by Paul Scott
*
It was Mabel who told Sarah the truth about the scorpion; two days after great-grandfather’s funeral (and Susan still not talking to her, so that she was alone in the orchard until Mabel, also walking alone, came upon her and said, ‘Well, if you’re doing nothing, take me for a walk’).
They went through the orchard and through the gate in the iron rail fence that enclosed it from the meadow. This meadow sloped down to a brook and a spinney. There was a path, worn by custom. The meadow was let to a man who kept cows there. Susan was afraid to walk down to the spinney unless the cows were all bunched together at the far end of the field, but Sarah liked cows. In India they were sacred. In England they weren’t, but they were warm and sweet-smelling. She liked the way they tore at the tough grass with their thick curled tongues. She wondered how they avoided pulling it up by its roots and what they thought about when they looked up from their tearing and munching, flicking their ears and striking their flanks with their fly-whisk tails, and watched you watching them. Sometimes they took no notice of you at all, but cropped their way with ragged herd instinct from one part of the meadow to another without pausing to look up as you passed near by. At other times they all held their heads up or turned them to watch you pass behind their rumps. Now, as Sarah walked with Aunty Mabel towards the spinney they were pulling up grass on either side of the path. She could smell their breath and thought Aunty Mabel hesitated to pass through their midst. They’re quite docile,’ Sarah said, and took Aunty Mabel’s hand, partly to reassure her and partly because just here the track was ridged and rather difficult for an elderly lady to negotiate. ‘They’re not great-grandpa’s,’ she said, forgetting for the moment that nothing was great-grandpa’s any longer. ‘They belong to Mr Birtwhistle. He lets us watch them being milked sometimes.’
‘Do you enjoy that?’
Sarah thought. ‘No. But I’m interested in it. I mean enjoy is how I’d describe liking something artificial like a book or a game. But milking is to do with actual life, isn’t it, so I like it but I don’t enjoy it. Does that make sense?’
‘Of a kind.’
When they reached the brook Sarah showed Aunty Mabel the stepping-stones which gave access to the opposite bank and the woodland. ‘It used to be our private wood,’ she explained, meaning her own and Susan’s, and private in the sense of pretend. ‘There’s a fence on the other side of the spinney. The land on the other side of that belongs to Mr Birtwhistle but it’s all right to go in so long as you keep to the edges. I mean it’s all right for me and Susan. Or has been. I suppose everything will undergo changes now. It’s probably our last summer. Daddy’s going to let the house and might even sell it.’ She stopped, realizing that she was talking to Aunty Mabel as if she were a stranger instead of a member of the family who probably knew far more about her father’s plans than she did herself. And she kept forgetting that Aunty Mabel had visited great-grandfather years ago, long before the 1914–18 war, with grandfather Layton, to meet her stepson, Sarah’s father, and so must know the brook and the stepping-stones, the spinney, and the neighbour’s land on the other side, and that this might be the last summer of all that any Layton would come here.
‘Shall you miss it?’ Aunty Mabel asked.
‘I expect so, although we only ever come in July and August. I probably wouldn’t mind not coming if I knew I could and had simply gone somewhere else for a change. It will be knowing I can’t come that will make it seem sad, as if a phase of my life has ended for ever.’
They stood looking at the brook. Sarah didn’t sit on the bank because Aunty Mabel was much too old for that sort of thing. Near the water the earth was always damp. It was a hot day, but shady here. Aunty Mabel had a coat on though. She was cold in England. Three years ago Sarah had felt the cold too but had got used to it. She had dreams sometimes, in colour, like a film, of herself in sunshine in Pankot. The brook babbling over the stones reminded her of Pankot in miniature. But then everything in England was on a miniature scale. She thought this had an effect on the people who lived there always. In comparison with her mother and Aunt Fenny and Aunty Mabel, for instance, Aunt Lydia – although taller than any of them – seemed to Sarah to lack a dimension that the others didn’t lack. Lacking this dimension was what Sarah supposed came of living on a tiny island. She felt this, but also felt she hadn’t yet developed the reasoning power to work it out in terms that would adequately convey what she felt to other people. So she kept quiet about it and was conscious of Aunty Mabel keeping quiet about something too, and noted this down mentally as one of the things she’d not noticed before that distinguished her Indian family from her English family – distinguished her father, mother, Aunt Fenny and Aunty Mabel from Aunt Lydia, Uncle Frank (Aunt Lydia’s physician husband) and poor old great-grandpa. Her English family kept quiet about nothing, but were always speaking their minds. Aunt Lydia sometimes presumed to speak other people’s too. And all at once she saw the correspondence between (in particular) Aunty Mabel who never said very much at all and her sister, Susan, who said a lot, but hoarded important things up until someone came along (their parents for instance) whom she judged to be worth speaking her mind to.
Sarah did not understand this unexpected connection between her sister and Aunty Mabel but knew it was an Indian connection. The English who went to India were different from those who didn’t. When they came back they felt like visitors. And the people they came back to felt that the connection between them had become too tenuous for comfort (tenuous was one of Sarah’s favourite new words). There were areas of sensitivity neither side dared probe too deeply.
Sarah said, ‘I think we’d better go back otherwise we’ll be late for tea and make things difficult for Mrs Bailey.’
‘If you think so,’ Aunty Mabel said.
On their way to the house Sarah had what she secretly called one of her funny turns. All that happened in a funny turn (nobody ever noticed them because obviously there was nothing to see) was that everything went very far away, taking its sound with it. It was rather like looking through the wrong end of great-grandpa’s field-glasses and at the same time getting the wireless tuned in badly. Sarah had decided that her funny turns were all to do with growing up. At any given moment (she imagined) her bones and flesh expanded a fraction beyond the capacity her blood had to pump itself into all the crevices it was supposed to get at, leaving her brain briefly deprived of nourishment and her eyes and ears in consequence fractionally just incapable of making an accurate recording of what was really going on. She had worked it out that there was no common factor to the turns. It wasn’t a question of how cold or hot the weather was, or of how much or how little she had been exerting herself, or of how hungry or how overfull she was, or how she felt. She found the sensation very interesting, but if it happened while she was talking to somebody, she worried a bit about talking sensibly. When it happened now, as they went back into the orchard (Sarah taking care to shut the gate properly) she also worried about making sure that Aunty Mabel didn’t fall on one of the hummocks in the rough grass. She was never certain of her own balance during a funny turn because balance depended on getting your sense of perspective and distance right.
So she took her time closing the gate, hoping that in a few seconds she would stop feeling like a giant in a tiny landscape, that Aunty Mabel would come back into her proper proportions, bringing the orchard with her. She said (in a voice that rang in her head but gave no impression of being loud enough for Aunty Mabel to hear), ‘I think there’s a stone in my sandal.’ Sometimes it helped to bend down, because that sent the blood into the head where it was needed. She bent down. A little to one side of her feet there was a fallen apple. Her feet and the apple were tiny, far away. One of the things about a funny turn was that although you felt gigantic in relation to everything else any part of yourself that you looked at was small and far away too. When she had fumbled with her sandal she touched the apple, fascinated by her distant hand; picked the apple up, and w
as stung by the wasp that was searching its soft bruised underside. The pain was sharp. Her brain recorded the message accurately, but there was still a layer of insensitivity separating her recognition of the pain and her realization that the pain was happening to her. She heard herself cry out. She stood upright.
‘What’s wrong?’ Aunty Mabel asked.
‘I’ve been stung.’
She was all right then – the funny turn was finished. Her little finger hurt. Aunty Mabel took the stung hand and looked at the tiny red puncture – the originating centre of the swelling and inflammation that was already beginning to show.
‘A wasp or a bee?’
‘Oh, a wasp. It was having a go at the apple.’
‘Have you been stung by a wasp before?’
‘Yes, twice.’
‘That’s all right, then. We’ll get back and put something on it.’
‘Mrs Bailey recommends lemon juice.’
‘That will do.’
‘Why is it all right that I’ve been stung before?’
‘Because some people are allergic.’
‘Does that mean they could die?’
‘Yes. But it’s very rare.’
‘I thought only snake bites and scorpion stings were fatal.’
‘No. And not always they.’
They walked side by side through the orchard towards the lawn and the house. On a day like this tea would normally have been in the garden in the shade of the cedar. Not having tea in the garden was one of the family’s concessions to the formal discipline of mourning, or a sign anyway of their respect for the feelings of people like Mrs Bailey. Sarah was glad that none of her family seemed to believe in God. She didn’t really believe in God herself. She didn’t like religious people; rather she did not like them directly they stopped being ordinary and started to be religious. Truly religious people, like nuns and monks and saints were a different matter. She thought of them as truly religious because they gave up their lives to it, and giving up your life to it struck her as the only thing to do if you believed in it. If you didn’t believe in it the most you could do was to be charitable and try not to be selfish.
She was worried because Susan had never been stung either by a wasp or a bee. Susan led a charmed life. Aunt Lydia said Susan would always fall on her feet. Sarah could not remember Susan hurting herself badly – not badly enough to leave a scar. Susan did not remember the day of the scorpion, although she had knelt by Sarah’s side, watching Dost Mohammed build a fire round it.
‘Is it true,’ Sarah asked Aunty Mabel as they crossed the empty sun-struck lawn, ‘that scorpions kills themselves if you build a ring of fire round them so that they know they can’t get out?’
‘No.’
Sarah was not surprised, in spite of having once seen what looked like proof that they did.
Aunty Mabel said: ‘Their skins are very sensitive to heat, which is why they live under stones and in holes and only come out a lot during the wet. If you build a ring of fire round them they’re killed by the heat. They look as if they sting themselves to death because of the way they arch their tails over their bodies. But it’s only a reflex action. They’re attacking the fire, and get scorched to death by it.’
After a few moments Sarah said, ‘Yes, I see,’ and was sorry it wasn’t true that they committed suicide, even though for some time now she had ceased to believe old Dost Mohammed’s story and in the practical experiment he conducted in support of it. She admired intelligence and courage because she often felt herself to be lacking in both; and it had always seemed to her that the small black scorpion found in the servants’ quarters at No. 3 Kabul road, Ranpur, had shown intelligence and courage of a high order; intelligence enough to know that it could never set about escaping without burning itself painfully to death, courage enough to make a voluntary end of it by inflicting on its own body the paralysing stab it knew would kill it. Sarah admired soldiers of ancient times who fell on their swords because they had lost a battle. She had a childhood nightmare of her father losing a battle one day and deciding to fall on his, or shoot himself, to avoid being captured.
Now that Aunty Mabel had confirmed what she already suspected about the death of the scorpion she was able to link one truth with the other: which was that the last thing she would want her father to do if he lost a battle was fall on his sword. It was an awfully impractical thing to do. And it would be impractical of the scorpion to kill itself. After all the fire might go out, or be doused by rain. It was more practical of the scorpion to attempt to survive by darting its venomous tail in the direction of what surrounded it and was rapidly killing it. Just as brave too. Perhaps braver. After all there was a saying: Never say die.
In the kitchen where Mrs Bailey was cutting cucumber sandwiches and watching the kettle Sarah had her hand seen to. After tea, which the family had in the drawing-room with all the windows open on to the flagged terrace that overlooked the garden, Susan sat in the window-seat reading one of her mother’s magazines, and Sarah went upstairs to their bedroom. She sat in a window-seat too, which had a view across to Mr Birtwhistle’s meadow. She had a pencil and an exercise book and drew a family tree, beginning with great-grandpa.
She had no idea why she drew the family tree but doing it made her feel better. It gave her a sense of belonging and of the extraordinary capacity families had for surviving and passing themselves on and handing things down. She extended the tree by mapping in what she described to herself as the Muir branch: giving her mother the two sisters Mrs Layton was entitled to (Aunt Fenny and Aunt Lydia, with their respective husbands, Uncle Arthur and Uncle Frank) and the parents they were entitled to, General and Mrs Muir. She and Susan were entitled to them too. They had Muir blood in their veins as well as Layton blood. At Christmas Aunt Lydia and Uncle Frank always took them up to Scotland where General and Mrs Muir lived in retirement. Sarah did not like Scotland. It was cold and craggy. Before her mother and father sailed back to India they were going up to Scotland too, but she and Susan weren’t going with them. They were going back to Aunt Lydia’s in Bayswater. Aunt Lydia and Uncle Frank had not come down for the funeral but had sent flowers. In her heart of hearts (as she put it to herself) she had never really taken to Aunt Lydia but had done her best not to show it because Susan didn’t like Aunt Lydia much either and between them, Sarah felt, they could have made life miserable for themselves by exaggerating the things about Aunt Lydia they didn’t like and were in mutual agreement about, and minimizing the things about her which they – Sarah anyway – did like.
When she analysed the pros and cons of Aunt Lydia she knew that it was Aunt Lydia’s dislike of India that stood in the way of her feeling affection for her. She took a red and blue pencil and drew a red ring round her Indian relatives on the family tree and a blue ring round her English relatives. Great-grandpa had a blue ring and so did Uncle Frank and Aunt Lydia (although Aunt Lydia had spent eighteen months in India after the war). There was a warming preponderance of red crayon on the tree.
‘That is my heritage,’ Sarah said, then noticed that so far she had put no ring at all round Aunty Mabel. She put down the red pencil to pick up the blue and then paused.
‘Why ever was I going to do that?’ she asked herself. And retrieved the red pencil, ringed Aunty Mabel firmly with that fiery colour; the one denoting the Indian connection.
*
Six years later in the July of 1939 she came across the exercise book among other relics of her childhood that had been packed in a leather trunk and stored in Aunt Lydia’s gloryhole. She sorted the trunk out now to make sure that nothing was worth saving from the bonfire – an incinerator, actually, at the far end of the untended weedy walled enclosure that Aunt Lydia called a garden – worth saving from the holocaust into which her English years were being thrown and causing her a degree of pain at separation she had not expected.
She sorted the contents of the trunk on a day when Aunt Lydia was out shopping with Susan and Aunt Fenny who was ba
ck again with Uncle Arthur from India. Susan was buying clothes for the tropics. Sarah thought that buying clothes for the tropics in Kensington was a waste of time. But Susan had set her heart on a topee with a veil swathed round its crown and hanging over the brim at the back to give extra shade to the neck; and on white shirts and jodhpurs to complete the outfit. Wearing these she would look like the heroine in The Garden of Allah. She also wanted some dresses in silk and georgette (which would be sweaty). And a shooting stick. And anything else that caught her eye and further excited the image she had of herself as a young girl – dressed and ready for a romantic encounter in an outpost of empire – whose father was a lieutenant-colonel, recently appointed to the command of the first battalion of his old regiment, the Pankot Rifles, and destined, no doubt, if there were a war – which seemed likely – to become a brigadier and then a major-general.
Possibly, she thought, the difference between herself and Susan was that Susan was capable of absorbing things into her system without really thinking whether they were acceptable to her or not; whereas she herself absorbed nothing without first subjecting it to scrutiny. Perhaps this was wrong. Perhaps she tried too hard to work things out. She didn’t relax. She didn’t have a talent for just enjoying herself, which was a pity because she must miss a lot that Susan never missed.
Finding nothing worth saving from the trunk she took the contents in several batches and several armfuls down the two flights of stairs and down the half-flight into the semi-basement and the kitchen whose door gave access to the garden.
There, on a warm July evening scented by warmed brick, bruised grass and the fumes of traffic in the park and on the Bayswater road, she set fire to the relics of a youth she did not understand but felt had given a certain set to her bones, a toughness to her skin, and caused her now (half-shielding her cheeks from the heat of the fire in the incinerator) to stand watching the conflagration as it were in her own right as a person who now inherited the conflicting attitudes of the Laytons and the Muirs, and of Aunty Mabel, and of grand-grandpa who had ‘gone out’ on an August morning to the scent of cedars and stale flowers in vases, so that she had a vision of herself and her family as the thing she was burning, and of that thing, of that self, as an instrument of resistance and at the same time of acceptance. She could feel the heat on her bones, the heat on her skin. Within them remained the nub, the hard core of herself which the flames did not come near nor illuminate.
