by John Masters
Afterwards I wanted to clean my teeth. I ground them together, and the grit grated like sand between them. I sniffed Colonel Savage’s toothbrush. It was supposed to be a terrible thing to do, but I needed it. He had used it, so he would not notice if I did. He might hear through the door. No, the train was making too much noise. He couldn’t kill me even if he did smell toothpaste on my breath. I took the toothbrush, put on a lot of paste, and began to scrub and rinse.
When I came out of the bathroom I felt clean except for the stiffness in the sari. Being clean changed the sort of tiredness I had. Before, I’d had a nervous headache, a kind of restless exhaustion. Now my legs and eyelids were heavy and my body was calm and my mind turning over very slowly. I sat down carefully on the lower berth.
Savage said, ‘You still look as if you’d been under a steamroller—but you’re clean, at any rate.’
He put down his book, got up, and poured a lot of whisky into each of two tumblers. He rummaged under the berth and dragged out a tin box half filled by a single huge block of ice. Three bottles of Murree beer and half a dozen bottles of soda water lay on the ice. They had melted forms for themselves, like hares, and the dirty water was sloshing about in the bottom of the box with the labels floating in it. Savage jerked open the cap of soda bottle on the metal opener built into the bathroom door, and began to pour. ‘Say when,’ he said.
I said, ‘When, sir.’
He took his own glass, slumped back in the chair at the bottom of the berth, and put his bare feet up on the wall opposite. He said, ‘When are you going to stop playing hare and hounds with your WAC (I) commission?’
I drank, and answered automatically, ‘I don’t know what you mean, sir.’
He said, ‘For Christ’s sake stop calling me “sir” for a few minutes and answer a question honestly.’
I knew why he was being abusive to me. He wanted me to get so angry I would say more than I meant to. But I was too tired.
He said, ‘I suppose I can’t call you a traitor to your king and country, because you’ll flourish your beautiful new sari at me and say that George is not your king and this is not his country.’
It was a short strong whisky he’d given me. I expected it to burn my throat, but it didn’t. Perhaps I didn’t have the energy to react, certainly not enough to argue. He was still trying to make me angry. But he didn’t know that I was glad to be with him because he wasn’t a Sikh, because I understood everything he said, even the abuse. I looked at my empty glass, and he refilled it. I began to say, I haven’t been a traitor, but it seemed a waste of time. The dust whirled away in a long plume, light against the twilight, past the green-tinted windows. It had seemed pitch dark in there at first, but not now. I saw with surprise that the electric lights were on.
I said, ‘I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to be an Indian. Everything went wrong.’
‘Murder is wrong,’ he said.
He said it quite gently. I said, ‘It wasn’t murder, it——’
He interrupted me. ‘They died. Someone killed them.’
I said, ‘Who died? What do you mean?’
He said, Those B.O.R.s in the smash at Pathoda. You saw some of them the, didn’t you? That’s why I made you go up there with me.’
My heart was bumping and the glass slowly shaking in my hand.
He said, ‘I know you are lying about K. P. Roy. I’ve always known. You know something about him.’
I sighed, put down the glass, and slowly wrung my fingers together. Now was the time for me to get free, while the wheels beat clickety-clack, clickety-clack, and the dust hung in a pale motionless blur on the darkness, and the electric lights shone reflected in the windows. When I had spoken I would have no place to go at all—in the cantonments, or the city, or the Railway Lines.
I gathered myself and said, ‘But I killed Lieutenant Macaulay.’
Savage carefully put down his glass and said, ‘Tell me.’
I said dreamily, ‘I killed Lieutenant Macaulay. In the yards. There was a goods train passing.’ I told him about it. There had been a goods train while Ranjit stood beside me staring down on the body. It had passed by on the other side of the rows of wagons, easing up opposite us so that the chains clanked and the buffers struck together, clang-clang-clang all down the train. The brake van would have stopped just the other side of where we crouched in the black grit, but the signal must have gone off and the light blinked to green, and even now I can hear the strain on the chains and the heave of the train and the slow whoofing from the engine as the driver opened her up to go on north through. Bhowani Junction.
I said, ‘He was trying to rape me. He put his hands on me.’
Savage’s face was cold then, and his eyes brilliant. He seemed short of breath. He said, ‘But you’d led him on.’
I knotted up inside, and my skin began to shiver of its own accord. I said, ‘I didn’t!’
He said, ‘Christ, I saw you. The day the battalion arrived you backed your luscious arse into him. In the yards—near where you killed him.’
I jumped up and stood over him where he sat tensely in the chair. I screamed down at him, ‘In the yards he put his hands on me that day, and I wouldn’t stand it. But I didn’t want to get him into trouble with you, that first time. That is what happened! Then in the Traffic Office it was worse. Ranjit saved me, and I wanted to complain. Patrick complained for me, but you pretended you thought it was Ranjit he was complaining about! You knew all the time who it was. You thought I ought to do what he wanted because I am only a bloody cheechee. I killed him with that fishplate. I found it under my hand when he threw me down!’
I shouted out the whole story. I told him about Ranjit and Ghanshyam. I told him how my fear and shame had changed to pride when the Sirdarni talked to me. I got it all out.
Then I fell back on the berth, picked up my whisky, and drank it.
The train ground to a stop. ‘Timrai Junction,’ Savage said, not looking out. ‘Your father leaves us here to-day.’
I muttered, ‘Yes.’
Mr Glover knocked on the door and came in to look at our tickets. I sat on the berth, thinking miserably of what a mess I was in, while Colonel Savage bought a ticket for me. Mr Glover gave me a curious look as he went out; he knew my family quite well. Birkhe came in with more bottles of soda and a plate of chicken sandwiches. He put them down on the table and asked whether the colonel-sahib wanted anything more for the moment. Savage shook his head. I saw Pater walking down the platform beside the train. He had put his coat on now and taken off the red bandanna. He looked old, tired, and very dirty under the glaring lamps. He saw me in the compartment and made to come forward, but then he saw Colonel Savage and stopped, smiling. He waved his hand and went away.
Birkhe said, ‘Salaam, sahib. Salaam, miss-sahiba,’ and got out, closing the door behind him. The train jerked forward.
When Savage spoke again his voice was quite different. It became conversational, but the kind of conversation people make when a bigger thing is in their minds and they are bottling it up until it is ready.
He said, ‘Macaulay had it coming to him. And then a couple of days later you appeared in a sari. It was pretty obvious, you know.’
I said, ‘Oh, was it really?’
‘Govindaswami was sure you’d done it. I knew you’d done it. Another of our yard sentries saw you crossing the railway and skulking along the Limit Road when you were supposed to be in the Institute.’
Munching a sandwich, I asked why the Collector didn’t have me arrested.
Savage told me: Because he thought I’d find out, sooner or later, that K. P. Roy and the Sirdarni weren’t the best friends Ranjit could have, and then I’d be able to help him—Govindaswami—a lot.
Savage found a tin of cigarettes in his parachute bag and gave me one. ‘Better smoke this to exorcise the presence of the One, Aum,’ he said.
I saw him in clear focus, but a little larger than life. I heard his voice that had so often sounded cold and
nasal, now as clear as a tenor bell. The narrow little compartment magnified him, and I could also see his face reflected in the glass of the window. An electric light bulb glittered above his head. I lifted my wrist to look at my watch. My hand moved slowly, and I noticed that the skin of my wrist was flawless. The watch hung steady, all by itself, a thing apart from me and apart from everything else. To test the sharpness of the separation I looked at other things in turn, and listened to other sounds beyond the tick of the watch. It was true. Each object that I concentrated on separated out and became wholly important, obvious, all-absorbing. I looked at Colonel Savage’s forehead. Three beads of perspiration hung there above his left eyebrow. I thought of my own forehead. It was cool and smooth. I thought of my ears. I knew the shape of them, and perspiration was forming behind them. Later it would run slowly down the side of my neck.
I said, ‘It was awful, trying to be an Indian. No one understood me.’
The inane words hovered there, quite clear and full and round above me, and stayed in my ears as echoes. Unhurriedly I tried to bring them back to change them. There was plenty of time before they left me for good and set out on their journey to Rodney Savage in the chair. I said, ‘Pater and Patrick don’t understand what is going to happen, Ranjit doesn’t understand what is happening. You don’t understand what has happened. But I found I couldn’t change myself.’
He said, ‘I know.’
I said thickly, ‘You knew? You’ve been so beastly to me.’ If I spoke clearly and was honest with him, he would see what it was really like. Then he would be able to help me. He was strong enough. I said, ‘May I have another drink, sir?’
I smiled at him to tell him I didn’t really mean the ‘sir’. He said, ‘You’re half drunk already. Are you sure you want another?’
I said, ‘Yes, please. And another cigarette.’
I sank back on the berth, rested my head on the parachute bag, and lit the cigarette. It took a long time, but Colonel Savage did not get up to help me. I blew out the smoke in a long thin stream. I said, ‘Even a cigarette tastes better now.’
He said, ‘Do you think I’ve never been afraid?’
I closed my eyes. It was wonderful. I’d told him, and now I didn’t have to worry any more. He’d tell me what to do. The cigarette tasted lovely, and the whisky was warm and wonderful in my stomach. It was not hot, but just lovely and warm in the carriage. There was a warm, almost forgotten thing, like a thin silk blanket, wrapped round me. Slowly I recognized it. It was security, it was protection, it was happiness.
My God, it was him.
He was moving slowly in the compartment. I heard his chair creak, then his bare feet on the floor. He knew, a fraction of a second before I did.
His lips came slowly down on mine, and his fingers slid slowly back in my hair. For a breath I held my lips closed against him, then all the sensations separated out as before, and there was only one. I parted my lips and hung for a long time on his mouth. The lights clicked off. His hands moved, and my ache was gone. The train rocked him closer against me, and a million miles away the whistle shrilled.
The train ran through a station. Lights flashed in at the windows, each light like a blinking, vanishing thought on the surface of a deep waiting. I think I’d always been waiting for this.
The station flung back under a long stammering of the wheels across a score of sets of points. I opened my eyes to see his dim face, so tense and hard and close, and put my arms round his neck.
Later I heard my voice crying, ‘Yes,’ and, ‘Yes,’ and long, long afterwards I sat up, took my whisky, and looked through the glass of the window at the racing darkness and the black shadow-trees. He lay there—I knew him all of a sudden, the man with the complexes—hating himself for being so passionate and expert.
I bent over him, kissed his forehead, and whispered, ‘Why didn’t you——?’
‘Do this sooner?’ he finished for me.
I nodded and kissed him again. I said, ‘I didn’t know, but I think you always have.’ I remembered what Molly Dickson had said—‘Is that man in love with you?’ Rodney must be quite an easy person to understand as long as you weren’t involved with him.
He lay back, his hands joined behind his head. He said, ‘I believe in ordeal by fire—that night at the Institute when they wouldn’t dance with you, for instance. Other times. I wanted to see what you were made of. Perhaps I felt too serious about you, too. I did think you were angling for Macaulay though, at first. I couldn’t stand it. Then I knew that it had to be you. It had to be you, like this, without a word spoken, without any begging or asking or refusing or petting or ogling or hand-stroking.’
He hummed the tune: ‘It had to be you, it had to be you, it had to be you.’
I had been drunk. But that had all gone and left no hangover. I didn’t remember ever feeling better, ever in my life being so warmly wrapped up in certainty. I swayed against him on purpose, as the train swayed, so that my breast would press against him. He kissed my breast, and on his lips something slipped through the warmth and security, and I said, ‘I don’t want to fall in love with you.’
He raised his head, frowned at me, and said, ‘Don’t you? I rather hope I do fall in love with you. Perhaps I have. I’m not sure.’
‘Why do you hope?’ I closed my eyes lazily. I wanted to kiss his feet and wash them so that he would be cool. But already, again, I saw his eyes.
‘Oh, Rodney,’ I said, ‘be careful. I’m afraid I am going to love you.’ For a minute more I was able to think and hold on to a little fear, even under his mouth. Then I gave up my power of thinking, gave it to him with everything else that he wanted. Over and over in my mind, before I slept, ran the tune and the silly words—‘It had to be you.’
BOOK THREE
RODNEY SAVAGE
male, thirty-four, English, unmarried; lieutenant-colonel commanding 1st Battalion 13th Gurkha Rifles, Indian Army
THIRTY
I woke up with a start and a bright light in my eyes. The silence was as loud as it is after a concentration of 155s had just hit you. The wheels had stopped, the windows weren’t rattling or the berths creaking or the carriage frame murmuring. Someone’s body moved across the light outside, and I saw a face at the window six inches from my head. The man was cupping his hands to hold out the light so that he could see in. His nose was flattened against the glass. I could have moved or pulled up the shutter, but I wanted to see Victoria, naked, getting up. She sprang up and knelt on the berth by my head. She and the face stared at each other for a second. She looked as beautiful as—a naked woman kneeling by a naked man’s head. Then she jerked up the shutter and gasped. ‘Rodney, Patrick’s at the window!’
I rolled out and flipped down the catch on the door. We were off. I knew that it must have been Patrick. As soon as I get something good and wonderful and kind, like Victoria, I start to lose it.
I stood up, yawned, and pulled down the blind on the door. The door shook and rattled. Taylor hammered on it with his fists and shouted, ‘Come out! I saw you! Oah, you dirtee little slut!’ He had a strong Anglo-Indian accent. Victoria’s was only noticeable when she got excited.
She stood there, trembling, like a big smooth doe, between the berth and the wall. I examined her carefully, to remember. God knew when this would ever happen again. I put one hand round her neck and rickled her with the other. She tried to push me away, but I held her and kissed her hard while the door shook and groaned. Then I said, ‘You’d better take your clothes and get dressed. In there.’ I nodded to the bathroom and stooped to pick up my trousers.
‘But—what about Patrick?’ she said. She stood in the tiny bathroom, the door open, struggling into her brassiere and girdle.
‘What about him?’ I said. I began to brush my hair. She couldn’t find her pants—in Punjabi, her kachh, signifying self-restraint. The door-handle rattled. Taylor’s mouthing was almost unintelligible. ‘Oah, come out! Oah, you slut! Oah, you——!’
She w
hispered, ‘Do I look all right?’
I switched on the bathroom light and looked at her, and said, ‘Okay.’ I smiled and tried to make out that I was quite relaxed. I pulled a cheroot from my case and told her to put some lipstick on. Otherwise, she’d never looked better. Sex suited her.
She had to smile when I told her that, and she gave me a quick kiss before she picked up her lipstick. Patrick hammered and hammered. Another voice joined in outside there, and I recognized it as Bill Heatherington’s. Bill said, ‘Please be quiet, my good man. Do you know if this is Colonel Savage’s compartment?’
Taylor yelled, ‘I don’t know! Why the hell should I know? Of course it is his, I saw him with——’
Bill said. ‘There’s no need to shout.’
‘There,’ Victoria whispered breathlessly, ‘I’m ready.’ She smoothed out the folds of her sari and stood quivering like a violin string. It was the kind of situation people tell me they dream about and wake up sweating with embarrassment. I stood there, puffing steadily, and all the lights were blazing in the compartment. I told her, ‘You look like a recruit on his first quarter guard.’
She said, ‘Oh, Rodney! What are we going to do?’ She was entangled in God knows how many sets of values that didn’t mean a damned thing to me, or that I’d grown away from—but I wasn’t going to give her up. I made up my mind at that instant that I would fight—that I must fight—for her with everything I’d got.
So I opened the door. Taylor stumbled on the top step and burst in like a bomb. I put out my arm to steady him and said, ‘Careful, Taylor. You’ll be hurting yourself.’
He stood there, pressed back against the wall, with his chest heaving. He was like a big, brave, clumsy buffalo, even to the pale blue-green eyes. He didn’t seem to notice me, though my hand was resting on his sleeve, but glared directly at Victoria. Bill Heatherington stood behind him, outside the door. Bill is plump and fortyish, with a small fair moustache and blue eyes. Behind Bill was Birkhe, his eyes dancing and his face as unreadable as a Bath bun. Indian passengers hurried past in the light streaming out of the station buildings. The vendors and hawkers chanted their wares up and down the platform. A clock face directly above Birkhe’s head said 10.16 p.m. This was Gondwara.
