The Day of the Scorpion (50 page)

They did so. There were curried eggs and rice. Afterwards Mabel and Barbie went to their rooms and her mother to the spare, for the ritual of sleep. Sarah went out on to the verandah. Susan had had her tray. She was resting on the same chair and in the same position Sarah had found her in ten days before. Sarah sat down, completing the pattern, presently turned her head and saw that Susan was watching her.

‘What did Dicky Beauvais say?’ she asked.

‘Only that he’d ring.’

A pause.

‘Is that what you’re waiting for?’

Sarah looked away, towards the five-mile hill.

‘No, Susan. I’m not waiting for anything.’

A pause.

‘You’re very lucky.’

‘Why lucky?’

‘Not to be waiting.’ Susan’s eyes were shut again. Gently, as if withdrawing into sleep, she turned her head into her folded hands.

At first Sarah did not notice the change in the rhythm of her sister’s breathing; but then became conscious of it: conscious that the pauses between the rise and fall were unusually long, the rise and fall unnaturally abrupt. Sarah got up, went close, and understood what was happening. She reached out to touch Susan’s head, but was afraid to. Close like this she could hear the suffocating attempts to deny the outlet for a pent-up misery. But what kind of misery? She
could not tell. She thought: You have the courage of ten like me. And knelt, leaning on her hip, clasping one ankle, to wait and try to convey to Susan that she was there if wanted. And after a while, still making that sound as if she were suffocating, Susan took one hand away from her face, groped for contact and held on, moving her head from side to side behind the hand that covered it, as if she would wear it down to the skull and Sarah’s shoulder to the bone, to relieve her agony.

There’s no one here,’ Sarah murmured. ‘Let it come out.’

‘I can’t,’ Susan said. Her voice was almost unrecognizable, a hoarse moan below the breath, but emphatic in its conviction. ‘I can’t. I’ve got to hang on.’

Sarah bent her head until her cheek rested on the tense knuckles.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, if you want.’

‘Then it may be all right. I thought the service would help it all come back. But it didn’t. It didn’t, and I don’t know how to face it without. I don’t know how to face it.’

She pulled her hand away and flung herself round so that she was on her back; and lay like that, with her eyes shut, turning her head from side to side, pressing down on her swollen belly with both hands.

‘At the service I prayed for the baby to die. I want him to die because I don’t know how to face it alone. How can I face it with Teddie never never coming back? I didn’t want the baby, but it pleased him so, and he wrote and wrote about it, and I could face it like that. But I can’t face it alone. I can’t bear it alone.’

‘You won’t be alone, Su—’

‘But I am. I am alone.’

Abruptly she sat up, doubled herself over her folded arms and began to move her body in a tight rocking motion. ‘Just like I was before, just as I’ve always been, just as if I’d never tried. But I did. I did try. I did try.’

‘What did you try—?’

‘You wouldn’t understand. How could you? You’re not like me. Whatever you do and wherever you go you’ll always be yourself. But what am I? What am I? Why – there’s nothing to me at all. Nothing. Nothing at all.’

Sarah sat quite still, watching that rocking motion, held by it, and by the revelation, what seemed to be the revelation, of what had lain behind the game that seemed to have ended, the game of Susan playing Susan. Susan nothing? Susan alone? She pondered the meaning of: Whatever you do and wherever you go you’ll always be yourself: and recognized their truth. She was herself because her sense of self, her consciousness of individuality was tenacious, grindingly resistant to temptations to surrender it in exchange for a share in that collective illusion of a world morally untroubled, convinced of its capacity to find just solutions for every problem that confronted it, a world where everything was accepted as finally defined, a world that thought it knew what human beings were.

But it did not know what Susan was. In grey and on her knees; yes, it knew that Susan; and it knew Susan in white with the wind catching her veil, or standing at a carriage window flushed and smiling and taking a last sniff at a bunch of flowers before throwing them in that bride’s gesture which proved a readiness to share her luck and fortune. It did not know her in a coloured smock, rocking to and fro, and had no answer to her cry that she was nothing.

It did not know her and had no answer and Sarah did not know her either – not as Susan – but with something of a shock recognized in the girl crouched on the chair a sibling whose pretty face and winning ways had been, after all, perhaps, only a fearful armour against the terrors of the night, a shield that was not visible to her but deluded others into believing her protected. What else had they been deluded by? By everything, perhaps, but most of all by the signs and portents of self-absorption, that apparent trick and talent for creating a world around her of which she was the organizing determinedly happy centre. It had not been that at all. There had been no secret garden, but only Susan crying to be let in and building the likeness of it for herself because she believed the secret garden was the place they all inhabited, and she could not bear the thought that she alone walked in a limbo of strange and melancholy desires.

Shifting her weight Sarah reached and put her arms round her sister.

‘You do amount to something, and you’re really not alone,’ she said, and Susan turned into the embrace, with the weird sound of someone inwardly recognizing and inarticulately acknowledging refuge.

II

Several images converge. That woman in the
burkha
, glimpsed in Ranpur, making her way to the mosque through the street of the moneylenders: one merely chanced upon her and noted the smell of Chanel No 5; but – walking unhurriedly, in that enfolding garment – she defies her prosaic environment of time and place. She can be pictured years before, not in Ranpur but in Pankot, making her way along a section of the bazaar, like a ghost condemned to walk in a certain place, so many steps, presenting to the world a front, a proof of her existence, silently calling attention to herself; always appearing and disappearing in the same places, as though the route, as well as her presence, is significant.

There was such a woman in the dream Sarah had, but she was in widow’s white, not purdah; and did not walk but remained prostrate. Yet, in the recurrence, in the uncertainty as to real intention, similarities existed. The whole of Sarah’s dream was like the woman in the
burkha
. It came and went and stayed in her mind, so that sometimes, in daylight, awake, the visions of the dream would transpose themselves and she would find herself leaving Jalud-ud-din’s and encountering, through the eyes of the woman who usually begged alms outside, this other woman, the one in white, lying in the dust, seeking for a mercy no one was capable of showing. For Sarah there came a time when the whole of that summer became inextricably entangled, as if, at this point, converging strands of circumstances met and intermingled, but did not cohere; and woven into them were the patterns of her dream, and Barbie’s dream, and the tale from the hills that had sent young Morland in his sleep to an unexpected death by drowning. She found it difficult later to remember things in the order they happened. There was a sense in which they became interchangeable.

For instance: did she fancy she saw Lady Manners in the bazaar before the old lady strangely announced her presence in Pankot (strangely because having announced it she remained resolutely in a purdah of her own)? Or had Lady Manners re-entered her sleeping and waking consciousness before she had made her presence known, so that the glimpse Sarah thought she had of her, leaving Jalal-ud-din’s in the company of a distinguished-looking Indian woman, seemed like some special manifestation rather than a visual confirmation of a presence that was the subject of common gossip? And what came first? Lady Manners or the letter that revived the other image of the stone thrown into the car taking poor Teddie and his best man to the wedding? And when, why, was it first suggested that Susan was dangerously withdrawn and the tale was resurrected of Poppy Browning’s daughter who, bearing her first child three months after being told her husband had died in the Quetta earthquake, promptly smothered it?

The most logical sequence would be one in which the letter reviving the image of the stone came first, because this might be seen as having had an effect on Susan that set people talking about Poppy Browning’s daughter and the business of the smothered child; and as having had the effect, as well, of reminding Pankot of the affair in the Bibighar Gardens in advance of Lady Manners’s arrival, so that the arrival had the special poignancy Sarah seemed to remember as attaching to it.

There had been many letters: from all over India, from people who had seen Teddie’s death gazetted or the notice in the
Times of India
. Most were addressed to Mrs Layton and she set about answering them with an industriousness that Sarah fancied was in part therapeutic, in part self-indulgent. All through the mornings, and on many an evening, Mrs Layton sat at the oak bureau in the grace and favour living-room, writing, writing. Page after page. There was apparently no end to the store of words, the flood of words. And she
became more directly communicative. She discussed the letters with Sarah. She drank less.

There were also letters to originate: to Aunt Lydia in Bayswater, to Colonel Layton in Germany, to that uncle of Teddie’s in Shropshire whom the marriage had relegated from his old status of next-of-kin and of whose nephew’s death on active service it had therefore become Susan’s or Mrs Layton’s duty to inform him. The Shropshire uncle had promised a wedding present after the war; it seemed doubtful now that Susan would ever get it; he had not given an impression of a generous nature. There were letters to send to Aunt Fenny too – now left Delhi for Calcutta where Uncle Arthur had at last acquired a job [a strange-sounding kind] that carried the pip and crown of a Lieutenant-Colonelcy: the first to tell Fenny of Susan’s loss and the second to put her off coming up, as she offered.

There were expected letters; one each for them from Tony Bishop who, but for the jaundice, would have been Teddie’s best man, and who now worked in Bombay. There were unexpected letters, a formal note of condolence from the Nawab of Mirat to Susan and a less formal letter to Mrs Layton from Count Bronowsky who said that the Nawab was deeply affected to hear of the death in action of the husband of the charming girl to whom and to whose family he had had the privilege and pleasure of extending some small hospitality the previous year. He wanted the Laytons to know that they were welcome at any time, now or in the future, to stay as his guests again, at the palace, or in the summer palace in Nanoora. ‘How kind,’ Mrs Layton murmured, ‘but quite out of the question,’ and wrote to thank the Nawab and his wazir, and explained that Susan was awaiting the birth of her baby.

Susan detached herself from the business of the letters. She asked her mother and Sarah to open them, answer for her, and keep by any of those they thought she might look at later. She specified only one exception to this rule. And this was the letter for which they waited. It came (Sarah thought later, unable quite to recall the order of things) in a batch of mail on the Sunday of the week following the Memorial Service. The flimsy envelope, addressed to Susan, was franked by a field
post office, and attested for the censor by an officer whose rank alone was legible.

‘I think this is it,’ Mrs Layton said. She handed the envelope to Sarah who was helping with lists and priorities. Susan was at the back, playing with Panther, throwing a ball from the veranda and waiting at the balustrade while he went to retrieve it. They could hear the scuttering sound of the dog’s pads and claws as it hurled itself down the steps and, after an interval, hurled itself back up them again to drop the ball with a
puck
at Susan’s feet, panting from the exertion, and with the pleasure of having a mistress who again took notice of him.

Sarah handed the envelope back. ‘It must be.’ She looked round, alerted to a change in the rhythm of the game by the dog’s anxious whimper. Susan was standing by the open window, watching them.

‘It’s come, hasn’t it?’ she asked.

Mrs Layton held the envelope out. ‘We think so. Here you are, darling. You’ll want to take it away.’

Susan came over, took the letter and went back to the veranda. They heard Panther growl and Susan say to him, ‘Oh, all right, just once more.’ She must have thrown the ball then. The dog scuttered away. Mrs Layton opened another letter. ‘It’s from Agnes Ritchie in Lahore,’ she told Sarah. ‘Put her on B list.’

Sarah entered Agnes Ritchie’s name in the B column of her list and when her mother gave her the letter put it with others in the B folder. Susan must have thrown the ball into the bushes of bougainvillaea. It was some time before they heard the dog return. Ball in mouth, it came into the living-room, looked round and went out again. They heard then, faintly, from the far end of the veranda, the scraping of its claws on the closed door of Susan’s room. In a while this sound of insistence died away. Sarah got up and went outside. The labrador raised its head and glanced at her. The ball was held securely between its extended paws.

‘Come on, Panther,’ she said, ‘I’ll throw your ball for you.’

But the dog rested its head again and waited.

Mrs Rankin rang and spoke to Mrs Layton about the Red Cross aid committee meeting, Mrs Trehearne sent a chit about the British Other Ranks Hospital Welfare and Troops Entertainments committee. Dicky Beauvais came round and asked Sarah for tennis at five with supper and pictures to follow. Mahmud complained that the dhobi had failed to turn up and asked permission to go into the lines and if necessary into the bazaar to find him. Distantly they heard the bells of St John’s announcing matins, and closer, the strains of the regimental band of the Pankot Rifles at practice in the grounds of the officers’ mess. The crows swooped and squawked. It was an ordinary Sunday morning. But an hour after she had taken the letter Susan was still in her bedroom, secluded with her evidence of war.