Staying On: A Novel (Phoenix Fiction)

by Paul Scott

  But there I go rambling on. Please forgive me. I’m addressing the envelope to Miss Sarah Layton at Combe Lodge, the address in the notice, although I doubt you yourself live there or that Miss Layton is correct. I expect you married years ago and that one or more of the grandchildren mentioned are your own children. I do hope that you and Susan have had happy and fulfilled lives since you both went home and put India behind you.

  There is just one thing I ought to mention. I assume that Teddie may be Edward, Susan’s boy by her first marriage to poor Captain Bingham who was killed in Imphal. Teddie must be grown-up now, in fact nearly 30, I suppose. The point is his little ayah, Minnie, now works for the proprietor of this hotel, a Mrs Bhoolabhoy. Little Minnie (hardly little now!) wanted to work for me at Rose Cottage when she and her uncle Mahmoud got back to Pankot after accompanying you all to Bombay to see you off on the boat. She loved the bungalow and its memories, but I already had a woman servant and anyway Mahmoud insisted on their both going to Ranpur to the household your father had kindly recommended them to. Then of course Tusker and I went to Bombay. When we came back we found her working at the hotel, which was then still owned by old Mr Pillai, although managed by a new man called Bhoolabhoy. When we moved into the annexe she would have liked to work for me entirely but of course Tusker needed a male servant and one servant was the most we could afford and actually needed. A few years ago Mr Pillai died and this woman bought the place and then surprised us all by marrying Mr Bhoolabhoy. Anyway, Minnie has secure employment. Her uncle, your old bearer Mahmoud, died in his village soon after his retirement, which was why Minnie came back to Pankot. But I imagine your father knew this. I remember Minnie saying that Colonel Layton-Sahib had been very kind, keeping in touch with Mahmoud and sending him money. She said neither of them had been happy in Ranpur once the family your father recommended them to went abroad in some diplomatic post and had to leave them behind. She spoke very disparagingly of the new household they found work in. I can believe it because frankly servants are not often so well treated as they used to be and those who are old enough to remember how we treated them do seem very much to regret the change. We are fortunate in the man we have now. Of course, Minnie was very young when she was little Edward’s ayah and seems to have adjusted and runs to and fro for Mrs Bhoolabhoy as to the manner born. I shan’t say anything to her about her young charge of all those years ago until I hear from you that “Teddie” is one and the same – which I should so much like to do, Sarah, if ever you have a moment to spare. Please forgive this absurdly long letter, which was meant to be no longer than was necessary to convey my sympathy.

  With Love,

  Lucy (Smalley)

  PS. I hope not but fear that the reference to the Cancer Research Fund indicates that your father suffered from this terrible thing, as my own dear father did, whose illness too was described as short. It was all over in a month. Tusker and I were then down in Mahwar, in the early ’Thirties and I could scarcely believe it when my mother wrote from home to say he had gone. In those days of course they had none of the drugs that make this disease now a little easier for everyone to bear, easier for those who succumb to it and for those who simply have to watch and wait.

  . . .

  I have had rather a sad life, Lucy told herself, as she sealed the letter.

  First the twins had gone, her elder brothers, both killed in a motor accident on the Kingston By-Pass. Then her father. Then Mumsie, no doubt of a broken heart because the men of the house were no longer there and Lucy had never quite counted in that male-oriented household, and was anyway now beyond reach, in India, a place of which her mother had disapproved. “I’m told the climate is very heating,” Mumsie had said, wrapped in woollies against the persistent chill of the vicarage. Mumsie had disapproved of Tusker, too, although she had tried to disguise it, because he was a soldier serving his King. But anything Lucy did, anyone Lucy chose, anyone who chose Lucy, had to be disapproved of because she was only a girl and Mumsie hadn’t wanted another child after the twins, certainly not one of the female sex which was what she’d got.

  “Yes, from the beginning I had a sad life,” she repeated. “A life like a flower that has never really bloomed, but how many do?” She stuck a stamp on the envelope and decided to walk down to the post-box herself rather than entrust the letter to Ibrahim who would read the name and address and gossip like mad to everyone, including Minnie.

  Tusker was on the verandah at work on his notes. She had not inquired what these were. He had been a good boy the night before, actually in bed when she got back from the pictures, having made his own cocoa and left hers in the pot to rewarm. The level of the gin in the new bottle suggested restraint, unless Billy-Boy had brought his own bottle with him. She wondered whether the subject of the garden had come up. If so it had passed off amicably enough because Tusker had been in a good mood and was in a good mood this morning.

  “I’m going to the bazaar,” she said, “to get your pills, Tusker dear. Is there anything you want?”

  “No thanks, Luce.”

  “Then I’ll be off. Bloxsaw!”

  The animal groaned but obediently got to its feet and padded after her. The mali was tending the potted plants that flanked the gravel path.

  “Good morning, mali,” she said on the spur of the moment. The young man rose and touched his forehead. The dog kept its distance, sheltering behind her. She said, in her terrible Urdu, “To you, from me, for your work, many thanks are.”

  He lowered his eyes, touched his forehead again.

  “Come, Bloxsaw. Chalo.”

  Mali, of course, was as yet too young to be a Toole, she thought. But there is a Toole in him. (“Bloxsaw!”). The neck isn’t right, yet, but the eyes are promising. Devotion and challenge. Muni’s eyes had been the best eyes. Newman’s and McQueen’s eyes were different from Muni’s and from one another’s. But interesting. One needed an identikit to make the perfect Toole.

  “Bloxsaw!” She put the dog on the lead and addressed it thus: I must apologize, Mr Allnutt, at having really to insist that we go this way when all too obviously you are determined to go that way, but it is absolutely imperative, just as it is imperative that instead of lifting your leg at every tree we pass, and going off at a tangent, we go as quickly and directly as we can to Ghulab Singh’s the chemists so that I may purchase those few commodities essential to my husband’s health, I might say survival, do I make myself plain?

  “Yes, ma’am,” Bogie/Bloxsaw muttered, and pulled again on the rope (the lead) that dragged the boat in which she sat, shaded by her parasol, through the Afro-Indian swamp.

  . . .

  When Lucy had gone Tusker, instead of continuing the notes he was making about the library book (“A Short History of Pankot” by Edgar Maybrick, BA, LRAM. Privately Printed), interpolated the following passage:

  “Well, that proves it. The mali isn’t an hallucination, or if he is then Luce is even more hallucinated because she just spoke to him. Not that I’ve ever really thought he was an hallucination except for that minute or so when Billy-Boy first brought him into the compound and I wondered whether I’d actually died weeks ago that night on the loo and had since been having a sort of dreamtime all to myself. But it’s been interesting the way nobody has once mentioned the fellow to me. Originally I didn’t dare in case I actually was damn’ well seeing things. I mean even Bloxsaw ignored him until that day we came back from our walk and then he barked at him and suddenly turned tail, so I thought well dogs are odd, I mean they sometimes see things we don’t. And why has Billy-Boy never mentioned him? Obviously though it’s been some kind of plot to humour me and they’re waiting for me to show gratitude because I grumbled so much about there being no mali. I’ll be buggered if I say anything first. The young fellow’s got the garden up a treat though, unless I’m imagining that too, but I expect the Punjabi bitch will send me a bloody bill in which case she can whistle for it because I can always say, What mali? (NB, though, wait and se
e and say nowt.)”

  . . .

  He resumed his notes on the library book.

  “Old Maybrick was always a bit of a fool, but a harmless one, and I must say I admire the way he can write a 78 page monograph on the history of Pankot and refer to the Pankot Rifles only in one paragraph. Stuck up bloody regiment it was in our day. Thought the sun shone from its collective arse. The pinkest young subalterns on station gave themselves airs if they were Pankot Rifles blokes. They even condescended to the Area Commander. There was that one who ducked out of an appointment as aide to a general because the general was originally only a Gunner. Bloody fool him. Died in North Africa with the first battalion which old Layton later managed to get put into the bag to a man, or what was left of them. As a Mahwar Regiment chap I didn’t begin to rank with them at all, of course, not that I minded a bugger. I was never regimentminded anyway, especially after it was made plain I’d blotted my copybook by marrying at home without the CO’s approval. Approval! Great Scott, I was pushing thirty.

  Never forget his face when I got back from long home leave with Lucy in tow and said, Colonel, I have the honour to present my wife, her name’s Lucy. It used to be Lucy Little but it’s now Lucy Smalley, which seems a logical sort of progression don’t you think, sir? (Ha).

  Poor old Luce. She didn’t help matters when she told the Colonel’s lady that she’d been at Pitmans and her speeds were such and such and that the solicitor’s office where she worked was where we met. If old Luce’s dad had been a bishop it would have been okay, but he was only a vicar, a parish priest. It didn’t matter a damn to me. If it had I wouldn’t have married her. People used to think of me as a dull conventional sort of chap, but that was their problem, not mine. Mind you, I never did anything to disabuse them of the idea they’d got hold of that young Smalley was “safe”, a bit dim, but good with paper if not with people. It suited me well enough. Always did like paper, working things out on it, arranging things with it. The best job at battalion level was adjutant. I was acting adjutant when I went home on long leave that time. I was supposed to be appointed when I got back, and had told Luce as much. I never did work it out whether it was her, or the fact I’d married her without going through that bloody silly rigmarole of having her vetted, that persuaded him I’d be better out of the regiment altogether. Bit of both probably. He got rid of us by putting me up for a temporary job in one of those small princely Indian states which the Political Department was circularizing, and within the month Luce and I were off to Mudpore. I was never regimentally employed again. Didn’t care a fig. The Mudpore thing carried extra pay so I spun it out as long as I could. Can’t remember what I was called, something like Administrative Adviser to the Commander of the State Forces, but I remember the job clear enough: sorting out the balls-up the previous British attached officer had made and which led to a stampede of the Prince’s elephants. The clot had cut down their feed because he thought there was jiggery-pokery going on in the stables.

  What a joke. What a lark. Ought to have written my memoirs. Old Luce adored Mudpore. We had that bloody great bungalow practically in the grounds of the palace, the use of one of the Daimlers with a liveried chauffeur, and when we first met the Maharajah he had on all his paraphernalia and looked a regular bobby-dazzler, coat of silver thread, pearls festooned in his turban; and Luce said, This is the real India, Tusker. Only she didn’t call me Tusker because nobody did until later, when I’d got the elephants behaving properly again. Of course the Mahwars have always been nicknamed the Tuskers because of the insignia but I’m the only chap the nickname stuck to personally and permanently. A young punk of a subaltern once said I must be called Tusker because it took me as long to work out a problem as it took a pregnant cow-elephant to drop its calf, that’s to say twice as long as a member of the human race needs. Must say I gave him full marks for that one.

  He fancied Luce. You could see him working out how and when he could have it off with her. Joke was she seemed to have no idea what was in his mind. Bit dim about things of that sort, old Luce. This was in Ramnagar where we were after Mudpore and where she was the only white woman for miles around. He used to come in from the mofussil every Friday night, so regular that I called him Amami. He followed us to Lahore where we went next but went off her because Lahore was crammed with what he couldn’t get his mind off. In 1935 he blew his brains out in Quetta after being found in bed with a senior officer’s grass-widow. He blew them out at 2 o’clock one morning. An hour later the earthquake reduced the bungalow he blew them out in to rubble, so he could have saved himself the bother.

  We were in Quetta the year after the ’quake. Whenever we packed up to go to another station Luce used to describe it as setting out again on our little wanderings. People called her Little Me because she had this ridiculous habit of saying things like “There’ll just be the four of us, including Little Me,” or, “Oh how nice, is that just for Little Me?” So there we were, Tusker and Little Me. A boring couple, but useful. Luce never seemed to cotton on to the fact that people found us heavy-going. Knowing shorthand she was in demand on every woman’s committee that was going. She mistook it for popularity and was chuffed for days if one of the senior bitches complimented her on her minutes or called her Lucy instead of Mrs Smalley. As for me, I deliberately kept what nowadays they call a low profile. I wanted to be thought dull. Dull but thoroughly reliable at the desk-work officers usually affected to despise. I worked hard at getting a name as the man who could sort out other people’s balls-ups. I liked moving around. My majority came through in ’38. We could have gone home on leave next year but put it off and then it was too late because the war started. In 1940 the regiment asked to have me back. Not bloody likely. Knew how to short-circuit that sort of thing. Moved round more than ever before, then in September 1941 we came up here to Pankot to Area Headquarters. Took one look at it and I thought, nice scenery, good climate, this is where I’ll dig in for the duration or know the reason why. So set about making myself indispensable at the daftar, which meant making the job look more complicated that it was even after I’d sorted out the mess the previous fellow had made and could do it standing on my head. I was 40, still only a major. Had to wait another four years for a half-colonelcy, but didn’t care. Accommodation was short. Luce and I were billeted at Smith’s, a sitting-room and a bedroom, the ones Billy-Boy and that monster of a wife of his now live in. Luce always hankered after a bungalow of our own, but Smith’s was fine by me. It helped me merge unobtrusively with the background. My only ambition ever has been to survive as comfortably as possible.

  Old Maybrick doesn’t mention Smith’s at all. He’s got the date of the Church right but is out by a year over the installation of the organ, according to Billy-Boy, but then Maybrick only played the bloody thing. Maybrick was an enthusiast. Enthusiasm is the most ruinous thing I can think of.”

  . . .

  Tusker’s birthday was April 10, Lucy’s September 12. They had fallen into the habit of repaying station hospitality mainly by inviting people to what they called Birthday Buffet suppers. Lucy’s birthday buffet was less troublesome than Tusker’s because she simply went ahead with the arrangements, writing chits to people to whom they owed, warning Mr Bhoolabhoy and confirming the approximate number of guests expected. The number of guests was always approximate because sometimes people rang at the last moment to announce they had people staying and could they bring them along, or rang to say they’d been ordered to Delhi. This could be tiresome because the cook at Smith’s needed several days’ notice to arrange the catering, and once the order had been given and a per head price agreed with Mr Bhoolabhoy it was difficult to make changes.

  The other difficulty was that of trying to remember or find out who was veg and who was non-veg, how many were fruit-juice only people and how many ranked as what Tusker called certified alcoholics; but at least – now that the whole province was “wet” the liquor was easy to get, could be drunk in the open, and unused bottles returned to
Jalal-ud-Din’s. In Pankot there was not even a dry day, although there was one in Ranpur. The anomalies of the Indian drinking laws from province to province had always been too many for Lucy to grasp, but Tusker professed to be an expert, to be able to tell anyone who cared to inquire what obstacles had to be overcome to get a drink in any major Indian city you could name, to know where you could get beer ad lib but needed a permit for hard liquor, where what could be drunk in public or only in a permit room, which states were dry but had capitals as wet as a Sunday afternoon in Wales (as he put it), where your car might be stopped in transit from a wet to a dry area and searched, in which places a permit holder could buy his whole month’s ration in one go and in which the liquor shops were run by men he described as suffering from a touch of the Morarjidesais and allowed only one bottle a week.

  Tusker’s obsession with the liquor laws dated from the time he’d been in trouble with the police in Bombay. But Lucy preferred not to think about that because it was all part and parcel of what she called the débâcle and he’d begun to knock it back at half-past ten in the morning.

  For the past ten years a bottle of Carew’s gin a week and a monthly bottle of Golconda brandy, a dozen bottles of beer had been about all they could afford to have in the house, and a lot of it went on people who dropped in, as Indians tended to, especially if they had an American staying with them who had asked “Are there any old-style British around here?” and were brought along to see for themselves.