The Day of the Scorpion

by Paul Scott

  The effect is the same.’

  Sarah did not agree but did not say so, content anyway that her mother had settled momentarily into the kind of nostalgic mood that suggested the actual arrival would go well, although later that night there might be a hint of tearfulness at lonely bed-going – a whiteness under the rouge unfashionably applied low instead of high on the cheeks, an inner disintegration betrayed by a marginal relaxation of the muscles of the jaw and neck that produced a soft little pad of tender aging flesh under the courageous chin. Presently held high (as Sarah saw, looking over her shoulder) to receive a dab or two from the puff of a compact, there were, in its structure, the presentation to the world, signs of effort-in-achievement. Almost unconsciously bringing her hand up to stroke her own chin and neck in a gesture partly nervous and partly investigatory she marvelled at the havoc a few years would wreak on flesh so firm. There came a time when the face changed for ever, into its final mould. Hers had not done so, but her mother’s had. Some faces then went all to bone, others went to slack, fallen, unoccupied folds and creases of skin. Her mother’s would do that, and perhaps Susan’s too, years hence. Her own would tauten. As an old woman she would probably have a disapproving but predatory look. Her mother would go on softening whereas she herself would harden exteriorly, become brittle interiorly. She would break into a thousand pieces, given the right blow. To kill her mother in old age would be a bloodier, more fleshy, less splintery affair. Her mother was protected already by incipient layers of blubber (like Aunt Fenny, but unlike Aunt Lydia). All the more credit to her therefore, Sarah thought, that she managed to convey a certain steeliness from within the softness.

  Even at the most exasperating moments Sarah could feel, for her mother, a surge of love and deep affection that sprang goodness knew not from a long uninterrupted experience of her as a mother – the separation had been too long for that – but rather from a sensation of being able to treat her as if she were a human being towards whom she had a duty that was scarcely filial at all: almost as if she were a stranger of a kind suddenly encountered. She felt such a surge now, but as usual was unable to express it because her mother was not even looking at her, but putting the compact away. Well, so it goes, Sarah thought. And so it went: the taxi moving slowly through a tunnel of alternating bars of sunlight and strips of shadow and then coming out abruptly into the gravelled forecourt where the NCO with the diaphanous pugree stood by the side of the parked fifteen hundredweight that had brought their luggage. They drove in under a shadowy porticoed entrance and drew up at the bottom of a shallow flight of steps. At the head of the steps two men were waiting. As Captain Merrick spoke they were joined by a third.

  The chap in the scarlet turban is Abdur Rahman. He’s head bearer and belongs to the Nawab. The little fellow holding his topee is the steward, his name’s Abraham – an Indian Christian. He’s the SSO’s chap. And yes – there’s Mr Kasim.’

  Sarah, looking up, saw Ahmed emerge from the dark interior.

  *

  ‘Was it wise?’ she heard her Aunt Fenny asking, and recognized her mother’s first-drink-of-the-day voice: ‘Was what wise?’

  ‘Letting her go riding alone with Mr Kasim.’

  ‘I didn’t let her as you call it. I didn’t know.’

  ‘Didn’t know? You mean she just sneaked off?’

  ‘Oh, Fenny, what’s wrong with you? My daughters don’t sneak off. They go. They don’t have to ask permission. They’re of age. They do what they like. One gets married. The other goes riding. How am I supposed to stop them? Why should I try?’

  ‘You’re becoming impossible to talk to sensibly. You know perfectly well why it’s unwise for Sarah to ride alone with an Indian of that kind.’

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘Any kind, but especially Mr Kasim’s kind.’

  Sarah said, ‘What of Mr Kasim’s kind, Aunt Fenny?’ and shaded her eyes from the glare of the lake that at midday always seemed to penetrate the shade of the deep porticoed terrace on which her mother and aunt were sitting, on chairs set back close to one of the open french windows which gave access to the terrace from the darkened sitting-room, and through which she had now stepped. She could not see the expressions on her aunt’s or mother’s face, and did not join them. She stood near them, gazing at the lake, letting that milky translucence work its illusion of detaching her from her familiar mooring in a world of shadow and floating her off into a sea of dangerous white-hot substance that was neither air nor water.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Aunt Fenny said. ‘I didn’t know you were listening. I was saying I thought it unwise for you to ride alone with Mr Kasim.’

  From the midst of that buoyant, dazzling opacity she said, ‘Yes, I agree – it was unwise.’ When they returned the syce had been waiting. He followed them round to the gravel forecourt below the terrace on which she presently stood and held her horse’s head while she dismounted. Mr Kasim dismounted too. ‘Come in and have some breakfast,’ she suggested. He thanked her and said, ‘Some other time perhaps,’ asked her if there was anything special that either she or her family wanted to do, to see, or to have him bring or make arrangements for. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said, ‘thank you for taking me riding.’ She wondered whether for some reason or other they should shake hands. He remounted, touched his topee with the tip of his crop and brought the horse’s head round – all, as it were, in the same capable movement. As she came on to the terrace she listened to the sound of the hooves on the gravel.

  ‘We shan’t go riding again,’ she said and lowered her head, turned, looked at Aunt Fenny and found the older woman’s face set in that extraordinary mould that was the answer to the need to express something beyond the private emotional capacity to understand.

  Sometimes she hated Aunt Fenny, mostly she was irritated by her. For the moment she felt inexplicably close to her and to her mother who had her eyes closed, one hand at rest on the arm of the wicker chair, the other clasping a half-empty glass of gin and lemon, apparently waiting for the day to come into its familiar focus as one totally indistinguishable from any other.

  Well, they are my family, Sarah told herself. I love them. They are part of my safety and I suppose I’m part of theirs.

  What happened?’ Aunt Fenny asked. Her voice, normally rich and well-risen, sounded flat and dry.

  ‘Nothing happened. I meant it was unwise because it made us both self-conscious. It never occurred to me that it might. It wasn’t until we actually set out that I realized it was the first time I’d been alone with an Indian who wasn’t a servant. And there seemed to be nothing to talk about. He only spoke when spoken to and kept almost exactly the same number of paces behind me from start to finish.’

  The stiffness had left Aunt Fenny’s face but this softening only emphasized the lines that years of stiffening had left permanently on her, the private marks of public disapproval.

  And what I remembered on the way back (Sarah thought, half-considering this face that was Aunt Fenny’s but also that of an English woman in India) was the luggage in the little cabin, with that girl’s name on it. She was never real to me until I saw the luggage. She was a name in a newspaper, someone they talked about in Pankot. She began to be real when I saw the luggage in the houseboat in Srinagar. The child must belong to the Indian they said she was in love with, otherwise why should that old lady keep it? But it might have been any half-caste baby. The luggage was different. It was inert. It belonged only to her. She was no longer alive to claim it, but this is what brought her to life for me. And this morning as I rode home, a few paces ahead of Mr Kasim, she was alive for me completely. She flared up out of my darkness as a white girl in love with an Indian. And then went out because – in that disguise – she is not part of what I comprehend.

  ‘He is a perfectly pleasant young man,’ Aunt Fenny said, ‘and I understand his brother is an officer. But these days one simply can’t tell what these young Indians are up to, let alone what they’re thinking.’

&nb
sp; ‘Perhaps they find the same difficulty in regard to us.’

  ‘Yes, perhaps they do. But on the whole, my dear, we ought not to let that concern us. We have responsibilities that let us out of trying to see ourselves as they see us. In any case it would be a waste of time. To establish a relationship with Indians you can only afford to be yourself and let them like it or lump it.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sarah said. ‘I suppose you’re right. But out here are we ever really ourselves?’

  III

  There was, to begin with, the incident of the stone.

  Apart from the black limousine travelling some seventy-five or hundred yards behind a wobbling bicycle ridden by an Indian carrying a raised umbrella as a protection against glare, there was no traffic on Gunnery Road; neither were there any visible pedestrians at the place where the incident occurred – the Victoria roundabout where a car coming down Gunnery Road and wishing to turn into Church Road had to slow down and describe a three-quarter circle round the monument. The driver of the limousine, an elderly man with a grey beard and wearing palace livery, having passed a file of peasant women with baskets on their heads going in the opposite direction, then began to concentrate on the cyclist and the possible obstacle he represented. He began to decelerate. Gunnery Road and the three other roads meeting at the roundabout were well shaded by big-branched thick-boled trees. The wobbling cyclist turned left. The way now seemed clear for the driver of the limousine to negotiate the roundabout, but encroaching age and several minor accidents had made him cautious, distrustful of what an apparently empty street might suddenly conjure in the shape of fast-driven vehicles.

  The sound, when it came, did not immediately register. He allowed the limousine to continue to glide towards a point on the roundabout where he would be able to see what threatened from the left and how clear it was to the right. When the sound did register he braked, stared at the bonnet and the windscreen, then twisted round to confront the pane of glass dividing him from his passengers and, finding it unblemished, only then looked through it.

  The passengers, both British officers, were thrust back hard, each into his separate corner. Their arms were still held in half-defensive attitudes. They were looking from floor to window to floor and to the space between them on the seat: as one might look for some suspected poisonous presence – a snake for instance. The last thing the driver noticed was the shattered window on the nearside of the car – not the window in the door, which was lowered, but the fixed window that gave the passenger a clear view. It took the driver several seconds to realize that neither officer could have broken it, that something had been thrown. At this point both officers came to life, shouted something at him, each opened a door and jumped out. One word, one idea – half formed into the shape of an image actually seen – came into the driver’s head. Bomb. He had heard of such things happening, but had no experience of them. He opened his own door, stumbled out and found himself climbing marble steps. He missed his footing, fell and lay motionless with his hands covering his head, waiting for the explosion.

  After a while he sat up. Above him loomed the plinth on which the White Queen sat, hardened and sensitive, gazing up the length of Gunnery Road, which was still empty of traffic. The file of village women, now some four hundred yards away, continued their journey uninterruptedly. Turning he found both officers standing in the road a few feet from the car. They were looking towards and making gestures at the low grey stucco wall that marked the boundary of a compound. One of them had a handkerchief held to the left side of his face. They stopped looking at the wall and looked at him.

  ‘Sahib,’ he said to the one without the handkechief, after he had picked himself up, walked down the steps and approached them, ‘I thought you jumped out because a bomb had been thrown.’

  The officer did not smile. He had blue eyes. The driver was always fascinated by Sahibs with blue eyes. The eyes of the other Sahib were not so blue, hardly blue at all, but he had very pale eyelashes. There was blood on the handkerchief.

  He followed the Sahibs back to the car and watched while they looked at the shattered window and into the back. He went round to the offside door and helped them to look. He did not know what he was looking for. An object of some kind. He found the object wedged in a corner under one of the tip-up seats. He picked it up. A stone. He said, ‘Sahib, this is it.’ He handed it to the Sahib with the blue eyes. The Sahib took and showed it to the other Sahib.

  Presently the unwounded Sahib looked across at him and said, ‘Did you see who threw this?’

  ‘I saw no one, Sahib. Only the women with the baskets but we had gone many yards past them before it was thrown. The person who threw it must have hidden behind that tree, Sahib. There may have been such a man. I do not know. My mind was not on this kind of matter. There was a man on a bicycle in front of the car. He was not making signals. My mind was on this man on the bicycle. He is gone. He went to the left. I did not see any other man. I am sorry, Sahib. It is not an auspicious beginning.’

  ‘You’re damned right it isn’t,’ Teddie Bingham said. ‘For God’s sake, Ronnie, is there any blood on my uniform?’

  ‘It’ll sponge out. Let me have a look at that cut.’

  Teddie took the handkerchief from his cheek. Blood oozed out of a jagged cut below the cheekbone. Captain Merrick clapped the handkerchief back on.

  ‘It may need a stitch and there may be glass in it.’

  ‘But, Christ, there isn’t time.’

  ‘You can’t get married bleeding like a stuck pig. Come on. Get back in and mind you don’t sit on a splinter or you’ll really be in trouble. When we get to the church I’ll root out the chaplain and use his phone to get a doctor. There may be time to ring through and warn Susan and Major Grace. It’ll mean putting the ceremony back a few minutes.’

  Before sitting Merrick inspected his own and Teddie’s side of the seat for splinters, then told the driver to get on quickly to the church.

  ‘The bloody bastard,’ Teddie said. ‘Whoever it was. Bugger him and bugger the Nawab. And bugger his bloody limousine.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? A crest on the door as big as your arse. A bloody open invitation for some bolshie Nawab-hating blighter to heave a bloody great rock through the window.’

  Merrick smiled; and was silent, contemplating the stone which he held balanced on the palm of his right hand.

  *

  Nawab Sahib was having the frayed end of his coat sleeve trimmed when Count Bronowsky told him there had been an incident involving one of the motor-cars on loan to the wedding party. The car, a 1926 Daimler, once the property of the late Begum, had been struck by a stone as it turned into Church Road at the Victoria roundabout. A window had been shattered and Captain Bingham cut on the cheek. The other occupant of the car, a Captain Merrick, was unhurt. He had telephoned the information through to Ahmed Kasim from the chaplain’s house where Captain Bingham was receiving attention from a medical officer. The ceremony had been delayed for half an hour and the reception at the Gymkhana Club would now begin at 11.15 instead of at 10.45. There was therefore no need to hurry.

  Nawab Sahib, who was standing patiently in the middle of the room – his left arm held out while his personal body-servant snipped stray bits of thread from his cuff – glanced at Bronowsky. The Count was dressed in a starched cream linen suit, cream silk shirt and dove-grey silk tie. He had his best ebony gold-topped cane to lean on. The Nawab then looked at young Ahmed who wore a grey linen jacket and trousers, noticeably less expensive but quite well cut and properly pressed.

  The silent inspection over, the Nawab returned his attention to the make-and-mend operation on his own coat, and said,

  ‘Has a substitute car been sent?’

  ‘It was offered but declined. Captain Merrick insists the damaged one is perfectly serviceable.’

  ‘Has the chief of police been informed?’

  ‘Ahmed has telephoned him, your Highness.’


  ‘Will he think to make contact with the military police in the cantonment? Or will he rush about in the city arresting every likely culprit?’

  The questions, recognized by the Count as rhetorical, were left unanswered. Ali Baksh, the chief of police in Mirat, was currently under the cloud of the Nawab’s unpredictable but cautious displeasure. Another reason for Bronowsky saying nothing was his understanding that the Nawab’s composure was deceptive and so best left untampered with. Bronowsky had trained the Nawab to think of himself as a man who had to deny himself the luxury of violent criticism, even of expressing an opinion about anything except strictly personal matters, and who had a duty to the one million people he ruled never to leap to a conclusion or take any unconsidered action. But Bronowsky knew that although the Nawab had so far made no comment on the incident of the car his sense of outrage had been disturbed and fired.

  Bronowsky smiled. Within sight of the end of his own reign he allowed himself the full pleasure of self-congratulation. Nawab Sahib had been transformed, step by painful step, from a tin-pot autocratic native prince of extravagant tastes and emotions into the kind of ruler-statesman whose air of informed detachment and benign loftiness was capable of leaving even the wiliest mind guessing and the coldest heart warmed briefly by curiosity; and wily minds and cold hearts were the combination Bronowsky found most common in English administrators. Nawab Sahib was Bronowsky’s one and only creation, his lifetime’s invention. He had fallen possessively in love with him and watched with compassion the struggle Nawab Sahib sometimes had to discipline himself to act and move – and think – in the ways Bronowsky had taught him.

  Nawab Sahib removed his arm from the gentle support of the servant with the scissors and inspected the cuff. His private austerities were the last remarkable flowering of Bronowsky’s design for a prince; remarkable because Bronowsky had not planned them. For Bronowsky, the austerities were to his design what the unexpected, seemingly inspired and unaccountable stroke of the brush could sometimes be to a painting, the stroke that seemed to have created the need for itself out of the combined resources of the canvas and the man who worked on it, and so was definitive of the process of creation itself and of the final element of mystery in any work of art.