‘Poor Laura. I said it was a sad name.’ Perron brought his head back level. ‘Does it upset you still?’
‘Not any more.’
‘What about Sarah Layton?’
‘What about her?’
‘She referred to you with what I’d call respect and admiration. Mutual?’
‘Yes.’
‘Pity. I mean for me. Given half an opportunity making a bit of a pass at Sarah Layton was the one thing that made the prospect of several days in Pankot bearable. But I expect I’d better behave, hadn’t I? Yes. Well. Incidentally, do you mind very much if in future I call you sir in front of other people? You can go on calling me Guy if you like but it offends my sense of military decorum to call you Nigel in public.’
Smiling, otherwise ignoring this, Rowan said, ‘Do you know where you’re putting up?’
‘You mean quartered. No, but I have every confidence in my officer. He’s the kind of man who knows it’s good form to look to the needs of horse, groom and self in that order, although his own comfort is assured, naturally, so it can always be safely left until last. Why? Were you thinking of keeping in touch?’
‘We ought to arrange an evening if we can. You can reach me by ringing Two Hundred.’
‘The Governor’s hill palace?’
‘It’s the guest house attached to what used to be the summer residence.’
‘Used to be? Has the weather deteriorated?’
‘I mean it’s shut up.’
‘With accommodation so short?’
‘People complain, but like this coach it doesn’t convert very easily. And the next Governor may revive the old seasonal system of six months in the hills and six on the plain. Anyway ring me there. We’ll fix something.’
Perron nodded.
Rowan said, ‘I’ll send a bearer in with the menu. He’ll bring you a drink too if you want another. I’ll leave that to your discretion. And feel free to ring the bell at any time.’
Again Perron nodded.
‘Sleep well,’ Rowan said, and began to go.
‘Thanks for the bed, Nigel. I’m very grateful.’
*
The corridor was empty. No Red Shadow. In the dining-room two tables were laid and were being set out with chafing dishes. He smelt, fleetingly, carnations. And the scent of cologne. But there were only marigolds. He told one of the bearers to attend to the guest in compartment number two and then went through into the saloon.
Suleiman was kneeling, easing one of Merrick’s feet into crimson leather slippers. Between the stiff first and second fingers of Merrick’s black-gloved left hand was a lighted cigarette. Merrick and Suleiman both turned their heads. Suleiman grinned, showing handsome teeth. Merrick smiled, an odd lopsided smile – or so the scar tissue made it appear; and Rowan, in spite of everything, felt touched and under an odd kind of compulsion to forget what he knew, what he thought he knew; what it was unfair, after all, to allow himself to be affected by when he had scarcely said more than a few words to the man. As he took his seat on the sofa and nodded to the bearer indicating that he wanted another drink before eating, and listened to what Merrick was saying about Suleiman’s theory that it was bad for the circulation to wear walking shoes when one wasn’t walking, he also felt himself being supported, braced up almost, by an unexpected sensation of being once more – away from Guy Perron – in control of things, of himself, and in surroundings that matched his mood. And presently when Suleiman had gone, taking Merrick’s shoes with him, and he and Merrick were alone, eyeing one another with what Rowan supposed an observer would interpret as cautious interest, it struck him as being odd that the one man he might have expected to be a disruptive or abrasive presence was not, but seemed to fit in and to share with him this feeling of repose, or anyway of momentary relief from the pressures which had been piling up, undermining his confidence: a feeling accentuated, perhaps, by the way the coach absorbed and muffled the vibration and clatter of the wheels without diminishing the flattering sensation of a speed and movement forward that were absolutely effortless.
The Moghul Room
(Guy Perron)
I
MY AUNT CHARLOTTE’S knowledge of India and Indian affairs was very limited but her enthusiasm for any subject that interested another member of the family was quickly stirred and once it had been stirred it was difficult to moderate. For example, the technique and mystique of ballooning continued to exert a fascination for her long after her brother, my Uncle Charles, had abandoned it as a sport (having come down near Cobh in Ireland after setting out from Kent for Essex). For years, subsequently, she maintained a scrap-book into which she pasted cuttings of anything she could find that was connected with the subject of unpowered aerial navigation.
Flattering as her sharing of one’s interests was it could be a little tiresome even if one’s own enthusiasm remained unflagging. The clippings of newspaper articles and reports about India which she sent or saved for me until her first and fatal illness were, in a sense, an unnecessary duplication. However it is to her I owe a comparison between Operation Bunbury and the last Viceroyalty.
‘Your viceroys are all Bunburyists,’ she declared. (From the moment of my return home in 1945 all Indian personalities, policies and problems, were referred to as mine: your Mr Gandhi, your Mr Nehru, your Kashmir problem, your non-alignment policy, your confrontation with the Chinese, your application for foreign aid, your green revolution, your family planning.) ‘Your viceroys’ in ‘Your viceroys are all Bunburyists’ was just one of many examples of this habit of placing everything Indian as it were in my gift. Asked to justify this statement, though, she pointed out the regularity with which at certain climactic moments in talks and negotiations my viceroys withdrew, packed their bags and came home for consultation.
This, she said, was ‘pure Bunburyism’, clear evidence of pre-arrangements between my viceroys and my Secretary of State for India in Whitehall to ensure the continuation of whatever policy the British Government was currently pursuing in regard to the sub-continent. ‘Take your present policy’ she said once, when Wavell was still Viceroy (I always kept notes of our conversations), ‘this is clearly a policy of conducting serious talks about a future constitutional change within a general framework of an assumption on our part that the existing status quo will be maintained. Which means that when your Lord Wavell detects that the serious talks are about to break down – or look like continuing so successfully that the status quo is actually at risk – he has himself called from the conference room as if to the telephone and returns a few minutes later to announce that there has been a development in London that requires his immediate presence there. It is merely another way of saying as Mr Worthing would have done, “I’m afraid my poor friend Bunbury has taken a turn for the worse and that I must catch the 3.15.” ’
I thought this a bit unfair to Wavell but on reflection saw that there was something in it in regard to viceroys in general, and said so. Thereafter whenever the Viceroy – Wavell, and then his successor, Mountbatten – arrived back in London, Aunt Charlotte sent me a postcard (usually of aerial views of the countryside) with a brief message: ‘Bunbury unwell again.’ ‘Poor Bunbury giving cause for anxiety,’ etc. The Mountbatten viceroyalty, though, produced this (an extract from one of the many letters of hers which I have preserved):
‘If Attlee means that power is to be transferred as early as 1948, then Bunbury’s ill-health has undergone a change. I don’t mean he’s better or worse, merely unwell in a different way. If our policy now is to get out, then you will begin to see that Bunbury’s delicate constitution will respond admirably to every turn of events which advances our policy of demission of power by 1948 but suffer serious setbacks on any occasion when impediments to it are put in our way.’
In reply I pointed out that for the first time a viceroy of mine (Mountbatten) appeared to have plenipotentiary powers and that although this was advantageous administratively it meant that the Bunbury gambit might well have had
its day. Aunt Charlotte declared at once that a viceroy with plenipotentiary powers would be the greatest Bunburyist of the lot, because it meant he would have taken Bunbury to India with him. This was not clear to me. I asked her to elucidate. She wrote:
‘I mean that Bunbury has at last emerged in his true colours as The British Presence in India – traditionally seated (I mean bedridden) in Whitehall, but at last visiting with Dickie (how well that boy has done) the scene of his hitherto only vicarious triumphs and failures. Attlee has said (it is so plain to me I wish it were to you) that a holiday in India until 1948 might be beneficial to him. A valedictory tour, so to speak, like the personal appearance of a famous film-star known to millions but only as a shadow on the silver screen. After the valedictory tour he will return home, retire and be content to fade away to look at his press-cuttings. So henceforth any deterioration in Bunbury’s health will occur only when it looks to the Viceroy as if your Indians aren’t going to let Bunbury leave as planned.’
The force of her argument was driven home early in June 1947 when the Viceroy – having had what the papers revealed day after day as the greatest difficulty in finding someone among the contenders both able and willing to relieve us of Indian responsibility and letting Bunbury go (I recalled Purvis’s warning) announced that power would be transferred not in 1948 but in ten weeks’ time.
Telegrams between Aunt Charlotte and myself crossed. Mine read: Bunbury stop looks like experience of personal appearance proved too much. Hers: Doctors here have re-examined Bunbury X-rays stop condition worse than thought stop vital expedite his return otherwise fear worst in that climate stop Dickie coping but suggest you fly out observe and supervise stop will arrange passage and underwrite reasonable expenses.
Reading this I realized that Aunt Charlotte had become a convinced Purvisite. ‘Condition worse than thought’ argued that a British Presence in India was as Purvis might have said no longer viable economically or administratively. ‘Vital to expedite his return’ was a hint that the members of the Labour Government after nearly two years in office were getting desperate at the prospect of having to continue to support this presence. Considering the complexity of the moral, political and historical issues which surrounded the attempted transfer of power in India and considering that these were the only issues ever publicly discussed I think Aunt Charlotte showed remarkable perspicacity. She thought so herself and as the years passed took undisguised pleasure in heavily underlining confirmatory passages in the articles and books she sent me – the writings of soldiers, statesmen and civil servants, journalists and historians – to draw my attention to admissions of the kind that supported what, misunderstanding me slightly, she claimed with my authority as her own entirely original opinion: that as a result of the war, the policy of Indianization, the running down of the machinery of British recruitment to the civil service and police, and as a result of the infiltration of political, communal and nationalistic modes of thought into the Indian armed services (the Naval Mutiny in Bombay in 1946 was always cited as an example) it would have been difficult, even impossible, to maintain in India any form of stable government with a responsibility to Parliament at home and for law and order and national defence in India, except at a cost which even if the will and the means were available would have been excessive and just not on from the British taxpayer’s point of view.
In the delirium of pneumonia (at an advanced age she unwisely took an interest – an active interest – in her grandnephew’s passion for duck-shooting at dawn on the marshes) she spoke of many things which made sense to a member of the family. ‘What, there, the penny black. Who would have thought it had so much blood in it?’ Such a statement, sinister from the point of view of the medical staff, was perfectly rational if you remembered Aunt Hester’s craze for philately and Uncle William’s frustrated theatrical ambitions which dated from his appearance in a school production of Macbeth. Other remarks, obscure to the nurses, clear to me, showed that she was thinking turn and turn about of the things that had interested or obsessed her brothers and sisters. I should explain that my father was the only Perron of his generation who got married. The other brothers and sisters paired off: George (who was the eldest and who inherited) and Harriet, William and Hester, Charles and Charlotte. Cousins Henry and Sophie were my grandfather Perron’s only brother’s children. They paired off too. My father, Aunt Charlotte used to say, only got married because he was the odd boy out. Insisting on being sent to Chillingborough with a view to an Indian career, joining the army at the outbreak of the great war and getting married (not even to a relation) were, I suppose, the forms which Perron eccentricity took in his case. I was sent to Chillingborough really as an act of devotion to my father’s memory. It was felt that he had never had a chance to show what – as a Perron – he could do – but that being killed on November 10, 1918, suggested he had been on the right lines. His brothers – who all had brilliant minds but unadaptable personalities – were in the main privately tutored between expulsions from a number of establishments of varying reputations and competence.
I am trying to convey as clearly and economically as I can something of the background of the last surviving member of that generation of Perrons who as she lay dying revealed herself to me as a woman whose life, so apparently full, had been in so far as original enthusiasms and direct experience were concerned (with that single and fatal exception) empty. A croaked reference to speed bonny boat could have been related either to my rowing or to the punt in which she had set out with her great-nephew to see for herself what so enthralled him about shooting duck. Drugs succeeded in reducing her temperature and there was a lucid interval before she relapsed into sleep, unconsciousness and coma. Opening her eyes and finding me there she said – indicating what she obviously recognized as a private room – ‘Well I see that I am dying beyond my means’ – closed her eyes and never opened them again, nor communicated, except by smiling intermittently at thoughts she did not share with me. That explicit reference to Bunbury’s creator was the nearest she came to touching on a subject that had been a bond between us ever since I first set sail for India; but in making it she was just as likely to have been thinking of her Thespian brother as of her ‘Indian’ nephew, or even of neither but of her late brother George who, inheriting the bulk of the Perron estate, had made a number of foolish investments.
She was such an unegotistical person, such a champion of other people’s causes, that it seems grossly unfair to connect her in any way with responsibility for a death roll that was never accurately counted but which has become widely accepted as reaching the one-quarter million mark.
‘Your Punjabis,’ she said when I got back from the euphoric and bloodstained country after taking the trip to ‘observe and supervise’ which she had subsidized in 1947, ‘Your Punjabis would appear to have taken leave of their senses.’
She was referring to the massacres that accompanied the migrations of communities after the decision to partition. I told her that the murders of Hindus and Sikhs by Muslims and of Muslims by Hindus and Sikhs had by no stretch of the imagination been confined to the land of the five rivers, but Punjab was a word which had always had a strong appeal for people like Aunt Charlotte and she probably felt that once you had pronounced it (particularly as she pronounced it, with a rotundity of mouth and emphasis of jaw – Poonjawb) then you had said all that needed to be said about the golden land below Afghanistan. She therefore continued to demarcate the zone of violence on this provincial basis and I think succeeded too in mentally reducing the slaughter to the manageable proportions of an isolated act of insurrection which was the result of allowing things to get a bit out of hand.
It would never have occurred to her to examine her conscience in regard to those one-quarter million deaths, although she had, in fact, as I had done – voted for them. It would not have occurred to her because she held single-mindedly to the Purvis principle, the view that a British presence in India was an economic and administrative bu
rden whose quick offloading was an essential feature of post-war policy in the welfare state. I’ll give her this, though: in adhering to this principle she never once introduced the ethical argument that colonialism was immoral – an argument that supported so many of us. I don’t think the ethical argument ever entered her head. She was esentially a pragmatist. The only moral argument I ever remember her advancing was the one she used to try to convince me that my joining up would be unfair to the men she assumed I would accept responsibility for.
Needless to say, I never told Aunt Charlotte that she, as well as I, was responsible for the one-quarter million deaths in the Punjab and elsewhere. But I did once ask her who, in her opinion, was responsible. She said, ‘But that is obvious. The people who attacked and killed each other.’ There was no arguing with this, but it confirmed my impression of her historical significance (and mine), of the overwhelming importance of the part that had been played in British-Indian affairs by the indifference and the ignorance of the English at home – whom Aunt Charlotte, in an especially poignant way had in my mind come to represent; and upsetting though I found it, nothing was more appropriate than that in that delirium, when images of all the acquired and borrowed interests of her life flowed swiftly through her heated imagination, images of India were totally forgotten.
*
In investing someone with historical significance one should proceed cautiously but I think the conclusion I came to about her share of responsibility for disorder and bloodshed can be traced back to that grey humid morning in Kalyan when I stood up and spoke for half an hour to a hall full of restless and inattentive men about the territorial ambitions of Mahdaji and Daulat Rao Sindia, and realized how little any of us knew or cared about a country whose history had been that of our own for more than three hundred years and which had contributed more than any other to our wealth, our well-being.