The Lotus and the Wind (38 page)

It was the end of January, 1882. Three months ago the two had returned. By then the family group by the lake in Kashmir had long since broken up, so Robin had found her in Peshawar. He was supposed to be on leave still, but most days he worked with Major Hayling. Nothing much seemed to have changed, yet everything was different. Often she found herself holding wordless communion with Jagbir. Their mouths talked of boot polish, metal polish, and rifle oil--but silently, as they spoke, Jagbir standing at attention, she sitting in a chair, they sought each other’s eyes and without words agreed that what must be, must be.

She left them and walked along the passage to the front verandah. They were in a little bungalow that the cantonment executive officer had given her when she came down from Kashmir. It stood on the western edge of cantonments, facing the Khyber Pass. When the wind rose it took the full blast, because it was unsheltered, and the windows rattled; but it was the only bungalow she could get.

She saw Major Hayling turn his horse into the short driveway. In his full dress he looked as distinguished, sinister, and sly as ever. He dismounted carefully, and his groom, who had been trotting behind him, came up to take the reins. The major walked up the steps on to the verandah and saluted her. ‘Good afternoon, my dear. Is the hero getting dressed?’

‘Heroes. They’re dressing each other.’

‘Ah, yes, I forgot Jagbir’s decoration. When I see him I always think he’s already got them all, somehow.’

‘So do I. Rupert, I’d like to thank you for getting Robin this medal. Of course I used to think a D.S.O. would answer everything, solve everything. Then, when I saw him in Kashmir, I thought it would mean absolutely nothing. Now I’m not sure. Robin is really pleased, I think.’

Hayling’s eye wandered speculatively over her face. ‘I’m glad to hear it, even if his pleasure is only on your behalf. Don’t thank me. I told the chief about Robin’s being considered a coward, and the chief swore he’d get him the D.S.O. for this work if he had to invent a battle in Afghanistan for him to win it in. Look, I just dropped in to talk with you for a minute, because I’ve got to start packing as soon as the parade’s over. You know, don’t you? Simla. I wanted to ask if you know what Robin means to do next. You know what we think of him. Is he going to--?’

She felt the pain coming up in her chest and towards her eyes, but she had had plenty of practice now and could keep her voice steady. ‘I doubt if he will return to your service, Rupert.’

He looked keenly at her. All the time he absently pushed the hilt of his sword up and down, making the toe of the scabbard clink on the tiles. He said suddenly, ‘Well, anyway, our plan worked--for what you wanted it to at the time.’

She nodded. It had worked. Robin had won the Distinguished Service Order. But of course she had grown a thousand years older since Mclain’s drunken slap launched her on this course. She said, ‘You know it was the wrong fight. You warned me then that it might be. Oh, Rupert, what do you think he’ll do?’

He said abruptly, ‘I don’t think. I just believe that God helps men when their loads become greater than they can bear. Women too.’ He saluted her again, went down the steps, remounted his charger, and rode away.

Half an hour later she drove with Robin and Jagbir in a carriage to the parade ground. Jagbir protested that he preferred to walk, but they overruled him, so he sat on the front seat, facing them. She watched his hand move around, checking the angle of his cap and the fastening of button and belt, touching the hilt of bayonet and kukri, searching anxiously for the rifle that was not there. When he remembered that his dress for the parade was Review Order, Sidearms Only, he sat still. None of them spoke, but it was friendly, and they smiled together as the carriage rolled along.

On the parade ground a battalion of infantry already stood in line. A small wind blew dust devils about and lifted the hems of the ladies’ dresses where they stood behind a stretched rope which marked the edge of the parade ground. There was a table in front of the rope and a pair of black morocco cases on the table. Some staff officers in scarlet and drab were grouped around it, talking carelessly among themselves. There was a row of chairs to which the general’s aide-de-camp led the commissioner’s wife, the general’s wife, and the wives of other notables as they arrived. The husbands stood behind the ladies’ chairs or drifted off to talk with friends.

The A.D.C. came up, saluted, and led Anne to a chair in the centre of the row. She sat down slowly. Robin and Jagbir ducked under the rope and joined the staff officers near the table.

She greeted, and answered greetings, without knowing what she said or hearing what was said. Robin and Jagbir stood side by side now, apart, and no one looked at them or spoke to them. It might have been a conspiracy of all the others to pretend that they were about to be drummed out of the Army. Opposite, the low sun shone on steel and silver and the red splashes of the battalion’s facings.

She sat in the same coma of waiting that she had been in since he left her in the Sind Valley. His return and their unspoken agreement to say nothing of what was closest to her heart had made no difference. Hayling was waiting, Jagbir was waiting; Colonel Rodney and Caroline--they were here, Caroline in the next chair, Colonel Rodney behind her. She spoke with them. The girls stood a little way off among young officers of the station, and she heard their low, excited laughs. Her own father and mother came. Her father had already begun to blow his nose violently into a huge khaki handkerchief.

But they all waited in a tension that they must conceal because they all had their lives to live. Sometimes, as at this moment, she expected Robin to break the tension by some violent blow, some detonation in the spirit, as an explosive bursts a dam. She thought: He will throw his medal in the general’s face and run away, and we will all run after him, shouting, ‘Come back! We love you.’ She flushed. That was what they all had been doing, particularly she herself. She thought: He will turn around when the medal is on his chest and call me by name. I’ll have to go out there. I’ll hesitate and blush, but I’ll have to go and stand beside him. Then he’ll turn and shout in a loud voice, ‘I love my wife and my bed and my home and my children, and--’

The general stepped forward, and everyone stood up. A gun boomed. The steel and silver and red shifted in focus and settled again as the soldiers stood at the Present. The clash of arms chimed across the parade ground. The dust devils rose, and she felt the light pressure of Colonel Rodney’s hand on her shoulder.

She bowed her head.

They were all clapping and cheering and crowding around her. Robin stood there in front of her, the red and blue ribbon and the white enamel cross brilliant against the dark green of his tunic. Jagbir stood there, a bright red cordon around his neck and a bright silver medal flapping on the end of it as colonels and majors pumped his arm.

Everyone congratulated everyone else. The band played, the drums thudded, and the fifes wailed and the long files swung away. Suddenly she was among her own families, and Hayling and Jagbir were there. Robin stood opposite her, and everyone else had gone.

Each in his own idiom, they said a few words to Robin. She had long since given up trying to hold her face in a smile. She could keep it steady, but a smile was false. She stood, contained and serious, to one side of them all, watching and listening.

The girls touched his medal and flung their arms around his neck. Colonel Rodney’s eyes burned like icy fire under his beetling eyebrows. He took his son’s hand in both his own, but said nothing. Caroline did not touch him. She stood close to him and said, ‘God be with you,’ emphasizing the word ‘God’ as if no one else might be with him.

Anne’s father seized Robin’s right hand and shook it violently up and down, then dropped it to blow his nose. He cried, ‘We’ll see you a brevet major in no time, my boy, a general! There’s no limit!’ Her mother’s voice scraped along. ‘Wonderful, so pleased for your sake! How are the babies, the dear twins?’

Hayling put out his left hand, the palm twisted over so that it could meet another’s right, but Robin had already put out his left, so their hands fumbled together for a second before meeting. Hayling said, ‘You’ll always know where to reach me.’ Robin’s set face relaxed quickly, and he smiled.

Hayling came over and took Anne’s hand. ‘
Au revoir
. Let me know.’ He walked away, and she watched his back until the groom helped him on to his horse.

In the carriage Robin and Jagbir talked in Gurkhali. After a minute Robin turned to her and said, ‘Jagbir’s going with Hayling as far as Amritsar. He’ll have to sleep in Hayling’s bungalow to-night.’

‘He’s got six months’ leave, hasn’t he?’

‘Yes. Then he’s rejoining the regiment. He couldn’t be my orderly any more, anyway, now that he’s a naik.’

Of course she had known that ever since Colonel Franklin telegraphed that he was promoting Jagbir, but she had not faced the fact of it before this instant. At the bungalow she watched as they shook hands and spoke together for a minute. Then Jagbir turned away to the servants’ quarters, and she waited by Robin’s side at the head of the verandah steps until he reappeared with his kitbag slung over his shoulder. The gaudy cordon of the Indian Order of Merit no longer glowed around his neck. He must have stuffed it into his pocket. He marched down the drive, right, left, right, until in the road he turned and saluted. Robin raised his hand a few inches and let it drop. She stole a quick look at his face and saw that it had not changed. She waved her hand to Jagbir, and they waited on the verandah until he was out of sight.

Inside it was dark, and she called for the lamps to be lit and went to feed the babies. After she had begun Robin knocked and came in. He sat down in a chair opposite her and watched until they had finished. His eyes were deep, the lights in them deeper.

She said, ‘My dearest, kiss me.’ He kissed her, a long kiss, and she closed her eyes.

When ayah returned to soothe the babies she followed him to the dining-room. Alif served them dinner, and they talked about so many things that she could not afterwards recall the details--books, people, houses, horses, soldiers. He had not remembered to change, so he sat in full dress opposite her, the medal on his left breast. She never remembered him so calmly contented as this. Slowly she forced herself to admit that she knew the reason for it. He was going.

There, she had thought it. She waited but could not feel the terrifying sense of loss that she had expected. He was happy, and because she loved him she was happy. She felt his calm and his mysterious content invade her.

Before the end of the meal the wind got up. She told Alif to bolt the doors and windows. For this hour she would like to shut out the hiss of the wind, although she did not now regard it as her enemy. The whipping curtains hung still. She saw a light passing down the road and told Alif to draw the curtains and put more wood on the fire in the drawing-room.

When they moved there after dinner she took out a book and began to read, as had become her custom. The wind strengthened and rattled the window-panes. Something fell with a crash in the compound--a slate off the roof of the servants’ quarters. She’d have to have it seen to to-morrow. She did not raise her eyes from the book but from that moment on she did not read. The pages turned steadily under her hand at the proper intervals of time, but she was not reading. The wind blew harder. Behind the wine-red curtains and beyond the shimmering glass panes of the window the night would be blue-black now, edged with the grey blades of the wind. Robin sat across from her, on the other side of the crackling fire, his eyes lightly closed.

She had fought the wrong fight and then discovered that the real, impalpable enemy was the wind and not to be gained against by any weapons within her reach. Now at last she knew that even the wind was not her enemy but her lover, who must come and go if he was to live.

She could say: We will be poor and lonely without you; the babies need a father; why do you have to go? Are you coming back?

Yes. But she could say also: I have grown as you have grown. I will be neither anchor nor rope to you. Because you must go, go, and I love you. When you come again I will be here, and I love you.

Because he would go with her love and with all her true hopes that he would find what he sought, he would come back. Because the wind blew in him he could not stay, even when he returned, to become a furnishing of her life. She did not want that. The world would commiserate with her, but the wind would love her, and she was happy.

Robin got up silently from his chair. He looked down at his uniform and the medal and said, ‘I’ve got to go and find something. It’s for you and for Jagbir--for everybody. I must change.’

When he had gone she put down the book and waited again. Only a little more now, say half an hour. She knew suddenly that she was loved as few women had ever been. To this being, this Robin, God had given mysterious wings. She had shown Robin the rich prizes in the deep waters of human love and begged him to help her win them. He had thrown himself in and all but drowned. All the ways of men and women to each other were wonderful.

After half an hour she arose and walked easily along the passage. Their room was empty, the bathroom empty. His clothes lay neatly folded on the bed, his medal on top. His helmet was on its shelf and his sword-slings on their hook. The babies slept in their cribs in the alcove at the far end of the bedroom. She would have liked to know that he had kissed them, but she never would know. She stooped over and kissed them herself to be sure. When she got up she saw a small silver coin on her dressing-table. She recognized it and put it carefully away in a drawer. She would have a brooch made of it, not with the obverse uppermost to show the proud head of the young god, but the reverse, the indecipherable scrawl of a message in an ancient language.

It seemed stuffy in the room. She opened the long windows and looked out. The wind came through the night, over three thousand miles of desert, pamir, mountain, and steppe, and blew in her face. For a moment it whipped through the house, for that moment lending its nervous searching energy to the animate and the inanimate, so that the babies stretched out their hands in sleep and the curtains flew up in a curving dance.