Zemindar (59 page)

That was what love was. That was what love should be. Not this deliberate assaying of worth, this detached examination of qualities. Love should need no accountant.

‘Don’t think so much,’ he said at last, as still I did not speak, and there was great tenderness in his tone. ‘Don’t try to analyse and dissect. Don’t be so obstinately set on seeing your way, on being right. Oh, my little mule, stop kicking! Forget your head and just this once trust your heart!’

He was pleading with me. I looked up at him, but now his eyes were guarded.

‘I’m afraid it is my heart I am guided by,’ I answered apologetically. ‘I think you want something that I cannot give you. I can’t pretend to feel what I don’t, Oliver.’

‘Would I want you to pretend?’

‘No.’ So much was patent.

‘You have no need of pretence with me, Laura. Never will have.’ He sighed and took his hands away from mine.

‘So it’s still Charles, eh? I’d have sworn you were over that. Could it be that you are only pretending to yourself that you love him, for old time’s sake?’

‘But I don’t! No, it’s not Charles and I am certainly not pretending anything at all to myself in his regard.’

I might not love Oliver, but I could not have Oliver thinking I still loved Charles.

‘Oh, I’m not denying,’ I went on, as he folded his arms and stared across the colourless fields, ‘I’m not denying that I thought for a long time that I did love Charles. To begin with, perhaps, I really did. He was so handsome and elegant, and I had known so few young men. But that’s all finished now. I think it has been finished for even longer than I realized, perhaps because I didn’t want it to be. I know I can’t make any sense to you. Men are so different about these things: all black and white and clear cut and quite unable to appreciate the gradations and changes in a woman’s feelings. But it is finished. I’ve grown up, I suppose. It’s strange, you know. I thought this journey to India in his company, seeing him with Emily, would be the cruellest thing I’d ever have to endure. At the beginning it was. Then, well, I found I wasn’t thinking of him so much, or if I were it was with criticism, and now, though I can remember quite well how I once felt about him, I no longer feel it. Feel anything for him. You must believe that, please?’

‘Good! Familiarity generally does breed contempt, you’ll find.’

‘That’s putting it a little too strongly. But at least, in this case, familiarity seems to have put an end to romantic dreams. That much I will acknowledge.’

‘Good again. Romance is for dimwits and cowards!’

‘What a dull, prosaic world we would have if everyone thought so.’

‘Nonsense. Reality is far more interesting than romance.’

‘Interesting? Possibly for the strong-minded. But never as pleasant.’

‘Hmph!’

We were silent for a time. Heat haze shimmered over the ground and only the tops of the few scrubby thorn-trees were visible, like corks bobbing in a sea of soda water.

What a peculiar place to receive a declaration of love, I thought, and from Oliver Erskine of all people. Everything lacked reality: our situation in this baked terrain, our fugitive condition, our unfamiliar clothing. I was very tired, very hot, and conscious of my own lack of cleanliness; no doubt these physical discomforts played a part in keeping realization from me, even the true realization of what Mr Erskine had just told me.

Had things been different, had he declared his love in the drawing-room at Hassanganj, or in the garden at Mount Bellew, had my world been safely balanced on security, familiarity and hope and not overthrown by fear and flight and the horrible evidence of sudden death, I suppose I would have been young enough and female enough to have enjoyed thinking over my conquest. I would surely have felt flattered, no doubt complacent too, however little I loved him. I would have realized that it was no mean thing to bring a man of so positive a temperament to my feet, and perhaps the very flattery of it would have led me to think I could love him in return or, at all events, desire not to lose my power over him.

But my little times were too badly out of joint to permit the tender triumphs of courtship. His declaration, almost casual as it was, had certainly surprised me, and for a moment stirred me to the recognition that it was genuine, and even briefly touched my heart. Yet for many reasons I was incapable of any response, and the chief of these was that all my faculties were bent on the justification of what I had done the night before. For, although the emotion engendered by the dreadful deaths my friends had met with was genuine, I had been kept awake through the long night and the hot morning, not by the vision of their decomposing bodies lying unattended in the peepul grove, but by the fear that I had done them yet another wrong in robbing them. In robbing the dead. Twice during the night I had brought myself to the point of throwing away the wretched black garter that I had thrust into the bosom of my dress; and twice I had desisted. It was of this I thought as we sat in the hot shadow, so close together—and not of Oliver.

‘Oliver?’

‘Yes?’

‘Please help me.’ Tears of exhaustion and self-pity rose to my eyes as I spoke.

‘What is it, Laura? You know I will.’

‘I … I did an awful thing last night. At least I think it was an awful thing now, but then I only remembered that she said I could always call on her for help, that it would always be ready for me. I didn’t think of it as thieving, but perhaps they have relatives and then I will certainly have to send it back. Everything is so dreadfully uncertain and there’s no way of knowing what we might need money for, cash for, before we reach Calcutta, and none of us have very much with us. But if they have relatives, I will send it them back. I promise I will!’

‘Who? What? Send what back?’

‘Mrs Wilkins’s garter.’

‘What are you talking about?’

He put his hand under my chin and forced me to face him. Seeing the tears, he wiped them away with a fold of my
burqha
. ‘What is all this, Laura? Now start from the beginning and tell me.’

‘It was on the ship, that’s where it began. I had looked after them, Mrs Wilkins and Elvira, when they were ill, and I suppose they were grateful, although I didn’t do any more than they would have done for me or anyone else, I’m sure. But afterwards, when they were well again, Mrs Wilkins showed the garter to me. I think it was the last day on board. She always wore it, and she said India was a hard place for a young girl and that if I ever needed help—money, you know—I was just to write and let her know. She had sold two already, but she was a thrifty soul and there would always be enough for me.’ I gulped and sniffed.

‘You mean there was money in the garter?’ He began to look less puzzled.

‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘Jewels! Pearls and rubies and a very large emerald. I didn’t think of it at first. Not when I found them. But then I remembered, and I went back. The … the flies … they were so repulsive! But I got it, and then I went away and was sick. It was horrible, Oliver, horrible! A terrible thing for anyone to do, and I know I was wrong. Robbing the dead is a crime. Oh, Oliver, what am I to do?’ I wailed.

‘Where is this thing?’ he asked.

I took it out and gave it to him. He examined it minutely, much as I had done in such different circumstances on the ship ten months before. He pulled a few stitches at one end, making an aperture, then shook the garter vigorously. Four milky pearls and a ruby fell into the palm of his hand. He whistled in admiration.

‘Magnificent!’ he exclaimed. ‘If they are all as good as these, you are almost a wealthy woman.’

‘But they are not mine. I don’t want them. Don’t you see, I stole them! I went back and found them near Mrs Wilkins’s dead body!’ I enunciated each word very deliberately so that he would understand. He regarded me blankly for a moment, then the corners of his mouth twitched and, burying his face in his hands, he gave himself over to laughter.

I sat watching his shoulders shake and wondered whether my misdeed had been too much even for him. Did men sometimes have hysterics as women did?

When he looked up, there were tears in his eyes, and for a while he could not speak. Every time he tried to, he would catch my anxious eye and something would set him off again. At last he leant back against the wall and mopped his perspiring face with the tail of his turban.

‘Oh, my jewel,’ he gasped, started to laugh again, but controlled himself. ‘My queen amongst women. My angel of expediency. My saint of common sense. There are no words good enough for you!’

‘Stop it, Oliver. You’re teasing me, and a moment ago you promised to help. I am really worried about what I did.’ But something in his face, a suggestion of disbelief, perhaps, prompted me to smile as I spoke.

‘You have absolutely nothing to worry about,’ he assured me solemnly. ‘No woman capable of retaining her practical good sense in spite of what she experienced on such an occasion as last night need ever worry. About anything. Anywhere!’

‘But that’s just it, don’t you see? I’m ashamed of having done it, but I’m even more ashamed of being the sort of person who could think of doing it. Emily … well, you know it would never have entered Emily’s head. She would never have thought of the jewels, or that they might be useful to her, with those two poor things lying there in that awful condition. Perhaps I wouldn’t have either, ordinarily,’ I allowed myself, ‘but now with everything so upset, we might very well need more money than we have with us. It seemed such a pity to leave them there.’

‘No, don’t. Please Laura, don’t explain. It would start me off again, and I can’t bear any more. Oh, my God!’

‘But are you sure? You don’t think I was very wrong to do it? Honestly?’

‘Tell me, what would have happened to that … that thing, if you hadn’t taken it?’

‘The jackals …’

‘Yes, but then someone, sooner or later, would have found it and discovered what it contained. There is no one in the world so curious or so rapacious as an Indian peasant. Have you thought what would have happened if the men who killed the Wilkinses had discovered it, as well they might have done?’

‘No.’

‘They would have bought guns, ammunition, supplies with them to use against other people like the Wilkinses. Against us, perhaps. They would have made good use of them, believe me.’

‘Yes—but after all, those were … enemies.’

‘Would Mrs Wilkins sooner her enemies had her jewels than her friends?’

‘I suppose not.’

‘You said yourself she had offered you her help. Now, in a wrong way but at the right time, she has given it to you. And tell me, how did she come by the things in the first place? Did she buy them?’

‘No! Oh, she told me all about it. The Major, only he wasn’t a major then of course, got them after a battle ages ago, in one of the states, from the coat of a dead princeling, Mrs Wilkins thought …’ My voice trailed away in confusion.

‘Oh, no! Oh my God! I’m off again!’

This time I was able to join in the unseemly laughter with only a trace of remorse left in my mind.

* * *

That evening, as we made our way back to the cart to resume our journey, I made an opportunity to have a few words alone with Oliver.

‘I am sorry,’ I told him, ‘that I am not able to feel for you as you would wish me to. I am very … grateful for your regard.’

‘Are you?’ He was striding along with his rifle over his shoulder, and I had to hurry to keep up with him and out of earshot of the others. ‘But I don’t want your gratitude, Laura. There’s no place for gratitude between two people as matched and equal as us. I’m willing to wait for what I want from you. I always get what I want—in the end!’

And with a grin he lengthened his stride and left me to pick my way onward alone.

We travelled steadily all that night and until the early afternoon of the following day. Ishmial had managed to procure a strip of canvas from somewhere with which he roofed the wall of the cart so that its occupants were protected both from the sun and curious eyes. We had decided again to press on by daylight, for now Lucknow was only a score or so miles away, but the pace of a bullock-cart is scarcely hectic, however harshly the driver may yell at his long-suffering beasts or however cruelly he may twist their bony tails.

As we drew near the city, even the side roads that we were using became busy with traffic, with other carts and shabby horse-drawn
gharis
and
ekkas
, with mounted men and throngs of villagers, with sometimes bands of sepoys marching in ragged formation or half a dozen
sowars
on fine mounts who galloped in the middle of the road regardless of pedestrians. And the closer we got to Lucknow, the more obvious became the atmosphere of tension, of crisis around us. Several times we stopped boldly at roadside
serais
where Ishmial bought food, watered the bullocks and made use of the opportunity to ask questions and listen to gossip, that gossip of the Indian roads that travels faster than a message by telegraph, and carries more of actual truth than any newspaper. The information was not reassuring; it became apparent that all the north-eastern section of the Indian peninsula was now in turmoil—all Oudh, Bihar, and Bengal, to say nothing of Delhi itself. The sepoys we saw swaggering along so arrogantly were all mutineers, most of them making their way to Lucknow from small stations up-country. As I watched each party pass, peeping through the slit between the canvas and the top rail of the cart, I wondered whether these were the men who had attacked the Wilkinses. Oliver thought it possible that the dreadful deed had been done by the Major’s own men, who had known his intentions and seen him set off with his family and his cartload of baggage, a powerful incentive to murder in the present times.

So far, we had managed to skirt the towns and larger villages, but now we could no longer avoid passing through them on our course, and each of the little towns, with its tall balconied houses cut through by narrow alleys crowded with people, indicated clearly the mood of the country.

The
bunnias
were doing a roaring trade, the streets outside their little shops solid with sepoys buying food, as watersellers and coffee vendors, with their conical copper jugs and their tinkling bells, moved busily among the crowds. On the balconies, women of doubtful virtue, for they were unveiled, watched the comings and goings and engaged in high-pitched conversation with the soldiery beneath them. Even the usual smell of an Indian bazaar—of rotting vegetables, filthy drains, hot oil from the sweet shops, dust, urine, cheap sweet perfume, and incense coils and sweat—seemed to be heightened in the heat and excitement, and the stains of red betel nut juice, spattered on every building, were ominously like blood to my nervous eyes.