The Splendor Of Silence (25 page)

"Three months," Sam replied, even as a slow burn began within him. "And Burma?"

"Just a little while," Sam said. "I'm glad to be here. I had not realized there was a regiment quartered at Rudrakot."

"Have a drink?" someone else said. They parted to let him through to the chairs ranged around a wood table, and as he came up to the table, he was introduced to the ladies sitting there. The final one, when his eyes came to rest upon her, was Mrs. Stanton.

"Why, we are old friends," she said. She spoke with the assurance of a long friendship, though theirs had been a mere acquaintance, tinged by something very akin to loathing in Sam. "We shared a coupe from Palampore last night," she said to the listening ears around her. Even the officer
s o
f the Rifles had stilled, waiting for more, watchful. She tittered and raised a hand to hide a smile. "Nothing inappropriate, I assure you. There was simply no other place in the bogie. Captain Hawthorne has been in the war, at Burma. Iliad no idea that your business in Rudrakot was at the Victoria, Captain Hawthorne."

Two of the Rudrakot Rifles officers wistfully slid their hands along the brass buttons on their uniforms, a sharp red, with dull gold epaulets. Only in India, Sam thought suddenly, would even men wear the red of ripe cherries--a color so bright as to almost be naughty--with no effect on their manhood. Here everything was so shamelessly hued--countenances, clothes, hair, even the languages, rich with ribaldry that Sam had not even dared to understand. For he knew that all such ribaldry would suffer in translation into English and become, from the colorful, merely banal. The khaki, his khaki, represented the war, any other color, especially red, which was difficult to camouflage, meant a regiment in waiting, a rear guard, and one perhaps never to be called to the front, never to glory in victory, never to die a stupid death.

Mrs. Stanton had made everything worse, as women would when they meant to be clever but ended up being merely shrill. Envy rose and sighed above them all, onerous, souring the sun-fired air--it extinguished some of the goodwill around Sam and he wanted to say to these young men, not so much younger than he in age perhaps, that wars were messy, deflating exercises, that life never returned to normal, that the only way to survive was not to feel anything, especially not regret at a well-ironed red uniform.

"There's no business as such, Mrs. Stanton," he said. "I'm here, as I said on the train, to rest my shoulder. On leave." He paused. "I'm not at the Victoria Club either."

They waited.

"I'm staying with the political agent."

Mrs. Stanton raised her thinly penciled eyebrows. "You mean the resident, surely. But I did not see you in the house. Is he with us, Amelia?" This last to the young woman next to her who wore a wide-brimmed hat even under the shamiana's shade, and lifted it and her head with an effort. Sam transferred his attention to Amelia Pankhurst and felt a slight surprise when he saw her. For she was young, younger than he had expected the wife of a British resident to be, perhaps not even thirty. She had a conventionally pretty face, with eyes, nose, and mouth at the right places, an
d a
sleek head of golden hair. Her eyes were blue, but the blue of newly blown glass, without any character behind them. Amelia Pankhurst had slung her long and thin body on the easy chair, arms on the armrests, a glass of something cold casting drops of condensation upon the wood. Her expression did not change, the smile remained the same, no life came to her eyes. Mrs. Stanton surreptitiously nudged her in the ribs. "My dear, is Captain Hawthorne with us?"

"I'm sure I don't know, Adelaide." Her voice held a little bit of childish petulance. "I was lying down after lunch; perhaps he is in the house, but I wouldn't know that." She caught Sam's gaze eventually and said, "Welcome to Rudrakot, Captain er Captain. We hope you have a good stay with us." And then she subsided into her loose, flowered dress and allowed it, in doing so, to fall in becoming folds around her body. Amelia Pankhurst was not quite as detached as she seemed; she knew how to be picturesque in the best of ways without seeming to think about it.

Sam bowed his head. "Thank you, Mrs. Pankhurst."

"Lady Pankhurst," Mrs. Stanton corrected, and Sam acknowledged that with another nod and continued, "But I am staying at the political agent's house."

"Ah " That came out in a rush of whispers from almost everyone around him.

"By special invitation?" Mrs. Stanton asked. "Surely not, Mr. Raman would have no reason ..."

The underlying implication was that if Sam was at all important enough to have been invited to stay with the political agent, when he could, as all other visitors did, have just as easily stayed at the Victoria Club, then Mrs. Stanton had very poorly judged her traveling companion of the previous night. Sam saw her dust something invisible off Amelia Pankhurst's shoulder and saw Mrs. Stanton for what she was--not a relative, not an aunt or an elderly cousin, but a hired companion. Engaged for the special purpose of keeping Amelia Pankhurst connected with the real world. Mrs. Stanton oversaw the myriad duties of a resident's wife; she wrote out the elegant dinner invitations at the end of which Amelia scrawled her pretty name; she scolded the servants into obedience.

Colonel Pankhurst had escaped the arrows of Kama, the Hindu God of love, all over the length and breadth of India for thirty years, only to fall prey to Cupid on his last Home leave three years ago. He had met

Amelia in London and had been charmed by her aloofness, her exquisite grace in smoking cigarettes, even by the crimson lipstick imprints on her wineglasses when she set them down on the table. The war was but a few months away, trouble rumbled all through town, but Amelia was untouched. So strong, so brave, Pankhurst had thought, while they were all in such a dither. So he married her after a very brief courtship; she married him because she was told to do so and thought it would be jolly good fun to go out to India and ride on an elephant or watch the races at the gymkhana in her best hats. It took Pankhurst two months to realize that his wife was unruffled all the time because very little meant anything to her, but he was still in lust with his her, and still envied for the perfection of her complexion and the gloss of her hair. He was a practical man--even reasonable at times or he would not have been inculcated from the army into the more hallowed Indian Political Service as a diplomat stationed in princely kingdoms--so he'd hired Mrs. Stanton from the ranks of old, widowed army wives who had stayed on in India.

Mrs. Stanton then was the unofficial wife at the residency, and she made sure the real wife, the woman who carried Pankhurst's name, sailed through her days with relative ease, that she came down to the parties on Pankhurst's arm correctly dressed, that she kept up a semblance of social obligations and danced with the officers from the Rifles and the Lancers in the correct order.

Sam could not have known all of this upon his first introduction, but he sensed most of it anyhow; since coming to Rudrakot earlier this day, he had suddenly become aware, suddenly started to see this society in India. It wasn't just Rudrakot, of course, Sam had been in India for three months, and now the sum of all of his experiences slowed into an ultimate comprehension, all the pieces, noticed blatantly or absorbed only by his subconscious, began to fit into place. He also saw why Mrs. Stanton considered herself so important.

Before this job as a companion to Lady Pankhurst, she had been reduced to taking quarters on a monthly basis at a hotel run by a slovenly Indian who never looked at her without seeming to want to rip off her starched collar and bury his head between her sagging white breasts. His mouth had always watered when he talked to her, his saliva stained red with paan. Mr. Stanton had been a mere boxwallah, a clerk at the local cement factory for twenty-five years, and when he died, there had been n
o h
ome for Mrs. Stanton to return to, no children to impose upon, and she could only afford the rent at the second-class Indian hotel and all the travails, real and imagined, the lustful owner put her through. Here, she could not pay for the whole-meals plan, so subsisted on tea and dry toast for breakfast, the odd curry pounded into blandness for dinner, a stringy leg of chicken bathed in a squishy white sauce when her purse ran full. But for all the poverty, the shame and embarrassment at her reduced circumstances, her tongue had been cutting, her gaze keen, her sense of propriety stupendous, her person neat and presentable, every frock darned in pearl-like stitches, every stocking reused until the silk feathered and disintegrated upon touching. Colonel Pankhurst's choice had fallen upon her, among the various other women who could have had this job. In all of her fifty-eight years, this was the best thing that had ever happened to Mrs. Stanton, and so enormous was her self-confidence, so little her humility, that she thought it only her right--after all, she had spent an unnecessarily penurious life as a wife with Harold; she had been born without either looks or money; something that was long owed to her had come due.

Sam could not resist his irritation at Mrs. Stanton, could not help being petty, even though he knew he was being petty and saying, "Colonel Eden at the governor-general's office in Calcutta suggested that I stay with Mr. Raman. He has been most welcoming."

There was something about stringing of those words Colonel Eden governor-general that became a matter of awe and respect, just as Sam had intended. Now he was ashamed of having been so blatant, but he was tired of all the talk even without having talked very much. Sam had no drawing-room manners, not because he had been brought up without any, but the minuets with words, the fencing, the possible thrown daggers sidestepped, the chatter bored him. His mother had never asked much of him other than a few minutes of politeness when they had company and some respectful silence that could be taken for assent when it was necessary. Mike would make faces, or sometimes retching noises that would disintegrate into coughs to cover them up, and fooled no one really but the guests, but Sam had learned to hold himself courteous on a razor's edge, and had never been pushed over that edge to make a cutting remark. Until now.

"Of course they would have been," Sims said, raising his glass and looking at Sam through it. "It's an honor to be commanded by anyone i
n t
he governor-general's council. Do you know Colonel Eden, I mean, personally?"

"I've only met him once," Sam said.

"You must come and stay with us," Mrs. Stanton said, swiveling her head this way and that until she saw Mr. Abdullah at a table near the cakes and the tea. She waved at him and he ignored her a couple of times and then, forced to respond, rose from his chair, dabbed at his mouth with a napkin, and came to stand by her. Surprised by this supposed intimacy between them, surprised even to see Mr. Abdullah at the mela, Sam had begun to shake his head, but Mrs. Stanton would not allow him the luxury of speech. "Mr. Abdullah," she said, "I have invited Captain Hawthorne to stay with us at the house. Will you see that arrangements are made, please?" Then to not seem too nice, for Sam was just beginning to become more astonished at all this civility, she added, "Right away."

Mr. Abdullah unbent his back--he had been leaning over Mrs. Stanton--and cleared his throat. He brought his hands around his stomach and clasped them together, cracking the knuckles of his thumbs as he did so. He raised his head, his gaze fixed solemnly on the tablecloth, and nodded a couple of times. Sam began to smile. It was the entertainment in the bogie all over again, with a different twist this time, for this time Mrs. Stanton had deigned to talk to Mr. Abdullah, or she was somehow forced into it by circumstances. Who was he to her? A servant in the house? Impossible then that he should sit under the shade of the same shamiana as his masters, sit even at a table, drink tea from the same cups and saucers, wipe his mouth with the same linen napkins. Sam looked around, hoping Mila or Ashok was nearby for an explanation.

Mr. Abdullah glanced at Sam, smiled faintly into his mustache, and directed a short bow toward him. He said firmly to Mrs. Stanton, "I will do so if Lady Pankhurst wishes it, but I believe Captain Hawthorne to be staying at Mr. Raman's house--it would be churlish of us to take him from such good company, to provide him with merely ours. Am I not right, Captain Hawthorne?"

Glad to finally be given an opportunity to speak, Sam said, "Not entirely, Mr. Abdullah. I will be glad of your company, but I have accepted Mr. Raman's invitation and am quite comfortable there. Thank you, nonetheless."

"There," Mr. Abdullah said to Mrs. Stanton. "The matter has been settied. Now I will go back to my tea." He turned around and walked back, and they were left with Mrs. Stanton's splutterings.

"Really," she said, a flush rising on her face. "Really!"

"Adelaide," Lady Pankhurst said sedately, "you must leave poor Mr. Abdullah alone. Edward has told me, in no uncertain terms, that he is his diwan, his right-hand man, and not here for our purposes." She giggled. "I really must listen to my husband, Adelaide. He quite demands it, this obedience." She reached pink-frosted fingertips toward her cigarette case and all the officers snapped open their lighters and stood around her, little flames glowing over their fists. Amelia Pankhurst surveyed each of them and their lit flames pulled upward in the still, hot air before placing the cigarette between her rouged lips and leaning toward a young man with a pronounced Adam's apple and a weak, blubbery chin. His hand wobbled noticeably as he held the light under her cigarette. She held it to steady and guide the flame with one finger, cool against his heated skin, and fluttered her eyelashes in thanks. "Captain Hawthorne," she said, exhaling a long plume of smoke. "Welcome to Rudrakot. You will find yourself very well accommodated at Mr. Raman's home--he is a charming man, with much conversation, and I'm afraid we might just be lacking there. I hope your stay here is very pleasant."