by Paul Scott
Every glance – I found it too painful to give much more just then – and subsequent study showed heart-breakingly little except her continuing concern over the question of Mabel’s grave – evoked images of her distraction and how, as time went on, she seemed not to have recognized me. In the end she had even given me another name, Gillian Waller. It rang a bell, but I couldn’t remember why.
I stuffed the envelopes into my shoulder-bag and managed to push the lace in too. I didn’t want the lace for one particular reason. For the same reason I couldn’t throw it away. There remained the book. I picked it up again and was glancing through it when Nigel came out.
He said, ‘Good, that’s settled.’ He looked pleased. ‘Tomorrow. Probably in the evening.’
‘Which leaves you free for tonight?’
‘Yes.’
‘You know Ronald Merrick’s invited too?’
‘I wasn’t sure.’
‘I’ll make your excuses if that’s what you’d prefer.’
‘Would you prefer to dine here?’
‘I think that’s ruled out, Nigel. I’m not inventive enough to think of an excuse that would cover both of us.’
‘In which case I’ll come to Rose Cottage. Have the other half before we go into lunch.’
‘I’m having the other half.’
‘Well, have the next.’
‘No, this is fine. I’ve a stencil to finish this afternoon. But you’re one drink behind. You’d better catch up.’
He gave an order to the steward; then noticing that the packages had gone from the table leaving an unidentified book in their place he said, ‘Mystery cleared up?’
‘I don’t think there was much of a mystery after all but I haven’t looked through everything yet. I really am grateful though. Are you keen on Emerson?’
‘I don’t know him I’m afraid. Guy Perron’s the Emerson expert. He was quoting him last night.’
‘Oh? Barbara Batchelor was an expert too I should think, judging by the homework she seems to have done on him. I thought you might like to keep the book as a reminder of a pretty odd sort of mission.’
‘I shan’t need reminding. If you don’t want it why not give it to Guy? It might cheer him up.’
‘Is he very down-in-the-mouth?’
‘I shouldn’t say that. Fighting mad might be nearer the mark. He told me he has a scheme to wangle his repatriation. But I never did know when Guy was being serious.’
‘I should say he’s serious when it’s necessary. For instance in Bombay he saved a man from drowning himself in the bath.’
‘But not – I gathered – from chucking himself out of a hospital window later and breaking his neck. So Guy said.’
‘I didn’t know that. Poor Captain Purvis.’
I felt suddenly like laughing. Such a useless, farcical death.
Nigel had been leafing through the book. ‘Here it is. “Society is a wave.” One of Miss Batchelor’s favourite passages too if the markings are anything to go by.’ He handed the book back to me. I read the passage. It meant nothing to me. I put the book on the table.
‘I think Sergeant Perron should have it if you don’t want it, although a sermon on self-reliance is hardly what he needs. Will you be seeing him?’
‘I’m not sure. I’ve given him this number to ring. He didn’t know where he’d be billeted. Poor Guy. Two suicides in one week and an order attaching him to Ronald Merrick’s department. Incidentally, coming up last night he told me you’d met another old Chillingburian, Jimmy Clark, or Clark-Without as we called him.’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Where was this?’
‘In Calcutta.’
‘What was he doing there?’
‘Oh, passing through on his way to Kandy, looking up old acquaintances, including Uncle Arthur and Aunt Fenny. He’d been on one of Uncle Arthur’s courses and was quite the blue-eyed boy.’
‘Was that the only time you met him?’
‘Yes, he flew to Kandy next day to take up some glamorous sounding appointment. Or perhaps he was just swanning around.’
‘Probably. What did you make of him?’
‘I thought he talked a lot of sense. He had us all sized up pretty well.’
‘Us?’
‘People like us. English people in India. Except that he didn’t think we were really English any more. He said we got left behind. Preserved in some kind of perpetual Edwardian sunlight.’
Nigel laughed. ‘Let’s eat,’ he said.
*
‘Game pie of a kind,’ he pointed out. ‘And champagne also of a kind. Compliments of Government House. It came up in the ice-box.’
‘Who are they meant for, though? Not me. Could it be the elusive congressman, Mr Kasim?’
‘No, for me, I think, from HE. This is my last assignment for him. They’re taking me back into the political.’
‘When? When are you going?’
‘I’m probably leaving Ranpur some time next week.’
‘It’s what you wanted.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘Where will you go? Kotala?’
‘I shouldn’t think Kotala.’
‘What’s your ambition? The Residency at Hyderabad?’
‘Too late for that. I’d need another ten or fifteen years.’
‘Then why go on? Why not just get out?’
‘I thought we talked about that when we first met over Count Bronowsky’s champagne. I thought you said nothing was an excuse for working at half-pressure, or standing back from a job while it’s still there to be done.’
‘Did I say that?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’ve remembered. It doesn’t sound like me at all.’
‘I thought it did. Anyway. It’s what you said.’
‘I can’t have been thinking straight.’
‘Have some more game pie.’
‘I can’t even get through this.’
Suddenly I felt nauseated. Irregularity was one of my problems these days, so I was usually prepared; and it was better than the punctual but protracted miseries I’d once endured. I murmured an excuse, got up and went back to the guest bathroom and scrabbled in my crammed shoulder-bag for what I needed; panicking when for a moment I couldn’t find it among all the things from Barbie’s room at the Samaritan. But once I’d uncovered it the sensation of sickness seemed to change its nature. I found myself shivering, as if from a slight fever. But it wasn’t fever, it was delayed shock, a physical response to the emotional strain of the ride home from the Dak bungalow after the realization that either my mother or Aunt Fenny had told father about the abortion in Calcutta. It had been for me to tell him; no one else. I seemed to have his forgiveness. If I wanted anything it was understanding.
Plugging myself against the unseasonable but likely menstrual flow I found myself weeping as I’d never done before, not even at that time Aunt Fenny took me in her arms in the hospital room and warned me that mother would never refer to what had happened because for her it hadn’t, and that anything I wanted to get over should be got over there and then.
To muffle the sound of my crying I ran the taps hard, and bathed my face. The cold water was like a series of slaps. I stared at my ruined self, hating every pore, every line, every bone. But, ruined or not, as a face it was indestructible. A Layton more than a Muir face. Built to last.
The thought was not new, and thinking it again I recalled the last time I’d thought it: in the garden of Rose Cottage, bending my head to take the scent of a red rose. That was all. The garden. The rose. Barbie and I. And this conviction of being built to survive. But I couldn’t recall the context. It might have been before or after Mabel’s death.
I began to repair my Layton face; doing it with care and deliberation as if the end-result had to represent my conscious projection of myself into a particular future. And then the context came back: the context of the rose and Barbie and of Gillian Waller. It had been before Mabel’s death, when Susan was s
till pregnant. Who is Gillian Waller? Barbie had asked me. We were walking in the garden, the garden as it had been before the time of the tennis court. Who is Gillian Waller? I don’t know, I’d said. Why? And unwittingly Barbie disclosed that at night sometimes she went into Mabel’s room, took off her spectacles, put away the book she’d fallen asleep over, tucked her up and turned off the light, and then waited until she could be sure the sleep hadn’t been interrupted. In this sleep, this half-sleep, Mabel had sometimes muttered to herself, as old people do. Gillian Waller, she had said. So it sounded. So: Who was Gillian Waller? ‘I’m afraid to ask,’ Barbie explained. ‘I hate to seem to pry. She’s such a self-contained person. There are people like that. She’s one. Is Susan more cheerful?’
Not cheerful, I said. Holding on.
I could feel Barbie’s hand on my arm as she said, ‘To what? Would you say she’s dangerously withdrawn?’
I leant over the basin, stared at the white porcelain; smelt the rose. ‘We endure,’ I said. ‘We’re built for it. In a strange way we’re built for it.’ But at this point the context changed, led me to another similar occasion when Barbie and I were in the garden and she grasped my arm again and said, ‘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. Some people are made to live and others are made to help them. If you stay you’ll end up like that, like me.’
*
‘Are you all right, Sarah?’ Nigel called from the bedroom.
‘Yes, thank you,’ I called back.
I waited until I heard the click made by the bedroom door as he went back into the main living-room. Then I considered my reflection very seriously and understood, slowly, the full irony of the situation. I said to my reflection: ‘There goes a man I might have been happy with and who up to the time he rang me at the daftar and I told him about Susan and Ronald probably thought he could be happy with me.’
I completed the mask, exaggerating the lipstick and, before opening the bathroom door, smiled, to prepare for the entrance.
But I did not have to enter. I had entered already, long ago.
The Circuit House
I
THE ONLY LIGHT entering the compartment came from one of the arc-lamps that lit the siding, but a dim light was on in the corridor and when the door slid open he saw that it was Ahmed, not Hosain, who had come to wake him.
‘It’s time, father.’
‘Has Mr Mehboob arrived?’
‘Yes, half-an-hour ago. But Hosain said you hadn’t bothered to go to bed and were only dozing, so I left you until the last moment.’
‘Even on stationary trains I don’t sleep. Just for me we could all have come by car and not bothered with this.’ He wound his scarf round his neck and put on his cap. ‘How far is the Circuit House? I’ve forgotten.’
‘About half-an-hour’s drive.’
‘So near?’ On that previous occasion, coming from the Circuit House, the journey seemed endless. But that had been a journey with a joyful reunion, not a painful one, at the end, and they had driven all the way to the station at Mirat, not this station. He made a mental note: I am not fully awake – guard against these muddles.
Outside in the carpeted corridor Hosain was waiting and took the briefcase from him, to relieve him both of the weight and of the supposed indignity of having to carry anything himself. Unencumbered he went to the door. The last time he got off a railway coach at this particular siding it had been with difficulty, climbing down backwards because there was no platform, the distance between the level of the coach floor and the level of the cinder-yard great, the steps perpendicular. He had had to beg help with his luggage from one of the conducting officers. That was three years ago, almost to the day. ‘Where is this?’ he had asked. The receiving officer had said, ‘Premanagar’. Which meant they were imprisoning him in the fort. After that he had had to climb unassisted into the back of a police truck. He had barked his shins. But this morning – for it was nearly five o’clock – there were special steps already in position and two railway employees to steady them and him against every eventuality.
Mr Mehboob came fussily across the dimly lit and deserted cinder-yard to greet him and conduct him to the waiting limousine, whose driver held the door open. Everything has meaning for you, Gaffur, he quoted silently to himself, the petal’s fall, the change of seasons.
The railway coach and the limousine both belonged to the Nawab. But this was the last time he would find himself in his kinsman’s and Count Bronowsky’s debt; or very nearly the last. When what had to be done at the Circuit House had been done he would return to the coach, which was filled with all the accumulated stuff of his life under restriction at Nanoora, and travel on by rail to Ranpur to reoccupy his home permanently. The limousine would return to Mirat. Mehboob had been right. There would have been no point in coming from Nanoora to Premanagar by car when the coach had to come anyway, would leave Nanoora earlier, and offer him a chance to sleep during the hours it was parked in the siding.
The secretary followed him into the Daimler and settled ponderously beside him on the softly cushioned back seat. He had wanted Ahmed beside him. But Mehboob was jealous of his own prerogatives. As a secretary he wasn’t a patch on poor old Mahsood and as a man Mr Kasim found him irritatingly like an English caricature of an Indian – possessive towards people with power, arrogant to those with none. Even his physical characteristics now fitted him for the part he played with such breathless intensity. His plumpness was only just short of obesity. His nickname was Booby or Booby-Sahib – a kindly enough invention of Mahsood’s (who towards the end when he was losing his grip but refusing to let go was always saying, ‘I will ask Booby. I will tell Booby’) but which was now used behind Booby’s back and sometimes even to his face with less charitable intention. As Mahsood’s assistant Booby’s liabilities had been less apparent than his assets, chief among which was what had seemed an unrivalled knowledge of party political machinery acquired at grass-root level on the local sub-committees and in the corridors of the provincial legislative assembly. He had first come to Kasim’s notice in 1937 as the backroom man largely responsible for the election campaign that had sent to the assembly another Muslim Congressman, Fariqua Hamidullah Khan. Khan had defeated a Muslim Leaguist whom the League had thought would walk away with the seat – a lean hawk of a man whose expression in defeat had been a sight to see.
In those days Mehboob had been lean too. Kasim had met him in old Hamidullah Khan’s house on the painful occasion when he had had to tell the old war-horse that his name wouldn’t be going forward to the Governor as a candidate for a portfolio in the first Congress Ministry in Ranpur. He had expected to be given the department of education and there were times, subsequently, when Kasim regretted not having given the old man his chance. A Muslim minister for education might have been quicker (even a man as slowed up by age, vicissitudes and disappointments as Hamidullah Khan) to pounce on or defy the hard-line Hindus who had made it compulsory in the district schools to salute the Congress flag, sing songs which had a Hindu rather than an Indian national connotation, and to teach history in a religious rather than a political context. It had been this more than anything throughout the country that had alerted the Muslims to the dangers of a Hindu-raj succeeding a British-raj and which had provided Jinnah with the kind of political ammunition he’d been so short of. But Kasim hadn’t given Hamidullah Khan his chance and in July 1942 the old man died while on a visit to his ancestral home near Rawalpindi. The next month Kasim was imprisoned in the fort at Premanagar. Released in 1944 to the protective custody of the Nawab, joined by his wife, and presently by old Mahsood, he had looked at his ageing secretary and seen the unmistakable signs of deterioration. ‘You need a young assistant,’ he had said. ‘Perhaps so, Mac-Sahib.’ And a day or two later Mahsood had come to him. ‘There is a man, poor young Mehboob who got Hamidullah Khan into the assembly. Doing nothing since Khan Sahib died. Like Othello. Occupa
tion gone.’ ‘Get him,’ Kasim had said, recalling the lean young man.
And here he was, Mehboob, Booby, Booby-Sahib, sitting beside him, weighing the Daimler down at the left-hand side.
‘Were there any letters after I left?’ Mr Kasim asked, turning his attention from the window.
‘I have them here,’ Mr Mehboob said. ‘Three are marked personal so I have not opened them. One of them is from Bapu. Another from your daughter, Mrs Hydyatullah.’
‘And the third?’
‘From our indefatigable suppliant, Pandit Baba Sahib.’
‘You could have looked at that. After all CID will already have done so.’
The door on Mehboob’s side opened. Ahmed leaned in.
‘Everything is ready,’ he said.
‘Then come along.’
‘I’m going in the escort vehicle.’
‘You would be more comfortable here.’
‘It’s all arranged. An alteration would create confusion.’
Kasim nodded. Ahmed shut the door. The driver got in. Presently the car moved. Kasim closed his eyes and didn’t respond when Mehboob said, ‘Premanagar very depressed area. Here too much erosion, too much poverty, no industry. Government has just abandoned it as hopeless. Here presently we shall have communists, isn’t it? Everyone very bolshie. Why else are they giving us an armed escort?’
Kasim didn’t answer. It was mainly Mehboob’s fault that Ahmed had elected to go in the other vehicle. His younger son and his new secretary had never pulled on well together. Mehboob despised Ahmed for having no political sense; Ahmed was simply indifferent to Mehboob. He was indifferent to everybody. He lived his own life. He was dutiful when it was necessary to be dutiful. But there was no affection. He had seemed to love only his mother. When she died he had acted as if her death need not have happened, and as if he blamed his father for the fact that she died without having seen Sayed again.