A Division Of The Spoils (Raj Quartet 4) (53 page)

Our hands touched as the paper was transferred. The softness and gentleness of her fingers balanced out the impression of hardness, of military efficiency. It occurred to me that the time she’d devoted to me could perhaps best be repaid by giving her the chance to take up some of mine if she wanted to. I didn’t
have
to leave Pankot tonight. And now that it came to it I wasn’t sure that I wanted to.

‘On the whole,’ she said, as if reading my thoughts, ‘I’d settle for the discomfort if I were you. Joe Baker’s had another signal. There’s a Major Foster arriving tomorrow morning on the night train. You’re asked to meet him, so I suppose he’s Ronald’s replacement.’

I’d met Major Foster. He was a ditherer, the kind of well-meaning chap whom it could be fatal to get near. If I met him and told him I had to leave on the mid-day train, on repatriation, he might out of sheer good intention invent so many problems that we would still be solving them two hours after the train had gone.

I said, ‘Yes, he is the replacement. I’ll settle for a night’s
discomfort. I may as well ring Sub-Conductor Pearson now. Then we’ll know how long I’ve got.’

‘I shouldn’t if I were you. Not for a while. Joe Baker said six-thirty or so.’

For some reason she reddened slightly and returned her attention to the rain, which was stopping.

Salaam’a appeared.

‘Would you prefer a drink to more tea? Nigel said I could make free so long as I didn’t dine the station. You’re not quite the station.’

‘No, I’m not, am I? I’d like a drink very much.’

I told Salaam’a to bring out the drinks trolley. When we were alone I said, ‘Can you stay and have an early meal with me?’

She didn’t answer. She must have heard. The rain had now stopped entirely. She continued to stare ahead of her. Her cigarette was nearly finished. I glanced over my shoulder to see what apparently held her attention. The sun was just coming out. The Summer Residence rose – base to roof – out of the fast-moving shadow of a retreating cloud. Sunshine had already flowed across the garden. It pressed hard against the line of the balustrade, warmed my back and made me conscious of the hastiness with which I’d put clothes on.

‘You’ve seen the house, I suppose,’ she said. ‘I expect Nigel showed you over.’

‘No. Isn’t it shut up?’

‘The servants will always let you in.’

‘There seems to be only one servant left.’

‘They live in the main quarters. They only come down if there are people at the guest house. The house itself was built in 1890. Most of it’s plain Anglo-Indian but there’s a Moghul suite where they used to put up pet princes. The throne room’s very ordinary, just a couple of chairs on a dais, and the ball-room’s quite small. But they danced on the terrace too. There used to be coloured lights in the trees.’

‘That must have been nice.’

‘It was all rather stiff and starchy. At least on the surface. And that’s about all you see when you’re young and just back out from home. Not that I’m really competent to judge. People here sigh for what they used to call the full season
when the Governor and his wife moved up for the hot weather. But there hasn’t been a full season since ’thirty-nine, and Susan and I missed that. I remember it best as part of childhood. We had ghastly parties here.’ She smiled at a memory. ‘When the new Governor took over in ’forty-one he was rather unpopular at first for not continuing the tradition of six months in the hills. Mother says the dances Susan and I have been to were very scratch affairs by comparison, but people get used to anything. At Flagstaff House we used to rate a major-general but since the beginning of the year we’ve only had a brigadier. People complain but they’re getting used to that too. And now that the war’s over I suppose it’ll alter even more, with people whose retirement’s been postponed upping sticks and going home, or settling here and growing old and tiresome and complaining that their pensions don’t go far.’

‘When does your father retire?’

‘In about three years. But I’ve no idea what they’ll do.’

‘Rose Cottage belongs to them?’

‘Yes, they’re luckier than some. The army stopped people buying or building property in Pankot years ago – I don’t mean on West Hill, only Indians build there. But father’s stepmother got hold of Rose Cottage a few years before the embargo. She left it to him along with everything else she had. I expect you could see what a lot of money’s been spent on it recently. I’ve always imagined father and mother spending the rest of their lives there, but now I don’t know.’

Salaam’a wheeled the trolley out. We both chose gin. While he prepared the drinks I excused myself and went inside to wait for him. When he came in I told him I was leaving for Ranpur that evening, that he should arrange supper for two because the memsahib might be staying. I gave him his baksheesh and an extra few rupees to tip his invisible assistants. Then I told him the memsahib and I wanted to look at the house, that we would go over in about fifteen minutes. How did we get in? He said the head chaukidar would let us in. He would go now and make sure the head chaukidar was there.

She was waiting, glass poised to drink. I faced her, leaning against the balustrade. We toasted the space between us.
After drinking we remained silent. I gave her a full minute by my watch and the same full minute to myself to prove beyond reasonable doubt that my idea about the immediate future was not all that different from hers.

The minute gone the silence continued, but delivered us slowly from any sense of the strain that slightly marked its beginning. Eventually I said to her, ‘I never thanked you for Emerson.’ She put her head back against the cushion, studied me, as if she knew the passage which had come into my mind and which had caused me to mention the book:

The world rolls: the circumstances vary every hour. All the angels that inhabit this temple of the body appear at the windows, and all the gnomes and vices also. By all the virtues they are united. If there be virtue, all the vices are known as such; they confess and flee.

*

On the way there I looked for them but they must have scattered; but remembering the distant view of the upper storey from the lines of the Pankot Rifles depot I asked her whether she had ever noticed how the sun setting behind West Hill seemed to have to pause until the upper windows of the Summer Residence released its last reflection, and the
raj
allowed night to fall. Well, she said, she was familiar with the effect but had never identified its cause. She was smiling, her head up, one hand shielding her eyes, neck curving from the brave little angles of jaw and chin. Something dazzled her – the suddenly exposed sky, sunshine on wet surfaces, or the drops of rain strung in the trees to dry. We had left the path, chosen the directer way across the lawns for which she was more suitably shod than I. My feet and trouser bottoms were wet, the chappals clung to my bare soles. A week later, unpacking and repacking my kit-bag in Deolali, the chappals, still slightly damp to the touch, smelt of grass, and the trouser bottoms were tide-marked. The chappals were in my possession for a number of years, and – even after a long time unused – discovered in a cupboard, dried, cracked, the buckles rusty, the smell of dampness and the smell of grass still seemed to be in them like a perfume of their own recollection of that
occasion; their recollection of the persistence of damp when moving across dry flagged terraces and interior floors of stone and parquet and carpet, through chill shadow and hot streaks of filtered light when shutters were opened like doors on the tombs of flies and moths whose mummified bodies lay on dusty sills; taking the weight of the wearer’s heels as he gazed upward at vast chandeliers enveloped in balloons of muslin; or substituting for weight the stickiness of suction when the ankles were crossed for the enthronement of the substitute Governor and his Lady on two shrouded chairs; the weight redistributed again, concentrated on the toes as the sightless painted eyes of Muirs and Laytons and fellow members of a pro-consular dynasty were met by live eyes in a head thrust forward – the body canted to achieve a position where the light on dark varnish less obscured the detail and colour of pigment underneath.

Stairs, corridors; doors opened by keys obtained earlier for a consideration from the ancient chaukidar who was lost below in a dream of opium and the vanished splendour of which he was the guardian and we no more than observers. Sensibly and more drily shod she moved through the Summer Residence like a visitor who had been before and had little to gain except the satisfaction of her companion’s curiosity, which was minimal, overriden by preoccupation with the way she walked through this maze of imperial history, or stood revealed by the chance falling of light and shade, responding to changes in the pressures that different rooms imposed on her recollections which seemed to be of a time she no longer recognized as real.

And yet, turning from some object pointed out in one particular room, an object that had failed like so many in so many rooms to recommend itself to me as having continuing substance or sustained meaning, she seemed to me to have only this unreality in her possession and to belong to it like a prisoner would belong, after a time, to a cell his imagination had escaped but whose door he was not permitted to open.

We chose this particular room, I think, because at first glance it represented in itself a form of release: release from the stupefying weight of nearly a century of disconnection from the source. But the Moghul suite was no less burdened
by that weight; it was the inner box of a nest of boxes. Through one unshuttered window, westering sun filtered through the intricate fretwork of a screen on to the tiled floor where the chappals lay, temporarily set aside. A smell of old incense permeated the fabrics of the covers and cushions of an immense divan such as might have been used by court-musicians. One fancied that dust rose from it, gently enveloping us in a dry benevolent mist in which hung minute particles of the leaves and petals of garlands of flowers: jasmine, roses, frangipani and marigold, and all the names of Allah. One observer: a mouse. Are you afraid? I asked. No, she said, I’m not afraid. Eyes closed, at rest, I realized that we had been both observed and accompanied. The distant coppersmith still continued, beating out his thin, endless, strip of metal into the alternating shapes of the sounds and silence of the Pankot hills.

*

Returning the keys to the chaukidar, I make my own way out and look for her; and, mistaking the place, think for a moment she has taken the opportunity I gave her (out of delicacy, thinking she might prefer not to have to bid the chaukidar goodnight) to abandon me too; but she is waiting, out there on the lawn, gazing up at the highest windows where the day awaits permission to end. Joining her, I glance up and find that it is already ended. There are no faces, either, unless they are our own, watching us go – not only as we do, across the lawn back to the guest house – but further, much further, on separate roads that may never cross again.

Having poured her another drink I go inside to telephone Sub-Conductor Pearson. A woman answers. Her voice has a Eurasian lilt. She leaves the phone. I hear her calling for ‘Leonard’. Pearson, not Purvis. Calling him from his Sunday afternoon in married quarters? Waiting, I wonder what Sergeant Baker said to make Sarah blush when she recommended not disturbing the Sub-Conductor until 6.30 or 7 (until an appetite for beer and curry and Sunday love had been appeased and been slept off?). His voice is full of nuts and bolts, of oil and graphite; and sober irritation at being
reminded of a promise given earlier when all the Sunday pleasures were ahead. But he is a man of his word. He tells me where to go and when to be there and whom to ask for. I have about two hours.

*

She said she would not stay to supper. She would have liked to but she had left it too late to ring and say she had made other arrangements. She ought to get back soon.

‘Then let me take you.’

‘No. You’ve too much to do. I’ll wait while you pack and change. Then I must go and you must eat.’

My packing was a hit and miss business. First I had to change back into uniform. In doing so I seemed to change my flesh. I was a sergeant again. She, in her uniform, remained a colonel’s daughter. Theoretically a rule had been broken. I began searching in the kit-bag for some tissue-paper packages – scarves and stoles for the Perron women (and a few for non-Perron women). My hand kept touching the transcript of the examination.

‘Guy?’

She was standing just inside the bedroom door.

‘I just wanted to say I’ll make sure that someone meets Major Foster tomorrow. Is that servant of Ronald’s still around? Nigel told me you caught him thieving.’

‘I’ve not seen him.’

‘Major Foster will probably ask. Where was he quartered?’

‘At Flagstaff House, I think, with the other servants.’

‘I’ll make sure. I’m going now.’

‘Going
now
?’

‘Yes, I must. Write to me some time. Let me know how you get on.’

There are situations in which it is very difficult to know what to say. One of the tissue-packages was in my hand.

‘I bought a few things for people back home. I’ve nothing else.’

She took the package because I really gave her no alternative. ‘It’s only a scarf. At least I think it is. Perhaps we’d
better open it in case it’s something like a tie for one of my uncles.’

‘Whatever it is I shall like it.’

We went back to the verandah.

‘One more drink.’

Her back and shoulders felt so much thinner than they really were.

She shook her head and said there wasn’t time. She must go. She didn’t need a tonga. It was only a short walk up the hill. I went with her to the front of the guest house. The light had almost gone. I said I couldn’t let her go home alone.

‘I shall be perfectly all right. It’s what I’d prefer. Honestly. Goodbye, Guy.’

She turned and set off down the narrow drive. I called after her. She glanced round, waved the package. I began to follow her, but stopped, understanding that her wish to go now and go alone was genuine. In a moment the curve of the drive had taken her away. I went back to finish packing my kit-bag. As I shoved the typescript well in to make room for the slacks and shirt and chappals I remembered that particular line:
We haven’t seen each other since the night we visited the temple.
I rolled down my sergeant’s sleeves, the drill for night-time. While buttoning the cuffs a trick of light made my hands seem brown.