Authors: Paul Scott
I’ve forgotten who most of the people were who came that time for cocktails. There was Dr. Anna Klaus, I know, because that was the first time I’d met her, although I’d seen her talking to Dr. Mayhew when she came to the Mayapore General for some consultation or other. And Matron was there. And Vassi (the lawyer, Mr. Srinivasan, who was a friend of Lili’s and also of Hari’s aunt and “uncle”). Hari’s editor on the
Mayapore Gazette,
Mr. Laxminarayan, was also supposed to be there but didn’t turn up, probably because he found out Hari had been invited and he didn’t feel the protocol would be right if he and a junior member of the staff were at the same function! At least that’s what Hari said later. I know the Whites looked in for half an hour, and there were some teachers from the Higher School and the Technical College.
He was late turning up. He hadn’t wanted to come, but had decided to face it. He was ashamed of his clothes. He didn’t know any of us except Vassi and they didn’t like each other much. When I say he didn’t know any of us I’m wrong. He knew quite a lot of people by sight, because as a reporter on the
Gazette
it was his job to. He let slip to Aunt Lili that they had met before and that she had once answered a question he put to her when she won second prize for her roses at the flower show. I was standing next to her when he let on about that. He made it sound as if she ought to have remembered talking to him. She pretended to, but from the way she pretended I could tell that she disliked being
made
to pretend, which she only did because she thought he was hurt not to be recognized. And he saw through her pretense too. And at once became what I call prickly.
I put my foot in it too. When he spoke he sounded just like an Englishman. So I blurted out, “Wherever did you learn to speak English as well as you do?” He just looked at me and said, “England.” So of course I bashed on in a panic, expressing astonishment and interest, falling over myself to be friendly, but only succeeding in being inquisitive. Then Lili took me away and made me talk to some other people and the next time I saw him he was standing more or less alone, on the
edge of a group of the teachers. So I went up to him and said, “Let me show you the garden.” It was getting dusk and we were already
in
the garden, so it was a frightfully stupid thing to say. But it was this time of speaking to him that I really noticed how good-looking he was. And tall. So many of the Indian men I talked to I topped by an inch or two, which was something that usually added to my hysteria at a party where I was feeling shy and awkward.
But he let me show him the garden. Which is why I remember I’d been in trouble with Bhalu that morning. I showed him the flower bed I’d trampled on getting at the marigolds. I asked him whether he’d had a nice garden when he lived in England and he said he supposed it had been all right but that he’d never taken much notice of it. Then I said, “Do you miss it all, though?” and he said at once, “Not anymore,” and sort of moved away and said it was time for him to go. So we walked back and rejoined the party which was breaking up. He said good-bye to Lili and thanked her rather brusquely and then just nodded good-bye to me. And I remember afterwards, when he’d gone, and one or two people stayed for dinner, all Indians, how forcibly it struck me that except for the colour of his skin he wasn’t an Indian at all—in the sense I understood it.
When everyone had gone and Lili and I were having a nightcap she said, “Well, what were you able to make of young Mr. Coomer?”
I said, “I think he’s a terribly sad man.” It was the first thing that came into my mind, and yet I didn’t seem to have thought of it like that until then. And Lili said nothing except something like, “Let’s have the other half and then bash off to bed.”
I’m glad that I’m writing all this down, because even if you never read it it’s helping me to understand things better. I think I’ve been blaming Lili for taking against Hari. No, let me be honest. I don’t think I’ve been blaming her, I know I have. And I think I’ve been wrong. Reliving that first meeting with him I see how Lili, who was responsible for me to
you,
probably watched the way we left the party to inspect the garden, and didn’t misinterpret but responded to the little warning bell that she must have learned, during her life, never to ignore. Remembering all the wonderful things about Lili, I
must
be wrong to think that she could ever really have harboured resentment of Hari for the critical attitude he adopted towards her in those few insignificant moments when they first met at her party. And Lili, after all, is a woman too. She can’t have been
totally unmoved by Hari’s physical presence. Nor unconcerned, when she saw us going off together (only for ten minutes!), about me, and how
I
might be moved by it.
I used to think the fact that she seemed to “drop” him after that first well-meaning attempt to gather him into what was called the MacGregor House set was due to nothing more than her annoyance at his prickliness, or anyway to the stuffiness she can sometimes astonish you with if people don’t behave in exactly the way she personally considers “good form.” And knowing that she had put herself out to help him when he was a total stranger to her I thought she was annoyed that he hadn’t shown the faintest sign of gratitude, hadn’t even said—as he was so capable of saying because the language and the idiom and the inflections were natural to him, “Thank you for the party,
and for everything,”
when he said good-bye.
Perhaps this apparent brashness contributed to her reservations about Hari, but I am sure, now, that if he and I had simply smiled distantly at each other and passed each other by, the first thing she would have said, when the party was over, would have been something like, “Poor Mr. Kumar needs bringing out. We need to knock that chip off his shoulder. After all, it’s not really his fault that it’s there.” But she had seen that the chip on Hari’s shoulder was insignificant compared with the possible danger that lay ahead for me, for him, if that clumsy but innocent walk in the garden developed into the kind of familiarity which Lili, as a woman of the world, saw at once as not unlikely.
Was it now that my dreams came back? Do you remember, Auntie? Those dreams I wrote to you about once? The dreams I had when I first came to India, and which I had again after I’d left ’Pindi and gone to Mayapore? The dreams of
faces,
the faces of strangers? Dreamed, imagined, constructed out of nothing, but with an exactness that was frightening because they were so real? The faces of strangers I had to take with me even into dreams because I felt that I was surrounded by strangers when I was awake?
The first two weeks or so in Mayapore, when everything was new to me and I was getting to know my surroundings, I didn’t have those dreams. But as I told you in that letter, there was a period when the newness had worn off, when I hated everything because I was afraid of it. I think the cocktail party marked the beginning of this. I wanted to pack my bags and go back to ’Pindi—which interested me because when
I was suffering this kind of homesickness in ’Pindi I wanted to pack my bags and go back to England. And just as I think you guessed something of what I was going through, so I believe did Lili. But how much of my restlessness—which I tried so hard to disguise—did she put down to my thinking about Mr. Kumar? How much, indeed,
was
due to my thinking about him?
It was at this time that I broke my vow, never to go to the club because Lili couldn’t go with me. The girls I worked with at the Mayapore General were always on at me to go with them. And it was so easy to talk to them. I used to feel the relief of leaving the MacGregor House and cycling to the hospital and when I got there not caring what I said or how I said it, and being able to flop into a chair and complain about the heat—using all the little tricks of expression and gesture that you know will be understood, and which don’t have to be thought about. The luxury, the ease, of being utterly natural. Giving back as good as you got if someone was edgy or bitchy. Being edgy and bitchy yourself. Letting it rip, like a safety valve.
So I started going with some of them to the club for a drink on my way home. They were usually picked up by young officers from the barracks, round about five thirty. There wasn’t any serious attachment going. Just boys and girls getting together in their off-duty and maybe sleeping somewhere if it could be fixed. We used to drive to the club in tongas, or in army trucks if the boys could “swing the transport” as they called it. Then we’d congregate in the lounge bar or the smoking room, or on the terrace. Or there was a games room, where they had a portable and a lot of old dance records, Victor Sylvester, Henry Hall, and some new ones, Dinah Shore, Vera Lynn, and the Inkspots. Usually round about six thirty I’d slip away and get a tonga home. I felt horribly guilty about going to the club because I’d told Lili I jolly well wouldn’t. She’d always said, “Don’t be silly, of course you must go.” And I owned up at once, the moment I’d been, although on the way back that first time I was thinking up all kinds of excuses for being late. Once I’d owned up it made going again that much simpler, though. I felt less and less guilty and more and more at home in the club. Several times I stayed to dinner there, and only rang Aunt Lili at the last moment.
And then one day one of the boys who was a bit drunk and who’d insisted on coming with me to the phone said, “She’s not really your aunt, is she?” I said, “No. Why?” And he said, “Well, you don’t look as if you’ve got a touch of the tar brush. I’ve had a bet on it.” And all
kinds of little things fitted into place—oh, less in connection with what the boys and girls had said, but over the sort of things some of the civilian women had said, or rather
not
said. The way they’d looked when I said “The MacGregor House” when they asked me where I was staying. The way some of the civilian men had chipped in and asked questions about you and Uncle Henry, as if (as I realized now) to test it out that I really was a niece of a one-time Governor and not some by-blow of Lili Chatterjee’s family.
But there is this, too, Auntie—I think this kind of thing would have run off me like water off a duck’s back if all the time, underneath the easy pleasure of being with the boys and girls, there hadn’t been a sort of creeping boredom, like a paralysis. Basically I hated the way that after a few drinks everything people said was loaded with a kind of juvenile smutty innuendo. After a while I began to see that the ease of companionship wasn’t really ease at all, because once you had got to know each other, and had then had to admit that none of you really had much in common except what circumstance had forced on you, the companionship seemed forced itself. We were all imprisoned in it, and probably all hated it, but daren’t let go of it. I got so that I would just sit there listening to the things that were said, thinking, “No, this is wrong. And I haven’t got this time to waste. I haven’t this time to spare.”
It was the evening I went to the club after the visit to the War Week Exhibition on the maidan that I first
admitted
this to myself. Was it just coincidence that I’d seen Hari again that afternoon, for the first time since the party? I suppose not. The two things were connected—the second meeting with Hari and my looking round the club and listening and saying to myself “I haven’t this time to waste.” And of course that other man was at the club too. Ronald Merrick I mean. Perhaps this wasn’t coincidence either.
I went to the War Week Exhibition on the Saturday afternoon, at about four o’clock, with three or four girls from the hospital and two or three young subalterns from the Berkshires. We went to watch the parade and the military band which was the week’s grande finale. There were the finals of the boxing, too, and the wrestling. The boxing was nearly all between English boys, but the wrestling was between Indians from one of the Indian regiments. One of the girls said, “Oh no, I couldn’t bear to watch
that,”
so we went to the boxing and watched these young soldiers dab at each other and make each others’ noses bleed. Then we went into
the tea-tent. The parade was scheduled for five thirty. I’ve never seen anything like that tea-tent. Flowers everywhere. Long trestle tables covered with dazzling white cloths. Silver-plated urns. Iced cakes, cream cakes, jellies, trifles. One of the boys we were with whistled and said that “some wog contractor was putting on a show and making a packet.” And of course this was probably true, and at once canceled out the thought that only the English were having a beano, although it didn’t cancel out the picture you had of the people at home scuttling off to the shops with their dismal little ration books. And it didn’t cancel out the thought of all the people who weren’t allowed in the tent, not because they couldn’t afford the price of the tea-ticket, but because this was the tent for “Officers and Guests” only. There were a few Indian women there, the wives of Indian officers. But the mass of faces was white—except behind the tables where the servants were running up and down trying to serve everyone at once. And “Officers” was really only a polite way of saying “Europeans” because there were plenty of civilians and their wives there too, but only white civilians, like the Deputy Commissioner, and several men I recognized from Lili’s parties as teachers or executives from the British-Indian Electrical.
The DC was standing talking to the Brigade Commander and as we passed them Mr. White said, “Hello, Miss Manners. You know Brigadier Reid, I think.” Why was I so pleased? Because at once the boys I was with sort of stood to attention and the girls looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. Apparently the Brigadier was previously stationed in ’Pindi and had met us once or twice at parties, but we only vaguely remembered one another. He asked after you and then the DC said, “How’s Lili?” and I said “Fine” and felt that somehow I was vindicated and no longer ranked in our little group as the odd girl who lived with “that Indian woman.” Because even if she was “that Indian woman” the Deputy Commissioner called her Lili. And yet afterwards I was annoyed, too, because the DC hadn’t said, “Where’s Lili?” He knew, without even having to think about it, that she was unlikely to be in the tent and therefore probably wouldn’t be on the maidan at all because she wouldn’t go to “the other tent.”