The Day of the Scorpion

  ‘Things are looking up,’ he said now above the din on the arrival platform. ‘You’re only twenty-five minutes behind schedule. I’ve got breakfast organized. I expect you’re ready for it.’ He pecked the cheek Mrs Layton offered, shook hands with Mrs Grace whom he had met only twice, held Sarah’s hand for a prolonged few seconds as if the switch of his affections from her to her sister still needed some explanation, then turned and kissed and held on to pretty little Susan who had an air of being flushed and dishevelled in spite of the fact that not a hair was out of place and she had worked for half an hour on perfecting the pallor she had decided suited her as the wife-to-be of an officer who would soon be away to the war. It was on Teddie’s cheeks a flush was actually visible, but he appeared brisk, fully in control of the problems posed by an arrival. The flush seemed to be one of pleasure combined with effort: the pleasure of seeing his future wife again and the effort he would always put into doing even the most ordinary things right, more especially when there were members of the opposite sex depending upon him for their comfort and safety. He had an Indian NCO in attendance whose khaki drill shirt and knee-length shorts stood out from his limbs and body in stiff, starched, knife-edged perfection. The man’s pugree was an exotic affair of khaki cloth and diaphanous khaki muslin which gave his otherwise gravely held head a quirk of flirtatiousness and added a note of self-conscious gallantry to the way in which he stood by the open carriage and took charge of the mounds of luggage which the red-turbanned coolies were already fighting over.

  ‘Don’t worry about your things,’ Teddie Bingham said. ‘Noor Hussain’s got the luggage bando taped,’ and having thanked the officers in the adjacent compartment who had looked after Mrs Layton and her party on the journey from Ranpur and were now travelling on south, escorted the ladies through the crowd to the station restaurant, explaining that Noor Hussain would see the luggage safely stowed in a 15-cwt truck and taken to the guest house where they would find it waiting. For personal conveyance he had laid on a couple of taxis, and those too would be waiting directly breakfast was over.

  Entering the restaurant behind her mother and Aunt Fenny, but ahead of Susan and Teddie who were obviously conscious of their duty as an engaged couple to stay close, Sarah concentrated on the smells coming from the kitchens. Whatever the day held in store breakfast was a meal she felt it was wise to give her undivided attention to. Once she was seated at the table, the orders given for cornflakes or porridge, egg and bacon, toast and marmalade, the first cup of tea or coffee drunk, and perhaps the first cigarette of the day lighted, she thought she would be able to view the sight of Susan and Teddie sitting together opposite her with more confidence in their future than she felt capable of drumming up at the moment.

  There was (Sarah thought) something about Teddie Bingham that didn’t wear well. He was not a man who grew on you. In this respect he was like the countless other young men to whom she had been mildly attracted and then lost interest in or lost to Susan with no hard feelings on either side. What was special about Teddie was the fact that Susan had agreed to marry him. Sarah could not understand why. She hoped, but did not believe, that they loved one another. She did not believe it because until they announced their engagement there seemed to have been nothing to distinguish him as a man apart, in the crowd of men round Susan.

  ‘But then,’ Sarah thought, ‘we all have the same sort of history. Birth in India, of civil or military parents, school in England, holidays spent with aunts and uncles, then back to India.’ It was a ritual. A dead hand lay on the whole enterprise. But still it continued: back and forth, the constant flow, girls like herself and Susan, and boys like Teddie Bingham: so many young white well-bred mares brought out to stud for the purpose of coupling with so many young white well-bred stallions, to ensure the inheritance and keep it pukka. At some date in the foreseeable future it would stop. At home you understood this, but something odd happened when you came back. You could not visualize it, then, ever stopping.

  She looked across the table at Susan, at her mother, at Aunt Fenny, and remembered her Aunt Lydia saying that India was an unnatural place for a white woman. As a child she had not understood, but had understood since, and agreed with Aunt Lydia that it was. They did not transplant well. Temperate plants, in the hot-house they were brought on too quickly and faded fast, and the life they lived, when the heat had dried them out and left only the aggressive husk, was artificial. Among them, occasionally, you would find a freak in whom the sap still ran. She was thinking of her old Aunt Mabel in Pankot, and of the Manners girl’s aunt in Srinagar who, in the midst of their conversation, had suddenly filled her with an alarming sense of her own inadequacy as a human being, so that on returning to her own houseboat she had sat in front of a mirror and stared at herself, wishing she were anything but what her outward appearance proved she was: an average girl whose ordinariness was like a sentence of life imprisonment.

  ‘You are not going to tell us, I hope,’ Aunt Fenny said to Teddy when she had taken her place, fussed about a stain on the tablecloth, studied the bill of fare, ordered porridge and poached eggs and returned her spectacles to their red leather pouch, ‘that the wedding has to be even earlier, tomorrow for instance, because if so there’ll be no one to give Susan away. Arthur simply can’t get down until Friday.’

  ‘No, don’t worry, Mrs Grace, Saturday it is.’

  ‘What about your best man, Teddie?’ Mrs Layton asked.

  ‘It’s all fixed. I asked the chap I share quarters with if he’d stand in and he said he’d be glad to. Since then he’s been bustling around making sure everything’s all right at the guest house. He’ll be along after breakfast to help us get sorted out. His name’s Merrick. I hope you’ll like him.’

  ‘Merrick?’ Aunt Fenny repeated. ‘It doesn’t ring a bell. What is he?’

  ‘A gee-three-eye,’ Teddie said, who took so many things literally.

  Aunt Fenny turned to Mrs Layton. ‘Millie, wasn’t there a Merrick on General Rollings’s staff in Lahore in thirty-one? It could be the same family.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t remember, Fenny. It’s all so long ago.’

  ‘Of course you remember. He married one of those awful Selby girls. No. I’m wrong. . .’ Aunt Fenny paused. There was a family joke that Aunt Fenny kept the army List on her bedside table, and still referred to it whenever she gave a party and was in doubt about the seniority of one of her guests and consequently where to seat him and his wife. ‘It wasn’t Merrick. It was Mayrick. I don’t know a Merrick. Is he an emergency officer?’

  ‘He got an immediate commission, I gather,’ Teddie explained. ‘He was in the Indian Police.’

  ‘Isn’t that unusual?’ Aunt Fenny wanted to know. ‘Young Mr Creighton pulled every string there is to get out of the civil and into the army for the duration, but they wouldn’t let him go. He told me he’d only heard of one instance of it being allowed and I think that was a case of the poor young man in question absolutely pining away at the prospect of not being in on the shooting and becoming quite useless at his work. Perhaps it was Mr Merrick. What is his first name?’

  ‘Ronald.’

  ‘Ronald Merrick. What rank?’

  Teddie looked faintly surprised. ‘Captain.’

  ‘My dear boy, I gathered that when you said he was a G3 (I). I meant his rank in the police.’

  ‘Oh, that. Superintendent or something, I think.’

  ‘What district?’

  ‘He did tell me. Now what was it? Is there a place called Sunder-something?’

  ‘Sundernagar,’ Aunt Fenny pronounced. ‘A backward area. Relatively unimportant.’ Captain Merrick thus disposed of she smiled blandly.

  ‘Did you enjoy Kashmir?’ Teddie asked.

  ‘It was all right. The wrong end of the season and of course we had to cut it short.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry.’

  ‘We had a vaguely unpleasant experience too. Millie wanted to move our boat up the lake to where she and John spent
their honeymoon. There was only one other boat up there and it all seemed quite idyllic, if over-quiet and slightly inconvenient. Unfortunately our neighbour turned out to be someone on whom it was impossible to call. I’ll give you three guesses.’

  Teddie coloured up in anticipation of hearing something he’d rather not hear in front of Susan. Sarah glanced at her mother who was still reading the menu, apparently not listening. Only her mother knew about her visit to Lady Manners, and only for her mother’s sake had Sarah said nothing to the others.

  ‘I give up,’ Teddie said.

  ‘Old Lady Manners. And the child—’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ His blush deepened.

  Mrs Layton put the menu down. ‘What is the guest house like, Teddie?’

  ‘I’ve only seen it from the outside, but the station commander says it’s pretty comfortable. Ronald Merrick knows more about it than I do. He’s been there a couple of times to check on the bando-bast. Incidentally, you’ll have it all to yourselves. It’s in the palace grounds and it’s staffed by palace servants, but the Nawab’s put it at the Station Commander’s disposal for the duration, so it’s really treated as cantonment territory and there’s no need to stand on ceremony.’

  ‘Shall we see the Nawab?’ Susan asked.

  Teddie assumed his playful expression. ‘Why should you want to see the Nawab?’

  ‘Because there was a scandal about him. He fell in love with a white woman and followed her all the way to the South of France.’

  ‘Oh, did he? Who told you that?’

  ‘I did, but I thought everybody knew,’ Aunt Fenny said. ‘The affair between between the Nawab of Mirat and Madame X or whatever they called her, was quite a cause célèbre in the early twenties. She was Russian or Polish and pretended to be of good family, but was probably a lady’s maid. I don’t know what originally brought her to India but she got her hooks into the Nawab, played him for what he was worth, cried off when he wanted her to marry him as his second wife and scooted back to Europe with the Nawab after her. They ended up somewhere like Nice or Monte Carlo. I remember there was a story about some jewellery which she claimed he’d given her – presumably for services rendered. He threatened legal action and they say this Count Bronowsky acted as go-between – so successfully that the Nawab brought him back and made him his prime minister.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Teddie said. ‘I’ve heard of Bronowsky. He’s still around.’

  ‘If he was really a Russian count I’ll eat my hat but the Nawab’s been under his thumb ever since and he’s even dazzled the Political Department, according to Arthur. But then of course he had to, otherwise they’d have made the Nawab get rid of him years ago.’

  ‘You haven’t answered my question, Teddie,’ Susan reminded him, ‘but of course once Aunt Fenny starts it’s difficult to get a word in edgeways.’

  She smiled at Mrs Grace, but Sarah recognized the hectic little flush spreading over her powdered cheeks as a sign of the temper her sister seemed to find it hard to control whenever she felt even fleetingly neglected. Content, often, to sit and listen and think her thoughts, her most casual remarks or gestures demanded and usually received immediate reponses, from women as well as men. Sarah sometimes marvelled at the way Susan could suddenly divert a conversation by throwing into it a comment or a question, and at the way she could then just as suddenly retire from it and leave people disorientated. It was as if she periodically and deliberately sought to test the strength of the impact of her personality.

  ‘I asked,’ Susan said, turning back to Teddie, ‘whether we shall see the Nawab.’

  ‘I don’t know. He’s away at the moment but may be back at the weekend. Colonel and Mrs Hobhouse – that’s the Station Commander and his wife – say we ought to invite him to the reception, but that it’s not certain whether he’ll come.’

  ‘Why? Because the reception is to be at the club?’

  ‘No. He’s allowed in as a guest, you know. Because of Ramadan. I mean he’ll be fasting between sun-up and sundown.’

  ‘I’d like to have a Nawab at my wedding,’ Susan said, ‘especially one who used to be wicked. Besides, if we make a bit of a fuss of him he’ll have to send a wedding present and it might turn out to be a tray of super rubies or a fabulous emerald, or a few spare ropes of pearls.’

  Teddie smiled, and glanced affectionately down at her left hand, at the finger on which she wore his own modest cluster of engagement diamonds. She chose this moment to lean back in her chair, an indication that the others could again talk to each other.

  Breakfast came to the table at last.

  *

  There were twelve tables in the station restaurant. Sarah counted them. Ten were occupied. The floor was patterned by black and white tiles. The ceiling was high; three four-bladed fans, suspended from it, revolved at half speed. The windows on the platform side were frosted to shut out the sight of trains, travellers and coolies. On one wall there was a portrait of the King-Emperor, George VI, and on another a pre-war poster of invitation to Agra to admire the stale image of the Taj Mahal. The bearers were dressed in white and had cummerbunds of green and black, white gloves and bare feet. At one table two Indian officers, Sikhs, sat together. A nursing officer of the QAIMNS was breakfasting with a captain of Ordnance, an Anglo-Indian girl with a subaltern of the Service Corps. The rest of the customers were British officers. Some had arrived on the 07.50. Others would be waiting for a departure.

  And presumably (Sarah told herself) with the exception of the two Sikhs and the little Anglo-Indian girl, we all represent something. And looked at her own family, considering them for the moment as strangers to her, like the rest of the people eating English breakfasts in a flat and foreign landscape. There, she thought, watching Aunt Fenny, is a big-boned, well-fleshed woman. To look at her you’d say she has transplanted better than the thinner, sad-faced woman by her side, but her manner is a shade too self-assured, her voice a shade too loud, and when she stops speaking her mouth sets a shade too grimly, and the first impression that she has transplanted well is overridden by another, the impression that when she finds herself alone she will sit with a far-away look on her face, a look that would be gentle if it weren’t for the mouth. However quietly or gently she moves or sits the mouth will stay fixed and grim so that all her thoughts and recollections will enter the room and surround her not with happiness but with regrets and accusations. Which means that even then you would not be able to feel sorry for her. The thinner, sad-faced woman is her sister. They have the same nose and a manner towards each other of intimacy that is neither casual nor closely affectionate and betrays a long but not necessarily deep experience of each other. Their real intimacy was over long ago. It ended with childhood, and was quite likely an intimacy only one of them felt, most likely the sad thin one who uses her hands with a curious vagueness, as if certain gestures which are habit are no longer appropriate because the person they were habitually made to, to express contentment, affection, to establish contact, to claim loyalty, to offer it, is no longer close to her.

  Well, she was cheating. Sarah realized. No one looking at her mother could know that about her from her gestures. Would they know the other thing? Would they, by looking at her, be able to tell that the vagueness, the air of slight distraction, was proof – as Sarah knew it was – that Mrs Layton was already, at 8.30 in the morning, beginning to work out how long it would be before she could decently have a drink? You are still attractive, Sarah thought, and you are only forty-five. It is three years since you were with him. And India is full of men. So don’t think I don’t understand about the bottle in the wardrobe, the flask in your handbag.

  She turned to Teddie and Susan. For her, the lightly but firmly sketched portrait of compatibility and pre-marital pleasure in each other’s company which they presented in public, carried no conviction. In Teddie, Sarah was conscious of there seeming to be nothing behind his intentions – touchingly good on the surface – that gave them either depth or reality. I
n Susan she had become aware of a curious aptitude for deliberate performance. Susan was playing Susan and Sarah could no longer get near her. The distance between them had the feeling of permanence because the part of Susan called for a pretty, brown-haired, blue-eyed, flush-cheeked girl who entered, almost feverishly, into the fun and responsibilities of a life Sarah herself believed mirthless and irresponsible. It was mirthless because it was irresponsible, and irresponsible because its notion of responsibility was the notion of a vanished age. The trouble was, she thought, that in India, for them, there was no private life; not in the deepest sense; in spite of their attempts at one. There was only a public life. She looked again at the faces in the restaurant – ordinary private faces that seemed constantly to be aware of the need to express something remote, beyond their capacity to imagine – martyrdom in the cause of a power and a responsibility they had not sought individually but had collectively inherited, and the stiffness of a refusal to be intimidated; group expressions arising from group psychology. And yet they were the faces of people whose private consciousness of self was the principal source of their vitality.

  Once out of our natural environment (she thought) something in us dies. What? Our belief in ourselves as people who each have something special to contribute? What we shall leave behind is what we have done as a group and not what we could have done as individuals which means that it will be second-rate.

  She lit a cigarette and listened to Teddie and Aunt Fenny talking about Lord Wavell who was to be the new Viceroy and Lord Louis Mountbatten who was to be Supreme Commander of the new South-East Asia Command. Aunt Fenny was saying that it was a mistake to divest GHQ in India of its traditional military role. Teddie said Lord Wavell would make a good Viceroy because he was a soldier and people could trust him. New winds were blowing, but the dust they raised seemed to Sarah to be as stale as ever. Hot coffee was brought, the bearer sent with orders for morning papers: the Times of India for Mrs Layton, The Civil and Military Gazette for Aunt Fenny; nothing for Susan unless the new edition of The Onlooker was out; for Sarah the Statesman which Aunt Fenny disapproved of because although it was an English newspaper it was always criticizing Government or GHQ and was currently (she said) exaggerating the seriousness of the famine in Bengal, and blaming everybody for it except the Indian Merchants who had hoarded tons of rice and were waiting for the market price to rise to an even more astronomic figure. ‘Besides,’ she said, ‘the Bengalis won’t eat anything but rice. There are tons of wheat going begging but they’d rather die than change their damned diet.’