Far Pavilions (22 page)

It was the first of several surprises, not all of them disagreeable. That the boy should prove to be equally at home with a horse or a gun was something that they had not expected, and for which they were profoundly grateful: ‘As long as he can shoot and ride, I suppose he'll scrape past,’ said his cousin Humphrey. ‘But it is a pity we didn't catch him younger. He doesn't seem to have any of the right ideas.’

Ash's ideas remained unorthodox and frequently led him into trouble; as witness his refusal to eat beef in any form (this was the last and strongest remnant of Sita's training, and the one that took him the longest time to overcome despite the many difficulties involved – not to mention the lectures and punishments it brought down on his head from teachers and schoolmasters, and the anger, resentment and irritation it aroused among his relations). Then, too, he could not see why he should not offer to teach Willie Higgins, the boot-boy, to ride, or invite twelve-year-old Annie Mott, the thin, overworked little scullery maid who always looked half starved, to share his tea in the schoolroom. ‘But it's my tea, isn't it Aunt Millicent?’ asked Ash. Or: ‘But Uncle Matthew gave me Blue Moon for my own horse, so I don't see why…’

‘They are servants, my dear, and one does not treat servants as equals. They would not understand it,’ explained Aunt Millicent, annoyed at being argued with in broken English by this impossible offspring of her eccentric brother-in-law. How
like
Hilary – he had always been a problem, and now that he was dead he was still capable of causing them grave embarrassment.

‘But when I was Lalji's servant,’ persisted Ash, ‘I used to ride his horses, and –’

‘That was in India, Ashton. You are in England now, and must learn to behave properly. In England we do not play with the servants or invite them to share our meals. And you will find that Annie is adequately fed in the kitchen.’

‘No she's not. She's always hungry, and it isn't fair, because Mrs Mott –’

‘That's enough, Ashton. I have said “No”, and if I hear any more of this I shall have to give orders that you are to be kept away from the kitchen and not allowed to speak to any of the underservants. Do you understand?’

Ash did not. But then neither did his relatives. Later on, when he had learned to read and write in English as well as speak it, his uncle, in a praiseworthy attempt to encourage industry and lighten the tedium of lessons, had given him a dozen books on India, saying that they would of course be of special interest to him. The books had included several of Hilary's later works, together with such stirring tales as
The Conquest of Bengal
, Sleeman's account of the suppression of Thuggery, and Sir John Kaye's
History of the Sepoy War
. And Ash had certainly been interested; though not in the way that his uncle had intended. He found his father's books too dry and erudite, and his reactions to the others had seriously annoyed Sir Matthew, who had been rash enough to request his opinion on them.

‘But you asked me what I thought!’ protested Ash in some indignation. ‘And that is what I think. After all, it was their country and they weren't doing you – I mean us – any harm. I don't think it was fair.’

‘Shades of Hilary!’ thought Sir Matthew with exasperation, and he explained tartly that, on the contrary, they had been doing a great deal of harm – what with murdering, oppressing and making war on each other, strangling harmless travellers in honour of some heathen goddess, burning widows alive, and generally obstructing trade and progress. Such horrors could not be allowed to continue unchecked, and it was both the duty and responsibility of Britain, as a Christian nation, to put a stop to these barbarities and bring peace and tranquillity to the suffering millions of India.

‘But
why
was it your responsibility?’ asked Ash, genuinely puzzled. ‘I don't see that it had anything to do with you – I mean with us. India isn't even anywhere
near
us. It's at the other side of the world.’

‘My dear boy, you have not been giving proper attention to your books,’ said Sir Matthew, striving for patience. ‘If you had read more carefully you would have learned that we had been granted trading posts there. And trade is not only vital to us, but to the prosperity of the entire world. We could not permit it to be disrupted by continual vicious and petty wars between rival princes. It was necessary to preserve order, and that we have done. We have, under God's providence, been able to bring peace and prosperity to that unhappy country, and bestow the blessings of progress on a people who have for centuries suffered atrocious persecution and oppression at the hands of greedy priests and quarrelling overlords. It is something we may be proud of, and it has not been without grave cost to ourselves in labour and lives. But one cannot hold back the march of progress. This is the nineteenth century, and the world is becoming too small to permit large portions of it to remain in a state of medieval depravity and barbarism.’

Ash had a sudden vision of the white pinnacles of the Dur Khaima and the wide sweep of the plateau across which he had ridden out hawking with Lalji and Koda Dad, and his heart sank: it was terrible to think that one day there might be no wild, beautiful places left where one could escape from the things that Uncle Matthew and his friends called ‘Progress’. He had formed an unfavourable opinion of Progress, and he did not continue the conversation, it being obvious to him that he and his uncle would never see eye to eye on such subjects.

Ash was aware (as Uncle Matthew was not) of a great many things in Pelham Abbas that were in need of reform: the waste and extravagance, and the feuds that raged in the servants' hall; the tyranny of the upper servants and the miserably inadequate wages that were considered sufficient payment for long hours of gruelling work; the unheated attics in which such despised underlings as kitchen and scullery maids, boot-boys and under-footmen slept; the long flights of uncomfortable stairs that the housemaids must toil up and down a dozen times a day carrying cans of boiling water, slop-pails or loaded trays, with the dread shadow of instant expulsion without recompense or reference hanging over them should they commit any fault.

The only difference that Ash could see between the status of the Pelham Abbas servants and those in the Hawa Mahal was that the latter led pleasanter and more idle lives. Yet he wondered what his uncle would think if Hira Lal or Koda Dad – who were both wise and incorruptible men – were suddenly to appear before the gates of Pelham Abbas accompanied by the guns, war elephants and armed soldiers of the Gulkote State Forces, and take over the management of the house and estates, setting them to rights according to ideas of their own? Would Uncle Matthew gratefully accept their domination and willingly obey their orders because they were running his house and his affairs better than he could run them himself? Ash doubted it. People everywhere preferred to make their own mistakes, and resented strangers (even efficient and well-meaning ones) interfering with their affairs.

He resented it himself. He hadn't wanted to come to
Belait
and learn to be a Sahib. He would far rather have stayed in Mardan and become a sowar like Zarin. But he had not been given the choice, and felt in consequence that he understood more about the feelings of subject races than his Uncle Matthew, who had spoken so patronizingly of ‘bestowing the benefits of peace and prosperity on the suffering millions of India’.

‘I suppose they look on me as one of the “suffering millions”,’ thought Ash bitterly, ‘but I'd rather be back there, and working as a coolie, than here, being told what to do all day.’

The holidays had been oases in a dry wilderness of lessons, and but for them he often felt that he would not have been able to endure this new life; for although he was encouraged to walk and ride in the park, it was never alone but always under the watchful eye of his tutor or a groom. And as the park was surrounded by a high stone wall and he was not allowed beyond the lodge gates, his world was in many ways as restricted as that of a prisoner or a mental patient. Yet the loss of freedom had not been the worst thing in those years, for Ash had experienced much the same restriction in the Hawa Mahal. But then Sita had been there, and he had had friends; and at least Lalji had been young.

The age of his present gaolers irked him, and after the colourful muddle of an Indian court he found the decorous and inflexible ritual of Victorian country-house life dreary and meaningless – and alien beyond words. But since his pocket money, like the servants' wages, was too meagre to permit him to think of escape – and in any case, England was an island and India was six thousand miles away – there was nothing he could do about it except endure it, and wait for the day when he could go back to join the Corps of Guides. Only obedience and hard work could hasten that day; so he had been obedient and had worked hard at his lessons, and his reward had been the end of tutors and life at Pelham Abbas, and four years at the school his father and grandfather and great-grandfather had attended before him.

Nothing in Ash's formative years had prepared him for life in an English public school, and he detested every aspect of it: the regimentation, the monotony and the lack of privacy, the necessity to conform and the bullying and brutality that were meted out to weaklings and all whose opinions differed from those of the majority; the compulsory games and the reverence paid to such gods as the Head of Games and the Captain of Cricket. He was not given to talking of himself, but the fact that one of his names was Akbar had elicited questions, and his replies having revealed something of his background, he had promptly been nicknamed ‘Pandy’, a name applied for many years by British soldiers to all Indians, whom they termed ‘Pandies’ in reference to the Sepoy, Mangal Pandy, who had fired the first shot of the Indian Mutiny.

‘Young Pandy Martyn’ had been treated as a species of foreign barbarian who must be taught how to behave in a civilized country, and the process had been a painful one. Ash had not accepted it in the proper spirit, but attacked his tormentors with teeth, nails and feet in the manner of the Gulkote bazaars, which was apparently not only uncivilized but ‘unsporting’ – though it did not appear to be unsporting for five or six of his opponents to set upon him at once when it became clear that in the matter of muscle he was a match for any two of them. But numbers invariably triumphed, and for a time he had again seriously contemplated flight; only to reject it once more as impractical. He would have to endure this as he had endured the lesser evils of Pelham Abbas. But at least he would show these
feringhis
that on their playing fields he could be as good or better than they.

Koda Dad's training in marksmanship having encouraged a naturally good eye, it had not taken long for Ash's schoolmates to discover that ‘young Pandy’ could more than hold his own at any form of sport, and it had made a great deal of difference to their attitude towards him – particularly once he had learnt to box. When he eventually graduated from the Second Eleven to the First, played fives and football for his House and later for the school, he became the object of considerable hero-worship among the junior forms; though his contemporaries found him difficult to know. Not unfriendly, but apparently uninterested in any of the things that they had always believed in, such as the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon races, the importance of being well-bred, and the Divine Right of the British to govern and control all coloured (and therefore unenlightened) peoples.

Even Colonel Anderson, in most matters so wise and understanding, had little sympathy with Ash's views, for his own opinions inclined more in the direction of Sir Matthew's. He too had pointed out that with the triumph of the steam-engine and the improvement of medical standards, the world was becoming smaller and more overcrowded every year. It was no longer possible for either nations or individuals to go their own way and do exactly as they pleased, for if everyone were free to do as they liked, the result would not be contentment, but anarchy and chaos. ‘You'll have to find a desert island, Ash, if you want to live your life without anyone else interfering with it. And I don't suppose there are many of those left.’

The English climate had not improved Colonel Anderson's health as much as had been hoped, but though he had been forced to resign himself to a life of semi-invalidism he continued to take an active interest in Ash, who still spent the greater part of the school holidays under his roof. The Colonel's house was a small one on the outskirts of Torquay, and though in no way comparable to Pelham Abbas, Ash would have preferred to spend all his free time there, since those portions of the holidays that had to be spent in his uncle's house continued to be a severe trial to both of them. Sir Matthew being annoyed to find that, except in the matter of sport, his nephew showed no signs of turning into a credit to him and every sign of being as intransigent as his father Hilary had been, while Ash, on his part, was equally baffled and exasperated by his uncle, his relatives and his relatives' friends. Why, for instance, would they persist in asking for his views, and then be affronted when he gave them? ‘What do
you
think, Ashton?’ might be a well-meaning remark, but it was also a singularly stupid one if he were not expected to give an honest reply. He would never understand the English or feel at home in their country.

Colonel Anderson never asked stupid questions and his conversation was astringent and stimulating. He loved India with the single-minded devotion that some men give to their work – or their wives – and would talk by the hour of its history, culture, problems and politics, and the knowledge and guile that must be acquired by those who aspired to serve and govern its peoples. On these occasions he invariably spoke in Hindustani or Pushtu, and as neither Ala Yar or Mahdoo ever addressed his protégé in English, he was able to report to Mardan that the boy still spoke both languages as fluently as ever.

The Colonel had been ill in the winter of 1868, so Ash had spent the Christmas holidays at Pelham Abbas, where his education – if it could be called that – had taken a new turn. He had been seduced by a recently engaged housemaid, one Lily Briggs, a bold, brassy-haired girl some five years his senior, who had already caused considerable rivalry and dissension among the men in the servants' hall.