by Paul Scott
‘Painful yes. One must find it that. But that doesn’t mean we should hide it away or pretend it never happened or that it’s over.’
‘Oh, it’s over. The girl’s dead.’
‘The child’s alive.’
He smiled. ‘I mean the case died with the girl. I agree, the child’s alive. His child, presumably. At least one presumes she imagined so.’
‘You told Sarah you were fond of the girl yourself. And yet you sound so bitter. About her.’
He seemed quite undaunted. ‘I was fond of her. I had to take that into consideration. But I think I stopped being fond of her when I realized which way she’d jumped. So it was never a serious impediment.’
She thought: What a curious word to use. Impediment. And – jumped. That’s a curious word too. Sexual jealousy? Racial jealousy?
She found herself suddenly unwilling, unable, to consider the matter. She felt drained of imaginative energy. She stared at the embryo tennis court. It meant nothing. It was simply a place to pat a ball to and fro, to and fro.
Between their feet the woman in the white saree abased herself. Beseeching them. ‘We are gods,’ she thought, ‘and this was our garden. Now we play tennis. It’s easier to beseech against a background of roses.’
That flash of inspiration had come, unexplained, unattended. But there seemed no more to come. She looked at him. Again he was regarding her. His chin was in his hand. He had stubbed the cigarette. It lay dead, bent double, on the little brass tray that had come from Benares on the banks of the Ganges where bodies were burnt and the ashes cast to float, float on, float out to an unimaginable sea. Her old trunk of missionary relics with them. Bobbing, lazily twisting, under a copper-coloured sun. Immense crowds came to the festivals on the banks of the holy river. Greater crowds than came to any church. The air was heavy with the scent of jasmine, decayed fish, human and animal ordure. In the trunk Edwina’s picture sailed to a far horizon.
She said, ‘I am your mother and your father.’
‘What?’
‘Man-bap. It wasn’t that for Edwina. It was despair. But I suppose Teddie felt it.’ She realized that in an oblique way – in his remarks about Kumar and a certain type of Englishman – he had been referring to Teddie, to men like Teddie, but she could not fathom his deeper references. The arm he had lost for Teddie span away too – on the swift current of the holy river: garlanded.
She had slumped forward, knees apart, feet splayed, her skirt stretched, elbows on her knees, her hands clasped.
‘Tell me about my friend, about Edwina Crane. Was there much left?’
There was a long pause. She did not look at him. She stayed in that ungainly position.
‘Enough to identify.’
She nodded. And to bury. She had never thought of that before. Never thought of the possibility that the coffin was light with a few scorched bones shrouded in fragments of burnt saree. ‘And the letter?’ she asked. ‘What did she say in the letter, the one that was never read out at the inquest?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t remember except that it satisfied the coroner.’
‘And satisfied the police. You remembered the picture. You must remember the letter. The letter was much more important to a policeman.’
‘Is it important to you?’
‘It might be.’
She glanced up. His chin was still resting on the live-hand, but he was looking at the garden.
He said, ‘Well, it was a sane letter. Personally I should have recorded a simple verdict of suicide.’
‘What did it say?’
‘Simply that she was resolved to take her own life.’
‘There must have been more.’
‘You mean something to support the verdict of suicide while the balance of the mind was disturbed?’
‘Yes, was there?’
‘Personally I don’t think so.’ He seemed in a way to regret that Edwina had gone to hallowed ground. He added, ‘But she did end the letter with the kind of statement that satisfied people she was off her head. The kind it was thought better not to read out. I can’t think why.’
‘What was it?’
He turned his head towards her, using his hand as a pivot for his chin.
‘“There is no God. Not even on the road from Dibrapur.”’
An invisible lightning struck the verandah. The purity of its colourless fire etched shadows on his face. The cross glowed on her breast and then seemed to burn out.
‘“Not even on the road from Dibrapur?”’
He nodded.
For a moment she felt herself drawn to him. He offered recompense. He looked desolated as if Edwina’s discovery were a knowledge he had been born with and could not bear because he had been born as well with a tribal memory of a time when God leaned His weight upon the world. He needed consolation.
She became agitated. She felt for the gold chain and found it but it seemed weightless.
He smiled. He said, ‘How serious we’ve become.’ He shot the sleeve of his good arm and looked at the dial of a watch which he wore with the face on the inner side of the wrist. ‘And I ought to be getting back to see the club secretary.’
She got up. ‘No, wait. I want to give you something.’
She bent down and retrieved her handbag from the ground near the leg of the unfamiliar chair.
‘Come, you can help me. The locks may be stiff.’
She waited until he had got to his feet and then led the way round the verandah to the front, walking several paces ahead of him. The tonga-wallah sat hunched, half-asleep, his head at the same angle as the horse’s. She saw to her horror that the horse had deposited a neat pile of manure between the shafts of the sacrosanct gravel of the drive.
She edged round the trunk and knelt on the first step, then scrabbled in her handbag for the key. The padlock clicked open easily, so did the left hand clasp. The right hand one had always been a brute. But it gave. She flicked the hasps up.
‘Now,’ she said. She raised the Pandora-lid, stared and cried out. From rim to rim the trunk was filled with the creamy white butterfly lace.
‘But this isn’t mine!’
She snatched at the lace and pulled it out. Beneath it were her relics.
‘How did it get in here?’ she wanted to know. ‘I never put it in here. I’ve not seen it since the day Mabel showed it to me.’
She held the lace in both hands and then looked up to appeal to Captain Merrick. But the lace was before his time. She had a desire to show it to him. ‘Look,’ she said, and threw one end. He caught it deftly. She drew her arm back. The lace hung between them. The butterflies trembled.
‘Isn’t it beautiful? The woman who made it was blind.’ She stared at and through this lepidopterist’s paradise-maze but could see no further than the old woman’s fingers. ‘Mabel wanted me to have it for a shawl.’
He offered back the end he had. She gathered the lace in and then flung it over her shoulders.
‘Can I carry it?’ she asked, laughing. The lace smelt of camphor, lavender and sandalwood. These were the scents of Mabel’s and Aziz’s gift. ‘She must have given it to Aziz, and he to me. During that time he had the key to my trunk.’
She pulled the lace off her shoulders. ‘I’m sorry, Captain Merrick. You haven’t the least idea what I’m talking about. No matter. I opened the trunk’ – she picked up the picture – ‘to give you this.’
She held it up to him. He made to take it.
‘No,’ she said. ‘The other hand.’
She reached up and helped to insert the picture into the rigid glove.
‘It’s small, but much bigger than an ashtray. Is it too heavy?’
‘I don’t think so.’
The black glove, his good hand and one of her hands held the picture. Slowly they each withdrew the support of their living flesh.
‘There, you can do it. You can carry it.’
There was perspiration on his mottled forehead. He gazed down at the awkwardly angled gift.<
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‘Oh, this,’ he said. ‘Yes, I remember this. Are you giving it to me?’
‘Of course.’
One eyebrow contracted in a frown. The other – vestigial – perhaps contracted too.
‘Why?’
She thought about this.
‘One should always share one’s hopes,’ she said. ‘That represents one of the unfulfilled ones. Oh, not the gold and scarlet uniforms, not the pomp, not the obeisance. We’ve had all that and plenty. We’ve had everything in the picture except what got left out.’
‘What was that, Miss Batchelor?’
She said, not wishing to use that emotive word, ‘I call it the unknown Indian. He isn’t there. So the picture isn’t finished.’
A drop of sweat fell from his forehead on to the bottom left-hand corner of the glass that protected the picture.
‘Let me relieve you of its weight, Captain Merrick. I’ll ask mali to wrap it in some paper for you. Meanwhile’ – she began closing and locking the trunk – ‘would you be so kind as to ask my tonga-wallah there to put the trunk in the back of the tonga? I’ll ask mali to help him and also for some rope to lash it in. But I think it will require a man to order him to take it.’
‘The trunk? In the back of the tonga?’
‘What else?’
‘I should have said it’s much too heavy.’
‘Oh, nonsense. It only contains my years and they are light enough.’
She strode round the bungalow calling the mali.
*
The trunk was roped, upended like a coffin on its foot, one edge resting on the footboard of the passenger seat, the other within an inch of the canopy above. The shafts of the trap were at a high angle. The bony horse looked in danger of elevation. The morose tonga-wallah stood at the horse’s head, keeping it down.
She placed the lace shawl over her head like a bridal veil. Captain Merrick was examining the lashings and knots with a man’s expert and wary eye for such things. At her approach he said, ‘I don’t advise this. Have you far to send it?’
‘Just down the hill. To the church.’
‘It’s very steep. I think the fellow is right.’ He jerked his head at the tonga-wallah. ‘It’s too great a load.’
‘But I shall pay him well. He’s an old man. The competition is very severe nowadays. The young drivers dash hither and thither and getting all the custom. It’s a kindness really.’
‘How do you intend to get back yourself?’
‘In the front, of course.’
Captain Merrick said nothing.
‘Do you disapprove of that? Of my driving hip to hip with a smelly old native?’
‘The weight will be impossible.’
‘But I shall balance the trunk. You see? We shall tip forward on to a splendid even keel. Are you walking to the club?’
‘It was my intention. Mali says it may rain. Don’t you think–’
But she interrupted. ‘Where will you be going when you leave Pankot, Captain Merrick?’
‘Simla.’
‘For a holiday?’
‘No. On army business.’
‘We must talk again. There are many things I should like to discuss. I’ll ask Clarissa Peplow to ring you at the hospital. At the military wing, presumably.’
‘That would be very kind.’
She turned to the mali. She gave him twenty rupees. She ruffled the head of the mali’s boy.
‘Can you understand what I say?’ she asked the boy in Urdu. He nodded. She smiled. In Dibrapur it might be all right.
She offered her hand to Captain Merrick. The mali had the packed picture ready for him.
‘You won’t forget the picture, will you? Will you help me up?’
They moved to the tonga. The footplate was very high. She felt his good arm take some of her weight. He had been a strong man. As she arrived under the canopy she was enclosed by the sadness of that. She stared down at him.
‘Does it hurt?’
After a moment he smiled. ‘A little.’
‘Poor boy,’ she said. Suddenly he seemed like a boy. A boy without bricks. ‘You were going to be decorated. Did it come through?’
‘Yes.’
‘An MC?’
‘A DSO for some reason.’
‘But that is very distinguished, congratulations. Have you been invested yet?’
‘Not yet. Next month I gather.’
‘Where? In Simla?’
He nodded. She smiled at him compassionately. Simla meant the Viceroy. She felt that this would please him particularly.
‘I’m sorry you missed the Laytons,’ she said again.
‘There’ll be other opportunities,’ he said. ‘Shall I tell the fellow to get up?’
‘If you would.’
He went to the horse’s head. The old man came round, mounted, untied the reins from the rail and picked his whip out of the stock.
‘Au revoir, Captain Merrick.’ She adjusted the lace veil and raised her hand.
The equipage moved slowly and creakily out of the compound of Rose Cottage. As it turned into Club road she saw the valley lay under a thin blanket of cloud and felt the first spots of a chill November rain.
She had not even noticed the sun go in.
The tonga gathered momentum. The old man began to apply the brake. Once or twice the horse slipped. Barbie could feel the weight of the trunk at her back: her years pressing on her, pushing her forward, pushing her downward. She pressed her feet hard against the curved footboard but her legs had little strength.
There is no God, not even on the road from Dibrapur. But then (she argued) I am taking the road to Dibrapur, not from it. The tonga-wallah shouted at the horse which had stumbled. ‘You mustn’t shout at him,’ she said, ‘he’s doing his best.’ For some reason she longed to have the picture back. The rain was coming down quite hard. As they passed the club there was a flurry of tongas coming up the hill and about to turn in there. The old man’s hands were knotted in the reins. One of the other wallahs shouted an insult.
‘Hold your tongue,’ Barbie shouted back. In turning her head she became more fully aware of the lace. Her head was a nest of butterflies. They were caught in the lank grey hair. She shut her eyes. Twenty stairs, including the landing floor. She began to sing. ‘I’ve seen a deal of gaiety throughout my noisy life.’ She opened her eyes.
Behind the equipage a peculiar light glowed on and off; winter lightning. Something troubled her. The lightning brought it closer. It was Mildred’s face, eyes hooded, mouth turned down, quirked at the corners; glass held under chin in droop-wristed hands.
The horse slid, stumbled, righted itself. It raised its tail. There was a smell of stable. The horse stumbled again. The old man jerked the brake on harder. She thought she smelt burning. She glanced at him. His eyes at last were wide open. He looked at her for an instant before redirecting his own troubled gaze at the road ahead and at the trembling flanks of his old horse; and Mildred’s face was there again just for the split second it took for it to dissolve and reform and become the face of the man who regarded her, chin in hand, thoughtful and patient, so purposeful in his desire for her soul that he had thrown away Edwina’s.
She began to tremble. She pressed with all her strength against the footboard. Below, Pankot lay shrouded by the mist of the winter rain which had left its snow on the summits. They were passing the golf-course. People were running for cover under coloured umbrellas.
*
Sometimes although very rarely, these cold showers – penetrating the warmth of a Pankot November day – troubled the atmosphere and produced an imbalance, a rogue element of electric mischief that shattered the silence like a child bursting a blown-up paper bag containing flashes of paper fire.
There was just such an explosion now, as the rickety old tonga entered the steepest part of Club road. It blared across the valley, jerking alive the unliveliest members of the club, comfortably cushioned in upholstered wicker, and was accompanied by the brightest
amalgam of blue and yellow light ever seen in the region: an alert such as even the combined rifles of Pankot and its tribal hills could not have achieved by sustained fusillade.
The horse screamed; its eyes rolled; it reared, thrashing the space between its hooves and the greasy tarmac and then achieved both gravity and momentum, dragging and rocking the high-wheeled trap with its load of missionary relics.
Why! It is my dream! Barbie thought, hanging on to the struts with both hands, shutting her eyes to contain the blessing of it. Her hair flew long and black and she was a child dancing spinning down Lucknow road and racing up the stairs and holding the pincushion high to her mother who held her black bombasine sides laughing to hear her father sing it:
I’ve seen a deal of gaiety throughout my noisy life,
With all my grand accomplishments I ne’er could get a wife.
The thing I most excel in is the PRFG game, a noise all night,
In bed all day, and swimming in champagne.
For Champagne Charlie is my name,
Champagne Charlie is my name,
Good for any game at night my boys,
Good for any game at night my boys,
Champagne Charlie is my name
Champagne Charlie is my name
Good for any game at night boys,
Who’ll come and join me in a spree.
On the long downhill sweep the equipage gathered speed, out of control of the crazed horse. The wheel spokes span counter to the rims. Sparks from the burning brake and spray from the wet surface formed bow-wave and wake.
She opened her eyes and saw the toy-like happy danger of human life on earth, which was an apotheosis of a kind, and she knew that God had shone his light on her at last by casting first the shadow of the prince of darkness across her feet.
Careless of the shawl of butterflies she reached for the reins to help the old man resist the gadarene pull of the four horses. He tore at the monstrous membrane that blinded him and which blinded Barbie too like a great light followed by a giant explosion, a display of pyrotechnics that put the old November Crystal Palace shows to shame.