Night Train to Jamalpur(46)

She was a woman in early middle age, beautiful in the Anglo-Indian way, and she wore black. She was one of the very few Anglo-Indians in the room. I looked again at where she pointed and saw photograph of a smiling, handsome man of medium features and perfectly symmetrical moustache. It was the late John Young. The woman introduced herself as Sonia Young, and over the sound of the band, I tried to commiserate with her loss, and to say something of my close involvement in her husband’s final hours. But she already knew. She had caught sight of me at the Institute.

‘I should apologise for my son. He was belabouring you.’ She looked slightly less Indian than her husband, but had a slightly more Indian way of speaking. ‘He is always resenting.’

‘I should think he’s entitled to a few resentments,’ I said, ‘after what happened.’

‘No,’ said Sonia Young, ‘because this world is open to him.’ She indicated the dance. ‘His father made sure of that. But he chooses to plough his own furrow.’

‘He is not in here then?’ I said, indicating the book.

Sonia Young shook her head. ‘John and I though – plenty of times.’ Taking the book from my hands, she leafed through the pages, and the years. ‘We were quite a bit thinner then,’ she said, smiling. She was a very straightforward person.

I said, ‘Perhaps your son sees a different India emerging.’ It was a strange thing to be saying, with the Elephant Glide or whatever it might be, yo-yoing away in the background, and Sonia Young didn’t think much of my suggestion because she said, ‘No . . . It is only a question of his temperament. He has a poor temperament. He gets it from me.’

‘Now I don’t believe that for a minute,’ I said.

‘You are calling me a liar?’ she said, with a raised eyebrow.

‘Not a bit of it,’ I said.

‘You’ve met John. You saw his temperament. You know it’s not from him.’

‘Of course not.’

‘So what are you saying, exactly?’ she said, laughing.

‘That’s a good question, that is,’ I said, putting the photograph album back down, which caused the Indian in charge of it to bow at me.

Sonia Young said, ‘Do you think it was these notorious criminal tribes, then, that killed my husband?’

‘The evidence points that way,’ I said.

Mrs Sonia Young didn’t seem convinced about the criminal tribes, but at least she didn’t appear to think that I’d done it.

The music, and therefore the dancing, had stopped. The band members were leaving the stage for a breather, pushing towards the French windows and lighting cigarettes. To my left, I could hear Mary Bennett saying, ‘The bouquet? That was red roses, just as if we’d been marrying in Surrey! The cake was done at Firpo’s. Well of course they are the best.’

Her prized husband, Superintendent Christopher Bennett, was standing about three feet away from her and looking spare. Once again, he acknowledged me, raising his hand in greeting. I thought he might be coming over, and so I turned to Mrs Young, saying, ‘This is a colleague of mine, Superintendent Christopher Bennett.’

‘I’m sorry, who?’ said Mrs Young. She still had half an eye on the tasselled album, and the photographs of the life she’d lost; and Christopher Bennett wasn’t coming over anyway.


IV

Moving through the ballroom, I heard, ‘The city engineer won’t walk under that veranda, so I’m dammed if I will.’

Walking further, I heard, ‘. . . the ladies’ hockey season, that amusing prelude to the season of masculine hockey . . .’

And then I heard, ‘There was this couple dancing at the Trocadero . . .’

Dougie Poole was embarking on the Gurkha joke, the one Canon Peter Selwyn had told me in the Bengal Club. It was evidently doing the rounds.

‘Why the Troc?’ someone asked.

‘You’ll see,’ said Poole, and he paused, frowning. ‘No you won’t. They were dancing somewhere anyhow, somewhere in London . . . So they’re waltzing away, and the woman says to the man, “Do you come here often?” and he says, “No, not often because I’m in the army out in India, and I’m just home for a while on leave.”’

A dozen sahibs and memsahibs were clustered around Poole, who was leaning against a food table. They all looked very worried as he pressed on with the joke: ‘So she says, “Oh, you’re in a good regiment, I’m sure,” and he says, “It’s a Gurkha regiment actually.” She says, “Really? But I thought the men in the Gurkhas were all black,” and he says, “No dear, only our privates are black.” Two of the memsahibs departed at this point – and sharpish. The band leader was announcing some new speciality, and Poole had to shout to be heard above him: ‘“But my dear,” says the woman, “how simply marvellous!”’