The Day of the Scorpion

  ‘Can you manage, my dear?’

  Mrs Roper’s head scarcely came to the level of the bunk. The fans whisked the stray ends of her grey hair which was set in a way that suggested Mrs Roper remembered she was pretty as a girl. Mrs Roper’s husband had been a Forestry Officer in Burma. He sent her back to India in 1941 and as she hadn’t heard a word since the Japanese invasion she believed he was hiding out with one of the hill-tribes who had been their friends. Mrs Perryman’s hair was brassy-blonde. Her husband had been in the medical service and died of cholera in 1939. She took in paying-guests, one of whom was Mrs Roper. They had been staying with Mrs Roper’s brother’s family on leave at Ootacamund and were on their way back to Simla, having returned by way of Calcutta to visit a friend of Mrs Perryman’s whose husband was in jute. It was their first holiday since the beginning of the war, and they had saved for it, presumably. But they had not mentioned money.

  Sarah knew all these things about them because they had talked incessantly from midday when the train left Howrah station until an hour after lunch. They had talked for kindly reasons because Uncle Arthur had taken them on one side to thank them for letting her share the coupé and to ask them to look after her because her great-Aunt, of whom she had been very fond, had died suddenly in Pankot and the shock had sent her sister into premature labour. She swung round on the bunk and was held by a reaction in her bloodstream, unexpected but familiar. Sound and sight became miniature, far away. From behind brass screens she heard Mrs Roper say, ‘Now don’t rush. I just thought you’d want plenty of time because we only stay in Ranpur ten minutes.’

  With her foot she felt for the top of the nest of steps, far down in the distorted well of the coupé, and finding them, made the descent.

  ‘You’ve had a nice long sleep. We nodded off too. Now don’t bother about us. Is there anything we can do?’

  ‘No thank you, Mrs Roper. I’m fine.’

  ‘Leave the bunk. Directly we’ve had dinner Mrs Perryman and I are going to tuck down.’

  In the cubicle she bathed her face in slow-running tepid water. There were specks of soot. The train was going over points, intersection after intersection. She steadied herself on the handgrip and confronted her mirror image. Did it show? Could anyone tell? That she had entered, like other women? Yes; to her it showed; vividly; more vividly than her anxiety for Susan, more strongly than the grief cushioned by disbelief that she felt for Aunty Mabel who walked in and out of her mind, condemned by a memory to go on performing the task to which so many hours of her last days had been stubbornly devoted; more strongly than the concern for her mother who had been alone to cope and for her father for whom Aunty Mabel was now an irretrievable part of a time she had been unable to hold back for him. She did not know why she should have wanted to hold it back. She did not even know she had tried to until she saw that it had gone. She had failed but she had entered. She had entered her body’s grace.

  Mrs Roper personally selected the coolie to carry Sarah’s single suitcase. Thirty years of experience had given her an eye, she said; an eye for the kind of coolie an unaccompanied white girl could rely on not to intimidate her into paying him more than he deserved, and to make sure, in such a case as this, that the transfer from one train to another was smoothly accomplished.

  ‘Shouldn’t we find an escort for you?’ Mrs Perryman asked. ‘There must be at least one young officer on the platform we could whistle up.’

  But Sarah was already at the open door of the carriage and there were nearly two hours to go before the train for Pankot left Ranpur. ‘I’ll go to the restaurant and then to the waiting-room if necessary. I’ll be perfectly all right. Thank you for all your kindness.’ She shook hands with them and stepped down. The platform was crowded. She saw bearers threading their way through with loaded trays, and called up to Mrs Roper that their meals were coming. Then she waved and followed the elderly coolie who had her suitcase on his head. Her childhood delight in travelling at night was still a potent force. She had always loved the noise, the risk, of railway stations. The journey to Calcutta was the first she had ever made alone. The case, hovering at eye level – and as bodies interposed themselves between her and its bearer looking as if it moved of its own accord without support – was a symbol of childhood’s end. It struck her how curious an object a suitcase was. To it you consigned those few essential portable things that bore the invisible marks of your private possession of them; but the case itself was destined to live most of its useful life under the public gaze and in the hands of strangers.

  At the door of the station restaurant the coolie halted. The turbanned head, which earned him an anna for all that it could carry at any one time, was set in a rigid thrust-up position that gave his eyes, under wrinkled, hooded lids, a preoccupied, anxious look. She changed her mind about going to the restaurant first. The Pankot train would be waiting at its special platform. She could look for her reservation and, if she were lucky, get the compartment opened and have a tray sent in. She gave the coolie instructions and once more followed him, to the end of the main platform, to the point where two subsidiary tracks came in to a bay, to sets of buffers, with a platform separating them. On one track there were three lit coaches, one of them painted blue and white, colours she had never seen before, and on the other the Pankot train, which she recognized because of the coaches: old-fashioned, squarer-cut, and with decorative flourishes in the woodwork. There were a few people on the platform, among them two Indian police, and a station official with a white topee. The Pankot train was in darkness. Some way along the platform under a lamp, a group of private soldiers were playing cards. Men off leave or on posting; perhaps both kinds. Tomorrow night they would be playing cards or writing home at the regimental institute and perhaps Mrs Fosdick or Mrs Paynton would be among the women who manned the tea-urns. She felt the first lick of a wave of nostalgia for the Pankot hills, but fought it down because upon its ripples grief could ride in. She spoke to the Indian in the white topee. No, the train was not ready yet. No, he did not have the key to unlock the compartments. But he went with her, looking with a torch for that strange advertisement of her name, noted and written on a piece of card by someone she would never see and placed in its metal bracket on the side of the carriage by someone she might see but never know.

  Closer to the group of card-players this other card was found. A coupé. The discovery gave her childish pleasure, as did the fact that there was no name on the card but her own. Miss Layton. She would sleep undisturbed. She turned to the patient coolie and used the old old words of command. Idhar thairo. Idhar thairo. Stay here. Stay here. Dutifully he lowered the case and then squatted beside it as though it were a child he had carried far, out of some ancient servitude which he himself still had the habit of but hoped not to entrust with the other burden of the genes; and would not, for the genes of the case were hers, not his.

  ‘What’s the blue and white carriage?’ she asked the man in the white topee.

  ‘Oh, that is private. It belongs to a maharajah.’

  ‘Which maharajah?’

  ‘I do not know. There are so many.’

  She thanked him for finding her compartment and walked back towards the restaurant, anticipating light and noise. This platform was sour and gloomy. Clark’s words came back to her. ‘A tomb-attendant?’ Ahead of her a man was getting out of the blue and white carriage, a man in a white suit and panama hat. He had a stick and took the descent carefully. She noticed him because he might be the maharajah but quickly realized he could not be. The lamp on the platform revealed the fact that he was a European. He took out a cigarette case. He had got out of the carriage to smoke. Perhaps the maharajah was inside and did not like him smoking. He glanced at her, but concerned himself again with his cigarette, as if quite uninterested in her presence. He was oblivious of the fact that she had entered. Had entered. To him, perhaps, all women were assumed to have entered. Into their bodies’ grace.

  But beyond him she hesitated and tur
ned. Her action caused him to look in her direction, with his one available eye. The other was the blind buffed eye of a nocturnal animal. She retraced her steps.

  ‘Count Bronowsky?’

  Already he had lifted his hat, but it was clear to her he did not recognize her, and for a moment she was afraid she had spoken to a man who looked like Bronowsky but was not. He said, ‘Yes, I am Count Bronowsky.’

  ‘I’m Sarah Layton. We stayed at the guest house last October when my sister was married.’

  ‘Miss Layton? Well, forgive me. Why didn’t I recognize you? But I know. It’s the uniform. I see indeed it is you.’ He held out his hand and, when she gave him hers, carried it with an old man’s courtesy to his lips and held on to it. His accent, which she did not remember having remarked in Mirat struck her as comic, exaggerated. She had a sense of charade which probably emanated from him because she had had it on the morning of the wedding when he joined the group on the lawn of the Mirat Gymkhana club; a sense of charade, of puppet-show; of dolls manipulated to a point just short of climax.

  ‘Nawab Sahib and I were so very distressed to hear of Captain Bingham’s death,’ he said. How clever still to remember Teddie’s name; but then the old wazir could count a memory for names among his many – obviously many – talents. He had remembered Merrick’s too.

  ‘It was kind of you to write. Have you been staying in Ranpur?’ She assumed that like herself he was on the point of departure.

  ‘No, not staying.’ He let her hand go. ‘Have you?’

  ‘I’m only changing trains. I’ve just got in from Calcutta.’

  ‘That train is going to Pankot?’

  ‘It is at midnight. I came along to make sure my booking was fixed. Now I’m going to have some supper.’

  ‘In the restaurant?’

  ‘Yes. It’s still open.’

  ‘And are you alone?’ She nodded. ‘My dear Miss Layton, I cannot allow it. We can do better for you than that. In the restaurant you will wait for twenty minutes for something badly cooked, I’m quite sure of it. And then you will not sleep a wink, and what dire consequences might ensue from entering such a place unaccompanied I do not know.’ He took her arm, holding hat and stick and unlit cigarette in his other hand, and began to guide her to the steps of the Nawab’s coach.

  ‘But—’

  ‘But I am inviting you. On behalf of Nawab Sahib, who is not here by the way. I invite you into more compatible surroundings. Besides, apart from my own pleasure there is that of a handsome young Englishman who is already bored by my company but too well bred to show it. Only his sense of duty persuades him to sit and listen to me as if every word I speak is of importance to him. And Ahmed will be here presently. You remember Ahmed? You rode horses together. Do you like champagne? Of course you like champagne. With perhaps some caviar. And some cold game pie. Or smoked ham with melon. When Nawib Sahib is not in the coach it is possible for me to indulge a taste for smoked ham. The champagne is from my personal pre-war stock. I have been eking it out this past year but the Allied invasion of France encourages me to hope for fresh consignments before too long. You know the story of the true princess?’

  ‘The one who needed twelve mattresses?’

  ‘That is she. But even through twelve mattresses she felt the discomfort of one little pea from the pod. How can I let you suffer the discomfort of entering a public restaurant?’

  ‘Well, I’m used to it. But thank you.’

  The way in was like the entrance to a Pullman coach, but a thickness of carpet at once pointed a private superiority. The door that led into the main interior was closed and she waited until Bronowsky had negotiated the steps and joined her. His lameness, like his accent, was new to her. Perhaps it was only noticeable when he had something more agile to perform than walking. He opened the door on to a saloon of red and gold – a travelling throne-room such as she imagined the last Tsar Nicholas would have felt at home in. There were tables lit by crimson-shaded lamps, gilt chairs with crimson backs and seats, footstools, and salon sofas. At the far end an open doorway, hung with looped velvet curtains, gave a view of a dining-table set with a snowy white cloth and decked for a buffet.

  As they went in the man Count Bronowsky had forewarned her of looked up from the document he was reading. Her arrival obviously surprised him and to get up he had first to secure the document to the briefcase on which he had been resting it, and uncross his legs. An army officer, he was wearing best KD.

  ‘Allow me to introduce Captain Rowan,’ Bronowsky said. This is Miss Layton whom I have just rescued from going alone to the restaurant. Nawab Sahib and I had the pleasure of her company at the Palace guest house last year on the occasion of her sister’s marriage.’

  Rowan nodded. Sarah thought she would not describe him as handsome. Her main impression of him was of a man, perhaps a little younger than Clark, who would be extremely difficult to get to know. There was something in the careful way in which he had overcome his surprise, temporarily withdrawn his interest from the document, and risen, still in possession of it and of the briefcase, that suggested a controlled expenditure of energy, a distrust of any kind of instant reaction, a firm belief in the importance of keeping reserves of whatever particular capacities he had. She judged that probably they were considerable.

  A steward appeared in the doorway of the dining saloon. ‘First,’ Bronowsky said, ‘champagne. We were going to wait for Ahmed, but only as a puritanical exercise in self-discipline. With champagne there should always be a sense of occasion, which you have kindly supplied. Come, sit. Do you smoke?’ He offered her a silver box of pink cigarettes with gold tips. When they were settled he went on: ‘I myself smoke only in the evenings, and then I’m afraid I smoke too many, but these are mild. My introduction to smoking was of a most unusual nature in that I was chastised by my father not for smoking but for showing an aversion for tobacco which he thought unmanly. All through one summer, when we were in the country, and I but sixteen, I was made to sit opposite him in his study at ten o’clock each morning and smoke a cigar under threat of a beating from my English tutor should I but turn a paler shade of pale. The fact that my tutor would not have hurt a fly and that I knew the threat no more than a threat, mere bombast, on the part of a man for whose moral cowardice I had the greatest contempt, did not diminish my valiant struggles to disguise my nausea. It became, you understand, a point of honour to smoke the disgusting thing to the bitter end and retire – apparently in good order. But my repugnance for cigar-tobacco has never left me. That winter, in St Petersburg, I took a perverse fancy for the gold-tipped cigarettes smoked by the lady who frequently visited us. I should perhaps explain that my mother died when I was ten. I would steal one of these cigarettes from this lady’s handbag whenever I had the opportunity. She kept them in a tortoiseshell case. I remember the case quite clearly, the smooth feel of it in my fingers. And having stolen one I would smoke it after I had gone to bed delighting in the fact that I had stolen it from her and that, unwomanly as smoking was considered at that time, these particular cigarettes looked revoltingly effeminate. Hence my life-long habit – gold-tipped cigarettes, preferably pink, and after sunset. In such small ways we preserve the memories of our youth and remain to that extent forever young. What memories, Miss Layton – or I should say, what habits that will become memories do you think you will still celebrate when you are my age?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I’m sure there are some.’

  ‘With girls perhaps it is different. They grow up and marry and have children of their own and everything from their own childhood is put by. Perhaps this is sad because much later what was put by as done with and forgotten may come back to plague them with an intense nostalgia. Their children grow up and go away and all the years a woman devotes to them are as if they have never been. Women are more courageous than men though. Perhaps they accept that their life’s work, I mean in the biological sense, is very quickly over. But a man and his career, that is different. His career i
s the whole of his life. He can afford to introduce notes of absurdity. Perhaps he needs to. His body undergoes no biological change, his life is not divided in that way, nothing physically dramatic happens to him. He never carries his own creature inside him, the poor man has to make do with the one he was born as. Perhaps this explains why he cherishes the memory of its different stages of growth and hangs on to them, in the hope of seeing something whole.’

  The champagne cork popped. They were all three silent witnesses of the ritual of pouring. The steward wore white gloves. He handed the glasses on a silver tray. Bronowsky said, ‘Captain Rowan, I had not intended tonight to introduce a personal note, but there was a private reason for the champagne and Miss Layton’s gift of her company prompts me to share my secret with you both. Today is my seventieth birthday, and I have a toast.’ He grinned. ‘As an Englishman you will probably appreciate it more than Nawab Sahib would – who touchingly remembered the day and sent me a telegram this morning from Nanoora.’ He raised his glass. ‘“It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk, Though my own red roses there may blow; It is little I repair to the matches of the Southern folk, Though the red roses crest the caps, I know. For the field is full of shades as I near the shadowy coast, And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost, And I look through my tears on a soundless clapping host, As the run-stealers flicker to and fro, To and fro; O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!”’

  He raised his glass still higher, then lowered it and drank; and, when they followed suit (both – Sarah thought – rather put off their strokes by the unexpectedness of the occasion and the obscure, indeed incongruous, connection between the words and the man who spoke them) Bronowsky went on: ‘The poem was explained to me by the charming boy from whom I learnt it in 1919, but I fear my own private interpretation is the one that remains with me. He was just eighteen and his parents had sent him from England to stay with a French family who were holidaying on the Italian Riviera. He learned, or was supposed to learn, French conversation from them. I, a poor Russian émigré, was hired to teach him the language’s grammar and syntactical complexities, not I fear successfully because he fell madly in love with the Spanish maid of a neighbouring family. His other interest, his only other interest, was cricket. He came to me one day and said, Monsieur Bronowsky, please teach me a French poem. Well, I knew why. I had seen them together, holding hands and staring into each other’s eyes, quite dumb, because the girl really only spoke her own language and what little French they might have exchanged quite deserted him the moment he was in her adorable presence. “But if she speaks only Spanish,” I said to him, “what purpose will a French poem serve? Why not recite to her in English?” He said he’d thought of that but he only knew one poem, which happened not to be suitable. I begged him to let me be the judge of that and made him recite it. I was extraordinarily moved and told him to repeat it to her in just the same manner, but perhaps a little slower and with slightly more expression. I also got him to write it down for me.’