The Far Pavilions (32 page)

But Ash was not listening. He had put down his cup with a hand that was noticeably unsteady and now he sat down with some suddenness. He did not want to hear anything more or to talk to anyone. Not to George, anyway. And yet…

He said abruptly: ‘But that can't be true. The Bachelors' Ball was right at the beginning of the month. That's nearly six weeks ago, and I've seen her since then. I had tea with her, and if it was true she would have told me then. Or her mother would. Or someone.’

‘They didn't want to announce it too soon. They kept it quiet until his new appointment came through – I suppose it sounded grander then. Marrying a Resident, you know.’

‘A
Resident
? But –’ Ash broke off and scowled at George, who must be even drunker than he had thought, because a Residency was a senior appointment: a ‘plum job’ of the Indian Civil Service. Only men who had served that department for many years were sent to represent their Government in some independent native state with the title of ‘Resident’.

‘Bholapore – one of those states somewhere down south,’ said George indifferently. ‘It was in the papers last week.’

‘Bholapore?’ repeated Ash stupidly. ‘But – Oh, you must have made a mistake. You're drunk. That's what it is. How would Belinda ever meet anyone like that, let alone get engaged to him?’

‘Well, she has,’ said George flatly and as though it did not matter very much. ‘Friend of her father's. You must have noticed him: stout party with a red face and grey whiskers. He was having tea with them the last time you were here, and Belinda was all over him.’

‘
Podmore-Smyth
!’ gasped Ash, appalled.

‘That's the fellow. Pompous old bore, but I'm told he's no end of a catch. Sure to be knighted before long and end up as a Lieutenant-Governor, and all that. His wife only died last year, and his daughters are older than Belinda, but she doesn't seem to mind that. He's got a lot of money of course – his father was one of those Calcutta Nabobs, so he's simply rolling in it. And I suppose she likes the idea of being Lady Podmore-Smyth. Or Her Excellency the Governess. Or possibly even Baroness Podmore of Poop one day.’ George gave a hollow crack of laughter and helped himself to more coffee.

‘I don't believe it,’ said Ash violently. ‘You're making it up. She wouldn't do a thing like that. Not Belinda. You don't know her like I do. She's sweet and honest and –’

‘She's honest, all right,’ agreed George bitterly. His lip quivered and once again his eyes filled with tears.

Ash disregarded them: ‘If she's engaged to him it's because she's been forced into it. Her parents are behind this – that dried-up old stick of a father and her idiotic, gossiping mother. Well, if they think I'm going to let them ruin Belinda's life and mine, they're wrong.’

‘You're the one who's wrong,’ said George. ‘Her parents didn't like it above half, but she coaxed them round. She's a taking little thing, as you should know by now. But then you don't really know her at all. Neither did I. I thought I did, and I would never have believed… Oh God, what am I going to do?’

The tears brimmed over and trickled down his cheeks, but he made no attempt to brush them away or any effort to control them. He merely sat there slumped in his chair and staring into vacancy, with his jaw slack and his fingers clenching and unclenching on the coffee cup. He was an embarrassing sight and his unashamed misery exasperated Ash. What right had George to behave like this? It was not as though Belinda had even been engaged to him, or ever would have been. Ash told him so with considerable sharpness, and found a perverse comfort in doing so. But though he had not minced his words they drew no answering spark of anger from George.

‘It's not that,’ said George dully. ‘You don't understand. Of course I knew she'd never marry me; I'm not a fool. I was too young and I hadn't any prospects. I hadn't…
anything!
I suppose that's why I invented all that stuff. To make myself more interesting… But I never thought – I didn't dream that she'd take it like that if she found out.’

‘Found out
what
?’ demanded Ash, justifiably bewildered. ‘For God's sake, George, pull yourself together and stop babbling! What is all this about? What did she find out?’

‘About me. You see I – I've told a lot of lies about myself. And that woman Mrs Gidney, who Belinda's mother is so thick with, has a friend in Rangoon who knows someone who – Well, it was like this…’

It was a simple and rather sordid little story, and no one came out of it very well. Mrs Gidney, writing to a dear friend in Rangoon, had happened to mention George's name and comment on his romantic ancestry, and by an unfortunate coincidence the friend was acquainted with a certain Mr Frisby in the teak trade. And that was how it had all come out…

George's grandmother, far from being a Greek countess, had been an Indian woman of humble parentage whose union with his grandfather – a colour-sergeant in a British regiment stationed in Agra – had been of a strictly temporary nature, but had resulted in the birth of a daughter who had eventually been placed in a home for the orphaned or abandoned children of mixed parentage. At the age of fifteen the child had been found employment as a nursemaid in an army family, and subsequently married a young corporal in her master's regiment, one Alfred Garforth. Their son George, who had been born in Bareilly, was the only one in the family to survive the Mutiny of 1857, his parents, his baby brother and three small sisters having all been murdered in the space of fifteen frenzied minutes.

George had been spending the day with the family of a friendly storekeeper who had escaped the massacre, and during the few years that remained before the regiment returned to England, the same kindly couple had given him a home, for as his father too had been an orphan, there were no relations to take care of the boy. It was during this period that little George learned from his playmates that a ‘half-caste’ was an object of scorn. There were several such among the barrack children, and they and he were teased and despised by those whose parents and grandparents were white, and looked down upon - with almost equal scorn by Indian children with parents and grandparents who were brown.

‘Yer grandma was a sweeper-woman!’ or ‘Yah, yah, yer a bleedin' blacky-white,’ were familiar taunts in scuffles among the barrack children, while the vocabulary of the bazaar children could be even more wounding. Yet George, by the irony of fate, was fairer than many of his white tormentors, and had he possessed a tougher character, or been less good-looking, he might have lived down the unknown grandmother. But he was not only a very pretty little boy, but a painfully timid one, a combination that endeared him to adults but made his own generation yearn to kick him – which they did with enthusiasm and on every possible occasion.

George developed a bad stammer and burning hatred of his schoolmates and the barracks and anything and everything to do with the army, and when the regiment sailed for England, taking him with them, it was only the kindness of the storekeeper and his wife, Fred and Annie Mullens, that saved him from being sent to an army orphanage, for they had arranged for him to be educated at their expense at a small boarding school near Bristol that catered exclusively for children whose parents were overseas. A large number of these children spent both holidays and term time at the school, and nearly all of them had been born abroad, which was George's misfortune, for they too spoke of ‘half-castes’ with scorn, and one of their number who had the misfortune to be black-eyed and dark-complexioned was cruelly teased on this score – George, to his shame, joining in with the best of them. For with the possible exception of the Headmaster, no one at the school knew anything about him, and he was therefore able to invent a family-tree for himself.

At first this was a comparatively modest affair. But as he grew older he enlarged it, adding mythical grandparents and great-grandparents and a variety of picturesque ancestors. And because he was always afraid that one day his eyes would become darker and his skin betray him by turning brown (as his baby curls, once blond, had done) he gave himself an Irish father – the Irish being prone to black hair – and added a Greek grandmother for good measure. Later he was to discover that a majority of waiters and small shopkeepers in Soho were immigrants from Greece, and as by then he could hardly change this mythical woman's nationality, he decided to make her a countess.

Towards the end of his school-days his benefactor, Mr Mullens, who had a friend in Brown & MacDonalds‘, arranged for his protégé to enter that firm as a clerk, imagining that by doing so he had done young George an excellent turn and started him on what might one day prove to be a profitable career in the wine business. Unfortunately, the news had been anything but welcome to George, who left to himself would never have returned to India, but he lacked both the courage and the means to refuse such an offer. When he had served his apprenticeship and was eventually ordered to Peshawar, the only bright spot on his horizon was the fact that close on four hundred miles separated Peshawar from Bareilly, and that he would not, in any case, be expected to visit Mr and Mrs Mullens; for barely a month before his departure he heard that Mr Mullens had died of enteric and his brokenhearted widow had sold the store and sailed for Rangoon, where her son-in-law was doing well in the teak trade.

Mr Mullens, charitable to the last, had left George fifty pounds and a gold watch, and George spent the money on clothes and told his landlady that the watch had been his grandfather's. His Irish grandfather – the O'Garforth of Castle Garforth…

‘I didn't think they would ever find out,’ confessed George miserably. ‘But Mrs Gidney has a friend whose husband is in the teak trade and knows old man Mullens's son-in-law, and it seems that the friend met Mrs Mullens one day and they began talking about the Mutiny and all that, and Mrs Mullens told her about me and how her husband paid for my schooling and got me this job, and how well I was doing, and – Well, just about
everything
. She even had a photograph of me. I'd forgotten that. I sent it to them my last term at school. I used to write to them, you know. And then this friend wrote to Mrs Gidney…’

Mrs Gidney had apparently conceived it her duty to ‘warn’ her dear friend Mrs Harlowe, and Mrs Harlowe, greatly upset by George's duplicity, had somewhat naturally told her daughter. But where the two older ladies had merely been shocked, Belinda had been outraged, not so much because she had been lied to, but because she considered that she had been made to look foolish. After all it was she and her mother who had, in effect, sponsored George and helped to launch him on Peshawar society, because although his looks alone would have attracted a certain amount of attention, they would never have obtained for him the social recognition that Mrs Harlowe's partiality and her daughter's friendship for him had bestowed on him from the start. Besides, Belinda had more than half believed that romantic tale of a liaison between his mythical great-grandmother and Lord Byron (though to give George his due, this was one rumour for which he was not responsible), but though she had found nothing shocking in an illegitimate grandmama born of such exalted parents – in fact, quite the reverse – the bastard daughter of a colour-sergeant and a low-caste Hindu woman was a very different affair, and sordid in the extreme. Why, George's mother was nothing more than a half-caste – an illegitimate Eurasian who had married a corporal in a line regiment – and George himself had more than a ‘touch of the tar-brush’, for he was one quarter Indian; and low-caste Indian at that. This –
this
was the man that she, Belinda, had helped to foist onto Peshawar society and had danced and dined with and bestowed her smiles on. Now all the other girls were going to laugh at her, and she would never live it down. Never.

‘She was so
angry
,’ whispered George. ‘She said such terrible things – that all half-castes told lies and she never wanted to see me again, and… and if I ever spoke to her again she'd c-cut me d-dead. I didn't know anyone could be so cruel. She didn't even look p-pretty any more… she looked ugly. And her voice… Her mother k-kept saying “You don't mean that, dear. You can't mean that.” But she did. And now she's started t-telling people. I know she has, because they look at me as though I was s-some sort of insect and… What am I going to do, Ash? I'd k-kill myself if I could, but I haven't got the g-guts to do it. Not even when I'm drunk. But I can't stay here any longer. I can't! D-do you think that if I made a c-clean breast of it to my boss he'd send me s-somewhere else? If I
begged
him to?’

Ash did not answer. He was feeling dazed and sick, and in spite of everything, disbelieving. He would not and could not believe it of Belinda. Of George, yes. The story explained a great deal about George: his appalling sensitiveness and lack of confidence; that abrupt transformation from tongue-tied timidity to brashness and truculence when Belinda set out to charm him and Mrs Harlowe treated him with consideration and kindness, and he began to believe in himself at last; and most of all, his complete moral and physical collapse now that his make-believe world had been exposed as a sham. But Belinda could never have behaved in the manner he described. George was inventing again and allowing his guilty conscience to put into her mouth sentiments that he had already applied to himself. Because these were the sort of things he was afraid she might say, he was punishing himself by pretending she had actually said them – and quite possibly, too, that she was engaged to Mr Podmore-Smyth, which was something else that he, Ash, was not prepared to believe until he heard it from her own mouth. Then if her parents were really putting pressure on her to force her into marrying some dirty old man in his dotage, he would expose them for what they were.

He stood up and jerked the
chik
aside, and shouted for the servant to call him a tonga.

‘You aren't going?’ gasped George, in a panic. ‘Don't go yet. Please don't go! If you leave me I'll – I'll only get drunk again, and it's worse when I'm drunk. Besides, b-brandy only makes me feel braver. I might g-go out and d-do something stupid. Like going to the Club this morning and m-making a fool of myself.’