The Tea-Planter's Daughter Read online

  “It is only the branches of a big tree being blown against the roof, Babuchi,” the boy told him. And then the boy remembered the power of Julia Madam, wondered if it really was the wind that was moving the tree, and felt afraid again.

  Only half an hour till the guests were expected and the remaining servants had to find candles, lamps, pour paraffin, trim wicks and still no Master came. So terrible was the burden of responsibility placed on the shoulders of the tubby cook, and so many were the things that still had to be done, so ill did he feel, that he began to shiver all over, to come out in prickles and tingles. So instead of making any more preparations for the party he wrapped himself in his grey blanket, sat in his rocking chair by the kitchen fire, moaned, and issued instructions to the equally shuddering matey, who struggled (by the light of a single candle that was constantly being blown out by the wind) to grate carrots, sprinkle pepper, roll butter balls and spread toast fingers. Babuchi eventually began to feel so ill he was unable even to turn his head to check that the inexperienced boy was working properly.

  Kali arrived at last having failed to find his cow. His face was creased with worry and he raced round the table putting plates down without wiping them, his dirty tea towel flying on his shoulder. Sometimes he would rush out into the slush and drizzle to call, “Pallpapatti, Pallpapatti, my Milky Butterfly!”

  Panthers roamed grizzling with empty bellies though the black monsoon evenings, straightening their claws on tree trunks spongy with water, waiting for an opportunity like Kali’s cow to stumble into their dusk.

  “Pallpapatti, Pallpapatti,” mourned Kali, as he slammed glacé cherries on to lemon flips, and slopped sauce and salty tears on to his high polished table.

  The tree kept thrashing the roof, the sound of it sometimes drowned by the noise of the wind. Julia Clockhouse, whose soul was trying to grow as great as the storm, felt full of aching and a hopeless longing because she could not allow it to. She thought that out there somewhere was a small scorched cow yearning for home and comfort, like Julia was.

  It seemed to Julia that it was only when her soul was allowed to expand that she felt entirely comfortable. Even when she was in the house in which she had been born, nowadays she felt like someone living in a strange land. She remembered the days of her childhood, before she knew about evil and the devil, and before her father had stopped loving her. She had been really happy then and this place had felt like home. She remembered the first days of their marriage, when she had allowed her soul to become happy because she had thought that it was experiencing a permissible joy! She suddenly felt that she could not bear to go on like this, pressing something so important back inside her. She even told herself, “Tomorrow I will let you out for a little teeny bit,” as though she was talking to a caged-up, desperate dog. “Tomorrow I will let myself enjoy all those things again, even if it does allow the devil in. Tomorrow I will not drink gin. Tomorrow I will allow myself to have home and comfort again,” for in a muddled drunken manner she knew that home was not among walls and in chairs, nor surrounded by gardens or even being looked after by people who loved you. Home was something in the absolute centre of Julia round which everything in the universe could revolve if it wished, and not disturb her in the least. But she daren’t go home because it might let the devil in. Gin was stopping her from enjoying home and comfort, just as Kali’s cow was being stopped from going home by something out there in the dark.

  Once, after Julia had married Ben, she had said to him, “I wonder if my father could have been wrong, and if the things that happened to me were not bad at all. What do you think?”

  They had been sitting on the highest hill in the valley, looking down on to the plains. Ben had caressed her cheek with his knuckles and said, “Even your father cannot have always been right!”

  Julia frowned, and peered down, trying to see people through the heat haze that covered the plains like a muslin quilt. India is so full of people. There must have been thousands down there. And yet they were all invisible. “It was so extraordinary,” she said. “I mean why should he suddenly hate me like that! I had done nothing to him … then …”

  Ben shrugged, and said, “People can’t always be responsible for their feelings. He couldn’t help feeling whatever he did about you. It probably wasn’t hate at all, anyway. Maybe he was just ashamed of his true feelings for you …” Ben was silent for a while, and Julia waited a little anxiously as though what he was going to say next was very important. “I think the trouble was,” Ben continued, “that he tried to squash what he felt for you back inside. Squashing things is always a mistake …”

  “Oh yes!” Julia agreed heartily.

  “He was frightened, I suppose. Frightened of himself...” Ben spoke slowly, as though he was surprised at his own perception. He realised as he spoke that his own fear of Edward had made it impossible for him to see the man in a clear light before. Now he said suddenly to Julia, “I mean, I think that a lot of the trouble between you and your father was that he was frightened of you!”

  “Of me?” said Julia, looking at him amazed. “But what is there in me to make him afraid?” But as she spoke she remembered the shudders of the tea-plucking women, the way the men namaskared. She said, “Ben, would it be possible for you to be frightened of me?”

  He gazed at her in silence for a long time, and then he said, “If I didn’t love you, then I suppose I could be!”

  She stared down into the plains; thinking, wondering. She did not know if it was a good thing or a bad thing for a husband to accept the possibility that he might be afraid of his wife. In the end she said softly, “Oh well, then I hope you never do stop loving me!”

  “So do I!” he said, but he was laughing as though there was no possibility of such a thing happening.

  She saw something move down there, but could not tell if it was a waggon toiling along a highway carrying a twenty-foot-high hayload, or a man. It might even be a goat or a dog she thought, for distance had drained away perspective.

  She was going to say, “I don’t think I am dangerous,” but then she remembered what she had done to her father. And the jackal that had taken her goose. So she said, “I could do good, instead of harm,” and wished she hadn’t said it. It sounded, she thought, like a threat. He might take it to mean that unless he loved her she would do him harm.

  And now he had stopped loving her. Julia wondered if he was not coming home because he was afraid of her. She wished she had made it quite clear to him that her words had not been a threat. She wished she had not let Ben know what her power was. She wished she had not showed him the clock breaking, the little elephants trotting. She wished she had allowed him to love her whatever the consequences. Surely anything was better than sitting here in a darkening room on her birthday, with the rain beating on the roof and no one loving her. Somewhere out in the night was a lost cow that was not so miserable as Julia Clockhouse who dared not let her soul out.

  Outside the explosions of fireworks set off to celebrate the return of the yogi went unheard, and rockets sizzled in a soaking sky before they burned.

  Julia Clockhouse, too sad to continue, decided not to.

  Ornaments on the mantelpiece are not the same as trees from a primeval jungle, but Julia smouldered with the spark of the yogi today and thought herself capable of bringing down, with her mind, the tree that stood outside her bungalow. The roots of the tree, she thought, would unbalance the boulder that hung halfway up the hillside. Julia imagined it thundering down, and punching its way through the roof of her home. It would obliterate everyone inside it. All the giggling and the badness would be blotted out.

  She put her attention on the tree, and it bent as though the god that had nearly crushed her that morning was pushing it ground wards with his thumbs.

  Chapter 15

  At seven-thirty the guests began to bundle from their cars like people delivered from a holocaust, breathless to tell the adventures of the journey. Thick and sinking muds and slithering i
nclines were the least of it. Wild elephants had stood in the path of the Sallingers, with only eyes and trunks visible in the headlights. Nana said with a sob in her voice, “You could only see their trunks and eyes and not their bodies at all. They looked like cobras ready to strike. I nearly fainted.” Dick patted her consolingly on the shoulders and sucked his pipe noisily.

  “I thought our last hour had come,” wept Nana. “They came right after us. Slowly. Sometimes coming right up to the car and touching it with their trunks. One huge tusker looked through the windscreen and there was an expression in his eyes which meant, ‘I will smash you to pieces if one of my family gets hurt!’” She gulped at the brandy they had given her to steady her nerves. “I said to Dick ‘Supposing the engine’s hot? They’ll burn themselves and push us over the edge. They’ve done it to buses on the estate, you know.’”

  Dick smiled indulgently and said, “Old girl, they were much more likely to kill us because of your shrieks.”

  Julia raised her eyes to the top of the hill knowing that the elephants the Sallingers had encountered must be the same ones she had seen in the morning. She wondered for a moment what it would be like to walk among them.

  The guests leaked mud and water all over the sweeper’s gleaming floors. If they had been Labradors the servants would have had them chained up on the back verandah until they were dry. They came into the rooms laughing, gasping, joking, a little drunk already with the anticipation of the big celebration to come. Kali dashed around them like a nervous bee taking half a guest out of a wet coat then pausing to ask, “Did you see a little cow on the road, Sir? Small and dark with curling horns?”

  “Come along, old fellow,” said the guest. “Now you are putting on again the sleeve you have just removed. Keep your mind on what you are doing!”

  “Julia Missie once said that Pallpapatti looked as though she had been scorched like an overdone biscuit,” said Kali, shaking Lorraine’s drenched cloak so that water went spraying all over the wall. “But of course for my Pallpapatti to have this dark colour is beautiful, whereas for a biscuit that is burnt …”

  “Kali, have you been drinking?” demanded Lorraine, and went into the sitting room that was already thick with the smoke of cigarettes and pipes, and the fumes of gin, saying, “Really Julia, that poor old butler of yours has gone right off his rocker. He keeps babbling on about burnt biscuits …”

  The Rani arrived on foot because her car had got stuck on a tea bush. Her gold jewels spouted water and she was muddy to the knee, for she had had to remove her slender sandals and wade through.

  “I can forgive you much!” she raged, “But your roads, never! My son is sitting in the car. Please send some servants to bring him.” She strode through the guests as though still through mud, her sari raised to show slender ankles.

  “Ah, the general manager?” she snapped, taking Dick’s offered hand, at which he hung his head humorously, and said, “Alas no. A mere minion I fear.”

  Someone put the song “Raindrops keep falling on my head” on to the gramophone, but the rain on the iron roof nearly drowned it, so Kuts Chatterjee suggested playing “You are my sunshine” instead. “Let’s inspire the weather!” he said, twirling his moustache, and because there was a slight laugh he said it ten more times.

  “Have a pink gin, darling,” said Amanda to Julia. “It’s your tipple, I know. I personally like brandy, but we’ve all got to have something to lean on here or we’d go insane!” She pointed to where the two old bachelors from the top end of the valley lurched round the room singing the snatches from “You are my sunshine”. “Some of us go insane in spite of the support,” she said.

  Curry puffs and peanuts were offered round by an abstracted Kali, holding the plate tilting, eyes on the hills. These were eaten by equally abstracted guests, so that it was the carpets that ultimately became best fed.

  “Men are so awful, darling,” murmured Amanda, sliding her finger over Julia’s cheek, and she whispered, “How furry you are. Like a little chicken.” Julia felt her hair stirring in the dark at the touch.

  “What do I smell like?” whispered Amanda, and Julia said, “Church.” Amanda, pulling Julia’s face against her own, said softly, “Each day I lie naked in the smoke of aromatic gums. Tomorrow you must come to my bungalow after Bertie is gone to the estate and we will incense ourselves together!”

  “Now, now, Amanda,” said Dick Sallinger, passing by with an overflowing mug of beer. “Don’t take advantage just because her husband is away.”

  Through the dense crowd of guests could be heard the voice of the Rani loudly demanding that something be done about her stranded son. “Out there in the dark, in the rain, threatened with who knows what wild animals and fears …” and joined soon by the voice of Doris, “Come on, one of you men! Someone must go at once and rescue this unfortunate lad.”

  “Come back, darling,” called Amanda to Julia in her husky voice. “Don’t go yet. We have only just begun to know each other.”

  The managers got together and discussed labour troubles and close pruning, the disadvantages of artificial fertiliser, and the felling of gum clearings. The young unmarried assistants gathered round Harry’s blonde hitchhiking niece who was staying with her aunt and uncle, while the young married ones watched with envy. And the wives got down to the indifferent haircuts of the club barber, and the frightful way in which servants always took advantage.

  After a few drinks the guests began to forget Kali’s indifferent serving, and the absence of their host. They did not even notice, after a while, that the curry puffs had all got burnt and the kebabs were gritty as though they had fallen on the floor.

  “I hope you are getting a chance to see the district,” said Nana to Harry’s niece. “You should get one of these young men to take you round on their motor bike.” And Lorraine whispered loudly to Doris, “I thought she was only staying for a week, and she’s been here for a fortnight already and no sign of her going.”

  Muriel became dizzy and had to lie back on the sofa, where the ladies fanned her and called to Kali to bring a glass of water. Muriel’s husband sipped his Bangalore beer, and hoped sadly that his wife would soon be over her malaise, and turn once again into the jolly girl he had met and married on his last leave.

  Kuts Chatterjee came over and held Muriel’s wrist while he counted her pulse. Then he pulled back her eyelids and looked at her eye whites. In the end he said he thought she had a little anaemia, and suggested she eat plenty of liver and spinach. At these words Muriel went very white and said she felt sick.

  Dick Sallinger came up silently behind Julia while she was pouring drinks at the bar, and threw his hands over her eyes. Putting his mouth close to her ear he murmured, “A kiss if you can’t guess who …” He pressed himself close to her, and said, “Oh golly! You lovely little chickabiddy you!” After that even though she pushed him off fiercely he grabbed her every time he thought Nana wasn’t looking.

  Kali brought in whatever dinner he managed to rescue from the shivering Babuchi, and put it on the table. It looked, Kali thought, even less appetising than Ben Clockhouse’s usual fare, but that was all there was. As it turned out, by the time the guests were called to eat several of them had drunk enough gins and Indian whiskys to be able to eat Ben Clockhouse’s food without even being aware of it.

  The two old bachelors did not go to eat at all. They were immersed in reminiscences of the days of Thomas Buxton.

  “Crocodiles in the river then,” said one.

  “Are you sure?” asked the other.

  “Of course I’m sure,” said the first. “I wouldn’t have said it otherwise. Thomas shot one.”

  “That was a python.”

  “That was another time …”

  Lorraine tasted the cape gooseberry mutton and told Harry, “I will make us some sandwiches when we get home.”

  One of the young bachelors had managed to get a promise from Harry’s niece to come on the back of his motor bike the next day. An
other bachelor whispered that he would take her now if she liked.

  “My little cow is out there in this terrible storm,” Kali told the guests. “She is used to deep straw and hot mash, and has never spent a night outside.”

  The guests put their arms round his shoulders, telling him, “Cheer up, old chap. She’ll be back by morning, you’ll see,” or, humorously, “Ay, the fickleness of females …” then laughed and forgot the butler and his missing cow a moment later.

  The Rani persuaded a servant to fetch her stranded son, and, waiting, told tales of palace hunts with tame cheetahs for hounds.

  “Our family is renowned for courage. My son is pampered, that is all …” she said.

  The servants returned to say that the little Raja would not come, at which the Rani groaned and clutched her heart saying, “I can hardly bear to think of him out there alone. He has always been headstrong. He was never an obedient boy!”

  Young managers went to rescue Jaswant.

  “Ah, they are so kind,” murmured the Rani, who knew the power of her own charm.

  “He says he is happy there,” they told the anxious mother on their return. They had taken him gin and mutton patties.

  “You are so kind,” said the Rani and rewarded them with details of cheetahs sinking their short jaws in the thighs of sambar.

  When Julia burst out on to the streaming porch the words that had made Dick Sallinger laugh were still on her mouth … “Uncle! Don’t!”

  “Darling girl, you make it sound incestuous.” He had pushed his hand into her dress, and whispered, “Sweet niece, sweet niece,” while Julia had struggled, and thought of screaming.

  “How,” she told the glorious free blackness from which the rain fell, “could I? What would they say? Nana Auntie would find out …” Her breath was hammering against her throat, and her mouth still smelled of the strong tobacco on Dick’s breath.

  “What’s the matter, darling?” he had whispered. “Come on now, you know you want me … I kissed you long before you married that fellow Clockhouse!”