The Pavilion in the Clouds Read online

  But she knew that this was not true. She did like boys. She did not know why, because they could be a nuisance, and they were often dirty; but she liked them.

  To make up for the lack of human playmates, Bella created personalities for her dolls. The two who were named after the Chinese poets, Li Po and Po Chü-i, were her constant companions, always with her, always watching what she was doing. They were both boys, she decided, and she had cut the long hair with which they had come and exchanged their dresses for masculine clothing. Li Po was the braver of the two and often had to try things before Po Chü-i would join in. Po Chü-i, though, was good at mathematics and drawing and had an invisible dog. They never fought, although Li Po sometimes accused Po Chü-i of being greedy and secretly helping himself to extra slices of cake. Li Po also had a pet whom only the two of them could see: a mongoose called, coincidentally, Rikki Tikki Tavi.

  Virginia asked her whether she was enjoying her lessons with Miss White. “She’s taught you so much,” she said. “Your handwriting is so good now. And you’ve learned all those capital cities.”

  She did not reply, but stared steadfastly at the floor.

  “So tell me, what is the capital city of . . . Now let me see, Canada? Yes, Canada. I’m sure you know that one.”

  “It’s Ottawa.”

  “Of course it is. And what about Chile? That’s a hard one. Could you point out Chile to me on a map?”

  “It’s in South America. Down at the bottom, on the lefthand side. And the capital is Santiago.”

  “My goodness! I’d probably have a bit of difficulty finding Chile myself. Not that I’m planning to go there, but still.”

  And then the question again. “And you like Miss White, don’t you?”

  There was something about the way the question was asked that put her on her guard. Did her mother want her to say that she disliked her? Was she being prompted to that answer? If she said she did not like Miss White, then the governess might hear of it and punish her. That sort of thing happened – she was sure of it. It was safer – far safer – to like everybody.

  “Of course.”

  She noticed her mother’s disappointment. But then, “Well, that’s very good. It’s best to like people who are teaching you things. It makes learning all that much easier.”

  Then her mother said, “Do you think Daddy likes Miss White too?”

  She was not sure about that. Her father had never said anything about Miss White – at least not in her presence. She assumed that all adults liked one another, and she could see no reason why her father would be anything but welldisposed to the governess.

  Virginia was waiting.

  “Yes, I think he likes her.”

  The next question was put very gently. “Why do you think that?”

  She shrugged. “He’s never said that he doesn’t.”

  “No, I don’t suppose he has.”

  The subject was dropped. “Would you like me to read you Hiawatha?”

  She nodded.

  “From the beginning?”

  A further nod.

  She listened to the poem, lulled into a strange, dreamy state by the insistent rhythm of the tetrameter. She closed her eyes and saw the unfamiliar landscape she had seen portrayed in the illustrated edition from which her mother now read: the shores of Gitche Gumee, the shining Big-Sea-Water. But she opened her eyes at the warning and moved closer to her mother: “Oh, beware of Mudjekeewis, Of the West-Wind, Mudjekeewis; Listen not to what he tells you; Lie not down upon the meadow, Stoop not down among the lilies, Lest the West-Wind come and harm you!”

  Why would anybody want to harm anybody else? What could the wind do to you?

  She had had enough. “Now the bit about Minnehaha.”

  “Yes, that’s a lovely part.” A pause. “You’d like to be called Minnehaha, wouldn’t you?”

  “It’s a beautiful name.”

  In Calcutta, Miss White told Virginia, with a certain air of reproach, she had lived with the family. “Of course, it was a very large house – not quite as big as Government House itself, but not far off it. I had a suite of rooms, and a small library of my own. We had meals in a small dining room – the main dining room was used only for special occasions. Of course, Colonel Summers could use Government House for entertaining when the Lieutenant Governor himself was away on leave and he was Acting Governor.” She paused. “That was a busy time for all of us, when that happened. To be Acting Governor of Bengal is no small thing, as you can imagine.”

  Virginia listened, pained at the implicit comparison between the status Miss White had enjoyed in Calcutta and the one that she had here, as a governess on a tea estate, and not even the biggest tea estate in that part of Ceylon.

  “We do our best,” she said. “We make do up here. In my family home in Colombo, things were different. My parents sometimes entertained the entire Chamber of Commerce to dinner. And some government people too. Thirty or forty people.”

  “I’m sure that was very much appreciated,” said Miss White.

  “One cuts one’s cloth as best one can.”

  Miss White looked away. “One cuts one’s coat according to one’s cloth.” It was not clear whether this was a correction or an observation.

  Bella was unaware of these tensions. She was relieved that Miss White was kind to her; she had heard, from Richard’s sister, that at the small school they attended, the Hill School, they were told to stand in a corner if their fingernails were dirty or their exercise books blotted. And once, when one of the boys was heard swearing, one of the teachers had taken him and washed his mouth out with carbolic soap. Miss White only raised her voice occasionally, and then out of frustration rather than in anger.

  The governess lived in her own house some distance from the main bungalow. It was a pretty building, although its veranda was tiny, and none of the rooms were quite large enough for comfort. It was also overshadowed by a stand of tall trees, inhabited by tribes of raiding monkeys. Anything left outside was in danger of being removed by these monkeys and carried up into the branches of the trees. A small boy was employed to keep the monkeys away, by shouting and throwing stones, but when he went off for a meal or was engaged on some other duty, they would take full advantage of the dropping of his guard.

  Bella was not encouraged to disturb Miss White when she was at home in her house.

  “Miss White does not want you hanging around all the time,” explained Virginia. “She has you all the time for your lessons – she needs a bit of peace, as I’m sure you’ll understand.”

  A formal invitation, though, was extended every other Saturday, when Bella would go for tea with Miss White by herself. They would sit in Miss White’s small drawing room and look at the photograph albums that the governess kept in a glass-fronted bookcase. These albums, of which there were fourteen, were mostly filled with pictures Miss White had taken in Calcutta, although one or two earlier ones were of St Andrews. The Calcutta photographs were largely of groups of people sitting in circles on lawns. Each photograph had underneath it a list of names, so that if memory failed, Miss White could look to the list and supply the details.

  One or two faces appeared several times.

  “That man,” said Bella, pointing. “That one with the moustache. He’s in lots of photos. Who was he?”

  “He was in the ICS,” said Miss White. “He was doing very well there. He spoke excellent Bengali, they said, although I never heard him doing so.” She reached out to touch the photograph – briefly, fondly. “He was a very charming man with a wonderful sense of humour. He was always laughing. And he made other people around him laugh too.”

  “Did you like him?”

  Miss White looked at her. “Did I like him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course I did. Everybody did.”

  “What was he called?”

  Miss White hesitated. “He was called Robert. We all knew him as Bobby. That suited him so well.”

  Bella watched her. Go
vernesses did not cry, and yet she thought that Miss White was going to cry. Was she sad because Bobby had died, perhaps?

  “Is he dead now?”

  Miss White shook her head. “Of course not. Bobby’s alive and well.” And then she became business-like and snapped the album shut. “We should go and look at my vegetable garden. I had some of the biggest carrots you’ve ever seen. And there are some gooseberries that I’ve been growing. People said they wouldn’t like it up here in the hills, but I’m proving them wrong.”

  When Virginia travelled down to Colombo, as she did every other month, Miss White had dinner in the main house each night. Bella would already have had her meal by the time the governess came in but was allowed twenty minutes or so with the adults before bedtime. Miss White always seemed to be in a particularly good mood on these occasions, laughing at Henry’s stories and adding some of her own from her Calcutta days. These were peppered with references that Virginia did not understand, and that were usually prefaced with the words You’ll know what I mean, of course.

  In the darkness of her bedroom she could hear the sound of their conversation in the dining room, the low rumble of her father’s voice broken from time to time by a high-pitched peal of laughter from Miss White. She felt angry: it seemed all wrong that her father should be enjoying himself like this when her mother had to go off to Colombo to see people who were no fun at all, as far as she could make out. They talked only about their illnesses and their pills, her mother had told her, and one of them insisted that she read out loud to them until midnight and beyond. They were very difficult.

  One evening when her mother was away she woke up after only a couple of hours of sleep. From within the house there came the sound of conversation, fainter than usual, which suggested that her father and Miss White had moved into the drawing room, which was further away. She sat up and then, on impulse, slipped out of bed altogether, put on her dressing gown and tiptoed into the corridor outside her room.

  She was now able to make out what her father was saying.

  “He never saw her again . . . Not surprising.”

  Now came Miss White’s voice. “You wouldn’t have thought it, would you?”

  “Hope springs eternal . . . as they say.”

  “He wouldn’t do that again in a hurry.”

  Then there was silence, followed by a cough and the sound of a chair being pushed back along the uneven timbers of the floor. Something was said that Bella did not catch, and then her father’s voice again, “I’ll walk you over. It’s a dark night.”

  She drew back into the shadows. The drawing-room door opened into the corridor, and they might see her if she remained where she was. She held her breath, and did not breathe in until they were outside. Then she returned to her room and crossed to the window from which she could look out onto the lawn. Miss White’s house was on the far side of that lawn, tucked away in the trees, but lit by lights she must have left burning while she was over in the bungalow for dinner.

  She saw two shapes cross the lawn, moving in and out of the shadows. She waited. A cloud crossed the moon, and the shadows intensified.

  2

  A Charming and Colourful Thief

  M iss White said to her, “One day, of course, you will be sent home to school. It will all be very different then.”

  Bella listened, but said nothing. Being sent home was at the same time a threat and a promise. Home was somehow better – everybody knew that; it was a privilege; it implied membership of something that so many people simply did not have. There were the people who worked on the estate – she was not sure where they came from, but it was not home. They were just there – unknowable because they spoke a different language and had obscure beliefs. And that was all somehow ordained – a simple fact of life that everybody seemed to accept.

  But she had never been entirely clear about where home was. She had really known only a couple of places – the nearby small town of Nuwara Eliya and then Kandy, more important, more bustling, not far away – and yet she knew that there was another country far away where everything of any importance came from and that was the home to which people referred. It seemed to be part of the natural order that the place you thought of as home – the house in which you spent your childhood – should not be your real home but something temporary, something you would eventually leave. You did not belong there – not, at least, in the way in which the Sinhalese belonged. They might have names that sounded Dutch or Portuguese, but that did not mean that they looked to those distant countries. Home for them was here in Ceylon, even if their names were van Horst or da Silva, or something like that: they were as Sinhalese as the Amerasinghes or Dissanayakes.

  She did not see why she would have to go home. Miss White said it was for education – so that she could learn more about the world. And yet why could her governess not teach her these things that she had to learn? There was no limit, as far as she could tell, to Miss White’s knowledge. She knew all the kings and queens of England, and Scotland, in order, starting with William the Conqueror. She knew all about the crusades and Robin Hood and Bonnie Prince Charlie and the building of the railways. She could recite Burns and Wordsworth without looking at a book. She had read more than ten plays by Shakespeare – she reeled off the list if you asked her – and she could quote long passages from The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest. How could there possibly be anything that any teacher in England or Scotland could teach that Miss White did not already know?

  She asked her mother. “Why do people have to go to school in England?”

  Her mother corrected her. “Or Scotland. Remember we’re Scottish.”

  “I don’t see what the difference is.”

  Her mother shook her head. “There are very big differences. There’s nothing wrong with England, of course, but it’s not Scotland.”

  “And Scotland isn’t England.”

  “No, of course not.” Virginia paused. “Miss White may forget these things, you see, because she’s consorted with all those English people in Calcutta. That Deputy Acting Assistant Governor, or whatever he called himself – that sort of person. Sometimes English people forget all about Scotland.”

  “But why do I have to go to school there? In Scotland or England? Why can’t I stay here?”

  Her mother sighed. “Because this isn’t our country. Do you understand that?”

  Bella looked puzzled. The map that Miss White displayed on the wall of the schoolroom glowed with red: it was the colour of so many countries, and its meaning had been explained to her. “But it is. There’s the picture of the King in the Post Office.”

  “The King, yes . . . It’s our country in a way, maybe, but actually we haven’t been here all that long. And there are not all that many of us. Over in India there are even people who want us out.”

  “Why would they want us out? What have we done to them?”

  Virginia sighed again. “These are big matters. But the point is that children have to go home to school when they get a bit older. It’s the same for everyone. That Macmillan boy – Richard – he’s going in a few months’ time. He’s ten now, almost eleven, isn’t he? That’s very late. I don’t understand why they haven’t got round to it before, especially with everything being so tense with Hitler and Mussolini and these people. And the Japanese too. His mother was telling me they’ve booked their passages. She’s taking him. He’s going back to Scotland – to school.”

  Richard had spoken to her about that. He had said that he was counting the days until their departure. “I’ll see you over there,” he said. “When you come, that is.” And then added, “Maybe. Who knows?”

  He was going to school in a place called Perthshire. It was in the hills, he explained, and the boys all lived in large houses – far bigger than anything you could see in Kandy, where there were those missionary schools. The school had its own pipe band and even had a laboratory where you could study chemistry. “There are these things called Bunsen burners, you see,” he t
old her. “You use them to heat chemicals. You have to be careful about explosions. There are explosions all the time.”

  She listened with fascination. She had seen a picture of a laboratory in her copy of the Children’s Encyclopaedia, the mainstay of the small library of books in Miss White’s schoolroom. There was an article in the first of the bluebound volumes entitled “Why do I laugh or cry?” She had read that from start to finish and had even tried to explain it to Richard once, although he had not been listening. He had a habit of saying that he already knew things, and he did that now, although she suspected that he knew nothing about tear ducts, as she did. She had read the article one day – to herself – having taken the relevant volume out to the Pavilion in the Clouds. There is no known reason why tears should come when we cry, but there is a very good reason for the tears we are really making all the time we are awake . . . Richard should listen to that, because it might be useful for him to know such things. It would be all very well to learn how to use a Bunsen burner in a laboratory, and to cause any number of explosions, but you should also know about tear ducts.

  Virginia encouraged her to read the Children’s Encyclopaedia. “There’s just about everything you need to know in there,” she said.

  But she knew that was not quite true. There was nothing about the Chinese poets. She had looked for them, and they were not there.

  “There’s nothing about Li Po,” she said. “Nor Po Chü-i. I’ve looked.”

  Virginia smiled. “Arthur Mee can’t fit everything in. But I’m sure that if he asked Mr Waley he’d write something about them for him. There’s no reason why boys and girls shouldn’t read the Chinese poets. You do, don’t you? Or, rather, I read them to you, and you like them.”

  Miss White said, “These Chinese poets lived a long time ago, you know. They are what I’d describe as very dead.” She smiled – an icy smile that Miss White reserved for situations of which she did not entirely approve.

  Bella was silent. This was plainly not true, and yet why should Miss White say they were dead if they weren’t? Perhaps it was jealousy. Bella knew all about jealousy and how it could make people behave badly – even to the extent of them saying that Chinese poets were dead when they were not. She thought that if Li Po and Po Chü-i could hear about her dolls being named after them they would be pleased. It was an honour to name somebody after another person.