by M A Bennett
‘Well,’ I said, looking at them stooping and circling in their strange, slow dance, ‘it’s not necessarily that they are not nice. It’s in their nature.’ There really could not have been a better cue line for what came next.
‘Hallo.’
We turned to see a figure emerging from the clubhouse.
It was Henry.
16
He strode easily towards us, one hand in his trouser pocket, like some Burberry model.
He was wearing a light cream suit and the club tie – that distinctive black-and-orange stripe – knotted at his throat. He fitted in perfectly; more than that, he looked like he ran the place. And then I realised. He did run the place. ‘You’re the secretary of the Tiger Club?’ I blurted, by way of a greeting.
‘Yes.’
‘Since when?’
‘Since 1st January. I had a rather … trying Christmas.’
By the dry, clipped way he said that, you’d think he’d lost his wallet, not his father and his ancestral home.
‘But … you’re only eighteen.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And according to regulations, that’s the minimum age.’ He smiled his familiar, shit-eating grin. ‘Of course, to be brutally frank and candid, it’s all about having the right name. Having a de Warlencourt at the helm is a bit of a tradition here.’
‘So we’ve been hearing.’
‘The place is mostly run by Colonel Moran, the chap who greeted you. Terror for big game is the colonel. He once crawled down a storm drain after a wounded man-eating tiger.’
Shafeen stared at Henry all the way through this exchange with the hostility I’d seen so many times before. The one time I’d seen a softening was when Shafeen had taken Ty from Henry’s arms on the night of the fire. Now he looked hawkish and hostile, like one of those high-flying birds. ‘Why the hell did you come all the way out here?’
Henry regarded him. ‘Let’s have a drink. It’s a bit of a long story.’
He indicated a nearby table and pulled out my chair for me, earning himself a filthy look from Shafeen. Both of them waited, in a kind of chivalric stand-off, for me to sit down before they did. Henry settled himself easily in a chair and I remembered well that cat-like grace that made him seem at home anywhere. Shafeen, in his national dress, sat straight and stiff. You’d have thought this was Henry’s country, not his.
Henry raised a lazy hand. ‘Bearer!’
A guy came over, and he was the first Indian guy I’d seen in the place. He was wearing, unbelievably, the same outfit that the feather-fan servant had been wearing in the picture of Monty de Warlencourt. Head-to-toe white, with a turban, complete with a tiger-orange jewel nestled in its snowy folds.
‘Burra peg,’ commanded Henry, without a please or a thank-you. I didn’t understand what he’d said, but Shafeen clued me in.
‘Still using the old Raj vocab, eh?’ said Shafeen sharply.
‘If it ain’t broke,’ said Henry outrageously, ‘don’t fix it.’ But then I caught a wicked glint in those blue eyes and knew he was deliberately baiting Shafeen.
Even Shafeen smiled bitterly, and, as the drinks came – something clear on ice, with a slice of lime – he thanked the bearer ostentatiously in Hindi. He and the bearer shared a look.
Shafeen took a sniff of his drink. ‘Bit early for gin and tonic, isn’t it?’
Henry handed me a glass, then raised his.
‘My father always used to drink to the Siege of Gibraltar,’ he said.
‘Why on earth?’ I asked.
‘Gibraltar was attacked so many times that the British navy felt they could make the toast at any time of day,’ said Henry, ‘safe in the knowledge that, at that moment, Gibraltar was always under siege. It means –’ he looked pointedly at Shafeen – ‘that it’s never too early for a drink.’ He took a gulp. ‘Trust me, if you ever find someone who drinks to the Siege of Gibraltar, it means they are the right sort. It’s kind of a code.’
‘I’d rather drink to my father’s health.’ Shafeen’s toast dropped into the conversation like a stone.
If the two of them had been playing poker, which they kind of were, Shafeen had played his ace. Even Henry looked discomfited. He sat a little straighter, and straightened his face too. ‘Yes, of course. How is he?’
‘We’ll get to him in a minute. First, answer the question. Why did you come all the way out here?’
Henry leaned back in his chair, completely at ease. He took out a cigarette case, such as you might see in Rebecca. He offered the cigarettes around and then, when we refused, lit one himself. It was while he was carrying out this elegant action that I first noticed his hands.
They were completely scarred – a desert of pinched, burned flesh, healed shiny and tight. A lump rose in my throat. So this had been the price of saving Ty from the fire.
He caught me staring. ‘Bit of a mess, eh?’ he said. ‘Luckily they don’t entirely spoil my beauty.’
I looked away swiftly and could feel my cheeks heating up. I concentrated instead on the object he’d set down on the table. It was one of those fancy silver lighters on which you flip up the top and then spin the little wheel to get a flame. I could see it had something etched on the side. A lion and a unicorn, and some sort of coat of arms.
I risked a look back at his face as he took a drag on his cigarette. I’d never seen him smoke before. I knew he did, knew all the Medievals did, because we used to see their fag butts jammed in the wire mesh of the Paulinus well. ‘Terrible habit,’ Henry acknowledged. ‘But I started again after Christmas. Stress, I suppose.’ He blew a plume of smoke at the peerless view of golden plains and the misty blue mountains towering behind like an incredible piece of CGI in a film. ‘You asked an interesting question,’ he said to Shafeen. ‘Why did I come all the way out here?’ He picked a fragment of tobacco from his tongue with those damaged fingers. ‘Let me ask you one in return. Do you know the story of the Tiger, the Brahmin and the Fox?’
‘Everyone in India knows it,’ said Shafeen. ‘You learn it at your mother’s knee.’
‘I don’t know it,’ I said.
They both started telling the story at once, like a couple at a dinner party trotting out a well-worn anecdote, then stopped, and Henry sat back in his chair. ‘You tell it, darling,’ he mocked with a gracious flourish of his cigarette.
Shafeen frowned and spoke to the landscape. ‘Once there was a Brahmin – sort of a holy man – walking down a road. He saw a tiger in a trap. The tiger pleaded very eloquently for his freedom, promising that he would not eat the Brahmin if he was released. The Brahmin set the tiger free, and the tiger immediately goes back on his promise and states his intention to eat the Brahmin. The Brahmin appeals to a passing fox to judge the case. The fox claims not to understand what has happened and asks to see the trap. The fox is shown the mechanism but claims he still doesn’t understand and asks the tiger to show him how it works. The tiger gets back inside the trap to demonstrate and the fox shuts him in.’
‘Precisely,’ said Henry. ‘We know there are FOXES at play. Now we just need to work out,’ he said, glancing at Shafeen, ‘who is the tiger and who is the Brahmin.’
So he knew. Henry knew about the rival order of anti-establishment rebels out to get him and his kind.
‘Foxes in fairy-tales always win,’ Henry went on. ‘Always. Think of Chicken Licken, the Gingerbread Man. They are cunning and cruel and always one step ahead of the game.’
He started faffing about with the lime in his glass, pushing it down into the G&T and watching it bob back up. ‘The FOXES tried to take out our entire Boxing Day guestlist, and they succeeded in taking out my father. I just didn’t fancy them taking me out.’
‘I don’t think that was them,’ I said, without thinking.
‘Which bit?’ asked Henry.
I ignored Shafeen’s warning look. ‘Your father. I don’t think the FOXES killed him.’
He turned his very blue gaze on me. ‘What makes you say that?’
I looked away. Henry could always make me tell him things when he looked at me like that, and I didn’t want to give the Abbot away. Besides, despite Henry telling me the ‘fox in a box’ story, and taking me to the Red Mass, and saving Ty’s life, I still couldn’t be 100 per cent sure he was now one of the good guys. ‘Instinct.’
He looked back at the view again and took a drink before speaking. ‘Well, despite my well-developed respect for your instinct, darling Greer –’ I sensed Shafeen bristle at the endearment – ‘I didn’t want to take the chance.’
‘So you ran away,’ said Shafeen bluntly.
Now Henry turned his blue gaze on Shafeen. ‘How interesting that you would say that, old chap.’ He smiled pleasantly. ‘I’d rather characterise it as giving myself a chance to regroup.’
‘Well, as concerned as we are for your welfare,’ said Shafeen sarcastically, ‘I have a few questions about my father.’
Henry straightened up once again, stubbed out his cigarette and immediately lit another one. ‘Of course.’
‘Were you here that day?’
‘Yes, I called the ambulance. He’d sent his driver away.’
Shafeen thawed a fraction. ‘I suppose I should thank you for that.’
‘Yes,’ said Henry, with a ghost of a smile. ‘I suppose you should.’
But Shafeen said nothing.
I jumped into the silence. ‘Where was he? When he collapsed?’
Henry swivelled around in his chair. He indicated the hallway we’d just come from. ‘Just there. In the passageway.’
‘You saw him go down?’
‘Yes.’
‘How did he look?’ Shafeen’s voice broke a little.
Sounding more sympathetic than I’d ever heard him, Henry said, ‘To be quite frank, old chap, he looked like he’d seen a ghost.’
This struck me – it was just what the guru had told Princess Himani.
‘I just about caught him before he hit the deck,’ Henry continued. ‘Then we put a cushion under his head. I checked he was breathing, stuck him in the recovery position and waited for the experts.’
Finally Shafeen said it. ‘Thank you.’
Henry inclined his head. ‘You’re welcome. How is he?’
‘Still unconscious. They’re hopeful he’ll pull through but can’t be sure.’
Henry’s mouth twitched a little in sympathy. ‘Believe it or not, I know what you’re going through.’
‘Really?’ said Shafeen scornfully. ‘I doubt that.’
‘As I have just lost my own father, I call that an ungallant remark.’
Now it was Shafeen’s turn to be chastened. ‘You’re right, I’m sorry.’
‘And I didn’t get to say goodbye to mine. You did.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Our faithful family doctor, of course,’ said Henry. ‘He’s been with us for generations. He even helped my mother give birth to me. So he was happy to fill me in about that tender little scene. Kiss me, Hardy.’ Henry flicked his ash viciously into the ashtray, but it was hard to gauge, from the lightness of his tone, how much that had actually hurt him.
‘OK,’ said Shafeen, shifting a little uncomfortably in his chair. ‘You know what went down. So we might as well talk about the apology. The deathbed confession, I mean. Your father said he was sorry for what he did that Justitium, the autumn half-term of 1969.’
‘No,’ I interrupted. It was time for truth telling. ‘He said he was not sorry for what they did together.’
Shafeen sighed faintly, but he didn’t disagree. ‘Do you know what he … they might have done together?’
Henry shrugged. ‘Not a clue.’
Shafeen said, ‘Do you think they might have gone huntin’ shootin’ and fishin’? Like you did?’
The blue eyes flickered. ‘It’s possible. It’s a long-established family tradition. Or rather, it was.’ He stubbed out his cigarette in the chunky glass ashtray with an air of finality.
I was inclined to go a bit softer on him than Shafeen, since he had, in fact, saved Ty’s life – and perhaps Aadhish’s too. ‘So your father never mentioned that Justitium weekend? Never told you what happened?’
Henry unhurriedly lit another cigarette and breathed out the answer with the smoke. ‘No.’ He looked from me to Shafeen. ‘The way I see it, since my father most inconsiderately shuffled off this mortal coil on Boxing Day, the only person who can tell you what happened is your father.’
I took a tiny sip of my gin and tonic. ‘There’s a suggestion,’ I persisted, ‘that there might be unfinished business.’
I looked at Shafeen, and he picked up his cue. ‘My mother went to see a … a guru. A Vedic astrologer. It was he who said that my father had unfinished business.’
‘A moon reader, eh?’ said Henry. ‘Hmm.’ I expected him to laugh or pour scorn on the idea. He did neither. He stretched out his long legs in front of him and said, ‘You know, before I came out here, I would have said that was all rot.’
‘And now?’ I asked.
‘Now I don’t know.’ He gazed beyond us at the view. ‘This place changes you.’
‘For Christ’s sake.’ Shafeen put his glass down sharply on the table. ‘This is not your spiritual retreat. It doesn’t exist for you to have some sort of awakening. This is my country.’
I’d never heard him speak so passionately about India when he was in England. He looked out to the mountains, the birds above and the trees below, where tigers may hide. ‘God, nothing changes, does it? Take what you want and leave the rest.’
Henry regarded him. ‘Ah, yes. The naughty British Raj.’ He tutted, as if at a wayward child, and flicked a glance at me. ‘Been filling you in, has he? Britain bad, India good? That’s it, isn’t it?’
I couldn’t deny it.
‘Did he tell you all the Evil Empire’s Greatest Hits?’ He leaned forward and stage-whispered, ‘Did he tell you about Amritsar?’
I don’t know what my face did in reply to that, but Henry read it immediately.
‘He did, didn’t he!’ he crowed.
‘Don’t do that!’ Shafeen snapped.
‘Do what?’
‘Use Amritsar to make a cheap point.’
Henry flicked more ash. ‘Why not? You did.’
‘Hardly. I think it was an abomination.’
‘I too. But are you quite sure you didn’t use it to demonstrate to your girlfriend how mean and nasty the Raj was?’
‘I’m not just someone’s –’ I began hotly. But I might as well not have been there. This was between those two.
‘Yes. I’m absolutely sure,’ Shafeen said over me.
Henry sat back and laughed to himself softly.
Shafeen let a silence fall. Then he said, quite calmly, ‘What do you want from me, Henry?’
‘Balance,’ said Henry equably. ‘Just balance.’
‘What does that mean?’
Henry breathed in smoke. ‘An acknowledgement that, alongside the undoubted and manifold evils of the British occupation of India, marched some good.’
‘Like?’
‘Roads. Railways. Education. Trade. A legal system.’
‘We heard all this from your father.’
Henry looked at me. ‘Did your boyfriend tell you about the caste system? You think the British class system is bad? My Christ.’
‘You’re clutching at straws now,’ said Shafeen.
‘All right then.’ Henry exhaled smoke perilously close to Shafeen’s face. ‘What about suttee?’
Shafeen’s expression went suddenly still.
‘Did you tell her about that?’ probed Henry. ‘Did you tell Greer what would have happened to your mother if your father died, if the British hadn’t come along?’
For a moment they looked at each other, eye to eye, like two cats about to pounce. I was transported back, suddenly, to that first time at Longcross, when Shafeen had told his story about being the tiger’s son. This time Henry moved first. He got up from his ch
air, whereas Shafeen seemed frozen to his seat.
‘Well, I must get on. Let me call your driver for you.’
It all seemed very abrupt. I wasn’t sure how much the secretary of the Tiger Club had to do, but it very much felt like we were being thrown out.
Henry softened the blow. ‘Don’t be strangers, will you? And don’t leave it too long. I’m only here for a few more days.’ He looked up to the fierce blue sky. ‘It will be getting too hot for me soon.’
I wondered if he meant literally or metaphorically. He stooped to stub out his cigarette in the ashtray right in front of the immobile Shafeen. ‘We’re going out to see the tigers tomorrow if you fancy it. Elephants, beaters – the lot. You are both cordially invited, as my guests.’
‘A hunt?’ I said, as Shafeen seemed to be temporarily out of action.
‘We don’t hunt any more,’ he said, almost regretfully. ‘Not like the old days. It’s more of a safari now. And after that I’ll probably toddle back to dear old Blighty. I’m sure things will have cooled down by now. I mean, the home fires can’t still be burning, can they?’
With that devastating exit line, he skipped off to find Hari. I gave Shafeen a little shake. ‘Are you OK?’
He seemed to come out of his trance and smiled weakly. ‘Yes. Yes, I’m fine.’ He got to his feet and smoothed down his coat.
‘What did he say? What was all that about your mum?’
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing.’
Henry was waiting for us at the top of the steps and Hari at the bottom in the car.
Henry offered his ruined hand to shake and Shafeen took it rather limply – he still didn’t seem quite himself. And before I could dodge him, Henry kissed me on both cheeks.
‘Think about the tiger safari,’ he said. ‘It will be the last one for a while because the mating season starts. I’ll be gone after that.’
He stood in the portico at the top of the steps to watch us get into the car, hands in his pockets, in an unassailable position of authority. But just as Hari was about to drive off he took his hands out of his pockets, trotted easily down the steps and leaned in at Shafeen’s open window, his scarred fingers on the car door and his stag signet ring clinking on the metal. ‘Look, if it helps, I would say don’t underestimate the power of what you heard.’