Ragtime in Simla Read online

  Maud could understand the girl’s indignation. On their way down the platform they had passed the third class carriages. Wreathed in tobacco smoke of a particularly virulent French kind, noisy with loud conversation and shouts of laughter, crowded with large and doubtless garlic-scented men in bleu de travail. Not the place for an elegant personal maid from Paris. Second class would have been appropriate. But such it seemed was the case and the maid, with a final imprecation (Maud hoped that the word ‘merde’ did not enter Alice’s vocabulary), turned and marched away down the platform, heels clicking indignantly.

  ‘Florence! Elle s’offense pour un rien!’ said Isabelle by way of explanation. ‘Very touchy, you know.’

  If Alice had met Maud’s eye she would have read the message, ‘There! I told you so!’

  Isabelle de Neuville rallied and turned with polite interest to Alice. ‘You are going,’ she said, ‘to Bombay? For the first time? That is quite an adventure! May I ask what takes you to distant Bombay?’

  Before Alice could reply, the door opened again to admit the fourth passenger to their carriage. He was a young man, perhaps in his late twenties, leaning heavily on a stick and wearing dark glasses. He needed the help of a porter to climb the step and find his seat. Any time in the last four years a wounded soldier was a common enough sight but of late there had been fewer as the hospitals discharged their last patients and, such few as there were, they once again received special attention.

  The young man muttered an apology in English and repeated it in clumsy French then, obviously overcome by shyness, relapsed into silence and Alice was able to pick up Isabelle’s question and reply.

  ‘I’m going to Bombay,’ she said importantly, ‘because I have business there –’

  ‘That’ll do, Alice,’ said Maud repressively.

  ‘In fact I have a business there.’

  ‘You make it sound very intriguing,’ said Isabelle, laughing.

  ‘Not really intriguing. There’s a family business and after my grandfather’s death it was left to me. To me and to a cousin, that is. My parents died of the influenza last year and though the business should have gone to my older brother, Lionel was killed in France. A month before the war ended.’ Alice sighed and for a moment, reminded of her loss, she looked forlorn and vulnerable and her eyes filled with tears.

  Maud Benson thought, not for the first time, that Alice’s eyes were just a little too large, a little too expressive and far too blue for her own good.

  Alice brightened. ‘This cousin of mine, well, second cousin really – I’m going out to meet him. I’ve never met him before!’

  ‘That sounds intriguing too!’

  ‘There are lots of second cousins in the business and I’ve never met them either.’ And Alice went on to describe as best she understood it herself the nature of the family business now, in part at least, hers. ‘I don’t really understand who they all are. But I’ve been sent a sort of “Who’s Who” telling me who are the – er – dramatis personae,’ (Alice was pleased with the phrase) ‘and who’ll meet me and where I’m supposed to go and where to buy clothes.’ She tapped a slim leather folder in her lap. ‘It’s all in here and I’m supposed to read all this. But, really! There’s just too much to look at!’ And then, naively, ‘I’m ever so excited!’

  Isabelle received an impression of considerable opulence. She had never been to India but even she had heard of ICTC, the Imperial and Colonial Trading Corporation. She smiled at the excited and, she had to think, slightly inebriated English girl talking with such hope and enthusiasm of her future. So innocent. So vulnerable.

  ‘. . . and there’ll be elephants and rajahs, tigers and Bengal Lancers! Indian princes dripping with diamonds! Perhaps I might marry one of them!’ Alice chattered on.

  Maud began to nod off and was unsure how many miles they had covered when she was awoken by a waiter passing through announcing that luncheon was served. The young soldier shook himself and remembering his manners managed to say shyly that he would be delighted to escort the ladies to the dining car if they wished to go. He was smiling to himself as though at a private joke. ‘Colin Simpson,’ he introduced himself, ‘Captain in the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. Rejoining my regiment. For a month or so, prior to demobilization. Silly sort of business but if His Majesty’s Government are prepared to pay my fare out and back, I’m not going to complain!’ He smiled again. ‘My regiment’s in India at the moment actually. I too am bound for Bombay.’

  Maud Benson could hardly remember a time when she had been so resentful. Her carriage companions had, quite unnecessarily, requested to be seated at the same table and had proceeded cheerfully in a babble of French and English to order every course on the menu. They had even insisted that she drink a glass of wine with the fish and another with the lamb. With predictable results. Two hours after they had sat down they were still at table talking fifty to the dozen while Maud could hardly keep her eyes open. Though unwilling to leave her protégée behind, Maud concluded that, though flushed and clearly over-stimulated, she was safe enough in the company of the rather dull and unglamorous young captain. And his presence would cancel out any attempt on Isabelle’s part to engage Alice in . . . what? Maud was not quite sure but thought it might amount at its imaginable worst to – gaming or drinking. And that was most unlikely in the circumstances. In a few hours Madame de Neuville would be out of their lives anyway. Satisfied, Maud made her apologies and reeled back to their carriage to take, as she put it, ‘her postprandial forty winks’.

  She did not hear the sigh of relief from the three remaining at the table. She did hear the conversation resume at once and with increased animation. Three glasses of wine appeared to have loosened the captain’s tongue to a point where he could boast of leopards and tigers, of shikari, of romance and danger to be found in the foothills of the Himalayas.

  At the end of the meal, Colin Simpson excused himself and went to smoke a cigar in the corridor. Draining her glass of brandy, Isabelle de Neuville rose to her feet and with a gracious smile made towards the ladies’ compartment at the end of the carriage. As she moved carefully along the dining car, it lurched suddenly and she had to steady herself on the arm of a waiter. Thanking him prettily, she turned, laughing, to Alice and called, ‘There I told you! Sixteen-year-old train driver!’

  Alice laughed back and settled to wait for Isabelle to return.

  Whether it was the two unaccustomed glasses of wine taken over lunch on top of the mysterious Campari-soda which was causing the train to sway or whether there really was a sixteen-year-old engine driver at the controls, Alice couldn’t decide but the condition was getting worse. Noises were getting louder as the train approached a bend before the viaduct crossing of a deep valley. Swaying and staggering and hardly able to keep her balance, Maud Benson emerged blear-eyed from the carriage.

  ‘What on earth’s going on? These French railways!’

  Alice passionately wished that Isabelle would return and she took a few paces towards the ladies’ cloakroom at the end of the carriage but a sudden lurch threw her on to her knees.

  It was clear that something was seriously wrong. The train was bumping and banging against the parapet of the viaduct. It was worse than that. The train had smashed the parapet from which masonry blocks were, one by one, in a percussive series of deafening machine-gun explosions detached to fall many feet below into the ravine.

  ‘Isabelle!’ Alice called desperately but the floor came up and hit her. Broken glass shattered round her. A jagged splinter gashed her cheek. The ceiling of the carriage was beneath her and this was the last thing she saw before she lost consciousness.

  She was spared the sickening plunge as the Blue Train – the pride of the SNCF – tumbled three hundred feet into the ravine. With an explosion of sound, the engine, pistons still racing, crashed, for a moment to be suspended between the sides of the ravine. But only for a moment. One by one the falling carriages, with a long roll of murderous noise, pil
ed on top and as further sections of the parapet gave way further carriages fell. A despairing shriek from the train whistle continued to mark the death of the Blue Train.

  In her carriage, Maud Benson struggled to regain her seat, wondering, as Alice had done, why the walls of the carriage were beneath her, becoming vaguely aware that the luggage rack opposite had buckled but never aware that it was sections of this, snapping with catapult force, that had hit her under the chin, almost severing her head.

  Luggage compartments burst open, trunks and cases were spewed on to the ground. The first and second class carriages at the head of the train were little more now than an unidentifiable tangle of wrecked steel. Seat cushions, light fittings, dining-car tables and tablecloths, wine bottles even from the pantry, soon to disappear in a sheet of flame as the galley exploded. The third class carriages at the rear of the train were at first seemingly undamaged until these too were finally pulled by their own weight from the track, through the parapet and into the ravine.

  As the flames died and the clanking carcass settled, the deathly silence was broken only by the hysterical crying of a baby.

  It was an hour and a half before the rescue train creaked its way cautiously from St Vincent through the Burgundy hills and came to a stop a careful hundred yards down the line from the collapsed viaduct. The employees of the SNCF, the fire brigade, the doctors and stretcher bearers hastily assembled on the train stood for a moment aghast, looking down on the disaster in the remote wooded ravine below. The Blue Train lay crushed and mangled under the weight of the iron girders and masonry which spilled under, around and above it.

  Pierre Bernard, casualty officer, aged sixty-five and overdue for retirement, spoke for all. ‘Maintenance! No bloody maintenance! Been going on for years! I warned them! Bloody war!’

  The men stared in horror at the smouldering remains of the burnt-out carriages and crossed themselves, unable to speak. They had come prepared to save lives and tend the injured but the deep silence below was warning enough that their task was to be of a more sinister character.

  An urgent message was sent back down the line for heavy lifting gear (none nearer than Lyons) and with silent determination they collected picks, spades and stretchers and set off to climb down into the ravine.

  After an hour of toil, one baby still alive and unhurt had been recovered along with eighty bodies only from a death toll estimated variously at two hundred and four hundred, and the search for survivors still went on. Coming at last to wreckage which had fallen further than the rest and was untouched by the fire, the searchers caught sight of a lisle-stocking-clad leg sticking out from under a first class carriage. With picks they forced the metal seams apart and extracted the body of a middle-aged woman. Thoughtfully they pulled down her tweed skirt, put her bag and her crochet work beside her on the stretcher and covered her up. The bearers set off to make another slow trek back up to the railway line.

  The next body was that of a soldier in British khaki uniform. ‘Le pauvre con!’ muttered Pierre Bernard. He looked with distress at the war medals still attached to his chest. ‘He survives the war to die like this! Head stove in. Take him up.’

  A glimpse of red fabric behind a boulder caught his eye, ‘Over here!’ he called and the men followed. They stood looking with a sorrow not diminished by the number of corpses they had already handled at the woman lying like a rag doll at their feet. Her back was broken, her head smashed open by the rock next to which it still lay, the red woollen jacket and black fur trimmings sticky with congealed blood. ‘Take her up,’ said Pierre.

  A small sound caught his attention. ‘Chut! Chut! Listen! What’s that?’

  Again he heard the faint cry. ‘Help! Help me!’

  They hurried towards the sound. A girl in a torn grey dress was struggling to rise to her knees. For a moment Pierre thought, distractedly, that she was kneeling to pick the spring flowers, primroses and cowslips, which studded the grass around her. This fancy vanished the moment she turned towards them. With a gasp of pity and horror he took in the blood-sodden dress, the mad blue eyes staring, unseeing, in a white face rendered the more startling by the stream of bright red blood which still flowed from a gash on the side of her face.

  ‘Maud?’ she said as they gathered round her. ‘I’m so sorry! Maud! Oh, where’s Maud?’

  Chapter Two

  Northern India, Spring 1922

  Joe Sandilands felt the judder of the train as the brakes were applied. Eager to put the tedious journey behind him, he thankfully rose to his feet to take his hand luggage from the rack. His sudden movement triggered a fluttering response amongst the other passengers in the carriage. The two army wives roused their four children, hot and cross, who stirred about, stretching and yawning and quarrelling sleepily amongst themselves.

  Joe helped them to lift down and sort out picnic hampers, toys and crayons and travelling sleeping bags, and his smiling good humour and easy ways with the children were rewarded by effusive thanks and inviting smiles from their mothers. He replied politely to suggestions of attending picnics, dinner parties, fund-raising events and theatrical performances in Simla.

  ‘Are we there yet? Is this the Hills?’ asked the youngest child for the twentieth time.

  ‘Not yet, darling. Fifty miles to go. This is Kalka. This is where we change trains and get on to the Toy Train. Then we’ll go chugging up into the Hills. Round lots of bends we’ll go, through lots of tunnels, up and up into the clouds. And you’ll see snowy mountains and huge trees and lots of monkeys! You’re going to love it in Simla, Robin!’

  ‘Are you coming on the Toy Train with us, sir?’ Robin asked Joe.

  ‘No, Robin. I’ll be sorry to miss it but a friend is sending a car to the station to pick me up. We’ll have a race, shall we? See which of us gets to Simla first?’

  ‘A car?’ said the boy’s mother, Mrs Major Graham, raising her eyebrows. ‘You have friends in high places then – socially as well as geographically, I mean. I understand that there are only two or three cars allowed to enter Simla . . .’

  The Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal,’ said Joe, answering the question good manners forbade her to ask, ‘Sir George Jardine, has kindly lent me his summer guest house for the month while I’m on leave.’ He waited with curiosity to see the effect the name would have on his audience. In caste-conscious and precedent-conscious India it was always a preoccupation to establish where in the pecking order to place a new acquaintance. Joe was humorously aware that both women would subconsciously have been marking him out of ten. Policeman? One mark only. DSO ribbon, on the other hand – three marks perhaps. Quite personable and well spoken, perhaps another three. But, borrowing the Lieutenant-Governor’s guest bungalow and having a car sent to meet him! Many, many marks! Certainly up to an aggregate of ten. Good old India! thought Joe, reading the by-play and the glances exchanged between the women. He was amused to see their friendly directness now salted with a pinch of deference as they reassessed his status.

  The children, supremely unaware of any change in social nuances, pounced on this new information.

  ‘Has the Governor got an elephant?’ they wanted to know.

  ‘He has four in Calcutta where he lives in the cold weather but none in the Hills,’ Joe explained.

  ‘Will you have to wear your medals all the time if you’re staying with a Governor?’ asked the oldest boy.

  ‘Oh, yes, Billie. At breakfast, at tiffin, at dinner. I shall even . . .’ Joe leaned forward and finished confidentially, ‘have to wear them on my pyjamas.’

  Round-eyed disbelief was followed by a shout of laughter and the children were still giggling as Joe bounced them out of the carriage and into the waiting arms of their ayahs and bearers who hurried forward to retrieve their families ready for the next leg of the journey.

  The Umballa to Kalka train had been crowded with English families fleeing the heat of the plains for the cool of the Himalayan foothills. In early April the temperature was already unbeara
ble in Delhi and government and military alike were on the move to the summer capital of India. Simla. Joe looked above the heads of the excited crowds milling around him hoping to catch his first sight of the town perched on its spur of the mountains. Though, disappointingly, Simla was still hidden from view he stood for a moment making out the line of mighty snow-capped mountains in the distance beyond the dark foot-hills, the morning sun striking the summits with a theatrical brilliance, rank after rank and on and up into Kashmir and far Tibet.

  Joe had enjoyed the company of talkative children on the long journey from Umballa; he had even enjoyed fencing with their inquisitive mothers but now the pending arrival in Simla – so much looked forward to – was too precious to share. Joe wanted to savour it in tranquillity, and as the crowds swirled away to the Toy Train he found himself at last alone on the platform. Alone that is but for one other passenger. A tall, distinguished, heavily built man was, like him, gazing in rapt absorption at the mountains.

  He seemed to be in no hurry; he was clearly not intending to take the Toy Train. He seemed, like Joe, to be savouring this moment. Joe tried to place him in the hierarchy of India. Expensively dressed in a casual linen suit. Not made in England – not made in India. France? No. Joe decided – America. Also, the man himself – English-looking but not English. His silver-grey hair was longer than any London barber would have permitted. Distinguished. Confident and attractive in his frank enjoyment of this shared moment. He caught Joe’s eye and smiled.