‘I’m glad you felt that,’ he said. ‘Sitting so close to him it was painfully apparent to me that he did.’
‘You never mentioned to him that you remembered him at Chillingborough.’
‘It seemed unnecessary. It could have struck a false note, too.’
She stayed silent for a moment or two then said, ‘I expect you’ve realized why H.E. asked you to look into the files.’
‘I’ve imagined he did so because you asked him to.’
‘Then you’re probably wondering two things. You’re wondering why I should ask him and why I should wait a year after my niece’s death before asking him. Is it safe now?’
‘Safe?’
‘To have the blinds raised. I feel I’m driving to my grave.’
Why, and so you are, a voice told her. She recognized it from other occasions. Old people talked to themselves. From a certain age. No. Always. Throughout life. But in old age the voice took on a detached ironical tone. Passion had this determination to outlive its prison of flesh and brittle bone. As it made arrangements to survive it grew away, like a child from its favourite parent, impatient for the moment of total severance and the long dark voyage of intimate self-discovery. And so you are, her voice said. Driving to your grave. The parting of our ways. A release for both of us. One to oblivion, one to eternal life so unintelligible to either of us it ranks as oblivion too. And already our commitment to each other is worked out and nearly over. Momentum will carry you through what motions are left to you to show your grasp of situations and responsibilities.
‘The child,’ she said. ‘But even now I can’t be sure. Only surer. She was so sure. To look at her towards the end you’d think, how astonishing! That combination of ungainly ordinariness and state of grace. One has to make do with approximations. Lies and approximations. When we say he spoke the truth we mean this. Everything becomes distorted. When the child cries its needs are so simple. When he cried he scarcely seemed to know it. Who will read the record?’
‘H.E.’
‘And the member for home and law?’
‘He’s an Englishman.’
‘Why do you mention that?’
‘Because it’s pertinent. But Kumar will be released.’
‘To what? In any case I don’t want to know. I’ve had my amusement.’
‘Amusement?’
‘Isn’t it all a charade? Over now. We go back into our corners and try to guess the word. Hari Kumar will have to guess it too. And Mr Merrick. Nothing can happen to Mr Merrick, can it? – everything in the file is the uncorroborated evidence of a prisoner. Nothing will touch him. That is part of the charade too.’
‘It’s safe now,’ Rowan said. And began, one by one, to raise the blinds.
Part Two
A CHRISTENING
I
March–June 1944
The year had begun quietly, but the death in captivity of Mrs Gandhi and her husband’s own illness and release, ostensibly on compassionate grounds, marked a time which seemed, in retrospect, to be one of dreams and auguries.
Early in March, when he came in from a tour of his subdivision, young Morland, an officer on the staff of the Deputy Commissioner for the Pankot district, reported a curious tale that was being circulated in the hills; the rumour of the birth to a woman whose husband had abandoned her of a child with two heads. The mother had not survived an hour and the child – a boy – died before the sun set on the first and only day of its life. Morland, suspecting that the death of a child with any considerable deformity might well have been assisted (although two heads had to be taken with a pinch of salt), had spent two weeks attempting to trace the rumour to its source, but had no luck. Everyone knew it had happened, but nobody was sure of the exact locality. Places were suggested, but going to them Morland was told: Not here, not here: and another village would be named, usually the one he had come from. The closer he tried to get to it the farther away the scene of the event became. But the effect on the people who discussed it with him was clear enough. Such things did not happen without a reason. It was a forewarning. But of what? Heads were shaken. Who could tell? On the journey home Morland noticed the constant freshness of the flowers placed on the little wayside shrines of the old tribal gods.
Having rid himself of the accumulated stains and strains of his tour, and taking his ease at the club, manipulating with excessive, youthful care that symbol of mature and contemplative manhood – a stubby briar – brick-red of face and bleached of head, Morland admitted he himself had come rather under the spell of the superstitious anxiety of the people of the hills and found his sleep disturbed by an odd sort of dream which, when he woke up, he never could remember anything of except that it seemed to have something to do with death by drowning. Morland always paused before he added, ‘I don’t know whether you know, but actually I swim like a fish.’
Within a week Morland was posted to the secretariat in Ranpur, his dream of death by drowning and the tale of the two-headed infant monster were all but forgotten, and Morland himself passed out of sight and mind (as he passes now into the limbo of only marginal images). But on March 18th, when the people of Pankot were startled by the news that the Japanese had crossed the Chindwin in force the day before, there were some who at once recollected the expectations of disaster Morland had brought with him from the remoter areas of the region. Five days later the Japanese crossed the frontier between Burma and Assam and stood on Indian soil, poised for the march on Delhi.
By the end of the month Imphal and Kohima and the whole of the British force in Manipur were isolated. Rumour ran that Imphal had fallen. In Delhi, the Member for Defence, Claude Auchinleck, assured the Assembly that it had not, that his information from the supreme commander, Mountbatten, was to the effect that it was still strongly held. In the Pankot club a wag said that Morland’s tale of the monster with two heads was probably set going by natives who had heard about the separation of GHQ, Delhi, from its old responsibilities in the field; that all this streamlining and modernization was a lot of poppycock; and that the Japs would never have invaded India if the army in India hadn’t been put in the way of its right hand not knowing what its left hand was doing. The joke was ill-received, not because the joker was necessarily thought to be talking nonsense but because, pretty clearly, it was no time for laughter. At Area Headquarters a picture was emerging on the map in General Rankin’s office of total encirclement of the forces in Assam, and of the movements of formations from other parts of the front and from training areas in India in reinforcement. Rankin was heard to say, ‘Well, this is it.’
Morland’s dream was not the only one Pankot heard of. In Rose Cottage for instance, Miss Batchelor, the retired missionary teacher who lived with old Mabel Layton, also dreamed; and, unlike Morland who had been reticent, told everyone who cared to listen all the details that she could remember. She dreamed she woke and found Pankot empty. She walked down the hill from Rose Cottage and saw not a soul until she got to the club where one solitary tonga waited. Between the shafts there was a lame horse. Well, not really a horse. The more you looked at it the more obvious became its resemblance to an ass, a creature such as Our Lord sat astride of for the entry into Jerusalem.
‘You’d better jump in,’ the tonga wallah said, ‘they’re coming and everyone’s gone on ahead to catch the train.’ She hesitated to accept the invitation because this particular tonga wallah was a stranger to her and she didn’t trust him. ‘What are you waiting for, Barbie?’ he said, and she saw that it was really Mr Maybrick – the retired tea planter who played the organ in the protestant church – but with his face stained and wearing native costume. So she jumped in and made room for herself among the piles of organ music, and off they bowled at a smart and pretty pace down the hill, past the golf course, where there were people playing, carrying coloured umbrellas. ‘Those are the fifth-columnists,’ Mr Maybrick shouted at her. ‘The golf course is the rendezvous.’ It was known that the Japanese had stealthily surrounded
Pankot during the night. ‘We must take refuge, there’s no time to catch the train,’ she cried, trying to shout above the noise and rushing of air caused by the tonga’s swift passage. Mr Maybrick was now driving four-in-hand. His whip whistled and cracked in the air above the wild-maned heads of a team of galloping black horses. ‘To St John’s! To St John’s!’ she shouted and was then at the reins herself and it was her own short-cropped grey hair that was wild and flying. ‘Alleluia!’ she called, ‘Alleluia!’ But the church had gone. ‘You’re just in time,’ Mr Maybrick said – in his ordinary clothes now, but wearing a clerical collar. They were standing calmly, but sharing the knowledge that this was the eleventh hour. They were in the compound of a little mission school. ‘It’s really Muzzafirabad,’ Miss Batchelor thought. Her old servant Francis was tolling the bell. They could see hordes of Japanese crossing the golf course, under cover of paper umbrellas. She turned to Mr Maybrick and said, ‘We must save a last bullet each,’ but when they looked back to the golf course the Japanese had gone and the children were coming to school, summoned by the bell. ‘Come along, children,’ Barbie said, keeping her voice friendly but authoritative. Francis said: ‘The danger has not passed, memsahib.’ But she called to everyone, ‘It’s quite safe now.’ They went into the schoolroom, but it was a church again and Mr Maybrick was playing the organ. She sat in an empty pew to give thanks for their deliverance. ‘And it was extraordinary,’ she said, whenever she told the dream, ‘I’ve never felt so much at peace. I think it was really a dream about poor Edwina Crane. I went to Muzzafirabad just after she’d left. That was a long time ago – 1914 actually. They were tremendously proud of her there. She really did save the mission from rioters, she just stood in the doorway, with all the children safe inside, and told them to go away and not bother her. And they obeyed. The children used to show me where she had stood, and I felt I’d never live up to their special idea of a mission teacher. I think it was really a dream to tell me that Edwina is at peace, in spite of that awful business of her setting fire to herself, in 1942.’
*
And, presently, when Teddie was dead, a dream came to trouble Sarah. In the dream they were saying goodbye to him and even he knew that he would never come back. He had a look on his face that expressed the most extraordinarily complete awareness of the place he was going to. The look made him beautiful. They were all stunned by it and by the knowledge that his presence was some kind of trick, because he was already gone. ‘Of course, Sarah, it’ll be up to you really,’ he said, just before he left them. They had to fight their way through a group of Teddie’s friends and avoid the figure of the prostrated woman in the white saree, and after that Sarah was running alone through a deserted street. When she got home her father was waiting. ‘I suppose you did your best,’ he always seemed to say although his lips never actually moved. In this dream she was intermittently being made love to by a man who never spoke to her. Who is that man? people asked her – her mother or father, or someone who happened to pass by. Oh, I don’t know, she said. There was a superior kind of mystery about the man.
The dream had begun a few days after they had the news that Teddie was killed. The news was signalled from Comilla to Calcutta and from Calcutta to Area Headquarters in Pankot where it was intercepted by an alert signals corporal who knew Corporal Layton, and liked her for not being standoffish with non-commisioned men, and thought it best to have a word with someone else before the message went by dispatch-rider to the Pankot Rifles lines where all the Laytons’ mail was sent. And so at 10.45 on an April morning Sarah was told by General Rankin that there was some bad news he thought it best to tell her privately so that she and her mother could work out how best to break it to her sister. She remembered the time, 10.45, because when General Rankin sat down he no longer obstructed her view of the clock behind his desk. He had made her sit directly she came in and did not sit himself until he had told her about Teddie and reassured himself that she was going to take it with reasonable composure. To one side of the clock there was the map with tell-tale clusters of flags around Imphal and Kohima. She thought of Teddie as permanently pinned, part of the map.
‘Is your mother at home or will she be out shopping?’ the General asked.
‘They’re both at Rose Cottage. I think there’s bridge.’
The romantic period of Susan’s pregnancy had ended. She was showing. Before long, she said, she would be showing very badly. The grace and favour bungalow stood virtually unprotected from the military gaze in the lines of the Pankot Rifles. She had complained for several weeks that it was like living in a barracks. Now she felt she was showing too much to spend the day happily at the club and had acquired a liking for resting on the veranda at the back of Aunt Mabel’s, knitting and crocheting and gazing across the flower-filled garden to the Pankot hills, while her mother played bridge inside with Miss Batchelor and whoever else could be persuaded to forsake the club and the well-stocked bar, and gusty invasions of male company.
Hearing that Susan and her mother were at Rose Cottage the General nodded. Mrs Rankin had played there on two occasions recently and it was scarcely a week since a hint had been dropped to Sarah that her mother’s losses were unpaid up. In the midst of this new catastrophe the little debt remained as a source of vague irritation and restraint between the Laytons and the Rankins, not to be forgotten but temporarily overlooked.
‘You’d better go up there and get your mother on her own if you can,’ Rankin said. ‘I’ll tell the transport people to provide you with a car, and I’ll have a word with your section commander. Your mother may need you at home for a day or two I shouldn’t wonder.’ He paused. ‘What a terrible, terrible thing.’
He went over to a cabinet, poured a small measure of brandy into a glass.
‘Drink this. It’s Hennessy three star, not country.’
She drank it down. She hated brandy. The smell reminded her of hospitals.
‘Who looks after Susan?’ Rankin asked, as if he too had been reminded. ‘Beames or young Travers?’
‘Dr Travers.’
‘You may feel or your mother may feel he should be there when Susan is told. Meanwhile I’ll ring my wife. We’ll all do what we can.’
‘Thank you,’ she said and put the glass on his desk. ‘I’d better go now.’ She put the signal in her pocket. ‘I think I ought to go by tonga. If I turn up in a car Susan may wonder and get alarmed before we’re ready to say anything.’
‘Would you like my wife to go with you? She’ll be at the club. You could pick her up on your way.’
Ten rupees was what her mother owed. ‘It’s very kind of you,’ she said, ‘but it’s not as if Mother and Susan are alone.’
‘Wait a few minutes before you go. You’ve had a shock.’
‘No, it’s better like this. I mean better than just the telegram arriving.’
He saw her to the door. In the outer office the aide who had taken Captain Bishop’s place opened the other door for her and accompanied her down the long arcaded veranda. He went with her all the way to the gravelled forecourt and out beyond the sentries who slapped the butts of their rifles. He hailed one of the tongas that stood lined up in the roadway. The sun was very hot, but the air was crisp; the famous Pankot air that always carried a promise of exhilaration and could be cold at night in winter so that fires were lit at four o’clock. Area Headquarters lay midway between the bazaar and the Governor’s summer residence. Between these two were the golf course and the club. It was uphill, and the plumed horse took the slope at a nodding walk, jingling its bells and sometimes breaking wind. She remembered Barbie Batchelor’s dream. She watched the road slipping by beneath her feet, her back to horse and driver and stable smell – a smell that was part of the smell of Pankot, the whole panorama of which was widening and deepening as the tonga gained height, disappearing as the road curved from the straight into the first of the bends on the hill on whose farther slope Rose Cottage lay with views to all the hills and valleys of the distri
ct her grandfather had ridden and her father had walked. Down on her left now was the golf course, come back into view, and, briefly visible, the bungalow where her father and Aunt Mabel lived after the First World War. More distantly she could see the familiar huts and old brick buildings of the Pankot Rifles depot, and the roof, among trees, of the grace and favour bungalow. Another bend in the road and the tonga, momentarily on the straight again, bowled past the flower-strewn embankment and then the open gateway of the club, giving a glimpse of white stucco columns and bright green lawns. Another turn and they were past the closed iron gates of the long driveway that corkscrewed up to the deserted summer residence. Climbing again now, slowly, past openings of private dwellings posted with familiar names: Millfoy, Rhoda, The Larches, Burleigh House, Sandy Lodge. At the top – Rose Cottage.
‘Thairo,’ she called, but the driver had already stopped. She got down, hidden from view by the high embankment. She wondered whether she should keep the tonga waiting, but decided not, gave him two rupees to save argument and turned into the steep little drive that was flanked by rockeries. Aunt Mabel was cutting roses, basket in arm, secateurs in hand, wearing old brogues, woollen stockings and a shapeless green tweed skirt. As a concession to the sun she had on a collarless sleeveless blouse, bright orange, that exposed her brown, old woman’s mottled arms and neck. On her head there was a wide-brimmed pink cotton hat. These days you had to be careful not to come upon her too suddenly. The deafness that Sarah’s mother thought of as assumed to match a mood had become more serious than that. But while Sarah was still several yards distant, her aunt turned. After a moment she put the secateurs in her basket and set it down on the grass, came to Sarah and took hold of her left arm, cocked her head to hear whatever it was Sarah had come at this unexpected time of day to say.
‘Susan mustn’t see me yet. Can you get Mother out here somehow?’