Motherland (41 page)

‘No need to go into the city yourselves,’ she says. ‘Just make sure we do the best we can with the men we have.’

Syed Tarkhan is deeply distressed by the violence.

‘It’s only what you said would happen,’ says Larry.

Tarkhan shakes his head.

‘I feel ashamed,’ he says. ‘I feel to blame.’

So many staff have left that there is a shortage of both cars and drivers. Government House rents three Buick Eights, and one is made available to transport hospital guards. Larry learns that Tarkhan proposes to drive the car himself.

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘No, Larry,’ says Tarkhan. ‘There’s no need.’

He means there’s no need for Larry to put himself in danger. This is no longer Larry’s country. But Larry too feels shame and blame.

‘Think of it as a last hurrah for the motherland,’ he says.

‘Ah, I see.’ Tarkhan smiles at that. ‘A noble gesture.’

They pack into the Buick: a Gurkha lieutenant, three of his men, and Larry. Tarkhan takes the wheel. They drive across the city to Old Delhi. They encounter no trouble on the way, but
here and there they see burned-out shops and overturned trucks.

At the Victoria Zenana Hospital the Gurkhas take up their post, and Larry receives a report on the latest casualties from the nurse in charge.

‘Not so terrible.’

‘The mobs will be out after dark,’ says Tarkhan.

They drive back through the deserted streets of the Paharganj area as the light fades in the sky. Crossing the overbridge by New Delhi station they hear shouts. Then comes a burst of gunfire, and the windscreen explodes into fragments. Tarkhan gives a grunt and tips over to one side, then with a convulsive movement rights himself.

‘Syed!’

The car lurches out of control, heading for the parapet of the bridge. Tarkhan struggles with the wheel, panting loudly. The car shudders to a stop. Tarkhan slumps forward, blood pouring from his right shoulder. The engine cuts out.

‘Syed!’

Before Larry can make a move to help him, an army lorry comes screeching up, and eight or nine armed men jump out.

‘Out of the way! Out of the way!’ They point their guns through the shattered windscreen. ‘This is for the Muslim scum!’

Larry can hear from their voices that they’re beyond reason. They’ve come out hunting to kill, and they no longer care. The gun barrels jab at him.

‘Out of the way!’

Half paralysed by terror, he realises dimly that he himself is not in danger. He is an Englishman. Their war is no longer with the likes of him. All he has to do is move aside and let the fratricidal rage take its course. These thoughts pass through his mind
at lightning speed, even as his eyes fall on Tarkhan’s hands, which still grip the steering wheel. He hears the wounded man groan. He sees the fingers of one hand open and close. This simple human gesture is all it takes.

‘No!’ he cries.

He throws himself across Tarkhan, embracing him, as if his arms have the power to shield him from gunfire.

‘Muslim scum!’ shout the armed men. ‘We shoot Muslim dogs! You will die too!’

Larry pulls Tarkhan even more tightly into his arms, so that the blood from his wound runs down his own chest. He hears Tarkhan’s choking voice.

‘Go, Larry. Leave me.’

The men with the guns tug at his sleeves, shouting. He closes his eyes and rocks his friend in his arms and waits to die.

Now the shouting is loud and close. A gun fires, a single shot echoing in the night. He smells the smell of fresh blood. He hears Syed Tarkhan’s low groans. Then he hears another sound: the growl of the army lorry driving away.

He draws a long deep breath. He becomes aware of the drumming sound in his ears, and knows it’s his own pulsing blood. Have they killed his friend in his arms?

‘Syed?’

Tarkhan turns to him, groaning. He can see no fresh wound.

‘I’m taking you to the hospital.’

He drags the wounded man into the passenger seat, and wedges him between the seat and the door. He starts the engine. Hand trembling on the gear stick, he reverses onto the road, and turns to drive back the way they came.

At the Victoria Zenana Hospital the nurses stretcher Tarkhan
into a ward and tear the blood-soaked clothing from his upper body. Larry stays by his side.

‘How badly is he hurt?’

‘He’ll live,’ they tell him. ‘How about you?’

‘I’m not hurt.’

Tarkhan has lost consciousness. A doctor comes and examines the single gunshot wound.

‘Smashed the collarbone,’ he says. ‘Lucky not to have got the main artery.’

So that second gunshot missed its target. How could they miss, at point-blank range? Reliving its sound now in memory, it seems to Larry that the second shot was fired into the air. Why?

He drives the Buick back to Government House alone, careless of any further danger. The warm night air streams through the smashed windscreen, bathing his face. A strange lightness of spirit has taken possession of him. He feels as if he has died and risen again and is now immortal.

Entering Government House through the north door, he makes his way down the corridor, past the startled looks of servants, to the small office where Geraldine keeps her charts. He finds her there alone. She stares at him, mute with shock.

‘It’s all right,’ he says. ‘It’s not my blood.’

He opens his arms. Responding instinctively to his gesture, she comes into his embrace.

He holds her tight, feels her trembling in his arms. He bends his head towards her, and understanding, she turns her face to his. He kisses her, clumsily at first. Then he feels her lips respond, and her body soften in his arms.

When they part, there are bloodstains on her dress, and she is looking at him wonderingly.

‘Larry,’ she says.

Suddenly it’s all so clear. He could have died back there on the overbridge, but he didn’t die. That second gunshot was a command that said: live. Time is so short, death comes so soon. While we have this precious gift of life we must cherish it. We must love each other.

‘I have so much love to give you,’ he says.

‘Do you, Larry?’

‘Will you let me love you?’

He doesn’t ask for her love. That’s for her to give. This isn’t about his own needs or fears. This is about the life force within him, that’s pouring from him in a ceaseless stream.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes.’

*

Larry goes back to the Victoria Zenana Hospital the next day to find Syed Tarkhan sitting up in bed and drinking tea.

‘Larry,’ he says. ‘My brother.’

‘So you’re going to pull through, are you?’

‘I’m leaving, my brother. This afternoon I leave for Karachi.’ He holds out his hand. His eyes have never left Larry from the moment he entered the ward. ‘I will never forget you.’

His limpid gaze speaks to Larry, saying, There are no words.

‘So you’re off to build a brand-new country,’ says Larry.

‘If God wills.’

‘I’ll miss you.’

Tarkhan holds his hand tight, and nods and shakes his head at the same time, all the while looking into his eyes with his tender loving gaze.

‘It truly was a noble gesture, Larry,’ he says.

‘Married?’ says William Cornford.

‘Well, we’re not married yet,’ says Larry. ‘But we’re going to get married.’

‘Well, well, well,’ says his father, nodding his head. ‘This is very good news. Very good news. Cookie will be so excited. As am I. So who is she?’

‘Her name is Geraldine Blundell. Her brother was at Downside a year above me. So she’s a good Catholic, you’ll be pleased to hear.’

‘All I need to please me is to know that you’re happy.’

‘I’m very happy, Dad. You wait till you meet her. She’s very lovely, and very special. She’s been in India with her brother.’

‘So we have poor India to thank, do we? I don’t expect when you took yourself off there you thought you’d come back with a wife.’

‘It was the last thing on my mind.’

‘Well, my boy, I think this calls for a drink.’

William Cornford fusses about in his library, searching through
his bottles for something suitably celebratory. He settles on a single-malt whisky.

‘Now I know it’s none of my business,’ he says, his attention on the glasses, ‘but have you given any thought to what you’re going to live on?’

‘Yes, Dad,’ says Larry. ‘I do realise I need a job.’

‘I rather think you do.’

‘I was wondering if you had anything going?’

William Cornford continues pouring whisky, but now his hands are trembling. He hands Larry his glass. Not trusting himself to speak, he raises his glass in a silent toast.

They drink.

‘Welcome to the company,’ he says at last, his voice throaty with emotion.

*

The Blundells live in Arundel. The marriage is to take place in the church of St Philip. Mrs Blundell has hopes that the Duke of Norfolk will attend, in his capacity as Earl of Arundel and head of the premier Catholic family in the land.

‘You know he’s also the first peer of the realm,’ she tells Larry. ‘As hereditary earl marshal he organised the coronation of the king. Not that Hartley and I care for titles as such. Really it’s the sheer weight of
history
that we find so moving.’

Geraldine has warned Larry about her mother.

‘She’s one of those people who doesn’t really believe in failure. She sees it as a lack of moral fibre, I think. I can hear her now, saying to us children, “Do it properly or don’t do it at all.”’

‘She sounds terrifying,’ says Larry.

But Barbara Blundell takes to Larry from the beginning.

‘If you don’t mind my saying so,’ she tells him, ‘you come as
something of a relief after the last one. Geraldine is my special pet. You’ll forgive my partiality, but I think you’d have to look far and wide to find her combination of beauty without and beauty within. She deserves a husband of true faith and ample fortune. And since Bernard Howard has sired only daughters …’

She gives a shrill high laugh, to show that this is a joke. Bernard Howard is the Duke of Norfolk. Larry is a little alarmed by the ‘ample fortune’ part, which seems not to be a joke. Geraldine tells him not to worry.

‘Mummy knows you’re only starting out. But she’s tremendously reassured to know it’s the family firm. Also I told her you have a best friend who’s a lord.’

‘Do you mean George?’ Larry is surprised to find George in the role of asset. ‘His grandfather sold patent medicine.’

‘A lord is a lord,’ says Geraldine placidly.

England has enjoyed a blazing summer, which extends into a warm dry autumn. The outlook is good for the wedding, now fixed for Saturday, October 25th.

‘After all, we don’t want to compete with the royal wedding, do we?’ says Barbara Blundell with her high laugh. Princess Elizabeth is to be married on November 20th. This turns out to be the reason why the Duke of Norfolk can’t come to Geraldine’s big day. ‘I am a little disappointed, but I suppose someone has to organise the wedding of our future queen.’

The honeymoon is to be in the Cornford house in Normandy, which has been fully refurbished after its wartime occupation. Louisa offers their house as a staging post for the Channel crossing.

‘They’re to stay the night of the wedding with the Edenfields at Edenfield Place,’ Barbara Blundell tells her friends. ‘Then they go on to the family estate of La Grande Heuze.’ She
lingers on the words
place, estate, grande
, with a light but pointed emphasis.

Larry bears all this with a good spirit. He sees Geraldine now in her element, quietly countermanding her mother’s extravagances, making sure that the correct information passes down the chain of family, priests, guests and tradespeople who each have their part to play in the wedding. Her grasp of details astonishes him, as does her confidence in her own judgement in all matters of taste. She will wear her mother’s wedding dress, the seamstress will adjust it to fit her. Larry will wear morning dress. There will be four bridesmaids, of descending size, and two very small pageboys. She suggests that George would make a suitable best man, but here Larry holds out. He makes it clear that he wants Ed Avenell.

‘You’ve never met George,’ he says. ‘Ed is far more dashing.’

*

While Geraldine busies herself with plans for the wedding, Larry is given a crash course on the family company, Elders & Fyffes, in all its current aspects. The London headquarters has recently moved from the Aldwych to 15 Stratton Street in Piccadilly. The rooms are unfamiliar to Larry, but the faces are all the same. Everywhere he goes he meets a general smiling delight that he is to join the firm at last.

‘You know why they’re so happy?’ his father asks him. ‘It’s not because of your pretty face. It’s because they expect you to take over after me, and that means things will go on being run in the same way.’

‘So they shall,’ says Larry, ‘if I have anything to do with it.’

‘Subject, of course, to our ultimate masters in New Orleans.’

This means the mighty United Fruit Company.

‘I thought they pretty much left us alone to run the show,’ says Larry.

‘They do. That was the understanding, back in ’02, when the company nearly went under, and my father turned to them for help. Andrew Preston was running United then, and he was a man of his word. But Preston is long gone. There’s a fellow called Zemurray in charge now. Very different kettle of fish.’

‘Zemurray?’

‘I think he began as Zmurri. Russian, I believe.’

‘And you don’t trust him.’

‘I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of him. But so long as we make money for him, I think he’ll leave us alone.’

As part of his familiarisation process, Larry makes a tour of the main company facilities. He walks the quays of the purpose-built docks at Avonmouth, and at Liverpool. He inspects the purpose-built temperature-controlled railway wagons, and several of the huge depots where the fruit is kept in chilled storerooms until ready for delivery. He goes on board
Zent III
, the company’s most recently acquired vessel, originally built in Norway and operated by Harald Schuldt, a German importer, before being seized as a war prize. The Fyffes fleet numbers fourteen ships, down from the twenty-one before the war, but more than enough for the current depressed level of trade. He studies figures that show the problems the company faces, due to shortages in Jamaica and government restrictions.