The Pavilion in the Clouds

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “The idea being that rotten wood would be difficult to spot? And, because of that, nothing to do with any fault on his part? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Virginia nodded. “Perhaps . . . Although I’m not really sure what I’m saying. I don’t know what to think.” She met her friend’s gaze. “Don’t you have times like that? Times when you just aren’t sure whether you’re quite getting what’s going on?”

  Heather stretched out and put her hand gently on Virginia’s forearm. “Darling, I understand. Of course I do. You’re trying to find an explanation that keeps everything intact – especially your marriage.”

  Virginia could not conceal her misery. That was exactly what she was trying to do. That was why she had contacted Heather – she wanted somebody else to say to her that everything was all right. She did not want to reach the unpalatable conclusion that she had been dreading. Above all else, she wanted reassurance.

  Heather, who had been leaning forward, now sat up straight: she was resolved. “I think you need to act. You could spend a lot of time – and lose a lot of sleep – thinking about all this – trying to read things into this and that, trying to work out what – if anything – is going on behind your back. That’s going to get you precisely nowhere.” She paused, looking shrewdly at Virginia to see if she was carrying her with her. She decided that she was. Virginia wanted her to tell her what to do. That was why people asked other people to lunch at short notice. For some reason, this had happened to her many times before, in the invitations of various friends. Perhaps that’s what I’m cut out to be, she thought: a shoulder on which others liked to cry. Well, there were far worse roles in this life.

  “I’m not sure,” Heather continued, “that your fall has anything to do with what may or may not be going on in the background. It may all be no more than a misunderstanding. But this extraordinary business of Bella and the . . .” she looked away with distaste, “and the underwear is a bit different. That may be a childish prank – I rather think it is – but there may be something much more serious underneath. She may have a feeling about this Lavender White – she is called Lavender, isn’t she? Anyway, she may have picked up something very real, and that may be why she’s trying to provoke an issue between you and her. Do you think that’s possible?”

  Virginia nodded. “Yes, I do.”

  “In that case, nip it in the bud. Get rid of her.”

  The waiter returned to take their plates away. Seeing the unfinished curry on Heather’s plate, he enquired whether it had been too hot.

  “No, perfect,” Heather replied. “As ever. Now, what about ice cream? What flavours today?”

  “No flavour, Mam.”

  “No flavour?”

  “That means it is not vanilla or strawberry. It is something else. Nothing has been added.”

  “Perfect,” said Heather, glancing at Virginia for confirmation. “I think we’ll both have that.”

  He retreated, and Heather quickly became business-like. “Terminate her contract – or whatever you call it. Pay her off. Problem solved.”

  “But we promised her at least another ten months.” Where would Miss White go? Back to Calcutta, back to the circles she talked about, to the people who were almost the Governor of Bengal but not quite?

  Heather made a gesture of resignation. “All right, but what’s more important to you – ten months’ salary in lieu of notice, or your marriage?”

  “If you put it that way . . .”

  “I do,” said Heather.

  Virginia looked doubtful. “What do I tell Henry?”

  “You could tell him that you think she’s coming between the two of you.”

  “I could say that,” agreed Virginia. “Because it’s true. She is.”

  But Heather had a warning. “The danger with saying that, of course, is that it could provoke a crisis. If he is having an affair, the hard thing for him might be bringing it out into the open. But in making the accusation, you will have done that for him. So it may prompt him to make a choice – and that choice, I’m sorry to say, might be her. You never know. Men are tricky. It’s the way they’re made.”

  “But . . .”

  Whatever objection was forthcoming was brushed aside. “No, I’d be inclined not to say anything about that – rather, blame yourself. Say that you just can’t get on with her. Say that you feel uncomfortable having her about the place. Say that she gives you the creeps. I’ve only met her a couple of times myself, but frankly I find her a bit creepy.”

  “I feel a bit sorry for her sometimes, I suppose.” That was true, and for a few moments she thought – with charity – of Miss White with her stories about Calcutta and St Andrews, and with the rouge she applied rather too generously to her cheeks, and with there being no question of any man in the background.

  Heather understood her friend’s reservations. “Fair enough, but you can’t take the risk of anything developing, even if there’s nothing at the moment. There’s something odd going on, isn’t there? Don’t let it go any further. You have to take the plunge. Just do it. Make a bit of a fuss, but don’t let on that you think he’s been up to no good. That way you can let things get back to normal, and he’ll probably forget all about it. Men do.”

  The ice cream arrived, and Heather dug into it with the long-handled spoon accompanying it.

  “No flavour,” she said.

  8

  The Music Goes Round and Round

  V irginia decided to speak to Henry the following evening. They were together on the veranda as dusk fell, each nursing the drink that was their nightly sundowner – a gin and tonic for her and a whisky and soda for him. It was the best time of the day, she thought: Henry, tired from work, would be ready to relax, while she liked to watch the vestiges of day drain from the sky as the stars, as if on cue, made their appearance. It was also their time on their own, as Bella usually spent the half hour before her bath and bedtime attending to her scrapbooks. She had a shelf of these – bulging volumes into which she pasted pictures clipped from magazines and old newspapers. The scrapbooks were composed of rough grey paper; the glue she used she made herself out of flour and water. It took time to set, but it worked, and it did not have the smell of the glue that came in bottles. Li Po and Po Chü-i had scrapbooks too, that she maintained for them, although their taste in pictures differed from hers. Li Po liked photographs of food, while Po Chü-i liked pictures of birds. “You like very different things, don’t you?” she said to them.

  “We went to different schools,” Li Po replied. “That is why we are so different. One day I’ll tell you all about those days.”

  Miss White was in her bungalow, from the windows of which squares of yellow light spilled out onto the lawn. She was playing her gramophone, and faint notes drifted through the semi-darkness – a tune she favoured, as they had heard it often enough.

  “The BBC Dance Orchestra,” said Henry, taking a sip of his whisky. “Listen to them. There they go.”

  It was ‘The Music Goes Round and Around’. The lyrics, half heard, were distant, tinny things. I push the first valve down, The music goes down and around, And it comes out here . . . Virginia had once seen Miss White dancing to it on the veranda of her bungalow, dancing alone, until she realised that she was being watched and had stopped in embarrassment.

  “Henry Hall,” said Virginia. Her hand was shaking.

  “He sings that other one, doesn’t he?” asked Henry. “The one that Bella likes so much.”

  “‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic’.”

  Henry smiled. “I listened to the words the other day when Bella played it. A rather odd little song.”

  Virginia picked up her glass. It was cold to the touch. She took a deep breath. “Henry, I need to talk to you about Miss White.” She spoke softly, keeping her voice down, although there was no chance of the governess hearing them across the two hundred yards of lawn that separated her bungalow from theirs.

  She hardly dared watch for his reaction. She glan
ced from the corner of her eye and then looked away. He had not flinched. He had simply taken another sip of his whisky.

  “What about her?”

  “I want her to go.”

  He put down his glass. He frowned. Then he turned to her. “Why?”

  The sky was almost dark now. A small flock of birds moved against the last streaks of light and was gone. A constellation, faint, just visible, dipped and swung above them, tiny points of white, pinpricks.

  She kept her voice level. She was going to be firm; she was not going to become emotional. “I think it’s time for her to go.”

  He picked up his glass and considered this for a few moments. Then he said, “But why? We told her she’d have another year.”

  “Ten months actually.” It had sounded so little when she had first thought of it; now it was another matter.

  “A year – ten months. Doesn’t make much difference. Why now?”

  She looked at him directly, trying to give the appearance of being surprised. “You don’t want her to go?”

  That might have been the challenge that she had wanted to avoid making – the words had somehow slipped out. And into a pool of silence, it seemed, as he was impassive – so much so that she had to glance at him to see whether he had heard her.

  He had, and now he replied, “I don’t mind either way. But it does seem a little harsh to show her the door when we told her that she’d be here until Bella went to school.”

  She was ready for that, as she had thought about it. “Bella could go off to school early. When Penny agreed, she said she could come any time.” Penny was Henry’s sister – the aunt in Edinburgh with whom Bella was to board. “She said that – remember? And I doubt if the school minds too much when she starts.”

  Henry lowered his glass to the table.

  She said, “Have another whisky.”

  He looked at her quizzically. “You think I need it?”

  Some of the tension drained away – but not all. She saw that he hesitated before reaching for the bottle. Was he worried about what he might say after another dram? That he might reveal what he really felt?

  “I don’t think you need it, no. But I know this may be a bit of a bombshell for you.”

  He poured the whisky into his glass and added a splash of soda water from the siphon. The carbon dioxide hissed. He turned to her as he lifted the glass. “Why?” he asked. “Why should it be a bombshell?”

  “It’s a change in our arrangements.”

  He considered this. “Arrangements change all the time.” He paused. Then, “What have you got against her? I thought you took the view that she was doing a very good job with Bella. Look at her reading. And her French. She’s got beyond that plume de ma tante stuff already. I even heard her say something in French to those dolls of hers. Heaven knows what it was, but she said it.”

  “Oh, I know. She’s a very good teacher. I’m not disputing that.”

  Over the lawn, the music stopped, and then started again. The BBC Dance Orchestra remained on duty.

  “If she’s a good teacher, and Bella is happy with her, then couldn’t you just put up with your . . .” He searched for the right words. “. . . with your feelings of irritation? I fully accept that she might keep us on our toes . . . intellectually.” It was not a tea-planter’s word, and he used it tentatively. “But she does the job, and we have to think of her perfectly reasonable expectations.”

  Virginia felt a momentary resentment. The criticism, the distancing, the implication in the word he had chosen to use expressed an attitude she did not like at all. Henry and his friends may be suspicious of things of the mind, but she was not. That was the whole point of her reading circle: they were using their minds; they were asking questions. She was the intellectual equal of Miss White, even if, unlike the governess, she had had no university education. That had been because her parents had believed that her destiny was marriage and that higher education would be a distraction from that. And her mother had explicitly warned her that there were many men – possibly the majority – who were wary of a woman who might overshadow them in matters of the mind. “They don’t like it,” she said, “if you know more than they do. It’s just the way men are. They like to be the leaders.”

  She had seethed at the unfairness of this and had tried to argue against what she saw as a self-defeatist view, but her mother simply smiled. “You’ll find out soon enough that what I say is true,” she said. “You’ll see.”

  Miss White, it seemed, had understood this sensitivity and had been careful not to make much direct mention of her educational advantage. Although she pointedly referred to her father’s academic standing, she only occasionally added that she, too, had been at university. “I was at St Andrews,” she said. “Just like my father. My father teaches there, as I think I may have mentioned.” Out of politeness more than anything else, Virginia had asked her what she had studied and had listened with a glazed expression as she listed the subjects she had included in her arts degree. “We all had to do the course in moral philosophy,” she said. “Or almost all of us. It was regarded as an important cornerstone. Hume, you know.” She paused. “David Hume, that is, the great Scottish philosopher. We had to read Hume.”

  “Of course,” said Virginia, adding, “Hume. Of course.”

  Miss White looked at her as if trying to decide whether or not she had ever heard of him. “Sympathy,” she said at last. “I always thought that people like Hume and Adam Smith were absolutely right when they said that sympathy lay at the heart of any moral system.”

  Virginia looked out of the window, towards the Pavilion in the Clouds, on the far side of the lawn. Two monkeys were playing on the structure’s roof; one, having stolen something belonging to the other, appeared to be taunting its friend. A piece of fruit, perhaps. A nut from one of the trees.

  “Do you think there’s any sympathy in nature?” Virginia asked. “In monkeys, for instance?”

  Miss White looked surprised. “Hume was thinking of human beings.” It hardly needed to be said, she thought, but one should never underestimate the extent to which people could misunderstand things or would simply not take a common enough reference. She had met somebody in Calcutta who was under the impression that Camembert was a French revolutionary; or, rather, she had not actually met that person, but they had talked about him at a dinner party, and she had been as amused by this as everyone else, except, perhaps, the host, who had looked slightly anxious before he joined in the laughter. Camembert, of course, was not to be confused with Roquefort – now there was a convincing Jacobin.

  Virginia was saying something. “Of course he was. I was just wondering, though, whether monkeys might not have the same . . . well, the same feelings as we do. I was just wondering.” And she thought: Do they know anything about monkeys in St Andrews?

  But Henry was looking at her, and she stopped thinking about Miss White and David Hume and that peculiar conversation they had had about monkeys. Now she turned to Henry, who was asking her, “Did you hear what I said to you?”

  She shook her head. “Sorry. I was thinking about something else.”

  He was patient. “I was saying that I thought it might be a bit unfair to ask her to leave at this stage. She hasn’t put a foot wrong, as far as I can see.”

  Virginia reached for her glass. There was still a small amount of gin and tonic in it, and she did not want to pour herself another one. She wanted to keep a clear head for this conversation. If she had another gin, then she knew what might happen. She might say what she really thought; she might come out and make precisely the accusation that she was resolved not to make.

  “Oh,” she said airily, “she’s been all right, I suppose.”

  He looked at her with incredulity. “Just all right? Is that all? I think she’s been far more than that. She’s put in a real effort with Bella. She’s spent hours – hours – reading to her. She’s taught her all that Wordsworth. I’ve heard her. Wordsworth – and Bella’s only ei
ght. Can you point to any of the other children round here who know their Wordsworth?”

  He took a further sip of whisky before he answered his own question. “I can’t. Bella is streets ahead of any of the other children on any of the estates. Any. And the children from Colombo too.”

  “I’m not sure whether being able to recite screeds of Wordsworth is all that useful,” she said quietly. “Children are more than little gramophone records.”

  “I never called them that. And Bella has learned plenty of other things. Her maths, for instance . . . She’s run rings round young Richard, and he’s said to be quite good at the subject. Jimmy told me he gets his tables a bit mixed up – Bella never does that. Maybe there’s a point to Wordsworth.”

  She stared at him. “But what about me?”

  He frowned. “You? Wordsworth?”

  Her irritation surfaced in her voice. “Not Wordsworth – I’m not talking about Wordsworth. I’m talking about the fact that I read to her too. I read to her a great deal.”

  He was placatory. “I don’t deny that. I didn’t mean to imply that you don’t.”

  “I’ve taught her about the Chinese poets. She can recite some of the Wiley poems. You’ve heard her. She even named those dolls of hers after two of the poets. That was so sweet.”

  He became even more conciliatory. “My darling, I know all that. I know you’ve put a lot of effort into her education. And I’m proud of you – I really am.”

  That was probably true, she thought. He was proud of her reading circle; she had once heard him saying to somebody at the club, “My wife doesn’t just play tennis, you know. She has a reading group. They read fearfully impressive books – you’ve no idea.” She wished that her mother could have heard that – her mother, with her cutting remarks about how intelligence in a woman put most men off.

  Now he reached across and touched her wrist gently, in a gesture of reassurance and appreciation. “Yes, I’m proud of what you do with your time.”