by Paul Scott
Ah! she said, falling endlessly like Lucifer but without Lucifer’s pride and not, she trusted, to his eventual destination. My eyeballs melt, my shadow is as hot as a cinder – I have been through Hell and come out again by God’s Mercy. Now everything is cool again. The rain falls on the dead butterflies on my face. One does not casually let go. One keeps up if one can and cherishes those possessions which mark one’s progress through this world of joy and sorrow.
*
I remember (Sarah said) Clarissa Peplow telling me how Barbie suddenly marched into the rectory bungalow covered in mud and blood but still on her feet and said, ‘I’m afraid there’s been some trouble at the junction. Perhaps someone would kindly deal with it. I have seen the Devil. Have you a spade?’
The driver survived too. But the horse had to be shot.
Coda
Lines from the Hospital of the Samaritan Mission of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy.
Ranpur. December 1944 – August 1945
‘Good morning, Edwina,’ Sister Mary Thomas More said. She had bad teeth. She smelt of garlic and of galloping corruption. ‘Or are we Barbie, today? What are we looking at?’
Miss Batchelor wrote on the pad: The birds.
‘I see no birds, Edwina. Aren’t we speaking today, either? Is it a day of silence?’
Miss Batchelor wrote: It is the same as all days.
‘Not all days can be the same. There is the one which we all await and ought to fear.’
Miss Batchelor wrote: Bugger off. Or bring me a spade. Suit yourself.
After Sister Mary Thomas More had pursed her crypt-like lips, Miss Batchelor added a postscript: And bugger the Pope.
There was bread and water.
It was the only food she liked. It was clean.
*
Sarah said, ‘Barbie? Barbie? Don’t you know me?’
Miss Batchelor could not hold the pencil because she could not see it and both her hands had been severed. When Sarah had gone they took away her shoes because of the tramping sound.
*
‘Good morning, Edwina. Or is it Barbie? You don’t know me. My name is Eustacia de Souza. I’m new. I mean I visit. You’re my first. You must tell me all about yourself otherwise I shan’t know what to do to help, shall I, and Mother Superior will be upset.’
Miss Batchelor wrote: You may tell me about the birds.
Miss Batchelor liked the look of Eustacia de Souza. Eustacia de Souza was as black as your hat, several shades blacker than Sister Mary Thomas More. Eustacia de Souza was not a nun.
Miss Batchelor added to her note: My name is Barbara, not Edwina. I am under a vow of silence.
‘I understand, dear. At least I understand that part. I’m not sure I understand about the birds. Which birds do you mean?’
Miss Batchelor pointed through the barred window. Eustacia put on her glasses and peered.
‘I can’t see any birds, dear, apart from a few crows. You can’t mean crows, can you? India’s full of bloody crows.’
Miss Batchelor drew a picture of the horizon and a middle distance. She sketched a point of reference. A minaret.
‘Oh, a heathen thing.’
Miss Batchelor shook her head. She struck the minaret through with her pencil and then drew a line and a ring. And made angular strokes, playfully. Like birds flying.
‘Just a moment, dear.’
Eustacia clung to the bars like a helpful monkey. She was very ugly. Her bottom stuck out of a print artificial silk dress. She had white shoes and high heels. She stank under the armpits but it was the stink of hope.
‘I don’t actually see any birds there, Barbara dear. Are you sure they’re still there?’
Miss Batchelor looked. She wrote: No – but they often are.
Eustacia sat on the spare stool and smoked and talked. About peculiar things. ‘We’ve got them in Mandalay, dear. We’ll be in Rangoon like a streak of piss before May’s out. Cast not a clout. Old Billy Slim could screw me any time he asked, dear. Better’n my husband. Small as he is I’d put the flags out for Billy any day.’ Eustacia frowned. ‘Have you ever thought about length, dear?’
She did not look as if she required an answer. She looked at Miss Batchelor who sat contained by her dignity and desire.
‘Do you have the least bloody idea what I’m talking about, love? Do you know where this is, dear, I mean what town for God’s sake?’
Miss Batchelor wrote: Ranpur, looking west.
Eustacia de Souza smiled and nodded. Then frowned again. ‘West?’ she said. She looked. She nodded. She smiled very wide. ‘That’s where it is,’ she said. Miss Batchelor was reminded of a melon. She felt thirsty.
She wrote: You must go now. It is the dangerous hour.
Mrs de Souza’s face turned a nasty purple. When she had gone Miss Batchelor broke the tea-cups and waited for the relief of cold water and winding-sheet. She screamed and struggled because that was the way Sister Mary Thomas More liked it. At the end the nun’s coif was limp.
*
The landscape had changed because the light had altered. It was very hot. She wrote: Calendar. They brought her one. It said June 6th. She destroyed it. Next day they brought her another because Father Patrick was visiting. It said June 7th, 1945. She put it on her bedside table, and when Father Patrick had gone, under her mattress. But they did not take it away.
*
‘How are you, Barbie?’ the girl with the fair helmet of hair said.
The calendar said, June 30th, 1945. She wrote: I am in good health.
‘Is there anything you want?’
She wrote: Birds.
‘Birds?’
She wrote at length:
From the window, beyond the minaret, there are birds. Smudges in the sky. Not necessarily now. But there are birds there often. You can hardly see them but they circle, as though there is a nest there. There is a hill. Trees, I think.
She watched the girl reading the note. She put out her hand to touch her. The girl looked momentarily startled. Miss Batchelor withdrew her hand not wishing to frighten her. But the girl then reached out and held her.
‘It’s all right, Barbie. Let’s look at the birds.’
They went together to the barred window.
Miss Batchelor tried to articulate. Her throat rattled.
‘It’s all right, Barbie,’ the girl with the fair helmet of hair said. ‘I understand. Where now, beyond the minaret?’
Together they watched. Distantly where the land folded there was a haze. Above it, birds.
‘Yes, I see. I don’t know why they’re there. I’ll find out. They must be quite big birds, mustn’t they?’
Miss Batchelor nodded. She was proud of her birds.
She wrote to the girl: Do you live in Ranpur?
The girl said, ‘No, in Pankot, at Rose Cottage. I’m only in Ranpur for two days. I’m going to Bombay to meet my father.’
Miss Batchelor held the girl’s hand. She felt that she had to say something important but could not remember what.
*
The girl came the following morning. She said, ‘The birds belong to the towers of silence. For the Ranpur Parsees.’
Then she wrote it down on Miss Batchelor’s pad as if she thought Miss Batchelor might forget it.
Miss Batchelor wrote: Yes, I see, Vultures. Thank you.
She looked round the room. She shook her head. She wrote: I have nothing to give you in exchange. Not even a rose.
For some reason the girl put her arms round Miss Batchelor and cried.
‘Oh, Barbie,’ she said, ‘don’t you remember anything?’
She nodded. She remembered a great deal. But was unable to say what it was. The birds had picked the words clean.
*
Often now she was left alone. Sister Mary Thomas More had used the word incorrigible. She sat at the window watching through narrowed hungry eyes the birds that fed on the dead bodies of the Parsees. At night she blew dandelion clocks and continued to blow th
em long after they had become bereft, deprived. To blow them to the bone was the one sure way she now had of sleeping, sure in the Lord and the resurrection and the spade.
A young Madrassi nun, observing her thus, and thinking old Miss Batchelor’s hour had come, ran out into the darkling intermittently lit medieval corridor and brought the stark night-sister, who, standing in the traditional pose, with shriven fingers on patient’s pulse, and uncommitted eyes, merely firmed her lips in imitation of the daylight brides, and then made a high mark on the bed-bottom board that charted the old missionary’s journey across the hilly country of exodus.
Asleep, Barbie no longer dreamed. Her dreams were all in daylight. Do not pity her. She had had a good life. It had its comic elements. Its scattered relics had not been and now can never all be retrieved; but some of them were blessed by the good intentions that created them.
One day after such a dreamless sleep, she woke, rose, knelt, prayed, splashed water on her parchment face from the rose-patterned bowl that sat like one half of a gigantic egg in an ostrich-size hole in a crazy marble top, dressed, had breakfast and marked off the calendar of the fair-haired girl’s absence.
It was August 6th, 1945.
The date meant nothing to her. No date did. The calendar was a mathematical progression with arbitrary surprises.
She took her seat at the barred window. Today it was raining. She could not see the birds. But imagined their feathers sheened by emerald and indigo lights. She turned away and rose from the stool. And felt the final nausea enter the room.
She stood, swaying slightly, in the ragged heliotrope costume which was stained by egg and accidents with soup, and then holding her naked throat, padded slippered to the secure refuge of her bed and sat, leaning her shoulder casually against the iron head.
She strained at the rusted mechanism of her voice and heard its failing vibrations in her caved-in chest.
‘I am not ill, Thou art not ill. He, She or It is not ill. We are not ill, You are not ill, They are all well. Therefore . . . ’
She raised a questioning or admonitory finger, commanding just a short moment of silence for the tiny anticipated sound: the echo of her own life.
They found her thus, eternally alert, in sudden sunshine, her shadow burnt into the wall behind her as if by some distant but terrible fire.
Appendix
‘I find myself uncertain which of two recent events – the election of a socialist government in London and the destruction of Hiroshima by a single atomic bomb – will have the profounder effect on India’s future.’
Extract from a letter dated in August 1945 from Mr Mohammed Ali Kasim to Mr Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
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Copyright © Paul Scott 1971
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First published in the United Kingdom in 1971 by William Heinemann
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