The Day of the Scorpion (23 page)

‘Yes, some years ago, in a very junior capacity.’

‘And before your army commission?’

‘I was DSP Sundernagar.’

‘Ah yes. We lived there once. Rather a remote district. Was there much trouble there last year?’

‘No, very little. Fortunately. It helped me persuade the powers that be that I could be more usefully employed.’

Presently Mrs Layton said, ‘You were telling us about Mr Kasim’s son.’

‘Yes, I was.’ A further hesitation. ‘I don’t quite know how to put this. In Ranpur he’d present no problem, but this is native sovereign territory and as a representative of the palace young Kasim is entitled to – well, certain consideration. One can’t just treat him as a sort of errand-boy. The State’s barely more than the size of a pocket-handkerchief but it’s run on very democratic lines and has a tradition of loyalty to the crown. One of the Nawab’s sons is an officer in the Indian airforce and of course the Nawab handed his private army over to GHQ on the first day of the war. It was mustered into the Indian Army as the Mirat Artillery, and got captured by the Japs in Malaya. In other words, officially the military in Mirat take an extremely good view of the Nawab.’

‘And of all his entourage, including Mr Kasim. Oh, we promise to be well behaved.’

Presently Captain Merrick said, ‘I beg your pardon, Mrs Layton. I’ve put everything very clumsily. The point I intended to make was that friendly and co-operative though Kasim is on the surface, it’s as well to treat him cautiously as well as considerately because it would be unnatural if he didn’t resent us a bit.’

‘We probably shan’t have time to let it worry us, Captain Merrick.’

‘No.’

And then, suddenly, they had left the avenue of trees behind and were driving alongside the lake. Dazzled, Sarah heard his voice: ‘There’s the palace now,’ her mother’s low exclamation and then his voice again, close to her ear. ‘You’re looking in the wrong direction, Miss Layton.’

Beyond the reeds the lake curved away and the road became splashed again by shade from old banyan trees. A high brick wall, topped by jagged bits of broken glass, had come in from the left. The taxi was slowing. Ahead, a culvert marked the private entrance to the guest house. There was nothing to be seen of it, nothing to see at all apart from the long straight road which eventually led – Captain Merrick said – through the waste ground into the old city of Mirat. There were walls on both sides of the road now. They turned in through an open gateway. A grey-bearded sepoy with a red turban and red sash round the waist of his khaki jacket came to attention. The taxi continued along a gravel drive that was flanked on either side by bushes of bougainvillaea and curved towards the left. The bushes thinned, there were patches of grass, and through trees a glimpse of rose-coloured stone.

‘Do you know,’ Mrs Layton said, ‘it reminds me of the drive up to grandfather’s old place.’

‘But that was all laurel and rhododendrons,’ Sarah pointed out, remembering – none too clearly – her great-grandfather’s house which she had last seen the year of his death, as a child of twelve.

The effect is the same.’

Sarah did not agree but did not say so, content anyway that her mother had settled momentarily into the kind of nostalgic mood that suggested the actual arrival would go well, although later that night there might be a hint of tearfulness at lonely bed-going – a whiteness under the rouge unfashionably applied low instead of high on the cheeks, an inner disintegration betrayed by a marginal relaxation of the muscles of the jaw and neck that produced a soft little pad of tender aging flesh under the courageous chin. Presently held high (as Sarah saw, looking over her shoulder) to receive a dab or two from the puff of a compact, there were, in its structure, the presentation to the world, signs of effort-in-achievement. Almost unconsciously bringing her hand up to stroke her own chin and neck in a gesture partly nervous and partly investigatory she marvelled at the havoc a few years would wreak on flesh so firm. There came a time when the face changed for ever, into its final mould. Hers had not done so, but her mother’s had. Some faces then went all to bone, others went to slack, fallen, unoccupied folds and creases of skin. Her mother’s would do that, and perhaps Susan’s too, years hence. Her own would tauten. As an old woman she would probably have a disapproving but predatory look. Her mother would go on softening whereas she herself would harden exteriorly, become brittle interiorly. She would break into a thousand pieces, given the right blow. To kill her mother in old age would be a bloodier, more fleshy, less splintery affair. Her mother was protected already by incipient layers of blubber (like Aunt Fenny, but unlike Aunt Lydia). All the more credit to her therefore, Sarah thought, that she managed to convey a certain steeliness from within the softness.

Even at the most exasperating moments Sarah could feel, for her mother, a surge of love and deep affection that sprang goodness knew not from a long uninterrupted experience of her as a mother – the separation had been too long for that – but rather from a sensation of being able to treat her as if she were a human being towards whom she had a duty that was scarcely filial at all: almost as if she were a stranger of a kind suddenly encountered. She felt such a surge now, but as usual
was unable to express it because her mother was not even looking at her, but putting the compact away. Well, so it goes, Sarah thought. And so it went: the taxi moving slowly through a tunnel of alternating bars of sunlight and strips of shadow and then coming out abruptly into the gravelled forecourt where the NCO with the diaphanous pugree stood by the side of the parked fifteen hundredweight that had brought their luggage. They drove in under a shadowy porticoed entrance and drew up at the bottom of a shallow flight of steps. At the head of the steps two men were waiting. As Captain Merrick spoke they were joined by a third.

The chap in the scarlet turban is Abdur Rahman. He’s head bearer and belongs to the Nawab. The little fellow holding his topee is the steward, his name’s Abraham – an Indian Christian. He’s the SSO’s chap. And yes – there’s Mr Kasim.’

Sarah, looking up, saw Ahmed emerge from the dark interior.

‘Was it wise?’ she heard her Aunt Fenny asking, and recognized her mother’s first-drink-of-the-day voice: ‘Was what wise?’

‘Letting her go riding alone with Mr Kasim.’

‘I didn’t let her as you call it. I didn’t know.’

‘Didn’t know? You mean she just sneaked off?’

‘Oh, Fenny, what’s wrong with you? My daughters don’t sneak off. They go. They don’t have to ask permission. They’re of age. They do what they like. One gets married. The other goes riding. How am I supposed to stop them? Why should I try?’

‘You’re becoming impossible to talk to sensibly. You know perfectly well why it’s unwise for Sarah to ride alone with an Indian of that kind.’

‘What kind?’

‘Any kind, but especially Mr Kasim’s kind.’

Sarah said, ‘What of Mr Kasim’s kind, Aunt Fenny?’ and shaded her eyes from the glare of the lake that at midday always seemed to penetrate the shade of the deep porticoed
terrace on which her mother and aunt were sitting, on chairs set back close to one of the open french windows which gave access to the terrace from the darkened sitting-room, and through which she had now stepped. She could not see the expressions on her aunt’s or mother’s face, and did not join them. She stood near them, gazing at the lake, letting that milky translucence work its illusion of detaching her from her familiar mooring in a world of shadow and floating her off into a sea of dangerous white-hot substance that was neither air nor water.

‘I’m sorry,’ Aunt Fenny said. ‘I didn’t know you were listening. I was saying I thought it unwise for you to ride alone with Mr Kasim.’

From the midst of that buoyant, dazzling opacity she said, ‘Yes, I agree – it was unwise.’ When they returned the syce had been waiting. He followed them round to the gravel forecourt below the terrace on which she presently stood and held her horse’s head while she dismounted. Mr Kasim dismounted too. ‘Come in and have some breakfast,’ she suggested. He thanked her and said, ‘Some other time perhaps,’ asked her if there was anything special that either she or her family wanted to do, to see, or to have him bring or make arrangements for. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said, ‘thank you for taking me riding.’ She wondered whether for some reason or other they should shake hands. He remounted, touched his topee with the tip of his crop and brought the horse’s head round – all, as it were, in the same capable movement. As she came on to the terrace she listened to the sound of the hooves on the gravel.

‘We shan’t go riding again,’ she said and lowered her head, turned, looked at Aunt Fenny and found the older woman’s face set in that extraordinary mould that was the answer to the need to express something beyond the private emotional capacity to understand.

Sometimes she hated Aunt Fenny, mostly she was irritated by her. For the moment she felt inexplicably close to her and to her mother who had her eyes closed, one hand at rest on the arm of the wicker chair, the other clasping a half-empty glass of gin and lemon, apparently waiting for the day to
come into its familiar focus as one totally indistinguishable from any other.

Well, they are my family, Sarah told herself. I love them. They are part of my safety and I suppose I’m part of theirs.

What happened?’ Aunt Fenny asked. Her voice, normally rich and well-risen, sounded flat and dry.

‘Nothing happened. I meant it was unwise because it made us both self-conscious. It never occurred to me that it might. It wasn’t until we actually set out that I realized it was the first time I’d been alone with an Indian who wasn’t a servant. And there seemed to be nothing to talk about. He only spoke when spoken to and kept almost exactly the same number of paces behind me from start to finish.’

The stiffness had left Aunt Fenny’s face but this softening only emphasized the lines that years of stiffening had left permanently on her, the private marks of public disapproval.

And what I remembered on the way back (Sarah thought, half-considering this face that was Aunt Fenny’s but also that of an English woman in India) was the luggage in the little cabin, with that girl’s name on it. She was never real to me until I saw the luggage. She was a name in a newspaper, someone they talked about in Pankot. She began to be real when I saw the luggage in the houseboat in Srinagar. The child must belong to the Indian they said she was in love with, otherwise why should that old lady keep it? But it might have been any half-caste baby. The luggage was different. It was inert. It belonged only to her. She was no longer alive to claim it, but this is what brought her to life for me. And this morning as I rode home, a few paces ahead of Mr Kasim, she was alive for me completely. She flared up out of my darkness as a white girl in love with an Indian. And then went out because – in that disguise – she is not part of what I comprehend.

‘He is a perfectly pleasant young man,’ Aunt Fenny said, ‘and I understand his brother is an officer. But these days one simply can’t tell what these young Indians are up to, let alone what they’re thinking.’

‘Perhaps they find the same difficulty in regard to us.’

‘Yes, perhaps they do. But on the whole, my dear, we ought not to let that concern us. We have responsibilities that let us
out of trying to see ourselves as they see us. In any case it would be a waste of time. To establish a relationship with Indians you can only afford to be yourself and let them like it or lump it.’

‘Yes,’ Sarah said. ‘I suppose you’re right. But out here are we ever really ourselves?’

III

There was, to begin with, the incident of the stone.

Apart from the black limousine travelling some seventy-five or hundred yards behind a wobbling bicycle ridden by an Indian carrying a raised umbrella as a protection against glare, there was no traffic on Gunnery Road; neither were there any visible pedestrians at the place where the incident occurred – the Victoria roundabout where a car coming down Gunnery Road and wishing to turn into Church Road had to slow down and describe a three-quarter circle round the monument. The driver of the limousine, an elderly man with a grey beard and wearing palace livery, having passed a file of peasant women with baskets on their heads going in the opposite direction, then began to concentrate on the cyclist and the possible obstacle he represented. He began to decelerate. Gunnery Road and the three other roads meeting at the roundabout were well shaded by big-branched thick-boled trees. The wobbling cyclist turned left. The way now seemed clear for the driver of the limousine to negotiate the roundabout, but encroaching age and several minor accidents had made him cautious, distrustful of what an apparently empty street might suddenly conjure in the shape of fast-driven vehicles.

The sound, when it came, did not immediately register. He allowed the limousine to continue to glide towards a point on the roundabout where he would be able to see what threatened from the left and how clear it was to the right. When the sound did register he braked, stared at the bonnet and the windscreen, then twisted round to confront the pane of glass dividing him from his passengers and, finding it unblemished, only then looked through it.

The passengers, both British officers, were thrust back hard, each into his separate corner. Their arms were still held in half-defensive attitudes. They were looking from floor to window to floor and to the space between them on the seat: as one might look for some suspected poisonous presence – a snake for instance. The last thing the driver noticed was the shattered window on the nearside of the car – not the window in the door, which was lowered, but the fixed window that gave the passenger a clear view. It took the driver several seconds to realize that neither officer could have broken it, that something had been thrown. At this point both officers came to life, shouted something at him, each opened a door and jumped out. One word, one idea – half formed into the shape of an image actually seen – came into the driver’s head. Bomb. He had heard of such things happening, but had no experience of them. He opened his own door, stumbled out and found himself climbing marble steps. He missed his footing, fell and lay motionless with his hands covering his head, waiting for the explosion.