The Day of the Scorpion (18 page)

England’s climate had also toughened her people. Years ago Sarah had written an essay with the rather grandiloquent title: The Effect of Climate and Topography upon the Human Character. The idea, she remembered, had first come to her in the summer holiday of the year great-grandpa died and she had walked across Mr Birtwhistle’s field encouraging Aunt Mabel not to be put off by the cows and then stood by the brook thinking how much like Pankot in miniature her surroundings were; the year when she was struck by the difference between her Indian family and her English family. ‘England,’ she had written when she was a couple of years older, ‘although temperate climatically speaking, combines within a very limited geographical area a diversity of weather and natural features. Such conditions react upon the inhabitants to make them strong, active, energetic and self-sufficient. It is these qualities which they take abroad with them into their tropical and subtropical colonies, lands whose native populations are inclined because of things like heat and humidity to be less strong, less active, less energetic and more willing to be led, a fact which has enabled European races in general but the English in particular to gain and keep control of such territories. Upon the return of our colonial exiles to the land of their birth they are struck by the
smallness of everything and by the fact that the self-sufficiency of their race, thus re-encountered, is really the result of the self-satisfaction of a people who have had comparatively little to contend with in the human struggle against nature.’ She remembered the opening paragraph almost word for word and also remembered the red-pencil comment of the headmistress in the margin, ‘An interesting essay and well developed so far as the question of climatic influences is concerned. I do not fully understand your reference to topography as an influence, however, and perhaps you fail to understand it yourself, as witness your failure to develop that aspect of your argument.’

‘But I do understand it,’ Sarah had assured herself, ‘and it’s all there, she just hasn’t read it.’ Reading it again, though, she thought that perhaps a bit of clarification would do no harm, then that it would be a definite improvement; finally that the headmistress was right and that clarification was essential, but in her mind first and only then on paper; and in her mind the clarification obstinately refused to come. She was stuck with that single recollection of a notion that had reached her out of the blue, that the place near the brook in the spinney beyond Mr Birtwhistle’s fields was like Pankot in miniature and that this somehow explained why her Indian family were not like her English family.

Over to the right of the waste ground there were a few trees and a road and facing the road a substantial bungalow behind grey stucco walls. ‘Who lives there?’ she asked Ahmed, holding the reins tight in one hand and pointing.

‘That’s Count Bronowsky’s house.’

‘Is he really a count?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Dare we gallop?’

‘If you’d like to.’

‘Where to? To the city gates?’

‘There’s a nullah. We’ll have to bear left and join the city gate road.’

‘I don’t mind nullahs.’

‘It’s too wide to jump.’

‘Come on then.’

She dug in her heels. A moment she loved: the slight
hesitation, the gathering of propulsive forces in the animal she sat astride, the first leap forward that always seemed to her like a leap into a world of unexplored delight which she could only cut a narrow channel through and which she would reach the farther end of too soon but not without experiencing on the way something of the light and mysterious pleasure that existed for creatures who broke free of their environment. Ahead she made out the broken line of the nullah and as the horse did not at once respond to movement of wrist and pressure of heel had a second or two of fear that had itself broken free into a curious region of stillness and excitement; and then the horse began veering left; a quick glance over her shoulder showed her Ahmed. She felt an extraordinary, exhilarating sense of the perfection of their common endeavour. Together they galloped along the line of the nullah and charged through the gap where the nullah petered out a few yards from the road. From here she could see the city gate, isolated relic of the city wall, and how the road led to it and had come diagonally across the waste ground from the palace. They passed through splashes of shade from the trees that lined the road, drew level with and passed a line of lumbering carts drawn by humped white oxen, and then a file of women with baskets on their heads. The air was salurated by the pale smell of centuries of dung-fire smoke. The city was close. Why, it looms, Sarah thought, I don’t want it: and exerted pressure with her right heel and right wrist to bring the horse round in a fine galloping sweep. She sensed the animal’s bloody-minded resistance. It seemed as if it would neither turn nor slow, but would charge mindlessly on and dash itself and her to pieces on the city of Mirat. But then she felt the slight change of rhythm and the neat little spasm of adjustment to the centre of gravity, and Mirat began to swing towards her left shoulder. She exerted pressure to slow the horse to a canter, and then to a trot. At this end of the waste ground there was a group of three banyan trees, two of them with a fine display of rooted branches. She reined in beneath the youngest of the trees and looked round. Mr Kasim had reined in too, and waited exactly as before, a few paces behind her, to her left. Such precision! She smiled at him, pleased for both of them. The
smile she got in return, though, was as distant as ever. Obviously he had not shared her pleasure; instead, probably, shared her moments of dismay, wondering what blame would be put on him if she fell and was injured. In his position Teddie would have felt obliged to say, Are you all right? or, You’d better go easy on that brute. And have got himself ready to complain to the head syce when they returned to the palace; all of which – Sarah realized – would spoil the morning for her by introducing the all-too-familiar note of criticism that day in day out acted in you and on you as part of a general awareness of being in charge, of having to be prepared to throw your weight about, so that really there was nothing you could enjoy for its own sake, nothing you could give yourself over to entirely.

She looked towards the town and said, ‘It’s funny, Mr Kasim, but I’ve not once heard the muezzin since I’ve been here, and yet there are all those minarets.’

‘The wind’s been in the wrong direction, I expect.’

‘They do call then?’

‘Oh yes. They call.’

‘Five times a day?’

‘Yes.’

‘Will the îd al-fitr prayers be said in the mosques or out here?’

‘Out here. Why?’

‘I read somewhere that they’re supposed to be held in the open air if possible.’

‘You must have seen such meetings before, in open places?’

‘No. I don’t think so. I suppose because I’ve only been in places where they make them stay in the mosques in case of trouble. Or perhaps I’ve seen them but not known what was going on.’

‘Last year the îd fell during the wet season. The prayers were indoors then.’

‘Why is it preferred for them to be in the open?’

Mr Kasim paused, as if considering; but he might have been reluctant to answer so many questions about his religion. She, after all, was an infidel. When the answer came, though,
it suggested mockery; mockery of her and of the beliefs of his own people.

‘Because of the crowds, I expect. The idea is wholly practical.’

‘You mean you have to cater for all the people who never go into a mosque normally?’

‘Yes,’ Ahmed said. And added, ‘But I’m no kind of authority. The Imam at the Abu-Q’rim mosque would probably have a different explanation.’

‘When exactly will the îd fall?’

‘When the new moon is seen.’

‘Supposing it’s cloudy?’

‘Then you calculate and usually make it thirty days instead of twenty-nine or thirty after the beginning of Ramadan, to be on the safe side. But it won’t be cloudy this year and of course the calculation is already made. In fact the îd is due about a week after your sister’s wedding.’

‘Is it? But how nice. That means everybody will be happy.’ She turned. It was uncomfortable having to sit askew in the saddle just to talk to him. She set the horse at a walk and then at a trot. Everybody will be happy. Everybody will be happy. Distantly she could see the roof of the palace. The sun was already hot and the short-lived freshness of early morning already staling. She noted the first phase of that curious phenomenon of the Indian plain, the gradual disappearance of the horizon, as if the land were expanding, stretching itself, destroying the illusion that the mind, hand and eye could stake a claim to any part that bore a real relation to the whole. It is always retreating, Sarah told herself, always making off, getting farther and farther away and leaving people and what people have built stranded. Behind her, she knew, Mr Kasim rode at a constant watchful distance, but as the land expanded it left them in relation to the horizon getting closer and closer together. She felt that a god looking down would observe this shortening of distance and wonder what it was about his lesser creations that made them huddle together when they might have emulated giants, become giant riders on giant horses. Why – Sarah cried to herself – that’s how I used to feel! That’s how I felt on the day of the wasp. And tried now to induce the feeling again, but failed.
Well, I am full-grown, she thought, and those were growing pains. Full grown. Full grown. She persuaded the horse into a canter and thought of the men she might have married and the children she might have had since becoming full-grown, and wondered whether there was really such a thing as love and if there were what subtle influences it might have on the purely animal response, some men, but not Teddie, had wakened in her. She wondered if Teddie had awakened Susan in that way, and Susan Teddie; and envied her not for being woken but for apparently being endowed with a nature that was ready to take all the rest on trust. My trouble is, she thought, I question everything, every assumption. I’m not content to let things be, to let things happen. If I don’t change that I shall never be happy.

Again they moved left to avoid the nullah which on this side did not peter out but passed under the road, through a culvert. It was shallow, though, and the banks were easy. Sarah urged her horse down into it. The clay bottom was cracked, so quickly had the post-monsoon sun dried out whatever water settled here during the rains, but there was mud still in the shadow of the culvert. The ground bore the imprint of cattle, goat and horses’ hooves.

‘Do you come this way, Mr Kasim, I mean when you ride alone?’ she called.

She did not hear his reply clearly. It might have been ‘Sometimes’. She took the rise back out of the nullah. They were now close to the house Mr Kasim said was Count Bronowsky’s: newish-looking Anglo-Indian palladian, she noted; isolated in an extensive walled garden, probably built for him, by him. That sort of man knew how to feather his nest: a foreigner, a European, in the service of a native prince, a throw-back to the days of the nabobs of the old trading companies – French, English and Portuguese. She did not think she would like old Count Bronowsky, although it was said he had done fine things. Fine things for himself too, she imagined, judging by the house. She could not imagine her father retiring to live in such a place, rather to a gabled villa in Purley, or a timbered cottage in Pankot if he chose to live the rest of his days in India. People like Teddie and Susan closed their eyes to the fact that her father’s generation must be the
last generation of English people who would have such a choice. War or no war, it was all coming to an end, and the end could not come neatly. There would be people who had to be victims of the fact that it could not. She herself was surely one of them, and perhaps Mr Kasim too.

Suddenly she wheeled the horse round in the same kind of tight circle Mr Kasim had described before they set off on their gallop. She caught him before he had time to hang back, and so confronted him in the act of reining in, but having done so she could not find an acceptable way of explaining her impulsive action, either to him or to herself. Curiously, though, in the moment before being embarrassed at finding herself at a loss, she thought that the world might be a more interesting and useful place to live in if there were more such empty gestures as the one she had apparently made. They were only empty in the sense that there was room in them for meaning to be poured. That kind of meaning wasn’t found easily. It was better, then, to leave the gesture unaccompanied. To make words up just for the sake of saying something would be incongruous. So she closed her mouth and smiled, turned her horse’s head and continued on at a walk, listening to the sound that never seemed to stop between sun-up and sundown, was taken for granted and seldom heard consciously at all: the sore-throated calling of the crows.

When they returned to the guest house she saw her future brother-in-law and his best man waiting on the terrace.

‘Hello,’ she called. ‘What a nice surprise. Are you here for breakfast?’

The officer Susan Layton was to marry, Teddie Bingham, was the kind of man Mrs Layton would have preferred her husband to be on hand to approve of. She had complained to Sarah that it was bad enough having to write to Colonel Layton and tell him that his youngest daughter was getting married to a man he had never heard of, could not meet and might not like, without the additional worry of searching for the right sort of phrases to convey to him the idea that in his absence she had done everything necessary to be reassured
about Captain Bingham’s background and found nothing amiss. She did not want to worry him. God knew he had worries of his own. Letters to a prisoner of war had to be cheerful and soothing.

‘All you need tell him,’ Sarah pointed out, ‘is the name of Teddie’s regiment and that Susan and he love each other. That’s all he’ll need to know. And that’s all there is to tell. After all, nothing is amiss, is it?’

‘There’s the question of his parents. It’s easier if a man has parents. All there seems to be is an uncle in Shropshire, a father in the Muzzafirabad Guides who broke his neck hunting and a mother who married again, had an unhappy time and died in Mandalay. Your Aunt Mabel says she knew some Muzzy Guides people but doesn’t remember a Bingham, which is neither here nor there because she only remembers what she wants to. But it means all we’ve got to go on is Dick Rankin’s word and Teddie himself.’