The Day of the Scorpion

by Paul Scott

‘Oh I wish,’ Barbie said, holding Sarah’s arm tight, then letting it go, abruptly, ‘– but I can’t. Go with you. My old headquarters are in Calcutta, you know.’

  *

  Barbie’s ministrations to Aunt Mabel were unobtrusive. She made herself scarce while Sarah followed Mabel along the rear veranda, holding the cradle-basket for the new crop of dead heads. The light had nearly gone. From inside Barbie touched the switch that turned on the globes on the veranda.

  ‘When are you going then?’ Mabel asked.

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  Mabel nodded, finished attending to the azalea.

  ‘Where will you stay?’

  ‘I rang Aunt Fenny. She’ll put me up for a couple of nights.’

  ‘I thought they lived in Delhi.’

  ‘They moved to Calcutta in January.’

  They went on to the next flower. Sarah said:

  ‘I wanted to ask you something. Something special.’ It was hard to speak up and still soften the blunt edges of a request. ‘I wanted to ask you about an old christening gown.’

  The capable old hands continued without pause, caressing, turning, searching, nipping; preserving the strength of the plant, coaxing it to vigour and ripe old age with the removal of those decayed relics of its former flowering. I am asking, Sarah thought, to take something like that from her, as well. And wondered if the same thought had occurred, shot home, a sharp wound swiftly healed by acceptance of its necessity – because without speaking Mabel suddenly turned and went inside, leaving Sarah alone there with the basket. There was silence inside the house but presently Barbie came to the french window and beckoned.

  ‘She’s in her room and wants you to go in.’

  Sarah put the basket down by the chair that was Susan’s favourite and followed Barbie through into the hall. The door of Mabel’s room, which Sarah had seldom entered, stood open. She tapped, quite loudly. Mabel was on her knees by the open press at the foot of the bed, laying back folds of tissue paper – the same gestures, in exaggerated form, that she used to part foliage to expose the withered blooms on hidden stalks. She turned the last fold, wordlessly exposed the handiwork of a vanished generation. From a distance it was, as Sarah had predicted, yellowed, and perhaps close-to would be brittle-looking; but when she knelt and placed her hand between the lace and the fine lawn that lay beneath it the lace came alive against the pinkness of her skin.

  ‘It’s French,’ Aunt Mabel said. ‘If you like you can let Susan have it.’

  ‘I didn’t know about it,’ Sarah replied. ‘And it’s for you to say.’ She hesitated. ‘It’s exquisite.’

  There were springs of lavender whose scent mixed with those of sandalwood. Around the hem of the lawn undergarment was a half-inch border of seed pearls. She marvelled at the industry gone into decoration that would not be noticed when the gown was worn. On that day, yes, that one day anyway, wearing this she had looked beautiful.

  ‘My first husband’s mother was French,’ Mabel said. ‘When we married he took me there, to see them. His mother’s family. We sailed back to India from Marseilles. I never saw them again.’

  ‘And they gave you the lace?’

  ‘No, his mother gave me that in London. I never saw her again either. She was very handsome. He got his looks from her. And his courage. She was dying but we didn’t know. She kept it from us. She saw he was happy.’

  Sarah moved her hand under the lace. Astonishing. There was a motif of butterflies. They were alive, fluttering above her moving hand.

  ‘It was an old château. Very old.’

  ‘Where her family lived?’

  ‘Yes. There was a tower.’ A pause. ‘She lived there. An old woman making lace. She was blind. She’d made lace all her life. I think she was a poor relation or an old retainer. I showed them this lace, this piece. His mother gave it to me – for a christening. And they said, It’s Claudine’s. Come and see her. Claudine made it, you can tell from the butterflies. So we climbed the tower and went into the room right at the top where she lived and worked. She ran her fingers over the lace, and put her hand under it like you’re doing and said, “Ah, oui, pauvre papillon. C’est un de mes prisonniers.” And then something I didn’t understand but which they told me meant her heart bled for the butterflies because they could never fly out of the prison of the lace and make love in the sunshine. She could feel the sunshine on her hands but her hands wove nothing but a prison for God’s most delicate creatures.’ A pause. ‘I asked them to tell her that real butterflies might play in the sunshine but only lived for a day. It was rather silly and sentimental, but she smiled and nodded and took it as a compliment because she knew I was very young and didn’t understand.’

  Gently Sarah withdrew her hand. The butterflies were still. She thought of the christening to come and herself standing, perhaps by the side of Ronald Merrick, making vows in the name of a child swaddled in this lace, and knew that she did not want it used for such a purpose, for that occasion. She knew, but could not have explained.

  ‘Please take it,’ Mabel said. ‘Anyway, I’ve meant that you should have it one day.’

  Sarah began folding the tissue. She shook her head. ‘I’m awfully grateful, but I think it should stay here.’

  ‘No, take it,’ Mabel repeated. She completed the folding of the gown into the tissue, lifted and held it so that, involuntarily, Sarah raised both hands to receive it. ‘It’s yours. It says so in my Will. But take it now. I’ve no use for it. Things shouldn’t be kept if they can’t be put to use.’ She got slowly but quite steadily to her feet, leaving Sarah kneeling, holding the bulked-up tissue. Their glances met, and held. Then, as she turned her head and began to move away, Mabel said:

  ‘You are very young too, but I expect you understand better than I did at your age.’

  *

  The tonga was still waiting and the driver was lighting his lamps. She told him to drive down to the bazaar, to Jalal-ud-din’s. As well as the christening gown Mabel had given her two hundred rupees to help, she said, with her fare and expenses. ‘But they’ve wangled a travel warrant for me,’ Sarah had protested, ‘and even given me a movement order to make it look as if I’m on official business.’ General Rankin, no less than other right-thinking people in Pankot, approved of Sarah Layton’s mission. ‘Well, it will help with bills,’ Mabel had said, ‘I expect your mother owes some.’

  Between Rose Cottage and the club there was no other traffic. In early June, before the coming of the summer rain, even the Pankot air lost its bite. The heat of the day lingered on into the dark. She longed for rain. Susan’s baby would be born in the early weeks of the rain. The mornings would be misty and on days when there was no rain the hills would be vivid green. She sat in the back of the slow-going tonga, holding the parcel, and fancied she could feel the slight pulsation, the flickering of tiny white wings. She became aware of the quietness of the road, its look of desertion, and remembered Barbie’s dream of her gallant ride to St John’s and her own dream that began with Teddie, who knew where he was going and struck them dumb because of that.

  But at the club entrance there were other tongas and from there down the long stretch to the bazaar, with the golf course on her right, and on her left the bungalows that skirted the foot of Central Hill, dominated by the churches of St John’s and St Edward’s, they passed others, and a military truck, a taxi or two, and presently there were the lights that marked the beginning of the bazaar.

  She got down at the tonga stand, told the driver to wait because she wanted him to take her on down to the Pankot Rifles lines. The shops were open, some of them brightly lit so that the few street lamps were paled to nothing. But it was not an hour for civil shopping. Groups of British soldiers eyed her but let her pass without comment, knowing she was not for them. The corporal’s chevrons on her sleeves could never trick them into believing otherwise. A white girl was an officer’s girl, and probably an officer’s daughter. A chokra trotted by her side, offering his services as a little beast
of burden. He waited outside Gulab Singh Sahib’s pharmacy while she went in and bought toothpaste and toothbrush to use in Calcutta and, as an afterthought, a bottle of toilet water to sweeten the journey. She paid what they owed and wondered where the line was drawn between necessity and luxury, the high cost of living and extravagance; and, outside, gave the three little parcels to the chokra but refused his offer to carry the parcel of tissue and lace.

  ‘Jalal-ud-din’s,’ she told him and turned towards the store, walking down the arcaded frontage of Pankot’s European-style shops; and saw her – the beggar woman who, for Sarah, had become interchangeable as a suppliant figure with the woman in the white saree. And afterwards, because she had concentrated on the figure of the beggar woman, recalled that embarrassing and distressing scene on Mirat station and Merrick’s remote face, his muttered rejection of her plea in the same tongue the woman spoke in, she was unsure, as unsure as she was ashamed; unsure that the elderly white woman, half-hidden by a distinguished-looking middle-aged Indian woman, in the act of bending, climbing into a car through a door held open by an Indian driver, whose bulk almost immediately cut her off, was the woman from the houseboat; ashamed because the glimpse she had, the conviction that the woman was Lady Manners, caused her automatically to stop, half turn away, to avoid anything in the nature of a direct physical confrontation, as if – so – she might make up for an earlier impulsive action, eradicate it, rub it out, and identify herself with a collective conspiracy. She was ashamed to remember the way she stood, awkwardly poised, persuasively conveying in every exaggerated histrionic gesture and change of expression the portrait of a girl who feared she had left something behind at Gulab Singh Sahib’s; so that the chokra, concerned, held up the three packages, inviting her to count. Then he pointed to the package she held herself, as though he thought some fit of absent-mindedness had caused her momentarily not to realize that she held it.

  She smiled and nodded and faced towards Jalal-ud-din’s again, the shame already warming her face; but there was no sign of the car. It had gone swiftly, silently, no doubt turning the corner of the inverted V to take the steep road into West Hill where people like the Laytons never went. She turned again, retraced her steps to the tonga stand and there gave the chokra his anna.

  III

  ‘Now tell me,’ Aunt Fenny said, ‘what have you really come for?’

  The flat was air-conditioned. Perhaps that shadow of professional neglect which Uncle Arthur had always seemed to work under had not lifted; but at least he appeared to have reached the point of contact with the earth of its dark rainbow, and found a crock of fairy gold: the flat, its high view far above the roofs of old aristocractic houses, the like of which he had never secured for his and Aunt Fenny’s personal use; and a war-time sinecure which, so far as Sarah could make out, involved him in giving lectures of a paramilitary nature to young officers, on the structure of Indian military and civilian administration. He was, she gathered, seconded to a branch of welfare and education which had its eye on the capacity some of these young Englishmen might show for identifying themselves with the problems of a country with which the war alone had brought them in contact. Behind the lectures was a blandishment: Stay on, stay on. ‘We give them a picture you know,’ Colonel Grace said, ‘of what it’s really like in peace-time, eradicate some of those impressions they have, that we’re a load of blimps, sitting on our fannies under punkahs and shouting Koi Hai.’ To counteract all that they gave them the stuff. The real stuff. Sarah nodded, and the young men – three of those in question – smiled easily. According to Aunt Fenny the flat was usually fuller even than Sarah had found it of Uncle Arthur’s ‘chaps’. He had conceived it part of the duties of the department he headed to bring the chaps home, or have them call, in groups, swapping the scratch amenities of the temporary mess out at the place where the courses were held, for the more considerable ones of a genuine Anglo-Indian pied-à-terre, where they could imbibe, at breakfast, tiffin or dinner, those lessons that went deeper than any mere chat from a rostrum ever could. There had been no British intake into the ICS since the war began and the Indian army was dense with emergency officers of all kinds who had never thought of making a career of arms, least of all in India. Among them, surely, there were a few who would get the call, see the vision, understand the hard realities of imperial service and feel the urge to match themselves to them?

  ‘They’re mostly what Arthur calls in abeyance,’ Fenny told Sarah as she showed her her room – a comfortable little white-walled box, as cold as a refrigerator, with the bulging grey Bengal monsoon sky – which Sarah had never seen in her life before – filling the hermetically sealed window. Overnight from Ranpur she had ridden into the June rain. It would not reach Pankot for a while yet. She felt, from this alone, that she had travelled into another world, so that it amazed her that it was ever possible to make the mistake of thinking of India as one country.

  ‘What kind of abeyance?’ (She was thinking of her mother.)

  ‘Oh, you know, between postings, or getting better from jaundice, or just among the crowd that get stuck in depots and training establishments and apply for courses to stop themselves going barmy. We don’t get many who are born slackers. At least Arthur doesn’t bring them back here. Of course they’re not usually quite our kind of people’ – (Sarah nodded, again, gravely) – ‘but then we’re a bit of a dying species, aren’t we, pet? And they’re mostly nice cheerful chaps, and some of them are from good homes, and it’s usually that kind who are seriously thinking of staying on after the war. Arthur’s a great success with them – I think because he responds to them. He feels they genuinely want to know about India and what it’s meant to the standard of life they enjoy back home and take so much for granted.’

  ‘I expect you’re a success with them too, Aunt Fenny.’

  ‘Oh, I am! Do you know why? Because I’m happy. Isn’t it gorgeous—?’ She indicated not the room so much as the flat the room was a cold, rather remote, unlived-in part of. ‘To be cool. Oh, to be cool.’ There had been a time, surely, when Aunt Fenny had dismissed the more modern aspects of twentieth-century Anglo-Indian life as unwelcome signs of things going to the dogs. Sarah smiled. She herself preferred to be less cool, but it was nice to see Aunt Fenny enjoying something. This morning the lines of disapproval that fixed the mouth were like marks of an old illness, like smallpox, that had left no other trace. But it was at the moment Sarah was thinking this that Fenny stopped being happy about the flat and reverted to her older, probing, rather suspicious self.

  ‘Now tell me, what have you really come for?’

  Sarah told her. When she finished Aunt Fenny said, ‘But, pet, couldn’t I have done it for you and saved you all this trouble and expense?’

  ‘They gave me a rail warrant.’ She hesitated, observed Aunt Fenny’s invisible hackles tremble with the effort she was making not to let them rise, and added, ‘Susan has this idea he’s lost a limb or his eyesight, and that if anyone goes to see him and then writes to her they might not tell her the truth, out of kindness.’

  ‘But I could have seen him and then come up to Pankot.’

  ‘That would have been expense and trouble for you and you could still have kept the facts from her out of kindness. I think she wanted it to be me because she believes she could see through it if I kept anything back.’

  Aunt Fenny smiled, touched Sarah’s arm.

  ‘Do I detect six of one and half a dozen of another? I mean he took a bit of a shine to you in Mirat. Was it mutual?’

  Sarah looked away, unable to take the opportunity to make Aunt Fenny feel less excluded from the question of Captain Merrick’s bodily state of health. ‘No, not at all. Anyway, I don’t think he took a shine. I’m not really looking forward to it, but it seems to be important to Susan, and I’d like to get it over with as soon as possible. Do you think if I turned up this morning they’d let me see him?’

  ‘You’ll do no such thing. You’ll tuck down here for the rest
of the morning and catch up with some sleep. I’ll ring the hospital and see what can be arranged for early evening or late afternoon, then you can have a relaxed day, see Mr Merrick at about five o’clock and come back here in time for drinks. Some of the boys are coming in for dinner. Do you really have to go back tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve booked my sleeper from Ranpur to Pankot for tomorrow night.’

  ‘The old midnight special?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you’ll have to be on the midday from Cal to get the connection? What about a reservation? It’s not easy at such short notice.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll squeeze in. It’s not difficult if you don’t want a berth. Someone with a berth to Delhi will let me sit in. We get to Ranpur about nine in the evening, long before anyone wants to have their bed made up.’

  ‘Yes, well, all the same I’ll ask your uncle to pull some rank. He’ll enjoy that. He’s just like a boy about being able to say it’s Colonel Grace speaking. But get your head down for now, pet. I can tell you didn’t have a berth last night. Was it ghastly?’

  ‘No, fun really. I sat up all night with some nurses who were on their way to Shillong.’ And envied them, going to the war it seems I can never go to. We played cards and drank rather a lot of gin. And I listened while they discussed men in general and in particular the two officers who tried to get off with the two prettiest girls and had to be firmly ejected from the carriage when the train stopped at Benares. I fell asleep, near Dhanbad. The taste of the journey is still in my mouth.

  She sat on the bed and at once knew how tired she was. Over-excited. Like a child. She was aware of Aunt Fenny stooping to unlace her shoes for her. She protested but it was done just the same. Weightless, her legs lifted easily on to the bed. Curtains were drawn. Comforted by all this evidence of family devotion and the softness of the pillow under her head, she fell asleep.