To The Coral Strand

by John Masters

  Why had the lake emptied itself again? Because I did not love. When had she noticed the desiccation, the dryness? At the moment of Henry’s death, that was the truthful answer. It had taken half a year of loneliness after that before she could admit it to herself, and that brought her to - now. And what had made the next change, which she would never have admitted for another six months, except in the death-like honesty of this illness? What was it that brought once more a sense of life into her existence, as palpable as running water to refill the emptied, dried lake? The water was cold at first, bitter cold. She shivered at memories of anger - but anger meant life; of hate and striving - but with growing energy. Then, in the night, the night before the fever, or perhaps it was already upon her, the pulsing warm flood, her heart lifting and beating, faster and faster, her voice singing in the silence . ..

  A man’s head hung in a halo of light very close to her. Rodney Savage, his head a foot from hers, his eyes down, his lips slightly parted, a look of total absorption on his face. He was dressed, but very tired. The halo was a lantern on the table behind him. The blurred pink to the left, at the lower limit of her field of vision, was her own body, naked. He was sponging her down with a cold, wet sponge. The texture of substances became very clear, though distant. She was lying on one of the big, rough jail-made towels, near the outside edge of the bed. The wooden edge of the bed bit into her buttocks. Under the towel she felt the criss-cross pattern of the newar mattress.

  She whispered, ‘Do I look as you expected?’

  He went on sponging, but turned his head slightly. ‘Yes ... better, as a matter of fact. Don’t worry. It’s only tit for tat, isn’t it?’

  She closed her eyes. It was intolerable that he should meet her, ask her to take her clothes off, and not even remember her, however drunk he had been. That had always annoyed her. And now, when he did see her naked, he still did not remember that first time, but only the other day, the time when frightened and lonely she had come upon that fantastic scene at the temples. Fantastic, and frighteningly wonderful.

  Yes, it was a towel that she lay on. So he must have cleaned her of vomit and faeces, and taken away the sheets and clothes. She could not move her head, but the room smelled of soap and water.

  ‘How long ... ?’ she whispered.

  ‘Three, four hours,’ he said. ‘It’s one o’clock in the morning. Roll over now, on your front.’ His hands helped her, and she lay face down, feeling the cool sponge, hearing the tinkle of water as he wrung it out over an empty bucket, dipped it again in a full one, half-wrung it, put it to her back. ‘You have a temperature of 104J,’ he said. ‘What have you got? Here--’ she felt his hand slip into hers as it lay beside her - ‘press my finger when I say the right word. Typhus? Malaria? Dysentery? Typhoid?’ She squeezed his finger in her hand.

  ‘Para,’ she muttered into the pillow.

  ‘Paratyphoid? Should I move you at once to Bhowani? I have the Bentley. Yes? No?’ She squeezed again.

  ‘No? You’re too weak. I’m going to try to keep you warm and clean. There ought to be some glucose in the hospital, and I’ll find that and give it to you. And I can get some milk and boil it. Nothing else until you can tell me. Is that right?’

  The last word echoed and repeated in her head ... right-right- right-right, becoming fainter and fainter as her reserve of strength faded, rhythmically falling away in the repeated echo. She closed her hand tight on his finger and holding on to that drifted out on a heaving dark tide of sleep.

  The light hurt her eyes, and someone whistling sounded like a shriek in her ears. She moved and the whistling stopped. It was daylight. She was wearing a man’s pyjama coat and nothing else, and there were two blankets on the bed. She was sweating heavily.

  ‘Something to drink,’ he said.

  She felt the spoon in her mouth, contracted her throat muscles and forced herself to swallow, again, again. When she could take no more she turned her head and muttered, ‘Warm chicken broth …. Pills, labelled sulfaguanidine. Twenty at a time.’

  She slept. She drank warm chicken broth, and knew from the taste that some sulfaguanidine must be ground up in it. Night time. She slept again.

  She awoke to a hot morning light. He took her temperature, and said, ‘A hundred exactly. Feel able to talk?’

  She said, ‘I didn’t tell the D.C. anything. I never saw you do anything suspicious, or meet anybody except Mr Faiz Mohammed once or twice, and I didn’t think it worth telling them that. Nor about ... the temples.’

  He said, ‘I know you didn’t.’

  She had to tell him now, while it was clear in her mind and he was here. At any moment he might vanish again, as he had come. ‘Ranjit Singh stopped here on his way back the other day. He told me he had just given you the order cancelling your lease. I hadn’t done anything, said anything, but I was pleased.’ She looked at him, but he had his back turned to her. He must turn round and see her face; but he did not. She had to talk to his back as he went on mixing something in a bowl, a degchi of warm milk beside him on the table. ‘Then that evening all the rest of the people here left. Two old women and a child left the hospital, though they were sick. Men came and carried them away. The sweeper left. The servant here.’

  ‘It was nothing to do with me,’ he said, still not turning.

  ‘Oh, I know, I know - now! There was an effigy ... ’

  ‘You saw that? I hoped you had not. I cut it down and burned it.’

  Then he did turn and come towards her, a mug in his hand. Dark pouches lay under his eyes, and a black stubble round his chin and jowl. He looked murderous, the pale-blue eyes shining feverishly.

  ‘You’re sick, too,’ she muttered.

  ‘Not sick - just tired.’

  In the ocean of sleep there had been islands, painful islands. She had sat on pots, bones aching, clinging convulsively to something or someone. She had vomited, emptied her bowels, felt hot urine on her legs, drunk soup. Towels had been changed, and sheets, and blankets. Through the window now she could see blankets and towels and sheets and pyjama coats and shirts and dishcloths hanging on a clothes line. He must have washed them.

  He said, when she had greedily finished the broth, suddenly aware of violent hunger pains, ‘Now, should I take you somewhere where you can be properly looked after?’

  ‘Are you going to Delhi?’

  He shook his head impatiently. ‘I don’t know. That’s not the question. Where should you go?’

  She turned away. ‘I’m staying here,’ she said flatly. ‘You can leave me now. By evening I shall be able to look after myself.’

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But I shall bring Kunthi and Devi before I go. They’re two girls from Pattan, and I’ve already given them some first-aid and hygiene training. Their normal profession is whore, but they’ll look after you as long as you want them to.’

  She mumbled, ‘Thank you,’ into the pillow.

  ‘Now can I leave you safely for an hour or so?’

  An hour! When before dark he was going away for ever. ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘I’m off now, then. Go back to sleep.’

  ‘I’m hungry,’ she said resentfully. Did he have no awareness of any of her emotions or feelings?

  ‘I’m sure you are. But no food now. Go back to sleep ‘

  Sleep, she muttered, sleep, sleep, sleep. But against her will, she did. When she opened her eyes she saw a thin, dark Indian girl, her hair drawn tightly back from the high forehead, squatting on the floor near the head of the bed, her eyes fixed on her in an intense,

  unwinking stare. She recognised the girl at once as one who had been in his arms on the temple platform.

  ‘What is your name?’ she whispered.

  ‘Devi,’ the girl answered. ‘He says you are to eat when you wake.’ She stood up.

  ‘Where is he?’ she asked.

  ‘Asleep,’ she said over her shoulder as she went out towards the kitchen. ‘I will awaken him.’

  ‘No!’ she crie
d.

  ‘It is his order,’ the voice said from the kitchen.

  He did not come in until she had finished eating, and Kunthi had taken away the bowl, and also firmly made her change out of his pyjama coat into one of her own nightdresses. She sat up, pulling the sheet higher to her neck.

  ‘Mind if I smoke a cheroot?’ he said. ‘I’ll sit near the window.’

  ‘Oh, please do,’ she said. ‘I’d like a cigarette, too.’

  He found one of hers, put it in her mouth, and lit it. He puffed away at his cheroot. She saw that he had shaved and now looked a little less demonically villainous, though just as tired.

  ‘I must go soon,’ he said. ‘I think you’ll be all right. Kunthi and Devi will see that no harm comes to you. I’ve told them to tell Faiz Mohammed at once if you have a relapse ... Don’t take that effigy too hard, or your people leaving. There are all sorts of rumours flying around. The Chambal Army is going to move everyone out and dig defences against India ... The Indian Army is coming through with guns and tanks, blasting everything before them with bombers. That’s what’s caused the flight, more than your excessive Christianity.... It did seem excessive to me.’

  She said, ‘I didn’t feel very Christian when I lost my temper with you ... when I tried to hate you.’

  He said, ‘You seemed more human to me then. Before, when I saw you, from what I heard ... there seemed to be nothing but Christian resignation, turning the other cheek, love thine enemy. A saint in a church, palms joined, looking upward, beatific smile on the lips. Fixed beatific smiles make a woman look stupid.’

  Her heart beat with a pleasant warmth. So he had thought about her! Why, oh, why, couldn’t he have come earlier, when he was alone in Pattan, and discussed all this?

  She said, ‘I was lonely ... afraid ... afraid of India ... bored . . . frustrated. I am not a missionary, I have no real faith, I was terrified my husband would find out ... But I did not want to show it. I wanted to stick it out, to do my job to the end, without failing. Sometimes ... sometimes I used to think, lying awake in bed at night, that it was all a preparation. Once I told him at least that much, and he smiled and said “Yes, it was, a preparation for heaven.” I didn’t think so, but I could not say anything.’

  He had listened with a sort of curious half-attention, his eyes sometimes fixed on hers, sometimes wandering round the room, his fingers fiddling with the sheet. Now ask me what I really felt, what I thought about you, she willed him; talk, talk about us; bring it all out of me; the right word, the right look, a touch, will do it...

  He got up listlessly. ‘It’s the times. Something’s pushing us out of India - rejecting us.’

  ‘Yes!’ she cried. ‘We’re in the same boat.’

  ‘We’re both being pushed out - you for trying to change old patterns, me for trying to get back to them ... I must be on my way.’

  ‘Where to?’ she asked quickly. ‘What are you going to do?’

  He said, ‘I don’t know. I only know that they’re not going to push me out ... I dropped in that evening to return the clothes you lent me. Your husband’s, I suppose? Also to tell you that you’d won, here.’

  ‘No, no!’ she cried.

  ‘I also meant to tell you I didn’t think you’d find your victory very real. Then I saw the effigy, and I knew I wouldn’t have to say anything. Except good-bye ... We didn’t really affect each other at all. We just thought so, but really it was events, and times, which caught us both up and threw us against each other. There’s no need for us to part as enemies.’

  She looked at him and said, ‘I am not your enemy. The opposite.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said simply, and there was no way of knowing whether he understood but did not care, and was sorry; or did not understand, and was sorry; and no clear understanding, in her exhausted calm, of which of the two would be worse.

  ‘Kunthi!’ he called.

  Another girl came in, the curvaceous one who had fallen down dead drunk on the platform. Margaret could see her now, more clearly than her smiling, clothed presence - her firm full breasts pointing to the sky, the legs parted, a beatific smile on her face, and every finished curve speaking of a woman’s fulfilment.

  Rodney spoke to her and she walked, hips swinging, into the other room, and came out with a bedding roll on her head. Rodney followed, returning with a suitcase.

  ‘Your pyjama coats!’ she cried. ‘I saw two on the line ... It must be lunchtime. You must have something to eat.’

  But he shook his head, and Kunthi came in with the pyjamas and in a trice they were packed away in the suitcase.

  ‘Good-bye,’ he said.

  ‘Good-bye,’ she said. ‘And - and thank you.’ The door closed behind him and she whispered, ‘With all my heart ... Oh, God, oh, God,’ and sank her head into the pillow.

  Chapter 8

  ‘Rodney!’

  I’d heard that call twenty, thirty times the past few days, since arriving in Delhi. I couldn’t walk in the street, have a drink at a bar, swim at the club pool, without a voice calling me. This time I was walking down the long corridor on the ground floor of the Imperial, and it was Max. He was wearing uniform and looked fit, burly, and business-like. I had decided, long since, that he had learned about my love for Janaki, and had - sensibly and typically - realised that it had hurt me a great deal more than it could hurt him.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.

  ‘Robbing a bank,’ I said.

  Max laughed. The usual conversation followed: Where was I staying? Good heavens, that flea pit! (I was staying at a small hotel in Old Delhi.) I must go and live with his cousin Hari. That, too, was as usual. Everyone invited me to stay, but I always refused. My old room was ready for me in John Clayton’s bungalow, but I did not want to go there. Not that it would have been ‘awkward’. The business with Frances was over and she knew it. She had already got a passage home about a month hence.

  For politeness’ sake I should have asked Max what he was doing in Delhi, knowing that his division was in Bhowani, but I didn’t want to continue the conversation. Besides, I knew. Obviously he had been called up to discuss the increasing tension between India and Chambal. If India decided to deal with Chambal by force, Max was going to be the bullyboy.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ he said finally, with a rather unconvincing look at his watch. He summoned up his courage. ‘And, Rodney, old boy, you know, if there’s anything I can do ... I have lots of friends - Daulat, Rikhye, P. R. Sethi--’

  ‘Don’t worry, Max,’ I said, ‘I’ll come round with my hat in my hand before I have to sell the Bentley.’ That was a lie, but what else could you say to a man like Max?

  We parted and I went on out into the street and walked aimlessly towards Connaught Circus. It was hot then, at the very end of March, and I was not wearing a hat. Out in the bustle of the crowd, the clop of tonga pony hoofs and the rustle and murmur of people in my ears, dust rising by the hawkers’ stalls, students lolling in the shade on the grass under the trees, bicycles ebbing to and fro like schools of fish ... I slipped back into the chain of thought which Max had interrupted - the morass of thought would be a better notion.

  From the beginning, when the D.C. came to throw me out of Pattan, there had been interruptions, like finding Margaret Wood ill and alone at the mission, and, since then, these chance meetings. I could not decide whether the interruptions prevented me from achieving an orderly thought sequence, which would solve my problems, or mercifully yanked me out of a futile nose-chasing-tail hypnosis.

  In the foreground, when I trod water in my swamp, all I could see was debt. John Clayton had put a lot of money into the hunting camp, and so had Frances. It had gone - not through my fault, but all the same it had gone, and I felt I owed it back. I had also lost all but a small amount of my own savings, and now had less than 300 rupees in the world, plus my pension. I wasn’t going to starve, but neither was I going to be able to repay my debts.

  So - I must get a job. Here I cou
ld feel my teeth gritting together, and a voiceless repetition of the words In India. Daulat, Rikhye, and P. R. Sethi, whom Max mentioned, were industrialists, owners of banks, airlines, cotton mills, God knows what else. P. R. Sethi was, in addition, a hell of a good man. Any of them, plus half a dozen others I could think of, would give me a good job, and were powerful enough, and independent enough to tell L. P. Roy to go to hell if he tried to prevent it.

  Also, I wanted to meet Sumitra again.

  Here all forward progress stopped, and the heavy mud of the morass began to rise about my hips and waist, clasping and dragging. Try as I might, I could think of no job that I would accept. No job that I would be offered, that is. There were plenty that I would not be offered. For instance, I had already heard whispers of trouble between the new government and the Assam hill tribes, especially the Nagas. I saw the Nagas’ point of view, and I saw the government’s. I knew the Nagas - fought with them in the war - was an honorary Naga myself. If the government made me Special Commissioner for the Hill Tribes, and promised fifty years to me and my successors to bring the tribes into their new India - I’d go like a shot. But it was part of the problem that such a job had to be done by an Indian. It would make no difference if I crossed over into Pakistan, except that I could claim Pakistan citizenship by birth, having been born in Lahore. Even so, they would definitely not send me to Gilgit, Chitral, Waziristan, or any of the places where I wanted to be and where I could have done a good job. In brief, I didn’t want what I could get and couldn’t get what I wanted - and needed.

  So, back to the money ... By now I must have been round this circle 750 times. I wondered occasionally what Margaret Wood thought of me, when she recovered sufficiently to be aware that I was there. What I had to do in that forlorn bungalow I did in a trance. She was filthy, and I had to undress and wash her, many times. I don’t suppose any man has ever had such a good-looking body under his hand and been so little aware of it. I remember briefly wishing it were Sumitra, that’s all. I remember leaving with my suitcase, and I know she was saying something, but I have no idea what. I only hoped I hadn’t been rude to her, unintentionally. She seemed a good, brave woman now that our troubles had got us below the squabbling level, and I didn’t want to leave any bitterness.