The Ravi Lancers (28 page)

The engine whistled and chuffed off westward. A minute later, snug under a carriage rug beside Diana Bateman on the driver’s seat of the trap, Krishna rolled out towards Shrewford Pennel.

The snow had stopped somewhere in mid-channel, yesterday. In the setting sun, under scattered clouds, the cliffs of England had glowed gold like the battlements of the city of God. The land lay under a blanket of pure white, so bright that it hurt the eyes to look at it for long. Here, now, the hedges along the roadside were hung with white bands and wreaths of snow, and red berries gleamed in the white-draped holly trees. Smoke curled up from cottages nestled low in the snow. Rooks wheeled against the blue sky above the etched fingers of the elms. A group of boys outside a farm cottage were gathering snow and throwing snowballs after two girls. The girls ran away down the lane, their faces bright and laughing. Dogs barked and ran in a field, and by the Old Vicarage a dozen young people were riding toboggans down the slope below the churchyard wall. An old man, passing with a saw over his shoulder, touched his cap with a smile and a cheerful, ‘Afternoon, miss! ‘

Krishna sighed in tired contentment. This was England, seen in winter as he had imagined it from reading Dickens and from Mr. Fleming’s descriptions. He felt better every moment. There could be nothing seriously wrong with a country, a people, so warm, so sensible, so stable. The trap turned into the driveway of the Old Vicarage, the horses’ hoofs silent in the snow, and drew up in front of the door. Old Mrs. Bateman, Warren’s mother, came out and Krishna stepped down carefully, aware of the weakness in his legs.

‘Come in, Krishna,’ she said. She looked at him. ‘Take him straight to his room, Diana.’

He felt a hand under his arm. ‘Here, lean on me. There now.’ Five minutes later he was undressed and asleep.

When he awoke and peered at his watch he saw it was four o’clock. He had slept nearly five hours, but he felt more than refreshed, as though the blasting, the paralysis, the exhaustion and horror of the Battle of Hill 73 were parts of a dream long gone. He dressed and went downstairs to find the family gathered in the drawing room eating buttered crumpets. Warren’s wife, Joan, greeted him pleasantly. She was wearing a bright red blouse of what looked like sandbag material, and a sheepskin skirt not half way down her calf. The children, stuffing their mouths with crumpets and dripping butter on to the carpet, also wore sheepskin trousers, both the boy and the girl. Outside, the daylight had faded, and a lamp in the window of a cottage across the valley glowed like a big star. Ralph Harris stood by the fire, his gaze turned inward, his eyes unfocused.

Diana examined Krishna critically. ‘You look much better now. Quite different. But I don’t think ...’ She looked at her sister-in-law.

‘Oh, ask him,’ Joan Bateman said impatiently. ‘I will lend him a sheepskin coat and he will come to no harm.’

Krishna looked inquiringly at Diana, his tea cup poised, a crumpet in the other hand. She said, ‘We’re going carol singing this evening--a little group we call the Pennel Carollers--and I was going to invite you to come along with us. It’s awfully good fun, really. But when I saw how tired you were ...’

Joan Bateman interrupted, ‘You go, Krishna. But you’ll wear a skin coat, of course.’

‘Er, yes, of course,’ Krishna said cautiously. Joan was lying on her stomach on the floor with the children now, seemingly oblivious of the fact that her skirt had ridden above her knees, exposing the backs of her thighs. He averted his eyes and gazed at her face, turned towards him.

‘You know what the Swami Draupananda writes?’ Joan said. ‘About the skins of the innocent filtering out evil? Sheep are innocent, aren’t they?’

‘Er, yes, I think so.’

‘Come on, then,’ Diana said breezily, ‘put on extra thick socks, and the sheepskin coat.’

‘I bought it for Warren,’ Joan said, ‘but he didn’t want it. I’ll go and get it.’ She rose from her ungainly position with a grace Krishna would not have believed possible and floated out of the room.

Old Mrs. Bateman said, ‘Swami Draupananda is Joan’s latest find. I suppose he’s very famous in India?’

Krishna said, ‘I’m afraid I have never heard of him.’ He caught Diana’s eye and they both suddenly smiled. Diana said, ‘The waistcoat won’t do you any
harm
at least ... but, oh dear, I’d like to smack those children sometimes. But Mother’s the only one who can do that ... Now wrap up well, because it’s cold as long as we’re outside.’

Half an hour later Krishna stood at one end of a little half moon of bundled-up carol singers outside the doctor’s house at the other end of Shrewford Pennel, Diana next to him. A lamp by the front door over the doctor’s night bell turned the falling snow into golden spears. They started with
Good King Wenceslas
, because, as he had apologetically explained to Diana, that and
A Partridge in a Pear Tree
were the only carols he knew, both taught him by Mr. Fleming. ‘The “Partridge” carol was the favourite of Mr. Fuller, when he used to come out with the Pennel Carollers,’ Diana said.

Krishna remembered the name and said, ‘Didn’t he play cricket, too?’

‘Yes, but in the past few years he’s become a, what do you call it, recluse, hermit. He’s supposed to have done something ... I don’t know what.’

Krishna remembered more then--that this Mr. Fuller was suspected of having the same sexual tastes as Captain Sher Singh. But here the perversion was not spoken of, and Diana Bateman obviously had no idea what Mr. Fuller was accused of. And if he told her, she would be no wiser. That was a sort of innocence. Every Indian woman of her age, or of many years younger, would know, however virtuous she was. Here it was hard to separate virtue, or innocence, from ignorance.

On the feast of Stephen,
When the snow lay round about,
Deep and crisp and even ...

The doctor came out with his wife and when they had finished singing invited them in for a glass of ginger wine. The wine was sweet and peppery on the tongue and Krishna loved it. He smiled warmly at Diana, glass in hand. She said, ‘You sing very well.’

‘Only those two songs.’

‘We’ll have to sing others later. You can just hum.’

From the doctor’s they went to a farm under the rise of the Plain, and more ginger wine. From there to Pennel House, and sad Sir Tristram and his big stern Lady and on the grand piano the picture of the boy killed with the Coldstream Guards, in his full dress, and this time ginger wine for the ladies and for the men a whisky-mac--the same with a large tot of whisky poured into the wine glass on top of the ginger wine.

Lady Pennel swept up to Krishna where he was drinking at Diana’s side and said, ‘It is nice to see our gallant Indian fellow subjects fighting at our side for their Emperor ... and our king.’

‘Yes, Lady Pennel,’ Krishna muttered. He thought, she’s like an image of a goddess such as we carry in procession in Basohli--five times life size.

‘Civilization is at stake. No sacrifice is too great. I think you know we have already given our only son, and the heir to the tide.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Krishna mumbled.

Lady Pennel turned on Diana. ‘I hear your mother still has Young Marsh working for her, Diana.’

‘Yes. Two or three hours a day.’

‘If no one would employ that young man, he’d be forced to do his duty, and volunteer for the army,’ Lady Pennel said. ‘His poor father is dying of shame.’

‘He says he thinks war is immoral,’ Diana said.

‘He’s a slacker,’ Lady Pennel said sharply, ‘or a coward. I don’t know which is worse. And, of course, it’s Ralph Harris who puts these ridiculous ideas into his head. There’s another young man who ought to be in the trenches. I’m surprised your mother doesn’t make him go.’

‘No one can make Ralph do what he doesn’t want to,’ Diana said with a touch of weariness.

‘I heard your mother had got him a position in Manchester.’

‘He didn’t want to accept it.’

‘A very difficult young man,’ Lady Pennel said, majestically. ‘I understand, of course, but... Give your mother my regards, please.’ She sailed away, nodding, and a few minutes later they were out in the snow again. ‘Only one more house and then we finish back at the Old Vicarage,’ Diana said.

The new snow lay two inches deep on top of the old now. The clouds were low but not thick and a silver moonlight diffused through them so that everything was clear but without depth, for there were no shadows. Snow mantled the singers’ shoulders and lay in white coronets on top of caps and bonnets. They walked together down the lane, a dozen talking, all but he and Diana in the broad soft slur of the Wiltshire dialect, back past the crested gates at the entry to the Pennel House drive, and the gatehouse where Old Marsh lived, now doubling as gatekeeper and gamekeeper, too. because a younger man had volunteered for the Navy.

Outside the Old Vicarage, as soon as they began to sing, the curtains were pulled back in the drawing room and they looked in, singing to the two children standing on the window seat, dressed in pyjamas and quilted dressing gowns, with their grandmother standing behind them, an arm round each slight shoulder, and Joan by the fire, a book in her hands, and Ralph Harris beside her, looking not at the carollers but at her.

It’s beautiful, Krishna said to himself. He glanced at Diana as he sang, and she turned to look at him at the same time, and again, as once before but for a different reason, his heart missed a beat. If she had been an Indian, perhaps even a Frenchwoman, it would have been impossible to doubt that she was offering him herself, her body. But with Diana it was impossible to doubt just the opposite. That look was a direct communication, undistorted by the fact that they were of different sexes, with all that that carried, for most, of threat and promise, danger and excitement.

Then she turned her head away, still singing, and soon they were inside, drinking more ginger wine. Diana was pouring whisky into his glass with a generous hand. ‘Warrie loves whisky-macs at Christmas time,’ she said.

Krishna Ram drank, and had another after the rest of the carol singers had gone, with a touching of forelocks from the men, and bobbed half-curtsies from the rose-cheeked women. The whisky and wine ran warm through all his blood now, and when once or twice a memory of Hill 73 came to his mind, the whisky itself seemed to rush to the attack and drive it out. He was warm and well. Lines were softening, blurring. Diana was talking, and so was he, but what they talked about, he did not know. They served him food, but what it was, did not matter. More wine! There was a Christmas pudding covered with a brandy sauce, and holly stuck into it. Before that Mrs. Bateman asked him if he would like to carve the meat as he was the only gentleman present, but he begged to be excused. He knew nothing of carving meat. What sort of meat was it? Probably beef, for the English ate little else. What did it matter? And then, after dinner, trying to get up from a deep chair by the fire, and stumbling back into it ...

‘You’re still weak,’ Diana said. ‘You should go to bed, really, Krishna.’

Really, yes, he thought; and the whisky was helping as well as the fatigue. He said good nights and went slowly up the stairs, and in a moment, only half undressed, was asleep.

Krishna steadied the log with his left hand and with his right rhythmically worked the long cross-cut saw backwards and forwards. It was damp in the carriage house, for the doors were open, a cold rain was falling outside and visibility was down to a hundred yards. Water dripped from the trees on to the dirty remains of the snow, and the drive was a channel of mud between the pleached hedges. It was January 5, 1915, the last day of his convalescent leave. In truth he had felt fully recovered a couple of days before, with a corresponding sense of guilt that he had not returned at once to the regiment; but there was the doc’s direct order not to return before his full week was up, however he felt; and there was the quiet grace of life here; and there was Diana. For seven days he had shared her life--grooming the spaniel, exercising the horses, taking the trap to Devizes for the week’s shopping, a ten-mile drive each way across the downs, past mysterious white horses carved into the chalk--becoming visible again as the rain washed the snow off the slope. He had offered to help old Mrs. Bateman but there was no work for a man at this time of year, until now. Yesterday they’d bought a tree at the back of the Pennel estate, and Young Marsh had felled it, sawed it into pieces small enough for loading into the borrowed farm cart, and brought them to the Old Vicarage. Now the huge logs had to be sawed and then split into pieces that could be used in the kitchen range and the fireplaces in the drawing room and the bedrooms.

Ralph Harris was at the other end of the two-handed saw. He was stripped to his shirt sleeves, a pair of old corduroy trousers loose round his waist, the braces hanging down, inappropriately thin shoes heavily splashed with the greyish mud of the vale. They had been working for half an hour, saying almost nothing, but there was no sign of sweat on Ralph’s pale, narrow face, while Krishna was sweating heavily under his khaki shirt and tunic--but he was glad of it. In the trenches he had felt a lack of physical condition. A foot soldier’s life, digging, carrying, bending, was very different from that of a mounted lancer.

Ralph Harris said, ‘So you’re going back to France tomorrow.’

Krishna said, ‘I’m afraid so. I shall be sorry to go ... I could live here forever.’

‘Yes,’ the other said. ‘It’s a good life for people with money, and class. It’s different for the others ... the ordinary people.’

Krishna did not speak, not knowing quite what Harris meant. Harris continued, ‘The rich have the poor by the short hairs here, but most of them are too stupid to realize it. Except people like Young Marsh, who are willing to see what’s really quite obvious.’

Krishna said, ‘I don’t see anything bad here. Nothing like it is in India at any rate, even in my grandfather’s state. Or in Germany and Poland and Russia, from what I have read.’

‘You wouldn’t know ... because you can’t see, I suppose ... George Jenkins and his wife were kicked out of their cottage last week, just before Christmas, because he wouldn’t work any more for one of the Pennel tenants--Isaiah Tate at Hill Farm. Tate was paying George only fifteen shillings a week, though George is a good and experienced man. He asked for more, so Tate kicked him out. George went to Pennel House to tell Pennel he had nowhere else to go, but Pennel said he had to get out. It was a tied cottage.’