The Ravi Lancers (49 page)

‘You sit on it, run the water--either just into the bowl, or there’s a vertical spray--then use your hand to soap yourself. Your left hand only, if you’re an Indian.’

‘The left hand?’ she said, puzzled.

He nodded. ‘This one’--he held it up--’We use it for wiping ourselves, instead of toilet paper.’

‘Instead of toilet paper,’ she gasped, ‘you mean . . . ?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We think that toilet paper is really very insanitary. You can only get clean in running water so when we defecate we take a pot of water called a
loti
, and when we have finished we run some of the water over our left hand, and then rub the backside and go on doing it until the hand comes away clean.’

She moved to the basin and began to run hot water. She said, ‘Do you do that?’

He said, ‘Not now, because the general and Warren ordered us to act like British officers. But I shall again soon ... We also think it’s dirty to bathe in a bath, like that’--he nodded at the elaborately decorated bath tub. ‘We only bathe in running water, usually a river. A woman will go in wearing her clothes.’

‘How dirty! ‘ Diana said.

‘But it isn’t really. She washes under a layer of cotton. The cotton dries on her, she’s clean, and she hasn’t displayed herself in invitation to men.’

He held her from behind, again cupping her breasts in his hands. ‘Get dressed, and we’ll go out and see Paris.’

It was two days later. ‘An orphanage,’ she said dreamily, ‘with a playing field. Two, close to each other--one for boys and one for girls. And two hospitals.’

‘All right,’ he said, laughing, ‘you shall have one hospital and one orphanage. Boys and girls who lose their parents don’t need to lose the company of the other sex as well.’

‘But there ought to be a special hospital for women,’ she said. ‘Eventually,’ he said, ‘but when there isn’t any hospital at all, the first step is to get one, not to start worrying about specializing in diseases of women, or of the lungs, and so on ... Hey, a little slower, darling. We’re not on a route march.’

The Seine flowed placid beside them, at their left hand. On the towpath ahead a pair of huge horses towed a long coal barge up towards Fontainebleau. Cattle lay in the heavy green of the water-meadows, the dense yellow of buttercups and dandelions carpeting the fields with what seemed to be a reflection of the golden bowl of the summer sky. This was Krishna’s last afternoon of leave.

At five o’clock next morning he must catch a train for the front.

She slowed her pace. A diamond brooch sparkled at her breast. It had cost the equivalent of three hundred pounds, and he had almost had to fight her to make her accept it. Mercenariness was not a fault that she possessed; just the opposite--it was hard to give her anything, from an embrace to a brooch, unless he could somehow persuade her it was good for her ... healthy, proper.

The barge was far ahead, no one following them, the nearest house a riverside tavern at the lock ahead, which the horses were approaching. He caught her sleeve and said, ‘Let’s make love.’

‘Here?’ she gasped.

‘Yes ... quick. I’ve got those things in my pocket.’

‘Oh, Krishna! ‘ But he had her half down in the long grass, and she was lifting her heavy skirt. He tugged impatiently at her white drawers and got them down. ‘Oh, Krishna,’ she said, again. There it was, the rough triangular copse, the slit he had entered a dozen times, and now was ready for again. With trembling fingers he rolled the FL on to his bursting penis, feeling that it would explode, shooting seed into her face if he had to touch it a moment longer. Then he plunged it into her.

She held his head, murmuring, ‘There, there! ‘

The ecstasy came before he had thrust five times, and he cried out, moaning the name of god in Hindi, for surely it was the divinity who squeezed all his being into his loins and sent it squirting out in these long shuddering pulses. ‘There, there!’ She was like a mother now, harbouring his head, his tears, his seed.

He lay spent on her. A while later, he did not know how long, she said gently, ‘Get up now, darling ... Feel better?’

He nodded. ‘Better’ was not the right word, but what was? He peeled off the FL and threw it into the river. He watched her pull up her drawers and arrange her dress, then they walked on, towards Fontainebleau.

Fontainebleau. The most beautiful palace in the world, she would probably say. As Versailles was the biggest. The Louvre the best art gallery. The British Museum the best museum. Let her talk. What use was it to tell her of Shalimar or Fatehpur Sikri or the Red Fort, or that place in Cambodia--Angkor Wat? As well try to persuade her, or Warren, to use a
loti
instead of toilet paper. Or that boys and girls were better off growing together, discovering each other, than segregated. Or that orphans might be better regarded as wards of the world, children of all, rather than institutionalized, in some sense prisoners.

After they were married, and he had succeeded to the
gaddi
, there was so much she was going to do. He must have spent half his leave talking about Ravi, because she wanted to know. She was going to be a loyal and hard working Rani, inspecting hospitals, looking after sick women and orphans, holding functions for charity, presiding at baby clinics and sewing bees.

They passed the tavern, and the woman at the lock gates curtsied as they went by. The forest of Fontainebleau swept down to the river’s edge and a lone swan glided slowly along under the bank, disdainfully indicating that they might throw him a crumb. A tall black soldier in French uniform passed, his cheeks cicatrized with tribal slash marks, a plump white girl on his arm. The soldier nodded cheerfully, and Krishna nodded back. They were both in uniform, but the man could not be expected to know British rank badges. That was one good thing about the French--they didn’t have the same sense of colour superiority that the British did; though, from what he had seen, they were even more certain of the superiority of their civilization. Diana was learning, too, for the continual sight of French women with Negroes and Arabs and squat little men from Indo-China had made her realize that others did not think the way Warren and most Englishmen did. Once, seeing a particularly black soldier sitting with a French girl at a pavement cafe on the Champs-Elysees, Krishna had said suddenly, ‘Are you glad I am not that black?’

She looked at him with her deliberate cow-like placidity, and said, ‘I don’t know. If I felt the same about you as I do now, I wouldn’t care.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but would you feel the same? Could you?’

She had thought a moment before replying, ‘It would be more difficult, because I feel that very black people must think differently from us. You think like an Englishman.’

He said nothing. It had been true once. At least, he had done his best to make it true. But it wasn’t true now, and never would be again. But what was the use of telling her that? She would find out for herself in time.

‘Tell me about the schools,’ she said now. ‘What sort of schools are there in Ravi? Who are the teachers? What subjects are taught? What is the compulsory school age?’

She was very like Warren, he thought, asking how many men were on parade, how many NCOs trained as small arms instructors, how many stretcher bearers, how are the gas masks cleaned.

But that night, on the wide bed, with the window open and Paris humming like a mighty animal all around, and the light on, though she had whispered, ‘Turn it off,’ he mounted between her upraised thighs, and when she gasped, ‘The FL, darling!’ he had said ‘No!’ and entered her with powerful determination, and held his seed until she moaned in transport far beyond the therapeutic exercises of the early times, and writhed and bit him like the animal he had at last succeeded in making her, neither English nor Indian, brown nor white, only female. ‘There ... there ... there! ‘ he cried at last, the words forced out of him with each spurt of his seed. ‘There! ‘

Let Vishnu decide, for His hands were upon their loins, and upon their fates.

The train clattered out on to an iron bridge and for a moment, between the girders, Warren looked down a curving reach of the river, where the dome of St. Paul’s rode high above the teeming chimneys and myriad spires of the city. The train slowed, rode in under a glass arch: Charing Cross. Now at last, in London, he felt that he was home again. But he saw, as he stepped out on to the platform, that the trains had brought the war with them from France. A score of the officers getting out of the first class compartments, and as many of the soldiers pouring out of the third class, were lightly bandaged, or limped, or carried one arm in a sling. And these were only the ‘walking wounded’, already discharged from hospitals or, like himself, not sick enough to go to one at all. The train at the next platform was a hospital train, come up from Folkestone with the seriously wounded evacuated from the field hospitals in France. Few of these would ever again be fit to fight. He stood, feeling cold in the muggy heat of the day, looking down into shattered faces obscured by layers of bandage, on to bodies on stretchers, the coverings not concealing that the body ended at the trunk, at faces already grey with the pallor of death, at faces without eyes, at eyes glaring out over the abyss of a vanished face and jaw. Here and there gracious ladies moved among the stretchers handing out flowers bought from the cockney flower girls in the station yard, where hospital orderlies were loading the wounded into ambulances for transport to their next, last but one, resting place.

Warren turned away, trembling. Narayan Singh had his valise and suitcase out of the compartment and was waiting, the baggage hefted on his shoulder. The air felt stifling and oppressive. Warren thought he would suffocate inside one of those smelly boxes on wheels called taxis. Telling Narayan Singh that he had decided to walk, he beckoned a taxi, and said to the driver, ‘Take this man and the bags to Paddington, please. Drop them at the booking office. Give him the change from the fare out of this, after you’ve taken a shilling tip for yourself!’

‘Bob’s your uncle, guv,’ the driver said. ‘

‘Ere,
chalo
, ‘op in, mate.’

The taxi chugged out into the Strand and vanished in the swirling traffic of Trafalgar Square. Warren stayed in the station yard until all the wounded had been loaded into ambulances. The ladies spoke to the wounded, as they waited, and the wounded smiled politely, when they were physically able to do so. The flower girls joked with them and they tried to laugh, if they had anything to laugh with. All the while able-bodied men passed in and out of the station, up and down the Strand, outside the iron railings. Some were in uniform, but most were not. Hulking stevedores from Covent Garden; clerks--mousy, but fit enough to carry and aim a rifle; youths flirting with the flower girls when they should have been in the trenches; older men, but still not forty, paunchy from sitting at desks, when they could have been driving lorries or issuing stores for the Service Corps ... all these people, guzzling, soaking, guarding their worthless hides while the flower of England, the volunteers, lay in windrows in Artois and Flanders, mown by the Spandaus.

He started walking, taut with anger. ‘Come, Shikari,’ he ordered. ‘Keep to heel.’ But then he realized that Shikari was back in France, and he was alone. A passing woman looked at him curiously, and he flushed; she must have heard his call to the non-existent dog.

The Admiralty Arch opened up the long vista down to Buckingham Palace between banks of flowers. Pelicans patrolled the sward of St. James’s Park, and flotillas of ducks and geese swam on the tranquil waters. He strode on, his swagger stick swinging. His head had begun to ache again. He’d be all right as soon as he was tucked up in his bed in the Old Vicarage for a good night’s sleep. It was funny waking up two--or was it three?--nights ago and finding Narayan Singh standing guard over him as though he were a prisoner, or a would-be suicide. Narayan told him, when he was really awake, that there was a letter in his pocket. Had all that really happened, that Krishna had written? He could faintly recall some of it. Still, the brigadier-general’s signature on his leave pass was clear enough. And the doctor’s brief note; over-work, need to avoid a complete breakdown--the only cure was rest, away from all responsibility.

But how could anyone rest while England lay in mortal danger? Look at this man coming down the Mall, arms swinging, fit as a fiddle--but not in uniform. And there, two more lying on the grass with shop girls, canoodling, while the corpses rotted outside Ypres. And here, a woman in a tilted hat with a wide brim, eyeing him, smiling, inviting. ‘

‘Ullo, dearie.’

‘Go away,’ he snarled at her. ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’ Sentries stamping on the ground outside the Palace. Buttons in threes, Scots Guards, in khaki. Good boys, they’d be in France soon enough. Every man was needed, every single one, to overcome the Hun. No exceptions, no excuses, no mercy. Up Constitution Hill, the couples rolling together like mating animals in Green Park, the grass stretching away under the heavy-leafed trees to Piccadilly. Apsley House, the Iron Duke on Copenhagen, flanked by his Highlanders and Riflemen and Dragoons. The building of England stood, the banks and palaces and mansions; the trees of England stood, the oaks and elms and chestnuts ... but the people, these people scurrying, lying grinning, were like termites gnawing at the foundations. Undermined by selfishness, self indulgence, failure to uphold the honourable and the good--how long could England stand?

They were looking strangely at him now as he strode up the edge of Hyde Park. They were easing away from him as he passed. He glared back, seeing the evil and the weakness in each, however carefully they tried to hide it. The men to France ... every one of them! The women ... God, for the women, what? There was a man with a red tie at Hyde Park Corner, shouting, and waving his arms, a hundred people gathered, some listening, some talking. Scum! He shook his fist at the speaker and went on. The Edgware Road, Sussex Gardens, denser crowds, the smell of bodies, barrows of flowers, fish on trollies, Jews selling underwear, even a Sikh selling shirts from a barrow. What was he doing here, instead of with a regiment?