By the time he emerged again they had secured the Land-Rover’s steering with an ingenious padlocking device of Larry’s own invention, briefly examined the palm-decked amenities within the hotel, still dim and almost unpeopled in the dawn, and moved round to the small terrace at the rear of the building.
And there at last was the Periyar Lake, or at least the first glistening reach of it, curving in to lip the soft green swell of turf some forty feet or so below the level of the terrace, and winding away in the distance to lose itself among folded green slopes of grass and trees. The far-off ranges modulated from green to blue, to smoke-grey, and dissolved into the pearly light of a morning as yet sunless. A flight of steps led down from the terrace to the grass, and thence a long, curving causeway swept away righthanded into the water, like a Devonshire hard, its coral-coloured surface breaking gradually through the green of the grass only to lose itself again beneath the quivering dove-grey of the shallow water. On the right flank of the hard, within its protecting curve, three or four white launches were moored; and from there a belt of stiller water, broad and pewter-grey, launched itself out across the lake-surface. To the left, where the bay rounded in a sickle of shore and curved away again, they saw the first ghostly gathering of dead trees, skeletons standing six feet or more out of the water, quite black, all their lesser branches long since rotted away. From the water’s edge rose a band of about a hundred yards or more where the grass was pale, thin and low; then at high-water-mark the lush, man-high growth began, and the living trees, not jungle here, but fairly open woodland, through which the first rays of the sun filtered and found the mirror-surface, to splinter in slivers of blinding light when the fitful dawn-wind troubled the lake. There were clouds, soft, light and lofty, above the receding folds of the forest.
‘No wonder the English felt more at home in the hills,’ Dominic said, as they stood gazing in sharp, nostalgic pleasure. ‘It wasn’t only the temperature, it was the whole look of the place. You’ve only got to get high enough, and you’ve got English trees, English gorse and heather, even an English sky. You never realise how you’ve missed the variety of cloud until you see it again after months of staring at absolutely naked blueness.’
‘Then perhaps they felt really at home,’ murmured Priya, with the first spark of mischief he had observed in her, ‘when the monsoon rains began.’
‘Personally,’ Patti said sceptically, ‘I can do with quite a lot of naked blueness before I start complaining. That’s one of the things I do like about India, and one of the things I’m going to miss if I do go home.’
‘You haven’t made up your mind, then?’ Larry turned to look at her with more interest than he had yet shown. She was duplicating, Dominic thought, a dilemma of Larry’s own. Both of them were drawn, and both of them repelled; and both of them, each in a different fashion, held it against India that they did not know what to do.
‘Oh, I don’t know! – It’s the parents, you know – I’m the only one, and they gave me the works, private schools, music lessons, riding lessons, the lot! I keep feeling I’ve got to give them some sort of return for their money. But then, even if I do go back and work at it, I sure as hell know the end product isn’t going to be what they were bidding for. Maybe they’d be safer if I stayed here – I mean, you can do quite a bit of romancing about a daughter several thousand miles away, but it’s no good if she keeps blowing in and smashing the image. And I do love this country – hate it, too!’ she added honestly. ‘Some of the components are marvellous, if only you could break the whole lot apart, and put them together again in some form that would actually work.’
‘And couldn’t you say that just as accurately about any country under the sun?’
‘I suppose you could. I know you could. So why go home? Why go anywhere? Start from where you are.’
‘I did,’ he said grimly, focusing his Werra on the dead trees that spread their arms rigidly now over quivering silver water. ‘I started practising shattering it to bits and rebuilding it nearer to the heart’s desire right where I was, on a New England campus. I’ve had the New Left and the activitists – from mid- to extreme- to off-the-map and up-
the wall. They never chanced a thing except themselves, and so far as I could see, that was no change for the better. And all they shattered were people – usually innocent people – as even policemen can be,’ he added sourly, and turned his back on her abruptly, and the shutter clicked.
‘Then where do you go after that?’ she said, and she had been so startled by this burst of confidence from him that it was almost a cry of appeal.
‘If I knew that, I should be on my way.’ That was the most Dominic had ever yet heard from him about his own intolerable situation, and perhaps the most anyone was going to hear until he resolved it one way or another. ‘Good, here’s Lakshman, we can get off now.’
Lakshman came round the corner of the hotel in conversation with a young fellow of his own slender build, but taller and more muscular. He was dark-skinned and clean shaven, with a prominent nose and strong brows, above narrowed dark eyes that had the seaman’s look of focusing upon distance. He salaamed briefly and cheerfully, and favoured them all with a broad and gleaming smile.
‘Sir, I am Romesh, your boat-boy. Ladies, you please come this way.’
He pattered before them down the steps in his worn leather sandals, and led them down the tongue of grass and the curving causeway to the boats. His working wear consisted of khaki shorts and a tunic of white cotton, with a red sash round his waist, and a loose white cotton turban, with a short cockade of pleats over his forehead and a balancing fan of pleated folds on his neck.
Patti danced down the steps after him, Priya following more sedately. ‘Romesh, you speak good English. That’s lucky!’
‘I speak a little, memsahib. Not good!’ He turned upon her a flashing smile, half-bold and half-shy; she saw that he was quite young, probably only a few years older than herself. ‘But I try to show you all game, very good. It will be fine morning, many elephants come.’
He loosed the rope that moored the smallest of the white boats; the canvas canopy slapped gently in the breeze, and then was still. The vast, bright body of the sun glowed through the trees, and the clouds, unbelievably high in a pale sky, began to sail slowly like boats on a reflected lake. Romesh drew in the line and steadied the boat, holding out a hand to help the girls aboard. There was comfortable room for them all, and seats to spare. The largest boat, rocking languidly to the motion they created, must hold as many as fifteen passengers without crowding.
Romesh kicked off his sandals and sat down to the motor, and in a moment teased it into life. They slid out into the deep channel, clear of the skeleton trees, and headed across the first bight of the lake. On either shore the bare, peeled area of grass rose, steeply or gradually, to the contour of the high-water-mark, and there the grass and bushes soared to a man’s height, and the trees crowded close.
‘The water is rather low,’ said Lakshman, ‘but that is good, because then the animals must come well clear of cover to reach the water, and we shall have a good view. Sometimes it is much lower even than this, and then it is more difficult for the boats, because there is so much dead forest.’
Close to the shore, wherever they turned, there was always at least one spectral tree to be seen. In the deeper passages whatever remained of the drowned giants – if anything remained – was far below the draught of motor launches. They looked back, and the hotel and the landing-stage were already out of sight. The note of the boat’s engine was low, leisurely and quiet. Romesh scanned the shores as they moved, watching for anything living that might emerge from the rim of the trees.