by Paul Scott
‘Susan mustn’t see me yet. Can you get Mother out here somehow?’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Teddie’s been killed.’
Mabel’s expression did not alter. After a moment she let go of Sarah’s arm, then touched it again as a mark of reassurance, turned, picked up the basket and went inside. Sarah followed. The veranda at the front of Rose Cottage was narrow. It was cluttered with pots of flowering shrubs. The famous views were all at the back where the garden sloped to a wire fence, below which the land became precipitous. The cottage was one of the oldest in Pankot, built before the fashion came for building in a style more reminiscent of home. Stuccoed, whitewashed, with square columns on the verandas and high-ceilinged rooms inside, it was a piece of old Anglo-India, a bungalow with a large square entrance hall. The hall was panelled. Upon the polished wood Mabel’s brass and copper shone. The bowls of flowers gave off a deep and dusty scent, and Sarah, standing in the doorway, half-closed her eyes and imagined the drone of bees on a summer’s day at home in England, which she had thought of as Pankot in miniature. But England was far away and Pankot was miniature itself. Rose Cottage was not big enough to contain Susan’s loss and the gestures of sorrow that presently must be made. They would be offered and the whole of Susan’s loss and other people’s sorrow would balloon and Pankot would not be able to contain it. She could not hear any voices. She turned away from the hall and stood on the veranda, amazed at the bright colours of flowers in the sunlight and the antics of a pair of butterflies whom Teddie’s death had not affected. She waited for her mother to come out. At this time of day she would be in her first drinks of the day state: languid but mettlesome, neither to be loved nor criticized, and requiring an explanation she would not ask for in so many words and which Sarah in this case could not give.
She heard her mother’s footsteps.
Mrs Layton was frowning, puzzled by and impatient of an interruption. The frown meant that Aunt Mabel had not said why Sarah had come. That Mabel had said nothing was too characteristic to be called unfair. Quickly Sarah began to formulate words. There’s awfully bad news, Mother. But that wouldn’t do at all. Bad news could be about her father. Shot while trying to escape. Killed by a disease made worse by malnutrition; or dead of lost hope or broken heart.
She said, ‘Teddie’s been killed,’ and reached in her pocket, gave the crumpled signal form to her mother who took it, read it, went inside and sat on a hard hall chair and read it again. Mabel came out of the living-room followed by Barbie Batchelor, Mrs Fosdick and Mrs Paynton. They gathered round Mrs Layton. Becoming aware of them, Mrs Layton looked up from the telegram and said, ‘Teddie’s been killed.’
Sarah went past them into the living-room. Cigarette smoke still hung in the area of the abandoned bridge-table. Here again there were bowls and vases of flowers and deep overstuffed chairs, and a sofa dressed in flowered cretonne. At the far end the french windows were open on to the veranda. She could see the upholstered cane lounging chair and Susan’s bare feet crossed at the ankles in an attitude that suggested deep repose of all the body. Her sister’s drowsiness and fleshy calm made the veranda momentarily unapproachable. But she had assured herself no movement inside the house had penetrated that quiet, upset that delicate contemplation of a world without trouble.
She went back into the hall. They were talking in low voices. Her mother still sat. She had the fingers of one hand pressed lightly against her forehead. Miss Batchelor was leaning over her, supporting her back with an arm, but the support was unnecessary. Her mother’s back was stiff. She caught Sarah’s eye. And Sarah knew. It was she, Sarah, who must find a way of breaking the news to Susan, and the way she found would probably be clumsy, in which case Susan might forgive her but never forget.
She said to Aunt Mabel, ‘I’m going out to try and tell Susan now. I think someone should ring Dr Travers in case she takes it badly.’
To make Aunt Mabel hear she spoke clearly. The others turned. She had sounded hard but reliable. Such a combination was understood. If no member of the Layton family had been up to it one of them would have taken charge in just that way. Without waiting for Aunt Mabel’s reply she went back into the living-room, edged past the chairs round the bridge-table and stepped out on to the paved veranda. Susan was asleep. A faint perspiration was visible on her upper lip. Her swollen belly tautened the cotton smock and the skirt of the smock was rucked up above her bare knees. The rest of her looked too fragile for the burden of disfiguration, but in her sleep she was smiling. There was a faint upward lift to each corner of the moist closed lips.
Sarah could not wake her up and destroy such happiness. She sat on a near-by chair, watching her sister for the slightest sign that she was waking, and a ridiculous notion came to her that Susan should go on for ever dreaming and smiling and she go on sitting: in this silly uniform (she thought) with sleeves rolled up like a soldier’s, but showing the white chevrons, and wearing sensible regulation shoes. One of her lisle stockings had a snag near the ankle. She wet a finger and applied it. It would do no good. It never did. The scent from the garden and from the ranges of hills where pine trees grew, oozing aromatic gums, came in waves with the faint breeze that here – even on the stillest day – could be felt on the cheek. Her father said that at eye level from the veranda of Rose Cottage the closest ground was five miles distant as the crow flew. He had worked it out with map and compass, sitting where she was sitting. That was the time he taught her to orientate a map with the lie of the land and take bearings to determine a six-point reference on the grid. He never taught Susan such things. But I am a grown woman, she told herself, not a leggy girl learning the tricks he would have taught the son he never had. In a letter at Christmas Colonel Layton said of Teddie, whose photograph they had sent, ‘That son-in-law of mine looks all right. Not quite like seeing him in the flesh, but that will come, DV. Meanwhile I heartily approve and send my love to them both, and to you, Millie, and of course to Sarah.’ Of course. Of course. She glanced back at Susan and saw under the book that lay open on the floor, pages down, a block of writing paper and the edge of an envelope that would contain the last letter Teddie wrote, the last she had received at least, to which she had not quite summoned the energy to reply, and so had put it by, to doze, and write later, beginning after lunch, and ending after tea, giving it then to Mabel’s old servant Aziz to take down to the post.
She heard a faint sound and looked over her shoulder. Aunt Mabel was standing behind her, watching Susan too. She had never been able to tell what Aunt Mabel was thinking and now that true deafness was setting in even the old look of her sometimes watching you with inward curiosity about what you were thinking and why you were thinking it seldom appeared on the old but unwrinkled face. Her mother once said Mabel had no wrinkles because she cared for nothing and nobody, not even herself, and was never worried or concerned like an ordinary human being.
From the hall came the ring of the telephone. Mabel did not hear it. She moved to the balustrade and began to tend some of the flowers that were growing in pots and hanging baskets. Don’t wake, Sarah told her sister. The telephone was promptly answered. She guessed the caller was Mrs Rankin. Mrs Rankin would be relieved that Mildred wasn’t alone, but had Mrs Paynton and Mrs Fosdick to support her. In Mrs Rankin’s book Mrs Paynton and Mrs Fosdick would count. And Sarah knew that she herself would count. While intending almost the opposite she was growing into a young pillar of the Anglo-Indian community. When they got back from the wedding she had been restless. It had been as if with Susan safely married her role of elder daughter had been taken from her. A married woman took precedence over a spinster. Sensing a release and a challenge she told herself: I must go to the war; and inquired about a transfer to the nursing services, which would take her as close to the war as a girl could get; closer than her clerking would ever take her. When she heard of it her mother made no comment; it was Mrs Rankin who took her aside and said, ‘My dear, you mustn’t think of it. It seems u
nfair because you’re young, and want to do your bit, more than your bit if you can, but here’s where it’s going to be done. Have you thought of how much more your mother will need you if Susan has a baby?’ And a week later Susan announced that this indeed was what she was going to do. Neither Sarah nor her mother ever said anything about the war Sarah could not go to, but between them now, in addition to the silences that hinted at need there were these new silences that were like a recollection of intended betrayal, silences of accusation, silences in which Sarah felt herself charged with having attempted to escape from her responsibilities, caring nothing for her mother, being jealous of her sister and forgetful of her father whose peace of mind depended on a certain picture of them holding a fort together. But these were charges she sometimes made against herself and needed no look in her mother’s eye, no set of her mother’s still lips, to remind her of.
She leaned back in the chair, turning her head to keep the silent watch: on Susan sleeping and smiling, and on Aunt Mabel taking dead heads off an azalea to give strength to buds not yet open. But that only worked with plants. The bud of Susan’s belly wouldn’t wax stronger with the cutting off of Teddie. Or would it? The image was grotesque but it had come and would not go away. It was merged with another, an image of a shapeless mindless hunger consuming Susan, consuming all of them, feeding on loss, on happiness and sorrow alike, rendering all human ambition exquisitely pointless because the hunger was enough itself.
Don’t wake, she told Susan again, and closed her eyes to contribute to the persuasive arguments of the heat and scent and the siren whispers of the air. She opened them abruptly because Susan had stirred, shifted her legs and turned her head so that now she faced Sarah. After a while with eyes still closed she raised her right arm and made extra shade for her face with the crook of the elbow, then seemed to fall asleep again, but the weight of her own arm disturbed her, and her waking thoughts were more solemn than her sleeping ones. Unsmiling now she half lifted the lids of her eyes and observed Sarah through the fringes of her lashes and the shadow of her elbow. Sarah looked away. Presently she heard another movement – the sound perhaps of Susan lifting her arm to disperse the shadow, raising her head a bit to confirm the reality of Sarah’s presence. A moment later Susan asked in a sleepy voice:
‘Is it lunch-time already?’
Her eyes were shut again. She had moved her arm and made a pillow of both hands for her face.
‘No. I’ve come back early.’
At the far end of the veranda Mabel stood watching, alerted by the movements Susan had made. She had kept an eye open. Sarah was grateful. In spite of the marked withdrawal from other people, when a real pinch came – Sarah had always thought so – Mabel could be relied on. She was a point of reference. You could not embrace her but you could lean against her and if you ever did so perhaps you would find that she was a shelter too, because she stood firm, and cast a shadow.
‘Why have you come back early?’ Susan asked, long after Sarah thought she’d dozed off again. And then, ‘Anyway, what is the time?’ Susan had stopped wearing her watch. She had read somewhere that mothers-to-be shouldn’t allow themselves to be distracted by artificial divisions of time. Sarah looked at her own wrist. Was it only thirty-five minutes?
‘Eleven-twenty.’
She glanced back at Susan and watched the eyes open yet again. They conveyed a slight annoyance.
‘Have you come on badly, or something?’
Sarah shook her head. Since Susan had stopped coming on herself she either pretended not to know when Sarah had a period or spoke of it as if it threatened to disrupt her own routine. So Sarah thought. But perhaps she had become self-conscious and read into Susan’s manner what she felt about them herself: that hers were the menstrual flows of a virgin, sour little seepages such as Barbie Batchelor had presumably sustained for a good thirty years of her unreproductive life.
She said, ‘No,’ and then, seeing an opportunity, added, ‘It’s not that.’ She found herself studying the snag in her stocking again, and automatically wetted her finger, dabbed it, found inspiration from the firm contact. ‘Let’s help Aunt Mabel with the flowers.’ She had an idea that Susan ought to be standing, that it would be bad for her to be told what she had to be told, lying as she was.
She stood up. Susan watched her and then looked round and noticed her aunt standing at the balustrade, attending to the flowers and yet not attending to them.
‘Why should we do that?’ she asked, but fully awake now, returning her right arm to its crooked position above her head, looking at Aunt Mabel who, Sarah saw, remained still, resisting any temptation to dissociate herself from the situation that was arising.
‘Come on,’ Sarah said, ‘you’ll get as big as a house if you lie around all day. You ought to take much more exercise.’
‘I am as big as a house, and I’ve done my exercise.’
‘Well, I’m going to push the back of your chair up anyway. You always lie out on it much too flat.’ She went round behind and heaved the levered back higher.
‘Oh, Sarah, no. What on earth are you doing?’
‘Sitting you up.’ She readjusted the holding rod. Her arms were trembling. She came round to the front of the chair. ‘I’d better lower the foot. Then you’ll be almost respectable.’ She knelt, and did as she had warned. When she had finished she continued kneeling. She said, ‘Sorry. Have I made you awfully uncomfortable?’
Her sister was leaning forward, her hands clasped to the chair arms, her legs slightly apart with the smock ridden farther up from her knees. She was not displeased by the attention but puzzled by its suddenness and the absence of any immediately clear reason for it. Now she leant back, but kept her grip on the arms.
‘What have they done, given you a day off?’
‘Sort of.’
Susan waited.
‘Well?’
Sarah reached for one of Susan’s hands.
‘Something’s happened, which I have to tell you.’
The hand lay beneath hers, quite unresponsive.
‘I don’t know how to, but I’ve got to. I think I can only say it straight. It’s about Teddie.’
She paused, deliberately, to let it sink in. When she believed that it had she went on:
‘The signal came this morning and they stopped it being sent over because they knew I was on duty. The signal says – it says that Teddy’s been killed. So that’s what we have to start believing because there can’t be any doubt. If there were any doubt it wouldn’t say that, but it does, and I’m sorry, sorry.’
Now she took both of Susan’s hands. But they were pulled away.
‘No,’ Susan said.
She stared down at Sarah.
‘No.’
Mrs Fosdick came, and her mother, and Mrs Paynton, then Miss Batchelor. ‘No,’ she said, rejecting them all, jerking herself away from each touch of a hand on her arm or shoulder. ‘No. No. No.’
She kicked out with one foot, as if kicking Sarah away. Sarah got up and the others closed in, filling the gap. They surrounded her completely. ‘No,’ Sarah heard her say again; but her voice was muffled now, as if she had covered her face.
Sarah went down the steps into the garden. At the end of the garden there was a place – a pergola dense with briar rose, and behind it a fir where there would be shade from the hot yellow light. As she went she heard a sound that made her stop: a drawn-out shriek, a desolate cry of anguish. When she reached the shade behind the pergola and under the fir she stood with her arms folded, and then sat and wondered whether Susan’s cry had crossed the five measured miles to the other side of the valley, and wept – for what exactly she did not know – and it was over very quickly. She dried her eyes and did not want to be alone any longer. She got up, left the shade and reapproached the house with the sun heavy on her neck and heating her scalp. The situation was familiar. It had all happened before – people on a veranda and herself returning to join them. How many cycles had they lived thro
ugh then, how many times had the news of Teddie’s death been broken? How many times had Susan been taken indoors – almost dragged, stiffly resistant – in her mother’s arms, while Mrs Fosdick and Mrs Paynton stood like silent supervisors of an ancient ritual concerning women’s grief? Aunt Mabel had sat down, with the basket of dead heads on her lap.
‘Are you all right, Aunty?’ she asked, bending over her.
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘Can I get you anything?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Let me take those.’ She touched the handle of the basket but Aunt Mabel held on.
‘Tell your mother she and Susan can have my room for the night if they would like that. I don’t advise it, but Aziz can rig up extra beds and I can pig in with Barbie. You can have the little spare if they decide to stay.’
‘Thanks, but I’ll try and get them home.’
Mabel gazed up at her, then nodded. Sarah left her and joined Mrs Paynton and Mrs Fosdick who had gone into the sitting-room. There was no sound from anywhere in the house.
‘They’re in Barbie’s room,’ Mrs Paynton said, keeping her voice low. ‘You mustn’t be hurt, Sarah.’
‘No,’ said Mrs Fosdick. ‘She didn’t mean it, hitting out at you like that.’
‘I wasn’t hurt.’
A message had been left at Dr Travers’s. Isobel Rankin had phoned and offered to look after Susan and her mother at Flagstaff House. Everyone would do everything they could. It was difficult to tell how Susan was taking it. She hadn’t cried yet. But there had been that sound. Sarah guessed that the sound had shaken them. It wasn’t the kind of sound a Layton made. The servants had heard it. The sound was shocking, Sarah thought, to everyone but her. They would have preferred her sister to cry, quietly, in the privacy of her room. Well there, in her mother’s arms, she could have wept to her heart’s content and earned their eager sympathy. God knew they weren’t hard women; but there was something intemperate, savage, about a grief that went unaccompanied by a decent flow of tears. They all three stood in the room that Barbie Batchelor had made cosy with chintz and cretonne. Miss Batchelor came back. Her tall thin body, iron-grey short-cropped hair and unhealthy yellow face – a network of lines and wrinkles – suddenly struck Sarah as ridiculous. Missionary India had dried her out. There was nothing left of Barbie Batchelor.