Far Pavilions (38 page)

‘And I gather he's rich as well.’

Belinda missed the sarcasm and accepting the comment at its face value said happily: ‘Yes, he is. He's given me such lovely presents. Look.’

She held out her left hand in unaffected pleasure and Ash saw with a pang that it was adorned with a band of enormous diamonds, any one of which was at least twice the size of the pearls in that pretty but unpretentious ring that he had bought for her in Delhi over a year and a half ago. It seemed much longer than that; five years at least. Too long for Belinda, who was going to marry a man old enough to be her father. A fat, rich, successful widower who could give her diamonds and make her Lady Podmore-Smyth – and present her with two ready-made step-children the same age as herself.

There appeared to be nothing left to say. The sight of those diamonds on Belinda's finger proved that all the arguments and pleas that he had meant to use would be a waste of time, and all he could do now was to wish her happiness and go. It was strange to think that he had planned to spend his whole life with her and that now he was probably seeing her for the last time. Outwardly she was as pink and white and pretty as ever, yet it was obvious that he had really never known what went on inside that golden head, but had fallen in love with someone who had existed largely in his imagination.

He said slowly: ‘I suppose I've been doing it too. Inventing stories to suit myself and make me feel more comfortable, just like George did.’

Belinda stiffened, and once again, and shockingly, her face was scarlet with anger and her voice high-pitched and shrewish: ‘Don't you speak to me about George. He's nothing but a low-bred, lying hypocrite. All those stories about a Greek grandmother -’

Something in Ash's face checked her and she broke off and gave a shrill laugh that was as ugly as her voice: ‘Oh, I forgot you wouldn't know about that. Well, I'll tell you. She was no more Greek than I am. She was a bazaar woman and if he thinks I'm going to keep my mouth shut, he's mistaken.’

Ash said haltingly, through stiff lips: ‘You can't. You don't mean it… You couldn't…’

Belinda laughed again, her eyes bright with anger and malice. ‘Oh, yes I could. And I have, too. Do you think I'm going to sit and wait until someone else finds out and starts telling everyone, and people begin laughing at me and Mama behind our backs, and sympathizing with us for being taken in? I'd rather die! I shall tell them myself; I shall tell them that I always suspected it and that I trapped him into admitting it, and -’

Her voice was shaking with resentment and wounded vanity, and Ash could only stare at her, appalled, while her pretty pink mouth went on and on manufacturing malice and pouring out spite as though she could not stop herself. Had he been older and wiser, and less badly hurt himself, he might have recognized it for what it was: a tantrum thrown by a spoilt child who has been courted and flattered and over-indulged to a point where good sense and youthful high-spirits have turned to conceit and vanity, and any opposition – any fancied slight – is magnified into an unforgivable injury.

Belinda was young and not very wise. She had been foolish enough to accept the compliments of her beaux at their face value, and after a heady year as a reigning belle had come to expect adulation, approval and envy as her due. She had, in fact, become insufferably set up in her own esteem, and having flaunted the handsome George as one of her conquests, she could not endure the thought of what several jealous young ladies would have to say when they discovered how she had been hoodwinked. How
dare
George lie to her and make a fool of her? – that, in effect, was her instinctive reaction to Mrs Gidney's disclosures. The pathos of George's lies and posturing, the personal tragedy that underlay it and the humiliation that he must now be suffering were aspects of the affair that she had not even thought of, for in the shock of discovery she could only think of how it might affect Miss Belinda Harlowe.

Ash was the first person apart from her Mama and George himself to whom she had been able to unburden herself of all the pent-up forces of resentment and wounded vanity that had been accumulating within her ever since she learned of George's duplicity, and she found it a great relief. But to Ash, listening to the angry spate of words, it was the final betrayal: the collapse of all that he had believed her to be – sweet, kind, innocent and good. The owner of this shrewish voice was none of those things. She was a worldly and grasping woman who was prepared to marry an old, fat man for the sake of money and position. A heartless snob who could judge a man and condemn him for the sins of his grandparents, and an evil-tongued virago who was not above ruining a man's reputation in order to save a few scratches on her own.

He had not spoken or made any attempt to interrupt the tirade, but his disgust must have shown plainly on his face, for Belinda's voice rose suddenly and her hand darted out with the swiftness of a cat's paw to slap his cheek with a violence that jerked his head back and made her palm tingle.

The action took them both by surprise, and for a frozen moment they stared at each other in mutual horror, too startled to speak. Then Ash said grandly: ‘Thank you,’ and Belinda burst into tears and whirling round, ran to the door, which was, of course, locked.

It was at this juncture that the crunch of wheels on gravel announced the inopportune return of Major and Mrs Harlowe, and the next ten minutes had been, to say the least of it, confused. By the time Ash had been able to get the key out of his pocket and unlock the door, Belinda was in hysterics, and her startled parents were greeted by the sight of a sobbing, screaming daughter bursting out of the drawing-room to rush wildly across the hall and into her bedroom, slamming the door behind her with a bang that reverberated through the bungalow.

Major Harlowe had been the first to recover himself, and what he had had to say on the subject of Ash's manners and general disposition had made unpleasant hearing. Mrs Harlowe had contributed nothing to the interview, having hurried away to comfort her afflicted daughter, and her husband's trenchant summing-up of Ash's character had been conducted against a background of muffled wails and agitated maternal appeals to know what that ‘horrid boy’ had been doing.

‘I intend to take this up with your Commanding Officer,’ announced Major Harlowe in conclusion, ‘and I am warning you that if I ever catch you so much as attempting to speak to my daughter again, I shall take great pleasure in giving you the thrashing you so richly deserve. Now get out.’

He had given Ash no opportunity to speak, and even if he had done so there was very little to be said that would not have exacerbated the situation still further; apart from an abject apology, which might possibly have been accepted, though it would not have changed anything. But Ash had no intention of apologizing. The boot, he considered, should be on the other foot, and he had confirmed the Major's opinion of him by looking that irate gentleman up and down in a manner that could hardly have been bettered by his Uncle Matthew, and leaving without so much as a word of explanation or regret.

‘Insufferable young puppy,’ fumed the Major, justifiably incensed; and he retired to his study to compose a forceful letter to the Commandant of the Corps of Guides, while Ash rode back to Mardan with his mind in a turmoil of anger and disgust and sheer, concentrated bitterness.

It was not Belinda's engagement that stuck in his throat. He could have found excuses for that: the Victorian age approved the marriage of young girls to much older men, and it was no uncommon thing for a girl of sixteen or seventeen to marry a man of forty. Mr Podmore-Smyth, whatever his physical disadvantages, was rich, respected and successful, and Belinda had probably been flattered by his attentions and ended by mistaking her admiration for his qualities as something much warmer, and persuading herself that it was love. She was, after all, young and impressionable, and she had always been impulsive. Ash might have forgiven her engagement, but he could neither excuse nor condone her behaviour in the matter of George.

George had undoubtedly told a lot of silly lies, but the revenge Belinda was taking on him was cruelly unjust, for it was not as though he had intended to marry her under false pretences. He knew very well that neither she nor her parents would ever have seriously considered him as a possible husband, and the most he had hoped to do was to make himself more interesting in her eyes and be accepted as an equal by the narrow, insular society of the cantonment. Yet now she was planning to expose him as a liar and a half-caste to that same society, knowing full well that although they might forgive the first, they would neither forgive nor forget the second. George would be ruined socially, for Anglo-India was intensely parochial and the story would follow him up and down the country. Wherever he went there would always be someone who knew it, or had heard it from someone else, and the virtuous middle-class matrons would whisper behind their fans while their daughters snubbed him and their menfolk laughed – and blackballed him at their Clubs.

‘It's not fair!’ thought Ash passionately. What did it matter who a man's grandmother was? Or his father or mother, if it came to that? He wished now that he had swallowed his pride and his bile and put in a plea for George to Belinda's father. He ought to have spoken up and told that old puffing-billy what his daughter was up to, and that she must be stopped. Except that it was already too late for that, as according to her she had already told several people, and for all he knew, her father might agree with her. Her mother and that tattling woman Mrs Gidney obviously did, and so, presumably, would their friends and acquaintances, all of whom would sympathize with that conceited little bitch, Belinda, and turn on poor George like a pack of wolves. The ugliness and injustice of it stuck in Ash's throat and choked him, and he felt physically ill with disgust.

He had arrived back in Mardan in a black rage and blacker disillusionment. And a few day later Dilasah had absconded with the carbines, and five sowars of his clan, including Malik Shah and Lal Mast, had been stripped of their uniforms and expelled from the Regiment with orders to bring back the stolen carbines or never again show their faces in Mardan…

Ash had intended to demand an interview with the Commandant in order to protest against the action that had been taken. But he had been forestalled by the belated arrival of a letter from Major Harlowe, and had been sent for instead to explain himself. The dressing-down he had received from Belinda's father had been nothing to the one he received from his C.O., though most of it went over his head, for once again he was obsessed with an injustice. It was not
fair
that five men of Dilasah Khan's tribe, with impeccable records -men who had never even liked Dilasah, let alone helped him! – should be driven out of the Guides like criminals. He could barely wait for the Commandant to finish speaking before making his own protest; and the fact that he had obviously paid little attention to anything that had been said to him did nothing to improve his case, or the Commandant's temper.

‘If anyone is responsible, it's me,’ declared Ash with a fine disregard for grammar. ‘
I'm
the one who ought to be sacked or sent after Dilasah, because I knew there was something wrong somewhere, and I ought to have seen that he didn't get a chance to do anything like this. But Malik and the others had nothing whatever to do with it, and it's not fair that their faces should be blackened in this way. It's not their fault that he belongs to their tribe, and it's downright unjust that -’

He got no further. The Commandant told him in one brief, blistering sentence what others had previously told him at greater length but with less clarity, and dismissed him from the Presence. Ash took his troubles to Zarin, but once again received no encouragement from that quarter, for Zarin considered the Commandant's action to be a wise one. So too did Risaldar Awal Shah.

‘How else will he get our rifles back?’ demanded Awal Shah. ‘We of the whole Guide Corps have scoured the countryside and have not caught so much as a glimpse of Dilasah. But it may be that his own kin will be able to read his mind and follow his trail, and in two days, or three, they will return with the rifles. Thus their honour and ours will be saved.’

Zarin grunted in agreement, and Koda Dad, who happened to be paying a rare visit to his sons, not only sided with them but took Ash to task.

‘You talk like a Sahib,’ said Koda Dad crossly. ‘To prate of injustice in such a matter is foolishness. The Commandant-Sahib is wiser, for he is thinking not as an
Angrezi
but as a Pathan, while you – you who were once Ashok – are looking at this as though you had never been anything but Pelham-Sahib.
Chut
! how many times have I not told you that it is only children who cry “it is not fair” – children and Sahib-log? Now at last,’ added Koda Dad acidly, ‘I see that you are indeed a Sahib.’

Ash returned to his quarters sore and discomforted, and as angry as before. Yet even then he might have saved himself from folly if it had not been for George – for George and Belinda…

Walking into the mess that night, Ash met one of his fellow subalterns, newly returned from a visit to Headquarters in Peshawar.

‘Heard the news about that fellow Garforth?’ inquired Cooke-Collis.

‘No. And I don't want to, thanks all the same,’ retorted Ash rudely. He had not expected the story to spread quite so quickly, and the thought of having to listen to some second-hand or third-hand version of it sickened him.

‘Why, didn't you like him?’

Ash ignored the question, and turning his back, hailed a
khidmatgar
and ordered himself a double brandy. But Cooke-Collis was not so easily put off: ‘Think I'll have one too.
Hamare waste bhi
,
*
Iman Din. I need it, by jove. Nasty business at any time, but when it's someone you know, it's a bit of a shock, even if you didn't know them very well, and I didn't really; though I'd met him at several dinner-parties and dances and all that sort of thing, because he got asked all over the place. Very popular with the ladies, even though he was only a junior boxwallah. Not that I've anything against boxwallahs, you know; daresay they're a very pleasant lot. But Garforth was the only one you seemed to meet almost everywhere, and I won't deny that it was a nasty shock to hear that he -’