by Paul Scott
‘I’ll ask,’ the young officer said and began to go inside but remembered his manners in time and invited her to precede him into the building. Inside, his newness and uncertainty were even more apparent. There was no one about and he seemed unsure what to do next. Barbie said, ‘It’s my own fault. I ought to have rung. But I was coming this way and thought I’d kill two birds with one stone. The trouble is I’ve never visited him in his quarters and have no idea where he hides out. Have you?’
‘No, I’m afraid I haven’t.’
She got it then: the unmistakable London accent. It came out in the word afraid. It warmed her heart. So did the rather over-greased black hair, the stubby plebeian but not unhandsome features beneath it. As a soldier he must be confident and efficient otherwise the regiment would not have accepted him even at this stage of the war when regiments were taking the best they could get, which she had heard was very good, but having to close their eyes to social shortcomings. As a gentleman he obviously fell short of the Pankots’ traditional requirements, and knew it, was far from happy in this silent mausoleum.
‘The fact is we only got here from OTS last week,’ he said. A bearer crossed the hall, carrying a tray. The subaltern stopped him and asked in inaccurate Urdu whether Captain Coley was in the mess. He didn’t understand the bearer’s reply but Barbie did. Captain Coley would not be in mess until after the week-end. She asked the servant if he knew where Captain Coley lived because she wished to see him quite urgently. He gave her directions but they were very muddled and she did not understand the references. She said, ‘Is Ghulam Mohammed here?’
The bearer said he did not know Ghulam Mohammed. There was no Ghulam Mohammed in the mess.
She asked him how long he had worked in the mess, and the answer was disturbing. Since last November.
‘Ghulam Mohammed was here then,’ she insisted.
No, he had never worked with a Ghulam Mohammed. If Memsahib wished he would ask the head steward.
‘It doesn’t matter.’ She turned to go. The officer followed her. He probably hadn’t understood a word. She was glad. Her hold on things had begun to be undermined.
All the same he grasped the situation. ‘No luck?’
‘No, none. But I think I’ll be able to find it.’
‘The driver will know, won’t he?’
‘Oh, I’d forgotten the driver. How clever of you. The driver’s bound to know.’
When they got outside, the driver had turned up and was waiting by the cab door. Asked if he knew where the adjutant sahib lived he said nothing but inclined his head to one side and kept on doing so in answer to every one of her questions.
‘He knows?’
‘He knows.’
‘Can we take you?’
‘How kind. But shan’t I be making you late for a parade?’
‘It’s only the munshi.’ He led the way round to the passenger seat, warned her about the height of the step.
‘Adjutant Sahib bungalow,’ he told the driver after he had slammed the door shut for her. A few seconds later he knocked on the back of the cabin and shouted, ‘OK.’ As the truck engine started she thought she heard men’s laughter. She smiled. The cabin smelt of petrol and other peculiar metallic odours. The truck, one of the snub-nosed variety, gave her the feeling of riding in a tank. It bucked and growled. The windscreen wipers swung like metronomes but squeaked on the glass. She expected it was against the rules for a civilian to ride in it. She wished she had insisted on getting into the back. She would have liked to gossip to the young officers and to have found out where they all came from and what they thought of India. Were they the kind of young men Sarah had met at her aunt’s and uncle’s in Calcutta? If you’re ever stationed in Cal, she might say, watch out for a man called Colonel Grace, he’ll be after you to sign on for ever.
She glanced at the driver. Thin cheeks. Hawk’s nose. And a skin so sunburnt that the usual Pankot copper-colour was, in this light, blue-sheened. There were minute red veins in the whites of his eyes. She was startled by the clarity of her vision. He smelt powerfully of garlic. His khaki was immaculately starched and pressed. His marbled brown legs were covered by fine dark hairs above and below the knee, between the tops of the socks and the hem of the knife-edged shorts. Tucked above the windscreen was a faded postcard, a photograph of a chubby wide-eyed smiling beauty with a caste-mark between her thick eyebrows; an Indian film star, she supposed. She imagined a smell of jasmine, a thin nasal voice. How remote his life from her own. But he could have come from the same village as Aziz, or Ghulam Mohammed.
She had never asked Mabel who Ghulam Mohammed was. Now he had gone, like Poppy Browning’s daughter, like Gillian Waller, with Mabel to the grave, the one that should not have been dug: crying out soundlessly like the unknown Indian on the road from Dibrapur and the girl in white whom she imagined running in the dark from a martyrdom, or from something unimaginable, which might even have been love. She thought: Perhaps I should have given the spoons to the old woman in the veiled topee, have waited in St John’s for her to arrive, and kneel or sit staring at the altar unconsciously sharing my vigil, and called to her softly: These are for the child. And given her the twelve little apostles. But perhaps she isn’t in Pankot any longer. Perhaps she was never here. In any case it’s too late. I’m presenting the spoons to the mess.
She clapped her hand against her pocket. Yes, the box was still there. She gazed out of the streaming windows. The speed of the truck made the rain seem heavier. All this area of Pankot was new and strange to her. It looked unwelcoming. Rows of huts, squat and dark, parade grounds, basket-ball pitches. Distantly, clutches of figures silhouetted against the white light running for cover. It was very hot in the cabin. The window in the door on her side was misting up.
At a cross-roads marked by military signposts the driver turned left. This road after a while became tree-lined. They were going past bungalows up a slight incline and then down into a dip at the bottom of which the driver stopped. There was no bungalow visible, only a dirt track leading off to the left through a kind of copse.
‘Adjutant Sahib,’ the driver said and pointed at the track. She noticed a square white board on a short post aslant in the hedge, but could not read it. The young officer appeared and opened the door. ‘Is it far up the track, do you think?’ he asked. ‘The truck could get up there. It’s muddy to walk.’
‘Oh I don’t mind. Not in the least. I’m dressed for it.’
‘What about when you leave? I’ve not been this end before. Do you know where you are?’
She asked the driver how far she would have to walk to get a tonga. He indicated ahead and said half-a-mile. She thanked him and got out. She put her sou’wester back on but did not bother to tie the strings under her chin.
‘It’s been very good of you. I hope I haven’t made you late for the munshi.’ She offered her hand. Before shaking it he took off his cap. She could hear the others talking. ‘My name’s Barbara Batchelor, incidentally. At present I’m staying with the Peplows, that’s at the rectory bungalow next to St John’s church. Arthur Peplow’s always glad to see new faces. People sometimes look in for a beer after Sunday morning service, before going up to the club. So don’t forget. And good luck to you all, if I don’t see you again. Don’t get wet. I’m all right. Well protected.’
She went and stood at the end of the dirt track. The door slammed. She waved, watched the truck turn in the road and waved to the men in the back when a full view of them was presented by the truck’s manoeuvres. When it had gone out of sight she turned and studied the board.
A foot square, two feet off the ground, it had been painted white some time ago. The paint was peeled, the black letters had faded and the first letter had come off with its background. The notice read: apt. K. Coley. Under the name an arrow pointed up the track or would have done so had the board been straight. Its tilt directed the arrow downward into the mixture of gravel, pebbles, earth and mud and tyre-marks which made up the track
’s surface.
From the path there was nothing to be seen of the bungalow where Coley lived. It was an appropriate setting for a man whose military ambitions were said to have been smothered ten years before in the tumbled bricks and masonry of Quetta. One could imagine him choosing it for its isolation, its proximity to the lines and to the office he was content to occupy for the rest of his working life. He stirred himself, Barbie had heard, only when threatened by promotion and posting to another station. There was nothing he did not know about the running of the regimental depot. Successive commandants had connived at his schemes to stay put.
At the entrance to his hidden retreat Barbie felt a pang of remorse. She could never like Coley but the air of melancholy emanating from the faded tilted board and from the whole area persuaded her to make allowances, to forgive him for behaviour that perhaps had not been natural but forced on him by Mildred. Perhaps he had been afraid to resist her, fearing the power she potentially wielded. Mildred’s husband – if he survived prison-camp – was Trehearne’s likely successor as depot commandant. Or so Coley might anticipate. And presumably he had only a slender stock of pride. Most of it would have gone with his ambition. If acting the part of the dog at Mildred’s heels secured his future, he would play it.
The track curved and came to an abrupt end: a corrugated iron shed, a garage. To the right a gateway without a gate opened on to steps of rough-hewn stone that led up into the copse.
She climbed the stone steps. What she entered was a compound planted with hedges, shrubs and bushes that had grown wild among trees. She identified rhododendron among other more exotic leaves and could see that the path had originally been laid out with an eye to withholding for as long as possible a view of the bungalow that lay at its end; so that the revelation of what was ordinary and ugly stunned her for an instant into acceptance of it as rare and beautiful. Walls, windows, roof, verandah – entirely commonplace, mean even – moved her with the austere poetry of their function. Here a man sheltered from and diminished the horror and vulgarity of the world by the simplicity of his arrangements for living in it.
The path had brought her within a few feet of the front verandah steps. The verandah was narrow. From where she stood she could see the padlock on the hasp of the closed doors. Eden was unoccupied. But perhaps round the back she would find a servant capable of being roused from mid-afternoon torpor. As she moved a gust of wind blew leaves upward. At the back of the bungalow she found a small grassed compound, a servant’s hut, also closed and padlocked, and an open-sided byre in which a tethered goat was munching vegetable stalks.
The rain was still not heavy. She hesitated before climbing the steps to gain the temporary shelter of the back verandah, then went up stealthily, conscious of trespass during the occupier’s and the servant’s absence. This verandah was deeper than the one at the front and was furnished in the familiar way with wicker chairs and table. The windows were shuttered. There were no french windows; only plain narrow doors, also closed.
She prepared to wait for the rain to reach its peak and die out or settle into a persistent Pankot drizzle through which she could walk in search of a tonga without getting too wet. The darkness of the sky suggested a heavy fall. Already the air seemed thick with mutterings of storm and the distant warning murmur of tempestuous forces gathering in the hills to strike through the valley.
But after that single gust of wind no other came and the rain continued to fall modestly. Nothing in nature confirmed as real the restlessness in the surrounding air. She clenched her fist and put it against her chest; her heart was not pounding, but there was a pressure round about her, a pulsing. She turned and stared at the shuttered windows and then at the narrow doors which when not closed would be hooked back to the outside walls. The hooks hung loose. But the hasps were not in position. The doors were not locked. Cautiously she tried the handle on one of them. It opened without a sound and the screen of wire mesh yielded to a touch.
‘Captain Coley?’ she said, and cleared her throat, meaning to call again, more loudly, but the interior was dark and so hot it seemed to suck the breath out of her lungs and at the same time to whimper with relief like a creature deprived of liberty who sensed release. ‘Captain Coley?’ she repeated. The words came out unsteadily and made no impression on the creature’s distant incoherent supplications, its scarcely audible gasps and cries. The mesh screen swung back; she was not aware of pushing it. ‘Captain Coley?’ she said again and something folded her in its sticky arms and drew her into the interior; not the creature but its keeper. It held her for a moment and then was not there and the illusion of hot darkness was splintered. Her flesh tightened, attacked by frosty particles of fear, the shuttered bungalow was filled with subterranean light and at its centre the creature was imprisoned in a room divided from the one she stood in by swing ornamental shutters that filled no more than the central space of the open doorway. It was like being back again in that chill corridor approaching other doors that gave a view through oval windows. She was drawn to them by the creature’s moans and cries until she stood in a place where over the top of the shutters she saw in the gloom the creature herself, naked, contorted, entwined with another, gaunt and male and silently active in a human parody of divine creation.
It was not the stark revelation of the flesh that caused Barbie to gasp and cover her mouth for in her own body she guessed the casual ugliness that might attach to a surrender to sensuality. What filled her with horror was the instantaneous impression of the absence of love and tenderness: the emotional inertia and mechanical pumping of the man, the cries coming from the woman who seemed driven by despair rather than by longing, or even lust. It was as though the world outside the subterranean room was dying or extinct and the joyless coupling was a bitter hopeless expression of the will of the woman for the species to survive.
Turning, groping, Barbie regained the verandah, closed the door and leaned on it, head back, mouth open like a swimmer breaking surface; and then fearing she must have been heard made for the steps, stumbled in going down them and blundered round the side of the bungalow, terrified of discovery, of turning and seeing Mildred and Kevin Coley bearing down on her, naked, raw-eyed, determined on her destruction as the sole witness of their act of adultery.
She ran down the path and – misjudging the twists – was whipped by twigs and obstructed by branches. Going down the rough-hewn steps she misjudged again and wrenched her ankle, falling. Scrambling up she ran down the track. It seemed endless. When eventually she came out on to the lane she turned left into the unknown.
The ankle did not begin to hurt until, after walking for fifteen minutes without coming upon a landmark or a wider road that might lead her back to familiar surroundings, she stopped, knowing that something was wrong. She felt in her pocket – but the spoons and the letter were still there. The wrongness was in the other pocket. There was no sou’wester but it wasn’t on her head either. Her hair was sopping wet. She turned, intending to go back to look for it but at that moment became aware both of the pain in her ankle and of the futility of such a search. The sou’wester must have been torn off her head by the overhanging branches in the garden. She could not remember that happening. But then she could not remember either whether she had taken the hat off on the verandah and left it on the table. Her name was written in indelible pencil on the white lining of the headband.
Limping, punishing the stick, she struck out again through what had become a downpour, not daring to stop and shelter in case her ankle seized up and she found herself unable to move, marooned in this inhospitable region.
Part Five
THE TENNIS COURT
I
Miss Batchelor was taken to the civil wing of the general hospital on the day Nicky Paynton heard that her husband had been killed in the Arakan.
For three days Clarissa had sent meals into Barbie’s room, spoken to her from the doorway but otherwise kept clear in order not to be infected by the awful cold the old mission
ary had caught as a result of walking about in the rain, without a hat, getting lost, returning home like a drowned rat and then refusing all advice and offers of hot balsam.
But on the fourth morning, alarmed first by the sight of Barbie’s flushed face and the fact that she opened her eyes but seemed unable to speak or rouse herself, and then by the feeling of hot dry skin under her own cool hand, Clarissa rang Doctor Travers who, after a brief examination, sent for an ambulance.
‘How long has she been like this?’ he asked while they waited. Clarissa confessed that she hadn’t actually seen her since before lunch on the previous day when she thought she looked better but not as well as she insisted. ‘I made her promise not to get up and she said she wouldn’t. After that I was busy all day but the boy said she ate all her meals, except her supper. She was asleep when he took it in. She hasn’t touched her night drink either.’
Travers said, ‘I wish I’d known sooner. Actually it’s risky moving her but I don’t think we could save her here. I ought to warn you it’s ten to one against her making it. She’s got broncho-pneumonia and the heart’s pretty weak. What on earth’s the poor old thing been doing?’
Clarissa said she didn’t know but described the state Barbie was in when she came back into the house on the afternoon of the day of the christening. They went back to the room and for a moment Clarissa thought Barbie had gone in the few minutes she and Doctor Travers had been talking in the hall.
He sat on the bed holding Barbie’s wrist and then listening to her chest again through his stethoscope. ‘I suppose she’s quite alone in the world?’ he asked presently.
‘Until she came to Pankot she lived only for the Mission,’ Clarissa said. ‘She talks about getting back into harness but of course she’s past it. I think it was the letter she had from them saying they wouldn’t have her back that did it.’