The Ravi Lancers (36 page)

‘Ah ... but still servant of English? Thees my ‘ouse once ... my ‘usband killed first week of war. Now I living weeth sister, we both ‘ores ... Was good fuck?’

He nodded. ‘Very good.’ He wanted to tell her to get her clothes on, covering the tufts under her armpits and the now wet bush gleaming between her parted thighs. But she said, ‘I understand ... you like beat me again? ‘Ere!’ She took the swagger stick and gave it to him and knelt on the bed. ‘Go on ... I no charging no more money.’

The criss-crossed welts stood up scarlet now, and already beginning to tinge dark blue at the ends. Krishna Ram felt another stirring of desire, the stick twitched involuntarily in his hands and his penis jerked half upright. But suddenly it was not Marthe the French whore but her ... her buttocks, her bush sticking out between the thighs, her parted lips half hiding, half beckoning. Would he want to slash at her? For the same reasons? He threw the cane down and said, ‘Get dressed. No more.’

She dressed methodically. When she was ready she said formally, ‘
Merci, monsieur
... When you wanting, sending servant, yes?’

‘No,’ Krishna cried. ‘No! Go now. Please! ‘

He threw himself back on the bed and tried to shut out the visions streaming steadily through his mind, like pictures across the screen of a bioscope, but they came steadily on, an endless succession of views of
her
, from in front, from behind, from the side, as she washed, stood, brushed her hair, urinated, ran, ate, petted her dog. She was always naked, white, and marked with those three thick stigmata of hair, one under each arm and one in the crotch.

A week later he sent Hanuman with a message to Captain Ramaswami, asking him to come over. When the black captain arrived, with an ungainly salute, Krishna Ram said, ‘I think I’ve got VD.’

The doctor said, ‘Take down your trousers. Let’s have a look.’ A minute later: ‘Yes. A dose of gonorrhoea.’

Krishna began to button himself up again. ‘Sohan Singh got me a woman a week ... exactly seven days ago. It was the whore Marthe. She and her sister practise at the end of the village, she said.’

He stood, feeling unclean, thinking that the discharge from his penis was visible to all the world, staining his trousers and his body.

‘You should have waited till Sohan had had time to get his brothel for our men going. Yes, it’s in operation now. He got two girls from a long way off. They are set up in an old cowshed about half-mile along the road to Boulouris. I inspect them both every other day, but there’s better protection than that--Sohan Singh keeps a guard on them day and night, and no one but our men gets anywhere near them.’

‘Have none of our men got VD?’

The doctor said, ‘Oh, there are a few hereditary syphilitics, and one or two men caught gonorrhoea by slipping into Amiens or Abbeville on short leave, but we know who they are and they’ve all been cured ... Come over to the RAP and I’ll start treating that. The first thing I have to do is stop the inflammation. And then I’ll give you the hockey sticks.’

‘What’s that?’ Krishna asked, pulling on his trousers.

‘Silver sticks of gradually increasing size, which we have to work down the urethra once a day to make sure that scar tissue from the inflammation that is causing that discharge doesn’t grow on to the opposite wall of the urethra, and so block it. By the way, no more alcohol until you’re cured. It prevents healing of the inflammation.’

Krishna said, ‘I’m giving it up anyway. What happened that night ... what I was feeling and thinking ... has made me realize that we ... I... have enough problems without drinking.’

‘Good,’ the doctor said. ‘You were hitting the bottle much too hard. Whatever they are,
you
can stand up to them without it.’

Half an hour later, in the RAP, when Captain Ramaswami had bathed and anointed his penis and he had just finished dressing, the RAP orderly rushed in with a hissed message.
‘Brigadier-general sahib ane wala hail’

The doctor frowned, ‘What does that idiot want here?’

Rainbow Rogers burst into the RAP on the heels of the orderly. ‘Ah, there you are, Krishna ... and you, Captain, what’s your name, I keep forgetting?’

‘Ramaswami,’ the doctor said briefly.

‘Ramaswami, of course ... Well, this is a great day for all of us.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Krishna said. His penis felt sore and again the thought obsessed him that the discharge was staining the front of his breeches. ‘Why, sir?’

The brigadier-general touched his medal ribbons, glancing down. ‘I have been given an immediate award of the CMG. Here’s the ribbon. See!’ His finger rested on a new blue-red ribbon at the head of all the others on his left breast. ‘It was awarded for the action at St. Rambert Ridge,’ he said. His hand dropped and he raised his head. ‘It was won by all the gallant soldiers of my brigade, and in their names I shall wear it proudly.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Krishna Ram said.

‘I have put you in for a decoration, too, Krishna Ram, but as yet we have heard nothing about it. I most sincerely hope you get it... Now I must dash back to my headquarters. The Russian General Podgorov is coming for dinner and I must be there to do the honours. I may be showing him round one of the regiments tomorrow, but the Brigade Major will telephone ahead.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Anything you want? ... Oh, we’ve heard from Division that there’s no hope of getting another British officer for you. Oh, you didn’t know Major Bateman had asked for one? Well, he had ... Do you have any idea when he’s returning to duty?’

‘About a month, he thinks, sir,’ Krishna said.

‘Good, good. We need him ... though you’re doing very well, yes, very well.’

He strode out, an almost ethereal light of happiness lighting up his thin face.

Ramaswami said, ‘Brigadier-general Roland Vernon Rogers, CMG, MVO! What a goal to live for ... I must get back to work.’

‘Don’t forget that the big
tamasha’s
due to start in an hour.’

‘I know,’ the doctor said, ‘but I promised myself I’d try to read up on all the gynaecological work that’s been published since I left India. I have a friend at St. Mary’s in London who’s been sending it over to me.’

‘Oh, come on,’ Krishna said. ‘There’s going to be a nautch. We’re going to light big fires, and wear every bit of costume we brought with us, and more that Sohan Singh has had made up somewhere. There won’t be an Englishman there. You’ll think you’re back in India--not a white face to be seen!’

‘That couldn’t be India,’ the doctor said grimly.

‘Yes it could--in Basohli.’

The doctor grinned suddenly, the smile transforming his big harsh face and said, ‘Very well, Rajah sahib. I hear and I obey. Who am I, a mere black man, to counter the prince’s command?’ He made a mock
namasti
.

Warren dozed fitfully in a corner seat of a first-class compartment as the leave train bumped slowly towards St. Omer. His leg ached slightly, as it still did when he had to hold it in any one position for too long, but otherwise he was again fit, and fully recovered from his wound. Three days ago he had walked twenty miles with Diana, from the house to Netheravon on the Plain and back, as a final test. They had lunched on bread and cheese at a pub by Stonehenge. It was quite like old times. Diana was a good scout, but even she had changed in some ways. She was not quite so open and transparent, seeming now to hide emotions where before she would show them. But it was Joan who had changed the most. He found himself frowning and tried to keep his face impassive. It was that damned Ralph ... the poor chap couldn’t help his background and birth, but why did that have to turn him into a raving socialist and pacifist? And why did Joan have to swallow the whole thing hook, line, and sinker? Mother still kept trying to get him a job but he wouldn’t go. The two of them were having a bad effect on the children, too, teaching them to sit around in fuggy rooms, painting or drawing when they ought to have been out of doors with a dog and a gun ... well, they were a little small for the gun yet, but that was the right idea.

The train ground to a stop and the major in the opposite corner of the crowded compartment peered through the window. ‘Arnay-le-Poste,’ he said. ‘Where’s that?’

‘About half way, sir,’ a lieutenant in the middle said, stifling a yawn.

‘What are we stopped for now?’ someone asked.

‘God knows. To get a cow off the line, probably.’

The station building was tall and silent, lit by a faint lamp over the name inscribed in red tiles high on the side. With a rumble and a hiss-hiss-hiss a train pulled up on the other line. Dimly Warren could make out cattle trucks full of soldiers. Not British, he thought--French, or perhaps Belgian. Where were they going? They were mostly asleep, the doors of the cattle trucks open to the May night air, here and there a man standing in the door or sitting on the step, his legs dangling dangerously. The troop train hissed out of the station and still the leave train waited. Half an hour passed, then another train drew up on the other line, this one coming from behind. It stopped and Warren saw that it was a long goods train loaded with stores--mainly artillery ammunition from the shapes of the objects under the dimly gleaming tarpaulins. He peered at his watch and saw that it was 4.20 a.m.

The ammunition train pulled out northward and half an hour later the leave train followed. The first light spread a pinkish haze over the flat fields of Artois and Warren felt a momentary shiver of recollection: thus came the dawn the morning of the attack at St. Rambert. He closed his eyes against the memory, and the sight of the captain opposite snoring, his mouth open, stubble dark on his lean jaw.

Yes, his leg had recovered and the broken bone healed, but now there was a hurt in his mind. It was not only Joan who had changed. England itself wasn’t the same as it used to be, even as it had been when he and Krishna spent a few days there in September last, and played cricket ... Everything was going to the bad. He thought of the girls he had seen in London on his way through. Respectable girls, you would have said--you would have known, once, from their accents. Now they were selling themselves on the Strand and down the Haymarket. Giving themselves away, more accurately, for the money they asked went to war charities, they proclaimed. One had accosted him and she was a lady. That was bad enough, but when he told Joan about it she had actually defended the girl: she had a right to do what she liked with her own body, Joan said. Prostitution was only wrong if it was exploiting women for economic reasons, Joan said. Thank God the children were too young to understand what she was saying, or thinking. He’d have to put a stop to that kind of talk before they grew much older ... And take Ralph and Young Marsh and their talk of social injustice and pacifism! Joan’s arty friends laughed at his standards, but in times of difficulty they were what helped you win through. In hard times you didn’t relax standards, but tightened them. He remembered meeting Fuller in the lane one dusk--Fuller, the man who’d made an indecent advance to a boy three or four years ago. At the time--himself home on furlough--he’d been among those who favoured taking no action, overt or covert. Live and let live, he’d said, and he remembered telling Sir Tristram Pennel that India was full of buggers, and none the worse for it.

But running into the fellow in the lane just last week was an awkward business, for Fuller had come forward with hand outstretched crying, ‘Major Bateman! I heard you were back. I do hope your wound is not serious.’ Warren had taken the hand, because his mind hadn’t worked quickly enough, and the fellow had practically popped out of the hedge at him. But then he’d thought, this man’s a sodomite, like Sher Singh. He’s as bad as Young Marsh refusing to volunteer, as bad as the girls giving themselves away on Piccadilly. They were all in their way undermining the foundations of society. So he’d said stiffly, ‘Yes, my leg is almost healed now. Good evening,’ and strode on, as Fuller quickly stepped aside for him. He’d just caught the expression on Fuller’s face ... like a child slapped without warning. He’d believed that Warren was his friend, and now he’d been snubbed. Warren gritted his teeth: he wasn’t any bugger’s friend, or any loose woman’s, or any traitor’s.

That was a bad evening, for he’d arrived home, his face grim, thinking of Fuller, and been met at the door by Joan, white, the light behind her, a telegram in her hand. ‘Tim’s dead,’ she said, ‘shot down over the German lines.’

Tim was her second brother, recently transferred from the Green Howards to the Royal Flying Corps. Warren could think of nothing to say except, ‘He was doing his duty.’

Then Joan did the extraordinary thing. She lifted her hand with the telegram in it and dashed it across his face as he stood there in the hall, crying, ‘To hell with duty! Don’t you see it’s destroying what it’s supposed to defend? And turning you all into animals. Worse--into machines! ‘

She ran upstairs sobbing, her long hair trailing down her back. For a moment Warren thought he’d go up after her, and try to comfort her, but decided that in her present mood she would not accept his comforting.

‘I say, are you all right, sir?’

It was the lieutenant opposite, looking at him with concern. He said shortly, ‘Yes, why?’

‘You cried out... in your sleep.’

‘I wasn’t asleep,’ he said gruffly. ‘Are we nearly there?’

It was full dawn now, and the rising sun shone on rumpled fields, shattered buildings, and a huge barbed-wire enclosure holding thousands of tons of ammunition, and millions of boxes and crates, all geometrically divided by duckboarded walks and gravelled roads. Here and there tall lorries were being loaded by working parties. The train drew into St. Omer station. He was back at the war. He stood up with a sense of grim exhilaration. During these weeks lying in bed with his leg in traction, staring at the ceiling, thinking; during those days walking the lanes alone or with Diana--he had digested all that he had seen, at the front and in England. He had worked out what was right and what was wrong. He knew what he had to do.

At the RTO’s office he found a message directing him to report to the Divisional commander before returning to his regiment, which was at Mennecy. An hour later he was with Major-General Glover, eating a breakfast served by khaki-clad waiters. The general said, ‘Had a good leave, I hope, Bateman.’