Fragrant Harbour by John Lanchester Page A

established models for dealing with women in a quasi-official capacity, formed by encounters with nannies, school matrons, and housemasters’ wives. They were polite and interested when Sister Benedicta spoke about politics. Before long, the Jardines man had developed a technique for responding to her opinions – diatribes would be too strong a word – about British India, by asking innocent-sounding questions about the regime in Hanoi or Algiers.
    All was not harmony and peace at our dinner table, however; on the contrary. For some reason the arrival of the two missionaries seemed to strike Marler on a psychic sore point. Right from the start, when he was introduced to them, he behaved like a man inflamed, provoked beyond all reason. His opening words to the sisters were:
    ‘Off to save souls?’
    This came out so bluntly, so much like a direct insult, that the rest of us simply laughed, as if this were a deliberate exaggeration of his usual directness, a clumsy attempt at humour. It seemed impossible that anyone would be this consciously rude, at firstmeeting, to somebody he didn’t know. Even his wife looked embarrassed. But that didn’t impede Marler in any way, and it did not take long for the first proper argument. In fact, it happened during the dinner the first night after Marseilles. Sister Benedicta had asked the army man whereabouts in India he was headed. He said he was going to the Punjab.
    ‘Ah, the Afghan frontier. So troubling to you British for so long now. Subject peoples are often so ungrateful, are they not?’
    Many of us may have been thinking, steady on, this is a bit much for someone we’ve only just met, but everyone smiled politely, except Marler.
    ‘I think that those remarks are extraordinarily offensive,’ he said at considerable volume.
    Sister Benedicta gave him a long cool French look.
    ‘You are challenging the idea that the so-called North-West Frontier of your Indian Empire has been disputatious?’
    ‘We brought order and justice to half the world. There was no such thing as India before the British arrived there and civilised it. I simply will not accept this easy jeering from a citizen of a less successful empire whose only real objection to British achievements , if the truth is admitted, is that they were British and not French. As for the Catholic Church, systematically spreading superstition, idolatry, ignorance, and wishful hocus-pocus wherever it lands, the whole institution, with its greedy corrupt priests and credulous populace, casts a dark shadow on the earth and the world would be better off without it.’
    ‘Hocus-pocus is an accurate term. It is derived from “ hoc est corpus meum ”,’ said Sister Maria.
    ‘It is enviable to be able to speak with such confidence on subjects about which one knows so little,’ said Sister Benedicta. ‘I was briefly in Peshawar, in which we have a little mission teaching medical skills to the local people as part of our mission to spread darkness and unreason over the earth,’ she said, speaking to the army man, who was listening with his eyes while continuing to eat soup. ‘They have a remarkable range of unfamiliar breads which I think you will enjoy. As for the British bringing civilisation to India,’ she went on, turning to Marler, ‘you will find, if you have the opportunity to spend some time there, that the Indians were civilised many hundredsof years before the Roman Empire first brought the light of reason to your homelands.’
    It went on from there.
    *
    The next day, as we chugged across the tideless Mediterranean on our way to the Suez Canal, most of the passengers had settled down to a quoits tournament. The prize was a dinner for two at the Captain’s table, with champagne. (Although meals were included in the ticket price, we had to pay for our own drinks.) I had teamed up with Cooper.
    ‘What did you make of all that then?’ I asked him.
    ‘Bit rum,’ he said. ‘Not sure you should speak to a woman