‘What’s missing?’ I said.
Fisher turned to face me, his eyes bulging, his moustache fluttering in the backdraft of the little train. It was the first time I had seen it move. Behind us the glass door rattled. We both turned. One of the women was there, and one of the children: a boy. The woman was holding her hat against the breeze with one hand, while the other hand rested on the shoulder of the boy. He stepped over to the railing of the veranda and gave a polite cough. He was being sick into the cloud. A case of either motion or mountain sickness.
I turned back towards Fisher. ‘What did you want to tell me about?’
He pointed down, and for a while he didn’t speak, and we watched the rails.
‘No track shoes,’ Fisher said, at length.
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘The rails are screwed directly on to the sleepers.’ It was an economy measure permissible on small-gauge railways, where not so much ‘give’ was needed in the rails. I said as much to Fisher, but I did not believe he listened.
The boy had stopped being sick, and he looked to be benefitting from the colder air. He was eyeing Fisher curiously. Fisher put his hand into his suit-coat pocket, and I was on the point of knocking him over the veranda when I realised this was not his gun hand that he was reaching with, but his left. Out came a paper bag. He held the bag in front of the boy, who took from it a boiled sweet.
The woman was the person who had clashed with Fisher before, and she could not conceal her amazement at this development.
‘Now what do you say?’ she asked the child when she finally found her voice.
‘Thank you for the humbug, sir.’
Fisher eyed the boy. ‘It’s not a flipping humbug, is it? It’s a comfit.’
III
The tropical forest had given way to oaks and rhododendrons, and the Indian summer had become an English spring, albeit a misty one.
We were beyond the halfway point, and Fisher and I were back in our little anteroom to the main compartment. After the loops, the train had performed some other tricks. For example, it had climbed for a while by running hard uphill into a dead end, then reversing over points on to a higher ledge than it had started from, then running hard uphill again, so progressing by zigzags. The first time the train made a reverse, one of the women in the main saloon had screamed, probably imagining we were running out of control down the hill. The train had then started chasing its tail again: another loop.
At a spot called Tindharia we had been besieged by tea-wallahs. It had been distinctly cool there, and the women had put woollen sweaters on the children. On emerging from that station, we had been able to look down on the workshop of the mountain railway; it came and went through swirls of cloud, like a factory that had died and gone to heaven. An hour later, at a spot called Kurseong, we had all taken a meal in the station restaurant. Then the children from the first class carriage stood on the platform and watched what looked like an organised entertainment by a troupe of monkeys. I almost expected the monkeys to bring round a hat afterwards. Kurseong was a vertical town, with tea plantations all around. As we pulled away from it, the clouds became strange, with whirlpools of vapour ascending and descending inside them. My ears clicked.
‘Why the interest in narrow-gauge railways?’ I asked Fisher. We were back in the little saloon, smoking at one another.
Silence for a space.
‘I saw an advertisement in the paper. Small-gauge kit being sold off . . . Thought there might be money in it.’
‘Who was selling?’
‘Bombay . . . Port Authority.’
A further silence.
‘What paper?’
‘Statesman.’
‘When?’
‘I don’t bloody know, do I? Couple of weeks back.’
I was a faithful reader of The Statesman. At three anas, it was very good value. I had seen no such advertisement.
The window was wide and clear. Beyond it, I saw that we were beginning to coincide with a road: the Cart Road, I believed it was called. It was going the same way as us: to Darjeeling. The queer-looking mountain people walked along it, some carrying baskets strapped to their foreheads. We shuffled into a place called Tung, all steam and fog. The houses of Tung were made of wood, with triangular roofs, like so many cuckoo clocks. Long tattered streamers flew from flagpoles in the gardens, where grew willow trees, cherry trees and red flowers that blazed brightly in the haze. We rolled past some Gurkha-like men digging up the road, and the locomotive rang its bell at them. One man looked up from his work, grinning. They all wore big gold earrings, like pirates. An ox cart was approaching them, and behind the ox cart a motor. The very rich did prefer to motor up; I’d seen a number of cars on the road, and plenty of petrol bunks. This motor was long and blue, almost as long as our railway carriage and I believed it was the kind they called a ‘Continental’. The driver was uniformed. A dark-suited and middle-aged Indian sat beside him. On the rear seat, looking over a newspaper, sat a handsome young Indian in tweeds. It was the R.K.
Our train swayed towards the car, and he was looking through the window, looking my way, and it seemed that he didn’t know quite what to do. He half raised his arm, just as Fisher, in the chair opposite to mine, raised his paper to his face. Well, it was clear as day. The two were acquainted; the two were in league, and didn’t want me to know it. It wasn’t Askwith Fisher had been going to meet at the Debating Society dance; it was the R.K. I continued to watch the Continental as it overtook the train. The golf clubs, fishing rods and gun bags bristling from the rear matched Fisher’s golf clubs and gun bag. He was going up to the hills because they were going up to the hills – and yet he had wanted to travel up with me.
If the murder of John Young on the Jamalpur night train had been the result of a bungled attempt to do away with me, with Fisher as a conspirator, then the instigator need not have been William Askwith, or whatever traffic officer feared being exposed as corrupt. What if the instigator was the R.K.? He was presumably a man used to getting what he wanted. It appeared that he wanted my daughter, and I was the barrier standing in his way.
Thinking of Bernadette, I willed the train on. I didn’t want the R.K. to arrive in Darjeeling before I did, but two minutes later I saw him again. His Continental was parked behind another motor, just as big, possibly a Rolls. Its European occupants had stepped out on to the road, and a gush of steam was coming from the radiator. The cars had no choice but to attack the hills, and it was too much for some. The R.K. and his two companions were stopping to assist. It seemed I would beat him to Darjeeling after all.
Fisher was still reading his paper, or pretending to.
‘Why have you come up here?’
‘For the bloody social gaiety, why do you think?’
We had come to a place called Ghum. We circled a wide, flattish hill for no apparent reason, and with infuriating slowness. But then, finally, we were bearing down on the terminus.
IV
Darjeeling was a town falling down a mountain, and this mountain had turned its back on India, and the plain of Bengal. Instead, it faced a blue-grey valley patrolled by clouds. On the other side of this valley were ‘the snows’, the Himalayas, which were, at the present moment, buried treasure, merely a whitish gleam behind bands of grey cloud. The sun was big in the sky, like a painting of the sun, and it gave off little heat. Most of the European men boarding the tongas, or walking along the principal road – the Mall – were dressed like mountaineers. Thick knickerbockers, guernseys and pipes were the order of the day. The women’s coats were sometimes fur-trimmed. The air held the smoke of a hundred coal fires and the dark light of impending downpour. Taken all together, I felt that I was in the Scottish Highlands, some time either side of winter.
Fisher was delayed behind me in the station, mustering his goods and marshalling some servants for the short run to the Hotel Mount Everest. The queue for tongas was too long, so I engaged a rickshaw. I showed the man a hand-drawn map, given me by Lydia, on w
hich Cedar Lodge was indicated . . . and the rain began to fall as we ticked our way along the Mall.
After the station, the Mall became a bazaar, with stalls on the road. Next came bigger buildings, including the clubs of the town, set back from the Mall, and with British-looking gardens. Thereafter, the Mall became a pleasant avenue running through a park, with overspreading cedars and white railings against the steep drop, and well-dressed strollers, all now holding aloft umbrellas that were shiny with rain.
We came to Cedar Lodge, prettily located in the park. It resembled the station master’s house at Grosmont in Yorkshire. I hurried along the drive, to be greeted by the middle-aged married couple who were caretakers of the house and servants to its occupants. They were not mountain people but from the plain, and their English was good. Their names were Ajit and Sahira.
They were the sole occupants of the house. Where were the memsahib, and the missy memsahib? I wanted to know. Ajit said they had gone out to some sort of tea. So they had not been killed by a snake on the ‘down’ train from Sealdah. Ajit asked whether I myself wanted tea. The cup was delivered to me by Ajit in the living room. His wife was looking on anxiously from the doorway, and I believed that Ajit spoke for both of them when he said, ‘The house is kept just as the memsahib likes it.’
‘You mean it is a mess?’
‘No, sahib,’ he said simply, but he did mean that, and I was sure his wife had asked him to point out that the mess wasn’t their fault.
I walked around the house, cup in hand. The rooms were small and solid, with wooden floors, red turkey rugs and tartan blankets. The place put me in mind of Christmas. A log fire was laid in every room, and a coal fire was lit in the main room. All the coal scuttles except the one in the main room were empty, and I concluded there was a shortage of coal in town, about which I would be proved right.
Where Cedar Lodge differed from the station master’s house in Grosmont was that it was clean. But it was littered with the betokening signs of female social ambition: three dresses thrown across the bed of the master bedroom, and there was a copy of a book by Annie Besant, who had had helped found the Congress party of India. This was the reason the wife admired Annie Besant, and also the reason she resented her: Lydia would have liked to have founded the Congress party herself. A pile of calling cards lay over-toppled on the bedside table. ‘Captain and Mrs Stringer . . .’ I couldn’t bear to read the continuation of it. That ‘Captain’ was such a slim branch for Lydia to hang it all on, whereas her daughter might have the chance of an Indian prince. Half a dozen shimmery evening dresses hung in the wardrobe, which was more than I recalled Lydia having, but perhaps a few were Bernadette’s: the two had begun to merge in that way.
I saw that, once again, a communicating door would connect the master bedroom with Bernadette’s bedroom. There would be no marital relations here either, and my mind swung back to Miss Hatsuyo of Old Court House Corner, and her Japanese speciality.
There were two portable gramophones in Bernadette’s bedroom, and disks scattered around them. Her brand-new travel case was on the bed with its contents spilled over the thick counterpane, including more rouges, hand mirrors and bottles with bulb sprays than I liked to see. A torn envelope disclosed a note of some kind. It surely could not be from the R.K. He had only just arrived, and this note had been opened and read some time ago. Yet the paper was of good quality and ‘For the attention of Miss Bernadette Stringer’ was written in a very fancy hand. I moved towards it, but stayed my hand. I ought not to look.
I moved towards the window. I was thinking how quiet this place was compared to Calcutta, when I heard the rattle of an approaching vehicle. A single horse was pulling a carriage of the kind called a dandy through the trees and the rain.
I switched on the electric light in Bernadette’s room. On the dresser lay a catalogue of some kind: it was called Beauty Shop. There was also a slumped pile of silk hats on the dresser. Bernadette called ordinary (but expensive) silk hats ‘useful hats’; then there were ‘charming’ hats, and the newly fashionable material for these was lizard. But here was something else again: a leather hat. It looked like a racing driver’s hat, only there was a band of lace across the front, so it was really for the female accomplice of the motor-car driver. It had not been worn, and the price tag was still inside. Thirty rupees. The cost of a decent cotton twill suit; or two months’ wages for an Indian labourer, depending on which way you looked at it.
On the pillow a magazine lay open and I saw the heading, ‘Powder Puffs in the Balance’. Being unable to credit that such a headline could generate what appeared to be several pages of small print, I picked it up. I put on my reading glasses: ‘One must admit that the heat of ballrooms and the ardour of dancing are foes to the complexion . . .’
I returned to the living room. A large brass clock ticked; the coal fire made a similar sound. It was now almost eight o’clock. What type of tea continued until eight? Of course, they might have ‘gone on’. In India, a tea party often followed a tea party. Yes, the two of them had been expecting my arrival, but the social round was more important.
At eight thirty, I asked Ajit and Sahira whether they could expand upon the memsahib and the missy memsahib having gone to ‘tea’, and they disclosed that the tea had been ‘on the Mall’. Well, everything was ‘on the Mall’.
At eight forty-five, I stepped out of the house, and lit a Gold Flake under the blaze in a lamp that was in turn under the branches of a cedar tree. The great valley lay beyond the trees. I wondered whether, come morning, there would be a view of ‘the snows’ through the trees and across that valley, and at that moment I heard the sound of a motor. This could be them, I thought. They had gone for a spin in someone’s car, and were now being returned; but it was a motorcycle that came through the trees, a native constable riding upon it. I dropped my cigarette and stood upon it. Was he the sort of constable who brought bad news? I put my hand out to stop him.
‘Sahib?’ he said, and that was hopeful. His tone suggested he couldn’t have been looking for me.
‘Were you looking for Cedar Lodge?’ I said, indicating the house.
He shook his head. He wore a white turban and a long white cape against the drizzling rain. He was a handsome chap; he looked like a sort of motorised angel, and on the petrol tank of his bike was written the word ‘Zenith’.
‘I am worried about my wife and daughter.’
He cut off his engine, and I felt strangely light-headed in the sudden silence, there in that illuminated woodland high in the sky. Nobody could climb Everest, the highest of ‘the snows’, on account of the lack of oxygen. Maybe it was in short supply at this lower level too. The constable was taking out his notebook . . . but I could now hear the rattling of a tonga, coming from the direction of town. ‘Hold on,’ I said to the constable. The tonga was coming on fast. I was practically praying for it to stop outside the little wicket gate of Cedar Lodge, and when it did so, and Bernadette jumped down, followed by the wife, who stepped more carefully on to the muddy ground, I heard myself saying to the constable, ‘I need not trouble you any further, thank you.’
V
‘A lot flat tyres,’ said Bernadette, who was ‘curled up’ on the sofa, in the manner approved by the young ladies’ magazines. She meant that the guests at the tea had been a lot of bores. The last of the coal burned in the grate.
I was drinking a peg; the wife held a glass with a green cordial of some kind in it.
She said, ‘You’d think that if someone had just been attacked by one of the most dangerous snakes in the world, and then they gave a tea party, that you would go to it.’
‘Well, you did go to it,’ I said.
Bernadette said, ‘The Askwiths didn’t.’
The tea had in fact not been on the Mall, but at the small hotel on Victoria Road where the Pooles were putting up. They had given the tea, in their modest way, in a private room of the hotel. It was by way of celebration of Dougie’s escape from sudden death, but
it had unfortunately coincided with another tea, given by His Excellency, the Governor at his summer residence. The Askwiths had been at this grander event, and Lydia was affecting to be put out on the Pooles’ behalf when in fact she was put out at not being on the Governor’s guest list herself.
‘He hasn’t suffered any ill effects then? Dougie, I mean.’
‘Nor any good ones,’ said Lydia.
‘He’s still a rummy,’ said Bernadette.
‘At tea you are supposed to drink tea,’ said Lydia.
‘Did he talk about it? The snake attack, I mean.’
‘I thought you’d read the statement he gave,’ Lydia said, crossly.
But I wanted to know if there was any discrepancy between the statement he gave and what he was saying now.
‘He said he knew very little about it,’ Lydia continued. ‘He told us that if he’d been wearing his elasticated boots he’d be dead – if the teeth had gone through the elastic.’
‘The fangs,’ said Bernadette, with great relish. She, in contrast to her mother, was in a good mood about something, and I thought I knew what. The arrival of the bloody R.K. She’d expected it, or got wind of it somehow.
After an interval of silence, I began to ask about their journey up. ‘Was the weather clear? Did you get any views?’
Lydia said, ‘It’s not “views”. Only in Yorkshire do people have “views”.’
‘It’s scenery,’ said Bernadette, looking up from her magazine.
The wife’s chain of thought was perfectly clear: she would never go to the best tea parties if she was married to a man who said ‘views’, and in this she was quite right.
Night Train to Jamalpur Page 17