And that is why I fought him, why I beat at him, why I said, ‘We’ve not seen each other. You know nothing.’
So easy to say. ‘I’ve not seen Hari. I’ve not seen Hari since we visited the temple.’ That’s what I told Lili when I was lying on the sofa in the living-room. She had understood at last what was wrong and had asked, ‘Was it Hari?’ And out it came, perhaps too glibly, but incontrovertible. ‘No. No. I’ve not seen Hari. I’ve not seen him since we visited the temple.’
‘Who was it, then?’ she asked. I couldn’t look at her. I said, ‘I don’t know. Five or six men. I didn’t see. It was dark. They covered my head.’
Then if you didn’t see them, how can you be sure one of them wasn’t Hari Kumar? That was a question that had to be answered, wasn’t it? She didn’t ask it. Instead she said, ‘Where?’ and I said, ‘The Bibighar,’ and again there was a question. What was I doing in the Bibighar? It wasn’t asked. Not then. Not by Lili. But the trap was beginning to close. It had been closing ever since I got back and stumbled and fell on the steps of the verandah.
I hurt my knee badly. I think I passed out for a few seconds. When I came to, and was trying to get up, Lili was there staring at me as if she didn’t recognise me. I remember her saying the name Raju. I suppose she called him to help or he’d come out with her. The next thing I remember is being in the living-room and being given a glass of brandy. Raju and Bhalu must have carried me in. I remember Bhalu standing on the rug without his chappals. His bare feet. And Raju’s bare feet. Black hands. And black faces. After I’d drunk the brandy Lili asked them to carry memsahib upstairs. When they came towards me I couldn’t bear it and began to cry out and tell her to send them away. It was then that Lili knew what had happened. When I opened my eyes again she and I were alone and I was ashamed to look at her. She said then, ‘Was it Hari?’ and I gave her the answer I’d rehearsed.
And I’m still ashamed of the way I cried out when Bhalu and Raju came towards me. I cried out because they were black. I’m ashamed because this proved that in spite of loving Hari I’d not exorcised that stupid primitive fear. I’d made Hari an exception. I don’t mean that I loved him in spite of his blackness. His blackness was inseparable from his physical attraction. I think I mean that in loving him and in being physically attracted to him I’d invested his blackness with a special significance or purpose, taken it out of its natural context instead of identifying myself with it in its context. There was an element here of self-satisfaction and special pleading and extra pride in love because of the personal and social barrier I thought my love had helped me to surmount. It had not surmounted it at all. No, that is not quite true. It had partly surmounted it. Enough for me to be ashamed then, as well as now, and to ask Lili to call Raju and Bhalu back and help me upstairs. I thanked them and tried to show them that I was sorry. In the morning, on my tray, there were flowers from the garden, which Lili said Bhalu had cut for me.
*
Before they helped me upstairs Raju had rung Dr Klaus. On our way up to my room Lili said, ‘Anna’s coming. It’s all right, Daphne. Anna’s coming.’ Lili waited with me in my room. We heard a car or truck drive up and Lili said, ‘That will be her.’ A few moments later there was a knock on the bedroom door and Lili called out, ‘Come in, Anna.’ I didn’t want to see even Anna, so I turned my head away when the door opened. I heard Lili say, ‘No, no, you mustn’t come in.’ She got up and went outside and closed the door. When she came back she told me it was Ronald, that he had been at the house before, looking for me. I said, ‘It’s very kind of him, but I’m back now, so tell him it’s all right.’ Lili said, ‘But you see, my dear, it isn’t, is it?’ And then she began to question me again, to get the answers to questions Ronald had asked. In the Bibighar, but when? How many men? What kind of men? Did I recognise any? Would I recognise any? How did I get back?
She left me for a few minutes. I heard her talking to Ronald in the passage. When she came back she said nothing but sat on the bed and held my hand. Like that we heard Ronald drive away. He was driving very fast. Without looking at her I said, ‘You told him it wasn’t Hari, didn’t you?’
She said she had, so I knew Ronald had asked. The way they’d both jumped to the conclusion that Hari was involved only strengthened my resolve to lie my head off.
It was then just a matter of waiting for Anna. I was glad when she got there, glad to be treated like a sort of specimen, clinically, unemotionally. When she’d finished I asked her to tell Lili to get one of the boys to run a bath. I had an idea that if only I could lie in warm water for an hour I might begin to feel clean. She pretended to agree, but she’d given me a strong sedative. I remember the sound of running water, and passing into a half-sleep, imagining that the running water was pouring rain. She ran the water only to lull me. When I woke it was morning. She was still at the bedside. I said, ‘Have you been here all night?’ She hadn’t of course, but had called in first thing. I always liked Anna, but until that morning I’d also been a bit afraid of her, as one is of people whose experiences haven’t been happy. One hesitates to question them. I never asked Anna about Germany. Now there was no need. We had found something in common. Which is why we were able to smile at each other, distantly, just for a moment or two, as if the connection between us was only just discernible.
*
I’ve told the truth, Auntie, as well as I know how. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to tell it before. I hate lies. But I think I would tell them again. Nothing that happened after the Bibighar proves to me now that I was wrong to fight for Hari by denying I’d seen him. I know in my bones that he suffered. I know that he is being punished. But I mustn’t believe that he is being punished more badly because of my lies than he would have been by the truth.
When I think of the contortions people went through in an attempt to prove I was lying and in an attempt to implicate him I tremble at the thought of what could have happened to him if just once, by a slip of the tongue, I’d admitted that we were in the Bibighar together.
But this doesn’t help me to bear the knowledge that those other boys are unjustly punished. How can people be punished when they are innocent? I know that they went to prison in the end for reasons said to be unconnected with the assault. I hang on to that, in the hope that it is true. But if it hadn’t been for the assault I think they’d be free today. They must have been the wrong men. I know I said I didn’t see the men, and this was true. But I had an impression of them, of their clothes, their smell, a sense of them as men, not boys. They were hooligans from some village who had come into Mayapore for the hell of it. From what people said the boys who were arrested didn’t sound like hooligans at all.
I didn’t hear about the arrests until late the following day. Anna and Lili knew already. Ronald had come back the previous night and told them he’d got ‘the men responsible under lock and key’. They said nothing to me at the time because I was asleep by then and nothing in the morning because one of the men was Hari. About half-past twelve Lili came in with Anna. She said, ‘Jack Poulson has to talk to you, but he can talk in front of Anna.’ I asked her to stay too, but she said it would be best for Anna and Jack to be alone with me. When Jack Poulson came in he looked like a Christian martyr who’d just refused to disown God for the last time. I was embarrassed by him and he was embarrassed by me. Anna stood by the open door on to the balcony and Jack stood close to her until I told him to sit down. He apologised for having to ask questions and explained that Mr White had given him the job of ‘dealing with the evidence’ since it was not merely a police matter but one that involved the station as a whole.
I had had time to think, time to worry about the questions Lili hadn’t asked the previous night, but which I’d seen as ones that would have to be answered. What was I doing in the Bibighar? How did I know that Hari wasn’t there if I didn’t see the men who attacked me? I realised that the only way I could get through an interrogation without involving Hari was to relive the whole thing in my mind
as it would have happened, as it would have had to be, if Hari hadn’t been in the Bibighar with me.
My story was this: that after seeing Miss Crane I’d left the hospital and gone to the Sanctuary. I made a point of asking Jack Poulson not to say too much about the Sanctuary – if he could help it – because I went there to assist at the clinic and was sure this was a breach of hospital regulations even for a voluntary unpaid nursing officer. He smiled, as I’d intended he should. But then he stopped smiling and by his silence forced me to go on, unaided, to the difficult part of the story.
I left the Sanctuary about dusk. It had seemed clear that no one would come to the clinic because of the rumours of trouble. The whole town was unnaturally quiet. The people had imposed their own curfew. But far from frightening me it lulled me into a false sense of security. For once I felt I had Mayapore completely to myself. I cycled to the Chillianwallah Bagh Extension road and then over the Bibighar bridge and the level crossing.
At this point Jack Poulson said, ‘Did you see anyone near the crossing?’
I thought about that. (I still hadn’t been told about the arrests.) So far we were still dealing with fact, with truth, but I had to judge the extent to which I could allow myself to tell it. I saw nothing dangerous in the truth so far, so I tried to conjure an accurate picture of crossing the bridge and the railway lines. I said, ‘No. There was no one about. The light showed green at the crossing – and I seem to remember lights and voices coming from the keeper’s hut. When I say voices I mean a child crying. A feeling of some kind of domestic crisis that was taking up everyone’s attention. Anyway, I cycled on. When I got to the street lamp opposite the Bibighar I stopped and got off.’
After waiting for a moment Jack said, ‘Why?’
I said, ‘I stopped originally to take off my cape. I’d put it on when I left Sister Ludmila’s because I thought it was going to rain again, but it hadn’t done, and you know what it’s like wearing a rain cape for no reason.’
Jack nodded and then asked if I’d actually stopped under the streetlamp. I thought: That means somebody saw me, either that or they’re trying to establish that someone could have seen me. I wasn’t bothered because I was still telling the truth. But I was wary, and I was glad that the half-lie I was about to tell was closer to the truth than the story I’d first thought of and rejected – that I stopped by the Bibighar to put my cape on because I thought it was going to rain, or because it had come on to rain and I’d decided to shelter for a while in the Bibighar. I rejected that story because it hadn’t been about to rain, and didn’t rain, and anyone could have proved that it didn’t.
So I said, yes, I’d stopped under the streetlamp and taken my cape off. And my rain-hat. I’d put my hat in the pocket of the cape and put the cape over the handlebars.
Mr Poulson said, ‘What do you mean when you say originally you stopped to take off your cape?’
This was the first real danger point. Again I was glad I’d rejected the idea of a melodramatic attack by unknown assailants who overpowered me and dragged me into the Bibighar. I said, ‘You’ll think it awfully silly, or if not silly then foolish or careless.’ Now that I was actually telling the lie I congratulated myself. In an odd way the lie was so much in character. Typical of that silly blundering gallumpinggiil Daphne Manners. I looked Jack Poulson straight in the eye and came out with it. ‘The cantonment was so quiet and deserted I wondered whether I’d see the ghosts.’
‘The ghosts?’ he asked. He was trying to look official but only succeeded in looking as inquisitive as I was pretending to have been, the night before. I said, ‘Yes, the ghosts of the Bibighar. I’d never been there in the dark’ – that was dangerous, but it passed – ‘and I remembered having heard that the place was supposed to be haunted. So I sort of said, Up the Army, Steady the Buffs, and crossed the road and went in. You can always get in because there’s no gate. I thought it was a bit of a lark and that when I got back I’d be able to say to Lili, “Well, I’ve laid those Bibighar ghosts. Bring on Janet MacGregor.” I wheeled my bike up the pathway to the pavilion, then parked it, turned the lamp off, and went up on to the mosaic platform.’
But Mr Poulson had never been in the Bibighar. He went later to inspect the scene, but for the moment I had to tell him what the mosaic platform was before he was in the picture. ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘I sat on the platform and had a cigarette’ – (that slipped out and was also dangerous because if any cigarette ends had survived the night’s rains they’d not be English ones) – ‘and waited for the ghosts to show up. I was saying things to myself like, Come on, ghosts, let’s be having you, and then began to think about Miss Crane, and wonder whether I hadn’t been an awful fool. I suppose it was mad of me, sitting there, last night of all nights. But I didn’t take what had happened in outlying parts of the district seriously, did you? I suppose they were watching me. I didn’t hear anything – except the dripping and the croaking – I mean the dripping from the leaves and the roof and the croaking of the frogs. The men came rather suddenly. Almost from nowhere.’
Mr Poulson reassumed his Christian martyr face. He said, ‘And you didn’t see them?’ Which was the other warning note. I said, ‘Well, for an instant perhaps. But it was all so quick. I didn’t have any warning. One moment I was alone and the next surrounded.’
Of course this was the part of the story Jack Poulson wanted to know about but found so acutely embarrassing he could hardly look at me while I told it. He kept glancing at Anna, for moral support, and at the time I wondered why she just stood there, obviously listening but staring at the garden, detaching herself from the interrogation, turning herself into an impersonal lump that would only spring into action and become Anna Klaus again if her patient’s voice betrayed signs of distress.
Jack Poulson said, ‘I’m sorry to have to press these questions. But is there anything you remember about these men, or about any one of them, anything that will help you to identify them?’
I played for time. I said, ‘I don’t think so. I mean they all look alike, don’t they? Especially in the dark,’ and was conscious of having said something that could be thought indelicate, as well as out of character. He asked me how they were dressed. I had a pretty clear recollection of white cotton clothing – you know, dhotis and high-necked shirts, peasant dress, dirty and smelly. But the warning bells rang again. I saw the danger to Hah if the men were ever caught. I think that if I were taken to the Bibighar, at night, and confronted with those men, I would know them. You can recognise people again, even when you think there’s been nothing to identify them by, even if there’s been only a second or two to get an impression you can hardly believe is an impression, or at least not one worth describing or trying to describe. I was afraid of being confronted, afraid of finding myself having to say, ‘Yes, these are the men,’ because then they would plead provocation, they’d go on their knees and scream and beg for mercy and say that such a thing would never have occurred to them if the white woman hadn’t already been making love to an Indian.
The trap was now fully sprung, Auntie, wasn’t it? Once you’ve started lying there’s no end to it. I’d lied myself into a position there was no escaping from except by way of the truth. I didn’t dare tell the truth so the only thing I could do was to confuse and puzzle people and make them hate me – that, and stretch every nerve-end to keep Hari out of it by going on and on insisting that he was never there, making it so that they would never be able to accuse or bring to trial or punish the men who assaulted me because they knew that the principal witness would spike every gun they tried to bring into action.
But of course I was forgetting or anyway reckoning without the power they had to accuse and punish on suspicion alone. There was a moment when I nearly told the truth, because I saw the way things might go. I’m glad I didn’t because then I think they would have proved somehow that Hari was technically guilty of rape, because he’d been there and made love to me and incited others to follow his example. At least m
y lying spared him being punished for rape. It also spared those innocent boys being punished for it too. I’ve never asked what the punishment for rape is. Hanging? Life imprisonment? People talked about swinging them on the end of a rope. Or firing them from the mouth of a cannon, which is what we did to mutineers in the nineteenth century.
So when Jack Poulson asked me how the men were dressed I said I wasn’t sure, but then decided it was safer to tell the truth and say ‘Like peasants’ than to leave the impression of men dressed like Hari, in shirts and trousers.
Mr Poulson said, ‘Are you sure?’ which rather played into my hands because he said it as if my evidence was contradicting the story he’d been building up, or other people had built up for him, a picture with Hari at its centre. So I said, Yes, like peasants or labourers. And I added for good measure, ‘They smelt like that, too.’ Which was true. He said, ‘Did any of them smell of drink?’ I thought of the time Hari was found on the waste ground by Sister Ludmila. For the moment it looked safer to tell the truth again and say I didn’t remember any special smell of drink.
Mr Poulson said, ‘I’m sorry to have to subject you to this.’ I told him it was all right, I knew it had to be done. For the first time in the interrogation we looked at each other for longer than a split second. He said, ‘There’s the important question of the bicycle. You say you left it on the path near the pavilion. Did you leave your cape on the handlebars?’
I couldn’t immediately see the significance of this question. I assumed he knew that the cape had been used to cover my head because I’d told Lili and Anna. He’d got all this kind of detail from them. He never asked a single question about the assault itself. Poor fellow! I expect he’d rather have died than do so, magistrate though he was. But it was an English girl who’d been assaulted and his magisterial detachment just wouldn’t hold out. I decided to tell the truth about the cape. I said, ‘No, I’m pretty sure I took it with me on to the platform. In fact I did. I thought the mosaic might be damp, but it wasn’t. So I didn’t sit on the cape, I just kept it by me.’