Night Train to Jamalpur(93)

A bearer was bringing drinks out on to the terrace, where perhaps twenty men and women sat talking or reading. I passed one of the curious, half-dead bushes. Was this the manasa tree that Canon Peter Selwyn had mentioned as being supposed by the Hindus to give protection against snake bites? He had said they were common throughout Calcutta, and that you would find a statuette of the goddess Manasa beneath the trees, yet there was nothing at the base of this one but a white stone. Nodding at a couple of the terrace drinkers whom I vaguely recognised from Fairlie Place, I entered the lobby of the Insty, where a big card game was in progress. Other members sat in the basket chairs near the bookshelves, reading through the engineering journals, or the novels of the Wheeler’s Indian Railway Series, and there were a couple of kids flipping through the Bumper Books.

There was a whole new crop of advertisements on the notice-boards, and their severe practicality seemed to clash with this scene of Saturday afternoon jollity. ‘Goodbye Rust!’ I read. ‘Syronite WILL NOT rust’, or ‘Rupees Fifteen Thousand – save this amount yearly using Sentinel Steam Wagons’. And there were notices advertising ‘homeward’ sailings: ‘P&O British India Companies’ . . . ‘Isthmian Steamship Lines’ . . . ‘Ellerman Line’.

I heard, ‘Now with a sportsman’s instinct, I was absolutely sure I had hit the beast, but I didn’t see it fall. So I summoned a few of the men, and told them to take their dogs down and search the hillside . . .’ The speaker was Charles Sermon, the only European in the place apart from me, as far as I could tell. He had collared some poor fellow, and was steering him into the corridor leading to the bar. I had been banking on Sermon being at the Insty; in fact, he was the main reason for my visit. I wanted a word with him about the rebellion of the Company officers in 1919. The grievances had arisen from the war, and Sermon had been in the war. Therefore I too began walking along the corridor leading to the bar. In the rooms off, the holiday mood continued. One room seemed to be hosting a table-tennis tournament; a gram played in another.

The bar was pretty crowded, and with men and women, whereas in the burra clubs the sexes were separated for drinking purposes. Sermon had taken his latest victim over to a corner table, where a bearer was serving them pegs, but I was looking at two middle-aged women sitting at the next-but-one table over. Before them on their table were some tasselled photograph albums, a stack of photographs, and a pot of paste. One of the two women I didn’t know. The other was Sonia Young, widow of John.

Reasoning that Charles Sermon would be talking shikar for at least the next hour, I first walked across to where Mrs Young sat. She recognised me immediately. In her extremely direct way, she introduced me to her companion as ‘probably the last man to see John alive, apart from whoever killed him’, causing her companion to shake my hand rather gingerly. As she spoke, she was pasting a photograph into the album: it showed a European couple looking silly as they engaged in what was probably an animal dance. The woman’s hair was all across her face, and the man’s tongue was sticking out. The picture had been taken at the Debating Society dance, and that went for all the photographs. I knew what Sonia Young was about. She was the custodian of the albums, and it was right they be stored at the Railway Institute, since an invitation to this particular dance was one of the highest social peaks an Anglo-Indian could achieve. The next photograph to go into the book showed William Askwith being congratulated by his wife after making his speech from the stage, and the one after showed Sonia Young herself. She was in the garden, the French windows were open behind her; she held a glass of something, and she was smiling, but of course she was alone, and this must have been one of the few pictures in all the collected albums showing a sole individual rather than a couple. Mrs Young’s companion was studying the photograph.

‘You look absolutely lovely, my dear,’ said Sonia Young’s companion, as if that might make up for her being alone.

Eyeing me, Sonia Young said, ‘The main thing is that I look thin,’ and of course, I gave that remark the go-by, but she was now leaning towards me. ‘Don’t you think I look thin?’ she demanded.

‘You look very elegant.’

‘Thin!’ she said, slapping the table and laughing. She wore a single gold bangle on her wrist. An Indian woman would have worn several bangles, a European woman none at all.

‘Is your son about?’ I asked.

‘He is right there,’ she said, pointing through the crowd towards the bar, where Anthony Young was nursing a drink and looking like trouble. He eyed me. ‘What a charming expression,’ said Mrs Young, ‘but you needn’t worry about him coming over. He won’t have anything to do with me when I’m on this job.’