The Day of the Scorpion

  When the year was up and a girl had been through a complete cycle of seasons, it was time for her parents to take a hand. It was remarkable how docile the girls became, how easily they could now be led into the right sort of match. The second year was the year of engagements and marriages; the third year was devoted to maternity. With the first grandson or grand-daughter one could sit back with a sigh of relief that one’s duty had been properly done.

  The war had disrupted this ideal pattern. The Layton girls, for instance, were among the last girls to come out as members of what old Anglo-Indian wags used to call the fishing-fleet. These days one only got people like nurses. On the other hand the supply of men had become a torrent of all sorts where once it had been a steady dependable flow mostly of one sort only – the right. (Pankot, for instance, was full of the most extraordinary people.) One felt, as it were, besieged. Through the smoke and confusion one tried to maintain contact. One sought the reassurance that the old nucleus was still established at the centre. It was heartening to know that the elder Layton girl seemed to have chosen a man one could describe as pukka. He was a Muzzy Guide. His father had been a Muzzy Guide. If his association with Sarah Layton developed as one hoped, one could then say that Colonel Layton’s departure from the bosom of his family long before the end of that first traditionally difficult year when a girl stood in need of the steadying hand of a father as well as of the guiding hand of a mother, had not had any real ill-effect. One might congratulate Sarah Layton on her own good sense.

  In this way the ladies of Pankot, at bridge, at tea, behind the counter of the canteen of the Regimental Institute and in rehearsal breaks in their production of The Housemaster, discussed the various ramifications of Sarah’s friendship with Teddie. They seemed to have set their hearts on an engagement. One could – they said – always do with a really good wedding, and with a Layton girl involved one could expect a reception at Flagstaff House, perhaps count on the General to give the bride away. Life had become a shade drabber each successive year of the war. One was lucky if the Governor and his Lady spent more than May and June in the summer residence. Last year, 1942, when all that turmoil was going on down in the plain, there had hardly been even the shadow of a season. As for home comforts, those too were rapidly becoming a thing of the past. The influx of troops, the establishment of training camps, the departure of one’s own menfolk, had driven one out of one’s rightful bungalows to pig in at Smith’s Hotel, the club annexe, or, if one was luckier than other grass widows, into (in Pankot idiom) grace and favour bungalows such as Mrs Layton and her daughters occupied in the vicinity of the old Pankot Rifles depot, although that meant one spent a fortune in tonga fares just to go to the club for morning coffee. By rights, the station felt, Mrs Layton and her daughters should have been living in Rose Cottage. As it was there was insufficient room there because old Mabel Layton, who had bought the cottage some time in the thirties, shared the place and expenses with Miss Batchelor, a retired missionary (and a born spinster if ever there was one) and both of them seemed destined to live for ever. On the whole, though, one envied the retired people who had their own places, although some of them had been reduced to taking in paying-guests, and as they died off the military requisitioned their bungalows for use as nurses’ hostels and chummery messes.

  Meanwhile, one coped and made what one could of any occasion that might briefly bring back memories of what life in India had been like before the war. In the heat generated by their expectations of the wedding, warmth was felt for the Laytons as a family and a symbol. One forgave Mrs Layton her vagueness, her forgetfulness, her understandable little indulgences. After all, she was still an attractive woman. Better a few too many chota pegs than the possible alternative.

  The news that Teddie Bingham and Sarah Layton were no longer to be seen in each other’s company came as a sad disappointment. Hopes that they had merely had a tiff and that a reconcilation would spur them on to a mutual declaration of affection were dashed when Teddie turned up at a club dance as a member of a trio of officers escorting Susan. It was calculated that he had more than his fair share of dances with her, including the last waltz. It was noticed that Sarah was not at the dance at all. Mrs Paynton reported an encounter with Sarah in Jalal-ud-din’s shop the morning after and having received – in response to her friendly inquiry after Captain Bingham’s health – an evasive reply that was barely polite. As Mrs Paynton said, Sarah Layton had always been punctilious in her observance of the rules laid down for the exchange of pleasantries – although (and perhaps the others would agree with her?) when one came to think of it she had never seemed entirely relaxed. In the present circumstances one had to make allowances. On the other hand perhaps one ought to consider more closely what it was about a girl who consistently lost men to her younger sister. Young men being what they were, nine times out of ten their desertion of Sarah in favour of Susan could be explained readily enough. But Teddie Bingham, surely, had been the one extra time, and ten out of ten suggested there was more to it than Susan’s good looks and jolly temperament proving too strong as competition.

  ‘If you ask me,’ young Mrs Smalley said – and hesitated because she was never asked and had not been asked now. But she had searched for just such an occasion to make her mark with this group of her elders and betters. So, flushed but determined, she contined – ‘the trouble is she doesn’t really take it seriously . . .’

  After an appreciable pause Mrs Paynton inquired, ‘Take what seriously?’

  ‘Any of it,’ Mrs Smalley said. ‘Us. India. What we’re here for. I mean in spite of everying. In spite of her – well, what she was brought up to. I mean although men never talk about it they feel it, don’t they? I mean in a more direct way than even we do. I think they’re more sensitive than women are to, well, people – people like Sarah Layton. I believe that after a while they get a horrible feeling she’s laughing at them. At all of us. Oh – I‘m sorry. Perhaps I ought not to have said that . . .’

  There was silence. The ladies looked at one another. Poor Mrs Smalley wished the ground would open and swallow her. She – a Smalley (for what that was worth) had criticized a Layton, in public. And had talked about – it. One never talked about it. At least not in so direct a way.

  Suddenly Mrs Paynton spoke. Mrs Smalley stared at her. She thought she might have misheard. But she had not.

  ‘My dear,’ Mrs Paynton had said. ‘How extremely interesting.’ Now she turned to the others. ‘I’m not at all sure Lucy hasn’t put her finger bang on the spot.’

  Trembling, Lucy Smalley accepted a cigarette from Mrs Fosdick.

  ‘It was last year I first felt it,’ she said, having been persuaded to explain in greater detail what she meant when she said Sarah Layton didn’t take ‘any of it’ seriously. ‘I mean whenever we talked about all those dreadful things that were going on in places like Mayapore.’ When she said ‘we’ she was speaking figuratively. She had rarely ventured a word herself. Because she had not, she had had more time to watch and listen. Whenever Sarah had been present with Mrs Layton, Mrs Smalley had taken special note of her because Sarah was the one woman in the group Mrs Smalley could treat as junior to herself. ‘I thought perhaps she was a bit shy, so I always made a point of talking to her. It was never anything she said, but gradually I couldn’t help feeling she was thinking a lot. I thought that sometimes she was bursting to come out with something, well, critical of us. Just as if she thought it was all our fault. And yet not, well, quite that. I mean I don’t think she’s a radical or anything. I think the best way I can describe it is to say that sometimes she looked at me as if I were, well, not a real person. I mean that’s the reaction I had. She made me feel that everything we were saying was somehow a joke to her, the sort of joke she couldn’t share.’

  Again, the ladies exchanged glances. ‘I think I know what you mean, Lucy,’ Mrs Paynton said. ‘And I think it’s something like that, in the back of one’s mind you know, that makes one feel even more stron
gly that it’s time she settled down.’

  The ladies agreed. Mrs Smalley was conscious that her moment of glory had passed its peak. The others, led by Mrs Paynton, now absorbed her suspicions of Sarah Layton, adapted them, and came to the conclusion that Miss Layton probably didn’t mean to give people the impression of having unsound ideas and would be straightened out quickly enough if the right man came along. Perhaps Captain Bingham had been the wrong man. Things might be better for her when that little minx of a sister was married.

  Three weeks later when Susan and Teddie took the station by surprise by announcing that they were to be married, Mrs Fosdick declared that a man who could woo one girl, switch his allegiance to her sister and end by marrying her was scarcely to be trusted to remain faithful for long, and that her opinion of the significance of pale eyelashes had therefore been vindicated. The other ladies said that Captain Bingham’s choice, wavering though it might seem, was proof of there being something in the Layton girls that appealed to his deepest sensibility and that his final choice as between the two of them showed up even more clearly that the elder girl, although perhaps outwardly possessed of whatever it was that appealed in this way, was inwardly unsatisfactory in this other way that men sensed more quickly than women but which had at last been pinned down as unsoundness, if only of the incipient kind; and when it was noticed that Sarah Layton smiled at Teddie and Susan the idea the ladies might have had that she bore no grudge and took it all like a good soldier was edged out of their minds by this other idea – the faintly disagreeable one that she was smiling at them instead of with them.

  All the same, they looked forward to the wedding. When Captain Bingham was posted quite suddenly as a G3 (Operations) to a new divisional headquarters stationed in Mirat, Mrs Fosdick said she wouldn’t be in the least surprised if the whole thing now fell through and Susan, with so many other eligible men to choose from, decided she had made a mistake. The Laytons’ departure for a late – last-fling-for-Susan – holiday in Srinagar strengthened her belief that Susan would soon find other fish to fry. The final surprise and disappointment came when the Laytons returned early from Kashmir and announced that the wedding, far from being either postponed or cancelled, had been hastened forward and would take place out of Pankot, in Mirat. One felt (the ladies said) that even taking into account the exigencies of war-time, and the fact that Captain Bingham was obviously soon returning to active service in the field, the Layton wedding had taken on a hole-in-the-corner air which it was somehow not easy to forgive.

  ‘I’m not at all sure,’ Mrs Paynton announced, ‘that Mrs Layton should allow herself to be rushed like this. I get the impression she’s really quite upset but is trying not to show it for the girl’s sake. Apparently Susan is coming back to Pankot with them after the wedding because there’ll only be a three-day honeymoon and after that Captain Bingham is off. You don’t suppose . . .’

  She did not say what was not supposed because she knew the other ladies must have supposed it already, as she had done, and rejected the supposition as too outlandish in relation to a Layton to be considered seriously for a moment – unless, perhaps, the Layton girl involved had happened to be Sarah. If Mrs Smalley was right and had put her finger on what was wrong with Sarah Layton, what was disturbing about her, then one could say that nothing was beyond the bounds of possibility.

  *

  Teddie Bingham’s posting to Mirat and his discovery soon after arrival that if he wanted to get married his bride would have to come to him, be content with a seventy-two-hour honeymoon in the Nanoora Hills and prepared to kiss him goodbye as soon as it was over, were not the only events that threatened to disrupt the harmonious pattern of the wedding. Susan, somewhat to her family’s surprise, shrugged these disappointments away and said that anyway being married in Mirat should be fun, especially if – as was suggested – they stayed beforehand at the palace guest house. They could go to Ranpur (she said), meet Aunt Fenny and Uncle Arthur (who was to give her away), and travel to Mirat as a party. So, provisionally, it was arranged, but soon after the return from the Kashmir holiday Major Grace informed them he could not get down to Mirat earlier than the Friday before the wedding. He had to attend a series of conferences and there was no getting out of this disagreeable duty. Mrs Layton said she did not much care for the idea of travelling down and staying for nearly a week in the guest house without a man to look after them. Again Susan brushed the objection aside. The guest house would be perfectly safe. According to Teddie the Nawab of Mirat had handed it over to the station commander for the duration, to provide extra accommodation for military visitors (and their families) and although it wasn’t in the cantonment it was in the grounds of the palace and was guarded. ‘That still leaves the train journey,’ Mrs Layton pointed out. ‘You’re forgetting Teddie’s best man,’ Susan reminded her. One of Teddie’s friends in Pankot was a man called Tony Bishop, another old Muzzy Guide wounded in Burma and presently acting as ADC to General Rankin. Tony had already agreed to support him at the wedding. It would be the simplest thing in the world to get General Rankin to give him special leave so that he could go down to Mirat with them.

  So Mrs Layton spoke to General Rankin and got his promise to allow Captain Bishop to escort them. But one week before the party was due to leave Tony Bishop went down with jaundice. Mrs Layton visited him in the military wing of the Pankot General Hospital.

  ‘It’s no good,’ she said, ‘he’ll be there for three weeks, so now there’s no best man. But it’s a blow. Of all Teddie’s friends Tony Bishop strikes me as the most sensible.’

  ‘Best men are two a penny,’ Susan retorted, and went up to Area Headquarters where she put a call through to Teddie at his divisional Headquarters and spoke to him personally. ‘He’ll get someone in Mirat, probably the man he shares quarters with,’ she said when she came back. The remarkable thing, Sarah realized, was that for once Susan had done something herself instead of getting someone to do it for her. Her mother said no more about being unaccompanied on the train. It had never been a serious objection. There were bound to be plenty of officers on their way to Mirat and Susan would only have to stand a few moments on the platform with her mother, Aunt Fenny and Sarah, before a gaggle of subalterns approached them and inquired if any help was needed. Which was precisely what happened.

  *

  There were two Mirats: the Mirat of palaces, mosques, minarets, and crowded bazaars, and the Mirat of open spaces, barracks, trees, and geometrically laid out roads with names like Wellesley, Gunnery and Mess. The two Mirats were separated by an expanse of water, random in shape, along one side of which ran the railway and the road connecting them. The water and the gardens south of it were the Izzat Bagh, so-called because the first Nawab declared that Kasims would rule in Mirat until the lake dried up: a fairly safe bet because it had never done so in living memory. But it was a boast, and boasts were always considered dangerous. Providence ought not to be tempted. A man could lose face simply as a result of tempting it. The inhabitants of the city anticipated the worst. Instead, so it was said, for two successive years after the Nawab’s announcement the wet monsoon was abnormally heavy and prolonged. When, in the second year, the lake flooded its banks and destroyed the huts of the fishermen, drowning several, people took it as a sign of celestial approval of the reign of the house of Kasim whose honour – or izzat – had been so dramatically upheld. The lake was adopted as a symbol of the Nawab’s power, of his fertility, of an assured succession reaching into the far distant future. The mullahs declared the lake blessed by Allah, and the Hindus – eighty per cent of the population – were prohibited from using it even during the festival of Divali. A mosque was erected on the southern shore and a new palace was built with gardens going down to the water. The court poet – Gaffur Mohammed – celebrated the establishment of the new palace and its garden in this verse:

  So you must accept, Gaffur,

  That your words are no more than the petals of a rose.

 
They must fade, lose scent, and fall into obscurity.

  Only for a while can they perfume the garden

  Of the object of your praise. O, would they could grow,

  Lord of the Lake, eternally.

  It was in these gardens that a guest house in the European Palladian style was built in the late nineteenth century, round about the time that a British military cantonment was established with the Nawab’s approval in the area north of the lake.

  *

  There were two halts for Mirat: Mirat (City) and Mirat (Cantonment). The latter was the first arrived at if you travelled from Ranpur. The mail train was scheduled to reach Mirat (Cantonment) at 07.50 hours but was usually anything between half an hour and one hour later. Having deposited its passengers at Mirat (Cantonment) it took a half-hour rest and then chugged out, at a rate never exceeding 10 mph, negotiating points, junctions and level-crossings until it reached the long isolated embankment that separated the lake from the waste land that had once – before the coming of the cantonment – been characteristic of the northern environs of the city. The train crawled along the bleak strip of ground that raised the railway to one level and the trunk road to another, slightly lower, with a kind of reluctance, as if the engine-driver expected subsidence or, anyway, signals showing green that would flash red at the last moment, scarcely leaving him time to apply his brakes. Between the presiding power and the old glory there was, as it were, a sense of impending disaster.

  Although the Laytons and Mrs Grace were to stay at the palace guest house it was at Mirat (Cantonment) they alighted, on Teddie Bingham’s instructions. ‘Make sure,’ he had written to Mrs Layton, ‘you don’t get carried on into the city. Of course I’ll be there to meet you, and even if I’m unable to I’ll get someone to do so for me. But I thought it worth mentioning, just in case anything goes wrong, and remembering you’re staying at the palace guest house you think you have to travel on into the city itself. No one ever does.’