Staying On: A Novel (Phoenix Fiction)

by Paul Scott

  “We should write to Cooks,” Lucy suggested to Tusker after one such visitation (Mrs Desai and a lady from Virginia who called Lucy Honey), “and ask them to put us on the tourist itinerary. After the Taj Mahal, after the rock temples of Khajarao, after Elephanta, after Fatehpur Sikri, after the beach temple at Mahabalipuram and the Victoria Monument in Calcutta, the Smalleys of Pankot. We could make a packet, Tusker, especially if you wore your old topee and I could be discovered playing Mahjong. A little tableau-vivant. Ibrahim could take the money at the door and guard their shoes.”

  Tusker’s birthday buffets were more difficult to organize because he invariably said he wasn’t going to have one this year and couldn’t afford it and people would have to whistle for it and sod the lot of them. His habit of bad language dated from the day of his final retirement from the army in 1949 when he shook her to the core on his return home from the daftar for the last time, flung his cap on the floor and said, “Right that’s ******* that,” using a word Lucy could only think of as spelt in asterisks. A few hours later he shook her again by making love to her twice between lights out and reveille.

  As a lover Tusker had been something of a disappointment to her. Her mother had warned her that men were insatiable, especially in heating climates. Finding that on their short honeymoon, on the boat out, and on arrival in India, Tusker seemed satisfied by limiting his conjugal performances to Wednesdays and Saturdays (with an occasional matinée performance on the honeymoon) she had thought of her thin rail of a father with new respect since she had to assume that he was her mother’s only source of experience. After a while even Wednesdays began to fall off. She awaited the falling off of Saturdays too but this never came about. Tusker seemed to have been wound up in such a way that Saturday night was the night he rang.

  But then he was a methodical man. There was a drill for everything, even for this. Saturday nights were usually club nights and they usually got back to their quarters at half-past eleven. At midnight she climbed in under the massive white mosquito net that shrouded the large double bed of those early married days and switched off her light, leaving Tusker’s on. Ten minutes later he came out of the bathroom, climbed in on his side, switched the lamp off after ten minutes spent reading something of military significance, and settled. About five minutes later still his hand sought her waist. She breathed out heavily, as if her slumbers were only momentarily disturbed. His hand then moved to the mound of venus. She breathed in. He muttered something and heaved himself up and over on top. He smelt of the Bay Rum which he favoured as a hairdressing. She tried hard to get the erotic sense of this particular smell because often she needed every bit of help she could get. But in regard to Bay Rum the law of diminishing returns had set in long ago. Perhaps part of the trouble was that on their first coition she had been so ripe in anticipation that she may have misled him about the degree of attention he need pay her. She hadn’t noticed Bay Rum on that occasion.

  Subsequently he scarcely seemed to notice her at all. He went through the motions. Of these motions, so she had worked it out over the months and years, there was an average of thirty. His climax was not so much a climax as a sigh, after which he collapsed as if pole-axed, rolled away and slept.

  And so in the pale dark, and the stillness, a dark lightened by the white net, and a stillness punctuated by Tusker’s snores and the yelps of distant jackals, she had found herself remembering Toole and recreating him. She had been doing so ever since.

  Now Tusker had conked out.

  And was about to be 71.

  She would have all the bother of finding out whether he really meant it this time that he wasn’t going to have a birthday buffet. She usually allowed two to three weeks before his birthday before opening discussions. And so on Monday March 20 when she came back from the bazaar she was ready with the opening shot. But before she could open her mouth he said, “Who’s Mrs Guy Perron?”

  “I have no idea, Tusker. Why?”

  “You’ve got a letter from her, that’s all.”

  He handed her an airmail envelope.

  Chapter Seven

  WHEN SHE opened the letter she realized that Mrs Guy Perron was Sarah Layton. Dear Mrs Smalley, Sarah began. Of this formal opening Lucy approved. Although she had always called Sarah Sarah and Susan Susan, they being so many years her juniors, they had always addressed her properly (in the way she for years had called their mother Mrs Layton and not Mildred. She’d tried the Mildred once and been properly snubbed).

  “Dear Mrs Smalley, It was so good of you to write to me about Father’s death. He would have been so interested to hear you were still in Pankot. His death was not due to cancer and he was alert and active almost right to the end which came rather suddenly. It was mother who had cancer, I’m afraid.

  You are quite right, Teddie is Susan’s son by her first husband Teddie Bingham. Teddie is now a father himself, which is where ‘Boskie’ comes in, a little boy of three which is about the age Teddie was when you last saw him in Pankot. He and his family are in Washington just now, but I’ve written to Susan telling her of your kind letter and the interesting news about Minnie. She’ll no doubt tell Teddie next time she writes to him. She married for the third time a couple of years after we all came home. They live in Scotland. He’s a physician. Since their marriage she has been in good health and I think very happy and contented. Teddie has followed in his step-father’s footsteps by going into medicine. I’m sure he’ll recall Minnie because he has a vivid memory and used to astonish me with the clarity of his recollections of India, although some must have been helped out by the family photographs. There’s one taken in the garden of Commandant House at our farewell party in 1947, which includes you and Colonel Smalley. Perhaps you have a copy? If you have and you can still pick me out, the tall fair-haired man in civvies on my left is my husband Guy.

  Guy is an historian and has the chair in modern history at one of the new universities. Presently he’s on a sabbatical and we’re living at Combe Lodge. Normally we live in Falminster but rented the house there to a visiting American professor and his family last autumn and came down here so that Guy could work on his new book and I could look after father who found it lonely here after Mother died. Lance and Jane, as you imagined, are our children, but both are quite grown-up now and at Universities. We may continue permanently at Combe Lodge if Guy gets an appointment in London that seems to be on the cards. I’m not banking on it though. Academic life is as itinerant as the one we used to live in India, or nearly.

  You probably don’t recall Guy at all because you only met on that occasion when father was handing over at Commandant House. Minnie, in fact, probably recalls him as the young Englishman who turned up in Mirat in August ’47 just after Susan’s second husband, Colonel Merrick, had died. He was in the carriage with us on that awful journey to Ranpur when the train was stopped and people were killed. He had to go on to Delhi but came up to Pankot later to see how we all were before flying home, which is why he was at the farewell party. Actually he’d been in Pankot before, very briefly, in ’45, so he’s as interested as I am in anything you can tell us about it nowadays.

  I do hope Colonel Smalley is now well on the mend. I was sorry to hear he’d been badly under the weather. I still have the lovely sandalwood box he gave me when I stopped being a WAC(I) and gave up the daftar. (Incidentally, I’ve always thought of you both as Tusker and Lucy, so may I call you that after all these years?)

  Another reason for this letter is to tell you that I’ve given your address and telephone number to a very pleasant young man called David Turner, who was a student of Guy’s. He’s going out to India in April to lecture at various universities and collect material for a thesis. Ranpur is on his itinerary so we’d already suggested he should take a few days off and go up to Pankot to get some hill air. He flies to Delhi on April 10. He doesn’t start his main lectures until the universities reassemble in the wet weather but he’s keen to see as much as possible and also to go down int
o Bangladesh (as all young people seem to be). He’s been in India before and has friends in Calcutta. He wants to spend a month or so acclimatizing himself again and travelling around. He’s also interested in talking to English people who stayed on, and I know he’d love to meet you. He’s a very good amateur photographer incidentally and especially interested in old British gravestones which sounds awfully morbid to me, but I told him there are some family gravestones in Pankot (Muirs and Laytons) and he’s promised to bring back pictures if they’re still identifiable. I’m sure he’ll be in touch with you, probably towards the end of April, but knowing how casual young people are nowadays he may just turn up. But don’t worry. He’s not the kind of person you need to go to the least trouble over. Guy and I are awfully fond of him. I’ve told him about the new Shiraz and that Smith’s still exists. If there’s any small thing you’d like him to bring out from home please tell me and I’ll get it and give it to him. There’s just about time for me to hear from you before he leaves, so please don’t hesitate, I’ll send something to Minnie via David anyway. Meanwhile my thanks again for your very kind and most welcome letter. Please let us keep in touch. Kindest regards to you both. Sarah.”

  . . .

  From her escritoire Lucy could just see through the window the top of Tusker’s head which meant he was still settled and content in his chair. She was glad. She would not have liked to be interrupted and interrogated about the letter. It had both an ebullient and a disturbing effect on her. She read it through once more. Again it both raised her spirits and lowered them. It provoked a variety of emotions and she could not for the moment sort out one clearly from the other: delight in new contact, renewal of contact, envy of a life so free and open, nostalgia for Pankot as it had been.

  She put the letter down, took her spectacles off and realized that her heart was going very fast so that she sat still and breathed slowly and deeply and wondered whether she was going to have an attack of the kind Tusker had had.

  It came to her then that fundamentally she did not believe in Tusker’s recovery, in there being any firm foundation, any foundation at all, for accepting Dr Mitra’s assurances that another attack was not inevitable. She had merely been closing her mind to what at a deeper level of consciousness she knew had to be faced. In a year, perhaps sooner, she could be a widow.

  She would be alone. She would be alone in Pankot. She would be alone in a foreign country. There would be no one of her own kind, her own colour, no close friend by whom to be comforted or on whom she could rely for help and guidance. The question whether she would be virtually destitute was one that frightened her so much that even her sub-conscious mind had been keeping that fear buried deep. There were areas of Tusker’s affairs over which he had always presided like a jealous God and over which he still presided even though he must remember the time when she lost faith in his capacity to preside sensibly over anything.

  “What I must do,” she thought, “is go out to him now, regardless of the consequences, and say, Tusker, what is to happen to me if you die first?”

  But just then she heard him say, “Ha!” which meant he had found another passage to criticize in poor old Mr Maybrick’s charming little book on the history of Pankot, and that if she went out to say Tusker what is to happen to me etcetera she wouldn’t have the chance to open her mouth because he would start complaining about some tiny little error Mr Maybrick had made. Either that or he would be so absorbed (or pretending to be) that the vital question would be rewarded at best with no answer or at worst by some coarse counter-question such as What the bloody hell are you talking about?

  “Tusker and I do not truly communicate with one another any more,” she told the empty living room. “His silence is his silence and my loquacity is my loquacity but they amount to the same thing. I can’t hear what he is thinking and he does not hear what I’m saying. So we are cut off from one another, living separate lives under the same roof. Perhaps this is how it has always been between us but only become apparent in our old age.”

  Life might have been different if they had gone home when he retired from Smith, Brown & McKintosh in 1960. She had been weak and foolish not to insist, not to issue an utimatum. Bleak though England had seemed during the few weeks they’d spent there in 1950 by 1960 things had vastly improved by all accounts, although at the expense of a huge rise in the cost of living which, as old India hands on pension, priced them – so Tusker insisted – out of the home market.

  But that had been an excuse. Slowly it had been borne in on her since that Tusker had never intended to go home. It was as though he bore a grudge against his own country and countrymen, whereas if either of them was entitled to bear a grudge it was she, for the way she’d so often been treated by some of those awful women who had condescended and taken every nasty little advantage of her as a junior wife who was not in a position – no, not in a position – to tell them where they got off but instead, oh yes instead, under an obligation to bear their treatment meekly not just for Tusker’s sake but because a hierarchy was a hierarchy and a society without a clear stratification of duties and responsibilities and privileges was no society at all, which the Indians knew as well as anyone, let alone the British who had had the whole burden to bear and without whom India would just have fallen apart and nearly did in 1947 when the British handed over and the Indians started killing each other and would have fallen apart if Dickie Mount-batten hadn’t been backed up by men like Nehru who was an aristocrat, an old Harrovian and a thorough gentleman and by an army whose senior officers were mostly Sandhurst men and awfully reliable.

  There really wasn’t a single aspect of the nice civilized things in India that didn’t reflect something of British influence. Colonel Menektara had impeccable English manners, as did his wife who was in many ways as big a bitch as Mildred Layton had been, but this comforted Lucy since it indicated continuity of civilized behaviour, and as the wife of a retired colonel herself she was in a position to give delicately as good as she delicately got which meant that she and Coocoo Menektara understood one another perfectly.

  The new Indian army was a credit to the old. The men never failed to get to their feet at the club if you paused to say good evening. With such an army and with such a prime minister as Nehru’s daughter at the helm one need never fear a dictatorship of generals, such as they’d been forced to have in Pakistan.

  Nor could one anticipate the subversion of the peasantry who remained as they had presumably been from time immemorial: tough, self-reliant, hard-working, astute, shrewd and long-suffering. This was how the British had found them and had the sense to leave them although with access to all the advantages of western technology which upper class Indians were certainly proving themselves keen to understand and adopt for the benefit of the country as a whole.

  What filled her with anger, often, was the recollection that because of Tusker’s lack of ambition she herself had had to wait until the very end to rise to the position she had aspired to and longed for, the position of Colonel’s Lady. No sooner achieved, and the old hierarchy collapsed and the new one, the Indian one, took its place and in this one her position had been marginal and temporary and soon exchanged for that of, to be blunt, yes, to be blunt, box-wallah’s wife, mixing with other box-wallah’s wives in a world which had increasingly dismayed her because it was one which had brought her into contact with the emerging Indian middle class of wheelers and dealers who with their chicanery, their corrupt practices, their black money, their utter indifference to the state of the nation, their use of political power for personal gain were ruining the country or if not ruining it making it safe chiefly for themselves: a hierarchy within a hierarchy, with the Mrs Bhoolabhoys at its base and at its peak people like the Desais, who had been nothing, were now as rich as Croesus and marrying their daughter into the family of a minister who himself had become rich by putting a price on his department’s favours; or so she understood if she were to believe Tusker. But what of what Tusker said about any
thing was she to believe?

  The answer came as if whispered in her ear by a winged messenger who had been standing patiently for years waiting for the moment to deliver his message. Nothing. She could believe nothing Tusker said or did because nothing he said or did revealed continuity of thought, intention or action. He had become devious in spite of that combative forthright manner. This meant that she could no longer believe in Tusker. She had begun not to do so on the day the British left India and they had stayed on, on loan. His personality change really dated from then.

  She resumed her spectacles and said aloud, “I shan’t think about that today. I’ll think about it tomorrow.” But the magic formula for transformation and transmigration was not working today. The Lodge was not Tara. She found her attention divided between the letter from Sarah which needed a quick answer and the problems that Tusker’s personality changed had encumbered her with.

  Dear Sarah, she would begin—

  “Ha!” Tusker said again, banging another nail into Mr May-brick’s coffin.

  Dear Sarah (she would begin) So many thanks for your letter. (Without actually saying it’s the first time I’ve heard of a sandalwood box I don’t remember Tusker mentioning it or you showing it to me at the time). It was so nice to hear from you. This is just a hurried reply to say we shall be delighted to see your young friend David Turner here in Pankot. (I shan’t say anything to Tusker yet, he’ll only grumble and say something unkind about young Englishmen who can afford to swan around India no doubt at someone else’s expense probably the taxpayer’s, which is ridiculous when I tell you he’s prepared to pass the time of day with a dirty little English hippie whose begging is a disgrace to us all.) I’ll write more fully in a day or two. (But then you see I’m afraid Tusker has lost his sense of proportion and only seems to like English people who have dropped out.) I do hate to ask for such a silly little thing and on no account go to any trouble over it (just for little me though why you shouldn’t I don’t know, it’s not much to ask and you can’t rely on people like Mrs Desai who’s always going to and fro between Delhi, Zurich, London, Paris and New York and comes back loaded with stuff from the duty free shops and other stuff that if she doesn’t smuggle in must cost her a fortune at the customs not that she can’t afford it but she always seems to forget my little requests). But if young Mr Turner wouldn’t be most awfully embarrassed to have such an item in his luggage (he sounds to me as if nothing would embarrass him at all, I wonder how long he wears his hair?) and if you could obtain it easily, I mean locally, without going to the bother of a journey to Selfridges (which Mrs Blackshaw made such a fuss about having had to do) I really should appreciate enormously two dozen sachets of Martin and Williams’s Belle Madame Special Blue Rinse No. 3, which is the only thing that suits my stupid old hair and is virtually unobtainable here and I’m fast running out of the sachets Mrs Blackshaw kindly sent last year (which were held up in the customs and cost more in dues really than was worth the trouble because Tusker grumbled so much although he’d grumble if I stopped paying attention to my personal appearance and my hair is my only vanity)—