Breakfast with the Nikolides

by Rumer Godden

  I see you, Mother. I cannot help it. Everything I know, I know from you. You have been there as long as I can remember. As soon as I come near you I am stupid and stiff and I cannot think properly and I cannot say even what I think. I can arrange words clearly in my mind so that they would astonish you, and as soon as I come to you to tell them, I cannot say any of them; but perhaps I am not quite as stupid over this as I used to be. You are so beautiful, so utterly quick and clever; your eyes are dark and your lashes make them look darker still and very very large, but I have discovered something: they are not as big as we think and they move quickly like a bird’s; birds’ eyes have no lashes and if yours had none, they would be exactly like a bird’s, and your fingers are like your eyes, quick and busy … Her mind broke into panic … Mother, please be still. Don’t do anything, don’t let anything happen here!… And she grew angry … I am warning you, Mother. I see you. One day, you will do more than you mean …

  ‘There they are,’ said Binnie, and on the edge of the jetty they could see far-away figures standing and waiting. ‘I should be jumping up and down,’ said Binnie, and she added, ‘but of course the Nikolides don’t jump if they can help it.’

  Emily straightened herself … I shall not think now. If anything has happened it can wait … And replacing Louise in her mind came the figures of three little monkeys that Charles had given her. ‘They are Japanese,’ said Charles. ‘Sensible people have them all over the world, not to emulate altogether, but there are times when it’s good to be like them.’ ‘See nothing, hear nothing, say nothing,’ said the monkeys, and as Emily thought of them Louise seemed to dwindle back across the water; and the jetty and the Nikolides grew every moment larger and more clear.

  Louise that very second was thinking of Emily … I see you too. I see you, Emily. You always do all you possibly can to upset me. All this trouble has come from you and Charles. What did I say? What did I beg? ‘Don’t give Emily a dog. Don’t take Don into the bazaar.’ You never listen to me – you never think of me. When you went this morning you pushed and rushed into the car. You did not say goodbye to me like Binnie. You did not wave and smile. That was so like you. You forgot all about me. You forgot all about Don.

  Don was shut up where you could not hear him cry. I need not have bothered. You never asked for Don. All that you thought of was yourself. You see I am right; I know you and I can turn your thoughts like the wind on a paper streamer … And suddenly, into Louise’s mind came a remembrance like a prick. Was she so sure? She remembered something that Emily had said a day or two ago. ‘Mother, if I have two children, do you know what I’m going to call them? Willy and Nilly, Mother. Isn’t that a good name for two children like us?’

  Emily could not have thought of that for herself; it must have been coincidence – or Charles. She could not have thought that for herself …

  You have not improved, Emily, since I brought you out. You have gone unbecomingly sallow and you have grown too much, outgrown grace like a weed, though you have never been pretty like Binnie. You have a long face, not like a little girl’s, with flattened cheekbones that give your eyes a slant as if you were keeping a secret, and usually you are; you are deceitful and you have a way of keeping your elbows out defensively, and you are very very obstinate and you are one continual worry about your health. You looked well yesterday, today you are suddenly more sallow than ever. I have bought you so many ribbons for your hair, I like it plaited and turned up in coils, it makes your face look longer to have it hanging down like that; it is so fair and so limp it looks quite greenish, and when you shut your eyes it gives you the look of a girl that is drowned; it makes my heart turn over. But I am foolish to agonize over you, Emily. You think of nothing and no one but yourself. It is strange that I should have so insensitive a child. I am foolish to save your feelings, you have none to save … A brisk stir filled Louise … She has gone, gone to breakfast with the Nikolides; she took that without one question. When she comes back it will all be over, and she will never know what has come near her … And dramatically Louise cried: This threat will have been wiped out of their lives!… And then a small, familiar worry nagged her … ‘I hope you will be careful what you eat, Emily. I have had to leave that to you. Charles is so odd, he refused to let me warn Mrs Nikolides about your stomach.’

  ‘You shall not shame Emily like that,’ said Charles.

  ‘Don’t be absurd. You know how greedy she is. She will eat anything, and then she will be upset.’

  ‘Better to upset her stomach and save her face,’ said Charles.

  ‘We saw you from the distance,’ said Jason as the launch touched the jetty. ‘How do you do, Emily? How do you do, Binnie? What a long time you have taken in getting here!’

  ‘How do you do? How do you do?’ said Alexandra gravely. ‘No, you are not late. It’s half-past ten. You are just in time for breakfast.’

  ‘What is there for breakfast?’ asked Binnie as she stepped ashore.

  There would be queer, rather greasy things for the breakfast that the Nikolides had at this enchanting hour; perhaps mulligatawny soup with rice, fish balls, stewed fruit and cake. Emily knew with certainty what would befall her later in the day. Never mind, ‘See nothing, hear nothing, say nothing.’

  A warm wind blew down the Nikolides’ garden, bringing the smell not of breakfast, but of scent from the flowers on the row of trees that were champac trees – queer bare thick polished branches, no leaves and white chiselled cups of flowers touched with gold, as strange and exotic as the Nikolides themselves. Through the cracks in the jetty the water looked miraculously, clearly green, and Emily’s stomach gave a delicious little rumble.

  First Binnie, then Emily, then Shah, passed inside the house to breakfast with the Nikolides.

  V

  The telephone rang in the Das house while Narayan was dressing; he called, ‘Shila, answer that.’

  Shila was dusting the study and when Narayan called she stayed there, rooted by his desk, the duster in her hand and a piteous expression on her face. The bell continued to ring. ‘Shila. Shila, where are you? Answer the phone.’

  She took one step towards it and, as if it knew she was coming, it gave another peremptory ring. ‘Shila!’

  In a rush she took the receiver off and held it. There was a prolonged silence. Narayan came in fastening his collar. ‘Well, who is it?’

  She shook her head and offered him the receiver.

  ‘Who? Who is speaking?’

  ‘I – don’t know.’

  ‘You have taken if off and you have not answered it? What is the matter with you? Are you dumb? Are you mad?… What have you been doing?’

  ‘I have … not listened to it … Indro.’

  ‘Why not? Why not? All this time we have had the telephone and you are still afraid of it. Other girls use the telephone, why not you? What is the matter with you?’ She twisted her fingers and said nothing, though her lips trembled.

  ‘Answer. Answer me,’ shouted Narayan. ‘How many times have I told you to answer me?’ He stopped, trying to control himself, and he said more gently, ‘You make me speak and behave to you in a way I have sworn not to speak or behave. Why are you afraid to answer the telephone, Shila?’

  ‘Suppose – suppose it should be – Mr Pool.’

  ‘And if it is – you can speak to him as well as I. Why should it be Mr Pool? He has never telephoned me here, and at this hour he goes riding.’

  ‘Suppose he did not go. Suppose he has come back.’

  ‘Suppose! Suppose! I tell you, it won’t be Mr Pool. Answer it at once.’

  From the telephone impatient buzzing noises were coming; her eyes bright with tears, Shila held the receiver up and whispered down it, ‘Ah?’

  ‘Louder. Much more louder than that.’

  ‘Ah?’

  Narayan heard a second voice. It sounded impatient.

  ‘Ah?’

  The voice went on, a long speech, and her eyes slid to Narayan in anguish. ‘Ah?’


  ‘Oh, give it to me,’ cried Narayan and seized it out of her hand. ‘Who is it? Who is it?’ he barked.

  ‘It – it is Mr Pool … Indro.’

  He was intensely irritated. ‘And he will think I’m married to a fool,’ he cried bitterly. ‘You do not try, you do not care. You do nothing for me that I ask you. What use are you to me?’ He turned his back on her and said, ‘Good morning, Mr Pool. I am sorry I have kept you; my wife is an ignorant girl and not accustomed yet to answer the telephone.’

  Shamed to the quick Shila stood behind him; her head was bowed and her hands pressed together in an effort not to cry, but in spite of that two lines of tears slid down her cheeks and dropped on to her skirts; she was wearing a sari of white, dotted in a pattern of green; and between the green flowers the teardrops fell and shone for a moment and sank away into the muslin. Narayan turned his head to make a note and she quickly bowed her head still lower and made the quick age-old gesture of drawing her sari across her face so that he should not see it, and ran out of the room; he heard her crying break as soon as she was outside the door.

  He could not wait, he had to answer Charles’s call, and he hurried off on his bicycle – but as he went, the sound of his voice, not Shila’s, came back to his ears; and it sounded unnecessarily violent and a little pedantic, and from that violence came a sense of shame: he felt jarred, out of content, and though he tried to blame Shila the blame fastened on him and the sound of his angry voice seemed to follow him as he rode along the road. ‘A woman’s tears in the morning bring bad luck.’ That was superstition, told by old women like Tarala; but he almost turned and rode back to tell Shila – What could he tell her? Only that he was sorry and she would not understand that; she thought only that she had offended and that his right to punish was divine; besides, Charles had already been kept waiting and Narayan bicycled on, though he knew it would not have been necessary to say a word: to go back was enough … Later, later. I will comfort her later, said Narayan, and turned in through the Pools’ gate.

  He was riding up the drive where the poinsettias dipped their scarlet beads when Charles, riding the little mare, passed him almost at a gallop and flashed out of the gate with nothing to show they had gone but a cloud of dust and kicked gravel, the servants who had run out of the house at the noise, and the noise of hoof-beats dying away on the road.

  ‘What in the world?’ cried Narayan, who had fallen off his bicycle. He was furious. ‘He nearly rode me down. I shall certainly go away.’ He did not mean that; he was far too curious, and when the servants salaamed him with a civility that came from important happenings, he followed them at once to the stables. ‘What is up? Something is very much up.’ He was ushered through the stables to a loose-box, and there was Mrs Pool in tears.

  This morning will never pass, Louise had said dramatically … Days may be all the same in the sight of God but for us some are over before they have come, some go on for ever; the days of misery and suspense go on, days like this …

  (And interrupting her was a voice that was like Charles’s, like all the unsympathetic people in the world: ‘You invented a dream for yourself …’)

  (‘I did not invent it. I dreamt it.’)

  (‘You invented a dream for yourself’ said the inexorable voice. ‘Take care. You started more than you knew.’)

  (‘I can’t stop it. I can’t stop it!’ screamed Louise.)

  (‘You could have stopped it. Why didn’t you look at the rider’s face?’)

  Louise shut her eyes and her ears and turned her head away …

  She was in the long line of stables behind the house where Delilah and a Bhutia pony and the pigeons lived. In an empty stall Don lay on the floor and Louise watched beside him, and Charles stayed there watching Louise. ‘Why don’t you go away,’ said Charles, ‘and leave the poor little brute alone?’

  ‘I want to be sure.’

  ‘You have made up your mind already. Why do you have to pretend?’

  She did not deny it and he could have predicted the justification she made – ‘With children we must not take the faintest risk.’

  ‘Not we – you,’ said Charles. ‘I will take risks – in proportion – even for them. But you have no sense of proportion. You won’t; not if Don and I and everyone in Amorra have to die for it.’

  ‘Oh, why don’t you go away?’ cried Louise.

  Why did he stay? Why did he stay there, still and gloomy, watching her? The truth was that it was no good Charles going away; in the day and in the night and the next day and every day Charles was conscious of Louise and Louise was conscious of Charles.

  In the evening he worked late in his office and he could hear Louise in the drawing-room above; her heels made a tattoo on the stone floor, a tattoo that filtered down through the thick ceiling so lightly that he had to listen for it. He listened for her playing too, and it was either so restless or so passionate that it was infuriating; she played too softly, beginning something, wandering off into something else, or else she filled the whole house with a torrent of sound.

  ‘Surely Mrs Pool plays the piano a great deal,’ said the resident professors in the evening. ‘Is Mr Pool so fond of music?’ asked another. The students laughed and said, ‘She gets from the piano what she can’t get from Charlie.’ There were rude rumours current in the College because Charles had lived eight years in Amorra and kept alone.

  In the evenings when he came upstairs he would not find Louise playing; she was silent, usually embroidering a small canvas on a frame. Charles hated fine useless work.

  ‘That is bad for your eyes, and for you. It’s too fine.’

  ‘I don’t find it fine.’

  It gave her hands something to do. Charles smoked cigarettes which he disliked and poured out drinks. Each time he touched the bottles on the tray he saw her watching.

  ‘I don’t get drunk, you know,’ said Charles. ‘That wasn’t one of my failings.’

  Louise did not answer; her needle went a little more quickly in and out.

  ‘Don’t say you have forgotten.’

  She lifted her head and said with the direct intentness of a little coiled snake, ‘I shall never forget.’

  But Charles was not stung. He smiled and looked down at her easily, as if she were a small, pretty thing, harmless to him. She was very pretty; she was dressed as if it might have been a party, her wide spreading skirts were chiffon, dead-leaf brown with a tinge of squirrel colour in the folds, and the brilliant colour of her hair with its knot shadowing her neck made her skin look cream and warm, and she wore two studs of earrings, tortoiseshell, that had all the colours of her dress, her eyes, her hair. ‘You always did know how to dress, didn’t you?’ said Charles.

  Her look was almost a glare and he laughed and said: ‘Don’t be afraid. I mean nothing more than I say. I do admire – the dress.’

  The evenings passed in silence and constraint until one night when Charles came up in an old pair of shorts stained with oil and chemicals and a shirt frayed, with all its buttons gone, and bare legs, native sandals and an old checked coat.

  Louise stared. ‘I’m not going to dine with you like that.’

  ‘I fail to see your objection.’

  ‘In those clothes—’

  ‘I put them on to match you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You put on your worst mind to dine with me,’ said Charles mildly, ‘so I put on my worst clothes to dine with you.’

  She gave in with a sudden grace, and on the rare occasions that Louise chose to do that she could be very graceful indeed; and she found, now that she had allowed herself to talk to Charles, that it was a relief, it was even a pleasure; the evenings wound away smoothly with sudden little surprises of unexpected thought, like islands in a river. Charles was unusual, Louise found herself remembering and thinking of the things he said. He had changed; he was courteous and cultured; and another question came up in her mind with the uneasiness of one of Emily’s pricks – had C
harles always been courteous and cultured? Could it be – Louise who had changed?

  I think about him because I am homesick and lonely, she told herself. It is because he is the only person here – that makes him seem important … Louise, quite naturally, did not count eleven thousand Indians. To her an Indian was not a person. She tried not to think of Charles, but she was so much alone. Everyone else in Amorra seemed to lead a teeming busy life; Charles had his work; the children had their lessons, and for the rest of the day they were curiously absent. They had always some perfect plan of their own and, even when they were with her, they talked of things she could not talk of. They were immersed in their own occupations, trust Emily for that, and Louise was left alone.

  Charles had a picture in the drawing-room, a new one that she had not seen; it was the Chinese, of flake-white pigeons on a green background the colour of poppy stems. Most Chinese pictures are still, but this was full of movement, full of white wings beating upon the green, beating out of the picture … Does Charles know the feeling of that? asked Louise. Is that why he bought it?… She would look at it with her hands pressed down on the keys of the piano, staring at it while the notes, held down, vibrated on and on until the room was full of them; they would not escape until they died, and the pigeons could not escape however they beat their wings. Did Charles feel that? No, probably not.