Authors: Paul Scott
Judge Menen said he understood why I should feel this in regard to “the man Kumar” but the refusal to attempt identification of the other men might be interpreted as wilful obstruction by the principal witness and this might lead to the prosecution being able to prove its case in spite of that witness’s evidence, because the wilful obstruction might be held as a sign of general unreliability.
I thought about this. Mr. Poulson brightened up a bit. He didn’t mind that Menen was an Indian and perhaps shouldn’t speak to a white girl like that. It was the Law that spoke. He thought the clever old Judge had forced me into a corner by scaring me with a legal technicality, a reminder that even the principal witness couldn’t obstruct the Crown in the pursuit of justice. But I thought I saw my way out. And I wasn’t really convinced that Judge Menen was on particularly sure ground himself. I said, “If my evidence is thought unreliable for that reason, does it become less unreliable if I go through the farce of looking at these men, with no intention whatsoever of saying I recognize them? You’d prefer me to go through that farce? You’d only have my word for it that I didn’t recognize them. Simply looking at them isn’t a test of reliability in itself, is it?”
Menen’s poker face didn’t alter. He said they would assume, continue to assume, that I was telling the truth, and reminded me that the whole inquiry was based on the assumption that I was telling the truth, that it was only the refusal to comply with the request to attempt identification which could raise the question of unreliability. He went on, “In your statement you say you had a brief impression of the men who attacked you. You have described them as peasants or labourers. That being so, with such an impression in your mind, why do you refuse to cooperate in the important business of helping us, as best you can, to decide whether the men being held are held on sufficient grounds?”
Looking at him I thought: You know they’re the wrong men too. You want me to go down to the jail and look at them and say, No, they aren’t as I remember them at all. Either you want that, or you want me to make it
quite
plain, perhaps outrageously plain, that it’s useless for anyone to expect to bring this case to court with these boys as defendants.
But I was still afraid of confronting them. I was sure they were the
wrong boys, but I didn’t know. I didn’t want to face them. If they were the right boys there was a danger—only very slight, but still a danger—of their panicking at the sight of me and incriminating Hari. And if they were the right boys and I recognized them I didn’t want to have to say, “No, these aren’t the men.” I wasn’t sure I could trust myself to carry it off, even for Hari’s sake.
I didn’t want to tell that sort of lie.
There’s a difference between trying to stop an injustice and obstructing justice.
I said, “No, I won’t cooperate. One of these men is innocent. If one innocent man is accused I’m not interested in the guilt or innocence of the others. I refuse absolutely to go anywhere near them. The men who raped me were peasants. The boys you’ve got locked up aren’t, so they’re almost certainly all innocent too. For one thing they’re all Hindus, aren’t they?”
Mr. Poulson agreed that they were all Hindus.
I smiled. I’d prepared this one awfully well, I thought. I said, “Then that’s another thing. One of the men was a Muslim. He was circumcised. If you want to know how I know I’m quite prepared to tell you but otherwise prefer to leave it at that. One was a Muslim. They were all hooligans. Apart from that I can’t tell you a thing. I can’t tell you more than I have done. The impression I had of them was strong enough for me to know that I could say, ‘No, these aren’t the men,’ but not strong enough for me to say, ‘Yes, these
are
the men.’ For all I knew they could have been British soldiers with their faces blacked. I don’t imagine they were, but if by saying so I can convince you I know you’ve got at least one wrong man, well then I say so.”
Mr. Poulson and the young man whose name I don’t remember both looked profoundly shocked. Judge Menen stared at me and then said, “Thank you, Miss Manners. We have no more questions. We are sorry to have had to subject you to this examination.”
He got to his feet and we all stood, just as if it was a courtroom and not the dining room of the MacGregor House. But there the similarity ended. Instead of Judge Menen going out he stood still and made it clear that it was my privilege to leave first. When I got to the door Jack Poulson was ahead of me to open it. A purely automatic gesture, part of the Anglo-Indian machinery. But I could
smell
his shock. Bitter, as if he’d just eaten some aromatic quick-acting paralyzing herb.
I went upstairs and poured myself a drink. I thought it was all over and that I’d won and Hari would be released in the next few hours, or the
next day. I stood on the balcony as I’d done so often during the past two weeks. During the riots you could hear the shooting and the firing and the noise of trucks going from one part of the civil lines to the other. For a day or two there’d been policemen at the gate of the MacGregor House. They said the house might be attacked, but we’d been more worried about Anna Klaus than about ourselves. At one time she was practically a prisoner in the purdah hospital in the native town, and we didn’t see her for a couple of days. Mrs. White wanted Lili and me to move into the Deputy Commissioner’s bungalow, but Lili wouldn’t go. Neither would I. That’s when the police guard appeared. The sight of the police guard made me feel like a prisoner too. Ronald never came near himself. He’d washed his hands of me. I felt that with a few exceptions the whole European community was ready to do that or had already done it. I didn’t care. I got to the stage of believing that everything was coming to an end for us, I mean for white people. I didn’t care about that either. One evening Lili told me the rioters had broken into the jail. I thought: That’s how it will resolve itself. They’ll free Hari. I didn’t know he wasn’t in that jail. But I thought: The Indians will take over. Perhaps they won’t punish me. Perhaps Hari will come to the house. But I couldn’t visualize it clearly enough. Nothing like that would happen. The soldiers were out and there was the sound of firing, and everything was only a question of time for
us,
hopeless for
them.
The robot was working.
But I was worried about Anna, and Sister Ludmila. They were the only white people I knew who lived or worked on that side of the river. Sister Ludmila told me later that she defied the curfew and went out every night with Mr. de Souza and her stretcher bearer. There was plenty of work for them. The police turned them back once or twice but generally they managed to give them the slip. The “death house” as people called it was always occupied. And every morning the police went there, and the women whose husbands or sons hadn’t come home.
I was worried for you, too, until Lili told me she’d got Robin White to send you a message through official channels that I was all right. They tried to keep my name out of reports that appeared in the national newspapers. Some hopes. Thank God we’d talked on the phone before my name was given away. Even so I was afraid you’d come down to Mayapore. I bless you for not doing, for understanding. If you’d come down I couldn’t have borne it. I had to work it out alone. I bless Lili for
understanding that too. At first I thought her detachment was due to disapproval, then that it was due to that curious Indian indifference to pain. But of course her “indifference” was wholly “European,” wholly civilized, like yours, like my own. There are pains we feel, and pains we recognize in others, that are best left alone, not from callousness but from discretion. Anna’s detachment was rather different. Hers also was European, but Jewish, self-protective as well as sensitive, as if she didn’t want to be reminded of pain because to be reminded would transfer her sensitivity from my pain to what she remembered of her own. By keeping that amount of distance she was able to establish a friendship between us, trust, regard, the kind of regard that can spring up between strangers who sense each other’s mettle. One shouldn’t expect more. But affection comes from a different source, doesn’t it? I’m thinking of the affection there is between you and me, which is not only an affection of the blood because there is the same kind of affection between myself and Lili. It’s one that overcomes, that exists, but for which there isn’t necessarily any accounting because trust doesn’t enter into it at all, except to the extent that you trust because of the affection. You trust after you have learned to love.
I could never feel affectionate in that way towards Anna. Neither, I’m sure, could she towards me. But we were good and trusting, understanding friends. One develops an instinct for people. I wander on about this because when I stood on the balcony, drinking my well-deserved gin and lime juice, I saw Ronald and Mr. Poulson come out of the house and get into Ronald’s truck. Judge Menen wasn’t with them. He stayed behind to have a drink with Lili.
And I thought: How curious. Ronald and Jack Poulson are just
people
to me. I felt no real resentment, not even of Ronald, let alone of Jack who was obviously going off somewhere to chew the rag with Ronald. But I felt they were outside the circle of those people “it was worth my while to know,” as my mother put it once, probably meaning something else entirely. To me my own meaning was clear. I already
knew
them. They were predictable people, predictable because they worked for the robot. What the robot said they would also say, what the robot did they would do, and what the robot believed was what they believed because people like them had fed that belief into it. And they would always be right so long as the robot worked, because the robot was the standard of rightness.
There was no
originating passion
in them. Whatever they felt that was
original would die the moment it came into conflict with what the robot was geared to feel. At the inquiry it needed Judge Menen to break through the robot’s barrier—if break is the appropriate word to use to describe the actions of a man who made even getting out of a chair look like an exercise in studied and balanced movement. But he got through. At one moment he was sitting on
their
side, the robot side, and the next moment he was through. We were through together, he
brought
me through or joined me on the other side—whichever way you like to put it. So it seemed right, now, that he should have stayed behind to have a drink with Lili, and leave the robot boys to go off on their own and work out how to make it look as if the robot had brought the inquiry to some kind of a logical conclusion. They had to save the robot’s face, as well as their own.
It was odd to find myself thinking this about Mr. Poulson. Mr. and Mrs. White thought very highly of him. He was still pretty young, young enough to be cautious, which may sound silly, but isn’t, because a young man has a living to earn, a family to support, a career to build. But it probably needs something like what came to be called the Bibighar gardens affair to sort out the mechanical men from the men who are capable of throwing a spanner into the works. Which is another way of describing what I feel about Judge Menen. What is so interesting is that the spanner he threw into the works, the spanner that brought the inquiry to a stop was the right spanner. It must take years of experience and understanding to know which spanner to use, and the exact moment to use it. I think he knew so well, that in the end he handed the spanner to me just to give himself the additional satisfaction of letting me throw it in for him. He knew that the only way to bring the robot to a temporary halt was to go right to the heart of what had set it in motion—the little cog of judicial procedure which had been built into it in the fond hope that once it was engaged it would only stop when justice had been done. By going to the heart of the mechanism he exposed it for what it was and gave me the chance to bring it to a halt by imposing an impossible task on it—the task of
understanding
the justice of what it was doing, and of proving that its own justice was the equal or the superior of mine. But it was only a
temporary
halt.
Long before Judge Menen left I came in from the balcony and had my bath. I was finished and dressed for dinner before Lili came in and asked if I was all right, and if I would like to see Anna who had called on her way home from the purdah hospital. I said, “Is Judge Menen still
here?” She told me he’d gone about ten minutes ago. And had sent me his love. I’d never seen Lili
moved
before. I’d only seen her amused, or wry, or disapproving, or detached. I think it was Judge Menen who had moved her with whatever it was he said to her—or rather caused her to be moved directly she set eyes on me again after talking to him. I don’t know what it was he had said. I never shall. That is typical of Lili. Typical of him too. And in a terribly English way Lili and I sort of got out of each other’s light—put yards of space between us, but were together again.
I went down with her and greeted Anna. Lili asked her to stay to dinner. She said she would. For me it was like a sudden treat, a picnic plan confided to a child early on a golden summer morning. When Lili went out to tell Raju to tell cook it was dinner for three I gave Anna a freshener for her drink. She said, “You look better. Please keep it up.”
And I said, “I think I shall. I think we’ve won.” I said “we” because Anna had stood by me all that time. I knew, before the inquiry, that she’d been asked that naked question: “In your opinion was Miss Manners
intacta
before the assault?” And I knew what she had replied. When I said “I think we’ve won,” she raised her glass.
This was the last evening of happiness I had. After it I was optimistic but not happy. In the end even my optimism went. I needed Hari. I needed Lili too, and Anna, and you, but most of all I needed him. I’d built my own enclosed little circle, hadn’t I? The one I’d feel safe in. A circle of safety in no-man’s-land. Wherever we go, whatever we do, we seem to hedge ourselves about with this illusory protection. Hours went by. Days. More than a week. I never went out. When people came I escaped to my room. The MacGregor House was gradually filled again with vibrations whose source I had never pinned down before but now did and saw as inseparable from it: trust, compromise, something fundamentally exploratory and noncommittal, as if the people in it were trying to
learn,
instead of teach—and so forgive rather than accuse. There is that old, disreputable saying, isn’t there? “When rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it.”
Well, there has been more than one rape.
I can’t say, Auntie, that I lay back and enjoyed mine. But Lili was trying to lie back and enjoy what we’ve done to her country. I don’t mean done in malice. Perhaps there was love. Oh, somewhere, in the past, and now, and in the future, love as there was between me and Hari. But the
spoilers are always there, aren’t they? The Swinsons. The bitches who traveled as far as Lahore. The Ronald Merricks. The silly little man who summed up his own silly little island history when he whistled and said, “some wog contractor is making a packet.”