by Rumer Godden
‘Yes. You are so great, Edward,’ pleaded Alix, ‘but what is the use of being great if you are cruel?’
‘I’m not great – but cruel …’ He seemed to have to say it again to make it believable. Srimati Roy’s words were in his ears – ‘Aie! Why make dirt, Sir Edward?’ – and for a moment he seemed to hear the serene lapping of the river. ‘But what are we to do?’ he asked, bewildered. ‘What else can I do?’
‘Wait.’
‘Then it may be too late.’
‘If it is … my mother would say,’ said Alix, ‘that to interfere with this is sin.’
‘Your mother!’ The momentary softening had stopped abruptly and the contempt in his voice made Alix’s temper flare.
‘How dare you speak of Mumma like that? She knows things you don’t, things I had forgotten.’
‘Only what you were taught.’
‘Taught and believed.’
‘Mumbo-jumbo.’ Edward almost shouted it but Alix was suddenly quiet and dignified as she said, ‘Mumbo-jumbo is what you hear from outside and do not believe. What you feel in you is true. My God, I ought to know.’
‘Oh Alix!’ Una stole to her and Alix put an arm round her.
‘It’s difficult for you to understand, Edward,’ Alix went on, ‘because you have never been what they call “bad”.’
‘Nonsense. Of course I have.’
‘You haven’t. I know – and that is what makes you so harsh.’
‘Harsh? Cruel? What other epithets have you for me?’ But Alix was steady.
‘Not harsh with other people, but Una is you.’
That touched him. ‘I thought she was,’ he said slowly, ‘but not now. Not for a long time – only I hadn’t the wit to see it. I don’t know whose fault that is.’ As Edward said it, he remembered his own admission to Srimati Roy, ‘I have made Una suffer.’ Yet it was the very sight of her suffering, so worn, tormented and dishevelled, that pushed him into harshness again as he turned on Alix: ‘Are you trying to tell me I should let a child, an unfortunate misguided child, bear a half-caste bastard?’
‘You’re not to call him that.’ It was another shriek from Una.
‘That’s what it would be – another little unwanted.’
‘He isn’t unwanted. I want him. I want him.’
‘Don’t scream at me.’
‘I will!’ But Una lowered her tone in helpless misery. ‘Hem said you would do this.’
‘Hem was right.’
‘That’s why we upset all our plans. We had meant to tell you everything, after the Tagore Prize, when Ravi had won it. We had it all planned … then we knew this … Hem advised us to hide, that’s why we ran away, but I still didn’t dream you would—’
‘Then you ought to have dreamt.’ Edward caught himself up and spoke quietly. ‘You mustn’t be hysterical, Una. This – is done every day – thousands of times a day, because it is sense. It won’t even hurt you.’
‘Hurt me. Kill my baby and it won’t hurt me!’
‘Think straight. It isn’t a baby yet – just an embryo.’
‘It’s you who should think,’ Una hurled at him. ‘An embryo is a baby. I ought to know. He is in me. He is mine and you are not to touch him. Not to touch him.’
‘That’s enough. I will ring Doctor Gottlieb myself.’
‘I think this must be the first time in my life,’ said Alix, ‘that I have acted against my own interest. It’s a new feeling,’ but her smile was wan.
‘What can he do to you?’ asked Una.
‘I suppose put me away.’ For all her capability, her seeming sophistication, Alix’s attitude to her marriage with Edward was that of the simplest Indian wife.
‘Listen – he is on the telephone.’ Una’s very skin seemed to creep with fear but ‘Colonel Jaiswal?’ Edward was saying. ‘Forgive me for disturbing you, but could you have some of your men posted here tonight?’
‘Has something further happened?’
‘Nothing. Perhaps I am nervous but …’
‘The men are posted. I thought it possible there might have been a bazaar leak to some of Bhattacharya’s old friends, someone in the Praja Swaraj hear a distorted story and so come to take revenge. Have you any such suspicion?’
‘Not of them but – there’s no one I can trust.’
‘He means me,’ whispered Alix. ‘But at least he isn’t telephoning Doctor Gottlieb.’
‘A guard outside my daughter’s room – both doors.’
‘So I can’t run away again,’ whispered Una.
‘That wouldn’t be wise. They would only catch you – but you have been so brave, be brave still. Soon he will be less angry – already he has wavered, poor Edward. Perhaps he may not insist—’
‘But how not?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Alix, ‘but wait. Go to your room now and I will bring you a hot drink. Edward’s guards will at least let me do that. Then, in the morning …’
‘In the morning Una will go into Gottlieb’s nursing home.’ Edward had come back. ‘I am sorry if I am harsh and cruel but it is the only sense. We’re all too tired and distressed to talk any more, so, Alix, you had better not see Una again. Come, Una, I will take you to bed.’
‘I will take myself,’ but she stopped at the door. ‘Ravi was the peacock.’ It was a whisper, but it filled the drawing room. ‘He was proud and innocent.’
‘Innocent!’
‘Yes, innocent – until you made him perjure himself,’ and Edward knew he had heard her use, or misuse, that word before.
‘We had made a beautiful holy thing,’ said Una, ‘until you touched it. You didn’t want me to watch the monkeys. You didn’t even like the servants watching them or to have them near the house, but you have made us, Ravi and me, into monkeys – helpless, public. You said the monkey man ought to be prosecuted. I think so too. Goodnight, Mister Monkey Man.’
There was silence in the room after she had gone. Alix sat with bowed head as if she were ashamed – for me, thought Edward. He went to the piano and leaned against it, his eyes closed. ‘Harsh’, ‘cruel’ … he could repel those, but ‘monkey man’. Una called me ‘monkey man’ – and it fits, thought Edward; everything and everyone seemed shut out by the rattling of that evil little drum and, Hideous, thought Edward, I have been hideous.
Then a voice broke through to him. ‘Edward, come here.’ It might have been Mrs Lamont’s voice, it was so warm with compassion. ‘Edward, come here to me,’ said Alix, and Edward came.
Una stood in the little muslined bedroom she had so joyously discarded – was it only three days ago? It was not yet three days. Here she was back, but it was she, Una, who was discarded now. Ram had come in with a tray of milk and sandwiches – Ram, not Alix. Perhaps he had been moved with pity, because he said, ‘Eat, Baba … or drink.’
Eat … drink … go to bed … in the morning … The commands made no impression. Nothing will make an impression any more, thought Una. Then, at the bathroom door, she heard a muffled knock.
‘Ssh! It’s only Hem.’
For a moment a wild hope had stirred in Una, but Ravi was probably in Varanasi; even if he were not, he would not come now … only Hem. Una opened the bathroom door. ‘Hem!’
‘Ssh!’ Hem whispered. ‘The place is bristling with boots and turbans.’
‘Then how did you get here?’
‘They followed Miss Lamont – I beg pardon, Lady Gwithiam – and, of course, me. We were both trailed, most thor-ough-ly. I must say in this respect,’ said Hem, ‘I am not ashamed of my countrymen. After she left I went in the routine way to the medical centre, but it has perhaps fifty exits, if you count unorthodox ones known to us students. I slipped up to the roof, slid down a drainpipe – sometimes it is advantage to be dark-skinned – I then jumped down into a lorry filled with sacks. It obligingly drove away.’
‘Jumped? How far?’
‘Say, twenty feet.’
‘Hem! You might have been killed.’
‘No, I am that horse – ho
w is he called – the horse with wings?’
‘Pegasus. He is the poet’s horse.’
‘Poet’s donkey in this case.’ Hem laughed. ‘Then I came through our gap and hid in your sister’s empty room. Come inside the bathroom. They will not see us there.’
Una went in and closed the door.
‘I had to come,’ said Hem.
‘To find out about Ravi?’
‘Ravi! To find out about you.’
‘I am – in one piece,’ said Una.
‘Hush. Whisper.’
‘Tomorrow I won’t be,’ said Una. ‘Tomorrow Edward will do as you said.’
‘I am sorry.’
Una had started to shiver again and, ‘Now I have seen you are safe,’ said Hem, ‘I will go.’
‘Hem,’ said Una. ‘In Indian thought, a girl who isn’t married – and has made love – is a whore, isn’t she?’
‘I have a naniji too,’ said Hem, ‘who, if I said blasphemy – and I was a blasphemous boy – washed out my mouth with soap. We are in the bathroom. Do you want that I wash out yours?’
‘I think, Hem,’ said Una, ‘you are the only person in Delhi I want to see again.’
‘I must go,’ said Hem hastily, ‘but wait, this is yours,’ and he held out a book.
‘My Elementary Mechanics.’ Una looked at the forgotten book. ‘I won’t need it.’
‘You will.’
Una shook her head. ‘I have lost too much time.’
‘Poppycock,’ said Hem without sympathy. ‘I lost two years,’ and, Remember Mrs Porter’s little doll who wouldn’t lie down, thought Una. Hem was like that doll.
‘Hem,’ she said. ‘Will you tell me something? When they held that man down and threw acid into his eyes – Edward told me – it was Ravi who did it, wasn’t it?’
‘You should mind your own business,’ said Hem as he had said before.
‘It is my business.’
‘It was long ago. We were stupid boys.’
‘But you went to prison.’
‘It is fashionable to be a jailbird – and I was acquitted.’
‘After a time – probably a terrible time – and Ravi was hiding as a gardener.’ Her face was hard, ‘Do you know, Hem, why the peacock gives those terrible screams?’asked Una. ‘He has looked down and suddenly seen his feet. He had been so busy admiring his train that he had forgotten he had them.’
‘Una, don’t. Ravi is Ravi.’
‘Yes …’ and she lifted those eyes, grown older now but, for all their unhappiness, still as candid. ‘That is the wonder. Well, I suppose,’ she tried to shrug, ‘anyone can have a baby; very few can write a poem.’
Una was woken by a fierce cramp that made her whole body constrict. Have I got real dysentery? But it was followed by an aching pain that was familiar.
She was half-drugged with sleep. Had they put something in the milk that Ram had brought her? It had tasted of honey and Ram had stirred it as he put it down. She had thought she could not sleep, but sleep had come. Was Ravi in the room with his low chanted lullaby?
‘Nini, baba, nini
Roti …’
I shall sing it to my baby but I can’t remember the words. I must ask Ravi … but, of course, the hut was empty … empty. Half-drifted into sleep, Una thought there was moonlight in the room; it seemed there had been moonlight all through this strange other-world time; surely there had been a moon when Alix went with Vikram; moonlight when she, Una, had stolen out to Ravi – ‘Read me your poems …’ ‘Then you must come to my hut tonight …’; the garden was filled with their whispered voices – she remembered the Budh Purnima moon at Agra. Had there been a moon when she bathed in the Ganges at Varanasi, or was it the light from the ghat? I was so hot then. Now she was shivering, but was it from cold or pain? It was not a diarrhoea pain. Then why should she have it? I shouldn’t have this sort of pain, thought Una, not for six or seven months. I am dreaming.
It was no dream. With the next cramp she heard a noise that brought her to reality; the sound of boots as someone moved to the edge of the verandah, cleared his throat and spat. Edward’s melodramatic policeman! The moonlight was not from the moon but from the light left on for the guards on the verandah, and the scene in the drawing room seemed to come back. I screamed at Edward, thought Una, he shouted at me, then the pain was lost in the wonder of Alix. She, she, Alix/Miss Lamont, took my part. For Alix to lose her temper with Edward was unthinkable, yet she had lost it. They quarrelled, thought Una in wonder, and suddenly it was honest. Though Edward was furious now, he must respect Alix, something Una guessed he had not done before. When Edward isn’t angry, he is fair-minded, thought Una, but that will not save me; the anger would last well over the morning – when they are going to do … that … to me. That!
The cramp came again so that she rolled on the bed and had to bite her lip not to moan; then it went, leaving the pain, and now she knew why it was familiar.
She dragged herself up from the bed and pulled the curtains closer to shut out the policeman and the verandah. In the bathroom, she turned on the light; yes, there was a stain on her pyjamas and, as she looked, a trickle of red ran down inside her thigh to her leg, an infinitesimal Ganges, but of blood; not heart’s blood but womb blood which, for a woman, is far deeper and, like the river, taking these weeks and months away: beauty and ugliness; adoration, revulsion; cruelty and tenderness; suffering, well-being; misery, ecstasy, joy. Ravi and their baby. Una gave a sob. ‘So no one,’ she said aloud in the bathroom, ‘is going to have their way.’
It was all ended in that little running stain.
The bonfires are out, wrote Hal. She had looked back in her diary to that long-ago afternoon in January. Now she wrote, My affairs do drag me homeward, and a tear splashed on the page. At the convent they were doing The Winter’s Tale; again Hal had been chosen as Perdita – but I think I shall never play her. ‘Homeward’, if you can call it home. Una was right; it was ignominious to be posted around like a parcel. I am to be sent to Mother. I suppose some of this Una business has reached her – not by me this time – and she has threatened Dads. It is on condition I go to Miss Perry’s school in Connecticut. School … school! Hal’s pen bit deep. Plain living and high thinking once more. Hal so much preferred high living and plain thinking. When shall I see Vikram, my darling Vik, again? Another tear fell but Hal caught it. I will see him again! The pen bit deeper. Dad’s conference is transferred to Bangkok; he is going there with Alix so we leave Delhi for ever. A whole spatter of tears. Una has gone back to Cerne. Then Hal wrote, More amazement! Her gardener has won some tremendous prize for poetry. Then he wasn’t only a gardener.
In Shiraz Road Ganesh was showing the new young gardener how to take down the seed house; bamboos and mats had to be stored under cover or they would rot in the deluge of the monsoon. The new chota mali was eager and Ganesh was pleased at the deft way he rolled the mats, stacked poles, cleaned pans. ‘We will build it afresh in October,’ said Ganesh. ‘Another sahib is coming. Then I shall teach you how to sow the seeds.’
AFTERWORD
I first read and enjoyed The Peacock Spring when it was published in 1975. Only two years later it appeared in a series for younger, teenage readers. I thought this a brave choice. To write about the ‘Romeo and Juliet’ relationship between an English schoolgirl and a young Indian was outspoken for the time, but Rumer Godden was a daring, innovative writer who frequently handled controversial subjects. Her own life was far from conventional. Born in 1907, she spent much of her childhood in India where her father worked for the Navigation Steamer Company. One of four sisters, she was always the observer, the writer. The family house was in Narayangunj, East Bengal (now Pakistan) and young Rumer hid her stories and poems in the garden, in the trunk of a giant cork tree.
When she was five and her sister Jon was six, they were sent to England to live with their grandmother and two aunts. This upheaval was disturbing and miserable and Rumer remembered these feelings in The Peacock
Spring when describing Una and Hal’s move from their English girls’ school to an unknown life in India. She often drew on her own experiences in her adult and children’s novels, and had a sensitive understanding of the thoughts and emotions of young people. She hated all kinds of injustice, discrimination and bullying.
With the start of World War I in 1914 she and Jon, now 12 and 13 respectively, returned to their beloved India and found themselves back among the familiar sounds, colours, smells, vivid religious festivals and people, both rich and poor. Back to the family they had missed, and the servants, amongst them Hindu Brahmins, Muslims, Buddhists and Catholics – a mixture of languages and castes.
Today, with increased travel and emigration, barriers within India are broken down. Even so, the importance of faith and caste remains. In her autobiography, A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep, Rumer Godden wrote, ‘India is so vast and varied that not even Indians can comprehend it all.’ As she grew up she developed a particular interest in the Eurasian people, the term used for those born of mixed marriages, who were often not accepted by either Indians or Europeans. Before becoming a writer Rumer worked as a dancing teacher and was criticized for defying convention and welcoming Eurasian girls to her classes. During this time, she stored up incidents and conversations, to be recalled in her later writing. One story that always haunted her she described as ‘strange and sad’. It involved two English pupils, their attractive, dark-eyed Eurasian governess and her fat, greedy mother who had the ‘chi-chi’ accent so frowned upon by the upper classes. Rumer sensed unease and hostility towards this governess, especially from the older girl, and she became worried when local gossip spread about the girls who had been seen wandering around the bazaar, unchaperoned. Then, one day, the older girl fainted while dancing and Rumer later discovered that she was pregnant by her father’s Indian servant. Some forty years later this story became the basis for The Peacock Spring.
I was lucky enough to get to know Rumer Godden, after I had read The River, another of her books set in India, on the radio. She remains a writer who never ceases to surprise me. Her stories are always compelling, her characters many-layered, her handling of relationships subtle and truthful, and there is always, below the surface, more to enrich the reader, to return to again and again. That is certainly true of The Peacock Spring.
