Night Train to Jamalpur(9)

I spoiled her, I suppose.

A flash of light came through the window slats; it threw five bars of light on to the compartment floor, and they commenced to move in unison over my bed, and up towards the luggage rack, where they remained for five seconds before being snatched away. We had passed another illuminated factory or insignificant station on the line to Jamalpur. I wanted to get to sleep before the single-line working, because if it was hard to get off on a moving train, it was harder still on a stationary one. But I couldn’t sleep.

I thought again of Bernadette . . .

She had been given piano lessons from a young age, and she had stuck to them. In that triumphant year of her scholarship, she played the piano part in Schubert’s piano trio in B flat at the York De Grey Rooms, and it was a particular source of pride to the wife and me that the other girls – violin and cello – were both five years older. Then Bernadette had met Philippe Gregoire. She met him through her literature teacher, Miss Starling. Philippe Gregoire was a black man from America – New Orleans – and he had written a book about being a black man from New Orleans that had won a prize. As such he was a great curiosity in York, and Miss Starling had asked him to give a talk at the high school. Afterwards, he had played the piano in the assembly hall, and he had shown the girls how to play in a special dancing rhythm . . . rag time, it was called, and Schubert went right out the window after that. The girls and Miss Starling had loved it, and the one who had really taken to it had been Bernadette.

She had been tipped off that American music was all the rage in Calcutta, and this had proved right. For Bernadette and her friends, the place was ‘jumping’. She had fallen in with the daughters of two railway officers, Claudine Askwith and Ann Poole, and they spent all their time playing American music on the piano or playing the records on the ‘gram’, and practising existing dances or – as if there weren’t enough dances already – making up new ones.

Then we had all gone to the May Ball at the Six O’Clock Club. It was our second week in Calcutta, and even though still malarial, I was dragged there by the wife. The very top railway people were there, keen to hobnob with the near-the-top army officers and Indian civil service types who were the other principal guests.

The dance was held in a regulation Calcutta mansion, standing in its own compound a little way north of Dalhousie Square. In the lobby, the sola topees of the arriving guests were stacked on shelves fifteen foot high, creating an effect of a sort of library of hats. Aside from the ballroom there were many anterooms, some set aside for ‘games’ and all with their squads of Indian bearers ready to serve glasses of the famous Six O’Clock punch. There wasn’t an orchestra but a ‘band’, which was something racier, and they knew the American dances. It had been immediately obvious to me that they would know them, because when Lydia and I entered the ballroom, the leader of the band, an Anglo-Indian who had a great deal of hair kept down with a great deal of pomade, was smoking a cigarette and talking to a selection of the prettiest women. The ballroom had opened out on to a veranda, and that opened out on to the gardens, where stood little colonies of basket chairs and tables, all bounded by a crumbling and picturesque brick wall, with little lizards darting all over it. Into this wall were set alcoves illuminated by Chinese lanterns. And those alcoves spelt trouble.

Bernadette had slid away from us on arrival, and I believed she had helped herself to two glasses of punch before filling out her dance card. The filling out hadn’t taken long. She had been, to my mind, the prettiest girl in the room and it turned out that one man – or boy – had booked three dances. He was an Indian, one of only half a dozen in a room containing perhaps three hundred people. The rule of thumb was that no Indian could join a Calcutta club, save for a couple of the clubs that prided themselves on their open-mindedness, and so would admit one or two Indians (provided they were millionaires). You would see more Indians attending the dances, but even here they had to be something special, and this young fellow’s dinner suit was certainly beautifully tailored; it flowed about his slim form in a way you rarely see. His patent shoes sparkled, and there was something sparkling in his lapel, too. It kept collecting the shimmer of the room and sending it out in a silver ray. It did so as he danced with Bernadette.

The wife and I were not dancing, but looking on from the side. We had danced the previous: a waltz, and that had done nothing at all for my headache. It had struck me, in fact, that a waltz is malaria set to music.

I asked about the silver ray.