Staying On: A Novel (Phoenix Fiction)

by Paul Scott

  “Please forgive me, Mrs Smalley. As you see, I was also startled. You may not believe me but I had just been thinking about you.”

  . . .

  His morning had begun in a peculiar way. He woke to find himself in bed with Lila, stark naked, his mouth and nose half-smothered in her immense breasts, his shoulders clamped in the iron embrace of her arms and his legs pinioned between hers. She seemed to be blowing playfully on the top of his head.

  What puzzled him was to find himself in bed with her at all. He could not actually recall being summoned. He wondered whether while he slept she had crept into his room and carried him over her shoulder to her own bed, stripped him of his pyjamas and then lowered him on top of her. Since he had daily waking evidence that he probably spent most of his sleeping hours in a state of readiness, he supposed it would have been quite possible for her thus to have availed herself of the opportunity to enjoy what otherwise went to waste without his having to wake up and consciously co-operate. After all, she had the strength.

  It was amazing how strong even smaller-built women than Lila could be, and how determined. Their sudden inexplicable whims and preferences in what seemed to him sometimes irrelevant matters (for example y-fronted underpants instead of the looser cooler boxer-style trunks) were equally astonishing. It was all part of their charm, of course, not knowing what they’d say or do next, not knowing where you stood with them. Or lay. On the one night he had succeeded in catching Hot Chichanya’s eye in Ranpur and been admitted to her room she had laughed at his underpants. She had also insisted first on their standing, and then on their lying, and then on adopting a position she had to show him in an illustrated book before he believed it possible. “Thin men are so supple,” she said, turning him out into the night to go home to his own hotel. “Come back tomorrow but with proper underpants and we’ll do the Koshak Dance.”

  But into the delights and mysteries of the Koshak Dance he had not been initiated. Next evening she greeted him in full Koshak Dance uniform which apart from the whip which he eyed unhappily would have been interesting to divest her of but it seemed for the moment that she intended to remain fully clothed while Mr Bhoolabhoy “and these two other nice boys” danced round her in a circle. The two other boys wore nothing but red leather boots and red y-fronted briefs. There were several pairs of boots he could try on, she said. “You have the pants?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “But they are the wrong colour. I will go and change them.”

  He beat a retreat. Ever since when he had been viewing the prospect of a return engagement for Hot Chichanya at the Shiraz with dismay and delicious apprehension. Even while performing with her what she called double-lotus an area of his imagination had been occupied by the picture of being locked, so, with Mrs Bhoolabhoy, and had continued to be occupied, so that now and again he smiled, then giggled and had to call himself very sternly to order to avoid having to absent himself from Lila’s company and succumb to a fit of hysteria. Lila in the double-lotus position would be even more of a sight to see than Lila stuck all over with Dr Battacharya’s acupuncture needles.

  Except, he himself would not survive to see the sight long. On the count of weight and gravity alone she would break every bone in his back and legs before the connexion had been achieved. Either that or she would be unable to control the arc of the rocking movement and break him at the pelvis or fall on top and smother him.

  Brought fully awake by these images he realized he was being smothered now. He unstuck his perspiring face from her bosom and squinted upward.

  She was fast asleep. The playful blowing on the top of his head was no such thing. Oblivious, she was puffing at dreamtime dandelion clocks. Her slack lips quivered with each expulsion of breath. The brows were contracted: storm signals of another migraine, another bad morning. When she woke life would be difficult. It would be wise to extricate himself before she did so. He had a technique for this which he used occasionally in the middle of the night to return to his own room without waking her. Mostly she chucked him out with no ceremony. She preferred to sleep alone and he had learned from experience that the morning glory of Mrs Bhoolabhoy’s conjugal contentment (a rare bloom) withered rapidly if she did not find herself alone, even if she had not personally dismissed him because incapable of doing so (pole-axed, he liked to think, by a particularly passionate five star performance on his part).

  He could not remember ever having to leave surreptitiously with the morning light already filtering through the curtains and illuminating the fine hairs on her upper lip; but the technique would have to the same, thus: nuzzle up to a nipple if you could find one and give an amorous little groan. This usually brought in response a groan of a different kind. Next, find a free hand of one’s own, which wasn’t as easy as it sounded, what with cramp and pins and needles already set in, and place it on the back of a thigh or whatever part it could reach, or, if already in contact, move it suggestively to another part. Before doing this it was best to tense the muscles slightly to withstand the convulsion this combination of loving approach and fond leavetaking usually provoked.

  It was provoked now. Mrs Bhoolabhoy moaned loudly, heaved and turned herself over and away, predictably taking Mr Bhoolabhoy’s head with her in a kind of wrestler’s half-nelson. It could be painful and was this morning; but the rest of the drill was comparatively easy because the two of them were well lubricated with perspiration. One just slipped the head away from the grappling hold inch by inch.

  Free of Mrs Bhoolabhoy, Mr Bhoolabhoy slid backward out of the bed and knelt, automatically groping on the floor for the place where he must have left his pyjamas. Finding none he came finally and fully awake and stood up. His head was throbbing. He went weak at the knees so dropped to them again, quietly. Was he imagining the whole thing? Was he dreaming? No. Looking round the half-lit bedroom the memory of the night before came clearly back to him.

  There were no pyjamas because he had never got into pyjamas. Before he went to bed with Lila he had been in this room in his clothes, the same clothes he had worn for Sunday Evensong: clerical grey lightweight suit, white shirt, dark blue tie, black shoes, black socks, white aertex undervest, white aertex boxer-pants. They were there – cast away with utter abandon, unbrushed, unhung, victims of scandalous neglect; dying of it, by the look of them, having been all night out in the open with no one to care for them, gather them up and take them to a place where they would have felt comfortable and wanted.

  Yes, there they were: thrown by him across the settee, Lila’s day bed. He approached them, knee by knee, and collected them item by item, careful not to jog the coffee-table on which was set out further evidence of the previous night’s carousal – an empty gin bottle, two glasses, one of them one-third full of stale gin and tonic; an icebucket, a revoltingly full ashtray, two trays of the remains of huge dishes of curried chicken, pilaf rice, papadoms, assorted congealed chutneys; a jug one quarter full of water and air bubbles; curled slices of lemon, three bottles of beer (one opened but scarcely used, the others empty), an empty packet of India King cigarettes and a three-quarter empty box of marrons glacés.

  Still on his knees, Mr Bhoolabhoy, clutching his clothes, an awkward task, made for the door to his own bedroom, feeling like the actor who played Toulouse Lautrec in that film, one of the few he had ever seen. (Mr Thomas had recommended it for the can-can.) He dropped a shoe, and froze, but Mrs Bhoolabhoy simply snored. He had to stand to open his door but once inside unaccountably dropped to his knees again, placed his clothes carefully on a nearby chair, shut the communicating door, bolted it, then hobbled over to his bed and climbed up and lay upon it in the embryo position. He closed his eyes to open his aching mind to the light of yesterday.

  . . .

  It had been a good day to start with; Sunday, his day off. It had also been the Reverend Stephen Ambedkar’s day. The Reverend Stephen was a very fussy fellow. Mr Bhoolabhoy was a bit afraid of him. His predecessor, the Reverend Thomas Narayan, had always stayed at S
mith’s on his monthly visit to minister to the spiritual needs of Pankot’s Christian community. The Reverend Stephen Ambedkar had done so only once, since when he had stayed mostly with the Menektaras, who weren’t Christians but one of whose friends, the Inspector-General of Police in Ranpur, was. Mr Bhoolabhoy wondered whether after his first parochial visit the Reverend Stephen had said something unkind to the Inspector-General about the accommodation his predecessor had had to put up with.

  Spiritually joyful though the monthly visitations were they were also a source of administrative tension and slight anxiety. This had never been the case in the days of old Mr Narayan who had come up on the Saturday night train which got into Pankot on Sunday morning, deposited his meagre bag in Room 5, joined Mr Bhoolabhoy for breakfast and then walked with him up to the Church at about 9.30. Mr Bhoolabhoy had been up at the church earlier, to let Susy in and by the time he returned with Mr Narayan she had done the flowers. Over a cup of coffee from Susy’s flask and seated round the table in the vestry Mr Narayan had told them the hymns he would like sung and the lessons he would like read. While Susy went to mark the places in the bible on the lectern and insert the hymn numbers in the frames, he and Mr Bhoolabhoy would go over the month’s accounts and discuss parish affairs. At 10.25, while Mr Narayan put on his vestments, Mr Bhoolabhoy would climb up to the chamber and toll the bell six times.

  The bell was to summon communicants. The Reverend Thomas Narayan never failed to celebrate communion before Matins however few people turned up, and he had no strong opinions about the need for abstinence prior to the mass. Mr Bhoolabhoy took care to eat nothing and merely sip his coffee. Sometimes he and Susy were the only two communicants to approach the Lord’s table. After communion, and after the morning service that followed and was better attended, Mr Narayan would wander among his flock in the churchyard and sometimes accept an invitation to lunch with one of them. At other times a group of them would go back with him and Mr Bhoolabhoy to Smith’s. In the afternoons he visited the sick or the unhappy or Susy’s Sunday school which she held in the bungalow that had been her mother’s but where she now lived alone. After evensong, more thinly attended than matins, Mr Thomas Narayan might dine with her or with the other Thomas, Mr Thomas who managed the cinema, or with Mr Bhoolabhoy. On Monday he went back to Ranpur on the midday train but had been known to delay his departure if a death seemed imminent. It was not so much a case of his having a nose for death but one for saving church funds: the cost of a sudden trip to Pankot to conduct a funeral service either in the church or in the little chapel attached to the crematorium at the General Hospital which the British had built. In the case of sudden death he could be telephoned in Ranpur at any time of the day or night and had been known more than once to hitch a ride in a military truck coming up on army business. Marriages and christenings, of which there seemed these days to be fewer than there were funerals, were fitted in with his weekends.

  They had been good days.

  By contrast the days since the death of the Reverend Thomas Narayan and the advent of the Reverend Stephen Ambedkar had been in one sense better, in another worse. Mr Bhoolabhoy couldn’t say just what the better and worse arose from or amounted to but he was aware of Mr Ambedkar as a man who caused him both to cherish expectations and condition himself to sustain disappointments.

  “We must do something about this ancient instrument,” Mr Ambedkar said, during his first visitation, meaning the organ; and when Mr Bhoolabhoy pointed out that the cost of even marginally maintaining the fabric of the church itself was already greater than funds could bear Mr Ambedkar smiled in a worldly way and left Mr Bhoolabhoy with an impression that the right man could always find money for the right thing if sufficiently convinced of its necessity and if he happened to be endowed with the right kind of connexions. But Susy was still having to hammer out the hymns on the piano and tune it herself; and the congregation had to be content to celebrate Holy Communion when it suited the Reverend Stephen to officiate, which wasn’t often because unlike old Tom Narayan he insisted on doing so no later than eight o’clock in the morning, on an empty stomach, which meant that he could usually conduct the service only at those weekends which brought him up to Pankot on Fridays or Saturdays, weekends which seemed difficult not to connect with the weekends when the Inspector-General of Police in Ranpur came up to play golf; arriving in his official car with the identifying flag fluttering and Mr Ambedkar sitting next to him wearing dark glasses and looking forward to some golf too and to a weekend not at the Menektaras but at the old Flagstaff House where they would both be fellow guests of General Krippalani, the senior officer in the Ranpur area.

  There was just one other possibility of holding communion apart from on golfing weekends. Mr Ambedkar was persona grata with the director of the Indian Airlines office in Ranpur and occasionally got a free air passage to Nansera, which meant that he arrived in Pankot on the airport bus late on a Saturday afternoon but then usually had to return to Ranpur on Sunday evening. Sometimes Mr Bhoolabhoy had very short notice of Mr Ambedkar’s intended arrival by this method and was hard put to it to spread the news to intending communicants to be at St John’s by eight o’clock on Sunday morning if they wished to avail themselves of the opportunity offered. Mr Ambedkar always expressed his understanding of this difficulty but you could see he was a little put out if less than half-a-dozen turned up to kneel at the rail. Before beckoning them forward he rather ostentatiously counted them and then consecrated the requisite number of wafers, and the wine. Mr Bhoolabhoy noticed that his accuracy in regard to the wafers did not extend to accuracy over the amount of wine, of which there was usually a fair swig left at the bottom of the chalice which Mr Ambedkar drained and then wiped with a sigh of resignation.

  On an ordinary monthly visit, though, and yesterday had been one of them, Mr Bhoolabhoy did not expect Mr Ambedkar to put in an appearance at the church until approximately a quarter to eleven, when he would arrive in the Menektaras’ car. At about 10.40, then, Mr Bhoolabhoy would go down to the lychgate to wait for him. But yesterday Mr Ambedkar had turned up at a quarter past ten and surprised Mr Bhoolabhoy, Susy and Mr Thomas drinking coffee in the vestry, all preliminary work done, flowers arranged, hymn and prayer books set out, collection bag taken from its cupboard.

  And he had not arrived alone. With him was a young priest of such dense blackness of skin it showed purple. Irradiating this blackness was a set of teeth so white they looked like an advertisement for a miraculous new toothpaste not yet on the market but being sample tested and already offering proof of the happiness and confidence to be inspired by its regular use.

  “Francis,” the Reverend Stephen Ambedkar said to Mr Bhoolabhoy, “this is Father Sebastian.”

  “Hello, Francis,” Father Sebastian said, offering his firm and confident hand. “And this must be Susy. Hello. And Mister Thomas. Stephen has told me about you all and how you’ve helped him keep the church up. What a fine example it is of British hill station church architecture. 1885 or so?”

  “1883,” Mr Bhoolabhoy said.

  “Not far out, then. Good. By the way, who looks after the churchyard? So many of these other old places look run down.”

  For a moment Mr Ambedkar looked perplexed, but kept his own smile going and offered it to Mr Bhoolabhoy without quite turning it away from Father Sebastian. Mr Ambedkar had not noticed the improvement in the churchyard. If he had he hadn’t mentioned it.

  “It is a boy called Joseph,” Mr Bhoolabhoy said. “He works as a mali at the hotel. In his spare time he comes here.”

  “I should like to meet him. May I see inside?”

  The Reverend Stephen guided him out of the vestry and into the body of the church and shut the door. Mr Bhoolabhoy, Miss Williams and Mr Thomas remained. For a while none of them spoke.

  Then Susy said, “Father Sebastian.”

  “Anglo, it must be,” Mr Bhoolabhoy murmured, “not Roman. He is South Indian. Anglo-Catholics very strong there nowadays.”r />
  “I was born chapel,” Susy declared, pushing her coffee cup away. “At least that’s what Ma said Dad was. Sergeant Taffy Williams, Welch Regiment. Attached Pankot Rifles 1928–1930. Small arms instructor, killed North-West Frontier, 1934. I don’t remember him. But I remember chapel. That old corrugated iron roof place we used to go to on West Hill every Sunday regular as clockwork. We never came here. Ma said it was because Dad was chapel and wouldn’t have liked us to. But chapel was nothing to do with it. Ma was brought up C of E. Chapel was where we went because most people like us went there. If we’d come here we’d have had to sit at the back because Ma wouldn’t have liked to embarrass the English ladies whose hair she did. Even to have sat at the back would have embarrassed her. She might have come if I’d looked like Lucille but I didn’t and I don’t but I’ll be damned if I’m going to go on playing the piano for a minister who wants to be called Father and is as black as two hats, especially in a Church Ma wouldn’t bring me to.”

  “Susy, love,” Mr Bhoolabhoy said, putting an arm round her. “You’re talking nonsense. And he’s only a visitor.”

  “No he’s not. I’m sure he’s not. I hear things. I hear things in the Seraglio room at the Shiraz just as I used to hear things in my own salon before I was run out of business by the bloody Punjabis.”

  “Watch your language in church,” Mr Thomas said.

  “What things do you hear, Susy?”

  “That any day now Mr Ambedkar will be promoted and that he will probably end up as Bishop of Calcutta.”

  “You are telling me that Hindu and Parsee and Moslem ladies gossip about such things while having their hair done? Be honest now. It is purely your own imagination.”

  “What if it is? Anyway, I bet I’m right. I bet Father Sebastian isn’t just any old visitor.”