Shadow of the Moon (92 page)

Once again, after so many years, sitting on the zenana roof in the twilight, Winter heard the old familiar stories of her childhood told to those children, as Aziza Begum had once told them to her. And as she listened she heard too the ugly sound of gunfire from the beleaguered Residency, and was disturbed by conflicting emotions.

‘Mrs Hossack says she wonders how I can endure to be friends with them, when their people are killing our people,' she confided to Alex, sitting on his roof-top one hot evening. She had carried up a strange brew made from herbs that Hamida had assured her was invaluable for those recovering from dysentery and fever, and having stood over him while he drank it under protest, had stayed talking to him in the twilight.

Mrs Hossack's observation had evidently worried her, for after an interval of silence she returned to it: ‘It's not that I forget what is happening to my own people. I couldn't forget, even if I wanted to, while I can hear the firing and know that every time I hear it it may mean that someone in the Residency is dying. But - but that does not make any difference to the way I feel about Ameera and the others. Mrs Hossack says that it should. She hates them all. I know it is different for her. They - their people - killed her husband and one of her children, and two more died. But—'

She stopped, her brows puckered in a frown, unable to explain how it was that she could feel so friendly and at ease with these women while at the same time be tortured by hope and fear and a burning anxiety for all those of her own blood who were stubbornly defending themselves in the wreck of the Residency.

Alex said drily: ‘It is considered a patriotic duty in time of war to hate every member of the nation one is fighting against, and we only remember the injunction to love our enemies and do good to those who hate us when those enemies are safely defeated.'

‘But Mrs Hossack—' began Winter.

‘Mrs Hossack, poor woman,' said Alex, ‘will remember the death of her husband and children, and the cause of it, until the day she dies. What she will not remember is that thousands of the race who killed them have stood
by us, and died for doing so. There are not only white people in the Residency, Winter. There are Indian troops too, and Indian servants, who could escape death and disease and starvation by deserting to their own people, but who are staying to help a handful of British to hold out, and who will be considered traitors to their own side and butchered without mercy if the Residency falls. There is no particular merit in fighting for your own skin when you know that it is fight or die, but there is considerable merit in being prepared to die when you know you can escape quite easily. Put at its lowest, there is a certain stubborn foolhardy heroism in that.'

Winter turned to look out over the trees and the roof-tops to the fantastic fretted silhouette of mosques and palaces, dark now against a darkening sky, and after a moment or two she said: ‘What will happen in the end?'

‘That depends on what you mean by the end.'

‘When all this has ended. Will we hold it for always?'

‘No,' said Alex, turning over on his back and looking up at a frieze of fruit bats flapping silently overhead on their way to the orchards and gardens of the villas that fringed the crowded city.

‘Why? Why do you say that?'

Alex considered the question for a moment and then said reflectively: ‘A hundred years ago this country was a collection of quarrelling, warring petty kingdoms, for ever at each other's throats. The Company - or Clive - put a stop to that, and we've been making a nation out of it ever since. We've done it in our own interests of course, because you can't mix profitable trading with continued uproar. But also because, as a nation, we cannot resist moving in and showing someone how to run his affairs when we see them being run damned badly. We regarded this country as being in a deplorable mess, and set out, fired by an entirely genuine and proselytizing zeal as much as the desire for profit, to put our neighbour's house in order and hand on what we consider to be the blessings of civilization. Which is why we have managed to combine conquest with a pleasant glow of self-righteousness. But once we have welded India into a more solid whole it will become increasingly difficult to hold on to it.'

‘Is that a prophecy?' inquired Winter with a smile.

‘No. It's common sense. It's too large a country. Bacon once wrote something to the effect that if a handful of people, with the greatest courage and policy in the world, grasped too large an extent of territory, it might hold for a time, but it would fail suddenly. He was right.'

‘What about America?' demanded Winter.

‘There weren't so many Americans in America,' said Alex lazily. ‘All they'll have to do there is to exterminate the original owners or pen them up in smaller and smaller reservations. But India happened to be very well stocked with Indians.'

Winter got up and went to lean on the parapet, looking down on the garden below. The scent of dust and the sharp smell of wood-smoke rose through
the hot, still air, and there were rockets going up into the darkening sky over the city, for it was the festival of Bakr Id. From somewhere in the zenana quarter a woman was singing to a sitar; the words clearly audible in the quiet evening - as clear as the crack of shots from the Residency …

Winter said: ‘
Nani
- Ameera's grandmother - used to sing that. “
Alas we were all ignorant and only at the time of our death was it proved that whatever we had seen was all a dream, and whatever we had heard was a short tale
.” It's a song that was sung long before Plassey was fought. This is such an old country—'

‘No, it isn't,' said Alex. ‘It's new. It's as new as - as Russia, if you like.'

Winter turned to smile at him in the dusk. ‘Now you are just arguing for the sake of argument.'

‘No, I'm not. Anything that has such tremendous possibilities and horizons is new. We are old. You can predict more or less what will happen to us. But you cannot predict what will happen to her. She has lain fallow for centuries - they still use the same methods of ploughing and irrigation that they used when we were wearing skins and living in caves. They've gone to seed. But seed if it's ploughed into the ground produces something new. Think of what they could do! We've started them off again - ploughed them in, if you like. They'll hate us for it, but they wouldn't have done anything for another hundred years or so if left to themselves. We've tried to go too quickly and force our way of life on them, but in a hundred years from now - or two hundred, or three - their history may show that Plassey wasn't an end or a defeat, but a beginning. Even this that is happening now was probably needed.'

Winter turned quickly from the parapet and came to stand at the foot of his bed. ‘
Needed
? Why, Alex? Why? You can't say that something as horrible and as cruel as this was needed! Mrs Hossack and that child of hers, and that child's grandchildren, will remember some of the things that have been done. And so will Ameera's children. They'll go on hating.'

‘Perhaps,' said Alex. ‘Though for ourselves we are poor haters and we have short memories. But I cannot believe that this revolt will not mean the end of the Company. I believe that the Crown will have to take over now, and if that happens it is going to mean an enormous stride forward as far as India is concerned. This may mean as much as Plassey. More!'

‘And when we go?' asked Winter.

‘When we go Hinduism will probably come into its own again, and if they aren't careful the country will drift back into an Eastern version of the Balkans - in which case Russia may well win the game after all! But one thing
at least we can be certain of. All this that is happening now will not be regarded by them as a mutiny, but as a heroic War of Independence and Liberation. And because they are a young country they will deny their own atrocities and make political capital out of ours, and the truth - which is neither black nor white - will be lost. But I will have been dead a long time by then. And so will you! Here come the rest of the castaways. Unless it's old Dasim.'

There were footsteps and low voices on the narrow stairs that led up to the roof, and then Carlyon was there, scowling at the sight of Winter and Alex talking together, and Mr Dobbie and the others followed behind him, coming up to breathe the cooler air now that the light was fading.

Arthur Carlyon was a handsome man and the Mussulman garb he wore suited his tall, broad-shouldered figure. Alex lay and watched him as he stood by the parapet talking to Winter, their figures outlined sharply against a green sky in which the first stars floated palely, and disliked him with an intensity and thoroughness that he had not thought himself capable of. But Winter had lost her fear of Carlyon, and, if she had thought about it at all, had forgiven him.

What he had done, or tried to do, belonged to the shadowy past and was completely unimportant. They had all passed through too much, and a yawning, unbridgeable gulf seemed to divide them from the life they had led before the
Shaitan ka hawa
- the ‘Devil's Wind' - had roared across India in the heat of May. Only the present was real; and even that possessed a dream-like unreality that was typified, thought Alex, by the two figures who stood against the darkening sky - an Eastern prince and princess; graceful, oriental, formalized. An illustration by a Persian court-painter to a story from the Arabian Nights - Prince Ahmed and the Fair Pari-Banou, who were, or had been, Baron Carlyon of Tetworth and Mrs Conway Barton.

Even Lou added no touch of reality to those days. The brittle, acid, fast-living, hard-drinking Mrs Josh Cottar of Lunjore had vanished without trace, and in her place was an anxious-eyed woman who looked ten or even twenty years older than that other Mrs Cottar, and who appeared to think of nothing but the welfare of a tiny, placid infant with a fuzz of red hair and round, solemn blue eyes.

‘Lou,' said Alex crossly one evening, ‘you are getting to be a dead bore over that baby. I have it on the best authority – O'Dwyer's - that she isn't smiling at you. It's wind.'

‘Dr O'Dwyer doesn't know what he's talking about,' said Lou calmly. ‘Of course she's smiling at me. She knows me.'

‘So she ought to. You never leave the wretched child alone for five minutes. What is Josh going to say to this?'

‘I don't know,' said Lou. And she might just as well have said ‘I don't care'. ‘There, Alex! - she
is
smiling.'

‘Take it away,' said Alex irritably. ‘It smells of sick. And so do you, Lou!'

He was abominably bad-tempered these days, and Winter put it down to the natural irritability of convalescence.

He had recovered to a reasonable extent, but he did not move from the pavilion on the roof, because the fever had an unpleasant habit of returning at unexpected intervals and he could not seem to get free of it. Also he preferred being left alone to being sent down to join the other men in a room on the lower floor. He considered that he saw quite enough of them as it was. They were allowed to come up to his roof on most evenings, since it was thought to be safer for them there than in the garden, and the women would usually join them for an hour or so.

There were only three women now - four, if one counted Lottie's daughter. Miss Keir had never recovered from that nightmare journey in the covered cart. Her mind had given way, and her health had already been seriously affected by the privations she had endured in the weeks before her arrival at Pari. She had lingered on for a few days and died one hot night within a week of their arrival at the Gulab Mahal, and Lou Cottar had moved down into Mrs Hossack's room in her place.

Lou had said that it was because Mrs Hossack was afraid of being alone, but Winter confided to Alex that she thought Lou had made the exchange because Mrs Hossack, as the mother of four, was a mine of information on the subject of babies, and could be relied upon to give helpful advice should any infantile crisis threaten Amanda.

Winter could not help feeling grateful for the exchange, though she had grown very fond of Lou and thought the baby a darling. But it was wonderful to have her room to herself again: her own room - Sabrina's room. To be able to sit there in peace and quiet. To talk to Ameera there, and to the other women and children who would visit her, without Lou, restless and uncomprehending, sitting silent while they talked and laughed. The nights too were doubly restful now that there was no baby to demand food and Lou's frequent and anxious attention.

‘Lou of all people!' said Alex crossly. ‘I should have said that she was as unmaternally minded as a goldfish, yet here she is, reduced to a state of crooning imbecility in a mere matter of weeks. I am beginning to think that I made a great mistake in assisting that infant to get born. It will be a lesson to me to mind my own business in future.'

He turned on his elbow to look at Winter, and said disagreeably: ‘I don't see you making much fuss over the brat. Are you devoid of any maternal instincts, Mrs Barton?'

‘No,' said Winter, giving the matter thought. ‘But you see, it isn't my baby.'

‘It isn't Lou's,' said Alex.

‘Yes it is. Lottie gave it to her.'

‘And I wonder,' said Alex unpleasantly, ‘what Edward English's parents are going to say to that?'

It was a thought that frequently worried Lou. Supposing that Edward's parents demanded the child?

‘They can't have her!' thought Lou. ‘She's mine! They
couldn't
take her—'

She lay awake at night worrying about it, when she was not worrying about the child's health. Amanda's health need not have given her so much anxiety. The tiny creature throve and gained weight and ceased to wail and whimper. It was in fact a remarkably placid baby, and as babies go a very pretty one. Lou adored it.