by Paul Scott
She tried to assess the degree of humiliation Bronowsky would be capable of feeling. If he was really a count, the white Russian émigré who had been found by the Nawab in Monte Carlo and made use of as a go-between in the affair the Nawab was having, or had had and was trying to continue, with a European woman, and considering the fact that he had served for twenty years in a position that must have been even more testing than that of a British political adviser to an Indian ruler, then he had probably acquired a degree of immunity from attacks on his prestige and self-esteem.
But then, Sarah reminded herself, it was impossible to assume anything when it came to such matters. And often it was the thoughtless action, the unintentional insult, the casual attack which, catching you off guard, hurt most. Remembering the twitch of amusement when the Nawab made his imperious but frail, attractive gesture of command to be helped down the steps, Sarah was struck by the idea that perhaps the crooked fleeting smile was one of amusement at the Nawab’s expense, an involuntary sign of underlying resentment of the fact that he, Bronowsky, should be subjected to the same humiliation as the Nawab, his master, but be denied the opportunity to get his own back so swiftly. ‘One never knows,’ Mr Hobhouse had said recently, ‘what to make of the Count, but of course it’s probably important to remember he’s a dispossessed Russian and that the Nawab is not, after all, a little Tsarevich saved from a cellar in Ekaterinberg.’
Sarah wished she had seen how he reacted to the sight of Susan curtsying to the man who was not a little Tsarevich, or could see his expression now, as he waited his turn to be introduced. He stood, slightly stooped, his head inclined to catch whatever Mrs Hobhouse next said to him, but looking away half right, so that Sarah saw only his eye-patch profile. Was a black patch, on its own, expressive? Sarah thought that it was. Seen by itself, thus, it looked like the round bulging eye of a nocturnal creature abroad in sunlight, staring myopically, alerted by some unexpected but familiar sound of which it awaited a repetition in order to be certain of the accuracy of its judgement of the source: and Sarah, glancing in the direction indicated by the fixed intensity of the imaginarily luminous black patch, found that the source appeared to be Captain Merrick who, for the moment, stood alone, hands behind his back, unaware of the scrutiny he was under, taking a breather from the cumulatively exhausting duties of best man. Hatless, in full unflattering sunlight – the first time she was conscious of seeing Captain Merrick so – the years he could give Teddie showed. He was probably nearing thirty. In the company of Teddie and the young officers who surrounded Susan, he looked hardened, burnt by experiences distant from their own and placing him at distance now. He was not really Teddie’s type. Chance alone – the sharing of quarters with Teddie and Captain Bishop’s jaundice – had led to his presence at the wedding.
But the same could be said of all the other guests. And realizing that, Sarah understood what was odd about the thing Susan had said. The oddness was in that possessive phrase, ‘my wedding’. She should have said ‘our wedding’ if the wedding had to be mentioned at all. She should not have said ‘my wedding’. She should not have curtsied. She should not have been so composed, earlier, when she arrived promptly at the church at the postponed hour, and made no comment on the cause of the delay, walked slowly up the aisle on Uncle Arthur’s arm and appeared not to see the damage to Teddie’s cheek. Even in the vestry afterwards she had said nothing about the stone. She had said little about anything except to express concern that her shivering at the altar might have been too obvious and uncertainty about the suitability of the new name given her in exchange for the old one.
But she was guilty of all these acts and omissions, and ‘my wedding’ was – to Sarah – suddenly and touchingly significant, revealing as it did the extent to which Susan was conscious of the fact that no one else except Teddie seemed much concerned about it. Being married to Teddie was something she had set her heart on, presumably because in her mysterious self-sufficient way she was prepared to love him and be loved by him, but whatever the reason for the marriage the wedding was the one conclusive step she had to take to demonstrate in public the importance of what was happening to her. It was, on a much larger scale, like the gesture she made or sudden word she spoke which interrupted the flow of other people’s thoughts and drew attention back to her existence. But the wedding, among strangers, in unfamiliar surroundings, already marred by the incident of the stone and the insult to the Nawab, was an affair that threatened to overwhelm her. She was fighting the threat with a single-minded determination, a tense, febrile assertion of her rights to her own illusion which Sarah, now that she understood, admired her for, loved her for, because she judged the amount of courage it took to close the eyes to the destructive counter-element of reality that entered any state of intended happiness.
She thought: That sort of courage is what distinguishes Susan from me, apart from her prettiness, and why men like Teddie have always finally preferred her company to mine. She creates an illusion of herself as the centre of a world without sadness and allows them entry. It is like when we are children. She is the little girl with the gift for making let’s-pretend seem real; although when she was young it was the last talent I suspected in her. If she had it then she kept it secret, closely guarded. Now it has blossomed. One senses it in her as something tough and enduring but delicately poised, in constant need of fine adjustments so that it can contain or be contained, be shared, withheld, never diminished by exposure to ridicule.
The old protective instinct which she had thought atrophied by long disuse quickened and then lay still. All the outlets for it were overgrown and it understood it had woken to no purpose and must sleep again, become oblivious of its awakened hunger. Abruptly she moved away – taking the opportunity given by a general movement as the Count went forward to meet the bride and groom – and found herself facing Ahmed: a re-enactment in different dress and circumstances of the occasion on the waste ground when she rode at him, smiling and speechless, and he stared back, smiling less but just as silent: a meaningless situation then, equally meaningless now. They might have come from different planets. It was impossible to establish common ground; neither sense of duty nor personal compulsion would ever bridge the distance or shatter the glass from behind which they smiled and stared vacantly at one another like specimen products of alien cultures in display cabinets in a museum placed close together through an administrative oversight, or odd stroke of chance.
‘He is very pleased with the book,’ Ahmed announced suddenly.
‘Oh yes. Gaffur. I’m glad.’ She turned her head slightly, because of the garlic. It really was a revolting smell. The poems of Gaffur and the smell of garlic: a dark vision of an old lady under an awning on the sun-deck of a houseboat, and of trunks, musty, unclaimed, containing what was left of that girl: passed over Sarah’s consciousness of her presence on a sunlit scene – inconsequential but positive – like vapours casting actual shadows.
‘It was a bit of luck,’ she said. The old lady knew so much: more than facts – the shape and substance and significance of an accumulation of detail that so often, in the mind, passed by, as a procession of irrelevancies.
‘What was a bit of luck?’
The voice was not Ahmed’s but that of Captain Merrick who had arrived at her side.
‘The poems of Gaffur,’ she replied, glancing up at Merrick. ‘Just something we brought for the Nawab. Someone we met in Kashmir told us that Gaffur was a Kasim too, so we had a copy bound up, we wouldn’t have known otherwise.’
‘I don’t even know about Gaffur. Is he famous?’
‘Oh, not is, was.’ She turned to Ahmed again. ‘I mean in the sense of “was, not is”, because he’s dead. But he’s still famous as a classic isn’t he?’
Ahmed put his head on one side, letting the eyes close. He rarely made a typical Indian gesture. He held and used himself with the stiff composure of an Englishman. She had absorbed that fact unconsciously, was only conscious of it now when he resp
onded with the gesture of the head, like any other Indian deflecting a compliment to himself or his country from its target.
‘But something tells me,’ she went on, ‘you don’t go in much for poetry. What did Gaffur write about? Deserts and roses, and moonlit gardens? Jugs of wine?’
Merrick laughed. ‘That’s Omar Khayyam.’
‘Oh, no, just Persian,’ she said. ‘I mean they all wrote like that surely, Persian poets, Urdu poets. Was Gaffur an exception?’
‘No, I think he wasn’t,’ Ahmed said. ‘Roses and deserts and moonlit gardens pretty well fill the bill from what I remember.’
‘Did you have to learn him as a boy?’
‘Read is a more accurate word.’ Ahmed hesitated, then added, ‘I never learned anything my teachers thought important. In the end they gave me up.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Sarah said. ‘It’s how I feel about me, more or less, except that I think I’d say I never saw the importance of what I was taught and always felt I wanted to be taught quite different things – the sort of things no one thought of teaching. I was the kind of child who automatically asked why when I was told the cat sat on the mat. My teachers said I ought to curb a tendency to squander curiosity on the self-evident.’
‘Then from their point of view, you’re in the right place, Miss Layton. In India nothing is self-evident.’
She looked at him, puzzled. Ask him a question and he would answer, usually with that brevity which made asking a further question a grindingly self-conscious business. She did not remember him making comments – of the kind that could remove verbal exchange from the level of an interrogation to that of a conversation – but in the last few moments he had made two, although the second had the familiar characteristic of those answers of his which seemed to kill a subject stone-dead, and left her suspended (she felt) like a vulture hovering over a carcass with no meat left on. She smiled, found herself tongue-tied, but hoped her silence would be interpreted as politeness and interest and would encourage him – if for once he was in the mood to talk – to continue. But it did not. He was not even looking at her now: instead at Captain Merrick, holding his head at an angle that disclosed an aggressive set of chin and jaw. He did not look angry but she wondered whether he was. He had been stopped at the door too, and had even less opportunity than Count Bronowsky to even up the score.
‘Actually,’ Captain Merrick said, ‘that’s something I feel bound to disagree with. I’d say things that are self-evident are common to all countries.’ He was smiling and so now was Mr Kasim, but glancing from one to the other Sarah thought: No, you mustn’t tangle with each other. She felt powerless to stop them. She saw Aunt Fenny hastening down the steps and moved to intercept her; but that was unnecessary. She was coming to them in any case.
‘What’s been going on?’ she asked before she had quite reached them.
‘Nothing’s been going on, Aunt Fenny. The Nawab has arrived.’
‘Well I know that. People up there are saying he had difficulty getting in.’ She did not trouble to lower her voice. Aunt Fenny never did. She seemed not to have seen Mr Kasim standing almost next to her, but turned on him abruptly, thereby proving she had, and said, ‘What a chapter of accidents!’ and came back to Sarah, leaving her exclamation as it were – bouncing, to work its own way to a position of rest. ‘I’ve been putting out Susan’s going away things. I can’t find the hat-box.’
A room in the annexe had been set aside for the bride’s use. Sarah and Aunt Fenny had brought Susan’s luggage with them. ‘It must still be in the car,’ Sarah said. ‘I’ll go and see.’
‘No, I’m sure Captain Merrick won’t mind—’
Seeing he was wanted he came closer.
‘A hat-box. We think it’s still in the car. The one Sarah and I came in.’
‘I know where it’s parked. I’ll check. What should I do with the box, bring it to you or take it to the annexe?’
‘If you’d bring it to me? Well, whatever you think. So long as it’s found. God knows what we’ll do if it’s not there or been stolen. There wasn’t a servant in sight at the annexe just now. Anyone could have walked in. I’ve nabbed a spare body and made him stand guard on peril of his life.’
Captain Merrick nodded and went. ‘Come,’ Aunt Fenny said. ‘I must meet the Nawab.’
As Sarah followed Mrs Grace she carried with her an impression of Ahmed alone, disengaged; standing restricted in the centre of a world she would never enter, did not know and could not miss. How lucky we are, she thought. How very, very lucky.
*
‘Nobody told us you was expecting any Indian gentleman, sir,’ the MP explained as he accompanied Captain Merrick to the place where the bridal cars were parked.
‘I realize that. It was very remiss of us.’
‘We didn’t think you allowed Indian gentlemen into the club, so the corporal and me, sir, we thought those three gentlemen was havin’ a lark. I mean anyone could’ve got hold of one of those cards, sir, and written a fancy name on it.’
‘You did your duty as you saw it, Sergeant, no one is blaming you.’
‘All the same we dropped a right clanger, didn’t we, sir? Especially seeing one of ’em was a white gentleman after all and another was his nibs.’ The sergeant grinned. ‘Captain Bates’ll have my guts for garters.’
‘Is he your officer?’
‘That’s right, sir. But no sweat. We live and learn. And I’ll know the nabob next time, won’t I?’
They stopped at the line of limousines. One of the drivers left the circle of men squatting under one of the old trees shading the lawn, but the sergeant ignored him, opened the doors and presently found the box on the floor under one of the tip-up seats. ‘Here you are, sir, one hat-box, brides for the use of.’
‘Thank you, Sergeant. Are you staying with us or expecting a relief?’
‘Orders are to wait and escort the cars to the station, sir.’
‘In that case there’ll be something for you and the corporal to toast the bride and groom in. I’ll lay it on and send one of the stewards out to take you round and show you where. But you’d better go one at a time.’
‘Thank you, sir. That’ll be very much appreciated.’
‘Well even a copper has to eat.’
The sergeant grinned again, came to attention and saluted. Merrick, encumbered by the hat-box, and capless, sketched the idea of a salute in reply and made back towards the club entrance. As he reached the steps he paused, looked at the hat-box, and then instead of entering continued along the front until he reached the corner of the building where a path led off through a shrubbery marked by a directional finger on which the word Annexe was painted black on white. He returned a few minutes later, without the box, and walked along the side of the clubhouse, between a flower-bed and the tennis courts where an old man in shirt and dhoti and a youth in a ragged pair of khaki shorts were restoring the lime-wash markings. Merrick stopped, reached into his pocket for his cigarette case, selected one, lit it and began leisurely to smoke and watch, as if concerned about the straightness of the lines that were reappearing, brightly, on their faded predecessors. The youth was doing all the work. It was not arduous but the sun was hot and the gleam on his shoulders showed that he was sweating. He became conscious of the spectator, made a mistake in the marking. The old man spoke to him sharply. Merrick did not move. He inhaled smoke slowly, deeply, continuing to watch until, growing tired of the scene, he threw the cigarette half-smoked into the flower-bed and continued along the path.
The lawn was now deserted. A single voice, a woman’s raised in laughter, came from the almost equally deserted terrace. The wedding party had gone inside for the cold fork-lunch wedding breakfast and the ceremony of the cutting of the cake. Merrick looked at his watch. Ten minutes short of midday. He walked on the lawn, making for the steps, paused near them, stooped and picked up shreds of pink and white paper where someone had stood and brushed confetti from a dress or uniform. Straightening he sa
w himself watched by Count Bronowsky who had appeared at the head of the steps alone.
As Merrick joined him Bronowsky said: ‘Ah, there you are, Captain Merrick. I suppose you have been undertaking yet another of the onerous duties of best man.’
‘Just a small errand to recover a hat-box.’
‘Well, you are a man for detail. I can see that. For instance, you share my compulsive instinct for tidiness. What was it, confetti?’
Merrick opened his hand.
They say it’s significant,’ Bronowsky said, picking the scraps of paper from Merrick’s palm and dropping them into the empty glass a guest had left on the balustrade. He picked the glass up too and placed it on a near-by table, for greater safety. While he did these things he continued to talk. ‘I mean significant psychologically. Compulsively tidy people, one is told, are always wiping the slate clean, trying to give themselves what life denies all of us, a fresh start.’ Having finished with the confetti and the glass he now looked at Merrick and, putting a hand on his shoulder, began to lead the way along the terrace towards the distant hum of conversation in the inner room where the bride and groom and guests had reassembled. ‘You are married?’ he asked casually.
