by Francis King
‘You realize this will cost you a packet?’
‘Yes, I realize.’
The girl was shivering in her cheap, light overcoat, though the day was a warm one, with flies buzzing noisily against the surgery window.
‘I don’t put my head on the block for nothing,’ the doctor went on, so callous and cool that Toby had an all but irresistible urge to punch him in his sallow, prematurely lined face.
But you do not punch someone from whom you want something which no one else will give you and so Toby merely said: ‘Of course not. What’s the tab?’
The doctor shrugged and then drawled: ‘Well, let’s settle for fifty.’
Toby barely had that money in the bank, he would be skint.
‘Cash,’ the doctor added.
‘Of course. Cash.’
The girl began to whimper, drawing the lapels of the coat over her breasts.
‘Have you got it with you?’
‘No.’
‘Well, you’d better get it. No cash, no deal.’
Toby got it.
Once the whole crude, horrible business was over, the girl, who had previously been so panicky, showed an amazing stoicism. Her mother never guessed or, if she did, pretended, with no less stoicism, not to have done so … What became of the girl? Only now, as he canters under the trees, a stout, muscular, ageing man on a grey horse, is he troubled that he has no idea, no idea at all. Perhaps she is happily married, perhaps she is an embittered and lonely spinster, perhaps she is dead. He who is usually full of complacent self-love now feels abrasive self-hatred.
It is odd, he thinks, that Isabel, who often boasts ‘Oh, I’m never ill’, who is so serene and so strong, should have never been able to carry any child other than Peter beyond her fifth month. It is as though her body deliberately expelled, with the least fuss and the least mess, any possible rival to her cherished darling. Or perhaps – the weirdness of the idea makes him smile to himself – it is the child himself who somehow, by some magic, ensures that he will never have that rival. Peter, after all, does not welcome even other people’s children for long in the house, finding occasion to quarrel with them on the frail pretexts that they have broken or appropriated toys of his, have ganged up against him or have made disparaging remarks about the family. Toby wonders if this child which Isabel has miraculously carried into the seventh month will, for once, survive. Somehow he doubts it. He will come home from Simla or Bombay or Calcutta and Isabel will tell him, with no grief, shock or even surprise, ‘ I’m afraid I lost the baby while you were away.’ Lost – it is the word she always uses. Strange word, as though she had gone out and then somehow mislaid it like a glove or a handkerchief.
In the office, Mr Ram – he is always Mr Ram to Toby and Toby is always Sir to him – has again made a muddle of something. ‘Don’t you realize, you bloody fool, that that account is separate from that one?’ Toby stabs with a forefinger first at one sheet of paper and then at another. ‘Are you completely moronic?’ Hilda types away as though nothing of this was happening, her myopic eyes swimming back and forth, like creatures from ocean depths, behind those thick glasses which always irritate Toby with their reminder of a weakness. ‘Have you sent off that letter to Millett’s?’ Toby now demands, though he knows that Mr Ram cannot have done so, since he only mentioned it to him the last thing the previous evening. Mr Ram shakes his head with a drooping, yielding sorrow and Toby yells: ‘Jesus Christ!’ Toby always knows when he is behaving badly, as now; but he cannot stop himself. He longs for Mr Ram to hurl something hard and sharp back at him – ‘You bloody bully!’ ‘Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?’ ‘Fuck off!’, that kind of thing. But Mr Ram has to think of his wife and his wife’s mother and the four – or is it five? – children all crowded into three rooms. So Toby goes on: ‘I don’t know why I employ you. I don’t know what use you are to me – or what use you’d be to anyone else. I sometimes even wonder if you ever got that degree. I just can’t believe it. BA in what, for God’s sake!’
Mr Ram looks up at Toby and Toby recoils. The eyes under the arched, silken eyebrows are, yes, murderous. There is no other word for it. Toby has never seen them like that before, usually they are so soft, so gentle, so pleading, just as Mr Ram’s voice is usually so soft, so gentle, so pleading with its Sorry, sir, yes, sir, I’ll try to do better, sir, please forgive me, sir, I was up all night with my youngest, my youngest is sick, sir. Now Mr Ram says none of these would-be-placating, exasperating things. He merely looks at Toby. Silent. Toby goes off to his own office, throws himself down into his chair and, tilting it back, puts his hands, the reddish hair thick on their backs, one to either cheek. He’s gone too far, that’s torn it. Oh Christ!
He tries to work but the words of the company report before him – extraordinary credit of rupees 35,000, acquisition of 15% holding of, wholly owned United States subsidiary, interim dividend – flicker and fade, flicker and fade. His heart is thumping. He remembers that terrible burning sensation behind the sternum, that overmastering thirst, the hallway darkening, his falling, falling, falling, and then the vomit jerking out of him in uncontrollable spasm on spasm, as though he were having some endless, agonizing orgasm. Someone poisoned him. Perhaps it was the assistant cook, who fled with all his belongings and was never traced. Perhaps it was someone like Mr Ram, who has that murderous look in eyes once so meek. He has always known that his employees do not like him, one does not expect to be liked if one insists on a decent day’s work for a half-decent day’s pay in this godforsaken country. But now, for the first time, he realizes that they hate him. It is an unpleasant realization.
But why should he be surprised? Last week, urged by Isabel, he rode over the hills to the mission-station, to condole with the two absurd women, sisters from Huddersfield, who run it between them. The sisters belong to some obscure low-church sect, which pays them the most meagre of pittances to interfere in the lives and beliefs of people who are too courteous to tell them, as Mr Ram is too courteous to tell him, to fuck off. One of them, a former hospital nurse, hands out medicaments, usually aspirins and laxatives; and the other, whom Toby suspects of never having read anything but the Bible and English language textbooks, gives classes. ‘Oh, dear, we ought to have them over,’ Toby often sighs; but they rarely do so. ‘ They are so terribly not handkerchief drawer,’ Isabel also often says, using an idiom, common in both senses, of that time and place. But now Toby obeyed Isabel’s urgings to ride over to see the poor old things.
The square, whitewashed building, with its hideous roof of corrugated iron scabbed with rust, had become only a blackened, jagged shell. Like some huge, decaying molar: that was the image which came to Toby as he rode up. The tiny chapel lay in pieces on the ground, as though some fractious child had pushed over a rickety meccano construction in a tantrum. The servants’ quarters were still standing and, in front of them, two tents had been erected. The tents were not of the kind to which Toby is used, with soaring poles and rooms ample enough for sofas, chairs and tables to be set out on rugs. These were the sort of tents in which, back home, boy scouts crowd to sleep when camping. The two women, in the shapeless cotton dresses and plimsoles which they always seem to wear, were seated out in front of them, one in a deckchair and one in a chair of plaited cane. They were doing nothing.
Toby dismounted from his horse and handed it to the dishevelled servant, his turban askew and his mouth full of food, who had hurried out from the servants’ quarters. The women had meanwhile sprung up to greet him with a wild, startled eagerness. ‘Mr Thompson!’ one of them cried out, clapping her hands together. ‘We never thought to see you!’
As he approached, the other sister grabbed at his arm. ‘How kind of you to come! And you so busy! And such a long road!’
‘Well, I felt … All of us were so distressed to hear …’ In fact, he was now embarrassed, rather than distressed.
‘How kind everyone has been. How wonderfully kind. Mrs Anderson was over here yesterday and
she said they’d be happy to put us up in their lovely home for just as long as we wanted. And the Governor’s ADC …’
They prattled on, calling to the servant first to bring a third chair and then to make some tea, yes, Toby must have some tea. They would like to offer him a drink but, as he knew, their religion … Yes, Toby knew.
The tea was black and bitter, with an overlay of nauseating sweetness from the condensed milk already poured into the cups before the servant brought them out on a tin tray decorated with blowsy purple roses.
Toby was gazing about him. Then he said bleakly: ‘You must have lost everything.’
‘Well, almost everything,’ the older sister confirmed, far from bleakly. ‘But we still have our friends. And we still have our faith.’
There was a terrible pathos in that last remark to Toby, since he himself has no faith at all. Did they mean faith in their arid, rigid form of Christianity? Or faith in the people whom they had for so many years tried to serve and who had now repaid them in this fashion? Probably both, he decided.
‘The vicar has been wonderful,’ the younger sister said; and the older took up: ‘Yes, Mr Andrews has been wonderful, considering we’re not of his flock. In fact’ – she laughed, putting a hand to her mouth, as though to reveal its interior were indelicate – ‘ one would never guess that he’s one of the opposition, as it were! He’s getting up a collection for us. He’s already collected hundreds, literally hundreds, of rupees.’
Toby stirred his tea in its thick, hospital-style cup. He sighed. ‘Well, of course, I’ll be contributing,’ he said. He felt tongue-tied, he did not know why.
‘Oh, Mr Thompson, how good you are! What a good, good man!’ The younger sister, who must once have been pretty, again grasped his arm. Her nails were far from clean and she smelled, he suddenly noticed as she leaned closer to him, of charred wood.
‘Who could have done such a thing?’
‘Who? Yes, who indeed?’ The sisters looked at each other, as the older spoke. ‘ It’s a mystery to us. We cannot imagine, we just cannot imagine.’
‘Well, although I’ve spent most of my adult life in this country, I still don’t understand them.’
‘But they’re no different from us, Mr Thompson! No different at all!’ The younger sister again leaned forward and again that smell of charred wood filled his nostrils.
Toby shrugged. How could one contradict them?
When he rode away, having told them that Isabel had made up some parcels for them, which two of the servants would be bringing over later, Toby experienced a sudden coldness and dread. What harm had these poor, silly, trusting, loving women ever done to anyone? And again he asked, silently now, as the horse picked its way round boulders and over hillocks: Who could have done such a thing? Who? Who?
Then this countryside, gentle hills gathered round a tranquil lake, seemed to him to hold a sudden menace, akin to that which had led to Jack’s murder on the verandah of the bungalow which he had shared with two other bachelor officers. A hand hovered, then rested on a grey rubber sheet. ‘ I don’t want to see him. Don’t. Please.’ There was panic in Toby’s voice. ‘I want to remember him – remember him as he was.’ The young English police officer was embarrassed. It was Isabel who had insisted that they wished to be shown the corpse. The police officer looked over to her. She nodded. Toby lurched away. The hand folded back the sheet, clammy and cold on healthy palm. Isabel gazed down at her twin for seconds on end. What did he look like? Had they patched him up? Toby never dared to ask her, either then or later.
Toby heard the swish of the sheet being once more drawn up. He turned, sought Isabel’s face. It was frozen, as though she had been lying with her twin in his bed of dry ice. She emitted a tremulous, long-drawn sigh.
… Toby often now thinks of Jack, though he tries not to do so, just as someone who has resolved to put a decaying tooth out of mind is reminded of it by intermittent twinges. He is leaning across the billiard table in the club, he is pouring out a glass of whisky for some guest after dinner or, brows knitted and hands dangling between bare knees, he is straining at the thunder-box; and then, all at once, the kukri is flashing down, stabbing and ripping at the flesh beneath it. It perplexes Toby that, now that he is dead, Jack should so often squirm and slither into his mind unsummoned, whereas, when he was alive on the other side of the subcontinent, he would forget all about him for days and days on end. He was a bit of an ass, Toby had decided as soon as he had met him, with that braying laugh of his, that love of practical jokes and that reckless passion for gambling, which would often drive him to borrow money openly from his brother-in-law or, more often, secretly from his sister. Despite their undemonstrativeness with one another, the closeness of the twins to each other was at once clear to Toby, simultaneously baffling him and filling him with resentment. So, too, he was both baffled and resentful when he saw Peter squirming and giggling in delighted abandonment under Jack’s exploring, nicotine-stained fingers. Why couldn’t the fool leave the boy alone, instead of over-exciting him like that? It was a relief when Isabel intervened with her ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Jack!’ or ‘ Do let him be!’
… Toby and the women are sitting out on the lawn in the warm, slanting light of evening, while Peter plays near them with a huge doll, almost his own size, the present of a maharanee who has, she declares, ‘fallen madly in love with him’. Peter first shamed Toby by saying a doll when the maharanee asked him what he would like for a present; now he shames him by playing with it in front of visitors and servants. Mysteriously, the child has christened the doll Alfred but refers to it as ‘she’.
Helen, who has returned from a meeting of the Bluebells, is still in her sepia uniform, her cocked hat on the ground beside her deckchair. Peter approaches, drops the doll and then picks up the hat and places it on his head. It comes down over his eyes, resting on the upturned tip of his nose. ‘Look, Mummy, look! Clare! Helen! Granny!’ Only the old woman laughs. He pulls off the hat and chucks it down beside the doll.
He approaches still nearer to Helen, slowly, furtively, on tiptoe, as though in a game of grandmother’s footsteps. She is aware of his approach but ignores it as, hands clasped, she gazes down to the lake. Then he asks, forefinger tapping: ‘What’s that thing on your belt?’
‘My scout knife,’ she says. Now the forefinger is tracing the stitching on the sheath. ‘Oh, leave it alone!’
‘Can I see it?’
‘No.’
He grasps the sheath. ‘ Please!’
‘You’ll only cut yourself on it. It’s sharp.’
‘Show it to him, Helen,’ Isabel looks up from her sewing to say. ‘But don’t let him touch it.’
Reluctantly, Helen pulls the knife out of its sheath. Its edge, cruelly sharp, glints in the sunlight. Fascinated, fingers of one hand pressed to his lower lip, the child stares at it. They are all staring at it, even Helen.
Toby sees the kukri flashing downwards and the blood spurting in a high, scarlet arc. He sees the brown, muscular fist, the brown, muscular forearm above it. He hears a yell.
He looks away, a hand to his eyes. ‘Put it away,’ he grunts.
Helen returns the knife to its sheath. Peter, who has already lost interest in it, has picked up the doll and is wandering off.
Toby’s eyeballs feel sore, as though that glint of sunlight on honed metal had seared them. Normally so energetic, he has a sensation, increasingly common in recent weeks, of life suddenly ebbing from him. It will flood back, he knows that from experience. Of course it will flood back. But suppose, suppose – the thought suddenly terrifies him – that that outgoing tide, ebbing away to leave inert, wrinkled mud-flats behind it, were, by some mysterious caprice, to refuse to renew itself.
He thrusts the thought from him, with an effort, as though it were something heavy and slack which had fallen across his body. Then he stretches out his arms, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to reveal his freckled forearms, out to the sun, a red ball above the hills to the ea
st of the lake. ‘What a day! What a wonderful day!’ Already he can feel the tide returning.
As he says this, he smiles across at Clare. But, her right leg swinging restlessly as it is balanced on the knee of her left, she refuses to look at him.
Suddenly, as though that flash of knife had been a zigzag of lightning striking first Toby and now, much later, her, Isabel puts down her sewing on her lap and says, quietly pensive: ‘I often wonder … How could anyone have brought himself to do what that man did to Jack? How, how?’
‘It’s better not to think about it,’ old Mrs Thompson says. Over the years she has acquired a technique of wiping from her mind whatever might eventually prove gritty or corrosive.
But Isabel goes on: ‘That’s the only reason why I should like to have gone to his trial. To see what kind of man he could possibly be.’
‘I expect he looked like any other Indian,’ Toby says, using the past tense, since the man has already been hanged. ‘He certainly did in the newspaper photographs.’
‘And yet he was a monster,’ Isabel insists. ‘Or possessed. To kill someone for so trivial a reason – and to kill him in that way. Unthinkable.’
‘Unthinkable only to us,’ Toby says. ‘To an Indian …’ He sighs. ‘Strange people. All these years and I still don’t understand them, not one bit. So quiet, gentle, kindly, good-natured. And then suddenly …’ Again he sees that flash of steel, that high, scarlet arc.
Mrs Thompson laughs nervously. ‘When you talk like that, you frighten me,’ she says.
‘Things like that can happen anywhere in the world. The Indians are no different from us – or at least they’re no more wicked.’ Helen gets up, goes to the wooden palisade above the cud, and leans over it.
Again Toby looks over to Clare and again she refuses to meet his gaze.