1977 (24 page)

“Won’t they be very expensive?”

“No charge! No charge!” he shouted, and put his hands behind his back, like Ibrahim, yet

unlike Ibrahim, more like a man who put them there to forestall an intention to put them on

her.

Well, well.

“That is very generous of you, Mr Bhoolabhoy. I shan’t presume on your generosity to

more than a modest extent, though. A print or two, particularly of the one of
mali
and me at

the graveside, to send to—to send home. Oh you’d be surprised how welcome they’ll be and

how nostalgic people are. Old Pankot friends. People before your time, of course. They like

one to keep up. Pictures of the church and the churchyard will be looked and looked at and

sighed and sighed over, I assure you.”

They were standing now under the arch of the lychgate. She looked at her watch. It was

half past midday. The tonga wallah again hawked and spat. She thought of going home. She

was no longer cross with Tusker. But it would be no bad thing to remind him that she was

not to be taken for granted. And indeed she wasn’t to be. Here, after all, was Tusker’s friend

almost making a pass at her. Had she been younger it would not have amused her. But it did.

Lunch alone at the club struck her as a satisfactory way of bringing an unusual morning to a

suitable climax.

“Well, I must be off,” she said.

“Wait!” (Whatever next?) “Wait, Mrs Smalley! I will send Joseph back with you. Some of

these tonga drivers are very reckless. Joseph can sit with him and restrain him from

excitement.”

“I really can’t think what could excite the tonga wallah, Mr Bhoolabhoy. Actually he’s a

slow old coach. He’s driven me often enough before. There’ll be no need of Joseph. And in

fact I’m not going home. I’m going to the Club, which will be far too long a way for Joseph

to walk back.”

He looked crestfallen, then suddenly alarmed. “It is Monday!” he cried.

“Yes, it is Monday.”

“Monday is not a good day for the club. In fact it is a very bad day.”

“A bad day?”

“A very bad day. The worst day of the week.”

“But whatever can be wrong with it? Surely Mrs Bhoolabhoy spends most of Monday at

the club?”

“But this is the point, Mrs Smalley! It is a bad day for you to be there precisely because Lila

will be there. She will disobey my advice not to go today. If you see her do not approach her.

Keep away. She has fever. Fever of some kind. She does not know what she is saying or

doing. She should stay all day in bed.”

“Well perhaps that’s what she’s decided to do. It would certainly be unwise of me to expose

myself to infection, so I’ll take your advice and try to keep away. But the fact that today she

has fever doesn’t surely explain why all Mondays are bad days?”

“But the bridge! The bridge! That is a fever in itself. All day they play. Rubber after rubber

after rubber and losing money and getting cross with one another and ordering the servants

hither and thither. One moment coffee, next moment sandwiches, more coffee, tea, drinks.

People in the dining-room complain because the servants are running to and fro between the

kitchen and the card room hour after hour. People who are not playing bridge get no service.

They are calling it Black Monday and no longer bothering to go.”

“Well, I have never heard that. How interesting. All the same I’m determined to go to the

Club. I shall risk the poor service. A sandwich would do me very well, too. My appetite is

not large.”

“If you must you must,” he said (despairingly?). “But please do not approach Mrs

Bhoolabhoy. Please also tell Colonel Sahib that tonight he and I should not be convivial. I

too perhaps have fever.” He took a few startled paces back. “Forgive me, forgive me.

Thoughtlessly I may have infected you already. What have I been thinking of? God grant it is

not cholera. Get near no one. Speak to no one.”

He was wringing his hands again.

“Mr Bhoolabhoy, as Doctor Mitra can probably confirm, the last case of cholera in Pankot

was years and years and years ago when there was a mild and very swiftly dealt with minor

epidemic down in Ranpur. If your poor wife has a fever it is almost certainly no more than

the result of having eaten something that disagrees with her.”

She turned, walked slowly enough to the waiting tonga to convey that she welcomed Mr

Bhoolabhoy’s company as far as there. Just before she climbed in she said, “I shall probably

ring Colonel Smalley from the club. Shall I tell him you think it unwise to meet this evening

or shall you send him a chit to that effect? Or do you think the fever will have abated by

then?”

“Please tell him. Perhaps I also shall send a note.”

He now stood with shoulders adroop. She smiled down at him and then holding the strut

of the canopy with her left hand she extended the other in a gesture of farewell.

WHEN THE TONGA moved off Mr Bhoolabhoy remained where he was; just as in her

fantasies of Toole, Toole had often stood to watch her go, poor inarticulate passionate man,

his unquenchable desire endlessly torturing and endangering him. It was not safe for him to

be seen near her. The consequences of being seen would be terrible. But he did not care.

And whatever they did to him he would be back again eventually, risking all for just a

glimpse of her.

“When I get to the club,” she told herself, “I shall have lunch right away. Or perhaps a gin

fizz first at that little table tucked away at the far end of the terrace where one need not be

bothered by people. But if I see Mrs Menektara I shall ask whether she has a snapshot of

Rose Cottage as it is now. Afterwards I shall write to Sarah and say we’ll be delighted to

meet Mr Turner. I shall say that in a day or two I’ll send by separate post some photographs

I have, snaps taken quite recently, one of which shows Mabel’s grave with myself and
mali

tending it. Is it dishonest not to explain how this happened to come about? No. Anyway it

must be a short note. It must be posted today so that it’s sure to reach her before Mr Turner

leaves for India. I’ll leave the matter of the blue rinse for a postscript.”

The tonga horse began to plod slowly up East Hill. She changed her mind about the order

in which things should be done. She would ring Ibrahim first and tell him she would not be

home for lunch and that she would go to the pictures that evening after all. Then she would

definitely have a drink. Two perhaps. After lunch she would write to Sarah and post the

letter in the club box. At tea time she might walk up to Rose Cottage on the off-chance of

finding Mrs Menektara in if she hadn’t shown up at the club.

“Rose Cottage is such a beautiful bungalow, Mr Turner. The oldest in Pankot. I was very

happy there. We moved in when the Laytons moved out. Tusker had been asked to stay on

for a year or two and we decided that would be the right thing because he wasn’t near

retiring age and the Indians were keen to retain the services of senior English officers to help

them during the period of transition, particularly in the army. You’ll find it’s in the army

where the clearest evidence of our influence for good is found, but then of course many of

the senior Indians in 1947 were Sandhurst trained. Some of them became generals overnight.

“It’s ironic and perhaps sad don’t you think, Mr Turner, that in the wars between India and

Pakistan, the one just over, for instance, the opposing generals are often old class-mates,

some of them even once subalterns together in the same regiment. I’ve heard that described

as a good thing because if one general knows another well he knows how his mind works

but I think that cuts two ways and might almost be a guarantee of stalemate, although it

didn’t work out that way last December. It seems to have been an absolute walkover. The

army people here in Pankot are quite understandably still pretty chuffed about it.”

The tonga lurched as the plodding horse slipped.

“It’s wise to hang on to a strut, Mr Turner. After all these years I still do it automatically. I

hope you don’t mind coming to the club in one of these contraptions. We no longer have a

little car. Actually although it can take an age uphill particularly with two of us aboard a

tonga is a good way of getting around in Pankot what with all the slopes and curves and

twists and the fact that the roads were not really built for motor-traffic, although heaven

knows there’s enough of it around these days with all the military transport and the cars that

go with people’s jobs. In the very old days, before Tusker’s and mine even, only very senior

officers were allowed motor cars and even when
we
first came people still mostly got around

in this way. More people rode then too.

“Anyway I thought this was better than a taxi, quite the best way to bring you to the club

because sitting like we are with our backs to the driver and looking back at what we’re

leaving behind you get this gradually unfolding and expanding view of the Pankot valley.

“We’re coming up what we call East Hill, which was always the British side. That’s the golf

course on our left. There’s St John’s spire down to our right. I’ll take you there tomorrow. I

hope Sarah liked the photographs I sent her. But your own will be better.

“Ah, now, Mr Turner. This is where you begin to see right down into the valley and the

bazaar. Down there to the left, all those old buildings amid the trees, that’s the old area

headquarters where Tusker worked during the war. That’s the Shiraz of course. It really is

rather dreadful, isn’t it? You used to be able to see Smith’s from here but the Shiraz blocks it

out. For the same reason you can hardly see the General Hospital, it’s that group of white

buildings snuggling into the trees about half a mile beyond. Over to your right you get a

good view of West Hill which is where the rich Indians always built their summer villas and

still do. And from here you get the best view of the bazaar. It reminds me a bit of the bazaar

in Gulmarg. On a misty morning the upper storeys of those old wooden buildings sort of

peep out as if from the cloud. Some people think it looks Swiss or Tyrolean. But sometimes

I’m reminded mostly of home, the hills beyond are so gentle.

“What we call South Hill, that is. Although of course it’s several. There beyond the bazaar.

That’s where the Pankot Rifles are. Boys and young men still come in from the hill villages

to the recruiting
daftar
. It’s part of Pankot’s tradition. That isolated grey building is

Commandant House, quite the draughtiest one in Pankot. The Menektaras simply wouldn’t

live there. If you direct your gaze an inch or so to the left that’s the mess. I must ask Colonel

Menektara to let you see it. It’s kept up just as in the old days, which I find very encouraging.

“No, you can’t see Rose Cottage from here. That’s behind us and above us quite a long way

yet, the very last bungalow at the top of Club road and we haven’t come to the bungalows

yet, they all lie beyond the club in what’s called Upper Club road that takes you up and

round the peak so that you’re facing north, and that gives you the loveliest view of all. At the

back of the garden at Rose Cottage you can stand almost virtually on the edge of a very steep

and wild and lovely descent and the nearest hill must be five miles away, and beyond there’s

another hill and then another and then many, many more rising higher and higher until they

become distant mountains with snow on them even in summer, and on the hottest day the

air comes on your cheek with a bite in it and the smell of resin.

“But you’ll have caught a glimpse of the mountains when you arrived, as you came through

the little pass at the top of South Hill, the only road into Pankot from the station. I

remember so clearly the morning Tusker and I first arrived, years and years ago, over thirty.

It was a day like this, Mr Turner. They’d sent a car from Area Headquarters to meet us and

when we got to the pass and we saw the valley below and the mountains beyond I thought,

well, perhaps Pankot won’t be so bad after all, even though I was tired of all our wanderings

and never having a home for longer than a year or two and often less and hadn’t wanted to

come. Not at all the sort of life I’d expected when I first came out.

“Before Pankot, I’d only been really happy once in India, Mr Turner, and that was in a little

princely state called Mudpore, India in the way I’d more or less imagined it when typing

those letters dictated by Mr Smith of Coyne, Coyne, Smith and Coyne to Lieutenant, then

Captain, T. U. Smalley of the Mahwar Regiment which all had to be filed under F. J. Smalley

Decd. The carbons I mean. The letters themselves went to the bank in Bombay and Bombay

sounded so glamorous.

“I used to think how marvellous it was that a letter typed in the office and posted in