20

It was suddenly, in these months of cold, that the young General Dilip Rai discarded his heavy cloth coat and came for his lesson in an achkan of corded white silk, buttoned with balls of gold; the collar was stiffened with gold in scrolls and the silk stood out; it was as white as milk or seed pearls, and Sister Honey rushed to find a sheet to spread over his chair before she would let him sit down. Then a procession of coats began, each one as lovely as the last; a maize colour patterned with flowers in damask, a white brocade with a gold sprig; a dove grey satin and one with stripes worked entirely in petit point like a grandmother’s footstool. He changed his earrings every day and he smelled strongly of scent.

‘Do you like it?’ he asked Sister Ruth, offering her his handkerchief. ‘It’s called Black Narcissus and I got it at the Army and Navy Stores.’

‘Black Narcissus!’ said Sister Ruth scornfully.

Afterwards in the Refectory, she told the others and said: ‘That’s what I’m going to call him. It’s a beautiful name for him. He’s so vain,’ she mocked, ‘like a peacock, a fine black peacock. I’m going to call him Black Narcissus.’

‘But he isn’t black,’ said Sister Honey, who had laughed and felt mean for laughing. ‘He’s only a dusky olive colour.’

‘They all look alike to me,’ said Sister Ruth loftily, and she answered Dilip ungraciously and said: ‘I don’t like scent at all.’

‘But don’t you think it’s rather common to smell of ourselves?’ he pleaded. ‘To tell you the truth,’ he said shyly, ‘I’m trying very much to improve myself. Have you noticed any difference in me the last few days?’

‘I’ve noticed that you’re not getting on very fast with your French,’ answered Sister Ruth. ‘Now, General, will you write out from memory the present indicative of the verb “aller”, to go.’

It seemed suddenly and utterly fantastic to her, that she should be requiring French verbs from this dark young prince, in his shimmering coat; working in the smell of his narcissus scent made her head reel, and she went to the window, looking out across the terrace. She could just see the factory roof far down below and the streamer of smoke from its chimney; as she looked down, her eyes hardened and she squared her shoulders; then she leant against the sill, her chin on her hand, one finger tracing the line of the wood; she smiled, a curious little absent smile, and now her eyes were wide and softly green.

The young General seemed very beautiful to all the nuns. When he came galloping down the drive, flashing under the deodar trees, he might have been a forerunner of the spring and summer days that were so long in coming. They had seen so little colour in the winter that he seemed almost startling, and he came so fast, his pony’s mane rising in the wind like a crest, its tail streaming over the sky and clouds between the trees.

Sister Clodagh had let more than she knew into the Convent with the young General Dilip Rai.

He was outside everything they had considered real; he was the impossible made possible. He was fantastic. His white pony was a stallion of the famous Tangastiya breed; it galloped up and down the hills, and when he galloped it on the narrow paths of the high ground, his head looked to be above the clouds, and the trees below the path brushed his knees. His coats and jewels were fabulous, and he was as naïve and charming as the youngest son in a fairy story. His people were fantastic too, heady and strong with their crude bright clothes and goblin faces, and they also rode these white and dappled stallions.

‘Have you noticed,’ Sister Philippa asked once, ‘how important these people are? How they’ve impressed themselves on us, compared with the natives in other places we’ve been in?’

They and the General were not too fantastic for the country; nothing was too strange for the mysterious and impenetrable State and the ice mountains and the dark forests and the valley with its easy luscious fields.

Sister Honey stopped in her work to listen eagerly to the children saying their lesson in the next room, as if they belonged to her; Sister Philippa straightened her back from her frozen beds and stared across the garden, seeing it in summer, and Sister Ruth watched and waited for Mr Dean. Sister Clodagh’s face was so softened and changed that Mother Dorothea would not have known her.

‘Sometimes she looks half asleep,’ said Sister Briony. ‘Really, I’d think she had liver if she didn’t look so well. She’s as flushed and clear-skinned as a young girl!’

If Sister Briony noticed anything unusual about the Sisters, she thought spring must be coming and they needed dosing; all she thought about the General was that he should not be allowed to wear his best clothes in the morning. She was far too busy to look out of the window or to stop and think about people, except as legs and arms and heads that needed bandaging and eyes and stomachs and chests that came to be treated.

Sister Clodagh was very angry when she heard that Sister Ruth had nicknamed the young General ‘Black Narcissus’. She was angry and astonished at its neatness; what had made Sister Ruth echo her own dream with a name? In her dream, Dilip and Con had held mirrors in the palms of their hands, and she had tried to attract them but could only echo what they said. And now Sister Ruth had put her dream into words.

Often now, it was Con and not the young General who sat at her desk, while she was in her chair stitching at the wool picture of St Francis and the animals; there was not the gulf and the snowline beyond the windows, but the lawn and the veronica hedges, the foreshore and the lake and the low green mountains.

‘Con, won’t you ever finish? Pat’s had the boat waiting for the last hour.’

‘Lord, girl, can’t a man write a letter in peace?’ They smiled at one another across the room; there was such happiness in that, that she had to turn away and look at the lake and the boat with patient Patsy in the stern.

In summer they were often out with him on the lake after brown trout, or fishing the Upper River when it was not let, or else at the small stream that ran out on the lake. Every year the cousins came over for the shooting, and there were the long days on the mountain with the guns and Roderick and Morna and Gamble matching themselves against Con’s springers. ‘Call in your mad dog, Clo. Is it the Waterloo Cup you’ve entered it for? Take it home and cut off its tail just behind its ears. It’s corrupting my beautiful Joey.’

‘Joey! That rabbit catcher!’

Cousin Michael’s wife, Mary, eyed the men and said: ‘Well, Clo, I suppose very soon you and Con –?’

‘You and Con.’ Everyone was thinking that. Everyone was waiting. The Byrnes at Clough House, and the O’Driscolls at Fosse, and the Misses Barradine at Castle Maine, and Lady Truebridge, who was her godmother. ‘These emeralds are for you, child, when you marry Con.’ There were the Malley girls, Moira had been making eyes at Con since she was in socks; and the Riordans and the Shephards and the Monks, and young Jerry Caldecott who was the next Lord Toome, as mother was always pointing out. They were all waiting and wondering.

It was in the winter she saw most of them; that last winter every face had been an open question. Hounds met three mornings a week and Con had let her ride Thunderer as well as having her own Peewit. ‘Be careful of that horse, he’s the family fortune.’ Con kept by her side and showed her the way when she let him. ‘Be careful, Clo. Mind him at the break. Keep behind me if you can.’ The dances and the hunt balls were in the winter, and the Misses Barradine’s games party, and the tenants’ dance which was the only kind of entertainment Con’s people ever gave; that last one had made her stiff with self-consciousness, scenting congratulations in the air. ‘Miss Clodagh and Mr Con, isn’t it?’

But in the blessed summer months they were shut away by themselves; Con’s father was not the only one who withdrew into obscurity and let the house and the fishing and the shooting. ‘Our house is a byword now,’ grumbled Con, that last summer. ‘Even the agents can’t recommend it. No one will take it now.’ She was glad of it; it kept him there, and every evening his whistle came over the hedge.

Father looked over his paper. ‘That’s Con.’ Mother put down the fleecy knitting. ‘Now not too late, dear.’ As she closed the door she heard mother say: ‘Oh dear, I’d like them to settle something before next winter.’

They walked down the hill and leaned on the bridge to watch the stream run into the lake. She always remembered how, in the fields, the rabbits showed white scuts and undercoats as they played and the geese shone like pearls in the mud, and a gull over the lake showed white wings as it turned to the shore. She always remembered those small shining pieces of white.

‘It isn’t even a life for a man,’ said Con. ‘There isn’t anything in it for me. What do I get out of it, waiting for the old man to die? Seeing him toil and slave for a house that’s falling to pieces over his head. The rot’s in and the land’s gone to weed and he won’t see it. He’ll kill himself for it and I’m expected to do the same. Why? Because we’ve always been here; because of a lot of old dead and buried men. What do I care what kind of blood I’ve got, when I haven’t a penny to bless myself with? What do I care if the land’s been ours for a thousand years when it isn’t worth a halfpenny now?’

‘But Con, you know quite well you’re proud of it and love it.’

‘Love it! When he dies, and it’s the sober truth I’m telling you, Clo, I shall let the whole thing go and clear out to Uncle Nat. I’ve written and told him so and he agrees with me. Fond as I am of the old man, there are things I won’t do. As soon as he goes, I go. I never want to see the place again.’

The water seemed to flow away from her, the geese, and the clouds seemed to run together into a blur. ‘Think of all there is to do in the world,’ cried Con. ‘God! Sometimes I can’t wait for it all. Clo, doesn’t it make you itch to get away?’

‘I don’t want to go away,’ she said. ‘I want to stay here, like this, for the rest of my life.’

‘Please, Sister,’ the young General was saying, urgently from her desk. ‘In this passage

“Laudate et benedicite mio signore et regratiate;

Et seruite a lui cum grande humilitate”

how do I translate “Et seruite”?’

She was sitting at her embroidery frame, the blue thread of St Francis’s eye in her hand, and the unstitched eye still staring at her from the canvas.

‘Sister, I’ve asked you twice,’ said Dilip plaintively. ‘What is the right translation for “Et seruite”?’

Kanchi looked for him every day, she watched him ride up and give his old coat to the groom so that it should not be seen, and pull down his cuffs and straighten his hair, and touch his earrings to be sure they were in place. Then he took up his books and went in to his lesson, leaving a waft of fragrance on the air, that made Sister Briony say: ‘Tsst! Tsst!’ and fetch the pine disinfectant.

If he saw Kanchi he smiled at her because she was young and pretty like himself, and because he knew that she desired him. He thought that was perfectly natural, but at present, with all his schemes and ambitions, he had no time for anyone but himself, and he smiled at her and went in to his lesson.

Kanchi dropped her lids at once, but after he had gone, she raised her eyes to his back and they were bright with tenderness and greed.