by Paul Scott
He hesitated, then added, ‘Tonight I am a bit drunk.’
Then, looking at his watch he saw it was tonight no longer. He put pencil and notebook back in the jacket pocket. The evening at the Maharanee’s was over. Standing, staring at that name, Purvis, he realized that curious and complex as it had been the evening had had shape. Beginning with Purvis, it had ended in Purvis’s office. He appreciated the symmetry of that.
He visited the bathroom. Returning, he went over to the light switch, changed his mind and crossed to the desk, found the blue crayon and went to the wall calendar. He drew an X through the 5, stared at the 6 and said aloud, ‘That, anyway, is the crystallization, the point reached in the time continuum.’
He turned the fan down to its slowest rate of revolutions, switched off the light, opened the shutters on the unglazed barred window and breathed in. Bombay. Bom-Bahia. Part of an inheritance. His monarch’s. His own. The corporal’s, Purvis’s, the Maharanee’s. The street beggar’s. He lay, adjusted the cushion the corporal had brought as a pillow, and the blanket so that it just covered his abdomen, the most vulnerable part of the body when there was a fan going. For a while pictures of the day just ended flickered across the screen lowered by his eyelids, but all at once there was the disturbing invasion of shots of Coomer, from all angles, long, medium and close; Coomer opening his shoulders, hitting out at a sequence of balls whose pitch and pace were subtly varied by the invisible bowler; or team of bowlers; the deliveries were in too mercilessly rapid a succession for one man alone to send down.
The cameras of Perron’s imagination began to tire. Presently only one remained, and this zoomed in close to recreate a memory of the boy’s face. There was a face, an idea of a face, a man’s rather than a boy’s, and formed from a notion of an expression rather than from one of features: an expression of concentration, of hard-held determination, of awareness that to misjudge, to mistime, would lead to destruction. There was no sound. And suddenly the face vanished. A flurry of birds, crows, rooks, rose from the surrounding elms, startled by a sudden noise, although there had been no noise. And they were not elms, but palms; and the birds were kitehawks. They circled patiently above Perron’s head, waiting for him to fall asleep.
Journeys into Uneasy Distances
I
IN VIEW OF what once happened there the countryside through which the mail train passes on the first stage of the journey from Mirat to Ranpur is surprisingly undramatic. The passenger who has what initially seems the good luck to be alone in a compartment soon grows restless as mile follows mile with nothing to catch the attention or work on the imagination other than what in India is common-place: the huddles of mud villages; buffalo wallowing in celebration of their survival from the primeval slime; men, women and children engaged in the fatal ritual of pre-ordained work.
Only the slow train stops at the wayside stations. On their single platforms people wait with bundles and a patience that has something exalted about it, although this impression could be the result of the express passing through too quickly for individual faces to be clearly noted. There are three such stations all of which are reached within thirty minutes of leaving Mirat cantonment. Thereafter, the villages become distant, but there is one, abandoned and ruinous, which appears suddenly and unexpectedly, close to the line.
Those ruins don’t look old. For an instant the traveller conjures images of flames, of silhouetted human shapes running distractedly, stooped under burdens. But the moment of imaginative recreation is a brief one. The crippled dwellings and crumbled walls slide quickly out of sight and the panorama of wasteland, scarred by dried-out nullahs and rocky outcrops, appears again and expands to the limit of the blurred horizon where the colourlessness of sky and earth merge and are distinguished only by a band of a different intensity of colourlessness which, gazed at long enough, gives an idea of blue and purple refraction. Everything is immense, but – lacking harmony or contrast – is diminished by its association with infinity.
The ruined village is explained. The land is eroded. The exodus must have been slow, quite unremarkable. One by one the men would have gone, taking their women and children and driving their thin cattle, while inch by inch the soil was swept away and the implacable rock exposed until there was nothing but the empty waste; and the wind blowing hot in the telegraph wires that border the railway.
The land now seems to be at peace. It requires some effort to see such a place as a background to any sudden or violent event. Perhaps there was no bloodshed, no murder on this stretch of line. But, as if remembering violence the train slows and then draws to a stop. There is a clank under the carriage; cessation, immobility. The compartment – not air-conditioned, one fan not working – grows warmer. Presently there comes the hollow sound of unevenly clunking goatbells and in a moment or two the straggling herd comes into view, driven by a lean man and a naked urchin, in search of patches of impoverished grazing. They go by without a glance, drugged by the heat and the singleness of their purpose. When they have gone there is silence but their passing has disturbed the atmosphere. The body of the victim could have fallen just here.
A few moments before, he is said to have gestured at the shuttered window of the compartment door on which strangers outside were banging and said ‘It seems to be me they want’, and then smiled at his shocked fellow-passengers, as if he had recognized a brilliant and totally unexpected opportunity. In a flash he had unlocked the door and gone. Briefly, a turbanned head appeared, begged pardon for the inconvenience and then removed itself. The door banged to. One of the passengers stumbled across luggage and relocked it. After a moment he lowered the shutter and looked out. Those nearest to him might have seen his horrified expression.
Just then the engine driver up ahead obeyed an instruction and the train glided forward. It was the smooth gliding motion away from a violent situation which one witness never forgot. ‘Suddenly you had the feeling that the train, the wheels, the lines, weren’t made of metal but of something greasy and evasive.’
Without warning it glides forward now, from the place where the herd of goats has been, seeming to identify a spot marked with the x of an old killing by its mechanical anxiety to get away before blame is apportioned and responsibility felt. Increasing speed, the train puts distance between itself and the falling body and between one time and another so that in the mind of the traveller the body never quite achieves its final crumpled position on the ground at the feet of the attackers.
‘It seems to be me they want,’ the victim said. Perhaps he said no such thing but gave the impression of thinking it because of that look on his face of recognizing some kind of personal advantage. This look may have been due to nothing more than a desire to reassure the other occupants of the carriage that they had nothing to worry about themselves and that he would be quite safe so long as he went of his own free will. But all the evidence suggests that the witness was right about the words and the expression. The victim chose neither the time nor the place of his death but in going to it as he did he must have seen that he contributed something of his own to its manner; and this was probably his compensation; so that when the body falls it will seem to do so without protest and without asking for any explanation of the thing that has happened to it, as if all that has gone before is explanation enough, so that it will not fall to the ground so much as out of a history which began with a girl stumbling on steps at the end of a long journey through the dark.
The train is cautious in its approach to Premanagar. Tracks converge from the east, coming from Mayapore. To the left, some miles distant, is the fort, no longer a prison, infrequently visited by tourists; peripheral to the tale but a brooding point of reference and orientation. To the south, now, lies Mirat with its mosques and minarets. North, a few hours journey, is Ranpur, where a grave was undug, and farther north still, amid hills, Pankot, where it was dug in too great a hurry for someone’s peace of mind. Beyond the fort, the west lies open, admitting a chill draught. The erosive wind
, perhaps. After a short halt the train moves on to its final destination.
*
It is dark by the time it clatters across the bridge and worms its way into the city of Ranpur, as it was dark on Tuesday August 7, 1945, when Sarah Layton and her father, and the handful of soldiers released from hospital, arrived from Delhi and disembarked to pick up the midnight connection to Pankot; and since the railway station has changed little it is easy to picture them, to pick them out of a crowd which behaves as crowds on platforms do (with a mixture of hysteria, impatience, gaiety and – in isolated cases – resignation). The platform is one of several protected by the vaulted, glassed and girdered roof that rests on steel ornamental pillars. At the base of these pillars people congregate, waiting for trains or inspiration. The lighting is yellow, intermittent. There are areas of light and half-light and areas of shadow. Through these areas passengers walk or run, and coolies trot bare foot, erect under head-loads, shouting warnings of approach. The grey paving is spattered with new and old spittings of betel-juice which a stranger to the country may confuse with bloodstains. There is a smell of coalsmoke, ripe fruit and of cotton cloth which human sweat has drenched and dried on and drenched again. It is a smell by no means peculiar to this station but for those to whom Ranpur represents a home-coming it has a subtle distinction, a pungency of special intensity, a benign and odorous warmth which even Sarah who had not been away for long was conscious of as she got down from the coupé and joined her father. Patiently he was choosing three coolies from the gang that had run alongside for fifty yards or more.
There had been no problem at Delhi. Ronald Merrick had waited to see them off on the Ranpur train, to be on hand if at the last moment Colonel Layton again had to be dissuaded from breaking the journey. But he had been docile, good-humoured, quietly intent on the morning papers with their latest reports of the significance of the bomb of ‘devastating power’ which the Americans had dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on Monday morning.
News of the attack had reached them on the platform of the Victoria terminus in Bombay, half-an-hour before the train was due out. Some English people said they had just heard it on the lunch-time radio. Aunt Fenny sent Uncle Arthur off to see what more he could find out. He had put on weight and did not walk quickly, was away some time, nearly missed them, had to accompany the moving train shouting ‘Seems to be true but I can’t make head or tail of it. Have a good trip.’ In the evening when they stopped to take on dinnertrays there was confirmation in the evening papers. It had been an atomic bomb. The ultimate weapon. The question was whether Hirohito would now surrender to save other cities, Tokyo itself, from devastation. Sarah thought: It might be over, then. And knew relief. Excitement even.
‘The moral reservations’ (she has said) ‘came later. At the time you could only feel glad. Awestruck, I suppose, by the sheer size of the thing. And by the miracle. I never met anyone who felt otherwise until long after. If we had doubts about the wisdom of letting off bombs like that they were very long-term. Too long-term to bother us. The short-term was the important thing.’
In the short-term, above all, it might mean safety for her father. He’d said nothing about further active service. The prospects were shadowy but they existed. No one expected the liberation of Malaya and the conquest of the Japanase mainland to be accomplished quickly or cheaply. If the war continued he would probably manoeuvre for a command before he was fully fit. But now the chances were that it would not continue and, walking with him along the platform, with one coolie ahead and two behind, to rendezvous with the havildar and the five sepoys who had travelled in a compartment a long way separated from their own, she was able to entertain an illusion of serenity, of entering a period of life which by contrast with the one just ended might be described as free, uncluttered, open at last to endless possibilities.
II
For a few seconds she awaited confirmation that the child had whimpered, but there was no sound of Minnie stirring in the spare room to pick him up and comfort him. Wondering whether Susan was still asleep or up to something odd, she felt for the switch on the bed-side lamp. The shock of no contact brought her fully conscious. She sat up in unfamiliar surroundings, a wall on one side, nothing on the other. She recalled, then, where she was; and because there was utter stillness, assumed that probably what had woken her was the jerk of the train coming to a halt. From her upper-berth she glanced down into the well of the coupé and saw her father – his shape, rather – standing at the carriage door. The window was lowered. She could smell the pine-trees – the scent of the hills. The air was chill. The light of Wednesday was just beginning to come.
‘All right, Father?’
She spoke quietly but he drew his head in and glanced up at once, as if caught doing something forbidden.
‘Did I wake you? I’m sorry.’
‘No. It wasn’t you. It must have been the train stopping.’
‘Afraid that was ten minutes ago. I made a duff hand of opening the window. How about some tea? There’s plenty in the flask.’
‘I’ll come down and get it for us.’
‘No, no. You stay there.’
She felt for her dressing-gown. ‘I’ll come down anyway.’
‘Do you want some light?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘That would spoil it.’
He said nothing. She felt that he understood her mood. She climbed down and removed the steps from their hooks. He had his back turned, pouring tea from the thermos into the cups Aunt Fenny had packed in the hamper. The tea in the thermos had been bought the night before from the station restaurant at Ranpur. He handed her a cup. She stood near the lowered window, warming her hands on it.
‘In the old days,’ he said, ‘we used to stop round about here to get up a proper head of steam. Then we got the new locomotive and were able to get up the gradient in a brace of shakes. I suppose the new engine’s getting old. Listen.’
There was a faint noise, an abrupt exhalation, followed by a clank. It came again, then again. It sounded far off. The coupé was in a carriage at the rear of the train which was halted on a curved stretch of line. The window her father had opened looked east towards the plains they had left, across a deep valley, at the moment full of mist – below eye-level so that it looked like the surface of a lake. On the other side of the carriage was the rock face. The road, which took steeper gradients, was above them. She turned her wrist until she was able to make out the position of the hands of her watch. He saw what she was doing and said, ‘Just over two hours to go, or should be if we keep to the time-table.’
She moved away from the window so that he could resume his vigil if he wished to, and sat on the lower bunk. He went back to the window. She wanted a cigarette but resisted temptation. In Bombay he had said to Aunt Fenny, ‘Isn’t Sarah smoking rather a lot?’ and Fenny had tipped her off. She had tried to cut down, not for fear of his disapproval but as part of her campaign to guard him from as many sources of irritation as was in her power. She had warned her mother by letter how easily he could be upset, of the prison-camp habit of saving ‘the unexpired portion’; pocketing bits of bread to eat later; the mark of a man who had known hunger. The habit was dying hard, as hard – no doubt – as recollections of conditions of which he never spoke. And he had been uninquisitive about affairs she had been prepared for him to question her on.
He had never mentioned the death of Teddie Bingham, the son-in-law he had never seen, nor delved into the nature of Susan’s illness. Neither had he referred directly to the death of his stepmother, Mabel, from whom Rose Cottage had been inherited. Sarah had once begun to warn him that her mother had made a few changes in the place, but he had interrupted, saying Fenny had mentioned ‘something about a tennis-court’. He’d added: ‘Pity about the roses, but I suppose they needed a lot of attention and the court’s a good idea for you girls.’
What else had Fenny said ‘something’ about? She was the kind of woman who let things slip without necessarily mea
ning to or even knowing that she’d done so. But in the case of the destruction of the greater part of the rose garden to make room for the tennis-court, Sarah was grateful to be relieved of the job of telling him herself. She had feared doing so; unnecessarily, it seemed, judging by the casual way he had taken it.
