Bhowani Junction (29 page)

I said, ‘Oh, was it really?’

‘Govindaswami was sure you’d done it. I
knew
you’d done it. Another of our yard sentries saw you crossing the railway and skulking along the Limit Road when you were supposed to be in the Institute.’

Munching a sandwich, I asked why the Collector didn’t have me arrested.

Savage told me: Because he thought I’d find out, sooner or later, that K. P. Roy and the Sirdarni weren’t the best friends Ranjit could have, and then I’d be able to help him—Govindaswami—a lot.

Savage found a tin of cigarettes in his parachute bag and gave me one. ‘Better smoke this to exorcise the presence of the One, Aum,’ he said.

I saw him in clear focus, but a little larger than life. I heard his voice that had so often sounded cold and nasal, now as clear as a tenor bell. The narrow little compartment magnified him, and I could also see his face reflected in the glass of the window. An electric light bulb glittered above his head. I lifted my wrist to look at my watch. My hand moved slowly, and I noticed that the skin of my wrist was flawless. The watch hung steady, all by itself, a thing apart from me and apart from everything else. To test the sharpness of the separation I looked at other things in turn, and listened to other sounds beyond the tick of the watch. It was true. Each object that I concentrated on separated out and became wholly important, obvious, all-absorbing. I looked at Colonel Savage’s forehead. Three beads of perspiration hung there above his left eyebrow. I thought of my own forehead. It was cool and smooth. I thought of my ears. I knew the shape of them, and perspiration was forming behind them. Later it would run slowly down the side of my neck.

I said, ‘It was awful, trying to be an Indian. No one under
stood me.’

The inane words hovered there, quite clear and full and round above me, and stayed in my ears as echoes. Unhurriedly I tried to bring them back to change them. There was plenty of time before they left me for good and set out on their journey to Rodney Savage in the chair. I said, ‘Pater and Patrick don’t understand what is going to happen, Ranjit doesn’t understand what is happening. You don’t understand what has happened. But I found I couldn’t change myself.’

He said, ‘I know.’

I said thickly, ‘You knew? You’ve been so beastly to me.’ If I spoke clearly and was honest with him, he would see what it was really like. Then he would be able to help me. He was strong enough. I said, ‘May I have another drink, sir?’

I smiled at him to tell him I didn’t really mean the ‘sir’. He said, ‘You’re half drunk already. Are you sure you want another?’

I said, ‘Yes, please. And another cigarette.’

I sank back on the berth, rested my head on the parachute bag, and lit the cigarette. It took a long time, but Colonel Savage did not get up to help me. I blew out the smoke in a long thin stream. I said, ‘Even a cigarette tastes better now.’

He said, ‘Do you think I’ve never been afraid?’

I closed my eyes. It was wonderful. I’d told him, and now I didn’t have to worry any more. He’d tell me what to do. The cigarette tasted lovely, and the whisky was warm and wonderful in my stomach. It was not hot, but just lovely and warm in the carriage. There was a warm, almost forgotten thing, like a thin silk blanket, wrapped round me. Slowly I recognized it. It was security, it was protection, it was happiness.

My God, it was him.

He was moving slowly in the compartment. I heard his chair creak, then his bare feet on the floor. He knew, a fraction of a second before I did.

His lips came slowly down on mine, and his fingers slid slowly back in my hair. For a breath I held my lips closed against him, then all the sensations separated out as before, and there was only one. I parted my lips and hung for a long
time on his mouth. The lights clicked off. His hands moved, and my ache was gone. The train rocked him closer against me, and a million miles away the whistle shrilled.

The train ran through a station. Lights flashed in at the windows, each light like a blinking, vanishing thought on the surface of a deep waiting. I think I’d always been waiting for this.

The station flung back under a long stammering of the wheels across a score of sets of points. I opened my eyes to see his dim face, so tense and hard and close, and put my arms round his neck.

Later I heard my voice crying, ‘Yes,’ and, ‘Yes,’ and long, long afterwards I sat up, took my whisky, and looked through the glass of the window at the racing darkness and the black shadow-trees. He lay there—I knew him all of a sudden, the man with the complexes—hating himself for being so passionate and expert.

I bent over him, kissed his forehead, and whispered, ‘Why didn’t you——?’

‘Do this sooner?’ he finished for me.

I nodded and kissed him again. I said, ‘I didn’t know, but I think you always have.’ I remembered what Molly Dickson had said—‘Is that man in love with you?’ Rodney must be quite an easy person to understand as long as you weren’t involved with him.

He lay back, his hands joined behind his head. He said, ‘I believe in ordeal by fire—that night at the Institute when they wouldn’t dance with you, for instance. Other times. I wanted to see what you were made of. Perhaps I felt too serious about you, too. I did think you were angling for Macaulay though, at first. I couldn’t stand it. Then I knew that it had to be you. It had to be you, like this, without a word spoken, without any begging or asking or refusing or petting or ogling or hand-stroking.’

He hummed the tune: ‘It had to be you, it had to be you, it had to be you.’

I had been drunk. But that had all gone and left no hangover. I didn’t remember ever feeling better, ever in my life
being so warmly wrapped up in certainty. I swayed against him on purpose, as the train swayed, so that my breast would press against him. He kissed my breast, and on his lips something slipped through the warmth and security, and I said, ‘I don’t want to fall in love with you.’

He raised his head, frowned at me, and said, ‘Don’t you? I rather hope I do fall in love with you. Perhaps I have. I’m not sure.’

‘Why do you hope?’ I closed my eyes lazily. I wanted to kiss his feet and wash them so that he would be cool. But already, again, I saw his eyes.

‘Oh, Rodney,’ I said, ‘be careful. I’m afraid I am going to love you.’ For a minute more I was able to think and hold on to a little fear, even under his mouth. Then I gave up my power of thinking, gave it to him with everything else that he wanted. Over and over in my mind, before I slept, ran the tune and the silly words—‘It had to be you.’

male, thirty-four, English, unmarried; lieutenant-colonel
commanding 1st Battalion 13th Gurkha Rifles, Indian
Army

I woke up with a start and a bright light in my eyes. The silence was as loud as it is after a concentration of 155s had just hit you. The wheels had stopped, the windows weren’t rattling or the berths creaking or the carriage frame murmuring. Someone’s body moved across the light outside, and I saw a face at the window six inches from my head. The man was cupping his hands to hold out the light so that he could see in. His nose was flattened against the glass. I could have moved or pulled up the shutter, but I wanted to see Victoria, naked, getting up. She sprang up and knelt on the berth by my head. She and the face stared at each other for a second. She looked as beautiful as—a naked woman kneeling by a naked man’s head. Then she jerked up the shutter and gasped. ‘Rodney, Patrick’s at the window!’

I rolled out and flipped down the catch on the door. We were off. I knew that it must have been Patrick. As soon as I get something good and wonderful and kind, like Victoria, I start to lose it.

I stood up, yawned, and pulled down the blind on the door. The door shook and rattled. Taylor hammered on it with his fists and shouted, ‘Come out! I saw you! Oah, you dirtee little slut!’ He had a strong Anglo-Indian accent. Victoria’s was only noticeable when she got excited.

She stood there, trembling, like a big smooth doe, between the berth and the wall. I examined her carefully, to remember. God knew when this would ever happen again. I put one hand round her neck and rickled her with the other. She tried to push me away, but I held her and kissed her hard while the door shook and groaned. Then I said, ‘You’d better take your clothes and get dressed. In there.’ I nodded to the bathroom
and stooped to pick up my trousers.

‘But—what about Patrick?’ she said. She stood in the tiny bathroom, the door open, struggling into her brassiere and girdle.

‘What about him?’ I said. I began to brush my hair. She couldn’t find her pants—in Punjabi, her
kachh,
signifying self-restraint. The door-handle rattled. Taylor’s mouthing was almost unintelligible. ‘Oah, come out! Oah, you slut! Oah, you——!’

She whispered, ‘Do I look all right?’

I switched on the bathroom light and looked at her, and said, ‘Okay.’ I smiled and tried to make out that I was quite relaxed. I pulled a cheroot from my case and told her to put some lipstick on. Otherwise, she’d never looked better. Sex suited her.

She had to smile when I told her that, and she gave me a quick kiss before she picked up her lipstick. Patrick hammered and hammered. Another voice joined in outside there, and I recognized it as Bill Heatherington’s. Bill said, ‘Please be quiet, my good man. Do you know if this is Colonel Savage’s compartment?’

Taylor yelled, ‘I don’t know! Why the hell should I know? Of course it is his, I saw him with——’

Bill said. ‘There’s no need to shout.’

‘There,’ Victoria whispered breathlessly, ‘I’m ready.’ She smoothed out the folds of her sari and stood quivering like a violin string. It was the kind of situation people tell me they dream about and wake up sweating with embarrassment. I stood there, puffing steadily, and all the lights were blazing in the compartment. I told her, ‘You look like a recruit on his first quarter guard.’

She said, ‘Oh,
Rodney
! What are we going to do?’ She was entangled in God knows how many sets of values that didn’t mean a damned thing to me, or that I’d grown away from—but I wasn’t going to give her up. I made up my mind at that instant that I would fight—that I must fight—for her with everything I’d got.

So I opened the door. Taylor stumbled on the top step and
burst in like a bomb. I put out my arm to steady him and said, ‘Careful, Taylor. You’ll be hurting yourself.’

He stood there, pressed back against the wall, with his chest heaving. He was like a big, brave, clumsy buffalo, even to the pale blue-green eyes. He didn’t seem to notice me, though my hand was resting on his sleeve, but glared directly at Victoria. Bill Heatherington stood behind him, outside the door. Bill is plump and fortyish, with a small fair moustache and blue eyes. Behind Bill was Birkhe, his eyes dancing and his face as unreadable as a Bath bun. Indian passengers hurried past in the light streaming out of the station buildings. The vendors and hawkers chanted their wares up and down the platform. A clock face directly above Birkhe’s head said 10.16 p.m. This was Gondwara.

Taylor shook his left fist under Victoria’s nose. In his right hand he brandished her pants. They were pink brief with a thin edging of lace round the legs. Taylor bawled, ‘I saw you lying naked on thee bed, like a tart! Naked on thee bed, I saw you. Oah, you are a——! Oah, you!’ He lashed out at her with his fist. I tightened my grip on his arm and pulled him back with a jerk, so that his fist hit the wall, not very hard. Bill Heatherington was laughing silently.

Taylor turned on me and bawled, ‘And you, you stuck-up rotter! Just because you are a colonel in thee military department you think you can play fast and loose with my girl. You tried to get me out of thee way by killing me with an ink bottle, didn’t you?’

I was sorry I’d never had a chance to apologize to him about that. Now wasn’t the time. I said, ‘Please talk softer, Taylor. I have a pierced eardrum. And stop insulting Miss Jones. I don’t know whether she is your girl, but I do know that she is my Intelligence Officer. She was not naked, nor was I.’

‘I saw you!’ he screamed, pounding the berth with his hand.

Heatheringron broke in with, ‘Want any help, Rodney?’ and climbed on to the upper step of the door.

I said, ‘No thanks, Bill. Mr Taylor’s rather excitable, but he is not dangerous.’ I don’t know why I had to be so unpleasant.
Well, I do. Plain, common jealousy, available at all Woolworths.

Taylor went quite pale and said slowly, ‘I will shoot you, Mister Colonel bloody Savage, I will shoot you.’

I said, ‘I think defenceless Indian clerks are more your mark, Taylor.’ It wasn’t fair, but I don’t play fair. I play to win.

Taylor stared at me and said with a kind of shocked wonder, ‘You are a cad, Colonel Savage. You know I was onlee doing my duty to protect the armoured car.’ He was a most admirable man, really.

I said, ‘I understand, Taylor. Now—get out.’

But he stood there still, in his dirty white shirt and his old St Thomasian’s tie and his down-at-heel black shoes, between us two colonels of infantry. Then he said, pleading with Victoria, ‘Vickee, you
were
on the berth, weren’t you? I saw you. I am not drunk.’

She waited for me to answer. She wanted me to speak, and then it wouldn’t be her own hands that destroyed him. But I am not a cricketer. I am only a good first slip. I said nothing. At last she said, ‘No, I wasn’t. Please go away, Patrick. I don’t want to speak to you.’

Taylor’s big hands opened and closed, but there was no one he could strangle there; they groped round for something to hold on to, but Victoria had moved out of his reach. He turned and stumbled out—with her pants.

Victoria’s knees were shaking, and she sat down suddenly on the edge of the berth. Bill cleared his throat twice, obviously wondering whether he should say anything about what he had just seen. He kept his eyes away from Victoria. Someone blew a whistle, and I said, ‘We’d better get off the train.’ I told Birkhe to bring out our kit.

It was cooler on the platform. I had begun to develop quite an eye for the beauty of the railway, and I don’t mean Victoria. The train made a good curve on the curved platform, and was finished off by a curve in another plane, the engine’s boiler and the stainless steel bands round it. The signal up there flicked to green, and the highlights on the boiler and on
the steel bands changed from ruby to emerald.

I wondered why Bill had come down to meet me. I told him I could have found my way out to his camp. Then I said, ‘You haven’t met Subaltern Jones, have you? Victoria, Bill Heatherington. He commands the Thirtieth Raj Rif.’

‘I’ve seen your name often,’ she said, holding out her band. Bill murmured, ‘How do you do, Miss Jones.’

The train pulled out, southbound, and the empty rails were left there shining under the lights. I had to put Bill straight. I said, ‘Victoria is a WAC (I). She’s been doing Battalion Intelligence Officer as well as Railway Liaison Officer for me.’ I paused a long time and then added softly, speaking directly at Heatherington and looking at him and smiling, ‘And, she’s a very nice girl.’

Heatherington grinned cheerfully at her then, she smiled back, and all the awkwardness had gone. It’s as easy as winking, if you’re born a son of a bitch, in the happy American phrase. The trouble is that the only people I like are people who can do it, like Birkhe—and all Gurkhas, for that matter—and Taylor. Now Heatherington’s inquisitiveness was satisfied, and Victoria’s reputation was at least partly refurbished. Heatherington was still smiling, as though saying to himself, Well, you lucky bastard Or perhaps he was smiling because Victoria was so beautiful and in love, and a very nice girl. Anyway, his look was just that—very nice, nothing more.

Heatherington clicked his tongue, stopped, and fumbled in his pocket. He handed me a signal form and said, ‘Here, Rodney. This came for you an hour ago. I’ve just remembered that I came to the station to give it to you.’

I took it, read it, and handed it to Victoria. This is it:
SECRET
.
TO
30
RAJ RIF FROM
1/13
GR
.
FOR LIEUTENANT-COLONEL SAVAGE PERSONAL FROM COLLECTOR BHOWANI BEGINS TAYLOR HAS AUTHORIZED SEVERAL AFI MEN KEEP ARMS WITH THEM AS PERSONAL PROTECTION AGAINST ANTI-EUROPEAN ACTIVITIES HE CLAIMS TO HAVE RECEIVED YOUR PRIOR AUTHORITY RESULTING SITUATION INFLAMMABLE PLEASE RETURN BHOWANI EARLIEST TO DISCUSS WITH ME REGARDS GOVINDASWAMI ENDS

She handed it back to me and said slowly, ‘Patrick has a pistol on him. I saw it in his pocket.’

I hadn’t noticed that.

I worked out that Taylor must have come down there to talk to the lieutenant of the Gondwara A.F.I. platoon. He’d find himself in front of a firing squad for fomenting a mutiny if he wasn’t careful. I wondered where he’d got to. I told Birkhe to ask the Stationmaster where he was, and bring him to us if he could.

‘
Jee-lo, huzoor,
’ Birkhe said.

It didn’t matter a damn where Taylor was, except that I wanted him back in Bhowani after I’d talked to Govindaswami. I said, ‘Victoria, your leave is cancelled.’

She smiled at me, her lips parted and the big warm bedroom eyes shining. She said, ‘It doesn’t matter, sir. I hadn’t even warned the Roviras that I was coming.’

It was lucky in one way that this affair came up at that moment. Otherwise she might have been thinking more of Patrick the wronged lover, instead of Taylor the angry buffalo.

I said, ‘And now, when does the next bloody train on the Delhi bloody Deccan bloody Rail-bloody-way bloody well leave for Bho-bloody-wani?’

They laughed, and I took Victoria’s arm and said, ‘Let’s go and get something to eat.’

‘The next train back is Number One Down Mail, depart Gondwara twenty-three thirty-three, arrive Bhowani Junction oh-five forty-seven,’ she said happily. She knew the time table by heart.

Heatherington said, ‘My God, the girl’s a walking Bradshaw.’

I said, ‘She’s a railway girl, from Bhowani. She’s been wearing a sari to find out whether she prefers it that way.’

Bill glanced at her in the light streaming from the door of the European refreshment room. He seemed to notice for the first time that she was an Anglo-Indian. He shook his head and said, It must be damned difficult.’

She smiled at him for that and said quickly, ‘It is.’

Bill pushed open the door of the refreshment room, and I
said, ‘Not in there, Bill, for God’s sake. I’ve had enough racing murghi and stewed prunes to last me until I’m ninety-five.’ I led them a couple of doors along, into the non-vegetarian Hindu restaurant.

They followed me, and as we stood inside I caught Victoria looking at me with wonder and surprise in her face. By God, I knew why. I was young again, no more than twenty-five. There hadn’t been any war, and I hadn’t ordered a hundred attacks, and I hadn’t got any M.C.S. She’d done it, simply by lying naked to take me, and answering me with love and gladness.

She laughed aloud with happiness, and Bill said, ‘Miss Jones, when you smile you really are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’

So I had done the same to her.

She laughed again and said to Bill. ‘You’ve been in India too long, sir, or you wouldn’t say that to me.’ She smiled, and looked at me to acknowledge how wonderful it was that she, an Anglo-Indian, could say a thing like that. Whatever happened afterwards, I knew she was rid of that fear for good. (George, you may give me another medal.)

The manager popped out of the back of the restaurant like a weevil out of a biscuit. ‘Sahib!’ he cried. ‘You have come to
wrong
place! This is restaurant, Hindu, non-vegetarian.’

‘I know,’ I said, holding up my hand. ‘But we are Hindus, non-vegetarian.’ The place was empty, no trains were due in, and I asked him whether it would be all right. He beamed and said, ‘Yes, yes, sah, quite all right, sah!’

‘Then speak Hindustani to me, brother. You’re not a Bombay bearer, and I’m not a gona,’ I said in Hindustani, and his smile widened. This pidgin English was one of the worst things the war-time invasions of India had done, and I couldn’t stand it any more than I could stand soldiers saying, ‘Very good, sir.’ I told the manager, ‘As a matter of fact, we are on our way to attend a Congress meeting in Delhi as guests of the Mahatma and the Pandit. We are hungry. We also want some whisky to drink to the early departure of the English. Oh, yes, there’ll be one more of us coming.’

He cried, ‘Yes sah, yes sah,
Jee-han, sahib, jee-han, jee-han!
Congress wale!
’ He hurried out, shaking with laughter.

We leaned across the table and talked. Victoria laughed and talked with us. Bill and I disposed of the shop which I’d originally come down there to discuss with him, and she knew what we were talking about and made notes in my notebook for me. Birkhe came in and sat down with us. No one knew where Taylor was. Every now and then Birkhe and I would talk in Gurkhali while Victoria joked with Heatherington. The food came; we ate properly with our fingers and talked of Delhi and Bhowani, Calcutta nd Bombay and Manali, Peshawar, Rawalpindi, and Poona, Razmak and Quetta. Victoria didn’t really belong to that world, but for the moment she could believe she did. The people she’d worked with in Delhi wouldn’t know Razmak from Friday, but she had heard enough to recognize the right cries, so she drank more whisky and got as high as a kite, but without getting frisky. The engine and I had given her such a going over that her body had become separated from her mind. Her body sat quietly in the chair, recuperating, while her mind sang and rejoiced round that room like a nightingale.