Land of the Living

by Georgina Harding

  Yours

  Jack

  Chap I stayed with in Nagaland. ICS. They’re sending him home.

  I suppose they’ll all have to come home now, she said.

  It’ll hardly be home to him, will it? He must have lived in India longer than he ever lived in England. They have a way out there of talking about England as home even if they’d hardly recognise the place.

  He had thought it in the summer, hearing the news from India. We are leaving India, he had thought. So Hussey must come home now. When the second thought came to him it had seemed a second loss.

  He wants to come and see us.

  Then we must have him to stay. When’s he coming?

  He doesn’t say.

  Tell him he can come any time. She put a hand to her belly. She was six months pregnant, the bump already big on her slight frame. Let’s hope it’s before the baby’s due.

  Yes, he said, though the thought came to him that he might use the baby as some excuse, so that he might not come.

  Does he have a wife? You’ve hardly told me anything about him.

  There was a wife once. She died. There’s a grown-up son somewhere.

  He knew the wife’s name. Eleanor Mary Hussey. He had seen her grave outside the little white church at Mokokchung. There was the son, schooled in England and enlisted shortly before the end of the war, and a Sema Naga girl – not girl, woman, rather round and merry, not by any means a beauty – often at the bungalow when Hussey was there, and she went back to her village when he went on tour. So little he had learned of Hussey’s personal life, in all the weeks that he had lived with him. Strange to think that Hussey and Eleanor, Eleanor Mary, had been through what he and Claire were going through, knowing this potential, the beginning of family. You did not see anything of it in him.

  He signs himself Jack, he said, I’ve never thought of him as that. Only Hussey.

  Good Lord! the man had said. Taking his feet from the chair, taking the pipe from his mouth. A tall oddly familiar kind of Englishman, bony, a little unkempt, the look on him, even at first sight, of a man who lived alone. And where have you come from?

  Hussey, coming here. He had issued the invitation in good faith, he had such a gratitude to the man, yet he had not expected him to come. He had thought Hussey somehow immune; as if he would stay up there for ever, in his high bungalow, smoking his pipe, studying his Nagas, typing out his ethnographic studies in the small hours of the night. Those nights when he had lived there, when he was so much awake and sleep was so erratic, he had found comfort in the sound that came through the thin walls, of Hussey typing away, typing amateurishly with two fingers on his big black typewriter, typing out observations that sometimes he would give him to read the next day, on flimsy white paper with a smudged and much corrected carbon copy, that one for himself and the top one for London. He had imagined permanence, certainty of purpose, in the little flurries of clacking, the return, the pauses, the seep of tobacco smoke through the darkened house.

  There had been terrible reports from India this last year. Riots. Killings, in cities and villages, horrifying in their nature and in their unthinkable number. People pulled from trains, in unthinkable numbers, and killed by the tracks. He had read those things, here in England where they were so far away, and even here he could picture them. (So many things he could picture nowadays. Words came to him as pictures and he couldn’t blank the pictures out and return them to words.) He knew how it looked, how it would look. He knew how the cities must have looked, the streets and the open drains where the words had said that all those bodies lay – and the trains, he knew the open glassless windows of the trains, the long hot embankments, the vast land that stretched out away from the tracks, the figures on the land – and the words told him of the people on the trains, the grappling hands at the windows, the people killed where they sat, or dragged out; how they lay slaughtered, in white cloth and bright sari cloth, along the side of the line. The vultures. The flies.

  He had known that. The words told him that, small print in black and white. But the words told him that the killings, like the politics, were things mainly of the Indians and the plains. He had pictured all that, and he had pictured Hussey up in his sea of blue hills, utterly removed from it all. Clouds between them.

  The letter was followed by a postcard from Cairo a couple of months later. Hussey had reached the Pyramids. Good for him, he thought, he must be spinning out the journey home. There would be no urgency to his returning to the place that he called home but wasn’t really. Might as well see a pyramid or two – or three, there were three pyramids at Giza, weren’t there? Three in the postcard, certainly, and a palm tree and a camel. Hand-coloured sand and a streak of turquoise in the sky. Then, the same day that the postcard came, there was a telephone call. It seemed too soon, that the man had travelled as fast as the card.

  That’s quick.

  What’s quick?

  That was Hussey. He wants to come this Thursday. I’m sorry, I didn’t think he’d be here so soon. Perhaps he hadn’t really expected that he would ever arrive.

  What do you think he’d like to eat, your friend, if he’s been in India all this time?

  The food there had been the plainest, cooked by the merry woman, plain boiled things but the hottest chillies to go with them.

  Whisky soda, that’s what he likes.

  Roll upon roll of hills, the lone white man on his veranda overseeing all. Stretched out in the planter’s chair, whisky glass, pipe to his mouth. Rainstorm passed, leaves shining, the powerful smell of suddenly wet earth. Clouds breaking up and whisking themselves away as they did only in places so high. Watching the clouds clearing from the hills, the man will be able to see from a long way off the little cavalcade making its way towards him, winding down the slope opposite, then out of sight in the dip of the valley, identifiable, as it climbs up to where he is, as another lone white man and two Nagas, but its macabre nature not known until they reach the lawn and the roses and the marigolds. Well might he say, Good Lord! The stink of the head will have got to him even amid the pipe smoke.

  Easy to spot him on the railway platform by his stillness. Everyone else was on the move. He had his back to the gate, a stiff figure in a rather roomy new overcoat and a dark trilby, but Charlie knew him at once.

  Hussey, over here!

  A clasping of hands. Good to see you, old boy.

  I’m sorry, I didn’t want to keep you waiting.

  The train only just got in.

  Let me take this.

  The suitcase spoke of where he had come from, the hard brown leather worn soft at the corners, scuffed and scratched, but the handle, as Charlie put his hand to it, little used. It was a suitcase that had been carried on men’s heads and not in their hands.

  How was the journey?

  Fine.

  He took the case to the car, placed it on the ground, opened the boot, lifted it in, Hussey standing the while by the passenger door. Charlie got in his side and leant across to open it for him.

  Well, let’s go.

  It was difficult to know where to begin. The car’s engine seemed loud, each change of gear noticeable. Hussey looked out at the landscape.

  Is it far?

  Not far.

  Tell me when we get to your land.

  As they approached the house Claire came out to meet them.

  From the way Charlie had spoken of him, she had been expecting someone more substantial. This man was thin and sallow. His hand shaking hers was dry as paper. His eyes on her made her more than ever aware of her fullness. I didn’t know, he said, Charlie didn’t tell me. Congratulations.

  Oh, not long to go now, she said. She thought it might embarrass him to say how very soon she was due. I’m sorry, I look like a whale. But actually she felt rather grand and stately before him.

  He had brought them a gift. A beautiful thing, he thought. He hoped they would see the beauty in it. Sometimes it seemed to him that what was beautiful there was lost
on people here.

  He gave it to them when he came down for a drink before supper. They had all bathed and changed. The fire was burning high in the grate. Claire had on a dark red dress that clashed just so slightly with her lipstick, and Charlie looked sleek and clean, a little pink. He had filled out in the last three years, a solidity to him that must be partly health and coming home but was also his physical way of life. He was beginning to look like the Norfolk farmer he had become. He knew that he must feel glad for him, because this should be an enviable existence.

  Whisky soda?

  Yes, please.

  Ice?

  No, no ice.

  The drink amber in a cut-glass tumbler. Glint of light on it.

  He had looked at the land from the train. There had not been a hill all the way from London. Then from the car, as Charlie drove. Dull, tamed land, he had thought, almost every square yard of it productive. No jungle here, none of that age-old battle to hold the jungle back. They turned off the main road. Tell me when we get to your land, he had said, wanting to know where Charlie’s farm began, and Charlie told him when they got to the hedge that formed the boundary. This is our land now, on this left side of the road, all ours from now on, and he saw how one field, whoever it belonged to, very much resembled another. But then there was the house, set at the heart of its land, and this pretty, hugely pregnant woman standing in the porch. So much purpose. And he thought that owning land in itself was purpose. Just putting your feet on it would hold you down. Because he himself was floating. He had been floating in London, through all the people on the grey streets, even in the club, where there were others India-returned as he was and floating too, as they read The Times in their leather armchairs and recognised the symptoms of it in each other, and repeated familiar phrases in the attempt to fix themselves, the phrases already becoming a little absurd or contrived. What was a chota peg once you were home but a little glass of whisky?

  I’ve brought you this, from Nagaland. He pulled it out from his pocket and offered it to Claire, and she took it tentatively. It was the head of a mithun carved in some blackish wood, small enough to fit in the palm of her hand, a piece of orange string running through a loop at the back of it that must once have held it around a man’s neck.

  A bull’s head?

  Not a bull exactly, a mithun. Mithun are the cattle they have there. But much like a bull.

  She turned it about, strange in her Englishwoman’s hands, a smooth stylised bull’s head with long horns, burnished and greasy from the skin of the man who had worn it, who touched it before she touched it, and blackened further by the smoke of the huts. Everything that ever went indoors in Nagaland had a little of that sooty coating, and a smell that clung to it even when you took it out and transported it elsewhere.

  Why, it’s like a little piece of modern art, she said. A Henry Moore or something. Thank you so much. And she put it up on the mantelpiece between the figurines.

  He was disappointed to see it there. Of course, it will dry out here, he thought, and the smell will fade. The life will be gone from it.

  He assumed that the figurines beside which it seemed so incongruous were hers, to her taste, that she was the sort of woman who lived in this sort of house. And that her answer was no more than politeness.

  They ate in the dining room.

  I hope it’s not too chilly for you, his hostess said, thinking as people in England always thought that he had come from a climate of constant heat. No, no, it’s fine, I’m quite acclimatised, he replied, though the room was in fact a little chilly. It was Claire who he thought must feel the cold most, in her dress. He supposed the pregnancy kept her warm. Or just the colour of the dress. She looked warm, with her dark curled hair and brown eyes, at the end of the table closest to the sideboard, pulling herself heavily up to bring a ladle for the gravy. Charlie stood at the sideboard and carved a joint of beef. He felt that he should do something, left sitting alone at the mahogany table with the candles and silver things upon it. It was so long since he had been in such a place.

  He did look cold. There was a draught even when the door was closed. Better if they had eaten in the kitchen. She had thought it necessary somehow to have supper here but it made the evening too formal. This room wasn’t friendly. It would be the first room she would redecorate, when they had the money. She would have it red, wine-coloured. Red dining rooms were more intimate. She thought this as the two men talked, the conversation passing about her, she eating slowly, but greedily because of the baby, aligning the knife and fork straight on her plate when she had finished, folding the white linen napkin and placing it tidily on the polished wood, resting her hand there, waiting until they were finished too, wondering when they would be ready for pudding or cheese. Were they saying what they wanted to say? The talk was men’s talk, club talk, without personal meaning. They talked about India’s Independence. There had been so much talk of that, this year just passed. But what Hussey said was different. He said that Independence hadn’t pleased the Nagas. For a moment she was caught by the conversation. When Gandhi was killed, he said, when he was already in Kohima on his way home, he had heard a Naga laugh aloud.

  But why? she asked, seeking explanation. Perhaps her voice was too light, because they didn’t hear her, and didn’t answer, as if her words were only for herself.

  Other things caught. The notion of the Union Jack coming down, fluttering as it folded. That the population of tigers had increased since the war – either that, or the tigers had increased their attacks on humans, having become habituated to human flesh, so much of it there was, strewn around. How horrid, that. She passed the cheeseboard. She had managed to be generous with the dinner, despite rationing. Yes, this was Stilton. Ah, Hussey said, he hadn’t tasted real Stilton for years.

  As she put out the cheese Charlie remembered that there was some port. He went out to the kitchen, found the bottle and two small glasses. Came back into a silence.

  There was something I remember I said once. About the Nagas. I think it was rather romantic.

  She was outside the conversation now. Not drinking. Withdrawn into the company of the baby, one hand resting unselfconsciously on her bump.

  I think I said they were noble. They aren’t really, are they? They’re just like anyone else.

  Oh, said Hussey. In some ways I think they are.

  So he was in love with them too.

  It is cold in here, she said. Let’s go through to the sitting room.

  She led them through, moving sedately, going forward to take the guard from the fire.

  Let me. You shouldn’t be doing that, darling.

  The two men sat in armchairs on either side of the fireplace, Claire on the sofa facing it. She kicked off her shoes and curled up with a cushion against her.

  They sound rather horrid to me, your Nagas, not noble at all. But she spoke rather sweetly and smiled, so that it was clear that she didn’t mean him to take offence. The challenge was not to him but to Charlie, in that secret place that he kept from her.

  Ah, well, they do have a terrifying reputation.

  She would draw this man out, since he was here, whom Charlie spoke of as so wise.

  You have to get to know them for yourself, isn’t that so, Charlie?

  She would tell him to fill his glass again and talk, Charlie silent in the other chair thinking whatever he thought, looking into the fire.

  Things were changing, he said with a touch of regret. Many of the Nagas were hymn-singing Baptists now. There had been American missionaries all over the place, building chapels, teaching them hymns, making them wear clothes as if their nakedness had been a sin. Though he had still had to deal with head-takings now and then.

  How did he ‘deal with’ head-takers, she wondered, this pale bookish man out there in the jungle? So scarcely credible it seemed, this world that he spoke of. Anyway, wasn’t head-taking just murder?

  No, not there, he said. There it was not murder but accepted, like disease, or a
traffic accident, or war. Though of course it seemed like murder. Of course one might well see it as murder, particularly when it was a case of some woman a raiding party had caught out in the fields, or a child who had been taken captive.

  Oh God, but that’s utterly barbaric.

  Hussey put down his glass and leant forward, elbows to his knees and long pale hands paired before him. Like one of those missionaries. How unexpected it was, this conversation earnestly followed in this room which was still not really her room, but Ralph’s room, like a waiting room or rather a room in a house in which they were all of them guests coming from their different places and passing through. Or through which Hussey was passing, while they two were long-term residents, becalmed before the ticking clock, the reflections in the mirror, shocking her with his macabre and not entirely believable traveller’s tale. Don’t get me wrong, though, the traveller was saying, in his thin dry voice. In the old days, in the average Naga village, a loss of more than one or two heads a year would have been considered singularly unlucky. It was as if they lived in a constant state of war, but only a simmering kind of war, and one that was bound about with rules and rituals. What they called genna. Think about it. War’s a way of being, isn’t it? It’s like a religion. It brings people together, gives shape and purpose to everything. And life’s not the same when it’s gone. There was an essay he had read, he could send it to her if she liked, by an ethnographer in Melanesia, who observed how when headhunters were deprived of headhunting they lost their zest for life. That was the phrase the ethnographer used, that was the phrase precisely. He had never met people anywhere with such zest for life as the Nagas.