The Peacock Spring (13 page)

‘I feel it in her, Una, so does Amina Srinevesan; so, I think, do you. That is why I do not like you, Kate’s daughter, and Hal of course, being in her charge.’

‘She isn’t in charge.’ Una would dearly have liked to say that, but could not deny it.

‘Mr Sethji may be sharp in business, but he is an honourable man. I don’t believe he would have done anything unfair; but in any case,’ said Mrs Porter, ‘to pretend you
are what you are not, to know what you do not, is lack of probity. Your father has given Miss Lamont his trust, and that’s why I am uneasy. You and Hal are young; no one knows what you may do
next, not even yourselves.’

‘
We
?’ Una was startled. She had not thought they were talking about her and Hal. ‘What could we do?’

‘You don’t know,’ said Mrs Porter. ‘That’s why, in a strange country like this, Eddie needs someone completely trustworthy.’

Alix, brought up in what Bulbul Misra called ‘old India’, had a siesta every afternoon. Hal, as usual, followed her idol. ‘After all, we are out
early.’

‘I wish, Una, that you would rest too,’ said Alix.

‘I can’t sleep in the day.’ Besides, Una liked what she called ‘the empty time’. The servants, off duty, went to their quarters and were probably asleep as were
Alix and Hal; even the birds were silent, even the lizards still, the whole garden drowsed in the warmth and sun, but Una was not drowsy; she was too harrowed with despair.

‘You can’t really want to do those ghastly-sounding sums,’ said Hal.

‘They’re not ghastly when you understand them.’

‘But can you?’ Hal asked it doubtfully. It did not seem to her that anybody could.

‘I could if they were explained to me. I have to. They’re – they’re my language,’ said Una.

‘Then?’

‘Then nothing. I expect I’m done for,’ and Una tried to shrug.

Long ago, when she was three or four, she had been given a little doll – by Mrs Porter, she thought suddenly. Why, I do remember her! It was in Calcutta; it was really
the figure of a doll, so small it had fitted into a matchbox but, cast in metal, it was weighted so that if it were knocked over, at once, or slowly, depending on the hardness of the knock, it
stood upright again. ‘A ninepin doll,’ Edward had told her.

‘Ninepin?’

‘Made to be knocked over.’

‘And stand up again.’

Una had made it a private little garden in sand; she remembered the feel of the hot sand as she stuck flowers into it, scarlet and yellow flowers, g
ō
l mohur, she
remembered – the g
ō
l-mohur trees with their brilliant sprays would be out soon here in Delhi. She had made a pool from a river shell; the Shiraz Road fountain
tinkled into the pool in the pavilion; it seemed to Una much the same as her shell and as secret, but why should she think of it now? The doll had been lost, probably in one of their innumerable
packings, but it was as if it sent her a message.

She did not believe for one moment in the professors Alix had talked of, nor that she would go to the International School. At my age, the pupils would be going back to their own countries to
take examinations. She was, too, tied by her promise not to tell Edward, but, ‘Don’t just lie down,’said Una to Una. ‘There must be other ways. If you write to Crackers, she
might find a correspondence course – there must be such things. Meanwhile, you try by yourself.’ And, the next afternoon, she found her
Elementary Mechanics
that Ram Chand had
carefully put in the bookcase. Someone had cleaned it – she was sure the book had fallen into the wet flowerbed – probably the someone was Monbad – but then she saw it had a
marker; neither she nor Alix had put one there; it was marking page seventy-one, not a usual marker, but a feather, a tip feather from a peacock’s train, lucently blue and green, with the
iridescent eye in a feathered fringe that scintillated with colour as it caught the light.

Who had put it there? Someone who cares, thought Una. For the first time since the scene with Alix she felt warmed – and titillated; she picked up the book, a pad and her pencils and went
out to the summer house.

At first the green and shade seemed cool, inviting and, sitting down to the rough table, she began to work: ‘If the slope of the plane is 30 degrees to the horizontal and the force of
gravity vertically downwards,’ she murmured aloud, ‘then the component of the acceleration perpendicular to the plane in the upward direction will be -10 cos 30°
m/s
²
.’ She wrote
The cos of 30° is √3/2 so that will make the acceleration -√5/3
.

In the same way the acceleration along the plane would be -10 cos 60° or -5 m/s
²
since the cos of 60 is
½ . . .

She looked it over and could see no fault in it. ‘But how do I do the next part?’ She knew the formula v=u+at, ‘But how do I apply it to this?’ she asked hopelessly.
‘How can I find t if I don’t know v? The acceleration will be negative but that doesn’t get me far.’ It was closer under the creepers than she had imagined and there was
sweat on her forehead. ‘V=u-gt. But where do I go from there?’ She had looked up the answer and knew that the time of flight should be 2/√3 seconds. ‘But how do I get this?
How?’

The sun glare from the garden hurt her eyes; the scent of the honeysuckle made her dizzy but she kept doggedly on, writing the equation out again and putting in the value for t,
v=u-2g/√ 3,
but still it seemed to make no sense, and she sat staring at it. It was hopeless. I can’t, thought Una, I can’t. I’m beaten.

She heard a rustle, as if creepers had been pushed aside, then, behind her, a warmth; there was another soft movement, as of muslin clothes – indeed a muslin sleeve brushed her cheek
– and a new smell mingled with the honeysuckle scent, freshly washed skin, a slightly onion-scented breath and something she was to learn was coconut hair oil. Then a hand came over her
shoulder; it was a brown hand on a strong wrist that wore an amulet, a darkened silver seal on a red cord, and on to Una’s scrubbed and tormented page it laid another feather with another
iridescent eye. ‘Just to tell you,’ said a voice in English, ‘that I am I. Then, please do not be frightened.’

Una was not frightened, not even startled; in the dreamy, scented warmth, the voice simply seemed natural and it seemed natural too when she looked up and whispered, ‘Ravi!’

‘You know my name?’

‘I asked Dino. I . . . I have been watching you.’

‘I know you have, Miss Spy. Very well, I watched you back.’

‘You write poems,’ she said. ‘That’s why you put the feather as a marker. I should have guessed at once.’

‘And what did you think of my feather?’

‘In England we should say a peacock feather brought bad luck.’ How strange, thought Una, that she should be able to say to this particular young man exactly what she thought.

‘Here not at all,’ said Ravi. ‘On the reverse, the peacock is sacred, very emblem of India; and I hope the book was properly cleaned.’ His pronunciation was a little
stilted – ‘proper-lee’. ‘The earth was wet and you threw the book hard. Hard! Ari bap!’ He laughed again and stopped. ‘That Miss Lamont is no good for you, I
think.’

‘I knew you were listening but didn’t think you would understand English.’

‘No, Ravi the chota mali shouldn’t understand or speak English. Perhaps I am master spy.’ Una thought she had never seen such white and even teeth.

She seemed small and pale sitting there below him who was so large, brown, golden brown and merry; that was the word that suited him as he stood laughing down at her. I was right, thought Una.
He is far more attractive than Vikram Singh, by far the most attractive person I have ever seen.

He moved round and sat on the summer house’s other wooden chair – the honeysuckle and creepers hid them both from the upper garden. ‘I suppose I should ask you, Miss-baba, may
I sit down?’

‘Don’t be silly,’ and Una found herself laughing; there was something in Ravi that stirred happy, easy laughter – and I said I should never laugh again, thought Una.

‘I have spoken English since little,’ Ravi was saying, ‘and I was reading it at St Thomas’s College. Had I stayed at college I should have taken a first, probably with
honours.’ He said it curiously without conceit, with the assurance of a young cock bird.

‘And you didn’t stay?’

‘No.’ There was a momentary shadow. ‘I – I was persuaded into a – a group the authorities do not like,’ then he cheered. ‘And had I taken a first,
immediately everybody would have wanted me to do something: my father would have wanted I come home and manage our estate; my mother that I should become a doctor; my uncle would have wanted me in
government service, diplomatic. My group wanted me in politics. But, you see, I did not want any of those things. I wanted writing poems.’

‘Are they good poems?’ Una had been to one of Lady Srinevesan’s evenings where she had stayed mute, watching and listening; she had not, of course, been able to judge the poems
in Indian languages, though she had liked their rhythms; but had secretly thought most of those in English worse than poor and, ‘Are yours good?’ she asked warily.

‘Very good.’ He was serious. ‘Better now than I could have believed. I wanted peace in which to write them and it is peaceful in your father’s garden,’ said Ravi.
‘Until someone throws a book into a flowerbed.’

‘I am sorry.’ But Una could not feel sorry.

‘No, no. You were brave,’ and Ravi said, ‘That Lamont! But why do you not tell your father?’

‘I promised I wouldn’t.’

‘Even at your expense?’

‘Even at my expense.’ This seemed so strange a philosophy to Ravi that for a moment he did not talk. Then, ‘Unfortunately,’ he said, ‘I have chiefly forgotten my
mathematics but I am arranging for you. I have a mathematical friend, Hem, Hemango Sharma. He is at present in medical school, but he is most good at mathematics. He took them at St Thomas’s.
Hem shall come here and teach you.’

‘But . . . how?’

‘At the back of my hut is a loose – do you call it a “paling”?

– in the fence. No one can see, but it is my entrance and exit – and Hem’s. He comes through it to visit with me. Hem will bicycle here one, two times a week in these
afternoons when no one is about and slip in here with me.’

‘You will be seen.’

‘Hem and I have the art of disappearing.’ Again there was that shade in Ravi’s voice, ‘and I shall stand guard while he instructs you.’

‘But . . . suppose he doesn’t want to.’

‘What I want, Hem wants,’ Ravi was certain. ‘He will come.’

‘I certainly will not,’ said Hem.

‘Hem, you said yourself she is only a little girl.’

‘She cannot be all that little if she is doing calculus,’ and,

‘Ravi, don’t! Don’t . . .’ pleaded Hem.

‘If you consider,’ explained Hem, ‘the component of velocity perpendicular to the plane, there will be an instant when the ball is still, when v equals
0.’

‘Of course,’ said Una. ‘Of course.’

What, asked Hem, had made him give in to Ravi and come? Pity? ‘She is so badly treated,’ Ravi had said, but how could a poor medical student pity Miss Una Gwithiam? ‘No, it was
purely the mathematics,’ said Hem.

‘It was curiosity,’ said Ravi and it was true that Hem could not help being curious about this girl who had so improbably made friends with her father’s gardener,
‘Because she doesn’t know you are anything else,’ said Hem.

‘She senses it. Yes, she is very much taken with me,’ said Ravi, preening, but for the moment it was Hem who had Una’s whole attention.

‘Look at the equation,’ he told her. ‘When the ball is still, v equals 0, so if you use the equation v=u-gt and put v=0 the initial speed in this upward direction is 10 cos
60° and you have 0=5-5√3t which gives t=1/√3 seconds as the time taken to reach the highest point.’

It was as clear an exposition as any of Mr Rattray’s and, ‘Yes,’ said Una. ‘Yes.’

‘Then the downward journey will take the same length of time, so that the total flight time is 2/√3 seconds, which is the answer you want. Do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ said Una again but more firmly. She was beginning to feel the satisfaction, the little surge of power and mastery that she had felt at Cerne under Mr Rattray. ‘I think I
understand.’

‘Now that you know how long the flight is,’ Hem went on, ‘you can easily find the distance, or range, along the slope . . . by considering the equation of motion along the line
of greatest slope. v=u-g cos 60° . . . Miss Gwithiam, you are not listening, I think.’

‘I am. I am,’ said Una hastily.

‘Let me look,’ said Ravi and Hem had to watch the two heads as they came together over the book, Ravi’s hair black and glossy, Una’s almost green-brown in the
creeper-filtered light of the summer house.

Then Una looked up at Ravi, her eyes alight with mischief. ‘You are not properly dressed,’ she told him.

‘I am not?’ Ravi pretended to be indignant.

‘No, you have no flower behind your ear.’

When Una came to think of it, she had never had a friend of her own before. There were people she had liked, of course, but then Edward always moved on. Inevitably they would
one day move on from Delhi, but she shut that out of her mind. True she had been quite a long time at Cerne but the girls there, and Mrs Carrington and Mr Rattray, had to be shared. No one shared
Ravi, for some reason she discounted Hem – ‘Well, I am always discounted,’ Hem would have said – and, too, Una now had a secret which was a satisfying little tit for tat to
Edward and Alix.

At the slightest sound from the house, a footfall on the verandah or path, Ravi slid behind the creepers to the flowerbeds and all anyone saw was the chota mali at his work weeding, while
Miss-baba Una, apart and alone, was bent over her books in the summer house.

‘Alix,’ she had said, ‘I think I have worked that problem out. Let’s see if I have the answer right,’ and watched while Alix guilelessly produced the answers
book.

‘Quite right.’ Alix was relieved. ‘I must say, Una, it does you credit.’

‘Perhaps I can go on by myself – for a little.’ How strange that anyone so adept at deceiving should be so easily deceived, ‘But Alix doesn’t know enough to
suspect,’ Una told Ravi.