Staying On: A Novel (Phoenix Fiction)

by Paul Scott

  He did this at the Menektaras’ Holi party by leaving the adults and joining the children, submitting first to their shyly thrown little handfuls of powder, then egging them on by shying back, so that presently they showered him with blue, purple and crimson powder and he returned to the adults covered from head to foot, his clothes caked, his eyes and teeth gleaming through the mask of coloured dust like a miner coming up from a pit where the devil’s rainbow had its source. And in this state he had threatened to embrace first Coocoo and then Mrs Mitra.

  “Well, he’s all right again,’ Dr Mitra said, guiding Lucy to the non-veg table. Having guided her he stood back waiting until it was the men’s turn to follow the women and fill their plates.

  Long used to the demarcation of eating zones as between male and female at parties such as this, Lucy still found it onerous, especially when everyone was sat on chairs formed into a large circle – or rather two large circles, one for the men and one for the women – and you were stuck with just two women to talk to, one on each side of you. Coocoo Menektara spared her guests the boredom of the imprisoning circles but there were chairs dotted here and there on the lawn for those who wanted them and these, random though they were, were the focal point towards which the women were drawn – as much, Lucy thought, by the tradition of segregation as by the wish to take the weight off their feet – and few of the younger ones were ever capable of resistance, of invading the closed ranks of the standing men. Indeed, the men’s apparent determination to eat by themselves was itself a powerful dissuader.

  Today, feeling her age, Lucy had sat down and then wished she hadn’t because the chair she’d chosen and which she now couldn’t move from because Mrs Mitra and Mrs Srinivasan joined her immediately she was settled, gave her an uninterrupted view of Tusker.

  It was one she would have preferred to be spared. There he was, in the garden of the oldest and most beautiful bungalow in Pankot, a gesticulating clown, coloured from head to foot and giving a performance that was not so much attracting attention as forcing laughter from the immaculately dressed and well-behaved Indians whom he was haranguing, or telling some unseemly story to. Those on the fringe of the group were paying little attention but watching for the moment when the last of the women left the buffets; then they strolled to the tables and presently only Tiny Menektara remained, one hand behind his elegant upright back, the other holding his merely sipped-at glass, his head sometimes nodding, at other times thrown back in soundless laughter, while Tusker went on and on; about what Lucy could not imagine but she hoped it was not about the recent war; she hoped he was not being funny about the war; there was scarcely anyone in the garden who did not know of someone whose son or husband had been killed in the fight with Pakistan over Bangladesh.

  Tiny was now prompting Tusker to get some food and Tusker went with him but paused on the way to put his empty glass on the bearer’s tray and take a full one.

  Mrs Srinivasan and Mrs Mitra were talking about Mr Bhutto, the new prime minister of Pakistan. “He’s only a grocer’s son,” Mrs Srinivasan was saying, “so what can you expect? And what is Mujhib? Anyway I am tired of Bengal. It has never been anything but a trouble to us. Like Ireland to the English, isn’t it, Lucy?”

  But Lucy had no chance to reply because there was a crash and then a commotion on the verandah. People looked round. Some stood up. Lucy stayed seated. She did not need to stand up and peer in order to know what had happened. Tusker had upset something. The final disgrace. There was a hush. She noticed now that the men were gathered looking down at something or someone and the only thing they could be looking down at was Tusker, and that meant that Tusker was no longer upright which in turn meant that he had had another attack; perhaps the fatal one. She hardened her heart again, to withstand the immediate alarm that must presently soften into grief and terror. And here was Coocoo flowing gracefully across the lawn in her lovely saree, a gorgeous bearer of bad news.

  “Tusker seems to have had a bit of a fall.”

  “Oh, dear. Silly Tusker. I’d better come across and see.” She moved slowly, putting her plate on the grass, gathering her things. At the end of one’s life all that was left was dignity and one was damned lucky to have the chance to show it. She left her bag on the chair. It had been a good bag. The treacherous sunlight showed how old it was. She went with Coocoo towards the verandah. The men were gathered round the steps but made way for them. One of them righted the wicker table Tusker must have fallen against or grabbed as he fell. There had been things on the table. The verandah was spattered with broken glass. He lay spread-eagled in his clown’s clothes. His eyes were shut. The eyelids were startlingly white against the coloured powder that caked his face and head. The clown’s mouth was open. Through it, unconscious or conscious, he was gulping in the pine-scented air. Dr Mitra was kneeling beside him, fingers on the pulse of his left wrist. Tusker’s right hand was bloody, still gripping the stem of a glass.

  Mitra said, “I think he just missed his footing and knocked himself out.”

  “Will he be all right?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  Tusker muttered something.

  “Can’t hear you old chap.”

  “Home,” he said more clearly. “Not hospital. Bugger hospital.”

  “Who said anything about hospital? You’ll be right as rain.”

  Tusker opened his miner’s eyes. “Luce? You there, Luce?”

  “Yes, Tusker.”

  “Home. Not hospital.” He began to raise himself into a sitting position. Dr Mitra tried to restrain him but in the end had to help him into the sitting position he was insisting on. “Sorry about that,” he said. “One too many, that’s all. Slipped on some bloody thing. Bad business. Damned bad form, eh? Ladies present. Get drummed out. Ha!”

  The group round the verandah began to disperse. Presently only Tusker and Lucy, Mitra, Tiny and Coocoo and some of the Menektara servants remained. Tusker shut his eyes and bowed his head, concentrating on the business of recovering strength. Then he opened one eye, now the other, as if aware for the first time of the state of his clothes. He rubbed his trouser leg and inspected the palm of his hand.

  “Well it’s what the card said. Tiny and Coocoo are playing Holi.” He glanced at them. “Why haven’t you played then? It wasn’t us who invented it. From the look of me you’d think it was. Keep away old man,” he said to Dr Mitra, shrugging Mitra’s hand off his shoulder. “You’ll ruin that lovely suit.”

  . . .

  “You don’t believe in things like Holi, do you, old man?” he said an hour later when Dr Mitra drove them both back to The Lodge. “Load of guff. Excuse for a piss up, like Christmas for us. More like Easter though. Eh, Luce? Fertility rites. D’you know Mitra old chap when I first came out six hundred million years ago or whatever it bloody well was I was fool enough to ask the colonel’s lady what Holi was in aid of. She told me. Told me the whole thing. No flies on her, Mitra old fruit. But when Luce here asked me, when she came out, I was such a bloody gentleman I just hummed and hawed and said, Spring festival, y’know, so the poor little thing piped up at a dinner table one night in one of those awful sodding silences we used to have to endure because the memsahib at the head of the table had got her knickers in a twist and anyone who knew a thing about what you said or didn’t say in a situation like that just naturally kept quiet. I’ve lost the thread, Luce. What was I saying?”

  “You were telling Dr Mitra about the awful gaffe I made, Tusker, but perhaps he’s not interested.”

  “Of course he’s interested. He’ll dine out on it for weeks, won’t you Mitra old boy old man old boy?”

  “Perhaps. Who knows, Smalley old fellow?”

  A pause.

  “You taking the piss by any chance?” Tusker asked. “If you are, sod you. Sod you anyway. Sod us one and all.” He leant back.

  It was intolerable. In the driving mirror her glance slid off Dr Mitra’s. She felt as outraged by his composure as by Tusker’s abominable beh
aviour and disgusting language. She felt outraged too by this reminder of the gaffe, years and years ago, back there in horrid Mahwar, ‘piping’ up in that somehow transient silence which she arrested by saying – because Holi was the last thing that had been mentioned – “Why do they use those colours? One had always thought of Spring as green.” He could have saved her from that. He could. Yes he could have saved her from that by telling her the truth when she’d asked him. The silence at the table then was echoed in the silence in Dr Mitra’s car; her eventual realization of the significance of the colours here exemplified by the sight of Tusker caked in reds and purples (ruining Dr Mitra’s car seat covers) – the colours that symbolized both the menstrual flow and the blood a groom drew from a virgin bride.

  Intolerable too was the homecoming which was so early it caught Ibrahim unawares, taking his ease on the front verandah with Minnie (who fled) and with Bloxsaw whose hackles rose when Tusker in his harlequin disguise emerged from the car. The creature bared its teeth and growled and would have fled too if Tusker had gone near it.

  “You must tell me the truth, Dr Mitra,” she said half-an-hour later when she saw him back to his motor. “Did he fall because he’d drunk too much or because he’s had another slight attack?”

  “If I were worried about him would I leave him here? Don’t worry. Keep him off the booze, that’s all. Ring me any time. I’ll look in tomorrow.”

  “You haven’t answered my question, Dr Mitra.”

  “I thought I had. The hospital is only a stone’s throw, but I’ve left him with you. Isn’t that an answer? It’s the best thing. He likes his own home.”

  “Yes, I see.”

  “I’ll give him a new prescription probably. Let’s see tomorrow.”

  She wanted to ask, How long? A year? Less, more? Any time? But she had lived long enough to know that you did not ask questions to which there were no answers and which you didn’t want answered. When she went back into the bedroom Tusker was asleep. His face and hands and arms although washed still bore traces of the Holi powders. The ruined clothes were in the dhobi basket. She thought, her distress giving way to irritation, “And he was quite right. It’s their festival not ours. They who should have looked like clowns.”

  . . .

  Between Holi and Easter he regained his resilience. On the Monday after Palm Sunday (March 27) he announced that he and Billy-Boy would be convivial that evening. She and Ibrahim went to the pictures. She went because any departure from the norm might have alerted him to her concern although this was lessening day by day. He was drinking nothing stronger than beer, and little of that. He had seen the writing on the wall. Nevertheless she couldn’t afterwards remember what picture she had seen because for her the screen had been filled with images of her arrival home to a house of death, the empty place at the end of a journey, or the dark at the bend of the stairs in her father’s house.

  So that, arriving home and finding the place locked she panicked. She gave Ibrahim the key and made him go in first. The light was on in the living-room. There was a note on the escritoire. From Mitra?

  It was a note from Tusker. “Gone to the cabaret at the Shiraz with Billy-Boy. Back at midnight.”

  “It’s all right, Ibrahim. I shall go to bed. Perhaps you’d stay up until he gets back.”

  Later, hearing the sound of singing she switched off her light. The singing was Tusker’s and Billy-Boy’s. The dog in its basket in the garage began to bark. The singing stopped at once. Billy-Boy must have scooted home. She heard Tusker locking up. She’d left his bedside lamp on and when he came in she watched him from under lowered lids. “Luce?” he said. He wasn’t drunk. “Luce, you awake?” She heaved over on to her other side and covered her head.

  . . .

  “They rush you for the beer in that place,” he said next morning. “Beer, Luce, that’s all I had. It was Billy-Boy who was on the booze. I bet he’s copping it this morning from Madam.”

  “What on earth made you decide to go to the Shiraz?”

  “He was being a bore, that’s why. A proper misery. He perked up when we got there, though.”

  “How nice.”

  “Good picture, was it?”

  “I don’t remember the picture. It went out of my mind when I got home and found you nowhere in sight, Tusker.”

  He drank his orange juice and then banged the top of his egg.

  “It’s Easter this coming weekend,” he said.

  “I thought you’d given up noticing things like Easter.”

  He cut his buttered bread into soldiers to dip into the yolk.

  “There’s a new bloke. Black as your hat, according to Billy-Boy. Likes to be called Father. He’s coming up at Easter.”

  “You’re spilling egg on your shirt.”

  “Thought we might go on Sunday. What about it old thing?”

  She finished her own egg. An egg was symbolic too.

  “You’re suggesting we should go to church together on Easter Sunday?”

  “Good a time as any. Have a shufty.”

  “You’ll find the churchyard much improved.”

  “Wasn’t thinking of the churchyard. A shufty at his new reverence is what I meant. Who knows, Luce, it might fall to him to ash us both to ash and dust us both to dust. We might as well have a look at the bugger.”

  “Really, Tusker.”

  “You think that morbid?”

  “I was saying really to the language. But I’ll say it to the idea, too. Really.”

  “Ha!”

  . . .

  They went to morning service on Sunday April 2nd. The church was fuller than she had seen it for years. She stared in dismay and fascination at Father Sebastian. She was glad Tusker hadn’t insisted on eight o’clock communion. But when the new priest began to intone the sentences of the scriptures prescribed for opening the order of morning prayer in a loud ringing voice she was struck first by their beauty and then by the recollection of her father mumbling them and then by the resonance of Father Sebastian’s voice and the curious appropriateness of the Indian lilt to the lilt and rhythm of the words. She opened her eyes and saw that his were shut and that he was speaking words known by heart.

  “I will arise and go to my Father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.”

  . . .

  “Dearly beloved brethren, the Scripture moveth us in sundry places to acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickednesses,” Father Sebastian continued, without a break, and the service was away, flowing through the church and through Lucy’s mind and heart and soul. Standing for the first hymn she glanced at Tusker whose presence comforted her. His forehead was ridged in concentration. He had never been able to hit a note accurately but she was less conscious this morning of that slightly painful effect than of the surprise and pleasure of hearing him giving voice instead of droning.

  During Father Sebastian’s sermon, the text for which he took from one of the anthems prescribed to be said or sung on Easter Day instead of a psalm (“Christ, our passover is sacrificed for us: therefore let us keep the feast; not with the old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness: but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth”) she thought his attention was drawn to her rather frequently as if she were someone he felt he had seen before, which of course he had done if he’d yet studied the photographs Mr Bhoolabhoy must have sent him days ago. Mr Bhoolabhoy had kept his promise to let her have copies and she had posted two or three, including the one showing herself and mali at Mabel’s grave, to Sarah. She hadn’t shown them to Tusker, nor yet said anything to Tusker about Sarah or Mr Turner who would probably be arriving just about now, in Delhi, with – she hoped – her new packets of blue rinse. Directly he made contact and announced the day he expected to be in Pankot she would make an appointment with Susy and splash out by letting her use the whole of the one packet she had left. She had said nothing to Tusker because she didn’t
want him to grumble about coping with a stranger. Grumbling was bad for him. It was some days since he had grumbled, and look at him now: so much better and actually in church with her and paying attention.

  “Ha!” he exclaimed, bringing her back with a start from her own thoughts to the sermon. Not in church! But then she realized that laughter was the order of the day. The preacher himself was smiling, and Tusker’s Ha! was nothing to be embarrassed by. The sermon was funny. She now concentrated on it and found herself smiling. But she was glad when towards the end Father Sebastian stopped making little jokes and became serious, even solemn. She could not wholly approve of laughter in church. Nor, during the creed, although it was her custom to sketch a little curtsy to acknowledge the reference to the Virgin Mary, could she quite approve of the way Father Sebastian virtually prostrated himself and did not rise or raise his voice from a troubled murmur until he came to the line: The Third day he arose again from the dead. He had the whole congregation muttering and bobbing. And then, looking back on the hymns, when they got to the last one, All Things Bright and Beautiful, she realized that jolly and rousing and nostalgic as they had all been they were leaving in her mind a sense of naivety. They had been children’s hymns, rather than grown-up hymns. A strange mixture, the whole thing: a sophisticated sermon, naive hymns, and popishness in the ritual. As the service ended and the congregation broke up she saw that everyone was smiling as if they had just seen a very amusing picture. Tusker was smiling too.