A Division Of The Spoils (Raj Quartet 4) (32 page)

‘We’re due out now.’

‘That’s up to you. But there’d be no point in bringing Colonel Merrick without the party specified in the movement order. The officer, the sergeant and the servant.’

‘You’re saying all or nothing?’

‘Yes.’

‘It beats me.’

As the
MCO
and his sergeant set off Ashok came down from the coach. Rowan spoke to the Indian official to confirm that he would see the boy safely out of the station. He bade Ashok goodbye, wished him luck in his exams and returned to the sitting-room compartment. The head bearer was putting out bottles and glasses on the marble top of a waist-high mahogany corner cabinet. A miniature brass rail held them secure. He ordered a brandy and soda and presently carried the glass out to the observation platform and placed himself where he could see fairly far down the train. The rope barrier
was still in position but a section of it had been opened up. There was a sound of warning whistles. The platform was still crowded. The only Englishwomen he could see were in a group: girls in uniform,
QAS,
seeing someone off, probably on short leave or on posting up to the General Hospital in Pankot. They had some
RAF
and American officers in tow and looked merry.

Then they moved in closer to the carriage making room for people to pass: the
MCO
and an officer whose left arm hung stiffly by his side. Behind them Rowan just made out the tall jungle-green clad figure of a man wearing a green slouch hat and, next to him, someone in a pugree. Luggage bobbed on the heads of the coolies in the rear.

Rowan went back into the coach and drank his brandy down and returned to the observation platform. He went down the steps as the party passed through the opening in the rope barrier.

‘Colonel Merrick?’

The man tucked a swagger cane under his left arm. Momentarily Rowan was appalled by the scar-tissue that disfigured the left side of Merrick’s face. Sarah had never mentioned that. He took Merrick’s right hand, briefly.

‘My name is Rowan.’ He had been steeling himself to say ‘sir’. The word did not come. But he managed the rest of what he’d rehearsed. ‘I think we have a mutual friend in Sarah Layton. I already know your sergeant.’ Before Merrick could react he turned to Perron. Yes. No mistake. He offered his hand. ‘How are you, Guy?’

A little muscle ridged itself on Perron’s cheek.

‘Fine, thank you, Nigel.’

They shook hands. Rowan readdressed himself to Merrick.

‘We’d better sort things out so that the luggage can go in. There’s a spare coupé which has its own bath cubicle, and then there’s a single berther that’s probably more comfortable but it shares washing arrangements with another. There’s no one using the coupé.’

‘I should be more than content with either,’ Merrick said. ‘But I do have a certain handicap. The coupé would suit me very well if it’s really not wanted. Then I could have my servant in with me. In any case, it’s very civil of you.’

‘I’ll have the luggage put in then. Is this your servant?’

Rowan glanced at the man who stood to one side of Guy Perron. Extraordinary. A cap of gold thread swathed with stiff white muslin, an embroidered waistcoat over a white tunic gathered at the waist by a belt, and baggy white trousers. Into the belt was tucked a miniature axe on a long shaft decorated with silver filigree. The face was clean-shaven but pockmarked. The eyes looked as though they were rimmed with kohl. A bazaar Pathan: handsome, predatory; the kind of man Rowan instinctively distrusted.

‘Yes, that’s Suleiman,’ Merrick said. ‘There isn’t much luggage. We came in a hurry and fairly light.’

Rowan called over one of the servants from the coach. He gave orders for Merrick’s luggage to be placed in whichever coupé wasn’t occupied by Mr Gopal.

‘What have you got, Guy?’

Perron indicated a kit-bag by his side and a briefcase in his hand. ‘Just these.’

‘Well we can sort you out later.’ He told another bearer to put Perron’s kit-bag in the sitting-room. ‘I expect you could both do with a drink. Let’s go up.’ He led the way to the observation platform and stood aside to let Merrick up. Perron waited. Rowan waved him on. When they had both gone up he watched the Pathan follow the porters into the coach at the other end. Then he smiled at Ashok, nodded to the
MCO
and went into the sitting-room.

Merrick had removed his cap and placed it with the swagger cane on the small table between the two armchairs. He looked younger than Rowan had expected and, by Perron’s side, curiously unimpressive. Perron, in this confined area, appeared large and heavily built. The jungle-green uniform added a special note of aggressiveness. His hair was fairer than Rowan remembered and the face, in maturity, less mobile in expression. As a youth Perron had smiled constantly.

‘Thank you for taking us in,’ Merrick said. ‘I imagine it’s meant bending the rules a bit.’

‘Imperceptibly. What will you have, Colonel Merrick?’

‘A whisky would do very nicely, thank you. And perhaps Perron may have one too. Then I think he’d like to get his head down. He’s spent most of the past week travelling.’

‘There’ll be a light supper next door in ten minutes or so,’ Rowan said. Warning whistles were being blown. ‘What about it, Guy? The
MCO
said the Delhi train was very late in. Haven’t you missed dinner?’

‘I haven’t had it but I haven’t missed it.’ Perron’s tone was edgy and abrasive. ‘Incidentally; no whisky for me. Unless it’s Scotch.’

‘It is.’

‘Really? Well, that fits.’

‘Fits what?’

Perron didn’t answer. He stiffened his trunk and limbs as if coming to attention. ‘With your permission, sir,’ he said to Merrick, ‘I should like to do as you suggest and get my head down.’

‘Shall I continue in custody of the bag, sir?’

‘No, leave that here.’

Rowan signalled to a servant in the dining-room and pointed at Perron’s kit-bag.

‘If you want to tuck down I’ll show you where you can settle in.’

The bearer was handing Perron a glass of whisky and soda as Rowan went past him. In the dining-room he paused, heard Perron say, ‘Goodnight, sir’, and Merrick’s reply, ‘Goodnight, Sergeant.’ The train began to glide forward. When Perron came in, holding his glass, Rowan went to the far door at the right-hand side of the dining compartment and passed through it into the corridor. Merrick’s Pathan, on guard outside the farthest coupé, watched him. Rowan slid open the door of No. 1 compartment. The lights were on. His case was on the luggage rack. Perron followed him in.

‘Which would you like, Guy? This one with the bed arranged so that your head faces away from the engine?’ He opened the door into the shower and
B.C.
cubicles and then another door into a duplicate berth. ‘Or this one where the head faces towards?’

Perron looked round the rosily-lit compartment.

‘Have you nothing in between?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Then I’ll make do with this.’

‘I’m told the last Governor’s lady preferred it.’

‘What about the present Governor’s lady?’

‘She never comes up to Pankot. If
HE
has to he goes by road.’

‘The coach is something of an anachronism?’

‘You could say that.’

‘That fits too.’

‘Like Scotch. Why? Fits what?’

‘The generally hallucinatory atmosphere I currently exist in. Your health.’

The servant came in with the kit-bag, stowed it on the rack and left by the sliding door that gave on to the corridor. When he had gone Perron shot the bolt.

‘Guard your property and your life,’ he said, as though it were a quotation. In one corner of the compartment there was a diminutive armchair, chintz-covered. He squeezed himself into it. ‘The Red Shadow is at large. Did you ever see anything quite as camp?’

‘Camp?’

‘Suleiman.’ Perron hesitated. ‘Never mind.’ Then, ‘Sandhurst, wasn’t it? Chillingborough and Sandhurst. Now this.
ADC
to
HE.
The Governor in Ranpur. Unless I’ve been imagining it all and still am, which seems likely. I believe something may have happened to me a week ago tonight. It
is
Sunday?’

‘No. Monday. The thirteenth. What happened to you a week ago on Sunday?’

‘There was a Maharanee mixed up in it somewhere. And then there was poor Purvis. Are you sure it’s the thirteenth? I could swear it was still Sunday.’

Rowan looked at his watch. ‘Actually we’re both wrong. It’s now Tuesday the fourteenth.’

‘Good,’ Perron said. ‘Two days nearer.’

‘Nearer what?’

‘The successful conclusion of Operation Bunbury. She’ll have had my telegram by now. She will have given the first little tug to the first little string. What should we allow? A month, conservatively? Can I hold out even for a month? Or shall I commit murder? What do they do to sergeants who murder their officers?’

‘Hang them, I think.’

‘Very degrading. A firing squad would be different. Aunt Charlotte would approve of a firing squad.’

The train clacked over a series of points. Rowan steadied himself. Perron produced a hip flask from a sidepocket of his jacket and topped up his whisky and soda. ‘Scotch,’ he said. ‘A parting gift from my previous officer. A pleasant enough but finally very ineffectual man. The only alternative he had to propose was that I apply at once for a commission. He thought it likely it could have been immediate but I said immediate or delayed made no difference because accepting a commission at this stage of the game would simply be a policy of despair.’

‘There’s no need to drink your own whisky, Guy. Just press the bell.’

‘I don’t suppose you have the slightest idea what I’m drivelling on about, have you, Nigel?’

‘Some of the details are a bit obscure but oddly enough I get the general drift.’

‘Do you? I wish I did. I find the general drift elusive. So here’s to Aunt Charlotte and Operation Bunbury. I hope you’re not going to ask me to explain Bunbury as well as camp.’

‘No. But how will an imaginary sick friend solve your problem?’

‘He died. At least he did according to the telegram I sent Aunt Charlotte. You remember Aunt Charlotte?’

‘The sister of your balloonist uncle?’

‘That’s the one. The one who got on awfully well with that stunning girl you were with at School versus Old Boys. I can’t remember her name. Did you marry her, by the way?’

‘No.’

‘Are you married?’

‘No, go on about Bunbury.’

‘Bunbury was Aunt Charlotte’s idea. When I told her I couldn’t delay my call-up any longer she said I obviously wasn’t trying and that it was most unpatriotic of me because it wasn’t going to be fair on the men for whose lives and welfare I so thoughtlessly intended to accept responsibility. She only became resigned to it when I got it through to her that I intended to serve anonymously in the ranks and when I agreed to tip her off the moment I wanted her to pull strings to
get me out. Throughout my relatively short but not uneventful military career, from Salisbury Plain to Kalyan, I’ve kept her informed of my state of mind by reporting on our friend Bunbury’s state of health. His death last week will have galvanized her into action.’

‘What sort of action?’

‘She has several friends in what are called high places. Permanent establishment, not politicians. And fortunately I have a pleasant little niche awaiting me in what poor Purvis’s benefactor called the groves of Academe. Perhaps more fortunately, our new government is both anti-imperialist and pro-education. In every graduate they will discern a future pillar of an expanded state school system. Not that I intend to be one. But I have the utmost confidence in Aunt Charlotte’s ability to arrange a priority demobilization especially if she works in unison with a certain professor of modern history.’

‘Who is this Purvis you keep mentioning?’

‘Was. Not is. He’s dead too.’ Perron drank deeply, not quite finishing what was in his glass. ‘I don’t think I want to talk about Leonard Purvis. I’d rather talk about Bunbury. I had to follow up the telegram to Aunt Charlotte with a letter just in case the cable went astray. Would you like to know what I told her about how Bunbury died?’

‘How did Bunbury die?’

‘He committed suicide. Twice.’

‘Twice.’

‘The first time he did it in the bath-tub but I managed to revive him but when he did it again I wasn’t there. They’d put him in an upstairs ward and when they weren’t looking he threw himself out of the window and broke his neck.’

‘A very determined Bunbury.’

‘I’m glad you appreciate that. It’s what I feel. In determination of that calibre there is something heroic. The thought first struck me at the hurried little inquest which they dragged me up from Kalyan to attend. They made out it was suicide while of unsound mind but you could tell they knew he was as sane as they were. On the other hand what
I
knew was that there wasn’t a man in the room with anything like so profound a sense of what he was in the world to do, nor anything like so profound a sense of the criminal waste of
human energy that we’ve seen in the last six years. I’m glad he didn’t survive to hear about the new bomb.’

‘Are you sure about not eating, Guy?’

‘Could I have something in here?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then I’d better.’ He poured more neat Scotch into the over-rich mixture. ‘Normally, you know, I’m quite abstemious, but I’ve spent the past few days discreetly stoned to the eyeballs, a condition which the Red Shadow observes with envy and malicious longing to get his corrupt and filthy thieving hands into my kit-bag to see how many bottles I have left. I for my part long to catch him at it, so that I can boot him in the arse. And believe me, Nigel, before I leave, boot him I shall, with or without provocation. It’s a point of honour. The arses of the Suleimans of India exist to be booted by British sergeants. It’s traditional. One for the sergeant, two for the regiment and three for the
raj.
And then the women of the Suleimans of India will laugh like drains, the wild dogs of the hills will yelp their satisfaction and there will be peace again on the Khyber. I think you’d better go, because Suleiman will be making a note of the time you and I have been alone in a locked compartment and will make his report accordingly to Major Merrick. I beg his pardon. Colonel. But it’s difficult to keep up. He was a major when I saw him in Bombay on Bunbury Sunday. A colonel when I reported at his office in Delhi on Thursday. I entertain this illusion now that it’s dangerous to be parted from him for more than a day or two. Every night I go to sleep terrified that in the morning he’ll be a full colonel or even a brigadier.’