The Caprices (6 page)

“Do you have a family, Harry?” she asked.

“Not of my own. I have two brothers and one sister.”

“What do they do?”

“My older brother is in the railways. My younger brother is in training for the Civil Service. And my sister is mad about archery and jazz. She does the books for the family business.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful.” Mrs. Berystede’s hand went to Harry’s shoulder. “I want a family,” she said. “Edgar tells me that I am mother to all of India. Why do I need a baby when I am mother
to six hundred million people?” Mrs. Berystede began to tear up and the handkerchief strayed to her eyes. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Of course Edgar tells everyone that it’s me, but I’ve been to the doctor. I just get so angry.” The tears began to spill, but she managed a smile. “I want to shoot everything in sight.”

Harry nodded, then raised his glass to Mrs. Berystede and drained it. He wished he could put his arm around her. “I can tell you are a good woman,” he said, “and I’m sure that you would be a wonderful mother. I am sorry.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Berystede, sitting suddenly straight, “you are so kind.”

There was a silence in the room. Harry looked up and an informal assembly was watching him. He was not surprised. In the front row was a shocked Major Berystede. Behind him and to the left was Tunsdale, who was smiling with support and sympathy. Harry knew he had just been unanimously blackballed.

Tunsdale and Harry rode back to the cantonment together. “What an outright disaster,” said Tunsdale. “I haven’t had that much fun at the club since I joined. What was the old bag telling you, anyway?”

“Nothing of interest,” said Harry. “She was just a bit lonely.”

“And wanted the company of the handsome, swarthy lieutenant.”

“She’s right to be crazy here,” said Harry. “It shows the presence of—”

“Of what?”

“Of a soul,” said Harry and they laughed.

The next morning Harry awoke to both the sting and blur of a headache. The walls were spinning around the room and his attendant, although studiously solemn, had a merry twinkle in his eyes.

“I feel terrible,” Harry confided. “Give me some water.” Harry sipped cautiously from the edge of his glass. His stomach was very delicate.

“Sir,” said his servant. He gestured around the bridge of his nose and Harry hazarded to touch the cheekbone beneath his left eye, which was throbbing. The flesh around his eye was swollen and tender.

“Is it bruised?” asked Harry.

“Quite black,” said his servant. “It looks very painful.”

“Wonderful,” said Harry.

With some effort and a good deal of help from his servant, Harry managed to get dressed and shaved. His mind kept flashing images at him—Tunsdale handing him his flask, the ensuing argument, Tunsdale and Harry at the army brothel (Harry fortified into feeling one hundred percent European), and the one knuckle-up punch from the unidentified fist, which had sent him flying right back into the arms of Mother India. Tunsdale had tried to pass Harry off as Welsh, despite the fact that all the men frequenting “the rag” knew him. In fact, Harry had been laughing when the punch hit him and even though his head was reeling and he had more pains than one, he chuckled to himself as he crossed the swept dirt of the garden and made the steps of the mess.

He didn’t even notice Berystede smoking on the veranda.

“Lieutenant,” said the major.

“Sir,” said Harry.

“What on earth happened to your eye?”

“This, sir?” Harry shook his head. “The lesser part of honor.” Which was indiscretion.

Berystede stiffened. “You should put some ice on it,” he said.

Harry nodded and continued inside.

How was Harry to know that at the same time Tunsdale was insisting that he was Welsh, Berystede and his wife had finished off a monumental, tight-lipped row. When Harry was struggling back onto his horse, Mrs. Berystede too was mounting hers, taking off for an angry moonlight ride across the fields. While Harry was passed out in bed with his servant easing off his boots,
Mrs. Berystede had just pitched off her horse while flying over a ditch. When she finally returned home she was cut, muddied, and humiliated. She refused to offer an explanation. Berystede had not slept that night and the sight of Harry, smelling distilled, handsome despite his obvious lack of sleep, strong, young, and vital, had stirred his deepest insecurities.

And Harry’s explanation for the state of his eye had planted the seeds of suspicion.

Tenko
, Japanese reveille, came at the end of the night. Changi was run on Japanese time, even though Singapore was an hour and a half behind. Harry was dreaming of some mountain-edge horse game where the players leaped one after another, gleefully, spiraling downward and never hitting bottom. He rolled to his feet out the side of the cot as Sergeant Itsumi plowed down the row of the sleeping men, pounding their shins with his flashlight. Today was a lucky day because all the men managed to get to their feet. All had survived the night. Outside, the sky was just starting to glow with the coolest, most distant light.
Bango
started and the men counted off dutifully in Japanese:
ichi, ni, san, shi, go
. . .

“Roku!”

. . .
shichi, hachi, ku, ju
. . .

Berystede was not a dream. Harry had seen him, recognized him, despite three years’ wear and alteration. Probably Berystede was in the hospital. Harry had watched him walk from the truck toward the assembly area until he disappeared behind the edge of the barracks. He had watched the determined limp, the pained grimace, and felt sad to see him so low. Only the major’s supposed death had made Harry reconsider his contempt, but now . . . Berystede was old and weak, neither dead nor alive, and Harry was unable to articulate his emotion.

After breakfast, Harry went to the hospital to have the doctor dust his genitals with sulfur. The hospital was a long hut with a few low cots and a number of mats laid edge to edge. Harry
paused outside the door, arrested by the metallic stench of warm blood. At the screen, two dozen flies buzzed angrily to get in, while just inside the same number were trying to escape. The major was indeed there, lying on a mat, one arm thrown out onto the floor, the fingers curled in a loose fist. Harry watched the major sleep as he endured the stinging shock of the sulfur and the doctor’s sympathetic fanning, which the doctor performed with his broad-brimmed hat.

“Open your mouth for me,” said the doctor.

Harry obliged.

“Jesus Christ. You’ve still got all your teeth. Have you been eating insects?”

“Yes, sir, per your recommendation.” Harry leaned in and whispered, “The major, is he all right?”

“I’m afraid not. It’s a miracle he made it here.”

“Can I talk to him?”

“Do you know him?”

“Yes.”

Harry went to squat beside the major’s mat. The flesh on Berystede’s face had been eaten away and his lips were dry, pulling up on his teeth so that his gums were exposed. When the major breathed, a shallow, rasping sound escaped his mouth, the same sound a shell made when you put it to your ear. Clearly, Berystede was sleeping, but his eyes were open a crack and the whites showed, although the irises quivered into view.

“Major Berystede,” whispered Harry, “it’s Lieutenant Gillen, sir.”

The eyes shuddered open.

“Lieutenant Gillen,” he repeated.

Berystede took a deep breath, “Harry. You look well.”

Harry nodded.

“So,” the major’s face relaxed, “I finally found a club that would take us both.”

• • •

Malaya had been an unqualified disaster.

The 11th Indian were garrisoned at Sitra on the west coast of Malaya, after pulling back from the Siamese border. They were to hold the Japanese here, where there was a road heading south. The Japanese force was inferior in numbers and, Harry had been told, in strength. The Japanese were all nearsighted. They couldn’t aim a rifle. Their legs were bowed so that they scampered when upright in a half-evolved netherworld between ape and man. At their tallest, the Japs hit four feet. They had bucked, protruding teeth. They spat when they talked. Fighting them was presented as an indignity to be suffered. Harry wondered that they hadn’t left for Malaya armed with a sack of rat poison. The first night, when they were still organized with the men sleeping in their regimental rows and a separate officers’ latrine, Harry had been unable to sleep. The English were wrong about the Japs. They were as formidable as any Germans, Boers, or Afghans. Harry knew this, just as he knew that the Indian part of his blood boiled equally with the British.

On December 12, 1941, the soldiers of the 11th Indian, after suffering major losses, began their retreat from Sitra. Three days later, the 11th Indian had been pushed south forty kilometers to the village of Gurun. The supposedly pro-British villagers had refused them food and while Major Berystede made a ridiculous speech about crown and colony, Harry, Tunsdale, and the others “confiscated” as much food as they could. Harry no longer knew whom he was protecting or even why he was fighting, aside from some abstract sense of right and wrong, British perfection and Japanese barbarism.

Two days later, a flanking move by Japanese ground forces had split the British and Commonwealth troops up the middle. Japanese air strikes had forced Harry and the others into the jungle. The 11th Indian was lost. Harry was now one of a band of forty men—separated and hungry—trying to navigate back to the coast. For four days they retreated through solid, snake-infested
jungle. While they were wading through a waist-deep creek, sunk to the knees in mud, a steady rain of bullets began to fall and Harry had watched more than twenty men die right there. He’d watched their bodies sinking slowly. The Japanese were silent, efficient, and invisible, nothing more than a singing bullet and rustle of jungle greenery.

None of the 11th Indian were trained in jungle warfare. Some of the older men had been in Shanghai, but their withdrawal from the “Paris of the East” in 1937 had not prepared them for this. Harry had thought through the surrender of Shanghai. If the Japanese were so insignificant, then why had the British surrendered? He had heard other officers explaining this embarrassment away, saying that Hong Kong was more valuable, that the British did not want to provoke the Japanese when the naval base at Singapore, Changi, was still in the process of construction. But the truth of the matter was that the British had no more right to be in Shanghai than the Japanese and with Chiang Kaishek agitating against imperial forces—Japanese and British—withdrawal was the only sensible move. At least an organized, urban withdrawal was something that the Indian army was well equipped to execute.

The Australian troops, also there at the request of Mother England, had outright laughed at Harry and his men, their kits, their swords, the ceremonial panache with which they approached soldiering. The Indian army was trained to give and take orders, but in the jungle you could not see or hear the commanding officer and the situation changed so rapidly that one needed initiative and confidence to act independently, two traits that had been systematically drilled out of the soldiers’ mindset. The jungle made the men crazy. The sky only revealed itself in slivers, the invisible sun only served to raise steam into the air. Harry’s proud sepoys, mostly from the plains of the Punjab, were reduced to struggling on all fours.

Major Berystede led what was left, maybe twenty men, up a
rocky creekbed. Progress was slow because of the injured, and Harry was relieved when after four hours’ march, the ground began to level out. Through the dense greenery ahead, Harry could see bright light, which threw all the great leaves and sinewy vines into relief. They were at the edge of the jungle. When Harry’s platoon burst through the last of the tropical growth, they found themselves at the perimeter of a clay tennis court. It was as surprising as Alice’s tumble into Wonderland. Suddenly the sun shone in an acceptable, general way. Birdsong was loud and lovely, without the crash and startle of branches breaking overhead. Beyond the tennis court was a handsome house with a wide veranda and classic columns. Papaya and banana trees grew in attractive clusters bordered with whitewashed rocks and there was a faint smell of blossoms. The lawn, until very recently, had been meticulously maintained.

Harry stepped onto the court. He listened. The place was completely silent, something that made him uneasy. Major Berystede cautiously peered around. He sheltered his eyes with his hand and squinted up at the house. He seemed lost and Harry knew what was running through his head: he couldn’t even keep track of men he’d lost and didn’t want to make any more decisions that would result in more death.

“I’ll go on ahead,” said Harry.

Harry’s heels sounded lightly on the clay court. Only recently, someone had swept it smooth, because the clay was even except for one disturbed path up through the center. Harry squatted down to look at the tracks—small men’s feet and, if he wasn’t mistaken, cloven, the toes separated, the prints wide.

“Lieutenant Gillen!”

Harry turned.

It was Sergeant Singh, standing not quite at attention, but not quite at ease.

“Come on then,” said Harry, “let’s go find this devil.” Harry
got up and they approached the house together, walking in clear sight of whatever had silenced it. The sound of the major’s voice drifted across the court and lawn—soothing and low—as he organized search parties to the right and to the left of the garden. The heat was only just starting and Harry’s mind wandered from thoughts of battle and blood.

“I find it very strange,” said Sergeant Singh, “a lovely house like this in the middle of the infernal jungle.”

Harry nodded, then raised a hand to quiet him. Together, carefully, they mounted the steps. The door hung open on its hinges and when pushed, swung noiselessly inward. Harry followed the arc of it and found himself in a foyer with a parquet floor and a cathedral ceiling. At the top of the curving stairs was a rose window. A small brown sparrow was trapped there and beat itself against the brilliant panes. Beams of light splintered through the glass onto the landing in an exact rose pattern, disturbed only by the bird, whose desperate shadow marred the perfect symmetry. Harry continued to his right, where the sound of an electric fan and some rustling papers asserted itself against the quiet. Together, Harry and Sergeant Singh walked across the waxed floors and through the arch that marked off a library—a white-walled room with a large bay window fitted with velvet bench seats, floor to ceiling shelves with books bound in red leather and blue cloth, an old pukka once used to move air still on the ceiling, and a broad blackwood desk with the electric fan blowing the papers of a ledger to a desperate flutter. And at the desk, wearing the pocket jacket favored in Malaya, his pale hands still resting on the table, was the presumed owner of the house. Harry was surprisingly unmoved. The man was dead, clearly, because the neck terminated in a clean, fresh wound. The man’s head was nowhere in sight.