The Day of the Scorpion (49 page)

‘She wants to go home,’ young Travers said when he came out of Barbie Batchelor’s room, where Susan was. He was not young, only younger than Beames, the civil surgeon to the station. ‘And I think that’s best, so I’ll take her in the car with Mrs Layton.’ She had refused a sedative. She had not lain down. She had hardly spoken. She did not speak in the car. When they reached home she went straight to her room. She lay on the bed then, while Sarah and her mother saw to the shutters and drew the curtains. She said, no, there was nothing she wanted, only for them to have their lunch and not bother with anything for her. She would be all right in a while.

The front compound of the grace and favour bungalow had a low wall and looked directly across the road to the back of the bleak Pankot Rifles mess, a rambling L-shaped structure, only partially concealed by trees. The Layton dining-room
and master-bedroom had views on to this. At the back there were two other bedrooms and the sitting-room and these had kinder views on to an attempted garden – a square of lawn, a wall. Behind the wall were the servants’ quarters. The bedrooms – Susan’s and Sarah’s – were small. They interconnected. They shared a bathroom that was reached from the back veranda. The black labrador, Panther, who had been a puppy when the girls came out in 1939, had mourned the absence of Colonel Layton, then attached himself to Susan, and these days marked the veranda outside her bedroom as his special territory. He whimpered at her door and Sarah told Mahmud to take him to the kitchen compound and try to keep him there. She told Mahmud what had happened. Mahmud was not one of Sarah’s childhood memories but he had been in her father’s service for many years, almost ten. When he went, pulling the protesting Panther, she knew that the circumstances of the family’s mourning were complete. Sorrow would fill the house and compound with a kind of formality and even the dog would quieten. She went to look for her mother and found her wandering aimlessly in her bedroom with a glass in her hand which, with a wholly uncharacteristic gesture, she abruptly tried to hide, covering it with the palm of her other hand. The telephone rang in the hall. Sarah went to answer it.

Returning, she said, ‘It was the padre’s wife. She wanted to come round now, but I put her off until this evening.’

Her mother must have emptied the glass and put it away, out of sight. ‘I never cared much for Teddie, you know,’ she said suddenly. She was sitting erect, almost on the edge of the old PWD armchair, rubbing one bare elbow. ‘So I can’t pretend to be bowled over exactly. And I don’t think Susan ever really loved him. She was very secretive about the honeymoon. At least she was with me. Did she say anything to you?’

‘No.’ This direct approach disturbed and embarrassed her.

‘I shouldn’t think Teddie was very – experienced. Not that that’s terribly important. Although it is if there’s a lack of consideration too. And that’s how he struck me, as likely to be inexperienced and inconsiderate. I’d always hoped that Muzzy Guide friend of his, Tony Bishop, would cut him out.
But he never even tried. I don’t think he cared for Teddie much either or Teddie’s attitudes. The one thing they had in common was a regiment.’

‘We’d better eat,’ Sarah said.

‘There’s some cold chicken and salad. Tell Mahmud to get up a tray for her. She can’t not eat.’

But she did not eat. The telephone kept ringing through lunch, and afterwards the chits began to arrive. Mahmud was sent to Jalal-ud-din’s to stock up on tick with country gin and bottles of lemon and lime, and cashew nuts, for the expected invasion of callers. They began to arrive from five onwards: Isobel Rankin, Maisie Trehearne, the wife of Colonel Trehearne who commanded the Pankot Rifles Depot, the Adjutant, old Captain Coley, whose wife had not survived the Quetta earthquake and who himself had not risen since because his ambition did not survive either; Lucy Smalley, Mrs Beames, Carol and Christine Beames who worked at Area Headquarters with Sarah; Dicky Beauvais, deputizing for the most recent batch of Susan’s pre-showing grass-widow gallants, young officers who came ostensibly to claim the company of the unmarried sister but had tended to end up fetching things for Susan.

They came, spoke in low tones, and went one by one or two by two. The last to come were Dr Travers and the Reverend Arthur Peplow with his wife Clarissa to both of whom Dr Travers had given a lift; and only the doctor and the chaplain entered Susan’s room, Travers first, and then Peplow, after Travers came out and pronounced her well enough and wanting to have a word with him.

‘She has asked for a Memorial Service,’ Peplow told them ten minutes later, accepting a gimlet, ‘and I think that very suitable. I shall be very happy to arrange it.’

‘Not happy, darling,’ said Mrs Peplow, who was always correcting his way of putting things.

‘Of course not. Happy to be of use; the circumstances are sad enough. I think on Saturday week, so that I can announce it next Sunday at matins and evensong. If you agree, Mrs Layton.’

‘If it’s what Susan wants.’

And Susan wanted it. She only referred to it once, the day
after, when she asked her mother to send for the durzi and tell him to bring bolts of whatever he had in grey – silk and chiffon. ‘It’s for the service,’ she said. ‘I shan’t wear black. And grey will always come in.’ She drew the design herself, basing it on one of her smocks which the durzi had already made up. She chose a silk for the smock foundation, a chiffon for the outer drapes which she had the durzi cut to hang full and loose; and in it she hardly showed at all, but stood in the shade of the veranda – while the tailor knelt with pins in mouth and chalk in hand – a white-faced grey-clad little ghost. For her veil she made over a circlet of blue velvet and pale blue velvet flowers and hung it with soft grey net. A grey suede handbag, gloves and shoes, were the only other expense – and these would come in too.

And she made an impression, yes, an impression, walking unsupported by but next to her mother, up the aisle of the church in which she had been christened, with Sarah coming along behind, in uniform. The whole station was represented, the pews were packed. In the days preceding the memorial service Pankot had become conscious of a need and of an occasion coming that would satisfy it. At its centre, Susan, veiled, revealed what that need was, moved them to an intensity of determination to fulfil it; to reaffirm. They lifted their voices high to sing, Lord, While Afar our Brothers Fight, Thy Church United Lifts Her Prayer; and lowered them to a grave and tender note of fervent understanding when they came to the third verse:

For wives and mothers sore distress’d,

For all who wait in silent fear,

For homes bereaved which gave their best,

For hearts now desolate and drear

O God of Comfort, hear our cry,

And in the darkest hour draw nigh.

But the last two lines were sung in mounting passion because the verse stirred them to a sense of what was owed to people like the Laytons. In India hadn’t the Laytons always given of their best? In those two young girls, the one sad in grey, the other brave in khaki, there ran the blood of Muirs and
Laytons and there were those two names on headstones in the churchyard, stones so old now that the names could only be read with difficulty. A time would come – the congregation felt it, as it were a wind driving them before it so that they had to cling hard not to be scattered – when all their names and history would pass into that same dark.

After the hymn Mr Peplow read the 23rd Psalm and as he finished General Rankin went to the lectern and read from Corinthians:
Behold I show you a mystery, We shall not all sleep
. He read well until he reached the passage: O death where is thy sting? O grave where is thy Victory? when his voice became flat with self-consciousness. When he returned to his seat Mr Peplow said, very simply, ‘Let us Pray.’ They knelt and prayed for the deliverance from evil and the coming of the kingdom, for the whole state of Christ’s church militant here on earth, for their sovereign George; and – after a pause – for the quiet repose of the soul of Edward Arthur David Bingham.

After the second lesson (
Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live
) which was read by Colonel Trehearne in his high, light, lilting voice, they rose to their feet again and sang ‘Abide with Me’, and it was remarked by those nearest to her that when they came to the opening lines of the last verse,
Hold Thou Thy Cross before my closing eyes; Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies
, Susan lowered her head and after the Amen sat down very quickly, with her head still bowed. She stayed like this throughout Mr Peplow’s short address. He spoke of their sympathy for the young widow of a brave officer whom many of them had known, and remembered clearly for his cheerfulness, his kindly disposition. He had no doubt that Edward Bingham’s was the kind of cheerfulness that adversity would not have diminished and it was this picture of him, young, smiling and in the prime of life that they must carry away with them. It would be a gallant soldier’s best memorial.

He then spoke of the name Bingham, of the father who, like the son, had served in a famous regiment, and of the marriage only a short time ago of the younger Bingham into a family whose history of service to India went even further back. He did not need (he said) to speak at length about such things, for
in this congregation the meaning of such service was fully understood and never had the meaning been clearer or the need to serve more pressing than now. This young officer had died, not in a foreign land, but on Indian soil, fighting off an enemy who had brought untold misery to the simple peoples of Burma and Malaya and would bring it to the Indians too if at what seemed like the eleventh hour we failed. But to fail, surely, was not possible, and already the tide was turning. Perhaps this time next year we should see the forces of evil and destruction swept into the sea, Burma regained, Malaya relieved, and India safe from threat, free to turn again to the ways of peace. The victory would not be without cost, but men such as he whom they had prayed this morning in remembrance of would, he hoped, not have died in vain. They were troubled times they had lived through, were living through, and yet had to face, and it was not only for victory to their arms they had to pray but for God to grant wisdom to those in whose hands chiefly lay the future happiness and progress of the great sub-continent, with all its complex problems and manifold differences of caste and creed and race. He asked them to join him presently in a minute of silent prayer, for the repose of the gallant dead, for the safety of the soldiers of India and Britain fighting – even as they sat there – shoulder to shoulder on the eastern frontier, for the peace and blessing of God upon the bereaved, and for wisdom in the councils of the world.

He left the pulpit and when he sank to his knees in front of the altar the congregation followed suit in their pews, prayed their prayers and thought their thoughts. It was said that on the eastern frontier the soldiers of India and Britain fighting shoulder to shoulder had found among their enemy Indian soldiers once captured by the Japanese but now fighting for them. The thought was bitter. Somewhere at the back of the church a coin, got ready for the collection, dropped on the tiled floor, but it marked the silence even more heavily and in itself conveyed an assurance of anxious, charitable intention. Rising once more Mr Peplow announced the last hymn, No 437, ‘For All the Saints, Who from their labours rest’. The collection was for the Red Cross. Four officers from area headquarters solemnly stalked the pews and were rewarded
with the chink of coins and crackle of notes in the woven bags they offered on long wooden rods. As the congregation broke into the penultimate verse, ‘But lo! there breaks a yet more glorious day’, they delivered the collection to Mr Peplow, waited until he had raised it in humble offering and thanks, and then about-turned and regained their seats in time to join in:

From earth’s wide bounds, from ocean’s farthest coast,

Through gates of pearl streams in the countless host,

Singing to Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

Allelulia.

Once more they knelt, for the blessing, and rose to restrained chords from the invisible organ, played by Mr Maybrick, the retired tea planter; and waited while, accompanied by Mr Peplow, the Laytons left. After a decent interval, they began to crowd the aisles, their faces stiff with dignity, automatically taking or giving precedence, so that the Rankins were the first to arrive in the porch where Mr Peplow stood holding one of Susan’s hands in both of his. He let her go so that Isobel Rankin could embrace her, which she did, lightly, making a token kiss of the air near one veiled cheek and murmuring, ‘It was a beautiful service, I hope you felt that.’ Susan murmured in return and put out her hand to take the one offered by General Rankin to whom she said, in a low but firm voice:

‘Thank you for reading the lesson so clearly, and for everything.’

The General nodded, touched – Sarah saw – that Susan should think of thanking him at all. Presently the Rankins went, with subdued farewells, and others took their place. Dicky Beauvais touched Sarah’s shoulder and said, ‘I’ll ring you later. Where’ll you be?’ She told him they were going on to lunch at Rose Cottage and only had to wait for Barbie Batchelor so that they could all go up together in the car General Rankin had lent them for the occasion. He touched his cap and went. Sarah was away
from the porch now and shielded her eyes from the sun, and then Miss Batchelor was upon her, grinning but blowing her nose. The others emerged from the porch. Mr Peplow accompanied them down the gravel path that led in a curve through the hummocky graveyard – downward, because the church stood, among pine trees and cypress, on an eminence.

At Rose Cottage Susan went with Barbie into Barbie’s room to change into the flowered smock and sandals that had been brought up by Mahmud earlier in the day. Barbie came out and told them Susan had asked for lunch on a tray. She would eat it out on the veranda.

‘It’s been such a strain for her,’ Barbie said. ‘I don’t think she feels up to talking. I’ll tell Aziz and then I think the form is for us all to go in and eat.’