Night Train to Jamalpur(35)

‘You like it here,’ I suggested to Sermon.

‘I do,’ he said. ‘I’m tolerated by the regular crowd; they serve a proper glass of whisky, the provender is excellent, and it’s just a short stroll over the bridge from my place off Strand Road.’

But not as short a stroll as the burra clubs of downtown Calcutta would be.

He was an old India hand, and his white drill suit was of a Victorian cut. It was of good quality, but slightly grubby, or at any rate not as white as the flower in his buttonhole, which was not like any I could see in the garden. I believed it was a white carnation, whereas the carnations in the garden were of other colours. He wore old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses that clashed with the rough redness of his face, and seemed to signify the descent from outdoorsman to box-wallah.

‘Do you think he did it?’ I said. ‘Do you think the boy did his father in? Or arranged for it to be done?’

Charles Sermon seemed quite shocked.

‘The two of them would have rows, and they would have rows in here,’ he said, indicating the Institute, ‘but I don’t think it would ever have come to that, old man.’

‘What did they fight about?’

‘Politics primarily, I think. The father was a great loyalist, like most of the Anglo-Indian chaps. The son thought that was rather craven of him, I suppose.’

‘But surely no Anglo-Indian supports the nationalists. They’d be worse off under the Indians than they are under us.’

Charles Sermon shrugged, reached for his whisky. ‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘he was killed by a bandit wasn’t he? I’ve seen a lot of that myself up country . . .’

On the face of it, he was a man for the mofussil, the countryside, and it was the devil’s own job to keep him off hunting, yet from what I could work out he’d long since stowed away his shotgun. He was now just an ink-spiller in the traffic office . . . although not for much longer. I had gleaned that Charles Sermon was coming up for superannuation, and the return to Blighty.

He was saying, ‘Talking of dacoits, I was up with my old shikari pal, Clive Webster, in the Mandlabaju block in the Central Provinces. Now whilst the majority of villages in that territory are—’

‘Do you have a place lined up for when you go back home?’ I said, cutting him off.

‘Oh,’ he said, because he didn’t seem to mind being cut off, ‘your neck of the woods: Scarborough.’

The coast. I should have known. After years of humidity, the old India hands wanted sea air.

‘The Esplanade?’ I suggested, because I knew Scarborough, and I could see him in a flat there, overlooking the floral gardens, the funicular railway and the sea. Every evening at six, he’d go to the Esplanade Hotel for his peg. There’d be people in there who’d listen to his hunting stories. Well, they’d have to. I myself had always hankered after the Esplanade: the grand white houses seemed to capture and hold the sun. But no; Charles Sermon wouldn’t be on the Esplanade . . .

‘Few streets inland from there, old man.’

We drifted on to the snake attacks, and I told Sermon of the photographs I’d seen. Midway through my account, Sermon stood up to help the mali with the kerosene tins. When he sat back down he was wheezing somewhat. He was slightly out of condition.

‘Compare death by tiger bite,’ Sermon said, returning to his seat.

‘Compare it to what?’

‘Snake bite. Ever seen Stripes take down a buff?’

‘A what?’

‘Buffalo, old man. Tiger on a buffalo. Straight to the neck. The buff doesn’t know what’s hit him. A lightning death – almost pleasant in the absence of pain. I recall—’

I told him I was very sorry, but I had an appointment at the Writers’ Building. Sermon seemed to regret my departure. He sent a bearer to collect my hat, offered to accompany me to the garden gate of the Insty. We looked out over the railway lands, which were strangely peaceful under the setting sun: the marshalled goods wagons to one side, the passenger coaches to the right, all patiently waiting – and Horwah still further to the right. Charles Sermon said, ‘There’s only one man to speak to on the snake front . . .’

‘Is he at the zoo?’

‘He practically is the zoo. Professor Hedley Fleming. Cleverest man in Calcutta.’

And he shook my hand warmly.


III

The electric lights blazed from the windows of the Writers’ Building, and the trams moved back and forth in front, shuffling their advertisements for Lifebuoy Soap like cards in a pack. Their motors whined and their bells tolled, but inside the office of Khudayar Khan all was silent.