Zemindar (15 page)

Occupied as I thus was with affairs which I had chosen to make my own, I gave small thought to anything but the people and problems most immediate to me. But one morning late in November, a morning of pure, pale skies and glancing sunlight, of dove call in the garden and the scent of freshly watered flowerbeds under the restless shade of the neems, I set out with Mrs Barry, Charles and Wallace on an expedition to the bazaar, where Charles intended to buy a length of silk as a gift for his mother. Such an expedition was something of a novelty even to Kate Barry, as the ladies of the cantonments preferred to shop on their own verandahs, the local tradesmen being willing to transport their wares any distance for the inspection of their customers.

I had received several warnings against visiting the native city; disease was rampant, I was told, and the more nervous ladies hinted at other evils as well, so I was doubly pleased at being included in the expedition and at having Mrs Barry’s company. Because of Emily’s condition, now verified by the doctor, Charles had decided against her accompanying us. Surprisingly, she had made no protest. I was relieved, as her curiosity was small and I knew she would have tired of the sights and wished to return home long before I was satisfied with my impressions. Wallace and Charles were on horseback, and Mrs Barry and I rode in the Averys’ rather battered buggy. We had settled ourselves and were about to move off, when the postboy ran up to Wallace with two or three letters.

‘Bills, nothing but bills,’ Wallace said cheerfully as he looked through them. ‘Oh, and here’s one that looks more interesting for you, Charles.’ He pocketed his own mail, and we waited while Charles tore through the seal on a thick white cover and read the letter it contained.

‘Well!’ he exclaimed. ‘If it isn’t my long-lost brother, at last!’

‘From Oliver Erskine?’ called Emily from the verandah where she was waiting to see us off.

‘No less.’

‘What does he say? Oh, Charles, do tell me, you can’t leave me in suspense all morning.’

‘It’s no more than a note, my dear, and forwarded from Calcutta too, I see. It congratulates me on my marriage, and trusts that he will see us in the near future. He will, he says “make it his pleasurable duty” to visit us in Lucknow. No invitation to Hassanganj, of course, nor any indication of when he will be here. Still it’s something, I suppose.’ Charles laughed and thrust the letter into his pocket. ‘Scarcely an affectionate and concerned brother, but at least we are in communication.’

Kate Barry was a comfortable person to be with. I had discovered that one question, judiciously phrased, could open up the floodgates of her experience and leave me free to listen, almost without comment, for an hour at a stretch. I decided that this ride was just the occasion for some questions regarding Mr Erskine, and, as I had hoped, Kate knew none of Mr Roberts’s reticence in discussing him.

‘Is it long since you last saw Mr Erskine?’ I enquired decorously as we passed through the Avery gate.

‘Oh, let me think. Now I believe it would have been some time in the spring.’

‘This last spring?’ I asked, surprised, as I somehow had the impression that Mr Erskine had not been seen in Lucknow for years.

‘Yes, March, I believe. He was with Henry Cussens, down at the Constantia Lake one evening, and I had a few words with him. He comes into Lucknow every two or three months, y’know, on business. Banking, ordering supplies, that sort of thing. Occasionally he looks us up, but he never stays more than a couple of days, and it must be a couple of years now since he even had a meal with us. Of course we are old fogies to him, but he seems to enjoy talking about his grandmother and the old days, and he knows that I am fond of him, and don’t care a button about his reputation either.’

‘His reputation?’ I ventured disingenuously.

‘Oh, yes, m’dear. He has—or rather had, for nobody knows how he conducts himself nowadays—but he
had
a terrible reputation! Earned it too, I must confess, contrary divil that he is. But he was much younger then, of course. Very wild. Headstrong and uncaring, y’know. Divil a bit he minded what anyone said of him.’

Kate sat back more comfortably against the worn padding of her seat, and I held my breath, praying that her attention would not be deflected from this interesting subject. I need not have worried; she was merely settling herself for a nice gossip.

‘Yes,’ she went on, ‘very wild. That was after his grandmother’s death of course. He was just feeling his oats, I expect. But for a time there was quite a succession of—well, dubious young females who visited him as guests. Of course he was all alone in Hassanganj at that time, so people jumped to conclusions. The right ones too, I have no doubt. There was a young French actress, I remember, and another girl who was supposed to be an opera singer, though where even Oliver Erskine could have found an opera singer in Oudh is beyond me. Oh, and several other less colourful ones. They never lasted long, and then they’d be seen all dressed up, with their bandboxes and trunks neatly roped, waiting in the hotel here to be taken back to wherever they had come from. Of course the local ladies were outraged; you can just imagine it, my dear, now that you know us. Before that, all the mamas with eligible daughters in the station were for ever inviting him to stay with them, or angling for invitations to Hassanganj for themselves. But once the lady friends started, he was dropped like a hot brick. Not that he cared a fig, I’m sure. The crop of insipid young misses we raise out here are certainly not for his culling! For one thing, he’s a very intelligent man. Far too intelligent to shut himself up for life, way out there in Hassanganj, with some empty-headed girl who’d lose her bloom by twenty. Not he!

‘I always say, or rather I
think,
for George would be scandalized if I
said
it, that he found an excellent solution to his problem in his succession of frivolous young ladies. They did him no harm, and I can’t believe he did them any. In fact they probably made a pretty good thing out of his generosity for—well, favours received. And he really did us no harm either, never brought them into society or tried to foist them on to us as relatives, or anything like that. Very proper about it all he was, in his own way. But the fact remains that he worked at earning himself a reputation for being “fast”, and, whatever the current state of his morals, “fast” he has remained to Lucknow. And more particularly to Mariaon. But, however, there has been no talk of that sort of thing for years. Now his crime is that his opinions, on annexation and this
talukhdari
settlement thing—handing over the land to the peasants—and so on, are extreme. The folk here think he has too much sympathy with the natives. Perhaps he has, indeed, and who could blame him? He’s spent his life among ’em in a way that none of the rest of us have. And he won’t hold his tongue, y’see. He will say what he thinks, and, since what he thinks is seldom in agreement with what we think, every time he opens his mouth he adds fuel to the flames. If you see what I mean.’

‘Yes. Yes, I do,’ I laughed, ‘and I must say your account of the gentleman leaves me quite intrigued to meet him. But for Heaven’s sake don’t breathe a word of any of this to Charles or I never shall. Charles would throw a fit and hustle us back to England immediately.’

‘And would he so? Well, I suppose he would have to think of Emily’s feelings. But I’m glad you’re too sensible to be shocked. This sort of thing happens everywhere, y’know; and as I say, Oliver conducted his little
amours
in a far more gentlemanly fashion than many I could mention. And then, of course, he’s settled down a lot in recent years. The thing that really bothers people with him, though, is that he can’t be ignored. Too rich, y’see, and too influential in his own way. The “Authorities” still continue to invite him to our jollifications—not that he often deigns to attend—and, well, it is impossible to cut a man who is introduced to you by the Resident or your C.O. or someone like that. So they content themselves with backbiting and resurrecting the old scandals.’

‘You mentioned once that there was some trouble surrounding Mr Erskine’s relations with his mother. I know Mrs Flood, and it does seem strange to me that anyone as dominating and possessive as she is should have had so little to do with the upbringing of her first child.’

‘Ah yes, indeed, there was a tremendous row soon after Oliver’s father’s death, when Oliver was just a mite, you know. It was the talk of Lucknow for a while, though none of us ever knew what had really happened. His mother … now what was her name?’

‘Maud,’ I supplied.

‘Of course. Well, Maud had never got on too well with the elder Erskines and as soon as opportunity offered after her mourning, came into Lucknow to spend some time with a married friend whose husband, an Italian y’know, was one of the many rather dubious foreigners who clustered around the Nawab of the time. This man, an out-and-out adventurer, my dear, managed to persuade the silly woman that with his help the Nawab could be influenced into revoking, or at least curtailing, old Adam Erskine’s ownership of Hassanganj, and could then arrange matters so that she, Maud that is, would stand to gain much more from the estate than a widowed daughter-in-law could otherwise expect.

‘Theoretically, I believe, something of the sort might have been possible, as places like Hassanganj were sometimes conferred by deed-of-gift, and a sufficiently unscrupulous donor, or his successor, could arrange the reversion of the gift to himself. However, Ghazi-ud-din Haider, the Nawab of the time, was one of the more worthy incumbents of the throne.’

Kate paused to open her parasol and settle herself more comfortably, then went on.

‘No doubt he was tempted briefly, for if he transferred Hassanganj from Adam Erskine to Maud, as Oliver’s guardian, he could demand a much larger percentage of the revenues. But Maud and her friends had not taken into account
izat
, the stringent but admirable Mohammedan code of honour. Ghazi-uddin refused to go against his predecessor’s wishes, and so nothing came of the wretched Italian’s machinations. Except the scandal. When Maud got back to Hassanganj she found that news of the affair had preceded her and she was no longer welcome. Of course no one knows what took place, but the upshot was that she was somehow persuaded to leave Oliver in his grandparents’ guardianship and take herself off to England—no doubt with a handsome annuity. And Oliver, so I believe, had no communication with his mother until the lawyers informed her of old Mrs Erskine’s death.’

‘Strange,’ I mused, more to myself than to Kate. ‘From the way Mrs Flood talked, I’d have thought that nothing but distance ever separated them. I had come to the conclusion that she had not seen him as a child because her second husband raised objections. How easily we can be misled about our acquaintance.’ And particularly when they want to mislead us, I added silently, with a vivid recollection of the small, cunning eyes in Mrs Flood’s fat face.

A month before, we had exclaimed with wonder at the extent and magnificence of Lucknow—the City of Palaces—lying open to our astonished gaze in the forgiving light of dawn, but the drives we had taken through the parks and gardens around the city, passing many large and imposing mansions hardly less than palaces, had prepared me for some disappointment in the city itself. Now, as we made our way from the shady avenues of Mariaon Cantonment into its teeming heart, I was to discover that Lucknow’s glory lay all in the past.

The great structures, the mosques, palaces and temples, whose spires had so beguiled us from a distance, were beautiful now only to eyes able to see them as they must have been, to minds capable of appreciating the artistic vision and architectural mastery that had built them; for as one approached them, the delicate proportions, the elegant strength of design, the strangely beautiful embellishments of plaster, gilt and paint, all faded before an overpowering awareness of dirt, decay and human distress. The massive piles thrust their gilded minarets and airy cupolas out of a noisome sea of crowded tenements, rickety shops, ramshackle shanty dwellings cut through by unpaved alleyways and labyrinthine lanes, the whole seething with the continual crush and movement of a vast and poverty-ridden populace.

That human life should be sustained,
could
be sustained, in such conditions horrified me. Never had I seen men and women so ragged, so filthy and so shameless.

Fetid streets, lined with crazily constructed open-fronted booths, and strewn with decaying vegetable matter and accumulations of ancient ordure nauseous to both nose and eyes, were crowded with shabby, shoving, shouting humanity. Among the bare feet of their elders, naked children slipped in search of anything edible in the debris; mangy dogs, stark-ribbed and yellow-eyed, snapped apathetically at the flies or snarled at the children who crawled too near; great white sacred bulls, with fat humps swaying and dewlaps flapping, nuzzled the gutters, secure in the knowledge that even in this Mohammedan city no hand could be turned against them. Here a couple of goats were tethered to a bedstead on which an old man lay crouched in sleep; there a sheep was slaughtered under the delighted gaze of a covey of pot-bellied children, who leapt back laughing as the arc of blood from the stretched throat soaked them. A caravan of camels, bell-hung and belching, fought for space with three lumbering elephants who swept the open shops of sweetmeats as they passed, and a cavalcade of seedy horses bearing a variety of evil-looking men, black-moustachioed and heavily armed, forced its rearing, neighing way through the throng. Holy men, the ‘Sky Born’, dressed as their mothers had borne them, long locks matted with ashes, foreheads marked with the ubiquitous symbol of Shiva, sat cross-legged and withdrawn among the cabbage leaves and horse-droppings, and every corner harboured a beggar exhibiting his sores or waving the stumps of his limbs, while importuning and imprecating the passers-by with an equal, hopeless violence.

And over all, enclosing all, accentuating the disgusted be-wilderment that filled me as my eyes roved the scene, was the noise—that sheer shell of sound that seems indivisible from humanity in India: shouting and hoarse cries, the wail of infants, the screams of children at unlikely games, vendors crying their wares, temple bells and beggars’ bells and the bells of camels and the deep ‘dong-dong’ bells of elephants, dogs yelping, donkeys braying, horses neighing.