The Day of the Scorpion (20 page)

Again, the ladies exchanged glances. ‘I think I know what you mean, Lucy,’ Mrs Paynton said. ‘And I think it’s something like that, in the back of one’s mind you know, that makes one feel even more strongly that it’s time she settled down.’

The ladies agreed. Mrs Smalley was conscious that her moment of glory had passed its peak. The others, led by Mrs Paynton, now absorbed her suspicions of Sarah Layton, adapted them, and came to the conclusion that Miss Layton probably didn’t mean to give people the impression of having unsound ideas and would be straightened out quickly enough if the right man came along. Perhaps Captain Bingham had been the wrong man. Things might be better for her when that little minx of a sister was married.

Three weeks later when Susan and Teddie took the station by surprise by announcing that they were to be married, Mrs Fosdick declared that a man who could woo one girl, switch his allegiance to her sister and end by marrying her was scarcely to be trusted to remain faithful for long, and that her opinion of the significance of pale eyelashes had therefore been vindicated. The other ladies said that Captain Bingham’s choice, wavering though it might seem, was proof of there being something in the Layton girls that appealed to his deepest sensibility and that his final choice as between the two of them showed up even more clearly that the elder girl,
although perhaps outwardly possessed of whatever it was that appealed in this way, was inwardly unsatisfactory in this other way that men sensed more quickly than women but which had at last been pinned down as unsoundness, if only of the incipient kind; and when it was noticed that Sarah Layton smiled at Teddie and Susan the idea the ladies might have had that she bore no grudge and took it all like a good soldier was edged out of their minds by this other idea – the faintly disagreeable one that she was smiling at them instead of with them.

All the same, they looked forward to the wedding. When Captain Bingham was posted quite suddenly as a G3 (Operations) to a new divisional headquarters stationed in Mirat, Mrs Fosdick said she wouldn’t be in the least surprised if the whole thing now fell through and Susan, with so many other eligible men to choose from, decided she had made a mistake. The Laytons’ departure for a late – last-fling-for-Susan – holiday in Srinagar strengthened her belief that Susan would soon find other fish to fry. The final surprise and disappointment came when the Laytons returned early from Kashmir and announced that the wedding, far from being either postponed or cancelled, had been hastened forward and would take place out of Pankot, in Mirat. One felt (the ladies said) that even taking into account the exigencies of war-time, and the fact that Captain Bingham was obviously soon returning to active service in the field, the Layton wedding had taken on a hole-in-the-corner air which it was somehow not easy to forgive.

‘I’m not at all sure,’ Mrs Paynton announced, ‘that Mrs Layton should allow herself to be rushed like this. I get the impression she’s really quite upset but is trying not to show it for the girl’s sake. Apparently Susan is coming back to Pankot with them after the wedding because there’ll only be a three-day honeymoon and after that Captain Bingham is off. You don’t suppose . . .’

She did not say what was not supposed because she knew the other ladies must have supposed it already, as she had done, and rejected the supposition as too outlandish in relation to a Layton to be considered seriously for a moment – unless, perhaps, the Layton girl involved had happened to be
Sarah. If Mrs Smalley was right and had put her finger on what was wrong with Sarah Layton, what was disturbing about her, then one could say that nothing was beyond the bounds of possibility.

Teddie Bingham’s posting to Mirat and his discovery soon after arrival that if he wanted to get married his bride would have to come to him, be content with a seventy-two-hour honeymoon in the Nanoora Hills and prepared to kiss him goodbye as soon as it was over, were not the only events that threatened to disrupt the harmonious pattern of the wedding. Susan, somewhat to her family’s surprise, shrugged these disappointments away and said that anyway being married in Mirat should be fun, especially if – as was suggested – they stayed beforehand at the palace guest house. They could go to Ranpur (she said), meet Aunt Fenny and Uncle Arthur (who was to give her away), and travel to Mirat as a party. So, provisionally, it was arranged, but soon after the return from the Kashmir holiday Major Grace informed them he could not get down to Mirat earlier than the Friday before the wedding. He had to attend a series of conferences and there was no getting out of this disagreeable duty. Mrs Layton said she did not much care for the idea of travelling down and staying for nearly a week in the guest house without a man to look after them. Again Susan brushed the objection aside. The guest house would be perfectly safe. According to Teddie the Nawab of Mirat had handed it over to the station commander for the duration, to provide extra accommodation for military visitors (and their families) and although it wasn’t in the cantonment it was in the grounds of the palace and was guarded. ‘That still leaves the train journey,’ Mrs Layton pointed out. ‘You’re forgetting Teddie’s best man,’ Susan reminded her. One of Teddie’s friends in Pankot was a man called Tony Bishop, another old Muzzy Guide wounded in Burma and presently acting as ADC to General Rankin. Tony had already agreed to support him at the wedding. It would be the simplest thing in the world to
get General Rankin to give him special leave so that he could go down to Mirat with them.

So Mrs Layton spoke to General Rankin and got his promise to allow Captain Bishop to escort them. But one week before the party was due to leave Tony Bishop went down with jaundice. Mrs Layton visited him in the military wing of the Pankot General Hospital.

‘It’s no good,’ she said, ‘he’ll be there for three weeks, so now there’s no best man. But it’s a blow. Of all Teddie’s friends Tony Bishop strikes me as the most sensible.’

‘Best men are two a penny,’ Susan retorted, and went up to Area Headquarters where she put a call through to Teddie at his divisional Headquarters and spoke to him personally. ‘He’ll get someone in Mirat, probably the man he shares quarters with,’ she said when she came back. The remarkable thing, Sarah realized, was that for once Susan had done something herself instead of getting someone to do it for her. Her mother said no more about being unaccompanied on the train. It had never been a serious objection. There were bound to be plenty of officers on their way to Mirat and Susan would only have to stand a few moments on the platform with her mother, Aunt Fenny and Sarah, before a gaggle of subalterns approached them and inquired if any help was needed. Which was precisely what happened.

There were two Mirats: the Mirat of palaces, mosques, minarets, and crowded bazaars, and the Mirat of open spaces, barracks, trees, and geometrically laid out roads with names like Wellesley, Gunnery and Mess. The two Mirats were separated by an expanse of water, random in shape, along one side of which ran the railway and the road connecting them. The water and the gardens south of it were the Izzat Bagh, so-called because the first Nawab declared that Kasims would rule in Mirat until the lake dried up: a fairly safe bet because it had never done so in living memory. But it was a boast, and boasts were always considered dangerous. Providence ought not to be tempted. A man could lose face simply as a result of tempting it. The inhabitants of the city anticipated the
worst. Instead, so it was said, for two successive years after the Nawab’s announcement the wet monsoon was abnormally heavy and prolonged. When, in the second year, the lake flooded its banks and destroyed the huts of the fishermen, drowning several, people took it as a sign of celestial approval of the reign of the house of Kasim whose honour – or izzat – had been so dramatically upheld. The lake was adopted as a symbol of the Nawab’s power, of his fertility, of an assured succession reaching into the far distant future. The mullahs declared the lake blessed by Allah, and the Hindus – eighty per cent of the population – were prohibited from using it even during the festival of Divali. A mosque was erected on the southern shore and a new palace was built with gardens going down to the water. The court poet – Gaffur Mohammed – celebrated the establishment of the new palace and its garden in this verse:

So you must accept, Gaffur,
That your words are no more than the petals of a rose.
They must fade, lose scent, and fall into obscurity.
Only for a while can they perfume the garden
Of the object of your praise. O, would they could grow,
Lord of the Lake, eternally.

It was in these gardens that a guest house in the European Palladian style was built in the late nineteenth century, round about the time that a British military cantonment was established with the Nawab’s approval in the area north of the lake.

There were two halts for Mirat: Mirat (City) and Mirat (Cantonment). The latter was the first arrived at if you travelled from Ranpur. The mail train was scheduled to reach Mirat (Cantonment) at 07.50 hours but was usually anything between half an hour and one hour later. Having deposited its passengers at Mirat (Cantonment) it took a half-hour rest and then chugged out, at a rate never exceeding 10 mph, negotiating points, junctions and level-crossings until it
reached the long isolated embankment that separated the lake from the waste land that had once – before the coming of the cantonment – been characteristic of the northern environs of the city. The train crawled along the bleak strip of ground that raised the railway to one level and the trunk road to another, slightly lower, with a kind of reluctance, as if the engine-driver expected subsidence or, anyway, signals showing green that would flash red at the last moment, scarcely leaving him time to apply his brakes. Between the presiding power and the old glory there was, as it were, a sense of impending disaster.

Although the Laytons and Mrs Grace were to stay at the palace guest house it was at Mirat (Cantonment) they alighted, on Teddie Bingham’s instructions. ‘Make sure,’ he had written to Mrs Layton, ‘you don’t get carried on into the city. Of course I’ll be there to meet you, and even if I’m unable to I’ll get someone to do so for me. But I thought it worth mentioning, just in case anything goes wrong, and remembering you’re staying at the palace guest house you think you have to travel on into the city itself. No one ever does.’

‘Things are looking up,’ he said now above the din on the arrival platform. ‘You’re only twenty-five minutes behind schedule. I’ve got breakfast organized. I expect you’re ready for it.’ He pecked the cheek Mrs Layton offered, shook hands with Mrs Grace whom he had met only twice, held Sarah’s hand for a prolonged few seconds as if the switch of his affections from her to her sister still needed some explanation, then turned and kissed and held on to pretty little Susan who had an air of being flushed and dishevelled in spite of the fact that not a hair was out of place and she had worked for half an hour on perfecting the pallor she had decided suited her as the wife-to-be of an officer who would soon be away to the war. It was on Teddie’s cheeks a flush was actually visible, but he appeared brisk, fully in control of the problems posed by an arrival. The flush seemed to be one of pleasure combined with effort: the pleasure of seeing his future wife again and the effort he would always put into doing even the most ordinary things right, more especially when there were members of the opposite sex depending upon him for their
comfort and safety. He had an Indian NCO in attendance whose khaki drill shirt and knee-length shorts stood out from his limbs and body in stiff, starched, knife-edged perfection. The man’s pugree was an exotic affair of khaki cloth and diaphanous khaki muslin which gave his otherwise gravely held head a quirk of flirtatiousness and added a note of self-conscious gallantry to the way in which he stood by the open carriage and took charge of the mounds of luggage which the red-turbanned coolies were already fighting over.

‘Don’t worry about your things,’ Teddie Bingham said. ‘Noor Hussain’s got the luggage
bando
taped,’ and having thanked the officers in the adjacent compartment who had looked after Mrs Layton and her party on the journey from Ranpur and were now travelling on south, escorted the ladies through the crowd to the station restaurant, explaining that Noor Hussain would see the luggage safely stowed in a 15-cwt truck and taken to the guest house where they would find it waiting. For personal conveyance he had laid on a couple of taxis, and those too would be waiting directly breakfast was over.

Entering the restaurant behind her mother and Aunt Fenny, but ahead of Susan and Teddie who were obviously conscious of their duty as an engaged couple to stay close, Sarah concentrated on the smells coming from the kitchens. Whatever the day held in store breakfast was a meal she felt it was wise to give her undivided attention to. Once she was seated at the table, the orders given for cornflakes or porridge, egg and bacon, toast and marmalade, the first cup of tea or coffee drunk, and perhaps the first cigarette of the day lighted, she thought she would be able to view the sight of Susan and Teddie sitting together opposite her with more confidence in their future than she felt capable of drumming up at the moment.

There was (Sarah thought) something about Teddie Bingham that didn’t wear well. He was not a man who grew on you. In this respect he was like the countless other young men to whom she had been mildly attracted and then lost interest in or lost to Susan with no hard feelings on either side. What was special about Teddie was the fact that Susan
had agreed to marry him. Sarah could not understand why. She hoped, but did not believe, that they loved one another. She did not believe it because until they announced their engagement there seemed to have been nothing to distinguish him as a man apart, in the crowd of men round Susan.

‘But then,’ Sarah thought, ‘we all have the same sort of history. Birth in India, of civil or military parents, school in England, holidays spent with aunts and uncles, then back to India.’ It was a ritual. A dead hand lay on the whole enterprise. But still it continued: back and forth, the constant flow, girls like herself and Susan, and boys like Teddie Bingham: so many young white well-bred mares brought out to stud for the purpose of coupling with so many young white well-bred stallions, to ensure the inheritance and keep it pukka. At some date in the foreseeable future it would stop. At home you understood this, but something odd happened when you came back. You could not visualize it, then, ever stopping.