The Pavilion in the Clouds

by Alexander McCall Smith

  But then there was hot water, and the comforts of clean sheets, and food served on bone-china plates, and trips to Colombo, and The Illustrated London News and the gramophone. If these were part of material tyranny, then it was a comfortable tyranny that one would have to be awfully high-minded to give up. And perfume, of course – one should not forget perfume and sandalwood soap sent out from London. Perhaps if Buddhism were more accepting of these things, then it would be easier to be a Buddhist.

  She did not speak to Henry. One day she would do so – she would tackle him about what lay ahead of them, rather than conveniently pretending that the future would sort itself out. She would ask him to set a date, a terminus to their life in Ceylon, when they might go back and farm somewhere in the Borders, near Melrose, perhaps, and enjoy the company of neighbours and townspeople, and go shopping in Edinburgh, at Jenners, and not be lonely and cut off from all the latest things.

  Henry was busy. The price of tea was abnormally high, and this was an inducement to increase production before the market corrected itself. It was a feature of tea production that fluctuations in the price could wipe out a whole month’s profit during the time it took to get the finished product down to Colombo; Henry had seen this happen to people he had known, some of whom had been ruined within the space of a few weeks when a whole crop had been dried too quickly or too fiercely, or had been packed when too damp and had become mouldy. One of the planters had simply walked away after a series of misfortunes, and Henry had been able to understand why he had done it, even as others talked of cowardice and weakness of character. He had been unable to meet his wages and had been pressed by the bank in Colombo to pay off a mushrooming overdraft. People did not understand the pressures under which a small or marginal estate might work. To abandon everything like that was cowardly, Henry thought, but might people not be forgiven – occasionally – for being human?

  It had been the talk of the club for weeks, if not months, and Henry had participated in some of the discussion.

  “I knew Bill was weak,” said one of the members in the bar. “But I had no idea just how weak he was.”

  “And Helen – poor woman – left behind to pick up the pieces,” said another, of the planter’s wife.

  “How many wives are in that position, I wonder? Thousands.”

  “Mind you, some bring it upon themselves. There are some shrews . . . I’m not justifying it, of course, but they can drive a man to distraction.”

  “He was probably planning to leave her anyway. That’s the sort of chap he must have been. Carrying on with somebody and all the while planning to skedaddle.” That was Henry who said that.

  “Despicable,” muttered another member of the group.

  Henry nodded. “Unfortunate,” he said.

  “There are bolters of both sexes,” said the man who had started the discussion. “Both can come out of the stables if things get too difficult.”

  “It’s not easy,” said Henry, “to keep women entertained up here. What’s there for them to do? Tennis? Bridge? My wife reads a lot. She runs out of books, actually. We at least have our work.”

  “For which nobody in particular thanks us,” said another.

  “Does anybody thank anybody?” asked Henry. “For anything? I only ask.” He paused. “And what do we get out of it? We see our lives slipping away from us. We work all hours of creation. We have people coming to us with their problems all day, every day. We’re dog-tired when we get home. Home leave is a long time off. And so it goes on and on.”

  They looked at him.

  “No use complaining,” said one, and the others nodded. What was wrong with Henry? If everybody started talking like that, they might as well pack up. You had to believe in what you were doing; if you started to question things, you were finished. Everybody knew that, even if very few people spelled it out. Was Henry weak, like Bill? Was he going to surprise them? Not Henry, surely, who had never faltered, as far as anybody knew, and whose estate was run on model lines. No, this was an unguarded thought of the sort that we all had from time to time, and that meant nothing very much. So his comment was ignored, and the conversation moved to other topics.

  Henry had to be in Colombo overnight. He would make the journey to Kandy by car and then take the midday train to the capital. There was a dinner to mark the retirement of a government official who had been helpful to the tea estates – four or five of the planters would be attending, and they would travel together. “Not that I particularly want to go,” he said to Virginia. “I have better things to do than sit through interminable speeches. You know what it’s like.” He gave her an enquiring look. “You’ll be all right?”

  “Of course I shall. I’m not going to be on my own. And Miss White . . .”

  “Of course,” he said. “She’ll be in her bungalow. And I can get Michael to sleep in the kitchen, if you like. Just so that there’s a man about the place.”

  “We’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”

  He nodded. “He snores anyway. You’d hear him throughout the house.”

  She smiled. “He has an awfully big nose, poor Michael. It’s a bit like a trumpet. That would account for the snoring.” She thought of the cook’s wife, a small, timid woman who hid her face behind a headscarf when you looked in her direction. She had borne him five children and put up with years of snoring too. Poor woman.

  “You sure you’ll be all right?”

  She was. “You go. Try to enjoy yourself.”

  Suddenly it occurred to her that he might not be going with the other planters; he might be going with Miss White. The unwelcome thought came as a shock, and her expression registered this. He noticed, and said, quite sharply, “What?”

  She sought to cover up her surprise. “Nothing.”

  “You looked as if you’d thought of something.”

  She shook her head. “I hadn’t. Just odd thoughts. Nothing to do with anything.”

  She watched him motor down the drive that linked the bungalow with the estate road. As he reached the junction, he sounded the car horn, wound down a window and waved. The sound of the horn reminded her of the steam train’s whistle. That wistful blast punctuated the trip from Kandy at intervals of a few minutes, whenever the train negotiated a corner or approached a bridge, or when it neared a station, in a cloud of hissing steam, and people were milling about on the line, seemingly indifferent to the approach of the engine. There were so many people – so many – and they kept coming; whenever anything happened, people would materialise out of nowhere and watch with dark, wide eyes. Henry slept through the noise, cocooned in the padded seat of his first-class compartment, unaware of the stares of others. He could sleep all the way from Kandy to Colombo, he said, which was the reason why he chose to travel by train rather than make the journey by car.

  Bella was finishing off a lesson with Miss White then came to see her mother in the pavilion.

  “Ask Michael to bring a tray of tea out here,” Virginia said to her. “And lemonade for you. There’s some cake, I think.”

  Bella had been carrying Li Po and Po Chü-i. She put the dolls down on a small table, arranging their limbs for comfort. “They like cake too,” she said. “Po Chü-i in particular. He is much greedier than Li Po. He often has more than his fair share.”

  Virginia gave Po Chü-i a disapproving look. The doll looked back at her, shameless.

  “Gluttony is one of the vices,” she said sternly. “Does Po Chü-i know that?”

  Bella replied that she doubted it. “He is not nearly as clever as Li Po,” she said. “Li Po knows much more than his brother.”

  “Are they brothers, then?” asked Virginia.

  Bella looked thoughtful. “Sort of brothers. Sometimes they are – sometimes they are not. It all depends.”

  Virginia smiled. “That’s interesting. I thought they were just friends.”

  “Oh, they are friends too. They’re best friends. They’re blood brothers, actually.”

  That interest
ed Virginia. Her own brother had revealed to her once that he had a blood brother – his friend at school – and that they had sealed their bond with the mingling of blood from razor cuts on the palms of their hands. She had been horrified. “You could die,” she warned. That was a good way to get blood poisoning – and if you got blood poisoning, then you died. Everybody knew that. But he had laughed, as one might laugh at some piece of pre-scientific superstition. “You don’t understand. Blood brothers don’t die from blood poisoning. It’s not like that.”

  She had felt envious. She had never heard of blood sisters. Boys, it seemed, had so much more fun.

  “He’s my best friend ever,” her brother continued. “If I ever had to save his life, I would do it. Straight away. No thinking. I’d save his life.”

  “And mine?” she asked. “Would you save my life too?”

  “Possibly,” he said. “But that’s different.”

  Now she looked at Bella and said, “You could try to make Po Chü-i a better doll.”

  This brought a snap response, and a look of reproach. “He’s a poet. He’s not a doll.”

  “Of course.”

  “Po Chü-i gets really angry if he hears somebody calling him a doll. I have to tell him that they don’t mean to be rude, but he still gets angry. He says that people should know better than that.”

  “Of course they should,” said Virginia. “And I’m very sorry if I offended him.”

  “He says it’s all right. He said he knows that you won’t do it again.”

  Virginia nodded. “I still think you could tell him not to be so greedy. I’m sure he’ll listen to you.”

  Bella went off to ask for the tea and lemonade. While she was away, Virginia reached into the large wicker basket that she kept beside her chair in the pavilion. This was where she put out-of-date magazines once they had been read – they were removed from the large magazine canterbury on the bungalow veranda to this basket. She found an old National Geographic. She liked the pictures; she enjoyed the prose, with its slight air of the cinema travelogue. There was an article on the North American woodpecker and one entitled ‘Men and Gold’. Throughout history, the article said, men have been unable to resist the allure of this beguiling metal – it adorns and beautifies, just as it corrupts. She looked at the woodpeckers and began to read about them, but her mind soon wandered. She was thinking about Henry. She loved him; of course she loved him, and she was sure that he loved her. She had been imagining everything. It was inconceivable that he should have strayed. Why should he? She looked at the two dolls. They were impassive.

  Bella came back, and the tea and lemonade followed her. They looked at woodpeckers together. “I don’t like those birds,” said Bella, wrinkling her nose in disgust. “They look horrid.”

  “They’re all right,” said Virginia.

  Bella shuddered. “They could hurt you with those beaks. Look at them.”

  “Woodpeckers never attack humans,” said Virginia.

  Bella looked at her anxiously. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, absolutely sure.” She smiled. “There are other things to think about, darling. You needn’t worry about woodpeckers.”

  They paged through the magazine. Virginia poured herself a cup of tea and sipped at it while Bella drank the homemade lemonade from her glass. It was too sweet for the adult palate, but children loved it. She thought of the letter she would write Penny in Edinburgh, asking her to watch the amount of sweet things in Bella’s diet. And she would have to tell her about how some things gave her a mild rash if she ate too much of them – pumpkin, oddly enough, did that. There would have to be a list of requests – tactfully put, of course, because they were imposing on Penny’s kindness. The alternative, of course, was for Virginia to go back, to leave Ceylon, and set up home in Scotland. Some wives did that, but it meant that they never saw their husbands more than once a year, and what was the point of being married if you were to spend most of your time apart? Those marriages rarely survived the prolonged separation. Women could cope with that sort of thing, but not men, because so many of them simply could not be by themselves for any length of time. Men were weak; they looked so strong, sometimes, but that was misleading. Men were weak.

  Virginia looked at her watch. Time was an emptiness. It was a billowing, echoing void. We threw events into it, as we might throw stones over a cliff, or into a well, and lose sight of them. Nothing was anchored; nothing was permanent. She looked up at the sky and thought of how small our concerns seemed when viewed from somewhere up there, somewhere impossibly far away. We were just a little rock hurtling through space, and we were the tiniest things on that rock, for all our ambitions and anxieties. What did any of our human concerns matter from that perspective? National Geographic certainly understood that: the latest issue, still in the house, had an article that suggested the sun would burn out and explode in a few billion years, but before it did that it would burn our earth to a crisp. We would become cosmic dust, it said. If that was our fate – and the astronomers seemed agreed on it – then did it make much sense for us to treat our brief moment too seriously? She sighed. She would like to be able to discuss this with somebody, but who was there? Henry would not understand, or would simply say, “Be that as it may,” which was what he said about anything beyond his immediate comprehension. Heather? She would quickly move the conversation back to a subject of her choice – she always did that. Miss White? The governess, even when they had been talking to one another, would have curled her lip and implied that she had already thought about these things and knew the answer but would not expect Virginia to be able to understand that.

  She saw that it was now four o’clock and that there were three hours until dinner. She would have a lie-down, perhaps, and a brief nap. Then she could run a bath and luxuriate in that for half an hour before it would be time for a sundowner and perhaps a game of draughts with Bella. Miss White had taught her how to play, and Bella had become an adept at the game. There seemed to be a ruthless streak in her – a determination to win that she, Virginia, rarely felt. That was strange. People differed when it came to competitiveness. Heather, for instance, liked to win at tennis and could sulk if she lost, and there were one or two other women at the club who were the same. Virginia was indifferent to the result – and when she told Bella that it did not matter whether one won or lost, she, unlike many parents who gave the same message, actually believed it. So many of the things we told our children, she thought, we did not believe. She did not believe that there were three wise men from the east, nor that there was a primeval garden with an apple tree, nor that Noah built himself an ark and its precise length was three hundred cubits; she believed none of that, and yet she herself had solemnly told Bella about these things, reading to her from a book called The Sunday-School Book. And we had to believe in something, she told herself, because the truth sometimes seemed too thin to satisfy our yearnings.

  She said to Bella, “I’m going to go inside and write a letter before I go for a little nap. Do you want to stay out here?”

  Bella was undecided, but then she nodded. “For a little while.”

  “Keep away from the edge.” It had been secured now, with a new barrier, but Virginia still felt wary.

  Another nod.

  “And then come back in in about ten or fifteen minutes. You might like to tidy your room, and then we can play draughts.”

  Bella grinned. “I’ll beat you again. I bet I’ll win.”

  “It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose,” Virginia began.

  “It does,” said Bella. “It does matter. You want to win.”

  Virginia smiled. “We’ll see.”

  Virginia occupied herself with writing a letter to her parents. Her father had retired now, and, having left Colombo, they were living in a village outside Dumfries, in the southwest of Scotland. Their life, she suspected, was a small and constrained one – her father had an arthritic hip that prevented him getting about, and her mother occupied
her time with the affairs of a rural women’s institute. She had written to them about their decision to send Bella back early – now she had more details to give them, about the place she was to get at George Watson’s Ladies’ College in Edinburgh, about the arrangement with Penny, about how she herself hoped to come home for a good long stay – four or five months – in the summer of 1940, when Henry was due to take his long leave.

  “I try not to worry,” she wrote. “We read what is happening on the continent, and it makes me very anxious. Henry says that we are unprepared because we haven’t spent enough on the armed forces. He says you have to make sacrifices if you want to defend yourself properly. He says that too many people have been looking the other way and that doing that just won’t work.

  “I don’t think the Germans will ever be satisfied. Hitler will want more and more because he’s promised so much to his people. And they love it when he picks on defenceless people – they cheer the bully on. There are some Jewish people in Colombo who have been raising money for Jews in Germany who have lost their homes and businesses to those thugs. I feel so sorry for them because so many of them have no other home and people don’t seem to want them. Can you imagine what it feels like to know that other people don’t want you? We’ve never felt that because we’ve always been so fortunate, but sometimes I stop and think about it, and I can hardly bear it.”

  She had begun to write about the birds she had seen in the garden when she heard the scream. She let go of her pen, and a drop of ink fell onto the page of the letter. The ink blot spread quickly, sending out tiny rivulets through the fibres of the paper. She stood up, her heart racing. Had that been Bella?