by Paul Scott
‘I don’t mind nullahs.’
‘It’s too wide to jump.’
‘Come on then.’
She dug in her heels. A moment she loved: the slight hesitation, the gathering of propulsive forces in the animal she sat astride, the first leap forward that always seemed to her like a leap into a world of unexplored delight which she could only cut a narrow channel through and which she would reach the farther end of too soon but not without experiencing on the way something of the light and mysterious pleasure that existed for creatures who broke free of their environment. Ahead she made out the broken line of the nullah and as the horse did not at once respond to movement of wrist and pressure of heel had a second or two of fear that had itself broken free into a curious region of stillness and excitement; and then the horse began veering left; a quick glance over her shoulder showed her Ahmed. She felt an extraordinary, exhilarating sense of the perfection of their common endeavour. Together they galloped along the line of the nullah and charged through the gap where the nullah petered out a few yards from the road. From here she could see the city gate, isolated relic of the city wall, and how the road led to it and had come diagonally across the waste ground from the palace. They passed through splashes of shade from the trees that lined the road, drew level with and passed a line of lumbering carts drawn by humped white oxen, and then a file of women with baskets on their heads. The air was salurated by the pale smell of centuries of dung-fire smoke. The city was close. Why, it looms, Sarah thought, I don’t want it: and exerted pressure with her right heel and right wrist to bring the horse round in a fine galloping sweep. She sensed the animal’s bloody-minded resistance. It seemed as if it would neither turn nor slow, but would charge mindlessly on and dash itself and her to pieces on the city of Mirat. But then she felt the slight change of rhythm and the neat little spasm of adjustment to the centre of gravity, and Mirat began to swing towards her left shoulder. She exerted pressure to slow the horse to a canter, and then to a trot. At this end of the waste ground there was a group of three banyan trees, two of them with a fine display of rooted branches. She reined in beneath the youngest of the trees and looked round. Mr Kasim had reined in too, and waited exactly as before, a few paces behind her, to her left. Such precision! She smiled at him, pleased for both of them. The smile she got in return, though, was as distant as ever. Obviously he had not shared her pleasure; instead, probably, shared her moments of dismay, wondering what blame would be put on him if she fell and was injured. In his position Teddie would have felt obliged to say, Are you all right? or, You’d better go easy on that brute. And have got himself ready to complain to the head syce when they returned to the palace; all of which – Sarah realized – would spoil the morning for her by introducing the all-too-familiar note of criticism that day in day out acted in you and on you as part of a general awareness of being in charge, of having to be prepared to throw your weight about, so that really there was nothing you could enjoy for its own sake, nothing you could give yourself over to entirely.
She looked towards the town and said, ‘It’s funny, Mr Kasim, but I’ve not once heard the muezzin since I’ve been here, and yet there are all those minarets.’
‘The wind’s been in the wrong direction, I expect.’
‘They do call then?’
‘Oh yes. They call.’
‘Five times a day?’
‘Yes.’
‘Will the îd al-fitr prayers be said in the mosques or out here?’
‘Out here. Why?’
‘I read somewhere that they’re supposed to be held in the open air if possible.’
‘You must have seen such meetings before, in open places?’
‘No. I don’t think so. I suppose because I’ve only been in places where they make them stay in the mosques in case of trouble. Or perhaps I’ve seen them but not known what was going on.’
‘Last year the îd fell during the wet season. The prayers were indoors then.’
‘Why is it preferred for them to be in the open?’
Mr Kasim paused, as if considering; but he might have been reluctant to answer so many questions about his religion. She, after all, was an infidel. When the answer came, though, it suggested mockery; mockery of her and of the beliefs of his own people.
‘Because of the crowds, I expect. The idea is wholly practical.’
‘You mean you have to cater for all the people who never go into a mosque normally?’
‘Yes,’ Ahmed said. And added, ‘But I’m no kind of authority. The Imam at the Abu-Q’rim mosque would probably have a different explanation.’
‘When exactly will the îd fall?’
‘When the new moon is seen.’
‘Supposing it’s cloudy?’
‘Then you calculate and usually make it thirty days instead of twenty-nine or thirty after the beginning of Ramadan, to be on the safe side. But it won’t be cloudy this year and of course the calculation is already made. In fact the îd is due about a week after your sister’s wedding.’
‘Is it? But how nice. That means everybody will be happy.’ She turned. It was uncomfortable having to sit askew in the saddle just to talk to him. She set the horse at a walk and then at a trot. Everybody will be happy. Everybody will be happy. Distantly she could see the roof of the palace. The sun was already hot and the short-lived freshness of early morning already staling. She noted the first phase of that curious phenomenon of the Indian plain, the gradual disappearance of the horizon, as if the land were expanding, stretching itself, destroying the illusion that the mind, hand and eye could stake a claim to any part that bore a real relation to the whole. It is always retreating, Sarah told herself, always making off, getting farther and farther away and leaving people and what people have built stranded. Behind her, she knew, Mr Kasim rode at a constant watchful distance, but as the land expanded it left them in relation to the horizon getting closer and closer together. She felt that a god looking down would observe this shortening of distance and wonder what it was about his lesser creations that made them huddle together when they might have emulated giants, become giant riders on giant horses. Why – Sarah cried to herself – that’s how I used to feel! That’s how I felt on the day of the wasp. And tried now to induce the feeling again, but failed. Well, I am full-grown, she thought, and those were growing pains. Full grown. Full grown. She persuaded the horse into a canter and thought of the men she might have married and the children she might have had since becoming full-grown, and wondered whether there was really such a thing as love and if there were what subtle influences it might have on the purely animal response, some men, but not Teddie, had wakened in her. She wondered if Teddie had awakened Susan in that way, and Susan Teddie; and envied her not for being woken but for apparently being endowed with a nature that was ready to take all the rest on trust. My trouble is, she thought, I question everything, every assumption. I’m not content to let things be, to let things happen. If I don’t change that I shall never be happy.
Again they moved left to avoid the nullah which on this side did not peter out but passed under the road, through a culvert. It was shallow, though, and the banks were easy. Sarah urged her horse down into it. The clay bottom was cracked, so quickly had the post-monsoon sun dried out whatever water settled here during the rains, but there was mud still in the shadow of the culvert. The ground bore the imprint of cattle, goat and horses’ hooves.
‘Do you come this way, Mr Kasim, I mean when you ride alone?’ she called.
She did not hear his reply clearly. It might have been ‘Sometimes’. She took the rise back out of the nullah. They were now close to the house Mr Kasim said was Count Bronowsky’s: newish-looking Anglo-Indian palladian, she noted; isolated in an extensive walled garden, probably built for him, by him. That sort of man knew how to feather his nest: a foreigner, a European, in the service of a native prince, a throw-back to the days of the nabobs of the old trading companies – French, English and Portuguese. She did not think she would
like old Count Bronowsky, although it was said he had done fine things. Fine things for himself too, she imagined, judging by the house. She could not imagine her father retiring to live in such a place, rather to a gabled villa in Purley, or a timbered cottage in Pankot if he chose to live the rest of his days in India. People like Teddie and Susan closed their eyes to the fact that her father’s generation must be the last generation of English people who would have such a choice. War or no war, it was all coming to an end, and the end could not come neatly. There would be people who had to be victims of the fact that it could not. She herself was surely one of them, and perhaps Mr Kasim too.
Suddenly she wheeled the horse round in the same kind of tight circle Mr Kasim had described before they set off on their gallop. She caught him before he had time to hang back, and so confronted him in the act of reining in, but having done so she could not find an acceptable way of explaining her impulsive action, either to him or to herself. Curiously, though, in the moment before being embarrassed at finding herself at a loss, she thought that the world might be a more interesting and useful place to live in if there were more such empty gestures as the one she had apparently made. They were only empty in the sense that there was room in them for meaning to be poured. That kind of meaning wasn’t found easily. It was better, then, to leave the gesture unaccompanied. To make words up just for the sake of saying something would be incongruous. So she closed her mouth and smiled, turned her horse’s head and continued on at a walk, listening to the sound that never seemed to stop between sun-up and sundown, was taken for granted and seldom heard consciously at all: the sore-throated calling of the crows.
When they returned to the guest house she saw her future brother-in-law and his best man waiting on the terrace.
‘Hello,’ she called. ‘What a nice surprise. Are you here for breakfast?’
*
The officer Susan Layton was to marry, Teddie Bingham, was the kind of man Mrs Layton would have preferred her husband to be on hand to approve of. She had complained to Sarah that it was bad enough having to write to Colonel Layton and tell him that his youngest daughter was getting married to a man he had never heard of, could not meet and might not like, without the additional worry of searching for the right sort of phrases to convey to him the idea that in his absence she had done everything necessary to be reassured about Captain Bingham’s background and found nothing amiss. She did not want to worry him. God knew he had worries of his own. Letters to a prisoner of war had to be cheerful and soothing.
‘All you need tell him,’ Sarah pointed out, ‘is the name of Teddie’s regiment and that Susan and he love each other. That’s all he’ll need to know. And that’s all there is to tell. After all, nothing is amiss, is it?’
‘There’s the question of his parents. It’s easier if a man has parents. All there seems to be is an uncle in Shropshire, a father in the Muzzafirabad Guides who broke his neck hunting and a mother who married again, had an unhappy time and died in Mandalay. Your Aunt Mabel says she knew some Muzzy Guides people but doesn’t remember a Bingham, which is neither here nor there because she only remembers what she wants to. But it means all we’ve got to go on is Dick Rankin’s word and Teddie himself.’
General Rankin was the Area Commander. Teddie had come to the Area Headquarters in Pankot from the staff college in Quetta. It was not a good posting for an officer who had commanded a company of the Muzzafirabad Guides in Burma, acted as second-in-command of the depleted battalion during the retreat. From Quetta he might have had a G2 appointment, or at least a posting to the staff of an active division. He admitted this himself. He hoped and believed the posting to Pankot was only temporary. The one good thing about it, he added, was that it had brought him and Susan together.
Before Susan it had brought him Sarah. She and Susan, both mustered into the Women’s Auxiliary Corps, worked as clerks at Area Headquarters which had stationed itself permanently in Pankot for the duration to avoid the confusion and pressures of the yearly move from Ranpur to the hills and back again. Corporal Sarah Layton was the first of the two Layton girls he noticed, and for a time it seemed that he would prove to be the exception to the rule which, according to interested observers in Pankot, made it almost inevitable that any man first taking an interest in Sarah Layton would presently cool off her and start paying attention to Susan, who admittedly was prettier, livelier, always to be counted on to do what Pankot people described as making things go. The result was that one was never sure which group of men Susan would next be seen as the sparkling centre of, only certain that from time to time, in these groups, there would turn up a man who, briefly, had been conspicuous as a companion of her quieter, elder sister. Once he had succumbed to Susan’s more obvious attractions he became one of a crowd; one ceased to notice him and, as a consequence, did not mark his disappearance. Susan, it was assumed, took none of her men seriously. They came, direct or via Sarah, danced attendance, and were replaced.
When Teddie Bingham showed signs of being Susan-proof it was to Sarah rather than to himself that he drew attention. The ladies of Pankot discussed this interesting situation over bridge, committee-teas, behind the counter of the canteen of the Regimental Institute for British soldiers of non-commissioned rank, and behind the scenes at rehearsals for their amateur theatricals. It was, they agreed, time that Sarah Layton settled down. She was all of twenty-two. She was very presentable, quite pretty, and well behaved. Her background was excellent, in fact impeccable within the context of Anglo-India in general and Pankot in particular. She was practically born in Flagstaff House (the senior ladies reminded those less well-endowed with detailed knowledge of Pankot history), her mother was a Muir, her maternal grandfather had been G O C Ranpur; her paternal grandfather had a distinguished career in the Civil, she was related by his second marriage to old Mabel Layton, and her father – now a prisoner in Germany – had commanded the 1st Pankot Rifles in North Africa.
And, in herself, Sarah Layton was upright, honest, and, one imagined, a tower of strength to her mother. Mrs Layton, it had to be admitted, had not borne up under the strain of separation from her husband with the case and cheerfulness one had the right to expect of a senior military wife. One found her vagueness and general air of distraction difficult to deal with. It had become an aggravating duty, where once it had been a pleasure, to partner her at bridge, for instance. She was not alway meticulous about paying her losses, either. Fortunately, a hint to Sarah Layton was known to be effective. It was rumoured that native shopkeepers like Mohammed Hossain the tailor, and Jalal-ud-din, the general merchant, had taken to referring overdue accounts to Sarah as an insurance against painful accumulation. Honorary secretaries of ladies’ committees on which Mrs Layton sat had become used to mentioning the dates and times of meetings to Sarah, because this seemed to be the best way of reducing the odds against Mrs Layton turning up. On top of all this, there was – how should one put it? – a tendency in Colonel Layton’s lady towards over-indulgence with the bottle.
Sarah Layton, it was obvious, was the temporary rock on which the Layton household had come to rest, and it seemed unfair that her mother should be demonstrably more alert to the existence of her younger daughter. One could not exactly describe Mrs Layton’s attitude to Susan as fond – one gave her credit for retaining, in public, a proper manner of emotional detachment from the affairs of her children – but if one assumed fondness behind the manner then Susan, clearly, was the favourite daughter – and seemed to know it. That she knew it was, perhaps, the one major flaw in the bright little crystal. The minor flaws – vanity and pertness – were probably marginal evidence of the existence of this major one. But one forgave her in any case. She could not help it if people were attracted to her. It would be unnatural of her to pretend this was not so and only a girl with a remarkable capacity for self-effacement would not take advantage of it.
All the same one was sorry for the comparatively – and it was only comparatively – less attractive si
ster. One had never doubted that eventually she would come across a man who, looking for more than a casual flirtation, would prefer the things she had to offer. What made the association between Teddie Bingham and Sarah Layton so especially interesting to the ladies of Pankot was the fact that Teddie, in their majority opinion, was really rather good-looking; that is he was if sandy reddish hair and pale eyelashes weren’t on one’s personal list of things in a man one found disagreeable. The qualification was made and accepted because one lady, a Mrs Fosdick, said she was allergic to men with red hair and that she always counted pale eyelashes a sign of weakness and untrustworthiness. Another lady, a Mrs Paynton, said nonsense, pale eyelashes denoted an exceptionally amorous nature, and if that is what Mrs Fosdick meant by weakness and untrustworthiness she was all for it. The ladies smiled. Their interest in Teddie Bingham thus aroused in regard to a specific point, they turned to a reconsideration of Sarah Layton and agreed that in life it was the quiet and unassuming people who in the end surprised one most. One had to remember, too, that both the Layton girls had come back out with, as it were, the dew of maidenhood still fresh on their young faces. Parents in India, reunited with their daughters, were well aware of the attendant dangers. On any station there were never enough young girls to go round. Even the plainest poor creature might expect attention from young men fired by climate and scarcity. The girls were fired by the climate too, and the sensation of power over herds of – as it were – panting young men could easily go to their heads. The first year was the one to watch out for. A girl needed her parents then. Wise parents stood by and let a girl enjoy the illusion of having her head in the first six months. One might expect anything up to six announcements that she had met the one man in the world for her. In the second six months one had to shorten the rein because this was the period when having found and discarded six Prince Charmings she could be expected to select as a seventh a man who had shown no interest in her at all, probably because he was already spoken for and had dropped out of the game of romantic musical chairs.