A Division Of The Spoils (Raj Quartet 4) (44 page)

*

When the women withdrew the servant brought a couple of decanters. One of them contained the remains of that much-travelled bottle of Old Sporran. I declined the whisky and had brandy; an act of self-denial which I followed up by mentioning Bagshaw and inviting what I would least welcome: a claustrophobic conversation about the hermetic world of school, that alchemy in reverse which transmutes the gold of life into the lead of tiresome recollections of immaturity. But Colonel Layton showed no enthusiasm for Bagshaw. He smiled benignly, uncommitted. He was suffering, I thought, from delayed reaction to the shock of homecoming. Here for him, briefly, was a likeness of the world he had just escaped from, a room occupied entirely by men. I don’t think he liked it, suddenly. He raised his glass of malt whisky in a rather shaky hand and said, ‘Strange thing. There was a young Oberleutnant at the last camp I was at –’ and retold the story for – I assumed – Rowan’s benefit, but when he had finished and I glanced at Rowan I fancied Rowan too had heard it before but assumed I hadn’t.

‘Extraordinarily kind of you, Perron,’ Layton said, nodding at his glass. ‘I feel it would be civil to write to the Oberleutnant and tell him it came true. Haven’t actually sat down to Jane Austen yet, though. So mustn’t deceive him. Not that one would know where to write. By the way, my future son-in-law told me that officer you rescued from the bath
succeeded on his second attempt. Sorry about that. It was his whisky originally, wasn’t it?’

I agreed that originally it was.

‘Odd thing,’ he said, ‘the compulsion to suicide.’ Layton was studying the pale liquid in his glass, perhaps seeing in the whisky of one dead man the face of another. ‘What do you say, Rowan? Odd? To be quite so at the end of the tether?’

Rowan said he was inclined to think there was a certain dignity in taking one’s own life. Layton said he supposed the Japanese would agree but that it was wretched for the family and that that was what a man should think about. In the case he’d just had, the case of Havildar Karim Muzzafir Khan, it was the plight of the widow and her children that most concerned him. The regiment would have to make sure she didn’t suffer unduly. But she had left her dead husband’s village and gone back to her own. He feared that her neighbours had made life impossible for her when they heard what he’d done, in Germany. He turned to me. ‘Perron, is anything that’s worth knowing coming out of these interviews?’

The briskness of the military manner flared up in that one question and then went out again. I decided that he would prefer the truth so replied that so far as I was qualified to judge I should say nothing worth knowing whatsoever. He nodded.

‘That’s rather the conclusion I’ve been coming to,’ he said. And nodded again. The images of the evening at Rose Cottage end there.

*

In my bedroom at the guest house I found on the bedside table a copy of Emerson’s essays – heavily underlined and marked in the margins. Its owner, or one of its owners (it had obviously been handled a great deal) had written her name on the fly-leaf. Barbara Batchelor. The underlining began with the first familiar and sonorous paragraph of the essay on History:
There is one mind common to all individual men:
and continued intermittently. I flicked the pages to find the other familiar passage in the essay on self-reliance and found that marked too:
Society is a wave. . . .

‘You’ve found the book, then,’ Rowan said when I took it out on to the verandah to join him over what he called a nightcap. ‘I’m sorry, I ought to have mentioned it, but forgot. It was among some things I brought up from Ranpur for Sarah. We thought you’d like it.’

Barbara Batchelor was an old missionary who’d once lived at Rose Cottage as companion to Mabel Layton, Layton’s stepmother, now dead. Miss Batchelor was dead too. The book was among some things she’d left for Sarah.

When I was settled Rowan said, ‘Incidentally, it needn’t make any difference to you, but I’ve decided to go back to Ranpur tomorrow.’

I felt bewildered. ‘Whenever did you decide that?’

‘I suppose in the last half-hour or so.’

Recalling the tentative arrangement I’d overheard him making with Mrs Layton to play some tennis over the weekend I realized he was telling the truth. I didn’t press for an explanation.

‘I can’t very well stay here once you’ve gone,’ I said. ‘I’d better see the accommodation people tomorrow.’

‘That’ll only confuse them. They know you’re here. If I were you I’d hang on at least until an officer comes up to take Merrick’s place, or you get ordered back to Delhi. I’ve signed you in as my guest. I’ll mark it
sine die
, so all you’ll have to do is sign any chit the servant asks for and sign the steward’s register before you leave.’

‘Who pays? Government or you?’

‘Government. So long as you don’t dine the station or do anything the auditors might think odd, like drinking three bottles of whisky before breakfast. They’d apply to me in that case.’

‘You pay for the drinks anyway, don’t you?’

‘Don’t let it inhibit you. You can drink to my future if you like. I’m going back into the Political,
HE
warned me about it before I came up. That’s why I’ve been having these few days off. I rang him tonight before we left though and he told me the signal had come in. I fly to Delhi on Tuesday and then get told where I’m going.’

‘It’s only Thursday.’

‘Oh, well. Clearing things up, packing. Better to get on with it.’

‘Does Miss Layton know you’re going?’

‘She knows I’m expecting the posting.’

‘Didn’t you tell her it had come?’

‘No.’ He hesitated. ‘Somehow the atmosphere tonight didn’t seem right. I’m sorry it wasn’t all that successful an evening.’

I asked him what time he intended leaving. He said the private coach was still in Pankot. It was just a question of getting it coupled on to the mid-day train. Gopal had gone back by car, with Mohammed Ali Kasim. He said, ‘Perhaps there’ll be a signal for you tomorrow too, from your Aunt Charlotte. Then we could go back together.’

‘It’s a shade early for my signal.’

‘You were serious, though, about Bunbury?’

‘Deadly serious.’

‘What happens if it doesn’t work?’

‘A court-martial, I should think. Are you positive it’s hanging and not shooting?’

But this irritated him. He stopped looking at me. He seemed to find the dark beyond the verandah the most rewarding of anything within his range of vision. I waited. Presently he glanced back at me. He said, ‘Was it a surprise to see me the other night at Ranpur station?’

‘Totally unexpected.’

‘But you recognized me.’

‘Easily.’

‘Would you, if you hadn’t met Sarah in Bombay and she hadn’t mentioned I was in Ranpur, working as an aide to
HE
?’

‘Perhaps not so instantaneously.’

‘Even if we’d been contemporaries at school, same house, same year, and close friends. It wouldn’t necessarily follow would it that we’d recognize each other if we met years later in a public place?’

‘It could follow. Why do you ask?’

‘Do you remember a boy called Colin Lindsey?’

‘It rings a vague bell. Who was Colin Lindsey?’

‘Harry Coomer’s closest friend.’

‘Then I may. I once asked Coomer to tell me the difference
between karma and dharma but he said he didn’t know. I suggested he might ask his father during the summer holiday but he said he probably wouldn’t see him because he was spending the holiday with – well – “Lindsay, here”?’

That was the picture: Coomer and ‘Lindsey, here’, standing together, the brown boy and the white boy, resisting an inquisitive prefect’s invasion of their solidarity and privacy.

Rowan said, ‘He saw more of the Lindseys than of anyone. His father encouraged it and kept himself in the background. He wanted Harry to grow up as much like an English boy as he could.’

I was about to say: How much like was that? But checked myself. Rowan was too delicately poised between confession and characteristic silence for me to take the risk of upsetting him with that kind of facile question. For a while neither of us said anything but he began to lose interest in the dark beyond the verandah, as if Kumar were no longer out there but had come in to shelter in our recollections of him. A third, empty, white cane chair might have been his. Well, not his, not Coomer’s; but Kumar’s, whatever Kumar was or had become; whatever he would look like now, sitting there, no longer interested in cricket, but rape. White women. It meant nothing to me. But I wondered how deep Rowan’s prejudice lay. Of the depth of Merrick’s I had no doubt.

He said, ‘I suppose we ought to take into consideration the distinct possibility of our not meeting again for at least as long as it’s been since we last did. What, ten years ago?’

‘Next time it won’t seem so long. I’m told the older you get the quicker time goes.’

Such cliché simplicity also seemed to irritate him. He asked me what it was that amused me. I told him that what amused me was the awful seriousness that seemed to overcome people who worked in India. He said he thought I’d only just stopped accusing him of not being serious enough. I said that wasn’t quite what I meant. There was a difference between taking a situation seriously and taking oneself seriously.

He became interested again in the dark beyond the verandah. I thought I had done it this time and that soon he would drink up and say goodnight. Instead he said, ‘Yes, but out here
there are penalties for appearing not to. At least, that’s one’s earliest understanding. One is wrapped up in the cocoon of a corporate integrity. It’s a bit like being issued with a strait-jacket as well as a topee. It makes it difficult to act spontaneously and you become so used to wearing it that you find it difficult to do without it.’

‘They used to issue spinepads too.’

‘I know.’

‘But they went out. Like topees are doing.’

‘I don’t think the strait-jacket ever will.’ But he was smiling again. He said, ‘Sarah puts it well. She says that in India English people feel they are always on show. I think that’s true and on the whole that nothing worries us more.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Perhaps because we feel that fundamentally there’s so little to see?’

‘The
raj
with a superior manner hiding an inferiority complex? I can’t say I’ve come across much evidence of that.’

‘You could begin with me. I’ve very little real confidence. But it would be dangerous to give that impression. I expect I overcompensate. Most of us do. It’s probably what happened to Colin Lindsey.’

It was my cue but I didn’t take it up. I wanted him to tell me about Kumar and Merrick but I suspected that any further prompting would result in my getting a watered-down account and that I would only get a reasonably full one if I left the initiative to him. He hesitated again. But whatever it was that made him want to tell me finally won the struggle with whatever it was that made him reluctant to do so.

*

In May of the previous year (1944) on the day Rowan resumed his duties as
ADC
after one of several spells in hospital, the Governor called him into his study, said, ‘You’re an old Chillingburian, aren’t you?’ and asked him if he remembered a boy called Hari Kumar or Harry Coomer. Rowan said he did. The Governor handed him the confidential file on a man currently detained under the Defence of India Rules. This was Kumar. Rowan found it surprising that the boy he had known
should have developed into a political activist. The real shock came when he read further and realized that Kumar had not been arrested on political grounds but on suspicion of leading a criminal assault by several Indians on an English girl called Daphne Manners in Mayapore in August 1942.

Rowan remembered the Bibighar Gardens case quite well. He had been in hospital in Shillong still recovering from illness contracted during the long march out of Burma with what remained of his regiment. The Bibighar Gardens affair was something out of the common rut among the reported incidents of rioting, arson and sabotage that followed the arrest of political leaders, because it involved what in spite of that cautious phrase ‘criminal assault’ had clearly been the rape of a white woman. Rowan also recollected the sense of anti-climax when nothing further happened. A report that the men arrested had not after all been charged but sent to prison as political detenus was taken up by the Calcutta
Statesman.
It seemed odd, the
Statesman
suggested, that all six men originally reported arrested with such promptness, while presumably turning out to be the wrong men (since no charges had been made) should also all turn out to be politically active in a way that caused the authorities such concern that detention orders had had to be issued.

The
Statesman’s
interest in the case provoked no official comment; and when the riots were over, the Bibighar Gardens affair like so many others that had marked that period of violent confrontation between the
raj
and the population, simply passed into history together with the rumours that had added colour to it, the chief of which was that the girl herself had scotched the charges by denying that the arrested men were those who had attacked her and threatening to say such extraordinary things about colonial justice and colonial prejudices, if a trial were held, that it was decided there would be no point in attempting to hold one.

Rowan had heard these rumours, the accompanying explanation that one of the men arrested had been her lover and that she was so besotted or terrified that she had willingly perjured herself to save him, in fact had only admitted to being attacked because she couldn’t disguise the awful state she came home in. She’d cooked up a story about the men
being of the
badmash
or criminal type, not young educated boys like the ones in custody. He also heard the story that later she returned pregnant to her aunt in Rawalpindi and in the March of 1943 he had seen the notice in the
Times of India
of her death in Kashmir and of the birth of a child on the same day. The child, a girl, had been given an Indian name, and the notice had been inserted by her aunt, Lady Manners, the widow of Sir Henry Manners, one-time Governor of the province of Ranpur. At this time Rowan was again in hospital, in Calcutta. From there he went back to his regimental depot. Later he was in Delhi for a while. Early in 1944 he was appointed to Malcolm’s staff at Government House, where Sir Henry and Lady Manners had lived during the late ’twenties and early ’thirties. But when Malcolm gave him the file on Hari Kumar he had not thought of the Manners case for months.