by Paul Scott
She had said the words aloud and said them aloud again as she approached the entrance to the front garden of Rose Cottage. My family. My family. Before repeating the words she had not expected anything of them but at once she felt the tug of an old habit of affection and then a yearning for the powerful and terrible enchantment of inherited identity, which she had spent most of her adult years fighting to dispel; fighting as hard as Susan had fought to feel herself touched by it; and drawn into it, to its very centre, where she would no longer feel, as she had once confessed to Sarah she felt, like a drawing that anyone who wanted to could come along and rub out; that there was nothing to her except this erasable image. The first psychiatrist, Captain Samuels, had shown no special interest when Sarah mentioned it. He had simply said, What do you think that means? But had turned away to arrange things on his desk as if uninterested in her amateur opinions. So she had not answered and the question of Susan’s idea of herself as a drawing people could rub out had never come up again, either with Samuels or with his successor, Captain Richardson.
But it had stayed in Sarah’s mind as an explanation of her sister’s self-absorption and self-dramatization. She did not understand what it was that had made Susan feel so inadequate and the discovery that she did had been a shock. Until then, the self-absorption had seemed to her that of a girl who not doubting her attraction demanded that others should provide her with constant evidence of its existence, and paid obsessive attention to the smallest detail when setting the scenes for these necessary acts of recognition. But the sequence of scenes that had made up – still made up – Susan’s life could no longer be thought of as Susan playing Susan. It was Susan drawing Susan, drawing and re-drawing, attempting that combination of shape and form which by fitting perfectly into its environment would not attract the hands of the erasers. What Sarah feared now was that the game had stopped being a game, had become a grim and conscious exercise in personal survival; that Susan now drew and redrew herself attempting no more than a likeness that she herself could live with; and that she might tire of the effort.
When she reached the open gateway which was flanked by two stone pillars, she paused, convinced that her father had done so too a few minutes ago. In Mabel’s day the name of the bungalow was set out in metal letters fixed to an unpainted wooden board planted in the high bank that bordered the road. Over the years the colour of the metal had become hardly distinguishable from the wood. They had faded into the background, as Mabel had faded into hers, and left the board with a look of being indifferent to the arrival of strangers. The board was still there but was partially hidden by the wild growth on the bank. To see it at all you would have to know it existed. Its identifying function had been usurped by neat white boards, one on each of the stone pillars, announcing respectively in bold black lettering the name and number of the house and the name of its occupier: Colonel J. Layton. Yes, he would have stopped, confronted abruptly by this evidence of ownership, and then perhaps searched for the old board until he found it, probably in a place that didn’t quite conform with the one he remembered.
She set off along the curved gravel drive between the rockeries which were vivid with the blue, white, yellow and purple stars of flowering plants. There had been rain in the night and the air was fresh, chill in the shadows of trees and bushes, but the sky was now cloudless and as she came to the end of the rockeries the sun heated her face.
The staff car was parked opposite the steps up to the square-pillared verandah. There was no sign of the driver. The thickset white stuccoed bungalow looked deserted, but in the way a place could do that had only just been abandoned. Again she stopped. If she entered she would find the occupants gone, the signs of their presence still fresh and warm, and a strong odour of the danger from which they had fled. She had felt this once or twice before, but this morning the sensation was particularly strong.
And, looking at the bungalow, as it were through her father’s eyes, she thought she saw for the first time what it was that sometimes gave this impression. By stripping it of anything that made it look ‘cottagy’ – pots of plants on the balustrades, flowering creepers round the square pillars – her mother had restored to it not its elegance (it could never have had that) but its functional solidity, an architectural integrity which belonged to a time when the British built in a proper colonial fashion with their version of India aggressively in mind and with a view to permanence. Exposed by the cutting back of trees and plants, set off by the new gravel on the drive and the widening of the forecourt (the rockeries were also earmarked for destruction) its squat rectangular bulk was revealed, and with it its essential soundness. The secluded, tentative air which Sarah had often associated with it in Aunt Mabel’s time had quite gone. The name, Rose Cottage, given to it by a previous owner, a tea-planter, was now all too clearly, absurdly, inappropriate, and only the difficulty there would be with the dak had stopped her mother scrapping the name entirely and identifying the bungalow as 12 Upper Club Road.
In restoring it to a likeness of its former self, Sarah knew her mother had intended to create a setting that would speak for itself and also for her and her family’s claim on history through long connection. The name Layton, and her mother’s maiden name, Muir, under portraits on the walls of Government House in Ranpur and Flagstaff House and the Summer Residence in Pankot, on the drunken headstones in the churchyards of St John’s and St Luke’s, performed the same function of austere advertisement. In their dumb immobility they avoided the vulgarity of the words whose meanings they conveyed; but conveyed with so remote, so mute a self-awareness that even when identified they seemed thinned by irony. Service, sacrifice, integrity. And she had succeeded, but at a cost. By cutting away inessentials, the accumulations of years, she had robbed the place of a quality that belonged to that accumulation, the quality of survival and the idea behind it – that survival meant change. Restored, the bungalow no longer reflected the qualities of the people living there, it no longer fitted them as they truly were, so that – even when they were in it – from outside the bungalow looked empty, like a place of historic interest, visited but not inhabited. And, more than usually oppressed this morning by the sensation that she had arrived at a moment when it was deserted, she saw the bungalow in a sudden, shatteringly direct, light – looking as it looked now but even starker, uncompromisingly new amid the raw wounds left by space having been cleared for it; and on its verandah a white man in Indian clothes at ease in a cane lounging chair, or on a charpoy, attended by servants or by one of his Indian mistresses, and contemplating through the mists of claret fumes and cheroot smoke the fortune he had made or hoped to make out of private trade. The words whose meanings her mother had wanted to convey belonged to a later age, an age when the bungalow was already old. Unwittingly she had exposed the opposites of those words: self-interest, even corruption.
She made her way quickly, avoiding the steps, taking the path round the side, then stepping off it because the new gravel crunched, on to the new turf that had been put down on ground cleared of shrubs. The side verandah was empty but there was a spread blanket, a coloured ball and some bricks where the child had been playing. The doors to the room she shared with Susan were open. She hesitated. There was no sound of voices inside the house. Ahead she could see one side and corner of the high netting surrounding the tennis-court, and moving forward, widening the angle of vision, saw Minnie, the little ayah, inside the netting at the far end of the court, walking behind the child whose arms she held aloft by the wrists as he took faltering bandy-legged steps towards his mother. The centre net was not up and Susan sat on a blanket in the middle of the court at the point where the lime-marked centre lines met, with her back to the house, leaning on her right hip, her left arm stretched back, grasping one ankle, the other arm taut, hand palm down on the blanket, taking the weight. Close to this hand Panther II sat watching the child, scraping the blanket with his tail. Susan wore one of the full-skirted flowered cotton dresses that made her look eig
hteen still, too young to be a mother, touchingly too young to be a widow; and, round the shoulders, tied by its sleeves, a cardigan. The hairdresser had been – perhaps yesterday. The dark hair sported a crisp new set, a thick fringe of tight curls at the back that left her neck bare. When she spoke her voice carried. ‘Come along then.’ More faintly Sarah heard Edward’s gurgling response. But suddenly he squealed. Minnie had picked him up and was running forward. She placed him on the blanket close to Susan and then retreated, ran to the opening at the side of the court and through it across the lawn towards the servants’ quarters, as though this were part of a game of hide-and-seek.
But Sarah knew that it was not; guessed that the girl had seen Colonel Layton coming out into the garden and – partly out of shyness (for she was still very young and had never met the head of the household), partly out of unwillingness to intrude, or to receive yet the look or expression of gratitude which she had earned – put herself out of reach.
As if alerted by Minnie’s sudden action, Susan had looked round, and now got to her knees, picked Edward up and stood facing the bungalow with her head down talking to the boy, holding his right hand out in the direction of his grandfather who now entered the court from the gate on the verandah side of the netting. At first Sarah thought he was alone, but presently she saw her mother following slowly, arms folded, one hand at her neck, pressing down her string of pearls. The hairdresser had attended her too. And Sarah did not recognize the jumper and skirt. Nor the shoes. They were new. Beside her mother and sister she felt travel-stained, dowdy in her uniform, excluded from the scene: from what she recognized as a scene – for all its appearance of evolving naturally from a sequence of haphazard events. It bore, for Sarah, the familiar mark of Susan’s gift for pre-arrangement, or her continuing and frightening attempts to reduce reality to the manageable proportions of a series of tableaux which illustrated the particular crisis through which she was passing.
It would be better, she had said to her mother, for you and daddy to be alone for a bit when he gets here, wouldn’t it? So I’ll be in the garden with ayah and Edward.
In this way the true climax of his homecoming had been delayed, transferred from the scene with his wife to the scene with the daughter who had a grandson to present. And a dog. But no husband. Instead, the ghost of the soldier whom she had married. The ghost, and the living likeness of the man in the child. These were her gifts to her father and her current explanations to herself of what she was in the world’s eyes and in his particularly: a promise for him of his continuity and in that promise perhaps she saw a dim reflection of promise for her own.
He stopped just short of mother and child, raised his arms, inviting a triple embrace. It’s grandpa, Susan seemed to be saying. She held Edward up and after a moment’s hesitation her father took him and holding him firmly under the arms raised him high. Edward gazed down at the stranger with an expression that from a distance struck Sarah as oddly dispassionate for a child so young. It was an expression she had seen before on Edward’s face when confronted by men. He seemed to have a reserve, amounting to a vague antipathy, for grown members of his own sex. Almost alone among them, Ronald Merrick had inspired an early positive response, in spite of the burn-scars, the artificial hand. These had not frightened the child.
The one thing Edward seldom did when men touched him was cry; but his grandfather did not know this and perhaps interpreting Edward’s failure to show pleasure or interest in being raised aloft as a warning that tears could quickly follow, put him carefully down on the nearest corner of the blanket and, straightening up, gazed at Susan.
Hello, daddy, she seemed to say. Then she covered her face with both hands and, standing so, was embraced. When she uncovered her face and raised her head to kiss and be kissed her eyes were closed and she was crying. Sarah could hear her. He began saying things to comfort and jolly her out of it. And although he must have noticed the puppy before he chose this moment to exclaim about it. They both looked down at Panther, broke apart and knelt together on the blanket. Introductions were made. Panther wagged his tail and skittered a bit, happy but cautious under the flurry of attention. Colonel Layton scratched the puppy’s head, ruffled Edward’s red curls, placed an arm round Susan’s shoulders. She wiped her left cheek dry with the palm of her hand. The scene was over.
I can enter now, Sarah told herself.
III
By the time the car had negotiated the narrow lanes from the Samaritan Hospital of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy in the old city of Ranpur, through the Koti bazaar to the Elphinstone fountain, the street lighting was coming on.
Only one police squad remained of the force that had been out in the afternoon. The men were relaxed, awaiting the order to return to barracks. Traffic was flowing freely around the circus and access to the Mall and the Kandipat road was no longer restricted – signs that His Excellency the Governor had made the journey from the airfield out at Ranagunj back to Government House without incident and that news of Mr Mohammed Ali Kasim’s brief stop in Ranpur, en route from Mirat to Pankot with the body of his secretary, Mr Mahsood, had not led to a popular demonstration in the latter case nor to an anti-government demonstration in the former – or certainly not one of the kind that got out of hand and at nightfall left the air charged with anxiety and irresolution.
As the driver turned into the Mall an Indian Sub-Inspector broke off conversation with a head constable, came to attention and saluted: the car rather than its occupant.
Rowan touched the peak of his cap then leant back and looked ahead to the still distant bulk of Government House, dark against the deep mauve northern sky and the grey pink-tipped storm clouds. The avenue of approach was bordered on each side by double rows of shade trees and the compounds of Ranpur’s oldest European houses and bungalows. The sidewalks were as wide as the road. It was a processional route but seldom used for such an occasion because the way from the airfield where people usually arrived now lay to the east of Government House, beyond the cantonment.
The Mall, running for a measured mile and a half from the Elphinstone fountain to the Governor’s residence, was bisected midway by Old Fort Road. In the middle of this intersection rose the bronze canopied statue of Queen Victoria. In 1890 that statue had been the cause of serious deliberations by the committee of the Ranpur Gymkhana Club. Unwilling quite to believe the story, since it seemed so perfectly apocryphal, Rowan had tackled the club secretary and eventually been shown the faded but still legible page of the committee’s minute recording a bare majority vote against a proposal to paint the statue white to meet the criticism of members that, in bronze, Victoria – particularly in profile – bore an unhappy resemblance to a Rajput warrior lady of the kind who defied the British in the early decades of the century. The motion had been lost on the grounds of impracticability. A further motion that representations should be made to the appropriate department to try to ensure that any future replica of the Monarch should be executed in the best white marble was carried unanimously.
Although the Civil Lines officially began at the Elphinstone fountain, the Victoria statue was now regarded as the threshold. She stood on permanent sentry duty, accoutred with orb and sceptre, gazing with an air of abstraction towards the city. Behind her back the Mall continued, but on this second stretch there were no houses. The double lines of shade trees now bordered areas of flat open ground on which the military and police authorities could quickly establish command posts and hold reserve forces at time of civil disturbance. The line (or front) formed by Old Fort Road was considered the furthest that a civil demonstration should be allowed to march on Government House unless its intentions were clearly peaceful. Coming up the Mall from the fountain, riotous marchers invariably found the way blocked by squads of police, or soldiers, deployed across the road in front of the statue. The old houses and bungalows on the Mall between the statue and the fountain had long since been abandoned by the British and taken over by rich Indians. According to the British
it was the inconvenience of places built in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries which had caused their removal to the newer and better accommodation provided by subsequent building along Old Fort Road and on the cantonment side of Government House, although it was occasionally admitted that it would have been tedious to live on a route so frequently used by crowds of people making nuisances of themselves. The joke still current among the Indians, though, was that the British had lost their nerve and decamped, leaving their Queen behind.
To reach the Gymkhana Club Rowan would have to tell the driver to turn right at the statue and go along the eastern arm of Old Fort Road. He was tempted to do so. Since 1800 hours it had been his twenty-four hours off-duty. The prospect of beginning it with a dip in the club’s pool, a drink or two on the terrace and a quiet supper alone in the annexe to the main dining-room, attracted him. He could send the driver back to Government House with a note for the duty-officer to say where he was. Or he could ring the duty-officer from the club to ask whether HE had asked for him, although that was unlikely. The twenty-four hours off-duty once a week was treated by Malcolm with rigorous respect.
But he gave the driver no instruction.
*
Having passed the sentries and the checkpoint inside the west gate they came out on to the forecourt of the west wing and pulled up at a certain point below the flight of steps leading to the great colonnaded terrace. Rowan signed the man’s logbook, got out, went up and pushed through half-glazed double doors into the hall, full as usual with white-uniformed servants. He signed the duty book, marking himself OD, added his name to the mess list, went to check his pigeon-hole for letters and was handed two by the hall steward. Both felt like formal invitations. He went through the open half-glazed doors out on to an inner terrace, one of the four that flanked the inner courtyard: an immense rectangle laid out with intricate geometric precision and formality with lawns, paved walks, ponds and fountains. On ceremonial nights the fountains were floodlit but in the wet season were usually not even turned on. This evening the courtyard was lit only as far as the light from ornamental lanterns that hung from the apex of each section of the vaulted ceilings of the terrace could reach. Between the square pillars there were set great whitewashed tubs of hydrangea, geranium and bougainvillaea, and the ubiquitous crimson canna lilies. To reach the entrance to the staircase to his quarters Rowan had to walk past these almost to the end of the terrace and past the offices which coped with the routine work of the household. Most of these were shut and the benches provided for messengers empty, except outside the telephone exchange and the signals office which were manned round the clock, as was the cypher office, in the east wing, where Rowan spent most of his working day. He glanced across the courtyard. The first-floor windows of Malcolm’s private rooms were lit.