by John Masters
‘And when I do find him,’ Margaret said, ‘if he agrees to leave India, will you smuggle him out of the country in one of your ships?’
Sir Andrew fingered his heavy jowls and his Scots accent became more noticeable. ‘They are not my ships any more, Mrs Wood. They belong to the new McFadden Pulley, of which I am not a partner, merely the managing director, and that for only a few months more.’
‘The ships’ officers are still English, aren’t they,’ she said emphatically, ‘even in the coasting steamers?’
‘It’s a dangerous business for us to get involved in,’ he said.
‘You owe it to him!’ she cried. ‘What were you doing when he was being wounded in Burma?’
Sir Andrew held up his hand. ‘I will see what might be possible, if the situation arises. I doubt that it will arise.’ He walked with her to the door. Just before opening it he said with a half-smile, ‘I was sitting at that desk during this war, Mrs Wood. But in 1917 I was lying wounded and frozen in a trench with a hundred corpses, at a place called Passchendaele.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘Good luck, ma’am. I only hope he turns out worthy of you.’
On to the address he had given her, hurrying on foot through the crowds in the lazily growing heat. A guarded talk with two small dark men in European clothes. Ah, Colonel Rodney Savage. Did Madam realise that if they learned anything about that gentleman they were in duty bound under the terms of their licence to report it to the police? The gentleman had a criminal as opposed to a civil suit pending against him. This was a special case! Yes, indeed, precisely. In the circumstances, provided it was only information, not leading to a situation where their agents could be said to have made actual contact, as in serving papers or the like ... Aah, nothing of the sort, Precisely. In that case ...
On, to the office of Milkwalla and Company Ltd. Wait in the outer office, cautiously scrutinised by fat gentlemen in tall hats through glass partitions. Guided into the presence of Sir Ramatoola Milkwalla, a stern old man in traditional Parsee robes; in the corner, at another big desk, a young man with a huge R.A.F. moustache and hacking jacket. The old man reads Janaki’s note, mumbling politely to himself. At the end: ‘Mrs Wood, if your qualifications are as stated, I am sure the hospital will be only too glad to employ you ... but for how long? It upsets the routine of the hospital to employ nurses, especially senior ones, who come for a few weeks and when their, ah, purpose is served, leave. How long a contract of service will you sign?’
No more lies, anywhere. She lifted her chin. ‘I am here looking for a man - Colonel Savage. When I find him I will leave the hospital, if he wants me to.’
The young man in the corner turned. ‘Rodney Savage? The chap who rubbed out that clot Gokal Singh in Chambal?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘I knew him in Burma. Came to our squadron mess once, and broke all our plates. Great binge! Next day I flew him over Homalin in a Harvard. Flack everywhere, no joy. Pranged on landing. Kersplat! No gore.’
‘Murder?’ the old man said. ‘Do I understand, madam, that you are associated ...?’
The young man said, ‘Come into the other office for a moment, Dad.’
They left her alone. When they returned the young man said, ‘A piece of cake. I’ll ring old Merchant and he’ll give you the job. Savage was one of the best brown jobs I ever came across.’
On to the hospital, a large brick building half a mile back from the docks. Crowds of all races waiting under the trees outside, and in the corridors. Interview with Dr Merchant, a tired, overworked man. Talk about Dr Pallister at the Royal Mersey. She got the job, as senior night sister, medical wards. The matron did not ask her why she wanted night duty, but was only too glad to agree. Start tomorrow, to give her time to get her uniform cleaned and laundered. She would wear the Royal Mersey cap and cape, of course? Of course.
On, back to Janaki’s, to eat. Out, working like a hound through crowded streets, staring at every face, until an Anglo-Indian police officer barred her way. His voice was hard: ‘How long have you been on the street? I don’t recognise you.’
She shook her head, a tired hound coming out of water. The street lamps glowed, her feet burned. She stared at the man. ‘Where am I?’
His voice changed. ‘Are you all right, ma’am?’
‘Yes, yes.’
She turned and hurried away. Must get a street map of the city tomorrow, mark it out in sectors, search each sector thoroughly. Must sleep. After she started work, how many hours a day could she walk, search? Must remember to visit the detective agency every day, too ...
On, through the night, the next day. The first night at the hospital, the routines coming back to her hand so that she did automatically what had to be done, and between watched the dawdling circles of the clock until she could go home, Sleep, hurry to the agency, lean over the two dark men. Any news? No, ma’am, we must exert patience ... Out on to the streets.
One morning hurrying up the stairs at Janaki’s at eight o’clock on her way to bed, a hand on her elbow detained her. She tried to shrug it off but it held more firmly, and a voice said, ‘Margaret, stop!’
She stopped. Janaki linked her arm in hers and walked her up to the bedroom, forcing her to go at her own slow pace. Inside the room Janaki said, ‘Sit down in the chair ... You’ve been running for a week now. Now you really do look ill. Do you want to get sacked from the hospital? Do you want to make some terrible mistake there and kill a patient? Do you want Rodney to think an old witch is after him, if you do find him? When’s your night off?’
‘Tonight, but I volunteered to give it up.’
‘Oh, no, you don’t. I shall ring Dr Merchant and cancel that. We haven’t seen you for days, your food is hardly touched ...’
‘I’ve got to find him,’ Margaret said sullenly. This happily married woman did not understand.
Janaki said, ‘See, you’re so tired you’re getting bad tempered ... Max suggested an idea, in his last letter.’
‘What?’
‘He said that the only hope of getting Rodney out of hiding was to find what he cares about, and appeal to that. He thinks Rodney still worries about that Gurkha driver who disappeared. Remember Sumitra telling us about him, one evening in Bhowani, a day or two before Rodney came?’
Margaret nodded. She remembered, and remembered the Gurkha’s face, too. He used to drive often past the mission bungalow when Rodney was at Pattan, and he drove the wounded man to Bhowani, the man Lady Hillburn shot. She said, ‘But he stole the jewels, didn’t he? For the reward that Rajah Dip Rao was giving. Rodney must hate him. He was the first to betray him.’
Janaki said, ‘Perhaps. But Max suggests you put an advertisement into the paper, pretending you’re Ratanbir. If Rodney doesn’t respond, you’re no worse off. But Max thinks Rodney will want to see him again, to find out the truth. He thinks that Rodney doesn’t really believe he did it. He believes, or wants to believe, that it was somehow a machination of Sumitra’s and L. P. Roy’s … ‘
‘What will he say, if it does work, and he finds it isn’t Ratanbir, but me?’
Janaki said, ‘That is a risk you have to take. You can’t do anything for him until you find him.’
Margaret made up her mind. ‘Very well. I will.’
Janaki said, ‘Max said, don’t use Ratanbir’s name, as the police will know of the connection and it’s a distinctively Gurkha name, which would be noticed in a Bombay paper. His old army number was 2588. So many Gurkhas have the same name that the officers often speak to them by the last two figures of their numbers. You may have heard Rodney call him atharsi - that’s 88.’
‘The meeting place would have to be in code. I mean, some place that Ratanbir and Rodney would know, but would not be clear from the text.’
‘Yes. Suppose you say, round the corner outside the place where he used to work. Rodney would know that was McFadden Pulley’s. There’s a cafe there, a sort of teahouse among a lot of small shops,
bookstalls, and so on ... We’ll have to insert the ad several times, in several papers ... Would you rather I sent a servant to the rendezvous? We could describe Rodney to him, and he could follow him, and tell us where he lives. Better still, tell the detective agency.’
‘No, I’ll go myself,’ she said. ‘Where’s a pencil and paper?’ When she went to bed an hour later the advertisement was already on its way by messenger to the newspaper offices. The message, to run a week in all newspapers, was: Waiting five p.m. every day one hour in teashop round corner from place you used to work - 88.
That evening, from five to six, she sat in the dingy teashop, waiting. It was a worrying, anxious time, and full of problems, some of which she had not foreseen. She had foreseen that she must not sit too much in view, or he could recognise her from a distance, realise the deception, and again vanish, this time for ever. On the other hand, she must sit far enough forward so that she could see him when he did enter the teashop. She had foreseen that, sitting alone for an hour in such a place, she would be the object of curiosity and perhaps worse, and so had armed herself with a book, and also ordered a quantity of the teashop’s sickly sweetmeats, so that she appeared to be taking a peculiar sort of supper.
She had not foreseen the denseness of the crowds, nor their St Vitus’s Dance of purposeless motion. For minutes at a time she could see nothing but jiggling legs, waving shirt-sleeves, dark, animated faces. The teashop jerked with them. On the street outside they hurried in opposing streams, met in tide rips of animation, broke into circling groups, rushed off in different directions. After half an hour her head ached and her left eye, catching the restlessness, developed a tic.
She had not foreseen the bugs. Just when the concentrated effort to pick out his face amid the frenzy was becoming nervously oppressive, she felt a bug crawling up the inside of her thigh. Instinctively she jumped to her feet, meaning to ask the man at the counter where the lavatory was. Then she sat down again. She dared not leave even for a minute. A couple of young men standing jammed together close to her table stared at her in amused astonishment, and she bent her head over her book. But he did not come.
The next evening she doused her underclothes with bug powder. As she sat down at the same table, and opened her book, she could not help a smile, quickly concealed, at the typically Indian mixture of high tragedy and low comedy. The powerful smell of the bug powder crept out from under her skirt to mingle with the subtly expensive perfume she had bought that afternoon. The men jammed round the tea urns kept looking about, and at each other, and sniffing. But he did not come.
The next day, fifteen minutes after the appointed time, he came- a stoop-shouldered figure in dirty white trousers and shirt, a newspaper in one hand, a battered topi on his head, dark stubble on chin and jowl - a middle-aged Anglo-Indian, down on his luck. For a moment she did not recognise him, and obviously he had no eyes for her because after staring round the teashop, he turned and left. She half rose, fighting to hold back her tears. The men stared at her as she put money on the table, grabbed her book, and hurried out. She saw his topi above the puggarees and the bare heads, and walked faster. At the next corner, when the snarling, ill-tempered traffic held him up, she caught him. She touched his arm, ‘Rodney,’ she said in a low voice.
The traffic cleared and he walked on, turning his head. His eyes were dull on hers. He said, ‘Oh. It was you, was it?’
‘I must talk to you.’
He stopped. ‘Well?’
She looked nervously up and down the crowded street. ‘Not here. It’s not safe.’
He opened the newspaper in his hand, and gave it to her. On the front page a two-column headline announced Amnesty in Chambal. The story explained that with the setting up of a democratic Congress ministry in the province of Chambal, and in order to eradicate all previous bitterness, the government had declared an amnesty in respect of acts done during the troubles. A brief editorial comment noted that this closed the cases of half a dozen men - they were listed -- now in hiding or in jail awaiting trial. Rodney’s name was on the list.
‘It’s an evening paper,’ she said, ‘I left the house at three and didn’t see anything ... Oh, Rodney, that’s wonderful!’
He took back the paper. ‘Well?’
‘Please let me come with you.’
‘I can’t stop you,’ he said.
He walked on. She walked beside him, wishing she were not so conspicuously clean, so fastidiously dressed beside him, so that men turned their heads and women stared at her.
‘Can you smell the bug powder on me?’ she asked, forcing a smile. ‘That teashop’s crawling with the beasts. My panties are full of powder. Yesterday a bug practically went to earth up there before I could catch him.’
He said, ‘I can smell it.’
After fifteen minutes’ walk through increasingly squalid streets, he turned into a row of mean houses on a mean street. Garbage, offal, and filth overflowed the gutters, the street lamps shone on broken glass and chipped brick, on women leaning out of windows and washing hung from lines strung across the street.
She followed him up one flight of stairs, along a passage smelling of urine, and into a small back room, its bare walls streaked with damp, the wooden floor bristling with splinters. She saw his suitcase and a chamber pot under the bed, and, thrown into the corner, half a dozen newspapers. A single electric light bulb hung from the ceiling.
‘As you’ve got bug powder on, you can sit on the bed,’ he said. ‘I have to go to work in an hour.’
‘Me, too,’ she said. She wanted to ask him what his work was, but she had better wait. She said, ‘First, is your wound healed properly?’
‘It hasn’t bothered me.’
‘May I look at it?’
He unfastened his shirt and opened his fly buttons without a word. His trousers dropped and she leaned forward. The exit wound was still slightly inflamed. ‘Turn round,’ she said. The entry wound in his back was clean and healthy, faintly pink, light scar tissue well formed. ‘Turn round again, please. You ought to keep that well covered, and protected with sulpha powder until it heals properly. You haven’t seen any signs of blood in your urine or stool?’
‘I haven’t looked,’ he said.
Her professional detachment vanished. She became intensely aware of the ridge of hair running down from his navel into the dense forest of his loins, of the muscled columns of his thighs, the unequivocal statement of his male formation.
A tiny movement in the hairs caught her eye. Her arms went out, holding him tight by the buttocks. This she knew only too well, from her profession.
‘Oh, Rodney,’ she wailed, her voice breaking, ‘you’ve got crabs. And you’re covered with bug bites. You must have lice, too.’
‘Probably,’ he said. He pulled up his trousers, so that she had to take her hands away.
‘For God’s sake, leave India,’ she cried. ‘Sir Andrew Graham will give you a passage. There’s nothing for you here now, nothing at all.’
She waited, pleading silently for an answer. What there had been for him, what had been offered so generously, he had refused. What he had tried to keep had been taken from him, and broken before his eyes. There was nothing.
‘Go?’ he said slowly. ‘I can’t go. I’d be ashamed.’
‘Ashamed of what?’ she cried.
He held out his empty hands and stared at them, turning them over slowly. He said, ‘Nothing. Having nothing. Being nothing. I can only do that here.’
She drew a deep breath. ‘Let me look after you, then. I have a night job, too, nursing at the Wadalia Memorial. I don’t ask anything else. I won’t get in your way. I don’t ask you to speak to me even, but ... I can’t bear it!’ Tears welled up in her eyes.
He said, ‘I have nothing to give you.’
She cried, ‘I don’t want anything.’
He didn’t speak for a long time. Then she heard his distant voice: ‘I suppose nothing else will teach you. All right.’
She l
eaped to her feet, her arms out. In the face of his silent indifference she let them fall to her sides. ‘We’ll have to get a better room,’ she said, ‘where I can cook.’
‘I’m staying here,’ he said. ‘The room next door’s empty, and there’s a gas ring and a cold water tap in it.’
For a moment she felt chilled; but then at once thought, It’s better not to crowd too closely on him until he asks me. She said, ‘I’ll take it now, and move in tomorrow morning’ - she found another smile - ‘with a gallon of disinfectant and five pounds of bug powder.’
‘All right,’ he said.
Chapter 20
February: the fresh light pouring a clean Aegean-colour wash over the filth of the city and shading the smoke to pastel. By the end of the month, twice daily scrubbing walls and floors of the two rooms with soap and water, with carbolic acid, with Jeyes Fluid, with potassium permanganate, she had conquered the bugs. By taking beds and chairs into the street, unwinding the newar, dousing the frames in kerosene and setting fire to them, she burned the bugs out of the cracks and joints. By soaking his head and her own in kerosene, by shaving and blue ointment and vigilance she freed him and herself of lice, nits, and crabs. By miserly scraping and clearing of scraps she kept away the mice, rats, and cockroaches. The landlord, a fat Muslim living in terror of his Hindu neighbours ever since the partition massacres, at first treated her as a madwoman, but now with a grudging respect.
Rodney was clean, and free of parasites, because she kept him free. Otherwise he had not altered one jot. Every evening he left the house, walked to the Central Station, and took an electric train three stops up the line to the cotton mill where he was employed as night watchman. He had originally given the name of D’Souza when applying for the job, and saw no reason to change it. Every morning he returned, ate the supper she had prepared, then went to bed. At three in the afternoon he awoke, ate breakfast. She washed up and cleaned. He lay on his bed until the time came to go to work.
