by Paul Scott
‘Yes, but they’ve been in Pankot since the father went abroad on active service. He commanded the 1st Pankots in North Africa. He’s a prisoner of the Germans. Then there was her grandfather, who was a distinguished civilian, Finance Member of Council here in Ranpur during the previous war. And her maternal grandfather, General Muir, was General Officer commanding, also in Ranpur, early in the Twenties.’
Rowan nodded.
‘And you, Captain Rowan? I see you were in Burma, presumably during the retreat. But nevertheless effectively. Or do you affect the traditional indifference to the Military Cross and pretend that it came with the rations?’
‘It sometimes seems the only satisfactory explanation.’
‘Were you wounded?’
‘Only exhausted. It was a long march.’
‘You have been ill?’
‘I think, rather, debilitated.’
‘The malignant and endemic fevers that used to cut life short but have learnt subtler methods of invasion. Quite. Our court physician, who doubles that far from onerous rôle with the slightly more exacting one of Minister of Health in our little Council of State and runs a hospital in his spare time, has a theory that it is only the lethargy induced in Englishmen by low but persistent tropical fevers, the lethargy and its corollary, the concentration of mental and physical resources on a particular task, that has kept the raj stubbornly intact. He says that the moment medical science finds a way of rendering the English bloodstream and the English bowel system immune to the attacks of Indian microbes and amoeba, then the English will all perk up, look around and wonder what on earth they are doing out here, and as a consequence roar with laughter and resign. He cites as an example of depressive and obsessive behaviour the case of General Dyer, who shot all those unarmed Indians in Amritsar in nineteen-nineteen, believing that by doing so he was saving the Empire. Habbibullah is convinced that the poor old fellow’s brain was inflamed by the accumulation in the blood stream of the poisons of chronic amoebic infection. Of course he tells me all this because he is convinced that as a European I am similarly infected, in spite of my protests that for my age I am in vigorous good health and have never shot anyone, armed or unarmed.’
‘Actually I believe General Dyer had arterial sclerosis and died of it quite a few years later, but it’s one of the slow diseases, isn’t it? Someone did once suggest to me that it could have affected his judgment at Jallianwallah.’
‘I didn’t know that. I must tell Habbibullah. How nice to meet a young Englishman who knows a bit about the country’s history. Dyer was another man who made a mistake, or acted controversially, and remained convinced to the end that he had been absolutely right.’
Rowan did not reply immediately. He wondered whether the allusion to Merrick was intentional.
‘It surprises me a little, sir. That you should feel that. Most Englishmen who work out here have to be pretty well informed, surely. Not that knowing about Dyer is much of a test.’
Bronowsky smiled at him and leant forward, with his hands one on top of the other, supported by the ebony cane that was probably not as necessary an aid to balance as he made it appear.
‘I exaggerated, yes. But one meets so many young officers who turn out to be here only because of the war and who know nothing. Mention General Dyer to them and they say, Oh, which division is he? It’s different with the hard core of the professionals, which I take it you belong to. Do you have family connections with India?’
‘Only on my mother’s side. My father was out here at one time, but in the British Army.’
‘Ah. I have been uselessly sifting my old memory for a Rowan. What was your mother’s maiden name?’
‘Crawley.’
The old man lowered his head, raised one finger and placed it on his chin.
‘Crawley,’ he repeated. ‘There was a Thomas Crawley who was Resident at Kotala. He ran things very successfully during the ruler’s minority. Were he and your mother related?’
‘He was her brother, but considerably older. Did you know him?’
‘Only by reputation. In latter days he experienced some difficulties. It was a pity. Have you had anything to do with the Political Department yourself?’
‘I worked a probationary year just before the war.’
‘Indeed. Your ambitions lie in that direction? But the army reclaimed you for the war no doubt. Where were you? Presumably not in Kotala?’
‘No, but I did meet the Maharajah in Delhi.’
‘How did that go?’
‘Not at all, at first. When I told him Crawley had been my uncle he sheered off.’
‘You told him voluntarily?’
‘It would have been unfair not to. He was in one of his expansive moods, inviting people at random.’
‘Inviting them to what?’
‘One of his famous parties at the palace in Kotala.’
‘That must have been a temptation. To see the place where your uncle spent the best part of his working life.’
‘Yes, it was. My mother lived with him at the Residency for two or three years before she went home to get married. I’d seen all the photographs and heard all the tales about how it was in those days, and quite a bit about what happened after the ruler came of age. But I felt I’d only get the best out of a visit if I went openly as Tommy Crawley’s nephew.’
‘You said the meeting with the Maharajah didn’t go well at first, that he sheered off. Did he change his mind?’
‘Yes but I don’t know how quickly. He must have kept tabs on me through his grapevine, though, because a couple of months later when I was touring with the agent for a small group of states north of Kotala I got a letter from him inviting me to call. It was a bit of a poser because it meant getting clearance from the department as well as from the Resident in Ranikot.’
‘Why Ranikot?’
‘When Uncle Tommy left Kotala the agency was transferred to the group that came under Ranikot. The Resident there put an assistant in at Kotala but everything had to go through him.’
‘That can’t have pleased the Maharajah.’
‘It wasn’t meant to. By regrouping his state and severing his direct link with the Crown Representative, the department thought he’d be upset enough to withdraw the accusations he’d made, that my uncle was interfering in private and state matters to an intolerable degree, not only withdraw but beg to have him sent back. I think they were looking forward to telling him it was too late and were rather surprised when he made no complaint.’
‘Why too late?’
‘Well my uncle was getting on and the strain of their constant bickering had ruined his health. My mother came out to see him in Simla while he was on sick leave and tried to persuade him to retire at once and not wait the two or three years he still had to go. She wasn’t at all surprised when we met her off the boat and told her Uncle Tommy had died while she was on the passage home. The Maharajah wrote to her offering his sympathies. She’d known him well when he was a boy but didn’t feel up to sending him more than a formal acknowledgment. When I was coming out, though, she said that if ever I bumped into young Kotala I should give him her salaams.’
‘And did you?’
‘Yes. He was very touched.’
‘You accepted his invitation, then, in spite of the red tape. Good.’
‘I’m afraid I couldn’t. The officer I was touring with was dead against it, and actually a private trip on the side would have been a bit much for him to agree to because I was dogsbodying for him in a fairly hectic programme and supposed to be learning the ropes. So I wrote begging off. But I gave him my mother’s message and said I hoped there’d be another opportunity of meeting. A week later he turned up at our next stopping place. He’d driven more than a hundred miles.’
‘Was he so anxious to apologize for his treatment of your uncle?’
‘He apologized for sheering off. I was afraid of the other thing too. I’d worked it out years before, from all the things my mother told me or let
slip that the fault had really been my uncle’s. I think she’d reached the same conclusion. As you said, he virtually ran the state while the prince was a minor and apart from that they’d formed an extremely close and affectionate father-and-son relationship. When the prince came of age all that should have stopped. My uncle should have stood back and been content to let the young man assume full responsibility, but he made the error of continuing to treat him as a minor, of forgetting that he was a ruling Hindu prince. And, of course, that must have led to a situation in which the prince’s relatives and his state officials made it clear that they despised him for letting the Resident browbeat him and that if he had an ounce of real spirit he’d start showing my uncle where to get off. Unfortunately he did that in a young man’s over-exuberant way, spending money wildly on personal extravagances, drinking too much and womanizing, all the things that gave my uncle the opportunity to press his criticisms. In fact after a year or so you only needed evidence of cruelty and corruption and complete disregard for the welfare of his poorer subjects to have had a case to depose him.’
‘And there was no such evidence.’
‘I imagine the only harm the Maharajah ever did to anyone was to himself. And I think he felt that. I’d say it still rankled. I got the impression he would really have liked to be abstemious and upright, all the things my uncle no doubt represented to him as virtues when he was growing up, hated being unable to resist other temptations and blamed my uncle for that as well. Well as I say he apologized for sheering off when we first met but when it got to the point where it was obvious one of us ought to mention Uncle Tommy he became very edgy. He’d driven all that way so I felt the ball was in my court, but I was reluctant to play it. I’m ashamed to admit I thought there might be a price-tag on the whole thing, that the idea was to soften me up by a display of magnanimity or remorse so that I’d agree to put a word in for him over some scheme he might have going.’
‘Well, you’d been in the country just long enough to suspect he might think you new enough to try it on. How did you play the ball?’
‘I didn’t. I shirked it. So just before he got into the car to go back he confronted me. It’s the only word. Have you ever met him?’
‘No. Not the maharajah. We’ve never been to Kotala and he’s not in the Chamber. Insufficient guns.’
‘Quite tall. Very plump. He uses scent and wears rings. Diamonds mostly. There was even a small jewelled cockade in the centre of his turban. I think you could call Kotala the walking effete-looking Indian potentate of popular English imagination. It isn’t an image that conveys what we mean by dignity whatever it may convey to Indians, but ever since that day I’ve tried not to prejudge from appearances. I don’t think anything could have been more dignified than his parting speech. He said he was glad to have met Tommy Crawley’s nephew, trusted we’d meet again and have the opportunity to build a relationship on the friendly basis he hoped we’d established, but that this wouldn’t be possible from his point of view unless I knew and accepted that although he had loved my uncle as a boy and had happy memories of those times, he had had a terrible time with him later, which he would never forget and could never forgive. He said, “When I was young your uncle was always saying, when you know you are in the right, fight for it, never give in, never retreat and never retract. My opinion is that in that matter I was right and he was wrong. If I regret anything it is the nature of the weapons he forced me to use and the nature of the balm he forced me to resort to to heal the wounds he inflicted.” I was so impressed that when he’d gone I went straight to my room and wrote it down.’
‘A prepared speech,’ Bronowsky said, ‘but effective. I should think sincere. Yes. Very English in its sentiment, but of course very Indian too. He was testing your mettle and temper as well as getting something off his chest. What did you say?’
‘The first thing that came into my head. Afterwards I realized I was lucky he hadn’t made a speech like that when I first met him. In the interval I’d been around and cottoned on to the system, the one that calls for the ruler to stand his ground and you yours but for you both to open up the ground between without committing yourself to occupy it. I said I personally knew very little of the quarrel between them except that my uncle had been deeply affected by it, had presumably felt as strongly about the correctness of his own behaviour, that I’d always regretted my uncle’s career should have ended on such a note but would regret it far more had it seemed now that their differences after all hadn’t been so serious that they couldn’t somehow have been overcome, and was most grateful to His Highness for speaking so frankly and relieving my mind of any such supposition.’
‘Were you alone with him?’
‘Yes, why?’
‘A pity. If your superior officer had heard that, I imagine you’d have received a most favourable report.’
‘Actually I’m not at all sure it didn’t raise a doubt about my fitness for political work. I was questioned pretty closely about what we’d said to each other and was made to feel I might do better if I applied myself more conscientiously to routine matters.’
‘Young men with an aptitude usually excite caution rather than enthusiasm. It has ever been so. But you will probably survive. I trust so. If you have ambitions there still. Do you?’
Rowan smiled. He said, quoting, ‘ “The body’s fever, dying like a fire, Sheds little light upon the heart’s concerns.” ’
‘Ah,’ Bronowsky said after a moment. ‘Gaffur. But a somewhat more elegant translation than the one in the existing English version. The fading fever in the blood is like a dying fire, de dum de dum etcetera. But how apt. Gaffur, recovering from a bout of malaria or dysentery. Is that other version your own? Yes? Then we have one vice in common, although my own translations from the Urdu come more under the heading of extra-curricular activities for Nawab Sahib. Of course you know the Gaffur connection?’
‘He was court poet in Mirat, in the eighteenth century.’
‘And connected to the ruling family. A Kasim. Nawab Sahib had never read Gaffur in English. But he has many exquisite volumes in the original. Whenever people feel they should give him a gift that shows forethought but not extravagance they usually hit upon the poems of his distinguished ancestor. For instance, the Laytons presented him with a copy when he offered them the hospitality of the guest house at the time of the wedding. But the habit is rarer in English people than in Indians. He was very pleased and expressed the wish to learn some of his favourite verses in English. He was horrified when he read Colonel Harvey-Fortescue’s Victorian effusions and since then I have had to try my own hand. I shan’t assume the false modesty of the complacent amateur and pretend I’m not highly satisfied with some of the results. In fact I’ve become quite addicted to the exercise of this latent skill and sometimes fancy myself quite a little Pushkin. But it is hard on the eye. Having only one it is sensible to take care of it, but difficult to remember to do so. One adjusts so easily to such a slight impediment and seldom thinks of oneself as handicapped, unless one sees or hears of someone in the same or worse condition.’
The stories of Bronowsky’s blind left eye and lame left leg ranged from the possible to the scurrilously unlikely. It was Rowan’s chance to hear one of them and his chance to approach the subject of disability, the subject of lost limbs, the subject of Merrick. A chance again deliberately contrived? It was worth taking up. He realized how much he was enjoying talking to the old wazir and it pleased him to think that the conversation was no more than a ritual, a courtly circumnavigation of a subject they were both interested in but both too skilled to raise directly. Each had stood his ground. The space between was wide open. One could step on to it now without giving much away.
‘I notice,’ Rowan said, ‘that the blind eye and the lame leg are both on the left side. Does that mean there was a common cause or is it a coincidence?’
‘Oh, common. And common enough in those days. St Petersburg. A makeshift bomb. An explosive little incident
at dusk on the drive from the Winter Palace.’ Bronowsky leant back in his chair. ‘An explosion like a scarlet flower in black foliage, thrusting out of the snow. A little summer miracle in winter. That and the pressure. One did not recall a noise. Perhaps the snow muffled it. Such are one’s recollections. Later the discomfort. And the strange remote satisfaction of knowing it was no worse. No limb lost. A mere eye. A bad leg. Growing pleasure. The distinction of a limp and an eye-patch. The poor young fellow who threw the bomb was the only fatal casualty. He mistook me for Another. I made a callous joke. That now I had only one eye to weep with and mourn his useless little death. But that was to disguise less insensitive feelings. I thought, How strange. He did not know me, nor I him, but all through his life, from birth, for twenty years, without realizing it he had been moving towards me, step by inevitable step, and I had been waiting for him, preparing to set out on that drive through the snow, to keep an appointment, wrapped in my furs, well muffled, well disguised, so that he would not recognize me at the very last moment as the agent of his death. I saw his photograph. They had it, of course. And one from the morgue of his remains. They showed me this too, as if it would please me. Extraordinarily his face was unmarked. Very pale against the blackness of his hair and the wispy adolescent growth of beard on cheeks and chin. A dark young man, I thought, of random destiny and private passions. It was a revelation. As I looked at the photograph I realized that he could have been my death, that perhaps fate had decreed this, but had wound the machinery up wrong and was now aghast at the error. It struck me that, well, I must watch out, that perhaps even now a birth was taking place in some remote village, to rectify things. It seemed to me that fate would work this way, that the destiny so apparently random must be shaped even so from the beginning, that I had at least twenty years grace before I must keep the next appointment, this time with a young man who would complete the task. I pictured his life. How it would be. Not privileged like mine but harsh and sombre, so that his heart would grow into a habit of sadness which it pleased me to think of as also a sadness for me, because of what he must do that he did not know. I fell a little in love with him. And there were times when things were not good with me that I wished to hasten the consummation. This was in nineteen hundred. When I left Russia nearly twenty years later it was with the feelings almost of a deserter. By then, you see, he would have been in the prime of youth with only a few years to wait. In Berlin and in Paris I watched out for him, at first only among the young men of our emigration but then among young Germans too and young Frenchmen, because I realized that the appointed agent need not after all be of Russian nationality and that one of fate’s little jokes might be that I should think myself secure merely because I had crossed a frontier. Even in India I used to watch.’
