by Paul Scott
‘Yes, of course–’
Merrick nodded. ‘Good. It’s time we got to know each other.’ He smiled, turned, then turned back again. ‘By the way. Congratulations.’
‘Congratulations?’
‘Hosain tells me you’re getting married soon.’
‘Oh. Did he? Well yes, I am. Thanks.’
He watched Merrick steering his guests to the dining-room, ushering them through the doorway with a guiding hand on each of their backs in turn. The bearer brought Teddie’s beer. The man standing next to him was the adjutant of the British battalion of the brigade up near Premanagar.
‘Interesting that, this morning,’ the adjutant said. ‘No idea anything like that going on but then I’ve only been in the country six months. What was he, do you know? I mean in the Indian government?’
The chap meant ‘in the Civil’. Amazingly ignorant. Teddie said he had no idea which should have been good enough but apparently wasn’t.
‘A sort of spy do you reckon?’ the adjutant asked. He had a plebeian voice and manner. He was the sort of chap one found in the bars of Tudor-style roadhouses back at home in the vicinity of Kingston-on-Thames. The fellow actually winked as such fellows did. The vulgarity of modern English life suddenly overwhelmed Teddie. It was flowing into India, blighting everything. He smiled distantly at the adjutant and murmured an apology for leaving him. He intended to swallow his beer and go into mess but, warned by a mild but sudden sensation of inner instability, put his glass down and made his way across the room to the door that led to the lavatories. Secluded there he discovered that his normally healthy and regular motions had become unpleasantly loose, untrustworthy. His forehead came out in a sweat. He felt rather unwell. The thought of food didn’t much appeal. He must have picked something up.
He left by a side entrance and entered the complex of covered ways that connected B mess building to the junior officers’ huts. The whole place had a temporary feeling about it. The last occupants of these particular lines had been members of the staff of a chemical and psychological warfare school. They had left a smell of gas capes and propaganda. Teddie had heard someone say that. It struck him as apt. Reaching his own room he found the door padlocked. Hosain was on mess duty. Teddie cursed his present domestic arrangements. He fumbled for his key and then paused, having noticed something extremely odd. Leant against the wall under the window there was a push-bike, or rather the remains of one. For an instant he thought someone had been in the room, taken either his own or Merrick’s bicycle, removed one wheel and buckled one of the mudguards for a joke. But that wouldn’t account for the rust. And then, the wreck under the window was without a cross-bar: a woman’s bicycle. Nevertheless he hastened to take the padlock off the door and open up.
Bicycles were kept inside rooms because of the danger of theft. Both bicycles were where they should be. He went out for another look at the useless and mysterious object and in doing so noticed something else: chalk marks on the floorboards of the verandah, decorating the threshold. Some sort of design. The effect was cabalistic.
He sniffed the air for the lingering scent of an ill-wisher, wondering whether he would be able to isolate such a smell from all the others to which he had become used. He could not. He stepped over the chalk marks and went to the verandah rail. There wasn’t a soul; just a perspective of doors like his own, each with its padlock, and beyond the hut a space and in continuing perspective another hut. Straight ahead across the bare earth compound the prison-camp style wire fence divided the lines from waste ground. Nobody could get over the wire but nobody needed to. The lines were always full of unexplained people. They came in at points where the PWD had either got fed up with erecting the fence or run out of material. It was not a security area. It might once have been someone’s intention to make it one.
He reconsidered the broken push-bike. Perhaps Hosain had found it dumped and placed it there to show that he was an honest boy. He could have got a few annas for it from the cycle-shop wallah in the cantonment bazaar. But there had to be a connexion between the bicycle and the chalk marks. The marks could have been made by Hosain. If the boy had been a Hindu Teddie would have more readily believed that this was the explanation; that the bike and the chalk marks were some odd form of puja or offering for the welfare of the rooms’ occupants to ensure them a safe journey, wherever they were going, through intercession with some modern addition to the Hindu pantheon: the god of mechanical transport.
But Hosain was a Muslim. It was unlikely that either the bhishti or the sweeper took sufficient interest in any of the officers they served to make such a well-meaning gesture to one or two of them. Besides which the marks had an inauspicious feeling to them. Teddie hesitated, controlling an urge to obliterate them. His bowels began to move again. There was a griping pain in them and the sweat broke out on his forehead. He stared down at the cabalistic signs which suddenly seemed to be responsible for the disorder in his guts, for the disruption of his life which he now felt the whole morning had somehow plotted to bring about. He scuffed his rubber-soled shoes across the marks, blurring the outlines. He continued scuffing and scraping until only an ashy smear was left. He felt better.
Back in his room he found a letter from Susan on his side of the desk. He ripped it open. It was dated five days ago. ‘Dear Teddie, Tomorrow we’re off to Kashmir. Aunt Fenny and Uncle Arthur will meet us in Delhi and then we’ll all travel together up to ‘Pindi.’ They would be in Srinagar by now. He stuffed the letter into his jacket pocket and went round the back to the privy. Things were no better but he had stopped sweating. He hoped he was not going to be really ill. He read Susan’s letter right through. When he returned to his room he lay down on the bed hoping to catch forty winks. After ten minutes, still wide awake, he sat up and lit a cigarette and read Susan’s letter again. Srinagar would be full of officers on leave. He saw the danger he was in of losing her to some fellow with more to offer, a fellow with talent and money, a fellow who had the measure of things as they were, the kind of fellow who would understand everything Merrick talked about this morning and be able to believe it without feeling that if it was true nothing was sacred any more and nobody could be relied on, that everyone was living in a bloody jungle.
Teddie got off the bed and stubbed his cigarette. He felt emotional but couldn’t work out what he felt emotional about except the prospect of being jilted or of hearing that the whole of the Malayan battalion of the Muzzys which had been captured near Kuala Lumpur had gone over to that Bose character. What he did work out was that everything that was wrong for him was really the fault of that bounder Hunter who had drunk away his mother’s money and then her vitality and when he was dead hounded her to her own grave. Except that there wasn’t a grave. He would have felt more settled knowing there was a grave.
It was raining again when he was ready to go back lunchless to the daftar. He couldn’t face putting on a sweaty cape and cycling. He stuck his cap on and padlocked the door behind him. The ruined bike struck him as ridiculous. He walked through the covered ways until he got to the front of the mess where he was able to whistle up one of the cycle tongas whose drivers congregated outside the main gate.
IV
During the afternoon Teddie forgot about the bicycle and the chalk marks but remembered them at six o’clock on his way back to the hut. Hosain was squatting on his hunkers outside the room, whose door was open, latched back against the outer wall leaving the mesh screen exposed. The orderly got to his feet when he saw Teddie coming up the steps. He had been sitting on the spot where the chalk mark smear was. There was no sign of the bicycle.
Teddie asked where it was. Hosain indicated the room, entered ahead and pointed at the two serviceable machines. Teddie explained about the broken bicycle. Hosain went outside, looked and came in saying there wasn’t a bicycle.
‘I know,’ Teddie said. ‘But there was. What time did you get back from mess duty?’
Hosain said he was back at 1430 but had gone strai
ght to his own quarters, changed and gone to the bazaar for Merrick Sahib. He came back from the bazaar at 1630 and opened the room. There hadn’t been a bicycle then. If there had been a bicycle earlier someone must have taken it, probably the person who left it there in the first place. He would ask some of the other orderlies and the bhishti. But what was the good of a bicycle with only one wheel?
‘Quite. That’s the whole point.’
Teddie felt cross because Hosain was looking at him as if he thought Teddie was trying to cause trouble for the servants over something he had only imagined seeing. Suddenly Merrick called from the bath-house. Hosain shouted, ‘Sahib!’ and went with alacrity. It wasn’t Merrick’s fault but, no doubt about it, since his arrival Hosain had given Merrick preferential treatment. It was ridiculous having to share an orderly. Come to that it was bloody stupid having to share a room.
Teddie sat in his armchair with his legs stuck out in the shoe-removing position. Presently he heard Hosain laugh and a warm friendly sort of noise from Merrick. Less than a minute later he heard the back door being unbolted and Hosain shouting for the bhishti and then Merrick clomped in wearing unbuckled chappals and nothing else but a towel tied round his middle. He was rubbing his head with another towel.
Teddie’s immediate reaction to the sight of Merrick was admiration shot darkly through with envy because Merrick had one of those bodies in which every sinew was clearly and separately defined, properly proportioned and interlocked. The fellow didn’t seem to have an ounce of fat on him. You could count the pads of muscle that made up his abdominal wall.
‘Ah, there you are,’ Merrick said. ‘I’m sorry about lunch-time.’ He stopped rubbing his head and stuck the towel round his neck. ‘We seem to have been Coxing and Boxing for days one way or another. I didn’t see you come into mess, by the way.’
‘As a matter of fact I got rather taken short.’
‘Oh. Mirat tummy?’
‘Sort of. But I think it’s gone off.’
‘I have some stuff that will settle it if it hasn’t. I expect you’ve been sitting under the fan or drinking too much iced beer. Take a dose anyway to be on the safe side. Hold on and I’ll get it.’
Teddie felt reluctant but grateful. It was like being jawed by an older boy about looking after your health; like being taken to the San because someone had noticed you were suffering in silence. Merrick came back with a small bottle and a spoon. Hosain followed him in. ‘I’ll pour,’ Merrick said, ‘because it tends to come out in a dribble and then in a rush.’ He poured a couple of drops. The drops were followed by a dollop. It was brown and looked nasty. Merrick leant forward and obediently Teddie opened his mouth. The stuff tasted like very strong cough mixture. It seemed to grip his throat all the way down.
‘It cements you up,’ Merrick explained. ‘If you have another dose in the morning you’ll be right as rain.’
‘Thanks.’
Merrick made a gesture at Hosain who knelt and untied Teddie’s shoes. He took the medicine bottle and spoon back to the bathroom and returned rubbing his head with the towel again.
‘It must be the humidity,’ Teddie said. ‘Not used to it recently. I’ve been stationed up in the hills the past few months.’
‘Well you’d notice it then. Actually the humidity’s fairly low here. Ever been in Sundernagar?’
‘I’ve never even heard of Sundernagar.’
‘It’s where I was before they let me into the army. Your shoes go green overnight. I had an inspector who swore he was getting webbed feet, and he was an Indian.’
‘An inspector? Were you in the Indian Police then?’
‘Yes. I was DSP Sundernagar. Most of it’s tribal area. Pretty boring for anyone who isn’t an amateur anthropologist. My predecessor was. He was desperate to get back. I was just as keen to get out.’
‘Were you there long?’
‘Too long.’
Teddie nodded. DSP meant superintendent, the top man in a district after the collector and the judge. He was glad Merrick wasn’t ICS. The few ICS men he’d known had been remote clever fellows, too intellectual for his tastes. The police were different, easier to get on with. Some of them envied you if you were Army. Merrick was now satisfactorily placed and explained and in spite of his high police rank Teddie felt pleasantly superior to him in occupation as well as in type, background and – as was clearer the longer he listened – in class. The police weren’t always quite as particular as the other services.
He forgot about the bicycle and chalk marks until he was in his bath and then he had a flash of inspiration about them. Having arrived at an explanation that connected the whole incident to Merrick rather than to himself he was reluctant to mention it but decided he ought to, for security reasons.
Returning to the room, already dried and wearing clean underclothes under his robe, he said, ‘I say, Merrick–’ and then stopped, struck by a sense of having intruded upon a situation between Merrick and Hosain which he could not describe but which seemed full of potential for an intimate kind of anger or violence. Hosain was looking sullen but also tearful. He went out. Merrick now fully dressed, appeared momentarily distracted, deprived by Teddie’s entrance of the opportunity to press home some kind of point that a moment ago had been important to him to make.
Merrick said, ‘I’ll see you in B mess in a few minutes then. What will you drink?’
Surprised, Teddie said, ‘No, it’s on me–’
‘Well, we’ll see.’
Merrick went. Teddie looked round the room expecting to see something that explained what he found inexplicable. He shrugged, called Hosain and began to dress. When he got to the shoe putting-on stage he called Hosain again. Putting on and taking off his own shoes and boots were activities at which he drew the line if there was a man available to perform these services. He had learned to draw the line in Muzzafirabad where his first co, Colonel Gawstone, advised him never to stoop if he could help it. The climate wasn’t right for it. Mrs Gawstone had stooped to pick up a glove and keeled right over and never got up. They had buried her the next day.
‘Everything comes suddenly in India, Bingham,’ Teddie remembered old Hooghly Gawstone saying. ‘Sunrise, night, death, burial. Nothing keeps in the heat.’ And in Shropshire in sultry weather the milk went off. Extraordinary chain of thought. He had forgotten why Gawstone was called Hooghly but vaguely remembered a story involving an elephant and the floating body of a dead sadhu. Or was that another story? Even two stories?
He went to the door and looked out. Not a soul in sight. The chalky smear was indiscernible because the light was going and the glow of the lamps in the room pushed his shadow across the place where the smear was. A man appeared suddenly round the corner of the hut. It was Merrick. He came up the steps saying, ‘I left something behind.’
It sounded rather feeble. Something. What? Key? Wallet? Why not say? Had he come back to find out whether Hosain was telling Teddie what the row had been about? If it had been a row. There’d been no sound of a row.
‘Did you send Hosain on another errand?’ Teddie asked.
‘No. Isn’t he here?’
‘No, he bloody well isn’t. He’s just buggered off.’
‘Anything special you want?’
‘Only for the little blighter to put my shoes on for me.’
Teddie went back in, sat down, and began to slip his feet into the clean pair of shoes.
‘Here,’ Merrick said, and threw him a long tortoise-shell shoe-horn. It made the job easier but Teddie was too irritable to mutter more than an almost inaudible ‘Thanks.’ It irritated him to have to do the job himself and irritated him to have Merrick watching him. At one point in his exertions he could have sworn the man was about to come and help him. The idea made him nervous. He fumbled with the laces. He went into the bathroom to wash his hands. When he returned to the room Merrick was standing in the open doorway as if looking for someone but presumably just waiting patiently for Teddie to finish.
�
��I’m ready now. Did you get what you came back for?’
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘We’d better lock up at the back too, I suppose. The whole thing strikes me as a bit bloody much.’
‘What does?’ Merrick asked Teddie when Teddie had bolted the bath-house door from inside and the door connecting bath-house to living quarters and rejoined him at the doorway on to the front verandah.
‘What does what?’
‘Strikes you as a bit much.’
‘Having to put on your own shoes and lock up your own room. The little blighter has practically fuck-all to do. I’ve a good mind to boot him in the arse when I see him again, buggering off like that.’
Teddie wanted to get out of the room now into the open air and over to the mess to have a couple of burra pegs; but Merrick was standing in his way. There was an expression on his face which Teddie interpreted as disapproving. Perhaps Merrick was one of those chaps who had moral objections to strong language. Teddie wasn’t very happy about it himself but there were pressures building up inside him these days which he didn’t understand and using words like that helped to reduce them; or did if they weren’t silently rejected, crammed back down your throat by someone like Merrick. Perhaps the fellow was religious.
Merrick said, ‘I think I’m to blame for Hosain making himself scarce. I had to tick him off. It was the first time and he got quite a shock.’
‘And what was the ticking off about?’
‘A small enough thing.’
It may have been the way Merrick looked at him (in that manner Teddie would have called calculating had it not been for the tentative friendly smile) but now he felt exposed to the accusation he believed Merrick had intended to spare him. He said, ‘Was Hosain complaining about me?’
Merrick seemed in so little hurry to reply that the answer became unnecessary. Merrick dressed it up, though. He said, ‘I got the impression he found working for two officers – onerous. I wasn’t conscious of anything so strong as a complaint against one of us in particular.’