The Mulberry Empire

by Philip Hensher

  He clapped his hands and the toothless dirty old woman who was always in the boutique, fingering the goods – perhaps Das’s wife, there was no means of knowing – mumbled off into the recesses of the shop.

  ‘I really want nothing of you, Mr Das,’ Masson said. ‘Chai would be splendid.’

  ‘Perhaps a perusal of your treasures, Mr Masson?’ Das said as the chai arrived. Masson took the stinking sweet orange confection, tea and milk and sugar and water boiled together for half an hour. As always at Das’s shop, the water it had been made from was so filthy, the chai could have been strong or weak, and Masson had to rid himself of the irrational idea that Das made his tea out of the water his crone familiar washed her grubby old body in. The crone smiled and shook her head from side to side, letting go of the cup, leaving a dirty thumbprint over the clay rim. ‘Always welcome, always welcome. Or perhaps he would like to see a few minor curiosities I acquired in the course of several perambulations about this great metropolis, hmm? No obligation, my dear sir, merely an oddity or two I feel you would be interested by, and – I confess – one or two more I should be grateful to have the benefit of your undoubted and excellent wisdom regarding their history, provenance and significance. Queen Anne penny, indeed.’

  The exchange of business was a necessary preliminary to their conversation, Masson had found. Das preserved some necessary dignity by reminding himself that they had begun in a business relationship, and would not, entirely, get beyond that. It might have been designed, too, to remind Masson that he would not come to know everything about Das, that whatever expertise he acquired about Das’s stock, he was always there on sufferance. Das reached across the table, stained with rings, and gestured at a small knife, curved and graceful like a miniature scimitar. Masson picked it up carefully and turned it over. A cockroach ran across the table, making Masson jump; it had been sheltering under the blade, and Masson now discreetly flicked it onto the floor with the tip of the knife. Das hated to see an insect killed, and tutted mildly, either at Masson’s squeamishness or to suggest that the thing was of no significance.

  The blade was curved, whether for grace or use. Though the handle was encrusted and filthy, the quarter-inch at the blade’s edge shone. This knife had been used regularly, and recently. Masson had heard of oriental knives that cut flesh as easily as butter, and placed the tip of his forefinger on the edge of the blade. It rested there, the blade trembling slightly in Masson’s hand.

  ‘You are left-handed, I perceive,’ Das said.

  ‘I use both equally well,’ Masson said, fixed on the thin contact between finger and blade, insubstantial as a point in geometry.

  ‘That is bad luck, very bad luck,’ Das said, drawing back from Masson with his shock of red hair and his divided soul. He made a warding-off hiss, like the noise of hot metal in water.

  Masson smiled his wide open devouring smile. ‘On the contrary,’ he said. ‘It’s a piece of very good luck.’ And he moved the knife, a small movement, half an inch, putting no pressure on the handle. There was a sudden heat in the finger, and underneath the blade, the colour had fled the dirty finger, a little field of tripe-white as the blood drew back under the blade. Masson made his pain-noise, the same hissing Das had made, the same sound of hot metal in water. The blood returned and welled up, wine-dark, in the little flap of severed flesh the knife had made. White, translucent, an onion’s slice. Masson put down the magnificent knife, and sucked his salty finger for a minute. When he took it out, the finger was clean, and white in his dirty hand.

  ‘A good knife,’ he said, picking it up again.

  ‘Whence does it originate, in your opinion?’ Das asked.

  Masson turned the knife over again. The handle was so encrusted with rust and dirt that it was hard to see if it were decorated. He ran the nail of his forefinger over the surface, and there was some raised pattern – he followed the line – some arabesque – some writing, surely. By the whiplash feel of it, he supposed it to be Arabic, some belligerent verse of the Koran. Not Indian; he somehow knew this, without knowing how he knew. He guessed at Persian. It felt like damascene work, anyway.

  He said this to Das as he was feeling the knife. Das clapped his hands with pleasure. ‘Indeed, indeed, excellent, quite on the nail, as you would say,’ he said. ‘I had an interesting visitor this week, a traveller, who had acquired some curiosities. I cannot account for it, but he was eager to disembarrass himself of some old Persian treasures. That, I think, is the finest of his hoard, alas, and sadly in want of care, but the other objects I acquired from him have their own interest and even, I dare say, some measure of value. Would you, by any chance, care to …’

  ‘In a furious hurry, was he, your friend?’ Masson said. ‘And I have no doubt that you found yourself in possession of a large quantity of Persian antiquities without requiring too much of the gentleman?’ Das looked outraged at the suggestion that he might be in the habit of consorting with thieves. It took a moment to make him realize that Masson was only casting the first shot in the exchanges over the final price, and for a while he seemed unwilling to show his newly acquired objects at all.

  But in the end, he yielded to the undeniable argument of lucre, and Masson was soon looking, with hungry eyes, at an array of metalwork spread out on Das’s table. For a moment he was incongruously reminded of this morning’s exercise with the dismantled musket, as he pored over the miscellaneous array of mostly Persian, mostly indifferent antique objects. In the end – it took an hour – he settled, besides the knife, for a little silver dish and three unfamiliar coins, interesting in appearance, unaccountably so. As was customary these days, he paid Mr Das with a combination of his army pay and the restitution of one of Masson’s own early purchases, before he had developed a proper eye. This process of secondary haggling occupied another half an hour, as Masson attempted to return to Das some of the worthless trash he had originally passed off on Masson at any price. Das, indignant at being insulted in such a manner that it should be suggested that his shop should ever be soiled with such bazaar trinkets, and denying furiously that he was the first source of the trash, attempted to inveigle out of Masson the beautiful little silver medal he had sold him no more than three weeks before, presumably having realized its worth in the interim. At length an agreement was reached, leaving both Masson and Das sore and suspicious, and they settled down to talk, undisturbed by customers, the army, Suggs or Sale.

  ‘Mr Das,’ Masson began. ‘Speaking of your visitor last week, if you were to travel and were obliged to live on the proceeds of what you could sell on your travels, what goods would you take?’

  ‘I do not understand your question, Mr Masson,’ Das said. He picked his nose meditatively and examined the contents before flicking it at the floor. ‘I have no need or desire to travel, as you well know, I am sure.’

  ‘Indeed, indeed,’ Masson said. He persevered. ‘In a hypothetical situation, however, if you were obliged to travel, and the only means of support you had was the sale of what goods you could carry, what would you take with you to sell?’

  ‘Ah,’ Das said, now having got the point. ‘Like my friend, earlier this week, in flight from his own shadow and selling his worldly goods at a highly disadvantageous rate, I can assure you.’

  ‘Disadvantageous to him, Mr Das.’

  ‘Indeed, indeed,’ Das said. He had a disconcerting habit of taking up Masson’s expressions and repeating them, a minute or two later. You could see the quick boy he must have been. ‘Well, I am sure you are aware that this is a simple matter of working out the relationship between value and bulk.’

  The conversation ran its course; they agreed on silver, as being most easily disguised and most universally valued. ‘But why,’ said Das, ‘why, my friend, this sudden interest?’

  It was time for Masson to go. He consigned the Persian dish to the cupboard where he stored his things, saying a silent goodbye to it, and thanked Das for the chai. He left the knife with Das. The heat and damp were insuffe
rable, and, returning to the barracks, Masson lengthened his journey by remaining in the shade. Anyone watching him might have thought there was some superstition which directed his route, like a child leaping the cracks in the pavement. Certainly he drew the attention of the Calcutta streets; the red-toothed men squatting on their haunches chewing paan and spitting consumptively followed him with their incurious eyes. They wondered at this peeled-raw man, ugly and gawky, shrinking into the darker side of the street, hugging the wall like a conspirator, looking down, hiding something.

  4.

  Masson was hiding something, as it happened. It was his plan for escape. It had seemed audacious, impossible, but now Das, with his idle conversation, had found something for him. Until now, Masson had seen no way to be in the East, where he wanted to be, other than by the way he had chosen. The surety that he could only find the East he had dreamt of by remaining where he was, serving the Company at the Company’s request, all at once left him.

  Masson was entering the camp lost in thought, and hardly saw the Colonel’s wife rapidly approaching; he was halfway through the little door let into the gate when he became aware of her, and had to withdraw his step to stand, respectfully, outside while she bustled up. No weather seemed to slow or trouble the grim, sweat-less figure of Florentia Sale, and she came from the knife-edged sunlight of the yard into the dark of the lodge, and, bending through the keyhole door, out again into the street where Masson stood waiting respectfully. She moved jointily, at quite a lick, like an aged racehorse. She normally passed without acknowledgement, but as he stood there, her bonily unwielded figure seemed to unfold telescopically, and she became aware of him.

  ‘Soldier,’ she said, her eyes fixed on a point firmly beyond Masson’s shoulder. ‘Find my husband, if you please, and give this to him.’ She produced a sealed letter from her swinging reticule, and tapped Masson on the chest with it. He took it from her, nervously. ‘Most important. Don’t lose it. Don’t forget it. I know how you chaps can be with anything remotely important.’

  And then she was off like a horse from the slips. She set off not as if she were going to the bazaar in an idle moment, or to bully some collector’s little wife over tea, but as if she were carrying a small bomb with a short fuse. Masson looked after her in her steaming wake with something approaching admiration. She had not looked once at him in the course of their encounter. Masson looked around him at the street, the lodge. Empty, apart from natives. He looked at the letter. He felt just like dropping it in the gutter, into the Calcutta detritus. It was a pact with himself, and with Calcutta; with India; with the Asia he had dreamt of, which, if he stretched out his hand and closed his eyes, thrummed under his fingers as securely as it had when he was lonely, and alone, and fourteen, in Devon. He not only knew now that he was going to escape into India. Such a little escape, like stepping over a low brick wall without looking down or looking back. He also knew how he was going to do it, and if dreaming of escape is no more than the normal human condition, knowing how you are to escape is tantamount to escaping. After all, men do escape, from time to time; it is not merely a dream. Masson accepted an instruction, gravely; he looked at the direction on the white sealed paper – The Colonel Sale, it said, and Urgently Required, in Florentia Sale’s urgently spiked hand – and then, hardly thinking about it, he cast it into the drains and entered the camp, whistling. That was how things were to be, from now on. It hardly mattered how long his escape would take – six months, a year. Now, he knew how to escape, and to that end bent all his silent powers.

  5.

  It took, in the end, a year. The ten days in solitary did not dent his resolve, or make him feel that there was danger in his undertaking. Of course Florentia Sale, unobservant and disdainful as she was, had recalled that the private soldier she had entrusted with the urgent duty was red-haired. Failing to convey a despatch – and Florentia Sale, for this purpose, counted as carrying much the same importance as her colonel consort – was a punishable offence. Masson didn’t care. Solitude was what he was accustomed to, and what he frankly preferred to the grim miasma of the barracks, the fog-like aroma of the bodies of the platoon. Bodies; the heroic McVitie and twenty-five others, sweating through the Calcutta nights. It also taught him something useful – and Masson was determined that, from now, what he heard and saw and was told should above all be useful to him in his future life on the other side of that low wall. It taught him that he was conspicuous and would, wherever he went, be seen and remembered. It was not just a question of red hair, which could be dyed or covered. Masson was intelligent enough to see that. It was his whole person, which could not be changed. Most people in the world were inconspicuous, readily formed a crowd. Masson did not. He stood out in a crowd like a pianoforte before an orchestra. His secrets, prompt as his red hair, made him obvious and memorable. That could not be changed. It was worth knowing, that was all.

  It took a year of acquisition and learning and planning. Not even Das was told what he was about to do. He had a new interest, introduced with a carefully casual air, in silver. Particularly old Persian silver. If Das remembered their earlier conversation, he did not give any sign of it. Masson bought what fragments he could, until he had decided in which direction he wanted to go, beyond the British pale, beyond the North-West Frontier, where no one would pursue him. There, it was quite probable that Persian silver was no rarity, that he would find it worth less than in Calcutta. He switched to bazaar-ware, less pleasing, more saleable. He even bought, though he had to force himself, the grim imitations of European silver with which the Calcutta silversmiths hoped to supply the daily needs of the British. Once or twice, Masson even found an opportunity while on kitchen duty to take Company silver; it was hideous, but beyond Jalalabad, these lumpy saltcellars, these squarely elaborate knives and forks might well entrance a remote nabob. Once, a great silver plate was missed, and the barracks turned upside down; nothing was proved, and by then the massily encrusted trophy was safely entrusted to Mr Das, who, if he wondered about the sudden accumulation in the dank little cupboard, said nothing and did nothing. In any case, little as Masson trusted the shopkeeper, even to him it must be apparent that these trophies were too conspicuous to sell behind Masson’s back. Nor did he seem to wonder when Masson started to take Persian seriously, and within a year had absorbed and learnt enough of the oriental lingua franca–all scholarly pretensions to Sanskrit forgotten – to converse very fluently with any of Das’s occasional casual visitors, passing through in a two-year journey from Peking to Isfahan.

  Too fluently – strangely fluently. A change came over Masson when he spoke Persian and his Persian personality, as he slipped into the most beautiful language on earth, its long floating ambiguous rose-petalled paragraphs like the long twisting full paragraphs of a sad nightingale’s song, was not the Masson who emerged, haltingly and secretively, from the terms of the language he had spoken all his life. Masson wanted desperately to engage those wary old men in conversation, who so clearly saw Calcutta as Masson did, saw it as a stage on the long latitudinous journey and not, as the English did, as the great white Imperial jewel at the other end of the long road from London. It was not just that, nor the fascination of talking to a man whose manner and form of life Masson would so shortly pursue. It was the fascination of speaking Persian. There was the wonder of the beautiful language, so full of improvisation and fluid song, so little trammelled by the false bridges and carapace of grammatical structure, laid out in tables. But beyond that, Masson, speaking, improvising, in Persian, felt as if a new personality had been vouchsafed to him, and he observed this flirtatious anecdotal multifarious new Masson from outside, observing the transformation with an inner astonishment until the visiting bright-eyed merchants began to draw away, nervously.

  In these last months, his raucous comrades, like the whole establishment, lost all their terror. From the august Florentia Sale down to the ravenous black rats, big as terriers, everything seemed to fade like cloth in the sun. They we
re wraiths, all at once, whose future, unknown to them, had no substance, like nervous disinherited relations about a deathbed. He had set no term on his time here, and would have gone on, quite happily, his eyes fixed on that astonishing shining destiny.

  6.

  It was a Tuesday. It had been raining all day; not in bursts, but a steady hot rain, without any lessening or thickening, like a hot falling river. The streets steamed upwards and stank. The platoon had been on guardroom duty all day, and was at work in a desultory skiving manner, polishing and shining, with blacking and cloths. McVitie was striding around the guardroom like a deposed king, unquestioned, while the platoon worked. He rolled round the guardroom, his thumbs in his belt-loops, treating the platoon to a long and haphazard account of his adventures with women. He was thirteen – no, twelve – and she was twenty-four, a maid, and blooming, and he made her squeal. And then with her sister Molly, she took the great length of it, complaining like a stuck pig, fit to wake the dead, but she took it, again and again and again. And then when he was fifteen, the vicar’s daughter took him by the hand and led him behind, behind a tombstone, that was right, and she made him take it out to show her, though she were no more an fifteen herself, and she knew how to suck it clean, to give um delight and save her maidenhead, so she said, but he bent her over and took her from behind, where there weren’t no maidenhead neither, and then from afore, and then – McVitie guffawed at his own wit – there weren’t no maidenhead there no more to trouble the vicar’s daughter.

  The platoon sniggered sycophantically. Masson managed a smile, of sorts, at McVitie’s dingy memoirs, stale and weary as the unfaulting rain.

  McVitie suddenly stopped in his flow; his gaze, narrowed and intensely felt, but stupid beneath his white eyelashes as a pig’s, had settled on Masson.