A Division Of The Spoils (Raj Quartet 4) (17 page)

‘Oh no you won’t. You bloody well won’t,’ he said aloud.

*

Half an hour later, soaked to the skin by the renewed downpour, he gave up trying to trace the fault in the brand new jeep’s electrical system and accepted the guard-commander’s offer of a bed-down for the night. The guard-commander, a British corporal – seemed to welcome company. In the guardroom, keeping his voice low so as not to disturb the three huddled shapes disposed on charpoys in corners away from the dim light of a lamp that hung centrally above a trestle-table littered with mugs, playing-cards and worn copies of
Picture Post
and
Reader’s Digest
, he offered Perron a shot of buckshee rum.

‘Found its own way here, Sarge,’ the corporal said, and winked. Outside, in the dark, he had called Perron sir at least twice but had got over any embarrassment this might have caused him. While they sat smoking and drinking rum the corporal explained that he and his bunch had been in India for a whole month and were still wondering what had hit them. They were part of a formation that had been under orders for France just before – as the corporal put it – old Hitler packed it in. For a while they’d been looking forward to becoming part of the army of occupation. There were chaps making fortunes there right now and from what he’d heard the frauleins would do it for a packet of cigarettes or even a Naafi sandwich. The corporal had been in the army for a year and some of the men in his unit less than that. They had reckoned Germany would be a cushy billet in which to see their time out and from the way ‘old Slim’s lot’ had given the Japs ‘the bum’s rush out of Burma’ the last thing any of them had expected was to be sent out East. When you looked at the map (the corporal said) you could see that the Japanese had had it. You could hardly see
where places like Malaya were. But here
they
were. Had the Sarge ever known such a bleeding awful place. How long had the Sarge been out here?

‘Two years,’ Perron said.

‘Christ.’

The corporal studied him, respectfully, but looking for signs of deterioration. ‘I reckon I’d be round the twist if they kept me out here that long.’ His tone became even lower; confidential. ‘What’s it like, Sarge. With these Indian bints?’

‘The colour doesn’t come off.’

The corporal shook his head. ‘I couldn’t fancy it somehow. Some of the half’n’halfs look okay but the one’s who’re white enough not to put you off are only interested in officers, aren’t they? We been warned to watch it too. They say there’s always a coal-black mum waiting in the parlour to get the banns read if you so much as touch the daughter. That true, d’you reckon, Sarge?’

‘I’ve heard of cases.’

The corporal shook his head again. Perron glanced at the sleeping men. Only one of them had his face turned towards the light. He looked about nineteen, so, come to that, did the corporal. The faces were those of urban Londoners and belonged to streets of terraced houses that ended in one-man shops: newsagent-tobacconist, fish and chip shop, family grocer, and a pub at the corner where the high road was. What could such a face know of India? And yet India was there, in the skull, and the bones of the body. Its possession had helped nourish the flesh, warm the blood of every man in the room, sleeping and waking.

‘Where do I turn in?’ Perron asked.

‘I’ll show you.’ The corporal looked at his watch. ‘Then I got to change the guard.’ He led the way out into a passage. ‘There’s a coupla wog clerks that sleep down that end, and there’s a duty officer upstairs with the phone put through. He’s a wog too. I think the officers that work here take it in turns to sleep in, not that anything ever happens, but there’s a safe in the room the duty-officer sleeps in, so I reckon there’s a lot of secret papers. There’s a spare charpoy here, though—’ he opened a door and switched on a light – ‘and a bog through that door. You got a blanket, Sarge?’

‘No.’

‘I’ll bring you one in.’ He switched on the fan and went out. The room was an office, so sparsely furnished it looked like a monk’s cell. Along one wall, under a shuttered window, stood a bare charpoy. Aslant one corner, there was a trestle-table covered by an army blanket, with one folding canvas chair behind it and a folding wooden chair in front of it for visitors. A neatly positioned telephone and blotting pad, a pen and pencil tray, an empty in-basket and an empty out-basket told a story of meticulous attention to work or of a complete absence of work to give attention to. Facing the visitor, parallel to the top edge of the blotter and the pen and pencil tray, was a triangular wedge of wood on which the name of the desk’s occupant was painted in white.

Capt. L. Purvis.

Here behind the desk Purvis had sat, waiting for a call from Delhi that never came, and presumably here he had lain, on the charpoy, gazing at the alien geography of the ceiling, nursing his invaded gut and his invincible Englishness. And, on the wall behind the desk, he had marked off with a blue crayon the days of his martyrdom. Perron looked at his watch. Not yet midnight. Even if Purvis had learned to cheat by crossing a day off immediately before he left the office in the evening Perron did not feel he could cancel out August 5 for him until his watch showed 0001.

‘Here’s your blanket, Sarge, and something for a pillow. Anything else?’

‘No thank you, Corporal.’

‘We brew up at 0600. Okay for you?’

‘Fine.’

‘Pleasant dreams then, Sarge.’

After he had taken off his damp uniform, hung it over the chair back under the fan and mopped himself reasonably dry with the green handtowel from his pack, Perron sat in his underwear on the edge of the charpoy and slowly performed the nightly task of trying to obliterate from his mind all the disturbing residue of the day’s malfunctioning and so leave it free to crystallize, to reveal the point reached in a continuum he was sure existed but, in India, found so difficult to trace.

He lit a cigarette and stared at his stockinged feet, then
reached over to his jacket and got out the notebook and pencil. After a while he wrote: ‘Two continua, perhaps, in this case? Ours, and the Indians’? An illusion that they ever coincided, coincide? A powerful illusion but still an illusion? If so, then the
raj
was, is, itself an illusion so far as the English are concerned. Is that what she meant when she said she did not think India was a country one could be happy in?’

Dissatisfied with this he drew a pencil line lightly across the entry and tried again.

‘For at least a hundred years India has formed part of England’s idea about herself and for the same period India has been forced into a position of being a reflection of that idea. Up to say 1900 the part India played in our idea about ourselves was the part played by anything we possessed which we believed it was right to possess (like a special relationship with God). Since 1900, certainly since 1918, the reverse has obtained. The part played since then by India in the English idea of Englishness has been that of something we feel it does us no credit to have. Our idea about ourselves will now not accommodate any idea about India except the idea of returning it to the Indians in order to prove that we are English and have demonstrably English ideas. All this is quite simply proven and amply demonstrated. But on either side of that arbitrary date (1900) India itself, as itself, that is to say India as not part of our idea of ourselves, has played no part whatsoever in the lives of Englishmen in general (no part that we are conscious of) and those who came out (those for whom India had to play a real part) became detached both from English life and from the English idea of life. Getting rid of India will cause us at home no qualm of conscience because it will be like getting rid of what is no longer reflected in our mirror of ourselves. The sad thing is that whereas in the English mirror there is now no Indian reflection (think of Purvis, those men I lectured to, and the corporal here in the guardroom), in the Indian mirror the English reflection may be very hard to get rid of, because in the Indian mind English possession has not been an idea but a reality; often a harsh one. The other sad thing is that people like the Laytons may now see nothing at all when looking in their mirror. Not even themselves? Not even a mirror? I know that getting rid of
India, dismantling all this old imperial machinery (which Purvis sees as hopelessly antiquated, a brake on economic viability – his word) has become an article of faith with the intellectual minority of the party we have just voted into power. But we haven’t voted them into power to get rid of the machinery, we’ve voted them into power to set up new machinery of our own for our own benefit, and for the majority who voted India does not even begin to exist. Odd that history may record as pre-eminent among the Labour Party’s post-war governmental achievements the demission of power in countries like this? Could it be that, in power now, and with a mandate to demit power, the party will forget or omit to demit it? It could be. But we shall see. The machinery for demission is wound up and there are, as Purvis knows, overriding economic arguments for setting it in motion as soon as the war’s over. In England the war
is
over. It ended on May 6. In England the war’s a dead letter except for people with sons, brothers and fathers and husbands out here. And the fact that they’re still out here simply adds to an English sense of grievance that England ever got involved with anything or anywhere south or east of spitting distance of the white cliffs of Dover. Terrific insularity. Paradox! The most insular people in the world managed to establish the largest empire the world has ever seen. No, not paradox. Insularity, like empire-building, requires superb self-confidence, a conviction of one’s moral superiority. And I suppose that when the war is really over the recollection that there was a time when we “stood alone” against Hitler will confirm us in our national sense of moral superiority. Will it be in those abstract terms and on those shifting grounds that we’ll attempt to build a new empire whose cornerstone will be the act of relinquishing for “moral” reasons the empire we actually had?’

He hesitated, then added, ‘Tonight I am a bit drunk.’

Then, looking at his watch he saw it was tonight no longer. He put pencil and notebook back in the jacket pocket. The evening at the Maharanee’s was over. Standing, staring at that name, Purvis, he realized that curious and complex as it had been the evening had had shape. Beginning with Purvis, it had ended in Purvis’s office. He appreciated the symmetry of that.

He visited the bathroom. Returning, he went over to the light switch, changed his mind and crossed to the desk, found the blue crayon and went to the wall calendar. He drew an X through the 5, stared at the 6 and said aloud, ‘That, anyway, is the crystallization, the point reached in the
time
continuum.’

He turned the fan down to its slowest rate of revolutions, switched off the light, opened the shutters on the unglazed barred window and breathed in. Bombay. Bom-Bahia. Part of an inheritance. His monarch’s. His own. The corporal’s, Purvis’s, the Maharanee’s. The street beggar’s. He lay, adjusted the cushion the corporal had brought as a pillow, and the blanket so that it just covered his abdomen, the most vulnerable part of the body when there was a fan going. For a while pictures of the day just ended flickered across the screen lowered by his eyelids, but all at once there was the disturbing invasion of shots of Coomer, from all angles, long, medium and close; Coomer opening his shoulders, hitting out at a sequence of balls whose pitch and pace were subtly varied by the invisible bowler; or team of bowlers; the deliveries were in too mercilessly rapid a succession for one man alone to send down.

The cameras of Perron’s imagination began to tire. Presently only one remained, and this zoomed in close to recreate a memory of the boy’s face. There was a face, an idea of a face, a man’s rather than a boy’s, and formed from a notion of an expression rather than from one of features: an expression of concentration, of hard-held determination, of awareness that to misjudge, to mistime, would lead to destruction. There was no sound. And suddenly the face vanished. A flurry of birds, crows, rooks, rose from the surrounding elms, startled by a sudden noise, although there had been no noise. And they were not elms, but palms; and the birds were kitehawks. They circled patiently above Perron’s head, waiting for him to fall asleep.

IN VIEW OF
what once happened there the countryside through which the mail train passes on the first stage of the journey from Mirat to Ranpur is surprisingly undramatic. The passenger who has what initially seems the good luck to be alone in a compartment soon grows restless as mile follows mile with nothing to catch the attention or work on the imagination other than what in India is common-place: the huddles of mud villages; buffalo wallowing in celebration of their survival from the primeval slime; men, women and children engaged in the fatal ritual of pre-ordained work.

Only the slow train stops at the wayside stations. On their single platforms people wait with bundles and a patience that has something exalted about it, although this impression could be the result of the express passing through too quickly for individual faces to be clearly noted. There are three such stations all of which are reached within thirty minutes of leaving Mirat cantonment. Thereafter, the villages become distant, but there is one, abandoned and ruinous, which appears suddenly and unexpectedly, close to the line.

Those ruins don’t look old. For an instant the traveller conjures images of flames, of silhouetted human shapes running distractedly, stooped under burdens. But the moment of imaginative recreation is a brief one. The crippled dwellings and crumbled walls slide quickly out of sight and the panorama of wasteland, scarred by dried-out nullahs and rocky outcrops, appears again and expands to the limit of the blurred horizon where the colourlessness of sky and earth merge and are distinguished only by a band of a different intensity of colourlessness which, gazed at long enough, gives an idea of blue and purple refraction. Everything is immense,
but – lacking harmony or contrast – is diminished by its association with infinity.