Zemindar (11 page)

‘You can hardly consider that portrait flattering, Laura. As Emily has said, my brother is far from handsome.’

‘And I should say he is too conceited to want to be thought otherwise. If my guess is right, he would sooner be considered dominant and self-confident than handsome, and in that case the artist very likely played up the qualities his sitter fancies in himself. Flattery can take many forms.’

‘Well,’ and Charles smiled, ‘I can see that you are not to be influenced, and perhaps we shall soon have an opportunity to find out which of us is right.’

‘But is it not curious how little similarity there is between the two of you? Neither in colouring nor in feature is there anything to suggest a relationship between you.’

‘Perhaps, when we get to know each other, some affinities of character, at least, will become apparent.’

As we turned away, Emily took a last look and declared, ‘Well, no one will make me think much of his looks, and what is more I am sure I shall be afraid of him.’

Mr Roberts laughed, and turning to me said that that was the best joke of the day. The others had walked on, so I was left to ask him what he meant.

‘It must be a most misleading portrait after all, Miss Hewitt. No wonder Erskine parted with it,’ and he laughed again. ‘You see, in our little party the ladies and gentlemen have reversed the usual pattern of opinion regarding Mr Erskine. Mr Flood and I have found that we can like and admire him, while you and Mrs Flood have both expressed a marked antipathy. But from all I have heard—and it is of course mere hearsay—it is the men who commonly criticize Mr Erskine, while the ladies find him quite irresistible!’

Well, I thought to myself, there is no accounting for tastes, but I knew that I would have no difficulty at all in resisting Mr Erskine.

We were now more than halfway through the month of September. Abruptly the daily monsoon downpours ceased and the ‘rains’ (as the locals termed the annual three-month deluge) had ended for the year. The heat and the humidity both abated, and we began to turn our thoughts to plans for our journey upcountry. Captain and Mrs Avery, with whom we were to stay while in Lucknow, would have to be informed of the date of our arrival. Emily had received no less than three letters from Wallace Avery, communicating his pleasure at entertaining his wife’s relatives in his ‘humble’ home.

But still no word arrived from Mr Oliver Erskine. ‘Well, we shall just have to plan without taking him into account,’ Charles said firmly, though I knew that he would hardly dare to face his mother if he had to return home without visiting his brother. There had been several letters from her, too, but none of them mentioned any communication from her elder son, though each one exhorted Charles to make every effort to meet him.

Charles reckoned that he would have the ‘hang’ of methods of business in Calcutta by the middle of October. So, tentatively, we planned to leave Calcutta then, spend the intervening weeks until Christmas with the Averys in Lucknow and then, in the cool, clear month of January, make our way to Delhi where further introductions from Hewitt, Flood & Hewitt awaited us—though these were merely social, no business being conducted by the firm in the old Mogul capital. In March we would take the overland route home and be back in England by the end of April, just a year after we left it. However, if Oliver Erskine did extend an invitation, our itinerary would have to change. Everything would be delayed, and as the overland route in the middle of the hot weather was said to be very trying, we might then spend a few months in one of the hill stations, delaying our departure until September. Privately, and though I was almost sure I would dislike having much to do with Mr Erskine (his ill-manners in regard to his brother only buttressed the opinion I had formed on seeing his portrait), I very much hoped that our time in India would be extended. I wished to see as much as possible, and not least the great Himalaya mountains. Fortunately I knew that at the back of Charles’s mind was the intention of making any visit to Hassanganj as long as possible, for he was not unaffected by his mother’s hope of his inheriting the Erskine properties, though he would never admit it.

Emily took very little part in our discussions and planning. She seemed to have lost interest in everything; where once it had seemed that she found her chiefest joy in contradicting me and thwarting Charles, now she acted as though she had no part in any of our plans. She adopted Mrs Chalmers’s habit of remaining in a muslin wrapper until midday, retired again to her room immediately after
tiffin
, and only at night, particularly when we were to be in company with some of her young admirers, did she display any sort of animation. And then she displayed too much, flirting with all comers, and pointedly ignoring her husband, who, instead of remonstrating with her on her behaviour, seemed relieved to be free of her presence. I did not like this turn of events, but there was nothing I could do, and neither of the young people ever mentioned their discontent with each other to me.

At the beginning of October Emily finally attained her dearest objective: an invitation to Government House. She and Charles attended a small but very grand ball, were presented to Lord Canning, the Governor General, hobnobbed with other titled heads and important personages and were for once in agreement in being very well satisfied with their evening of grandeur. The following morning they left the required cards of appreciation in person and, that done, there was nothing else in Calcutta to turn our minds from our forthcoming journey to Lucknow.

I like change, I like travel; and nothing lifts my spirits sooner than the prospect of new places to be seen and new people to be met. So it was with great anticipation that I set out on the next stage of our journey.

India’s first stretch of railway line had recently been opened from Calcutta, and we were accompanied to the railway station by a throng of friends and well-wishers, most of them, I fancy, more taken with the novelty of such a departure than any real concern for us; but in all it was a cheerful, noisy occasion unclouded by those griefs and regrets customary at partings. I would certainly miss Mr Roberts, of course, and was much touched by his presence on the station and by the large packet of books that he put into my hands by way of a farewell gift.

‘I hope very much that we will meet again, Miss Hewitt,’ he said, pressing my hand in farewell. ‘You have been like one of my own daughters to me, and I shall miss your company. But who knows? Perhaps I will see you again quite soon. I am usually in Lucknow sometime during the cold months, and now that Oudh is opening up perhaps I shall have more frequent opportunities of seeking out my friends.’

‘And don’t forget—you have been summoned to Hassanganj,’ I laughed, trying to withdraw my hand before Emily observed Mr Roberts’s tender clasp and sorrowful face.

‘Ah yes, but that entails a separate journey. However, I do hope you will manage to see the place. That’s the real India for you, Miss Hewitt. Now let me know if there is any way in which I can be of service. Please! You have my address?’

I said I had, and at last managed to withdraw my hand and climb the steps up to the carriage, but as I leant out of the window to wave, I wondered for a second whether Emily could possibly have been right regarding Mr Roberts. Standing there on the crowded platform, in his neat alpaca suit with his hat in his hand and his hand on his breast, he looked quite mournful as the train drew away.

Dust flooded in on us as we began to move, and by the end of the journey we were as black as coal miners, our eyes red with hot cinders and our hair gritty with ash. However, all our friends had contributed something towards our comfort, and the carriage was so full of fruit, boxes of sweets, bottled chickens and tinned tongues that there was scarcely room for us, and I was ungrateful enough to wonder what was to be done with all this provender when we had to transfer to
dak-gharis
at the end of the brief stretch of line. A zinc bathtub, packed with ice and sawdust and containing bottled soda water and half a dozen bottles of moselle, was a wonderful help in allaying our discomfort and in passing the time.

My recollections of the rest of the journey, when we debouched from the train and took to the road, are not pleasant. Over a week we spent jolting over rutted, unpaved roads, in a sort of wooden box on wheels, ill-sprung and fitted with hard seats specifically designed to leave no bone in the body unbruised. We travelled by night, resting, or trying to rest, by day, in a succession of dingy
dak
-bungalows, eating badly cooked food in dirty rooms crawling with insects and loud with the hum of mosquitoes, sleeping on hard beds under tattered netting, and waking, unrested, to another long night of dust, heat and fatigue. Often we were delayed because we could get no change of horses; the Eurasian in charge of the
dak
would explain volubly that military men and the servants of the Company had priority on the half-starved, broken-winded beasts available. It was not until the third day’s travelling that we discovered that a judicious bribe could be counted on to transfer the priority to ourselves. Thereafter we got along more quickly, if no more comfortably, while Emily bewailed our lack of official status and the fact that we had no travelling carriage of our own, and Charles inveighed against the prevailing corruption of the populace.

Our Calcutta servants accompanied us in another
ghari
—the two
ayahs
, Charles’s bearer and a water-carrier who, as soon as we halted in the compound of a
dak
-bungalow for the day, set about heating water for our baths, while the bearer made up beds with our own linen and the
ayahs
washed and pressed our clothes.

Just a few months before I would have considered so many attendants unnecessary, but then I had not known the impossibility of getting an Indian servant to perform anything but his own explicit and restricted duties, nor had I seen the veritable retinues of factotums that accompanied ‘old India hands’ on even the briefest of peregrinations. And having sampled the
dak-
bungalow food, we soon regretted turning down Mrs Chalmers’s suggestion that we should bring along our own cook as well.

But eventually the journey came to an end, and we found ourselves approaching Lucknow very early on a cool, fresh morning. There had been a shower of rain during the night, so the air was clear and the pale sky luminous in the rays of the rising sun as we drove through country that, though not heavily cultivated, bore every mark of fertility. I was impressed especially by the magnificence of the trees: grand groves of ancient mangoes whose dark foliage shone in the soft light, massive peepuls and long avenues of towering jarmins or feathery sheeshums broke up the stretching plain most pleasingly, lending the whole scene a parklike aspect. Early as it was, the villagers were already astir. Bullock carts, their drivers muffled in cotton sheets, lumbered along rough tracks leading off the road; wells, worked by yoked oxen ambling eternally in a small circle, had begun to creak, and men and women padded silently to their work in the fields, accompanied by long, pale, early-morning shadows.

In a state of high excitement at having reached our destination, we hung out of the windows exclaiming at all we saw when, all at once, a stronger ray of light glinted on a gilded spire as we topped an incline, and there below us lay the domes, the towers and minarets of the city, seeming from that distance and in that clear yet quiet light like a vision of the Arabian Nights.

We knew that the city of Lucknow was more than thirty miles in circumference; that it contained a million and a half souls; that it was said to combine the qualities of Paris, London and Constantinople. But not all these statistical statements had prepared us for the sheer extent of the place. We seemed to be advancing towards an ocean of rooftops, but had only time to exclaim when the view was once again concealed by the contours of the country, and we were forced to master our impatience for a nearer acquaintance.

Within the hour we were driving through the tree-lined roads of the suburb devoted to the Army’s quarters—the Mariaon Cantonment. On either side of the road neat European bungalows, very similar to each other with their deep pillared verandahs, stood in large gardens well provided with flowers and blossoming shrubs. Ladies and gentlemen were out for their morning rides; children walked hand-in-hand with their
ayahs,
followed by liveried
chaprassis
; dog-boys exercised their wellfed charges, and everything proclaimed security and comfortable familiarity to such an extent that I could not help thinking that Mr Chalmers had probably been right in considering Mr Roberts an alarmist.

Wallace Avery was a Captain in the 13th Native Infantry, a Company as opposed to a Queen’s regiment. His wife Connie was the daughter of Mrs Hewitt’s sister, and therefore first cousin to Emily, but no relation of mine. I had never met them and Emily herself remembered them only dimly from a long-ago leave when she was a small girl.

Wallace was a short, corpulent man in his forties, with a balding head, a very red face, prominent eyes and a loud voice. Nothing could have been more cordial than his welcome of our party as we alighted, dusty and travel-stained, on the gravel sweep before his bungalow, while a horde of servants and coolies swarmed over the
gharis
to unload our boxes, all yelling as though some alarming crisis had overtaken them, while dogs barked, a parrot on the verandah squawked and somewhere a child cried to add to the hubbub.

He kissed Emily enthusiastically, slapped Charles on the back, wrung my hand so that it hurt, and at the same time gave orders to the servants, roared imprecations at the
ghari
drivers who couldn’t control their horses in the confusion, and called for his wife to come and greet us.

‘Good to see you. Very good. Not a bad journey, eh? How was the railway train? No, damn you!’ (to a coolie) ‘Take it down by the straps, not the handle. Can’t trust these blighters to use their heads even in a simple matter like handling a trunk. Now—you’re tired, I’m sure, but bear up, we’ll have you all snug in no time. Ours is a humble home—not like Mount Bellew, ha! ha!—but you are very welcome, very welcome. Connie! Confound the woman! What is keeping her? Always late, Connie. Her only fault. Come in, come in! Co-o-n-nie!’