Free The Raj Quartet, Volume 1: The Jewel in the Crown: The Jewel in the Crown Vol 1 (Phoenix Fiction) by Paul Scott Page B

however,” he said, “there is news of the roof?”
    “No, there isn’t. I’ve checked through all the estimates again and there’s not one that’s low enough. Can’t you find someone to do it cheaper?”
    “I have tried all who are willing to do it at all. If we wait much longer even the low estimates will go up. And these people cannot work for nothing.”
    She was about to say, Well, that’s not what I’m asking, I’m not asking them to do it for nothing. She would have said that to Mr. Narayan. She held back from saying it to Mr. Chaudhuri. Instead she said, “No. Well come on. I’d like a cup of tea.” And even that sounded brusque.
    Mr. Chaudhuri closed the school, padlocked the door, and joined her in the Ford. At his bungalow tea was not ready. He did not apologize; but while she was resting on her bed, waiting to be called, she heard him taking his wife to task for not ordering things better. When tea was ready it was served on the verandah. Mrs. Chaudhuri did not join them. She moved between kitchen and verandah, carrying things with her own hands, smiling but saying little, and when there seemed to be nothing more that they wanted stood in the shadow of the doorway, pretending not to be there, but watching her husband for the slightest indication from him that something had been forgotten, or was wrong, or needed to be replenished.
    “It is this,” Miss Crane often told herself, “this awful feudal attitude to his wife that makes it difficult for me to like him.”
    But it was not that. In the evenings Mrs. Chaudhuri sometimes sang to them. Directly she was seated cross-legged on the rush mat, gently supporting the onion-shaped tamboura, she became a different woman; self-assured, holding her bony body gracefully erect, not unlike the way Lady Chatterjee held hers when sitting on a sofa at the DC’s. After Mrs. Chaudhuri had sung a couple of songs Mr. Chaudhuri would say, almost under his breath, “It is enough,” and then Mrs. Chaudhuri would rise, take up the tamboura and disappear into an inner room. And Miss Crane knew that Mr. and Mrs. Chaudhuri loved one another, that Mr. Chaudhuri was not a tyrant, that the woman herself preferred the old ways to the new because for her the old ways were a discipline and a tradition, a means of acquiring and maintaining peace of mind and inner stillness.
    On this night, the night of August the 8th, which Miss Crane felt in her bones was a special night, one of crisis, she longed to make Mr. Chaudhuri talk, to find the key to his reticence, a way of breaking down his reserve. It would have been easier for her if he had been as old-fashioned in his manners as his wife, because then their association would have been of an altogether different kind. But he was not. He was westernized. He wore European clothes at the school and, at least when she was staying with them, at home. They ate at a table, seated on hardwood chairs and talked about art and music and the affairs of the school, but never politics. There was a cloth on the table, there were knives and forks to eat with, and ordinary china plates. At dinner Mrs. Chaudhuri sat with them, although she took almost no part in the conversation and ate practically nothing. A woman servant waited on them, the same woman who did the cooking. Miss Crane would have felt more comfortable if the woman had been an untouchable because that would have proved, in the Chaudhuris, emancipation from the rigidity of caste. But the woman was a Brahmin.
    They had coffee in the room that overlooked the verandah, in which she and Miss de Silva had sat on old cane chairs, but where they now sat on low divans with their feet on Kashmiri rugs. Miss de Silva had been content with an oil lamp; Mr. Chaudhuri had rigged up an electric light that ran from a generator in the compound. They sat in the unflattering light of one naked electric bulb around which moths and insects danced their nightly ritual of primitive desire for what might