by Olivia
"You asked me a question about Josh. I will now answer it. Had Jai returned to Calcutta with appropriate servility, with deference, begging assistance from a benevolent father, Josh might have been magnanimous, his reactions to him might have been different. But Jai did not return as a minion or an obsequious mendicant. He returned as a competitor, a rival in the tea trade, a challenger—this bastard son of his from the wrong side of the blanket who had been born in his servants' quarters! I had never seen Josh as staggered, as shocked, as outraged as he was on that day of Jai's impromptu visit to our office to announce his return. Then came further effrontery, even more galling than his visit. Jai's rise in the commercial world was meteoric. You must appreciate, Olivia, that in our colonial society, alas, Eurasians are considered the lowest on the social scale by both the Europeans and the Indians. Raventhorne, however, traded shrewdly and successfully with both and with equal facility. Perhaps because he was vociferous about his dislike of the British, he earned the trust of the growing Indian merchant community. His dealings with them paid rich dividends, which we could not match. And over the years he made it such that the Europeans could not do without his clippers, his warehouses and all the efficient benefits he provided."
Olivia nodded. "Yes, I do see all that but about my question ..."
"I'm coming to that, I coming to it." Animated, Ransome inched forward in his seat as if to emphasise the importance of what he was about to say. "Everything Josh had dreamed of achieving, you see, Jai seemed to achieve first: sizable tea exports to America despite those Tea Parties, the innovation of individual tea packets for the retail trade, the fastest fleet of seagoing vessels out of Indian ports—and Josh's ultimate dream, steam navigation. Josh had seen those giant tea trees up in Assam. Anyone who could cultivate indigenous tea would be forever free of the bondage of China, of opium. Thanks to his tribal heritage, Raventhorne did and was. Whereas European experimental tea gardens struggled with labour problems, rising costs, poor quality crops, Raventhorne's tribal kinsmen used their traditional expertise, and his gardens thrived.
"Riddled with envy and corrosive jealousies, Josh began to feel dangerously threatened. And don't forget those acts of ruthless sabotage whereby our opium consignments were consistently pillaged and our teas to London adulterated. Our reputation was crumbling, our credibility was on the chopping block, the roots of our very endeavours were being eroded—and Raventhorne still flourished. The man was a maniac. He had to be stopped somehow."
"And so," Olivia mused aloud, "a lynching was arranged..." Remembering her own glass of milk, she started to sip. Despite Ransome's passionate efforts, somehow none of the dramatis personae in his story seemed real to her anymore. From a distance, they all looked faded, like flowers pressed between the pages of a book and forgotten.
"Yes." He did not deny the charge. "The night-watchman's death was not part of the plot, but everything else was. Thwarted in his ambitions, Josh forgot that Jai was his son, forgot those early years, forgot all the indecisions and contradictions, remembered only that the labours of his whole life were at stake. He ... I too, of course, how can I deny that? . . . wanted Raventhorne dishonoured, publicly disgraced, thrown out of Kirtinagar, barred from commercial practice—"
"Hanged!"
He was startled by her caustic interjection. "Yes," he conceded. "Even that. And Raventhorne would have hanged, make no mistake about that, had Josh revealed to Slocum the whereabouts of Das's body."
Olivia sat up and looked openly sceptical. "Are you trying to tell me that he didn't?"
Carefully, Ransome reclined again. "I don't know. I wasn't with Josh that night. He said he did, but that Slocum dithered. By the time Slocum decided to move, the Ganga was out of reach anyway."
"He said he did? You don't believe that?"
"At that time I didn't know what to believe!" He spread his hands. "When I questioned Josh later outside Slocum's office, he flew into a temper and shouted at me, railing obscenities. 'How dare you question my motives, Arthur?' he yelled, apoplectic with rage. 'Don't you think I want to see the bastard swing?' Well, I believed him then. But now I wonder again, Olivia, I wonder again. I suppose I will always have to wonder now." The deeply etched lines of sorrow were once more upon his face. "Had Josh known that his daughter too had sailed with the Ganga, there would have been no need to wonder."
Briefly, the faded flowers pressed between the pages of memory burst into full blossom, their colours alive and vibrant. The evening of her party leapt into Olivia's inner vision as clear as crystal. "It was on this tenuous chance, this whimsical fragment, that Raventhorne staked his life that day?" Like the flowers, her incredulity revived. "He could court certain death merely in the hope that his father would not be able to kill him? Because of some vague childhood memory . . .?"
"Again, I don't know. I simply do not know." He shook his head. "Unless Raventhorne chooses to confide in us," he laughed at the absurdity, "that too we will never know. But Raventhorne is canny, unnaturally perceptive. And he has, as he warned us, a long memory. He remembers details, has an arcane ability to reach into people's minds—as I once told you. Even as a child, he was disquietingly intuitive. Perhaps there is some other-world language he shares with his father; perhaps it told him something in those few minutes. Or, perhaps, it was just his good luck. Besides, he had no choice but to face Josh's challenge."
"Of course he had a choice!" Olivia scoffed. "He could have picked up the Colt and shot his father instead. He was facing a challenge. It would have been an act of self-defence."
"Yes. He could have. And it would have been justified. I know a great deal, Olivia, some of it admittedly conjecture, but I don't know everything. I certainly don't know Jai anymore. Sometimes I feel I didn't even know Josh as well as I had thought. What I do know with certainty, however, is that with his despised weakness publicly exposed, Josh would not be able to live with himself. He believed fervently that his son had desecrated his daughter, he believed that he should be killed, he believed that he would be the one to do it. But when the time came, he could not look into his son's eyes and wilfully destroy him. It was a moment of bitter self-knowledge for Josh. He was fallible like other human beings—and in that fallibility, he had let Raventhorne snatch victory away from him. No—that he could never have lived with."
This time as he relapsed into silence and the quiet expanded into ticking minutes, Olivia presumed that he was finally finished, and she rose. If, by breaking the seal of confession with such brutal frankness, Ransome had expunged much from his conscience, he had also exhausted himself completely. But he still made no move to rise with Olivia. Obviously, there was more he had to say. His gaze, open and steady until now, dropped towards his toes as if the weight of his eyelids prevented him from meeting her patiently questioning eyes.
"You asked me something earlier that I was not ready to reveal to you then, not because I intended to withhold it but because I am covered with shame at what else was perpetrated. Yes, Jai has a great deal against me too! This, you see, has to do with his mother." Alert again, Olivia shook off her drowse and reseated herself. "Once more we have to go back three decades, to when Josh saw that forgotten naiad again. What he felt for her now was not passion but pity. Removed from her pastoral utopia, she had become ordinary in his eyes, merely another native woman like one of the ayahs. In his persisting guilt he was still kind to her, but throughout those eight years of her stay in his house he was terrified that one day she would, perhaps unwittingly, reveal her secret. And his!"
"And she never did? She never confided in anyone, even the other servants?" This was another aspect that Olivia's rational mind could not accept. "Knowing servants and their penchant for gossip, surely they did at least talk amongst themselves about their suspicions?"
He nodded, but a trifle impatiently. "It is precisely this that I am about to explain. As for Jai's mother, no, she didn't confide in anyone, perhaps not even in her son. Josh had forbidden her to, you see. For her that
was enough. She loved him, you know. Right until the end, she loved Josh without seeming qualification. If the servants did gossip among themselves, well, half-breeds were no longer a novelty. Many sahibs kept Indian mistresses, some of whom might be good-looking domestics from their own households. It is an iniquitous sign of our times, Olivia, that to some Englishmen such arrangements are included in their rights as rulers. And many Indians—curse their submissive fatalism!— meekly accept that right without question, some even with pride." For a moment he forgot his indignation to glower at the fire-red tip of yet another cheroot. Then he recollected the thread of his intended revelation and shook off the momentary deviation. "Nor should you find it surprising, Olivia, that in later years no one in station has made the connection between Lady Stella Templewood and Jai. She died even before Estelle was born. Jai did not return to make his splash until many years after even that. Apart from myself and maybe one or two oldtimers, no one remembers the colour of Lady Templewood's unusual eyes!"
But Olivia was no longer interested in that obscure phenomenon; what gripped her mind now with curious tenacity was that blameless waif and her blind devotion to one who so little deserved it. It was about her that she wanted to learn more. "But did the girl never want justice for herself? For her child? Uncle Josh's one callous command was enough to keep her quiet?"
"Yes, it was enough. For her, it was enough. But it was not enough for the rest of us. To ensure that she did not break her silence, we initiated other precautions. We kept the girl quiet on opium." His eyes again dropped to his toes, his deliberate monotone more expressive than any emotion. "The idea originated with Lady Templewood, but we both, Josh and I, endorsed it with enthusiasm. And it was those lethal little pellets that put the unbreakable seal on her tongue. They made her a slave to our will. They drove her and kept her chained to that dream-world where there is no inconvenient reality, no escape. By the time Jai was eight, she could not survive a day without those pellets. She was a hopeless addict and, of course, no longer a threat to our respectability."
From Olivia no comment was required, nor was any offered. But even though the fire glow was warm, she felt her extremities tingle with cold. Haunted by his relentlessly resurrected private ghosts, Ransome shuddered. Wordlessly he rose now, glanced at his pocket watch through obscuring tears, then nodded, as if really aware of the time it told him, and picked his coat off the back of a chair. He started to put it on in front of the long mirror, fastening each button with meticulous intent.
"So you see, my dear, between us we destroyed Jai's young mother." His air of calm was a façade; inwardly he was trampled by guilt. "We sacrificed her without a care in the good cause of preserving our pristine reputations. Oh yes—Jai Raventhorne has plenty against me still, plenty!" He thrust his hands deep into his pockets and a bitter little smile sat on his mouth. "What he has been seeking to redeem over these many years is merely this infamous disparity in the scales of justice. All things considered, would you not say we have been entirely deserving of his vengeance?"
Mumbling apologies for having ruined her rightful hours of sleep with his pointless remembrances, expressing gratitude to her for having listened to them with such patience, he quietly walked out the door. Still shaken by his final confession, Olivia watched him go in silence.
It was almost three o'clock in the morning. They had talked for hours, scratched many surfaces beneath which wounds still throbbed. By all considerations Olivia should have been exhausted, her debilitated body screaming for slumber. But in the aftermath of Ransome's pitiless self-recriminations she felt wide awake, strangely re-energised. All at once her thoughts raced on several levels, her mental revival as therapeutic as Dr. Humphries's copious medications. For one, talk of Hal Lubbock, even in passing, had jarred her into a much needed reminder. She too was an American, a born and bred fighter! All her life she had lived with the glowing example of a father who never conceded defeat even when defeat was a foregone conclusion. He had taught her to detest moral cowards, to despise those who would not fight, who surrendered without even attempting battle. She had suffered a setback, true, but—as Dr. Humphries had pointed out—it was not the end of the world. Why should she hide in corners from Jai Raventhorne? What would her father have to say now if he could see her crippled with anxiety, wallowing in self-pity? His advice to her, were it available now, would be to let Jai Raventhorne return and do his worst! If circumstances ordained that she had to stay, had to fight, then she would stay and accept his challenges as they came. And if he ever dared to claim her son and try and remove him from her, she would not make the mistake her uncle had: She would aim straight for Jai Raventhorne's heart. And she would not miss.
The complex, cathartic narration with which Arthur Ransome had sought to relieve his long-fermenting transgressions had melded in Olivia's mind the past with the present in odd, patchwork patterns. Her heart ached for him; he had not spared himself even though his was not the major part in the conspiracy. In his generous loyalty to his dead friend, he nonetheless appropriated half the blame. This other level on which Olivia's thoughts raced produced inner turmoils of a different nature, guilt in another direction. As much as Ransome had been able to, as much as he would ever be able to, he had cast off some of the ballast weighting down his conscience. It was perhaps time she too did the same.
Ignoring the dawn of another day and the fact that she had not slept at all, Olivia sat down at her desk to write another, longer, letter to her cousin Estelle.
CHAPTER 19
It was the season of Christmas.
In the cosy downstairs parlour of the Birkhurst residence, the least formal of the reception-rooms, a tall conifer stood in a wooden tub, and it was splendidly decorated with coloured streamers, glass baubles, silver fairies in twinkling tinsel, gold stars, snowy white cotton wool, a cardboard Santa Claus and his reindeer, and banks of mistletoe and holly purchased with scandalous extravagance from Whiteaways. The house was filled with music and song and seldom heard gales of laughter. On Christmas Day the Donaldsons, the Humphrieses and, of course, Arthur Ransome had been guests at a veritable feast of traditional fare produced with uncanny skill by Rashid Ali and the specially summoned Babulal. There had been gaily wrapped gifts for everyone, including the servants and their families, particularly the children. There had also been crackers and fireworks, boisterous carol singing and generally uninhibited revelry such as had not been witnessed in years at the austere, under-inhabited mansion.
It was Olivia's second Christmas in India. And so different in spirit from that miserable occasion of twelve months ago in Barrackpore, which no one now could rustle up the courage to remember!
But if it was different in spirit, the credit for making it so, Olivia conceded readily, went entirely to her cousin Estelle. Her response to Olivia's letter had been warm and pathetically eager, and her return to Calcutta gratifyingly prompt. Olivia was shocked to see the change in her cousin. In her consuming sense of loss she had shed weight, the abundant vitality subdued and the sparkle sadly diminished. In the week Estelle had been here she had seldom talked of her father. It was only when she had first arrived that she had not been able to control her grief; she had thrown herself into her cousin's arms, clung to her like a limpet and wept like a frightened child suddenly finding itself lost and alone at a fairground. But then, after that, she had resolutely cast her own feelings aside to cater to those of her ailing cousin. That she cried privately in the solitude of her room, Olivia knew; sorrow was never far from her eyes, but she kept it hidden. In her palpitating and durable guilt at having contributed so heavily to Olivia's misfortunes, Estelle spared no effort to make reparation in a hundred different ways. She waited on Olivia hand and foot, anxious to please and to earn that forgiveness she despaired of. And with the grim determination of a bulldog she had set about bringing good cheer to a house that so badly needed it.
The Christmas festivities and frivolities had been her idea. "A quiet Christmas?" She had echoed Oli
via's desultory suggestion with horror. "Why, Amos will never forgive us that! If only for his sake, we must make it as merry as we can no matter what our own feelings." Olivia could not deny that she had been touched.
In fact, Olivia could not deny that it was Estelle's effort and initiative that had brought about their rapprochement with such painless ease. If during the first day or two there had been stiffness between them, it had by now melted considerably. Estelle forcibly suppressed her own depression to work hard at lightening Olivia's; whatever the cost to herself, it must have been heavy. The smoothness with which their badly jarred relationship was being patched up was a relief to Olivia. She had not been entirely fair to Estelle, and her cousin's inability to sustain grudges made it easier for her own conscience. Besides, with this truce there was at least one less tension in their lives. Also, Estelle had been spending long hours with Arthur Ransome; therefore, by now there was no doubt that she too knew everything, and it was another relief not to have to pretend with her.
The tedium of Olivia's enforced convalescence weighed heavily on her. Estelle's high spirits and spilling vivacity, however forced they might be, made her an amusing companion, and the confinement to barracks less difficult to bear. In her year away, and with the gruesome tragedies and traumas she had had to bear, Estelle had matured. Outgrown largely were the compulsive flow of trivialities, the irritating prattle that centered forever around herself, the torrent of gossip about Calcutta's tiresome follies and frolics. Now there was restraint in her conversation; finally, Estelle had attained that adulthood she had always craved. But what an exorbitant price she—and others—had had to pay for it!
