‘After we’d had dinner and you were seeing to the men. It’s a surprise breakfast. Have a hard-boiled egg first?’
‘Hard-boiled eggs too. Well done. No, I’ll have a sandwich first.’
When she was a child and before the years of exile at school in England they had trekked on ponies through the Pankot hills, making camp at tea-time, striking camp at dawn; rather, the servants had made camp ahead of them and done all the striking. What’s for breakfast? her father used to say. Hard boiled eggs and cold bacon sandwiches. With mugs of hot sweet tea. Eaten and drunk before the sun had risen and scorched the mist away. Night found her so tired that she slept before she had time to fix in her mind the position of the jackal packs in relation to the camp. That was the year of the map-reading lessons when she had been initiated into the mysteries of orientation, six point references and compass bearings; lessons begun on the verandah of Rose Cottage which had a view of the hills and distant peaks which he taught her to relate to the hatchings and contours of a map pinned to a board, under talc upon which the coloured chinagraph pencils left marks you could rub out with your finger and obliterate entirely with a rolled-up handkerchief. He taught her the tewt – the tactical exercise without troops – and she had seldom looked at a landscape since without being alerted to its topographical influence on what was or was not militarily feasible to perform in it. But she had never grasped as a man could do the points of weakness, the conditions that were favourable for the daring stroke that spelt success. Everything, hill, valley, hedge, tree, lake, river, bank, forest, seemed – militarily – overwhelmingly dangerous. So her military accomplishments really began and ended in the commissariat – providing hard boiled eggs and cold fried bacon sandwiches. These she could understand, appreciate, hunger after; and happily leave to him and to men like him the things that sharpened different appetites. Preparing a bacon sandwich now she thought of how he had virtually lost a regiment. She handed the sandwich to him, as it were in compensation.
He waited until she had made one for herself and then, looking at each other like old conspirators, they bit in, holding their hands up to catch crumbs.
‘They taste better on a train,’ he said, after swallowing. ‘Something to do with the smoke and soot.’ She poured tea into the mugs. Because they both liked it sweet she’d had the milk and sugar added in the flask: a thick strong picnic brew. The regular puffing sound of the engine came and went as it negotiated the bends and gradients on the hillside. She looked at her watch. One hour to go. He was at the window again, mug in hand.
‘There they are!’
He waved and made room for her. Several carriages along the sepoys had their heads stuck out of the window of the special compartment Movement Control had reserved for them. They were grinning and waving. She waved back. One of them pointed. Perhaps his village was visible from here, or in this vicinity. But most of them came from the higher hills beyond Pankot. What a lot they had seen. What tales they could tell. In their villages they would be important men. They had seen the world and would be accounted wise in its ways. Their advice would be listened to. They would swagger a bit. The hands of the unmarried ones would be sought by parents with dowries and daughters. And a special distinction attached to them because Colonel Sahib had waited in Bombay until they were all fit enough to travel. That tale would be told far into the future. It was something he had done for them. They would always remember.
She waved again and turned back in. He was on the bench looking up at her, smiling, as if proud of them, of her; as if happy. But she knew he was not; not deeply happy. She offered him an egg and a twist of pepper and salt to dip it in after he’d cracked and shelled it. He began this operation and she sat beside him similarly occupied. In India, yes, one could travel great distances. But the greatest distance was between people who were closely related. That distance was never easy to cover. Is Sarah heartfree still? he had asked Aunt Fenny in private, but Fenny had told her and added, Are you pet? So that for a moment it seemed that she would refer to what had never been referred to since it happened. And what had happened constituted the greatest distance there could be between her and her father. Or did it? She would have liked to tell him. She believed he would understand. But the train rattled on and she said nothing. They cracked eggs.
I particularly remember the eggs (Sarah has said), the moment when, simultaneously, he became conscious of the mess we were making and I became conscious that it irritated him.
*
There followed the moment of revelation, that in his valise her father had an old clothes brush. He used this to sweep the crumbs and sharp little fragments of shell into The Times of India – after they had brushed down their clothes and the seat with their hands. He carried the folded paper into the W.C. and poured the contents down the pan.
When he came back he made no comment. Gradually her embarrassment spent itself. She looked at him encouragingly, alert to the possibility that he had something special to say for which the clearing up of the mess may have been a delaying tactic as much as anything else; and looking at him, came up against the barrier of his inarticulate affection, his restraint, his inner reservations – as solid an edifice as the rock-face that marks the end of the line from Ranpur to Pankot where the traveller gets down from the train several hundred feet below the hill-pass that leads into the Pankot valley.
Here there is a sound, neither far nor distant, but because the arrival of a train is always noisy the traveller may not notice it except perhaps as a faint singing in the ears or a gentle pressure on the back of the neck, a sound that does not vary in intensity. Full awareness may be delayed but when it comes identification is immediate. It is the sound of the streams and waterfalls that emerge from fissures and secret places in the rock: invisible from any part of the station or the concourse, above and around which the rock looms, softened by vegetation and (most mornings) mists which may gradually reveal themselves as drizzle, or burn away as the sun gets at them.
Somewhere along the road that winds up from the station the sound of rushing water is lost, but to know precisely where you would have to travel on foot, or order the taxi or the tonga to halt at every likely turn and twist, and listen, and in the one place where the driver would be prepared to obey such an order (the brow of the hill, at the pass where in the turning between rocks the whole panorama of the Pankot valley is suddenly disclosed) the sound has already gone and the ear is blessed by the holy silence that only the biblical clunk of goatbells interrupts.
‘Thairo,’ her father said, at the same time leaning forward and touching the shoulder of the lance-naik driver whom Captain Coley had sent with the staff car to meet the train. Ahead of them the truck-load of ex-invalids careered on down the long straight road that led into the valley, making for the depot where some of their families waited for them. Her father’s wishes had been scrupulously carried out. The arrival had been unremarkable, departure from the concourse delayed until only the truck and the staff-car remained. He had waited for a while in the carriage and, later, on the platform, until – within twenty minutes – the entire train-load of passengers had found or chosen their transport and gone. The sounds of the streams and the water were louder, then. Now on the brow of the hill, with the engine switched off and the windows open, he sat for a moment and then got out. She did not follow him.
After a while he got back in. He said ‘Everything seems so much closer together,’ as if in his absence Pankot had shrunk, the three hills which enclosed the valley been edged towards one another and squeezed up against the bazaar whose upper storeys of wooden balconies under steep-pitched wooden roofs rose above the mist into the clear morning air (which, Sarah saw, made them look nearer than they were).
Ten minutes later the car entered the V-shaped bazaar, at the low point of that letter: the square, with its war memorial, the meeting place of the road up into West Hill and the steeper road that thrusts assertively into the other hill upon which the British had chosen to build whe
n they discovered in Pankot an ideal retreat from the hot weather in Ranpur. The main street, flanked arcaded shops, probably looked narrower to him. Passing the general store he said, ‘Jalal-ud-Din’, and smiled, shook his head, as if the store-sign was evidence of the indestructibility of Pankot’s principal contractor. Jalal-ud-Din’s shutters were still up. The first servant with a chit would not appear until nine o’clock. It would be ten o’clock before the first memsahib arrived to give an order and inspect the new stock. At this present hour there were few people and the car was not obstructed by tongas, cylists or cows. It continued, making for the junction of Church and Club Roads where the driver changed gear for the long uphill climb and where Sarah (as nowadays she always did) saw what her father couldn’t: Barbie Batchelor’s overturned tonga, the horse struggling, its leg broken, and the tin trunk, the cause of the trouble, upended in the ditch where it had burst open on impact and scattered its contents of missionary relics. From this scene of disaster Barbie had walked away, up Church Road to the rectory bungalow, mud-stained, clothes torn, still dazed and, according to the chaplain’s wife, Clarissa Peplow, demanding a spade, still apparently harping on that old question: whether Mildred had buried Mabel in the wrong place, in the churchyard of St John’s in Pankot instead of by the side of her second husband, Colonel Layton’s father, in the churchyard of St Luke’s in Ranpur.
‘What was that?’
Had she spoken? He seemed to think so. She had been thinking: Poor Barbie. She might have said it aloud. She smiled, shook her head, looked out across the golf-course which had played a part in a dream Barbie had had and had liked describing, a dream that had ended in St John’s and which Barbie interpreted as heavenly reassurance that her old friend Edwina Crane had been forgiven for taking her own life. But that was three years ago, after the riots of 1942. Now Barbie’s dreams were waking ones, lived behind barred windows in Ranpur. I have nothing to give you in exchange, she had written, not even a rose: written on a pad because she no longer spoke – which made it more difficult than ever to tell what she remembered, if anything. But ‘not even a rose’ had shown some grasp of the past, some stubbornly held recollection of the time when she had been happy, with Mabel, in Rose Cottage.
The car was getting near to the cottage now and she found herself suddenly short of breath, as though her heart had begun to beat for both of them, and this seemed extraordinary to her because at the same time she was conscious of having, just now, as they passed the entrance to the club, also passed the point of any further personal involvement in his homecoming. When she thought of the things to be done and said during the next quarter of an hour her skin prickled with irritation. The familiar names at the entrances to the bungalows in the last stretch of the road to Rose Cottage increased her uneasiness. Her body pressed back hard against the seat, ostensibly to give him a better view, but he was not leaning forward to look, in fact he was pressed back too, or so it seemed to her from the sense she had of his body’s alignment with her own. So far as she could tell they both sat thus, wedged into their corners, staring straight ahead or gazing obliquely away from one another through the nearest window, passive and reluctant rather than active and eager, and it occurred to her that perhaps he was as aware as she that so much more could have been made of their time together and that now it was over and the opportunity to know each other better gone, perhaps for ever.
‘I think,’ he said suddenly, and then jerked forward, touched the driver’s shoulder. ‘Stop here.’ And hesitated before saying to her, ‘If you don’t mind. I’ll walk the rest.’ She nodded. He got out. Before he shut the door he asked her, ‘Will you give me time to cope? Say five minutes?’
‘Of course.’
She understood. In this way he could achieve a small measure of surprise. It did not offend her that he wanted to achieve it alone. He set off, striding easily, alert and upright, already – as he had said – dressed for the part but now performing it. The driver was puzzled, glanced over his shoulder, uncertain whether he was supposed to drive on, follow slowly or stay put. She said in Urdu: Wait here for five minutes. He switched off. He was too new to the regiment to remember her father personally. He had not been overawed by the occasion; proud, rather, of the part he was playing in it. She wondered whether he felt cheated of its climax. This was the time when she should jolly him along, like a good colonel’s daughter, but she was disinclined to ask the formal questions, which her father had also omitted to do: What is your name? What village do you come from? What other family members have served in the regiment? Instead she lit a cigarette. As she clicked the lighter off her eyes met his in the driving-mirror. He looked down immediately, too quickly for her to judge his reaction but she supposed that smoking was one of the things that made Englishwomen sexless to boys like this; smoking, short skirts, uniforms; and the white skin that probably made the body appear composed of a substance that was not flesh but an unsatisfactory substitute whose erotic qualities only men similarly endowed could appreciate.
As she exhaled, this notion seemed to take form in the smoke and hang with it until it was sucked through the open window, leaving her with a profound sense of her misplacement in these surroundings. But there was no compensating sense of release from them because she could not easily imagine alternatives: to Pankot, yes, but the alternative to Pankot was still an Indian alternative, a variation of Pankot, and Pankot was already crowding in on her, threatening that illusion of serenity, of future possibilities, which had excited her the evening before, getting off the train at Ranpur. She was still in India, still of India. You could exchange one surrounding for another but not the occupation, an occupation less and less easy to explain and to follow except by continuing to perform it and seize opportunities to demonstrate – like the artist who carved angels’ faces in the darkest recesses of a church roof and countered the charge that people couldn’t see them by saying that God could – that dim as the light had grown it was still enough by which to see an obligation.
Five minutes had gone but she sat motionless, watching the smoke from her cigarette, unwilling to give the order to start up, unwilling to stir sufficiently to lift the cigarette to her mouth. From somewhere in the forested slopes a coppersmith-bird began its insistent high-pitched calling, a monotonous tapping sound of which she was usually only subconsciously aware but whose single rhythmically repeated note, coming just now, seemed to be counting the seconds away for her; and then, as it continued, encouraging her not to move but to listen, to surrender to its nagging persuasion until she entered a state of torpor or stupefaction, of which it might take some predatory advantage, reveal itself as a bird of more ominous intention, a bird of the species Barbie watched beyond the barred window, planing the sky above the invisible towers.
Abruptly it fell silent. The driver looked round.
‘Panch minute, memsahib?’
‘Han,’ she said, ‘lekin –’
But what? Carefully she stubbed the cigarette in the chromium tray on the panel of the door, reluctant to bring the journey to a conclusion. Her capacity to feel or show family affection had diminished and in one area all but vanished. She felt closest now to Aunt Fenny who had seen her through the thing that happened to her. They had seen it through together, if such a lonely and love-less experience could ever be thought of as anything but solitary. Where there might have been recriminations between them there had been only a wounded but finally healing silence; healing because it had been warmed once by physical contact – Aunt Fenny’s plump arm round her shoulders, Aunt Fenny’s head against hers. Between herself and her mother there had been neither word nor gesture. Nothing. For her mother it had never happened. It was her mother’s assumption of ignorance that hurt her most. Sometimes, holding Susan’s baby and chancing to find her mother watching her, she felt she would have welcomed any response, even disgust, that showed her mother appreciated that the act of ministering to her sister’s child was one that could fill her with the anguish of her own physical de
privation; and then, seeing no glimmer of recognition in that steady dispassionate gaze, she felt deprived again, of part of herself, of everything really except her guilt.
Her guilt was unquestionable but there was only one aspect of it which she was truly ashamed of, and this she bitterly regretted. She knew that behind her longing to talk about it to her mother lay a need for consolation and that this was a weakness, a form of self-indulgence. Understanding this she could live with her mother’s silence, endless though it was as a punishment. For her mother the silence was part of the code, the standard: the angel’s face in the dark. Or was it a demon’s? Whichever it was it helped her mother to preserve an attitude of composure and fortitude and Sarah was able to admire her for it and see the point. In this way Sarah carved angel faces of her own and only at moments of acute distress had destructive impulses to tear the fabric of the roof and expose the edifice to an empty sky.
I shall walk the rest of the way, too, she told herself. And opened the door, got out, shut it, before she could change her mind. She told the driver to go ahead to the bungalow and wait. She stood in the road until the car had started then, following slowly, watched it as it took the last section of the hill. Rose Cottage was behind the next bend.
The coppersmith had resumed but from farther off, having flown to try its luck elsewhere or to plot another point in the boundary of its territory. She knew nothing of its habits, little of the lives of wild creatures whose co-existence with her own species created a mysterious world within a world; or rather, worlds, a finite but to her uncountable number, self-sufficient, separated, but intent on survival. She walked faster, to the tune of the distant coppersmith, and recalled with clarity the night of Susan’s wedding in Mirat, wandering amidst the fireflies in the grounds of the palace guest house and saying aloud to her absent father: I hope you are well, I hope you are happy, I hope you will come back soon: and then turning back towards the house where Uncle Arthur sat alone on the lit verandah, a long way away from her, in a pattern of light, a circle of safety. My family, she had thought then. My family, my family.