The Day Of The Scorpion (Raj Quartet 2)
Page 26
‘Aunt Fenny, I just don’t understand you.’
‘Ah here it is. Millie, put it in your handbag for safety. Help me up, Sarah. What don’t you understand?’
‘You’re still talking about that Manners business—’
‘But Susan can’t hear—’
‘That’s not what I mean. I mean you’re quite prepared to gloat over the details, you’re willing to sit Captain Merrick down, stick a glass in his hand and prise every last juicy bit of the story out of him, without any thought for his feelings at all. But when we had an opportunity to show friendly to the poor girl’s aunt it was you who found the perfect excuse for keeping our distance. You said a visit would embarrass her.’
‘Well, so it would,’ Fenny said, turning to help Mrs Layton fold the dress into the suitcase. ‘And if it hadn’t embarrassed her it would certainly have embarrassed me. Everyone agrees that that woman’s behaviour has been quite extraordinary.’
Sarah began to undress, contorting herself to get at the row of satin-covered buttons. She felt a tide of anger and frustration spread through her body.
‘You could actually hear that revolting crying,’ Fenny added. ‘It was like being next door to some awful Indian slum. It made one feel quite sick, the thought of an English woman living in it.’
‘I was in it too,’ Sarah said, and as she did so seemed to discover, through her finger-tips, the secret of undoing the dress, and to touch, as well, the spring of some deeper secret that had to do with the unlocking of her own precious individuality. She let the slipper-satin gown fall to her feet where it lay like an unwanted skin. ‘I spent a whole hour in the slum, talking to the extraordinary woman and looking at the revolting baby. Of course it wasn’t a slum and the baby wasn’t revolting. But I’d agree about Lady Manners. She wasn’t ordinary.’
‘You went to see her?’
‘Yes.’
‘What for?’
‘To apologize for us. Perhaps the rest was just curiosity, like yours, Aunt Fenny.’
She picked up the sloughed dress. It was a garment she would never wear again. Suddenly, the waste no longer offended her; she was glad – glad Susan had insisted on peach slipper-satin, had resisted her own puritan preference for a material that, with adaptations, could have served secondary long-term purposes.
‘Did you know about this, Milly?’ Aunt Fenny asked.
‘Yes, I knew.’
‘And approved?’
‘I find it difficult to approve or disapprove of what I don’t understand. Let’s just say I knew you and Arthur would understand it even less. I told her not to mention it. But it doesn’t matter now. May we forget it, please? May we just concentrate on getting Susan safely to the train?’
‘You’re absolutely right. I don’t understand. Apologized for us? My dear child, sometimes you worry me. You worry us all. You worry us very much.’
‘Yes, I know,’ Sarah said, packing the bridesmaid’s dress and satin shoes into tissue. ‘I worry me too. Shall I put Susan’s veil in my case? There’s more room.’
Automatically Aunt Fenny handed the folded veil and tissue over. Fragile, even insubstantial, its packed bulk yet called for two hands to support it. Carefully, Sarah placed it in the suitcase on top of the other things: the veil, the most important of all the trappings of Susan’s determined illusion, now done with, put away. She remembered the day spent in Aunt Lydia’s glory-hole, the armfuls of stuff taken down into the Bayswater garden and burnt in the incinerator from whose heat she had stood back, shielding her face with a grubby hand and thinking of the perpetual light that seemed to shine upon the members of her family.
Perhaps, she thought, I am no longer in darkness, perhaps there is light and I have entered it. But she did not know what light exactly, nor what entering it would already have laid on her by way of obligations. But if it was light she wanted to share it. She looked at Aunt Fenny and at her mother, snapped the locks of the case shut as if completing, with a happy flourish, some special conjuring trick.
‘But don’t let’s worry just now,’ she said. ‘It’s not only Susan’s day, it’s ours too.’
*
And to end it, adding a third link to the chain forged by the throwing of the stone and the barring of the club doors to the Nawab, there was the curious incident of the woman in the white saree who appeared from out of the crowd on the platform of the cantonment station where the train for Nanoora was drawn up, and who seemed intent on joining the group seeing Teddie and Susan off, although she stayed a few paces behind them.
At first only the officers on the fringe of the group noticed her, and they thought nothing of her presence. But now from farther down the platform a warning whistle blew and as Captain Merrick came down from the compartment, leaving Mrs Layton and Sarah and Major and Mrs Grace to make their private family farewells to the departing couple, the group moved to give him room, spreading out, leaving a clear space, so that Merrick, turning, found the woman a few feet away, and coming closer.
The saree was only of cotton, but being white, suggestive of widowhood and mourning, the cheapness of the material could not be counted a sign of poverty. The thought that she might be a beggar did not enter the heads of any of the officers near by. She was not very dark skinned, and she looked clean, respectable. In fact the immediate impression everyone had, including Mrs Grace who now also left the compartment with her husband and Sarah, was that an unpleasant scene was about to take place, with the Indian woman claiming a seat in the first class.
But she seemeed to be a beggar after all. She had begun to speak, in Hindi, which the nearest of the officers got the drift of, and it was clear to others that Captain Merrick understood too because he answered her, also in Hindi. Help me, she had said, your Honour alone can help now. I beg you. Be merciful. To which Merrick replied: Please go away. There is nothing I can do for you.
She cried out, and fell to her knees – an alarming spectacle which, moving as it might have been on a stage to an audience already translated to a state of suspended disbelief, could only be a cause of embarrassment on a public platform. And the cry, the act of abasement, were not all. She pulled the saree from her head, revealing greying hair, reached out and grabbed poor Captain Merrick’s feet and placed her forehead on the dirty ground, moaning and keening. It was impossible to touch her. One of the officers said, ‘Jao! jao!’ and tried to help Merrick urge her away by pressing on her shoulder with his shin. She let go, but held her ground, scrabbled in the dirt and dust of the platform and symbolically smarmed her head with ash. She rocked and swayed, crying out the while inarticulately.
The extraordinary scene came to an abrupt end. An Indian railway official, the man who was checking reservations, emerged from a near-by compartment, saw what was happening and came at a run. He grabbed the woman roughly, pulled her to her feet, pushed her away, once, twice, as often as was necessary to press her back into the crowd of watching Indians, shouting angrily, threatening her with the police. Back among her own people she fell to her knees again, resumed her crying and gesturing, crazed by some grief that the bystanders could not understand or share, and which therefore seemed absurd to them. They watched her curiously, then parted as an elderly Indian with a grey beard and wearing steel-rimmed spectacles pushed his way through, approached her, spoke, raised her to her feet and led her away out of sight, down the platform.
‘A madwoman,’ the man in charge of reservations said. ‘Please, no one is badly molested?’
That she was a madwoman seemed unquestionable, but to hear her so described by this particular man was like having official confirmation of the fact. It could be assumed that the woman was known: a poor, mad, harmless creature who pestered sahibs on railway platforms.
Teddie had his head thrust through an open window. A clean piece of sticking plaster adorned his cheek. ‘What was all that?’ he asked cheerfully. But he was not looking for an answer. There was another blast on the whistle. He turned back into the compartment.
‘Somebody catch,’ she shouted, and flung the tired little bouquet she had carried all morning into the air, but in Sarah’s direction. She caught it and instinctively raised it to her nose to sniff the still sweet-smelling blooms. She looked up and found Susan watching her, waiting perhaps for some particular word or gesture but there was no word or gesture to find beyond a mouthing of the word ‘Thanks’. All I can do as well, Sarah said silently, is wish you happiness.
And that seemed to be enough.
IV
Captain Merrick came to the guest house at the beginning of the short twilight. Sarah was alone on the terrace waiting, she explained, for the darkness to fall and the fireflies to come out. The rest of her family were still in their rooms.
‘Haven’t you slept this afternoon?’ Merrick asked. She still wore the dress she’d changed into for the farewells at the station.
‘Oh, I meant to rest but the place was too quiet. It’s been such a hive of activity all week. So I wrote letters, well – one letter, to Father, about the wedding.’ She looked at her watch. ‘They’ll be in Nanoora soon. Won’t you ring for a drink?’
‘If you’ll have one too.’
‘I may as well.’
Merrick went to the bell-push set in the wall near the french windows. He had changed out of best KD into a cotton bush shirt and slacks. After he’d rung he stood by the balustrade.
‘The last place the light goes from is the lake,’ Sarah said. ‘But when it’s really dark the lake’s much darker than anything.’
‘Water reflects the sky,’ Merrick said, prosaically. He took out his cigarette case, came towards her. She shook her head.
‘No, thanks. Not just now. But you do. It’s part of the pleasure of this particular time of day. Smelling someone else’s tobacco smoke.’
‘You’re very sensitive to atmosphere.’
‘I suppose I am.’ She thought for a moment. ‘But not more than anyone else. Perhaps I think about it more.’
Abdur Rahman came out.
‘What will you have, Ronald?’ she asked, using his given name because for the first time it seemed natural to do so.
‘Whisky if I may.’
‘Whisky soda, Sahib ke waste, Abdur. Burra peg hona chahie. Aur Tom Collins meri lie.’
‘Memsahib.’
When Abdur Rahman had gone Merrick said, ‘You think I need a burra peg then?’
‘I don’t know about need. Deserve.’
‘I used hardly to drink at all.’
He sat opposite her, lit his cigarette, then said, ‘I’m off to Calcutta first thing in the morning, so I’ve really come to say goodbye to everybody.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’
‘The signal was in when we got back from the station. Three of us have to go, but it wasn’t unexpected. The General warned us before he went himself. I think it means some change of location for the training and forming-up area. Perhaps things are on the move.’
Sarah said nothing for a while. The light, fading fast, perceptibly, had begun its tag-end of the day business of investing people you sat close to – Ronald Merrick in this case – with a curious extra density, a thickness and solidity that compensated for the darkening and fading of features, hands and clothes so that the person on whom darkness fell was not diminished but intensified. She thought of what he meant when he referred to things being on the move. Those things seemed to be so far away that they were almost unimaginable, and yet within a day or two he could be close to them and she could reach out and touch him now and he could carry the impression of her touch into areas of danger.
‘Does it ever strike you,’ she asked, ‘how odd it is about war, I mean about the way it’s concentrated in special places? And in between the places huge stretches of country, whole continents where life just goes on as usual?’
‘Like here?’
She nodded. ‘Like here.’
He said, after a while, ‘I suppose the other curious thing is wanting to go to it. I needn’t have.’ He glanced at her. ‘Will you write to me sometimes?’
She glanced back, ready to smile, taking it as a light-hearted, vaguely sentimental suggestion of the kind she could forgive him because he was, all said and done, a soldier; but she was aware, meeting his glance, of the request perhaps being as serious as it was unexpected.
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Thank you.’
He might have intended to add something but Abdur Rahman came out with the tray of drinks. Sarah took the cold glass, waiting until Merrick had said ‘bus’ to the pouring soda water, then called ‘Cheers’. The ice burned her lips, numbing them. This first moment of drinking chilled liquid always reminded her of the feeling in the lips as injections in the mouth wore off. She swallowed, closed her eyes and put her head back, making a faint exclamation of satisfaction she only partly felt.
Merrick said, ‘I’ve enjoyed meeting you all, you know. It’s been a long time since I was – with a family.’ He sipped his whisky. ‘I came to say goodbye but also with the hope of being able to apologize. I think I can to you. If you weren’t alone I probably wouldn’t think it opportune. It’s not the sort of thing one can say to several people.’
Sarah had opened her eyes and turned her head, but he was looking doggedly in the direction of the lake.
‘That stone someone chucked this morning was really thrown at me. I know it sounds childish and melodramatic but persecution of that kind has been going on ever since I left Mayapore. It’s never bothered me but today all of you were involved. And that’s what I want to apologize for, for two of the things that spoilt the day for Teddie and Susan, and all of you. The stone, and that unpleasant scene on the platform. I’m not sure I oughtn’t to apologize for the insult to the Nawab too. I ought to have made sure those lads from the military police knew there were to be Indian guests. In any case they wouldn’t have been on duty if the stone hadn’t been thrown. I’m sorry. I was the worst best man Teddie could have chosen.’
‘Oh, no!—’
‘It’s all to do with that Mayapore business.’ He was looking at her now. ‘You know about my connection with that?’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘I’m sorry – I mean for not saying who I really was and then being, well, faced with having to deny it and tell a lie or admit it and look as if I’d been telling one. It made me feel and look ridiculous, made it seem I’d something to hide or be ashamed of, but all I’ve wanted is to forget it, not have to answer questions about it in every new place I go to. I hope your mother in particular understands that. She’s had me under her roof. I’m not unconscious of the obligation that has put me under.’
Sarah resumed her watch on the lake. She felt vaguely ill-at-ease, conscious of those things about Ronald Merrick that Aunt Fenny put down as signs of a humble origin. Phrases like ‘under her roof’ and ‘not unconscious of the obligation’ had a stilted, self-advertising ring that she didn’t altogether care for. It alarmed her to realize that she could respond, as automatically as Aunt Fenny, to the subtler promptings of the class-instinct. Why should I question his sincerity? she asked herself; realizing that this was what she was doing.
‘We all understood,’ she told him. ‘I’d say it was the natural thing to do.’
‘Thank you.’
‘But I don’t really understand about the stone and the woman on the station. Was she the mother of one of the boys that got arrested?’
Merrick smiled, took another drink.
‘Well, you do understand, you see. It’s all quite simple once you know who I am. But she wasn’t the mother of one of the boys, she was his aunt. Although pretty much like a mother to him. It wasn’t pleasant seeing her like that this morning. I remember her
as respectable and dignified.’ He drank again. ‘I shan’t forget it in a hurry. But of course I’m not supposed to. They want it to prey on my mind until I’m as convinced as they are that I made a terrible mistake, the kind of mistake I shan’t be able to live with because it’ll be impossible to correct it. But it’s impossible now. They must know that. That poor woman was being used. She probably thought there’s a chance I could work a miracle for her.’
Dim as a picture was Sarah comprehended vividly enough the essence of what it would convey if a whole light shone on it. She understood that he had carried a burden a long way, for a long time, had suddenly put it down and was intent on showing her – and himself – what it was before he shouldered it again and took it with him wherever he was going. Perhaps he hoped that showing it would lighten it, although – in the swiftly encroaching dark through which he was beginning to loom he looked capable of rejecting any claim that showing it might give a would-be sharer.
‘Did you see that man who took her?’ he asked. ‘He’s behind it. I heard he was in Mirat, and had a woman with him. He put her up to it, brought her all the way here from Mayapore, getting her hopes up that I could be moved by that kind of appeal, that I could do something. It’s pretty cruel. He probably doesn’t care a fig for her, or the boy, any of them. It’s sheer pretence. The case is useful to him, that’s all. It serves his purpose. But that’s India for you. They’re quite indifferent to one another’s sufferings when it comes down to it, and we’ve become so lofty and detached, so starry-eyed about our own civilized values and about our own common-sense view prevailing that our policy has become one of indifference too. We don’t rule this country any more. We preside .over it, in accordance with a book of rules written by the people back home.’