Staying On: A Novel (Phoenix Fiction)

by Paul Scott

  “Ha!” Tusker said again. Then he called, “Luce?”

  “Coming Tusker.”

  “Are you there, Luce?”

  “I’ve just said so.” She went out to the verandah.

  “Who was the last person buried at St John’s?” he asked.

  She thought for a while.

  “Mr Maybrick,” she said.

  “There you are! He’s got that wrong too. He says here it was old Mabel Layton.”

  She stared at him.

  “But Tusker, dear, I think he was buried after he’d written his little book.”

  He stared at her in retaliation. “Well for God’s sake, I’m not such a bloody fool as not to realize that.”

  It was a warm morning but wild irritation was bringing her out in goose-pimples. She had the urge to beat him over the head with A Short History of Pankot which she now wished she had never found hidden away on a dusty shelf in the club library and brought back for him.

  “Then what is your problem, Tusker?”

  “I don’t have a problem. It’s Maybrick’s problem. I beg your pardon. Was Maybrick’s problem. He says here, ‘With the interment in 1943 of Mabel Layton, the record of burials in this old churchyard ends and this chapter in the history of Pankot as it reveals itself to us through the headstones that mark the graves of British men and women who died far from home is closed.’”

  “That’s wrong,” Lucy said.

  “Well that’s what I just said.”

  “I don’t mean that. What I mean is that it was 1944 when Mabel died so she couldn’t have been interred in 1943, could she?”

  “In Maybrick’s book people can be buried any bloody time or not at all. He’s there, isn’t he? But according to his book he can’t be.”

  “She wasn’t supposed to be there either.”

  “Who wasn’t supposed to be what?”

  “Mabel Layton wasn’t supposed to be buried at St John’s. She wanted to be buried at St Luke’s in Ranpur next to her second husband, James Layton, ICS, John Layton’s father, but Mildred just shovelled her into the ground so as to be shot of her.”

  “What on earth are you talking about? I don’t know what you’re saying or what it’s got to do with old pissy-pants Maybrick.”

  “It has quite a lot to do with Pissy-Pants Maybrick, Tusker,” Lucy said levelly, “because it was Edgar Maybrick who went with Miss Batchelor to the mortuary only he didn’t go in to view the body because of his wife who had died, so Miss Batchelor went in alone to convince herself that Mabel was really dead and after that she went off her head and tried to stop Mildred burying Mabel at St John’s. She hadn’t believed Mabel was dead and had a bad conscience about having left her alone to spend the afternoon repairing Mr Maybrick’s Handel.”

  “His what?”

  “For his organ. It was coming apart. Perhaps it was his Bach.”

  “Sometimes you kill me, Luce,” Tusker said, helpless it seemed with mirth and wiping his eyes.

  “I am glad that I have some kind of positive effect on you, Tusker. It is at least proof that I am still alive and in possession of certain faculties. Among them for instance the faculty of provoking a response if only a response to me as an absurd person. But naturally I could not expect to be able to jog a memory so deeply buried in deliberate forgetfulness and wilful obfuscation.”

  “Obverse-what?”

  “Obfuscation. It is a word currently popular among critics of government. This morning I find it pertinent to you, Tusker. You obfuscate. You stupefy me. You bewilder me. I do not know where or what I am when I talk to you.”

  She clasped her hands under her chin the better to stop him interrupting. “And I do not know why you obfuscate. Presumably it’s because nothing is clear to you any more and you deplore the idea of things being clear to other people. You were born under the sign of Aries, which reminds me we must discuss your birthday, and you do not want to be left out because people born under this sign hate being left out of anything but are utterly selfish always trying to control and order other people about to suit themselves and going on doing it or trying to do it even when they seem to have lost their grip on reality but of course they are probably only pretending half the time to have lost their grip in order to attract sympathy and attention. It is typical of you to pretend to have found one error and at the same time overlook a real error – the fact that it was on June six nineteen forty-four which was the day of the landings in Normandy that Mabel Layton died on the verandah of Rose Cottage when there was no one in the bungalow except Susan because Miss Batchelor was having tea with Mr Maybrick and Susan went into premature labour as a result and after the baby was born she went off her head too and Minnie had to save the baby from being burned to death, which of course they tried to hush up but we all knew because you can never stop Indian servants gossiping. And Mildred never never forgave poor old Miss Batchelor for not being at Rose Cottage on the one day in years when there was some excuse for her being there at all and she told her to vacate and didn’t care that Barbie had nowhere to go, all Mildred was interested in was moving into Rose Cottage at last herself with Susan and Sarah, and you’re not going to tell me you don’t remember, and don’t remember Susan being rude to us at the Church and how you said later that her being rude was probably the first real sign that she was off her rocker and hadn’t recovered, but of course you were always making excuses for people like them and pretended not to notice what I had to put up with which I only did because it was my duty to do so although it was a very different matter when they’d all gone home, you were free with your criticisms then, Tusker. Take Rose Cottage. You knew I’d longed and longed to live there but after we’d moved in and the Laytons and all the other people had gone all you did was poke fun and complain about Mildred’s bad taste getting rid of the roses and making a tennis court. You poked fun at the Laytons even in front of Indians and were insensitive to the fact that very often the Indians were shocked and that I was embarrassed and am still embarrassed by the way you belittle things and people that belong to a part of your life you have decided is behind you. In Bombay you poked fun at the Indian officers you’d been working with who’d taken over the reins, you poked fun at them to all those box-wallahs. It is not an attractive trait Tusker, and it is too late for you to do anything about it, it seems to be part of your nature to attack, to denigrate and now to obfuscate, and I have lived with it too long to have the strength to do anything but regret it and to observe it as the reason why I have no friends, because all our friends are your friends, Tusker, not mine, and – yes, I will say it – they are all black and I want you to realize that it has been much on my mind recently that if you had not recovered from your attack I would have been alone here, alone, Tusker, and having to rely for human sympathy and moral support upon people who frankly do not care for me, not deeply, and for whom I do not deeply care either.”

  A pause.

  Tusker said, “You’re pissed, Luce.”

  “Which is another thing. I have noticed that you do not use words like that in front of Coocoo Menektara or Mrs Srinivasan, nor even in front of their husbands. You seem to reserve them for me, for Dr Mitra, for Ibrahim and for your bosom-chum Mr Bhoolabhoy. And I am not as you so crudely put it, pissed, but might be before the day is out. You call me to ask who was the last person to be buried at St John’s knowing perfectly well that Edgar Maybrick was entirely within his rights to say it was Mabel Layton, and that it would have been highly macabre for him to have nominated himself, even though he was the last person, and will ever remain so, because there is no more room.”

  “Yes there is. There’s a nice little space in the southwest corner. Enough for two if they dig deep enough.”

  She crossed her arms over her long-unclaimed bosom. Suddenly there was a grunting sound from the mower and then (was it?) a distant shriek of outrage from Mrs Bhoolabhoy. The symbolism did not escape her: two aspects of the grim reaper.

  “I am not concerned what you do wit
h me, Tusker, if I predecease you. You can sell me to Tata’s for soap, for all I care. But what I do with you if you predecease me is entirely my business. I shall probably float you down the Ganges on a raft woven of the paper in which you have all your life buried yourself, but not – you understand – so that you may drift out into the Bay of Bengal to become a speck of water and merge with the Absolute, but so that you may merge with the millions of tons of silt that are making the Hooghly river un-navigable and giving concern to the Public Works Department of the city of Calcutta. Have you decided what you want to do about your Birthday Buffet?”

  “Yes,” Tusker said. His eyes looked filmed over. His skin was blotchy. Perhaps another attack was imminent.

  “Then give me instructions.”

  “That’s soon done. Bugger the birthday buffet.”

  “This is your message to your friends? This is the way in which you wish me to convey letters of non-invitation to, say, Colonel and Mrs Menektara?”

  “I’ll dictate it if your bloody shorthand’s still up to it.”

  She nodded, gripped her beads. “Bugger is not a word Pitman’s taught me, but for subtlety of sound and elegance of outline the Pitman method has never been surpassed and I suspect your dictation would not find me at a loss. But it grieves me, Tusker, that in our old age you too should sneer at me for having once had to acquire a skill which I was proud to have acquired and of which I remained proud even when I realized that in India it marked me as a girl who had once had to work for a living. And it came in handy enough, didn’t it? Without it, the cost of discovering one had married a man without manly ambition might have proved insupportable. Every hour you spent hiding yourself behind a desk, Tusker, was paid for by me in little humiliations, dogsbodying for the wives of the men who profited from the work that flowed from your desk, your desks, your hundreds of desks, none of which any man who thought as much of his wife as he thought of his own peace of mind and comfort of body would have sat at for a moment once he realized that other men were enjoying the fruits of his work and their wives with them and his own wife suffering. It was you, Tusker, who made me a dogsbody because a role of dogsbody for yourself was the one you had chosen to play. But at least you might have gone on playing it and not begun to freak out the moment you left the army. People do not understand when they find an apparently mature man acting in an entirely different way from the one to which they are accustomed and what people do not understand they dislike or fear and they do not easily forgive the person who is the cause of these disagreeable emotions. I shall not raise the subject again and shall not discuss it further. I think I have made my feelings plain and in all the circumstances I should be grateful if you would be so kind as to make plain the position I should be in if you had another attack and did not survive, and instead of making absurd notes about poor Mr Maybrick’s inoffensive little book you made plain notes in plain terms about my financial position as it would be were I to find myself alone here and weeping amid the alien corn.”

  Tusker’s mouth hung open. Her heart was racing, but triumphantly. She had never stunned him into silence. His silence now was like the silence she had years ago imagined creating in a darkened theatre, one which would hold until after her exit when it would be shattered by prolonged applause, a deserved ovation: the kind she had dreamed of and might have got back in ’Pindi before the war when they did The Wind and the Rain, except that that hard grasping little bitch Dulcie Thompson got the part, not that there’d ever been any doubt that she would nor that she, Lucy, would end up in the prompt-corner as assistant stage manager to the incompetent Captain Starling, and anyway the part had never been auditioned for. Leading parts went automatically to Dulcie and you took your life in your hands if you prompted her during one of her Pauses or alternatively got chewn to a rag if you couldn’t tell the difference between a Pause and a Black-Out, which was virtually impossible because Dulcie’s addiction to Pauses was matched only by her susceptibility to Black-Outs which she covered by succumbing to her other addiction – business: business with a handkerchief or a handbag, unrehearsed business that ruined other actors’ concentration, even moving props that caused blackout for someone else a few minutes later when he found the prop not in its place.

  “I need a prop now,” Lucy thought. “Something to help me get off while Tusker’s mouth is still open.” But there was no prop. She would have to ad lib. “I don’t suppose, Tusker, that you even remember the time when Dulcie Thompson was ill on the fourth night of The Wind and the Rain and the GOC was coming and everyone was in despair and Major Grimshaw rang you and said as ASM I was also understudy and obviously knew the part backwards so would I do it and you said, no?”

  Tusker closed his mouth but still said nothing.

  “If you remember the incident at all no doubt you only remember me saying Oh Tusker thank you for getting me out of it I’d have been terrified but terrified – which I would have been but not of me making a mess of it but of making us conspicuous and putting Dulcie Thompson’s nose out of joint and so making things difficult at the daftar for you, with Colonel Thompson, because after all you knew of my interest in amateur dramatics before we were married and listened apparently so sympathetically to what I told you of my hopes, then, of doing a part, so what you said to Major Grimshaw was a lie, but in my silly little way I thought of it almost as a compliment because I thought you were worried that I’d act Dulcie Thompson into the ground, but I’m afraid it was simply another example of the way you have always deprived me, yes, deprived me, of the fullness of my life in order to support and sustain the smallness of your own. And there is no need to remind me, Tusker, that at the last moment Dulcie Thompson arrived anyway and without actually giving the performance of her carefully modulated, calculated, controlled and disgusting life created a sufficient enough impression to cause her husband to be elevated two months later to the rank of brigadier and to be posted abroad, during which time no doubt the GOC had it off with her in Ootacumund.”

  “Naini Thal,” Tusker said.

  “Ootacumund, or Naini Thal, it is neither here nor there.”

  “Don’t agree. It was definitely Naini Thal. And it wasn’t the GOC but that other general, old Trumpers. Ootacumund was the place she had it off with young Bobbie Beamish. Old Thompson divorced her and she became the Marchioness of Peacehaven and was last seen in Cairo at a party given by Henry Kissinger for Golda Meir.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Tusker. You’re making all this up. Dulcie Thompson died years ago.”

  “Luce, love, people like Dulcie Thompson never die.”

  “Which means you remember her.”

  “Oh, I remember Dulcie Thompson. Biggest knockers in ’Pindi.”

  He had deprived her of her scene.

  “I shall go for a walk,” she said.

  “You’ve been for a walk.”

  “Then I shall go for another. Is there anything you want from the bazaar?”

  “Nothing you can buy,” Tusker said.

  It was better not to inquire further into this.

  Chapter Eight

  BEFORE GOING out she rummaged in the bottom drawer of the chest in the bedroom among the old snapshots and photographs.

  They should, of course, be assembled properly in an album, Mr Turner, she thought, opening the first of her imaginary conversations with this as yet unknown young man who might turn out to be a sympathetic listener, but my husband caught me at it one day and said sticking snaps of one’s past life into albums is onanistic. I didn’t know what that meant but looked it up, so you’ll understand my reluctance to continue the good work. Ah, here’s the one Sarah mentioned. The Layton’s farewell party at Commandant House.

  She took the photograph over to the escritoire where she had left her spectacles.

  “Memsahib?”

  Ibrahim startled her.

  “What is it now?”

  “It is Monday, Memsahib.”

  “I know that. After all, yesterday was Sunday
.”

  “I book a seat at the movie?”

  “No. I don’t know. I’m busy at the moment.”

  “Bhoolabhoy Sahib not coming this evening?”

  ‘I have no idea.”

  “Memsahib ordering trays for lunch or going to the dining-room?”

  “I don’t know that either. Kindly stop interrogating me, Ibrahim. I don’t know what I shall be doing at lunch time or come to that for the rest of the day. I’m going out and I may stay out but if I elect to come back it doesn’t necessarily follow that I must be driven out again to see a picture I may not want to see simply because Colonel Sahib and Mr Bhoolabhoy propose to spend the evening knocking it back and gossiping like a couple of old women.”