1977 (15 page)

She put the letter down, took her spectacles, off and realized that her heart was going very

fast so that she sat still and breathed slowly and deeply and wondered whether she was going

to have an attack of the kind Tusker had had.

It came to her then that fundamentally she did not believe in Tusker’s recovery, in there

being any firm foundation, any foundation at all, for accepting Dr Mitra’s assurances that

another attack was not inevitable. She had merely been closing her mind to what at a deeper

level of consciousness she knew had to be faced. In a year, perhaps sooner, she could be a

widow.

She would be alone. She would be alone in Pankot. She would be alone in a foreign

country. There would be no one of her own kind, her own colour, no close friend by whom

to be comforted or on whom she could rely for help and guidance. The question whether

she would be virtually destitute was one that frightened her so much that even her sub-

conscious mind had been keeping that fear buried deep. There were areas of Tusker’s affairs

over which he had always presided like a jealous God and over which he still presided even

though he must remember the time when she lost faith in his capacity to preside sensibly

over anything.

“What I must do,” she thought, “is go out to him now, regardless of the consequences, and

say, Tusker, what is to happen to me if you die first?”

But just then she heard him say, “Ha!” which meant he had found another passage to

criticize in poor old Mr Maybrick’s charming little book on the history of Pankot, and that if

she went out to say Tusker what is to happen to me etcetera she wouldn’t have the chance to

open her mouth because he would start complaining about some tiny little error Mr

Maybrick had made. Either that or he would be so absorbed (or pretending to be) that the

vital question would be rewarded at best with no answer or at worst by some coarse counter-

question such as What the bloody hell are you talking about?

“Tusker and I do not truly communicate with one another any more,” she told the empty

living room. “His silence is his silence and my loquacity is my loquacity but they amount to

the same thing. I can’t hear what he is thinking and he does not hear what I’m saying. So we

are cut off from one another, living separate lives under the same roof. Perhaps this is how it

has always been between us but only become apparent in our old age.”

Life might have been different if they had gone home when he retired from Smith, Brown

& McKintosh in 1960. She had been weak and foolish not to insist, not to issue an

utimatum. Bleak though England had seemed during the few weeks they’d spent there in

1950 by 1960 things had vastly improved by all accounts, although at the expense of a huge

rise in the cost of living which, as old India hands on pension, priced them—so Tusker

insisted -out of the home market.

But that had been an excuse. Slowly it had been borne in on her since that Tusker had

never intended to go home. It was as though he bore a grudge against his own country and

countrymen, whereas if either of them was entitled to bear a grudge it was she, for the way

she’d so often been treated by some of those awful women who had condescended and

taken every nasty little advantage of her as a junior wife who was not in a position—no, not

in a position—to tell them where they got off but instead, oh yes instead, under an

obligation to bear their treatment meekly not just for Tusker’s sake but because a hierarchy

was a hierarchy and a society without a clear stratification of duties and responsibilities and

privileges was no society at all, which the Indians knew as well as anyone, let alone the

British who had had the whole burden to bear and without whom India would just have

fallen apart and nearly did in 1947 when the British handed over and the Indians started

killing each other and would have fallen apart if Dickie Mountbatten hadn’t been backed up

by men like Nehru who was an aristocrat, an old Harrovian and a thorough gentleman and

by an army whose senior officers were mostly Sandhurst men and awfully reliable.

There really wasn’t a single aspect of the nice civilized things in India that didn’t reflect

something of British influence. Colonel Menektara had impeccable English manners, as did

his wife who was in many ways as big a bitch as Mildred Layton had been, but this

comforted Lucy since it indicated continuity of civilized behaviour, and as the wife of a

retired colonel herself she was in a position to give delicately as good as she delicately got

which meant that she and Coocoo Menektara understood one another perfectly.

The new Indian army was a credit to the old. The men never failed to get to their feet at the

club if you paused to say good evening. With such an army and with such a prime minister as

Nehru’s daughter at the helm one need never fear a dictatorship of generals, such as they’d

been forced to have in Pakistan.

Nor could one anticipate the subversion of the peasantry who remained as they had

presumably been from time immemorial : tough, self-reliant, hard-working, astute, shrewd

and long-suffering. This was how the British had found them and had the sense to leave

them although with access to all the advantages of western technology which upper class

Indians were certainly proving themselves keen to understand and adopt for the benefit of

the country as a whole.

What filled her with anger, often, was the recollection that because of Tusker’s lack of

ambition she herself had had to wait until the very end to rise to the position she had aspired

to and longed for, the position of Colonel’s Lady. No sooner achieved, and the old hierarchy

collapsed and the new one, the Indian one, took its place and in this one her position had

been marginal and temporary and soon exchanged for that of, to be blunt, yes, to be blunt,

box-wallah’s wife, mixing with other box-wallah’s wives in a world which had increasingly

dismayed her because it was one which had brought her into contact with the emerging

Indian middle class of wheelers and dealers who with their chicanery, their corrupt practices,

their black money, their utter indifference to the state of the nation, their use of political

power for personal gain were ruining the country or if not ruining it making it safe chiefly

for themselves : a hierarchy within a hierarchy, with the Mrs Bhoolabhoys at its base and at

its peak people like the Desais, who had been nothing, were now as rich as Croesus and

marrying their daughter into the family of a minister who himself had become rich by

putting a price on his department’s favours; or so she understood if she were to believe

Tusker. But what of what Tusker said about anything was she to believe?

The answer came as if whispered in her ear by a winged messenger who had been standing

patiently for years waiting for the moment to deliver his message.
Nothing
. She could believe

nothing Tusker said or did because nothing he said or did revealed continuity of thought,

intention or action. He had become devious in spite of that combative forthright manner.

This meant that she could no longer believe
in
Tusker. She had begun not to do so on the

day the British left India and they had stayed on, on loan. His personality change really dated

from then.

She resumed her spectacles and said aloud, “I shan’t think about that today. I’ll think about

it tomorrow.” But the magic formula for transformation and transmigration was not working

today. The Lodge was not Tara. She found her attention divided between the letter from

Sarah which needed a quick answer and the problems that Tusker’s personality changed had

encumbered her with.

Dear Sarah, she would begin —

“Ha!” Tusker said again, banging another nail into Mr May-brick’s coffin.

Dear Sarah (she would begin) So many thanks for your letter.
(Without actually saying it’s the

first time I’ve heard of a sandal-wood box I don’t remember Tusker mentioning it or you showing it to me at

the time)
. It was so nice to hear from you. This is just a hurried reply to say we shall be

delighted to see your young friend David Turner here in Pankot.
(I shan’t say anything to Tusker

yet, he’ll only grumble and say something unkind about young Englishmen who can afford to swan around

India no doubt at someone else’s expense probably the taxpayer’s, which is ridiculous when I tell you he’s

prepared to pass the time of day with a dirty little English hippie whose begging is a disgrace to us all.)
I’ll

write more fully in a day or two.
(But then you see I’m afraid Tusker has lost his sense of proportion

and only seems to like English people who have dropped out.)
I do hate to ask for such a silly little

thing and on no account go to any trouble over it
(just for little me though why you shouldn’t I don’t

know, it’s not much to ask and you can’t rely on people like Mrs Desai who’s always going to and fro

between Delhi, Zurich, London, Paris and New York and comes back loaded with stuff from the duty free

shops and other stuff that if she doesn’t smuggle in must cost her a fortune at the customs not that she can’t

afford it but she always seems to forget my little requests)
. But if young Mr Turner wouldn’t be most

awfully embarrassed to have such an item in his luggage
(he sounds to me as if nothing would

embarrass him at all, I wonder how long he wears his hair?)
and if you could obtain it easily, I mean

locally, without going to the bother of a journey to Selfridges
(which Mrs Blackshaw made such a

fuss about having had to do)
I really should appreciate enormously two dozen sachets of Martin

and Williams’s Belle Madame Special Blue Rinse No. 3, which is the only thing that suits my

stupid old hair and is virtually unobtainable here and I’m fast running out of the sachets Mrs

Blackshaw kindly sent last year
(which were held up in the customs and cost more in dues really than

was worth the trouble because Tusker grumbled so much although he’d grumble if I stopped paying attention

to my personal appearance and my hair is my only vanity)
—

“Ha!” Tusker said again. Then he called, “Luce?”

“Coming Tusker.”

“Are you there, Luce?”

“I’ve just said so.” She went out to the verandah.

“Who was the last person buried at St John’s?” he asked.

She thought for a while.

“Mr Maybrick,” she said.

“There you are! He’s got that wrong too. He says here it was old Mabel Layton.”

She stared at him.

“But Tusker, dear, I think he was buried after he’d written his little book.”

He stared at her in retaliation. “Well for God’s sake, I’m not such a bloody fool as not to

realize that.”

It was a warm morning but wild irritation was bringing her out in goose-pimples. She had

the urge to beat him over the head with
A Short History of Pankot
which she now wished she

had never found hidden away on a dusty shelf in the club library and brought back for him.

“Then what is your problem, Tusker?”

“I don’t have a problem. It’s Maybrick’s problem. I beg your pardon.
Was
Maybrick’s

problem. He says here, ‘With the interment in 1943 of Mabel Layton, the record of burials in

this old churchyard ends and this chapter in the history of Pankot as it reveals itself to us

through the headstones that mark the graves of British men and women who died far from

home is closed.’ “

“That’s wrong,” Lucy said.

“Well that’s what I just said.”

“I don’t mean that. What I mean is that it was 1944 when Mabel died so she couldn’t have

been interred in 1943, could she?”

“In Maybrick’s book people can be buried any bloody time or not at all.
He’s
there, isn’t he?

But according to his book he can’t be.”

“She wasn’t supposed to be there either.”

“Who wasn’t supposed to be what?”

“Mabel Layton wasn’t supposed to be buried at St John’s. She wanted to be buried at St

Luke’s in Ranpur next to her second husband, James Layton, ICS, John Layton’s father, but

Mildred just shovelled her into the ground so as to be shot of her.”

“What on earth are you talking about? I don’t know what you’re saying or what it’s got to

do with old pissy-pants Maybrick.”

“It has quite a lot to do with Pissy-Pants Maybrick, Tusker,” Lucy said levelly, “because it

was Edgar Maybrick who went with Miss Batchelor to the mortuary only he didn’t go in to

view the body because of his wife who had died, so Miss Batchelor went in alone to

convince herself that Mabel was really dead and after that she went off her head and tried to