The Day of the Scorpion

  ‘Yes, that’s Ronald Merrick,’ she said. ‘Are you sure it’s the only one?’ She turned the pages of the album. It struck her as disturbingly significant of some kind of failing in all of them that he should have been missed out of the main wedding groups, that none of them had noticed his absence at the time, nor remarked it later when the proofs were chosen and the enlargements made. ‘Yes, I remember,’ she said, turning back to the one photograph in which he was represented. ‘Aunt Fenny couldn’t find your hat-box and he went to look for it and then immediately he’d gone there was the fuss about getting the pictures taken while the Nawab was still in the garden.’

  ‘I didn’t even know my hat-box was lost,’ Susan said, ‘but I suppose you’d call that typical.’

  ‘Perhaps he didn’t want his picture taken.’

  ‘Oh, everyone likes their picture taken.’

  ‘He may have thought of it being in The Onlooker and people recognizing him as the policeman in the Manners case.’

  Susan considered this. She smoothed the photograph with one finger as if feeling for an invisible pattern she thought must be there, in the grain of the paper. She said, suddenly, ‘Teddie was terribly upset. About that I mean. I don’t think he ever forgave him. But I must, musn’t I? I mean I must write and thank him for trying to help Teddie. It’s the right thing. Especially the right thing when he’s not what Aunt Fenny calls one of us.’ She smiled, as to herself, and continued smoothing the surface of the photograph. ‘I think I envy him. Not being one of us. Because I don’t know what we are, do you, Sarah?’ She closed the album abruptly. ‘The letter doesn’t say which hospital or how badly wounded he is, but if it’s a base hospital he must be pretty bad, mustn’t he? If I enclose a letter for him when I write to Colonel Selby-Smith it would get sent back to wherever he is, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, that would be best.’

  ‘I should write, shouldn’t I?’

  ‘It would be a kind thing to do.’

  ‘Oh, not kind. I don’t know kind. I don’t know anything. I’m relying on you to say.’ She was staring at the letter. ‘I need help. I need help from someone like you, who knows.’

  ‘Knows what?’

  ‘What’s right, and wrong.’

  ‘Help with the letter?’

  ‘Not just the letter. Everything.’ She folded the letter and gave it to Sarah. ‘Will you show it to Mother for me?’

  ‘I will, but it would be nice if you showed it.’

  ‘I know.’ She was upright on the edge of the bed smoothing the counterpane now. ‘But I’d rather not.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Mother didn’t like Teddie. She didn’t want me to marry him. She never said so, but it was obvious. She didn’t really want me to marry anyone until Daddy comes back. She wants everything to be in abeyance, doesn’t she? – because for her everything is. Everything – especially things about men and women. She didn’t talk to me, you know.’

  ‘Talk to you?’

  ‘She made Aunt Fenny do it. Or anyway Aunt Fenny volunteered and Mother let her. I don’t think that was right, do you?’

  After a moment Sarah said, ‘Was there anything you didn’t know?’

  ‘Oh, it isn’t that. It was that Mother let Aunt Fenny. It made me feel she didn’t care enough to make sure herself that I knew about the things I had to let Teddie do. She didn’t want any of it to happen, so for her it wasn’t happening. But at the time it just seemed to me to prove she didn’t care, that nobody cared really.’

  Sarah felt cold. Again she did not speak for a moment or two. Then she asked, ‘Is that how you thought about it? That making love was just something you had to let Teddie do?’

  Susan stopped the smoothing. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t think about it much. All that was on the other side.’

  ‘The other side? The other side of what?’

  Sarah saw that her sister’s cheeks had become flushed. She seemed, simultaneously, to become conscious of the warmth herself and brought her hands up and held them to her face. She no longer wore the engagement ring: only the plain gold band which had a thick old-fashioned look about it as if it might have been Teddie’s mother’s – the one relic of a life unhappily ended in Mandalay – although he had never said it was.

  ‘I seem to have lost the knack,’ Susan said.

  ‘The knack of what?’

  ‘Of hiding what I really feel. I’m out in the open. Like when you lift a stone and there’s something underneath running in circles.’

  ‘Oh, Susan.’

  But she felt the truth, the pity of it, and was afraid. The wan hand of a casual premonition had stroked her neck.

  Susan looked at her and, as if seeing the hand that Sarah only felt, at once covered her eyes and bowed her head. From under her palms her voice came muffled.

  ‘I used to feel like a drawing that anyone who wanted to could come along and rub out.’

  ‘That’s nonsense.’

  Susan uncovered her face and looked at Sarah, surveying – Sarah felt – her outline and density. She did not say: No one could ever rub you out. But such a judgement, held suddenly by Sarah of herself, briefly lit her sister’s expression – calm, unenvious – without quietening the hectic flush that had reappeared after days of absence.

  ‘No, it’s not nonsense.’ She looked down at her lap and her now folded hands. ‘I felt it even when we were children in Ranpur and here, up in Pankot. I think it must have been something to do with the way Mummy and Daddy, everyone, were always talking about home, when we go home, when you go home. I knew “home” was where people lived and I had this idea that in spirit I must be already there and that this explained why in Ranpur and Pankot I was just a drawing people could rub out. But when we got home it wasn’t any better. It was worse. I wasn’t there either. I wanted to tell someone but there was only you I could talk to and when I looked at you I felt you’d never understand because you didn’t look and never looked like someone people could rub out. Do you remember that awful summer? The summer they all came home and great-grandpa died? Well, I looked at them and felt no, they hadn’t come home, that they could be rubbed out too and that perhaps I fitted in at last. So I longed to come out again, longed and longed for it. When we did come out we weren’t kids any more. I wasn’t frightened of India as I was as a kid. But everyone seemed real again and I knew I still didn’t fit in because there wasn’t anything to me, except my name and what I look like. It’s all I had, it’s all I have, and it amounts to nothing. But I knew I had to make do with it and I tried, I did try to make it amount to something.’

  ‘I never knew you were frightened.’

  ‘Oh yes. I think I was very frightened. I don’t know why exactly. But I was always trying to get to the other side, the side where you and everyone else were, and weren’t frightened. It was a sort of wall. Like the one there.’ She nodded towards the closed window where Panther had tried to get in and Sarah glanced in that direction, saw that the wall she meant was the one at the end of the patch of garden that hid the servants’ quarters. ‘Was there a wall like that in the garden at Kabul road?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Dividing the servants from us?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I know I was frightened of the servants. No one else seemed to be. I suppose that was part of it. On the other side of the wall it was very frightening but only frightening to me and I expect I was ashamed and had this idea that if only I could get over I’d be like everyone else.’

  ‘Is that what you wanted? To be like everyone else?’

  ‘Oh, I think so. We do as children. I think that’s what I wanted. Of course when we came out again I wasn’t frightened any more, I thought of it more as wanting to make a life for myself that would add up just like everyone else’s life seemed to add up. I mean everyone seemed so sure, so awfully sure, and I wasn’t. I wasn’t sure at all. I thought, if only I could make a life for myself, a life like theirs, a life everyone would recognize as a life, the
n no one could come along and rub me out, no one would try. Marrying Teddy was part of it, the best part, even though I didn’t really love him.’

  ‘I wondered,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Everybody wondered, didn’t they? Well, that’s the answer. I didn’t. I thought I was in love a score of times, but knew I wasn’t really, not inside where it’s supposed to matter, and that frightened me too. It proved there wasn’t anything inside, but I didn’t want to go on being alone. I can remember it as clear as clear, the day I thought, why wait? Why wait for something that’s never going to happen? I’m not equipped. Something’s been left out. And I was always good at hiding what I felt, so I thought well, I’ll get away with it and nobody will ever know. Whoever I marry will never know. And there was poor Teddie. He walked straight into it, didn’t he? I married him because I quite liked him and I thought there probably wasn’t much to him either. But I think there was. Yes, I think there was. He almost made me feel there might be something to me, in time. But he had a rotten honeymoon. Rotten.’

  She turned, looked straight at Sarah and said:

  ‘Not because I was scared or because he didn’t try to make things different, but because I’d nothing to give him. That’s why he was so pleased when I wrote and told him about the baby. He’d married a girl with nothing to her, but she’d given him something to make up for it. And having it to give him could have made me something, couldn’t it? Who do I give the baby to now, Sarah? There isn’t anybody. And I’ve nothing for it, except myself. And it’s odd, awfully odd, but now when I think about what any of us could give it I can’t see the answer.’

  She hesitated, but held herself very still, and for a few seconds a half-formed picture came to trouble Sarah of Susan as a child holding herself like that, with the gritty surface of a faded red brick wall dark behind the halo of light on her hair; but the picture would not come more vividly or significantly to life and she could not say whether it was an Indian or an English memory.

  ‘No,’ Susan repeated. ‘I try and try but I can’t see the answer. I suppose the trouble is that people like us were finished years ago, and we know it, but pretend not to and go on as if we thought we still mattered.’ Again she hesitated, then, looking full at Sarah again, asked, ‘Why are we finished, Sarah? Why don’t we matter?’

  Because, Sarah thought, silently replying, we don’t really believe in it any more. Not really believe. Not in the way I expect grandfather Layton believed – grandfather and those Muirs and Laytons at rest, at peace, fulfilled, sleeping under the hummocky graves, bone of India’s bone; and our not believing seems like a betrayal of them, so we can’t any longer look each other in the eye and feel good, feel that even the good things some of us might do have anything to them that will be worth remembering. So we hate each other, but daren’t speak about it, and hate whatever lies nearest to hand, the country, the people in it, our own changing history that we are part of.

  But she could not say this to Susan. Instead she asked, ‘Why do you say we? We may be finished or not matter, or whatever it is. But you matter. I matter.’ She wished she could believe it with the simple directness with which she said it. ‘There’s too much of it. Too much “we”. Us. One of us. Oh I agree – one of us, I don’t know what we are any longer, either. Stop thinking like that. You’re a person, not a crowd.’

  Again Susan studied her, calmly, but not – Sarah decided – unenviously, although the degree of heat generated by envy was slight, and said, ‘How self-assured you are,’ in a tone that reminded her – as a blow might remind – of that afternoon on the houseboat in Srinagar when she had looked at that old woman and heard herself say, ‘What a lot you know.’ What a lot you know. How self-assured you are. But I am not, not, not. Had she not been, that old fragile poised little lady, one of whose hands (she suddenly recalled) rested casually with faded Edwardian elegance on the little pearl buttons of a cream pleated blouse? Well, no, perhaps she had known nothing either, and been certain of nothing except that the years of belief were over and those of disbelief begun.

  Sarah shook her head.

  ‘I’m not self-assured at all. But I do know this – the baby matters too.’ She meant, but did not say, that Susan had a duty to it. She did not want to use the word. There had been, still was, altogether too much talk of duty, almost none of love.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Susan said. ‘Everything must be done that can be. And if there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. Mother said that if you do it, Aunty Mabel will agree.’

  ‘If I do what?’

  ‘Ask her. About the christening clothes.’

  ‘What do I have to ask about the christening clothes?’

  ‘Whether she’ll lend them.’

  ‘What christening clothes are those?’

  ‘Yours. Mine got lost or something. But she still has yours. Barbie told me. She saw them in one of Aunty Mabel’s presses when Aziz was doing it out.’

  ‘How did Barbie know they were mine?’

  ‘She asked Aunty Mabel. And that’s what Aunty Mabel said. And Mother told me she remembered Aunty Mabel was given your christening gown because it was made up mostly of lace that had belonged to Aunty Mabel’s first husband’s mother, and of course Aunty Mabel never had any children so the lace wasn’t used and she wanted it to be used for you.’ Susan paused. ‘I thought perhaps you knew. Hasn’t Aunty Mabel ever taken it out and shown you and said, “Look, this is what you were christened in?”’

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘I thought perhaps it might have been a secret you had with her.’

  ‘I never knew Aunty Mabel and I had any secrets. Wasn’t the gown used for you too?’

  ‘No. I had something modern, so Mummy said. And it got lost, or didn’t last. Not like the lace. I’d like it if the baby could wear the gown you were christened in.’

  ‘I’ll ask Aunty Mabel. But it might be old and a bit smelly.’

  ‘No. Barbie said it was beautiful. And that Aunty Mabel must have taken special care of it. There’s something else I have to ask. I mean about the christening. Will you be godmother? Mother says Aunt Fenny will expect to be asked, but I don’t want that.’

  ‘I shouldn’t make a very good one.’ Sarah hesitated. ‘I don’t believe in it.’

  To say this she had averted her eyes and in her mind was an image of Aunty Mabel kneeling by a press (as she had never seen her kneel) and holding (as she had never seen her hold) the mysterious gown, inspecting it for signs of age and wear as though it were a relic the god in whom Sarah did not believe had charged her to preserve against the revival of an almost forgotten rite. And glancing back at Susan she thought she saw the convulsive flicker of an ancient terror on the plumped-out but still pretty face.

  ‘I know. But if anything happened to me you’d look after the baby, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Nothing’s going to happen to you.’

  ‘But if it did.’

  ‘Well, there are plenty of good orphanages.’

  ‘Oh, Sarah – not even as a joke.’

  ‘Then don’t ask silly questions. Of course the baby would be looked after.’

  ‘That’s not what I’m saying, not what I’m asking. Looked after, looked after. I’m asking if you’d look after it, not just to say it would be looked after.’

  ‘Something might happen to me too.’

  It was unkind, she thought, the effect that embarrassment had. Of course she would look after the baby.

  Susan turned her head, seemed to stare at Teddie’s picture. She said, ‘Yes, something might happen to you. It will. You’ll get married. You’d want your own children. Not mine and Teddie’s.’

  ‘You’ll get married too.’

  ‘Oh no. Not just to give the child a father. Not again, like that, without really loving. And how can I learn that?’

  ‘You’ll love the baby.’

  ‘Shall I?’ Susan faced her again.

  ‘When you’ve got the baby it will be all right, and after a w
hile someone like Dicky Beauvais will ask you to marry him.’

  ‘Not someone like Dicky Beauvais.’

  She made it sound as if one phase of her life had ended.

  ‘No, all right. But someone.’

  ‘I shouldn’t want to be taken pity on and that’s what it would be I expect. Poor Teddie Bingham’s widow, a child herself really, how will she manage?’ Again she glanced at her dead husband’s portrait, searching perhaps for something in his hallowed face that showed not pity but compassion for those he had, without meaning to, left behind to manage as they might.

  ‘I think,’ she said, ‘that after all it would be better if you wrote to Captain Merrick for me. You could thank him so much more kindly, make him understand how much the Laytons are beholden to him for what he tried to do for Teddie. Whatever it was. Whatever it was.’ She frowned, getting it seemed no clearer picture from the picture of Teddie of the unwanted gift he had made her of his death; and Sarah – catching the frown, considering the tone and rhythm of that repeated qualification, whatever it was – became aware of an element of doubt about the death that had entered for both of them.

  ‘Well if you prefer it,’ she said and then wondered: But what shall I say? and felt a little surge of resistance to the idea of saying anything, as though the act of writing would count as a surrender, proof that in the end he had succeeded in making her approach him – as herself, for herself, and as a Layton, for the Laytons.