A Division Of The Spoils (Raj Quartet 4) (39 page)

I roared for the bearer – instinctively calling a witness – and this galvanized the Red Shadow.

‘Sahib,’ he said, opening his innocent arms, showing his empty hands and backing away, making for the door. As he backed I advanced and pronounced anathema.

‘Rejected seed of a diseased pig-eater,’ I began. ‘Despised dropping from a dead vulture’s crutch. Eater of sweeper’s turds and feeder on after-birth. Fart in the holy silence of the universe and limp pudenda on the body of the false prophet.’

With each phrase I pushed him in the chest, out of the room, on to the verandah and then along its length. At each phrase he shook his head, wagged it rather in the Indian way, from side to side, an ambiguous movement suggesting both agreement and disagreement but striking a balance which seemed to mean: What the Sahib says, the Sahib says. And the Sahib continued saying, astonishing himself with a richness of imagery and fluency of Urdu he had never achieved before and has never matched since. Why didn’t I write it down immediately afterwards? I’ve often wished that when finished the Red Shadow and I could have sat together and gone through it. But it has gone – like the Red Shadow but less precipitately and without my prompting. The verandah, elevated two feet from the ground but without a balustrade and giving on to a gravel path, made a perfect launching pad. And the Red Shadow when it came to it did not lack a certain grace and elegance of line. I’ve always felt that recognizing the inevitable the artist in him rejected resistance and settled for
co-operation. Our combined movements were balletic, slightly rough and ready and under-rehearsed but cumulatively not without poetry.

As we approached the edge of the verandah my flat-palmed pushes became closed fist prods – not punches; but they brought his arms and hands from the appealing to the protective position. We established a rhythm of prod and jerk and presently I grabbed his shoulders (this was the moment when he seemed to decide to go along with me) steadied him, removed the ten rupee note from his belt, and swung him round to face the way he was about to go, which he did, borrowing rather than receiving thrust from the sole of my bare foot, and adding some thrust of his own in an attempt to jump that wasn’t made quite soon enough but contributed to the angle of flight and the arc of descent. He fell, rather heavily, spreadeagled, his lower body on the gravel and his upper on the grass on the other side of the path. And lay there; winded or pretending to be.

The sequence at an end and my week-old ambition fulfilled, I turned and found that there had indeed been witnesses. Apart from the bearer, the sweeper, the bhishti, and an unidentified person (no doubt of the kind who always turn up when there is an accident or act of God to contemplate with serene detachment – a freelance extra, as it were) there was Sergeant Potter.

What odd things one says to people, post-crisis. Seeing Potter I called out, ‘Just the man I wanted. Will this cover everything? I’m leaving.’

‘So I gathered,’ Potter said, ignoring the ten rupees and looking down at the Red Shadow. ‘But presumably not together?’

*

What Merrick had done was unforgivable. I had the story from Potter whose curiosity about my relationship with Merrick had been aroused by watching me deal violently with Merrick’s servant. Ten minutes later he came to my room with my bar chits and the change from the ten rupees. By this time I was dressed and packed and I’d sent the bearer down to
the gates to get a tonga. The Red Shadow had gone; where, I neither knew nor cared. Potter asked what it had all been about so I told him. I bore Potter no ill-will because I was convinced that the
NCOS
’ sudden change in attitude to me was entirely due to having seen me with a man they’d met before and had cause to dislike. But what cause? I wanted to know. Finding I was still friendly, Potter began to open up.

He said, ‘Will that fellow make trouble for you with Colonel Merrick?’

I said it wouldn’t bother me, but that as Merrick had gone to Ceylon and as I expected to be repatriated almost any day I’d probably be back in England before Merrick knew what had hit him or rather what had hit Suleiman. But I didn’t refer to them as Merrick or Suleiman. I called them Count Dracula and Miss Khyber Pass. Potter blushed. He said, ‘Look, I’m sorry. We thought he’d had the nerve to plant you on us.’

Potter didn’t take much more persuasion to spill the beans.

*

It concerned a medical
NCO.
Potter didn’t give me his name, but let’s call him Lance-Corporal Pinker, Pinky for short, and let us imagine him as a reserved, studious and hard-working young man who had lived an institutional life with other men in uniform without ever seriously arousing the suspicion that he was what is called abnormal. Even Sophie Dixon wasn’t absolutely clear on this score, or particularly interested. He liked Pinky because Pinky was harmless and friendly, quite intelligent and very conscientious. He had never served in the field, always at base hospitals. He had been in India for a few months and in Pankot for most of them. He was already in Pankot when Corporal Dixon and Sergeant Potter returned from Burma and were posted to the hospital’s military wing.

At that time Pinky was working on the wards. His transfer to the office of Captain Richardson, the psychiatrist, came later. Pinky and Sophie were on the same officers’ ward when Colonel Merrick (then Major) used to turn up for treatment and adjustment of his artificial hand and arm. He did this whenever he visited Pankot and on one occasion was admitted for two or three days because the chafing of the harness
had set up inflammation and there was some question of infection.

It was now that Potter filled me in on Sophie Dixon’s record in the field. His compassion for sick or wounded men sprang from the feminine side of his nature and he never left anyone in doubt about his physical preferences, but these were made entirely acceptable to the men he tended because it was his compassion and care – his dignified ministration to a sick man’s needs that they were made to feel, never the other thing. They knew the other thing was there, they had only to listen to him camping it up in the casualty station tent or basha – but (as Potter put it) ‘when he touched a man you could see that nothing was being conveyed except clinical reassurance’. In Potter’s mind there was even an idea that Sophie’s overt posture was a form of sublimation and that in fact he lived like a monk, on and off duty.

According to Sophie, the officer with the burnt face and artificial arm ‘must have been quite a dish’. This was the irony; originally Sophie had liked Merrick, so had Pinky. Whenever he came for treatment, Sophie mothered him. He thought the wounded hero brave, patient and well-disposed. Merrick never seemed at all put out when Sophie put on his act. ‘Sometimes I wonder about the Major,’ Potter remembered Sophie saying. ‘When I give him the bedpan this morning he looked at me ever so thoughtful. I nearly come out in one of me hot flushes. Watch it, Dixon, I says to meself. Hands off the tiller and leave it to the Navy.’

It would have repaid him to have listened to his own advice or rather to have watched not ‘it’ but Pinky. If he had watched Pinky closer he might have seen when the time came that Pinky was in trouble or heading for it. But by then Pinky was off the wards and in the psychiatrist’s office. When Merrick next turned up for treatment he said to Sophie, ‘I see your old colleague’s working for Captain Richardson. Isn’t that a waste of nursing skill?’

It didn’t surprise Dixon that Merrick had visited the psychiatrist. Considering the nature of his wounds a chat with the psychiatrist would not have been in the least remarkable. Six weeks later Merrick was again in Pankot. He visited the hospital. This time he was accompanied by the
Red Shadow. Sophie saw them together and at once nicknamed Suleiman Miss Khyber Pass of 1935. A few days after Merrick had gone back to Delhi, taking the Red Shadow with him, Sophie found Pinky crying and packing his kit. It took Sophie some time to find out why.

*

Working in Richardson’s office Pinky (so it would seem) had had his eyes opened for the first time in his young life to the fact that his inclinations were not nearly as uncommon as he had supposed. His was a typical case. Over-protected as a boy he had preferred the company of girls until he reached the age of puberty. After that he found himself attracted, mysteriously, to his own sex. He felt unique. Later he learned that to be like this was wrong, and later that it was not so unique as to have escaped being a criminal offence. As he grew older still he also discovered that it made ordinary men laugh. He knew he couldn’t help being what he was and he didn’t hate himself, but he couldn’t have borne to be found out. He told Sophie that when he came to Pankot at the age of twenty he had had no sexual experience with anyone except himself.

His job in Richardson’s office was clerical and highly confidential. It wasn’t a hard job because the number of cases in the hospital needing serious psychiatric treatment was never high. There were a few disturbed men in one ward and, now and again, in another, an officer or two whose ‘equilibrium’ had been upset. Psychiatry was still a bit of a joke in Pankot but it had become vaguely fashionable in the army. Just as potential officer-cadets in England had a routine chat with a psychiatrist at the war-office selection boards so, now, in Pankot’s military wing, convalescent men had chats with Richardson. It was almost a branch of welfare.

Richardson had a lot of time on his hands and Pinky discovered that he made use of it by keeping separate sets of private and confidential files for personal reference in his future civilian career. As Richardson’s confidence in Pinky grew so did Pinky’s opportunity to satisfy his curiosity about the contents of these private files. Richardson told him that psychiatry was a very inexact science and that there were
judgments it was wiser not to record officially because the army simply didn’t understand the complexity of a man’s emotional life and it was grossly unfair to penalize someone by recording an informed professional but far from conclusive opinion that might be interpreted subsequently in the naïvest manner and block a man’s promotion. When Richardson found that Pinky was genuinely interested in psychiatric method he sometimes lent him ‘closed files’ of men who had been discharged and, during slack times, even discussed them with him. He never showed him files on men which were still ‘open’ and all the files, both the official and the separate private files, were kept under lock and key. If Pinky was lent a file he had to return it to Richardson before Richardson left the office.

What fascinated Pinky was the revelation that in Richardson’s view (and who was Pinky to argue?) ‘repressed homosexual tendencies’ were not infrequently the cause or one of several causes of what – up there in the wards – might look simply like depression or apathy or a temporary inability to cope. He became intensely curious about the notes Richardson had made or was making about the men currently undergoing treatment – in particular one man around whom Pinky had been spinning private fantasies: a tough, good-looking corporal who had been in Burma with Wingate’s expedition.

A timid boy, his obsession gave him courage. He stole Richardson’s key – easy enough because the key was kept in a drawer of the desk which Richardson did not always remember to lock. What took nerve was getting a copy of it made in the bazaar and putting the original key back. Thereafter, night after night, he sat at his desk with one of the current confidential files, risking discovery but taking the risk because what he read absorbed him. The files changed his whole attitude to himself. The man in the ward, for instance, the one whom Pinky fancied, had admitted to Richardson that he had ‘mucked about’ with a fellow Chindit, still preferred women but wasn’t ashamed of the mucking about because he thought of it as something that had ‘just happened quite natural’, just ‘part of the business of being stuck in the jungle and being shot at’ and if he were back there he’d
probably do it again. What amazed Pinky was Richardson’s diagnosis that this man was ‘intelligent and well-balanced’ with a ‘healthy attitude towards sex’, and that his depression was almost certainly due to a combination of the physical after-effects of the dysentery for which he had already been treated and an understandable but by him unacknowledged conviction that he’d had enough of combat. The note on the official file, which mentioned nothing about ‘mucking about’ closed with the comment, ‘Fit for active duty from the point of view of this department but recommend further analysis of faeces’.

Intelligent and well-balanced. A healthy attitude towards sex. Pinky seized on the phrases as if they were lifebuoys. He acquired nerve. When he went down to the canteen or into the bazaar he looked about him, eyes open, newly confident. When he sat in the downstairs room of the Chinese restaurant (the floor reserved for other ranks) he glanced more boldly at men he liked the look of. Any one of them, judging by the files, might be willing to ‘muck about’.

It was during this first extrovert phase that Merrick came back into his life, arriving at the office one evening after Richardson had gone and just at the moment when Pinky was at the filing cabinet selecting his evening’s reading. He hadn’t heard Merrick knock or come in but, looking up, saw him in the open doorway between Richardson’s office and his own. Pinky’s alarm was short-lived. Merrick was not to know that the cabinet was private. When Merrick spoke to him in a friendly manner, remarking on his transfer from the wards, Pinky stopped feeling guilty and asked Merrick what he could do for him. Merrick said he was in Pankot for a day or two and hoped he would be able to have a word with Captain Richardson. Pinky looked at the diary and made an appointment for the following afternoon. ‘Merrick?’ Richardson said next day, ‘Isn’t that the officer with the burnt face and amputated arm?’

When Merrick arrived Pinky sent him straight in. Presently he was called in himself. Richardson handed him the key and asked for a particular file. Without thinking – because he was now so used to handling them – Pinky brought him the official buff file and the private green one. Richardson handed
back the latter and Pinky put it away. Merrick was in Richardson’s office for about twenty minutes. When he had gone Pinky went in with some incoming mail and found Richardson studying the private green file. He gave both files back to Pinky. Pinky asked whether he should open a file for Major Merrick. He was told that Merrick wasn’t a client. The files that had been got out in connection with Merrick’s visit were known to Pinky. They weren’t among those that interested him. They concerned a woman. He wondered what Merrick had been asking that caused the files to be got out, but did not inquire. The only other point of interest about this episode was that Pinky learnt for the first time that Merrick’s peacetime job was in the Indian Police. The subject came up because Pinky said he supposed when the war was over the amputated arm would mean an end of Merrick’s military career. Richardson said he’d no doubt go back into the police with a desk job and added, ‘
CID
I shouldn’t wonder. He’s dealing with these
INA
cases already.’ Pinky thought perhaps the woman’s file was also connected with the
INA
business. He wasn’t interested in the
INA
either.