Night of Fire Read online

  In other photographs, closer and more intimate, the couple were sitting on their bungalow’s veranda, or in its sunlit rooms. Here was his mother planting a pot of nasturtiums or cradling a Labrador puppy, while his father lounged in a wicker chair reading Blackwood’s Magazine. They stared unsmiling into the camera. Steven might not have recognised them. His mother’s eyes looked blacker and sharper than they were, her hair tightly parted and bunched to either side. Her expression was different from any he remembered; she looked hard, self-protected, even frightened. Yet she’d fallen in love, she said, with the scent of cedars and the Himalayan streams. As he turned the pages, Steven was overcome by the feeling of how deeply his parents were separate from him. They had lived these lives before he was born. His mother had ridden horses at the Annandale race meetings; his father had hunted sambur in the Sivalik Hills. There were blurred snapshots of people dancing. As he looked, his parents became stranger with their time. Inscrutably young, they drifted away from him. He longed to question them: What were you feeling? Were you so different? Yet even in this alienation, he realised that by some trick of time they already seemed to be his parents, and subtly senior. They would for ever be older than him.

  In such photographs the servants occupied an opaque hinterland of their own. They wore white jackets and banded turbans, but their dark complexions seemed to retract them into shadow. If they appeared in any photo, they were labelled under generic names – the khansame,the mali, the dhobi – and they walked barefoot. Only the chief bearer laid a guiding hand on the shoulder of a small boy – Ricky – who stood to attention in khaki shorts and a loose, big-collared shirt. And towards the album’s end, another child appeared. Steven knew this must be himself. He was lying in the lap of his Indian nurse, his ayah, whose bangled arms cradled his head, or he held her hand as an infant schoolboy. Soon both boys wore outsize topis, Ricky already alert and manly, clutching a home-made kite, while Steven’s face looked blanched and dreaming. She, his ayah, was almost all he could remember of India, and perhaps he had imagined her too. She was a mission-educated Madrasi, his mother had said, and wore a crimson sari. Her face and arms were burnished, dark and oiled, and the corners of her eyes, slanting nearly to her hairline, gave her the gaze of a cat. Of Steven’s broken memories barely three survived: a monkey leering from a stone lantern somewhere; the pliant mud from which he’d modelled little animals; and the aroma of this dark woman.

  He closed the album and switched off his lamp. Below the hotel window rose the noises and fumes of a late-night bazaar – the smells of woodsmoke and coriander, and the sound of Hindi music. He went out on to the balcony, unwilling to sleep. The hillside below was covered in dimming lights. The familiar excitement of such moments – of unknown lights and sounds – was touched with the melancholy of his parents’ absence. One by one the lights went out and the noises dwindled. Then the barking of the pye-dogs started up – a howling that had haunted his mother’s nights – and a half-moon was shining over the mountains.

  He gazed at this for a long time: the dying lights of the town beneath the illumined Himalayas. Fancifully he wondered if the elation he felt at such sights were not a kind of remembrance. He wondered if the sensations of his Indian infancy, which had followed him through English boarding school in fading images – a leering monkey, a woman’s bangled arm – had lingered on in his unconscious, so that his later passion for travel was not a desire to experience novelty at all, but a hunt to recover what he had lost: a pilgrimage whose origins he had forgotten.

  Dawn came quickly. The magic of the night bazaar had evaporated. The store shutters were down – it was Sunday – and the pye-dogs lay asleep in the gutters. A cold wind came in from the north. Ricky, who had woken dull-eyed and tetchy, insisted on recalling over breakfast their father’s disillusion: how premature the Indianisation of the civil service had been, how interfering the parvenu politicians, how weak-willed the British. Everybody, it seemed, was a fool, even his father. ‘He never saw it coming.’

  But in the early-morning quiet they could discern at last the insubstantial shape of their parents’ world. If you dissolved from your mind the suburbs swarming over the farther slopes – their roofs too brightly red or green – then the cleansed hills would roll untrammelled to the foot of the imperial ridges, and the long, glacial silhouettes of the Himalayas loom closer. From the curve of the old, narrow high street, the lanes dropped precipitously into the valley. The gabled shops that lined it clung to old names and times: Ram and Son 1908; C. Fook Chong & Co, designer of Chinese shoes; Duti Chand Travel Good; est. 1921 . . .

  Steven remembered his mother deriding the mall as a centre of gossip and wasted time. She ordered everything through the Army & Navy Stores catalogue, she said, and he was aware of scanning these shops with her indifference. But while he was recreating Simla through her eyes, Ricky was doing so through his father’s, and when they found a side door of Christ Church open, they went in to find their father standing in imagination among the bronze memorial plaques to the dead servants of the Raj, lit by Victorian virtues: Prudence, Fortitude, Patience – pallid women in stained glass.

  Soon afterwards Steven stumbled on the little Gaiety Theatre, where their mother had acted in one of the amateur plays staged by the British. Its programme was pasted into the album that Ricky had brought along with him – they opened it in the empty auditorium – and there was a picture of their mother in a clinging silk dress, acting in an obscure comedy called By Candlelight. Even in a photograph she looked too big for the stage, her gestures and features too stark. A guide told them that nothing since her day had changed: only the crimson decor had been muted to green and gold. Gingerly Steven climbed the stage to the spot where she had stood, and followed her gaze beyond the kerosene footlights to the viceregal box and the banked seats – three hundred and twenty of them. He even thought he felt her stage fright.

  It was noon before they reached the old precincts of imperial government. The domestic Tudor architecture had disappeared, and their way was dark with trees. Buildings in heavy stone stood on the slopes above them, half invisible. Ricky walked buoyantly, his spirits recovered, his father’s album slung in a hessian bag over one shoulder. But Steven felt a sad frustration. He had thought Simla might bring his parents nearer, that his damaged brain would shape new understanding round them. But instead he sensed them receding into history. Their world was not his, and they were young, far younger than he was now. Ricky, he thought, was more wholesome, more down-to-earth than him. Ricky either cared less or accepted more. ‘They were just themselves, Steve,’ he said.

  They reached the office where their father had worked, but it had become a barracks, inaccessible – the Sikh sentry warned them away. Then came the quaint imperial post office, and at last they were winding up beneath the long, dark-stoned revetment of the drive to Viceregal Lodge, the heart of British power over four hundred million souls. For a long time the place withheld itself, hidden on its tree-thronged hill. Then mown lawns appeared, clipped hedges and English flower beds, and finally the enormous confection of the residence itself. They gazed at it in astonishment. It was at once forbidding and fantastical: a massive architectural hesitation between Tudor palace, giant baronial castle and Mogul pavilion.

  They sat on a bench and caught their breath. Here, in an early photograph, their father stood beneath the emblazoned porch, one hand on his hip, posing for an unknown camera. He was barely twenty-five. He must have been on official business, because he was dressed not for an evening reception, but in shorts and knee-length socks. As Steven scrutinised the photograph, he saw to his bemusement a face in which the ingrained sourness of the father he remembered had never been. The mouth that became so tight and cynical was smiling broadly. Under his topi, his expression was cloudless, confident, as if the porch above him were the entrance to the future. In later years, Steven recalled, his father had ridiculed Viceregal Lodge as a mongrel wedding cake, its multi-tiered galleries and mullioned windows
, oriels and turrets all blazoned with a heraldry he said he despised.

  For a while they walked among the magnolias and irises of the Victorian garden. They heard a peacock cry. Ricky had turned sombre. ‘I don’t know why Dad stayed so hurt by India,’ he said. Steven sensed he was empathising with his father’s failure, as if failure were genetic. ‘He should have left it behind.’

  They walked out of the estate and under the rim of its hill. A tarmac road replaced the track that had once wound beneath their parents’ bungalow. Its glade was dense with hemlock and cedar trees. The mangy rhesus monkeys that infested the town had vanished, and a troop of white-maned langurs was plunging through the branches. He and Ricky had little hope of finding even the site of the bungalow. Ricky said he had clear memories of it. Steven had none. There were other houses scattered along the way now: run-down cottages and warehouses, an advocate’s office. But the lane was very quiet. Sometimes the langur monkeys leapt with a crash from their treetops on to the corrugated iron roofs, then stillness returned.

  They sat for a while on a crumbling wall, in the scent of fallen pine needles, and debated whether to go back. Then suddenly Ricky said: ‘There it is!’

  They were sitting on its lower terrace, and they saw at once that it was derelict. Above them a thicket of new-grown trees obscured it, and the bank on which it stood was a tangle of grasses. They climbed the fractured steps softly on to the veranda. Ricky recognised the stuccoed pillars, brightly sunlit in the photos, but darkened now by overhanging trees. The veranda paving had splintered into a roughened pool of stones under their feet. Ricky was saying: ‘I remember . . . I remember . . .’ but his voice was muted, unsure.

  They tried the doors, but they were locked. Whoever had last lived here must have left years ago. A web of cracks was spreading over the outer walls, and the frames of steel mosquito netting dangled from the windows. Against one balustrade somebody homeless had laid a few bricks to enclose the cinders of a fire. There were dead leaves, a pair of rotted trainers. But Steven glimpsed the view through trees that his parents would have known: a gleam of mountains where a lammergeier was sailing on the wind. Sometimes, staring about him, he wondered if a few years ago, before his brain surgery, he would have remembered everything. He began to slip in and out of wish-fulfilment. He imagined he recalled his father sipping gin on the terrace, while his mother came and went smiling through the doors.

  Ricky had opened their album on a window ledge, and was working out the layout of the rooms. Peering through a window where the shutters had disintegrated, Steven saw only debris and splintered glass. But this, he realised, had been his parents’ sitting room, and a single yellowed photograph furnished it again with its cane chairs and chintz curtains and a sofa where his mother was reading. A potted palm stood in the left-hand corner, with a wind-up gramophone beside it. Beneath this snapshot, this now-ruined room, his father had inscribed: ‘Our first home’. Steven went on looking through the window, surprised by the prickling behind his eyes. There had been a teak sideboard too, and the skin of a sambur hung on the wall above his mother’s head.

  She had been happy here. Bored by the round of bridge parties and race meetings, she said, she’d taken up Urdu lessons and had held soirées for Indian wives. She disbelieved the rumoured hatred that was gathering against the British, and years later remembered with nostalgia the fluttering pennants of the Indian cavalry, the day-long picnics in the pine woods, and the sudden starlight of the Indian nights, by which she’d read Anna Karenina.

  None of this could Steven guess from the faces staring from the album. Only his ayah seemed herself, whoever that might have been, her age irrelevant, her upswept eyes fixed on an infant’s face. But from an envelope stuck at the album’s end, as if in afterthought, there fell out a photo of their mother in the sitting room beside another man. He was delicately handsome, dressed in a knee-length surcoat and carrying a cane: an Indian aristocrat, it seemed, hatless but immaculate, with polished European shoes. He was looking at the camera with anxious, swimming eyes, while she was looking at him, her hand on his arm.

  ‘Let’s see.’ Ricky was peering over Steven’s shoulder. ‘That’s a strange photo.’

  ‘Her hand . . .’

  ‘An Indian.’ Ricky began to smile. ‘That was unheard of.’

  ‘I wonder who took the photo.’ Steven smiled bleakly, surprised.

  ‘His servant, I suppose.’ Ricky suddenly laughed. ‘She was never one to play by the rules.’

  ‘You think he was her lover?’

  ‘Simla was notorious for that. Everyone had affairs.’

  ‘I know Father did, but not Mother.’

  Then Steven felt a dull sadness, but quite for what, he didn’t know. As a boy he had thought his mother beautiful – perhaps every son did – then came to realise her heaviness, her indefinable rawness. Only with old age did some inner frailty paper her skin delicately over her bones, and her gaze was sometimes softened by confusion. He wondered who else had held the hand that reached for his across the hospital bed. Maybe, characteristically, she had thrust the affair behind her; or perhaps, in her silence, cherished it. He wished only that he had known. She seemed farther away now.

  ‘Do you remember him, Ricky?’

  ‘I was only seven!’

  Ricky was talking about other things: his first Wolf Cub uniform at the prep school nearby, and how two years earlier he had inveigled himself on to the route of the departing viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, and presented a wobbly salute; and the clouds of butterflies that had once flowed over the school playing fields and into the valleys.

  Under the monkey-infested trees they squeezed around a wall to the servants’ quarters. A few outhouses were still standing, their tin roofs intact, and a gutted cookhouse. Steven walked beyond them into the remains of the garden, stepping frailly between remembrance and the illusion of it. He stared back at the bungalow’s wall, its brick chimneys, the balustrade. Something seemed immanent in them. He found himself treading lightly, as if to make no noise in the present.

  Then he remembered the orchard. A kind of sickness overcame him. He was willing his mind too fiercely to enter the past, he knew. But in the undergrowth, the Himalayan apple trees stood gnarled and redolent – they would already have stood tall sixty years ago – and he touched their trunks as though they were familiar. A circle of stone marked where the water butt had stood: a black-painted cylinder that he suddenly recollected, its rim already frayed by rust. No brain surgery had erased it. The stones were rough and damp to his touch. Beyond them he pictured Ricky’s young face, saying nothing, and the smell of fallen apples filled his nostrils. Then, in the luxury of willed remembrance, in the orchard’s long grass, his ayah’s bangled arms were round him, and although he knew that the remembering brain trembles and changes with every recollection, her eyes were shining and his child’s lips kissed her, he was sure, and he caressed her dark breast.

  * * *

  Beyond the window the view had dimmed to a flatland of blurred shapes and ashen colours. Wheat and paddy fields left only opaque rectangles in the fog. To the south, the Ganges was invisible. Sometimes a few farmers crossed the mist, or a bullock stood idle in the merging land and sky.

  At dusk, Steven dropped into half-sleep in his empty cubicle, inured to the stench of the urinals and to the chai-sellers calling along the corridors. On the bare bunk opposite, Ricky had left him a water bottle and some biscuits, and the memory of an awkward farewell. By the time they parted – two elderly Englishmen embracing in the turmoil of Old Delhi station – something of Ricky’s old, brusque authority had returned. He might have continued travelling, he said, but India was not his country, he couldn’t stand another masala chicken, and there were things he had to do back in England.

  To his own surprise, some incommunicable sadness in Steven made him want to return with Ricky, but not yet. He planned to see Varanasi, the great pilgrimage city on the Ganges, and perhaps afterwards to travel south. In parting, Ricky
had said: ‘Are you still pissed off about forgetting things, Steve? Because your memory’s fine. You keep remembering them all: Dad and Mother and all those others . . . maybe too much.’

  For eighteen hours the fog blinded the train to snail’s pace. It seemed always to be slowing down, but it never stopped. Steven pulled the stained railway sheets and blanket over his head, and lay on his back in jaded insomnia. Belatedly he resented Ricky for the notion that he was slipping back into memory, into the dead. Yet of course there were deaths that continued, deaths that seemed unresolved: Sylvia, the colleague’s wife he had loved after his divorce, who had died in a distant hospital; the friend who had hanged himself decades ago; and his mother, yes, who returned to him always, in her unhealed absence, and her new enigma. And then there were those other, lesser deaths – partings and betrayals – that haunted you in the solitude of travel: old friends he had forgotten, women he had failed in love. It was now that the elusiveness of memories most troubled him. He wondered if the intermittent throbbing in his head was self-induced. Sometimes, fantastically, he even imagined there might have been another self, who had known and experienced things more intensely than he, someone of whom he was only a belated refraction.