The Mulberry Empire

by Philip Hensher

  ‘Why am I telling you all?’ he said, as if a brilliant thought had come to him. ‘Someone else’s turn.’ He picked up a tin of blacking and threw it hard, at Masson. It hit him, hard, on his arm. ‘Tell us of all your judies, then.’

  The platoon roared; the one thing that made Masson entirely conspicuous was that he was the one man in the platoon who never came on the trips to the brothels in Company Street. Few of the platoon went every Sunday afternoon – perhaps only McVitie – and some went only for form’s sake, like little Morgan, who turned out on high days and holidays, and saved half his pay for his widowed mother in Carmarthen. But they all went sometimes; it was only Masson who never went. He was aware, and scared, that to the rest, his never going must look dangerously like a principle, or something worse.

  ‘I prefer to keep private matters private,’ Masson said, unable to stop himself, and even to him it sounded priggish and unconvincing. The platoon guffawed again; there was a hard, forced edge to their laughter, as if brought out for McVitie’s approval. Whatever it sounded like to McVitie, to Masson, half-smiling, it was the noise of hounds baying.

  ‘Prefer to keep private matters private,’ McVitie said, mimicking in mincing tones. Then he said it again, to make the men laugh harder. ‘Private matters private.’ His face seemed to close up with malice and triumph. ‘I bet you do. Till the hands come calling of a Saturday night. I bet there ain’t nothing left private of you then. I bet you lay it all out on a tray for um then, begging for it, ain’t you? Bent over the stile, begging for it, ain’t you? Bet you miss all them great big farmhands, eh, boy? Tell you what, boy—’

  The laughter, now rising to a howling pitch, died suddenly as the guardroom door was flung open and Suggs, the Sergeant-Major, stood there bristling. McVitie, who, horrifyingly, had actually been undoing his belt, sat down abruptly and reached for a boot to polish. Suggs stood and glared at them for a minute, then stalked off glintingly. The door stood open.

  Masson was trembling. He could not see how McVitie and the platoon had come to see what they had seen; no notion of his had betrayed what he dreamt of, only an omission. No: he knew how. There was a fear in him; and the fear was bound up with the revelation of McVitie, fresh and wet with sweat, his huge eyes pouring out hate at Masson, his shirt undone three buttons revealing the firm white freckled flesh within, the graceful, perfect whiteness of the bare feet. He hated himself for this, and knew McVitie, somehow, had seen the way Masson had once looked at him. That was the source, surely, of the terrible intimacy of hatred which fell between them, and Masson could only resolve what was quite impossible, never to look directly at McVitie ever again.

  Ten minutes after lights out, Masson took himself off to the latrines to write up his notes. That was his practice. It was the only time of day when privacy could be guaranteed for a quarter of an hour. Outside, in the hot Calcutta night, a dog howled; somewhere very close, just outside the gates, and a human voice or two was raised as if in answer. Sweat seemed to drip from the blue air. The lights were put out by Suggs on his rounds, and Masson felt quietly in his kit bag for the precious little volume; a bound book of blank pages, with the stub of a pencil tied into its spine with a piece of string. Masson now felt in a different pocket on the kit bag’s inside, and found the little silver medal he had bought from Das a day or two before. Noiselessly, in his summer combinations and barefoot, he swung out of bed and padded off to the latrines. Most of the platoon was already asleep.

  Alone, Masson lit the stump of candle he had pocketed with a flint and a taper, and settled down. He allowed himself no more than fifteen minutes; more would mean too great a risk of discovery. Masson did not care about punishment, but he feared for his vital notes, which, if discovered, would surely be destroyed. He opened his notebook at the first clean page, and examined the silver medal. Mughal; no doubt. He began to write a note, starting with where and when it had been bought. He wrote in a tiny hand, resembling the busy progress of carnivorous ants across the page. It saved paper, and, should the volume be found, at least the notes would not be read. There was nothing in the notes. But Masson preferred secrecy.

  The candle flickered, as if in a small breath of wind, as if the door to the latrine had fallen open. Masson stopped writing, looked up. There was no sound. He started to write again. Mughal; late Mughal, the seventeenth century. Awreng-zeb, reign of, he was writing.

  ‘Busy, Charlie, then?’ McVitie said. He had quietly opened the door, and was standing there leaning against the wall, observing Masson while he wrote. He was in grubby brief summer combinations, his legs and torso naked. Behind him, in the shadow, an acolyte stood guard. Masson knew who it was; Hastings, the shifty cheat with no idea in his head and foully stinking breath. Talking to him always made Masson wonder whether some small oriental rodent had died in his throat, and stuck there. Masson looked at McVitie, his terror too huge to try to hide.

  ‘I thought you came out here of a night to give yourself a thrill,’ McVitie said. His voice was gentle, even cooing. ‘What’s that you’re writing, then, Charlie, your diary?’

  He leant forward, and took it, gently, irresistibly. He flicked to a random page.

  ‘17th March,’ he read. ‘Got up, did guard duty, polished my boots, ate my stinking rice, retired early … 18th March, watched McVitie take a bath; I’d spread my buttocks for his gurt engine, I swear I would.’

  ‘Give that to me,’ Masson said, furious. There was nothing there but dry notes on coins, and he felt himself invaded by McVitie’s fantasies. At the door, Hastings, the halfwit lickspittle with the perpetually stinking breath, turned nervously. McVitie continued in the same relaxed, reassuring tones.

  ‘I hadn’t quite finished, Charles, my dear fellow,’ he said. ‘Wait. There’s another interesting entry here, isn’t there. Where were we? Oh yes: 20th March. Got up, frigged myself stupid thinking on my darling McVitie and his pillar of love. After tiffin, went and stole the regimental silver.’

  ‘That’s rubbish,’ Masson said, but all at once, with the flush of blood to his head, he was betrayed. McVitie looked at him, a half-smile of delight about his mouth.

  ‘Joe,’ he said to the sycophant at the door, not raising his voice one notch, ‘I think you might owe me ten shillings. Your faith in human nature was entirely misplaced, it seems.’

  ‘That’s rubbish, and you know it,’ Masson said, but he felt a terrible sense of plunging, and he could feel himself beginning to bluster, as his hands took on a frightened life of their own.

  ‘Don’t you worry, Charlie,’ McVitie said scornfully. ‘I wouldn’t split on you, no more’n I’d read—’ he handed back the little volume, ‘—a lady’s diary.’

  Masson took it, trying not to snatch. Perhaps that was all. But McVitie seemed in no hurry to go; he stood there, in his customary lounging position, one hand proprietorially fingering his heavy crotch.

  ‘What do you want?’ Masson said, attempting firmness.

  McVitie affected astonishment. ‘Want, Charles? Why, I don’t want nothing. Can’t a fellow stand where he finds it comfortable, like? I’m not in your way, am I, Charles, my boy? Not preventing you from doing anything you came in here for, am I? You want to get on with your diary, I ain’t stopping you, am I? You want to take a shit? Don’t mind me, my son. Because I’m just planning to stand here—’ and with that, with a single gesture of his thumb, he pulled down the drawstring waist of his combinations, tucking them deftly behind his hairy ginger testicles, ‘—and do what I came in here to do. And I hope – I sincerely hope – you’re not thinking of stopping me, are you, Charles? Not thinking—’ McVitie paused, looked down at his stubby, fat, suddenly ludicrous erection with an expression almost sorrowful in its intensity, ‘—not thinking of refusing a chap, are you, Masson?’

  McVitie started frigging his cock there, six inches from Masson’s face; a slow brutal rub with his heavy fist; Masson could smell the sex and sweat of it, there, in his face.

  ‘Let me go,’ Masso
n said, standing up decisively.

  ‘No one’s stopping you,’ McVitie said, smiling quietly, baring his teeth. ‘Nothing’s stopping you. Except what you want.’ Masson stepped forward, and McVitie tripped him, and, as he stumbled, was quickly behind him, ramming his arm up behind his back in a half-nelson. McVitie pushed Masson to the floor, grunting in his ear. Against his face, Masson felt the stone floor of the latrine gritty and wet and warm. On his back, kneeling, McVitie took a handful of Masson’s hair, tugged his head back and slammed it against the flagstone. A hand – McVitie’s – was tugging at his combinations. There, in front of his eye, was a pair of boots – the waiting, surveying Hastings. In his back – low in his back – there was a finger, a hard prodding finger, pushing bluntly, blindly, and there in his ear was a voice, McVitie’s, a muted whispering cry, saying, right there in Masson’s ear, ‘Answer to your dreams, boy, answer to a maiden’s prayer.’ He kicked once, trying to cry out, and behind him something – the candle – fell and everything was darkness. In his mouth, McVitie’s fist, which he bit. But it was only cloth and metal, and he could not hurt McVitie, he could never hurt the invincible McVitie, he knew that now.

  7.

  All at once, it was over; they were gone. Masson lay there in the dark, and it seemed to him that hot liquids were dripping from him – salt, and blood, and sweat, and hot liquid shit. It took an age to stand up, and when he did, unaccountably, it was his joints and bones and right shoulder which most hurt. He found some water in the dark. In the bowl it was warm and thick as sputum. He could feel between his fingers how dirty it was. He washed himself, there, in the dark, trembling as he did so, washing as best he could. When, an hour, a good hour later, he stumblingly felt his way back to his bunk, he could hear the room was silent; not silent with sleep, but all holding their breath, pretending unconsciousness. And then he knew they all knew.

  The night was hot, and wet. The rains would not be long returning; the air was soaked with the hanging moisture, waiting to fall like a restrained cataract. One more bucketful of water, gathering in the gathering clouds, and the whole would fall on the brown city. The platoon turned, and sweated silently, and waited for sleep or morning. There was silence in the room. No one snored, all that long hot night.

  It was Masson whom the platoon would not look at the next day; Masson whose bruised and broken gaze no one would meet. McVitie had gone too far, but McVitie always went too far, and the cowed esteem, the enforced popularity with which the platoon observed its hero was as it had always been. Only there was a bandage round his hand, where Masson had bitten him; he had bitten him, which was something. But it was Masson no one would look at, Masson whose ready excuses for his night-torn face were not listened to, or needed.

  That afternoon, he had only an hour, but he knew that would be enough. He walked out swiftly, having spoken no word to anyone all day, or met their gaze. Outside the gates, the cobbler who was always there was hammering with his poor tools at a poor pair of shoes; squatting against the wall, frowning in concentration. It was a posture, Masson thought, which only natives could take up; he himself could squat for a minute or two on the balls of his feet, but it was a physical impossibility to squat with his feet flat on the floor, and it was never comfortable. But natives could squat like that for hours. If there was some sort of anatomical peculiarity which enabled this, he did not know. It was some kind of favour, like the one which meant that natives did not sweat, even in the most hellish of Calcutta’s wet heats. The man seemed quite happy in his naked concentration, bashing the shoe into bits; and next to him was a street tailor, stitching at a shirt and taking care with his left hand not to let his work fall into the dirt. And next to him was a woman, cooking some gloop in a little vessel for any passer-by with an anna or two. In this city there were cooks, wastrels, builders, tailors: there were those who told your future or your health with an inspection of the soles of your feet. Street-corner physicians, handing out phials of watercress liniment – an infallible cure for poor digestion – next to one prescribing the same bottle for impotency, memory, the swelling sickness. The restorers of virginities, the makers of marriages, the ordainers of caste, water diviners, sweetmeat pedlars, both gilded and plain; milkmaids, mendicants, thieves; scribes, storytellers, world-renouncers, whores, those who pursued no trade, and those who pursued a trade as yet unnamed. All at once it struck him how terribly few the British were, how thinly scattered over the surface of India, like an exiguous dusting of fine sugar over a cake. These were good lives he seemed to see, here on the street. Useful lives. It was time to go.

  He took himself off to the bazaar and bought two substantial panniers. What else he needed, he knew where to find it. And then to Mr Das’s.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ Das said, rising in alarm at Masson’s blossoming bruises and one missing front tooth.

  ‘I walked into a door,’ Masson said briefly. ‘It was a door called McVitie.’

  ‘My dear fellow,’ Das said again, giggling a little in shy concern. ‘I hope, at the very least, that the door named McVitie came off rather worse than the man named Masson.’

  Masson had no time for this. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, on the whole I came off a great deal worse than he did. Look here, Das, I need something today. I need what’s in my cupboard.’

  ‘Need what, precisely?’ Das said, smoothing his hands down his kurta. ‘Chai, my dear fellow?’

  ‘I doubt I have time,’ Masson said. But the crone had been despatched with a double clap of Das’s hands. ‘Look, I need it all, today.’

  ‘Not leaving Calcutta, my dear sir?’ Das said. A veil – almost an expression of cunning – came over his face.

  ‘No, indeed no,’ Masson said. It was best not to start on farewells. ‘No; merely a fellow collector. I wish to show him my purchases. Merely that.’

  ‘A fellow collector,’ Das said musingly. He fixed Masson in his gaze. ‘One who finds himself unable to come here, for instance, who wants to see everything you possess.’

  ‘Yes,’ Masson said. He shrank from his real reason not to tell Das that he was leaving. It was not that he was afraid of being betrayed; he simply did not want to say goodbye. He recognized how cowardly this was, and was satisfied to know that Das certainly knew he was leaving.

  Das suddenly seemed to switch off his amiability. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘You know best.’ He stood and led the way into the gloomy recesses of the shop. In the back was Masson’s cupboard, and Das unlocked it gracelessly. It took half an hour to wrap each trinket, coin, plate in the long stretches of cloth Masson had brought to lessen the noise, and then pack it all into the pannier.

  There was one thing missing at the end. ‘The knife,’ Masson said flatly. ‘There was a Persian knife.’

  Das was crestfallen. ‘Ah – a knife? Are you entirely sure? I don’t recall. Everything is there, my dear fellow – are you sure it isn’t there already?’

  ‘No,’ Masson said. ‘It isn’t there. It looks,’ he went on, reaching over Das’s shoulder to retrieve the knife itself from a high shelf, ‘it looks uncommonly like that.’

  Das stared at him, blank, pentagonal, his expression quite veiled. Masson took the knife and, as if to demonstrate his disdain for Das and everything Das could supply, he bent down and pushed the pretty knife brutally down the side of his boot. It was not a dirk, made for such a purpose, but something richly damascened, curved, polished. A knife for display as much as use, a precious thing, and Masson pushed it brutally down the side of his boot. Das seemed almost on the point of protesting, but shut his mouth.

  8.

  Calcutta at this time was not an old city. The monuments were few, and put up by the English. There was a sense that those who lived here were not born here, and would not die here, if they could help it; there was a sense that everyone in this city was a temporary inhabitant, camping out with what would suffice. From the Colonel’s lady to the most abject beggar in the streets, everyone in Calcutta had ended up here, and stuck. It wa
s a thick knot on the silken rope which connected the Bosphorus to China, and that was all. There was no history here, and it aimed to be an English city, with its churches and lawns, its solid official palaces and square garrisons. But all around, the great sea of Indian life washed at the bulwarks, patiently.

  Masson walked back swiftly, an undirected rage preventing him from seeing how much the people stared at him. It was an anger which, at the top, he directed at Das, the thief. But he knew that Das alone was not the cause of it. It was like when you were young, and your brother hogged the blanket in the cold night. That was the same feeling of anger, and you felt angry with your brother. But it only took a moment to see that your brother’s problem was the same as yours. What was the real thing that made you angry? It was the fact that you had no bed of your own. To be alone, you had to walk for an hour to your secret place, to sit at the hollowed-out roots of a gorse bush with a briar pipe and stare out to sea. That was the cause for anger. But to be angry, you had to turn on your brother, whose wish to be alone ought to be no less than yours. He was grown-up now, and still he had not had his wish, and still he was turning, in his mind, on people whose small wrongs deserved no blame.

  Tonight would do. It would have to do, or wait ten days for the next good chance. It would do because he was on guard duty. All day he had been hiding the unpleasant thought from himself that the roster had thrown up Hastings as company at the gate tonight. Waking, nothing had seemed worse than the idea that McVitie’s frightened crony was to spend the night-time watch with him; six hours with the feeble stinking dog. He had wondered whether Hastings would seek to change his duty, but then saw that he would not dare; half of McVitie’s bluff was that no one would challenge his right to act as he wished. If Hastings tried to avoid him, that might seem like an admission that they had done wrong.