Black Narcissus by Rumer Godden

Author:Rumer Godden
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504040341
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-08-02T04:00:00+00:00

19

Sister Philippa brought the seed lists to the office. In the evenings she had spent hours making them out. Her work in the garden was almost at a standstill now; the January and February days were all alike, they went like a procession of the nuns themselves, unrelieved by any colour; there seemed to be no life or movement in the earth but the wind tearing at the trees and bamboos. Still Sister Philippa was in the garden while it was daylight, planning and marking, turning up pieces of earth and littering the ground behind her with scraps of paper that the wind blew away, so that she had to draw her plans all over again. She called Nima up from his warm quarters at all hours and she would stop in the middle of talking to him, looking to where the snows lay hidden under the clouds; wrinkling up her eyes at the place where Kanchenjunga was wrapped away, while Nima waited with his eyes watering in the wind. She had a collection of pots ready for seed in the shed that Mr Dean had put up for her and she spent a great many hours there; best of all she had the catalogues of spring and summer flowers and her lists of them to make.

‘That cow is sick and you haven’t even seen it,’ said Sister Briony. ‘The boy says she has been off her feed for days. There’s nothing you can do in the garden now, so you might attend to your other work.’

‘Lemini, you’ve a great hole in your skirt, did you know?’ asked Kanchi pertly.

It was so difficult to decide what to have. Roses for instance. Mr Dean said she would have enough roses from the trees on the terrace and that no other kind could be better for colour and scent. ‘They start with copper-coloured buds and go into flame and orange and rose and apricot, and when they die they turn cream. There are thousands on a tree, Sister, higher than the house. I can smell them down at the factory. I’ve only seen one other place where roses grow like that, in the Nishat Bagh in Kashmir.’

‘Have you seen those gardens then?’ cried Sister Philippa. ‘Do tell me about them. Have you seen the Shalimar?’ But the roses in the catalogue had such tantalizing names and the descriptions were so beautiful that she had to write down a few. ‘I must see what “Lady Hillingdon” is like and this “Golden Dawn” that they say has forty-five petals and this lovely sounding “Shot Silk”.’

She had visions of the hill behind the house white and gold with daffodils and jonquils, but Mr Dean said that bulbs in this damp climate were extravagant, they rotted and had to be renewed every year, and that the spring was so brief and had so much already packed into it that they were more trouble than they were worth. ‘If you plant hill crocus, it’ll cost you nothing,

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