Second Best Wife (17 page)

'Oh, Celine, I'm so sorry,' Georgina said at once. 'I wasn't really listening. I was thinking about— something else. I didn't mean to be nasty, or to snub you or anything.' Celine smiled, the sunshine breaking through the threatened shower of rain. 'I was talking about Stuart. Georgina, have you ever been in love?'

Georgina was on the point of saying no, but something in the other girl's face prevented her. 'Why?' she asked instead.

'Well, you can't be in love with William. He'd know if you were because he's married to you. And
he
thinks you and Stuart might fall in love with each other. He said so! Only I couldn't bear it if you did!'

Georgina's look was scandalised. 'How many men do you think

I want?'

But Celine was unamused. 'Oh, Celine, really! William was talking about something else. He knows as well as you do that I'm not going to fall in love with Stuart! And as for him, I hardly think my looks would appeal much when he has only to turn his head and look at you. You're the one who's beautiful, my pet, not me!' 'But you have something else —'

'Me?' Georgina laughed at the very idea. 'You should ask my sister about that! She's the one who has the looks in our family and attracts all the attention, though even she would pale into insignificance beside you! I think you're the loveliest person I've ever seen.'

Celine looked merely uncomfortable. 'It's nice of you to say so, Georgie, but I don't think you know much about things like that after all.' She looked up appealingly. 'You're welcome to William, but not to Stuart as well! I wasn't going to tell you — I wasn't going to tell anyone because they'll only laugh at me, but I love Stuart and I want him to love me.'

'If you ask me, he hasn't far to go! Why don't you tell him how you feel, Celine?'

'If it's true and your demon is the one I saw, I'll think about it. I won't otherwise. Stuart deserves the very best, not a retarded idiot —'

Georgina put on a severe expression. 'I won't have you speak of yourself like that!' she cut in. 'Don't ever say such a thing again, Celine!'

'Don't you believe it?' the other girl asked.

'No, I don't! And Stuart won't either!'

'Then you don't mind, Georgie? I know you only have to lift your little finger — ' She bit her lip. 'I expect it's always been the same for you!'

Coming on to the verandah, William caught Celine's last plea. He put his arm round the girl's shoulders, smiling down at her. 'Surely you're not afraid of competition from Georgie?' he teased her. 'Jennifer never had any trouble from her.'

'Then Georgie wasn't trying! I don't like the sound of Jennifer anyway. She sounds silly and spoilt, and Georgie isn't either of those things. I'll bet most people prefer her really!'

'Do you?' William appeared to have lost interest. 'I shouldn't put my shirt on it, if I were you.'

Celine flounced away from him indignantly. 'You're a fool, William!' she told him over her shoulder.
'You
preferred her, didn't you? And so would Stuart if she wanted him!'

William favoured her with a lazy smile. 'What makes you think

I prefer her?' he asked.

Celine looked him straight in the eye, ignoring Georgina's ineffectual protest. 'Because you married her,' she said with considerable violence, 'and because you're glad you did! You've been glad ever since!' The blank look came over her face like the ringing down of a curtain. 'Shall we go in to lunch?' she said.

CHAPTER NINE

Georgina had never stood back and compared William to any other man before, but she did so now, watching him and Stuart as they stood side by side, making desultory conversation while they waited for Celine and her to join them. To an objective observer, the slighter man had to be considered the more handsome, but she was far from being able to make such an objective judgment. It was William who tugged at her heartstrings and whose smile reduced her knees to jelly. Besides, she liked his largeness, both in mind and body. Indeed, she couldn't think of anything she didn't like about him! Bad luck to her, she thought, if she couldn't keep her emotions under better control. Under the very best of circumstances William would be a hard man to hold, and her circumstances could hardly be worse.

Stuart had brought his jeep and they all piled in, the women sitting in the back to allow the men more leg room.

'Are you all right back there?' William asked, smiling an ironical smile at his wife.

'Would it matter if we were not?' she returned.

'You could always sit on my knee!'

She blushed. 'And what about Celine?'

'I hardly think there would be room for both of you.'

'Then I'll stay where I am!'

Having got that settled, Stuart drove off through the close by tea gardens, some of them planted on such steep hills that Georgina wondered that the Tamil women could balance themselves to pick the precious leaves. In their brightly coloured saris they looked as pretty as butterflies, making their way up and down the long lines of bushes, picking with both hands as they went. They wore some specially made baskets on their backs which they filled up at lightning speed, untiring in their urgency to earn the extra bonuses that were paid to anyone who picked more than the minimum weight required.

'Do they all come from South India?' she asked Stuart.

'Originally. I daresay a high proportion of these were born here in Ceylon, but they still think of their home as being in India. It's hard to believe, but many of their relatives back home in the mother country are even poorer

than the Tamils here. Many of them send a large proportion of their earnings back to India. That's part of the trouble, because Sri Lanka can't afford the drain on her resources and the Tamils get caught between the pressures on both sides of the argument. Someone will have to think of an answer soon, though. Many of them are worse than poor —the whole island is poor! — but some of the Tamils are actually starving.'

‘Why did they come?' Georgina asked.

Stuart made a wry face. ‘We, the British, imported them to work the tea estates. They're much more amenable to long hours of repetitive, dull work than are the Sinhalese— especially the women. There's no doubt they've been let down somewhere along the line. Tea is very important to the Lankan economy and they ought to benefit accordingly. But when one tries to apportion the blame it becomes much more difficult. All kinds of political platforms are mounted by all kinds of people and they all make a great deal of noise. Meanwhile the Tamils fall further and further behind in the subsistence stakes.'

‘Can't we do something?'

Stuart pooh-poohed the idea. ‘Our hands are hardly clean enough for anyone to want to listen! Until recently many of these estates were British owned and nothing was done then for them. It would be a case of the pot calling the kettle black with a vengeance!'

Georgina sighed. ‘But on this estate —'

‘Things are pretty good here,' Stuart agreed. ‘The best tea is grown high up, and one can hardly get higher than here. We get the best prices and offer our workers the best conditions accordingly. Some of our tea is so highly thought of that if one were to buy it in London it would cost all of seven pounds a pound. Nobody will pay that, so it gets mixed in with other grades. When I take you over the factory you'll be able to try your hand at my job and find out how good your taste-buds are. I never drink alcohol or eat spicy food in case I lose my touch, but it has other rewards. Tea is a fascinating crop.'

Celine leaned forward eagerly to catch the full import of his words. Her eyes were bright and alive with interest. It was a far cry from the apathetic, lacklustre child she sometimes appeared to be.

‘I didn't want to leave Australia, but I'm awfully glad now that William made me come. He doesn't usually want Miss Campbell and me around when he's working and we just stick at home. But I wouldn't have missed all this for anything!'

'Miss Campbell might have been happier back home,' William said dryly.

'Who cares? I love it here! She's cross because you only gave her a few hours to pack up all our things. She didn't want to come.'

Georgina laughed. 'I'm glad she hasn't succeeded in putting you off Sri Lanka,' she said. 'It wouldn't be the same here without you.'

Celine blinked with pleasurable disbelief. 'I didn't want to come because
she
didn't,' she blurted out. 'She doesn't like it when William comes the heavy guardian, you see. She likes to be the only one to tell me what to do.'

Georgina put a comforting hand on the girl's shoulder. 'If William comes the heavy guardian too often you should send him about his business,' she advised. 'You're old enough to make your own decisions. Don't you agree, Stuart?'

Stuart cast a quick look at the lovely, fair girl, giving nothing away. 'I like her the way she is,' he said.

Celine giggled nervously. 'And how am I?'

'Gentle and biddable,' he replied promptly. 'I can't abide pushy women!'

'Like Georgina,' William put in at once.

'Georgina?'
Stuart exclaimed, almost running the jeep off the road. 'There's nothing wrong with Georgie.'

Georgina cast her husband a look of malicious triumph. 'Thank you, Stuart,' she murmured meekly. 'It's nice to be appreciated for a change.'

William uttered a snort of laughter. 'Oh, I appreciate you all right, Georgie Porgie, but not for any milk-and-water blood in your veins.'

Georgina looked warningly in Celine's direction, but William paid no attention at all. His eyes slid over her, their meaning perfectly plain to any observer, and then he turned round in his seat again, saying something
sotto voce
to Stuart that Georgina couldn't quite catch.

She was glad when they reached the Hindu temple and Rabahindre came running forward to meet them. He put the palms of his hands of his together and lifted them high in front of his face. 'We are all ready, madam,' he said to Georgina. 'Everyone is very pleased to have you visit us!'

And sure enough, it seemed as though the whole village had turned out to mark their arrival. The children stood in neat lines on one side of the open space in front of the temple, watching eagerly as the visitors were divested of their shoes and led into the first of the chambers inside. There they were met by the local priest, a member of the lowest of the Hindu castes as were his flock, dressed in a white garment that was already stained with the mud of the evening before.

Georgina's first discovery was that the concrete floor was as slippery as glass. The roof had leaked in places, allowing the rain to come flooding in, and they were up to their ankles in muddy water long before they had passed through the outer room into the inner sanctuary.

The priest began a long sustained chant, the meaning of which had been lost in antiquity. Georgina remembered someone at college telling her that Hindu gods were some of the oldest in the world and that there was a school of thought that thought the gods of ancient Greece had originated from the same source, travelling to Europe by way of the very island where she was standing now.

The white-robed figure advanced towards them with a tin plate on which were mixed a number of coloured pastes. With infinite care he marked their foreheads and garlanded them with chains of marigolds and gold and silver decorations of the kind that we put on Christmas trees in England. Then with half a coconut in their hands, filled with flowers and the leaf of the betel-nut, they were led forward until they were almost touching the table that served as an altar and which stood in front of three curtained cubicles in which were hidden the representations of three of the most important members of the Hindu pantheon.

When the first curtain was drawn back, the elephant-headed son of Shiva and his consort, variously known as Parvati, Durga, Kali, etc., was revealed. Ganesha, as the remover of obstacles, is propitiated by every Hindu before every major undertaking and is much more popular than his warlike brother, Kartikeya, who is more generally known in South India by the name of Subrahmanya.

The central curtains revealed the more important god Shiva, the third member of the Hindu triad, the destroyer and the lord of the dance and who is sometimes worshipped for his sexual proclivities also. This last was brought home by a curious iron object on the altar in front of him that Georgina only belatedly recognised to be some kind of phallic symbol. Incense was burned before him and the chanting increased in intensity until one of the poorest-looking members of the congregation went off into a trance and began an erratic kind of dance that made Celine ask nervously, 'Is he all right?'

'It can happen to anyone,' Stuart reassured her. 'If he gets out of control, they'll touch him with some of the sacred ashes and he'll come out of it. It can happen to anyone. It could even happen to you.'

Happily, Celine had no time to express any further doubts before the priest was holding out a bowl of smouldering coals towards them and, following Stuart's example, they cupped the smoke into their hands and brought it up to their faces and down over their heads.

'What does this do?' Georgina asked in a whisper.

'You're receiving the power of the god,' William answered her.

She hoped it would work for a non-believer and doubled her cash contribution to the proceedings as a kind of insurance that it would. She knew little or nothing about Shiva, but she was attracted by his dancing figure with its many arms and one leg raised, while the other stood on some diminutive figure down below.