by Paul Scott
Bronowsky indicated the room, the table, the silver and the glass and the patient silent servants.
‘Who pays, the people or the occupier? And who is Dmitri Bronowsky? Who pays him? How much is he paid? How much pension does he expect from you? How much pension can the people of India afford to pay you so that you can go on paying all these pensions to which you say you are already committed? And I know what Nawab Sahib will say, because he has already begun saying it. He will say, “Dmitri, what have I to do with these people or they with me? What are all these facts and figures and percentages and bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo? If you load my head with all this, how can I hold it up?” Come, let us have coffee.’
As they went Perron said, ‘As Mrs Grace said this morning, now we’ve all got to get used to living like carpet-sellers in Cairo.’
‘But of course!’ Bronowsky said, delighted. ‘Now we are all émigrés. Have some more champagne and a cigarette.’
*
The servant came to his side and refilled his glass, offered the open silver box. Dmitri settled his left foot on the stool. He told the servant to leave the champagne in the ice-bucket, to bring in the brandy and then to leave them.
‘The thing that holds the members of an emigration together is only their recollection of a mutually shared past, Mr Perron, but they are divided by a deep distrust of one another’s present intentions. So there is no creative coherence. And individually they feel guilty of desertion. An emigration is possibly the loneliest experience a man can suffer. In a way it is not a country he has lost but a home, or even just a part of a home, a room perhaps, or something in that room that he has had to leave behind, and which haunts him. I remember a window-seat I used to sit in as a youth, reading Pushkin and teaching myself to smoke scented cigarettes. That window is one I am always knocking at, asking to be let in.’
A steward brought a note. To read it Bronowsky took out a gold rimmed monocle. ‘Forgive me, I must leave you for just a moment to attend to this.’
Alone, Perron went out on to the terrace. The garden was flood-lit. At its centre was a fountain whose jets sprayed inward from the rim. In a moment Bronowsky was back. ‘There are other illuminations at the front, it seems, not of my devising.’
*
From the front compound they could see the glow of the fires in the city. ‘They are burning each other’s shops,’ Bronowsky said. ‘In the past eight months, whenever I saw a sight like this, I was comforted by the thought that Colonel Merrick was coping with it. Tonight I miss him. So perhaps will the police. All I can do is to ensure that what should be done is being done and what shouldn’t be isn’t. The cost is counted in the morning. Meanwhile one feels a bit like Nero, in need of a fiddle. Perhaps I should send for the court-musicians. But let us go back and finish the champagne.’
They strolled up and down the terrace. The fountain kept changing colour. Perron was struck by the irony of the situation. Here, luxury, elegance. A mile away, everything a man possessed in the world was perhaps going up in smoke.
‘Until the war,’ Bronowsky was saying, ‘there was almost no civil disturbance in Mirat. Such communal dissatisfaction as there was arose from the feeling the educated Hindus had that in spite of all my efforts they were still at a disadvantage, and from the counter-feeling high-ranking Muslims had that Hindus had been encouraged to compete too well. But by and large there was peace, particularly in the rural districts where the things that mattered to people were to enjoy prosperity when it was there to be enjoyed and to feel they could trust their Nawab to look after them when it wasn’t. Before the war, Mr Perron, I could tour the state and talk to a Mirati farmer out there in the mofussil, a Hindu or a Muslim, and he would prove to have but the vaguest idea of who Gandhi was, or who Jinnah was. For him the world began and ended in his fields, and with his landlord, and with the tax-collectors, and with Nawab Sahib who sat here in Mirat, Lord of the world, Giver of Grain. Out there it is not so very different now but in our towns and in our city they have become affected by what Congress is saying, what the Muslim League is saying, up there in Delhi, in Calcutta and Bombay. This began during the war. Mirat was also affected by the realization that the British raj had proved far from invincible in Burma and Malaya and in Europe. On top of that we had all these people who fell foul of the British and scurried to places like this where it was not so easy for your police to get hold of them. It was left to our own. Well, you can pick a man up and send him back where he came from, but you cannot send ideas back, especially if there is an element of truth and justice in them.’
‘What led to your applying for help from the States Police?’
‘A virtual breakdown in our own police department and a danger of mutiny in our State Armed Force, which consists of one regiment only, the Mirat Artillery. That was last November – but the trouble began earlier when men of the regiment who had been prisoners of the Japanese returned home and it became generally known that some of their comrades had joined the INA and were now prisoners of the raj. No one knew at the time quite what to make of this. The prisoners who had stayed loyal came back to a heroes’ welcome, naturally. Men of the Nawab’s artillery have served in both world wars, in France in ‘fourteen-’ eighteen. In Malaya this time. The artillery is a Mirati tradition. In the old days they used to make some of those huge old cannon you’ll know about from your study of eighteenth-century Indian history and the men from this region have always been adept at gunnery. So. It has always been a proud regiment, too. Unfortunately by the time the men came back, to their heroes’ welcome, Congress and the League had already taken the cudgels up on behalf of the INA. Our gunners found themselves in bad odour when they said what they thought of Bose. Some of the most outspoken were beaten up one night in the bazaar, probably by the same people who beat poor Ahmed up when it became known that his father wasn’t going to defend Sayed. Perhaps that was a blessing in disguise because it stopped him going into the bazaar to visit what in my youth were called ladies of easy virtue. For a long time afterwards he was faithful only to Mumtaz. But the worst situation arose in the spring of last year, when the officers and men of the Mirat Artillery who had been in the INA came back, the officers cashiered and the men released –’
‘At Holi.’
‘Ah, yes, at Holi. Almost as stupid a decision as the decision to try the Sikh, the Muslim and the Hindu at the Red Fort.’
‘Did the INA men get a heroes’ welcome too?’
‘It was unofficial, but warmer if anything. There were only two officers and nineteen men. The officers’ careers were finished, not that they needed careers, they both came from well-to-do families. The main question was what was to happen to the nineteen gunners. In Mirat, political parties do not officially exist, since the state proscribes them, but there are shadow parties and shadow committees and of course one has always known who belongs to them and who the leaders are and who will therefore emerge presently as the men with local political power in Mirat. The nineteen gunners were being persuaded by both these shadow parties, Congress and League, that they should be reinstated by a grateful Nawab for having tried to help Bose rid the country of the British.’
‘Which didn’t please the loyal men of the Mirat Artillery?’
‘To put it mildly. The cumulative effect of all this purely political propaganda was that on the Muslim League’s All-India Direct Action Day, the Mirat Artillery refused duty to stand by in aid of the civil power, and their officers were powerless. The men took a very simple view, Mr Perron. They thought that Direct Action Day was simply a ruse to reinstate the nineteen gunners and they would have nothing to do with it, either way. They sat in their barracks while the civil population ran riot. The Mirat Police were entirely ineffective because they were in sympathy with the League. We had to get aid from the cantonment, British troops, and the officer commanding those troops knew his men were so fed up with India and Indian politics that he dared only issue one man in twelve with live ammunition. I remember standing wi
th Nawab Sahib in one of the upper rooms at the front of the palace and watching the pall of smoke above the city and thinking, My life has been wasted.’
Bronowsky rested against the balustrade, sipped his champagne.
‘But one always feels better next day. All the same I have never seen Nawab Sahib so angry. He blamed the poor regiment. He said his grandfather would have had the officers trampled to death by elephants and every mutineer blown from the guns. He raved against Gandhi and Jinnah and then against the Viceroy and the Commander-in-Chief, and then because he knew there was only one head he could effectively roll, he turned on me and accused me of ruining him with all this modernity. It took me a day or two to persuade him that the artillery only needed his personal assurance that the INA gunners would not be reinstated. The police were a graver problem. It took me longer to persuade him that we needed assistance from outside, from the States Police. He felt we could rely entirely on help from the cantonment. But you know, Mr Perron, too much reliance of that kind sours the relationship between city and cantonment. Well. In the end he let me go to Delhi and put the position to them. And so – some weeks later – Ronald.’ Bronowsky paused. ‘I am a little chilly. It’s the fountains. They cool the air amazingly. Let us go in and have brandy.’
*
He had dismissed the servants and served the brandy himself. Now he settled opposite Perron and rested his foot on the stool.
‘When I heard who was coming in command of a States Police detachment and in an advisory capacity to the Nawab and myself, it was my instinct to say no, no, no, no, he is a man with too controversial a reputation and the last time he was in Mirat he was subject to the attention of people who seemed determined to persecute him for his behaviour in Mayapore. What are they doing sending him here? What are they doing employing him again in the police? Then I wondered what business that was of mine. And remembered that I had on very first acquaintance found him an interesting and impressive man. Impressive in some ways. You know that he had certain qualities, Mr Perron?’
‘I saw only the bad side, I’m afraid.’
‘That I think is because in spite of your interest in the past you are a man of the present, as I have always tried not very successfully to be. Merrick without question was a man of the past, so much so that he believed implicitly both in its real virtues and in what he imagined had been its virtues. And you know, in the situation that has existed here in Mirat this past year or so, where few people know what they are doing or why they are doing it, the presence of such a man comes almost as a relief. He treated the whole thing as though it were just a silly quarrel between naughty children. And in a way he was right. He inspired confidence with his impartiality and his absolutely inflexible and unshakable sense of his own authority. It can be a very dangerous combination. But there was one thing about him this time that seemed to me to be new. He struck me now as an inwardly melancholy man. I would never have said that about him before. The only time I saw him, how shall I put it, glow with the old conviction, was when he was with the child.’
‘Not when he was with his wife?’
‘I am no judge, Mr Perron. Unless a man and a woman are obviously and tiresomely publicly wrapped up in one another I find it difficult to judge the degree of warmth between them. That is a warmth I have never enjoyed. One eventually withdraws. Perhaps becomes insensitive. I was, I admit, sensitive to what I thought might be certain tendencies in Merrick when I first met him in Mirat at the time of Susan’s first wedding. I wish now that I had been more sensitive to the possibility of these tendencies having become, how shall I say, in no way lessened by his experience of marriage. Even at my age one assumes – well – what it is easiest to assume. So when he first arrived to take up his appointment I said, Are you still being persecuted by people making melodramatic demonstrations, throwing stones and chalking inauspicious signs on your doorstep? We made a joke of it. But he said what he had said in Bombay, that all that had ended. I knew that could be only partly true because Ahmed had told me there was a revival of persecution when he was in Delhi dealing with his brother’s and other INA cases. But I decided to take his word for it and there was no reason to suppose that persecution would start up again simply because he was back in Mirat. Unfortunately it did begin again, but in a much subtler way. It may seem a little odd to you, Mr Perron, that whoever wished to persecute him for what he did in Mayapore in nineteen forty-two should have waited so long to bring the operation to its logical conclusion? There must have been many opportunities to kill him in the past five years.’
‘It was twenty years before someone assassinated the ex-Governor of the Punjab. Ostensibly for supporting General Dyer over the Jallianwallah Bagh massacres.’
‘That’s true. Why do you say ostensibly?’
‘I shouldn’t think the Governor was shot for that at all. It was a conveniently dramatic form of protest against India being dragged into another European war.’ Perron smiled. ‘I gather from Nigel you have an idea Merrick was a convenient victim too. That killing him was intended to aggravate racial tension as much as anything.’
‘Yes.’ The old man studied him for a moment or two. ‘Not everyone feels the British have earned the immunity you all seem to be currently enjoying. I myself am not entirely convinced that it is fully deserved. But if it’s the last thing I do in Mirat, I’ll take every step necessary to ensure that this immunity continues, even if it means suppressing evidence and issuing false statements. Do you disapprove?’
‘A little.’
‘So do I. But I balance my disapproval with the thought of what might be happening now if we had shouted murder, also with the thought that the murder was so subtly planned and executed that the prospect of ever seeing justice done is infinitely remote. Then of course there’s the thought of the distress and pain Susan would have been caused by any open investigation. It’s a good thing, in her unstable state of mind and health, that she doesn’t know in what strange and unsavoury circumstances her husband died.’
‘Strange and unsavoury?’
‘I don’t mean just the manner of death but what made him vulnerable to such a death.’
‘Yes, I see. Do his spies come into the picture?’
‘Who mentioned spies to you?’
‘Susan. She also mentioned Indian clothes. The ones he wore to go out with his spies.’
‘Mr Perron, he had no spies. Nor did he ever go out in these clothes. Perhaps in his younger days he used to get up to that romantic sort of trick, colouring his face and disguising himself as a Pathan and going out into the bazaars. And of course in his time he must have employed spies in his department, just as our own police chief employs them. But Ronald and spies and Indian clothes, in Mirat, no, no, these were mere bits of play-acting. Khansamar never believed in the spies. He is a good servant, though, and not given to gossiping. I wish he had been. If I had known about so-called spies then I would have been alerted and I could have warned Khansamar to be more on his guard. And although it would have been a rather delicate thing to do I might have warned Ronald too. He may not have needed a warning, though. It is quite possible that he knew what was going on. In which case his murder might be seen as a form of suicide. Unfortunately I only knew about spies when it was already too late and Khansamar was questioned and told us about these visitors.’
‘Visitors as distinct from people coming asking for jobs?’
‘Why do you ask that?’
‘Susan said people were always coming looking for jobs.’
‘That was how it would have seemed to her. Originally that was how it seemed to Khansamar. But with the benefit of hindsight one begins to understand that it was all part of a new subtle form of persecution. At that time, Merrick was living alone, in Nigel’s bungalow. The other one was being got ready. According to Khansamar these young fellows began to turn up soon after Merrick arrived. Khansamar turned them all away. He knew they were not Miratis. They span the same tale, of coming long distances to seek work and a
lways offered little chits of references. Khansamar is illiterate. Chits mean nothing to him. Then one day Merrick found him shooing one of them off, a persistent fellow who had come several times. Merrick looked at the boy’s references, which may or may not have been genuine, probably not, not that it mattered. Merrick told him there was no work to offer him. But he was back again next day. He stood at the gate and salaamed Merrick whenever he passed in and out until in the end Merrick told Khansamar he was fed up with the sight of him and that he might as well be given a job for a day or two, helping one of the malis repair and lay out the tennis-court in the compound of the bigger bungalow. So this is what Khansamar did. He told the mali to work the boy hard, so hard bat he would give up. But he worked so well that in a day or two the tennis court was nearly finished.’
*
Moreover, so the story went, the mali’s wife had taken to the boy and had begun to mother him. He was a handsome young fellow and very well-mannered. After working all day in the compound he would make himself useful in the servants’ compound. The mali was keen to keep him on but after three days Khansamar went to Merrick and reminded him that the day or two was up. Merrick went to inspect the tennis-court. They were just laying out the lines of lime-wash. Merrick watched for a while, then said, ‘He is obviously used to hard work. Put him to cutting all the long grass.’
Khansamar was quite pleased. There was a lot to be done in both compounds. Many odd jobs. And the boy was very respectful to him. When he had cut all the grass in one compound Khansamar set him to work in the other. In the evenings he worked on a new vegetable patch behind the servants’ quarters, work which the mali himself had been putting off day after day. On one such evening Khansamar asked him, ‘Do you never rest, Aziz?’ And the boy said, ‘I am alone in the world, father. Work is all I have.’