A Division Of The Spoils (Raj Quartet 4) by Paul Scott

got it to ring reached him and no hum of party conversation either. He wondered whether Purvis had the date right and then whether someone had tipped the Maharanee off about Security’s interest in her circle of friends so that she had cancelled the party and would be found curled up with a good book. Wondering this he next considered the possibility that she had taken a fancy to Purvis and planned to lure him back to the flat with or without the bottle of whisky on a night when she knew they could be alone together. He could not assess the power of Purvis’s sexual attraction. In such matters women had their own unassailable scale of values and judgment. But, having arrived at this possible explanation he now wondered how old she was and, if young, how well-favoured. The evening suddenly seemed full of an unexpected kind of potential.
    The door was opened abruptly by a young Indian girl of gazellelike charm. ‘Hello,’ she said. Clearly she had none of that creature’s timidity.
    ‘Hello. I’ve got a note and a package.’
    ‘For me?’
    He gave her the envelope. Her beautifully architectured eyebrows contracted. ‘Oh, it’s for Auntie. What a jolly shame. But do come in.’
    ‘Thank you.’
    Perron stepped inside and let her close the door. Her scent was too cloying for his taste but welcome after the smell on the night breeze blowing in from the Bombay foreshore which Perron was convinced was used as a lavatory. Indian insistence that it was just the smell of the sea and the seaweed had not yet made him change his mind.
    In the hall – the top end of a long wide passage with doors leading off from either side of it and cluttered with solid but poorly assorted furniture, including an ornately carved black Chinese settle upholstered with velvet cushions – the girl took the package from him and put it together with the envelope on an ebony table on which a heavy and thick-ankled Shiva danced in his petrified ring of fire. She said, ‘Come and have a drink why not?’ and led the way into a living-room.
    Around the walls sofas and chairs were set in the solemn and rather hostile manner of the segregational East. The tiled floor was uncarpeted – perhaps for dancing. There was no balcony but the windows were wide open. The lighting was less successful than in Purvis’s flat. From the centre of the ceiling hung a cluster of bulbs in a cruciform wooden chandelier of the kind that at home was
de rigueur
in rooms that sported fake beams and parchment lampshades with galleons stencilled on them. But these bulbs were unshaded. A few wall-lights in glass and chromium brackets added to the glare but did nothing to eliminate the harsh shadows. Near the window was a cocktail cabinet of impressive vulgarity, and to this the girl had gone. She turned round.
    ‘You’re a sergeant, aren’t you? Auntie says all sergeants drink beer but there was one the other night who asked for a White Lady.’
    ‘Were you able to oblige him?’
    ‘One of the officers got it for him but it took them ages because of the glass having to be put in the refrigerator.’
    ‘A straightforward gin and lemon squash would suit thissergeant very well. Shall I make it myself and get you a drink too?’
    ‘Oh, no. I’m supposed to do this sort of thing. Auntie says it’s good for me because it helps me not to be shy. I used to be very shy. But if you like to hold the bottle and help to pour it would be nice because I find the bottles so heavy, and once I dropped one and Auntie trod on a piece of the glass and was very cross.’
    Perron joined her at the Wurlitzer-style cabinet. At a rough estimate he thought there were about fifty glasses of different shapes set ready, none of them as clean as they might have been. Gravely he uncapped a bottle of Carew’s and held it above the glass she presented. She put her hand on his and canted.
    ‘Is that enough?’
    ‘More than generous.’
    ‘May I leave you to do the rest? I must take Auntie the