A Division Of The Spoils (Raj Quartet 4) (22 page)

But Sarah knew that it was not; guessed that the girl had seen Colonel Layton coming out into the garden and – partly out of shyness (for she was still very young and had never met the head of the household), partly out of unwillingness to intrude, or to receive yet the look or expression of gratitude which she had earned – put herself out of reach.

As if alerted by Minnie’s sudden action, Susan had looked round, and now got to her knees, picked Edward up and stood facing the bungalow with her head down talking to the boy, holding his right hand out in the direction of his grandfather who now entered the court from the gate on the verandah side of the netting. At first Sarah thought he was alone, but presently she saw her mother following slowly, arms folded, one hand at her neck, pressing down her string of pearls. The hairdresser had attended her too. And Sarah did not recognize the jumper and skirt. Nor the shoes. They were new. Beside her mother and sister she felt travel-stained, dowdy in her uniform, excluded from the scene: from what she recognized
as
a scene – for all its appearance of evolving naturally from a sequence of haphazard events. It bore, for Sarah, the familiar mark of Susan’s gift for pre-arrangement, or her continuing and frightening attempts to reduce reality to the manageable proportions of a series of tableaux which illustrated the particular crisis through which she was passing.

It would be better
, she had said to her mother,
for you and daddy to be alone for a bit when he gets here, wouldn’t it? So I’ll be in the garden with ayah and Edward.

In this way the true climax of his homecoming had been delayed, transferred from the scene with his wife to the scene with the daughter who had a grandson to present. And a dog. But no husband. Instead, the ghost of the soldier whom she had married. The ghost, and the living likeness of the man in the child. These were her gifts to her father and her current explanations to herself of what she was in the world’s eyes and in his particularly: a promise for him of his continuity and
in that promise perhaps she saw a dim reflection of promise for her own.

He stopped just short of mother and child, raised his arms, inviting a triple embrace.
It’s grandpa
, Susan seemed to be saying. She held Edward up and after a moment’s hesitation her father took him and holding him firmly under the arms raised him high. Edward gazed down at the stranger with an expression that from a distance struck Sarah as oddly dispassionate for a child so young. It was an expression she had seen before on Edward’s face when confronted by men. He seemed to have a reserve, amounting to a vague antipathy, for grown members of his own sex. Almost alone among them, Ronald Merrick had inspired an early positive response, in spite of the burn-scars, the artificial hand. These had not frightened the child.

The one thing Edward seldom did when men touched him was cry; but his grandfather did not know this and perhaps interpreting Edward’s failure to show pleasure or interest in being raised aloft as a warning that tears could quickly follow, put him carefully down on the nearest corner of the blanket and, straightening up, gazed at Susan.

Hello, daddy, she seemed to say. Then she covered her face with both hands and, standing so, was embraced. When she uncovered her face and raised her head to kiss and be kissed her eyes were closed and she was crying. Sarah could hear her. He began saying things to comfort and jolly her out of it. And although he must have noticed the puppy before he chose this moment to exclaim about it. They both looked down at Panther, broke apart and knelt together on the blanket. Introductions were made. Panther wagged his tail and skittered a bit, happy but cautious under the flurry of attention. Colonel Layton scratched the puppy’s head, ruffled Edward’s red curls, placed an arm round Susan’s shoulders. She wiped her left cheek dry with the palm of her hand. The scene was over.

I can enter now, Sarah told herself.

By the time the car had negotiated the narrow lanes from the
Samaritan Hospital of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy in the old city of Ranpur, through the Koti bazaar to the Elphinstone fountain, the street lighting was coming on.

Only one police squad remained of the force that had been out in the afternoon. The men were relaxed, awaiting the order to return to barracks. Traffic was flowing freely around the circus and access to the Mall and the Kandipat road was no longer restricted – signs that His Excellency the Governor had made the journey from the airfield out at Ranagunj back to Government House without incident and that news of Mr Mohammed Ali Kasim’s brief stop in Ranpur,
en route
from Mirat to Pankot with the body of his secretary, Mr Mahsood, had not led to a popular demonstration in the latter case nor to an anti-government demonstration in the former – or certainly not one of the kind that got out of hand and at nightfall left the air charged with anxiety and irresolution.

As the driver turned into the Mall an Indian Sub-Inspector broke off conversation with a head constable, came to attention and saluted: the car rather than its occupant.

Rowan touched the peak of his cap then leant back and looked ahead to the still distant bulk of Government House, dark against the deep mauve northern sky and the grey pink-tipped storm clouds. The avenue of approach was bordered on each side by double rows of shade trees and the compounds of Ranpur’s oldest European houses and bungalows. The sidewalks were as wide as the road. It was a processional route but seldom used for such an occasion because the way from the airfield where people usually arrived now lay to the east of Government House, beyond the cantonment.

The Mall, running for a measured mile and a half from the Elphinstone fountain to the Governor’s residence, was bisected midway by Old Fort Road. In the middle of this intersection rose the bronze canopied statue of Queen Victoria. In 1890 that statue had been the cause of serious deliberations by the committee of the Ranpur Gymkhana Club. Unwilling quite to believe the story, since it seemed so perfectly apocryphal, Rowan had tackled the club secretary and eventually been shown the faded but still legible page of the committee’s minute recording a bare majority vote against a
proposal to paint the statue white to meet the criticism of members that, in bronze, Victoria – particularly in profile – bore an unhappy resemblance to a Rajput warrior lady of the kind who defied the British in the early decades of the century. The motion had been lost on the grounds of impracticability. A further motion that representations should be made to the appropriate department to try to ensure that any future replica of the Monarch should be executed in the best white marble was carried unanimously.

Although the Civil Lines officially began at the Elphinstone fountain, the Victoria statue was now regarded as the threshold. She stood on permanent sentry duty, accoutred with orb and sceptre, gazing with an air of abstraction towards the city. Behind her back the Mall continued, but on this second stretch there were no houses. The double lines of shade trees now bordered areas of flat open ground on which the military and police authorities could quickly establish command posts and hold reserve forces at time of civil disturbance. The line (or front) formed by Old Fort Road was considered the furthest that a civil demonstration should be allowed to march on Government House unless its intentions were clearly peaceful. Coming up the Mall from the fountain, riotous marchers invariably found the way blocked by squads of police, or soldiers, deployed across the road in front of the statue. The old houses and bungalows on the Mall between the statue and the fountain had long since been abandoned by the British and taken over by rich Indians. According to the British it was the inconvenience of places built in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries which had caused their removal to the newer and better accommodation provided by subsequent building along Old Fort Road and on the cantonment side of Government House, although it was occasionally admitted that it would have been tedious to live on a route so frequently used by crowds of people making nuisances of themselves. The joke still current among the Indians, though, was that the British had lost their nerve and decamped, leaving their Queen behind.

To reach the Gymkhana Club Rowan would have to tell the driver to turn right at the statue and go along the eastern arm of Old Fort Road. He was tempted to do so. Since 1800 hours it
had been his twenty-four hours off-duty. The prospect of beginning it with a dip in the club’s pool, a drink or two on the terrace and a quiet supper alone in the annexe to the main dining-room, attracted him. He could send the driver back to Government House with a note for the duty-officer to say where he was. Or he could ring the duty-officer from the club to ask whether
HE
had asked for him, although that was unlikely. The twenty-four hours off-duty once a week was treated by Malcolm with rigorous respect.

But he gave the driver no instruction.

*

Having passed the sentries and the checkpoint inside the west gate they came out on to the forecourt of the west wing and pulled up at a certain point below the flight of steps leading to the great colonnaded terrace. Rowan signed the man’s logbook, got out, went up and pushed through half-glazed double doors into the hall, full as usual with white-uniformed servants. He signed the duty book, marking himself OD, added his name to the mess list, went to check his pigeon-hole for letters and was handed two by the hall steward. Both felt like formal invitations. He went through the open half-glazed doors out on to an inner terrace, one of the four that flanked the inner courtyard: an immense rectangle laid out with intricate geometric precision and formality with lawns, paved walks, ponds and fountains. On ceremonial nights the fountains were floodlit but in the wet season were usually not even turned on. This evening the courtyard was lit only as far as the light from ornamental lanterns that hung from the apex of each section of the vaulted ceilings of the terrace could reach. Between the square pillars there were set great whitewashed tubs of hydrangea, geranium and bougainvillaea, and the ubiquitous crimson canna lilies. To reach the entrance to the staircase to his quarters Rowan had to walk past these almost to the end of the terrace and past the offices which coped with the routine work of the household. Most of these were shut and the benches provided for messengers empty, except outside the telephone exchange and the signals office which were manned round the clock, as
was the cypher office, in the east wing, where Rowan spent most of his working day. He glanced across the courtyard. The first-floor windows of Malcolm’s private rooms were lit.

Reaching the narrow door and the narrow staircase Rowan began to climb. His quarters were high up, on the second floor where the corridors were narrow, the rooms small, the ceilings low and the windows perpetually grimy. He had a sitting-room, a bedroom and a bathroom which suffered the drawback of having no running hot water. This had to be brought up from the basement in kerosene tins.

Without his bell, his telephone, and without the servants who manned the corridor, he might have felt himself marooned in a little oasis of inconvenience and for the first few weeks of his temporary appointment as an
aide
he had in fact suffered mild attacks of claustrophobia. But he had grown to see only the advantages of the place, even to be fond of it, and when offered something better on being transferred from temporary to official duty he had elected to stay. The quarters were supposed to provide short-term accommodation only and he was now the corridor’s oldest inhabitant. One of the advantages was that the servants allotted to the corridor looked upon themselves now as virtually in his personal employ. He knew their histories, their weaknesses, their aspirations; helped them with their private problems and settled their disputes. He had never felt himself cut out to be a good regimental officer; but he was sufficient of a soldier to miss contact with men for whose welfare he was responsible. The servants were a surrogate.

Two of them greeted him now. One took a key from its hook on the board and another a sealed envelope from the pigeon-hole used for internal messages. Jaiprakash opened the door of his sitting-room and switched the lights and fan on. Rowan handed him the key to his drink cupboard and asked him to pour a whisky-soda. Jagram meanwhile went into the bedroom and bathroom, turning on lights and fans, then came back and went out to the corridor to call the bhishti. So it was, night after night.

To drink his whisky Rowan sat in his one comfortable chair. He opened the invitations, neither of interest to him, and then the envelope containing the internal mail. Two of
the smaller envelopes inside contained bills. In addition there were various memoranda, the daily communiqué from the press office, a copy of a bread-and-butter letter from a senior officer of Eastern Command who had spent a few days at Government House and mentioned Rowan among those he thanked for making his stay comfortable. The largest envelope contained several cyclostyled pages: the general programme for the next few days, giving dates, times, functions, and the names of those members of the Governor’s staff who were required to attend. Wherever his own name appeared the clerk had inked in an asterisk. Since Rowan had drafted most of the itinerary himself he glanced through it now mainly to refresh his memory and to check whether the Governor’s private secretary, Hunter-Evans, had had to make any last minute changes.

Tomorrow night at 1930, when his day off was finished, he was to be at the reception in the state rooms for members of the Department of Education, the Municipal Board and the Ranpur Chamber of Commerce and at 2100 at the dinner for Mr Kiran Shankar Chakravarti who in the past few years had made several crores of rupees out of army contracts and had donated a sufficient number of them to found a department of electrical engineering at Government College.

At 10 a.m. the day after, he and Priscilla Begge (representing Sir George and Lady Malcolm respectively) were to welcome and escort to Government House Lady Burke from Delhi, whose interests were the Red Cross, the wvs and the work of women’s committees, and in the afternoon he had another reception committee at Ranagunj airport to collect a popular English entertainer who had been touring Burma and Bengal and who was to stay at Government House and give a concert at the Garrison Theatre in the cantonment. On the evening of the same day he was to accompany the indefatigable Lady Burke and Mrs Saparawala, the vice-chairman of the Ranpur Women’s War Committee, back to the station to catch the night train for Calcutta where they were to attend a conference. The day after that there was a morning meeting of the Executive Council followed by a lunch party for
HH
the Maharajah of Puttipur, and an afternoon visit to the quarries out at Rangighat. That was new to him. He hesitated, then
remembering that the Maharajah was greatly addicted to the sight and sound of dynamiting, he took up a pencil and marked Rangighat with a stroke, to remind himself to check that someone had thought not only to warn the Ranpur Quarry and Construction Company of the Maharajah’s visit but to tell them to be sure to have a few decent bangs laid on, even if they weren’t scheduled, and whatever the weather.