by Paul Scott
*
March 8th, 1944
Dear Helen,
It is all right. About Edwina. Let me describe it to you while the detail is fresh in my mind. Ever since the news of the enemy’s invasion of Indian soil we have been alert. This morning when I rose I knew that something of vital importance to our safety had happened. I called Aziz but got no answer. I knocked at Mabel’s door and went in expecting to find her still in bed because it was early. Her bed had been slept in but was empty. I searched. She was nowhere to be found. She and Aziz had gone. The servants’ quarters were abandoned. It didn’t take me long to work it out that everyone was making for the railway station and that a place would have been reserved for me on the train alongside Mabel. In fact I remembered that this had been carefully planned beforehand in the event of Pankot falling in danger of enemy attack.
I packed a few things, closed and bolted all the doors, windows and shutters, and let myself out. Imagine my relief when I saw a tonga waiting. The wallah flourished his whip and warned me to step on it. I thought, ‘I may step on it but can the horse?’ It looked more like an ass than a horse but I thought it would embarrass the driver to have this pointed out. ‘You’d better jump in,’ he said, ‘because they’re coming and everyone’s gone ahead to catch the last train out.’
I stopped trusting him. He observed my hesitation and in a different tone of voice said, ‘What are you waiting for, Barbie? You’d better buck up.’ It was Mr Maybrick in disguise. He had piles of his organ music tied up in untidy bundles in the back. I scrambled in, made room for myself. Off we started. The horse wasn’t lame as I’d feared. We made excellent progress. I felt elated, as in those days when my father took me on a spree and I had to hold my hat on. (It had a wide brim with artificial flowers Mother made out of coloured scraps of velvet). As we bowled down the hill past the golf-course I thought there were people there all wearing hats like this but then realised they were holding up umbrellas, coloured ones, made of paper. Mr Maybrick told me they were fifth columnists and that the golf-course was the rendezvous. We were in danger of being cut off and there was no time to catch the train. We would have to seek refuge in St John’s Church.
It was at this stage that everything became weird. You say I dreamt. But what is a dream? Everything ‘happens’ in the mind whatever the source of the event. Now four-in-hand, first Mr Maybrick and then I whipped the horses down Club road making for the haven of the church. My short grey hair flew black and long and I was filled with joyful longings and expectations. I was not myself.
I felt capable of dealing with every eventuality, calm in anticipation of the Lord’s help. We arrived at the site of St John’s but a change had come about. It was not the churchyard which I and Mr Maybrick (now back in his ordinary clothes but with a dogcollar like Mr Cleghorn) were standing in but the compound of the mission school in Muzzafirabad. My servant Francis was calling the children to school by tolling the bell. He tolled it eleven times. We had a view across the golf-course. The number of paper umbrellas had increased and the fifth columnists had now been joined by the Japanese. We could see their yellow faces and the guns they carried in place of golf-bags. Mr Maybrick also had a gun. He looked at me and said, We must save a last bullet each. I did not believe such a terrible step would be necessary. When I looked again I did not see the enemy but troops of children marching to their lessons. I called out, wishing to hurry but not to frighten them. Francis whispered to me that the danger had not passed. I was afraid his expression would show how desperate he felt so I smiled and said to each group of children as they passed through the school doorway, ‘It’s quite safe now.’
At last all the children were inside. Mr Maybrick and I went to join them. And then I was Edwina no more but myself and the schoolroom was the church after all and I was alone. Mr Maybrick was at the organ playing. The church was otherwise empty, still, safe, happy. I knelt in a pew to give thanks for our deliverance and as I did so the most benign thought entered my mind. A voice said to me: I’m all right now. I knew it was Edwina. She wanted me to know that God had forgiven her that mortal sin and received her into His everlasting peace and mercy.
This was a form of communication, wasn’t it? From Him, about Edwina. Which means I am not abandoned, although I think that now Edwina has gone from me in this life forever I am not unlonely. But this is a loneliness I can support.
*
April 28th, 1944
Dear Helen,
Do as I have done. Go to the window when it is dark and look at the night sky and ask yourself this question: Are the heavens finer than they were?
Teddie Bingham is dead, killed in action. The house still rings with Susan’s single cry of anguish and on the edge of my bed remains the imprint of her body where she sat afterwards in stony silence, cut off from all human correspondence. My poor Susan. Heavy with child. Weighed down by her loss. Scarcely more than a child herself. In front of the other women here I couldn’t restrain my tears.
I shed tears at my father’s death. I felt he had died through some fault of mine. I was so plain and gawky and not clever in the ways a little girl is meant to be. Over the seams I sewed, for instance, my mother pursed her lips, and blacking his boots I fumbled so badly his socks became smeared and he said, Heavens, child! but the Heavens were not open to receive me and shield me from his forgiveness. His funeral as is the custom among the London poor was more splendid than his life. So many flowers! A crowded church. Men I had never seen in the house, stiff in black and with the formality of respect for a life gayer than it should have been but now gone and leaving wisps of secret masculine camaraderie behind it that had no business either in our family or the house of God. And there was one young woman, in passing whom on our way out my Mother sparked with ebony lights and an electric stiffness in that corset which made her waist a tower of strength but not particularly of affection.
At home in the midst of ham and stout she placed her hand warningly under her heart and thus announced the approaching years of her martyrdom and her patient claim on my body, soul and memories, and I was aware of the peculiar poetry and diversity of life and its intricate loyalties which left me bereft and determined to arrive at a source, as it were at a conclusion, which the mirror announced in advance of the event. God, anyway, would have me; therefore I yearned for Him. But was it He who answered?
I look at the night sky where Teddie is scattered and am awestruck at this kind of immensity. Unthinkable distances. Surely no prayer can cross them. I am humble in the face of such sublime power. But in the next instant I try to imagine what existed before it was created. I try to imagine no universe. Nothing, nothing. Try to imagine that. In all that terrifying blackness try to imagine no blackness, nothing, not even vacuum, but nothing. Nothing even as a thought. Space deprived of space in which to exist. Draw in the billions of light years of space and stars and darkness, compress and compress until all existence, all space, all void is the size of a speck of dust.
And then blow it out.
The mind cannot conceive of this situation. The mind demands that there be something and therefore something before something. Is the Universe an unprincipled design? Does God weep somewhere beyond it crying to its prisoners to free themselves and come to Him? If it is all explained by chemistry, that chemistry is majestic. It can only lead to the most magnificent explosion, to which God will harken while we burn and disintegrate and scatter into pieces.
I am worried about Mabel. She talked once not about God but about the gods as though some kind of committee were sitting, one before which she had become weary of giving evidence. At night she falls asleep over her book with her spectacles on her nose at a dangerous angle. I have nightmares in which I see her turn into the pillow, crushing and splintering the lenses, cutting herself, bleeding slowly from closed eyelids so that she appears to be crying blood. She waits with Spartan fortitude for her life to run its course. Her days are spent in celebration of the natural cycle of seed, growth, flower, dec
ay, seed.
One day she said to me, ‘No flower is quite like another of the same species. On a single bush one is constantly surprised by the remarkable character shown by each individual rose. But from the house all one sees is a garden, which is all there is to it anyway in the long run.’
Perhaps that is how she sees the world. She puts her hand on my arm and I am imprisoned by her capacity to survive. A sentence of life, suffered with patience and forbearance and with small pleasures taken by the minute, not the hour. Is that tranquillity? She is not so tranquil in sleep. Bygone things press on her then.
The fighting in Manipur has been very fierce but it looks as if we shall drive them back, doesn’t it? There will be no paper umbrellas on the Pankot golf-course. As Mabel said, everything will be just as it always was.
*
June 5th, 1944
My Dear Miss Jolley,
Shortly after the Memorial service that was held here for Captain Bingham a mysterious event took place. A name appeared in the visitors’ book which is kept at the gate of Flagstaff House. The person signing gave no indication of her whereabouts in Pankot, contenting herself with the word Rawalpindi after her signature, as if to leave no room for doubt while withholding opportunity for contact. It was as though she wished to say: I am here in your midst, think about it.
But no stranger has appeared. No one has seen her or seen anyone who might be her. Yesterday evening I raised the question discreetly with Sarah, suggesting to her that since they were so close to her in Kashmir they would recognize her; but Sarah said they would not. I did not think it a good idea to press her, to face her directly with the question whether in Srinagar she had visited the woman, spoken to her, seen the child.
Is the child here too? Unbaptized? You will know to whom I refer, whose signature it is that has appeared in the book. You will not know, none of us does, why she is in Pankot or where she is staying. Unless the signature was a practical joke, as has been suggested, she must be hidden away in the area of West Hill where there are summer residences that belong to rich Indians from Ranpur, an area which people from East Hill never visit. Her arrival and simultaneous disappearance serve to emphasize the stark division there is between our India and theirs. She has made herself one of them. The division is one of which I am ashamed. I have done nothing, nothing, to remove it, ever. My poor Edwina sat huddled by the roadside in the rain, holding that dead man’s hand. That, I continually see, was significant. For me that image is like an old picture of the kind that were popular in the last century, which told stories and pointed moral lessons. I see the caption, ‘Too Late.’
Sarah came to the cottage yesterday evening to say goodbye. She went to Ranpur today to catch tonight’s Calcutta mail. Only for a short visit, but for a special reason, and for Susan’s sake, to see and talk to a Captain Merrick who is in hospital there, having been wounded – Susan believes badly – in the same action in which poor Teddie was killed. It seems in fact that he was with him on that occasion at the height of the fighting on the Imphal plain and performed some sort of heroic act whose object, although it failed, was to save Teddie. An officer from Teddie’s division wrote to Susan and told her of Captain Merrick’s bravery, since when she has had a letter from Captain Merrick himself, in hospital, but not in his handwriting. This weighs on Susan’s mind. If ever she blamed him for the disturbing events that spoiled her wedding day she is determined to forgive and forget and in any case, as a soldier’s daughter, sees it as her duty to extend the hand of gratitude to her dead husband’s comrade. She has asked Sarah to ask him if he would stand as godfather to the child, when it is born.
For this I am thankful. In the past few weeks she has been, many of us feel, dangerously withdrawn, lying here on the verandah at the cottage day after day, as she used to before Teddie’s death when her pregnancy curtailed her activities, but without that look of living inwardly. I heard a woman here, Lucy Smalley, say that poor Susan reminded her of the daughter of a woman called Poppy Browning, but she shut up when she saw I was in earshot; and tonight I asked Sarah who Poppy Browning was. She did not know. Nor does she know who Gillian Waller was, or is, for I was silly enough to ask that too and then had to explain, to expose myself as a stupid old woman who tucks another old woman up, one who mutters in her sleep.
A little while ago I mentioned to Susan the existence of the lace and when Sarah and I had done talking tonight she went in to Mabel and received that exquisite christening gown to take to her sister. The child is due next month. In Calcutta, Sarah is to stay with her Aunt Fenny and Uncle Arthur. They have moved from Delhi. He is now a Lieutenant-Colonel. I longed to go with her, to have a chance to see our old headquarters again and to see the wounded man, who perhaps knew Edwina. Will Sarah remember to ask him this time?
Yours, Barbara Batchelor.
*
She scrawled the signature, closed the exercise book that had belonged to a little girl called Swaroop. She undressed, put on her gown and opened her door to listen and judge the state of affairs. It was past midnight. She crossed to Mabel’s door, opened it silently and stood arrested. Mabel, propped against her pillows, must have watched the door opening.
‘Can’t you sleep either?’ she said; and Barbie recalled the day nearly five years before when she had gone out to the verandah and found Mabel working there, the day she had expected to be told she must go when her holiday was over. Can’t you sleep either? Mabel had said. I don’t blame you. It’s such a lovely day.
Mabel had already put her book aside and replaced her spectacles in their case, and Barbie felt pleased with her as she would have been pleased to find that a pupil had learned a difficult lesson well.
‘Oh, I haven’t tried yet,’ she said. ‘I’ve been writing letters, catching up, and time just slipped by. Can I get you anything?’
‘No, thank you, Barbie. There’s nothing I want. I’m not sleepy though. It’s rather close, isn’t it?’
‘Just a bit.’
Mabel nodded, apparently glad to have her impression confirmed.
‘It won’t be long before the rains get here,’ Mabel said. She glanced at the curtained windows as if through these an approaching rain might be discerned. ‘Did I tell you it was raining the first time I came to India? I remember being very disappointed. I’d expected brilliant sunshine and it seemed such a long way to come just to get wet and see grey sky. But then I’d not experienced the heat. So I didn’t appreciate the contrast.’
‘It’s not so marked up here.’
Barbie went further into the room and then to the bedside, checked the muslin-covered water jug even though she could see that the tumbler hadn’t been used.
‘Stay and talk to me,’ Mabel said. The request was so unexpected that for a moment Barbie wondered whether Mabel was making fun of her. But her friend’s face betrayed no irony.
‘Talk? What about?’
‘Anything. About when you were young. I always enjoy that.’
‘Do you? Do you?’
She sat on the edge of the bed. She could not remember, now, ever being young. And then did. ‘I was always a bit afraid of going upstairs to bed. So I hummed a song which I fear Mother disapproved. That is to say the first line of it. I don’t mean she disapproved only of the first line and of course I don’t mean hummed because you can’t hum words, but I sang it under my breath over and over. And in the end I couldn’t ever remember the rest of it and never have. Isn’t that strange? I’ve seen a deal of gaiety throughout my noisy life.’
‘Throughout what?’
‘Throughout my noisy life.’
‘Oh.’ Mabel smiled. ‘One of your father’s comic songs.’
‘He was passionately fond of the music hall. And often promised to take me but of course never did, he was afraid of what my mother would say if she found out and anyway he was always short of what he called the ready. There was the Christmas when he lost the presents for my stocking on the journey home. As white as a sheet when he came i
n at the door and very very late, but not drunk, that’s what Mother said years later when she told me, when he was dead and she had forgiven him, and told me there wasn’t any Father Christmas anyway. I never knew I once nearly didn’t get a stocking. I don’t remember a Christmas when there wasn’t something in it. Mother said that when he came home and said: I’ve lost the stocking things, poor Barbie’s stocking things: they set to and turned out drawers and cupboards looking for odds and ends for hours so as not to disappoint me and that I said it was the nicest stocking ever. But perhaps that’s only how she remembered it. But it showed they loved me. I adored Christmas mornings. I always woke while it was still dark and worked my toes up and down to feel the stocking’s weight and listen to the rustle and crackle. And then I’d sit up and sniff very cautiously to smell the magic, I mean of someone having been there who drove across frosty rooftops and had so many chimneys to attend to but never forgot mine.’
‘Yes,’ Mabel said. ‘I remember that – the idea of a strange scent in the room, but I don’t think I put the idea into words.’
‘I don’t suppose I did either. It’s how I describe it now. As children we accept magic as a normal part of life. Everything seems rooted in it, everything conspires in magic terms.’ She laughed. ‘Even the quarrels in our house had the darkness of magic in them, they were strange and incomprehensible and threatening as magic often is. I expected to find toads hopping on the staircase and misshapen things falling out of cupboards.’
‘Poor Barbie.’
‘No! My life was never dull.’
‘Is it very dull now?’
‘Now least of all.’
She had a sudden strong desire to lower herself gently and be taken into the older woman’s arms and to lie there in peace and amity until they both fell asleep. She would be content then not to wake but to dream forever, enfolded, safe from harm; and for an instant it seemed to her that if she sought harbour in this way it would not be closed to her; that Mabel would accept her and go with her happily into this oblivion of cessation and fulfilment.