The Day of the Scorpion (46 page)

She opened her eyes and stared down into the room, was struck again by that extraordinary incongruity: the hunched submissiveness of the man’s body, the alert and responsible intelligence of the man himself.

‘Walking up and down with the tin mug – that’s how Merrick found me when he came in. He looked as if he’d been home to bathe and change but not to sleep. He was very pale. I thought I saw the tic start up again on his cheek, but it was only for a second or two. I asked him what the time was. His response was automatic. He said it was six o’clock. Answering automatically like that showed him that our relationship had changed. He began to look puzzled. I walked up and down and every time I turned to face him I saw this expression on his face, a sort of dawning mystification, and I thought, my God, the risks he’s taken, he must have been very sure, he must have been absolutely convinced of my guilt. And he was still sure, still absolutely convinced, but he guessed or knew it had all begun to go wrong, and he couldn’t work out why. I had a flash of admiration for him. He was totally unconcerned about what I could say or do that could get him into trouble. He said the constables would bring me something to eat and some fresh clothes to put on that had been collected from my home. They brought the food and clothes. Then they took me to a new cell, the one that turned out to be my home for a couple of weeks. I never saw anyone all that time except the two constables and Merrick, unless I was taken upstairs and examined by people like Iyenagar and the Assistant Commissioner. When Merrick examined me it was always in the room where the trestle was but there was never any physical violence. He questioned me every day, sometimes twice or three times, and I could tell that the conviction never left him. I was guilty. The day he told me Vidyasagar had been arrested he tried lying again, tried to
make me believe Vidya had incriminated me by accusing me of trying to get him to take part in a plot to attack Miss Manners, but I had the impression that making me confess didn’t interest him any more. Our last full session was the day after I’d been examined by Iyenagar. Merrick said he understood what I was doing. He called it pretending nothing had happened, wasn’t happening and wouldn’t happen. He said I was wrong, it had happened, was still happening and would go on happening and that he had more contempt for me than ever before. It wouldn’t have done me any good to complain to the lawyer, but it disappointed him I hadn’t had the guts to accuse him when I had the opportunity. He wouldn’t bother to question me again. He admitted he’d lied about Miss Manners accusing me. He said she’d told a cock and bull story about going into the Bibighar Gardens because as she strode past she had a sudden idea that she might see the Bibighar ghosts if she went in. So she’d gone and sat in the pavilion and then been attacked by five or six men she hadn’t got a proper look at. Then he said, “But it’s not true. You were together in the Bibighar. You rammed her. You know it, she knows it, I know it. She’s lying and you’re lying. She’s lying because she’s ashamed and you’re lying because you’re afraid. You’re so scared you’re trying to convince yourself the whole business is an illusion, like some naked Hindu fakir pretending the world doesn’t exist. What price Chillingborough now?” Then he got up and stood very close to me and reminded me step by step of all the things he’d done to me. He invited me to hit him. I think he really wanted me to.’

Kumar slowly looked down, as if to indicate that he had finished. After a while Rowan said, ‘I shall call the clerk back in. Do you wish to make a statement to this effect?’

He shook his head, then raised it. For the first time a smile was fully recognizable. ‘I’ve said it all. The clerk wasn’t here to record it. That’s part of the situation too, isn’t it?’

She felt the first wave – scarcely more than a milky ripple – of an extraordinary tranquillity the nature of which she had no energy to determine; instead only the temptation to surrender to as a runner tired of the race would give in to the temptation to fall out of it. It will end, she told herself, in total and unforgivable disaster;
that
is the situation. As she
continued to look down upon the tableau of Rowan, Gopal and Kumar – and the clerk who now re-entered, presumably as a result of the ring of a bell that Rowan had pressed – she felt that she was being vouchsafed a vision of the future they were all headed for. At its heart was the rumbling sound of martial music. It was a vision because the likeness of it would happen. In her own time it would happen. She would live to see what she had been committed to enshrined in the glittering reality of an actual deed, and the deed itself would be a vindication of a sort. But it would never happen in her heart where it had been enshrined this many a year. The tranquillity she felt was the first tranquillity of death. For her the race had ended in the Kandipat in this room with its secret sordid view on to another. The reality of the actual deed would be a monument to all that had been thought for the best. ‘But it isn’t the best we should remember,’ she said, and shocked herself by speaking aloud, and clutched the folds and mother-of-pearl buttons in that habitual gesture. We must remember the worst because the worst is the lives we lead, the best is only our history, and between our history and our lives there is this vast dark plain where the rapt and patient shepherds drive their invisible flocks in expectation of God’s forgiveness.

The room was empty. Only the light remained, the dim light, and the glaring light that shone on the empty chair. Kumar had gone with the rest. A hand had touched her shoulder. Looking round she was aware of Captain Rowan and of his voice repeating a question, ‘Are you all right, Lady Manners?’

‘Yes,’ she said, and let him help her out of the chair. Standing she put her handbag on the table, took off her distance spectacles and returned them to the case. She thought how odd such human preparations for departure were. In the passage the weight of unconditioned air threatened to extinguish her. Her legs were shaky from the long inactivity of sitting. They went by stages through degrees of cold and heat: from the cool room to the close, warm corridor, out into the oven-scorched air and the furnace of the
waiting motor-car. She sat with her eyes closed, felt the subsidence of the cushion as he lowered himself into the seat’s opposite corner. Then the movement: the villainous shadow of the prison gateway. No pause this time. Sun-fish swam across her lowered lids. She raised them and was blinded by a spike of light that pierced the blinds as the motor-car turned at an angle into the sunlight and smell of Kandipat.

‘He told the truth,’ she announced with a suddenness that caused him to glance at her sharply.

‘I’m glad you felt that,’ he said. ‘Sitting so close to him it was painfully apparent to me that he did.’

‘You never mentioned to him that you remembered him at Chillingborough.’

‘It seemed unnecessary. It could have struck a false note, too.’

She stayed silent for a moment or two then said, ‘I expect you’ve realized
why
H.E. asked you to look into the files.’

‘I’ve imagined he did so because you asked him to.’

‘Then you’re probably wondering two things. You’re wondering why I should ask him and why I should wait a year after my niece’s death before asking him. Is it safe now?’

‘Safe?’

‘To have the blinds raised. I feel I’m driving to my grave.’

Why, and so you are, a voice told her. She recognized it from other occasions. Old people talked to themselves. From a certain age. No. Always. Throughout life. But in old age the voice took on a detached ironical tone. Passion had this determination to outlive its prison of flesh and brittle bone. As it made arrangements to survive it grew away, like a child from its favourite parent, impatient for the moment of total severance and the long dark voyage of intimate self-discovery. And so you are, her voice said. Driving to your grave. The parting of our ways. A release for both of us. One to oblivion, one to eternal life so unintelligible to either of us it ranks as oblivion too. And already our commitment to each other is worked out and nearly over. Momentum will carry you through what motions are left to you to show your grasp of situations and responsibilities.

‘The child,’ she said. ‘But even now I can’t be sure. Only
surer. She was so sure. To look at her towards the end you’d think, how astonishing! That combination of ungainly ordinariness and state of grace. One has to make do with approximations. Lies and approximations. When we say he spoke the truth we mean this. Everything becomes distorted. When the child cries its needs are so simple. When he cried he scarcely seemed to know it. Who will read the record?’

‘H.E.’

‘And the member for home and law?’

‘He’s an Englishman.’

‘Why do you mention that?’

‘Because it’s pertinent. But Kumar will be released.’

‘To what? In any case I don’t want to know. I’ve had my amusement.’

‘Amusement?’

‘Isn’t it all a charade? Over now. We go back into our corners and try to guess the word. Hari Kumar will have to guess it too. And Mr Merrick. Nothing can happen to Mr Merrick, can it? – everything in the file is the uncorroborated evidence of a prisoner. Nothing will touch him. That is part of the charade too.’

‘It’s safe now,’ Rowan said. And began, one by one, to raise the blinds.

Part Two

A CHRISTENING

I

March–June 1944
The year had begun quietly, but the death in captivity of Mrs Gandhi and her husband’s own illness and release, ostensibly on compassionate grounds, marked a time which seemed, in retrospect, to be one of dreams and auguries.

Early in March, when he came in from a tour of his subdivision, young Morland, an officer on the staff of the Deputy Commissioner for the Pankot district, reported a curious tale that was being circulated in the hills; the rumour of the birth to a woman whose husband had abandoned her of a child with two heads. The mother had not survived an hour and the child – a boy – died before the sun set on the first and only day of its life. Morland, suspecting that the death of a child with any considerable deformity might well have been assisted (although two heads had to be taken with a pinch of salt), had spent two weeks attempting to trace the rumour to its source, but had no luck. Everyone knew it had happened, but nobody was sure of the exact locality. Places were suggested, but going to them Morland was told: Not here, not here: and another village would be named, usually the one he had come from. The closer he tried to get to it the farther away the scene of the event became. But the effect on the people who discussed it with him was clear enough. Such things did not happen without a reason. It was a forewarning. But of what? Heads were shaken. Who could tell? On the journey home Morland noticed the constant freshness of the flowers placed on the little wayside shrines of the old tribal gods.

Having rid himself of the accumulated stains and strains of his tour, and taking his ease at the club, manipulating with
excessive, youthful care that symbol of mature and contemplative manhood – a stubby briar – brick-red of face and bleached of head, Morland admitted he himself had come rather under the spell of the superstitious anxiety of the people of the hills and found his sleep disturbed by an odd sort of dream which, when he woke up, he never could remember anything of except that it seemed to have something to do with death by drowning. Morland always paused before he added, ‘I don’t know whether you know, but actually I swim like a fish.’

Within a week Morland was posted to the secretariat in Ranpur, his dream of death by drowning and the tale of the two-headed infant monster were all but forgotten, and Morland himself passed out of sight and mind (as he passes now into the limbo of only marginal images). But on March 18th, when the people of Pankot were startled by the news that the Japanese had crossed the Chindwin in force the day before, there were some who at once recollected the expectations of disaster Morland had brought with him from the remoter areas of the region. Five days later the Japanese crossed the frontier between Burma and Assam and stood on Indian soil, poised for the march on Delhi.

By the end of the month Imphal and Kohima and the whole of the British force in Manipur were isolated. Rumour ran that Imphal had fallen. In Delhi, the Member for Defence, Claude Auchinleck, assured the Assembly that it had not, that his information from the supreme commander, Mountbatten, was to the effect that it was still strongly held. In the Pankot club a wag said that Morland’s tale of the monster with two heads was probably set going by natives who had heard about the separation of GHQ, Delhi, from its old responsibilities in the field; that all this streamlining and modernization was a lot of poppycock; and that the Japs would never have invaded India if the army in India hadn’t been put in the way of its right hand not knowing what its left hand was doing. The joke was ill-received, not because the joker was necessarily thought to be talking nonsense but because, pretty clearly, it was no time for laughter. At Area Headquarters a picture was emerging on the map in General Rankin’s office of total encirclement of the forces in Assam,
and of the movements of formations from other parts of the front and from training areas in India in reinforcement. Rankin was heard to say, ‘Well, this is it.’

Morland’s dream was not the only one Pankot heard of. In Rose Cottage for instance, Miss Batchelor, the retired missionary teacher who lived with old Mabel Layton, also dreamed; and, unlike Morland who had been reticent, told everyone who cared to listen all the details that she could remember. She dreamed she woke and found Pankot empty. She walked down the hill from Rose Cottage and saw not a soul until she got to the club where one solitary tonga waited. Between the shafts there was a lame horse. Well, not really a horse. The more you looked at it the more obvious became its resemblance to an ass, a creature such as Our Lord sat astride of for the entry into Jerusalem.

‘You’d better jump in,’ the tonga wallah said, ‘they’re coming and everyone’s gone on ahead to catch the train.’ She hesitated to accept the invitation because this particular tonga wallah was a stranger to her and she didn’t trust him. ‘What are you waiting for, Barbie?’ he said, and she saw that it was really Mr Maybrick – the retired tea planter who played the organ in the protestant church – but with his face stained and wearing native costume. So she jumped in and made room for herself among the piles of organ music, and off they bowled at a smart and pretty pace down the hill, past the golf course, where there were people playing, carrying coloured umbrellas. ‘Those are the fifth-columnists,’ Mr Maybrick shouted at her. ‘The golf course is the rendezvous.’ It was known that the Japanese had stealthily surrounded Pankot during the night. ‘We must take refuge, there’s no time to catch the train,’ she cried, trying to shout above the noise and rushing of air caused by the tonga’s swift passage. Mr Maybrick was now driving four-in-hand. His whip whistled and cracked in the air above the wild-maned heads of a team of galloping black horses. ‘To St John’s! To St John’s!’ she shouted and was then at the reins herself and it was her own short-cropped grey hair that was wild and flying. ‘Alleluia!’ she called, ‘Alleluia!’ But the church had gone. ‘You’re just in time,’ Mr Maybrick said – in his ordinary clothes now, but wearing a clerical collar. They were standing calmly, but
sharing the knowledge that this was the eleventh hour. They were in the compound of a little mission school. ‘It’s really Muzzafirabad,’ Miss Batchelor thought. Her old servant Francis was tolling the bell. They could see hordes of Japanese crossing the golf course, under cover of paper umbrellas. She turned to Mr Maybrick and said, ‘We must save a last bullet each,’ but when they looked back to the golf course the Japanese had gone and the children were coming to school, summoned by the bell. ‘Come along, children,’ Barbie said, keeping her voice friendly but authoritative. Francis said: ‘The danger has not passed, memsahib.’ But she called to everyone, ‘It’s quite safe now.’ They went into the schoolroom, but it was a church again and Mr Maybrick was playing the organ. She sat in an empty pew to give thanks for their deliverance. ‘And it was extraordinary,’ she said, whenever she told the dream, ‘I’ve never felt so much at peace. I think it was really a dream about poor Edwina Crane. I went to Muzzafirabad just after she’d left. That was a long time ago – 1914 actually. They were tremendously proud of her there. She really
did
save the mission from rioters, she just stood in the doorway, with all the children safe inside, and told them to go away and not bother her. And they obeyed. The children used to show me where she had stood, and I felt I’d never live up to
their
special idea of a mission teacher. I think it was really a dream to tell me that Edwina
is
at peace, in spite of that awful business of her setting fire to herself, in 1942.’