A Division of the Spoils

by Paul Scott

  ‘Not such a rapid clearance.’

  ‘We didn’t go through the police in Hari’s case. Ahmed got his father’s secretary to ask Mrs Gopal to find out what she could through the young man who used to help him. We got the reply today. He’s still coaching students. He never leaves Ranpur. He was there the whole of last week. One of his pupils is the youngest son of a Congress minister and he’s been at the minister’s house every evening for the past month coaching the boy for his matriculation.’

  ‘Things have improved for him, then.’

  ‘A little, I suppose. But it must be a poor enough livelihood.’

  ‘Perhaps he supplements it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘A bit of free-lance journalism? He used to be a reporter and sub-editor.’

  ‘Perhaps. Incidentally, we now have an address. If you want it.’

  ‘Yes, I’d like his address.’

  ‘I’ll get it for you. Then I’ll have to go to bed, Guy. I’ve got to see the States Department people off on the morning train.’ He got up, went into the adjoining room, came back and handed Perron a slip of paper with Kumar’s address scribbled on it. ‘Be careful what you say to Sarah, won’t you? She doesn’t know the worst details. We had Merrick’s bedroom cleared up before she saw it. None of the other servants was allowed to see it either.’

  ‘Presumably they were questioned, though.’

  ‘Yes, but the Chief of Police did that himself, without saying exactly why. Khansamar was put through the hoop too.’

  ‘Where are the other servants?’

  ‘Back at the Dewani Bhavan, where they came from.’

  ‘There must be rumours, surely.’

  ‘Rumours, yes. Too many people had to be involved, and eventually it’ll become more or less common knowledge, but the thing has been to counteract the rumours, especially in the cantonment, and keep up the fiction that Merrick died as a result of the riding accident.’

  ‘Who has his clothes? And his arm?’

  ‘The Chief of Police. I must turn in, Guy. If you see Dmitri tomorrow, he can probably answer any questions better than I.’

  Perron said goodnight and made to go, then paused.

  He said, ‘Who was Philoctetes?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Philoctetes.’

  Rowan rubbed his forehead. He looked so tired that Perron was about to leave the question until morning. But then Rowan said, ‘The great archer.’

  ‘A great archer?’

  ‘Friend of Hercules. One of the heroes of the Trojan war. Sophocles wrote a play about him, but it’s one I never read. They had to set him ashore, abandon him on the voyage out. Lemnos, I think.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He was hurt in some way. Wounded by one of his own poisoned arrows. Or perhaps he just developed boils and suppurating sores from a vitamin deficiency. Anyway, he stank, and the others couldn’t stand the smell. So they set him ashore, and went on.’

  ‘Yes,’ Perron said. That fitted. ‘Did he ever get to Troy?’

  ‘Eventually. If I remember rightly they decided they needed him after all. What interests you about Philoctetes?’

  ‘I came across the name recently and wondered, that’s all.’

  When he got back to his room he found that Tippoo had brought in all the stuff he’d left on the verandah; the scissors, notebook, the newspapers, and his own bottle of brandy. He had a final drink and read the essay Alma Mater once again. That night, fearful of snakes, of ghosts, he cocooned himself in a sheet, within the security of his mosquito-net shrouded bed. He lulled himself to sleep by counting arrows, flying from the bow, at first slowly, well-aimed, and then quicker, until they were flying incredibly fast as the archer stood, holding his ground, intent on survival. Just before he slept he thought: The smell in the room is not after all just Merrick’s smell, but also the smell of the archer’s wound.

  He woke while it was still dark, from a nightmare that had transformed him into a huge butterfly that beat and beat and fragmented its wings against the imprisoning mesh of the net.

  V

  Extract from Perron’s Diary, Wednesday August 6

  11 p.m.

  An ominous day, ending with the reflection of fires in the night sky above the city. This afternoon, news of the Nawab’s accession to India brought out a crowd of Congress supporters who assembled on the maidan for speeches and cheers. The police and military kept them away from the palace, and from a convoy of Muslim families making their way in trucks, carts, dhoolies and on foot to the collecting point in the cantonment. Tonight there were repercussions, angry Muslims attacking Hindus. Attack. Counter-attack. The sky glows. Police and military patrol the road outside this bungalow and presumably make forays into the city. They say there will again be no fishing on the Izzat Bagh lake tomorrow.

  Beyond the lake you can just see the paler glow of the cantonment bazaar. The raj rests quietly in the darkness behind. In bungalows here and there there must be lights and laughter, parties. (The departing Peabodys are giving one.) Here, where I am, a strange feeling of being suspended between these two worlds. On other similar occasions when the situation became difficult, Merrick would be found touring the city, by jeep, or sometimes during daylight on horseback. ‘Tonight I miss him,’ Dmitri said. He hadn’t mentioned Merrick until then. Dmitri and I had champagne. We smoked pink gold-tipped cigarettes. He told me something about St Petersburg (between interruptions, of which there were many). At ten-thirty our meeting ended. The Nawab had sent for him. ‘Poor old dear,’ Dmitri said. ‘He’s looked at the sky and wonders what he has done wrong, or what I have ever done right.’

  This ominous day began early. She did not ring but arrived with horses shortly after Nigel had gone across to the palace to take the States Department people to the station. They were to travel in the Nawab’s salon coach so as (Dmitri said) to give them a taste for princely luxury as a ‘frail insurance against any future diminution of it’. Tomorrow we are to travel by ordinary first-class passenger coach. Dmitri has cancelled the arrangement to send us by another of the Nawab’s coaches in case after today’s troubles it becomes a target for attack by Muslims who feel that the Nawab has let them down. He has got the movement control officer to guarantee a compartment for us. We shall be 9. The old-fashioned first-class compartments seat 8 comfortably and one of the 9 is little Edward and another is the ayah who will probably sit on the luggage. Which leaves only 7 adults: Sarah, Susan, Mrs Grace, the two Peabodys, Ahmed and me. We should be comfortable enough and are due at Ranpur at 7 p.m. The Peabodys are reported upset, though, that they aren’t to travel in a palace coach. Dmitri said: ‘Don’t stand any nonsense with them if they start objecting to the ayah or to Ahmed. Times have changed.’ He seems very insistent on this. The number in the compartment won’t worry me. It sounds like being a good party. Mrs Grace is fun.

  The horses Sarah brought were a pleasant surprise. She was dressed for riding. There was no Ahmed. No Mumtaz. We trotted out to the maidan and across to the other side. She showed me (at a distance behind shade trees) the barracks of the Mirat Artillery, the police barracks, and the hospital and told me about the first time she got Shiraz to go with her, how nervous the girl was, how over-awed the staff and the patients were at this manifestation from the Palace: the Nawab’s daughter, rumoured to be cross and difficult and haughty. Sarah had broken the ice, in the maternity ward, by picking up a baby she’d become used to handling (whose mother wasn’t recovering as quickly as she should) and then placing it in Shiraz’s arms. The first contact Shiraz had ever had with a commoner outside the palace. It worked. And of course the mother would never forget it: that the Nawab’s daughter had held her son. ‘What made you give so much time to this girl?’ I asked. ‘Her unhappiness,’ was all Sarah said. Then she cantered away, towards the open ground beyond the military tents and horse-lines.

  Suddenly she cries out and thrashes her reins, left, right, and gallops off, making for the distant city wall, or what
is left of it. The gateway alone is intact. I try to catch up but she is by far the better and more confident horseman, and she knows the lie of the nullahs, which I don’t. But, behind her as I am, we seem to career together towards that implacable pink stone. Then she suddenly veers and shouts again, loudly, savagely, and races her horse back at a pace I really can’t match: thrashing the reins in that way, left, right, as if charging cannon in some desperate enterprise. And there is nothing there except the pale blue sky, the green of the shade trees, the tawny stain of the scrubby earth. I let her go, ease my own horse’s pace, watch her; small white-shirted figure, going like a little demon into the distance, leaping the nullahs. I think it was her way of saying goodbye to a place where she has been free and happy. She rides in a wide circle, coming round now and galloping towards me. At first I assume she will ride right up, but just ahead of me she moves in a tight turn and then brings her mount to a canter, a trot, a walk; to a stand. As I reach her she puts it at a sedate walk. We say nothing. It isn’t necessary. But as we near the road again, outside my bungalow, she says, ‘Come to the guest house and meet Aunt Fenny. We’ll have breakfast there.’

  Neither of us has mentioned Merrick.

  Mrs Grace is a plump rather florid woman (much as one thought). A bit breathless, but very talkative. Susan not up for breakfast. We have ours on the terrace. This is where the Laytons stayed when Susan came to Mirat to marry Teddie Bingham. I asked about Colonel Layton. Since early in 1946 he has been Colonel Commandant at the Pankot Rifles training depot. A disappointment. He had hoped for the area command. He is handing over now to a man called Chaudhuri, who was only a major a few months ago. The new 1st battalion goes to a Sikh who has been in Pankot for some years, Chatab Singh. For a while there was a problem about the regiment’s future. Officially, the Pankot people are predominantly Muslims, as a result of conversion in the days of the Moghuls. The regiment, mixed, but reflecting this predominance, has such a good reputation that Jinnah wanted it and offered it a home near Peshawar. How he thought he could keep it recruited from men who lived in the Pankot hills, one does not know. Some English people in Pankot have raised the question of the silver in the mess and suggest that the new Indian Government should buy all the knives, forks, spoons and trophies, everything of value, and that the proceeds should be shared out among the families of the men who had contributed to their cost. ‘So you see we all end up like carpet-sellers in Cairo,’ Mrs Grace said. ‘John gets hot under the collar when he hears people talking like that.’

  Edward comes out. He takes me to see the white peacock. Not the one I saw myself. This one is carved out of marble and is secluded in a secret place among the trees. Fear snakes. When we get back Nigel has arrived from the station, seeing the States Department people off. The Peabodys were seeing off the Rossiters and told Nigel that this evening it would be open house at their bungalow. Mrs Grace said, ‘Those awful people. Do we have to travel with them? Can’t we rustle up an extra body or two and crowd them out?’

  Interesting, this. Universally popular as the English are in India just now, among themselves there emerges this dissension. The old solidarity has gone because the need for it has gone.

  *

  ‘But of course,’ Bronowsky said, ‘now we are all émigrés. Have some more champagne and a cigarette.’

  Perron nodded. The servant came to his side and refilled his glass. In the Dewani Bhavan there was the dry dusty scent of potpourri. The lighting was rose-coloured. It glowed on ormulu and gilt chair-arms. In this light Dmitri Bronowsky looked twenty years younger. His lame left leg rested on a gilt and plush footstool. The ebony cane and the black eye-patch accentuated the white of his tropical suit which was faintly tinged by the glow of the lights. He wore a tie of the same pink as the cigarettes.

  *

  The invitation to dinner had reached Perron at five o’clock. Leaving Rowan working on his written report to the Resident at Gopalakand, it had surprised him to find no other guests. By eight-thirty, after a number of interruptions by messengers and telephone calls, he realized that he and Dmitri were to spend the evening alone. He had hoped for Sarah. As if recognizing a source of disappointment, Bronowsky – leading him into a grand dining-room – said he asked Sarah but that she felt she couldn’t leave Susan alone on their last night in Mirat. ‘And failing Sarah, I felt we might dine alone. It is a little selfish of me to subject you to my unadulterated company, but not entirely so. If we had another guest or two then I could not tell you the things you have come to Mirat to learn about – how princes rule and live in this country. Anyway, I feel I deserve an evening off myself, with just one sympathetic listener.’

  The table was long enough for twenty or thirty guests and the room was lit as if there were that number needing to see what they ate. Perron and Bronowsky sat at one end, where great bowls of flowers gave off heady scents. Bronowsky ate little, seemed to be content with a bite or two of each course and a glass of each of the wines that accompanied them. He talked with skill and good humour. The range of the old wazir’s knowledge and experience and the clarity of his memory were remarkable. It struck Perron, too, that he talked vividly because he knew that the opportunities to hold court, while he still had power, were becoming fewer. The last thing Dmitri Bronowsky would ever be was an old and tiresome man living on his memories and boring other people with them. On the day he had to retire, he would probably retire quite happily into himself.

  ‘What is Mirat’s future, then?’ Perron asked, when the right moment came, between sips of the champagne with which, along with the pêche flambée, the meal was delightfully ending.

  ‘We shall be absorbed into the provincial administration of Ranpur. Our executive and our judiciary will be superseded by those of Ranpur. We shall be ruled from Ranpur and from Delhi. We shall have a deputy commissioner sent down to control us. Some of our younger men will be lucky and secure official appointments. Our revenues will go to Government and Government in turn will accept certain responsibilities for us. Also, and this is so interesting, we shall become a constituency or several constituencies and elect and send members to the legislative assembly. All this I have told and constantly tell Nawab Sahib. I remind him how years ago I foretold it. If either of his sons had political talent, ah then, that would have been one way of maintaining izzat under a new dispensation. For in a world where a ruling prince becomes redundant isn’t there an opportunity for one of his heirs, someone in his family, to sit not on the gaddi but in the assembly, or even in a ministerial chair at the Secretariat?’

  ‘And neither son has political talent?’

  ‘In confidence, my dear Mr Perron, neither talent nor wit. It did not take me long to see that this was and would be so. So. I cast around. And my eye lighted on another member of the house of Kasim. The Ranpur branch. The rebellious political branch.’

  ‘Ahmed?’

  ‘Many people have wondered what I am doing employing the son of Mohammed Ali Kasim who is, by nature, opposed to princes. Many people have wondered what Mr Mohammed Ali Kasim can have been thinking of to allow his younger son to take service in a feudal little state. I do not know what Mr Kasim had in mind. Perhaps he was just pessimistic about the boy in those days. I have always been optimistic. Scratch me a very little and you will find an eternal optimist. Scratch a little deeper and you will no doubt uncover a great intriguer, but I hope a well-intentioned one. Scratch deeper still, never minding the blood, and perhaps you will find an old White Russian of liberal sympathies but intent even now on rescuing his Tsar from the cellar in Ekaterinburg, or failing his Tsar, the little Tsarevich. An English lady in the cantonment who had psychological perceptions once described me so. Your glass is empty, Mr Perron.’

  It was refilled.

  ‘It was my intention to arrange, if it could be done without undue pressure, an alliance between the princely Kasims of Mirat and the political Kasims of Ranpur. I had hoped that Ahmed and Shiraz would fall in love one day. They say that when a man fa
lls in love, with a woman, he becomes aware of all his worldly responsibilities. If there is one thing I do most sincerely wish just now it is that Ahmed and Shiraz were man and wife and that marriage had awakened in him all those political instincts he must have inherited from his father, no matter what he says to the contrary. I wish this because just now when Nawab Sahib is in the doldrums, when he summons me at midnight or early in the morning because he cannot sleep or hasn’t slept, and stares at me, it would be so nice to say: What are you bothered about? I have always warned you that there may be nothing for your sons to inherit except the remnants of a purely formal dignity, but here is your daughter Shiraz and here is your son-in-law Ahmed, son of a famous and respected Indian politician who still has great influence behind the scenes. When you begged me to come back to India with you because of the little service I had done for you, you said, “I must be a modern state. Make me modern.” So, admit it, I have made you modern in every way I can. Moreover you have a son with business interests in Delhi and who has a wife who builds swimming pools and has money in Zurich. You have another son in the air force. Above all you have a son-in-law who may one day represent Mirat in the provincial assembly and, who knows, end as a minister of central government, perhaps even as Prime Minister. Isn’t that modern enough for you? Unfortunately, I cannot tell him this because he has no son-in-law. Man can only propose. But given another year or two’s grace and perhaps God would have disposed, as I so devoutly wished. For my prince’s benefit, you understand, Mr Perron. For my prince. Perhaps a little for myself. As it is I have to go and sit with him, late at night or early morning, and try to prepare him just to face the moment when the States Department people will descend on us again, this time with their scales and abacuses and weights and measures and arithmetical tables, their meticulously devised formula for separating what belongs to the people and what belongs to Nawab Sahib, what is a proper charge on Government and what is a charge on Nawab’s personal household, asking how many palaces have you, then, and what are they used for, and who pays for all this –’