‘And was it successful?’ Sarah asked. ‘I mean with the Spanish maid?’
‘Alas. He found her that same afternoon holding hands with a fisher-lad. He told me of this disaster when he came for his evening lesson. He was stunned, well, you could see it, but also well controlled, in the way of the English. He went home very soon after that in order, so he said, to get in some more cricket before the summer ended. You could tell he was quite finished with women. At least for a week or so.’
‘What a sad story,’ Sarah said.
‘Isn’t it? I’m delighted you see that it is sad as well as comic. And I’ve always thought how much that flirtatious young lady’s memories were impoverished by the chance she missed to have her hand held and her ears simultaneously enchanted by a poem she would not have understood a word of but could hardly have failed to know was spoken from the heart. You see he felt quite romantic about cricket, and so long as she didn’t know what the poem was about, it was the perfect vehicle for him to express one passion through the medium of another. She would have heard the rhymes, and the slow alliterative and repetitive cadences which seem to be holding on to memories to stop them slipping too soon away. She would have heard the strange hard burr of a northern language, softly spoken, and so different from the loudly spoken languages of the south, which the sun seems to have melted so that they flow ever quickly onwards, with hardly a pause, like time itself. Above all, how could she not have detected the note of pride ringing through the lamentation! Oh, if I had been she, no doubt I would have positively swooned away.’
‘Anyway,’ Rowan said, ‘congratulations. Your own journey south has been capped by conspicuous successes.’
‘Ah,’ Bronowsky exclaimed. ‘I have understanding companions. Thank you. Steward. More champagne. Miss Leyton, what news of your father?’
‘We haven’t heard for some time, but we believe he’s well.’
‘And he’ll be home soon, surely? And your mother and sister? Particularly your sister?’
‘Yes, they’re both well.’ She would not intrude her anxiety. Or her grief.
‘And what took you to Calcutta, alone?’
‘My aunt lives there now.’
‘Ah yes, I recall. Mrs Grace? And your uncle who gave your sister away? They are both in Calcutta? She nodded. ‘And the officer who was best man, Captain Merrick, have you had news of him?’
She hesitated, again reluctant to introduce a sombre subject on the old man’s birthday. In any case he was probably only being polite.
‘He interested me considerably,’ Bronowsky went on, as if prompting her. ‘I thought him an unusual man.’
‘Actually it was to visit him in the hospital that I went to Calcutta.’
‘Really? What is wrong with him?’
‘He was rather badly wounded at the same time Captain Bingham was killed. My sister was anxious to find out if there was anything we could do because she was told he’d tried to help Teddie. There’s been a recommendation. I mean for a decoration.’
‘Yes,’ Bronowsky said after a moment’s thought. ‘Courage. He had physical courage. You could see that. I’m distressed to hear he was wounded. How badly?’
‘He’s lost an arm. He pulled Teddie out of a blazing truck while they were under fire.’
‘Ah.’ A pause. ‘Yes. Which arm?’
‘The left.’
A pause. ‘Then that is something. I observed him picking up bits of confetti, also stubbing a cigarette. He was right-handed.’ He turned to Rowan. ‘You may remember the man we’re speaking of. Merrick?’
‘No. I don’t think so.’
‘I don’t mean you would remember him personally. He went into the army from the Indian Police. He figured rather prominently in that case involving an English girl, in Mayapore in 1942. The Bibighar.’
Rowan was drawing on his cigarette. He nodded. ‘Oh yes. That case.’
‘He was District Superintendent. In Mirat I had a long and interesting talk to him and found him still utterly convinced that the men he arrested were truly guilty. I myself and I suppose most people since have come to the conclusion they couldn’t have been. It would have been understandable if Merrick had begun to waver in his opinion – unless you accept that he left the police temporarily under a cloud and he harboured a grudge. But he had tried for years to get into the army. He was a very ordinary man on the surface but underneath, I suspect, a man of unusual talents. Are those boys still in prison?’
‘Which boys are those?’
‘The ones arrested, not tried, but detained, as politicals.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know, Count.’
‘I hope they are not forgotten and just being left to rot. The provincial authorities have an obligation in this matter, surely.’
‘I’m sure they are not just forgotten.’
‘The Indians remember. Unfortunately not only Indians of the right sort. There is a venerable gentleman of Mayapore who last year visited Mirat and engaged in some tortuous processes of intimidation. The stone – Miss Layton, you recall the stone – was almost certainly thrown at the instigation of this slippery customer. He is one of those on whom we keep a watchful eye. I am told he has recently left Mayapore, but I am not told where he has gone, or why. Forgive me, it is an uncheerful subject, and Miss Layton must eat. We shan’t wait for Ahmed. In any case he’s probably only going to be interested in the champagne.’
Rowan looked at his watch and Bronowsky, who was rising, touched his arm. ‘We shall be able to leave on the scheduled time. Ahmed will see to it. Come.’ He led them to the dining saloon. Two stewards removed covers from the waiting dishes.
*
‘I must go, I’m afraid,’ Sarah said, putting down her coffee cup. Her watch showed twenty minutes to midnight and for some time now she had been nervously aware of mounting activity on the platform. Once she had parted the crimson velvet curtains that covered the window she sat near and had seen more soldiers, and officers directing them; Indian families with mounds of roped luggage, some of the women in purdah. The lights were on in the Pankot train but the view was too oblique for her to make out her patient coolie, who would still be waiting.
‘Another five minutes,’ Bronowsky pleaded. He had regaled them with more champagne and talk of pre-1914 Russia and post-1918 Europe, but for the last ten minutes she had been too conscious of the narrowing gap between the minute and hour hands of her wrist-watch to take in much of what he said. She believed that Captain Rowan was similarly preoccupied, but disguising it better. Occasionally he glanced at her as if to say: I know how you feel, but don’t worry.
‘If I stay another five minutes I shall never want to go, and I’ve got my compartment to get unlocked.’
Bronowsky put down his glass. ‘Then I mustn’t be selfish. But Ahmed will be disappointed. He often talks about you.’ They all three stood. He took her hand and kissed it. ‘Thank you for my birthday present. You will return to Mirat? One day, very soon?’
‘Yes. I should like to,’ she said, and realized quite suddenly that she meant it, and knowing how unlikely it was that she would ever go again, felt a wrench at parting that was out of all proportion to the real loss or lack of expectation. She turned to Rowan.
‘Goodbye, Captain Rowan.’
He took her hand, but not in farewell. ‘I’ll see you to your compartment,’ he said, but Bronowsky intervened, insisted that this was a privilege he claimed for himself. She thought Rowan’s face betrayed a momentary blankness, as if the refusal by Bronowsky of his offer to accompany her had made it necessary for him to dismiss from his mind some line of thought or plan of action he had wished to pursue; but since they had only just met and were unlikely ever to meet again, she knew she must be mistaken. But the impression remained, after they had said goodbye and while Bronowsky was handing her down on to the platform. Once down it vanished to the back of her mind, driven there by surprise.
‘Why, they’ve cordoned us off,’ she said.
?
??It saves us from being boarded and from constant explanations that we are not a public conveyance,’ he said, and guided her inside the cordon of ropes that held the crowds away from the three coaches, to a point where a policeman was on duty. Originally there had been only two policemen. There were four or five now. The policeman let them through. She felt she would have understood the cordoning off and the presence of police if the Nawab had been travelling. But he was in Nanoora. She had assumed from some of the things said by Bronowsky and Rowan in the past hour and a half that Bronowsky was going to Nanoora too.
She glanced up the platform. They were level now with the front of the first of the three coaches which a locomotive was slowly approaching.
‘There is our engine,’ the Count said, pointing with his stick. He walked on her left, holding her left elbow. ‘We are due to leave at half past midnight, so we must hope Ahmed isn’t much longer delayed. If we fail to leave at twelve-thirty the railway people can’t fit us in to their schedule again until two a.m. That is your coolie attracting our attention. Now, where is an inspector to unlock your compartment? The fellow over there in the white topee?’ Bronowsky waved his stick. The coolie humped the suitcase and stood with that same upward-strained rigidity of neck and head.
It was the same kind of topee but a different man under it, and he had the key. He unlocked, entered and switched on lights and fans, and the coolie climbed up and deposited the bag, returned, touching his turban. She had two rupees ready but Bronowsky restrained her and gave the old man a folded note, which looked like five and must have been because after he salaamed he did not go away but waited near by as if accepting an obligation to see that the train carried her safely out of his hands and into those of God.
In the compartment adjacent to hers three young subalterns who looked like new postings from an OTS eyed her curiously, no doubt assuming that the elderly man with the eye-patch and ebony cane was her father, a sahib of the old school. No, she wanted to say to them, it’s not as you think you see it. What you see is a trick, everything here is a trick. She turned to Bronowsky, feeling for questions.
‘Have you a blanket and things like that?’ he asked before she could speak.
‘Yes they’re in my case.’
‘And you haven’t left the key of the case behind in Calcutta?’
She laughed, looked in her handbag and reassured him. The question eluded her. ‘Please don’t stay, Count Bronowsky,’ she said, and held her hand out. ‘Thank you for a marvellous supper and for rescuing me from the restaurant. And – Happy Birthday.’
He took her hand, but was silent for a while, looking down at her through his one eye.
‘How self-contained you are! I don’t remember that when you were in Mirat. But of course we did not exchange many words and you were somewhat overshadowed by the occasion. A bride is always the centre of attraction. But Ahmed noticed you. He affects not to be susceptible to the charms of white ladies. But after you had gone I observed how on many mornings he rode across the waste-ground opposite my house and retraced exactly the course you had taken together, stopping under the same trees, cantering along the same stretch.’ He smiled. ‘I am confessing, aren’t I? That I watched you from the window of my bedroom. I did, but not intentionally. I caught sight of you by chance, but was held by the spectacle. I was amused to see he was doing as he had warned, the night before, when he told me he was to take you riding. He said: Oh! I shall keep my distance, I shall keep my place. It was a joke, of course. Not a bitter one. He has great objectivity, perhaps too much. He is somewhat like an actor who knows every line in a play and plays his part to perfection but cannot light the character up from inside, so with him it is always a part. Well here is Ahmed Kasim, he says, committed to go riding with this English girl. What is expected, what does the world say? Yes, of course. Five paces behind. How amusing! Only he is perhaps less amused than he would have us think. You understand?’
‘I understand, yes.’
‘You understand what I am saying, but not why I am saying it. To tell you the truth I am not sure. It’s probably the champagne. On the other hand, unlike the majority of people I am the opposite of tongue-tied by railway stations and scenes of departure. It must be due to a fear implanted in my mind years ago that even the simplest goodbye may turn out to be for ever and leave you with a feeling of remorse for big and little things you left unsaid. Not that you should ever say everything. Perhaps I am talking to stop you asking those questions you want to ask which I can’t answer. I must beg forgiveness. I am only adding to the mystery. But mysteries are no bad thing, especially for the young. They warm the powers of perception and in themselves can be quite beautiful.’
A warning whistle blew. Bronowsky gripped her hand more firmly, reassuring her there was still time – far more for her than for him. ‘But don’t misinterpret. That picture you have in your mind now, of Ahmed retracing the course you took across the waste-ground. I did not intend a romantic allusion. I said he had great objectivity. He is a spectator, an observer, and when the need arises he can take a part, but not with his heart in it because he doesn’t know what part he wants to play or, if he has an inkling, he doesn’t see where it fits in. He’s indifferent to all the passions that most arouse people in this country. I suppose with a family like his that’s lived, breathed and thought nothing but politics it’s not unnatural. But in India it’s rare. And because it’s rare he thinks of it as a disease peculiar to him. He said to me once: “My mother tells me to think hard about something my father once wrote to her – We are looking for a country. But when I think about it I can only make the comment that the country’s here, and so am I, and shouldn’t we stop squabbling over it and start living in it? What does it really matter who runs it, or who believes in Allah, or Christ, or the avatars of Hindu mythology, or who has a dark face and who has a light?”’
‘Yes,’ Sarah said, ‘What does it matter?’
Bronowsky considered her, and for the first time she noticed how concentrated, how single-minded, a one-eyed man had to be, how deprived he was of the tragi-comic human right to laugh on one side of his face and cry on the other, like the king in the fairy tale. She felt pierced, as if by a singularity of purpose and intent. But that was a mystery too. Perhaps it was beautiful. She did not know. In a few minutes the chance to know would have gone, would have joined the sad jumble of all the other limited chances which (panic-stricken by the thought that the train would suddenly be gone without her), she felt everyone was given.
‘He told me about his father’s letter and his reactions to it some time after you rode together, after you had left Mirat.’
The whistle blew again.
‘And you see, he had never spoken to me so frankly before. And I remembered those solitary rides he took, which I did – I must confess – see at first in a superficially romantic light. But now when I look at that picture of him over and over re-enacting that morning ride, I seem to see him trying to recapture something. Some moment he missed, or did not seize, and only understood later was significant.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘there was a moment.’
‘Tell me.’
‘I can’t. It wasn’t clear. It was to do with the way he kept behind.’
‘Something you said?’
‘No. Didn’t you see?’
‘Beyond the mullah, when you galloped, you were outside my range. Two blurred specks. But coming back I thought you once had difficulty with your horse.’
‘Not difficulty. I tricked him. I closed the gap. Just for a moment.’
‘And then?’
‘That was all. He waited for me to ride on.’
The third whistle. ‘Thank you, Miss Layton,’ he said. ‘Now – you had better take your seat, but don’t close the door. My steward has some extra luggage for you.’ Looking behind she found the steward waiting with a small hamper held to his chest. ‘Come.’ He handed her up. She stood back and let the steward come in and place the hamper on the floor. When he
left the compartment Bronowsky closed the door. She stood at the lowered window. There is some champagne,’ he said, raising his voice, ‘for a christening, which if my arithmetic is correct will take place in the quite near future. But there are also a few things for you to nibble if you get hungry. Shut the windows tight, lock the door and lower the blinds. And if you are in trouble knock loudly on the wall between you and the young officers next door who have been watching with very understandable interest. When next you write to Captain Merrick please remember me to him and tell him I recall our conversation. He will know what I mean.’
‘Yes, I will. And thank you again.’
‘Now. Please pander to an old man and an old Russian superstition. The circumstances are wrong but the gesture may overcome them. Just sit quietly for a moment, as one always should before setting out on a journey.’