A Division Of The Spoils (Raj Quartet 4) (59 page)

‘He told me he proposed marriage to her. I don’t see it as a thing a man would invent.’

‘And I don’t see it as a thing a man would talk about. Why did he?’

‘I suppose I asked him. I don’t mean directly. It just came up. We were discussing the case. Talking about his future. He said his Inspector-General had supported him but he wasn’t sure what the long-term effects would be on his career as a whole. He was very frank.’

‘He thinks he made a mistake?’

‘No. I didn’t get that impression. Rather the reverse. But I believe it’s often worried him that his feelings for the girl might have influenced him, made him act too hastily, not wrongly, just too hastily. Well, I don’t wonder. Wretched case altogether. Wretched to talk about.’ He hesitated. ‘I’d really prefer not to.’

‘All right, daddy, we won’t talk about it. That doesn’t mean we may not have to live with it, Susan especially, if people start pressing for inquiries into some of the things that were done at the time. But I mustn’t say that, must I? The mere prospect might make you feel sorry for him. You should never feel sorry for Ronald.’

‘I’d feel sorry for any man who was victimized.’

‘Victimized, yes. So would I.’

I’d started to fold the paper in which the sandwiches had been packed. Noticing some still ungathered crumbs I unfolded it again, swept them in, and refolded. I had repaid him badly for the care and trouble he’d taken, for the love and affection he’d shown, making arrangements like these before telling me something he thought might upset me. I’d neither set his mind at rest nor, in the last few minutes, even spoken kindly to him.

‘It was such a lovely breakfast,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve spoilt it. I honestly didn’t mean to. Now I suppose we ought to be getting back.’

‘You haven’t spoilt it. What is the time?’

‘Eight-thirty.’

‘Are you on duty again?’

‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’ I remembered the Government House bag, with stuff in for me from Nigel. I’d meant to get to the daftar quite early to round up Sergeant Baker to make sure I got the packages.

‘What will you say to Susan?’ father asked.

‘Nothing. She won’t ask my opinion. The thing has been for me to be there when she’s wanted me to be there. To be there and go along with whatever she’s decided to do. Oddly enough, I’ve been quite good at that. If marrying Ronald is her new interest she’ll be all right so long as she’s making plans and seeing everything in terms of the next step ahead.’

‘If she stops seeing things like that, would you know?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sooner than your mother?’

‘Probably.’

‘Would you tell me?’

‘If I’m here, daddy.’

‘Might you not be?’

‘I can’t live at home indefinitely.’

‘I do understand that. But – well, for a while. At least until after the wedding.’

‘That might depend on when the wedding is.’

‘I’d not imagined anything impulsive.’ He felt for my hand again. ‘Don’t
you
be impulsive. What had you in mind?’

‘Going home, really. I’d like to get myself a job of some kind. Aunt Julia would take me in for a bit, I expect.’

‘Going home? But that’s a long-term plan, surely?’

‘I thought of going to Aunt Fenny in Bombay for a while. Then on from there when I’ve really decided. I can pay my own passage. Aunt Mabel left us each five hundred pounds of our own. Susan and me, I mean. And I’ve got a bit more.’

‘That’s your nest-egg. There’s no question of forking out your own fare, if going home’s really what you want. But I hope not yet. Not yet, Sarah. Give me a bit of time to enjoy my whole family.’

I felt the net closing in again. I said, ‘Well the war’s not quite over yet.’

‘No, but if it is, try not to be in too much of a hurry or think me too selfish. It’ll be easier for us all to make plans when we know what’s to happen to me. The Trehearnes will be going after Christmas. It looks as if I’ll take over. But there’s just a chance of my getting the Area. Your mother’s a bit restless, she’d really like a change of scene, but if we got the Area that would rather please her. Flagstaff House. All that goes with it. And it would probably see out my time.’

‘You’d like it too, wouldn’t you?’

‘Yes, I would. As a young man I assumed I’d end up a general. Small chance of that now. I’d settle for brigadier. Or just full colonel doing Trehearne’s job.’

‘Then I’ll cross my fingers, daddy.’

‘Would it make any difference to your plans?’

‘Flagstaff House?’

‘You were practically born there. And, well, if it happens I’d be sorry to think of your missing it altogether. You’ve had your share of stale gingerbread. Opportunity for a bit of gilt. But perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Raising hopes.’

He would never understand how little the idea of moving into Flagstaff House raised my hopes. And just then they needed raising. Looking at that oddly unfamiliar view of East Hill it seemed to me that once long ago I’d been marooned there and that now the flood had receded, receded so far that you would have to walk miles to find water and even then have to wade on, endlesssly, without coming to a depth sufficient to swim in.

For one moment I believed, perhaps illogically, my only hope of getting away lay in confessing to my father what had happened to me. I could say: Look, I’m no longer a virgin. I was bedded by one of those officers Uncle Arthur’s paid to make enthusiastic about having a career in India, only this chap turned out only to be enthusiastic about what Uncle Arthur would call the wrong things, and I was left in the club, also the wrong one, like any tiresome little skivvy, but unlike her we were able to arrange to have it brought off, and boringly unconventional though I’ve always been from most people’s point of view, I simply didn’t have the nerve to walk round pregnant and unmarried in Pankot. I know I’m not by a long chalk the first colonel’s daughter to wander down the primrose path, but the catch is that I would never marry a man without first telling him what had happened, which mother knows. I made it clear to Aunt Fenny and if Aunt Fenny’s run to form she’s obviously told mother that I’d never marry under false pretences. Mother’s probably guessed it anyway. And she doesn’t really mind because it would go against her patrician scale of values to let me marry a man she really approved of and she thinks the ones she’d approve of are the ones who’d turn tail once they knew. So she’s written me off. You’d better too.’

I glanced at him, and then, summoning the nerve, I began to tell him. I got as far as ‘Look –’ and then, after a second or two, departing from script, ‘There’s something I want you to know, something I must tell you,’ but I got no further because
he suddenly grabbed my hand and, not looking at me, said, ‘No,’ quite sharply, and then repeated it more gently.

‘No. Nothing to tell me. Better be off.’

Still without looking he let go of my hand; briefly but quite strongly put his arm round me and then let go altogether and stood up and shouted something to the boys who scrambled up and ran round to get the horses. Then he went to the head of the steps and down them. He was calling something to me, pointing, perhaps at the fir tree high up on East Hill which his better-trained eye had sighted; but half-keeping his back to me, giving me time to let the reason for his reaction sink in.

He knew about the pregnancy and the abortion. Fenny or my mother had told him. Fenny probably; perhaps only hinting at a cause of unhappiness which my mother had more coldly identified. I went to the head of the steps, pretended to look where he was pointing, shading my eyes.

The boys brought the horses. Ashok helped me to mount. When he’d done so I thanked him and led off without waiting for father, heading down the stony track. Half-way down my horse began to miss his footing. The effort of keeping control, slight as it was, seemed immense; the last shameful straw. By the time I reached the road I couldn’t see clearly. I waited until he came up. We could go one of two ways. He chose the shorter, and I fell in behind him. But presently he moved over to his right, waited until I was level and, apart from having to drop back a couple of times when a vehicle went by, stayed silently abreast of me until we reached home.

*

Susan was in the bathroom which meant I didn’t have to talk to her. I changed quickly into uniform and to avoid seeing anyone set off for the daftar without even washing the smell of horse off my hands. Momentarily I’d forgotten the reason for wanting to be early on duty, but recalled it when the tonga approached the spot where Barbie’s accident had been, the spot Clarissa Peplow once pointed out to me, where after careering down Club Road out of control the tonga had overturned, spilling them all into the ditch. From this point Barbie had walked, mud- and blood-stained, presumably
refusing assistance from passers-by, making for the rectory bungalow into which she strode, calling for a spade and announcing that she had seen the Devil. The spade was for resurrecting Mabel. The devil was Ronald Merrick.

Rose Cottage had been shut. Mother, Susan, the baby and ayah had gone down to Calcutta to join Fenny and me after our holiday in Darjeeling, a reunion intended to maintain the illusion that everything was well with everybody. In the family’s absence Mahmoud had discovered the trunk in the mali’s shed and complained about it to the man mother had asked to keep an eye on things – Kevin Coley. And Kevin had gone down to the rectory to ask Barbie to remove it.

According to Clarissa, Barbie didn’t mind. When she went up to the cottage to collect the trunk she found a stranger there. Ronald. He’d come up to the Pankot hospital to have the artificial hand fitted and had called at the cottage to see us. According to Ronald he and Barbie sat and talked, mainly about her missionary friend, Edwina Crane, whom he’d known in Mayapore. She insisted on giving him the copy of the picture which she associated with Edwina. Then she asked him to supervise the loading and securing of the trunk in the back of the tonga. He said he’d advised her against it; it was too cumbersome, too heavy. But she wouldn’t listen. He said she struck him as over-excited, in fact, he said, ‘Exalted might be the better word.’

It was quite a while before I talked to Ronald about his meeting with Barbie. He had left Pankot before we returned from Calcutta. At that time I’d only met him twice. I’d not liked him. But the real animosity came later when he began to turn up in Pankot on the excuse of visiting the hospital, but in fact it seemed to me to attach himself to us. I realized that he was a very lonely man in the ordinary sense of the word and without my realizing quite how it happened I found myself more often in his company than seemed explainable. At the pictures, for instance, or eating out at the Chinese restaurant when it was inconvenient to entertain him at home (when Susan wasn’t well, or had taken too much of her sedative). Going out with him when he was in Pankot, so far as I was concerned, was no more than a duty, one more duty to add to the many I’d got lumbered with or stupidly volunteered for
and I assumed that this was understood by the family as a whole. What he assumed about it had been beyond me to work out. He knew I disliked him. Knowing he knew made me feel that we were all safe from him.

When we went to the Chinese restaurant he always ordered a particular table, the one in the window on the first floor (officers only) which looked out on to the bazaar, and which at least provided him with the view to which my silences too often forced him to give attention. I never felt that my being poor company upset him. We were at the Chinese restaurant when I first asked him to describe in detail his meeting with Barbie. I didn’t tell him I’d just seen her, in the Samaritan in Ranpur, but I think he guessed. When he said, ‘She struck me as being over-excited when she set off, in fact exalted might be the better word,’ he studied me closely as if checking for the effect of that word exalted. The exaltation began (he said) when she opened the trunk to give him the picture and found a lace-shawl which she said didn’t belong to her but which she thought Mabel’s old servant Aziz must have put in the trunk when he temporarily had the key to it.

I knew which lace he meant, lace which Mabel had been given by her first husband’s mother – lace like a web of butterflies, worked by a blind old French woman, some of which had been used for Susan’s baby’s christening, and some, years before, for my own. I had recognized it only a couple of days before at the Samaritan hospital, draped round Barbie’s head and shoulders, stained brown with dried blood.

Ronald said, ‘She put it on when she got into the tonga, like a bridal veil.’

The lace shawl, with its rusty stains, was among the packages that Nigel had been given by the Reverend Mother to hand over to me.

*

But of course there was nothing waiting for me at the daftar, nothing – Sergeant Baker told me – addressed to me in the overnight bag from Government House. I thought of ringing Nigel up but delayed doing so, finding an excuse not to do that until after five, because he would be busy, but in fact shirking
it because the main reason for ringing him would be to tell him about Ronald and Susan and to try to coerce him into helping me to stop it; which seemed a bit unfair.

I remember sitting at the typewriter in the daftar, cutting a stencil from a holograph order written out by Major Smalley, and using so much red-sealer to obliterate mistakes that the wax paper began to look like a piece of the lace shawl Barbie had worn, seated at her window. She had on that occasion seemed to have found peace, the peace of absorption in a wholly demanding God, a God of love and wrath who had no connection with the messianic principles of Christian forgiveness, and it was like that I preferred to remember her, not – as at other times when I had visited her – unanchored, unweighted, withershins, attempting to communicate with the doomed world of inquiry and compromise.

When I was midway through the stencil the phone rang. The operator told me a Captain Rowan was on the line. It was as though I’d conjured him. I said, ‘Nigel? I’m afraid there was nothing in the bag. Is that why you’re ringing?’

‘Partly,’ he said. ‘Actually I brought the stuff up with me.’