by Paul Scott
Hapgood’s eyebrows twitched. He glanced at the wall.
‘Oh?’ Then, ‘Actually they’re Guler-Basohli school. But Kangra covers it.’
The servant had come in with a glass on a tray. He put this down on the drinks table.
‘Scotch? Gin?’ Hapgood asked.
‘Gin, thank you.’
‘Master will have gin,’ Hapgood told the boy without looking at him. ‘Why do you feel it was partly your fault?’
‘Purvis had no idea what they were, until I admired them and told him how valuable they were. So it was probably my fault that he singled them out when he was throwing bottles.’
‘Oh,’ Hapgood said. ‘Was that why? We often wondered. He never seemed to notice them.’ He strolled across the room towards the paintings. ‘But as you see, the damage has been fairly well disguised. They are exquisite, aren’t they? My wife was pretty upset at the time. But as I told her, it needs more than a bottle of rum to destroy a work of art.’
Perron had forgotten it was rum. Hapgood hadn’t. He turned to Perron suddenly. ‘Did you know the man my old bearer told me about? The man who had to climb the balcony and pull Purvis out of the bath?’
Perron admitted that he was the man.
Hapgood said, ‘Good heavens.’ Then, ‘My dear chap. How nice of you to call – to have remembered the paintings. My wife will be sorry to have missed you. She was awfully touched that you bothered to leave the servant a chit about the bathroom door.’
Perron recalled that the servant had asked for a chit. He didn’t actually remember writing one. Obviously he had done, probably while sitting in this room afterwards, drinking Old Sporran.
‘Perron,’ Hapgood was saying. ‘Perron. Yes, I remember now. But . . .’
‘Sergeant Perron,’ Perron said, to clear up any doubts. ‘Field Security, Poona.’
‘Field Security? I see. Somehow we’d always imagined the Sergeant Perron who pulled Purvis out of the bath was something to do with his so-called economic advisory staff.’ Hapgood led the way back to the balcony. ‘Field Security, Poona. Did you know a fellow who’s now in pharmaceuticals here? What’s his name –’
‘Bob Chalmers?’
‘That’s it. Chalmers. His firm banks with us. I don’t know him well. I remember he said he was Field Security in Poona and liked it so much he stayed on.’
‘Chalmers was my officer. Actually I’m staying in his flat here in Bombay. We kept up, after the war.’
‘Well bless my soul. Have you come out to join his firm?’
‘No, I’m only on a visit. Quite a short one. And I’ve not seen Bob yet and probably won’t now. He had to go to Calcutta just before I arrived, but left everything laid on so that I could stay at his place.’
‘Yes, I see. And you knew the Graces?’
‘No, I knew their niece, and their niece’s father.’
‘I’m afraid Mrs Grace has left. Poor old Arthur Grace died last year. Very suddenly. My wife and I were quite upset. He’d had dinner with us only the night before. Mrs Grace had gone up country to see her sister. The niece was getting married. Yes, I remember now. She was here to meet her father, wasn’t she, when we were in Ooty?’
‘The elder niece was here. There was a younger one.’
‘I don’t remember that. Anyway, one of them got married. Which was why Fenny Grace was away and poor old Arthur was on his own for a couple of weeks. We used to have him up. I thought he was perfectly all right but my wife said she wasn’t happy about him. She said he looked as if he didn’t know what anything was about any longer. Curious phrase. But women have these intuitions. He had a heart attack. Went, just like that.’
Hapgood snapped his fingers, but to call the servant’s attention to his empty glass. Perron’s was still half-full.
‘This was last year?’
‘Last year, yes. Middle of February. When the Indian ratings here mutinied. Things were a bit of a mess, but Fenny came back the moment we wired. Actually we thought it a bit thick that no one from her family came with her to help her get through it. But you’re right. There must have been two nieces. I remember her saying her niece wanted to come with her. She couldn’t have meant the niece who’d just got married. Must have been the other.’
‘Sarah, I should think. The one who got married must have been Susan.’
‘It rings a bell.’
‘Susan must have married a man called Merrick.’
‘I think that was it. Chap with something wrong with him?’
‘He lost an arm in the war.’
‘That’s it. Yes. Fenny left us some snaps she took at the wedding. She had them printed here once she’d dealt with the funeral. Pity my wife’s away. She’d have details like this much clearer in her mind. If you’re anxious for news of the family I’m sure I could turn up the sister’s address. Pankot, wasn’t it? Fenny must have given it to my wife, and my wife’s very efficient keeping her address book written up.’
‘I have the Pankot address. It’s just that I’ve not heard since the end of ’forty-five. My fault really. One somehow lets things slide.’
‘True. True. One lets things slide. The last we saw of Fenny was when she left for Delhi after the funeral. She was going to fly home to another sister in London. I expect the London address is in my wife’s book too, but I don’t think they wrote to one another because Fenny said it would only be a short trip and that she’d be back again. Then our daughter married an awfully nice Canadian Air Force chap we met in Ooty. We were in Montreal last year for the wedding. Pretty killing expense. But once in a lifetime. Now my wife’s back in Montreal waiting to become a grandmother. I’m expecting a telegram almost any day.’
Perron lifted his glass. ‘Good luck.’
‘Thank you.’ After drinking Hapgood said, ‘Are you committed this evening?’
Perron lied. ‘I’m afraid so, yes.’
‘Tomorrow, perhaps?’
‘Unfortunately I’ve left this call very late. I’m off tomorrow.’
‘Oh. Where are you off to? Not home?’
‘No, a little state called Mirat.’
‘A long journey. They had some trouble there recently. Is that why you’re going?’
‘I didn’t know that. What sort of trouble?’
‘Usual thing. Communal riots. I think it’s died down. Anyway, it’s in the Punjab things are getting tricky. Too many people on the move in the hope of ending up in the right place. But what can you expect when you draw an imaginary line through a province and say that from August fifteen one side is Pakistan and the other side’s India? The same applies to Bengal.’
‘It is rather drastic, isn’t it?’
Hapgood gave Perron a penetrating glance. He said, ‘It’s what an important minority felt they had to have and in the long term it’s probably for the best.’
Perron nodded. Hapgood was probably more in sympathy with the Muslims than with the Hindus.
‘Do you have press connections, then, Mr Perron?’
‘Only rather marginal ones. Sufficient to help me move about and get seats on planes.’
‘I asked because nearly every stranger from home you come across nowadays is either a journalist or a member of parliament swanning around ostensibly to observe the democratic process of dismantling the empire but actually making soundings for his private business interests. Nothing wrong with that, of course. India’s going to be an expanding dominion market once it settles down. The thing is, we’ll have to meet more outside and inside competition. Do you have business interests as well as marginal press ones, Mr Perron?’
‘My interests are primarily academic.’
Again Hapgood snapped his fingers and again while they continued talking his glass was taken and replenished and returned. This time Perron had his own glass topped up. The Oval was under the spell of pink and turquoise light, fading into indigo shadows.
‘If you have press connections, though, I suppose you’re here to be in at the kill, if I may put it
that way. Forgive me, but Mirat seems such an unlikely little place to go. If you want to be in at the kill you should go up into the Punjab and try to accredit yourself to the wretched chaps who’ve been formed into the boundary force and have the job of protecting the refugees and stopping them tearing at one another’s throats.’
‘Well as I said. My interests are primarily academic. And at the moment primarily concerned with the relationship between the Crown and the Indian states.’
‘Well you could go up to Bahawalpur. They’ve had some high jinks there. Or down to Hyderabad. That’s the one princely state large and powerful enough to prolong its independence for a while. Have you seen Patel? He’s in charge of what I call the coercing operation. Have you seen the head of the British Political Department? He’d give you the other side of the picture. They say his department has been burning private papers for weeks now, all the scandalous stuff we’ve collected over the years about the way some of the Princes behaved. Couldn’t let Patel get his hands on those, could you?’
‘Well I have a definite invitation to Mirat. I think it will suit me very well, especially if it’s had its troubles.’
‘What sort of invitation, Mr Perron? I ask because I might be able to help you.’
‘That’s very kind of you. Actually the invitation’s from the Chief Minister, Count Bronowsky. I met him here in Bombay during the war. He was kind enough to say I’d be welcome in Mirat at any time.’
‘Then there’s nothing I could do to smooth your way better. It was Bronowsky I had in mind. I don’t know him socially, but he’s had an account with us for years, and we usually meet in my office when he comes to Bombay. I haven’t seen him for some time. Probably because of the troubles they’ve had there. How is he?’
‘I’ve no idea, but well, I imagine. I wrote to him just before coming out from England and there was a telegram waiting for me at Bob Chalmers’s flat, inviting me to turn up whenever I wanted.’
‘Well. Give him my regards.’
Perron looked at his watch, and prepared to finish his drink.
‘Are you absolutely committed this evening? I’ve got a few people coming in, couple of chaps from the bank and their wives. Friends. Not all that boring. Actually it’s buffet. Nowadays in Bombay you never know who’ll turn up or who they’ll bring. Being alone just now I encourage it.’
Perron was tempted. He had a brief and flaming image of the Maharanee floating in on the arms of a couple of English bankers, in her scarlet saree, subsiding on to the long settee under the Guler-Basohli paintings, showing her nipples; and of Aneila offering chairs, cigarettes, and dewy tumblers which she had rinsed under the tap in Purvis’s bathroom to help the sinister little servant cope. And an image, then, of all the lights going out, because the light had virtually gone now from the forgiving Bombay sky, leaving only a gleam in the fretted edges of the palm fronds. And the sweet, grave, unforgettable unforgotten smell, drifting across from Back Bay.
‘I’m afraid I am committed, sir,’ Perron said. ‘Perhaps if I come back this way I could give you a ring.’
‘Of course,’ Hapgood said, pleased to be called sir. But it was now Hapgood wanted. A new face to ease the ache of boredom. Hapgood’s own face went out, as the nearby street-lamp came on, below and behind him. A trick of illumination.
‘You have a new servant, I see.’
‘Young Gerard? Yes. Bit of a mongrel. We inherited him from a chap who retired last year. Our agent in Ipoh. Gerard kept things going for him while he was in prison-camp. Very efficient fellow. Not like poor old Nadar, the one you’d remember. Trouble with Nadar, he couldn’t keep his hands off stuff that got left around. We had to let him go. Mistake, probably. My wife says it’s better to employ a dishonest servant you know inside out than one you’ll never get on any sort of terms with. Not that it’s going to matter either way to us next year. Our time will be up then. Learn to do our own cooking and washing up, I shouldn’t wonder. Neither of us fancies Montreal. So it looks like Ewell or Sutton. Know anything about mushrooms?’
Automatically Perron thought of cloud formations.
‘Mushrooms?’
‘A friend of our Canadian son-in-law, an ex-RAF type who lives in Surrey, has gone in for mushrooms. Grows them in his garage. Making a fortune, I’m told. Not that we’ll be looking to do that. But you need to put your mind to something, so preferably something with a saleable end-product. I don’t fancy chickens. Mushrooms are quieter.’
Hapgood smiled. His face, re-illuminated as he guided Perron back into the living-room where Gerard had switched on some of the table-lamps, looked composed. And resigned. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you change your mind, just arrive. Meanwhile I’d better get myself ready for the invasion.’ Perhaps Gerard had run his bath (with the same imperturbable expression he had shown when running baths for Japanese officers in his previous master’s house in Ipoh?).
Perron was about to say, ‘Do you still have the same cook?’ but realized in time that this might sound like an inquiry into the quality of the food to be expected. So he left not knowing whether that happy, co-operative, and sturdy little man still presided over the hot stoves in the Hapgood kitchen. On the whole, Perron thought, it was unlikely that he did. The bearer, the cook, and the cook’s boy, had been a happy family too, in spite of the rivalry and the demarcation of zones of responsibility. When the bearer went they had probably followed him.
As Gerard held the door open, Perron glanced once again down the corridor, to get his last glimpse of Purvis’s still-closed door.
*
Back in Bob Chalmers’s rather odd flat he made a few notes about his visit to Hapgood. The oddness of Bob’s flat consisted not merely in the unexpected situation of the house (in one of the narrow rather squalid roads behind the Gateway; not far, surely, from where the massage parlour had been?) but in the admixture of traditional and emergent Anglo-Indianism in its appointments. The rooms where basic European needs were scrupulously met (bathroom, bedrooms, dining-room) were furnished in the old dependable style. But in the living-room there was nowhere to sit comfortably. There were imitation Persian rugs on the floor, sparkling cushions from Rajputana, mattresses covered by durries or printed cotton bedspreads, a pair of tablas, a harmonium, and in a conker-coloured leather case – a tamboura, probably from Bengal. On the walls there were modern paintings by modern Indian painters. Impressionism had arrived (and a pointilliste school, after Seurat, to judge by a disturbing view of the burning ghats at Benares). Scattered round the room on cushions, on floor, on mattresses and in a unit-style bookcase, were the things that showed Bob Chalmers to be perhaps a little uncertain where his tastes lay. There were trade magazines dealing with pharmaceuticals and other light and heavy industrial subjects. There were literary magazines published in Calcutta and pale blue stiff-boarded editions of works by Radakrishnan about karma and dharma and the Hindu way of life. The bookcase held several volumes from the Left Book Club, a row of old Readers’ Digests and the latest novel by Nevil Shute. On a very low coffee-table, among pottery ashtrays, were a translation of the poems of Gaffur by a Major Tippet, and the March 1947 issue of The New English Forum which Perron had sent him. This was an issue containing one of Perron’s articles, the article originally entitled Daulat Rao Sindia and the British Other Rank, but subsequently retitled (for publication) An Evening at the Maharanee’s, which title Perron had tossed out from the top of his head at the end of a rather drunken lunch at Prunier’s with the young Tory MP who published the magazine and whose personal assistant in the publishing firm he directed had recommended Perron as a likely contributor, after reading Perron’s review (in the New English University Monthly) of a book called My Memories of INA and its Netaji, by Maj. General Shahnawaz Khan, Foreword by Pt Jawahar Lal Nehru [sic], which Bob Chalmers had sent him from Bombay after its publication in Delhi in 1946 with a letter of which the only passage Perron clearly remembered was: ‘Remember Bombay and Bordeaux? Well, this is connected. And get that last
paragraph of “Jawahar Lal’s” foreword, I quote: “I must confess that I have not been able, through lack of time, to read through this record, but I have read parts of it and it seems to me that this account is far the best we have at present.” Unquote. How’s that for shrewd fence-sitting, now that the trials are over?’
But then, Perron thought, putting his notebook away, and nodding assent to Bob Chalmers’s bearer who was standing in the doorway indicating that supper was ready (which he could already tell, smelling the delicious scent of turmeric) where else can one sit, and remain in balance?
II
Perron woke. the silence was solid; as if he had been spun off the world into space. There were no echoes, not a glimmer of light in the primeval dark. Then he heard the engine breathe in the distance and re-identified himself as the lucky lone occupant of a coupé on the night train from Ranpur to Mirat. He sat up, reached for his cigarettes. The lighter illuminated his watch. Five a.m. He twisted his body round and raised the blind and then the shutter and gazed out at the pale frozen landscape. So vast a country. Its beauty unnerved him. The engine breathed again, sounding nearer. He held his own breath and listened to another sound: the cries of dogs hunting the plain in packs.
When he woke again light was streaming through the unshuttered window and the train was moving slowly, clacking its wheels rhythmically, reluctantly. The landscape was eroded. Nothing could live here, he thought.
He was cold. He got up, slipped his feet into chappals and reached for his robe. Enfolded in silk he rasped one hand against his cheeks. His eyes were gummy. They felt raw from the specks of sand and soot that had entered the compartment. Pushing through the door into the lavatory he felt the chill coming up through the hole in the pan. He wanted hot coffee. Comfort. There was none. In an hour or two it would seem impossible that he had ever felt cold.
*
Shaved, washed, dressed, he went to the sunny side of the compartment to warm himself. It was 7 a.m. He should have been in Mirat by now and drinking coffee or tea in the station restaurant, getting some bacon and egg. He had lost the knack of travelling in India. He hadn’t even brought a flask of water. All he had was yesterday’s papers, bought in Ranpur: The Times of India and The Ranpur Gazette. He now read through the Gazette, scarcely taking it in, flicking the pages. The only pieces worth reading were a waspish editorial and a quiet essay by someone calling himself Philoctetes. He couldn’t remember who Philoctetes was. In this case, probably, the editor, exercising a gentle taste for belles-lettres.