Night Train to Jamalpur(61)

Thinking of Bernadette, I willed the train on. I didn’t want the R.K. to arrive in Darjeeling before I did, but two minutes later I saw him again. His Continental was parked behind another motor, just as big, possibly a Rolls. Its European occupants had stepped out on to the road, and a gush of steam was coming from the radiator. The cars had no choice but to attack the hills, and it was too much for some. The R.K. and his two companions were stopping to assist. It seemed I would beat him to Darjeeling after all.

Fisher was still reading his paper, or pretending to.

‘Why have you come up here?’

‘For the bloody social gaiety, why do you think?’

We had come to a place called Ghum. We circled a wide, flattish hill for no apparent reason, and with infuriating slowness. But then, finally, we were bearing down on the terminus.


IV

Darjeeling was a town falling down a mountain, and this mountain had turned its back on India, and the plain of Bengal. Instead, it faced a blue-grey valley patrolled by clouds. On the other side of this valley were ‘the snows’, the Himalayas, which were, at the present moment, buried treasure, merely a whitish gleam behind bands of grey cloud. The sun was big in the sky, like a painting of the sun, and it gave off little heat. Most of the European men boarding the tongas, or walking along the principal road – the Mall – were dressed like mountaineers. Thick knickerbockers, guernseys and pipes were the order of the day. The women’s coats were sometimes fur-trimmed. The air held the smoke of a hundred coal fires and the dark light of impending downpour. Taken all together, I felt that I was in the Scottish Highlands, some time either side of winter.

Fisher was delayed behind me in the station, mustering his goods and marshalling some servants for the short run to the Hotel Mount Everest. The queue for tongas was too long, so I engaged a rickshaw. I showed the man a hand-drawn map, given me by Lydia, on which Cedar Lodge was indicated . . . and the rain began to fall as we ticked our way along the Mall.

After the station, the Mall became a bazaar, with stalls on the road. Next came bigger buildings, including the clubs of the town, set back from the Mall, and with British-looking gardens. Thereafter, the Mall became a pleasant avenue running through a park, with overspreading cedars and white railings against the steep drop, and well-dressed strollers, all now holding aloft umbrellas that were shiny with rain.

We came to Cedar Lodge, prettily located in the park. It resembled the station master’s house at Grosmont in Yorkshire. I hurried along the drive, to be greeted by the middle-aged married couple who were caretakers of the house and servants to its occupants. They were not mountain people but from the plain, and their English was good. Their names were Ajit and Sahira.

They were the sole occupants of the house. Where were the memsahib, and the missy memsahib? I wanted to know. Ajit said they had gone out to some sort of tea. So they had not been killed by a snake on the ‘down’ train from Sealdah. Ajit asked whether I myself wanted tea. The cup was delivered to me by Ajit in the living room. His wife was looking on anxiously from the doorway, and I believed that Ajit spoke for both of them when he said, ‘The house is kept just as the memsahib likes it.’

‘You mean it is a mess?’

‘No, sahib,’ he said simply, but he did mean that, and I was sure his wife had asked him to point out that the mess wasn’t their fault.

I walked around the house, cup in hand. The rooms were small and solid, with wooden floors, red turkey rugs and tartan blankets. The place put me in mind of Christmas. A log fire was laid in every room, and a coal fire was lit in the main room. All the coal scuttles except the one in the main room were empty, and I concluded there was a shortage of coal in town, about which I would be proved right.

Where Cedar Lodge differed from the station master’s house in Grosmont was that it was clean. But it was littered with the betokening signs of female social ambition: three dresses thrown across the bed of the master bedroom, and there was a copy of a book by Annie Besant, who had had helped found the Congress party of India. This was the reason the wife admired Annie Besant, and also the reason she resented her: Lydia would have liked to have founded the Congress party herself. A pile of calling cards lay over-toppled on the bedside table. ‘Captain and Mrs Stringer . . .’ I couldn’t bear to read the continuation of it. That ‘Captain’ was such a slim branch for Lydia to hang it all on, whereas her daughter might have the chance of an Indian prince. Half a dozen shimmery evening dresses hung in the wardrobe, which was more than I recalled Lydia having, but perhaps a few were Bernadette’s: the two had begun to merge in that way.