by Paul Scott
I used to think the fact that she seemed to ‘drop’ him after that first well-meaning attempt to gather him into what was called the MacGregor House set was due to nothing more than her annoyance at his prickliness, or anyway to the stuffiness she can sometimes astonish you with if people don’t behave in exactly the way she personally considers ‘good form’. And knowing that she had put herself out to help him when he was a total stranger to her I thought she was annoyed that he hadn’t shown the faintest sign of gratitude, and hadn’t even said – as he was so capable of saying because the language and the idiom and the inflexions were natural to him – ‘Thank you for the party, and for everything’, when he said goodbye.
Perhaps this apparent brashness contributed to her reservations about Hari, but I am sure, now, that if he and I had simply smiled distantly at each other and passed each other by, the first thing she would have said, when the party was over, would have been something like, ‘Poor Mr Kumar needs bringing out. We need to knock that chip off his shoulder. After all, it’s not really his fault that it’s there.’ But she had seen that the chip on Hari’s shoulder was insignificant compared with the possible danger that lay ahead for me, for him, if that clumsy but innocent walk in the garden developed into the kind of familiarity which Lili, as a woman of the world, saw at once as not unlikely.
*
Was it now that my dreams came back? Do you remember, Auntie? Those dreams I wrote to you about once? The dreams I had when I first came to India, and which I had again after I’d left Pindi and gone to Mayapore? The dreams of faces, the faces of strangers? Dreamed, imagined, constructed out of nothing, but with an exactness that was frightening because they were so real? The faces of strangers I had to take with me even into dreams because I felt that I was surrounded by strangers when I was awake?
The first two weeks or so in Mayapore, when everything was new to me and I was getting to know my surroundings, I didn’t have those dreams. But as I told you in that letter, there was a period when the newness had worn off, when I hated everything because I was afraid of it. I think the cocktail party marked the beginning of this. I wanted to pack my bags and go back to Pindi – which interested me because when I was suffering this kind of homesickness in Pindi I wanted to pack my bags and go back to England. And just as I think you guessed something of what I was going through, so I believe did Lili. But how much of my restlessness – which I tried so hard to disguise – did she put down to my thinking about Mr Kumar? How much, indeed, was due to my thinking about him?
It was at this time that I broke my vow, never to go to the club because Lili couldn’t go with me. The girls I worked with at the Mayapore General were always on at me to go with them. And it was so easy to talk to them. I used to feel the relief of leaving the MacGregor House and cycling to the hospital and when I got there not caring what I said or how I said it, and being able to flop into a chair and complain about the heat – using all the little tricks of expression and gesture that you know will be understood, and which don’t have to be thought about. The luxury, the case, of being utterly natural. Giving back as good as you got if someone was edgy or bitchy. Being edgy and bitchy yourself. Letting it rip, like a safety valve.
So I started going with some of them to the club for a drink on my way home. They were usually picked up by young officers from the barracks, round about 5.30. There wasn’t any serious attachment going. Just boys and girls getting together in their off-duty and maybe sleeping somewhere if it could be fixed. We used to drive to the club in tongas, or in army trucks if the boys could ‘swing the transport’ as they called it. Then we’d congregate in the lounge-bar or the smoking-room, or on the terrace. Or there was a games room, where they had a portable and a lot of old dance records, Victor Sylvester, Henry Hall, and some new ones, Dinah Shore, Vera Lynn, and the Inkspots. Usually round about 6.30 I’d slip away and get a tonga home. I felt horribly guilty about going to the club because I’d told Lili I jolly well wouldn’t. She’d always said, ‘Don’t be silly, of course you must go.’ And I owned up at once, the moment I’d been, although on the way back that first time I was thinking up all kinds of excuses for being late. Once I’d owned up it made going again that much simpler, though. I felt less and less guilty and more and more at home in the club. Several times I stayed to dinner there, and only rang Aunt Lili at the last moment.
And then one day one of the boys who was a bit drunk and who’d insisted on coming with me to the phone said, ‘She’s not really your aunt, is she?’ I said, ‘No. Why?’ And he said, ‘Well, you don’t look as if you’ve got a touch of the tar brush. I’ve had a bet on it.’ And all kinds of little things fitted into place – oh, less in connection with what the boys and girls had said, but over the sort of things some of the civilian women had said, or rather not said. The way they’d looked when I said ‘The MacGregor House’ when they asked me where I was staying. The way some of the civilian men had chipped in and asked questions about you and Uncle Henry, as if (as I realised now) to test it out that I really was a niece of a one-time Governor and not some by-blow of Lili Chatterjee’s family.
But there is this, too, Auntie – I think this kind of thing would have run off me like water off a duck’s back if all the time, underneath the easy pleasure of being with the boys and girls, there hadn’t been a sort of creeping boredom, like a paralysis. Basically I hated the way that after a few drinks everything people said was loaded with a kind of juvenile smutty innuendo. After a while I began to see that the ease of companionship wasn’t really ease at all, because once you had got to know each other, and had then had to admit that none of you really had much in common except what circumstance had forced on you, the companionship seemed forced itself. We were all imprisoned in it, and probably all hated it, but daren’t let go of it. I got so that I would just sit there listening to the things that were said, thinking, ‘No, this is wrong. And I haven’t got this time to waste. I haven’t this time to spare.’
It was the evening I went to the club after the visit to the War Week Exhibition on the maidan that I first admitted this to myself. Was it just coincidence that I’d seen Hari again that afternoon, for the first time since the party? I suppose not. The two things were connected – the second meeting with Hari and my looking round the club and listening and saying to myself ‘I haven’t this time to waste’. And of course that other man was at the club too. Ronald Merrick I mean. Perhaps this wasn’t coincidence either.
*
I went to the War Week Exhibition on the Saturday afternoon, at about four o’clock, with three or four girls from the hospital and two or three young subalterns from the Berk-shires. We went to watch the parade and the military band which was the week’s grand finale. There were the finals of the boxing, too, and the wrestling. The boxing was nearly all between English boys, but the wrestling was between Indians from one of the Indian regiments. One of the girls said, ‘Oh no, I couldn’t bear to watch that,’ so we went to the boxing and watched these young soldiers dab at each other and make each other’s noses bleed. Then we went into the tea-tent. The parade was scheduled for 5.30. I’ve never seen anything like that tea-tent. Flowers everywhere. Long trestle-tables covered with dazzling white cloths. Silver-plated urns. Iced cakes, cream cakes, jellies, trifles. One of the boys we were with whistled and said that ‘some wog contractor was putting on a show and making a packet’. And of course this was probably true, and at once cancelled out the thought that only the English were having a beano, although it didn’t cancel out the picture you had of people at home scuttling off to the shops with their dismal little ration books. And it didn’t cancel out the thought of all the people who weren’t allowed in the tent, not because they couldn’t afford the price of the tea-ticket, but because this was the tent for ‘Officers and Guests’ only. There were a few Indian women there, the wives of Indian officers. But the mass of faces was white – except behind the tables where the servants were running up and down trying to serve everyone at once. A
nd ‘Officers’ was really only a polite way of saying ‘Europeans’ because there were plenty of civilians and their wives there too, but only white civilians, like the Deputy Commissioner, and several men I recognised from Lili’s parties as teachers or executives from the British–Indian Electrical.
The DC was standing talking to the Brigade Commander and as we passed them Mr White said, ‘Hello, Miss Manners. You know Brigadier Reid, I think.’ Why was I so pleased? Because at once the boys I was with sort of stood to attention and the girls looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. Apparently the Brigadier was previously stationed in Pindi and had met us once or twice at parties, but we only vaguely remembered one another. He asked after you and then the DC said, ‘How’s Lili?’ and I said ‘Fine’ and felt that somehow I was vindicated and no longer ranked in our little group as the odd girl who lived with ‘that Indian woman’. Because even if she was ‘that Indian woman’ the Deputy Commissioner called her Lili. And yet afterwards I was annoyed, too, because the DC hadn’t said, ‘Where’s Lili?’ He knew, without even having to think about it, that she was unlikely to be in the tent and therefore probably wouldn’t be on the maidan at all because she wouldn’t go to ‘the other tent’.
Anyway, I introduced the boys and girls, which rather made their day, but also helped to make mine later, when we were on our way across the maidan to the parade and I saw Hari and went up to him and talked to him for about five minutes while the others waited where I’d left them, and were prepared to wait because they couldn’t be sure who Hari might be if I was on chatting terms with the DC and the Brig. When I got back to them one of the subalterns said, ‘Who was that?’ so I just said, ‘Oh, a boy who was at Chillingborough,’ as if I had known him then and he had been a friend of my brother or some other male relation. Which shut them up, because none of them had been to anywhere as good. I was quite shameless. About being so snobbish, I mean. Because this was their weapon, not mine. I mean it was their weapon, then, in Mayapore, even if it wasn’t at home. I enjoyed the brief sensation I had of turning their world momentarily upside down.
*
Hari was at the War Week Exhibition for the Gazette. I didn’t recognise him at first – partly because I don’t see people very well without my glasses, but mainly because he looked different. It took me several meetings before I realised that since the cocktail party he’d spent money on new clothes – narrower, better fitting trousers (and not ‘babu’ white). In spite of his awkwardness at that party, I think that after it he had expected more invitations, and spent money he couldn’t afford so that he wouldn’t feel so out of place. At one of our later meetings I said, ‘But I’m sure you used to smoke. You had a cigarette at the party.’ He admitted this but said he’d given it up. Even then I didn’t immediately connect the new clothes and the money saved from giving up smoking, or see what these things meant in terms of the hopes Lili’s invitation had raised for him.
He’d spent all his life in England, or anyway from the age of two when his father sold all his land in the UP and went to live there. His mother had died when he was born, and once they were in England his father cut himself off from everyone except this one sister, Hari’s Aunt Shalini who had been married off at sixteen to a Gupta Sen, the brother of a rich Mayapore bania. In England Hari’s father made a lot of money, but then lost it, and died and left Hari penniless and homeless. And so there he was, just in his last year at Chillingborough, quite alone. His Aunt Shalini borrowed money from her well-off brother-in-law to pay Hari’s passage back to India. He worked for a time in the uncle’s office in the bazaar, but eventually got this job on the newspaper, because of his knowledge of English. Aunt Lili told me a bit of this (she got it from Vassi) but for ages I assumed that because his aunt’s brother-in-law was rich money was no problem to him, and I thought his working on a newspaper was from choice, not necessity. It took some time as well for me to understand that all the plans he and his father had had for him had come to nothing, because his ‘Uncle’ Romesh wouldn’t spend a penny on further education, but set him to work, and his Aunt Shalini had virtually no money of her own. And then, of course, it took some time for the penny to drop that Hari’s Englishness meant nothing in India, because he lived with his aunt in one of the houses in the Chillian-wallah Bagh – which was on the wrong side of the river.
When I went up to him on the maidan that day I said, ‘It’s Mr Kumar, isn’t it?’ which the white people nearby obviously took note of. I misjudged the reason for his silence and the reluctant way he shook hands. I said, ‘I’m Daphne Manners, we met at Lili Chatterjee’s,’ and he said, yes, he remembered, and asked how we both were. We chatted on like that for a while, with me doing most of the chatting and feeling more and more like the squire’s daughter condescending to the son of one of her father’s tenants, because that’s how he seemed to want to make me feel. I wondered why. I broke off finally, saying, ‘Come along any evening. It’s open house,’ for which he thanked me with that expression that meant he wouldn’t dream of coming along unless specially asked and perhaps not even then because he took the invitation as a meaningless form of politeness.
So off I went and rejoined the gang and sat for an hour watching the parade and listening to the band. And in the club that evening I stayed on for dinner and we talked about the marching and the drill. All the boys were awfully proud of themselves because of the boxing and the regimental precision of the Berkshires. You could sense flags flying everywhere. When Ronald Merrick turned up he came straight over to me, which wasn’t at all usual. Since the dinner party at Aunt Lili’s, when we didn’t particularly hit it off, we’d only exchanged a few words and had the odd drink or two for form’s sake if we bumped into each other at the club. He always seemed busy and unrelaxed, and happiest in the smoking-room talking to other men and getting into arguments. He had a bit of a reputation for being on the quarrelsome side, and apart from a number of unmarried girls who chased him people didn’t like him much. But this evening he came straight over to me and said, ‘Did you enjoy the parade? I saw you on the maidan.’ He sat and had drinks with us, and then came out with this semi-invitation to me to come along one evening and listen to his Sousa records, which the other girls chipped me about when he’d gone, coming out with that old joke about etchings, and never trusting a policeman. One of them said, ‘Daphne’s obviously got what it takes for Mr Merrick. I’ve been trying to land that fish for ages.’ One of the boys made a joke about what she meant by ‘takes’, so the subject was back to normal. Being a Saturday there was a dance on too, and the usual horseplay at the swimming pool. And out on the terrace you didn’t only sense the flags waving, you could see them. Scores of little flags strung among the fairy lights. There was an atmosphere of ‘We’ll show them’. The boy I was dancing with said that War Week had given the bloody Indians something to think about. Then he began to get amorous and I had to fight him off. I left him and went into the ladies and sat on the seat and listened to the scurrilous chat going on on the other side of the door and thought, No, it’s wrong, wrong. And later, back in the lounge-bar, deafened by the thumping band, I thought, ‘I haven’t this time to waste. I haven’t this time to spare.’
I felt as if the club were an ocean-going liner, like the Titanic, with all the lights blazing and the bands playing, heading into the dark, with no one on the bridge.
*
Auntie, promise me one thing, that if the child survives but you can’t bear to have it near you, you’ll try to see that the money I leave is used to give it some kind of decent start in life? I look around, trying to think where the child might go if it lives and I don’t. I don’t presume on your affection for me to extend to what is only half my flesh and blood, and half that of someone unknown to you – perhaps someone unknown to me, someone disreputable. I have got myself used to the idea that you won’t want it under your roof, in fact, please don’t worry on that score. It’s inevitable that a child so badly misconceived should suffer a bit fo
r my faults. In any case, let’s be frank, you probably won’t live for as long as the child would need you to if he first came to a fully conscious, recollective existence while under your roof. I think of Lili. But wonder, too. Perhaps as the child grows, some likeness to Hari will become apparent. I so much hope so. Because that will be my vindication. I have nightmares of the child growing up to resemble no one, black-skinned, beyond redemption, a creature of the dark, a tiny living mirror of that awful night. And yet, even so, it will be a child. A god-given creature, if there is a god, and even if there isn’t, deserving of that portion of our blessing we can spare.
I suppose the child – if I’m not here to nurture him – will have to go into a home. Couldn’t it be as well my home in a way? There is that woman whom they call Sister Ludmila. I asked her once whether she needed money. She said not, but promised to tell me if she ever did. Perhaps as she gets older (and I don’t know how old she is) she will spare a thought for the new-born as well as for the dying. It’s a logical progression.
By ‘decent start in life’, I don’t mean background or education, but much simpler things like warmth, comfort, enough to eat, and kindness and affection. Oh, all the things squandered on me.
If it is a boy, please name him Harry, or Hari if his skin is dark enough to honour that kind of spelling. If a girl – I don’t know. I haven’t made up my mind. I haven’t thought of ‘it’ as a girl. But if she is please don’t call her Daphne. That’s the girl who ran from Apollo, and was changed into a laurel bush! With me it’s been the other way round, hasn’t it? Rooted clumsily in the earth, thinking I’m running free, chasing the sun-god. When I was in my teens Mother once said, ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake stop gallumping!’ which puzzled and then hurt me because being tall I had an idea that I was a sort of graceful Diana type – long-legged and slender, taut as a bow, flitting through the forest! Poor Mother! She had a frightful talent for pouring cold water on people. It was David who taught me to see that she did this because she never knew from one minute to the next what it was she really wanted, so she felt that things were always going wrong around her, and had to hit out at the nearest likely culprit, usually Daddy, but often me. She adored David, though, which is probably why he saw through her more easily than Daddy and I did and was able to explain her to me. She never had her defences up for him. I suppose it was because even after years of living comfortably in England she still talked about India as if she had only just escaped from it a minute ago that I grew to feel sorry for it, and then to love it and want it for its own sake, as well as for Daddy’s. When I was old enough to understand them he used to show me snaps and photographs and tell me what I thought were wonderful tales of the ‘land where I was born’, so that when I first came back out here I was always looking for the India I thought I knew because I had seen it in my imagination, like a kind of mirage, shimmering on the horizon, with hot, scented breezes blowing in from far-away hills …
