Night Train to Jamalpur(60)

The woman was the person who had clashed with Fisher before, and she could not conceal her amazement at this development.

‘Now what do you say?’ she asked the child when she finally found her voice.

‘Thank you for the humbug, sir.’

Fisher eyed the boy. ‘It’s not a flipping humbug, is it? It’s a comfit.’


III

The tropical forest had given way to oaks and rhododendrons, and the Indian summer had become an English spring, albeit a misty one.

We were beyond the halfway point, and Fisher and I were back in our little anteroom to the main compartment. After the loops, the train had performed some other tricks. For example, it had climbed for a while by running hard uphill into a dead end, then reversing over points on to a higher ledge than it had started from, then running hard uphill again, so progressing by zigzags. The first time the train made a reverse, one of the women in the main saloon had screamed, probably imagining we were running out of control down the hill. The train had then started chasing its tail again: another loop.

At a spot called Tindharia we had been besieged by tea-wallahs. It had been distinctly cool there, and the women had put woollen sweaters on the children. On emerging from that station, we had been able to look down on the workshop of the mountain railway; it came and went through swirls of cloud, like a factory that had died and gone to heaven. An hour later, at a spot called Kurseong, we had all taken a meal in the station restaurant. Then the children from the first class carriage stood on the platform and watched what looked like an organised entertainment by a troupe of monkeys. I almost expected the monkeys to bring round a hat afterwards. Kurseong was a vertical town, with tea plantations all around. As we pulled away from it, the clouds became strange, with whirlpools of vapour ascending and descending inside them. My ears clicked.

‘Why the interest in narrow-gauge railways?’ I asked Fisher. We were back in the little saloon, smoking at one another.

Silence for a space.

‘I saw an advertisement in the paper. Small-gauge kit being sold off . . . Thought there might be money in it.’

‘Who was selling?’

‘Bombay . . . Port Authority.’

A further silence.

‘What paper?’

‘Statesman.’

‘When?’

‘I don’t bloody know, do I? Couple of weeks back.’

I was a faithful reader of The Statesman. At three anas, it was very good value. I had seen no such advertisement.

The window was wide and clear. Beyond it, I saw that we were beginning to coincide with a road: the Cart Road, I believed it was called. It was going the same way as us: to Darjeeling. The queer-looking mountain people walked along it, some carrying baskets strapped to their foreheads. We shuffled into a place called Tung, all steam and fog. The houses of Tung were made of wood, with triangular roofs, like so many cuckoo clocks. Long tattered streamers flew from flagpoles in the gardens, where grew willow trees, cherry trees and red flowers that blazed brightly in the haze. We rolled past some Gurkha-like men digging up the road, and the locomotive rang its bell at them. One man looked up from his work, grinning. They all wore big gold earrings, like pirates. An ox cart was approaching them, and behind the ox cart a motor. The very rich did prefer to motor up; I’d seen a number of cars on the road, and plenty of petrol bunks. This motor was long and blue, almost as long as our railway carriage and I believed it was the kind they called a ‘Continental’. The driver was uniformed. A dark-suited and middle-aged Indian sat beside him. On the rear seat, looking over a newspaper, sat a handsome young Indian in tweeds. It was the R.K.

Our train swayed towards the car, and he was looking through the window, looking my way, and it seemed that he didn’t know quite what to do. He half raised his arm, just as Fisher, in the chair opposite to mine, raised his paper to his face. Well, it was clear as day. The two were acquainted; the two were in league, and didn’t want me to know it. It wasn’t Askwith Fisher had been going to meet at the Debating Society dance; it was the R.K. I continued to watch the Continental as it overtook the train. The golf clubs, fishing rods and gun bags bristling from the rear matched Fisher’s golf clubs and gun bag. He was going up to the hills because they were going up to the hills – and yet he had wanted to travel up with me.

If the murder of John Young on the Jamalpur night train had been the result of a bungled attempt to do away with me, with Fisher as a conspirator, then the instigator need not have been William Askwith, or whatever traffic officer feared being exposed as corrupt. What if the instigator was the R.K.? He was presumably a man used to getting what he wanted. It appeared that he wanted my daughter, and I was the barrier standing in his way.