The Peacock Spring (3 page)

Edward had read it aloud to Miss Lamont; those underlinings, question and exclamation marks seemed to call for reading aloud, but he had also read out some of Mrs Carrington’s. ‘They
seem to think it serious for Una. Do you?’

‘I begin to feel sorry for Hal,’ said Miss Lamont.

‘You needn’t be. It is usually Hal who takes the limelight. Una somehow gets left out – except by me, of course – but now all of them at home seem united.’ He was
not to know how that casual but certain ‘at home’ made Alix Lamont feel shut out, a hybrid outsider, and ‘Your Aunt Frederica is hardly polite about me, is she?’ Miss Lamont
could not help saying.

‘She doesn’t know you,’ but Edward said it absently. ‘Could this really spoil Una’s chances?’ he asked.

‘That’s for you to decide,’ and Miss Lamont bowed her head. Her fingers pleated the folds of her dress as she sat still and silent; Alix Lamont knew well how potent that
stillness and submission could be and, sure enough, ‘What they forget,’ said Edward, ‘is that I am a man, not a machine.’

‘Hallo!’ said Edward a few minutes later. ‘Here’s another letter – from Una herself.’ He turned the envelope over and saw the postmark.
‘It’s at least a fortnight old.’

‘Indian posts!’ exclaimed Alix.

‘It was written before Una knew,’ he said, then chuckled as he read it out:

Care Pater,

Supplex tibi scribo impensa vivendi crescet; pecunia ergo, quam mihi liberaliter das, mihi non satis est. Alterum tantum peto, sine quo pauper ero.

Audi, Pater, et inclina aurem tuam.

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to translate for me,’ said Alix.

Edward thought for a minute, then, ‘It’s schoolgirl Latin, of course – Well, Una hadn’t learnt any Latin until she went to Cerne. “Dear Father, I write to you as a
suppliant. The cost of living rises, therefore the money you generously give me is not enough. I ask for twice as much, without which I shall be a pauper. Listen, Father, and consider.” In
other words,’ said Edward, ‘give me more pocket money.’ He laughed again. ‘It’s just a joke. I wrote to her in German; she knows I know she doesn’t like German
and is bad at it.’

‘Bad! Good enough to read a letter.’

‘She has retaliated, that’s all,’ and, ‘Little monkey!’ said Edward and chuckled again.

‘Mumma. I’m frightened.’

‘Frightened?
You?
’ The bulk of Miss Lamont’s mother looked up from the long cane chair where she was lying; her eyes, completely trustful, and all that was left of the
daughter’s beauty in the ruins of her face, grew wide. ‘But Ally, you are never afraid.’

‘Mumma, he writes to her in German, she answers him in Latin.’

‘My God!’ said Mrs Lamont.

Seldom these days did her poised elegant daughter come to see her so late in the evening, but as soon as Edward had left to go to his dinner Alix had taken out his smaller car.

It was a Diplomat, the government-approved Indian-made car and the despair of Chinaberry, as the United Nations Tamil chauffeur was nicknamed because of his almost blue-black skin. ‘No
good. Often going wrong. Six weeks for repair and spare parts,’ Chinaberry had told Edward in disgust. He had tended the UN’s Cadillac for six years now with love and it was
discrediting, to Chinaberry, that a cheap Indian car – ‘Not cheap, abominably expensive,’ said Edward – should be seen in his, Chinaberry’s, garage. ‘This is
United Nations Number One house,’ he would have said, ‘and my new Sahib is Director of United Nations Environment and Research for Asia, the whole of Asia,’ he boasted,
‘Secretary for the Conference as well,’ but, ‘The Government discourages imported cars,’ Edward told Chinaberry.

‘Cadillac was imported.’

‘Long, long ago,’ and with the courtesy Edward always used, ‘even towards servants,’ said Alix – ‘Particularly towards servants,’ Edward would have
corrected her – he explained to Chinaberry: ‘As a foreigner and a newcomer I must be careful to fall in with your Government’s wishes.’ Chinaberry thought nothing of his
Government’s wishes and was certain Edward could have bought another Cadillac, ‘or at least a Buick.’

‘If I were an Indian I should have to pay over a hundred-percent tax,’ Edward explained.

‘But you are not an Indian.’ Chinaberry could not fathom Edward’s wish to share.

‘I can drive the Diplomat if Chinaberry won’t,’ Alix had said.

‘Not in Delhi. With all these bicycles and scooter taxis in such teeming streets, it’s so easy to have an accident. You might find yourself in a riot if you touched a child or,
worse, a cow. Unfortunately, a cow is holy,’ said Edward, ‘and there are too many children.’

She looked at him uncertainly; she still did not know quite how to take him. Then, ‘Too many children,’ he added and sighed. ‘No,’ he went on, ‘this is a city where
a woman ought not to drive.’

‘Hundreds do – because they have to,’ Alix could have added; instead she coaxed: ‘It will only be in New Delhi, to the parade ground or the Gymkhana Club. The girls will
want to get about and I shall take great care.’ But now she drove into the Old City, through the Lahore Gate, threading the narrow labyrinth of streets behind the Chandni Chowk, Old
Delhi’s ‘moonlight square’ and biggest commercial street. One of Ganesh’s Memsahibs would have driven more courteously but Alix dodged bullock carts and tongas, using the
strident hooter, brushed too closely by three-wheeled scooter taxis, bicycle rickshaws, dazed cows, coolies with loads or barrows, pedlars, pai-dogs; she shouted at children, made white-dressed
Indian gentlemen leap for the gutters and, putting her bright head out of the window, exchanged invective with Sikh taxi drivers – only Alix’s stream of words was faster. ‘Child
of a swine!’ shouted Alix, ‘Ullu-ka-pattha – son of an owl.’ ‘Have you slept with your mother?’ she demanded. Edward would have been astonished.

She had stopped the car in a space where bullocks and ponies were tethered round a post among cohorts of bicycles and scooter taxis – Alix called them ‘phut-phuts’; some
‘first class’, grander than others, more roomy, were painted scarlet and hung with tassels like a children’s toy. Alix had locked the car and chosen an older urchin among twenty
jostling smaller ones to guard it, then picked her way down an unlovely gulley where old car parts were sold. ‘They will take the hubcaps off your car and sell them to you again while you are
bargaining,’ she could have told Edward. The line of booths was hung with rusty bicycle chains, spanners, old headlamps and heaped with battered car seats, trays of springs, nuts, bolts; worn
tyres were piled in the road and the air was filled with the stench of hot oil, burning rubber and the clang of iron being beaten out.

Above the lane and overhanging it were houses. Edward, once exploring the Old City, had wondered who had built them, at the turn of the century perhaps, tall, gracious, with scrolled-iron
balconies. Some of the balconies were covered in with fine grilles to screen the women; the pediments were carved or ornamented in plaster, but now the house fronts were hung with boards:
‘Malik Amrit Lal Patney, advocate’, ‘Goodwill Electric Company’, ‘Perfume, Incense, Chewing Tobacco’, ‘Happiness Coffee and Tea House’, but most of
the houses were hotels with ambitious names: The Regal Hotel, The Savoy, Metropole, Grand-Mahal and, squeezed between two larger ones, its board hung even more crooked, The Paradise Hotel.

In the welter of cookshops, stalls, vegetable sellers’ baskets, tea barrows, barrows for sherbet, and sugar cane, for ices – ‘Mango Duet’, ‘Strawberry
Delight’ – and a dozen goats with their kids lying contentedly in the dust, it was difficult to find the entrance to any hotel, but Alix was accustomed and quickly threaded her way to
the Paradise, stepped over the open drain than ran below the shops, tightening her telltale nostrils as she smelled the gutter cess, and went up the steepest and narrowest flight of the whole of
the block.

‘Mumma, you will never get up or down those stairs,’ she had said when Mrs Lamont first chose it.

‘Why should I want to, m’n?’ said Mrs Lamont. ‘My God, when do I go out?’ Careful not to let the walls touch her dress or her white bag, Alix, this evening, had
gone swiftly up the first flight and come out on the landing that was the centre of the Paradise Hotel. Here was the rickety office, much like a ticket office in a station with a communal water
filter and refrigerator, while a few old steamer chairs, their cane blackened by twenty years or more of use, stood against the walls. In one a fat man lay asleep, his trousers unbuttoned over his
pale stomach, his bare feet up on the boards of the chair, nutshells and betel stains on the floor around it.

In the peculiar sleaziness of a third-class Indian hotel, rooms led off the landing and their tattered green door curtains showed glimpses of, in one, a dormitory where bunks were let by the
night; behind another was a humbly respectable living room with beds, a line of clothes slung along a rope, a table, a cooking stove. In another, Alix could see young Westerners, European or
American, in gaudy dirty Indian clothes, their feet bare as they sat or lay on the floor; a couple were twined together, one young man was asleep, his fair hair stirred by the breeze from a
creaking electric ceiling fan. There was a sound of women scolding or quarrelling, of children crying; babies crawled in the corridor, children were everywhere while, in one doorway, an old woman,
a grandmother perhaps, her legs and feet swollen with elephantiasis, shrilled and scolded at them. Radios sounded from landings far upstairs, raucously mingling with the street noises from below,
and from the surrounding rooftops came the perpetual sound of crows.

The fat man opened one eye. ‘Going to see Mummy?’ he asked. ‘That’s nice!’ Alix had not answered him, but had swept past disdainfully, and his eyes, wistful and
brown, had followed her as she went along the corridor to a door hung with a curtain that was not stained or torn but new; it led to the hotel’s best room overlooking not the booths of
car-parts gulley, but a fruit market and a lane of shops. Alix lifted the curtain and went through.

‘You!’ It had been a cry of delighted surprise. ‘You! Ally!’

‘Don’t call me Ally.’

A crone of an old woman was crouched at Mrs Lamont’s feet, pressing them with her hands, as her mistress, wearing a bright flowered wrapper, lay in the long chair made soft with cushions.
In Mrs Lamont, Alix’s curves had turned to a mound of soft flesh; she was almost as swollen as the elephantiasis grandmother, but her eyes were as large as Alix’s, the same deep brown
but without their watchful glitter; Mrs Lamont’s eyes, though, saw a long way and for a while she let the only noise in the room be the sound of the palm-leaf fan she was lazily using and the
chink of the old woman’s, Terala’s, bangles that slid up and down on her arms as she worked. Terala’s bangles were twisted wire, two iron studs made her earrings and her white
cotton sari was limp and grey. She herself was thin and light as a withered leaf. She did not dare to look at Alix but, ‘Ally, where are your manners?’ said Mrs Lamont. ‘You
should wish Terala, m’n? and you haven’t wished me.’

‘Mumma, I haven’t time . . .’ But Alix bent and kissed her mother – again the telltale nostrils drew in. Mrs Lamont’s face was powdered thickly as a clown’s
and, ‘Why do you use that filthy powder? Its scent is horrible.’

‘It is called Flowers of Heaven,’ said Mrs Lamont undisturbed. ‘It only costs six paise.’

‘Phaugh!’ But Mrs Lamont liked everything strong and highly coloured, everything that smelled and tasted. Her room was crammed ‘with life’, Alix had to admit. It was a
hotchpotch of good and poor: the rugs might be soiled but they were genuine Agra – Alix could remember them from her childhood homes in Pondicherry and Calcutta. There was sandalwood and
brass; the bed had a red quilt and was heaped with dirty silk cushions like the long chair. There were Kashmir embroideries, Persian copper-fretted lamps, carved tables and brackets; on a shelf was
a statue of the Virgin Mary, carved long ago in Goa, but beside it a bazaar mirror was painted with staring roses. The doors were open to the balcony ‘and all the street noises and
smells!’

In most of these hotels the ground floors were given over to restaurants and cookshops, their smells even more pungent than the lane and pervaded by the smell of frying in mustard oil; there
were lesser smells of curry and spices, decaying vegetables, orange peel, of cess, and every hotel had at its steps that centre of gossip, the paan seller’s stall, his betel leaves spread on
blocks of ice, his pastes in doll-sized brass bowls among cigarettes and newspapers. Terala haunted the paan seller – she would not look at Alix now because she knew her teeth were stained
red with areca nut – and Mrs Lamont was forever sending her to the cookshop to buy samosa, kebab or kulfi, the Indian version of ice cream, to keep ‘just in case’. ‘But you
shouldn’t keep food,’ Alix often expostulated. Now she found that the meat safe on the window sill was clustered black with flies feasting on a cloth Terala had hung there and,
‘Mumma, can’t you tell Terala to wash out that filthy cloth?’ In the Paradise Hotel her ‘filthy’ lapsed into ‘filthee’ and she had almost screamed it. But,
‘What do a few flies matter?’ Mrs Lamont was quite comfortable. ‘Where there is food, there will be flies, and if they kill me, I am old.’ At that moment, a pair of
cockroaches, alarmed by Alix’s violence, scuttered into the bathroom. ‘Ugh!’ Alix shuddered. ‘Where is the phenyl? I brought you a bottle of Jeyes Fluid only last week.
Where
is
it?’ At the shrillness of her voice the palm-leaf fan paused, was still, then, ‘Ally, come here to me,’ said Mrs Lamont and, after a moment, Alix turned, dropped
to the wicker stool beside her mother and buried her head in that capacious lap.

‘She wrote it with a dictionary,’ declared Mrs Lamont.

‘Mumma, she’s at Cerne. That’s a famous school. They
teach
them there. That’s why it’s so expensive.’

‘The more expensive the school, the less they learn. Your father always said it. I’m sure she did it with a dictionary.’

‘Mumma, send Terala outside.’