The Jewel In The Crown (The Raj quartet)

by Paul Scott

  What made being thrown out more or less bearable was the fact that Miss Crane didn’t seem to care whether I stayed or went, so the situation resolved itself. The sister stood over the bed and I got up and Miss Crane said, ‘Thank you for visiting me, Lady Chatterjee.’ But the way she said it made it sound as if I were too late, or she were too late, or as if nothing that happened now could alter the way she saw things. A couple of days later Bruce rang me and said any time I wanted to visit Miss Crane I only had to appear at the reception desk. He’d kicked up an awful fuss apparently. He said the hospital staff simply hadn’t realised who I was. I said, Oh Bruce, of course they realised. If I’d been just Mrs Chatterjee the whole thing would have been a joke to them, something they could score over and then forget. But being Lady Chatterjee, the widow of a man knighted by their own King, that made it awfully serious, something they really had to take a stand over, quite apart from the personal jealousy they might feel not being Knights’ ladies themselves. After all, practically every Indian who had them gave up his title and honours about this time and returned his decorations to the Viceroy for forwarding to King George or whatever, and that was thought frightful. If it wasn’t thought frightful it was thought only right, because the Europeans always looked on Indian titles as a bit of a joke. If Nello had been alive I expect he’d have reverted to plain Mister along with the rest of them. These days a lot of people still use their titles even though they’re not recognised by Government but in those days people used to say to me, Why don’t you drop the Lady? Nello would have dropped the Sir. So I said I can’t choose a course of action for a husband who’s dead. If I drop the Lady I’m really dishonouring him, just for my own peace of mind. Anyway, he deserved his title.

  There were people in Mayapore who said I only kept up with Lady Manners for snob reasons, Indian snob reasons, like calling an English person by his Christian name. They said the same when I had Daphne come to live here at the MacGregor House. She was Henry Manners’s brother’s daughter. Connie White told me people tried to snub Daphne in places like the Gymkhana, snub her by pretending not to know where Daphne was staying so that they could smirk or look shocked when she said the MacGregor House. She didn’t go to the club much – at least not at first – because I wasn’t allowed in there, even as a guest. The Deputy Commissioner himself couldn’t have got me past the door. Even the Viceroy couldn’t. She only went to show friendly to the girls she worked with at the hospital, but then Ronald Merrick tried to set his cap at her and began to take her out and around and she was at the club with him several times. That was another bad mark against her. Mr Merrick was just about the most eligible bachelor on the station. He was quite good-looking, if a man with a permanent sneer in his eyes can ever be called that, but the main thing about him was his position as District Superintendent of Police. All the unmarried girls who didn’t mind too much that he had no ‘family’ to speak of had hopes of hooking him. He’d never taken much notice of them so they didn’t take very kindly to Daphne for apparently getting hold of him without so much as a finger raised. Neither Robin White nor Jack Poulson liked him much, but they said he was good at his job. Judge Menen couldn’t stand him, but never said so in so many words. I had him round at the MacGregor House because I’d been on good terms with his predecessor, a rather older man called Angus MacGilvray. I thought Mr Merrick would be annoyed if he didn’t even get an invitation, but I was surprised when he accepted it. He only came, though, because it was here he had the opportunity to meet Indians socially. You could see his mind working away, storing up little things that were said, so that he could go home and make a note on the confidential files that were kept so that whenever there was any civil trouble the most influential congress wallahs and anyone who ranked as dangerous could be locked up right away. I guessed he cottoned on to Daphne because he saw it as a duty to be on terms with someone who might let slip things that were going on here that were kept from him when he visited. He saw the MacGregor House as a sort of Cliveden, a hot-bed of Indian intrigue, a forcing-house for English reds – which of course would be the opposite of Cliveden-ish, but you know what I mean. But I was wrong, I think. His reasons for cottoning on to Daphne were much more complicated than that. By the time I realised how complicated, it was too late.

  I often wish I could have that time all over again, but knowing what I know now. Not just for Daphne’s sake, but for Miss Crane’s sake. I think I could have stopped Miss Crane from becoming sannyasi in that especially horrible way. It’s all right to give everything up as long as you realise just what it is you’ve had. Poor Miss Crane didn’t. That last time I saw her at the bungalow, when she was sitting in her room and I noticed the two blank spaces on the walls, she said, ‘Lady Chatterjee, why do you come to see me?’ And all I could think of to say was, ‘To see if you want anything.’ Well, I ask you, what was the good of that? Can you imagine a woman of Miss Crane’s temperament admitting that she needed help? What should I have said, do you think? Said instead of what I did say? Well, if she were there now, and not that fat fellow picking his toes and listening to film music on his little radio, I think I’d say, ‘Because neither of us must give up, and I can see you’re about to.’

  I must get my times sorted out. I work it out that I paid her three visits, not four. The first time in the hospital, and then on the occasion when she was still laid up but at home and I found her resting on the verandah with that old servant of hers hovering about, watching from the doorway to make sure she wasn’t upset, and then a few weeks later when I’d heard about her resignation which came as a surprise to everybody. After my first visit to the bungalow I thought I should keep away for a while, but then people told me she’d had her soldiers to tea again. So I thought, Now’s the time. Now we can get to know each other. But I didn’t go right then. I had so much to do. I didn’t go until I heard about her resignation and that people were saying she must have gone a bit bats. I called one afternoon. The servant was on the verandah, which of course was perfectly normal, but I realised he was on guard. He said Miss Crane was very busy and couldn’t see anyone and I was about to go when she called out, Who is it? and he went inside, then came out again and said I could go in. She was in her bedroom, sitting in an armchair. She didn’t get up and didn’t ask me to sit down, but I sat all the same and it was then she said, Lady Chatterjee, why do you come to see me? I thought for a moment, and then came out with this silly remark, To see if you want anything. It’s kind of you, she said, but there’s nothing I want. I said, I hear you’ve resigned from the mission. She simply nodded her head. I looked round the room, as you do, don’t you, when you’re with someone in a room you’ve just heard they’re going away from. And I saw those two blank spaces on the walls, one of which must have been made by Gandhi and the other by someone else. So I made this remark about packing already. Oh, I shan’t need to pack, she said, and then after a bit, while I was trying to work out why, she smiled, but to herself, not to me, so I thought, Well, it’s true. She’s nuts. It was because I thought, Oh, she’s nuts, that I didn’t ask what she meant, didn’t say, The mission johnnies are going to give you the bungalow then? I didn’t ask because it seemed so unlikely and I thought her answer would only add to the feeling I had that she was off her head, and I didn’t feel up to coping with the embarrassment of having it proved. So I left it at that, she wouldn’t need to pack. Poor Miss Crane. I ought to have followed up, I ought to have said, Why? Not that she’d have come right out with the real answer. The awful thing is it was in my mind afterwards that it may have been only then, when we were sitting there talking about not needing to pack, that she really understood why she wasn’t going to pack, saw why there wouldn’t be any need. That smile, you see, coming some while after she’d said, Oh I shan’t pack, I shan’t be packing, I shan’t need to. Then she changed the subject. She asked how Daphne was. How is Miss Manners? Like that, in that tone of voice, of someone asking about a colleague, as if between them they represented something, w
hich I suppose they did. She didn’t know young Kumar. If she’d known about Hari Kumar I expect she’d have said, How is Miss Manners? in the same tone as before but added, Is it true what I hear, what I hear about what they’ve done to young Mr Kumar?

  *

  Dinner is the only meal Parvati has with the family, such as the family is: that is to say, Lili Chatterjee and young Parvati, the two of them. When there are no guests there is this picture to be had of them sharing one end of the long polished dining-room table, with two places laid close together, the old woman and the young girl, talking in English because even now that is the language of Indian society, in the way that half a century ago French was the language of polite Russians.

  The man who serves them is quite young, too young to have been more than a small lad about the house at the time Miss Manners lived there, and actually he was not even that. He is a recent acquisition. He is from the south, a cousin of some kind of Bhalu, the old gardener. It amuses Lady Chatterjee that although it was on Bhalu’s recommendation that Ram Dass, whom she calls Ramu, got the job of houseboy he has since had little to do with the gardener because Bhalu’s position is so inferior to his own. He will not even admit a family connection. Sometimes from the servants’ quarters behind the house you can hear them quarrelling. The cook despises them both. He has cooked for a maharanee in his time. There is a girl sweeper called Sushila. Lady Chatterjee turns a blind eye to evidence that the Muslim driver, the handsome grinning Shafi, sleeps with Sushila. It is difficult to get enough servants and their wage demands get higher every year. Some of the rooms in the MacGregor House are shut up.

  With all the chicks lowered the house is dark and cool even at midday. The ceilings are very high. In such rooms human thought is in the same danger as an escaped canary would be, wheeling up and up, round and round, fluttering in areas of shadow and in crevices you can imagine untouched by any human hand since the house was rebuilt by MacGregor. In these rooms, at night, even the artificial illumination of lamps and brackets fails to reach the remoter angles and areas that would lie far beyond the reach of a man standing on the shoulders of another. It is best to depend upon a humdrum eye-level for impressions; the strain on the neck otherwise is no less acute than the strain on the senses then of other years impinging on the present. There is in any case always a lulling feeling of immediacy in these ground-floor rooms, the present lying as it does in the lower levels, like the mist of a young day in ancient hollows. It is in going upstairs that the feeling of mounting into the past first comes and ever afterwards persists, no matter how many times the routine journey is undertaken. Bedrooms, after all, are more specifically the repositories of their old occupants’ intimate sensations than the public rooms below.

  Collecting a key from some arcane source or other – a guest never penetrates the barrier from behind which the control and ordering of the household is directed – Lady Chatterjee goes up the broad uncarpeted polished wood staircase that curves from the black and white tiled hall to the complex of landings and corridors and opens the mahogany, brass-knobbed door of the room where Miss Manners slept and which she still calls Daphne’s room. It smells musty, as unused as the late Sir Nello’s museum of schoolboy curios which suitably enough lies directly below it, with a view to the garden when the chicks are raised and a continuing view through the gaps between the bushiness of the shorter trees to the plains that surround Mayapore and the smudge of hills on the horizon. There is the spire of St Mary’s church, a mile or two distant, still standing, still as irrelevant to its background as any architecture, Anglo or Indian, seems to be in this strangely unfinished landscape that makes the monotonous chanting of the crows which are never at rest sound like the cries of creatures only partially evolved, not yet born, but sharpened already by desires the world will eventually recognise as hunger.

  In the desk there are two of the letters Miss Manners wrote to her aunt which Lady Manners afterwards gave to Lili Chatterjee, perhaps not wanting them herself, or the recollections they stirred; and these, possibly, reveal similar hungers and contrasting desires: uncoordinated, irrelevant. She must have written them – unless she wrote them at night when the crows fitfully slept, impatient of morning – to the same accompaniment they are read to all this time after. The letters, read to the accompaniment of this continuing unchanging sound, are curiously dead, strangely inarticulate. Why pretend otherwise? They do not resurrect the writer. They are merely themselves; like the photograph of Miss Manners which is signed with a calligraphic flourish by one Subhas Chand who used to take portraits of those people on the station who wanted a record for friends and relatives of what Mayapore had done to them. Subhas Chand, Lady Chatterjee says, had a booth in the shop of the chemist, Dr Gulab Singh Sahib. And Clancy was pictured there, in full-face, as his handsome pushing self in spotless khaki drill, and in matey combination with the rustic Barrett, staring out at the world from a background (again irrelevant) of draped velvet and gothic fern (maidenhair in a brass bowl on a romantic revival monumental column around which graveyard ivy is invisible but naggingly present to the impressionable eye).