The Day of the Scorpion (21 page)

She looked across the table at Susan, at her mother, at Aunt Fenny, and remembered her Aunt Lydia saying that India was an unnatural place for a white woman. As a child she had not understood, but had understood since, and agreed with Aunt Lydia that it was. They did not transplant well. Temperate plants, in the hot-house they were brought on too quickly and faded fast, and the life they lived, when the heat had dried them out and left only the aggressive husk, was artificial. Among them, occasionally, you would find a freak in whom the sap still ran. She was thinking of her old Aunt Mabel in Pankot, and of the Manners girl’s aunt in Srinagar who, in the midst of their conversation, had suddenly filled her with an alarming sense of her own inadequacy as a human being, so that on returning to her own houseboat she had sat in front of a mirror and stared at herself, wishing she were anything but what her outward appearance proved she was: an average girl whose ordinariness was like a sentence of life imprisonment.

‘You are not going to tell us, I hope,’ Aunt Fenny said to Teddy when she had taken her place, fussed about a stain on the tablecloth, studied the bill of fare, ordered porridge and poached eggs and returned her spectacles to their red leather
pouch, ‘that the wedding has to be even earlier, tomorrow for instance, because if so there’ll be no one to give Susan away. Arthur simply can’t get down until Friday.’

‘No, don’t worry, Mrs Grace, Saturday it is.’

‘What about your best man, Teddie?’ Mrs Layton asked.

‘It’s all fixed. I asked the chap I share quarters with if he’d stand in and he said he’d be glad to. Since then he’s been bustling around making sure everything’s all right at the guest house. He’ll be along after breakfast to help us get sorted out. His name’s Merrick. I hope you’ll like him.’

‘Merrick?’ Aunt Fenny repeated. ‘It doesn’t ring a bell. What is he?’

‘A gee-three-eye,’ Teddie said, who took so many things literally.

Aunt Fenny turned to Mrs Layton. ‘Millie, wasn’t there a Merrick on General Rollings’s staff in Lahore in thirty-one? It could be the same family.’

‘Oh, I don’t remember, Fenny. It’s all so long ago.’

‘Of course you remember. He married one of those awful Selby girls. No. I’m wrong. . .’ Aunt Fenny paused. There was a family joke that Aunt Fenny kept the army List on her bedside table, and still referred to it whenever she gave a party and was in doubt about the seniority of one of her guests and consequently where to seat him and his wife. ‘It wasn’t Merrick. It was Mayrick. I don’t know a Merrick. Is he an emergency officer?’

‘He got an immediate commission, I gather,’ Teddie explained. ‘He was in the Indian Police.’

‘Isn’t that unusual?’ Aunt Fenny wanted to know. ‘Young Mr Creighton pulled every string there is to get out of the civil and into the army for the duration, but they wouldn’t let him go. He told me he’d only heard of one instance of it being allowed and I think that was a case of the poor young man in question absolutely pining away at the prospect of not being in on the shooting and becoming quite useless at his work. Perhaps it was Mr Merrick. What is his first name?’

‘Ronald.’

‘Ronald Merrick. What rank?’

Teddie looked faintly surprised. ‘Captain.’

‘My dear boy, I gathered that when you said he was a G3 (I). I meant his rank in the police.’

‘Oh, that. Superintendent or something, I think.’

‘What district?’

‘He did tell me. Now what was it? Is there a place called Sunder-something?’

‘Sundernagar,’ Aunt Fenny pronounced. ‘A backward area. Relatively unimportant.’ Captain Merrick thus disposed of she smiled blandly.

‘Did you enjoy Kashmir?’ Teddie asked.

‘It was all right. The wrong end of the season and of course we had to cut it short.’

‘I know. I’m sorry.’

‘We had a vaguely unpleasant experience too. Millie wanted to move our boat up the lake to where she and John spent their honeymoon. There was only one other boat up there and it all seemed quite idyllic, if over-quiet and slightly inconvenient. Unfortunately our neighbour turned out to be someone on whom it was impossible to call. I’ll give you three guesses.’

Teddie coloured up in anticipation of hearing something he’d rather not hear in front of Susan. Sarah glanced at her mother who was still reading the menu, apparently not listening. Only her mother knew about her visit to Lady Manners, and only for her mother’s sake had Sarah said nothing to the others.

‘I give up,’ Teddie said.

‘Old Lady Manners. And the child—’

‘Oh, I see.’ His blush deepened.

Mrs Layton put the menu down. ‘What is the guest house like, Teddie?’

‘I’ve only seen it from the outside, but the station commander says it’s pretty comfortable. Ronald Merrick knows more about it than I do. He’s been there a couple of times to check on the bando-bast. Incidentally, you’ll have it all to yourselves. It’s in the palace grounds and it’s staffed by palace servants, but the Nawab’s put it at the Station Commander’s disposal for the duration, so it’s really treated as cantonment territory and there’s no need to stand on ceremony.’

‘Shall we see the Nawab?’ Susan asked.

Teddie assumed his playful expression. ‘Why should you want to see the Nawab?’

‘Because there was a scandal about him. He fell in love with a white woman and followed her all the way to the South of France.’

‘Oh, did he? Who told you that?’

‘I did, but I thought everybody knew,’ Aunt Fenny said. ‘The affair between between the Nawab of Mirat and Madame X or whatever they called her, was quite a
cause célèbre
in the early twenties. She was Russian or Polish and pretended to be of good family, but was probably a lady’s maid. I don’t know what originally brought her to India but she got her hooks into the Nawab, played him for what he was worth, cried off when he wanted her to marry him as his second wife and scooted back to Europe with the Nawab after her. They ended up somewhere like Nice or Monte Carlo. I remember there was a story about some jewellery which she claimed he’d given her – presumably for services rendered. He threatened legal action and they say this Count Bronowsky acted as go-between – so successfully that the Nawab brought him back and made him his prime minister.’

‘Oh yes,’ Teddie said. ‘I’ve heard of Bronowsky. He’s still around.’

‘If he was really a Russian count I’ll eat my hat but the Nawab’s been under his thumb ever since and he’s even dazzled the Political Department, according to Arthur. But then of course he had to, otherwise they’d have made the Nawab get rid of him years ago.’

‘You haven’t answered my question, Teddie,’ Susan reminded him, ‘but of course once Aunt Fenny starts it’s difficult to get a word in edgeways.’

She smiled at Mrs Grace, but Sarah recognized the hectic little flush spreading over her powdered cheeks as a sign of the temper her sister seemed to find it hard to control whenever she felt even fleetingly neglected. Content, often, to sit and listen and think her thoughts, her most casual remarks or gestures demanded and usually received immediate reponses, from women as well as men. Sarah sometimes
marvelled at the way Susan could suddenly divert a conversation by throwing into it a comment or a question, and at the way she could then just as suddenly retire from it and leave people disorientated. It was as if she periodically and deliberately sought to test the strength of the impact of her personality.

‘I asked,’ Susan said, turning back to Teddie, ‘whether we shall see the Nawab.’

‘I don’t know. He’s away at the moment but may be back at the weekend. Colonel and Mrs Hobhouse – that’s the Station Commander and his wife – say we ought to invite him to the reception, but that it’s not certain whether he’ll come.’

‘Why? Because the reception is to be at the club?’

‘No. He’s allowed in as a guest, you know. Because of Ramadan. I mean he’ll be fasting between sun-up and sundown.’

‘I’d like to have a Nawab at my wedding,’ Susan said, ‘especially one who used to be wicked. Besides, if we make a bit of a fuss of him he’ll have to send a wedding present and it might turn out to be a tray of super rubies or a fabulous emerald, or a few spare ropes of pearls.’

Teddie smiled, and glanced affectionately down at her left hand, at the finger on which she wore his own modest cluster of engagement diamonds. She chose this moment to lean back in her chair, an indication that the others could again talk to each other.

Breakfast came to the table at last.

There were twelve tables in the station restaurant. Sarah counted them. Ten were occupied. The floor was patterned by black and white tiles. The ceiling was high; three four-bladed fans, suspended from it, revolved at half speed. The windows on the platform side were frosted to shut out the sight of trains, travellers and coolies. On one wall there was a portrait of the King-Emperor, George VI, and on another a pre-war poster of invitation to Agra to admire the stale image of the Taj Mahal. The bearers were dressed in white and had cummerbunds of green and black, white gloves and bare feet.
At one table two Indian officers, Sikhs, sat together. A nursing officer of the QAIMNS was breakfasting with a captain of Ordnance, an Anglo-Indian girl with a subaltern of the Service Corps. The rest of the customers were British officers. Some had arrived on the 07.50. Others would be waiting for a departure.

And presumably (Sarah told herself) with the exception of the two Sikhs and the little Anglo-Indian girl, we all represent something. And looked at her own family, considering them for the moment as strangers to her, like the rest of the people eating English breakfasts in a flat and foreign landscape. There, she thought, watching Aunt Fenny, is a big-boned, well-fleshed woman. To look at her you’d say she has transplanted better than the thinner, sad-faced woman by her side, but her manner is a shade too self-assured, her voice a shade too loud, and when she stops speaking her mouth sets a shade too grimly, and the first impression that she has transplanted well is overridden by another, the impression that when she finds herself alone she will sit with a far-away look on her face, a look that would be gentle if it weren’t for the mouth. However quietly or gently she moves or sits the mouth will stay fixed and grim so that all her thoughts and recollections will enter the room and surround her not with happiness but with regrets and accusations. Which means that even then you would not be able to feel sorry for her. The thinner, sad-faced woman is her sister. They have the same nose and a manner towards each other of intimacy that is neither casual nor closely affectionate and betrays a long but not necessarily deep experience of each other. Their real intimacy was over long ago. It ended with childhood, and was quite likely an intimacy only one of them felt, most likely the sad thin one who uses her hands with a curious vagueness, as if certain gestures which are habit are no longer appropriate because the person they were habitually made to, to express contentment, affection, to establish contact, to claim loyalty, to offer it, is no longer close to her.

Well, she was cheating. Sarah realized. No one looking at her mother could know that about her from her gestures. Would they know the other thing? Would they, by looking at her, be able to tell that the vagueness, the air of slight
distraction, was proof – as Sarah knew it was – that Mrs Layton was already, at 8.30 in the morning, beginning to work out how long it would be before she could decently have a drink? You are still attractive, Sarah thought, and you are only forty-five. It is three years since you were with him. And India is full of men. So don’t think I don’t understand about the bottle in the wardrobe, the flask in your handbag.

She turned to Teddie and Susan. For her, the lightly but firmly sketched portrait of compatibility and pre-marital pleasure in each other’s company which they presented in public, carried no conviction. In Teddie, Sarah was conscious of there seeming to be nothing behind his intentions – touchingly good on the surface – that gave them either depth or reality. In Susan she had become aware of a curious aptitude for deliberate performance. Susan was playing Susan and Sarah could no longer get near her. The distance between them had the feeling of permanence because the part of Susan called for a pretty, brown-haired, blue-eyed, flush-cheeked girl who entered, almost feverishly, into the fun and responsibilities of a life Sarah herself believed mirthless and irresponsible. It was mirthless because it was irresponsible, and irresponsible because its notion of responsibility was the notion of a vanished age. The trouble was, she thought, that in India, for them, there was no private life; not in the deepest sense; in spite of their attempts at one. There was only a public life. She looked again at the faces in the restaurant – ordinary private faces that seemed constantly to be aware of the need to express something remote, beyond their capacity to imagine – martyrdom in the cause of a power and a responsibility they had not sought individually but had collectively inherited, and the stiffness of a refusal to be intimidated; group expressions arising from group psychology. And yet they were the faces of people whose private consciousness of self was the principal source of their vitality.

Once out of our natural environment (she thought) something in us dies. What? Our belief in ourselves as people who each have something special to contribute? What we shall leave behind is what we have done as a group and not what
we could have done as individuals which means that it will be second-rate.

She lit a cigarette and listened to Teddie and Aunt Fenny talking about Lord Wavell who was to be the new Viceroy and Lord Louis Mountbatten who was to be Supreme Commander of the new South-East Asia Command. Aunt Fenny was saying that it was a mistake to divest GHQ in India of its traditional military role. Teddie said Lord Wavell would make a good Viceroy because he was a soldier and people could trust him. New winds were blowing, but the dust they raised seemed to Sarah to be as stale as ever. Hot coffee was brought, the bearer sent with orders for morning papers: the
Times of India
for Mrs Layton,
The Civil and Military Gazette
for Aunt Fenny; nothing for Susan unless the new edition of
The Onlooker
was out; for Sarah the
Statesman
which Aunt Fenny disapproved of because although it was an English newspaper it was always criticizing Government or GHQ and was currently (she said) exaggerating the seriousness of the famine in Bengal, and blaming everybody for it except the Indian Merchants who had hoarded tons of rice and were waiting for the market price to rise to an even more astronomic figure. ‘Besides,’ she said, ‘the Bengalis won’t eat anything but rice. There are tons of wheat going begging but they’d rather die than change their damned diet.’