Night Train to Jamalpur(45)

‘Mr Poole’s lovely really,’ Bernadette put in. ‘Ann adores him, but he’s a bit nuts, and practically always blotto. Claudine told me that her dad’s warned Mr Poole about his drinking.’

Lydia turned away to take a fruit punch from a bearer.

‘I wonder what’s eating him,’ I said to Lydia. ‘Poole, I mean.’

‘He doesn’t get on with India; never has done since he came out here the year after the war. This year, he went down with prickly heat in February – before it was hot. You know it was Margaret who dragged him out here?’

‘That’s it,’ said Bernadette. ‘It was the only way they were going to get a reasonable number of servants.’

‘You see,’ said Lydia, ‘Margaret’s father had been in the Indian Army and he loved the life – very social, you know, and played all sports, whereas poor old Dougie’s a duffer at everything like that.’

‘He’s originally from a spot called Walthamstow,’ Bernadette put in, ‘and Claudine says he’s Walthamstow all over and that’s why Ann has a London accent.’

‘She probably says you have a Yorkshire accent,’ said Lydia.

‘Of course she does.’

‘Any more gossip about him?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Bernadette. ‘We were talking about the snake attacks this afternoon, and Ann just happened to mention that her dad had kept snakes as a boy, and he’d written away to one of the boys’ papers about them.’

‘Why?’

‘Asking advice. The letter was printed in the paper, anyhow.’

‘What paper?’

‘I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?’

I would do. I had thought that if Poole had any involvement in the bad business going on around me, it might be that he’d sent in the dossier complaining about corruption in the traffic department. I certainly had not fingered him as the loony putting the snakes on the trains.

I found Poole again a few minutes later. He’d got hold of a bottle of champagne, and was scrutinising the label. When I came up to him, I looked at it as well. It read, ‘Dry Elite.’

‘That’s a misnomer,’ he said.

Dougie Poole had himself brought up the subject of the snakes just a moment before, so I felt at liberty to wade right in.

‘What do you reckon about the snakes?’ I said.

‘I reckon it must be the nationalist Johnnies going after all the top box-wallahs in the first class carriages,’ he said. ‘The snake would be a good weapon for them. Comes from the soil of India. So it’s like turning India itself against the imperialist enemy.’

Having finished his glass of champagne, he was pouring himself another one.

I said, ‘I’ve heard you had an interest in snakes, when you were a lad?’

‘I kept a snake,’ he said at length.

‘What sort?’

‘Oh, grass snake.’

‘Of course, they’re not poisonous.’

‘Venomous, Jim, venomous. No, they’re not that. And they’re beautiful as well. Greenest thing you ever saw. Like jade. I became very attached to him.’

‘I believe you sent away to a certain paper about the snake?’

‘You are well up on all this.’

‘I had it from the girls, you know.’

‘Yes. Well, when he was dying I sent away . . . for advice. To the captain.’

‘Captain who?’

‘The Captain, Jim. Paper of that name.’

‘Really? I had that as a boy as well.’

‘Did you really Jim? Did you love “Tales from the Indian Railways”? “Founded on fact”, they were . . . I don’t think. By H. Hervey, “illustrated by the author”. Did you notice how all the stories in The Captain were “illustrated by the author”? I think they must have been hard up. But “Tales of the Indian Railways” . . . What about that runaway train load of elephants with the monkey driving? Implausible in itself, but when you add in the other runaway trainload of elephants, coming the opposite way on the same line, also with a monkey driving . . . Bit hard to credit, even when you’re ten.’

‘What did they say about your snake?’

‘They said the snake was likely too cold, so I put it in the cupboard with the airing tank.’

‘Do any good?’

He looked at me with his sad, down-pointing eyes.

‘Not a bit. Didn’t last more than another two days.’

The guitar man in the band started making that chugging noise; another of the speciality dances was getting underway. I looked into the garden. There were as many people out there as in. It was backstage, so to speak: men smoking, women adjusting each other’s dresses and scanning their programmes. The church beyond was just a dark silhouette. Near the French windows, I noticed, one of the white-clad servants was presiding over a table on which stood not food or drink but a display of fancy, tasselled photograph albums. Dougie Poole having embarked on another of his weaving walks through the crowd, I approached this table, and I took out my reading glasses as the bearer presented one of the albums for my inspection. It showed past dances of the East Indian Railway Debating Society, labelled with the dates. The first dance had been held in 1904, so this present one was the nineteenth, not a very notable anniversary. Back in 1904, tails had been worn. As I leafed through the pages, I saw how these became ordinary dinner suits, and the women’s hair and dresses got shorter, the latter quite excitingly so. A woman was beside me. She said, ‘That was my husband,’ and she was pointing down to the page I had open, which was the page for the previous year: 1922.