‘I’m half buried,’ he said. ‘I don’t think my jigger will do the trick.’
Fisher took a club from his own bag, and carried it over to the R.K.
‘Will that one fit the bill?’ asked the R.K.
‘I should bloody hope so,’ said Fisher, blowing smoke. ‘It’s called a bloody “sand wedge” after all.’
I was thinking, ‘Is that any way to talk to royalty?’ when some sensation, the cause of which I was not immediately aware, made me turn to see a golf ball flying towards my eye at a hundred miles an hour; I rocked back. I had escaped practically certain death by two inches, and I had done so because Fisher and the R.K. had given a joint shout of ‘Fore!’ in the very nick of time. The ball had been struck by one of the two Englishmen behind, and he was approaching now as I picked myself off the ground, ‘Sorry about that, old man,’ he was saying. ‘I was trying to cut the corner. By rights it would have gone miles over your head, but I rather topped it.’
‘I don’t think it is quite within the spirit of the game,’ said the R.K., with folded arms. ‘Not etiquette.’
‘Well, now,’ said the Englishman, ‘as to that . . . I have apologised sincerely, and I do not think I need further instruction in what is, after all, a game invented in my home country.’
He was English and golf had actually been invented in Scotland. But what he meant was that he wouldn’t take instruction from an Indian.
‘Faults on both sides,’ suggested the other Englishman.
Fisher walked fast towards the first Englishman, and belted him hard in the face. ‘There are now,’ he said.
I had known the fellow was for it, simply because Fisher had dropped his good cigar and trodden on it before making his advance. I could see the Havana now, flattened and dead in the semi-rough. The R.K. was shaking his head and looking down at the ground. The two Englishmen, one of them bleeding heavily from the nose, were hurrying back to the clubhouse with Fisher staring after them. For them, and for us, the game was over.
Chapter Ten
I
The hall at the Gymkhana Club was more like a gymnasium to my mind: a bare, echoing place with a viewing gallery running around the top. At least, that had been my impression at seven o’clock. Come eight o’clock, the place was no longer bare, but packed with perspiring dancers who moved under an ever-thickening cloud of cigar smoke and whisky fumes.
Lydia and I had had two waltzes, and had eaten the supper that had been served at ten. It had been a good dinner, involving a transparent soup with shredded meat in it, a haddock in cheese sauce, and lamb chops – but all in French. We now stood side by side on the gallery, looking down at the dancers. It was like looking down on a fairground, with multiple little coloured revolutions occurring. The dancers included Bernadette, Ann Poole and Claudine Askwith, and the music was one of the American specialities, which the lead bandsman called ‘jass’. Bernadette, Ann and Claudine were all about the familiar business of embracing their partners, holding them out for inspection, approving of what they saw, and so embracing them again. Each danced with a young subaltern, or at any rate men in white mess jackets and sparkling shoes.
The R.K. was present, or had been, and he and I had chatted pleasantly about small-gauge railways. He had then danced one dance with Bernadette, and he may now have left for another social function entirely. Bernadette, twirling away below me, did not seem to be missing him.
This could be accounted for as follows . . .
After the golf game, I had returned to Cedar Lodge to find Lydia in but Bernadette out on a call with her friends. I had explained about the game to Lydia, and I had given her my insights into the character of the R.K. I had told him of the commercial offer he had made me, and I said I’d found him a thoroughly pleasant and sensible young fellow, almost completely European in his ways. I doubted very much that he kept a harem, and so on.
Eventually Lydia cut in, saying, ‘Tell Bernadette all that.’
‘But it would only encourage her,’ I said.
Lydia, who had been sitting on the sofa and drinking a beef tea made with milk (she had been drinking no end of that revolting concoction recently), had made no answer to this, except to slowly shake her head before taking another sip of her drink. Darjeeling, it seemed, was not doing her any good at all.
When Bernadette was delivered back to Cedar Lodge, I proposed that she and I go for a walk. She said she didn’t want to come; she had a jigsaw to be getting on with. I told her the jigsaw could wait. She said, ‘No, it can’t.’ I said I wanted to tell her about a game of golf I had just played with the R.K., and at this she had put on her coat again directly.
We walked, through failing light, towards that part of town called Chowstra, a pretty little colony of chalets and trinket shops. We walked into a wood-smelling tea shop, and I bought Bernadette a cup of cocoa.
‘I bet Raju’s ripping at golf,’ she said.
‘He’s very nearly as good as me,’ I replied.
‘But you’re atrocious at golf.’
The observation was grist to my mill, so I kept silent.
‘You talked to him about me, I suppose.’
‘The moment I mentioned your name, he immediately knew who you were. He said, “Yes, she’s the friend of Ann and Claudine.”’
Another silence.
‘I don’t believe you,’ Bernadette said. ‘You’re just trying to make me think less of him.’ And there were tears in her eyes.
I said, ‘I am being completely honest.’
‘Swear on your mother’s grave.’
My mother had died at the moment of my birth, as Bernadette well knew. She had often called on me to swear on her grave, and I did so again now. ‘And I am being completely honest when I say I found him a thoroughly likeable young chap. I’m sure he doesn’t keep a harem, and it was ridiculous of me to think that he did.’
‘Yes. It was.’
‘He and I hit it off pretty well. Did you know he has a keen interest in small-gauge railways?’
Bernadette was looking sidelong; but she was rallying, I could tell. There would be no more tears.
‘He’s planning to lay out one himself,’ I continued, ‘in the two-foot gauge. He and his father are more like company directors than minor royalty, and they run Suryapore very much on business lines, but also with one eye on the interests of the people. They pay their taxes as you said, and they give no trouble. They’re a model of the kind of rulers that the government wants to encourage. Now I don’t know how things stand between the two of you, but if you wanted to have him around for tea or something, then I for one would make no objection. In fact, I’d very much enjoy the chance to have another chinwag with him.’
Bernadette was looking at her empty cup. At length, she said with utter disgust, ‘A chinwag?’
As we walked back to Cedar Lodge, she said, ‘He has an interest in railways, you say?’
‘Little ones, yes.’
And we walked on in silence.
I did not believe that I alone had been responsible for Bernadette’s cooling towards him, but my approval of the chap had apparently sealed his fate, and I believed I had rescued my daughter from what could only have been a painful entanglement on both sides. But if the wife was pleased about this outcome, then she had not said so. She had appeared indifferent. Her gloomy mood had continued, and she was silent as she stood beside me now, on the gallery of the Gymkhana hall. Presently, she did a half-turn towards me to say something. I couldn’t hear above the pounding of the ‘jass’, but she moved away from me directly after. As a rule, the wife never gloomed for more than a day, and I was starting to think there was more to this than the matter of a return of cards.
I wandered down from the gallery, and through the hall. The band members were taking a breather, so I could hear the talk of the guests.
I heard, ‘They’ve overdone the servants. You can’t see the bloody wood for the trees.’ And I heard, ‘Do they ever go out and about, the purdah ladies?’<
br />
I stepped outside, and lit a Gold Flake. The evening was mild. Rickshaws awaited, and a couple of motors, but not the R.K.’s. Yes, he must have left already, and Fisher had not shown up at all. I crossed the road, from where I could look out over the downward portion of the twinkling town. It was a beautiful spot, but it had made my wife miserable – or something had.
I tossed away my cigarette stump, and re-entered the hall, where I saw Dougie Poole taking a drink from one of the tables that lined the hall. He was wavering somewhat as he moved away with it, and I wondered whether he had sobered up even for a moment since I had seen him last. I then clapped eyes on William Askwith. He was saying to a big, lobster-like man, ‘You get rather a mixed bag up here, now,’ and he was eyeing Poole all the while. In spite of the blankness of Askwith’s face, it was pretty clear to me that he thought Poole an unfavourable specimen. Askwith’s eye now fell on me with, perhaps, a different sort of blankness on his face. He approached with hand outstretched, and every appearance of amiability.
‘Captain Stringer,’ he said. ‘Delighted to see you here. I hope the mountain air is clearing your mind of any Commission of Enquiry headaches with which you may be afflicted?’
It was difficult to know what to say to that.
‘As a loyal servant of the Company, it would be quite wrong of me to suggest that you have been enjoined to clean the Augean stables, Captain Stringer, but—’
‘There’s a lot to be getting on with,’ I said, ‘yes. But I know you’re pretty hard-pressed in traffic as well.’
‘Quite so, and to continue the equine train of thought, we are rather changing horses in mid-stream. You may have heard that we had considered putting in to the Board for substantial new orders of rolling stock.’
‘Passenger or freight?’
‘Oh, both. We had conducted the necessary surveys, and armed ourselves with a pretty watertight case . . .’
‘But surely’, I said, ‘there’s no shortage of passenger carriages at least. At any one time there are hundreds standing idle around Howrah. A carriage might be there for a couple of months between runs, surely? And they’re not properly guarded, hence all this snake trouble.’
Askwith’s expression did not change, because it could not change.
‘The Board might well have made that very same point, Captain Stringer, had we proceeded with our application. It is likely they would also have trotted out the familiar line that when Indian passenger carriages are overcrowded, the Indians simply resort to travelling on the roof!’
I gave the half smile that seemed to be required.
‘Such observations are always likely to be made by those unacquainted with the plans and diagrams from which we work. Nevertheless, in consideration of the economy drive presently underway, we propose to withdraw our application for supplementary stock, and I will propose instead a more scientific system of rotation.’
Askwith was raising his glass in greeting to someone over my shoulder.
‘And how would that work?’ I said.
‘In essence, the periodical repairs ought to occur after a certain number of miles rather than a certain period of time. That way, the number of running miles would be kept permanently in view, and in place of a mass of irrelevant documentation I would like to see introduced a new and simplified distribution card – a universal document, you see – for every rake of carriages or wagons, these to be filled out by the running men, and also used as a record by the traffic managers.’
‘I see,’ I said, because I almost did.
But now the woman who’d been signalling to Askwith came up and claimed him, and I went looking for the wife, while revolving all that Askwith had said, and wondering above all why why he’d given me all that technical stuff. I knew I’d found Lydia when – during another pause in the music – I heard an aggrieved male voice saying, ‘You seem awfully keen to get the British out of here.’
He was in a sitting-out room together with Lydia and half a dozen others. The speaker was somewhere at the top of the Boss Class, a friend of Askwith’s. His name was Kendall, I believed, and he had public school written all over him.
‘I don’t wish to be rude,’ he said to Lydia, ‘but you could make a start by leaving yourself.’
‘My passage home is booked for 30 August on the P&O line,’ Lydia said, which was true enough. ‘On returning, I will be giving a series of talks to some organisations I am involved with, and I will speak of the charm, politeness, modesty and forbearance I’ve met out here.’
‘She means from the natives,’ somebody said, rather bitterly.
‘I mean from the Indians.’
‘They’re not all forbearing,’ said Kendall. ‘There are people at this dance who’ve been the victims of revolutionists.’
‘Who?’
‘Major Askwith,’ said Kendall. ‘He was riding on a tram in Calcutta, and he—’
‘Had his hat removed, yes.’
‘He could have had a sunstroke.’
‘Yes,’ said Lydia. ‘But instead of that, he walked into the Army & Navy Stores and bought himself a new hat.’
‘I was talking to him at the Governor’s tea party,’ said Kendall. ‘Do you know what that man does to bring on young Indians in his department of the railway? Damn it all, we’re here for their own good.’
Lydia said, ‘So British India is one big charitable endeavour?’
Silence for a space.
‘You could say that, yes.’
A clever-looking old woman in a long Victorian dress gave a snort at that. She very delicately took a thin cigarette from a silver case and lit it. She was enjoying herself no end.
‘As Christians,’ Lydia said to Kendall, ‘. . . we are all Christians, I suppose . . ?’
Somebody said, ‘Rather.’
‘. . . As Christians,’ Lydia ran on, ‘we’re not supposed to assert our moral superiority.’
‘Who says?’ enquired Kendall, genuinely baffled.
‘John 8:7.’
‘Well, I daresay . . .’ said Kendall, who’d gone a bit vague.
‘“Let he that is without sin cast the first stone”,’ quoted the man who’d said ‘Rather.’
The shrewd-looking old lady pointed her cigarette at Lydia and said, ‘I think you’ve just asserted your moral superiority.’ It was a blow struck on Kendall’s behalf, but he didn’t seem to have noticed. He was lumbering along some distance behind.
He said, ‘I’m not asserting my own moral superiority . . .’
‘Anyone who knows Mr Kendall knows that would be ludicrous,’ said the old woman.
Kendall said, ‘I’m asserting the moral superiority of the British state over the condition of anarchy.’
Somebody said, ‘I think we lost the moral high ground after the Amritsar massacre,’ and everyone turned towards the new speaker, a young subaltern by the looks of him. This was a very unexpected – and strong – intervention on Lydia’s side.
Kendall said, ‘You are speaking of the Ajnala incident?’
Lydia said, ‘When they kill us it’s an “outrage”, when we kill them it’s an “incident”.’
‘Who is your husband?’ the old woman suddenly asked Lydia. She seemed to keep switching sides – just to keep trouble brewing.
‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with anything,’ said Lydia, but somebody pointed to me, saying, ‘There he is.’
Kendall looked my way: ‘You’re a railway officer, I think?’
I explained that I was a police detective, seconded to the East Indian Railway Commission of Enquiry.
The man who’d pointed me out (whom I’d never clapped eyes on before), said, ‘You’re on a sort of busman’s holiday, I suppose. No offence meant.’
‘I’ve nothing against busmen,’ I said.
Half turning towards me, Lydia said, ‘I should imagine my husband fought alongside plenty of them in the Somme Battle.’
I could have kissed her for that, especially since she looked so mise
rable. As a rule, this sort of ding-dong would do wonders for her.
The doughty old woman said, ‘Can’t see why anybody would mind an investigation. Unless they were on the take.’
Kendall, who had coloured at the Somme remark, coloured further at that.
Lydia stood up and looked across the room at me, with a sad half-smile that I could not understand.
Bernadette too was silent in the tonga as the three of us rode back to Cedar Lodge. But whereas the wife’s silence was unfathomable, Bernadette’s was less heavy and more thoughtful. I was convinced that her infatuation with the R.K. was over, and so I had scored a victory on that front. I also felt that the question of Fisher had been satisfactorily resolved. All, or most, of his mysterious behaviour could now be accounted for, and I intended to reward myself by spending my last full day in ‘the hills’ doing little or nothing.
Back in Calcutta, Lydia and Bernadette had booked a programme of cross-country horse rides, and these would start tomorrow, from some stables at Ghum. Perhaps the exercise would do something to buck Lydia up, or maybe it would take my own departure to do that. I was an anchor to the wife’s social ambitions, and she might float free without me.
There were no returned cards waiting for her at the Lodge, but as Ajit took our coats, he handed me a small and more official envelope that had arrived for me only an hour earlier. It was from the duty sergeant at the Darjeeling police office on Auckland Road. Detective Inspector Khudayar Khan of the Calcutta CID was in town, and he would be obliged if I would get in touch as soon as practically possible so that arrangements could be made for a further interview regarding the shooting of John Young on the night train to Jamalpur.
II
The arrangement made was that the detective inspector would come to Cedar Lodge. It happened that the door was opened to him by Lydia, and I heard her speaking rather merrily to him as I came downstairs. His presence seemed to have a galvanising effect on her, even though I had warned her that he could be out to fix a murder charge on me. She was holding his Panama hat as she said, ‘It seems a shame to sit chattering over teacups in such a very beautiful place.’ I did not catch his murmured response. He did not need to say much, looking as he did: blue twill suit with military cut, starched white collar.
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