Staying On: A Novel (Phoenix Fiction)

by Paul Scott

  “Okay, we’re in business,” Ibrahim said.

  By midday the machine was clean, bright and slightly oiled and Joseph without a word trundled it into the compound of The Lodge and set it down on the grass. One push proved that the grass was too long for the way the machine was set. He had brought a spanner from the shed and now bent to adjust the blades. He adjusted them several times before the mower was running smoothly and quietly. Grass sprayed from the blades like a green fountain leaving beneath a fourteen-inch wide strip of yellowing turf. Joseph knelt to inspect this strip, smoothing his hand over it, then gathering a handful of cuttings to inspect them.

  Ibrahim left him to it. It was nearly time to collect the trays for Sahib’s and Memsahib’s lunch. He kicked off his chappals and climbed up to the verandah. The Sahib was awake but not looking at Joseph. The delightful purring sound of the mower beginning the job of cutting the lawn did not seem to be reaching him. Neither was it reaching Memsahib who was inside at her escritoire writing more letters. It was still apparently reaching neither of them when he brought the trays and Joseph was still hard at work. Ignoring the boy he went to get his own midday meal. When he returned to collect the trays the sound of the mower was no longer to be heard. The boy must have given up and, like the old mali, looked for a place to get in some sack-time.

  But the boy was, after all, still hard at work, sweeping the cuttings from the section he’d mown and gathering them into neat piles. Looking forward to some sack-time himself, Ibrahim nevertheless squatted down in his favourite place of observation. Memsahib was in bed asleep and Sahib was dozing in his chair. Ibrahim watched the boy scoop the cuttings into a piece of sacking and cart them off somewhere. He watched him go back and forth and presently, through heavy eyelids, watched him begin prodding the shorn grass with a fork. Whatever did he think he was doing? Prodding the lawn with a fork when only a small section of it had been cut?

  He waited until Joseph looked in his direction and then beckoned him over. He had to do this twice before the boy got the message. He speared the fork into the turf and came across. Joseph went behind the bungalow and waited for him.

  “Why are you prodding the grass with the fork?”

  Close-to he saw that Joseph was drenched with sweat.

  “To make breathe.”

  “You are telling me grass breathes?”

  “All living things breathe.”

  Ibrahim’s heart was touched. The boy himself had scarcely any breath.

  “Come, you have done enough for a while. You’d like a cuppachar?”

  Chapter Five

  THAT EVENING over a meal Minnie had cooked for them Ibrahim told Joseph all he felt it necessary for the young mali to know: that the old mali had gone to work at the Shiraz, that Mrs Bhoolabhoy was a difficult woman it was best to keep away from; that the English Sahib had not been well and might not speak to him but that if he did he should say that Mr Bhoolabhoy had asked him to put the garden straight. Meanwhile he was to take orders only from Ibrahim. The Sahib and Memsahib had been pukka-log in the days of the raj, had been in India for forty years and although still pukka they were often very peculiar, like most old people. Sometimes they did not know what time of day it was.

  “They are not having clock?” Joseph asked.

  “They have three clocks. One in the kitchen, one in the living-room and one in the bedroom. They each have a wristwatch. I also have a wristwatch, made in Switzerland, shockproof, waterproof, jewelled movement, purchased in Oxford Street, London, Yookay. When you say people aren’t knowing what time of day it is it is an English way of saying they are a bit cracked.” Ibrahim tapped his forehead.

  “Sahib and Memsahib are pagal?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Have they been to the sisters?”

  “It is a different kind of pagal. English kind.”

  “You have been foreign, Ibrahim?”

  “I am England-Returned.”

  “Ah.” A pause. “‘Are the gardens in England beautiful? They say they are the most beautiful gardens in the world. I should like to work in such gardens.”

  “You wish to go foreign?”

  “To see and work in such gardens, yes. Hyde Park. Sinjames. Kew. Ennismore.”

  “Ennismore?”

  “One of the sisters is writing to a lady living in these gardens. I am posting the letters. She helped me to read the envelopes. But it was very difficult for me.”

  “If you work hard in this garden, if you give satisfaction, who knows what will come of it, Joseph? You might become regular employee, get good pay, save up. This is what my brother-in-law did. He was bearer to an officer-sahib in Mirat. Bengali officer.” Ibrahim paused to hawk and spit. “Also he married my elder sister. Then he went foreign. He was waiter in a big restaurant in London. Getting many tips because a well-trained man, son of man like my own father who was personal bearer to Colonel Moxon-Greife, from the time Colonel Moxon-Greife was only Captain Moxon-Greife, right until Colonel Sahib and Colonel Memsahib went home. But that is another story. I was telling you about my brother-in-law, making many tips, saving, saving.”

  “To buy own restaurant?”

  ‘No, to buy shop, also to send money to my sister. In shop he is working very hard and making good profits, so then buying house big enough for sub-letting. You understand sub-letting?” Joseph shook his head. “Big house, many rooms, accommodation for many people. All Indians. All living Finsbury Park.”

  “Ah,” Joseph said again. “Park.”

  “So when he is a prosperous man he sends for his wife my sister. So then she is going foreign too and I go foreign with her to guard her on the long journey and to see brother-in-law again and all his many relations who also had gone foreign.”

  “Tell me about Finsbury Park, Ibrahim.”

  “Fins-burry, not Fintzbri. About Finsbury Park there is nothing to tell. Apart from the maidan it is all shops and houses and too much of traffic. I did not go foreign to look at the maidan. I did not go foreign to become shopkeeper. I went foreign to guard my sister and for the experience. Experience is more valuable than money. Here you will be getting a lot of experience. Also food and shelter. If all goes well, even a little money.”

  Ibrahim waited. An intelligent boy would ask: How much? At least, a smart boy would. So far, though, Joseph had struck him as a boy who was intelligent enough about the things that interested him, but not smart. The next few seconds would show. If Joseph asked; How much? he would have to be watched. And, clearly, he was puzzling a question out.

  “Ibrahim,” he said at last, “will all go well if I do the work well?”

  “That is a good question. I am glad you have asked it. The answer is, not necessarily. I have always done my own work to the best of my ability. But often I get the push.”

  “Push?”

  “The push. Get pushed out. Chucked out. Sacked. It can happen any day.”

  “But you are still here,” Joseph said, after considering the situation.

  “There is a thing called re-instatement.”

  Joseph frowned, trying to concentrate.

  “Put it this way, Joseph-bhai,” Ibrahim murmured because he had caught a glimpse of Minnie’s shadow and knew she was listening in to this man-talk. “If it is a day when the Sahib does not know what time of day it is, he may say, Ibrahim, bugger-off, let me see no more of you. You are sacked, fired, given push. So I shrug, I say, ‘If God so wills.’ Then I wait for Memsahib to return. I say, Memsahib, I am leaving. It is Sahib’s hukm. So she goes to him and says, ‘Tusker, how can we manage without Ibrahim?’ To her also he says bugger-off.”

  “What is this buggeroff?”

  “It is a very old English phrase meaning jeldi jao. Likewise piss-off. These are sacred phrases, Joseph, never to be used by you or me when speaking to Sahib-log but I will teach you some of them.”

  Joseph nodded his head.

  “So I bugger-off. But that night there is no cocoa to warm their bones and lull th
em rockabye to sleep. And in the morning there is no chota hazri to wake them up, no porridge to set them up for a cold winter day. I am not making it, Memsahib is not making it because although she has not buggered-off in one sense she has in another. Presently Sahib may be making it, being stubborn, but when he makes it it is no bloody good because of that shaitan of a stove, so soon he comes looking for me. In my quarters he finds all my things gone. So he comes looking for me here at Minnie’s. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asks. ‘Waiting for Pay,’ I say. ‘Why should I pay you when you are not doing your bloody work?’ he asks. So then I know I am reinstated. If sacked by Memsahib then it is not so easy. Being a woman she can brew tea and cook porridge better. Two or three days may go by before Sahib again comes looking. ‘Memsahib has burnt her hand,’ he says. Some such excuse.”

  The boy nodded again. Ibrahim lit a Charminar. It was satisfactorily established that Joseph neither smoked nor drank alcohol. His appetite had been lustier than expected, though. And Minnie had been very flattered by the way her food had been scoffed. (A point to watch. Joseph was a good-looking boy.)

  “Ibrahim,” he said, “What happens if you are pushed by both Sahib and Memsahib?”

  “Given push, not pushed. Get idiom right.”

  “What happens if you are given push by Sahib and Memsahib at one and the same time?”

  Ibrahim looked at him thoughtfully. He said, “Suddenly you are a philosopher as well as a gardener? You are entering realm of metaphysics? Joseph Einstein is it? Versed in the theory of time and relativity? Haven’t I just made it plain that Sahib and Memsahib are always at loggerheads and that sometimes they do not even know what time of day it is, even in Pankot?”

  “But Ibrahim, this is what puzzles me. Supposing they neither of them know what time of day it is on the same day and forget to be at loggerheads and push you together? Who then makes the porridge?”

  “Not you, Joseph,” Ibrahim said quickly, scenting a danger. “If I am given the sack you are also sacked. I am not asking you to make porridge, only to cut the grass and tend the canna lilies. You are not a Smalley-Sahib boy, you are Ibrahim’s boy. You are my boy.”

  Joseph looked at the floor, on which they were squatting round the remains of their meal. Presently Minnie, who was eating her own supper behind the curtain that separated one small room from another, shouted:

  “So now in your old age you are wanting a boy.”

  “What nonsense are you talking?” he shouted back.

  “You call it nonsense?” she cried. “When clear for all the world to hear you tell him he is your boy?”

  “All the world? Suddenly you are all the world? One world, one big ear working, one mind not working?” Pause. “Take no notice, Joseph. She is annoyed with me because I am sitting here talking to you instead of telling her the meal must have been cooked in Paradise. But I am talking to you as a father, Joseph. Malum?”

  Joseph glanced up. The eyes were still sombre, the look guarded.

  “Not a Father. Not a Brother. Not orphan-school type teacher wallah,” he added hastily, inspired to intuit something from the boy’s manner. “Pukka father. Father of son. Also Employer. By arrangement with Bhoolabhoy Sahib.”

  Joseph’s eyes cleared. He thought for a while and then said, “In a week or two, Ibrahim, grass cuttings making good compost if kept well-watered. In hot weather coming, very good to make burra canna-lilies. Strew compost among lilies, so keep moisture in earth. Canna lilies then growing much tall and beautiful. Will that be doing well?”

  Again Ibrahim waited for the subject of How Much to come up. But it didn’t. He said, “It will be doing well, Joseph-bhai. The Sahib is very fond of the canna lilies.”

  . . .

  It took Joseph six days to cut the grass section by section, carry the cuttings away to his compost heap in the rear compound and spear each mown section with the garden fork. Sometimes, warned by Minnie that Mrs Bhoolabhoy was in a bad way that morning, Ibrahim made sure that the boy did something quiet. But to be told not to mow did not seem to worry him. He was a methodical worker. There was always something he could find to do. On the seventh day instead of resting he thoroughly cleaned the machine, sharpened and lowered the blades and then traced out parallel swathes on what was again looking like a lawn. He watered it and then began on the edges with the shears.

  Midway through this seventh day Tusker decided he was well enough to take a walk. Towards the end of February the sun in Pankot is quite hot, but the air is still brisk. Tusker wound one of Lucy’s knitted scarves round his neck, took stick in one hand and Lucy-Mem in the other and descended the verandah steps. Summoned, Bloxsaw slowly followed them along the path to the side entrance. They did not look at Joseph and Joseph did not look at them. When they came back an hour later the only member of the trio to take notice of Joseph was the fool of a dog who went barking and snapping at him as if he were an intruder never seen before.

  “Heel, sir!” Tusker shouted. “Heel, sir!” and banged the stick on the gravel path while Memsahib entered The Lodge dissociating herself from this display of male masterfulness.

  Meanwhile Bloxsaw yapped and snapped and skittered round poor Joseph’s ankles. Joseph kept still. Suddenly the dog whined, tucked its tail between its legs and ran indoors yelping.

  Ibrahim observed this scene from a distance. Later he put the question. “What did you say to the dog, Joseph?”

  “Only I said, Bless You.”

  “Ah. That too is a sacred phrase. But I know a better one. You can use it when speaking to the dog. One day I will teach it to you.”

  . . .

  It was March the First.

  “The winds of March that make my heart a dancer,

  The telephone that rings, but who’s to answer?”

  In this month of March Lucy-Mem always played “These Foolish Things” on her gramophone, an ancient HMV radiogram which would only play 78s, which was neither here nor there because Lucy only had 78s, a veteran collection of records bought during the war from some of which the mere ghost of a sound came out, but it was a ghost Ibrahim loved to hear her conjure, which was something she now tended to do only when alone. Occasionally people like the Menektaras asked her to play an old Inkspot or an old Judy Garland, and then she would oblige. But Tusker always laughed, and the Menektaras found the records amusing too, which Ibrahim knew Lucy didn’t. The record she loved best, and Ibrahim knew she loved it best because she never played it for anyone but herself (although it was also played for him, listening on the verandah or in the kitchen) was Dinah Shore singing “Chloë”. Apart from the movies he shared with Memsahib her passion for the sort of music connected with those movies, and with the Moxon-Greife household where there had been a gramophone similar to Lucy-Mem’s and a pile of records similar to hers which they used to play when they had young people in who liked to dance after dinner and he had hidden himself near the verandah and watched and listened. When Memsahib played “Chloë” she always stood very still, with her eyes closed. Sometimes she played it several times over and from his listening place he would pause in his work and nod his head in time to the old tune. Oh, bumpa-bumpa-bumpa-bumpady-day-do. Bumpabumba bumpabumpadidaydoo. Oh through the black of night, I gotta be where you are. If it’s wrong or right, I gotta go where you are. I’ll roam through the dismal swamplands (bump), Searching for you. If you are lost there let me be there too.

  “What is worrying you, Ibrahim?” Minnie had asked him once after such a session and she came round at midnight.

  “Sadness of world,” he replied.

  . . .

  March the First this year was the day Tusker went out for the first time entirely on his own. Being the first of the month it was also accounts day for Memsahib and pay-day for Ibrahim. When Tusker had gone, accompanied by Bloxsaw, Ibrahim waited in the kitchen for the familiar sounds of Lucy-Mem opening her escritoire, then the drawer in which the metal cash-box was kept. Hearing both sounds he put the kettle on to make her the m
id-morning pot of coffee. He laced it as usual with Golconda brandy to put her in a good mood for the reckoning after which he would be summoned to answer questions, listen to her homily about the rising cost of living and the need to watch expenditure, and finally receive his monthly wage.

  On reckoning days, she was at her most formidable. Burra Memsahib assoluta. From his vantage point near the kitchen doorway he observed her meticulously controlled and studied act at the desk with admiration, also with some impatience and a delightful apprehension of the possibility of a row of the kind they both knew how to conduct if it developed.

  Initially, no words were exchanged except, “Coffee, Memsahib,” and “Thank you, Ibrahim, just leave it there.” He placed the tray within reach of her left hand. Her right hand never let go of the elegant black and silver ball-point with which she rechecked the totals of bills paid before entering them on the right-hand side of her housekeeping book. She used the left hand to pierce the bills on a spike and, intermittently, to pour the coffee and carry the cup to her pursed mouth. He noticed that she was able to add up a column of figures as quickly when sipping as when not sipping.

  Occasionally she made separate notes in a red memo book. She made these in shorthand, a form of lettering he recognized for what it was and regretted he had never learned. Today she was making fewer shorthand notes than usual. She was also having uncharacteristic trouble adding up. Had he overdone the brandy, this time? He waited until she had got her sums right then entered, coughed, and said, “More hot coffee, Memsahib?”