Ellis Peters - George Felse 11 - Death To The Landlords Read Online Free PDF Page B

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