Staying On: A Novel (Phoenix Fiction)

by Paul Scott

  “I was so touched. Touched that he had noticed such a little thing. The GJS/LL at the bottom of the firm’s letters. From the beginning then, you see, I had reason to think of him as an observant person.

  “This was the summer of 1930. His first long home leave. He was going back to India in early November. The girls in the office guessed what was in the wind long before I woke up to the fact that he wasn’t just being decent to his solicitor’s secretary, ready to pass the time of day with her if he arrived early for an appointment. Arriving early became a habit.

  “Then one day, Mr Turner, he was late for once. It was the last appointment of the day. When he came out from seeing Mr Smith he found me with my hat and coat on and the typewriter covered. He realized he’d kept me late and asked if he could drop me off anywhere on his way to Bayswater.

  “He got a cab in Chancery Lane and on the way to Bloomsbury I thought suddenly, poor Captain Smalley. He’s a bit shy like me, and also finds London dull after all those years in the gorgeous East. He’s probably longing to get back there, where all his friends are. And then it struck me that he had been ringing and visiting the office rather more often than was absolutely essential for someone whose affairs were comparatively simple and easily conducted even when he was thousands of miles away. It’s that of course which the other girls had noticed.

  “So after that lift home in the cab I let my mind open to this possibility that perhaps he came because he had few friends in London and quite liked talking to me not only because he was lonely, but perhaps for myself—

  “Myself as myself, myself as a woman who although working as a secretary and having to work was all the same what we used to call (Heavens, Mr Turner, how old-fashioned it sounds) a gentlewoman, whose father was in the Church and whose mother although only a poor relation nevertheless was related to the late Sir Perceval Large of Piers Cooney Hall, Piers Cooney, in Somerset, where my father had had his first curacy. Tusker knew about Piers Cooney because he’d asked if I knew Dorset and I’d said no but I knew a bit of Somerset and explained how for three glorious summers just after the war the twins and I had spent a fortnight there and why this was and what the connexions were. I told him as much as I did because I didn’t want to pass myself off as someone with connexions better than they actually were.

  “A few days after that cab drive he rang again. And what he said confirmed my thoughts about him being a lonely man. He said he had two stalls for a show that night and would I care to go with him, and that if so he’d pick me up at my digs in time to fit in a bite to eat somewhere first, just a bite because we could have supper afterwards.

  “I had no lunch that day, because after I’d put the phone down I remembered he’d said stalls and in those days one dressed for stalls and dress circle, or did if one cared about doing things properly, and I thought that if Captain Smalley had misjudged me and turned up in day clothes I could always change back in five minutes but at least he’d know he needn’t worry about inviting me out again to a place where it would embarrass him not to be dressed.

  “So I spent the whole lunch hour in Oxford Street. I almost broke the bank. Not on a dress. I had a long dress, a black chiffon. And I had a stole. Rabbit, dyed as black as sable. It was my only evening rig. I’d brought it up from home in the Spring of that year when I felt myself coming out of my shell and anticipated a need to have it by me in town. And here was the need. What I broke the bank on was a pair of good shoes and a pair of good gloves. Black shoes and black gloves. Oh, I paid the earth. But one had to on things like that.

  “And then I bought a bag. How well I remember the bag. An evening bag. Dark green moiré silk, and a chiffon handkerchief to match. Just this one statement of colour, Mr Turner. I have always had to be careful about colour. My eyes never seem to have quite made up their minds about being grey, blue, green or violet. In those days the faint green tinge could be picked up by a green accessory. Later, by wearing deep red. Then the green faded from my eyes forever. But this is woman’s talk. It couldn’t interest you.

  “The black stole, the black chiffon dress, the shoes and gloves, and then the bag. A lovely July evening. I was going to the ball, Mr Turner, and the coach called promptly.

  “And he was dressed. He complimented me on the room. I always kept it neat and tidy. I’ve called it a bed-sitter but there were two little rooms, the sitter and the bed, with connecting doors. I’d bought some sherry. After we’d had a drink I went to fetch my stole and bag. When I came out he was gazing out of the window just as I’d seen him that first day at the office. And then he turned round.

  “He didn’t say anything and I couldn’t see his face clearly. The sun was shining in. I was in its glare. But I felt that its warmth and light were coming from him as well. I remember the whole of the rest of the summer like that. Sun, sun, endless sun. Women need the sun. There’s plenty of it in India but that’s not the kind of sun I mean. The kind I mean is the kind that if it’s absent makes you feel your heart is undernourished and eventually that you are dying, very slowly. Of neglect.

  “And it was strange but for me the sun started to go behind a cloud very soon after we got to India. So much sun otherwise. Days and days, weeks and weeks of sun. Not a cloud in the sky. Only this other cloud, so small at first. The cloud of feeling that as Tusker’s wife I didn’t please people much. That Tusker didn’t please them either. That I no longer really pleased Tusker. The cloud grew bigger then.

  “It vanished when we went to Mudpore, although in Mudpore it rained and rained, week after week. Most people loved the rains at first and were happy for a week or two after the monsoon broke. Then they got irritable. But I was happy all the time. Tusker thought I was happy because of the prince and the palaces and the elephants, happy in Mudpore because Mudpore was India as I’d imagined it. And partly that was why. Partly it was because I wasn’t beset, yes, that’s the word, beset by women who in Mahwar were cruel to me in order to be kind. But mostly I loved Mudpore because Tusker was happy there too, and I realized that like me he was something of a solitary person but that this might be a solitariness we could share. There were no other English people in that little state. The Political Agent seldom visited. Tusker liked working alone and he liked working with Indians. And because he was happy he was good to me.

  “I wanted never, never to leave Mudpore. But we left Mudpore and there was no other Mudpore ever again, only a succession of places like Mahwar, where cards had to be left and ps and qs minded, and the army lists studied to be sure you knew who was who and who was senior to whom. I didn’t object in principle. I never rebelled. Neither did Tusker. But strangely, Mr Turner, so very strangely, I think we rebelled against one another. The rains were over when we left Mudpore, and the sky hadn’t a cloud in it except that little one again, coming up over the horizon as if it had been waiting for me to come back to reality, the cloud of Tusker’s never explained withdrawal which I’d first felt the chill of in Mahwar and which grew and grew and for years now has largely filled my sky. I expect my own cloud has filled his.

  “I ought not to be telling you this. But Sarah said you’d be interested to talk to people who had stayed on and that can only mean you want to know what it has been like, but of course it has not been like anything because it has been different for everybody, just as it has been different for me and different again for Tusker, only I don’t know just in what way different because we do not communicate. At the deepest level we do not know what the other one is thinking or feeling and you might think that after forty years of marriage we could have got around to that, and I really don’t think it’s been anything to do with our not having had children, which is one thing he has never blamed me for, nor I him, and I don’t think that it’s been anything in particular to do with India, although that must have helped, because when I look back on it, when I sit back and concentrate on it, I feel that India brought out all my very worst qualities. I don’t mean this India, though Heaven help me I sometimes don’t see a gre
at deal of difference between theirs and the one in which I was a memsahib, but our India, British India, which kept me in my place, bottled up and bottled in, and brain-washed me into believing that nothing was more important than to do everything my place required me to do to be a perfectly complementary image of Tusker and his position. Do no less, certainly no more, except to the extent that one might judge doing an allowable bit more might help him.

  “And you might think that actually I was ideal material, malleable clay. I was. I’d been brought up to know my place. But I thought when I married Tusker and came out that all that was over. I thought Tusker was rescuing me from it. But he was only taking me back to the Vicarage. Father went into his study or off to Church or on his rounds of the parish. Tusker went off to the daftar. And little Mrs Smalley went off to a sort of Coyne, Coyne, Smith and Coyne run entirely by women. ‘You mean you can actually write shorthand, Mrs Smalley?’ And up went the eyebrows. You could see them thinking, ‘We’ll have to make the best of her.’ Which meant making use of me, so that although I was always on this committee and that committee I was on it but not of it.

  “And there were these rigid levels of the hierarchy. Put it this way, Mr Turner, if you were a Captain’s wife there were always other Captain’s wives whose husbands were senior. Even a day or two’s seniority mattered. You were supposed to know, you were supposed to find out, and if you didn’t know they made it plain you’d made a gaffe. And above them were the Majors’ wives. And when Tusker became a major then there were senior Mrs Majors not to mention Mrs Colonels and Mrs Brigadiers and Mrs Generals all living in that heady atmosphere of the upper air. Necessary, necessary, yes, but oh so often not easy to bear. I remember the little thrill I felt when a senior colonel’s lady called me Lucy when Tusker was only quite a new major. How petty, to feel a thrill. How petty to get one’s own back for little humiliations suffered. But I remember when he was quite a senior major how I sometimes treated junior Mrs Majors.

  “I’d learned the rules, Mr Turner. The rules of the club. I’d learned them for Tusker’s sake and when they made him a Lieutenant-Colonel at the end of Nineteen forty-five I thought: Perhaps the sun will come out again. But it didn’t. We didn’t even move out of Smith’s hotel. We’d been billeted there from the day we arrived early in the war, two rooms, en-suite, the same ones the Bhoolabhoys now occupy as bedrooms. We used one as a living-room and the smaller as a bedroom. We didn’t move because Tusker wouldn’t. We could have moved into a bungalow of our own several times, but Tusker wouldn’t. He said the hotel was convenient for the daftar, which it was. He said it was cheaper living there than running your own establishment – in those days he was very tightfisted. In a way I respected this. I’d been brought up to know the value of money, too. Now he’s tight-fisted again but that’s because there’s no alternative. He spent money like water, lost money, gambled money, made a fool of himself directly he left the army for commerce and we lived in Bombay. But that’s another story. I mustn’t talk to you about it.

  “We didn’t leave Smith’s until the whole British–India thing was coming to an end and Tusker had agreed to stay on for a year or two. Rose Cottage was becoming vacant because Mildred had gone home and Colonel Layton and Sarah and Susan were moving down to Commandant House. We were offered it. For once I insisted. If we were going to stay after practically every other British family had gone then I wanted for once in my life a proper setting, Mr Turner. And for once Tusker didn’t resist. He only grumbled a bit. I thought that was a good sign. I thought perhaps after all the sun would come out again, between us. But it didn’t. Not really. Except once – and that paradoxically was after sunset.

  “I remember the ceremony we had here in Pankot on Independence eve very clearly still, the evening of August fourteen, Nineteen forty-seven, down there on the parade ground of the Pankot Rifles. At sundown they beat the retreat. After that we dined at Flagstaff House. Then we went back to the parade ground. It was quite chilly. We sat on stands put up for the occasion. The whole place was floodlit. There was still one small British contingent on station, a mixed bunch. They marched on last after all the Indian troops had marched on. There was a band. That was a pretty scratch affair too, but they seemed inspired by the occasion. They played all the traditional martial British music. Then there were some Indian pipers, and a Scottish pipe-major. They played ‘The Flowers of the Forest’. One by one all the floodlights were put out leaving just the flagpole lit with the Union Jack flying from it. Colonel Layton and the new Indian colonel stood at attention side by side. Then the band played ‘Abide With Me’. They still play that, Mr Turner, when they beat the retreat in Delhi on the eve of Republic Day.

  “It was so moving that I began to cry. And Tusker put his hand in mine and kept it there, all through the hymn and when we were standing all through God Save the King, and all through that terrible, lovely moment when the Jack was hauled down inch by inch in utter, utter silence. The only sounds you could hear were the jackals hunting in the hills and the strange little rustles when a gust of wind sent papers and programmes scattering. There was no sound otherwise until on the stroke of midnight the Indian flag began to go up, again very slowly, and then the band began to play the new Indian national anthem and all the crowds out there in the dark began to sing the words and when the flag was up there flying and the anthem was finished you never heard such cheering and clapping. I couldn’t clap because Tusker still had hold of my hand and didn’t let go until all the floodlights came on again and the troops marched off to the sound of the band.”

  Chapter Eleven

  BEFORE EASTER there was Holi, the Spring fertility festival of the Hindus whose lower classes spent the day roaming the bazaar and throwing coloured powder over one another. Sometimes they squirted coloured water although this was supposed to be illegal because it ruined their clothes and they were poor people.

  At Holi, the well-off usually stayed indoors to avoid getting spattered by gangs of merrymakers. Some of them had friends in and played token Holi in their gardens, like the Menektaras who each year held a Holi party in the garden of Rose Cottage. According to Tusker this was no different from any other Menektara party except that as you arrived Coocoo Menektara lightly smeared the men’s foreheads and dabbed the women’s wrists with magenta-coloured powder. After that, while the Menektara children played Holi with greater enthusiasm under the supervision of their ayah in a corner of the garden well out of reach of the grown-ups in their nylon sarees and smart suits, it was – again according to Tusker – the usual question of elbows bend at the bar and then round the mulberry bush of the buffets, of which there were the necessary two (veg and non-veg).

  The Menektaras’ Holi party was one Lucy looked forward to because it was in the open air and she was able to wander in daylight round a garden once briefly hers and now restored by the removal of Mildred Layton’s tennis court to a likeness of what it had been in old Mabel Layton’s day, with beds stocked with the English hybrid tea roses which Colonel ‘Tiny’ Menektara (he was six feet tall) was so knowledgeable about.

  Tiny Menektara was kind and attentive to her always, and between herself and Coocoo there was this understanding which might be summed up as their mutual recognition of the fact that while all colonels’ ladies (active or retired) were more or less equal some were less or more equal than others. It depended upon which side you were looking at it from. Coocoo’s flirtatious manner with Tusker caused Lucy no qualms. She saw behind it more clearly than she could see behind Tusker’s flirtatious manner with Mrs Desai. When Coocoo embraced Tusker it was obvious to Lucy that Coocoo was thinking: Yes, you’re nice. you can be fun, you make us laugh, you’re always welcome, but you’re an Englishman so you represent the defeated enemy.

  It was different, she supposed, for the new generations of English and Indians who met and made friends with one another; but however friendly you were with Indians of your own generation, the generation that had experienced all the passions and prejud
ices, there was somehow in that relationship a distant and diminishing but not yet dead echo of the sound of the tocsin.

  Coocoo Menektara’s Holi invitations came in the form of printed cards with a blank for the date. The print said: “Coocoo and Tiny are playing Holi on ............. at 12 Upper Club Road. Please Come. RSVP.” This year Lucy left the card on Tusker’s table, having added in pencil an ? to it. It came back to her escritoire with a note: “Good-o!”

  He was more generally amenable these days and had been since the day she went to the club and had too many gin fizzes and hadn’t got home until six, expecting a scene. There had been no scene. He’d merely asked, rather plaintively, if she’d had a good day. After her bath she found him in the living-room reading The Times of India, drinking a glass of beer.

  “I’ve ordered trays,” he said. “Billy-Boy sent a note over. He thinks he’s sickening for something. Thought we shouldn’t risk the dining-room.”

  “Very wise.”

  She sat at her escritoire with a gin and lime juice and entered the day’s alarming expenditure in her housekeeping book, and added a rupee or so to the actual cost; against the cost of mali’s next month’s wage. Dishonesty. Wretched dishonesty.

  “Are you going to the flicks?” he asked when Ibrahim brought the trays and set the food out on the table.

  “Yes.”

  “Anything worth seeing?”

  She glanced at him. She wondered if he was about to suggest going with her. Her behaviour today had shaken him. Before she could begin to feel properly contrite she said firmly, “No. It’s a woman’s picture called How to Murder your Wife.”

  A sense of other people’s humour had never been one of his strong points. In the days before his personality change he’d had little sense of humour himself – at least none that he shared with other people. It had developed subsequently, but in almost knockabout pantomimic form. Other people’s jokes, if subtle, still failed to amuse him. He could be deliberately obtuse about seeing their point but scathing if he made a subtle joke himself and it took anyone time to appreciate it. In the main he had become a man roused most to laughter by ribaldry, and by other people’s discomfiture, a man for whom perhaps the supreme comedy of life would be the sight of someone actually slipping on a banana skin. She thanked God he had never quite descended to the level of the practical joke. As it was, Tusker being deliberately funny was invariably an embarrassment to her, particularly when he seemed to be being funny at his own expense – making an exhibition of himself.