The Jewel In The Crown (The Raj quartet), Page 2

  At this stage she fell in love, not with the young assistant chaplain to the station who sometimes conducted the services at the local Protestant church (which would have been a possible match, indeed was one that in her good moods Mrs Nesbitt-Smith chaffed her about and smilingly pushed her towards) but hopelessly and secretly with a Lieutenant Orme who was as handsome as Apollo, as kind, gentle and gay with her as any hero in a romantic novel, as ignorant or unheeding of her regard as his good looks so well enabled him to be in a station remarkable that year for the number of pretty well-placed girls of whom he could have his pick: hopelessly in love, because she had no chance; secretly, because she found she did not blush or act awkwardly in his presence, and Mrs Nesbitt-Smith, even had she bothered to observe the reactions of her children’s governess to a man so splendidly equipped, in every sense, as Lieutenant Orme, would not have been able to tell that Miss Crane had longings in directions which were, by tradition, totally closed to her. That she neither blushed nor acted awkwardly puzzled Miss Crane. Her heart beat when he stood close by and perhaps there came a slight dryness into her mouth, but her feelings, she decided, must have been too intense, too adult, for her to act like the fluttering stupid girls who knew nothing of the world’s reality.

  When Lieutenant Orme was posted away, still uncommitted and with his usual glittering luck, as ADC to a general, to the frenzied disappointment of up to twenty pretty girls, as many plain ones and all their mothers, no one, Miss Crane believed, could have suspected the extent to which his departure darkened her own life. Only the children, her two most intimate human contacts, noticed that her manner changed. They gazed at her through those still remarkably blue but now older and calculating upper middle-class eyes and said, ‘What’s wrong, Miss Crane? Have you got a pain, Miss Crane?’ and danced round her singing, ‘Old Crane’s got a pain,’ so that she lost her temper, slapped them and sent them away screaming through shadow and sunlight to be comforted by the old ayah of whom, she knew, they had become fonder.

  Before the next hot weather began Major Nesbitt-Smith’s regiment was ordered home. ‘I and the children will be going on ahead,’ she overheard Mrs Nesbitt-Smith say to a friend, ‘and of course Crane will be coming with us.’ Speaking of her to others Mrs Nesbitt-Smith usually referred to her as Crane, but as Miss Crane to her face and the children, and, in rare moments of warmth and gratitude, as Edwina, as when for instance she lay in her darkened punkah-cooled room with Miss Crane kneeling by her bedside soothing with cologne one of her raging headaches.

  For many days after the news of the regiment’s impending return to England, Miss Crane went about her duties with no particular thoughts in her head because she had firmly put Lieutenant Orme out of them some time ago and nothing had come to take his place. ‘And he,’ she said to herself presently, ‘was a fancy, a mere illusion that never stood a chance of becoming real for me. Now that I’ve banished the illusion from my thoughts I can see them for what they are, what they have always been, empty, starved, waiting to be filled. How will they be filled at home, in England? By care of the children as they grow, and become old, beyond me? By substituting different children for these and a different Mrs Nesbitt-Smith for this one? Households that are not the same household and yet the same? And so on, year after year, as Crane, Miss Crane, and sometimes, increasingly rarely, until no more, Edwina?’

  In the evenings between five o’clock – when the children had had their tea and became the temporary sole charge of the ayah for play and bath – and seven o’clock when she supervised their supper before going in to dine alone or, if circumstances permitted, with the family, Miss Crane was free. Mostly she spent those two short hours in her room, having her own bath, resting, reading, writing an occasional letter to another of her kind who had exchanged this station for another or gone back to England. But now she began to feel restless and took to putting on her boots and – parasol opened and protectively raised – walking down the lane of the civil lines in which the Nesbitt-Smiths’ bungalow stood. The lane was shaded by trees that thinned out gradually as the bungalows gave way to open cultivated fields. Sometimes she walked in the opposite direction, towards the cantonment bazaar beyond which lay the railway station and the native town which she had entered only on one occasion – with a group of laughing ladies and timid companions in carriages, stoutly accompanied by gentlemen – to inspect a Hindu temple which had frightened her, as the native town had frightened her with its narrow dirty streets, its disgusting poverty, its raucous dissonant music, its verminous dogs, its starving, mutilated beggars, its fat white sacred Brahmini bulls and its ragged population of men and women who looked so resentful in comparison with the servants and other officiating natives of the cantonment.

  On the day that she found herself questioning the prospect of a future that was, as it were, an image seen in a series of mirrors that reflected it until it became too small for the eye to see – a diminishing row of children and Nesbitt-Smiths and Edwina Cranes – the walk she went on at five was the one that brought her out to the open spaces where the road led on into the far distance. Reaching this point, she stopped, afraid to go farther. The sun was still hot, still high enough to make her narrow her eyes as she gazed from under the brim of her hat and the cotton canopy of the parasol, towards the horizon of the flat, wide, immense Punjabi plain. It seemed impossible, she thought, that the world continued beyond that faraway boundary, that somewhere it changed its nature, erupted into hills and forests and ranges of mountains whose crests were white with eternal snows where rivers had their source. It seemed impossible too that beyond the plains there could be an ocean where those rivers had their end. She felt dwarfed, famished in the spirit, pressed down by a tremendous weight of land, and of air and incomprehensible space that even the flapping, wheeling crows had difficulty keeping up in. And she thought for a moment that she was being touched by the heavy finger of a god; not the familiar uplifting all-forgiving God she went through the motions of praying to, but one neither benign nor malign, neither creating nor destroying, sleeping nor waking, but existing, and leaning his weight upon the world.

  Acknowledging that women such as herself tended to turn to if not actually to seek sanctuary in religion, she walked on the following evening in the other direction and when she came to the Protestant church she turned into the compound and went up the broad gravel path, past the hummocky graves marked by the headstones of those who had died far from home, but who in their resting place, had they woken, might have been comforted by the English look of the church and its yard and the green trees planted there. The side door of the church was on the latch. She went in and sat in a pew at the back, stared at the altar and gazed at the darkening east window of stained glass which she saw every Sunday in the company of the Nesbitt-Smiths.

  The god of this church was a kind, familiar, comfortable god. She had him in her heart but not in her soul. She believed in him as a comforter but not as a redeemer. He was very much the god of a community, not of the dark-skinned community that struggled for life under the weight of the Punjabi sky but of the privileged pale-faced community of which she was a marginal member. She wondered whether she would be Crane to Him, or Miss Crane, or Edwina. If she thought of Him as the Son she would, she presumed, be Edwina, but to God in His wrath, undoubtedly Crane.

  ‘Miss Crane?’

  Startled by the voice she looked over her shoulder. It was the senior chaplain, an elderly man with a sharp pink nose and a fringe of distinguishing white hair surrounding his gnomic head. His name was Grant, which caused restrained smiles during services when he intoned prayers that began Grant, O Lord, we beseech Thee. She smiled now, although she was embarrassed being found by him there, betraying herself as a woman in need almost certainly not of rest but of reassurance. A plain somewhat horse-faced woman in her middle twenties, alone in an empty Protestant church, on a day when no service was due, was somehow already labelled. In later years, Miss Crane came to look upon that moment as the one t
hat produced in her the certainty of her own spinsterhood

  ‘You are resting from your labours,’ Mr Grant said in his melodious congregational voice, and added, more directly, when she had nodded and looked down at her lap, ‘Can I be of any help, child?’ so that without warning she wanted to weep because child was what her father had often called her in his sober, loving moments. However, she did not weep. She had not wept since her father’s death and although there would come a time when she did once more it had not arrived yet. Speaking in a voice whose steadiness encouraged her, she said, ‘I’m thinking of staying on,’ and, seeing the chaplain’s perplexity, the way he glanced round the church as if something had begun to go on there which nobody had bothered to forewarn him of but which Miss Crane knew about and thought worth staying for, she explained, ‘I mean in India, when the Nesbitt-Smiths go home.’

  The chaplain said, ‘I see,’ and frowned, perhaps because she had called them the Nesbitt-Smiths. ‘It should not be difficult, Miss Crane. Colonel and Mrs Ingleby, for instance, strike me as worth approaching. I know you are well thought of. Major and Mrs Nesbitt-Smith have always spoken highly.’

  The future looked dark, a blank featureless territory with, in its centre, a pinprick of light that seemed to be all that was left of Edwina Crane.

  ‘I think I should like,’ she said, giving expression to a thought that had never properly been a thought until now, ‘to train for the Mission.’

  He sat down next to her and together they watched the east window.

  ‘Not,’ she went on, ‘no, not to carry the Word. I am not a truly religious woman.’ She glanced at him. He was still watching the window. He did not seem to be particularly upset by her confession. ‘But there are schools, aren’t there?’ she said. ‘I meant train to teach at the mission schools.’

  ‘Ah yes, I see, to teach not our own children but those of our dark brethren in Christ?’

  She nodded. She found herself short of breath. He turned to look at her fully, and asked her, ‘Have you seen the school here?’

  Yes, she had seen the school, close to the railway station, but – ‘Only from the outside,’ she told him.

  ‘Have you ever talked to Miss Williams?’

  ‘Who is Miss Williams?’

  ‘The teacher. But then you would be unlikely to know her. She is a lady of mixed blood. Would you like to visit the school?’

  ‘Very much.’

  The chaplain nodded and presently, after the appearance of having thought more deeply, said, ‘Then I will arrange it, and if you are of the same mind I will write to the superintendent in Lahore, not that there is anything much for you to judge by in Miss Williams’s little school.’ He shook his head. ‘No, Miss Crane. This isn’t an area where we’ve had much success, although more than the Catholics and the Baptists. There are of course a great number of schools throughout the country, of various denominations, all committed to educating what I suppose we must call the heathen. In this matter the Church and the missions have always led the way. The government has been, shall we say, slow to see the advantages. So, perhaps, have the Indians. The school here, for instance. A handful of children at the best of times. At the times of the festivals none. I mean, of course, the Hindu and Moslem festivals. The children come, you see, mainly for the chappattis, and in the last riots the school was set fire to, but that was before your time.’

  *

  The mission school was not the one she had had in mind which was close to the railway, the Joseph Wainwright Christian School, a substantial building, a privately endowed school for Eurasian children, the sons and daughters of soldiers, railway officials and junior civil servants whose blood had been mixed with that of the native population. The mission school was on the outskirts of the native town itself, a poor, small, rectangular building with a roof of corrugated iron in a walled compound bare of grass, with nothing to identify it apart from the cross roughly painted on the yellow stucco above the door. She was too ashamed to admit her mistake to Mr Grant, who had brought her in a tonga, and now handed her down and led her through the opening in the wall where once, before the last riots, there might have been a gate.

  To come with him at midday she had had to obtain permission from Mrs Nesbitt-Smith and explain her reason for wanting leave of absence from the task of teaching the young Nesbitt-Smiths. Mrs Nesbitt-Smith had stared at her as if she were mad and exclaimed, ‘Good heavens, Crane! What on earth has possessed you?’ And then added, with what looked like genuine concern, which was touching and therefore far more upsetting than the outburst, ‘You’d be with blacks and half-castes, cut off from your own kind. And besides, Edwina, we’re all very fond of you.’

  She was undoubtedly acting like a fool, far from sure even that she was acting on an impulse she had interpreted correctly. To begin with, to have confused the Eurasian school with the mission school proved how ignorant she was of what was there under her own nose, proved how little was really known by people such as herself about the life of the town they were supposed to have a duty to, a duty whose proper execution earned them the privileges they enjoyed. If she had not even known where this particular mission school was, what, she wondered, could she hope to contribute to other mission schools or deserve to gain from them?

  The door of the school was open. There was a sound of children singing. When they reached the door the singing stopped. Mr Grant said that Miss Williams was expecting them and then stood aside. She crossed the threshold directly into the schoolroom. The woman on the dais said, ‘Stand up, children,’ and motioned with her arms at the pupils who were seated on several rows of benches, facing her. They stood up. A phrase written in block capitals on the blackboard drew Miss Crane’s attention. Welcome Miss Crane Mem. At another sign from the teacher the children chanted it slowly. ‘Welcome, Miss Crane Mem.’ Trying to say, ‘Thank you’, she found her tongue and the roof of her mouth dry. The visit on which she had set out in the role of a suppliant for employment was looked upon here as the visit of an inquisitive memsahib. She was terrified of the obligation this put her under and of the stuffy whitewashed room, the rows of children and the smell of burning cowpats that was coming through the open door and windows from the back of the compound where no doubt the God-sent chappattis were being cooked. And she was afraid of Miss Williams, who wore a grey cotton blouse, long brown skirt and black button boots, and was younger than she and sallow-complexioned in the way that some of the most insufferable of the European women were who had spent a lifetime in the country; only in Miss Williams’s case the sallowness denoted a half-Indian origin, the kind of origin for which Miss Crane had been taught to feel a certain horror.

  Miss Williams left the dais on which there were the teacher’s desk and only one chair. Invited, Miss Crane sat, and the chaplain stood next to her. He had said, ‘Miss Crane, this is Miss Williams,’ but had not said, ‘Miss Williams, this is Miss Crane,’ and as Miss Crane sat down she attempted to smile at the girl to apologise for an omission not her own, but her lips were as parched as her mouth, and she was conscious, then, of an expression growing on her face similar to that which she had seen so often on Mrs Nesbitt-Smith’s. It became etched more deeply when at last she submitted to the duty to look at the children, found herself the lone, inarticulate object of their curiosity and awe, perhaps their fear. The simple dress she had put on, her best in order to look her best – white muslin with a frilled hem but no other decoration beyond the mother-of-pearl buttons down the pleated choker; and the hat, a straw boater perched squarely upon her piled up hair; the folded parasol of white cotton with a pink lining, a gift from Mrs Nesbitt-Smith last Christmas – now seemed to envelop her, to encumber her with all the pompous frippery of a class to which she did not belong.

  At Miss Williams’s command a little girl, barefoot and dressed in a shapeless covering that looked like sacking, but whose pigtail was decked with flowers for the occasion, came forward with a nosegay, curtsied and held the nosegay up. Miss Crane took it. A
gain she tried to say ‘Thank You’, but her words must have been unintelligible because the little girl had to look at Miss Williams for confirmation that the ritual of presentation was over. Neither seeing nor smelling the flowers, Miss Crane held them to her nose, and when she looked up again the little girl was back in her place, standing with the other little girls in the front row.

  ‘I think,’ Mr Grant said, ‘that the children may sit down again, don’t you, Miss Crane? Then presently they can either sing the song or say the poem I’m sure Miss Williams here has been rehearsing hard all morning.’

  For a moment Miss Crane stared helplessly at the flowers in her lap, aware that Miss Williams and Mr Grant were both watching her, both waiting for her. She nodded her head, ashamed because in the first public duty of her life she was failing.

  Sitting down when Miss Williams told them to, the children were silent. Miss Crane thought that they had sensed her discomfort and had interpreted it as displeasure or boredom. She forced herself to look at Miss Williams and say, ‘I should love to hear the song,’ then remembered Mr Grant had said poem or song, and added, ‘or the poem. Or both. Please let them do what they have rehearsed.’

  Miss Williams turned to the class and said in her slow, curiously accented English, ‘Now children, what shall we sing? Shall we sing the song about There is a Friend?’ and then, ‘Achchha,’ a word Miss Crane knew well enough, but which was followed by rapid words in Hindustani she could not catch because they sped by too quickly. I can’t, she thought, even speak the language properly, so how can I hope to teach?