by Francis King
Reluctantly we obeyed.
From our bedroom window – on the ground floor since this was a bungalow – we watched as Dr Penrose, usually leisurely and dignified in his pace, now dashed across the dusty space between his bungalow and ours. Soon the Roches also appeared. They must have already been having their siesta, since he was in only pyjamas and she in a dressing-gown.
Later young Dr Cameron, from the nearby military cantonment, drove up in his high, open-top Austin, from which, a notable athlete at both Fettes and Edinburgh University, he leapt down, to race towards the bungalow. After that we waited and waited, still standing at the window.
‘Do you think he’s dying?’ Maria asked.
‘Perhaps he’s already dead.’
She shook her head violently, in a refusal to accept such an outcome.
‘It must have been something he ate,’ I said.
‘Perhaps he has this – this cholera. He and mummy were talking about it yesterday. He went to see a patient in the bazaar. He thought that man had it. Remember?’
I nodded but it was the first that I had heard of this.
‘People die of cholera,’ she added. ‘Very quickly I remember nanny once told me that. She lived through a cholera epidemic in Bombay.’
‘We don’t get cholera. Only the Indians do.’
Eventually we saw Dr Cameron, Dr Penrose and Roche carrying our semi-conscious father out to the car, as though he were a bag of rubbish for the dump at the far end of the compound. Roche was supporting the shoulders, his teeth gritted with the effort. The other two were supporting the legs. At a distance, as though they dreaded that the calamity were somehow infectious, there cowered a small, huddled group of servants, among them the orderly, the boy kitmatgar and Dr Penrose’s erect and white-bearded Muslim bearer, once an Indian Army sergeant. I remember briefly thinking it odd that there was no sign of Joseph. As the three Englishmen laid the body out in the back of the vehicle, I suddenly saw one of my father’s legs first twitch convulsively and then kick out.
‘He’s alive! He’s still alive!’ I cried out.
Maria, hands to mouth, shook her head violently from side to side.
‘Yes, he is! He is!’
My mother clambered into the back of the car, at the same time shifting my father’s head and shoulders on to her lap. Dr Penrose carefully put a large foot on the running board and then heaved himself into the front passenger-seat. After some hesitation Roche squeezed himself in beside him, a hairy arm trailing outside the window.
For a moment I had a feeling of total abandonment. Then I heard Mrs Roche calling: ‘Children! Children! Where are you? Are you all right?’
As we joined her, Maria asked: ‘Where’s Joseph? I didn’t see Joseph.’
‘Joseph?’ Mrs Roche was puzzled.
‘Our cook.’
‘Oh, he’s probably made himself scarce. Indians often do in an emergency.’ She put an arm round Maria’s shoulder and then stretched out her other arm to draw me close. ‘ You’d better come over to our bungalow until your mother gets back.’
I thought it ominous that she did not talk of our father also getting back.
He almost died; but, with his remarkable constitution, he somehow, against all the odds, survived. At first it was thought that, in that intense heat in a period without refrigerators, the chicken in his curry must have gone off. That would explain the mysterious disappearance of Joseph, who would no doubt have feared that he would be held responsible for the horror of what had occurred. None of the other servants, not even his boy assistant, would confess to having witnessed his departure. It was puzzling that Joseph had removed every one of his possessions, with the odd exception of the white shoes, perhaps considered by him to be too bulky to carry away along with everything else. My mother, with her usual brisk efficiency, was in search of a replacement cook as soon as she was no longer sleeping at the hospital and spending most of the hours of her days there.
Then came the devastating news. An analysis of my father’s vomit and of the remaining curry in the dish from which only he had eaten, had revealed traces of poison. Who could possibly have wanted to kill my father? His was such a placid, benign nature and, though he could have easily become a successful physician in England, his religious convictions had instead sent him out to India to work largely among its most impoverished inhabitants in a climate that he hated. He was an innocent, almost a saint. Eventually it was generally agreed that, for some still mysterious reason, Joseph must have been responsible. It was he who had prepared the curry; and his immediate disappearance made his guilt all the more plausible.
Why, why, why? As he slowly recuperated, his face grey and oddly shiny and his voice reduced to a hoarse whisper, my father continually reverted to the question.
‘Pas devant les enfants,’ my mother would hiss. But she could not deter him.
‘What did he have against me? What got into his head? I never did him any harm.’
On one occasion Roche, to whom these questions had been put when, unseen by the adults, I was reading an ancient copy of the Illustrated London News behind a bookcase in one corner of the sitting-room, replied ‘He’s probably a psychopath. No one can account for how such people behave.’
‘But he always seemed so normal. And so decent. I never doubted the sincerity of his beliefs, never for one moment.’
Then, when my father was once more able to resume his work and my mother was about to take my sister and myself at long last up to Naina Tal, the answer came. A CID officer, a small man with a sharp profile and slightly protuberant teeth, visited us with some news. What it was, Maria and I, banished to our bedroom, did not hear in person. But we learned of it later Investigations had revealed that Joseph had never worked for a mission in Lucknow. His references must have been forged. He had been identified, by means of some photographs taken by our mother of him and us two children together in the garden, in the kitchen and outside his hut He was a well-known agitator and member of a secret society, recently infliltrated by the Intelligence Bureau, called The Red Arrow. The group had been responsible for four attempted assassinations and one successful one. Apparently – I learned this many years later from my father – the CID officer had expressed contempt that Joseph’s efforts to ‘bump off’ (his phrase) my father, had been so inefficient. The idiot, the officer said, had not realised that the poison would have been so much diluted by the curry with which it was mixed that it could not be relied on to be lethal. ‘They rarely get it right. Hopeless.’
‘Well, thank God for that,’ was my father’s reply. Then he asked: ‘But why was I his target? Why pick on me? I’ve nothing to do with the government. I’m a person of no importance.’
‘Well, we have a theory about that. There’s someone with the same name of yours in the Intelligence Bureau. Not merely surname, Christian name too. Did you know that? Yours is not a usual surname. Is it?’ He laughed. ‘Oh, trust them to get something like that wrong! We’re pretty sure that that’s what it was.’
It was soon after we had returned to the mission, the hot weather over, that there was another piece of news. Joseph had been involved in the attempted assassination of an Indian prominent in the Viceroy’s Council. An informer had given warning, so that the chauffeured car in which the Indian politician had been supposed to set out had contained not him but a police officer, and a police officer had also taken the place of the usual chauffeur. Another car, containing armed policemen in mufti, had followed. All the six members of the assassination squad had been machine-gunned to death as they had tried to escape from the cordon around them.
I remember how Maria, my mother and I listened in an increasingly oppressive silence to my father recounting all this to us. We had just arrived back in the house, late in the evening, and the dining-room was feebly lit by two oil-lamps and an acetyline one, dangling from the ceiling, on which it cast huge shadows. Had those shadows really seemed horribly menacing to me, the nine-year-old child that I then was, or
is it creative memory that has now persuaded me that they did?
I was looking at my father, not at either my mother or Maria. ‘One can’t help feeling sorry for the poor devil,’ my father said at the close of his narration.
‘Sorry! How can you feel sorry?’ my mother demanded, her face suddenly growing red. Her voice, usually so reasonable and quiet, now rasped with fury. ‘ What a fool you are! How can you feel sorry for a thug who tried to kill you? Oh, you make me sick, you really make me sick!’
‘But we’re told to love our enemies and to do good to those who hate us. Aren’t we? Isn’t that what we believe?’ My father’s voice was plaintive.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ my mother shouted. I had never before witnessed her show such contempt for my father.
‘Anyway …’ Calmly my father got to his feet and walked over to his desk. ‘Here’s a last photograph.’ He picked up a copy of The Times of India, folded back at a page. ‘A photograph of him.’ He held it out to us. ‘ Horrible. Why do they publish such things?’
Suddenly, with astonishing speed, Maria leapt up from her chair and raced over to where he was standing. She snatched the newspaper and stared down at it. Later, I too was to stare down at it and examine, with a mixture of revulsion and triumph, the half-page, black-and-white photograph of the body lying out on a pavement, with a crowd of people jostling around it, as three Indian policemen in uniform struggled to hold them back. Joseph’s white cotton trousers and long shirt were blotched with dark stains. His head was twisted sideways. There was a triangle of blood beneath it, and in the centre of one cheek there gaped a dark, jagged hole. A turban lay beside a clenched hand.
Maria glared in turn at each of us. Then she let out an extraordinary yelp, as of an animal caught in a trap from which it cannot escape. My mother tried to grab her arm as she loped, body almost doubled over, out of the room.
‘Maria! Maria!’ my mother called. Then she demanded: ‘What’s come over the child?’
‘She was fond of him,’ I said. But that did not seem, even then, an adequate reason for such an outburst.
‘I expect she’s tired after that ghastly journey,’ my mother said. ‘I certainly am. Let’s see if Mohammed can rustle something up for us to eat.’
Mohammed was our new cook. Next morning my father would be complaining of his ‘inedible’ scrambled eggs – but would nonetheless eat them.
Three
When in the past I have performed this task of clearing up the debris of a life that has ended – my mother’s, my father’s, a cousin’s, this or that friend’s – I have became less and less discriminating and more and more impatient. In consequence, my pace has constantly accelerated. So it is now. Who would want this almost new dressing-gown, this folding umbrella, this long rope of chunky amber beads? Who would be glad to be given a hagiography of Lenin printed in East Germany, a copy of Whitacker’s Almanack dated 1983, or a hot-water bottle in a pale-blue cover presumably crocheted by Maria herself? All these I thrust, without hesitation, into one of the black bin bags that Mrs Bird (or Bard or Baird) has given me for the things that I decide not to keep and that she says that she will eventually pass on to the local equivalent of the RSPCA.
Maria’s life was so full of passion, ardour and endeavour. She organised CND sit-downs, she camped out on Greenham Common, she invaded Rugby pitches to demonstrate against South African teams playing in Britain. She wrote innumerable letters to newspapers, few of them ever published. She sent countless cheques to human-rights organisations, some genuine like Amnesty and Index on Censorship, but many merely disseminators of propaganda for this or that Communist regime.
Now I am turning the pages of her passport. It is crammed with the blurred stamps of countries that few tourists would ever dream of entering, so dangerous and backward are they. With a sigh, I consign it to yet another overflowing bin bag. How strange and how sad that all that is left of so much selfless, if also self-deluding, activity should now be contained in these five or six plastic bags stacked against each other in a corner of a single narrow, stifling room. How sad and strange, too, that all the money that our German grandmother so carefully husbanded in her Swiss bank account and left in its entirety to her favourite grandchild, should have then been recklessly squandered on causes that, if they had achieved the worldwide success of which Maria had so obsessively dreamed and for which she had so persistently fought, would have made obsolete all private accumulations of capital.
I am nearing the end of my task when I notice that far under the bed, almost out of sight, there lies a battered brief-case. Half-kneeling – I feel a sudden, sharp twinge in my right knee as I stoop – I reach under the bed and drag it out. At some time Maria, who was always losing her keys, must have forced the lock, so that its hasp is broken and the briefcase is fastened only by one of its two straps. I open it. It has three compartments.
In one of these compartments there is a yellowing cutting from The Daily Worker. When I unfold it, it reveals a long obituary of the Indian nationalist politican Subhash Chandra Bose, repeatedly imprisoned by the Raj for his attempts, then regarded as traitorous, to ally India with the Japanese and Germans during the War. Maria has underlined certain phrases in red ink – ‘burning idealism’, ‘unflinching courage’, ‘a moral beacon’, ‘selfless in his pursuit of …’ I read no further. I screw the cutting up in a fist and then throw it towards one of the black bags. It falls to one side of it and then, as though it had a life of its own, slowly, flower-like, begins to uncurl in the dry wind from the open window above it.
The second compartment of the briefcase contains, to my amazement, nothing but a clearly ancient pessary. I always assumed Maria to have been a virgin, too much in love with causes and humanity at large to focus sexually on any single human being, male or female. I push it back into the briefcase.
In the third compartment I come on an ancient sponge-bag. There is something hard inside it. A dried-out piece of soap? I unzip it. No. It’s that piece of wood carved by Joseph to decorate Maria’s and my birthday cake more than seventy years ago. I stare down at it, with a mingling of amazement and, yes, annihilating grief, of a kind that the news of Maria’s death has failed until this moment to cause me. Inseparably – like Siamese, not ordinary, twins – our figures are conjoined. The sunny smiles that Joseph carved on to our faces now look to me like rictuses of agony. The shirt that he long ago painted a bright blue has faded, some of its colour drained away in irregular streaks. Only Maria’s strap-shoes are still pristine. They look far too large for the tiny figure to which they are attached.
I continue to gaze down at the object. How strange that for all these years, during which she recklessly jettisoned her family, her inherited fortune and our bewildered parents’ hopes that she would achieve a conventional career or a conventional marriage, she nevertheless kept this piece of wood picked up from under a banyan tree in an obscure, overgrown Indian garden and then inexpertly carved by a murderer.
Slowly I put the conjoined figures into the pocket of my crumpled, ill-fitting linen jacket, making it bulge and so look, I am sure, even more unsightly. As I move, the irregular object, with its sharp protuberances of heads and elbows, digs into my thigh.
‘How are you getting on?’ Her voice sounds vaguely impatient. Perhaps I have overstayed my welcome. ‘Your taxi is here.’
‘My taxi?’
I have forgotten that the driver of the taxi that brought me here insisted that he would pick me to up to take me back to my hotel. There are few tourists in Luxor now and the trade is therefore highly competitive.
‘I told the driver to wait. He won’t charge a fortune for doing so, as in London.’
‘I’m almost finished.’
‘Don’t worry about the bags and boxes. My husband can carry them out to the station wagon when he gets home. We can drop them off tomorrow – the ones you want at your hotel, the rest at that charity. He has an almost free day and, thank God I’ve finished that wretched commissi
on. I could paint those pictures in my sleep.’
The taxi moves slowly along the corniche in the dying light of a sun that seems to rest, an enormous, immoveable disk, above the sterile, humped mountains. Since my responses have been so grudging, the driver has now stopped his exuberant chatter. I gaze at the sauntering crowds. I put a hand into my jacket pocket and touch the two figures. I touch them again. Then I draw them out and stare down at them. Again I am overwhelmed by that feeling of mingled revulsion and annihilating sadness.
On an impulse, I suddenly lean across the cracked, dusty seat towards the window open beside me, and fling the ancient relic out into the road. I turn my head feeling faintly dizzy as I do so, and look back at it through the rear window. A vast lorry passes over it without doing it any damage as it turns off the corniche. Then two ramshackle cars, clearly racing each other and almost touching, speed up to pass us. The wheel of one goes over it and crushes it, as it might an empty cigarette packet or a plastic bottle.
I lean my head back and close my eyes. I long for silence, for my air-conditioned room, for my bed, and for that blissful state when, suspended in a fragile hammock between retreating life and approaching death, all remembrance and even all thinking cease.
Copyright
First published in 2005 by Arcadia
This edition published 2013 by Bello
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR
Basingstoke and Oxford
