by Paul Scott
‘Yes,’ Sarah said. ‘Yes, I think that’s true.’
Merrick drained his glass.
‘When I was a youngster one of the first questions I asked the District Superintendent I worked my probationary period with was how much longer he thought we’d rule India. I was thinking of my future which was something I’d somehow never thought of as necessary when deciding to try for the Indian Police. But when I got out here it all seemed so unreal, like a play. I suddenly couldn’t picture it as a thing I’d work at all my life. So I asked this extraordinary question, extraordinary I mean because it was absurd to be wondering about much more than learning the job I’d chosen and worked hard to get. He didn’t think it extraordinary, though, and I’ve always remembered his reply. He said: “Don’t bother your head about that, Merrick, because there’s not a thing you can do. India will be ours until one day between questions and other business in the House of Commons the British people through their elected representatives will vote to get rid of it. The majority won’t have the least idea what they’re doing. Getting rid of India will be just one clause in a policy of reform dreamed up by intellectuals and implemented by the votes of mill-hands and post-office clerks, and if you think there’s any connection between their India and the one you’re going to help police you might as well go home now.”’
He set his empty glass down.
‘I’ve never accepted that,’ he said. ‘The fact, yes. But not the mentality that so often goes with it. Well, you know the sort of thing, I expect, although you don’t really get it in the army because it’s a tradition that you have your own self-contained community and a job to do that nobody outside thinks worth a button until the shooting begins. While there isn’t any shooting you take it as all part of the game to be mucked about. You accept it philosophically. But in the civil and the police, in the business of daily administration of the country, there’s the constant irritation of being strait-jacketed by policy from above. At the top the Government of India tries to fight the Secretary of State in Whitehall and at the bottom the district officer tries to fight the Government. But it’s always a losing battle. You find yourself automatically implementing a policy you feel passionately is wrong and the only thing you can do short of resigning is detach yourself from the reality of the problem, from the human issues if you like. You become – a rubber stamp. That’s the mentality I mean. It’s something my first superintendent encouraged me to resist. Perhaps he was wrong. He was an officer of the old school. He’d seen what he called better times, times – he said – when you were master in your own bailiwick. I suppose I should have recognized that it was an older school, not mine, and that I live in a rubber-stamp age. And don’t get the wrong impression, Miss Layton. I haven’t been kicked out of the police. I applied for permission to transfer to the army at the beginning of the war. I pulled every string I knew, just like Mrs Grace’s friend. It needed the Mayapore business, needed me to become what’s known as a locally controversial figure, to persuade them to release me for the duration, but I had to plead pretty hard even then. I sometimes think that if I’d done something terribly wrong the rubber stamp would have endorsed it. That’s its danger. It’s a controlling force without the ability to judge. Once you’re part of the rubber-stamp process yourself you could almost get away with murder. And that’s wrong. Must be. You ought to be answerable for your actions, but you ought to be able to act, you ought to be involved. As an individual. As a person. As a fallible human being.’
‘There are times,’ Sarah said, ‘when I think I don’t know what a human being is.’ Times – she told herself – when I look up and see that heaven is empty and that this is an age when all of us share the knowledge that it is and that there has never been a god nor any man made in that image. It is an intensely bleak discovery because it calls our bluff on everything. ‘But I know what you mean,’ she continued. ‘It’s easier for men. Being involved. No. That’s a facile remark. It’s not easy for any of us.’ She looked at him. ‘What was she like? the girl. The girl in the Mayapore business.’
‘Rather like you,’ he said, without hesitation, as if he had expected the question and knew in advance what his reply would be. ‘Not physically. Well, she was taller.’ He fingered the empty glass, slithered it to and fro, a few inches, on the table. ‘I suppose a bit clumsy. She knocked things over. She made a joke of it. But she was very sensitive. She said she’d been gawky as a child. She still felt like that. Unco-ordinated. But I only saw her as – peculiarly graceful. Grave. Slow. Beautiful almost, because of that. The kind of girl you could talk to. Really talk to. Or just sit with. Our tastes were – much the same. In music. Pictures. That sort of thing. Our backgrounds were quite different, because mine is very ordinary, but Daphne didn’t give a damn who your parents were or what school you went to.’
Sarah felt compelled to say it.
‘Were you in love with her?’
He played with the glass a few seconds longer, then gave it up, stubbed his cigarette, studied the hand that had moved the glass, holding it stiffly with the fingers splayed, rubbing the back and the palm with the thumb and finger of his other hand.
‘I don’t know. I thought I was for a while. But if I was it wasn’t at first sight. I’d met her several times and not thought of her that way. In fact my first impression of her was a bit unfavourable. I thought, Here we are, another of those English girls who come out here with bees in their bonnets about the rotten way we treat Indians. Give her time to find they’re taking advantage of her and she’ll get over it, she’ll go the other way, be worse than any of us. In a year she won’t have a good word to say for them. She was living with an Indian woman. You had to take that into account. Lady Chatterjee was one of those Westernized aristocratic Rajputs, an old friend of Daphne’s aunt, and Daphne had come down with her from Pindi to see what she called something of the real India. I can’t say I cottoned much to Lili Chatterjee. She belonged to that top layer of Indian society that mixes with our own top layer, but that’s not real intimacy. More like necessary mutual recognition of privilege and power. A banquet at Government House, a garden party at Viceregal Lodge. You’d find a lot of Lili Chatterjees there. You’d also find this particular one playing bridge in Mayapore with the Deputy Commissioner’s wife. But not at the Mayapore club, not among ordinary English men and women when they were off duty. They pretend they don’t care, the Lili Chatterjees I mean. Pretend they don’t need to rub shoulders with the English middle-class in their cosy middle-class clubs and homes. But they resent it. Daphne resented it too. She wasn’t able to draw the distinction. She didn’t see why a line had to be drawn – has to be drawn. But it’s essential, isn’t it? You have to draw a line. Well, it’s arbitrary. Nine times out of ten perhaps you draw it in the wrong place. But you need it there, you need to be able to say: There’s the line. This side of it is right. That side is wrong. Then you have your moral term of reference. Then you can act. You can feel committed. You can be involved. Your life takes on something like a shape. It has form. Purpose as well, maybe. You know who you are when you wake up in the morning. Well sometimes you can rub the line out and draw it in a different place, bring it closer or push it farther out. But you need it there. It’s like a blind man with a white stick needing the edge of the pavement. Poor Daphne tried to do without all that. I attempted to stop her – well, crossing the road. She didn’t seem to know she was crossing it. I suppose that’s when I first really looked at her, first considered her. And found out she wasn’t just another of those English girls with bees in their bonnets. She was this girl. And it wasn’t a bee. I don’t know what it was. It was quite beyond me. But whatever it was it destroyed her.’
He cocked his head, considering her.
‘I’m sorry, I said she was rather like you, didn’t I, but I’ve mostly been describing the things that made her different. I’m not sure I can put my finger on what it was about you that reminded me of her.’
‘Does that mean I don’t any
longer?’ Self-conscious under his scrutiny she defended herself from it with the thought that he was an appalling man whom she didn’t trust. He had a lively intelligence, perhaps less lively than its activity within the confines of a narrow mind made it seem; but she did not have to pay for the pleasure, of listening to a man – an Englishman in India – talking seriously, by liking him. She was interested in finding out why she reminded him of Miss Manners, but did not care whether the reason was flattering or the opposite of that.
‘What I’m going to say,’ he said, ‘may sound impertinent.’
‘No – I’m sure it won’t.’
‘Well – that first morning. When I’d joined you all in the station restaurant and you sat in front of the taxi next to the driver. I felt from your manner you were making the same sort of judgements of us that she did. And I thought – please forgive me – here’s another one who doesn’t see why a line must be drawn. But it was none of my business. And I was wrong anyway.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because I can see the line’s been drawn for you. You accept it. Do you remember in the taxi how I made rather heavy weather of young Kasim’s position, and your mother very understandably thought I was speaking out of turn?’
‘Yes, I remember that.’
‘Talking about Kasim. It was a sort of Pavlovian response on my part. I’d met him and I think subconsciously he’d impressed me as a man of Hari Kumar’s type.’
‘Who is Hari Kumar?’
‘The chief suspect in the Bibighar Gardens case. The man she was friendly with.’
‘Yes, I see.’
‘And yet not Kumar’s type. Physically, yes, but finally Kasim bears no more resemblance to Kumar than you do to Miss Manners. But in the taxi I think there was a sort of fantasy in my mind of Hari and Daphne being about to come together again. I’m sorry – it sounds awful, but there it was. You sat there in the front seat, shading your eyes – and that was like her. She had a way of standing, peering at things a long way off, with just that gesture. And at the end of the journey, the guest house, and Ahmed there, well – waiting. On the other side of the line.’
For an instant Sarah held in her mind’s eye an exact image of Ahmed as she had first seen him at the entrance to the guest house, emerging from the dim interior, and of herself still dazzled by the lake whose glare had become trapped inside her head, making it ache; and then this vision dissolved into another, of herself and Ahmed riding across the waste ground with constant distance between them except at those two moments, Ahmed’s seizing of the reins, herself wheeling round suddenly to face him.
‘That morning you went riding with him,’ Ronald Merrick was saying, ‘and Teddie and I turned up unexpectedly for breakfast. When we saw you coming back I thought, Well, that’s it, I was right, it’s all happening again. But then when you both got off your horses I realized it wasn’t happening at all. You were friendly enough, but the barriers were up. The way you stood I could see you weren’t sure how to leave him, I could see it crossing your mind: What do I do now, how do I get rid of him politely? You invited him in to breakfast, didn’t you? Now if it had been Kumar he’d have accepted. But Mr Kasim knows where the line has to be drawn too. It was a relief to you both when he got back on and rode off. Am I right?’
Sarah felt he was right for the wrong reasons. She did not answer him immediately. He aggravated a grinding impatience in her which she knew she must discipline.
‘I can’t speak for Mr Kasim,’ she began.
‘Then for yourself,’ he urged. ‘It was a relief.’
‘I wasn’t under pressure.’
‘We’re always under that. Resisting it or pretending it’s not there only adds to it.’
‘What we are talking about, Ronald?’ – she used his name again deliberately, as a little punishment for calling her Miss Layton after she had herself dispensed with that formality. ‘The social pressure that keeps the ruled at arm’s length from the rulers, or the biological pressure that makes a white girl think she mightn’t like being touched by an Indian?’
Did he blush? She was not sure. The light was too far gone, absorbed, drained into the lake. He put up a hand and rubbed his forehead: a gentle action – a reflex, it seemed, of his mental registration of the need, now, to tread decisively but delicately on ground set with traps for the unwary.
‘They are connected,’ he said. ‘If you visualize such a union, or if you consider its counterpart, the connection is quite clear. A white man, well, supposing I – or Teddie – I mean if one’s tastes ran that way, to marry an Indian woman, or live with her. He would not be – what is the right word? Diminished? He wouldn’t feel that. People would not really feel it of him, either. He has the dominant role, whatever the colour of his partner’s skin. The Indians themselves have this prejudice about paleness. To them a fair skin denotes descent from the civilized Aryan invaders from the north, a black skin descent from the primitive aboriginals who were pushed into the jungles and hills, or fled south. There is this connotation paleness has of something more finely, more delicately adjusted. Well – superior. Capable of leading. Equipped mentally and physically to dominate. A dark-skinned man touching a white-skinned woman will always be conscious of the fact that he is – diminishing her. She would be conscious of it too.’
He relapsed into silence. Presently he said, ‘I’ve said it all very badly. And I’ve broken one of the sacred rules, haven’t I? One isn’t supposed to talk about this kind of thing. One isn’t supposed to talk about anything much.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s how we hide our prejudices and continue to live with them. Will you have the other half?’
‘No, thank you. I ought to be going. I’m only half packed. Will you say goodbye and make my apologies to your family?’
Sarah glanced to her left. A light fell on the terrace from Aunt Fenny’s and Uncle Arthur’s room. A servant had wakened them. Her mother’s room was dark.
‘I expect Aunt Fenny will be out in a while.’
‘I mustn’t stay.’
He sat on for perhaps as long as half a minute, then rose.
‘There’s one,’ he said. ‘A firefly. The end of your vigil.’
But she did not see it. Standing, she thought of Teddie and Susan arrived already at the Nanoora Hills Hotel, observing the scene spread out below the balcony of their bridal room.
‘The end of your vigil,’ Merrick repeated, ‘and the signal for me to depart.’
She smiled, went to the light-switch on the wall near the bell-push and flicked it on. Merrick, bathed in yellow light, lost that faded density. The sleeves of his bush shirt were still rolled up to the elbows. His arms were covered in fine blond hairs. Beneath the flesh on his cheeks the bone structure was emphasized by downward-pointing shadows. His eyes, his whole physical presence, struck her as those of a man chilled by an implacable desire to be approached, accepted. She felt reluctant to take the hand he slowly, consideringly held out as if uncertain that anyone would welcome contact.
‘Well, goodbye,’ she said, letting their hands meet. His felt warm and moist. The light had already attracted insects. They encircled the shade, distracting her. For politeness’s sake she began to accompany him down the terrace but he said, ‘No, please don’t bother. Besides, you’ll miss the next firefly.’
She watched him go – puzzled that by going he made her feel lonely. He did not look back. She returned her attention to the garden. After a while she heard the sound of the truck engine.
*
She paused in her walk below the terrace. The night air was India’s only caress. She was among the fireflies now. One passed within a few feet, winking on and off. Since Ronald Merrick left she had bathed and changed, but still was the first out to begin the ritual of the evening at home – home being anywhere, any place there was – say – a veranda, a bit of a view and the padding slap of a barefoot servant answering a summons. Home, such as it was, was the passing of the hours themselves and
only in sleep might one wander into the dangerous areas of one’s exile (and perhaps, in one’s thoughts, between one remark and another, one gesture and another). One carried the lares and penates, the family iconography, in one’s head and in that sequestered region of the heart. Why we are like fireflies too, she told herself, travelling with our own built-in illumination; a myriad portable candles lighting windows against some lost wanderer’s return.
She laughed, chasing one of the luminous pulsating bugs and then stopped, having remembered her father. ‘I hope you are not lonely,’ she said aloud. ‘I hope you are well, I hope you are happy, I hope you will come back soon.’ And turned back towards the terrace and was in time to see Aunt Fenny and Uncle Arthur come out and stand for a moment arrested by some unexpected thought, consideration, recollection. From this distance their exchange was all dumb show, and not much of it either. Two or more English together were very uninteresting to watch. Fenny left Uncle Arthur’s side and went to her sister’s room from which light showed behind the louvres of closed shutters. Fenny must have tapped. A vertical band of light appeared, widened, and Fenny went inside.
Alone, Uncle Arthur now sat in a wicker chair. Alone he relaxed. Alone he became almost communicative with himself. He shouted for the bearer, crossed his legs, jerked one rhythmically up and down, smoothed his balding head, scrubbed his moustache with the first joint of his left index finger, shifted his weight in the chair, drummed on the adjacent table with his right hand. Yawned. Eased his tie. Scratched his crotch. And hearing Abdur Rahman approach, stretched his neck back to speak to him. Perhaps he asked where she was because Abdur seemed to invite his glance to fall upon, to attempt to penetrate the darkness of the garden beyond the geometrical patterns of light falling upon gravel and grass.
