The Day of the Scorpion (67 page)

He took his hand from his glass, stubbed his cigarette and rose. She anticipated a physical attack on her, but he did not make it. Instead he went back to the bedside table, picked up the key and returned. He resumed his former position on the floor, tossed the key two or three times like a coin, then placed it on the floor between them.

‘
My
key for
your
Aunt Fenny,’ he said. ‘I pay the forfeit and keep Aunt Fenny. There’s not much going on in her, but what goes on is tough as old boots. I like that. If she were five years younger and I were five years older we’d screw. She knows it. In that cosy closed-in little corner of her bird-brain mind where the real Aunt Fenny lives she knows it, just as she knows in the same cosy little corner that asking me to look after you was the most risky thing she could do if you wanted to hang on to that cherry of yours. Obviously what she really thinks is that you ought to get rid of it. Which means she thinks the same as I do, only with her the thought’s subconscious. I’ll tell you another thing. You’re tougher than she is. Far tougher than you probably realize. With you the toughness goes an awfully long way in because you haven’t got a bird-brain. It thinks. Potentially you’re worth twenty Aunt Fennys. But the thinking and the toughness aren’t worth a bag of peanuts if you lack joy. And that’s what Aunt Fenny has that you haven’t. Joy. Not much. She’s too shallow to have much of anything, but I bet you she
was a scorcher as a girl. I bet she went for joy first and let the thinking and toughness come later, and that means that in her late middle-age she still remembers how to get a kick out of life. It doesn’t really matter which way round you do it, if you do it both ways. But why not do it both ways from the start? Isn’t that sensible? Isn’t the place already overcrowded with people who have thought for so long they’ve forgotten how to be happy, or with people who’ve spent so long trying to be happy they haven’t had time to think, so end up not knowing what happiness is? For pete’s sake, Sarah Layton, you don’t know anything about joy at all, do you?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I don’t,’ and reached for the key and then, stupidly, lost sight of it because her eyes had responded – as if of their own accord – to a humiliation, an unidentifiable yearning, and a dim recollection of an empty gesture that had something to do with wrenching the reins of a horse and wheeling to confront imaginable but infinitely remote possibilities of profound contentment. She felt the metal of the key under her fingers and the flesh-shock of his hand on her knuckles.

‘You’re crying,’ he said. ‘Why? Because you really want me to make love to you? I couldn’t promise that. Not love. You couldn’t either, could you? Not with me. If you liked we could pretend that it was love but it wouldn’t be honest and your honesty is part of what attracts me. You don’t belong, do you? And the trouble is you know it, but I suppose while your father’s away you feel you have to pretend you do belong, for his sake.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I do belong. That’s what I know. That’s the trouble. Please take your hand away.’

He did so. She grasped the key. It weighed nothing. What it would open was a prison of a kind.

‘Wait,’ he said. He got up, went to the far side of the bed. Through the net she saw blurred pictures of a stranger dressing. There was a superior kind of mystery about him. In her dream there had been no problems, no threat of violence. She had surrendered to him casually. The absence of a climax struck the one familiar note; that and an awareness of her father’s unspeaking presence, his silent criticism of her failure to hold back for him the tide of changing circum
stances, her failure to hold in trust days he had lost which belonged to him; days that must, to him, be an incalculably dear proportion of those few left in which the once perpetual-seeming light would shine on undisturbed by the brighter, honest, light whose heat would burn the old one to a shadow.

The stranger came from behind the net and stood for a moment watching her. Who is that man? people asked her in the dream. And her reply had always been, Oh, I don’t know. She had never been convinced that she spoke the truth, but in any case now knew the answer. Who is that man? Why, one of us, one of the people we really are.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘shall we go, Sarah Layton?’ He came closer. ‘If so you ought to bathe your eyes. My Aunt Fenny would think the worst had happened if she saw you now.’

She was holding the key in one hand and her handbag in the other. The blurred opaque image of his face cleared. Presently he bent forward, grasped the exposed end of the key and carefully took it from her. He held out his other hand and, when she did not move, reached further and touched the strap of the handbag, then grasped it. Her own grip loosened. She felt the smooth strip of leather slide from her fingers and watched him stand back, holding the two things she had surrendered and which he now seemed to be showing her, waiting for some kind of confirmation that she understood he had them. He transferred the key to the hand with which he held the handbag then stooped and picked up the ashtray and, with his free hand, their glasses, holding them from the insides, rim to rim, between thumb and fingers. He went to the bedside-table, placed the glasses and the ashtray by the lamp and, after a moment’s hesitation, placed the handbag there as well. Still holding the key he went over to the door and inserted it in the lock but did not turn it. He came back and stood in front of her in further brief consideration and then went over to the bedside-table again and switched the lamp off so that the room was as it had been at the beginning of their encounter. The shaft of light from the bathroom stretched across the floor, separating them until he emerged from the shadow on the other side of it and crossed over on to her side, and squatted. He touched her right ankle, gently lifted and eased the shoe from her foot and then the shoe from
the other foot, and placed the shoes neatly together on one side of the chair. The hand in which she had held the key was cupped and taken, and then the other, and both carried and held to his face, so that it seemed she had reached out and put her hands on his cheeks with a gesture of adoration. She closed her eyes, exploring the illusion of possession which such an adoration might create between two people and was then aware that her hands were no longer held except by the desire to explore. Her own head was taken. For a while they stayed so, enacting the tenderness of silent lovers, and then slowly bending her head she allowed him to deal with the old maid’s hook and eye.

V

His hand was on her arm gentling her from sleep and in the second or two before she woke she knew the sweet relief of this evidence that she had only dreamt the scene in which Aunt Fenny told her Susan was in premature labour brought on by shock; and that the reality was this warm quiescence with which her body came back to life and consciousness, flesh to flesh with the body of the man who had penetrated it, liberated it, and was waking it again from profound rest so that it might enclose and be enclosed and go again, rapt, to the edge of feeling.

‘I’m sorry,’ the voice said. ‘But we’re nearly there.’ A strange, unbelievable, soundless splintering; an extraordinary convolution of time and space. Her eyes opened and she saw the woman whose name was Mrs Roper. ‘We’re coming into Ranpur, Miss Layton. I’m sorry to disturb you.’

She pulled herself upright, understanding completely where she was and yet not understanding it at all, but she knew she was indebted to Mrs Roper and to Mrs Roper’s friend, Mrs Perryman, and that this was because they had let her share the coupé and had even had the top bunk lowered so that she could rest properly. She knew from the lights in the ceiling, close to her head, that it was night, whereas it had been day when the bunk was lowered. Her uniform was crumpled.

‘Can you manage, my dear?’

Mrs Roper’s head scarcely came to the level of the bunk. The fans whisked the stray ends of her grey hair which was set in a way that suggested Mrs Roper remembered she was pretty as a girl. Mrs Roper’s husband had been a Forestry Officer in Burma. He sent her back to India in 1941 and as she hadn’t heard a word since the Japanese invasion she believed he was hiding out with one of the hill-tribes who had been their friends. Mrs Perryman’s hair was brassy-blonde. Her husband had been in the medical service and died of cholera in 1939. She took in paying-guests, one of whom was Mrs Roper. They had been staying with Mrs Roper’s brother’s family on leave at Ootacamund and were on their way back to Simla, having returned by way of Calcutta to visit a friend of Mrs Perryman’s whose husband was in jute. It was their first holiday since the beginning of the war, and they had saved for it, presumably. But they had not mentioned money.

Sarah knew all these things about them because they had talked incessantly from midday when the train left Howrah station until an hour after lunch. They had talked for kindly reasons because Uncle Arthur had taken them on one side to thank them for letting her share the coupé and to ask them to look after her because her great-Aunt, of whom she had been very fond, had died suddenly in Pankot and the shock had sent her sister into premature labour. She swung round on the bunk and was held by a reaction in her bloodstream, unexpected but familiar. Sound and sight became miniature, far away. From behind brass screens she heard Mrs Roper say, ‘Now don’t rush. I just thought you’d want plenty of time because we only stay in Ranpur ten minutes.’

With her foot she felt for the top of the nest of steps, far down in the distorted well of the coupé, and finding them, made the descent.

‘You’ve had a nice long sleep. We nodded off too. Now don’t bother about us. Is there anything we can do?’

‘No thank you, Mrs Roper. I’m fine.’

‘Leave the bunk. Directly we’ve had dinner Mrs Perryman and I are going to tuck down.’

In the cubicle she bathed her face in slow-running tepid water. There were specks of soot. The train was going over
points, intersection after intersection. She steadied herself on the handgrip and confronted her mirror image. Did it show? Could anyone tell? That she had entered, like other women? Yes; to her it showed; vividly; more vividly than her anxiety for Susan, more strongly than the grief cushioned by disbelief that she felt for Aunty Mabel who walked in and out of her mind, condemned by a memory to go on performing the task to which so many hours of her last days had been stubbornly devoted; more strongly than the concern for her mother who had been alone to cope and for her father for whom Aunty Mabel was now an irretrievable part of a time she had been unable to hold back for him. She did not know why she should have wanted to hold it back. She did not even know she had tried to until she saw that it had gone. She had failed but she had entered. She had entered her body’s grace.

Mrs Roper personally selected the coolie to carry Sarah’s single suitcase. Thirty years of experience had given her an eye, she said; an eye for the kind of coolie an unaccompanied white girl could rely on not to intimidate her into paying him more than he deserved, and to make sure, in such a case as this, that the transfer from one train to another was smoothly accomplished.

‘Shouldn’t we find an escort for you?’ Mrs Perryman asked. ‘There must be at least one young officer on the platform we could whistle up.’

But Sarah was already at the open door of the carriage and there were nearly two hours to go before the train for Pankot left Ranpur. ‘I’ll go to the restaurant and then to the waiting-room if necessary. I’ll be perfectly all right. Thank you for all your kindness.’ She shook hands with them and stepped down. The platform was crowded. She saw bearers threading their way through with loaded trays, and called up to Mrs Roper that their meals were coming. Then she waved and followed the elderly coolie who had her suitcase on his head. Her childhood delight in travelling at night was still a potent force. She had always loved the noise, the risk, of railway stations. The journey to Calcutta was the first she had ever made alone. The case, hovering at eye level – and as bodies interposed themselves between her and its bearer looking as if it moved of its own accord without support – was a symbol
of childhood’s end. It struck her how curious an object a suitcase was. To it you consigned those few essential portable things that bore the invisible marks of your private possession of them; but the case itself was destined to live most of its useful life under the public gaze and in the hands of strangers.

At the door of the station restaurant the coolie halted. The turbanned head, which earned him an anna for all that it could carry at any one time, was set in a rigid thrust-up position that gave his eyes, under wrinkled, hooded lids, a preoccupied, anxious look. She changed her mind about going to the restaurant first. The Pankot train would be waiting at its special platform. She could look for her reservation and, if she were lucky, get the compartment opened and have a tray sent in. She gave the coolie instructions and once more followed him, to the end of the main platform, to the point where two subsidiary tracks came in to a bay, to sets of buffers, with a platform separating them. On one track there were three lit coaches, one of them painted blue and white, colours she had never seen before, and on the other the Pankot train, which she recognized because of the coaches: old-fashioned, squarer-cut, and with decorative flourishes in the woodwork. There were a few people on the platform, among them two Indian police, and a station official with a white topee. The Pankot train was in darkness. Some way along the platform under a lamp, a group of private soldiers were playing cards. Men off leave or on posting; perhaps both kinds. Tomorrow night they would be playing cards or writing home at the regimental institute and perhaps Mrs Fosdick or Mrs Paynton would be among the women who manned the tea-urns. She felt the first lick of a wave of nostalgia for the Pankot hills, but fought it down because upon its ripples grief could ride in. She spoke to the Indian in the white topee. No, the train was not ready yet. No, he did not have the key to unlock the compartments. But he went with her, looking with a torch for that strange advertisement of her name, noted and written on a piece of card by someone she would never see and placed in its metal bracket on the side of the carriage by someone she might see but never know.