The Pavilion in the Clouds

by Alexander McCall Smith

  And so when Henry returned at noon, she greeted him with a smile and with the suggestion that they sit on the veranda together, he with a cold beer and she with a shandy, while he told her about the dinner in Colombo. He would regale her with stories about the people whom he knew down there – people in whom she had no real interest – but she would be attentive and would laugh at all the right places, and they would be happy, as they always had been, in their particular, not very dramatic way.

  He was happy to do this, although he wanted to have a quick bath beforehand, to wash off the dust of the journey. That done, he appeared on the veranda smelling of the sandalwood soap he liked to use in his bath, a smell that she would forever associate with him, she thought – with this place in the clouds, with this time in her life.

  “Where’s Bella?”

  “With Miss White.”

  He took a sip of his beer. “Lovely,” he said, referring to the ice-cold beer and the feel of the condensation on the side of the glass. He always loved that.

  And she took a sip of her shandy – three parts lemonade and one part beer, a drink that she found suitable for lunchtime when gin would be far too strong and would effectively ruin the afternoon. “Rivers of the world,” she said. “Miss White has spent the morning teaching her about rivers of the world. And some other things too, I think. She said they’d finish by lunchtime.”

  “Poor Bella,” said Henry. “Rivers of the world – does she really need to know quite so much about them? I suppose one ought to have a vague idea where the Amazon is, and the Ganges, and so on. But beyond that . . .”

  Virginia shrugged. “She thinks it important.” She changed the subject. She would have to say something more about Miss White’s change of plans, but she did not want to broach the subject just yet.

  “And the dinner?” she asked.

  He laughed. “Oh, the dinner. Just as I expected. Speech after speech. One old boy droned on for twenty-eight minutes – I timed him – and then stood up afterwards to say that he had something to add. The groans could be heard from one end of the room to the other. He was too deaf to notice.”

  “Well, you did your duty.”

  He nodded. “There was a book that they asked everybody to sign. That was to check up, I think, on who was shirking. I’m glad I went. These government types, you know, have long memories. They chalk it all up.”

  She reached for her shandy and was taking a sip when she heard a voice from within the house.

  “That’s Bella’s lesson finished.” She lowered her glass. She would have to tell him before Bella appeared – or Miss White did, for that matter, although now she saw Miss White making her way back across the lawn to her bungalow. She would be preparing her lunch, she thought, and would eat on her own veranda, out of sight of the main house. She felt saddened at the thought of this lonely woman, eating by herself: had they failed in their duty of hospitality? Had they made her feel isolated and alone, far away from any friends or relatives, cooped up in this remote place?

  She thought that Bella was probably in her room, playing, as she liked to do, after her lessons. She would only appear when the bell for lunch went – which meant that now there was time.

  “There’s been a development,” she began. “She’s going early.”

  “Who?”

  “Miss White.”

  She had not intended to watch for his reaction, but she could not help but do so. She saw him frown – almost imperceptibly – but then the frown disappeared, and he said, quite evenly, “Any reason?”

  Virginia hesitated. She was not sure what to say. She could not reveal what Bella had done because that would amount to a confession of suspicion – even if not to an outright accusation. Yet she did not want to tell a barefaced lie; she had never deceived him – actively, that is – and she had no desire to do so now.

  “Oh, some little misunderstanding over a chance remark from Bella.” And then, glossing over this as quickly as she could, she went on, “She’s more sensitive than one might imagine, you know. On the outside she’s all very brisk and schoolmistressy, but there are things going on underneath that exterior.”

  He gave a start. “Things? Such as?”

  She waved a hand in the air. “She broods on things, I suspect. You know how some people dissect every little remark that others make and try to work out what it means – to see whether there’s an agenda. You know how some people are.”

  “You mean paranoia?”

  “Not quite. That’s a bit extreme, isn’t it? I don’t imagine she thinks people are out to get her. That’s what paranoia is, isn’t it?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, she’s not like that. But she’s a bit . . . how shall I put it? A bit prickly? A bit on her dignity?”

  He thought about this. “She’s sensitive, I think. Women often are.”

  She looked at him. “More sensitive than other women. Is that what you’re saying?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t say that. It’s just that sometimes one has to watch what you say – especially if you’re a man. You say something that can be taken quite the wrong way.”

  “And men don’t do that? They don’t take things the wrong way?”

  He shrugged. “Some do. But most men . . .” He smiled. “We’re an uncomplicated breed, you know. We say what we think we mean, and we assume that what other people say is, well, just that – what they say. We don’t always look for hidden meaning.”

  She was relieved that the conversation had drifted away from what Bella might have said. “Anyway,” she continued, “she’s leaving tomorrow. Or so she said. I told her there was no hurry, but she had the bit between her teeth. She seemed to think . . .” She trailed off.

  He waited. “Yes?”

  “She seemed to think that I took a dim view of her.”

  He reached for his beer. She watched his hand. It was steady. This was not a man discussing his lover with his wife. She felt reassured.

  He did not look at her as he spoke. “Odd that she should say that.”

  She glanced at him, and then quickly looked away. “And we had a bit of a scare. A snake.”

  It seemed as if he had not heard her. “You haven’t given her any reason to think that you . . .” He hesitated, waving a hand vaguely, almost dismissively, “. . . that you don’t get on with her, have you?”

  She did not answer, but returned to the subject of the snake. It occurred to her that she should have told him about this earlier – the moment he had arrived back. It would have been more natural to do it then – more the act of a woman who trusted her husband – which she did, of course; she trusted him, she told herself; she wanted to trust him. “There was a snake. It was in the pavilion. Bella was there.”

  He frowned. It was as if he was returning from some distant place. “In the pavilion?”

  “Yes, in the basket I keep the magazines in. Inside it, I believe.”

  He looked puzzled. “Odd.” And then he said, “What was it? I saw a pipe snake down there not all that long ago. Odd little thing. Completely harmless, of course.”

  “A cobra.”

  There was no mistaking his surprise. “My God. Inside the basket?”

  “Yes.”

  He shuddered. “But that could have been dreadful.” He made a face. “What’s a cobra doing up here? They don’t like cool weather.”

  That had occurred to her, too, she told him. “Miss White saw it too, thank heavens.” That was hardly a full acknowledgement of what Miss White had done, she thought.

  He did not seem interested in this detail. “I’ll get the men to cut the grass back. The grass at the sides is a bit high. If we cut it back it should discourage any nasties.” He paused. “And everybody was all right?”

  “We were a bit shocked.”

  “I’m sure you were.”

  She took a sip of her shandy. Suddenly it seemed too sweet, and she wondered whether perhaps her tastes were changing. The older women, thos
e who had been married to planters for decades, ending up drinking spirits at lunchtime. There was a group of them at the club – who sat and chatted over gin-and-French on Saturdays, their voices rising, sometimes shrieking with laughter at some particularly malicious scrap of gossip. She would never end up like that. They would go home well before either of them reached that stage. They should go home now, she thought. She should bring pressure to bear on Henry to give up while they still had a marriage and before they became like the rest of them. This was not their place, and sooner or later they would be shown the door; why wait? They were itching to do that in India, and the same would happen here, even if the voices here were less strident and more accepting of the compromises and juggling dreamed up to keep the system going. She sighed inwardly; that was not her problem. It never was the woman’s problem, was it? Women were left to provide support, to shore things up, while men took the decisions with the chess board on which everybody was put out like pieces in a game.

  He was looking at her quizzically, as well he might, she thought, because had she explained to him what she was thinking, he would have been dumbfounded. He had not questioned any of this, she believed. It had never occurred to him that any of this was unusual, even, let alone actually wrong. And there was a reason for that, of course: there was tea to be planted and harvested. Who was going to do that if he, and others like him, were not prepared to live this lonely existence, so far from home? Nobody had done it before, and if they left, she was not sure who would do it in their place.

  He had said something to her, which she had not heard, and now he repeated himself. “You were miles away. I asked whether Bella has been told that Miss White is going early?”

  She nodded.

  “And?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “I don’t think it matters to her one way or the other. She knows she’s going home. She’s excited about school.”

  It was her moment, and she suddenly decided to seize it. “I’d like to go too.”

  He was staring at his feet. “You? With Bella?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry to spring this on you. We should have talked before this.”

  He looked up. “Then why didn’t we?”

  She met his gaze, and the reproach it conveyed. She felt a momentary resentment. “A conversation involves two people, Henry. Two. If you don’t have two, then it becomes a monologue. It’s one person talking to herself. It’s not a conversation.”

  “I wasn’t blaming you,” he said, grudgingly. “I should have talked too.”

  “Well, we didn’t.”

  He sighed. “And now we are.” He paused. “Better late than never, I suppose.”

  He looked at her, and she saw that there was tenderness in his gaze. “It can’t be easy,” he continued. “It can’t be easy for women – sending their children off like that.”

  “I hate the thought,” she said. “I hate the thought of it. I always have. Right from the first day you have the child, you think: I’m going to have to give this up. That’s what you think. And then you think: well, I can have another one, and another one after that, and keep somebody in the nest for years that way, until a reckoning that’s far enough away that you can stop thinking about it.”

  He was listening. She was unburdening herself in a way in which she had not done before, and he was listening. It had never occurred to her that he would sit there and listen, and not raise objections to these destabilising thoughts, these female thoughts that lapped at the edges of his male world and would wash it all away if given the chance.

  Suddenly he reached for her hand. “Oh, Virgie.” It was his pet name for her – not used very often, but brought out in real tenderness. “I know. I know how you feel. And I feel a bit like that myself. I feel all . . .” He broke off. There was pain in his eyes.

  She returned the pressure of his hand. It was as if they were shaking hands: two newly introduced strangers, shaking hands.

  “You really want to go, don’t you?”

  She nodded. She was going to cry. She felt the tears coming, and she knew that she would not be able to resist. They were coming from behind a dam, somewhere in the up-country of her feelings, and they would not be kept in.

  “All right,” he said. “You should go.”

  “And you?”

  He looked at her. She tried to make out what his expression meant, but she could not fathom it. It seemed to her that he was struggling with something within himself.

  At last he spoke. “I’ll come too.”

  She found it hard to take it in, and for a moment the tears were forgotten. “You mean that you’ll come with me? We’ll all go?”

  He confirmed that this was what he had been thinking. They would all go home, although Bella might precede them, since arrangements had been made, and it would take months before he could extricate himself from the estate.

  Bella would need to start school, he felt, and they could not delay that much longer.

  She struggled. “You’ll sell this place?”

  “Yes, I’ll sell this place. In fact . . .”

  She waited. She felt exhilarated. She could give him all the time he needed to tell her whatever he had in mind. The important thing was that the decision had been made.

  “In fact,” he continued, “I called in on Pessoa down in Colombo. He happened to mention that there was somebody looking around for something. Somebody who had been up in Assam and had a bit of spare money to invest.”

  She was excited. “You could sell to him,” she said. “Perfect.”

  He laughed. “You can’t just sell to the first person who comes along.”

  “Why not?”

  He seemed surprised. “Because you’re selling more than just . . . well, more than just a couple of bungalows and a factory and so on. You’re selling a whole world up here. There are all these people . . .” He gestured towards the hillside where the lines were – the houses, the families.

  She was chastened. “Of course. Of course.”

  “I’d want to make sure that whoever I sold up to treated my people decently.”

  She knew that. He was a decent man. And she felt ashamed to have thought the things that she had thought; she felt ashamed to have mistrusted him. There were plenty of women who were married to men they could not – and should not – trust, but she was not one of them.

  Now he asked, “What arrangements has Miss White made?”

  She replied, “She wasn’t very specific. As I told you, she was very cool towards me.”

  He looked concerned. “I’m going to have a word with her.”

  Virginia was worried. “About what? I don’t think she’s going to change her mind.”

  He conceded that that was unlikely, but he would still want to offer help with whatever needed to be done. “She’ll need to get down to Colombo.”

  “She has friends in Kandy. I think she was planning to go to them in the first place. Then down to Colombo. Presumably she’ll then just pick up her original plan a few days later.”

  He rose to his feet and looked across the lawn towards Miss White’s bungalow. “I’ll go and see her.”

  She rose too. “I’ll come with you.”

  He shook his head. “No. You stay. I’ll just be a minute. It’s probably easier for me . . .”

  But why? She did not understand why it should be easier for him to talk to Miss White. She opened her mouth to say something, but he had reached the steps down from the veranda and was on his way. She watched him for a few moments as he strode across the lawn, and then she turned and went into the house, into the corridor, with its cool air and its dark silences. She passed the open door of the living room and saw a letter lying on her writing table. She needed to address the envelope and look for a stamp, and she did this now. Drifting down the corridor there came the sound of Bella singing in her room. Virginia loved that and listened now to the song that Miss White had taught Bella when she had first arrived, ‘Sur le Pont d’Avignon’. It had rapidly become Be
lla’s favourite, and they heard it at odd times – from the garden, from the bathroom, from the schoolroom itself. Why did they dance on the Avignon bridge? She had once almost come to the point of asking Miss White that but had not done so in the end, afraid of being shown up as ignorant. It might be that everyone knew why this was and that she, alone, was puzzled. She did not want to give Miss White that opportunity to parade her superior education. “Why do they dance? But don’t you know that they always danced on that bridge in Avignon?”

  She went into the living room. Henry called it the drawing room; she did that too, when talking to him, but otherwise referred to it as the living room. He said, “You don’t need euphemisms, you know” – and laughed. “Or affectations,” she replied. “This is a bungalow.” He came from a slightly higher echelon of society than she did, although she thought, in her heart, that these divisions were irrelevant – and unkind. We are all simply walking bags of organs, she said to herself. Heart, lungs, miles of piping – larger, and more ruthlessly calculating, versions of the monkeys that infested the trees at the edge of the lawn – and yet we clothed ourselves in gradations and niceties and superstitions about how you did what. There was a woman at the club who was the niece of a man who had been knighted for donations to a political party, and who thought, quite seriously, that this made her somehow better than the rest of them. The absurdity of this amused Virginia but seemed to escape others, who deferred to her sense of her own superiority.

  She sat down at her desk and reached for the fountain pen she had left lying on a large square of blotting paper. She noticed that she had forgotten to replace the cap, and this meant that the ink would have dried in the nib. She would probably have to run it under the tap for a second or two to dislodge the coagulation – if ink actually coagulates, she thought, or was it only blood that did that?

  And she was thinking that when she heard the shot. It was quick and sharp, but it brought with it what seemed like a brief and tiny echo. And then silence.