by Paul Scott
I went down with her and greeted Anna. Lili asked her to stay to dinner. She said she would. For me it was like a sudden treat, a picnic plan confided to a child early on a golden summer morning. When Lili went out to tell Raju to tell cook it was dinner for three I gave Anna a freshener for her drink. She said, ‘You look better. Please keep it up.’
And I said, ‘I think I shall. I think we’ve won.’ I said ‘we’ because Anna had stood by me all that time. I knew, before the inquiry, that she’d been asked that naked question: ‘In your opinion was Miss Manners intacta before the assault?’ And I knew what she had replied. When I said ‘I think we’ve won’, she raised her glass.
*
This was the last evening of happiness I had. After it I was optimistic but not happy. In the end even my optimism went. I needed Hari. I needed Lili too, and Anna, and you, but most of all I needed him. I’d built my own enclosed little circle, hadn’t I? The one I’d feel safe in. A circle of safety in no-man’s-land. Wherever we go, whatever we do, we seem to hedge ourselves about with this illusory protection. Hours went by. Days. More than a week. I never went out. When people came I escaped to my room. The MacGregor House was gradually filled again with vibrations whose source I had never pinned down before but now did and saw as inseparable from it: trust, compromise, something fundamentally exploratory and non-committal, as if the people in it were trying to learn, instead of teach – and so forgive rather than accuse. There is that old, disreputable saying, isn’t there? ‘When rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it.’ Well, there has been more than one rape. I can’t say, Auntie, that I lay back and enjoyed mine. But Lili was trying to lie back and enjoy what we’ve done to her country. I don’t mean done in malice. Perhaps there was love. Oh, somewhere, in the past, and now, and in the future, love as there was between me and Hari. But the spoilers are always there, aren’t they? The Swinsons. The bitches who travelled as far as Lahore. The Ronald Merricks. The silly little man who summed up his own silly little island-history when he whistled and said, ‘some wog contractor is making a packet.’
Connie White came to see me one day. She brought Mavis Poulson with her. But she realised after ten minutes or so that she’d get nowhere because bringing edgy, virtuously pregnant Mavis had been a mistake. She sent her away. As the Deputy Commissioner’s wife she could do such a thing with no more than the personal courage it took to make Mavis dislike her for a day or two. When we were alone she said, ‘My husband doesn’t know I’m here. I shan’t tell him I’ve been. And I oughtn’t to interfere, I know. But they’ve sent Hari Kumar away. They’ve put him and the other boys in prison.’
It wasn’t a shock. I was prepared for it. Days of silence from Lili had prepared me for it. I didn’t understand it but that wasn’t the same as not believing it could happen. I asked what they were putting him in prison for. She made a gesture that defined the futility of both the question and the answer. She said, ‘All the papers went to the Commissioner, and it’s out of our hands now. But I wanted to know if there’s anything you can tell me that you wouldn’t tell Jack or Robin, or Lili.’
I said, ‘What sort of thing, for heaven’s sake?’
Again she made that gesture, whose meaning we both knew. She said probably only I could tell her what sort of thing. I thought it was a trap. I smiled at her. She said, ‘Well, you know what men are. They always tell themselves they can’t afford the luxury of real curiosity. I mean curiosity about people. Oh, I know they solve all kinds of complex problems that prove we’re made of water and gas or something, and that the universe is still exploding and travelling outwards at umpteen million light years a second which I suppose is fascinating, but of no practical use to us when it comes to trying to keep the servants happy and stopping them from making off just as effectively at a rate measurable in miles an hour.’
I laughed. It was so absurd. Small talk. Chat. Jolly jokes. Bless her. This was her armoury. The key – the chink in the armour – was that word ‘curiosity’. I knew what I was supposed to say. ‘What are you curious about?’ I laughed again. I expect she thought I was bats. They say poor old Miss Crane went round the bend. Lili went to see her once while I was still at the MacGregor. Perhaps twice. I don’t remember. We didn’t talk about it much. Miss Crane had taken all the pictures down from her walls or something, although she wasn’t going anywhere. Later she committed suttee. You saw the report of it in The Times of India, I think. We both saw it. Neither of us mentioned it. Perhaps Lili wrote to you and told you more about it. Of course it’s wrong to say ‘committed’ suttee. Suttee, or sati (is that the right way to spell it?) is a sort of state of wifely grace, isn’t it? So you don’t commit it. You enter into it. If you’re a good Hindu widow you become suttee. Should I become it, Auntie? Is Hari dead? I suppose you could say we’re hermits enough here to rank as sannyasis anyway. But no. I’ve not done with the world yet. I’ve still got at least one duty to perform.
And I knew I had a duty to perform for Connie White. After I’d stopped laughing I said, ‘Well then, what are you curious about?’
You can’t not pay for a joke. You’ve got to cough up the price put on it.
She said, ‘Well, it all seems to begin with a man called Moti Lal.’
I’d never heard of Moti Lal, but it turned out he was the man Ronald was looking for the first time he arrested Hari. Moti Lal was once employed by Hari’s uncle. He was always haranguing groups of students and young men and labourers. When he started trying to organise the staff at the place where he worked old Romesh Chand sacked him. He also got served with an order under section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code. I think Ronald instigated that. It’s the one that calls on you to abstain from an act likely to cause a disturbance in the district, isn’t it? Anyway, like so many other people were doing, to keep the British embarrassed, he defied it, and was prosecuted under section 188 of the Penal Code and sentenced to six months. I remember all this jabberwocky because I latched on to it while Connie talked about it, hoping it would explain what could happen to Hari. It didn’t, but I looked it up afterwards in the law books in Lili’s library.
Moti Lal was sent to the jail in Aligarh. He escaped. And Ronald was looking for him when he called at the Sanctuary on the morning Hari was there with a hangover. I asked Connie what all this Moti Lal business had to do with an innocent man being sent to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. She said, ‘But that’s the point. Hari Kumar isn’t being sent to prison for the assault. He’s being sent for political reasons. He knew Moti Lal.’
Again I laughed. I said, ‘Hari knew Moti Lal. I know Hari. Why don’t you send me to jail too? I suppose all those other boys knew Moti Lal as well?’
She said she wasn’t really concerned about the other boys. There were police files on all of them. They’d all been examined by Jack Poulson. Both Jack and her husband believed that they were the kind of boys who, if they hadn’t been taken into custody on the night of the Bibighar, would have been arrested within forty-eight hours for rioting or sabotage. Whatever one felt about the justice or injustice of it, they were ‘fair game’ in present circumstances, and safer out of the way.
I said, ‘Fair game is the right description. You could hardly release them now, could you? They were arrested for the worst crime of all, and everybody knows it. And the same goes for Hari, doesn’t it? Only it’s even trickier for him. Because everybody knows we used to go out together.’
She agreed that it was trickier for Hari, or rather had been trickier when it was still uncertain whether he’d taken part in the assault. But none of the boys was being charged with assault. That case was still open. The police were still working on it. But it looked unlikely that they’d ever catch the men who were responsible, unless the men began to boast – either back in their villages, or wherever they came from, or in the jails. You couldn’t rule out the possibility that the men who’d assaulted me were among those arrested during the subsequent rioting. The police only hoped they weren’t among tho
se killed. Connie didn’t think they would be because men of ‘that kind’ weren’t likely to have risked their lives defying the military. If they’d been arrested they’d have been with the men who got caught looting. If they were still free they could, of course, be anywhere, and probably the only thing to hope for was an informer, someone with a grudge against them who heard them boasting. The trouble was that in India you could never rely on evidence when it was come by in this way.
I don’t know what Connie was trying to do. Relieve me of the anxiety that Hari might still be punished for the assault; put me on my guard, because she guessed the truth and therefore also guessed that I didn’t want the men caught in case they incriminated Hari; catch me off my guard, hoping for a careless word that would undo all the good I’d so far done. Perhaps she was trying to do none of these things. When you’ve lied your head off you suspect nearly everyone of cunning and evasion and deceit. I expect she was just curious, as she said, exercising her woman’s right to satisfy her curiosity now that the men had made everything irrevocable.
She said Moti Lal had never been caught. He’d gone ‘underground’. The boys who’d been drinking hooch when they were arrested all swore they’d not seen Moti Lal since he was sent to prison. Jack Poulson thought they were lying. The trouble was that Hari Kumar had ‘gradually emerged’ during all these investigations and interrogations as ‘a young man of whom the gravest suspicions had to be entertained’ (which also sounded to me like something Jack Poulson must have said). The police had kept a file on him for several months. He’d been had in for questioning at the time they were looking for Moti Lal. He’d ‘made a mystery over his name’, and had at first given the wrong one – which in itself was a punishable offence, although Ronald Merrick hadn’t proceeded against him because the offence in Hari’s case was only technical. But Hari had gone on record as saying, ‘I hate the whole stinking country, the people who live in it and the people who rule it.’ He’d worked in the same firm as Moti Lal. He was a one-time colleague of a young anarchist called Vidyasagar who’d been arrested for distributing seditious literature and delivering a pamphlet to the police calling on them to assist the people to ‘liberate the martyrs of the Bibighar Gardens’. At the time of his arrest, after the assault on me, his room had been searched. The police thought it curious that there were no letters in his room; no letters, except one – a letter from someone in England who wasn’t identified because he’d only signed his Christian name, but it was clear he was in the forces, and had been at Dunkirk. He described Dunkirk as a shambles. He asked Hari to bear in mind that letters might be opened. His father had opened some of them while this boy was in France and hadn’t forwarded them because they were full of ‘hot-headed political stuff.’ Nobody could understand why Hari had kept just this one letter out of all the letters he must have had from time to time from different people. Of course they didn’t intend to pursue the business of who this rather ‘bolshie’ sounding English boy might be. It was enough that the letter more or less proved Hari was a bolshie himself. Without much difficulty a case had been made out to show that Hari Kumar – in spite of seeming to be such a quiet, uncommitted, well-educated young man – was a leading member of a group of dangerous fellows whose early arrest alone had deprived them of the opportunity to act openly against the war effort. The papers relating to Kumar and the other boys had been sent to the commissioner, and the commissioner had agreed with the decision Robin White had ‘very reluctantly’ come to: the decision that these boys should be imprisoned under the Defence of India Rules.
By the time Connie got to this point in her harangue I was laughing in the way you do when the alternative is to cry. I knew who the English boy must be. I said, ‘But it’s a farce! It’s absurd! Hari can prove it’s a ridiculous monstrous farce!’
She said, ‘But my dear, that’s what puzzles me. The other boys denied everything – everything except that they all know each other, which they hardly could deny. They shouted and wept and insisted that they were innocent of everything except drinking hooch. And we knew they were lying. But Hari was an altogether different matter. He was examined personally by Jack Poulson. But to every question he said nothing. He neither denied nor agreed. The only thing he ever said in his own defence was ‘I wasn’t at the Bibighar. I haven’t seen Miss Manners since the night we visited the temple.’ And of course he only said that when they were accusing him of assault. To all the other questions his only answer was, ‘I have nothing to say.’ It’s unnatural. I mean to me it’s unnatural. The men simply took his silence as a confession of guilt. I expect if I were a man I’d have done the same. But I’m a woman, like you. I think of Hari Kumar and listen to Jack talking to Mavis about him, and to my husband talking to old Menen, and I think, “It’s wrong. A man doesn’t say nothing, unless he’s trying to put a noose round his own neck. He fights for his life and his freedom. He fights because he is a man.”’
We were sitting on the verandah. Oh, everything was there – the wicker chairs, the table with the tea tray on it, the scent of the flowers, the scent of India, the air of certainty, of perpetuity; but, as well, the odd sense of none of it happening at all because it had begun wrong and continued wrong, and so was already ended, and was wrong even in its ending, because its ending, for me, was unreal and remote, and yet total in its envelopment, as if it had already turned itself into a beginning. Such constant hope we suffer from! I think the MacGregor House was built on such foundations. The steps up to the verandah where I’d stumbled and fallen were only a few feet away. I had never seen Janet MacGregor’s ghost, but I felt that she must have seen mine.
Connie said, ‘I expect it’s frightfully silly of me, but you know if Hari Kumar had been an Englishman I could have understood his silence better, although even then it would have had to be a silence imposed on him by a woman.’
I began to laugh again. I laughed because I saw that this time there really was nothing I could do – for Connie, for myself, or for Hari, for anyone. My legs – bare from the knee down – were an anachronism, an outrage. To play the scene with anything like style I needed a long dress of white muslin, and a little straw boater on my head. I needed to be conscious of the dignity of the occasion. I needed to be able to say, ‘But Harry is an Englishman,’ and then to rise, put up my little parasol and detach myself from Constance White’s company, so that she would know but say nothing because this was a world where men died in the open and women wept in private, and the Queen sat like a wise old lady on her throne and succeeded in that difficult feat of proving that there was a world where corruption also died for lack of stinking air.
Oh well, it was fine, wasn’t it? Me sitting there in one chair and Connie White in another, showing acres of bare ill-looking flesh, sweating under the arms, and Hari sweating in a disgusting jailhouse, beyond the reach of either of us, wondering what he’d gained by acting like a white man should when a girl made him give a promise: a promise for his sake, yes, but for her own too. She wanted him. She wanted him to be around to make love to her again. It was marvellous. Marvellous because he was black. I wanted him and he was black so his blackness was part of what I wanted. Sitting there with Connie, laughing my head off, I hoped for one bitter, selfish moment that he suffered as much as I did, for putting his bloody acquired English pride above his compulsion to enter me. I wished him joy of his stupid sense of values. I thought: How typical! You tell an Indian to say nothing and he takes it literally.
Afterwards, of course, I knew he hadn’t taken it literally. He’d interpreted it that way deliberately. To punish himself. To give him something new about himself that he could mock. When Connie had gone, no wit the wiser for her visit, but I suppose convinced I was unbalanced, Lili found me weeping in my room, because the comic mood had gone, the melodrama had exploded, not into tragedy but just into life and all the stupid cross-currents that tossed you indiscriminately from one thought to another but managed to keep you up. You can never drown. Never, never. Until you
’re dead. So why be so ridiculously afraid of the truth?
But with Lili sitting on my bed, wanting to comfort me but also wanting to chastise me for my absurdity, I was a child again. I wept and cried out, ‘I want him, I want him. Bring him back to me, Auntie. Please help to bring him back.’
She said nothing. Like Hari. For them I suppose there is nothing to say. Nothing, that is, if they are intent on building instead of on destroying. Behind all the chatter and violence of India – what a deep, lingering silence. Siva dances in it. Vishnu sleeps in it. Even their music is silence. It’s the only music I know that sounds conscious of breaking silence, of going back into it when it’s finished, as if to prove that every man-made sound is an illusion.
What an odd concept of the world that is! We shall never understand it. They don’t really understand it themselves, I suspect. Is it to try to understand it that Sister Ludmila wanders the streets collecting the bodies of the dead and the dying? Is it just a concept that could be traced to some long-forgotten overwhelming, primitive experience of pain and suffering? I ask because it struck me, a few weeks later, when
I knew I was pregnant and I asked Lili to send for Anna Klaus, that Anna stood on the same edge of reality and illusion herself, because she’d been deprived and had suffered and continued to live. She’s a great believer in anaesthetising the patient, a great giver of sedatives. I remember how she stood in my bedroom frowning her little professional frown as she sorted things out in her black bag. Such a wealth of compromise there is in a doctor’s bag! She seemed to be a long way away from me, and yet to be taking me with her – millions of miles away down long glazed white-tiled tunnels, subterranean passages of human degradation that were saved from filthiness because we northerners have learned how to make suffering aseptic and non-contagious. At first I had a silly idea she was preparing something for me to take to get rid of the child. I said, ‘What’s that, what’s that?’ She said, ‘What a fuss! It is only to give you a quiet night. Expectant mothers must be contemplative. Like nuns.’