Colonel Julian and Other Stories (27 page)

Whenever he stopped the car and stood up and pointed about the swamp she did not stir. She sat in the seat next to his own as she had sat in the chair on the verandah, the night before, dreamy and quiet but with bright warm black eyes, so that it was hard to tell if she was bored or not by all he said.

‘We'll see the other river in five minutes,' he said.

Then she said an unexpected thing.

‘By the way, did you come to my room last night?'

‘You were fast asleep,' he said.

‘I was awake and I heard you.'

‘I came to see if you had a mosquito net, that's all,' he said. ‘Some people come here and because it's high they think a net isn't necessary. They think there are no mosquitoes. But there are. They come from the swamp here. You need a net.'

‘I never have a net,' she said. ‘In Burma for four years and I never had a net. I hate them. I feel they stifle me. I can't sleep with them.'

‘That was silly. It was dangerous,' he said.

‘In wartime,' she said, ‘you get used to that.'

He did not speak; but as they drove on again he felt overwhelmed by his own inadequacy. He had been doing the same two trips a month out of Calcutta, by the night mail, for twenty years; pottering round the estate; fussing over improvements; finicking and praying over it as a parish priest finicks and prays over the little eddies and whirls of a parochial pond. War had come and swept disastrously over the East like an awful flood and had left him as he was.

And now it was Quit India. Riots were beginning in Calcutta. The English—Scots like MacFarlane did not seem to
him of the same account—were going at last. There would be great rejoicing. People who did not know India and did not understand and did not care would say it was a wonderful thing, a great step forward, a revolutionary thing. Perhaps for some people it was. But to him it was a pace backward: the birth of another nationalism in a world diseased by nationalism, the creation of yet another frontier.

He was glad when they reached the river. He got out and ran round the front of the car and helped the girl jump down into the sand. She was wearing a pure white dress of smooth linen that buttoned down the front, and once again he was shaken by impulses to touch the line of her hair and the deep fine thread, down through her body, of its continuation.

‘This river comes from the Himalayas,' he said. ‘It's Himalayan snow.'

‘It's like the other,' she said.

The river, very wide at that point, melted on the far side into forests of yellow haze. Strong green currents broke across it from all directions like quivering muscles. In that way it was like the river of the previous day, except that now there was no ferry to the other side.

The girl bent down and put her hand in the water.

‘Icy,' she said. ‘Wonderful and icy.'

‘This is the best view of Kangchenjunga you can get,' he said. ‘Straight through there.' He pointed upstream, squinting against the sun. ‘That's the spot exactly, although you can't see it today.'

‘The water's wonderful,' she said. ‘Why didn't you tell me it was so marvellous? I'd have brought a costume.'

‘There are terrible currents,' he said.

She stood looking at the shore of monsoon-washed sand, white and fine as a seashore in brilliant sun between the river edge and the grasses of the swamp. In its icy clearness there were great egg-like stones, whiter than the sand.

He saw her begin to take off her shoes.

‘What are you going to do?' he said.

‘Paddle.' She lifted the edges of her dress and unrolled her stockings, peeling them down her brown smooth legs. ‘Come on.' The dark eyes flashed. ‘You too.'

‘No,' he said. ‘I'll sit here. I'll watch you.'

Standing in the water, holding her dress above her knees, she bent her head, looking down at her feet, and he felt himself quiver, once again, because of the line of her hair.

As she turned and began to walk slowly upstream, in the shallow edge of the water, swishing her feet, he saw her head, vividly black above the white dress, move slowly into the line of mountains, where Kangchenjunga should have been.

‘Don't go too far,' he called.

‘No,' she said. ‘If I don't come back you'll know I'm swimming.'

‘No,' he said. He was agitated. ‘Don't do that! It's dangerous. Don't do that.'

‘Have a nap,' she called. ‘It'll do you good!'

He stood watching her for a moment or two longer. As she stepped away on big white stones he saw water and sun gleam on the bare skin of her legs and arms. Then as she poised to balance herself he saw the line of her body going down, white and brown, with her reflection, to the bottom of the pools she was crossing. He watched her go like this, seventy or eighty yards upstream, past the first elbow of sand and rock, and then he sat down to wait for her by the car.

When the rifle shot came out of the swamp edge, also from upstream, and hit him full in the chest, he did not fall. The suddenness of it seemed simply to paralyse him from the waist upwards. For some seconds he did not even stagger. He stood acutely watching the white river shore, the water, the swamp edge, the running Indian figure with the rifle disappearing into low bamboo.

For a few moments longer he seemed to hold these object briefly focused with the most painless calm and brilliance and then he fell backwards, choking.

As he lay there the girl came running to him over soft sand. He kept his eyes open with terrible difficulty, waiting for her to arrive. When she did arrive she had taken off her dress, and once again there was her face, white but calm; her black hair with its tormenting central line; her naked breast and shoulders as she bent down.

‘That was your murderer all right,' she said. ‘That was one of your wonderful people.'

He lay on the sand, burned by sun, his mouth open, and
tried to answer. He could not speak. All the life of his body, borne on a great torrent of blood, was flowing back to his head, choking with hideous congestion his sight and breath. He made weak and frantic signs that he wanted to sit up.

She put her arms about him, holding him upright for a few seconds longer. He whimpered in a great struggle to hold his weakness, his terror and the flow of blood.

‘Don't worry,' she said. ‘It's all right. I'm with you. Try not to move.'

He made another tortured effort to speak but he could make no sound. His mouth slowly slobbered blood. Everything he wanted to say seemed to become compressed, in a final glittering moment, into his eyes. She saw them convulsedly trying to fix themselves on herself, the sky and the mountains. This convulsion, calming down at last, gave way to a startling flash of reflected light. It leapt into the dying retina with such brilliance that she turned and instinctively looked behind her, towards the swamp and the mountains, as if for a second he had seen the murderer coming back.

But when she turned there was no one there; and when she looked back at his eyes she saw that all sight of sky, the mountains and the haze that hid the further mountains had been extinguished too.

Now only herself remained.

On a journey to ‘have a look at the old airfield,' the narrator stops at a café and talks to the keeper, who bought the place for her son when he became a pilot. Her hints and coy manner suggest that she earnt money on the side from visiting soldiers, saving for a son that never came home. Behind her brazen façade lays a sadness that comes through in delicately brief glimpses.

She had a face that seemed carved out of candle-grease: as if at some time the pale flesh had melted and run down and then remoulded itself in mauve-powdered cheeks, double chin and baggy eyes. She had several rings on her fingers and in the late winter afternoons the eyes were very blue under glistening mascara lids, shining with a kind of coy brightness as they drooped and flickered behind the counter of the little café, eyeing me up and down. They had a nakedness she could not cover.

Outside it was bitterly cold.

‘Off to Newmarket?' she said. ‘Tea won't be a minute, sir'

‘No,' I said. ‘Just touring round.'

I had come up to look at the airfield; I had a fancy to see what it looked like now. But here, on all sides, there was nothing to be seen but striped black-gold lands of half-ploughed stubble and all along the roadsides golden cones of piled sugar-beet waiting to be carted away. Frost had already withered to partridge brown the reeds on the dyke-sides and once again a dark ice-wind was blowing in from the sea.

When she gave me the tea across the counter I held the cup close under my face in my cold red hands.

‘That wind goes through you,' she said.

‘Yes,' I said.

‘Business up here?'

‘Sort of,' I said. ‘I came to have a look at the old airfield.'

‘No?' she said. ‘Really?' She let her flabby face squash forward into her hands, so that her big rings pressed into the flesh of her cheeks. ‘Going to have something to eat? Piece of cake?'

She laughed suddenly with heavy throatiness.

‘Piece of cake,' she said. ‘That takes you back a bit, don't it? Piece of cake, eh? That takes you back.'

‘It does,' I said.

‘Was you up here?' she said.

‘Three months in forty-two.'

‘No?' she said. ‘Really?'

She went on to say that it was before her time; she had bought the café a little later. Her rings pressed a little deeper into the congealed flabbiness of her cheeks; her eyes grew a little brighter, flickering up and down a little more. She forgot about the piece of cake. ‘Got up here about the time the Americans came,' she said. ‘They was a mob.'

I said I was sure they were.

‘Tea sweet enough?' she said. ‘Let me hot it up a bit.'

‘No, it's just how I like it,' I said

She sucked at her lipstick, pursing her large mouth upward and outward.

‘Well, it's nice you dropping in here,' she said. ‘It's nice to meet one of the old gang again.'

I nodded and drank my tea. While I was drinking she walked to the other end of the counter and opened a drawer. She came back with a photograph in a black wooden frame.

‘Ever run across him?' she said

I began to hold the photograph up to the light and she said:

‘Half a jiff. I'll switch the light on.'

A little naked light flashed on the glass of the frame from above the counter. ‘There you are. Ever come across him?'

‘I don't think so.'

‘Nice boy,' she said. ‘My son.'

I stared at the face in the frame; it looked like any one of a thousand faces I had seen and that, for the same reason, I should not see again.

‘Flying officer,' she said. ‘Killed over Arnhem.'

Beyond the windows the winter sky was a brilliant blue over fields that were black except for gold vaporous piles of sugar beet waiting to be taken away.

‘Bought this place just after he joined,' she said ‘Idea of keeping it warm for him, you know.'

I was prepared for her, in that moment, to start crying: but she smiled, fleshily with the old coy girlishness, instead.

‘It was warm all right,' she said. ‘Warm, I'll say. Too warm sometimes.'

Perhaps I ought to have smiled, too. But I was, in fact, still looking at the photograph. She seemed to take my silence as a form of disapproval and she explained quickly:

‘Well, you know how it was. Chaps a long way from home. Here for a cup o' tea in the afternoon and gone to Kingdom come for supper. What could you do? Had to make 'em at home, had to do something. It broke your heart. You know?

I said I knew.

‘We had some sorts up here I tell,' she said. ‘Americans, Poles, Canadians, Czechs, Negroes. We had some times. You know I liked them negro boys. They were polite. They had manners. I don't know I didn't like them more than the others. You know?'

I said I knew. I laid the photograph on the counter. For the first time she moved her hands from her face and now I could see where the sharp big rings had marked the flabby flesh with deep, red scars.

For some moments she stood looking at the photographs. If there were any tears in her eyes they seemed to have frozen over the pupils in a dreamy glaze.

‘Just got his medals come,' she said. ‘Took 'em six years.'

For the first time she seemed a little bitter; she pulled her lips into a thin red line. ‘Think they could put a jerk in it, wouldn't you? Six years.'

I said you could not hurry these things. There were forms to be filled in; there were regulations. She laughed.

‘You bet,' she said. She looked half-bitter, half-amused, and then suddenly she was bright again, girlish and coy and friendly.

‘Like to see 'em?' she said. ‘I put 'em away upstairs. I won't be a jiffy.'

She went out of the room and upstairs. When she had gone I felt the presence of her persisting in old deep waves of perfume from her powdered face. I could almost taste it in the rest of my tea.

With pride she laid the two fresh, clean medal cases on the counter.

‘He got two,' she said. ‘One over Calais. One over Arnhem.'

‘It must be wonderful to have them,' I said.

‘Think so?' The eyes were wet and bitter now. ‘I earned the money for him. And now he's not here. I didn't care how I earned it—well, you got to earn it somehow.'

I stared at the medals; I wanted to tell her I had to go; but she said:

‘I give up everything and now he's not here. I tell I made some sacrifices——'

‘I'll really have to be pushing on,' I said.

‘Really?' she said. ‘Going far?' She looked at me eagerly, with bright blue eyes, blinking. ‘Don't want a room for the night? I get quite a few commercials staying here. Cheaper than Cambridge.'

I said I had to be pushing on.