The Day of the Scorpion (62 page)

‘I’ve brought nothing long,’ Sarah said. Fenny had on an emerald-green dinner gown.

‘It doesn’t matter. Mrs Braithwaite’s just phoned to say Iris has gippy-tum and since they’re over at the Pedleys it means Dora won’t come either. So, pet, you’ll be the only pebble on the beach. Now tell me about poor Mr Merrick.’

Sarah told her as much as it was necessary for her to know.
When she had finished Fenny said, ‘Why not stay a day or two longer? I mean if you could stand it. I’m sure it would cheer him up to see you again. He won’t want to be bothered by me. Besides, I never know what to say to people in a bad way. I don’t think I could. I’ve always been a terrible coward about illness. Arthur says that when he has only a cold even, I act as if I don’t love him any more. I can’t explain it but other people’s physical troubles seem to strike me dumb. If you stay on a day or two and see him over the worst I promise I’ll really put the red carpet out for him afterwards. I’m good at jollying people along.’

‘Why?’ Sarah exclaimed, pausing in the midst of applying foundation cream. ‘Why should there be a red carpet? Why should we start getting involved at all?’

Aunt Fenny’s face, reflected behind her own in the mirror, looked momentarily blank.

‘Well, pet, you know the answer better than I do, I imagine. It’s you who came all the way down here to see him.’

‘For Susan.’

Fenny smiled. ‘Only for Susan?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, I’m sure. Why?’

‘Well, he was awfully attentive in Mirat. I thought you might be a bit gone on him.’

‘How could I be? He’s not our class.’

The irony, she saw, was lost on Fenny.

‘No. But he’s made something of himself and that sort of thing doesn’t matter like it used to, does it? I mean people say it’s what a man does and is in himself that counts and I think that’s true.’

‘Am I really so unattractive, Aunty? A board-school boy with a brain and a gentlemanly veneer, and only one arm? Couldn’t I do better than that?’

‘Oh, Sarah.’ Fenny flushed. ‘Well, I was only thinking of you being happy. I thought you might be attracted to him and trying to hide your feelings because of what the rest of us might say. None of the things that are against him would matter to me if you did love him. I’d back you up, honestly, right to the hilt. So do you? Do you, pet?’

‘As a matter of fact he appals me.’ She finished her unrewarding work with the cosmetic, stared at her own face and at the reflection of poor Aunt Fenny’s which now seemed as bereft as her own. ‘And it would be wrong to run away with the idea that he liked Teddie, by the way.’

After a bit Fenny said, ‘I shan’t ask you why you say that. I’ll just accept it. But I will ask you this. I’ve wanted to for ages. Were you in love with Teddie? Did it hurt to lose him to Susan?’

‘No. I wasn’t in love with Teddie either.’ She got up from the stool and went to the white-painted fitted wardrobe, took out the dress she had brought as best. Its absurd nice-young-girl look touched nerves that caused alternate chills of irritation and desolation. Removing the robe and standing for a few seconds in her underwear, acutely self-conscious under Fenny’s appraisal of her figure, she put the dress on, hastily but reluctantly, like some kind of outgrown but necessary disguise that fooled nobody any longer. She recalled, from somewhere, but did not immediately connect it to the day of the wedding, taking a dress off and feeling she had entered an area of light. Dealing deftly with the simple buttons and the hook and eye of the kind she always chose – on the large side because she had no patience and seldom any help – she said, ‘You see, Aunt Fenny, I don’t know what it means when people use that word. But thanks for worrying about me. Just don’t, that’s all. I’ve met men I’m attracted to and some of them have been attracted back. That’s simple enough. But this other thing, love, love, that’s never happened. If it has I never knew it, so it must be over-rated. It must be a bit of a sell.’

‘Well,’ Fenny said, more brightly, ‘that’s all right then, isn’t it? You’ve got it all to come. One thing’s absolutely certain. You won’t be in love and not know it.’

‘Did you know it, Aunt Fenny? Did you?’

Fenny’s smile contracted, but did not disappear.

‘Several times I thought I did, once I knew.’

‘You were lucky, then.’

‘No, pet. Not lucky. It wasn’t Arthur.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘No you must never be sorry. No, never. Ninety-nine per
cent of life is compromise. It’s part of the contract. I’ve been perfectly happy. I won’t say content. Contentment’s a different thing. I think I’ve reached the stage where I could honestly say if I didn’t still think of myself as a young woman, well, I
am
, that I’ve had a good life. Nothing marvellous has ever happened to me, but nothing bad either. I don’t suppose I’ve done a great deal of good anywhere but I hope no one could say I’ve ever done any real harm. When I pop off there won’t be a thing you could put your finger on to prove, you know, that I’d done more than earn my keep. It’s not much, but even that takes a bit of doing, and it’s about the most the majority of us can expect of ourselves.’

‘I know.’

‘Well, smile for me to show that you do.’

Sarah smiled.

‘And if you come here I’ll tell you my secret.’ Sarah went. She sat on the bed and suffered the warm weight of Aunt Fenny’s well-nourished hand on her own chill bony arm. ‘It’s not a secret to your mother. Has she never told you?’ Sarah shook her head. ‘I’m not surprised. Families are funny things. They have far more secrets from each other than you’d think likely, don’t they? We know a lot about our friends, but not much about our kith and kin.’ She paused, but she was still smiling. She said, ‘The secret is that I adored your father.’

‘My father?’

‘But adored him. Not from afar, either, but he only had eyes for Millie. He thought me silly and empty-headed, a terrible little flirt and never took me the least bit seriously. He still doesn’t. If I said to him now, John, do you know I loved you madly, he’d think it was a joke because he never noticed then and has never noticed since. In fact only Millie noticed and even she’s forgotten just
what
she noticed. So have I, in a way, you know, in the way you do when it’s all so long ago. But you see, pet, even now, I mean but even now, perhaps especially now, because it’s ages since I’ve seen him, if he walked into this room my heart would take a funny little turn. Just for a second. Then, bump, back to reality because there never was and couldn’t be anything between us. If there had been, if he’d felt the same, well even if we’d never married I’d never be able to say as I do that nothing
marvellous has ever happened to me, but he didn’t, so it wasn’t marvellous. But it
was
this thing you say you don’t know about, and it’s not just physical attraction. And if it ever happens to you, you mark my words, you’ll jolly well know.’

Sarah, who had stared for a while at her own clasped hands, glanced up. She found it difficult to take her aunt as seriously as she probably deserved. Like Sarah’s mother and father, Fenny belonged to a generation of men and women – the last one there might ever be – who seemed to have been warmed in their formative years by the virtues of self-assurance and moral certainty; what, she supposed, she used to think of as a perpetual light, one that shone (thinking of Aunt Lydia) on their radical as well as conservative notions of what one was in the world to do. And weren’t these things illusion of a kind? And this love, which Fenny said was not just physical attraction, an illusion too? Sex she understood, and even a grand passion because that, presumably, was a compound of physical desire, envy, jealousy and possessiveness. But love of the kind Fenny had described, the kind she herself and no doubt Susan had grown up to believe in as right and acceptable, now seemed to her like one more standard of human behaviour that needed that same climate of self-assurance and moral certainty in which to flourish; like all the other flowers of modest, quiet perfection which Susan had imagined grew on the other side of the wall, in the secret garden.

‘Susan—’ she began.

‘What about Susan, pet?’ Then, like Uncle Arthur, without waiting: ‘I was thinking of Susan, too, of when we saw her and Teddie off at the station on their way to Nanoora.’

‘Were you? Why, Auntie?’

‘Because of a similar occasion, when we saw your father and mother off on
their
honeymoon. I coped with it awfully well. Later there was a family joke about it. They said I was so busy being the centre of attraction for all the young officers who came down to wave them off that I hardly had time to wave to them myself. In Mirat I watched you so closely, pet, because it brought it all back to me. I knew something had made you unhappy and I wondered if you were feeling the
same about Susan whisking Teddie away as I felt about Millie whisking John. You looked so sad.’

‘I wasn’t sad.’

Truly?’

Truly.’

Then everything’s all right, Now.’ A squeeze of the arm. ‘Finish making yourself look pretty and come in as soon as you can. And do think over what I said. I mean about staying for a bit, just so that you can enjoy yourself, and meet a few new faces. I’m sure General Rankin will turn a blind eye to a few days absence, and your mother can do without you very well. Just for once. Heaven knows when the baby comes you’ll all be at sixes and sevens, so take advantage now, pet.’ She hesitated. ‘I know it’s been difficult, for
many
reasons. In the old days coming out to India was a tremendous lark. All you’ve had is this dreary war and – what it’s done to people.’ People like my mother, you mean, Sarah thought. ‘When your father gets home and realizes how much you’ve done to help your mother and Su, he’ll be very proud of you, but awfully upset to know how little fun you’ve had.’

As if on cue the silence beyond the closed door was broken by a peal of men’s laughter. Her aunt made a funny face. ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘If you leave them too long they start telling each other horrid stories. Men simply aren’t serious creatures at all, they make a joke of everything. I’d better go and keep them in order. What a shame Jimmy Clark’s only here until tomorrow, he was one of Arthur’s most promising chaps on the course and is such a nice man, but then he was at your father’s old school. They’re sending him down to do some special training in something rather hush-hush in Ceylon. He’s only thirty but Arthur says he’ll probably end up a lieutenant-colonel if the war goes on another year, which it probably won’t. He got an emergency commission but we think he’s the kind of man who may want to stay on in the army either here or at home. Incidentally, he’s been asking all about you.’

Fenny rose, gave Sarah what was meant as a reassuring pat. Sarah smiled up at her, feeling it incumbent on her to remain where she was, like a tense little chrysalis from which – in the ten or fifteen minutes of privacy that were left to her and
encouraged by homilies and the dutiful desire to shake off all those dark and gloomy images of the world as a repository only of occasions and conditions of despair – she would emerge as the tough little butterfly of Aunt Fenny’s affectionate imagination.

‘No,’ Aunt Fenny said, ‘tonight the ladies will
not
withdraw. At least not for more than a few minutes. There are only two of us and frankly, Arthur, the walls in this flat are too thin for mutual comfort.’ The chaps, cheered by cocktails, an Anglo-Indian curry, two bottles of South African hock and the expectation of brandy or liqueurs, laughed dutifully. There were six of them, including Jimmy Clark who sat on Sarah’s right. On her left, at the head of the table, was her Uncle Arthur, deep in but chin above his cups. Opposite her, on Uncle Arthur’s left, was a pale-faced young officer with a lick of hair who had begun the evening with what she had detected as intellectual reservations but who was now, long before its ending, apparently entranced and well on his way to what she knew men called being as pissed as a newt. Why a newt? She had kept newts one summer at Grandfather’s, in a deep square blue Mackintosh’s toffee tin and all she could recall was that the water turned sallow and the newts had died. Perhaps that was it. Sallowness, and death by drowning, like Mr Morland in his dream.

‘We’ll all withdraw and meet next door for coffee and what’s-it. Have you boys decided how you’ll finish up this evening? There’s Ingrid Bergman and Gary Cooper at the New Empire.’

‘Send not,’ the pale young officer intoned, ‘to ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee. I’ve seen it, it’s rotten.’

‘And unless you’ve booked there isn’t a chance,’ another man said.

‘Well, Arthur and I are going on to the Purvises,’ Fenny announced. ‘We thought you young people might make up a party of your own. I’m sorry Iris and Dora couldn’t come because then you might have preferred to stay here and dance to the gramophone. There’s plenty to drink and bits to eat if
you get peckish later, so do stay if you’d prefer to, or all go out somewhere. You can talk it over with coffee. It’ll be in in just a few minutes.’

Catching Sarah’s eye she nodded and rose. Noisily they followed suit. Major Clark helped Sarah with her chair.

In the living-room Fenny said, ‘The thing is, pet, just to fall in with what they decide and not express a preference. Men much prefer the helpless happy type. My bet is they’ll plump for the Grand Hotel. It’s an officers’ hostel these days and they feel at home there. They might mix in with another party. Don’t be too put out or standoffish if you find yourself in a gang that includes chichis. Boys like these from home think we treat girls like that awfully badly, and perhaps we do. They laugh at them too, but feel sorry for them, and can’t bear it when English girls turn up their noses. But you’re not like that, pet, are you? You’ll have a lovely time. It’s quite a thing for them to
have
an English girl, and they’ll adore just being seen there turning up with you. And, pet, there’s safety in numbers. Well, listen to me. Birds and bees. I shan’t start worrying about you until long after midnight. Jimmy Clark will look after you. He’ll know exactly why I put him next to you.’