For the first time, Christopher put the mug of poteen to his lips and
drank. It took his breath away and made him splutter, but the fire
that filled him afterwards made him feel better. He looked at the pale
liquid in the tin and thought of the priest raising the chalice at
mass. Hie est enim Calix Sanguinis mei. Wine and whiskey,
blood and fire, faith and despair. He raised the mug again and drank.
This time he did not cough.
“I was born near here,” he replied to Cormac’s question. He thought he could afford to be honest with him.
“My father worked for the Political Service. He brought me up to love the country. I don’t think he loved anything or anyone himself but India. Not my mother, not really. She died when I was twelve, and I was sent to school in England. Then, when I was fifteen, my father disappeared.”
The doctor looked at him curiously.
“What? Vanished into thin air, d’you mean? Like a fakir” He pronounced the word as if it was ‘faker’.
Christopher gave a wry smile.
“Just like a fakir,” he agreed.
“Only without a rope. No rope, no music just himself. He was making a visit to Major Todd, our Trade Agent in Yatung back in those days. There was nobody in Gyantse then. My father left Kalimpong one day in October with a party of guides and bearers. The weather was turning bad, but they had no difficulty in making it over the Nathu- la They were already well into Tibet when he disappeared.
“The party woke up one morning to find him gone. No note, no sign, no trail they could follow. He’d left all his belongings in the camp. They searched for him, of course all that day and the next, but he was nowhere to be found. Then the snow got really heavy and they had to call off the search and push on to Yatung.
“He never reappeared. But nobody found a body. They sent a letter to my school; I was handed it one day in the middle of Latin class. It was very formal no compassion in it, just the formalities.
They sent me his things eventually decorations, citations, letters , patent, all the trumpery. I still keep them in a trunk at home in England. I never look at them, but they’re there.”
“So you stayed in England?” Cormac interjected.
Christopher shook his head.
“Not until recently. I left as soon as I finished school and came straight out to India to join the ICS. That was in 1898. I’m not quite sure why I came back. Sometimes I think it was to look for my father, but I know that can’t be right. Perhaps I just felt f something had been left unfinished here, and I wanted to finish it.”
“And did you?”
Christopher stared at the wall, at a patch of damp high up, near the ceiling. There was a gecko beside it, pale and ghostly, clinging tightly to the wall.
“No,” he said, but quietly, as though speaking to himself.
“Bloody awful, isn’t it?” said Cormac.
Christopher looked at him, uncomprehending.
“Life,” the doctor said.
“Bloody awful business. That,” he went on, ‘is the only advantage of growing old. There’s not much more of it to face.”
Christopher nodded and sipped from his mug. He felt a shiver go through him, as if it were a premonition of something. It was getting late.
“We have to talk,” he said.
“Fire away,” said Cormac, leaning back in his chair.
“Something’s going on here,” Christopher said.
“Tonight I was attacked. Perhaps it was a thief, as you say; perhaps it was a dacoit who’d grown tired of ambushing people on the highways and byways; and perhaps it was someone who didn’t want me in Kalimpong asking questions. I’m beginning to think that last possibility is the one with most going for it.”
“What sort of questions have you been asking, Mr. Wylam?”
Christopher told him. Cormac was silent for a while, collecting his thoughts. The light of the penny candle hurt his eyes; he turned his face away from it gently.
“I don’t suppose I’m allowed to ask you exactly why you’ve been enquiring after this monk. Or why someone would want to snatch your son in the first place, much less bring him here to Kalimpong or up to Tibet.”
“All I can say is that I used to work for the Government and that someone in a position to know thinks my son’s kidnapping is related to the work I did. We know the monk brought a message out of Tibet and that the message was conveyed to a man called Mishig, the Mongol Trade Agent here.”
“Aye, I know Mishig well enough. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn he was involved in something shifty. Go on.”
“The problem is finding out just how a man who was dying, who seems to have had no visitors, and who is said to have been delirious, managed to get a message to anyone. I’m beginning to think I’m wasting my time here.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” said Cormac in a quiet voice.
Christopher said nothing, but he sensed that the atmosphere in the room had changed. Whether it was as a result of the poteen or the lateness of the hour or the relating of reminiscences, Cormac’s mood had altered from jesting cynicism to measured seriousness.
He was a man on the verge of divulging closely guarded matters.
“I think,” said the doctor, choosing his words carefully, ‘the man you want is the Reverend Doctor Carpenter. He knows Mishig well enough. And, if I’m not mistaken, he knew the monk even better. But, to tell you the truth, it’s just as likely that Tsewong took the message to Mishig himself. It was one or the other of them, believe me.”
A deep and seamless silence followed Cormac’s words. Christopher felt himself hold his breath then release it slowly.
“Carpenter? But why’ What possible motive could a man like that have to take messages round town on behalf of a man he must have considered the next best thing to a devil-worshipper?”
“A motive? With wee Johnny Carpenter? Good God man, we’d be up all night if we started talking about motives.”
“Such as?”
Cormac did not reply at once. Maybe it was his turn to feel suspicious. Christopher guessed he had set in motion a process he was beginning to regret.
“Let’s begin with something else,” he said.
“Officially, this man Tsewong died of exposure. I wrote the death
certificate me self
You’ll find a copy with the Registrar for Births and Deaths, Kalimpong District. Man called Hughes’ a Welshman from Neath.
We’re all Celts round here. Anyway, that isn’t what Tsewong died of at all. Do you understand me?”
“How did he die?” asked Christopher. He noticed that Cormac had begun to take more of the poteen.
“He took his own life.”
The way the doctor pronounced the word, it sounded like ‘tuck’:
‘he tuck his own life’. Christopher imagined the monk in bed, dying.
“Tuck yourself up now,” came the voice of Christopher’s mother from his childhood. Tsewong had come through the cold passes into India and tucked himself up for good.
“But that’s impossible.”
“Is it?” Cormac’s voice was gentle, almost pathetic. He had seen the dead man, touched his face, his skin.
“You think a Buddhist monk can’t kill himself? For some of them, their whole life is a slow death. There are men in Tibet who shut themselves into a wee hole in the rock and have themselves bricked up with nothing but a gap to let food in and shit out. Did you know that? That’s a living death. They last for years and years sometimes. They go in young men and end up old corpses.
