Night Train to Jamalpur(8)

It had occurred to me that Fisher had stolen the file, simply because I found him to be a generally suspicious character.

I thought of Fisher as I stood pissing into the thunderbox, the dark sleepers flickering past the bottom of the dirty tin hole. When we’d first teamed up, I’d thought I must have got across him somehow. But it seemed that everyone had got across him. Fisher was as rude to the railway officers as he was to the Indian constables. His mantra was ‘You have a complaint, brother? Put it through the proper channels.’ Or ‘You know where the bloody complaints book is, don’t you? Here, I’ll fetch you a pen.’ And yet he was learning Hindustani. He had a book on it; and in the two weeks I’d been walking about Calcutta with him, I’d seen him give money to beggars – whole rupees, not just a few anas. On a tour of the goods yards around Howrah, he’d suddenly broken away from our party and given assistance to half a dozen Indians trying to push a great bale of cotton up a ramp. ‘Put your bloody backs into it, can’t you?’ he’d roared at them.

I washed my hands and face. The sound coming from the thunderbox hole was like a complaining voice from the underworld. I pulled the chain, watching the silver whirlpool form and die on the tracks as soon as it had formed. You couldn’t say that Fisher was particularly guilty of what the wife called ‘colour prejudice’. He was prejudiced against every bugger.

I stepped back into the shaking compartment. I stretched the sheet over the couch, and in doing so I knocked the cotton bag to the floor. There appeared to be something still inside it. It had struck me that the snake attacks seemed to have started at the same time as my arrival in India, but I did not believe the snakes could be connected to the Commission of Enquiry. The snakes were an attack on the railway rather than on those investigating the railway. Either way, I nudged the bag with my foot to make sure the ‘something’ was not something alive. I squinted inside, then fished out a rolled-up mosquito net: the kind you draped over yourself, like a shroud. I turned off the electric light; I retreated beneath sheet and net, and I commenced to sweat.

I thought of our daughter, Bernadette. John Young had guessed right there as well. She was trouble.

In her first week at the high school in York, she had been given the stick by the headmistress for laughing at a teacher, a Miss Brewster, who owned a motor car. Miss Brewster parked her car on the asphalt of the school yard, and it seemed that every time she climbed in, it sagged in the middle. The day after Bernadette had received her punishment, Miss Brewster had climbed into her car again; it had sagged again and Bernadette had laughed again, albeit this time outside the school gates. But she was given the stick for a second time, and that had confirmed her as a rebel.

She had been such a sweet girl too, and – aged five or so – keenly interested in railways. Lydia would deliver her to me at the police office, on the main ‘up’ platform at York station, and we would wander about. She liked the steam from the locomotives – ‘train clouds’ she called them. She would be hypnotised by the sight of a train arriving, and when it had left the station she would be bereft, calling, ‘Come back, come back!’ The train never came back, of course, and I explained that there would be a very great smash if one ever did. So then she wanted to go and see where the trains lived – that is, the sidings. I would walk through the sidings with her, being one of the few men in York with a pass that allowed me to do that, and we would traipse along between the high wagons to the point where I became quite bored. But not Bernadette.

One day I saw a fellow trying to break the seal on a wines and spirits wagon, and I ran him in – arrested him with Bernadette in tow. She wasn’t frightened but the bloke swore like blazes, and when I’d handed him over to the duty constable in the police office, and taken Bernadette off for her regular treat of an eclair at the station hotel, she pronounced: ‘I did not like that man.’ It had been an important day in her life, as when the car had sagged for the second time. She’d been down on police work ever since, and down on railways as well. As she grew older, she would join Lydia in recommending different jobs to me, something swankier or – what was her other word? – ritzier. Might I not be a lawyer, attending the Crown Court, where all the briefs were so dashing in their long black robes?

In other words, she was on the way to being a snob, like her mother, but with not much sign of her mother’s social conscience. Bernadette had other virtues though. She was a spirited girl, and very kind (to anyone who didn’t stand in her way). One of her story books contained an illustration of a young girl walking in a ballet dress across the beautiful terrace of a country mansion; the girl held a little sparkling purse, and exuded a great sense of confidence and pride. The caption read ‘On a Birthday Morning!’ and that was Bernadette all over. That was just how she walked though our home village. She was blessed in some way that could not possibly last, so I was always on the look-out for signs of sadness and disappointment that might herald the start of a decline into the reality of the world.