by Paul Scott
There’s no one here,’ Sarah murmured. ‘Let it come out.’
‘I can’t,’ Susan said. Her voice was almost unrecognizable, a hoarse moan below the breath, but emphatic in its conviction. ‘I can’t. I’ve got to hang on.’
Sarah bent her head until her cheek rested on the tense knuckles.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, if you want.’
‘Then it may be all right. I thought the service would help it all come back. But it didn’t. It didn’t, and I don’t know how to face it without. I don’t know how to face it.’
She pulled her hand away and flung herself round so that she was on her back; and lay like that, with her eyes shut, turning her head from side to side, pressing down on her swollen belly with both hands.
‘At the service I prayed for the baby to die. I want him to die because I don’t know how to face it alone. How can I face it with Teddie never never coming back? I didn’t want the baby, but it pleased him so, and he wrote and wrote about it, and I could face it like that. But I can’t face it alone. I can’t bear it alone.’
‘You won’t be alone, Su—’
‘But I am. I am alone.’
Abruptly she sat up, doubled herself over her folded arms and began to move her body in a tight rocking motion. ‘Just like I was before, just as I’ve always been, just as if I’d never tried. But I did. I did try. I did try.’
‘What did you try—?’
‘You wouldn’t understand. How could you? You’re not like me. Whatever you do and wherever you go you’ll always be yourself. But what am I? What am I? Why – there’s nothing to me at all. Nothing. Nothing at all.’
Sarah sat quite still, watching that rocking motion, held by it, and by the revelation, what seemed to be the revelation, of what had lain behind the game that seemed to have ended, the game of Susan playing Susan. Susan nothing? Susan alone? She pondered the meaning of: Whatever you do and wherever you go you’ll always be yourself: and recognized their truth. She was herself because her sense of self, her consciousness of individuality was tenacious, grindingly resistant to temptations to surrender it in exchange for a share in that collective illusion of a world morally untroubled, convinced of its capacity to find just solutions for every problem that confronted it, a world where everything was accepted as finally defined, a world that thought it knew what human beings were.
But it did not know what Susan was. In grey and on her knees; yes, it knew that Susan; and it knew Susan in white with the wind catching her veil, or standing at a carriage window flushed and smiling and taking a last sniff at a bunch of flowers before throwing them in that bride’s gesture which proved a readiness to share her luck and fortune. It did not know her in a coloured smock, rocking to and fro, and had no answer to her cry that she was nothing.
It did not know her and had no answer and Sarah did not know her either – not as Susan – but with something of a shock recognized in the girl crouched on the chair a sibling whose pretty face and winning ways had been, after all, perhaps, only a fearful armour against the terrors of the night, a shield that was not visible to her but deluded others into believing her protected. What else had they been deluded by? By everything, perhaps, but most of all by the signs and portents of self-absorption, that apparent trick and talent for creating a world around her of which she was the organizing determinedly happy centre. It had not been that at all. There had been no secret garden, but only Susan crying to be let in and building the likeness of it for herself because she believed the secret garden was the place they all inhabited, and she could not bear the thought that she alone walked in a limbo of strange and melancholy desires.
Shifting her weight Sarah reached and put her arms round her sister.
‘You do amount to something, and you’re really not alone,’ she said, and Susan turned into the embrace, with the weird sound of someone inwardly recognizing and inarticulately acknowledging refuge.
II
Several images converge. That woman in the burkha, glimpsed in Ranpur, making her way to the mosque through the street of the moneylenders: one merely chanced upon her and noted the smell of Chanel No 5; but – walking unhurriedly, in that enfolding garment – she defies her prosaic environment of time and place. She can be pictured years before, not in Ranpur but in Pankot, making her way along a section of the bazaar, like a ghost condemned to walk in a certain place, so many steps, presenting to the world a front, a proof of her existence, silently calling attention to herself; always appearing and disappearing in the same places, as though the route, as well as her presence, is significant.
There was such a woman in the dream Sarah had, but she was in widow’s white, not purdah; and did not walk but remained prostrate. Yet, in the recurrence, in the uncertainty as to real intention, similarities existed. The whole of Sarah’s dream was like the woman in the burkha. It came and went and stayed in her mind, so that sometimes, in daylight, awake, the visions of the dream would transpose themselves and she would find herself leaving Jalud-ud-din’s and encountering, through the eyes of the woman who usually begged alms outside, this other woman, the one in white, lying in the dust, seeking for a mercy no one was capable of showing. For Sarah there came a time when the whole of that summer became inextricably entangled, as if, at this point, converging strands of circumstances met and intermingled, but did not cohere; and woven into them were the patterns of her dream, and Barbie’s dream, and the tale from the hills that had sent young Morland in his sleep to an unexpected death by drowning. She found it difficult later to remember things in the order they happened. There was a sense in which they became interchangeable.
For instance: did she fancy she saw Lady Manners in the bazaar before the old lady strangely announced her presence in Pankot (strangely because having announced it she remained resolutely in a purdah of her own)? Or had Lady Manners re-entered her sleeping and waking consciousness before she had made her presence known, so that the glimpse Sarah thought she had of her, leaving Jalal-ud-din’s in the company of a distinguished-looking Indian woman, seemed like some special manifestation rather than a visual confirmation of a presence that was the subject of common gossip? And what came first? Lady Manners or the letter that revived the other image of the stone thrown into the car taking poor Teddie and his best man to the wedding? And when, why, was it first suggested that Susan was dangerously withdrawn and the tale was resurrected of Poppy Browning’s daughter who, bearing her first child three months after being told her husband had died in the Quetta earthquake, promptly smothered it?
The most logical sequence would be one in which the letter reviving the image of the stone came first, because this might be seen as having had an effect on Susan that set people talking about Poppy Browning’s daughter and the business of the smothered child; and as having had the effect, as well, of reminding Pankot of the affair in the Bibighar Gardens in advance of Lady Manners’s arrival, so that the arrival had the special poignancy Sarah seemed to remember as attaching to it.
*
There had been many letters: from all over India, from people who had seen Teddie’s death gazetted or the notice in the Times of India. Most were addressed to Mrs Layton and she set about answering them with an industriousness that Sarah fancied was in part therapeutic, in part self-indulgent. All through the mornings, and on many an evening, Mrs Layton sat at the oak bureau in the grace and favour living-room, writing, writing. Page after page. There was apparently no end to the store of words, the flood of words. And she became more directly communicative. She discussed the letters with Sarah. She drank less.
There were also letters to originate: to Aunt Lydia in Bayswater, to Colonel Layton in Germany, to that uncle of Teddie’s in Shropshire whom the marriage had relegated from his old status of next-of-kin and of whose nephew’s death on active service it had therefore become Susan’s or Mrs Layton’s duty to inform him. The Shropshire uncle had promised a wedding present after the war; it seemed doubtful now that Susan would ever get it; he ha
d not given an impression of a generous nature. There were letters to send to Aunt Fenny too – now left Delhi for Calcutta where Uncle Arthur had at last acquired a job [a strange-sounding kind] that carried the pip and crown of a Lieutenant-Colonelcy: the first to tell Fenny of Susan’s loss and the second to put her off coming up, as she offered.
There were expected letters; one each for them from Tony Bishop who, but for the jaundice, would have been Teddie’s best man, and who now worked in Bombay. There were unexpected letters, a formal note of condolence from the Nawab of Mirat to Susan and a less formal letter to Mrs Layton from Count Bronowsky who said that the Nawab was deeply affected to hear of the death in action of the husband of the charming girl to whom and to whose family he had had the privilege and pleasure of extending some small hospitality the previous year. He wanted the Laytons to know that they were welcome at any time, now or in the future, to stay as his guests again, at the palace, or in the summer palace in Nanoora. ‘How kind,’ Mrs Layton murmured, ‘but quite out of the question,’ and wrote to thank the Nawab and his wazir, and explained that Susan was awaiting the birth of her baby.
Susan detached herself from the business of the letters. She asked her mother and Sarah to open them, answer for her, and keep by any of those they thought she might look at later. She specified only one exception to this rule. And this was the letter for which they waited. It came (Sarah thought later, unable quite to recall the order of things) in a batch of mail on the Sunday of the week following the Memorial Service. The flimsy envelope, addressed to Susan, was franked by a field post office, and attested for the censor by an officer whose rank alone was legible.
‘I think this is it,’ Mrs Layton said. She handed the envelope to Sarah who was helping with lists and priorities. Susan was at the back, playing with Panther, throwing a ball from the veranda and waiting at the balustrade while he went to retrieve it. They could hear the scuttering sound of the dog’s pads and claws as it hurled itself down the steps and, after an interval, hurled itself back up them again to drop the ball with a puck at Susan’s feet, panting from the exertion, and with the pleasure of having a mistress who again took notice of him.
Sarah handed the envelope back. ‘It must be.’ She looked round, alerted to a change in the rhythm of the game by the dog’s anxious whimper. Susan was standing by the open window, watching them.
‘It’s come, hasn’t it?’ she asked.
Mrs Layton held the envelope out. ‘We think so. Here you are, darling. You’ll want to take it away.’
Susan came over, took the letter and went back to the veranda. They heard Panther growl and Susan say to him, ‘Oh, all right, just once more.’ She must have thrown the ball then. The dog scuttered away. Mrs Layton opened another letter. ‘It’s from Agnes Ritchie in Lahore,’ she told Sarah. ‘Put her on B list.’
Sarah entered Agnes Ritchie’s name in the B column of her list and when her mother gave her the letter put it with others in the B folder. Susan must have thrown the ball into the bushes of bougainvillaea. It was some time before they heard the dog return. Ball in mouth, it came into the living-room, looked round and went out again. They heard then, faintly, from the far end of the veranda, the scraping of its claws on the closed door of Susan’s room. In a while this sound of insistence died away. Sarah got up and went outside. The labrador raised its head and glanced at her. The ball was held securely between its extended paws.
‘Come on, Panther,’ she said, ‘I’ll throw your ball for you.’
But the dog rested its head again and waited.
*
Mrs Rankin rang and spoke to Mrs Layton about the Red Cross aid committee meeting, Mrs Trehearne sent a chit about the British Other Ranks Hospital Welfare and Troops Entertainments committee. Dicky Beauvais came round and asked Sarah for tennis at five with supper and pictures to follow. Mahmud complained that the dhobi had failed to turn up and asked permission to go into the lines and if necessary into the bazaar to find him. Distantly they heard the bells of St John’s announcing matins, and closer, the strains of the regimental band of the Pankot Rifles at practice in the grounds of the officers’ mess. The crows swooped and squawked. It was an ordinary Sunday morning. But an hour after she had taken the letter Susan was still in her bedroom, secluded with her evidence of war.
‘I’ve done enough,’ Mrs Layton said. ‘I’m going to wash my hair.’ She gave Sarah the pile of envelopes, the result of the morning’s spate, and went into her room, calling for Minnie, Mahmud’s widowed niece who helped him run things by taking care of the intimate details of a household of women. The call for Minnie roused the dog. It went padding past the window, making for the source of this evidence of renewed activity. Sarah finished stamping the envelopes, went into the entrance hall and left them on the brass tray where Mahmud would find them on his return from his quest for the lost dhobi. She went into her own room. Minnie had made the bed, tied the laundry into a sheet and pinned Sarah’s list to it. The connecting door into Susan’s room was closed and she could not hear her sister moving.
She tapped, then opened the door. Susan was sitting on the bed with an album on her knee which Sarah recognized as the one containing the wedding photographs and press cuttings. The letter was on the bedside-table, propped between the table-lamp and a framed picture of Teddie – Susan’s favourite because it showed him looking serious, with the mere ghost of a smile.
‘Mother’s washing her hair and I thought I’d do mine,’ Sarah explained. ‘You don’t want the bathroom for ten minutes, do you?’
Susan shook her head.
‘Was it a letter about Teddie?’
‘Yes.’ She put the album down, picked up the letter and began to read it but seemed to give up half-way. She offered the sheet of buff army paper to Sarah.
‘Dear Mrs Bingham, Since it was with me that your husband worked most closely it is, I think, my duty – a very sad one – to offer you on behalf of his divisional commander and fellow officers, deep sympathy in the loss you have sustained by his death, of which you will by now have received official notification. He died as a result of wounds, having gone forward, under orders, with instructions to the commander of a subordinate formation then in contact with the enemy and under heavy pressure. With him at the time was Captain Merrick, whom you met in Mirat of course. Captain Merrick, although himself wounded – and at risk of his own life – rendered the utmost assistance to your husband, and stayed with him until the arrival of medical aid. Captain Merrick told the medical officer that your husband had not been conscious, and it may be some relief to you to know, therefore, that he did not suffer. Captain Merrick has now been evacuated to a base hospital and the Divisional Commander has been pleased to submit a report, in the form of a recommendation, in respect of Captain Merrick’s action. Teddie – as most of us knew him here – ever cheerful and devoted to his task, is sadly missed by all of us. Those of us who met you, your mother and your sister, on the occasion of your wedding in Mirat, all send our special personal sympathies. Yours sincerely, Patrick Selby-Smith, Lt.-Colonel.
Sarah returned the letter to its place by Teddie’s portrait. Susan was going through the album again.
‘I’ve never noticed it before,’ she said, ‘but there seems to be only one picture of him.’
‘Of Colonel Selby-Smith?’
‘No, of Captain Merrick. This is him, isn’t it? It’s really only half a face.’
Sarah sat on the bed next to her sister and studied the photograph. It was taken at the pillared entrance of the Mirat Gymkhana Club a moment or so before they left for the railway station. It showed Teddie with his plastered cheek turned from the camera and looking down at Susan who stood with her feet neatly together, in a tailored linen suit, wearing a little pill-box hat and holding the bouquet. Behind them on the steps, partly shadowed, were Aunt Fenny and her mother, Uncle Arthur and Colonel and Mrs Hobhouse. Behind these was the group of largely anonymous officers of whom she only recognized Ronald Merrick. Merrick w
as not looking into the camera but down on to Uncle Arthur’s neck. In that little crowd of grinning young men he looked remote, humourless; but younger – she thought – than she remembered him looking in full light, under the sun. The camera and the shadows had smoothed out lines and not recorded the weathered texture of the skin. As a youth, at home, with his fair hair and blue eyes – she was sure they were blue – he must have seemed to those near to him comely and full of promise. ‘She didn’t care,’ he had said, when talking that evening about Miss Manners, ‘what your parents were or what sort of school you went to.’ He must have been conscious of them himself, though, and Sarah wondered about them, about the ambition that had driven him and the capacity that had enabled him to overcome what she supposed would count as disadvantages if you compared them with the advantages of a man like Teddie Bingham. She had never written to Captain Merrick, but then he had never written to her. Once – or was it twice? – he had sent his regards to them all through Teddie, perhaps more often than Teddie remembered to say. She wondered how literally he had taken what she recalled now as a promise to write sometimes. She had thought the request for letters part of the attempt he seemed to make to convey to others an idea that he was a man rather alone in the world, a man whose background and experience set him somewhat apart but gave him reserves of power to withstand what other men might feel as solitariness. She remembered how they had sat on the terrace the last time she saw him, waiting for the fireflies to come out, and how as the light faded Captain Merrick’s body had resisted that diminishing effect, had intensified, thickened, impinged; and how she felt that if she had reached out and touched him then he could have carried the frail weight, the fleeting sensation, of her fingers on his arm or hand or shoulder into those areas of danger that coexisted with those of the impenetrable comfort that surrounded her, protected her, and barred her exit. He had appalled her, she had not trusted him, although why that was so she did not know clearly. He had stood under the light that lit his face and his need, and his implacable desire to be approached; and offered his hand. He still impinged; what he had done or tried to do for Teddie, did not seem to alter – except in a curious way to emphasize – her picture of him as a man obsessed by self-awareness; but the request for letters might have been genuine.