Some Kind of Grace, page 18
‘You’ve been in great danger.’
‘What do you mean? Danger from whom?’
‘From the people here. Last night they held a jirgha; that’s a council.’
‘I saw the fires.’
‘It was about you and Donald.’
‘I’m not surprised. They’re greatly concerned about us. They know Donald’s dangerously ill. They know we’re far from home. I’m expecting a child. It’s perfectly natural for them to be anxious about their guests.’
‘They decided that you have to leave the valley at once.’
‘You must have misunderstood, Mr. McLeod. Often I do myself, through not knowing the language well enough.’
‘I know it pretty well. It would be difficult to misunderstand this.’ He touched the lump where Rafiq had struck him with the gun.
She examined it carefully. ‘Did you fall?’
‘I was struck with the butt of a gun.’
‘By someone here?’
‘Rafiq, a kinsman of Azim’s.’
‘I know him. His wife’s a friend of mine. He’s usually very jolly and friendly. You must have provoked him.’
The complacency in her voice and smile irritated him; it considered itself invincible. This was the smugness of those who had no doubt they were God’s favourites. Even misfortunes, such as the attack in the dark house at Mazarat, and even Donald’s painful illness, were in reality marks of favour. Those like himself who saw God’s hand in nothing could hardly be expected to see it in death and rape.
She waited, with patience and intelligence, for him to say what she had already dismissed as nonsense.
‘They thought there was only one way to protect themselves.’
‘From whom?’ she asked, amused. ‘Surely not from us.’
‘From the soldiers. They thought they would have to kill you, you and Donald. Some of them still think it.’
She gave what seemed to him an imitation of Goodwood Purdie being scandalised by some awful impiety.
‘What a shocking thing to say!’
‘You visited a village at Haimir.’
‘Did we? We visited many villages.’
‘This one is before you come to the blue lake. There was an old woman, with one eye.’
‘We did visit a village where there was an old woman like that; but she had two eyes; one was blind, though.’
‘You remember her?’
‘Very well.’
‘And the village?’
‘Yes. It was a very poor, desolate place. They did their best to be hospitable, poor souls. But I must admit I wasn’t at ease among them.’
‘Why not?’
‘They were all so filthy and diseased. Syphilis mostly. I had to think of my child, and Donald was so weak and susceptible. They had no idea at all of hygiene. They defecated at their door-steps, like animals. I did what I could to train them, though the language difficulty made it almost impossible. Besides, I didn’t feel well.’
‘You gave a bangle to a young girl.’
‘Yes. Poor thing. She took a liking to it. She was very ill.’
‘She’s dead now.’
‘I’m not surprised. There are so many like her throughout the East; millions dying in the most dreadful misery and pain.’
‘Yes. There was a photograph, too.’
‘Yes, of Donald’s mother. He gave it to the old woman. It fascinated her. Perhaps the poor old creature saw in it what she herself might have been, had she been given a chance. She was quite intelligent.’
‘The photograph and the bangle were used as evidence to convict the whole village.’
‘Of stealing? But they didn’t steal them. We gave them freely.’
‘Not of stealing. Of murder.’
‘Murder?’
‘And two of them, one the old woman’s son, and the other a simpleton, were dragged off to the city, to be hanged.’
‘But whom were they supposed to have murdered?’
‘You and Donald. They confessed to it.’
‘How could they?’ she cried. ‘We are still alive.’
‘No one knew that. You were traced to this village. The bangle and the photograph were found; there was blood on the photograph. So they were accused, and in the end they confessed.’
‘Why should they, when they knew they were innocent?’
‘They were beaten into it. Haimir is now a celebrated village. Tourists will go out of their way to see it. They will peep into the cave where it is said you were sleeping when you were attacked. When Azim left here a week ago it was Haimir he went to. He wanted to see for himself what had happened to them. Now he’s afraid that it might happen to his own people.’
‘I find all this difficult to believe, Mr. McLeod.’
‘I’m not surprised. It’s true, all the same.’
‘From your tone you seem to think that Donald and I are to blame.’
‘I don’t think you’re altogether innocent. If you had got a message out of here, to let people know you were safe, it wouldn’t have happened.’
She closed her eyes, and placed her clasped hands on her belly. ‘Safe?’ she whispered. ‘You have not seen Donald yet?’
He rose. ‘I’m going to.’
‘He’s too ill to talk to anyone.’
‘I’ve come a long way.’
She stood up. ‘I shall warn him you are here. If he agrees to see you, do not be surprised if you find him greatly changed.’
‘I know he’s ill.’
‘I meant in his mind, in his attitude to God. All the time he suffers great pain. It confuses him. Sometimes, from the way he speaks to me, I can tell he doesn’t know who I am. You mustn’t excite him.’
‘I’ll try not to.’
She turned; after she had gone a few steps, she said, ‘Mr. McLeod, we are grateful for your help; but you must allow us to decide whether or not to accept it.’
He watched her walk towards the house, leisurely in the sun. At the door she turned, looked back for almost a minute, and then waved.
So that was the beautiful, tender-souled, pious Margaret Duncan, whom Goodwood Purdie had so unctuously pitied. She was beautiful, yes; but her soul, even before this pilgrimage and the ordeal at Mazarat, must have been tough enough; a kind of stupidity and selfishness protected it. Donald and she had made love, successfully enough as her pregnancy indicated; but there could be little doubt that before it she would have gasped out some kind of grace, and after it a thanksgiving. She would have made it so pure that for Donald, his conversion still raw, it must have been intolerable.
It would be as well to keep in mind that she was – in a way too subtle for him to diagnose – mad.
Eighteen
She kept him waiting for thirty-five minutes, deliberately, he felt sure. The delay was not caused by her solicitude for Donald. No; all the time he felt she was watching him from the window, wishing with a resentment in which piety was an ingredient that he had not come. There was, of course, an obvious and pardonable reason: she could not conquer the fear that the child in her womb might not be Donald’s. However resolute, pious, and self-sufficient she might be, she would find it hard to cherish a child conceived in terror on her part and criminal lust on the father’s; yet she was showing great courage in facing that possibility. No one could blame her for wanting to stay here until the child was born. The bitter problem of what to do with it, if it was born dark-skinned and darker-souled, could perhaps be resolved in this remote valley of dark-skinned people; at home in Britain, or in the hospital at the British Embassy, it could never be. Yet did she not believe in a ubiquitous God who, to someone in favour like her, always intended benevolence?
McLeod tried to curb his spitefulness towards her. He could hardly judge her because he did not understand her. She and her kind were far less comprehensible to him than Azim’s people. Her beliefs seemed to him almost insanely contradictory, yet to her they were so consistent that she was able, strengthened by them, to face up with remarkable courage to a situation that would have overwhelmed many a woman whose religious faith, like his own, was an intelligent postponement.
All the same, when she at last came out and walked slowly towards him, he again found it difficult to sympathise with her; his sympathies were instead with Azim. The latter at least knew humility; she had given no sign yet of knowing it. She had expressed no regret, and apparently had felt none, on hearing about the two men hanged on her account. Had she dismissed them as heathens, outside her God’s concern? Hardly, for hadn’t she devoted her life to nursing similar heathens?
‘Donald wants to see you,’ she said. ‘But I think I should warn you.’
He waited.
‘He has an obsession.’ She kept looking at him, but he could see she was under great stress to turn away; pride, stronger than modesty, prevented her. ‘He is under the delusion that the child I am expecting is not his. He will tell you that; he has told others. There are explanations. The chief one is, he thinks that love – sexual love – is shameful. Many people, whose religious faith has become uncertain, think that. You see, something happened while we were in Mazarat. I am telling you this, Mr. McLeod, but I must repeat it is our business, mine and Donald’s, no one else’s. Ours and God’s only.’
Did God’s part in it embrace the old woman’s at Haimir, for instance, or her own parents’? McLeod remembered them, white-haired, respectable churchgoers, who in mild voices had blamed Kemp for their daughter’s death and expected him to roast in hell for all eternity.
They walked towards the house. She led the way.
‘I said something happened at Mazarat.’ She did not turn round.
‘I know about it.’
She swung round. ‘Who told you?’
‘The Colonel of the police.’
‘What did he tell you? Does everyone know? They promised it would be kept secret.’
‘It is secret. He told me in a delirium. He had malaria; besides, his wife and three children had died of smallpox a month or so before. His account was rather incoherent.’
‘What did he tell you?’
‘That you had been attacked – raped, he said.’
‘Did you talk to the doctor at the hospital?’
‘No, he’d been transferred.’
‘You wouldn’t expect to find a very skilful doctor there.’
‘No.’
‘And he was frightened. But surely he would be able to recognise the symptoms of pregnancy. I was already pregnant, Mr. McLeod. I asked Mr. Purdie the minister to marry us, because I knew I was pregnant. The doctor agreed. I don’t enjoy talking about this. It should be forgotten. I could forget it, but Donald can’t. It’s part of his obsession. He’ll want to tell you about it. If you can, dissuade him. In his own interests. He torments himself. He blasphemes. He humiliates me. Worst of all, he denies the child is his.’
Then from within the house a hoarse, plaintive voice called, ‘Come in, Johnny,’ in Gaelic.
She gripped McLeod’s arm fiercely. ‘What does that mean?’
‘It’s Gaelic for “Come in”.’
‘I didn’t know he knew Gaelic.’
‘He doesn’t. Just a few phrases.’
‘Talk in English, please. I want to hear everything that’s said. I have a right to.’
As McLeod entered, troubled by the Gaelic words and their associations of home, he saw a leopard skin spread out on the floor, with the mouth snarling and the eyes gleaming. It gave to the sunlight in the room an atmosphere of unrest and threat that Kemp, lying on a charpoy, intensified. His grin of welcome was itself like a snarl, and his eyes glittered hungrily. But what made him look most like the dead animal was his stillness. His hands on the blue cover were as still as its claws, and his haggard, bearded face, against the orange pillows, was like John the Baptist’s on a platter, in a picture McLeod had once seen. There was the same expression of sinister ecstasy.
‘Well, Johnny,’ he said, ‘as they say in your native hills, it’s a far cry from Loch Awe.’
McLeod saw that his plan was impossible. Kemp was a dying man.
‘It is, Donald.’
‘Come over here, and let me see you.’
McLeod went over and Kemp grinned up at him.
‘Meg tells me you’ve been looking for us.’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you think we were lost, Johnny?’
‘Yes.’
‘We are, Johnny, so lost that neither you nor anyone else will ever find us. Is that right, Meg?’
‘Don’t excite yourself, Donald. You’ll just bring on another attack.’
‘Why shouldn’t I excite myself? Here’s a friend come hundreds of miles to see me.’
‘He came over the mountains, Donald.’
‘He looks it. Have you got the pot on, Meg? Make our guest a cup of tea. So you came over the mountains, Johnny? You’d find it cold up there, and lonely. I lie and watch them all day. Do you know what you look like Johnny? A refugee from Armageddon. Tell me, Johnny,’ he went on, with a sudden eagerness in his voice, ‘is it true what Meg keeps telling me? That the “war to end all humanity” has started?’
‘It’s you that keeps telling me, Donald.’
‘The truth is, Johnny, we’ve been telling each other, to console ourselves.’
‘There’s no war, Donald.’
‘You’re not just saying that to spare our feelings, Johnny? You’ve got the wrong idea if you are. Meg’s been praying there’s a war. Every day she’s been coming in with stories about the men carrying guns and the women being frightened. You see, she thinks the world deserves to be annihilated because of what happened to her at Mazarat. You’ll have noticed she’s pregnant? Do you still have your dreams, Johnny? You were always one of the astutest minions of Caesar, except that you had the kind of dreams a man of God should have. I keep telling Meg, “We’re like creatures in one of Johnny McLeod’s dreams.” The climax was at Mazarat.’
‘I’ve told him.’
‘But your version’s different from mine, Meg.’
She looked at McLeod, appealing to him to stop Donald, or at least not to believe him.
‘A stinking sort of place, Mazarat. Though you were right in mentioning that the domes of the mosque are bonny in the moonlight, with the doves flying about them. In fact, it wasn’t far from the mosque that Meg was attacked.’
‘It was the Colonel of the police who told me about it, Donald.’
‘The dapper wee chap. You could see your face in his boots. He could see his own in everything. More conceited than a rutting sparrow, but efficient at his job.’
‘Since you met him his wife and three children were wiped out by smallpox.’
‘Is that so now? Looks as if somebody else is efficient at his job, too. The deil, I mean, Johnny. Who else? He let loose at us a couple of the most fiendish hashish-maddened brutes out of hell. But the wee Colonel had them rounded up before you could cry “Hallelujah!” And he had them shot while you waited. And by Christ I did wait. I showed a most praiseworthy and Christian perseverance in seeing wickedness punished and virtue revenged. The General Assembly would have been proud of me.’
Over by the stove Margaret kept her face turned away; to hide the hatred on it, McLeod felt sure.
‘Those misbegotten bastards, Johnny, cheated me after all. They died with the certainty of paradise in their eyes. I saw it there myself. You don’t believe in paradise, Johnny. So you’re worse off than the scabbiest, skinniest, shiniest beggar in this tail-end of civilisation. I believe in it, Johnny; but I believe most of all in the deprivation of it.’
‘You’re killing yourself,’ she cried.
‘They had knives, Johnny. We were tired; we’d been travelling for ten hours, in a bus crammed with people. I’d been feeling sick, too.’
‘What he’s trying to say,’ she said, ‘is that he could do nothing to help me.’
‘That’s right, Johnny. I could do nothing. I couldn’t even be killed. So poor Meg was stripped and raped.’
She covered her eyes. ‘Don’t talk about it,’ she screamed.
‘As a result, Johnny, she’s pregnant. Christ, was there ever a less immaculate conception?’
She rushed over, her face wet with tears. She tried to keep her voice quiet. ‘You know that isn’t true. It’s blasphemous and false. I was already pregnant before it happened.’
‘But you never told me, Meg.’
‘You know why. The doctor verified it.’
‘Because I asked him to. You had to be pacified, Meg. You were going out of your mind.’
‘No, Donald, you were the one going out of your mind. It was you who insisted on waiting, to gloat over their punishment.’
‘Was that madness? Johnny, tell her that was the clearest-minded Christian sanity.’
‘Leave Mr. McLeod out of it. Let him be a witness only. It’s time I said this to you, Donald, before a witness. I think God must have sent Mr. McLeod here to be that witness.’ In spite of herself, her voice kept rising, and her tears were fresh. ‘I was already pregnant, Donald, because you and I had sworn, before God, that we were husband and wife.’
‘An oath’s not as potent as that.’
‘As husband and wife we made love, Donald, not once, not twice, many times.’
‘She’s lying, Johnny, she’s a lying bitch,’ screamed Donald. ‘If you hand me that Bible I’ll swear upon it she’s lying. I made a vow, Johnny, in India, years ago, and I’ve kept it. She’s tried to make me break it, but I never have. Give me that Bible and I’ll swear upon it. Give it to me, or I’ll get up and fetch it myself. The last time I tried to get up I fainted and was unconscious for a couple of days.’
McLeod was reminded that she must attend to all Donald’s needs.
The sick man was growing weaker. ‘Give it to me, Johnny.’
‘It’s not necessary, Donald.’
‘It is, I tell you.’ He gasped and grimaced with pain. ‘I’ve got to convince you she’s lying.’
It was she, become calm again, who put the Bible where he could place his hand upon it. For almost a minute he lay, gasping quietly, his eyes closed, with his hand upon the Bible as another man’s, in danger, might rest upon a gun. He appeared to have forgotten what he had been going to do. He began to moan, with his teeth sunk into his lip. When he opened his eyes for a moment there was no recognition in them of McLeod or Margaret, but only of pain.
