1977 (33 page)

and the tray-helpings were already small enough. She poured herself a very small gin and

tonic and tiptoed out to sit near Tusker and wait for him to wake up.

But sitting, she saw he was awake already. His head was still lowered but his eyes were

open, gazing at her.

“Hello, Tusker, dear. Have you had a nice little nap?”

He did not reply. She sipped her drink. “Would you like a little drink? A very very small gin,

because it’s Sunday?”

“Why because it’s Sunday?”

“Sunday is chicken pulao day. Pulao goes down nicely after a spot of gin. And you have

been such a good boy.”

“I’m not having chicken pulao. I’m having poached egg on toast.”

“Oh, dear. How dull. I’m not sure about egg for breakfast and egg for lunch. It’s very

binding. Aren’t you feeling well, Tusker?”

“What I feel’s neither here nor there. I’m having poached egg on toast. In fact we’re both

having poached egg on toast. And we’re cooking them here.”

She saw now that he was wearing his malevolent expression. She would have to tread

carefully. “I see,” she said. “Are there enough eggs?”

“Ibrahim’s gone to get some more.”

She sipped her gin. He was going to be
awkward
. Her tummy rumbled with hunger.

“By all means then, Tusker, have a poached egg. But I’m really very hungry, so I shall have

chicken pulao.”

“Not today you won’t because you’re not going to the dining-room and Ibrahim isn’t going

to fetch a tray from the dining-room. We’ve finished with the dining-room and we’ve

finished with trays.”

A pause.

“There are a lot of things I could say to that, Tusker, but I suppose first I’d better ask,

why
?”

“Because I say so.”

A pause.

“And what precisely is the connexion between what you say and what I do?”

“The connexion is that I’m still master of this bloody house.” He waited. “Well? Am I or

aren’t I?”

“I can’t deny that. No. Indeed, I can’t. You are the master of the house. On the other hand

I am the mistress. And it is usual for the mistress to decide what shall be eaten and by whom

and when, and if the master does not like it there’s mostly nothing he can do about it unless

he happens to have a talent for shopping and cooking which I’m afraid you haven’t. I have

seen you attempt to make a curry. In the bazaar I’ve known you to squander half the week’s

housekeeping in half-an-hour. I have watched you poach an egg. If you insist on having a

poached egg for lunch I am prepared to poach it for you myself in order not to see several

eggs wasted, and because as mistress of the house it’s my duty to see the master fed. But

after that, Tusker, I shall go across and have my chicken pulao. I shall expect to sleep

between three o’clock and five o’clock and providing Ibrahim brings back enough eggs I

may even poach you another one for your evening meal. Then I’ll have to decide whether to

have one too, or dine at Smith’s or at the Club or at the Shiraz.”

“Afford it can you?”

“No. What we can still just afford is our special arrangement with the kitchen and

management at Smith’s and this is an arrangement I have absolutely no intention of giving

up, unless of course you replace the electric stove with one that works effectively, and hire a

cook. I have not stayed on in India to become, in my old age, either a cook or a masalchi.

You have always pointed out the advantages people like us enjoy over those who have gone

home and have to make do without servants even when they can afford them. If we had

gone home I should have welcomed turning my hand to whatever was necessary. But we did

not go home and so I don’t welcome turning it. Here is Ibrahim now.”

She called him so that instead of going round the back he came round the front. Her hand

was feeling a bit shaky. She had not intended to take Tusker up quite in the way she had

done. But he had this effect on her nowadays.

“Thank you, Ibrahim,” she said, taking the eggs from him. “I’ll deal with these. Go and get

your own meal. Did Burra Sahib give you the money for the eggs?”

Ibrahim said he hadn’t. She asked how much was owed, opened her purse and gave him

the sum asked. Before going he looked from one to the other of them, then salaamed and

took himself off. She took the bag of eggs to the kitchen, switched on the plate that was

supposed to heat a saucepan of water. It would do this either in a few seconds or half-an-

hour. One could never tell. She smelt the butter from the fridge. It was a bit off, but would

do to grease the poaching pan and stop the eggs sticking. She searched for this pan, found it,

studied it. It was dirty. She went out.

“Will scrambled do? I’m not cleaning
this
.”

“Neither am I.”

“Quite. So you see. You
see
the
difficulties
.”

“I see more than you think,” he said. “And you’re not going to the dining-room. Neither of

us will. Ever again.”

She sat down, holding the dirty pan well away from her. “Then I’ll ask you again, Tusker.

Why
? Only this time don’t say because you said so. And do for once
think
before you speak.

Think for instance of the fact that we have invited Father Sebastian to dinner tomorrow

evening. One can hardly offer him a poached egg, so unless you intend to give him drinks

here and then take him over to the Shiraz or up to the club—neither of which

establishments strikes me as being quite his venue if that’s the word—there’ll really be no

alternative to our dining him at Smith’s or arranging for Smith’s to serve a special little meal

for us here. And while you’re bearing all this in mind I might as well tell you that I asked him

this morning to bring Susy Williams with him, if she’s free. It would make up a four.”

“Susy Williams? In Heaven’s name you’ve known Susy Williams for more than thirty years

and not had her to a meal once.”

“Which is one reason for having her now. When she does my hair in the morning I shall

confirm the invitation. There’s no more to be said about
that
. The only thing there’s anything

to be said about is where do we feed them? And if you say Ha! or start obfuscating and

mention poached eggs again I shall throw this dirty pan straight at you.”

“Throw it then.”

“I shall if you say Ha!”

“Ha! Ha!”

She threw it. It bounced off him as if he were made of something other than flesh and

bone. Bloxsaw yelped, staggered to his feet and loped away to seek sanctuary in the garage.

Startled crows shrieked and wheeled in the warm pellucid air. She got up and went inside to

get herself another drink.

Only once before had she hit him ; and that was at the time of the débâcle in Bombay,

when she beat him off with a rolled-up
Times of India
, outraged less by what had been hinted

about a relationship between him and Mrs Poppadoum than by what he had just told her:

that he had refused Mr Feibergerstein’s proposal to send them home to work out the last

year of his contract with Smith, Brown and McKintosh, which would mean getting a small

pension from the firm to add to the pension from the Indian Government. The alternative

was really an ultimatum, little better than the sack. And he had chosen the alternative. “I’m

sixty next year,” he’d yelled at her, grabbing the
Times of India
from her numb hand. “I’m not

spending my Goth birthday in some place like bloody Stevenage. And I’m not going to be

blackmailed.”

Somewhere like bloody Stevenage was where Feibergerstein Industries of Boston, London

and Amsterdam had acquired Smith, Brown & McKintosh’s interest in a pharmaceutical

company. Feibergersteins were also big in the chemical fertilizer industry. They had also

recently acquired control of Smith, Brown & McKintosh, who had run a shipping and

general merchandise agency in India for over 80 years, and employed Tusker on his

retirement from the army for ten of them as their administrative manager, at a salary that had

sounded to Lucy glamorous in comparison with his army pay and which, together with the

paid-for business trip home in 1950 and the prospect of more to come had accommodated

her to the idea of staying-on yet again; until she realized that Tusker’s personality change on

leaving the army involved him in spending money like water, gambling, drinking, getting

involved with the tax-authorities, the customs and with the police over the Bombay liquor

laws; and finally, it seemed, with Mrs Poppadoum.

In her heart Lucy had never believed that Tusker had misbehaved with Mrs Poppadoum.

The Mrs Poppadoums of this world were beyond old Tusker’s reach. Sigrid Poppadoum was

young, Swedish by birth, a tall blonde beauty who (Lucy was convinced) made eyes at

everything in trousers to annoy her prickly little Indian husband (whose third wife she was)

who could steer government contracts the way of Feibergerstein and Smith, Brown and

McKintosh, and whose nephew, trained at a business school in the States, had become a

protégé of Solly Feibergerstein and been placed by him at Smith, Brown and McKintosh in

Bombay as a young but senior executive. Mr Feibergerstein’s wife, Mary-Lou, had said to

Lucy when visiting with him in Bombay, “Solly railly berlaives in Indian-ah-zaershun, which

ah guess you British never railly did.”

For years now it had been clear to Lucy in retrospect that poor old Tusker had been for the

chop the moment Solly Feibergerstein set eyes on him and had seen nothing but an old dug-

out, an old Sahib whom Smith, Brown and McKintosh should never have employed when

there were competent young men looking for jobs. But at the time it had simply seemed to

her that Tusker was digging his own grave, complaining that that “young twit Poppadoum’s

nephew” was after his job, that he wouldn’t trust Solly Feibergerstein farther than he could

throw Poppadoum, but doing nothing to prove Mr Feibergerstein wrong in his assessment

of Tusker’s own capabilities. The opposite in fact.

And today, drinking another gulp of gin and lime, still shaking from the effort of having

thrown the poaching pan at him, she still could not forgive him for the débâcle. There had

been that incident at the Taj, when—half-cut yet again—he had bitten Mrs Poppadoum’s

ear, spilt his wine and said “•••• it,” which had made Sigrid Poppadoum laugh and laugh but

caused her husband great offence, and Solly and Mary-Lou (and Mr Sylvester, the Managing

Director of Smith, Brown & McKintosh) to smile bleakly in that way Lucy remembered

the old race of British Sahibs and Mem-sahibs smiling if you did anything not quite pukka.

For this smile to be effective and eloquent the lips had to twitch but turn down at the

corners and the eyes be cast down for no more than a couple of seconds, and then raised

and a new topic of conversation then introduced. Watching them, Lucy realized that nothing

had changed for
her
, because there was this new race of sahibs and memsahibs of

international status and connexion who had taken the place of generals and Mrs Generals,

and she and Tusker had become for them almost as far down in the social scale as the

Eurasians were in the days of the
raj
.

“Tusker’s worth the lot of them put together,” she had thought but the thought had lasted

only a moment and the ghost of it, returning to haunt her now, gave her no comfort. He had

been the most awful bloody fool. You simply couldn’t survive in the world by speaking your

mind and acting as you felt, moment by moment. It was all wrong, wrong. There were times

for this, conditions for that. Of this timing Tusker had long ago lost his intuitive awareness.

He had thrown his bonnet over impossible windmills. His unreasonable rage, when faced

with the consequences, was the rage of a child.

He was right in one thing, though. It had been attempted blackmail : the choice offered of

going home to work out the last year and take a pension, or of taking almost immediate

separation in India and a piddling sum by way of compensation for loss of office. He had

taken the compensation.

She had had no say in it. She had protested. She had cried. She had beaten him over the

head with a newspaper. It had been like trying to knock sense into something composed

only of temper and vapours and obstinacy and stupidity. And where had the compensation

gone? It had gone—most of it on that absurd extravagant trip round India which had ended

in Pankot. “One last look,” he said. They were still looking. But the rest of it had gone too.

Like his compensation from the army. How was it possible for money to go so quickly?

And where was the written statement she had asked for during their last quarrel? The clear

statement of the position she would be in if he dropped dead? Where was
that
? She drained