To The Coral Strand

by John Masters

  ‘Let me!’ she cried.

  ‘Cook, woman,’ he said, summoning the wide sardonic grin. He bent and began to put on his boots. She saw beads of sweat bursting out on his forehead. She went to the kitchen and quickly lit the fire. She heard him moving about the house. Fifteen minutes later he came through to her, and she saw that he was wearing khaki trousers and a shirt that had belonged to her husband. ‘I found these,’ he said, ‘also a small haversack, full of bottles and bandages. I’ve thrown them out.’

  She made tea, poached eggs, and buttered bread, and put out a pot of jam. He set it all on the mantelpiece in the living-room and ate hungrily, standing. ‘Sitting hurts,’ he said.

  She said, ‘Don’t go now, Rodney. Hide in the attic. The new missionary is coming in the taxi from Bhowani, and I’m sure we’ll be able to smuggle you out in it somehow, if we pay the man enough. There’ll be room in the boot.’

  He smiled, his mouth full. ‘Me, locked in the boot of a car, with five thousand rupees on my head?’

  ‘You must trust me,’ she cried. ‘You were helpless all night. Besides ... ‘

  ‘I know you,’ he said suddenly. ‘You were wearing a light-blue linen frock, very plain. There were some dark rain spots on it, and you were worried and frightened. I asked you to take your clothes off and you ran away.’

  She said, ‘I knew you’d remember, one day! It was Independence Day. You were drunk.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And they’d just given me an O.B.E. That’s enough to drive any man to drink.’

  ‘And your father had been killed.’

  He gulped down the rest of the tea and said abruptly, ‘I’m going. Where’s the rest of the food?’

  She showed him, and he stuffed it all into the first-aid haversack, a loaf of bread, some butter, a piece of cold mutton, half an uncooked chicken, a pound of sugar, a can of bully beef, the pot of jam.

  ‘Money?’ he said.

  She emptied her purse into his hand - 108 rupees. He gave her back five, and turned towards the door. She stepped in front of him.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  He examined her. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are you going to try to reach Bombay? I can speak to Sir Andrew Graham. They’ll arrange to get you out of India secretly. Where can I wait for you in Bombay? I’ll have everything fixed.’

  ‘No,’ he snarled. ‘I’m not leaving India. Now, get out of the way.’

  She stood aside. ‘I love you, Rodney.’

  He stared at her in passing. ‘That’s too bloody bad,’ he said. She fell on the bed, too exhausted to feel pain, and slept.

  The sound of knocking on the outer door awakened her. Ten o’clock. He’d had four hours. Drawing back the curtains she saw three sepoys, and a pair of thin, loinclothed peasants wandering round the back of the house. One of the peasants was pointing at the ground as he walked. She called, ‘Wait,’ washed her face, combed her hair, and opened the front door. The same lieutenant who had come in the jeep was there. He too looked tired. He saluted carefully. ‘Did Colonel Savage come here, Mrs Wood?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  He said, ‘Mr Roy put a couple of shikaris on to tracking him. They have followed him as far as this. They say he spent some hours inside, and then went on east.’

  ‘Can they follow his trail farther, from here?’ she asked quickly. The young man said, ‘He wasn’t so tired when he moved again. He got into the stream over there, and they don’t think they’ll be able to pick it up again ... He took me into my first battle. I was terrified, a brand-new second-lieutenant commanding a company attached to the 1/13th Gurkhas for the operation. He was ...’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘If he came here, I didn’t see him. I know nothing about it.’

  The lieutenant smiled at her. ‘I’ll report to headquarters.’ He ran down the steps and leaned over the back of a truck parked on the road, radio antennae sticking up from it. The sepoys and the shikaris squatted among the weeds at the foot of the veranda.

  The lieutenant returned. ‘General Dadhwal would like to speak to you, ma’am. He would come down if he could, but he can’t leave his headquarters. Would you mind ...?’

  She climbed into the truck. She sat silent for the short ride, while the driver slammed the truck confidently round the hairpin bends, under the red-rock cliffs and the tall trees. At the summit, where the walls of the gorge fell back and the plain opened out, he turned right down a narrow track recently cut through the trees. General Dadhwal stepped out of his tent before the truck stopped, saluted, and helped her down.

  Inside the tent, when they were seated across from each other at the green-baize table, he said, ‘You know, Mr Roy can make it very unpleasant for you when he hears the evidence of the shikaris. Accessory after the fact, and so on. You’d better leave at once. I don’t think he’ll bother to have you arrested after that. Especially as I can persuade him that you won’t change your story. You won’t, I presume?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Mind if I smoke?’ He shifted his body and found his pipe and matches. His tunic was faded but spotlessly clean, the brass buttons glittering, the double row of medal ribbons bright on the dull khaki. There was a good deal of grey at his temples and along the sides of his heavy head. Like everyone else today, he looked tired.

  He said, ‘I thought ... I understood, that you were no friend of his.’

  ‘In the beginning,’ she said. She laid her hands flat on the table. ‘General, I love him. I must find where he’s trying to go, what he’s trying to do.’

  The general muttered, ‘Christ! ... I am sorry, ma’am. Forgive me ...’ She gestured impatiently. The general got up and paced the little tent. After a few minutes he seemed to make up his mind. He stopped opposite her. ‘He’s got to leave India, and everything that India has meant, everything he’s done. He’s got to leave it all behind ... all. He’s got to start again somewhere - England, Canada, Kenya, it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘That’s the only thing he said. What he was not going to do. He’s going to stay in India.’

  The general again muttered under his breath and sucked noisily at his pipe. He sat down. ‘Mrs Wood,’ he said, his brown eyes steady on hers, ‘Rodney Savage and I have had a special sort of relationship for a long time. He is not just England, he is England-in-India. And I am not just Indian, but a special sort of Indian. I wish that much of what has happened between us had not happened - not just the imperialism and the rest, other things as well. They’re all too tied together to explain, even if I wanted to and had the gift of the gab. What matters now is that I will not help you, even if I could, unless I am sure that you can give Rodney what he needs. Something different from what other women are ready to give him. How do you love him? Why? Tell me.’

  She remembered that Janaki, whose thighs had held Rodney in the night, was the general’s wife. She was sure that the general knew. There was a love almost as great as her own here. She had no cause to be embarrassed. She said, ‘I came out here thinking I loved my husband, thinking I had religious faith to be a missionary. After he died I found that I had been lying to myself. I did not love him - I respected and admired him. I did not have faith -I only wanted to be a good and loyal wife. The first time I saw Rodney he wanted me to take my clothes off. I hated him and I couldn’t forget him ... But what is the difference between wanting me as a woman and wanting me as a nurse? Which is more insulting? ... In the middle of that desert where I was, frightened and alone, there was no one in sight but him. He was there for me to hate, to despise, to fear. Then I fell ill, and if he had not come by I would have died. In the weakness and the delirium and the fear - I was very much afraid that I was going to die - my intense feelings about him simply changed round. Or I gave up the struggle of trying to pretend the opposite of the truth. I gave up trying to be loyal to Henry’s ghost. I don’t know much about psychology, but whatever the reason is, the thing’s happened often enough before. Don’t they say
you only have to worry when the person you love doesn’t care, one way or the other? ... Hate became love, despisal became respect, fear became worship. He felt nothing. He was thinking of Sumitra, if of any woman. Now she’s destroyed him, and he feels nothing for anyone, or anything.’

  ‘How can you change that?’ the general asked in a low voice.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I only know that there’s nothing else but him, for me, in life. Surely, somehow, if I can only show him that, he can begin again.’

  The general relit his pipe, drew a sheet of paper towards him and wrote carefully. After five minutes he folded the note into an envelope and gave it to her, unaddressed. ‘That is for my wife in Bhowani,’ he said. ‘She’s at Flagstaff House. I don’t know what Rodney will do, where he will go ... but I think it quite likely that he will turn up there for help of some kind. You can stay as long as Janaki is there ... It is also possible that the Rani of Kishanpur may arrive, for the same purpose as yourself. I know how you feel about her - but, if you can, try not to hate her. She has been as badly hurt as you. Perhaps more, because she did have in her grasp everything she wanted - and threw it away.’

  ‘He will go back to her,’ she said miserably. ‘She is so beautiful. They have shared so much.’

  ‘It is possible,’ the general said. ‘I hope not ... Now, I’m going to send you straight to Bhowani in my staff car with my A.D.C. Just stop off to collect your things. You’re packed? Good.’ He held out his big hand. ‘Good-bye, Mrs Wood.’

  ‘Good-bye ... Did you say something about Mrs Dadhwal’s leaving Bhowani?’

  He smiled grimly. ‘I have been posted to an obscure command in the farther wilds of Assam - a non-family station. Mr Roy is very angry with me. But I have a week or two yet. Janaki will come up to see me off from Chambalpur airfield. Soon after, she’ll go to her mother’s house in Bombay. I don’t suppose you and I will meet again. I won’t say “good luck”. It sounds cheap. I will pray for you.’

  He ushered her out of the tent.

  Chapter 17

  After leaving the distraught Margaret Wood and the mission bungalow I crossed the road and a ragged field, rolled up my trousers, and entered the shallow Shakkar stream. While night lasted I had to go carefully and very slowly. I could not afford a sprained ankle, and I couldn’t afford to scatter water on stones which would normally be dry. They would be after me soon.

  When light came I had covered a quarter of a mile. After that I went comparatively fast for half an hour, then turned up a side stream, which came in from the east, and for a time followed the bed of that. It was a torrent that fell down the high escarpment between the old Rest House and Sabora, and I knew that the linked pools of still water only reached the foot of the slope. Before they ended I sat on a rock in the water and took off my boots and socks. I wrung out my socks, spread one over each shoulder and waited for them to dry. The old Rest House, from which the hidden manoeuvrings of politics had ejected me, lay due south of me and less than a mile away. The morning was cold, not bitter-sharp like mornings on the high desert plateau of Chambal, but raw. My wound ached and a mist as pervasive and chilly as the caresses of a drowned army surrounded me. I shivered the whole time I sat there. I could not see more than a hundred yards at ground level, then the trees became blurs and at last vanished in the mist. Above, their tops made cold patterns against the lightening pale-blue sky.

  An airplane droned over, east bound, and I froze where I sat, turning my head down, before I realised from that first glance that it was a DC-3, the Indian Air Force’s regular mail and V.I.P. passenger run from Chambalpur to Bhowani and Delhi, which had passed over every morning at this time while I was in the C.C.S., after the surrender.

  When it had gone below the trees, and I could hardly hear the soft throb of the engines, I picked my way to the bank, barefoot on the stones, carefully put on socks and boots, and began to climb fast up the face of the escarpment. Most of the trees were bare of leaves in that season, and I felt all the time, as I climbed up that westward-facing slope, that someone was watching me from the opposite slope, below Dhain. If they saw me, at that distance of about two miles more or less, they could not hit me. But they had cars, and could get round to Sabora in half an hour, to Pattan in less, and from there converge across my path - any path. My only chance was speed.

  I climbed up, a little to the right of the line where smooth red stone and long black streaks showed how the stream, in the monsoon, rushed down this face in a heavy waterfall. A long nerve in my stomach pulled all the way from my thigh to my chest at every step. There was no strength in my legs, and my breath came in short wheezing gasps - I, who had once run up and down this slope three times in an hour with young Ganesha.

  I reached the top, threw myself down and vomited. A painful spasm in my stomach made me think that my wound had reopened, perhaps forcing out part of my guts. I dared not stop to look. The vomit spattered the giant teak leaves under my face, and after a few minutes I struggled to my feet and went on eastward. Just here I had killed the sambhur stag and fed the people of Pattan when they were starving. By that pterocarpus I had waited, and there by that patch of heavier jungle I had shot him . . . On, east, the leaves roaring under my feet, earth and rock as dry as splintered bone and the low sun clear and yellow in my eyes.

  After two hours I knew that I had passed the first danger line. Sabora was behind my left shoulder by two miles, and Pattan six miles behind my right. I had crossed the main footpath from one to the other, which was the obvious and best place for them to cut me off. The forest ocean rolled away in all directions now, and I stopped under a tree, leaning back against the rough bark and staring all round. Where to go? Bhilghat lay south-east about twenty-five miles. I could not reach it today, but tomorrow I could. There I could find shelter, and old Gond women with prehistoric remedies for wounds, and I could he in the hut while Gulu’s grand-daughters fed me and cared for me until I was fit again.

  Gulu was in jail, the settlement full of police, schoolmasters, and probably soldiers. I could not go there. I could not go back to Pattan. I could not use roads or well-travelled paths. Where, then?

  I began to walk again. There was no answer to the question, but nor could I stand still. Sometimes problems resolve best by staying in one place and thinking. Sometimes, as when I was in the morass in Delhi, holding the body still produces the same result on the mind - nothing.

  Sabora, the McFadden Pulley quarries, and the metalled road to Bijoli and Bhowani were on my left, Bhilghat on my right. I walked between, allowing the sun to climb past my right shoulder ... On through the long morning. Sleep in a dense thicket in the early afternoon. Awaken groaning with thirst, my throat gummed, and on again in the growing cool of the evening. An hour before sunset I came to the dirt road from Sabora to Bhilghat, the same I had driven along with Ranjit Singh and Max, in the beginning. Heavy military tyre treads marked the dust, with the traces of bare feet and goat hoofs. I took off my boots and crossed in my socks, carefully brushing the ground behind me with a bunch of leaves. On the far side I put on my boots and went on east.

  A footpath joined my course at a diagonal. Stooping to examine it, I saw that it had once been used, but not for some months. It led east, so I followed it for twenty minutes, drawing quickly behind a tree when I caught a glimpse of stone, glowing red in the filtered rays of the setting sun. I went forward cautiously. It was a shrine, ruined and deserted, giant creepers climbing up the lone standing wall, stones fallen on one another, and a chipped and weather-worn statue of Shiva Nataraja against the inner face of the standing wall. Faded flowers lay on a stone slab below the dancing god, but when I went forward I saw that they had been lying there a long time and were now all but crumbled to dust. That explained the state of the path. This was a shrine to which the people of some neighbouring village - five or fifteen miles away - came to worship once a year. Water lay in a kind of stone urn. I stooped over it and drank. It was black and bitter and tasted of lea
ves, but it slaked my thirst.

  It would have been safer in the jungle, but the shrine attracted me and I sat down on the stone slab, sweeping the dried flowers to the ground, and leaned back against the wall, my head against Shiva’s balancing right foot. There I opened my haversack and ate.

  As I ate the banked red fires died down in the stone, the sun set, and the surrounding forest began to creak and move, awakening slowly to its life of the darkness. The stone turned cold under me, the daytime world of colour and texture dissolved into the night world of pattern and mass. The bats began to swoop down the dark alleys of the jungle, and I carefully refastened the straps of the haversack.

  The direction of the wind changed and in the huge silence I heard the barking of dogs. There was a village nearby then, hardly a mile from me. It was to the south, but I would have to go carefully when I started out in the morning.

  Who could I turn to now? I thought of Victoria Jones, the Anglo-Indian girl who had married Taylor the railwayman. She had loved me once. Taylor had got a job on the mineral railway after being dismissed from the Delhi Deccan, and they were living in Bijoli, only forty miles north-east. Suppose I went there. Victoria owed me at least shelter, money, help.

  I turned angrily. She owed me nothing, nor I her. Taylor would hand me over to the police, to ingratiate himself with the Indians he despised.

  I lay down, put the haversack with its sharp-edged contents under my head, and tried to go to sleep. Jackals began to howl their insane chorus, rushing aimlessly through the trees in the dark. Far in the north I heard the cough of a leopard. The dogs of the village were silent. Such shrines as this are usually the home of cobras, and I thought I heard the slithering of a big snake over the stones as I lay on my back, staring through closed eyes at the darkness, but I was not afraid and did nothing to investigate ...