A Division Of The Spoils (Raj Quartet 4) (21 page)

As she exhaled, this notion seemed to take form in the smoke and hang with it until it was sucked through the open window, leaving her with a profound sense of her misplacement in these surroundings. But there was no compensating sense of release from them because she could not easily imagine alternatives: to Pankot, yes, but the alternative to Pankot was still an Indian alternative, a variation of Pankot, and Pankot was already crowding in on her, threatening that illusion of serenity, of future possibilities, which had excited her the evening before, getting off the train at Ranpur. She was still in India, still of India. You could exchange one surrounding for another but not the occupation, an occupation less
and less easy to explain and to follow except by continuing to perform it and seize opportunities to demonstrate – like the artist who carved angels’ faces in the darkest recesses of a church roof and countered the charge that people couldn’t see them by saying that God could – that dim as the light had grown it was still enough by which to see an obligation.

Five minutes had gone but she sat motionless, watching the smoke from her cigarette, unwilling to give the order to start up, unwilling to stir sufficiently to lift the cigarette to her mouth. From somewhere in the forested slopes a coppersmith-bird began its insistent high-pitched calling, a monotonous tapping sound of which she was usually only subconsciously aware but whose single rhythmically repeated note, coming just now, seemed to be counting the seconds away for her; and then, as it continued, encouraging her not to move but to listen, to surrender to its nagging persuasion until she entered a state of torpor or stupefaction, of which it might take some predatory advantage, reveal itself as a bird of more ominous intention, a bird of the species Barbie watched beyond the barred window, planing the sky above the invisible towers.

Abruptly it fell silent. The driver looked round.

‘
Panch minute, memsahib?
’

‘
Han
,’ she said, ‘
lekin
–’

But what? Carefully she stubbed the cigarette in the chromium tray on the panel of the door, reluctant to bring the journey to a conclusion. Her capacity to feel or show family affection had diminished and in one area all but vanished. She felt closest now to Aunt Fenny who had seen her through the thing that happened to her. They had seen it through together, if such a lonely and love-less experience could ever be thought of as anything but solitary. Where there might have been recriminations between them there had been only a wounded but finally healing silence; healing because it had been warmed once by physical contact – Aunt Fenny’s plump arm round her shoulders, Aunt Fenny’s head against hers. Between herself and her mother there had been neither word nor gesture. Nothing. For her mother it had never happened. It was her mother’s assumption of ignorance that hurt her most. Sometimes, holding Susan’s baby and chancing to find her
mother watching her, she felt she would have welcomed any response, even disgust, that showed her mother appreciated that the act of ministering to her sister’s child was one that could fill her with the anguish of her own physical deprivation; and then, seeing no glimmer of recognition in that steady dispassionate gaze, she felt deprived again, of part of herself, of everything really except her guilt.

Her guilt was unquestionable but there was only one aspect of it which she was truly ashamed of, and this she bitterly regretted. She knew that behind her longing to talk about it to her mother lay a need for consolation and that this was a weakness, a form of self-indulgence. Understanding this she could live with her mother’s silence, endless though it was as a punishment. For her mother the silence was part of the code, the standard: the angel’s face in the dark. Or was it a demon’s? Whichever it was it helped her mother to preserve an attitude of composure and fortitude and Sarah was able to admire her for it and see the point. In this way Sarah carved angel faces of her own and only at moments of acute distress had destructive impulses to tear the fabric of the roof and expose the edifice to an empty sky.

I shall walk the rest of the way, too, she told herself. And opened the door, got out, shut it, before she could change her mind. She told the driver to go ahead to the bungalow and wait. She stood in the road until the car had started then, following slowly, watched it as it took the last section of the hill. Rose Cottage was behind the next bend.

The coppersmith had resumed but from farther off, having flown to try its luck elsewhere or to plot another point in the boundary of its territory. She knew nothing of its habits, little of the lives of wild creatures whose co-existence with her own species created a mysterious world within a world; or rather, worlds, a finite but to her uncountable number, self-sufficient, separated, but intent on survival. She walked faster, to the tune of the distant coppersmith, and recalled with clarity the night of Susan’s wedding in Mirat, wandering amidst the fireflies in the grounds of the palace guest house and saying aloud to her absent father: I hope you are well, I hope you are happy, I hope you will come back soon: and then turning back towards the house where Uncle Arthur sat alone on the lit
verandah, a long way away from her, in a pattern of light, a circle of safety. My family, she had thought then. My family, my family.

She had said the words aloud and said them aloud again as she approached the entrance to the front garden of Rose Cottage. My family. My family. Before repeating the words she had not expected anything of them but at once she felt the tug of an old habit of affection and then a yearning for the powerful and terrible enchantment of inherited identity, which she had spent most of her adult years fighting to dispel; fighting as hard as Susan had fought to feel herself touched by it; and drawn into it, to its very centre, where she would no longer feel, as she had once confessed to Sarah she felt, like a drawing that anyone who wanted to could come along and rub out; that there was nothing to her except this erasable image. The first psychiatrist, Captain Samuels, had shown no special interest when Sarah mentioned it. He had simply said, What do you think that means? But had turned away to arrange things on his desk as if uninterested in her amateur opinions. So she had not answered and the question of Susan’s idea of herself as a drawing people could rub out had never come up again, either with Samuels or with his successor, Captain Richardson.

But it had stayed in Sarah’s mind as an explanation of her sister’s self-absorption and self-dramatization. She did not understand what it was that had made Susan feel so inadequate and the discovery that she did had been a shock. Until then, the self-absorption had seemed to her that of a girl who not doubting her attraction demanded that others should provide her with constant evidence of its existence, and paid obsessive attention to the smallest detail when setting the scenes for these necessary acts of recognition. But the sequence of scenes that had made up – still made up – Susan’s life could no longer be thought of as Susan playing Susan. It was Susan drawing Susan, drawing and re-drawing, attempting that combination of shape and form which by fitting perfectly into its environment would not attract the hands of the erasers. What Sarah feared now was that the game had stopped being a game, had become a grim and conscious exercise in personal survival; that Susan now drew and redrew
herself attempting no more than a likeness that she herself could live with; and that she might tire of the effort.

When she reached the open gateway which was flanked by two stone pillars, she paused, convinced that her father had done so too a few minutes ago. In Mabel’s day the name of the bungalow was set out in metal letters fixed to an unpainted wooden board planted in the high bank that bordered the road. Over the years the colour of the metal had become hardly distinguishable from the wood. They had faded into the background, as Mabel had faded into hers, and left the board with a look of being indifferent to the arrival of strangers. The board was still there but was partially hidden by the wild growth on the bank. To see it at all you would have to know it existed. Its identifying function had been usurped by neat white boards, one on each of the stone pillars, announcing respectively in bold black lettering the name and number of the house and the name of its occupier: Colonel J. Layton. Yes, he would have stopped, confronted abruptly by this evidence of ownership, and then perhaps searched for the old board until he found it, probably in a place that didn’t quite conform with the one he remembered.

She set off along the curved gravel drive between the rockeries which were vivid with the blue, white, yellow and purple stars of flowering plants. There had been rain in the night and the air was fresh, chill in the shadows of trees and bushes, but the sky was now cloudless and as she came to the end of the rockeries the sun heated her face.

The staff car was parked opposite the steps up to the square-pillared verandah. There was no sign of the driver. The thickset white stuccoed bungalow looked deserted, but in the way a place could do that had only just been abandoned. Again she stopped. If she entered she would find the occupants gone, the signs of their presence still fresh and warm, and a strong odour of the danger from which they had fled. She had felt this once or twice before, but this morning the sensation was particularly strong.

And, looking at the bungalow, as it were through her father’s eyes, she thought she saw for the first time what it was that sometimes gave this impression. By stripping it of anything that made it look ‘cottagy’ – pots of plants on the
balustrades, flowering creepers round the square pillars – her mother had restored to it not its elegance (it could never have had that) but its functional solidity, an architectural integrity which belonged to a time when the British built in a proper colonial fashion with their version of India aggressively in mind and with a view to permanence. Exposed by the cutting back of trees and plants, set off by the new gravel on the drive and the widening of the forecourt (the rockeries were also earmarked for destruction) its squat rectangular bulk was revealed, and with it its essential
soundness.
The secluded, tentative air which Sarah had often associated with it in Aunt Mabel’s time had quite gone. The name, Rose Cottage, given to it by a previous owner, a tea-planter, was now all too clearly, absurdly, inappropriate, and only the difficulty there would be with the
dak
had stopped her mother scrapping the name entirely and identifying the bungalow as 12 Upper Club Road.

In restoring it to a likeness of its former self, Sarah knew her mother had intended to create a setting that would speak for itself and also for her and her family’s claim on history through long connection. The name Layton, and her mother’s maiden name, Muir, under portraits on the walls of Government House in Ranpur and Flagstaff House and the Summer Residence in Pankot, on the drunken headstones in the churchyards of St John’s and St Luke’s, performed the same function of austere advertisement. In their dumb immobility they avoided the vulgarity of the words whose meanings they conveyed; but conveyed with so remote, so mute a self-awareness that even when identified they seemed thinned by irony. Service, sacrifice, integrity. And she had succeeded, but at a cost. By cutting away inessentials, the accumulations of years, she had robbed the place of a quality that belonged to that accumulation, the quality of survival and the idea behind it – that survival meant change. Restored, the bungalow no longer reflected the qualities of the people living there, it no longer fitted them as they truly were, so that – even when they were in it – from outside the bungalow looked empty, like a place of historic interest, visited but not inhabited. And, more than usually oppressed this morning by the sensation that she had arrived at a moment when it was deserted, she
saw the bungalow in a sudden, shatteringly direct, light – looking as it looked now but even starker, uncompromisingly new amid the raw wounds left by space having been cleared for it; and on its verandah a white man in Indian clothes at ease in a cane lounging chair, or on a charpoy, attended by servants or by one of his Indian mistresses, and contemplating through the mists of claret fumes and cheroot smoke the fortune he had made or hoped to make out of private trade. The words whose meanings her mother had wanted to convey belonged to a later age, an age when the bungalow was already old. Unwittingly she had exposed the opposites of those words: self-interest, even corruption.

She made her way quickly, avoiding the steps, taking the path round the side, then stepping off it because the new gravel crunched, on to the new turf that had been put down on ground cleared of shrubs. The side verandah was empty but there was a spread blanket, a coloured ball and some bricks where the child had been playing. The doors to the room she shared with Susan were open. She hesitated. There was no sound of voices inside the house. Ahead she could see one side and corner of the high netting surrounding the tennis-court, and moving forward, widening the angle of vision, saw Minnie, the little ayah, inside the netting at the far end of the court, walking behind the child whose arms she held aloft by the wrists as he took faltering bandy-legged steps towards his mother. The centre net was not up and Susan sat on a blanket in the middle of the court at the point where the lime-marked centre lines met, with her back to the house, leaning on her right hip, her left arm stretched back, grasping one ankle, the other arm taut, hand palm down on the blanket, taking the weight. Close to this hand Panther II sat watching the child, scraping the blanket with his tail. Susan wore one of the full-skirted flowered cotton dresses that made her look eighteen still, too young to be a mother, touchingly too young to be a widow; and, round the shoulders, tied by its sleeves, a cardigan. The hairdresser had been – perhaps yesterday. The dark hair sported a crisp new set, a thick fringe of tight curls at the back that left her neck bare. When she spoke her voice carried. ‘Come along then.’ More faintly Sarah heard Edward’s gurgling response. But suddenly he squealed. Minnie had
picked him up and was running forward. She placed him on the blanket close to Susan and then retreated, ran to the opening at the side of the court and through it across the lawn towards the servants’ quarters, as though this were part of a game of hide-and-seek.