The Day Of The Scorpion (Raj Quartet 2)

by Paul Scott

She smiled, but said, ‘I suppose that’s how it looks. It’s only half the truth.’

  ‘What’s the other half?’

  She moved her hand from under his. She hated simplifications, especially those to which her own ideas of the complex nature of reality might be reduced. He did not reclaim contact.

  ‘Extraordinary, isn’t it,’ he said, ‘that the people in this country who feel most like foreigners to each other are English people who’ve just arrived and the ones who have been here for several years. Last Christmas, after I left here, I was up in ‘Pindi staying with a friend of a friend back home who’s been out here for about ten years. And there they were, the man, the wife, and two of the po-faced kids, and right from the beginning we felt towards each other like I suppose those people do who suffer from that odd racial prejudice thing, as if in spite of our being the same colour and class, one of us was black, me, and the others white, them. We were tremendously polite but simply had nothing to say to each other. I felt I’d met a family who’d been preserved by some sort of perpetual Edwardian sunlight that got trapped between the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea round about the turn of the century. Of course, having gone straight there from Mira’s I was prepared to believe I’d struck something unusual. I hadn’t, though, had I? It makes me want to say, Where have you all been? Come back. All is forgiven.’

  She was still smiling. She said, ‘Come back where? Forgiven by whom, and for what?’

  But he was, after all, quite serious. ‘I suppose one of the things you need to be forgiven for is deluding the Indians as well as yourselves into thinking that the values of 1911 are still current at home.’

  ‘Why 1911?’

  ‘Wasn’t that the year of the Delhi Durbar? Post-Edwardian I grant you, but anything before 1900 would be a journalist’s exaggeration and anything after 1914–18 quite irrelevant. And when I say deluding Indians I don’t mean people of the kind you see in this room, I mean the kind who take you seriously, and that includes chaps like Gandhi and Nehru. Actually I hate the word Westernized, it’s used so loosely. You could say Mira’s Westernized, but she’s modern West and that means a fair slice of modern East as well. Nehru and that lot, all the liberal-upper and bourgeois middle-class of India, they’re one hundred per cent old-fashioned West. And it’s all as dead as yesterday, isn’t it? You ought to bury the body, or expose it to the vultures like the Parsees do. It didn’t survive the Great War. It makes an awful smell. Of course there are still pockets of the stink at home, your kind of people go back to them and I was educated at one. Highly unsuccessfully. They went in a lot at Chillingborough for future colonial administrators, didn’t they? They were even planning to have an Indian boy there – one who wasn’t a Maharajah’s son. He came round with his dad during my last term to have a look-see at one of the traditional founts of all liberal-imperial wisdom, and I thought, the poor little sod, he thinks this is where his future gets handed to him and unwrapped like a slab of chocolate. But he probably hadn’t got a future.’

  ‘Hadn’t he?’

  ‘As a tomb-attendant? I expect he’s a sub-divisional officer now and wondering whether to stay in the executive or transfer to the judiciary. His deputy commissioner is more likely to be an Indian than an Englishman but the work he does and the attitudes that go with it will be the same as they were forty years ago when some pink-faced boy from Wilt-shire sat under the same punkah and wrote many letters home to his mother.’

  ‘What do you do for a living?’

  ‘You mean in peace-time. The answer’s the same in war or peace. I live.’

  ‘On air?’

  ‘No. I make money too.’

  ‘At what?’

  ‘At what? Do for a living? It’s awfully unimportant, isn’t it? Strip the guff from any job and what have you got? A way of making money. And please don’t say, “Somebody has to run things.” I know they do. Running things means making them pay. I run things to the extent I make things pay. To me a Viceroy is about as important or unimportant as a company secretary who drafts the annual report for the shareholders to tell them what the board’s been up to. Your board’s made a lousy job of running things out here. The place is a goldmine, but it’s stiff with unemployed BAs and people who die in the streets of hunger. That’s a legacy from all those blue-eyed Bible thumpers and noble neo-classicists who came out here because they couldn’t stand the commercial pace back home. You had a perfectly good thing going in that old merchant trading company who used to run things until the industrial revolution. What you wanted then was a bevy of steely-eyed brass founders and men of iron who’d have ground the faces of the Indian peasants in the dirt, sweated a few million to death and dragged India yelling into the nineteenth century. Instead of which you got the people who didn’t like the smoke and the dark satanic mills because that sort of thing was vulgar, and after them you got the people who didn’t like it because of the inhumanity that went with it. What you didn’t get was the damned smoke. And that’s the trouble. The Indian empire’s been composed exclusively of English people who said No. Out here you’ve always had the negative side, the reactionaries and the counter-revolutionaries, but you’ve never had the bloody revolution. That’s why an Indian urban dweller’s life expectation is still thirty-five and why people die of starvation while the band plays at Government House, and Pyari plays the sitar at Mira’s. Well, at home after the war we’ll cut your empire adrift without the slightest compunction. It’s a time-expired sore, a suppurating mess. From the point of view of people who really run things it’s like a leg that you look at one morning and realize is too far gone in gangrene to be worth saving. Limping’s better. It’s going to be up to the Indians to grow a body from the limb. Of course most of them will make the mistake of thinking their independent body-politic is a whole, walking body. And at home we’ll pretend we’ve fulfilled a moral obligation by giving it back to them. But that won’t be the reason. We’ll get rid of it because it doesn’t pay and it’s too late to make it pay. Give the war another year, the one in Europe anyway, and the one with Japan another year. Say summer 1946. You can expect a general election in England in the summer of 1946 at the latest, and the socialists will get in because the common soldier and the factory worker will put them in. Lopping off India is an article of faith with the socialists but when they see that keeping it doesn’t pay they’ll lop it double-quick. Who wants India’s starving millions as one of what we’ll all call our post-war problems?’

  ‘Are you a socialist?’

  ‘Good Lord, no. I’m what you’d call a low Tory, if you could call me anything at all.’

  ‘Why are you so sure the socialists would win an election? Won’t Mr Churchill’s reputation count for anything?’

  He laughed, and turned the question.

  ‘Why do women always call him Mr Churchill? It makes him sound like a vicar who’s been invited to judge the home-made calves-foot jelly. But the answer’s yes, of course, his name will count. For everything patriotic, proud, victorious and time-expired. I don’t suppose you’ve talked much to common British soldiers, have you? The fellows you refer to as BORs? You ought to. Ask them what they think of life out here, I mean the national service wallahs, not the regulars. Then you’ll know. If there’s one thing war shows the man in the street it’s the difference between himself and the officer-caste. Back home it’s obvious enough but on foreign service he feels it like a kick in the teeth. I’ll tell you what your BOR in Deolali or your cockney motor mechanic with the Desert Rats or your Brummagem door-to-door salesman with Wingate in Burma thinks. He thinks, “All right, mate. Have it cushy whenever you can and be a Boy Scout while the shit flies. Get on winning the war your lot started. I’ll even give you a cheer at the end. And when you’ve got the whole stinking mess sorted out, be a good lad and bugger off, out of my sight, out of my government and out of my bloody life. But for ever.” And what goes for the officer-caste goes for Churchill. Your poor blighter of a BOR thinks it’s all real, you see. He hear
s the popping of corks in the officers’ tents and goes back to his mug of tea or stale NAAFI beer with murder in his heart knowing everything would be all right if he could guzzle brandy, or if the Colonel had to choke on a mug of tea with bromide in it to stop him feeling randy. He thinks his own lot ought to run things because there are more of his lot drinking tea with bromide in it than there are what he calls la-di-dah poofs swigging brandy and getting hot for women they won’t know how to poke.’

  With an effort Sarah kept her eyes coolly on a level with his. She understood that the test and his use of gutter-slang, were part of a process of seduction. He would use different methods with different women. The words he chose for her and the whole gravamen of his argument were calculated to expose her as someone for whom, primarily, he felt contempt. He wanted her on her mettle. Or in embarrassed confusion. Or weak and defeated. She was not sure which.

  ‘Go on,’ she said.

  He laughed, again reached for her hand and grasped it hard. ‘You’re quite a girl, Sarah Layton.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m not quite a girl. I’m this one,’ and was aware of having jerked him into unexpected recognition of her as a person and not a type. She told this from his heavy hand which became, for a second or two, uncharacteristically inert.

  ‘He’s on the ball in one sense, your BOR,’ Clark continued. ‘The brandy’s real enough and so’s the tea and bromide. His mistake comes in thinking the difference between them has some kind of moral significance and proves his rights as a human being have been infringed. But what he calls his rights as a human being start where his honest sensations stop, don’t they? His honest sensations tell him to knock the Colonel down and pinch his brandy, but he’s scared to do that and begins nursing a grievance and inventing a right, the right to a fair share. But when you cut out the moral claptrap your fair share of anything is what you’re strong enough to grab. Or would you prefer the word earn? In practice it comes to the same thing. Your fair share is what you take. Don’t you agree?’

  Did she? She felt as if the effort she had put into facing up to him had reduced her power of concentration, that somehow she had missed some of the words and that her sudden inability to answer exposed for both of them the real reason why she sat there, unprotesting. With a gesture half-affectionate, half-mocking, he moved his hand and placed the knuckles behind her ear, ruffling her hair. Understanding that it would amuse him to see her shrink from such contact, she deliberately – but slowly – changed the angle of her head and body to force disengagement. The hand moved away, only to rest again on her bare neck.

  ‘You’re very tense,’ he said. ‘Did your visit to the hospital upset you?’

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘Is he a bit of a mess, then, this fellow you went to see?’

  ‘They’re amputating his arm.’

  ‘Oh. Yes, that is bad, isn’t it? But it explains one thing that puzzled me. The fact that you appeared to take such an instant dislike to me. It means you must have noticed me and that the dislike was merely a transference of the physical revulsion you felt for the poor blighter they’re going to cut up. It’s quite common. Amputation is revolting, but a woman especially won’t accept that it is until she sees someone she likes the look of, then she thinks, “You’re disgustingly whole, why have you got two arms, blast you?” Or legs, or whatever it is the chap she used to like hasn’t got any longer.’

  ‘But I didn’t like him.’

  ‘No?’ The hand on her neck moved an inch or so. ‘You came an awfully long way to see him then, but I’ll accept that and I don’t think it makes any difference. The revulsion was there. You took it out on me. Shall I tell you something?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re not so tense now.’

  It was true. Her body had become capable of controlled and fluid movement: a new feeling that added to her confidence and for which she felt indebted to him in a way she could not explain, except by acknowledging that it flowed from his hand. His eyes and line of cheek, lit obliquely, gave his face – now fully turned towards her – an irony which she thought she understood.

  ‘You’re still a virgin, of course, aren’t you?’

  The shocking directness of the statement caused her to jerk her glance away. She felt that he had hit her. Presently, she said, as clearly and levelly as she could, ‘Yes, I’m still a virgin-of-course,’ and by doing so arrested the retreat of warmth. But she could not bring herself to face him. For a while she was conscious of his continued observation and of the way her body was becoming increasingly dependent on the support of his hand for whatever air it had of self-possession. When he removed his hand and placed it momentarily on hers before removing it entirely, it seemed to her like a valedictory gesture, an acknowledgement of her as the person she had made him see behind the paper-thin exterior; the girl he had stalked, attacked, and tried to shock into a predictable herd-reaction. But when he took his hand away she felt he took that real self too and left her with nothing but her shell. She sat, coldly bereft, and then wondered if he had taken anything, had seen instead what she herself could not see, but began to have intimations of; that the shell was all there was because she had rejected all the things that had once filled it, and had not replaced them. One by one they had gone, the beliefs, affections and expectations of her childhood: but when? She stared across the room at the carpeted daïs where the unattended instruments lay and felt herself unattended too. Perhaps at her christening certain spectres had come like unbidden guests, spectres of that extinction-through-exile that awaited Muirs and Laytons and all their kind, and stolen away unseen, having cursed or blessed her with an awareness of their presence which would dog her footsteps and fill her mind, until, bit by bit, as she was bidden, she had cast out of herself all her inheritance and was left in possession – as it were of a relic – of a shell whose emptiness was the proof for future generations of where the fault had lain and why there could have been no other end, even for her. Perhaps especially not for her, because once – hunched on a window-seat – she had drawn her root and branch and ringed her Indian family proudly in red. Perhaps it had been a condition of the christening gift that what she discarded bit by bit should be discarded as proudly as it had once been put on, so that the possibility of looking for substitutes to ensure survival was excluded. If you went down you went down and the proudest way was not to go down fighting for eroded values but, simply, with them, however little you were responsible for them. Those values were your shell as well, what you were left with after you had rejected their substance. The shell was unalterable.

  He said, ‘I seem to have discovered the chink in your armour. But are you annoyed with me for asking, or because you have to admit you are? Or is it a bit of both? I can’t believe it’s that you’re plain old-fashioned shocked or embarrassed. And you don’t look like a girl who thinks a man should automatically assume the absence of a wedding ring on the hand of a well-brought-up young lady means she’s saving it up for Mr Right. Or am I wrong?’

  They were questions she could not answer except from a fund of outworn stock replies such as he would only receive with a gently derisive pretence of not having anticipated. The alternative was silence; which she chose.

  ‘In any case,’ he said, ‘clearly I must apologize.’

  The hand rested again on the back of her neck. The warmth flowed back in, revealing the one unchanging purpose to which she could be put, even as a shell. Her nipples hardened in simulation of giving suck, but she continued to stare at the daïs. There was sudden movement in the room. The man who played the tablas had come back in. A girl accompanied him.

  ‘Mira is doing us proud,’ he whispered, leaning close. ‘It’s Lakshmi Kripalani. She sings, in case you didn’t know.’

  She nodded, more in acknowledgement of his breath’s faint palpations of her ear than of the words spoken. Mira was approaching. The Maharanee had also risen and was coming in her wake, but continued on towards the curtained doorway. Mira came
to the sofa and leaned forward and spoke to her, excluding Clark.

  ‘They’ll be playing again soon. I’d better show you where you can freshen up.’

  Clark removed his hand, relieved her of the unfinished glass of brandy.

  ‘It’s a good idea,’ he said. ‘They might go on for an hour. It depends on how inventive they’re feeling. I’ll keep this warm for you.’

  Sarah got up with the half-formed intention of telling him that an hour was too long, that she should go home because they both had an early start to the day ahead; but she could not summon the determination. She followed Mira into the bar, through into the hall, then a passage, and up a staircase that turned twice. They came out on to a gallery whose barred windows were unshuttered and admitted the warm mulchy smell of the Bengal night. The gallery turned at right angles and continued along the length of the side of the house. Light came from naked bulbs fixed into sockets in the gallery roof. The Indians sometimes had a crude, uncluttered attitude towards electricity, Sarah thought. So often the bulb was accepted as a decoration in itself. Mira wore no chola under the dark saree. The elastic of a brassiere showed. At the end of the gallery she turned in at an open door. Sarah followed and paused – astonished at the room’s opulence. A double bed, raised on a wide but shallow daïs and enclosed by a white mosquito net hung high and centrally so that the effect was of a regal canopy, was its main focus. The gossamer net shivered under the gentle changing pressures of air wafted by two revolving ceiling fans. The daïs was covered in white carpet and the bedcovers were of creamy white satin. The furniture was satin-walnut. Mira, still without speaking, had walked to a door, opened it and switched on a light.

  There’s probably everything you want. If not, just ring and one of the girls will come.’

  A fragrance, a chill; the bathroom was air-conditioned. It was larger than her bedroom at Pankot and marble-floored, with sheepskin rugs. Above the semi-sunken bath gilt faucets projected from marble green tiles. At one end of the bath pink frosted glass screened off the shower.