‘It’s a diamond,’ said Lydia. She had met the fellow before at an earlier dance, and was now watching him intently. ‘He is the son of a maharajah, and he’s considered holy. Well, he’s a high Brahmin.’
‘Where did she meet him?’
‘At a game of musical chairs.’
The wife was telling me this with a note of pride. I said, ‘You can’t have a railwayman’s daughter from York, dancing with an Indian prince.’
‘On grounds of colour prejudice, would that be?’
‘On grounds they might strike up a romance, and that can only end in tears.’
We watched them dance: the two were inexplicably of the same mind. Really it was like seeing a horse run or a dog walk – you couldn’t make out how it was done, which was perhaps why it was called the foxtrot.
Lydia told me the young Indian’s name. His first name was normal enough: Narayan. The rest I couldn’t catch. She told me that, being the son of a raja, he was a rajkumar, and from then on he was referred to between us as ‘The R.K.’
The dance came to an end, and the dancers became a milling crowd, with Bernadette and the R.K. milling within it. But then they disappeared. They would be in the garden – in one of the brick alcoves. I said to Lydia, ‘Shouldn’t we go and find them?’
‘I will in a minute. There’s no harm in a little spooning. She’s nearly seventeen, Jim, and while I know you don’t want to be here, the only reason you are here is because of her.’ That was true enough. We had been invited to the dance by the Askwiths on account of their daughter’s friendship with our daughter. We wouldn’t have made the grade otherwise.
As the next dance began, I said, ‘She was booked with someone else for this one, and I can’t see her.’
Lydia turned to me. ‘Jim,’ she said, ‘you’ve gone yellow.’
‘Don’t change the subject.’
‘You should go back to the hotel.’
She escorted me back to the lobby, all the time telling me not to fret about the R.K. He was only one of many sons of one of many maharajahs. Were there not about fifty pages of them in the Calcutta Directory? And this boy’s father was amongst the smaller ones. He had only about a hundred and fifty square miles somewhere ‘up country’; Lydia didn’t know exactly where, only that you couldn’t get there by the East Indian Railway. The place was called Suryapore, and it was mainly forest, but there was some coal, and a quantity of ruined temples. The boy’s father, the Maharajah of Suryapore, spent a good deal of time in America. When he was in India, he was not entitled to a gun salute when formally received by the British and so, as far as the Indian aristocracy went, he was something of an also-ran. He was still worth a mint, however.
The wife was in two minds about the R.K. She could see the dangers of an association, but did not want to display colour prejudice by warning the girl off him. She also admired his looks, his money and his social position. After talking over the matter the next day, I had taken it on myself to speak to Bernadette. She’d blown up as soon as I’d mentioned the R.K.; I’d got cross in turn, and pronounced the ban: she was absolutely forbidden to see the R.K.
By my reckoning, she’d seen him three times since then, secure in the knowledge that her mother did not support the ban, as long as she was always in public when with him. It had been my fault to start with, of course. I ought not to have brought the two of them to India.
Judging by the clattering of every loose object in the compartment, the Jamalpur night train had hit full speed. The young dancers of Calcutta had a word for this loose shaking and I could not at first call it to mind. But it came to me at length: ‘syncopation’, and the small satisfaction of recalling it allowed me to drop asleep in spite of all.
V
I dreamt of a snake that generally carried itself in the shape of the ‘and’ symbol: ‘ampersand’ I believed was the word, and this snake could open doors by coiling itself around the handles. It seemed to be trying to open the exterior door of my compartment, the one by which I would step down on to the platform when we arrived at our destination, but how could it do that while we were flying along at top speed? I then heard a sort of slow gunshot, and I saw the flare of the gun at the same time, but that couldn’t be right. It was the flare of other guns at other times that I had seen, but I believed the shot I had heard was real. I sat up and turned on the light.
All was as before. The fan was still turning, I was still alive. No bullet had been loosed in this compartment, but the train was at a stand, and I somehow knew it had been at a stand for some time. I opened the sliding door to the dark corridor; I heard a noise from the left, but I turned right, and walked into a man lying on the floor. He was in his underclothes. I leant down. The corridor carpet was sodden with blood, the man’s underclothes likewise. The man was John Young. The sliding door of what had been his compartment was open, and he was half in and half out of it. A man was standing behind me. I turned – a European probably in his sixties in ghostly white pyjamas that stood out in the gloom. He was the oldish fellow I’d seen on boarding. He had come from compartment number three. He said, ‘What’s wrong with his head?’ and I saw what he meant: about a third of John Young’s head was missing. Fisher now came out of number four compartment in white cotton trousers and braces but no shirt. He had on his boots with laces unfastened. There was an expression on his face that was hard to interpret.