Night Train to Jamalpur(95)

‘What year?’ I asked, as she passed over the album.

‘Nineteen-eighteen,’ said Mrs Young, as a hand came over my shoulder, grabbed my tie, and pulled me backwards off my chair. Anthony Young was speaking calmly as he continued trying to strangle me on the floor of the bar. ‘You get out of here, man. You talk to my dad, and the next thing we know he’s bloody dead. Now you’re up to some new funny business with mater, you bloody—’

It was Charles Sermon, with the assistance of a couple of others, who pulled him off me. The others took the lad away, with his mother following and shouting choice insults at him. Sermon, breathing hard and looking me up and down as I readjusted my clothes, said, ‘No real harm done. Our young friend is being escorted from the premises, as they say. Now do you fancy a spot, old man? Out on the terrace, I mean?’


II

I sat on the terrace with Charles Sermon. The mali was near the low garden gate, dead-heading flowers with a pair of scissors. Beyond him, the cloud from the jute mill was conspiring with the sunset to make the whole of the railway lands orange. We had thought we were in for a display of shunting, but the tank engine in question, which had been manoeuvring promisingly some quarter of a mile off, had now stopped, remaining thoughtfully smoking in front of a rake of carriages. Sermon too was smoking, which he ought not to do since it made him wheeze. We had started with a few words about Anthony Young. Sermon was sure he could be the right sort of lad if taken in hand. He was thinking of writing to a couple of the railway colleges on the boy’s behalf. I had then asked him about the rebellion among the senior officers in 1919.

‘Oh yes,’ he said with a chuckle. ‘The supervising staff were all up in arms.’

‘So you yourself had no part in it?’

He shook his head.

‘But you were back with the Company by then – after your war service, I mean?’

‘That’s right, I came from France in late ’seventeen. The whole affair was put to rights pretty quickly. The petitioners came to terms with the Board. Pay grades and pension entitlements were redrawn in favour of the ex-army chaps, and a ten per cent war bonus was paid on top. I did pretty well out of that, I don’t mind saying. You can read all about it in the Company magazine for the following year, 1920. Of course, they glossed over the original grievance, but they went to town on the story of the amicable settlement.’

He wondered why I had asked about it, and, watching him carefully, I had told him of the coincidence of dates with the first outbreak of snake attacks.

He coughed on his cigarette. ‘You’ve found a thread to follow, have you? I mean, you think it might all arise from the grievance of a top-grade man?’

I said I didn’t know.

‘Well, as many crimes are committed high as low,’ Sermon said, and it did occur to me that, as a man who spent half his life among the Anglo-Indians, he might not be a natural defender of the top men, even if they were British like himself.

I asked him about his coming retirement to the charming – I thought – seaside town of Scarborough. I was determined that he would like Scarborough, but he did not seem overly enthused at my mention of the funicular railway, which cost only tuppence for an all-day ticket, or the delicious Italian ices to be had at Giordano’s Parlour on the front. I had thought, in view of the white chrysanthemum, that he would be galvanised by my description of the Esplanade Gardens, but he merely said, ‘I suppose the air will do me good.’

I said, ‘You’ll be taking back a cabin-trunk full of memories.’

I was thinking of tiger skins and other souvenirs of his shikari years, but he said, ‘Oh, I might just take that trunk full of memories, and pitch it into the sea.’

‘A new start, then,’ I said, and he didn’t seem too sure about that either. He signalled to a passing bearer to bring drinks: watered whisky for himself, a lemonade for me.

I thought we’d better get off Scarborough. It was the one thing he wouldn’t hold forth on. He asked if I’d been in touch with Professor Hedley Fleming. I said I had been, and I told him a little of what Fleming had said. The drinks came. Still watching Sermon carefully, I told him of my late encounter with the snake men of the Howrah railway lands, and of my proposed encounter with their infamous uncle. Sermon seemed excited by this; it set him breathing fast. I supposed this was just the sort of yarn that you wouldn’t hear on the Scarborough Esplanade, and I believed he was almost on the point of asking to come along.

The mali came up, salaaming to us on his way into the Insty. He carried flowers, no doubt to make a display in there. He paused by Sermon’s chair, and they exchanged a few words, and laughed.