IV
‘We’ve gone in,’ Uncle Arthur had said. ‘We landed in Normandy this morning and established a beachhead. Your mother will be bucked, won’t she? I’d lay odds on your father being home by Christmas. We thought we’d have a special drink to that.’
In the vestibule, watched by the sergeant and the orderly with pimples, he introduced her to the officer he had brought with him – one of the men, she imagined, who was to enjoy or suffer dinner with the course leader and his wife and whose evening was probably further disorientated by being asked to help collect the niece who had visited a patient in the military hospital.
‘This is Major Clark. For some reason utterly escapes me I think he’s sometimes known as Nobby. He was only a Captain a couple of months ago when he had to sit and suffer my interminable spouting. Decent of him to come back and visit us. My niece Sarah Layton. Be a good fellow and whistle the driver up.’
As Clark went out into the porticoed entrance she was aware of a broadness of back, a compactness of body, a physical wholeness. No burns, no bullets, no severance.
‘How was young what’s-his-name?’
‘All right. Considering.’
‘Good. Tell us all about it presently. I rang your aunt from the daftar. She said to see if I could pick you up. She’s wondering if she should ring your mother.’
‘Why should she do that?’
‘To make sure she’s heard.’
‘Heard what?’
‘The good news. But she’s bound to have. I say, are you all right?’
‘Yes, thank you.’ She smiled. Her face felt made of elastic.
‘It’s these places. The smell gets on your tummy. Come on, the gharry’s here.’
The gharry was Uncle Arthur’s staff car. Clark saw them into the back and sat himself next to the driver. As they turned into the road the rain fell. Lightning scarred the horizon.
‘When are you off then?’ Uncle Arthur inquired, raising his voice to be heard above the sluicing rain and the long, trundling, skittle-ball rolls of converging thunder. But it was Clark he’d spoken to.
‘First thing in the morning.’
Clark sat with one arm along the back of the seat, his back wedged in the corner of the seat and the door, so that he could talk and be talked to, see and be seen. Vaguely she registered the voice, the intonation, the air of ease, the appraisal she was under. She looked out of the window, scarcely listened to their conversation. They came out into Chowringhee, a place of lights and bicycles and trams. The window was misting up. The city lights hastened the approaching dark. With the edge of her palm she cleared a view for herself and felt like a child intent on observing, from a position of safety and comfort, an alien and dangerous magic.
‘Well, what d’you think of the second city of the Empire?’ Uncle Arthur asked. ‘It’s her first visit,’ he explained, not waiting for an answer, something she usually thought of as a failing in other people but as a virtue in him. His lack of curiosity had always made him easy to get on with. It was, she supposed, a wholly avuncular virtue, common to that species. She thought that in its unpossessive uninvolved affection there might be felt something of the granite-rock of always available love. Should she weep – and for a few seconds, alarmingly, she felt like doing so – he would be desperately embarrassed but inarticulately sound, a speechless comfort. ‘You should have been here a couple of months ago. Major Clark would have shown you the ins and outs. Wouldn’t you?’
‘Would I, sir?’
‘Well, dammit, Clark, you had a reputation. I doubt he ever got to bed before dawn. But no one would have guessed. Always looked as fresh as a daisy.’
She glanced at Uncle Arthur, realized he had already had a sundowner to celebrate that distant inaudible barrage of invasion, or had not quite recovered from a sumptuous lunch; and, catching Clark’s eye, saw his judgement or knowledge corresponded with her own. There was, on his rather ugly face, an opacity, a semi-revelation of vanity and of amusement at someone else’s expense which she did not understand and did not like. She thought of herself as pinned by its calculated directness. And looked back at the streaming window, burning with a ludicrous little sense of injustice that he should exist, unmarked, to pass silent comments on Uncle Arthur who seemed to find him engaging and anyway gave him lifts and invitations, good counsel and reports presumably; carried him into the circle of her safety that rested for the moment in the existence of Aunt Fenny in Calcutta; and there, in Pankot, dark, silent and undisturbed by rain or rumours of war and amputation – in Susan and her mother – and far, far away, beyond the streaming window, in the still centre of her father’s patience and yearning for release and a quiet passage through the night.
She had not recognized the road. The driver’s turn into the forecourt of the apartments was unexpected. She felt the curious flattening of inquiring spirit the traveller suffers from, knowing himself without occupation or investment in the fortunes of a strange city. Sandwiched between Uncle Arthur and Major Clark (who, she noted, smelt of some aromatic substance, an aggressive exudation of his naked body beneath the thin cellular cotton of his khaki bush-shirt) she thought of the lift as taking her from one level of non-experience to another. It came to her that like Ronald Merrick she did not travel well, and then that she was whole and, unlike Susan, unbeholden. I do not, she thought, no I do not, give a damn. The Furies were riding across an uninhabited sky, to their own and no one else’s destruction. The real world was a tame, repetitious place: one part of it, when you really looked, was much like another, a chemical accident, a mine of raw material for the creation of random artefacts to house and warm or satisfy the need for sensual pleasure or creature comfort. The lift was one such. It jerked to a stop.
‘No, a drink first and a bath second,’ she told Aunt Fenny who was abroad in the flat in housecoat, slippers and tidy chiffon turban, midway in her preparations for the evening: a revelation to Major Clark of intimate domestic detail which Sarah put down as a further sign that Aunt Fenny had entered the new age, in which old Flagstaff House values were shrewdly to be readjusted as an insurance against the extinction of those who had held them. Gimlet and cigarette in hand and for a moment alone, Sarah was conscious of belonging to a class engaged in small, continual acts whose purpose was survival through partial sharing in an evolution which, of all the family, only Aunt Lydia back in Bayswater had anticipated and closely witnessed the process of. It was a survival of exiles. Their enemy was light, not dark, the light of their own kind, of their own people at home from whom they had been too long cut off so that, returning there briefly, a deep and holy silence wrapped them and caused them to observe what was real as miniature. In India they had been betrayed by an illusion of topographical vastness into sins of pride that were foreign to their insular, pygmy natures. From the high window of this concrete monstrosity you could see the tragedy and the comic grandeur of tin-pot roofs, disguised at street level by those neo-classical facades which perversely illustrated the vanished age of reason. What reason? My history (Sarah thought, drinking her sweet gimlet, then drawing on her bitter cigarette), my history, rendered down to a colonnaded front, an architectural perfection of form and balance in the set and size of a window, and to a smoky resentment in my blood, a foolish contrivance for happiness in my heart against the evidence that tells me I never have been happy and can’t be while I live here. It’s time we were gone. Gone. Every last wise, stupid, cruel, fond or foolish one of us.
She turned from contemplation of the rooftops, aroused by the sounds of more of Uncle Arthur’s chaps arriving – among whom she sensed the presence of the next generation of her jailers. To avoid immediate confrontation she brushed past Major Clark who had been standing there as if about to speak and told Aunt Fenny – who was giving orders to the white-clad servant – that she’d finish her drink in the bath.
‘I’ll come in while you’re dressing. I want to hear everything,’ Fenny said. ‘I’ve only got to slip into something and I’m rea
dy. Have you anything pretty to wear? Iris Braithwaite from downstairs hopes to come, and perhaps Dora Pedley. They’re always got up to kill. But the little party’s for you, pet. Afterwards the boys will probably take you dancing or to the flicks, so do your best—’ this last in almost a whisper, on the threshold of Sarah’s room whose door she held open.
‘Well I can’t do more than my best, Aunt Fenny.’
‘My dear, I’d forgotten. You look done up. Was it bad?’
‘They’re cutting off his arm.’
‘Oh, no.’
The bath was already drawn. She rang the bell and, when he answered, gave her glass to the bearer and told him to bring it back refilled. She shivered in the bleak atmosphere of the air-conditioned room, gratefully entered the steam and humidity of the bathroom to undress in more familiar discomfort. Naked, she put on her shabby bathrobe and felt caressed, but stubborn in her refusal to succumb to a small passion for personal belongings. For a minute or so, back in the ice-box of the bedroom, she sat, smoked, combed out her hopeless hair and drank the second gimlet, smoothed cleansing cream on to her incorruptible Layton face. So uncomely was it (in her eyes) that a wave of pity for it released a succeeding wave of erotic desire to have it loved, it and all her body – untouched beneath the robe Barbie Batchelor had helped her choose the sensible material for. She went and lay in the bath, the tumbler on its edge, within reach, and wondered what else might be in reach.
No, I don’t, she repeated, I don’t give a damn. But knew she did. Even for Aziz Khan and Fariqua Khan for whose names she had already conjured faces, and – considering them now, their staring eyes and speechless open mouths (as if aghast at the injustice of no more than condign punishment) – she formulated questions: Why really did Teddie interfere? What made him so anxious to be present when Ronald Merrick tried to get information out of captured Indian soldiers? Had he witnessed an earlier interrogation? Or was it merely, as Merrick seemed to suggest, because he had grown not to trust him over anything? When the water had cooled below the point of comfort she got out, wrapped herself in one of Aunt Fenny’s new-age towels – which was as big as a tent, as soft as down, fit only for a woman in love – and dried herself quickly as if to avoid contamination; but remained swathed for a few moments longer before substituting the shabby robe that had strayed with her from shabby Pankot.
The air-conditioning enveloped her as she passed from bathroom to bedroom. She felt like a clinical specimen captured and cosseted for some kind of experiment which Aunt Fenny, who knocked and entered, had already undergone and emerged from triumphantly, qualified to conduct on others.
‘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. r />
‘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.