The Grandmothers
Page 27
‘Didn’t they offer you a commission?’
‘Yes, I turned it down. Now, I wonder why?’
‘You might have had things a bit easier.’
‘I thought so on the troopship, yes.’
‘Yes.’
And another time, looking at the red volume on James’s knee.
The tumult and the shouting dies,
The Captains and the Kings depart.
‘They don’t seem to be departing, sir. Far from it.’
‘That’s what they want us to do. The Indians. Depart. You might have noticed.’
James had now been in India for a week and he had not done more than glance at a newspaper.
‘Riots.’ ‘Free India.’ ‘India for the Indians.’ ‘The British Tyranny.’
Months of socialist indoctrination, which of course had to include ‘Free India’, had slid off James. He thought, Well, India for the Indians: that makes sense.
‘The lot before you. The previous regiment. They’ve gone to Burma.’
‘Yes, we know.’
‘Before they left they were suppressing riots in … pretty close to here. They put down quite a nasty spot of bother. What do you think about that?’
James thought that if you were a soldier you did what you were told, bad luck.
‘Mine is not to reason why, sir.’
The Colonel laughed. ‘Very wise!’
‘Are we going to Burma, sir?’ James dared.
‘I don’t know. No, I really don’t.’
‘And if you did you wouldn’t tell me.’
‘And if I did I couldn’t tell you. But as you know, the Japs are threatening to invade India and free it from our tyranny. And they’re getting closer all the time.’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘And some troops will be kept here, in case of that.’
‘I see.’
‘Yes, it looks like that.’
And another conversation, towards the end of that visit, which James was hardly to remember later, so little impression did it make on him, compared with the vividness of Cape Town.
The Colonel had come on to the verandah, his boots loud on the wooden floor, and he stood looking at the soldier, who was lost to the present and staring, his mouth a little open.
‘James …’
James did hear, after a pause, then smiled, stood as the Colonel sat down. He sat down again himself.
The Colonel said, ‘You know, this isn’t an easy country for some of us – well, some do seem to flourish like the green bay tree. Not many. It takes it out of you.’ Now he hesitated, trying to think of the right thing to say. He shifted his lengthy legs about in the cream linen trousers which had a shine on them from someone’s iron. With one thin sunburned hand he rubbed his chin, while he stared thoughtfully, not at James, but into the garden.
‘Are you sleeping – may I ask?’
‘Not too well. It is so hot.’
‘Yes, it is, things’ll get better when the monsoon comes. Not long now.’
‘The monsoon, everyone talks about it as if it’s some kind of magic wand.’
‘Well, it is. Yes, that’s what it is. James – if I’m talking out of turn, then forget it. But I want to say … you mustn’t take things too hard. Bad idea anywhere, but in this country … it tips people over the edge, India does, if you don’t get a grip of yourself. We aren’t made for this climate. It does us in. I’ve seen it … I’ve been here forty years. Too long. I’d be Home now if it wasn’t for the war.’
If James had taken this in, it didn’t show on his face; he didn’t move, or look at the Colonel.
‘Think about what I’m saying, will you? Try and take things a little easier.’
‘Yes, sir. Yes … it’s that ship, you see. I don’t think you can have any idea …’ One does not say to an old man that he hasn’t an idea, not about anything. ‘I mean … I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean …’ And then, angry, white-faced: ‘It was terrible. It was …’ And he brought two clenched fists frustratedly down on his chair arms. His book fell, and the Colonel picked it up, sat turning pages. He read aloud:
‘Cities and Thrones and Powers
Stand in Time’s eye,
Almost as long as flowers,
Which daily die:
But, as new buds put forth
To glad new men,
Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth
The Cities rise again.
I often recite that to myself when things get rough.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘A sense of proportion, one must keep that.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And you do forget, you know, one does forget.’
‘I will never forget, sir, never, never.’
‘I see. I’m sorry.’ And the Colonel moved off.
On the day the cars came to take the Grants’ guests back to their camp, the air seemed full of rubbish. A wind was busy in the trees, whirling leaves and even small branches out into the roads where people scurried into doorways and holes in a jumble of shops and little houses, and shopkeepers struggled to put up their shutters to save their goods being whisked into the air. Mouths were dry. Eyes stung from the dust.
The cars passed a platoon, accompanied by their corporal, returning from some jaunt associated with the two weeks’ leave. Their eyes were screwed up, their mouths clenched tight, against the sun and the dust. This made them look indignant. Ten expostulating men with the dirt running off them as they marched, and the dust in clouds as high as their knees. The two cars passing raised the dust even more and looking back, the passengers saw a ghostly platoon vanish in a dirty cloud.
The men went to report their return, and James was told that ‘it had been suggested’ he should take a commission and then join Administration. Who had suggested? It could only be Colonel Grant, who was a friend, he had said, of Colonel Chase. ‘Nine to Five,’ thought James, ‘It’s my fate.’
‘Get to Medical tomorrow and then report back.’
James was in a long hut that housed twenty, rather like the hut which was his first home as a soldier getting on for three years ago. None of the men he had been with in Britain were here, but some were fellow sufferers from the ship. On twenty beds, ten to a side, young men sat, listening to the wind fling dust at their shelter.
‘Christ, what a country.’
No one disagreed.
They began exchanging news about their two weeks’ leave. All grumbled: nothing to do, a couple of ‘clubs, so called’ making a favour of admitting Other Ranks, a few Eurasian girls, anyone fucking those bints was asking for it, again a shortage of beer, the heat, the heat, the heat.
Then one said to James, ‘We hear we’re going to have to salute you, sir.’
This was unfriendly. James who had listened to routine criticisms, amounting to hatred, of the officers, realised he was now on the other side.
‘So it seems,’ he said.
A soldier gave him a mock salute from where he sat.
‘Enough of that,’ said the corporal.
‘Yes, Corporal.’
‘Administration,’ said James. ‘Pen-pushing.’
‘Better than square bashing.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said James.
‘And how was it at your Colonel’s?’
One of the men in the hut had been among the ten, and now James said, ‘Ask Ted, he’ll tell you.’
‘Fucking awful,’ said Ted, ‘And she’s …’ he screwed his forefinger at his forehead.
‘Suited me,’ said James, annoyed at the ingratitude, ‘I needed a bit of quiet after that voyage.’
‘Quiet,’ said Ted. ‘I’d like a bit of action.’
‘Perhaps they’ll move us on,’ said someone.
‘And perhaps not,’ said James. And he told them what Colonel Grant had said: some regiments were to be kept in India in case of a Jap invasion.
Groans and curses.
‘Roll on the bloody peace.’
The men got to breakfast wet and hot. They went to Medical – hot and wet.
‘How’s that knee?’
‘Better,’ said James. It was a lean healthy knee again,
‘I see you play cricket. I’ll get your name put down.’
The doctor prodded James here and there, and said, ‘And now your feet.’
James took off his boots. Liberal applications of a strong-smelling liquid.
‘And your sore throat?’
James had mentioned his sore throat to no one but the Colonel.
‘It’s not too good.’
‘Let’s take a look … yes, I see. It’s the dust. But now the rains have come, it’ll clear up.’
And how did he know? All the personnel, from the Colonel down, were new to India. All were dismayed by it. ‘You’ll acclimatise,’ said this young man, who had read in his textbooks that one did.
The rain stopped. A clean and well-sponged sun appeared.
Hundreds of young men marched and drilled, drilled and marched, the sweat running under the khaki while the sergeants shouted at them that they had gone soft and useless, but don’t worry, we’ll see to that.
James was sent that day to Supplies to get a Second Lieutenant’s uniform, spent time on new boots, and then was in a hut with one other Second Lieutenant, Jack Reeves, who was fitting books into a shelf when he arrived – so, that boded well.
James now said to his new comrade that he had no idea how to behave as an officer.
‘Don’t fret,’ said Jack Reeves, ‘I told the corporal the same and he said, “Just repose on the bosom of your sergeant-major and he’ll see you right”.’
‘Some bosom,’ the rejoinder had to be.
And now both young men were in Administration, with fifteen others, under a Captain Hargreaves who in peacetime had been trying to beat the Slump with a chicken farm in Somerset. The war had saved him from bankruptcy. He was a rather loud, blustering sort of fellow, but competent enough. Every morning he arrived in Administration, took salutes, saluted, and then allotted tasks like someone dealing cards. They dealt with supplies of food, of uniforms, of medical supplies; with the movement of men and with transport. Admin knew everything about the camp and its dispositions, and there was in this an agreeable feeling of power, if James’s temperament had permitted. But his real life, his secret energies, went into waiting for a letter from Daphne. Almost the last thing he had said to her was, ‘You will write, won’t you? Promise.’
But had he actually given her his number? Even his full name? Had she ever called him anything but James?
The measure of his disassociation from reality was that it had taken him weeks to realise that he didn’t have her full name, and certainly not her address. He could not write to her, but she would somehow find out where he was and write. He trusted her to find a way. It had taken the ship three weeks to get from Cape Town to Bombay. Allow a week – well then, two weeks – for delays; he could expect a letter any day now.
No letter. Nothing.
So he had to write to her. But all he remembered of that four days of paradise was stumbling off the ship into Daphne’s arms – that is how it had seemed: a radiance of bliss. A wonderful spreading house on a hillside in a street of such houses, and a garden. A little verandah from where you looked down at the sea, the murdering sea, and where he had danced with her, all night, cheek to cheek. Then that little house in the bushes that smelled of salt, and the waves crashing and thundering all around them.
But no address. Not a number, not the name of the street. The women who organised the hospitality when the troopships arrived, they didn’t take account of the name of this or that soldier: they simply despatched soldiers to willing hostesses. How could he find out her surname? The base at Simonstown? Write and ask for the names of the hostesses who had been so kind when the Troopship X was in? … Careless talk costs lives. He could not put it in a letter. The censor would have it out.
What was he to do? Never mind, she would write and then there would be an address. Meanwhile he wrote long letters to her, saving them carefully, numbered and dated.
He dreamed of her with an intensity that was like an illness. What he remembered of Cape Town – and with every day the scenes he dwelt on became sharper as he polished them, relived them – was clearer to him than this ugly place full of bored young men. This camp! – what a cock-up (so the men grumbled) – even now not all the huts had been built. Some men were still in tents that had been glaring white but now were stained and brownish, where watery mud lapped around the bases and seeped in through ground sheets. Even now gangs of thin little brown men in loincloths – surely cooler at least than thick khaki? – were hoisting up sheets of roofing or running around with hods of bricks. Everything had a look of impermanence, of improvisation. Everything was difficult: food and water, and basic medicines which had to be rushed, if that was the word, by train from Delhi.
There was grumbling over the food. Curries were making their appearance, but what the men wanted was the roast beef of old England, and that made all kinds of problems. The Hindus didn’t eat beef, and their cows wandered about, skinny and pitiful but sacrosanct, and beef came from the Moslems. Water was the worst: every drop had to be boiled, or otherwise was supposed to have purification tablets, but sometimes the men forgot. There had already been an outbreak of dysentery and the little hospital was full.
In the intervals between storms of rain the dust dried, but what dust … James took up handfuls of it, sifted it between his fingers, a powder as fine as flour. ‘The spent and unconsidered earth,’ he murmured: that is where Kipling got his line, from the lifeless, fine-blowing soil of India. This soil wouldn’t be able to grow the tiniest weed, it was so spent.
He passed requisite time in the Officers’ Mess, and its rituals, he was not negligent. He was determined not to be thought an oddity.
And yet he knew he must be, because he sometimes didn’t hear when people spoke to him. He was happiest with Jack Reeves, in their hut, reading, or talking about England. Jack was homesick and said so; James was sick with love, but did not confide in his friend. No one could understand, he knew that.
No letter came from Daphne. Letters from his mother, yes, with messages from his father, heavily censored, but Daphne was silent.
In his position in Administration he learned that another troopship was arriving, not destined to discharge its load at Camp X but at Camps Y or Z; fifty men would arrive here, to replace the twenty-five taken off at Cape Town and the casualties since. There had already been funerals; the Last Post had sounded over Camp X. Some sick men would never be fit for duty and would have to wait until the end of the war to get home. As Colonel Grant had said, India took it out of you.
This camp was so charged with homesickness and longings that it could have lifted up into the air and got home to England without the benefit of ships, or even of aeroplanes – which were for the VIPs. So Jack jested with James: it was a fantasy that was enlivening the camp for a while.
The new arrivals off the unnamed troopship had spent three days in Cape Town: bad luck would have taken them to Durban, but it was Cape Town. James spoke to one, and then another, until he found one who had been a guest, but did not describe anything like the houses and gardens James remembered. Then at last James did, by diligent pursuit, hear that yes, he had got lucky. The man had been whisked off to a house on a hill, with a garden and …
‘What was her name?’
‘Betty, she was called Betty. And what a party, the food, the drink …’
‘And was there another woman there? A girl with fair hair?’
‘There were a lot of girls, yes. What was her name?’
‘Daphne, her name was Daphne.’
And now at last James heard: ‘Yes, I think there was.
Yes. Yellow hair. But she wasn’t there much. She was pregnant. Must have popped by now.’
And no matter how James pressed and urged, that was all he could find out.
Pregnant. Nine months. It fitted. The baby was his. It had to be. Funny, he had not once thought of a baby, though now he felt ridiculous that he hadn’t. Babies resulted from lovemaking. But that was a bit of an abstract preposition. His lovemaking, with Daphne, what did it have to do with the progenitive? With baby-making? No, it had not crossed his mind. Now he could think of nothing else. Over there, across all that sea, beyond the appalling Indian Ocean, was that fair city on its hills, and there in that house was his only love with his baby.
He tried again with his informant. ‘What was the address? Where was the party?’
‘No idea. Sorry.’
‘What was the fair woman’s name?’
‘I thought you said Daphne.’
‘No, her surname.’
‘No idea.’
‘Did you get the name of your hostess, the dark one, Betty?’
‘I think it was Stubbs.’
‘No address?’
‘Sorry, I never thought to keep it – you know, they just drove us up there and then back again.’
‘Is she going to write to you?’
‘Who?’
‘Betty, Betty Stubbs, is she going to write you letters?’
‘No, why should she? There were dozens of us, she isn’t going to write letters to every poor sod she invited to a party.’
But James was better off by one name. He had had Betty, and now he had Stubbs. Her husband was a captain at Simonstown and a friend of Daphne’s husband.
Bringing himself back from his world of dreams to reality (‘what they call reality’ – he knew how his state would be criticised, if anyone guessed it) he decided that he could not write to this husband of Daphne’s friend Betty and say, ‘Please give the enclosed to your friend and neighbour Daphne.’ After all, Daphne did have a husband. She had said so. But she could have had two or three husbands and they would not affect the secret life he shared with Daphne and which he knew – she must – share too. No one could have lived through that time and not for ever be changed – that he knew. But he did not wish to harm her.