Night Train to Jamalpur(47)

One man laughed.

Somebody had alerted Margaret Poole, and she came fast across the room. She took her husband by the shoulders, by which time all his listeners had moved away. ‘Douglas,’ she said. ‘You’ve had enough,’ and she turned towards me, saying, ‘Of course, he’d had enough an hour ago.’

Two hours ago would have been nearer the mark, but she didn’t seem very upset. Margaret Poole spoke to her husband as if he were a child: ‘A peg is one part whisky to five parts water, dear. Not the other way round. And you have to get up early to go to Asansol.’

There was a look of amusement on her face, if anything. Margaret Poole was rather tanned and capable-looking. Her frizzy hair might have been colourless but it sprouted very healthily. Dougie Poole had never felt the ‘Call of the East’; his wife had felt it. She was the sort of Englishwoman who was born to be on the back of an elephant. I asked a bearer for a glass of iced water, and, murmuring something about the great heat, I passed it to Margaret, who passed it to Dougie, whom she had now placed in a chair. It was pretty obvious that she cared for him, which perhaps made things worse for him, since he might be wondering why, and not finding a reason. I wondered why Poole had to go to Asansol. It was the best part of a day’s journey. Probably for a meeting about coal traffic: Asansol was a great centre for that. The meeting would likely be on Monday, and he would be travelling there tomorrow – on the Sunday – so as to arrive in good time.

Leaving Dougie Poole in the capable hands of his wife, I resolved to seek out the bottle of Beck’s beer to which I was entitled. I found one at a corner table, where I lit a Gold Leaf. Blowing smoke, I thought ahead to the business I had in hand for Monday: an early visit with Deo Rana to a certain storeroom at the spot called Sheoraphuli, followed by an appointment with Professor Hedley Fleming of the Zoological Gardens; and I tried to see how the snakes, the Night Mail shooting and the possibility of corruption in the traffic department might all fit together. I hadn’t got very far, when a long-faced, rather religious-looking woman said, ‘Have I already given you one of these?’ It was Eleanor Askwith, and the leaflet concerned her charitable effort, the St Dunstan’s Fund.

‘You have actually.’

At this rate, I might have to make a donation. She turned aside as the music stopped, and I saw that the band was vacating the stage to make way for her husband, William Askwith. He thanked us all for coming to the Nineteenth Annual East Indian Railway Debating Society dance. He told us how such occasions as this celebrated the fellowship of the Railway, the most important in India. These were difficult and uncertain times for the Company, with the government about to take over, but we in this room were united in a single aim: to serve the public. He then put in a word for that part-timers’ corps, the East Indian Railway Regiment, in which he was a major (new recruits were always welcomed), and also for the St Dunstan’s charitable effort, whose patroness was his wife, and which was a purely voluntary effort, with no paid workers, and much in need of donations. There was then a toast, and three cheers for the Railway.

After the speech, I went to the palatial Gentlemen’s, where I drained off the Beck’s beer. When I returned, a new dance was in progress, but I could not see Lydia or Bernadette on the floor. I had also not seen them during the speech. I circulated the dance floor and, walking past the French windows, I heard Lydia’s voice, slightly raised, coming from the garden. As I approached her, I heard Mary Bennett: ‘Well, in the end common sense prevailed, so I wore the white charmeuse trimmed with diamante and sprays of . . .’

Lydia stood in a group of people clustered under the branches of what I believed to be an ebony tree. Pretty Chinese lanterns hung from the black branches, but the conversation had taken a heavy turn.

‘Of course socialism can work in India,’ Lydia was saying to a railway officer.

‘My dear lady, I beg to disagree. It is quite incompatible with the religion, as all these Congress-wallahs are most uncomfortably aware.’

‘Which religion?’ Lydia enquired. ‘Hinduism?’

‘Naturally, yes. We have our classes, they have their castes – it’s much the same.’

‘Caste is fading.’

‘Is it my dear? Tell that to the untouchables sleeping in the gutters of Chowringhee.’

‘There is a great principle of egalitarianism in the religion,’ said Lydia.

‘Of what?’ enquired her opponent.

‘Of equality,’ said Lydia. ‘In Hindu philosophy we are all manifestations of God. We are all sacred.’