The Ravi Lancers (51 page)

Warren waited. The convulsive movements stopped, the man slid off the woman without looking round, pulled up his trousers and began to fasten his fly buttons. The woman, the lips of her vulva enlarged and wide-spread, dripping out the seed just squirted into her, the blonde hairs wet, was his wife. Slowly she pulled down her skirt, staring him straight in the eye as she did so. Ralph Harris turned round, and said, ‘I’m sorry, but I suppose you had to learn some time.’

Warren said, ‘Whoring with a slacker. Now I see why he wouldn’t go away to fight--or even work.’

‘I love him,’ she said. She had stood up and was holding Ralph’s hand. Her face was mottled and flushing as the blood flowed back into it from the secret parts of her body.

‘He is five years younger than you,’ Warren said contemptuously. ‘Apart from the other things.’ He thought, I ought to feel anger, but I don’t; only a kind of heat, as of battle, where I have the enemy in the hollow of my hand, the machine guns trained, and no escape for them. She had to be punished, for she had broken the standards and was teaching others, even his own children, to do the same.

She said, ‘I used to love you, Warren. Until this war, you were...’

‘Stop! ‘ he ground. ‘We’ve been into all that before.’

‘We’ll get married as soon as you divorce her,’ Ralph said.

‘You won’t,’ Warren said, ‘because I’m not going to let her go. You’re not going to marry anyone. You’re going to France.’ He stared into his half-brother’s face. ‘You come to Devizes with me tomorrow and volunteer for the army. The infantry. No escape into the service corps and a safe billet at the base for you. The Guards would do you a lot of good. You will volunteer for the Coldstream Guards in my presence, and you will go in, and stay in.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Warren,’ Joan said.

‘Or,’ Warren continued, ‘I shall sue Joan for divorce, and drag all this mud into the open.’

No one spoke for a while, then Ralph said, ‘I’ll have to go, darling.’

‘Of course you don’t! I don’t mind who knows! ‘

‘It would kill mother,’ Ralph said. ‘He knows that.’ To Warren he said, ‘I’ll go with you tomorrow, but you must promise to let Joan free. There’s nothing left of your marriage. You can’t pretend there is.’

‘I promise nothing of the sort,’ Warren said. ‘She is going to stay with me, as my wife, doing her duty in her proper place, as I do mine in mine. All I promise is that I shall say nothing to anyone else about... this.’

‘Leave us then,’ Ralph said, his voice hardening, ‘we have to say good-bye.’

For a moment Warren hesitated. The nerve of the man, to ask him to leave them alone, to make love again perhaps. But they were looking into each other’s eyes and he realized that it would make no difference whether he stayed or went. They were aware only of each other. He went out, closing the battered door carefully behind him, and returned to his room.

The train slid across the flat fields of Berkshire at a steady seventy miles an hour. It rushed over the Thames at Maidenhead and raced through Slough. Warren sat in a first class corner seat, his thoughts passing in pleasant review. Ralph Harris was in the army, at last. Fuller had been told not to appear again. Joan would not speak to him, except in front of his mother, and then only when she had to. Good. Everyone was doing what they must, what was right. His mother had noticed something amiss, and asked anxiously, ‘Dearest Warrie ... is there anything wrong between you and Joan?’

‘Nothing, mother,’ he’d said, patting her hand. ‘Nothing at all.’

She had looked at him doubtfully. She knew he was lying, perhaps, but then she knew too that a man’s marriage is his own business and no one else’s, not even a mother’s. She had said, ‘Joan’s a good girl, really, Warrie. It’s this war that has upset her ... and she so highly strung. Think of the number of people she loved that she’s lost.’

‘There’s nothing to worry about, mother,’ he had said. And that was the truth. What was there to worry about in the fact that he had put his foot down at last, as he should have done years ago, when he first recognized the way she was heading, towards this arty and dangerous socialist nonsense? She had ruined the marriage so what was left but duty?

The train came to a halt at Paddington and there, as he went out with the RM and Narayan Singh, was Dayal Ram, helping Lady Harriet Symonds out of a taxi. A porter took the couple’s suitcases. Dayal Ram saw Warren and saluted. He had a half smile on his handsome face, but it was a smile of superiority, not friendliness.

‘Good morning, Lady Harriet,’ Warren said. ‘Good morning, Dayal.’

‘Just arrived on ten days’ leave, sir,’ Dayal said. His voice was cold.

‘And I’m whisking him down to Warwickshire to have a real rest,’ the girl said, ‘and all the things he can’t get in the trenches.’ Her smile left no doubt of her meaning. ‘Now do excuse us, we only have a minute to catch our train.’

They hurried off. Warren stared after them for a moment. Dayal was going to spend ten days fornicating with an English girl, a peer’s daughter at that. He’d have to teach him a few harsh lessons when he got him back into the trenches. And what had Diana been doing? He’d written to her address the day he arrived on leave, but had had no answer until this morning. Where could she have gone, without telling her mother, or why hadn’t she answered before? Why hadn’t she come down to Shrewford Pennel, knowing he didn’t have long on his leave? Ah, perhaps she had known about Ralph and Joan, and guessed that this time it would come to a head, and didn’t want to be there when it happened...

He took the RM and Narayan to the hostel for Indian soldiers in Victoria Street and arranged to pick them up there in time to catch the returning leave train that evening. Then he continued in the same taxi to his great-uncle’s flat in Kensington.

Major-General Rodney Savage, CB, was his mother’s older brother. He was eighty-seven or eighty-eight now, long a widower, and lived alone in a flat on Nashe Street, with his bearer, Ashraf, who was nearly as old as he. Warren wondered, as he waited on the step after ringing the bell, whether he should tell the old man about Joan; but what would be the purpose, except to make clear to him the terrible slackening of morality in England, and surely he must be well aware of that already?

Soon he found himself seated in a big chair in front of the fire, a whisky and soda in his hand. It was a hot day but the old general’s blood ran cold, though his eyes still sparkled a fierce frosty blue and when he stood up his back was straight.

‘Why didn’t you bring your rissaldar-major along, Warrie?’ the old man asked. ‘You said in your letter that he was with you in Shrewford Pennel... Speak up. I’m a little deaf these days.’

‘I thought I’d see you alone,’ Warren said. ‘Then I’m going down to Woolwich to see Diana. If you felt up to it, I thought I’d send the RM round on his own.’

‘Of course I’m up to it,’ the general grumbled. ‘When the time comes that I can’t talk to a rissaldar-major I won’t be able to talk to you ... What does he make of England, eh? Is he from Ravi?’

‘No, uncle, he’s from the Guides Cavalry.’

‘Good regiment, good regiment!’

‘And he’s a very good man, too ... The richness of the soil here and in France impresses all of them, of course, and the size of the buildings.’

‘They have big buildings in India, too.’

‘Yes, but ours seem more solid to them, I think, and they are in use. The big buildings in India mostly seem to be ruins, or monuments, or museums ... Of course he doesn’t know enough of England to see what a deterioration is going on in our life. I don’t really like having sowars come to England ... women accosting them in the street, men and women drunk in the gutters...’

‘They’ve seen
gora-log
drunk in the bazaars of India,’ his great-uncle said.

‘Yes, but that’s different ... And, when they’ve volunteered, what can they make of all the able-bodied slackers they see in the streets and shops? I’m afraid they’ll go back to India with an impression that we’re finished, that we have lost our determination as a people ... that we won’t fight ourselves but are hiring them to fight for us.’

The general shot him a quick look under the fierce white eyebrows. ‘And you think that’s true?’

‘From what I have seen, yes, sir.’

The general took a mighty gulp of his whisky and put the heavy cut-glass goblet down. ‘Things are changing, certainly ... gals showing their ankles almost as much as they did when I was young, before that German prig Albert had his way. And a lot of the barriers between the classes are breaking down. Not bad ideas as long as something better replaces them. And there are a lot of slackers, yes, but not all the able-bodied men you see about in mufti are slackers. Do you realize two million men had volunteered for the army by last Christmas--four months after the war started? But hundreds of thousands of ‘em haven’t been called up even yet because of shortage of equipment of every kind ... No, no, we’re not finished. When they’re really up against it, the people will come through all right. Always have. Always will.’

‘I don’t know, sir. I wish...’

The general interrupted him, ‘One reason for discontent or lack of enthusiasm, that does exist, is the way the war is being fought. Great God, I wish I were young enough to be out there with you and see for myself what’s wrong. All we know here is that the generals keep promising, but never perform. The casualties are enormous but where are the results? We are destroying Christendom ... for what?’

‘That’s what Joan says,’ Warren said, involuntarily, the words jerked out him by surprise.

Again a keen look was shot at him. ‘Oh. How is she?’

‘Well,’ he muttered.

‘And the children? You have two, don’t you?’

‘Yes, sir. They’re well... What do you feel about pacifists, sir?’ The general drank again and pulled speculatively at his ear. He said, ‘I’m Indian Army, Warrie--like you. We’ve only dealt with volunteers. That’s all we want to deal with, eh? When we’re recruiting through the Doab Canal villages, we don’t go in demanding why this boy and that boy don’t volunteer. We just take the ones that do, and try to send them back so proud and fit and strong that next time we go, more boys will volunteer. I treat every Englishman the same way. If he’s not in uniform he has his reasons, and they are not for me to question--as long as the service is voluntary.’

‘That’s what my mother thinks.’

‘Margaret’s a sensible girl ... but whether recruiting ought to be voluntary, that’s a different matter. We’ve never had conscription in this country and the idea is hateful to me ... but then we’ve never had casualties on this scale before, and the war going to go on for years, as Kitchener thinks. Perhaps we ought to enlist everyone ... including a few top business-men to help run the war. We soldiers certainly are not doing it very well.’

They talked then of Shrewford Pennel and of old days in India, until Warren looked at his watch and saw that it was time for him to set out for Woolwich. As he got up the general said, ‘I’ve put in a telephone ... in the hall. Tell the rissaldar-major to come along at four. I’m going to have a little stroll and then a nap.’

The old bearer creaked out of a back room and showed Warren to the door, saluting in the old fashioned way, his doddering hand shaking against the dark green puggaree band adorned by the crossed kukris and silver figures XIII of his master’s old regiment. Warren found a taxi, and nearly an hour later was walking down a dingy street in Woolwich looking at the house numbers.

The landlady eyed him suspiciously when he rang the bell and announced that he wanted to see Miss Bateman, but her face cleared when he added, ‘I’m her brother.’ She peered up at him and said, ‘Ow yes, so y’are. Look alike as two peas ... ‘Ope you wasn’t offended like but we carn’t afford to get a bad name ‘ere, y’know.’

Diana came to her door when he knocked and after a startled pause flung her arms round his neck, crying, ‘Oh, Warrie! I’m so glad to see you.’ He wondered why she looked surprised, for she knew he was coming.

‘There now, ‘e’s safe,’ the landlady cooed, and went downstairs, clucking sympathetically.

Diana looked well, Warren thought, prettier than the last time he’d seen her; younger, too, though she was nearly thirty-one. Her eyes sparkled and she had an air, a new manner. She chattered away, asking him whether he was ready for lunch, and where he wanted to go. As he answered he glanced out of the window at a vista of grimy brick walls and broken windows. God, how ugly, he thought, and turned his eyes inside the room. He caught sight of a photograph in a silver frame on her bedside table. He recognized the frame. It used to hold a photograph of himself in full dress, but now it held a photograph of Yuvraj Krishna Ram and Diana, holding hands with the Eiffel Tower behind them.

He felt again the strange red-hot sensation in the depths of his body that had flooded him when he saw Ralph thrusting into Joan. He said, ‘When was that taken?’

She looked around, saw the photograph and opened a drawer as though to sweep it in. Then she stopped, holding the photograph hugged to her breast. ‘Oh dear, I meant to put it away before you arrived, but I forgot... or perhaps I didn’t really want to.’

Now he saw the diamond brooch at her breast. ‘Is that real?’ he asked. The sensations plunging through him were alternately hot and crackling cold, as though he were a part of a line carrying thousands of volts of electricity.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘
he
gave it to me. Oh, Warrie!’--she put down the photograph and clung to him--’we love each other so much! I’ve never been so happy. We’re going to be married and one day soon I shall be the Rani of Ravi. It’s so exciting, so wonderful, there’s so much for me to do there! I shan’t just sit in the harem eating sweets and getting fat! ‘

‘You went... lived with him, in Paris?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘When?’

‘This week. I’m only just back.’

He turned and walked out of the room and down the stairs, hearing her cry behind him: ‘Warrie ... Warrie! Warrie, please! ‘

Krishna Ram crawled carefully down the side of the shell hole and crouched at the bottom, recovering his breath, until the eight other men of the patrol joined him. The German lines in Sector 76 lay fifty yards ahead. It was near the end of August, and a warm rain was falling. In this area the lines had been stationary long enough now so that, what with harassing fire every night, and covering fire for patrols and small scale attacks, and SOS tasks and defensive fire, the tree stumps had been blown to matchwood; and the ground, which had once been stippled with grass, and wild flowers, and wheat grown from last year’s ungathered harvest, was now just mud--brownish mud, wet, slippery, and cratered with small and large shell holes, littered with corpses, helmets, bayonets, skulls, broken rifles, snakes of barbed wire, sandbags, and boots with feet rotting inside them. Over all hung the universal smells of lyddite and decay.