The Day of the Scorpion (56 page)

She held the cigarette for him but he shut his eyes briefly and thanked her, said he’d had enough. He couldn’t actually stop smoking, but it did make him a bit dizzy. Sister Prior was slowly breaking him of the habit.

‘What time do you go back tomorrow?’ he asked.

‘I ought to catch the midday train.’

‘Then I shan’t see you again.’

‘I could come tomorrow morning. Would you like me to?’

His eyes were shut again.

‘Oh, I should like it. But they wouldn’t. They have other plans for me tomorrow. It’s a good thing you turned up today.’

She waited for an explanation. When it seemed there wasn’t to be one she asked him directly, ‘Is it the surgery you mentioned in your letter?’

He nodded. He opened his eyes but didn’t look at her. ‘They were going to do it sooner. But I didn’t travel as well as they expected. They made me feel like a bottle of wine when they said that. That I hadn’t travelled well.’

‘Did they fly you out?’

‘Yes, it was fun. I’ve never flown in my life before, until all this. They flew me out of Imphal first, and then from Comilla. I’ve clocked up about three hours, I think. On my back though. It’s an odd feeling flying on your back. You think of yourself as totally invulnerable. Well, you do taking off and in the air. Landing’s a bit of a jolt. The chap who was in here when you arrived pranged on Dum-Dum a couple of weeks ago, coming in from Agartala. Extraordinary. The plane was a write-off, but he only bust a leg.’

She said after a while, ‘Do you want to tell me about tomorrow, about what they’re doing?’

He turned his head towards her, as if to study the depth of her interest.

‘Oh, they’ll poke about and come up with something and tell me afterwards. And don’t be fooled. I look as weak as a kitten, I know, but I’m full of beans under this dopey exterior. Otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it yet.’

‘What time are they doing it?’

‘Nine o’clock. Unless there’s an emergency. I mean, not me. Someone else. I’m not a priority. Don’t worry. I’m all right.’

‘If I rang at about midday I expect they’d tell me how it went.’

‘Yes, I’m sure they would.’

‘Then I’ll do that.’

‘Thank you.’ A pause. ‘Teddie told me Susan was having a baby. He was very proud.’

‘It’s due next month. In about three weeks.’

He said, ‘I expect she hopes it will be a boy.’

‘I don’t think she minds.’

Again he shut his eyes. ‘What do you say?’ he asked. ‘She was such a happy girl. It’s the happy people who are hardest hit when something like that happens. Teddie was a happy sort of man, too. They seemed made for each other. Well, I suppose that kind of happiness means there’s a basic resilience, and that when she’s got over the shock she’ll come up smiling. Although—’

‘Although what?’

‘She struck me as happy in the way a little girl is. Perhaps that’s a protection too. It interested me, the difference between you both.’

He brought the sentence to an abrupt end. She felt the full-stop. They had entered a zone of silence. For a moment she imagined he had fallen asleep, exhausted by the visit and unable to cope with the demands it made on him. Perhaps he was already under sedation, in preparation for whatever they were going to do to him in the morning. She felt a stirring of morbid curiosity, the beginning of a distasteful urge to draw the sheet away and observe the condition of his legs and abdomen, and arms from elbow downwards.

‘I expect there are things you both want to know.’

She glanced up quickly.

‘I hope my letter didn’t worry you,’ he added. ‘Did you show it to Susan?’

‘Yes, I did.’ She hesitated. ‘It did worry us a bit.’

‘I’m sorry. Did anyone ever write to her from the division?’

‘She had one the day before from Colonel Selby-Smith, so she knew you and Teddie had been together when it happened. He said you’d helped him. That’s one of the reasons I’m here, to tell you how grateful she is. Well, all of us. And of course she’s looking for reassurance, that you’re all right, or going to be. The letter from Colonel Selby-Smith seemed to hint that what you tried to do to help Teddie made things worse for you. What worried us about your letter was that it had to be dictated.’

‘Yes, I see.’

She waited, expecting an explanation, or a comment; the reassurance that she could take back to Susan. When it did not come it was, perversely, not concern for him – which might have filled her – but renewed reluctance to be drawn towards him which she felt; and this seemed to empty her. She thought, almost abruptly: He lacks a particular quality, the quality of candour; there is a point, an important point, at which it becomes difficult to deal with him. He isn’t shut off. It isn’t that. He’s open, wide open, and he wants me to enter, to ask him about the legs I can’t see, the forearms I can’t see, the obscene mystery beneath the white helmet of bandages. But I won’t. They, or their absence, their mystery – these I find appalling as well. It’s unfair, perhaps unhuman of me. On the other hand, it can’t be inhuman because I feel it, and I belong to the species, I’m a fully paid up member.

He had turned away, aware – possibly – that the purely physical equation of their eyes, meeting, lacked a value. When he began speaking she wondered whether the way in was being widened; salted, like the way in to a dangerous, derelict mine. She found herself exerting pressure on the ground with the soles of her feet and on her chair with the small of her back.

‘I thought it might be something else that worried you,’ he said, ‘that thing I said about the business lying heavily and wanting to talk about it. Get it off my chest. As if I had some sort of confession to make.’

‘Have you, Ronald?’

He turned again, stared at her. He smiled slightly.

‘Well, we all have, I suppose. The fact is I feel responsible. Perhaps there’s something about me that attracts disaster, not for myself, but for others. Do you think that’s possible? That someone can be bad luck?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘I was the worst best man Teddie could have chosen. Remember me saying that? That night I came to say goodbye and found you watching fireflies?’

‘Waiting for them. Yes, I do remember.’

‘You denied I was the worst, but that didn’t fool me. Teddie wasn’t fooled either. When I saw him again he’d cooled off. I
could see him putting distance between us. Oh, I’m sure there’s something in it. You find you have – a victim. You haven’t chosen him. But that’s what he is. Afterwards he haunts you, just as if he were on your conscience. The irony is that you don’t really have him there. You can question your conscience and come out with a clean bill. But he sticks, just the same. Teddie sticks. And that has a certain irony in it. I’m sorry. I’m making it worse. I mean, giving you more cause to worry, not less.’

‘It was Susan who worried. But just about you and how you really are and how much of what is wrong is due to your staying and looking after Teddie.’

‘Staying?’

‘She was told you stayed with him until the arrival of medical aid.’

‘I suppose that was one way of putting it, but there wasn’t any alternative. Well, make that clear to her. We were both up the creek. The question is why? Whose creek?’

He closed his eyes again, and this time it occurred to her that closing them was deliberate, part of a total effect he was seeking to make. His voice was quite strong; it showed no real sign of fatigue.

‘You see, I ask myself, continually ask myself, whatever fault it may have been of his, would it have happened if I hadn’t been with him? And the answer is no. It wouldn’t. It was the stone all over again. The stone that hit the car. Only this time it wasn’t a stone. And of course it wasn’t thrown at me. Everything about it was different, but the same. In effect.’

She said, ‘You’re imagining it. You ought to forget it and concentrate on getting better.’

He lay for a while, not speaking, not looking.

‘No,’ he said suddenly, so that she was almost startled. ‘One doesn’t get better by not facing it. Besides, I was fond of him. I may have envied him too. You know how it is. He had all the attributes, didn’t he? The game. Playing it. I mean really believing that it was. Astonishing, because it’s not a game, is it? Unless you play it, then I suppose that’s what it becomes. I keep on telling myself that it was playing the game that killed him, so that his death becomes a kind of
joke. Only I can’t see it. To me it was just a mess that he wouldn’t have got into without me.’

He turned again and watched her.

‘I’m telling you, not Susan. I couldn’t tell Susan. For her I’d play the game myself. But with you it isn’t necessary, is it?’

‘No, it’s not necessary.’

‘Anyway, you’d see through it. I lack the attributes. You notice things like that, but I feel you don’t mind, that it doesn’t matter to you that I’m not – not like Teddie. It mattered to Teddie. It made him over-meticulous about the rules. He was trying to point the difference between us. He never quite forgave me for what happened at the wedding. He didn’t say much, but he made me feel – intended to make me feel – that I’d done something not quite – pukka – getting involved in that sort of thing, accepting the intimacy he offered when he asked me to be best man but failing to tell him just who he was inviting intimacy with. It was the sort of situation you couldn’t actually say was wrong. All you could say was it wouldn’t have happened if, for instance, I’d been a Muzzy Guide – wouldn’t have happened then because a fellow-officer in the true sense of the word wouldn’t have any – what? Areas of professional secrecy? He wasn’t blaming me. He saw how reasonable it was for me not to go round saying, Look, I’m the police officer in the Manners case, and I get threatening anonymous notes, and any day someone might chuck a stone at me and involve me and whoever I’m with in an embarrassing police scene. Yes, he saw that. All the same he resented
being
involved. He saw it as an unnecessary vulgarity, one that marked the difference between my world and his. He recognized that these two worlds had to meet, I mean in war-time, but that didn’t mean he had to like it or encourage the intimacy to continue. We had one brief talk after he’d got back from Nanoora and joined the General and the advance party in the training area we went to, and of course he said all the right things, that I had absolutely nothing to apologize for or explain; but after that he never mentioned Mirat to me again. When I say he told me about Susan having a baby, that isn’t strictly true. He told someone else, and it came up in mess – as a cause for general congratulation. Well, you know. One makes a sort of
joke about it. It was quite a night. We were pushing the boat out because the orders had just come from Corps to move the division down into the field. They were all a bit high. Which is partly why Teddie let it out, that he was going to be a father. And that was the night I really knew that he did resent having got mixed up socially with a chap who wasn’t a Muzzy Guide or its equivalent. He was laughing at the things the others said to him. But when I congratulated him and asked him to give you and Susan my kind regards he became frigidly polite.’

‘You’re exaggerating. Teddie wasn’t like that.’ But she guessed that Teddie had been. ‘Anyway, he sent on your kind regards.’

‘Oh, but he would. He said “Yes of course. I’ll do that.” And that was his
word
. The frigidness and politeness were due to him turning it over in his mind first, whether he should agree or say “No, I think not if you don’t mind, Merrick”.’

‘You make him sound terribly old-fashioned.’

‘He was.’ A pause. ‘He believed in the old-fashioned virtues. The junior officers in a war-time divisional HQ are a pretty hybrid bunch. They divide, you know, into the amateurs and the professionals. But there’s a paradox, because the professionals are invariably the temporary chaps like me. The amateurs are the permanent men like Teddie, who see it as a game. But even among
them
Teddie stood out as an anachronism. He had old-fashioned convictions. So did a lot of them. But in Teddie you felt he had the courage that was supposed to go with them. And when I look at it squarely, it was having that kind of courage that killed him. But he died an amateur. He should have had a horse.’

‘The Muzzy Guides used to.’

‘I know.’

Again he closed his eyes.

She said, ‘What do you mean, he died an amateur?’

‘I’ll tell you, but I don’t want you to tell Susan.’

‘I can’t promise not to.’

He smiled, but kept his eyes shut.

She said, ‘She may prefer to know he died that way.’

‘Yes,’ he said presently. ‘In its way it had a certain
gallantry.’ He paused, opened his eyes, glanced at her. ‘You know about the Jiffs?’

‘Jiffs?’

‘They’re what we call Indian soldiers who were once prisoners of the Japanese in Burma and Malaya, chaps who turned coat and formed themselves into army formations to help the enemy. There were a lot of them in that attempt the Japanese made to invade India through Imphal.’

‘Yes, I’ve heard of them. Were there really a lot?’

‘I’m afraid so. And officers like Teddie took it to heart. They couldn’t believe Indian soldiers who’d eaten the king’s salt and been proud to serve in the army generation after generation could be suborned like that, buy their way out of prison camp by turning coat, come armed hand in hand with the Japs to fight their own countrymen, fight the very officers who had trained them, cared for them and earned their respect. Well, you know. The regimental mystique. It goes deep. Teddie was always afraid of finding there were old Muzzy Guides among them. And of course that’s what he did find. If Teddie had been the crying kind, I think he’d have cried. That would have been better, if he’d accepted the fact, had a good cry, then shrugged his shoulders and said, Well, that’s life, once they were good soldiers, now they’re traitors, shoot the lot.’ Merrick hesitated. ‘A lot were being shot. Our own soldiers despised them. They were a pretty poor bunch, badly led, badly equipped. And I suppose underneath the feeling artificially inspired by their propaganda – that they were the real patriots, fighting for India’s independence – they were, deep down, bent with shame. The Japanese despised them too. They seldom used them in a truly combatant role and left them in the lurch time after time. Anyway, that’s the picture we were getting, and we were also getting a picture of our own troops, Indian and British, killing them off rather than taking prisoners. That wasn’t what we wanted. The whole thing of the Jiffs became rather my special pigeon in divisional intelligence. And I was trying to get a different picture. I wanted prisoners. Prisoners who would talk, talk about the whole thing, recruitment back in Malaya and Burma, inducements, pressures, promises. Which Indian officers had gone for the thing and which had
only been sheep. When it came to the question of Indian King’s commissioned officers who had joined the Jiffs, Teddie preserved a sort of tight-lipped silence. He made you feel an officer who turned traitor was probably best dead anyway, unmentionable, quite unspeakable. And perhaps not really a shock, because to him an educated Indian meant a political Indian. But the sepoys, NCOs and VCOs were a different matter. It’s those he would have cried for. All those chaps whose fathers served before them, and had medals, and little chits from old commanding officers. Sometimes he said a lot of them probably joined so as to get back on their own side, and that in any major confrontation the Jiffs would come over and help kick the Japanese in the teeth. He became obsessed with the whole question. He seldom talked of anything else, to me anyway, because the Jiffs were my pigeon, and in a subtle way he used the Jiffs, his views on them, and mine, to point up the differences between us. Do you know what distinguishes the amateur?’