‘You look absolutely lovely, my dear,’ said Sonia Young’s companion, as if that might make up for her being alone.
Eyeing me, Sonia Young said, ‘The main thing is that I look thin,’ and of course, I gave that remark the go-by, but she was now leaning towards me. ‘Don’t you think I look thin?’ she demanded.
‘You look very elegant.’
‘Thin!’ she said, slapping the table and laughing. She wore a single gold bangle on her wrist. An Indian woman would have worn several bangles, a European woman none at all.
‘Is your son about?’ I asked.
‘He is right there,’ she said, pointing through the crowd towards the bar, where Anthony Young was nursing a drink and looking like trouble. He eyed me. ‘What a charming expression,’ said Mrs Young, ‘but you needn’t worry about him coming over. He won’t have anything to do with me when I’m on this job.’
I knew the score. As far as Anthony Young was concerned, the Anglo-Indians were merely being patronised by the annual inclusion of a few of their number in the Debating Society dance, and he didn’t think it an event worth commemorating. Two tables over, Charles Sermon was holding forth, and I caught the sound of his rumbling tones: ‘. . . One of the Indian shikaris, a fine old Rajput who feared nothing this side of Nirvana . . .’ The chrysanthemum in his buttonhole was as white as the one he’d been wearing last time, but his white linen suit was a shade or two grubbier. Glancing up, he saw me. He looked surprised, but then signalled a friendly greeting before resuming his lecture. Meanwhile, Anthony Young had left his post at the bar. It seemed he was coming over to us after all.
‘You again,’ he said, glowering over me.
Sonia Young said to me, ‘He means “Hello, how are you?”’
‘Have you found my dad’s killer yet?’ At least he’d stopped accusing me of being the murderer, and in answer to his question I wanted to say that yes, I had; that his dad had been killed in a bungled attempted ambush on a nationalist revolutionary. But I kept silence.
Anthony Young didn’t go away. He was sipping a beer, continuing to glower.
His mother and her friend continued to paste in the photographs.
‘I don’t know why you bother with that rubbish,’ he said to her.
She said, ‘Now if you can’t be polite go away.’
‘How are you enjoying life as a travelling ticket inspector?’ I said.
‘It keeps me out of this place, anyhow.’
It didn’t seem to keep him out of it very much.
‘He won’t be in that sort of job very much longer,’ said Sonia Young.
Anthony Young was eyeing me. ‘She’s worried I’ll be mixing with the bloody darkies. She wants me climbing the ladder, man. Study the loco mags! Get your special apprenticeship!’
Mrs Young and her friend had left off pasting in photographs, and they were now looking back over the pictures of earlier years at the dance. Without looking up at her son, Mrs Young said, ‘With your brains, you could be a chief mechanical engineer by the time you’re thirty-five.’
‘Then I can join that bloody world,’ he said, indicating the album, ‘alongside a lot of men who keep their daughters away from me. Then, if I do get hitched, they won’t dare send their kids to where I send mine in case they pick up the chi-chi way of talking.’ He was eyeing me again. ‘Think about it, man. That’s no bloody good.’
From two tables over, Charles Sermon was saying to his Anglo-Indian friend, ‘Shall we have the other half?’ I had been warned that people in India would say this. It meant “Shall we have a second drink?” but this was the first time I’d actually heard it said. Sonia Young turned one of the pages of one of the albums, and Anthony Young stabbed his finger down on a photograph of a young European woman dancing with a young European man. ‘She’s a damned fine tart!’
‘You bugger off!’ shouted his beautiful mother, and the whole bar did fall silent for a moment.
I watched Anthony Young. It seemed to me that he was slightly less truculent, or slightly less drunk, than he had been the last time, but that could change, since he was now walking back to the bar. Slowly the hubbub of conversation rose again, and I wanted to give the impression to Mrs Young that I had taken this family spat smoothly in my stride, so I said: ‘Do you mind if I ask . . . was your father or mother English?’
‘I don’t mind,’ said Mrs Young, but her friend, addressing me for the first time, put in, ‘Some people would do.’
‘My mother was an opera singer,’ said Sonia Young, ‘on a tour of India. She was from Manchester. My father was an engine driver, and he was from Delhi originally, but he came here to work from the Howrah engine shed. He was a top-link man, always on the expresses. The engines called Atlantics, you know?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Big engines. The wheel arrangement is 4-4-2.’
‘I daresay it is, my dear,’ said Mrs Young, and she patted the back of my hand, as though I were a hopeless case.
‘An engine driver and an opera singer,’ I mused.
‘An intriguing alliance, you are thinking.’
‘It sounds almost—’
‘I’ll tell you what it sounded,’ said Mrs Young. ‘It sounded loud. They were forever rowing.’
She was once again looking over the photograph albums. She tapped me on the elbow, saying in a conspiratorial tone, ‘Here’s another intriguing alliance for you.’ She was indicating a page on which had been pasted a single extra-large photograph. It showed a collection of smiling couples standing in the garden of Wright’s Hotel, all taking a breather from the Debating Society dance.
‘What year?’ I asked, as she passed over the album.
‘Nineteen-eighteen,’ said Mrs Young, as a hand came over my shoulder, grabbed my tie, and pulled me backwards off my chair. Anthony Young was speaking calmly as he continued trying to strangle me on the floor of the bar. ‘You get out of here, man. You talk to my dad, and the next thing we know he’s bloody dead. Now you’re up to some new funny business with mater, you bloody—’
It was Charles Sermon, with the assistance of a couple of others, who pulled him off me. The others took the lad away, with his mother following and shouting choice insults at him. Sermon, breathing hard and looking me up and down as I readjusted my clothes, said, ‘No real harm done. Our young friend is being escorted from the premises, as they say. Now do you fancy a spot, old man? Out on the terrace, I mean?’
II
I sat on the terrace with Charles Sermon. The mali was near the low garden gate, dead-heading flowers with a pair of scissors. Beyond him, the cloud from the jute mill was conspiring with the sunset to make the whole of the railway lands orange. We had thought we were in for a display of shunting, but the tank engine in question, which had been manoeuvring promisingly some quarter of a mile off, had now stopped, remaining thoughtfully smoking in front of a rake of carriages. Sermon too was smoking, which he ought not to do since it made him wheeze. We had started with a few words about Anthony Young. Sermon was sure he could be the right sort of lad if taken in hand. He was thinking of writing to a couple of the railway colleges on the boy’s behalf. I had then asked him about the rebellion among the senior officers in 1919.
‘Oh yes,’ he said with a chuckle. ‘The supervising staff were all up in arms.’
‘So you yourself had no part in it?’
He shook his head.
‘But you were back with the Company by then – after your war service, I mean?’
‘That’s right, I came from France in late ’seventeen. The whole affair was put to rights pretty quickly. The petitioners came to terms with the Board. Pay grades and pension entitlements were redrawn in favour of the ex-army chaps, and a ten per cent war bonus was paid on top. I did pretty well out of that, I don’t mind saying. You can read all about it in the Company magazine for the following year, 1920. Of course, they glossed over the original grievance, but they went to town on the story of the amicable settlement.’
He wondered why I
had asked about it, and, watching him carefully, I had told him of the coincidence of dates with the first outbreak of snake attacks.
He coughed on his cigarette. ‘You’ve found a thread to follow, have you? I mean, you think it might all arise from the grievance of a top-grade man?’
I said I didn’t know.
‘Well, as many crimes are committed high as low,’ Sermon said, and it did occur to me that, as a man who spent half his life among the Anglo-Indians, he might not be a natural defender of the top men, even if they were British like himself.
I asked him about his coming retirement to the charming – I thought – seaside town of Scarborough. I was determined that he would like Scarborough, but he did not seem overly enthused at my mention of the funicular railway, which cost only tuppence for an all-day ticket, or the delicious Italian ices to be had at Giordano’s Parlour on the front. I had thought, in view of the white chrysanthemum, that he would be galvanised by my description of the Esplanade Gardens, but he merely said, ‘I suppose the air will do me good.’
I said, ‘You’ll be taking back a cabin-trunk full of memories.’
I was thinking of tiger skins and other souvenirs of his shikari years, but he said, ‘Oh, I might just take that trunk full of memories, and pitch it into the sea.’
‘A new start, then,’ I said, and he didn’t seem too sure about that either. He signalled to a passing bearer to bring drinks: watered whisky for himself, a lemonade for me.
I thought we’d better get off Scarborough. It was the one thing he wouldn’t hold forth on. He asked if I’d been in touch with Professor Hedley Fleming. I said I had been, and I told him a little of what Fleming had said. The drinks came. Still watching Sermon carefully, I told him of my late encounter with the snake men of the Howrah railway lands, and of my proposed encounter with their infamous uncle. Sermon seemed excited by this; it set him breathing fast. I supposed this was just the sort of yarn that you wouldn’t hear on the Scarborough Esplanade, and I believed he was almost on the point of asking to come along.
The mali came up, salaaming to us on his way into the Insty. He carried flowers, no doubt to make a display in there. He paused by Sermon’s chair, and they exchanged a few words, and laughed.
‘Were you speaking Bengali?’ I asked Sermon.
‘Hindustani,’ he said. ‘Picked it up in my travelling days. Not much use in the traffic office, of course.’
Mention of that office prompted me to ask if he knew Harry Jebb, the fellow Dougie Poole had mentioned as suspecting corruption. Sermon nodded. ‘I knew him a little. He’s taken superannuation, I believe.’
‘Any grievance against the Company?’
‘Not that I know of. Why bring him up? He can’t be responsible for the snakes. He’s back in Blighty.’
‘Oh, Dougie Poole just happened to mention him.’
‘Poole,’ said Sermon, in a thoughtful sort of way. ‘Curious chap . . . deep thinker.’
He’d said much the same about him the last time we’d discussed Poole. I might be speaking out of turn by letting on that Poole had got the chop, but I steered the talk towards Askwith, and I did let on that he’d told me about his new system of traffic control.
Sermon frowned. ‘Now I know a new scheme is being talked of – part of the drive to economical working . . . But I rather thought it was Poole himself that had cooked it up.’
It was my turn to feel an access of excitement, because I had suspected just such a thing.
‘And it’s not as if he was given a special duty to do it,’ Sermon continued. ‘He just dreamed it up on a venture, and he’d been hawking it around without much prospect of success.’
I said, ‘I’ll tell you another curious fact about Poole. He has an interest in venomous snakes.’ I ought not to have said it, but I couldn’t resist.
‘Does he now? How do you know he has that interest?’
I was so far out on a limb, there was no going back. I said, ‘When he was a boy, he wrote to one of the boys’ papers asking advice on how to keep them.’
‘What paper?’
‘The Captain.’
‘We have The Captain here. What number?’
‘March 1897, page 33.’
‘Hold on a moment.’ Wheezing somewhat, Charles Sermon rose to his feet and walked into the Insty, as I sat in the heavy heat of late afternoon, and thought about Dougie Poole. A couple of minutes later, Charles Sermon came out holding the volume of Captains that corresponded to the one I’d read in Bertram’s Club, Darjeeling, but this one was bound in the maroon covers rather than blue as at Bertram’s. Sermon was holding the book open.
‘Rum,’ he said, passing it over.
There was no ‘Naturalist’s Corner’ on page 33; there was no page 33 at all. It – apparently alone of all the pages in the volume – had been neatly sliced out near the spine.
III
Monday dawned with a suffocating grey sky. It made the white municipal palaces of Calcutta seem whiter still, giving them a sort of gold-edged glow – and it trapped in the heat. I spent the first part of the morning in the office on Commission of Enquiry business. I then glanced again at the documents relating to September 1919, but Charles Sermon had convinced me that the unrest among the railway top brass in 1919 was a matter of no account as far as the snake business was concerned. I had not yet unrolled the bundle of documents I’d made on the previous Friday. I’d been carrying it in my suit-coat pocket off and on, and it was there again now. At eleven o’clock I considered returning to the Insty in hopes of inspecting more closely the photograph of the Debating Society dance in 1918 – the one Mrs Sonia Young had been about to show me before I’d been pounced on by her son. I wanted to verify what – or rather who – I thought I had glimpsed in that photograph before the violent interruption. I had in fact returned to the bar of the Insty after my talk with Sermon on the Saturday afternoon, only to discover that Mrs Young had left for home and taken the albums with her. I was now frustrated again, because Jogendra Babu informed me that the Insty was closed all day Monday.
At midday, Deo Rana came into the office. He was keen to be off to the snake men’s uncle, even though we’d been told he wouldn’t be pitching up until the mid-afternoon. I said, ‘Won’t we be early?’
‘Better than late,’ said Deo.
I still didn’t understand this assignation. Was the snake men’s uncle only open for business at certain fixed times? If he were itinerant, then how could his nephews (who were apparently also his enemies) be so certain of his movements? If Deo Rana knew, he wasn’t letting on. I caught up the map showing the location, and I stowed my Webley in my suit-coat pocket. We went down into Fairlie Place and, there being no police tongas available, we hailed one plying for hire, a two-horse job.
The tonga set off fast. It turned right out of Fairlie Place, and into Dalhousie Square. We then began running south along Government Place, where we came alongside trams. It seemed we were beginning to race one of them. As the tram rocked along, a spray of sparks tumbled from the pantograph collecting the power from the overhead, and it was as if the sparks had ignited the lighting that now flashed. I eyed Jogendra, waiting for the great crash of thunder. When it came there was no flicker of reaction on his face. We pressed on, now under roaring rain. Through the window slats, I saw people running in all directions, and umbrellas were sprouting at a great rate like so many black flowers.
A few minutes later we turned left off Kidderpore Road into Lower Circular Road; we then turned into Bhawanipore Road, where there were no other tongas. We were closing on the place that had been marked on the map. Bhawanipore Road had once been grand, but now some of the buildings were roofless, with palm trees sprouting inside, and most of the window shutters smashed, or sagging at odd angles. We turned again, into a nameless road, and here was further deterioration, the houses becoming so many brick or tin hutches under the worsening rain. Canvas canopies were attached to some, and all this material shuddered in the storm like rigged
sails. The road ended at a stinking black canal.
Tolly’s Nullah was a waterway that had been de-silted a hundred years before by a certain Colonel Tolly . . . but then it had silted up again, at least in part. It still connected the docks on the Hooghly with a couple of other rivers to the east of the city, but Colonel Tolly would have been disgusted at the state of it in 1923. In that lashing rainstorm, Tolly’s Nullah resembled a black-ink etching of Tolly’s Nullah.
We had come to rest on the black muddy south bank of it. We climbed down, and paid off the tonga-wallah. Two white cows loitered on the black beach, one with a scrap of pink ribbon attached to a horn; there were also a number of broken carts. Immediately to the left of us stood a derelict pumping station that appeared mosque-like. In the corresponding position on the opposite bank stood a lone chimney, a mysterious vapour swirling around the top of it. A sailing ship with broken masts and spars rotted in midstream, and alongside it a smaller boat (it might once have been a lighter to the sailing ship) revolved in the swirling waters at about the speed of the second hand of a watch. We had arrived at the very spot marked on the map, but there was no sign of the snake men’s uncle. Deo Rana was pointing to the right, and there – a hundred yards or so along the bank – was a parked tonga. The tonga-wallah sat up top, huddled in an oilskin cape; and two men were approaching the tonga from the direction of the water. One was a big European fellow in oilskin cape and sola topee. The other was a small Indian in loose white clothes, and with a blanket around his shoulders. These two were Charles Sermon and the gardener, or mali, of the Railway Institute. I ought to have guessed that these two were in partnership somehow. I made rapidly towards them across the black beach with Deo Rana in tow. As we walked I shouted over my shoulder, explaining to Deo Rana the identity of the two men we were approaching, because, as far as I knew, he had never clapped eyes on either before.
Night Train to Jamalpur Page 26
