Night Train to Jamalpur(71)

‘Hold this,’ he said, handing me his cigar.

He succeeded in his attempt.

As he reclaimed his cigar I said, ‘I fancy a couple of these.’

‘Yes, well, you can buy your own can’t you?’

‘Where from?’

‘I had this from Hatzopolo’s on Lindsay Street.’

‘In Calcutta?’

‘That’s the only Lindsay Street that I know of,’ he said, and we all walked on at our habitual fast pace.

Behind us, the two Englishmen were mounting the teeing ground. They had been off taking their own shelter from the rain, and were now to the rear of us once again. Mine was the first ball we came to. I hit a bad hook, and it clattered into the trees. There was no point looking for it. I took another ball from my bag, unwrapped it, and this time found the apron of the green. The R.K., meanwhile was frowning in the sand trap.

‘I’m half buried,’ he said. ‘I don’t think my jigger will do the trick.’

Fisher took a club from his own bag, and carried it over to the R.K.

‘Will that one fit the bill?’ asked the R.K.

‘I should bloody hope so,’ said Fisher, blowing smoke. ‘It’s called a bloody “sand wedge” after all.’

I was thinking, ‘Is that any way to talk to royalty?’ when some sensation, the cause of which I was not immediately aware, made me turn to see a golf ball flying towards my eye at a hundred miles an hour; I rocked back. I had escaped practically certain death by two inches, and I had done so because Fisher and the R.K. had given a joint shout of ‘Fore!’ in the very nick of time. The ball had been struck by one of the two Englishmen behind, and he was approaching now as I picked myself off the ground, ‘Sorry about that, old man,’ he was saying. ‘I was trying to cut the corner. By rights it would have gone miles over your head, but I rather topped it.’

‘I don’t think it is quite within the spirit of the game,’ said the R.K., with folded arms. ‘Not etiquette.’

‘Well, now,’ said the Englishman, ‘as to that . . . I have apologised sincerely, and I do not think I need further instruction in what is, after all, a game invented in my home country.’

He was English and golf had actually been invented in Scotland. But what he meant was that he wouldn’t take instruction from an Indian.

‘Faults on both sides,’ suggested the other Englishman.

Fisher walked fast towards the first Englishman, and belted him hard in the face. ‘There are now,’ he said.

I had known the fellow was for it, simply because Fisher had dropped his good cigar and trodden on it before making his advance. I could see the Havana now, flattened and dead in the semi-rough. The R.K. was shaking his head and looking down at the ground. The two Englishmen, one of them bleeding heavily from the nose, were hurrying back to the clubhouse with Fisher staring after them. For them, and for us, the game was over.





Chapter Ten



I

The hall at the Gymkhana Club was more like a gymnasium to my mind: a bare, echoing place with a viewing gallery running around the top. At least, that had been my impression at seven o’clock. Come eight o’clock, the place was no longer bare, but packed with perspiring dancers who moved under an ever-thickening cloud of cigar smoke and whisky fumes.

Lydia and I had had two waltzes, and had eaten the supper that had been served at ten. It had been a good dinner, involving a transparent soup with shredded meat in it, a haddock in cheese sauce, and lamb chops – but all in French. We now stood side by side on the gallery, looking down at the dancers. It was like looking down on a fairground, with multiple little coloured revolutions occurring. The dancers included Bernadette, Ann Poole and Claudine Askwith, and the music was one of the American specialities, which the lead bandsman called ‘jass’. Bernadette, Ann and Claudine were all about the familiar business of embracing their partners, holding them out for inspection, approving of what they saw, and so embracing them again. Each danced with a young subaltern, or at any rate men in white mess jackets and sparkling shoes.

The R.K. was present, or had been, and he and I had chatted pleasantly about small-gauge railways. He had then danced one dance with Bernadette, and he may now have left for another social function entirely. Bernadette, twirling away below me, did not seem to be missing him.

This could be accounted for as follows . . .

After the golf game, I had returned to Cedar Lodge to find Lydia in but Bernadette out on a call with her friends. I had explained about the game to Lydia, and I had given her my insights into the character of the R.K. I had told him of the commercial offer he had made me, and I said I’d found him a thoroughly pleasant and sensible young fellow, almost completely European in his ways. I doubted very much that he kept a harem, and so on.