A Division Of The Spoils (Raj Quartet 4) (91 page)

*

‘Bang!’ Edward shouted. After they had been going for about half-an-hour (and all, one by one, except Perron and the
Peabodys had used the lavatory – Perron because he didn’t want to go badly enough to feel it worth his while fighting the way over that mound of luggage) Edward had found the perfect use for the piled trunks and cases. He shot them from behind this entrenchment until they were all dead. Except Mrs Peabody, who was resistant to imaginary bullets.

But the ‘Bang!’ obviously stirred thoughts. ‘Do you hunt, Mr Perron?’ she asked. These were not the first words she had spoken to him, simply the first she had volunteered.

Perron said he didn’t.

‘Do you shoot?’

‘No. I watched Ahmed hawking the other day.’

‘Who?’

‘Ahmed. Mr Kasim. Over there.’

‘Hawking?’

‘With a hawk.’

‘Oh. I see. Yes. Really? I don’t think I should care for that. It seems to me rather cruel to tame a wild creature. But I like a day out with hounds and a day out with the guns. We hope to get in a few days at Bharatpur before going on up to ’Pindi. You’ve been to Bharatpur, I suppose? Oh, you should. The jhils there are famous.’

She talked on for a while, about Bharatpur, about Kashmir, about the boundless number of places she and Reginald had been in India. ‘We’ve never been south though, except of course through it to Ooty. There’s some good going in Ooty. But the south always depresses me. I never think of it as India at all. We’re northern India people by temperament, I suppose. Tell me, what is your regiment?’

Perron admitted that he did not own a regiment and had never served in one except for a few months during the war as a private, after which he had transferred to Intelligence and then to Field Security.

‘But you were in India?’

‘For a while.’

‘In Field Security?’

‘Yes. With a man called Bob Chalmers.’

‘Chalmers. Chalmers. No, I’m afraid I don’t know that name.’

‘He’s now in pharmaceuticals in Bombay.’

‘Really. How interesting. He stayed on, then. Reggie was awfully tempted to go into pharmaceuticals himself, after all one of the few things we can do for this country now is help them fight the battle of disease.’

‘And poverty.’

She smiled. ‘I sometimes think the poverty is very exaggerated. Most of the Indians one knows could buy one up lock stock and barrel.’

‘There are the ones one doesn’t know.’

‘In the villages, Mr Perron, every peasant woman has her gold bangles. No, no. It is not the poverty. It is the disease. The superstition. The
inertia.
’

‘Bang!’ Edward said.

Perron died again.

And then so did the train. The luggage juddered from the vibration of the braking. Minnie grabbed the child. They all rocked to and fro for a moment and then steadied themselves. The train came to a halt.

*

‘Probably a cow on the line,’ Mrs Peabody said. ‘Reggie – see what you can see if you can manage to climb over that carpet.’

But Ahmed was already up. He lowered the window of the door and leant out.

‘I remember a cow on the line,’ Susan said in the dead silence. ‘Don’t you, Sarah?’

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘But where? All I remember is the train stopping and daddy saying just what Mrs Peabody just said. “Probably a cow on the line.” And there was. But where was it, Sarah?’

‘Between Ranpur and Delhi. Nineteen-thirty.’

‘Ranpur and Delhi. What lovely names. There’s so much poetry in Indian names. Ronnie used to say that. Where is your home at home, Mrs Peabody?’

‘We are in Northamptonshire. Just outside Norby.’

‘Norby. That’s what I mean. And mother says she’s found a house in Epsom. It sounds like an aperient.’

‘Major Peabody?’ Ahmed called out. ‘Would you please put
up the windows and close the shutters on your side? Mrs Grace? Please? On yours?’

He was locking the compartment door. Now he pulled the window up and closed the wooden shutter.

‘What is it, Ahmed?’ Mrs Grace asked.

‘Oh, nothing much. Just some kind of silly nuisance. Mr Perron, please, on your side?’

‘What’s the chap say?’ Peabody asked.

‘He seems to want the windows closed and the shutters pulled down,’ Mrs Peabody said. ‘I can’t think why. It’s hot enough and there’s one fan not working.’

Peabody stood up. ‘What are you doing? Baking us alive or something?’

Ahmed was helping Mrs Grace to close windows and pull down shutters on the other side of the compartment. Perron started doing the same on the Peabody side.

‘What’s wrong, Ahmed?’ Sarah asked.

‘Just some silly people making a nuisance. Don’t worry.’

There was nothing to be seen through the windows except a vast hot dry eroded landscape. ‘Do you mind?’ Perron asked, leaning in behind Mrs Peabody and dealing with her window and shutter.

‘Yes I do. I do mind. For heaven’s sake!’

‘Just shut the windows please and pull down the shutters,’ Ahmed repeated. ‘Mrs Grace, I think ayah shouldn’t sit here. Let her get under the seat just for a while. Come, Minnie.’ He got hold of her and forced her gently to the floor. ‘Play hide and seek with chokrasahib. Come on, Edward. Look, ayah is hiding.’

Edward shouted, ‘Why is she hiding? I don’t want to play hide and seek. It’s a silly girl’s game.’

‘No, it isn’t silly,’ Ahmed insisted. ‘Come on, help hide ayah. Pretend bad men are looking for her.’

‘Look here, Kasim,’ Peabody began – but just then there was a long drawn-out wail, rising in pitch, from up ahead. There was a grumble of voices from the adjacent compartment, then a shout, and the sound of windows and shutters being closed. The wailing continued as an accompaniment now to sudden screams.

They remained, as if transfixed. From under the bench
came a low moan from the little ayah. The boy bent down. ‘What’s wrong, ayah?’ he asked. Ahmed got hold of him and said, ‘Okay, it’s only a game. Ayah’s pretending to hide from bad people. Major Peabody, please come to this side and take ayah’s seat so that no one can see her.’

Peabody hesitated, then began to clamber over the luggage. As he did so something hit the compartment, something soft. And again. The sound of a hand slapping the side of the carriage. Behind it all the continuing sound of wailing and screaming.

‘Take the boy,’ Ahmed said, and lifted him over into Sarah’s arms. Peabody was still straddled across the luggage.

‘Reggie, what are you
doing?
’ his wife asked him. He looked at her as if he thought her a perfect fool but said, ‘God knows what anyone’s doing, it must be some kind of damned silly demonstration,’ and completed the movement of stepping over the luggage, lost his footing and fell against Mrs Grace and Susan. ‘Oh, damn it,’ he said and just then people outside began to pound heavily on the door and the side of the compartment and then there was a little crack and an explosion of broken glass and Susan shrieked. Another explosion; another shattering of glass. She shrieked again. As if by old instinct, Peabody remained ducked down, forgetting that the glass couldn’t fly in through the lowered shutters. It was dark in the compartment. Little wires of light lay along the edges of the wooden louvres. The occupants of the seats were ducked down too, including Ahmed. Mrs Grace had her arm round Susan. Sarah held the boy. This was the tableau Perron saw when after a sudden silence had lasted a few seconds he looked up and round.

There was a bang on the door. Then a hammering that went on for some while. When it stopped a man’s voice came quite clearly: ‘Come on, Kasim Sahib.’ More bangs on the door. Susan gasped. Mrs Peabody cried out, ‘What are they doing, what are they doing?’ Then the voice from outside could be heard again. ‘Come on out. Kasim? Kasim Sahib? Come on. Or do we have to break in and annoy all the sirs and ladies? Kasim? Kasim Sahib?’ When the voice stopped the hammering on the door began again.

Silence suddenly. Then another shattered window. This
time Edward began to cry. Sarah cradled him. Perron got up – to do what he didn’t know: climb over to the door, open the shutter and shout that there was no Kasim there?

But Ahmed had got up too. Because of the noise of Edward crying and Susan shrieking Perron did not clearly hear what Ahmed said, but it sounded like, ‘It seems to be me they want.’ It could have been, ‘Be ready to re-lock the door.’ But he smiled, shrugged, and had suddenly unlocked it. As he did so Peabody lunged forward, as if to stop him. But he was too late. Ahmed opened the door and went.

A turbanned head appeared. Peabody must have seen the head at eye-level. Perron saw it from above. The head rose. The man must have been getting purchase on steps and handgrip. It looked as if he was coming in. He got one hand on the door-handle. In his other was something that looked like a sword but surely couldn’t have been. He said, ‘Sorry to have disturbed you, sirs and ladies. On to Ranpur, isn’t it?’ and then let himself fall away, dragging the door shut. Peabody lunged forward again and locked it.

A feeling of terrible relief swept over Perron. At the time it was just relief. It was terrible subsequently; when it sank in that it had been the relief a man feels when his self-protective instinct tells him he has personally survived a passing danger. Perhaps Peabody felt the same relief. And perhaps it was this that presently made him push up the shutter and look out.

Then he lowered it quickly, stood for a moment, staring at the shutter, checked the lock on the door, and turned round and sat on the bench in the place Ahmed had vacated without saying a word.

And as he did so the train began to glide forward – slowly, silkily, smoothly; as if getting stealthily away from a dangerous and incomprehensible situation. Except for Peabody, who had looked out, none of the people in the compartment could quite visualize the scene of this second departure. Later they must all have done so. In Perron’s mind it remains so vivid that it sometimes seems to him that he raised a shutter himself and watched as the train drifted away along this stretch of line, on whose embankment bodies lay; some close, some farther off as though they had tried to run away and then been caught and struck down – men, women, youths, young
girls, babies; in death looking all the same, like dummies stuffed for some kind of strange fertility festival.

*

It took three-quarters of an hour to get to Premanagar. At first it seemed as if they would cover the entire distance in the semi-darkness of lowered shutters and in total silence apart from the rhythmic clack of wheels hastily putting distance between the living travellers and the abandoned dead; but after five minutes or so Mrs Peabody said, ‘Reggie, do you think we might have some light and air? I think otherwise I might be going to faint.’

‘Only on your side,’ Mrs Grace said. ‘Here we have a great deal of trapped broken glass.’

‘It was my side I was thinking of. Perhaps you’d help me, Mr Perron, since you’re here.’

Perron lent a hand.

‘I didn’t like that game, Auntie Sarah,’ Edward said. ‘Is it finished?’

The child’s tear-stained face was revealed as the shutters went up. He climbed off Sarah’s lap and then up and over the piled luggage. ‘You can come out now, ayah,’ he shouted. ‘We’ve stopped playing that game. Where’s Ahmed? Has he gone to pee again? I want to pee too.’ He had to say it several times and then staggered towards the door of the w.c. His unsteadiness suddenly impressed itself on Major Peabody’s eye.

‘Come on, old chap, then. I’ll take you.’

‘What’s
your
name?’ Edward asked as he was taken in.

‘Never mind my name,’ Peabody said; and shut the door on them both.

Sarah was now leaning forward, both elbows clasped in her hands, her head bowed. Ayah had got up and was standing against the luggage. When the door of the lavatory opened and Edward came out alone she took charge of him and sat with him in the place that had been Ahmed’s and then Peabody’s and was now anybody’s or nobody’s. Peabody was in the cubicle for nearly ten minutes. Perhaps he was being sick. He looked very pale when he came out. Finding his new place
gone he clambered over the luggage and sat once more in the far corner opposite Susan who still cradled the basket and was still cradled in Mrs Grace’s arms.

‘Is mummy crying again?’ Edward asked.

Nobody answered. But then Sarah said, ‘We just let him go. We all of us sat here and let him go.’ After that none of them spoke. In this way they came into Premanagar.

*

Before the train actually stopped Peabody got up. Perron got up too. At the door Peabody said in a whisper, ‘Keep them in here, Perron. They mustn’t come out on to the platform.’

‘But I must.’

Peabody said, ‘I think not.’

‘I’m sorry, Peabody. But I’ve got to go back to where Ahmed got out.’

Peabody frowned. Perhaps at the use of his surname. ‘There’s nothing to go back for. He was hacked to pieces.’

Perron didn’t really take this in. He said, ‘I must get to a phone and ring the palace. We can’t just leave it like that. Someone’s got to go back.’

From outside, suddenly, as the train came to a halt, came the renewed sound of wailing and shouting. Peabody’s breath smelt acid. He said, ‘They might turn on us when they take it in. They might decide it’s our fault. You’d be better advised to stay here and look after the women. I’m going to find out what’s happening.’

‘It’s all right, Major Peabody,’ Sarah called. ‘Mr Perron knows what he must do. I’ll stand by the door if that’s what you want.’ She clambered over. Reluctantly Peabody opened the door. An English voice outside exclaimed, ‘My God.’ Peabody and Perron went down. ‘Lock it,’ Peabody told Sarah. She said, ‘There’s no need to lock it now.’

Other English passengers had come down from the adjacent compartments – two of them women. Two Indian officers ran through asking them to make way. Automatically they stood back, as if accepting that this was an Indian affair, not theirs. They stood pale-faced, shocked.

Some of the dead were already being brought out of the
third-class carriages. The nearest of these was a purdah-coach and out of this white and black bundles of veiled women were being lowered. Most lay motionless when put down, one or two seemed to be trying to crawl back in. Among the dead from the purdah-coach were the bodies of small children. And beyond the purdah-coach the platform was becoming littered with blood-stained bundles of white cloth, with black limbs sticking out of the cloth. One body lay on the roof of the coach. No one seemed to have noticed it. From some of the windows of the coaches heads and arms hung down. Blood slowly made shapes on the dirty grey concrete of the platform. Ahead, the locomotive suddenly let off steam, as if about to haul the train out again. People began to shout. A wave of panic swept along the platform and then because the train didn’t move died away and left only the wailing of those searching among the rows of dead and dying passengers.