by Paul Scott
Kasim looked up. ‘Unfortunately,’ the old man said, ‘we have only one life to live and we are granted only one notion of what makes it worth living. It isn’t easy to write that notion off as mistaken or the life we live in pursuit of it as wasted.’
‘I know.’
‘Do you? You will. But not yet. You’re young and your life is all before you.’
Yes, but what kind of life? Ahmed wondered. The life he lived now wasn’t his own because he lived it in the dense shadows of his father’s life and of the lives of men like him. He longed to grope his way out and cast a shadow of his own. The longing was so intense that his blood stirred. It was as if a voice inside him cried out: Rebel! Rebel!
But Rebel against what? In India only one kind of rebellion was possible, and that kind had become an old man’s game. They had played it a long time and it wasn’t over yet. The game and the men had grown old together and India had grown old with them.
‘Well?’ Kasim asked. ‘What are you waiting for? Go and fetch them, or are you going to explain what you’ve been trying to tell me? Which of the two alternatives you think I should choose?’
Ahmed hesitated. The game had gone wrong but his father had always played it honourably. No doubt he would do so to the end. What was sad was the fact that his father was not looking for a country for himself but for his sons, and they could never inhabit it because a country was a state of mind and a man could properly exist only in his own. In his father’s India, the India his father was, Ahmed felt himself an exile; but an exile from where he didn’t know. His mind was not clear enough to penetrate the shadows of other men’s beliefs which lay across it; and before these beliefs – so sure and positive, so vigorously upheld by words of challenge and acts of sacrifice – he felt stupidly unformed and incoherent. Perhaps it was a beginning of coherence for him to have understood the nature of his father’s problem, and to have spoken out. But farther than that he could not go. Could not? Should not, rather. The problem was his father’s, not his; and the hands the problem was in were safe enough. The old man would never compromise. Neither would he give up the fight. The sight of him sitting there, waiting to confront three men he thought of as his country’s oppressors, moved Ahmed to despair and melancholy pride. The bizarre notion struck him that if only there were a mirror in the room he would take it down from the wall and put it on the table and say: ‘There’s the India you’re eating out your heart looking for.’ In the shape of his father’s prison-diminished body, he felt for such an India an undemanding, a boundless love, and for an instant in his own heart and bones he understood his father’s youthful longing and commitment and how it had never truly been fulfilled, and had never been corrupted, so that even in an old man’s body it shone like something new and untried and full of promise.
But there was something missing; and knowing what it was and how he could cover up his silence and indecision and at the same time convey to his father something of what he felt he went to the table, picked up the white Congress cap and offered it.
‘You’ve forgotten this,’ he said. ‘They pretend to laugh at it, but of course they’re afraid of it really. If they see it on the table they might come to the wrong conclusion.’
His father stared at the cap, then bent his head. Ahmed put the cap on for him, gave it a jaunty tilt. His father’s hands touched his, seeking to impose an adjustment. ‘No, straight,’ he said. ‘And firm,’ and muttered something which Ahmed only partly caught.
But outside, on the veranda, he caught the whole of it. The sky was lighter and the Fort stood immense and dark and implacable; mercilessly near. ‘Straight and firm,’ his father had said – ‘like a crown of thorns.’
EPILOGUE
And after all it seemed that Susan had held somewhere in the back of her mind a memory of the day she once told Sarah she had forgotten: the day Dost Mohammed made a little circle of kerosene-soaked cotton-waste, set light to it and then opened a circular tin, shook it, and dropped the small black scorpion into the centre of the ring of fire. Poised, belligerent, the armoured insect moved stiffly, quickly – stabbing its arched tail, once, twice, three times. Sarah felt the heat on her face and drew back. When the flames died down the scorpion was still. Dost Mohammed touched it gingerly with a twig and then, getting no response, scooped the body into the tin.
‘Is it whole?’ Susan asked. For a while she had this strange idea that it couldn’t be because it had been born nearly a month too soon. She received the child in her arms reluctantly, fearing that even at this stage one of them might destroy the other; or, failing this, that she would find some vestigial trace or growth which a few more weeks’ gestation would have taken care of. What will you call him? people asked. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘A name is so important. How can I choose an important thing like that entirely on my own?’
Susan had had a bad time. ‘But,’ Mrs Layton said, ‘she was a brick.’ And so it was generally agreed. A brick. Like her mother. Among those who knew the Laytons only one person withheld praise of the way in which Mildred Layton had coped in Sarah’s absence and this was Barbie who maintained a tight-lipped, red-eyed silence, and made preparations for departure from a place of refuge that had not proved permanent. Perhaps it was to Mr Maybrick that she spoke confidentially and through Mr Maybrick that a story gained subterranean currency that Mildred Layton had ridden roughshod over her suggestion that Mabel had wanted to be buried in St Luke’s cemetery in Ranpur, next to her second husband, and not in the cemetery of St John’s. Had Mabel ever expressed such a preference? Perhaps she had, but only to Barbie, and there was nothing in the Will to confirm it. Even if there had been, who could blame Mildred for the hasty arrangements made to inter her stepmother-in-law’s body in Pankot within twenty-four hours of the old woman’s sudden death? What else could she have done, with Susan in labour brought on by the shock of witnessing that death, alone, on the veranda of Rose Cottage? The expense, the inconvenience (the sheer horror, if you liked) of packing the old woman with ice and transporting her to Ranpur would have been intolerable, and it was more important to help a new life into the world than to be certain that the remains of a spent one were buried in a place one had only an old maid’s word had been the place desired by the departed.
And so Mabel Layton had gone to her last resting place in the late afternoon of the day following her death. There were mounds of flowers on the grave to make up for the thin scattering of people who managed to get away for the service. Mrs Layton’s flurried presence was noted and respected. She would have been forgiven for not attending because Susan still lay in a room of the Pankot nursing home, as yet undelivered. Her mother had spent the night there and would return directly the funeral was over to spend another night, if need be. Was it, people wondered, a false alarm? It would be quite understandable, if so. It was a terrible thing for a young girl so far advanced in pregnancy to find herself sitting on a veranda with a dead woman. It would have been better if there had been some warning, if old Mabel had cried out or fallen or at least shown signs of being unwell; instead of which she had simply stopped tending the plants on the balustrade and sat down in a chair close to the one Susan was lying on, and given up the ghost. Well, she was an old woman and it was a good way to go; but not good for Susan who had only gradually become puzzled and then alarmed by the angle of the old woman’s head. ‘Are you awake, Aunty Mabel?’ she asked, raising her voice because of the deafness. And, three hours later, when Rose Cottage was almost empty again of all the people Susan had sensibly and courageously helped to summon, her mother found her in the little spare, with her hands pressed to her abdomen and her eyes wide with terror and incomprehension.
‘It can’t have,’ she said, when Dr Travers told her twenty minutes later that her labour seemed to have begun. ‘It can’t be. It isn’t time. The baby isn’t finished.’ For thirty-three hours she lay in a room of the nursing home which Isobel Rankin had seen was made available – a lovely room, marked down on the offic
ial lists as exclusive to the wives of officers of senior field rank. And at five o’clock in the morning – as Sarah slept fitfully on the train from Ranpur, keeping watch on the night’s progress (and Ahmed Kasim sat on the veranda of the Circuit House near Premanagar, keeping a different kind of watch) – Susan was delivered of a boy who looked absurdly, touchingly, like Teddie.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Susan said when Sarah told her Mr Merrick was grateful but felt he couldn’t accept. ‘I’m going to ask General Rankin, but there have to be two godfathers for a boy so you’d better ask Dicky. At least he’s got two arms.’ It was the only thing she ever said that showed how little or much she had taken in of Sarah’s story about Teddie’s death and Merrick’s action and misfortune; but thereafter she began to show a tender devotion to the child which Dr Travers said was a sign of her having come through, of her confounding those Jeremiahs who once talked about her as being dangerously withdrawn like the daughter of a woman called Poppy Browning. Who said that? Mrs Layton demanded, not having heard the rumour but remembering Poppy Browning well enough from the old days in Lahore. Miss Batchelor had mentioned it, Dr Travers thought. ‘That woman!’ Mrs Layton cried; and another nail was driven into Barbie’s coffin.
On the day before Barbie quit Rose Cottage for temporary sanctuary with the Peplows, Sarah found her wandering in the garden with Mabel’s cradle-basket and Mabel’s secateurs. ‘I should have kept my mouth shut,’ she said, ‘I mean about St Luke’s in Ranpur. But she did wish it. She told me. Quite clearly. Last year. I suggested we should go down to Ranpur to do some Christmas shopping but she said, Oh I shall never go back to Ranpur, at least not until I’m buried. I thought your mother knew all about it but was forgetting it in all the rush and confusion. But there you are. I’ve opened my mouth once too often. Rose Cottage is yours now, and it’s not as if I expected to stay on or have longer than a week or two to make other arrangements if Mabel died before I did. What hurts is being misunderstood and leaving a place I’ve been happy in, under a cloud. I know it was unfair to you, my being here. If I hadn’t been, there’d just have been room for you and Susan and your mother. I said so to Mabel. More than once. Oughtn’t I to go, Mabel? I said. After all I’m not family, and they’re not comfortable down there in the grace and favour. But she wouldn’t hear of it. I don’t know why. She lived a life of her own, didn’t she? I never knew what she was thinking. It sometimes seemed to me she’d found herself, I mean her true self, and just wanted to be alone but have someone who would talk to her. Heaven knows I did that. Well, it’s all over now. I’ve written to the Mission. I thought I might do some voluntary work. There are people starving and dying, aren’t there? There must be something I can do, even if it’s only laying out bodies. I shouldn’t want paying. I’ve got my pension and the little annuity she’d left me. Not that I’m happy about that. Nor is your mother, I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘You mustn’t think that, Barbie. You made Aunt Mabel’s last years very pleasant. It’s the only way she could repay you. And we’ve still got plenty. We’re well off now.’
Barbie looked round the garden. Mabel’s presence was like a scent. ‘Shall you be happy here, all of you?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know at all, Barbie.’
‘Will she marry Captain Beauvais?’
‘Susan?’
‘People think so. They say the child should have a father. I’d encourage it if I were you. If she doesn’t marry again you’ll never get away.’ Suddenly Barbie flushed and grasped Sarah’s arm. ‘That’s what you want, isn’t it? To get away. But some people are made to live and others are made to help them. If you stay you’ll end up like that, like me. Worse probably because all this’ – she released Sarah’s arm and made a broad gesture at the garden and the hills – ‘it’s coming to an end somehow, isn’t it? Very soon.’
Abruptly Barbie left her and Sarah did not see her again until the morning of the christening when she sat alone in a pew near the altar while Sarah and Dicky, General and Mrs Rankin, and Sarah’s mother, stood at the font and Mr Peplow received the new Edward Arthur David Bingham as a lively member of Holy Church. The baptism was hurried, almost furtive; and when it was over the Rankins went their way and the Laytons went theirs. There was no party but Dicky went back with Sarah and her mother to the grace and favour bungalow where the business of packing private possessions into crates for the move to Rose Cottage had been interrupted the day before. The child was placed in the care of Minnie who had been promoted to the position of ayah and had already notably proved her worth; but it was Sarah who dealt with the milk and the bottle and the rubber teat while Minnie watched, anxious to learn but so far unsuccessful in persuading the child to accept this substitute for his mother’s breast.
In the afternoon Dicky drove Sarah to the nursing home – a week to the day and almost to the hour that he had driven Susan home from there with the child in her arms. He did not go in and Sarah told him she would get a tonga home. ‘Shall I come and see you tonight?’ he asked. She did not want him but thought it might be better, if only for her mother’s sake, to have someone in the house to whom both of them could talk. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘come in time for drinks.’
‘I do hope you find her better,’ he said, ‘Oh, I do hope so.’ He turned away and Sarah went in. Twenty minutes later, escorted, she entered the room where Susan was, which was not a pretty room at all. There were bars at the window. Susan sat on an upright chair, hands folded on her lap, watching the gently falling rain and smiling. Another chair was placed near by and on this Sarah took up her position and waited until Susan slowly turned her head and looked at her.
‘Hello, Su. I’ve come to see if there’s anything you want.’
How pretty you look, Sarah thought. Pretty and happy. No, more than happy, profoundly content, totally withdrawn. You’ve found your way in. Why should that cause us pain and sorrow? Why should it hurt to think that you don’t recognize me? Or only recognize me as someone belonging to a world that’s become unreal to you and isn’t to be compared with the one you’ve always imagined and imagine now, and smile at because you feel its protection all round you like a warmth?
Now you look back at the window, through the bars which you don’t see. The little flush on your cheeks which used to look hectic no longer does so; it’s a flush of pleasure and the smile is a smile of happiness, almost of beatitude. Why do we call it sickness? And pray for you to come back to us? When you come back you may remember what you did or tried to do, and why. And we are selfish enough to want you to remember and tell us because we’re not people who will accept mysteries if we think there are explanations to be had.
But you scare us. We sense from the darkness in you the darkness in ourselves, a darkness and a death wish. Neither is admissible. We chase that illusion of perpetual light. But there’s no such thing. What light there is, when it comes, comes harshly and unexpectedly and in it we look extraordinarily ugly and incapable.
She glanced round and spoke in a whisper to the young psychiatrist who stood waiting with Dr Travers. ‘May I touch her?’ The man nodded. Sarah had no faith in him; not because he was young – that was a good thing – but because his work was exclusively with men. She leaned forward.
‘Susan? It’s me – Sarah.’
But Susan did not look at her again and Sarah shrank from touching her. She did not want to intrude or disrupt the pattern of her sister’s absorption. After a while she said, ‘Goodbye, Susan. I’ll see you again tomorrow,’ but the words went unheeded or unheard and she rose and went with the doctors to the door. ‘Can you keep her here?’ she asked. Travers said they hoped so. The alternative – as Mrs Layton so much feared – was a place in Ranpur. But the patient was very quiet. It was probably only a passing phase. Travers said he could have sworn that a week ago her attitude to the child was normal; maternally loving and possessive.
It wasn’t normal, Sarah wanted to say, but none of them had seen it; except Mahmoud’s widowed n
iece, Minnie; and it had not been her place to say but only to watch and learn and be on her guard, and make offerings to the old tribal gods of the hills, which it seemed she and the other servants had got into a habit of doing, secretly, to ward off a rumoured evil of monstrous birth, and which she now continued to do because as far as Minnie was concerned the affliction which she had detected in the young memsahib’s devotion to the child was of divine origin, as all madness was, a sign of God’s special concern and interest.
Sarah waited until the rain stopped, then left the nursing home and took the first tonga in the line. ‘To St John’s,’ she told the tonga-wallah. She did not want to be alone with her mother. When they reached the church she asked the man to wait and went into the churchyard, past the hummocky graves – old lichen-eaten crosses aslant in long wet grass. She took the path round the south side of the church, to the newer part of the cemetery and stood at Aunt Mabel’s grave with its mounds of withered wreaths. Her own little posy, gathered from the garden of Rose Cottage after the funeral, was withered too. The ink had run on the cards, leaving ghostly traces of anonymous remembrances. Ah, oui. Elle est une de Mes prisonnières. That too had been a nail in poor Barbie’s coffin because she had told Susan about the butterflies in the lace. Had she been listening or had Mabel repeated the story to her after Sarah had gone? No matter. ‘Little prisoner, little prisoner. Shall I free you? Shall I free you?’ Susan had said, touching the baby’s cheek with her finger. But even that had passed them by as no more than a tender admonition.