Night Train to Jamalpur(62)

I saw that, once again, a communicating door would connect the master bedroom with Bernadette’s bedroom. There would be no marital relations here either, and my mind swung back to Miss Hatsuyo of Old Court House Corner, and her Japanese speciality.

There were two portable gramophones in Bernadette’s bedroom, and disks scattered around them. Her brand-new travel case was on the bed with its contents spilled over the thick counterpane, including more rouges, hand mirrors and bottles with bulb sprays than I liked to see. A torn envelope disclosed a note of some kind. It surely could not be from the R.K. He had only just arrived, and this note had been opened and read some time ago. Yet the paper was of good quality and ‘For the attention of Miss Bernadette Stringer’ was written in a very fancy hand. I moved towards it, but stayed my hand. I ought not to look.

I moved towards the window. I was thinking how quiet this place was compared to Calcutta, when I heard the rattle of an approaching vehicle. A single horse was pulling a carriage of the kind called a dandy through the trees and the rain.

I switched on the electric light in Bernadette’s room. On the dresser lay a catalogue of some kind: it was called Beauty Shop. There was also a slumped pile of silk hats on the dresser. Bernadette called ordinary (but expensive) silk hats ‘useful hats’; then there were ‘charming’ hats, and the newly fashionable material for these was lizard. But here was something else again: a leather hat. It looked like a racing driver’s hat, only there was a band of lace across the front, so it was really for the female accomplice of the motor-car driver. It had not been worn, and the price tag was still inside. Thirty rupees. The cost of a decent cotton twill suit; or two months’ wages for an Indian labourer, depending on which way you looked at it.

On the pillow a magazine lay open and I saw the heading, ‘Powder Puffs in the Balance’. Being unable to credit that such a headline could generate what appeared to be several pages of small print, I picked it up. I put on my reading glasses: ‘One must admit that the heat of ballrooms and the ardour of dancing are foes to the complexion . . .’

I returned to the living room. A large brass clock ticked; the coal fire made a similar sound. It was now almost eight o’clock. What type of tea continued until eight? Of course, they might have ‘gone on’. In India, a tea party often followed a tea party. Yes, the two of them had been expecting my arrival, but the social round was more important.

At eight thirty, I asked Ajit and Sahira whether they could expand upon the memsahib and the missy memsahib having gone to ‘tea’, and they disclosed that the tea had been ‘on the Mall’. Well, everything was ‘on the Mall’.

At eight forty-five, I stepped out of the house, and lit a Gold Flake under the blaze in a lamp that was in turn under the branches of a cedar tree. The great valley lay beyond the trees. I wondered whether, come morning, there would be a view of ‘the snows’ through the trees and across that valley, and at that moment I heard the sound of a motor. This could be them, I thought. They had gone for a spin in someone’s car, and were now being returned; but it was a motorcycle that came through the trees, a native constable riding upon it. I dropped my cigarette and stood upon it. Was he the sort of constable who brought bad news? I put my hand out to stop him.

‘Sahib?’ he said, and that was hopeful. His tone suggested he couldn’t have been looking for me.

‘Were you looking for Cedar Lodge?’ I said, indicating the house.

He shook his head. He wore a white turban and a long white cape against the drizzling rain. He was a handsome chap; he looked like a sort of motorised angel, and on the petrol tank of his bike was written the word ‘Zenith’.

‘I am worried about my wife and daughter.’

He cut off his engine, and I felt strangely light-headed in the sudden silence, there in that illuminated woodland high in the sky. Nobody could climb Everest, the highest of ‘the snows’, on account of the lack of oxygen. Maybe it was in short supply at this lower level too. The constable was taking out his notebook . . . but I could now hear the rattling of a tonga, coming from the direction of town. ‘Hold on,’ I said to the constable. The tonga was coming on fast. I was practically praying for it to stop outside the little wicket gate of Cedar Lodge, and when it did so, and Bernadette jumped down, followed by the wife, who stepped more carefully on to the muddy ground, I heard myself saying to the constable, ‘I need not trouble you any further, thank you.’


V

‘A lot flat tyres,’ said Bernadette, who was ‘curled up’ on the sofa, in the manner approved by the young ladies’ magazines. She meant that the guests at the tea had been a lot of bores. The last of the coal burned in the grate.