The Peacock Spring (2 page)

When they had come out of Crackers’s study, Una had been so silent that Hal paused before she rushed away. ‘To tell everyone,’ as she said.

‘Una, you
are
pleased?’

‘I thought I had three years,’ said Una.

‘But . . . you are pleased.’

‘No.’

‘Oh Una! You must be. Think – Delhi and here!’

‘I happen to like it here.’

‘You can’t. Not compared. . .’ Then Hal beseeched, ‘Una – why?’

‘Here it’s . . . orderly.’ Una could explain no more than that.

‘You needn’t go back to your classes,’ Mrs Carrington had said.

‘No, it wouldn’t be much use now, would it?’ Una had agreed and, ‘I’m going out,’ she told Hal.

Watching the solitary, pacing figure, Hal knew there was no feeling of bonfires in her sister Una.

‘Write to him,’ suggested Mrs Carrington.

‘I did, but I tore it up.’

It was not easy for a Cerne girl to see the headmistress; for most of them, Crackers was a figurehead, someone who, in her cap and gown, took assembly, sometimes gave lectures to the seniors
and, on occasions, conducted the school orchestra, yet, mysteriously, Mrs Carrington knew her girls, all four hundred of them. She was often met with in unexpected places, did unexpected things,
which perhaps had given Una the courage to go to her directly. Una had first, though, to pass the secretary whose desk was in an alcove outside the study door.

‘Please may I see Mrs Carrington?’

The secretary had not been with Mrs Carrington for sixteen years – longer than Una had been alive – without learning something of her ways and, ‘You are Una Gwithiam?’
she asked.

‘I think you may knock and go in.’

Now, ‘You tore up your letter?’ said Mrs Carrington. ‘Why?’

Una’s grey-green eyes did not baffle – did not deign to baffle, thought Mrs Carrington – as did the eyes of most young girls; they were honest, which was at variance with the
half-mocking understatement, the shrug with which she usually hid her feelings. ‘Surely that girl is uncommonly self-contained,’ Mr Rattray who coached Una in mathematics had said.

‘So would you be if you had spent most of your life in suitcases – metaphorically and actually,’ said Mrs Carrington. In her time, the headmistress had known and assessed
perhaps ten thousand girls, she thought a little wearily, and now she looked carefully at the one opposite her. Una’s face was too long for beauty, but fine-boned, with a high forehead, a
fine thoughtful forehead. This girl, given a chance, thought Mrs Carrington, might grow up to the nobility and integrity that, with a certain toughness, had made Sir Edward Gwithiam the notable
diplomat he was; but perhaps, thought Mrs Carrington, there was only room in one family for one Sir Edward. Yet she had always thought of him as an attached, even a doting father; not six months
ago he had been, proudly, she had thought, discussing Una’s prospects of getting into university, though he obviously did not think as much of her quiet achievements as, for instance, he did
of Hal’s music. ‘I want Hal to study with Signor Brazzi.’

‘Such a little girl, Sir Edward?’

‘Yes.’ He had been firm but now had come this sudden veer of mind.

‘Your father will have to pay a term’s fees,’ the other girls told Una and Hal. ‘A whole term’s fees for nothing.’ Such an improvident impetuous parent was
outside their comprehension, as was Una’s reply.

‘I don’t suppose he knew that term had started.’

‘Well, he has so much to think of, it’s no wonder he had forgotten,’ said Mrs Carrington.

But if he had forgotten, wasn’t thinking of us, what made him suddenly decide to have us out? That was the puzzle Una would not put into words.

‘Why did you tear up that letter?’ Mrs Carrington asked again.

‘I thought it might hurt him.’ For once Una did not use her usual subterfuge. ‘You see, I . . . can’t judge what’s happening.’ It was coming out in jerks.
‘He . . . he might need me. Edward – my father – and I are special. We always have been, even when he married . . . Louise.’ Mrs Carrington sensed that Una hated to speak of
her stepmother. ‘I was little then but – and I expect it sounds strange – even then he relied on me.’

‘Yet he sent you away to please this Louise.’ Mrs Carrington forbore to say it – she had fathomed something of the disaster of Sir Edward’s brief marriage to Hal’s
mother.

‘Other men have wives,’ Una went on. ‘They play golf, or shoot or fish; Edward does nothing but work – unless I’m there. At least I make him go for a walk
sometimes, and we read.’

‘How long is it,’ Mrs Carrington asked, ‘since you were with your father?’

‘Almost a year,’ said Una. ‘We went out to him in Washington at Easter. He did make a flying visit to London about half-term but we just had lunch with him. He hadn’t
time for more.’

‘You have grown up a good deal in this year.’

‘I?’ Una obviously meant, ‘What have I to do with it?’ but, ‘Don’t expect things to be exactly the same,’ said Mrs Carrington.

‘They always will be with Edward and me.’ Una had drawn herself up. Then, ‘He plays with Hal,’ she said more naturally. ‘They have fun. I’m not fun.’
She said it as she would have said, ‘I am plain,’ but Mrs Carrington knew that Una had her own brand of fun, her own delights, and she was not plain. There was something of a water
nymph about her – perhaps it was the whiteness of her skin – but Una was at the lanky stage and it would take a connoisseur to prefer her to Hal. Hal, with her small plumpness, would
never be lanky and Mrs Carrington thought with a pang of Hal’s dimples, the bloom of her skin, the long curls.

‘Curls are a disease of the hair,’ Una teased her sister.

‘Then it’s a pretty disease,’ Hal retorted, which was true. Most Gwithiam eyes were, to Una, an uninteresting grey-green ‘like mine and Edward’s’; she did not
realise how they could blaze true green with anger – or joy, thought Mrs Carrington; she could guess that not much joy had come the way of Sir Edward and Una – interest, yes, but not
joy. Hal’s eyes were blue, the same wide-open kitten blue that, in Louise, had briefly captivated – ‘trapped,’ said Great-Aunt Frederica – their father. Una was sure
that Hal was the most adorable creature on earth but, ‘Hal can’t follow Edward,’ she said now; she did not know how else to put it. ‘Would you read what he says?’ and
she pushed an air letter, forwarded from Great-Aunt Freddie, across the desk to Mrs Carrington.

. . .
someone to read with and talk to again
. . .
We will go for some of our prowls, shall we?
‘He and I,’ explained Una, ‘love walking about the little streets
of a city.’
Miss Lamont and Hal can have their music. We will read or play chess
. ‘We both love chess,’ said Una. ‘You see . . . ?’

‘I see,’ said Mrs Carrington.

‘So . . .’ Una gave one of her small fatalistic shrugs. ‘I tore up my letter.’

‘That was kind, Una.’ Mrs Carrington did not probe. ‘You are probably right. A high position can be lonely.’

‘But,’ and Una became an ordinary thwarted child. ‘For me, just now!’

‘There are good schools in Delhi.’

‘But not Cerne.’

‘Una, you must not be a schoolgirl snob.’

‘They are still not Cerne.’

‘I grant you that – but I had forgotten; you will have individual teaching – a governess.’

‘At my age!’

‘It would have been better to have called her a companion-tutor,’ Mrs Carrington agreed. ‘But you must have had people looking after you before.’

‘Nannies or ayahs when we were young,’ said Una in contempt. ‘While we were in Geneva we had a cook-housekeeper, and Persians in Teheran, but we look after ourselves. You
shouldn’t make people level, then put them down,’ and her deepest worry came out. ‘There’s something in this not . . . straight.’

‘Not straight?’

‘Yes. Not like Edward. Usually he asks us, consults – after all, we have been through a good deal with him. It’s as if he had suddenly put us into . . . a different category
– children.’

‘Well, you are officially children.’ Mrs Carrington felt she had to point that out, and ‘There must be a reason.’

‘Yes, but what? Why doesn’t he tell us?’ and Una spoke as Mrs Carrington had never imagined she would speak. ‘I don’t want to go. I don’t. I want to stay here
at Cerne. Mrs Carrington, if
you
wrote to him . . .’

‘I have written,’ said Mrs Carrington.

Dear Sir Edward,

A parent’s decision about his daughter’s education is, of course, his own
. . .

‘Here we go,’ groaned Edward but, as he read on, his face grew more grave, frighteningly grave to Miss Lamont, sitting beside him. Mrs Carrington had tried to be both tactful and
restrained.
For Halcyon
, Crackers had winced again as she wrote the name,
for Halcyon it does not matter so much; if your governess is as musical as it would seem from your letter, and so
fluent in French, and insists on good reading, Hal will probably do as well in Delhi as here; she is, to say the least, not academic. Una is different. It may sound absurd to say of a
fifteen-year-old that she hasn’t much time, but Una has set her mind on going to university and every month counts. We believe that, given a chance
. . .

‘Given a chance!’ The words seemed to shock Edward. He walked up and down the drawing room with the letter in his hand.

‘I should have thought simply in being your daughter she had every chance.’ Miss Lamont’s voice was melodiously low and soothing, even if it did have an inflection of
sing-song.

‘Perhaps this Mrs Carrington has grown stereotyped? Perhaps a little fuddy-duddy?’

Edward had a sudden vision of Mrs Carrington, groomed, alert and by several years his junior, but deliberately shut it out. ‘Yes, that’s what they all are – stereotyped,’
he agreed.

‘And they must not make your Una the same.’

‘No, by God!’ said Edward.

‘That Miss will stay here as Memsahib.’ Ganesh predicted to Ravi; doing the evening watering, with the smell of wet earth rising from the flowerbeds, they could
look in at the lighted drawing room where Edward and Miss Lamont were sitting. Ganesh had seen many employees of high-official families – European, English, American, Indian – and he,
like Din Mahomed, the butler, whom everyone called Dino, Dino’s two assistants, Aziz and Karim, and Ram Chand, house bearer-valet and the guests’ valet, Jetha, even Mitchu, the sweeper,
had been swift to assess Miss Lamont. They had all known Eurasian half-caste nannies, but those had worn uniform and stayed in the nurseries, not, with head held high and fashionable clothes, sat
talking and drinking martinis with Sir Edward, nor given orders in house and garden, ‘While the Sahib,
our
Sahib stays in a hotel.’

‘Why can’t they stay together?’ asked guileless Ravi.

‘It will only be until the children come, but she is not a pukka Miss-sahib,’ said Ganesh, ‘pukka’ meaning proper, his eyes shadowed as if he were truthfully troubled.
‘These babas have no mother,’ he said as if he were trying to explain it to himself.

‘Then, naturally, there must be a woman to look after them.’

‘But she is not pukka,’ Ganesh said again. As if it mattered, thought Ravi.

Edward was still reading Mrs Carrington’s letter.
You say you have found a governess-tutor, but can one woman, however brilliant, give a girl of Una’s
potentialities all she needs? It is the specialist teaching that worries me, rather than the all-round subjects
. . .

‘Isn’t it a pity,’ asked Miss Lamont, ‘to let a girl specialize so young?’

‘Specialist teaching isn’t necessarily specializing.’ Edward did not mean to sound so dry but when worried he was always curt. ‘It seems Una is something of a
mathematician.’

‘You mean arithmetic? Algebra?’ But Edward was not listening. Without finishing it, he had discarded Mrs Carrington’s letter and, opening a second, gave a deeper groan.

‘What is it?’ asked Miss Lamont.

‘My Aunt Frederica,’ said Edward.

Eddie, are you mad?
Great-Aunt Frederica was neither tactful nor restrained.
It is mad to take Una and Hal out to India! At their age! At this time, when term has started and you will
soon be in the hot weather!
Aunt Freddie’s exclamation and interrogation marks seemed to fly off the page and hit Edward.
And what in the world do you propose to do with them –
especially Hal? You can’t keep girls of school age incarcerated nowadays and Hal is her mother’s daughter. I won’t rub that in,
wrote Aunt Freddie and proceeded to rub it in.
You ought to know what it means. You know she can twist you round her little finger as Louise always could. It is asking for trouble!
Then, suddenly:
No, I am wrong. The real concern is
not for Hal but Una. THINK, Eddie, THINK! When Kate died you sent Una to Kate’s mother. When you married Louise you took her back again. That didn’t last long. Hal was born and Louise
turned against Una. Poor mite, she was sent back to Lady Osborne. Lady Osborne died, you took Una home – if home it was. Louise left you – which was a mercy – and Una saw Hal,
whom she loved and protected, batted back and forth across the Atlantic!
– Edward saw a little girl hurled across oceans –
and though Una was a child she was old enough to be
aware of the long legal battle you fought, quite rightly, to keep Hal
. Edward remembered once hearing Una say, ‘Children shouldn’t be posted around like parcels,’ but he did
not think it had disturbed Hal. ‘It’s nice to have your father and mother both fighting to have you. It makes you feel wonderfully important,’ Hal had said.

Then all those changes,
Aunt Freddie’s letter went on.
School in Geneva, Teheran, Bangkok, dozens of changes of places, names, friends! Now, at last, when you had given in to my
pleadings and sent the girls to a proper school
– only English schools were proper to Aunt Frederica –
and Una is settled at Cerne, absorbed and at ease, and Hal, to put it
bluntly, is safe, you uproot them again and decide in this thunderbolt way to take them to India!! THINK, Eddie, think.

As for the governess, I must say flatly that I should feel a good deal happier if I had chosen her myself.