A Division Of The Spoils (Raj Quartet 4) (2 page)

Journalists in other parts of India thought they detected in the attitude of members of the Congress high command more pious hopes than firm convictions of Mr Kasim’s continuing allegiance to the twin cause of freedom and unity which he had supported throughout his political life, and a characteristically enigmatic comment by the Mahatma (not spoken, but written down, it being his day of silence) did little to remove the suspicion that during the Simla conference there had been private differences of opinion between
MAK
and his distinguished colleagues. Asked if he could throw any light on Mr Kasim’s apparently self-imposed security screen, Mr Gandhi wrote: ‘God alone throws light on any matter and in this light we may from time to time perceive the truth.’

With this the two journalists had to be content because the Mahatma indicated that the interview was over. They departed, leaving him to bathe and have his massage.

A few days later public interest in Mr Kasim’s political intentions was temporarily extinguished by the unexpected news that the British electorate had voted overwhelmingly for the Socialists and, in doing so, relegated the arch-imperialist, Mr Churchill, at the moment of his triumph, to the post of Leader of His Majesty’s now numerically harmless Tory Opposition.

*

The story that three senior members of the Bengal Club promptly died of apoplexy, although not without a certain macabre charm, proved to have no foundation in fact; but there was no doubt that for several days relations between many British officers and the rank and file of conscript British soldiers serving their time in India, who had voted by post and
proxy, were a little distant, and in one reported case demonstrably strained and only saved from escalating to the point where they would have formed the basis of a very serious affair of conduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline by the presence-of-mind of a sergeant-major who stood between his captain and a lance-corporal who had admitted ‘voting for old Clem’ on the railway station at Poona and said, ‘Sir, I think we have a little touch of the sun.’ It was raining at the time.

The rifle company of which this captain was in command formed part of a British infantry battalion that was on its way to Kalyan, near Bombay, to join the forces gathering there for the invasion and liberation of Malaya, in an operation known as Zipper. The battalion reached Kalyan on July 30 and settled itself in to a section of an immense hutted encampment that looked and proved dreary. The wet monsoon was at its peak. The Churchillian officer and most of his colleagues managed to travel frequently by jeep to find solace in Bombay, in whose roads part of the invasion force of shipping had already anchored in preparation for the embarkation of the troops, but the rank and file were less fortunate.

There was Housey-Housey, a camp cinema, and Indian prostitutes who were cheap but out-of-bounds. There was mud. It was a bleak terrain that it took some effort of imagination to see as once having been part of the background to the romantic and exotic affairs of the Mahratta kings in whom a fair-haired and well-spoken British Field Security sergeant – with a degree in history from Cambridge – attempted to interest a bored and restive group of captive Cockney, Welsh, Midlands and Northern Englishmen who had to be forgiven for wondering what they were doing in Kalyan getting kitted up for the Far East when the real war (the one in Europe) was over and the lights had actually gone up in London, in every sense. Accounts received from home of VE night celebrations had already eroded what little sense of India’s attractions they had acquired and since this had in any case never been lively enough to nourish in them any kind of curiosity about her history or her future, the Field Security sergeant, whose name was Perron, was soon left in little
doubt of his audience’s indifference to the political machinations and territorial ambitions of Mahdaji and Daulat Rao Sindia. Since he had embarked on the lecture with neither enthusiasm nor optimism, the audible appeal to wrap it up for ****** sake caused him no surprise and scarcely a pang. His closing description of a lady-warrior said to have reduced her male rivals to a state of military impotence, by admitting them to her chamber one after the other on the night before a battle, brought the lecture to an end in an atmosphere of near-hysteria. ‘Bring ’er on,’ the same voice cried, and the room then resounded to whistling and the stamping of hundreds of ammunition boots – a noise that greeted the Welfare Officer as he arrived to see how Sergeant Perron was getting on and which seemed to encourage him in a belief that such lectures were a good thing; a belief of which Sergeant Perron did not disabuse him because he had decided quite early in his military service that for life to be supportable officers had to be protected from anything that might shatter their illusion that they knew what the men were thinking.

Knowing himself incapable of reaching the required standard of self-deception in this, and other matters that came under the heading ‘Leadership’, and believing that life in the ranks would provide him with a far greater measure of freedom and better opportunities to study in depth human behaviour during an interesting period of history, he had politely but stubbornly resisted every attempt made to commission him. Only one set of the batch of uncles and aunts who had taken it in turns to bring him up thought this short-sighted. The others approved of his decision. They thought it agreeably eccentric, quite in keeping with the radical upper-class tradition which they liked to feel distinguished them as a family.

‘It obviously went down well,’ the Welfare Officer said, toning down his North Country accent and matily accompanying Perron from the lecture hall. ‘I must say I had doubts, but a chap who really knows his subject is more likely to pass some of his enthusiasm on than not. You must do some more, sergeant.’

‘A good idea, sir.’

‘These waiting periods are damned difficult. There’s a
batch of airborne blokes due in soon. Now that the show in Germany’s over they’ll be itching to get started and give the Jap a knock. They’ll be a handful to keep occupied and entertained. I know you’ve got your own special security job to do but I’d be grateful if you’d spare half-an-hour to talk to them one morning on this Indian history thing of yours. I’ll try and come myself. Learn a bit too. Extend my range beyond the Black Hole. Never too late for that, eh?’

Perron said, ‘Actually, if you don’t mind, sir, I think they’re more relaxed without an officer present.’

Captain Strang looked relieved. To reassure the officer that his interest was appreciated but that his friendliness would not be taken advantage of and made an excuse for slack behaviour, Perron slapped up a particularly smart one when they parted and would have stamped his feet had they not been standing in a puddle. Perron had cultivated a formidable parade-ground style and soldierly manner not only to preserve that encouraging image of discipline and efficiency which heartened officers but also (after a tiresome experience with a Seaforth Highlander captain in the map-room of a camp on Salisbury Plain) to minimize the risk of his
BBC
accent (as fellow-
NCOS
called it) and his cultural interests giving them the impression that he was a pansy.

*

The sight of the armada gathering off Bombay – a city to which Sergeant Perron’s field security duties now began to take him fairly regularly – appearing, disappearing and reappearing as the curtains of monsoon rain and mist rose and fell with sinister effect, did not usually depress him. In four years of service he had learned to look upon the entire war as an under-rehearsed and over-directed amateur production badly in need of cutting. In this light the low grey shapes of the troopships and escorts could be seen as figments of the imagination of an unknown but persistent operational planning staff whose directives had caused them to appear. The same imagination could just as easily dispel them. Nothing in the army was absolutely sure until it happened and he did not
intend to worry about Zipper or the danger he might be in until the ships weighed anchor with himself on one of them.

But on the afternoon of Sunday August 5 as he drove past the Taj Mahal Hotel in a brand new jeep that had been lent in temporary exchange for the motor-cycle he had left at the motor-pool for water-proofing for the sea-borne landings in Malaya, he observed that the armada had increased in size since his view of it a couple of days before. Perhaps it was the sense of futility lingering from his previous day’s lecture on the Mahrattas that chiefly contributed to his unusual feeling of disquiet, of there being something in the air that boded no good and moved him to nostalgic thoughts of a world where peace and common sense prevailed.

Being early for his appointment with a Major Beamish he stopped the jeep and gazed at the brown-grey waste of Bombay water. Without ever having taken any other personal avoiding action than that of co-operating cheerfully over the deferment of his call-up to enable him to sit his finals and obtain his degree, he had managed to get through the war so far without coming any closer to a violent end than half-a-mile away from a bomb off-loaded by a Heinkel over Torbay after a night visit to Bristol. But he had always assumed that his turn for danger would come. Posted to India in 1943 he had expected it to come quite soon but, of course, any apprehension that he felt in regard to that was combined with the excitement of finding himself after several years’ scholarly absorption in Britain’s imperial history actually in the country in which so much of it had originated.

In the first six months the luck of the draw of postings had given him opportunities to visit Cawnpore, Lucknow, Fort St George, Calcutta, Seringapatam, Hyderabad, Jaipur and Agra, and if he had felt some disappointment in these places as relics of old confrontations he had always managed to suppress it before it grew strong enough to undermine his academic confidence. ‘India’ he wrote in his notebook, ‘turns out to be curiously immune to the pressures of one’s knowledge of its history. I have never been in a country where the sense of the present is so strong, where the future seems so unimaginable (unlikely even) and where the past impinges so little. Even the famous monuments look as if they were built
only yesterday and the ruined ones appear really to have been ruined from the start, and that but recently.’

Occasionally he was tempted to blame the war for his inability to relate the country he saw to what he knew of its past and at such times he thought how interesting it would be to come back or stay on when the war was over, to examine India undisturbed. But this afternoon, looking at the unfriendly vista of the Arabian Sea which as a boy he had thought the most romantically named ocean in the world, he felt more strongly than ever how perilously close to losing confidence the actual experience of being in India had brought him; and he wanted to go home – not (like the men to whom he had lectured) merely for home’s sake or to enjoy the first fruits of a new political dispensation (for which he too had posted his vote by proxy through his Aunt Charlotte) – but so that he could regain lucidity and the calm rhythms of logical thought. These, he knew, depended upon a continuing belief in one’s grasp of every issue relevant to one’s subject and India seemed to be the last place to be if one wanted to retain a sense of historical proportion about it.

He got out his notebook with the intention of writing something down that might clarify his thoughts and expose as baseless his nagging doubts about the value of work he intended to do in pursuit of certain ineluctable truths but just as there seemed to be no connection between the India he was in and the India that was in his head there was no connection either between paper and pencil and the page remained ominously blank. This depressed him so much that he wrote out in a determined hand: ‘Tell Aunt Charlotte that Bunbury is deteriorating rapidly?’

*

‘This is Captain Purvis, sergeant,’ Major Beamish said, indicating a thin-faced, mousy-haired, ill-looking man who was dosing himself with brown pills which he washed down with water without quite choking. ‘You an’ ’e are goin’ this evenin’ to a party.’ Beamish, like so many elderly regular officers, spoke a kind of upper-crust cockney.

‘Yes, sir,’ Perron said, keeping his thumbs in line with the seams of his trousers.

Beamish was in a bad temper, either as a result of a thick Saturday night or of lingering resentment at being made to work on a Sunday. He said, ‘Fer God’s sake sit down. It’s too bloody hot fer parade-ground manners.’

Perron, who stood over six feet in his socks, chose the deepest of three available chairs in deference to Major Beamish whose trunk was short in proportion to his legs and who therefore sat lower at his desk than seemed either fair or suitable for a man of his domineering temperament. Satisfied that his eye-level was now a flattering few inches below Beamish’s, Perron met the officer’s gaze with soldierly frankness.

‘D’yer have yer civvies with yer?’

Before Perron could answer, the other officer – who was now sitting with his eyes closed and his arms folded broke in. ‘Shouldn’t advise civvies in this case.’

‘I have my Army Education Corps gear, sir,’ Perron said.

‘Those’ll do,’ Purvis said.

‘You fill ’im in, Purvis, or shall I?’

‘Would you? I’ll interrupt if I don’t think you’ve got it right. Could we have that fan on more?’

Perron got up and went to the board of switches and turned up the dial that regulated the ceiling fan. Irritably, Beamish re-allocated weights to keep the papers moored to the desk top, then lit a cigarette but did not offer the tin.

‘It’s about security fer Zipper and loose talk here in Bombay,’ he began. Perron listened attentively for the ten seconds it took Beamish to pass from the informative to the opinionative mood and then tried to tune in what he called his other ear: the one that caught the nuances of time and history flowing softly through the room, a flow arrested neither by Beamish’s concerns nor his own sense of obligation to further them by putting himself at Beamish’s disposal. Glancing at Purvis he wondered whether that officer also heard the whisper of the perpetually moving stream or whether the expression of concentration was due to the compelling effect of the brown pills. When Purvis’s brows suddenly contracted he decided it must be the latter.