradually through the green of the grass only to lose itself again beneath the quivering dove-grey of the shallow water. On the right flank of the hard, within its protecting curve, three or four white launches were moored; and from there a belt of stiller water, broad and pewter-grey, launched itself out across the lake-surface. To the left, where the bay rounded in a sickle of shore and curved away again, they saw the first ghostly gathering of dead trees, skeletons standing six feet or more out of the water, quite black, all their lesser branches long since rotted away. From the water’s edge rose a band of about a hundred yards or more where the grass was pale, thin and low; then at high-water-mark the lush, man-high growth began, and the living trees, not jungle here, but fairly open woodland, through which the first rays of the sun filtered and found the mirror-surface, to splinter in slivers of blinding light when the fitful dawn-wind troubled the lake. There were clouds, soft, light and lofty, above the receding folds of the forest.

‘No wonder the English felt more at home in the hills,’ Dominic said, as they stood gazing in sharp, nostalgic pleasure. ‘It wasn’t only the temperature, it was the whole look of the place. You’ve only got to get high enough, and you’ve got English trees, English gorse and heather, even an English sky. You never realise how you’ve missed the variety of cloud until you see it again after months of staring at absolutely naked blueness.’

‘Then perhaps they felt really at home,’ murmured Priya, with the first spark of mischief he had observed in her, ‘when the monsoon rains began.’

‘Personally,’ Patti said sceptically, ‘I can do with quite a lot of naked blueness before I start complaining. That’s one of the things I
do
like about India, and one of the things I’m going to miss if I do go home.’

‘You haven’t made up your mind, then?’ Larry turned to look at her with more interest than he had yet shown. She was duplicating, Dominic thought, a dilemma of Larry’s own. Both of them were drawn, and both of them repelled; and both of them, each in a different fashion, held it against India that they did not know what to do.

‘Oh, I don’t know! – It’s the parents, you know – I’m the only one, and they gave me the works, private schools, music lessons, riding lessons, the lot! I keep feeling I’ve got to give them some sort of return for their money. But then, even if I do go back and work at it, I sure as hell know the end product isn’t going to be what they were bidding for. Maybe they’d be safer if I stayed here – I mean, you can do quite a bit of romancing about a daughter several thousand miles away, but it’s no good if she keeps blowing in and smashing the image. And I do love this country – hate it, too!’ she added honestly. ‘Some of the components are marvellous, if only you could break the whole lot apart, and put them together again in some form that would actually
work.
’

‘And couldn’t you say that just as accurately about any country under the sun?’

‘I suppose you could. I
know
you could. So why go home? Why go anywhere? Start from where you are.’

‘I did,’ he said grimly, focusing his Werra on the dead trees that spread their arms rigidly now over quivering silver water. ‘I started practising shattering it to bits and rebuilding it nearer to the heart’s desire right where I was, on a New England campus. I’ve had the New Left and the activitists – from mid- to extreme- to off-the-map and up-

the wall. They never chanced a thing except themselves, and so far as I could see, that was no change for the better. And all they shattered were people – usually innocent people – as even policemen can be,’ he added sourly, and turned his back on her abruptly, and the shutter clicked.

‘Then where
do
you go after that?’ she said, and she had been so startled by this burst of confidence from him that it was almost a cry of appeal.

‘If I knew that, I should be on my way.’ That was the most Dominic had ever yet heard from him about his own intolerable situation, and perhaps the most anyone was going to hear until he resolved it one way or another. ‘Good, here’s Lakshman, we can get off now.’

Lakshman came round the corner of the hotel in conversation with a young fellow of his own slender build, but taller and more muscular. He was dark-skinned and clean shaven, with a prominent nose and strong brows, above narrowed dark eyes that had the seaman’s look of focusing upon distance. He salaamed briefly and cheerfully, and favoured them all with a broad and gleaming smile.

‘Sir, I am Romesh, your boat-boy. Ladies, you please come this way.’

He pattered before them down the steps in his worn leather sandals, and led them down the tongue of grass and the curving causeway to the boats. His working wear consisted of khaki shorts and a tunic of white cotton, with a red sash round his waist, and a loose white cotton turban, with a short cockade of pleats over his forehead and a balancing fan of pleated folds on his neck.

Patti danced down the steps after him, Priya following more sedately. ‘Romesh, you speak good English. That’s lucky!’

‘I speak a little, memsahib. Not good!’ He turned upon her a flashing smile, half-bold and half-shy; she saw that he was quite young, probably only a few years older than herself. ‘But I try to show you all game, very good. It will be fine morning, many elephants come.’

He loosed the rope that moored the smallest of the white boats; the canvas canopy slapped gently in the breeze, and then was still. The vast, bright body of the sun glowed through the trees, and the clouds, unbelievably high in a pale sky, began to sail slowly like boats on a reflected lake. Romesh drew in the line and steadied the boat, holding out a hand to help the girls aboard. There was comfortable room for them all, and seats to spare. The largest boat, rocking languidly to the motion they created, must hold as many as fifteen passengers without crowding.

Romesh kicked off his sandals and sat down to the motor, and in a moment teased it into life. They slid out into the deep channel, clear of the skeleton trees, and headed across the first bight of the lake. On either shore the bare, peeled area of grass rose, steeply or gradually, to the contour of the high-water-mark, and there the grass and bushes soared to a man’s height, and the trees crowded close.

‘The water is rather low,’ said Lakshman, ‘but that is good, because then the animals must come well clear of cover to reach the water, and we shall have a good view. Sometimes it is much lower even than this, and then it is more difficult for the boats, because there is so much dead forest.’

Close to the shore, wherever they turned, there was always at least one spectral tree to be seen. In the deeper passages whatever remained of the drowned giants – if anything remained – was far below the draught of motor launches. They looked back, and the hotel and the landing-stage were already out of sight. The note of the boat’s engine was low, leisurely and quiet. Romesh scanned the shores as they moved, watching for anything living that might emerge from the rim of the trees.

‘He is trained to catch any movement. If he sees something he will not make any sound, but point. Then he’ll try to bring the boat in more closely and switch off the engine, so that we can watch without disturbing them.’

They had, as it seemed, an immense world to themselves. It was difficult to grasp the scale of these hills and these remarkably English-looking trees, until Romesh stiffened and pointed, and found them their first elephants. In a sheltered bay on their left hand, a whole ponderous herd winding its way down through the trees, across the open belt of spongy grass, and into the silvery shallows. Beside the boles of those trees the two big tuskers shrank to the dimensions of toy animals. There were seven or eight cows, and four calves, varying from a half-grown youngster to a small, skittish baby. They played and splashed and squealed like puppies in the shallows, sending up fountains of spray, while the elders wallowed blissfully, and heaved themselves ashore to graze afterwards streaming water like granite cliffs deluged by a flowing tide. Romesh, flashing white teeth in a delighted, proprietorial grin, shut off the engine and let the boat slide slowly inshore between the drowned trees, and they watched for a long time, until the herd moved off at leisure into the forest.

After that it was elephants all the way; they saw them pacing in line, far up on a half-cleared hillside, moving methodically down towards the lake. They saw them bathing in half a dozen sheltered coves, and paused each time to draw inshore and take pictures. Several times they saw deer, and once, where the shores opened out in grassland and they emerged into the widest part of the lake, a large sambur grazing, bulky as a bison. The sun rose higher, and the clear heat of the day came on, but the fresh currents of air across the water were cool and fragrant. Silver-blue before them, under a deepening blue sky only delicately dusted with cloud, the lake expanded broad and calm, and here the light was dazzling. They could see the long barrage of the Periyar dam far in the distance. After the enclosed, steep-shored bays the elephants preferred, this was a minor sea.

‘It’s time to turn back,’ Lakshman said reluctantly, ‘If we are to get the boat back on time.’

‘What a pity! ’ Patti sighed. ‘This is glorious. How long ago was the dam built, Lakshman?’

‘Last century, it’s an old one. I think about 1890. It turns the Periyar river through a long tunnel, and makes it flow east down into the Madurai plains. It used to go west to the Malabar coast.’

‘And the wild life sanctuary, is that old, too?’

‘Quite old, it was made while this was still Travancore State territory. It’s been established so long that it has many, many herds of elephants.’

‘You like to keep boat?’ Romesh suggested hopefully. ‘Come again in afternoon? Sometimes is better in afternoon. Maybe even see tiger.’ He had brought the boat about, and they were heading gently back for the narrows.

‘Oh, could we?’ She looked hopefully at Larry. ‘Is it very expensive? Couldn’t you be our guests this time? If you don’t have to rush away?’

They looked at one another, and apart from the question of who paid, which could be left in abeyance for the time being, there was no need for much persuasion. The beauty of the place and the fascination of the animals made departure seem a deprivation; at least they could have one more trip, for the late afternoon watering.

‘All right, why not? If the boat isn’t already booked for the rest of the day? After all, it is Sunday, there are sure to be a few trippers.’

‘I take you,’ promised Romesh heartily. ‘I fix it for boat.’

‘Good for you!’ Patti was delighted. ‘Romesh, you’re a treasure. What’s the rest of your name, may we know?’

He flashed his magnificent teeth at her in a pleased grin. ‘It is Romesh Iyar, memsahib.’

‘A good Keralese name.’

‘Yes, memsahib, from Quilon.’

They were between the steep banks again now. Once or twice they caught sight of buildings close to the water, one, as Romesh told them, formerly a palace. They were encountering, too, the boats which had set off later than theirs, and had just reached this stage in the pilgrimage. The big launch, packed with the Sunday whites of husbands and the fluttering saris of wives and flower-tinted dresses of children, ploughed steadily ahead into open water, passing them closely.

‘I see the Bessancourts made it,’ Larry said.

There they sat among the butterfly passengers, he in his sober grey suit and Panama hat, she in her black
shalwar
and grey and white
kameez
, with a white muslin scarf over her pile of black hair. They looked about them at the strange and beautiful world of the Periyar Lake with wide, attentive, appraising eyes; and when they saw their young acquaintances in the small launch they did not wave, but inclined their heads with the tightest of French smiles, as on an after-church promenade in Combeaufontaine or Oulchy-le-Chateau.

They were drawing near to the final inlet that would bring them back within sight of the hotel, when they met the smart white launch, as small as their own, but newer. Mr and Mrs Mani sat installed among its cushions in jubilant state, beaming like gratified children; and Mrs Mani, though somewhat taken aback at recognising her acquaintances in a private boat when she had certainly taken it for granted they were passengers among the rest in the communal launch, nevertheless fluttered a silk handkerchief at them graciously, and achieved a very accomplished smile for their benefit. Sushil Dastur sat in the stern of the boat, very neatly and nervously, his knees drawn up, hugging the inevitable briefcase that went with him everywhere. And opposite the Manis, lounging along the whole of one seat with a cushion at his back, sat a tall, bulky man in a tussore suit and a snow-white shirt, grey hair curled in tufts over his ears, and the sunlight glinting blindly from the lenses of his gold-rimmed glasses. They saw him briefly in passing as a sculptured mask in bronze, without eyes, with a heavy mouth and jaw and a thick, pale throat.