The Repercussions

by Catherine Hall

  Over the past weeks, the pictures in my head of our life together in India – the touring honeymoon of the great sights, a moonlit walk by the Taj Mahal, summers in the foothills of the Himalayas, children, a boy and a girl, the two of us sitting on a veranda together when we are sixty, watching the sun go down – all those pictures, as clear to me as slides on a magic lantern, have faded one by one and disappeared.

  I grieve for those old imaginings as if they had been memories, as if all of that had happened and was then lost. But as those dreams have vanished, new ones have taken their place.

  Six months ago Hari would have been part of the background: a nameless Indian. I remember the group of soldiers coming down the station platform and thinking how foreign they looked. I never thought I might have a conversation with one of them, let alone be enchanted by his stories. How foolish I was, how naive.

  If Colonel MacLeod or Colonel Campbell were to find out, they would clear their throats and be gruff and pained, and we would both be sent away. They would think I was no better than the women who climbed on the railings to catch a glimpse of the patients.

  Perhaps I am no better. I no longer care.

  Mamma and Papa would care. Papa may well be a matter-of-fact man who talks about all people being the same on the operating table, but I know enough to be sure that such thoughts would disappear were he to be faced with the prospect of an Indian son-in-law.

  Son-in-law? What I am thinking, to speak of marriage? I must confess that I have indulged in daydreams, replacing my previous imaginings of Robert and me with ones of Hari and me, disembarking from the boat at Bombay arm in arm, then travelling on the overnight train to Calcutta, the train pushing through the darkness, over the Indian plains, while we sit in our compartment talking tales of Bengal and beyond.

  These are wicked thoughts. A week ago, I was preparing to commit myself to Robert for life. I would have stood in a church and made my wedding vows, promising to be with him for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health. Instead, at the first hint of sickness, I am ready to leave.

  I may very well be wicked, terribly wicked, to transfer my affections from one man to another with such seeming ease. It is not with ease. I mourn and grieve the one I leave behind. But this war has taught me something: that happiness cannot be counted on: it is fleeting and must be grabbed and held on to.

  Forty-One

  When I woke up it took me a moment to remember, then I felt an awful, crushing sadness. I lay for a while on the hard bed, my head thudding, sweating out the alcohol, then got up and checked the news on my computer. There wasn’t much more, except a confirmation that the bombing had been ordered by the Taliban. An updated body count was given, but no names. I thought of Molly, a decade before, talking to victims’ relatives, scribbling furiously in her notebook.

  “I always take down names,” she’d said. “Give a person a name in a news report and they’re important. They mean something. That’s what you’d want for your family.”

  I knew Rashida would have been buried already, following Islamic custom, but I didn’t know where. After a while, I phoned Faisal.

  It was a difficult conversation. Both of us were close to tears.

  “If I hadn’t persuaded her to help me that one last time, she’d be alive.”

  There was a pause.

  “Jo,” he said. “In that case, I could say that I am guilty too. I recommended Rashida to you. Who can say where anything starts? We just know where it ends.”

  “Her brothers won’t think like that. Should I contact them? Should I speak to her father?”

  There was another pause.

  “I don’t think that would be wise.”

  “Please Faisal, I want to see her grave.”

  “I’ll find out where it is.”

  As I was leaving the guest house to go to the cemetery, I saw that there was a voicemail waiting on my phone.

  “Hello Josephine. David Holmes here, a friend of your great-aunt Edith, the executor to her will. I’m afraid I have some bad news. Edith died three days ago, on Monday. The cancer spread very quickly at the end. I’m not quite sure where you are – I know you often work abroad, but the funeral will be on Friday, at the Lawn Memorial Cemetery in Brighton. I do hope you’ll be able to come. My telephone number is—”

  I cut him off, unable to believe what I was hearing. Edith had never mentioned being ill. When I saw her last, before I left, she’d seemed frail, but no more than usual. I’d brought her a bottle of whisky and we’d sat together, sipping it from crystal tumblers. Had she held me tighter than usual when she’d said goodbye? Had she known it was the last time she’d see me?

  Edith. The last one that I could call family. Gone.

  The chowkidar beckoned to me.

  “Taxi,” he said.

  I made my way over to the car. Faisal looked at me and said nothing, probably thinking my tears were for Rashida. I didn’t know whom my tears were for any more – they weren’t something that could be divided, assigned to an individual.

  I pulled my headscarf over my face. “Come on, Faisal,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  The cemetery, in the west of the city, was one of the bleakest places I’ve ever seen, a wasteland of brown dirt heaped into mounds. No gate, no fence, nothing to show that this was a place to honour the dead. No headstones, no flowers, just pieces of rock, a few poles hung with tattered rags. The only other person there was a woman, kneeling in the earth, her burqa pushed back as she wept with her head on a rock that she gripped with tight, weathered hands.

  We made our way across the cemetery, stumbling over rocks and lumps of dirt, trying to avoid the graves. Faisal seemed to know where he was going, and I followed two paces behind, my eyes screwed up against the gritty dust.

  Rashida’s grave stood out among the others – freshly dug, the earth soft. The mound was very small. I thought of tiny, smiling Rashida, lying there for ever and I began to cry again, for her and for everyone else who’d died: the people I’d worked with, the people I’d photographed, Edith, my sister, Mum and Dad.

  I can’t do this any more, I thought. I’ve got to stop. I’m going home.

  Leaving Kabul took a while. There were people to see, goodbyes to be said. I went back to the prison, to give the women prints of their photographs, hoping they wouldn’t ask about Rashida. I paid a visit to Leila and the rest of Faisal’s family. Faisal and I looked at each other helplessly, knowing how much there was to say and how little we would.

  “Will you come back?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Perhaps, one day, in a while.”

  “Will you write?”

  “Of course. I’ll let you know what happens to Leila’s pictures.”

  First I had to get myself back home, wherever that was. I’d been in touch with David Holmes to explain that I couldn’t go to the funeral. That was when he told me about the flat. As soon as he said it, I thought about hiding out there for a bit.

  “Can I do that?” I asked.

  “Officially we should wait until probate is granted.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “It could be six months, even longer.”

  “Oh.”

  There was a pause. “Edith was never a stickler for rules. And she was very fond of you. I know you have a key. Why don’t you go and look after the place while we sort out the legalities?”

  Which is how I ended up in Brighton. Twenty-four hours before, I’d packed up my rucksack and my camera bags, taking only what I needed, leaving books for the guest-house library next to a pile of clothes and odds and ends for the man who cleaned my room. Pulling on jeans and an old hooded top, I paid baksheesh to the sweeper and the chowkidar, then got into a cab.

  I didn’t go straight to the airport, but to the old city and the house with the high walls. Standing outside it, remembering the peace of that afternoon, the coffee and mulberries, the photo albums of Kabul, I realized I couldn’t go in, c
ouldn’t face the old man and his grief. I shoved the envelope with the print of Amanullah and Rashida into the hands of the chowkidar together with a dollar bill, and ran back to the taxi.

  As we made our way past the roadside stalls and pavement hawkers, ragged boys and stray dogs, I leant my head against the taxi window, thinking of how much and how little the city had changed since I first drove in from the Shomali Plains a decade before. I’d thought there might be hope when I’d seen the crazy wedding halls and all those new blocks of flats. Now all I felt was a heavy, miserable exhaustion.

  On the plane, I took off my headscarf and put up my hood, retreating into it, staring out of the window at the mountains. I moved through Dubai airport like a ghost, then spent the flight to Gatwick drinking whisky. A train to Brighton, a cab along the seafront and, well, you know the rest.

  Forty-Two

  ELIZABETH WILLOUGHBY’S DIARY

  22nd May 1915

  I have spent the past three days in a horrible state, my mind filled with hopes and their corresponding fears. It is all very well to indulge in daydreams of Hari and me together, of trains to Calcutta and boats to Bombay, but where is my proof that he feels the same?

  There was another reason for my reaction when he warned me about Robert. I realize now that I had hoped he might declare his feelings. I find myself going over conversations, looking for clues as to his intentions, but all I find is a collection of incidents, of looks, like the flush in his cheeks when he had called me his friend. “I feel as if…” he had said, and then stopped. What had he meant to say next?

  Should I declare myself to him? Until I am certain, I must keep my feelings to myself. Each morning I spend longer than usual at my dressing table, checking my reflection in the looking glass to make sure that there is nothing out of the ordinary about me, that I look like Nurse Elizabeth Willoughby about to start her day at work, no more and no less.

  This has not been easy. Each time I catch sight of Hari I have to turn away to catch my breath, to stop myself observing him with surgical scrutiny. I want to know everything about him, to get to know the angles of his face, to determine the exact colour of his eyes, to be sure of which side he parts his hair. It is as if by knowing these things I will possess him and make him properly mine. It is a strange greed, a hunger that shocks me with its intensity.

  When I look at Robert now, I feel the opposite. I have spent so many hours gazing at him over afternoon tea, at dinner, at dances. In his absence, I have stared at his photograph, the very one that sits on my night table now. There is no other face that I know as well: the curve of his lip, the length and spacing of his eyelashes, the slight crookedness of his left eyebrow. I know that when he is moved the skin below his ears flushes the faintest of pinks. When he is angry a small pulse beats below his right eye, like the racing heart of a tiny animal. But now I have to force myself to look at him, because to look at him is to remember, and that is painful. I make myself do it, because I am not yet ready to tell him how my feelings have changed. And part of that, I must confess, is for a very simple reason: I am frightened. Of what? Of provoking him, of bringing out the fighting man, the soldier with his head and his heart still in the battlefield. It is as if he is perpetually poised, ready to attack or be attacked.

  This morning, when he came to visit the men, I greeted him as usual, careful to give nothing away. He smiled at me: it was one of those rare and special smiles that make his face light up.

  “You look beautiful today, Elizabeth.”

  I felt myself flush. “Do I?”

  He brought out a bunch of sweet peas from behind his back and said that he was sorry for his behaviour over the past weeks. He hadn’t been himself, he knew that, and he wanted to apologize.

  I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Elizabeth? Will you forgive me?”

  His voice held such hope and such regret and sadness that I found myself saying, with as much sincerity as I could, “Of course I will, Robert. Of course.”

  But it is not a question of forgiveness: that would be a thousand times simpler. The truth is that that this war has changed not just him, but me too. I am not the blushing schoolgirl I was when we met. I am not the nervous fiancée having dinner at the Grand Hotel. Working at the Pavilion has changed me: I notice things; I question them. And I like my work. I like to feel as if I am part of the world, not just an observer.

  Has Robert noticed those changes? He has not noticed the most important one of all. I must tell him, I know, and it will feel cruel, the final blow to a man who has suffered so much already.

  I have tried to find distraction in my work, but it is proving difficult. This afternoon I arranged for the orderlies to take the patients into the gardens, where we set up the usual card tables and refreshments. It was a beautiful day, sunny and warm. The Sikhs had rolled up the sides of their temple tent, and the sound of their hymns drifted across the gardens, which are now in bloom, with even a few bluebells spread under the trees.

  I was pushing a patient to a shady spot when I saw Hari walking along the path, deep in conversation with Atash Khan, one of the Pathans from Robert’s regiment. A group of other Pathans was sitting on the grass and, as we passed, one of them began to sing, like an opera singer, with vast, expansive actions, making his fellow patients grin and slap their thighs in appreciation. I thought of how I would like to sit on the grass under a tree with Hari, listening to music. Perhaps he could sing me a song from India, a raga, like the ones he has told me about, different depending on the time of day it is sung.

  As Hari and Atash Khan drew closer, the Pathan stopped, listened for a moment, then said something to Hari, and abruptly left him, going instead to join the others.

  Hari was left looking rather lost, like a schoolboy whose friend had deserted him. I couldn’t prevent myself from going to him.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked.

  He blinked, as if he were waking from some sort of trance.

  “I’m perfectly all right,” he said. “Thank you all the same.”

  I was standing so close that I could smell his hair pomade, something very English that smelt of lavender. It took all my strength not to lean in closer. I wanted to be alone with him, for something to happen, something that would tell me whether or not he felt the same way as me.

  “Will you come for a walk?” I asked, surprising myself with my boldness.

  “What?” he said. “Oh. Yes, I suppose so, if you like.”

  We began to take a turn around the gardens. Neither of us said anything for a while, then Hari broke the silence by saying that he had been up to the Kitchener to visit Lal Bahadur. Eagerly, I asked how he was. Hari looked grave and said that he was unchanged: most of the time he lay in his twitching state, with occasional fits of the sort that we had seen.

  “They dosed him with morphine,” he said, “to keep him from feeling too much.”

  “Sometimes I’d like some morphine for myself,” I blurted out.

  Hari looked at me, shocked.

  I managed to stammer that sometimes all the suffering that one sees at the Pavilion is too much to bear. I meant nothing of the sort, of course: the feelings I wanted to suppress were all to do with him. I felt an odd thrill, as if I were testing myself, skating close to the edge of a confession, but not quite tipping over.

  He frowned. “Do you know where morphine comes from?”

  I thought for a moment, recalling my training. “Opium?”

  “Let me tell you a story.”

  A long time ago, in Calcutta, Hari had a friend, Aditya. Their families lived nearby, and the two boys had grown up together. Hari always wanted to be a doctor; Aditya a lawyer, like his father.

  The boys had dreamt of going to Oxford together, but Aditya did not pass the entrance examinations. Both of them had been awfully upset and Aditya’s father was furious. One day, in the long, terrible build-up to the monsoon season, when the temperatures were at their peak, and the air heavy with damp, teasi
ng the city with the promise of rain, Aditya and Hari had slipped out of Hari’s house. Hari did not know where Aditya was taking him.

  “Where did you go?” I asked.

  “To Bow Bazaar, near Sealdah, one of the biggest railway stations. We were not supposed to go there: it’s one of the so called ‘grey areas’ between the Black and White Towns. It’s where the Anglo-Indians live, with the Portuguese and the Armenians.”

  Hari thought that Aditya might take him to see the dancing girls that Bow Bazaar was famous for, but instead they went down one of the narrow lanes to a door that was painted blue. When, after a long wait, the door was opened, the face that peered from it was Chinese.

  Hari had heard of the opium dens in Bow Bazaar, but he had never dreamt of visiting one. For a moment he hesitated. He and Aditya had smoked their first cigarettes together and drunk the whisky that his father kept for guests, but this was much more serious, and Hari was nervous.

  “I tried to tell Aditya but all he would say was ‘please’.”

  Hari knew how terrible Aditya’s disappointment was that he could not go to Oxford. In two months, he would be left behind while Hari went to England. And so, knowing he could not leave him now, he followed Aditya inside.

  The room they stepped into was dimly lit. Customers lay on benches covered with thin mattresses, their heads propped up on wadded pillows.

  “The heat in the room was unbearable,” Hari said. “The air was filled with smoke, but not like from cigarettes, a sweeter smell than that. We were given a long pipe each and some little balls made out of something sticky. ‘It’s called Black Earth,’ Aditya said. ‘Pure Bengali opium made from poppies grown in fields that the British took from Mughal princes.’”

  At first Hari had felt strange lying on the thin mattress, in full view of everyone else in the room. But after his first choking pulls on the pipe, he hadn’t cared a bit. Instead, he said, he had felt the deepest sense of calm that he had ever known, and had drifted into a hazy bliss.