Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 37, No. 6. Whole No. 211, June 1961
Avram Davidson
The Affair at Lahore Cantonment
It is some time before dawn, in the late spring, as I write this. The seagulls have more than an hour before it will be their moment to fly in from the river, screeing and crying, and then fly back. After them, the pigeons will murmur, and it will be day, perhaps a hot, sticky day. Right now the air is deliciously cool, but I find myself shivering. I find myself imagining the cold, the bitter cold, of that morning when Death came in full panoply, like one dressed for dinner. That morning so very long ago…
In the winter of 1946-7 it was cold enough to suit me, and more, although the thermometer was well above what I used to consider a cold winter at home. But I was then in England, and the wet and the chill never seemed to leave me. The cottage where I was staying had the most marvelous picturesque fireplaces — it had them in every single room, in fact. But coal was rationed and firewood seemed not only unavailable, it seemed unheard of. There was an antique electric heater, but it emitted only a dull coppery glow which died out a few inches away. The only gas fire was, naturally enough, in the kitchen, a cramped and tiny room, where it was impossible to write.
And it was in order to write that I was in England. In the mornings I visited the private library, fortunately unbombed, where lay a mass of material unavailable in America. Afternoons I did the actual writing. In the early evenings I listened to the Third Program while I looked over what I had written, and revised it.
Late evenings? It was, as I say, cold. Raw and damp. I could retire to bed with a brace of hot water bottles and read. I could go to the movies. I could go to the local, see if they had any spirits left, or, failing that — and it usually failed — have a mug of cider. Beer, I don’t care for. The local was named… well, I won’t say exactly what it was named. It may have been called The Green Man. Or The Grapes. Or The Something Arms. A certain measure of reticence is, I think, called for, although by now the last of the principals in the story must surely be dead. But for those who are insatiably curious there are always the newspaper files to check.
But be all that as it may. It was eight o’clock at night. The Marx Brothers were playing at the cinema, but I had seen this one twice before the War and twice during the War. My two hot water bottles gaped pinkly, ready to preserve my feet from frostbite if I cared to retire early to bed. I would have, but it happened that the only reading matter was a large and illustrated work on Etruscan tombs.
So the local won. I: was really no contest.
It was warm there, and noisy and smoky and sociable. True, almost none of the sociability was directed my way, but as long as I wasn’t openly being hated, I didn’t care. Besides, we were all in luck: there was whiskey on hand. Gin, too. I drank slowly of the stuff that keeps the bare knees of Scotland warm and watched the people at their quaint native rituals — darts, football pools, even skittles.
A large, rather loutish-looking man at my right, who had made somewhat of a point of ignoring me, said suddenly, “Ah, Gaffer’s heard there’s gin!” A sort of ripple ran through the crowded room, and I turned around to look.
A man and a woman had come in. A little husk of a shriveled old man, wrapped almost to the tip of his rufous nose. An old woman, evidently his wife, was with him, and she helped undo the cocoon of overcoat, pullover, and muffler that, once removed, seemed to reduce him by half. They were obviously known and liked.
"Hello, Gaffer,” the people greeted him. “Hello, Ma.”
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to come fetch him when it’s his going-home time,” she said.
“I can manage meself, Missus,” the old man said querulously.
“If I don’t turn up, some of you give him a hand and see he has all his buttons buttoned. One gin and two ales, Alfred — no more, mind!” And with a brisk, keen look all around she was off.
She seemed the younger of the two, but it may not have been a matter of years. Thin, she was, white-haired and wrinkled; but there was no pink or gray softness about her. Her black eyes snapped as she looked around. Her back was straight. There was something not quite local in the accents of her speech — a certain lilting quality.
The old man was given a seat at a table near me and the fellow who had first announced the old man’s entrance now said, “Got your pension today, eh, Gaffer? Stand us a drink, there’s a good fellow.”
The old man stared at a palmful of change, then stirred it with a twisted finger. “My missus hasn’t given me but enough for the gin and the two ales,” he said.
“Ah, Tom’s only having his games with you, Gaffer,” someone said. “He does with everyone. Pay no mind.” And they resumed their conversation where they’d left off, the chief topic of the night being that the English wife of an American serviceman stationed in the county had given birth to triplets. “Ah, those Yanks,” they said indulgently.
“ ‘Ah, those Yanks,’ ” Tom mimicked. His spectacles were mended on the bridge with tape. “They get roaring drunk on the best whiskey that you and me can’t find and couldn’t afford to buy it if we could; they smash up cars like they cost nothing — you and me couldn’t buy them if we saved forever. Curse and brawl like proper savages, they do.”
There was an embarrassed silence. Someone said, “Now, Tom—” Someone looked at me, and away, quickly. And someone muttered, rather weakly, about there being “good and bad in all nations.” I said nothing, telling myself that there was no point in getting into a quarrel with a middle-aged man whose grievances doubtless would be as great if all Americans, civil and military, vanished overnight from the United Kingdom.
To my surprise, and to everyone else's, it was the Gaffer who spoke up against the charge.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, laddie-boy,” he said to Tom, who must have been fifty, at least. “’Tisn’t that they’re Yanks at all. ’Tis that they’re soldiers, and in a strange land. That’s a wicked life for a man. I’ve seen it meself. I could tell you a story—”
“Sweet Fanny Adams, no, don’t!” Tom said loudly — an outburst which did nothing to increase his popularity. “I heard ’em all, millions of times. The old garrison at Lahore and the Pay-thans and the Af-gains and the Tarradid-dles, mountain guns and mules, and, oh, the whole bloody parade. Give us a rest, Gaffer!”
He could have killed the old man with a slap of his hand, I suppose, the Gaffer looked that feeble. But he couldn’t shut the old man up, now he’d had his sip of gin.
"No, you don’t want to hear naught about it, but I’ll tell it anyway. Me, that was fighting for the flag before you was born.” For a moment his faded blue eyes seemed puzzled. “Oh, but I have seen terrible things,” he said in a voice altogether different from his vigorously annoyed tone of a second before. “And the most terrible thing of all — to see my friend die before my eyes, and he died hard, and not to be able to do aught to help him.” His words died off with a slow quiver.
Tom wasn’t giving up that easily. “What’s the football news?” he asked at large. No one answered.
“And not just the fighting in the Hills,” the Gaffer went on. “What was that all for? India? They’re giving India away now. No — other things… My best friend.”
“How about a game of darts?” Tom urged, gesturing toward the back room, through the open door of which we could see the darts board and a frieze of old pictures which dated back six reigns or more. I’d often meant to examine them with attention, but never had.