by Paul Scott
‘No, no,’ Mabel said. She made a gesture as if to stop him but it was ignored. He was intent on revealing a treasure. He lifted a package out and removed the top layer of tissue with a flourish.
‘Sarah bachcha,’ he said. Barbie went closer. A wedding veil? No, a complete garment. She could see the neckline and tiny sleeves folded across its front. Sarah bachcha. Sarah as a baby. She got down on her knees. ‘Oh, it’s a christening gown. Was it Sarah’s?’
‘Hān. Sarah Mem.’
Aziz linked thumbs and flapped his splayed fingers. ‘Batta fye,’ he said, and laughed at Barbie’s puzzled expression. He put his hand in under the creamy lace from which the gown was made. As he did so Barbie exclaimed. The hem of the fine lawn undergarment was edged with a band of seed pearls. But there was more enchantment to come. ‘Look,’ he said, and fluttered his hand. The lace came alive. Butterflies palpated his pink brown palm. Three of them. Five. Seven. A dozen. More than that. The whole gown was made of lace butterflies.
‘Oh, but it’s beautiful,’ Barbie said. ‘Did Susan wear it too?’ Mabel answered. ‘No. Susan had something new.’
Now that the lace was exposed Mabel seemed willing to acknowledge it. But putting out her hand to touch it Barbie felt that she was encroaching upon one of the many parts of Mabel’s hidden history. She drew her hand back.
‘No, do take it out,’ Mabel protested. ‘It’s beautiful lace. My first husband’s mother gave it to me for when we had children, but we never did. There’s a full length of it still unmade up. Enough for a shawl. Aziz, show Barbie Mem the piece.’
Aziz reached into the press and lifted out another tissue-wrapped package. He opened it and unravelled the lace as the durzi unravelled bolts of cloth. The lace cascaded across his and Barbie’s knees. The butterflies hovered, settled, rose, settled again. Some of their wings were folded, others only partly folded. Some displayed the full spread.
‘It’s exquisite,’ Barbie said. She hardly dared touch it. ‘So delicate and alive.’
‘It’s rather remarkable when you realize that the old woman who made it was blind.’
‘Blind!’
‘Not from birth. But for many years. She sat in a room in the top of a tower of an old French château that belonged to my mother-in-law’s family. She called the butterflies her prisoners.’
Barbie put both hands under the lace and raised them. The butterflies quivered as in a taut web. They were part of the web.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘They are caught, aren’t they? How carefully you’ve looked after it.’
‘Aziz sees to that. Would you like that piece?’
Barbie let the lace free. ‘It’s very kind of you,’ she said, ‘but it’s much too beautiful. I wouldn’t know what to use it for. And besides it’s precious and it’s family.’ She thought of the wedding and its possible consequences. ‘And now it may come in.’
‘What?’
‘If Susan and Teddie have children.’
‘There’s Sarah’s dress already made up and there if wanted. Are you sure?’
‘Quite sure. But thank you very much for the offer.’
III
Mrs John Layton, the card began, Miss Sarah Layton and Mrs Edward Bingham, request the pleasure of your company at the Officers’ Mess, The Pankot Rifles. The date was for two weeks ahead, the time mid-day. On the bottom right-hand side it said Buffet Luncheon and on the left RSVP. Two cards were delivered to Rose Cottage.
In the envelope containing Barbie’s there was a note from Susan. ‘Dear Barbie,’ she had written, ‘thank you so much for the beautiful set of Apostle teaspoons. I’m writing to Teddie who I know would wish me to say thank you on his behalf as well. I heard from him a few days ago and he says he is very fit but of course working very hard. Mummy and I have decided that she should give a little party here to make up for having to have the wedding in Mirat and that it would be a good idea to have it on my twenty-first. A lot of our wedding presents were to cover both occasions. I do hope that you and Aunty Mabel will both be able to come. Mummy says it’s years since Aunty Mabel visited the Mess and a lot of the young officers who have heard of her but never met her are dying to because really she is quite famous, not just because of Daddy but because of all the silver her first husband presented and which is used on special occasions. We shall have the wedding presents displayed, by the way, and your spoons will look awfully nice in their blue-lined box. With Love, Susan.’
‘I expect you’d like to go, Barbie,’ Mabel said.
‘Only if you do.’
‘Well I shall have to but I’d want to come away before they start eating. I can’t bear eating standing up or eating in crowds. But Mildred knows that. She won’t mind. If I put in an appearance that’s all anybody will want, but you stay on and have a good tuck in.’
‘Eating in crowds gives me indigestion too. We’ll go and come back together. We’ll arrange to slip away.’
I shall have the heliotrope, she decided. When I look in the mirror and see my grey hair I know I can carry the heliotrope.
She went down to the bazaar towards evening which was the time she liked best, especially in November when it was quite cold and there were braziers and early lanterns and the small of charcoal and incense. She stood at the entrance to the durzi’s shop. A chokra beckoned her in, dusted a chair and invited her to sit and then went through the curtain which presently parted again to admit the old man and the chokra who was carrying the bolt of purple cloth.
‘Ah, so you know what I’ve come for,’ she said. He unravelled three or four yards and held it up. She gazed at it, testing for the edge of an old uncertainty and found it gone. ‘The name heliotrope,’ she said, ‘comes from the Greek words helios, meaning sun, and trepo meaning turn. Helio-tropion. A plant that turns its flowers to the sun.’
‘Memsahib has decided?’
‘Yes. And you have my measurements. The usual style, the skirt straight, box pleat at the back, the coat with pockets on my hips, deep enough and roomy enough for me to stick my hands in. As in the last suit, the grey one. I leave the choice of lining to you, it is always perfectly matched. When shall I come for the fitting?’
The fitting was a formality. Year by year his scissors and needle were wielded with precision, year by year she gained, lost, nothing in weight nor changed shape in any way. He had only to refer to his figures that were filed away either in a drawer or in his mind under the name Bachlev, Baba; the holy woman from the missions. The fitting was arranged for one week from that evening and the finished garment promised for delivery the morning of the day before the party. He gave her a snipping of the cloth. She put it in her handbag. It would be useful if she wanted to match up shoes, gloves and handbag, or to consider the tones of the blouse to go with it or of one of her sprays of velvet flowers for the lapel.
*
‘How nice you look, Barbie,’ Mabel had said. ‘What a happy colour,’ and had seemed almost eager to be off; but half-way down Club road she had suddenly turned as if she had changed her mind and would tell the tonga-wallah to take them back. In the lapel of the Bond Street costume a small diamond brooch glittered, a miniature of the Pankot Rifles badge. She wore no other jewellery. The brooch had been a gift from her first husband, who died on the Khyber. Her face was shaded by a grey felt hat with a wide brim. In place of a ribbon a fawn chiffon scarf was tied round the base of the crown. The free ends hung behind to shade her neck. Her legs, too often hidden by shabby gardening trousers, were still slim and well-shaped. Seated, the shortened skirt revealed them to the knee; to just below it when she stood. Fawn gloves covered the work-roughened hands.
We could go to Ranpur, Barbie had said the night before. To do some Christmas shopping. ‘Oh, I shall never go to Ranpur again,’ Mabel replied, ‘at least not until I’m buried,’ which had seemed to Barbie an odd sort of thing to say until she remembered that her friend’s second husband was buried there, in the churchyard of St Luke’s; and the way she now twisted round as
if to tell the tonga-wallah to go back seemed like a momentary confusion, as if what was uppermost in her mind was the idea of going to Ranpur for that macabre purpose and the understanding that the time hadn’t yet come and that the journey downhill must be cancelled, or anyway postponed. And then her eye had been reattracted by Barbie’s heliotrope costume and the real object of the journey had again become clear. So that she resumed her position and watched the road unravel beneath her feet, and said nothing, but listened, or did not listen, while Barbie talked –
– or talked and was silent. God, she felt, had waited a long time for her to see that she could ignore the burden of her words which mounted one upon the other until they toppled, only to be set up again, and again, weighting her shoulders; a long time for her consciously to enter the private realm of inner silence and begin to learn how to inhabit it even while her body went its customary bustling way and her tongue clacked endlessly on: as at present, keeping time with the clack of the horse’s hooves as the equipage, avoiding the bazaar, dropped down through Cantonment Approach road, making for the military lines.
‘We’re late,’ she heard herself exclaim. In the world where she talked, where everybody talked, time was of peculiar importance. In Rifle Range road there were no other vehicles. They passed the end of grace and favour lane and in a moment or two turned left into Mess road. The geometrically laid out huts showed black against the green and the green itself was sparse, trodden. Distantly, in groups, sepoys drilled. A board painted in Pankot Rifles colours and with a huge gilt and coloured replica of the badge marked their destination. They turned at right-angles, crossing a culvert into a compound, approached the long square-pillared portico, and drove into it. When the tonga stopped Barbie could hear the uneven drone of voices inside. Servants stood at the entrance, dressed in white tunics and floppy white trousers. The ribbons in their pugrees, and their broad cummerbunds, were woven in horizontal stripes of the regimental colours. One of the servants, tall and thickly built, elderly, moved forward and saluted and stood offering his arm to Mabel.
‘Memsahib!’ he said.
Mabel had automatically put her hand on his wrist but the note of urgency in his voice arrested her. Her body seemed to stiffen with uncertainty or alarm. The servant spoke again and Barbie listened carefully so that she could tell Mabel louder and in English what he was saying.
‘He says he wonders if you remember him now that he’s old and has a beard.’
‘What?’
Barbie repeated it but was not sure Mabel understood. She was looking down at the man, her hand still gripping his wrist.
‘Is it Ghulam?’ she asked at last. ‘Ghulam Mohammed?’
The old man nodded and for a while they stared at each other. Then he turned his wrist over so that his palm touched hers.
‘You are well, Ghulam Mohammed?’ she asked in Urdu.
‘I am well. Is it so with you?’
‘It is so.’
‘God is good.’
‘Praise God. Ghulam, this is my friend, Miss Batchelor.’
‘Memsahib.’
‘Now we must go in,’ Mabel said in English. He made his arm into a crook and helped them down, and then up a shallow flight of steps into the dark interior.
‘Thank you,’ Mabel said, and added – as if to impress the name on a memory she could not trust – ‘Ghulam Mohammed.’
The hall was pillared. The voices came from a room on the left whose double doors were open. Barbie could see Mildred in a flowery hat, Colonel and Mrs Trehearne, and Susan looking younger than twenty-one talking to Kevin Coley, the depot adjutant who had lost his wife in the Quetta earthquake, was now the oldest captain in the regiment and said to be content to remain so. Barbie always thought he had a face like a medieval martyr; one of the unimportant ones who went to the stake in job lots.
And then, as they approached the doors, there was a change of rhythm in the voices, a slowing down, and a quietening; what Barbie recalled ever afterwards as a hush which spread back through the room and brought people’s heads round to watch Mabel’s arrival, her return after a long inexplicable absence to the place she had first entered longer ago than anyone else present, which meant that her presence now had a mystical significance. In her there surely reposed the original spirit of the hard condition, the spirit that belonged to the days of certainty, self-assurance, total conviction?
With several paces yet to go Mabel hesitated as if she would draw back and suddenly Barbie wished that they both could. But – ‘It is very crowded,’ Mabel said and then moved forward indomitably as Mildred came out to receive her. The brims of their hats forced distance on their embrace, but Mildred looked genuinely pleased and even grateful to Barbie whose trembling hand was taken in a gesture that implied there was greater affection than the social circumstances allowed Mildred to show. ‘You both made it,’ she said. ‘How nice. Mabel, there are some young boys who are dying to meet you but scared stiff so go easy on them for God’s sake. There’s one called Dicky Beauvais whose uncle was a subaltern under Bob Buckland. I know he’s particularly hoping for a word.’
‘Hello, Aunty.’ Susan said. ‘It’s so nice of you to come and thank you for the marvellous present.’ She kissed her aunt and then surprisingly kissed Barbie too and said, ‘What a nice colour,’ and led them into the still hushed assembly where the distance between Barbie and Mabel began subtly to lengthen because the Trehearnes interposed themselves and guided Mabel gradually towards the Rankins while the Peplows claimed Barbie as their own. Mabel looked over her shoulder, bewildered, but the already tenuous link was snapped by Mildred’s obtrusive hat and Kevin Coley’s crucified shoulder and Barbie felt herself forced away from the centre to the periphery. I never understood, Mrs Stewart was saying, your sudden interest in Emerson. I do not wish to talk about Emerson or indeed about anything, Barbie said, but only from inside that area of privacy and silence. Her voice was saying something quite different. Is Sarah here? she was asking Clarissa. She wasn’t at the door unless I missed her, how awful if I did. No I have not met Mrs Jason, how do you do?
There were glimpses to be had of the felt hat and the chiffon scarf. They formed a point of reference. Her eye continually sought it. The room, dark-panelled and Persian carpeted, was uncomfortably warm and close. Half-lowered tattis on the porticoed verandah kept out the glare. A bearer offered a tray and she took a glass of sherry to occupy her hands. She had not reckoned with this separation and it occurred to her that it had been engineered, arranged beforehand by Mildred with the innocent connivance of Clarissa Peplow who seemed to have assumed the duty of making sure that Barbie was kept entertained, refreshed, introduced and out of certain people’s way. She began to be afraid that when the time came for her to help Mabel slip away she would be unable to find her, which was ridiculous since there was only this one room in use and the verandah on the other side of the long buffet table, where the windows were open, letting in some fresh air. She looked for but could not see the display of wedding presents. Neither, now, could she see the hat with the chiffon scarf. The room frightened her.
‘What a nice suit, Barbie.’
It was Sarah. Barbie clasped her hand. ‘Is she all right do you think, in this crowd? I feel I ought to be with her but there are so many claims on her attention.’
‘They’ve got her a chair,’ Sarah said. ‘Over in the corner there. You can’t see her from here but she’s all right.’
‘We’re slipping away, you know, before the buffet.’
‘Yes, I know. Barbie, you know Tony Bishop, don’t you? He’s been posted to Bombay. Isn’t he lucky?’
‘We met once at Rose Cottage but you may not remember me from among all those young people.’ She offered her hand to the ill-looking man who had been Teddie Bingham’s friend. ‘Are you quite recovered from the jaundice?’
‘Thank you, yes.’
‘It is so debilitating, well so I gather, never having had it, only heard. I’ve always enjoyed excessive good h
ealth which I suppose is rather indecent, a sign of diminished sensibility perhaps, a certain coarseness of constitution no doubt inherited from my father whose life was terminated by the wheels of a hansom cab or bus on the Embankment I forget which in fact I was never quite sure but everyone expected him to go from cirrhosis of the liver which given the same intake any ordinary man would have contracted. Did you change your mind, Sarah, I mean about the presents? Susan told me they’d be on display but perhaps it proved too difficult, I mean they’d need guarding wouldn’t they?’
*
But the presents were on display on the verandah, guarded by a naik and two sepoys who stood stiffly in the at ease position not catching the eye of any guest because it was not the guests of whom they had to entertain suspicion but intruders or contractors’ servants coming too near the sparkling array of cutlery, glass, tea and coffee sets, trays, table-lamps, vases and carved boxes. A kind of queue had formed, as for the rite of passing by a bier Barbie thought when fifteen minutes later she accompanied the Peplows and Mrs Stewart to inspect the remains of the wedding. The verandah was crowded too.
Trees partially screened the view across to the grace and favour bungalow which Barbie had never been inside because she had always declined Sarah’s invitation to go in when – as they sometimes did – they shared a tonga from the bazaar and Barbie went out of her way to bring Sarah home. She thought she could hear Panther barking. There were cries from the parade ground. But the verandah of the mess seemed to lack conditions in which an echo could exist. Voices, sounds, had a brazen hollow quality. ‘Wavell’s the first Viceroy we’ve had who knows anything about the country and then of course he’s a soldier,’ someone told her but when she glanced round the speaker’s face was not turned to her but to another man and she did not know either of them. When they reached the loaded table she could not see the spoons.