Everything looked the same. Heat had dried the nullah to a muddy trickle, but that was
usual before the rains came, and Ensign Harry Standish crossed the bridge to the British
town with the comforting sense of coming home. Under his breath he was humming ‘Widdicombe
Fair’.
The Mall was its usual afternoon quiet. The doctor’s wife was reading in the shade of
her veranda, and when he called ‘Hullo, Mrs Carron, I’m home!’ her hand flew to her mouth
and the book dropped with a smack to the stones. She seemed too startled to return his
greeting, and he guessed with amusement she hadn’t recognized him. That was fair enough.
The boy who left India nine months ago was very different from the eighteen-year-old
officer walking home in the triumph of his first-ever battle. He was looking forward to
telling his father.
He was still humming as he passed jauntily on to their own bungalow. The white gate
looked the same as always, but it bumped open unevenly at his push and he saw with
surprise the base was clogged with weeds. There were more growing along the path, and as
his footsteps crunched on the gravel the silence blasted back at him like a ricochet from
a shot. Where the devil were the servants? Even the path ahead was dirty, its white stones
speckled with a spray of earth, but as he neared the house he realized the mud was moving,
the random specks resolving themselves into a glinting black trail that reached all the
way to the side door of his father’s study.
Ants.
His footsteps quickened, slapping urgently up the path. He dropped his pack, knocked on
the door and said, ‘Sir?’ but the ants were bolder, swarming over his boots in their haste
to scurry under the crack of the door. They weren’t soldier ants, they wouldn’t attack a
living man, but he kicked out in revulsion and the door shuddered ajar at the blow. He
threw it open wide.
The stench hit him like a wall of heat, sickly, rotten, and tinged with the sourness of
whisky. The ant trail trickled past his foot, solidified to an advancing phalanx, and drew
his eyes up to the black, heaving mound spread over the floor in the cruciform shape of a
man. But the head was monstrous, a gorgon’s, surrounded by dark tentacles of ants as they
clustered and puddled over what he understood suddenly were sprays of blood or worse.
Realization forced his gaze back to the body, following the eloquent curve of the outflung
arm to the open hand and the metal object lying silently beside it. There were ants on the
gun too.
His throat clenched, and he reeled back through the door, spitting and retching, only
vaguely aware of footsteps approaching on the gravel. A voice called ‘Master Harry-sahib!’
and old Ramesh Kumar came hurrying towards him with a basket, but his smile of welcome
congealed into anxiety at the sight of the ants and open door. ‘The colonel-sahib . .
.’
‘In there,’ he said, turning away to retch again. ‘In there.’ He scrubbed his sleeve
violently over his mouth and saw with curious detachment the trembling of his arm.
He heard the hoarse cry, then the slow deliberate tread as the khansamar backed
out of the study to stand beside him. Thank God for Ramesh, he thought dully. The other
servants might have disappeared, but the old butler would never desert them. ‘For God’s
sake, Ramesh, what’s happened here?’
‘My fault, sahib,’ said the old man. ‘Never does the colonel-sahib send me out of town
to market, never in twenty years, I should have known he would do this.’ His knees
crunched to the ground, and Standish saw with shock that he was weeping. ‘Oh, what will we
do, sahib, what will we do?’
Ramesh had three times his years and five times his wisdom, but Standish felt the
burden of ‘sahib’ crash round his shoulders like a yoke. There was no senior officer here,
he had no father, there was only himself to be what the old man needed. He swallowed down
his own shock and said, ‘No one’s fault, Ramesh. Now get me water, we’re going to clear
this before anyone sees.’
‘Han, sahib,’ said the khansamar at once, leaping up at the sound of authority.
‘Water.’ He hurried round the house for the well and Standish forced himself to go back in
the room. He wouldn’t look at the thing on the floor; that wasn’t his father, wasn’t the
man he’d shaken hands with every night of his childhood, wasn’t the respected Colonel
Standish who would sometimes forget himself and play bears under the dining table with his
boy. He looked at the room instead and only now noticed how much was missing. The bookcase
was nearly empty, the candlesticks gone, nothing on the stained tablecloth but a half-
empty whisky bottle and a tumbler clouded with finger marks. He lifted them off, and
whipped away the cloth as Ramesh staggered back in with a bucket. ‘In the middle, Ramesh,
clear me a hand-hold in the middle.’ His father’s waist and strong chest, the
middle.
Ramesh threw. The water made a red streak in the black, the British army coat of which
father and son had been so proud. Standish flung the tablecloth over the terrible head,
bent to force his arms under the body, and lifted it with surprising ease. No need to
look, no need to flinch, a man couldn’t be revolted by the body of his own father. He
carried it outside with his head held high in a travesty of pride, and lowered it into the
horse trough by the front gate. Little pricks of pain peppered his wrists where the ants
bit, but he thrust the corpse under and watched the drowning insects float to the surface
in a thick black scum. A paleness glimmered beneath, and just for a second he saw the
horror of blood and bone and brain and the eaten-out cavities that had been his father’s
eyes.
He swung away in shock, furiously brushing the clinging insects from his arms and coat.
There were steps at the gate, Dr and Mrs Carron, but Ramesh was running past to meet them,
and Standish leaned against the almond tree as he fought to control his nausea. The murmur
of voices gave him a moment’s space, and he allowed himself to look at the indignity of
his father’s legs hanging over the edge of the trough. Why had he never seen how thin and
frail they were, never until now? A terrible emptiness began to stir in his chest, and
with it the first yearning of grief.
He crushed it down ruthlessly to make his mind work. The money was gone, obviously, but
it would take more than that to drive a devoted soldier to blow his brains out. What had
it done to him, this army he’d given his whole life to? What had it done? He stared at the
ground for answers, but saw only faint grey splashes of water already evaporating in the
heat.
A woman’s voice rose over the others, Mrs Carron saying, ‘Oh, Henry, Henry, that poor
boy, whatever will he do?’ He watched the dark edges of a damp patch magically shrinking,
until there was nothing left but a single ant lying crippled and helpless on the burning
stones.