The Day of the Scorpion (22 page)

Sarah tapped ash carefully into the glass ashtray and felt put off by the sight of the stub of her previous one, marked red by her lipstick, a sign of her personal private life, her none-too-hopeful message in a bottle cast back up by an indifferent tide on an island on which she sometimes felt herself the only one alive who still wanted to be rescued.

They were confronted by a forbidding openness, of water and unabsorbed light, a sort of milky translucence that deadened the nerves of the eyeballs and conveyed the impression that here one would live perpetually with a slight headache.

‘There’s the palace now,’ Captain Merrick said. Sarah heard from her mother a low exclamation that could have
been one of admiration or of disappointment. For the moment she herself was blinded by the vast area of sky and water.

‘You’re looking in the wrong direction, Miss Layton.’ His voice was close. He was leaning forward. She had an impression that his fingers had touched her very lightly on the shoulder. The voice was resonant. There was something, in its tone that acted as an irritant, although not an unpleasant one. ‘I’m not looking in any direction,’ she said. She raised her left hand to shade her eyes. ‘There’s so much glare.’

‘I was afraid you’d find that, sitting up front. I’ll tell the fellow to stop, then we can change places.’

Sarah shook her head. ‘No. I can see the palace now—’ Distantly, a dusty-rose-coloured structure with little towers, and a white-domed mosque with one slim minaret on the edge of the lake, reflected in the water – and – among the trees, at the end of the lakeside road they travelled on, a small palladian-style greystone mansion. The guest house.

The lake was on their left. Fishermen were casting nets from long low boats. The nets fell on the water, rippling its glassy surface as if sudden areas of chill were causing patches of gooseflesh.

Again the voice in her ear.

‘You see where the reeds begin? That’s the boundary of the fishing rights. They’re not allowed to work closer to the palace. It’s a traditional family occupation, the rights are handed down from father to son. They’re quite a proud sect. Muslims, of course.’

Her mother spoke. When Captain Merrick replied his voice was no longer just behind her. He had sat back. But the voice was still resonant. It was a good voice, but not public school. Aunt Fenny had already commented on that fact, in the ladies’ room at the station restaurant. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘you can get some peculiar people in the police. I don’t suppose Captain Merrick’s family would bear close inspection. But he’s quite the little gentleman, isn’t he, and terribly efficient over detail. That’s a sign of a humble origin, too. Did you hear him tell Teddie the luggage has already arrived at the guest house? That means he called there to make sure,
before coming to collect us. How shall we go? You, Susan and Teddie in one taxi, me, Sarah and Captain Merrick in the other?’ But Mrs Layton said, ‘No, I’ll go with Sarah and Captain Merrick. Then I’ll feel less like a mother-in-law.’ She retired into a cubicle. Susan and Aunt Fenny went out. Sarah waited, gazing at her ordinary face in the mirror, combing her hair which was the same colour her mother’s had been before it began to fade and she took to using bleach; a dark blonde, difficult to curl, badly in need of the permanent wave she would have to undergo before the wedding. She hated her hair. She hated her chin and cheekbones. They were too prominent. She repaired her make-up without interest. She envied Susan for having the kind of face that powder and lipstick could alter. Through these her own face always came back at her with a kind of dull incorruptibility, authentic bony Layton, quite unlike the rounder, more gently moulded Muir face. Well, she thought, it would wear better. There was a toughness in the Layton face that weathered storms. Her great-grandfather had had it, her father had it, and now she had it.

Mrs Layton came out of the cubicle. She had her handbag with her. Through the mirror Sarah saw her mother glance at her, then look away. Without speaking she came across to one of the hand-basins, set her bag down, washed her hands, touched her hair and adjusted her hat. Silences between them were not unusual. They were strange silences which Sarah found difficult to break once they had set in. She sometimes thought of them as silences her mother used to establish between them a closeness that had never existed before and which she thought it too late to establish now except in this exchange of sentences unspoken and of gestures unoffered. There were occasions – and this was one of them – when Sarah felt a surge of almost hysterical – because pent-up – affection for this vague distracted woman who was her mother. The old forthright manner with its edge of sharpness that demanded respect, loyalty, more than it demanded love, was gone. It seemed now that nothing at all was being demanded and nothing given, except whatever casual things they were that were asked and given by habit – and these silences, which seemed to express a need that went
much deeper than mere reliance on Sarah to forget she had not been loved as much as Susan and to give the kind of help Susan never could have given.

Following her mother and Aunt Fenny out of the restaurant – but this time in the wake and not the van of Susan and Teddie because Teddie’s best-man-to-be had gravitated as if by a force of nature to the role of escorting her, seeing that doors were kept open for her to pass through, that any remark she made would get a suitable response, and of making light and suitable conversation himself should she seem to be in need of cheering up – Sarah remembered how within a few weeks of her arrival in Pankot in 1939 she had decided that India affected Englishmen in two ways: it made them thin and pale or beefy and red. Her father and – potentially – her new escort belonged to the former category, Uncle Arthur and (potentially) Teddie Bingham to the latter. The thin pale Englishmen were reserved and mostly polite to other people, including Indians even when they didn’t like them; the red beefy ones acquired loud voices and were given to displays of bad temper in public. Between these two types of opposites there seemed to be no shades of colour or grades of behaviour worth noting. The young men fell potentially into one or the other of these categories directly they set foot in Bombay or went out to their first station. Their pinkness, you saw then, judging by its texture in each individual case, would fade or deepen; their flesh, depending upon built-in things like bone structure and muscle tone, would shrink or thicken; their good nature, according to the amount of self-control needed to sustain it, would become fixed and frozen, or would explode dramatically under the pressure of the climate and their growing inability – Uncle Arthur was a case in point – to take any real pleasure in the company kept.

But one thing was shared in common by these two broadly distinguishable types of men: their attitude to English women. After a time Sarah had been able to analyse it. They approached you first (she decided) as if you were a member of a species that had to be protected, although from what was
not exactly clear if you ruled out extinction: it seemed to be enough that the idea of collective responsibility for you should be demonstrated, without regard to any actual or likely threat to your welfare. In circumstances where no threat seemed to exist the behaviour of the men aroused your suspicion that perhaps it did after all but in a way men alone had the talent for understanding; and so you became aware of the need to be grateful to them for the constant proof they offered of being ready to defend you, if only from yourself.

This collective public approach also affected their personal, private approaches. When young men talked to her, danced or played tennis with her, invited her to go riding, to watch them play men’s games, to go with them to a show, became amorous or fumbled with her unromantically in the dark of a veranda or a motor-car, she had the impression that they did so in a representative frame of mind. ‘Well here I am, white, male and pure-bred English, and here you are pure-bred English, white and female, we ought to be doing something about it.’ The potential red beefy types were usually more enthusiastic for doing something about it than the potential thin pale types, but however hot or cold the degree of enthusiasm was Sarah could never feel it as an enthusiasm for her, but instead as an enthusiasm for an ideal she was supposed to share and which the young man in question apparently assumed was a ready-made link, a reliable primary connection between them that might or might not be more intimately strengthened according to taste. The ideal was difficult to define and Sarah had thought she ought to define it before deciding whether she should reject it or uphold it. She certainly had no intention of casually accepting it and becoming thoughtlessly implicated in it, which is what she believed Susan had done.

In the station concourse Sarah said to Captain Merrick, ‘Mother would like you to come with us. Teddie can take Susan and Aunt Fenny,’ and got her mother into the back of the first taxi. She saw Teddie approaching and wondered whether her mother’s objections were not so much to being made to feel like a mother-in-law as to Teddie himself. She said, ‘I want to ride in front, Captain Merrick. You go in with Mother.’

The driver was an Indian civilian. He would probably smell. Captain Merrick hesitated, but both doors were open and she got in. Teddie joined them. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked Mrs Layton. She said she was and told him to look after Susan. A few moments later they were settled and the taxi moved away, out of the shade. The heat coming from the engine and the hot air blowing through the open window combined with the glare and the baked musty stench of the taxi-driver to smother Sarah in that blanketing numbness which, in India, was a defence against the transformation of the illusion of exhaustion into its reality. She half-closed her eyes. They were going down a wide street of arcaded shops – the cantonment bazaar. The jingling harness of horse-drawn tongas, bicycle bells, the sudden blare of Indian music from a radio as they passed a coffee-house were sounds which this morning rubbed the edge of a nerve already raw from the irritation of feeling that everything was going inexorably forward and leaving her behind, that she could not catch up, could not cope. The taxi turned from the bazaar into a wide avenue. Ahead, the centrepiece of a roundabout, was the inevitable statue of the great white queen, Victoria, in profile to them on the line of their approach to it, the head slightly bowed under the weight of the dumpling crown and an unspecified sorrow.

The road was now shaded by trees, lined by the grey-white walls of compounds behind which gardens and old bungalows of military family occupation were occasionally revealed in glimpses of deep shadowy verandas, patches of sun-struck lawns, beds of the ubiquitous crimson canna lilies. A scent of dew and strange blossom entered on the artificially created breeze and Sarah inclined her head, as if to a narcotic that might lift her spirits.

‘We’re coming to the church,’ Captain Merrick said, and told the driver to slow down when they got to it so that the Memsahibs could see it better. His Urdu was fluent.

A greystone spire, Victorian Gothic; a churchyard, and leaning palm trees which always reminded Sarah of the India of old engravings. Behind their taxi the other taxi carrying Susan, Teddie and Aunt Fenny, also slowed. Mrs Layton did
not remark on the church. Presently they regained their former speed.

The chaplain’s name is Fox, by the way,’ Captain Merrick said, and then began to rehearse the next few days’ programme. A small party at the club tonight to introduce them to the General who would be out of station for the wedding itself, and to the Station Commander and his wife. Dinner at the Station Commander’s the following evening which the Chaplain would certainly attend. The Gl and his wife, the Station Commander and his wife, would have to be invited to the wedding. Teddie and Mrs Layton could work out between them who else among Teddie’s fellow-officers and who else on the station should be invited. The club contractor was working on the basis of a small reception catering for between twenty and thirty people. Had Mrs Layton managed to get the cards printed in Ranpur? If not the printer Lal Chand who printed and published the
Mirat Courier
could produce them in twenty-four hours. The tailor Mrs Layton had mentioned in a letter to Teddie had been told to be at the guest house at midday to receive preliminary instructions. The steward in the guest house was under the control of the station staff officer, and would present the bill for meals and drinks at the end of their stay. Captain Merrick understood that these would be approximately at club prices. The rest of the guest house staff was supplied by the palace and there was no charge for accommodation, services or laundry other than personal laundry, all of which were to be accepted as part of the hospitality of the Nawab of Mirat to members of the services visiting the cantonment and unable to get accommodation in the club or the Swiss Hotel. The guest house was in the grounds of the palace, but there was a private way in and a separate compound. The private entrance, like the main entrance, was under armed guard, and there was a chaukidar. A palace motor-car would, Captain Merrick believed, be put at their disposal to help with things like shopping trips, and other motors from the palace garage would be lent for the wedding itself.

‘I think that’s about all, Mrs Layton, except that there’s a young fellow who’s distantly related to the Nawab and whose job it is to see that you have everything you need. He’s
an Indian, of course, a Muslim, and I think you’ll like him. His name is Ahmed Kasim and he’s a son of Mohammed Ali Kasim, the Chief Minister in the provincial government of thirty-seven to thirty-nine.’

‘MAK? But isn’t he locked up?’ Mrs Layton asked.

‘Exactly, that’s the point. I mean it’s something I think necessary to remember when dealing with young Kasim. He’s an attractive young fellow, well-educated, speaks first-rate English, not in the least the usual surly type of Westernized Indian who thinks he’s a cut above everybody – and believe me I’ve had some experience with that sort—’

Mrs Layton said, ‘Yes, I’m sure you have. Teddie tells us you were in the police. My sister is dying to hear how you managed to get out of that uniform into this. She knows a young man in the Civil who’s tried everything but still hasn’t managed to swing it. Were you ever in Ranpur?’