by Paul Scott
*
When Rowan told the driver to take us to Rose Cottage, Colonel Layton Sahib’s place, I had a picture of what I must be in for, one so vivid that it depressed me. As a name, Rose Cottage wasn’t quite as bad as say Mon Repos or Dunromin but I could not imagine anything much worse than dining there, among the cosy souvenirs of a lifetime of exile on the King’s business. I pictured the Laytons surrounded by Benares brass and sweet briar, floral cretonnes and bronze gods; a Buddha smiling back at a yawning tiger-skin, and – above the mantelpiece – a watercolour of the Western Ghats and – on it – photographs of Sarah and Susan as little girls on ponies in Gulmarg. There might even be an imitation Chinese vase filled with dry bulrushes in a corner or on a grand piano; a standard lamp with a tasselled shade and dinner mats painted with hunting scenes from the English shires: Taking a Fence; The Water Jump; The Whipper-in; In Full Cry.
But directly we drove between two rather gaunt pillars my spirits rose. Had I heard right? Rose Cottage? One illuminated board simply announced ‘12’ and the other ‘Colonel J. Layton’. A moment of hiatus followed, a dark transit past dim ugly shapes which I feared might be rockeries, but then – lit from arc-lamps in the forecourt – I saw the beautiful proportions of an early nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian bungalow: squat, functional and aggressive, as well anchored to the ground as a Hindu temple.
‘Good Heavens.’
‘What’s wrong?’ Nigel asked.
‘I hadn’t expected anything so fine.’
‘It’s one of the oldest buildings in Pankot, I’m told. Is it your period?’ He was smiling, taking something of a rise out of me but pleased that I was pleased. The verandah showed signs of vandalism: a wooden balustrade, obviously a later addition, but not recent; but apart from this the whole area was free of ornament, with one exception: a hanging lantern of iron and glass, plain, ugly and perfectly in keeping. In a niche near the door there was a handbell but the bearer, simply dressed in white linen tunic and trousers, was already receiving us. Nigel called him Mahmoud and told him I was Perron Sahib. The square hall was beautifully proportioned but ruined by oak panelling. I noted, though, that there were no wall hangings – no pictures, or trays. It looked as if something had persuaded the owner to leave the panelling to make its own vulgar statement. On the tiled floor there was a large Persian rug of a lovely silky texture. Heavy mahogany doors marked the positions of the rooms surrounding the hall. The one facing us was open. Mahmoud led us in.
*
I have tried to recapture events in some kind of sequence to give a lucid picture of my evening with the Laytons but it is as though after the shocks and surprises of that day I suffered a reaction of such intensity that I might have been hard put to it to write a coherent account the following morning let alone twenty-five years later.
Moreover, it was an evening during which nothing happened which contributed to what you would call a narrative line and which left me with nothing more useful from your point of view than impressions of members of the family – first impressions of the two I’d not met before and changed ones of the two whom I had. The most vivid impression of all was made by Mrs Layton, a woman whose personal distinction was heightened by an icy stoicism and by what was overlain but not disguised by that coldness: an unmistakable human sexual warmth, which I judged would be strong when aroused. Her air of detachment, the economy of movement and expression, the hard outer casing of the memsahib – so often tiresome in other members of that monstrous regiment – were, in her, peculiar graces. You felt that through them she was protected against the shock of life in general, and with them ready to meet the shock of her own head-on.
Rowan, in introducing us, told her how impressed I was with the house. She said something uncompromisingly direct like, ‘Oh. Why?’ My reply, whatever it was, helped to establish a tenuous bond between us. I understood that she had been making alterations both to the outside and inside and that there was still a lot to do which she was quite determined on in spite (was it?) of opposition from people who preferred it as it had been in Colonel Layton’s stepmother’s day. It must have been much later, probably when Nigel and I were leaving, that the question of the oak-panels in the entrance hall was raised. She described them as ‘a pity’, the more so because the damage done by removing the panelling might be considerable and the expense, in consequence, perhaps incalculable.
I describe the bond between us as tenuous because although I often felt a mutual empathy whenever we spoke to one another or when our glances happened to coincide, there were as many if not more occasions when a remark I made which she might easily have taken up was utterly ignored. She fascinated me. I observed with solicitude the portents of physical decline, the areas of flesh between eyebrow, cheek and ear, from which the resilience had gone, leaving the skin to find its own salvation, which it could only do with the help (presumably) of astringents which might, but didn’t, never do, shrink it sufficiently to arrest the development of a network of minute folds and fissures which show up as lines and wrinkles and lend to the eyes a sad and perplexing beauty and luminosity, for the eyes do not age in the way that the flesh does, or do not when they are the eyes of a woman who is still handsome and armed with a proper measure of self-respect.
When she lifted her head – she had a habit of doing so and at the same time touching the necklace she was wearing – the pad of flesh under the chin was tautened and, for an instant, this and a consequent firmness of throat and neck created an illusion of youth, until you saw one, then two, obtrusive tendons and a faint blotchy discoloration in the region of the thyroid. On one occasion when my conscious critical self observed these marks of ageing, the other self, the self that weighed rather than noted evidence, was moved by a tender curiosity and a bold impulse to touch the skin as if to verify that what the eye saw was real, and as if, too, to communicate an opinion that it was virtuous in her to own such marks and that they inspired admiration, not pity. Perhaps it was her sensitivity to this reaction that caused her every so often to switch herself off from me, as a precaution against an unnecessary complication.
Possibly my reaction was an effect of the invigorating Pankot air acting in conjunction with the effect of that empathy, my recognition of Mildred Layton as an attractive older woman, one who, while conscious of the fact that one was borne along on the ever-flowing tide whose sound I sometimes listened for, did not allow the angle of her vision to be restricted to the view of here and now. She had, I believed, a vigorous sense of history, vigorous because it pruned ruthlessly that other weakening sense so often found with the first, the sense of nostalgia, the desire to live in the past. Throughout that evening she impressed me more and more as a woman who instinctively rejected the claims of years gone by if – unlike 12 Upper Club Road as I discovered she preferred to call it and to which she was in the process of restoring only what it could properly claim – these claims conflicted with her own claims, her determination both to survive and to defeat any force that currently threatened her.
Such strength of mind and character I attributed to her, and I judged it had probably not been sustained without effort and some assistance. She drank fairly heavily, like one accustomed (one might say disciplined) to it. One thing I noticed, the switching off became more frequent towards the end of the evening and was signalled by a lowering of the lids, a partial hooding of the eyes; but this was the only sign I could detect of the working of the alcohol.
*
Susan was the first of the two daughters to put in an appearance. If I had met her somewhere else and spoken to her for any length of time without knowing who she was, no familiar note would have been struck. Between this conventionally pretty girl and her sister there seemed to me to be no resemblance. Dark, carefully dressed hair and a high complexion, eyes that slid away from contact with your own and seemed emotionally disconnected from the smile of the neatly lipsticked mouth. The mouth alone performed the function of doing its social duty. Or was I looking for signs of disorie
ntation? Her breasts were full, freckled above the deep cleft between them. She would be buxom in middle-age in spite of that narrow little waist (accentuated, I think, by a belt and a flared skirt). She was encumbered, distracted rather, by a Labrador puppy which had hectic manners which suddenly deserted it as if it had seen a ghost or had recollected some standing order about behaviour indoors. It retreated into a corner and sat awaiting a command or inspiration. It had the Labrador trait of looking at you in a way that revealed the white of its eyes – or so I think, having seen a similar animal recently that evoked these memories. Between Susan and this puppy there was a curious tension – a febrile acknowledgment both of the importance and unreliability of the other’s presence. It did not take me long to recognize that for each the other was a symbol of a security desired but not felt. It took me a little longer to see that Susan Bingham felt no security in anything and longer still to work out one of the reasons why this insecurity made itself felt so strongly. The room was wrong for her, the room, the whole house. If the house had been as I’d expected, she would have fitted it. As it was it deprived her of the safety of a proper background. I noted how her mother kept watch, alert for any sign Susan might give of not intending to go through with something she had promised to perform. This is not hindsight. I was not at ease. Susan was difficult to talk to. I felt that the only way to break through to her would be to say: Tell me all about yourself. Her self-centredness was like an extra thickness of skin. Without it, I believe, she would have died of panic or exposure. What she needed – the sense of human correspondence – was precisely what she protected herself from experiencing. I was appalled at the idea of the proposed marriage. As a victim, she was ready-made.
But it was – I reminded myself again – none of my business. None of this was. I was merely a spectator; as much but no more involved than someone in the audience of a theatre. The play had Chekovian undertones. For all the general air of easiness, the uneven co-operative effort to perform, en famille, each member of the cast was enclosed, one felt, by his own private little drama. Rowan, surprisingly talkative, did well – I thought rather too well – in his part of cheerful friend of the family. He wasn’t cut out for it.
When Sarah came in at last it was as if someone had strayed on to the stage through error. She looked nondescript and her behaviour was colourless. She was quite unlike the girl I met in Bombay. My disappointment was profound. I assumed that in Bombay I must have been in a very uncritical mood where women were concerned. She was wearing the same dress, the one she had worn at the Maharanee’s, but this time it did nothing for her. Her hair was dressed in the same way but lacked lustre. She did not even walk well. She had little to say to any of us. The one pleasant effect of her arrival was that Susan became a little more communicative and Rowan much less so. He had acquired the tentative air of a man who hadn’t quite decided whether he was as fond of someone as he had imagined. Sarah gave him little encouragement. To me she gave none.
It was at dinner that it occurred to me that the evening had a motif; neither planned for nor consciously acknowledged. It was suddenly in the air. The motif was the forthcoming marriage and the part which I might or might not play in frustrating it. Only Susan and Colonel Layton, I thought, were completely unaware of this.
The motif first became apparent to me in the table arrangement. Mrs Layton put Rowan on her right and me on her left. Colonel Layton, at the other end, had his married daughter on his right and Sarah on his left, which meant that Susan was next to me and Sarah next to Nigel. This strict adherence to an order of precedence that gave the married daughter seniority over her elder unmarried sister was, I thought, nevertheless open to more subtle interpretation, for there would have to come a point when I deliberately engaged Mrs Bingham in one of those table conversations which – even at so small and intimate a gathering – assume a semiprivate character; and it would undoubtedly be my duty to mention her engagement to the officer I worked for and to offer my good wishes.
The subject of Susan’s engagement hadn’t arisen yet. After dealing with soup and responding to Mrs Layton’s questions about the places I had visited in India, about the origins of the name Perron, about my balloonist uncle and my other eccentric relatives (Nigel must have briefed her well) I became very conscious that Susan was not communicating with her father nor (I felt) listening either to Nigel and Sarah or to her mother and me; that she was, in fact, waiting, self-contained, embattled; waiting for me to turn round and say: Well, tell me all about yourself.
This is the one moment in the evening I clearly remember. The soup plates were being cleared. Mrs Layton transferred her hostess’s attention to Nigel, giving me the cue to transfer my own to Mrs Bingham. Protected, as I thought, by the conversation between Nigel and Mrs Layton I turned to Mrs Bingham and said Nigel had told me about her engagement to Colonel Merrick and that I should like to offer her my best wishes for their future happiness.
In the sudden silence in which I found myself ending it, my quiet little speech splashed as loudly as a stone thrown into a placid pond on a summer night.
After the ripples had died away Mrs Bingham looked round and smiled. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That is most kind of you. I’m sure we shall be. Very happy.’
Then she turned away, resuming contemplation of her place at table. I noticed Colonel Layton’s left hand was occupied moving bits of bread from the middle of his side-plate to the outer rim and back again, as if he were counting cherry-stones that told his future. I imagine I tried several times to engage Susan Bingham in something approximating to conversation. I have no recollection of succeeding; instead I recall, chiefly, a sense of other people’s resignation – particularly Mrs Layton’s. Neither she nor Nigel (nor Sarah) could possibly have expected me to say anything except what I did say. Perhaps it was only when I said nothing more that they recognized their own subconscious expectations; resigned themselves to the inevitability of the marriage. Only Colonel Layton seemed unaware, unaffected. He smiled; ate sparingly. His demeanour suggested thoughts passing through his mind: How extraordinary – how nice – how lucky I am – whatever will happen to me next? The emotional instability of Bombay had gone. Rather, it lay hidden under the carapace, the hardening shell of reaffirmation.
*
When the women withdrew the servant brought a couple of decanters. One of them contained the remains of that much-travelled bottle of Old Sporran. I declined the whisky and had brandy; an act of self-denial which I followed up by mentioning Bagshaw and inviting what I would least welcome: a claustrophobic conversation about the hermetic world of school, that alchemy in reverse which transmutes the gold of life into the lead of tiresome recollections of immaturity. But Colonel Layton showed no enthusiasm for Bagshaw. He smiled benignly, uncommitted. He was suffering, I thought, from delayed reaction to the shock of homecoming. Here for him, briefly, was a likeness of the world he had just escaped from, a room occupied entirely by men. I don’t think he liked it, suddenly. He raised his glass of malt whisky in a rather shaky hand and said, ‘Strange thing. There was a young Oberleutnant at the last camp I was at –’ and retold the story for – I assumed – Rowan’s benefit, but when he had finished and I glanced at Rowan I fancied Rowan too had heard it before but assumed I hadn’t.
‘Extraordinarily kind of you, Perron,’ Layton said, nodding at his glass. ‘I feel it would be civil to write to the Oberleutnant and tell him it came true. Haven’t actually sat down to Jane Austen yet, though. So mustn’t deceive him. Not that one would know where to write. By the way, my future son-in-law told me that officer you rescued from the bath succeeded on his second attempt. Sorry about that. It was his whisky originally, wasn’t it?’
I agreed that originally it was.
‘Odd thing,’ he said, ‘the compulsion to suicide.’ Layton was studying the pale liquid in his glass, perhaps seeing in the whisky of one dead man the face of another. ‘What do you say, Rowan? Odd? To be quite so at the end of the tether?’
The briskness of the military manner flared up in that one question and then went out again. I decided that he would prefer the truth so replied that so far as I was qualified to judge I should say nothing worth knowing whatsoever. He nodded.
‘That’s rather the conclusion I’ve been coming to,’ he said. And nodded again. The images of the evening at Rose Cottage end there.
*
In my bedroom at the guest house I found on the bedside table a copy of Emerson’s essays – heavily underlined and marked in the margins. Its owner, or one of its owners (it had obviously been handled a great deal) had written her name on the fly-leaf. Barbara Batchelor. The underlining began with the first familiar and sonorous paragraph of the essay on History: There is one mind common to all individual men: and continued intermittently. I flicked the pages to find the other familiar passage in the essay on self-reliance and found that marked too: Society is a wave. . . .
‘You’ve found the book, then,’ Rowan said when I took it out on to the verandah to join him over what he called a nightcap. ‘I’m sorry, I ought to have mentioned it, but forgot. It was among some things I brought up from Ranpur for Sarah. We thought you’d like it.’