by Paul Scott
The Trehearnes had taken to him because they thought him a cut or two above most of the last year or so’s intake of newly-commissioned English subalterns from Belgaum and Bangalore who had arrived at the depot, stayed a few weeks and then departed to join the 4/5th and the 2nd battalions in Burma. Moreover, Second-Lieutenant Drew had expressed interest in the idea of applying for a regular commission and this ambition counted in his favour when it came to comparing him with some of the rougher-spoken and rougher-mannered men who had got into the regiment with (I suspected) higher qualifications from OTS as potential leaders of infantry. He was what was never actually called but certainly thought of as regimental depot material which meant it was thought he would eventually prove to be perfectly adequate for active regimental duty but was meanwhile presentable enough in the mess and at dinner parties such as this to be put temporarily by and employed more pacifically.
I could tell that he had had little or no experience of women; his attentiveness betrayed anxiety. Someone, his mother probably, may have told him that a gentleman never looked lower than a girl’s nose. The result was that when he talked to you he kept his chin up and head back and made you feel disembodied below the neck. He had beautiful hands; not fine and elegant but firm and shapely. But you seldom had a chance to admire them. They were usually clasped behind his back or bunched into fists. Even at table they tended to disappear between mouthfuls, presumably to clutch one another or be wiped surreptitiously on his napkin. When you had the opportunity to touch or be touched by them – that is, when he danced with you – they were uncomfortably moist, but at least they were a connection; although a distant connection because he danced you at arm’s length – which made it seem like dancing with a draught. I admit I had occasional fantasies about Mr Drew’s hands, and after seeing him in the club swimming pool I also had occasional fantasies about the rest of him. Perhaps I should have told him, not for my own good, but for his. He can’t have been unaware of his physical appearance, but I think he probably needed confirmation from outside before he could relate his own awareness to other people’s. I had a distinct impression that he might be the only child of elderly parents. He seemed to belong to a generation earlier than his own – that of the Edwardians, say – which would explain his enthusiasm for the outward forms of Anglo-Indian life.
He was, of course, more directed towards Susan than to me (interested or attracted would be the wrong words). She aroused his masculine instinct to protect. Confronted by me he was always on the defensive. It was I who reminded him that fundamentally he was a bit afraid of all of us. Sometimes when talking to him I heard in my own voice tones like those Clark-Without had used when talking to me, tones calculated to provoke; and then I stopped, a bit appalled at the ease with which one followed disreputable examples, and at the ease with which bitterness, once felt, lodged itself, dug itself in and hardened all the edges of your personality.
When we went into dinner Maisie put him between mother and Susan. I had been intended to sit between Colonel Trehearne and Kevin Coley, which would have been rather like sitting between a couple of posts. As it was, I sat between Colonel Trehearne and my father, which while not greatly different was more comfortable. And from here I was able to watch Mr Drew more or less undistracted and, while mother talked to Colonel Trehearne, attend to what Susan and Mr Drew were jointly building that might rank as a conversation; and occasionally contribute to it myself, talking across the table when Mr Drew found himself at a loss. One advantage Mr Drew had in making a go of sitting next to Susan was that he took the shy man’s way out; he kept the ball rolling by asking her questions about herself; about what she had been doing, about whether she had enjoyed that, about what she thought she might do next week and about the chances she saw of enjoying that too or enjoying it more. I suppose it was really due to her that the conversation was a success, because once he had got on to the subject of what she had done or had thought, she was able to take an interest of a kind that encouraged him to go on feeding her with questions, scraping the bottom of the barrel of his imagination, but managing. When a change of course signalled a change in talking duties and mother turned to him he became at once less articulate. A faint flush of anxiety spread across his face and stayed there. You could see the gleam of perspiration on his forehead.
I don’t remember what she talked to him about nor, now that Colonel Trehearne was free, what subject or subjects he and I chose in order to avoid talking about others. What I do remember clearly is the way in which I suddenly became conscious of the yelping and whining of the dogs. While Maisie talked to Susan and mother talked to Mr Drew and Colonel Trehearne and I exchanged trivial bits of information, the imprisoned dogs moaned and barked and snarled somewhere at the back of the compound. If Maisie heard this distant accompaniment of protest she gave no sign of it. The talk continued. The noise never stopped except to change key.
Father was the only person at the table not talking, and at the moment I became conscious of the dogs I became conscious of this too; aware of the nervous intensity of the silence in which he listened to the cries of those chained animals. He stopped eating. Maisie glanced at him and then very quickly turned back to Susan; which made it plain that mother had warned her to take no notice of anything he did which she thought odd, like putting his fork down, covering a piece of bread with a napkin; staring at the plate.
But this was different. It was the effect of the barking of the dogs that left him unable to eat another mouthful, unable to speak (I felt) or even to move, because of what the dogs reminded him; what, locked up, they represented. I was afraid of what he might do. I took an opportunity to say something to him. He looked at me. His smile was benign. Beneath the table his right hand was trembling. Perhaps my speaking broke the spell. He resumed eating. But sometimes when the sound of the dogs reached a crescendo his knife and fork shook.
*
‘If I were you, Maisie,’ my mother said, when we were out of earshot of the men, having left them to drink their whisky in the draughty dining-room, ‘I’d let those hounds loose. It’s worrying John, hearing them yelp.’
Intermittently she had this capacity to astonish me with unexpected proof of having noticed things she’d seemed protected from or unconcerned about; but on this occasion my reaction to the revelation was very strong. Waiting my turn for the lavatory and my turn at the looking-glass, it struck me that there was now absolutely nothing to keep me living where I was living, doing what I was doing. It had all come suddenly to an end. I sat on Maisie’s bed and opened my mind to the prospects, the joyful prospects of being free because there was no further family duty for me to perform, no one it was necessary to keep an eye on, or stand by, see through a crisis, make excuses for as I’d had to do in the early days at the grace and favour bungalow before there was Mabel’s money to be extravagant with and bills ran up, card debts were being forgotten, and too much gin was being drunk (so elegantly, so discreetly); no one now for whose return I had to wait. Even Susan no longer needed me. She only needed everyone.
So I could go home, stay with Aunt Lydia in Bayswater, find myself a job, a place of my own, and a man I could look at and not feel that he was tortured by an affection for the country I’d not been happy in and to which he would always be longing to return, as if to prove something to himself. I could finish with India before it had quite finished with me, rusted me up, corroded me, corrupted me utterly with a false sense of duty and a false sense of superiority.
I emerged (a little over-painted I think – I noticed mother look at me) and determined to be nice to Mr Drew. I tried to get him to talk about Surrey (where great grand-father had lived and where, walking with Aunt Mabel to show her the stream where Susan and I played together I had been stung by a wasp at the moment of one of what I called my funny turns, which might have been growing pains and made me feel immense in a diminutive landscape); but when Mr Drew did talk about Surrey it sounded to me like a different country – a foreign place – so I made hi
m dance with me to Maisie’s portable, out on the verandah where it was no draughtier than indoors, while Susan sat inside, not watching us, but with an expression on her face that I recognized but tonight refused to do anything about. Then the dogs came in and there was pandemonium. Susan’s coffee cup somehow got knocked over (or was deliberately spilled to distract attention from the dogs). Her new dress was stained down the front and before you could turn round the pieces on the board had been rearranged and Susan was there in the middle of the scene, with people sponging her, inviting her to have another cup, while she tried to embrace the hound that had caused the trouble; and Mr Drew got down on his knees to collect bits of broken china, and then realized he’d made a gaffe because what else were all these servants for? Still outside, Ire-wound the gramophone and played another record of which no one took any notice except towards the end when father came out and said, ‘Years since I did this,’ and shuffled round with me for the last few bars. Then we went inside where two of the dogs had their devoted heads on Maisie’s and Patrick’s knees and the third was lolling, tongue out, enfolded by one of Susan’s arms: the two of them leaning against one another, squatting in the centre-piece of the rug, in front of the empty hearth.
*
But those intimations of freedom continued. My limbs felt as though they were made out of a substance that wasn’t always obedient to the law of gravity. I seemed buoyant, almost on the verge of levitation; to have become in relation to Pankot a dominant but disinterested force. I was no longer ashamed of the dreams I had and had considered shameful, dreams in which I also played a dominant rôle, loving a man who was an amalgam of Major Clark and the young American officer in Darjeeling who was Clark-Without’s only successor so far, and who had so impressed Aunt Fenny with his courtly Boston manners that she never suspected him of having other than a brotherly interest in the girl she was supposed to be chaperoning, the girl who was supposed to be convalescing from a spell in a nursing-home in Calcutta, and whose problem was no longer emotional but physical, and who let him into her room three nights in a row, because unlike her Aunt Fenny she hadn’t been deceived; had recognized in the American the same single-minded and powerful sexual drive that had distinguished Clark-Without and which she wanted – perhaps for a number of reasons – to appease and be appeased by.
For not least among those reasons was the need to satisfy again her own fully awoken physical desires. I oughtn’t to say ‘not least’. The need was pre-eminent. An almost unbearable ache. Perhaps I should leave it at that and perhaps it is only some lingering old-fashioned idea that desire without love needs excusing in a woman that makes me not want to refer to this episode without also groping for other explanations. The danger of doing so is that one could come up with another idea, equally false; the idea that I was deliberately debasing myself, paying myself out, being consciously promiscuous because that was now all I was fit to be; a well brought up young woman who had betrayed her upbringing by lying on her back for the first man with the power to persuade her on to it, and who had then had to get rid of the result in the usual sordid way, going in for a d and c and coming out foetus-free but permanently stained, soiled.
Well, I was not debasing myself with John J. Bellenger III but I was not in love with him either. Nor was I hoping that he would fall in love with me so that I could laugh in his face and have my own back on Clark-Without, on men in general. Perhaps all these possibilities were there, in my mind, like echoes of explanations, other people’s explanations, but fundamentally there was only the desire, and if it was enclosed by a kind of anguish that anguish was for the loss of a scarcely begun life, the destruction of a child I had conceived, should have carried, loved and looked after. Appeasing the ache of physical desire, I was – yes, I think so – also comforting that anguish, trying to numb it.
But I do not know. The American told me with some understandable pride that I was the twenty-third girl he had had, not counting the ones he had had to pay for. I wasn’t sure whether he wanted to amuse or shock me, hurt me or excite my admiration. It could have been that he was unsure himself because when I asked him which of these reactions he expected he looked confused, then laughed and said I had struck him as a girl who was naturally inquisitive and who would be interested in statistics, and that he’d never told a girl before which statistic she represented. I didn’t believe him. Afterwards, when he had gone back to what he called States-side (he was in Darjeeling getting in some leave at the end of a tour of flying duties) and Fenny and I went back to Calcutta where mother and Susan were to join us, I worried rather about the possibility of having caught a disease, which would have been the last straw as far as mother was concerned (if I was unable to keep it as secret from her as she was determined the other business officially had to be).
*
The anguish had been part of the dreams, but now it had gone, or been sublimated in images of extraordinary sensuous tranquillity. One’s moral sense sleeps while the subconscious mind works out its logic. Here we were, in perfect amity, revealing to one another the purity of a simple physical connection, myself active, they supine, eyes closed, mouths smiling faintly, free of that grim alignment which in real life reflected tensions. I now woke up from these dreams gradually enough to suffer no shock. For a few moments the tangible quality of pleasure lingered, so that the pleasure seemed to come with me into the actual world and colour all my responses, even my response to the knowledge that I’d only dreamt. Lying in the dark I luxuriated in my own ability to smile. And when up and about, getting on with the dull repetitious routine of coping with things and with other people, I had the idea of this smile in my head, in my whole body, as if a smile were a newly developed faculty.
*
Saturday, Sunday night, Monday. On the Monday night, because he had unexpectedly rung me, Nigel Rowan came into the dream too, not centrally, but on its misty periphery, as if he were waiting for me to finish and resume some kind of moral responsibility.
‘Who was that?’ my mother had asked when I’d put the phone down in the hall and joined her and father in the living-room. I told her. ‘Is he in Pankot, then?’ she asked.
No, I said, he was ringing from Ranpur. She expected to be told more than that and when she wasn’t told she said, ‘Was he ringing to say he’s coming up?’
She’d heard more about Nigel Rowan from Clara Fosdick than she had ever heard from me. Clara Fosdick had probably given her a good report of him and exaggerated the amount of time Nigel and I spent together in Ranpur before I continued on to Bombay to await father’s arrival.
‘No,’ I said. ‘He’s not coming up.’
‘Did we ever know any Rowans, John?’ she asked father.
‘I don’t remember. Why?’
‘Sarah’s met a Rowan who’s one of Malcolm’s aides. According to Clara Fosdick he had a relative in the Political but the name Rowan doesn’t ring a bell. Did you know a Rowan at school?’
‘I don’t remember one.’
‘Clara said this Rowan was at Chillingborough. Perhaps his father was too.’
‘Do you mean Perron?’
‘No. Not your eccentric sergeant. A Captain Rowan.’ She looked at me again. ‘What did he ring about?’
‘About something I asked him to do.’ I turned to father. ‘Nigel Rowan’s uncle was Resident at Kotala. He’s just told me.’
My father nodded. He wasn’t taking it in. But mother said, ‘Then he must be Tom Crawley’s nephew. You remember, don’t you, John? All the fuss there was? How interesting. Are you sure he’s not coming up?’
‘He didn’t say he was.’
‘Did you tell him about your eccentric sergeant?’
‘I mentioned Mr Perron. Yes.’
‘Did he remember him?’
‘Yes. Very well.’
‘Not an impostor, then.’
‘No, mother. Not an impostor.’
‘He won’t go to sleep,’ Susan said, coming in with Edward in her arms and the ayah just beh
ind her. ‘He won’t go to sleep until he’s said goodnight again to grandpa.’
The child was as good as asleep, but this scene was part of the day’s programme. I had delayed it a bit by being so long on the telephone. The child turned his head into Susan’s breast when his grandfather dutifully leant over him and said, ‘Goodnight, old chap.’ Satisfied, Susan transferred him to Minnie’s arms.
‘Is there time for me to have a drink, or have I held things up too long already?’ Susan asked.
‘We couldn’t have gone in before because Sarah’s been on the phone,’ mother explained.
‘Oh. I’ll take it in shall I then?’
‘There’s no hurry,’ father said. He went to the side table where Mahmoud as instructed had set out the bottles and glasses so that Colonel Sahib could mix the drinks himself.
‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I realized today that I’ve put up a fearful black? I’m not sure I shan’t have to send in my papers.’
‘What dreadful thing have you done, John?’
‘I’ve been on station very nearly a week and I’ve neither sent up my card to Flagstaff House nor signed the book. Back in ’thirteen, in Ranpur, it took me the best part of two weeks, doing nothing else, just leaving my card, ticking off the names on the list that Mabel gave me. Had to dress right for it too, and it cost a fortune in tonga-fares and shoe-leather.’