The Jewel In The Crown (The Raj quartet)

by Paul Scott

  He said that the evidence last night had pointed to Hari, and that it couldn’t be ruled out that he was there, in spite of my belief that he wasn’t.

  I said it wasn’t a question of belief. I asked him whether he really thought I wouldn’t know if Hari had been among those who attacked me. That scared him. He was afraid of an intimate confession. When I realised this I thought I saw how to play the whole thing, play it by scaring them at the thought of what I might come out with, in court. I asked him about the other men. He pretended he didn’t know anything about them. I smiled and said, ‘I see Ronald is keeping it all very much to himself. But that’s no wonder, is it? After all, it’s pretty obvious he planted the bicycle.’

  Lili had been shocked, but her shock was nothing to Jack Poulson’s. He said, ‘What on earth makes you say a thing like that?’ I told him to ask Ronald. It seemed wiser to leave it at that, to leave Mr Poulson with something tricky to bite on. Before he went – and he went because ‘in his view there was nothing it would be advantageous to pursue for the moment’ – I said, ‘Hari wasn’t there. I doubt that any of the men you’ve arrested were there. It’s the usual thing, isn’t it? An English woman gets assaulted and at once everyone loses all sense of proportion. If Ronald or any of you think you’re going to get away with punishing the first poor bloody Indians you’ve clapped hands on just to give the European community a field-day you’ve got another think coming. It’ll never stand up in court because I’ll stand up in court and say what I’m saying to you. Only I might be more explicit about a lot of things.’

  He got up and mumbled something about being sorry and that everyone appreciated what a terrible time I’d had, that he was sure no one who was innocent could possibly be punished. I said, ‘Then tell me this. Forget the one innocent man you’ve got locked up at the moment. Do the others fit my description of them at all?’

  He said he didn’t know. He hadn’t seen them. But I wasn’t letting him off so lightly. I was chancing my arm, but it seemed worth it. I said, ‘Oh, come off it, Jack. You know all right. Even if you haven’t seen them you must know who they are. Are they what I said? Smelly peasants? Dirty labourers? Or boys like Hari? The kind of boy Mr Merrick seems to have it in for?’

  I’d hit the mark. But he still insisted he didn’t know. He said he believed that one or two of them were known for or suspected of political activities of ‘the anarchist type’. I pounced on that. I said, ‘Oh, you mean educated boys? Not smelly peasants?’

  He shook his head, not denying it but closing the way to further discussion.

  *

  Retrospectively, I’m sorry for the bad time I gave poor Jack Poulson. But it had to be done. I’m pretty sure he went away thinking, ‘It won’t stick. Not with those fellows Merrick’s got locked up.’ I don’t know how much more he would say when he got back to the Deputy Commissioner’s bungalow, which was almost certainly where he was headed. To Mr White probably all he needed to say was something like, ‘Either she’s lying, or Kumar is innocent, but if she’s lying or continues to lie he ranks as innocent anyway because we’ll never prove him guilty. The same goes for the others. Merrick’s made a gaffe.’

  Robin White detached himself from the affair, to the extent that he left Jack Poulson in charge of it up to the point where a final decision had to be made. If he’d been a man like his predecessor Mr Stead (whom men like Vassi loathed) God knows what would have happened. I suppose to Robin the assault on a silly English girl wasn’t very important when he compared it with the other things he had to deal with. I don’t know whether Mr Poulson ever said anything to Mr White about the bicycle and my accusation against Ronald. It wouldn’t have been an easy thing for him to pass on. At the inquiry the bicycle was never mentioned, and the only time Hari was mentioned was when Ronald was giving evidence of arrest. He answered questions which Jack Poulson seemed to have worked out carefully in advance. In fact the evidence of the arrests struck me as ridiculous. Mr Poulson read out the names of the men arrested and simply asked Ronald where and at what time they’d been taken into custody, and what they had been doing. As I already knew from what Lili had told me, the other poor boys had been drinking hooch in a hut near the Bibighar bridge but at the inquiry the unfairness of it struck me all over again. According to Ronald, Hari was in his bedroom, ‘washing his face on which there were cuts and abrasions’. I nearly interrupted and said, ‘What about the bicycle?’ but thought better of it. The bicycle not being mentioned was a good sign. I wondered if Jack Poulson had talked to Ronald in private and decided from the answers he got that he’d better keep the bicycle business quiet, not only for Ronald’s sake, but for the sake of the Service, the flag and all that. But I did come out with the remark about the cuts on Hari’s face when Jack Poulson asked me whether I recalled ‘marking’ any of the men who attacked me. I mean the remark about Hari probably having had a scrap with the police.

  After the so-called evidence of arrests Ronald was dismissed and then they got down to the business of going over my statement again and asking questions, and I saw how the evidence of arrests was so thin that although it proved nothing it could also prove anything. Judge Menen had kept quiet – I mean he’d not asked me any questions so far, but towards the end he said, ‘I must ask you why you refused the other day to attempt to identify the men held in custody,’ which I had done, when the worst of the troubles in Mayapore were over and they wanted to push the case to a conclusion of some sort and get it over with. I said, ‘I refused to attempt identification because they must be the wrong men. I shall say so in court, if necessary.’

  Judge Menen said he understood why I should feel this in regard to ‘the man Kumar’ but the refusal to attempt identification of the other men might be interpreted as wilful obstruction by the principal witness and this might lead to the prosecution being able to prove its case in spite of that witness’s evidence, because the wilful obstruction might be held as a sign of general unreliability.

  I thought about this. Mr Poulson brightened up a bit. He didn’t mind that Menen was an Indian and perhaps shouldn’t speak to a white girl like that. It was the Law that spoke. He thought the clever old Judge had forced me into a corner by scaring me with a legal technicality, a reminder that even the principal witness couldn’t obstruct the Crown in the pursuit of justice. But I thought I saw my way out. And I wasn’t really convinced that Judge Menen was on particularly sure ground himself. I said, ‘If my evidence is thought unreliable for that reason, does it become less unreliable if I go through the farce of looking at these men, with no intention whatsoever of saying I recognise them? You prefer me to go through that farce? You’d only have my word for it that I didn’t recognise them. Simply looking at them isn’t a test of reliability in itself, is it?’

  Menen’s poker face didn’t alter. He said they would assume, continue to assume, that I was telling the truth, and reminded me that the whole inquiry was based on the assumption that I was telling the truth, that it was only the refusal to comply with the request to attempt identification which could raise the question of unreliability. He went on, ‘In your statement you say you had a brief impression of the men who attacked you. You have described them as peasants or labourers. That being so, with such an impression in your mind, why do you refuse to co-operate in the important business of helping us, as best you can, to decide whether the men being held are held on sufficient grounds?’

  Looking at him I thought: You know they’re the wrong men too. You want me to go down to the jail and look at them and say, No, they aren’t as I remember them at all. Either you want that, or you want me to make it quite plain, perhaps outrageously plain, that it’s useless for anyone to expect to bring this case to court with these boys as defendants.

  But I was still afraid of confronting them. I was sure they were the wrong boys, but I didn’t know. I didn’t want to face them. If they were the right boys there was a danger – only very slight, but still a danger – of their panicking at the sight o
f me and incriminating Hari. And if they were the right boys and I recognised them I didn’t want to have to say, ‘No, these aren’t the men.’ I wasn’t sure I could trust myself to carry it off, even for Hari’s sake. I didn’t want to tell that sort of lie,. There’s a difference between trying to stop an injustice and obstructing justice.

  I said, ‘No, I won’t co-operate. One of these men is innocent. If one innocent man is accused I’m not interested in the guilt or innocence of the others. I refuse absolutely to go anywhere near them. The men who raped me were peasants. The boys you’ve got locked up aren’t, so they’re almost certainly all innocent too. For one thing they’re all Hindus, aren’t they?’

  Mr Poulson agreed that they were all Hindus.

  I smiled. I’d prepared this one awfully well, I thought. I said, ‘Then that’s another thing. One of the men was a Muslim. He was circumcised. If you want to know how I know I’m quite prepared to tell you but otherwise prefer to leave it at that. One was a Muslim. They were all hooligans. Apart from that I can’t tell you a thing. I can’t tell you more than I have done. The impression I had of them was strong enough for me to know that I could say, “No, these aren’t the men,” but not strong enough for me to say, “Yes, these are the men.” For all I knew they could have been British soldiers with their faces blacked. I don’t imagine they were, but if by saying so I can convince you I know you’ve got at least one wrong man, well then I say so.’

  Mr Poulson and the young man whose name I don’t remember both looked profoundly shocked. Judge Menen stared at me and then said, ‘Thank you, Miss Manners. We have no more questions. We are sorry to have had to subject you to this examination.’

  He got to his feet and we all stood, just as if it was a courtroom and not the dining-room of the MacGregor House. But there the similarity ended. Instead of Judge Menen going out he stood still and made it clear that it was my privilege to leave first. When I got to the door Jack Poulson was ahead of me to open it. A purely automatic gesture, part of the Anglo-Indian machinery. But I could smell his shock. Bitter, as if he’d just eaten some aromatic quick-acting paralysing herb.

  *

  I went upstairs and poured myself a drink. I thought it was all over and that I’d won and Hari would be released in the next few hours, or the next day. I stood on the balcony as I’d done so often during the past two weeks. During the riots you could hear the shouting and the firing and the noise of trucks and lorries going from one part of the civil lines to the other. For a day or two there’d been policemen at the gate of the MacGregor House. They said the house might be attacked, but we’d been more worried about Anna Klaus than about ourselves. At one time she was practically a prisoner in the Purdah Hospital in the native town, and we didn’t see her for a couple of days. Mrs White wanted Lili and me to move into the Deputy Commissioner’s bungalow, but Lili wouldn’t go. Neither would I. That’s when the police guard appeared. The sight of the police guard made me feel like a prisoner too. Ronald never came near himself. He’d washed his hands of me. I felt that with a few exceptions the whole European community was ready to do that or had already done it. I didn’t care. I got to the stage of believing that everything was coming to an end for us, I mean for white people. I didn’t care about that either. One evening Lili told me the rioters had broken into the jail. I thought: That’s how it will resolve itself. They’ll free Hari. I didn’t know he wasn’t in that jail. But I thought: The Indians will take over. Perhaps they won’t punish me. Perhaps Hari will come to the house. But I couldn’t visualise it clearly enough. Nothing like that would happen. The soldiers were out and there was the sound of firing, and everything was only a question of time for us, hopeless for them. The robot was working.

  But I was worried about Anna, and Sister Ludmila. They were the only white people I knew who lived or worked on that side of the river. Sister Ludmila told me later that she defied the curfew and went out every night with Mr de Souza and her stretcher bearer. There was plenty of work for them. The police turned them back once or twice but generally they managed to give them the slip. The ‘death house’, as people called it, was always occupied. And every morning the police went there, and the women whose husbands or sons hadn’t come home.

  I was worried for you, too, until Lili told me she’d got Robin White to send you a message through official channels that I was all right. They tried to keep my name out of reports that appeared in the national newspapers. Some hopes. Thank God we’d talked on the phone before my name was given away. Even so I was afraid you’d come down to Mayapore. I bless you for not doing, for understanding. If you’d come down I couldn’t have borne it. I had to work it out alone. I bless Lili for understanding that too. At first I thought her detachment was due to disapproval, then that it was due to that curious Indian indifference to pain. But of course her ‘indifference’ was wholly ‘European’, wholly civilised, like yours, like my own. There are pains we feel, and pains we recognise in others, that are best left alone, not from callousness but from discretion. Anna’s detachment was rather different. Hers also was European, but Jewish, self-protective as well as sensitive, as if she didn’t want to be reminded of pain because to be reminded would transfer her sensitivity from my pain to what she remembered of her own. By keeping that amount of distance she was able to establish a friendship between us, trust, regard, the kind of regard that can spring up between strangers who sense each other’s mettle. One shouldn’t expect more. But affection comes from a different source, doesn’t it? I’m thinking of the affection there is between you and me, which is not only an affection of the blood because there is the same kind of affection between myself and Lili. It’s one that overcomes, that exists, but for which there isn’t necessarily any accounting because trust doesn’t enter into it at all, except to the extent that you trust because of the affection. You trust after you have learned to love.

  I could never feel affectionate in that way towards Anna. Neither, I’m sure, could she towards me. But we were good and trusting, understanding friends. One develops an instinct for people. I wander on about this because when I stood on the balcony, drinking my well-deserved gin and lime-juice, I saw Ronald and Mr Poulson come out of the house and get into Ronald’s truck. Judge Menen wasn’t with them. He stayed behind to have a drink with Lili.

  And I thought: How curious. Ronald and Jack Poulson are just people to me. I felt no real resentment, not even of Ronald, let alone of Jack who was obviously going off somewhere to chew the rag with Ronald. But I felt they were outside the circle of those people ‘it was worth my while to know’, as my mother put it once, probably meaning something else entirely. To me my own meaning was clear. I already knew them. They were predictable people, predictable because they worked for the robot. What the robot said they would also say, what the robot did they would do, and what the robot believed was what they believed because people like them had fed that belief into it. And they would always be right so long as the robot worked, because the robot was the standard of Rightness.

  There was no originating passion in them. Whatever they felt that was original would die the moment it came into conflict with what the robot was geared to feel. At the inquiry it needed Judge Menen to break through the robot’s barrier – if break is the appropriate word to use to describe the actions of a man who made even getting out of a chair look like an exercise in studied and balanced movement. But he got through. At one moment he was sitting on their side, the robot side, and the next moment he was through. We were through together, he brought me through or joined me on the other side – whichever way you like to put it. So it seemed right, now, that he should have stayed behind to have a drink with Lili, and leave the robot boys to go off on their own and work out how to make it look as if the robot had brought the inquiry to some kind of a logical conclusion. They had to save the robot’s face, as well as their own.

  It was odd to find myself thinking this about Mr Poulson. Mr and Mrs White thought very highly of him. He was stil
l pretty young, young enough to be cautious, which may sound silly, but isn’t, because a young man has a living to earn, a family to support, a career to build. But it probably needs something like what came to be called the Bibighar Gardens affair to sort out the mechanical men from the men who are capable of throwing a spanner into the works. Which is another way of describing what I feel about Judge Menen. What is so interesting is that the spanner he threw into the works, the spanner that brought the inquiry to a stop was the right spanner. It must take years of experience and understanding to know which spanner to use, and the exact moment to use it. I think he knew so well, that in the end he handed the spanner to me just to give himself the additional satisfaction of letting me throw it in for him. He knew that the only way to bring the robot to a temporary halt was to go right to the heart of what had set it in motion – the little cog of judicial procedure which had been built into it in the fond hope that once it was engaged it would only stop when justice had been done. By going to the heart of the mechanism he exposed it for what it was and gave me the chance to bring it to a halt by imposing an impossible task on it – the task of understanding the justice of what it was doing, and of proving that its own justice was the equal or the superior of mine. But it was only a temporary halt.

  Long before Judge Menen left I came in from the balcony and had my bath. I was finished and dressed for dinner before Lili came in and asked if I was all right, and if I would like to see Anna who had called on her way home from the Purdah Hospital. I said, ‘Is Judge Menen still here?’ She told me he’d gone about ten minutes ago. And had sent me his love. I’d never seen Lili moved before. I’d only seen her amused, or wry, or disapproving, or detached. I think it was Judge Menen who had moved her with whatever it was he said to her – or rather caused her to be moved directly she set eyes on me again after talking to him. I don’t know what it was he had said. I never shall. That is typical of Lili. Typical of him too. And in a terribly English way Lili and I sort of got out of each other’s light – put yards of space between us, but were together again.