by Paul Scott
She looked at Mira, fearing her, chilled by her, but ready to praise what belonged to her. But Mira seemed quite indifferent and held the door open as if anxious to be gone. Thank you,’ Sarah said, and went past her. The door was closed. The lavatory was in an adjoining cubicle. The cistern was the modern kind with a levered handle. It flushed quietly and immediately. In the pedestal wash-basin, piping hot water flowed. Back in the bathroom she sat on a luxurious stool with curved gilt claw legs and a padded green velvet seat. The legs of the marble-topped table matched the legs of the stool. She studied herself in an immense mirror; a flattering one. Glancing at the array of bottles and sprays and jars she opened her handbag with misgivings about the quality of its contents but determined to use nothing that didn’t belong to her, and then was held by a delayed reaction. Her eye had caught objects that struck her as incongruous. Among the scents, lotions and other items in a toilet battery of wholly feminine connection were two wood-backed bristle hairbrushes and a leather case. The zip was half undone. She reached out, zipped further, then completely, and lifted the cover, stared at the contents – four gold-plated containers and a matching safety razor.
She turned round, considered the bathroom, searching it for other clues to masculine occupation without much idea of what to look for, and noticed in one corner a bin with a padded seat that obviously lifted. She turned back to the mirror and went to work with powder from her compact, occasionally glancing at the bin’s reflection. A dab of lipstick completed her repair operations. She shut her handbag. The click echoed. She sat for a while and felt in need of some show of kindness, such as Aunt Fenny had made, taking her shoes off, making her rest, and again remembered that she had not slept properly for two days; three, if she counted the night she last slept in Pankot, disturbed by a gift of lace, a meeting avoided, and expectation of new ground and a long journey. She looked at her watch. Eleven-thirty. Less than six hours since she had said Goodbye, Ronald, and got in return a goodbye that was not coupled with the blessing and absolution of her name.
Her name – she got up from the stool – her formidable, bony, yearning name – and walked to and opened the bin; stared down at the soiled expensive briefs, those meshes of mysterious and complex cellular imprisonment. She closed the lid, knowing that both bath and bedroom were tainted by his casual presence and the ludicrous talent he had for casual contemptuous excitation.
I am sensible now – she decided – after Pyari has played I shall go home, alone if necessary. She reached for door-handle and light-switch, intending to flick the one after opening the other, but when she opened the door a whole field of darkness faced her. She stood arrested by it and by the notion that darkness always contained dangers and presences.
Instinctively, but without conviction, she blamed Mira, who had apparently not even left the door open between bedroom and gallery. There would have been light enough then. Momentarily she was without a sense of direction. She felt along one wall, searching for another switch. Her elongated shadow probed the slant of bathroom light across the floor and up a blank wall. There was no switch. But she had her bearings. The five-mile hill, the five-mile door. Over there, she told herself; and was rewarded then by the suddenly visible pale strip of light making the boundary of bedroom and gallery. She walked towards it, and stopped.
‘You’re going the wrong way,’ he said. ‘I’m over here.’
His voice came from behind, from some intensely organized, centralized point of reference. Turning towards it she was dazzled by the light from the decoy bathroom. The bed was darkly shadowed by one of the bathroom walls, which jutted into the room.
‘You seem startled. Weren’t you expecting me?’
‘No.’
She turned and walked towards the slit of light, anticipated the driven-home look and the absent key. She jerked the handle. The absurdity of the handle’s obedient but unfunctional mobility nullified her attempt to convey composure. Nothing looked sillier than trying to open a door the person watching you knew you knew was locked. She turned back, facing that equally absurd dark central point of reference.
‘That’s a pity,’ he said. ‘I thought you understood we had an appointment. Mira did, so you mustn’t worry about our absence causing comment. Is it the dark that puts you off? I thought you’d prefer it. At first, anyway.’
‘We have no appointment. Please turn the lights on and open the door.’
As she spoke she realized that her eyes had become more used to the dark areas beyond the shaft of light coming from the bathroom. There was a slow rhythmic movement and in the second before the restored bedside lamp reversed the negative image into a positive one she detected the stretched arm, sensed the manipulative action of his hand on the switch, and understood from the spare density of his form that he was naked.
He was seated on the edge of the bed, staring back at her across a still extended arm, caught and held in the ageless classic pose of a figure from some Renaissance ceiling. The shock he gave her was that of astonishment that in the flesh a man could look as he had been depicted for centuries in stone and paint. Lowering the arm he exposed a sculptured chest.
‘Are you sure you want the door opened?’
‘Yes.’
‘The key’s here on the table. I’ve also been thoughtful enough to bring our glasses. Have I miscalculated? I don’t often, but it wouldn’t be the first time. It’s an occupational hazard of the male. You get a few more slaps in the face than you deserve, but you also get your screws, so you can’t complain. Are you quite sure you don’t want to lose that cherry?’
‘Quite sure. I’ll give you a minute to unlock the door.’
She moved, making for the bathroom. Casually, he got up and was there before her. She stood still. Naked, the earlier and only slight advantage he had in height was further diminished. In her high heels she eyed him almost levelly, but her manifest disadvantage in strength and weight was pressed home on her as if by an actual pressure of his limbs. She turned, sat on a padded satin-covered chair. Doing so disclosed to her the shameful fact that she was trembling. She faced him again, deliberately. She observed him dispassionately, from head to foot. Having quartered him she looked again to her front and said, ‘I’ve seen you now, so may I go?’
‘That wasn’t the object of undressing. I turned the light off, remember? The only reason I’m like this is that making a pass at a girl and getting her hot and then introducing the devastatingly practical note of pausing to take your clothes off always strikes me as highly comic. When a man wants a screw he ought not to beat about the bush. It’s different for girls because their clothes can come off so gracefully. Have I really wasted my time?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, that’s an occupational hazard too.’
There was a pause. Presently he crossed her line of vision. When he reached the bed he felt under the mosquito net and drew something out. Blue material. His pyjama trousers. He put them on. The bunched tops of the trousers thickened his waist slightly. He lit a cigarette, then brought their glasses of brandy over. He put them on the floor, went back to the table for an ashtray, returned and sat on the floor himself, and gazed up at her.
‘You’re not really plain, are you? In fact you’re quite pretty. And you’ve got thin shoulders. In the buff I expect your breasts look much more prominent.’ He put his head on one side, considering her. ‘But your hips are a shade too narrow. I bet you’ve got a hard little bottom. What I like best about you though is you never say anything too obvious. I know the dialogue that can go with this particular situation by heart and it gets pretty boring. So that’s what I like best. Your not saying anything obvious and your Colonel’s daughter’s guts. It makes an unusual combination.’ He drank, indicated her own glass. ‘Drink up. It’ll do you good. I never screw them when they’re pissed so you’re quite safe. I mean don’t not drink because you think I’d take advantage if you had too much. But I don’t suppose you ever have too much, do you? That’s another point in your f
avour. Your aunt told me you have a thin time at home because your mother drinks. It’s embarrassing, isn’t it? My father drank a lot. He used to cry too. Does your mother cry? What she ought to do is give up drinking and find some young officer who’ll screw her whenever she wants and bow out without making a fuss when the Colonel comes home. After all, that would be better for the Colonel, wouldn’t it? To come home to a placid, loving woman, instead of a neurotic alcoholic who gets her screws out of bottles.’
‘Like your father?’
‘Yes, like him.’
‘And what did your mother do for screws?’
‘Oh, Mother was never hard up. She went in for handsome chauffeurs. When I was eighteen I put my foot down, though, and insisted that even if the chauffeurs went to bed with her they still had to call me either Master James, or Sir.’
‘And did they?’
‘Yes, but I expect it cost her an extra small fortune at the men’s shops in Bond Street.’ He smiled. ‘Go on. You’re doing very well. For one awful moment I thought you were going to say something like “Kindly leave my mother and father out of this.” I hope you’re not too cross with Aunt Fenny, by the way. She was only trying to paint a little picture of you that would bring out my protective instincts. She said more than she intended, but that was my fault.’
‘I realized that.’
‘Do all your family view you with the same mixture of alarm and affection as she does?’
‘Probably.’
‘Why are you shivering?’
‘Because I find it difficult to control myself.’
‘And you feel you must? What do you find difficult to control? Your temper?’
‘Yes.’
For the first time since coming to sit on the floor he freed her from her self-imposed obligation not to let her glance waver. He looked down at his glass and for a moment she escaped into the safe oblivion of private darkness. When she opened her eyes again he was watching her. She said, ‘i’d be glad if you’d open the door now. If the taxi’s still waiting I can go home without putting you to any trouble. If it’s not I’m afraid you’ll have to organize one. I don’t know where we are.’
‘Don’t worry about the taxi. You’re forgetting I promised Aunt Fenny you’d come to no harm.’
‘She’s my Aunt Fenny, not yours.’
The comfortable angle of his head and trunk, the casual, easy, disposition of his limbs created confusing images in her mind of strength and languor and confident patience. They were confusing because she herself felt she had come to the end of a tether.
He took his hand from his glass, stubbed his cigarette and rose. She anticipated a physical attack on her, but he did not make it. Instead he went back to the bedside table, picked up the key and returned. He resumed his former position on the floor, tossed the key two or three times like a coin, then placed it on the floor between them.
‘My key for your Aunt Fenny,’ he said. ‘I pay the forfeit and keep Aunt Fenny. There’s not much going on in her, but what goes on is tough as old boots. I like that. If she were five years younger and I were five years older we’d screw. She knows it. In that cosy closed-in little corner of her bird-brain mind where the real Aunt Fenny lives she knows it, just as she knows in the same cosy little corner that asking me to look after you was the most risky thing she could do if you wanted to hang on to that cherry of yours. Obviously what she really thinks is that you ought to get rid of it. Which means she thinks the same as I do, only with her the thought’s subconscious. I’ll tell you another thing. You’re tougher than she is. Far tougher than you probably realize. With you the toughness goes an awfully long way in because you haven’t got a bird-brain. It thinks. Potentially you’re worth twenty Aunt Fennys. But the thinking and the toughness aren’t worth a bag of peanuts if you lack joy. And that’s what Aunt Fenny has that you haven’t. Joy. Not much. She’s too shallow to have much of anything, but I bet you she was a scorcher as a girl. I bet she went for joy first and let the thinking and toughness come later, and that means that in her late middle-age she still remembers how to get a kick out of life. It doesn’t really matter which way round you do it, if you do it both ways. But why not do it both ways from the start? Isn’t that sensible? Isn’t the place already overcrowded with people who have thought for so long they’ve forgotten how to be happy, or with people who’ve spent so long trying to be happy they haven’t had time to think, so end up not knowing what happiness is? For pete’s sake, Sarah Layton, you don’t know anything about joy at all, do you?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I don’t,’ and reached for the key and then, stupidly, lost sight of it because her eyes had responded – as if of their own accord – to a humiliation, an unidentifiable yearning, and a dim recollection of an empty gesture that had something to do with wrenching the reins of a horse and wheeling to confront imaginable but infinitely remote possibilities of profound contentment. She felt the metal of the key under her fingers and the flesh-shock of his hand on her knuckles.
‘You’re crying,’ he said. ‘Why? Because you really want me to make love to you? I couldn’t promise that. Not love. You couldn’t either, could you? Not with me. If you liked we could pretend that it was love but it wouldn’t be honest and your honesty is part of what attracts me. You don’t belong, do you? And the trouble is you know it, but I suppose while your father’s away you feel you have to pretend you do belong, for his sake.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I do belong. That’s what I know. That’s the trouble. Please take your hand away.’
He did so. She grasped the key. It weighed nothing. What it would open was a prison of a kind.
‘Wait,’ he said. He got up, went to the far side of the bed. Through the net she saw blurred pictures of a stranger dressing. There was a superior kind of mystery about him. In her dream there had been no problems, no threat of violence. She had surrendered to him casually. The absence of a climax struck the one familiar note; that and an awareness of her father’s unspeaking presence, his silent criticism of her failure to hold back for him the tide of changing circumstances, her failure to hold in trust days he had lost which belonged to him; days that must, to him, be an incalculably dear proportion of those few left in which the once perpetual-seeming light would shine on undisturbed by the brighter, honest, light whose heat would burn the old one to a shadow.
The stranger came from behind the net and stood for a moment watching her. Who is that man? people asked her in the dream. And her reply had always been, Oh, I don’t know. She had never been convinced that she spoke the truth, but in any case now knew the answer. Who is that man? Why, one of us, one of the people we really are.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘shall we go, Sarah Layton?’ He came closer. ‘If so you ought to bathe your eyes. My Aunt Fenny would think the worst had happened if she saw you now.’
She was holding the key in one hand and her handbag in the other. The blurred opaque image of his face cleared. Presently he bent forward, grasped the exposed end of the key and carefully took it from her. He held out his other hand and, when she did not move, reached further and touched the strap of the handbag, then grasped it. Her own grip loosened. She felt the smooth strip of leather slide from her fingers and watched him stand back, holding the two things she had surrendered and which he now seemed to be showing her, waiting for some kind of confirmation that she understood he had them. He transferred the key to the hand with which he held the handbag then stooped and picked up the ashtray and, with his free hand, their glasses, holding them from the insides, rim to rim, between thumb and fingers. He went to the bedside-table, placed the glasses and the ashtray by the lamp and, after a moment’s hesitation, placed the handbag there as well. Still holding the key he went over to the door and inserted it in the lock but did not turn it. He came back and stood in front of her in further brief consideration and then went over to the bedside-table again and switched the lamp off so that the room was as it had been at the beginning of their encounter. The shaft o
f light from the bathroom stretched across the floor, separating them until he emerged from the shadow on the other side of it and crossed over on to her side, and squatted. He touched her right ankle, gently lifted and eased the shoe from her foot and then the shoe from the other foot, and placed the shoes neatly together on one side of the chair. The hand in which she had held the key was cupped and taken, and then the other, and both carried and held to his face, so that it seemed she had reached out and put her hands on his cheeks with a gesture of adoration. She closed her eyes, exploring the illusion of possession which such an adoration might create between two people and was then aware that her hands were no longer held except by the desire to explore. Her own head was taken. For a while they stayed so, enacting the tenderness of silent lovers, and then slowly bending her head she allowed him to deal with the old maid’s hook and eye.
V
His hand was on her arm gentling her from sleep and in the second or two before she woke she knew the sweet relief of this evidence that she had only dreamt the scene in which Aunt Fenny told her Susan was in premature labour brought on by shock; and that the reality was this warm quiescence with which her body came back to life and consciousness, flesh to flesh with the body of the man who had penetrated it, liberated it, and was waking it again from profound rest so that it might enclose and be enclosed and go again, rapt, to the edge of feeling.
‘I’m sorry,’ the voice said. ‘But we’re nearly there.’ A strange, unbelievable, soundless splintering; an extraordinary convolution of time and space. Her eyes opened and she saw the woman whose name was Mrs Roper. ‘We’re coming into Ranpur, Miss Layton. I’m sorry to disturb you.’
She pulled herself upright, understanding completely where she was and yet not understanding it at all, but she knew she was indebted to Mrs Roper and to Mrs Roper’s friend, Mrs Perryman, and that this was because they had let her share the coupé and had even had the top bunk lowered so that she could rest properly. She knew from the lights in the ceiling, close to her head, that it was night, whereas it had been day when the bunk was lowered. Her uniform was crumpled.