To The Coral Strand Read online

  To The Coral Strand

  John Masters

  © copyright 1962 by Bengal-Rockland Inc.

  For Alan and Nancy

  This book is wholly a work of fiction and no reference is intended in it to any person living or dead, except that a few public figures are mentioned. Geographically, a few of the places mentioned are, of course, real - for example, Delhi and Bombay; the great majority are imaginary.

  J.M.

  Chapter 1

  Margaret Wood walked slowly down the centre of the path, between the deep ruts of cart wheels. The sun streamed through the trees on her left hand, but the earth seemed dark.

  Was it evening, then? She passed her hand in front of her eyes, and for a time afterwards could see nothing. She began to fall, and grasped a tree for support. Later, light returned, and she limped forward. Her shoes were red, and the red mud stained her bare legs.

  The jungle fell back on the right and tall shapes began to glow among the trees. The sun spread an aura of orange light over the twisted facades and towers of four temples. All four stood on a stone platform raised a few feet above the level of the earth. The summits of the towers rose a little above the tops of the tallest trees. She leaned dizzily against the stone platform.

  Was it evening, then? Twenty-four hours since he had died. Ten since the red earth rattled down on his coffin. Nine since she started walking.

  The part of the platform where she rested, near the track, was almost undamaged. The nearest temple stood there, too, seemingly complete. Behind, tree roots and bushes grew through cracks in the stone. One of the other temples was little more than a ruin, another leaned crazily against the bole of a peepul tree which had grown up from the earth below. The light shone, under a flat lintel, into the interior of the temple which leaned against the peepul tree. It illumined a stone pillar, polished and glowing, the side facing her carved with the curved lines that turned it from a pillar to a phallus. The other three towers repeated the shape. Every tower rose by soaring steps, and every step was composed of a torrent of human beings in stone, but alive. Every human being coupled sexually with another, or others. Close to her head, where she had laid it on the stone, a girl bent over, her long hair sweeping her bangled ankles, and a man powerful in his desire held her hips from behind. The stone girl smiled straight at the living woman.

  Margaret closed her eyes and wept soundlessly. God had taken Henry from her and she was alone. Why? Where was His infinite mercy? Alone against this overpowering, thrusting animalism, which Henry had so despised . . . and feared. Alone, by herself, without his simple goodness, that had been able to shame her out of all passion.

  She straightened her knees, and began to walk again.

  ‘Been having a look at the local pornographic exhibition?’ The man’s voice was a little high-pitched, pleasant, slightly nasal. She jerked her head up and the words snapped out before she had time to think. ‘Yes ... No, of course not.’

  The man stood in the road five feet from her, a walking-stick in his hand and his head bare. Through the blur of her recent tears his face sprang into violent focus, evenly lighted, grey against the orange glow among the trees. She stepped back a pace, and another, raising her arms. ‘Keep away,’ she gasped. ‘Don’t touch me!’

  A shadow of astonishment crossed the man’s blue eyes, then his expression altered. ‘You’re ill. You’re out on your feet.’ He took a pace towards her.

  She backed away. The trees swayed and the earth heaved. ‘Don’t . . .’ she began, and stopped. She stared more closely at him, one arm still raised. Was it possible that she had been mistaken? He stood there for inspection, his thin lips parted and his forehead wrinkled in an anxious frown. He was quite tall, clean shaven, his hair thick and dark, his eyes pale cold blue. His face was long and narrow, tapering to a strong pointed chin, his mouth wide. His khaki shirt flapped outside khaki drill trousers, and his desert boots were covered with the same red mud that covered her shoes. He held the walking-stick in his left hand, and his rolled sleeves showed thin muscular arms thickly covered with black hair, a silver wrist-watch strap round his left wrist.

  She had not been mistaken. This was the man.

  ‘Now, please,’ he said. ‘Let me help you before you fall down.’ He smiled. ‘I assure you I never assault women unless, in one way or another, they invite me to. You must be Mrs Wood.’

  ‘My husband,’ she began, and stopped. The red earth glowed at her feet, and the sky was turning red. ‘My husband ... is dead.’

  She saw him stepping quickly forward, his arm outstretched, and then the red light filled her eyes.

  She was lying on her back, water on her face and in her eyes and hair. She sat up, feeling an arm supporting her, and looked dimly around. It was almost dark. A stream purled and splashed past her feet and she saw a dim white shape to the right. ‘That’s the old Forest Rest House,’ she muttered, ‘and this is the stream, the Shakkar.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I carried you here. You weigh quite a lot.’

  ‘I’m not fat,’ she said indignantly, sitting up straight.

  ‘That’s better. No, you’re not fat, but you’re not a sylph... Can you walk now, if you lean on me? If not, I’ll get my car. I could be back in half an hour.’

  ‘I can walk,’ she said. He helped her up. Her knees trembled so that she almost fell. ‘I think so. I’ve been walking a long time.’

  He said, ‘I apologise for my flippancy. I just parked my car in Lapri and walked straight past your mission. No one told me.’

  She began walking, his stick in her hand. He walked at her side, comfortably matching his pace to hers; and as he walked, he talked - He was with McFadden Pulley, had been for a year. It’s good, interesting work, he said, and worthwhile. He had never realised how much pioneering the British business firms did, and with no help from Government. At the moment, indeed, it was worse than that - there were prospects of active hostility from the socialistic-minded Congress. But McFadden Pulley would show them! At this very moment M.P. were on the track of new ore sources which, properly exploited, would create a whole new industry for India.

  ‘What ores?’ she asked involuntarily.

  ‘Mainly manganese,’ he said. ‘Do you know anything about metals?’

  She did not answer. His manifest enthusiasm had momentarily aroused her from her lethargy. But Henry was dead, and how could she care what this man did or thought? Anyway, he was only talking to keep her awake.

  He rambled on. He was staying at his firm’s Sabora quarries, just down the main road. She had visited them, of course? ‘No ... I mean, yes, once.’ He loved this central Indian countryside.

  He had been in these parts before. How long had she been in India?

  ‘I landed in Bombay on August 15, 1947,’ she said, and turned her head to stare at him, trying to see his face. There was no reaction.

  ‘Independence Day,’ he said. ‘You’ve been here a year, then. I’ve been here seventeen years. There’s a legend that a remote ancestor came here first in 1620, or thereabouts. Quite a long time.’

  He turned to other subjects - the trees, the flowers, the wild animals. He asked her how much Hindustani she had learned and cross-examined her with Hindustani words and phrases.

  Two miles, she thought. Two miles down the gently winding road, empty as a churchyard at this hour of the evening. Last time she met this man he’d been a lieutenant colonel in worn jungle- green uniform, with two rows of medal ribbons, and he’d been drunk. It was in Bombay, not far from Sir Andrew Graham’s flat - Sir Andrew was the managing director of McFadden Pulley. Perhaps he’d just come away from the flat, too, or was on his way there to be interviewed for a job in civilian life. He’d obviously got the job - but surely
not that day, in that state?

  Her thoughts blurred and wandered. She wished she could lie down and sleep.

  ‘Shall I carry you?’ he asked. ‘I could, you know. You’re not really a bit heavy.’

  ‘No,’ she snapped.

  His supporting arm pushed and joggled her, and she stumbled on. She didn’t even know his name. He knew hers, because someone at the Sabora quarries must have mentioned the missionary couple buried in the jungles up the road, just over the border in Chambal State. Mentioned it, but not bothered to mention that Henry was dead. Perhaps they didn’t know. Or care. Quiet, shy, Henry had never been anyone’s hero. And now he’d gone, silently, with no one but herself as mourner.

  A yellow light shone ahead, and the man said, ‘Nearly there.’ He raised his voice and called, ‘Koi hai? Iddar ao,jaIdi.’

  ‘There’s no one,’ she mumbled. ‘No servants. We are missionaries.’

  ‘But there is someone,’ he said.

  She recognised one of the nurses, a convert, walking towards them, lamp upheld. She heard the man’s rapid talk as the two of them helped her up the steps. Now he had lifted her, and was carrying her to the bedroom. Last night she had knelt all night in the chapel, praying over Henry’s body ... and before that she’d lain alone here while he crept towards death in the front room, where he had insisted they put him. Now she was really alone. She wanted to cry out, Don’t leave me. The nurse was a dirty, unwilling girl, her face sulky even in this extremity. Margaret had learned enough Hindustani to understand that the man was saying, ‘She’s just tired. Stay with her. Give her something to drink, warm milk or tea, if she wakes up.’

  She opened her eyes with a last effort, ‘Thank you. What’s your name?’

  ‘Rodney Savage.’

  When she awoke it was full morning and she was alone. She got up, and only then felt the blisters on her feet. She raised them and looked incuriously at the water-filled lumps spreading across the balls of her feet and between and under every toe. She prepared breakfast, ate hungrily and drank deeply, and went into the glare of the sun.

  Her aching feet led her slowly down the dishevelled drive, a few yards along the road, and then left, towards the tiny chapel. Beside the chapel stood seven crosses. Six, the graves of men and women who had died in the mission hospital, were marked with simple stone crosses. Henry’s had a wooden cross. Later, she must go to Sabora and ask the masons at the McFadden Pulley quarry to make her a tall, beautiful one for him. No, not bigger, just the same as the others: he would have wanted that.

  She stood for a moment at the cross, looking down. What am I to do now? Go over to the ward and see the patients, as though nothing had happened? Write letters to the Society in England, asking for instructions? Begin packing my clothes?

  Henry gave her no answer, on his grave the red earth lay silent, a little darker than the rest, but drying, fast sliding back into the breast of India.

  She turned to the chapel. Its door hung open on a broken hinge and she slipped in. It seemed very dark inside, but hot. There were two benches on one side, two on the other, at the end a bare teak table, and on the table a wooden cross. The floor was of beaten earth and the whole room was twelve feet square. She sat on one of the benches, staring at the cross, then slipped to her knees.

  ‘Jesus Christ, our Lord,’ she began, aloud, and stopped.

  Her whisper hung in the enclosed darkness. A bat circled the room, brushing the silence with noiseless wings, and settled with a creeping sound back on its perch.

  Henry was dead. His work, his life had been this mission. He had carried it forward through a thousand trials, a thousand disappointments. Now the work was hers. She clasped her hands together so tightly that the nails bit into the palms. She was so tired. Already they had written to her from England, accepting that she must close the mission when Henry’s slow, inevitable march to death reached its end. It would be easy to give up, and leave this burning, desolate land to its heathenism, to the pagan sexuality, which could live even in dead stone and seemed to wink and laugh everywhere, just under the decorous surface of life.

  ‘Give me strength to stay. I will not go,’ she prayed. The mission, her husband’s lifework, must live on in her, where he himself would live, inviolate.

  She sat back on the bench, feeling the sweat run down between her thighs and under her breasts.

  As clearly as though he were speaking to her now she heard the man’s voice, Rodney Savage’s voice: ‘You’ve chosen a fine time to arrive, haven’t you? Can’t you read the traffic signs? One-way only, for us. That way.’ And the vivid image of the man saying them, one upflung arm pointing out to sea, face grinning sardonically under the street lamp.

  Now it was dawn that morning a year ago, August 15, 1947, India’s Independence Day. She stood on the deck and watched the grey hot light spread under the monsoon clouds, and watched the approaching city grow out of the water. Henry lay in his bunk, weak and in pain with the first intimations of his illness. She remembered thinking, guiltily, as the Gateway of India slid past, that it was a strange moment to be arriving, bearing the dour messages of Lancashire nonconformist Christianity, in a country joyfully celebrating its reunion with its Hindu past. Henry had been here before, of course, many years. Henry felt nothing, no premonition, no despair. But Henry had faith.

  By the evening of that day Henry felt a little better, but not well enough to go and see Sir Andrew. She quieted his fears on her account, left him in the cheap hotel, and went herself. McFadden Pulley’s cement works at Sabora were close to the Lapri Mission and the firm had always been generous in its help.

  It had drizzled slightly on her way, but when she came out after seeing Sir Andrew the rain had stopped. The streets were in pandemonium. Rockets fizzed across the sky, thunder flashes exploded everywhere, and bonfires flared in the roadways. Without warning a surging crowd, yelling and singing at the tops of their voices, had surrounded her, and she had felt a momentary panic. She found herself pressed against a lamp-post, close to a tall British officer. He was wearing a peaked military cap of pale khaki felt with a black cloth patch behind the big silver badge. The light shining directly on his shoulders showed his rank badges, the black crown and star of a lieutenant-colonel of a Rifle regiment - she had learned all that during the war. A heavy lanyard of twisted black and dark-green cord looped round his neck under the lapels of his tunic, and then divided at the top shirt button, one strand disappearing into each breast pocket. He wore two rows of medal ribbons, starting with the O.B.E. and then the Military Cross with two silver rosettes. Three M.C.s, she remembered thinking - he was a hero. Rodney Savage.

  He noticed her, examined her, and after a while said, ‘Frightened?’

  ‘A little,’ she said, smiling because her panic had gone. ‘They seem so ... wild.’

  ‘Just off the boat?’

  She nodded. ‘This morning, very early. My husband is a medical missionary. He’s been out before, but this is my first time.’ She had to shout to make herself heard above the din. ‘Have you been here long?’

  That was when he said it, ‘Can’t you read the traffic signals? One-way only, for us. That way,’ and the arm pointing seaward. That was also when she realised he was drunk. Nearly paralytic, her long nurse’s training added. She found herself examining him with clinical interest. The lamp-post was supporting him, but his eyes were out of focus and his voice slow, the words kept separate by hard effort, each word slightly blurred.

  She became frightened again, for her question seemed to galvanise him into action. He took a step forward and stood, swaying slightly in the middle of the crowd. He raised his hand, and bellowed in a tremendous voice, ‘Indians! Listen to me.’ The people nearest to him turned in astonishment. The noise took a while to die down, but soon he stood in the centre of a dense circle of excited, dark faces.

  ‘Indians,’ he repeated, ‘you are now independent...’ The faces broke into smiles, and a dozen voices rose in eager shouts in a language
she could not understand. A tall thin man in a dhoti shouted in English, ‘And about time, too, don’t you agree?’

  The drunken colonel bawled, ‘You are taking over this country as a gift from me ... ’ He turned to the man in the dhoti and added, ‘It is not about time, my friend, because you will make an unholy mess of it.’

  She tried to move behind the lamp-post and out of sight. If he annoyed them, they would both be torn in pieces. These people were out of control.

  The dhoti wearer translated for the crowd, who murmured loudly. The dhoti wearer said, ‘But it is our country! You would not be denying that?’

  ‘Certainly, I do! It is not your country. It is mine. I made it, from a hundred countries, I and my great-great-grandfather, and my great-grandfather, and so on. But don’t forget my father, my father, whom you murdered yesterday because he loved you.’ He raised his voice still more. ‘I am sorry I do not speak Gujrati, but my friend here will translate for you ... You are ignorant, superstitious, lazy buggers. You don’t believe in India, because you’re too, too small to understand India. Only understand your own dungheap . . .’ She looked over her shoulder for a way of escape, but there was none. She was hemmed in. The colonel went on, ‘Whassa name that little man, no clothes, spectacles, spinning wheel?’

  ‘The Mahatma!’ the English-speaker gasped. ‘Oh, do not dare . . .’

  ‘He understood,’ the colonel shouted, ‘so you shot him. Like my father . . . Well, aren’t you going to kill me, too?’

  The English-speaker hung his head as he mumbled a translation. The crowd fell silent. Margaret watched in numb astonishment.

  The colonel threw his arms wide and began to talk in a language she did not then understand, but now knew was Hindi. Simultaneously he embraced the English-speaker and shouted, ‘It’ll be all right!’ In a moment he almost vanished under the yelling, weeping, laughing crowd. She saw him shaking hands, hugging everyone close to him, and kissing women on the cheek.