The Day of the Scorpion

  ‘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 b
een 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?’

  Sarah shook her head.

  ‘The affection he has for his task, its end, its means and everyone who’s involved with him in it. Most professional soldiers are amateurs. They love their men, their equipment, their regiments. In a special way they love their enemies too. It’s common to most walks of life, isn’t it? To fall in love with the means as well as the end of an occupation?’

  ‘You think that’s wrong?’

  ‘Yes, I think it is. It’s a confusion. It dilutes the purity of an act. It blinds you to the truth of a situation. It hedges everything about with a mystique. One should not be confused in this way.’

  ‘Are you never confused, Ronald?’

  ‘I am – frequently confused. But I do try to act, unemotionally. I do try for a certain professional detachment.’

  ‘It’s funny,’ she said, ‘I should have said you were actually quite an emotional person. Underneath. And that it sometimes runs you into trouble.’

  He was watching her, but she detected nothing in his expression except – and this so suddenly that she felt she had observed it the moment that it fell on him – a curious serenity. ‘Well, of course, you’re right,’ he said. ‘I’ve certainly run into trouble in my time. It’s one thing to try to act unemotionally and quite another thing to do so. No act is performed without a decision being made to perform it. I suppose emotion goes into a decision, especially into a major decision. My decision to get out of the police and into the army was an emotional one, wasn’t it? Just like the one I made as a boy, to try to get into the Indian Police. But I don’t think I was ever an amateur, either as a copper or a soldier. I had no affection for the job, in either case. But I did the job. I tried not to be confused. That was the difference between Teddie and me – the real difference, not the one that had to do with the fact that Teddie was a Muzzy Guide and I was, well, what I am – a boy from an elementary school who won a scholarship to a better one and found it difficult later not to be a bit ashamed of his parents, and very much ashamed of his grandparents. But any difference that Teddie saw in our attitudes, he’d always put down to the fact that I wasn’t the same class. You can’t disguise it, can you? It comes out in subtle ways, even when you’ve learned the things to say and how to say them. It comes out in not knowing the places or the people your kind of people know, it comes out in the lack of points of common contact. People like me carry around with them the vacuum of their own anonymous history, and there comes a moment when a fellow like Teddie looks at us and honestly believes we lack a vital gift as well, some sort of sense of inborn decency that’s not our fault but makes us not quite trustworthy. I’m sorry. I’m not speaking ill of him. That’s what he thought. And that’s why he was killed. I’m only trying to make it clear, make this background clear. He was killed trying to show me how a thing should be done, because he didn’t trust me to do it right. Well, it was his own fault – but remove me from the situation and it wouldn’t have happened.’

  ‘What situation?’

  He closed his eyes and turned his head away. ‘What situation? It was a simpler one than – another I remember. It began with a fellow called Mohammed Baksh. A Jiff. He was captured by a patrol from one of the companies of the British battalion of the Brigade that was probing forward on our right flank. Overnight things had become terribly confused and by morning the British battalion had found itself out on a limb. The advance of the Indian battalion on their left had been held up and it looked as if the British battalion might get cut off or have its flank turned. They were astride a road in hill country and we hadn’t got a clear picture of the enemy’s strength, or of where the major enemy attack was likely to come from. And this particular Brigadier was suffering from a bout of jitters, he was jumpy about losing his British battalion and wanted to pull them back, but the General had other ideas, of pushing another battalion forward astride the road and deploying both battalions to encircle whatever enemy units there were in the immediate vicinity. But he didn’t want to issue the order without personal contact with the Brigadier. He decided to visit the Brigade and get things moving from there, unless he judged the Brigadier’s on-the-spot appreciation had something to be said for it, or he thought him incapable of pressing forward immediately with the right sort of enthusiasm. He took Teddie with him. And at the last moment he turned to me and told me to go with them to make sure the Brigade Intelligence Officer had a complete picture of what we knew, and to assess on the spot anything he might be able to add that would be new to us.’ A pause. ‘We went in two jeeps. There were three in the General’s. The General, Teddie, and the Indian driver, two in mine, myself and my driver. Teddie drove the other jeep. He loved driving. A jeep particularly. And the driver liked sitting perched at the back, with a Sten gun. It was a lovely morning. Bright and crisp. During the day of course it got very hot. Have you ever been in Manipur?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘On the plain itself, around Imphal, it’s like northern India up in the North-west Frontier, around Abbotabad; much the same view of hills and mountains. We were south of there, in the foothills. The road was pretty rough. Steep wooded banks one side, pretty long wooded drops the other – well, for much of its course. You flattened out every so often, when you went through a village. We reached the Brigade headquarters round about eight-thirty a.m. I wasn’t in on the talk that went on between the Brigadier and General. I was with the Brigade Intelligence Officer and he’d just had the IO of the British battalion on the wireless, reporting that patrols had picked up this fellow Mohammed Baksh of the Jiffs. So far he hadn’t given any information. They said he looked half-starved and had probably deserted several days before. I wasn’t so sure. The picture I had was that most of the Jiffs looked pretty exhausted. They didn’t have the stamina of the Japanese. The whole force had crossed the Chindwin and come through hill jungle. The Japanese are old hands at that. Advance first and worry about your lines of communications and supplies afterwards. That’s their technique.
It worked in Burma and Malaya, but it didn’t work this time because we were ready for it. That’s why the General wanted to push the other battalion forward. He guessed the Indian battalion on the left of the British was misinterpreting the strength of the opposition they’d met in the night. I realized it was important to know more about this Jiff fellow. If all that stood in the way of the British battalion was a Jiff formation, then the General could perform his containing operation easily.’

  ‘Didn’t the British battalion know what was in front of them?’

  ‘No, they’d reached their objective, and the only reason for the pause was their discovery that their left flank was unprotected, because the Indian battalion hadn’t kept pace. The Indians were stuck about two miles back, apparently contained by a Japanese force of at least battalion strength. But the General thought that if the Indian battalion was pinned down by the Japanese, so were the Japanese by the Indians, a sort of tactical stalemate, and since the British battalion was astride the road the initiative was still very much with the Brigade. The British battalion had sent patrols forward, of course, but found nothing except this stray Jiff and their patrols reported no apparent threat to their flank or rear. Down there, you know, it isn’t country you can stand and get a view of. You have to probe it more or less yard by yard. But they had found the Jiff, and I wondered whether the fact that he hadn’t given any information was because he spoke no English and the IO of the British battalion spoke hardly any Urdu. I asked the Brigade IO what was happening about Baksh. He said he’d asked the battalion to send him back but the answer had been, Come and get him, we can’t spare either the transport or the men just to look after a Jiff.’

  He stopped, said, ‘I’m sorry. Would you help me drink from that contraption on the table?’

  She rose, went round by the bed for the teapot and held it for him.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Would you like to share another cigarette?’