The Far Pavilions (52 page)

Her words had been a reminder, too, of another thing he had chosen to ignore: the swiftness with which the days were slipping by, and the fact that far more than two thirds of their journey was over. By now half Rajputana lay behind them; they had long since skirted the deserts of Bikanir, passed south of Ratangarh and Sikar, and from there marched north-eastward up through the harsh, rock-strewn ridges that guard the great Sambhar Lake and the approaches to Jaipur. Now, having crossed the Luni River and forded two tributaries of the Banas, they were facing south once more and it would not be long before they reached their journey's end; and then… Then he would attend the wedding ceremonies and watch Juli walk seven times round the sacred fire with the Rana of Bhithor, and when it was all over he would ride back to the Punjab alone, knowing that this time she was lost to him for ever.

It did not bear thinking of. But he would have to think of it now.

There was no moon that night, but Ash had always been cat-eyed in the dark, and grim necessity during his years in tribal territory had helped to sharpen his sight so that now he could walk confidently where many others would have had to grope forward with caution. He had brought the
lathi
with him as a walking-stick and not a weapon, for he had no fear of being attacked, and as for losing his way in unfamiliar country, there was little danger of that because he had ridden across it earlier that evening and noticed that half a mile away, in a direct line from his tent, the level ground narrowed to form a natural roadway between a wilderness of thorn-scrub and pampas grass and a wide belt of broken rock. As this provided the shortest and easiest way to reach the open country beyond, he was not likely to miss it even in the darkness, particularly with the lights of the camp providing a beacon that could be seen for miles across the plains.

The ground underfoot was hard and dry, and once his eyes had grown accustomed to the starlight he walked quickly; intent only on putting as much distance as possible between himself and the camp, because it seemed imperative to him that he should get beyond the range of the sound and smell of men and animals, and the sight of oil lamps and cooking fires, before he even began to think of Anjuli and himself.

Always, until now, the affairs of the camp had come between him and any serious consideration of personal matters, since he could not afford to be dilatory where his command was concerned but must deal promptly with every difficulty as it arose, however petty it might be, for unless solutions were found and arguments settled in the shortest possible time, chaos could easily result. But with Juli it had been different. The problem that she posed was a strictly personal one and so could be set aside to be dealt with later; there was no need to hurry, for he would be seeing her that evening – and tomorrow evening, and the evening after that… They had plenty of time…

But now, all at once, it could be put off no longer; time was running out, and if there was anything to decide he must decide now – one way or another.

The roar of the camp dwindled by degrees to a gentle hum and then a faint murmur that faded and was finally lost, and now at last the night was quiet: so quiet that for the first time in many weeks Ash found that he could hear the sough of the wind and a dozen small sounds that were suddenly audible in the silence. The whisper of dry grass and casurina fronds stirring in the breeze. The hoot of an owl and the scutter of some small nocturnal animal foraging around a clump of pampas. The chirr of a cricket and the flitter of a bat's wing, and from somewhere very far away, the sound that is the night-song of all India – the howl of a jackal-pack.

For a mile or so the plain remained level, and then it sloped sharply upwards, and Ash crossed a long, low ridge that was barely more than a spine of rock thrusting up from the naked earth, and once on the far side of it, found that he could no longer see the glow of the camp fires or any trace of human habitation. There was nothing now but the empty land and a sky full of stars; and there was no point in going any further. Yet he walked on mechanically, and might have done so for another hour if he had not come on a dry watercourse that was full of boulders and smooth, water-worn pebbles that slid treacherously underfoot.

To have crossed that by starlight would have been to risk a sprained ankle, so he turned aside, and selecting a patch of sand, settled down cross-legged in the classic Indian posture of meditation, to think about Juli… or at least, that was what he had meant to do. Yet now for no reason, he found himself thinking instead of Lily Briggs. And not only Lily, but her three successors: the soubrette of the seaside concert party, the red-haired barmaid of The Plough and Feathers and the provocative baggage from the hat-shop in Camberley, whose name he could no longer remember.

Their faces rose unbidden from the past and simpered at him. Four young women, all of whom had been older and far more experienced than he, and whose appeal to men had been unabashedly erotic. Yet not one of them had been mercenary, and it was ironic that he should have wished to marry Belinda Harlowe, who had the soul of a huckster, because by contrast she had seemed to epitomize all that was sweet and good and virginal – and was, in addition, a ‘lady’. He had told himself that he loved her because she was ‘different’ – different from four over-generous wantons whose bodies he had known intimately but whose minds he had known nothing about and had never been interested in – and it had taken him more than a year to discover that he knew nothing about hers either, and that all the admirable qualities that he had believed her to possess had been invented by himself and forcibly bestowed on some mental image of his own devising.

‘Poor Belinda!’ thought Ash, looking back a little wryly at that pasteboard paragon of his own devising, and at the tedious young prig that he himself had been. It was not her fault that she had failed to live up to that idealized portrait; he doubted if anyone could have done so. The real. Belinda had been no angel, but merely a very ordinary and rather silly young woman who happened to be pretty and was vain of her prettiness, and had been spoiled by too much flattery and adulation. He could see that quite clearly now, and realize, too, that the worldliness that had made her accept Mr Podmore-Smyth's offer, and the vindictive outburst that had destroyed poor George, could hardly be condemned as unusual failings when it was clear that a good many other people shared them. He himself would probably have shrugged off the first as a sensible if unromantic decision, and the second as a natural display of feminine pique at being lied to, had some other woman been involved. But because it was Belinda who had done these things he had chosen to regard it as a personal and appalling betrayal, and his revulsion had been so violent that for a time he had not been quite sane.

Even now the thought of what she had done to George gave him a momentary twinge of nausea. And George's face, as he had last seen it that hot Sunday afternoon in Peshawar, was still painfully clear in his memory. But Belinda's eluded him, and trying to recall her, Ash discovered that he could only remember that her eyes had been blue and her hair yellow; but not what she had actually looked like, or how she had spoken or moved or laughed. She seemed to have faded as an old daguerreotype will do if left too long in the sun, and considering all the emotional agonies he had suffered on her account, it was disconcerting to discover that he could remember Lily Briggs far more clearly. Though perhaps that was not so surprising for Lily had encouraged him to explore and caress every inch of her warm nakedness, while with Belinda, respect had kept his love-making strictly within bounds, and on those rare occasions when he had been permitted to take her befrilled and trimly corseted shape in his arms, his kisses could hardly have been more reverent had he been a Russian peasant kissing an ikon.

Sensuality had had no place in his affair with Belinda, while sensual pleasure had been the sole purpose of all the previous ones. With the result that, having experienced these two extremes, he had decided that he had now learned everything about women; and disliking what he knew, was cured for ever of falling in love (in the circumstances, an understandable reaction, though hardly an original one). Yet now, like many a disillusioned lover before him, he had fallen in love again. And it seemed like the first and only time: and would, he knew without any doubt, be the last.

There had been no joy in this discovery, for it was something that he would have given a great deal to avoid; and had there been any choice he would, even now, have elected to escape it, because he could see no solution that did not spell despair either for himself or Juli: or possibly for both of them. But as far as he was concerned, there was nothing he could do about it; it had been too late from the night that he had given her back his half of the little mother-of-pearl fish and had taken her into his arms, and known in the same instant that they belonged together just as surely as the two halves of the broken charm, and that it was not only Juli's luck-piece but he, Ash, who had been made whole again – and happy beyond words. He could not change that even if he would, nor could he analyse it or explain it away. It was simply there – like sight or sunlight or the air he breathed. An integral part of him…

Juli was as unlike any other woman he had ever known as a blue day in the Himalayas is unlike a grey one on Salisbury Plain. There was nothing that he could not tell her or that she would not understand, and to lose her now would be like losing his heart and his soul. And what man can live without the one, or hope for Heaven without the other?

‘I cannot give her up,’ thought Ash. ‘I cannot… I
cannot
!’

A night-jar flitted down the dry watercourse and came to rest on a boulder, unaware that the motionless figure within a yard of it was a man, and a foraging mongoose paused, nose a-twitch, and deciding that the human was not dangerous, crept forward to investigate. But Ash was not aware of them: he was locked away in a private world, and so lost in thought that had there been dacoits abroad that night he might never have returned to camp, because the discovery that he could not face losing Juli was merely a first step on a long and dangerous road, and it was only when he had taken it that he began to see clearly how formidable were the barriers that separated them, and how difficult to surmount.

That Juli shared his own feeling of completeness and belonging was something he knew without having to be told; just as he knew that she was fonder of him than anyone else in the world – as she had always been. But fondness was not love, and if what she felt for him was only the same single-hearted devotion that had been given him by an adoring little girl who had trotted at his heels and thought him the wisest and best of all brothers, it was not enough, and unless he could change that into something deeper he would surely lose her…

It was not as her brother that he could ask her to throw in her lot with him and face the consequences: the disgrace and the difficulties, and the incalculable dangers that might follow. And his own love for her was not in the least brotherly; it was as a wife that he wanted her. But even if she had grown to love him in the same way, that too was only a first step, for she was still Anjuli-Bai: a princess and a Hindu. And though the question of rank might seem trivial to her, that of caste might prove too strong for her to overcome.

Ash's foster-mother had been a devout Hindu, and as her son he had been brought up with a proper knowledge of religious matters. He had studied the Rig-Veda and was familiar with the tale of the sacrifice of Purusha, the primeval man, from whose immolation came all creation, together with the four Hindu castes. From Purusha's breath had come the Brahmans, the priestly caste; from his arms, the warriors, or Kshatriyas; from his thighs, the Vaisyas – agriculturalists and traders; and from his feet the servile caste, the Sudras. All other men were outcasts; ‘untouchables’ whose very presence was defilement. Wherefore, to a Hindu, caste was the most important thing in life, for it decreed every person's social status and the work they were permitted to do, and affected in one way or another every aspect of living. Nothing could change it. A man born a Sudra, in the lowest caste, must live and die as one; no riches or power that he might acquire could raise him to a higher one, and his children and grandchildren, and their children after them to the end of time, would always be Sudras. Only a life of great piety and good works might, after his death, make it possible for him to be reborn as a member of a higher caste. But apart from that, there was no other way in which he could escape his destiny.

Sita's people had been farmers: hill-men, claiming Rajput blood. Her husband too had been a Vaisya, and she had brought Ash up as strictly as though he had been her son. Juli's mother, on the other hand, had been a half-caste, and therefore, in the eyes of orthodox Hindus, tainted by her foreign blood. But her father had belonged to the warrior caste, and like many Kshatriyas, considered that they, and not the Brahmans, should by rights hold pride of place. He also happened to be an autocrat, a Rajput and a Rajah. On these counts he regarded himself as being above caste, and had he wished to marry the daughter of the lowliest of Untouchables, he would probably have done so and carried it off with a high hand. Nevertheless, on the grounds of caste alone he would certainly not have considered the foster-child of the waiting-woman, Sita (and even less the only son of Professor Pelham-Martyn), in any way a suitable husband for his daughter by the
Feringhi
-Rani. Nor would his heir – that was something that Ash could be certain of, despite the lowly origins of Nandu's own mother, or the fact that the dubious status of his half-sister, Anjuli-Bai, had caused so much argument and hair-splitting with the emissaries from Bhithor that only a lavish bribe and the promise of a munificent dowry had finally induced them to accept her as a suitable wife for their Rana.

At this date, however, the question of Nandu's approval or disapproval was wholly irrelevant; the fact remained that as the marriage contracts had been agreed and betrothal gifts exchanged, his sisters were to all intents and purposes already the legal property of the Rana, and the wedding ceremony would do no more than supply the final seal to a bargain that had been approved and was regarded as binding. So except for a miracle, there was no way out that would not involve a major scandal and considerable danger; and Ash was no believer in miracles.