A Division Of The Spoils (Raj Quartet 4) (51 page)

And it was on this assignment that he’d met Sarah Layton – changing trains on her way back to Pankot from Calcutta where she had visited the wounded hero, the best man at Susan’s wedding. There she was, a rather travel-stained
Deus ex machina
, bringing news about wounds and decorations
which might solve the problem of departmental concern for Merrick’s reputation and Merrick’s future; but for Rowan, I thought, rather more than that. Was he, by the time I met him on the same station, more than just rather fond of her?

I thought so. His decision to go back to Ranpur the next day suggested he had had hopes which he had suddenly given up. I should have liked to see them together, not as I had done that evening, but in Ranpur during two or three days of what I judged to have been a tentative exploration of airier regions that promised to be in common ownership. Mutual antipathy to Merrick was no more than a way in to those regions. Rowan, of course had not – and never would have – disclosed to her what he knew, and she had nothing to disclose except her instinctive woman’s prejudice. These meetings between them had taken place during the brief time she spent in Ranpur before going down to Bombay to meet her father. Before then, they had met only that once when she had just come in from Calcutta and her visit to Merrick. He hadn’t been sure what her relationship with Merrick was. It was a relief to him, he said, to discover that in one sense there was no relationship. Another discovery was that she had once met Lady Manners in Kashmir, had seen the child; believed Merrick had made a terrible mistake. It was now that he told her he’d known Kumar as a boy, at school. But that was all. He might have told her more this time, on this visit to Pankot, but naturally hadn’t done so.

‘Naturally?’ I asked.

He said, ‘Well, of course.’

It was silly to have questioned it. Merrick was to be Miss Layton’s brother-in-law. That being so, from Rowan’s point of view the subject of Merrick and Kumar was utterly closed as one he felt able to discuss with her. I wondered when she had first heard or suspected that Merrick planned to marry her sister. Almost certainly the answer must be that she’d suspected nothing until she and her father got back to Pankot. Most certain of all was that it had been a shock to Rowan. I began to see the fullness of Rowan’s little tragi-comedy. He had, after all, had hopes of her. The brief holiday in Pankot had been intended as an opportunity to convey to her that his resumed career in the political was one he hoped she might
share with him. Perhaps his hopes had only finally been dashed, or shelved for future exploration, during the few hours we’d spent that night at Rose Cottage. Perhaps, with Merrick gone, he had hoped to find her recovered from the shock, less weighed down, looking and acting like the girl he knew (the girl I remembered). Had he at any time said anything to her at all about his hopes? Had she rebuffed him?

His attention was again directed to the darkness beyond the verandah; and suddenly I saw this other, faintly ludicrous aspect of the affair; one that inclined me to believe that because Rowan was the kind of man he was he had said nothing to her at all. He would have taken his time anyway, and before an opportunity arose the wind had been knocked out of his sails by the announcement of Susan’s engagement. Well, imagine it: imagine, for instance, Rowan shaving, brushing his hair, facing up to his reflection; thinking what he
must
have thought because every man would. Imagine him thinking this: Could I honestly spend the rest of my life knowing what I think I know about the man who would be my brother-in-law and say nothing?

And the answer would be, no. The other answer would be that knowing himself incapable of saying anything he knew that his own hopes had to be abandoned.

*

Malcolm was on the point of leaving for Delhi when Rowan got back from the Kasim assignment and told him the news about Merrick’s gallantry in the field. ‘I’ll check it,’ Malcolm said. ‘Meanwhile we’ll say nothing. It would be best if the Inspector-General got to know through his own sources.’ It meant another delay, the possibility too of this development making the
IG
even more stubbornly opposed to any course of action that belittled Merrick’s earlier performance as a guardian of the law. But the farce was coming to an end. Quite suddenly, without fuss, it was over. The
IG
withdrew his objections to Kumar’s release. Kumar was informed and told the date on which he would be free and instructed to report to the police in Ranpur once a week for six months. He was allowed to write to his aunt to prepare her for his return.

The aunt was living in rooms above a shop in the Koti bazaar. So Gopal told Rowan. They met the night the order of release was signed – a form of gentle celebration by two conspirators. Rowan was thinking: Yes, but release to what? Gopal had already formed a plan. He said it would be possible to put Kumar in the way of beginning to earn a living as a private teacher of English. He knew a reliable young man who would help him and who had already made contact with the aunt. The poor woman was very nervous and suspicious. It had been difficult for Gopal’s young man to gain her confidence. He had had to ask her to trust him when he said the authorities had at last taken an interest in her nephew’s case, trust him when he said there was every reason to hope that Hari would be released, and trust him again when he said he would help him to find work and keep out of the way of people who might want to exploit him.

‘I suppose I was sticking my neck out,’ Gopal said, ‘but that is what necks are for.’

*

It was ironic, Rowan said, and salutary, that of the two of them it was old Gopal, who had begun by not liking Hari, who had put his mind to the question of Hari’s rehabilitation.

Kumar had been free for over a year now. Rowan hadn’t seen him, neither had Gopal. He relied on Gopal for news and Gopal relied on his reliable young man. Kumar no longer had to report to the police but the
CID
still kept an eye on him. It had been weeks before Kumar trusted Gopal’s young man enough to fall in with the scheme for teaching English. He made the excuse that he would himself have to learn Hindi properly, first. But eventually, probably when it occurred to him to wonder what they lived on and he realized that his aunt had come to the end of her small resources and had always been too proud to beg help from her brother’s family and only too anxious to cut herself off completely from her dead husband’s, and had now sold the last bit of her jewelry, he agreed to help cram a couple of candidates for entrance to the Government College. Their success brought him other boys, including a nephew of Gopal’s. He seldom visited their
homes. He seldom left the apartment. He was paid very badly but he refused anything that smelt of financial help. The reliable young man, when he could do so without Kumar knowing, gave the aunt small gifts, as if in return for the cups of tea and coffee he had when he visited them; gifts of a few vegetables, flour, ghi. The young man’s own means were limited. Some of these gifts, Rowan suspected, came from Mrs Gopal.

Rowan had been able to do very little. He knew no Indians of the kind whose sons would go to an anonymous private teacher in the Koti bazaar. Rowan’s Indian friends were rich. Gopal was the exception – the only middle-class Indian with whom he had ever become on intimate terms. At the same time perhaps the only Indian with whom he had ever been on such terms.

And now Rowan was leaving Ranpur. He had no idea where he would be sent. Even that little which it had been open to him to contribute, so vaguely, so anonymously, would come to an end, now. He would keep in touch with Gopal as far as that was possible. Gopal and he had always had an idea that as circumstances changed, politically, it would be in their power unobtrusively to guide Kumar back into life. What he was living now was hardly a life. The reliable young man reported that Kumar seemed to have no ambition and that it was distressing to listen to the aunt painting an optimistic picture of a happy future when you only had to look at Kumar’s face to see that Kumar’s window on to the world was still closed and darkened. And once, coming on her alone, the young man had found Aunt Shalini crying. ‘Why should he hope?’ she asked, ‘when there is nothing for him to hope for? He understands only English people and they will never forgive him because of the girl. The doors will always be closed to him.’

She meant the doors Hari had been brought up to open – the doors into the Administration. And what she said was true. Rowan himself was in possession of no key that would enable Hari to enter. Neither was Gopal. Even the way in to a junior teaching post in a Government College was barred.

*

‘I’ve often thought of writing to old Bagshaw,’ Rowan said. ‘I don’t really know why. One couldn’t put it all in a letter anyway. And perhaps the old boy’s dead now.’

‘Is that where you see a future for Kumar? Back home?’

‘I don’t see much of a future for him here. I’m just broadening the perspective. It occurred to me that back home, if that’s really where you’re going, you might chance on something that could help. Anyway, I’d appreciate it if you’d write to me sometimes. Would you like another drink?’

I said I would, but that I’d take it to my room. It was nearly one o’clock.

‘I’ll send it in.’ I imagined him sitting up for a while yet.

He didn’t send it in. He brought it himself, calling to me through the half-open bathroom door. With a glass of brandy he gave me a large manila envelope.

‘It’s a carbon of the full typescript. I thought you might like to keep it. Take it home with you. To the groves of Academe. Officially it doesn’t exist.
HE
told me to lose the copies of the full record. I destroyed the top and the shorthand book. I kept the carbons. I still have one.’

‘Do you always carry this around?’

‘No. I thought of giving it to Mr Gopal as a parting gift but thought better of it. Sleep well.’

On the way out he stopped.

‘You’d better destroy it if you find Operation Bunbury snarled up and you’re still stuck with Merrick. I mean in view of his light-fingered servant. Incidentally, you’ve never told me why you asked who Mrs Bingham was.’

‘It’s still too long a story.’

‘But connected in some way?’

‘Where Merrick’s concerned everything’s connected.’

‘Yes. I suppose it is.’

When Rowan left me I opened the envelope meaning just to glance through it while I drank the brandy, but it was two o’clock before I’d finished reading and except for a sip or two the brandy was untouched. Far more than when Rowan described the examination I was attracted, appalled, riveted, firmly convinced of Kumar’s innocence but deeply puzzled by his stubborn refusal to answer that vital question. If Rowan’s
object had been to ensure that I would find it difficult to get Kumar out of my mind then he had probably succeeded.

I put the transcript in my kit-bag and padlocked it, drank the brandy and went to bed.

I’d read the transcript using Rowan’s final interpretation like a sieve, to isolate scraps of gritty evidence – the interpretation he’d only recently arrived at, the only one he thought made sense. I agreed. Kumar and Miss Manners had become lovers. They had been making love in the Bibighar. The marks on his face were got in a scuffle with men who pulled them apart, beat him up, knocked him unconscious or sat on him while one by one they raped the girl.

That, I thought, made sense; but thereafter there was no sense – only a silence which however hard I listened to it seemed incomprehensible. Nothing emerged from it after I turned the light out except pictures of Kumar: the man I had never seen not the boy whose face I couldn’t clearly remember; but sweeping and cutting and blocking that merciless succession of contemptuous deliveries. Elms and rooks; but then again, not these, but palms and crows: the view from the flat which Purvis contemplated, retreated from, saying, ‘I’m an economist’, then coming in and pushing me further and further back into that elegant room with its priceless paintings in the Ghuler-Basohli style. Standing there, drink in hand, I lurched into sleep and Purvis was Kumar, seated, looking up at me through the eyes of this other man who kept saying: I don’t think I’ll ever forgive it.

*

Rowan had left a note. The steward brought it with my breakfast and the morning papers at 8.30. Rowan wrote that he’d had to make an early start to Area Headquarters to arrange about the special coach. He would have to go down to the station too. A tonga could be got to take me to the Pankot Rifles depot and he’d try to call in there to say goodbye. In case he couldn’t he gave me an address in Delhi (that of a bank) for future correspondence. Very thoughtfully he gave me the name of the officer at Area
HQ
who would know of any signal arriving for me.

*

I got to the Pankots’ depot at ten o’clock. They had suspended the interviews. I waited an hour but Rowan didn’t turn up. I went to Area Headquarters. He had been there but had gone (I imagined) to say goodbye to the Laytons. In the signals office I introduced myself to the signals sergeant and made sure he had my telephone number. I went back to the guest house and was told that Rowan had just rung to say goodbye. For the rest of the day and throughout the evening, Ulysses-like I lashed myself to the mast of my quarters, deaf to every seduction except that of the sirens of the telephone exchange and signals office; afraid to go out, just in case a miracle had speeded Operation Bunbury up and a movement order was already on its way to me, one that required immediate action to be considered valid.

Saturday is a blank. All I remember is a reduction in the guest house staff. An invisible garrison commander had issued orders to reduce the rations and send the cooks and bhishtis, every able-bodied man, to fill the gaps at firing-ports and listening posts, leaving me attended by one shabby fellow who scavenged somewhere for pallid meals of thin gravy soup, dried meat and miserly salad and got steadily drunker, deafer and more difficult to conjure either by electric bell, handclap or parade-ground order. His name was Salaam’a. One yelled this greeting at empty space unoptimistic of his filling it. It puzzled him that I wore a sergeant’s uniform. He thought it was some kind of disguise.