Fellow Passenger

by Geoffrey Household

  ‘’Ad an early job, myte,’ I said. ‘Shan’t look like this in ’alf an hour.’

  The man behind the counter grinned at me and asked what I wanted. I cannot analyse what it is which makes people take kindly to a smiling sweep—perhaps the mere comicality of his appearance.

  ‘Got to get a ’at for the Annual Ball to-night,’ I explained. ‘One o’ them Indian turbans, like. Knock ’em cold, that will!’

  ‘I can’t let you hire it,’ he answered.

  ‘Tell you what. I’ll buy it, see? And you can tyke it back afterwards. I’ll keep it clean if yer wraps it up for me.’

  ‘Got an idea what you want?’ he asked.

  ‘One o’ them Bengal Lancer ’ats. Size six and three-quarters.’

  He brought out one or two from the back of the shop. They were too gorgeous for anything but a pantomime emperor.

  ‘More army, like,’ I suggested.

  He had a further search and laid four on the counter. One of them, in strong cotton of a faded blue, somewhat resembled that of my Sikh. It also had graceful lines, the lower folds sweeping from the temples down to the nape of the neck. Even in adversity one should not be indifferent to appearances. I am sure that half my motive in handing over Michael Bassoon to communist care was disgust at his oafishness.

  This creation was mine for thirty bob, said the costumier, and I could have twenty-five back if I returned it in clean condition. He packed it up for me, and then winked.

  ‘What’s the joke?’ he whispered. ‘You nearly took me in. All perfect but the accent, and that’s damn good!’

  I winked back.

  ‘Watch the bill at the Palladium in a month’s time,’ I said.

  I bought soap, towel, shaving mirror, and needles and cotton for repairing the stretched elastic. Then, with my odd-shaped parcel of hat slung on the handlebars, I set out on the endless grind of pedalling into the country along the Great West Road. Not too far from London I hoped to find some quiet stream, hidden by bushes, where I could wash and assume my new personality.

  It was a weary way for a man short of sleep and not accustomed to bicycling. By two o’clock I had only reached Slough, and still the houses lined the road. I crossed the Thames at Maidenhead and took the road to Cookham. There was no privacy at all by the river. You couldn’t expect it in fine weather at the beginning of August. After Cookham I tried the other bank, which looked more hopeful. At last I found what I wanted—a backwater among willows and scrub. It was sluggish, muddy and uninviting to the general public.

  Once safe among the bushes I undressed and slid into the water. The opposite bank was marsh, but even so I was terrified lest someone should appear. I was now plain, bronzed Howard-Wolferstan, naked in every sense. I never could get used to the fleeting moments when I had to be myself. I became a cowering fugitive, without anything whatever to prop my morale or amuse my impudence.

  I tried on the mass of hair. It was a fair fit, but would be improved if a tuck were taken in the material under the chin. Lying on my stomach in the grass, I sewed away at the tuck and the elastic. Then I inserted my head into its new decorations and put on the blue pugaree, sick with nervousness lest it should stop short of the elastic. It did not. In fact, seen in the mirror, the effect of the whole outfit was princely. Confidence returned.

  With better clothes I could have walked into the Ritz; but better clothes were as yet unobtainable. In spite of two windfalls, purchases had reduced my stock to under eleven pounds. I thoroughly cleaned my grey-brown suit—the police, eager to be precise, had helped me by committing themselves and the public to brown—and put it on again. Before I did so, I stamped my sweep’s brushes hard down into the river mud. So irrevocable an act gave me a moment of misgiving. The sweep, so long as he kept moving, was safety. But there it was—he couldn’t talk and he couldn’t sleep under a roof.

  I avoided crossing the bridge over which I had come, and followed the road north to High Wycombe. There I bought a small pack to fit my bicycle, a clean shirt and a waterproof cape—more to protect my pugaree than myself, for I could always stop and shelter from rain. No one in all England was in less of a hurry than I. At a Wardrobe Dealer (as he described himself), run for farm-hands who frequented the town on market days, I found a shabby old coat of excellent tweed. That at once made me appear of a social class more in keeping with the splendour of my whiskers.

  The next urgent task was to find a small country inn where I could be put up cheaply and comfortably for the night, for I was pretty well exhausted. On the Oxford road I soon came to it and a landlord who, after a moment’s hesitation, decided that the gorgeous East could not be alarming if dressed in an honest country coat. Food, alcohol and sleep were heaven. My face was on the television in the bar. I was too tired even to feel disgust for the grinning ape whose photograph they showed.

  Morning brought a fresh day’s papers. They were more entertaining. Karlis had been picked up, and indignant editorials were shooting down the whole of British security in flames. He had done the incredible—simply proceeded up river, dressed in Russian uniform, steering a launch the name of which was written in Russian characters and, after drying himself out and filling up with petrol, reached Richmond without being questioned by a soul. That, of course, was the kind of thing which could only happen if a man were simply waiting to give himself up; he surrounded himself with a spiritual aura of innocence. If I had tried it, the first police boat would have swooped down on me.

  He had sworn that I pushed Elias Thomas Conger overboard. I fear that a distant note of schoolboy giggle was noticeable in the newspaper comment. Otherwise, the police merely announced that he had confirmed the official story. I never heard any more of him than the rest of the public. Apparently the United States asked for him, and we quietly and thankfully let him go. I doubt if he could have been a success; he hadn’t imagination enough to earn a good living out of one of their Committees of Public Safety. He would have done better to write for the Sunday papers as I advised him.

  In dealing with myself the papers were still severe, though under the bloodthirsty language I detected a furtive shade of admiration, perhaps reflecting the tone of the talk in Fleet Street bars. They could not get away from the fact that I had convulsed the security services of two empires. It was a pity, I gathered, that I had been corrupted by a Latin-American background. Without that, my enterprise might have been directed to the more worthy ventures of the New Elizabethan Age. I spotted the patriotic note. So long as I remained successfully on the run, I should be an Englishman—though monstrously perverted—of the true breed; but the moment I was a convicted traitor, I was jolly well going to be an Ecuadorian.

  I found myself painfully stiff from unaccustomed exercise on buoys, Sikhs and a bicycle, so I decided to stay another night at the pub and restore myself to normal. I passed as a well-born Punjabi exploring England on little money. In that part my way of speech aroused no comment, for an anglicized Indian was not expected to have either a local or a foreign accent. To avoid registration as an alien, I stated, with convincing details, that I had been born in London. The only snag I found was the occasional cheery ex-soldier who insisted on addressing me in some jargon of which every sentence ended in ‘hai’. I think it was Urdu. I was, however, at perfect liberty to grin understandingly and answer in English.

  The next day I went on to Oxford, and strolled in the gardens of my college to complete recuperation. Stobbs, who had been under-porter in my day, was now head porter. When I passed through the lodge in my character of oriental tourist, he was dealing with a newspaperman who wanted reminiscences of Howard-Wolferstan. I listened, pretending to be reading the notices on the board. A very wild young gentleman, said Stobbs with evident approval, not like what they got nowadays. Well, but was he a communist? Stobbs refused to remember, and I had the impression that a pound note changed hands.

  ‘This college,’ said Stobbs,
‘’as changed the King of England, and wished it ’adn’t. And if any of the young gentlemen ’ad politics which they wished later they ’adn’t, it’s no business of yours nor mine, because when you’ve ’ad my experience you’ll always know where the best of ’em are.’

  The reporter unwisely asked where. Stobbs jerked his thumb at the war memorial and returned to his work.

  Pleasant though it was to be again, for a moment, out of the reach of time, Oxford was no place for me. Even in the Long Vac. earnest souls from east of Suez chattered their way from college to college, and seemed eager that I, too, should enjoy their enjoyment. I became weary of hiding up staircases or pretending to be short-sighted. The impression was growing upon me that our small island—at any rate in its more sophisticated towns—was becoming a mere suburb of Asia. We had all the disadvantages of empire, without the power. A social historian might well put it the other way round, but the difficulties of a harassed and bogus oriental would not occur to him.

  Plainly it was best to stick to country towns and villages where Punjabis were whatever I said they were. I pedalled north without the expensive lunch which I had proposed to offer myself. It was as well. Clothes and two nights at an inn had reduced my store to four pounds and a little silver.

  Along the road, on the blank walls of barns and, as I neared Banbury, on occasional hoardings, were bills of Benjafield’s Circus. They suggested possibilities for the temporary employment of a picturesque Indian out of a job. Nobody could know less of circuses than I did, but at least I brought a fresh mind to the business. The only ideas I had had for earning a living were fortune-telling or casual agricultural labour. Both were likely to lead to registration with some official.

  I found Benjafield’s on a field outside Banbury. It was a small show, combined with a singularly grubby travelling fair. I called at the proprietor’s caravan. His wife was inside, doing accounts in a space about four feet by two, surrounded by pigeon-holes full of files. Her face had that matt cream-yellow tint of a hard-working entertainer without make-up, and the rest of her was lean and wiry. She looked at me as if I were nothing out of the ordinary and told me to see Fred. I should find him with the horses.

  This glimpse of neatness warned me not to underrate circus intelligence. There was efficiency, too, in the lay-out and cleanliness of the motor caravans, the power unit and the horse lines. The fairground caravans, however, had the melancholy of detribalization. Their inhabitants were content to earn a living by offering the public the very least it would accept.

  Mr Fred Benjafield was bathing the off fore of a pinto liberty horse. He had the keen and worried expression of a good farmer on poor land—though no farmer I ever met had his effortless, Caesar-like ability to do three things at the same time. During his conversation with me, which was conducted, apart from a first long inspection, entirely over his shoulder, he never stopped cursing the groom or doctoring the horse.

  ‘What can you do?’ he asked. ‘Now then? Can’t expect the public just to look at your whiskers, you know!’

  ‘Why not? Put me in a uniform at the door.’

  ‘Haven’t got a uniform. What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Broke,’ I said, ‘and don’t want to ask my father for money.’

  The mass of glossy hair made me ageless. I could put my age at twenty-five and be believed. The position I imagined had often been true enough before the war—not that I had ever been afraid to ask my beloved father for money, nor he reluctant to give it. But there had been times when I was so ashamed of my extravagance that I laid on myself, as a sort of pleasant penance, a month of very quiet living. That was how the English countryside came to be familiar to me.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  I had called myself Ram Singh at the pub; but that, I discovered, committed me absolutely to being a Sikh. A little more elasticity was needed.

  ‘Faiz Ullah,’ I answered on the spur of the moment.

  It was the only Indian name I could remember—a wild quirk of memory caused by horses, for it belonged to a polo pony in Kipling’s ‘Maltese Cat’.

  ‘Know anything about elephants?’ Benjafield asked.

  I feared that would come. No one could look at me without thinking of elephants. Still, I could not complain. It might have been tigers.

  ‘I’m better with horses,’ I answered.

  ‘Any act?’

  ‘No. Just ride them and groom them.’

  ‘What’s so bloody marvellous about that?’

  ‘Well, what’s so bloody marvellous about elephants?’

  ‘This is,’ he said. ‘The public wants ’em, so I have to have a damn useless pair of ’em.’

  ‘What sex?’ I asked.

  ‘Female, of course. You don’t have male elephants in this business. For one thing, they’re unreliable. And for another, you can’t have the children pointing at ’em and calling out, “Ma, what’s that thing?”’

  He worked himself into a swift passion with the groom for not noticing earlier the state of the pinto’s off fore. I felt it was time to assert myself.

  ‘Two female elephants are known as a sisterhood, not a pair,’ I said.

  ‘Not in the circus, they aren’t. A pair of bitches, I call ’em.’

  ‘What’s wrong with them?’

  ‘They can’t do a bloody thing except sit on tubs.’

  ‘Well, what do you keep them for?’

  ‘Haven’t I told you?’ he stormed at me. ‘Because the bloody public wants elephants.’

  ‘I’ll have a look at them,’ I said. ‘I used to play around in the elephant stables as a boy.’

  He detailed the groom, whose name was Steve, to show me the elephants. It was Steve’s business to feed them, and Mrs Benjafield used to show them.

  ‘There y’are!’ said Steve. ‘That one’s Pearl, and that one’s Topaz.’

  He strolled off and left me to it. There is a terrifying ruthlessness in the circus. You either can or you can’t, and they want to find out at once.

  Pearl and Topaz were small elephants, about seven feet high at the shoulder; but the two uncompromising backsides which faced me seemed the biggest chunks of flesh I had seen since the death of my great aunt—not, of course, that she had ever revealed herself to me so unashamedly, but my head, as a small boy, was on a comparable level.

  They were in a canvas shelter, like the horses, and both tethered by a fore-leg. Pearl was on the left. I pushed my way between her ribs and the canvas, and told her to get over. She got over, and examined my whiskers and turban with her left eye. She was not impressed. She filled her trunk from a bucket of water and squirted it down her throat. I understood her perfectly. The next trunk load was going to be for me if I didn’t get out of there. She expressed her opinion of me still more forcibly as I passed behind her to talk to Topaz.

  Topaz received me with a squeal of joy. She was much stupider than Pearl. She thought I was the real goods straight from Lahore, and at once investigated my trousers with her trunk. My experience of the Americas suggested that this was not indelicacy, but a search for something which a former trainer used to keep in his sash. If I were wearing the faja or sash and had some bulky treat for my riding animal, it would be there that I should put it.

  One could not, I perceived, treat elephants as horses. They were too placid and too intelligent. Yet I had no intimate knowledge of any other animal. It seemed best, therefore, to count on sex rather than zoology and to put my trust in their immense and undoubted femininity.

  It is a poor excuse when calling on maiden ladies to say that the shops were shut, so I strolled out into the fairground, which was waiting for the evening and meanwhile doing a desultory business with a few holiday-makers and a lot of children. It seemed to me that toffee-apples were likely to be popular with elephants. One could even present them in a vast box tied up with blue ribbon.

>   I tried to bargain with the stall-holder for her spoiled, or yesterday’s, toffee-apples. She didn’t ’ave none spoiled, and yesterday’s was kept ’ygienic and good as new. She was perfectly well aware that I was trying to get a job with the circus—news travelled from end to end of the community in about thirty seconds—and when I got it, if I got it, I could have toffee-apples at the trade rate. I did not tell her I wanted them for the elephants, thinking it best to keep my secrets as an animal trainer to myself, so I paid the full price and removed the sticks.

  I returned to Pearl and Topaz with five toffee-apples in my pocket and one in the waistband of my trousers. They had decided during my absence that I was no conceivable use to the sisterhood. At last, by offering my navel to Topaz with the abandon of an oriental dancer, I managed to persuade her into trying again. She removed the toffee-apple, ate it, and promptly discovered the rest. I allowed her two, and moved over to Pearl, followed by the weavings of an affectionate trunk.

  Pearl had regarded this undignified flirtation with contempt. She paid not the slightest attention to me, and I was compelled to lay a toffee-apple at her feet. She picked it up and dropped it daintily into Topaz’s straw, Topaz wasn’t proud. She ate it.

  I could not believe that Pearl did not like toffee-apples. Plainly she was just sulking, so I sulked, too, and turned to go. I was half-way between the sisterhood when the finger of a trunk closed upon the back of my collar and gently persuaded me back. I assumed it belonged to Topaz. I discovered, when deposited in front of her, that it belonged to Pearl. I patted her trunk, said it was time to go now, and decidedly went.

  No use. I was popped back again at the tea-table. I reminded myself firmly that if she meant mischief she would not be so oddly formal about it. We stared at each other. Pearl’s expressive eyes were not malicious. She was not even laughing at me. She was plain disappointed. ‘Here am I,’ she almost said, ‘a fitting companion for an intelligent person, but I still find that gentlemen prefer Topazes.’