The Mulberry Empire
The Mulberry Empire
Philip Hensher
The bestselling novel from the Man Booker Prize shortlisted author of The Northern Clemency and King of the Badgers.‘The Mulberry Empire’ is a seemingly straightforward historical novel that recounts an episode in the Great Game in central Asia – the courtship, betrayal and invasion of Afghanistan in the 1830s by the emissaries of Her Majesty’s Empire, which is followed by the bloody and summary expulsion of the Brits from Kabul following an Afghani insurrection (shades of the Soviet Union’s final imperial fling in the very same country in the 1980s).The novel has at its heart the encounter between West and East as embodied in the likeable, complex relationship between Alexander Burnes, leader of the initial British expeditionary party, and the wily, cultured Afghani ruler, the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan.For those who enjoyed William Dalrymple’s ‘Return of a King’, ‘The Mulberry Empire’ is a must-read.
THE MULBERRY EMPIRE
or
The Two Virtuous Journeys
of
The Amir Dost Mohammed Khan
PHILIP HENSHER
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_08cc148f-d310-5068-afee-f993dab9c7d7)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (https://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
Published by Fourth Estate 2016
First published in Great Britain by
Flamingo 2002
Copyright © Philip Hensher 2002
Philip Hensher asserts the moral right to be
identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780007112265
EBook Edition © JULY 2012 ISBN 9780007406821
Version: 2016-08-08
DEDICATION (#ulink_00edbe92-38ca-5ea8-a2b7-a7c4ba001e90)
For Laurent Rodriguez
C’est toi d’abord, ô bien-aimé,
M’apportant avec ta gaité
Dorénavant douce, I’armée
Des victorieux procédés
Par quoi tu m’as toujours dompté,
Conseil juste, forte bonté …
VERLAINE
CONTENTS
Cover (#u67cb3186-c8ba-5d55-8830-28d33125f6f8)
Title Page (#uc0ab3b44-a084-56a0-942f-e53c84745a3b)
Copyright (#ud97f0631-d0ed-5f15-97a6-73af36a1610c)
Dedication (#ulink_806b5779-690e-598f-a643-f7ab80807a51)
Bella (#ued255ad4-3165-5fe7-adfc-4c552e7ddb8f)
One (#uafae094e-cc7c-57a3-8492-9c71cebdeb59)
Two (#uc771300b-e86d-57c5-bf32-2afc68b016c0)
Three (#ud3057137-6ce4-509e-b4ee-e3b9491377e1)
Four (#u0fda7563-4fd7-5cbb-ad6a-1fb2e57cfc69)
Five (#u114f7b8c-b3d0-51c1-b272-8f5efd07e478)
Six (#uf13ae68a-5b71-5710-80e6-4188b7931afb)
Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Burnes (#litres_trial_promo)
Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Anthropological Interlude (#litres_trial_promo)
Akbar (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Glossary (#litres_trial_promo)
Cast List (#litres_trial_promo)
Errors and Obligations (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Other Works (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
BELLA (#ulink_e90f5396-e421-56f7-863d-61732a1db785)
On peut juger du mépris qu’avait pour l’étude des langues un homme qui passait sa vie à découvrir l’epoque précise de la chute des empires et des révolutions qui changent la face du monde.
STENDHAL, La Chartreuse de Parme
ONE (#ulink_4d03b3b4-4f58-5a3f-b51a-2e84b2373c33)
THE AMIR DOST MOHAMMED KHAN had fifty-four sons. And his favourite among these sons was Akbar. One day Dost Mohammed feared that he was ill, and close to dying, and he called his fifty-four sons to him. They came from the far peaceful corners of the kingdom of the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan to the great city he had caused to be built, and as they rode through the country, they were not troubled or threatened. The wisdom and strength of their father made straight roads for them, and the justice he had wrought smoothed their passage.
One after another, his four-and-a-half dozen sons came to the great city of Kabul, and the people of Kabul, seeing that the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan had summoned his sons, turned their dust-filled eyes to the dust in grief. One after another, his sons rode through the wide streets, which were crowded but silent in sorrow. They came to the great palace, and came to the bedchamber of their father, the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan. And to each he said with kindness, as he came in, that his speed had been that of one driven by the Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days. But the great Amir lied, for each had been driven to him by love.
At the end of three days, the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan lay in his bed, and looked around at the silent crowd of his sons, and bid them count themselves. The living counted themselves, and then the dead sons, and then the sons to come, who were not yet born, whom Dost Mohammed loved best, said their names, but only to Dost Mohammed in the dark shade raised over his head. He counted them, and there were fifty-three. It seemed to Dost Mohammed that one was missing.
‘Great King,’ the second youngest of the sons said. ‘Akbar is not yet here. But he must be fast approaching.’ Dost Mohammed nodded, and the rough cloth of his bed cover seemed to whisper a denial. ‘That is not so,’ the youngest of the sons said. ‘Akbar my brother has sent a message that he will not come. He has sent a message to the great King my father that he is occupied, and may not turn away from the borders of the country, to mop my father’s face and hold my father’s head.’ And the brothers looked away in shame that their father should hear the truth.
But Dost Mohammed nodded, and was pleased by what the youngest of the brothers had said. ‘He has done right,’ he said, just that. He raised his head, and looked at the sons who were there, and the sons who were dead, and the sons who were not yet born, and the single son who had better things to do, and the Amir was pleased. And the sons – Afzal, and Azam, and Shams-i Jahan, and Ghulam Haidar, and Sher Ali, and Amin, and Sharif, and Akram and Wali and Faiz and Hawa and Hajira and Ahmad and Zaman and Umar and Ummat al-Mustafa and Bibi Zumurrud and Salih and Muhsin and Nur Jahan and Hasan and Husein and Wafa and Aslam and Qasim and Sher and Nek and Hashim and Sadiq and Shuaib and Rahim and Azim and Sadiq and Sarw-i Jahan and Yusuf and Azim and Habibullah and Mamlakat and Sharaf Sultan and Durr Jan and Sahib Sultan and Bibi Saira and Aisha and Bilqis and Sadiq and Rahim and Saifullah Khan Wakil and Agha and Fatima and Zainab and Banu and Mulk-i Jahan and Badr-i Jahan, youngest of the brothers (for it is written that the women who are born to a great Emperor may be considered sons, too) – the sons of the great King looked at him and saw him revive, and start to live again as he heard that everything was well with his kingdom. Glory be on the names of the sons of the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, greatest of the Afghans, wisest of his people!
In time, Akbar found that his strength had secured his father’s kingdom from his enemies, and, leaving his people with the instruction to be awake and vigilant, hastened to his father’s house. But he found the Dost well, and recovered, and merry, and full of love for the greatest of his sons, and Akbar embraced his father. ‘My son,’ the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan said. ‘You did right not to come to my call, but to remain at the call of the kingdom that will be yours. You, alone among my sons, are truly my son.’ And after that embrace, the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan lived in peace and plenty for years to come, in the knowledge of his wisdom and the knowledge of the wisdom of his son.
TWO (#ulink_266f151f-d922-5a28-a5d5-a779c8b49c01)
1.
‘EMPEROR OF THE AFGHANS,’ Burnes chanted, ‘Lord of the most distant horizon, King of the far hills, Heir of Israel, Lord of the Wind of a Hundred, of a Hundred, of a Hundred—’
He opened his eyes, and made a deflating noise. ‘Ppphhhhhwah,’ he said. ‘I always get stuck there.’
Outside, in the courtyard, a fight was breaking out between a gang of boys; the sudden close yelling was like a flock of geese, diving over the roofs of the mud-brick house. Burnes knocked his fist against his forehead, as if pretending to think. Dr Gerard got up from the corner of the room where he had been squatting, awkward as a camel, and went to the shutters to see what, if anything, the fight outside was about.
‘Very good,’ Mohan Lal said smoothly. ‘Your Persian is really excellent, if I may say so.’
There was an embarrassed sort of silence, since Mohan Lal, naturally, ought not to say so. Certainly, it was not for him to tell Burnes whether his Persian was good or not. Still, he seemed to take it upon himself not just to compliment his betters, but, on occasion, to correct them. Anywhere else, of course – but this was not anywhere else, and, knowing that all of them had to rely on Mohan Lal’s goodwill, the party had taken a tacit decision to put up with the guide’s elegant superiority, perpetually bordering on the supercilious.
‘What is it, anyway?’ Burnes said finally. ‘I can’t remember. I’m sorry.’
‘Lord of the Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days,’ Mohan Lal said, smiling faintly, as if giving a child the answer to a terribly obvious Christmas puzzle. ‘An interesting title. The Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days is a summer wind, a phenomenon fascinating in the abstract, although not something one would wish to experience. It is regarded as a unique property of the kingdom, and therefore an appropriate title for the Amir.’
‘Not something I’d want to boast about,’ Dr Gerard said, turning back to the room, disappointed in the small drama of the courtyard outside. ‘And I hope we’re not here long enough to have to put up with it.’
‘If he keeps us waiting here long enough,’ Burnes said, ‘we may simply have to grit our teeth and endure.’
Outside, Kabul continued its usual life.
Burnes found it hard to be quite sure whether, here, they were prisoners or not. Ten days before, they had arrived at the gates of the city – or what passed for the gates, a waist-high mud wall full of holes. An inadequate rampart, one might have thought, but the Afghans came and went quite happily, as if never fearing an enemy, giving no thought to invaders or infidel. Until now, Burnes had remained swathed in his cloth, blanketed up, his face browned first by colouring and after by the weeks trekking in the mountain sun, his blue eyes becoming more startling by the day. Arriving at Kabul, however, it seemed wise to admit to what they were immediately, and take their chances.
Kabul had surprised Burnes. He had read what there was to read about the country, looked with every appearance of care at the drawings, the prints of the city. They hadn’t been wrong, exactly; but still the city was not what he expected. No commentator, no artist, had captured what Burnes saw; it was as if they had seen only the outlines of the city, or rather, as if they, like Burnes, had seen it whole, and only cared to convey the city in part. Burnes tried to think of what it was his guides had left out. He could only think of it in two words: the fragrance; the filth.
In other cities, the fruit-and-flower smell of the street, the stench of the shit, human, canine, equine and more, would have seemed the inessentials of the city’s life. It had seemed like that to the observers of the city whose work they had so relied upon; they had removed the fragrance and the filth from their gaze as lying above or below what substance truly mattered. Buildings, thoroughfares, population numbers could be set down, and that was what, it seemed, really counted; not the mere smells of this city. It seemed always in danger of turning into an orchard, a stable, or a vast latrine. To Burnes, on the other hand, it was the intangible but overpowering fact of smell which seemed central to the place. Sitting in this half-prison, with all the time in the world to practise the address to the Amir and pursue absurd speculations, he found himself wondering about a map of the city which would convey this sense of his. In his head was a map of Kabul which did not describe the streets and the buildings, but set down the intangible and rich sudden odours of the place; described where a whiff of horse-shit mingled with the heavy perfume of rotting mulberries, where dead dog and fruit blossom competed. He closed his eyes, and there, in his head, was a weighty flush of sensation, a wave like the colour purple, arriving in his head, foreign, uninvited, irresistible. You did not need to walk the streets to map them in this olfactory manner; you only needed to sit by the window, and wait for a breeze. He had seen nothing of the city, in truth, nothing but a few streets as they had arrived, nothing but the few buildings around the house where they now lived, when their guards occasionally escorted them out. The city came to them, its perfumes carried on the wind.
2.
They had arrived, and stood there at the wall, for a moment or two, as if their mere stance could announce their purpose. In front of them, there was the city. It was hard to think of it as a prize worth taking, now. Now that it was here in front of them, it seemed very unlike the great imperial jewel London and Calcutta so easily dreamed of. The hills and hollows of the land had been scattered, it seemed, with detritus; rambling, temporary houses, plastered smooth, scattered where they would fall. It was a city set high in the mountains, and the chill at night was fierce. Between the houses of the city paths, roads of packed-down mud ran; between them a thousand pedlars of goods set up their stalls to sell what they would. But it seemed to Burnes, as he stood there with his companions and waited for the Afghans to come and discover what he wanted, less like a city than a great wild garden. The groves of this high city joined, rambled with fruit trees, with what must be mulberries, blotting on the street and casting their high scent to the wind. What had London and Calcutta dreamed of? A city which could turn into an imperial jewel, certainly, a great imperial city, and not this random assembly, like the careless evening settlement of some wandering people.
Burnes, Mohan Lal the guide, and Gerard had dismounted. They stood there for a while, and it was not long before the curious little boys were succeeded by some more authoritative figures. Mohan Lal had stepped forward, but Burnes spoke first. They had listened to his explanation intently, had exchanged the ritual compliments calmly and gracefully, and, without consulting, had allowed them to remount, and led them into the city. A mounted group approached, shouting hoarsely, wheeled hungrily, curiously, around them like circling buzzards, and, before Burnes could start his explanation again, had ridden off.
First the customs house. The three of them had been hurried into a low white house, its door barely on its hinges. As the eager crowd of short, beakily-featured men, all shouting, poured into the garden of the house, a flock of magpies rose clattering like knives from the fruit trees. The packhorses were tied up outside, and quickly stripped of their bundles. Inside, an immensely fat man emerged with great state from a back room, chewing and wiping some grease from his mouth with the bottom of his coat. All the Afghans fell abruptly silent. He gazed at them as mournfully as a dog as their luggage was brought in and dumped on the floor.
Burnes began his explanation. May the sun ever shine, glorious empire of the Afghans, long heard rumours of the wisdom and greatness of the kingdom. All received with gracious nods; tea was called for and brought by two boys of strongly corrupt appearance. Flat sweet bread followed, politely picked at by the Europeans, wolfed by the Afghans. Burnes pressed on. He and his companions were Europeans, returning home from India overland. Long heard rumours of the beauty of Kabul and promised, etc. (A brief pause here as one of the tea boys, after setting down a glass for Burnes, tried to stroke his neck. Burnes pushed him off gently, and the nearest adult hit the boy very hard with the butt of his rifle, to everyone’s colossal amusement.) Hoped to stay in Kabul for a month, and their great dream was to meet and talk with the great and famous Emperor of the Afghans, the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan.
Burnes came to the end of his speech, and the customs officer gave a brief side-to-side nod of approbation. It wasn’t quite clear what this meant; Burnes, to be sure of indicating what sort of people they were, got out his letters of introduction to the Amir, each carefully prepared in India with a grandiose seal. The official, however, showed almost no interest in them after a quick glance or two. ‘Oh God,’ Gerard said in English. ‘They’re going to search the bags.’ Burnes ignored him; there was nothing to be done about it, and the best way to stay calm was to try not to remember what on earth there was in there.
‘My books,’ Burnes said, as they extracted a dog-eared copy of Marmion and flicked through it. A sketchbook he feared might worry them more, but they looked at it cursorily, and set it down.
‘Tell me,’ the customs officer said. ‘In your country, it is said that pork is eaten. Can that be true?’
Burnes was prepared. ‘It is a food eaten only by the very poorest people in our country. I myself have never tried it, but it is said that it has the taste, somewhat, of beef. That’s a sextant.’
‘Good, good,’ the customs officer said as the underlings turned the object upside down, trying to force a noise from it. ‘And what is it?’
‘It is called a sextant in my language,’ Burnes said. ‘A sort of talisman.’
‘Good, good,’ the customs officer said. ‘In my country we have many sextants.’
It was a long afternoon, but eventually the possessions had all been examined and packed up again. Nothing seemed to excite their interest except Gerard’s bottles of medicine, which they passed around, sniffing at; the maps did not seem to trouble anyone. In the end, Burnes paid the official an enormous bribe in rupees, and gave him a little looking glass.
‘I think he was rather disappointed,’ Mohan Lal said. ‘He was probably hoping for more guns or a thrilling sort of dagger, I expect. They are said in my country to be frightfully fond of weaponry, these Afghan fellows.’
Gerard gave a snort, with which Burnes silently concurred. Mohan Lal had long ago started to seem a tedious companion, with his incessant calm explanations of why things had gone wrong.
They had been led to a house. The owner of the house had welcomed them as if they were guests, effusively, ordered them to be given food and drink, and showed them their beds. Were they prisoners? Were they guests? The interminable attentions of the Newab Jubbur Khan, the owner of the house, and of the series of small boys who sat in the corner of the room with muskets seemed to point to different conclusions. They had arrived ten days ago, and seemed no nearer achieving what they were here to do.
What they were was quite a simple matter: two British officers and a native guide. What they were doing there, not even Burnes would, for this moment, quite bring into his mind. If the knowledge was not at the front of his thoughts, even the calmly interrogative brown gaze of his guards would not bring it out. What Kabul was – what Afghanistan was, here at this moment, far from India, further from England in some sense other than yards and feet than even an explorer like Burnes could quite comprehend – was a matter which could not be thought of as simple. There was, too, the question of what an Englishman was doing in Asia. That had been a question which, in this sort of situation, Burnes had had ample time to contemplate, and never managed any kind of answer. He began to be nervous, sitting here; any Englishman grows atavistically restless if he finds himself more than a hundred miles from the nearest sea, and Burnes was somehow aware all the time that this high brown stinking city was a great deal more than a hundred miles from any imaginable sea.
3.
‘Now, the Lord,’ Burnes went on. ‘No, sorry, vocative, O Lord of the Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days. I always forget Persian numbers over fifty or so.’
‘It is not particularly complicated,’ Mohan Lal said, smiling in his infuriating way. ‘Numbers in Arabic are far more complex a proposition. And we may find we have plenty of time to perfect the address to the Amir.’
‘I’m sure,’ Gerard said. ‘Years, probably. Hi, you, sir.’
The guard in the corner of the room moved, minimally.
‘Are we to see the Amir today?’ Gerard said, as he had asked ten times a day since they had arrived.
The guard made a head-tipping gesture; whether it meant something, or whether it was just the weight of the boy’s enormous, mushroom-coloured turban, was not clear.
‘In any case,’ Gerard said, ‘he knows we are here. Probably.’
The boy guard, his loaded jezail like a bayonet between his thin dirty hands, considered this, deeply, and then made the same head-tipping gesture. ‘Rus?’ he said in the end, nodding three times at the three Europeans. They appeared to know very well what Mohan Lal was.
‘No,’ Burnes said patiently, not for the first time. ‘No, we are not Russians. We are from England, from Engelstan.’
‘Yes,’ Gerard cut in. ‘Tell the Newab Jubbur Khan to tell the Amir. Go on, go and tell your commanding officer. He will see us then, when he knows where we come from.’
The boy looked, as if deeply wounded, appealing to Burnes. ‘Rus,’ he said once more, and then, for no reason on earth, started to laugh uproariously. He did not get up.
‘I wish they wouldn’t do that,’ Gerard said irritably. ‘Laugh like that, I mean. It makes me think they know something we don’t know. And why do they keep calling us Russians?’
‘Rus,’ the boy said again, murmuring as if entranced, understanding a word in what Gerard said.
‘No, no, not Rus,’ Gerard said. ‘And when do we hear from the damned Emperor of the damned Afghans? Oh, God – oh, God – that damned mutton at breakfast. Gentlemen, excuse me—’
Burnes shrugged, as Gerard rushed from the room, clutching his stomach chaotically like an unfastened valise. He prided himself on the value of patience in these dealings. That was the great thing in the East; patience, because nothing ever happened when it should, nothing ever happened on schedule. Everything, in dealing with the great rulers of the East, was whim and delay. Ten days was nothing; because, in response to whim and delay, there was no sensible behaviour to adopt but a complete, more-than-Oriental patience. That was what everyone said, and Burnes was pleased with himself for having exercised a great deal of patience with every potentate he had ever come across, and usually attained, if not the desired end, then, at least, some interesting conclusion. What no one had ever warned him about was the necessity to exercise some patience with one’s fellow travellers; with a supercilious ass like Mohan Lal, forever making superior suggestions about one’s Persian or giving one ridiculous and probably entirely false information about the curious customs of the country, or a bigger ass like Gerard, complaining about the slightest inconvenience to his blessed dignity, arguing for two entire days about the necessity of shaving his head and dying his beard black before crossing the Indus, always wanting to tell some outraged and heavily-armed nabob about the greatness of the Empire, or even, once, telling an imam in response to the invariable question about the European diet that, yes, he ate bacon daily and very delicious it was too. Unfairly, Burnes blamed Gerard even for his disastrous digestion, the steady torrential cataract from his bowels, blamed in turn on the damned mutton at breakfast, the damned beans at dinner, or the damned melon which the rest of the company had eaten at Jalalabad with no ill effects. Yes, the exercise of patience with one’s damned fellow travellers was the most taxing thing; compared to that, waiting ten days to see the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan presented him with no difficulty whatever.
4.
Out on the street, debate about the Europeans who rode so badly was furious and incessant, like the noise of a cloud of swallows.
‘The Amir will not see them.’
‘The Amir will see them tomorrow, fool. He has seen them yesterday, and knows everything about them.’
‘How can the Amir have seen them when they have not seen the Amir?’
At the edges of the market, the old men jogged up and down on their heels, agitated by debate, and punched at the air, quick as clockwork. They bothered no one.
‘The Amir sent Akbar the son of the Amir, and the Amir saw them with the eyes of Akbar.’
‘Did they not know the son of the Amir when Akbar was announced?’
‘Many are the ways of the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, and wise they are.’
Futteh the singer, plump and pale as a dove, his saucy eyes wandering to make sure of his audience, finished sucking on his plum, pondered, spat. He began a story.
‘You recall the tale of the Vizier’s daughter and the son of the King,’ he started. ‘And the King did not know how he should know if the daughter of the Vizier was true and good as she was thought to be. Now, this was many, many years ago, in China. And the Vizier had the most marvellous garden of roses in all of China, and he was in the habit of taking a walk in the garden, each morning. And one morning, he was accompanied in his walk by his daughter, who was as beautiful as the first light of the dawn over the mountains. He was glad to walk in the rose garden with his daughter, and, after they had walked together for an hour, the Vizier said to his daughter: My daughter, is it true that …’
The story unravelled. Futteh was a good storyteller, and, even in the cold of the early evening, he could hold half a dozen old men with his seamless voice. Their eyes fixed on his, six pairs of eyes, whether crafty, knowing, cynical, for the moment subdued into the quiet trust of the audience. Their knees hunched, their backs against the wall, they listened to the comforting tale they had heard hundreds of times before. Occasionally they interrupted with marginal, concerned comments – ‘He does not know that the ring has been swallowed by the fish on the King’s table,’ or, ‘The girl, does she not understand that the man she is marrying is her own brother?’ or, as narrative catastrophe threatened, ‘Allah is great and merciful.’ But for the most part, they let Futteh tell the story in his own leisurely manner.
When it was over, an hour or two had passed, and the audience sighed, as if wanting more of their own satisfaction.
‘The son of the King in the story disguised himself, and went into the marketplace to hear what the common people were saying,’ one of the audience said.
‘Yes, and that is what Akbar, son of the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, that is what he has done, with the Russians.’
‘They are not Russians,’ another man said, passing. ‘Engelstan.’
‘Akbar put on a tribesman’s clothes, and took a jezail,’ Futteh said, waving his hand in the air impatiently, dismissing either the objection or the flies. ‘And he went to the house where the English are, and sat with them for two hours, and talked with them. But all the time, they did not know who they were speaking with.’
‘Great is the mind of the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, and wise is he in the ways of the world,’ someone murmured.
‘And they ride so badly,’ Futteh added, with great finality.
‘Like the sack of rice on the back of an old donkey,’ his listeners chorused sagely.
5.
The orchard city fell into shade as the afternoon wore on; pale peaches, espaliered against the wall, plums, apricots, pears; beneath the window of the Newab Jubbur Khan where they sat all day, a fine apple tree, just like the trees of Burnes’s childhood. He shut his eyes, and sniffed, and sometimes, through all the smell and noise and clear strange mountain air, there was all his childhood, in the sheltered Montrose garden. Walnuts, cherries, vines, and more wonderful things, pomegranates growing in the streets, and, everywhere, mulberry trees; their fruit piled up in market stalls, lying in the street, and the whole city sucking ceaselessly on fruit. At the door of their wing in the courtyard, a small boy, padded up with scraps of cloth, his legs wrapped up puttee-fashion, his dirty feet bare and hardened in sandals, was sucking on a handful of cherries and mulberries, cracking walnuts between his hard teeth, and every so often running his tongue round his mouth to clean off what juice was staining his face, leaving a fat white clown-smile in a fruit-smeared face. And everywhere the birds; bright chattering magpies, the fat burble of doves, edging at each other in their nervous fighting. Burnes watched them for hours from the window. And the nightingale; he had never known, quite, what the Persians meant when they wrote about the nightingale, but here, it was a sharp lemon tang, cutting through the rich sweetness of the dungy perfumed city, a line of pure song, returning on itself, multiplying, varying, twisting, but always, always, itself. He sat in the evening light, and listened, and found no way to ask the others to be quiet too.
The day wore on, and at some point towards the end of the afternoon, a procession of dishes began to be carried into the room. The two women of the house, veiled in brick-red cloaks, carried them in. Their veils were raw squares of cloth, dropped over their heads. A coarse lattice was cut in to allow them to see. Burnes seemed to catch the glint of an eye through the loose weave of the eye-slit, and, before he lowered his eyes, wondered for a moment if that meant the woman was looking at him. From their gait, they were both young, and the contours of their bodies were revealed by the rippling red cloth.
A third woman stood at the door and watched, holding a baby; she too was veiled; even the baby was veiled. She seemed to be supervising the other women. Perhaps a favoured wife. The dishes were set down on the floor without explanation, and, when the entire room was filled with clay dishes, the three women retreated to the door, looked once at the food, and not at the men, and quickly left. And then the Newab Jubbur Khan came in.
The Newab, whose house this was, seemed to regard them with an almost affectionate air. He made a point of eating with them; he also made a point of coming in after the food, and leaving without excusing himself. The three of them scrambled to their feet.
‘You have passed an agreeable day, I hope?’ the Newab said kindly. He was a slight man, his nose a huge beak in his little face; when he walked, it was with an evident consciousness of grandeur which his appearance did not entitle him to. He walked like a man who has once been fat. ‘If you do not object, I would like to eat with you.’
‘We would be honoured,’ Burnes said.
‘Honoured indeed,’ Gerard said, looking warily at the food. ‘Thrice honoured.’
The Newab nodded agreeably at Gerard’s meaningless formulation. ‘Sit, sit,’ he said. He rattled off the habitual prayer, lazily looking round, and without taking a breath, fell back from Arabic into Persian. ‘The lamb is particularly fine, from my own flock.’ He gestured at a greasy-looking dish, grey and shining in the sun. Burnes leant forward and scooped up some of the cold stew, knowing perfectly well that the Newab was lying politely, since all the food here had to be ordered up from the bazaar. Gerard just looked green.
‘Tell me,’ the Newab asked, after each of the dishes had been commended and accepted, and they were embarked on the task of struggling unsuccessfully with what could be eaten of the Newab’s food. ‘How large a city is London, or Calcutta?’
‘They are different cities, Newab, and both large and beautiful,’ Mohan Lal said.
‘I see,’ the Newab said. He seemed, still, to be under the impression that Calcutta and London were more or less the same place, or perhaps different names for the same city; an impression they had been trying to correct for some time now. ‘But how big? Is it, for instance, as large as our city?’
‘I think it might be even a little larger,’ Burnes said tactfully. ‘How many people, for instance, live in Kabul?’
The Newab sucked on his teeth, and gazed at the wall, as if calculating. ‘Many, many people, and their numbers grow every day, thanks to the wisdom and kindness of the Amir who rules over them.’
‘I see,’ Burnes said, making a routine half-incline of the head at the mention of the Amir.
‘London has many hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, and is the richest and most beautiful city in the world,’ Gerard cut in. Burnes looked at him in irritation; what the point of boasting to the Newab about the size of London was, he had no idea. Just an unthinking, involuntary outcrop of Gerard’s personality, as frustrating and impossible to argue with as geology.
‘Of course, we have seen very little of Kabul,’ Burnes said. ‘But the reputation of the beauty and splendour of the city has spread far, and we have travelled from India in the hope that we may see for ourselves.’
‘How is it that you have seen very little of Kabul?’ the Newab abruptly asked. He seemed genuinely puzzled, proffering a dish of boiled aubergines.
Burnes was thrown. ‘We have been resting here, at your hospitality,’ he said finally, seeing no way to point out that they were effectively prisoners. At that, as if to make his point, one of the succession of small boys with muskets wandered in. He greeted the Newab elaborately, the English more casually, and sat down in the corner of the room, promptly falling asleep, both hands on the barrel of his gun. ‘At the gracious hospitality of the Newab,’ Burnes said, pointedly. ‘We have been unable to see the famous city of Kabul.’
‘Great is the city of Kabul,’ the Newab Jubbur Khan echoed, absently. He took a piece of bread, tearing it in half, and dipped it in some dish of meat; before eating it, he made a vague gesture of invitation towards Gerard, who, with too evident unwillingness, followed his example. ‘Yes, the city is great, and its fame has spread far. The bazaar of the city is the greatest in the world, where the world comes to marvel at the riches and splendour of the empire. The merchants of China and Russia and Engelstan come to the great markets, laden with goods, and leave laden down with more than they brought, such are the marvels of the city. The beauty and splendour of the city is great, and the beauty of the people of the Emperor is famous throughout the world. And such, willing, it will always be. Over the city is the Bala Hissar, the palace of my brother, the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, where my brother rules over his family and his wives and his wealth in wisdom and mercy and goodness, willing. And the palace of my brother is famed throughout the world, and the world comes to express its wonder at its beauty and greatness and the greatness of my brother the Amir.’
He paused, perhaps considering whether his description of the city would, in the end, be as useful to the English as simply letting them out to look for themselves; perhaps, however, considering what there could possibly be to start praising next in the high stinking city. Not the food, at any rate, Burnes thought unkindly, refusing the offer of another greasy dish.
‘The Amir is your brother?’ Mohan Lal said.
‘The Amir is the brother, it is said, of every Afghan,’ Burnes said, helping out.
‘He is my brother,’ Jubbur Khan said simply. ‘The shade of the same mountain shadowed our birth, and may the same stream refresh his parched tongue.’
‘May friendship be forever between warriors,’ Burnes said.
‘And he is my brother,’ Jubbur Khan said again.
‘He is the brother of every Afghan,’ Gerard said, conventionally echoing what Burnes had said.
‘He is the brother of every Afghan,’ Jubbur Khan agreed. But then he seemed troubled, and said, once more, more emphatically, ‘The Amir is my brother.’
‘He is the brother of every Afghan,’ Gerard said again, idiotically.
‘He is your brother?’ Burnes cut in. ‘He is the son of your father?’
‘He is the son of my father,’ Jubbur Khan said, relieved. ‘Yes, he is the son of my father.’
This explained a great deal. And now Jubbur Khan got up, as if he had said enough to explain who he was, and who the Amir was, and what the Europeans were. He got up, bowing on all sides, and swept out with massive graciousness, hardly waiting for his guests to raise themselves and bow graciously back, as if his good manners were such that no complementary response could possibly improve or complete them, and was out of the door and at the bottom of the stairs before Gerard succumbed to what had clearly been troubling him for some time, a colossal, harrumphing and malodorous fart, like a bough breaking under the sheer weight of fruit. The boy guard looked up, surprised and humorous. Burnes vastly bowed in his direction, the sleeves of his robe collapsing about his arms and hands. ‘And to you, O Lord of the Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days,’ he said. ‘That, I expect, is a very good sign.’
‘Indeed,’ Mohan Lal said. ‘Your digestion is improving, to venture a fart. You need not have waited until the departure of the Newab, indeed. I have read that the Afghan custom is to fart at table.’
‘A risky business,’ Gerard said. ‘With nothing to eat but this damned greasy food.’
6.
Outside, there was a flicker of movement. A scarlet-leaved tree against the dense dusk sky trembled suddenly; a gust, quickly over, as if someone had shaken the tree’s trunk and run away. Another movement, something which might have been a bird, shooting up from the tree with a raucous squawk, abruptly muted. Gerard raised himself from where he lay, complete with food and boredom, and went to the window, where Burnes was already standing. Underneath the tree, a flash, sudden, of white, like the wink of a fish belly, turning in a black pool. For a moment the faces of the Afghans had turned up to the window, before returning to their usual occupation; their teeth and eyes winking white in the dusk. They could be guards; yes, they could be; or, conceivably, they could merely be sitting there, as they would sit there indifferently, whoever was inside the house of the Newab. Burnes did not know, and could not think who to ask.
Out in the court, the squatting boys were preparing for their street-sport. There were five of them, and each clutched, underneath his arm, something which peeped and squawked, a weak piping squawk like an unoiled hinge. With his free hand, each dipped steadily into a little bag, tied to the sash at his waist next to the knife, and ate shrivelled-up little apricots, crunching and spitting the stones with all the absorption they had. In a moment, a boy threw down the piping bird under his arm, and, as if recognizing the challenge, the boy facing him in the circle threw down his bird, too. The two quails shivered their plumage back into plumpness, and nervously strutted in the other’s direction. The boys made an encouraging noise, a quick strange grunting rattle, like a pig eating a snake, and a handful of grain was flung down. The fight began.
It was dark, below, and Burnes could see nothing of the sport; the faces were turned down in excited absorption, and all that could be heard was the occasional fierce cry from a boy, quickly stifled, the pipe and peck of two small birds fighting over a handful of grain. Burnes had seen the sport before, in the daylight, from this window. The rudimentary contest seemed never to weary or tire the street, and they squatted over the two little fat birds, watched them barge each other, pluck at each other with their fierce little beaks like toy birds, a harmless little bout between paint-bright tin birds, wheeling in their tin circles.
Down there, small cries of excitement, quickly muted, were being made; this was not a game for cheering at, but one where the small shrieks of the birds, rending and tearing each other’s little flesh for grain, was to be heard and winced over. This was the sport – the one thing, as it were – which kept Kabul quiet, and everyone watched it; underneath the window, Burnes had seen fine horsemen, street boys – even, a couple of times, an idle Newab Jubbur Khan leaving his house for a morning constitutional – pause for a moment before the rapt silent bout. It was too dark to see, from the window, what was happening; you could not see which of the two birds was succeeding, which was succumbing. There was only the faint tremulous cries of small fat birds, assaulting each other furiously over grain which neither of them would eat. Burnes drew back into the room.
The guard came in. But instead of sitting down in the corner, he stood at the door, and looked at them; at Burnes and Gerard and Mohan Lal. ‘He,’ the guard said finally, ‘will see you tomorrow.’ He made a small gesture with his head, the side-to-side twist, an acknowledgement of something, though none of them had said anything, and then left.
They stared at each other.
He will see you tomorrow, the guard had said, just that; and Burnes ran the sentence through his head, over and over again, to see if it was clear, if he had understood it correctly. Language brings opposite meanings so intimately together, and if the guard had said He will not see you tomorrow, there was a terrible danger that Burnes would have missed it. He ran through the sentence, over and over, adding words which he might have missed, substituting they for he, never for tomorrow, kill for see. He got to the end of it. He was absolutely sure of what he had heard. The Emperor of the Afghans would see them tomorrow.
But with that certainty came an appalling and unanticipated terror. They had travelled to Kabul, never knowing what they would find there; had presented themselves at the gates; had submitted to their guesthouse garrison without more than a weak tremor of dread. And now, with the certainty that they would do what they had arrived to do, terror set upon Burnes. No; not quite that; it was not that something had struck at him. It was more that something had left him. As if, with the ordinary words, some great certain presence in him had abruptly fled, clearing the walls and windows, the barriers of his own skin without an effort. He sat, trying, almost, not to shake with the black terror of his own certainty, fleeing him, and waited for it to leave. It was the Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days, and it began in this room, it began its furious flight from this little room, and fled from him, his fear, his terror, his knowledge. He did not know, quite, what it was, what certainty he was losing with this flight, as if of wind; he could only feel it leaving, with no sense at all of what would be left of him when it was gone, what strength to carry out his task. He waited saying nothing, as if in thought, and in a moment it was over; the fleeing strength and certainty had, just at the door, turned and looked at him in quiet curiosity. At him: at the shell of what had housed all that certainty for so long. Turned and looked and left, leaving nothing but Burnes. He sat for a moment in silence, wanting not to show any fear, to anyone, ever again.
7.
In these long nights, Burnes dreamt of Montrose. He could not help it.
You went to the door of your chamber, and turned, and looked. The thin curtains were blowing in the summer breeze, and already, at this moment in the morning, the sun was lighting the thin white cloth, there at the narrow windows. You looked down at yourself, and there too, your white nightgown billowed out with the cool Scottish morning breeze, lit with the cool Scottish morning light. And there were your boy’s feet, there, on the floor, blue almost with the cold, and veiny. For a moment, you could go back and hug yourself in bed, while the first of the morning; there, your bed, cut and rumpled and squashy with your sleep; or you could do what you could do, run downstairs in your bare feet and throw open the Montrose door to the Montrose morning. Rub your eyes and moan like a dove with your sleep; push your fists into your eye sockets, and fret your sides with your own quick warming embrace. And there. The blue sky; the birds at song; the smell of the morning’s first earth and, behind you, the first clanking noises of the house, preparing itself for the day, as the maids raked the fire and the girl brought in the milk. Yes, he would run, in this cold he could see, and not only feel, down to look at the dreamt Montrose morning.
But then he turned and looked at Montrose, and it too had become an orchard city, high in the dry brown mountains; Scotland turned to Islam, the granite city turned to a city of mulberries, and the perfume wafting over Burnes’s sleep was not heather, the song was not that of the starling, but the heavy blossom of mulberry, the clean song of nightingales. It was as if he woke, and went to the Montrose window, and outside, there were orchards and orchards of mulberries. Mulberries outside, weighing the tree down, the tree glimpsed through the open Scottish door. And there, there, was a boy, a curious near-boy, a near-warrior, barely uniformed, a powdery beard against his soft skin, scurrying away outside, peering in at Burnes, in his high gleaming magnificence. And in his wake a sweet whiff of the many-perfumed city, a waft of dung and smoke and the high Scottish, yes, heathery Scottish mountain air; and the scent, too, of mulberries, growing outside somewhere, clotted on the trees, fallen and thick on the roads as dung. Burnes looked down at himself, and his bare nightgowned flesh was glittering with brass, with spurs, his boots bright with polish, but stained with the fruit flesh, the limbs of one who had walked long and far through the orchards. And as he woke, Burnes thought of something he knew, even after waking, to be true: that the fruit for which the English had the single name of mulberry had in Persian six separate names, and in Pushto, the language of the far high hills, the fruit had so many names that no one could ever know them all; a fruit which, before, had seemed single turned in Burnes’s dream into one with so many names that no man had ever counted them all, and no man would ever risk reciting the many divine names of the divine fruit.
They must have come early, the next morning. Burnes woke from his dream, and already he could hear the whinnying of the strange horses out there in the garden, their unfamiliar-sounding jingle. He lay there on the padded floor, his eyes open, and could see from their unnatural stillness that Gerard and Mohan Lal, too, had woken, and were lying without moving, their eyes closed, feigning sleep so as not to move, not just yet. He lay and listened to the terrifying noise of the horses. They were down there, the men who would take them to the Emperor, of whom they knew nothing, of whose cruelty and goodness they knew nothing. Down there, waiting with all the patience they were born with.
They dressed quickly, and after a breakfast of milk and flat bread, went down to their escorts. They were there, sitting peaceably on their horses, not dismounting, just waiting as they had waited, surely, for an hour or two. Burnes led the other two out. Mohan Lal awkwardly salaamed, a gesture which they returned perfunctorily; their unfamiliar, unwelcoming look at the guide confirming what Burnes had always felt, that his frankly inquiring gaze, noting down, say, a particular stirrup loop as peculiar to the region, was always one guaranteed to bring suspicion and dislike down, not just on him but on the whole party.
It was the first time out of the house in days, and Burnes could not help feeling stiff. He stretched, awkwardly, as the light almost hurt his eyes, and for the first time, he saw the city. Not arriving for the first time, where novelty coloured the vision, not through a window, making distant what was there to be seen, but seeing a city which, it now seemed, he knew from his memory. A scattered city, lying in the scoop of the earth, the brown cubed houses lying against the vast slow rise of the brown mountains like dice in a cupped pair of hands. All the way they had ridden here, the earth had seemed dully brown, unchanging, empty, like the momentarily empty earth after waterless months, from which all colour had been sucked, leaving only brown. But now, coming out into the air, it seemed as if everything had enriched, multiplied in the unchanging earth; the dazed eye, looking down from the dazzling clean blue of the sky, saw a hundred, a thousand tints in the bare mountain earth; browns whitening with chalk, a streak of vivid yellow, a shadow going into mauve in the early-morning sun. Everything, he saw, pausing here before the bleak dazzling sun, could be found here; horses, orchards, sky, water, earth, and now, waiting for the high remote Emperor, he seemed in terror and jubilation to see everything there was, everything, there in the earth.
‘Where are we going to?’ Burnes shouted to the mounted guards. He was glad to hear his voice sounded authoritative.
‘The Bala Hissar,’ one said, not looking down at him.
‘Is it far?’ Burnes called.
‘No,’ another horseman said. ‘Not far.’
‘The Emperor is waiting,’ the first horseman said. ‘It is time to go. Are you ready?’
‘Yes,’ Burnes said. ‘Yes, we are ready.’
They set off, their guard not dismounting but hemming them in between the horses’ high flanks. The horses walked with such stately gravity that at one moment, one of them could not bear the tenseness of the slow walk and wheeled abruptly off, circling like a hawk in the street before the rider brought the beast back. There could have been something brutal, a blunt assertion of power, in their making the party walk between the horses, like tethered slaves. They may have felt this – Gerard certainly felt this, to judge by his clenched-buttock stride, now the result of his august pride as much as his fluid bowels – but Burnes couldn’t feel any outrage in himself at this treatment. Rather, he felt, in his glittering exotic clothes, dress uniform draped splendidly with the heavy red court robes, like a pilgrim. An unworthy pilgrim, walking humbly up the hill to the great sawn-off blunt rock, the palace, the Bala Hissar, in the middle of which vast plain mass sat the Amir. Up there was the Emperor, politely patient, waiting; you could feel his calm wait here, walking the street between their mounted companions. And the mounted companions, too, seemed quiet, subdued by the Emperor’s patient quiet. What splendour was up there, Burnes could not tell; but he felt that there would be none. This city, plain-dressed, the high clean air given its florid perfume by the fruit trees, wasn’t ruled by some fabulous potentate; he could feel it. No cushion-fleshed tyrant in a pile of rubies sat up there, watching them approach; just a mind.
As they walked through the narrow mud streets, they were given a thorough inspection. The children came to the windows, and stood, staring; shadows, in the upstairs shuttered windows, showed them that the women of the city, too, were curious. The shops in the bazaar were opening, and, behind the piles of fruit, of bags of spice, the merchants and customers, sitting in the early sun, followed the procession with humorous open eyes. Over the city, the Bala Hissar, a great shapeless piece of power, and they walked the streets, not responding to the keen attention of the city.
They walked on, not speaking to each other or their guards. Occasionally, over their heads, one of the horsemen would call out to another, or to someone in the street. They called out in Pushto, and each time Gerard, walking by Burnes’s side, stiffened, knowing that they didn’t want to be understood. Burnes worked on his patience; if Gerard could be kept from speaking at least until his easily-ignited fury had died down, that would make things a great deal easier. After they had run the gauntlet of the bazaar, the houses seemed to drop away. The hill of the Bala Hissar itself was bare, clear for a siege.
This last stretch, as the road turned upwards, seemed to divide and stretch before them, and it seemed to Burnes, as the Bala Hissar receded from them, that this was the road in the paradox; that with each step, the road doubled in length, that each step grew smaller and more painful, and the great fortress would never be reached, as they laboured at its gates, endlessly. But it was mere minutes before they were there at the open gates, and their escort turned, at some unseen signal, and rode off, calling to each other, now, in Persian.
8.
A small man ran up to them and beckoned quickly with his two hands, scowling. He seemed alone, and they followed him into the big square court of the palace. It was quite empty, and they walked briskly across it into another opening, the doors swinging open. Two boys were lounging there, each with a jezail slung across his back, each turbanned massively, and they made some side-to-side swing of the head, acknowledging not them, but their little guide. He gestured and beckoned continuously, and they followed him into another hall, where a group of more soldierly youth stood, waiting, and then into another. As they walked through the rooms of the palace, they acquired some kind of attendance behind them, the boys forming a chattering guard behind them, and all the time the little man, dancing, beckoning, in front of them. They walked through one room after another, the heavy blunt-carved dark wood doors opening weightily, and in every room there was almost no furniture, almost nothing, just plain plaster walls, the narrow windows of a palace in a country which knew all about heat, and about cold. Abruptly, they all fell silent, and at a circling gesture from their guide, stopped. The guide looked them over, critically, as if for the first time, and, with a circling gesture, stirring something in the air, a half-smile, a nod at the guards at the door, conveyed somehow that here they were. The doors were brought open and their guards fell back behind them, as they walked, in an awe they tried to subdue, into the great hall of the Amir. And there he was.
The hall was bare, long and square, with a single step at the end rising to a modest platform. There was nothing in the room except a huge Turkey carpet, rich and deep as rubies. At the far end of the hall, perched on the edge of the step, sat the Amir. A group of courtiers and mullahs, ten or twelve, stood behind him; the courtiers wore swords dangling from their kummur-bund. As they entered, the group seemed to stiffen, and drew back, forming a little fan around the Amir, who did not rise. They bowed deeply from the far end of the hall, rose very slowly, and walked forward. Every five paces, they stopped and bowed again, an obeisance returned with a tiny benevolent craning of the neck by the Amir. It wasn’t a court ceremonial; just a ritual concocted to show the greatest possible deference, which, it was hoped, the Amir would take as some court ritual of Europe. Finally, at ten paces from the Amir, they dropped to their knees and bowed their heads very slowly to the floor, counted to five, as agreed, and raised them again.
The Amir was smiling. ‘Welcome, welcome,’ he said. He was a sharp-featured man, a scimitar of a nose scything through his beautiful humorous face, and his big dark eyes danced, curious or amused, from one to another. His robes were plain, and, like the earth, a dozen shades of brown, and wrapped around his body as he sat, cross-legged, on the edge of the step. By his side, the nobles looked savage, graceless, bundled like washing. He gave a small bow from the neck, not in humility but, as it were, cueing Burnes to speak.
‘Emperor,’ Burnes began. ‘Lord of the distant horizon, Emperor of the wind, King of the Afghans, Heir of Israel …’
That was not quite right. He continued.
‘Heir of Israel, we come to offer you the shade of our friendship. May the shade of our friendship always offer you rest and solace, may the waters of the love between our empires never run dry.’
‘May the song of the nightingale always bless your counsels,’ the Amir returned, ‘and may the wise horses of your empire bear you without tiring to your last home. Sit down, sit down.’
Burnes, Gerard and Mohan Lal awkwardly forced themselves into a cross-legged posture; a painful business in high-topped boots.
‘Greetings, Sikunder Burnes,’ the Amir said. ‘Your name is auspicious.’
An old and now familiar joke, from much repetition. Memories were long here, and every single Afghan, on hearing Burnes’s name, had asked him if he were Alexander the Great, come to rob the country again. It had seemed unfortunate; now, he had come to see it was just their sense of humour. ‘There is nothing, thank God, I share with the Greek Alexander, and come not to plunder your kingdom, but in all respect.’
The nobles, teetering with nervously thrilled anxiety, now gave way to a general giggling, stopped with one quick sideways jerk of the Amir’s head. Behind him, the two pairs of double doors, one on either side of the throne room, were half opened; it had clearly been a great honour that, on their entry into the Bala Hissar, the double doors were all opened. Out of the doors came now a procession of cooks, bearing great dishes of heavy beaten silver, starting with a whole steaming lamb, lying on its back with its legs pathetically upwards in a sea of steaming spinach. It was, Burnes estimated, ten o’clock in the morning, and Gerard was tensing at the sight.
‘How many kings are there in Europe?’ Dost Mohammed suddenly asked. ‘And Napoleon, is he still King in Europe?’
‘Ah—’ Burnes said, thrown off balance. But the Amir seemed hardly to mind.
‘I do not understand,’ the Amir continued. ‘It seems that the lands of the kings of Europe march with each other. Are they on good terms, or do they fight over their borders? How can they exist without destroying one another? I am most interested, Sikunder Burnes, to have the benefit of your wisdom and knowledge.’
Burnes recollected himself. He had been made sleepy by the East, and had been preparing for a long series of introductory gestures; the mutual flattery for half an hour, the commendation and reluctant acceptance of every single dish, the entertainment from the professional anecdotalist. He hadn’t anticipated anything like conversation starting up for at least two hours.
‘There are many countries in Europe, great Amir,’ he began. Dost Mohammed, gathering up his retinue, gestured them to their places on the carpet around the colossal morning feast. He drew Burnes to his right side, and seemed to be listening with great attention, the Amir’s big dark sad eyes fixed on him as he spoke. When the list had come to an end, he took a deep hissing breath through his nose, like a horse after exercise.
‘I see,’ he said. ‘It seems to me that your advancement in civilization, as you describe it, does not save you from war and dispute.’
‘It is to be feared so.’
The minor nobility and clergy, all trembling with curiosity, now responded to some kind of sign from the Amir, and fell on the food with a terrible cheerful eagerness.
‘It is said,’ a very young prince asked, ‘that in your country, the flesh of pigs is eaten. Is this true, Sikunder Burnes?’
The Amir waved away the question before Burnes could answer it. ‘Tell me about taxation in Europe,’ he said. ‘How do your kings collect money to conduct their wars?’
‘Such a thing can barely interest the great Amir,’ Gerard interposed, ‘so peaceful are his lands and the lives of the people under his wise rule.’
‘Nevertheless, I want to know,’ the Amir said, not taking his eyes off Burnes. ‘Tell me about taxation.’
‘And you, great Amir,’ Burnes said. ‘What do you know of the people of Europe? Have you, with your own eyes, seen the embassies of Russia?’
Dost Mohammed took a piece of bread, and chewed it, thoughtfully.
‘Pray, sir,’ Dr Gerard said abruptly. ‘What are your times of prayers?’
The mullah, on safe ground here, immediately began to rattle off the list. Gerard interrupted him. ‘You are enjoined, I think, by the Koran, to pray before sunrise and after sunset?’
‘Yes, yes,’ the mullah said. ‘Yes, and damned be the infidel who neglects such prayers.’
Gerard could hardly contain himself, his feet twitching with his suppressed theological glee. ‘Tell me, sir,’ he went on, his eyebrows shooting up in theatrical amazement, ‘how one of the faithful would carry out this injunction in the Arctic Circle?’
The mullah hardly paused. ‘In every part of the world are the injunctions of the Koran to be obeyed, except in some circumstances while travelling, when it is written that—’
‘Quite, quite, quite,’ Gerard went on. ‘But in the Arctic Circle, man.’
‘The—’ the mullah paused, uncertain.
‘The Arctic Circle is the utmost point of the earth, sir, the Ultima Thule, the furthest point on the geographical globe, far north of any inhabited or habitable spot. It exhibits – and this is my query – a seasonal curiosity, for five or six months of the year. In the winter, the sun does not rise; in the summer, the sun does not set, and the barren northern lands are plunged into a night which lasts for months, and, in the summer, a perpetual day. Sir, I repeat my question. How may these prayers be performed in a land where there is neither sunrise nor sunset? Are we to suppose that the faithful Esquimaux are only enjoined to perform their devotions twice a year?’
Gerard was enjoying himself too much, Burnes reflected, and now the mullah had had a moment to consider the question and make something up. He glanced at the Amir, and, to his slight surprise, there was no sense of insult there, but, over the sharp hooked nose, a glittering and amused look in the eyes. Dost Mohammed, too, was enjoying himself.
‘Quite, quite,’ the mullah said. ‘The Prophet himself visited the faithful Eska, the faithful Eska. It is said. And in such countries it has always been the custom that prayers are not required, in those countries, yes, it is sufficient to repeat the Quluma.’
‘Permit me to ask, sir,’ Burnes cut in with a confident feeling that, now, he was entertaining the Dost, ‘in which chapter of the Koran this doctrine may be found? We poor infidel, alas, may not claim to know or understand the sacred writings.’
‘Yes,’ Dost Mohammed added. ‘Yes, where is this extraordinary idea to be found? I do not remember such a thing. And when is the Prophet supposed to have found time to convert the Eska? I suppose at the same time he was travelling to Engelstan to pay his homage to Sikunder Burnes’s grandfather, fool.’
The poor mullah started to blush furiously, and the argument was taken up in the far corner of the room. Burnes dared to look directly at the Amir, who was twinkling graciously.
‘You see,’ the Amir said to Burnes, leaning over confidentially and entirely ignoring the gurgle and chatter of the debate, ‘both our fools and our wise men love to argue, and hope never to conclude their arguments. And in your country, do the wise debate, so as to outlast the nightingale’s song?’
‘From dusk to dawn, great Amir,’ Burnes said. ‘And in every land, I think.’
‘But your companion has made an interesting point,’ the Amir said. ‘And one which the mullahs, now, will never settle. Perhaps you should return in seven years, and see what conclusion they have reached, because I fear they will not agree today.’
The Amir looked distinctly amused by this prospect. Burnes looked at him, and the Amir looked, frankly, back; and, for once, looking into the eyes of one of the great princes of the Orient, Burnes did not feel like a rabbit transfixed by a snake.
‘The climate of your city is most healthy, great Amir,’ Burnes said, slipping back into idle compliments. ‘And the beauty of your people is the most remarkable I have ever seen in my travels.’
‘If you stay, Sikunder,’ the Amir said, shrugging briefly, ‘you will be struck by the Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days, and you will not think the climate so fine.’
‘The Wind, Amir?’
‘It strikes at travellers, and may take only one. A pestilential wind, which strikes and kills.’ The other Afghans had fallen silent now. ‘It attacks like a cold wind, and leaves the traveller senseless. And the flesh of the man struck by the Wind falls from the bones, and limbs soften and fall away from each other, and the hair falls out at the touch. A disease of the low-lands, a curse of the Wind.’
‘Pray God—’ Gerard said.
‘And now, Sikunder Burnes,’ the Amir went on, quite calmly. ‘Let us speak of your European alchemists.’
9.
And so, when the infidel had been fed, and watered, and dismissed for the day, Dost Mohammed looked out over his city. Dost Mohammed, son of Sarfraz, son of Hajji Jamal, son of Usaf, son of Yaru, son of Mohammed, son of Omar, son of Khizar, son of Ismail, son of Nek, son of Daru, son of Saifal, son of Barak, son of Abdal, Abdal the Great, father of the Afghans, Heir of Israel, Lord of the Wind, Emperor of the distant horizons; Dost Mohammed looked over the city in his easy splendour, and, in the empty room, let his marvellous mind fill with guile. No noise of feeling crumpled his face, and he thought as long as he could about the English. They, surely, would be useful; the heavy useful English, having money and guns and land, could usefully help the Amir to stay just as he was, just where he was, and continue in his usual ways, without offering interference, preventing trouble without knowing, exactly, what they were doing. Presently the call of the imam to prayer drifted up from the city. Dost Mohammed began, quite slowly, on his devotions. As he rose and fell, his head lifting and dropping over the divine flawed complexity of the prayer-mat, his lips muttering in the empty room, his mind continued to dwell, quite properly, on punishment. It was the Amir’s duty each night to determine the punishments to be visited on wrongdoers the next day, and it was to this which, in prayer, he now turned his mind. From the mosques in the city, a rumbling muttering of prayer filled the city with noise, thousands of the devout rising and falling, a single huge multiple sound, and Dost Mohammed rose and fell in prayer, and thought of violence. The wrongdoers the next day were a various bunch. Low thieves, the adulterous twelve-year-old wife of one of the sons of the Amir, the rebellious chief of a tribe whose lands lay just within the uncertain shifting borders of the kingdom. Hanging and beheading and dragging behind horses for the thieves, as was ordained. The adulterous princess to be thrown down the well of the Bala Hissar itself.
And, for the seditious leader – Dost Mohammed thought hard. He despised rebellion, because it always failed; and failure was what Dost Mohammed despised most, being a blot on the face of God. His head lifted and lowered above the glowing ruby prayer-mat, and for the moment he could not think of any punishment. Then he remembered the decreed fate of Sayad Ata, in his youth; he had been caught in rebellion. His fate had been to be tied down on his breast while an elephant trampled on him. Dost Mohammed, deep in prayer, remembered the devout, righteous and splendid sight of the death of Sayad Ata; how the unworthy descendant of the Prophet himself had groaned and wailed at the approach of the beast! How his followers had groaned in the crowd, not understanding where the path of right had led, as if a thousand elephants were approaching, to tread on them! How his shrieks had been stopped, like a finger placed over the hole in a leaking whistling goatskin, as his bones, all at once, had cracked and popped! How grand and dreadful the sudden gouts of blood from every orifice, bursting out like a spirit-witness to the Faith, spilling into the dust! How right and good, the decreed end of Sayad Ata! Rising and falling in his devotions, his mind filling with the happy contemplation of the exercise of justice and right, the Amir quite forgot that some other means of execution would have to be found for tomorrow’s rebellious tribesman, there being, at the moment, no imperial elephant to be had. What had happened to the imperial elephant Dost Mohammed could not, for the moment, quite recollect; whether the dingy, foul-tempered, foul-smelling and noisy beast had been borrowed by some fool son, given to another recalcitrant tribe as an expensive joke, or had simply wandered off into the hills, Dost Mohammed could not think, so firmly fixed was his mind on the imperial devotions, the imperial punishments. But soon the great Amir, son of Sarfraz, son of Hajji Jamal, all the way back to Abdal and the Heir of Israel himself, would have to think up some new way of putting the better class of criminal to death. Tomorrow, perhaps, he would ask the infidel if he wanted to come and see the executions. Tomorrow, indeed, he would ask the infidel how criminals were put to death in Engelstan. The infidel, after all, was bound to be full of ingenious new ideas.
At the other side of the city, the infidel was sitting or standing, and not saying anything much. Gerard had taken off his full dress uniform, and was sitting in his long thick smalls, holding but not reading a book; his mouth pursed in concentration, he was staring over the top, examining the clean rough floor. Mohan Lal had absented himself, and was in the latrines. Burnes, standing at the window, was giving way to an unfamiliar sensation, the slow scarlet flashes of terror. He had expected relief after his audience with the Amir. He had met emperors before, had met with the great of the Company and the Government. He had been ushered into the presence of the jewelled savage potentates of the East, had sat with tyrants whose teeth were blacked and pointed, as with the blood of their own children, and each time, before, had experienced the same sequence of events. Before, there had been a sort of dread, suppressed by the will like a child’s balloon held to the ground by a spreading fist; then the willed exercise of confidence as the great savage potentate, whether a pantomime cannibal king or a savage director of the Company in his Bloomsbury palace, turned his eyes to the pink-and-white stripling and listened to the cautious opinions, buried in carefully lavish flatteries. And afterwards, that sense of relief, as the fist let the balloon go and the dread flew away, away, leaving only a nervous flurry of chat.
Now Burnes did not want to chat. He felt no relief. He felt no nervousness. He felt only the same terror he had felt before they had set off for the Amir’s palace, and the kindness of the Amir only augmented the terror he had felt at his quizzing presence. All at once, he felt the full imperial splendour of the Amir’s mind, of which he had been permitted to glimpse only the merest fraction; he had recognized that here was no ostentatious potentate, but the weight and show of the imperial, the Napoleonic mind up there could not be greater if it buried itself in rubies. He was not, to be perfectly honest, quite sure what if anything had happened to them, up there in the Bala Hissar; only that tomorrow it was going to happen again. Tomorrow, they would go back, and tomorrow it would be the same. He would walk through the hard-packed mud streets, corralled between horses, walking between hot flanks in his thick shining uniform, and feel himself drenched in sweat and dread.
There was an itch there in him, there, in his hands, and, for the first time since arriving in Kabul, he went to his pack, and took out his notebook, a knife, and the last scrap of a pencil. Slowly, paying no attention to the others in the room, he cut away at the stump, baring the lead, and then squatted on the floor. He took the pencil in his itching hand, and began to write.
‘The Afghans,’ he wrote, ‘are a nation of children; in their quarrels they fight, and become friends without any ceremony. They cannot conceal their feelings from one another, and a person with any discrimination may at all times pierce their designs. No people are more incapable of managing an intrigue. I was particularly struck with their idleness; they seem to sit listlessly for the whole day, staring at each other; how they live it would be difficult to discover, yet they dress well, and are healthy and happy.’
While he wrote, the itch, the uneasy fear, seemed to pass, as he described what he was so certain of, and seemed to bring the Afghans who surrounded them, every one under the point of his pencil. Now, as he wrote, they were a nation of children, and he, describing them, felt for the moment quite safe. But as he stopped and stared at the wall, the feeling returned. ‘I imbibed a very favourable impression,’ he wrote, ‘of their national character.’
10.
Under the lighted window, five squatting men sat, their attention focused on the eldest of them, his beard thick and square and white on his brown face, like a silver spade. Sadiq, older than he could tell, was telling them a story. His stories were not princesses in gardens and wizards and magic rings, but stories of this city, stories of the past. He was telling them what their fathers had told them many times, the story of how the brave, the great Futteh Khan, great brother of the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, met his end at the hands of the stinking enemy. They knew the story, had heard it a hundred times, from their fathers, their mothers, and, dozens of times, many many dozens of times, sitting just here, squatting against the wall, listening to just such a storyteller as the fierce-eyed Sadiq, rousing them to vengeance, muttering into the listening night. ‘And when the Vizier Futteh Khan returned, the treacherous Prince Kamran, chief of the stinking Suddozyes, he fell on him, and seized him, and his eyes were put out. And when he was blind and powerless he was not left to wander the deserts to beg for pity, powerless as he was, but was sliced, and cut, and yet he suffered all in silence. First the treacherous Prince Kamran demanded that he and his brothers surrender to the Persian Emperor, and the Vizier refused. And so Atta Mahmoud Khan, may his torments in hell be unending, sliced off his ear, and another the other ear, and a third his nose. And all the time they lied and said the Vizier had done them wrong. May we rise up and avenge the Vizier and all his enemies! And then his right hand and then his left, and all these torments and lies the Vizier Futteh Khan bore silently and without a sound, as the blood gushed from his face and the stumps of his arms like the fount of a river in spring, so brave was he; but when his enemies took his beard, and with their knives cut it from his face, he wept from his bleeding eyes and cried out from his tongueless mouth, to think how his pride was treated. Vengeance fall on his enemies! Vengeance in the hearts of the subjects of the Amir!’
Above, by the light of a candle which stank of tallow, and burned the walls black and smoked out the room, Burnes, oblivious, wrote on, setting down the Afghans, making sure of what they were and what he knew. For now, this would do. In the end, however, he came to examine his feelings, his sensations; and came to contemplate the particular hollow beating, between dread and excitement, which settled in the stomach at especial moments. Especial moments; standing there, in the hall of the Bala Hissar, waiting to be shown into the presence of the Amir. It was a feeling like that of standing there before a woman who waited only for him to seize her. A feeling like sitting, even, at his desk, taking up a sheaf of paper and beginning to write, to set down what he had seen. Each time the same feeling, each time, a feeling not to be argued with, or explained away. So strong it was, and it remained, that he concluded, in the end, when his life had become what it would become, that it was not, after all, what it so resembled, the awareness of the physical manifestation of sex, nor of the possibility of sex, but merely that of possibility. For him, the excitement which hollowed out his stomach and made his heart beat would always be produced not by what might happen, but what would not, despite all appearances, occur, and it was for the empty promises of chance that his heart beat, and his eyes grew big, and his stomach hollowed, and he stood, and stared at what was there to be stared at. Just that. And, each day, before he began to write, the proverb of the poet came to mind, the proverb carved deep on the tomb of the Emperor Babur, and he spoke it to himself, in his sincere deep rumbling Persian. Drink wine in the city of Kabul, and send round the cup without stopping; for Kabul is a mountain, a sea, a town, a desert.
THREE (#ulink_05b1b881-5c39-5569-9a9a-629bb5c3ff0d)
1.
LONDON, IN MAY.
At any other place in the world, late May would customarily be termed spring, and call forth the songs of birds, and the gambolling of infant mammals, and their attendant poets to sing their praises in the approved manner. Here, in London, in the fourth decade of the last century but one, there are no birds, or only ones so very brown and grey and drooping it is as if their native colours are all washed out with the incessant rinsing which falls from the London skies, birds which make no noise but an occasional croak to clear their throats of dirt. There are no lambs for the poets to celebrate, but only the usual London dogs, lying, their limbs curled up, at every street corner, too dejected to do anything but raise their heads in mild supplication at every passing boy’s kick, too far gone in hopelessness to make any noise but a quiet moan, like the wind in a loose pane. You may be sure that the month makes no difference to them, or only in that the earth they find themselves licking ceaselessly off their pelts is dry like dust, or wet like mud. There are poets, it is true, here in London, in the fourth decade of the last century but one, and they write, it is true, about spring and lambs and birds. But to do so, I suppose, they are obliged to shut their eyes against the city they live in, and make something up.
London knows no seasons; knows nothing of spring or summer or winter. It knows nothing but two seasons: Dust, and Mud. Now, at this moment, in May, we seem to be getting towards the end of Mud. Mud settled in more than six months ago, and has shown no sign of taking its leave just yet. The streets have settled into their pristine ooze, and if there be any bedrock beneath the vast sucking mass which London is proud to call a street, no one pretends any longer to know. Anything dropped in the street is instantly swallowed by London and its mud, and is never seen again; a prayer-book, a ring, a hammer, a cloak; all fall to the ground and are forever lost, deep in the mud and slime and filth of the London street. Once a poor musician let his bassoon fall, not far from Seven Dials; the mud deprived him of his livelihood, and the family, tragically bassoonless, now must beg for their merest sufficiencies, there, outside Mrs Lirriper’s drapery shop. Once, as mothers tell their naughtier sons, a small boy let go of his mother’s hand while crossing the great swamp of Piccadilly, and, untethered, sank to the bottom of the mud, never to be seen again. Soon, it is to be hoped, the weather will improve, and Mud be succeeded by Dust, though it seems unlikely that any poet will want to sing the praises of that modern season. When that happens, everything changes; the sounds of the city alter from the obscene sucking and splash and brown drain-gurgle of one half the year, to the dry crackle and quiet thudding of the other half. Those who cannot leave the city will start to complain, not of the wet and chill ceaselessly rising around their ankles, but the dry choking heat which gets into the throat, and strangles the Londoner all day and all night.
But if it is true that London knows no seasons, that, perhaps, is because it knows only one Season. It is here, in May, that we find ourselves; here, standing with the linkboys and the cutpurses and the crossing-sweepers, each unpromising youth with the tools of his unpromising trade, standing and gawping at the slow procession unfurling before them, at this hour of early dusk in late spring. It is the height of the Season, and also, nearly, the end of it – a paradox more often stated than relished. The linkboys and cutpurses and crossing-sweepers stand just where Piccadilly turns into Park Lane, and watch the procession before them, silently or raucously calling out, according to their temperament. Up Piccadilly comes a succession of carriages, each a closed black box on wheels, shiny and locked, drawn, mostly, by two black horses, for all the world as if the cashboxes of Threadneedle Street had, with one voice, cried, ‘Enough of the City!’ and, equipped each with a pair of plate-faced footmen and a set of wheels, set off to see if what they had always heard of the West End and its Court could possibly be the case. Up Piccadilly come the melancholy cashboxes, and, at the corner, you can see, as they turn, the whinnying wheels and hooves pulling free of the mud, that each, too, contains a treasure.
The linkboys cry out, with ridicule or amazement, at what they see. At this corner, the inhabitants of each carriage lean forward, and look out. Because here, you see, at this corner, lives the Duke, the old victor of Waterloo, and everyone is curious about the Duke’s habits, and will, on passing from Piccadilly into the Park, lean forward in the hope of a brief glimpse of the great man. It is a hope which is often gratified; the Duke is a man who likes to show himself, and strolls, daily, in the Park to accept the homage of strangers. But tonight, there is nothing to be seen. If the inhabitants of the carriages sink back with a minor disappointment, their evenings indefinably clouded now in some way, we have not been disappointed; because now, with the linkboys and the cutpurses, we have caught a marvellous glimpse of a lady or two. Out of the funereal darkness of the inside of a carriage, for all the world like the glitter of a black cashbox being flung open, a glistening white face appears, bathed and almost certainly scented, a white face which allows you to dream of the white flesh, the dream of white lace and silk almost certainly hidden underneath the dark cloak, and, most marvellous of all – something which forces even the wiser cynics of the observing mob into an awed silence – the unmistakable deep glitter of diamonds, brought from the far East for no reason but to decorate these cool, lovely, clean faces. Everywhere else in the city – everywhere else in the great world, as far as the linkboys know – is mud and filth, and these white faces with their bright white light of diamonds shine like unaccustomed, unimaginable virtue.
They flash in the gaze of the street observers for one second, these costly faces, and then move on in their stately way. Where are they all going, all in the same direction? Why, they are going out, naturally, because this is the Season, and in the Season it does not do, if you are of a certain level in society, to stay at home. It is required of you to put on your least comfortable clothes, ones fitted neither for a London cold nor a London heat, and go and sit for a few hours with people you know nothing of and care nothing for, drawing what satisfaction you may from the fact that when you leave to go home, outside there may be poor people who may be prepared to gawp, who, you hope, are eaten up with envy of you; because if no one in London envies you in your party-going plight, it is hard to see why you should continue the exercise.
2.
The carriage now rounding the corner extracts itself with such unpredictable lurchings from the mud beneath the wheels that the cockaded footman on top almost drops his reins. Inside, a startled face lunges towards the window, to the rich appreciation of the street onlookers; they like a nice-looking girl. The nice-looking girl smooths her dress, braces herself as if with cold, and draws back into her seat. By her is an old man, his skin so taut and leathery, his eyes so yellow and unobserving, and the whole effect so quickly angular as he sits there in the clothes for his immaculate evening that you almost expect a forked tongue to dart out, to catch a fly or two. His blood is cold, his movements quick and stiff. He is not in the first flush of fashion, nor of youth; his clothes, though immaculate, have a distinct first-gentleman-of-Europe air, as if remembering on his behalf what he has now forgotten, his high season, so long ago. The fashion of thirty years before, too, accounts for his air; not inattentive, exactly, but strongly attentive to something not in the carriage, something Bella cannot see and does not wish to share. The ruby witch, she once heard him call it; the opium he has been taking, daily, for decades. In recent years, noticing, perhaps, that the young did not care for it and often disapproved of it, he has stopped mentioning it with his customary glee, even to what remains of his family. Bella would not mention it, but has grown used to the idea that when her father hands her into the carriage on their evening round, his touch will not be firm, his gaze fixed on a spot somewhere beyond her. The jerk of the carriage into or out of the mud jolted him into seeing; now his eyes are glazing over again, into their customary blank bliss. His daughter looks at him; she knows the expression very well, and blushes for him.
‘I see the Duke is still in town,’ she says.
‘The Duke would never leave town before – before—’ her father says, as his look moves back inside the carriage. ‘I remember, once, many years ago, before you were born or not long after. In the Park we were, and I greeted the Duke. Old acquaintances we were, and he stopped and pinched y’brother’s cheek. “Fine child, that, Colonel,” he said. And Harry took one look at him, with his great beak and his great ramrod shoulders and started to howl. Never saw the Duke again, not to speak to.’
‘Poor Harry,’ Bella Garraway murmurs. Her father has been galvanized by his own anecdote, which Bella has heard many times before; everyone in London has one story about the Duke of Wellington, and – Bella sometimes thinks – each is told and retold until every story has been heard by every man, woman and child in London, and then they die, stories melting into silence, and oblivion. Her father’s story always moves her, strangely, even though it hardly amounts to a story, so ruefully does it reflect on poor Harry and his hopes. She has no response for his story, but it hardly matters, because now Colonel Garraway is sinking back into his sharp-elbowed opiate haze.
The line of wheeled cashboxes moves on, stately as an oriental caravan through the trackless wastes of Piccadilly and Park Lane, all with one end, it seems, in view. At this time of the year, at this time of the afternoon, it is always thus; the upper few thousand, scrubbed and whited like so many peripatetic sepulchres, squeeze themselves into their least comfortable clothes, and set off for the evening’s entertainment. To dinner, to a rout, to a dance, to the opera; the upper few thousand, encased in whatever it has been decreed they should wear, limber stiffly through their doors, and into their carriages, to set off to see whatever people they have been seeing every week, all through the Season. Stiffened by their unyielding but undeniably fashionable raiment, you would recognize a member of the upper few thousand even unclad, fresh from the bath, or at the loose-robed gates of heaven; their gait is jointed and unnatural as a puppet’s is, and an old dowager walks as smartly as an upright old soldier. You would recognize them naked, but they are held up by their clothes and, stripped of their acquired carapace, they would surely fall, bonelessly, to the ground. As they manoeuvre their much corseted old bodies in or out of the carriage, it is difficult not to fancy that they creak in the exercise. But fashion dictates the stiff brocades and tight corseting, and fashion, here and now, is obeyed as promptly as an admiral.
Of course, everyone who now is making their slow path up Park Lane knows everything that is to be known of their fellow pilgrims. They are a very few, few thousand, and only rarely do they admit a new postulant at the crepuscular shrines of the fashionable London evening. Rarely, and usually by virtue merely of being born, is a new member of Society admitted. Money may admit you as a curiosity; or genius, particularly if displayed by a foreigner about whose origins it is possible to be rather vague, such as that excitingly-coiffeured Signor Paganini who was everywhere with his recitals two years ago. Adventure, too, or heroism committed by a suitably handsome young man in the East may serve very well to supply the fashionable two-legged curiosity of the Season. A young man with a good tale to tell, possessed of the fortune which accrues so readily in India and the deserts which lie beyond the Bosphorus, may be admitted to have a splendid Season, listened to by every ear from Park to Park, and carry into the country at the end the memory of adoring listening faces, turned up to his, white fans clasped by plump white hands, fluttering off like Cabbage Whites as the marvellously retold anecdote reaches its terrifying climax and the brave young man saves the little Rani from the jaws of the man-eating tiger. He may, also, carry the certainty of hundreds of new friends, many brave Seasons to come, if the hero of the day is foolish; if he is wise, however, he will pack his bags and go back to the scene of his great triumphs after one Season. Next year, as everyone knows, the great world will supply some new excitement, and the great tiger-beating hero will be cut in the Park by all his old friends, now so fascinated by a seven-foot American funambulist, a Russian poetess or eight-year-old watercolourist that his old stories start to seem very old hat indeed. He will be well advised to retire where he can, and draw what solace he can from his thousands, the vast and grateful emerald the Maharajah awarded him, the rapidly-acquired fat sensible wife.
3.
For the moment, the hero of the hour suspects none of this. Burnes is dressing, in as leisurely a fashion as he can manage. Here, in the dressing room of the house he has taken for the Season, he would not think that his time in the stage lights is drawing to a close. If he thinks anything, he probably considers that he is entering on the first stages of a vertiginous ascent. By now, he is intimate with people he barely dared to notice a few months ago; he finds, with a regret that does him credit, that he no longer has much time for those who introduced him to all those salons, before Christmas; he finds, with a malicious pleasure which quite surprises him, that the Montrose neighbours who snubbed his father twenty years ago now queue to drop their cards in the silver filigree bowl in the hall; they, those Montrose neighbours, have been turned in his eyes into what everyone laughs at, a set of nabob Scotch with raw-skinned ambitious wives. Burnes is decent to everyone, because that is his way. He has started to be noticed by the great – by Dukes – by Royalty, even, once; and, surely, the time will come when the brief notice, the honour graciously conferred in crowded rooms, turns into intimacy, and he finds himself a welcome visitor at every house in town. Perhaps not this year, because the Season is drawing to its brilliant close; but next year. Yes, perhaps next year.
His fingers have slowed, stopped. He stretches out his hand, and Charles hands him the next item in the ritual, in silent deference. For one moment, as he ties the elaborate knot, it occurs to him that he and his valet must be the same age. He looks, critically, in the glass at the final result. He has dined out twenty-one times already this month, and told his story twenty-one times. He looks, critically, at himself in the glass and prepares to go out, to tell it once more. What he sees in the glass is what you expect to see, of the hero of the minute, or more or less so. Not so brown as he was, not so thin as he was. He has been taken in from the heat and dust and wind, and left to pale and fatten on an unaccustomed diet; a diet of drawing rooms, and lobsters and champagne; of morning walks in the Park with no exercise more strenuous than the three-inch raising of the hat; of the ceaseless attentions of the most accomplished young ladies the metropolis can supply wholesale. That the accomplishments of the young ladies run no further than the performance of half a dozen Irish airs on harp or pianoforte hardly troubles Burnes. If he wants other, bolder accomplishments than the ones fashionable London permits of its women, he knows by now where to find them. Under the softening regime, he is quite altered from the man of six months ago; no longer dark and lined and meatless as a piece of old leather that has lain out in the tropical sun for years on end, but pale and soft. He looks at his own veal-face, there in the glass. Only his hard hands betray the fact that he has led quite a different life from his eager listeners; only the bright light in his dark eyes shows that he has seen things they will never see, or wish to.
Charles pauses in his ministrations, looks inquiringly at Burnes in the glass. Burnes becomes aware that the valet said something.
‘Yes, Charles?’ he says.
‘My lady Woodcourt’s, sir?’ Charles repeats.
‘Yes,’ Burnes says. ‘Yes, alas.’
‘Lady Woodcourt,’ Charles says, managing to sound both approving of Burnes’s destination this evening and, shaking his head, disapproving of his master’s irreverent tone. Burnes hardly minds; by now, he can afford, he believes, to appear unconcerned by even the most alarming invitation. And who is Lady Woodcourt, after all? A wicked old woman who has lifted her skirts for two kings and who knows how many prime ministers, whose whoring days ought to be over by now. Lady Woodcourt, indeed; a woman he knew nothing of six months ago. Charles takes the brushes and applies them to Burnes’s head, the dressing now almost complete. ‘May I ask—’ he continues.
‘No,’ Burnes says. ‘No, this will be all. I shan’t be needing you again tonight, thank you.’ He has always been good with his men, and, as Charles takes the clothes brush to wipe away the flakes of scurf on the waistcoat, he grins at him. Charles nods, demurely, and finally helps Burnes on with his immaculately shining black coat.
4.
Half a mile away, the wicked old woman is descending, very carefully, a staircase. All that perfumes and silk and preservatives can do for her charms has been done, which is not much. Footmen stand around, upright as chessmen on the black and white marble floor, and she comes down the stairs, their bent little old mistress. As usual, the first arrivals have preceded her, and are now kicking their heels in the anteroom. Lady Woodcourt does not hurry on their account, nor does it occur to her to acknowledge them. She moves, a slow bent little old woman, down the stairs as if she would like an arm or a stick to keep her upright. Here, in her house, she seems a nervous little bird in a brilliant gold cage; everything so baby-blue and gold, every wall so hung with looking glasses to entertain its denizen with contemplation of herself. And, between the mirrors, still more representations of Lady Woodcourt. Three or four portraits of her at her peak. In one, she is a girl in her father’s grounds. The painter, long ago, saw something in her mind, and has her holding a whip and snaffle. Another is an embarrassing and improbable portrait of her in mythological guise, as – as – as (even Lady Woodcourt, guiding her guests round, has sometimes to pause and think and dredge her old mind) Minerva, the foolish-looking owl just escaping from her limp pale fingers. The third is her wedding portrait, and unwary callers have been known to inquire of each other who the little gentleman in brown could possibly be. That useful and patient Sir Bramley is still to be seen over the fire in his wife’s London house, clinging to her arm in fear and disbelief. What happened to him in life, no one quite knows. A very young man ventured once that he had been washed, and dissolved, being nothing, in the end, but varnish and ornament. Certainly it is difficult to believe in Sir Bramley as anything more substantial than his painted past self, but the remark got back, and the very young man was seen no more at Lady Woodcourt’s. In reality, it is thought, Sir Bramley lives in Italy for the sake of his health, and leaves Lady Woodcourt to the exercise of her influence and her many protectors.
No smooth-skinned oil-fresh Minerva now, she comes forward into the room and staggers into a chair. Almost at once, the blue-coated chessman at the door gives a start and calls out the names of the first skulking guests.
‘Colonel and Miss Garraway,’ he calls, blushing and gulping like the boy he is. In through the door pop the old Colonel and his pretty daughter. He, behind some perfect translucent ruby glaze, is a hopeless and declining old beau of hers, a useful stopgap who does no harm to anyone but himself; next to him, his daughter seems alarmingly alert and clean and young. Lady Woodcourt greets them without rising, her hand resting on a bijou gewgaw, a knobbled warty Chinese bronze pig. The girl, she is pleased to see, is as pretty as everyone says, as she follows her father’s abstracted bow with a gracefully embarrassed bob, scrutinizing with intense juvenile interest the finer details of the Aubusson, murmuring something which might have been ‘My lady’. A great improvement, all in all, on the Colonel’s late wife, who came into a room and waited for the company to rise and say how-de-do, as if she deserved nothing less. This girl, at least, would not laugh in your face and call you her dear Fanny.
Bella Garraway comes into the room, and her feet in their thin slippers are glad not to be kept waiting on marble any longer. It is her first time at the famous, the fascinating Lady Woodcourt’s; her papa has taken care not to alarm her, but all the same, she is wearing what diamonds Mama’s case has yielded up. Lady Woodcourt sits, smiling vaguely; a woman shrivelled and brown as an old apple, her filmy old eyes drifting perpetually away from the mark. Bella advances, and submits to Lady Woodcourt’s grip, a fierce clutch like the clasp of a purse. She just drinks her in; her thin body, her brown wrinkled flesh drifting loosely within the hard carapace of her boned gown like a boat at its moorings. Bella has no idea, in reality, who Fanny Woodcourt is. But Bella, as her sister and governesses always privately remark, is quick on the uptake, and her eyes run quickly over the room, assessing each gift, each bibelot with the commercial eye of an auctioneer. Each object, indeed, has its magnificent provenance, since Lady Woodcourt buys nothing for herself, and takes only from the grandest of her admirers. Anything Bella’s father ever gave her is surely in Lady Woodcourt’s dressing room by now, if not passed on to the housekeeper. Bella drops her eyes in modesty, but if she will not meet Lady Woodcourt’s gaze, she is at least curious enough to inspect her voluble possessions. Whether each porcelain treasure, each glittering glass is the gift of his Grace, Excellency, Majesty hardly matters. Bella looks around, assessing, and sees what Fanny Woodcourt has been.
‘My daughter, Lady Woodcourt,’ Colonel Garraway says, with all his opium-glazed gravity. Lady Woodcourt nods, so calmly that Bella unkindly wonders whether she, too, has been drinking from the phial of the ruby witch. She has learnt how to be suspicious of anything as innocent as composure or boredom in anyone much over the age of forty-five. They all do it, she suspects; and none of them discusses it in her hearing, ever.
‘I’m afraid you will find us all,’ Lady Woodcourt says, ‘a very dull old company tonight. Do sit down. I am quite mortified, my dear, to inflict such a, such a bundle of dry old sticks on you. I positively fear you may never come again, and that, that, that—’
‘That would never do,’ Colonel Garraway supplies gallantly, handing his daughter to a settle, and sitting down after her. Lady Woodcourt laughs brilliantly, a sound as if her glassy old bones have tumbled loose, all at once, and chimed together into a heap, somewhere inside her skin.
‘I’m sure it will be delightful,’ Bella says, inadequately.
‘Such a lot of dry old sticks,’ Lady Woodcourt says, with a touch of steel, not liking to be contradicted even in this mock-apology. She seems to believe her own polite disclaimer for a second, believing what she says as she says it, as all liars must, and a cloud passes over her brow. ‘Still – that wonderful young man – the explorer, who, who, who—’
‘The hero of Bokhara,’ Colonel Garraway adds, smiling. ‘Yes, that very wonderful young man.’
‘Bokhara,’ Lady Woodcourt sighs, relieved. ‘Now that is a place, I swear, not one person in a thousand had heard a jot or, or, or tittle of one year ago. And now we talk of it as readily as we talk of, of—’
‘Dorsetshire,’ Colonel Garraway says.
‘Of Dorsetshire,’ Lady Woodcourt continues. ‘My young friends talk of nothing else. I think one or two, they fancy taking a house in the better quarter of Bokhara for the winter. Now what do you think of that?’
‘I’m sure I don’t know,’ Bella says, faintly alarmed as Lady Woodcourt spectacularly tinkles away.
‘All stuff and nonsense, of course, and I don’t believe any one of them could point to the wretched place on the map. Still, we talk of nothing else, I find, and all down to this singular, ah, fascinating, ah, ah, remarkable young man, all—’
‘Captain Burnes,’ Bella interjects.
‘Indeed. Thank you, my dear,’ Lady Woodcourt says, looking genuinely as if no one has ever done her a greater favour. ‘And now, who is this—’
‘M. le Duc de Neaud,’ the footman calls, or rather attempts, since what he announces is the Duck de Nod. ‘And,’ as a little woman in a snuff-coloured dress scurries in after her diminutive husband, ‘Mme la Duchesse.’
Everyone rises with an audible relief.
‘Delighted – charmed – delighted – quite on time – feared to be early – my dear Fanny – my dear—’ the Duchesse de Neaud spills over. She is English, a chatterbox, resented by no one, welcome everywhere, if she does not come first or leave last. The Duc limits himself to a quick bow and a scowl. He came over after the Revolution and, penniless, married one of those spinsters who attended the old Queen Charlotte, to everyone’s surprise, including hers; her future had seemed to be mapped out in the series of faintly dictatorial books for children she wrote in dull afternoons at Windsor. She turns from Lady Woodcourt to Bella. ‘My dear – my dear—’
Colonel Garraway snaps into awareness. ‘Duchesse,’ he says. ‘My daughter, Bella.’
‘Miss Garraway,’ the Duc says. ‘Charmé.’ But he is already turning, already charmed, it seems, with the next entrants, and Bella sees no reason not to sink back into her chair as the room starts to fill.
5.
‘Charmed – delighted – couldn’t be more—’ the Duchesse says, sitting down by Bella. But she is talking, not to Bella but to a fast-approaching young man, pink in his half-worried, half-confident face. He bows rapidly, crumpling at the middle like a man who has been punched hard.
‘May I inquire,’ the young man says to the Duchesse. Bella stops paying any attention, and concentrates on her fan. The old people are coming in, showing no emotion, walking smoothly around each other, bowing automatically, like puppets on casters. The boy at the door is keeping up, but there is now quite a queue outside, waiting to hand their card and have him call their name. She is called back by her name.
‘I quite doted on Bella when she was too little to know who was kissing her goodnight,’ the Duchesse glitters, aiming her smile somewhere beyond the young man, bowing and smiling nervously. ‘Quite doted on her. I would hug her and affection her, and – such a pretty little thing, and now, quite such a beauty, now, don’t blush, my dear.’
Bella bows, remembering very well what it was like to be clutched to the swarthy old Duchesse’s bosom, heavy and spiked with trinkets; it felt like falling through the window of a jeweller’s shop. The Duchesse bows back, and then the young man bows, and they are all precisely like an entire yard full of tired chickens. She was no Duchesse then, but only an old spinster. The young man presents a familiar face to Bella.
‘How do you do, Miss Garraway,’ the familiar face says.
‘How do you do,’ Bella says firmly back, smiling like the audience at a vaudeville.
‘Miss Gilbert,’ the yelping barker cries into the room, ‘and Miss Jane Gilbert.’
She sees from the smiling guest’s proprietorial security, his relaxed saunter back into the chair, that this is the son of the house. She corrects herself, looking at Lady Woodcourt, who has no sons. She is no more fecund than a sideboard. This, surely, is the guest of honour. ‘How do you do, Mr Burnes. Do you find the climate here suits you? Or do you long for the East?’
‘Have you read Mr Burnes’s book, Miss Garraway?’ the Duchesse interposes. ‘I rave over it – the learning – the wit – the fierce fierce tribes of the exotic East. How brave – how heroic you have been, sir. Have you read his book?’
‘I have tried, sir, so many times, and each time the bookseller sends me back empty promises, leaving me abandoned. I am not entirely hopeless, but your bookseller is quite the jilt, Mr Burnes.’
The Duchesse laughs brilliantly, flutingly; a youthful and yet historic noise, a descending scale directly from old Queen Charlotte’s nurseries. If the Duchesse laughs, there can be no impropriety whatever in this corner of the blue and gold drawing room. Two sisters approach, their faces long as doors: the Gilbert sisters. In mourning, as they so often are, they scrutinize Burnes efficiently. The elder is twenty-seven, and five years ago was sadly disappointed in love; the younger is no older than Bella, but already has her sister’s half-angry air, and will come to nothing in the end.
‘Quite the jilt,’ Bella says, as the sisters move on.
‘You must tell us,’ the Duchesse continues, ‘of your adventures in Bokhara. I long – I pine – for the story, the entire tale, from the horse’s mouth.’
‘So long and dull a story can hardly interest ladies,’ Burnes says conventionally.
‘No, no, Mr Burnes,’ the Duchesse says, but she seems to take him at his word, since she rises and goes, smiling, into the crush. The room is crowded now, and Bella’s father, there, fifteen yards away, is fixed in his gaze and uncomprehending. One of the Gilbert sisters is talking at him, and directing a fierce laugh at him, the laugh of someone who knows rejection well; he looks like a frightened old man. This is how it is, an hour after his dose. She does not know, and does not wish to know, where he buys what he needs; she only knows, with a wave of shame, that he no longer even talks about it. She wants to rescue her father, there, standing in the embrace of his invisible ruby witch. Burnes, next to her, is twitching like a bird on the branch. It is her duty to carry on talking to him about his East, but she looks at her father and has nothing to say to such a stranger.
6.
Through these evenings, these festive London gatherings, people move without any will, like balls on a billiard table. At one end of the space, new balls spill into the confined space, and at the far end, the balls drifting around the smooth space prod each other and drift off unpredictably. An announcement at the door, a pair of new arrivals, somehow nudges the room along a little, and the mass, unwilled, cannons through the room, and the last ripple brings Burnes to his feet, and face to face with Stokes, a brilliant and brilliantly polished writer for the journals, his head smooth and gleaming like marble, his glittering spectacles always ready to be whisked off to make a point. They greet each other, silently.
‘I understand, Mr Burnes, that you have been signally honoured,’ Stokes begins.
‘Beyond my desserts, no doubt, sir,’ Burnes says.
‘I heard that you were signally honoured,’ Stokes persists. ‘By our friend in Brighton.’
‘I would hardly call the King my friend,’ Burnes says. Or yours, he seems to insist.
‘That must have been a thrilling occasion, sir,’ Stokes said.
‘If I were, indeed, honoured by the King’s curiosity in my explorations,’ Burnes says, ‘you could hardly expect me to tell you the purport of the conversation.’
‘Come, come, Burnes,’ Stokes says. ‘I meant no affront. I did not think it was so very secret. It was from the – no, better not to say – but it was from a gentleman of the Court that I heard the interesting fact. Would you prefer to find some more quiet place to talk?’
‘No, sir,’ Burnes said. ‘I can have nothing to say to you that I would keep from any person here present. I was honoured by the King’s interest, who had read my book with the greatest curiosity, and I received the King’s gracious command to Brighton. That is all. A trivial meeting, made remarkable only by the King’s majesty. There is really nothing more to say.’
(He resists the recall of the jovial bulging maggot in silk stockings and a scrubby wig, thumping the floor with his stick, his nervous Queen clutching the gilt sides of the chair, underneath the vast grand mouldings and velvet and gilt, what passed in his late brother’s mind for an oriental palace, and asking such blunt ordinary wrong questions it was not in him to know how to respond, to offer any kind of satisfaction.)
‘Your reticence does you credit, sir,’ Stokes says. ‘I have read your book, and greatly admire it. You exhibit the greatest faculties of curiosity, erudition and exposition. But I reached the end of your book with one burning question, ah, as it were, unextinguished. What in heaven’s name are we doing in Afghanistan? What, come to that, are we doing in India?’
‘Sir, I hardly know what you can mean.’
‘My meaning is this,’ Stokes continues. ‘What drove us to acquire our oriental possessions? And what is driving us to acquire still more? I presume, sir, that you were not in Kabul in pure curiosity. I presume, in short, that your mission was conducted to the sound of those siren voices enjoining us to occupy the whole of Asia, and bankrupt our children and our children’s children and our children’s children’s children. There can be no doubt that you were there to prepare for us to acquire the Punjab, to repeople Afghanistan with our sons and daughters, and open up yet another bottomless pit, to swallow our limited resources – resources which could be put to better use two miles from this house, to clothe and feed the filthy urchins who will beg a farthing from you, and from me, the second we leave our so agreeable hostess’s embrace this evening. What, sir, in heaven’s name, are we doing in India?’
‘You are quite wrong, Mr Stokes,’ Burnes says. This is a familiar argument; he has had it, indeed, with Stokes on previous occasions. ‘There is no intention to add the Punjab or the western tracts of land to our possessions. My mission was purely geographical, purely driven by curiosity. But what, sir, would be the alternative you propose? Were we to stay at home and do nothing?’
‘And why not? What is so wrong with being satisfied with what you have?’
‘Nothing, sir, unless you have the spirit of a Briton. Our possessions, sir, are vast new markets. Do you suppose our little island can contain our native spirit? Of course it cannot. And should we stay at home, relinquish India tomorrow, what would happen? Would the natives not slide back into all manner of native barbarities – the murder of travellers, the forced suicide of widows? Thuggee and suttee? Would the precious flame of Christianity survive six months in such a poisoned atmosphere? Would India, indeed, be left to its own devices? Would not the French perceive an empty space? Would not Russia send its vast armies to bring new barbarities to a barbarous land? Sir, I suspect you of the worst sort of cynicism.’
‘Perhaps,’ Stokes says, smiling, maddeningly, like a teacher praising a moderately bright pupil. ‘I admire your spirit, Mr Burnes – I who have never travelled so far as to see the ocean.’
Burnes bows, deeply, coldly; he is oddly irritated by the conversation.
7.
One of the chessmen comes smoothly into the room, and stops just short of Lady Woodcourt. She breaks off her animated conversation with the latest of the guests, and turns to the footman. The guest bows to her back, and makes his escape into the room. What information the footman bears must be thrilling, for in an instant Lady Woodcourt clasps her hands to her brown wrinkled bosom, as if to stop a pet white mouse escaping from between her dugs, and skips girlishly into the centre of the room. The chatter in the room stops raggedly, and the guests all turn to her, shining with her announcement. She calls out, not raising her voice, and everyone graciously inclines in her direction, like a grove of willows in the breeze.
‘… in honour of our most favoured guest, the hero, I may say, may I not, of Bokhara, M. Mirabolant has graciously consented …’
Burnes, who has sat down again, is nodding and smiling; he has had plenty of time to grow used to this announcement.
‘… M. Mirabolant has created a new, a marvellous dish, in honour of his adventures, his great heroism – dear friends, one moment, only …’
And the doors are swung open, and, there is M. Mirabolant, the great chef de cuisine on whom all London dotes – what all great London used to call a Cook. The great M. Mirabolant, universally agreed to be the greatest Frenchman in existence since – since – since Napoleon, since Voltaire, since time began. And before him is borne a large white china dish, piled high with some white stuff into the approximate semblance of a snowy mountain. M. Mirabolant is all geniality, his broad red face greeting the room without, precisely, greeting anyone. There is a little murmur and patter of applause, as the ladies’ hands, soft as the flapping of doves into the sky, acclaim the dish, and the room turns from Mirabolant to the plump hero of the hour, who smilingly discounts any sense that he is worthy of Mirabolant’s marvellous pudding.
‘M. Mirabolant,’ Lady Woodcourt insists, ‘tell me, do not all dishes have a name?’
M. Mirabolant, all geniality, agrees that they do.
‘Pray, M. Mirabolant,’ the Duchesse de Neaud joins in, ‘charming, quite charming – do tell us, what are we to call this dish?’
M. Mirabolant draws himself up, pulls on the left outer extremity of his marvellous black moustache, gazes in deep thought at the glossy mountain of cream on the shoulders of two trembling footmen. Perhaps no inspiration will come, and the room trembles before M. Mirabolant’s genius. But they need not worry; for a light falls on the great Frenchman’s face, and genius prepares to speak.
‘It calls itself,’ he growls, his eyes fixed, as if in a trance, on the dish, and not at all on the attending multitudes, ‘une coupe Bokhara.’
And now a rapture of applause breaks out in the room, and Mirabolant turns and sweeps out, leaving his adoring public, his ecstatic mistress, quite as if he had hired them for the evening, and not the other way round. Leaves, too, a confection made up entirely of iced cream and crushed meringue, the whole sprinkled with white rose petals.
‘Tell me, Mr Burnes,’ Bella finds herself saying. ‘Is this a customary dish of the natives of Bokhara?’
‘To the best of my recollection, Miss Garraway,’ Burnes responds gravely, ‘they dine on it nightly. Meringue is their staple diet.’
‘I was certain of it,’ Bella says. ‘You must have had more dishes named in your honour than anyone now living.’
Burnes laughs heartily, immediately smothering the noise. ‘Perhaps I am a little ungrateful,’ he says. ‘But it seems to me that, like the Dutchman’s daughter, the dish has been christened twenty times, and still remains no better than it was at the first.’
‘Is it always coupe Bokhara, Mr Burnes?’ Bella says. ‘I do hope not – what a melancholy prospect that would be. Not only to have to eat iced cream and meringue every night, but not even to have the solace of variety offered by an occasional change of name.’
A cousin of Lady Woodcourt has gone to the piano, and has started up a strange crooning and crackle, which passes for a selection of Welsh airs; a young man stands by to turn the pages, his eyes wandering about the room, his fervour all directed towards finding some means of escape from his sentry duty.
‘No, not always, indeed, Miss Garraway,’ Burnes says. ‘I think it is only coupe Bokhara when M. Mirabolant takes the helm.’
‘Twice weekly?’ Bella says.
‘Quite that,’ Burnes agrees. ‘Other than that, it may be anything at all; blanquette à l’ Afghanienne, rôti de porc à la mode de Kabul, or coupe Bokhara. Yes, perhaps you are right; it is mostly coupe Bokhara.’
‘And is it always iced cream and meringue with white rose petals on top?’
‘Always. No – I do Mirabolant an injustice – perhaps once the rose petals were pink.’
The macabre daughters in their matching grave-gowns, taking a turn about the room, now come to where Burnes sits with Bella. They bow, sourly; Burnes responds, Bella makes a tiny incline, her shoulders trembling with withheld laughter, and they pass on.
‘I think your brother was in India, Miss Garraway,’ Burnes says when they are gone.
‘Yes, Harry,’ Bella says quickly. ‘Yes, that is right. How did you come to know such a thing?’
‘I think it was the first thing I knew about you,’ Burnes says. Bella blushes and lowers her head, pretending to smooth her gown. ‘I heard of him in Calcutta. It was a sad end. He was spoken of well by everyone.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ Bella says. ‘My father would be comforted to hear you say that. We hoped India would be the making of him.’
‘I am sure it would have been,’ Burnes says. ‘I would not wish to intrude on your father in such festive – I mean – I would not be the one to bring melancholy thoughts to mind among happy friends.’
Bella smiles, seeing where all this talk is leading. All this chatter about poor useless Harry, sent out to India to save his name and put an end to his card debts, dead in three months in an unmentionable duel over an officer’s wife or, in official despatches, of the terrible Calcutta cholera. Poor Harry, indeed; but now, at least, he seemed to be serving some kind of useful purpose.
‘I wonder if you would permit me to call,’ Burnes says. ‘To offer some small solace to your poor father.’
‘I am sure he would take great pleasure in your conversation, Mr Burnes,’ Bella says, smiling warmly. ‘You are welcome to call at any time.’ And rests, for one moment, her little white hand on Burnes’s; it is cool and pale, his hand, and as she touches him, he does not start, or move, but merely stares, gazes, at the two-second miracle of her hand in his.
‘Thank you,’ Burnes says, helplessly. ‘And I shall bring my book, if you would permit me.’
‘We should be delighted,’ Bella smiles, and her smile is big and white and open. Her little square teeth, her clean pink mouth, her perfect lips. The smile, it makes him pause, and look, and around him, the room is silent, as if a great glass bell has dropped over them, and they move in a slower, bigger atmosphere. She smiles, and she shows her teeth, and glitters at him; there is no modesty in her, but only delight. He thanked her, and she is, for no reason, delighted.
At the other side of the room, Colonel Garraway snaps back into consciousness, his back upright and clean. It is like a window opening in the room. There before him is a girl, sour in the face and wrapped in black, looking at him inquiringly. He has no idea who she is, or what she has just said. At the other end of the room, there is a girl sitting on a sofa with a man. She is his daughter, his daughter Bella. He stands upright, and sees exactly where he is, at Lady Woodcourt’s. He bows, for no reason, at the girl in black, by his side, and then sees that behind him is a window, and outside the window is the street, and in the street ten or twenty boys, urchins, are leaping up and down, trying to see into the house, to look in and see Colonel Garraway looking out, just as he is looking out trying to see them looking in. A brilliant thought occurs to him now; the world is full of windows, and some are inside the head, and some are not. He must go home and write that down. He bows again to the girl by his side, whose name is Miss Gilbert. He will go and fetch his girl, Bella, who is looking damned fine, and then they will go home, and he will write down his brilliant thought, whatever it was.
Burnes stays for half an hour after the departure of Bella and her father. He is the guest of honour, but he is allowed to be tired. And tomorrow, he has something to do. He leaves the fluttering gracious crowd, feeling no gratitude to be treated in this luxuriant way, but only relief to be free and once again in the street, in the open air. And tomorrow, he has something to do. He walks out of the door, and there is his carriage, waiting for him. But he does not step into it. He stands on the steps, and, if his feet are in the mud, his eyes are on the night sky, and what he thinks about is something not there, but only in his thoughts. Her teeth, eyes, hands.
FOUR (#ulink_70838c26-16c1-5905-b7a8-dd3500de6958)
1.
ALEXANDER BURNES DID NOT COME the day after Lady Woodcourt’s party – or the next day – or the day after that. And on the fourth day, just when Bella and her sister had gone to the Park – just, in fact, at the hour when they might have been expected to be in the Park – he left his card and a set of his Bokharan travels.
Bella made no gesture when she saw the bit of pasteboard, showed no feeling beyond an agitated fumbling with her bonnet’s ribbons. But, walking upstairs as upright as she could manage, as slowly as she could, she felt cheated of something, as if she had been promised the most thrilling-sounding of M. Mirabolant’s puddings, and, in the event, she had been presented not even with the customary confection of meringue and cream, but, four days after she had expected it, an engraving of the promised delight on a card three inches by two. Walking slowly up the stairs, she ran her fingers over the card, three inches by two, as if it held for her the slightest promise, as if it had anything in common with her uselessly unshared hopes. Bella was twenty-four. She expected nothing.
So it was that, when Burnes was announced, a full week after Lady Woodcourt’s famous party, and shown into the drawing room where Bella was sitting, alone with her work, she stared at him as if she had never seen a man in her life.
The Garraways lived in Hanover Square, in a house so exactly what one would have expected that, Bella thought, none of her family or her family’s friends could ever be said to have set eyes upon it. It had precisely the right amount of old furniture to be respectable; it had precisely the right number of new objects to be fashionable. There was a pianoforte and a harp; there were sofas and curtains and a wilderness of walnut, just as other people had; there were portraits by Lely of dear great-great-grandmama, stout in a blue silk gown with her hand resting on a silver globe and pointing to the heavens. There was an ugly one, too, of poor Harry which he had ordered the week after arriving in India, in which his head was inexplicably round as a football (‘A native artist,’ Colonel Garraway was apt to say in mitigation, showing the curious visitor the label, ‘Executed in the Year 1826 by the Humble Servant of the Brush T. S. Lal, Student and Pupil of the great English Master, Sir Tilly Kettle’). All quite as everyone else had things; all so perfectly appropriate to the Garraways’ station in life that one could have predicted the house’s exact appearance, and certainly had no need to look at it. It was true that the Garraways, in their dining room, had what, through the gloom, could be perceived to be a lamentable mythology by Hogarth where others might have had a doubtful Claude, but what of that? The Garraways were so completely respectable that they could pass off a small lapse like that as an interesting curiosity, and nobody doubted, since they said so, that an interesting curiosity is what it was. They were respectable to the point of dullness.
It was four in the afternoon, and Colonel Garraway was in his study, taking his second dose of opium of the day. He had unlocked the miniature walnut tantalus, and carefully measured out the drops into a glass. After twenty years establishing a good understanding with the ruby witch, each of his three daily doses was large enough to kill a neophyte. He mixed it with water from the decanter, raised it to the light and gazed at it sternly. This moment of calm contemplation, which never varied or altered, was an essential part of the Colonel’s thrice-daily renewing of his acquaintance with opium; it was his idea of a necessary self-restraint. Presently the world returned to normal. The room deliciously sagged around him, the armchair softened, rose up in an embrace, and all was well again. He never recalled, or noticed, the moment of swallowing; it passed. The Colonel smiled to himself. No, not to himself; to his books. There they were, all his little books. There they were; now, which was his favourite? There, the one with nice gold lettering, there on the spine; Dryden Dramatic Works Vol. III. That was his favourite, wasn’t it, because the I, I, I on the spine was so like three nice gold pillars. Perhaps the green stock, for this evening’s tenue, for Lady Woodcourt’s. The Regent would surely approve. But then he remembered, as a dull double knock sounded through the house and the armchair softened under him like warm toffy, that Lady Woodcourt’s had taken place a week before, he had no green stock to wear, and the Regent, now, was King – no – was dead. He settled back. The ruby witch! he thought. The ruby witch!
Elizabeth Garraway was in her room, attempting to ignore the clink and knock from her father’s study next door. It was the familiar sound of him unlocking the tantalus, taking out the miniature decanter, and settling into oblivion. She was not sure, but she rather thought what she most disapproved of in her father’s opium habit was his having had made these appurtenances, acknowledging that there was no hope or desire in him to abandon the habit. Her hair was as smooth as if it had been lacquered onto her head; her velvet dress was as rich and dark as the heart of a poppy. She continued writing her letter.
‘… I feel, however, that the weaker sex, so justly named at present, only occupies so subservient a position due to the manifest inadequacies of feminine education.’
She sighed, and thought for a moment. She was writing to her correspondent in Germany. She had had great hopes of Goethe until he died, but Herr R—, although no more effusive in his replies than one would expect of the greatest and most famous novelist in Europe, had been most encouraging. She continued.
‘If the conventional female “accomplishments” stretched to trigonometry and Greek at the expense of the watercolour sketch and the covering of screens, what changes in the helpless position of the sex in society could we hope to see!’
She looked at her sentence, quite satisfied. She wondered for a moment whether Herr R—would know what was meant by screen-covering, if that were not a usual practice of German virgins, but decided to leave it. What an honour to educate the great R—, even in so small a matter! She was brought from her thoughts by the sound of the double knock. Bella, however, was in the drawing room, she thought, and could best be left. She, turning back to her elevated correspondence, was decidedly not at home.
2.
Bella, indeed, was downstairs in the drawing room, her mind quite empty. When the double knock came at the door of the house, she was staring abstractedly at a house fly working its way across the walnut table. Her work was in her lap. The fly seemed lost, cautious, bewildered. Its huge jewelled eyes blank, it seemed to be finding its way over the polished table by touch. It leant on its feelers like an old man on a pair of sticks, as if exhausted; then, suddenly, it reached back and swiftly groomed its wings, back, head with three sleek gestures, and with a single snap, flew off on its own purposes. Bella blinked. In front of her was a young man, pink and ginger as a cake. His hat was apologetically in his hand. She did not recognize him.
‘Miss Garraway?’ the young man said. ‘I startled you. I—’
‘Mr Burnes,’ she said crisply, smiling; and, indeed, Emily had a standing instruction to admit Burnes without question, when she was not at home to all others. She had expected, however, some announcement. ‘How pleasant. Do sit down.’
‘I did call,’ he said. ‘I was unable directly to call after the evening at – at—’
‘At Lady Woodcourt’s,’ Bella said, smiling. There were, it was true, an appalling gaggle of hostesses in London, all rather like Fanny Woodcourt; Bella had spent the previous week accompanying her father to a selection of them, in the unfulfilled hope of seeing Burnes. ‘A memorable evening for you, was it, Mr Burnes?’
‘Much resembling a great many other evenings it has been my pleasure to attend in the last few months,’ Burnes said. ‘Indeed, I think I could hardly distinguish it at this distance from a dozen others this last month.’
‘What uninterrupted bliss your life must be,’ Bella said. ‘For a poor female like me, there could be no higher pleasure than a succession of evenings identical to Lady Woodcourt’s. Or perhaps you are weary of them, Mr Burnes? Surely not. Do not disappoint my youthful hopes.’
‘I confess,’ Burnes said, leaning forward in his chair as if she had a lapel to seize, ‘if I thought my life likely to consist of such evenings, I should return to Kabul and never leave again.’
‘No pleasures, then?’ Bella said. ‘None, sir?’
‘One,’ Burnes said, and the drop in his manner into a feeling seriousness was as marked as if he had fixed his gaze with hers. She leant forward, unaccountably disconcerted, and rang for tea.
‘Have you seen your friend, Mr Stokes?’ Bella said, smoothing her dress down as she settled back.
‘Mr Stokes?’ Burnes said, perplexed. He picked up a gold snuffbox, and examined it. ‘Was that the gentleman’s name?’
‘You seemed to be holding an energetic conversation with him at Lady Woodcourt’s,’ she said. ‘A bald gentleman. A writer, I believe. No – I remember now – he is the editor of a periodical. Great things were expected of him, and he wrote a novel – or did he merely promise to write a novel? It is so difficult to remember. Do you plan to write a novel, now, Mr Burnes? You are certainly promising enough to threaten one.’
Burnes took this well. ‘I fear I shall be too occupied with weightier matters shortly. My time is not entirely my own, Miss Garraway – I return to India in six weeks. Do you suppose six weeks enough time to write a three-volume novel?’
‘I feel certain that you, at any rate, possess the dash to carry through such a project. Can it be that the man who bearded the potentates of Asia in their den would shrink from the demands of sending Arabella and Rudolpho through three misunderstandings and the trial of a false suitor before reuniting them in the last pages of the third volume?’
‘Stop, Miss Garraway, I beg you,’ Burnes said, laughing. ‘I am almost moved by your tale. Perhaps it is you who should write a novel – you, after all, have a great deal more than six weeks to write your masterpiece.’
‘I hope you are not suggesting that I do not have a great number of highly important calls on my time,’ Bella said, pretending to be angry. ‘But, I assure you, I could not write such nonsense – I could not write any novel, nonsensical or no – under any motive less pressing than to save my life. By the by, Mr Burnes, you will think me remiss for not thanking you directly for the gift of your book.’
‘It was the smallest task, Miss Garraway,’ Burnes said. ‘If you enjoy it, that will be thanks enough.’
‘I have already enjoyed it,’ Bella said as the tea came in. She got up and went to the window. Outside, two girls were rolling a hoop past; a man sat in a dark gig, his horse’s nose down in a bag of oats. ‘Perhaps you are right; perhaps I have too little to do, as all my sex. Or perhaps your book was more than commonly engaging. What occupation would you advise for a poor unmarried female? My sister writes to German philosophers, but I know I should burst out laughing before I had written a page. It is a great problem, is it not – how the virgins of England shall occupy their time?’
‘I should advise them all,’ Burnes said solemnly, ‘to acquire and read my book. Then they would be transported to unfamiliar worlds of thought, I should quickly grow rich, and virtue would flow from this universal unproductive idleness.’
She answered him in the same vein, and the conversation lapsed for a moment. It was a fine spring day, almost summer in the promise of heat, and, standing there, she suddenly longed to be in the country, where her eyes could rest upon an expanse of green from her father’s house, where there was some relief greater than the Park and the small dusty square of green called Hanover Square, where dogs panted as if in the remotest desert.
She was lost in thought for a moment, and Burnes startled her by saying, ‘When do you go to the country, Miss Garraway?’
He might have been following her thoughts, although it was not an unnatural thing to ask in May, in London. ‘I imagine shortly after your departure, Mr Burnes. I doubt you could have found anything more queer on your travels than our house in Gloucestershire. It is truly something to make a Sultan stare. A moat, castellations, a swarm of savage peacocks, and everything inside so higgledy-piggledy. It is picturesque, as my sister says, to the point of shame.’
‘I’m sure that I should love it very much,’ Burnes said, now entirely serious.
‘Yes,’ she said, having nothing contrary to say. ‘Yes, I think I love it too. Tell me, which of your oriental potentates did you find the most agreeable? From your book, they all seem equally amiable, or almost all.’
Burnes drew his chair a little closer to hers, set down his teacup. A light film of sweat was dewing his forehead; it must now be warm in the street. ‘On the whole,’ he said. ‘I think Dost Mohammed, the Prince of Kabul.’
‘The Prince of Kabul,’ Bella breathed, turning to him with her luminous grey eyes. ‘How I envy you, to number such a tremendous personage among your acquaintance. The Prince of Kabul – it truly sounds like the black villain in a Christmas raree show. I see him, entering, stage left, his face and his intentions for the heroine both as black as pitch. Forgive me, Mr Burnes – I let my tongue run on to no purpose, and I recall now how kind the gentleman was to you from my reading of your book. And now here is my sister.’
3.
Bella, with relief, rose as her sister came in, gliding as ever, a ready smile on her face. The gliding was a characteristic of Elizabeth. She moved without any impediment to her path, as if, in the kindest possible way, any impediment which did not rapidly remove itself would be crushed beneath the wheels of this mildly smiling female Juggernauth. She was twenty, and, on the whole, got her own way with anyone from Goethe to the stillroom maid. Bella presented them.
‘How dull you must find London, Mr Burnes, after all your exciting travels.’
‘On the contrary, Miss Garraway,’ Burnes said. ‘I have met far more interesting and engaging people in London and, since the greater part of my travels was spent in great discomfort, thirsty and hungry and subject to a succession of trivial ailments, I am glad to exchange the romance of desert life for the unremarkable comforts of Park Lane.’
‘But surely, Mr Burnes,’ Elizabeth continued, ‘you must find London talk tiresomely dull after the company of your Indian nabobs and Emirs. After the barbaric court of a Maharajah, what possible entertainment can there be for you in an English lady’s drawing room?’
Elizabeth was refusing to sit down, the better to clasp her hands and strike minor attitudes against the chimney breast. It was all very well, but Burnes, hat in hand, was beginning to look somewhat awkward standing there, like a footman awaiting his mistress’s pleasure. Bella merely looked amused.
‘To be frank,’ Burnes said, ‘so few of your Eastern princes have anything of interest to say.’
‘That cannot be true, Mr Burnes,’ Bella said. ‘Why, your book is full of interesting and extraordinary remarks passed by the princes you met. I do not believe you could write such an interesting book filled with the remarks of the ladies of London society.’
‘To be sure,’ Burnes said, subsiding with relief as Elizabeth finally sat down at the pianoforte, ‘their conversation seems extraordinary and full of fascination to us, who have only an imperfect knowledge of their culture, just as the meanest building put up in the Orient seems wonderful to us, as our eyes are not accustomed to what is commonplace.’
‘The meanest building of the Orient – the garden huts of Bokhara – a tremendous notion, sir,’ Bella said as Elizabeth started on one of Field’s nocturnes, not at all softly.
‘There are exceptions to what I say,’ Burnes said over the intensely genteel din. ‘As I was saying before Miss Elizabeth Garraway came in—’ gracious nod ‘—I found Dost Mohammed, the Prince of Kabul, to be a remarkable man.’
‘I have not quite – reached as far as – him in my – perusal of your – book,’ Elizabeth said, in little gasps between Field’s trickier ornamental flourishes; both she and the music seemed to hiccough.
‘How did he immediately strike you, Mr Burnes?’ Bella said.
‘He has very bad teeth,’ Burnes said, smiling warmly and incidentally displaying his own very good ones, the fruits of a Scottish childhood eating nothing but roots and thistles. ‘His conversation is curiously intelligent and penetrating when he asks about us – I felt often that, after my visit, he must surely know far more about the British than this Briton, at least, had succeeded in discovering about him. But in the main, it is a curious, intangible, indefinable quality he has which makes him so remarkable. Do you know what I mean by charm?’
‘Of course,’ Bella said. ‘I am surprised to hear a Scotsman refer to it. I had thought it a strange and infrequent visitor to your nation. I know from the immortal Kant that properties and qualities may flourish without being named, but this is the first I have heard of the word being used without anything to attach it to. But I forgot, Mr Burnes, you have spent long in London, and Kabul, where they know, no doubt, all there is to be known of charm.’
Even Bella feared this raillery might have gone too far, but Burnes seemed to take it in good part, merely replying, ‘I would never have thought from your appearance, Miss Garraway, that you had read the immortal Kant.’
‘Naturally not,’ Bella said. ‘I hear most of it from my sister, who is the great reader among us, and that seems to suffice for the normal demands of a lady’s conversation.’
Elizabeth came to the end of her nocturne with a gulpingly hammered series of chords, and rose to the sincere thanks of Burnes, before excusing herself to the necessity of her correspondence. Burnes got up to take his leave, but before he could speak, Elizabeth had shot through the door and was halfway up the stairs; it was her ostentatiously tactful manner, which never failed to embarrass Bella and make her unable to say anything. She stood there, with Burnes, smiling. Elizabeth had gone, he was alone with her sister; and yet nothing so very terrible seemed to have happened.
‘Mr Burnes,’ Bella said. It sounded facetious, mocking, said like that, and though she had nothing she wanted to say to him, it would be foolish now to sit down again. She recollected herself. ‘I am so pleased you came. There must be so many calls on your time, I know.’
‘I am so sorry I was unable to call before today,’ he said softly, and that was not quite what she meant.
‘We—’ Bella stopped. ‘I am pleased you came at all. Do come again, any time. Truly, any time you can spare from your valuable six weeks.’
He bowed, and since his lovely eyes would not quite meet hers, she felt assured that she had now said too much. She could see their next meeting now, in her head; they would be in a crowded room, he surrounded by duchesses, ministers, talking – he had now acquired an emblematical significance – to Stokes the writer and all that shining entourage. And a chill would have fallen between the two of them like a curtain, as he bowed with all the unfeeling profundity at his disposal.
She was so lost in her thoughts that when Burnes, looking mildly puzzled, took his leave and went, she hardly noticed that she was quite alone in the drawing room.
4.
‘Truly, I like him,’ she said later, to Elizabeth, upstairs, after dinner.
Elizabeth left off brushing Bella’s hair, and turned to her own. It was an unspoken annoyance to Bella that her sister, who was apt to embarrass when strangers were present, and spouted nonsense by the square yard when in correspondence with German philosophers, was perfectly rational and sympathetic alone, after dinner, with no servants listening.
‘He seems admirable,’ she said. ‘But you say he leaves in six weeks.’
‘Yes, he does.’
‘And when does he return?’
‘He hasn’t named a date. I doubt he knows. But truly, I like him.’
Elizabeth pulled at her hair, dragging it in front of her face like a veil, and through it made a vulgar noise with her tongue and lips. Bella shrieked, falling back onto her bed in giggles. ‘Truly,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I like him.’
‘I do.’
‘Well, when he returns, perhaps you will still like him. Fancy – Bella Garraway to wait ten years for her betrothed, and he comes back, unable to remember the name of this suddenly old woman, or in a box, a sad early death, dead of the cholera – remember, Bella, George Hathersage, dead after five weeks in Calcutta, dead at twenty-four. Or – fancy, picture, you at the docks, waiting, expectancy bright in your wrinkled old face, and off steps Mr Burnes, the hero of the age, his left arm firmly linked to a Maharajah’s daughter and his right clinging to a case of her family’s diamonds.’
‘If it comes to that,’ Bella said. ‘We have diamonds, too.’
‘But Bella, it may be years – do think.’
‘It doesn’t signify, Elizabeth. I am quite sure he will not call again. Don’t ask me how I can be so sure, but I am sure.’
But he did call; the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. He came and he sat, and he submitted to being teased and quizzed until Bella was blue in the face. Always they laughed together – it was a strange sound, in that house, so very genteel – and always they were at ease with each other. The second time Burnes came, he was admitted at once to the empty drawing room, and asked to wait while Miss Bella was sent for. He thought Miss Bella was at home, the footman did – couldn’t answer, he was sure, for the remainder of the family. Burnes nodded, satisfied. He looked around him, at the dark quiet room which could be anyone’s, and, bearing no trace of her, was Bella’s. He wondered where in this abandoned corner of Hanover Square she had left her mark, and the ticking of his watch was loud against the back of his hand. There was a rude rumpus from upstairs; it made him jump. He could have sworn it was the noise of a girl jumping down the stairs, two at a time, and accompanying herself by singing, the sort of unobserved raucous singing he would never have imagined her capable of. The tune was ‘Men of Harlech’, but Burnes, hat and gloves in hand, grew pale as he heard the words Bella, unobserved, as she clearly thought, was applying to the familiar regimental favourite.
I’m the man (thud!) who came from ScotlandShooting (thud!) peas up a nanny-goat’s bottom (thud!)I’m the man who (thud!) came from ScotlandShooting—
With that, she burst incontinently into the silent drawing room, and from the momentary alarmed look on her face, all was clear to Burnes. The footman had failed to find Bella. She had leapt downstairs to the accompaniment of the childhood favourite, believing herself to be alone in the house. Burnes, however, was equal to the situation.
‘On the contrary,’ he said with his best Montrose brogue, ‘I’m the man who came from Scotland.’
After that, they were, so to speak, on all fours with each other, and the casual observer of Mr Burnes’s near-daily calls in Hanover Square might well have been surprised to see the great explorer demonstrating the distinction between the Afghan turban and that of the faithless Sikhs, with the doubtful aid of the drawing room curtains, while the accomplished, beautiful and respectable Bella Garraway lay supine with laughter on the sofa.
‘Truly, I like him.’ That was all she said to her family, and it was her useful formula. She resisted all suggestions that he should come to dinner, and was not pressed. Colonel Garraway’s state made the hosting of a dinner a problematic proposal, and, for her part, Bella could only contemplate the idea of observing Burnes across a plate of soup with a tremor of amusement, when he had spent the previous afternoon teaching her to imitate the precise noise a Bactrian camel makes before spitting.
Only sometimes he fell silent in her company, seemed sadly lost in thought as his eyes fixed on the wallpaper, and she knew quite well what he was thinking, what in all honesty he felt he should now say. If, however, he did come to the point of looking at her and saying, ‘Bella, I am poor,’ she knew, for once, what she would say in return; she would say, quite simply, ‘Burnes, I am rich,’ and there would be an end on it. Or a beginning; one of the two. But of course he never did say it, having no tongue with which to say such a thing. The truth, unspoken, hung like a curtain between them, and it was, it seemed, only Bella who understood that if he chose, he could take that curtain and wind it, absurdly, about his head, and reduce her, as always, to the point of laughter.
‘Truly, I like him,’ she said, and truly, she did.
‘Must you go?’ she said. It was late in the afternoon in Hanover Square, and Burnes was standing to leave.
‘I must, Bella,’ he said, but he was smiling, and she knew it meant nothing, and let him go. She shut her eyes, and hugged herself, and smiled, and stayed where she was. She stayed where he had left her, just for a moment, trembling, taut, unseen, like a harp string when the door has been closed on an empty room. She stayed there with her eyes closed until she heard the door to the house close behind him. She opened her eyes on the empty room, and moved swiftly to the window – to the side of the window, where she would be in shadow, and watched him trot down the steps to the house. She saw how gracefully he moved. He must, she thought, be a fine dancer. And then, with an erotic force which made her blush for the weakness of her first thought, she realized from the grace of his few quick movements down the steps in Hanover Square, what he must be good at. What he must be best at. He, surely, was a horseman of superlative accomplishment.
Burnes stopped on the last of the steps, and seemed to realize something. He stood, and began to cast a glance back at the solidly-shut door of the Garraways’ house. He hovered there for a moment, while Bella watched, puzzled, and then thrust his hands into his coat-tails, and strode off with a pretence of purpose.
When Bella turned round, Emily was in the room. Instead of removing the tea-things, she was hovering over the sofa.
‘The gentleman—’ she said, almost nervously.
‘Yes, Emily?’ Bella said, turning back to the sight, once so ordinary, of Hanover Square without an Alexander Burnes in it. ‘Yes, what is it?’
‘The gentleman forgot his gloves, miss,’ Emily said. She was holding up a pair of pale blue gloves. That was what it had been; Burnes had left his gloves there, and only realized once he had left the house. Casting a glance back at the door of the Garraways’ house, he had found that too difficult a challenge; the man who had confronted the Amirs of Bokhara now, apparently, had found some timidity in him which made him shrink from returning to claim his gloves.
‘That won’t – no—’ Bella said, almost snatching the gloves back from Emily. ‘—no, they are my father’s gloves, not Mr Burnes’s. Give them to me – I was on the point of taking them up to him. I need to talk with my father, in any case.’
Emily was clearly doubtful. ‘I think he’s asleep presently, miss,’ she said. ‘I can take them up later with the six o’clock tray.’
Like an invalid, Colonel Garraway had a tray at set times; his six o’clock tray bore what had proved the efficacious restorative of half a pint of dry sherry and some ship’s biscuits. Bella was firm, not permitting herself to wonder what Emily and the massively multiplying dependants below stairs would be saying in half an hour about her theft of Burnes’s pale blue gloves. Bella, suddenly, simply didn’t care. ‘I’ll take them up now,’ she said, almost furiously, and, walking across the room and snatching the gloves up, almost ran up the stairs with them.
It was only when she was in her room, the door safely shut behind her, that Bella could think of what she had done, and why she had done it. She stood, holding his gloves, and it seemed to her that somewhere, deep in the house, carpets were being beaten; a great regular dull thud, making the walls vibrate and the windows ring. She listened, and it was no noise, but only her heart, the betrayer, rousing the house to her strange desire. She held the gloves to her, and the sound would not stop. The Garraways were so respectable they would never surprise anyone, never disappoint or astonish anyone with their perfect breeding. Now something had come to astonish, to overthrow, to bowl over a Garraway, and she listened to her beating heart with an emotion not far from bewilderment.
In her room, in her bureau, in the third drawer from the top, Bella kept a box of tokens. Tokens of her past life, which no one had seen, or would see. It was this she now reached for, in which she placed Burnes’s purloined gloves. A clockwork toy, twenty years old, no longer working; who, now, could say what that meant to Bella? Or a playbill, smudged with a masculine thumb, eloquent only to its collector, and to us, who observe her at this most private juncture, quite silent? A handkerchief, embroidered by hand – not very well, as if by a child, and marked with a D – we would venture so far as to guess that this belonged, once, to Bella’s mother, whose name in this house is so sadly neglected, that it is the handkerchief clutched by her mother as she died. Precious things; most precious things. It was here she placed Burnes’s gloves, not quite knowing why, but hearing some imperative voice, which she obeyed.
5.
Burnes’s book, that summer, was read everywhere. The King did not read it, true. But yet even he had granted the author an audience, had graciously accepted a copy, and had listened, nodding from time to time, while Lady Porchester took it upon herself to describe Burnes’s adventures at length to Queen Adelaide. So – since he had never been known to take down any book but the Navy Regulations – even he could, loosely, be said to have read it. All London read it. The hostesses and their daughters read it to each other in the course of their long afternoons. In the city, the busy traders took time from making money to wonder at Burnes’s daring, the odd folk he had met, whose existence had never, until that year, been remotely suspected by people whose cellars were filled with the substantial tributes of the far-flung world. Boys at Westminster read it surreptitiously, their eyes shining, and that year, half the poems written for the Prize turned out to be Afghan pastorals, in which a shepherd of the neighbourhood of Herat, longing for his lost herd of fat-tailed sheep (Pothon platykerkous oies), came upon a dusky shepherdess. Most people who read Burnes’s famous account of his famous travels saw romance in it, and were satisfied to hear of another man’s colourful adventures and miserable minor discomforts. Bella, for instance, like a thousand other very similar young ladies between the Park and the Palace, enjoyed it as she might have enjoyed a fancy-dress ball. All these young ladies wondered only at the soft, rather irresolute man who hovered so in drawing rooms, at his having carried out such a mission. The young ladies, like Bella, looked at his white freckled skin and his thin floppy hair, the lightest possible shade of ginger, and wondered.
If many of Burnes’s readers, that summer, were taken with a sense of romance, there were others who read his book and found something worth consideration; or rather, there were those who, in reading Burnes’s book, felt their own sense of romance quite distinct from that of the herd. Burnes’s book recounting his travels to Kabul and beyond ought to have been a simple fact, on which London could agree. There it was, in three volumes, rather large type – it had been written in such a great hurry, so as to meet the public curiosity, that it had altogether been touch and go whether the bookseller could make it stretch to three volumes at all. It ought to have been a simple fact, on which London could agree, like St James’s Palace, or the Strand, or the milkmaid in the Park. But they would not behave like that, these three quite slender volumes. They seemed much more like living beings, or, better, a contagion which takes different forms in each body it attaches itself to. A contagion may not be altogether a bad thing; it may, for instance, form an inoculation, preventing something far worse. And Burnes’s books spread from reader to reader. In some of its hosts, its effect was mild; a new curiosity in an unfamiliar part of the world, a burst of romantic enthusiasm. In others it induced a grand desire to change the globe. That, let it be said, was Burnes’s intention.
The Prime Minister read it, and wondered why he had never thought about the state of Kabul before; the political classes read it, and often wondered what consequences would flow from our regarding these strange and backward states as mere curiosities. Fat clergymen read it, having little else to do with their time, and badgered anyone who cared to listen on the plain Christian duty to bring the boundaries of Christendom a little wider, to extend our Indian missions westward. Few people took the opinions of clergymen entirely seriously, but they were saying, imperfectly, what their more intelligent elder brothers were starting to feel. These places were, or ought to be, our business, and if we did not acquiesce in our plain duty, there were others who would make it their business.
‘The Russians, sir, the Russians,’ the Duchesse de Neaud said to anyone who would listen – in this case, at the opera, her fervour was being directed at a young protégé of hers, a genius of political economy, a gentleman called Chapman. The old Duchesse, quite uncommonly fervid, was beating him on the breast with her fan as she made her point – an awkward backhanded manoeuvre, since he was sitting behind her in her box. ‘The Russians – mark my word, sir – are strong, and in want of an empire. No nonsense about Reform there, no worry about the abolition of slavery – nothing, sir, nothing – and Russia would march into India as soon as our backs are turned. I assure you, sir—’
‘I hardly think, ma’am, they are in a position—’ Chapman began, weakly; the Duchesse’s transformation into an observer of the movements of nations had occurred so suddenly, the terrain had abruptly altered, without warning, and the Duchesse’s interlocutors felt their way slowly, not entirely sure when they were treading on solid ground.
‘Precisely, sir, precisely my point,’ the Duchesse went on. ‘It is as in a game of cards. If you sit on what you have won, you quickly see it diminish by the depredations of others. Am I not right, sir?’
Lord Palmerston, who had been attempting to attend to the opera, now gave up with a small inner gesture of regret at the rising shriek of the Duchesse’s theorizing. He turned with a tight ready smile to agree with her. Chapman, hovering nervously at her shoulder, sank back into the depths of the red velvet box, hoping to engage the girl in pink with the vast eyes as soon as the Duchesse could be safely handed over to the guest of honour. Lord Palmerston raised a questioning eyebrow. There were few moments when no one was trying to speak to him, and he cultivated the appearance of a melomane, in part, to allow himself a moment free from the rival demands of the town. The Duchesse was in full spate.
‘… most interesting – most interesting young man – remarkable book …’ she was saying, before spooling back wildly to the outset of her conversation. ‘You see, sir, it simply is no good to stay as we are, to be satisfied with our Indian possessions as they are.’
‘I promise you, Duchesse—’ Palmerston began.
‘What if other hands than ours were to be tempted – yes, tempted, I said, yes, I agree, very fine form, never purer in her top register – tempted by the idea of these virgin lands?’
‘India, madam?’ Lord Palmerston had no idea how he was allowing himself to be drawn into such a conversation.
‘No, sir, the kingdoms of Kabul and Bokhara and – and – if you look at Mr Burnes’s maps, it becomes perfectly apparent that there are others who have as clear an interest in it as we—’
‘That interest being none, I suppose, Duchesse, eh?’ the old Duc called from the back of the box.
‘No, monsieur, no, no – I mean Russia, Lord Palmerston.’
‘Russia, madam?’ Lord Palmerston said, hoping by a display of incredulity to bring an end to a conversation he was being subjected to at all hours of the day and night by the most improbable people. The Duchesse, however, was not so easily cowed.
‘And once Russia has established itself in Bokhara, moving on from its Crimean possessions—’
‘Madam, I hardly think—’
‘Crimean possessions – very true, very possible, not at all – imagine, sir, a Russian empire stretching to Kabul – do you suppose for one instant that they would be satisfied with that? No, sir, it would be onward to the kingdom of the Sikhs, and then, I assure you, our Indian possessions begin to look very vulnerable indeed. I doubt we could defend them against such an onslaught.’
‘I assure you, Mme la Duchesse,’ Lord Palmerston said, now entirely giving up on the opera, ‘that these are all most remote possibilities which I am confident the Governor General would meet appropriately. But, really, madam—’
‘Not remote – not possibilities – not for one moment remote,’ the Duchesse went on, her words spilling out of her snuff-coloured silk. She clutched at ribbons in her enthusiasm. ‘Have you read Mr Burnes’s travels, sir? The most efficacious manner, I assure you, of meeting the Russian threat – yes, threat, sir – is to move at this exact moment into Kabul, to Bokhara – these vast and peaceful countries, new markets, sir, and labouring under the yoke of an oppressive superstition – sir, do you not think it our plain duty as Christians and Europeans to bring enlightenment to these benighted people and save them – rescue them – from the – the threat of a fate worse, worse, I say,’ the Duchesse’s voice rising as she lost her own thread, ‘than their own?’
Behind her, Chapman and the pink silk heiress were taking refuge behind her fan, which trembled alarmingly. Lord Palmerston gave up.
‘I think, Duchesse,’ he said wearily, ‘you make a point which I know many people will agree with.’
There was something so final in his tone that even the Duchesse had to sit back in her chair, assuring herself that she, at least, had succeeded in bringing these very important matters to the attention of somebody who would attend to the situation. She turned her attention to the opera, but the act seemed to be over now. Malibran, in a most unbecoming braided blonde wig, was bowing beneath a vast weight of flowers, behaving, at least, as if she were receiving the acclaim of a grateful multitude. The Duchesse, triumphant, prepared to rise and retell her conversation a hundred times.
6.
In the Duchesse de Neaud, the infection represented by Burnes’s book had found a fertile carrier; truly a carrier, one might say, since she passed on the main features of the contagion without proving profoundly susceptible to the virus itself. Like those wealthy invalids who complain bitterly of an influenza while all the time suffering far less than those to whom they will pass on the illness, she made a great deal of noise for a season on the subject of the central Asian principalities, and, having stirred up a great deal of pained opposition and concern, was satisfied to forget the subject and never again mention Burnes, Kabul or Bokhara with her former fervent tones.
The weather in London changed, quite abruptly. The streets dried into dust which settled like a veil over everything; fruit from the market seemed to have been stored for centuries in the dungeons of some belle au bois dormant, so thick did the dust of the streets disguise the bloom of the fruit. The Season began, all at once, to come to an end. There were a few landmarks by which the Season might be considered concluded, but it felt like a rapid collapse of business, and not a cleanly marked boundary. There was no doubt that after the Court had withdrawn, after the last Drawing-Room, after the old Duke’s Summer Ball, there was no Season but a hastily convened retreat, as every house from Park to Park resounded with the beating of carpets, the single occupation of dustsheeting furniture and the sealing-up of trunks, in so much grim-faced hurry that a stranger might have concluded that a marauding army was hammering at the gates of the city, and not merely the unimagined, unexperienced phenomenon of an August in London. But at a certain moment in the year, it was clear that the Season had lost what purpose it had. Perhaps – Bella thought – it ended as soon as an acquaintance remarked, however casually, that he was leaving town early this year. The next day, in fact. The thought presented itself with an attendant melancholy which was quite unfamiliar to her. Never before had the simple fact of having to leave London struck her as so sad a loss, so devastating a revelation of what she must always have known, that the round of parties and Park and dinner was, in truth, at best wearisome and at worst a stale and unprofitable waste of existence. It made no sense to her, to feel like this, and yet that was how she felt. She could only understand it by thinking that, after the last steamy night at the opera, after the last agonizing Drawing-Room, some wardrobe-faced courtier prodding you in the back and your ostrich feathers shedding by the minute, there would be no more Burnes. She understood that very well. He was this year’s novelty, and next year there would be another.
The idea of a different state presented itself to her; the idea of an August where Bella and Burnes together could walk the empty London streets, their happiness observed only by costermongers.
For Bella, now, in this year of Grace, the idea of her departure from London with so much unsaid – even granted that she did not know what she would say, even if she could say it – brought to mind images of collapse. Soft yielding sand, collapsing inwards in an hourglass; a bathful of water sliding unstoppably into the drains; Bella alone, in the drawing room at Hanover Square, hearing only the clink and knock of the opium tantalus in the sounding empty house, waiting for departure, and nothing else.
In these last days, there was so much to be done, and the preparations for the months in Gloucestershire were as detailed and solid as for a siege. Gloucestershire was all very well, but there was much which could not be acquired there at any price. For the long siege of dullness, dictated by the fashion which would separate Bella so irresistibly from Burnes, food was needed. The current books, French novels for upstairs, English for the drawing room, old Italian poetry for the library; these things would represent a brave assault on the grim boredom of a Gloucestershire afternoon. New clothes, naturally; it was astonishing how much time could be stolen from the long day by bathing and dressing, but the trick only worked if there were new bonnets, new dresses to hand. Other than that, there remained the resort of driving about the countryside, calling on families; even a country curate’s wife, however crass or absurd, would serve to alleviate the ache of ennui as swiftly as her father’s unvarying solution. Other amusements were now closed to Bella. Fishing with worms, digging for treasure in the rose garden, dropping grandpapa’s folios from the battlements into the moat with a still memorable, pleasing, deep-sounding plop! – these were things, not newly forbidden to Bella, since they had always been clandestine activities, but since she had grown up and begun to blush, some inner sense, not of decorum but of absurdity, forbade her these previously delightful entertainments. So it was that, to beguile the long August days, purchases had to be made, and Bella and Elizabeth found their last weeks in Hanover Square taken up with visits to the drapers, to the booksellers, in search of some prospective amusement.
7.
The bookseller’s shop was full, and Bella and Elizabeth had to pick their way through a forest of acquaintances, all despatched on the same desperate errand, to fetch the season’s novelties to while away the long country summer. In a street off Piccadilly, the brown little shop was enduring its busiest week of the year, and the gentleman proprietor was wringing his hands as he tried to satisfy each lady with an interesting novelty; and Bella could see, as she quietly picked over the loose-bound piles, that the task of reconciling an individual recommendation with the sort of book which, fashion dictated, all London would be raving over by November, would indeed drive anyone to wring his hands in despair. Just now, Mr Sandoe was attempting to pacify a substantial marchioness, whose bulk and wide-mouthed face made her, without reason, appear actually to be hungry for a few volumes. Bella, waiting patiently for his attention, picked up an unbound volume; a limp volume of poems about rivers, lakes, mountains, trees – she turned the pages, but no human being was there, only the poet and his trembling emotions laid out for the admiring reader like the last stages of a dissection. There was enough of that, Bella felt, in the country already, and she wanted no slim volume of tremulous awareness, silently deploring her own infallible sense of desolation when she looked at an unpeopled mountain. Bella, who always thought that the one thing the view of an empty meadow wanted to complete it was a picnic of fifteen or twenty well-dressed gentlefolk artistically arranged, set down the exquisitely self-satisfied volume with an uncharacteristic burst of dislike.
‘Miss Garraway,’ a voice broke in. ‘And Miss Elizabeth Garraway – charmed, how pleasant to meet old friends when out on an errand – so tiring, so enervating, so refreshing to meet, merely, with two such—’
‘How do you do, ma’am,’ Bella said, bobbing to the Duchesse de Neaud, who was accompanied by one of the sour-faced Gilbert girls. ‘You are, I perceive, on the same errand as we are—’ then, recollecting herself, ‘—though you, ma’am, will have the benefit of a great library to while away your days.’
The Duchesse, indeed, was going to Windsor with the Court, as she acknowledged with a profound and unspeaking nod of the head. She was a great favourite of the King, who had known her in his sisters’ nurseries for half a century, and was an intimate, she felt able to imply in conversation, of the Queen.
‘I long for the day – quite long, my dear – when I am able to spend a moment in a chair with a book at Windsor – quite impossible. HM, you know …’ (this in a confidential whisper) ‘… remarkable little body, great energy, of course – entirely unable to set down, to lose oneself – quite exhausting, although—’ the Duchesse seemed suddenly terrified, as if another pair of listening ears might retell this comparative lack of enthusiasm and cast the Duchesse from her blissful social position into the outer darkness, ‘—nothing but pleasure in the duty, you know, nothing but, so simple, so easy, so pleased with every small service. And Windsor, you know, where every prospect pleases …’
The Duchesse looked around her a trifle wildly, perhaps recalling, far too late, how the second half of the line went. The Gilbert girl took the opportunity to force a simper and bob at Bella and Elizabeth.
‘When do you leave town, ma’am?’ Bella asked.
‘Yes, indeed – Tuesday next, I believe – thank you Miss Garraway – or so I believe, quite, entirely, happily dependent on the wishes of others—’
‘I hope M. le Duc is well?’ Elizabeth asked.
‘Thank you, yes, quite well, quite mad with uncertainty, constantly requiring his trunks to be unpacked for some favourite jewel, naturally, though happy, as I say, to be – I expect, Miss Garraway, you have read this – most entertaining, most instructive—’
This, naturally, was Burnes’s book, which the Duchesse seized with both hands from a pile on the bookseller’s table. Bella had the presence of mind not to blush, and, though Miss Gilbert was smirking to a painful extent, she could assure herself that the Duchesse probably meant nothing by it. Elizabeth had wandered off, thankfully, affecting to be engaged by some other book.
‘Indeed, ma’am,’ Bella said collectedly. ‘Mr Burnes and I, you know, are quite friends.’
That did the trick, and Miss Gilbert went off to squeeze Elizabeth for gossip.
‘Most timely, his book, I must say,’ the Duchesse went on, apparently not much caring whether Bella was friends with Burnes or not. ‘Lord Palmerston – at the opera, you know – only last Wednesday – no, Thursday – most concerned, most intrigued. You see my dear, as Burnes says very truly, nature abhors a vacuum – abhors – and where we refuse to step in, others may. You mark my words—’ and a black, glittering and sombre eye now engaged Bella’s own, ‘—others may. Thank heaven for Burnes – excellent, splendid, most timely warning, Palmerston was saying so to me—’ again that tactful drop in volume, to impress Bella that it was only the significance of what the Duchesse was saying that led her to invoke Lord Palmerston, and not a desire to display her glittering connections to a crowded bookseller’s shop, ‘—he and I were talking about it – Malibran, in The Sleepwalkerine, most enchanting, ringing top notes, last Thursday – no, Wednesday – and we agreed, he and I—’ now speaking again at normal levels, ‘—that we must go to the rescue of these poor people. Helpless, quite helpless, in need, if anyone is, of our assistance – and, as I was saying—’ sotto voce, ‘—to him: if we do not, others may. The Russian Bear, my dear, the ravening hungry Russian Bear. Thank heaven for Burnes.’
The Duchesse, now finished, fixed Bella again with her gaze, and then, astonishingly, gave a great ursine growl. Bella jumped back, having no response whatever to make to this; she could hardly growl back, as if she were in the nursery with this small brown wrinkled duchess – a mental picture of the Duchesse in her infant frocks, clutching a rusk, shrunken but entirely the same, and growling, shot across Bella’s mind. Nor, in all conscience, could she respond in any way to what the Duchesse had said; she understood nothing of what she was referring to.
Elizabeth returned, and Bella felt able to escape. As they left, the Duchesse, still deep in her own thoughts, cried, ‘A word to the wise, my dear—’ and then, as Bella nodded her goodbyes, she made her astonishing bear’s growl once more. The surprising fact was that no one else in the bookseller’s shop – not even Elizabeth – seemed remotely troubled or interested by the remarkable performance. Bella stepped into the pillbox carriage waiting for them with a persistent and worrying sense that it was she, and not the extravagant old woman, who had made a spectacle of herself.
8.
She felt able to plead fatigue, and John took them back to Hanover Square, their errands almost complete. Elizabeth, inexhaustible, let Bella off at Hanover Square before asking John to take her on, wanting to make her farewells to a friend in Green Street.
It was three in the afternoon, and Burnes had been waiting, ‘no more than five minutes, I assure you’.
‘How did you know I – we should return soon?’
Burnes smiled. ‘I did not. I had set a limit on my patient waiting.’
‘And how long was that, Burnes?’ Bella said, long ago having passed to this intimate, military form of address. She began to unpick her bonnet as they sat down. ‘I would like to know what value you place on my company, and the length of time you would wait for my return seems as accurate a measure as any. For some truly important person – let us say for the Governor General, the King, or my sister’s friend Goethe—’
‘I believe Herr Goethe is dead, Bella.’
‘No matter – for these, let us say they would merit a whole afternoon’s waiting, hat in hand, jumping to your feet every time the maid enters to feed the fire. On the other hand, let us say, for our friend Stokes—’
‘I was truly asking myself whom you were planning to alight on, but Mr Stokes is a very fair choice.’
‘Thank you. For Mr Stokes, I do not suppose you would wait at all; a mere drop of the card in the bowl, and off you would fly like an afrit riding the West Wind. Am I correct?’
‘Quite so.’
‘And yet you waited for me – how long I do not know – and you would, I believe, have waited a minute or two longer. How long the limit you had privately determined is for me to establish, and that, I presume, will inform me what value you place on the conversation of a silly little girl. I wonder with what ingenuity I can discover the true facts of the case.’
‘No ingenuity is required,’ Burnes said, laughing at Bella, scratching her head like a regular urchin. ‘I will tell you – I had decided to wait for fifteen minutes. In any case, I knew you had gone to your bookseller’s two hours before, since Emily was so kind as to tell me, and I knew a bookseller could not detain you much longer than that.’
‘Very well,’ Bella said. ‘Fifteen minutes. Now I call that a very valuable contribution to knowledge, though, like the higher mathematics, I hardly know as yet what use I shall put it to.’
‘I dread your uses, Bella,’ Burnes said, helping himself to tea and, greedily, to sugar. ‘But how long would you wait for me?’
Bella was silenced, and Burnes, too, in a moment stopped laughing. There was no answer to that; in them both was the unspoken knowledge that the ‘six weeks’, so lightly spoken, so long ago, had shrunk now to one week, that then, he was gone, that after, there was nothing that either could see. In Burnes’s pained anxious face was some knowledge that he had not been fair to Bella, and it would have been better not to have come at all; in Bella’s face was nothing but a forgiveness for anything Burnes might do, be doing, have done. Bella’s forgiveness had no tense, had no aspect, and Burnes dropped his eyes from hers, from her sad, her shining eyes.
‘In the interests of coquetry,’ Bella said, collecting herself, ‘no woman would ever wait for a man as long as he would wait for her. If I were a flirt, five minutes; if I were a woman of normal self-regard …’
But she saw in Burnes’s face that he had no heart any longer for their normal banter, that their conversation, like the afternoon, like their lives, had turned in an unexpected direction, and now there was no retrieving it.
‘Perhaps ten minutes?’ she said, and faltered, her eyes, now, big and swimming and full of ache. She looked at her lap.
‘Bella,’ Burnes said again. ‘How long would you wait for me?’
She could not think, and she hardly trusted her voice to speak.
‘I don’t know,’ she said simply. He could not look at her, perhaps in shame, and he drew back a little in his chair.
‘That,’ he said after a moment, ‘must be your brother.’
For a second she did not know what he meant, and then she saw he was talking about the portrait above the chimney breast. He was right to move away from these dangerous and unstable territories. There could be nothing much gained by talking each other into ultimately painful declarations. She rallied herself.
‘Yes, indeed, Harry, my poor brother,’ she said briskly. ‘Not a good likeness, but – forgive me, I was about to say something uncharitable.’
‘I should forgive you,’ Burnes said, smiling.
‘Very well, then; I was about to say that few people would have wanted a good likeness of Harry in a drawing room. He was so very – so very …’
‘Do go on, Bella,’ Burnes said. ‘I think I understand.’
‘No,’ Bella said. ‘He was so very much not at home in a drawing room. He was not quite – not quite tamed, I think one might say. He had a knack, a habit, of arriving anywhere early, and then progressing swiftly to the furthest wall. And then he would stand there – I mean, at a rout, if there was any promise of a crowd, of fresh blood and new flesh.’
‘You make him sound quite the vampyr,’ Burnes said, looking at the faintly extraordinary portrait with the perfectly round head, the legs crossed at the knees and the hand resting, extravagantly, on a tiger.
‘Perhaps so,’ Bella said seriously. ‘If you had seen him against the wall, watching as people came in, assessing himself, preparing himself to spring on his victim – and yet, of course, he could be excellent company and he was my brother. He had to go to India – there was a between-maid, and then another, and debts, cards, and then – you know, Burnes, I feel it shows very bad judgement to attempt to elope with the mother of your principal creditor.’
Burnes, despite himself, laughed. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘But yes, not a highly judicious act. May I ask—’
‘Really, Burnes, she is still with us. You could hardly expect me to say Emma Franklin, could you? It was decided, then – Harry decided, and we decided, and London gave a great sigh of relief – that he should go to India and make his fortune. Not an unfamiliar story, you must admit, though Harry’s petits péchés were somewhat more ambitious than the common run. Packed off – dead within months. You heard of him, I recall, in Calcutta.’
‘Hardly,’ Burnes said. He had forgotten, by now, how he came first to speak to Bella; it was so very many weeks ago. ‘As I remember, I heard of him first in London – I heard that you had a brother who went to India and died. Only that.’
‘Ah,’ she said, taken by surprise, and all at once, he recalled his ordinary lie, and crimsoned gorgeously from the neck upwards. She was amused. ‘A very ordinary death; we heard that it was cholera, and cholera does, you know, carry off very many new arrivals in India. A year or so later, the portrait arrived, brought by some fellow Company officer – wallah, he called himself. They’d all put up a subscription and paid for the portrait to be finished. I heard the true story from him. Another very ordinary death – another officer’s wife behaved like an ass, and they were surprised. Did you know duelling was so much the fashion in Calcutta? Pew’aps it ain’t, as Harry would have said – Harry would have driven almost anyone to defend his honour with pistols.’
She had finished. He saw in her smile and anecdotal glitter how brave she was, and could be again. For herself, she saw only concern in a good man’s face.
‘You miss him, don’t you,’ he said finally. The room was dark, and quiet; she heard the heavy ticking of his watch in the empty house.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I do. Now, don’t betray me—’
‘I would never betray you, Bella,’ he said, and it was as if there were no other sentence in the world, there to be spoken. She shook her head, not able to look at him, and he understood very well that she meant Nor I you. He took her hand, and she moved, suddenly, her body moving in response to his touch like iron to a magnet. ‘Come with me,’ he said, rising and advancing to the door. He paused there, and turned, and smiled at her, and, deprived of all will, she rose herself, and followed him.
Out into the street they went, Bella entranced, without a wrap, without a bonnet, and they walked silently southwards through the London streets. No one saw them go; no one paid them any attention as they walked, and through London unfashionable and fashionable they went in silence. She followed him, and it was as if he were drawn by something; what it was, she could not guess, though she could feel that something was pulling him, and it was forty minutes before the streets opened and emptied and there they were, together, at the edge of the river.
Watching the river: watching a perfect chaos of boatmen unloading their goods and passengers onto the wharves. So much to be seen. They stood in bewitched amusement and watched as one lady, stout as a grub in a tight coat, between little shrieks of alarm, allowed herself to be handed into the safe arms of her brass-buttoned husband, waiting with flushed embarrassment on the wharf. Bella and Burnes were interested and uncaring as if the brass-buttoned gentleman had been awaiting a delivery of bales of cotton into his arms, and not merely a wife. By them stood the eager crowd of boys, some ragged, some Sunday-best, which always materializes from nowhere if there is ever the chance that a lady of respectable middle years may fall, shrieking, into a river. The two of them watched, attentively, and would not for the world have admitted that their motives were no more noble than those of the boys. The spectacle came to a disappointing end, safely, and the puerile onlookers almost sighed, waiting for the next entertainment the river’s ordinary traffic might afford them.
‘I would give ten pounds,’ Burnes said after a while, ‘to know the precise contents of every bale, every chest, every warehouse we can see.’ She had not expected him to say anything romantic, and he had not; he had said something better, something interesting. ‘To come down here – I feel rather like a novelist must in a crowded room in an inn. To feel that if all the unspeaking secrets contained in it were opened up – then, I should be master of the world, and know everything.’
‘What would you discover?’
Burnes picked up a stone and sent it skimming into the river.
‘Nothing, perhaps,’ he said. ‘You could ask people about their passions. That is the way to discover something. No – they would only lie to you.’
‘Sometimes,’ Bella said. ‘Would we discover a great deal by your exercise? Even if we did go down to the wharf and pay the boatman five shillings to allow us to inspect his load, what do you suppose we should find? A boatload of cotton, or coal, or tea, I expect; nothing more interesting or romantic than that.’
‘Bella, you disappoint me,’ Burnes said, rubbing his hands together, although it was not cold in the slightest degree. Bella turned and stared at her companion, as if he had gone mad. ‘Not interesting? Not romantic? The docks of London?’
‘Romantic?’ Bella said. ‘Come now, Burnes, be less paradoxical with me. I am too dull for this.’
‘No paradox whatever,’ Burnes said. ‘Merely think – cotton, and coal, and tea – commonplace dull things. Think where they have come from, Bella; think of the journey they have undertaken, through what wastes and deserts, think what hands they have passed through, what fortunes, what hopes rest on these ordinary things. There are men thousands of miles beyond India, whose inner eyes are bent, this very moment, on that exact load of rice, there—’
‘You exaggerate, sir.’
‘Not a whit. Men considering whether, now, their little fortune has reached England safely or is at this moment lying at the bottom of the sea; men wondering whether some shift in weather will double the value of what they sent us, so many months ago, when it comes to sale, or whether it will realize half the poor farmer’s expectations. Riches or poverty, competing furiously in a man’s mind; a family made or destroyed, there in that bale. Look on that, Bella. Look in front of you. The whole world is here, this afternoon, now. In those cases, being thrown down, coffee and silks and spices, wool and diamonds, all docketed and ticked, all as if it were the most ordinary thing imaginable that the great world should pass through London, like a great haystack passing through the eye of a single needle. Import and export; sending England out to the world, taking the world into England. Cotton, silk, spice, coffee, gold, silver. The world, Bella, the world. Do you not feel it, Bella? Do you not see that I am showing you what I can, showing you the world? You could never find out what people want by going into a room and asking them. But by God, if you could stop this day now, at this moment, and spend as long as you liked examining every bale, every load, every sack of goods you can see, finding out what everything was worth, who sent it, who is about to buy it, by God, you would begin to understand the world. You would begin to understand what the world dreams of.’
9.
The river continued its placid brown life, unmoved by Burnes’s enthusiasm. As Burnes had talked, they had started to walk again, and they now found themselves in the shadow of the great bridge. A boatman clung on to the rope hanging on the nearest pier, the boat under his lurching feet being pushed away by the current. It swung from one side of the great pier to the other. With his left hand, he nonchalantly ate a bit of bread and an onion. The river was low, its stench so strong and heavy that it could be tasted in the mouth. A flock of coal-lighters was secured for the next few hours in the treacle-rich ooze of the river’s mud, a stuff almost valuable in itself. On the far bank, boys, almost naked, were plunging into this thick mass of mud, occasionally surfacing with cries to show that some small treasure, some penny had been found. Here surfaced a boy, black and dripping, his hand upstretched with a treasure, and trying to hail a little green tug with his shrieking gull-cry. The traffic of the river continued its furious pace uninterrupted, in the middle stream, like water-insects, handling each other out of the path with busy prodding prongs, hooks, ropes, businesslike and abrupt, not pausing for pleasantry, or apology; the purposeful dancing of a rude public ball. Long and intricate levels of wooden stairs and causeways, eroded and slippery smooth, clung to the river’s edge, and each boat, loading, unloading, mooring for a few short hours, seemed like an efficient drab bird which had alighted on one branch rather than another for no particular reason. In a moment it would set off again in a new direction, impelled by nothing more than its own furious energy. As each boat sat there, it seemed as if it cost it more energy to stay still than to move.
Bella said nothing. To her, it had always seemed the river, brown-black, crowded, noisy and stinking; it had never seemed to matter greatly where her tea came from, what produced the stuff for her linen. She could not suppose that the originators of the stuff worked explicitly to supply her with tribute, like the worshippers of a pagan god. Money and trade; filth and lucre. And yet she did feel it, she did; she felt that here, with Burnes, she was being shown a world; whether it was the great world Burnes descanted on, or the great opening mind of a man she suddenly, incomprehensibly, loved and would give herself to, she did not know.
‘It frightens you, the world?’ Burnes said suddenly. His eyes were fixed on Bella’s face; they were dark and swarming with appraisal. They wavered in their orbs as if searching for some secret that Bella’s face held.
‘Perhaps it does,’ Bella said carefully. ‘Sometimes I don’t understand what – quite what the greater part of it has to do with me. You will despise me for that.’
‘Never,’ Burnes said, his eyes fiery, fixed on hers, and in one unspoken agreement, they turned, and began to pick their way through London, to return to the place they came from.
The house, still, was empty as they entered, and in the dark hall, Burnes turned to her. She looked with bewilderment upon his face, but he was not preparing to leave her: on the contrary, he was keeping her, and in his expression was a new certainty, as if he knew all at once where to go and what to do. Still with her hand in his, she, all bewildered, submitted to be led forward a pace or two. He hesitated for a moment: it appeared that now he had forgotten what opportunity he had perceived in the course of the journey from the river to this sad empty house; forgotten why he was standing here, why he had taken Bella’s hand. But it was, after all, easier than that. She looked at him. His head was cocked like a foxhound’s. He was listening for the sound of any other person in the house.
‘Very well, then, Burnes,’ she said, and she had spoken her decision, her right hand in his. What they had understood with the burden of those so few days bearing down upon them, neither would express: she felt that. He led her, then, saying nothing, and she submitted to be led; and together, in the empty house, they walked upstairs.
FIVE (#ulink_b9e5fe21-b693-5832-969c-f74efb3a5b7c)
1.
ASTRANGER WAS THERE, out there, somewhere, somewhere in the haphazard piled-up overlapping streets of Kabul. No one had planned this city, and its many streets were like hundreds of thousands of individual routes. As if a pond was made of the ways that fish find through it. Down there, somewhere in the carpet-mass of pattern and direction and half-intended result, a European stranger had arrived, in an inadequate and fascinating disguise, and the town, quietly, was talking and talking and talking about the new arrival until the muted babble of discussion mounted the hill to the austere halls of the Bala Hissar, and reached – so quickly, so quickly – the ears of the Amir. And to the Amir, the arrival of the new European in town was like the dropping of a rock into the opaque pool of water which was the city, ruffling the surface immediately in ordinary and predictable ways, but disturbing the substance and mass beneath in a manner which could not be seen, or predicted. The Amir sat on the steps of the throne room, with the nobles and the clergy, and listened, noncommittally nodding his head from time to time, as if he were hearing nothing more than gossip.
‘His hair is red,’ the Newab Mohammed Zemaun Khan said. ‘Red, red as the devil’s is.’
‘And he wears the clothes of the country people,’ the Newab Jubbur Khan cut in. ‘He came from the East, from India, but he has been to many, many places. He speaks to everyone about the places he has been, and asks everyone, down to the smallest child, a thousand thousand questions.’
‘A wise man, then,’ the Amir said, pretending to reprimand the court. The Newab Jubbur Khan was a poor fellow, the Amir’s brother, and if Mohammed Zemaun would one day amount to something, for the moment he was no more than the Amir’s gawping boy-nephew.
‘A spy, Pearl of the Age,’ a mullah said. The Amir Dost Mohammed Khan turned, not recognizing the voice; it was the Mir Wa’iz, the teacher of Kabul, speaking through a mouthful of food.
‘A spy, Holiness?’ the Amir said; the Mir Wa’iz had not, quite, recovered from his display of asininity, weeks and weeks before. He had, after all, allowed the English to question holy doctrine over the question of the faithful Esquimaux, and could still be savagely teased on any subject. ‘But what enemies can I see on the most distant horizon? Do we not live in peace and plenty?’
‘A fool, then,’ Mohammed Zemaun said. ‘Or a mere scholar.’
‘He came from the East,’ the Mir Wa’iz insisted, in his best holy inscrutable manner.
‘A scholar, I expect,’ the Amir said. ‘But we shall spy on him, a little, shall we not?’
In truth, Dost Mohammed felt and knew that the arrival of the new Englishman was, in the end, going to prove to be more than gossip, but for the moment there was no reason for the clergy and nobles and wives to know such a thing, and his nodding head was intended to soothe the city into a mood of mere curiosity about the interloper …
… and down there, in the city, in a hired house, the Amir could almost see the interloper in his absurd and extravagant disguise, writing like a poor scribe, his head down to the page, his tongue almost out. When the Amir concentrated, he could see the arrival, beginning to write, concentrating, his mind on what he was doing, his sudden and uncontrolled movements betraying the angry impatient European fool as he put one word after another down. Like all Europeans, he would be writing about himself, setting down the ease and mastery with which he had come to this point, and the ease and mastery with which he had persuaded the city of what he was. His name the Amir did not need to imagine. He knew it: Masson. And down there in the city, in the far-off distant serene concentrating gaze of the Amir, Masson, the new arrival in his inadequate disguise, started to write …
The nobles and the clergy stirred among themselves, restlessly. They were dressed splendidly, and in their thick brocades they seemed to whisper, although nobody spoke. Against them, the Amir looked like an angel, come down from heaven to reprimand them. Today, as every day, he was resplendent in his white muslin; a six-foot angel with a broad curving nose and bad teeth.
‘The Sikhs,’ he said finally. It was the end of a train of thought which had begun with the interloper, Masson, and ended with a British-funded invasion of the Amir’s empire. The angel, bad-toothed, imperial in white, looked into the middle distance of the throne room, and saw the far locked doors being flung open by British soldiers, each a fat little red-faced replica of Burnes, armed to the teeth; beyond it, the Amir’s empire, so carefully subdued and brought together, like a basket weaved of Jew’s-hair thread, was being trampled through by an endless line of similar red-faced replicas, backed up by the filthy stupid – the Amir pursued his own indomitable line of thought, and came to a single sounding conclusion. ‘The Sikhs,’ he said.
‘The Sikhs, Pearl of the Age?’ the Newab Mohammed Zemaun Khan said. None of the heavy crowd of nobles understood what the Amir meant; a moment ago, he had seemed to be talking, or to be about to talk, about the Englishman, and to have dismissed the idea that he could be a spy. And now he had moved on to the Sikhs, the thorn in the side.
‘I am talking about the Sikhs,’ the Amir said, calmly. ‘Did they send the English spy? What is he here to find out? Who sent him, if not the English? Why, may I ask, do you come here laden with gossip to weary the ears of women, and have no knowledge, no conclusion, nothing, nothing, nothing, of interest for your Emperor?’
Just at that moment, a hammer struck on metal, somewhere, three rooms away, and the court, with thanks, admitted silently that it had nothing to say about the Sikhs. In a moment, more food came in, borne at shoulder height; it was ceremonial food, and everyone gratefully arranged themselves around it. No one was hungry; everybody ate. It was easiest.
2.
‘We need to know about the English,’ Dost Mohammed said.
The English? It was an unspoken question around the court. These abrupt changes of subject were familiar in the inner chambers of the Bala Hissar; the court took them as they took the vapid maxims of the mullahs. They demonstrated the workings of a profound mind. When a mullah emerged from deep thought to pronounce that Life is a dream, and therefore, a dream is life, he commanded a general flaccid assent. No one would contradict him, not knowing what thoughts had led to a conclusion so perfectly meaningless. Talking to the Amir was rather like that, except that the workings of his mind usually emerged in the end. His brief peremptory comments could be difficult to link, since they were only fragments of a brilliant, involved, silent analysis of a large subject. But the court fell silent when he made these remarks, and observed the Amir, eyes lowered, in respect.
‘We need to know about the English,’ the Amir said again. ‘So send a boy down to the spy.’
The spy? The Mir Wa’iz went so far as to cast a gaze at the Newab Jubbur Khan, raising an eyebrow; perhaps the Newab would know what his brother the Amir’s intentions were. The Newab’s inscrutable way with a fistful of lamb, however, was most likely due to bafflement. Naturally the Newab would not want to admit that he, too, had no idea. But in a moment the Amir took pity on them.
‘We can hardly talk to the English about their ambitions,’ the Amir said. ‘And we will not talk to the Sikhs, to find out who is the tool of whom, like the tale of the monkey on the elephant’s back. But we seem to have a spy here. Very badly disguised, and he has made no attempt to come and speak to Us, so – a stinking spy it is. Gentlemen!’ The Amir clapped his hands, three times. His voice had shrunk to a whisper, and the noise in the bare throne room was explosive as gunshot. The gentlemen of the court came running at the handclaps, like birds magically called back to a branch. ‘Take this away. No food is required.’
The court froze, mid-chew; it was the grossest breach of etiquette to eat while the Amir had refused food, and they were left, suddenly, with cheek pouches full of meat, to swallow slowly without any evidence of chewing.
‘Send a boy down to him. Does he like boys? Not a commonplace boy, a boy of parts. Does he like boys?’ The Amir, now, was businesslike.
‘Yes, Pearl of the Age.’
‘Have one sent. Not too young. A remarkable boy. We will wish to talk to him afterwards. How old are your sons, Khushhal? How old is the most beautiful of them?’
The least of the nobles, called forward suddenly from the back of the crowd, twitched, terrified, at this direct appeal. His betters parted, let him through, gazed at him with solemn disbelief. He stuttered, nervously, unprepared.
‘In my eyes, Pearl of the Age—’
‘Yes, yes,’ the Amir interrupted. ‘Yes, very estimable, Prince. You know the son I mean.’
‘Hasan is seventeen, Pearl.’ Khushhal seemed unaccountably cast down. He had seven sons, the court remembered, or possibly eight.
‘Is he a sensible boy, cousin? Is he worthy?’
‘He is the finest steed in my stable, Amir, and I give him to any task of his lord’s willingly, knowing that he will succeed where many others, where many others—’ Khushhal was losing his way in the stately sentence, ‘—might to their Amir have brought failure and sorrow.’
Dost Mohammed seemed content. ‘Very well, excellent. Make him understand that he may have to do something beyond talking to the English about the Sikhs. Don’t tell him what to do, cousin – it wouldn’t do to shock the English out of countenance. Or out of bed, I mean, Khushhal?’ Everyone laughed at the Amir’s heavy joke, covering their mouths genteelly. ‘You’re certain he likes boys, the English spy?’
‘Yes, Pearl of the Age, quite sure.’
‘Well, let us see. Is it Friday?’
‘Friday, Amir,’ Khushhal said, overstepping himself. The Vizier had been trembling at the Amir’s coat-sleeves to make this announcement.
‘Have the people come to see Us?’
‘Naturally, Imperial One,’ the Vizier leapt in, urgent with his own grandeur.
‘Well, show them in. No, no, no more food.’
3.
Friday was, by decision of the Amir, set aside for any citizen of Kabul with a grievance to come and set it before the court. It was Dost Mohammed’s invention. None of his predecessors had carried out such a practice, as the scandalized nobility had muttered among themselves when it had become apparent that the young Sirdar – as he then was – was perfectly serious in proposing that any man at all might come and wear the court’s patience into rags with his trivial complaints. Only the Mir Wa’iz, however, had the nerve, as a licensed idiot whom Dost Mohammed liked to contradict, to say bluntly, ‘But no Amir before you, Lord of the Wind, has ever suggested such a thing.’
Dost Mohammed was ready for that, and reminded the court, and, particularly, the Mir Wa’iz (taking his sleeve firmly between thumb and forefinger and drawing the mullah’s face terrifyingly close to his own) that, although none of his predecessors had found it necessary to hold a weekly plebeian durbar, every single one of them had met a violent end. An end (beheading, hanging, dismemberment, crushing, and blowing into bits with gunpowder) which, the court would do well to remember, had invariably been meted out to the intimates of the Amir concerned at the same time. The court had swallowed, as one. All at once, precedent and the habitual practice of the court had seemed a much less important thing.
‘Remember,’ Dost Mohammed had said, exercising his imperial prerogative of a broad open unshielded smile, ‘it is only five hours, every Friday, a short afternoon of boredom for you, and my chance to speak to anyone who wishes to speak to me. And, in return, you probably won’t be murdered in the bazaar. Who knows? You might even come to be loved as much as Us.’
The court had swallowed again. Five hours! At most, they had envisaged one carefully selected and clean old man, allowed to sit at the far end of the throne room and abase himself for – surely ten minutes would be enough?
But the Amir had been in deadly earnest, and no one found it much consolation to go on thinking of the grim fates of various long-gone Amirs. Frankly, Khushhal for one sometimes thought, after an hour or two standing stiffly behind the mildly nodding Amir while an old man went on and on about his problems, a quick and merciful death might not be such a bad thing. Nor was it the smallest consolation that the Amir himself hardly seemed to look forward to these occasions with enthusiasm. Certainly, the court had suffered enough, and none of them would venture the slightest expression of sympathy at what had now become an official duty.
‘Well, well, show them in,’ the Amir said. ‘Quick, Jubbur, the grass – quickly now.’
The Newab came from the back of the crowd with his appointed task. The Amir settled himself on the upper step of the throne room, while the others drew back. He took a deep breath, and shut his eyes. Jubbur Khan now, concentrating, placed the three blades of grass he had been holding in the second fold of the Amir’s turban, five inches above his left ear. He examined his handiwork, then stepped away, feeling for the step with his heel as he walked backwards to his appointed place.
‘How many?’ Dost Mohammed asked, opening his eyes, rejuvenated.
‘Twenty, sir,’ the Vizier said, straight-faced. The Amir nodded, and in they came. There was a particular approach of the common people on these occasions: they walked in like sheep, driven in by the attendants’ impatient shovelling gestures. They could not look at the Amir, of course, and stared instead furiously at the floor. But their movements were sheeplike; they moved in odd little scurries and shuffling panics, all at once in one direction. Some preferred, it seemed, to cling to the wall like blind men, as if the mere open spaces of the throne room terrified them. They moved forward, haphazardly, loosely, their fear palpable. They made no sound but an occasional small mew of alarm. The court watched the progress, unamused. It was like watching a lot of inflated bladders being pushed along a floor. Finally, they were in place in a rough square. At the attendants’ double clap, they all fell on their faces, exactly as if praying.
‘First,’ Dost Mohammed said after the terrific ten-minute preliminaries had been got through.
First was a vile old man, as ever. The court rustled, not entirely certain, in fact, whether this particular vile old man hadn’t been here a month or two ago. He began to recite his troubles, in a long-drawn-out cracked singing voice, an old bell being beaten again and again; worse, like a bell being beaten by a deaf man, to whom the noise would mean nothing.
‘My son is the light of my old age, Amir, the staff on which I lean. Once I was the tree in whose shade he lisped and played, which protected his helpless infancy. And as the lives of men and women teach us, a reversal must come upon us, so that those we once protected with our superior strength must, as the years pass, grow to be stronger than us, and as we grow frail, we may rely on the strength of their arms and the love in their hearts, as they once relied upon ours. Such is the way of human life, lived as it is in a short spell between birth and death.’
The man made a small but rhetorically rather effective gesture at his shirt, as if preparing to rend it in his grief. You could see the man had been an admirable and successful storyteller, in his day, though now his voice quavered and he lost his place too easily. He gathered himself, and went on in his amazingly annoying voice.
‘Hear then, O Amir, how wrongly I have been treated, how contrary to all human dignity and proper family life! Can such ill-treatment ever have been borne by one poor, neglected old man? Can such suffering ever have been so wilfully, so cruelly inflicted by a son on his helpless father, since the annals of time were started? Can the ears of the great Amir ever have been soiled by the sorrowful retelling of a tale so shocking, of maltreatment so blatant? You see, Amir,’ the vile old man went on, dropping disconcertingly into prose after his formal encomium, ‘my son is an ironmonger, with his own shop, in the bazaar. And I was an ironmonger before him, and the shop was mine originally. So two years ago Ahmed, that’s my boy’s name, he said to me, one day as we were sitting peacefully over a pipe one evening, I think I want to get married. So I said to him, what do you want to do that for? Because, straight away, I could see trouble coming. So he said …’
The interminable story wound on, as the daughter-in-law said, so I said to her, and then he said, well; and the court stood stiff as pillars, and wondered at the fantastic patience of the Amir. When it had finally come to an end, the old man looked up, blinking, bewildered, hardly knowing any longer where he was. He had been entirely absorbed by the immense tale of woe and wrong, his eyes fixed on the carpet. Dost Mohammed gave a great cough and a nod, as if commanding a swordsman to scythe through the incredible knots of wrongs and misunderstandings which constituted this unremarkably dull life.
‘You have complained that your son wishes you to leave his house, which once was yours,’ the Amir said. ‘You say that the wish comes from your son’s wife, though her wishes can mean nothing if they are different from your son’s. You say, truly, that you yourself freely and without condition gave the house to your son, before he married, and the law is unable to help you. I have heard your story with great interest, and say this to you, old man. Know that the life of man is brief upon this earth, and the happinesses which man may attain are few, and the travails many. Therefore do not complain beneath your load like a bleating ass, but accept joyfully the will of your family as you would the will of God. Go back to your son and say humbly that you deserve nothing, since you gave your love to him freely, and without hope of recompense. Say this to him humbly, in Our name, and if he should remain obdurate, you must accept what he has said, and throw yourself on the mercies of the bountiful world. That is all.’
The old man lurched backwards onto his feet, his knees cracking hugely, and, his eyes still cast clumsily downwards in his inexpressive walnut-face, shuffled back to the last row of the company of hapless supplicants. The Vizier called out the name of the second visitor.
Dost Mohammed relaxed, now, giving the supplicants a fine open smile. Around him, the court hardened, fingering their robes. He guessed most of them would prefer never to have to listen to such lowly men at such length. The Amir didn’t much care about that. He meant them, a little, to be bored, but, in the main, he wanted them to be insulted. If the Amir was happy to listen to the common people, dressed in their heavy brown robes, to listen to them talking at whatever length they chose, what was the point of serving in the court? What honour could possibly reside in being the noble designed by ancient custom to hand the Amir his rice, if any Kabul ironmonger could just as easily whisper in the Amir’s ear, simply by turning up on a Friday morning? Dost Mohammed understood very well that, unlike all those Amirs who had ended so badly, he had no friends, and could not; between the family of the Amir and the rest of Kabul, there was an absolute gulf. What had happened to the kings who hadn’t understood this? Shah Shujah, the fool, had immured himself and his court up, and delighted the court with his enclosed fantasies, his entertainments; flattered them with excess. And he was long gone, that old Amir, with his court, long chased out; and now Dost Mohammed was the Amir, and Shah Shujah was, no doubt, in a palace on some Kashmiri lake, disconsolately torturing some small boy to death for the sake of an afternoon’s entertainment. Dost Mohammed would not flatter his court with ideas of aristocratic and regal equality; he would insult them by making them see that, in his eyes, the greatest prince and the merest citizen of Kabul were as one. That was the point of the Amir’s Fridays. Not to right wrongs, as if the life of great princes were a tale to keep children quiet, but to remind the court, to their helpless indignation, that he, Dost Mohammed, was Amir, with three blades of grass in his turban, and they, the great princes of the court, they might as well be grovelling down there on the carpet, waiting with aching knees to be summoned at their Emperor’s whim.
Four hours later, the court was stiff with outrage as a fistful of knives. Dost Mohammed was serene as ever. The pack of mendicants, unanswered and yet somehow satisfied, made their sheeplike progress, backwards, shepherded by the court attendants, out through the double door. As they receded from the awe-struck anteroom into the more distant of the outer chambers, their chatter could be heard to break out again by degrees, merging into the irreverent cackle of starlings in the trees in the courtyard. In a moment, the room was again quiet. Dost Mohammed was thinking, and when he spoke, it was clear that nothing in the previous four hours had occupied much of his mind.
‘Send down the boy, Khushhal,’ he said briefly. ‘Today or tomorrow. He should stay there a week, and come and tell Us everything next Saturday. You know the particular boy? Good.’
‘Does the Amir wish to speak with my son before—’
The Amir shook his hands almost irritably at this absurd suggestion. Khushhal had taken the precaution of passing a note to an attendant summoning the boy, and he was at this moment standing in his best and simplest clothes two rooms away, trembling with nerves, no doubt. Still, it did no harm, that sort of thing. Had the Amir suddenly decided to inspect the boy’s teeth – the Amir’s own being so bad – it would not have done to ask him to wait on the pleasure of a seventeen-year-old boy.
4.
You know the one I mean, the Amir had said, querulously, as if it were absurd that anyone should think of another son. And as the court swept past the deeply bowing youth in the third anteroom, shrinking back into one of a file of attendants lining the little route between the throne room and Dost Mohammed’s suite of apartments, it was clear from the suddenly drawn eyes, the suddenly checked pace of half the court that they knew the son he meant, too. Dost Mohammed himself gave no sign of recognition in his purposeful stride, but, behind him, the nobility, normally so regulated, cannonaded each into each, tripped over each other as they caught sight of Hasan. For a moment they forgot how to walk. Khushhal himself had no idea. Well, he knew about the boy’s beauty, but he had no idea the fame of it had spread beyond the family into the city, and wasn’t entirely sure he liked the idea of his son being gazed at in the street, being the cause of lost sleep, being importuned to surrender what virtue, at seventeen, he still possessed, as if he were some bazaar-boy and not the son and grandson of princes. Still – Khushhal reflected – he himself had been famous, in his day (he relished the memory, twenty years back, of a trader at his shop abandoning a transaction and, open-mouthed, clambering up on a chair for a better view). If Hasan could be of use to the Amir, that, at any rate, was a more virtuous and useful end than, as Khushhal had, only using his God-sent gift of beauty to satisfy the lower urges with every bazaar-boy in Kabul, the heavens forgive him.
Hasan, at seventeen, was famous. Of course Dost Mohammed could only mean one of Khushhal’s sons. He meant the one who was an angel. Hasan, alone among the sons, was an angel. He had been so beautiful as a baby, as a boy, that his mother had feared for him, knowing that beautiful children often coarsen as they grow older, become overblown like a July rose, their temperament uncertain as they grow too accustomed to the regular supply of love. And when love as it must proves no certainty, they are not resigned to the fact, but are shocked and angry at the seeming injustice. She had veiled him for a time, like a girl baby, to keep off the demons his beauty would summon. Had those demons come? For beautiful children, love occupies too central a place in their mind, pushing other thoughts, wisdom, understanding to the edge, if not altogether out of their thoughts. We are not made for love alone. Love, in the end, is the prerogative of God, the force of whose love we glimpse in shadow, and dimly, when a man loves another. It is, perhaps, only those who for the first decade of their lives have been loved universally and without conditions, on account of their beauty, who go on believing the central fact of their life remains to love and be loved. Those lucky, unlucky people, so secure only in their insecurity, remain as they once were all their lives only in one respect: they always remain children.
The mother of Hasan said some of these things, and thought all of them, confiding the whole only in her prayers. How could this earthly angel not come to harm? But Hasan grew, and the light still shone beneath the soles of his feet as he lightly trod God’s earth. With each year, he remained beautiful; with each year, he became beautiful in a different way, since the beauty of a child is a changing thing, even when it is most constant. She never mentioned his name, never, never, in any context, for any purpose, without casting a net around his beloved skin by afterwards slipping in a ‘God willing’. It was so fragile, the radiant beauty which cushioned his steps, and nothing could touch, nothing, not even Time, could destroy it.
Khushhal had made a quick palms-down gesture and a hiss as he passed the boy, wanting him to stay where he was until Khushhal, with the court, had accompanied the Amir to the door of his apartments. The worst of his wives, the lewd contemptuous one, had been waiting there for the Amir; not respectfully, but waiting as if to insult him.
‘Dosto,’ she sang out the second the doors were opened, though she could have no doubt that the court was waiting just there for their dismissal. ‘I’ve been waiting for you for the whole day.’ She had an infuriating voice, with her drawling Suddozye-princess vowels. She had been a prize at the end of one of those footlingly interminable, brutal scraps with the Suddozye pretenders, and never missed a chance to display her contempt of the whole court and the Amir himself before the entire establishment – before Kabul, before the English ambassadors, if she could. Why the Amir didn’t simply toss her down a well …
‘I’ve been—’ the Amir sheepishly said.
‘I don’t care,’ came the voice. ‘Shut up with old women and bores and your sisters all day long. And you with your bores, I expect. Well, I need you here, now. I’ve lost my slippers, and you’re the only one who can find them for me. I need them now, slave.’ Her voice raised to a shrill little shriek with this last astonishing demand, and the court began to shuffle away in embarrassment, not even waiting for their dismissal. The Amir seemed oblivious of where he was.
‘Yes,’ he said, giggling a little. ‘Mistress.’
‘What did you say?’ the princess called. Her voice was cool and affectless as an unwearied dove’s. ‘Dosto? Slave?’
‘Yes, mistress,’ the Emperor said, more clearly, and then, suddenly, seemed to become aware again of the court. ‘That will do,’ he said briskly, dismissing his public humiliation. ‘I am not to be called upon.’
5.
The court scattered in overpowering embarrassment, almost before the double doors had swung shut on them. Khushhal found his way back to the anteroom where the boy Hasan still stood, waiting nervously. He beckoned to his son with the underside of his palm, a small flapping gesture, and together they walked through the mid-afternoon quiet of the palace’s public rooms.
‘Was that the Emperor?’ Hasan said after a time. He seemed nervous; but he usually seemed nervous, shrinking back within his skin from the unpredictable effects he had on people.
‘Have you never seen him?’ Khushhal said.
‘I think I have, years ago, when I was too small to know whom I was meeting and too long ago to remember his face afterwards. Of course I know the noble Akbar the Emperor’s son. Or I know who he is, not know him to be greeted by him. But I wasn’t sure of his father the Emperor.’
Khushhal gave him a sideways glance. ‘The Amir knows you, it seems. Or he has seen you, at least.’
‘I don’t know when that can have been,’ Hasan said reflectively, ‘for it’s not to be expected that the Amir’s life and mine take similar paths. He is not as I thought he would be.’
‘It is not for you to think how the Amir will appear, or consider what so great a man as he should be like,’ Khushhal said. Then he relented, as, with Hasan, he usually did relent, and said, ‘Of course, no one could expect you not to wonder what Akbar’s father would be like. They talk – at least the Amir talks – of sending Akbar as ambassador to the English in London.’
‘What for, father?’
‘I don’t know. I really don’t know. Perhaps the Amir has a lot to discuss with the English, and after all, they paid him the compliment of coming to visit him, so it would only be polite to send an ambassador to them with gifts, in return.’
Hasan’s attention had been drawn by a merchant of cloth, bringing materials into the fortress of the Bala Hissar. By now, they had passed beyond the state rooms and were in the outer shell of the palace, which resembled a market as much as anything, as the tradesmen of the city came to service and supply the court and the palace guard. An oddly silent market; when a baker, now, laden with the bread for the household, collided with a butcher with a bound calf over his shoulder, neither made the smallest protest as they surely would have outside, but walked away briskly, humbled and silenced by the sudden importance of their roles, the gravity of the shady palace. The cloth merchant was a little man, and waddled before three apprentices, meandering helplessly as they half-ran behind him, arms stretched out under the weight of brilliant bolts of rough silk, red and blue and gold. Hasan’s attention was taken like a child’s with a cloud of hummingbirds. Then he shut his mouth and said, ‘Where is London?’
‘Where the English live, who rule India,’ Khushhal said, despairing a little. ‘Though England is far away in one direction and India far in the other direction, beyond the great mountains beyond the empire of the Amir. Do you remember the English, when they came last year, when they lived with the Newab Jubbur Khan for a month, and brought the marvellous clock, the clock of gold and crystal?’
‘I remember,’ Hasan said, dimly. ‘Those English, they looked nothing like the merchants from India, the ones who come in the spring.’ Then he brightened, as if sunlight had fallen on his face, and said, ‘There is another English in the city, though he is dressed strangely, and talks strangely, the women say. Is he perhaps a Russian, that Englishman?’
‘Perhaps so,’ Khushhal said. They were in one of the little courtyard gardens which appeared from time to time in the great rude mass of the Bala Hissar. A pool of clean water at the centre, dripping with a delicious cooling sound into a trough; a plum tree, casting shade in the blunt-bright heat of the afternoon. The cool smell of water on marble, of the shade of a fruit tree; here was luxury, here in the silent quarter of the palace, and Khushhal and Hasan hitched their robes up to their knees and squatted in the cool shade.
‘The Amir has very bad teeth,’ murmured Hasan, as if he were thinking of something else. ‘I saw as he passed. He started to smile, as he may, and then he seemed not to want to smile, because his teeth are bad, perhaps.’
‘That is enough, boy,’ Khushhal said. ‘Remember you are in the house of the Amir before you insult him so childishly.’
‘I’m sorry, papa,’ Hasan said. ‘I was only making an observation.’
‘That’s all right,’ Khushhal said. They fell silent for a moment; somewhere, nearby, there was the rush of women’s voices, somewhere walled, enclosed and veiled, and they both listened to the lovely liquid sound. ‘The Amir, you must know, has a task for you. To do with the Englishman – it’s good that you know of him, since it concerns him.’
‘A task for me?’ Hasan said. ‘But how can it be that the Amir should need me to do anything for him? Why has he chosen me?’
Khushhal looked at his slow-lidded son. It was almost worrying, the boy’s lack of consciousness of his beauty. In his shy moods, he seemed to be shrinking back from his own face, disowning it, wanting to hide, preferring not to be looked at, not understanding why he was looked at. But it was wilfulness to question the decision of the Amir. Hasan’s strangely hot blue eyes – like Khushhal’s own, a sign of a direct and pure descent from the Jews, the founders of the Afghan nation – his high smooth brow and small beardless chin, his fine strong hair and teeth, his soft skin. It must have been obvious to Hasan, without too much concentration, what use he could be in the present case.
Khushhal explained slowly what was wanted. Hasan said nothing, merely listened, occasionally nodding. When Khushhal had come to the end of his explanation, Hasan sighed and salaamed to his honourable father. There had not been so much to explain, after all, and it was clear even to Hasan, who was always the last to shut his mouth and understand the point of a story or a joke, that his father did not quite know what Hasan was supposed to do. The Englishman, down there, in his disguise! Wasn’t that enough to have found out?
‘When shall I go there, papa?’ Hasan asked. He concentrated on working out some dirt from under his toenails with the point of his dagger.
Khushhal clapped him on the back, almost making him drive the knife deep into the ball of his toe. ‘As soon as you may choose,’ he said. ‘The Amir will send for you in seven nights.’
‘Now, then?’ Hasan said. He could not see why not, and his father nodded, dismissing him.
6.
Hasan flexibly raised himself like a deer from where he squatted, and, salaaming, left his father chewing thoughtfully on a twig in the inner courtyard of the Bala Hissar’s inner fortress, waiting on the pleasure of the Amir. He set off towards the Englishman’s house. The sentries braced themselves in half-salute as he left the palace by the main gates. He liked that. Hasan knew perfectly well where the Englishman was living. All Kabul knew where he was, knew all about his habits, his interests, the hours he kept and the people he saw. You could, they said in the bazaar, take him anything you found, anything you had. A broken old lamp, a worthless old coin you found in the earth, anything you happened upon, and he would give you money for it with cries of delight like a monkey’s howl, and then spend long minutes staring at it before opening his book and scribbling down in it. The boys in the bazaar abandoned themselves in merriment, the soles of their feet to the sky, at this last incredible detail. But he did not seem like a holy man, since he drank a good deal, a shocking amount, and the whole of Kabul, from the storytelling beggars crouched outside the limits of the bazaar to the gossiping nobles in the august silent halls of the Bala Hissar itself, knew precisely what he liked to do after nightfall with whatever boys presented themselves smiling at the gate of his secluded little house. Everyone knew about him. It was true that few had seen him, since he stayed inside like a woman, sending out for his needs; but everyone knew about him. There was an incredible party trick half a dozen boys could now perform, an incredulous account of his gabbling fantastic Persian, complete with the wildest gestures. Hasan was a slow serious boy, not given to laughter, always sitting wide-eyed and solemn while his companions retailed one hilarity after another. But he had laughed at the gulping mania of the impersonation, and hoped that now, brought up against the original of what was currently the city’s favourite joke, he could keep himself from hilarity.
He went directly down the hill from the fortress, ignoring the calls which came his way, and out through the great bazaar. He had lived here all his life, and could burrow through the deep entangled streets as well as any ragged urchin. They called out to him, knowing who he was, wondering at this boy in dazzling imperial white, this boy with the lovely cross face. They knew who he was – his dress proclaimed him – but there was already something in him, despite his blank simplicity, his effortless blank visage, which made the street hang back. They called out to him, but, awed, cast their eyes down before he could respond. They did not want to be the sort of people who called out to Hasan, son of Khushhal, the famous angel of the princely house, and they cast their eyes to the floor, dazzled, in modesty, before he could speak back to them. But he did not respond to their calls, and never had. Even those who called out to him knew this, before they made a sound. He was untouchable, virtuous, noble; the sun shone between the road and the soft pale soles of his feet. He was too good, they said, to walk the earth, and yet he walked the earth, which knew his virtue.
Hasan passed on through the parting crowds. The long twisting call of the muezzin was just beginning, like a great bird singing its inscrutable vowels, and, soon, Kabul would turn with regret from Hasan and, summoned, go to wash, and pray for its own sins. Hasan walked on, into the street of the shoemakers. Here it was that the Englishman had his house. He had taken it from the widow Khadija. The main artery of the quarter, now quickly emptying, was broad and fine, shaded with limes. Every thirty paces or so, a small half-street, blind-ended, like a three-sided courtyard, where the houses were. In the fourth of these was the widow Khadija’s house. The houses in this quarter of the city barely had windows or doors onto the street; they were built for the summer’s heat, the winter’s cold, to withstand a siege. They were solid houses, but not large. Behind the thick walls there was only a small garden and a few square rooms, Hasan knew; his old fencing master had lived in one. But as he stood there, he felt that behind the heavy coarse wall and deep-set tiny door, there could lie anything at all. He stood in front of the Englishman’s door. Silly! It was like any other! He felt no nerves. Nervousness was not part of him, but as he stood there, with his innocent cross face, he surely felt something, the barefoot emissary of the Amir with a dagger in his belt, the lovely ambassador between empires. He served an unknowing purpose, a purpose opaque to everyone. He served the implacable veiled purpose of the Emperor’s marvellous mind. There was a chatter, from within, like the chatter of birds, of monkeys, of women. But it was not the noise of birds. Hasan raised his soft princely hand to his soft pale face, just once. He pushed at the door. It gave; and, making no noise, he entered the house of the Englishman.
SIX (#ulink_8d88a65d-ae8f-5628-8798-88d4d164cef3)
1.
THIS IS THE WAY THAT Charles Masson came to be in Kabul and how he came to talk the way that he talked, which was the first thing anyone noticed about him.
Five years before, in an army camp in Calcutta.
The parade ground was a desert of musket parts. The company sat, cross-legged, red and sweating, each surrounded by his own little puzzle of greased iron to put back together.
‘Now this,’ Suggs, the Sergeant-Major, was saying through his horrible grin, ‘is the locking bolt. The locking bolt.’ He was holding up a small iron object between thumb and forefinger.
The Company, together, grunted a four-syllable noise with their heads to the ground, a masculine grunt which satisfied Suggs. He seemed to think they had replied with what he had said; they could, in fact, have said anything at all.
At the back of the platoon, his gun now in forty pieces scattered, a hopeless archipelago, on a greasy blue cotton tablecloth, sat Charles Masson. He scratched his head. Sweating profusely in his shirt and breeches, contemplating the nightmare iron picnic in front of him, he wondered merely what delicacy to go for next.
‘And this,’ the Sergeant-Major said, grinning sadistically at this further element of bafflement, ‘is the barrel-loader. The barrel-loader.’
There again, that grunting noise, five syllables this time, a downward scale, like a bouncing ball. Masson said nothing, not seeing the need to say an object’s name to commit it to memory. In his case, he was as likely to forget the horrid little object after saying its name as before. And he had decided that this was not the sort of information he wanted cluttering up his brain.
A distant door opened and shut. Shimmering a little in the late-morning heat came the figure of Florentia Sale, the commanding officer’s wife, her jutting jaw and purposeful stride in no way modified by the pink and white parasol, her virginal dress. As she approached, the men who had seen her started to struggle to their feet. Not Masson.
‘Don’t get up, I pray you,’ called Florentia, dragging her panting little dog after her. ‘Ignore me, ignore me. I should not be here, merely the shortest route, tiffin, you know.’
She flashed a steely smile at the men, and strode onwards. Masson silently wished rabies on her dog and – a moment’s contemplation after – on her as well. The Sergeant-Major said nothing, and it remained a half-hearted tribute, as the men who had risen got no further than a bent-knee stance before sinking down again to their morning task. Too absorbed in their task; not very interested, either, in Florentia Sale, their commanding officer’s commanding wife, a greedy old woman who was more accustomed to tell people not to trouble than she was to receive unsolicited tribute. She passed on, anyway.
‘This,’ Suggs went on, projecting to the far corners of the empty parade ground, ‘is the musket’s thumb-grip. A great help when you come to fire the bleeding thing.’ He too must be suffering; his great red face twitching and glistening in the heat, his eyes rolling and yellow with the long hours in this steamy blaze, in a uniform suited only to a damp European climate. But he seemed to gain energy from the furious heat, and not to be exhausted by it; his instructions, his striding energy, actually increased as the day went on. ‘What is it?’ he demanded.
‘A thumb-grip, Sergeant-Major,’ they chorused dully, the small diversion of Mrs Sale’s stately passage now dissipated.
Something had led Masson to this point, sitting on a parade ground, sweating into his Company-issue underwear, staring at wing-nuts. A long sickly childhood in a Devon farmhouse, and tales of an uncle who went to sea, bringing back incredible tales of the East. Told and told again. That had been it, surely. There was no desire for money in Masson; he had no wish to go back with his thousands to acquire a country house and respectability. He had no wish to go home.
That was odd, because the urge that had led him here was as hungry and unfilled in Calcutta as it had been in the grey square unwindowed farmhouse ten miles from Porlock. There, it had been his three young brothers standing between him and what he wanted; here, it was the Company, and his duties, and the wing-nuts. Masson had come to the East in the only way he could. It was not long before the means of his coming were standing between him and what he could see every day. Moments – small unremarked street-moments, unhistoric, unforgettable – where the India he had dreamt of in the long confinement of his childhood and the India all around him combined in a sonorous unison. Moments where no Company intruded, where no instructions were shouted, except the single one, inside him. He was reassured, as he heard that sounding double call, that what he had dreamt of was there after all. Saved, he was, in these moments from a deeper worry, that the fulfilment of the East he had dreamt of was one without his presence, his falsifying gaze. What he wanted was an East which was no longer exotic, but purely familiar, and he feared that, like a practising pianist, it could only achieve that when he was not looking at it. An India he wanted only to the degree that it could not include him; that was his fear, dispelled in those absorbed moments when he passed down a Calcutta street, unnoticed, or at least unremarked, or a curious unfearing boy met his expression with an equal gaze, and held it. Unmoving.
That was what Masson was here for; those sudden clicks of identity when, like a hot blush, he was sure that there was something there, just there for him. It was what he had always dreamt of, in the kitchen of the Porlock farmhouse, hunched over the Vicar’s Arabian Nights. He was sure now, after a year, that it was only Suggs and Sale that stood in the way of his finding it. Suggs and Sale; they had turned into an emporium, selling only frustration to Masson, representing everything that stood in his way. Suggs and Sale; he could have started a religion, to declare the pair of them unclean.
2.
The long morning came to an end, and the platoon limped off into the guardroom, soggy with their combined concentration. McVitie, the hero of the platoon, was, for once, beyond a quip. He satisfied himself with bending down and rubbing his head with both hands, furiously back and forth, as if his head were unconnected to him, like a man affectionately scrubbing at his dog after a run in the rain. A shower of sweat fountained from McVitie’s head, and, stripping himself of his shirt, he sank down limply on the rude benches which ran round the room.
‘Well, gentlemen,’ Masson said lightly. ‘I don’t know how much any of us will remember of this morning’s dose of pointless activity.’
The platoon ignored this, one of them merely giving a small moan of boredom with Masson’s comment. He was unpopular in the platoon, for no very clear reason. His unpopularity was such that his every statement was automatically greeted with a palpable turning of backs. More than that, it had reached the point where Masson himself aimed his occasional remarks squarely at the platoon’s disapproval. Not exactly enjoying their dislike, but having earned it, at least he would exult in the power of being able to evoke it most when he chose.
McVitie raised his square head a fraction from the bench, without opening his eyes. ‘We all learnt what we was learnt, Masson,’ he said. ‘It was only you. Don’t tar us with your stinking brush.’
He fell back, gormlessly, mouth open. Masson contemplated him, the platoon hero.
Elsewhere in the barracks, Florentia Sale was passing out her brisk instructions. She was in the basement of what was termed, inaccurately, the Colonel’s house; it was merely a random stretch of the building, a few interconnected rooms with a kitchen and a washing room in the basement, but the Colonel’s status required him to have a house, and a house he should have, even where there was none. In the basement kitchen, the heat was bathlike, but Florentia Sale was livid, pale, dry in this dense heat. About her, a foot below her square determined face, the kitchen servants clustered, and listened anxiously to her instructions. ‘Very important, very important dinner,’ she was crying, not looking at her listeners. ‘I want you to imagine – to imagine that you are cooking a dinner for the Governor General himself – for the King of England.’
There was a perceptible increase in worry, as the little faces creased. ‘King?’ one of them, the most senior apparently, said, his voice almost failing.
‘No, no, no,’ Florentia said. ‘I want you to imagine that the King is coming. I want you to take as much care over your work as if—’
‘King?’ the boy said again.
Florentia gave up, her face set like cooling gravy. ‘Yes, the King is coming,’ she said bluntly. ‘Remember – fry the onions well, and slowly. Curry? Curry? Understand?’ The heads below her wobbled from side to side, acknowledging and agreeing. ‘And soup. Soup? Understand? And the fish? How will you cook the fish?’ There was another general agreeable wobbling; Florentia took it, apparently, for assent. ‘How? White sauce? Parsley?’ The kitchen attendants looked from side to side, trying to establish seniority; one, in the end, stepped three inches forward and bowed superbly. He stepped back, and smiled ingratiatingly. Florentia sighed, and prepared to begin again.
After the soldiers’ tiffin, there was, unusually, three hours at leisure. Masson skipped off as soon as he inconspicuously could. He wanted to go and see Mr Das.
Mr Das had a boutique in the bazaar. Masson had been drawn in a year before, by a blue glass vase visible through the open door. Then he had wondered if it could be Roman, with the optimism of the inexperienced. Now, he knew it was Syrian, and not at all old, but Mr Das had become the nearest thing to a friend Masson had. The shop was a ruin of miniature artefacts, and old Das a fraud, apt to proffer the cheapest bazaar silverware as precious beyond an Englishman’s dreams. But he, from time to time, failed to know when a coin from his filthy chests was a thousand years old, and deeply unfamiliar. What he knew and what he did not know was apparent from the prices he set, and, after a year going through his stock, Masson felt that, all in all, he knew more than Das did.
Das didn’t trust Masson – that was clear from the way he constantly tried to rook him, as if taking the first step in an inevitable exchange of fraud. It was natural for someone in his position, with a boutique full of frail glass, to be wary of a beef-faced Englishman twice his size in a Company uniform; wary, too, when the Englishman in question, revealed as well intentioned, seemed to turn himself from a curious fool into a scholar within months, and Das looked at his surprising protégé with a habitual reproach, as if Masson had not been entirely honest with him at the first.
Nevertheless, Das had been useful to Masson. That first purchase, the Syrian blue glass vase, had worried Masson while he was paying for it. Until then, his purchases had been small and solid – coins, metalwork, durable little objects of devotion, all easily contained in Masson’s pack. Each treasure was accompanied by a set of meticulous notes on the object, based on what the coin-handler could tell him. That was not a trove to attract attention in the barracks, but this vase could not be stuffed away like that. Masson would not display it to the platoon’s mockery, and yet he wanted the little vase, wanted it badly, and would have gone on wanting it even if he had known that it was not Roman at all.
Mr Das was all tact, and saw the problem even before Masson had said anything. After all, what was a common soldier doing with such a fine object, handling it so tenderly? What would he do with such a thing? Masson eagerly fell in with Das’s suggestion that he transfer all his little collection to a secure cupboard in Das’s boutique, and, as Das foresaw, afterwards made all his purchases from Das. He was a sympathetic fellow, the shopkeeper, only betraying the slightest sorrow in a little wince when he saw the appalling tinsel exoticism of Masson’s first purchases, when he had arrived in Calcutta. Das handled the semi-industrial figure of Shiva in rough, tarnished bronze with a display of reverence intended much more to spare Masson’s feelings than for the benefit of the god. And since then, he had been of great use – there was talk, even, of introducing Masson to a scholarly friend of his, who might be able to start him off on Sanskrit – and he represented, all in all, the nearest thing to a friend Masson had ever had. His face was sharp-cornered at jaw and chin, like many Bengalis; he had an almost pentagonal, queerly inquisitive appearance.
3.
Das was turning a coin over and over as Masson came into his shop. A little man even by Indian standards, half Masson’s size, he was respectably dressed according to the lights of his religion. Masson could never quite get used to holding a conversation on serious matters with a man so nearly naked. He liked to be discovered in a scholarly attitude, and Masson sat in respectful silence for a couple of minutes, until Das was ready to speak to him.
‘My dear fellow,’ he said finally. ‘I wonder what you have to say to this. My mind, I confess, is a trifle stumped.’
Masson took the coin and looked at it, wondering as usual at the way Das talked, like Tacitus after a drink or two. The coin was a Queen Anne penny, probably palmed off on Das by a Company private too sharp for his own good. Masson considered telling Das that it was a coin of the reign of the Empress Agrippina before it occurred to him that Das might be testing him in some obscure manner. He told the shopkeeper what it was.
‘That,’ Das said, smartly snapping the coin back into his fist, ‘was more or less what I had supposed it to be. Thank you, my dear sir. And how may I help you today? A cup of chai first, certainly.’
He clapped his hands and the toothless dirty old woman who was always in the boutique, fingering the goods – perhaps Das’s wife, there was no means of knowing – mumbled off into the recesses of the shop.
‘I really want nothing of you, Mr Das,’ Masson said. ‘Chai would be splendid.’
‘Perhaps a perusal of your treasures, Mr Masson?’ Das said as the chai arrived. Masson took the stinking sweet orange confection, tea and milk and sugar and water boiled together for half an hour. As always at Das’s shop, the water it had been made from was so filthy, the chai could have been strong or weak, and Masson had to rid himself of the irrational idea that Das made his tea out of the water his crone familiar washed her grubby old body in. The crone smiled and shook her head from side to side, letting go of the cup, leaving a dirty thumbprint over the clay rim. ‘Always welcome, always welcome. Or perhaps he would like to see a few minor curiosities I acquired in the course of several perambulations about this great metropolis, hmm? No obligation, my dear sir, merely an oddity or two I feel you would be interested by, and – I confess – one or two more I should be grateful to have the benefit of your undoubted and excellent wisdom regarding their history, provenance and significance. Queen Anne penny, indeed.’
The exchange of business was a necessary preliminary to their conversation, Masson had found. Das preserved some necessary dignity by reminding himself that they had begun in a business relationship, and would not, entirely, get beyond that. It might have been designed, too, to remind Masson that he would not come to know everything about Das, that whatever expertise he acquired about Das’s stock, he was always there on sufferance. Das reached across the table, stained with rings, and gestured at a small knife, curved and graceful like a miniature scimitar. Masson picked it up carefully and turned it over. A cockroach ran across the table, making Masson jump; it had been sheltering under the blade, and Masson now discreetly flicked it onto the floor with the tip of the knife. Das hated to see an insect killed, and tutted mildly, either at Masson’s squeamishness or to suggest that the thing was of no significance.
The blade was curved, whether for grace or use. Though the handle was encrusted and filthy, the quarter-inch at the blade’s edge shone. This knife had been used regularly, and recently. Masson had heard of oriental knives that cut flesh as easily as butter, and placed the tip of his forefinger on the edge of the blade. It rested there, the blade trembling slightly in Masson’s hand.
‘You are left-handed, I perceive,’ Das said.
‘I use both equally well,’ Masson said, fixed on the thin contact between finger and blade, insubstantial as a point in geometry.
‘That is bad luck, very bad luck,’ Das said, drawing back from Masson with his shock of red hair and his divided soul. He made a warding-off hiss, like the noise of hot metal in water.
Masson smiled his wide open devouring smile. ‘On the contrary,’ he said. ‘It’s a piece of very good luck.’ And he moved the knife, a small movement, half an inch, putting no pressure on the handle. There was a sudden heat in the finger, and underneath the blade, the colour had fled the dirty finger, a little field of tripe-white as the blood drew back under the blade. Masson made his pain-noise, the same hissing Das had made, the same sound of hot metal in water. The blood returned and welled up, wine-dark, in the little flap of severed flesh the knife had made. White, translucent, an onion’s slice. Masson put down the magnificent knife, and sucked his salty finger for a minute. When he took it out, the finger was clean, and white in his dirty hand.
‘A good knife,’ he said, picking it up again.
‘Whence does it originate, in your opinion?’ Das asked.
Masson turned the knife over again. The handle was so encrusted with rust and dirt that it was hard to see if it were decorated. He ran the nail of his forefinger over the surface, and there was some raised pattern – he followed the line – some arabesque – some writing, surely. By the whiplash feel of it, he supposed it to be Arabic, some belligerent verse of the Koran. Not Indian; he somehow knew this, without knowing how he knew. He guessed at Persian. It felt like damascene work, anyway.
He said this to Das as he was feeling the knife. Das clapped his hands with pleasure. ‘Indeed, indeed, excellent, quite on the nail, as you would say,’ he said. ‘I had an interesting visitor this week, a traveller, who had acquired some curiosities. I cannot account for it, but he was eager to disembarrass himself of some old Persian treasures. That, I think, is the finest of his hoard, alas, and sadly in want of care, but the other objects I acquired from him have their own interest and even, I dare say, some measure of value. Would you, by any chance, care to …’
‘In a furious hurry, was he, your friend?’ Masson said. ‘And I have no doubt that you found yourself in possession of a large quantity of Persian antiquities without requiring too much of the gentleman?’ Das looked outraged at the suggestion that he might be in the habit of consorting with thieves. It took a moment to make him realize that Masson was only casting the first shot in the exchanges over the final price, and for a while he seemed unwilling to show his newly acquired objects at all.
But in the end, he yielded to the undeniable argument of lucre, and Masson was soon looking, with hungry eyes, at an array of metalwork spread out on Das’s table. For a moment he was incongruously reminded of this morning’s exercise with the dismantled musket, as he pored over the miscellaneous array of mostly Persian, mostly indifferent antique objects. In the end – it took an hour – he settled, besides the knife, for a little silver dish and three unfamiliar coins, interesting in appearance, unaccountably so. As was customary these days, he paid Mr Das with a combination of his army pay and the restitution of one of Masson’s own early purchases, before he had developed a proper eye. This process of secondary haggling occupied another half an hour, as Masson attempted to return to Das some of the worthless trash he had originally passed off on Masson at any price. Das, indignant at being insulted in such a manner that it should be suggested that his shop should ever be soiled with such bazaar trinkets, and denying furiously that he was the first source of the trash, attempted to inveigle out of Masson the beautiful little silver medal he had sold him no more than three weeks before, presumably having realized its worth in the interim. At length an agreement was reached, leaving both Masson and Das sore and suspicious, and they settled down to talk, undisturbed by customers, the army, Suggs or Sale.
‘Mr Das,’ Masson began. ‘Speaking of your visitor last week, if you were to travel and were obliged to live on the proceeds of what you could sell on your travels, what goods would you take?’
‘I do not understand your question, Mr Masson,’ Das said. He picked his nose meditatively and examined the contents before flicking it at the floor. ‘I have no need or desire to travel, as you well know, I am sure.’
‘Indeed, indeed,’ Masson said. He persevered. ‘In a hypothetical situation, however, if you were obliged to travel, and the only means of support you had was the sale of what goods you could carry, what would you take with you to sell?’
‘Ah,’ Das said, now having got the point. ‘Like my friend, earlier this week, in flight from his own shadow and selling his worldly goods at a highly disadvantageous rate, I can assure you.’
‘Disadvantageous to him, Mr Das.’
‘Indeed, indeed,’ Das said. He had a disconcerting habit of taking up Masson’s expressions and repeating them, a minute or two later. You could see the quick boy he must have been. ‘Well, I am sure you are aware that this is a simple matter of working out the relationship between value and bulk.’
The conversation ran its course; they agreed on silver, as being most easily disguised and most universally valued. ‘But why,’ said Das, ‘why, my friend, this sudden interest?’
It was time for Masson to go. He consigned the Persian dish to the cupboard where he stored his things, saying a silent goodbye to it, and thanked Das for the chai. He left the knife with Das. The heat and damp were insufferable, and, returning to the barracks, Masson lengthened his journey by remaining in the shade. Anyone watching him might have thought there was some superstition which directed his route, like a child leaping the cracks in the pavement. Certainly he drew the attention of the Calcutta streets; the red-toothed men squatting on their haunches chewing paan and spitting consumptively followed him with their incurious eyes. They wondered at this peeled-raw man, ugly and gawky, shrinking into the darker side of the street, hugging the wall like a conspirator, looking down, hiding something.
4.
Masson was hiding something, as it happened. It was his plan for escape. It had seemed audacious, impossible, but now Das, with his idle conversation, had found something for him. Until now, Masson had seen no way to be in the East, where he wanted to be, other than by the way he had chosen. The surety that he could only find the East he had dreamt of by remaining where he was, serving the Company at the Company’s request, all at once left him.
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Philip Hensher
The bestselling novel from the Man Booker Prize shortlisted author of The Northern Clemency and King of the Badgers.‘The Mulberry Empire’ is a seemingly straightforward historical novel that recounts an episode in the Great Game in central Asia – the courtship, betrayal and invasion of Afghanistan in the 1830s by the emissaries of Her Majesty’s Empire, which is followed by the bloody and summary expulsion of the Brits from Kabul following an Afghani insurrection (shades of the Soviet Union’s final imperial fling in the very same country in the 1980s).The novel has at its heart the encounter between West and East as embodied in the likeable, complex relationship between Alexander Burnes, leader of the initial British expeditionary party, and the wily, cultured Afghani ruler, the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan.For those who enjoyed William Dalrymple’s ‘Return of a King’, ‘The Mulberry Empire’ is a must-read.
THE MULBERRY EMPIRE
or
The Two Virtuous Journeys
of
The Amir Dost Mohammed Khan
PHILIP HENSHER
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_08cc148f-d310-5068-afee-f993dab9c7d7)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (https://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
Published by Fourth Estate 2016
First published in Great Britain by
Flamingo 2002
Copyright © Philip Hensher 2002
Philip Hensher asserts the moral right to be
identified as the author of this work
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This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Source ISBN: 9780007112265
EBook Edition © JULY 2012 ISBN 9780007406821
Version: 2016-08-08
DEDICATION (#ulink_00edbe92-38ca-5ea8-a2b7-a7c4ba001e90)
For Laurent Rodriguez
C’est toi d’abord, ô bien-aimé,
M’apportant avec ta gaité
Dorénavant douce, I’armée
Des victorieux procédés
Par quoi tu m’as toujours dompté,
Conseil juste, forte bonté …
VERLAINE
CONTENTS
Cover (#u67cb3186-c8ba-5d55-8830-28d33125f6f8)
Title Page (#uc0ab3b44-a084-56a0-942f-e53c84745a3b)
Copyright (#ud97f0631-d0ed-5f15-97a6-73af36a1610c)
Dedication (#ulink_806b5779-690e-598f-a643-f7ab80807a51)
Bella (#ued255ad4-3165-5fe7-adfc-4c552e7ddb8f)
One (#uafae094e-cc7c-57a3-8492-9c71cebdeb59)
Two (#uc771300b-e86d-57c5-bf32-2afc68b016c0)
Three (#ud3057137-6ce4-509e-b4ee-e3b9491377e1)
Four (#u0fda7563-4fd7-5cbb-ad6a-1fb2e57cfc69)
Five (#u114f7b8c-b3d0-51c1-b272-8f5efd07e478)
Six (#uf13ae68a-5b71-5710-80e6-4188b7931afb)
Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Burnes (#litres_trial_promo)
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Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
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Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Anthropological Interlude (#litres_trial_promo)
Akbar (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Glossary (#litres_trial_promo)
Cast List (#litres_trial_promo)
Errors and Obligations (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Other Works (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
BELLA (#ulink_e90f5396-e421-56f7-863d-61732a1db785)
On peut juger du mépris qu’avait pour l’étude des langues un homme qui passait sa vie à découvrir l’epoque précise de la chute des empires et des révolutions qui changent la face du monde.
STENDHAL, La Chartreuse de Parme
ONE (#ulink_4d03b3b4-4f58-5a3f-b51a-2e84b2373c33)
THE AMIR DOST MOHAMMED KHAN had fifty-four sons. And his favourite among these sons was Akbar. One day Dost Mohammed feared that he was ill, and close to dying, and he called his fifty-four sons to him. They came from the far peaceful corners of the kingdom of the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan to the great city he had caused to be built, and as they rode through the country, they were not troubled or threatened. The wisdom and strength of their father made straight roads for them, and the justice he had wrought smoothed their passage.
One after another, his four-and-a-half dozen sons came to the great city of Kabul, and the people of Kabul, seeing that the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan had summoned his sons, turned their dust-filled eyes to the dust in grief. One after another, his sons rode through the wide streets, which were crowded but silent in sorrow. They came to the great palace, and came to the bedchamber of their father, the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan. And to each he said with kindness, as he came in, that his speed had been that of one driven by the Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days. But the great Amir lied, for each had been driven to him by love.
At the end of three days, the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan lay in his bed, and looked around at the silent crowd of his sons, and bid them count themselves. The living counted themselves, and then the dead sons, and then the sons to come, who were not yet born, whom Dost Mohammed loved best, said their names, but only to Dost Mohammed in the dark shade raised over his head. He counted them, and there were fifty-three. It seemed to Dost Mohammed that one was missing.
‘Great King,’ the second youngest of the sons said. ‘Akbar is not yet here. But he must be fast approaching.’ Dost Mohammed nodded, and the rough cloth of his bed cover seemed to whisper a denial. ‘That is not so,’ the youngest of the sons said. ‘Akbar my brother has sent a message that he will not come. He has sent a message to the great King my father that he is occupied, and may not turn away from the borders of the country, to mop my father’s face and hold my father’s head.’ And the brothers looked away in shame that their father should hear the truth.
But Dost Mohammed nodded, and was pleased by what the youngest of the brothers had said. ‘He has done right,’ he said, just that. He raised his head, and looked at the sons who were there, and the sons who were dead, and the sons who were not yet born, and the single son who had better things to do, and the Amir was pleased. And the sons – Afzal, and Azam, and Shams-i Jahan, and Ghulam Haidar, and Sher Ali, and Amin, and Sharif, and Akram and Wali and Faiz and Hawa and Hajira and Ahmad and Zaman and Umar and Ummat al-Mustafa and Bibi Zumurrud and Salih and Muhsin and Nur Jahan and Hasan and Husein and Wafa and Aslam and Qasim and Sher and Nek and Hashim and Sadiq and Shuaib and Rahim and Azim and Sadiq and Sarw-i Jahan and Yusuf and Azim and Habibullah and Mamlakat and Sharaf Sultan and Durr Jan and Sahib Sultan and Bibi Saira and Aisha and Bilqis and Sadiq and Rahim and Saifullah Khan Wakil and Agha and Fatima and Zainab and Banu and Mulk-i Jahan and Badr-i Jahan, youngest of the brothers (for it is written that the women who are born to a great Emperor may be considered sons, too) – the sons of the great King looked at him and saw him revive, and start to live again as he heard that everything was well with his kingdom. Glory be on the names of the sons of the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, greatest of the Afghans, wisest of his people!
In time, Akbar found that his strength had secured his father’s kingdom from his enemies, and, leaving his people with the instruction to be awake and vigilant, hastened to his father’s house. But he found the Dost well, and recovered, and merry, and full of love for the greatest of his sons, and Akbar embraced his father. ‘My son,’ the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan said. ‘You did right not to come to my call, but to remain at the call of the kingdom that will be yours. You, alone among my sons, are truly my son.’ And after that embrace, the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan lived in peace and plenty for years to come, in the knowledge of his wisdom and the knowledge of the wisdom of his son.
TWO (#ulink_266f151f-d922-5a28-a5d5-a779c8b49c01)
1.
‘EMPEROR OF THE AFGHANS,’ Burnes chanted, ‘Lord of the most distant horizon, King of the far hills, Heir of Israel, Lord of the Wind of a Hundred, of a Hundred, of a Hundred—’
He opened his eyes, and made a deflating noise. ‘Ppphhhhhwah,’ he said. ‘I always get stuck there.’
Outside, in the courtyard, a fight was breaking out between a gang of boys; the sudden close yelling was like a flock of geese, diving over the roofs of the mud-brick house. Burnes knocked his fist against his forehead, as if pretending to think. Dr Gerard got up from the corner of the room where he had been squatting, awkward as a camel, and went to the shutters to see what, if anything, the fight outside was about.
‘Very good,’ Mohan Lal said smoothly. ‘Your Persian is really excellent, if I may say so.’
There was an embarrassed sort of silence, since Mohan Lal, naturally, ought not to say so. Certainly, it was not for him to tell Burnes whether his Persian was good or not. Still, he seemed to take it upon himself not just to compliment his betters, but, on occasion, to correct them. Anywhere else, of course – but this was not anywhere else, and, knowing that all of them had to rely on Mohan Lal’s goodwill, the party had taken a tacit decision to put up with the guide’s elegant superiority, perpetually bordering on the supercilious.
‘What is it, anyway?’ Burnes said finally. ‘I can’t remember. I’m sorry.’
‘Lord of the Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days,’ Mohan Lal said, smiling faintly, as if giving a child the answer to a terribly obvious Christmas puzzle. ‘An interesting title. The Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days is a summer wind, a phenomenon fascinating in the abstract, although not something one would wish to experience. It is regarded as a unique property of the kingdom, and therefore an appropriate title for the Amir.’
‘Not something I’d want to boast about,’ Dr Gerard said, turning back to the room, disappointed in the small drama of the courtyard outside. ‘And I hope we’re not here long enough to have to put up with it.’
‘If he keeps us waiting here long enough,’ Burnes said, ‘we may simply have to grit our teeth and endure.’
Outside, Kabul continued its usual life.
Burnes found it hard to be quite sure whether, here, they were prisoners or not. Ten days before, they had arrived at the gates of the city – or what passed for the gates, a waist-high mud wall full of holes. An inadequate rampart, one might have thought, but the Afghans came and went quite happily, as if never fearing an enemy, giving no thought to invaders or infidel. Until now, Burnes had remained swathed in his cloth, blanketed up, his face browned first by colouring and after by the weeks trekking in the mountain sun, his blue eyes becoming more startling by the day. Arriving at Kabul, however, it seemed wise to admit to what they were immediately, and take their chances.
Kabul had surprised Burnes. He had read what there was to read about the country, looked with every appearance of care at the drawings, the prints of the city. They hadn’t been wrong, exactly; but still the city was not what he expected. No commentator, no artist, had captured what Burnes saw; it was as if they had seen only the outlines of the city, or rather, as if they, like Burnes, had seen it whole, and only cared to convey the city in part. Burnes tried to think of what it was his guides had left out. He could only think of it in two words: the fragrance; the filth.
In other cities, the fruit-and-flower smell of the street, the stench of the shit, human, canine, equine and more, would have seemed the inessentials of the city’s life. It had seemed like that to the observers of the city whose work they had so relied upon; they had removed the fragrance and the filth from their gaze as lying above or below what substance truly mattered. Buildings, thoroughfares, population numbers could be set down, and that was what, it seemed, really counted; not the mere smells of this city. It seemed always in danger of turning into an orchard, a stable, or a vast latrine. To Burnes, on the other hand, it was the intangible but overpowering fact of smell which seemed central to the place. Sitting in this half-prison, with all the time in the world to practise the address to the Amir and pursue absurd speculations, he found himself wondering about a map of the city which would convey this sense of his. In his head was a map of Kabul which did not describe the streets and the buildings, but set down the intangible and rich sudden odours of the place; described where a whiff of horse-shit mingled with the heavy perfume of rotting mulberries, where dead dog and fruit blossom competed. He closed his eyes, and there, in his head, was a weighty flush of sensation, a wave like the colour purple, arriving in his head, foreign, uninvited, irresistible. You did not need to walk the streets to map them in this olfactory manner; you only needed to sit by the window, and wait for a breeze. He had seen nothing of the city, in truth, nothing but a few streets as they had arrived, nothing but the few buildings around the house where they now lived, when their guards occasionally escorted them out. The city came to them, its perfumes carried on the wind.
2.
They had arrived, and stood there at the wall, for a moment or two, as if their mere stance could announce their purpose. In front of them, there was the city. It was hard to think of it as a prize worth taking, now. Now that it was here in front of them, it seemed very unlike the great imperial jewel London and Calcutta so easily dreamed of. The hills and hollows of the land had been scattered, it seemed, with detritus; rambling, temporary houses, plastered smooth, scattered where they would fall. It was a city set high in the mountains, and the chill at night was fierce. Between the houses of the city paths, roads of packed-down mud ran; between them a thousand pedlars of goods set up their stalls to sell what they would. But it seemed to Burnes, as he stood there with his companions and waited for the Afghans to come and discover what he wanted, less like a city than a great wild garden. The groves of this high city joined, rambled with fruit trees, with what must be mulberries, blotting on the street and casting their high scent to the wind. What had London and Calcutta dreamed of? A city which could turn into an imperial jewel, certainly, a great imperial city, and not this random assembly, like the careless evening settlement of some wandering people.
Burnes, Mohan Lal the guide, and Gerard had dismounted. They stood there for a while, and it was not long before the curious little boys were succeeded by some more authoritative figures. Mohan Lal had stepped forward, but Burnes spoke first. They had listened to his explanation intently, had exchanged the ritual compliments calmly and gracefully, and, without consulting, had allowed them to remount, and led them into the city. A mounted group approached, shouting hoarsely, wheeled hungrily, curiously, around them like circling buzzards, and, before Burnes could start his explanation again, had ridden off.
First the customs house. The three of them had been hurried into a low white house, its door barely on its hinges. As the eager crowd of short, beakily-featured men, all shouting, poured into the garden of the house, a flock of magpies rose clattering like knives from the fruit trees. The packhorses were tied up outside, and quickly stripped of their bundles. Inside, an immensely fat man emerged with great state from a back room, chewing and wiping some grease from his mouth with the bottom of his coat. All the Afghans fell abruptly silent. He gazed at them as mournfully as a dog as their luggage was brought in and dumped on the floor.
Burnes began his explanation. May the sun ever shine, glorious empire of the Afghans, long heard rumours of the wisdom and greatness of the kingdom. All received with gracious nods; tea was called for and brought by two boys of strongly corrupt appearance. Flat sweet bread followed, politely picked at by the Europeans, wolfed by the Afghans. Burnes pressed on. He and his companions were Europeans, returning home from India overland. Long heard rumours of the beauty of Kabul and promised, etc. (A brief pause here as one of the tea boys, after setting down a glass for Burnes, tried to stroke his neck. Burnes pushed him off gently, and the nearest adult hit the boy very hard with the butt of his rifle, to everyone’s colossal amusement.) Hoped to stay in Kabul for a month, and their great dream was to meet and talk with the great and famous Emperor of the Afghans, the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan.
Burnes came to the end of his speech, and the customs officer gave a brief side-to-side nod of approbation. It wasn’t quite clear what this meant; Burnes, to be sure of indicating what sort of people they were, got out his letters of introduction to the Amir, each carefully prepared in India with a grandiose seal. The official, however, showed almost no interest in them after a quick glance or two. ‘Oh God,’ Gerard said in English. ‘They’re going to search the bags.’ Burnes ignored him; there was nothing to be done about it, and the best way to stay calm was to try not to remember what on earth there was in there.
‘My books,’ Burnes said, as they extracted a dog-eared copy of Marmion and flicked through it. A sketchbook he feared might worry them more, but they looked at it cursorily, and set it down.
‘Tell me,’ the customs officer said. ‘In your country, it is said that pork is eaten. Can that be true?’
Burnes was prepared. ‘It is a food eaten only by the very poorest people in our country. I myself have never tried it, but it is said that it has the taste, somewhat, of beef. That’s a sextant.’
‘Good, good,’ the customs officer said as the underlings turned the object upside down, trying to force a noise from it. ‘And what is it?’
‘It is called a sextant in my language,’ Burnes said. ‘A sort of talisman.’
‘Good, good,’ the customs officer said. ‘In my country we have many sextants.’
It was a long afternoon, but eventually the possessions had all been examined and packed up again. Nothing seemed to excite their interest except Gerard’s bottles of medicine, which they passed around, sniffing at; the maps did not seem to trouble anyone. In the end, Burnes paid the official an enormous bribe in rupees, and gave him a little looking glass.
‘I think he was rather disappointed,’ Mohan Lal said. ‘He was probably hoping for more guns or a thrilling sort of dagger, I expect. They are said in my country to be frightfully fond of weaponry, these Afghan fellows.’
Gerard gave a snort, with which Burnes silently concurred. Mohan Lal had long ago started to seem a tedious companion, with his incessant calm explanations of why things had gone wrong.
They had been led to a house. The owner of the house had welcomed them as if they were guests, effusively, ordered them to be given food and drink, and showed them their beds. Were they prisoners? Were they guests? The interminable attentions of the Newab Jubbur Khan, the owner of the house, and of the series of small boys who sat in the corner of the room with muskets seemed to point to different conclusions. They had arrived ten days ago, and seemed no nearer achieving what they were here to do.
What they were was quite a simple matter: two British officers and a native guide. What they were doing there, not even Burnes would, for this moment, quite bring into his mind. If the knowledge was not at the front of his thoughts, even the calmly interrogative brown gaze of his guards would not bring it out. What Kabul was – what Afghanistan was, here at this moment, far from India, further from England in some sense other than yards and feet than even an explorer like Burnes could quite comprehend – was a matter which could not be thought of as simple. There was, too, the question of what an Englishman was doing in Asia. That had been a question which, in this sort of situation, Burnes had had ample time to contemplate, and never managed any kind of answer. He began to be nervous, sitting here; any Englishman grows atavistically restless if he finds himself more than a hundred miles from the nearest sea, and Burnes was somehow aware all the time that this high brown stinking city was a great deal more than a hundred miles from any imaginable sea.
3.
‘Now, the Lord,’ Burnes went on. ‘No, sorry, vocative, O Lord of the Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days. I always forget Persian numbers over fifty or so.’
‘It is not particularly complicated,’ Mohan Lal said, smiling in his infuriating way. ‘Numbers in Arabic are far more complex a proposition. And we may find we have plenty of time to perfect the address to the Amir.’
‘I’m sure,’ Gerard said. ‘Years, probably. Hi, you, sir.’
The guard in the corner of the room moved, minimally.
‘Are we to see the Amir today?’ Gerard said, as he had asked ten times a day since they had arrived.
The guard made a head-tipping gesture; whether it meant something, or whether it was just the weight of the boy’s enormous, mushroom-coloured turban, was not clear.
‘In any case,’ Gerard said, ‘he knows we are here. Probably.’
The boy guard, his loaded jezail like a bayonet between his thin dirty hands, considered this, deeply, and then made the same head-tipping gesture. ‘Rus?’ he said in the end, nodding three times at the three Europeans. They appeared to know very well what Mohan Lal was.
‘No,’ Burnes said patiently, not for the first time. ‘No, we are not Russians. We are from England, from Engelstan.’
‘Yes,’ Gerard cut in. ‘Tell the Newab Jubbur Khan to tell the Amir. Go on, go and tell your commanding officer. He will see us then, when he knows where we come from.’
The boy looked, as if deeply wounded, appealing to Burnes. ‘Rus,’ he said once more, and then, for no reason on earth, started to laugh uproariously. He did not get up.
‘I wish they wouldn’t do that,’ Gerard said irritably. ‘Laugh like that, I mean. It makes me think they know something we don’t know. And why do they keep calling us Russians?’
‘Rus,’ the boy said again, murmuring as if entranced, understanding a word in what Gerard said.
‘No, no, not Rus,’ Gerard said. ‘And when do we hear from the damned Emperor of the damned Afghans? Oh, God – oh, God – that damned mutton at breakfast. Gentlemen, excuse me—’
Burnes shrugged, as Gerard rushed from the room, clutching his stomach chaotically like an unfastened valise. He prided himself on the value of patience in these dealings. That was the great thing in the East; patience, because nothing ever happened when it should, nothing ever happened on schedule. Everything, in dealing with the great rulers of the East, was whim and delay. Ten days was nothing; because, in response to whim and delay, there was no sensible behaviour to adopt but a complete, more-than-Oriental patience. That was what everyone said, and Burnes was pleased with himself for having exercised a great deal of patience with every potentate he had ever come across, and usually attained, if not the desired end, then, at least, some interesting conclusion. What no one had ever warned him about was the necessity to exercise some patience with one’s fellow travellers; with a supercilious ass like Mohan Lal, forever making superior suggestions about one’s Persian or giving one ridiculous and probably entirely false information about the curious customs of the country, or a bigger ass like Gerard, complaining about the slightest inconvenience to his blessed dignity, arguing for two entire days about the necessity of shaving his head and dying his beard black before crossing the Indus, always wanting to tell some outraged and heavily-armed nabob about the greatness of the Empire, or even, once, telling an imam in response to the invariable question about the European diet that, yes, he ate bacon daily and very delicious it was too. Unfairly, Burnes blamed Gerard even for his disastrous digestion, the steady torrential cataract from his bowels, blamed in turn on the damned mutton at breakfast, the damned beans at dinner, or the damned melon which the rest of the company had eaten at Jalalabad with no ill effects. Yes, the exercise of patience with one’s damned fellow travellers was the most taxing thing; compared to that, waiting ten days to see the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan presented him with no difficulty whatever.
4.
Out on the street, debate about the Europeans who rode so badly was furious and incessant, like the noise of a cloud of swallows.
‘The Amir will not see them.’
‘The Amir will see them tomorrow, fool. He has seen them yesterday, and knows everything about them.’
‘How can the Amir have seen them when they have not seen the Amir?’
At the edges of the market, the old men jogged up and down on their heels, agitated by debate, and punched at the air, quick as clockwork. They bothered no one.
‘The Amir sent Akbar the son of the Amir, and the Amir saw them with the eyes of Akbar.’
‘Did they not know the son of the Amir when Akbar was announced?’
‘Many are the ways of the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, and wise they are.’
Futteh the singer, plump and pale as a dove, his saucy eyes wandering to make sure of his audience, finished sucking on his plum, pondered, spat. He began a story.
‘You recall the tale of the Vizier’s daughter and the son of the King,’ he started. ‘And the King did not know how he should know if the daughter of the Vizier was true and good as she was thought to be. Now, this was many, many years ago, in China. And the Vizier had the most marvellous garden of roses in all of China, and he was in the habit of taking a walk in the garden, each morning. And one morning, he was accompanied in his walk by his daughter, who was as beautiful as the first light of the dawn over the mountains. He was glad to walk in the rose garden with his daughter, and, after they had walked together for an hour, the Vizier said to his daughter: My daughter, is it true that …’
The story unravelled. Futteh was a good storyteller, and, even in the cold of the early evening, he could hold half a dozen old men with his seamless voice. Their eyes fixed on his, six pairs of eyes, whether crafty, knowing, cynical, for the moment subdued into the quiet trust of the audience. Their knees hunched, their backs against the wall, they listened to the comforting tale they had heard hundreds of times before. Occasionally they interrupted with marginal, concerned comments – ‘He does not know that the ring has been swallowed by the fish on the King’s table,’ or, ‘The girl, does she not understand that the man she is marrying is her own brother?’ or, as narrative catastrophe threatened, ‘Allah is great and merciful.’ But for the most part, they let Futteh tell the story in his own leisurely manner.
When it was over, an hour or two had passed, and the audience sighed, as if wanting more of their own satisfaction.
‘The son of the King in the story disguised himself, and went into the marketplace to hear what the common people were saying,’ one of the audience said.
‘Yes, and that is what Akbar, son of the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, that is what he has done, with the Russians.’
‘They are not Russians,’ another man said, passing. ‘Engelstan.’
‘Akbar put on a tribesman’s clothes, and took a jezail,’ Futteh said, waving his hand in the air impatiently, dismissing either the objection or the flies. ‘And he went to the house where the English are, and sat with them for two hours, and talked with them. But all the time, they did not know who they were speaking with.’
‘Great is the mind of the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, and wise is he in the ways of the world,’ someone murmured.
‘And they ride so badly,’ Futteh added, with great finality.
‘Like the sack of rice on the back of an old donkey,’ his listeners chorused sagely.
5.
The orchard city fell into shade as the afternoon wore on; pale peaches, espaliered against the wall, plums, apricots, pears; beneath the window of the Newab Jubbur Khan where they sat all day, a fine apple tree, just like the trees of Burnes’s childhood. He shut his eyes, and sniffed, and sometimes, through all the smell and noise and clear strange mountain air, there was all his childhood, in the sheltered Montrose garden. Walnuts, cherries, vines, and more wonderful things, pomegranates growing in the streets, and, everywhere, mulberry trees; their fruit piled up in market stalls, lying in the street, and the whole city sucking ceaselessly on fruit. At the door of their wing in the courtyard, a small boy, padded up with scraps of cloth, his legs wrapped up puttee-fashion, his dirty feet bare and hardened in sandals, was sucking on a handful of cherries and mulberries, cracking walnuts between his hard teeth, and every so often running his tongue round his mouth to clean off what juice was staining his face, leaving a fat white clown-smile in a fruit-smeared face. And everywhere the birds; bright chattering magpies, the fat burble of doves, edging at each other in their nervous fighting. Burnes watched them for hours from the window. And the nightingale; he had never known, quite, what the Persians meant when they wrote about the nightingale, but here, it was a sharp lemon tang, cutting through the rich sweetness of the dungy perfumed city, a line of pure song, returning on itself, multiplying, varying, twisting, but always, always, itself. He sat in the evening light, and listened, and found no way to ask the others to be quiet too.
The day wore on, and at some point towards the end of the afternoon, a procession of dishes began to be carried into the room. The two women of the house, veiled in brick-red cloaks, carried them in. Their veils were raw squares of cloth, dropped over their heads. A coarse lattice was cut in to allow them to see. Burnes seemed to catch the glint of an eye through the loose weave of the eye-slit, and, before he lowered his eyes, wondered for a moment if that meant the woman was looking at him. From their gait, they were both young, and the contours of their bodies were revealed by the rippling red cloth.
A third woman stood at the door and watched, holding a baby; she too was veiled; even the baby was veiled. She seemed to be supervising the other women. Perhaps a favoured wife. The dishes were set down on the floor without explanation, and, when the entire room was filled with clay dishes, the three women retreated to the door, looked once at the food, and not at the men, and quickly left. And then the Newab Jubbur Khan came in.
The Newab, whose house this was, seemed to regard them with an almost affectionate air. He made a point of eating with them; he also made a point of coming in after the food, and leaving without excusing himself. The three of them scrambled to their feet.
‘You have passed an agreeable day, I hope?’ the Newab said kindly. He was a slight man, his nose a huge beak in his little face; when he walked, it was with an evident consciousness of grandeur which his appearance did not entitle him to. He walked like a man who has once been fat. ‘If you do not object, I would like to eat with you.’
‘We would be honoured,’ Burnes said.
‘Honoured indeed,’ Gerard said, looking warily at the food. ‘Thrice honoured.’
The Newab nodded agreeably at Gerard’s meaningless formulation. ‘Sit, sit,’ he said. He rattled off the habitual prayer, lazily looking round, and without taking a breath, fell back from Arabic into Persian. ‘The lamb is particularly fine, from my own flock.’ He gestured at a greasy-looking dish, grey and shining in the sun. Burnes leant forward and scooped up some of the cold stew, knowing perfectly well that the Newab was lying politely, since all the food here had to be ordered up from the bazaar. Gerard just looked green.
‘Tell me,’ the Newab asked, after each of the dishes had been commended and accepted, and they were embarked on the task of struggling unsuccessfully with what could be eaten of the Newab’s food. ‘How large a city is London, or Calcutta?’
‘They are different cities, Newab, and both large and beautiful,’ Mohan Lal said.
‘I see,’ the Newab said. He seemed, still, to be under the impression that Calcutta and London were more or less the same place, or perhaps different names for the same city; an impression they had been trying to correct for some time now. ‘But how big? Is it, for instance, as large as our city?’
‘I think it might be even a little larger,’ Burnes said tactfully. ‘How many people, for instance, live in Kabul?’
The Newab sucked on his teeth, and gazed at the wall, as if calculating. ‘Many, many people, and their numbers grow every day, thanks to the wisdom and kindness of the Amir who rules over them.’
‘I see,’ Burnes said, making a routine half-incline of the head at the mention of the Amir.
‘London has many hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, and is the richest and most beautiful city in the world,’ Gerard cut in. Burnes looked at him in irritation; what the point of boasting to the Newab about the size of London was, he had no idea. Just an unthinking, involuntary outcrop of Gerard’s personality, as frustrating and impossible to argue with as geology.
‘Of course, we have seen very little of Kabul,’ Burnes said. ‘But the reputation of the beauty and splendour of the city has spread far, and we have travelled from India in the hope that we may see for ourselves.’
‘How is it that you have seen very little of Kabul?’ the Newab abruptly asked. He seemed genuinely puzzled, proffering a dish of boiled aubergines.
Burnes was thrown. ‘We have been resting here, at your hospitality,’ he said finally, seeing no way to point out that they were effectively prisoners. At that, as if to make his point, one of the succession of small boys with muskets wandered in. He greeted the Newab elaborately, the English more casually, and sat down in the corner of the room, promptly falling asleep, both hands on the barrel of his gun. ‘At the gracious hospitality of the Newab,’ Burnes said, pointedly. ‘We have been unable to see the famous city of Kabul.’
‘Great is the city of Kabul,’ the Newab Jubbur Khan echoed, absently. He took a piece of bread, tearing it in half, and dipped it in some dish of meat; before eating it, he made a vague gesture of invitation towards Gerard, who, with too evident unwillingness, followed his example. ‘Yes, the city is great, and its fame has spread far. The bazaar of the city is the greatest in the world, where the world comes to marvel at the riches and splendour of the empire. The merchants of China and Russia and Engelstan come to the great markets, laden with goods, and leave laden down with more than they brought, such are the marvels of the city. The beauty and splendour of the city is great, and the beauty of the people of the Emperor is famous throughout the world. And such, willing, it will always be. Over the city is the Bala Hissar, the palace of my brother, the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, where my brother rules over his family and his wives and his wealth in wisdom and mercy and goodness, willing. And the palace of my brother is famed throughout the world, and the world comes to express its wonder at its beauty and greatness and the greatness of my brother the Amir.’
He paused, perhaps considering whether his description of the city would, in the end, be as useful to the English as simply letting them out to look for themselves; perhaps, however, considering what there could possibly be to start praising next in the high stinking city. Not the food, at any rate, Burnes thought unkindly, refusing the offer of another greasy dish.
‘The Amir is your brother?’ Mohan Lal said.
‘The Amir is the brother, it is said, of every Afghan,’ Burnes said, helping out.
‘He is my brother,’ Jubbur Khan said simply. ‘The shade of the same mountain shadowed our birth, and may the same stream refresh his parched tongue.’
‘May friendship be forever between warriors,’ Burnes said.
‘And he is my brother,’ Jubbur Khan said again.
‘He is the brother of every Afghan,’ Gerard said, conventionally echoing what Burnes had said.
‘He is the brother of every Afghan,’ Jubbur Khan agreed. But then he seemed troubled, and said, once more, more emphatically, ‘The Amir is my brother.’
‘He is the brother of every Afghan,’ Gerard said again, idiotically.
‘He is your brother?’ Burnes cut in. ‘He is the son of your father?’
‘He is the son of my father,’ Jubbur Khan said, relieved. ‘Yes, he is the son of my father.’
This explained a great deal. And now Jubbur Khan got up, as if he had said enough to explain who he was, and who the Amir was, and what the Europeans were. He got up, bowing on all sides, and swept out with massive graciousness, hardly waiting for his guests to raise themselves and bow graciously back, as if his good manners were such that no complementary response could possibly improve or complete them, and was out of the door and at the bottom of the stairs before Gerard succumbed to what had clearly been troubling him for some time, a colossal, harrumphing and malodorous fart, like a bough breaking under the sheer weight of fruit. The boy guard looked up, surprised and humorous. Burnes vastly bowed in his direction, the sleeves of his robe collapsing about his arms and hands. ‘And to you, O Lord of the Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days,’ he said. ‘That, I expect, is a very good sign.’
‘Indeed,’ Mohan Lal said. ‘Your digestion is improving, to venture a fart. You need not have waited until the departure of the Newab, indeed. I have read that the Afghan custom is to fart at table.’
‘A risky business,’ Gerard said. ‘With nothing to eat but this damned greasy food.’
6.
Outside, there was a flicker of movement. A scarlet-leaved tree against the dense dusk sky trembled suddenly; a gust, quickly over, as if someone had shaken the tree’s trunk and run away. Another movement, something which might have been a bird, shooting up from the tree with a raucous squawk, abruptly muted. Gerard raised himself from where he lay, complete with food and boredom, and went to the window, where Burnes was already standing. Underneath the tree, a flash, sudden, of white, like the wink of a fish belly, turning in a black pool. For a moment the faces of the Afghans had turned up to the window, before returning to their usual occupation; their teeth and eyes winking white in the dusk. They could be guards; yes, they could be; or, conceivably, they could merely be sitting there, as they would sit there indifferently, whoever was inside the house of the Newab. Burnes did not know, and could not think who to ask.
Out in the court, the squatting boys were preparing for their street-sport. There were five of them, and each clutched, underneath his arm, something which peeped and squawked, a weak piping squawk like an unoiled hinge. With his free hand, each dipped steadily into a little bag, tied to the sash at his waist next to the knife, and ate shrivelled-up little apricots, crunching and spitting the stones with all the absorption they had. In a moment, a boy threw down the piping bird under his arm, and, as if recognizing the challenge, the boy facing him in the circle threw down his bird, too. The two quails shivered their plumage back into plumpness, and nervously strutted in the other’s direction. The boys made an encouraging noise, a quick strange grunting rattle, like a pig eating a snake, and a handful of grain was flung down. The fight began.
It was dark, below, and Burnes could see nothing of the sport; the faces were turned down in excited absorption, and all that could be heard was the occasional fierce cry from a boy, quickly stifled, the pipe and peck of two small birds fighting over a handful of grain. Burnes had seen the sport before, in the daylight, from this window. The rudimentary contest seemed never to weary or tire the street, and they squatted over the two little fat birds, watched them barge each other, pluck at each other with their fierce little beaks like toy birds, a harmless little bout between paint-bright tin birds, wheeling in their tin circles.
Down there, small cries of excitement, quickly muted, were being made; this was not a game for cheering at, but one where the small shrieks of the birds, rending and tearing each other’s little flesh for grain, was to be heard and winced over. This was the sport – the one thing, as it were – which kept Kabul quiet, and everyone watched it; underneath the window, Burnes had seen fine horsemen, street boys – even, a couple of times, an idle Newab Jubbur Khan leaving his house for a morning constitutional – pause for a moment before the rapt silent bout. It was too dark to see, from the window, what was happening; you could not see which of the two birds was succeeding, which was succumbing. There was only the faint tremulous cries of small fat birds, assaulting each other furiously over grain which neither of them would eat. Burnes drew back into the room.
The guard came in. But instead of sitting down in the corner, he stood at the door, and looked at them; at Burnes and Gerard and Mohan Lal. ‘He,’ the guard said finally, ‘will see you tomorrow.’ He made a small gesture with his head, the side-to-side twist, an acknowledgement of something, though none of them had said anything, and then left.
They stared at each other.
He will see you tomorrow, the guard had said, just that; and Burnes ran the sentence through his head, over and over again, to see if it was clear, if he had understood it correctly. Language brings opposite meanings so intimately together, and if the guard had said He will not see you tomorrow, there was a terrible danger that Burnes would have missed it. He ran through the sentence, over and over, adding words which he might have missed, substituting they for he, never for tomorrow, kill for see. He got to the end of it. He was absolutely sure of what he had heard. The Emperor of the Afghans would see them tomorrow.
But with that certainty came an appalling and unanticipated terror. They had travelled to Kabul, never knowing what they would find there; had presented themselves at the gates; had submitted to their guesthouse garrison without more than a weak tremor of dread. And now, with the certainty that they would do what they had arrived to do, terror set upon Burnes. No; not quite that; it was not that something had struck at him. It was more that something had left him. As if, with the ordinary words, some great certain presence in him had abruptly fled, clearing the walls and windows, the barriers of his own skin without an effort. He sat, trying, almost, not to shake with the black terror of his own certainty, fleeing him, and waited for it to leave. It was the Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days, and it began in this room, it began its furious flight from this little room, and fled from him, his fear, his terror, his knowledge. He did not know, quite, what it was, what certainty he was losing with this flight, as if of wind; he could only feel it leaving, with no sense at all of what would be left of him when it was gone, what strength to carry out his task. He waited saying nothing, as if in thought, and in a moment it was over; the fleeing strength and certainty had, just at the door, turned and looked at him in quiet curiosity. At him: at the shell of what had housed all that certainty for so long. Turned and looked and left, leaving nothing but Burnes. He sat for a moment in silence, wanting not to show any fear, to anyone, ever again.
7.
In these long nights, Burnes dreamt of Montrose. He could not help it.
You went to the door of your chamber, and turned, and looked. The thin curtains were blowing in the summer breeze, and already, at this moment in the morning, the sun was lighting the thin white cloth, there at the narrow windows. You looked down at yourself, and there too, your white nightgown billowed out with the cool Scottish morning breeze, lit with the cool Scottish morning light. And there were your boy’s feet, there, on the floor, blue almost with the cold, and veiny. For a moment, you could go back and hug yourself in bed, while the first of the morning; there, your bed, cut and rumpled and squashy with your sleep; or you could do what you could do, run downstairs in your bare feet and throw open the Montrose door to the Montrose morning. Rub your eyes and moan like a dove with your sleep; push your fists into your eye sockets, and fret your sides with your own quick warming embrace. And there. The blue sky; the birds at song; the smell of the morning’s first earth and, behind you, the first clanking noises of the house, preparing itself for the day, as the maids raked the fire and the girl brought in the milk. Yes, he would run, in this cold he could see, and not only feel, down to look at the dreamt Montrose morning.
But then he turned and looked at Montrose, and it too had become an orchard city, high in the dry brown mountains; Scotland turned to Islam, the granite city turned to a city of mulberries, and the perfume wafting over Burnes’s sleep was not heather, the song was not that of the starling, but the heavy blossom of mulberry, the clean song of nightingales. It was as if he woke, and went to the Montrose window, and outside, there were orchards and orchards of mulberries. Mulberries outside, weighing the tree down, the tree glimpsed through the open Scottish door. And there, there, was a boy, a curious near-boy, a near-warrior, barely uniformed, a powdery beard against his soft skin, scurrying away outside, peering in at Burnes, in his high gleaming magnificence. And in his wake a sweet whiff of the many-perfumed city, a waft of dung and smoke and the high Scottish, yes, heathery Scottish mountain air; and the scent, too, of mulberries, growing outside somewhere, clotted on the trees, fallen and thick on the roads as dung. Burnes looked down at himself, and his bare nightgowned flesh was glittering with brass, with spurs, his boots bright with polish, but stained with the fruit flesh, the limbs of one who had walked long and far through the orchards. And as he woke, Burnes thought of something he knew, even after waking, to be true: that the fruit for which the English had the single name of mulberry had in Persian six separate names, and in Pushto, the language of the far high hills, the fruit had so many names that no one could ever know them all; a fruit which, before, had seemed single turned in Burnes’s dream into one with so many names that no man had ever counted them all, and no man would ever risk reciting the many divine names of the divine fruit.
They must have come early, the next morning. Burnes woke from his dream, and already he could hear the whinnying of the strange horses out there in the garden, their unfamiliar-sounding jingle. He lay there on the padded floor, his eyes open, and could see from their unnatural stillness that Gerard and Mohan Lal, too, had woken, and were lying without moving, their eyes closed, feigning sleep so as not to move, not just yet. He lay and listened to the terrifying noise of the horses. They were down there, the men who would take them to the Emperor, of whom they knew nothing, of whose cruelty and goodness they knew nothing. Down there, waiting with all the patience they were born with.
They dressed quickly, and after a breakfast of milk and flat bread, went down to their escorts. They were there, sitting peaceably on their horses, not dismounting, just waiting as they had waited, surely, for an hour or two. Burnes led the other two out. Mohan Lal awkwardly salaamed, a gesture which they returned perfunctorily; their unfamiliar, unwelcoming look at the guide confirming what Burnes had always felt, that his frankly inquiring gaze, noting down, say, a particular stirrup loop as peculiar to the region, was always one guaranteed to bring suspicion and dislike down, not just on him but on the whole party.
It was the first time out of the house in days, and Burnes could not help feeling stiff. He stretched, awkwardly, as the light almost hurt his eyes, and for the first time, he saw the city. Not arriving for the first time, where novelty coloured the vision, not through a window, making distant what was there to be seen, but seeing a city which, it now seemed, he knew from his memory. A scattered city, lying in the scoop of the earth, the brown cubed houses lying against the vast slow rise of the brown mountains like dice in a cupped pair of hands. All the way they had ridden here, the earth had seemed dully brown, unchanging, empty, like the momentarily empty earth after waterless months, from which all colour had been sucked, leaving only brown. But now, coming out into the air, it seemed as if everything had enriched, multiplied in the unchanging earth; the dazed eye, looking down from the dazzling clean blue of the sky, saw a hundred, a thousand tints in the bare mountain earth; browns whitening with chalk, a streak of vivid yellow, a shadow going into mauve in the early-morning sun. Everything, he saw, pausing here before the bleak dazzling sun, could be found here; horses, orchards, sky, water, earth, and now, waiting for the high remote Emperor, he seemed in terror and jubilation to see everything there was, everything, there in the earth.
‘Where are we going to?’ Burnes shouted to the mounted guards. He was glad to hear his voice sounded authoritative.
‘The Bala Hissar,’ one said, not looking down at him.
‘Is it far?’ Burnes called.
‘No,’ another horseman said. ‘Not far.’
‘The Emperor is waiting,’ the first horseman said. ‘It is time to go. Are you ready?’
‘Yes,’ Burnes said. ‘Yes, we are ready.’
They set off, their guard not dismounting but hemming them in between the horses’ high flanks. The horses walked with such stately gravity that at one moment, one of them could not bear the tenseness of the slow walk and wheeled abruptly off, circling like a hawk in the street before the rider brought the beast back. There could have been something brutal, a blunt assertion of power, in their making the party walk between the horses, like tethered slaves. They may have felt this – Gerard certainly felt this, to judge by his clenched-buttock stride, now the result of his august pride as much as his fluid bowels – but Burnes couldn’t feel any outrage in himself at this treatment. Rather, he felt, in his glittering exotic clothes, dress uniform draped splendidly with the heavy red court robes, like a pilgrim. An unworthy pilgrim, walking humbly up the hill to the great sawn-off blunt rock, the palace, the Bala Hissar, in the middle of which vast plain mass sat the Amir. Up there was the Emperor, politely patient, waiting; you could feel his calm wait here, walking the street between their mounted companions. And the mounted companions, too, seemed quiet, subdued by the Emperor’s patient quiet. What splendour was up there, Burnes could not tell; but he felt that there would be none. This city, plain-dressed, the high clean air given its florid perfume by the fruit trees, wasn’t ruled by some fabulous potentate; he could feel it. No cushion-fleshed tyrant in a pile of rubies sat up there, watching them approach; just a mind.
As they walked through the narrow mud streets, they were given a thorough inspection. The children came to the windows, and stood, staring; shadows, in the upstairs shuttered windows, showed them that the women of the city, too, were curious. The shops in the bazaar were opening, and, behind the piles of fruit, of bags of spice, the merchants and customers, sitting in the early sun, followed the procession with humorous open eyes. Over the city, the Bala Hissar, a great shapeless piece of power, and they walked the streets, not responding to the keen attention of the city.
They walked on, not speaking to each other or their guards. Occasionally, over their heads, one of the horsemen would call out to another, or to someone in the street. They called out in Pushto, and each time Gerard, walking by Burnes’s side, stiffened, knowing that they didn’t want to be understood. Burnes worked on his patience; if Gerard could be kept from speaking at least until his easily-ignited fury had died down, that would make things a great deal easier. After they had run the gauntlet of the bazaar, the houses seemed to drop away. The hill of the Bala Hissar itself was bare, clear for a siege.
This last stretch, as the road turned upwards, seemed to divide and stretch before them, and it seemed to Burnes, as the Bala Hissar receded from them, that this was the road in the paradox; that with each step, the road doubled in length, that each step grew smaller and more painful, and the great fortress would never be reached, as they laboured at its gates, endlessly. But it was mere minutes before they were there at the open gates, and their escort turned, at some unseen signal, and rode off, calling to each other, now, in Persian.
8.
A small man ran up to them and beckoned quickly with his two hands, scowling. He seemed alone, and they followed him into the big square court of the palace. It was quite empty, and they walked briskly across it into another opening, the doors swinging open. Two boys were lounging there, each with a jezail slung across his back, each turbanned massively, and they made some side-to-side swing of the head, acknowledging not them, but their little guide. He gestured and beckoned continuously, and they followed him into another hall, where a group of more soldierly youth stood, waiting, and then into another. As they walked through the rooms of the palace, they acquired some kind of attendance behind them, the boys forming a chattering guard behind them, and all the time the little man, dancing, beckoning, in front of them. They walked through one room after another, the heavy blunt-carved dark wood doors opening weightily, and in every room there was almost no furniture, almost nothing, just plain plaster walls, the narrow windows of a palace in a country which knew all about heat, and about cold. Abruptly, they all fell silent, and at a circling gesture from their guide, stopped. The guide looked them over, critically, as if for the first time, and, with a circling gesture, stirring something in the air, a half-smile, a nod at the guards at the door, conveyed somehow that here they were. The doors were brought open and their guards fell back behind them, as they walked, in an awe they tried to subdue, into the great hall of the Amir. And there he was.
The hall was bare, long and square, with a single step at the end rising to a modest platform. There was nothing in the room except a huge Turkey carpet, rich and deep as rubies. At the far end of the hall, perched on the edge of the step, sat the Amir. A group of courtiers and mullahs, ten or twelve, stood behind him; the courtiers wore swords dangling from their kummur-bund. As they entered, the group seemed to stiffen, and drew back, forming a little fan around the Amir, who did not rise. They bowed deeply from the far end of the hall, rose very slowly, and walked forward. Every five paces, they stopped and bowed again, an obeisance returned with a tiny benevolent craning of the neck by the Amir. It wasn’t a court ceremonial; just a ritual concocted to show the greatest possible deference, which, it was hoped, the Amir would take as some court ritual of Europe. Finally, at ten paces from the Amir, they dropped to their knees and bowed their heads very slowly to the floor, counted to five, as agreed, and raised them again.
The Amir was smiling. ‘Welcome, welcome,’ he said. He was a sharp-featured man, a scimitar of a nose scything through his beautiful humorous face, and his big dark eyes danced, curious or amused, from one to another. His robes were plain, and, like the earth, a dozen shades of brown, and wrapped around his body as he sat, cross-legged, on the edge of the step. By his side, the nobles looked savage, graceless, bundled like washing. He gave a small bow from the neck, not in humility but, as it were, cueing Burnes to speak.
‘Emperor,’ Burnes began. ‘Lord of the distant horizon, Emperor of the wind, King of the Afghans, Heir of Israel …’
That was not quite right. He continued.
‘Heir of Israel, we come to offer you the shade of our friendship. May the shade of our friendship always offer you rest and solace, may the waters of the love between our empires never run dry.’
‘May the song of the nightingale always bless your counsels,’ the Amir returned, ‘and may the wise horses of your empire bear you without tiring to your last home. Sit down, sit down.’
Burnes, Gerard and Mohan Lal awkwardly forced themselves into a cross-legged posture; a painful business in high-topped boots.
‘Greetings, Sikunder Burnes,’ the Amir said. ‘Your name is auspicious.’
An old and now familiar joke, from much repetition. Memories were long here, and every single Afghan, on hearing Burnes’s name, had asked him if he were Alexander the Great, come to rob the country again. It had seemed unfortunate; now, he had come to see it was just their sense of humour. ‘There is nothing, thank God, I share with the Greek Alexander, and come not to plunder your kingdom, but in all respect.’
The nobles, teetering with nervously thrilled anxiety, now gave way to a general giggling, stopped with one quick sideways jerk of the Amir’s head. Behind him, the two pairs of double doors, one on either side of the throne room, were half opened; it had clearly been a great honour that, on their entry into the Bala Hissar, the double doors were all opened. Out of the doors came now a procession of cooks, bearing great dishes of heavy beaten silver, starting with a whole steaming lamb, lying on its back with its legs pathetically upwards in a sea of steaming spinach. It was, Burnes estimated, ten o’clock in the morning, and Gerard was tensing at the sight.
‘How many kings are there in Europe?’ Dost Mohammed suddenly asked. ‘And Napoleon, is he still King in Europe?’
‘Ah—’ Burnes said, thrown off balance. But the Amir seemed hardly to mind.
‘I do not understand,’ the Amir continued. ‘It seems that the lands of the kings of Europe march with each other. Are they on good terms, or do they fight over their borders? How can they exist without destroying one another? I am most interested, Sikunder Burnes, to have the benefit of your wisdom and knowledge.’
Burnes recollected himself. He had been made sleepy by the East, and had been preparing for a long series of introductory gestures; the mutual flattery for half an hour, the commendation and reluctant acceptance of every single dish, the entertainment from the professional anecdotalist. He hadn’t anticipated anything like conversation starting up for at least two hours.
‘There are many countries in Europe, great Amir,’ he began. Dost Mohammed, gathering up his retinue, gestured them to their places on the carpet around the colossal morning feast. He drew Burnes to his right side, and seemed to be listening with great attention, the Amir’s big dark sad eyes fixed on him as he spoke. When the list had come to an end, he took a deep hissing breath through his nose, like a horse after exercise.
‘I see,’ he said. ‘It seems to me that your advancement in civilization, as you describe it, does not save you from war and dispute.’
‘It is to be feared so.’
The minor nobility and clergy, all trembling with curiosity, now responded to some kind of sign from the Amir, and fell on the food with a terrible cheerful eagerness.
‘It is said,’ a very young prince asked, ‘that in your country, the flesh of pigs is eaten. Is this true, Sikunder Burnes?’
The Amir waved away the question before Burnes could answer it. ‘Tell me about taxation in Europe,’ he said. ‘How do your kings collect money to conduct their wars?’
‘Such a thing can barely interest the great Amir,’ Gerard interposed, ‘so peaceful are his lands and the lives of the people under his wise rule.’
‘Nevertheless, I want to know,’ the Amir said, not taking his eyes off Burnes. ‘Tell me about taxation.’
‘And you, great Amir,’ Burnes said. ‘What do you know of the people of Europe? Have you, with your own eyes, seen the embassies of Russia?’
Dost Mohammed took a piece of bread, and chewed it, thoughtfully.
‘Pray, sir,’ Dr Gerard said abruptly. ‘What are your times of prayers?’
The mullah, on safe ground here, immediately began to rattle off the list. Gerard interrupted him. ‘You are enjoined, I think, by the Koran, to pray before sunrise and after sunset?’
‘Yes, yes,’ the mullah said. ‘Yes, and damned be the infidel who neglects such prayers.’
Gerard could hardly contain himself, his feet twitching with his suppressed theological glee. ‘Tell me, sir,’ he went on, his eyebrows shooting up in theatrical amazement, ‘how one of the faithful would carry out this injunction in the Arctic Circle?’
The mullah hardly paused. ‘In every part of the world are the injunctions of the Koran to be obeyed, except in some circumstances while travelling, when it is written that—’
‘Quite, quite, quite,’ Gerard went on. ‘But in the Arctic Circle, man.’
‘The—’ the mullah paused, uncertain.
‘The Arctic Circle is the utmost point of the earth, sir, the Ultima Thule, the furthest point on the geographical globe, far north of any inhabited or habitable spot. It exhibits – and this is my query – a seasonal curiosity, for five or six months of the year. In the winter, the sun does not rise; in the summer, the sun does not set, and the barren northern lands are plunged into a night which lasts for months, and, in the summer, a perpetual day. Sir, I repeat my question. How may these prayers be performed in a land where there is neither sunrise nor sunset? Are we to suppose that the faithful Esquimaux are only enjoined to perform their devotions twice a year?’
Gerard was enjoying himself too much, Burnes reflected, and now the mullah had had a moment to consider the question and make something up. He glanced at the Amir, and, to his slight surprise, there was no sense of insult there, but, over the sharp hooked nose, a glittering and amused look in the eyes. Dost Mohammed, too, was enjoying himself.
‘Quite, quite,’ the mullah said. ‘The Prophet himself visited the faithful Eska, the faithful Eska. It is said. And in such countries it has always been the custom that prayers are not required, in those countries, yes, it is sufficient to repeat the Quluma.’
‘Permit me to ask, sir,’ Burnes cut in with a confident feeling that, now, he was entertaining the Dost, ‘in which chapter of the Koran this doctrine may be found? We poor infidel, alas, may not claim to know or understand the sacred writings.’
‘Yes,’ Dost Mohammed added. ‘Yes, where is this extraordinary idea to be found? I do not remember such a thing. And when is the Prophet supposed to have found time to convert the Eska? I suppose at the same time he was travelling to Engelstan to pay his homage to Sikunder Burnes’s grandfather, fool.’
The poor mullah started to blush furiously, and the argument was taken up in the far corner of the room. Burnes dared to look directly at the Amir, who was twinkling graciously.
‘You see,’ the Amir said to Burnes, leaning over confidentially and entirely ignoring the gurgle and chatter of the debate, ‘both our fools and our wise men love to argue, and hope never to conclude their arguments. And in your country, do the wise debate, so as to outlast the nightingale’s song?’
‘From dusk to dawn, great Amir,’ Burnes said. ‘And in every land, I think.’
‘But your companion has made an interesting point,’ the Amir said. ‘And one which the mullahs, now, will never settle. Perhaps you should return in seven years, and see what conclusion they have reached, because I fear they will not agree today.’
The Amir looked distinctly amused by this prospect. Burnes looked at him, and the Amir looked, frankly, back; and, for once, looking into the eyes of one of the great princes of the Orient, Burnes did not feel like a rabbit transfixed by a snake.
‘The climate of your city is most healthy, great Amir,’ Burnes said, slipping back into idle compliments. ‘And the beauty of your people is the most remarkable I have ever seen in my travels.’
‘If you stay, Sikunder,’ the Amir said, shrugging briefly, ‘you will be struck by the Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days, and you will not think the climate so fine.’
‘The Wind, Amir?’
‘It strikes at travellers, and may take only one. A pestilential wind, which strikes and kills.’ The other Afghans had fallen silent now. ‘It attacks like a cold wind, and leaves the traveller senseless. And the flesh of the man struck by the Wind falls from the bones, and limbs soften and fall away from each other, and the hair falls out at the touch. A disease of the low-lands, a curse of the Wind.’
‘Pray God—’ Gerard said.
‘And now, Sikunder Burnes,’ the Amir went on, quite calmly. ‘Let us speak of your European alchemists.’
9.
And so, when the infidel had been fed, and watered, and dismissed for the day, Dost Mohammed looked out over his city. Dost Mohammed, son of Sarfraz, son of Hajji Jamal, son of Usaf, son of Yaru, son of Mohammed, son of Omar, son of Khizar, son of Ismail, son of Nek, son of Daru, son of Saifal, son of Barak, son of Abdal, Abdal the Great, father of the Afghans, Heir of Israel, Lord of the Wind, Emperor of the distant horizons; Dost Mohammed looked over the city in his easy splendour, and, in the empty room, let his marvellous mind fill with guile. No noise of feeling crumpled his face, and he thought as long as he could about the English. They, surely, would be useful; the heavy useful English, having money and guns and land, could usefully help the Amir to stay just as he was, just where he was, and continue in his usual ways, without offering interference, preventing trouble without knowing, exactly, what they were doing. Presently the call of the imam to prayer drifted up from the city. Dost Mohammed began, quite slowly, on his devotions. As he rose and fell, his head lifting and dropping over the divine flawed complexity of the prayer-mat, his lips muttering in the empty room, his mind continued to dwell, quite properly, on punishment. It was the Amir’s duty each night to determine the punishments to be visited on wrongdoers the next day, and it was to this which, in prayer, he now turned his mind. From the mosques in the city, a rumbling muttering of prayer filled the city with noise, thousands of the devout rising and falling, a single huge multiple sound, and Dost Mohammed rose and fell in prayer, and thought of violence. The wrongdoers the next day were a various bunch. Low thieves, the adulterous twelve-year-old wife of one of the sons of the Amir, the rebellious chief of a tribe whose lands lay just within the uncertain shifting borders of the kingdom. Hanging and beheading and dragging behind horses for the thieves, as was ordained. The adulterous princess to be thrown down the well of the Bala Hissar itself.
And, for the seditious leader – Dost Mohammed thought hard. He despised rebellion, because it always failed; and failure was what Dost Mohammed despised most, being a blot on the face of God. His head lifted and lowered above the glowing ruby prayer-mat, and for the moment he could not think of any punishment. Then he remembered the decreed fate of Sayad Ata, in his youth; he had been caught in rebellion. His fate had been to be tied down on his breast while an elephant trampled on him. Dost Mohammed, deep in prayer, remembered the devout, righteous and splendid sight of the death of Sayad Ata; how the unworthy descendant of the Prophet himself had groaned and wailed at the approach of the beast! How his followers had groaned in the crowd, not understanding where the path of right had led, as if a thousand elephants were approaching, to tread on them! How his shrieks had been stopped, like a finger placed over the hole in a leaking whistling goatskin, as his bones, all at once, had cracked and popped! How grand and dreadful the sudden gouts of blood from every orifice, bursting out like a spirit-witness to the Faith, spilling into the dust! How right and good, the decreed end of Sayad Ata! Rising and falling in his devotions, his mind filling with the happy contemplation of the exercise of justice and right, the Amir quite forgot that some other means of execution would have to be found for tomorrow’s rebellious tribesman, there being, at the moment, no imperial elephant to be had. What had happened to the imperial elephant Dost Mohammed could not, for the moment, quite recollect; whether the dingy, foul-tempered, foul-smelling and noisy beast had been borrowed by some fool son, given to another recalcitrant tribe as an expensive joke, or had simply wandered off into the hills, Dost Mohammed could not think, so firmly fixed was his mind on the imperial devotions, the imperial punishments. But soon the great Amir, son of Sarfraz, son of Hajji Jamal, all the way back to Abdal and the Heir of Israel himself, would have to think up some new way of putting the better class of criminal to death. Tomorrow, perhaps, he would ask the infidel if he wanted to come and see the executions. Tomorrow, indeed, he would ask the infidel how criminals were put to death in Engelstan. The infidel, after all, was bound to be full of ingenious new ideas.
At the other side of the city, the infidel was sitting or standing, and not saying anything much. Gerard had taken off his full dress uniform, and was sitting in his long thick smalls, holding but not reading a book; his mouth pursed in concentration, he was staring over the top, examining the clean rough floor. Mohan Lal had absented himself, and was in the latrines. Burnes, standing at the window, was giving way to an unfamiliar sensation, the slow scarlet flashes of terror. He had expected relief after his audience with the Amir. He had met emperors before, had met with the great of the Company and the Government. He had been ushered into the presence of the jewelled savage potentates of the East, had sat with tyrants whose teeth were blacked and pointed, as with the blood of their own children, and each time, before, had experienced the same sequence of events. Before, there had been a sort of dread, suppressed by the will like a child’s balloon held to the ground by a spreading fist; then the willed exercise of confidence as the great savage potentate, whether a pantomime cannibal king or a savage director of the Company in his Bloomsbury palace, turned his eyes to the pink-and-white stripling and listened to the cautious opinions, buried in carefully lavish flatteries. And afterwards, that sense of relief, as the fist let the balloon go and the dread flew away, away, leaving only a nervous flurry of chat.
Now Burnes did not want to chat. He felt no relief. He felt no nervousness. He felt only the same terror he had felt before they had set off for the Amir’s palace, and the kindness of the Amir only augmented the terror he had felt at his quizzing presence. All at once, he felt the full imperial splendour of the Amir’s mind, of which he had been permitted to glimpse only the merest fraction; he had recognized that here was no ostentatious potentate, but the weight and show of the imperial, the Napoleonic mind up there could not be greater if it buried itself in rubies. He was not, to be perfectly honest, quite sure what if anything had happened to them, up there in the Bala Hissar; only that tomorrow it was going to happen again. Tomorrow, they would go back, and tomorrow it would be the same. He would walk through the hard-packed mud streets, corralled between horses, walking between hot flanks in his thick shining uniform, and feel himself drenched in sweat and dread.
There was an itch there in him, there, in his hands, and, for the first time since arriving in Kabul, he went to his pack, and took out his notebook, a knife, and the last scrap of a pencil. Slowly, paying no attention to the others in the room, he cut away at the stump, baring the lead, and then squatted on the floor. He took the pencil in his itching hand, and began to write.
‘The Afghans,’ he wrote, ‘are a nation of children; in their quarrels they fight, and become friends without any ceremony. They cannot conceal their feelings from one another, and a person with any discrimination may at all times pierce their designs. No people are more incapable of managing an intrigue. I was particularly struck with their idleness; they seem to sit listlessly for the whole day, staring at each other; how they live it would be difficult to discover, yet they dress well, and are healthy and happy.’
While he wrote, the itch, the uneasy fear, seemed to pass, as he described what he was so certain of, and seemed to bring the Afghans who surrounded them, every one under the point of his pencil. Now, as he wrote, they were a nation of children, and he, describing them, felt for the moment quite safe. But as he stopped and stared at the wall, the feeling returned. ‘I imbibed a very favourable impression,’ he wrote, ‘of their national character.’
10.
Under the lighted window, five squatting men sat, their attention focused on the eldest of them, his beard thick and square and white on his brown face, like a silver spade. Sadiq, older than he could tell, was telling them a story. His stories were not princesses in gardens and wizards and magic rings, but stories of this city, stories of the past. He was telling them what their fathers had told them many times, the story of how the brave, the great Futteh Khan, great brother of the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, met his end at the hands of the stinking enemy. They knew the story, had heard it a hundred times, from their fathers, their mothers, and, dozens of times, many many dozens of times, sitting just here, squatting against the wall, listening to just such a storyteller as the fierce-eyed Sadiq, rousing them to vengeance, muttering into the listening night. ‘And when the Vizier Futteh Khan returned, the treacherous Prince Kamran, chief of the stinking Suddozyes, he fell on him, and seized him, and his eyes were put out. And when he was blind and powerless he was not left to wander the deserts to beg for pity, powerless as he was, but was sliced, and cut, and yet he suffered all in silence. First the treacherous Prince Kamran demanded that he and his brothers surrender to the Persian Emperor, and the Vizier refused. And so Atta Mahmoud Khan, may his torments in hell be unending, sliced off his ear, and another the other ear, and a third his nose. And all the time they lied and said the Vizier had done them wrong. May we rise up and avenge the Vizier and all his enemies! And then his right hand and then his left, and all these torments and lies the Vizier Futteh Khan bore silently and without a sound, as the blood gushed from his face and the stumps of his arms like the fount of a river in spring, so brave was he; but when his enemies took his beard, and with their knives cut it from his face, he wept from his bleeding eyes and cried out from his tongueless mouth, to think how his pride was treated. Vengeance fall on his enemies! Vengeance in the hearts of the subjects of the Amir!’
Above, by the light of a candle which stank of tallow, and burned the walls black and smoked out the room, Burnes, oblivious, wrote on, setting down the Afghans, making sure of what they were and what he knew. For now, this would do. In the end, however, he came to examine his feelings, his sensations; and came to contemplate the particular hollow beating, between dread and excitement, which settled in the stomach at especial moments. Especial moments; standing there, in the hall of the Bala Hissar, waiting to be shown into the presence of the Amir. It was a feeling like that of standing there before a woman who waited only for him to seize her. A feeling like sitting, even, at his desk, taking up a sheaf of paper and beginning to write, to set down what he had seen. Each time the same feeling, each time, a feeling not to be argued with, or explained away. So strong it was, and it remained, that he concluded, in the end, when his life had become what it would become, that it was not, after all, what it so resembled, the awareness of the physical manifestation of sex, nor of the possibility of sex, but merely that of possibility. For him, the excitement which hollowed out his stomach and made his heart beat would always be produced not by what might happen, but what would not, despite all appearances, occur, and it was for the empty promises of chance that his heart beat, and his eyes grew big, and his stomach hollowed, and he stood, and stared at what was there to be stared at. Just that. And, each day, before he began to write, the proverb of the poet came to mind, the proverb carved deep on the tomb of the Emperor Babur, and he spoke it to himself, in his sincere deep rumbling Persian. Drink wine in the city of Kabul, and send round the cup without stopping; for Kabul is a mountain, a sea, a town, a desert.
THREE (#ulink_05b1b881-5c39-5569-9a9a-629bb5c3ff0d)
1.
LONDON, IN MAY.
At any other place in the world, late May would customarily be termed spring, and call forth the songs of birds, and the gambolling of infant mammals, and their attendant poets to sing their praises in the approved manner. Here, in London, in the fourth decade of the last century but one, there are no birds, or only ones so very brown and grey and drooping it is as if their native colours are all washed out with the incessant rinsing which falls from the London skies, birds which make no noise but an occasional croak to clear their throats of dirt. There are no lambs for the poets to celebrate, but only the usual London dogs, lying, their limbs curled up, at every street corner, too dejected to do anything but raise their heads in mild supplication at every passing boy’s kick, too far gone in hopelessness to make any noise but a quiet moan, like the wind in a loose pane. You may be sure that the month makes no difference to them, or only in that the earth they find themselves licking ceaselessly off their pelts is dry like dust, or wet like mud. There are poets, it is true, here in London, in the fourth decade of the last century but one, and they write, it is true, about spring and lambs and birds. But to do so, I suppose, they are obliged to shut their eyes against the city they live in, and make something up.
London knows no seasons; knows nothing of spring or summer or winter. It knows nothing but two seasons: Dust, and Mud. Now, at this moment, in May, we seem to be getting towards the end of Mud. Mud settled in more than six months ago, and has shown no sign of taking its leave just yet. The streets have settled into their pristine ooze, and if there be any bedrock beneath the vast sucking mass which London is proud to call a street, no one pretends any longer to know. Anything dropped in the street is instantly swallowed by London and its mud, and is never seen again; a prayer-book, a ring, a hammer, a cloak; all fall to the ground and are forever lost, deep in the mud and slime and filth of the London street. Once a poor musician let his bassoon fall, not far from Seven Dials; the mud deprived him of his livelihood, and the family, tragically bassoonless, now must beg for their merest sufficiencies, there, outside Mrs Lirriper’s drapery shop. Once, as mothers tell their naughtier sons, a small boy let go of his mother’s hand while crossing the great swamp of Piccadilly, and, untethered, sank to the bottom of the mud, never to be seen again. Soon, it is to be hoped, the weather will improve, and Mud be succeeded by Dust, though it seems unlikely that any poet will want to sing the praises of that modern season. When that happens, everything changes; the sounds of the city alter from the obscene sucking and splash and brown drain-gurgle of one half the year, to the dry crackle and quiet thudding of the other half. Those who cannot leave the city will start to complain, not of the wet and chill ceaselessly rising around their ankles, but the dry choking heat which gets into the throat, and strangles the Londoner all day and all night.
But if it is true that London knows no seasons, that, perhaps, is because it knows only one Season. It is here, in May, that we find ourselves; here, standing with the linkboys and the cutpurses and the crossing-sweepers, each unpromising youth with the tools of his unpromising trade, standing and gawping at the slow procession unfurling before them, at this hour of early dusk in late spring. It is the height of the Season, and also, nearly, the end of it – a paradox more often stated than relished. The linkboys and cutpurses and crossing-sweepers stand just where Piccadilly turns into Park Lane, and watch the procession before them, silently or raucously calling out, according to their temperament. Up Piccadilly comes a succession of carriages, each a closed black box on wheels, shiny and locked, drawn, mostly, by two black horses, for all the world as if the cashboxes of Threadneedle Street had, with one voice, cried, ‘Enough of the City!’ and, equipped each with a pair of plate-faced footmen and a set of wheels, set off to see if what they had always heard of the West End and its Court could possibly be the case. Up Piccadilly come the melancholy cashboxes, and, at the corner, you can see, as they turn, the whinnying wheels and hooves pulling free of the mud, that each, too, contains a treasure.
The linkboys cry out, with ridicule or amazement, at what they see. At this corner, the inhabitants of each carriage lean forward, and look out. Because here, you see, at this corner, lives the Duke, the old victor of Waterloo, and everyone is curious about the Duke’s habits, and will, on passing from Piccadilly into the Park, lean forward in the hope of a brief glimpse of the great man. It is a hope which is often gratified; the Duke is a man who likes to show himself, and strolls, daily, in the Park to accept the homage of strangers. But tonight, there is nothing to be seen. If the inhabitants of the carriages sink back with a minor disappointment, their evenings indefinably clouded now in some way, we have not been disappointed; because now, with the linkboys and the cutpurses, we have caught a marvellous glimpse of a lady or two. Out of the funereal darkness of the inside of a carriage, for all the world like the glitter of a black cashbox being flung open, a glistening white face appears, bathed and almost certainly scented, a white face which allows you to dream of the white flesh, the dream of white lace and silk almost certainly hidden underneath the dark cloak, and, most marvellous of all – something which forces even the wiser cynics of the observing mob into an awed silence – the unmistakable deep glitter of diamonds, brought from the far East for no reason but to decorate these cool, lovely, clean faces. Everywhere else in the city – everywhere else in the great world, as far as the linkboys know – is mud and filth, and these white faces with their bright white light of diamonds shine like unaccustomed, unimaginable virtue.
They flash in the gaze of the street observers for one second, these costly faces, and then move on in their stately way. Where are they all going, all in the same direction? Why, they are going out, naturally, because this is the Season, and in the Season it does not do, if you are of a certain level in society, to stay at home. It is required of you to put on your least comfortable clothes, ones fitted neither for a London cold nor a London heat, and go and sit for a few hours with people you know nothing of and care nothing for, drawing what satisfaction you may from the fact that when you leave to go home, outside there may be poor people who may be prepared to gawp, who, you hope, are eaten up with envy of you; because if no one in London envies you in your party-going plight, it is hard to see why you should continue the exercise.
2.
The carriage now rounding the corner extracts itself with such unpredictable lurchings from the mud beneath the wheels that the cockaded footman on top almost drops his reins. Inside, a startled face lunges towards the window, to the rich appreciation of the street onlookers; they like a nice-looking girl. The nice-looking girl smooths her dress, braces herself as if with cold, and draws back into her seat. By her is an old man, his skin so taut and leathery, his eyes so yellow and unobserving, and the whole effect so quickly angular as he sits there in the clothes for his immaculate evening that you almost expect a forked tongue to dart out, to catch a fly or two. His blood is cold, his movements quick and stiff. He is not in the first flush of fashion, nor of youth; his clothes, though immaculate, have a distinct first-gentleman-of-Europe air, as if remembering on his behalf what he has now forgotten, his high season, so long ago. The fashion of thirty years before, too, accounts for his air; not inattentive, exactly, but strongly attentive to something not in the carriage, something Bella cannot see and does not wish to share. The ruby witch, she once heard him call it; the opium he has been taking, daily, for decades. In recent years, noticing, perhaps, that the young did not care for it and often disapproved of it, he has stopped mentioning it with his customary glee, even to what remains of his family. Bella would not mention it, but has grown used to the idea that when her father hands her into the carriage on their evening round, his touch will not be firm, his gaze fixed on a spot somewhere beyond her. The jerk of the carriage into or out of the mud jolted him into seeing; now his eyes are glazing over again, into their customary blank bliss. His daughter looks at him; she knows the expression very well, and blushes for him.
‘I see the Duke is still in town,’ she says.
‘The Duke would never leave town before – before—’ her father says, as his look moves back inside the carriage. ‘I remember, once, many years ago, before you were born or not long after. In the Park we were, and I greeted the Duke. Old acquaintances we were, and he stopped and pinched y’brother’s cheek. “Fine child, that, Colonel,” he said. And Harry took one look at him, with his great beak and his great ramrod shoulders and started to howl. Never saw the Duke again, not to speak to.’
‘Poor Harry,’ Bella Garraway murmurs. Her father has been galvanized by his own anecdote, which Bella has heard many times before; everyone in London has one story about the Duke of Wellington, and – Bella sometimes thinks – each is told and retold until every story has been heard by every man, woman and child in London, and then they die, stories melting into silence, and oblivion. Her father’s story always moves her, strangely, even though it hardly amounts to a story, so ruefully does it reflect on poor Harry and his hopes. She has no response for his story, but it hardly matters, because now Colonel Garraway is sinking back into his sharp-elbowed opiate haze.
The line of wheeled cashboxes moves on, stately as an oriental caravan through the trackless wastes of Piccadilly and Park Lane, all with one end, it seems, in view. At this time of the year, at this time of the afternoon, it is always thus; the upper few thousand, scrubbed and whited like so many peripatetic sepulchres, squeeze themselves into their least comfortable clothes, and set off for the evening’s entertainment. To dinner, to a rout, to a dance, to the opera; the upper few thousand, encased in whatever it has been decreed they should wear, limber stiffly through their doors, and into their carriages, to set off to see whatever people they have been seeing every week, all through the Season. Stiffened by their unyielding but undeniably fashionable raiment, you would recognize a member of the upper few thousand even unclad, fresh from the bath, or at the loose-robed gates of heaven; their gait is jointed and unnatural as a puppet’s is, and an old dowager walks as smartly as an upright old soldier. You would recognize them naked, but they are held up by their clothes and, stripped of their acquired carapace, they would surely fall, bonelessly, to the ground. As they manoeuvre their much corseted old bodies in or out of the carriage, it is difficult not to fancy that they creak in the exercise. But fashion dictates the stiff brocades and tight corseting, and fashion, here and now, is obeyed as promptly as an admiral.
Of course, everyone who now is making their slow path up Park Lane knows everything that is to be known of their fellow pilgrims. They are a very few, few thousand, and only rarely do they admit a new postulant at the crepuscular shrines of the fashionable London evening. Rarely, and usually by virtue merely of being born, is a new member of Society admitted. Money may admit you as a curiosity; or genius, particularly if displayed by a foreigner about whose origins it is possible to be rather vague, such as that excitingly-coiffeured Signor Paganini who was everywhere with his recitals two years ago. Adventure, too, or heroism committed by a suitably handsome young man in the East may serve very well to supply the fashionable two-legged curiosity of the Season. A young man with a good tale to tell, possessed of the fortune which accrues so readily in India and the deserts which lie beyond the Bosphorus, may be admitted to have a splendid Season, listened to by every ear from Park to Park, and carry into the country at the end the memory of adoring listening faces, turned up to his, white fans clasped by plump white hands, fluttering off like Cabbage Whites as the marvellously retold anecdote reaches its terrifying climax and the brave young man saves the little Rani from the jaws of the man-eating tiger. He may, also, carry the certainty of hundreds of new friends, many brave Seasons to come, if the hero of the day is foolish; if he is wise, however, he will pack his bags and go back to the scene of his great triumphs after one Season. Next year, as everyone knows, the great world will supply some new excitement, and the great tiger-beating hero will be cut in the Park by all his old friends, now so fascinated by a seven-foot American funambulist, a Russian poetess or eight-year-old watercolourist that his old stories start to seem very old hat indeed. He will be well advised to retire where he can, and draw what solace he can from his thousands, the vast and grateful emerald the Maharajah awarded him, the rapidly-acquired fat sensible wife.
3.
For the moment, the hero of the hour suspects none of this. Burnes is dressing, in as leisurely a fashion as he can manage. Here, in the dressing room of the house he has taken for the Season, he would not think that his time in the stage lights is drawing to a close. If he thinks anything, he probably considers that he is entering on the first stages of a vertiginous ascent. By now, he is intimate with people he barely dared to notice a few months ago; he finds, with a regret that does him credit, that he no longer has much time for those who introduced him to all those salons, before Christmas; he finds, with a malicious pleasure which quite surprises him, that the Montrose neighbours who snubbed his father twenty years ago now queue to drop their cards in the silver filigree bowl in the hall; they, those Montrose neighbours, have been turned in his eyes into what everyone laughs at, a set of nabob Scotch with raw-skinned ambitious wives. Burnes is decent to everyone, because that is his way. He has started to be noticed by the great – by Dukes – by Royalty, even, once; and, surely, the time will come when the brief notice, the honour graciously conferred in crowded rooms, turns into intimacy, and he finds himself a welcome visitor at every house in town. Perhaps not this year, because the Season is drawing to its brilliant close; but next year. Yes, perhaps next year.
His fingers have slowed, stopped. He stretches out his hand, and Charles hands him the next item in the ritual, in silent deference. For one moment, as he ties the elaborate knot, it occurs to him that he and his valet must be the same age. He looks, critically, in the glass at the final result. He has dined out twenty-one times already this month, and told his story twenty-one times. He looks, critically, at himself in the glass and prepares to go out, to tell it once more. What he sees in the glass is what you expect to see, of the hero of the minute, or more or less so. Not so brown as he was, not so thin as he was. He has been taken in from the heat and dust and wind, and left to pale and fatten on an unaccustomed diet; a diet of drawing rooms, and lobsters and champagne; of morning walks in the Park with no exercise more strenuous than the three-inch raising of the hat; of the ceaseless attentions of the most accomplished young ladies the metropolis can supply wholesale. That the accomplishments of the young ladies run no further than the performance of half a dozen Irish airs on harp or pianoforte hardly troubles Burnes. If he wants other, bolder accomplishments than the ones fashionable London permits of its women, he knows by now where to find them. Under the softening regime, he is quite altered from the man of six months ago; no longer dark and lined and meatless as a piece of old leather that has lain out in the tropical sun for years on end, but pale and soft. He looks at his own veal-face, there in the glass. Only his hard hands betray the fact that he has led quite a different life from his eager listeners; only the bright light in his dark eyes shows that he has seen things they will never see, or wish to.
Charles pauses in his ministrations, looks inquiringly at Burnes in the glass. Burnes becomes aware that the valet said something.
‘Yes, Charles?’ he says.
‘My lady Woodcourt’s, sir?’ Charles repeats.
‘Yes,’ Burnes says. ‘Yes, alas.’
‘Lady Woodcourt,’ Charles says, managing to sound both approving of Burnes’s destination this evening and, shaking his head, disapproving of his master’s irreverent tone. Burnes hardly minds; by now, he can afford, he believes, to appear unconcerned by even the most alarming invitation. And who is Lady Woodcourt, after all? A wicked old woman who has lifted her skirts for two kings and who knows how many prime ministers, whose whoring days ought to be over by now. Lady Woodcourt, indeed; a woman he knew nothing of six months ago. Charles takes the brushes and applies them to Burnes’s head, the dressing now almost complete. ‘May I ask—’ he continues.
‘No,’ Burnes says. ‘No, this will be all. I shan’t be needing you again tonight, thank you.’ He has always been good with his men, and, as Charles takes the clothes brush to wipe away the flakes of scurf on the waistcoat, he grins at him. Charles nods, demurely, and finally helps Burnes on with his immaculately shining black coat.
4.
Half a mile away, the wicked old woman is descending, very carefully, a staircase. All that perfumes and silk and preservatives can do for her charms has been done, which is not much. Footmen stand around, upright as chessmen on the black and white marble floor, and she comes down the stairs, their bent little old mistress. As usual, the first arrivals have preceded her, and are now kicking their heels in the anteroom. Lady Woodcourt does not hurry on their account, nor does it occur to her to acknowledge them. She moves, a slow bent little old woman, down the stairs as if she would like an arm or a stick to keep her upright. Here, in her house, she seems a nervous little bird in a brilliant gold cage; everything so baby-blue and gold, every wall so hung with looking glasses to entertain its denizen with contemplation of herself. And, between the mirrors, still more representations of Lady Woodcourt. Three or four portraits of her at her peak. In one, she is a girl in her father’s grounds. The painter, long ago, saw something in her mind, and has her holding a whip and snaffle. Another is an embarrassing and improbable portrait of her in mythological guise, as – as – as (even Lady Woodcourt, guiding her guests round, has sometimes to pause and think and dredge her old mind) Minerva, the foolish-looking owl just escaping from her limp pale fingers. The third is her wedding portrait, and unwary callers have been known to inquire of each other who the little gentleman in brown could possibly be. That useful and patient Sir Bramley is still to be seen over the fire in his wife’s London house, clinging to her arm in fear and disbelief. What happened to him in life, no one quite knows. A very young man ventured once that he had been washed, and dissolved, being nothing, in the end, but varnish and ornament. Certainly it is difficult to believe in Sir Bramley as anything more substantial than his painted past self, but the remark got back, and the very young man was seen no more at Lady Woodcourt’s. In reality, it is thought, Sir Bramley lives in Italy for the sake of his health, and leaves Lady Woodcourt to the exercise of her influence and her many protectors.
No smooth-skinned oil-fresh Minerva now, she comes forward into the room and staggers into a chair. Almost at once, the blue-coated chessman at the door gives a start and calls out the names of the first skulking guests.
‘Colonel and Miss Garraway,’ he calls, blushing and gulping like the boy he is. In through the door pop the old Colonel and his pretty daughter. He, behind some perfect translucent ruby glaze, is a hopeless and declining old beau of hers, a useful stopgap who does no harm to anyone but himself; next to him, his daughter seems alarmingly alert and clean and young. Lady Woodcourt greets them without rising, her hand resting on a bijou gewgaw, a knobbled warty Chinese bronze pig. The girl, she is pleased to see, is as pretty as everyone says, as she follows her father’s abstracted bow with a gracefully embarrassed bob, scrutinizing with intense juvenile interest the finer details of the Aubusson, murmuring something which might have been ‘My lady’. A great improvement, all in all, on the Colonel’s late wife, who came into a room and waited for the company to rise and say how-de-do, as if she deserved nothing less. This girl, at least, would not laugh in your face and call you her dear Fanny.
Bella Garraway comes into the room, and her feet in their thin slippers are glad not to be kept waiting on marble any longer. It is her first time at the famous, the fascinating Lady Woodcourt’s; her papa has taken care not to alarm her, but all the same, she is wearing what diamonds Mama’s case has yielded up. Lady Woodcourt sits, smiling vaguely; a woman shrivelled and brown as an old apple, her filmy old eyes drifting perpetually away from the mark. Bella advances, and submits to Lady Woodcourt’s grip, a fierce clutch like the clasp of a purse. She just drinks her in; her thin body, her brown wrinkled flesh drifting loosely within the hard carapace of her boned gown like a boat at its moorings. Bella has no idea, in reality, who Fanny Woodcourt is. But Bella, as her sister and governesses always privately remark, is quick on the uptake, and her eyes run quickly over the room, assessing each gift, each bibelot with the commercial eye of an auctioneer. Each object, indeed, has its magnificent provenance, since Lady Woodcourt buys nothing for herself, and takes only from the grandest of her admirers. Anything Bella’s father ever gave her is surely in Lady Woodcourt’s dressing room by now, if not passed on to the housekeeper. Bella drops her eyes in modesty, but if she will not meet Lady Woodcourt’s gaze, she is at least curious enough to inspect her voluble possessions. Whether each porcelain treasure, each glittering glass is the gift of his Grace, Excellency, Majesty hardly matters. Bella looks around, assessing, and sees what Fanny Woodcourt has been.
‘My daughter, Lady Woodcourt,’ Colonel Garraway says, with all his opium-glazed gravity. Lady Woodcourt nods, so calmly that Bella unkindly wonders whether she, too, has been drinking from the phial of the ruby witch. She has learnt how to be suspicious of anything as innocent as composure or boredom in anyone much over the age of forty-five. They all do it, she suspects; and none of them discusses it in her hearing, ever.
‘I’m afraid you will find us all,’ Lady Woodcourt says, ‘a very dull old company tonight. Do sit down. I am quite mortified, my dear, to inflict such a, such a bundle of dry old sticks on you. I positively fear you may never come again, and that, that, that—’
‘That would never do,’ Colonel Garraway supplies gallantly, handing his daughter to a settle, and sitting down after her. Lady Woodcourt laughs brilliantly, a sound as if her glassy old bones have tumbled loose, all at once, and chimed together into a heap, somewhere inside her skin.
‘I’m sure it will be delightful,’ Bella says, inadequately.
‘Such a lot of dry old sticks,’ Lady Woodcourt says, with a touch of steel, not liking to be contradicted even in this mock-apology. She seems to believe her own polite disclaimer for a second, believing what she says as she says it, as all liars must, and a cloud passes over her brow. ‘Still – that wonderful young man – the explorer, who, who, who—’
‘The hero of Bokhara,’ Colonel Garraway adds, smiling. ‘Yes, that very wonderful young man.’
‘Bokhara,’ Lady Woodcourt sighs, relieved. ‘Now that is a place, I swear, not one person in a thousand had heard a jot or, or, or tittle of one year ago. And now we talk of it as readily as we talk of, of—’
‘Dorsetshire,’ Colonel Garraway says.
‘Of Dorsetshire,’ Lady Woodcourt continues. ‘My young friends talk of nothing else. I think one or two, they fancy taking a house in the better quarter of Bokhara for the winter. Now what do you think of that?’
‘I’m sure I don’t know,’ Bella says, faintly alarmed as Lady Woodcourt spectacularly tinkles away.
‘All stuff and nonsense, of course, and I don’t believe any one of them could point to the wretched place on the map. Still, we talk of nothing else, I find, and all down to this singular, ah, fascinating, ah, ah, remarkable young man, all—’
‘Captain Burnes,’ Bella interjects.
‘Indeed. Thank you, my dear,’ Lady Woodcourt says, looking genuinely as if no one has ever done her a greater favour. ‘And now, who is this—’
‘M. le Duc de Neaud,’ the footman calls, or rather attempts, since what he announces is the Duck de Nod. ‘And,’ as a little woman in a snuff-coloured dress scurries in after her diminutive husband, ‘Mme la Duchesse.’
Everyone rises with an audible relief.
‘Delighted – charmed – delighted – quite on time – feared to be early – my dear Fanny – my dear—’ the Duchesse de Neaud spills over. She is English, a chatterbox, resented by no one, welcome everywhere, if she does not come first or leave last. The Duc limits himself to a quick bow and a scowl. He came over after the Revolution and, penniless, married one of those spinsters who attended the old Queen Charlotte, to everyone’s surprise, including hers; her future had seemed to be mapped out in the series of faintly dictatorial books for children she wrote in dull afternoons at Windsor. She turns from Lady Woodcourt to Bella. ‘My dear – my dear—’
Colonel Garraway snaps into awareness. ‘Duchesse,’ he says. ‘My daughter, Bella.’
‘Miss Garraway,’ the Duc says. ‘Charmé.’ But he is already turning, already charmed, it seems, with the next entrants, and Bella sees no reason not to sink back into her chair as the room starts to fill.
5.
‘Charmed – delighted – couldn’t be more—’ the Duchesse says, sitting down by Bella. But she is talking, not to Bella but to a fast-approaching young man, pink in his half-worried, half-confident face. He bows rapidly, crumpling at the middle like a man who has been punched hard.
‘May I inquire,’ the young man says to the Duchesse. Bella stops paying any attention, and concentrates on her fan. The old people are coming in, showing no emotion, walking smoothly around each other, bowing automatically, like puppets on casters. The boy at the door is keeping up, but there is now quite a queue outside, waiting to hand their card and have him call their name. She is called back by her name.
‘I quite doted on Bella when she was too little to know who was kissing her goodnight,’ the Duchesse glitters, aiming her smile somewhere beyond the young man, bowing and smiling nervously. ‘Quite doted on her. I would hug her and affection her, and – such a pretty little thing, and now, quite such a beauty, now, don’t blush, my dear.’
Bella bows, remembering very well what it was like to be clutched to the swarthy old Duchesse’s bosom, heavy and spiked with trinkets; it felt like falling through the window of a jeweller’s shop. The Duchesse bows back, and then the young man bows, and they are all precisely like an entire yard full of tired chickens. She was no Duchesse then, but only an old spinster. The young man presents a familiar face to Bella.
‘How do you do, Miss Garraway,’ the familiar face says.
‘How do you do,’ Bella says firmly back, smiling like the audience at a vaudeville.
‘Miss Gilbert,’ the yelping barker cries into the room, ‘and Miss Jane Gilbert.’
She sees from the smiling guest’s proprietorial security, his relaxed saunter back into the chair, that this is the son of the house. She corrects herself, looking at Lady Woodcourt, who has no sons. She is no more fecund than a sideboard. This, surely, is the guest of honour. ‘How do you do, Mr Burnes. Do you find the climate here suits you? Or do you long for the East?’
‘Have you read Mr Burnes’s book, Miss Garraway?’ the Duchesse interposes. ‘I rave over it – the learning – the wit – the fierce fierce tribes of the exotic East. How brave – how heroic you have been, sir. Have you read his book?’
‘I have tried, sir, so many times, and each time the bookseller sends me back empty promises, leaving me abandoned. I am not entirely hopeless, but your bookseller is quite the jilt, Mr Burnes.’
The Duchesse laughs brilliantly, flutingly; a youthful and yet historic noise, a descending scale directly from old Queen Charlotte’s nurseries. If the Duchesse laughs, there can be no impropriety whatever in this corner of the blue and gold drawing room. Two sisters approach, their faces long as doors: the Gilbert sisters. In mourning, as they so often are, they scrutinize Burnes efficiently. The elder is twenty-seven, and five years ago was sadly disappointed in love; the younger is no older than Bella, but already has her sister’s half-angry air, and will come to nothing in the end.
‘Quite the jilt,’ Bella says, as the sisters move on.
‘You must tell us,’ the Duchesse continues, ‘of your adventures in Bokhara. I long – I pine – for the story, the entire tale, from the horse’s mouth.’
‘So long and dull a story can hardly interest ladies,’ Burnes says conventionally.
‘No, no, Mr Burnes,’ the Duchesse says, but she seems to take him at his word, since she rises and goes, smiling, into the crush. The room is crowded now, and Bella’s father, there, fifteen yards away, is fixed in his gaze and uncomprehending. One of the Gilbert sisters is talking at him, and directing a fierce laugh at him, the laugh of someone who knows rejection well; he looks like a frightened old man. This is how it is, an hour after his dose. She does not know, and does not wish to know, where he buys what he needs; she only knows, with a wave of shame, that he no longer even talks about it. She wants to rescue her father, there, standing in the embrace of his invisible ruby witch. Burnes, next to her, is twitching like a bird on the branch. It is her duty to carry on talking to him about his East, but she looks at her father and has nothing to say to such a stranger.
6.
Through these evenings, these festive London gatherings, people move without any will, like balls on a billiard table. At one end of the space, new balls spill into the confined space, and at the far end, the balls drifting around the smooth space prod each other and drift off unpredictably. An announcement at the door, a pair of new arrivals, somehow nudges the room along a little, and the mass, unwilled, cannons through the room, and the last ripple brings Burnes to his feet, and face to face with Stokes, a brilliant and brilliantly polished writer for the journals, his head smooth and gleaming like marble, his glittering spectacles always ready to be whisked off to make a point. They greet each other, silently.
‘I understand, Mr Burnes, that you have been signally honoured,’ Stokes begins.
‘Beyond my desserts, no doubt, sir,’ Burnes says.
‘I heard that you were signally honoured,’ Stokes persists. ‘By our friend in Brighton.’
‘I would hardly call the King my friend,’ Burnes says. Or yours, he seems to insist.
‘That must have been a thrilling occasion, sir,’ Stokes said.
‘If I were, indeed, honoured by the King’s curiosity in my explorations,’ Burnes says, ‘you could hardly expect me to tell you the purport of the conversation.’
‘Come, come, Burnes,’ Stokes says. ‘I meant no affront. I did not think it was so very secret. It was from the – no, better not to say – but it was from a gentleman of the Court that I heard the interesting fact. Would you prefer to find some more quiet place to talk?’
‘No, sir,’ Burnes said. ‘I can have nothing to say to you that I would keep from any person here present. I was honoured by the King’s interest, who had read my book with the greatest curiosity, and I received the King’s gracious command to Brighton. That is all. A trivial meeting, made remarkable only by the King’s majesty. There is really nothing more to say.’
(He resists the recall of the jovial bulging maggot in silk stockings and a scrubby wig, thumping the floor with his stick, his nervous Queen clutching the gilt sides of the chair, underneath the vast grand mouldings and velvet and gilt, what passed in his late brother’s mind for an oriental palace, and asking such blunt ordinary wrong questions it was not in him to know how to respond, to offer any kind of satisfaction.)
‘Your reticence does you credit, sir,’ Stokes says. ‘I have read your book, and greatly admire it. You exhibit the greatest faculties of curiosity, erudition and exposition. But I reached the end of your book with one burning question, ah, as it were, unextinguished. What in heaven’s name are we doing in Afghanistan? What, come to that, are we doing in India?’
‘Sir, I hardly know what you can mean.’
‘My meaning is this,’ Stokes continues. ‘What drove us to acquire our oriental possessions? And what is driving us to acquire still more? I presume, sir, that you were not in Kabul in pure curiosity. I presume, in short, that your mission was conducted to the sound of those siren voices enjoining us to occupy the whole of Asia, and bankrupt our children and our children’s children and our children’s children’s children. There can be no doubt that you were there to prepare for us to acquire the Punjab, to repeople Afghanistan with our sons and daughters, and open up yet another bottomless pit, to swallow our limited resources – resources which could be put to better use two miles from this house, to clothe and feed the filthy urchins who will beg a farthing from you, and from me, the second we leave our so agreeable hostess’s embrace this evening. What, sir, in heaven’s name, are we doing in India?’
‘You are quite wrong, Mr Stokes,’ Burnes says. This is a familiar argument; he has had it, indeed, with Stokes on previous occasions. ‘There is no intention to add the Punjab or the western tracts of land to our possessions. My mission was purely geographical, purely driven by curiosity. But what, sir, would be the alternative you propose? Were we to stay at home and do nothing?’
‘And why not? What is so wrong with being satisfied with what you have?’
‘Nothing, sir, unless you have the spirit of a Briton. Our possessions, sir, are vast new markets. Do you suppose our little island can contain our native spirit? Of course it cannot. And should we stay at home, relinquish India tomorrow, what would happen? Would the natives not slide back into all manner of native barbarities – the murder of travellers, the forced suicide of widows? Thuggee and suttee? Would the precious flame of Christianity survive six months in such a poisoned atmosphere? Would India, indeed, be left to its own devices? Would not the French perceive an empty space? Would not Russia send its vast armies to bring new barbarities to a barbarous land? Sir, I suspect you of the worst sort of cynicism.’
‘Perhaps,’ Stokes says, smiling, maddeningly, like a teacher praising a moderately bright pupil. ‘I admire your spirit, Mr Burnes – I who have never travelled so far as to see the ocean.’
Burnes bows, deeply, coldly; he is oddly irritated by the conversation.
7.
One of the chessmen comes smoothly into the room, and stops just short of Lady Woodcourt. She breaks off her animated conversation with the latest of the guests, and turns to the footman. The guest bows to her back, and makes his escape into the room. What information the footman bears must be thrilling, for in an instant Lady Woodcourt clasps her hands to her brown wrinkled bosom, as if to stop a pet white mouse escaping from between her dugs, and skips girlishly into the centre of the room. The chatter in the room stops raggedly, and the guests all turn to her, shining with her announcement. She calls out, not raising her voice, and everyone graciously inclines in her direction, like a grove of willows in the breeze.
‘… in honour of our most favoured guest, the hero, I may say, may I not, of Bokhara, M. Mirabolant has graciously consented …’
Burnes, who has sat down again, is nodding and smiling; he has had plenty of time to grow used to this announcement.
‘… M. Mirabolant has created a new, a marvellous dish, in honour of his adventures, his great heroism – dear friends, one moment, only …’
And the doors are swung open, and, there is M. Mirabolant, the great chef de cuisine on whom all London dotes – what all great London used to call a Cook. The great M. Mirabolant, universally agreed to be the greatest Frenchman in existence since – since – since Napoleon, since Voltaire, since time began. And before him is borne a large white china dish, piled high with some white stuff into the approximate semblance of a snowy mountain. M. Mirabolant is all geniality, his broad red face greeting the room without, precisely, greeting anyone. There is a little murmur and patter of applause, as the ladies’ hands, soft as the flapping of doves into the sky, acclaim the dish, and the room turns from Mirabolant to the plump hero of the hour, who smilingly discounts any sense that he is worthy of Mirabolant’s marvellous pudding.
‘M. Mirabolant,’ Lady Woodcourt insists, ‘tell me, do not all dishes have a name?’
M. Mirabolant, all geniality, agrees that they do.
‘Pray, M. Mirabolant,’ the Duchesse de Neaud joins in, ‘charming, quite charming – do tell us, what are we to call this dish?’
M. Mirabolant draws himself up, pulls on the left outer extremity of his marvellous black moustache, gazes in deep thought at the glossy mountain of cream on the shoulders of two trembling footmen. Perhaps no inspiration will come, and the room trembles before M. Mirabolant’s genius. But they need not worry; for a light falls on the great Frenchman’s face, and genius prepares to speak.
‘It calls itself,’ he growls, his eyes fixed, as if in a trance, on the dish, and not at all on the attending multitudes, ‘une coupe Bokhara.’
And now a rapture of applause breaks out in the room, and Mirabolant turns and sweeps out, leaving his adoring public, his ecstatic mistress, quite as if he had hired them for the evening, and not the other way round. Leaves, too, a confection made up entirely of iced cream and crushed meringue, the whole sprinkled with white rose petals.
‘Tell me, Mr Burnes,’ Bella finds herself saying. ‘Is this a customary dish of the natives of Bokhara?’
‘To the best of my recollection, Miss Garraway,’ Burnes responds gravely, ‘they dine on it nightly. Meringue is their staple diet.’
‘I was certain of it,’ Bella says. ‘You must have had more dishes named in your honour than anyone now living.’
Burnes laughs heartily, immediately smothering the noise. ‘Perhaps I am a little ungrateful,’ he says. ‘But it seems to me that, like the Dutchman’s daughter, the dish has been christened twenty times, and still remains no better than it was at the first.’
‘Is it always coupe Bokhara, Mr Burnes?’ Bella says. ‘I do hope not – what a melancholy prospect that would be. Not only to have to eat iced cream and meringue every night, but not even to have the solace of variety offered by an occasional change of name.’
A cousin of Lady Woodcourt has gone to the piano, and has started up a strange crooning and crackle, which passes for a selection of Welsh airs; a young man stands by to turn the pages, his eyes wandering about the room, his fervour all directed towards finding some means of escape from his sentry duty.
‘No, not always, indeed, Miss Garraway,’ Burnes says. ‘I think it is only coupe Bokhara when M. Mirabolant takes the helm.’
‘Twice weekly?’ Bella says.
‘Quite that,’ Burnes agrees. ‘Other than that, it may be anything at all; blanquette à l’ Afghanienne, rôti de porc à la mode de Kabul, or coupe Bokhara. Yes, perhaps you are right; it is mostly coupe Bokhara.’
‘And is it always iced cream and meringue with white rose petals on top?’
‘Always. No – I do Mirabolant an injustice – perhaps once the rose petals were pink.’
The macabre daughters in their matching grave-gowns, taking a turn about the room, now come to where Burnes sits with Bella. They bow, sourly; Burnes responds, Bella makes a tiny incline, her shoulders trembling with withheld laughter, and they pass on.
‘I think your brother was in India, Miss Garraway,’ Burnes says when they are gone.
‘Yes, Harry,’ Bella says quickly. ‘Yes, that is right. How did you come to know such a thing?’
‘I think it was the first thing I knew about you,’ Burnes says. Bella blushes and lowers her head, pretending to smooth her gown. ‘I heard of him in Calcutta. It was a sad end. He was spoken of well by everyone.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ Bella says. ‘My father would be comforted to hear you say that. We hoped India would be the making of him.’
‘I am sure it would have been,’ Burnes says. ‘I would not wish to intrude on your father in such festive – I mean – I would not be the one to bring melancholy thoughts to mind among happy friends.’
Bella smiles, seeing where all this talk is leading. All this chatter about poor useless Harry, sent out to India to save his name and put an end to his card debts, dead in three months in an unmentionable duel over an officer’s wife or, in official despatches, of the terrible Calcutta cholera. Poor Harry, indeed; but now, at least, he seemed to be serving some kind of useful purpose.
‘I wonder if you would permit me to call,’ Burnes says. ‘To offer some small solace to your poor father.’
‘I am sure he would take great pleasure in your conversation, Mr Burnes,’ Bella says, smiling warmly. ‘You are welcome to call at any time.’ And rests, for one moment, her little white hand on Burnes’s; it is cool and pale, his hand, and as she touches him, he does not start, or move, but merely stares, gazes, at the two-second miracle of her hand in his.
‘Thank you,’ Burnes says, helplessly. ‘And I shall bring my book, if you would permit me.’
‘We should be delighted,’ Bella smiles, and her smile is big and white and open. Her little square teeth, her clean pink mouth, her perfect lips. The smile, it makes him pause, and look, and around him, the room is silent, as if a great glass bell has dropped over them, and they move in a slower, bigger atmosphere. She smiles, and she shows her teeth, and glitters at him; there is no modesty in her, but only delight. He thanked her, and she is, for no reason, delighted.
At the other side of the room, Colonel Garraway snaps back into consciousness, his back upright and clean. It is like a window opening in the room. There before him is a girl, sour in the face and wrapped in black, looking at him inquiringly. He has no idea who she is, or what she has just said. At the other end of the room, there is a girl sitting on a sofa with a man. She is his daughter, his daughter Bella. He stands upright, and sees exactly where he is, at Lady Woodcourt’s. He bows, for no reason, at the girl in black, by his side, and then sees that behind him is a window, and outside the window is the street, and in the street ten or twenty boys, urchins, are leaping up and down, trying to see into the house, to look in and see Colonel Garraway looking out, just as he is looking out trying to see them looking in. A brilliant thought occurs to him now; the world is full of windows, and some are inside the head, and some are not. He must go home and write that down. He bows again to the girl by his side, whose name is Miss Gilbert. He will go and fetch his girl, Bella, who is looking damned fine, and then they will go home, and he will write down his brilliant thought, whatever it was.
Burnes stays for half an hour after the departure of Bella and her father. He is the guest of honour, but he is allowed to be tired. And tomorrow, he has something to do. He leaves the fluttering gracious crowd, feeling no gratitude to be treated in this luxuriant way, but only relief to be free and once again in the street, in the open air. And tomorrow, he has something to do. He walks out of the door, and there is his carriage, waiting for him. But he does not step into it. He stands on the steps, and, if his feet are in the mud, his eyes are on the night sky, and what he thinks about is something not there, but only in his thoughts. Her teeth, eyes, hands.
FOUR (#ulink_70838c26-16c1-5905-b7a8-dd3500de6958)
1.
ALEXANDER BURNES DID NOT COME the day after Lady Woodcourt’s party – or the next day – or the day after that. And on the fourth day, just when Bella and her sister had gone to the Park – just, in fact, at the hour when they might have been expected to be in the Park – he left his card and a set of his Bokharan travels.
Bella made no gesture when she saw the bit of pasteboard, showed no feeling beyond an agitated fumbling with her bonnet’s ribbons. But, walking upstairs as upright as she could manage, as slowly as she could, she felt cheated of something, as if she had been promised the most thrilling-sounding of M. Mirabolant’s puddings, and, in the event, she had been presented not even with the customary confection of meringue and cream, but, four days after she had expected it, an engraving of the promised delight on a card three inches by two. Walking slowly up the stairs, she ran her fingers over the card, three inches by two, as if it held for her the slightest promise, as if it had anything in common with her uselessly unshared hopes. Bella was twenty-four. She expected nothing.
So it was that, when Burnes was announced, a full week after Lady Woodcourt’s famous party, and shown into the drawing room where Bella was sitting, alone with her work, she stared at him as if she had never seen a man in her life.
The Garraways lived in Hanover Square, in a house so exactly what one would have expected that, Bella thought, none of her family or her family’s friends could ever be said to have set eyes upon it. It had precisely the right amount of old furniture to be respectable; it had precisely the right number of new objects to be fashionable. There was a pianoforte and a harp; there were sofas and curtains and a wilderness of walnut, just as other people had; there were portraits by Lely of dear great-great-grandmama, stout in a blue silk gown with her hand resting on a silver globe and pointing to the heavens. There was an ugly one, too, of poor Harry which he had ordered the week after arriving in India, in which his head was inexplicably round as a football (‘A native artist,’ Colonel Garraway was apt to say in mitigation, showing the curious visitor the label, ‘Executed in the Year 1826 by the Humble Servant of the Brush T. S. Lal, Student and Pupil of the great English Master, Sir Tilly Kettle’). All quite as everyone else had things; all so perfectly appropriate to the Garraways’ station in life that one could have predicted the house’s exact appearance, and certainly had no need to look at it. It was true that the Garraways, in their dining room, had what, through the gloom, could be perceived to be a lamentable mythology by Hogarth where others might have had a doubtful Claude, but what of that? The Garraways were so completely respectable that they could pass off a small lapse like that as an interesting curiosity, and nobody doubted, since they said so, that an interesting curiosity is what it was. They were respectable to the point of dullness.
It was four in the afternoon, and Colonel Garraway was in his study, taking his second dose of opium of the day. He had unlocked the miniature walnut tantalus, and carefully measured out the drops into a glass. After twenty years establishing a good understanding with the ruby witch, each of his three daily doses was large enough to kill a neophyte. He mixed it with water from the decanter, raised it to the light and gazed at it sternly. This moment of calm contemplation, which never varied or altered, was an essential part of the Colonel’s thrice-daily renewing of his acquaintance with opium; it was his idea of a necessary self-restraint. Presently the world returned to normal. The room deliciously sagged around him, the armchair softened, rose up in an embrace, and all was well again. He never recalled, or noticed, the moment of swallowing; it passed. The Colonel smiled to himself. No, not to himself; to his books. There they were, all his little books. There they were; now, which was his favourite? There, the one with nice gold lettering, there on the spine; Dryden Dramatic Works Vol. III. That was his favourite, wasn’t it, because the I, I, I on the spine was so like three nice gold pillars. Perhaps the green stock, for this evening’s tenue, for Lady Woodcourt’s. The Regent would surely approve. But then he remembered, as a dull double knock sounded through the house and the armchair softened under him like warm toffy, that Lady Woodcourt’s had taken place a week before, he had no green stock to wear, and the Regent, now, was King – no – was dead. He settled back. The ruby witch! he thought. The ruby witch!
Elizabeth Garraway was in her room, attempting to ignore the clink and knock from her father’s study next door. It was the familiar sound of him unlocking the tantalus, taking out the miniature decanter, and settling into oblivion. She was not sure, but she rather thought what she most disapproved of in her father’s opium habit was his having had made these appurtenances, acknowledging that there was no hope or desire in him to abandon the habit. Her hair was as smooth as if it had been lacquered onto her head; her velvet dress was as rich and dark as the heart of a poppy. She continued writing her letter.
‘… I feel, however, that the weaker sex, so justly named at present, only occupies so subservient a position due to the manifest inadequacies of feminine education.’
She sighed, and thought for a moment. She was writing to her correspondent in Germany. She had had great hopes of Goethe until he died, but Herr R—, although no more effusive in his replies than one would expect of the greatest and most famous novelist in Europe, had been most encouraging. She continued.
‘If the conventional female “accomplishments” stretched to trigonometry and Greek at the expense of the watercolour sketch and the covering of screens, what changes in the helpless position of the sex in society could we hope to see!’
She looked at her sentence, quite satisfied. She wondered for a moment whether Herr R—would know what was meant by screen-covering, if that were not a usual practice of German virgins, but decided to leave it. What an honour to educate the great R—, even in so small a matter! She was brought from her thoughts by the sound of the double knock. Bella, however, was in the drawing room, she thought, and could best be left. She, turning back to her elevated correspondence, was decidedly not at home.
2.
Bella, indeed, was downstairs in the drawing room, her mind quite empty. When the double knock came at the door of the house, she was staring abstractedly at a house fly working its way across the walnut table. Her work was in her lap. The fly seemed lost, cautious, bewildered. Its huge jewelled eyes blank, it seemed to be finding its way over the polished table by touch. It leant on its feelers like an old man on a pair of sticks, as if exhausted; then, suddenly, it reached back and swiftly groomed its wings, back, head with three sleek gestures, and with a single snap, flew off on its own purposes. Bella blinked. In front of her was a young man, pink and ginger as a cake. His hat was apologetically in his hand. She did not recognize him.
‘Miss Garraway?’ the young man said. ‘I startled you. I—’
‘Mr Burnes,’ she said crisply, smiling; and, indeed, Emily had a standing instruction to admit Burnes without question, when she was not at home to all others. She had expected, however, some announcement. ‘How pleasant. Do sit down.’
‘I did call,’ he said. ‘I was unable directly to call after the evening at – at—’
‘At Lady Woodcourt’s,’ Bella said, smiling. There were, it was true, an appalling gaggle of hostesses in London, all rather like Fanny Woodcourt; Bella had spent the previous week accompanying her father to a selection of them, in the unfulfilled hope of seeing Burnes. ‘A memorable evening for you, was it, Mr Burnes?’
‘Much resembling a great many other evenings it has been my pleasure to attend in the last few months,’ Burnes said. ‘Indeed, I think I could hardly distinguish it at this distance from a dozen others this last month.’
‘What uninterrupted bliss your life must be,’ Bella said. ‘For a poor female like me, there could be no higher pleasure than a succession of evenings identical to Lady Woodcourt’s. Or perhaps you are weary of them, Mr Burnes? Surely not. Do not disappoint my youthful hopes.’
‘I confess,’ Burnes said, leaning forward in his chair as if she had a lapel to seize, ‘if I thought my life likely to consist of such evenings, I should return to Kabul and never leave again.’
‘No pleasures, then?’ Bella said. ‘None, sir?’
‘One,’ Burnes said, and the drop in his manner into a feeling seriousness was as marked as if he had fixed his gaze with hers. She leant forward, unaccountably disconcerted, and rang for tea.
‘Have you seen your friend, Mr Stokes?’ Bella said, smoothing her dress down as she settled back.
‘Mr Stokes?’ Burnes said, perplexed. He picked up a gold snuffbox, and examined it. ‘Was that the gentleman’s name?’
‘You seemed to be holding an energetic conversation with him at Lady Woodcourt’s,’ she said. ‘A bald gentleman. A writer, I believe. No – I remember now – he is the editor of a periodical. Great things were expected of him, and he wrote a novel – or did he merely promise to write a novel? It is so difficult to remember. Do you plan to write a novel, now, Mr Burnes? You are certainly promising enough to threaten one.’
Burnes took this well. ‘I fear I shall be too occupied with weightier matters shortly. My time is not entirely my own, Miss Garraway – I return to India in six weeks. Do you suppose six weeks enough time to write a three-volume novel?’
‘I feel certain that you, at any rate, possess the dash to carry through such a project. Can it be that the man who bearded the potentates of Asia in their den would shrink from the demands of sending Arabella and Rudolpho through three misunderstandings and the trial of a false suitor before reuniting them in the last pages of the third volume?’
‘Stop, Miss Garraway, I beg you,’ Burnes said, laughing. ‘I am almost moved by your tale. Perhaps it is you who should write a novel – you, after all, have a great deal more than six weeks to write your masterpiece.’
‘I hope you are not suggesting that I do not have a great number of highly important calls on my time,’ Bella said, pretending to be angry. ‘But, I assure you, I could not write such nonsense – I could not write any novel, nonsensical or no – under any motive less pressing than to save my life. By the by, Mr Burnes, you will think me remiss for not thanking you directly for the gift of your book.’
‘It was the smallest task, Miss Garraway,’ Burnes said. ‘If you enjoy it, that will be thanks enough.’
‘I have already enjoyed it,’ Bella said as the tea came in. She got up and went to the window. Outside, two girls were rolling a hoop past; a man sat in a dark gig, his horse’s nose down in a bag of oats. ‘Perhaps you are right; perhaps I have too little to do, as all my sex. Or perhaps your book was more than commonly engaging. What occupation would you advise for a poor unmarried female? My sister writes to German philosophers, but I know I should burst out laughing before I had written a page. It is a great problem, is it not – how the virgins of England shall occupy their time?’
‘I should advise them all,’ Burnes said solemnly, ‘to acquire and read my book. Then they would be transported to unfamiliar worlds of thought, I should quickly grow rich, and virtue would flow from this universal unproductive idleness.’
She answered him in the same vein, and the conversation lapsed for a moment. It was a fine spring day, almost summer in the promise of heat, and, standing there, she suddenly longed to be in the country, where her eyes could rest upon an expanse of green from her father’s house, where there was some relief greater than the Park and the small dusty square of green called Hanover Square, where dogs panted as if in the remotest desert.
She was lost in thought for a moment, and Burnes startled her by saying, ‘When do you go to the country, Miss Garraway?’
He might have been following her thoughts, although it was not an unnatural thing to ask in May, in London. ‘I imagine shortly after your departure, Mr Burnes. I doubt you could have found anything more queer on your travels than our house in Gloucestershire. It is truly something to make a Sultan stare. A moat, castellations, a swarm of savage peacocks, and everything inside so higgledy-piggledy. It is picturesque, as my sister says, to the point of shame.’
‘I’m sure that I should love it very much,’ Burnes said, now entirely serious.
‘Yes,’ she said, having nothing contrary to say. ‘Yes, I think I love it too. Tell me, which of your oriental potentates did you find the most agreeable? From your book, they all seem equally amiable, or almost all.’
Burnes drew his chair a little closer to hers, set down his teacup. A light film of sweat was dewing his forehead; it must now be warm in the street. ‘On the whole,’ he said. ‘I think Dost Mohammed, the Prince of Kabul.’
‘The Prince of Kabul,’ Bella breathed, turning to him with her luminous grey eyes. ‘How I envy you, to number such a tremendous personage among your acquaintance. The Prince of Kabul – it truly sounds like the black villain in a Christmas raree show. I see him, entering, stage left, his face and his intentions for the heroine both as black as pitch. Forgive me, Mr Burnes – I let my tongue run on to no purpose, and I recall now how kind the gentleman was to you from my reading of your book. And now here is my sister.’
3.
Bella, with relief, rose as her sister came in, gliding as ever, a ready smile on her face. The gliding was a characteristic of Elizabeth. She moved without any impediment to her path, as if, in the kindest possible way, any impediment which did not rapidly remove itself would be crushed beneath the wheels of this mildly smiling female Juggernauth. She was twenty, and, on the whole, got her own way with anyone from Goethe to the stillroom maid. Bella presented them.
‘How dull you must find London, Mr Burnes, after all your exciting travels.’
‘On the contrary, Miss Garraway,’ Burnes said. ‘I have met far more interesting and engaging people in London and, since the greater part of my travels was spent in great discomfort, thirsty and hungry and subject to a succession of trivial ailments, I am glad to exchange the romance of desert life for the unremarkable comforts of Park Lane.’
‘But surely, Mr Burnes,’ Elizabeth continued, ‘you must find London talk tiresomely dull after the company of your Indian nabobs and Emirs. After the barbaric court of a Maharajah, what possible entertainment can there be for you in an English lady’s drawing room?’
Elizabeth was refusing to sit down, the better to clasp her hands and strike minor attitudes against the chimney breast. It was all very well, but Burnes, hat in hand, was beginning to look somewhat awkward standing there, like a footman awaiting his mistress’s pleasure. Bella merely looked amused.
‘To be frank,’ Burnes said, ‘so few of your Eastern princes have anything of interest to say.’
‘That cannot be true, Mr Burnes,’ Bella said. ‘Why, your book is full of interesting and extraordinary remarks passed by the princes you met. I do not believe you could write such an interesting book filled with the remarks of the ladies of London society.’
‘To be sure,’ Burnes said, subsiding with relief as Elizabeth finally sat down at the pianoforte, ‘their conversation seems extraordinary and full of fascination to us, who have only an imperfect knowledge of their culture, just as the meanest building put up in the Orient seems wonderful to us, as our eyes are not accustomed to what is commonplace.’
‘The meanest building of the Orient – the garden huts of Bokhara – a tremendous notion, sir,’ Bella said as Elizabeth started on one of Field’s nocturnes, not at all softly.
‘There are exceptions to what I say,’ Burnes said over the intensely genteel din. ‘As I was saying before Miss Elizabeth Garraway came in—’ gracious nod ‘—I found Dost Mohammed, the Prince of Kabul, to be a remarkable man.’
‘I have not quite – reached as far as – him in my – perusal of your – book,’ Elizabeth said, in little gasps between Field’s trickier ornamental flourishes; both she and the music seemed to hiccough.
‘How did he immediately strike you, Mr Burnes?’ Bella said.
‘He has very bad teeth,’ Burnes said, smiling warmly and incidentally displaying his own very good ones, the fruits of a Scottish childhood eating nothing but roots and thistles. ‘His conversation is curiously intelligent and penetrating when he asks about us – I felt often that, after my visit, he must surely know far more about the British than this Briton, at least, had succeeded in discovering about him. But in the main, it is a curious, intangible, indefinable quality he has which makes him so remarkable. Do you know what I mean by charm?’
‘Of course,’ Bella said. ‘I am surprised to hear a Scotsman refer to it. I had thought it a strange and infrequent visitor to your nation. I know from the immortal Kant that properties and qualities may flourish without being named, but this is the first I have heard of the word being used without anything to attach it to. But I forgot, Mr Burnes, you have spent long in London, and Kabul, where they know, no doubt, all there is to be known of charm.’
Even Bella feared this raillery might have gone too far, but Burnes seemed to take it in good part, merely replying, ‘I would never have thought from your appearance, Miss Garraway, that you had read the immortal Kant.’
‘Naturally not,’ Bella said. ‘I hear most of it from my sister, who is the great reader among us, and that seems to suffice for the normal demands of a lady’s conversation.’
Elizabeth came to the end of her nocturne with a gulpingly hammered series of chords, and rose to the sincere thanks of Burnes, before excusing herself to the necessity of her correspondence. Burnes got up to take his leave, but before he could speak, Elizabeth had shot through the door and was halfway up the stairs; it was her ostentatiously tactful manner, which never failed to embarrass Bella and make her unable to say anything. She stood there, with Burnes, smiling. Elizabeth had gone, he was alone with her sister; and yet nothing so very terrible seemed to have happened.
‘Mr Burnes,’ Bella said. It sounded facetious, mocking, said like that, and though she had nothing she wanted to say to him, it would be foolish now to sit down again. She recollected herself. ‘I am so pleased you came. There must be so many calls on your time, I know.’
‘I am so sorry I was unable to call before today,’ he said softly, and that was not quite what she meant.
‘We—’ Bella stopped. ‘I am pleased you came at all. Do come again, any time. Truly, any time you can spare from your valuable six weeks.’
He bowed, and since his lovely eyes would not quite meet hers, she felt assured that she had now said too much. She could see their next meeting now, in her head; they would be in a crowded room, he surrounded by duchesses, ministers, talking – he had now acquired an emblematical significance – to Stokes the writer and all that shining entourage. And a chill would have fallen between the two of them like a curtain, as he bowed with all the unfeeling profundity at his disposal.
She was so lost in her thoughts that when Burnes, looking mildly puzzled, took his leave and went, she hardly noticed that she was quite alone in the drawing room.
4.
‘Truly, I like him,’ she said later, to Elizabeth, upstairs, after dinner.
Elizabeth left off brushing Bella’s hair, and turned to her own. It was an unspoken annoyance to Bella that her sister, who was apt to embarrass when strangers were present, and spouted nonsense by the square yard when in correspondence with German philosophers, was perfectly rational and sympathetic alone, after dinner, with no servants listening.
‘He seems admirable,’ she said. ‘But you say he leaves in six weeks.’
‘Yes, he does.’
‘And when does he return?’
‘He hasn’t named a date. I doubt he knows. But truly, I like him.’
Elizabeth pulled at her hair, dragging it in front of her face like a veil, and through it made a vulgar noise with her tongue and lips. Bella shrieked, falling back onto her bed in giggles. ‘Truly,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I like him.’
‘I do.’
‘Well, when he returns, perhaps you will still like him. Fancy – Bella Garraway to wait ten years for her betrothed, and he comes back, unable to remember the name of this suddenly old woman, or in a box, a sad early death, dead of the cholera – remember, Bella, George Hathersage, dead after five weeks in Calcutta, dead at twenty-four. Or – fancy, picture, you at the docks, waiting, expectancy bright in your wrinkled old face, and off steps Mr Burnes, the hero of the age, his left arm firmly linked to a Maharajah’s daughter and his right clinging to a case of her family’s diamonds.’
‘If it comes to that,’ Bella said. ‘We have diamonds, too.’
‘But Bella, it may be years – do think.’
‘It doesn’t signify, Elizabeth. I am quite sure he will not call again. Don’t ask me how I can be so sure, but I am sure.’
But he did call; the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. He came and he sat, and he submitted to being teased and quizzed until Bella was blue in the face. Always they laughed together – it was a strange sound, in that house, so very genteel – and always they were at ease with each other. The second time Burnes came, he was admitted at once to the empty drawing room, and asked to wait while Miss Bella was sent for. He thought Miss Bella was at home, the footman did – couldn’t answer, he was sure, for the remainder of the family. Burnes nodded, satisfied. He looked around him, at the dark quiet room which could be anyone’s, and, bearing no trace of her, was Bella’s. He wondered where in this abandoned corner of Hanover Square she had left her mark, and the ticking of his watch was loud against the back of his hand. There was a rude rumpus from upstairs; it made him jump. He could have sworn it was the noise of a girl jumping down the stairs, two at a time, and accompanying herself by singing, the sort of unobserved raucous singing he would never have imagined her capable of. The tune was ‘Men of Harlech’, but Burnes, hat and gloves in hand, grew pale as he heard the words Bella, unobserved, as she clearly thought, was applying to the familiar regimental favourite.
I’m the man (thud!) who came from ScotlandShooting (thud!) peas up a nanny-goat’s bottom (thud!)I’m the man who (thud!) came from ScotlandShooting—
With that, she burst incontinently into the silent drawing room, and from the momentary alarmed look on her face, all was clear to Burnes. The footman had failed to find Bella. She had leapt downstairs to the accompaniment of the childhood favourite, believing herself to be alone in the house. Burnes, however, was equal to the situation.
‘On the contrary,’ he said with his best Montrose brogue, ‘I’m the man who came from Scotland.’
After that, they were, so to speak, on all fours with each other, and the casual observer of Mr Burnes’s near-daily calls in Hanover Square might well have been surprised to see the great explorer demonstrating the distinction between the Afghan turban and that of the faithless Sikhs, with the doubtful aid of the drawing room curtains, while the accomplished, beautiful and respectable Bella Garraway lay supine with laughter on the sofa.
‘Truly, I like him.’ That was all she said to her family, and it was her useful formula. She resisted all suggestions that he should come to dinner, and was not pressed. Colonel Garraway’s state made the hosting of a dinner a problematic proposal, and, for her part, Bella could only contemplate the idea of observing Burnes across a plate of soup with a tremor of amusement, when he had spent the previous afternoon teaching her to imitate the precise noise a Bactrian camel makes before spitting.
Only sometimes he fell silent in her company, seemed sadly lost in thought as his eyes fixed on the wallpaper, and she knew quite well what he was thinking, what in all honesty he felt he should now say. If, however, he did come to the point of looking at her and saying, ‘Bella, I am poor,’ she knew, for once, what she would say in return; she would say, quite simply, ‘Burnes, I am rich,’ and there would be an end on it. Or a beginning; one of the two. But of course he never did say it, having no tongue with which to say such a thing. The truth, unspoken, hung like a curtain between them, and it was, it seemed, only Bella who understood that if he chose, he could take that curtain and wind it, absurdly, about his head, and reduce her, as always, to the point of laughter.
‘Truly, I like him,’ she said, and truly, she did.
‘Must you go?’ she said. It was late in the afternoon in Hanover Square, and Burnes was standing to leave.
‘I must, Bella,’ he said, but he was smiling, and she knew it meant nothing, and let him go. She shut her eyes, and hugged herself, and smiled, and stayed where she was. She stayed where he had left her, just for a moment, trembling, taut, unseen, like a harp string when the door has been closed on an empty room. She stayed there with her eyes closed until she heard the door to the house close behind him. She opened her eyes on the empty room, and moved swiftly to the window – to the side of the window, where she would be in shadow, and watched him trot down the steps to the house. She saw how gracefully he moved. He must, she thought, be a fine dancer. And then, with an erotic force which made her blush for the weakness of her first thought, she realized from the grace of his few quick movements down the steps in Hanover Square, what he must be good at. What he must be best at. He, surely, was a horseman of superlative accomplishment.
Burnes stopped on the last of the steps, and seemed to realize something. He stood, and began to cast a glance back at the solidly-shut door of the Garraways’ house. He hovered there for a moment, while Bella watched, puzzled, and then thrust his hands into his coat-tails, and strode off with a pretence of purpose.
When Bella turned round, Emily was in the room. Instead of removing the tea-things, she was hovering over the sofa.
‘The gentleman—’ she said, almost nervously.
‘Yes, Emily?’ Bella said, turning back to the sight, once so ordinary, of Hanover Square without an Alexander Burnes in it. ‘Yes, what is it?’
‘The gentleman forgot his gloves, miss,’ Emily said. She was holding up a pair of pale blue gloves. That was what it had been; Burnes had left his gloves there, and only realized once he had left the house. Casting a glance back at the door of the Garraways’ house, he had found that too difficult a challenge; the man who had confronted the Amirs of Bokhara now, apparently, had found some timidity in him which made him shrink from returning to claim his gloves.
‘That won’t – no—’ Bella said, almost snatching the gloves back from Emily. ‘—no, they are my father’s gloves, not Mr Burnes’s. Give them to me – I was on the point of taking them up to him. I need to talk with my father, in any case.’
Emily was clearly doubtful. ‘I think he’s asleep presently, miss,’ she said. ‘I can take them up later with the six o’clock tray.’
Like an invalid, Colonel Garraway had a tray at set times; his six o’clock tray bore what had proved the efficacious restorative of half a pint of dry sherry and some ship’s biscuits. Bella was firm, not permitting herself to wonder what Emily and the massively multiplying dependants below stairs would be saying in half an hour about her theft of Burnes’s pale blue gloves. Bella, suddenly, simply didn’t care. ‘I’ll take them up now,’ she said, almost furiously, and, walking across the room and snatching the gloves up, almost ran up the stairs with them.
It was only when she was in her room, the door safely shut behind her, that Bella could think of what she had done, and why she had done it. She stood, holding his gloves, and it seemed to her that somewhere, deep in the house, carpets were being beaten; a great regular dull thud, making the walls vibrate and the windows ring. She listened, and it was no noise, but only her heart, the betrayer, rousing the house to her strange desire. She held the gloves to her, and the sound would not stop. The Garraways were so respectable they would never surprise anyone, never disappoint or astonish anyone with their perfect breeding. Now something had come to astonish, to overthrow, to bowl over a Garraway, and she listened to her beating heart with an emotion not far from bewilderment.
In her room, in her bureau, in the third drawer from the top, Bella kept a box of tokens. Tokens of her past life, which no one had seen, or would see. It was this she now reached for, in which she placed Burnes’s purloined gloves. A clockwork toy, twenty years old, no longer working; who, now, could say what that meant to Bella? Or a playbill, smudged with a masculine thumb, eloquent only to its collector, and to us, who observe her at this most private juncture, quite silent? A handkerchief, embroidered by hand – not very well, as if by a child, and marked with a D – we would venture so far as to guess that this belonged, once, to Bella’s mother, whose name in this house is so sadly neglected, that it is the handkerchief clutched by her mother as she died. Precious things; most precious things. It was here she placed Burnes’s gloves, not quite knowing why, but hearing some imperative voice, which she obeyed.
5.
Burnes’s book, that summer, was read everywhere. The King did not read it, true. But yet even he had granted the author an audience, had graciously accepted a copy, and had listened, nodding from time to time, while Lady Porchester took it upon herself to describe Burnes’s adventures at length to Queen Adelaide. So – since he had never been known to take down any book but the Navy Regulations – even he could, loosely, be said to have read it. All London read it. The hostesses and their daughters read it to each other in the course of their long afternoons. In the city, the busy traders took time from making money to wonder at Burnes’s daring, the odd folk he had met, whose existence had never, until that year, been remotely suspected by people whose cellars were filled with the substantial tributes of the far-flung world. Boys at Westminster read it surreptitiously, their eyes shining, and that year, half the poems written for the Prize turned out to be Afghan pastorals, in which a shepherd of the neighbourhood of Herat, longing for his lost herd of fat-tailed sheep (Pothon platykerkous oies), came upon a dusky shepherdess. Most people who read Burnes’s famous account of his famous travels saw romance in it, and were satisfied to hear of another man’s colourful adventures and miserable minor discomforts. Bella, for instance, like a thousand other very similar young ladies between the Park and the Palace, enjoyed it as she might have enjoyed a fancy-dress ball. All these young ladies wondered only at the soft, rather irresolute man who hovered so in drawing rooms, at his having carried out such a mission. The young ladies, like Bella, looked at his white freckled skin and his thin floppy hair, the lightest possible shade of ginger, and wondered.
If many of Burnes’s readers, that summer, were taken with a sense of romance, there were others who read his book and found something worth consideration; or rather, there were those who, in reading Burnes’s book, felt their own sense of romance quite distinct from that of the herd. Burnes’s book recounting his travels to Kabul and beyond ought to have been a simple fact, on which London could agree. There it was, in three volumes, rather large type – it had been written in such a great hurry, so as to meet the public curiosity, that it had altogether been touch and go whether the bookseller could make it stretch to three volumes at all. It ought to have been a simple fact, on which London could agree, like St James’s Palace, or the Strand, or the milkmaid in the Park. But they would not behave like that, these three quite slender volumes. They seemed much more like living beings, or, better, a contagion which takes different forms in each body it attaches itself to. A contagion may not be altogether a bad thing; it may, for instance, form an inoculation, preventing something far worse. And Burnes’s books spread from reader to reader. In some of its hosts, its effect was mild; a new curiosity in an unfamiliar part of the world, a burst of romantic enthusiasm. In others it induced a grand desire to change the globe. That, let it be said, was Burnes’s intention.
The Prime Minister read it, and wondered why he had never thought about the state of Kabul before; the political classes read it, and often wondered what consequences would flow from our regarding these strange and backward states as mere curiosities. Fat clergymen read it, having little else to do with their time, and badgered anyone who cared to listen on the plain Christian duty to bring the boundaries of Christendom a little wider, to extend our Indian missions westward. Few people took the opinions of clergymen entirely seriously, but they were saying, imperfectly, what their more intelligent elder brothers were starting to feel. These places were, or ought to be, our business, and if we did not acquiesce in our plain duty, there were others who would make it their business.
‘The Russians, sir, the Russians,’ the Duchesse de Neaud said to anyone who would listen – in this case, at the opera, her fervour was being directed at a young protégé of hers, a genius of political economy, a gentleman called Chapman. The old Duchesse, quite uncommonly fervid, was beating him on the breast with her fan as she made her point – an awkward backhanded manoeuvre, since he was sitting behind her in her box. ‘The Russians – mark my word, sir – are strong, and in want of an empire. No nonsense about Reform there, no worry about the abolition of slavery – nothing, sir, nothing – and Russia would march into India as soon as our backs are turned. I assure you, sir—’
‘I hardly think, ma’am, they are in a position—’ Chapman began, weakly; the Duchesse’s transformation into an observer of the movements of nations had occurred so suddenly, the terrain had abruptly altered, without warning, and the Duchesse’s interlocutors felt their way slowly, not entirely sure when they were treading on solid ground.
‘Precisely, sir, precisely my point,’ the Duchesse went on. ‘It is as in a game of cards. If you sit on what you have won, you quickly see it diminish by the depredations of others. Am I not right, sir?’
Lord Palmerston, who had been attempting to attend to the opera, now gave up with a small inner gesture of regret at the rising shriek of the Duchesse’s theorizing. He turned with a tight ready smile to agree with her. Chapman, hovering nervously at her shoulder, sank back into the depths of the red velvet box, hoping to engage the girl in pink with the vast eyes as soon as the Duchesse could be safely handed over to the guest of honour. Lord Palmerston raised a questioning eyebrow. There were few moments when no one was trying to speak to him, and he cultivated the appearance of a melomane, in part, to allow himself a moment free from the rival demands of the town. The Duchesse was in full spate.
‘… most interesting – most interesting young man – remarkable book …’ she was saying, before spooling back wildly to the outset of her conversation. ‘You see, sir, it simply is no good to stay as we are, to be satisfied with our Indian possessions as they are.’
‘I promise you, Duchesse—’ Palmerston began.
‘What if other hands than ours were to be tempted – yes, tempted, I said, yes, I agree, very fine form, never purer in her top register – tempted by the idea of these virgin lands?’
‘India, madam?’ Lord Palmerston had no idea how he was allowing himself to be drawn into such a conversation.
‘No, sir, the kingdoms of Kabul and Bokhara and – and – if you look at Mr Burnes’s maps, it becomes perfectly apparent that there are others who have as clear an interest in it as we—’
‘That interest being none, I suppose, Duchesse, eh?’ the old Duc called from the back of the box.
‘No, monsieur, no, no – I mean Russia, Lord Palmerston.’
‘Russia, madam?’ Lord Palmerston said, hoping by a display of incredulity to bring an end to a conversation he was being subjected to at all hours of the day and night by the most improbable people. The Duchesse, however, was not so easily cowed.
‘And once Russia has established itself in Bokhara, moving on from its Crimean possessions—’
‘Madam, I hardly think—’
‘Crimean possessions – very true, very possible, not at all – imagine, sir, a Russian empire stretching to Kabul – do you suppose for one instant that they would be satisfied with that? No, sir, it would be onward to the kingdom of the Sikhs, and then, I assure you, our Indian possessions begin to look very vulnerable indeed. I doubt we could defend them against such an onslaught.’
‘I assure you, Mme la Duchesse,’ Lord Palmerston said, now entirely giving up on the opera, ‘that these are all most remote possibilities which I am confident the Governor General would meet appropriately. But, really, madam—’
‘Not remote – not possibilities – not for one moment remote,’ the Duchesse went on, her words spilling out of her snuff-coloured silk. She clutched at ribbons in her enthusiasm. ‘Have you read Mr Burnes’s travels, sir? The most efficacious manner, I assure you, of meeting the Russian threat – yes, threat, sir – is to move at this exact moment into Kabul, to Bokhara – these vast and peaceful countries, new markets, sir, and labouring under the yoke of an oppressive superstition – sir, do you not think it our plain duty as Christians and Europeans to bring enlightenment to these benighted people and save them – rescue them – from the – the threat of a fate worse, worse, I say,’ the Duchesse’s voice rising as she lost her own thread, ‘than their own?’
Behind her, Chapman and the pink silk heiress were taking refuge behind her fan, which trembled alarmingly. Lord Palmerston gave up.
‘I think, Duchesse,’ he said wearily, ‘you make a point which I know many people will agree with.’
There was something so final in his tone that even the Duchesse had to sit back in her chair, assuring herself that she, at least, had succeeded in bringing these very important matters to the attention of somebody who would attend to the situation. She turned her attention to the opera, but the act seemed to be over now. Malibran, in a most unbecoming braided blonde wig, was bowing beneath a vast weight of flowers, behaving, at least, as if she were receiving the acclaim of a grateful multitude. The Duchesse, triumphant, prepared to rise and retell her conversation a hundred times.
6.
In the Duchesse de Neaud, the infection represented by Burnes’s book had found a fertile carrier; truly a carrier, one might say, since she passed on the main features of the contagion without proving profoundly susceptible to the virus itself. Like those wealthy invalids who complain bitterly of an influenza while all the time suffering far less than those to whom they will pass on the illness, she made a great deal of noise for a season on the subject of the central Asian principalities, and, having stirred up a great deal of pained opposition and concern, was satisfied to forget the subject and never again mention Burnes, Kabul or Bokhara with her former fervent tones.
The weather in London changed, quite abruptly. The streets dried into dust which settled like a veil over everything; fruit from the market seemed to have been stored for centuries in the dungeons of some belle au bois dormant, so thick did the dust of the streets disguise the bloom of the fruit. The Season began, all at once, to come to an end. There were a few landmarks by which the Season might be considered concluded, but it felt like a rapid collapse of business, and not a cleanly marked boundary. There was no doubt that after the Court had withdrawn, after the last Drawing-Room, after the old Duke’s Summer Ball, there was no Season but a hastily convened retreat, as every house from Park to Park resounded with the beating of carpets, the single occupation of dustsheeting furniture and the sealing-up of trunks, in so much grim-faced hurry that a stranger might have concluded that a marauding army was hammering at the gates of the city, and not merely the unimagined, unexperienced phenomenon of an August in London. But at a certain moment in the year, it was clear that the Season had lost what purpose it had. Perhaps – Bella thought – it ended as soon as an acquaintance remarked, however casually, that he was leaving town early this year. The next day, in fact. The thought presented itself with an attendant melancholy which was quite unfamiliar to her. Never before had the simple fact of having to leave London struck her as so sad a loss, so devastating a revelation of what she must always have known, that the round of parties and Park and dinner was, in truth, at best wearisome and at worst a stale and unprofitable waste of existence. It made no sense to her, to feel like this, and yet that was how she felt. She could only understand it by thinking that, after the last steamy night at the opera, after the last agonizing Drawing-Room, some wardrobe-faced courtier prodding you in the back and your ostrich feathers shedding by the minute, there would be no more Burnes. She understood that very well. He was this year’s novelty, and next year there would be another.
The idea of a different state presented itself to her; the idea of an August where Bella and Burnes together could walk the empty London streets, their happiness observed only by costermongers.
For Bella, now, in this year of Grace, the idea of her departure from London with so much unsaid – even granted that she did not know what she would say, even if she could say it – brought to mind images of collapse. Soft yielding sand, collapsing inwards in an hourglass; a bathful of water sliding unstoppably into the drains; Bella alone, in the drawing room at Hanover Square, hearing only the clink and knock of the opium tantalus in the sounding empty house, waiting for departure, and nothing else.
In these last days, there was so much to be done, and the preparations for the months in Gloucestershire were as detailed and solid as for a siege. Gloucestershire was all very well, but there was much which could not be acquired there at any price. For the long siege of dullness, dictated by the fashion which would separate Bella so irresistibly from Burnes, food was needed. The current books, French novels for upstairs, English for the drawing room, old Italian poetry for the library; these things would represent a brave assault on the grim boredom of a Gloucestershire afternoon. New clothes, naturally; it was astonishing how much time could be stolen from the long day by bathing and dressing, but the trick only worked if there were new bonnets, new dresses to hand. Other than that, there remained the resort of driving about the countryside, calling on families; even a country curate’s wife, however crass or absurd, would serve to alleviate the ache of ennui as swiftly as her father’s unvarying solution. Other amusements were now closed to Bella. Fishing with worms, digging for treasure in the rose garden, dropping grandpapa’s folios from the battlements into the moat with a still memorable, pleasing, deep-sounding plop! – these were things, not newly forbidden to Bella, since they had always been clandestine activities, but since she had grown up and begun to blush, some inner sense, not of decorum but of absurdity, forbade her these previously delightful entertainments. So it was that, to beguile the long August days, purchases had to be made, and Bella and Elizabeth found their last weeks in Hanover Square taken up with visits to the drapers, to the booksellers, in search of some prospective amusement.
7.
The bookseller’s shop was full, and Bella and Elizabeth had to pick their way through a forest of acquaintances, all despatched on the same desperate errand, to fetch the season’s novelties to while away the long country summer. In a street off Piccadilly, the brown little shop was enduring its busiest week of the year, and the gentleman proprietor was wringing his hands as he tried to satisfy each lady with an interesting novelty; and Bella could see, as she quietly picked over the loose-bound piles, that the task of reconciling an individual recommendation with the sort of book which, fashion dictated, all London would be raving over by November, would indeed drive anyone to wring his hands in despair. Just now, Mr Sandoe was attempting to pacify a substantial marchioness, whose bulk and wide-mouthed face made her, without reason, appear actually to be hungry for a few volumes. Bella, waiting patiently for his attention, picked up an unbound volume; a limp volume of poems about rivers, lakes, mountains, trees – she turned the pages, but no human being was there, only the poet and his trembling emotions laid out for the admiring reader like the last stages of a dissection. There was enough of that, Bella felt, in the country already, and she wanted no slim volume of tremulous awareness, silently deploring her own infallible sense of desolation when she looked at an unpeopled mountain. Bella, who always thought that the one thing the view of an empty meadow wanted to complete it was a picnic of fifteen or twenty well-dressed gentlefolk artistically arranged, set down the exquisitely self-satisfied volume with an uncharacteristic burst of dislike.
‘Miss Garraway,’ a voice broke in. ‘And Miss Elizabeth Garraway – charmed, how pleasant to meet old friends when out on an errand – so tiring, so enervating, so refreshing to meet, merely, with two such—’
‘How do you do, ma’am,’ Bella said, bobbing to the Duchesse de Neaud, who was accompanied by one of the sour-faced Gilbert girls. ‘You are, I perceive, on the same errand as we are—’ then, recollecting herself, ‘—though you, ma’am, will have the benefit of a great library to while away your days.’
The Duchesse, indeed, was going to Windsor with the Court, as she acknowledged with a profound and unspeaking nod of the head. She was a great favourite of the King, who had known her in his sisters’ nurseries for half a century, and was an intimate, she felt able to imply in conversation, of the Queen.
‘I long for the day – quite long, my dear – when I am able to spend a moment in a chair with a book at Windsor – quite impossible. HM, you know …’ (this in a confidential whisper) ‘… remarkable little body, great energy, of course – entirely unable to set down, to lose oneself – quite exhausting, although—’ the Duchesse seemed suddenly terrified, as if another pair of listening ears might retell this comparative lack of enthusiasm and cast the Duchesse from her blissful social position into the outer darkness, ‘—nothing but pleasure in the duty, you know, nothing but, so simple, so easy, so pleased with every small service. And Windsor, you know, where every prospect pleases …’
The Duchesse looked around her a trifle wildly, perhaps recalling, far too late, how the second half of the line went. The Gilbert girl took the opportunity to force a simper and bob at Bella and Elizabeth.
‘When do you leave town, ma’am?’ Bella asked.
‘Yes, indeed – Tuesday next, I believe – thank you Miss Garraway – or so I believe, quite, entirely, happily dependent on the wishes of others—’
‘I hope M. le Duc is well?’ Elizabeth asked.
‘Thank you, yes, quite well, quite mad with uncertainty, constantly requiring his trunks to be unpacked for some favourite jewel, naturally, though happy, as I say, to be – I expect, Miss Garraway, you have read this – most entertaining, most instructive—’
This, naturally, was Burnes’s book, which the Duchesse seized with both hands from a pile on the bookseller’s table. Bella had the presence of mind not to blush, and, though Miss Gilbert was smirking to a painful extent, she could assure herself that the Duchesse probably meant nothing by it. Elizabeth had wandered off, thankfully, affecting to be engaged by some other book.
‘Indeed, ma’am,’ Bella said collectedly. ‘Mr Burnes and I, you know, are quite friends.’
That did the trick, and Miss Gilbert went off to squeeze Elizabeth for gossip.
‘Most timely, his book, I must say,’ the Duchesse went on, apparently not much caring whether Bella was friends with Burnes or not. ‘Lord Palmerston – at the opera, you know – only last Wednesday – no, Thursday – most concerned, most intrigued. You see my dear, as Burnes says very truly, nature abhors a vacuum – abhors – and where we refuse to step in, others may. You mark my words—’ and a black, glittering and sombre eye now engaged Bella’s own, ‘—others may. Thank heaven for Burnes – excellent, splendid, most timely warning, Palmerston was saying so to me—’ again that tactful drop in volume, to impress Bella that it was only the significance of what the Duchesse was saying that led her to invoke Lord Palmerston, and not a desire to display her glittering connections to a crowded bookseller’s shop, ‘—he and I were talking about it – Malibran, in The Sleepwalkerine, most enchanting, ringing top notes, last Thursday – no, Wednesday – and we agreed, he and I—’ now speaking again at normal levels, ‘—that we must go to the rescue of these poor people. Helpless, quite helpless, in need, if anyone is, of our assistance – and, as I was saying—’ sotto voce, ‘—to him: if we do not, others may. The Russian Bear, my dear, the ravening hungry Russian Bear. Thank heaven for Burnes.’
The Duchesse, now finished, fixed Bella again with her gaze, and then, astonishingly, gave a great ursine growl. Bella jumped back, having no response whatever to make to this; she could hardly growl back, as if she were in the nursery with this small brown wrinkled duchess – a mental picture of the Duchesse in her infant frocks, clutching a rusk, shrunken but entirely the same, and growling, shot across Bella’s mind. Nor, in all conscience, could she respond in any way to what the Duchesse had said; she understood nothing of what she was referring to.
Elizabeth returned, and Bella felt able to escape. As they left, the Duchesse, still deep in her own thoughts, cried, ‘A word to the wise, my dear—’ and then, as Bella nodded her goodbyes, she made her astonishing bear’s growl once more. The surprising fact was that no one else in the bookseller’s shop – not even Elizabeth – seemed remotely troubled or interested by the remarkable performance. Bella stepped into the pillbox carriage waiting for them with a persistent and worrying sense that it was she, and not the extravagant old woman, who had made a spectacle of herself.
8.
She felt able to plead fatigue, and John took them back to Hanover Square, their errands almost complete. Elizabeth, inexhaustible, let Bella off at Hanover Square before asking John to take her on, wanting to make her farewells to a friend in Green Street.
It was three in the afternoon, and Burnes had been waiting, ‘no more than five minutes, I assure you’.
‘How did you know I – we should return soon?’
Burnes smiled. ‘I did not. I had set a limit on my patient waiting.’
‘And how long was that, Burnes?’ Bella said, long ago having passed to this intimate, military form of address. She began to unpick her bonnet as they sat down. ‘I would like to know what value you place on my company, and the length of time you would wait for my return seems as accurate a measure as any. For some truly important person – let us say for the Governor General, the King, or my sister’s friend Goethe—’
‘I believe Herr Goethe is dead, Bella.’
‘No matter – for these, let us say they would merit a whole afternoon’s waiting, hat in hand, jumping to your feet every time the maid enters to feed the fire. On the other hand, let us say, for our friend Stokes—’
‘I was truly asking myself whom you were planning to alight on, but Mr Stokes is a very fair choice.’
‘Thank you. For Mr Stokes, I do not suppose you would wait at all; a mere drop of the card in the bowl, and off you would fly like an afrit riding the West Wind. Am I correct?’
‘Quite so.’
‘And yet you waited for me – how long I do not know – and you would, I believe, have waited a minute or two longer. How long the limit you had privately determined is for me to establish, and that, I presume, will inform me what value you place on the conversation of a silly little girl. I wonder with what ingenuity I can discover the true facts of the case.’
‘No ingenuity is required,’ Burnes said, laughing at Bella, scratching her head like a regular urchin. ‘I will tell you – I had decided to wait for fifteen minutes. In any case, I knew you had gone to your bookseller’s two hours before, since Emily was so kind as to tell me, and I knew a bookseller could not detain you much longer than that.’
‘Very well,’ Bella said. ‘Fifteen minutes. Now I call that a very valuable contribution to knowledge, though, like the higher mathematics, I hardly know as yet what use I shall put it to.’
‘I dread your uses, Bella,’ Burnes said, helping himself to tea and, greedily, to sugar. ‘But how long would you wait for me?’
Bella was silenced, and Burnes, too, in a moment stopped laughing. There was no answer to that; in them both was the unspoken knowledge that the ‘six weeks’, so lightly spoken, so long ago, had shrunk now to one week, that then, he was gone, that after, there was nothing that either could see. In Burnes’s pained anxious face was some knowledge that he had not been fair to Bella, and it would have been better not to have come at all; in Bella’s face was nothing but a forgiveness for anything Burnes might do, be doing, have done. Bella’s forgiveness had no tense, had no aspect, and Burnes dropped his eyes from hers, from her sad, her shining eyes.
‘In the interests of coquetry,’ Bella said, collecting herself, ‘no woman would ever wait for a man as long as he would wait for her. If I were a flirt, five minutes; if I were a woman of normal self-regard …’
But she saw in Burnes’s face that he had no heart any longer for their normal banter, that their conversation, like the afternoon, like their lives, had turned in an unexpected direction, and now there was no retrieving it.
‘Perhaps ten minutes?’ she said, and faltered, her eyes, now, big and swimming and full of ache. She looked at her lap.
‘Bella,’ Burnes said again. ‘How long would you wait for me?’
She could not think, and she hardly trusted her voice to speak.
‘I don’t know,’ she said simply. He could not look at her, perhaps in shame, and he drew back a little in his chair.
‘That,’ he said after a moment, ‘must be your brother.’
For a second she did not know what he meant, and then she saw he was talking about the portrait above the chimney breast. He was right to move away from these dangerous and unstable territories. There could be nothing much gained by talking each other into ultimately painful declarations. She rallied herself.
‘Yes, indeed, Harry, my poor brother,’ she said briskly. ‘Not a good likeness, but – forgive me, I was about to say something uncharitable.’
‘I should forgive you,’ Burnes said, smiling.
‘Very well, then; I was about to say that few people would have wanted a good likeness of Harry in a drawing room. He was so very – so very …’
‘Do go on, Bella,’ Burnes said. ‘I think I understand.’
‘No,’ Bella said. ‘He was so very much not at home in a drawing room. He was not quite – not quite tamed, I think one might say. He had a knack, a habit, of arriving anywhere early, and then progressing swiftly to the furthest wall. And then he would stand there – I mean, at a rout, if there was any promise of a crowd, of fresh blood and new flesh.’
‘You make him sound quite the vampyr,’ Burnes said, looking at the faintly extraordinary portrait with the perfectly round head, the legs crossed at the knees and the hand resting, extravagantly, on a tiger.
‘Perhaps so,’ Bella said seriously. ‘If you had seen him against the wall, watching as people came in, assessing himself, preparing himself to spring on his victim – and yet, of course, he could be excellent company and he was my brother. He had to go to India – there was a between-maid, and then another, and debts, cards, and then – you know, Burnes, I feel it shows very bad judgement to attempt to elope with the mother of your principal creditor.’
Burnes, despite himself, laughed. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘But yes, not a highly judicious act. May I ask—’
‘Really, Burnes, she is still with us. You could hardly expect me to say Emma Franklin, could you? It was decided, then – Harry decided, and we decided, and London gave a great sigh of relief – that he should go to India and make his fortune. Not an unfamiliar story, you must admit, though Harry’s petits péchés were somewhat more ambitious than the common run. Packed off – dead within months. You heard of him, I recall, in Calcutta.’
‘Hardly,’ Burnes said. He had forgotten, by now, how he came first to speak to Bella; it was so very many weeks ago. ‘As I remember, I heard of him first in London – I heard that you had a brother who went to India and died. Only that.’
‘Ah,’ she said, taken by surprise, and all at once, he recalled his ordinary lie, and crimsoned gorgeously from the neck upwards. She was amused. ‘A very ordinary death; we heard that it was cholera, and cholera does, you know, carry off very many new arrivals in India. A year or so later, the portrait arrived, brought by some fellow Company officer – wallah, he called himself. They’d all put up a subscription and paid for the portrait to be finished. I heard the true story from him. Another very ordinary death – another officer’s wife behaved like an ass, and they were surprised. Did you know duelling was so much the fashion in Calcutta? Pew’aps it ain’t, as Harry would have said – Harry would have driven almost anyone to defend his honour with pistols.’
She had finished. He saw in her smile and anecdotal glitter how brave she was, and could be again. For herself, she saw only concern in a good man’s face.
‘You miss him, don’t you,’ he said finally. The room was dark, and quiet; she heard the heavy ticking of his watch in the empty house.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I do. Now, don’t betray me—’
‘I would never betray you, Bella,’ he said, and it was as if there were no other sentence in the world, there to be spoken. She shook her head, not able to look at him, and he understood very well that she meant Nor I you. He took her hand, and she moved, suddenly, her body moving in response to his touch like iron to a magnet. ‘Come with me,’ he said, rising and advancing to the door. He paused there, and turned, and smiled at her, and, deprived of all will, she rose herself, and followed him.
Out into the street they went, Bella entranced, without a wrap, without a bonnet, and they walked silently southwards through the London streets. No one saw them go; no one paid them any attention as they walked, and through London unfashionable and fashionable they went in silence. She followed him, and it was as if he were drawn by something; what it was, she could not guess, though she could feel that something was pulling him, and it was forty minutes before the streets opened and emptied and there they were, together, at the edge of the river.
Watching the river: watching a perfect chaos of boatmen unloading their goods and passengers onto the wharves. So much to be seen. They stood in bewitched amusement and watched as one lady, stout as a grub in a tight coat, between little shrieks of alarm, allowed herself to be handed into the safe arms of her brass-buttoned husband, waiting with flushed embarrassment on the wharf. Bella and Burnes were interested and uncaring as if the brass-buttoned gentleman had been awaiting a delivery of bales of cotton into his arms, and not merely a wife. By them stood the eager crowd of boys, some ragged, some Sunday-best, which always materializes from nowhere if there is ever the chance that a lady of respectable middle years may fall, shrieking, into a river. The two of them watched, attentively, and would not for the world have admitted that their motives were no more noble than those of the boys. The spectacle came to a disappointing end, safely, and the puerile onlookers almost sighed, waiting for the next entertainment the river’s ordinary traffic might afford them.
‘I would give ten pounds,’ Burnes said after a while, ‘to know the precise contents of every bale, every chest, every warehouse we can see.’ She had not expected him to say anything romantic, and he had not; he had said something better, something interesting. ‘To come down here – I feel rather like a novelist must in a crowded room in an inn. To feel that if all the unspeaking secrets contained in it were opened up – then, I should be master of the world, and know everything.’
‘What would you discover?’
Burnes picked up a stone and sent it skimming into the river.
‘Nothing, perhaps,’ he said. ‘You could ask people about their passions. That is the way to discover something. No – they would only lie to you.’
‘Sometimes,’ Bella said. ‘Would we discover a great deal by your exercise? Even if we did go down to the wharf and pay the boatman five shillings to allow us to inspect his load, what do you suppose we should find? A boatload of cotton, or coal, or tea, I expect; nothing more interesting or romantic than that.’
‘Bella, you disappoint me,’ Burnes said, rubbing his hands together, although it was not cold in the slightest degree. Bella turned and stared at her companion, as if he had gone mad. ‘Not interesting? Not romantic? The docks of London?’
‘Romantic?’ Bella said. ‘Come now, Burnes, be less paradoxical with me. I am too dull for this.’
‘No paradox whatever,’ Burnes said. ‘Merely think – cotton, and coal, and tea – commonplace dull things. Think where they have come from, Bella; think of the journey they have undertaken, through what wastes and deserts, think what hands they have passed through, what fortunes, what hopes rest on these ordinary things. There are men thousands of miles beyond India, whose inner eyes are bent, this very moment, on that exact load of rice, there—’
‘You exaggerate, sir.’
‘Not a whit. Men considering whether, now, their little fortune has reached England safely or is at this moment lying at the bottom of the sea; men wondering whether some shift in weather will double the value of what they sent us, so many months ago, when it comes to sale, or whether it will realize half the poor farmer’s expectations. Riches or poverty, competing furiously in a man’s mind; a family made or destroyed, there in that bale. Look on that, Bella. Look in front of you. The whole world is here, this afternoon, now. In those cases, being thrown down, coffee and silks and spices, wool and diamonds, all docketed and ticked, all as if it were the most ordinary thing imaginable that the great world should pass through London, like a great haystack passing through the eye of a single needle. Import and export; sending England out to the world, taking the world into England. Cotton, silk, spice, coffee, gold, silver. The world, Bella, the world. Do you not feel it, Bella? Do you not see that I am showing you what I can, showing you the world? You could never find out what people want by going into a room and asking them. But by God, if you could stop this day now, at this moment, and spend as long as you liked examining every bale, every load, every sack of goods you can see, finding out what everything was worth, who sent it, who is about to buy it, by God, you would begin to understand the world. You would begin to understand what the world dreams of.’
9.
The river continued its placid brown life, unmoved by Burnes’s enthusiasm. As Burnes had talked, they had started to walk again, and they now found themselves in the shadow of the great bridge. A boatman clung on to the rope hanging on the nearest pier, the boat under his lurching feet being pushed away by the current. It swung from one side of the great pier to the other. With his left hand, he nonchalantly ate a bit of bread and an onion. The river was low, its stench so strong and heavy that it could be tasted in the mouth. A flock of coal-lighters was secured for the next few hours in the treacle-rich ooze of the river’s mud, a stuff almost valuable in itself. On the far bank, boys, almost naked, were plunging into this thick mass of mud, occasionally surfacing with cries to show that some small treasure, some penny had been found. Here surfaced a boy, black and dripping, his hand upstretched with a treasure, and trying to hail a little green tug with his shrieking gull-cry. The traffic of the river continued its furious pace uninterrupted, in the middle stream, like water-insects, handling each other out of the path with busy prodding prongs, hooks, ropes, businesslike and abrupt, not pausing for pleasantry, or apology; the purposeful dancing of a rude public ball. Long and intricate levels of wooden stairs and causeways, eroded and slippery smooth, clung to the river’s edge, and each boat, loading, unloading, mooring for a few short hours, seemed like an efficient drab bird which had alighted on one branch rather than another for no particular reason. In a moment it would set off again in a new direction, impelled by nothing more than its own furious energy. As each boat sat there, it seemed as if it cost it more energy to stay still than to move.
Bella said nothing. To her, it had always seemed the river, brown-black, crowded, noisy and stinking; it had never seemed to matter greatly where her tea came from, what produced the stuff for her linen. She could not suppose that the originators of the stuff worked explicitly to supply her with tribute, like the worshippers of a pagan god. Money and trade; filth and lucre. And yet she did feel it, she did; she felt that here, with Burnes, she was being shown a world; whether it was the great world Burnes descanted on, or the great opening mind of a man she suddenly, incomprehensibly, loved and would give herself to, she did not know.
‘It frightens you, the world?’ Burnes said suddenly. His eyes were fixed on Bella’s face; they were dark and swarming with appraisal. They wavered in their orbs as if searching for some secret that Bella’s face held.
‘Perhaps it does,’ Bella said carefully. ‘Sometimes I don’t understand what – quite what the greater part of it has to do with me. You will despise me for that.’
‘Never,’ Burnes said, his eyes fiery, fixed on hers, and in one unspoken agreement, they turned, and began to pick their way through London, to return to the place they came from.
The house, still, was empty as they entered, and in the dark hall, Burnes turned to her. She looked with bewilderment upon his face, but he was not preparing to leave her: on the contrary, he was keeping her, and in his expression was a new certainty, as if he knew all at once where to go and what to do. Still with her hand in his, she, all bewildered, submitted to be led forward a pace or two. He hesitated for a moment: it appeared that now he had forgotten what opportunity he had perceived in the course of the journey from the river to this sad empty house; forgotten why he was standing here, why he had taken Bella’s hand. But it was, after all, easier than that. She looked at him. His head was cocked like a foxhound’s. He was listening for the sound of any other person in the house.
‘Very well, then, Burnes,’ she said, and she had spoken her decision, her right hand in his. What they had understood with the burden of those so few days bearing down upon them, neither would express: she felt that. He led her, then, saying nothing, and she submitted to be led; and together, in the empty house, they walked upstairs.
FIVE (#ulink_b9e5fe21-b693-5832-969c-f74efb3a5b7c)
1.
ASTRANGER WAS THERE, out there, somewhere, somewhere in the haphazard piled-up overlapping streets of Kabul. No one had planned this city, and its many streets were like hundreds of thousands of individual routes. As if a pond was made of the ways that fish find through it. Down there, somewhere in the carpet-mass of pattern and direction and half-intended result, a European stranger had arrived, in an inadequate and fascinating disguise, and the town, quietly, was talking and talking and talking about the new arrival until the muted babble of discussion mounted the hill to the austere halls of the Bala Hissar, and reached – so quickly, so quickly – the ears of the Amir. And to the Amir, the arrival of the new European in town was like the dropping of a rock into the opaque pool of water which was the city, ruffling the surface immediately in ordinary and predictable ways, but disturbing the substance and mass beneath in a manner which could not be seen, or predicted. The Amir sat on the steps of the throne room, with the nobles and the clergy, and listened, noncommittally nodding his head from time to time, as if he were hearing nothing more than gossip.
‘His hair is red,’ the Newab Mohammed Zemaun Khan said. ‘Red, red as the devil’s is.’
‘And he wears the clothes of the country people,’ the Newab Jubbur Khan cut in. ‘He came from the East, from India, but he has been to many, many places. He speaks to everyone about the places he has been, and asks everyone, down to the smallest child, a thousand thousand questions.’
‘A wise man, then,’ the Amir said, pretending to reprimand the court. The Newab Jubbur Khan was a poor fellow, the Amir’s brother, and if Mohammed Zemaun would one day amount to something, for the moment he was no more than the Amir’s gawping boy-nephew.
‘A spy, Pearl of the Age,’ a mullah said. The Amir Dost Mohammed Khan turned, not recognizing the voice; it was the Mir Wa’iz, the teacher of Kabul, speaking through a mouthful of food.
‘A spy, Holiness?’ the Amir said; the Mir Wa’iz had not, quite, recovered from his display of asininity, weeks and weeks before. He had, after all, allowed the English to question holy doctrine over the question of the faithful Esquimaux, and could still be savagely teased on any subject. ‘But what enemies can I see on the most distant horizon? Do we not live in peace and plenty?’
‘A fool, then,’ Mohammed Zemaun said. ‘Or a mere scholar.’
‘He came from the East,’ the Mir Wa’iz insisted, in his best holy inscrutable manner.
‘A scholar, I expect,’ the Amir said. ‘But we shall spy on him, a little, shall we not?’
In truth, Dost Mohammed felt and knew that the arrival of the new Englishman was, in the end, going to prove to be more than gossip, but for the moment there was no reason for the clergy and nobles and wives to know such a thing, and his nodding head was intended to soothe the city into a mood of mere curiosity about the interloper …
… and down there, in the city, in a hired house, the Amir could almost see the interloper in his absurd and extravagant disguise, writing like a poor scribe, his head down to the page, his tongue almost out. When the Amir concentrated, he could see the arrival, beginning to write, concentrating, his mind on what he was doing, his sudden and uncontrolled movements betraying the angry impatient European fool as he put one word after another down. Like all Europeans, he would be writing about himself, setting down the ease and mastery with which he had come to this point, and the ease and mastery with which he had persuaded the city of what he was. His name the Amir did not need to imagine. He knew it: Masson. And down there in the city, in the far-off distant serene concentrating gaze of the Amir, Masson, the new arrival in his inadequate disguise, started to write …
The nobles and the clergy stirred among themselves, restlessly. They were dressed splendidly, and in their thick brocades they seemed to whisper, although nobody spoke. Against them, the Amir looked like an angel, come down from heaven to reprimand them. Today, as every day, he was resplendent in his white muslin; a six-foot angel with a broad curving nose and bad teeth.
‘The Sikhs,’ he said finally. It was the end of a train of thought which had begun with the interloper, Masson, and ended with a British-funded invasion of the Amir’s empire. The angel, bad-toothed, imperial in white, looked into the middle distance of the throne room, and saw the far locked doors being flung open by British soldiers, each a fat little red-faced replica of Burnes, armed to the teeth; beyond it, the Amir’s empire, so carefully subdued and brought together, like a basket weaved of Jew’s-hair thread, was being trampled through by an endless line of similar red-faced replicas, backed up by the filthy stupid – the Amir pursued his own indomitable line of thought, and came to a single sounding conclusion. ‘The Sikhs,’ he said.
‘The Sikhs, Pearl of the Age?’ the Newab Mohammed Zemaun Khan said. None of the heavy crowd of nobles understood what the Amir meant; a moment ago, he had seemed to be talking, or to be about to talk, about the Englishman, and to have dismissed the idea that he could be a spy. And now he had moved on to the Sikhs, the thorn in the side.
‘I am talking about the Sikhs,’ the Amir said, calmly. ‘Did they send the English spy? What is he here to find out? Who sent him, if not the English? Why, may I ask, do you come here laden with gossip to weary the ears of women, and have no knowledge, no conclusion, nothing, nothing, nothing, of interest for your Emperor?’
Just at that moment, a hammer struck on metal, somewhere, three rooms away, and the court, with thanks, admitted silently that it had nothing to say about the Sikhs. In a moment, more food came in, borne at shoulder height; it was ceremonial food, and everyone gratefully arranged themselves around it. No one was hungry; everybody ate. It was easiest.
2.
‘We need to know about the English,’ Dost Mohammed said.
The English? It was an unspoken question around the court. These abrupt changes of subject were familiar in the inner chambers of the Bala Hissar; the court took them as they took the vapid maxims of the mullahs. They demonstrated the workings of a profound mind. When a mullah emerged from deep thought to pronounce that Life is a dream, and therefore, a dream is life, he commanded a general flaccid assent. No one would contradict him, not knowing what thoughts had led to a conclusion so perfectly meaningless. Talking to the Amir was rather like that, except that the workings of his mind usually emerged in the end. His brief peremptory comments could be difficult to link, since they were only fragments of a brilliant, involved, silent analysis of a large subject. But the court fell silent when he made these remarks, and observed the Amir, eyes lowered, in respect.
‘We need to know about the English,’ the Amir said again. ‘So send a boy down to the spy.’
The spy? The Mir Wa’iz went so far as to cast a gaze at the Newab Jubbur Khan, raising an eyebrow; perhaps the Newab would know what his brother the Amir’s intentions were. The Newab’s inscrutable way with a fistful of lamb, however, was most likely due to bafflement. Naturally the Newab would not want to admit that he, too, had no idea. But in a moment the Amir took pity on them.
‘We can hardly talk to the English about their ambitions,’ the Amir said. ‘And we will not talk to the Sikhs, to find out who is the tool of whom, like the tale of the monkey on the elephant’s back. But we seem to have a spy here. Very badly disguised, and he has made no attempt to come and speak to Us, so – a stinking spy it is. Gentlemen!’ The Amir clapped his hands, three times. His voice had shrunk to a whisper, and the noise in the bare throne room was explosive as gunshot. The gentlemen of the court came running at the handclaps, like birds magically called back to a branch. ‘Take this away. No food is required.’
The court froze, mid-chew; it was the grossest breach of etiquette to eat while the Amir had refused food, and they were left, suddenly, with cheek pouches full of meat, to swallow slowly without any evidence of chewing.
‘Send a boy down to him. Does he like boys? Not a commonplace boy, a boy of parts. Does he like boys?’ The Amir, now, was businesslike.
‘Yes, Pearl of the Age.’
‘Have one sent. Not too young. A remarkable boy. We will wish to talk to him afterwards. How old are your sons, Khushhal? How old is the most beautiful of them?’
The least of the nobles, called forward suddenly from the back of the crowd, twitched, terrified, at this direct appeal. His betters parted, let him through, gazed at him with solemn disbelief. He stuttered, nervously, unprepared.
‘In my eyes, Pearl of the Age—’
‘Yes, yes,’ the Amir interrupted. ‘Yes, very estimable, Prince. You know the son I mean.’
‘Hasan is seventeen, Pearl.’ Khushhal seemed unaccountably cast down. He had seven sons, the court remembered, or possibly eight.
‘Is he a sensible boy, cousin? Is he worthy?’
‘He is the finest steed in my stable, Amir, and I give him to any task of his lord’s willingly, knowing that he will succeed where many others, where many others—’ Khushhal was losing his way in the stately sentence, ‘—might to their Amir have brought failure and sorrow.’
Dost Mohammed seemed content. ‘Very well, excellent. Make him understand that he may have to do something beyond talking to the English about the Sikhs. Don’t tell him what to do, cousin – it wouldn’t do to shock the English out of countenance. Or out of bed, I mean, Khushhal?’ Everyone laughed at the Amir’s heavy joke, covering their mouths genteelly. ‘You’re certain he likes boys, the English spy?’
‘Yes, Pearl of the Age, quite sure.’
‘Well, let us see. Is it Friday?’
‘Friday, Amir,’ Khushhal said, overstepping himself. The Vizier had been trembling at the Amir’s coat-sleeves to make this announcement.
‘Have the people come to see Us?’
‘Naturally, Imperial One,’ the Vizier leapt in, urgent with his own grandeur.
‘Well, show them in. No, no, no more food.’
3.
Friday was, by decision of the Amir, set aside for any citizen of Kabul with a grievance to come and set it before the court. It was Dost Mohammed’s invention. None of his predecessors had carried out such a practice, as the scandalized nobility had muttered among themselves when it had become apparent that the young Sirdar – as he then was – was perfectly serious in proposing that any man at all might come and wear the court’s patience into rags with his trivial complaints. Only the Mir Wa’iz, however, had the nerve, as a licensed idiot whom Dost Mohammed liked to contradict, to say bluntly, ‘But no Amir before you, Lord of the Wind, has ever suggested such a thing.’
Dost Mohammed was ready for that, and reminded the court, and, particularly, the Mir Wa’iz (taking his sleeve firmly between thumb and forefinger and drawing the mullah’s face terrifyingly close to his own) that, although none of his predecessors had found it necessary to hold a weekly plebeian durbar, every single one of them had met a violent end. An end (beheading, hanging, dismemberment, crushing, and blowing into bits with gunpowder) which, the court would do well to remember, had invariably been meted out to the intimates of the Amir concerned at the same time. The court had swallowed, as one. All at once, precedent and the habitual practice of the court had seemed a much less important thing.
‘Remember,’ Dost Mohammed had said, exercising his imperial prerogative of a broad open unshielded smile, ‘it is only five hours, every Friday, a short afternoon of boredom for you, and my chance to speak to anyone who wishes to speak to me. And, in return, you probably won’t be murdered in the bazaar. Who knows? You might even come to be loved as much as Us.’
The court had swallowed again. Five hours! At most, they had envisaged one carefully selected and clean old man, allowed to sit at the far end of the throne room and abase himself for – surely ten minutes would be enough?
But the Amir had been in deadly earnest, and no one found it much consolation to go on thinking of the grim fates of various long-gone Amirs. Frankly, Khushhal for one sometimes thought, after an hour or two standing stiffly behind the mildly nodding Amir while an old man went on and on about his problems, a quick and merciful death might not be such a bad thing. Nor was it the smallest consolation that the Amir himself hardly seemed to look forward to these occasions with enthusiasm. Certainly, the court had suffered enough, and none of them would venture the slightest expression of sympathy at what had now become an official duty.
‘Well, well, show them in,’ the Amir said. ‘Quick, Jubbur, the grass – quickly now.’
The Newab came from the back of the crowd with his appointed task. The Amir settled himself on the upper step of the throne room, while the others drew back. He took a deep breath, and shut his eyes. Jubbur Khan now, concentrating, placed the three blades of grass he had been holding in the second fold of the Amir’s turban, five inches above his left ear. He examined his handiwork, then stepped away, feeling for the step with his heel as he walked backwards to his appointed place.
‘How many?’ Dost Mohammed asked, opening his eyes, rejuvenated.
‘Twenty, sir,’ the Vizier said, straight-faced. The Amir nodded, and in they came. There was a particular approach of the common people on these occasions: they walked in like sheep, driven in by the attendants’ impatient shovelling gestures. They could not look at the Amir, of course, and stared instead furiously at the floor. But their movements were sheeplike; they moved in odd little scurries and shuffling panics, all at once in one direction. Some preferred, it seemed, to cling to the wall like blind men, as if the mere open spaces of the throne room terrified them. They moved forward, haphazardly, loosely, their fear palpable. They made no sound but an occasional small mew of alarm. The court watched the progress, unamused. It was like watching a lot of inflated bladders being pushed along a floor. Finally, they were in place in a rough square. At the attendants’ double clap, they all fell on their faces, exactly as if praying.
‘First,’ Dost Mohammed said after the terrific ten-minute preliminaries had been got through.
First was a vile old man, as ever. The court rustled, not entirely certain, in fact, whether this particular vile old man hadn’t been here a month or two ago. He began to recite his troubles, in a long-drawn-out cracked singing voice, an old bell being beaten again and again; worse, like a bell being beaten by a deaf man, to whom the noise would mean nothing.
‘My son is the light of my old age, Amir, the staff on which I lean. Once I was the tree in whose shade he lisped and played, which protected his helpless infancy. And as the lives of men and women teach us, a reversal must come upon us, so that those we once protected with our superior strength must, as the years pass, grow to be stronger than us, and as we grow frail, we may rely on the strength of their arms and the love in their hearts, as they once relied upon ours. Such is the way of human life, lived as it is in a short spell between birth and death.’
The man made a small but rhetorically rather effective gesture at his shirt, as if preparing to rend it in his grief. You could see the man had been an admirable and successful storyteller, in his day, though now his voice quavered and he lost his place too easily. He gathered himself, and went on in his amazingly annoying voice.
‘Hear then, O Amir, how wrongly I have been treated, how contrary to all human dignity and proper family life! Can such ill-treatment ever have been borne by one poor, neglected old man? Can such suffering ever have been so wilfully, so cruelly inflicted by a son on his helpless father, since the annals of time were started? Can the ears of the great Amir ever have been soiled by the sorrowful retelling of a tale so shocking, of maltreatment so blatant? You see, Amir,’ the vile old man went on, dropping disconcertingly into prose after his formal encomium, ‘my son is an ironmonger, with his own shop, in the bazaar. And I was an ironmonger before him, and the shop was mine originally. So two years ago Ahmed, that’s my boy’s name, he said to me, one day as we were sitting peacefully over a pipe one evening, I think I want to get married. So I said to him, what do you want to do that for? Because, straight away, I could see trouble coming. So he said …’
The interminable story wound on, as the daughter-in-law said, so I said to her, and then he said, well; and the court stood stiff as pillars, and wondered at the fantastic patience of the Amir. When it had finally come to an end, the old man looked up, blinking, bewildered, hardly knowing any longer where he was. He had been entirely absorbed by the immense tale of woe and wrong, his eyes fixed on the carpet. Dost Mohammed gave a great cough and a nod, as if commanding a swordsman to scythe through the incredible knots of wrongs and misunderstandings which constituted this unremarkably dull life.
‘You have complained that your son wishes you to leave his house, which once was yours,’ the Amir said. ‘You say that the wish comes from your son’s wife, though her wishes can mean nothing if they are different from your son’s. You say, truly, that you yourself freely and without condition gave the house to your son, before he married, and the law is unable to help you. I have heard your story with great interest, and say this to you, old man. Know that the life of man is brief upon this earth, and the happinesses which man may attain are few, and the travails many. Therefore do not complain beneath your load like a bleating ass, but accept joyfully the will of your family as you would the will of God. Go back to your son and say humbly that you deserve nothing, since you gave your love to him freely, and without hope of recompense. Say this to him humbly, in Our name, and if he should remain obdurate, you must accept what he has said, and throw yourself on the mercies of the bountiful world. That is all.’
The old man lurched backwards onto his feet, his knees cracking hugely, and, his eyes still cast clumsily downwards in his inexpressive walnut-face, shuffled back to the last row of the company of hapless supplicants. The Vizier called out the name of the second visitor.
Dost Mohammed relaxed, now, giving the supplicants a fine open smile. Around him, the court hardened, fingering their robes. He guessed most of them would prefer never to have to listen to such lowly men at such length. The Amir didn’t much care about that. He meant them, a little, to be bored, but, in the main, he wanted them to be insulted. If the Amir was happy to listen to the common people, dressed in their heavy brown robes, to listen to them talking at whatever length they chose, what was the point of serving in the court? What honour could possibly reside in being the noble designed by ancient custom to hand the Amir his rice, if any Kabul ironmonger could just as easily whisper in the Amir’s ear, simply by turning up on a Friday morning? Dost Mohammed understood very well that, unlike all those Amirs who had ended so badly, he had no friends, and could not; between the family of the Amir and the rest of Kabul, there was an absolute gulf. What had happened to the kings who hadn’t understood this? Shah Shujah, the fool, had immured himself and his court up, and delighted the court with his enclosed fantasies, his entertainments; flattered them with excess. And he was long gone, that old Amir, with his court, long chased out; and now Dost Mohammed was the Amir, and Shah Shujah was, no doubt, in a palace on some Kashmiri lake, disconsolately torturing some small boy to death for the sake of an afternoon’s entertainment. Dost Mohammed would not flatter his court with ideas of aristocratic and regal equality; he would insult them by making them see that, in his eyes, the greatest prince and the merest citizen of Kabul were as one. That was the point of the Amir’s Fridays. Not to right wrongs, as if the life of great princes were a tale to keep children quiet, but to remind the court, to their helpless indignation, that he, Dost Mohammed, was Amir, with three blades of grass in his turban, and they, the great princes of the court, they might as well be grovelling down there on the carpet, waiting with aching knees to be summoned at their Emperor’s whim.
Four hours later, the court was stiff with outrage as a fistful of knives. Dost Mohammed was serene as ever. The pack of mendicants, unanswered and yet somehow satisfied, made their sheeplike progress, backwards, shepherded by the court attendants, out through the double door. As they receded from the awe-struck anteroom into the more distant of the outer chambers, their chatter could be heard to break out again by degrees, merging into the irreverent cackle of starlings in the trees in the courtyard. In a moment, the room was again quiet. Dost Mohammed was thinking, and when he spoke, it was clear that nothing in the previous four hours had occupied much of his mind.
‘Send down the boy, Khushhal,’ he said briefly. ‘Today or tomorrow. He should stay there a week, and come and tell Us everything next Saturday. You know the particular boy? Good.’
‘Does the Amir wish to speak with my son before—’
The Amir shook his hands almost irritably at this absurd suggestion. Khushhal had taken the precaution of passing a note to an attendant summoning the boy, and he was at this moment standing in his best and simplest clothes two rooms away, trembling with nerves, no doubt. Still, it did no harm, that sort of thing. Had the Amir suddenly decided to inspect the boy’s teeth – the Amir’s own being so bad – it would not have done to ask him to wait on the pleasure of a seventeen-year-old boy.
4.
You know the one I mean, the Amir had said, querulously, as if it were absurd that anyone should think of another son. And as the court swept past the deeply bowing youth in the third anteroom, shrinking back into one of a file of attendants lining the little route between the throne room and Dost Mohammed’s suite of apartments, it was clear from the suddenly drawn eyes, the suddenly checked pace of half the court that they knew the son he meant, too. Dost Mohammed himself gave no sign of recognition in his purposeful stride, but, behind him, the nobility, normally so regulated, cannonaded each into each, tripped over each other as they caught sight of Hasan. For a moment they forgot how to walk. Khushhal himself had no idea. Well, he knew about the boy’s beauty, but he had no idea the fame of it had spread beyond the family into the city, and wasn’t entirely sure he liked the idea of his son being gazed at in the street, being the cause of lost sleep, being importuned to surrender what virtue, at seventeen, he still possessed, as if he were some bazaar-boy and not the son and grandson of princes. Still – Khushhal reflected – he himself had been famous, in his day (he relished the memory, twenty years back, of a trader at his shop abandoning a transaction and, open-mouthed, clambering up on a chair for a better view). If Hasan could be of use to the Amir, that, at any rate, was a more virtuous and useful end than, as Khushhal had, only using his God-sent gift of beauty to satisfy the lower urges with every bazaar-boy in Kabul, the heavens forgive him.
Hasan, at seventeen, was famous. Of course Dost Mohammed could only mean one of Khushhal’s sons. He meant the one who was an angel. Hasan, alone among the sons, was an angel. He had been so beautiful as a baby, as a boy, that his mother had feared for him, knowing that beautiful children often coarsen as they grow older, become overblown like a July rose, their temperament uncertain as they grow too accustomed to the regular supply of love. And when love as it must proves no certainty, they are not resigned to the fact, but are shocked and angry at the seeming injustice. She had veiled him for a time, like a girl baby, to keep off the demons his beauty would summon. Had those demons come? For beautiful children, love occupies too central a place in their mind, pushing other thoughts, wisdom, understanding to the edge, if not altogether out of their thoughts. We are not made for love alone. Love, in the end, is the prerogative of God, the force of whose love we glimpse in shadow, and dimly, when a man loves another. It is, perhaps, only those who for the first decade of their lives have been loved universally and without conditions, on account of their beauty, who go on believing the central fact of their life remains to love and be loved. Those lucky, unlucky people, so secure only in their insecurity, remain as they once were all their lives only in one respect: they always remain children.
The mother of Hasan said some of these things, and thought all of them, confiding the whole only in her prayers. How could this earthly angel not come to harm? But Hasan grew, and the light still shone beneath the soles of his feet as he lightly trod God’s earth. With each year, he remained beautiful; with each year, he became beautiful in a different way, since the beauty of a child is a changing thing, even when it is most constant. She never mentioned his name, never, never, in any context, for any purpose, without casting a net around his beloved skin by afterwards slipping in a ‘God willing’. It was so fragile, the radiant beauty which cushioned his steps, and nothing could touch, nothing, not even Time, could destroy it.
Khushhal had made a quick palms-down gesture and a hiss as he passed the boy, wanting him to stay where he was until Khushhal, with the court, had accompanied the Amir to the door of his apartments. The worst of his wives, the lewd contemptuous one, had been waiting there for the Amir; not respectfully, but waiting as if to insult him.
‘Dosto,’ she sang out the second the doors were opened, though she could have no doubt that the court was waiting just there for their dismissal. ‘I’ve been waiting for you for the whole day.’ She had an infuriating voice, with her drawling Suddozye-princess vowels. She had been a prize at the end of one of those footlingly interminable, brutal scraps with the Suddozye pretenders, and never missed a chance to display her contempt of the whole court and the Amir himself before the entire establishment – before Kabul, before the English ambassadors, if she could. Why the Amir didn’t simply toss her down a well …
‘I’ve been—’ the Amir sheepishly said.
‘I don’t care,’ came the voice. ‘Shut up with old women and bores and your sisters all day long. And you with your bores, I expect. Well, I need you here, now. I’ve lost my slippers, and you’re the only one who can find them for me. I need them now, slave.’ Her voice raised to a shrill little shriek with this last astonishing demand, and the court began to shuffle away in embarrassment, not even waiting for their dismissal. The Amir seemed oblivious of where he was.
‘Yes,’ he said, giggling a little. ‘Mistress.’
‘What did you say?’ the princess called. Her voice was cool and affectless as an unwearied dove’s. ‘Dosto? Slave?’
‘Yes, mistress,’ the Emperor said, more clearly, and then, suddenly, seemed to become aware again of the court. ‘That will do,’ he said briskly, dismissing his public humiliation. ‘I am not to be called upon.’
5.
The court scattered in overpowering embarrassment, almost before the double doors had swung shut on them. Khushhal found his way back to the anteroom where the boy Hasan still stood, waiting nervously. He beckoned to his son with the underside of his palm, a small flapping gesture, and together they walked through the mid-afternoon quiet of the palace’s public rooms.
‘Was that the Emperor?’ Hasan said after a time. He seemed nervous; but he usually seemed nervous, shrinking back within his skin from the unpredictable effects he had on people.
‘Have you never seen him?’ Khushhal said.
‘I think I have, years ago, when I was too small to know whom I was meeting and too long ago to remember his face afterwards. Of course I know the noble Akbar the Emperor’s son. Or I know who he is, not know him to be greeted by him. But I wasn’t sure of his father the Emperor.’
Khushhal gave him a sideways glance. ‘The Amir knows you, it seems. Or he has seen you, at least.’
‘I don’t know when that can have been,’ Hasan said reflectively, ‘for it’s not to be expected that the Amir’s life and mine take similar paths. He is not as I thought he would be.’
‘It is not for you to think how the Amir will appear, or consider what so great a man as he should be like,’ Khushhal said. Then he relented, as, with Hasan, he usually did relent, and said, ‘Of course, no one could expect you not to wonder what Akbar’s father would be like. They talk – at least the Amir talks – of sending Akbar as ambassador to the English in London.’
‘What for, father?’
‘I don’t know. I really don’t know. Perhaps the Amir has a lot to discuss with the English, and after all, they paid him the compliment of coming to visit him, so it would only be polite to send an ambassador to them with gifts, in return.’
Hasan’s attention had been drawn by a merchant of cloth, bringing materials into the fortress of the Bala Hissar. By now, they had passed beyond the state rooms and were in the outer shell of the palace, which resembled a market as much as anything, as the tradesmen of the city came to service and supply the court and the palace guard. An oddly silent market; when a baker, now, laden with the bread for the household, collided with a butcher with a bound calf over his shoulder, neither made the smallest protest as they surely would have outside, but walked away briskly, humbled and silenced by the sudden importance of their roles, the gravity of the shady palace. The cloth merchant was a little man, and waddled before three apprentices, meandering helplessly as they half-ran behind him, arms stretched out under the weight of brilliant bolts of rough silk, red and blue and gold. Hasan’s attention was taken like a child’s with a cloud of hummingbirds. Then he shut his mouth and said, ‘Where is London?’
‘Where the English live, who rule India,’ Khushhal said, despairing a little. ‘Though England is far away in one direction and India far in the other direction, beyond the great mountains beyond the empire of the Amir. Do you remember the English, when they came last year, when they lived with the Newab Jubbur Khan for a month, and brought the marvellous clock, the clock of gold and crystal?’
‘I remember,’ Hasan said, dimly. ‘Those English, they looked nothing like the merchants from India, the ones who come in the spring.’ Then he brightened, as if sunlight had fallen on his face, and said, ‘There is another English in the city, though he is dressed strangely, and talks strangely, the women say. Is he perhaps a Russian, that Englishman?’
‘Perhaps so,’ Khushhal said. They were in one of the little courtyard gardens which appeared from time to time in the great rude mass of the Bala Hissar. A pool of clean water at the centre, dripping with a delicious cooling sound into a trough; a plum tree, casting shade in the blunt-bright heat of the afternoon. The cool smell of water on marble, of the shade of a fruit tree; here was luxury, here in the silent quarter of the palace, and Khushhal and Hasan hitched their robes up to their knees and squatted in the cool shade.
‘The Amir has very bad teeth,’ murmured Hasan, as if he were thinking of something else. ‘I saw as he passed. He started to smile, as he may, and then he seemed not to want to smile, because his teeth are bad, perhaps.’
‘That is enough, boy,’ Khushhal said. ‘Remember you are in the house of the Amir before you insult him so childishly.’
‘I’m sorry, papa,’ Hasan said. ‘I was only making an observation.’
‘That’s all right,’ Khushhal said. They fell silent for a moment; somewhere, nearby, there was the rush of women’s voices, somewhere walled, enclosed and veiled, and they both listened to the lovely liquid sound. ‘The Amir, you must know, has a task for you. To do with the Englishman – it’s good that you know of him, since it concerns him.’
‘A task for me?’ Hasan said. ‘But how can it be that the Amir should need me to do anything for him? Why has he chosen me?’
Khushhal looked at his slow-lidded son. It was almost worrying, the boy’s lack of consciousness of his beauty. In his shy moods, he seemed to be shrinking back from his own face, disowning it, wanting to hide, preferring not to be looked at, not understanding why he was looked at. But it was wilfulness to question the decision of the Amir. Hasan’s strangely hot blue eyes – like Khushhal’s own, a sign of a direct and pure descent from the Jews, the founders of the Afghan nation – his high smooth brow and small beardless chin, his fine strong hair and teeth, his soft skin. It must have been obvious to Hasan, without too much concentration, what use he could be in the present case.
Khushhal explained slowly what was wanted. Hasan said nothing, merely listened, occasionally nodding. When Khushhal had come to the end of his explanation, Hasan sighed and salaamed to his honourable father. There had not been so much to explain, after all, and it was clear even to Hasan, who was always the last to shut his mouth and understand the point of a story or a joke, that his father did not quite know what Hasan was supposed to do. The Englishman, down there, in his disguise! Wasn’t that enough to have found out?
‘When shall I go there, papa?’ Hasan asked. He concentrated on working out some dirt from under his toenails with the point of his dagger.
Khushhal clapped him on the back, almost making him drive the knife deep into the ball of his toe. ‘As soon as you may choose,’ he said. ‘The Amir will send for you in seven nights.’
‘Now, then?’ Hasan said. He could not see why not, and his father nodded, dismissing him.
6.
Hasan flexibly raised himself like a deer from where he squatted, and, salaaming, left his father chewing thoughtfully on a twig in the inner courtyard of the Bala Hissar’s inner fortress, waiting on the pleasure of the Amir. He set off towards the Englishman’s house. The sentries braced themselves in half-salute as he left the palace by the main gates. He liked that. Hasan knew perfectly well where the Englishman was living. All Kabul knew where he was, knew all about his habits, his interests, the hours he kept and the people he saw. You could, they said in the bazaar, take him anything you found, anything you had. A broken old lamp, a worthless old coin you found in the earth, anything you happened upon, and he would give you money for it with cries of delight like a monkey’s howl, and then spend long minutes staring at it before opening his book and scribbling down in it. The boys in the bazaar abandoned themselves in merriment, the soles of their feet to the sky, at this last incredible detail. But he did not seem like a holy man, since he drank a good deal, a shocking amount, and the whole of Kabul, from the storytelling beggars crouched outside the limits of the bazaar to the gossiping nobles in the august silent halls of the Bala Hissar itself, knew precisely what he liked to do after nightfall with whatever boys presented themselves smiling at the gate of his secluded little house. Everyone knew about him. It was true that few had seen him, since he stayed inside like a woman, sending out for his needs; but everyone knew about him. There was an incredible party trick half a dozen boys could now perform, an incredulous account of his gabbling fantastic Persian, complete with the wildest gestures. Hasan was a slow serious boy, not given to laughter, always sitting wide-eyed and solemn while his companions retailed one hilarity after another. But he had laughed at the gulping mania of the impersonation, and hoped that now, brought up against the original of what was currently the city’s favourite joke, he could keep himself from hilarity.
He went directly down the hill from the fortress, ignoring the calls which came his way, and out through the great bazaar. He had lived here all his life, and could burrow through the deep entangled streets as well as any ragged urchin. They called out to him, knowing who he was, wondering at this boy in dazzling imperial white, this boy with the lovely cross face. They knew who he was – his dress proclaimed him – but there was already something in him, despite his blank simplicity, his effortless blank visage, which made the street hang back. They called out to him, but, awed, cast their eyes down before he could respond. They did not want to be the sort of people who called out to Hasan, son of Khushhal, the famous angel of the princely house, and they cast their eyes to the floor, dazzled, in modesty, before he could speak back to them. But he did not respond to their calls, and never had. Even those who called out to him knew this, before they made a sound. He was untouchable, virtuous, noble; the sun shone between the road and the soft pale soles of his feet. He was too good, they said, to walk the earth, and yet he walked the earth, which knew his virtue.
Hasan passed on through the parting crowds. The long twisting call of the muezzin was just beginning, like a great bird singing its inscrutable vowels, and, soon, Kabul would turn with regret from Hasan and, summoned, go to wash, and pray for its own sins. Hasan walked on, into the street of the shoemakers. Here it was that the Englishman had his house. He had taken it from the widow Khadija. The main artery of the quarter, now quickly emptying, was broad and fine, shaded with limes. Every thirty paces or so, a small half-street, blind-ended, like a three-sided courtyard, where the houses were. In the fourth of these was the widow Khadija’s house. The houses in this quarter of the city barely had windows or doors onto the street; they were built for the summer’s heat, the winter’s cold, to withstand a siege. They were solid houses, but not large. Behind the thick walls there was only a small garden and a few square rooms, Hasan knew; his old fencing master had lived in one. But as he stood there, he felt that behind the heavy coarse wall and deep-set tiny door, there could lie anything at all. He stood in front of the Englishman’s door. Silly! It was like any other! He felt no nerves. Nervousness was not part of him, but as he stood there, with his innocent cross face, he surely felt something, the barefoot emissary of the Amir with a dagger in his belt, the lovely ambassador between empires. He served an unknowing purpose, a purpose opaque to everyone. He served the implacable veiled purpose of the Emperor’s marvellous mind. There was a chatter, from within, like the chatter of birds, of monkeys, of women. But it was not the noise of birds. Hasan raised his soft princely hand to his soft pale face, just once. He pushed at the door. It gave; and, making no noise, he entered the house of the Englishman.
SIX (#ulink_8d88a65d-ae8f-5628-8798-88d4d164cef3)
1.
THIS IS THE WAY THAT Charles Masson came to be in Kabul and how he came to talk the way that he talked, which was the first thing anyone noticed about him.
Five years before, in an army camp in Calcutta.
The parade ground was a desert of musket parts. The company sat, cross-legged, red and sweating, each surrounded by his own little puzzle of greased iron to put back together.
‘Now this,’ Suggs, the Sergeant-Major, was saying through his horrible grin, ‘is the locking bolt. The locking bolt.’ He was holding up a small iron object between thumb and forefinger.
The Company, together, grunted a four-syllable noise with their heads to the ground, a masculine grunt which satisfied Suggs. He seemed to think they had replied with what he had said; they could, in fact, have said anything at all.
At the back of the platoon, his gun now in forty pieces scattered, a hopeless archipelago, on a greasy blue cotton tablecloth, sat Charles Masson. He scratched his head. Sweating profusely in his shirt and breeches, contemplating the nightmare iron picnic in front of him, he wondered merely what delicacy to go for next.
‘And this,’ the Sergeant-Major said, grinning sadistically at this further element of bafflement, ‘is the barrel-loader. The barrel-loader.’
There again, that grunting noise, five syllables this time, a downward scale, like a bouncing ball. Masson said nothing, not seeing the need to say an object’s name to commit it to memory. In his case, he was as likely to forget the horrid little object after saying its name as before. And he had decided that this was not the sort of information he wanted cluttering up his brain.
A distant door opened and shut. Shimmering a little in the late-morning heat came the figure of Florentia Sale, the commanding officer’s wife, her jutting jaw and purposeful stride in no way modified by the pink and white parasol, her virginal dress. As she approached, the men who had seen her started to struggle to their feet. Not Masson.
‘Don’t get up, I pray you,’ called Florentia, dragging her panting little dog after her. ‘Ignore me, ignore me. I should not be here, merely the shortest route, tiffin, you know.’
She flashed a steely smile at the men, and strode onwards. Masson silently wished rabies on her dog and – a moment’s contemplation after – on her as well. The Sergeant-Major said nothing, and it remained a half-hearted tribute, as the men who had risen got no further than a bent-knee stance before sinking down again to their morning task. Too absorbed in their task; not very interested, either, in Florentia Sale, their commanding officer’s commanding wife, a greedy old woman who was more accustomed to tell people not to trouble than she was to receive unsolicited tribute. She passed on, anyway.
‘This,’ Suggs went on, projecting to the far corners of the empty parade ground, ‘is the musket’s thumb-grip. A great help when you come to fire the bleeding thing.’ He too must be suffering; his great red face twitching and glistening in the heat, his eyes rolling and yellow with the long hours in this steamy blaze, in a uniform suited only to a damp European climate. But he seemed to gain energy from the furious heat, and not to be exhausted by it; his instructions, his striding energy, actually increased as the day went on. ‘What is it?’ he demanded.
‘A thumb-grip, Sergeant-Major,’ they chorused dully, the small diversion of Mrs Sale’s stately passage now dissipated.
Something had led Masson to this point, sitting on a parade ground, sweating into his Company-issue underwear, staring at wing-nuts. A long sickly childhood in a Devon farmhouse, and tales of an uncle who went to sea, bringing back incredible tales of the East. Told and told again. That had been it, surely. There was no desire for money in Masson; he had no wish to go back with his thousands to acquire a country house and respectability. He had no wish to go home.
That was odd, because the urge that had led him here was as hungry and unfilled in Calcutta as it had been in the grey square unwindowed farmhouse ten miles from Porlock. There, it had been his three young brothers standing between him and what he wanted; here, it was the Company, and his duties, and the wing-nuts. Masson had come to the East in the only way he could. It was not long before the means of his coming were standing between him and what he could see every day. Moments – small unremarked street-moments, unhistoric, unforgettable – where the India he had dreamt of in the long confinement of his childhood and the India all around him combined in a sonorous unison. Moments where no Company intruded, where no instructions were shouted, except the single one, inside him. He was reassured, as he heard that sounding double call, that what he had dreamt of was there after all. Saved, he was, in these moments from a deeper worry, that the fulfilment of the East he had dreamt of was one without his presence, his falsifying gaze. What he wanted was an East which was no longer exotic, but purely familiar, and he feared that, like a practising pianist, it could only achieve that when he was not looking at it. An India he wanted only to the degree that it could not include him; that was his fear, dispelled in those absorbed moments when he passed down a Calcutta street, unnoticed, or at least unremarked, or a curious unfearing boy met his expression with an equal gaze, and held it. Unmoving.
That was what Masson was here for; those sudden clicks of identity when, like a hot blush, he was sure that there was something there, just there for him. It was what he had always dreamt of, in the kitchen of the Porlock farmhouse, hunched over the Vicar’s Arabian Nights. He was sure now, after a year, that it was only Suggs and Sale that stood in the way of his finding it. Suggs and Sale; they had turned into an emporium, selling only frustration to Masson, representing everything that stood in his way. Suggs and Sale; he could have started a religion, to declare the pair of them unclean.
2.
The long morning came to an end, and the platoon limped off into the guardroom, soggy with their combined concentration. McVitie, the hero of the platoon, was, for once, beyond a quip. He satisfied himself with bending down and rubbing his head with both hands, furiously back and forth, as if his head were unconnected to him, like a man affectionately scrubbing at his dog after a run in the rain. A shower of sweat fountained from McVitie’s head, and, stripping himself of his shirt, he sank down limply on the rude benches which ran round the room.
‘Well, gentlemen,’ Masson said lightly. ‘I don’t know how much any of us will remember of this morning’s dose of pointless activity.’
The platoon ignored this, one of them merely giving a small moan of boredom with Masson’s comment. He was unpopular in the platoon, for no very clear reason. His unpopularity was such that his every statement was automatically greeted with a palpable turning of backs. More than that, it had reached the point where Masson himself aimed his occasional remarks squarely at the platoon’s disapproval. Not exactly enjoying their dislike, but having earned it, at least he would exult in the power of being able to evoke it most when he chose.
McVitie raised his square head a fraction from the bench, without opening his eyes. ‘We all learnt what we was learnt, Masson,’ he said. ‘It was only you. Don’t tar us with your stinking brush.’
He fell back, gormlessly, mouth open. Masson contemplated him, the platoon hero.
Elsewhere in the barracks, Florentia Sale was passing out her brisk instructions. She was in the basement of what was termed, inaccurately, the Colonel’s house; it was merely a random stretch of the building, a few interconnected rooms with a kitchen and a washing room in the basement, but the Colonel’s status required him to have a house, and a house he should have, even where there was none. In the basement kitchen, the heat was bathlike, but Florentia Sale was livid, pale, dry in this dense heat. About her, a foot below her square determined face, the kitchen servants clustered, and listened anxiously to her instructions. ‘Very important, very important dinner,’ she was crying, not looking at her listeners. ‘I want you to imagine – to imagine that you are cooking a dinner for the Governor General himself – for the King of England.’
There was a perceptible increase in worry, as the little faces creased. ‘King?’ one of them, the most senior apparently, said, his voice almost failing.
‘No, no, no,’ Florentia said. ‘I want you to imagine that the King is coming. I want you to take as much care over your work as if—’
‘King?’ the boy said again.
Florentia gave up, her face set like cooling gravy. ‘Yes, the King is coming,’ she said bluntly. ‘Remember – fry the onions well, and slowly. Curry? Curry? Understand?’ The heads below her wobbled from side to side, acknowledging and agreeing. ‘And soup. Soup? Understand? And the fish? How will you cook the fish?’ There was another general agreeable wobbling; Florentia took it, apparently, for assent. ‘How? White sauce? Parsley?’ The kitchen attendants looked from side to side, trying to establish seniority; one, in the end, stepped three inches forward and bowed superbly. He stepped back, and smiled ingratiatingly. Florentia sighed, and prepared to begin again.
After the soldiers’ tiffin, there was, unusually, three hours at leisure. Masson skipped off as soon as he inconspicuously could. He wanted to go and see Mr Das.
Mr Das had a boutique in the bazaar. Masson had been drawn in a year before, by a blue glass vase visible through the open door. Then he had wondered if it could be Roman, with the optimism of the inexperienced. Now, he knew it was Syrian, and not at all old, but Mr Das had become the nearest thing to a friend Masson had. The shop was a ruin of miniature artefacts, and old Das a fraud, apt to proffer the cheapest bazaar silverware as precious beyond an Englishman’s dreams. But he, from time to time, failed to know when a coin from his filthy chests was a thousand years old, and deeply unfamiliar. What he knew and what he did not know was apparent from the prices he set, and, after a year going through his stock, Masson felt that, all in all, he knew more than Das did.
Das didn’t trust Masson – that was clear from the way he constantly tried to rook him, as if taking the first step in an inevitable exchange of fraud. It was natural for someone in his position, with a boutique full of frail glass, to be wary of a beef-faced Englishman twice his size in a Company uniform; wary, too, when the Englishman in question, revealed as well intentioned, seemed to turn himself from a curious fool into a scholar within months, and Das looked at his surprising protégé with a habitual reproach, as if Masson had not been entirely honest with him at the first.
Nevertheless, Das had been useful to Masson. That first purchase, the Syrian blue glass vase, had worried Masson while he was paying for it. Until then, his purchases had been small and solid – coins, metalwork, durable little objects of devotion, all easily contained in Masson’s pack. Each treasure was accompanied by a set of meticulous notes on the object, based on what the coin-handler could tell him. That was not a trove to attract attention in the barracks, but this vase could not be stuffed away like that. Masson would not display it to the platoon’s mockery, and yet he wanted the little vase, wanted it badly, and would have gone on wanting it even if he had known that it was not Roman at all.
Mr Das was all tact, and saw the problem even before Masson had said anything. After all, what was a common soldier doing with such a fine object, handling it so tenderly? What would he do with such a thing? Masson eagerly fell in with Das’s suggestion that he transfer all his little collection to a secure cupboard in Das’s boutique, and, as Das foresaw, afterwards made all his purchases from Das. He was a sympathetic fellow, the shopkeeper, only betraying the slightest sorrow in a little wince when he saw the appalling tinsel exoticism of Masson’s first purchases, when he had arrived in Calcutta. Das handled the semi-industrial figure of Shiva in rough, tarnished bronze with a display of reverence intended much more to spare Masson’s feelings than for the benefit of the god. And since then, he had been of great use – there was talk, even, of introducing Masson to a scholarly friend of his, who might be able to start him off on Sanskrit – and he represented, all in all, the nearest thing to a friend Masson had ever had. His face was sharp-cornered at jaw and chin, like many Bengalis; he had an almost pentagonal, queerly inquisitive appearance.
3.
Das was turning a coin over and over as Masson came into his shop. A little man even by Indian standards, half Masson’s size, he was respectably dressed according to the lights of his religion. Masson could never quite get used to holding a conversation on serious matters with a man so nearly naked. He liked to be discovered in a scholarly attitude, and Masson sat in respectful silence for a couple of minutes, until Das was ready to speak to him.
‘My dear fellow,’ he said finally. ‘I wonder what you have to say to this. My mind, I confess, is a trifle stumped.’
Masson took the coin and looked at it, wondering as usual at the way Das talked, like Tacitus after a drink or two. The coin was a Queen Anne penny, probably palmed off on Das by a Company private too sharp for his own good. Masson considered telling Das that it was a coin of the reign of the Empress Agrippina before it occurred to him that Das might be testing him in some obscure manner. He told the shopkeeper what it was.
‘That,’ Das said, smartly snapping the coin back into his fist, ‘was more or less what I had supposed it to be. Thank you, my dear sir. And how may I help you today? A cup of chai first, certainly.’
He clapped his hands and the toothless dirty old woman who was always in the boutique, fingering the goods – perhaps Das’s wife, there was no means of knowing – mumbled off into the recesses of the shop.
‘I really want nothing of you, Mr Das,’ Masson said. ‘Chai would be splendid.’
‘Perhaps a perusal of your treasures, Mr Masson?’ Das said as the chai arrived. Masson took the stinking sweet orange confection, tea and milk and sugar and water boiled together for half an hour. As always at Das’s shop, the water it had been made from was so filthy, the chai could have been strong or weak, and Masson had to rid himself of the irrational idea that Das made his tea out of the water his crone familiar washed her grubby old body in. The crone smiled and shook her head from side to side, letting go of the cup, leaving a dirty thumbprint over the clay rim. ‘Always welcome, always welcome. Or perhaps he would like to see a few minor curiosities I acquired in the course of several perambulations about this great metropolis, hmm? No obligation, my dear sir, merely an oddity or two I feel you would be interested by, and – I confess – one or two more I should be grateful to have the benefit of your undoubted and excellent wisdom regarding their history, provenance and significance. Queen Anne penny, indeed.’
The exchange of business was a necessary preliminary to their conversation, Masson had found. Das preserved some necessary dignity by reminding himself that they had begun in a business relationship, and would not, entirely, get beyond that. It might have been designed, too, to remind Masson that he would not come to know everything about Das, that whatever expertise he acquired about Das’s stock, he was always there on sufferance. Das reached across the table, stained with rings, and gestured at a small knife, curved and graceful like a miniature scimitar. Masson picked it up carefully and turned it over. A cockroach ran across the table, making Masson jump; it had been sheltering under the blade, and Masson now discreetly flicked it onto the floor with the tip of the knife. Das hated to see an insect killed, and tutted mildly, either at Masson’s squeamishness or to suggest that the thing was of no significance.
The blade was curved, whether for grace or use. Though the handle was encrusted and filthy, the quarter-inch at the blade’s edge shone. This knife had been used regularly, and recently. Masson had heard of oriental knives that cut flesh as easily as butter, and placed the tip of his forefinger on the edge of the blade. It rested there, the blade trembling slightly in Masson’s hand.
‘You are left-handed, I perceive,’ Das said.
‘I use both equally well,’ Masson said, fixed on the thin contact between finger and blade, insubstantial as a point in geometry.
‘That is bad luck, very bad luck,’ Das said, drawing back from Masson with his shock of red hair and his divided soul. He made a warding-off hiss, like the noise of hot metal in water.
Masson smiled his wide open devouring smile. ‘On the contrary,’ he said. ‘It’s a piece of very good luck.’ And he moved the knife, a small movement, half an inch, putting no pressure on the handle. There was a sudden heat in the finger, and underneath the blade, the colour had fled the dirty finger, a little field of tripe-white as the blood drew back under the blade. Masson made his pain-noise, the same hissing Das had made, the same sound of hot metal in water. The blood returned and welled up, wine-dark, in the little flap of severed flesh the knife had made. White, translucent, an onion’s slice. Masson put down the magnificent knife, and sucked his salty finger for a minute. When he took it out, the finger was clean, and white in his dirty hand.
‘A good knife,’ he said, picking it up again.
‘Whence does it originate, in your opinion?’ Das asked.
Masson turned the knife over again. The handle was so encrusted with rust and dirt that it was hard to see if it were decorated. He ran the nail of his forefinger over the surface, and there was some raised pattern – he followed the line – some arabesque – some writing, surely. By the whiplash feel of it, he supposed it to be Arabic, some belligerent verse of the Koran. Not Indian; he somehow knew this, without knowing how he knew. He guessed at Persian. It felt like damascene work, anyway.
He said this to Das as he was feeling the knife. Das clapped his hands with pleasure. ‘Indeed, indeed, excellent, quite on the nail, as you would say,’ he said. ‘I had an interesting visitor this week, a traveller, who had acquired some curiosities. I cannot account for it, but he was eager to disembarrass himself of some old Persian treasures. That, I think, is the finest of his hoard, alas, and sadly in want of care, but the other objects I acquired from him have their own interest and even, I dare say, some measure of value. Would you, by any chance, care to …’
‘In a furious hurry, was he, your friend?’ Masson said. ‘And I have no doubt that you found yourself in possession of a large quantity of Persian antiquities without requiring too much of the gentleman?’ Das looked outraged at the suggestion that he might be in the habit of consorting with thieves. It took a moment to make him realize that Masson was only casting the first shot in the exchanges over the final price, and for a while he seemed unwilling to show his newly acquired objects at all.
But in the end, he yielded to the undeniable argument of lucre, and Masson was soon looking, with hungry eyes, at an array of metalwork spread out on Das’s table. For a moment he was incongruously reminded of this morning’s exercise with the dismantled musket, as he pored over the miscellaneous array of mostly Persian, mostly indifferent antique objects. In the end – it took an hour – he settled, besides the knife, for a little silver dish and three unfamiliar coins, interesting in appearance, unaccountably so. As was customary these days, he paid Mr Das with a combination of his army pay and the restitution of one of Masson’s own early purchases, before he had developed a proper eye. This process of secondary haggling occupied another half an hour, as Masson attempted to return to Das some of the worthless trash he had originally passed off on Masson at any price. Das, indignant at being insulted in such a manner that it should be suggested that his shop should ever be soiled with such bazaar trinkets, and denying furiously that he was the first source of the trash, attempted to inveigle out of Masson the beautiful little silver medal he had sold him no more than three weeks before, presumably having realized its worth in the interim. At length an agreement was reached, leaving both Masson and Das sore and suspicious, and they settled down to talk, undisturbed by customers, the army, Suggs or Sale.
‘Mr Das,’ Masson began. ‘Speaking of your visitor last week, if you were to travel and were obliged to live on the proceeds of what you could sell on your travels, what goods would you take?’
‘I do not understand your question, Mr Masson,’ Das said. He picked his nose meditatively and examined the contents before flicking it at the floor. ‘I have no need or desire to travel, as you well know, I am sure.’
‘Indeed, indeed,’ Masson said. He persevered. ‘In a hypothetical situation, however, if you were obliged to travel, and the only means of support you had was the sale of what goods you could carry, what would you take with you to sell?’
‘Ah,’ Das said, now having got the point. ‘Like my friend, earlier this week, in flight from his own shadow and selling his worldly goods at a highly disadvantageous rate, I can assure you.’
‘Disadvantageous to him, Mr Das.’
‘Indeed, indeed,’ Das said. He had a disconcerting habit of taking up Masson’s expressions and repeating them, a minute or two later. You could see the quick boy he must have been. ‘Well, I am sure you are aware that this is a simple matter of working out the relationship between value and bulk.’
The conversation ran its course; they agreed on silver, as being most easily disguised and most universally valued. ‘But why,’ said Das, ‘why, my friend, this sudden interest?’
It was time for Masson to go. He consigned the Persian dish to the cupboard where he stored his things, saying a silent goodbye to it, and thanked Das for the chai. He left the knife with Das. The heat and damp were insufferable, and, returning to the barracks, Masson lengthened his journey by remaining in the shade. Anyone watching him might have thought there was some superstition which directed his route, like a child leaping the cracks in the pavement. Certainly he drew the attention of the Calcutta streets; the red-toothed men squatting on their haunches chewing paan and spitting consumptively followed him with their incurious eyes. They wondered at this peeled-raw man, ugly and gawky, shrinking into the darker side of the street, hugging the wall like a conspirator, looking down, hiding something.
4.
Masson was hiding something, as it happened. It was his plan for escape. It had seemed audacious, impossible, but now Das, with his idle conversation, had found something for him. Until now, Masson had seen no way to be in the East, where he wanted to be, other than by the way he had chosen. The surety that he could only find the East he had dreamt of by remaining where he was, serving the Company at the Company’s request, all at once left him.
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Philip Hensher
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: The bestselling novel from the Man Booker Prize shortlisted author of The Northern Clemency and King of the Badgers.‘The Mulberry Empire’ is a seemingly straightforward historical novel that recounts an episode in the Great Game in central Asia – the courtship, betrayal and invasion of Afghanistan in the 1830s by the emissaries of Her Majesty’s Empire, which is followed by the bloody and summary expulsion of the Brits from Kabul following an Afghani insurrection (shades of the Soviet Union’s final imperial fling in the very same country in the 1980s).The novel has at its heart the encounter between West and East as embodied in the likeable, complex relationship between Alexander Burnes, leader of the initial British expeditionary party, and the wily, cultured Afghani ruler, the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan.For those who enjoyed William Dalrymple’s ‘Return of a King’, ‘The Mulberry Empire’ is a must-read.