A Division Of The Spoils (Raj Quartet 4) (55 page)

*

Feeling I must do something about whatever it was Barbie had left which the Bishop Barnard Mission hadn’t collected or didn’t want and about which the Reverend Mother was so vague and yet so insistent, I wrote to Nigel Rowan to ask him whether he’d ring her and get the facts clearer. That was on the Saturday. On that evening we dined with the Trehearnes.

Maisie Trehearne was tall, pale and stately, and so upright that it was rumoured she was supported by a steel corset. Lately she had taken to wearing flowing dinner gowns of grey or blue georgette which gave her the appearance of a metallic ghost. When she moved she created the illusion of cooling breezes which weren’t necessary because the Commandant’s house was the draughtiest in Pankot and wretched to dine at on a winter evening. The Trehearnes were the last people to order fires lit and the first to order the hearths to be cleared and guarded by brass trays. And never, in the rainy season, when the evening could be chilly – which fortunately it wasn’t on this occasion – was an electric fire brought in and
switched on. Her husband, Patrick, now sixty, had the same frail, febrile but inflexible look: highly tempered steel worn to the thickness of a wafer. There was scarcely a line on their faces. They were the faces of people who had never had a sleepless night or a moment’s worry, or, if they had, had somehow acquired an almost oriental sense of spiritual detachment from the cares of life.

The other obstacle to comfort at the Trehearnes was the pack of dogs, a strange hybrid collection ranging from puppies to full-grown brutes, seldom less than three altogether; raw, savage, the terror of servants, cause of concern to timid guests; obstinate, disobedient; objects of Maisie’s devotion and her husband’s sufferance. The dogs seemed natural victims of the disasters that were always befalling them. Ruling the roost at Commandant House they seemed disinclined to learn that the world outside was a hostile place. One, attacking a tonga horse, was kicked to death; another was bitten by a krait; yet another run over by a staff-car from Area Headquarters which it had thought had no business on the same road as itself. One, straying, was shot on the rifle-range. Others simply succumbed to one of the diseases domestic animals in India were always dying of. You would have thought that a woman so genuinely fond of animals, particularly of dogs, would have lost heart, but Maisie never did, she was always acquiring replacements for those that had fallen, and you always felt that her attachment was deep, her sense of duty to them strong, her horrified reaction to any tale of cruelty to animals of any kind absolutely real. You could still feel this about Maisie even when sitting in their dining-room under the glazed eyes of the creditable number of mounted shikar trophies for whose deaths she and Patrick were just about equally responsible. The trophies were seldom referred to. Perhaps they were there merely as relics of youthful exuberance which had long since been grown out of. I once heard Lucy Smalley say she wondered that Maisie didn’t mount the heads of the dogs too: a typical Smalley remark but not (which was also typical) wholly unjustified.

*

‘Watch out for the dogs, John,’ mother had warned father when we set out in the car Colonel Trehearne had sent up. The warning was unnecessary. Perhaps for once Patrick Trehearne had put his foot down, or Maisie and Patrick had both had the foresight to see that the usual kind of welcome you got at Commandant House didn’t sort well with greeting a man who had been locked up for several years. Instead, the dogs had been locked up and we entered unmolested.

It was father’s first dinner out and Maisie had promised mother to keep the party small. It turned out even smaller than planned because Kevin Coley’s servant rang just before we arrived to say that the Adjutant Sahib had gone to bed with a temperature. ‘Actually,’ Maisie said, ‘we’re rather worried about Kevin. He suddenly seems restless. After all these years resisting any attempt to move and promote him he’s acting as though he thought it was time something was done about him.’

The Trehearnes’ bedroom where we left our stoles, exposing necks, shoulders and arms, like Spartan women, to the chilly rigours of the interior, was immense. In it the twin beds looked diminutive, mere sparrows’ nests. High above them, suspended from the raftered ceiling, were circular frames for the mosquito nets which were hardly ever necessary but which Maisie had a fondness for. It was the kind of room, sparsely furnished, which always looked camped-out in rather than occupied, and where you wouldn’t have been surprised to find bird-droppings on the floor.

It was while we were in the bedroom that the subject of Barbie came up and I discovered that mother also knew she was dead. Susan was momentarily out of the room, powdering her nose in the adjoining bathroom (people in Pankot had learned not to refer to death and disaster in front of her, if they could help it). Maisie said, ‘Mrs Stewart at the Library tells me that according to Lucy Smalley, Miss Batchelor died the other day. Did you know?’

She addressed the question to both of us. I was standing at the foot of one of the beds. Mother was peering into the glass of the dressing-table, making a minor repair with her lipstick. Perhaps this provided her with an excuse not to speak. But she
didn’t react at all, her expression remained constant, concentrated. I was forced to answer. I said that Major Smalley had mentioned it to me at the daftar.

‘There was nothing in the
Ranpur Gazette
,’ Maisie said. ‘And the death columns are the first thing I read. It used to be the births and marriages but you seem to reach a time of life when you know only the people who die. How did Lucy hear?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, truthfully.

‘Do you, Mildred?’

‘Do I what?’

‘Know how Lucy Smalley heard Miss Batchelor was dead.’

‘All I know is what Mrs Smalley told me when she rang, but I suppose in this case one can take it as more or less true.’

‘What did she say?’

‘Only that the Bishop Barnard people had written to Arthur Peplow and that the chaplain who’s filling in for him opened the letter and asked her who Miss Batchelor was. Mrs Smalley, it goes without saying, had only dropped into the rectory bungalow to see if she could help with any little problem.’

‘Had the Peplows kept in touch with the Mission, then?’

‘I don’t know about keeping in touch. But the rectory was the woman’s last address. I expect the Mission wanted to be sure she’s left nothing here that they ought to have and I’m sure their solicitors will be already on to ours making a fuss about the annuity Mabel willed her. I suppose the estate will have to cough up what she’d have received if we’d ever got round to buying it. Thank God I had the presence of mind at the time to tell our own solicitors in London to drag their feet, and thank God she went off her head as soon as she did because that gave them a good excuse to drag their feet even harder. Mabel must have been off
her
head, making that sort of provision for an elderly spinster.’

‘I’ve never really understood about annuities,’ Maisie said.

‘You buy the damned things to provide an income for life which is all right if the person the annuity’s bought for lives a long time. The catch is, once it’s bought, the capital sum has gone forever. Even if you die the next day. I must say it would amuse me if the Bishop Barnard people think they’ve got
several thousand rupees coming to them. They have complete control of her estate, apparently, for what it’s worth.’

‘Poor Miss Batchelor,’ Maisie said. ‘I sometimes think she had a sad life.’

Mother put away her lipstick. As she did so she glanced up, regarding me through the mirror. Then she snapped her handbag and turned round.

‘I don’t think you’d feel so sympathetic, Maisie, if you’d had to watch her encouraging Mabel’s eccentricities and antisocial instincts and at the same time be pretty sure she was feathering her own nest pretty neatly, and then making all that macabre fuss about where Mabel should have been buried. I had Mabel’s funeral to cope with and Susan’s premature labour to cope with and I had to cope with them virtually alone because Sarah was down in Calcutta visiting that man Merrick in hospital. And on top of it all I had this damned silly woman running all over Pankot saying I was shoving Mabel into the ground at St John’s when she’d wanted to be buried at St Luke’s in Ranpur, next to John’s father. Even that elderly admirer of hers, Mr Maybrick, thought it was a bit much. And of course John tells me he never heard Mabel say a single thing about where she wanted to be put. I took him to see the grave this morning. He thought it very suitable.’

Susan came out of the bathroom and the subject was dropped.

‘How pretty you look,’ Maisie said, which was no less than the truth, the kind of thing Susan still needed to hear but which was nowadays inspired more by the obligation people felt under to encourage her back to life and happiness than by spontaneous admiration. I imagined that Susan herself was aware of this not very subtle undercurrent of intention, and that she responded to praise in the same way that someone who is enjoying remission from the pain of a disease they know they’re not yet cured of must respond to being told how well they’re looking. And, because it had happened before, I was now prepared to wake up that night and hear the sound of her crying. Her crying was terrible, because when she cried and I tried to comfort her we seemed very close, closer than we had ever been as children; but within a day or two we were
farther apart than ever. Every measure of love and affection had to be paid for by a larger measure of antagonism.

‘How pretty you look,’ Maisie had said, and then as if by an association of ideas, and leading us out, she said, ‘We have invited young Mr Drew.’

Edgar Drew. Eager Edgar. I tried to catch Susan’s eye but she had assumed her party rôle. Eager Edgar had been to Rose Cottage once or twice. In a rare conspiratorial moment between us Susan and I had christened him thus.

‘We thought,’ Maisie was saying to mother, ‘it would be nice for him to meet John.’ By which she really meant he would be suitable young company for Susan and me.

He had obviously arrived before us because Maisie didn’t greet him when we went into the sitting-room where he stood with Colonel Trehearne and father, one hand behind his back, the other clutching his sherry glass, his head adjusted to a slant of attentiveness and inquiry, the wary look of a young man whose heart wasn’t quite in what he had been taught he had to do to get on; of a man who having no inner resources of strength and energy – at least none he dared trust – saw no alternative to the perplexing business of flattering his elders. His father was an insurance broker in Byfleet and he had been to a public school of which I think he’d just reached the stage of feeling slightly ashamed because he realized it ranked as ‘minor’. Physically he was attractive but he nullified this attraction every time he opened his mouth. His conversation was excruciatingly dull and he seemed to have no opinions of his own. He worked hard to sound self-confident, so hard that one became aware of the effort it cost him.

The Trehearnes had taken to him because they thought him a cut or two above most of the last year or so’s intake of newly-commissioned English subalterns from Belgaum and Bangalore who had arrived at the depot, stayed a few weeks and then departed to join the 4/5th and the 2nd battalions in Burma. Moreover, Second-Lieutenant Drew had expressed interest in the idea of applying for a regular commission and this ambition counted in his favour when it came to comparing him with some of the rougher-spoken and rougher-mannered men who had got into the regiment with (I suspected) higher qualifications from
OTS
as potential leaders of infantry.
He was what was never actually called but certainly thought of as regimental depot material which meant it was thought he would eventually prove to be perfectly adequate for active regimental duty but was meanwhile presentable enough in the mess and at dinner parties such as this to be put temporarily by and employed more pacifically.

I could tell that he had had little or no experience of women; his attentiveness betrayed anxiety. Someone, his mother probably, may have told him that a gentleman never looked lower than a girl’s nose. The result was that when he talked to you he kept his chin up and head back and made you feel disembodied below the neck. He had beautiful hands; not fine and elegant but firm and shapely. But you seldom had a chance to admire them. They were usually clasped behind his back or bunched into fists. Even at table they tended to disappear between mouthfuls, presumably to clutch one another or be wiped surreptitiously on his napkin. When you had the opportunity to touch or be touched by them – that is, when he danced with you – they were uncomfortably moist, but at least they were a connection; although a distant connection because he danced you at arm’s length – which made it seem like dancing with a draught. I admit I had occasional fantasies about Mr Drew’s hands, and after seeing him in the club swimming pool I also had occasional fantasies about the rest of him. Perhaps I should have told him, not for my own good, but for his. He can’t have been unaware of his physical appearance, but I think he probably needed confirmation from outside before he could relate his own awareness to other people’s. I had a distinct impression that he might be the only child of elderly parents. He seemed to belong to a generation earlier than his own – that of the Edwardians, say – which would explain his enthusiasm for the outward forms of Anglo-Indian life.

He was, of course, more directed towards Susan than to me (interested or attracted would be the wrong words). She aroused his masculine instinct to protect. Confronted by me he was always on the defensive. It was I who reminded him that fundamentally he was a bit afraid of all of us. Sometimes when talking to him I heard in my own voice tones like those Clark-Without had used when talking to me, tones calculated
to provoke; and then I stopped, a bit appalled at the ease with which one followed disreputable examples, and at the ease with which bitterness, once felt, lodged itself, dug itself in and hardened all the edges of your personality.