Ellis Peters - George Felse 11 - Death To The Landlords (2 page)

‘We came up by the bus. No use going on to the hotel, until tomorrow, anyhow,’ she said simply. ‘We couldn’t afford to stay here, and it was too late for this afternoon’s cruise when we got here. I suppose you’ll be heading for the lake tomorrow morning?’ Her eyes flickered thoughtfully towards the Land-Rover again; he didn’t blame her for taking thought for the morrow, public transport was liable to be both unreliable and, on a Sunday, overcrowded. But she didn’t ask, not yet. It was too early, and she wasn’t going to be as crude as all that. As for the Indian girl, she stood a little apart, cool and still, watching them with a thoughtful and unsmiling face.

‘So will everyone around, I imagine,’ Larry said cautiously.

‘You’re American, aren’t you?’ she said, interested.

‘That’s right. My name’s Preisinger, and this is Dominic Felse – he’s English. As I think you must be.’

‘Not much good trying to hide it, is it?’ She shook her pale locks and laughed. ‘I’m Patti Galloway, and this is my friend Priya Madhavan. If I had the colouring I’d like to sink myself into the background, and all that, but I decided long ago that it was no good. Priya’s from Nagarcoil, we’re making our way there gradually, and taking in the sights on the way. Where are you heading?’

‘Oh, south. Down to the Cape, and then by Trivandrum and Cochin back to Madras. Dominic drops off at Madras. After that I don’t know yet.’

Her eyes had opened wide. ‘You must have a lot of time to spare. What do you do? Have you been working here? Or do you live here all the time?’ She was restlessly full of questions, but there was something artless and disarming about her directness; and if it was disconcerting that she waited for no answers, at least that gave Larry time to make up his mind. Why not, after all? Lakshman was just coming out from the arcaded porch with a slight, contented smile that said he had been successful, and there would be a private boat for them tomorrow. And the girls had their own plans, which apparently involved the family of one partner, and therefore were hardly likely to be changed as the result of a chance meeting like this. He could afford to be generous without any risk of getting in too deeply.

‘We were just going to sneak in and cadge a shower, as a matter of fact, before eating. If you two are on your own, and would care to join us, we should have a boat of our own for tomorrow morning. Why don’t we eat together and fix everything up over the meal?’

The furniture of the bungalow’s public room was of the simplest, but there were two tables, chairs enough and electric lighting that flickered alarmingly at times, but survived; and the
khansama
’s omelettes were good, and the fruit from the stall fresh and excellent. Since the tables were of the same size, it was natural to break up the guests into two equal parties of five; and that made it easy for the first on the scene – and inevitably that was Lakshman – to appropriate one of them for his employer’s party and his employer’s guests. Whether he approved of the addition of the girls to their number there was no way of knowing; his manners, as always, were graceful and correct.

Patti watched the other parties assemble with wide-eyed curiosity. Sudha Mani swept in wreathed in a nylon sari (‘Not at all practical,’ Priya said critically, ‘synthetics slip terribly, and don’t drape like live fabrics.’) and a great many rather fine bracelets, forgot her handbag, and sent Sushil Dastur scurrying off to fetch it. Her husband was to be heard deploring in English, presumably for the benefit of the foreigners, the economic policies of the Indian government, and the burdens under which business suffered, but he ended, as usual, with the shortcomings of labour. And even this subject came down, inevitably, from the general to the particular, for it seemed there was a letter which Sushil Dastur should have written and dispatched, and had not, and a valuable order might be jeopardised as a result.

‘If I do not supervise everything myself, nothing is ever done properly. Employees nowadays do not concentrate, they have no wish to work, only to pass the day and be paid. I was trained in the old school, hard I had to work, and by hard work I built up the business I have now.’

The Bessancourts spoke English reasonably well, a virtual necessity for other European tourists in India; and to judge by the conversation, they too had encountered the Manis previously in their travels, for the note of greeting was personal, even cordial. A familiar face in a strange land is a familiar face, and welcome, at least until you find yourself seeing altogether too much of it. Dominic could not imagine the Bessancourts and the Manis having much in common, or choosing to spend too much time together, but to have company over a meal is pleasant enough.

Madame Bessancourt was middle-aged, thick in the bust and thick in the hips, with a heavy, shrewd, sallow face and black hair, barely beginning to turn grey. She had achieved something remarkable in her solution of suitable dress for this trek. She had taken to the
shalwar
and
kameez
of the Punjabi women, in dark colours and amply cut for comfort, and astonishingly she looked completely at home in them, and almost Indian. The yellowish tint of her cheeks, her black eyes and black hair, the heavy body that belonged by rights in the unrelieved, noncommittal black of the
patronne
of some small hotel in Artois, nevertheless put on this alien dress with complete authority. Maybe there wasn’t really much difference between the French matron and the Indian matron, both masterful, practical and not to be taken lightly.

Her husband, on the other hand, had made no concessions. He was square and solid, with a balding head so uncompromisingly Alpine and a moustache so obviously French that any effort to conceal their origin must have failed from the start. So he wore suits exactly like those he would have worn at home, but made in lightweight cloths, and allowed himself an old Panama hat against the sun, and that was the extent of his special preparations.

‘What do you suppose they
do
?’ Patti wondered, watching them in fascination. ‘At home, I mean? You just haven’t a chance of guessing, have you? I suppose they could be retired, but they’re not so old, really.’

‘Heaven knows! Maybe a small factory somewhere – family business – and a son’s taken over,’ suggested Dominic, more or less seriously. Speculation is irresistible, and he had been wondering ever since he first set eyes on them. They bought that car in Bombay as soon as they landed, and God knows where they haven’t taken it by this time. They both drive – well, too. They stay in dak bungalows or railway retiring rooms, and do everything as cheaply as they can – though that may be French parsimony rather than lack of funds – but they don’t miss a thing. What they do, they do, a hundred and five per cent’

‘Perhaps,’ Lakshman suggested, ‘they won some big lottery prize, and this was a dream – and now they take possession of their dream.’

‘Yes, but even so,’ persisted Patti, still enchanted by Madame Bessancourt’s ambivalent, Indian-French solidity, self-possession and repose, ‘why
India
?’

‘Yes,’ agreed Larry pointedly, watching her sombrely across the table, ‘
why
India? Why in your case, for instance?’

‘Me? Oh, I finished school two years ago, and didn’t want to go on to a university – not yet, and anyhow,’
I’m not
clever, I might have had trouble getting a place – and I was stuck full of youthful idealism and all the current jazz, and I thought India was just the groovy place, the place that had the answers. You know how it was! Maybe it isn’t any more, I’ve been here two years.’ She bit into the dimpled green skin of an orange, and began to peel it, frowning down at her fingers, which were thin, blunt-nailed and not particularly well-kept; even gnawed a little, Dominic noticed, alongside the nail on both forefingers. She had a nervous trick with her eyelids, too, a rapid, fluttering blink, but perhaps that was simply out of embarrassment, because all attention was now centred upon her. ‘So I thought I’d volunteer to come out here and teach for a couple of years before I went to college, and though I’d missed the regular Voluntary Service Overseas draft – and anyhow, they might not have considered me the right type – I got this job in Bengal through one of Dad’s business friends who had connections over here. Just an ordinary school that used to be a mission school, and there was teaching in English as well as Bengali, and I had to help all the classes with their English.’

‘Did you learn any Bengali?’ Dominic asked with interest.

She looked up at him quickly. Her eyes were really an extraordinary colour, pale yet very bright, like a slightly troubled sea over sunlit sand. ‘Some. I can get by, but I couldn’t conduct a real conversation. Oh, it’s been fine in its way, I’m not complaining. Only I came here thinking this was where the low living and high thinking was, and the way to understanding, and India was going to show me what was wrong with all the rest of us. And what do you know? – here they are, almost the most quarrelsome race I’ve ever struck, almost the most corrupt, and all the high thinking is just talk, talk, talk, and the government is as mixed-up and inhibited and old and tired as any of ours, and I can’t see any end to it – or even any beginning of getting out of the mess. But maybe it’s me,’ she said disarmingly, and smiled up suddenly at Priya, and at Lakshman. ‘Don’t get me wrong! The best here are
the best
– the best you’re going to find anywhere on earth. But as for the system – did we really ever expect so much of it?’ She tilted her head, looking from Larry to Dominic, for plainly they were in this, too. ‘I’m on my finishing leave now, I get two months paid, and I’m still travelling hopefully. But where to, God knows! How have
you
managed?’

Dominic waited for Larry to speak, and he didn’t; for some reason Patti had shaken him, and his brooding face was the only thing about him that was going to be eloquent just yet. So Dominic filled the gap.

‘I was lucky. Every time I hear anyone else talk about India I realise it. I got pitched in here on a special job, without any time to have preconceived ideas, and everything about the job came unstuck, and I was left living off the country. When there’s a real crisis you find out who amounts to anything, and who doesn’t. That’s when I met the man I’m working for now – the Swami Premanathanand. You couldn’t very well be any luckier than that, whatever the hole you’re in. No, India didn’t let me down. That’s why I came back. But to work, not to meditate.’ He was aware that that might sound a trifle superior, but that was something he couldn’t help. ‘That’s the way it hit me, and I got hooked accordingly. And I’ve said I was lucky.’

‘But where are they
going
?’ persisted Patti fretfully. ‘I can’t see any future.’

‘I haven’t looked, I’ve been too busy with the present.’

‘But what do you actually
do
, then?’ she asked doubtfully.

‘I work for the Swami’s foundation, the Native Indian Agricultural Mission, on one of their farms near Tiruvallur. Doing anything – driving, messenger-boy, vet’s assistant, whatever’s needed. But mostly I seem to have become the district tractor-mechanic.’

‘But isn’t that sort of set-up just another way of being a big land-owner?’ Patti objected warmly.

‘Hardly! Everything we run is run on a co-operative basis. Each village is its own board of directors, and everything above a bare living for the central staff is ploughed back into the business.’ But he was not particularly disposed to talk about it; he was on leave, and she already knew everything she needed to know about him.

‘Do you think all that’s really going to
change
anything?’ she wondered wistfully.

‘It already has. Since we set up this particular grouping we’ve nearly doubled our rice yield annually – partly by increasing acreage, and partly with better double-cropping. Did you know that Tamil Nadu is going to be a surplus state any minute now? Not just through us, of course, we’re a very minor force, but we do work in with the government’s intensive district programme, and that’s far from minor.’

She looked reluctantly impressed, and at once sadly incredulous and warily hopeful. ‘I suppose your people farm back home? I didn’t have anything as practical as that in my background. My dad’s a retired army officer. I was born into the establishment.’

‘So was I,’ said Dominic with a fleeting grin, ‘only a different branch. Mine’s a policeman. Well, no uniform now, actually, he’s deputy head of the county C. I. D. I haven’t got anything more practical to offer than an arts degree, either, and that doesn’t dig any wells here. Or at home, for that matter. Everybody thinks it entitles him to be a teller, when we’ve already got too many tellers and not enough doers. So I thought I’d come over here and see how the doers live.’

‘Awful waste of a degree, though,’ protested Patti, rather surprisingly reverting to type.

‘Not a bit! It won’t rot.’

She considered him thoughtfully for a moment, background, parentage, eccentricities and all, and looked more than half convinced. ‘Well, maybe you’ve found something that’ll stand by you,’ she said handsomely. ‘I wasn’t that lucky. I never felt I was doing anything much, or getting anywhere. It seemed as if you’d have to smash the whole thing and start afresh before you’d see any results.’

‘And what will you do now?’ asked Larry, watching her soberly over the bowl of fruit. “When your paid leave’s over, I mean? Go home?’

‘I suppose so. I’ve got some of my A levels to repeat if I want to teach seriously, but I haven’t made up my mind yet. Yes, I guess I shall go home. Maybe try somewhere else. There’s supposed to be a second country somewhere for everybody, so they say. Maybe the stars have to be right. How about you?’

‘Me? Oh, I suppose I came here looking for the pure wisdom, like you. Though I ought to have known better. I’m an anthropologist by inclination, but a civil engineer by profession. I’ve been working on the plans for a small irrigation project up in Gujarat, but it looks as if various committees are now going to sit on the idea for years, and if they don’t squash it altogether they’ll probably alter it around until it’s useless. I thought I might as well have a look around the country while they’re considering the matter, so I bought the Land-Rover in Bombay, and set off more or less at random southwards. And Lakshman here comes along to take care of me.’