Staying On: A Novel (Phoenix Fiction)

by Paul Scott

  . . .

  “Have you written the letter?” she asked later. He said he had not. He said he had no time to write such a letter today.

  “Then you will write it tomorrow morning.”

  “I can’t write it tomorrow. Tomorrow it is Management’s day off. It is Sunday.”

  “You will write it on Sunday evening.”

  “I shall be engaged on church business on Sunday evening. It is Management’s day off until Monday morning.”

  “I shall not speak of this letter again. If it is not written by the latest on Monday morning before I sign the contracts Mr Pandey is bringing up and if he does not have a copy of that letter to take with him back to Ranpur by midday on Monday he will also take back my instructions to institute proceedings for divorce.”

  “Disobeying one’s wife are not grounds for divorce. You will write the letter yourself if it must be written.”

  “You are paid to write such letters.”

  “I am not paid well enough to write such letters. I have not had a rise in salary since marrying Ownership.”

  “Now who is being greedy? Huh? You get your keep. You get pocket money. On top of this sometimes you get sex. You will not get sex again until the letter has been written and perhaps not even then. And speaking of grounds for divorce, I am not thinking about disobedience to wife, but of more serious matters.”

  He began to tremble. She laughed. “Ranpur, for example. You think I do not know what goes on in Ranpur, huh? But I am a reasonable woman. I ask myself, what can one expect when one is married to a man who thinks of nothing but sex. If you write the letter I may forget about Ranpur. We might have sex in Bombay, or Calcutta. The consortium is also thinking of Goa. Goa would interest you. It is very sexy in Goa because the white hippies lie around having sex in the open. It is also full of old churches. In Goa there are more churches than houses. And there are many western tourists in search of the real India as well as hippies who have found it and are having sex.”

  She began to laugh. The bed began to shake. Her breasts wobbled and her belly heaved. He felt like a beggar, starved and meagre holding his bowl out and under a compulsion to grin and cut a caper and earn a paise or two. “I am lost,” he thought, as he left the room. “I do not want to go to Goa. I want to stay here. I want to stay here so long that in a hundred years from now people will be able to point to two worn places in the tiles below the steps to the altar at St John’s and say, ‘Francis Bhoolabhoy was here. Those were his knees.’”

  . . .

  But even the church was excluding him. He cycled there at seven o’clock on that Sunday morning, April 23, and knelt and prayed and then waited for Susy to arrive with the flowers. He knew that Father Sebastian was due to arrive on the night train from Ranpur. He knew Father Sebastian intended to stay yet again at Susy’s bungalow. He had hoped that Father Sebastian would stay at Smith’s, like old Tom Narayan. Father Sebastian was the kind of man St John’s needed and not the sort to seek the most comfortable and prestigious roof under which to shelter. But he seemed to prefer the accommodation Susy offered, and Susy’s company to his own.

  When it had turned eight o’clock and Susy still hadn’t turned up with the flowers he became restless. By nine o’clock he was pacing up and down the path from the lychgate to the porch. The service was not until eleven. But Susy was overdue. And he had worked out the reason long before she and Father Sebastian at last arrived at ten o’clock in a tonga that looked like a festival float so burdened by flowers that she and the priest were embowered by them. Against Father Sebastian’s shining black face her own dark coffee-colour looked so pale.

  She had gone to the station to meet him and they had had break-fast together. Now, while Mr Bhoolabhoy stayed in the background, they decorated the church together. When this was done he suggested to Father Sebastian that they might go over some accounts in the vestry but Father Sebastian said casually, “I’m here until Tuesday, and it’s such a lovely morning, let’s be outside. There is something I want to ask.”

  Susy did not come with them. To show that he was not jealous he said, “Come on then, Susy, enjoy the sunshine.”

  “No, I have one or two things to do in here yet.”

  “Tell me,” the priest said when they were outside. (What things had Susy still to do?) “The English lady who was here at Easter with her husband, Colonel—”

  “Smalley.”

  “Colonel and Mrs Smalley. Yes. Is she not the lady in some of the pictures taken in the churchyard?”

  “Yes, the same one.”

  “I’m using one of them, and the better of the two interiors, in the article I spoke of. Is she a regular worshipper?”

  “Not recently. But then her husband has been quite ill since January.”

  “Ah, yes. I see. I’m dining with them tomorrow evening.”

  It was the first Mr Bhoolabhoy had heard of it. Tusker had said nothing last Monday. All he’d said was, “Saw your new chap.” Somehow, Mr Bhoolabhoy thought, I am being left out.

  They strolled slowly back to the church. Mr Bhoolabhoy checked that all the hymn and prayer books were in place. From the vestry he heard Susy laughing with Father Sebastian. He stared at the altar. “I am just management even here,” he said. And hid himself until it was time to go and toll the bell.

  . . .

  It began to toll as Lucy’s tonga turned into Church road. “Send not to ask,” she murmured, “for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.” The grave and lovely words caused her sadness but no distress. Whenever she thought of them she remembered how at the end of the film Gregory Peck rode off with Ingrid Bergman on a horse. She hadn’t liked that film much. All she remembered was the horse with Ingrid Bergman being carried off on it. Descending she paid the tonga wallah off. There were still a number of people arriving. Next week, perhaps on Thursday, she would be here with Mr Turner. She hoped he wouldn’t be too much of an intellectual. It would be nice to talk to him about the common or garden things that had always interested her: films and plays and popular music. “I am an indoor person, I suppose, Mr Turner,” she would tell him. “It was impossible to enthuse about such things in India in my day, because they weren’t recognized as proper subjects for enthusiasm, precisely because they were indoor things. That makes me very middle-class, doesn’t it? The upper-classes and all the people who like to think of themselves as upper-class, are never happy unless they are competing at something in the open air, living what they call a full life. But in these indoor things I can recognize my own life and through them project and live so many lives, not just the one I have.”

  She smiled and nodded at the Singhs, went in and this time chose a pew near the back and knelt and prayed.

  She could be anything and anyone she wished. Within the darkness of her closed eyes and enfolding palms she was suddenly – how strange – Renée Adorée running after the truck taking Jack Gilbert away to the front in The Big Parade, one of the few old silents she had seen. Another was Seventh Heaven, which the girl like Clara Bow had taken her to. The twins took her to The Big Parade because it sounded a manly film and, she supposed, they had never got over what they called the disappointment of just missing the Great War and were compensating for the missed opportunity to have shown themselves fine fellows. They teased her afterwards for crying when Renee Adoree clung on to Jack Gilbert’s hands and then his boots as the truck carried him and his comrades away, and then had to let go because she couldn’t keep up, and there had been that lovely shot from the back of the lorry showing her receding into the distance, alone and forlorn on the muddy road. She hated the twins for teasing her and she’d hated them for sniggering during the scene in the shellhole when Jack Gilbert didn’t shoot the wounded German soldier but was good to him and then started raving about the horror and brutality of war. “The poor mutt’s only been at the front five seconds,” David had said in a voice loud enough for people to say Shh! She’d hated them for laughing at Jack Gilbert, not because of Jack Gil
bert but because of Toole and the fact that Jack Gilbert’s doughboy uniform had electrified her with a recollection of Toole.

  She uncovered her eyes and resumed her seat, waiting for the service to begin.

  Toole had been her first sexual object. She had woken to him, been woken by him, simply by sitting in the back of the Rolls which took them from the Hall to the Church at Piers Cooney each Sunday in those glorious summer holidays of 1919, 1920 and 1921, when she was 14, 15 and 16, and the boys nearly three years older. She had become aware of the back of Toole’s neck as she’d never been aware of anything before in quite the same disturbing way. And she hadn’t been able to understand why the twins made such a joke of Toole’s name: such a secret private joke; but every time they addressed him as Toole she knew the joke was being shared again between them.

  In the old days at St John’s in Pankot, leaving with Tusker and other officers and wives in strict order of precedence, while the rank and file of British soldiers on station, enduring church parade, had kept their seats to let the gentry leave, she had seen, sometimes, a Toole among them, and carried him away with her in her imagination, as she had without quite knowing why carried away Toole or been carried away by him all those years before.

  Toole had been Sir Perceval Large’s batman-driver in the war. The twins said it must have been a cushy billet because Uncle Percy (as they called him) had never been to the front. In her heart Lucy disagreed about the cushy billet. She was sure Toole had fought and suffered before becoming Uncle Percy’s servant and resented not being sent back to the trenches but instead forced to drive Uncle Percy’s staff car and clean his boots until the Armistice brought them both back to Piers Cooney.

  Toole was a local man, the son of a ploughman on one of Uncle Percy’s farms. She sensed from the back of his neck that he was also resentful of the fact that the war had not changed his condition of servitude much, but that driving was better than ploughing or labouring and that he was glad of a job that gave him the chance to exercise a skill acquired as a soldier and at a time when jobs were scarce anyway.

  He drove with immense care and assurance. So it seemed to her. When he was not driving he could be seen in his shirt-sleeves in the stable-garage, under the car or bent over its open bonnet, endlessly cleaning and polishing. In the August sunshine the gleaming coachwork of the motor dazzled her. Inside there was never a speck of dust or a stain on the buff corduroy-covered upholstery. The windows were as clear as if there were no glass. These things she noticed, but mostly she noticed Toole, up front, clad in a brown uniform that had a high tight collar with buttons at the front and seams at the back that spread and broadened from waist to shoulder; a uniform that fitted him so closely that it struck her that he must find it unbearably hot and uncomfortable because his neck and his gloved hands, which she knew were brown, suggested a preference for exposure to sun and weather.

  He seldom spoke. The twins asked technical questions about the car which she didn’t understand and which he answered briefly in words equally unintelligible to her but obviously to the twins’ satisfaction although they laughed at his accent too, and were always trying to get him to pronounce the word cylinders. They spoke to him in that haughty young gentleman’s way which was a combination of the carefree and easy-going and the arrogant.

  She believed he guessed that for them the word cylinders, pronounced with a Somerset richness, was as much a joke between them as his name, which they were always using. Occasionally he found ways of avoiding the word. Toole was no fool. She sometimes felt coming from him, too, a controlled contempt – not for her, to whom he was always gracious and courteous (opening the door for her and leaving the boys to make their own way out) – but for the twins, and at a different level for the three of them who were, he must have known, only the children of a poor relation who had been employed at The Hall to try to put some ginger into the sickly son, to train him to withstand the rigours of Eton during the illnesses that sent him and brought him back from one preparatory school to another, so that apart from the holidays he was often at home during term, in their mother’s care. Toole was old enough to know the Little children’s history, aware and alert enough to realize that the summer holiday for the three of them was his master’s charity towards a distant female cousin who had lived under his roof and then, her task completed, made a respectable marriage with the curate and who if subsequently unblessed by fortune had at least produced two strapping sons of her own and, as an afterthought, a dainty little girl, all three of whom would benefit from the kind of summer holiday their father could not easily afford and which perhaps was granted by Uncle Percy as a memorial offering to the sickly son who had been their mother’s charge and who had endured Eton, done well at Oxford, and died in the trenches.

  The writing of Christmas and birthday letters to Uncle Percy had been one of her earliest disciplines. Presumably Mumsie hoped for some lasting advantage from the connexion, but there was none, and 1921 was the last holiday in Somerset. Uncle Percy, long widowered, died the following Spring and the estate went to a nephew who was not interested in the Little side of the family. Lucy did not regret it. She was almost glad. The 1921 holiday had begun beautifully but ended horribly. Midway through it Toole was suddenly no longer there. An older man took his place – a nasty common little man, smarmy, obsequious but also insolent. Toole’s disappearance was a mystery because it was not discussed, but she overheard the twins talk.

  There had been a girl, a local girl. Toole and she had been what the twins, shying from the word love, called soft on one another. But the girl was “a cut above him”, a farmer’s daughter, promised by her father to the son of another. The girl had wanted to marry Toole and Toole wanted to marry her. They had both disappeared, although not together. Years later, the kinder of the twins, Mark, whom she found one day mooning in the orchard over the loss of the latest girl he and David had vied with each other for but who had been seen off by Mumsie who thought no girl good enough for either of them, said, “Remember Toole?” and told her how Toole had got his girl into troublé (“Sorry, Luce, but you’re old enough to know what I mean”) and promised to marry her. Toole had a little flat above the stable-garage, a decent wage, a decent job, a decent employer. They could have been happy, perhaps moved on to better things because the motor business was booming and there was nothing Toole didn’t seem to know about motors.

  He had gone one evening to face the family but the girl wasn’t there. She’d been packed off to a relation in Cornwall. The father and the father of the man she was promised to, and the man himself, had set on Toole, beaten him up and dumped him unconscious in a ditch a mile from the village. He’d probably lain there for hours. When he got back to the Hall he packed all his things and in the morning faced Uncle Percy. It was mid-month but he wouldn’t take a penny of the money owing him because he was letting his employer down by going at once and not giving notice. He was going to Cornwall to look for his girl. Then he just went and that was the last anyone ever saw or heard of him.

  “I hope he jolly well found her,” Mark said. “I hope they went off together. I’ve often wished I had his guts.” She said, “How did you find out all this, Mark?” He said, “That rotter who took his place told us. And what a rotter he was. Grinning and putting his hand on your knee and telling you not to get involved with girls. Oh, Lord. Sorry, Sis.”

  And he got up and went; went, went, as Toole had gone, gone. It was the last of the few intimate conversations she had with Mark, who was in Insurance, but spending his weekends with David (who was an accountant) bent over the open bonnets or under the chassis of what they called flivvers acquired on the cheap from richer friends and which they were making good for Sundays when they roared out of the vicarage, two hulking young men of nearly thirty, on their way to keep appointments with the girls Mumsie always disapproved of and made unwelcome; and roared out one Sunday too often, never to return, finding their own Passchendaele in a pile-up between their flivver and another. />
  . . .

  “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with us all evermore. Amen.”

  “Amen,” Lucy said. The service was over. It had passed her by. She had gone through it automatically, rising, kneeling, singing, or just sitting quiet remembering Piers Cooney. After the blessing Father Sebastian held his position. His arms were folded across his chest. No one dared move until he moved. The silence was intense. Suddenly there was a strange sound. Father Sebastian smiled, held up one hand, and as he did so a note blared, a true and singular note, an authentic note that took her breath away because it was by her so long forgotten. A wind seemed to stir through the congregation.

  The organ was playing. It was playing music she recalled but couldn’t name. An anthem, a voluntary, pealing and pealing away. There were falterings. The organ hadn’t played for a long time. But it played. She peered. The piano was abandoned. So it must be Susy who was up there in the old organ loft.

  When the music reached a climax Father Sebastian took up the great cross and, holding it high came down from the sanctuary and paced slowly down the aisle to the sound of the organ and the murmurs of the amazed congregation who bowed and bobbed and dipped as he went past them on his way to the West door.

  . . .

  He stood in the porch, holding the cross in his left hand, shaking each hand with his right. The organ still played. It took her a long time to get out of the church.

  “Mrs Smalley?” he said, when it was her turn.

  “Yes, Father Sebastian. What a lovely Matins. Whatever happened to restore the organ to us?”

  “A little technology, a lot of faith and Miss Williams to play.” He had had something for breakfast spiced with garlic. “You are the lady in the photographs?”

  “There were some photographs, yes. We shall see you tomorrow? My husband particularly asked me to remind you. Seven-thirty?”

  On the spur of the moment she added, “Do bring Susy with you. I’ve known her since she was a child.”