The Day of the Scorpion

  Layton was only momentarily disappointed that his first child was a girl. She was a delicate rosy-cheeked image of Mildred and himself with none of that red ancient wrinkled look of the new-born baby. All that lacked to complete his happiness was a home of his own to bring her and her mother back to when they came out of the Pankot Nursing Home. They stayed throughout that summer in Flagstaff House. He wrote to Mabel asking her to join them, but she seemed to have no liking for the hills now and stayed in Ranpur. She did not see her stepson’s first child until late in the following October, when the Laytons went down to Ranpur. They now had for the first time what could pass as a permanent home – permanent in the transient, military sense. The adjutant of the 1st Pankots had gone to the staff college in Quetta and Layton succeeded to the appointment. He moved his family into the bungalow that was to be their home for the next few years, No. 3 Kabul road, Ranpur: a stuccoed colonnaded structure, well shaded by trees in a large compound with adequate stabling and servants’ quarters, and a lawn where Sarah and Susan (born in Pankot, in 1922) played – mainly under the eye of Dost Mohammed the head mali who knew the ways of snakes and scorpions so well that neither child ever saw a live snake and only one living scorpion in the moment when, encircled by a ring of fire created by Dost Mohammed, it arched its tail over its body and (so he said) stung itself to death.

  *

  Sarah remembered the scorpion (she watched what Dost Mohammed called its suicide with the detached curiosity of a child) and the garden at No. 3 Kabul road – the shadowy veranda, a dark retreat from the intensity of sunlight; the high-ceilinged bedroom which she shared with Susan, twin child-size beds under twin mosquito nets, and slatted doors which Mumtez, their old ayah, closed at night and guarded, making her bed up against them, sleeping across the threshold. Sarah remembered being woken in the early mornings by the hoarse screeching of the crows. She confused these memories of the old bungalow in Ranpur with other more clearly sustained memories of Pankot; but neither Ranpur nor Pankot struck her when she came back to them, a young woman, as having survived the years of her growing up in England in the way she herself survived them: to her eighteen-year-old eye, in the summer of 1939, their reality was only a marginally accurate reflection of the mind picture she had of them. There was too much space between the particular places she remembered – places which were strongholds of her childhood recollections – and the strongholds themselves had a prosaicness of brick and mortar that did not match the magical, misty but more vivid impression they had left on her when young, so that returning to them, Pankot and Ranpur – Ranpur particularly – seemed to have spread themselves too thin and yet too thick on the ground for comfort.

  The sensation she had was one of insecurity which from day to day, and from moment to moment in any one day, could be cushioned by a notion of personal and family history. India to her was at once alien and familiar. The language came back slowly to her, in stops and starts. She was surprised by what she remembered of it, puzzled by what she seemed to have forgotten, but realized then that what she had ever learned of it was the shorthand of juvenile command and not the language of adult communication.

  And yet (Sarah thought) over here in an odd and curious way we are children. I am aware, coming back, of entering a region of almost childish presumptions – as if everything we are surrounded by is the background for a game. But Susan and I are somehow left out of the game, as if even now we are not old enough to be depended upon to know the rules and act accordingly. Before we are allowed to play we have to know the rules. Without them the game can be seen to be a game, and if it’s seen to be a game someone will come along and tell us to put our toys away. And this of course is what is going to happen. This is what I feel, coming back here. And directly it happens all the magic of the game will evaporate, the Fort will be seen to have been made of paper, the soldiers of lead and tin, and I of wax or china or pot. And Mumtez will not lie across the threshold, keeping our long night safe from ogres. Mumtez is gone long ago anyway. Where? Mother scarcely remembers her, which means perhaps that she was in our service for no longer than a year. She remembers Dost Mohammed but not the day of the scorpion. Instead she remembers the day of the snake who neither I nor Susan remember – I suppose because mother and Dost Mohammed between them kept the day of the snake well away from us.

  But older children forget the toys that have been put up into the attic; only the younger ones remember and then they too in their turn forget and play games as if they were not games at all but part of life. But it is all a business of cobwebs and old chests and long days indoors that find us thrown back on our own frail resources, because we are afraid to go outside and wet our feet and catch a chill. Pankot is such a place. Pankot is a retreat. So is Ranpur. Not the real Pankot, not the real Ranpur, but our Ranpur and Pankot. We see them as different from what they really are which is why when we come back to them we are aware of the long distances that separate one place of vivid recollection from another. In Ranpur we become aware of the immensity of the surrounding plain and in Pankot of the very small impression we have made on hills which when we are away from them we think of as safe, enclosed and friendly but which are in reality unfriendly, vast and dangerous. That is our first shock when we return. It’s not something we like to see or think about, so after a time we don’t see it and don’t think about it.

  *

  The house in Pankot and the bungalow in Ranpur which their parents were living in during the summer and winter respectively when Sarah and Susan returned to India in 1939 were not places either of the girls remembered. To begin with each was larger than its predecessor because Layton had now assumed command of the 1st Pankots after a fairly humdrum but not unsuccessful career, which during their daughters’ absence at home had taken him (and his wife) from Ranpur to Lahore, and Delhi, Peshawar and Quetta, but since houses and bungalows were built very much to the same pattern neither girl was particularly aware of what made these homes different from those they lived in as children.

  Sarah and Susan came back to India accompanied by their Aunt Fenny and Uncle Arthur – Major and Mrs Grace who had been taking home leave in 1939 – the year Susan finished with school, and Sarah, who had finished with school one term before, had come to the end of the short secretarial course she had insisted on taking, determined anyway to be prepared to be of some use to someone, somewhere.

  Aunt Fenny, the youngest of the Muir girls, had married Arthur Grace in 1924. Her marriage coincided with her father’s retirement. It had surprised people at the time that Fenny took so long to make up her mind between the several officers who from time to time laid siege to her affections. And her choice, coming when it did, in – as it were – the last year of her Indian opportunity (General and Mrs Muir having decided to retire to England) and lighting upon Arthur Grace, left an idea in people’s minds that she knew she had delayed too long. Arthur Grace was possibly the least eligible of the subalterns who wooed her, and the gossip was that at this last moment she panicked and said yes to his proposal merely because he happened to make it on a particular day, at a particular hour, when she was especially concerned about her future.

  His career had not been successful; they had not managed to produce children, and Aunt Fenny had become year by year more and more unrecognizable as the pretty but shallow girl who had had a good time in Pankot in 1919 and 1920 – a bridesmaid who had caught her sister Mildred’s bouquet when Mildred and John Layton were married in the church of St John in Pankot early one May morning, and who had been so solidly surrounded by interested young escorts at Pankot station later that day that she scarcely had time to wave her newly-married sister off on her honeymoon.

  Youngest daughter, bridesmaid, a godmother to Susan and Sarah – these were the happy stages Fenny passed through before joining the company of honourable matrons as the wife of Arthur Grace. And then, in her turn, Sarah – being then but three years old – acted as a bridesmaid to Aunt Fenny; although of that she had really no recollec
tion whatsoever beyond what was evidenced by the family iconography, a photograph in Aunt Lydia’s house in London and the same photograph in her mother’s album in India.

  It showed the Layton and the Muir families gathered together in slightly self-conscious but handsome, well-dressed and orderly array around a younger Aunt Fenny and a thinner Uncle Arthur with Sarah standing there, a little to one side, in front of Aunt Fenny, holding a nosegay whose scent she almost thought she could reconjure (in isolation from the unrecollected even that caused her to be holding it) and by her side the image of a five-year-old boy in satin pageboy rig whom she could not reconjure at all but whose name, apparently, was Giles, and who was the son of her father’s commanding officer.

  Perhaps the group portrait was most notable for its inclusion of Mabel Layton who stood next to her first husband’s old comrade-in-arms, by then the commanding officer of the 1st Pankots, Giles’s father, with on her other side an elderly Indian civilian who was present at the wedding because of his connection with the Governor who was also there with his wife shoulder to shoulder with General and Mrs Muir. The photograph was taken in the gardens of Flagstaff House at Pankot and in the background there could be seen the wooden balustrades and the kindly wistaria. Mabel Layton wore a wide-brimmed hat that all but hid her face, except for a mouth – held midway between repose and a smile.

  As a child in India Sarah was afraid of Aunty Mabel (as she insisted on being called). This may have had something to do with the fact that Aunty Mabel was not really her grandmother, but her father’s stepmother, and stepmothers were never nice people in story books. She liked Aunty Mabel in England better than she had in India, perhaps because she herself had grown up a bit. Mabel came to England with Major and Mrs Layton in the summer of 1933 when Sarah was turned twelve: the year great-grandfather Layton in Surrey was dying at last at the age of ninety-four.

  Although in that long period of exile in England as schoolgirls, she and Susan lived in London with Aunt Lydia, they usually spent several weeks of the summer holidays with their grand-grandfather. A casual observer might have thought that Susan was the old man’s favourite child. It was Susan who sat on his knee to listen to his rather gruesome fairy-stories and his stories of their father’s and grandfather’s boyhoods in Surrey. Sarah did not mind this apparent favouritism. Between herself and her ancient relative there was a silent understanding that Susan needed looking after because she was the baby of the family. His stories either went over Susan’s head or bored her, or frightened her. Towards the end of great-grandfather’s life Susan decided that she was too old to sit on his knee although she enjoyed the preferential treatment his invitation – increasingly reluctantly accepted – always gave proof of.

  Susan did not cry when great-grandfather Layton died; neither did Sarah but she felt they didn’t cry for different reasons. He died towards the end of the summer of 1933, shortly before Sarah’s and Susan’s parents were due to go back to India with Aunty Mabel. Sarah believed Susan did not cry because Susan had never thought of her great-grandfather as a person, but as an old and rather smelly piece of furniture that had to be put up with in the summer and sometimes came to life in a way that was personally disagreeable to her but reassuring to her sense of self-importance and of everything in the house being at her disposal. In the summer of his death Susan had acquired other reassurances: her father’s instead of her great-grandfather’s knee, her mother’s arms. It was the first reunion since the year of separation, 1930, when their mother, accompanied by Aunt Fenny, had brought the girls home to settle them at Aunt Lydia’s and at school before rejoining their father in India; and Susan – in the few weeks before great-grandpa died – now tearfully seized the opportunity to tell her mother she hated everything in England. This puzzled Sarah. Sarah had stifled her own unhappiness in England because she didn’t want it to rub off on to her sister who had seemed to take the uprooting and replanting (in what their parents always referred to as home – but which was as outlandish at first as Iceland would be to a Congo pigmy) as if nothing much had happened to her at all. The tears Susan now shed were counterfeit of those Sarah had kept in, and Sarah pondered the unfairness of it, the sudden inexplicable emergence of Susan as a little girl with a secretive side to her nature, who had not repaid Sarah for looking after her by trusting her enough to confide what was really going on in her mind but instead saved it all up to confide to her mother. From her state of puzzlement Sarah passed into one of distrust herself. Susan’s outbust about the hatefulness of life in England, at Aunt Lydia’s, at school, at great-grandpa’s, was surely a pose, a bald-faced bid for the bulk of everyone’s attention at a time when it should have been concentrated on great-grandpa who was dying, and it did not escape Sarah that she herself was being accused – although of what she wasn’t quite sure. She felt out of things, cut off from her family by Susan’s emotional claims on it and her implied criticism of the way she, Sarah, had tried in exile to represent it by looking after her sister as much like a grown-up person as she was capable of. And so when great-grandfather died, Sarah did not weep, because she felt – not necessarily understanding it – the final uselessness of giving way to an emotion: a life, well-spent, was over. It happened to everyone. It would happen to her mother and father, and to Aunty Mabel – to Aunty Mabel sooner than any of them, unless there were an accident or a war, or some special kind of Indian disaster such as cholera or unexpected illness. Susan, though, stayed dry-eyed – Sarah thought – because the death of anyone as old as great-grandpa was remote from her, relevant only to the extent it disrupted other people’s concentration on matters she thought of as really important.

  Susan did not want to go to the funeral. There was no difficulty about that. The difficulty that arose was over Sarah’s resistance to the suggestion that she should not go either but stay behind and look after Susan.

  ‘No, I want to go,’ she told her mother – with whom, after the years of separation she had not yet established an easy relationship. ‘Great-grandpa was very good to us. Mrs Bailey can look after Susan.’ Mrs Bailey was the old housekeeper, who had been left three hundred pounds. ‘In fact Susan can help her with the funeral meats.’ Funeral meats was an expression Sarah had picked up in the last day or so from Mrs Bailey herself. She thought that as food it sounded unappetizing to eat and doleful to prepare and that it might do Susan good to be made to take a hand getting it ready. She hoped as well that the baking of funeral meats would get rid of the sweet odour in the house that reminded her of cut-flowers going bad in vases.

  On the day of the funeral she shared a car to the parish church with Aunty Mabel and two of the elderly Layton relatives who had turned up earlier, had had to be met at the station and on the way to the church talked to Mabel about people Sarah did not know unless they were referred to as Mildred or John, which meant her parents. She did not cry at the service (no one did) nor later in the cemetery, standing by the amateur-looking grave that after a certain amount of necessary palaver received the coffin with great-grandpa in it; nor on the journey back. She cried later that night, in the dark, when Susan – who was not speaking to her – had gone to sleep. What made her cry was the thought that great-grandpa had put off dying until her father and mother and Aunty Mabel could get back home from India, but had not spun it out to put them in a position of having either to postpone their departure or leave England again still in a state of uncertainty. It seemed to be a thoughtful way of doing what the doctor had called ‘going out’. No one’s plans had been messed up. It struck her that he had deliberately stayed alive long enough to give them the satisfaction of believing they had made the last weeks of his life as jolly as they could be, confined to bed as he was, and then ‘gone out’ soon enough to give them time to do everything that had to be done, get over doing it, then pack their bags and catch the train and the boat their passages had been booked on months ago.

  She cried at this evidence of consideration for others; and then at the thought that in some w
ay she had failed Susan as an elder sister, because Susan obviously hadn’t been as carefree as her behaviour had previously suggested, didn’t feel enough consideration had been given to her. Sarah cried, too, because more than anything in the world at that moment she wanted to go back to India with her parents and Aunty Mabel and Susan. Without great-grandpa and the Surrey summer, England again looked to her like the alien land in which she and her sister had been sentenced to spend a number of years as part of the process of growing up. She felt grown-up enough now; quite ready, aged twelve, to tackle the business of helping her mother to look after father; quite ready to take Susan back, even alone, to the old bungalow in Ranpur where Mumtez guarded them against the dark and mysterious nights (for as such they now came at her). The knowledge that her parents no longer lived at No. 3 Kabul road, that Mumtez had long since gone, even been forgotten, that her mother and father were going back to a place called Lahore which was quite unknown to her, did not diminish the vividness of the picture she had of what a return to India would be like. She did not mind, either, that according to Aunt Lydia India was ‘an unnatural place for a white woman’. In any case she did not believe it. Her mother was natural enough for anyone, and so was Aunty Mabel if you thought about it and didn’t let it upset you when she averted her face when you went to kiss her (so that your lips merely brushed the soft part of her cheek near the earlobe). Aunty Mabel never let anyone get really close to her, but sometimes you found her looking at you, and felt the challenge of her interest in you; in what you were doing or thinking and in why you were doing and thinking it.