Zemindar (58 page)

Due to the long delay in the peepul grove, we made bad progress that night and, instead of halting at sunrise, pressed on our way until mid-morning. Then we turned off the track in the middle of an unprepossessing waste of barren land, and continued until we found a tree under which the cart was halted and the bullocks unyoked and tethered to pasture. Taking his rifle, Oliver set off to look for shelter and, after an eternity in the sweltering heat, returned to say that he had discovered an abandoned hut that would afford us more adequate shelter from the sun. We ate the remainder of some food from the night before; then while Toddy stayed with the cart, Ishmial strode off to find a village and fresh provisions and the rest of us wearily made our way towards Oliver’s shelter.

The hut, a one-roomed edifice of mud and gaping thatch, had probably once been a shelter for cattle, or perhaps for the herdsmen, though there was nothing left to betoken human occupation. Compared to the scorching fields, however, it was cool and hid us effectively from prying eyes, an attribute we were grateful for when at about midday, a herd of cattle passed in the charge of three or four small boys and the inevitable collection of ring-tailed dogs. Hearing the dogs bark a little way off, I resigned myself to discovery within moments. They would surely scent us and investigate the hut. But the same thought had struck Oliver. He motioned us to stay hidden, then walked out of the hut rubbing his eyes as though he had just woken from sleep, and crouching in the gloom we overheard a long, laughing conversation take place between the boys and himself. He came back still grinning.

‘They think they have come across the most stupid Pathan horse thief south of the Khyber,’ he chuckled. ‘I asked them the way to a fictitious village, saying I had lost myself in the darkness and my horse had bolted. Never having heard of the village, they told me just how to find it; if we were to follow their directions, we’d probably find ourselves in Hyde Park. However, they are not suspicious—but we must be away from here before the herd returns to the village at sunset.’

Charles and Emily were soon asleep with the baby, fed and comfortable, lying on my cloak between them. But I could not sleep now, as I had not been able to sleep in the cart all night. I sat upright in a corner seeing sights, hearing voices, thinking thoughts which I felt would never allow me to sleep quietly again.

‘Don’t you find it stuffy in here?’ Oliver whispered after a time; I had thought he too was asleep but, glancing at him in the opposite corner, had found his eyes watching me. Perhaps he guessed something of what I was undergoing from my face. ‘Come outside for a while; we can sit in the shade of the hut and there will be a little more air anyway.’

I followed him out stealthily and we seated ourselves, native fashion, on the baked earth, with our backs against the wall of the hut. An arid vista of poor fields and dry waterways stretched around us, and in the distance the herd moved slowly along cropping the short brown grass as it went.

‘Poor devils! They can’t make much of a living on this soil.’ Oliver picked up a handful of dry earth and let it slide through his fingers. ‘Dust! Just dust!’

I had thrown aside the face-flap of the
burqha
and swung the heavy folds back over my shoulders in an effort to cool myself, but I was too nervous to discard the thing completely and Oliver did not suggest that I should. Since leaving Hassanganj, our ablutions had been sketchy, to say the least, and what with dust, tears and sweat, I must have looked a sorry sight indeed. I took out my bedraggled handkerchief, sitting there in the hot shade, and tried to clean myself up.

Oliver watched in interested silence, then took the handkerchief from me, spat on it, and rubbed my cheeks vigorously in spite of my protests.

‘Don’t fuss,’ he countered irritably when he had finished. ‘A bit of spit isn’t going to kill you at this stage.’

‘It might at least have been my own spit!’

‘True,’ he grinned. ‘Forgive my lack of gallantry in not thinking of it myself,’ and then, after a careful scrutiny, he added, ‘What a nice face you have—when it’s clean!’

‘Thank you,’ I said stiffly.

‘Not beautiful of course, and certainly not pretty. Not plain either.’

‘That leaves very little that it can be,’ I pointed out, piqued despite myself, for I have never quite learned not to covet beauty.

‘Quite the contrary; it leaves a great deal. It’s a face of intelligence, and … generosity. And, though I can’t see it at the moment, you have a most magnanimous brow. All good things. Indicative of character!’

‘Thank you,’ I repeated acidly. ‘I suppose I should be glad the bad qualities are not apparent at least.’

‘Not apparent at first sight, but there all the same. You have a sharp tongue, a quick temper, are as stubborn as a mule and much too prone to jump to conclusions. You also appear to have a hankering for martyrdom, which does not at all accord with the rest of your temperament as far as I have been able to judge it. I cannot understand it, but I do deplore it!’

He was thinking of Charles, and suddenly I realized very distinctly how wrong he was and what a foolish conclusion he had jumped to himself. The knowledge that I could mislead him, even unwittingly, filled me with an irrational gaiety and I found myself laughing.

‘That’s better,’ he said innocently, ‘I am glad to hear you laugh again, Laura.’ Then he leaned over and covered both my dirty hands with one of his. ‘I’d do anything in the world to blot out the memory of last night for you. I’d have given my right hand to prevent you from … seeing what you did.’

I was sober again immediately and drew away my hands in the pretence of shading my eyes from the sun.

‘You must try not to brood, Laura. It cannot do anyone any good now … neither the dead nor the living. What has happened has happened. Now it’s over.’

‘I know,’ I sighed. ‘And three fairly harmless lives are over too. I know you are right, but it is still so … recent. I cannot help thinking of it. The dreadful ugliness of it. And wondering whether they … whether they …’

‘Whether they suffered? But that’s just it … you must not let yourself wonder. We’ll never have the answer to that question and you only wound yourself by asking it. You must try to think of something else. Anything else!’

‘Surely one needs to be able to think of something pleasant. And have you considered lately how few pleasant things there are to think of now? The present is better met each slow minute as it comes. The past hardly bears thinking of with pleasure because all that we were … all that we had or hoped for … is gone past retrieving. We will never be again, any of us, what we were just a week ago. And the future? Don’t ask me to think of that! I am afraid of uncertainty. I am a prosaic and rather limited person, not much given to over-optimism or flights of fancy regarding my own hopes for the future. The truest satisfactions I have known in life have come from setting myself some goal and then working towards it, knowing I was secure enough of time, and health, and opportunity, to do so. What, besides survival, is there for anyone to work towards now?’

‘It won’t always be so …’

‘Perhaps not.’ I shook my head helplessly. ‘But none of us can know when or how it will all end. So you see … neither past, present nor future are going to supply the material for healing reveries for me. Have you any other suggestions?’

He was looking straight in front of him, legs stretched out, thumbs hooked into the armholes of his red velvet waistcoat.

‘Well, yes, perhaps I have. Would it take your mind off your unpleasant memories to know that I love you? That I am, as the novelists put it, “in love” with you?’

The earth halted in its gentle rotation for a full second. The sun spun in its own orbit with the haloed speed of a peg-top thrown by a skilful boy. In the total stillness, the blood drummed against my eardrums with the shattering force of summer thunder.

Then, being me, I released the cosmos to its immemorial patterns and realized that it was the declaration that surprised me much more than the fact.

‘Are you really?’ was all I could think of to say.

‘I am,’ he assured me, in so prosaic a voice that I could have been forgiven for doubting it.

‘But why now?’ I insisted.

‘Do you mean, why do I tell you now?’

‘Well—yes.’ But it was not what I had meant.

‘As I said, I hoped it might divert your mind from the happenings of last night.’

‘Yes. Thank you! You are kind … as Emily has always said.’

‘And that is all?’

‘No!’ I took in a deep breath of hot dusty air. ‘No, of course not. But I don’t know how seriously I am to take you?’

‘Most seriously. If you will.’

I sat in silence, not looking at him because I knew he had turned and was watching my face.

‘What … what makes you think you love me … now? Is it something that has just happened?’

‘No. A long time ago.’

‘A long time ago! And yet I never guessed …’

‘No? Though I gave you so many hints?’

‘Hints?’ My surprise was genuine.

‘So you did always miss them? Sometimes I wondered whether you were not just being coy. Yet I suppose I know why you missed them.’

‘I really don’t know what to say!’

‘You soon will. I’ve never known you tongue-tied,’ he chuckled. ‘And as you are so clinically interested in the why’s and the when’s, well, having met my brother and his wife, I felt no need to ask them to spend the winter in Hassanganj. Five minutes of their company was enough to tell me that a week or so, at most, would be as much as I could stand of them. Then I met you, if you remember, and by, I believe, our third encounter I decided I had to know you better. If I am correct, it was that eventful afternoon in Cussens’s bungalow that finally decided me. Since then … well … it has been one long slow slide into subjection. And a damned sight more pleasant than I ever imagined such a progress could be, too, despite sundry alarms which sometimes boded badly for my intentions!’

‘That afternoon … at Major Cussens’s bungalow? Oh come, Oliver! Now I know you are joking. When I made such a fool of myself?’

‘No, Laura, I am not joking. Indeed I love you. In fact, if you will forgive the superlative, I love you … well … desperately.’

I had kept my eyes away from him but now I turned and looked into his face. The expression I discovered in his strangely coloured eyes filled me with such confusion that I was forced to look away again.

‘Please don’t,’ I whispered. ‘You’re embarrassing me.’

‘Good! You cannot be quite indifferent, after all.’

No easy reply came to me, and coyness, whatever he thought, was never part of my character. For the expression on his face had toppled my precarious assurance and with it all the judgements I had made of this man who said he loved me. In his amber eyes I had seen an unequivocal honesty of emotion which nothing in my upbringing, my experience or my imagination had prepared me to encounter. I was afraid … and as much of my own feeling as of his. With him, I knew now, no reserve would be possible, no withholding, no comfortable subterfuges, no concealments for the sake of self-preservation. And what he was prepared to give, he would demand in return. I would be engulfed, annihilated, by the strength of his feeling, by the force of his idea of me.

But I was not sure that his idea of me coincided with my knowledge of myself. He would expect a quality from me which I was not certain I possessed.

‘I told you once that I had watched you more than you imagined. Do you remember? I could not tell you then of the interest … or the delight, with which I watched you, a delight that grew deeper with every day you passed in Hassanganj. I wanted, you see, to discover whether there was any chance you could be happy, feel at home, in the sort of life Hassanganj had to offer. Not many women could, I suppose … at least not many of the sort of women that I have met in India. After a while, and perhaps I only wished it so, but I began to believe that you liked the life, the old house, even the solitude. You were never at a loss for something to do. You never complained of the lack of company, or of the discomforts due to the isolation. And so I began to hope that perhaps, given time, I could prevail on you to share Hassanganj with me. And then … well, this damned trouble started. But I was not wrong, woman dear, was I? You could be happy in Hassanganj?’

‘Yes … yes. I enjoyed the life. I could be happy there.’

All at once I found my two hands enclosed in his.

‘With me?’

I looked down at the lean brown fingers clasping mine, and for a moment gave myself up to a vision of what life with Oliver Erskine might be—a vision of happy dependence. It would be pleasant, I allowed myself for a moment to think, to resign myself to a stronger will, to acquiesce to a profounder intelligence, to be directed by a wider experience. There would be great, and real, satisfaction to be found as wife to the
sirkar
of Hassanganj, and there was no doubt in my mind that, in time, that would again be Oliver’s position in life. There would be wealth, and the security that wealth can give and, on a less materialistic plane, opportunity to influence for the better the lives of the people among whom we lived. More particularly, I acknowledged that I enjoyed his company and conversation and respected his attainments. Oliver Erskine was a man on whom I could rely, to whom I could always turn, and who would not fail me. My own conduct in the last weeks had shown me how much I trusted him, for in all the alarms of the days past it had been he who had directed me, and to him that I had gone for help—not Charles. Lastly, I felt, despite Moti, that once he had given himself, he would be faithful in a way unguessed at by more moderate men.

As though he had divined something of my thinking, he spoke: ‘About Moti … well, that’s finished. Quite finished. You know the worst of me, Laura, all of it, I believe. Will you not give me a chance to show you the best?’

I dared not meet his eyes again, but I smiled. I already knew so much that was good in him. It would not take much learning to be happy with him. And yet …!

My mind returned to the enraptured period when I first knew Charles, the breathless ecstasy of those first few days when I had discovered my love for him and could live in the hope of it being returned. Those faraway few days before Emily returned from Bournemouth and all my hopes fell to ashes as her small bronze boot in the grass set the hammock swaying.