Zemindar (55 page)

And all day the great pink house suffered in its death throes, fighting the flames that sought to devour it. So solidly built, roofed with tiles instead of thatch, it put up a long struggle, but the flames won at last, and as the day wore on, our dim refuge was several times illuminated as a great tongue of victorious fire forced itself into the overhanging smoke, to be followed by a roar of falling beams and disintegrating masonry, as part of the roof, or an angle of wall, collapsed into the inferno beneath. I thought of Danielle, of her jade, porcelain and crystal, so lovingly collected over so many years, and of Old Adam’s library. I thought of the effort, of the caring, of the time that had been put into creating the oasis of civilization that had been Hassanganj, all gone in one spiteful day, and I came near to real hate.

When the day was at its hottest, I was woken by Oliver shaking my shoulder and holding a flask to my lips.

‘Drink up,’ he said as I opened my eyes. I shook my head. It was the flask he normally filled with brandy when he went duck shooting in the early mornings. The very thought of that scorching liquor on my dry tongue made me want to vomit.

‘Come on now … it’s water. Only water.’ Unbelievingly, I took a sip. It was warm and tasted slightly of brandy, but nevertheless it was water.

‘Go on. Drink away. We’ve all had some.’ So I raised myself on one elbow and drank. It cleared my head; and my first reaction was annoyance. Why had he kept it from us for so long? Hadn’t he guessed how thirsty we would be?

I saw him grin in the half-light.

‘We have only two flasks; no sense in telling you until we really needed them. You don’t know what thirst is yet, but this will have to do you until five o’clock this evening, so stop grumbling. What did you expect me to have—a
mushak
full?’

Afterwards I fell into a deep sleep, from which I did not wake until late afternoon. The house was still smouldering. We ate hunks of buttered bread and slices of meat that Charles took out of his shooting bag. It was an effort to force the stuff down my throat, but Oliver had warned us that there would be no water until we had eaten and, like children, we obeyed him. The second flask was passed round. Immediately I felt better and my spirits rose. It was cooler now, and in less than two hours would be dark. Pearl was beginning to whimper and her sleep seemed lighter. Emily, I knew, was longing for her to wake, not only to reassure herself of the child’s health, but to ease her aching, over-full breasts.

When it had been dark for a full hour, Oliver decided to move. We covered the baby with her shawl, and our own faces with our clothing as he set to work reopening the aperture by which we had entered. He slid his body through it to the ground. I was just about to follow him, when he ordered me to stay where I was. He would take a look around and we were not to stir until he got back.

‘You might never come back!’ I pointed out irritably.

‘True,’ he agreed. ‘But don’t waste time wishing me dead. I’m as fond of my own skin … as I am of yours!’ He was gone before the words had sunk in or I had thought of a retort.

I resigned myself to another period of waiting, but more cheerfully, and it did not seem long before Oliver’s voice was telling me to get out, and his hands were pulling at the thatch to assist my descent into the open air. Stiff and cramped beyond bearing, I would have fallen as my feet touched the ground had he not held me upright. His face, close to mine for a moment, was strained and grim, and I realized in the midst of my own discomfort how much he must be suffering at the loss of his home.

After a moment I was able to stamp the circulation back into my legs, and gasped in great lungfuls of smoky air as he helped the others out in their turn. Not until we all stood together in the darkness behind the ice-house, giggling shakily in mingled relief and nervousness, did I notice his clothes. In place of his drab trousers and alpaca jacket, he wore now the baggy pyjamas, long loose shirt and starched turban of a Pathan, with a red velvet waistcoat covering his chest, and crossing it a pair of bandoliers such as Ishmial wore. Probably the things were Ishmial’s, I thought, but then remembered the talk in Lucknow so long ago when someone had hinted with disapproval that he assumed ‘native dress’. To judge by the ease with which he carried his strange apparel, perhaps they had been right.

‘Why, Oliver, how funny you look,’ exclaimed Emily. ‘Do we all have to dress up like you?’ The thought appealed to her.

‘Not just now, but later perhaps. First, we have to get out of the compound and find Ishmial and the bullock-cart which I hope he has managed to get for us. There’s no one around, neither our own folk nor the others, but go quietly and keep in the shadow.’

Charles took Pearl from Emily and the rest of us picked up our various bundles and followed Oliver, who carried a mysterious burden that had not been with us in the thatch under one arm, and a rifle on the other.

Our direction took us away from the house, but I turned back several times to watch the rosy glow of the smoke still rising from the ruins. Of the house itself, I could see nothing. It must have collapsed thoroughly into itself. Presently, we arrived at the high boundary wall that enclosed the whole park, and followed it for perhaps ten stumbling minutes. Then Oliver, placing his bundle and rifle on the ground, scaled the wall with disconcerting ease and, sitting crouched on the top in the shadow of a tree, gave a low whistle. Instantly, he was answered. In a few moments, amid the lamentations of Emily and only too aware of torn clothing, scraped knees and broken fingernails, we were all over the wall and on the edge of a rutted country track where waited Ishmial (a close approximation of his master now), Toddy-Bob and a bullock-cart.

My relief was great on seeing those two familiar figures, but, wasting no words on greeting, Oliver strode to the cart and came back with a large earthenware jar full of water and a copper container of food. It was native food—
chapattis
, vegetable curry and lentils—and we ate it with relish; having at last had our fill of water, we were able to turn our full attention to our plight.

‘Well, that’s that,’ Oliver grunted, standing up and rubbing his hands inelegantly on the seat of his baggy trousers, while Charles wiped the curry from his moustache with a grubby handkerchief. ‘Now get into these all of you, and you too, Toddy-Bob, and no argument!’ His voice was harsh and his manner brusque, but under the circumstances, who could blame him?

Oliver pulled apart the bundle he had carried and threw us each a voluminous tentlike garment of heavy cotton called a
burqha
 … such garments as Muslim women wear when outside their homes to protect themselves from the gaze of males.

‘Not me, Guv’nor!’ Toddy-Bob objected immediately.

‘Yes,
you
. God knows how you have managed so long in those clothes as it is.’

‘I only been out by night, as you well know—and then I ’ad me ’at off,’ Toddy said in an injured tone, removing his high coachman’s hat as he spoke and holding it behind his back. ‘S’truth, Guv’nor! You can’t expect me to wear no Muslim nightgown! Really you can’t! Tells you what … I’ll pull me shirt out over me breeches, and snitch a
puggaree
next time I ’as the opportunity. But you can’t get me into no
burqha
; and, Guv’nor, I’m that brown now, I’d be taken for a
bunnia
by me own mother—you know that!’

They measured each other for a moment in silence, and Oliver gave in gracefully. ‘Very well, but you’ll sit in the well of the cart with the ladies.’

‘And I’m really to get into this?’ Charles, in his turn, held up the offending garment as though it smelt.

‘You are. How else do you propose to hide those luxuriant yellow whiskers? To say nothing of your lovely blue eyes!’ Misfortune had not mellowed Mr Erskine’s tongue, I noticed, as Charles donned his
burqha
with disgust.

‘We will travel only at night; it is customary at this time of year and we will arouse no suspicion. But don’t speak to each other when we are passing anyone, keep your shoes covered by your skirts, and Emily, keep the baby under your
burqha
—that shawl is much too clean.’

We set off. Oliver and Ishmial walked beside the cart and the rest of us crouched on the dirty boards of the floor. We were in no way remarkable from a score of other parties we passed: three veiled women and a youth, accompanied by their two stalwart menfolk. Only Toddy’s bare head struck a false note, and, by morning, that too had been covered with a dirty white turban. How or when he acquired it, I can’t be sure, but once we had stopped outside a village to water the bullocks and had discerned a party of travellers asleep in their cotton sheets not far from us. Perhaps they had the answer.

It was a strange, almost mysterious experience, jogging along the immemorial ways of India while the great indigo arc of the night wheeled its burden of stars slowly above us, and the plain stretched away in its infinity of secret, unexplained life. A dozen times we passed through sleeping villages that might have been the same village, watched by the same ring-tailed, stark-ribbed dogs; shaded by the same groves; watered by the same shallow tanks; inhabited by the same population of skinny old men asleep on string beds beside the road. Villages that looked the same and smelt the same and gave the same inadequate protection to the same undemanding people. And, between the villages, stubbly fields, scrubby pasture and miles of wasteland broken by dry watercourses, with here and there, perhaps, the remains of a mud fort rearing a blacker bulk against the black of the sky. There was such a sameness in the dusty road, the nameless hamlets, the featureless dark landscape, that it became difficult to believe we were moving at all. When the sun gathered strength, we halted in a grove set some way back from the road.

No stretch of country in India, however inhospitable in appearance, is quite devoid of humanity, so it was pointless to look for a place where our presence would not be discovered. The most we could hope for was to blend with our surroundings, and this our bullock-cart, our apparel, and the presence of Ishmial enabled us to do. While we exercised our cramped limbs by strolling through the grove, Ishmial went in search of food and Toddy-Bob built a fire in a stone
chula
at the base of one of the trees—evidence that the grove was a recognized stopping place for travellers. We breakfasted on hot milk and dry
chapattis
and lay down beside the cart to sleep, while the men took turns in watching the approaches to the camp. Sleep came easily, in spite of lying on the bare ground, and it was midday before the heat, the flies and the wails of the baby combined to awaken me. Ishmial and Toddy-Bob were busily employed at the stone hearth cooking, Emily and Charles sat some distance away with Pearl, but of Oliver there was no sign. Toddy said he was on guard, and jerked his chin in the direction of the road.

I found him sitting cross-legged on the ground with his rifle across his knees, gazing abstractedly through the deep shadow of the trees towards the rutted white track, bordered by dusty lantana bushes and clumps of point-leaved cactus, that stretched its monotonous way through the parched land … back … back to Hassanganj. He made no move as I approached and sat down beside him.

In the branches above us a troop of monkeys stilled into silence for their noon siesta, but a small grey squirrel, angered by our presence, skittered shrilly up and down the bole of a mango, scolding us, and a flight of green parrots broke the heat haze with a sudden scream of movement.

Morosely, Oliver threw a pebble at the indignant squirrel.

‘Well,’ he asked, ‘and are you rested?’

‘Enough, but still uneasy.’

He made no reply, but watched for the squirrel to emerge from its hole so that he could take another shot at it.

‘Are we going to manage it, Oliver?’ I insisted. ‘Do you think we will ever reach Lucknow?’

‘We will.’ And it was no mere reassurance. It was a statement of fact. I knew him well enough now to realize that he would disdain lying in order to comfort me, so hoped that we would never be in a position where his answer would be less optimistic.

‘In another two nights, three at the most, we will be in the outskirts of the city. By that time we should know something of the state of its inhabitants and can make our plans accordingly.’

‘Do you think … do you think they will be antagonistic?’ I winced inwardly at that weak word, but was afraid to use a more accurate one.

‘Probably. But, having got that far, we should be able to get through the city without undue trouble. So long as the Residency is still open, of course. That’s all that bothers me. Tomorrow we should get some idea of how things are going there. How is Emily bearing it?’

‘Well. Much better than I had expected. She’s hardly even grumbling, and you know how she loves her comfort … Oliver?’

‘What?’

‘I want to say how sorry I am. About all this. And the house … and everything! It’s a terrible loss, and I feel that if we hadn’t been with you, you … well, you might have found some way of saving it. You could have done something perhaps.’

‘Perhaps,’ he agreed. ‘But I don’t think so, and anyway, you were not responsible. Why do you feel you were?’

‘I know we have been in your way. You’ve said so often enough.’

‘I was anxious for your safety. I hoped that whatever was going to happen would happen after you were gone. That’s all.’

‘I … I hate to think of it all in ruins, all that you Erskines have built up in Hassanganj. I suppose women are more sentimental about their surroundings and possessions and so on, but when I remember your books, and Old Adam’s chair, and your grandmother’s beautiful things, I could cry. It’s such wanton waste. I think I mind almost as much as if it had been my home and not yours. All it took to make it.’

‘It can be rebuilt … and I’ll rebuild it.’

‘Yes, but you’ll never be able to restore what you’ve lost.’

‘Perhaps I don’t want to. Isn’t it always a mistake to try to go back, to replace what has once been got rid of?’