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A Black Englishman

Picador

1920

There's no twilight in India. Darkness overtakes with shocking finality. I can't get used to it, but it's something to do with the breathless quality of the country and the sudden way things happen here. There's no time to adjust — no warning. I miss the slow blending of colors as shadows come and go until at last there's just one color, the way it is at home. Here saffron turns to flame and then to gold tinged with blue, and then it goes black. In a moment it's all over, and that startling dip into darkness feels like a reflection of jarring change or even a foreshadowing of something dreadful. Now of course I see that it was my own darkness that came on suddenly, but I didn't know it at the time. If I had, would I have stepped so jauntily up the gangway of that P & O liner and waved goodbye, wearing my new suede gloves the color of pistachios? Would I have chosen any of it if I'd known that darkness can strike like a fist or that a person can drown in it — and want to? Absolutely. I'd have chosen the whole bang shoot because I thought I could pull off anything then: I was twenty-three andinvincible, and I was going out to India, India, India. It was as though that crimson, heart-shaped subcontinent were thrumming with excitement and glamour all for me. And love had come again. So I picked up my skirts and charged at it, not caring how it would end. I was frightfully in love with love; I saw myself running to meet it the way a man stretches up his arms and whirls a woman down from a train and says: Beloved, you're here, now we can begin our exquisite life together.

My mother knew better, but I wasn't listening. As she turned to leave the ship with me on it, she said: You've made your bed now, Isabel, you'll have to lie on it. She had no idea what she was talking about because for her there'd never been any getting used to, putting up with, or making do. She was a thoroughbred; she had her own money, and it was only in marrying dear Pater that she'd taken a step down, which no doubt was why it was particularly galling for her to see me making the same mistake. When I'd told her that I was going to marry Neville, she was against it. It's not his origins, she said. No, don't give me that look; it's not those I object to, though certainly they leave much to be desired. I know the grimy village where his aunt lives, and there are God knows how many Webbs in the villages of Wales. And it's not even that he's been in India too long: his father born there, and Neville too. That's far too long to be away from civilization. And though you will sniff at this, it's not even that he's a noncommissioned officer. No, it's really not that. It's simply a matter of character. His is poor.

And with that she packed trunk after trunk of elegant clothes, handmade in London or Paris, and a pale gray visiting suit, and a couple of black gowns for the balls she imagined I'd go to, and some pert little frocks for playing bridge at the club. She even had some lightweight jodhpurs made for me in Bond Street. As if any of this were relevant. She made her view of Neville plain, but never once did she say to me: Don't do it. Perhaps she didn't think she had the right to counsel me in the matter of love. It was an area where her intelligence had slipped; this is what she made you feel. So she was unable to say to me: This is a mistake, I forbid it, or even, For God's sake, Isabel, don't be such a damn fool. Of course, had she tried, I'd not have given her the time of day. I rolled around in her disapproval voluptuously, and I have to say it made me more determined to put my own questions about Neville aside. I certainly had a sense of Neville's character; his eyes have a sleepy, predatory look, and I should have known that night in Porthcawl — but what's the point? It's like walking backward to see if you can find what you knew perfectly well you'd dropped in the first place.

I was willing to go to India with him because I'd chosen marriage more than Neville, and more than either, I'd chosen Life. It was nothing to do with money or security; we had pots of that. It was pure escape, pure rebound — nothing more. I had to get out of Wales. And I had to forget the dead, whose bones were filtering through the rainy battlefields of France, and I had to get away from all those who'd come crawling back, dragging wounds and amputations behind them, their minds crazed by the memory of what they'd seen. My brother talked about it once, when he was drunk, but then he clammed up and never mentioned it again. The ones who came back are all like that. They can't get over being alive when everyone else is dead. Jack told me that an officer of the Queen's Regiment had set himself on fire and that soldiers got medals for valor when really they were throwing themselves at the guns. It was hard to believe, after all we'd once believed about the glory and honor of war. Jack spoke about Ed from Cardiff, who'd ended up wandering around no-man's-land, holding his blown-off arm like a bouquet of roses. Once Jack saw a soldier digging a forward trench slice through a human face, and one night he stumbled over a corpse only to find that it was a boy he'd sat next to in school. I couldn't take it in. All I could think about was Gareth's scribbled words on a scrap of grubby paper: My dearest love, the frontline trenches are ten miles away and we are marching to Arras, dead horses everywhere and men tossed in ditches, mangled and headless. No one bothers to collect the dead anymore. None of us have the foggiest idea what we're doing, we're civilians, amateurs. All the real soldiers are dead.

OFTEN I FEEL as if I were in the same desperate rush that he was when he first went to France. Off he marched to war, boarding the troop train at Waterloo to have a grand adventure: Can't wait to get to the front to do my bit; am waiting for orders and desperate to go. I had the same feelings about India, going out in search of a grand adventure, an idea in my head. Mine was a vision of what lay at the end of the shipping lines, where the East began: a world wild and exotic beyond anything our little island could offer. Gareth left behind childhood and innocence and the first passion of our youth; I was leaving behind all my shattered hopes, the haunted, backward glances at places where the dear dead had once run up the blue hills and talked about how it would be tomorrow.

SUDDENNESS CAME ON the minute we reached India. It wasn't that way going out. The voyage out was a continuation of all I'd ever known, a slow glide through deep water, a casual changing of light as we moved eastward, until one morning everything was lit up like the huge diamond in Queen Victoria's India crown. We were heading into mystery and magic, into that gorgeousness I'd imagined since the days of flying about in my head, reading The Arabian Nights. On the boat, you see, we had so much time to get used to change, that's the thing, even going what's called the shortcut. Naturally, I was sick as a dog crossing the Bay of Biscay, felt my insides would fly out of my mouth any minute. I was so ill and green I thought I'd be happier if they just hurled me over the side and made an end of it. Whenever I lurched up on deck — only at night, of course, because one can't be vomiting in broad daylight — I saw the regulars hanging on to the railing, the same green faces puking over the side. We recognized one another, but turned away, each enclosed in a shameful cell of sickness, not saying a word.

The minute we got to the Mediterranean, I got my balance back. I began to feel the beauty of the sea again and my old kinship to it. I remembered the way we'd run down to the children's beach near Porthcawl early in the morning when no foot or paw had dented it. I'd wait for Jack to come down with Gareth, and we'd make sand castles, the three of us, I in my woolly bathing suit, which scratched so horribly between the legs, and the two of them running, kicking up sand. They buried me in the sand so that just my face was showing and then stuck a jam sandwich in my mouth to see if I could eat it without making the sand crack. In the old days, sailing to India meant dragging all the way around the Cape, instead of nipping across the Suez Canal and then down the Red Sea, past Mecca to Aden. The voyage out was so lovely. We had long, dreamy days with only the steady pulse of the ocean pulling us toward the Arabian Sea. At Port Said, little boys dove for pennies, and if you lowered a basket with money in it, they put in oranges, black grapes, bananas and pineapples, dates and little purple figs that were so much nicer than the dried ones we got at home. Once a chameleon came up in the basket, and it was so interesting to see such a peculiar Darwinian little chap; he was like something out of the Stone Age. The boat was oh, so glam, reclining on the water like a magnificent white hotel on a blue hill. It had a monumentalism about it. India has that, and I suppose the empire had that once too. Pater, using his Liberal Voice, insisted all that was over by the end of the century. The imperial ideal is dead, he'd say wearily, and the imperial race is weak and corrupt at its core. You certainly wouldn't know that on the Viceroy of India as it swanned across the ocean toward its glittering destination, ruling the waves, riding the crest of glory.

Naturally, Neville and I didn't have the money for first class, but it was the thing to do to travel POSH — port side going out, starboard coming home. That way one avoided the worst of the sun. For Neville, sailing P & O was a new experience, just as it was for me. When he'd sailed to India, it was on those ghastly troopships that take months to reach Bombay. But it was odd how, at first, as we embarked, the whole thing seemed to rub him up the wrong way. He was snappish and seemed to want to get away from it all. There we were, civilians and military together, and even on the quayside he was upset and surly. He wouldn't speak and stood stiffly beside me while my head was whipping this way and that, looking at all the expensive luggage, the porters and passengers, some wearing their new topis just for a laugh, the women dressed up to the nines, as if they were at Ascot. A few beautifully dressed Indians were strolling on the deck: exquisite women in saris the colors of exotic birds, men wearing impeccable suits from Savile Row, with snow white turbans on their heads. They were a handsome people, intelligent and cultured, with lovely deep brown eyes. I couldn't stop staring. I'd not seen Asians before. Well, of course one doesn't, certainly not in Wales, though Mama told me that after the grim Mutiny business, in eighteen something or other, Queen Victoria always kept two Indian servants by her side whenever she went out in public, as a sign of solidarity, and of shame, for our acts of vengeance after the sepoy uprising. The Indians on the ship dipped their heads in a wonderful way, and I wanted to get close to them to see the exact color of their skin.

My eyes were out on sticks. Going down into the hold were vast mahogany cabinets and chests, pianos, dining room tables and chairs, rocking horses, oil paintings, carpets, saddles, a grandfather clock or two, crates of china and crystal, tea chests full of English silver, and even a spanking new Bentley. Must have been for the Viceroy, or a maharaja, but then I saw the little flag all aflutter on the front, so that settled it. Such extravagance, and all this for the hoi polloi, the Raj of India, who were sailing off where destiny and duty drove them. But perhaps that's not fair, and maybe those days are over just as Pater says they are. Maybe going to India was their way of getting away from what had happened to England, leaving behind dead sons and lovers, or blank eyes in melted faces that look out of windows, seeing nothing. Maybe they have their own soldier who jumps out of his skin if a door slams or a firework goes off. I read in the paper about a doctor who works with the shell-shocked; the marching dead, he calls them. They quiver when the wind blows or start screaming when they pick up a smell that reminds them of poison gas. We don't have shell-shocked soldiers in India — or do we? Thousands of Indian soldiers died on the western front. Why were they willing to go off to die for something they couldn't have cared a fig about? All those regiments blown to bits, all those faces turning to mold on the cold hillside. Mother told me that in India, during the war, sacrifices were made, contributions to the war effort, socks and sweaters knitted, that sort of thing, but it couldn't have been the same as what happened to England, because for us it was right on the doorstep, far too close.

Sometimes, at home, when the wind was up, I seemed to get the smell of the dead wafting over the washing line or the cries of men dragging their boots down the lane. Even though I'd only heard about it — breathed or whispered in drawing rooms, or read in the columns of the dead in The Times — it was more real than the soup on the stove. There was a pressure in the air, a certainty of doom that never left. Even in Wales, protected from it, I remember how it felt to see the regiments marching past the post office to go to war. I'd look at one face and then another, thinking, You won't come back, and you won't, but you might, and you will, on and on down the marching line, ticking them off, trying to hazard a prayer, or barter with God, to spare the one soldier that absolutely had to come back, because without him life was unimaginable.

ON THE SHIP, for the first time really, I got to know the soldier I'd married — not the one I'd wanted to marry but the one I did marry. I'd never thought of Neville quite as a soldier until we were sailing to India. Later I began to understand how significant a part this played in his character, but in those first days, when he was not much more than a stranger to me, I wasn't looking that hard. Neville can be charming even as he can be peculiar, and you never know quite what you'll be getting from day to day or even from moment to moment. He has a vulgarity that's offset by a kind of meticulous neatness, and I think he gets that from the army. I first spotted it in the way he dressed and took care of his clothing. On the boat he was always hanging up and polishing, sending clothes off for washing and pressing, buffing up his shoes and brushing his hair with a hard palm-down smoothing motion, like someone ironing. He carries a uniform well, and he's handsome in a Celtic way, long face and melancholy eyes, but he doesn't look quite as good in mufti. There's something impressive about khaki. Khaki, so I'm told, began in India when they mixed up some curry powder and turmeric to get a less visible, more jungly shade. God knows how splendid our soldiers must have looked in the days of scarlet and gold or in pure, brilliant white, but khaki is the color of conquest, no doubt about that.

I noticed that women stared at Neville as he strolled on deck; he stared back. But that's natural enough. I look at men, and why not? At least I wasn't one of those girls going out to India to try to nab a husband. Neville sneered at them, and I didn't quite understand why. I mean, they weren't riffraff, not by any means. They were elegant and young, wore slim skirts and high heels, little hats set off to one side on gleaming hair, their faces delicately rouged, wearing lipstick that deep plum shade fashionable in London last season. One woman wore a navy fedora with a brim that hid most of her face. She had the loveliest pale gray traveling costume with simple and expensive lines, and it held her body in a tight embrace. Those girls made up what's called the Fishing Fleet; those who sail back alone are called the Returned Empties — odd that they're thought of that way when they're the daughters of distinguished Anglo-Indian families. Have people forgotten that there's a shortage of men or that the officers are all dead?

As I was thinking this, almost as if he could divine my thoughts, Neville came out with one of his truly ghastly remarks: Bunch of desperate bitches; fat lot of good their looks and lolly will do them with all the eligible bachelors rotting in Flanders and Ypres, all those pampered bodies feeding rats and worms.

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Excerpted from A Black Englishman by Carolyn Slaughter. Copyright © 2004 Carolyn Slaughter. Excerpted by permission of Picador.
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