The Pavilion in the Clouds

by Alexander McCall Smith

There was a screeching of monkeys from the trees outside. It was as if they were scandalised.

  She pushed the chair out from behind her. It toppled over. Bella came running up the corridor. Virginia gasped. Bella stood in the door. She had Li Po in her right hand. He was being held by his arm – his good arm – but he was twisted and was gazing intently at the floor.

  Bella looked at her as if expecting her mother to explain what had happened. Then she said, “Has Daddy shot a monkey? Has he?”

  14

  It Was an Accident, Nothing More

  B y the time Virginia reached the veranda, Henry was striding across the lawn towards the bungalow. He waved a hand, half in greeting, half in a gesture that said, Don’t worry. She watched him and was aware that Bella had wrapped her arms around her waist. She bent down and patted her on the shoulder, not sure what to say, but then deciding, “Daddy’s all right, darling. See. See Daddy.”

  Now he reached them, and he was smiling. “Nothing to worry about. Alles in Ordnung.” He sometimes said alles in Ordnung to make them laugh. It was a pet expression that he had picked up from a man who had worked for years on the family farm in the Borders. He had been captured by the Germans in 1916 and had taken two years to learn his few words of German. “That was the only German he picked up,” Henry said. “He was not a great linguist.”

  She began to speak. Her voice sounded too high-pitched. She swallowed, and started again. “What happened?”

  He glanced down at Bella, and then back at his wife. “Nothing happened. Nothing.”

  Bella let go of Virginia. “Did you shoot something?”

  He shook his head. “Oh, that. No, that wasn’t me shooting anything.” He tried to laugh, but Virginia could tell that he was tense, and the laugh withered on the vine.

  “It was an accident,” he said.

  She closed her eyes. This was simply not happening. He had shot her. Henry had shot Miss White and was claiming it was an accident.

  He was addressing her. “Virginia? Are you . . . Darling, nothing’s happened. Everybody’s fine.”

  She opened her eyes once again. She saw Li Po staring up at her. Chinese poets had seen worse than this; they saw some terrible things up in the mountains, in their exile.

  “Yes,” he said, reaching forward to tousle Bella’s hair. “Miss White was putting her revolver away, and it went off. She needs to learn about safety catches, I fear.”

  Virginia breathed a sigh of relief. “You see,” she said to Bella. “Everything’s all right. Daddy didn’t shoot one of the poor monkeys.”

  He laughed now, more credibly. “Not that they don’t deserve it – some of those are rascals.”

  She saw him put a hand into his pocket, and she suddenly realised that he was concealing the revolver. He noticed the direction of her gaze and said, “I’m looking after it for her.”

  Bella asked, “Is that Miss White’s gun?”

  “It is,” he said. “She won’t be needing it in Colombo, will she? You don’t need a gun in Colombo.”

  And at this point Miss White came out onto her veranda.

  “There she is,” said Henry. “She said she was going to go for a walk before lunch.”

  Virginia looked across the lawn. The governess was standing by her front door, staring across the lawn. Virginia raised a hand to wave, but Miss White turned round and went back inside, as might one who was in a sulk.

  “Go and wash your hands for lunch,” Henry said to Bella. “Go on, now. You don’t want to eat your lunch with dirty hands.”

  Bella obeyed, although reluctantly. She glanced at her father as she did so, a glance of reproach. He smiled back at her, pretending not to notice.

  Virginia stayed with Henry. As soon as Bella had gone, she whispered to him, “What happened?”

  “I told you,” he said. “The revolver went off accidentally. These things . . . These things happen.”

  She stared at him. “Henry, are you telling me the truth?”

  This might have been expected to anger him, but he simply answered, “Of course I am. Are you suggesting that she tried to shoot me? Is that what you’re saying?”

  She did not know what to say. She was suggesting that, unless . . . She hardly dared imagine the alternative.

  “I’ll tell you exactly what happened,” said Henry. “I knocked on the door, and I thought I heard her say come in. I thought I did. Perhaps I didn’t – I don’t know. Sometimes you think you hear things that you don’t actually hear.”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, there you are. I went in, and she was standing next to a suitcase that she had put on her sofa. She was packing things away. She turned round. She had some clothing in her hands, I think – I didn’t pay much attention to it, though, and then the gun went off. It was a terrible shock. I wasn’t expecting it.”

  “No.” It was all she could think of to say.

  “She was as surprised as I was, I think. She screamed, and I thought, Oh, my God, she’s shot herself. But then she was still standing, and I realised that it had been fired accidentally. I said something to her. I don’t know what it was. I probably said, You stupid woman or something like that. That was what I was thinking, I’m afraid; I don’t know. Maybe not. But I went up to the case and took the gun. It was lying on a cardigan. I took it, you see, because I thought that if you don’t know how to operate a safety catch, then you have no business having a weapon in your possession. Basic stuff. I told her that I was going to put it in the safe up at the office.”

  He stopped. Suddenly he looked shocked, and she realised that the calm demeanour had been a front. As he looked at her, his lip quivered slightly. One would not have noticed it if one was not looking for it, but she did see it now, and she put her arms around him.

  “My poor darling. What a . . . What a shock. A shock for you.”

  “Nothing,” he said. “All over now. All over.” He nodded and then moved away from her, freeing himself of her embrace. “We need to have lunch,” he said, and then added, “After these events I find I have a bit of an appetite.”

  He still had his hand in his pocket, holding the revolver.

  “You must put that thing away,” she said.

  He looked down. “Of course. I’ll go and lock it up.”

  He turned round, and she made her way into the dining room, where she rang a bell. Michael appeared.

  “Soup is ready,” he said.

  “Good.”

  He lingered before going back into the kitchen, and she realised that he was hoping for some explanation.

  “There was an accident,” she said. “Nothing bad. A gun went off by mistake. Miss White’s gun. Nobody has been hurt.”

  He nodded. “Guns no good,” he muttered.

  “No. No good at all.” And as he left, she added, “I hope the soup is not too spicy, Michael.”

  It would be, she thought; of course it would be too spicy. But the cook simply grinned and said with complete sincerity, “No, no. Not too spicy. Just right, Lady.”

  Part II

  In Scotland, in 1952

  1

  Matthew Arnold

  B ella enrolled in the University of St Andrews in 1949, at the age of nineteen, moving into a shared room in Wardlaw, part of University Hall, where woman undergraduates had lived since the late nineteenth century. Wardlaw was a Scots baronial mansion, a building of turrets and castellations, a place of winding staircases and impractical spaces. The students were tucked into sparsely furnished rooms that were too cold in the winter and too windy in the summer. Each had two small desks, a shared wardrobe, and two uncomfortable single beds. They were softened by the cushions that the students brought with them from home, and by the rugs they purchased from a soft-furnishings store in the town.

  On her second day in the university, Bella sat at her desk, writing her name in the books she had ordered from the bookshop in South Street, and paging through the synopses of the courses for which she had enrolled. Later that day
she was to attend a lecture on Matthew Arnold. Her roommate, Anne, who was studying French, was to have her first language class.

  Anne, who was English and had been brought up in London, said to her, “So you’ve lived all your life in Edinburgh?”

  Bella shook her head. “No. Most of it, though, I suppose. Since I was nine.”

  “And before that?”

  Bella put down the copy of Chambers Dictionary in which she had just inscribed her name. “Before that I lived in Ceylon. I came back to go to school here in Scotland.” She re-opened the Chambers and ran a finger down the list of words. “Gressorial,” she read. “You don’t know what that is, I imagine.”

  Anne smiled. “And neither did you – until a moment ago.”

  “True. Adapted for walking, apparently. It says here it’s a zoological term.”

  Anne looked out of the window. “It’s much colder here than in London. I don’t know if I’ve brought enough woollens. My mother warned me.” She turned to look at Bella. “Did yours?”

  “Did mine what?”

  “Did your mother fuss around like a broody hen? Did she tell you what you should bring with you to university?”

  Bella stared at the page of Chambers.

  The silence lasted long enough for Anne to realise her mistake. She reddened. “I’m sorry,” she stuttered. “Your mother isn’t . . . dead, is she? I’m really sorry if I’ve . . .”

  Bella looked up from the dictionary. “You weren’t to know. Don’t worry, anyway. It was quite a long time ago – during the War. 1942.”

  Anne lowered her voice. “I see. We knew lots of people who died in the Blitz. I had an aunt who was killed. And a cousin too.”

  “It was nothing to do with that,” said Bella. “Nothing to do with London. They were still in Ceylon. I was sent back in 1939, just before the War, and they stayed.”

  “So you came back all by yourself?”

  “With a friend of my mother’s. Then I went to my aunt.”

  “And your parents?”

  “They were meant to come a little later – my father was selling the tea estate, you see, but the sale fell through because of the War.”

  “It changed everybody’s lives. My father never really got over it. He’s somewhere . . .” She waved a hand airily. “He’s somewhere in the desert still. In North Africa. Not physically, of course, but inside him. He talks about it all the time.”

  Bella said that she supposed it was a big thing for everybody. “If you thought you were going to die, then life must have been . . . Well, I can’t imagine what it must have been like.”

  Anne looked grave. “He cries sometimes. I’ve seen him. When he has whisky, usually.” She smiled. “I suppose that’s understandable.”

  Bella continued with her story. “They had to stay, you see – my parents – and they were still there when the Japanese bombed Ceylon.”

  Anne winced. “Oh no . . .”

  “It was my parents’ bad luck that they had gone down to Colombo to see some friends just a day or two before the Japanese raid. The house they were staying in took a direct hit.”

  Anne watched her. “I’m really sorry.”

  “Thank you. I suppose they didn’t know anything about it.”

  “And you were back here?”

  “Yes, in Edinburgh. I was staying with an aunt. She lives there. I was already in school, and so I carried on with that. My aunt became my guardian. She was kind to me – she still is.”

  Anne looked down at her hands. “But I imagine it’s not the same – not quite the same thing . . .” She stopped herself once more, appalled at her own lack of tact. “I mean . . .”

  “I loved Ceylon,” said Bella.

  Relieved, Anne said, “I know somebody who lived in India. Same thing, more or less, isn’t it? She came back to this country – well, England, I suppose, not Scotland, for school. She was always talking about India and the things she did there. She missed it.”

  “I did. I cried for days when I first came to Edinburgh. I was homesick, I suppose. Then I got used to it, and the memory of what my life had been like there faded. And after my parents died, I put it out of my mind, really.”

  Anne waited for her to say more, but Bella became silent. Then she said, “Now this.”

  “You mean St Andrews?”

  Bella nodded. “Yes.”

  Anne had been lying on her bed as they talked. Now she stood up. “I’m determined to be happy. I’m determined.”

  “Me too.”

  “And find a boyfriend.”

  Bella laughed. “Me too.”

  “Not any old boyfriend, of course.”

  “Of course not.”

  Anne noticed something. She pointed to the small bookcase that Bella had beside her desk on the other side of the room. On the bottom shelf were Li Po and Po Chü-i.

  “Have you just put those there? Those dolls?”

  Bella smiled. “They were in my trunk. I’ve had them all my life. I thought that would be a good place for them.”

  “They’re lovely. They really are.”

  “Thank you.”

  “They’re good enough to be in a museum.”

  “Perhaps. But I’d never give them away. Never.”

  “Of course not.”

  She went to her lecture on Arnold, the first in the course in Victorian literature which she had chosen from the limited list on offer. There would be three lectures a week, they were told, and a tutorial in a small group of six students and a tutor. Her tutor was to be an Australian in his late twenties, who had completed a doctorate in Cambridge. He had been offered a chair in Melbourne, rumour had it, or if not an actual chair, a position that could in a short time become a chair. “He knows everything there is to know about Coleridge. He’s writing a book on him. Two books, in fact.” That was what the students who had been tutored by him the previous year said amongst themselves. Bella was prepared to be in awe of him but was immediately struck by his conceit. His gaze rested on her, and lingered, but she turned away.

  The professor in charge of the course was the author of a book on Wordsworth she had seen displayed in the university bookshop under a Highly Recommended sign. She had toyed with the idea of buying it, and had almost done so, but had been put off by the price and the density of the text. But now he was standing before them, at the podium, in his black gown, a man in his sixties somewhere, she thought, slightly stooped, in a scholarly way, and beginning to address them on the questioning of faith that followed Darwin’s discoveries.

  “It’s all in ‘Dover Beach’,” he said. “Which, I take it, most, if not all of you, have read.” He paused, smiling wryly. “Or perhaps not. One should never assume that the people to whom one is talking are of the same mind as oneself. And of course, when I use the term of the same mind I mean not only of the same opinion, but having, so to speak, the same furniture in their mind.”

  There was a ripple of laughter. The young man seated next to Bella adjusted his tie nervously. He whispered to her, “I’ve read nothing. Nothing at all. Have you read this ‘Dover Beach’ thing?”

  She nodded. She had read it in her English class in her final year at school in Edinburgh. The English teacher loved Arnold and made them read the poem aloud, pausing to discuss what each line meant.

  “I’m so ignorant,” said the young man, behind a cupped hand.

  “We all are,” she whispered back. “That’s why we’ve come to university.”

  “The central notion,” the professor continued, “is that there is – or was – a sea of faith that girdled the world. It was the guiding principle, the thing that kept humanity together – not that humanity was really together in the sense of being in some sort of voluntary association. Guiding principles – whether or not they be faiths – have a habit of keeping people down rather than together – if I make my meaning clear.

  “The building was a massive one – a whole construction of assumptions and conventions: a vast roof, like the roof
of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, under which variety and difference and experience of every persuasion was gathered, and made subservient. An unruly, awkward world, with all its cruelties and darkness, was subsumed under this overarching system of belief in the perfectibility of mankind. Imagine that. My metaphor is an architectural one; Arnold, though, was using metaphors of the natural world – the movement of tides, light, darkness. And then, suddenly, the sea withdraws – the poet hears it – and the lonely, rocky shore is exposed. The sea of faith might normally cover that, but now it seems to have withdrawn, and in its place there is emptiness and doubt.

  “Arnold, you see, was well ahead of his time – preternaturally so. He predicted what we would come to feel in the twentieth century when we reached the unsettling conclusion that in the absence of faith we are on our own and that there are no reassuring and authoritative answers – no single set of beliefs that can make sense of it all. The dissolution of empires, both spiritual and temporal, was what followed from that. Faith was a luxury that only the determined, the inventive and the irretrievably ignorant could afford: for the rest of us, there was the loneliness of doubt or the bleak knowledge that there was no ultimate justice, no irrefutable right and wrong, no graspable meaning in a random and sometimes uncomfortable universe.”

  She glanced at the young man beside her. He smiled back at her. “You see,” he whispered.

  She wrote to her aunt in Edinburgh every week, telling her about the lectures she attended, about the chaperoned tea parties in University Hall, about Anne’s description of her language classes. Her aunt wrote back once a month, usually on a postcard, telling her that life in Edinburgh was very dull without her and were it not for her membership of her Highland Fiddle Orchestra, a collection of almost fifty amateur fiddlers devoted to playing Scottish music, there would be little to write about.

  Then at the end of her first month in St Andrews, Bella wrote:

  I must tell you about a discovery I have made. It was very surprising for me – something I should, perhaps, have been aware of, but that I had simply not thought of. You must know the sort of thing I’m talking about. Something that is right under your nose and that you should discover, but that you don’t.