Staying On: A Novel (Phoenix Fiction)

by Paul Scott

The mower started up again.

  “And will you be so good as to tell your mali to stop that infernal noise? Mrs Bhoolabhoy is not the only one entitled to have nerves. I never said he should work every day. It seems to me he’s finding jobs for himself at my expense.”

  “Memsahib is no longer satisfied with Joseph?”

  “At the moment I’m not satisfied with anything or anybody. Tell him to stop. If things go on like this I shall have to start keeping a time-sheet, or rather you will have to start keeping one, showing the hours he’s worked and the work done, so that I can decide what is necessary and what is sheer exploitation.”

  “Exploitation, Memsahib?”

  “Exploitation! Of me!” Her voice had risen. Instinctively they both glanced at the window. “Of me,” she continued, sotto voce. “But I’m not a fool. I’m not to be exploited. I’m not to be led by the nose. Tell him to stop. Now.”

  Ibrahim went.

  She put her glasses on and considered the picture. She smiled. “Well, that’s gallant of you, Mr Turner, to recognize me. I scarcely recognize myself. But it’s a quarter of a century ago. If you recognize me you must know who this is. Yes, of course, Sarah. That’s Tusker. He’s lost a lot of weight since. And a lot of hair. A lot of everything, including today what I’d call most of what is left of his credibility. This, I think, must be Sarah’s husband, Mr Perron, or should I say Professor Perron?”

  The sound of mowing stopped.

  Peering closer at Mr Perron certain resonances came through, weakly at first, then strongly. “Yes, I do remember him, Mr Turner. He followed me home and for a night or two haunted our bedroom at Rose Cottage, I mean Tusker’s and mine, standing there in a corner in the dark, waiting for a snore from Tusker and a sign from me. He was the right height and the right breadth, perhaps a bit too tall, but his hair was fair and his eyes blue-grey. But he smiled too often. Look at him grinning here. He did not have the smouldering quality that is necessary in Toole and when he opened his mouth he talked himself right out of the part except physically, because Toole is rough of speech and hardly articulate. I remember Mr Perron being a disappointment to me, Mr Turner, because the back of his neck was the first thing I noticed, it was like the back of Toole’s neck, and I said to Sarah’s Aunt Fenny – that’s her, the rather stout woman, seated, with her arm round little Teddie – I said, Who is that young man? And she said oh, that’s Mr Perron (she must have said), who was with us in the carriage when the Hindus stopped the train and dragged Muslims out, he’s come up to see how we all are before flying home, come and meet him. Susan isn’t in the picture, Mr Turner, because she was in the nursing home again, getting over the shock of her second husband’s death and the shock of what happened on the train. And I confess that when I met your Mr Perron I thought: Are you going to be Susan’s third husband? She did rather run through them. I oughtn’t to tell tales out of school but it’s a long time ago now and I’m glad Sarah has found happiness, but in those days it was well-known in Pankot that Susan was always pinching her elder sister’s young men, but then she was a pretty vivacious little thing, though perhaps the vivacity was an early sign of hysteria. Sarah in those days was to put it plainly a bit dull from young men’s point of view, although a veritable brick so far as pulling her weight in the family was concerned. The mother drank, you know, I don’t mean embarrassingly, but she did have this tendency to start before anyone else and still be at it when they’d finished. But of course for a woman she was in the prime of life and had been without her husband for years. I expect you knew he’d been a prisoner of war in Germany. So one took that into consideration. There was never any unpleasantness and she was tireless in the work she had to do for the soldiers’ families. Her father was a Muir. GOC, Ranpur, early in the 20s. In a way the Laytons and the Muirs were Pankot. I’ll show you the graves of some of the forebears. Well, well, so it was Sarah Mr Perron had his eye on. I’m glad of that. There was a time when some of us became a bit worried about her. She sometimes gave this odd impression of not taking things seriously, I mean India, us in India, and I think that’s what put the young men off. There was even a moment when one wondered whether she was unsound in that respect. Sometimes she seemed to be laughing at us, and it suddenly occurs to me that this may have been why she got on well with Tusker when she worked for him at Area headquarters because if you listen to Tusker now you begin to suspect that he was laughing too because really he hasn’t a good word to say nowadays about anything connected with the past and this sometimes makes me feel, Mr Turner, that my whole life has been a lie, mere play-acting, and I am not at all sure, Mr Turner, if when you turn up and turn out to be self-reliant and young and buoyant and English and light-hearted and enthusiastic about your researches but look as if you will go home laughing at us like a drain that I shall be able to stand you, even though I yearn for you because simply by being here in this house you will be the catalyst I need to bring me back into my own white skin which day by day, week by week, month by month, year after year, I have felt to be increasingly incapable of containing me, let alone of acting as defensive armour. You don’t understand what I’m saying so let us pay our little visit to the cemetery where you can take your photographs and after that we could go up to Rose Cottage, or 12 Upper Club Road, as it’s really called, and ask Mrs Menektara for permission to take snaps of the old place as it is now, not changed much outside, but inside, oh dear dear me, a world of difference. She burns incense, you know, and the place is crammed with priceless carvings and statuettes that make it look as if they’ve raided a Hindu temple. It’s lit like a museum and it’s not easy to find a comfortable place to sit except on the verandah and in the dining-room, but sometimes when I lunch there I find some of the guests eating with their fingers which I know is traditional but I’m sure some of them do it because it’s now thought smart by the younger people, but oh it does put me off, and seems such a waste of all that lovely cutlery which has come from Liberty’s and is so incongruous when you know the chairs and tables have come from Heal’s and all the pictures on the walls are terribly modern, and lit, even in daytime.”

  A shadow fell.

  “What is it now, Ibrahim?”

  “Mali has stopped.”

  “Actually I’m not deaf. If you have nothing else to do this morning except hover you can go and fetch me a tonga to the side entrance.”

  “Memsahib is going to the club?”

  “Memsahib may indeed be going to the club.”

  “And having lunch there?”

  “Possibly. Just go, Ibrahim. Just bring the tonga. What is wrong with you this morning?”

  He put his hands behind his back.

  “Yesterday all was sunshine. Today all is gloomy. Memsahib much preoccupied, sorting out drawers. Sahib is now in a bad temper. Sahib and Memsahib not pulling on well together. This morning the house is not well settled on its feet. Cook reporting same applying at Bhoolabhoys. Ibrahim not knowing whether coming or going. Mali very dejected because grass grows and he is told to stop mowing, and make self scarce.”

  “What you say may be so. I don’t know what you expect me to do about it.”

  “It is a very funny picture,” he said after a moment. “Repeat showing, How To Murder Your Wife, starring Jack Lemmon. Memsahib much enjoyed last time round. Very popular film. Indian officers especially are liking it. Manager-sahib at cinema expecting full bookings. I bring tonga then go down to cinema and book memsahib’s ticket?”

  “Perhaps you’d better book two, Ibrahim. One for Burra Sahib and the other for Mr Bhoolabhoy. How To Murder Your Wife sounds more their sort of thing. Are you drunk?”

  “Memsahib must know that for Ibrahim alcohol is forbidden.”

  “The tonga, Ibrahim.”

  . . .

  It was a shamefully long time since either she or Tusker had been to church although her reasons were different from his. Tusker was not a believer. She had never grown out of the habit of belief acquired in childhood and at the ma
jor Christian festivals she had managed to overcome the disquiet she had begun to feel worshipping in a place where her pale face seemed to put her at a disadvantage.

  She felt conspicuous. She felt like someone who had never sought but had nevertheless achieved notoriety. She did not, she was sure, mind at all being preached to or blessed by a dark-skinned brother-in-Christ, nor kneeling in the presence of other such brethren, but at the level at which awareness of ambiguities and ambivalences existed she was conscious of them. It was like – as Phoebe Blackshaw had said after going to church with her once – being a black sheep in reverse exposure. Since the Blackshaws went home her own attendances had fallen off, and she had not gone to communion for years. As the tonga turned into Church road, going past the old rectory, now not a rectory but the home of Mr Thomas, the cinema manager, who had six children, she tried to work out precisely how long it had been since she last entered the little churchyard which in the days of the raj had each Sunday morning been such a social focal point, with all the tongas gathered outside waiting to take people home afterwards to their luncheon parties or to the club for cocktails and curry.

  “Wait here,” she told the tonga-wallah. When she went in through the old lychgate she paused under the arch. The recollections the gate aroused were not of her father’s gaunt suburban church but of the church in the village of Piers Cooney where long before she was born her father had had his first curacy, where later she and the twins, Mark and David, staying at Piers Cooney Hall for a fortnight three glorious summers in a row, had been driven to attend Sunday matins.

  “I must tell you about that, Mr Turner,” she said, sitting on the bench which she was sure she had never done before and was surprised to find herself doing now. She could not recall making the decision to sit but here she was doing so. “Forgive me, Mr Turner, this morning I am a little disorganized, a little disoriented. My mother’s name was Large. She was a poor relation of the people at the Hall. They employed her to look after their sickly son. She was a great woman for games in the open air. Her first name was Emily. Emily Large. My father’s names were Mathew Mark Luke Little. People’s names, like their lives, should not be targets for mockery, but I forgive you for smiling because you have connected Little and Large and Little to Smalley. I grant you it is funny. But it is not funny here under the arch of the lychgate with a view to the pathway through the green pastures of our dead who passed under this gate. Have you ever noticed, Mr Turner, that the grain in wood – as witness this seat – looks much the same wherever you find it? That a pebble is always a pebble, a blade of grass not to be mistaken for anything else, and that granted different intensities and degrees, depending where in the world you are, light falls here, there, indifferently, even with a kind of monotony, causing you no surprise other than the mild one of realizing that nature is not as inventive as you had supposed. The sound of the sea washing the beach at Juhu, north of Bombay, is the sound of the sea at Worthing or wherever. If you close your eyes, Mr Turner, there is no telling where you are.”

  She closed her eyes and bent her head. Some distance away the tonga wallah hawked and spat. Crows protested her occupation of the gateway. A wind sprang up, chilled by its journey from a source in the distant mountains, and then was gone, leaving a profound silence, interrupted (she realized) by the rhythmic sound of the coppersmith bird beating out its endless saucepans in the smithy of the great pine-clad hills in which Pankot rested two thousand feet or more above sea level.

  Snick-snick

  How strange, Mr Turner. What is that sound? It’s not the coppersmith. It reminds me of Saturdays in the summer at home, the sound that father made, cutting the hedge to the accompaniment of that other sound, click-cluck, which was the sound the twins made playing cricket on the vicarage lawn with their sleeves rolled up and smelling odd when you got close to them with the tray of lemonade mother made me squeeze and strain and take out to them. The only difference between them was that David had more freckles than Mark, otherwise they were identical twins and strangers got terribly confused. I’m afraid they often took advantage of that. They weren’t generous-natured boys. Sometimes they were very unkind to me but I didn’t dare complain – not after the time they poured green paint over my head and swore it was an accident which mother was inclined to believe, but not father who liked my pretty light brown hair and was so cross that for once he gave them each a terrible thrashing, or thought that was what he was giving them but I heard them sniggering afterwards, which they never did if Mother used the strap on them. They punished me though, by sending me to coventry for almost the rest of the summer holiday and if they referred to me at all it was as Tell-Tale or Baldy, because most of my hair had to be cut off, which mother did herself in a way that made me feel I deserved it and that it gave her pleasure to see me looking more like a boy than a girl. So most of those weeks I spent indoors, or hiding in the orchard, what we called the orchard, but it was only a few diseased old apple trees at the back of the vicarage garden, but I used to sit there listening to father clipping the hedges on a Saturday afternoon which was when he practised his sermon. Snick-Snick. Then click-cluck, the sound of the boys playing cricket and mother’s voice egging them on. She kept wicket. She had very large hands. But then she would wouldn’t she, with a name like that?

  Snick-Snick

  . . .

  She left the lychgate and set out on the path through the churchyard but suddenly stood arrested – not by the sound which, coming again, was clearly that made by a pair of shears, but by the appearance of the graves. A lot of grass had been trimmed and many of the headstones cleaned. Whoever was responsible for this was obviously even now at work, but invisible, presumably on the other side of the church, in the part of the yard where Mabel Layton was buried. Mabel herself had been a great gardener. Her crazy old companion, Miss Batchelor, had always said Mabel would never rest while she remained buried in the wrong place, in Pankot instead of down in Ranpur. But Mabel had remained buried. Or had she?

  Well let us not be silly, Lucy told herself, and set off again, taking the path that ran along the south side. Just as she reached the south door it opened and a figure emerged causing her nearly to jump out of her skin. She uttered a cry.

  Then: “Oh, what a fright you gave me, Mr Bhoolabhoy.”

  . . .

  Mr Bhoolaboy was himself in no condition for such a shock, particularly the shock of seeing Mrs Smalley, of whom he had just been thinking. Her sudden manifestation made him go weak at the knees for the second time that morning. Had he conjured her? But no. There she was, smiling at him now in her dignified ladylike way.

  There was a special corner in Mr Bhoolabhoy’s heart reserved for Lucy. His regard for her was of longstanding. It saddened him that she was no longer a regular member of the congregation. The sight of her upright and neatly dressed figure, her modest demeanour, the manner in which she attended and followed every phase of the service (as to the manner born, as it indeed she had been) had always reassured him about the fitness and decency and meaning of what they were all gathered together to do. When she and Tusker had first come to Pankot, in retirement, she had sometimes brought Tusker along and they had sat in the front pew. After Tusker stopped coming she, year by year, had sat farther and farther back, as if fading away. It had hurt him a bit, early on, but dimly he had begun to understand her reasons without being able quite to name them, and in any case self-effacement fitted so well the image he had of her as a real English lady of the old school, a lady who seldom raised her voice because she seldom had need. She had the gift of quietly commanding obedience from those who owed it to her. This did not of course include Tusker, whose manner with his wife sometimes puzzled Mr Bhoolabhoy but also interested him as an example of old English custom.

  It was always a pleasure to see her in the dining-room at Smith’s. Her presence made the place look less seedy. The same, at a different level of sameness, could also be said of his friend Tusker. It was pleasant to watch them dining on a
night when there were no other guests, saying virtually nothing to one another in that reserved British way. Tusker of course was free with his criticism of the food, the service, the state of the table-cloth, but his complaints were the kind a man made who also saw the funny side of there being need to complain and of the fact that it was he who was complaining.

  Mr Bhoolabhoy had often heard it said that one of the troubles with the British in the days of the raj was that they had taken themselves far too seriously. He was not quite old enough to have formed a firm personal judgment in the matter but he had formed an interim one to the effect that if it was true about the British in those days it was equally true of the Indians now; which would mean that it was being responsible for running things that shortened the temper and destroyed the sense of humour.

  Whenever Tusker and Lucy dined at Smith’s and other tables were occupied by Indian guests it was from the Smalley table that a glow of mildness and pleasure emanated. On such occasions they spoke more often to one another, exchanged cross-table chat with other diners if they knew them but devoted their attention to their plates if an altercation took place between another table and the waiter or Mr Bhoolabhoy, or on one or two dreadful occasions Mrs Bhoolabhoy who was convinced that the customer was not only always wrong but had to be proven wrong. It was the sense of responsibility that caused these altercations.

  . . .

  Why was it then that his responsibility as manager hadn’t shortened his own temper? One answer was all too clear. He didn’t run things. It was Lila who ran them. He sat metaphorically in the crook of her great arm like a ventriloquist’s dummy, merely mouthing her complaints and orders. The other answer perhaps was that although he had a sense of responsibility he had never had a very strong inclination to take it.

  He had been content to be dominated, first of all by Mr Pillai, now by Lila. He knew he would continue to be dominated. This morning he had been regretting this. Coming face to face with Mrs Smalley who was in her way as strong-willed a woman as Lila, but not domineering, he wished that he had been blessed with greater strength of character.