by Paul Scott
Presently Merrick said:
‘But of course it didn’t come off and nobody will ever tell the tale like that. And anyway that kind of tale has had its day. Is that why it didn’t come off?’
‘There’s your tale,’ Sarah said.
‘Oh no, mine was a professional action.’ He looked at her and again she thought she detected in his expression that curious serenity. ‘It’s only amateurs who create legends. There’s nothing memorable about doing a job. I said mine was a professional act. I didn’t go to save Teddie. I went to get Mohammed Baksh. I want you to accept that, and the fact that when it came to it I didn’t have the courage to go looking for him. I pulled Teddie out because I was afraid of what people would say if I left him to fry.’ A pause. ‘I don’t mean that all this went consciously through my mind, but in retrospect I see no other interpretation.’ A pause. ‘Do you?’
Do I? (she asked herself). Yes, I see a man who was in love with those legends, that way of life, all those things that from a distance seemed to distinguish people like us from people of his own kind, people he knew better. I see a man still in love with them but who has chosen to live outside in the cold because he couldn’t get in to warm his hands at this hearth with its dying fire. And it is strange because I long to exchange the creeping cold for a chill reality but feel in my bones that my kind of cold would not be his kind, just as the warmth I knew as a child was different from the warmth he always imagined. I don’t understand the distinction he makes between what he calls amateur and what he calls professional, but feel it’s a distinction he’s made to heal a wound. After all, there are only people, tasks, myths and truth. And truth is a fire few of us get scorched by. Perhaps it’s an imaginary flame, and can’t be made by rubbing two sticks together.
She said, ‘Some people would have been more afraid of pulling Teddie out than of what people would say if he’d been left there. And I don’t think you risked your life just to get Mohammed Baksh.’
‘No?’
‘You went down there without thinking why you went, Ronald. I mean when the shooting had started. You saw they were in trouble and needed help. What you call the game only looks like a game to people who aren’t in the team. I’m sorry but even if it’s only as twelfth man you’re a member of the team after all, aren’t you?’
He smiled, turned his head so that he need not look at her. He said, ‘You are, when it comes to it, very much the Colonel’s daughter, I’m afraid.’
‘I was born that way.’
She waited. He did not respond. Again she felt the pressure of his willing her to enter and explore the mysterious areas of his obsession. To counteract it she considered other mysteries, or anyway questions that remained unanswered: The outcome of the battle, whether it had ever been proven that Baksh had lied, and why; what other prisoners were taken and, more grotesquely, the circumstances of his vigil, with Teddie burnt but not unconscious all the time, and himself in some unexplained condition of numbness which perhaps wore off before the time was up.
‘Did the driver come through?’ she asked. He nodded. ‘And Teddie – was Teddie aware of what you’d done?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. If you could use a word like expression in a case like that I’d say his was one of blank amazement. He never made a sound. I’m not sure he could see me. But his eyes moved. At one time I thought he’d gone, but his heart was still beating. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t tell you things like that. Burning’s a terrible thing. I was glad when they told me he’d had a bullet lodged in his back. I suppose the fire had cauterized the wound. At the time I thought he was only dying from burns.’ He looked round at her again. ‘Sitting with him reminded me of the last thing I did as DSP Mayapore, just before I was – transferred to Sundernagar. There was an English mission school superintendent living there who committed suicide. Suttee, as a matter of fact.’
‘Oh – do you mean Miss Crane?’
‘You knew her?’
‘No, but the woman my aunt lives with was in the missions. She often talks about her. Edwina Crane.’
‘That’s her. Edwina Crane. A funny old bird. She’d been around for years but no one knew her at all well except I suppose the Indian children in the schools. If she had any friends they were Indians and half-castes. So it was ironic, because she was the first person from Mayapore to get hurt in the August riots. She was on her way back from a place called Dibrapur with an Indian teacher. A mob stopped them and murdered the teacher, beat her up and burned her car out. We had her in hospital the evening all that other business happened in the Bibighar. She’d been found sitting on the roadside in the pouring rain holding the dead Indian’s hand. You couldn’t get much out of her. She was half-delirious when I saw her and couldn’t remember anything. When she got better I think she was already off her head. Melancholia. I heard she’d resigned from the mission and wasn’t seeing anybody. Then she did this dramatic thing, dressed herself in Indian clothes, locked herself in a shed in her garden and burnt herself to death. A symbolic act, I suppose. She must have felt the India she knew had died, so like a good widow she made a funeral pyre. I had to go along there, poke about among her things, and question her old servant. There wasn’t much to find, she hadn’t left a note. But in a chest I turned up an old picture of Queen Victoria receiving tribute, a very stylized thing, with the old lady sitting on a throne under clouds and angels, and Indians of all kinds gathering round her like children. Man-bap. I am your father and mother. And in another place I found the little plate that had been taken off the frame. The picture must have been a gift in recognition of some special service years before. It went something like, To Edwina Crane, for her courage. The mission was in Muzzafirabad. Oh and it dated back years – I think before the First World War. But sitting there with Teddie made it all seem to connect, I mean connect what she had done all that time ago in Muzzafirabad and what he had just done, or tried to do. And then there was the other similarity – death by fire.’
He smiled at her. ‘I think that made me feel – what you said. I mean for a moment there I was an amateur myself. I fell for it, really fell for it, the whole thing, the idea that there really was this possibility. Devotion. Sacrifice. Self-denial. A cause, an obligation. A code of conduct, a sort of final moral definition, I mean definition of us, what we’re here for – people living among each other, in an environment some sort of God created. The whole impossible nonsensical dream.’
She waited. He had turned his head away again and when the silence continued unbroken the notion that he could have fallen asleep exhausted, nudged – but did not dislodge – the firmer belief she had that everything he said and did was rooted in acute awareness of himself as someone central to an occasion. And suddenly she had a vivid image of him on the platform of Mirat cantonment station, central to an earlier occasion that had been well marked by victims, although on that day, the day of the wedding, only the woman in the white saree had actually been present. But it was the significance of that lonely supplication that now struck her, for the first time, and recreated Bibighar in her mind as an occasion that continued, could not be ruled off as over, done with. Always, before, she had seen the white-clad figure as representative of an old misfortune that had left its mark; a sadness in a stranger’s heart, an unknown and so unrecognizable grief; and it was only now, observing the faced-away figure of the man the woman had approached as if he were someone capable of granting an alleviation, that she understood the continuing nature of the misfortune, realized that the boy whom the woman pleaded for must, then at least, still have been paying a price, however far distant away in time had been the occasion of his fault, if there had ever been fault.
A new disturbing element of uncertainty stirred her. It caused her to press again with her feet on the floor and with the small of her back into the uncomfortable upright chair, so powerful was that sensation of not wishing to be drawn towards that central point of reference that was in Merrick, that was Merrick. She felt deprived of
speech and then saw that this was a protection. Briefly she was adjured to silence by an exquisite tautening of nerves that promised, if only they could snap, to leave her vividly possessed by an absolute, an exemplary, understanding of what had been only partially revealed to her by that incident on the station.
But the moment passed. She was still possessed merely by unanswered questions. What was new and disturbing apart from her realization that the boy had still been paying for his fault, was the shadow of permanent misfortune she saw as fallen on him with the girl’s death. Had the girl before, or her aunt since, attempted to reduce the price he paid, might still be paying? Or had a net enclosed him, so subtly, irrevocably, that nothing they could try to do would help? And was Merrick alone responsible for that? Was it these victims, not Teddie, who now lay like a weight on that conscience of his which he said he could examine but give a clean bill to? Perhaps that was the way in to him, to become his victim and then to haunt his conscience. But if so, it seemed to her that it was an approach without access at the end. There was, for some reason, no way into him at all, and all the people whom he chose as victims lay scattered on his threshold.
She thought: You are, yes, our dark side, the arcane side. You reveal something that is sad about us, as if out here we had built a mansion without doors and windows, with no way in and no way out. All India lies on our doorstep and cannot enter to warm us or be warmed. We live in holes and crevices of the crumbling stone, no longer sheltered by the carapace of our history which is leaving us behind. And one day we shall lie exposed, in our tender skins. You, as well as us.
It was extraordinary how like each other they were, and at the same time rigidly divided by an antagonism she believed was mutual. She could not bear the thought of this man clinging through a god-relationship to the family she loved, honoured, felt a strange irritated anguish for. He would, through that relationship, attach himself like lichen to a wall, the crumbling stone of the blind house that was doomed to become a ruin. At least, she cried to herself, let it be as noble a ruin as it can; and then laughed at her absurd pride, the fastidious distaste of this Colonel’s daughter for a man she had decided, for no clear reason, she could not trust. And there was this problem too: that she had given her word to Susan that she would ask him.
She opened her mouth, but could not say it. She spoke the first words that came into her head.
‘Did you ever know old Lady Manners, as well as her niece?’ And then remembered Aunt Fenny had already asked him that, the day of the wedding, and been told he didn’t.
He turned his head towards her.
‘No. Why?’
‘I thought you might have. She’s in Pankot.’
‘Oh?’ He waited. She did not explain. ‘Is she well?’
‘We don’t know. None of us has actually seen her.’ Did he look relieved? ‘She signed the book at Flagstaff House.’
‘Does she still have the child?’
‘We don’t know that either.’
‘I see. Is Pankot such a large place, then?’
‘She must be living on the west side. The Indian side. It’s rather a mystery, why she signed the book.’ She wondered what he would say if she told him now the story of what she had done in Srinagar. The white ward seemed full of shadows and echoes of departed voices. ‘Incidentally,’ she heard herself say, ‘talking about children, before I go, I have a question from Susan,’ and hesitated, struggling again with her reluctance and her sense of duty. ‘She wonders whether you’d like to be one of the godfathers.’ She knew her voice was flattened by a cold formality. The same lack of enthusiasm must show in her face. Guilt pricked her. She might just as well have left the duty unperformed as perform it so badly.
‘How very kind of her,’ he said. He glanced away as if to turn the possibility over in his mind. She wondered if he felt the dead weight that had descended, the weight of the right-thing, like a stone pressing them down, sapping their strength. With one simple remark he threw the weight off. ‘But in all the circumstances it wouldn’t be suitable, would it?’ His glance returned, penetrating, implacable. She knew relief, felt only a small remorse. She was at a loss to understand what it was about him that so appalled her.
‘Are you to be godmother?’
She nodded.
He smiled faintly. She noted for the first time what it was that was so unusual about the blueness of his eyes. It was a blueness she realized she associated with the eyes of dolls: a demanding but unseeing blue, incapable either of acceptance or rejection. If the pillows were taken away, if he were lain flat, would they close and be incapable of opening until with inquisitive fingers you swung the delicately balanced lids up for a glimpse of those little mirrors with their grave but startling illusion of response?
‘Well,’ he said, ‘you don’t believe in it either, do you? But tell her – tell her I was touched and very grateful.’
‘Is your not believing in it the only reason?’
She was denied an answer. The door swung open. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Layton,’ Sister Prior said, advancing towards the bed – trim, capable and asexually attractive – ‘I’m told your uncle’s come to fetch you. I’m afraid I wasn’t able to let him up. Fact is I’m going to turn you out. How are we?’
‘We are well,’ Merrick said.
‘Are you sure my uncle’s here? It wasn’t arranged.’
‘Quite sure. Unless there are two Colonel Graces.’
‘I think there’s only one. I’ll say goodbye, then, Ronald. I expect Aunt Fenny will be round in a day or two. Is there anything special you’d like her to bring you?’
‘I don’t think they’re on the market.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Nothing. Just my little joke. And thank you. Thank you for coming.’
‘I’ll ring tomorrow before I leave.’
‘Well,’ Sister Prior interrupted, ‘tomorrow won’t be at all a good day to ring us, will it, Captain Merrick?’
‘No, Sister Prior. I suppose it won’t.’
‘The day after,’ Sister Prior suggested.
‘I shall be in Pankot the day after – I thought of ringing before I left.’
‘Oh well, your uncle can keep in touch. I’m sorry to hustle you, but we have our little duties.’
Sarah laughed. Sister Prior in the ward, in front of her patient, was quite a different person from the one in the waiting-room. She did not like either, but preferred the bitterness to the professional coyness. She turned to Merrick.
‘I’ll write to you from Pankot.’
‘Will you?’
The reply, meant – she believed – to shatter her, seemed to bounce off her. Never before had she been so conscious of the thickness of skin that was part of her inheritance. But consciousness of it at once began to thin it down. He had not meant, perhaps, to remind her of the earlier unkept promise, but had spoken involuntarily, out of genuine hope but lack of real expectation.
‘Of course,’ she said and then, determinedly, subtly stressing his Christian name because as yet he had not called her Sarah, she ended, ‘Goodbye, Ronald.’
‘Goodbye,’ he said. For an instant there was a repetition of that difficulty with the throat. ‘Goodbye,’ he said again, and closed his eyes, as if he knew he had been played with long enough.
*
In the corridor Sister Prior said, ‘He’s marvellous, isn’t he? You simply wouldn’t know he’s constantly in pain. He fights taking drugs. Is he a religious man?’
‘Religious? No, I don’t think so.’
‘I ask because there are sects that think pain is something you have to bear. With Ronald we have to get up to all sorts of tricks. But the odd thing is him thinking he’s not been drugged has the effect you’d expect if he actually wasn’t.’
Sister Prior pressed the button to summon the lift. The Bengal sky beyond the window of the waiting-alcove was sodden with rain and cloud and evening. Below, waiting, was Uncle Arthur on whom fortune had smiled at last.
‘Of course,’ Sister Prior was saying – and this, surely, was a third persona? – the talkative, informed and uniformed bouncer? – ‘it’s all to the good that he’s not over-dependent. He’ll come through tomorrow that much better.’
The lift arrived. Sister Prior waited while the attendant clanged back the gates. Entering, Sarah placed her hand so that the gates should not be shut and the descent begin, and it all be over without having come to its logical end.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but we know nothing and he wouldn’t say.’
‘Oh, I realized that. And you ought to know, oughtn’t you? The left arm.’
‘The left arm?’
‘They took the hand off in Comilla. Tomorrow we have to take off from just above the elbow. Third degree burns and a bullet in the upper arm and one in the forearm. The right arm’s a mess too, but we can save that. His face will be scarred for life but his hair will grow again, of course. He might even look human without the bandages.’
As if stung Sarah removed her hand from the gates and Sister Prior took her opportunity and slammed them shut. The lift lurched and began to go down. You bitch, she shouted silently. You bloody, bloody bitch. And wondered, presently (as the lift arrived and she smiled automatically in reply to fat old Uncle Arthur’s brick-red grin behind the mesh – strayed like a Cheshire cat into the infirm and unstable world of suffering), whether she meant herself or Sister Prior.
