A God in Every Stone (31 page)

– Mrs Forbes should be with us in a few minutes.

Mr Forbes, still in his grass-stained trousers but with hands that were well scrubbed, sat down on the armchair adjacent to Viv, nothing in his lined face with its ruffled eyebrows indicating that there was anything untoward about Viv dropping in during the middle of the afternoon when Mrs Forbes was undoubtedly taking an afternoon rest.

– I’m so sorry to disturb you. I just didn’t know where else to go, or who else to ask.

– What is it, my dear?

– What happened yesterday on the Street of Storytellers?

– I shouldn’t worry about it, Miss Spencer.

– Mr Forbes, if I can be very frank?

– Perhaps we should wait for Mrs Forbes?

– I worked as a VAD nurse in London for almost every day of the war that I wasn’t in Peshawar. You can guess what I saw, what I heard. Do you think I’m not equipped to cope with news of a skirmish in the Walled City?

Mr Forbes sighed, and sat back, his fingers bridged together, trembling against the tip of his nose. He had been one of the leading surgeons in Peshawar before his retirement and though Viv had never known him during his professional life his palsy struck her as an example of life’s cruelties.

– Things got out of hand.

– What does that mean?

– There was some inexperienced fool – allowed himself to get worked up by a baying mob and called in the armoured cars when it wasn’t necessary. And then – well, Pathans. In so many ways the finest men you’ll ever meet, but the first sign of a fight and the blood rushes to their brains.

– How many died?

The door opened and the liveried man entered with a tray on which there were biscuits and the usual sort of tea for Viv, and
kahwa
, scented with cardamom and almonds, for Mr Forbes. Fifteen years earlier she’d asked him when he planned to move back to England and he’d repeated the word ‘England’ back to her as if it were a strange vegetable that he had no intention of adding to his diet. They sat silently until the Native man left the room, closing the door behind him on Mr Forbes’ instructions.

– All things considered, it was something of a miracle. Several injuries. Broken bones, lacerations, that kind of thing. One fellow got his finger shot off, but if a man can’t hold on to his own gun he probably deserves it. Oh, and a horse was shot dead. Mrs Forbes is particularly upset about that. But the only chap who died was a dispatch rider – Bryant. Ignored orders, and rushed in where he wasn’t supposed to go. Right into the path of the armoured car. Terrible thing. And then, I regret to say . . . well, never mind.

– VAD nurse, Mr Forbes.

– The savages set him on fire.

– While he was still alive?

– Probably not, but does that matter?

– Are you saying the only Englishman who died was killed by our armoured cars?

– There’s no need to sound disappointed by the ability of our troops to withstand attack.

– I’m struggling to understand, that’s all. And how many Peshawaris died?

He shook his head and picked a book off the side table, turning it round in his hands, examining its bindings as though it were the Gutenberg Bible rather than a tome on military campaigns of the North-West Frontier.

– Were there any women among the dead?

– Have you been listening to some Congress propaganda? They don’t waste a moment! Here comes Mrs Forbes. We mustn’t talk about this in front of her.

The rules of the Peshawar Club were clear: if you were an Englishman you could apply for membership; if you were an Englishwoman you could enter as the guest of a member. But there were other rules in place which governed the interaction of the Indian guards with the ruling race, and when Viv arrived after dinner at Dean’s, uninvited, unaccompanied, she merely showed the guards a profile of sufficient disdain to ensure they wouldn’t question her right to be there. How badly she’d behaved with Remmick, accepted his favours as if they were her due – no, as if she were doing him a favour by allowing him to claim her as his guest. No one should ever be beautiful and young at the same time; it deranged the mind. Not that it excused his behaviour, of course. She wondered where in the world he’d got to by now.

Viv stopped along the pathway leading to the familiar single-storeyed club house with its multi-arched verandah, bracing herself against a palm tree with one hand so she could remove the drawing pin which had lodged itself into the heel of her python pumps. The days of derangement had passed. Now, however fashionable her hemline and heels, she was a spinster nearing forty, one of the tragic-but-uncomplaining women in a generation which had lost its men to the Great War. This was the story assumed of her, and she supposed it was true in its own way. There had been other men since the war ended – before the war ended, in fact – but joining one’s life to any of them in perpetuity always seemed to entail more loss than gain.

Indoors, the Club was as crowded as she’d ever seen it except during a ball but there was nothing of a festive atmosphere in the rooms heavy with smoke and whispers. Viv stood in the doorway, trying to decide whether or not to enter, until a slightly hysterical high-pitched laugh, which came from a man, decided it. Backing out, she walked around the club building and through the trees to the swimming pool from which no sounds of splashes and merriment issued despite the warmth of the night.

Beyond the rectangle of liquid darkness, a group of men sat on deckchairs and loungers, the ends of their lit cigarettes tracking the movements of their arms as they jabbed at the air. Sounds swooped across to her, too tangled for words to emerge. All the men seemed to be speaking at the same time. She took off her shoes – the grass prickling her feet through silk – and, still unseen in the shadow of a palm tree, slipped off her rolled garters and stockings and stuffed them into her handbag. Beneath the high diving board the darkness was particularly concentrated, and it was here she sat, her legs stockinged in water beneath the knee.

Eventually she heard the muffled tread of a man’s shoes on grass and though she held herself very still he walked straight towards her, stopping a few feet away to climb onto the low diving board, fully clothed. He walked to its end and, disappointingly, sat down, legs dangling just above the water’s surface. He didn’t look at Viv at first, but she knew he was aware of her. She had seen him – red-faced as ever – as she stood in the doorway, and it was unsurprising that he’d either seen her too or else been informed she was there by someone who knew he was a man who liked to know everything that went on in this city. There seemed barely any change in him since he’d walked into Dean’s on her second day in Peshawar, which said more about how middle-aged he’d looked in his youth than how young he looked in middle age.

– I’m surprised to find you here tonight.

– I could say the same of you, Miss Spencer. How did you get here from Campbellpur?

– So you knew I was on the train.

– Of course. Why are you surprised to find me here?

– I’d thought you’d be behind locked doors, making important decisions about important things.

She couldn’t make out his expression in the darkness as he removed a cigarette from its case, and patted his pockets.

– Catch.

She threw her lighter at him; it flashed silver in the darkness, and disappeared into the water. Without a word, barely a sound, he slipped off the diving board, the sleeves of his jacket briefly ballooning before the water dragged him down. Viv stood up, wondered whether to call for help from the men in deckchairs who remained engrossed in their conversation, and settled instead for lying flat beside the pool, her sequinned garter looped around her wrist, and plunging her arm into the wavering darkness. Diamonds of light flared in the water; something pressed against her fingertips and she started to jerk away before she recognised the familiar shape of the lighter and closed her fist around it.

Remmick pulled himself out of the water, and lay down on his back with a squelching sound, eyes fixed on the jut of the high diving board. Viv struck the lighter, was amazed to find it working, and offered him a lit cigarette. When he didn’t move she held the cigarette a few centimetres from his mouth and his head eased off the cement floor to take it between his lips, the length of a filter between her fingers and his kiss. She found herself imagining something that should be ludicrous, and by the catch of his breath knew he was imagining it too. She moved a few feet away, and everything that had started to happen stopped. When Remmick spoke his words leaned into each other, and she realised he was drunk.

– Remember when the Tochi Scouts were here on leave and one of them rode a motorcycle up the stairs of the diving board and then dropped –– whoosh! –– into the pool?

– Whoosh? I must have missed that.

– Really? ’Twasn’t you? Could’ve sworn it was. Anyone else would’ve been thrown out of the Club, but everyone recognised those fellows spend all that time in the tribal areas, Peshawar the oasis where they can let their hair down. That’s what it is, you know. An oasis. The place which isn’t all those other places in the Frontier.

– Or wasn’t all those other places?

He closed his eyes and there was a sound which was almost a sob.

– How bad is it? Viv asked. He held his arm up and pushed the sleeve back so she could see his wristwatch.

– What time is it?

– Nine twenty-three. No, wait, I think your watch has stopped. Must be the water. A few minutes past then.

– Within an hour we’ll have abandoned the Walled City.

– Who?

– We. The British. We’re pulling out the troops.

– Why?

– Because idiots and cowards are running things.

He crossed his arms over his chest like a pharaoh, eyes still closed.

– And you’ll have to leave tomorrow. All women and children being evacuated.

– Could you please sit up and start making sense?

Several seconds passed in silence. The men in the deckchairs stood up and walked across the lawn toward the verandah, not looking in her direction, their eyes fixed in front of them in a way that made it clear they were aware of her and would take back news to the dining room of an assignation beside the pool. She tapped Remmick’s forehead with the lighter. His eyes opened and he said, Go back to England.

– We did something terrible yesterday, didn’t we?

He put his hands to his ears, began to hum ‘Makin’ Whoopee’, and she shivered, wondering what could bring this man – always so assured, so solid – to this teetering place.

– The lorries, she said. The humming stopped, almost mid-note.

– Who told you?

Viv tasted blood in her mouth. It wasn’t her imagination. There was blood, real blood, she was swallowing it. And an ache in her tongue where her tooth had driven into it.

– Someone in a position to know, she said, and her voice was measured, without judgement.

– What was done had to be done, he said.

She closed her hand around the solidity of the lighter. There was a lesson she’d learned many years ago, though she hadn’t understood it at the time: how to coax information out of someone, how to make them believe you would never use it against them.

– If there’d been funerals this morning, all those bodies paraded around the street!

In her voice there was just the right mix of horror at what would have ensued and sympathy for the decision that had to be made to prevent it. There was a tiny exhalation – she understood it to be relief – from Remmick, before he responded:

– Mayhem. Absolute mayhem. The bastards, beg your pardon, would have whipped the entire Walled City into a frenzy.

– But we’ve lost the City all the same?

– Bolton – he’s cracking up. Somehow they’ve got him convinced that there’s a dam about to burst unless he withdraws the troops. It’s madness. We’ve contained it. We’ve done what had to be done.

– How many were there in the lorries?

She placed a hand on his shoulder as she asked the question; a woman appreciative of men who did what had to be done.

– I don’t know. I didn’t ask.

– Where were they taken?

– Six feet under. Beyond that, I don’t imagine anyone other than Caroe knows.

– Caroe?

– Man in charge of it. He’ll go far.

A lone cricket chirped in the vicinity of the oleander tree.

– Shall I tell you something I never understood, she said. My mother had a friend who lost a son in the Great War; he was buried in France. This was a woman who couldn’t venture more than ten feet from her house without treating it as if she were going on the Grand Tour. But on Armistice Day she heard the news on the radio, walked out of her door and didn’t stop until she was at her son’s grave. He’d been dead three years. Why should standing at a grave matter? But it mattered more than anything else in all the world.

Remmick sat up, then stood, entirely steady on his feet.

– You will keep your own best interests at heart, won’t you, Miss Spencer?

– It’s a vexed matter, to decide what those might be.