by Paul Scott
It was on the Friday – after our second ride to Muddarabad – that I heard poor Barbie was dead. Major Smalley mentioned it to me at the daftar, having heard it from his wife, and she was invariably well-informed. When I rang the Reverend Mother of the Samaritan Hospital in Ranpur and she talked vaguely of papers meant for me or my family I feared some kind of revelation, a written statement, a letter to my father whom Barbie had hardly known but on whom I knew she relied to settle once and for all the question whether mother had buried Aunt Mabel in the wrong place – a letter perhaps referring to mother’s association with Coley. I didn’t believe Barbie capable of malice. What I feared was an unintentional accusation by a woman whose wits were scattered – as scattered as the contents of the trunk she’d left at Rose Cottage where she’d been Aunt Mabel’s companion, and which she removed on the morning of the accident – the trunk that was the cause of the accident because it was too heavy for the tonga.
The trunk was full of things connected with Barbie’s work as a mission teacher, old textbooks, exercise books she’d kept to remember special pupils, gifts from the children and their parents, and a copy of the picture her old mission friend Edwina Crane had been given as a reward for heroism in the North West Frontier Province during the Great War. Barbie told me that the trunk wasn’t particularly important but it was ‘her history and without it according to Emerson she wasn’t explained’. When Mabel died she had to move into a small room at the rectory bungalow. She’d taken things down there bit by bit during the week or so mother gave her to give us vacant possession of Rose Cottage. The rectory wasn’t a permanent arrangement and Clarissa Peplow was worried about the amount of stuff she seemed to have. Barbie asked me if she could leave the trunk with the mali. I offered to take care of it myself. Susan and I would be sharing the room that had been Barbie’s and I saw no reason why I shouldn’t look after the trunk until she found a permanent home. But she knew mother would object. She said that if the mali put the trunk in his shed then providing I knew it was there that would be good enough. So that’s what was done.
*
Muddarabad was the village Havildar Karim Muzzafir Khan came from. We stopped there because father couldn’t bring himself to ride on and enter it and confront the havildar’s wife and family. Each morning, I think, he set off with that intention and then, reaching the halting-place, found the intention collapsing under the weight of his notion of its futility. Man-Bap. I am your father and your mother. This traditional idea of his position, this idea of himself in relationship to his regiment, to the men and the men’s families, had not survived his imprisonment; or, if it had survived, the effort of living up to it had become too much for him. Was it lack of energy or lack of conviction, I wondered, that caused him to rein in and sit straight-backed as if posing for his portrait as a military officer watching the course of a battle for whose outcome he would be held responsible, or studying the ground over which, tomorrow, conclusions would be tried?
And, watching him, it struck me how very rare after all were men whose genius lay in active warfare. For one genius there would be almost countless plodders who were commanders in name only, men to whom the structure of a landscape would present almost as great a problem in military understanding as it had always done to me, but who had been taught to apply a set of ready-made formulas so that it was upon these and not the terrifyingly wide margins of error that their minds were concentrated. As a child he had seemed godlike to me, revealing some of the secrets of his profession. I had the feeling now that he believed himself dishonoured – not by anything he had done but by his talent, which turning out limited had narrowed the whole area of his self-regard.
Waiting at the halting-place on the third morning, the Saturday, I recalled my mother’s words overheard the night before, when I came home late, having stayed on at the daftar to telephone the Reverend Mother at the Samaritan. ‘It’s a question of your presence more than anything. It was the same for me when you all went into the bag.’ And in retrospect it seemed scarcely any time at all since she had ridden out with Kevin Coley from one village to another to talk to the women whose husbands, sons and grandsons and brothers were either dead or captured in North Africa.
For her to visit every village would have been impossible but on other occasions she talked to women who came in from outlying districts for confirmation of the news, receiving them outside the adjutant’s office and even in the compound of the grace and favour bungalow where we lived in those days. Colonel Sahib, Colonel Memsahib. Two aspects of the one godhead. My mother was not built to look like a woman another woman could be comforted by – but at these meetings her very stiffness seemed right. The important thing was that she was there, in the shell of her flesh which if hard seemed trustworthy. She told these women the truth always, for instance that as prisoners of war the men would be separated from their officers and that it would be virtually impossible for father himself to ensure their welfare. But, subsequently, in many unobtrusive ways, she had kept an eye on the widows, and the wives who like herself could only wait patiently for their men’s return. She did this entirely out of her sense of duty. It was an act, but she played the part with a perfect sense of what would be extraneous to it. She did not make the mistake of identifying herself too closely with it. When she came back into the bungalow she shed it, or seemed to shed it. And called for gin.
So, ‘Why don’t you?’ she had said the night before, meaning why didn’t he ride on into Muddarabad. But it was different for father. Man-Bap. That act had been an inseparable part of his life as a commander of Indian troops. He had to identify himself closely with it. It was supposed to go deep into him, right down to the source of his inspiration. Every morning, when we stopped after riding down the northern slope of East Hill, it was as though he waited there for the inspiration to return and lead him down into the village. But, ‘Well’, he would say, and said it again that Saturday, ‘Better get back’. On the way home we usually rode abreast and talked about the things that had happened yesterday and the plans there were for today.
*
After riding we had breakfast and then I went down to the daftar. Officially he was on station leave but sometimes he went down to the Pankot Rifles lines. The immediate future was very uncertain. There was a question of long leave, the possibility of taking it at home; but the more important questions for him were of his fitness and of his next appointment. Long though I did for home leave the prospect wasn’t one I considered likely even if the war ended as people expected. He was too close to retirement to waste time in England. He had too much time to make up. He and mother were now well enough off, having inherited Mabel’s money, not to go after promotion simply to earn a higher pension, but he would go after it, I believed, to redress the balance. And it would be something to put his mind to. The obvious job for him was that of commandant of the depot which Colonel Trehearne had held throughout the war, postponing his own retirement. But now I got the impression that mother had set her sights higher and that she wanted to get out of the station. I couldn’t blame her. The expense she had gone to in altering Rose Cottage couldn’t in her case be seen as evidence of an intention to make it a permanent home. Even the prospect of final retirement there now seemed questionable.
*
Feeling I must do something about whatever it was Barbie had left which the Bishop Barnard Mission hadn’t collected or didn’t want and about which the Reverend Mother was so vague and yet so insistent, I wrote to Nigel Rowan to ask him whether he’d ring her and get the facts clearer. That was on the Saturday. On that evening we dined with the Trehearnes.
Maisie Trehearne was tall, pale and stately, and so upright that it was rumoured she was supported by a steel corset. Lately she had taken to wearing flowing dinner gowns of grey or blue georgette which gave her the appearance of a metallic ghost. When she moved she created the illusion of cooling breezes which weren’t necessary because the Commandant’s house was the draughtiest in Pankot and wretched t
o dine at on a winter evening. The Trehearnes were the last people to order fires lit and the first to order the hearths to be cleared and guarded by brass trays. And never, in the rainy season, when the evening could be chilly – which fortunately it wasn’t on this occasion – was an electric fire brought in and switched on. Her husband, Patrick, now sixty, had the same frail, febrile but inflexible look: highly tempered steel worn to the thickness of a wafer. There was scarcely a line on their faces. They were the faces of people who had never had a sleepless night or a moment’s worry, or, if they had, had somehow acquired an almost oriental sense of spiritual detachment from the cares of life.
The other obstacle to comfort at the Trehearnes was the pack of dogs, a strange hybrid collection ranging from puppies to full-grown brutes, seldom less than three altogether; raw, savage, the terror of servants, cause of concern to timid guests; obstinate, disobedient; objects of Maisie’s devotion and her husband’s sufferance. The dogs seemed natural victims of the disasters that were always befalling them. Ruling the roost at Commandant House they seemed disinclined to learn that the world outside was a hostile place. One, attacking a tonga horse, was kicked to death; another was bitten by a krait; yet another run over by a staff-car from Area Headquarters which it had thought had no business on the same road as itself. One, straying, was shot on the rifle-range. Others simply succumbed to one of the diseases domestic animals in India were always dying of. You would have thought that a woman so genuinely fond of animals, particularly of dogs, would have lost heart, but Maisie never did, she was always acquiring replacements for those that had fallen, and you always felt that her attachment was deep, her sense of duty to them strong, her horrified reaction to any tale of cruelty to animals of any kind absolutely real. You could still feel this about Maisie even when sitting in their dining-room under the glazed eyes of the creditable number of mounted shikar trophies for whose deaths she and Patrick were just about equally responsible. The trophies were seldom referred to. Perhaps they were there merely as relics of youthful exuberance which had long since been grown out of. I once heard Lucy Smalley say she wondered that Maisie didn’t mount the heads of the dogs too: a typical Smalley remark but not (which was also typical) wholly unjustified.
*
‘Watch out for the dogs, John,’ mother had warned father when we set out in the car Colonel Trehearne had sent up. The warning was unnecessary. Perhaps for once Patrick Trehearne had put his foot down, or Maisie and Patrick had both had the foresight to see that the usual kind of welcome you got at Commandant House didn’t sort well with greeting a man who had been locked up for several years. Instead, the dogs had been locked up and we entered unmolested.
It was father’s first dinner out and Maisie had promised mother to keep the party small. It turned out even smaller than planned because Kevin Coley’s servant rang just before we arrived to say that the Adjutant Sahib had gone to bed with a temperature. ‘Actually,’ Maisie said, ‘we’re rather worried about Kevin. He suddenly seems restless. After all these years resisting any attempt to move and promote him he’s acting as though he thought it was time something was done about him.’
The Trehearnes’ bedroom where we left our stoles, exposing necks, shoulders and arms, like Spartan women, to the chilly rigours of the interior, was immense. In it the twin beds looked diminutive, mere sparrows’ nests. High above them, suspended from the raftered ceiling, were circular frames for the mosquito nets which were hardly ever necessary but which Maisie had a fondness for. It was the kind of room, sparsely furnished, which always looked camped-out in rather than occupied, and where you wouldn’t have been surprised to find bird-droppings on the floor.
It was while we were in the bedroom that the subject of Barbie came up and I discovered that mother also knew she was dead. Susan was momentarily out of the room, powdering her nose in the adjoining bathroom (people in Pankot had learned not to refer to death and disaster in front of her, if they could help it). Maisie said, ‘Mrs Stewart at the Library tells me that according to Lucy Smalley, Miss Batchelor died the other day. Did you know?’
She addressed the question to both of us. I was standing at the foot of one of the beds. Mother was peering into the glass of the dressing-table, making a minor repair with her lipstick. Perhaps this provided her with an excuse not to speak. But she didn’t react at all, her expression remained constant, concentrated. I was forced to answer. I said that Major Smalley had mentioned it to me at the daftar.
‘There was nothing in the Ranpur Gazette,’ Maisie said. ‘And the death columns are the first thing I read. It used to be the births and marriages but you seem to reach a time of life when you know only the people who die. How did Lucy hear?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, truthfully.
‘Do you, Mildred?’
‘Do I what?’
‘Know how Lucy Smalley heard Miss Batchelor was dead.’
‘All I know is what Mrs Smalley told me when she rang, but I suppose in this case one can take it as more or less true.’
‘What did she say?’
‘Only that the Bishop Barnard people had written to Arthur Peplow and that the chaplain who’s filling in for him opened the letter and asked her who Miss Batchelor was. Mrs Smalley, it goes without saying, had only dropped into the rectory bungalow to see if she could help with any little problem.’
‘Had the Peplows kept in touch with the Mission, then?’
‘I don’t know about keeping in touch. But the rectory was the woman’s last address. I expect the Mission wanted to be sure she’s left nothing here that they ought to have and I’m sure their solicitors will be already on to ours making a fuss about the annuity Mabel willed her. I suppose the estate will have to cough up what she’d have received if we’d ever got round to buying it. Thank God I had the presence of mind at the time to tell our own solicitors in London to drag their feet, and thank God she went off her head as soon as she did because that gave them a good excuse to drag their feet even harder. Mabel must have been off her head, making that sort of provision for an elderly spinster.’
‘I’ve never really understood about annuities,’ Maisie said.
‘You buy the damned things to provide an income for life which is all right if the person the annuity’s bought for lives a long time. The catch is, once it’s bought, the capital sum has gone forever. Even if you die the next day. I must say it would amuse me if the Bishop Barnard people think they’ve got several thousand rupees coming to them. They have complete control of her estate, apparently, for what it’s worth.’
‘Poor Miss Batchelor,’ Maisie said. ‘I sometimes think she had a sad life.’
Mother put away her lipstick. As she did so she glanced up, regarding me through the mirror. Then she snapped her handbag and turned round.
‘I don’t think you’d feel so sympathetic, Maisie, if you’d had to watch her encouraging Mabel’s eccentricities and antisocial instincts and at the same time be pretty sure she was feathering her own nest pretty neatly, and then making all that macabre fuss about where Mabel should have been buried. I had Mabel’s funeral to cope with and Susan’s premature labour to cope with and I had to cope with them virtually alone because Sarah was down in Calcutta visiting that man Merrick in hospital. And on top of it all I had this damned silly woman running all over Pankot saying I was shoving Mabel into the ground at St John’s when she’d wanted to be buried at St Luke’s in Ranpur, next to John’s father. Even that elderly admirer of hers, Mr Maybrick, thought it was a bit much. And of course John tells me he never heard Mabel say a single thing about where she wanted to be put. I took him to see the grave this morning. He thought it very suitable.’
Susan came out of the bathroom and the subject was dropped.
‘How pretty you look,’ Maisie said, which was no less than the truth, the kind of thing Susan still needed to hear but which was nowadays inspired more by the obligation people felt under to encourage her back to life and happiness than by spontaneous admi
ration. I imagined that Susan herself was aware of this not very subtle undercurrent of intention, and that she responded to praise in the same way that someone who is enjoying remission from the pain of a disease they know they’re not yet cured of must respond to being told how well they’re looking. And, because it had happened before, I was now prepared to wake up that night and hear the sound of her crying. Her crying was terrible, because when she cried and I tried to comfort her we seemed very close, closer than we had ever been as children; but within a day or two we were farther apart than ever. Every measure of love and affection had to be paid for by a larger measure of antagonism.
‘How pretty you look,’ Maisie had said, and then as if by an association of ideas, and leading us out, she said, ‘We have invited young Mr Drew.’
Edgar Drew. Eager Edgar. I tried to catch Susan’s eye but she had assumed her party rôle. Eager Edgar had been to Rose Cottage once or twice. In a rare conspiratorial moment between us Susan and I had christened him thus.
‘We thought,’ Maisie was saying to mother, ‘it would be nice for him to meet John.’ By which she really meant he would be suitable young company for Susan and me.
He had obviously arrived before us because Maisie didn’t greet him when we went into the sitting-room where he stood with Colonel Trehearne and father, one hand behind his back, the other clutching his sherry glass, his head adjusted to a slant of attentiveness and inquiry, the wary look of a young man whose heart wasn’t quite in what he had been taught he had to do to get on; of a man who having no inner resources of strength and energy – at least none he dared trust – saw no alternative to the perplexing business of flattering his elders. His father was an insurance broker in Byfleet and he had been to a public school of which I think he’d just reached the stage of feeling slightly ashamed because he realized it ranked as ‘minor’. Physically he was attractive but he nullified this attraction every time he opened his mouth. His conversation was excruciatingly dull and he seemed to have no opinions of his own. He worked hard to sound self-confident, so hard that one became aware of the effort it cost him.