A Division Of The Spoils (Raj Quartet 4) (54 page)

*

They had emerged, erupted violently, from the shadows of the Moghul Room, attacked me, pulled me away, hit me in the face. Later when they had gone and we held each other again I said: Let me take you home. She said, No. No. We haven’t seen each other. We haven’t seen each other since the night we visited the temple. She saw the danger I would be in if I dared to go with her, dared to mutter to someone, a white man, an official, any of the men who would ask questions, ‘We were making love. These men attacked us.’ She had seen the danger of implicating me in any way, but she hadn’t seen the marks on my face, because it was too dark. And I hadn’t thought of them until I got home.

*

I don’t remember eating. I remember sitting on the verandah drinking the last of the
ADC’S
brandy and staring out into the dangerous Indian night until it was time to send Salaam’a to fetch a tonga to take me to the rendezvous with Sub-Conductor Pearson’s convoy and the first leg of the journey back to the source, where all these things, becoming distant again, would count for little and seem to belong to another world entirely.

(Sarah Layton)

THE SCENE WAS
over. I can enter now, Sarah told herself.

*

But I did not enter. None of us did. I thought I saw the reason. What had held us together as a family was father’s absence; his return showed how deeply we were divided. You could feel him making the attempt to come to terms with each of us separately. There was a time for mother, a time for Susan and Edward, and a time for me; and a different kind of time for the servants, for Pankot, for the regiment.

My time was before breakfast. Between seven and eight-thirty every morning father and I rode. He associated me with these early hours of the day and during them treated me with a special solicitude, as if the pattern of intimacy which had been established on the journey from Ranpur when we shared tea and bacon sandwiches and were careful with crumbs, might develop through repetition into something complex, mysterious and satisfying. At times he had the look of a man with a secret he was patiently waiting to share; at others that of a man empty of knowledge and recollection.

After a couple of days I noticed on these morning rides that we were taking the same route – down the northern slope of East Hill into the valley – and stopping at the same place. The view wasn’t spectacular. About a mile ahead you could see a village. That was all. But he reined in and sat motionless, gazed at the distant huddle of huts and the terraced fields that traced the contours of the hill. The earth was tawny. There was always a mist. You could smell the smoke of wood and dung fires. After five minutes or so he would look at his wristwatch
and say, ‘Well, better get back.’ Apart from this single comment he kept silent during the halt.

An obvious explanation of the choice of turning point was that it was fixed according to a formula involving time available, distance to be covered, expected time of return. But we did not always take the same route home and got back to Rose Cottage anywhere between say 8.15 and 8.45. The only part of the ride I could be absolutely sure of – the part that I began to feel was plotted by an obsession – was the route out and the halt and the five minutes’ silent contemplation of a village whose name I wasn’t certain of but checked on one of the large-scale maps at Area Headquarters. It was called Muddarabad.

We had never kept horses at Rose Cottage. Such stabling as there had been had – long before Aunt Mabel’s time even – become merged with the servants’ quarters and store-rooms. A syce brought horses up from the depot. In the past year or two I had ridden seldom, mother less and Susan not at all. In Bombay father had said that one of the things he was looking forward to was getting accustomed again to the saddle. He hadn’t ridden for nearly five years. I assumed that it might be a week or two before he felt fit enough to go out and that in any case it would be mother who went with him, but on his first evening at home he said, ‘What about riding tomorrow?’ and he said it to me. He rang Kevin Coley and I looked out my things but didn’t discover until I put them on in the morning that my jodhpurs were uncomfortably tight round the waist. Mounting, I was as nervous as I had been as a small girl. He wore slacks and chukka boots. He led off as though he had been going out every morning of his life.

This would have been Thursday, August 9. He rode a few paces ahead of me. We spoke very little. I felt some reserve – embarrassment – in regard to his physical presence – imagining mother still lying in their bed considering through half-shut eyes the pillow beside her which bore an impression of the head of the man who kept looking back at me, smiling, as if in delight in rediscovery. Do children, when grown up, even nowadays, quite believe in the reality of their parents’ sexual life?

Logic told me that in the past few years there must have
been moments when my father lay in his bed in prison-camp and thought, God, God, I must have a woman. Suspicion rather than logic told me that in my father’s absence my mother had had an affair. Logic in fact didn’t come into it. Kevin Coley looked incapable of physical passion; a dry desiccated creature whom nothing would arouse except a threat to the professional obscurity in which he’d been content to live since his wife’s death in the Quetta earthquake. But, nursing my suspicion – and my growing understanding of the complexity of physical needs and physical responses – I had to throw out the idea of non-capability, nonculpability, and – in consequence – try to suppress every emotion except that of ironic acceptance, which wasn’t easy – so difficult in fact that I couldn’t sustain it for long and had to try to counteract suspicion by telling myself that it was based on nothing more reliable than poor Barbie Batchelor’s delirious imagination, coupled with the workings of my own which, alerted by Barbie’s at first incomprehensible ramblings in the Pankot hospital, had since stretched the evidence (things seen, overheard, intuited) to make a case which the strictly rational side of my nature rejected, because even if adultery were the kind of game I could imagine my mother playing, adultery with Kevin Coley struck me as ludicrously out of character. So, I was back at the beginning of the circle of conjecture, and beginning to go round again, all the time conscious, naturally, that what chiefly nourished the retaliatory instinct to suspect her was her treatment of me, her utter disregard, her pretence of knowing nothing while knowing everything about the sordid abortion in Calcutta – everything except the name of the man who would have been the child’s father, which she could have found out easily enough not from me but from Aunt Fenny who couldn’t have been in much doubt but respected my silence and was fondly and foolishly guilt-ridden at the thought that she had been initially responsible for putting me in his way, or putting him in mine (it came to the same thing).

It was on the Friday – after our second ride to Muddarabad – that I heard poor Barbie was dead. Major Smalley mentioned it to me at the daftar, having heard it from his wife, and she was invariably well-informed. When I rang the Reverend Mother
of the Samaritan Hospital in Ranpur and she talked vaguely of papers meant for me or my family I feared some kind of revelation, a written statement, a letter to my father whom Barbie had hardly known but on whom I knew she relied to settle once and for all the question whether mother had buried Aunt Mabel in the wrong place – a letter perhaps referring to mother’s association with Coley. I didn’t believe Barbie capable of malice. What I feared was an unintentional accusation by a woman whose wits were scattered – as scattered as the contents of the trunk she’d left at Rose Cottage where she’d been Aunt Mabel’s companion, and which she removed on the morning of the accident – the trunk that was the cause of the accident because it was too heavy for the tonga.

The trunk was full of things connected with Barbie’s work as a mission teacher, old textbooks, exercise books she’d kept to remember special pupils, gifts from the children and their parents, and a copy of the picture her old mission friend Edwina Crane had been given as a reward for heroism in the North West Frontier Province during the Great War. Barbie told me that the trunk wasn’t particularly important but it was ‘her history and without it according to Emerson she wasn’t explained’. When Mabel died she had to move into a small room at the rectory bungalow. She’d taken things down there bit by bit during the week or so mother gave her to give us vacant possession of Rose Cottage. The rectory wasn’t a permanent arrangement and Clarissa Peplow was worried about the amount of stuff she seemed to have. Barbie asked me if she could leave the trunk with the
mali.
I offered to take care of it myself. Susan and I would be sharing the room that had been Barbie’s and I saw no reason why I shouldn’t look after the trunk until she found a permanent home. But she knew mother would object. She said that if the
mali
put the trunk in his shed then providing I knew it was there that would be good enough. So that’s what was done.

*

Muddarabad was the village Havildar Karim Muzzafir Khan came from. We stopped there because father couldn’t bring
himself to ride on and enter it and confront the havildar’s wife and family. Each morning, I think, he set off with that intention and then, reaching the halting-place, found the intention collapsing under the weight of his notion of its futility.
Man-Bap.
I am your father and your mother. This traditional idea of his position, this idea of himself in relationship to his regiment, to the men and the men’s families, had not survived his imprisonment; or, if it had survived, the effort of living up to it had become too much for him. Was it lack of energy or lack of conviction, I wondered, that caused him to rein in and sit straight-backed as if posing for his portrait as a military officer watching the course of a battle for whose outcome he would be held responsible, or studying the ground over which, tomorrow, conclusions would be tried?

And, watching
him
, it struck me how very rare after all were men whose genius lay in active warfare. For one genius there would be almost countless plodders who were commanders in name only, men to whom the structure of a landscape would present almost as great a problem in military understanding as it had always done to me, but who had been taught to apply a set of ready-made formulas so that it was upon these and not the terrifyingly wide margins of error that their minds were concentrated. As a child he had seemed godlike to me, revealing some of the secrets of his profession. I had the feeling now that he believed himself dishonoured – not by anything he had done but by his talent, which turning out limited had narrowed the whole area of his self-regard.

Waiting at the halting-place on the third morning, the Saturday, I recalled my mother’s words overheard the night before, when I came home late, having stayed on at the daftar to telephone the Reverend Mother at the Samaritan. ‘It’s a question of your presence more than anything. It was the same for me when you all went into the bag.’ And in retrospect it seemed scarcely any time at all since she had ridden out with Kevin Coley from one village to another to talk to the women whose husbands, sons and grandsons and brothers were either dead or captured in North Africa.

For her to visit every village would have been impossible but on other occasions she talked to women who came in
from outlying districts for confirmation of the news, receiving them outside the adjutant’s office and even in the compound of the grace and favour bungalow where we lived in those days. Colonel Sahib, Colonel Memsahib. Two aspects of the one godhead. My mother was not built to look like a woman another woman could be comforted by – but at these meetings her very stiffness seemed right. The important thing was that she was there, in the shell of her flesh which if hard seemed trustworthy. She told these women the truth always, for instance that as prisoners of war the men would be separated from their officers and that it would be virtually impossible for father himself to ensure their welfare. But, subsequently, in many unobtrusive ways, she had kept an eye on the widows, and the wives who like herself could only wait patiently for their men’s return. She did this entirely out of her sense of duty. It was an act, but she played the part with a perfect sense of what would be extraneous to it. She did not make the mistake of identifying herself too closely with it. When she came back into the bungalow she shed it, or seemed to shed it. And called for gin.

So, ‘Why don’t you?’ she had said the night before, meaning why didn’t he ride on into Muddarabad. But it was different for father.
Man-Bap.
That act had been an inseparable part of his life as a commander of Indian troops.
He
had to identify himself closely with it. It was supposed to go deep into him, right down to the source of his inspiration. Every morning, when we stopped after riding down the northern slope of East Hill, it was as though he waited there for the inspiration to return and lead him down into the village. But, ‘Well’, he would say, and said it again that Saturday, ‘Better get back’. On the way home we usually rode abreast and talked about the things that had happened yesterday and the plans there were for today.

*

After riding we had breakfast and then I went down to the daftar. Officially he was on station leave but sometimes he went down to the Pankot Rifles lines. The immediate future was very uncertain. There was a question of long leave, the
possibility of taking it at home; but the more important questions for him were of his fitness and of his next appointment. Long though I did for home leave the prospect wasn’t one I considered likely even if the war ended as people expected. He was too close to retirement to waste time in England. He had too much time to make up. He and mother were now well enough off, having inherited Mabel’s money, not to go after promotion simply to earn a higher pension, but he would go after it, I believed, to redress the balance. And it would be something to put his mind to. The obvious job for him was that of commandant of the depot which Colonel Trehearne had held throughout the war, postponing his own retirement. But now I got the impression that mother had set her sights higher and that she wanted to get out of the station. I couldn’t blame her. The expense she had gone to in altering Rose Cottage couldn’t in her case be seen as evidence of an intention to make it a permanent home. Even the prospect of final retirement there now seemed questionable.