by Glen Duncan
‘I don’t know what you think you’re doing,’ Cyril said. That evening, after Bannergee had left he’d come to the door of her room and found her packing a small bag. The tinny shouts of children playing in the street came in through the open window.
‘Leaving.’
There was a silence (which said he knew she wasn’t joking) before he let out a puff of laughter.
‘And where the bleddy hell is it you think you’re going?’
‘That’s none of your business.’
‘Don’t speak to me like that.’
Nothing. She balled two more pairs of white ankle-socks and dropped them into the bag. In the space between her and him it was as if the last of something was being burned away, going quickly in sizzling seconds, astonishing both of them with its friability. Adrenalin murmured in her. She pushed past him in the doorway, felt one last surge of the habit of himself mass, climb, reach out, incinerate. Nothing. Only a shorn quality to the air. At the front door she paused (a miracle she could hold the bag, wrists and hands weak with excitement) and looked back at him. He stood with one hand at his side, the other absently clutching the front of his shirt, as if he was about to try to yank himself off his feet. The rimless glare glasses were pushed up on to his forehead. The monkey mouth had gone small and tight.
‘You walk out of that door,’ he said, ‘don’t think about coming back.’
She stood on the threshold and looked out, not from hesitancy but to commit the moment to memory. The children were playing kick-the-can; someone was booting it tink-tatonk-tank-tonk while the rest shrieked and cackled and cheered, kicking up a yellow mist of dust. The tops of the banyans at the edge of the front garden were oranged by a shaft of late light. A cloud of frenetic gnats hung between the gateposts. The evening had a soft golden gravity. She had no money and nowhere to go if her instincts were wrong.
‘I’m warning you,’ he said.
She turned and walked away.
To Sellie’s. ‘Just for tonight, Aunty. I feel funny sleeping there where grandpa died.’ Sellie had been in bed all day, incapacitated ostensibly by grief. ‘Yes, yes, Kit, it’s all right,’ Will said, ushering her into the parlour. ‘You bunk up with Lucy or Dalma. We’re all sleeping outside, anyway. No point in troubling Aunty now, she doesn’t know whether she’s coming or going.’
‘What are you doing sleeping here?’ Robbie wanted to know. ‘It’s a secret,’ she said. ‘What secret?’ ‘You’ll see.’ ‘It’s the end of the Empire!’ Robbie said, jumping up and down inside his mosquito net. ‘God save the King!’
She was waiting on the platform when Ross got off the train the next day. ‘I’ve left,’ she said. They were her first words to him as he stepped down with his suitcase. The cool season was over; for a week now the middles of the days had been advertising the coming conflagration with yawning white skies and heat like a billion fine needles gently increasing their pressure against you. Kate felt tired and light, standing there with the chaos of passengers and hawkers around her. Hindi pani, Mussulman pani, pahn biri, tahsa char, garumi garum. She couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten. It occurred to her for the first time that if she’d made a mistake she was going to have to think of what to do. In the seconds that passed before he spoke, while she watched his young face take it in, calculate, she asked herself: What will I do if…? The question diffused into a vague image of herself walking with her bag through empty sunblasted land.
‘Will you marry me?’ Ross said.
The soonest they could manage was the twentieth of April (in the meantime Ross installed Kate–since Beatrice wouldn’t have her at Bazaar Road, to all the world living in sin–at his sister Rose’s, where she spent six weeks quietly observing the strangely successful, slovenly marriage of Rose and her according to Beatrice goodfornothing husband, Eric), on which day at eleven o’clock in the morning they were married by Father Francis Menezez at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament, Lime Road, Bhusawal. The number of Ross’s siblings alarmed Kate, the tribal ease they had with one another. They were all, too, ferociously direct. Well, madam, I hope you’re going to sort this harum-scarum bugger out once and for all? Kate nodded, though she had no idea what needed sorting out. At the Limpus Club reception Hector got leadenly drunk and after much indecipherable poisonous talking to himself passed out under the table. Sellie, Will and the kids were Kate’s only guests. Eleanor Silvers and her family had left for Australia that year. Cyril was not invited.
Kate had assumed (not without trepidation) that they would move into the Monroe family household, temporarily, immediately after the wedding. But late into the reception Ross ushered her outside and into a waiting ghari. ‘Where are we going?’ ‘Shshsh. It’s a surprise.’ He put his arm around her and kissed her, a little drunk, the breath said, but manageable. He lost his temper easily, drunk. She’d seen it once or twice at the dances, all the largesse and bonhomie at the stroke of one misinterpreted remark transformed into focused aggression. Not at her. At other men, the perpetual flame of competition. He wasn’t, she knew, a hitter of women, though his father, he confessed, had given his mother terrible beltings. It disgusted me, he’d said, head down, standing with her on the banks of the Taptee one evening at dusk. The water had been membranous, the colour of mercury, sliding slowly past, here and there rucked and ruffled by stones. On the bridge half a dozen other couples were silhouetted against the peachy sky. I couldn’t look at him in the same way afterwards, the cowardice of it. And yet when he’s sober you won’t get a better man. Kate had had to sift and weigh all this in the first months. But he’d passed. You knew, she told herself, if a man was dangerous to you: the potential was there like an undisguisable odour. He didn’t have it. Seeing his father brutalize his mother had drawn a line in him, sealed dignity at a certain depth. He wouldn’t go past it. The commitment to his own idea of himself wouldn’t let him.
The ghari stopped outside a small bungalow on Armoury Road and Ross told the driver to wait.
‘What?’ Kate said.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’re here.’
She put her arms out and he swung her down. Fished in his pocket and brought out a key. It glinted in the moonlight.
‘You’re not serious?’ she said.
‘I am.’
‘How?’
‘Never mind how. Come on, have a look inside.’
Fresh from the boxing Inters, bantamweight champion for the second year running, he’d gone straight to the accommodation office. Old Clem and Reggie Hodge had already put in their requisite words. Here’s the list of vacant houses, the officer had said. Take your pick. He’d picked the one furthest from her uncle’s.
‘There’s a bed and a table and chairs,’ he said. ‘The rest we’ll have to get bit by bit.’ Then after a pause when he didn’t know what was going on in her head: ‘We don’t have to stay here straight away, tonight. There’s room at home.’
She crossed from the darkness through a slab of moonlight on the bare floor, put her arms round him. ‘I want to stay here tonight,’ she said.
At a press conference at the Legislative Assembly in June 1947 Viceroy Mountbatten told journalists–casually, as if mentioning possible future weather conditions he didn’t expect anyone to be much interested in–that the transfer of power would be brought forward from the previously proposed date of June 1948 by some months, in fact that it ‘could be about the 15th of August’.
News of a ten-month advancement should have had India’s hacks in a fever. It didn’t, for the simple reason that many of them couldn’t believe it. Was the viceroy serious?
But by the third week of August it was apparent that he was.
‘Christ, look at all these fellows, men.’ On Victoria Terminus’s platform 5 Ross and Eugene stood side by side on a bench, looking over the heads of the swollen crowd. The station’s baked concourse was a deafening mass, barely movable through. Everywhere faces were tight, sweat-sheened, everywhere eyes busy with fear, everywhere someone t
rying to get past someone else. Families with what they could carry on their backs, in their hands, on their heads. Here and there station staff who looked like they hadn’t slept for days. Three locomotives stood like animals trained not to panic in crowds. Two days ago the Frontier Mail had arrived twenty-four unthinkable hours late in Bombay, having been held up, looted, and turned into a mass-murder scene en route. Thousands of Muslims were now to all intents and purposes living on the platforms of VT, waiting for trains to take them north into newly created Pakistan. The violence around Lahore was so bad that railway employees had stayed at home to protect their families. Suddenly Anglo-Indian staff had found themselves in curiously fierce demand, the (so far sound) reasoning being that since they weren’t Hindus, Muslims or Sikhs no one would murder them.
‘I don’t like it,’ Ross said to Eugene. ‘I don’t like it one bit.’
‘I know, but what to do? He’s a grown man, dammit all, isn’t he?’
Hector, this was, who was scheduled to take a train out from Bombay that evening.
‘He’s not in a fit state to be in the middle of all this bleddy madness,’ Ross said.
‘Leave it, men. There’s nothing you can do.’
‘I can’t leave it,’ Ross said. ‘You don’t know the state he’s in.’
The Inter-Railways season, the Hector–Bernice affair, the transport system, the country (or now countries, since stick-insect Jinnah had got his way), the collective sanity, all were in a state of collapse. Last night Reggie Hodge, the football manager, had called a halt to the GIPR’s part in the tournament. Team members were disappearing, from India to Pakistan, or from VT to their homes, or from fixture commitments to sudden demands from their employers. Within the last seven days the squad of twenty-two had been reduced by half. It was the same for all the competitors. ‘You can’t have a Cup without teams,’ Reggie had said, disgusted. ‘What a bloody enormous bollocks-up.’
The BB&CIR had pulled out of the tournament the previous week and Hector had gone back to work. Then, three days ago, Bernice had broken it off with him. He’d gone on a two-day drinking binge, got into a fight, ended up in jail and had to be bucksheed out by Ross and Eugene the following morning. Kept his job by the skin of his teeth. If Anglos hadn’t been such a precious commodity he’d have been sacked. As it was they’d scheduled him to take a passenger train up to Baroda this evening. They should have sent him to a sanatorium, Ross thought.
‘I’m going to get a pass,’ Ross told Eugene. ‘I’ll go up with him in the brake.’
Eugene groaned. ‘What for?’
‘To keep an eye on him. The way things are at the moment, I’m telling you he’ll get into trouble on purpose.’
Eugene looked around them at the throng. ‘You’ll never get a pass with all this madness going on,’ he said.
Hector, ravaged by booze and heartbreak, was in a state of thunderous misery.
‘Come on, for God’s sake,’ Eugene said, grabbing him by the back of the neck and giving him a friendly shake. ‘Think of all the other women out there. You’ve got to’–eyes sparkled, fingers of free hand wiggled–‘you’ve got to get tough with yourself and use them to get her out of your head, yes?’ Ross rolled his eyes, secretly touched by Eugene’s insistence on coming with them. They were half an hour out of Bombay. ‘You’ve got to go at it, you’ve got to fuck like a bleddy lunatic until the memory of her is gone, absolutely bleddy vanished. Understand? Like this, you see.’ Eugene started to sway and very gradually move his hips in circles while surveying an imaginary horde of available women. ‘Oh, yes, what’s your name? Lucy? Yes, come on Juicy Lucy that’s right, thank you…And what’s your name, my little poodle, eh? Cindy? All right, come on, chalo, Cindy, I can see you’re one of the Seven Deadly Cindys, aren’t you, eh? Thank you. Now you, you there with the legs, just lift your skirty for the dirty, come on, chalo, don’t keep Daddy waiting…You’re next, Charlotte, then Peggy, then Bernice…Oh yeah—’
Hector flung himself at Eugene and got him by the throat.
‘Wha—’ Eugene squeezed out.
‘That’s her bleddy name you idiot,’ Ross said, getting to his feet and grabbing his brother’s arms. ‘Hector, come on now don’t be stupid. He didn’t know, he just forgot. Come on, men don’t make me—’
With the application of the emergency brake all three men went over. It took a few moments for them to untangle themselves.
‘What the hell?’ Eugene said. ‘Why’re we stopping?’
Ross and Hector looked at each other.
‘Shit,’ Ross said.
In brash light on the veranda at Armoury Road Kate was thinking about England. There had been a letter from Sellie this morning and this was the second time she’d read it. Actually, a letter from Robbie (full of back-to-front consonants and ropy spelling) with a drawing of a house being virtually obliterated by slanted dashes she understood to be rain. ‘This is our hows in England.’ Robbie wasn’t happy. ‘At skool the call me names.’ It touched Kate that he’d written. She’d missed his harmless madness; the thought of him growing up depressed her, all his occult communications with insects and trees and imaginary things gone, the uncomplaining spirit driven out by whatever there must inevitably be, a job, money worries, lost love, the awakening to God’s cold experimental interest in the world. ‘Cyril’s in London with Arthur Cavendish,’ Sellie’s cursorily tacked-on paragraph informed her. ‘Arthur says he can get him on at Tate & Lyle.’ Sellie, Will and the kids were at Will’s mother’s house in the north, a town, Bolton.
‘Memsahib?’
Kate turned. ‘Yes?’
The servant, Dondi, of wizened mahogany-dark face and pickled eyes, stood in the kitchen doorway with a straw bag over his shoulder. (In it, as per Kate’s instructions, spices to be taken to the mill for grinding.) Dondi was an alcoholic station beggar Ross had one morning found shivering outside the team carriage in Bombay and taken pity on. Kate was discovering her husband’s hodge-podge: a willingness to break the law; emotional honesty; a feeling of entitlement to life’s treasure; stabs of empathy; caprice. Ross had taken Dondi under his wing, informally, paid him a pittance to run errands and polish his football boots, then a few weeks into the season brought him home to work at the house in Bhusawal. No drinking during the day, okay? After seven o’clock you can do what you want, but until then no high-jinks, understand? Dondi had wept as if he’d been adopted by royalty–though gratitude proved no match for addiction. Kate knew he knocked back a mug of meths now and then to get him through the day, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. He was gentle and devoted. It always seemed to her that the dark brown of his face had tinctured the whites of his eyes. He’d been skeletal when Ross had picked him up. Now, on leftovers that amounted to three square meals a day, he’d acquired a look of surprised wiry health.
‘No,’ Kate said, ‘there’s nothing else. When you come back from the chakki you can take the afternoon off if you want.’
Dondi grinned and joined his hands and shook his head slowly as if she’d made an outrageous joke. He was terrified of being given time off in case when he returned they’d changed their minds about him.
‘It’s all right,’ Kate said. ‘You can come back, drop off the masalas and do what you want till dinner time.’
Dondi bowed, hands still joined, still grinning and shaking his head and began to reverse out of the kitchen. ‘I’ll come back, sweep up,’ he said. Sweeping up was the default if he felt evidence of his redundancy beginning to show. Kate smiled and waved him away.
When he’d gone the house’s baked stillness reasserted itself behind her. The airmail paper’s pale-blue delicateness made her hold it up to the light. Liberation from Cyril had given her a new, amoral sensuous curiosity. (She wasn’t resolved about sex. It had frightened her and, initially, hurt. There was the mess Cyril had made to be somehow got through, wrongness that clung like dark strands of a stubborn web; but she was patient. Of late once or twice there had been intimations
of pleasure, as shocking as if she’d felt a prickling of clairvoyance. They hadn’t talked about it; bedroom life was inarticulable. But there were looks, hers saying don’t force anything, his wanting to know it was all right. She wasn’t sure it was all right. Her understanding even of the mechanics of conception and pregnancy remained sketchy. She was shy of asking Ross, though she knew he knew.)
She looked again at the address on the airmail letter. 7 Lever Street, Bolton, Lancs., England. Funny to think it had come all the way from Robbie’s hand some morning weeks ago. England. She folded it up and slipped it into the pocket of her skirt.
The compound’s copper and bronze red-flecked chickens glowed in the sun. In recent days the town’s collective spirit had been pulsed through by trainloads of people making connections for the north and east. When you stopped and attended to it the land was animally alert. Anglo-Indian faces were changing. It was as if the temperature had dropped, unseasonably. She’d asked Ross, one night in the dark after sex (because the silence afterwards did seduce them into speaking from the core of themselves, simply and honestly, even if it wasn’t to speak about what they’d just done), What does it mean to us, the British going? Will we be in danger? There’d been a pause before he’d answered and with a crisp thrill of wifely intuition she’d known he was weighing up whether to lie to her about something. She’d known, too, that he wasn’t going to lie, that the weighing-up had already been done when he married her. Listen, he said, I want to tell you something.
They’d lain side by side, not even holding hands, while he told her of the plan. The Olympic trials. England. He could turn pro, make money. They could travel. She’d listened staring up at the ceiling, feeling the house and the night listening with her. She didn’t say anything. So much new had happened that anything seemed possible. When he touched her hand she got a fright, and they laughed, and he said, And if there are children there’ll be more money to give them a good life with.