Night Train to Jamalpur

by Andrew Martin

  ‘Mr Poole’s lovely really,’ Bernadette put in. ‘Ann adores him, but he’s a bit nuts, and practically always blotto. Claudine told me that her dad’s warned Mr Poole about his drinking.’

  Lydia turned away to take a fruit punch from a bearer.

  ‘I wonder what’s eating him,’ I said to Lydia. ‘Poole, I mean.’

  ‘He doesn’t get on with India; never has done since he came out here the year after the war. This year, he went down with prickly heat in February – before it was hot. You know it was Margaret who dragged him out here?’

  ‘That’s it,’ said Bernadette. ‘It was the only way they were going to get a reasonable number of servants.’

  ‘You see,’ said Lydia, ‘Margaret’s father had been in the Indian Army and he loved the life – very social, you know, and played all sports, whereas poor old Dougie’s a duffer at everything like that.’

  ‘He’s originally from a spot called Walthamstow,’ Bernadette put in, ‘and Claudine says he’s Walthamstow all over and that’s why Ann has a London accent.’

  ‘She probably says you have a Yorkshire accent,’ said Lydia.

  ‘Of course she does.’

  ‘Any more gossip about him?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bernadette. ‘We were talking about the snake attacks this afternoon, and Ann just happened to mention that her dad had kept snakes as a boy, and he’d written away to one of the boys’ papers about them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Asking advice. The letter was printed in the paper, anyhow.’

  ‘What paper?’

  ‘I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?’

  I would do. I had thought that if Poole had any involvement in the bad business going on around me, it might be that he’d sent in the dossier complaining about corruption in the traffic department. I certainly had not fingered him as the loony putting the snakes on the trains.

  I found Poole again a few minutes later. He’d got hold of a bottle of champagne, and was scrutinising the label. When I came up to him, I looked at it as well. It read, ‘Dry Elite.’

  ‘That’s a misnomer,’ he said.

  Dougie Poole had himself brought up the subject of the snakes just a moment before, so I felt at liberty to wade right in.

  ‘What do you reckon about the snakes?’ I said.

  ‘I reckon it must be the nationalist Johnnies going after all the top box-wallahs in the first class carriages,’ he said. ‘The snake would be a good weapon for them. Comes from the soil of India. So it’s like turning India itself against the imperialist enemy.’

  Having finished his glass of champagne, he was pouring himself another one.

  I said, ‘I’ve heard you had an interest in snakes, when you were a lad?’

  ‘I kept a snake,’ he said at length.

  ‘What sort?’

  ‘Oh, grass snake.’

  ‘Of course, they’re not poisonous.’

  ‘Venomous, Jim, venomous. No, they’re not that. And they’re beautiful as well. Greenest thing you ever saw. Like jade. I became very attached to him.’

  ‘I believe you sent away to a certain paper about the snake?’

  ‘You are well up on all this.’

  ‘I had it from the girls, you know.’

  ‘Yes. Well, when he was dying I sent away . . . for advice. To the captain.’

  ‘Captain who?’

  ‘The Captain, Jim. Paper of that name.’

  ‘Really? I had that as a boy as well.’

  ‘Did you really Jim? Did you love “Tales from the Indian Railways”? “Founded on fact”, they were . . . I don’t think. By H. Hervey, “illustrated by the author”. Did you notice how all the stories in The Captain were “illustrated by the author”? I think they must have been hard up. But “Tales of the Indian Railways” . . . What about that runaway train load of elephants with the monkey driving? Implausible in itself, but when you add in the other runaway trainload of elephants, coming the opposite way on the same line, also with a monkey driving . . . Bit hard to credit, even when you’re ten.’

  ‘What did they say about your snake?’

  ‘They said the snake was likely too cold, so I put it in the cupboard with the airing tank.’

  ‘Do any good?’

  He looked at me with his sad, down-pointing eyes.

  ‘Not a bit. Didn’t last more than another two days.’

  The guitar man in the band started making that chugging noise; another of the speciality dances was getting underway. I looked into the garden. There were as many people out there as in. It was backstage, so to speak: men smoking, women adjusting each other’s dresses and scanning their programmes. The church beyond was just a dark silhouette. Near the French windows, I noticed, one of the white-clad servants was presiding over a table on which stood not food or drink but a display of fancy, tasselled photograph albums. Dougie Poole having embarked on another of his weaving walks through the crowd, I approached this table, and I took out my reading glasses as the bearer presented one of the albums for my inspection. It showed past dances of the East Indian Railway Debating Society, labelled with the dates. The first dance had been held in 1904, so this present one was the nineteenth, not a very notable anniversary. Back in 1904, tails had been worn. As I leafed through the pages, I saw how these became ordinary dinner suits, and the women’s hair and dresses got shorter, the latter quite excitingly so. A woman was beside me. She said, ‘That was my husband,’ and she was pointing down to the page I had open, which was the page for the previous year: 1922.

  She was a woman in early middle age, beautiful in the Anglo-Indian way, and she wore black. She was one of the very few Anglo-Indians in the room. I looked again at where she pointed and saw photograph of a smiling, handsome man of medium features and perfectly symmetrical moustache. It was the late John Young. The woman introduced herself as Sonia Young, and over the sound of the band, I tried to commiserate with her loss, and to say something of my close involvement in her husband’s final hours. But she already knew. She had caught sight of me at the Institute.

  ‘I should apologise for my son. He was belabouring you.’ She looked slightly less Indian than her husband, but had a slightly more Indian way of speaking. ‘He is always resenting.’

  ‘I should think he’s entitled to a few resentments,’ I said, ‘after what happened.’

  ‘No,’ said Sonia Young, ‘because this world is open to him.’ She indicated the dance. ‘His father made sure of that. But he chooses to plough his own furrow.’

  ‘He is not in here then?’ I said, indicating the book.

  Sonia Young shook her head. ‘John and I though – plenty of times.’ Taking the book from my hands, she leafed through the pages, and the years. ‘We were quite a bit thinner then,’ she said, smiling. She was a very straightforward person.

  I said, ‘Perhaps your son sees a different India emerging.’ It was a strange thing to be saying, with the Elephant Glide or whatever it might be, yo-yoing away in the background, and Sonia Young didn’t think much of my suggestion because she said, ‘No . . . It is only a question of his temperament. He has a poor temperament. He gets it from me.’

  ‘Now I don’t believe that for a minute,’ I said.

  ‘You are calling me a liar?’ she said, with a raised eyebrow.

  ‘Not a bit of it,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve met John. You saw his temperament. You know it’s not from him.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘So what are you saying, exactly?’ she said, laughing.

  ‘That’s a good question, that is,’ I said, putting the photograph album back down, which caused the Indian in charge of it to bow at me.

  Sonia Young said, ‘Do you think it was these notorious criminal tribes, then, that killed my husband?’

  ‘The evidence points that way,’ I said.

  Mrs Sonia Young didn’t seem convinced about the criminal tribes, but at least she didn’t appear to think that I’d done it.
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  The music, and therefore the dancing, had stopped. The band members were leaving the stage for a breather, pushing towards the French windows and lighting cigarettes. To my left, I could hear Mary Bennett saying, ‘The bouquet? That was red roses, just as if we’d been marrying in Surrey! The cake was done at Firpo’s. Well of course they are the best.’

  Her prized husband, Superintendent Christopher Bennett, was standing about three feet away from her and looking spare. Once again, he acknowledged me, raising his hand in greeting. I thought he might be coming over, and so I turned to Mrs Young, saying, ‘This is a colleague of mine, Superintendent Christopher Bennett.’

  ‘I’m sorry, who?’ said Mrs Young. She still had half an eye on the tasselled album, and the photographs of the life she’d lost; and Christopher Bennett wasn’t coming over anyway.

  IV

  Moving through the ballroom, I heard, ‘The city engineer won’t walk under that veranda, so I’m dammed if I will.’

  Walking further, I heard, ‘. . . the ladies’ hockey season, that amusing prelude to the season of masculine hockey . . .’

  And then I heard, ‘There was this couple dancing at the Trocadero . . .’

  Dougie Poole was embarking on the Gurkha joke, the one Canon Peter Selwyn had told me in the Bengal Club. It was evidently doing the rounds.

  ‘Why the Troc?’ someone asked.

  ‘You’ll see,’ said Poole, and he paused, frowning. ‘No you won’t. They were dancing somewhere anyhow, somewhere in London . . . So they’re waltzing away, and the woman says to the man, “Do you come here often?” and he says, “No, not often because I’m in the army out in India, and I’m just home for a while on leave.”’

  A dozen sahibs and memsahibs were clustered around Poole, who was leaning against a food table. They all looked very worried as he pressed on with the joke: ‘So she says, “Oh, you’re in a good regiment, I’m sure,” and he says, “It’s a Gurkha regiment actually.” She says, “Really? But I thought the men in the Gurkhas were all black,” and he says, “No dear, only our privates are black.” Two of the memsahibs departed at this point – and sharpish. The band leader was announcing some new speciality, and Poole had to shout to be heard above him: ‘“But my dear,” says the woman, “how simply marvellous!”’

  One man laughed.

  Somebody had alerted Margaret Poole, and she came fast across the room. She took her husband by the shoulders, by which time all his listeners had moved away. ‘Douglas,’ she said. ‘You’ve had enough,’ and she turned towards me, saying, ‘Of course, he’d had enough an hour ago.’

  Two hours ago would have been nearer the mark, but she didn’t seem very upset. Margaret Poole spoke to her husband as if he were a child: ‘A peg is one part whisky to five parts water, dear. Not the other way round. And you have to get up early to go to Asansol.’

  There was a look of amusement on her face, if anything. Margaret Poole was rather tanned and capable-looking. Her frizzy hair might have been colourless but it sprouted very healthily. Dougie Poole had never felt the ‘Call of the East’; his wife had felt it. She was the sort of Englishwoman who was born to be on the back of an elephant. I asked a bearer for a glass of iced water, and, murmuring something about the great heat, I passed it to Margaret, who passed it to Dougie, whom she had now placed in a chair. It was pretty obvious that she cared for him, which perhaps made things worse for him, since he might be wondering why, and not finding a reason. I wondered why Poole had to go to Asansol. It was the best part of a day’s journey. Probably for a meeting about coal traffic: Asansol was a great centre for that. The meeting would likely be on Monday, and he would be travelling there tomorrow – on the Sunday – so as to arrive in good time.

  Leaving Dougie Poole in the capable hands of his wife, I resolved to seek out the bottle of Beck’s beer to which I was entitled. I found one at a corner table, where I lit a Gold Leaf. Blowing smoke, I thought ahead to the business I had in hand for Monday: an early visit with Deo Rana to a certain storeroom at the spot called Sheoraphuli, followed by an appointment with Professor Hedley Fleming of the Zoological Gardens; and I tried to see how the snakes, the Night Mail shooting and the possibility of corruption in the traffic department might all fit together. I hadn’t got very far, when a long-faced, rather religious-looking woman said, ‘Have I already given you one of these?’ It was Eleanor Askwith, and the leaflet concerned her charitable effort, the St Dunstan’s Fund.

  ‘You have actually.’

  At this rate, I might have to make a donation. She turned aside as the music stopped, and I saw that the band was vacating the stage to make way for her husband, William Askwith. He thanked us all for coming to the Nineteenth Annual East Indian Railway Debating Society dance. He told us how such occasions as this celebrated the fellowship of the Railway, the most important in India. These were difficult and uncertain times for the Company, with the government about to take over, but we in this room were united in a single aim: to serve the public. He then put in a word for that part-timers’ corps, the East Indian Railway Regiment, in which he was a major (new recruits were always welcomed), and also for the St Dunstan’s charitable effort, whose patroness was his wife, and which was a purely voluntary effort, with no paid workers, and much in need of donations. There was then a toast, and three cheers for the Railway.

  After the speech, I went to the palatial Gentlemen’s, where I drained off the Beck’s beer. When I returned, a new dance was in progress, but I could not see Lydia or Bernadette on the floor. I had also not seen them during the speech. I circulated the dance floor and, walking past the French windows, I heard Lydia’s voice, slightly raised, coming from the garden. As I approached her, I heard Mary Bennett: ‘Well, in the end common sense prevailed, so I wore the white charmeuse trimmed with diamante and sprays of . . .’

  Lydia stood in a group of people clustered under the branches of what I believed to be an ebony tree. Pretty Chinese lanterns hung from the black branches, but the conversation had taken a heavy turn.

  ‘Of course socialism can work in India,’ Lydia was saying to a railway officer.

  ‘My dear lady, I beg to disagree. It is quite incompatible with the religion, as all these Congress-wallahs are most uncomfortably aware.’

  ‘Which religion?’ Lydia enquired. ‘Hinduism?’

  ‘Naturally, yes. We have our classes, they have their castes – it’s much the same.’

  ‘Caste is fading.’

  ‘Is it my dear? Tell that to the untouchables sleeping in the gutters of Chowringhee.’

  ‘There is a great principle of egalitarianism in the religion,’ said Lydia.

  ‘Of what?’ enquired her opponent.

  ‘Of equality,’ said Lydia. ‘In Hindu philosophy we are all manifestations of God. We are all sacred.’

  ‘I’m not,’ said one old buffer lighting a cigar.

  ‘It is held that we are all one,’ the wife pressed on, and her opponent eyed her thoughtfully. Perhaps he was thinking her rather beautiful, as I was just then. He said, ‘You would have only one class only on the trains, I suppose?’

  ‘Classes on trains are neither here nor there,’ said Lydia, and the man eyed her for a further interval. He was trying to work up some sort of conclusion.

  ‘We all have to stick together,’ he said slowly. ‘But we are not all one.’

  The group began to break up; Lydia turned to me.

  I said, ‘Have you seen Bernadette?’

  ‘She’s around somewhere,’ she said, waving vaguely in the direction of the dark churchyard.

  She did not seem to care for the job of chaperone, which surely did fall to the mother of a girl. I followed a line of white lights to the low railing that separated hotel from churchyard. The air was soft and thick and hot, and full of the chirping of crickets. I walked once around the church, which had a low yellow light burning inside it, and coming round to the far side, I saw a couple lying on the grass. They embraced while lying on their sides in
a sort of horizontal dance hold. The woman was looking at me, so I said ‘Good evening’, and she replied politely, just as though she were not practically in the middle of the sex act. I stepped back over the railings, then back into the ballroom, where a speciality dance was in progress; what they called a ‘spot dance’, with a small number of couples showing off in a circle of admirers. Ann Poole was in there, so the Pooles had not gone home, in spite of Dougie’s condition. Ann danced with a regimental type – his shoes were exceptionally shiny, at any rate. Claudine Askwith was also there, also equipped with what appeared to be a young officer.

  It was then that I saw Bernadette. She was dancing with the R.K. She seemed to keep pushing him away to contemplate him, and after every contemplation, she would whirl him around, then pull him tightly towards her, as though highly satisfied with the result of her examination. I wondered how differently this would look if they were in love. I believed it would look more or less the same. I could see nothing but a world of trouble waiting for the girl, and so, when the music stopped, I walked directly over to Bernadette and took her by the arm, peeling her away from the R.K., who was beginning to make a salaam of some sort towards me.

  I said to Bernadette, ‘I have to speak to you urgently.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘In the garden.’

  Quite surprisingly, she did follow me out, and Lydia was there on the lawn. ‘We’re going home now,’ I said to the two of them.

  ‘We are not,’ said Bernadette. ‘Why are we?’

  ‘Because the dance has ended.’

  ‘No it hasn’t.’

  ‘For you, it has.’

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ said Bernadette.

  ‘It is slightly,’ said Lydia, folding her arms and eyeing me. Well, they were in it together. Bernadette made a move back towards the dance floor.

  ‘We’re going!’ I shouted after her, at which she veered off towards the black tree. She picked a Chinese lantern off the tree branch as though it had been an apple, and spun around hurling it towards me. The little candle inside flew out through the top and made a falling arc of light, a small shooting star, before extinguishing itself on the grass. I was hit by the paper concertina and a spray of hot wax.